Fictionality, Factuality, and Reflexivity Across Discourses and Media 9783110722031, 9783110720891

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Fictionality, Factuality, and Reflexivity Across Discourses and Media

Narratologia

Contributions to Narrative Theory Edited by Fotis Jannidis, Matías Martínez, John Pier, Wolf Schmid (executive editor) Editorial Board Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik, José Ángel García Landa, Inke Gunia, Peter Hühn, Manfred Jahn, Markus Kuhn, Uri Margolin, Jan Christoph Meister, Ansgar Nünning, Marie-Laure Ryan, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Michael Scheffel, Sabine Schlickers

Volume 75

Fictionality, Factuality, and Reflexivity Across Discourses and Media Edited by Erika Fülöp In collaboration with Graham Priest and Richard Saint-Gelais

ISBN 978-3-11-072089-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-072203-1 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-072215-4 ISSN 1612-8427 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021932133 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements The research that led to the organization of the conference on which this book is based, as well as the conference itself, was funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation through the Postdoctoral Fellowship I held from October 2013 until September 2015 at the Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology (ICN) at the University of Hamburg. I would therefore like to thank first and foremost to the Humboldt Foundation for their generous support. The research and the conference itself were hosted by the ICN, which provided a welcoming environment to my projects. I am grateful to all the members for the stimulating exchange throughout my fellowship, and especially to the Director, Jan Christoph Meister, for his support also throughout the publication process of this volume, well beyond the time of my fellowship. The volume has also benefitted from feedback on various chapters by John Pier, Margarita Vaysman, Jennifer Yee, Frédéric Brayard, Miklós Kiss, Astrid Ensslin, and Serge Bouchardon, whom I would like to thank for their time and advice. Last but not least, my gratitude goes to Beverley Sykes and Ian Roscow for their careful proofreading of the manuscript. Erika Fülöp

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722031-202

Contents Acknowledgements Erika Fülöp Introduction

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Graham Priest A Logue 15 Nathan Wildman and Christian Folde A Puzzle about Fictional “I”s 26 Pierre Cassou-Noguès Postmodern Fables, Correlationism, and Speculation Richard Saint-Gelais Fictionalizing Metafiction Françoise Lavocat Portals of Fiction

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Michal Beth Dinkler The End of Fact vs Fiction: Reflexivity in Ancient Narratives

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Robert F. Wittkamp Writing and Reflections on Fictionality in Old Japanese Literature Lukas Hoffmann Factualized Fictions: David Foster Wallace’s Self-Reflexive Metafiction 123 Jobst Welge Historical Reference and (Auto)Fiction in the Recent Latin American Novel 138 Fátima Chinita Authorial Self-Personalization and Cine-Vision in the Film Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988) 152

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Jean-Marc Limoges Disrupting the Illusion by Bolstering the Reality Effect in Film

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Mathias Kusnierz The Iconomics of Reflexivity: The Real Value of Images of Fiction in Contemporary American Cinema 190 Stefan Schubert Playing with (Meta)Fictionality and Self-Reflexivity in the Video Game The Stanley Parable 212 Erika Fülöp Virtual Mirrors: Reflexivity in Digital Literature Notes on Contributors Index of Names Index of Concepts

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Introduction The dominant trend in post-2000 critical discourse on narratives and beyond suggests that self-reflexivity, both as a feature of creative works and as an object of study, has now become outdated as postmodernism reached a stage of exhaustion: the novel in particular, after its narcissistic phase, has returned to the story, to the subject, and to a less ironical and skeptical approach to history, and it is now concerned again with more serious issues than itself (Hoberek 2007; Kemp 2010; Timmer 2010; Meretoja 2014). The underlying suggestion is that reflexivity would go against referentiality and that it undermines the very possibility of factuality or engagement with the real world, as if it automatically fictionalized narratives. Linda Hutcheon’s definition of historiographic metafiction as “novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (1988, 5; emphasis mine) is symptomatic in this respect. But why should, in fact, the combination of self-reflexivity and the reference to historical events – and thus the claim to at least some degree of factuality – be paradoxical? Indeed, reflections on method that address the conditions of a (by definition factual) scientific or argumentative discourse within the space of that same, not exclusively non-narrative discourse, proliferated in the second half of the twentieth century. Derrida’s reflections on writing ([1967] 1976, [1967] 1978, [1972] 1981), Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge ([1969] 1972), or Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973), to mention only a few, all discuss the conditions of the very discourse and activity that they are practicing, without excluding a degree of narrativity and especially without ever being accused of fictionality. The social sciences, in particular anthropology, ethnography, and sociology, have gone through a reflexive turn in the same period, recognizing the need to account for the observer’s identity and position in the process of observation, description, and analysis, as well as for the historicity of the concepts and methods used (Rabinow 1977; Ruby 1981; Sandywell 1995a, 1995b, 1995c; Szakolczai 2000; Venkatesh 2013). Bartlett (1987) provides an excellent concise overview of all the “varieties of self-reference” – a term he uses interchangeably with (self-)reflexivity – across domains and disciplines ranging from philosophy and linguistics through the natural and human sciences to the arts. The central preoccupation of these and other late-twentieth-century metadiscursive texts was to account for the part of construction – or fictio – in the production of discourses and representations which are factual in their aim. The

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distinction between fact and fiction, between factual and fictional discourses, has itself been the object of much recent discussion not only in literary theory but also in philosophy, both analytic and continental. While literary theorists and fiction theorists first hoped to find distinctive traits in the text that help identify fictionality (Cohn 1999) and came to the (also not unanimously accepted) conclusion that these are neither semantic nor syntactic but depend on the pragmatic framework (Schaeffer [1999] 2010; Zetterberg Gjerlevsen and Nielsen 2020), continental philosophy, particularly poststructuralism, formulated the question primarily in terms of representation and referentiality and the limits of language’s ability to faithfully mediate the world. At the same time, in analytic philosophy logicians have been grappling with the consequences of the ontological difference between fictional and real objects on logic (Woods [1974] 2009; Priest 2005; Sainsbury 2010), its laws and its formalizability. Self-referentiality, on the other hand, poses the problem of the paradoxes it can generate, reflections on which greatly contributed to the development of non-classical logics (Priest [1987] 2006). As a result, the concept of logical impossibility, which is one reason why certain forms of narrative self-reflexivity in particular are associated with fictionality (Dällenbach 1977), has become much less straightforward and also needs to be reconsidered in the context of literary and other narratives. The questions of reality, or what lies behind reference and how we can know, and of the relationship between existing phenomena and their discursive (re)production also continue to lurk behind such problematizations. On the one hand, we are thus facing the intertwining of reflexivity and fictionality in literary narratives and their theorization, disregarding somewhat the place of factuality in the constellation, despite the fact that questioning the boundaries of fiction quite automatically raises the question as to where factuality, traditionally conceived in opposition to fictionality, begins or ends. On the other hand, the status of discourses traditionally oriented towards the real and therefore considered factual is called into question by self-reflexive investigations, further raising the issue of where constructedness might begin to constitute fiction – if not in the light of the pragmatic definition that posits stated inventedness as a condition of fictionality (Zetterberg Gjerlevsen and Nielsen 2020),1 at least in the less strict and more common sense of being invented. The aim of this volume is to explore how these ontological and epistemological questions about fiction, facts, and the real meet in self-reflexive discourses of various kinds and origins.

1 In those cases too, however, we could sometimes still wonder about the status of that statement . . .

Introduction

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Each of our key concepts is problematic in its own right and understood differently in different fields. Fact and factuality are probably the least controversial, even though how to define and how to identify them and what exactly characterizes facts remain a matter of debate. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy points out the double sense of the term fact: In the locution “matters of fact,” facts are taken to be what is contingently the case, or that of which we may have empirical or a posteriori knowledge. [. . .] “It is a fact that” takes a sentence to make a sentence [. . .]. It is locutions of this second sort that philosophers have often employed in order to claim (or deny) that facts are part of the inventory of what there is. (Mulligan and Correira 2017)

Factual discourse is then one that makes claims about “what there is,” and factuality describes the quality of such discourse. The major issue from our perspective in this volume is, however, precisely the nature of the relationship which various kinds of discourse can establish to “what there is.” The basis on which we generally (try to) establish “what there is” is what we call “reality,” “the real,” or “the actual.” The Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter: OED) defines “real” as “actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed.” If the relationship between discourse and reality is complicated enough in the case of traditional modes of representation such as literature, comics, or film and their (typically) one-way communication through closed forms, as the chapters on these will well illustrate, it becomes even more problematic with the processual and interactive digital medium. The latter, as we shall see in the final two chapters, invites us to rethink not only the modes of presence of the real in cultural artefacts and the ways in which those artefacts can reflect on this presence and their own presence within the real, but also the binary approach to fictional and factual/real, through the introduction of the third realm of the virtual. The real is then fundamental in defining what we consider factual in a discourse, but it also feeds into and shapes discourses in other ways than by being a reference for their representational content, which complicates or disrupts the binary opposition between fictional and factual discursive modes. A number of papers in this volume engage with such interventions of and on the real that contribute to forms of reflexivity, from metalepsis to the economy of images – in both senses of the term “economy” – and interactivity. Fiction and fictionality are commonly understood in opposition to reality and facts and factuality. Jean-Marie Schaeffer identifies three definitions based on this opposition that are used in narratology: (a) semantic definition: factual narrative is referential whereas fictional narrative has no reference (at least not in “our” world); (b) syntactic definition: factual narrative and fictional

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narrative can be distinguished by their logico-linguistic syntax; (c) pragmatic definition: factual narrative advances claims of referential truthfulness whereas fictional narrative advances no such claims. (2013; original emphases)

Schaeffer goes on to discuss the validity of the opposition, however, which has been contested by poststructuralist thinkers and social scientists who took up the Nietzschean argument “that fact itself is a mode of fiction (a fictio in the sense of a ‘making up’)” (2013; original emphases). The constructivist perspective this leads to can then, due to the blurred boundaries between “making (up)” and “shaping,” easily give some ground to the panfictionalist claim that everything is fiction – a position carefully examined and deconstructed by Françoise Lavocat (2016). I mentioned above the differences between analytic and continental philosophy in terms of perspectives, approaches, and questions raised, some of which will also become apparent through the contrast between two papers in this volume (see Nathan Wildman and Christian Folde’s paper on fictional “I”s on the one hand, and Pierre Cassou-Noguès’s discussion of Meillassoux’s thought and the use of fiction in philosophy on the other). Another complication around the concept of fiction is the multiplicity of its derivatives which can give rise to different interpretations. Should we draw distinctions among fictive and/or fictitious and fictional, and if so, also between fictiveness and/ or fictitiousness and fictionality? Would that lead then to a semantic split within the concept of fiction, from which all three adjectives are derived? Jerzy Pelc proposes a distinction between fictitious and fictional because he finds “fictive” too ambigous between “that which does not exist but was only fabricated” (1986, 2) in the sense of fictive objects or persons or in the sense of a fabricated “fictive certificate,” where the object factually exists but refers to something that does not really exist. Fictitious would therefore best be used for “things, persons, properties, relations, events and phenomena” that do not exist, and “fictional” to “expressions, sentences, writings, texts or works referring to fictitious entities” (2; original emphasis). Also in the interest of a more consistent terminology, Frank Zipfel (2001, 19) argues for reserving fiktiv (in German) to describe the ontological quality of nonexistent entities that appear in representations, and fiktional for texts and other representations that describe such fictive entities. Lavocat (2016, 18, fn. 1) calls such distinctions redundant, however, insofar as a fictional character will necessarily be fictive. There is no consensus on this question and the terminology used continues to vary in this respect as well both within and across disciplines.

Introduction

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The terminological disarray, the conceptual complexity, and the range of uses are nevertheless the greatest in the case of reflexivity. As Barry Sandywell writes, what is named by the polysemic term “reflexivity” (or “self-reflexivity”) is extraordinary in its ordinariness – the ubiquity of different forms and modalities of reflection and selfreflection in mundane human activities and arrangements; [. . . and as a consequence] the concept reflexivity references a heterogeneous multiplicity of phenomena. (Sandywell 2011; original emphasis)

The first layer of complexity of the term, which Jean-Marc Limoges will also build on in his chapter in this volume, comes from its etymology and – in English – an easily overlooked distinction in spelling in the derivatives that lends itself to the construction of just as easily misleading metaphors and crossovers. The verb reflect is the shared root that comes “from Old French reflecter or Latin reflectere, from re- ‘back’ + flectere ‘to bend’” (OED), and may refer to (1) with an object, the physical phenomenon of “throw[ing] back (heat, light, or sound) without absorbing it” (OED), such as when a mirror reflects an object, and from there a representation that offers a faithful image of something; or (2) with the preposition on or upon, to “think deeply or carefully about” something (OED). Reflection is a derivative of both of these: an image, a text, or other representation may be the reflection of something, or a reflection on or about something. Reflective may similarly be either a physical surface capable of reflecting light or a person with a tendency to reflect carefully on things. The adjective reflexive, based on the same root, on the other hand, moves away from the optical sense – even though it continues to carry its semantic traces – into (1) grammar, to denote a “a pronoun that refers back to the subject of the clause in which it is used”; into (2) logic, to denote a relation “always holding between a term and itself”; into (3) social sciences, to refer to a method or theory “taking account of itself or of the effect of the personality or presence of the researcher on what is being investigated”; and in a last, distinctive sense, into (4) physiology and psychology, to describe an action “performed as a reflex, without conscious thought” (OED).2 In the social sciences and especially in the arts and humanities, self-reflection, self-reflexiveness, and self-reflexivity are often used interchangeably to denote the phenomenon of an object, a representation, or a person, fictive or real, reflecting (on) itself/themselves. In this volume, we have opted for the last one among the three forms because in the domains and contexts discussed, any references to

2 I will leave out the last one from the following considerations as it does not substantially participate in the discussions about reflexivity in the humanities and social sciences. Richard Walsh (2016) has nevertheless proposed a new perspective on what he calls reflexiveness in literary contexts through a reintroduction of sense (4) of reflexive.

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optical reflections prove to be reflexive instances in the sense of establishing a relationship of the representation to itself in order to enable a reflexive process in line with the third meaning above, as we shall see for instance with the play of mirrors in Varda’s films as a reflection of/on the filmmaking process and the filmmaker’s role analyzed by Fátima Chinita. Moreover, the emphasis of this collection is precisely on the process and result of such reflexivity which considers the conditions of representation and its implications for the distinction or otherwise between fictionality and factuality. In the title of the volume and often in the texts, we leave out the prefix self- just to simplify, considering also that “reflexive” already implies that the relation and/or action in question is between the thing or subject and itself (that is to say, the same entity is both the subject and the object of the observation and representation). And we opted for reflexivity rather than reflexiveness simply because it is more common in English. In the scholarship on philosophy, literature, film, and other media, (self-)reflexivity has two major and a handful of minor competitors that require mention here. The major ones are self-reference on the one hand, and the various mediumdependent terms using the prefix meta- on the other. While often used in a broader sense, self-reference remains a primarily semiotic term highlighting the (f)act of someone or something referring (back) to oneself/itself. This (f)act is indeed the basis of all self-reflexive phenomena in all the media that lend themselves to interpretation through a semiotic process. Even though the optical phenomenon of mirror images in the above-cited example of Varda’s films does not in itself involve a semiotic process, it does become part of one in the film, which endows the mirror with a particular significance as a leitmotif showing the filmmaker and the filmmaking process. If self-reference is the basis, however, it does not in itself imply (an invitation for) a reflection on the nature and/or content of the referring semiotic object that would go beyond the primary meaning of the representation. The sentence “This is a sentence.” is self-referential but nothing more – for it to become self-reflexive in the sense we use the term here, it would require a context to expand its meaning and implications. That said, no book on self-reflexivity should go without a mention of Douglas Hofstadter’s monumental Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), which remains to this day the most encompassing and dazzling demonstration of the fundamental and ubiquitous nature of “self-reference, or ‘Strange Loopiness’” (21) from nature to science and the arts, both in the mechanisms of the world and in the human thinking about them. Hofstadter also shows, both in theory through his analyses of Escher, Bach, and beyond, and in practice through the fictional dialogues and narratives that alternate with the theoretical chapters and put them into self-reflexive practice, how self-reference feeds into self-reflexivity when it moves into the arts. What is more, he goes so far as to argue that selfreferentiality is the very basis of intelligence and of the human self (1979, 2007).

Introduction

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The fact that “reference” is a basic generic term denoting the semiotic process in a way that is applicable to all media, including non-representational ones such as music, is precisely the reason why Werner Wolf (2009) prefers it in his attempt to tidy up the terminological disarray of all the synonymous and quasi-synonymous concepts in use and offer an intermedial framework. He proposes the term metareference to refer to the phenomena on which the present volume also focuses and explains the choice of the prefix meta- rather than self- with the preference again for highlighting the logical relationship between a primary level of signification and a higher one that takes into account, and reflects on, this primary level. Wolf’s definition of “metaization” does in fact correspond well to the subject matter of this volume: the movement from a first cognitive or communicative level to a higher one on which the first-level thoughts and utterances, and above all the means and media used for such utterances, self-reflexively become objects of reflection and communication in their own right. (2009, 3)

The “reference” part of Wolf’s proposed term nevertheless remains somewhat binding and reductive because of the above-mentioned reasons and others that will concern in particular the digital medium, where the emphasis on a purely semiotic and representational process will seem insufficient. I discuss this in the last chapter. If Wolf’s term has not been taken up widely by the scholarship, meta- remains a very popular prefix for the phenomena in question, and this is what I identified as the second major competitor of the term (self-)reflexivity. While we continue using its various compounds in this volume as well – metafiction, metanarrative, metafilm, metagame, and so on – these terms are often more specific to a medium or a type of reflexivity, which becomes limiting when we look at the various media to compare and contrast modes and implications of reflexivity more generally and also aim to create intersections among our respective disciplinary discourses. Last but not least, I mentioned the existence of a number of “minor” competitors, by which I mean the various terms with the prefix self- and a handful of others that involve self-referentiality and more, such as self-aware, self-conscious, specular, or narcissistic fiction. An important disadvantage of these, in addition to their degree of specificity as to the nature or result of the reflexive phenomena they refer to, is that they are mostly used in conjunction with “fiction,” thereby begging the question we propose to ask in this volume about the boundaries between fictionality and factuality in relation to, or under the impact of, reflexivity. This is indeed the central issue which each chapter approaches differently, offering a range of perspectives, as we shall see below.

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If one kind of reflexivity and toying with the boundaries between fact and fiction ended with the postmodern, it is incontestable that no age reflected as much about the factuality or otherwise of information as the Digital Age – in particular since the emergence of social media – and included such reflections in the same spaces where the contents in question appear. Quantitatively, the amount of information-bearing content produced is unprecedented thanks to the digital medium’s capacity to condense, store, and circulate it in (virtually) dematerialized binary format, and the number of voices and contributions in such discussions is also unseen, simply because everyone has access to those spaces and can contribute to them. The authenticity and reliability of information circulating in the networks has thus become a major issue, aggravated by the contemporaneous storytelling (Salmon 2010) and post-truth tendencies in politics that defy any assumed respect for facts, justify growing preoccupations about their status and discernibility, and require the elaboration of metadiscursive models such as fact-checking. The possibilities offered by virtual reality and augmented reality, in combination with the problems raised by the emerging technology of deepfakes3 only adds to the complexity and confusion that requires constant reflection on the limits of the real. While these concerns are not the central topic of this volume, they do also explain and encourage a renewed interest in the complex relationships among fictional and factual discourses, their relationship to the real, and reflexivity. What we propose is a handful of considerations that include philosophy (chapters 1 to 3), literary and cultural theory and history from East to West (chapters 4 to 7), contemporary literature (chapters 8 and 9), film (chapters 10 to 12), video games (chapter 13), and digital literature (chapter 14), but not without crossovers among these. In addition to the diachronic, cross-cultural, and cross-disciplinary perspectives this selection offers on various aspects of those relationships, a number of more specific threads run through groups of papers, such as the nature of the self and the possibility of representing it, the figure of the author-creator and his or her relationship to the work created, and the nature and the conditions of possibility of immersion. Graham Priest opens this collection with a text concerning the nature of the self. “A Logue” is a philosopher’s discussion with himself where we see in practice what happens when a subject tries to grasp itself as a subject, inevitably becoming an object of observation and reflection in the process.

3 Deepfake is a recent but quickly evolving technology that consists in superimposing a face on a different body in a video footage in a way as to match the face’s articulation and gestures with a speech or action that the “owner” of that face never pronounced or carried out.

Introduction

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Nathan Wildman and Christian Folde continue the discussion on the “I” on a different tone, proposing to solve “A Puzzle about Fictional ‘I’s” that they introduce. The puzzle is this: even if we grant that some fictional uses of singular terms denote non-fictional entities, it appears impossible to do so within narrative fictions featuring internal narrators for any reflexive indexicals such as “I,” “now,” and “here.” This highlights a tension between fictional discourse and the standard semantics for certain pronouns and indicates a potentially fruitful area of future research for philosophers of language, aestheticians, and narratologists. Addressing the role of fiction in philosophy from a different perspective, Pierre Cassou-Noguès revisits the opposition Quentin Meillassoux draws between correlationism and speculation in light of Jean-François Lyotard’s “A Postmodern Fable.” Focusing on the possibility of making “ancestral statements,” which Meillassoux uses as a touchstone to discriminate between (nonspeculative) correlationism and his own speculative perspective, and which also appear in Lyotard’s fable, Cassou-Noguès highlights a hidden postulate in Meillassoux’s analysis, which he terms the principle of the present. Lyotard’s postmodern fable invites us to reject this principle, thereby acquiring a speculative function, while nevertheless also remaining part of a correlationist framework. Postmodern fiction, as presented by Lyotard, therefore offers a scenario and a mode of thinking about fiction and statements about the world in a way that Meillassoux deems impossible. With Richard Saint-Gelais, we then turn towards literature to examine the status of fiction and of reflexive discourse within fiction. Saint-Gelais points out that approaches to reflexivity in fictional discourse usually rest on the assumption that reflexivity justly stresses the text’s fictionality, either explicitly or implicitly. Read as keys to some of the work’s features, metafictional statements would thus acquire a referential status and form a non-fictional enclave in the midst of fiction. The chapter challenges this view by arguing that, far from always being serious, reflexive instances may offer a distorted view of the text. Ricardou’s anti-autoreprésentation or Groensteen’s travestissement du code capture this idea, while remaining in the truth paradigm by being conceptualized as deceitful utterances. Pseudo-non-fictionality is a step further still, consisting of metafictional statements that are affected by the fiction they refer to, thus escaping external truth judgements. Saint-Gelais proposes a detailed presentation of these through the analysis of a handful of examples and invites us to problematize the status of metafiction. Françoise Lavocat makes us enter further into fiction, quite literally, through her discussion of “Portals of Fiction,” a concept adapted from Jasper Fforde’s novels. For Lavocat, portals of fiction are beginnings of narrative fiction which

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underline, complicate, and thematize the access to the fictional world. She proposes a typology of such reflexive beginnings, distinguishing three kinds: delay and doubling, overlapping, and the paradoxical portal. The chapter analyzes these highly metafictional, self-referential, and in some way nearly always paradoxical portals and their respective functions, the nature of the references they make, and their impact on the distinction between fact and fiction. After these theorizations based mostly, if not exclusively, on modern and contemporary references, Michal Beth Dinkler takes the reader back in time to reconsider ancient narratives and the common misperception that literary reflexivity and the problematization of the fact vs fiction dichotomy is a uniquely (post)modern phenomenon. After arguing in the first part of the chapter that this historically short-sighted view needs to be revised, Dinkler discusses how the notion of narrative reflexivity illuminates ancient narratives’ rhetoricity and illustrates her argument through the analysis of a passage from the biblical Acts of the Apostles. Robert F. Wittkamp continues to broaden our perspective by opening it not only in time, but also geographically and culturally, bringing us as far as the Japan of the tenth century. His chapter outlines the history and varieties of the genre of monogatari – a term that means “storytelling” – from its emergence through the best known Genji monogatari [The Tale of Genji] to the birth if the historical (rekishi) monogatari and the poetical type (uta monogatari). These texts often contain reflections on the character of the monogatari and the fictional or factual, historical nature of the narratives. Beyond examining key passages, Wittkamp goes one step further to explore the conditions which made such early reflections on, and perceptions of, fictionality possible, and argues that adapting a writing system using the Chinese characters for the Japanese language, very different in nature, was key to this development. With a big jump in time and space again, Lukas Hoffmann also explores literary reflections on the status of the narrative in relation to a specific cultural context, this time in America at the beginning of twenty-first century. Focusing on David Foster Wallace’s metafictional writing, Hoffmann argues that metafiction, usually used to highlight the artifice of a text, reinforces authenticity when it is used in a particular way in Wallace’s novel The Pale King and his short story “Octet.” These texts include autobiographical theory and a self-reflexive mode that – in the act of reading – change the status of the narratives from (at first glance) fictional tales to non-fictional essayistic pieces. By applying Philippe Lejeune’s concept of the autobiographical pact, James Phelan’s “ethical narratology,” and Robyn Warhol’s “engaging narrator,” this chapter outlines how a reader’s empathetic faculty can be stoked by textual markers of non-fictionality.

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Jobst Welge remains in the same century and around the same problematic of autobiographical writing between fact and fiction, but takes us further south to Latin America. He discusses recent novels by Chico Buarque (Brazil) and Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Colombia) in relation to Gilles Lipovetsky’s concept of hypermodernity, further elaborated by Raffaele Donnarumma, which foregrounds a tendency in contemporary culture that is distinguished by historical or biographical referentiality and a general “return of the real.” The literary works discussed here use the mode of autofictionality to strengthen this truth claim yet combine it with metaliterary and self-reflexive devices. The works are representative of a new tendency of contemporary literature, perhaps especially relevant in Latin American literature yet also present in Europe, that engages with historical and personal traumas from the twentieth century in a way that does not primarily destabilize the boundary between history and fiction (as in historiographic metafiction), but rather uses a mode of hypothetical speculation and historical quest as a way to circle around mysteries and enigmas of the past and their survival into the present. Autobiography and autofiction are at the focus of Fátima Chinita’s chapter as well, but this time in film, in particular Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988) by Agnès Varda. The title suggests that this film is a portrait of the British actress Jane Birkin by the French director. Drawing upon the concepts of autobiography, autofiction, self-portrait, poetical art film, and essay film, Chinita argues that the film is indeed a personal and professional portrait, despite the continued game between truth and fakery, but also that the film actually represents Varda more than Birkin. She uses the expression persona-lization to indicate a corporeal representation which is somehow flawed or manipulated (in Birkin’s case) and deceptively truthful (in Varda’s case), and proposes the term cine-vision to allude to the homogeneity of the director’s professional world view imparted as authorial discourse. Although the film takes the form of a portrait, it is better termed an essay film that depicts Varda’s work methods, which the director calls cinécriture. Jean-Marc Limoges goes on to investigate more broadly the modes of reflexivity in film and its effect of enhancing or disrupting aesthetic illusion. Reflexivity and its various modes (metacinema, intertextuality, mise en abyme, metalepsis, etc.) are frequently understood as disruptions of the aesthetic illusion. In cinema, it is often taken for granted that any film that makes a reference to or mirrors itself is swiftly shutting the “window on the world” it was meant to open. Rather than disrupting viewers’ belief in the world presented by the film, however, some reflexive configurations seek to enable it. At the same time, paradoxically, other reflexive configurations aiming to disrupt the illusion do so by first reinforcing it. Limoges first offers an overview of the manifold

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meanings of reflexivity and its different modes in cinema, and then analyzes how these modes enable or disrupt the illusion, and how the reality effect impacts the way in which these modes are received by the audience. Looking at the relationship between fiction and reality from a very different perspective, Mathias Kusnierz proposes another approach to reflexivity in Hollywood cinema. Postmodern Hollywood cinema is characterized by the reflexivity of all of its images, insofar as they refer to other images or themselves before referring to the world. Theorists often come to the conclusion that Hollywood cinema therefore no longer speaks about the real. In this chapter, Kusnierz counters this assumption by examining the various ways in which images act on the real. Drawing on the attention theory of value developed by Jonathan Beller and the concept of iconomy proposed by Peter Szendy, Kusnierz shows that rather than being about the real, the reflexivity of cinematic images influences the real, particularly through what he calls “iconomic energy,” and examines how reflexivity can be perceived as a multiple and indirect way of intervening in the real, which turns Hollywood cinema into an ideological or an emancipating tool. Stefan Schubert then turns to video games, examining The Stanley Parable as a self-conscious reflection on the possibilities and limits of narrative choice and agency in interactive fiction. He looks at the nexus of the fictional, the real, and their manifestations in self-conscious video games, before discussing fictionality and metatextuality more specifically in The Stanley Parable and exploring how they are mobilized there to raise questions concerning agency, interactivity, and self-reflexivity. In a close reading of the game from the vantage point of literary and cultural studies, Schubert argues that The Stanley Parable self-consciously positions itself as a kind of text lying between reality and fiction, suggesting that its consumers take pleasure in that liminal status, and uses this position to ask larger questions about narrativity and textuality. Remaining in the digital medium, in the last chapter I address the specificity of digital literature in comparison to non-digital artefacts, in particular from the perspective of the modes of reflexivity this medium enables and which are not possible in other media, and the impact of this on the fictional vs factual binary. I first present briefly the functioning of the digital medium that underlies the poetics of digital literature and introduce the concept of the virtual, a third ontological realm which comes to complicate the traditional binary opposition between the fictional and the real and invites us to reconsider the nature and functioning of possible modes of discourse. I then outline Werner Wolf’s above-mentioned intermedial framework of analysis for what he terms metareference and argue that this theory cannot do justice to digital artefacts. I demonstrate this through the analysis of two works, The Readers Project by John Cayley and Daniel C. Howe and Loss of Grasp by Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert, highlighting how

Introduction

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processuality and interactivity respectively create modes of reflexivity in them that a purely semiotic and representational approach cannot grasp, and how they both require thinking in terms of virtualities. While the opposition between fiction and fact remains relevant in certain respects, I argue that the digital medium urges us to also think beyond this binary strongly associated with the representational paradigm and take into account the new affordances and directions offered by the new (meta)medium. This draws to a general conclusion of the volume with the observation that our central question about the relationships among ontological realms, discourses, and discourses about discourses and ontological realms cannot be given a universal answer and need to be re-examined as new technologies and modes of communication emerge.

Reference List Bartlett, Steven J. 1987. “Varieties of Self-Reference.” In Self-Reference: Reflections on Reflexivity, edited by Steven J. Bartlett and Peter Suber, 3–28. Dordrecht: Nijhoff. Cohn, Dorrit. 1999. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dällenbach, Lucien. 1977. Le Récit spéculaire: essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris: Seuil. Derrida, Jacques. (1972) 1981. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. London: Athlone. Derrida, Jacques. (1967) 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques. (1967) 1978. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, Michel. (1969) 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by Alan M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock Publications. Hansen, Per Krogh, John Pier, Philippe Roussin, and Wolf Schmid. 2017. Emerging Vectors of Narratology. Berlin: De Gruyter. Hoberek, Andrew. 2007. “Introduction: After Postmodernism.” Twentieth-Century Literature 53 (3):233–247. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2007-4007. Hofstadter, Douglas R. 2007. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books. Hofstadter, Douglas R. 1979. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Sussex: Harvester. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge. Kemp, Simon. 2010. French Fiction into the Twenty-First Century. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Lavocat, Françoise. 2016. Fait et fiction: Pour une frontière. Paris: Seuil. Meretoja, Hanna. 2014. The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mulligan, Kevin, and Fabrice Correira. 2017. “Facts.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/facts/. Nöth, Winfried, and Nina Bishara. 2007. Self-Reference in the Media: Self-Reference in the Media. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Oxford English Dictionary. n.d. Oxford Dictionaries | English. Accessed January 8, 2019. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/. Pelc, Jerzy. 1986. “On Fictitious Entities and Fictional Texts.” Recherches sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry 6 (1):1–35. Priest, Graham. (1987) 2006. In Contradiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Priest, Graham. 2005. Towards Non-Being: The Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rabinow, Paul. 1977. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ruby, Jay. 1981. A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology. University of Pennsylvania Press. Sainsbury, Richard M. 2010. Fiction and Fictionalism. London: Routledge. Salmon, Christian. 2010. Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind. Translated by David Macey. London: Verso. Sandywell, Barry. 1995a. Reflexivity and the Crisis of Western Reason. Logological Investigations, 1. London: Routledge. Sandywell, Barry. 1995b. Beginnings of European Theorizing: Reflexivity in the Archaic Age. Logological Investigations, 2. London: Routledge. Sandywell, Barry. 1995c. Presocratic Reflexivity: The Construction of Philosophical Discourse c.600–450 BC. Logological Investigations, 3. London: Routledge. Sandywell, Barry. 2011a. “Logological Investigations: Some Preliminatry Theses.” Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms, edited by Barry Sandywell. Surrey, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing. https://search-credoreference-com.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/con tent/entry/ashgtvd/logological_investigations_some_preliminary_theses/0. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. (1999) 2010. Why Fiction? Translated by Dorrit Cohn. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. 2013. “Fictional vs. Factual Narration.” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörgen Schönert. Hamburg: Hamburg University. https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/fictional-vsfactual-narration. Szakolczai, Árpád. 2000. Reflexive Historical Sociology. New York: Routledge. Timmer, Nicoline. 2010. Do You Feel It Too?: The Post-Postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Venkatesh, Sudhir Alladi. 2013. “The Reflexive Turn: The Rise of First‐Person Ethnography.” The Sociological Quarterly 54 (1):3–8. https://doi.org/10.1111/tsq.12004. Walsh, Richard. 2016. “The Fictive Reflex: A Fresh Look at Reflexiveness and Narrative Representation.” Neohelicon 43 (2):379–89. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-016-0351-z. White, Hayden V. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wolf, Werner, Katharina Bantleon, and Jeff Thoss, eds. 2009. Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Woods, John. (1974) 2009. The Logic of Fiction. London: College Publications. Zetterberg Gjerlevsen, Simona, and Henrik Skov Nielsen. 2020. “Distinguishing Fictionality.” In Exploring Fictionality: Conceptions, Test Cases, Discussions, edited by Cindie Maagaard, Marianne Wolff Lundholt, and Daniel Schäbler, 19–40. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark. Zipfel, Frank. 2001. Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität: Analysen zur Fiktion in der Literatur und zum Fiktionsbegriff in der Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Erich Schmidt.

Graham Priest

A Logue “Well, first of all let me thank Erika and all the other people involved here for putting on this conference, and for inviting me to talk to it. It is a great pleasure to be here.” “That’s a polite way to start, isn’t it?” “Yes, but you do mean it, don’t you?” “Of course. It’s great to be able to address an audience of a very different kind from the ones I normally address.” “You mean an audience just of logicians or philosophers?” “Yes. I wouldn’t normally get to meet many people in this kind of audience and so be able to exchange ideas with them.” “So many of them might not know much about you.” “I guess not.” “Then perhaps you’d better say a bit about yourself.” “Okay. Well. I’m a philosopher and a logician, and I work at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, but I’ve spent most of my working life in Australia. I’ve got a lot of interests, though I think that one of the things that I’m best known for is my work on paradoxes. Many paradoxes are arguments which end in a contradiction. The standard response, when one meets such a thing, is to try to explain what’s wrong with the argument. But I think that sometimes one should just accept the argument. And that means accepting its bottom line, albeit a contradiction.” “I think you’d better give an example.” “Okay. This is a very famous paradox, discovered by Bertrand Russell. Some sets of things are members of themselves. The set of all abstract objects, for example, is an abstract object, and so is a member of itself. And some sets are not members of themselves. The set of all chairs, for example, isn’t itself a chair. So it’s not a member of itself.” “I think I’m with you.” “Good. So consider the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. Is it a member of itself or not? If it is, then it isn’t. And if it isn’t then, well, it is. Either way, it both is and isn’t. That’s a contradiction.” “And you think the contradiction is true. Right?”

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“Right. In the terms of the trade, a dialetheia is a true contradiction. And Russell’s argument delivers a dialetheia.”1 “That’s a bit of heretical view, isn’t it? Most philosophers would reject the thought that a contradiction could be true out of hand.” “Yes, many philosophers think that the view is totally beyond the pale.” Pause. “Is that enough?” “Enough what?” “Of telling people a bit about myself? “Well, sort of . . . but not really.” “How do you mean?” “Well, what you have described in the public persona, Graham Priest. But that’s just your public face. The real you is what lies behind the face. Someone can learn all that about you by reading your books and listening to your talks. But they wouldn’t really know you at all, would they?”2 “I suppose not.” “No. You’re a bit like an orange. What the world sees is just the outer coating. When you peel that off, the real orange emerges.” “I’m not sure I like that image, but there’s a certain truth to it. The real me is what my friends and family see. The person who is a father, a lover, who enjoys wine and opera, physical exercise, who has creaky knees, who sits in coffees shop reading. That kind of thing, I guess.” “Yes. That’s much closer to the truth.” “Excuse me. It isn’t.” “Pardon?” “Who are you trying to kid?” “What?” “That’s not the real you at all.” “Uh? So what is?” “Well under all that stuff, there is a seething world of drives and emotions. Your ambitions and desires, regrets, sexual tastes and fantasies, hates, fears, shames. Isn’t that what it’s like to be you – from the inside?” “I suppose. It sounds to me as though you have been reading Uncle Sigmund.”3

1 Priest (2006). 2 Borges (1964). 3 Freud (1923).

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“Yes, I do dip into that old Wiener Kopfschrumpfer sometimes. Sometimes he even gets things right.” “You make me sound more like a peach than an orange. There’s the skin, within that the flesh, and in the middle, there’s the kernel – what the fruit is really all about. “You could put it that way.” Pause. “But wait a minute. Why should it stop there?” “What do you mean?” “Well, we’ve been stripping off successive layers. Why should we suppose that we have arrived at the last? Maybe if we dig deeper, we’ll uncover more and more layers.” “That’s not a very pleasant thought, is it?” “No, the deeper we dig, the worse things seem to be getting. “True, this is a sort of dance of the seven veils – and you’re no Salome.” Pause “Oh my God.” “What? “Maybe it’s worse.” “Worse?” “Well, suppose I strip off layer after layer, and in the end there is nothing.” “Um . . . So now you’d be more like an onion. One strips of layers and layers, until, in the end, everything has disappeared.” “So there is no essential me at all.” Pause “I think I’m feeling a bit dizzy. “Yes. I can see that a void at the center of your being, could produce anxiety – even nausea.”4 Pause. “Wait.” “Yes?” “But it can’t be like that.” “Oh! Why?” “Well, we dig and dig, and what do we find?” “I don’t know.” “Who is it that’s constructing this whole edifice? “You mean, who is at the base of the whole regress?”

4 Heidegger (1977), Sartre (2000).

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“Yes, who?” “It’s, er . . . ” “It’s the philosopher, the public philosopher. It’s you who’s doing this now, right?” “I suppose so. So the public philosopher is at the base of it all?” “Yes, though that’s not a good way of putting it.” “Why?” “Think about it.” “Erm . . . ” “The public philosopher is where we started. “Good grief.” Pause. “You mean that when we dig as deep as we can, we come back to where we started? So there’s no base at all. That certainly doesn’t sound like any fruit or vegetable I know!” “No. We’ve gone around in a loop. When we reach the bottom, we find ourselves at the top. Fruit don’t work like that! “So there’s no bottom. There’s no essential me. There’s just a hierarchy of layers that bends around on itself.” “You’ve got it.” “That’s weird. I’m speechless.” “Ah! Ineffability!” “Not exactly.” Pause. “Oh dear.” “What is it?” “Now I’m really troubled.” “Why?” “Well, it was bad enough having nothingness at the center of my being, but now I seem to have disappeared entirely.” “I don’t get it. Why?” “Well, the public philosopher Graham Priest depends for being what he is on the private individual. The private individual depends for his being what he is on the subjective individual. The subjective individual . . . and so on . . . depends on the public philosopher. There is nothing to ground out the whole bag of tricks. There is nothing that determines my being. So I don’t exist. I’m just a conjuring trick.” “I’m still not sure that I get it.”

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“Well, suppose that you were an astronomer in Ancient Greece or Ancient China. You might have wondered why the Earth doesn’t fall down. So suppose that you said that it must rest on something.” “Okay. That seems reasonable.” “It doesn’t really matter what it is. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that it rests on an elephant.5 You might then start to wonder why the Elephant doesn’t fall down.” “I guess.” “Suppose you said that it rested on a turtle.” “As good as anything, I suppose.” “But then you’d wonder why the turtle doesn’t fall down.” “Sure would.” “And suppose I said that it rests on the Earth?” “Well, that would be rather silly. Then there would be nothing to support the whole configuration. Earth, elephant, and turtle would all fall down together.” “Exactly. There must be a bottom somewhere, or nothing would determine the lack of falling.” “Right. “Well, it’s the same with me. The regress of mes must bottom out somewhere. Or there would be nothing to determine me. My being would be infinitely deferred, never achieved.”6 “So you wouldn’t be anything. You wouldn’t exist.” “Right.” Pause. “I’m not so sure that that would have to follow.” “Oh? Why?” “Well, suppose that I find a note telling me how to make a time machine. So I build it, and go back in time. When I’m there, I write the note and leave it at a place where my later self will find it. That’s exactly a loop of this kind. Isn’t it? And the events do exist.” “In some sense. But it’s just a story.” “Of course. But it’s a quite coherent story. You have a causal loop. Each event depends on another event, and the whole thing goes round in a circle. Perfectly possible, in some sense.”

5 Charpentier (1923), citing Hay (1605). 6 Schaffer (2010).

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“Well – and suppose that when I go back in time, I murder my grandmother as well as leaving the note. Then I’m not born. But I must have been born to build the time machine. That doesn’t sound very coherent.” “Perhaps not. But that’s a tricky issue. Let’s not go into it now, or our discussion is itself liable to go into a regress from which we will never come out!”7 “Okay.” “The point is that a loop of dependence is not, in itself, incoherent – even if some kinds are.” “Right.” Pause. “So it seems that there are lots of mes. And somehow they all lock together, in mutual dependence. Just like the causal sequence in the time-travel story.” “Yes.” Pause. “You know, I read somewhere8 that, according to Indian Jaina philosophy, reality is many-sided. And each aspect of reality is as real as any other. It’s a bit like a crystal, a cut diamond, with many facets. Each facet is one aspect of the unity which is the whole.” “A beautiful metaphor.” “And it now seems that you are like that. You are a jewel. And each aspect of you is one of its many facets.” “I like that image! Now we’re getting somewhere. So there are many perspectives. And each one is as real as any other.” “Yes, or perhaps better, there are many yous, each having a perspective on things; and each is equally valid as an expression of you.” “So any time one of me speaks, it’s from one of these perspectives, these facets of the jewel.” “Exactly.” “And the totality of me is the “whole jewel,” the totality of all facets.” “Yes.” “Which is greater than any one facet.” “Naturally.” “I think I’m getting it at last.” “No you’re not.” “What?” “No, you’re not getting it.”

7 Lewis (1976). 8 Priest (2008).

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“Who the hell are you?” “I’m the jewel.” “Don’t be silly. Jewels can’t talk.” “It’s a metaphor.” “Oh yes, of course. I forgot that.” “Wait a minute. Now I’m really confused. How many voices are there in this dialogue?” “Monologue?” “I really don’t know. Some sort of logue.” “Whatever. I’m the jewel, the totality of all facets.” “What?! That’s impossible. We just established that if one of me speaks, it’s from some facet, not the whole lot.” “Correct.” “So you have to be just a facet.” “Correct. I’m that as well.” Pause. “Let me get this straight. You are the whole jewel and one of its facets?” Pause. “So there’s a part which is the whole?” “Yes.” “How can that be?” “Maybe this can help. There is a lovely story by Borges, called the Aleph.9 In it, the narrator finds – or is shown – a small place in a cellar which contains everything in the cosmos, the Aleph. Looking into the Aleph one can see everything in space and time. So the Aleph is a part which is identical with the whole.” “I see. Hm . . . But if you look into the Aleph, you must be able to see yourself looking into the Aleph. And within that Aleph, you can see yourself looking into another Aleph. And so on.” “Indeed.” “Good grief. It’s Alephs all the way down!” “Look, I don’t want to be a killjoy, but this really is just a story – a flight of Borge’s fantasy. Things can’t really be like that.” “Oh yes they can. There is a whole branch of mathematics dealing with structures called fractals.10 Fractals are mathematical structures in which if you take any part, it’s exactly the same as the whole.” “So this facet of me has a fractal structure.”

9 Borges (2004). 10 Falconer (2003).

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“Exactly.” “I had no idea I was so complex!” “Well, perhaps boring. You just keep repeating yourself.” “Yea. That’s what some of my friends say.” “I know another beautiful image for this: the Tower of Maitreya.” “What’s that?” “Well, there’s a Buddhist sutra which is central to the Huayan version of Chinese Buddhism. It’s called the Avataṃsaka Sūtra.11 In this, there is a story about a man seeking enlightenment, Sudhana. He seeks out Maitreya – the Buddha to come. When he finds him, Maitreya lets him into his tower. And when he enters, Sudhana sees countless universes spread out before him. And in each of these, there is Sudhana in the tower of Maitreya, looking at countless universes, in which . . . You get the picture?” “Wow, yes. I wonder what kind of psychedelic drugs the author of the sutra had been taking?!” “Good question.” “Well, at least I get it now. I’m a bunch of facets. But there is one facet which is identical with the whole – a sort of global facet.” “Exactly.” “But which one is that?” “I guess you might have to achieve enlightenment, like Sudhana, to find out!” “Yea. Or drop acid.” “That’s probably easier.” “But there is something I know about it. “What?” “This discourse, right now, is being given by one of your facets. Right?” “Well, one or more of them. I’m a bit confused about this . . . Maybe they’re taking to each other!” “Doesn’t matter. They’re all encoded in the global facet. Right?” “So whether it’s one or many, the whole discourse is in the perspective of the global facet.” “I guess so.” “Okay. There’s something else about it.” “What?”

11 Cleary (1993).

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“Well, there’s a paradox of self-reference in set theory. It’s a bit more complicated than Russell’s. It’s called Cantor’s Paradox, and it’s something like this.” “Yes?” “Think of the set that contains everything – every set, every person, every star. Sometimes this is called the universal set.” “That’s a very big set!” “Yes, the biggest. There couldn’t be a bigger one, could there?” “Absolutely not.” “But there could be one bigger.” “Oh! Why?” “Here’s one way of seeing it. Even though the universal set contains everything, there could always have been something else, and adding this to the set would have made it bigger.”12 “So it must be the biggest set, but it cannot be. That’s certainly a contradiction.” “Indeed so. And here’s another way of looking at it. We started with the universal set, the biggest set possible. The we added something to it to make it bigger.” “So?” “Well, this thing we added must have been in the universal set to start with. After all, it contained everything. So this bigger set is the universal set.” “Erm . . . ” “So the universal set is bigger than itself.” “I see.” “And by the same token, it’s smaller than itself.” “And that’s one of these dialetheias? – one of these true contradictions?” “Yes. Pause. “Well, that’s very interesting. But I don’t see what it has to do with me and my self . . . or selves.” “Okay. Let’s go on. The global facet is one of you. Maybe a very special one, but just one, none the less.” “Indeed.” “But it’s identical with the whole, the whole jewel.”

12 It is not entirely obvious that there could be such a thing. Cantor’s genius was in coming up with a construction – diagonalization – which showed that there not only could be, but actually is. See Priest (2002, Ch. 8).

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“Yes.” “And the whole was, we agreed, bigger than any one part.” “Yes. That’s right.” “So this whole is bigger than itself.” Pause. “Oh . . . I see where we’ve been going! It’s exactly like the universal set, except that it’s about me!” “You get it.” “So I’m bigger than myself!” “Yes.” “There’s more of me than there is!” “Quite . . . and of course less!” “. . . damn.” “And that’s one of these dialetheias too?” “Looks like it.” Pause. “I think it will take some time for me to get my head around this. And all this thinking has done me in for today. “Yes, it’s about time to go for a drink.” Pause. “I have one more question first, though.” “What’s that?” “Which of the facets of Graham Priest was giving that last part of the discourse, the one about sets?” “Evidently, the logician – the public philosopher.” “But that’s where we started.” “Indeed.” “So we are back to the beginning again. We’ve come around in yet another circle.” “Yes.” “But at least I know a lot more about myself than when I started! Perhaps, as T. S. Eliot put it: ‘the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’”13 “Perhaps.” “No. You’ve gone nowhere.” “Huh. Why?” “This logue never really took place. It’s just a work of fiction.”

13 Eliot (1943).

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Reference List Borges, Jorge Luis. 2004. The Aleph and Other Stories. London: Penguin Classics. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1964. “Borges and I.” In Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, 246–247. New York: New Directions. Charpentier, J. 1923. “A Treatise on Hindu Cosmography from the Seventeenth Century (Brit. Mus. MS. Sloane 2748 A).” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London 3:317–342. Cleary, Thomas, trans. 1993. The Flower Ornament Scripture: A Translation of the Amatamsaka Sutra. Boston: Shambala. Eliot, T. S. 1943. “Little Gidding.” In Four Quartets. London: Faber and Faber. Falconer, Kenneth. 2003. Fractal Geometry: Mathematical Foundations and Applications. New York: John Wiley. Freud, Sigmund. 1923. “The Ego and the Id,” in Standard Edition, vol. 19, 3–66. London: Hogarth Press. Hay, John. 1605. De Rebus Japonicis, Indicis, and Peruanis Epistulæ Recentiores. Antwerp, Belg. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. “What is Metaphysics?” In Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, edited by David F. Krell, 95–112. New York: Harper and Row. Lewis, David. 1976. “The Paradoxes of Time Travel.” American Philosophical Quarterly 13: 145–152. Priest, Graham. 2002. Beyond the Limits of Thought, 2nd. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Priest, Graham. 2006. In Contradiction, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Priest, Graham. 2008. “Jaina Logic: A Contemporary Perspective.” History and Philosophy of Logic 29:263–278. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2000. Nausea. London: Penguin Classics. Schaffer, Jonathan. 2010. “Monism: The Priority of the Whole.” Philosophical Review 119:31–76.

Nathan Wildman and Christian Folde

A Puzzle about Fictional “I”s The aim of this paper is to raise a puzzle concerning occurrences of reflexive indexical pronouns in narrative fictions. In brief: even if we grant that it is possible for some singular terms that occur in fiction to denote non-fictional entities, it turns out to be extremely difficult to engineer circumstances where reflexive indexical pronouns do so. To do so, we begin by discussing (§1) some background about narrative fictions and the possibility of denoting non-fictional entities. Next, we detail (§2) some preliminaries about the semantics of the relevant pronouns and of quotation. This leads (§3) to the puzzle: due to the fact that most narratives are told to us by a narrator, it looks impossible for there to be an instance of a reflexive indexical pronoun that denotes a non-fictional thing. Then, after dismissing some potential replies to the puzzle (§4), we present (§5) the rare case where these reflexive indexical pronouns do successfully denote a non-fictional object: namely, whenever the narrator herself is a non-fictional entity. We then conclude (§6) by discussing future work the puzzle engenders. This result highlights the interesting and strange nature of fictional discourse, which remains a rich topic to be mined by those philosophers of fiction and language interested in its semantics. Fictions are typically about fictional people, places, and events. Among these purely fictional entities are Pierre Besuchow, The Lonely Mountain, and Harry Potter’s first Quidditch match. However, fictions often seem to be about non-fictional people, places and events, too. War and Peace, for instance, seems to be about Napoleon, the 1812 French Invasion of Russia, and Moscow. This latter point – that fiction can be “about” real-world entities – has been a topic of some debate in both narratology and philosophy, with some contending that fictions are ontologically homogeneous, concerning fictional objects only. Such a view naturally goes hand-in-hand with the semantic claim that singular terms occurring in fictions never refer to non-fictional objects. As such, ‘London’ as it occurs in A Tale of Two Cities does not refer to the real London; instead, it denotes a fictional surrogate, the London-of-the-story. We reject this fictional surrogate approach. For while there is something attractive to it, several key questions about the view remain unanswered. For example, what exactly is the relation surrogates bear to their real-world counterparts? Can there be more than one real-world counterpart to a fictional surrogate (or many surrogates for one real-world individual)? And what properties does a fictional object have to share with a non-fictional object to be a surrogate of

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722031-003

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it? Fictional surrogate advocates must tell us something to settle these and other, related, questions.1 Further, there are good reasons for thinking that certain occurrences of singular terms in fictions denote non-fictional entities. For example, the most natural readings of the following all involve taking certain terms to do so: Napoleon, the man of genius, did this!

(Tolstoy 2009, Book 13, Chapter VIII)

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eightyfour days now without taking a fish. (Hemingway 1952, 1)

Here it seems that “Napoleon,” and “the Gulf Stream” are all about certain realworld entities – a real French Emperor, and a real place where real people can (and do) go fishing. Similarly, Friend reports on a time when, while giving a talk at a conference, she told a short fiction about her colleague, Anthony Everett, being a secret MI6 agent: Assume that you are at the Empty Names conference, listening to the story. You would probably look at Everett while I tell it. If you did not take the story to be about the real person, one of the organizers of the conference, you would not find it so amusing. The fact that what I’ve said of Everett in the story isn’t true of him should not be a problem. After all, though Everett may not really be a secret agent, it is not so difficult to imagine that he is (he’s British, he travels a lot, etc.). In fact, if you know Everett well, you are probably imagining even more than what is true in the story. Perhaps you are considering how Everett has managed to keep up his secret agent skills right under you noses. Consider some other responses you could have. After the story is told, you might go up to Everett, and in a joking tone inquire as to whether he’s caught any spies lately. Similarly, just as a tourist might go to Baker Street in London to be on the street where Holmes lived, you might be imagining yourself in the very building (CSLI) where there is a spy trap. (2000, 191–192)

As Friend notes, imaginative engagement with these stories appears to require “engagement with the real person and the real place mentioned in the story,” (2000, 192). In other words, proper imaginative engagement with the story requires imagining things about the relevant real-world entity – if you don’t direct your imaginative thoughts towards that entity, you’ve failed to engage with the story in the appropriate way. Hence one who (mis)interprets the line from The Old Man and the Sea as being about a fictional Gulf Stream surrogate is

1 Motoarca (2014) offers a starting point for such a view, but leaves much of it underdeveloped. See Folde (2017) for arguments in favour of the view that fictions can feature non-fictional entities.

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akin to one who (mis)interprets it as being about the Thames: they’re imagining things about the wrong place. Of course, Friend’s example is merely an intuition pump, not a knock-down argument. But the fact that taking her fiction to be about a real person offers the simplest and most natural explanation for typical reactions to it (e.g. glancing at Everett while it is being told, imagining more about him, joking with him about it, etc.) supplies strong (albeit defeasible) abductive evidence for thinking that real entities can be denoted by fictional singular terms. This point can be bolstered by noting that fictions can teach us things about non-fictional entities. For example, by reading Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (1989), one can learn quite a bit about the history of the Knights Templar; relatedly, reading Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees (2001) can teach you a lot about bee keeping. The most natural explanation for this phenomenon is to say that the relevant entities are denoted by the related (fictional) terms – i.e. that, in Foucault’s Pendulum, “Knights Templar” denotes the non-fictional organization the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, and that “bees” in The Secret Life denotes bees. Finally, there are strong reasons to think that abstract objects, like numbers, properties, and concepts can be denoted by singular terms occurring in fictional texts. For instance, take the following line from Goethe’s Elective Affinities: “Hatred is a partisan, but love is even more so” (2000 [1809], 214). This claim features two singular terms – “Hatred” and “love” – which, if the sentence is to make any sense, denote the (non-fictional) notions of hatred and love. But, if that’s right, then non-fictional things can be denoted by terms used in fictions. For these reasons, it is plausible to think that occurrences of proper names in fictions can denote non-fictional entities.2 And once we do that, it is natural to wonder about extending this possibility to other denoting terms. The most obvious is anaphoric pronouns, where it looks like all the arguments supporting proper names directly repeat – an unsurprising point, given the standard treatment of such pronouns. But what about reflexive indexical pronouns like “I,” “now,” and “here”?3 The intuitive thought is that, for reasons parallel to those give above, there are occurrences of reflexive indexicals in fiction which denote non-fictional objects. For example, Seethaler’s The Tobacconist (2016), a story that largely focuses on

2 Of course, it remains an open question whether particular instances do, but this does not take away from the possibility of singular terms doing so. 3 In contrast to non-reflexive pronouns like “this” and “that.”

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the relationship between Franz, the purely fictional 17-year-old protagonist, and Sigmund Freud, features the following line: How many times have I seen it blossom . . .

(2016, 209)

The most natural interpretation of this takes the “I” to denote Freud, who is said to be murmuring the sentence. Similarly, the ‘I’ in I desire peace, no less than the Emperor Alexander.

(Tolstoy 2009, Book 9, Chapter VI)

is naturally understood as denoting Napoleon, who, we are told, is saying the line. However, the main thrust of this paper is to raise a startling puzzle for this intuitive answer: when it comes to narrative fictions, nearly all instances of reflexive indexical pronouns necessarily fail to denote non-fictional entities. To do so, we begin by detailing (§1) some preliminaries about the semantics of the relevant pronouns and of quotation. This leads (§2) to the puzzle – due to the fact that most narratives are told to us by a narrator, it looks impossible for there to be an instance of a reflexive indexical pronoun that denotes a non-fictional thing. Then, after dismissing some attempts to undercut the puzzle (§3), we present (§4) the rare case where pronouns like “I” do successfully denote a nonfictional object; namely, whenever the narrator herself is a non-fictional entity. We then conclude (§5) by discussing future work the puzzle engenders.

Preliminaries First, we assume that, when it comes to most narrative fiction, “there is at least one narrator in every narrative,” though this narrator “may or may not be explicitly designated” (Prince 1982, 8). The narrator is the one who reports to us (the readers) the story – they are the “teller in the tale” (Rimmon-Kenan 2002, 89), telling the story as “known fact” (Lewis 1978, 39).4 Of course, why the “most”? That is, why not say all narrative fictions feature a narrator? To address this, it is necessary to distinguish the following claims: External Internal

Every fictional narrative has an external narrator Every fictional narrative has an internal narrator

The former is a conceptual truth: fictional narratives have authors. The latter, however, says that every fictional narrative includes, in the world of the fiction, some entity that is the fiction’s narrator. While many accept this later claim, we

4 See also Walton (1990), Alward (2005), Wilson (2007), Margolin (2009), and Schmid (2010).

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think it likely false; this is because a fictional narrative can explicitly have it that there is no (internal) narrator (Folde 2017) or can leave it open whether there is an internal narrator (see Köppe and Kindt 2011; Köppe and Stühring 2011). However, it is plausible that most fictional narratives feature an internal narrator. So we will be operating with this weaker assumption. Second, per standard, we take it that reflexive indexicals have a linguistic “character” that is a function on contexts whose value at any context is the expression’s content at that context.5 For example, the character of “I” is a function on contexts whose value at any context c is the individual who used the term in c. So the denotation of “I” at a context where Erika says “I am hungry” is Erika, while its denotation in a context where Christian says “I am hungry” is Christian. Importantly, built into this understanding is the idea that an indexical like “I” only expresses some specific content – i.e. denotes a particular individual – when it is used; otherwise, the semantic function isn’t triggered. Thus an utterance of “I am the owner of the dog,” which uses the pronoun, would trigger the semantic function of “I” (meaning “I” would denote the individual who uttered the sentence), while an utterance of “The word ‘I’ only has one letter” would not. Third, it is generally accepted that there are three distinct kinds of quotation.6 Examples serve to clarify: (1) Quine said, “9 is a number” (2) Quine said that 9 is a number (3) Quine said talk of numbers “makes no sense” The first example is an instance of direct quotation; in uttering (1), the term “9” is mentioned and not used, so it denotes nothing. Meanwhile, (2) is a form of indirect quotation. Here, “9” and the other material in the quoted utterance is used, though it is embedded within a “that” clause. This linguistic environment typically involves some grammatical reinterpretation such that “9” does not denote the number 9.7 Finally, (3) is an example of mixed quotation, where one both directly and indirectly quotes. Hence uttering (3) requires both using and mentioning the quoted material.

5 By “character” we mean a “meaning rule [. . .] set by linguistic conventions [. . .] [that] determines the content of the expression in every context” (Kaplan 1989, 505); meanwhile, “content” is a mapping from circumstances of evaluation to extensions. 6 See e.g. Davidson (1979), Partee (1973), and Cappelen and Lepore (1997). 7 A good example is Frege’s well-known view according to which expressions in such environments denote their senses. Thus, “9” in (2) would not denote a number, but a sense, a way of presenting the number 9.

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Finally, we assume that expressions in fictional discourse can be used to denote objects, fictional or not. This has been denied.8 In that case, of course, the puzzle we identify is no puzzle at all. Whether this counts as an advantage of such views is open for debate, especially in light of the points made in the previous section. With these settled, on to the puzzle.

The Puzzle Consider again Tolstoy’s War & Peace, a narrative fiction featuring an internal narrator. This text features the following line: I desire peace, no less than Emperor Alexander.

(2009 [1867], Book 9, Chapter VI)

As mentioned above, there is a strong intuition that, if it denotes anything, the “I” in this line denotes Napoleon: he’s the one who, we are told, is uttering the line, so, given the standard semantics for “I,” he is who the term denotes. But we are told Napoleon says the line – that is, instead of hearing the words straight from Napoleon, we are getting Napoleon’s lines second-hand from the fiction’s internal narrator. In other words, we are reading a narrative fiction featuring an internal narrator who is (fictionally) reporting what Napoleon (fictionally) said. So a proper treatment of this line takes it not as a straightforward (fictional) utterance of Napoleon’s, but as a (fictional) utterance of the narrator’s about a (fictional) utterance of Napoleon’s. In this way, the narrator’s utterance must involve some form of quotation. Suppose it is direct quotation. Then the narrator’s utterance has the following form: (DQ) “I desire peace, no less than Emperor Alexander.”

As the quoted material here is only mentioned and not used, the embedded “I” does not denote the real Napoleon – or anyone else, for that matter. Alternatively, the narrator’s utterance features indirect quotation, like so: (IQ) I desire peace, no less than Emperor Alexander.9

8 See e.g. van Inwagen (1977, 301) and Plantinga (1974, 159). 9 Notice that, unlike in (2), in (IQ) the “I” is not embedded within a that-clause. However, the augmented paraphrase, “Napoleon said that I desire peace” is not an option either, because the “I” here clearly does not denote Napoleon, but rather the narrator.

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In this case, the “I” is used, so it can serve to denote something. The problem is that it is being used by the narrator. This means the “I” denotes the narrator, not Napoleon. Finally, suppose the utterance features mixed quotation: (MQ) I desire “peace, no less than Emperor Alexander.”

This leads to the same problem as indirect quotation – the “I” here is used by the narrator, so denotes them, not Napoleon. As a last resort, one might be tempted to replace the reflexive indexical pronoun with a third person one: (PR) He desires peace, no less than Emperor Alexander.

This gets the denotation right – the “he” denotes Napoleon – at the cost of removing of any occurrence of “I,” rendering itself irrelevant to our question. The upshot is that there is no sensible utterance the narrator can make that results in an instance of “I” that denotes Napoleon. The narrator’s utterance either features a reflexive indexical pronoun that is mentioned but not used (and hence does not denote Napoleon), a reflexive indexical pronoun that is used but does not denote Napoleon, or a non-reflexive pronoun (like “he”) that is used and denotes Napoleon. Thus the puzzle: once we unpack the options, there seems to be no way to get the “I” to denote Napoleon. And the puzzle is not specific to this instance: the same issue emerges when we consider any instance of an “I” occurring in a narrative fiction featuring an internal narrator. No matter how we understand the narrator’s utterances, they will never take us to a real-world entity – the interaction of the relevant reflexive indexical pronouns and the semantics of quotation make doing so impossible. As well as putting pressure on our intuitions about denotation, the puzzle raises a more general issue in philosopher of language. Kaplan (1989) famously claimed that semantic monsters – expressions which, when affixed to a sentence, require that the sentence be re-interpreted as if it were uttered in a different context – not only do not, but could not exist in natural language. However, the puzzle gives us a good reason to think Kaplan is wrong here: reflexive indexicals in narrative fictions featuring internal narrators look monstrous. In this way, the puzzle extends the idea that there is something extremely strange about the interaction between quotation and reflexive indexicals in a new, fictional realm.10

10 See e.g. Cappelen and Lepore (1997), Cumming (2003), and Geurts and Maier (2003), though compare Cappelen and Lepore (2003).

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Objections and Clarifications In this section, we anticipate three potential responses, which serve to clarify the nature and consequences of the puzzle. First, one might object that something has gone wrong with the puzzle from the off.11 To clarify, it is helpful to make use of a truth-in-fiction operator. Let ‘Ff (p)’, where ‘f’ is a place-holder for singular terms denoting a particular fiction, and ‘p’ a place-holder for sentences, abbreviate ‘it is true-in-f that p’. Now, the following is plausibly true: (4) FW&P (“I desire peace” is uttered by Napoleon) → 1. FW&P (the “I” in this (↑) utterance denotes Napoleon).12 That is, if it is true-in-War-and-Peace that Napoleon makes the relevant utterance, then it is also true-in-War-and-Peace that the “I” in Napoleon’s utterance denotes Napoleon. It is also plausible that: (5) FW&P (“I desire peace” is uttered by Napoleon). This seems to be what the narrator is telling us with the line discussed in the puzzle and, setting aside issues about unreliable narration, it looks plausible to take their testimony at face value. Then, by the above, it follows that (6) FW&P (the “I” in this (↑) utterance denotes Napoleon). The problem is that the truth of (6) seems to contradict the puzzle’s result that there is no utterance within the narrative that includes a reflexive indexical pronoun denoting Napoleon. However, (6) does not conflict with the puzzle’s conclusion. For (6) makes a claim about what is true in War and Peace – that, within the fiction, there is some utterance fictionally made by Napoleon that features an “I” denoting him. Meanwhile, the puzzle tells us something about the story told to us by the internal narrator: namely, that there are no utterances within this narrative that contain an “I” denoting Napoleon. These are not incompatible – something can be true in the world of the fiction but not true of the telling. It being the case that, in the world of the fiction, Napoleon makes an utterance with an “I” 11 Thanks to Graham Priest for pressing us on this point. 12 We employ the arrow to indicate that the relevant utterance is the one in the antecedant, thereby avoiding an interpretation of the conditional’s consequent where “this” refers to the consequent.

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denoting himself does not entail that the “report” given to us by the fiction’s internal narrator on these (fictional) goings-on will include a Napoleon-denoting “I.” This is clearest when we consider a non-fictional report. Suppose, reporting on a real-life exchange between Graham and Erika, Nathan says: Graham said, ‘I am going to buy the drinks.’ Erika replied, ‘Great! I’ll have a martini.’

Consider the two “I”s within Nathan’s utterance. Who do they denote? The intuitive answer is that the first denotes Graham, the second Erika. But, given the nature of Nathan’s utterance, this can’t be right. Clearly, the two sentences embedded within Nathan’s complex utterance are not themselves uttered by Nathan – he’s not the one who said he would buy the drinks, nor is he the one who ordered a martini. Rather, Nathan is merely reporting what others have said. Of course, if Nathan’s report is veridical, then it entails that there were some utterances that feature the relevant reflexive indexical pronouns that do denote the correct individuals. But these utterances aren’t the utterances Nathan is making, so they are not part of his report. This parallels the puzzle case. There, we have a narrator internal to the fiction who is telling us about a fictional world – effectively, they are reporting on the fictional events. The report they give us consists of a series of fictional utterances. Given the semantics for reflexive indexical pronouns, these utterances cannot feature reflexive indexical pronouns that denote anyone other than the narrator (if they denote anything at all). Consequently, all the uses of such pronouns within the text of such fictions – that is, all the instances of pronouns like “I” that we actually encounter when we engage with such fictions – cannot denote real world objects. Of course, if the narrator’s report on the fictional goings-on is veridical (i.e. the narrator isn’t unreliable), then the narrator’s utterance entails that, within the fiction, there is an utterance of Napoleon’s featuring the relevant reflexive indexical pronoun that denotes him – i.e. (6) is true. But this utterance isn’t part of the narrator’s utterances – it isn’t something that we readers “see” first-hand. All we’re getting are the (fictional) utterances that make up the narrator’s report. The central issue is the denotation of the terms involved in these utterances: do any of them feature reflexive indexical pronouns that denote non-fictional entities? The semantics for such pronouns, in combination with the nature of quotation, seem to make it such that none do. And, that being a weird result, is the puzzle. Consequently, there’s no tension between the puzzle and the truth of (6). And, more generally, this objection does not undercut the argument given in the previous section.

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A second possible response to the puzzle concerns certain cognitive mechanisms invoked in reading narrative fiction.13 When it comes to reading narrative fiction, we tend to not think of the fiction as akin to a real life situation we’re observing; i.e. we tend to “hear” each characters’ words directly, as if they are simply speaking the relevant lines in our presence, and “see” the events that (fictionally) occur first-hand. Of course, if characters are making their own utterances directly, then the puzzle does not get started: if it is Napoleon himself who (fictionally) utters “I desire peace,” then there’s no problem with the “I” of this utterance denoting Napoleon (indeed, there would be a problem if it did not). We certainly do not want to dispute that this cognitive mechanism exists, nor that the phenomenology of reading narrative fiction supports it. It certainly is often the case that when we engage with a narrative fiction, we feel like we are stepping into the fictional world, observing the (fictional) events first-hand. That said, we’re here concerned only with fictional narratives that feature, either explicitly or implicitly, internal narrators. Such fictions necessarily involve someone – the internal narrator – who (fictionally) provides to us a report of the relevant part of the fictional world. And this point is reinforced when we consider that, much like with real-life, reports can be reliable, telling us the truth about the fictional world, or unreliable, and mislead us about the relevant fictional goings-on. But unreliable narration is only possible if the story is narrated in the first place – that is, we can only be misled about the fictional truths provided someone is leading us in the first place, standing as an intermediary between us and the fictional world. What the puzzle demonstrates is that, despite the fact that we do naturally understand that the “I” in the quote above denotes Napoleon, simply on linguistic terms we know that it cannot. And that is the underlying challenge of the puzzle: reconciling the cognitive mechanism of “being there” that we feel when reading fiction with linguistic upshot of the fact that so much narrative fiction features internal narrators, who tell us about the goings-on in the fictional world. Finally, one might try to block our puzzling result by claiming that the narrator’s utterances feature a fourth, novel kind of quotation that somehow allows for the relevant reflexive indexical pronouns to be quoted while still retaining its original denotation. So, employing this new quotation, the narrator could say something like (DQ), but the “I” involved would retain its original denotation – namely, Napoleon. There is a lot to be said in favour of this response. First, and perhaps most importantly, it gives us a way to derive the intuitive conclusion: the relevant

13 Thanks to Erika Fülöp for helpful comments on this and the next point.

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“I” denotes Napoleon, just like we always thought! And it manages to preserve this point while still acknowledging that the relevant utterance is (fictionally) made by the fiction’s internal narrator, rather than Napoleon himself, thereby avoiding the problems raised in the previous paragraphs. Finally, it even offers us a way to resolve the deep reconciliation problem highlighted above: by understanding the internal narrator’s utterances as involving this novel quotation, we can say that the narrator is the one telling us what is going on and that we are (effectively) “hearing” the quoted utterances of the characters directly. Restricting this novel quotation to fictional discourse would then go a long way towards explaining some deep dark issues. For all of this, the proposed form of quotation is simply too good to be true. For one, details about how this new form of quotation works need to be filled in. Do quoted pronouns always retain their original denotation, or do they sometimes shift to have a new denotation? How does this form of quotation behave when embedded within other, more standard forms of quotation – if I directly quote an utterance of yours in which you employ this new quotation using a reflexive indexical pronoun, does the pronoun in my utterance denote me or you? Does this retaining of original denotation also apply to non-reflexive pronouns, like “you” or “he,” or do they shift? These are only some of the numerous questions that one would have to answer in order to make this new kind of quotation intelligible. This also highlights another potential problem: the proposed new form of quotation looks ad hoc. It is a high-powered piece of semantic machinery. To motivate adopting such machinery, we need strong, independent reasons for doing so – otherwise, this looks like a magic bullet, specifically designed as a get-out clause for our puzzle. Perhaps we can use some of the above to provide a motivation for the novel quotation. For example, we’re already quite happy to accept that fictional discourse is strange; building on this, one might argue that one special characteristic of fictional discourse is its ability to produce a different kind of quotation and a different mode of functioning for embedded indexicals/reflexive indexical pronouns. And perhaps some of the requisite details can be worked out in time. That said, until these matters have been clarified, it is hard to see how this solution adequately address the puzzle. So, pending future work, we can set this response to the puzzle aside. The general upshot is that the puzzle is a puzzle. Even if we grant that other terms occurring in narrative fiction can denote non-fictional objects, it looks like no reflexive indexical can do so.

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The Caveat Case Well, almost no reflexive indexical can. There is one exception: whenever the internal narrator is a non-fictional entity and is identical to the character making the utterance. For example, the following features a reflexive indexical pronoun that denotes a non-fictional entity: An American near Billy wailed that he had excreted everything but his brains. Moments later he said, “There they go, there they go.” He meant his brains. That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book. (Vonnegut 1969, 103)

However, such circumstances are extremely rare – even restricting ourselves to stories that feature singular terms that denote non-fictional entities, only very few narrative fictions feature internal narrators that are non-fictional entities. In fact, most narratologists would even deny that the above example is an instance. This is due to the widespread belief that author and (internal) narrator of a fictional narrative cannot be identical:14 The relation between author and narrator remains to be considered. It seems to me that their identification (A = N), insofar as it can be established, defines factual narrative [. . .] their dissociation (A ≠ N) defines fiction [. . .]. (Genette 1993, 70) The narrator, which is a strictly textual category, should be clearly distinguished from the author who is of course an actual person. (Margolin 2009, 351) Narrator (narrative entity, narrating subject): personifying expression for the speaker of narrative discourse that, in the case of fictional discourse, is fictional and has to be distinguished from the real author of the narration. (Martinez and Scheffel 2007, 187; our translation)

Thankfully, we do not need to identify narrator and author to generate a suitable case. Rather, we only need an instance where the fiction’s internal narrator – who is distinct from the author! – is a non-fictional entity. For example: I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled. (Graves 1934, 9)

14 See Folde (2017) for an argument against this tenet of narratology, however.

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His clumsiness, I thought, is part of his disguise, part of his armor, a kind of self-defense mechanism – he seems most sincere just when he makes the least sense. I knew I still had much to learn. (Coover 1977, 30) I found, for example, that Cicero was fond of repeating certain phrases, and these I learned to reduce to a line, or even a few dots – thus proving what most people already know, that politicians essentially say the same thing over and over again. (Harris 2006, 10)

These feature an indexical pronoun the narrator employs to denote themselves, and are all (fictionally) delivered by narrators who are non-fictional individuals: Claudius, Nixon, and Tiro, respectively. Consequently, they are instances where a fictional occurrence of an indexical pronoun denotes a non-fictional entity. However, it is only in vanishingly rare circumstances like this that the puzzle is avoided. So the point remains that the vast majority of such cases fail to denote the intuitive entity.

Conclusion This paper has detailed a novel puzzle concerning the denotation of non-fictional entities within fictional contexts. Specifically, even if we grant that it is possible for some singular terms that occur in fiction to denote non-fictional entities, it turns out to be extremely difficult to engineer circumstances where reflexive indexical pronouns do so. This highlights the interesting and strange nature of fictional discourse, and indicates that it remains a rich topic to be mined by those interested in its semantics, as well as the semantics of pronouns and quotation more generally.15

Reference List Alward, Peter. 2005. “For the Ubiquity of Nonactual Fact-Telling Narrators.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (4):401–404. Cappelen, Herman, and Ernie Lepore. 1997. “Varieties of Quotation.” Mind 106 (423):429–450. Cappelen, Herman, and Ernie Lepore. 2003. “Varieties of Quotation Revisited.” Belgian Journal of Linguistics 17:51–75.

15 We would like to thank Amanda Cawston, Erika Fülöp, Graham Priest, Robert Schwartzkopff, and Richard Woodward for helpful comments on various earlier versions of the chapter, as well as audience members at the 2016 International Conference on Narrative in Amsterdam for feedback.

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Coover, Robert. 1977. The Public Burning. New York: Viking Press. Cumming, Sam. 2003. “Two Accounts of Indexicals in Mixed Quotation.” Belgian Journal of Linguistics 17:77–88. Davidson, Donald. 1979. “Quotation.” In Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation, 79–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Friend, Stacie. 2000. “Real People in Unreal Contexts.” In Empty Names, Fiction and the Puzzles of Non-Existence, edited by Anthony Everett and Thomas Hofweber, 183–204. Stanford, CA: CSLI. Folde, Christian. 2017. “Non-Fictional Narrators in Fictional Narratives.” British Journal of Aesthetics 57 (4):389–405. Genette, Gérard. 1993. Fiction & Diction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Geurts, Bart, and Emar Maier. 2003. “Quotation in Context.” Belgian Journal of Linguistics 17: 109–128. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 2000. Elective Affinities, in his Selected Works, trans. Alfred A. Knopf. New York: Everyman’s Library. Graves, Robert. 1934. I, Claudius. London: Arthur Barker. Harris, Robert. 2006. Imperium. London: Hutchinson. Hemingway, Ernest. 1952. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Kaplan, David. 1989. “Demonstratives.” In Themes from Kaplan, edited by Joseph Almog, John Perry, and Howard Wettstein, 481–564. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kidd, Sue Monk. 2003. The Secret Life of Bees. New York: Penguin. Köppe, Tilman, and Tom Kindt. 2011. “Unreliable Narration with a Narrator and Without.” Journal of Literary Theory 5:81–94. Köppe, Tilmann, and Jan Stühring. 2011. “Against Pan-Narrator Theories.” Journal of Literary Semantics 40:59–80. Lewis, David. 1978. “Truth in Fiction.” American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1):37–46. Margolin, Uri. 2009. “Narrator.” In Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, 351–369. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. Martinez, Matias, and Michael Scheffel. 2007. Einführung in die Erzähltheorie. Munich: Beck. Motoarca, Ioan-Radu. 2014. “Fictional Surrogates.” Philosophia 42 (4):1033–1053. Partee, Barbara. 1973. “The Syntax and Semantics of Quotation.” In A Festschrift for Morris Halle, edited by Stephen Anderson and Paul Kiparsky, 410–418. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Plantinga, Alvin. 1974. The Nature of Necessity. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Prince, Gerald. 1982. Narratology. Berlin: Mouton. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 2002. Narrative Fiction. London: Routledge. Schmid, Wolf. 2010. Narratology. Berlin: De Gruyter. Seethaler, Robert. 2016. The Tobacconist. London: Picador. Tolstoy, Leo. 2009. War and Peace. Translated by Louise Maude and Alymer Maude, Project Gutenberg Edition. Published online at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2600/2600-h/ 2600-h.htm. van Inwagen, Peter. 1977. “Creatures of Fiction.” American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1):299–308. Vonnegut, Kurt. 1969. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dell. Walton, Kendall. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, George. 2007. “Elusive Narrators in Literature and Film.” Philosophical Studies 135 (1): 73–88.

Pierre Cassou-Noguès

Postmodern Fables, Correlationism, and Speculation The aim of this chapter is to investigate the speculative function of fiction in philosophy and, in particular, the importance of what I will call postmodern reflexivity in this speculative function. I will discuss how it relates to other aspects of the postmodern as described by Lyotard (1979, 1993). I will not speak about factuality, because for me the question is to what extent, or in what sense, philosophy deals with facts, in the same way that it would be a question of to what extent, or in what sense, mathematics deals with facts. I believe that philosophy investigates the laws and the boundaries of the possible in the sense that I will discuss below. In this perspective, one could speak about “philosophical facts” in the same way that one may speak about “mathematical facts.” But then one would have to keep in mind that these facts do not have the same status as the fact referred to in the sentence “It is now raining.” Moreover, the expression “philosophical fact” seems to imply some kind of Platonism, or realism (in the sense that the word is used in the term “mathematical realism”). Therefore, I will speak about the theoretical, or speculative, function of fiction in philosophy rather than its relation to factuality, even though the problem is indeed to investigate to what extent postmodern fiction may have, thanks to or in spite of its reflexivity, a cognitive function and a relation to an objective reality. In my book Mon zombie et moi [My Zombie and Me], I have proposed a framework which gives fiction a theoretical function in philosophy. Here I will consider this function with a focus on the postmodern and in relation to the opposition between correlationism and speculation as it is staged by Quentin Meillassoux in his book Après la finitude [After Finitude] (2008), which has received wide critical attention in recent years (see Malabou 2014 and Harman 2011). In the first section, I will come back to the framework which constitutes the foundation of this investigation. In the second section, I will discuss “ancestral statements,” which Meillassoux uses as a touchstone to discriminate between (non-speculative) correlationism and his speculative perspective and which one can also find in fiction such as Lyotard’s “postmodern fable.” The last two sections offer a critical discussion of the opposition Meillassoux draws between correlationism and speculation with regard to postmodern fables such as Lyotard’s. The aim of this discussion is to highlight a hidden postulate in Meillassoux’s analysis,

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which I call the principle of the present and which postmodern fiction invites us to reject. As a result, postmodern fiction acquires a speculative function even though it may be considered within a correlationist framework.

Fiction defines what is philosophically possible I consider fiction in a non-technical sense to be a good story or description, which works as such, without being compared to an external reality. Let us briefly come back to the various elements of this definition. Story or description: this would include H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man, Plato’s discussion of the case of Gyges in the Republic, and Ponge’s poems. I am not interested in the narrative as such but in the fact that the text works without being compared to an external reality. When I read the weather forecast in the newspaper, I glance at the window to see if is indeed raining, but this is not how I evaluate the account of the experience of Griffin in Wells’s novel, nor the description of the Seine in a poem by Ponge. The text just needs to “work.” Some stories do not work. We have no interest in them. We just toss the book away, or start chatting while the storyteller goes on. Some stories work, even though we take them to be imaginary. We may recognize the situation to be impossible in our world but we somehow accept the story. I will not investigate why some stories work and others do not. Obviously, the way the story is told matters. If two stories describe the same situation, one might work and the other might not. I understand fiction “that works” to be a kind of black box: I do not know, and it is not my aim to find out, why it works when it works. This is a concept which – I assume – everyone understands because everyone has the experience of fiction that works and fiction that does not work. It would be an entirely different job to understand why a piece of fiction works. My interest is elsewhere. I claim that pieces of fiction that work open up the domain of possibility on which philosophy relies. I will come back later to the question of the universality of this “fiction that works.” This claim consists of two parts. On one hand, any philosophy that is wide enough or general enough must make use of fiction. If one is working with a special philosophy, such as a philosophy of logic, or mathematics, then one might not need such fiction. But if a philosopher is investigating the world in which we live, he or she will have to refer to and somehow describe the region or aspect of the world that he is attempting to conceptualize. It might be a minimal description. Or the philosopher might refer to a description in a canonical text of the history of philosophy (remember Descartes’s piece of wax, or Husserl’s white

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paper, etc.). In any case, the philosophical description does not have to be true in the same sense as the weather forecast. The reader does not care, because it is of no importance, whether or not there really was a piece of wax on Descartes’s desk that someone held near the fire while he was writing. Even though the story the philosopher tells may be factual (and Descartes really is writing his metaphysical meditations in his dressing gown near a warm fire, and he really does sometimes walk to the window to watch passers-by who, under their big black hats, look like skeletons moving mechanically), we nevertheless read the philosopher’s story as a piece of fiction and not as a factual account. Is this fiction really a story? Many contemporary philosophers and most classical philosophers (Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Russell . . .) to which contemporary philosophers refer, directly or indirectly, include actual stories in their texts: pseudo-biographical accounts, thought experiments, jokes, myths, parables, and so on. In fact, I believe it would be impossible to find a philosophical text that is not based on a story (possibly through an indirect reference, or a reference to a text referring to a text referring to . . . Wittgenstein’s story of . . . and so on). However, the above argument, which relies on the need for the philosopher to describe that part or aspect of the world which he aims to conceptualize, would require an extension of the notion of story so as to include descriptions which may not really be stories. Let us leave this point open. Philosophy must include some description. A philosophical description is considered to be fiction. It does not have to be true. It just needs to work. In most cases, if not in all cases, it works as a story. At least, it opens up a possible situation, which the philosopher then discusses. Conversely, I claim that any situation described in fiction, in a story that works, should be considered to be possible in philosophy. Fiction opens up the set of examples that the philosopher may use; in other words, the realm of the possible on which philosophy depends. It implies that not just any situation will make a story that works. The realm of the possible has boundaries, and it is the task of philosophy to explore them. My favorite example is the invisible man, the character described by H. G. Wells in the eponymous novel. The invisible man, Griffin, sees without being seen: he has become transparent. Can one imagine (that is, tell a good story about) an intangible man, a character, analogous to Griffin, who can touch without being touched? If he tried to shake hands with me, he would be able to feel my hand but I would not be able to feel his. It seems impossible. Of course, there are stories about ghosts which one cannot touch, but they do not touch either. This is as if the invisible man, losing his visibility, had also lost his vision: he would have become blind. There are also beings who can touch but who are nearly intangible. Imagine a Lilliputian crawling along my

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arm, small and light as an ant. She would be touching my skin but I would not feel her. Ghosts, as in the film Ghost (Zucker, 1990), for instance, may be represented as such nearly intangible characters. Nevertheless, if I cannot feel an ant, or the Lilliputian, on my arm, it is because my sensibility is too crude. The ant remains tangible, and I would be able to feel it if I concentrated on its movement or exercised my sensibility. It is as if the invisible man would only be invisible to me only because I am short-sighted. But that is not the case. He is completely invisible, whereas the ant, the Lilliputian, or the ghost in the film Ghost is only nearly, or relatively, intangible. There are also characters which one should not touch (as it says in the Bible, “noli me tangere”), and if we apply this to the invisible man, it is as if he is invisible because one should look away in his presence. None of these characters is analogous to Griffin. There are no stories of intangible characters, that is, intangible in the way that Griffin is invisible: he can touch without being touched. This shows that the domain of fiction, stories that work, has boundaries and does not allow arbitrary constructions. I hold that such pieces of fiction are legitimate examples for philosophy. Through them, we learn something about the properties of the world in which we live. We see and we touch, but these senses do not have the same properties. It is easy to imagine touching from a distance; Aristotle delineates such a fiction, but there is a kind of visual transparency about such an action for which there is no tactile analogy. Thus, fiction does have a theoretical function. It is for the philosopher to decide what the intuition about space is regarding the Kantian geometer. Kant argues that a construction, a drawing, underlies all geometrical theorems. The geometer is trying to prove that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to a flat angle. He analyzes the concept of a triangle and that of a flat angle but he cannot find a route to the solution. Then he draws a triangle and a line that goes through one vertex that is parallel to the opposite side, and he sees that the three angles in the drawing do indeed form a flat angle. Using a similar logic, the philosopher could ponder on the essences of sight and touch, and many philosophers have, from Aristotle to Derrida and Nancy. The only way to discover and elucidate the essential properties of these senses is to try and tell oneself stories. The only way to find out whether or not touch allows for the same kind of transparency that sight may show a being to have, that is, whether or not there could be an intangible man, is to try and tell ourselves the story of an intangible man. We all know the story of the invisible man but there seems to be no way to give a tactile analogue to the situation described by Wells. I am not claiming that Kant’s analysis of geometry is true but that the role of fiction in philosophy is comparable to the role he attributes to “constructions

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in intuition” in geometry. Fiction, narrative constructions, underlie philosophical statements, even though the construction may be erased afterwards. Before speculating about postmodern stories, let us discuss a little further the example of the invisible man in order to clear up some possible misunderstandings. The most rigorous attempt I know to sketch a story of an intangible being is Renard’s “L’homme au corps subtil” [“Man with a subtle body”] (1913). A physicist, Bouvancourt, becomes intangible through a complicated physical process (just as Griffin becomes invisible), but Renard has to make Bouvancourt lose his sense of touch. It is as if Griffin became blind when he becomes invisible. The interesting point is that in the real world, Griffin should have become blind. Since he turns entirely transparent, rays of light would leave no traces on his retinas, so he should not be able to see. Nevertheless, we accept in Wells’s story that he does not become blind. Thus, the invisibility of Griffin seems to be impossible according to this science of common sense, or it seems to be impossible in our world. My claim is that, nevertheless, philosophy should take Griffin as a legitimate example which can be used to establish some facts about our experiences (for instance, the different properties of touch and sight). This implies that what philosophers should consider as “possible,” that is, the domain in which they are working, is wider than what is possible in our world or what is possible according to science. An objection to this approach could be that a clever writer would certainly be able to write a good story about an intangible character that is as intangible as Griffin is intangible. After all, Kafka wrote a story, and a good one too, about a man who turns into an ungeheures Ungeziefer (monstrous bug). Compared to that, creating an intangible character seems an easy job, but it would destroy the opposition I have been trying to put in place between sight and touch. My view is that de facto there is no story about an intangible character (an absolutely intangible character, not a nearly intangible character) that has the same echo as H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man. I am not interested, or I can pretend not to be interested, in the reasons why no such story has been written. It is a fact, and a fact which to me shows that there is a difference between the reflexivity of touch and that of sight: these senses do not have the same properties. If someone wrote a story about an intangible character which had an echo comparable to that of Wells’s (i.e. it became an immediate bestseller), then I would agree that in certain circumstances (as depicted in the story), touch does have the same reflexivity as sight. I would correct my metaphysics or my analysis of possible types of bodies. This leads to the second part of the same objection: can there be no new stories? That is, stories that introduce a new kind of being of which no one has thought of beforehand and which it might have even been impossible to imagine. In other words, can new stories transform the domain of the philosophically possible? Or, to put it more generally, should the stories that work and the beings

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and situations they describe, which are the domain of the philosophically possible, be conclusively defined, or are they dependent on a particular time and place, on a particular culture, or even on individual preferences? I definitely reject the idea that good stories depend on individual preferences. My view is that, in a given culture, everyone seems to adhere to the same stories (who has not seen one of the versions of the Invisible Man?). But should the philosophically possible be considered as universal or as culturally dependent? I believe that I can leave both options open. On the one hand, I could accept that the functioning of a good story depends on culture. The same stories that work for us here on Earth in the early twenty-first century might not have worked on Mars in the Middle Ages (we would only be able to ascertain this if we found some hieroglyphics by medieval Martians and a way to translate them). Conversely, this dependence on culture would mean that our metaphysics, the properties that we can attribute to our senses, our bodies, and space and time, are also culturally dependent. On the other hand, I could also in principle maintain that a good story is universal. This would be a gesture similar to that of Kant when, in his third critic, he declares that art (the beautiful) has a universality without concept. According to Kant, what is beautiful does not depend on culture, nor on individual traits, but it does not depend on a concept either. There is no concept and no set of characteristics which would define what is beautiful (if, say, beautiful is 1. made of white marble, 2. depicts a siren, 3. with short hair). Nevertheless, even though it is impossible to define what is beautiful, the beautiful is universal. What is truly beautiful is, or should be, beautiful for all. This is not the place to analyze the way in which Kant explains this universality that does not rely on a concept, but Kant realizes an interesting operation, which is to detach universality from the concept. In the same way, I could try to claim that, even though it is impossible to define what makes a good story, a good story is universal after it has been translated accurately: it works for anyone, anywhere. In this way, I could retain the universality of a metaphysics based on fiction. There are certainly various problems with the claim that the domain of philosophy, or the domain of what should be considered as possible in philosophy, is the set of beings, situations, and events described in fiction (in the sense of the stories that work). I will mention another problem later in this chapter that has come up repeatedly in discussions. Another objection would go along the following lines: even if we accept that fictional beings such as the invisible man may be considered possible in philosophy, conversely is it certain that everything that is possible, or everything that the philosopher should consider to be possible, may be told in a story that works? For instance, it seems that science should be considered possible in philosophy, but can all science make a good story? And if someone who has suffered a trauma

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cannot tell her story even though something real has happened, philosophy should be able to take this real event into account. My answer to this objection is that, yes, everything that the philosopher should consider to be possible may be told in a good story. The trauma should be turned into a story that works (that would be the aim of psychoanalysis, for instance), and scientific theories, however abstract, may be narrated. From this perspective, there are various domains of the possible that are included in each other. What is possible in the real world is included in what is possible according to science, and what is possible according to science is included in what should be considered to be possible in philosophy. The invisible man is an example of a philosophical possible that seems to be impossible according to science (for, as mentioned earlier, if Griffin is transparent, his retinas would not be able to keep track of the rays of light, and so he should be blind). Thus, the domain of what is philosophically possible is larger than the domain of what is scientifically possible. Of course, it is impossible to prove these claims. The above discussion aims only to clarify them. I provide a longer defense elsewhere (Cassou-Noguès 2010, 2016). My framework depends on a methodological postulate according to which what is possible in philosophy is defined by stories that work. My aim in Mon zombie et moi (Cassou-Noguès 2010) is to investigate using this framework our possible bodies and the seat of the self. I now wish to extend this framework in light of the opposition Meillassoux draws between correlationism and speculation. As already mentioned, I will try to show that, because of the postmodern trick, a philosophy based on fiction may be speculative in Meillassoux’s sense while remaining within a correlationist context. In fact, the comparison between Meillassoux’s ancestral statements and postmodern works of fiction such as Lyotard’s shows that the limitations that Meillassoux attributes to correlationism, but also his attempt to go beyond those limitations and found a speculative perspective, are based on a hidden postulate that is not generally valid. Thus, I claim that in his book Meillassoux does not succeed in founding a speculative perspective but that using postmodern fiction in philosophy enables one to speculate within correlationism and in this way solve the problem that Meillassoux draws attention to.

Ancestral statements: facts and fictions Correlationism, which has been dominant in the history of philosophy since Kant and from which, according to Meillassoux, we should break away, starts with the idea that the world has only been given to us as a correlate of our thoughts or

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mental acts (perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, etc.). In fact, I seem never to have access to an object itself but only to the object as I perceive it, as I think of it, so that the features that belong to my perceptive acts seem to shape the appearance of the object and hide from me the object itself, if there is an object at all. Conversely, I only know myself in such a relationship to the world and never as a pure presence that would be undisturbed by sensations or objects of thought borrowed from the outside: “By correlation, we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (Meillassoux 2008, 13). Correlationism holds that this correlation is unbreakable: we cannot consider objectivity and subjectivity alone, outside this correlation. Correlationism has shaped a good part of the history of philosophy since Kant. Kant and Husserl, but also Wittgenstein may be seen as correlationists. Meillassoux’s aim is to leave correlationism behind and go back to “the great outdoors of pre-critical thinkers, that outside which was not relative to us, and which was given as indifferent to its own givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not” (Meillassoux 2008, 17; original emphasis). The problem for Meillassoux is to find a way to this “outdoors.” In Meillassoux’s scheme, we have no obvious access to this reality beyond the correlates of our intuitions. But the first problem is to show the weakness of correlationism. The core of Meillassoux’s argument lies in what he calls ancestral statements, that is, statements which refer to an event, a reality, that is anterior to the emergence of the human species; for instance, “the Earth was formed 4.56 billion years ago.” Science produces ancestral statements. But, according to Meillassoux, correlationism cannot accept ancestral statements at their face value. The difficulty, in a nutshell, is the following: if everything that exists as a correlate to human consciousness or my individual consciousness, how could anything have existed before any human consciousness even appeared? One way or another, it seems that correlationism will have trouble accepting ancestral statements. Or it will need to use some trick which will deprive them of their literal meaning. Thus, correlationism is irremediably divorced from science. If we wish to accept some aspects of science, that is, if we simply wish to accept the common belief in the possibility of making ancestral statements, then we should find a way to break away from correlationism. In fact, in these pages, rather than speaking about science “proper,” Meillassoux evokes an image from a popular scientific book: “It is just a line. It can have different shades, a little like a spectrum of colors separated by short vertical dashes. Above these are numbers indicating immense quantities. It’s a line the like of which one finds in any work of scientific popularization”

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(Meillassoux 2008, 19). The numbers mentioned here are dates specifying notable events in the history of the universe (at least from a human point of view): the origin of the universe, the accretion of the Earth, the origin of life, and the origin of the human species, and so on. Lyotard’s postmodern fable mentions the same events but, obviously, they are then taken to belong to fiction rather than to science because they appear in a fable. Lyotard’s fable starts in the aftermath of the Big Bang and (briefly) sketches out the formation of stars, the formation of the solar system, the emergence of life on Earth (bizarre negentropic systems), and the emergence of the human species (even more bizarre systems which will sensibly modify the distribution of energy on the surface of the Earth). Indeed, humans spread all around the Earth. Civilizations are born and die. Then the industrial revolution takes place and spreads over the continents. In a typical postmodern twist, the fable mentions that it is at this point (in the aftermath of the industrial revolution) that it is told on Earth, but the fable goes on to tell of future times. It describes the human endeavor to survive the death of the Sun, on which organic life depends. According to Lyotard (1988), the aim of “techno-science” is to make possible a life independent of our natural bodies to enable us to cope with any disaster and, in particular, with this ineluctable disaster that is the death of the Sun. In the postmodern fable, the shift towards an inorganic life takes place but a question remains regarding its modalities: “‘What a Human and his/her Brain – or rather the Brain and its Human – would resemble at the moment when they leave the planet forever, before its destruction, the story does not tell’” (Lyotard 1997, 83). Lyotard does not claim that his fable is “recent, nor original.” But it is “realist” and “postmodern” (Lyotard 1993, 95). In terms which are like those used in his The Postmodern Condition but are not completely equivalent to them, Lyotard explains that the fable is postmodern in that the human being is not the central character. The fable is, instead, a “physical history” (98). It starts at a time that precedes the appearance of the human species and does not tell the story of human beings, or the story of the human species, but – claims Lyotard – the adventures of energy: how energy, which tends to dissipate, has been concentrated in such highly improbable systems as living beings and humans; how humans have struggled to maintain this unstable state; how a new form of life (a non-organic Brain) appeared before the death of the Sun. The human being is not the hero of the fable but a “transitory formation,” “products, vehicles” of energy, an “invention” and an “episode” (99) in the fable. For this reason, the fable does not have the features of the “grand narratives” of modernity (Christian, Hegelian, Marxist) which are centered on the human and lead to a reconciliation of the human being with itself. The fable promises nothing like that. Instead it narrates the various forms of repartition of energy that take place on the surface of the Earth.

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It is interesting that Lyotard does not find the postmodern character of the fable in its self-reflexivity (even though, as already mentioned, he uses such reflexivity in the fable, which notes explicitly that it is told by these transitory beings which call themselves humans) but in the decentring that it produces and that makes humans appear as transitory beings in a non-human universe. The fable is postmodern in that it is speculative in Meillassoux’s sense: it produces ancestral statements and aims at describing a universe where humans have not always been present, will not always be present, and might not ever have been present; it is a universe that is independent of humans. At the same time, the tale states that it is told by humans. Its structure, the moments that it highlights, for instance, are related to this human origin: it is centered on the Earth, it points to the appearance of the human species as a crucial event, and, more generally, it is a story in a human language. Thus, it seems that the inhuman universe that it describes is a correlate of the human ability to tell tales. As a result of this, we are facing two problems. First, there is a relationship between the two aspects of postmodernism: self-reflexivity, which is usually taken to characterize postmodern fiction (Hutcheon 1980; McHale 1987), and decentering, which Lyotard performs in this text and which turns humans, who were the central characters of the grand narratives of modernity, into transitory beings in a non-human universe. Second, we need to come back to the opposition that Meillassoux stages between correlationism and speculation and the reason why, in his framework, correlationism cannot speculate and, in particular, cannot produce or understand the literal meaning of ancestral statements. As for the first problem, in contemporary discourses, postmodernism would usually refer to the self-reflexivity of fiction, whereas the decentering that Lyotard discusses would fall under “post-humanism” (for instance Wolfe 2009). It is noteworthy that Lyotard, who has been a key figure in the definition of the notion of postmodernism, uses the term to mean precisely what would now be called post-humanism. This could serve as an argument in favor of the idea that the broader concept of post-humanism continues some aspects of postmodernism under a different name. In any case, Lyotard’s fable produces this decentering, not just by making ancestral statements or referring to a universe before humans existed: the Book of Genesis in the Bible or Plato’s myths do just that too, even though the humans remain the central characters of these stories, as they are interpreted by modernity. On the other hand, a science fiction novel may describe another universe, a universe where humans are not known. But Lyotard’s fable intends to describe a universe where humans exist but have not always existed, will not always exist and might have not existed at all. We, humans, appear in the universe of the fable as a contingent episode. Now, it seems that this decentering requires some

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kind of self-reflexivity: we, humans, have in our hands the story which describes a universe that is larger than our life span (as a species). This has to be explained. To stage this decentering, the fable has to discuss its own status or reveal the circumstances in which it is told. Thus, for Lyotard in this text, postmodernism as decentering seems to imply the self-reflexivity of postmodernism. In fact, it is the self-reflexivity of the story which makes it possible to stage such a decentering and can give the story its speculative value in Meillassoux’s sense.

Ancestral statements and correlationism Let us come back to the opposition between correlationism and speculation. In Meillassoux’s framework, why can’t correlationism accept ancestral statements in their literal sense? The difficulty mentioned above is that since correlationism considers that our reality exists only as an object of our thought, it cannot accept a reality that would exist before the event of consciousness. Whatever the consciousness is to which the correlationist refers, my individual consciousness or a transcendental consciousness, this correlation would not enable the correlationist to accept a reality that antedates the consciousness which it is correlated to. Meillassoux points to “the self-contradiction [. . .] of the givenness of a being anterior to its givenness” (Meillassoux 2008, 28). In other words, “what is given to us, in effect, is not something that is anterior to givenness” (31). The question is why not? Why could there not be a givenness, a correlation, some kind of intentionality, or a mental act which would relate to something anterior to it? For Meillassoux, this is a self-evident principle, which he neither explains nor justifies. I will call it the “principle of the present.” The correlation, a givenness, or a mental act can only relate the self to an object that is contemporary to it. One cannot relate to the past (nor the future) as such. One can only perceive, feel, or think of the present. Is that true? Is there a contradiction in denying the principle of the present? Bergson’s theory of memory, described in Matière et mémoire [Matter and Memory], is an example of a position which breaches the principle of the present. Indeed, according to Bergson, memory gives us access to the past as such. It relates the self in the present to an event from the past. Remembering is not making a picture of what happened, a picture that exists in the present, like a postcard, about which we would say: “this is past.” We perceive, in the present, the event from the past. Memory makes us perceive events through a distance of time. If I am on the beach watching red kites flying in the sky, I see them through a distance of space. If I remember, in the winter, lovely afternoons on the beach with

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red kites flying in the sky, I perceive them through a distance of time and space. I do not perceive them in the same way (precisely because my perception then reaches out through time and space). I may perceive them inadequately (as I may also perceive inadequately in the present). But memory is, according to Bergson, a perception in the past. Thus, Bergson’s memory goes against the principle of the present. Conversely, the principle of the present seems to lead inevitably to the “postcard theory” of memory. If we can only relate to the present, it seems that there is no other way to describe memory but as a picture that we form in the present and which, we say, refers to the past: it is a postcard that I hold in my hands and on which I wrote “summer 2016.” In any case, whichever theory of memory we accept, it seems that, since it is consistent, Bergson’s position shows that there is no self-contradiction in considering “the givenness of a being anterior to its givenness,” to use again Meillassoux’s expression, quoted above. Whitehead’s (1979) analysis of perception in Process and Reality is another example. The principle of the present is not self-evident. But how would this help correlationism? What is in question with ancestral statements is not a past that we can remember but a past that precedes the appearance of the human species. Nevertheless, the question seems to be similar. If we accept the principle of the present and the postcard theory that follows from it, when reading a story about the past, we should be forming a representation of the events described and add outside this representation the idea that “this could be the past.” Just like in the postcard theory, when remembering an event, we form an image, which is present, which we label “past” or add a date to, such as “8 July 2016.” In this perspective, the reference to the past can only be situated outside the representation, on the frame, for the representation itself is present. A story that is simply written in the past tense could be considered as a narrative delivered by an invisible narrator that is contemporaneous with us, a kind of postcard to which the invisible narrator itself adds “this is my past” or “this is the past of the universe in which I live.” But it is impossible to consider postmodern stories such as Lyotard’s in this way, for it goes beyond the life span of humans, which, the fable asserts, tell the fable. Moreover, when the fable refers to the moment when it is written, it segments time into a past, a present that is contemporary with us, and a future, which is part of the story it tells and which would be meaningless according to the postcard theory. The kind of reflexivity that Lyotard uses in the fable, and which underlies the postmodern character of the fable, becomes entirely meaningless. I have discussed in the first part of this chapter the claim that fiction is a mode of intuition about the possible, on which philosophy relies. The solution I offer for this difficulty is to consider fiction, including postmodern fables, as

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constituting an intuition about a possible past or a possible future, which opens up a relation to the past or the future, just as in Bergson’s view, memory is seen as a relation to one’s past. Because it can relate to a possible past or future, fiction would then breach the principle of the present. In this perspective, we may consider fiction as a human activity, a correlation if you wish, where a certain image is created and correlated with some subjective act, and as a speculation relating to a universe that is wider than our lifespan.

Beyond correlationism? The same kind of problems arise again when Meillassoux attempts to break away from correlationism. In the first part of his book, Meillassoux attempts to show (via the example of ancestral statements) that correlationism is inadequate with regard to contemporary science. It is one thing to discard correlationism, but it is another to be able to devise an alternative position, a way to “speculate” and to reach the “great outdoors.” Science produces ancestral statements. But since these are revisable, we have no certainty that they accurately describe the universe itself. In Meillassoux’s framework, scientific theories do not provide direct access to the “great outdoors” of speculation. Science does not in itself provide cognitive access to the reality beyond our consciousness. It only invites us to break away from correlationism. But it is still the philosopher’s task to prove that there is a universe which is not the correlate of our thoughts. So how does Meillassoux accomplish this? In fact, Meillassoux just needs one point of access to this universe: something that cannot be, or cannot be only the correlate of our thoughts. What is this something? The answer is simple: it is the possibility of our own annihilation, the possibility that we will die – not in the sense of our soul leaving the body and going somewhere else but in the sense of the definitive interruption of existence. Having an afterlife would not be annihilation. The possibility of our annihilation cannot only be an object of our thought. It is an absolute possibility: I must think of my capacity-not-to-be as an absolute possibility, for if I think this possibility as a correlate of my thinking, if I maintain that the possibility of my not being only exists as a correlate of my act of thinking the possibility of my not being, then I can no longer conceive the possibility of my not being. (Meillassoux 2008, 94)

These two claims need to be dealt with separately: (1) we have the evidence, the intuitive knowledge, that we may cease to exist; and (2) this possible annihilation cannot be only the correlate of our thought.

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Let us start with claim (2). The problem with (2) is as follows. If the possibility of my annihilation is only an object of my thoughts and has no reality outside this correlation, then it only exists for as long as I continue to think. I need to exist in order to make my non-existence possible. This does not seem to be a contradiction. In this case, if our non-existence is to be possible, this possibility must be an absolute one. Meillassoux rephrases his argument in these terms: Does this possibility [not to] depend on our thinking this possibility? Of course not, for if our mortality, our annihilation, was itself only possible on the condition that we exist to think, well, we would cease to be mortal, we would even cease to be able to think of ourselves as mortals. (2010, 32)

The weak point in the argument is in what follows the “well.” Let us accept that the possibility of my annihilation depends on my thinking this possibility. So this possibility only exists on the condition that I think. Now, as we know, if I think, I exist. Thus – concludes Meillassoux – I cannot not exist. But the inference is only correct if one adds “at the same time”: if I exist, I cannot not exist at the same time. However, I may exist now but not exist one day. I may have not existed yesterday and will not exist tomorrow. Reducing the possibility of our annihilation to an object of our thinking implies that this possibility only exists as long as we think, as long as we exist. However, it does not imply that we can no longer be annihilated. It only implies that we cannot not exist at this time, at this very moment when we are considering the possibility of our annihilation. But we may well not be at any other moment. And when we no longer exist, the possibility of our annihilation no longer exists. Thus, the possibility of our annihilation may be thought of as a correlate. It need not be an absolute and it does not offer a way out of correlationism towards a universe in itself. However, Meillassoux takes it as an absolute because he relies a second time on what I called the principle of the present. Indeed, if we can only think about the present, the annihilation, which we know to be possible, should take place now. But it cannot, since at this moment we are thinking about our annihilation: we are thinking and therefore we are. If it exists only as an object of our thought, our annihilation becomes impossible. But we know it to be possible. Correlationism therefore leads to a contradiction. However, if we reject the principle of the present, we may know now that our annihilation is possible one day. We know now that we have not always existed and will not always exist. We may remain correlationists and believe that our non-existence in the past and in the future is a fact correlated to our thinking. However, this requires that we are able to relate to the past and future and are not stuck in the present. Now let us come back to claim (1), according to which we know that our annihilation is possible. In After Finitude, Meillassoux does not give a clear

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explanation of the ways in which we arrive at this evidence. Of course, we see, or we know, that people die. But this death is not necessarily the annihilation that we have been speaking of in the above argument. For, after all, death could be followed by an afterlife, whereas what Meillassoux takes as an absolute, and which gives him access to the “great outdoors,” is our annihilation, the possibility that we cease to be (in any form – body or soul or something else). I have argued, against Meillassoux, that this possibility not to be is not an absolute, but I agree with Meillassoux that our possible annihilation is intuitive evidence. We know that we may not only die but may cease to be. I do not mean that we know there will be no afterlife but that we know that there is a possibility that there is no afterlife, or that it ends. A good example of this is revealed in Descartes’s system. Descartes proves the immortality of the soul but believes that God could still annihilate our soul (and, in fact, he needs to recreate it at each instant). Thus, for Descartes, the I of the “I think” is an immortal soul but it can still be annihilated. But where does this knowledge of our possible annihilation comes from? I would say that it comes from fiction. Every (good) story that we can tell ourselves includes the risk of annihilation. In all possible futures, there remains the risk of annihilation. This does not mean that we die in all (good) stories but that the risk of annihilation cannot be eliminated. For instance, in transhumanist fiction, I may upload myself onto a computer but an electrical breakdown would still kill me. Thus, the risk of annihilation is an element of all (good) stories and therefore an invariant of all possibles.

Conclusion I wish to stress several points. 1. There is a blind spot in Meillassoux’s analysis of correlationism. His attack on correlationism depends on a hidden principle which Meillassoux presents as self-evident and which I call the principle of the present, namely that we can only “be given,” perceive, feel, think about, and relate to the present. If correlationism is associated with the principle of the present, then certainly cannot give a viable meaning to ancestral statements. However, Bergson’s theory of memory (as well as Whitehead’s theory of perception) shows that the principle of the present may be breached without causing a contradiction. Moreover, if we have a “givenness” such that the object may be temporally dissociated from the act itself, we may accept the literal meaning of ancestral statements while remaining in a correlationist framework.

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2. Meillassoux fails to break away from correlationism. In fact, the principle of the present comes into play again when Meillassoux attempts to break away from correlationism and reach for an absolute which is something other than simply a correlate of our thoughts. Indeed, if Meillassoux takes the possibility of our annihilation as an absolute, it is because he disregards the fact that the “given” (the possibility of our annihilation) may be temporally dissociated from the “givenness” (the evidence of the possibility of our annihilation). But, obviously, I may believe now that my annihilation might happen one day. 3. In the end, the problem that Meillassoux raises, and which is essential for contemporary theory, is the difficulty of finding a way to describe in a correlationist framework a universe that was not made for humans, which existed before humans, and will in all likelihood exist after humans do not. Why do we need to remain in a correlationist framework? First, we don’t have a way out. Second, and more importantly, correlationism enables one to eliminate the ineffable. The postulate according to which any element or aspect of the universe may be adequately described (by science, literature, or art) and which exists as an object of possible descriptions leads to a form of correlationism. I suggest that we should stick to such a postulate but should aim at describing a non-human universe: we should be correlationists but should nevertheless speculate. To do that, we simply need a “givenness” which temporally dissociates the self and its object. I will call such relations “differant”: differant relations differ. The word is coined with reference to Derrida’s model of difference (Derrida 2011). However, Derrida’s differance is meant to point to an ungraspable gap between two terms that are taken to be absolutely contemporary, whereas with differant relations, I am interested in relations which introduce a huge gap – years, billions of years possibly – between the self and its object. Memory, as it is described by Bergson, and perception, as it is described by Whitehead, are differant relations. As I have tried to suggest, postmodern fiction could also be considered to have differant relations to a possible past or future.

Reference List Bergson, Henri. (1896) 1913. Matter and Memory. Translated by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. London: G. Allen. Cassou-Noguès, Pierre. 2010. Mon zombie et moi: la philosophie comme fiction. Paris: Seuil. Cassou-Noguès, Pierre. 2016. “A Quasi-Phenomenology with Examples. The Invisible Man, the Posthuman and the Robot.” Iride. Filosofia e discussione pubblica 29 (3):299–314. Accessed 9 January 2019. Doi 10.1414/84252.

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Derrida, Jacques. 2011. Voice and Phenomenon. Translated by Leonar Lawlor. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Ghost. Directed by Jerry Zucker. 1990. U.S. Paramount Home Entertainment, 2009. Blu-ray disc. Harman, Graham. 2011. Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 1980. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1979. La condition postmoderne. Paris: Minuit. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1988. L’inhumain: causeries sur le temps. Paris: Galilée. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1993. “Une fable postmoderne.” In Moralités postmodernes, 89–94. Paris: Galilée. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1997. “A Postmodern Fable.” In Postmodern Fables, translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele, 83–103. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Malabou, Catherine. 2004. Avant Demain. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. 1987. New York: Methuen. Meillassoux, Quentin. 2008. After Finitude. London: Continuum. Meillassoux, Quentin. 2010. “Métaphysique, spéculation, correlation.” In Ce peu d’espace autour: Six essais sur la métaphysique et ses limites, edited by Bernard Mabille, 73–96. Chatou, Fr.: Les Éditions de la Transparence. Renard, Maurice. 1913. “L’homme au corps subtil.” In Monsieur d’Outremort et autres histoires singulières, 81–128. Paris: Louis-Michaud. Wells, Herbert G. 1897. The Invisible Man. London: C. A. Pearson. Whitehead, Alfred N. 1979. Process and Reality. New York: Simon and Schuster. Wolfe, Cary. 2009. What is posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Richard Saint-Gelais

Fictionalizing Metafiction When I was maybe seven or eight years old, I had a dream which has since intrigued me and which provides, I believe, an appropriate introduction to this chapter. In this dream, I was playing in the schoolyard with my schoolmates – I remember the bustle all around – when suddenly it dawned on me that this was only a dream. I now recognize in this scenario what psychologists describe as a “lucid dream,” a dream in which one is aware of one’s dreaming. But mine presented a curious variation that explains why this dream has stayed with me all these years. Eager to share what seemed to me an important insight about the situation (indeed, about the nature of “reality”), I began to shout to everyone around me, “Hey, don’t you see that you are all dreaming?” I’ll never know how my listeners would have reacted, because the dream ended precisely at this point. What began, though, was my lasting perplexity: how, I have since wondered, could I (or rather, my dream persona) have been at once so insightful and so utterly wrong? I had somehow perceived the oneiric nature of what was happening, but I was wrongly assuming that each character in this scene – not only me but every person involved in it – was separately dreaming herself or himself into this dream: a dream which therefore would not be my dream but a shared one, resulting from our converging imaginations. Such was the “revelation” I was trying to impart to my schoolmates. How unfortunate that the dream’s abrupt ending makes it impossible to know the outcome of this strange attempt. Today, many years later, I would account for the fascination this dream has exerted on me in the following way. On the one hand, my being immersed in a dream state did not prevent me from perceiving this state, as if my dream persona had grasped the situation from the outside – from the waking point of view, so to speak. But, on the other hand, my persona’s understanding was affected, and even warped, by the oneiric context in which this understanding occurred. The very fact that I was thinking from within a dream resulted in a weird conception, according to which characters appearing in dreams are not the creations of the dreamer’s unconscious but independent dreamers, each projecting their persona in the dream world.1

1 Curiously, there is a science fiction novel by the British writer Christopher Priest, A Dream of Wessex (1987 [1977]), that is based on a similar premise, the only difference being that in it dreaming is replaced by a technology, the “Ridpath projector,” by means of which characters https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722031-005

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This dream came back to me as I was beginning to sort through my reflections on the relationship between reflexivity and fictionality. In its curious blend of knowledge and blindness, it seems to encapsulate the paradox I would like to examine here. Metafiction endeavors to describe fiction, either literally or figuratively. But it does so from within fiction – just as my conception of dreams as spaces shared by several dreamers belonged to a dream. Doesn’t this affect the status, signification, and validity of metafictional statements? In this chapter, I will consider some texts that dwell on precisely this paradox. Granted, dreams and fictions are two very different phenomena: the processes activated while reading fiction differ in important ways from those involved in dreaming. However convincing, the immersion in a fictional world is never complete; it is always framed by cognitive mechanisms ensuring that the reader always keeps in view the immersion process. In contrast, the dreamer is – usually – carried away by the conviction that the setting, characters, and events of her dream are real. The analogy between lucid dreams and metafiction, then, should not be taken literally, for they do not dispel the same kind of illusion. What they share, though, is the paradox that may arise when accounts of a given context are embedded in the very context they describe. My contention is that conceptualizations of metafiction have not always given sufficient attention to this paradox.

Metafiction as reference Classical theories of reflexivity postulate an opposition between self-reference and reference. An important proponent of this view is Jean Ricardou, who has consistently maintained that auto-représentation and représentation are two competing forces in texts, so that one cannot be established without contesting the other: auto-représentation, self-representation, reminds readers that they are reading, thus undermining the occultation of the text on which representation of an extratextual reality rests.2 Highly influential, especially in the structuralist context of the 1960s and 1970s, this view has been challenged by later critics. Janet Paterson argues that self-representation and representation, far from being incompatible, may work hand in hand, each one backing up the other: “Through its forms and

collectively imagine they live in a future Britain and forget their reality as long as they stay in this projected state. 2 “Tous les efforts que fait la fiction pour représenter la narration qui l’engendre s’accomplissent au détriment de toute éventuelle représentation du monde” (Ricardou 1972, 221).

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its themes, self-representation contributes to the production of the fiction, while representation orients our reading towards the discovery of the literary phenomenon” (1982, 191–193; my translation). The integration Paterson has in mind clearly takes place on an aesthetic plane. She lists a number of novelists (Nabokov, Gide, Proust, and Butor, among others) who, according to her, aim at a “symbiotic relation” (1982, 193) through which self-representation and representation, far from excluding each other, are subsumed under a supposedly harmonious process of signification. One would like, though, to see this claim supported by more than a list of writers whose works purportedly substantiate it. How exactly does this symbiotic relation work? As it stands, Paterson’s position seems to rest less on textual evidence than on an interpretive strategy seeking to preserve representation from the perturbation self-representation is likely to inflict on it. Gérard Genette and Marie-Laure Ryan adopt a different tack. Instead of discarding Ricardou’s oppositional conception of self-representation and representation, they see self-representation – or more exactly, metafiction – as pragmatically distinct from the fictional utterances they are combined with. For Genette, “a narrative that would exhibit its fictionality in every sentence through phrases such as ‘let’s imagine that’ [. . .] would make perfectly serious utterances” (1991, 17; my translation). Ryan states this even more bluntly: “By staying outside the fictional game, the text of metafiction is itself nonfiction” (1991, 93). It is easy to see the rationale behind this position. A text may be said to be metafictional, in a broad sense, when it includes elements or statements that refer to itself. These elements or statements may do so literally or in a figurative way; they may focus on textual or narrative features of the text, or its production or reception; they may, as in Genette’s examples, stress the fictionality of the work. Whichever is the case, metafictional statements claim for themselves a referential status. Contrary to fictional utterances, which do not refer (or refer to a fictional world), metafictional statements are serious utterances about the text, its fictionality, or its readers. The implication is that metafiction, according to Genette and Ryan, triggers a factual – instead of a fictional – mode of reading. It does not invite us to imagine a fictional world, but describes this world from the outside, framing it as the product of writing techniques and reading processes. Hence, this is the paradox of metafiction: it stresses the fictionality of the text but does so by tacitly excluding itself from this fictionality. Given this, we must not be surprised that many (if not most) commentators on metafictional texts attribute a truth value to mises en abyme, which they suppose, sometimes uncritically, to reveal something about some aspect of the text. A frequent concern of theoreticians studying metafiction is the risk of proliferation: the tendency of overeager readers to see metafiction everywhere – say, in every mirror, labyrinth, or character reading a book that may happen to be mentioned in a novel. Some, among

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them Lucien Dällenbach (1977/1986) and Bernard Magné (1986), have devised criteria in order to preclude over-interpretation by limiting the metafictional hypotheses to cases where reflexivity clearly contributes to a textual strategy. (One may think that their proposals aim to discipline the field in order to assuage the doubts conservative critics may entertain towards metafiction as such.) But this concern should not hide a more insidious trap facing critical discourse about metafiction: not the tendency to overestimate the frequency of self-reflexive devices or patterns, but the inclination to see in these devices and patterns truths about the text. Strangely enough, many a critic’s caution seems to be forgotten when it comes to self-reflexivity, as though the latter demanded – and obtained – an unconditional trust in its reliability, hence the not infrequent comments that describe mises en abyme and other metafictional devices as instructions (modes d’emploi) for the readers; see, for instance, Bal (1978, 126) and Dällenbach (1986, 10). This curious – but altogether not rare – strategy of reading can only be explained, I contend, by the common assumption that while self-reflexive elements are an integral part of the texts they belong to, they should be excluded from its fictional realm. Such a reasoning surprisingly aligns itself with what Thomas Pavel, in his Fictional Worlds, called a segregationist attitude to fiction (1989, 13–17). Segregationism sees fictional texts not as pragmatically and ontologically homogeneous discourses, but as the combination of fictitious and serious utterances. Pavel’s examples, as well as the usual understanding of segregationism, insist on references to extra-textual reality, such as descriptions of existing countries or cities, mention of historical figures, and so on. But we can see that segregationism extends to readings that exempt reflexivity from the fictional scope. One may think that this is unavoidable. Whereas there may be a lasting theoretical debate about the factuality or fictionality of, say, Napoleon in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Genette’s and Ryan’s accounts suggest that metafiction (and reflexivity in general) are necessarily outside the fictional frame and, therefore, call for a segregationist approach. This is a view I would like to call into question.

Mis-self-representation The first step I will take in this direction is a rather modest one. It consists in pointing out that self-representation may give an insufficient or even misleading account of the textual features it refers to. The first point, about incompleteness, has been made by Janet Paterson: In spite of the freedom that characterizes its operation, self-representation remains a partial, often fragmented representation. Therefore, it frequently manifests itself as a gap.

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For it is clear that between the represented and the representing signs, there are necessarily an interval, differences, and blanks; the likeness entails and hides differences. (1993, 36; my translation)

But this is not so much an objection to the segregationist view than a qualification of self-representation’s epistemological limits: a partial representation is still a representation. A more challenging view is offered by Chris Andrews’s critical observations on the validity of Georges Perec’s metafictional figure of the jigsaw puzzle as a representation of the relationship between author and reader: the jigsaw puzzle appealed to Perec as a model of the writer’s work, akin as it is to the formal constraints which he found congenial, and indeed liberating. But as a model of reading it is manifestly inadequate, since the problems of reading admit of multiple solutions and the text’s field of meaning is not closed. (1996, 789–790)

Andrews refreshingly questions metafiction’s supposedly universal capacity to shed light on textual phenomena. Does this concur with my position? Not necessarily. One could observe that the puzzle’s flaws as a metaphor of reading are not intentional – everything suggests that Perec seriously intended it to be illuminating – and that these flaws, therefore, are not part of the work by design. But we may imagine cases in which authors deliberately offer distorted images of their texts so that they are recognized as such. One could call such misleading images, which don’t seem (to my knowledge at least) to have received the attention they deserve, “mis-self-representations.” Jean Ricardou and Thierry Groensteen are two exceptions here. As we have seen, Ricardou’s critique of representation – of the idea that meaning governs writing – led him to insist on the importance of a counteracting force, autoreprésentation, which compels fiction to model itself, one way or another, on textual features. What he called anti-autoreprésentation is a devious way of achieving this. It happens when the fiction draws attention to its own text(uality) by having its content ostensibly contradict some textual feature. Ricardou’s example is La Fontaine’s fable The Heron, in which there is a description of the bird’s long beak and neck that is presented through a remarkable series of monosyllabic words: “Un jour, sur ses longs pieds, alloit, je ne sais où, / Le héron au long bec emmanché d’un long cou”3 (La Fontaine 1972 [1679], 178; see Ricardou 1978, 145–146, 160). Here, the inadequateness of the metatextual features does not mislead the reader, as in Chris Andrews’s analysis of Perec’s jigsaw metaphor. Ricardou argues, on the contrary, that it guides the reader

3 “One day, – no matter when or where, – / A long-legg’d heron chanced to fare / By a certain river’s brink, / With his long, sharp beak / Helved on his slender neck” (La Fontaine [1679] 1843).

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precisely towards a realization of the actual form of the text. For him, antiautoreprésentation clearly works in favour of autoreprésentation. Thierry Groensteen’s conceptualization follows almost the same path while putting more emphasis on metafiction’s capacity to distort, again deliberately, the textual mechanisms it refers to. He calls this strategy travestissement du code – meaning code misrepresentation or, literally, code travesty – and defines it thus: Code is misrepresented when a comic strip objectifies comic strips in a false way [objective la bande dessinée en faux], when it gives an inaccurate version of the code. [. . .] Travesty is a perverse form of objectification. It happens when the code forms the subject, not only of fiction, but more importantly of pretence. Travesty is an anti-pedagogy. (1990, 132, 137; my translation)

Groensteen’s example is a dazzlingly metafictional comic strip by Greg, in which his character Achille Talon explains the mechanics of comic strips, and especially of speech balloons (1971, 4).4 In the course of his talk, Talon is assisted by a technician who fixes a malfunctioning balloon, as if this balloon were a physical object in the world of the characters – which it is, oddly, since the following panels show the assistant picking up a replacement balloon, trimming it, and pasting it on the empty one hovering above the characters. Three observations are in order here. The first one is the most obvious. Although Groensteen’s article is about bande dessinée, it is clear that the scope of his notion of code travesty is not limited to this medium, and that it may be applied to other media as well. In Jasper Fforde’s novel The Eyre Affair, for instance, characters discuss their status as characters in a way that corresponds much more to the theatrical relationship between comedian and their roles than to their situation as written characters in a text (2001, 317–327). Groensteen would certainly see this as an instance of code travesty. My second observation is about Groensteen’s perspective, which stresses the cognitive function of reflexivity, even in cases involving misrepresentation. In a way that reminds one of Ricardou’s comments on The Heron, he approaches Greg’s whimsical version of the comic strip’s semiotic apparatus essentially as a detour in the path leading to an understanding of the comic strip’s real workings. Do such misrepresentations, he asks, befuddle readers, or do their patent absurdity lead these readers to realize how comic strips really work? Hence my third – and more general – observation. Theoreticians willing to make room for mis-self-representation tend to confirm, rather than refute, the attribution of a referential value to metafiction. By stressing metafiction’s limited

4 The reader may find this strip on this page: http://www.cegepsherbrooke.qc.ca/~bourgech/ semiologie/bd/bdspec3.htm (accessed 24 August 2016).

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(Paterson), erroneous (Andrews), reversed (Ricardou), or distorted (Groensteen) accounts of texts, these critics carry on with the removal of metafiction from the realm of fiction. Granted, they advocate a (welcome) critical distance from the claim that metafiction necessarily provides indisputable reading instructions. But their proposals remain anchored in a conception oriented by the categories of right and wrong, straightforwardness and misdirection. The heron’s long beak and neck point (by way of antiphrasis) to the shortness of the words with which La Fontaine describes the bird. Speech balloons as diegetic props remind readers that balloons are in fact a graphic convention, not physical objects perceived and manipulated by characters. Such games do not suspend the (self-)referential status of metadiscursive elements; they only add flourishes to this referential path. What is missing from these accounts, however relevant they are, is a recognition that metafiction may be conceived and interpreted as fiction. Marie-Laure Ryan, in the lines following the one I quoted above, acknowledges such a possibility, which she describes as “a metatext presenting its object text as fiction, but doing so from within the fictional universe” (1991, 93). Ryan does not exactly illustrate the point I would like to make, though, for the fictionality she seems ready to consider is only a matter of enunciation and does not seem to affect the status of the metafictional elements involved. Her example is Pale Fire’s character Charles Kinbote, who comments upon what is for him a real literary work – the poem Pale Fire, written by his neighbor and friend John Shade. The fictitiousness of Shade, Kinbote, and their respective writings makes Pale Fire an exceptional case of mise en abyme, but it does not, in itself, significantly undermine the complex metafictional lessons of Nabokov’s novel; in any case, Ryan’s brief remark does not suggest that she is considering this possibility. What makes Kinbote’s comments problematic, to say the least, is his very special brand of madness, not the fact that, being made by a character in a novel, they originate from the fictional realm.

Fictionalizing metafiction What we are looking for, thus, is a type of situation in which metafiction belongs entirely to the fictional context in which it appears, so that its content and purport become clearly problematic. To a certain extent, this is a matter of interpretation. Readers have to take a segregationist stance to confer a non-fictional status on metafiction; conversely, they may adopt an integrationist position (Pavel, 1989), not only by taking as fiction everything that makes up the diegetic world (characters, situations, etc.) but also by admitting that the fictional mode of reading

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called for by a text extends to its reflexive elements as well. Let’s reconsider, for instance, Greg’s strange speech balloons. We may, as Groensteen does, see them as a devious way to say something serious about the formal conventions of comic strips. But this strip would lose much of its wit if we did not, at the same time, see these balloons as fictitious objects playing havoc with Talon’s presentation and interfering with the “real” (that is, conventional) balloons that appear beside them. This interference is central to an understanding of what is happening before our eyes. Greg is not telling us a story on one plane and describing comic strip’s formal apparatus on another plane; he is doing both things at the same time, and in such a way that these planes become inextricably entwined. The story becomes metaleptically weird to the extent that the metafictional lesson becomes a fictional version of how comic strips work. What Greg’s strip offers is neither a wrong version of how balloons work nor a correct but indirect way to describe them. Instead, we are asked to entertain this imaginary conception of what balloons are and do: to conceive of a fictional world where such things may happen and be talked about. Stressing the fictionality of metafiction, then, is not only a matter of noting its inclusion in a fictional context, as Ryan does. It entails recognizing that fiction may in some cases affirm fictitious things about itself, that it may supply imaginary versions of the way fiction is to be understood. This is clearly the case when authors devise what I have called elsewhere indigenous theories of fiction – theories presented in the very fiction to which they apply (Saint-Gelais, 2010). These may be quite outlandish. In Dezső Kosztolányi’s “Le traducteur cleptomane” [The Kleptomaniac Translator] (1994, 9–17), a publisher discovers that Gallus, the young man to whom he has entrusted the translation of an English novel called Count Vitsislav’s Mysterious Castle, has replaced the original’s lush descriptions with bare ones, eliminating in the process crystal chandeliers, bank notes, jewels, and so on. This would amount to sheer sloppiness if it wasn’t later discovered that Gallus had spirited away the items he omitted in his translation, as though, by removing these words from the text, he could somehow transfer the corresponding goods to his reality – and his pockets. As it turns out, he not only could but did precisely this – an impossible feat for us, but one we have to admit is perfectly feasible, although quite disconcerting, in the world of the characters. Of course, one may be tempted to interpret this story as a metaphor of the semantic, stylistic, and cultural losses literary works regularly incur through the translating process. As plausible as this interpretation is, it does not account for Gallus’s possibly entering into possession of the vanished items, an event that has no counterpart in our reality but that we are tempted to accept as an integral part of the fictional context, even if the story’s

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narrator is reluctant to admit this.5 The illocutionary force of fictional discourse spectacularly applies here: not only does Kosztolányi’s narrative incorporate thoughts about translation issues, but it does so in a way that establishes a fictional context in which new, unusual rules govern fiction. Many indigenous theories of fiction concern embedded texts or fictions. This often has the (reassuring) effect of excluding the text we are reading from the unorthodox rules it establishes, rules that only apply to the embedded text the fiction talks about. Kosztolányi imagines that a translator may steal parts of the diegetic universe from the (imaginary) work he translates, but no reader will extend this possibility to the text she is reading. I have read this short story in its French translation; it never occurred to me that Ádám Péter, the translator, could have done what Gallus did. One sees immediately why such a strategy puts readers at ease: it presents them with odd ways of world-making while confining these to the fiction; reality (including the text they are reading) remains unaffected by these ontological oddities. Some texts, though, manage to avoid this blind spot effect. Among these, some of the more fascinating are those which deny their own fictionality. Everybody knows the “found manuscript” formula, but what I have in mind is a twist on this formula that attributes the denial of fictionality not to some fictitious editor who remains outside the novel proper, but to a character. Jean Ricardou’s third novel, Place Names, includes a fascinating exchange between two characters, one of which, the bookseller Epsilon, shows such comprehensive familiarity with the content and phrasing of the novel we are reading that his interlocutor, Olivier, feels compelled to protest that he, Olivier, is not living in a book: “In short,” says Olivier, “the absolute erudition that is yours could well guide us exhaustively through the entire book.” “Most assuredly.” [. . .] “In that case, necessarily, you yourself, Monsieur Epsilon, here before us in your book-filled storeroom, can be nothing other than some textual invention [l’invention d’un livre] . . . ” “Logically . . . ”

5 “Ou les avait-il mis, ces biens mobiliers et immobiliers qui n’existaient tout de même que sur le papier, dans l’empire de l’imagination [. . .]?” (1994, 16–17) [Where did he put these movable properties and real estate that all the same existed only on paper, in the world of imagination?]; my translation from the French translation. While he is eager to affirm the imaginary status of the items appropriated by Gallus, the narrator cannot help wondering what he made of them, thus recognizing, however grudgingly, their reality (in the story of course).

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“And we ourselves [Atta and me], logically, as you have speciously sought to insinuate, must be the two travellers, born of some legendary formal conflict. But, far from convinced by these outlandish claims [. . .].” (2007 [1969], 89)

Olivier’s reluctance seems reasonable enough: characters are not supposed to realize – or, confronted with this knowledge, to admit – their own fictionality. This is a consequence of fiction’s traditional delegation – or, one could say, banishment – of explicit metafictional signals to its paratext. Most novels give away their fictionality by displaying the word “novel” (or some equivalent mention) on the book cover, not by having characters flaunt it as Epsilon does, or as John Dickson Carr’s detective, Gideon Fell, very explicitly does in The Three Coffins: “I will now lecture,” said Dr. Fell, inexorably, “on the general mechanics and development of the situation which is known in detective fiction as the ‘hermetically sealed chamber.’ Harrumph. All those opposing can skip this chapter. Harrumph. To begin with, gentlemen! Having been improving my mind with sensational fiction for the last forty years, I can say–” “But, if you’re going to analyse impossible situations,” interrupted Pettis, “why discuss detective fiction?” “Because,” said the doctor, frankly, “we’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not. Let’s not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories. Let’s candidly glory in the noblest pursuits possible to characters in a book.” (1957 [1935], 123–124)

Many readers will probably take such statements to express a truth – both Ricardou’s Epsilon and Carr’s Dr. Fell are indeed characters in a book – while taking these truth-expressing sentences as somewhat misplaced. According to this view, a structural and ontological infraction is committed, not by saying that a fiction is a fiction, but by saying it where this truth should not be acknowledged – that is, inside fiction, thus conflating two levels that should remain distinct. In contrast to realist characters, who delude themselves about their ontological status, Epsilon and Fell are right, but are transgressively so. One could add that Fell’s interlocutor Pettis, by alluding to closed-room mysteries as “impossible situations,” is effectively describing – without realizing it – the very paradox Fell is creating: Gideon Fell’s speech is quite fantastic indeed – and, as with murders committed in apparently sealed rooms, seems to manage to come through an impassable barrier – the fictional frame. Fell’s speech is so fantastic, in fact, that one may be tempted to put forward another view, according to which characters’ admissions of their own fictionality are not so much truths embedded in a fictional context as fictional statements taking part, in their own strange way, in the stories in which they appear. By ridiculing Epsilon’s insistence on the book enclosing them, Olivier seems to align himself with one of the Place Names’ fictional country’s two competing dogmas,

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the one that gives pre-eminence to things over words. But subsequent episodes show that this is only a pretence intended to beguile his friend Atta, the undercover agent of the realist camp: Olivier secretly agreed with Epsilon’s acknowledgement of their fictionality all along. But Atta’s response to this only complicates matters: when threatened by Olivier, who has devised a byzantine way of getting rid of her, she retorts by showing, quite convincingly, that Olivier is the mad pyromaniac at large in the region, of whom several mentions have been made throughout the novel. His insight into his novelistic status, then, should be taken with a pinch of salt – he might be as deluded as Dennis Potter’s Hide and Seek’s insane character, Daniel Miller, who is convinced that an invisible author is controlling his slightest actions (1973). But this psychological explanation is undermined by its very verisimilitude, which only confirms Atta’s alignment with realism in a novel that clearly favors the formalist stance. The end result is the reader’s uncertainty about the validity of the characters’ metafictional stances: these should be taken not as truths obligingly provided by Ricardou’s novel, but as moves in a complicated and irremediably ironic fictional game. These brief observations show that Place Names is not only an intensely metafictional novel but one in which metafiction is intricately woven into the narrative’s twists and turns. A frequent reproach against Ricardou’s work is that he wrote “theoretical romans à thèse” in which fiction is subservient to conceptual issues. There’s no denying that his novels raise all manner of theoretical points, as Place Names quite explicitly does. But it would be misleading to ignore the degree to which these metafictional components end up looking as oblique and ambiguous as the fiction they belong to. This may look like a version of Janet Paterson’s idea of a mutual reinforcing of representation and self-representation, but it is not. Ricardou’s novel does not use the latter to enhance the former but encourages one to agree on their conflictual intricateness. Granted, one cannot say as much about Gideon Fell’s examination of closedroom mysteries, which appears instead as a purely essayistic parenthesis in the narrative. (Fell himself, after all, suggests that indifferent readers “skip the chapter.”) The form and content of Fell’s long speech are those of a lecture which could have been published separately and in which he develops a typology of the genre, complete with references to real detective story writers such as Gaston Leroux and G. K. Chesterton. The result is quite illuminating, and not only in regard to The Three Coffin’s specific plot. All this seems to resist fictionalization; chapter 17 of The Three Coffins, under the thin veneer of (minimal) dramatization, seems to stand outside the fiction. The paradox is that all this is achieved by a character who stresses his own fictionality – and, in the same breath, addresses the readers, as if he could be at the same time inside and outside the book.

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However baffling such contradictions are, they will probably amuse rather than put off most readers, who will conclude that they don’t suspend the fictional game as much as they play with its intricacies. Fiction is remarkable in that once we step into the frame that establishes it, we can never be assured that claims that we’re no longer under its jurisdiction are not just another fictional trick. Authors can create characters like Epsilon or Gideon Fell who seem to transcend the novel in which they nonetheless appear. Or they can create characters who bear their own name and who describe their narrative as confessions, not novels, as Philip Roth mischievously does in Operation Shylock (1993). Characters may even claim to have an author whose name is not the one that appears on the book cover, as in Leo Bruce’s cleverly silly Case With No Conclusion, in which Sergeant Beef complains that his investigations are narrated and published by one Lionel Townsend, who seems unable to provide him with mysteries as exciting – and as popular – as those of Agatha Christie’s Poirot or Nicholas Blake’s Nigel Strangeways: “I’m not sure you’re the one to report it,” said Beef. “You don’t seem to make much of my cases. Not what some of them do for their detectives. [. . .] Why can’t you make me famous? Like Lord Simon Plimsoll and those. I’m just as sure to get the right man in the end, aren’t I? [. . .] There was that nice little case the other day, for instance, that would just have suited me. Body found in a brewer’s vat. And who got the job? Nigel Strangeways, of course, Nicholas Blake’s detective.” (1984 [1939], 14; emphasis mine)

All this shows that in fiction, the “inside” – the narrative and the characters – may try to affect its “outside,” the frame on which the whole game depends. These Möbius-like operations are ultimately fictitious. This does not mean that we should not take them seriously, but only that fiction may always reassert its perplexing dominion over its components, giving us Ruritanias, alternative Napoleons, speech-balloon repairmen, dreams in which everybody is dreaming – and fictional accounts of fictionality.

Reference List Andrews, Chris. 1996. “Puzzles and Lists: Georges Perec’s Un homme qui dort.” MLN 111 (4): 775–796. Bal, Mieke. 1978. “Mise en abyme et iconicité.” Littérature 29:116–128. Bruce, Leo. (1939) 1984. Case With No Conclusion. Chicago: Academy. Carr, John Dickson. (1935) 1957. The Three Coffins, In A John Dickson Carr Trio :1–173. New York: Harper and Brothers. Dällenbach, Lucien. 1977. Le récit spéculaire: essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris: Seuil.

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Dällenbach, Lucien. 1986. Mirrors and After: Five Essays on Literary Theory and Criticism. New York: Graduate School, City University of New York. Fforde, Jasper. 2001. The Eyre Affair. London: New English Library. Genette, Gérard. 1991. “Récit fictionnel, récit factuel.” Protée 19 (1):9–18. Greg, [Michel]. 1971. L’indispensable Achille Talon. Paris: Dargaud. Groensteen, Thierry. 1990. “Bandes désignées (De la réflexivité dans les bandes dessinées).” Conséquences 13–14:132–165. Kosztolányi, Dezső. (1932) 1994. Le traducteur cleptomane et autres histoires. Translated by Ádám Péter and Maurice Regnaut. Paris: Viviane Henry. La Fontaine, Jean de. (1679) 1972. Fables. Paris: Le Livre de poche. La Fontaine, Jean de. (1679) 1843. Fables. Translated by Elizur Wright. Boston, MA: Tappan and Dennet. Magné, Bernard. 1986. “Métatextuel et lisibilité.” Protée 14 (1–2):77–88. Paterson, Janet. 1982. “L’autoreprésentation: formes et discours.” Texte 1:177–194. Paterson, Janet. 1993. Moments postmodernes dans le roman québécois. Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa. Pavel, Thomas. 1989. Fictional Discourse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Perec, Georges. 1987 [1978]. Life, a User’s Manual. Translated by David Bellos. Boston, MA: David R. Godine. Potter, Dennis. 1973. Hide and Seek. London: Andre Deutsch. Priest, Christopher. (1977) 1987. A Dream of Wessex. London: Abacus. Ricardou, Jean. 1972. “Intervention.” In Nouveau roman: hier, aujourd’hui, edited by Jean Ricardou and Françoise van Rossum Guyon, vol. 2, 221. Paris: U.G.E. Ricardou, Jean. 1978. Nouveaux problèmes du roman. Paris: Seuil. Ricardou, Jean. (1969) 2007. Place Names: A Brief Guide to Travels in the Book. Translated by Jordan Stump. Champlain, NY: Dalkey Archive. Roth, Philip. 1993. Operation Shylock. New York: Vintage. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991. Possible Worlds: Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Saint-Gelais, Richard. 2010. “Le monde des théories possibles: réflexions sur les théories autochtones de la fiction.” In La théorie littéraires des mondes possibles, edited by Françoise Lavocat, 99–126. Paris: CNRS Éditions.

Françoise Lavocat

Portals of Fiction I propose the term portals of fiction as a critical tool inspired by Jasper Fforde. In the context of this chapter, portals of fiction are beginnings of works of fiction which underline, complicate, and thematize their own access to alternative realms. I will present a tentative typology of such reflexive beginnings, distinguishing between three kinds of fictional portals: doubling and delay, overlapping, and creating an impossible world. Portals of fiction are highly metafictional, self-referential, and almost always paradoxical in some sense. Portals of fiction are therefore particularly well suited to the study of the intricate relationships between reflexivity, factuality, and fictionality, which are complicated by the fact that these concepts are inseparable from the question of paradox, or more precisely of contradiction.1 The pole of reflexivity must therefore be divided into two subcategories: paradoxical reflexivity and non-paradoxical reflexivity. Moreover, my investigation calls not only upon links between reflexivity and fictionality (e.g. does reflexivity have a preferential relationship with fictionality?) and those between reflexivity and factuality (e.g. are reflexivity and factuality incompatible?), but also upon the dividing line between fact and fiction. In exploring portals of fiction, we must ask ourselves whether they erase, underline, or problematize the divide between fact and fiction. Additionally, what are the primary forms of reference (historical, autobiographical, pseudo-autobiographical, allegorical, metafictional) that these devices employ? I will not spend time here defending the notion of an ontological and pragmatic distinction between fact and fiction,2 but will simply use this distinction as the premise of my argument. I will focus on the multi-tiered question of the relationship between reflexivity, factuality, and fictionality, reformulating it in the following manner: do paradoxical reflexivity and non-paradoxical reflexivity affect the divide between factuality and fictionality in the same way? In my earlier work on the relationship between fiction and paradoxicality, I focused on the role of paradoxes, and in particular the liar’s paradox, in fiction

1 According to current definitions (Moore 1998; Kranvig 1998), paradoxes are “apparently correct reasoning that results in contradiction, that is to say in nonsense” (Pouivet 2003; my translation). I am not dealing with paradoxes of this kind, because fictional worlds are not syllogisms, even if they can include faulty syllogisms within fictional situations (for instance, in Don Quixote, II, 51). In this chapter, I use “paradox” to refer to situations involving a logical contradiction, that is, impossible states of affairs. 2 For further discussion of this topic, see Lavocat (2016). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722031-006

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written during the Renaissance (Lavocat 2004, 2010, 2011a). I then widened my questioning to include fiction in general, which I called “impossible possible worlds” (Lavocat 2016) because many fictional works thematize the paradoxical ontological status of fiction, which gives existence to what does not exist. Meanwhile, influential definitions of fiction, such as that of Jean-Marie Schaeffer, which is based on Searle’s (1975), who describes it as “shared playful pretence,” (Schaeffer 1999), rest on a pragmatic contradiction, and Käte Hamburger (1957) showed that fictional discourse could use indexicals and the past tense in an aberrant and contradictory way. If fiction maintains pivotal and constitutive relations with paradoxes, could we then say, to quote Graham Priest’s (1987, 2006) concept, that it is the ideal space for dialetheias, “true contradictions”3? The answer is far from simple. If there are contradictions that readers naturally accept, one might say, without even being aware of them (such as the grammatical incongruities highlighted by Hamburger, or the aporia of a pact of “shared pretence,” or even all the impossible creatures and situations of fantasy and fairy tales), I have shown that certain paradoxes, in particular temporal ones, have the potential to undermine and destroy the fictional world (Lavocat 2016). Some contradictions are indeed incompatible with the very existence of a fictional world, which seems to be an illustration of the theory of explosion put forward by the logicians opposed to Priest’s proposal. The theory of explosion maintains that if we accept that a contradiction may be true, anything can be proved true. So if many fictional worlds literally explode because of the destructive effect of paradoxes,4 it becomes difficult to hold that fiction is an ideal space for all paradoxes. It must be concluded that paradoxes in fiction can not only vary in nature but can also have very diverse effects. In what follows, I will focus particularly on the portals of fiction and the contradictions they involve. I will argue that the beginnings of works of fiction, in which one enters the fictional world, shed light on the relations and the potential overlap between fact and fiction. So what kinds of contradictions do the beginnings of fictional works contain?

3 For traditional logicians, a “true contradiction” is a contradiction in terms. Here I will try to show that the very particular ontological milieu of fiction allows for the naturalization of certain contradictions, and it is from this perspective that I will speak with caution of true contradiction in fiction. This does not mean that I endorse paraconsistent logic in my approach to the real world. 4 This is particularly the case with fiction involving time travel (Lavocat, 2016). To give just one example, see the end of Future Times Free [Le voyageur imprudent] by René Barjavel ([1944] 1958).

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In science fiction and fantasy, a portal is a “technological or magical doorway that connects distant locations.”5 Just like the wardrobe in the Chronicles of Narnia, a portal allows the reader and fictional characters to travel between worlds. Fantasy is not, however, the primary genre I will be examining here. Drawing upon Jasper Fforde’s (2001) fictional “Prose Portal” in The Eyre Affair, I will use the concept of portals of fiction to designate reflexive opening passages of fiction that underscore, complicate, and thematize their own means of access to alternative worlds. Indeed, as Gérard Genette ([1987] 1997) and Andrea Del Lungo ([1997] 2003) have noted, the beginnings of prose narratives are particularly hospitable to reflexivity and metalepsis. But Genette and Del Lungo, along with other scholars (such as Kremer 2007), have focused on prefaces and beginnings that can be regarded as strategic spaces – as agents of seduction and infringement – that negotiate matters between the author and reader.6 I take a different perspective. After setting out and justifying the analogy between Fforde’s Prose Portal and reflexive beginnings of works of fiction, I will propose a tentative typology of these portals that divides them into three categories according to the differing degrees and manifestations of reflexivity and contradictions in them in order to understand whether and how they affect the distinction between fact and fiction. In doing so, I will simultaneously examine the ontological stakes involved in such games and the boundaries of fiction.

Jasper Fforde’s fictional Prose Portal In chapter 14 of The Eyre Affair (Fforde 2001, 140), a policeman asks Thursday Next, the main character, to draw the Prose Portal invented by her uncle Mycroft, who has just been kidnapped by a criminal organization and robbed of his astounding invention. Unfortunately, Thursday’s drawing is not included in the book – nor on the author’s fantastical website (Fforde 2000–2013), where many of the odd objects and strange animals found in his books are represented. The Prose Portal is consequently hard to visualize. We know, nonetheless, that it is made out of an old book (which we so often find in fantasy) that is adorned and overrun with dials and knobs. The book is hollow and electrically wired and is filled with paper manuscripts (a Wordsworth poem in chapter 11 and a Dickens novel in chapter 15) as well as

5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portals_in_fiction. 6 These scholars are also interested in the structural relationship between the beginning of a novel and its development or end.

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genetically modified “bookworms,” who have dictionaries and all available critical and literary knowledge synthesized into their DNA. Upon contact with a text, the bookworms produce a multitude of interpretations: To this he added the bookworms, who busily got to work. They slithered over the text, their small bodies and unfathomable collective id unconsciously examining every sentence, word, vowel sound and syllable. They probed deeply into the historical, biographical and geographical allusions, then they explored the inner meanings hidden within the metre and rhythm and juggled ingeniously with subtext, context and inflection. After that they made up a few verses of their own and converted the result into binary. (Fforde 2001, 125)

This biological-mechanical-electrical system produces a beam of light that emanates from the book box. Anyone who comes into contact with its ray disappears into the fictional world of the book on which the hermeneutical bookworms are working. The ray is ephemeral, lasting just a few minutes, and if the electricity is switched off (as happens in the novel), visitors in this fictional world cannot return to the actual world. The Prose Portal is, at best, complicated, and even its usefulness is sometimes called into question. As a child, Thursday Next learns to enter books in a simpler, traditional way: by reading them intensely. The Prose Portal, on the other hand, allows people to enter books without reading them. And more often than not, these characters are of dubitable moral standing. Consequently, after the destruction of his Prose Portal, Mycroft chooses not to rebuild it. In the subsequent four volumes devoted to Thursday Next’s adventures, however, the lack of a Prose Portal does not in the least hinder circulation between real and fictional worlds. The significance of this elusive device is therefore primarily metaphorical: the ray of light symbolizes the gateway between the two worlds, and the bookworms, while described as actual worms, also refer to prolific readers and learned philologists. The complexity of the instrument underlines the separation between reality and fiction, as well as the difficulty in switching from one to the other. Thursday’s alternative mode of immersion (mere reading) is more intuitive and gentle; slipping between worlds seems easier, almost natural. In focusing on the Prose Portal’s theoretical applications and implications, I follow in the footsteps of Richard Saint-Gelais (2016), who analyzes these kinds of metafictional devices as part of what he calls an indigenous theory of fiction. The Prose Portal can be understood on a figurative level as representing a learned approach to fictional immersion, since it requires an association between collective knowledge (the worms) and individual agency (the person entering the ray). The device playfully allegorizes this hermeneutical means of interacting with the text. As mentioned above, however, it ultimately constitutes just one of

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two modalities of immersion: one that relies on the device and involves interpretation with the help of encyclopaedic knowledge, and another one based solely and simply on reading. These approaches also represent two kinds of fictional beginnings: the reflexive ones, which imply a need to decipher figures of speech, double meanings, and allegories, and the non-reflexive ones, which enable a straightforward entrance into the world of fiction. In any case, reflexivity does not impede fictional immersion. In a tribute to the metafictional device invented by Jasper Fforde, though perhaps it is incorrectly named (since the Prose Portal allows access to poetry as well as narrative),7 I will therefore refer to reflexive beginnings of narrative fiction – those inviting interpretation and hermeneutical reading – as portals of fiction. The remainder of this chapter will be dedicated to this unique liminal fictional space, which can be divided into three subcategories: (1) those employing multiple or delayed beginnings; (2) those featuring ambiguous and metaleptic prefaces; (3) and those that creates impossible worlds and presents (apparently) ostensible obstacles to fictional immersion.

Three types of portals of fiction Doubling and delay I define “fictional doubling” as a device that both permits and represents entry into a secondary fictional world after the start of a narrative. This device can include falling asleep (presumably the oldest and surest way of representing entry into fiction); wandering through a pastoral setting until there is a chance meeting with a stranger (often a magician, mythological being, or allegorical character) who tells a story or serves as an agent of the main character’s adventures;8 travelling to a country or city explicitly designated as a land of romance; or creating a temporary society of storytellers. The last-mentioned action, which occurs in Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353), is frequently found in European fiction up until the eighteenth century, and some recent science fiction novels have revived the technique (e.g. Simmons, 1989–1997). This doubling ploy introduces and underscores a firm divide between two levels of discourse as well as between two worlds. The world of departure is

7 Very early on in The Eyre Affair, Mycroft’s wife, Polly, enters into a Wordsworth poem. Portal of Fiction would thus be a more accurate term than Prose Portal here. 8 See Lavocat (2014).

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purported to be “factual,” and often allegorically refers to real history or even the life of the author–narrator, as at the beginning of the Decameron. This type of portal generally requires a first-person narrator who is more or less identifiable with the author and thus directly in charge of the immersion process. He9 transports the reader to a secondary world that tends to be more conspicuously “fictional.” The real story thus begins, but only after a reflexive “delay.” Let us now take a brief look at the well-known opening to the Decameron, which brings to light some of the complex links between (almost) non-paradoxical reflexivity, factuality, and fictionality. The doubling portal is highly reflexive, and in the Decameron, this reflexivity hinges on the use of a first-person narrator with multiple functions: a literary persona in the proemio, or preface, (first threshold) and a testimonial narrator in the beginning of the “first day” (second threshold) who describes the historical plague of Florence. Then the first-person narrator disappears after identifying the various storytellers. Reflexivity also relies on intertextual reference here. In the proemio, references to Dante’s Commedia and Arthurian romances help provide a frame of reference for the Decameron. In the first day, the names of the female storytellers are borrowed from Boccaccio’s previous works, which may be intended as a further indication of their fictional status; but selfreference also points to the historical existence of the author Boccaccio. The allegorical content of the names and the number of characters is also broadly considered to be a signpost of fictionality. Consequently, we can see that reflexivity, as a hermeneutical tool, somehow has ambiguous effects on the distinction between fact and fiction. First-person narrators, explicit self-references, and historical settings can all be indicators of a basis in factuality, whereas fictionality is presumed to be the dominant domain when no first-person narrators, no cited information sources (i.e. “someone told me”), no self-references, no allegories, and no historical backdrop are present. Ties to Boccaccio’s other works suggest that the characters are fictional, but also that they are external to the world of the Decameron, which points to Boccaccio’s authorship (signpost of factuality). I said that this portal’s reflexivity was almost non-paradoxical. This kind of beginning is actually grounded in a paradox that pertains to the category of mutual inclusion. Both the proemio and the introduction – the latter narrating the creation of a society of storytellers and the instalment of a ten-day calendar – are explicitly included in the “First day” (Prima giornata) of this fictional calendar, and since the first day contains the decision to inaugurate a so-called first day and the ensuing period, we have something of a structural and temporal

9 In the early modern period, it was never a she.

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paradox before us. But its existence seems to have no impact on interpretations of the beginning, for, to my knowledge, no scholars have perceived this as a declaration of the fictionality of the whole. Indeed, the gradual disappearance of the narrator accompanies the transformation of factual narrative into fiction. However, most of the Decameron’s illustrations show the narrator always present (when he is absent in the narrative). All this is happening as if the illustrators, and perhaps readers, refuse to admit that the fiction is based on the narrator’s withdrawal, which changes from being intradiegetic to surreptitiously extradiegetic. Two illustrations that accompany fifteenth-century manuscripts of the Decameron underscore this interpretation. A manuscript from 1430 (Figure 1) depicts sharply separated spaces. On the left, there is a scene alluding to the historical plague. This historical scene is architecturally separated from the fictional scene by the Santa Maria Novella church standing in the middle. The fictional characters meet in the central church space, which is open at the front and right; the group is represented twice, appearing both inside and outside the church, with the men always separate from the women. And on the right, far away from them in the courtyard of a castle encircled by walls, we see the author watching the group; this is the metafictional space. Another illustration, from 1460,10 shows the group in a circular garden surrounded by a wall; outside it is the author, who is listening and writing. Reflexivity – the narrator’s presence – underscores both the division between worlds (materialized by a wall) and the continuity between factual narrative and fictional narrative. Needless to say, these situations of simultaneous proximity and separation between history, fiction, and metafiction are never actually described in the Decameron. In this case, the contradiction lies not only in temporal incongruity but also in the presence, role, and function of the narrator: he is both present and absent and both historical and fictional.

Overlapping The second type of portal, which employs what I call overlapping, is unique in that it can be crossed in both directions – from factual paratext to fiction, as well as from fiction to factual paratext.

10 See Boccaccio (1999, 52–53). Ms. Douce 213, Anonym (1450–1467), Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Figure 1: French Manuscript BNF n°239 folio 1 (detail).

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When this overlap operates from paratext to fiction, the portal also demonstrates its capacity to blur the boundary between fact and fiction. In many firstperson narratives from 1580 to 1625, the transition between paratext and primary text is almost imperceptible because the first-person narrator and his discourse are exactly the same in the preface as in the narrative – as if the same voice were speaking. In such cases, it can be difficult to determine the ontological status of the text (take, for example, Le bréviaire des amoureux ou l’image du vray amant [The Breviary of Lovers or the Image of the True Lover], from 1625, or L’amour aventureux [Adventurous Love], from 1623).11 I will therefore shift my focus to overlapping that occurs in the other direction – from fiction to factual paratext – since this requires a textual space that evokes the real world, or a paratext that overlaps with the fictional narrative. This overlap, which is sometimes slightly metaleptic, blurs the boundaries of fiction. We witness this phenomenon whenever an author addresses a character, which was very common in the seventeenth century. A rhetorical transfer of the fictional character from the fictional world to the factual paratext is accomplished by means of a metaphor – which equates the character with the book. This device is not literally metaleptic, as no real transfer of space takes place, but the author’s dedicatory preface intensifies the game, oscillating between literality and metaphor and creating characters with ambiguous ontological statuses. Jean-Pierre Camus (1621) shows himself to be a skilled player at this game when he addresses his character Parthénice at the beginning of his eponymous novel. In a reflexive dedication to Parthenice, Camus tells us that his character wants to leave him – her “father” – and has requested permission to travel and to see the world. Through allegorical means (the link between author and character is allegorized by a relationship between living persons, a father and a daughter), the author pretends that the book itself desires publication. Camus relates how he at first refuses permission but then finally grants it due to Parthénice’s virtue, which he is sure will mean that she will spread Christian lessons throughout the world. But Camus also claims that this journey will take place after Parthénice’s death. What can he mean by that? Does this imply that she dies because the character dies at the end of the story, or because she has died in the past as a historical person? Camus constantly reinforces the referentiality of his character. Or is her death inevitable because she is made of paper?

11 For more on this kind of first-person narrative from the beginning of the seventeenth century, see Lavocat (2014).

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On the other hand, she possesses a will and agency and has a desire to travel, and since it is possible to speak to her, Parthénice must be alive: Je change maintenant d’avis, et je loue votre dessein qui est d’aller voir le monde, puisque vous pouvez y cheminer bien plus surement à l’aide de ce papier que vous avez fait autrement en propre personne. (Camus 1621, unpaginated) [I now change my mind and praise your plan for going to see the world, for you can travel more safely with the aid of this paper than you could otherwise in person.12] (My translation)

At the end of his dedication, Camus recommends that the reader – who might be curious about Parthénice’s nature – should read his abundant postscript to the novel. In this other paratext (as in many critical writings by Camus, who is obsessed with the distinction between fact and fiction, for moral and religious reasons13), the author reveals and justifies the hybrid ontological status of his character Parthenice, who is both historical and fictional. I suggest that this overlapping portal, often associated with metaleptic contradiction (the character is dead and alive), favors ontological hybridity; in this way, the boundary between fact and fiction can be said to be blurred. In the work of Jean-Pierre Camus, we find a perfect example of this intertwinement of reflexivity, what we could call “mild metalepsis,” and a limited and playful blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction, despite Camus’s obsession with this boundary. To clarify, I would like to point out that not all metalepses are paradoxical – consider, for instance, the case of rhetorical metalepses.14 However, any metalepsis that literally15 brings the author and his characters, represented as natural persons, into contact with each other constitutes an ontologically and logically impossible situation. In the above example from Jean-Pierre Camus’s novel, the metalepsis is halfway between a rhetorical figure and an impossible state of affairs: it is always possible for the reader to consider it to be only a discursive feature (and not to take it literally), and that is why I called it mild metalepsis in the preceding paragraph. 12 The sentence in French is deliberately ambiguous. We should understand the meaning as follows: as a fictive real person, Parthénice will travel with a letter she wrote herself; or, just like a book, which is also made of paper, she will circulate easily among people. 13 See Lavocat (2011b). 14 Regarding this distinction, see Genette (1972), Ryan (2005), and Lavocat (2016). 15 These remarks follow on from Gérard Genette’s considerations in Métalepses (2004), whose subtitle is “de la figure à la fiction” [from figure to fiction]. Indeed, metalepsis can be considered a rhetorical figure taken literally. I have argued elsewhere that the issue of literalism is crucial in understanding the historical evolution of metalepsis, which is much more literal in contemporary culture than in earlier periods (Lavocat 2016).

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The enigma of the impossible narrator The last kind of portal I wish to highlight is built around contradiction of the most extreme kind. If we consider that three degrees of paradox exist, in an order that involves increasing visibility and dependence on the narrative itself, then the Decameron’s paratext exemplifies the first degree (minimal paradox); metalepsis as smoothed over by metaphor, and which is favoured by Camus, illustrates the second degree (mild paradox); and the enigma of the “impossible narrator” instantiates the third degree (maximal paradox). These contradictions concern time and highlight the undecided status of the narrator (Decameron), the problematic nature of a character (Parthénice), or make the whole fictional world rest on an impossible enunciation device. These distortions of logic and plausibility are of unequal scope and visibility: in the first two cases, the reader can easily cross the problematic threshold and forget the contradictions by immersing himself in the fictional world. In the case of dead narrators, this is more difficult, insofar as the status of these impossible worlds is repeatedly highlighted.16 However, let us recall that the illustrators of the Decameron, as described earlier, express a refusal to accept the paradox, however discreet it may be, and rationalize the fictional device by reintroducing a narrator–witness, who had disappeared before the group was formed in the story. Narrators can die at the beginnings of novels, as demonstrated in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis ([1881] 1997). This novel can be read as a perpetual test of the constancy of the immersion and benevolence of the reader, since the narrative is regularly interrupted by reminders of the narrator’s odd status. It is difficult to say to what extent this ongoing paradox impedes immersion. The paradox of the impossible narrator is also found in a concentrated form in the first pages of Our Friend Manso by Pérez Galdós ([1882] 1987), entitled “YO NO EXISTO” [I DO NOT EXIST]. The narrator is a character who relates the painful experience of his own creation: I DO NOT EXIST. And just in case some untrusting, stubborn, ill-meaning person should refuse to believe what I say so plainly, or should demand some sort of sworn testimony before believing it – I swear, I solemnly swear that I do not exist; and I likewise protest against any and all inclinations or attempts to consider me as being endowed with the unequivocal attributes of real existence. I declare that I am not even a portrait of

16 Riccardo Castellena, whom I thank, has pointed out other examples of dead narrators, such as Federico Tozzi’s Parole d’un Morto (1921). Personal communication and paper presented at the symposium Territoire de la non fiction, 7–9 December 2017, Paris, http://www. fabula.org/actualites/territoires-de-la-non-fiction_82158.php.

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anybody, and I promise that if one of our contemporary deep-thinkers were to start looking for similarities between my fleshless, boneless being and any individual susceptible to an experiment in vivisection, I should rush to the defense of my rights as a myth, demonstrating with witnesses called forth from a place of my own choosing that I neither am, nor have been, nor ever will be, anybody.17 (1)

We rarely come across such a pleasantly forbidding portal! Is its purpose to discourage the reader from entering a world of fiction that so vehemently proclaims its status, along with a renunciation of the game of make-believe? Or is it, on the contrary, meant to encourage the reader to test the impossibility of adhering to these preliminary declarations and to note the ease with which he or she can re-establish the more traditional fictional pact by just passing the barrier and challenge of the first chapter? Truth be told, in thus exposing his status of non-existence, the character presents a very skewed relationship with reality, because there is nothing more fictional than a non-existent person who speaks and, more importantly, possesses a superior consciousness to that of any human, as he is able to recount his life and even the way he came into the world before being born. The paradoxes of this portal thus constitute much more of an initiation into fiction than any kind of real impediment to entering such a world. Moreover, in an ironic echo of the capitalized opening words of chapter 1, chapter 2 is entitled “Yo Soy Máximo Manso.” [I Am Máximo Manso.]. Everything unfolds as if the red light were actually a green one. While the paradox of the impossible narrator is the predominant focus of Our Friend Manso’s opening passage, this portal combines all three degrees of paradox, the lowest degree of which touches the first and second portals. First, we have the paradox of mutual inclusion. Galdós’s narrator relates the process of his creation, which lays the groundwork for the possibility of his consciousness and capacity for speech. Second, this passage features a metalepsis,18 since the character occupies an authorial space (before the beginning of the

17 [YO NO EXISTO... Y por si algún desconfiado o terco o maliciosillo no creyese lo que tan llanamente digo, o exigiese algo de juramento para creerlo, juro y perjuro que no existo; y al mismo tiempo protesto contra toda inclinación o tendencia a suponerme investido de los inequívocos atributos de la existencia real. Declaro que ni siquiera soy el retrato de alguien, y prometo que si alguno de estos profundizadores del día se mete a buscar semejanzas entre mi yo sin carne ni hueso y cualquier individuo susceptible de ser sometido a un ensayo de vivisección, he de salir a la defensa de mis fueros de mito, probando con testigos, traídos de donde me convenga, que no soy, ni he sido, ni seré nunca nadie] (Pérez Galdós 1987, 7). 18 This kind of metalepsis (defined in 2004 by Genette as a violation of the separation between syntactically defined levels, a deviant referential operation, and a violation of semantic thresholds of representation) relies on the pleasure of connecting and facilitating the meeting of beings with different statuses: the author and the characters, but also characters from one

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“real” story) and usurps the author’s function by describing the author’s relationship to his work from the character’s point of view.19 Lastly, this opening also contains a special kind of syllepsis,20 which can be called “metafictional syllepsis.” Syllepsis is a stylistic figure of speech in which one word applies to two others but in a different sense for each – the literal one and a figurative one; this takes on a metafictional value when it is used to play with terms found in literature or literary discourse. This kind of device is relatively common in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature. Notably, we can find it in the famous portrait of Charite in The Extravagant Shepherd by Charles Sorel ([1653] 2005). In this comic portrait, which claims to denounce novelistic style, the common metaphors of romantic lyricism are taken literally, to such an extent that eyes really become suns, lips become coral branches, eyebrows become arches, etc. In fact, it is often in the context of a critique of novels that these comic syllepses are created. In The Wonderful Travels of Prince Fan-Feredin ([1735] 1789), written by a Jesuit called Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant, who seeks to deride readers’ love of fiction and deconstruct its attractiveness, the hero visits a neighborhood of craftsmen and merchants who produce materials that are only used in the construction of sentences and stories (in chapter 12, Workers, Professions, and Factories of Novel-Land). In this merchant quarter, the hero meets stringers together of beautiful sentences and embroiderers of little nothings, among others. More than three centuries later, Jasper Fforde makes full use of this idea. We have already explored his play on words when he uses “bookworms.” In chapter 5 of The Well of Lost Plots (2003), which follows the adventures of Thursday Next (The Eyre Affair being its first volume), the heroine gains access to a well that is both a library and a bustling trade center, where plot salesmen, context creators, idea renters, and plagiarizing delinquents, among others, rush around and peddle their goods. Unlike authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jasper Fforde does not set out to denigrate fictional literature, but instead to praise it. The

work of fiction with those of another. For a comprehensive review of the theories and definitions of metalepsis, see Pier (2016). 19 Sabine Schlickers has also noted this metalepsis, writing: “In this case, we can conclude that the emancipation of the character, who independently places himself at the same level as his creator, dissolves realist illusion and exercises a metafictional function” (2005, 154). In my opinion, this is more about a playful test of the fictional pact than its dissolution. 20 According to Dumarsais (1818) and Fontanier (1827), syllepsis as a figure of style (“oratory”) consists in uniting literal and figurative meanings in the same sentence. Recent studies (particularly Rastier 1997) associate it with a loosening of fixed expressions. This perfectly elucidates the ambiguity of metaliterary or metafictional syllepses, which simultaneously deride clichés of literary discourse, or literature as a cultural practice, and refuel them.

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ultimate effect, however, always contains surprise and comedy, and in this regard, it is very similar to the effects of metalepsis. Interestingly enough, the reshaping of literary discourse by its literal interpretation is very often linked to the theme of the artisanal or industrial production of literature, which is then sold and trafficked; literature, triviality, and metafictionality all go hand in hand.21 In the opening narrative of Our Friend Manso, the author makes a deal with the character whereby the character purchases the author’s story with four dozen literary genres payable in four instalments; a bushel of outmoded ideas – allpurpose ideas, neatly packed; ten gallons of sentimental syrup, tightly corked to stand up to export; and finally a great ration of expressions and set phrases, ready-made and all cut to size, along with more than one pot of glue for sticking, fitting, mounting, joining, and assembling.22 (Pérez Galdós [1882] 1987, 2)

From Charles Sorel ([1653] 2005) to Jasper Fforde, there are many examples of the concretization of literary metadiscourse. This rhetorical figure is inseparable from reflexivity, satire, and paradox, because it narrates an impossible encounter between an author and a character, as well as the existence of impossible objects (e.g. the pot of glue needed to bind together sentences in Our Friend Manso). The entire portal produces a slightly comic effect. The portal’s reflexivity has obvious ontological value, too, since it is a key manifestation of the philosophical debate on the basis of existence – it illustrates and allegorizes the paradox of fiction itself. This conglomerate of paradoxes makes for a complicated portal, which may ultimately impede fictional immersion. But as Marie-Laure Ryan (2010) shows, the reader has certain cognitive strategies at his or her disposal to resolve this paradox-driven tension, along with the desire for fictional immersion – that is, to discard or rationalize contradictions. While such multifaceted paradoxes at the openings of narratives challenge fictional immersion, they do not make it impossible. This final type of portal thus demarcates fictionality through paradox; it does not refer to reality, since the process of creation itself is fictionalized. As a result, there is absolutely no blurring of the boundary between fact and fiction.

21 In The Well of Lost Plots, we also find “generic” characters who are literally in the process of being created. Incomplete and indistinguishable from one another, they progressively acquire a name, gender, and personality. This evolution is a source of comedy. 22 [[C]uatro docenas de géneros literarios, pagaderas en cuatro plazos; una fanega de ideas pasadas, admirablemente puestas en lechos y que servían para todo, diez azumbres de licor sentimental, encabezado para resistir bien la exportación, y por último una gran partida de frases y fórmulas, hechas a molde y bien recortaditas, con más de una redoma de mucílago para pegotes, acopladuras, compaginazgos, empalmes y armazones] Pérez Galdós 1987 [1882], 3.

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I will not attempt to construct an entire theory based on just these few examples – even though I believe them to be paradigmatic – but I suggest that it is appropriate to further discuss and investigate the following recapitulative hypotheses. The identification of fact, fiction, and the boundary between them is only affected by paradoxical reflexivity. A spectrum of types and degrees of paradox exists, and both its smallest and largest manifestations in no way affect the boundary between fiction and non-fiction; non-paradoxical (or barely paradoxical) reflexivity, for instance, generally reinforces the distinction between fact and fiction, while a high degree of paradoxical reflexivity supports fictionality by merely challenging the process of fictional immersion without doing any serious damage to it. But a moderate paradox – which allows for an oscillation between metaphorical and literal interpretations and creates uncertainty as to the status of the various entities involved – may affect our perception of the boundary between fact and fiction. Hybrid beings and ambiguous contracts playfully complicate this kind of metaleptic portal of fiction. These considerations might also constitute a contribution to the debate on natural and unnatural narratology),23 because they propose (1) specifying the distinction between logical paradoxes and paradoxes of fiction, (2) identifying the function of paradoxes that signal the entry into fiction and relating them to the distinction between fact and fiction, and 3) considering fiction to be an ontological environment capable of naturalizing certain contradictions.24 It would also be interesting to specify which ones resist naturalization, in relationship to conventionalization.25 Are fictions the homelands of dialetheias, true contradictions, that is to say, contradictions accepted for what they are? The portals of fiction, by concentrating paradoxes, perhaps immunize the reader against the contradiction (for instance accustoming them to it, teaching them to play with it and then forget it); in this perspective, the portals could be operators of the naturalization of the ontological paradox of fiction. But it could also be argued that they 23 See Alber (2013) for a substantial bibliography. 24 “[T]here are the physical, logical, or epistemic impossibilities found in postmodernist narratives that have not yet been conventionalized, i.e. turned into basic cognitive frames, and thus still strike us as odd, strange, or defamiliarizing in the sense of Šklovski” (Alber 2013, 2). 25 For Alber, naturalization and conventionalization go hand in hand. Unnatural elements become familiar because they become literary and generic conventions. Here we are also facing physical, logical, or epistemic impossibilities that have over time become familiar forms of narrative representation (such as speaking animals in fables, magic in romances or fantasy narratives, the omnimentality of the traditional omniscient narrator, or time travel in science fiction) (Albert 2013, 2).

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constitute a provisory obstacle to fictional immersion, demonstrating the unnatural (constructed) nature of fiction. Portals of fiction highlight the continuity of fiction with reality and at the same time its separation from it.

Reference List Alber, Jan. 2013. “Unnatural Narrative.” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörgen Schönert. Hamburg: Hamburg University. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/unnatural-narrative. Anonym. 1625. Le bréviaire des amoureux ou l’image du vray amant. Rouen: Jacques Besongne. Barjavel, René. (1944) 1958. Future Times Three. Original title (1944) Le voyageur imprudent. Translated by Margaret Sansone Scouten. New York: Award Books; Paris: Denoël. Boccaccio, Giovanni. (1353) 1903. Decameron. Translated by James M. Rigg. London: The Navarre Society. Boccaccio, Giovanni. 1999. Decameron con le illustrazioni dell’autore e di grandi artisti fra tre e quattrocento. Edited by Vittoria Branca, Florence: Le Lettere. Bougeant, Guillaume Hyacinthe. (1735) 1789. The Wonderful Travels of Prince Fan-Feredin, in the Country of Arcadia: Interspersed with Observations, Historical, Geographical, Physical, Critical, and Moral. Translated by Miss Watts. Dublin: Zachariah Jackson. Camus, Jean-Pierre. 1621. Parthénice ou peinture d’une invincible chasteté: histoire napolitaine. Paris: Claude Chappelet. Cervantes, Miguel de. (1615) 2003. Don Quixote. Translated by Edith Grossman. New York: HarperCollins. Del Lungo, Andrea. (1997) 2003. L’incipit romanesque. Original title Gli inizi difficili. Per una poetica dell’ “incipit” romanzesco. Translated from Italian and reviewed and reworked by the author. Paris: Le Seuil, Collection Poétique; Padua: Unipress. Dumarsais, Cesar Chesneau. (1818) 1984. Les tropes, avec un commentaire raisonné [. . .] par M. Fontanier. Paris: Belin–Le Prieur. Facsimile, with an introduction by Gérard Genette. Geneva: Slatkin Reprints. Du Verdier, Gilbert-Saulnier. 1623. L’amour aventureux, Paris. Fforde, Jasper. 2001. The Eyre Affair. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Fforde, Jasper. 2003. The Well of Lost Plots. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Fforde, Jasper. 2000–2013. “Grand Central.” Accessed 12 January 2016. http://www.jasperfforde. com. Fontanier, Pierre. (1827) 2009. Les figures du discours, 23rd ed., introduction by Gérard Genette. Paris: Flammarion. Genette, Gérard. 1972. Figures III. Paris: Seuil. Genette, Gérard. (1987) 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin and Richard Macksey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Genette, Gérard. 2004. Métalepse: de la figure à la fiction. Paris: Seuil. Hamburger, Käte. (1957) 1973. The Logic of Literature, 2nd ed. Translated by Marilynn J. Rose. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Kranvig, Jonathan L. 1998. “Paradoxes, Epistemic.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 15th ed. vol. 7, general ed. Edward Craig, 211–214. London: Routledge. Kremer, Nathalie. 2007. “Préfaces. État de la question: de la présentation à la representation.” In L’Art de la préface au siècle des Lumières, edited by Ioana Galleron, 17–28. Rennes, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Lavocat, Françoise. 2004. “Paradoxes et fictions: Les nouveaux mondes possibles à la Renaissance.” In Usages et théories de la fiction: le débat contemporain à l’épreuve des textes anciens, edited by Françoise Lavocat, 87–111. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Lavocat, Françoise. 2010. “Paradoxes, fiction, mimesis.” In Methodos, savoirs et textes. http://methodos.revues.org/2443. Lavocat, Françoise. 2011a. “Paradoxes et métalepses au pays des romans.” In Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, 105–115. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Lavocat, Françoise. 2011b. “Fait et fiction dans l’œuvre de Jean-Pierre Camus: la frontière introuvable.” In Jean-Pierre Camus, edited by Max Vernet et Sylvie Robic, Dix-septième siècle, 251:263–270. Lavocat, Françoise. 2014. “Fictions en prose à la première personne (1585–1623).” Études de langue et littérature françaises (Futsubun Kenkyu) 45:69–87. Lavocat, Françoise. 2016. Fait et fiction: pour une frontière. Paris: Seuil. Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria. (1881) 1997. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moore, Gregory H. 1998. “Paradoxes of Set and Property.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7, general ed. Edward Craig, 214–221. London: Routledge. Pérez Galdós, Benito. 1882. El amigo Manso. Madrid: Alinaza. Pérez Galdós, Benito. 1987. Our Friend Manso. Translated by Robert Russell. New York: Columbia University Press. Pier, John. 2016. “Metalepsis (revised version; uploaded 13 July 2016).” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörgen Schönert. Hamburg: Hamburg University. Pouivet, Roger. 2003. “Paradoxe.” In Grand dictionnaire de la philosophie, edited by Michel Blay. Paris: Larousse, CNRS Éditions. Priest, Graham. (1987) 2006. In Contradiction: A study of the Transconsistent, 2nd ed. expanded. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Priest, Graham. 2006. Doubt Truth to Be a Liar. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rastier, François. 1997. “Défigements sémantiques en contexte.” In La locution entre langue et usages, edited by Michel Martins-Baltar, 305–329. Fontenay/Saint Cloud: ENS Éditions. http://www.revue-texto.net/Inedits/Rastier/Rastier_Defigements.html. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2005. “Logique culturelle de la métalepse, ou la métalepse dans tous ses états.” In Métalepses: entorses au pacte de la représentation, edited by John Pier and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 201–224. Paris: École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2010. “Cosmologie du récit: des mondes possibles aux univers parallèles.” In La Théorie littéraire des mondes possibles, edited by Françoise Lavocat, 53–81. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Sainsbury, Richard M. (1987) 2009. Paradoxes, 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Saint-Gelais, Richard. 2016. “Science (de la) fiction: de quelques théories autochtones de la fiction en science-fiction et ailleurs.” Fabula LHT 17 (14 July). Accessed 1 October 2016. http://www.fabula.org/lht/17/saintgelais.html. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. (1999) 2010. Why Fiction? Translated by Dorrit Cohn. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Schlickers, Sabine. 2005. “La métalepse dans les littératures espagnole et française.” In Métalepses: entorses au pacte de représentation, edited by John Pier and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, 151–166. Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Searle, John, R. 1975. “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse”, New Literary History. 6 (2): On Narrative and Narratives, 319–332. Simmons, Dan. 1989–1997. Hyperion Cantos. New York: Doubleday. Sorel, Charles. (1633) 2014. L’anti-roman ou L’histoire du berger Lysis, accompagnée de ses remarques. Texte édité, présenté et annoté par Anne-Élisabeth Spica. Paris: Champion. Sorel, Charles. (1653) 2005. The Extravagant Shepherd, the Anti-Romance, or, The History of the Shepherd Lysis. Translated by John Davies. Oxford, MI: Text Creation Partnership. Wikipedia. 2018. “Portals in fiction.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portals_in_fiction.

Michal Beth Dinkler

The End of Fact vs Fiction: Reflexivity in Ancient Narratives Language, myth, art, and religion [. . .] are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. [. . .] No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. [. . .] Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself. (Cassirer 1944, 25)

Ernst Cassirer’s observations above provide an intriguing starting point for a consideration of fiction(ality), fact(uality), and reflexivity in ancient narratives. Cassirer’s contrast between a lost age of “dealing with the things themselves” and the current situation of “man [. . .] constantly conversing with himself” reflects several underlying misperceptions: first, that referential and reflexive narratives are mutually exclusive categories;1 second, that they belong to different eras of human history, as if the “symbolic net” which causes humans to “constantly convers[e] with” themselves is somehow unique to the modern age; and finally, that at one time, humans could experience an unmediated reality. The last view has repeatedly come under critical fire, especially in the postlinguistic turn. The others, however, remain to be challenged, and this chapter represents a step in that direction. Humans have been “constantly conversing with” ourselves for as long as we have records of humans conversing. Our oldest extant literature attests that ancient writers – from the anonymous composer(s) of the Epic of Gilgamesh to Homer to Hesiod – were preoccupied with the complex relationships between representation and reality, history and mendacity, experience and exposition, and truth and the telling of tales. Many ancient narratives also appear to be quite aware of their own status as participants in such complicated discourses (Dinkler 2017). If reflexivity is a turning or a bending back on oneself – as its etymology suggests (from the Latin reflexivus, or re, again + flectere, to bend)2 – then I agree with Robert Siegle’s assessment: “Reflexivity is a

1 More recently than Cassirer, Linda Hutcheon’s well-known treatment of “narrative narcissism” refers to “novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages” (1988, 5; emphasis mine). 2 For foundational work on reflexivity in linguistics, see Ducrot (1972). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722031-007

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basic capability of narrative exercised in every period, historical schematizations notwithstanding” (1986, 3).3 How, then, are we to untangle the complex ways in which “language, myth, art, and religion” are interwoven in “the tangled web of human experience” depicted in and created by ancient narratives? Our extant narratives from antiquity present a particularly gnarled web of overlapping but distinct threads. What happens, for example, when a Roman historiographical narrative claims to be historical (what we would call factual), but the content – such as Tacitus’s references to divine omens (e.g. Hist. 2.50) – seems (to many today) to be imagined, constructed, or invented (what we would typically label fictional)?4 Such questions reveal tightly woven, knotty networks of conceptual conundrums; if untangling them is impossible in the space of one chapter, I at least wish to tug on some loose threads and see where that might take us. As a corrective to the common contemporary tendency to focus on reflexivity as a feature of (post)modernity, this chapter offers a longer diachronic perspective. I begin by briefly identifying three reasons for the common bias towards seeing reflexivity as a uniquely (post)modern phenomenon, all of which are shaped by the contemporary fact vs fiction dichotomy. After touching on several reasons why those three perceptions cannot be sustained in critical discourse, I argue that this scholarly myopia stems from modern views that are inaccurate or inapplicable to ancient narratives and that imposing modern conceptions (e.g. fact vs fiction) on ancient narratives obscures the ways in which those narratives work. I wish to ask, with historians of antiquity Carlin Barton and Daniel Boyarin: “What do we fail to see when we force other, earlier cultures into the Procrustean bed of concepts that organize our contemporary world?” (2016, 1). In part, I argue, we fail to see – or, perhaps better, we fail to understand – ancient narratives’ various rhetorical functions. As James Phelan writes, “narrative is a rhetorical action in which somebody tries to accomplish some purpose(s) by telling somebody else that something happened” (2007, 209). Therefore, in the second section of the chapter, I suggest that moving beyond “fact vs fiction” and adopting instead the lens of narrative reflexivity illuminates ancient narratives’ rhetoricity; it allows us to approach ancient narratives not only as objects

3 Throughout, I assume Jeffrey Williams’s definition of narrative reflexivity as those moments “when narrative refers to itself, to its own medium, mode, and process, rather than simply to other (nonlinguistic) ‘events,’ that we normally assume constitute a narrative” (1998, 7). 4 Or, relatedly, how should we understand “reality” vis-à-vis an ancient story that attributes events to divine causes and/or recounts transcendent, miraculous, or mystical experiences – causes and experiences that seem to exceed or elude linguistic expression and that defy many contemporary conceptions of the real?

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of hermeneutical inquiry but also as active agents, shaping their audience’s experiences of reality, and as participants in discussions of representation and narration that were ongoing in antiquity. Of course, not all ancient narratives function in the same ways as one another. Therefore, I will close the chapter by focusing on one specific late-firstcentury narrative account: the story of the apostles Paul and Barnabas in Lystra, found in the biblical Acts of the Apostles (14:8–18). My contention is that this scene, read as a moment of narrative reflexivity, comprises a narratively instantiated hermeneutical theory that applies not only to the preaching of Paul and Barnabas but also to the broader narrative itself.

Reflexivity as uniquely (post)modern: three misperceptions Following the metahistorical theorizing of critics such as Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit, scholars today are generally familiar – if variously comfortable – with the manifold challenges that have been posed to reading historiographical literature through the lens of a strict fact/fiction dichotomy (White 1987; Ankersmit 2001). All historical discourse employs (to varying degrees) narrative elements such as plot, sequence, and causality – all of which are characterized by selectivity. None of this is controversial. It does, however, render puzzling the fact that narratological discussions of fiction(ality), fact(uality), and reflexivity remain so overwhelmingly focused on modern or postmodern metafiction. For many historians of literature, metafictional self-reference is a feature of the modern novel. As reflected in Cassirer’s claims with which we began, reflexivity is generally perceived to be endemic to modernity. Gayle Greene, for instance, avers that the 1970s ushered in a new era marked by feminist Künstlerroman (1991, 36),5 while Joe David Bellamy wrote in 1975 that, “[f]iction in which the conventions or techniques of the story itself became the subject matter” is “a commonplace of recent practice” (1975, 14). Critics who locate the origins of metafiction prior to the twentieth century typically go back only a few centuries (when scholars do recognize reflexivity’s ancient roots, they tend to do so only parenthetically). Joan Douglas Peters, for example, who argues (against

5 Greene mentions a few earlier cases of literary self-reflection, but she draws a stark distinction between those and what she considers a new and unique time period marked by postmodern feminist metafiction.

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Gayle Greene) that feminist metafiction began long before the 1970s, associates the genre with the eighteenth-century British novelistic tradition (2002, esp. 1–2). Wayne Booth, wishing to reconsider the nature of earlier influences on Laurence Stern’s self-conscious narrator in Tristram Shandy, mentions Montaigne, Burton, Swift, and “more obscure writers [from] the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (1952, 164). By far the most common account is that reflexivity’s originary moment can be traced to Cervantes’s seventeenth-century publication of Don Quixote. The reflexivity of Don Quixote can hardly be questioned; let me give one of many potential examples. Don Quixote was originally published in two separate instalments (Volume I in 1605 and Volume II in 1615). In the second volume, Cervantes depicts the Don discussing the first volume with the bachelor, Sampson Carrasco: “[It] will need a commentary to make it intelligible.” “Not at all,” answered Sampson, “it is already so plain, that there is not the least ambiguity in it [. . .] in short, it is so thumbed, so read, and so well known by every body, that [. . .] you cannot go into a nobleman’s antechamber, where you won’t find a Don Quixote [. . .] in the whole book, there is not the least shadow of a dishonourable word [. . .]” “To write otherwise,” said Don Quixote, “were not to publish truth, but to propagate lies; and those historians who deal in such, ought to be burnt like coiners of false money.” (1998, 475)

Through his characters’ dialogue, Cervantes draws attention directly to the popularity and content of his first volume, playfully crossing boundaries between story and discourse in a multilayered reflection on truth, falsehood, authorship, and history. It makes sense, therefore, that in 1839 Heinrich Heine wrote that Cervantes “furnished a model for a new school of fiction, which we call the Modern Novel” (Heine 1887, 258; emphases mine). Over a century later, Heine’s assessment continues to reverberate in critical accounts; Alter, for example, considers Don Quixote the “first model of the novel as self-conscious genre” (1975a, 23), while Hutcheon calls it a “major forerunner of modern metafiction” (1988, 8). Based on its core definition of a text reflecting on itself, however, narrative reflexivity is not uniquely modern or fictional. Why, then, does narrative self-consciousness remain so conceptually linked to contemporary literature? Various accounts could be offered. Here, I wish briefly to highlight three discursive strains one commonly finds in traditional literary histories that, though challenged and in some cases definitively overturned by contemporary theorists, continue to exert significant influence in scholarly discourse. These strains are the traditional treatments of 1) the novel as a quintessentially modern genre; 2) the shift from oral to literate cultures; and 3) the “inward turn” and/as signposts of fictionality. Together, I argue, these views too often cause scholars to miss the

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complex ways in which ancient narratives thematize and thus theorize their own existence and interpretation.

The novel as a quintessentially modern genre Ian Watt’s popular 1957 work, The Rise of the Novel, asserts that the novel arose in the eighteenth century, when economic individualism, increased literacy rates, and Protestant values were also on the rise; Watt explicitly identifies Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding as the “first three novelists” (1957, 9). In this famous text, Watt celebrates “the distinctive literary qualities of the novel,” relating them directly to the sociocultural milieu of the modern “society in which it began and flourished” (1957, 7). Fredric Jameson distinguishes premodernity from modernity by calling his readers to “imagine a time before film (and before television); a world without the novel; a world which is therefore also poor in narrative” (2015, 4; emphases mine). Underlying such accounts is an emphasis on “the Novel’s role as superseding something else” (Doody 1996, 1–2). Georg Lukács’s influential tome The Theory of the Novel, written in 1920, is perhaps the most dire assessment of the novel’s supposed supersessionism: Lukács paints a stark contrast between the epic – the classic literary form of the Greek polis – and the novel – the literary form that is, for Lukács, unique to capitalist modernity (1971). Lukács concludes not only that literary forms neatly reflect the social world from which they arise, but also that the novel is a “problematic” genre because it reflects the chaotic meaninglessness that Lukács considered to be capitalism’s inevitable legacy. According to Lukács, the novel epitomizes the paradox and fragmentation of a “world gone out of joint” (1971, 17). Still, whether the assessment is approbation (e.g. Watt) or condemnation (e.g. Lukács), the assumption is the same: the novel was birthed, sui generis, at the start of the modern era.6

The shift from oral to literate cultures Closely related to the idea that the novel belongs to modernity is the notion that the modern era began with the invention of the printing press and the concomitant rise of mass literacy; as such, modernity is distinguished from all that

6 An important element of such discussions is differing definitions of the novel genre. See Seager (2012, esp. 1–23).

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went before it by a shift from oral to literate cultures. Of course, it is true that ancient narratives were not composed, preserved, or delivered in the same ways that we produce and publish narratives today. Reading cultures, literacy levels, and the nature of oral versus written delivery of texts remain topics of debate among those who study ancient cultures. Nevertheless, it is widely accepted that most ancient narratives circulated orally and/or were composed to be publicly performed, even if they were later textualized.7 The pertinent point here, however, is that oral cultures are often perceived as literarily unsophisticated. Modern aesthetic judgments of early Christian literature such as the New Testament Gospels provide a ready example. Near the end of the nineteenth century, cultural critic Matthew Arnold declared that literarily the gospels are “but a matter of infinitely little care and attention [. . .] a mere slight framework, in which to set the doctrine and discourses of Jesus” (1883, 231). In the 1920s, biblical scholar Karl Ludwig Schmidt (1923) echoed this assessment using a categorical distinction between Hochliteratur (“high” or “cultivated” literature, produced by educated individuals and demonstrating authorial consciousness) and Kleinliteratur (“low” or “folk” literature, produced collectively and circulated orally). Like Arnold, Schmidt characterized early Christian literature as Kleinliteratur. The persistent notion that metafiction is a product or feature of (post)modernity can be traced, in part, to the fact that oral cultures are so often perceived as literarily inferior to literate cultures, coupled with the notion that narrative reflexivity is a mark of literary sophistication. Williams, for example, draws these connections when he writes: The bias toward seeing [moments of narrative reflexivity] as intrusion or distraction [emphases mine] is based on the model of colloquial [i.e. oral] communication [. . .] With literary narrative, though, things are different [. . .] [O]ne might say that these reflexive moments – of the narrative of narrative – are a significant literary trait, one feature that marks a narrative as literary [original emphasis]. (Williams 1998, 5)

If premodern cultures are distinguished from modern cultures by a distinct oral/literate chasm, and if reflexivity is “a mark of literariness” (5), then it makes sense that many would assume narrative reflexivity only truly developed during the modern era.

7 Relevant contributions include those of Johnson (2010), Hezser (2001), Gerhardsson (1998), Alexander (1998), Thomas (1992).

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The “inward turn” and signposts of fictionality An additional reason why literary self-consciousness continues to be perceived as “the aftermath of modernism”8 is the tendency to characterize the (early) modern era by the rise of private individualism and self-awareness, in contrast to premodernity, which is described as collectivistic and “anti-introspective.”9 Some, like Jameson, locate the start of modernity in the Renaissance/Reformation periods and credit the crisis of traditional divinely sanctioned modes of authority for the rise of reflexivity (Stam 1992, 1–2; Jameson 2015, 4). Others, like Erich Kahler, contend that developments such as Freudian psychoanalysis (and/or Lacanian reinterpretations of Freud’s key concepts) prompted narrative’s “inward turn” towards self-consciousness (Cohn 1978; Kahler 1973). Interiority and self-referentiality have played a prominent role in narratologists’ debates over what Dorrit Cohn famously called “Signposts of Fictionality” – that is, narrational techniques by which one can delineate fictional from historical narratives (1978, 109; see also Riffaterre 1990; Zipfel 2001). Cohn (following Käte Hamburger, who discussed “signals” of fictionality in the 1950s) identifies, for instance, embedded focalization as a mark of fictionality,10 in contrast to the “stamp of historicity” that characterizes biographical writings: Where verbs of inner happenings are concerned, a punctilious biographer will abandon the inferential past for the past indicative only under special circumstances: when he can base his statements on autobiographical documents [. . .] even the most sympathetic biographer will, so long as he remains historiographically scrupulous, mark off his subject’s discourse from his own and resist, above all, lapsing into free indirect style. (1978, 27; emphases mine)

Cohn’s discussions of signs of fictivity contribute to the sense that narrational self-reference belongs properly to fictional narration and not to historical writings such as biography and historiography. Following Cohn (and Gérard Genette),11 some narratologists argue for a distinction between fictional narratology and historiographical narratology, with the latter focusing on “the narrative and literary choices historians have made

8 The phrase is drawn from Alter (1975b). 9 The literature on this dichotomy in the fields of psychology, anthropology, and cultural studies is voluminous. A useful summary appears in Brewer and Yuki (2007). 10 Many other narratologists agree, e.g. Genette (1990, 65), Margolin (2007, 69), and Schmid (2010, 27). On interiority in ancient narratives, see Dinkler (2015). 11 Genette (1991, 65–93) and Cohn (2000, esp. 109–131) are typically credited with introducing the concept of historiographical narratology (in different ways).

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to create plausible, persuasive representations of the past” (Pikkanen 2013, 224–225). Monika Fludernik employs just such a distinction in her well-known monograph Towards a “Natural” Narratology, in which she argues that narrativity is dependent on experientiality; consequently, Fludernik omits historiography from the category of narrative altogether (Fludernik 1996, 328). In response to subsequent critiques, Fludernik later revised her position but maintained the distinction between experientiality and narrative on the one hand and historiography on the other: “I would now argue that experientiality (and hence narrativity) occurs on a scale, and that the more academic a historical text is, the less experientiality there will be” (2010, 50). I shall return to this below.

Correcting the misperceptions The above section has briefly described three tendencies in traditional treatments of literary history that contribute to the sense that reflexivity belongs to the (post)modern age: 1) the tendency to consider the novel as a uniquely modern genre; 2) the tendency to associate the shift from oral to literate cultures with the rise of literary sophistication (and to consider reflexivity a mark of the latter); and 3) the tendency to conflate modern narrative’s so-called “inward turn” with the appearance of reflexive literary techniques such as narratorial intrusions, which are themselves seen as signposts of fictionality, as opposed to factuality. Each of these critical tendencies has been challenged from a number of different directions. Three points here will suffice to demonstrate that these views are based on unsustainable assumptions. First, it is simply incorrect that the novel genre (defined, most basically, as lengthy, fictive prose narrative) is unique to the modern era. Ancient novels exist from a variety of times and cultures (and are now, in fact, readily accessible online). Unfortunately, in histories of the novel as a genre, “it has been customary to mention [ancient novels] dismissively, often merely in footnotes” (Doody 1996, 1–2). This has led to widespread ignorance of a host of novelistic traditions from antiquity. Lawrence Wills identifies just one of many potential examples when he writes, “It is remarkable that the ancient Jewish novelistic tradition is so little known by modern readers [and that] the genre as a whole has often gone unrecognized” (2002, v). Second, even as we recognize the significant cultural, philosophical, and epistemological changes occasioned by the shift from oral to literate cultures, equating orality with a lack of authorial consciousness and aesthetic style all too easily slips into a condescending caricature of “primitive” societies and their

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literatures. In contrast to premodern people who were “subrational,” superstitious, and not self-aware, reflexivity becomes a kind of modern saviour – the enlightened humanist’s means to understanding reality. To return to the example of early Christian literature, the Hochliterature/Kleinliteratur dichotomy “owed more to romantic notions of primitivity than to insights into comparative literature” (Aune 2010, 143). Most biblical scholars today reject such views, along with the aesthetic judgments that are based on them. Third, as we saw above, if reflexivity “marks a narrative as literary” for Williams, it marks that same narrative as fictional (i.e. not historical) for Cohn. Yet this presupposes (post)modern generic conventions that distinguish fact from fiction. That narrative reflexivity disrupts distinctions between fabula and syuzhet only poses a problem vis-à-vis a narrative’s historicity if one defines historiographical writing (“non-fiction”) as impersonal, neutral reporting of facts à la nineteenth-century historical positivism. It might help to offer an important note of clarification at this point. Even if we reject objective positivism as impossible, we can still distinguish between fictiveness (in the sense of invented narrativity) and fictitiousness (in the sense of a narrative reference existing only as a figment of an author’s imagination). A narrative that is grounded in and refers to an actual historical event might be described as fictive, even if it is not fictitious. Moreover, narrational strategies are not always received in the same way; certainly, some literary techniques can signal fictiveness and/or fictitiousness to a greater degree than others even within the same narrative. Much narrative communication depends on the audience’s perceptions of and responses to such signals: “From the perspective of the receiver, fictionality is an interpretive assumption about a sender’s communicative act” (Nielsen et al. 2015, 66).12 Still, despite these complexities (and the many scholars who have insisted on them), scholarly discourse continues to bow to what Lee Patterson describes as the “tyranny of the historical” that results from the “unexamined distinction between ‘objective’ history and ‘subjective’ literature” (1995, 251). It bears repeating that post-Enlightenment ideals of historical (re)construction are, in many ways, foreign to ancient historiographical narratives (Dinkler 2018). In the ancient world, history and historiography were more capacious and flexible concepts than our modern categories. Scholars of antiquity have decisively challenged traditional boundaries between historical “fact” and imaginary “fiction” with respect to ancient narratives generally (e.g. Gill and Wiseman 1993; Bowersock 1994; Kim 2010; Luther et al. 2015), and it is commonplace among

12 See Paul Dawson’s response and their rebuttal in Nielsen et al. (2015).

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those who study ancient literatures and cultures to recognize that ancient writers conceived of and crafted various literary genres differently from how we do this today. As classicist Christina Kraus observes, ancient historians “constructed their works with techniques that were as much at home in oratory or the novel as with what we might call ‘historical research’” (2010, 415).13 Consider again Fludernik’s revised formulation that “the more academic a historical text is, the less experientiality there will be” (2010, 50). As she notes, this applies to the twentieth-century genre of “academic historiography” (2010, 50). It does not fit ancient historical writings, many of which could be located on the “high” end of Fludernik’s experientiality spectrum. Most ancient historians – even those who purport explicitly to have established “the facts” from “the evidence” – did not operate in a mode we would typically describe today as “academic.” Greek historian Thucydides provides a famous example. Thucydides begins his account of the Peloponnesian War with the assertion that he has “investigat[ed] with the greatest possible accuracy each detail,” and that “the endeavor to ascertain these facts was a laborious task” (1.22.3–4). At the same time, he asserts that he has made speakers “say what was in my opinion demanded of them,” since recording “the words actually spoken” proved impossible (1.22.1–2).14 To Thucydides, these are not contradictory practices. The generic conventions we find in ancient historical narratives have a direct bearing on the open question of whether narratologists ought to develop one form of narratology for historiographical narratives and another form of narratology for fiction. Is Daniel Fulda correct that doing so is “as urgently required as it is exceptionally difficult” (2005, 236)? In my view, the answer should differ depending on the time period and dominant generic practices in which a body of literature originated. Discussing “the first historians,” classicist Irene de Jong concludes that “there is no need to develop a separate historiographic narratology” (2014, 170). I agree, and wish to underscore that the question itself presupposes contemporary abstractions and generic conventions. In addition, as Michael Kearns asserts, the non-fiction/fiction distinction is simply “irrelevant when we pose the speech-act question of what the language is doing” (1999, 28; emphasis mine). I argue that imposing contemporary assumptions on ancient narratives occludes their distinctive rhetoricity – a rhetoricity, it

13 We might add that often their purposes for writing would also have been “as much at home” with those of orators and novelists. See, for example, the rhetorician Quintilian’s definition of historiography in Institutio Oratoria X.1.31. 14 Scholars continue to debate Thucydides’s descriptions of his own recording of history. See, for example, Garrity (1998).

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is important to note, that ancient writers themselves readily embraced. As Glen Bowersock observes, scholars today are: accustomed to hearing [. . .] that history itself is a fiction, or rhetoric, or whatever. The ancients would not have found that a particularly surprising doctrine, inasmuch as they drew only a faint line between myth and history and, as Cicero put it, considered the writing of history an opus oratorium – a rhetorical work.15 (1994, 12)

When it comes to ancient narratives, the fact versus fiction formulation is not only irrelevant but obfuscatory. Jettisoning the contemporary views described above (as much as we are able) can clear the path for a productive shift away from several unsustainable assumptions about ancient religious narratives and towards more fruitful considerations of their rhetorical force. As Robert Alter notes, when a narrative draws attention to “its own condition of artifice,” it effectively “probes into the problematic relationship between real-seeming artifice and reality” (1975a, x). Narrative reflexivity in ancient narratives – especially those that purport to be historical – draws attention to the very issues that render certain modern assumptions about those narratives problematic. I contend, therefore, that the notion of narrative reflexivity is a more useful and appropriate lens than “fact vs fiction” for considering what an ancient narrative is doing rhetorically. More specifically, focusing on reflexivity illuminates a narrative’s rhetoricity because meta-level narrative reflections promote a particular vision – from within a given narrative itself – of what narratives of various kinds can or should accomplish. Moments of narrative reflexivity proffer models of narration and interpretation; as such, they are also moments of self-theorizing by which narratives valorize their own mode of existence and participate in ongoing debates about representation and narration. The following section turns to a story from the biblical Acts of the Apostles (Acts), which is the second of two New Testament narratives written near the end of the first century CE by the author we call “Luke.”16 The Gospel of Luke and its sequel Acts both reflect on their own textuality. Both begin as no other

15 By “rhetorical,” Cicero and other ancient theorists meant that historiography was persuasive; they would not have agreed with the Socratic opposition between truth-telling (as unadorned and spontaneous) and persuasive speech (as calculated and ornate). See, for example, Apol. 17a–18a. 16 Some New Testament scholars date Acts to the second century. The author is unknown; the association of these texts with Luke the Physician comes from church tradition. I use the name Luke as a matter of convenience.

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New Testament text does: with formal Hellenistic prologues in which the author, writing in the first person, acknowledges that he is, in Phelan’s terms, “[trying] to accomplish some purpose(s) by telling somebody else that something happened.” The gospel begins as follows: Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account/narrative (diegesis) of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word (logos), I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the messages (logōn) about which you have been instructed.17 (1:1–4)

At the beginning of the book of Acts, the writer refers again to his own writing: “In the first book (logos), Theophilus, I wrote about all the things that Jesus began to do and to teach, until the day when he was taken up to heaven . . . ” (1:1–2). The opening frames of the narratives specifically refer to their own literary constructedness. These two accounts also contain multiple scenes in which characters read and/or discuss reading and interpretation. In the Gospel of Luke, for example, Jesus is presented at the start of his ministry as the ideal interpreter of the Hebrew Bible. Later, Jesus asks others how they read and understand the Jewish Scriptures (e.g. Lk 10:25–37, when he asks a lawyer how he reads the Law), and he interprets his own spoken narratives (the parables) for his disciples (e.g. Lk 8, when he explains the Parable of the Sower to his disciples). At the end of Luke’s gospel, the risen Jesus “opens the Scriptures” (24:32) for two of his disciples who had not understood them. In Acts, the “open-minded” Bereans are praised for “daily examining/investigating the Scriptures” (17:11) in order to test the veracity of the apostle Paul’s teachings.18 These scenes, together with the motif of misunderstanding that is woven throughout both Luke and Acts,19 suggest that the Lukan narratives are preoccupied with the intersections of reality and reliability and of experience and interpretation.

17 English translations are my own and have significant similarities to the New Revised Standard Version. 18 This latter example is one of six scenes in which the Lukan narrator explicitly depicts a character reading a written text, either by mentioning the presence of the text itself or by using the usual Greek word for reading, anaginōskō (Lk 4:16, 10:26; Acts 8:28–32, 13:27, 15:21, 17:11). 19 See, for example, Lk 9:44–45, 18:31–34, 24:13–53; Acts 8:18–24, 19:15.

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Paul and Barnabas in Lystra (Acts 14:8–18): a short case study The following pericope comes at a point in the story when two prominent Christian apostles, Paul and Barnabas, have been traveling around the Mediterranean preaching the Christian message and trying to gain converts to the new movement of Jesus-followers. The account is worth citing in full: In Lystra, a certain man was sitting who could not use his feet and had never walked, for he had been crippled from birth. He heard Paul speaking. And Paul, looking straight at him and seeing that he had faith to be healed, said in a loud voice, “Stand upright on your feet.” And the man jumped up and began walking. When the crowds saw what Paul had done, they raised their voice, saying in Lycaonian, “The gods have come down to us in human form!” They were calling Barnabas “Zeus,” and Paul “Hermes,” because he was the leader of the message (logos). The priest of Zeus, being outside the city, brought oxen and garlands to the gates; he wanted to offer sacrifice with the crowds. When the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard this, they tore their clothes and rushed out into the crowd, shouting, “Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men with the same nature as you, preaching good news to you, to turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. In past generations he allowed all the nations to go their own ways; yet he has not left himself without a witness in doing good – giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filling you with food and your hearts with joy.” Even with these words, they scarcely restrained the crowds from sacrificing to them.

Traditional biblical scholarship in the positivist historical-critical mode has analyzed this narrative in terms of questions such as the following (and many others like them): Did Paul and Barnabas actually travel together to the Roman colony of Lystra (and what happened there if they did)? Are miraculous healings like the one Paul performs in the story possible (and what are alternative explanations for the man’s newfound ability to walk)? What did Hellenistic Jews and/or Gentiles believe about miracles and/or disabilities at that time? What kind of dialect is Lycaonian (is it a form of ancient Hittite)? Was there really a temple to Zeus in the vicinity of Lystra? Why do the people refer to the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes if Lystra was a Roman colony (instead of referring to the comparable Latin gods Jupiter and Mercury)? Such questions are located mainly in the paradigm of fictionality versus factuality: they function in the Rankean mode of (re)constructing the past “as it

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actually happened” (wie es eigentlich gewesen).20 Answers to questions like these can proffer important insights into the late first century CE and the Lukan text, especially insofar as they help to establish the extra-textual repertoire on which ancient audiences would have drawn to make sense of the story. But they are not the only questions we might pose. What happens if we shift to a paradigm of reflexivity, asking instead (or in addition) what the narrative might be teaching about itself as narrative? Several details suggest that the text is amenable to such considerations; I wish to highlight two. First, and most obviously, the people of Lystra associate Paul with Hermes, rather than with a healing god like Asclepius. This identification is remarkable, since the event to which the people are responding is a miraculous healing. Second, the events of the story turn on the people’s misinterpretation of multiple kinds of evidence, including narrative; the story is expressly focused on questions of narrative interpretation. Let us explore each of these points in turn. Hermes is the divine messenger, the god of the Greek pantheon who invented language and endows others with a voice, and whose famous winged sandals allow him to bring word to gods and mortals from Zeus. “The first of all postmen” (Caputo 1987, 160), Hermes carries messages across thresholds, translates between worlds and beings, and traffics in multiple meanings. But Hermes is also simultaneously more and less than a faithful postman. He is a notorious trickster who often travels at twilight (earning him the nickname “companion of the dark night,” Homeric Hymns 4:290). Further, while Plato notes that Hermes “has to do with logos” (Plato, Cratylus 407e–408b), the Stoic Cornutus asserts that Hermes was sometimes seen as the logos himself (Cornutus, Cornuti Theologiae Graecae Compendium II:18–19). To invoke Hermes is to invoke the problematics of representation, persuasion, interpretation, and translation. In some sense, then, the people’s conflation of Paul with Hermes is paradoxically a propos. That is, the complex, contradictory traditions embodied in the mythical Hermes – and the hermeneutical issues encoded therein – all make Hermes precisely the right divine figure for the Lukan narrator to invoke here. It is not merely the mention of Hermes that draws attention to the unstable nexus of (mis)interpretation, truth, meaning, appearances, and reality. There is also the fact that the plot complications arise out of the people’s misreadings of Paul and his message. The narrator explains that they identify Paul with Hermes because Paul is “the leader of the message (logos)” (14:12). What is the logos to

20 The phrase wie es eigentlich gewesen appears in von Ranke (1885, vii), though scholars continue to debate what Ranke meant by it.

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which Luke refers? Within the story world of Acts, the word logos refers most often to the gospel story about Jesus Christ being “Lord of all” (10:36). By the time we reach chapter 14 of Acts, logos has been used over thirty times; most of those refer to the message the apostles are preaching throughout the Mediterranean. In other words, just as some associate Hermes himself with his message, the people of Lystra hear Paul’s message – his logos – about Jesus, and yet they erroneously conclude that the messenger – Paul – is the one they should worship. The narrative rhetoric makes clear that their misreadings are to be lamented. Paul and Barnabas tear their clothes (a sign of grief in the ancient world) and ask the people about the meaning of their actions: “Men, why are you doing this?” (implying, of course, that they should not be “doing this”). Without waiting for a response, the apostles provide a definitive counter-reading, which has two major emphases: first, they declare that whatever the evidence might seem to suggest, “We are men with the same natures as you.”21 This declaration underscores that, in this case, the witnesses have misinterpreted both the form (the apostles’ bodies) and the deed performed (the miracle) when they conclude that the apostles are what they do not seem: gods in human likeness. This conclusion is unsurprising in light of the widespread ancient notion – reflected in the Homeric epics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8:611–724) – that the gods disguised themselves as strangers. Nevertheless, the apostles insist that they are exactly (and only) what they seem: humans in human likeness. The second emphasis of the apostles’ hermeneutical corrective is an implicit appeal not to misinterpret the form and the deeds performed of the God about whom they preach. They preach their gospel message in order to persuade people “to turn [. . .] to the living God,” who, they declare, is the true creator of reality (“he made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them,” 14:15). Their “living God,” whose form the people cannot see, is more than what the people discern; the apostles legitimate this claim by pointing to the deeds performed – that is, the ways in which their god has provided for humans materially and immaterially. Together, these two emphases function rhetorically to differentiate the divine from the human in a way that, though familiar to contemporary monotheistic minds, strongly contradicts the fluid permeability that marked divine/ human boundaries in Greek mythology. As noted above, logos in the book of Acts refers generally to the gospel story about Jesus that the apostles preach on their missionary journeys. Yet logos can also be read as a meta-level reference to the Lukan narrative itself – both the

21 In Greek, the subject pronoun (hēmeis, “we”) is fronted for emphasis.

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Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles; logos is the very word that Luke employs in both prefaces to refer to his own message (Lk 1:1–4; Acts 1:1). The reference to Hermes and the misreadings in the narrative can both shed light on what the narrative teaches about itself. For instance, the apostles’ response to the people can be read as a pre-emptive narratorial warning to the implied audience against making similar hermeneutical missteps when they receive the message of the Lukan narrative. As such, this story commends a hermeneutical view for Luke’s audience that is analogous to the one the apostles deliver to the crowd: they ought to interpret this narrative account (Luke’s “good news”) correctly as a message aimed not at bringing glory to the messenger, its literary creator (as Quintilian envisions the goal of authorship in the Institutio Oratoria X:1.31), but at directing hearer(s) “to the living God” who is, according to Luke, the true creator of all that is. Of course, there is never a guarantee that a narrative’s rhetoric will succeed in persuading an audience. As deconstructionists and other poststructuralists have underscored, the romantic notion that sending and receiving a message is a straightforward endeavour (i.e. the postal-service theory of hermeneutics) is misguided. As John Caputo writes: [I]t is just such an epistolary service that Derrida wants to show is always already confounded and thrown into disarray: letters are lost, messages garbled, and neither the proper senders nor the proper addressee can be identified. (1987, 160)

The story in Acts ends precariously, with the apostles barely persuading the crowd that their alternative interpretation of the world is correct; they speak convincingly, but “even having said these things,” they can “hardly stop the crowd from sacrificing to them” (14:18; emphasis mine). The sending and receiving of messages (like the Lukan narrative) is always risky, never certain. Hermes’s invocation is appropriate for another reason, as well. Hermes journeys from the underworld to the heights of Olympus and back; he is a borderdweller, a marginal rogue who oversees roads and travel, variously impeding and enabling transitions from one time and place to another. And this is a significant moment of transition in the overall story of Acts. An original audience encountering the story for the first time probably would have wondered about the identification of Paul as the main spokesman of the gospel message, since up until this moment, Paul has not been the leader of the logos at all – Peter has. In chapters 1–12, Peter, apostle to the Jews, has been center stage as the main character of the narrative. However, chapter 13 marks a turning point in this regard; in chapters 13–28, Peter drops out – or, more accurately, he assumes a supporting role – and Paul, apostle to the Gentiles, displaces Peter as leader of the logos. Hermes’s liminality dovetails nicely, then, with this character transition in the book of Acts.

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To summarize this section, reading this scene through the lens of reflexivity allows us to see this narrative moment as a warning against misinterpretation. It is an appeal for correct reading of both the form and the deeds performed. Narrative reflexivity also allows us to see the ways in which the Lukan narrative’s form contributes to its deeds performed – that is, its rhetoricity.

Conclusion The first part of this chapter outlined three influential misperceptions that have led to the persistent association of reflexivity with (post)modernity in critical discourse. After making the case that we ought to reject those views – and the basic fact vs fiction dichotomy underlying them – I suggested that the notion of narrative reflexivity shifts our attention to more productive questions. I presented a short pericope from the biblical Acts of the Apostles to illustrate this kind of shift, emphasizing the insights made possible when reading through the lens of narrative reflexivity. To reconfigure Cassirer’s reflections, cited at the start, I would argue that narrative reflexivity provides one useful way of understanding the “varied threads” of “language, myth, art, and religion” that constitute “the symbolic net [. . .] of human experience.” While Cassirer laments humans’ inability to “confront reality immediately,” in my view, it is only when we recognize that we are and always have been in some sense “constantly conversing” with ourselves that we are finally able to “deal with the things themselves” (1944, 25). I wish to close by returning to the figure of Hermes. Heidegger, reflecting on the apparently obvious connection between Hermes and the Greek term for interpretation – hermēneia – notes that any connective tissue between them can only be discerned “by a playful thinking that is more persuasive than the rigor of science” (1971, 29). Perhaps it is just such “playful thinking” that can move us beyond contemporary assumptions of factuality and fictionality towards new and more persuasive understandings of ancient narratives’ reflexivity.

Reference List Alexander, Loveday. 1998. “Ancient Book Production and the Circulation of the Gospels.” In The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences, edited by Richard Bauckham, 71–111. Grand Rapids, IL: Eerdmans.

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Alter, Robert. 1975a. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley: University of California Press. Alter, Robert. 1975b. “The Self-Conscious Moment: Reflections on the Aftermath of Modernism.” TriQuarterly 33:209–230. Ankersmit, Frank. 2001. Historical Representation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Arnold, Matthew. 1883. God and the Bible. New York: Macmillan. Aune, David. 2010. “Literary Criticism.” In The Blackwell Companion to the New Testament, edited by David Aune, 116–139. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Barton, Carlin, and Daniel Boyarin. 2016. Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities. New York: Fordham. Bellamy, Joe David. 1975. Superfiction, or The American Story Transformed. New York: Vintage. Booth, Wayne C. 1952. “The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tristram Shandy.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 67:163–185. Bowersock, Glen. 1994. Fiction as History: Nero to Julian. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brewer, Marilynn, and Masaki Yuki. 2007. “Culture and Social Identity.” In Handbook of Cultural Psychology, edited by Shinobu Kitayama and Dov Cohen, 307–322. New York: Guilford. Caputo, John. 1987. Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cassirer, Ernst. 1944. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. 1998. The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote. Translated by Tobias George Smollett. London: Wordsworth. Cohn, Dorrit. 1978. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cohn, Dorrit. 2000. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cornutus. 1881. Cornuti theologiae graecae compendium. Edited by Carolus Lang. Leipzig: Teubner. De Jong, Irene J. F. 2014. Narratology and Classics: A Practical Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dinkler, Michal Beth. 2015. “The Thoughts of Many Hearts Will Be Revealed: Listening In on Lukan Interior Monologues.” Journal of Biblical Literature 133:371–397. Dinkler, Michal Beth. 2017. “Narcissus Has Been with Us All Along: Ancient Stories as Narcissistic Narratives.” Frontiers of Narrative Studies 3:33–49. Dinkler, Michal Beth. 2018. “Narratological Jesus Research: An Oxymoron?” In Jesus, quo vadis? Entwicklungen und Perspektiven der aktuellen Jesusforschung Conference Proceedings, edited by Eckart Schmidt, 187–230. Neukirchen-Vluyn, Ger.: Neukirchener Verlag. Doody, Margaret Anne. 1996. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Ducrot, Oswald. 1972. Dire et ne pas dire. Paris: Hermann. Fludernik, Monika. 1996. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London: Routledge. Fludernik, Monika. 2010. “Experience, Experientiality, and Historical Narrative: A View from Narratology.” In Erfahrung und Geschichte. Historische Sinnbildung im Pränarrativen, edited by Thiemo Breyer and Daniel Creutz, 40–72. Berlin: De Gruyter. Fulda, Daniel. 2005. “‘Selective’ History: Why and How ‘History’ Depends on Readerly Narrativization, with the Wehrmacht Exhibition as an Example.” In Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality-Disciplinarity, edited by Jan Christoph Meister with Tom Kindt and Wilhelm Schernus, 173–194. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Garrity, Thomas. 1998. “Thucydides 1.22.1: Content and Form in the Speeches.” American Journal of Philology 119:361–384. Genette, Gérard. 1990. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Genette, Gérard. 1991. Fiction et diction. Paris: Seuil. Gerhardsson, Birger. 1998. Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity. Grand Rapids, IL: Eerdmans. Gill, Christopher, and Timothy Wiseman, eds. 1993. Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World. Exeter, U.K.: University of Exeter Press. Greene, Gayle. 1991. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. On the Way to Language. Original title (1959) Unterwegs zur Sprache. Translated by Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper and Row; Pfullingen, Ger.: Neske. Heine, Heinrich. 1887. The Prose Writings of Heinrich Heine. London: Walter Scott. Hezser, Catherine. 2001. Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine. Tübingen, Ger.: Mohr Siebeck. Homer. 2003. The Homeric Hymns. Translated by Jules Cashford. New York: Penguin. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 2015. The Ancients and the Postmoderns. London: Verso. Johnson, William A. 2010. Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kahler, Erich. 1973. The Inward Turn of Narrative. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kearns, Michael S. 1999. Rhetorical Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kim, Lawrence Young. 2010. Homer between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature: Greek Culture in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kraus, Christina S. 2010. “Historiography and Biography.” In The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies, edited by Alessandro Barchiesi and Walter Scheidel, 403–410. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lukács, Georg. 1971. The Theory of the Novel. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Luther, Susanne, Jörg Röder, and Eckart D. Schmidt, eds. 2015. Wie Geschichten Geschichte schreiben: frühchristliche Literatur zwischen Faktualität und Fiktionalität. Tübingen, Ger.: Mohr Siebeck. Margolin, Uri. 2007. “Character.” In The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, edited by David Herman, 66–79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, James Phelan, and Richard Walsh. 2015. “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” Narrative 23:61–73. Ovid. 1916. “Metamorphoses.” Loeb Classical Library. Vols. 42–43. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Patterson, Lee. 1995. “Literary History.” In Critical Terms for Literary Study 2, edited by Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 250–262. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peters, Joan Douglas. 2002. Feminist Metafiction and the Evolution of the British Novel. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Phelan, James. 2007. “Rhetoric/Ethics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, edited by David Herman, 203–216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Pikkanen, Ilona. 2013. “Historiographical Narratology: A Narrativist Close Reading of a Cultural History of the Early 20th Century.” In New Approaches to Narrative: Cognition, Culture, History, edited by Vera Nünning, 223–236. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Plato. 1926. “Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias.” Loeb Classical Library. Vol. 167. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Quintilian. 1921. “The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian.” Loeb Classical Library. Vols. 124–127. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Riffaterre, Michael. 1990. Fictional Truth. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Schmid, Wolf. 2010. Narratology: An Introduction. Berlin: De Gruyter. Schmidt, Karl Ludwig. 1923. “Die Stellung der Evangelien in der allgemeinen Literaturgeschichte.” In Eucharisterion: Hermann Gunkel zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by Hans Schmidt, 50–134. Göttingen, Ger.: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Seager, Nicholas. 2012. The Rise of the Novel. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan. Siegle, Robert. 1986. The Politics of Reflexivity: Narrative and the Constitutive Poetics of Culture. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Stam, Robert. 1992. Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Columbia University Press. Tacitus. 1925. “Histories.” Loeb Classical Library. Vol. 111. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univeristy Press. Thomas, Rosalind. 1992. Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. von Ranke, Leopold. 1885. Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514, 3rd ed. Leipzig, Ger.: Duncker and Humblot. Watt, Ian. 1957. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press. White, Hayden. 1978. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, Hayden. 1987. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Williams, Jeffrey. 1998. Theory and the Novel: Narrative Reflexivity in the British Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wills, Lawrence. 2002. Ancient Jewish Novels: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zipfel, Frank. 2001. Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität: Analysen zur Fiktion in der Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Schmidt.

Robert F. Wittkamp

Writing and Reflections on Fictionality in Old Japanese Literature Applying concepts of fictionality to premodern literature is a difficult task which involves considerable risks. A conference on fictionality in global contexts held in 2012 at the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters1 revealed that the transfer of Western ideas and concepts such as “fictive stance,” “fiction contract,” and “speaking as if” to premodern Chinese literature is very difficult, if not “impossible” (Rydholm 2014, 6–7). However, the aim of this chapter is not to take this discussion up again but to focus on indigenous Japanese reflections, descriptions, and concepts which can be found in early medieval literature and which provide a basis for comparative studies on concepts of fictionality. The focus will be on the question of how such an intensive discourse on fictionality was even possible in the early years of prose literature. The underlying presumption is that Japan possesses a unique history of writing (German: Schrift; Japanese: shoki, moji) and that the materiality and mediality of the new media of paper, ink, and in particular Chinese characters triggered and accelerated observations about writing, which are connected with reflections on fictionality and factuality. While aiming to keep the range of literature considered as narrow as possible, I must first present a short history of Japanese writing and characters imported from China. The aim is to explain some difficulties that needed to be overcome to achieve the so-called monogatari literature, i.e. the literary (in the sense of written) storytelling that existed at the Japanese court from the tenth century.2 After this

1 Fiction in Global Contexts: History and Recent Developments (16–17 August 2012); for the papers of the conference see Cullhed and Rydholm (2014). Rydholm shows that “it is [. . .] problematic to apply modern Western concepts and theories of ‘fiction’ to classical Chinese xiaoshuo [. . .], the closest term to the Western idea of fiction in China [. . .], which refers to the short story, the novella and the novel in popular perception” (2014, 6–7). (The second part of the quotation, from “xiaoshuo . . .” is by Gu Ming Dong. For a discussion of the concept of xiaoshuo, see Gu [2006, 19–21]). 2 The concept of monogatari is rendered by Mostow and Tyler (2010, 1) as “literary court romance.” However, despite the fact that the Japanese word monogatari literally just means “telling something” without saying anything about its contents, their description seems to be too narrow, since it does not include narratives such as Taketori monogatari, or the “vernacular history Ōkagami (The Great Mirror, ca. 1090)” (Mostow and Tyler 2010, 6), which belongs to a genre called rekishi monogatari, i.e. historical storytelling. Thus, the term monogatari in Japanese research is used in two ways. The broader meaning includes all varieties of storytelling, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722031-008

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overview, I am going to examine some passages from monogatari and other Japanese texts which contain reflections and concepts comparable to fiction and fictionality in a broad sense. Finally, I will try to trace back these early reflections to the history of writing in Japan. Three examples from Old Japanese literature will corroborate the assumption that Japanese writing and fictionality are tightly connected right from the beginning.

A short history of writing in Japan A famous signet ring and other artefacts prove that Chinese characters arrived at the Japanese islands at the latest in the first century CE. Before the arrival of Chinese characters, the islands did not possess any autochthonous writing system, and in the centuries after their arrival, the Chinese characters were not used as semantic language signs but rather perceived as magic patterns or special designs.3 About four hundred years had to pass until, in the late fifth century, Japanese names expressed with phonographs appeared in inscriptions, which were still written in Chinese. This technique was already used in Chinese texts, for example to render Indian proper names in translations of Buddhist sutra. Although Japanese names were carved on swords at the end of the fifth century, it took over a hundred and fifty years before short texts appeared which attempted to reflect the characteristic features of the Old Japanese language. Apparently, these developments did not occur successively but in several “jumps,” and Kōnoshi describes the big leap of the seventh century as “internalization” (2007, 4–7). These developments are tightly connected to the political aims and circumstances of that period, but in the old East Asian world politics and

but the concept can be restricted to refer only to the “literary court romance” that appeared during the Heian period (794–1185). In recent research, the monogatari works of the following centuries are included in this narrow sense as well. 3 Lurie coined the term “alegibility,” calling it “a heuristic concept” for Chinese characters which are not comprehensible as signs representing a language but still have a function: “The term ‘illegible’ is best avoided because the important point is not that the particular inscriptions could not be or were not read (which is unprovable), but rather that under certain circumstances, the inscriptions function regardless – that is, their legibility does not become an issue” (2011, 28, 32, and for further explanations 368–369). The first part of Lurie’s book is devoted to the early history of writing in Japan; for a history of writing, the complicated use of Chinese characters in Japan from the sixth to the tenth century, and the development of the hiragana alphabet, see Wittkamp (2014b, 45–116).

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“literature” always formed a complicated nexus since writing was one of the main ways of expanding supremacy. When writing in Japanese using Chinese characters, one of the biggest problems was the divergent syntax of the two languages. Japanese, which places the verb at the end of a sentence, follows a different word order from Chinese, where the predicate precedes the object. However, in the late seventh century, certain artefacts, such as metal and stone inscriptions, or mokkan, narrow strips of wood with written messages, poems etc. on them, clearly show that they are written in Old Japanese, using Chinese characters as mere phonographs in order to render Japanese expressions, especially declinable and postpositional words. It is important to understand that even though the original meanings of Chinese characters are no longer used, to the reading eye they are never completely erased: a semantic noise remains.4 At the end of the seventh century, it was already possible to write Japanese poems completely in Old Japanese by using Chinese characters as mere Sinitic phonographs, which are in Lurie’s definition “characters used to write syllables whose pronunciations approximate those of the original Chinese words associated with the characters, regardless of their meaning” (2011, 273). Nevertheless, it still was not possible to compose longer prose texts which were capable of, according to Japanese scholars, expressing the subtle meanings of Old Japanese thinking and feeling. The enunciation of typical features such as tense, aspect, or honorific expressions by using phonographs or abbreviated writing, which has to be completed by the reader, was only possible within poetry because metrical composition was restricted to a fixed rhythm based on syllable counts.5 On the other hand, the basic prose style was still Chinese, though “smelling Japanese” (washū, literally “Japanese smell,” a common expression), and in some rare cases the prose was even mixed with Japanese phonographs, for example to spell out the complicated endings of Japanese declinable verbs.

4 In the poetry from the late seventh to the early eighth century, the original semantics were an important factor because poets used them to provide phonographs with a second layer of meaning, which led to extremely complicated semantic constructions and, after only one hundred and fifty years, to the incomprehensibility of the poems. For an examination of these unique poetological techniques, described as Schriftspiele (writing games), which on this scale only are known in old Japanese poetry, see Wittkamp (2014b). By “Old Japanese” I am referring to the language before the ninth century. 5 The usual poem (tanka) consists of five lines with alternately five or seven syllables (the last two lines consist of seven syllables each). In the abbreviated form (ryakutai), these tanka with thirty-one syllables are written with only ten (or little more) Chinese characters, two for each line. The rhythm of the whole poem guarantees the correct reading of the single lines, because they have to fit five syllables or seven respectively.

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During the eighth and ninth centuries, Chinese characters functioning as phonographs passed through a process of abbreviation and becoming cursive. Eventually, these phonographs developed into the so-called hiragana syllabary, one of the two original Japanese syllabaries. In the opinion of most Japanese scholars, these hiragana were the absolute precondition for composing monogatari literature, because by using hiragana, the poets were finally able to express “even the most subtle recesses of the Japanese kokoro (the ‘heart’)” (Suzuki 1989, 16).

Three discourses on fictionality and factuality There are still many open questions concerning the developments of monogatari, but at the beginning of the tenth century the genre appeared in the form of several works. Unfortunately, a great proportion of these works have been lost, but their titles have survived in other works. However, in the year 984, the scholar Minamoto Tamenori put together the Sanbōe kotoba (“Illustrations of the Three Jewels,” Kamens 1988, 3), a collection of Buddhist narratives (bukkyō setsuwa) written for one of the daughters of the emperor in order to explain Buddha’s teachings to her. Of course, the genre of monogatari literature was already extremely popular among the ladies at the Japanese court;6 the monk criticizes this in a famous passage from the introduction: Then there are the so-called monogatari, which have such an effect upon ladies’ hearts. They flourish in numbers greater than the grasses of Ōaraki Forest, more countless than the sands on the Arisomi beaches. They attribute speech to trees and plants, mountains and rivers, birds and beasts, fish and insects that cannot speak; they invest unfeeling objects with human feelings and ramble on and on with meaningless phrases like so much flotsam in the sea, with no two words together that have any more solid basis than does swamp grass growing by a river bank. The Sorceress of Iga, The Tosa Lord, The Fashionable Captain, The Nagai Chamberlain, and all the rest depict relations between men and women just as if they were so many flowers or butterflies, but do not let your heart get caught up even briefly in these tangled roots of evil, these forests of words. (Kamens 1988, 93)

6 I must mention that the earliest narrative hiragana texts, such as the Taketori monogatari, the Ise monogatari, or the travel diary Tosa nikki, were written by men, though hiragana were labelled as “female hand” (onna-de), i.e. the writing of women. However, the later monogatari literature, and in particular the most famous works, were written by erudite ladies at the court.

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But the warnings by Tamenori and other scholars were not able to impede the success of the new genre called monogatari. As early as about thirty years after the Sanbōe kotoba, the most important monogatari narrative appeared, the Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji), written by the lady Murasaki Shikibu. This monogatari, which was and still is an important source for the study of the courtly culture of the Heian period, contains several reflections on the fictionality and factuality of the monogatari literature, and the so-called discourse on monogatari is particularly well known. Genji, the hero of the tale, is watching a lady who is copying a monogatari by herself: Finding her enthralled by works like these, which lay scattered about everywhere, Genji exclaimed, “Oh, no, this will never do! Women are obviously born to be duped without a murmur of protest. There is hardly a word of truth in all this, as you know perfectly well, but there you are caught up in fables [monogatari], taking them quite seriously and writing away without a thought for your tangled hair in this stiflingly warm rain!” He laughed but then went on, “Without stories like these about the old days [furukoto], though, how would we ever pass the time when there is nothing else to do? Besides, among these lies [itsuwari-domo] there certainly are some plausibly touching scenes, convincingly told; and yes, we know they are fictions [hakanashi-goto, literally ephemeral things], but even so we are moved and half drawn for no real reason to the pretty, suffering heroine. We may disbelieve the blatantly impossible but still be amazed by magnificently contrived wonders, and although these pall on quiet, second hearing, some are still fascinating. Lately, when my little girl has someone read to her and I stand there listening, I think to myself what good talkers there are in this world, and how this story [soragoto], too, must come straight from someone’s persuasively glib imagination – but perhaps not.” “Yes, of course, for various reasons someone accustomed to telling lies [itsuwari] will no doubt take tales that way, but it seems impossible to me that they should be anything other than simply true [makoto].” She pushed her ink stone away. (Tyler 2001, 461)

The expression itsuwari-domo is rendered as “lies” or “falsehood” in another translation (Washburn 2015, 519), but in this passage it is used as the opposite of makoto, meaning “sincerity” or “faithfulness,” and “reality, factualness,” and maybe “reliability,” too.7 According to the “Great Genji Monogatari Dictionary,” itsuwari in this particular passage means “something that is fabricated or a written monogatari” (Akiyama and Murofushi 2011, 118). Apparently, the expression was chosen to match the female comprehension of the world, but we have to remember that this is a feigned understanding since the author was a woman herself, a woman whose understanding was not at all inferior to that of the male court population.8 However, her father “deplored the fact that she was born a

7 See Abe et al. (1996, 210). 8 “[Itsuwari] means monogatari. The word itsuwari was used to correspond to the comprehension of women” (Abe et al. 1996, 211). The expression furukoto (stories [. . .] about the old days)

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woman, since she was much better at learning the Chinese classics than her brother, his own student” (Lindberg-Wada 2014, 53). In the German translation by Benl, itsuwari is rendered as “Fiktionen,” presumably because some Japanese commentaries point out its proximity to the Japanese expression soragoto, literally meaning empty words. However, the expression soragoto appears in Genji’s explanations as well, and the German translation uses the word “Fiktion” again.9 However, the Japanese commentaries point out that soragoto is not the same as itsuwari, and we have to notice the subtle shift in Genji’s discussion, which moves from using itsuwari to soragoto.10 The word soragoto here stands for something “that is not supported by the facts of reality, something that is uncertain” (Abe et al. 1996, 210). Interestingly enough, Genji compares monogatari with the official chronicles that were believed to represent facts: “I have been very rude to speak so ill to you of tales! They record what has gone on ever since the Age of the Gods. The Chronicles of Japan11 and so on give only a part of the story. It is tales that contain the truly rewarding particulars!” He laughed. “Not that tales accurately describe any particular person; rather, the telling begins when all those things the teller longs to have pass on to future generations – whatever there is about the way people live their lives, for better or worse, that is a sight to see or a wonder to hear – overflow the teller’s heart. To put someone in a good light one brings out the good only, and to please other people one favors the oddly wicked, but none of this, good or bad, is removed from life as we know it. Tales are not told the same way in the other realm,12 and even in our own the old and new ways are of course not the same; but although one may distinguish between the deep and the shallow, it is wrong always to dismiss what one finds in tales as false [soragoto]. There is talk of ‘expedient means’13 also in the teaching

is defined as monogatari as well; see Abe et al. (1996, 210). A possible reading of the first two characters of Ko-ji-ki is furu-koto. The Kojiki, a chronicle that starts at the mythical beginnings of society and finishes at the end of the sixth century, is one of the most important works of old Japanese literature. It was submitted to the court in the year 712; I will come back to this narrative later. 9 See Benl (1966, vol. I, 726–727). In his discussion of the passage, Quenzer adopts Benl’s translation without any modification; see Quenzer (2008, 67–68). 10 See Abe et al. (1996, 210). 11 Original footnote 20: “The [Nihon shoki], an official history of Japan written in Chinese and completed in 720. It begins with an account of kamiyo, the divine age that preceded that of humans proper.” The first two volumes of the Nihon shoki have the original title “kamiyo (‘Age of the Gods’).” The following twenty-eight volumes begin with historical events from the first emperor Jinmu tennō and finish with Jitō tennō who reigned from 686 till 697. 12 Original footnote 21: “China. The original for this whole sentence is confusing and suspect, and it varies especially widely in different manuscripts.” 13 Original footnote 22: “Hōben, a device adopted by an enlightened being in order to lead one unequipped to accept more direct guidance to enlightenment. The term may cover what could be called in conventional terms a lie. The issue is treated at length in the Lotus Sutra.”

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that the Buddha in his great goodness left us, and many passages of the scriptures are all too likely to seem inconsistent and so to raise doubts in the minds of those who lack understanding, but in the end they have only a single message, and the gap between enlightenment and the passions14 is, after all, no wider than the gap that in tales sets off the good from the bad. To put it nicely, there is nothing that does not have its own value.” He mounted a very fine defense of tales. (Tyler 2001, 461)

The so-called monogatari-ron continues, and of special interest are the Buddhist discussions on fictionality. The important question discussed is whether fictionality functions as mere entertainment or as hōben, i.e. a means for education, “a didactic text meant for religious enlightenment.”15 I will leave the discussion to the articles already written about this in order to present a last example of the discourse on fictionality versus factuality.16 As we have previously seen in Genji’s self-reflexive talk, a distinction was made between monogatari and the Nihon shoki, the first of six official court chronicles written between 720 and 901. This distinction is brought to the fore in the Imakagami (The Present Mirror), a historical tale (rekishi monogatari) from 1170, which is closely connected to the fate of Murasaki Shikibu, the author of Genji monogatari. In this history book, which has a narrative style, tales like Genji monogatari are called tsukuri monogatari. The verb tsukuru means “to make,” “to fabricate,” and “to give form,” and we can assume that the expression was coined to point out the historical truthfulness and authenticity of the new genre of rekishi monogatari on the one hand, and on the other hand to distinguish between the tales described in Genji monogatari as soragoto or itsuwari and the so-called uta monogatari (“poem-tales,” Lindberg-Wada 2014, 63).17 The latter, in which the backdrop for poems is provided in short prose passages, have a long history which can be traced back to the seventh century.

14 Original footnote 23: “A paradox of Japanese Mahāyana Buddhism is that ‘the passions are enlightenment,’ the passions due to desire and the senses being precisely that which is furthest from enlightenment as commonly conceived.” 15 See Lindberg-Wada (2014, 55–62, quotation 55). 16 See Quenzer (2008) (the paper, which is accessible online, is in German but contains some titles of papers in English dedicated to fiction in Genji monogatari). 17 The most famous work within the genre of uta monogatari is The Ise Stories: Ise monogatari (Mostow and Tyler 2010; also Tales of Ise), which is from the Heian period. There are several translations into English, and A Short Cultural History is provided by Bowring (1992). Modern scholars believe at least “the oldest section of the Ise [. . .] to be a fiction fabricated by Narihira,” one of its presumed authors (Mostow and Tyler 2010, 3). However, Mostow and Tyler point out that “the episode is also included in the Kokinshū [the first official poem collection commissioned in 905] as historical fact” (2010, 3). Without a doubt, for the contemporary reader of the Heian period, the Ise monogatari was no fabrication but a reliable poetical work by a very sensitive author; see also Mostow and Tyler (2010, 5).

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Together with rekishi monogatari, they were believed to be factual, non-fictional works which are reliable and true in the sense that they are supported by historical events and include real persons’ names. These three discourses on monogatari – the passage from the Sanbōe, Genji’s explanations, and the self-reflexive distinction of the Imakagami between tsukuri-monogatari and uta-monogatari – support the idea that within a relatively short time from the introduction of the hiragana alphabet, that is, from the development of an appropriate Japanese writing system, a discussion unfolded about something that might be cautiously translated as fiction and fictionality. The reasons for this intensive reflexivity are still obscure, but they cannot be reduced to Chinese thoughts expressed in texts, which were known in Japan as well. In my opinion – and apart from the Buddhist discourse – another reason has to be sought in the unique circumstances in which writing developed on the Japanese archipelago. The last section of this chapter will provide examples and arguments to support this hypothesis.

Writing and fictionality: three case studies As already mentioned in the introductory remarks, I contend that the materiality and mediality of writing and characters sharpened Japanese observations on characters and writing. These observations, together with the encounter with a foreign universe of different myths, tales, and narratives, led to a discourse on fictionality. One has to try to envision, for example, the contact with Chinese myths written with Chinese characters, which for the readers of Old Japanese were not only completely different from their own narratives but did not necessarily render a spoken language, as was, for example, the case with an alphabet such as the Latin one that arrived in northern European countries. Chinese texts were produced using a writing system that was readable in any language of the Sinosphere, to which Japan, Vietnam, and Korea belonged as well. It is not yet clear whether Chinese texts from the seventh to the ninth century were read in Chinese or exclusively in Old Japanese, but modern transcriptions of presumed Old Japanese readings can be extremely different when it comes to declinable or functional words which are characteristic of Japanese but not spelled out in the texts. After only a century, the Nihon shoki (720) was no longer readable in Japanese – if it had ever been at all – and over the next one hundred years the court held a series of kōsho (lectures) in order to reconstruct the original readings and to bring order to the variants of the collected myths, which are permeated with Chinese cosmologies, myths, and religious thoughts, which I will

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discuss further below. Something similar happened to the Man’yōshū in the early tenth century, when the emperor ordered a translation of it into contemporary Japanese.18 The Japanese myths are collected mainly within the two works Kojiki (712) and Nihon shoki. While the Kojiki contains a single and coherent narration, the Nihon shoki presents the main text and alternative versions of it interspersed in the text as annotations that are written with conspicuously smaller characters and in two lines. While the Kojiki mythology presents a dexterous and coherent bricolage of all the myths existing in old Japan, a comparison with the different versions contained in the Nihon shoki reveals great differences. Consequently, one must not understand the concept of Japanese myths in the sense of a unique, homogeneous narrative underlying the several mythologies, but as narratives documenting cultural differences and plurality. The fact that Japanese myths intended to consolidate and legitimize the supremacy of the emperor is the subject of a long and ongoing discussion, but the existence of different versions also proves that the intentions and ideologies at the end of the seventh century, when Emperor Tenmu ordered the compilations, and in the early eighth century, when the compilations were finished long after his death, were no longer the same.19 However, one can assume that for the compilers and the readers of the chronicles, one effect of the different versions of myths lined up in the Nihon shoki, which represented the official history, was an experience of exchangeability, contingency, and unreliability. As a matter of fact, the Kojiki was transmitted only by very few specialists, and it almost fell into oblivion until its rediscovery in the late eighteenth century, but even the Nihon shoki was never read in its entirety. Nevertheless, the myths contained in the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki passed through a process of selection, homogenization, and rectification, and during the Middle Ages the historical narratives were read mainly in simplified versions or historical tables. The so-called Japanese myths were replaced at the beginning of the ninth century by the Kogo

18 The Man’yōshū is a collection of more than 4,500 poems, a few prose texts, and letters. The last poem dates from 759 but there are still ongoing discussions about when the final compilation of the twenty volumes (maki) was created. For an introduction, see Horton (2016), and for an examination of “landscape, writing and cultural memory” in Man’yōshū, see Wittkamp (2014a, 2014b). Alexander Vovin started a new translation with grammatical and linguistic explanations, commentaries etc. in 2009. The project started from Book 15 and six volumes are available so far. 19 These aspects are explored thoroughly by Herman Ooms (2009) in his book Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan. The Tenmu Dynasty 650–800. However, Tenmu died in 786 and it was Jitō, his wife and successor, who realized the reforms and ritsuryō codes of laws and ethics and who pushed through the succession of her young grandchild, Monmu tennō. Therefore, it would be more appropriate to speak of a Tenmu–Jitō Dynasty.

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shūi, a short text presenting a coherent and simple rearrangement of elements from the two chronicles. Particularly through the combination of myths and court rituals, it served as the official handbook of Japanese mythology. As confusing as these different versions still are today, it is very likely that the experience of exchangeability, contingency, and unreliability had already started with that part of the history of Japanese writing which was described above as “internalization,” a process during which a relatively small number of Japanese words came into contact with a vast amount of Chinese characters and semantics. An effect of this complicated encounter is that many of the characters offer several possible readings and many different characters result in an identical (homonymic) reading; and for a lot of other characters, a new Japanese word had to be coined at the start.20 One can assume that the differentiation between the perception of the world and the literary expression went hand in hand with the experience of fictionality.21 The following example will support this hypothesis. The Man’yōshū poem sequence in book 5 that starts with poem no. 853, which presumably was composed in the year 730, includes a foreword written in the Chinese style (kanbun). The provenance is Japanese but the text is replete with elements from Chinese literature. It is based on the narrative of the Taoist immortals (shinsen), which can be found in many Japanese poems of the eighth century as well. Particularly popular among Japanese littérateurs was the short Chinese novel You xianku (“A Dalliance in the Immortals’ Den,” Horton 2016, 58), known in Japan under the title Yūsenkutsu, a first-person xioashuo (novel, or tale) by Zhang Zhou (Wencheng; Japanese: Chōsaku [Chō Bunsei]). It was written during the Tang period and tells the story of a man who got lost in Youxianku, where he met two immortal women and spent the night with them. The short foreword to MYS 853 is not only the first Japanese narration with a first-person narrator, but the mixture of Japanese place names with elements of Chinese literature and other features creates (tsukuru) a hybrid space that would be described today as fictional (fiktiv in German): Preface [to the poem] on a leisurely stroll along Matura river By chance I went to Matura district for a stroll, and when [I] was looking at the deep pools of Tamasima river, I suddenly ran into maidens that were angling for fish. [Their]

20 An example of such a new word is ame no shita, the translation of the Chinese political expression tianxia (literally meaning under the heaven, i.e. the whole world with China in its center). The original characters were exclusively reserved for the Chinese realm but were used in the chronicles for Japanese self-descriptions. The political implications against China are self-evident. 21 This process of differentiation between perception and expression (Ausdifferenzierung der Wahrnehmung und des Ausdrucks) is examined by Wittkamp (2014a, 2014b); see the index under Ausdifferenzierung.

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faces [like] flowers were unparalleled, and so were [their] shining appearances. [Their] eyebrows were [like] the opening willow leaves, and [their] cheeks [like] the opening peach blossoms. [Their] spirit surpassed the clouds, and their elegance was above the [common] world. I asked them: “Whose village [and] whose house [are you] girls [from]? May be [you are] immortals?” The maidens all laughed and replied: “We are girls from a fishermen’s lodging, insignificant beings from grass[-roofed] huts. [We] do not have either a village or a house. What would be a proper name [for us]? [Our] nature just fits the water, and again [our] hearts rejoice [in the] mountains. [We] either face banks of [river] Luò envying in vain jewel fish [there]; or [we] lie down in the gorges of Wū mountains gazing leisurely at vapors and mists. Now [we] unexpectedly met [you], honorable guest, and [we] cannot overcome the feeling of gratitude and to want to express [our] true feelings. From now on, would it not be impossible that [we] grow old together?” [I,] lowly official replied: “Oh, yes, [I] humbly accept [your] fragrant command!” At this time the sun set down at the west of the mountains, and [my] black horse was going to go away. Finally [I] presented my inner feelings in the poems that said: [poem omitted]. (Vovin 2011, 88)

The names of the author of the preface and the poets of the following poem sequence are uncertain, but they were government officials dispatched from the capital in order to serve in Tsukushi. This administrative district in the northern part of Kyūshū was a liminal sphere where political and cultural exchanges with Yamato (central Japan) and the continent (China, Korea) took place. People like Ōtomo no Tabito, who was in all probability the author of the preface, were not only governmental officials but, as men of letters, specialists in Chinese literature and gifted poets as well. Taking a leisurely stroll and looking at the deep pools of a river are expressions not found in indigenous Japanese myths at that time, particularly since the movement of the first-person narrator has no defined destination and the river is no more a mere cause for action than is the case in the Japanese myths. The description of the space starts with Japanese toponyms but changes to Chinese toponyms in the answer given by the maidens. If the maidens were Chinese, how could they be in Japan, and if they were Japanese, how could they know the Chinese place names? In China, these toponyms were famous as spaces where the Taoist immortals lived, and Japanese readers in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, i.e. the aristocrats, courtiers, and officials, knew them as well, but of course the fishermen maidens didn’t. The toponyms, the immortal beings, the quotations from Chinese literature, and last but not least the writing in Chinese script create a hybrid space that would be described today as a contact zone (Pratt 1991) or a third space (Bhaba 1994). However, one cannot help but notice that these form a fictive diegesis as well, simply because the original narrative was a xiaoshuo, i.e. a fictional speech. Even though the Chinese xiaoshuo had already been realized as a fictional text depicting a fictive world, how much more fictional must this work

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have appeared to the Japanese aristocrats, courtiers, and officials? The author and the readership of the foreword and the poem sequence were sharing the same cultural sphere, and we can assume that a kind of “fiction contract” prevented the work from being misunderstood as a factual report. Furthermore, one has to keep in mind that the Man’yōshū was not an anthology of literature in the first place but rather a political text, or, as Gary L. Ebersole sees it, together with the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki it was part of the “Court’s larger historiographic project” (1992, 10). I assume that a text which is recognized as fictional in a collection of documents which are supposed to be non-fictional weakens the reliability of the whole work as a political text. The prose texts and poems written by the littérateurs in Tsukushi spread a touch of fictionality over the whole collection. The third case study are screens (byōbu) showing paintings and written poems (byōbu-uta).22 Richard Bowring discusses three different “ways in which such a poem which might appear on one of these screens might relate to a picture.” (1992, 410) Accordingly, a professional poet, who would not necessarily see the painting itself but sometimes only knew the theme or the name of the location, for example a river famous for the autumn leaves that could be seen along its banks or drifted on the water, had three ways of achieving his aim. The first was to “annul the space” (Bowring 1992, 411) between the observer and the painting on the screen and to present himself as a figure in the depicted scene in order to describe a particular mood, etc. Bowring writes: “As one might expect, the result is to de-emphasize the observer/poet and to push both poem and context in the direction of fiction” (411). Second, the poet could have been someone who viewed the landscape from outside the screen, maintaining a certain distance. Bowring gives an example to illustrate this, and his explanations bring the problem into focus: This example is far more descriptive, but in its attempt to capture the painting in words it adds both movement and sound, as if the static, spatial nature of the image were not enough. So successful is this substitution of word for image in fact that the picture disappears altogether; it is not really needed anymore because the poem has usurped its function. (1992, 411)

These two ways of creating interaction between words and pictures differ in terms of distance, perspective, and focalization. The third way in which a poem might relate to a picture is by engaging in a reflexive discussion, for example

22 For a thorough examination of Japanese screens in general and screen poetry, see Sorensen (2012, 1–147).

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about the sound of a waterfall that is painted on a screen. However, according to Bowring, the waterfall in the poem in question must be a painted one, and the poem cannot be divorced from the painting, for then we would lose the play on aesthetic distance that is part of its effect. We would also lose that subtle moment when, at the instant that the poem is born from the tension between painting and observer, it begins to exert its authority over the painting, interpreting it and investing it with new meaning. (1992, 410–411)

Unfortunately, the screens themselves are no longer in existence, but the poems from the later ninth and early tenth centuries survived in several poetry anthologies. Since screens with landscape paintings on them were part of the normal furnishings of aristocratic villas, everybody at the court would have been familiar with them. One can assume that simply by reading a poem from a collection, the contemporary reader was automatically able to concretize the depictions presented in the poems from their knowledge of painted landscapes – and could fill in possible gaps within the depictions. Interestingly, a poem could be a conventional poem in a poem-writing contest (uta-awase) at the court and only a foreword to the poem, which was added for its incorporation into an anthology, would turn it into a screen poem.23 The experience of the producer of a poem – whether it was on a screen or in an anthology – and of its readers that something could appear to be used in more than one way is crucial. The Kojiki, which, unlike the Nihon Shoki, was not written exclusively in the Chinese style (kanbun), includes a preface, which explains the reasons for the existence of the text. It says that old texts on history and genealogy already existed but were full of mistakes and forgeries and therefore these texts were not telling the truth and must be corrected. But the preface tells us not only what is false and what is true but also about how difficult it was to put the truth on paper when relying on a writing system that was originally designed for a completely foreign language.24 Today, the readings of many passages of the Kojiki differ in each commentary, and the single characters themselves, though reliable for the naked eye, are unreliable for the reading voice. Consequently, “Is the Kojiki readable?” [Kojiki ha yomeru ka?] was the title of an influential paper by Kamei Takashi published in 1957, and the question is still the subject of discussion.

23 The foreword that declares the poem to be a screen poem is the smallest format of ekphrasis (epkphrastisches Kleinstformat), so to speak, which gets the recipient into the right mood before reading the poem; see Wittkamp (2014c, 51). Consequently, the foreword must be translated as well. 24 See Yamaguchi and Kōnoshi (1997, 16–27) and for an English translation, Heldt (2014, 1–7).

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All three case studies concerning writing in Old Japanese literature discussed above suggest the possibility that they were not only understood merely as representations of reality. The reading of these texts was influenced by the experience of exchangeability, contingency, and unreliability – and other examples of similar literature would corroborate this conclusion. The experience of reading and writing texts, together with the initial experience of Japanese people coming into contact with Chinese writing systems during the seventh century, i.e. the experience that characters do not necessarily stand for only one possible word or meaning, arguably played an important role in early Japanese literary reflections on fictionality and factuality.

Reference List Abe, Akio, Ken Akiyama, Gen’ei Imai, and Hideo Suzuki. 1996. Genji monogatari, vol. 3. Tokyo: Shōgakukan. Akiyama, Ken, and Shinsuke Murofushi. 2011. Genji monogatari daijiten. Tokyo: Kadokawa Gakugei Shuppan. Bhaba, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Benl, Oscar, trans. 1966. Murasaki Shikibu: Die Geschichte vom Prinzen Genji, 2 vols. Zurich: Manesse. Bowring, Richard. 1992. “The Ise Monogatari: A Short Cultural History.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 52 (2):401–480. Cullhed, Anders, and Lena Rydholm, eds. 2014. True Lies Worldwide: Fictionality in Global Contexts. Berlin: De Gruyter. Ebersole, Gary L. 1992. Ritual Poetry and the Politics of Death in Early Japan. 2nd ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gu, Ming Dong. 2006. Chinese Theories of Fiction: A Non-Western Narrative System. Albany: State University of New York Press. Heldt, Gustav. 2014. The Kojiki: An Account of Ancient Matters. New York: Columbia University Press. Horton, H. Mack. 2016. “Introduction: Writing, Literacy, and the Origins of Japanese Literature.” In Cambridge History of Japanese Literature, edited by Shirane Haruo, Suzuki Tomi, and David Lurie, 50–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kamei, Takashi. 1957. “Kojiki ha yomeru ka.” In Kojiki taisei 3: gengo moji hen, edited by Takeda Yūkichi, 27–49. Tokyo: Heibonsha. Kōnoshi Takamitsu. 2007. Kanji tekisuto toshite no Kojiki. Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku. Kamens, Edward. 1988. The Tree Jewels. A Study and Translation of Minamoto Tamenori’s Sanbōe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Lindberg-Wada, Gunilla. 2014. “Murasaki Shikibu and The Tale of Genji: Fate and Fiction.” In True Lies Worldwide: Fictionality in Global Contexts, edited by Anders Cullhed and Lena Rydholm, 51–64. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Lurie, David B. 2011. Realms of Literacy – Early Japan and the History of Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mostow, Joshua S., and Royall Tyler. 2010. The Ise Stories: Ise Monogatari. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i. Ooms, Herman. 2009. Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan. The Tenmu Dynasty, 650–800. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession 2006:33–40. Quenzer, Jörg B. 2008. “Fiktion und Liebe im Genji Monogatari.” Nachrichten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens 183–184:61–73. Rydholm, Lena. 2014. “Chinese Theories and Concepts of Fiction and the Issue of Transcultural Theories and Concepts of Fiction.” In True Lies Worldwide: Fictionality in Global Contexts, edited by Anders Cullhed and Lena Rydholm, 3–29. Berlin: De Gruyter. Sorensen, Joseph T. 2012. Screens, Paintings, and Poetry in Classical Japan (ca. 800–1200). Leiden, Neth.: Brill. Suzuki, Kazuo. 1989. Monogatari o aruku. Tokyo: Yūseidō. Tyler, Royall, trans. 2001. Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Classics. Vovin, Alexander. 2009. Man’yōshū, book 15. Folkestone, U.K.: Global Oriental. Vovin, Alexander. 2011. Man’yōshū, Book 5. Folkestone, U.K.: Global Oriental. Washburn, Dennis, trans. 2015. Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji. New York: W.W. Norton. Wittkamp, Robert F. 2014a. Altjapanische Erinnerungsdichtung – Landschaft, Schrift und kulturelles Gedächtnis im Man’yōshū (萬葉集), vol. 1: Prolegomenon: Landschaft im Werden der Waka-Dichtung. Würzburg, Ger.: Ergon. Wittkamp, Robert F. 2014b. Altjapanische Erinnerungsdichtung – Landschaft, Schrift und kulturelles Gedächtnis im Man’yōshū (萬葉集), vol. 2: Schriftspiele und Erinnerungsdichtung. Würzburg, Ger.: Ergon. Wittkamp, Robert F. 2014c. Faltschirme und Bildrollen – auf dem Weg zum Manga? Zum intermedialen Erzählen im japanischen Altertum und Frühmittelalter. Norderstedt, Ger.: BoD. Yamaguchi Yoshinori, and Kōnoshi Takamitsu. 1997: Kojiki. Tokyo: Shōgakukan.

Lukas Hoffmann

Factualized Fictions: David Foster Wallace’s Self-Reflexive Metafiction “Self-reflexive metafiction alienates the reader and highlights that a text is a literary construct and only a representation.” This statement, or something like it, describes the standard approach to metafiction in literary criticism. Widely quoted standards such as Linda Hutcheon’s Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (1984) established this view and remain (mostly) unopposed. Literature’s self-reflexivity is seen as an aesthetic maneuver that is as old as the novel itself; Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759) is a role model for all texts that reflect on their own textuality. Since the glory days of self-reflexive postmodern metafiction (starting after WW2 and peaking in the 1980s), metafiction has become a standard in much literary fiction. However, examining the shift that literature and criticism underwent after the peak of high postmodernism in the 1980s, Mary K. Holland states, The emergence over the past several years of (by today’s count) eight books and a dedicated journal issue arguing that fiction and/or culture has changed substantially and generally enough to merit our consideration of a passing of postmodernism indicates quite clearly that we are seeing a dramatic critical shift in the way we read literature, in the nature of literature, or both.1 (2013, 14)

One point of reference for Holland is the 1993 summer issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction, where the then young author David Foster Wallace published an essay entitled “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Here Wallace roasts contemporary U.S. writers for unreflectingly using self-reflexive metafiction in their works. He is seeking another form of literature and gives a personal outlook: The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels. [. . .] Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. [. . .] Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. (1997, 81; original emphasis)

Readers familiar with Wallace’s fictional work might find this statement surprising. “Outdated,” “dead on the page,” and “backward, quaint, naïve?” The 1 Holland refers to (among others) James Kirby (2009) and Stephen Burn (2008). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722031-009

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author whose best-known novel, Infinite Jest is full of metafictional asides, numerous footnotes, and self-reflexive statements? But it is not only Infinite Jest that is prima facie opposed to the statements in “E Unibus Pluram”; almost all of Wallace’s texts, be they novels, short stories, or essays, are highly complex in their metafictional reflections.2 One could conclude that the phrases quoted above merely pay lip service to a time-honored opinion, or, as I will proceed to show in this chapter, that self-reflexive metafiction is not per se an alienating feature, that it can be used to strengthen the feeling of authenticity in the reader, that so-called new sincerity might be in need of metafiction, and that self-reflexivity might even change the status of a text from fiction to non-fiction.

The Pale King – fiction and truth Wallace’s posthumously published novel The Pale King is similar to Infinite Jest in terms of its range of diverse and seemingly disconnected plots and its excessive number of footnotes. However, the crucial difference is that The Pale King claims to be a true narrative: But this right here is me as a real person, David Wallace, age forty, SS no. 975-04-2012, addressing you from my Form 8829-deductible home office at 725 Indian Hill Blvd., Claremont 91711 CA, on this fifth day of spring, 2005, to inform you of the following: All of this is true. This book is really true. (Wallace 2011, 66–67; emphasis mine)

What purpose does this statement, made in the chapter “Author’s Foreword,” serve in The Pale King? Before claiming that “all of this is true,” Wallace includes not only his home address (actually true), but also his social security number (probably true). He seems to be willing to (over-)fulfil Philippe Lejeune’s famous autobiographical pact which states that an autobiographical text is a “[r]etrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality” (2007 [1975], 298). The “Author’s Foreword” is more than merely concerned with Wallace’s own existence: Wallace goes beyond this by giving the reader the bureaucratic information concerning the extra-textual/legal persona David Wallace. He explains where and when the text was written and combines all of this information with the declaration that “all of this is true.” 2 The term “metafiction” might not seem accurate for metatextual comments in nonfiction. Since the nonfiction I discuss is creative nonfiction and uses literary styles, I nevertheless think that “metafiction,” being the term in use in literary studies, better describes the metacomments at hand than fabricated terms like “meta-nonfiction” or “meta-fact” could.

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Lejeune, dealing with the “truth” question in “The Autobiographical Pact,” assumes that the autobiographical pact the author agrees to should include the following: “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” The oath rarely takes such an abrupt and total form; it is a supplementary proof of honesty to restrict it to the possible (the truth such as it appears to me, inasmuch as I can know it, etc., making allowances for lapses of memory, errors, involuntary distortions, etc.), and to indicate explicitly the field to which this oath applies (the truth about such and such an aspect of my life [. . .]). (2007 [1975], 316–317; original emphasis)

Wallace’s statement in “Author’s Foreword” comes close to Lejeune’s demand for a truthful (autobiographical) author. He constructs a literary environment that makes the reader aware of, and asks her to join, the autobiographical pact. Wallace not only explicitly states that the book is true but openly places it in a specific literary tradition: “The Pale King is, in fact, more like a memoir than any kind of made-up story” (2011, 67). Wallace is thereby fulfilling two criteria Lejeune claims are essential for the autobiographical pact: by giving his name in the narrative he “undersigns” (compare Lejeune 2007 [1975], 302–303) the pact (that is, he leaves no doubt that author = narrator = protagonist), and by defining his narrative as a memoir, he uses a title (compare Lejeune 2007 [1975], 308) that straightforwardly tells the reader how this narrative should be read. Lejeune’s ideas are obviously only one way of approaching autobiographical narratives, but they are of immense importance to autobiographical theory and writing. I will elaborate in the following the eminent congruency I see in Lejeune’s theoretical explanations and Wallace’s self-reflexive metafictional commentary. The ideas of both overlap most prominently in their concept of the reader and her role of distinguishing autobiographical writings from fictional ones. Other ideas and theories concerning autobiographical narratives emerged since Lejeune’s book was published. While concepts of autofiction or autocriticism are very interesting and necessary for discussions of autobiographical texts, one of the core elements of autofiction in the present argument, namely the shift of autobiographical data into a fictional narrative, is only a means to an end: trying to establish a “nonfictional” contract with the reader. This aspect of the contract between reader and writer is most concisely defined in Lejeune’s theory and therefore sufficient for my argument here.3 I will scrutinize parts of The Pale King to show that Wallace (mis)uses the autobiographical pact to intensify the reader’s feelings. This is where I see the

3 I discuss “autofiction,” “autocriticism,” and the general question of “genre” in my book Postirony (Hoffmann 2016, 18–21).

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decisive difference between Lejeune’s theoretical approach (namely to find a stringent and airtight definition for a genre) and Wallace’s idea of making use of literary conventions to address the reader in a specific way. Wallace uses autobiographical methods as a means to make the reader more than a passive consumer; he wants her to be a human being whose recognition of “a generalization of suffering” (McCaffery 1996, 127) enables her to understand and deal with her own existence more consciously. While most autobiographical narratives deal with the autobiographical pact implicitly, Wallace, in his idiosyncratic style, negotiates this pact directly with his reader by using metafiction. Lejeune talks of an “Autobiographical Space” (2007 [1975], 321) in which writer and reader are bound to a “Reading Contract” (323). He states that the autobiographical genre is a contractual genre [consisting of] a contract proposed by the author to the reader, a contract which determines the mode of reading of the text and engenders the effects which, attributed to the text, seem to us to define it as autobiography.” (323–324; original emphasis)

I agree with this concept that autobiography can only become a “referential text” (316) by way of the reader’s acceptance of the author’s intended truthfulness.4 I see this as a motivation in The Pale King: it is the reader who is asked by the author to sign a proposed contract that thereby shifts the reader’s perception into a referential mood. Wallace places responsibility in the reader’s hands, thereby showing his intent to create literature that a reader should actively work with rather than consume wearily. But to come back to Lejeune’s attempt to make autobiography a genre, I see many difficulties in proposing generic definitions, especially when dealing with The Pale King. Therefore, I propose to go one step further while keeping in mind that the autobiographical arises out of the reader’s acceptance of the author’s “proposed contract.” I think it is useful to retain the idea of the autobiographical pact but to object to the existence of autobiography as a genre. As Paul de Man claims: “[e]mpirically as well as theoretically, autobiography lends itself poorly to generic definition; each specific instance seems to be an exception to the norm; the works themselves always seem to shade off into neighboring or even incompatible genres” (2007 [1979], 265). The attempt to find a generic definition for autobiographical narratives is (mostly)

4 This part of Lejeune’s pact is the reason why intention is important for an autobiographical narrative in contrast to a fictional narrative. I am aware that the inclusion of intentions is highly problematic. I will come back to this when I discuss Wallace’s “Octet” below.

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of no use for the discussion of autobiographical texts and causes more problems than it solves. Even though Wallace calls The Pale King “a memoir” in the text and the publisher decided to use the generic information “an unfinished novel” on the front page, I will not claim that one of these labels is right. Instead, my reading of The Pale King will hint that the autobiographical can be used as a stylistic means for prose narratives to connect to the reader; for Wallace and others, this is inspired by a different urge to the one behind the use of Autobiography in a traditional sense (the capital “A” indicates that it is a generic term). I argue that The Pale King combines elements of the autobiographical pact – which in Lejeune’s definition is used exclusively for autobiography – and the “phantasmatic pact,” which in Lejeune’s thinking is an “indirect form of the autobiographical pact [in the autobiographical novel]” (2007 [1975], 321). In a sense, The Pale King could be understood as a stereotypical postmodern mixture of genres, and hence the “Author’s Foreword,” the footnotes, and even the claim about writing a “true” narrative could be dismissed as postmodern playfulness (see my statements about metafiction at the beginning of this chapter). However, Wallace’s concept of the reader and his idea of “serious” art – to be defined later in this chapter – oppose such a reading. Wallace, in attempting to produce a narrative that the reader honestly empathizes with, uses various aspects of autobiography that could lead to this feeling in the reader. While freeing himself from the bonds of such generic thinking, Wallace deliberately expands the autobiographical. His inclusion of fiction seems necessary to fill the narrative with all the meaning he wants it to carry and to overcome the one-dimensionality of writing either a novel or an autobiography. The narrative attempts to achieve this goal via self-reflexive metafiction’s explicit indication of autobiographical modes. In fact, the narrative openly discusses the idea of a pact with the reader: Our mutual contract here is based on the presumptions of (a) my veracity, and (b) your understanding that any features or semions that might appear to undercut that veracity are in fact protective legal devices [. . .] and thus are not meant to be decoded or “read” so much as merely acquiesced to as part of the cost of our doing business together, so to speak, in today’s commercial climate. (Wallace 2011, 73)

In this “Foreword,” Wallace includes everything that Lejeune claims is problematic. The reader learns that the “name of the author” equals the “name of the protagonist.” Again, Wallace states that “[a]ll of this is true,” and by reassuring the reader of the narrative’s “veracity” while simultaneously explaining that/ why some parts of the narrative may “undercut that veracity,” he guards himself against the charge of “lying.” (66–67) Violating the truth in a narrative is an accusation that can only be levied against referential texts. What is a reader to

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make of a narrative that combines fiction and the autobiographical? In contrast to Lejeune’s assumptions, I presume that the reader of The Pale King is willing and able either to make these distinctions or to ignore them entirely. However, the empathy Wallace establishes by calling the text a memoir will stick with the reader throughout the narrative. Wallace meets these concerns about truth and/ or lie in the text: The main way you can tell that the contracts [for fiction and autobiography] are different is from our [the reader’s] reactions to their breach. The feeling of betrayal or infidelity that the reader suffers if it turns out that a piece of ostensible nonfiction has made-up stuff in it (as has been revealed in some recent literary scandals [. . .]) is because the terms of the nonfiction contract have been violated. There are, of course, ways to quoteunquote cheat the reader in fiction, too, but these tend to be more technical, meaning internal to the story’s own formal rules [. . .], and the reader tends to feel more aesthetically disappointed than personally dicked over. (73)

Thus, the “Author’s Foreword” is the metafictional contract that Wallace signs with his own name: “author here [m]eaning the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona [. . .], David Wallace” (66). If the reader is willing to believe this and to accept the author’s promised “veracity,” The Pale King runs the risk of making the reader feel “personally dicked over.” (73) Wallace constructs a frame that cannot be any clearer about the purpose of the narrative’s status as a memoir; however, reading The Pale King clearly pushes the reader in the direction of reading the whole undertaking as “[a]n Unfinished Novel” (iii) rather than a verifiable memoir. Earlier in this chapter, I asked what Wallace’s purpose behind his “all of this is true” statement might be. So far, I have discussed where such a statement leads to, namely the fulfilment of what Lejeune describes as the autobiographical pact. Furthermore, I have shown that Wallace himself is aware of the (most probably negative) consequences for the reader’s feelings about the text; he disappoints the reader’s expectations by asking her to sign a “nonfiction” contract for a fictional narrative. By explaining why the reader might feel deceived during the reading, pleading mostly legal problems, Wallace anticipates possible critiques and (again) fulfils an aspect of the autobiographical pact. By acknowledging that part of the memoir is not true, but at the same time telling the reader that the untrue parts are only there for legal/literary reasons, a possible Lejeune(sque) critique of the narrator as a liar becomes redundant. Outside the “Author’s Foreword,” the narrative’s main theme is the human condition in a mentally paralyzing environment (symbolized by the bureaucratic mazes of the IRS). Wallace describes dullness, boredom, and despair as

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general threats to human contentment.5 He analyzes these threats in the abovementioned essays and describes literature as a means to help the reader find her way out of this “intrinsically painful” (85) space: I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of generalization of suffering. [. . .] We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. (McCaffery 1996, 127; original emphasis)

By looking at Wallace’s writings from different times in his career, it becomes clear that he tried to “give [the reader] access to other selves.” (127) The idea of presenting a “generalization of suffering” (127) which the reader can apply to her own life becomes apparent in “The Depressed Person.” Describing the protagonist’s situation, the story recounts how [t]he depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror. (Wallace 2007a, 31; emphasis mine)

The story that unfolds is trying to be exactly this articulation of pain that the depressed person is unable to achieve. However, what the reader is mostly confronted with is the depressed person’s anxiety that others – both her therapist and the friends she calls – might think she is overstating her feelings, that is, might think she is using a “melodramatic choice of words” (52). This deep concern with the ways in which others perceive oneself is a recurring motif in Wallace’s stories. The characters are trapped in a society whose judgment is mainly based on appearance. Nicoline Timmer describes this as exemplary for a postironic generation of writers: [their stories] exemplify, in turn, the dysfunctionality of postmodern ways of structuring experiences, of the postmodern way of constituting subjectivity, but, significantly, without necessarily resorting back to traditional narratives as some sort of solution for this dysfunctionality.6 (2010, 95)

5 He describes “dullness is intrinsically painful” (Wallace 2011, 85). 6 For a broader analysis of post-ironic non-fiction, see my book (Hoffmann 2016).

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The depressed person searches for a way out of her despair throughout the story, never finds that exit, and ends the story with the following description: “what words and terms might be applied to describe and assess such a solipsistic, selfconsumed, endless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared herself to be?” (Wallace 2007a, 58). While “The Depressed Person” is exclusively concerned with the inner pain of one character, readers who enter the world of Infinite Jest are repeatedly confronted with multiple characters and their different kinds of suffering. It is most prominently Hal Incandenza’s – “Wallace’s autobiographical doppelgänger” (Boswell 2003, 16) – anxiety and despair with which the reader is confronted. In a similar way to how this is expressed in “The Depressed Person” and at the beginning of Infinite Jest, Hal confesses, “I cannot make myself understood,” (Wallace 1996, 10) and follows with the assertion that his utterances seem to be “subanimalistic noises and sounds” (14; original emphasis). However, the reader is perfectly able to understand his account; it is only to the people inside the narrative that Hal cannot make himself understood. Infinite Jest deals with human despair and anxiety, first by showing Hal’s development and second by including the idea of self-help groups and their meaning in contemporary society. Timmer describes this as a “therapeutic culture” that people nowadays live in: “individuals in therapeutic-type cultures begin to ‘internalize’ the process of self-surveillance” that is fostered in such a culture that is characterized as being very much under the influence of the psychological or therapeutic profession. People have learned and incorporated, one could say, the therapeutic language and have thus come to expect that everything must make “sense,” must be explainable and resolvable. (2010, 314–315)

Wallace is aware of this development in contemporary society. His characters tend to talk in a “therapeutic voice” even when they are not in a therapeutic environment. Seeking the solutions that make “everything [. . .] explainable and resolvable” (315) is, on the one hand, helpful for these characters to come closer to an understanding of their particular problems; however, it hinders them from freeing themselves completely, and this is (as shown in “The Depressed Person”) also perceived by the reader. Even though The Pale King includes this therapeutic voice, Wallace introduces other elements which also convincingly address the reader’s feelings. Wallace intensifies this further mode of making the reader feel the “generalization of suffering” by declaring The Pale King to be a referential memoir, which he does by convincing the reader to empathize with the characters in the text because they are true. The chosen theme in The Pale King of boredom and dullness being the main columns of existence complicates empathy and sympathy on the one hand – “dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to

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attention” (Wallace 2011, 85) – but on the other hand fulfils another core idea of Wallace’s programmatic concern: “serious” art [. . .] is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. (McCaffery 1996, 128)

That parts of The Pale King are meant to disturb and discomfort the reader becomes obvious through Wallace’s style; again, just like in Infinite Jest, the astonishing number of footnotes often disrupt the reading process only to introduce “abstract information [that] is [not] vital to the mission of this [narrative]” (Wallace 2011, 69). The narrator even confesses that “[i]t’s hard to put all this very smoothly or gracefully” and tells the reader: “feel free to skip or skim the following if you wish” (69). This alienation of the reader (by denying her a “self-forgetting” and easy reading experience) is a recurring motive in Wallace’s works. This particularity of Wallace’s writings is what he himself refers to in “E Unibus Pluram” as “anachronistic” (Wallace 1997, 81). While asking the reader to feel along with the characters, Wallace also denies the reader the immersion in the narrative in the way that the sentimental novel often proposed. This alienation can be found in Wallace’s short stories and essays and in Infinite Jest as well; however, The Pale King’s footnotes serve another purpose: they mostly refer to operations in the IRS and give extensive details of highly complex tax concerns. The reader is then tempted, within the disruption, to fact-check the given information, and the referential frame of the narrative is thereby further strengthened. But the question remains: what “pleasure” is to be accessed in a text like The Pale King? Wallace’s idea, according to the statements he has made in different interviews and essays over the years, is the possibility that the reader – by empathizing with the pain of the characters – can find some comfort for herself and can conceive that others might empathize with her own pain as well. According to Wallace, this is the most redemptive pleasure.

“Octet” – making (meta)fiction into fact In contrast to The Pale King, “Octet” never explicitly claims to be true. The story, part of the collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), is a narrative cycle of four short belletristic pieces ending in a metafictional meditation. The different episodes are entitled as pop quizzes; they are short pieces that describe very different situations which usually conclude in a content-related question addressed

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to the reader. The heterodiegetic narrator presents tales of people in distress. The second quiz, for example, entitled “Pop Quiz 6,” is about two friends and the betrayal of the friendship by one of them. However, this pop quiz abruptly ends without a question. It concludes in the sentence: “In fact the whole mise en scène here seems too shot through with ambiguity to make a very good Pop quiz” (Wallace 2007b, 113). “Octet” ends in a metafictional debate on the weaknesses of the preceding pop quizzes, and, interestingly, it is narrated by a homodiegetic narrator. It is this last part of “Octet” that I want to discuss, because it strongly differs from the rest of the story and, in my opinion, is responsible for the reader’s emotional attachment. Zadie Smith, in an essay on Wallace, states that how you feel about “Octet” will make or break you as a reader of Wallace, because what he’s really asking is for you to have faith in something he cannot possibly ever finally determine in language: “the agenda of the consciousness behind the text.” (2009, 291)

I agree with Smith that there is something like an agenda behind the text and would like to expose this “agenda” in narratological terms. The first sentence of “Pop Quiz 9” is “You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer” (Wallace 2007b, 123), and it actively determines how one is supposed to read this narrative. Although the “you” is foremost and is obviously meant to address the narrator himself, it also addresses the audience. If the narrator did not mean to directly address the audience, there would be no need to use the second-person pronoun. The primary aspect of the “you” is the narrator’s urge to communicate with his reader, an idea that is already present in the preceding pop quizzes via the inclusion of the direct questions addressed to the reader. Because I perceive this aspect of communication as central to “Octet,” I will begin my close reading of the story by applying rhetorical narratology as defined by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Here, Rabinowitz’s differentiation between the authorial and the narrative audience (1987), which has been adopted by Phelan, is the basis for this investigation. The latter also argues that “the rhetorical model assumes that the flesh-and-blood reader seeks to enter the authorial audience in order to understand the invitations for engagement that the narrative offers” (Phelan 1996, 210). This concept touches the core of “Pop Quiz 9.” Its narrator states: How exactly the cycle’s short pieces are supposed to work is hard to describe. Maybe say they’re supposed to compose a certain sort of “interrogation” of the person reading them, somehow – i.e. palpations, feelers into the interstices of her sense of something, etc . . . though what that “something” is remains maddeningly hard to pin down, even just for yourself as you’re working on the pieces. (Wallace 2007b, 123)

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The narrator’s direct reference to the “person reading” the story strengthens my idea that the “you” of “Octet” has a twofold meaning: it is “you” who is asked to “feel” that something which is “maddeningly hard to pin down.” The narrator muses about the impossibility of expressing something of great importance and cannot pin down what he’s aiming at. So it is not merely something like a consciousness behind the text that remains outside language. Even the actual topic presented by the narrator remains blurred. “Pop Quiz 9” invites its reader to reflect on the fictional pieces in “Octet.” This is commonly called metafiction, but the narrator of “Pop Quiz 9” tells his readers that his own metafictional account is more than coy playfulness; it’s meant to show that the narrator is “100% honest. Meaning not just sincere but almost naked. Worse than naked – more like unarmed. Defenseless.” And he adds in direct speech: “‘This thing I feel, I can’t name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?’” (Wallace 2007b, 131). Following Phelan’s idea that a text is a sort of communication between author and reader, that the reader actively wants to join the authorial audience “in order to understand the invitations for engagement that the narrative offers” (1996, 210), I see “Octet” as actively inviting the reader to this communication with the question “do you feel it too?” Returning to Rabinowitz, I think one of his conclusions is important for my reading of “Octet.” Rabinowitz claims that a congruency between the authorial audience and the real reader only happens in autobiography, a non-fictional form of literature. I agree with this idea and therefore propose that “Octet” changes its status from being “a cycle of very short belletristic pieces” (Wallace 2007b, 123) to a factual reflection on writing and reading in “Pop Quiz 9”: here, the authorial audience and the real reader are congruent.7 Furthermore, as Raymond Gibbs notes, “a narrative’s meaning is established by hypothesizing intentions authors might have had, given the context of creation, rather than relying on, or trying to seek out, the author’s subjective intentions” (2007, 248). When, in “Pop Quiz 9,” the borders of fiction and fact blur, the reader who joined the authorial audience shifts her position, deciding to understand the author’s intention rather than the narrator’s. The author is obviously outside the text and his intention is unknowable. Gibbs offers an interesting solution to this problem by reducing the intention the reader feels behind the text to a hypothesized one. The factual aspect of “Pop Quiz 9” leaves the reader to seek an intention outside the diegetic area, that is, a consciousness behind the text. Although the reader always assumes about possible intentions – “if we did not speculate about or try to interpret the intentions of our

7 This is obviously in contrast to The Pale King, as I have discussed above, which only changes the way of reading for the reader.

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fellow human beings, most, if not all, types of interaction [. . .] would become impossible” (Alber 2010, 165) – the switch from fictional to factual narration in “Pop Quiz 9” leads to a particular type of assumption. In the pop quizzes leading up to “Pop Quiz 9,” the reader is directly asked to evaluate fictitious narratives – all but “Pop Quiz 9” end in direct questions about possible interpretations of the quiz to the reader – but “Pop Quiz 9,” in its factual descriptions, doesn’t end in a question but in a demand: “So decide.” (Wallace 2007b, 136). And what the narrator wants the reader to decide about is whether his intention to communicate with the reader and “ask her straight out whether she’s feeling this queer nameless ambient urgent interhuman sameness” (133) is convincingly put across in “Octet.” This is the intention the (ideal) reader ascribes to the narrative, and I argue that this “So decide” demand is understood by the (real) reader who entered the authorial audience not as an intradiegetic demand but as an instance of communication between the real author (defined by the hypothesized intention) and. This, again in line with Phelan’s idea, is one of the most direct forms of communication between author and reader, and in what follows I will show that the hybrid status of “Octet” enables this direct and thereby empathy-building communication. While reading “Octet” the reader is forced to handle two different ways of communicating. At first, the obviously fictitious setting makes her “sign a fictional pact,” which means she understands the narrative and analyzes it for congruency and logic within the narrative’s own fictional world and rules – in other words, she is looking for consistency within the intradiegetic world. “Pop Quiz 9”’s factuality essentially changes this pact: suddenly, the reader has to understand the narrative in terms of her own world, and interestingly it is this metafictional part – traditionally seen as alienating – that authenticates the sincere urge for communication on the narrator’s side. The reader has just read four short fictional pieces and is now confronted with a reflection upon writing these pieces. For her, the narrator’s assumptions about the preceding pop quizzes are factual because these pop quizzes exist on paper right in front of her and common knowledge tells her that a flesh-and-blood author wrote them. The factual pact tells the reader that the narrator is a stand-in for the real author (in contrast to fiction, where this assumption is untrue) but this real author is an agent from outside the text whom she cannot know but to whom she ascribes hypothetical intentions. This flesh-and-blood author tries to communicate with the flesh-and-blood reader, and since “Pop Quiz 9” cannot pin down what the intentions in “Octet” literally are, the reader is looking for a consciousness behind and outside the text. The undecidedness of “Octet” might feel frustrating. Zadie Smith comments on this frustration by saying, “It’s worth having faith in ‘Octet.’ [. . .] Buried in the middle of it there is a sort of confession, [. . .] a nakedly honest statement” (2009, 291). One cannot find textual markers that make “Pop

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Quiz 9” a factual narrative, so the reader must decide what she’s reading – just as the last sentence of the story urges: “So decide.” However, I have argued that “Pop Quiz 9” strongly invites its readers to sign a factual pact and the “sort of confession” detected by Smith, “the nakedly honest statement,” is the factual anxiety (of the consciousness behind the text) about whether the reader “feels it, too.” (Wallace 2007b, 133) In her discussion of the engaging narrator, Robyn Warhol states that “[the engaging narrator] addresses a ‘you’ that is intended to evoke recognition and identification in the person who holds the book and reads” (1986, 811), and she asks “how personally one can take [the narrative’s] addresses to ‘you’” (812). In “Octet,” the narrator applies the role of “a fiction writer” (Wallace 2007b, 123) to the “you” he is addressing, asserting that this “you” will have to puncture the fourth wall and come onstage naked [. . .] and say all this stuff right to a person who doesn’t know you or particularly give a shit about you one way or the other. [. . .] And then you’ll have to ask the reader straight out whether she feels it, too, this queer nameless ambient urgent interhuman sameness. [. . .] Again, consider this carefully. You should not deploy this tactic until you’ve soberly considered what it might cost. What she might think of you. Because if you go ahead and do it (i.e., ask her straight out), this whole “interrogation” thing won’t be a formal belletristic device anymore. It’ll be real. (Wallace 2007b, 133)

In these lines, the narrative picks up the problem every narrator faces, namely that he or she cannot know the (real) person who is reading the text and vice versa. However, this lack of knowledge does not stop the narrator from asking the one question the whole story leads up to, namely whether the reader feels it too. By admitting that no one can pin down this “it,” but by simultaneously insisting on the urgency of this “nameless ambient urgent interhuman sameness,” the reader becomes convinced that there is this important “it” that the narrator wants her to feel too. The narrator declares that this act could embarrass the “unfortunate fiction writer,” and we can assume that this is the author’s own anxiety – our ascribed hypothesized intention. However, the “you” involves the reader and asks her how she would feel in this situation. This culminates in leaving to the reader how she wants to deal with the narrative: “So decide.” (136) The narrator shows his awareness of the possible misreading/ misunderstanding of the whole narrative’s attempt to honestly show how seriously the narrator wants to address his audience, and one of Warhol’s core ideas could be read as a direct commentary on the passage set out above: [the] engaging narrator, too, intrudes into the fiction with reminders that the novel is “only a story” [however] their purposes are seldom playful: they intrude to remind the narratee – who, in their texts, should stand for the actual readers – that the fictions reflect real-world conditions for which the readers should take active responsibility after putting aside the book. (Warhol 1986, 815–816)

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My suggestion that “Pop Quiz 9” invites the reader to sign a factual pact corroborates this reading. The hybrid aspect of “Octet” moves from fiction that reflects real-world conditions to a factual description of real-world conditions – which is the composition of “Octet” that is depicted in “Pop Quiz 9.” Which active responsibility the reader should take after putting aside the book remains an open question; all that “Octet” wants of its reader is to “feel it, too.” At first, one might think that the elusiveness of the “it” is a weakness of “Octet,” but I contend that “Pop Quiz 9” only engages the reader’s emotions because of its non-didactic approach. A contemporary reader probably wouldn’t accept a narrative that proposes an absolute truth, but a desperate search for something important yet nameless appears to be very appealing. That the reader feels bound to the factual pact strengthens her empathy for the narrating I and the narrator’s proposal that it is important to feel the “it.” This strong empathy appears because of the sincerity the reader ascribes to the consciousness behind the text, which is understood to be the real author, a real human being, not an agent of a narrative. If it was only the narrator of a story who would doubt his success, the reader would judge this in an aesthetic way, but a reader who transfers the anxieties depicted in “Pop Quiz 9” to a flesh-and-blood author outside the text feels that the fear of failing is a real flesh-and-blood feeling.

Conclusion Both narratives, The Pale King and “Octet,” use metafiction in an unusual way. Instead of highlighting the artificiality of the texts, the metafictional commentary and self-reflexivity strengthens the narratives’ claims that they convey an empathetic feeling to the reader. Even though Wallace’s texts appear in a postmodern style, they hint at literature’s [. . .] ability to be about something, to matter, to communicate meaning, to foster the sense that language connects us more than it estranges us so that we can come together in ways that build relationship and community rather than the alienation and solipsism of antihumanistic postmodern literature.” (Holland 2013, 6)

Wallace’s whole oeuvre revolves around the question of how a contemporary – postmodern, ironic – reader can be compelled to “feel it, too.” Whether his idiosyncratic self-reflexive metafictional mode is successful, that is, whether it establishes a form of humanistic postmodern literature, only the reader can decide during the act of reading.

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Reference List Alber, Jan. 2010. “Hypothetical Intentionalism: Cinematic Narration Reconsidered.” In Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, edited by Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik, 163–185. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Boswell, Marshall. 2003. Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Burn, Stephen. 2008. Jonathan Franzen and the End of Postmodernism. New York: Continuum. de Man, Paul. (1979) 2007. “Autobiography as De-Facement.” In Autobiography, edited by Trev Lynn Broughton, 264–73. Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge. Gibbs, Raymond W., and Herbert L. Colston. 2007. Irony in Language and Thought: A Cognitive Science Reader. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hoffmann, Lukas. 2016. Postirony: The Nonfictional Literature of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers. Bielefeld: transcript. Holland, Mary K. 2013. Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature. New York: Bloomsbury. Hutcheon, Linda. 1984. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. New York: Methuen. Kirby, Alan. 2009. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture. New York: Continuum. Lejeune, Philippe. (1975) 2007. “The Autobiographical Pact.” In Autobiography, edited by Trev Lynn Broughton, 297–326. Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge. McCaffery, Larry. 1996. Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Phelan, James. 1996. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Rabinowitz, Peter J. 1987. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Smith, Zadie. 2009: “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace.” In Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, 257–300. London: Penguin. Timmer, Nicoline. 2010. Do You Feel It Too?: The Post-Postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wallace, David Foster. 1997. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” In A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, 21–82. Boston: Little, Brown. Wallace, David Foster. 1996. Infinite Jest: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown. Wallace, David Foster. 2007a. “The Depressed Person.” In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, 31–58. London: Abacus. Wallace, David Foster. 2007b. “Octet.” In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, 111–136. London: Abacus. Wallace, David Foster. 2011. The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel. New York: Little, Brown. Warhol, Robyn R. 1986. “Toward a Theory of the Engaging Narrator: Earnest Interventions in Gaskell, Stowe, and Eliot.” PMLA, 101 (5):811–818.

Jobst Welge

Historical Reference and (Auto)Fiction in the Recent Latin American Novel The Italian critic Raffaele Donnarumma has recently observed that authors who entered the literary scene during the 1990s have typically distanced themselves from the postmodernist predilection for fictional self-reflection in favour of a more balanced and dialectical relation: “these authors show that there exists a productive reconciliation between realism and modernism, between the will to talk about the world and a literary self-reflectiveness” (2014, 2).1 The term hypermodernity, adapted from a definition suggested by the French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky, serves to characterize the modes of cultural expression in contemporary culture that stage an opposition with the progressive model of modernity but, equally, criticize the ludic contingencies of postmodernism. Donnarumma’s diagnosis of the “return of the real” in the contemporary European novel, I contend, is equally (or even a fortiori) true regarding many recent examples of the Latin American novel, in which the metaliterary legacy of Borges and the genre of the new historical novel are combined with a new concern with presence and factual reality, most characteristically with regard to inter- or transnational legacies of the history of the twentieth century.2 We are concerned, then, with the symptoms of a postpostmodern literature that is characterized by a fictional transformation of social, biographical, or historical realities. As for Latin American literature, Donnarumma briefly qualifies the work of Roberto Bolaño – notably his novel 2666 (2004) – as occupying a strategic point of transition, since it is still indebted to postmodernism’s (parodic) deformation of reality, yet at the same time insisting on the effects of violence and history on real, situated lives.3 In this chapter, I will specifically look at such novels, in which the motive for and the activity of historical reconstruction refers to a concern with the traces and traumas of the “real” in private and collective experience and the survival of the past in the present but also refer to the self-reflexive, reconstructive efforts and the narrative moulding of a subject or an implicit narrator, marked as autofictional. If

1 See also Donnarumma (2014, 62). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. The recent English translation of the novels by Buarque and Vásquez (both 2018) could not be considered here, but are included in the bibliography. 2 See Welge (2015a). 3 See Donnarumma (2014, 149). On the tension between realism and the sense of hypothetical possibilities in this novel, see Welge (2015b). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722031-010

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in postmodernism the focus on historical narratives, perhaps better described as metahistoriographical ones, confounded the traditional boundaries between history and fiction, I contend that more recent works, while continuing to play with the limits of fiction and historical or factual reality, are distinguished by their common interest in the hypothetical – that is, an imaginative extension of the real that is closely intertwined with, yet deliberately transcends, the dimension of (historical) reference. The idea of imaginative extension is also grounded in the notion of the self as the locus of lived experience and reflexivity as well as in hypothetical elaboration upon the known facts of history and biography. As the recent study of Hanna Meretoja suggests, this dimension of the possibility (as an imaginary extension of the real) is indeed characteristic of broader tendencies of contemporary and European literature, insofar as novels defy the dichotomy between the actual and the possible and project “hypotheses of human possibilities in a past world” (2018, 17). Concerning the question, then, of how specifically the contemporary Latin American novel thus negotiates fictional self-consciousness with historical referentiality/possibility, I will concentrate here on two authors, Chico Buarque from Brazil and Juan Gabriel Vásquez from Colombia. They are also distinguished by their interest in the subjective refraction of history, or the interrelation between private and public (national) history – or, to put it differently, the survival of the violent history of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. By referring to their novels, I will show how those novels intertwine historical referentiality with a subjective search, partly by adopting techniques and genres such as autofiction, biofiction, and subjective reflections on historiography.4 The term and technique of autofiction, as the comprehensive study by Vera Toro (2017, 12–14) suggests, helps us to understand how novels that are not predominantly oriented toward the representation of the autobiographical self, nevertheless implicate biographical referentiality into a broader gesture of literary (self)reflexivity. By exploring the intermediate area between the factual and the fictional, by approximating the author with an autodiegetic narrator,5 autofictions essentially create an ambiguous discourse. In contradistinction to the postmodern genre of historiographic metafiction (Hutcheon 1988), I shall speak of “hypothetical reflection on history,” or “historical speculation,”6 which is where autofictional referentiality is conjoined

4 On the phenomenon of generic hybridity in this regard, see Alberca (2005–2006). 5 The distinction between author and narrator is usually seen as an indicator of fictionality. See Zetterberg Gjerlevsen 2016. 6 The term is used in Spanish (especulación histórica) by the narrator in the work of Juan Gabriel Vásquez (2015, 145), in a “real” interview that has been incorporated into the text.

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with a clear consciousness of the “truth” of fiction, insofar as fictionality can be a “real” part of historical and biographical life worlds (this is to be distinguished from the postmodern notion of the fictionality or constructedness of all truth claims). Hypothetical reflection surrounds the referentially or documentary real with a spectrum of possibilities, yet does not deconstruct it.

Chico Buarque, The German Brother Let us begin, then, with Chico Buarque. In his novel Leite derramado [Spilt Milk] (Buarque 2009, 2013), a transgenerational saga about decadence that is filtered through the unreliable voice of a fictional, one-hundred-year-old narrator, the Brazilian author sought to link a private family history with national history. In contrast, his more recent novel, entitled O irmão alemão [My German Brother] (Buarque 20147), investigates familial history by way of an explicitly autofictional perspective. The term autofiction, which was coined by the French writer Serge Doubrovsky and the genre practiced, for instance, by Patrick Modiano, refers to a literary form that is rooted in an essentially undecidable distinction between autobiography and literary fiction. Such a distinction becomes difficult to establish because of the novel’s aiming at realist illusion, which is of course conditioned by the reader’s external knowledge about the author’s life.8 With regard to the latter aspect, paratexts can be decisive elements for the creation of a pact of credibility. In the case of Buarque’s novel, the epilogue is such a paratext, in which the author explicitly expresses his debts to historians, editors, friends, and relatives for helping him with the “research” that undergirds the novel. The title of the novel refers to the autofictional narrator’s brother, who is both “real” (in the sense that the narrator is presented as a double of the wellknown author) and generally unknown. The author/narrator had already realized during the 1960s that his father, during a stay in Berlin in the 1930s, had another son, who was the result of his relationship with a woman who was not his wife; his adoption by foster parents was complicated by the Aryan purity laws of the Nazi regime. This unknown brother, Sergio Günther, grew up in East Germany, where he was known as the host of a musical show on television, as well as a singer who sang to East German dance music. The autofictional premise of the novel, then, is this “true” search for the lost brother of the

7 The English translation appeared in 2018 (My German Brother, transl. Alison Entrekin, Pan Macmillan/Picador) after finalizing this chapter. Therefore, all translations are my own. 8 See Achermann (2013, 23–54) and Gronemann (2004).

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author. The identity of the author’s enigmatic brother – who was himself ignorant of the identity of his biological father and whose existence the Brazilian family was aware of even as they supposed him dead after the Second World War – is of special interest for a Brazilian readership, insofar as the partial reconstruction of his life also appears to throw light on the private life of the author, who for decades has maintained his status as one of the undisputed superstars of Brazilian popular music, alongside his status as one of the most respected voices in contemporary Brazilian literature. The novel is therefore also concerned with the relation between the autofictional narrator/author (*1944) and his father, the equally very famous Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1902–1982), one of the most influential Brazilian intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century.9 Moreover, on its last pages the novel reproduces in color facsimiles a series of historical documents, such as Sérgio Buarque’s correspondence with Nazi authorities during the 1930s concerning the dubious Aryan genealogy of his unofficial son. These incorporated documents (alongside an authorial note and illustration credits referring to the author’s “family archive”), with their references to real names and dates, partly qualify the novel as a bio-fiction (that is, a fictional elaboration of the biography of a public figure), or as an instance of what one might call indexical realism, that is, the creation of a reality effect through the inclusion of recognizable real-world references.10 In a way that is characteristic of autofiction, the novel consistently blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. For instance, the narrator/protagonist is called Ciccio, which is similar to, yet different from, the author’s own name, Chico. In the narrative, the brother’s name is Sergio, mentioned alongside the father’s name (Sergio [Buarque de Hollander, 88; 149), which is in turn recognizable as the author’s father; and in the final note, the author speaks of “my brother Sergio Günther” (229). The author’s actual research concerning the mystery of the unknown brother occurred in 2013, decades after the first hints pointing to this secret part of the family history appeared, and after his brother’s death in 1981. Buarque’s Brazilian editor (from the publishing house Companhia das Letras) contacted a Brazilian historian, Sidney Chalhoub (229), who in turn solicited the help of historian João Klug and a German museologist, Dieter Lange. They helped to investigate the fate of the brother and were finally able to identify him as Sergio Günther and to make contact with Günther’s widow. After he was given this initial help,

9 Most famously, he is the author of a classic text about Brazilian cultural history: Raízes do Brasil (Roots of Brazil, 1936). 10 See Schoellhammer (2012).

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the author himself conducted interviews in Berlin during 2013 with friends and relatives of Sergio Günther.11 These research activities, especially searches made in the Babelsberg archive, led to the establishment of a number of biographical facts – yet the personal “truth” about Buarque’s brother, as well as the precise reasons for his adoption, remain enigmatic for the author/narrator. This autobiographically grounded constellation, then, does not lead to the confirmation of some tangible truth but rather to a series of hypothetical imaginations as to what the brother might have been like, for example fantasies about how this brother Sergio would have pressed his mother about the identity of his unknown father. There is even a hypothetical account of the lost son travelling to Brazil, where he would have been acknowledged as a legitimate son by his stepmother. Some of these passages are explicitly designated as counterfactual speculations, as dreams, or as novelistic fantasies.12 This suggests, of course, that all the other parts of the narrative, which are not qualified in this way, are all the more trustworthy. Let us look at an example, which concerns the mother of the lost son, Anne Ernst: Eis afinal uma hipótese que só me havia occorido nos piores sonhos, a de que Anne Ernst tivesse lá sua cota de sangue judeu. E assim posso entender que, com instinto premonitório, em maio de 1932 ela tinha confiado Sergio Ernst à tutela do Estado, requerendo que se desse ciência do fato ao pai natural da criança, Sergio de Hollander. (Buarque 2014, 149; emphases mine) [And now finally a hypothesis, which only came to me during my worst dreams, namely the one that Anne Ernst disposed of a certain amount of Jewish blood. And thus I can understand that she, with premonitory instinct, during May 1932 would have entrusted Sergio Ernst to the tutelage of the state, requiring that the natural father of the child, Sergio de Hollander, would have been informed of the fact.]

At another moment, the narrator imagines how his father would have reacted if he could have read the novel we are reading now (Buarque 2014, 150) or that the father might have visited his lover in Berlin a second time in the 1930s (207). Yet this emphasis on the hypothetical, the imaginary projection of the lives of others, is typically instigated by material objects or documents that trigger a memory, such as a sepia photograph (not reproduced in the book) of the father and Anne Ernst or a letter written in German by Anne to the father, the initial words of which are cited in the text but are followed by elliptical dots

11 See Vecchio de Lima (2015, 3). 12 “Posso romancear por exemplo a história de Anne Ernst” [For example, I can turn the history of Anne Ernst into a novel] (Buarque 2014, 148).

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(8–9). A few pages later, the letter is reproduced in Portuguese, translated by a friend of Ciccio (33). Moreover, as presented in the novel, the autofictional narrator doubles and continues the previous search undertaken by his father, Sergio Buarque, in whose gigantic library he discovers documents relating to a certain Heinz Bogart, the subsequent lover of Anne Ernst, a Jewish pianist who ended up emigrating to Brazil during the Nazi dictatorship. The narrator’s search for his brother runs parallel with the fate of his second, legitimate brother, Mimmo, a habitual womanizer who was arrested during the height of the Brazilian dictatorship; and whose traces have since been lost. The narrator keeps a photo of this rather unloved, envied brother, of this “desaparecido” [disappeared] (Buarque 2014, 197), who in the photo appears eternally young, “como o personagem de um romance” [like a character from a novel] (197). Long after the disappearance of this brother, the secret police perversely nurtured the vain hope that he might still be alive. When the narrator watches black-and-white documentary film sequences of Sergio in the UFA studios of Babelsberg, he at first takes the person to be Mimmo. Furthermore, the novel represents imaginings of the narrator in which the identities of the two lost brothers are confounded and superimposed upon each other, as well as on those of the father and the narrator himself – which at times also suggest a certain parallel between the Nazi regime of the 1930s and the Brazilian dictatorship of the 1960s: Passaria mesmo pela minha cabeça que Sergio Günther fosse o próprio Mimmo, aos trinta anos de idade, exilado em Berlim Oriental com passado nebuloso e nome falso. Mas à medida que a câmera fechasse em Sergio, mais eu veria nesse o rosto oblongo, o nariz de batata e até os óculos do meu pai. [. . .] E muito me engano ou seria meu o seu bico, quando ele pegasse a assobiar uma triste melodia, num silvo potente e preciso de que poucos são capazes como eu. (226) [It went through my head that Sergio Günther really might be Mimmo, at the age of thirty, exiled in East Berlin, with a nebulous past and a false name. Yet, as the camera was zooming in on Sergio, I saw all the more the elongated face, the potato nose and even the eyes of my father. [. . .] And if I am not mistaken, that’s my beak, when he began to whistle a sad melody, with a potent and precise hiss of which few are capable such as I am.]

Although the novel remains largely within the realm of private history, it hints at the possibility of what Michael Rothberg (2009) has called multidirectional memory, that is, the extension of the memory of the Holocaust into other areas of traumatic experience in different (trans)national contexts. Chico Buarque is one of a number of Brazilians who were living in European exile during the dictatorship and who developed a sort of psychic guilt complex with regard to their siblings who had stayed in the country and who were often tortured or

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disappeared; their experiences are similar to the story narrated in Bernardo Kucinski’s novel K. (2014; cf. Welge, 2019b). Towards the end of the novel, we encounter the narrator in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin, who now finally appears to be about to discover his brother’s fate. By coincidence, he spends the evening reading a book that he says he wishes his father could have read. This book, with its seemingly “endless paragraphs” (Buarque 2014, 217) turns out to be a novel by W. G. Sebald; it is possible to infer that it is Austerlitz (2001),13 which thus serves here as an intertextual allusion to the motif of historical inquiry (in this novel, Sebald himself includes an intertextual allusion to the search for a father). Such self-conscious strategies go beyond the idea of metafiction: like Sebald before him, Chico Buarque employs real names, documents, and numerous reality effects in his novel, which, presented as the outcomes of historical inquiry, appear to validate the general historical, autobiographical truth of the narrative; for the identity of the brother, however, they constitute a fragmentary and somewhat opaque existence, upon which subjective imaginations, and hence the narrative modelling of consciousness (often seen as a signpost for fictionality; Zetterberg Gjerlevsen 2016) may be projected, so that the co-presence of (auto)fictional and factual/documentary elements impress upon the reader a vertiginous tension between the authentic and the unfathomable, the possibly fictional.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez: The Shape of Ruins Let us now turn to Juan Gabriel Vásquez. The title of his 2007 novel, Historia secreta de Costaguana [The Secret History of Costaguana], suggests an ingenious combination of history and fiction, insofar as it purports to refer to the “secret history” of Costaguana, that is, a fictionalized picture of a Latin American republic as it appears in Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo (1904), in relation to which Vásquez’s novel is conceived as a kind of hypertext that reaches back to the history of the Columbian civil war of the nineteenth century. This concern with the decisive traumas of Columbian history is also the subject of Vásquez’s most recent novel, La forma de las ruinas [The Shape of the Ruins] (2015),14 which, in contrast to Buarque’s novel, tilts more towards the political history and the collective memory of the country. The historical center of the novel is

13 Buarque refers to it as “um romance repleto de fotos de bichos, de gentes, de estações de trem” [a novel full of photos of animals, people, and train stations] (2014, 217). For the influence of Sebald’s “traumatic realism” on international contemporary fiction, see Kaakinen (2017, 228). 14 Vásquez (2018).

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the murder of the popular liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on 9 April 1948, which is therefore now a legendary date. Following the assassination of Gaitán, an enraged mob devastated the city center of Bogotá in an orgy of destruction now known as Bogotazo. This event is now seen as leading to a continuing wave of civil war-like violence, called La Violencia, almost as if it were an independent power. The historian Herbert Braun researched the manifold implications of this day, which, through its many narrative re-elaborations, has almost taken on a “fictive, even fantastical” character (Braun 1985, xi) – and which has indeed led, even before Vásquez, to a number of literary representations.15 This day is widely regarded as a watershed within Columbian history, and for a long time it disabled any hope of the democratic integration of the pueblo [people/masses].16 Despite this political–historical dimension, in Vasquéz’s novel the framing perspective is also that of autofiction. The narrator of the novel, who is the recipient of various documents and internal narratives, and who lets us in on this process of creating fiction out of these sources, is seemingly a writer and Vásquez himself. For instance, he discreetly alludes to various episodes from his private life and his (literary) biography, coinciding with the known facts of Vásquez’ (literary) biography.17 An off-hand remark in a subordinate clause, according to which he had opened a “very strange” book by one W. G. Sebald for the first time in 1999, also appears to be a very significant hint regarding a metaliterary consciousness of the novel (Vásquez 2015, 195, 51), which again incorporates a series of facsimile documents and photographs. Similar to Sebald’s well-known practice, the truth status and source of most of these illustrations is left in doubt. In a central essayistic passage, the narrator associates the genre of the novel with the representation of hypothetical events, that is, with how they might have occurred [como hubieron podido pasar]: eso era lo único que me interesaba a mí de la lectura de novelas: la exploración de esa otra realidad, no la realidad de lo que realmente occurió, no la reproducción novelada de los hechos verdaderos y comprobables, sino el reino de la posibilidad, de la especulación, o la intromisión que hace el novelista en lugares que le están vedados al periodista o al historiador. (Vásquez 2015, 205)

15 For instance, El crimen del siglo (2006) by Miguel Torres. Torres’s novels are designated as “the best ones on the ninth of April” in Vásquez’s novel (Vásquez 2015, 201). 16 Braun states: “For Liberal and Conservative Leaders, as well as for Gaitán’s opponents, the tragic events that followed the assassination are etched in stone: convivencia was doomed and the spread of La Violencia was inevitable. Had Gaitán lived, his ability to use social and economic hatreds to mobilize the pueblo might well have made the civil strife even more destructive” (1985, 201). 17 For biographical information and a survey of Vásquez’ literary oeuvre, see Welge, 2019a.

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[this was the only thing that interested me in reading novels: the exploration of that other reality, not the reality of that which really had occurred, nor the novelistic reproduction of truthful and demonstrable facts, but rather the realm of possibility, of speculation, of the intromission of the novelist in places that are not accessible for the journalist or the historian.]

The voluminous novel parallels the reconstruction of the events surrounding the assassination of Gaitán with the previous assassinations of the presidential candidate Rafael Uribe Uribe in 191418 and J. F. Kennedy in 1963 – the latter event is discussed for about forty pages. On the level of a novelistic plot, this is motivated by the conspiracy theories of a certain Carlos Carballo, a figure who, driven by his obsessions, eventually instigates the narrator to write the book we are reading and whose previous research lay the foundation for the narrator’s inquiry. The figure of Carballo is probably fictional, and this could also be true of a friend of his, Doctor Benavides, who – straining credibility – shows the narrator the relics of Gaitán’s body (a dorsal vertebra, conserved in alcohol) that he has inherited from his father. However, in an interview with the Spanish daily El País (15 January 2016), Vásquez confirmed that this character has a basis in factual reality.19 At the same time, the conversations with these characters occur within the context of an emotionally intense situation, in which the narrator is anticipating the complicated birth of his twin daughters (the author has twin daughters; see Welge, 2019a). This circumstance, as well as the memories of his own great-uncle, who as governor of Boyacá was involved in the events of 9 April,20 appear to point towards an autobiographical truth, which seems internally plausible since the narrator/Vásquez informs us about the circumstances of how his own books have come about, and about the funeral of his literary colleague Humberto Moreno-Durán (1945–2005), and he quotes extensively from a (real) interview that he (the narrator/Vásquez) conducted with the latter, etc. Vásquez, then, understands the form of the novel as part of a

18 This political murder is also associated with that of the Austrian heir apparent Ferdinand, also in 1914 (Vásquez 2015, 247). 19 Vásquez says in Marcos (2016): “En 2005-2006, en las mismas circunstancias que se cuentan en la novela, conocí a un médico colombiano, hijo de un forense muy importante que por diversas razones y casualidades acabó teniendo en sus manos una vértebra de Gaitán.” [During 2005–2006, in the same circumstances as narrated in the novel, I became acquainted with a medical doctor from Colombia, the son of a very important forensic expert, who for various reasons and coincidences ended up holding in his hands a piece of Gaitán’s vertebra.] 20 See Braun (1985, 150).

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hybrid genre constellation which consciously incorporates intertextuality and non- as well as auto-fictional elements.21 The literary parallelization of the three political assassinations mentioned above has a certain resonance with the collective memory in Columbia: for instance, the government initially planned to bury the body of Gaitán at the same spot where Rafael Uribe Uribe had been buried.22 The connection to the Kennedy murder has also been discussed numerous times concerning both its symbolical and its conspirational dimensions.23 Yet Vásquez is not interested in the confirmation of the conspirational theory, that is, the alleged connection between these events. Rather, he intends to place this traumatic event from Columbian history, as well as the literary text, within a larger, global context – certainly with an international readership in mind.24 Moreover, the narrator moves on the streets of Bogotá as if they are a historical palimpsest of violence; that is, the assassination of Gaitán calls up previous and subsequent violent deeds from Columbian history, including the drug-related violence in recent memory. Insofar as the narrator circles around the urban area of La Calandaria in the fashion of a detective, he both assimilates himself into and distances himself from the mode of the postmodern anti-detective genre: Dibujado sobre el mapa de barrio, mi recorrido era un paralelogramo cuyos vértices, como en “La muerte y la brujula,” estaban dados por hechos violentos, salvo que los del cuento de Borges son el artificio consciente y meditado de un bandolero de literatura, y los míos no respondían más que a las despiadadas contingencias de la historia. (Vásquez 2015, 115)

21 Marcos (2016): “Esta novela en particular es investigación, autobiografia, por partecitas cortas es ensayo, novela histórica, policial e investigación criminal [. . .]. He vivido obsesionado con la idea de que las novelas deberían contar lo que solo ellas pueden contar: ir a lugares donde nadie más ha sido antes, donde la historia o el periodismo no pueden llegar.” [This novel in particular is an investigation, autobiography, for brief parts it is essay, historical novel, detective novel and novel of criminal investigation [. . .]. I have lived obsessed with the idea that novels should tell what only they can tell: to go to places where no one has gone before, where historiography and journalism cannot reach.] 22 Braun (1985, 184). 23 For instance, Santos Molano (2013, 1) says: “El agente Espirito, a quien se supone implicado en el asesinado de Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, fue así mismo partícipe en el de John Kennedy. Los procedimientos para el magnicidio de Kennedy parecen calcados de los que se utilizaron en el de Jorge Eliécer Gaitán.” [The secret agent Espirito, supposed to be implicated in the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, was also involved in the one of John Kennedy. The processes leading to the murder of Kennedy appear to be modelled on those used in the murder of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán.] 24 On the literary “export” of national traumatic events in Columbian literature, see Nicholson (2011).

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[Drawn on the map of the district, my parcours was a parallelogram, whose vertices, as in “Death and the Compass,” were marked by violent deeds, with the exception that those of the short story by Borges are a conscious and premeditated artifice of a highwayman of literature, while mine merely respond to the ruthless contingencies of history.]

In this regard, one might further argue that during the twentieth century the murder of JFK “heralded a veritable era of political murder,” as Eva Horn has suggested in her cultural–historical study, The Secret War (2013 [2007], 304). Horn emphasizes the “epistemic, legal, and political inaccessibility” of the event and associates it with an epochal “deprivation of reality” (304; original emphasis): What happened in Dallas has all the ingredients of a trauma – an event that must be reconstructed and retold after the fact because it wasn’t properly experienced in the first place. [. . .] The event gains a measure of reality only in reconstructive fictions.25 (305)

In her interpretation – which points to the proliferation of fictions, behind which the underlying, “true” event disappears – Horn follows the ideas set out in the novel Libra (1988) by Don DeLillo, the North American author who exerted a strong influence on Vásquez, as he himself acknowledged (Montgomery 2013). If the early literature of Don DeLillo can count as paradigmatic in its postmodern treatment of history,26 the indirect quotation of this poetics in Vásquez’s novel should not be understood, in my view, as confirmation of the author’s radical hermeneutical scepticism. Also here, the question is not what had “actually” happened. Rather, Vásquez puts the emphasis on the individual imagination in the face of what is uncertain yet still “real”: y tampoco hice el más mínimo esfuerzo para desterrar esas imágenes y esas informaciones de mi memoria, sino que me entretuve flirteando con ellas, enriqueciéndolas con mi propia imaginación, construyendo historias en la mente para darles un comienzo de forma verbal. (2015, 114–115) [and I didn’t make the slightest effort to banish these images and information from my memory, but I entertained myself by flirting with them, enriching them with my own imagination, thus constructing histories/stories in my mind, in order to give them a beginning in linguistic form.]

25 Horn also says: “Fiktion lebt so von einem – wie auch immer verstellten – Rekurs auf Wahrheit, sie ist das einzige Medium, in dem eine politische Wahrheit, eine Lösung des Geheimnisses – jedenfalls als Referenz – möglich ist” (2007, 451). [Fiction is a recourse to reality; it is the medium in which political truth, the unravelling of a mystery, can at least be referred to. (Horn 2013, 326)] 26 See Donnarumma, who argues that in postmodernity history became a “theater of complots and machinations” (2014, 207).

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Not coincidentally, the last pages of the novel are concerned with the phenomenon of transgenerational memory. For instance, it is said that Carballo wanted to touch the fabric of a piece of clothing by Gaitán, since his father had done this on the day of the assassination: “Las reliquias son también eso [. . .], una manera de comunicarnos con nuestros muertos” [Relics are also this, a way of putting us in communication with our dead] (Vásquez 2015, 546). Directly after this comment, the narrator/author addresses the question of how his daughters would cope with the memories and legacies of Columbian history. In this sense, the novel produces an intricate web of private and collective memories and thereby consistently stresses the mediatic reconstruction of memory and the self-reflection on the process of creating a memory.27 At the beginning of the novel, Vásquez cites the historically documented episode, according to which after the assassination of Gaitán his followers touched his blood on the street with their hands and their clothes in order to connect the physical presence of the dead person with their own existence.28 On the one hand, the recurrent imagery of blood and relics (the conserved remains of Gaitán) corresponds with the X-rays of the bullet in Gaitán’s body; on the other hand, the images are associated with the iconic photographs of Sady González (1913–1979), such as his images of the dead body of Gaitán, of his murderer (Juán Roa Sierra), and of the devastation of the Bogotazo – images which have been a lieu de mémoire of Columbian history for a long time. Some of these images are reproduced within the novel (Vásquez 2015, 45), and others are mentioned or discussed. This use of photographs is typical of indexical realism, yet in Vásquez’s novel they appear immediately adjacent to facsimile documents and other photographs, whose authenticity, as mentioned above, cannot be assessed by the reader. To conclude, in the panorama of contemporary Latin American literature, the use of autofictional and reality-driven elements in the recent works of Buarque and Vásquez confirms Donnarumma’s claim about there being a general tendency towards hypermodernity, that is, “a re-emergence of the subjective function and the re-negotiation between fiction and non-fiction” (Donnarumma 2014, 117; original emphasis). The incorporation of historical facts and characters, of photographs, relics, and autobiographical details in literary works designated as “novels” and which contain typically “fictional” elaborations of consciousness and narrative presentation, may be understood as resistance against referential dissolution in the age of post-postmodernism. We have seen that both authors have been influenced by Sebald’s model of a multiply mediated historical quest.

27 See Erll (2009). 28 See Braun (1985, 136).

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This shows that both authors – despite their concern with national and private traumas – consciously situate themselves in a specific kind of world-literary poetics that combines memory and the imagination of the historically possible (Meretoja 2018, 14–17).29 Literature here is assigned the function of circling around an enigma of private or public history. This particularly affirms the affective relevance of the autofictional subject/narrator and the privileged relation between narration and the production of hypotheses: the historical–factual evidence forming the basis of the fictional speculation ultimately intrigues because of its potential to instigate the imagination.

Reference List Achermann, Eric. 2013. “Von Fakten und Pakten. Referieren in fiktionalen und autobiografischen Texten.” In Auto(r)fiktion: Literarische Verfahren der Selbstkonstruktion, edited by Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, 23–54. Bielefeld, Ger.: Aisthesis. Alberca, Manuel. 2005–2006. “¿Existe la autoficción hispanoamericana?” Cuadernos del Cilha 7/8:115–127. Braun, Herbert. 1985. The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Buarque, Chico. 2009. Leite derramado. São Paolo: Companhia das Letras. Buarque, Chico. 2013. Spilt Milk. Translated by Alison Entrekin. London: Grove Press. Buarque, Chico. 2014. O irmão alemão. São Paolo: Companhia das Letras. Buarque, Chico. 2018. My German Brother. Translated by Alison Entrekin. New York: Pan Macmillan/Picador. Donnarumma, Raffaele. 2014. Ipermodernità: dove va la narrativa contemporanea. Bologna: Il Mulino. Erll, Astrid. 2009. “Narratology and Cultural Memory Studies.” In Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research, edited by Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer, 212–227. Berlin: De Gruyter. Gronemann, Claudia. 2004. “L’autofiction ou le moi dans la chaîne des signifiants: de la constitution littéraire du sujet autobiographique chez Serge Doubrovsky.” In Autobiographie Revisited: Theorie und Praxis neuer autobiographischer Diskurse in der französischen, spanischen und lateinamerikanischen Literatur, edited by Alfonso de Toro and Claudia Gronemann, 153–176. Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Horn, Eva. 2007. Der geheime Krieg: Verrat, Spionage und moderne Fiktion. Frankfurt: Fischer. Horn, Eva. 2013. The Secret War: Treason, Espionage and Modern Fiction. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge.

29 Vásquez, “La memoria de los dos Sebald,” in Vásquez (2009, 87–94). See also Vervaecke (2012).

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Kaakinen, Kaisa. 2017. Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary. Reading Conrad, Weiss, Sebald. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kucinski, Bernardo. 2014. K. Relato de uma busca. São Paulo: CosacNaify. Marcos, Ana. 2016. “Juan Gabriel Vásquez: ‘Hay que mojarse, ganarse enemigos y molestar.’” El País, 15 January. Accessed 5 October 2016. http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2016/01/ 14/babelia/1452774815_653704.html. Meretoja, Hanna. 2018. The Ethics of Storytelling. Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Montgomery, David. 2013. “Juan Gabriel Vasquez: Through fiction, an unsettled expat tries to decipher his homeland.” Accessed 4 January 2019. http://www.washingtonpost.com/life style/style/juan-gabriel-vasquez-an-unsettled-expat-trying-to-decipher-his-homelandwith-fiction/2013/11/21/6a98374c-521a-11e3-9fe0-fd2ca728e67c_story.html?noredirect= on&utm_term=.ad38f36490d0. Nicholson, Brantley Garett. 2011. “A Poetics of Globalism: Fernando Vallejo, the Columbian Urban Novel, and the Generation of ‘72.” PhD diss., Duke University, Durham, NC. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Santos Molano, Enrique. 2013. “Los Asesinos de Kennedy.” El tiempo 22 November. Accessed 5 October 2016. http://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/CMS-13212516. Schoellhammer, Karl Erik. 2012. “Realismo afetivo: evocar realismo além da representação.” Estudos de literatura brasileira contemporânea, 39:129–148. Toro, Vera. 2017. “Soy simultáneo.” El concepto poetológico de la autoficción en la narrativa hispánica. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert. Vásquez, Juan Gabriel. 2009. El arte de la distorsión. Barcelona: Alfaguara. Vásquez, Juan Gabriel. 2015. La forma de las ruinas. Barcelona: Alfaguara. Vásquez, Jun Gabriel. 2018. The Shape of the Ruins. Transl. Anne McLean. London; Maclehouse Press. Vecchio de Lima, Annalice del. 2015. “Aspectos da escrita contemporânea em O irmão alemão, de Chico Buarque.” Inventário 17:1–12. Vervaecke, Jasper. 2012. “Una mirada en los abismos de la historia: la impronta de Pynchon, Borges y Sebald sobre Los Informantes de Juán Gabriel Vásquez.” Revista de Estudios Colombianos 39:30–35. Welge, Jobst. 2015a. “Reality, Fiction, and the Limits of Postmodernity in the Contemporary Novel: The Case of Bernardo Carvalho.” In Einheitsdenken. Figuren von Ganzheit, Präsenz und Transzendenz nach der Postmoderne, edited by Irina Hron, 105–122. Nordhausen, Ger.: Traugott Bautz. Welge, Jobst. 2015b. “Apocalipsis y contingencia. Roberto Bolaño y los fines de la novela.” In Roberto Bolaño. Violencia, Escritura, Vida, edited by Ursula Hennigfeld, 83–100. Frankfurt: Vervuert. Welge, Jobst. 2019a. “Juan Gabriel Vásquez.” KLfG. Kritisches Lexikon zur fremdsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. 108/6, 1–17. Ravensburg: Munziger Archiv. Welge, Jobst. 2019b. “Memory, Truth, and Auto-Fiction in the Recent Latin American Novel.” In The Brazilian Truth Commission. Local, National, and Global Perspectives, edited by Nina Schneider, 286–301. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Zetterberg Gjerlevsen, Simona. 2016. “Fictionality.” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid. http://www. lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/fictionality.

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Authorial Self-Personalization and Cine-Vision in the Film Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988) Reversible expression and representation Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988) resulted from a collaboration between the film director Agnès Varda and the British actress Jane Birkin, although the initiative was Birkin’s and not Varda’s, as one might think. The actress approached the director and challenged her to make a film together. This conforms to Varda’s practice of declining the status of enlightened auteur, preferring instead to partner with other people in the creation of stories (Bénézet 2014, 58, 116, 127). For instance, in the short film Ydessa, les ours et etc… (2004), both female protagonists − Varda herself and the Canadian-based curator Ydessa Hendeles − are photographers, and Varda shares Ydessa’s point of view about memory. In the short film Oncle Yanco (1967), the eponymous subject, an old Greek man − who is both a lowbrow painter and Varda’s distant relative − plays some characters assigned to him by Varda (for instance, a cowboy). Interestingly, Varda has claimed that in Jane B. par Agnès V. she has created a fake self-portrait which is neither hers nor Birkin’s: “J’ai fait à sa place son autoportrait, donc un faux et ce faux autoportrait n’est ni le mien ni le sien” [I’ve made her self-portrait in her place, thus I made a fake one, which is neither mine nor hers] (Colvile 2009, 146).1 I wish to deconstruct this comment and explain how, in fact, she has made a portrait of them both, albeit not in the most direct manner. Indeed, the filmmaker exposes a lot of real information to those who know how to perceive it. The film carries many references to visual distortion (especially images reflected in mirrors) as a way of qualifying the “reality” presented (Figure 1). Nevertheless, Jane B. par Agnès V. is supposed to be a portrayal of the actress Jane Birkin, whom Varda, in the film, asks to expose herself personally and

1 Varda in an interview originally given to Claudine Delvaux in 1987. She implies that a selfportrait needs to be authored by the person depicted. Therefore, since in Jane B. par Agnès V. Varda replaces Birkin in this authorial stance, the result is not a “real” self-portrait. Note: This chapter was financially supported by FCT, the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under the postdoctoral fellowship programme SFRH/BDP/113196/2015. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722031-011

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Figure 1: Mirror distortion of Jane Birkin.

professionally. Indeed, in this project, Birkin not only talks about her own life − in iconic places and in the company of people who have marked and continue to mark her existence, such as her former husband Serge Gainsbourg − but she also agrees to perform various characters conceived expressly for her by Varda. Narratively, these roles, played out in fictional sequences, reveal different possibilities of “Jane,” different versions of her. They are constructs which reveal Birkin’s professional versatility as well as the complexity of the film, made up of several layers of meaning in a spectrum of possibilities placed somewhere between complete truth and absolute fakery. The fact that Birkin agrees to play this game makes the viewers more prone to question the veracity of the “biographical” information shown in the film, even when it is conveyed by Birkin herself, which is one of the two prevailing modes of presentation.2 For instance, at one point Birkin addresses the camera while standing in front of a screen on which slides of her childhood are projected as she talks about it. Her physical presence creates a second layer of apparent reality destined to assert the corporeality, and therefore the “truth,” of the images seen in the background. Strategies such as

2 The other consists of conversations, taking place on camera, between her and the film director.

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this one make the film look and sound stylized. Varda’s strategies of stylization fall into two seemingly opposed categories: (1) the non-linear narrative structure together with the non-homogeneous generic fabric; and (2) a solid script which is followed by Birkin. Yet the “roles” Birkin plays belong to a shared imaginary of the actress and the film director. Moreover, Birkin generally uses a type of poetic and ironical language that is typically and recognizably Varda’s and which, here and there, sounds contrived, giving the impression that she is acting and not being entirely genuine, even when she is speaking about her own life in the first person. In a scene in which Birkin arrives at the Champs de Mars in Paris, she empties her purse on the stairs and says, “[Even] when you show it all, you reveal very little.”3 The fact that in 2008 Varda imported this passage wholesale into her film Les plages d’Agnès proves how much this comment and its inner meaning are important to the film director. The sense of humor and the practice of taking banal metaphors literally − especially in the fictional segments − are entirely Varda’s. That is the case, for instance, in the Laurel and Hardy sequence (here rebaptized Maurel and Lardy) performed by Birkin and Laura Betti. The pseudoHardy “falls on the apples” lying around, which in idiomatic French means to faint (tomber dans les pommes). Yet, probably the best instance of shared imaginary between the two women in Jane B. par Agnès V. is the use of some clips taken from Kung-Fu Master! (1988), another film on which they worked together. The storyline for this film was written by Birkin and the film was directed by Varda. This filmic object is a by-product of the collaboration between the two women in Jane B. par Agnès V. and, ultimately, proof of its effectiveness. In Kung-Fu Master! Jane Birkin plays the character of Mary-Jane, an adult woman with two daughters, played by the actress’s own children, who falls in love with a fourteen-year-old boy, played by Mathieu, Varda’s son. Although the sentimental story is Birkin’s, Varda shaped it into a denser and less naïve plot, further developing the character of the young boy. The appearance of Birkin’s parents and brother in Kung-Fu Master! makes this film seem a little bit more Birkin’s than Varda’s, whereas in Jane B. par Agnès V. the opposite happens. This is not to deny both women their creative involvement in both works, but their degree of expression certainly differs from one film to the other. The reversibility of expression and representation contained in Jane B. par Agnès V., in which both authorship and depiction seem to fluctuate, is supported by the apparently scattered narrative. The film seems to be modelled on

3 Unless otherwise indicated, the quotations from the film are taken from the Blu-ray version.

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the flow of consciousness, which Varda is very keen on (Bénézet 2014, 56),4 but the narrative structure is tighter than it seems at first. The fake continuity (faux raccord) of actions, words, or situations between scenes proves that the elements are meant to occupy a certain position in the overall scheme of the film and that the non-linearity it flaunts was probably not entirely left until the editing stage. More than anything else, this structure makes the film flow easily and still look like the “non-film” that Varda said she would like to accomplish (Colvile 2009, 145, quoting Varda). Although the arrangement seems arbitrary, as free associations of ideas usually are, each sequence is narratively as well as formally justified.

Modalities of self-representation Although there is a clear collaboration between the two women in Jane B. par Agnès V., it is worth remembering that Varda is at the helm of the project and that she appears in it not only artistically, through her filmic enunciation, but also physically, through her presence in the frame on several occasions. As Dorota Chrostowska observes about Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000): “Her inquisitive corporeal presence in front of and behind the camera endows her films with an aura of subjective honesty.” (2007, 130, 1st column). In other words, Jane B. par Agnès V. is honest precisely because it is assumed to be creatively subjective. That subjectivity is primarily Varda’s. In an interview that Varda gave to Melissa Anderson in 2001, she points out that objectivity resides in the facts, whereas subjectivity permeates the way she thinks about and conveys them: “It’s like I always say: it’s both objective and subjective. [. . .] I can show my hand, or my hair, but then it is my perception of my aging as a subjective thing” (Kline 2014, 75). Therefore, my second aim in this chapter, and the most important one, is not only to invert the self-expression and self-representation of the women in a hybrid self-reflexive film positioned halfway between fact and fiction, but also to shed extra light on Varda as the actual subject of the film. In Jane B. par Agnès V., the French film director inscribes herself directly

4 The mind of the creator works in associative leaps, jumping from one subject and place to another in a manner reminiscent of the literary technique of “stream of consciousness,” wherein a narrator’s or character’s consciousness speaks the author’s mind. However, Varda disposes of the interior monologue whereby the creator’s thoughts are conveyed directly albeit in a more intimate way than through direct address. Bénézet’s synonymous “flow of consciousness” preserves the psychological dimension of the associations produced without entailing the same form of transmission.

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in the film through a double self-representation: corporeal and professional. Indeed, Varda turns the camera on herself during the film in order to better reveal her acts of portrayal (representation) and creation (expression) (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Varda doubly representing herself.

If one considers Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact” (1975, 23–24), that is, the necessary coalescence of author, narrator, and main character into one single identity via the use of the same name, one has to admit that Jane B. par Agnès V. does not fulfil the condition for autobiography. There is a clear bipolarization of functions in this film which is supported by the use of two different names. On the one hand, the author of the film is presumed to be Agnès Varda, since the film title is followed by the indication “par Varda” [by Varda] and the director is also one of the two intradiegetic narrators that the film ostensibly contains in a recurrent voice-over commentary verbalized by herself. On the other hand, Birkin is the main character − she is the “Jane B” of the title, the first name therein indicated, and she exercises a strong narration on screen as she comments upon her life. This bipolarization contradicts the idea that the film is a portrait of only Jane Birkin. Such an incongruity, along with the physical presence of Agnès Varda in the film she herself directs, is the key to the discursivity at stake, which is not essentially Birkin’s. Jane B. par Agnès V. cannot be considered an autofiction (i.e. self-fiction) either, for this implies a coalescence between protagonist and writer (or another

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similar creator). Although this “writer” appears, in body and in voice, in the artwork, he or she is self-created and speaks from an entirely fictional perspective. The most important condition of autofiction is the retention of one’s own name in an otherwise entirely constructed artwork (Colonna 1989, 34; Molkou 2002, 159). In “Autobiographie/Vérité/Psychanalyse,” Serge Doubrovsky (1980), defines autofiction as a complete invention: Le sens d’une vie n’existe nulle part, n’existe pas. Il n’est pas à découvrir, mais à inventer, non de toutes pièces mais de toutes traces: il est à construire. Telle est bien la “construction” analytique; fingere, “donner forme,” fiction que le sujet s’incorpore. (Quoted in Blüher 2001, 262–263) [The sense of a life exists nowhere, it does not exist. It is not to be discovered, it is to be invented; not in all its constituents but of all its traces. It has to be constructed. Such is the “analytic” construction; fingere, “to give form,” fiction in which the subject is incorporated.] (My translation)

In 1988, Varda was the only official film director mentioned in the title Jane B. par Agnès V.,5 and, although she may be a construct, she is not a character. For instance, Varda’s persona is different from Jean Cocteau’s mentir vrai (real lying), a practice in which the versatile artist creates an abstract author in order to better emulate himself as myth (“I am a lie which always tells the truth,” Phelps 1970, 104). I contend that Jane B. par Agnès V. belongs to the self-portrait mode. According to Raymond Bellour (1988, 334), a self-portrait is an intimate and personal expression, a sort of self-writing, which he calls écriture du Je [literally, writing of the I]. In this view, a self-portrait is characterized by its style, which is made of analogies, metaphors, and lyricism; it is more poetic than strictly narrative (341). Contrary to the autobiography, the self-portrait has no clear linearity and is presented as something that is taking place (a sort of a film in progress), rather than a report on something that has already happened and is, therefore, complete. Bellour admits that an autofiction is also constructed in a free style, which implies a bricolage of elements assembled in random order; an anarchic narrative, made of repetitions and correspondences; and hybrid mini-narratives, full of sheer imagination, fabulation, and lies. However, he claims that an autofiction consists in the invention of an author, whereas a self-portrait aims at explaining who the author really is. Bernard Bastide’s comment that Varda’s oeuvre is “a complex network of sensations, emotions and impressions generated by particular psychological states” (2009, 19) seems to fit perfectly into this schema.

5 Jane Birkin has directed a feature film since: Boxes (2007).

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Indeed, a self-portrait is a malleable genre within subjective literature just as the essay film is a versatile form in non-fictional cinema. Varda’s designation of her cinematic method as cinécriture (cine-writing) reveals a deliberate creative act which does not entail any kind of lying, only an operation of the unconscious. Kline defines this as creating “[n]ew relationships between images and sounds [which] allow us to unmask images and sounds that were previously suppressed, or hidden in us” (2014, 108). The film Jane B. par Agnès V. contains verifiable and truthful aspects that pertain to Varda’s life, notwithstanding its playful and fictional episodes and scenes. The “Varda” seen by the film viewers is, indeed, the film director and she is, indeed, seen doing her job of directing the film the viewers see − which is the epitome of mise en abyme. Her corporeal presence in Jane B. par Agnès V. is a clear self-reflexive statement, in more ways than one. She is really inside her film: first, in flesh and blood, as a self-representation of the biological director; second, through Jane Birkin, who, as an actress, is used to being directed by filmmakers (metteurs-en-scène); and, lastly, through the miscellaneous filmic material she chooses and the way it conveys a personal world view. Although the film seems to be mostly about the actress, there is, in fact, another layer of representation which discloses, at least, as much (and in my opinion, more) about the creator than it does about its creature.

Persona-lization: making up real people In Jane B. par Agnès V., Varda apparently keeps a low profile, relinquishing the center stage to the actress Jane Birkin. Still, the self-reflexivity announced in the film’s title is quite true: the film is Jane B. par Agnès V. They are two women on a par (pun intended): two women who work in imaginary artistic worlds; two women who, professionally, create characters and stories; two women who are connected by the same gender and similar outlooks on life. In short: they are two women who double as each other. In Les plages d’Agnès (2008), Varda mentions that by looking deeply into the camera she is able to reach the viewer; in Jane B. par Agnès V. the same is achieved through Birkin’s body. Varda tells her actress at the outset that she does not want to booby-trap her, she just wants her to look straight at the camera, right at the lens, otherwise she will not be able to see the film director. A communication therefore ensues between the so-called model and the ipso facto director. Not only are they able to communicate with one another through the lens of the camera, as reversed sides of the same image, but they also complement each other. The film seems to convey

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Figure 3: The so-called model (Jane B.).

Figure 4: The ipso facto director represented by the camera.

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the notion that they are one (Figures 3 and 4). The viewer is, apparently, not watching Birkin’s or Varda’s self-portrait but both portraits simultaneously as a piece of poetic cinema that is equally dependent on both of them and addresses their professional personae as creators of fantasies. As Varda claims in the film, “Le cinéma c’est 24 portraits différents par second, ou par heure” [Cinema is twenty-four different portraits each second or each hour6]. The most important factor in this particular equation is the person behind the camera and what she can do with her model. Birkin recognizes this and affirms it: “I don’t care what you do to me, as long as I feel you like me.” This is why I sustain that, despite the complementarity of the two women, the ultimate portrait is Varda’s. A fact that supports my claim is that Birkin mentions that she has agreed to play the actress as well as being Varda’s model. This sentence conveys a subtle inversion of the importance of their tasks in Jane B. par Agnès V. It is almost an acknowledgement of the statement made by Varda while conversing with Birkin in their first interlude in the film, in which the director claims the actress is plasticine in her hands (pâte à modeler). In Jane B. par Agnès V., the viewers see a construction of two women who do not hesitate to expose themselves, but in Birkin’s case the exposure becomes literal (when she appears naked on an upper balustrade or when she plays a pictorial Venus reclining on a bed), whereas in Varda’s case it is metaphorical. The camera behind which the film director usually stands is a sort of garment that she sheds when she appears on screen facing the audience. The key word in this process and in my ensuing argument is construction. The constant (self-)questioning of truth by Birkin, the fragmentary and apparently erratic film form adopted by Varda, and the sketches which work as films-in-the-film enfold Jane B. par Agnès V. in a veil of unreliability. This, combined with some visual references to the surrealist artists René Magritte and Salvador Dalí, probably leads the viewers to suspect that the film is not entirely what it seems. The portrait looms large over the biographical material. Indeed, the film starts with a tableau shot reminiscent of a pictorial tradition (Figure 5). Birkin, dressed like one of Vermeer’s peasant maids (seventeenth century), occupies the center of the frame, but something immediately feels wrong: on the far left of the picture, a bare-breasted Polynesian woman, looking as if she came out of a Gaugin painting (nineteenth century), oversees and overhears Birkin’s description of her lonely and dismal 30th birthday (which took place in the twentieth century).

6 This is my own translation. The translation in the Blu-ray version, which I deem unfortunate, reads as follows: “A film shows 24 portraits a second or per hour.”

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Figure 5: Adulterated tableau vivant.

The reality of the account is made very questionable by the double framing − a painting inside another hypothetical painting – and by the threefold temporality. This portrait is clearly a fake. Varda’s own recognizable voice-over says that it is a very calm image, timeless and motionless, in which we have the impression of feeling time flowing, helping to perceive the image as a non-real one. Even before Varda explains that there is a game involved in her cinematic relationship with Birkin in this film, or before she comments that a film is like a ballad, the viewers will probably perceive that they are not watching a straightforward cinematic account. The proposal about producing an official portrait “in the fashion of Titian and Goya” made by Varda at the beginning of her cinematic depiction of Birkin in this film is not really the point of departure of Jane B. par Agnès V., serving instead to reinforce the constructed nature of the pictorial in the film. Only Birkin’s body is real throughout, which is why it is given so much importance right from the start. For instance, she appears in a tableau vivant of Francisco de Goya’s La maja desnuda (late 1790s), as if to indicate that truth lies in the corporeal and in the details, not in the overall picture. Varda is all over this film, not only in her cinécriture, as author, but also, and especially, as subject. She cannot be separated from her chosen model, for she is the camera (metonymically, the visible apparatus which is very present in Jane B. par Agnès V.), she is in the camera (it is her perspective that the film presents), and she is behind the camera (in the director’s chair, acting as master

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of ceremonies). She states as much near the beginning of the film: “I’m filming your self-portrait. But you won’t be alone in the mirror. There’ll be the camera (it’s a bit me) . . . Too bad if I appear in the mirror or on the background.”7 During the verbalization of this film philosophy by Varda, Birkin is seen in front of a mirror hanging from a tree trunk in a park. The camera makes a 180-degree rotation from her right to her left, appearing in the mirror (and Varda with it) at the center point of the movement. The so-called behind the camera space is thus reflected in the mirroring frame (and the film frame itself), making both women visible at once as reflections in general and, moreover, as a reflection of each other (Figure 6).

Figure 6: Reversibility between the two women.

Unlike other films by Varda, in which a portrait of another artist is made by the director, in Jane B. par Agnès V., a portrait of the director is made through another artist. Both processes involve mise en abyme. One could say that the real game is actually the relationship between the director and the viewer. Throughout this hybrid film, countless roles are played. As an actress, it falls on Birkin to play most of them in fictional scenes or sketches that work as bits of rêverie and mini films-in-the-film. Indeed, they are not only stories, with different tones and set in different places, but they also represent cinematic

7 Varda actually means “the frame” (le champs).

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genres: the thriller (polar), with Birkin, as femme fatale, betraying her painter lover with the help of some gangsters; the costume drama, in which Birkin plays a pre-Raphaelite muse weeping for her deceased poet; the social drama, in which Birkin is a Dickensian mother with a cockney accent on the brink of becoming destitute (the scene is played in English and subtitled in French); the comedy of the widow who lives alone with her dog and still obliges the first of her two dead husbands by scattering his ashes in a vineyard in Montmartre as he would have liked; the sentimental drama, in which a couple go for a walk in the park with a lyrical demeanor; the slapstick comedy of Maurel and Lardy, complete with all the usual nonsense and mandatory pies in the face; the exotic foreign film, with a Spanish dancer performing her number in front of an enthusiastic local audience; the trivial New Wave interactions between a couple (Jean-Pierre Léaud was engaged in the project at Birkin’s request and here plays his usual cinematic persona); an adventure film set in the desert complete with Touaregs; the epic film, in which Birkin plays the mythological Ariadne weaving her thread to save her husband Perseus from the labyrinth; the musical, in which Serge Gainsbourg trains the pupil Birkin to record a song and face a live audience; the jungle film, with Birkin in the role of Tarzan’s mate, Jane; the Western, with Birkin as Calamity Jane; and the historical drama, with Birkin playing Jeanne d’Arc. All of these sketches have two things in common. First, they depict female roles in which the woman is dominant or has an intensified femaleness, which corresponds to Varda’s feminist ideas about the active role of women in society within their own gender identity. In the filmic situation in which a couple walks in a sad-looking autumnal park, the scene is played twice, the second time from a different perspective. In the first version, the woman speaks first, expressing nostalgia for times gone by and their once-upon-a-time “rapture”; then the man repeats the exact same sentence, thus conveying the idea that a sad role can also be played by a man. Both versions are accompanied by two verses recited in voice-over by Varda but with a slight change that alters the overall meaning of what is being watched.8 In the film excerpt in which Jeanne d’Arc is portrayed burning at the stake, Varda deliberately directs Birkin to be more feminine and to cry out in fear and terror: “Help me! I’m scared!” she shouts. In the Calamity

8 Varda first says “Dans le petit parc solitaire et glacé, deux formes tout à l’heure passées” [In the solitary and little frosty park, two forms have just passed] and then changes it to “Dans le petit parc solitaire et glacé, deux spectres ont evoqué le passé” [In the solitary and frosty little park, two spectres have evoked the past]. This is my translation. The Blu-ray version opted for a more poetic, albeit less faithful, rendering: “In the park, silent and vast, two shadowy figures passed” and “In the park, silent and vast, two spectres conjured up their past.”

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Jane sequence, the cowgirl writes a letter to her daughter Jenny and rejects the epithet “Calamity,” thus rebelling against the tomboy stereotype. The second thing that all the sketches have in common is that they are tributes to the genres they allegedly parody or pastiche. In other words, the sketches simultaneously rewrite the genres, thus reinforcing them, and demystify the said genres, revealing them as faked subverted versions. In fact, it is the pseudo-truth of cinema, a result of its photographic representational power in the analogue age, which is thus demystified. These sketches spell “cinema” and “not real,” irrespective of the genre they belong to; all of them are subjected to the wishes and commands of the film director. Varda herself takes a more active part in some of the sketches. In the casino sequence, she is a patron losing her entire fortune to a female croupier played by Birkin. This truly fictional role could be understood as a statement of her often repeated position on art, in which she highlights issues such as the difficulty of procuring financing and the lengths to which one must go to obtain funds, or else to find ways to do without them by opting for more personal projects. Here Varda is clearly not appearing as “Varda-the-filmmaker,” because the situation is not immediately metacinematic. In other less ambivalent situations, she plays her cinematic persona, appearing close to the objects that enable her cinematic practice: the camera, the sound recorder and the boom, film projectors, and so on. She is, thereby, presenting the viewer with a portrait of herself in the most direct sense. On these occasions she looks at the camera, although not always towards the center of the lens. By appearing in front of the camera next to the apparatus – in fact, as part of it − she is at once posing as the artist with the tools of her trade in the most painterly tradition and reversing the position of the camera as if it could turn on itself, something that she mentions as the l’envers des décors [the other side of the screen]. Therefore, she is doing two things simultaneously: posing for an official portrait, à là Velázquez, the meta-pictorial master and author of the painting Las meninas, in which the painterly dispositif is not only shown but also addressed as subject; and presenting a more dynamic and persona-lized vision of her professional world, in which she appears as “a hardworking and dedicated image-maker” (Bénézet 2014, 61).

Cine-vision: expression as authorial discourse As pointed out by Esteve Riambau (2009, 136), Jane B. par Agnès V. deals with two major Vardavian concerns: the dualistic relationship between true and false, and the look of the artist as creator. Muriel Tinel considers a portrait of the filmmaker

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to be a “self-representation of the said artist in the exact moment of her creative act” (2006). For Tinel, this is the “internal image of the artist” (emphasis mine). Varda’s artistic concept − cinécriture as a means to convey emotions through cinematic means, self-reflexivity, and an intertwining of reality and fiction – seems to confirm both Riambau’s and Tinel’s assertions. Varda’s self-reflexivity is very special in that, by inserting herself in the cinematic text, she issues an authorial discourse on her art that is charged with both personal and meta-artistic implications. Elsewhere I have proposed the term “cine-vision” for this cinematic self-reflexive world view conveyed in the form of an authorial discourse (Chinita 2013, 150). Jane B. par Agnès V. is foremost a portrait of the artist (Varda as a filmmaker) and her outlook on art intertwined with her life as the substratum on which art takes place. From the outset of the film, she declares herself to be as one with the camera and proves it by appearing a few times alongside it. In an interview she gave to François Wera in 1985, she claimed: “I’m not behind the camera, I’m IN it!” (Kline 2014, 118; the capitalized emphasis is Varda’s). The main goal of the film, therefore, is ideological: to convey an appraisal of cinema by exposing the apparatus and the inherent anti-illusionism of film production and to reveal the importance it occupies in the life and cinematic world view of its director. Varda can claim that she is in the camera, although her body occupies other positions as well, because there is nothing in the camera that was not put there by her and which does not reflect her emotions, thoughts, and experiences. Of course this could be claimed of every director at least in two ways. The first of them is the authorial stance of la politique des auteurs, as practiced by the French intelligentsia of the film clubs and film journals in 1950s Paris, and explained by Peter Wollen (1984, 80). In time, this practice came to be divided into two approaches in which, nonetheless, the director exerted total control over his or her works. In the first approach, the criterion for being considered an auteur was thematic, as the director had to reveal an inner consistency in signification and motifs. In the second approach, the director’s consistency of vision was perceived essentially in the form, that is, through his or her film style. Interestingly, Agnès Varda can be considered an auteur on both counts, for her style (based on self-reflexivity and film hybridity) is as important and consistent as her subjects and motifs (where cinema, art, and creation are prevalent). In Jane B. par Agnès V., this is noticeable in the recurrent presence of mirrors, the use of photographs and visual portraits, Varda’s voice-over, the superimposition of a face (Birkin’s) over a background (reminding the viewer that, in painting, a portrait is the representation of a face), the recreation of fictional situations and diegetic performances, allusions to the world of cinema (as, necessarily, a film about an actress must have), intradiegetic performances, a direct relationship between the creator and the viewers, archival footage or film clips, the showing of favored surrealist

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paintings, the consideration of painting and other arts, the motif of the beach, and so on and so forth. The second way for a director to be present in his or her work is through what Yannick Mouren (2007) calls poetic art film (derived from the Latin ars poetica): a fictional film in which the work methods, the aesthetics, and the professional ethics of the director are presented through a fictional filmmaker who is an alter ego of the real artist. This double may, however, be played either by a professional actor or by the real director using his/her name or a different one (114–124). The notion of persona is, somehow, involved here because Mouren concedes the presence of the real film director but not of his or her real essence (which, nonetheless, the filmic practice should convey). The paradox is explained by the fact that, for Mouren, this situation is not applicable to documentary films. That is why he also rejects biopics, films which contain documentary films on film, and making-ofs. However, it seems to me that Mouren forgets that documentary filmmakers are also film directors and that for them the only way to expose their praxis would have to involve some degree of “reality.” Therefore, I contend that the most self-representational films of Agnès Varda must be considered to be ars poetica films as well. In Les plages d’Agnès, Varda depicts herself while narrating her life story, but the film is mostly a cinematic essay on her praxis as a filmmaker, summing up her work as well as her directorial style and contents. Dominique Blüher claims that with Les plages d’Agnès, Varda created “a new cinematic genre of life writing that combines autobiographical narrative with performative selfportraits” (2013, 68). Indeed, in Les plages d’Agnès, the self-reflexive purpose and enunciative method is clear from the beginning; consequently, the selfportrait constructed in mise en abyme outweighs any biographical claim. The film is primarily a lyrical essay on an inner life (Varda’s world view) and an outward profession (her directorial and screenwriting career). Varda is more interested in her “essence” as someone who is devoted to the essence of cinema, a professional of the Seventh Art, and an overall creator. Indeed, she started working with art as a photographer, and since the turn of the twenty-first century she has been very prolific in the field of installation art. Jane B. par Agnès V., a forerunner of Les plages d’Agnès, evinces many of the same techniques in embryo: the French director situates herself and her film in a hybrid personal space. In fact, in Jane B. par Agnès V., Varda at once depicts and plays the roles of creator and essayist. According to Laura Rascaroli, “[t]his authorial ‘voice’ approaches the subject matter not in order to present an ostensibly factual report, but to offer an overtly personal, in-depth, thought-provoking reflection” (2009, 33). Structurally, the essay film is placed between fiction and non-fiction and is contaminated by both. Conceptually, the essay film contains a

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message conveyed in an undetermined manner and does not follow any preestablished rules. Whether or not the (extra-)textual authors appear physically in the film, they are strong enunciators whose presence is otherwise felt. The essay film usually resorts to a refined and non-pedagogical voice-over, other pre-existing audio-visual materials (e.g. archive footage and film clips), and performances, such as recreated scenes (44–63). All of these aspects are present in Jane B. par Agnès V. However, the most distinct aspect of Rascaroli’s thesis about the essay film is its dialogic relationship between viewer(s) and film enunciator qua director. There is a constant interpellation whereby the enunciator addresses the viewers directly, which is done by looking at the camera and taking part in a sort of conversation with them. These formal characteristics are reinforced by the adoption of a confessional mode. In the end, Jane B. par Agnès V. is essentially the staging of an authorial discourse, complete with the self-portrait of the strong enunciator who emits it.

Reference List Bastide, Bernard. 2009. “Agnès Varda, une auteure au féminin singulier (1954–1962).” In Agnès Varda, le cinéma et au-delà, edited by Antony Fiant, Roxane Hamery, and Éric Thouvenel, 15–24. Rennes, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Bellour, Raymond. 1988. “Autoportraits.” Communications 48:327–387. Bénézet, Delphine. 2014. The Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism. London: Wallflower Press. Blüher, Dominique. 2001. “L’auteur et l’autofiction.” In Nouvelle vague, nouveaux rivages: 1950–1970, edited by Jean Cléder and Gilles Mouëllic. Rennes, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Blüher, Dominique. 2013. “Autobiography, (re)enactment and the performative self-portrait in Varda’s Les plages d’Agnès / The Beaches of Agnès (2008).” Studies in European Cinema 10 (1):59–69. Chinita, Fátima. 2013. “Do metacinema auto-reflexivo como forma de enunciação autoral,” 2 vols. Unpublished PhD diss., University of Lisbon. Chrostowska, Dorota. 2007. “Vis-à-vis the Glaneuse.” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 12 (2):119–133. Accessed 22 September 2016. doi: 10.1080/ 09697250701755092. Colonna, Vincent. 1989. “L’autofiction (essai sur la fictionalization de soi en littérature).” Unpublished PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. http://tel.ar chives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/04/70/04/PDF/tel-00006609.pdf. Accessed 22 September 2016. Colvile, Georgiana M. 2009. “Auto portraits d’une autre: Jane B. par Agnès V. et Kung-Fu Master!” In Agnès Varda, le cinéma et au-delà, edited by Anthony Fiant, Roxane Hamery, and Éric Thouvenel, 145–155. Rennes, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.

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Doubrovsky, Serge. 1980. “Autobiographie/Vérité/Psychanalyse.” L’Esprit créateur: The International Quarter of French and Francophone Studies 20 (3):87–97. Kline, T. Jefferson, ed. 2014. Agnès Varda: Interviews. Jackson: University of Mississippi. Lejeune, Philippe. (1975) 1996. “Le pacte autobiographique.” In Le pacte autobiographique, new enlarged edition, 13–45. Paris: Seuil. Molkou, Elizabeth. 2002. “L’autofiction, un genre nouveau?” In French Literature Series 24: 155–167. Mouren, Yannick. 2007. “Le film art poétique, sous ensemble du film réflexif.” In Le cinéma au miroir du cinéma, edited by René Prédal, 114–124. Caen, Fr.: CinémAction-Corlet Publications. Phelps, Robert, ed. 1970. Professional Secrets: An Autobiography of Jean Cocteau. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Rascaroli, Laura. 2009. The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. London: Wallflower Press. Riambau, Esteve. 2009. “La caméra et le miroir: portraits et autoportraits.” In Agnès Varda, le cinéma et au-delà, edited by Antony Fiant, Roxane Hamery, and Éric Thouvenel, 135–143. Rennes, Fr.: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Tinel, Muriel. 2006. “Cocteau, Wenders, Akerman, Kramer . . . : Le cinéma et l’autoportrait.” Hors Champ, 26 April 2006. http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/LE-CINEMA-ET-LAUTOPORTRAIT.html. Wollen, Peter. 1984. Signos e Significação no Cinema. Lisboa: Livros Horizonte.

Filmography Boxes. Directed by Jane Birkin. 2007. Fr.: Les Films de la Croisade, 2010. DVD. Jane B. par Agnès V. Directed by Agnès Varda. 1988. U.S.: Cinelicious Pics, 2015. Blu-ray disc. Kung-Fu Master! Directed by Agnès Varda. 1988. U.S.: Cinelicious Pics, 2015. Blue-ray disc. Les glaneurs et la glaneuse. Directed by Agnès Varda. 2000. U.K.: Artificial Eye, 2011. DVD. Les plages d’Agnès. Directed by Agnès Varda. 2008. U.K.: Artificial Eye, 2009. DVD. Oncle Yanco. Directed by Agnès Varda. 1967. Fr.: Ciné-Tamaris, 2-disc edition, 2007. DVD. Ydessa, les ours et etc… Directed by Agnès Varda. 2004. Fr.: Ciné-Tamaris, 2-disc edition. 2007. DVD.

Jean-Marc Limoges

Disrupting the Illusion by Bolstering the Reality Effect in Film Illusion – be it “aesthetic,” as Werner Wolf and others describe it, or “referential,” as Lucien Dällenbach and others describe it – can be defined as follows: “aesthetic illusion is a basically pleasurable mental state that emerges during the reception of many representational texts, artifacts or performances” (Wolf 2011). To achieve this mental state in the cinema, a number of elements must be withheld from the audience. First, all enunciative elements must be concealed (that is, everything related to the cinematic production, such as the camera, the boom, the backdrops, etc.). Next, all evidence of editing must be obscured (cuts must be seamless and invisible). The same goes for the cogs of storytelling (episodes must coherently flow from one to the next towards a resolution). Aesthetic illusion also requires, among other things, that the story unfolds inside a believable framework and rests on a credible premise. Ultimately, in order for the audience to believe in the world onto which the film opens a window, it must disguise itself so as not to betray itself as an artificial and constructed object. It is this vanishing act that allows the audience to forget that they are watching a film. For some, the use of a reflexive mise en abyme – the presence of a film within a film – is enough to expose the hoax and might awaken audiences to the fact that they are watching a film, and this consequently interrupts their engagement with the story being told and disrupts their belief in the illusion. In his article “Mise en abyme,” written for the Dictionnaire des genres et des notions littéraires [Dictionary of literary genres and concepts] (1997), twenty years after having published his influential work entitled Le Récit spéculaire (1977) [The Mirror in the Text (1989)], Lucien Dällenbach rhetorically asks: [L]a mise en abyme n’a-t-elle pas pour effet de brouiller tout effet ‘réaliste’ [emphasis mine], de provoquer des ratés [emphasis mine] dans la représentation et, ce faisant, de saper l’illusion référentielle [emphasis mine] du lecteur?1 (1997, 13) [Is the effect of mise en abyme not to confound the “realistic” effect [emphasis mine], to provoke representational slip-ups [original emphasis], and in doing so to undermine the reader’s referential illusion? [emphasis mine]]

Nearly fifteen years later, in an article entitled “Étendues de la réflexivité,” Laurent Demoulin also claimed that

1 All translations from the French are by this chapter’s translator, Johanne O’Malley. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722031-012

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la réflexivité en cause est celle qui trouble la transparence du texte, qui rompt le contrat réaliste et la sacro-sainte illusion référentielle. Elle produit ainsi, chez le lecteur, un frisson, un petit vertige réflexif, une surprise, et lui rappelle le caractère construit de la littérature” (2010, 53; emphases mine) [the reflexivity in question is one which disrupts the text’s transparency, which violates the realist pact and the sacrosanct referential illusion, and in doing so, induces in the reader a certain shiver, a subtle reflexive vertigo, a surprise of sorts, and brings to the forefront the constructed nature of literature].

Despite the number of authors who have touched upon the notion of “reflexive vertigo,” it has rarely been the subject of extensive inquiry. Before asking ourselves whether the mise en abyme and all other reflexive techniques invariably disrupt the illusion and whether, in doing so, they also generate reflexive vertigo, and, further still, whether everything disrupting the illusion is necessarily reflexive – in essence, before asking what reflexivity achieves – perhaps we should first clarify what it is. How do we define reflexivity in film studies? By reading the theorists on the subject, we find that a single configuration is often ascribed a gamut of different terms, while a single term is often represented in a myriad of different examples, not all of which perfectly overlap. Authors more or less interchangeably talk about films that are reflexive, self-reflexive, self-referential, meta-referential, metatextual, intertextual, or even recursive or specular, films within films, or mise en abyme. I will propose yet another term later – auto-reflexive. Yet all these terms seem to remain somewhat amalgamated. When reading the literature, we often come across observations about this terminological confusion (and even notice the authors’ own inadvertent contribution to it). However, one single article, which is both disarmingly simple and staggeringly concise, with its mere four pages, offers us a chance to have the numerous terms elucidated. Jacques Gerstenkorn begins his article prosaically entitled “À travers le miroir (notes introductives)” [Through the looking glass (introductory notes)], published in the first edition of the journal Vertigo in 1987, by stating that due to the richness and diversity of the field of reflexivity “on doute de pouvoir baliser le paysage” [one doubts the possibility of mapping out the landscape] (1987, 7). This is precisely, and defiantly, the first task upon which I wish to embark here.2

2 It should be noted that my perspective is inextricably rooted in a francophone tradition and that what could herein be called a “sketch of the typological landscape” is indeed my own and is not based on the perspective of Werner Wolf that is so rooted in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. This is the reason for my preference for the term reflexivity (the term upon which my argument is based) rather than the term “metareference,” coined by Wolf, for instance.

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Are we able to explain why this field is so rich and diverse, why these slips in meaning have shaped the concept of reflexivity, and why everything – and anything – appears to be deemed reflexive? Might it not be because the term reflection is itself ambiguous? It is indeed, as Jean Cocteau’s famous statement from Le sang d’un poète [The Blood of a Poet] (1932) highlights very well: “Les miroirs feraient bien de réfléchir un peu plus avant de renvoyer les images” [Mirrors ought to pause for reflection before reflecting things]. The first meaning of reflection is a psychological or philosophical notion; the second meaning refers to a physical reflection, and the third meaning involves a figurative physical reflection.3 This complexity begins to explain the subsequent confusion. The first meaning of reflection, which I will describe as philosophical, involves the film reflecting upon or thinking about itself as a film or reflecting upon or thinking about cinema in general. The second meaning relates to the physical phenomenon, where, for instance, a mirror reflects an image, and, in the case of cinema, reflects what is ordinarily hidden from the audience (e.g. a mirror, in the diegetic world, can show elements of the extradiegetic world of production – the camera itself being the most obvious). The third meaning, the figurative meaning of the physical reflection, is illustrated where, for instance, a film “looks at itself,” as if through a mirror in an effort to contemplate or critique itself, thereby making itself the subject by revealing the behind-the-scenes view of film production – if not indeed the behind-the-scenes view of its own production, with the screen serving as a metaphorical mirror. Such instances include the film “reflecting back” the audience’s reception of the film by showing a group of viewers watching a film, so the film is “reflecting” (as in referring to) another film by quoting, copying, parodying, or making reference or alluding to it; or a film takes as its focus another film (or any other work of art) as a way to “reflect” an element of itself, notably when a historical event is retold (imitated, reproduced, or duplicated). Ultimately, these first three meanings serve as the foundation for all the others even if they naturally become entangled when reflection in the literal or figurative sense gives way to reflection in the philosophical sense. Table 1 below outlines these meanings. In short, the three meanings of reflection underlying the concept of reflexivity are the literal, the figurative, and the philosophical. Yet, regardless of what exactly the film reflects in any of these instances, a fourth meaning presents itself as able to encapsulate each of the previous three: self-reflection, that is, reflection as a focus on oneself. Does self-reflection not aptly evoke pensive characters

3 See Sémir Badir and Eleni Mouratidou (2010, 8) and Demoulin (2010, 51).

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Table 1: The three meanings of reflexivity. Psychological or philosophical sense (thinking)

Reflecting upon something

The film reflects upon something (itself as a film, or cinema in general)

Inducing reflection on something

The film induces viewers to reflect on something

Physical sense (mirror)

Literal meaning

The film literally reflects something (using a mirror)

Figurative meaning

The film is a metaphorical reflection of something

whose gaze is deeply set on their own image and who are attempting to take stock of their lives, of themselves? Gerstenkorn – as well as a number of others before and after him – seems to give credence to this encompassing meaning. At the very start of his article, in response to his question “Qu’est-ce donc que la réflexivité?” [What is reflexivity?], he states that it is a “phénomène protéiforme dont le plus petit dénominateur commun consiste en un retour du cinéma sur luimême” [protean phenomenon whose lowest common denominator consists of cinema focusing on itself] (1987, 7; emphases mine). Depite this, the bulk of my work here remains to be done, that is, fleshing out the various – and numerous – ways in which a film can focus on itself. My typology therefore aims, as Gerstenkorn intended, “de restituer leur cohérence à des faits trop souvent éparpillés” [to restore coherence to these all too often scattered elements] (1987, 10). In pursuit of further clarity, Gerstenkorn, using Christian Metz’s work (1971) as a guide, differentiates between cinematic reflexivity and filmic reflexivity. The former encapsulates a mode of reflexivity that exposes the enunciative device and another that suggests it. The latter can be further divided into “heterofilmic reflexivity” (in which a diversity of intertextuality instances exists) and “homofilmic reflexivity” (under which fall all instances of mise en abyme). After an extended overview and several adjustments to Gerstenkorn’s typology, I propose the distinctions set out in Table 2. Having distinguished between the various modes of reflexivity, we need to further differentiate between what might be called a reflexive film and reflexivity in film. A reflexive film is one in which reflexivity is broad and fundamental

4 I will not consider a second possibility that the philosophical sense could offer, that is, the audience’s ability to reflect on this or that. Indeed, despite what Robert Stam (1985) may purport, audience members may entertain personal reflections while viewing a film, any film, but this in no way imparts on the film any kind of reflexive quality.



Opacity



Dys-Narrativity

Film that highlights the organization Unlikelihood

Film that highlights the invention

Film that exposes or suggests the presence of the real – or supposedly real – enunciative device of the film itself, or shows some other disruptive element that cannot be explained from the story, thereby reminding viewers that they are watching a film. For instance, showing the actual camera in a mirror, letting the boom appear in the frame, or connecting with the audience by looking directly at the camera.

Film self-identifying as discourse through the use of delinearization, heterogenization, desynchronization, or densification of the filmic signifier.

Film self-identifying as narrative by revealing the lack of provocation, resolution, sanction, transformation, progression, or cohesion of its organization.

Film self-identifying as story by introducing all kinds of unlikelihoods (ideological, economic, diegetic, generic, or historic).

Means through which film underscores its phony, artificial, constructed nature

Auto-Reflexivity

Film that highlights the narration

Artistic Reflexivity (not specifically cinematic) 

Film that reflects other films (by quoting, copying, parodying, referring, or alluding to them) (heterofilmic reflexivity) or any work of art (intertextuality).

Inter-textuality

Film within a film that reflects (imitates, reproduces, duplicates, etc.) a part of the film itself (homofilmic reflexivity) or any work of art within a film that reflects a part of the film itself (mise en abyme).

Mise en abyme

Filmic Reflexivity (specifically filmic)

7 As the term self-reflexivity is often used interchangeably with the term reflexivity, I propose using the term auto-reflexivity to distinguish this specific kind of reflexivity. 8 Or non-transparent discourse.

ity.” Similarly, much like a film can reflect back another part of itself, so too can a work of art within a film reflect back a part of the film itself and hence why the term “mise en abyme” is less restrictive than the term “homofilmic.”

5 Adapted from the typology used in Gernstenkorn (1987, 7–10). 6 I use the broader term “intertextuality” for films making reference to other works of art, rather than other films as in the case with the more restrictive term “heterofilmic reflexiv-

Film that exposes or suggests the presence of the enunciative (filmmaking) devices on the diegetic level. For instance, showing a film set or a diegetic camera which is not directly associated with the making of the film being watched.

Reflexivity

Film that highlights the enunciation

Cinematic Reflexivity (specifically cinematic)

Reflexivity “[a] protean phenomenon whose lowest common denominator consists of cinema focussing on itself”*

Table 2: The typology of reflexivity.5

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and present throughout the film. Reflexivity in film, meanwhile, refers to a marginal, momentary, or sporadic instance – a cameo appearance if you will – within the film. Similarly, we could qualify a one-off or isolated instance of mise en abyme as a “specular configuration within a film” as opposed to a “specular film” whose entire premise rests on a mise en abyme. Further, what I have called reflexivity could also be what Marc Cerisuelo calls metafilm if the exposed or perceptible enunciative devices become the subject of the film or offer the audience a documentarizing perspective.9 After stipulating that “le métafilm n’est ni le film ‘en abyme,’ ni le backstage film, ni une simple représentation du monde du cinéma” [metafilm is neither the film ‘en abyme,’ nor a backstage film or simple representation of the world of cinema], Cerisuelo defines metafilm as follows: Film qui a explicitement pour objet le cinéma à travers la représentation des agents de la production (acteurs, réalisateur, producteurs, techniciens, agents de publicité et de relations publiques, personnel de studio, etc.) tout au long d’une trame narrative stricte, quel que soit le genre cinématographique auquel il peut éventuellement être rattaché, et qui propose à une époque donnée, une meilleure connaissance, soit d’ordre documentaire, soit par le biais de fictions vraisemblables, du monde du cinéma lui-même sur lequel est porté un regard critique. (2001, 92–93; emphases mine) [A film making cinema its explicit subject through a representation of the agents of production (actors, directors, producers, technicians, publicity and public relations agents, studio personnel, etc.) within a strict narrative framework, regardless of the cinematic genre to which it could be associated, and that presents, at a given time in history, the best understanding, be it as documentary or through the use of realistic fiction, of the world of cinema which is itself made the subject of critical examination.]

In sum, reflexive configurations can, at times, be merely isolated (or isolatable) and at others times can play a central role in the film. In either case, the techniques used to achieve these configurations may be the same. We can now return to the question raised at the beginning of this chapter: do all reflexive films disturb or otherwise undermine the aesthetic illusion? My answer is not necessarily. In the case of metafilm, or a simple mise en abyme, disruption of the illusion is not at all intended. Even when using cinema as its central subject, metafilm nevertheless opens a window on a world, in this case the world of cinema. Similarly, even if a mise en abyme uses film as its central

9 Metafilm, as defined by Cerisuelo, falls under the category of cinematic reflexivity (as defined by Gerstenkorn) – and not under the category of filmic reflexivity, because this type of film reveals traces of the enunciative (of a film within a film). The moment the film within the film is produced and shown to a diegetic audience, it becomes part of the filmic reflexivity. Evidently, the different categories can also mix; they are not tightly separated.

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pivot, it is more likely to call the audience’s attention to the film within the film rather than the film itself. Whereas this brand of reflexivity does not seek to disrupt the illusion, this is precisely, explicitly and intentionally, the goal of auto-reflexivity. Filming the camera itself through a mirror, moving the boom into the shot, revealing the backdrops, or having the director appear on screen or an actor look into the camera are all means through which a film can expose its own enunciative devices (be they real or supposed). Yet not all the elements that disrupt the illusion are auto-reflexive. Audiences may catch a glimpse of the camera against a reflective surface or the shadow of the boom across an actor’s face even if these glimpses into the means of production were not intended. Only when these are revealed deliberately can they be considered instances of auto-reflexivity. As I will discuss later, despite the result being the same in both cases – that is, a disruption of the aesthetic illusion – unintended instances can only be considered as simple errors of production. Let us now return to the core of my argument: in order for an auto-reflexive mode to successfully awaken the audience from the film’s illusion it must, paradoxically, first strive to create and maintain that illusion. The following examples of auto-reflexive instances in film will illustrate this. Consider metalepsis, that is, when diegetic boundaries are breached by the intrusion of a (supposed) extrafictional universe in the universe of the fiction, such as when the author appears in the world she or he created, or the opposite, when a fictional character or object steps out of its fictional universe into “reality,” a universe beyond the boundaries of its own world. To ensure that the viewer firmly believes such a metaleptic event can happen, the film must carefully tend to what I call the “coefficient of reality.” A number of animated films can help elucidate what I mean by coefficient of reality and help differentiate it from the reality effect. The reality effect is a notion from the field of film studies, not to be confused with Roland Barthes’s notion “effect of reality” in literary studies. Coined in his famous article about Flaubert, Barthes’s notion is about the presence of realistic detail. The reality effect, on the other hand, is about the illusion produite par un film sur le spectateur qui confond dès lors ce qui est présenté avec la réalité. L’effet de réalité provient de l’illusion du mouvement créée par le cinéma, de la précision et de la profondeur de l’image, de la richesse des matériaux picturaux et sonores, qui trompent ainsi la perception du spectateur; il crée une analogie avec la réalité. (Roy 2007, 154)

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[illusion the film creates in the audience, which therefore confuses the represented world with the audience’s own reality. The reality effect is generated by the illusion of movement that the camera creates, the precision and depth of the image, and the abundant sound and visual material which dupes the audience’s perception and creates an analogous reality.]

What I call the coefficient of reality, on the other hand, is the degree of realist impression produced at any given moment by an isolatable detail or element that appears to be either as real or more real than the rest. By virtue of their nature, animated films can never produce the reality effect as potently as real cinematic images can, but they can nonetheless sporadically integrate elements that will attempt to improve the coefficient of reality. For instance, at the end of Duck Amuck (1953) by Chuck Jones, the hand holding the pencil and badgering a short-tempered Daffy Duck (see Figure 1) is, we later learn, the hand of Bugs Bunny, who is the (fictional) extradiegetic producer and the product of another producer (extrafictional this time) much more founded in reality – Chuck Jones himself, who is not shown (though if he was shown, he would nevertheless remain a representation of himself as the real cartoonist, and a representation endowed with a high coefficient of reality at that). The aesthetic of the hand in Duck Amuck – which is in a white glove and has a greyish wrist – is not particularly realistic and follows the Chuck Jones’s style, thereby allowing us to believe that it belongs to a fictional character. Yet in The Car of Tomorrow (1951) by Tex Avery, the hand scratching out a model car (see Figure 2) offers a slightly more realistic aesthetic in that it in no way

Figure 1: Duck Amuck.

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resembles the style of Tex Avery. The coefficient of reality is therefore higher in The Car of Tomorrow, despite it still being a mere cartoon.

Figure 2: The Car of Tomorrow.

Moving one step further, in the Italian animated cartoon La Linea (1972) by Cavandoli, the photographically reproduced hand holding the pencil (Figure 3) which taunts the flustered character drawn from a single white stroke wields an incomparably more realistic aesthetic than the Chuck Jones and Tex Avery examples. It was inspired by an even older version in a cartoon from the early years of cartoon animation, Fantasmagorie (1908) by Émile Cohl, shown in Figure 4. This increasingly realistic aesthetic allows us to easily believe not only that the hand comes directly from an extrafictional universe but that it belongs to the cartoonist himself (even if we know that the hand of the cartoonist himself is not the cartoonist’s actual hand). The spectrum ranging between Duck Amuck and La Linea demonstrates how a heightened coefficient of reality can, despite the “breaking of the pact,” allow us to believe in a fictional world into which the extrafictional has intruded. The nuance of these examples merits some discussion. Certain films, and even cartoons, that enable this type of illusion may work towards disrupting it by resorting, from time to time, to techniques that are counter-illusionary, as shown above. This speaks to the crux of my argument: in order for the disruption to be successful, counter-illusionary techniques must themselves resort to illusion and, paradoxically, must enable the initial illusion in order to disrupt it. In this respect,

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Figure 3: La linea.

Figure 4: Fantasmagorie.

Tex Avery’s disruption by a human-like hand was intended to be more potent than the gloved hand offered by Chuck Jones. In contrast – and this is the first nuance I wish to mention – even if other films (such as those by Cohl and Cavandoli) offer higher coefficients of reality using counter-illusionary techniques

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consistently throughout a film, they will ultimately have the ability to offer a kind of fictional pact, an agreement of sorts that will allow the audience to entertain their fiction, thereby allowing – again, paradoxically – the counterillusionary technique to enable the initial illusion. In sum, if the reflexive (and anti-illusionary) technique is part of the narrative contract, chances are it will enable the illusion rather than disrupt it. The second nuance I wish to mention relates to the role of the horizon of expectations in the disruption of aesthetic illusion. Indeed, instances of autoreflexivity wrapped in a potent coefficient of reality – such as those in Tex Avery’s cartoons, Mel Brooks’s comedies, or Jean-Luc Godard’s films – are generally expected by the audience as opposed to instances of auto-reflexivity with a weaker coefficient of reality that unexpectedly arise in more traditional and conventional films. Let us now explore another instance of auto-reflexivity, namely when the film strip, this quintessential enunciative element of the projection process, is made perceptible. In seeking to showcase the enunciative device (to expose it or to strongly suggest it), certain films choose to make it perceptible. That said – and this is the third nuance I wish to mention – it is not the film strip itself that is shown but a supposed film strip, this being even more evident when viewing a film on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, or another digital format. In fact, if this type of reflexivity is meant to remind viewers that they are watching a film and subsequently to disrupt their belief in its fiction, the film must have carefully allowed this belief to exist. In other words, the more real this supposed film strip looks, the more the viewers will be unwilling to suspend their disbelief; the more the viewers believe in the (actual) existence of this (fictional) film strip, the less they will believe the fiction. This is why, in an effort to better understand the disruption of the illusion, I have introduced the notion of coefficient of reality; I will now discuss the fourth nuance – the concept of motivation. The importance of motivation is best seen in cases where a film strip is “revealed” – and in some cases even “burns” – such as in Persona (1966) by Bergman (see Figure 5), Fight Club (1999) by Fincher (see Figure 6), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) by Hellman (see Figure 7), and the cartoon Dumb-Hounded (1943) by Avery (see Figure 8). The last of these examples (the animated cartoon) is just as likely to disrupt the illusion but not as strongly as the others, which offer audiences a higher coefficient of reality. Yet in light of the previous argument, how can we contend that the disruption they generate will be less severe? This can be explained by the ability of apt audiences to be familiar with the motivation behind the dislocations in the diegesis: the metaleptic instance finds its place within the story

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Figure 5: Persona.

Figure 6: Fight Club.

presented by the film. In Tex Avery’s film, viewers would find no such motivation, other than the cartoonist’s penchant for disruption. Indeed, audiences of Persona and Fight Club are more than able to identify the possible rationale, the motivation for the disruption (whether it be diegetic, dramatic, or symbolic, etc.). Such audiences, upon exiting the fiction, could at once interpret the instance and then immediately proceed to re-enter the fiction. In Persona, they may perceive the moment as symbolically motivated. If we consider the moment when Nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) finds herself

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Figure 7: Two-Lane Blacktop.

Figure 8: Dumb-Hounded.

(emotionally) torn, becoming self-consumed, and at risk of losing her identity – which is in essence the interpretation Metz ascribes to it (1991, 88–89) – it is likely that viewers re-enter the fiction with the instance having added to the film’s meaning, rather than having disturbed it. In Fight Club, when Tyler Durden’s (Brad Pitt) rage reaches such a degree that it unravels the reel, viewers may perceive this as dramatically motivated. But what is the reason for the burning film strip at the end of the existential road-trip film Two-Lane Blacktop? Without understanding the motivation for it, and in the presence of a high coefficient of reality, the instance is very likely to disrupt the illusion. On the other

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hand, the unravelling and burning film strips in Robson’s Earthquake (1974) or Douglas’s The Amityville Horror (2005) are diegetically motivated in that their audiences are diegetic. Essentially, the more a disruption in the diegesis is motivated, or the more motivation it is ascribed by the audience (be it dramatic or symbolic), the less the instance of reflexivity will disrupt the illusion regardless of the potency of the coefficient of reality. To return to the point made earlier, it goes without saying that – and this is the fifth and final nuance I wish to mention – the circumstances in which a film is presented play a significant role when it comes to disrupting the illusion. Before I discuss the relevance of this more fully, it is useful to consider a couple of specific sequences that would be affected by how the film is viewed. Take, for instance, the sequence in Magical Maestro (1952) by Avery (see Figure 9) in which a thread (in fact, the image of a thread) that is quivering at the bottom of the screen is pulled out by the animated opera singer mid performance.10 It is hard to imagine that before the thread is snatched, audiences in the cinema did not believe that this thread was real and was truly stuck between the film and the projection lens. There is also the sequence in Avery’s satirical take on film noir Who Killed Who? (1943), a still of which is shown in Figure 10, in which a police officer arrives on the scene yelling the customary line “Everybody stay where you are!” Then, noticing what looks like the silhouette of an audience member making his way to the exit, the police officer promptly hits him over the head and gives him a stern warning, saying “That goes for you too, boy!” The coefficient of reality in these last two instances is slightly greater than it is in Dumb-Hounded, even if all three films belong to the world of cartoon animation. So how do the circumstances of viewing come into play? If the cartoons are viewed at home, the thread, the silhouette, and the film strip each offer a certain coefficient of reality but – through no fault of their own – to a lesser degree than if they had been viewed in a cinema. For instance, when the clip from Who Killed Who? was screened in a lecture theater as part of the course called Cinéma et intermédialité offered at Université Laval in the autumn of 2008, students reported having really, strongly believed for a moment that someone at the back of the room had in fact got up, proving that the cartoonist had indeed succeeded in creating an instance with a high coefficient of reality. Therefore, we can agree that when the film strip is shown, a more significant disruption is achieved (or likely to be achieved) when the film is viewed in a cinema or similar space, rather than on a television or computer screen. However, when a film strip is literally made visible in a theater setting, i.e. becomes

10 This gag was repeated in the opening credits of Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) by Edwards.

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Figure 9: Magical Maestro.

Figure 10: Who Killed Who?

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visible by accident, although a total breach is created in the flow of the viewing process, the disruption is, paradoxically, weaker because it is a disruption in the audience’s viewing rather than a disruption of the illusion. What explains this? Motivation, as I proposed earlier. The visibility of the film strip can also be the result of an accident and therefore free of any motivation.11 This therefore prevents all types of film strip accidents or faults (including the albeit quite real wear and tear of the film over time) from qualifying as instances of auto-reflexivity, even if they decidedly disrupt the illusion. In sum, it may now be clearer that it is possible for reflexive instances not to disrupt the illusion (this being the case for metafilms and certain instances of mise en abyme) and, conversely, that instances which successfully disrupt the illusion may very well not be reflexive (this being the case for production and projection errors). Further, instances of reflexivity (including auto-reflexivity) that disrupt the illusion may succeed in doing so on the condition that they also succeed in creating and maintaining it by resorting to using a strong coefficient of reality. So long as this kind of films are presented in the right context, it breaks the fictional pact, defies the horizon of expectations, and is devoid of any motivation the audience may infer. In other words, the more a film seeks to disrupt the illusion, the more it must invest in first creating and maintaining it; yet if the presentation of the film is accidentally interrupted, it is only the projection that is affected, and not the fiction. Let us look at a final set of examples to consider more closely the case of the paradoxical mise en abyme. If instances of auto-reflexivity offer us an insight into the artifices of the film itself, metafilm will offer us a window into the world of cinema, but when the film offers us a window into the production of the film itself, we are no longer talking about auto-reflexivity in film, but about an entirely auto-reflexive film. This corresponds to the third of the three types of mise en abyme identified by Dällenbach (1977, 51): simple, infinite, and paradoxical (or aporetic). The first type, the simple mise en abyme, as mentioned earlier, rarely seeks to disturb the illusion. The presence of a work of art in a film is not intended to disrupt unless it is presented ostentatiously. This type of mise en abyme is

11 Years ago, during a viewing in a cinema of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) by Wordley in a 16mm format, I witnessed an actual instance of the projector failing and the film strip burning (at the very moment that the contents of Quasimodo’s burning pails are dumped onto the heads of his assailants, no less!). The disruption was very powerful because the film was being projected in a cinema on 16mm film. Yet this would not fall into the category of an autoreflexive instance of disruption because it occurred due to an error, not the filmmaker’s design.

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often used to offer the viewer a clue or an opportunity to ask the following question: What does this work of art within the film attempt to reiterate, repeat, reprise, retell, or announce? The second type, infinite mise en abyme, by virtue of its ostentatiousness, is a more powerful attempt at disrupting the illusion. The paradoxical mise en abyme, however, produces the greatest strain in logic because – in line with Dällenbach’s definition devised based on literary examples – the work of art within the film is meant to be the film itself. Christian Metz (1968) explains how Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963) exemplifies paradoxical mise en abyme – as does Robbe-Grillet’s Trans-Europ-Express (1967), according to Sébastien Févry (2000). In both cases, the films tell the story of screenwriters/filmmakers – Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) and Jean (Alain RobbeGrillet) respectively – who are seeking to write and produce films that have the hallmarks of the films we are watching. Yet many other films could also – and I believe more clearly – serve as examples: Silent Movie (1976) by Brooks, The Player (1992) by Altman, New Nightmare (1994) by Craven, Tango (1988) by Saura, or Adaptation (2002) by Jonze. These films tell the story of their own making. They each feature a screenwriter or director who is attempting to produce the very film being watched – sometimes they are played by actors impersonating the screenwriter or director in question (such as Marcello Mastroianni playing Federico Fellini or Nicolas Cage playing Charlie Kaufman) but sometimes they are played by the director himself under a pseudonym (Mel Brooks playing Mel Fun) or using his own name (Wes Craven playing Wes Craven). The question is do they succeed in eliciting the vertigo they are said to have provoked, and further, is this vertigo due to a disruption in the illusion? If instances of paradoxical mise en abyme do in fact disrupt the illusion, it is because they succeed in creating and maintaining it. If viewers ask themselves how the film that is trying to be made (in the film) is in fact the film that has been made (the film being watched), and if the attention of viewers is displaced from the story to the discourse (which consequently seems to cause a disruption in the illusion), it is because viewers believe that the plot as acted out by the (fictional) characters is the same as the (actual) film’s plot. How can the film be trying to be made if the film has in fact already been made, and how can it already have been made if it has yet to be made? However, if viewers fail to believe (with good reason) that the plot of the film within the film is the plot of the film itself and fail to be drawn into the film as a discourse but instead remain immersed in the story, they will continue to believe the fiction precisely because they did not believe in it (i.e. it is because they did not believe that the film within the film is the film itself that they will continue to believe in the film itself). The paradox on which this type of mise en abyme rests is clear: the

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disruption of the illusion is only successful when viewers believe the illusion. It is unsuccessful when viewers have failed to suspend their disbelief. I could also argue that these types of cases could create a disruption to a greater or lesser extent depending on the level of ostentatiousness with which the plot within the film reflects the plot of the film itself. For a well-attuned audience, 8½ and Trans-Europ-Express may very well generate this (logical) disruption. However, not once do the screenwriters/filmmakers of 8½ or Trans-Europ-Express offer viewers ostensible and irrefutable clues to confirm that the film that they are striving to produce is in fact the film being watched. On the other hand, films such as Silent Movie (a silent film in which a filmmaker, Mel Fun/Mel Brooks seeks to produce . . . a silent film) or Adaptation (in which screenwriter Charlie Kaufman/ Nicolas Cage desperately tries to tell the story of a screenwriter desperately trying to tell the story) incessantly offer viewers hints to help them understand that the film to be made is indeed the film that has been made. When it comes to Tango, New Nightmare, and The Player, the moments of disruption are less incessant (placed solely at the start, the middle, and the end of the films, respectively) yet they are just as ostentatious. Differentiating between different modes of reflexivity has highlighted that its goal is not always to disrupt the illusion. Metafilm in particular is a case in point, in which a window into the world of cinema is opened up, inviting the viewer to believe in it. I have demonstrated that disrupting the illusion is, notably, the goal of auto-reflexivity (in which we can include metalepsis) and of paradoxical mise en abyme but that they can only achieve disruption under certain conditions: first, they must offer a strong coefficient of reality (as opposed to a real disruption caused in the viewing process); second, the motivation for the reflexive instance must be difficult or impossible to establish; third, in order to be more dizzying for the audience, the instance must break the narrative contract proposed by the film; fourth, the instance must defy the audience’s horizon of expectation; and fifth, the film must be presented under the right circumstances. It thus becomes apparent that auto-reflexive instances and auto-reflexive films (or paradoxical mises en abyme) succeed in disrupting belief by virtue of having first nurtured it. There remain a number of instances of reflexivity that I have not yet broached: opacity (or non-transparent discourse), dys-narrativity, unlikelihood, and of course, intertexuality. Further investigation of these instances would probably allow us to identify a similar paradox: the more a film appears real, the better it prepares the ground for the disruption of the illusion. If the film exposes its discourse rather than making it as transparent as possible, audiences – despite being well aware of the fiction – will be unlikely to buy into it (a factual story will, undeniably, create a much stronger coefficient of reality due to the very

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features of its discourse). If the film attempts to present itself as “real life” (that is, veers away from written, organized, orchestrated storytelling) by voluntarily omitting all forms of provocation, resolution, sanction (reward or punishment), transformation, etc., viewers will again be unlikely to buy into the fiction because of a lack of interest in the narrative (unless, of course, some of the nuances discussed here are part of the equation, for instance if the story’s disorganized nature falls inside the horizon of expectations or within the narrative contract, thereby allowing audiences to believe it). If the film attempts to break new ground or to explore unlikelihoods in an effort to offer viewers a truer, more realistic view of things, the illusion is again likely to be disrupted. An exploration of films that resort to this kind of reflexivity could allow us to uncover a similar paradox to the one noted above: the more a film works at being real, the greater is its potential to disrupt viewers’ belief in its fiction. Here, again, a possible distinction could be made between opaque films and opacity in film, between dys-narrative films and dys-narrativity in film, and between films based on unlikelihoods and unlikelihood in film. Therefore, perhaps we could distinguish between two types of reflexivity in relation to film: those that seek to enable an illusion and to sporadically disrupt it with reflexive instances with a high coefficient of reality (that let the audience choose to re-enter the fiction or to remain outside it) and those that seek to discourage all illusion (such as films by David Lynch or more radical, experimental films) through the use of instances that leverage modes such as opacity, dys-narrativity, or unlikelihood. In light of the paradoxes they present us with, these are types of films that merit further examination. Translation from French by Johanne O’Malley.

Reference List Badir, Sémir, and Eleni Mouratidou. 2010. “Introduction.” MethIS. Méthodes et interdisciplinarité en sciences humaines: étendues de la réflexivité. Liège, Belg.: Presses Universitaires de Liège. Cerisuelo, Marc. 2001. Hollywood à l’écran. Essai de poétique historique des films: l’exemple des métafilms américains. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle. Dällenbach, Lucien. 1977. Le récit spéculaire: essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris: Seuil. [Dällenbach, Lucien. 1989. The mirror in the text. Translated by Jeremy Whiteley with Emma Hughes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.] Dällenbach. Lucien. 1997. “Mise en abyme.” Dictionnaire des genres et des notions littéraires. Paris: Encyclopédie Universalis/Albin Michel.

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Demoulin, Laurent. 2010. “Étendues de la réflexivité.” MethIS. Méthodes et interdisciplinarité en sciences humaines: étendues de la réflexivité. Liège, Belg.: Presses Universitaires de Liège. Févry, Sébastien. 2000. La mise en abyme filmique: essai de typologie. Liège, Belg.: Edition de fournitures et d’aides pour la lecture. Gerstenkorn, Jacques. 1987. “À travers le miroir (notes introductives).” In Vertigo: le cinéma au miroir, 7–10. Paris: Avancées cinématographiques. Metz, Christian. 1968. “La construction ‘en abyme’ dans Huit et demi, de Fellini.” In Essais sur la signification au cinéma. Vol. 1, 223–228. Paris: Klincksieck. [Metz, Christian. 1974. “Mirror Construction in Fellini’s 8 ½.” Film Language: A Semiotic of the Cinema. Translated by Michael Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.] Roy, André. 2007. Dictionnaire général du cinéma: du cinématographe à internet. Montréal: Fides. Stam, Robert. 1985. Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. Michigan: UMI Research Press. Wolf, Werner. 2011. “Illusion (Aesthetic).” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, and Jörgen Schönert. Hamburg: Hamburg University. https://wikis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.php/Illusion_(Aesthetic)

Filmography Adaptation. Directed by Spike Jonze. 2002. Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD. Amityville. Directed by Andrew Douglas. 2005. Los Angeles, CA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2005. DVD. Duck Amuck. Directed by Chuck Jones. 1953. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2003. DVD. Dumb-Hounded. Directed by Tex Avery. 1943. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2003. DVD. Earthquake. Directed by Mark Robson. 1974. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2006. DVD. Fantasmagorie. Directed by Émile Cohl. 1908. Paris: Lobster Films, 2016. DVD. Fight Club. Directed by Fincher. 1999. Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2000. DVD. La linea. Directed by Osvaldo Cavandoli. 1972. Montréal: Undisc Video, 2008. DVD. Le sang d’un poète. Directed by Jean Cocteau. 1932. New York, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2000. DVD. Magical Maestro. Directed by Tex Avery. 1952. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2003. DVD. New Nightmare. Directed by Wes Craven. 1994. Los Angeles, CA: New Line Home Video, 2000. DVD. 8½. Directed by Federico Fellini. 1963. New York, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2010. DVD. Persona. Directed by Ingmar Bergman. 1966. New York, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2014. DVD. Silent Movie. Directed by Mel Brooks. 1976. Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006. DVD. Tango. Directed by Carlos Saura. 1988. Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1999. DVD. Trans-Europ-Express. Directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet. 1967. Paris: Carlotta Films, 2013. DVD.

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The Amityville Horror. Directed by Andrew Douglas. 2005. Los Angeles, CA: Metro-GoldwynMayer, 2005, DVD. The Car of Tomorrow. Directed by Tex Avery. 1951. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2003. DVD. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Directed by Wallace Worsley. 1923. Los Angeles, CA: Image Entertainment, 1999. DVD. The Player. Directed by Robert Altman. 1992. Los Angeles, CA: New Line Home Video, 1997. DVD. Trail of the Pink Panther. Blake Edwards. 1982. Burbank, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2004. DVD. Two-Lane Blacktop. Directed by Monte Hellman. 1971. New York, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2013. DVD. Who Killed Who? Directed by Tex Avery. 1943. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2003. DVD.

Mathias Kusnierz

The Iconomics of Reflexivity: The Real Value of Images of Fiction in Contemporary American Cinema To Peter Szendy with friendship

Introduction: the switch to Hollywood’s reflexive mode With the advent of postmodern cinema, the Hollywood film industry has taken a giant step forward in providing images whose first aim is to immerse the viewer in the film, thanks to photorealistic computer-generated imagery (CGI) (Jameson 1984; Odin 1988, 134). Although postmodern cinema is not to be confused with only using CGI, it is still a defining characteristic, as is the use of immersive images and sound provided by giant screens and technologies such as Dolby Surround and THX, created in 1975 and 1983 respectively (Jullier 1997, 46–61). Since the 1990s, that giant step has been reflected in a switch to a reflexive mode which can be seen in action and science fiction films from parody (Pulp Fiction 1994; True Lies 1994) to mise en abyme (the Matrix trilogy 1999–2003) and from metafilm (Total Recall 1990) to tribute film (Jackie Brown 1997) and pastiche (Starship Troopers 1997) through to films that include intertextual references (Kill Bill 2003–2004). American cinema repeatedly questions its modes of representation using a variety of means, to such an extent that theorists, critics, and filmmakers regularly blame Hollywood for being no longer interested in the world but only in its films (Malausa 2006; Thoret 2006a). This is why so many blockbusters are about fakes and counterfeits, from True Lies (1994) to Mission: Impossible (1996) and The Bourne Identity (2002), and from The A-Team (2010) to Inception (2010). For instance, the opening sequence of Starship Troopers (1997) is presented to the viewers as a newsreel which depicts events that they will see again as part of the narrative later in the film. In contemporary Hollywood cinema, images always precede reality (Baudrillard 1981, 155–161). At the same time, “reality” and “facts” increasingly take the shape of images provided by the media. The assumption underlying the criticism that Hollywood is no longer interested in the world is the traditional exclusive opposition between reflexivity

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722031-013

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(taking cinema as the subject) and referentiality (dealing with the world and reality). But this assumes that films have to take a stand: either to be about cinema or to be about the world. Quentin Tarantino, for instance, was heavily criticized by the highbrow press when Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012) were released; critics accused the postmodern, intertextual, spectacular, and extreme way of storytelling of erasing the concrete reality of history behind the spectacular illusions and the proliferation of cinephile references. American cinema gets the viewer lost in a maze of mirrors in which all the images refer to each other just like the architecture dreamed about by the characters in Inception (2010). My premise is that there is no Hollywood film in existence today that is not reflexive, insofar as the images keep referring to other images in an infinite process of meaning (Kristeva 1969, 219; Barthes 2002 [1973], 447–452) that Derrida (1967b, 423; 1972, 60–61, 208–209, 379) calls différance, and also insofar as, just like fossils, film images bear the marks of their past (Reynolds 2011). This is a distinctive characteristic of postmodern images: they refer to pictures of the past rather than to their contemporary reality, in a way that their meaning is never stabilized. For instance, in True Lies (1994), the opening sequence, which takes place outside the embassy, evokes the gloomy, expressionist atmosphere of the spy films of Fritz Lang, such as Man Hunt (1941) or Ministry of Fear (1944); the Harrier jet taking off reminds us of the images of helicopters in Apocalypse Now (1979). In Starship Troopers (1997), the sequence involving the arachnids’ attack on the stronghold on planet P reminds us of the images in famous westerns such as They Died with Their Boots On (1941), Fort Apache (1948), or The Alamo (1960), and the landing on planet K reminds us of the war images shot by John Ford, George Stevens, or Samuel Fuller (Natoli 1994, XI; Metz 2004, 23–25). Of course, whether those references are acknowledged strongly depends on viewers’ culture. So the meaning of the film will very much depend on how many of the references the viewers recognize and what association they will activate. Starship Troopers (1997) will generate radically different meanings depending on whether the viewers recognize all the references, the strong irony, and the political spoof in the film or, on the contrary, take everything at face value as they would with any regular combat or science fiction film. At the very least, we can say that if all the viewers will not be able to decipher the references, surely they will all be exposed, in one way or another, to the same kind of images circulating in popular culture. Images do not have to be specifically acknowledged for their value to be realized; it is enough that the viewers recognize broadly where they come from and which part of visual culture they refer to. Images used in science fiction films or westerns get their ideological value from the fact that they have already pervaded the culture at large and public space. On the other hand, recent Hollywood

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films tend to give increasing importance and space to intertextuality and to make references to the same domain, in a closed circuit, so to speak. For instance, the twenty films (to the time of writing) from the Marvel cinematic universe are all interconnected and offer a recurring cast and characters, very much like in Balzac’s (1976–1981 [1830–1856]) La comédie humaine. Intertextuality in that specific case does not take the shape of seriality (as it does with production cycles in Hollywood) but it has become reticular, pervading the viewer’s culture all the more. Little by little, films from the Marvel cinematic universe, by referencing each other, are building “this infernal circuit between the image and money” that Deleuze speaks about (1985, 105; 1989, 78). Thus Inception (2010) and its dreams that are embedded into one another in an infinite recursivity are the metaphor par excellence for an image that produces a system that only refers to itself. Cinema, a device that comes close to a waking dream, according to the early theorists and philosophers (Cavell 1979 [1971], 155, 209–212; De Amicis 2008 [1907]; Gorki 2008 [1896]) is now watching itself producing dreams. I would like to nuance the claim that cinema no longer speaks about the real. Peter Szendy quotes Derrida’s famous words “there is nothing outside of the text” (2012, 142; original emphasis), which in French are “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (Derrida 1967a, 227–228; 1976, 158), and changes them into “there is no extrafilm” (2016b, 124). According to Szendy, reality is always already structured as a film, so there is no reason to oppose films to reality. Moreover, recent theoretical approaches implicitly counter the assumption that reflexivity and referentiality cannot coexist. From the concept of iconomy developed by Peter Szendy (2014) to a discussion of the equivalence between the editing table and the assembly line on the one hand, and between a cinematographic device used to project images and industrial machinery creating value on the other hand (Beller 2006, 132–134, 234–235, 302–308), film theorists aim to show that rather than being about the real, reflexivity acts on the real (Bredekamp 2010), particularly through dematerialized mechanisms that produce value and that are reflected outside the cinema through concrete economic and ideological effects.

Iconomy and the eye as assembly line Peter Szendy (2014, 2017) bases his theory of iconomy on a sentence of Deleuze (1985, 104; 1989, 77): “Money is the obverse of all the images that the cinema shows and sets in place, so that films about money are already, if implicitly, films within the film or about the film.” Deleuze is referring to the fact that the pictures in a film are the result of complex financial operations. Through images,

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what is edited and assembled are those monetary operations. However, Deleuze is not only speaking of the mere cost of the images; he is also stating that images can be traded just like money. Not only are the pictures in a film intended to circulate within the global economy, but they are the very form of the exchange (Beller 2006, 49–59, 72–77). They enable the trading of a little light, affects, some percepts, and some concepts (Deleuze and Guattari 1991, 163–200), as well as moments lived more fully than usual (various emotions, suspense, empathy) for the money and the time of the viewer (Beller 2006, 104–110). The concept of iconomy can explain how images take on value beyond the mere value of the cinema tickets bought by the viewer. According to Szendy, money is the obverse of cinematic images. Thus, the latter make value circulate. Szendy asserts that the word iconomy is a pun which refers to the economy of the visible. What is at stake in this word is the economic value of the images and their circulation (Szendy 2017, 14). If Szendy investigates, in a philosophical fashion, the homology between money and images, and their circulation, Jonathan Beller uses concepts from cultural studies in order to show how the viewers create value through the act of watching a film. I would rather show, starting from Marx, Beller, and Szendy, how the economic value of the images extends to include an ideological value. Thus, I will use the word iconomy in a broader sense than Beller’s and Szendy’s. Jonathan Beller (2006, 1–2, 67–69, 243) asserts as an axiom the becomingimage of the commodity and the becoming-commodity of the image. According to Beller (2006, 7–12), the exchange-value of today’s commodities lies in their aesthetic appeal and their brand. The brand of a piece of clothing is the vessel of its value; it is the sign of an admittedly stereotypical or conventional prestige, but it can shift into monetary value (Szendy 2013, 87–88). This is why commodities increasingly merge into their images, thanks to mechanisms such as product placement. I submit that, with the rise of the blockbuster, this process has been pushed since the mid 1970s up to now to a point that has never been reached before, so that the link between a commodity and the images of it is stronger than ever. The commodification of images that we are witnessing in today’s Hollywood cinema is thus rooted in the one that started with the first blockbusters of the mid 1970s. The growing rationalization and abstraction that drive capitalist commodity exchange shape the becoming-image of the commodity as well as the becoming-image of the consumers. According to Marx’s principles of exchange-value (Tauschwerth) (Marx 1987 [1872], 69–74, 80–81) and equivalent form of value (Aequivalentform) (Marx 1987 [1872], 87–92), when I am buying branded commodities, I am consuming not only the products themselves but also their image and my own image as an “individual-consuming-brand-products” in the process.

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That is to say that we buy certain goods for their symbolic value rather than for their intrinsic qualities, because they are external signs of wealth and trappings of high social status (Moulier-Boutang 2008, 59). Moreover, we build fetishes (Waarenfetische) out of those commodities (Marx 1987 [1872], 102–105, 120–121); we create emotional bonds with them, identifying ourselves with their brand and extracting experiences and affects from them which seem more valuable than those we extract from unbranded products (Szendy 2016a). Consuming and using those branded commodities means disseminating their image into the public space. In other words, we are concretely circulating those goods and we are increasing the exchanges of value (Beller 2006, 245–249). According to Beller (2006, 19–23), cinema is the technical display that pushes the becoming-image of the commodity to its furthest limit. Indeed, if we consume brand commodities like images, we reciprocally consume images like commodities; in other words, we consume the images of brands as the ghostly figure and the dematerialized equivalent of those commodities (75–76). This first, purely optical way of consuming commodities encourages us to actually consume them. The screen on which commodities appear is their showcase: it adds appeal to them, makes them seem approachable as much as it prevents us from gaining access to them, and, through this dialectic, fuels our desire for them. Peter Szendy’s concept of iconomy (2014, 2016a, 2017) explains how images obtain symbolic and monetary value and gives a full account of its visual nature. Because cinema, in a way, accomplishes much more than simply having us consume images as commodities: it offers us an opportunity to experience those products through the interface of the screen (Beller 2006, 76–79, 243–248). By identifying ourselves with the characters in a film, we experience the commodities from their standpoint (Metz 2004; Leveratto 2006, 187–188, 259; Kasprowicz and Hippolyte 2007, 203–209) and therefore we begin to crave those commodities. This is probably why advertisements for luxury products increasingly include Hollywood stars (Dyer 1986; Dyer and McDonald 1998; Nacache 2005, 145–157): first, to make advertisements a more and more cinematographic experience; second, because actors project their own appeal onto the commodities which appear beside them on the screen. The desire we feel for Hollywood stars changes into a desire for the products they represent. On the basis of this axiom, Beller (2006, 38–42, 132–147) claims that there is an equivalence between the industrial assembly line and the eye of the viewer. When watching a film, Beller (201–204) says, the viewer carries out a series of automatic cognitive micro-operations (image editing, relating sound and images, building points of view, linking narrative elements, and deciphering speech) through which the images are assembled one after the other. We can see an illustration of this principle at the beginning of Blow Out (1981), when

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Jack Terry assembles the photographs of the car accident. The montage of the still shots cut from the magazine and the recorded sounds reveal the truth about the assassination of Governor McRyan and thus produce political meaning. But simultaneously, Manny, who sold the photographs to the magazine, is making a lot of money from them. The economic value of those images of the car accident comes from the political conspiracy in Blow Out, so the economic and ideological values are bound together in the film. It is very clear in Beller’s argument that these very mechanisms that build economic value also create ideological value. In fact, we cannot about separate economic and ideological values in Hollywood cinema; they are two faces of the same coin – two aspects of the same way of life shown to the audience. For instance, in 2012 (2009), when Jackson Curtis unexpectedly comes home to rescue his ex-wife and children from the gigantic earthquake that has just begun, the sequence includes a certain number of highly symbolic features that are crucial for the way Hollywood depicts the American Way of Life and that are also commodities: the typical one-family American house, the lively breakfast scene, the domestic dog, and the family car. What is unexpected in this depiction is that the car, a limousine, does not belong to Jackson but to Yuri Karpov, a Russian billionaire for whom Jackson works as a chauffeur. So the limo simultaneously embodies the failure of Jackson as a father (he is a struggling writer who cannot support his family), material success under the rule of capitalism, and the diverse excesses of the consumer society that is the cause of the ecological disaster at stake in the film. Commodities in this sequence are heavily ideologically laden. In other cases, the viewer builds dematerialized commodities out of images to consume them. As on an industrial assembly line, no value is created during that process. It is only when the images form a unity, when they are seen (Szendy 2013, 90–92), that their economic and ideological value develops. According to Marxist theory, value is indeed not contained within the commodity, but appears as an emanation from the product as it is directly exchangeable for any other good (Marx 1987 [1872], 80–81, 92–94). The viewer actively but unconsciously participates in the production of this value. So, even though the viewer exchanged money for those images (Beller 2006, 66–79), he is working while watching them. This work produces a value which does not benefit the viewer but is monopolized by the Hollywood industry. According to Marx’s theory, the viewer thus produces surplus-labor1 (Mehrarbeit), which generates surplus-value (Mehrwerth)

1 “During the second period of the labour-process, that in which his labour is no longer necessary labour, the workman, it is true, labours, expends labour-power; but his labour, being no

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for Hollywood (Marx 1987 [1872], 226–227, 237–248). Yann Moulier-Boutang (2008, 57–61, 94–95, 199) calls this phenomenon “cognitive capitalism.” The opening sequence of To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), the making of counterfeit money, illustrates this point and Deleuze’s above-cited words well, displaying how the eye of the viewer produces value from the images projected onto his or her retina. The whole sequence depends on a paratactic, elliptic editing of close-ups which requires that the eye of the viewer create the logical continuity of the shots in the absence of clear, obvious match cuts. So it is the connection of each of the shots in the viewer’s brain that leads to the making of the narrative and enables the viewer to understand that what is taking place is the making of counterfeit money. This making seems to be hand crafted and looks like offset printing and heliogravure, but the viewer as witness gives credit to that counterfeit money. Once the viewer can trust counterfeit money since it is a viable, efficiently tricking counterfeit, he can believe in the narrative (Szendy 2015). And it is because the viewer believes the narrative that the images are endowed with a symbolic value, which can then be converted into real value, as in the process described by Beller (2006, 66–68, 132–147). In terms of ideology, images may be misleading as well: at the end of Starship Troopers (1997), the main characters all feature in a propaganda clip in which the images have nothing but ideological value. These are the funny money paid for the obedience of the soldiers led to the slaughter. Beller’s analysis also explains why mechanisms such as product placement work efficiently. Jurassic World (2015) is packed with branded goods such as Mercedes cars and Beats by Dr Dre headphones, whose presence is bought by the companies as disguised advertising. But economic mechanisms at stake in films do not consist merely of product placement. To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) pushed up Willem Dafoe’s rating in Hollywood. In the film Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015), when the actor Tom Cruise puts himself physically at risk during the free-diving sequence, his value increases because he is covered by insurance in case of an accident. The insurance policy is the gold standard which can attest to the fair market value of an actor. The becoming-image of actors’ bodies makes them products with an exchange-value and an investment

longer necessary labour, he creates no value for himself. He creates surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of a creation out of nothing. This portion of the working day, I name surplus labour-time, and to the labour expended during that time, I give the name of surplus-labour. It is every bit as important, for a correct understanding of surplus-value, to conceive it as a mere congelation of surplus-labour-time, as nothing but materialised surpluslabour, as it is, for a proper comprehension of value, to conceive it as a mere congelation of so many hours of labour, as nothing but materialised labour” (Marx 1990 [1887], 188).

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value (Beller 2006, 104–110, 245–249). The more Tom Cruise’s value increases because of a particular film, the more will be reinvested in the next Cruise films or in the Mission: Impossible series (1996–2015), and the more profit they are likely to generate. So this very mechanism makes actors’ image a cost-effective advertising investment.

Use-value, exchange-value, and equivalent form of value In terms of Marx’s concepts developed in The Capital, the images have no usevalue (Gebrauchswerth) (Marx 1987 [1872], 75–80) but do have an exchange-value (Tauschwerth) (1987 [1872], 69–74, 80–102) that is expressed in money-form (Geldform) (1987 [1872], 100–102): images are exchanged for money at the cinema ticket counter and they “play within the world of commodities the part of the universal equivalent” (Marx 1990 [1887], 60), because “under their moneyform, all commodities look alike” (Marx 1990 [1887], 95). Now the question is what the images do with their value. The Capital might give an answer to this too. Images are what Marx calls an equivalent form of value [Aequivalentform], that is, they can be exchanged for any other form of value: “The equivalent form of value is thus the form of the commodity’s immediate exchangeability with any other commodity” (1987 [1872], 88). This means that, as values, all commodities are equal expressions of the same unit, human labor, and one can replace another. As a consequence, one commodity can be exchanged for another commodity as long as it possesses a form which gives it value. So images are expressions of human labor and one can replace another. The tradable, replaceable nature of images is furthermore a possible criterion that can be used to define postmodern cinema: all images are interchangeable and can potentially replace one another. This structural principle of the Hollywood image factory explains why remakes, sequels, prequels, and reboots flourish today. The Spider-Man (2002–2007) trilogy, directed by Sam Raimi, led ten years later to The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), its reboot directed by Mark Webb. The images from Raimi’s trilogy having demonstrated their exchange-value, this could be reinvested in new, substitute images. Different yet equivalent, they are an alternative version of Raimi’s films; their value comes from the fact that they replay as much as they replace Raimi’s images. As Jacqueline Nacache (1999) and Raphaëlle Moine (2004, 105–108) have shown, Hollywood is indeed constantly letting films fall into oblivion in order to achieve free-flowing, serial, formulaic production. The remake of Total Recall (2012) by Len Wiseman is much

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closer to an alternative version of the original film directed by Paul Verhoeven than to an update (Kolker 1998; Zanger 2006, 30–37, 101–115) or to an homage (Moine 2004, 102, 108–116). The remake is very different from the original film: although its main theme and narrative fabric are similar, the scenario has been largely redrafted. The diegetic world of the remake is thus completely different from that of Verhoeven’s film. However, the characters have exactly the same names, and thus watching the film is just like watching an alternative or redrafted version of the original script in which new images have replaced the old ones. The palimpsest – a digital, dematerialized one – is thus a recurring pattern of the remake: twice we can see the characters wearing a holographic necklace which conceals their face behind a flux of moving images, just like in A Scanner Darkly (2006). This visual flow shows the equivalent, tradable, and replaceable nature of the images today; this motif is like the synecdoche of the postmodern era where all images are equivalent. Colin Farrell’s face is replaced by many others within a short duration, just like Hollywood’s images are constantly replaced by new ones. As expressions of human labor, images are therefore interchangeable – but are they equal in value? No, they are not if we think that two images produced from the same amount of labor do not create the same surplus-value (Mehrwerth). It is thus possible to speculate on the images and to increase their value thanks to the consumption and circulation of films.

The circulation, amplification, and reversal of value: three aspects of iconomic energy I wrote earlier on that images were the very form of the exchange. Let me quote again Deleuze’s words: “Money is the obverse of all the images that the cinema shows and sets in place, so that films about money are already, if implicitly, films within the film or about the film” (1985, 104; 1989, 77). To fully grasp the implications of these words, we need to also consider a corollary: any film within the film or about the film is equivalent to money and creates money. Films within the film show how images work and thereby amplify – or at least prove – the value of images. A sequence in The A-Team (2010) shows Murdock, trapped in a mental institution, watching an episode of the original The A-Team TV series on a large screen with the other patients all equipped with 3D glasses, just like in a cinema. At the very moment when Mister T’s fictitious iconic truck heads towards the camera on the famous musical theme, the full-size model of the truck breaks into the wall to release Murdock, making fiction and reality

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coincide within the fiction. This sequence shows how Hollywood recycles old images in order to sell new ones; the mise en abyme, which ironically acknowledges the relation between old and new images in a postmodern fashion, lures fans into nostalgia so that they watch the new film while depicting them as lunatics. A film within a film is thus a form of speculation, in the triple meaning of the word: a financial operation that aims to make a profit out of market variations, an abstract and theoretical discourse, and being able to reflect images.2 In other words, any form of reflexivity has an economic function because images circulate when they refer to each other and any exchange of images simultaneously creates value. What is more, any image with value has a reflexive dimension, since it is tradable and ready to circulate and since its very structure already contains the potential for further exchanges. This may be the reason why American cinema today seems to be so constantly reflexive, each image referring to those preceding it or that will come after it. It is as if the reflexivity of the film, which appears with the circulation of images and the result of which is that one image keeps referring to other images before referring to the real, leverages the monetary value of each image. These iconomics of reflexivity determine an increase in value within the closed circuit of images. Deleuze states: What the film within the film expresses is this infernal circuit between the image and money, this inflation which time puts into the exchange, this “overwhelming rise.” The film is movement, but the film within the film is money, is time. The crystal-image thus receives the principle which is its foundation: endlessly relaunching exchange which is dissymmetrical, unequal and without equivalence, giving image for money, giving time for images, converting time, the transparent side, and money, the opaque side, like a spinning top on its end. And the film will be finished when there is no more money left . . . (Deleuze 1985, 105; 1989, 78)

Deleuze points out that each shot is money – and not only because one needs money to shoot – and creates value; every time images circulate, they are trading value at the same time. For instance, the scenario of each film in the Jason Bourne (2002–2016) tetralogy is very similar to those in the other three. Each film requires a follow-up, which extends the narrative so much as to almost duplicate it. Within the formulaic weave of each episode, Bourne is pursued by a lone assassin with whom he has the same dialogues;3 a CIA officer helps him while the whole agency is trying to take him down, and there is a car chase in each film.

2 In Latin, speculatio means consideration, inspection, or watching, and in English the adjective specular describes something that has the property of a mirror. 3 In the first episode, Clive Owen, before he dies, says to Matt Damon: “Look at us . . . Look at what they make you give.” Matt Damon says this very same line to Edgar Ramirez at the end of the third episode.

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The first one takes place in Paris and then it is duplicated in the second, the third, and the fourth film in Moscow, New York, and Las Vegas respectively. This is not a mere effect of the serial and formulaic nature of Hollywood blockbusters. It is rather that striking images push the audience to demand new, similar images, or at least equivalent images, in the next movie. So the film, a simple commodity which follows the law of supply and demand, brings those images to the audience. The reproduction of equivalent images and their circulation between blockbusters is a foundational principle of Hollywood production today. This is why each film of the Terminator series (1984–2015) repeatedly refers to the first episode and displays the same cult lines, such as “I’ll be back” or “Come with me if you wanna live” in different contexts. As far as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002–2007) is concerned, since it has demonstrated exchange-value, the images of the two sequels contain the circuit of exchange that will determine their reinvestment in the new trilogy. Dematerialized value behind the guise of images determines their infinite circulation. The value of images as an equivalent form of value may vary – it can increase and decrease; images are not an equal return for human labor. Differences in value account for some images acquiring more value than others in the same way as, in Marx’s theory (1987 [1872], 192–210, 237–239), it is the difference between the necessary working time (notwendige Arbeitszeit) and the surplus working time (Mehrarbeitszeit) (and thus the surplus-labor [Mehrarbeit]) that creates surplus value (Mehrwerth). Consequently, the more the images circulate, the more the viewers are working on them and creating value (Beller 2006, 113–114, 199–204). If money is exchanged through images, then their circulation also makes value circulate. As an immaterial entity, the cinema image is reproduced to circulate and thus its value is increased (it does not circulate with a constant value). Films with more copies than others circulate more and therefore have their value increased (Beller 206, 64–69, 258–259). Not only can we reproduce images to release them on a larger scale, but those images also spread out and disseminate their value into other images (Morin-Ulmann 2007, 67; Valantin 2010, 231). This is a two-level process. First, it is the images themselves that influence the production of other images. They are copied and reused through infinite cycles of variations. This has been the principle of genre production in Hollywood since the 1920s (Altman 1999, 30–48). An image, A, will be transferred onto an image, B, and it will transfer all or part of its own value and/or will increase B’s value. Second, those images are disseminated into the viewer’s consciousness and thus reproduce themselves in the collective psyche (Mauss 1935; 2013 [1950], 368; Leveratto 2006, 13–14; Kasprowicz and Hippolyte 2007, 203–209). That is why in real life we regularly come across individuals who

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model their appearance on the image of actors such as Johnny Depp or Ryan Gosling. It was striking to see how many young people adopted the same haircut and outfit as the driver in Drive (2011) as the popularity rating of Gosling exploded when the film came out. So the economic value extends into an ideological value; it shapes attitudes and ways of life in the core of reality. This principle of the dissemination of images has a corollary: it is impossible to control the various factors that cause an image to create value. I therefore suggest making a distinction between the iconomic energy, which refers to an intrinsic, plastic quality of the images, and the value (whether it is economic or ideological) which “emanates” from the images, to use Marx’s term, because of that iconomic energy (Marx 1987 [1872], 80–81, 92–94). I define iconomic energy as the spectacular power of the images created by their abstract, kinetic, and sometimes excessive features. These features are the generic ones that are found in action films or blockbusters, such as gunfights, car chases, bare-handed fights, explosions, or images of fire. These features, justified by the sole logic of the spectacle, are the “nonproductive expenditure” (Bataille 1988, 12) that remunerates the viewer for watching the film. As they are mostly “useless consumption” (Bataille 1988, 23) and ritual destruction, they are governed by the logic of the potlatch (Bataille 1988, 63–77; 2014 [1949], 61–73). Because they stimulate the senses of the viewers, give them visual enjoyment and show movement, light, and flickering images, to name only a few elements, the audience perceives them as energy (rhythm, speed, movement), or we could say they carry iconomic energy. The iconomic energy contained in generic features such as explosions, car chases, or gunfights gives power and efficiency to ideologically or economically salient signs. For instance, the final, long-awaited car-chase sequence in Jason Bourne (2016) carries an iconomic energy thanks to the hectic editing, the light, and the stunts that sublimate and give value to the Dodge driven by the protagonist. The chase sequence activates and amplifies the value of the car, so to speak. The combination of the car as a commodity and an economic sign and its spectacular display produces value: through the film we consume the Dodge, while the film itself consummates the car by destroying it (Bataille 1933; 1988, 45–61; 2014 [1949], 47–60). Similarly, in True Lies (1994) the combination of the gunfights and the array of ideological signs which define the jihadist terrorists (their language, their accent, their clothes, and their lines depict them as such) produces an ideological value, in this particular case a racist, imperialist discourse which confuses the Arabs with the jihad and which essentializes the issues of ethnic origin and religion at the same time (Moine 2007, 167–173). The jihadist terrorists in True Lies are the sign (or the synecdoche) of a racist discourse that the gunfights enhance, amplifying its force by the power of spectacle.

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While being entertained by the action scenes, the audience is more receptive to the discourse, even if they do not pay attention to it. The meaningless, spectacular form serves as a vehicle for amplifying and spreading meaningful signs. I suggest that the iconomic energy contained in the generic features (gunfights, car chases, etc.) can increase the ideological and/or economic value of the signs (commodities, ethnic stereotypes, etc.) that are displayed in the films. The codes and the forms of the action film make the racist discourse efficient in True Lies (1994) and give economic power to the commodities shown in Jason Bourne (2016). Since it depends on the narrative and the historical contexts, the economic and ideological value of the images is volatile and unstable; it can increase or decrease. That is why its mode of productivity is reversible: depending on the way the film and its narrative use the images, they will create different or even opposite values. If most of the films I have cited to illustrate this theory have been made since the 1990s, and thus belong to what we call “contemporary Hollywood cinema,” I would like to go back a bit in history and focus now on three films belonging to the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s and the early 1980s: Zabriskie Point (1970), Sorcerer (1977), and First Blood (1982). This was also a transition period from the studio system to the blockbuster era, which started with Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977). Therefore, we can observe in those three films how Hollywood’s expression and construction of an ideology changed in a decade, with the commodification of Hollywood cinema entering a new stage (Cook 2000, 40–44; Gomery 2003, 72–75; Thoret 2006b, 44–47). Consideration of the use of the same motif – an explosion in slow motion – in three different films can demonstrate how the same imagery contributes to creating a different ideological value in each case. The three sequences are the blowing up of a house in Zabriskie Point (1970) and of a tree in Sorcerer (1977), and the pyrotechnic final sequence in First Blood (1982). In each case, the explosion is a moment of dissipation, visual profusion, and ritual destruction whose value is symbolic as much as economic (Bataille 1933; 1988, 45–61; 2014 [1949], 47–60; Mauss 2007 [1925]). Moreover, the making of such spectacular images is immediately legible in terms of monetary costs: they show their reverse, so to speak, that is, the money they cost.4 Although the iconomic energy contained in these three sequences is very similar – it comes from the pyrotechnics – the ideological value that is produced in the end depends on the

4 In films, the more spectacular the image, the truer the saying “Time is money”: a short shot without spectacular production value will cost close to nothing, whereas a long sequence shot full of special effects will cost a lot, and its cost will increase in proportion to its duration.

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narrative context and to a greater extent on the historical context in which the films were born. Zabriskie Point is rooted in the American counterculture of the 1970s, but First Blood is a product of the Reaganite backlash of the 1980s, so it is not surprising that the pyrotechnics in the latter are endowed with a reactionary value, while they had a protest value in Antonioni’s film. The three sequences refer to each other because they all deal with the same issue; each one reflects the meaning of the other two, so the pyrotechnic ending in First Blood may remind the audience of the one in Zabriskie Point, or at the very least, the viewer is able to make a link between the three films because of the reoccurrence of the explosion imagery and the kind of ideological value it is associated with, even in First Blood, where it is reversed, as I will explain later. What is at stake in these sequences is the destruction of an object that hinders the reintegration of the characters in the society they belong to: a house that symbolizes the consumer society in Zabriskie Point, a tree that prevents the characters from accomplishing their mission in Sorcerer, and the center of a city that treats Rambo as an enemy in First Blood. What goes up in flames in each case is the image representing the problematic link between the characters and the society they belong to, so the explosion conveys a sense of social catharsis in each case. In Zabriskie Point, the house explosion envisioned by Daria has a value of protest: it suggests the fantasized destruction of the consumer society through the cinematographic images, the rhythmic editing, and the slow motion. Commodity fetishism (Fetischcharakter der Waare) becomes the fetishism of commodity destruction here (Marx 1987 [1872], 102–113). The slow motion enables us to observe the thousands of pieces of debris that are hurled through the air and to enjoy watching them burst, which is also a cathartic blast of abstract images that closes the film. In Sorcerer, the political, slow-motion violence becomes nihilistic: the explosion now only conveys a frantic will to survive. The protagonists are four exiled criminals who agree to transport a dangerous load of nitro-glycerine in return for the money that would allow them to go back home. After they drove across a suspension bridge in the middle of a storm and risked their lives, they appear to be stranded in front of a gigantic fallen tree. They figure out a way of destroying the obstacle: a few drops of nitro-glycerine and a handmade timer which consists of a sand pouch that trips the striker once it is empty. The shot of the emptying pouch represents time elapsing, which is the equivalent form of the squandered money, and a metaphor for greed destroying the protagonists.5 Once the bag is empty and the time has run

5 This image is also relevant in the overall background of the film, because the probability that the protagonists will die increases with the film’s narrative progression. Later in the film,

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out, the hand-crafted bomb annihilates the tree in a slow motion shot similar to the one in Zabriskie Point. The similarity of the two sequences stresses the difference in value between one film and the other. In Zabriskie Point, the explosion may suggest the dissipation of the revolutionary violence: the rules of trade come to an end thanks to and within the images. In Sorcerer, however, the explosion only embodies the death drive of the protagonists and the greed that pushes them towards their own destruction. The slow-motion explosion shot in Sorcerer is far less emphatic than in Zabriskie Point and it is edited to show lengthy shots of the characters frantically running from the tree to hide from the explosion; the sequence thus conveys an intense sense of panic and psychic dereliction. The causes of the destruction of the tree, namely time and nitro-glycerine, are the two principles that ruin the protagonist on psychological and physical levels. In both cases, it is remarkable that the images backfire in terms of commodities and money in order to sabotage them and make them meaningless, whereas in mainstream Hollywood cinema, images increase the value of a commodity most of the time. Finally, in First Blood, the explosion is the mechanism of a drastic revision of history by violence. It is the only means for John Rambo to make himself heard and impose his own Reaganite version of the Vietnam war, according to which the army would have won the war, had it not been for the politicians (KacVergne 2007, 216–220; Ross 2011, 251–253). Hunted like a wild animal, he can only make his voice publicly heard after having burned down the city center. At the end of the film, entrenched in the precinct and forced to surrender by the local police, he explains to Colonel Trautman, who has come to bail him out, that he had been treated appallingly since he came back from Vietnam after the politicians betrayed the U.S. army, and then bursts into tears. Because it balances the pyrotechnics displayed in the previous scene, the pathos makes the viewer’s assent to the Reaganite discourse (Wood 2003, 144–167; Rossinow 2015, 14, 24, 35–39, 78). But the audience is all the more receptive to this discourse because the pyrotechnics are once again cathartic, the burning city being an expression of Rambo’s anger, frustration, and woes. Here First Blood takes up the politically marked motif of New Hollywood’s protest cinema and turns it into a tool of ideological reaction. The film as a whole accomplishes such a reversal. It begins as a New Hollywood protest film: John Rambo, a long-haired wanderer who we do not know is a former Green Beret, shows up on the outskirts of a small town and is immediately apprehended by an aggressive, reactionary sheriff who prevents

when Serrano glances at his watch and declares “it’s nine o’clock in Paris,” his truck hits a stone and explodes (Thoret 2006a, 40–41).

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him from entering the town. The character seems to have no family ties, looks like a stereotypical homeless person and is in conflict with the local authorities: for the audience, all this means that John Rambo is a rebel. Moreover, the film conveys a very negative image of the Vietnam War, since Rambo is looking for a friend in the opening sequence and discovers that he died of cancer due to Agent Orange. So First Blood apparently exhibits significant material evidence of its affiliation to the New Hollywood protest cinema, but that is reversed at the end of the film to serve the Reaganite discourse more efficiently (Busch 2005; Collins 2007, 11–14).

Conclusion The study of Hollywood cinema’s specific reflexivity shows that far from being inward-looking, just like the two mirrors facing each other in Inception, it opens out to the real. In contemporary Hollywood cinema, reflexivity and referentiality are not mutually exclusive; rather, they complement each other. Not only do images refer to other images in an endless intertextual process but they influence the real, thanks to specific mechanisms I have tried to highlight in this chapter. The most important of them is the becoming-commodity of the image, which accelerates the flow of goods by dematerializing them. The images are seeded with ideological and monetary value and they imperceptibly shape our everyday environment. Because they constantly refer to other pictures, images made in Hollywood today form a Borgesean maze. They refer to the real and to countless other images in an open, almost infinite loop of exchange. While circulating, they disseminate their dematerialized value in other films. This value can increase or decrease because the becoming-commodity and the circulation of the images come under speculation, according to two of the meanings of this word: images mirror themselves and each other (Moine 2004, 123–124) and their value (both their exchange-value and their meaning) becomes unstable during this process. That unstable value explains why iconomic energy has the power to push certain signs towards one meaning or another. In First Blood, the signs of the ideological protest are reversed into a reactionary speech due to the iconomic energy of the pyrotechnics of the final scene and the specific context of John Rambo’s moving Reaganite speech. Iconomic energy creates an interplay between signs and forms, allowing for a degree of looseness in the connection between them so that signs are never firmly linked to forms and meanings. In this perspective, iconomic energy can change or distort the

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meaning of ideologically determined signs. Therefore, rather than pertaining to a preconceived, fixed discourse, the images in Hollywood films are a malleable raw material that can be given different meanings through their context, and according to the filmmakers intention, which will guide the viewers’ interpretation. The reversal of an ideological value into its opposite made possible by the specific productivity of iconomic energy suggests that the reflexive mechanisms at stake in the circulation of the images ideologically interfere in the core of reality. By reflecting the social structures through their endless circuits of images, the films imperceptibly shape those structures. When it assembles images, the Hollywood system constructs reality itself.

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Filmography 2012. Directed by Roland Emmerich. 2009. Columbia Pictures. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2010. Blu-ray disc. Apocalypse Now. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. 1979. United Artists. Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2016. Blu-ray disc. A Scanner Darkly. Directed by Richard Linklater. 2006. Warner Bros. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2010. Blu-ray disc. Blow Out. Directed by Brian De Palma. 1981. Filmways Pictures. New York, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2011. Blu-ray disc. Django Unchained. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. 2012. The Weinstein Company. Beverly Hills, CA: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2015. Blu-ray disc. Drive. Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. 2011. Bold Films. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2012. Blu-ray disc. First Blood. Directed by Ted Kotcheff. 1982. Orion Pictures. Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2015. Blu-ray disc. Fort Apache. Directed by John Ford. 1948. RKO. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2012. Blu-ray disc. Inception. Directed by Christopher Nolan. 2010. Warner Bros. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2010. Blu-ray disc. Inglourious Basterds. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. 2009. The Weinstein Company. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2009. Blu-ray disc. Jackie Brown. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. 1997. Miramax. Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2011. Blu-ray disc. Jason Bourne. Directed by Paul Greengrass. 2016. Universal Pictures. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2016. Blu-ray disc. Jaws. Directed by Steven Spielberg. 1975. Universal Pictures. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2012. Blu-ray disc. Jurassic World. Directed by Colin Trevorrow. 2015. Universal Pictures. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2015. Blu-ray disc. Kill Bill: Volume 1. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. 2003. Miramax. Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2008. Blu-ray disc. Kill Bill: Volume 2. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. 2004. Miramax. Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2008. Blu-ray disc. Man Hunt. Directed by Fritz Lang. 1941. 20th Century Fox. Auburn, WA: Twilight Time Movies, 2014. Blu-ray disc. Ministry of Fear. Directed by Fritz Lang. 1944. Paramount. New York, NY: The Criterion Collection, 2013. Blu-ray disc. Mission: Impossible. Directed by Brian De Palma. 1996. Paramount. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2008. Blu-ray disc. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. Directed by Christopher McQuarrie. 2015. Paramount. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Home Media Distribution, 2015. Blu-ray disc. Pulp Fiction. Directed by Quentin Tarantino. 1994. Miramax. Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2011. Blu-ray disc. Sorcerer. Directed by William Friedkin. 1977. Universal Pictures. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2014. Blu-ray disc.

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Spider-Man. Directed by Sam Raimi. 2002. Columbia Pictures. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2012. Blu-ray disc. Spider-Man 2. Directed by Sam Raimi. 2004. Columbia Pictures. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2012. Blu-ray disc. Spider-Man 3. Directed by Sam Raimi. 2007. Columbia Pictures. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2012. Blu-ray disc. Star Wars (later retitled as Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope). Directed by George Lucas. 1977. 20th Century Fox. Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2011. Blu-ray disc. Starship Troopers. Directed by Paul Verhoeven. 1997. TriStar Pictures. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2017. Blu-ray disc. Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Directed by James Cameron. 1991. TriStar Pictures. Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2017. Blu-ray disc. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Directed by Jonathan Mostow. 2003. Warner Bros. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2014. Blu-ray disc. Terminator Salvation. Directed by McG. 2009. Warner Bros. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2015. Blu-ray disc. Terminator Genisys. Directed by Alan Taylor. 2015. Paramount. Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Home Media Distribution, 2015. Blu-ray disc. The A-Team. Directed by Joe Carnahan. 2010. 20th Century Fox. Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2011. Blu-ray disc. The Alamo. Directed by John Wayne. 1960. United Artists. Los Angeles, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2000. DVD. The Amazing Spider-Man, Directed by Mark Webb. 2012. Columbia Pictures. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2012. Blu-ray disc. The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Directed by Mark Webb. 2014. Columbia Pictures. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2014. Blu-ray disc. The Bourne Identity. Directed by Doug Liman. 2002. Universal Pictures. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2016. Blu-ray disc. The Bourne Supremacy. Directed by Paul Greengrass. 2004. Universal Pictures. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2016. Blu-ray disc. The Bourne Ultimatum. Directed by Paul Greengrass. 2007. Universal Pictures. Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2016. Blu-ray disc. The Matrix. Directed by the Wachowskis. 1999. Warner Bros. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2014. Blu-ray disc. The Matrix Reloaded. Directed by the Wachowskis. 2003. Warner Bros. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2014. Blu-ray disc. The Matrix Revolution. Directed by the Wachowskis. 2003. Warner Bros. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2014. Blu-ray disc. The Terminator. Directed by James Cameron. 1984. Orion Pictures. Los Angeles, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2018. Blu-ray disc. They Died with Their Boots On. Directed by Raoul Walsh. 1941. Warner Bros. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2005. DVD. To Live and Die in L.A. Directed by William Friedkin. 1985. MGM. Los Angeles, CA: Shout! Factory, 2016. Blu-ray disc. Total Recall. Directed by Paul Verhoeven. 1990. TriStar Pictures. Santa Monica, CA: Lionsgate Home Entertainment, 2015. Blu-ray disc.

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Total Recall. Directed by Len Wiseman. 2012. Columbia Pictures. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2012. Blu-ray disc. True Lies. Directed by James Cameron. 1994. Lightstorm Entertainment. Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2012. Blu-ray disc. Zabriskie Point. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. 1970. MGM. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2009. DVD.

Stefan Schubert

Playing with (Meta)Fictionality and Self-Reflexivity in the Video Game The Stanley Parable Introduction In recent years, video games, as a particular kind of “text,”1 have shown an increasing awareness of their own mediality, their inner workings, and how they function. As it is still a relatively young medium, many popular and scholarly discussions have focused on how the video game “works” and how it differs from other types of media but can also be compared to them, notably films and novels. In the scholarly realm, this issue was debated with a lot of contention early on in the field of game studies, with disagreements on whether games are a kind of narrative or a different, separate form akin to play (ludus).2 To circumvent such rather formalistic discussions, I propose to understand video games as being situated in the borderlands of play and narrative, as a narratively liminal medium.3 This liminal status is also why, even more strongly than some other media, video games fuse the realms of the real and the fictional by presenting a fictional narrative world that has to be engaged with and explored actively by a real person and via their input, thus putting much more importance on this extradiegetic agent than a novel or a film might. While achieving a feeling of immersion is generally

1 In this context, I understand “text” in a broad cultural-studies sense as encompassing a wide area of possible media and genres or, in a more general sense, “any organized set of discourses (and meanings)” (Lewis 2008, 403). 2 This is known as the narratology–ludology debate in game studies. For summaries of the debate, see, for example, Wolf and Perron (2003, 2–13); Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al. (2008, 189–204); Mäyrä (2008, 5–11); and for examples of different scholarly approaches from these two sides, see particularly Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan (2004). As for my own understanding in this chapter, and trying to move beyond this debate, I do see The Stanley Parable as a kind of text or narrative, with some similarities to novels or films but also many differences, both of which one should pay attention to in order to best understand the game. To analyze it in more detail, I will make use of some narratological terms such as narrative or narrator to address the game’s clearly narrative elements, but I do not want to make any claims about what this particular game “is,” formalistically speaking. 3 This conception of video games as narratively liminal, located in the border zone of different symbolic forms, has been informed by discussions as part of the network “Narrative Liminality and/in the Formation of American Modernities,” funded by the German Research Foundation. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722031-014

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important for most video games, some games are increasingly countering this trend by, instead, self-reflexively highlighting how they work, and metatextually displaying the storytelling capabilities of video games as a medium. Remarkably, while contemporary scholarship on post-postmodernism tends to proclaim an end to the self-reflexivity that allegedly marked (only) postmodern writing,4 these discussions often disregard media other than the novel. In fact, in many ways, video games are beginning to engage in a “postmodern” self-reflexive exploration of their own reality–fiction divide (see Fest 2016, 1, 5). The Stanley Parable is one such particularly metatextual game – “a videogame about videogames” (1) – that stands out as a prominent, popular site to explore and discuss questions concerning fictionality and reality in a self-reflexive manner. Aware of its status as a video game that is somewhere between narrative and play, it suggests to its players that they should take pleasure in exploring the blurriness of these concepts. In this chapter, I will argue that The Stanley Parable self-reflexively negotiates the contact zones of fiction and reality by confronting its players with the mechanics of its own (interactive) storytelling, suggesting that they take pleasure in its “operational aesthetics” (see Mittell 2006; Harris 1981). The Stanley Parable highlights – and problematizes – the status of its own narrative as clearly fictional yet necessitating a real-life player’s input in order to work as an interactive text, and it does so while metatextually reflecting on issues of narrativity and textuality and on the limits of (narrative) agency and interactivity in video games. To arrive at this argument, I will first look at the nexus of reality, fiction, and self-reflexivity in video games in general, then I will introduce The Stanley Parable and discuss the game’s metatextual awareness of its own fictionality, and finally I will examine the game’s self-awareness about issues of choice and agency, which serve to illuminate how The Stanley Parable self-consciously positions itself between reality and fiction. For this investigation of the game, I will analyze it from the perspective of (American) literary and cultural studies and by close-reading parts of the game, understanding The Stanley Parable as an artefact of (pop) culture. Hence, this chapter is not concerned with the question of whether something in a story appears as reality or fiction but rather, on a more abstract level, with how a text self-consciously muses about its own status as lying between the poles of this supposedly neat distinction, thus bringing insights to the study of fictionality in its relation to the real through the case study of an interactive text.

4 For a longer exploration of such generalizing claims about postmodernism as well as of post-postmodernism’s tendency to construct such an understanding of postmodernism as a foil, see Herrmann et al. (2015).

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Fiction, reality, and self-reflexivity in video games Questions regarding the fictional and the real have almost always played a role in the variety of angles from which video games have been discussed in the scholarship of the last few decades, albeit sometimes only implicitly. Explicitly, these questions have certainly had a role in approaches that in the early years of game studies were dubbed “narratological,”5 in which questions of fictionality are directly tied to investigations of how video games can be understood as narratives or of the narrative elements they include. Yet even in so-called ludological approaches or – trying to move beyond the early ludology–narratology divide – in those that fuse different disciplinary vantage points, the way that video games oscillate between reality and fiction often appears as a central concern. In one of the most influential studies on video games, Jesper Juul’s HalfReal, the author notes that “video games are two different things at the same time: video games are real in that they consist of real rules with which players actually interact,” yet “[t]o play a video game is [. . .] to interact with real rules while imagining a fictional world.” For Juul, then, video games are “a set of rules as well as a fictional world” (2005, 1). This positioning of video games between real rules and a fictional world and the scholarship surrounding this issue demonstrate the inherent status of this medium as positioned between reality and fiction: in order to play a video game, real input is required by an actual person, an (inter)action that is more constitutive than in more traditional media such as novels or films,6 and in order to interact with this medium, its rules have to be observed. At the same time, similar to other media, a large part of what players engage with in most games is entirely fictional; as a playing subject, one “[is], at once, the person playing a game as well as embodying an 5 While this label is somewhat misleading, since not all of the studies subsumed under it use narratological tools, early examples of this line of scholarship include Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck (1998) and the work by Marie-Laure Ryan, such as Narrative as Virtual Reality (2001). 6 Of course, the audience is crucial for any kind of text, and reader-response criticism has certainly highlighted this importance of the reader, at times positing that “[t]he text has no life or meaning unless life and meaning are conferred upon it by a reader” (Fowler 2001, 26). In this sense, the dynamics discussed in this chapter hold true, to a lesser extent, for other, less interactive media as well. Yet in most games, this player input is even more constitutive, since it can affect the actual contents of the text itself. On this difference in degree, see Aarseth (1997), who understands this as a “nontrivial effort [that] is required to allow the reader [or player] to traverse the text” (1), as opposed to trivial efforts such as mere “eye movement” or “the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages” (2).

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avatar” (de Wildt 2014, 2). This set-up leads to a pervasive mix of “real” and fictional elements in the experience of video games that negotiates the boundaries of these two concepts.7 At the same time, such understandings of video games relate to negotiations of fictionality and factuality in non-interactive media as well, insofar as they, too, necessitate some kind of readerly presence for the text to become meaningful. Since a lot of scholarship has already been devoted to investigating this issue from a theoretical and more general point of view,8 I deem it worthwhile to try to reinvigorate this debate by, instead, looking more closely at how games actually deal with the oscillation between reality and fiction.9 As mentioned above, a more recent trend in video games confronts this issue explicitly in order to experiment with the potentials and limits of storytelling in video games, thus displaying a certain medial self-reflection.10 As scholars such as Sebastian Domsch (2013) have noted, in order for the medium to advance, more games should “[develop] their own deconstructions” and “let go of the concept of the game deciding on a

7 To approach this using another influential concept in game studies, this point of view entails a fluid understanding of the “magic circle,” first proposed by Johan Huizinga (1949 [1980]) to describe the “temporary worlds within the ordinary world” (10) created in the act of playing. The concept was later applied to digital games, in particular by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, to further explore the “unusual relationship between a game and the outside world” (2003, 94). In line with Edward Castronova, I understand this “shield of sorts, protecting the fantasy world from the outside world,” to be “quite porous,” with aspects from a fictional game world becoming important in the real world and values or attitudes from the real world being carried over to actions in the fictional world (2008, 147). 8 For a study of subjectivity in the context of these issues that also focuses on The Stanley Parable in particular, see de Wildt (2014). 9 By investigating these aspects from the vantage point of (American) literary and cultural studies, video games’ growing self-reflection can not only tell us something about how to narratively understand this medium but also about its surrounding cultural contexts. Specifically, looking at a particular game’s self-reflexive engagements with notions of fictionality and factuality helps uncover its “cultural work,” described by Paul Lauter as the way in which a text “helps construct the frameworks, fashion the metaphors, create the very language by which people comprehend their experiences and think about their world” (2004, 11; see also Tompkins 1986). 10 One particular subset of these kinds of games engages in what I call “narrative instability,” featuring fragmented, incoherent, and/or disjointed narrative elements that complicate and ambiguate narrative comprehension, in turn pointing to their own narrativity. For a general investigation of these kinds of texts, to which The Stanley Parable also belongs, see Schubert (2019), and for a focus on another narratively unstable video game, namely BioShock, see Schubert (2016). A similar turn towards self-reflexivity is discernible in other media as well, for instance in contemporary TV and film’s proclivity for “self-reflexive nostalgia” (see Ravizza 2013).

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winning or losing state” (179; see also Fest 2016, 3) – The Stanley Parable very much is such an “unwinnable [game]” (Domsch 2013, 180). Many of these games reflect on their own status as both fictional and real objects through the issue of choice and agency: while games are fundamentally about interaction, about the potential of interacting with them by making certain choices, these choices are, of course, always limited. Nevertheless, players are usually supposed to feel in control of playing the game and making meaningful choices, an aspect that scholars have discussed as the “illusion [. . .] of choice” or the “illusion of agency” (Atkins 2003, 44; Domsch 2013, 42). In my view, this illusion can be best understood as a textual effect: while players will never be able to do everything in a game, the narrative can heighten this feeling of being able to influence and choose between a variety of elements. At the same time, while scholars readily point out that this “myth” of “the seeming ability to do anything” in a video game “is just that, a myth” (Fest 2016, 11) and that “even the briefest contemplation shows us that the explorable options making up this freedom are limited” (de Wildt 2014, 2), it is important to acknowledge that there is, of course, no “unlimited” agency or potential for choice in the real world, outside video games, either. Instead, agency is always mediated “within a dialectic of enablement and constraint” (Bast 2015, 28). The Stanley Parable will point to this exact predicament as well, that is, to the ambiguities surrounding questions concerning agency.

Fictionality and metatextuality in The Stanley Parable In The Stanley Parable,11 the player takes control of an office worker called Stanley, who one day discovers that his co-workers seem to have disappeared and tries to uncover what exactly has happened by searching through the office building. The game is presented as a first-person shooter, that is, it is played from the perspective of the main character, in the first person – players see

11 The game was originally released in 2011 as a modification of the first-person shooter HalfLife 2 and republished as an HD version in 2013; this chapter refers to the latter version. While thus certainly an “indie” game and not one released and marketed by a prominent publisher, The Stanley Parable has been commercially highly successful and popular, having sold more than one million copies (Matulef 2014). The game has also already been discussed by quite a number of scholars, most of them focusing on what the game adds to the narrative possibilities of video games (see also Fest 2016, 2).

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what Stanley sees. However, there is no actual shooting in the game, no combat at all; instead, the main gameplay consists of exploring the world and occasionally opening a door or pushing a button. In terms of game genre, The Stanley Parable could thus also be described as an interactive story, or as a “‘graphical choose your own [adventure]’” with a focus “on structured exploration of a narrative through the use of decision points where the story can split into multiple new branches” (Heron and Belford 2015, 13). Its most interesting narrative feature is a constant voice-over narration by an unnamed narrator, who soon begins to address Stanley directly and later explicitly talks about the story that he wants to tell and about the choices involved in playing the game based on that story (which is The Stanley Parable). The game features multiple different “endings” based on where players decide to go, even though none of these definitively end the game. Instead, it always restarts and resets Stanley to the beginning, without ever offering a definite solution to this curious narrative set-up or to the question of whose story this is. Some of the endings provide additional background information on Stanley, others on the narrator, and some of them reveal that there is a large so-called mind-control facility underneath the office building monitoring the life of all of the employees. While Stanley can escape that facility in one ending, the endeavor to uncover this conspiracy quickly ceases to become the main point of interest for players – this plot concerning Stanley discovering and stopping the facility corresponds to the linear story that the narrator wants to tell. However, what the game presents as much more interesting are the numerous possibilities and temptations to stray from this path, to experience all of the other endings, which is strongly suggested by automatically restarting the game each time one reaches one of these outcomes, pointing to the fact that there is no one resolution to the story.12 As this brief summary might already have revealed, the game is generally very aware of its attempt at trying to tell a story, i.e. of its own fictionality, which becomes most apparent in numerous comments by the narrator. Players are introduced to the narrative set-up of the game through an opening sequence that has a voice-over by the narrator and, once they are given control over Stanley, the narrator continues to provide this voice-over narration. The very first words

12 The loading screen of the game also hints at this aspect, displaying the words “The end is never” in a continuous loop and thus forming the sentence “The end is never the end.” That the sentence loops back onto itself to form a statement about indefiniteness already speaks to The Stanley Parable’s self-awareness about its lack of a definite conclusion. In a similar vein, the game’s starting screen displays a visual mise-en-abyme, as it shows a computer monitor on which we can see a smaller version of the game’s starting screen, again depicting a monitor, and so on.

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of the narrator, in fact, are: “This is the story of a man named Stanley,” immediately pointing to the game’s awareness of the following events being a story. It soon becomes clear that this is not a fixed voice-over that passively comments but that it is instead a character who provides his own particular thoughts on the choices Stanley makes in the game. Instead of a neutral or passive narrative instance, this so-called narrator instead becomes a kind of homodiegetic (and clearly anthropomorphic) narrator who poses as a heterodiegetic one. While he is a character that is part of the narrative itself, he functions as the narrator of that story, without a physical presence but with narrative knowledge and power akin to a heterodiegetic narrator. This set-up already plays with players’ usual assumptions about a narrator in a novel or a voice-over narration in a film, as this narrator will often directly address Stanley (and/or the player) in moments of metalepsis and breaking the “fourth wall,” criticizing his actions.13 Whenever an obvious choice can be made – such as whether to go through a door on the left or the right – he will comment upon which one Stanley should go for; however, if players disobey that narration and choose something else, he will become increasingly frustrated with the players’ apparently “uncooperative” attitude. Most of the endings of the game are reached by choosing to go against the narrator’s preferred option at a specific point, with “disobedience produc[ing] the most interesting stories” (Hammond 2016, 193); this in turn prompts him to criticize Stanley’s efforts to go against the narrator’s version of the story. In many of these and other situations, the narrator points to what players witness as being a conscious effort at trying to tell a story. If they try to examine different objects in the office instead of going where the narrator wants them to, for instance, the narrator complains that “touching every little thing in the office [. . .] didn’t make a single difference, nor did it advance the story in any way.” Likewise, when they are in the office of Stanley’s boss and, instead of waiting for the narrator to finish his voice-over, just continue on in the room, he will comment: “Stanley was in such a rush to get through the story as quickly as possible, he didn’t even have a single minute to just let the narrator talk.” The metatextual references to both the story itself and the figure of the narrator in these and numerous other instances early on establish the game’s self-reflexivity, its awareness of telling a story. In turn, it also becomes apparent that the game’s goal is

13 As Astrid Ensslin notes, this effect is also created by the narrator’s use of the past tense, that is, “making propositions about what Stanley did (before he gets a chance to do so) rather than suggestions about where he might go” (2015 61–62; see also Bushnell 2016, 6). This set-up makes players “suspicious about the reliability or trustworthiness of the narrator right from the outset” and posits the narrator as a kind of “implied author (manifested in the choices built into the game)” whom the player “strives to undermine” (Ensslin 2015, 62).

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not to tell one such coherent story, since the numerous references to the game as a story negatively affect immersion, but rather that it is more interested in discussing stories – and storytelling – in general. In line with Patricia Waugh’s take on metafiction, The Stanley Parable is thus interested in “self-consciously and systematically draw[ing] attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (2002, 2). The ending that points not just to this awareness of The Stanley Parable as a story but to metatextual musings about narrative itself most directly has been called the Confusion Ending by the game’s community. Players come across this ending when they stray from the narrator’s path and refuse to “[get] back on track,” as the narrator suggests. Once there, players encounter what the narrator calls a “spoiler” about the mind-control facility, which they were not supposed to see yet. Consequently, the narrator claims that his story is now “completely unusable” and needs to be restarted, which subsequently happens a number of times, but each time with a different narrative anomaly, such as the existence of additional doors that Stanley can choose from in the room that originally had only two doors or the hallway leading to a dead end. In this overall scenario, the doors Stanley can enter and the rooms he can explore are equated with progressing the story, as the narrator repeatedly says that “there definitely was a story here before” and that they should strive to “find the story.” As an attempted solution, in one of the restarts, the narrator employs the help of a so-called Adventure Line, a bright yellow line on the floor that suggests to the player exactly where he or she is supposed to be going. This line symbolically depicts a linear narrative akin to the one in most novels or films and one that the player is to follow without straying from the path. In the overall game, but particularly in this set of sequences, the physical progress of traversing through the space of the office serves as a metaphor for progressing through the narrative events of a story. This becomes particularly evident as the narrator muses: “[W]ouldn’t wherever we end up be our destination, even if there’s no story there? Or, to put it another way, is the story of no destination still a story?” These thoughts refer to the game’s set-up, as it does not feature a clear destination, that is, a narrative endpoint that can be reached, and to narrativity as such as the narrator wonders what the minimum requirements for a (meaningful) story are. The focus on storytelling itself becomes even more evident as this ending progresses. When even the Adventure Line fails to get the player where the narrator wants her and instead only leads her in a circle, he restarts again, and this time, by going through some of the back doors of the office (and thus of the narrative space), she arrives at a large wall displaying the so-called Confusion Ending. This wall depicts how long players have been playing this one particular ending, and it also shows all the different steps and restarts they have taken

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so far, for instance disparagingly labelling the narrator’s musings about the “story of no destination” as “nonsense philosophy.” Furthermore, the wall also displays the steps they still have to take, with the final, eighth restart positing that “[t]he Narrator is gone” and that, “[a]fter a long time, Stanley dies.” For players arriving at this ending for the first time, this reveals that all of the previous restarts were not really restarts in the sense of the game beginning again from the start (as it does after the other endings); instead, they were all part of this one overall ending, which was completely predetermined and did not actually offer any meaningful choices. The narrator points to this very fact with confusion, being outraged that all of this is “determined” and asking: “[W]ho consulted me? Why don’t I get to decide? Why don’t I get a say in all this?” Ironically, just as Stanley’s narrative appears to be predetermined to a large extent by the narrator, the story the narrator wants to tell is seemingly dictated by a narrative instance above him. At the same time, the narrator’s complaint that he does not “get to decide” does not only refer to such a higher instance but of course also to the player, whose ability to influence what happens in the narrative, unlike in a traditional, linear story, is the major source of frustration for the narrator throughout the game. The scene ends in a seeming act of agency by the narrator, who refuses the wall’s command to restart the game, but after nothing seems to happen for a while, the narrator is interrupted mid-sentence and the game is genuinely restarted by an apparently higher narrative instance. Overall, even more so than the other endings of the game, this Confusion Ending highlights The Stanley Parable’s awareness of narrativity, of how a text tells a story, and of how – in a traditional text such as in most novels, at least – that is a linear process, a progression that should clearly be followed. In addition to this awareness of the game’s fictionality and its metafictional references, The Stanley Parable also includes nods to the game’s “reality,” that is, its existence as a game in the extradiegetic world that necessitates an input from a real player. For instance, when players walk through one of the corridors of the office, they can enter a small broom cupboard, which does not offer anything to interact with. However, if they remain there for long enough, the narrator will comment on this fact with increasing impatience, as there was “no choice to make, no path to follow, just an empty broom closet” with “absolutely no significance to the story whatsoever.” Eventually, the narrator assumes that Stanley’s continued insistence on staying in this cupboard must be because “you’re dead. You got to this broom closet, explored it a bit, and were just about to leave because there’s nothing here, when a physical malady of some sort shut down your central nervous system and you collapsed on the keyboard.” After this realization, the narrator tries to alert nearby people to the player’s demise by shouting, hoping for a “second player” to arrive. In another

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ending, referred to as the Not Stanley one, the game comments on the existence of the player as a real being even more self-reflexively. If players, instead of answering a phone call, unplug the phone from its power source, the narrator wonders how they managed to “cho[o]se incorrectly,” stating that “[n]ot picking up the phone is actually somehow an incorrect course of action.” Eventually, he uncovers the situation: “How had I not noticed it sooner? You’re not Stanley. You’re a real person. I can’t believe I was so mistaken. This is why you’ve been able to make correct and incorrect choices!” In these instances, the game, through the narrator, displays its awareness of video games necessitating a significant real-life input in order to work as texts. It also intricately connects this presence to its effort of telling a fictional story, interweaving the fictional and the real, extradiegetic realms. This is particularly prominently explored through the question of choice and agency in the game, which complicates the way a story can be told.

Agency, interactivity, and self-reflexivity in The Stanley Parable The self-reflexivity in The Stanley Parable extends beyond its recognition of the game as a fictional story and the player as a real entity and also includes an awareness of the game as a game, an interactive text with the potential for agency. As with the game’s previous elements, this awareness equally extends to a more abstract level, with the game metatextually discussing the (interactive) storytelling capabilities of video games as a medium in general.14 This recognition, again, is facilitated through the character of the narrator, who seemingly wants to tell a traditional linear story but whose storytelling efforts are thwarted by the reality of a player interacting with that story and choosing from among different narrative options. Such references to choice and agency generally appear throughout the game, just as the self-aware notions about the game being fictional, like in the previous instance of the narrator complaining that the player has “been able to make correct and incorrect choices,” but this overall question becomes the narrative focal point in a number of endings in particular.

14 As Rebecca Bushnell points out, however, this combination of narrative and agency does not refer exclusively to video game narratives; it “also expos[es] a fundamental tension at the heart of tragedy: that is, the conflict between a narrative’s drive toward a satisfying conclusion and its need to imply that characters are free to make choices” (2016, 5).

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In fact, two of the endings that are especially easy to reach illustrate The Stanley Parable’s awareness of (scholarly) discourses around the so-called illusion of choice in video games. The first of these, which has been dubbed the Freedom Ending by the community, occurs if players follow the narrator’s suggestions at every turn, which eventually leads to them uncovering the massive mind-control facility underneath the office complex that has been controlling all of its employees. In this ending, Stanley disables the facility and escapes the complex. After shutting down the power, Stanley reappears in a dark room, with a large door slowly opening by sliding up and revealing the sunlight outside, which gradually lightens up the room to reveal a “pastoral scene” (Hammond 2016, 193). Symbolically, the use of light and dark suggests enlightenment awaiting in the outside world, putting a positive note on this ending. The narrator, similarly, highlights the “freedom” that is waiting for Stanley: “No longer would anyone tell him where to go, what to do, or how to feel. [. . .] Stanley felt the cool breeze upon his skin, the feeling of liberation, the immense possibility of the new path before him. [. . .] And Stanley was happy.” However, as is true for most of the game, this narration, in the context of questions concerning agency, is highly ironic for a number of reasons. It purports that Stanley is now “free,” an agential being, but tells him, as it does throughout the whole game, exactly how to feel and what to do. At the same time, this particular ending can only be reached by doing exactly what the narrator tells one to do, by complying with his predetermined path. Even more significantly, though, the ending decouples the player from Stanley, foregoing the assumption that when Stanley is addressed, the player is addressed as well. This is symbolized by the controls of the game, since when players move Stanley forward to cross the threshold into the outside world, they suddenly lose control of him – the first-person camera still shows movement, but without any player input. Instead, this starts a brief cutscene that is played regardless of the player’s attempts at controlling her avatar and without her being able to change the camera or Stanley’s movement. This cutscene is used to signal a loss of control over Stanley by the player,15 but, of course, the only way to achieve “freedom” for the character Stanley is exactly this act of removing the player’s control. Overall, only by making the choice to always follow the “linear” narration – that is, not being an active agent against the will of the narrator – do players arrive here, where the freedom to choose is actually taken away in order to “free” Stanley, leaving the player, however, without any agency and compromising the illusion of choice in the game.

15 For a longer investigation of the use of cutscenes – “cinematic sequences addressing the reader, putting the player on hold” (193) – in video games, see Klevjer (2002).

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Directly after witnessing this ending, the game again restarts and resets Stanley to his office, and players might be immediately tempted to go on a similar path again but choose differently when they are forced to decide what will happen to the mind-control facility, which will lead to the so-called Explosion Ending. In fact, in the Freedom Ending, the narrator self-consciously hints at this way of playing the game as well, when he has Stanley reflect “on how many puzzles still lay unsolved” and has him ask “[w]hat other mysteries [. . .] this strange building” holds. If players choose to disobey the narrator in an attempted agential act of defiance by turning the mind-control device on in order to take control of the facility, the narrator is disappointed by players’ hubris and mocks their actual lack of control and (narrative) power. As a demonstration, he narrates that this action has activated the facility’s self-detonation mechanism, mockingly stating that this is Stanley’s “time to shine! You are the star! It’s your story now; shape it to your heart’s desires.” As with many of these references, these direct addresses by the narrator not only refer to Stanley but also to the player, suggesting that this move has indeed turned the game into “[their] story.”16 However, none of the many buttons and devices that can be interacted with in the mind-control facility have any effect on what happens in the following minutes, when the narrator simply continues to ridicule players for their lack of agency and, eventually, the facility explodes. In another moment of self-reflection, the narrator spells this out quite clearly: “You’re only still playing instead of watching a cutscene because I want to watch you for every moment that you’re powerless, to see you made humble.” Directly spelling out the possibility of “watching a cutscene” again draws attention to this monologue not just being directed to a character but to the players instead, metatextually telling them exactly how little control they have over the narrative. The significant choice of whether to shut down the facility or whether to take control of it, then, which is presented as a binary opposite, does not actually lead to different outcomes in terms of agency. One ending has players lose direct control over the player avatar Stanley, and the other has the narrator excessively point out how little control they have over anything in the game. Overall, this highlights the game’s awareness of the illusion of

16 This notion of turning a game into “one’s own story” is where much of the appeal of storytelling in video game lies for both players and game designers – in effect, it references the illusion of choice discussed earlier, the feeling created by some games that their players can freely form a story or a narrative world according to their own wishes.

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choice, of choice and agency being textual effects, with the game pointing specifically to the limits of choice in video games when both of these endings are taken together.17 Other endings in the game extend these reflections intertextually to other texts and metatextually to textuality itself. In the Games Ending, for instance, the narrator presents Stanley with adjusted versions of the game, such as adding a “competitive leaderboard [to help] you feel motivated to keep walking through doors,” and eventually briefly letting him play two other popular games within the game engine of The Stanley Parable: Minecraft and Portal. All this was prompted by the player’s insistence on disobeying the narrator’s suggestions for previous choices, with the narrator asking Stanley whether it was “worth ruining the entire story [he] had written out specifically for you” and overall displaying the game’s awareness of other stories and texts, which thus embeds the game’s discussion of agency within a larger intertextual framework.18 On the more metatextual side, the Not Stanley Ending broadens the game’s specific concerns with storytelling to the medium in general, exposing the inner workings of The Stanley Parable to make players aware of how its ludic story is constructed.19 In the last part of this ending, the player is positioned above the ceiling of the offices, looking through the walls and witnessing Stanley standing still in the room with two doors. With the player detached from their avatar, Stanley, lacking control, does not do anything, leading to the narrator to desperately plead: “Stanley, this is important. The story needs you. It needs you to make a decision. It cannot exist without you.” This direct affirmation of “the story” needing some kind of agential input – in line with much work in reader-response criticism – points to the importance of a player in order for a game to actually function as a text, to be able to exist as a meaningful cultural artefact. Simultaneously, the perspective that players take on here, looking at this scene from “above,” suggests that they are positioned outside and above the usual diegetic

17 The Out of Map Ending also draws explicit attention to this fact, offering players a binary choice and then having the narrator ask: “Will it be worth it for you to restart, and then come back here, just to do the other option?” 18 The Art Ending of the game partly works similarly – see Fest (2016, 12–19) for a detailed discussion of this ending in particular. 19 The Museum Ending also adds to this effect; it includes, among other peculiarities, an explorable set of rooms that depicts the development process of The Stanley Parable and displays various items and props from the game that appear to be from earlier versions or from beta testing, and it shows the credits of the game. Overall, the museum thus serves as another acknowledgment of the game being a game, but rather than just pointing that out verbally through the narrator, it does so visually by depicting the “behind-the-scenes” view of the game as a museum, a space that can be explored.

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layer of the game, as the narrator is not aware of their presence either, thus literalizing how players can look at and enjoy The Stanley Parable from a metatextual point of view. Notably, though, at this higher diegetic level, they cannot interact with or affect anything meaningful either – players, of course, also “need” the actual game, and they need the narrative presence of the narrator as well in order for something to happen in the story. The way to understand this scene, then, is to marvel at the operational aesthetics, to “watch the gears at work” (Mittell 2006, 35), i.e. to take pleasure not just in the content but in the form of this story when an insight is offered into how it is narratively constructed. Taken together, these different endings point to the The Stanley Parable’s self-reflection on matters of agency within and outside the realm of fiction. The game’s main interest – and its cultural work – lies not in telling, or trying to tell, one particular story, but rather in uncovering the nature of stories and storytelling in general, particularly in the medium of video games. However, unlike what the narrator suggests in the Explosion Ending, there is some agency involved in this exploration: players can choose where to go in the office and which of the endings to explore, and in which order, and they can equally choose to go back to a particular ending and try to do something differently. Compared to the gameplay options offered by most video games, this is a rather limited amount of interactivity;20 however, in terms of the narrative impact that these different choices have, it equates to a high level of (narrative) agency. The Stanley Parable, however, is also acutely aware of the limits of this agency, of the narrative choices it can offer, and rather than presenting these as convincingly as possible to players in order to create an illusion of choice, it instead chooses to consciously and directly expose its own limits, referencing the lack of “meaningful” choices in many of its endings. It is aware that all the possible narrative outcomes in the game have been predetermined, as they are written into the game as part of its code, but it also knows that it takes a player to explore these different narratives, in the process turning this code into an actual (even if not very interactive) game. Like, in a way, an “unwinnable [game]” (Domsch 2013, 180), its appeal lies in uncovering its inner workings, “its own processes” (Fest 2016, 9), and in seeing how the effort to try to tell a linear story (via the figure of the narrator) can clash with the potential for agency plotted into the game. As Jason Mittell phrases it, this focus on deriving pleasure from a text’s form, its discourse, can turn audiences

20 Connecting this to the game’s narrator, Souvik Mukherjee posits that “the story that the narrator is trying to tell constantly gets subverted by the player’s gameplay,” yet “the gameplay too gets subverted by the narrator” (2015, 101–102).

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into “amateur narratologists” (2006, 38) in the way they enjoy such a text.21 Such self-reflection on the level of form, in the context of video games, inherently entails a confrontation with a question about the boundaries and interactions between fiction and reality, positioning the player both as an agent in the game who acts out the different possibilities afforded by The Stanley Parable and, prompted by the game’s many metatextual references, as contemplating these elements from her extradiegetic position as well. In that sense, The Stanley Parable continues the line of work of many metafictional novels, which “also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text” (Waugh 2002, 2).

Conclusion The Stanley Parable discusses its own status between fiction and reality selfconsciously and further complicates this discussion by pointing to its own limits of (narrative) agency and interactivity. For the relatively large audience that this indie game found, its cultural work lies precisely in highlighting the storytelling possibilities and limitations of video games, which The Stanley Parable exposes self-reflexively by being a video game itself. Considered in a larger textual and cultural context, this investigation has pointed out how self-reflexivity in fiction, regardless of its current status in contemporary novels, is certainly not on the decline if texts from other genres and media are taken into consideration. Contemporary video games, in particular, seem to revel in these narrative experiments and explorations, and the audiences they attract appear to take pleasure in these relatively sophisticated and narratively complex set-ups. Remarkably, whereas early postmodern novels that engaged in such formal experiments were often considered too “avant-garde” to attract a large, general readership, the experimental, self-reflexive video games that engage in similar exercises often achieve commercial success,22 pointing to a potential shift in contemporary audiences’ willingness to engage with formal narrative experimentation.

21 As a case in point for such an understanding, the “Endings” page of the Stanley Parable Wiki features a user-created “story flow chart,” which neatly maps the different paths that the story can lead to (Stanley Parable Wiki 2016). 22 Some of these games, such as Alan Wake or the BioShock series, are also blockbuster titles to begin with, rather than indie games like The Stanley Parable.

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Reference List Aarseth, Espen J. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Atkins, Barry. 2003. More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bast, Florian. 2015. Of Bodies, Communities, and Voices: Agency in Writings by Octavia Butler. Heidelberg, Ger.: Universitätsverlag Winter. Bushnell, Rebecca. 2016. Tragic Time in Drama, Film, and Videogames: The Future in the Instant. London: Macmillan. Castronova, Edward. 2008. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. de Wildt, Lars A. W. J. 2014. “Precarious Play: To Be or Not to Be Stanley.” Press Start 1 (1):1–20. Accessed 14 November 2016. http://press-start.gla.ac.uk/index.php/ press-start/article/view/10. Domsch, Sebastian. 2013. Storyplaying: Agency and Narrative in Video Games. Berlin: De Gruyter. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Simon, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca. 2008. Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. New York: Routledge. Ensslin, Astrid. 2015. “Video Games as Unnatural Narratives.” In Diversity of Play, edited by Mathias Fuchs, 41–70. Lüneburg, Ger.: Meson. Fest, Bradley J. 2016. “Metaproceduralism: The Stanley Parable and the Legacies of Postmodern Metafiction.” Wide Screen 6 (1):1–23. Accessed 14 November 2016. http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/105. Fowler, Robert M. 2001. Let the Reader Understand: Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity. Hammond, Adam. 2016. Literature in the Digital Age: A Critical Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press. Harris, Neil. 1981. Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heron, Michael James, and Pauline Helen Belford. 2015. “All of Your Co-Workers Are Gone: Story, Substance, and the Empathic Puzzler.” Journal of Games Criticism 2 (1):1–29. Accessed 14 November 2016. https://openair.rgu.ac.uk/handle/10059/1326. Herrmann, Sebastian M., Katja Kanzler, and Stefan Schubert. 2015. “The Poetics of Politics.” In Poetics of Politics: Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture, edited by Sebastian M. Herrmann et al., 7–26. Heidelberg, Ger.: Universitätsverlag Winter. Huizinga, Johan. (1949) 1980. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Reprint, London: Routledge. Juul, Jesper. 2005. Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Klevjer, Rune. 2002. “In Defense of Cutscenes.” In Proceedings of Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference, edited by Frans Mäyrä, 191–202. Tampere, Fin.: Tampere University Press. Lauter, Paul. 2004. From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park: Activism, Culture, and American Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lewis, Jeff. 2008. Cultural Studies: The Basics. Los Angeles: Sage.

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Matulef, Jeffrey. 2014. “The Stanley Parable Has Sold Over a Million Copies.” Eurogamer. Accessed 29 November 2016. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-10-21-the-stanley -parable-has-sold-over-a-million-copies. Mäyrä, Frans. 2008. An Introduction to Game Studies: Games in Culture. London: Sage. Mittell, Jason. 2006. “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television.” The Velvet Light Trap 58:29–40. Mukherjee, Souvik. 2015. Video Games and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books. New York: Macmillan. Murray, Janet. 1998. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ravizza, Eleonora. 2013. “‘We Don’t Want Life to Look Difficult, Do We?’: Representations of the Fifties and Self-Reflexive Nostalgia in Mad Men.” Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies 14 (1):1–14. Accessed 14 November 2016. http://copas.uni-regensburg. de/article/view/161. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2001. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. 2003. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schubert, Stefan. 2016. “Objectivism, Narrative Agency, and the Politics of Choice in the Video Game BioShock.” In Poetics of Politics: Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture, edited by Sebastian M. Herrmann et al., 271–289. Heidelberg, Ger.: Universitätsverlag Winter. Schubert, Stefan. 2019. Narrative Instability: Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary American Popular Culture. Heidelberg, Ger.: Universitätsverlag Winter. The Stanley Parable. 2013. Galactic Cafe. Windows PC version. The Stanley Parable Wiki. 2016. “Endings.” Accessed 14 November 2016. http://thestanleypar able.wikia.com/wiki/Endings. Tompkins, Jane. 1986. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Pat Harrigan, eds. 2004. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Waugh, Patricia. 2002. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Routledge. Wolf Mark J. P., and Bernard Perron. “Introduction.” In The Video Game Theory Reader, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 1–24. New York: Routledge.

Erika Fülöp

Virtual Mirrors: Reflexivity in Digital Literature This chapter explores how, why, and to what extent reflexivity in and through programmable media, and in particular in digital literature,1 differs from reflexivity in non-digital media, and how this reflexivity and the medium itself relate to the conceptual binary of fictionality and factuality. I will first briefly present the functioning of the medium, fundamental for the ontology of the digital and the virtual, and then offer an overview of two key aspects that enable medium-specific modes of reflexivity in digital literature, processuality and interactivity. I will present these through the analysis of two works, The Readers Project by John Cayley and Daniel C. Howe and Déprise / Loss of Grasp by Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert. Werner Wolf’s conceptual framework on metareference, which purports to be applicable across all media to describe self-reflexivity, will serve as a test to measure media specificity. I argue that the digital medium escapes this theory, which was conceived based on, and remains limited to, the logic of representation. The programmable digital medium goes beyond that logic, into what Baudrillard calls the logic of simulation, and requires taking medium-specific affordances into account.

1 I use this term as a shorthand for “digital language arts” (Cayley, 2015b) or “electronic literature,” the distinction of which from digital arts is admittedly not clear-cut. “Electronic literature” has been defined by the Electronic Literature Organisation (ELO) as “work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer” (Hayles 2008, 3). Hayles and the ELO themselves problematize this definition, however, recognizing the difficulty of defining both the “literary” and the computer’s relevant “capabilities and contexts.” I will not enter that discussion here, because on the one hand both works chosen for the demonstration of my argument are well recognized pieces of electronic literature much discussed as such by the scholarly community, and on the other hand, it is not essential for my argument that they be considered as literary pieces. The argument based on the affordances of the medium applies to any artefact that builds on them. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722031-015

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The poetics and ontology of the digital Code, software, and writing digital Any writing that involves the digital medium has to work with its double nature, combining the “computer layer” and the “cultural layer,” to use Lev Manovich’s expressions (2002, 45). This means that any creative process must take into consideration the relationship and translation process between the two layers, and the result will also be dependent on their communication. The cultural layer, which appears to the user as “content,” is grounded in, and limited by, the computer layer. If the former is the space where (fictional and/or factual) representations can be (re)produced, the latter is the (real-world) computational framework which enables that production. The computer layer is further a combination of hardware and software: a machine that carries and executes orders, and a set of instructions that the programmer writes. The communication between the machine and the software happens through a translation of the human-written code into binary code,2 which the machine can read and execute by switching electrical currents on and off, generating the output that will appear on the screen in the form of human-readable representations and human-executable requests for input and interaction. Such layering has a number of implications relevant for the questions raised here. First of all, anything that appears to the user is the result of not only the process of writing the code, but also a process of execution that happens in real time as the software runs. At each moment in time, the software takes into consideration the current state of the machine and executes commands in light of that state. Weissberg (2002) considers this feature, and the fact that the instructions inscribed in the software can themselves be treated as data by that same software, to be constituent of the computer’s fundamental reflexivity. As a result of this process, even something static on the screen is always the product of an ongoing performance by the machine, and the output might also be different each time based on the same code. This performativity also means reactivity and interactivity: the code can enable or even require the user to intervene in the process and will take that intervention into account in what happens next. It can also draw data from real-time information streams which will be unique to each moment of each execution and again, the output will differ accordingly.

2 On the difference between code and software, see Berry (2015, 29–33).

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Secondly, the same kind of code underlies all the possible types of media output, including textual, visual, and audio content. At the level of binary code, the material and perceptual differences between different types of media are flattened out, given the same mode of existence. Kay and Goldberg (1977) therefore call the digital computer a “metamedium,” Manovich (2013) develops this approach further, and Berry (2015) uses the term “supermedium” for code in a similar sense. Programmable media is thus not just one more on the list of previously existing media but integrates them all, translating them into its own language. Thirdly, the execution depends not only on the code, but also on the hardware it runs on, including its type, speed, and user interface and input and output devices. In addition to the differences depending on user interaction and real-time data, the execution will thus also differ according to the machine, providing different user experiences. Stephanie Strickland’s (2006) eleven-point summary highlights further aspects of the complexity of “Writing the Virtual,” due to electronic literature’s “continual construction (poiesis) by its creators and receivers.” This “architectonic writing builds ‘instruments,’ to be ‘played,’” which means that “[t]ime, become active, stratigraphic, and topologic, is written multiply” and “[w]riting and receiving are real-time performative events.” Through such writing a “[s]oft ephemeral space in any number of dimensions is created and disassembled or dispersed inside an overall default situation of hybrid states of mixed reality.” Before narrowing our focus to processuality and interactivity, which I argue differentiate “virtual writing” and the poetics of digital literature from analogue representational media, let us consider briefly the nature of this “soft ephemeral space” of “hybrid states of mixed reality.” So far, I mainly used the term “digital” and “programmable” to talk about the medium, while Strickland speaks about writing the “virtual.” The three terms are closely associated and often used to describe the same phenomena, but while the first two are directly related to the technology, the last one draws attention to the ontology of the space invested and generated. “Virtual” also has a complex history with semantic ramifications, which itself may lead to confusion and therefore requires clarification.

What is “the virtual”? In addition to “digital,” “virtual” as an adjective competes with at least two prefixes, cyber- and hyper-, notably in “cyberspace” and “hyperreality.” Rather than being clearly distinct in their meaning, each of the three latter terms evokes a different theoretical tradition. Born well before the Internet and even the

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massification of personal computing,3 “cyberspace” was inspired by the cybernetic tradition associated with Norbert Wiener. After William Gibson’s oft-cited fictional vision of cyberspace as “[a] consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators” (Gibson 1995, 51), Bruce Sterling defines what it became in reality: Cyberspace is the “place” where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person’s phone, in some other city. The place between the phones. The indefinite place out there, where the two of you, two human beings, actually meet and communicate. (Sterling 2014 [1992], n.p., emphases in the original)

Cyberspace is then this “third space” that relies on physical systems but represents an experiential space for users in interaction with each other and the machines that we also distinguish from physical space. Hyperreality, on the other hand, originates in Jean Baudrillard’s pessimistic vision of the future based on the boom of multimedia, elaborated years before the birth of the Internet or even the spread of personal computers. Baudrillard directly associates the hyperreal with simulation, “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality.” (1994 [1981], 1). Simulation (and the hyperreal) is not opposed to the real as fiction is, and since in a world of what Baudrillard calls third-order simulacra, the real is “no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all.” (Baudrillard 1994 [1981], 2). Baudrillard does not take into account a distinction in the meaning of “simulation” that both French and English dictionaries highlight today: the “[i]mitation of a situation or process” may be (1) “The action of pretending; deception,” and (2) “The production of a computer model of something, especially for the purpose of study” (OED). The Trésor de la langue française distinguishes the two with the notes “Avec idée de tromperie” [With the idea of deceit] and “Sans idée de tromperie” [Without the idea of deceit] respectively.4 Conflating the two senses, Baudrillard sees all technological simulation to be deceitful by definition. At the same time, he emphasizes, and indeed builds his entire theory on, another, medical distinction he cites from the Littré dictionary: “Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms.” (cit. Baudrillard 1994, 3). The first one belongs to the order of representation: the “real” situation of being ill is “copied” so that the person looks like he is ill, while in

3 The term is usually attributed to Gibson but was used earlier by two Danish artists in a predigital sense as a space of communication (Lillemose and Kryger 2015). 4 Unless otherwise stated, all translations from the French are mine.

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reality he has no symptoms. In the second case, some processes will have been initiated in the body that produce a real fever, coughing, or other symptoms. While Baudrillard’s theory has been much criticized and represents a dystopian vision I do not adhere to, I will argue that both his conflation of the two senses of “simulation” and the cited distinction between representation and simulation are useful for thinking not only about digital artefacts, their relation to the traditional opposition between fiction and reality and fictional and factual discourse, but also their reflexivity. We have seen that the major difference that sets the programmable (meta)medium apart from analogue media is that everything happens through a constantly ongoing process of translation between code and computer, and related to that, the potential for interactive engagement. Rather than just producing representations – predefined and therefore passive images (be they still or animated), and/or texts, and/or sounds – computers enact and (re)produce processes. They can do so at two levels: first, they inevitably execute the code, but this code itself might, secondly, be the algorithmic simulation of a process modelled on, or reminiscent of, some other process. In this case, the creator of the software does not create a representational image or recording, but an algorithm that will initiate a process carried out in real time and the outcome of which may be unique to each execution. Ian Bogost calls this phenomenon “procedural representation,” which explains processes with other processes. Procedural representation is a form of symbolic expression that uses process rather than language. [. . .] Procedural representation itself requires inscription in a medium that actually enacts processes rather than merely describe them. [. . .] Procedural representation is significantly different from textual, visual, and plastic representation. Even though other inscription techniques may be partly or wholly driven by a desire to represent human or material processes, only procedural systems like computer software actually represent process with process. This is where the particular power of procedural authorship lies, in its native ability to depict processes. (Bogost 2007, 9, 14)

Bogost subsumes this under the broader category of representation, but I suggest, following Baudrillard, that this “operational simulation” (2016 [1993], 79) represents a more radical break from the order of representation. If it is not quite “the end of signification” overall, as Baudrillard (2016 [1993], 79) would have it, it is certainly a mode of signification which the order of representation and semiosis as we know them traditionally are not equipped to grasp. The disconnect between the mode of functioning of creative digital artefacts and Wolf’s metareference

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framework will illustrate the limits of such representational thinking through the prism of reflexivity.5 Baudrillard’s dystopian image of a world without the real is turned on its head in contemporary discourses on immersive artificial environments that aim to create a “hyperreality that will enrich – rather than diminish – our lives” (Foundry 2017). Such artificial environments today include technologies of virtual reality (VR) in the narrow sense, where the whole environment is computergenerated and the user is fully immersed;6 augmented reality (AR), where virtual objects are overlaid on a physical environment; or mixed reality (MR), where the user can also interact with the virtual objects added to the physical environment. Before the boom of these technologies, Ryan (2006, 227) already noted how VR promises to realize “the metaleptic dream of a corporeal, and therefore literal, passage into an imaginary world.” Roberto Diodato (2012, 4) further notes that the “virtual bodies” VR technologies create require us to think differently about the Körper–Leib and the perception–imagination relations. The very foundations of how we used to distinguish our perception of reality from representations of real and fictional phenomena are thus called into question. “Virtual reality” also has a broader use, however, which matches Gibson’s and Stirling’s cyberspace. As Downes explains this second sense: virtual realities are alternative or complementary social spaces. In this sense, cyberspace is a kind of meta-virtual reality wherein people can use computer-mediated communications to interact with one another in alternate and complementary social spaces. (2005, 6)

Yet this double technological sense of the virtual is still just one of three meanings that meet in the term. Marie-Laure Ryan (2001, 13) identifies the two other, historical uses: (1) the optical sense, “the virtual as illusion,” from which the connotation of fakeness emerged; and (2) the “scholastic” sense, “the virtual as potentiality.”

5 I do not consider simulation and representation to be mutually exclusive orders, however: simulations can and do contain representations in their outputs, which are the result of the software’s inevitable translation process, but which on the surface do not necessarily act differently from representations in non-digital media and may be subject to the same kinds of interpretation. 6 This can be considered to constitute a different ontology of language, according to Cayley: “Imagine a letter floating before our eyes in the immersive visual space of the Cave, the representation of an atom of language, but presented to us in a new world, in a world of what I will call ‘breaking media.’ This is a novel experience, a new phenomenology of language, and thus it would allow the proper application of the word ‘new’ as in ‘new media.’ The letter floating in space is not remediation; it is a novel mediation of language because it represents graphically embodied language in a way that is entirely unfamiliar, cut loose, as I put it, from the gravity of the leaf.” (Cayley 2015a, 203)

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Just as deceit and technology merge in Baudrillard’s influential concept of simulation, “virtual” historically encompasses both fakeness and potentiality. While it might seem to be misguided to think about digital phenomena through pre-digital uses of the term, I suggest that the fact that these remain so present in our thinking about simulations and the virtual can be considered emblematic, rather than merely a mistake. It is a symptom of the difficulty we face when trying to apply the traditional, representation-based opposition between the “real” and the “fictional” to digitally created virtual simulations. The questions of technology, ontology, and poetics thus meet in the concept of the virtual, just as technology, ontology, and politics meet in Baudrillard’s concept of simulation, reflecting the complexity and elusiveness of an experience that has now become natural and yet remains perplexing with its unprecedented combination of the material and the immaterial, the visible and the invisible, the fixed and the dynamic, the prescribed and the controllable. I contend that through a creative process and an output which involve reflection on and of technology, poetics, and aesthetics, digital literature addresses precisely these relations grounded in the processuality of simulation and the virtual. While the fiction-or-fact question raised by reflexive representations may be problematized by digital works as well, the performative nature of such works generates new ontological and discursive complexities. Our reality has become more complex with the emergence of processual media and virtual spaces, and the way we practice and think about discourses needs to take into account these new layers of complexity in our world and in the artworks. Moreover, such creative uses of the technology explore the virtual at two levels at the same time. First, they engage all three dimensions of the concept and show their interrelatedness in the inventive-illusory enactment, or dramatization,7 of the process of actualization of potentials through computer-generated performative and interactive virtual objects. Second, by experimenting with the (meta)medium, they explore the virtualities or potentials of virtual space and virtual objects.

7 Deleuze opposes this method of thinking through “spatio-temporal dynamisms” to representational thought: “Given any concept, we can always discover its drama, and the concept would never be divided or specified in the world of representation without the dramatic dynamisms that thus determine it in a material system beneath all possible representation.” “Through dramatization, the Idea is incarnated or actualized,” rather than simply discursively (re)presented (Deleuze 2004, 94, 98; emphases in the original). See also the application of this concept to (non-digital) metafiction in Fülöp (2014).

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Digital reflexivities Werner Wolf’s metareference theory and analytical toolkit (Wolf 2009, 1–85) is an ambitious theoretical framework on reflexivity that claims to be applicable across the media. Wolf proposes “metareference” as a neutral term that focuses on “the logical nature of the phenomenon” distinguishing between object- and metalevel (15), to replace the multiplicity of alternatives (self-reflexivity, selfreflection, self-reference, metarepresentation, etc.) and encompass the various subcategories (metafiction, metanarrative, metafilm, etc.). He defines it as a special, transmedial form of usually non-accidental self-reference produced by signs or sign configurations which are (felt to be) located on a logically higher level, a “metalevel,” within an artefact or performance; this self-reference, which can extend from this artefact to the entire system of the media, forms or implies a statement about an object-level, namely on (aspects of) the medium/system referred to. Where metareference is properly understood, an at least minimal corresponding “meta-awareness” is elicited in the recipient. (Wolf 2009, 31; emphasis in the original)

Wolf defines four criteria alongside which metareferential works in any media can be described and analyzed: 1. Scope of metareference: intracompositional (or direct) vs extracompositional (indirect) metareference. The former “operates within the work under discussion” (Wolf 2009, 38), as in George Eliot’s Adam Bede, with the narrator saying: “With this drop of ink at the end of my pen I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr Jonathan Burge” (cited by Wolf 2009, 37), while the latter “goes beyond the confines of the work” (Wolf 2009, 38), as does Flann O’Brien’s narrator in At Swim-Two-Birds: “One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with.” (cited by Wolf 2009, 37) 2. Semantic discernability: explicit vs implicit metareference. The above examples are both clearly discernible and therefore explicit, while the implicit kind is what Linda Hutcheon termed “covert metafiction,” which works through the “salient foregrounding of the medium” (Wolf 2009, 40), such as Sterne’s typographical devices in Tristram Shandy. 3. Content of metareference: fictio (mediality-centered) vs fictum (truth/fiction-centered) metareference. The former, which “implies a statement on, and elicits the idea of, mediality and the ontological artefact status of the work in question” is, in Wolf’s view, always by definition present in metareference. The second involves additional reference to “the truth-value of the work under discussion or its ‘fictionality’ in the conventional sense” (Wolf 2009, 41).

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4. Frequent functions of metareference: critical vs non-critical metareference. Wolf highlights that while metareference is often attributed a critical function, especially in postmodernism, it may also simply play the role of explaining aesthetic innovations or claiming authenticity, as it happens in realist novels (Wolf 2009, 43). Despite the different perspectives, these criteria remain largely focused on semantic questions rather than on how the metareference functions. The scope of metareference might seem a structural question, and it does raise the issue of the limits of the work – assuming that they exist and are identifiable – but when that assumption is satisfied, it remains a question of content, asking whether the reflexive element refers to the work itself (i.e. “this story,” “this novel”) or to a larger context (ex. “novel” or “literature” in general). Such a semantic focus overall might be necessary for the framework to be (theoretically) applicable across various media, each of which will use their different means and affordances to produce metareferentiality. This is one general theoretical and practical limitation of such a framework. Considered through the lenses of digital literature, however, these criteria will reveal not only a number of assumptions as to the nature of the artefact that they can be applied to, but also some shortcomings in terms of their semantic scope. Markku Eskelinen sums up the limitations of Wolf’s approach to intermediality in general: digital meta-media complicates Wolf’s theories of intermediality in three ways [. . .]. To Wolf, media are primarily specified by their underlying semiotic systems (verbal language, music, visual signs etc.) that are conventionally separate carriers of cultural content. The first complication is that each of these separate semiotic systems can now employ several media – as we have seen there’s more than one literary medium for written language alone. Second, in non-digital media different kinds of sign were either distinct or fused together (resulting in various hybrids), but not capable of being transformed multiple times back and forth into each other with or without the user’s effort. Third, the networked computers’ metamedial capacity to imitate and combine (and recombine) the elements of any distinct medium and the whole behavioral (or media-positional) repertoire of these media complicates the situation even further. (Eskelinen 2012, 328)

In an earlier article Eskelinen also specified the assumptions that underlie literary theory regarding its object of study, and which, despite all of Wolf’s efforts to move away from the literary origins of narratology, remain present in his intermedial framework: even the state of the art literary theories of today are ultimately based on literary objects that are static, determinate, intransient and random access with impersonal perspective, no links and utilising only the interpretative user function. To this one special type of

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object cybertext theory adds 575 rather fresh alternatives capable of undermining and shaking many basic assumptions and presuppositions derived from the print era. (Eskelinen 2004)

He identifies eight major shifts to deal with: from static to intratextual and textual dynamics, from determinate to indeterminate texts, from intransient to transient time, from random to controlled access, from impersonal to personal perspective, and from no links to links and conditional links. (Eskelinen 2004)

While Wolf’s edited volume on metareference contains a contribution on computer games which are beyond these shifts (Jannidis 2009), the author’s approach remains largely thematic, focusing on the cultural significance of metareference in video games – also without using Wolf’s analytic framework beyond adopting the term itself. Other theorists, notably Marie-Laure Ryan (2001; 2006; 2007) and Astrid Ensslin (2014) have, on the other hand, made significant steps towards opening the narratological approach to digital literature (as well as digital literature to narratology). They achieve this by combining narratology with a ludological perspective and taking into account the specificities of programmable media, with attention to the processual, performative, and interactive aspects of the works. Ensslin’s focus, while she observes that “ludoliterary texts tend to display complex self-referential and extratextual meanings, which can be best understood when seeing the text as a sophisticated, networked media ecology” (2014, 167–168, n. 7), is not reflexivity. Meanwhile, in a book chapter on selfreflexivity in net.art, Ryan identifies three “continuums” alongside which selfreflexive phenomena in net.art can be described: “the continuum of explicitness, the continuum of scope, and the continuum of individuation” (2007, 270). These largely match Wolf’s categories cited above, presented as axes rather than as binaries, with the exception of the missing critical axis, and Ryan’s analyses also remain primarily thematic here, concentrating on the self-reflexive “message” of the works. In Avatars of Story, she offers a more interesting approach to codework as an example of tangled hierarchy between the computer layer and the cultural layer, analysing the various degrees of engagement between the two that result in reflexivity (Ryan 2006, 218–224).8 Katherine Hayles (2008, esp. 131–157) and Manuel Portela (2013) offer further, not narratologically focused readings of reflexive electronic literary works, with great attention to their technological and programmed nature and the resulting complexity in the process of meaning-making and reception. Neither considers, however,

8 I will not elaborate on codework here, see also Berry (2015 [2011]) and Cayley (2002) on the subject.

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the intertwining of the ontological, epistemological, and poetic questions raised by the virtual nature of these works, understood in the triple sense of the term, and their related reflexive mechanisms – which is what I propose in the following sections.

Virtualities of virtual processes One of the earliest and still influential approaches to digital literature is convergence theory (see Bouchardon 2014a, 16–19), which opposes print text to hypertext. The latter would be “[a]n almost embarrassingly literal reification or actualization of contemporary literary theory” (Landow cited by Bouchardon 2014a, 17) of critics such as Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, and Lyotard, which would make it ab ovo reflexive. Bolter (1991, 190) similarly argues that “[i]f print disguised these ‘natural’ qualities of thought [the associative processes of the mind], hypertext made them transparent.” This approach was later criticized especially for the lack of consideration for the specificities of the technology (hardware, platform, code, interface etc.) that determines the possibilities and limits of digital textuality. Bouchardon argues that “hypertext and hypermedia are not another text and media, but a specific modality of textualization and mediatization” (2014a, 20). This does not mean that digital literature does not play with previously only mentally accessible and conceivable processes related to the production and reception of textuality. But it does not visualize nor does it perform them as such – and this is where the different senses of the virtual can be seen to collapse, by the same token as the works’ reflexivity, through which the “playing with” manifests itself, escapes a static semiotic-representational approach and the fictionality–factuality opposition. The Readers Project by John Cayley and Daniel Howe,9 “an essay in digital language art” (Cayley and Howe, 2009–2018, “Artist Statement”), exemplifies this well. By launching the “readers live” (Figure 1), the human reader-viewer is faced with two columns of text in dark grey font on a black background – a color combination that does not make it easy to read – which begins in lower case, suggesting that we are being thrown in the middle of the text or only are given a fragment. Words in the text begin to be highlighted in different colors in an order that seems impossible to decipher through simple observation. A separate side panel on the right titled “Focused Reader” lists words and expressions

9 http://thereadersproject.org/.

Figure 1: Readers live (The Readers Project).

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picked up from the text. A round button in the upper left corner of the screen opens a menu of “Readers Options,” where the user can untick any or all of the five “readers” (Perigram Reader, Oblique Perigram Reader, Simple Spawning Reader, Spawning Perigram Reader, and Mesostic Jumper10), each of which is associated with a color and offers a speed setting and the option of feeding into the Focused Reader. We also have a choice of three texts for the readers. The overall impression of the (scripted) readers’ work is one of a complex movement in, and gappy progression through, a text that one never gets to read in full, but which produces dynamic and colorful textual patterns on the one hand, and a new textual stream on the other, which the interplay between a vague semantic coherence and fragmentation endows with a certain poetic power. What the viewer understands is that the scripted readers’ complex but visibly not simply random algorithms extract a virtually infinite text from another, finite one, fundamentally transforming it in both form and content. The website’s visitor does not immediately land on this page, however. On the homepage, the artists present the work as follows: The Readers Project is a collection of distributed, performative, quasi-autonomous poetic “readers” – active, procedural entities with distinct reading behaviors and strategies. We release these readers onto inscribed surfaces that are explicitly or implicitly, visibly or invisibly, constituted by their texts. [. . .] Each reader follows traces of linguistic and poetic structure – symbolic idealities – that define their specific focus of attention. Since the their [sic] behaviors are derived from a necessarily partial, aesthetically implicated analysis of human reading, they explore and reveal certain contours and outlines of linguistic materiality’s “other dimensions,” in work that we propose to be significant, affective, and literary. (Cayley and Howe, 2009–2018, “About the Project. Overview,” emphases mine)

Manuel Portela (2013, 346) argues that “by programming readings of the text, Cayley and Howe exteriorize the inner workings of reading in the outer surface of writing.” They do indeed, in one sense – but admittedly not the workings of human reading, as Portela’s wording suggests, reminiscent of the convergence theory. At first sight, the readers may easily seem to be visualizing some aspects of the mental process of reading. But they do not emulate human reading, and they do not try to do so. They are the result of reflections on a culturally and historically bound practice of the reading process and its also culturally and historically bound interpretation in two stages: first a consideration of the book format and how the human eye follows the typographic layout of Latin alphabetic

10 The readers have changed over time – only three match Portela’s (2013) list and the authors keep developing new ones.

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writing, then a translation-adaptation of this process into terms which an algorithm can process. The latter involved developing the concept of “typographic neighbourhood,” which provides the basis for the scripting of the reading action using the model of cellular automata, and the concept of perigram, “a short sequence of statistically probable natural language” (Cayley and Howe 2009–2018, “Perigram Reader”) identified in the typographic neighborhood based on Google Books occurrences. In other words, the readers involve at least as much reflection on and of the materiality and algorithmic manipulability of textuality and reliance on the largest virtual knowledge base as they are a reflection on human reading. Ultimately, programmable media and the dynamic virtual objects they can create can never “exteriorize” or enact in any way human cognitive processes, which by definition involve a human body, world experience, and memory. They can only ever explore the virtuality – the potential and limits – of the digital medium itself, inevitably inspired by human modes of thinking and functioning. But any such inspiration needs to be translated into scriptable mechanisms and machine language, and the limits of translatability are the limits of the machine and of the simulations it can offer. This then is the meeting point for the virtual as illusion and the virtual as potential to be played with and dramatized in the virtual space. The readers are not “simulators” in the sense a flight simulator for pilot training would be, where the simulation needs to be as close to reality as possible to be able to play its role. They are simulacra in the Baudrillardian sense, with no pre-existing process that they would reproduce. Insofar as the project’s very title, coupled with the fact that the algorithms’ themselves are called “readers,” make the human reader think of them as representations of the humans’ own reading mechanisms, these algorithmic readers prove to be an “illusion” or “fake” simulations. This is an illusion dispelled practically as soon as it emerges, however; an illusion that does not really pretend to be what it is not – other than by the names – and in this sense the readers may also be considered fictional under the pragmatic definition of fictionality as “intentionally signalled, communicated invention” (Zetterberg Gjerlevsen and Nielsen, 2020). At the same time, the readers are entirely factual: they execute an actual code and carry out an effective series of calculations and text production that require very real material conditions. The binary opposition between fictional and factual does not seem adequate to describe this work, which indeed mobilizes all three senses of the virtual. Let us see then what Wolf’s intermedial framework can tell us about this work and its reflexivity: 1. Scope of metareference: Where to locate the reading and writing processes? The project is both about the reading of this particular work – which itself

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consists in the reading of either a pre-existing primary text or one written specifically for this purpose – and the reading of the machine’s reading of this text and of our own reading of both the text and the machine’s reading process and generated output. It is about reading, writing, language, and the computer’s and the digital economy’s relationship to them. In this sense, it is both “intracompositional” and “extracompositional” – and at the same time, neither of these, as “composition” suggests something complete(d), rather than in/a process. The code can be regarded as a composition, and the website does have its well locatable host and measurable dimensions in terms of data. The work is not (just) the code, however, but its execution, which in this case also draws on web-based resources and can go on virtually infinitely. Since the virtual space allows for infinite production from within a finite physical space, the analogue opposition between inside and outside fails to apply. 2. Semantic discernability: Does the fact of calling the “readers” readers make for explicit reflexivity? Do the project descriptions, which explain their purpose and functioning, belong to the work? They are positioned on the Project’s homepage, while the “Readers live” is a page within the site, so that the visitor is invited to read about the conception before exploring the work. But the work is clearly presented as a conceptual one, and the artists do not expect the users to understand the mechanisms just from looking at the work in execution. Explicit, then, yes and no: the work is entirely open about what it does and that it is a reflection on what it does, but it is not the actual algorithms of the “Readers live” that reveal it. 3. Content of metareference: As we have seen, this is not a work of fiction in the traditional sense, although it does contain signaled inventedness in the algorithms. It is clearly mediality centered insofar as it problematizes the medium’s potential to produce “reading” mechanisms and think about textuality, but this works only through the “invented” readers, which rely on factual computing power. 4. Functions of metareference: The work is presented as “both a celebration and a critique of the institutions of reading and writing,” which “provides a model for the understanding and critique of other reading agents on the net, as they are silently or pointedly deployed, both by big software and by the even less benevolently motivated engineers of the Dark Net.” (Howe and Cayley 2013) It thus admittedly both reflects on and challenges the reading process, both as practiced by humans and by machines, parasitizing human communication – which they also use to generate a new text with literary potential. The authors emphasize, however, that no “function” is targeted discursively and representationally, but only through action:

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“These quiet readers, by demonstrating how they read, and by generating new readings, perform aesthetically and also ‘act.’ In doing so, perhaps, they can help us to do the same.” (Howe and Cayley 2013; my emphases) As opposed to Wolf’s emphasis on representational content, Manuel Portela’s analysis highlights the reflexive character of the project from the human reader’s perspective with an emphasis on the process: Since these readings of the machine are offered as writing to human readers, the writing of reading and the reading as writing contained in The Readers Project turns readers into metareaders who are forced to read their own act of reading the program reading. (Portela 2013, 346)

The three occurrences of the verb “read” in the last clause have a different meaning each – metaphorical for the first, referring to the human cognitive act of reading for the second, and to the algorithms’ action on the text for the third – and we have seen that the latter two especially are not to be confused. But their combination underscores again that the key element in producing this reflexivity is precisely the work’s processual and performative capability. Overall, the scripted readers and The Readers Project as a whole do not “refer”; they do. They perform an action on the text that visualizes some of the hundreds of thousands of eligible word combinations (Cayley 2010) that can be considered as the text’s virtual linguistic and literary halo. It is an ongoing enactment or dramatization of the birth of the actual – virtually, in the virtual space. This “mirror” of the reading process thus turns out to be only a “virtual” one in yet another sense then, in line with the OED’s first definition of the adjective as “almost or nearly as described, but not completely or according to strict definition” (my emphasis).

Virtual Interactivity According to Espen Aarseth’s often quoted definition, the requirement of a “nontrivial effort” from the reader-user “to traverse the text” (1997, 1) is the very specificity of what he calls “ergodic literature,” to which digital literary creations belong. Weissberg (2002) further specifies that not all that matches Aarseth’s criteria of ergodicity is interactive and requiring the presence of a computer programme between the human and the object being interacted with, so that the latter is capable of a change of state and response to the former. Stefan Schubert’s paper in this volume interprets The Stanley Parable’s reflexivity from the vantage point of agency and examines how the game’s use of interactivity, combined with

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the narrator’s commanding and theoretically aware discourse, results in a complex questioning of the interplay between fictional and factual action and shapes the story and the game’s outcome. If The Stanley Parable can itself be considered a literary game (Ensslin 2015) playing with “illusory agency,” (MacCallum-Stewart and Parsler 2007), Serge Bouchardon and Vincent Volckaert’s Loss of Grasp (2010)11 is the digital literary thematization, amplification, and virtual enactment of this concept and experience. Consisting of six “scenes,” this work presents the story of a man having the impression of losing control over his life, realizing that his wife remains unknown to him after twenty years of marriage and his son feels alienated from him as well. This narrative core can be understood from the textual elements of the work, including written and spoken words: the first date with the woman to become the narrator’s wife, from which we get fragments of a conversation in the second scene, after the first one’s brief first-person narratorial reflections on how everything seems to be escaping him, then the strange letter from her in the third scene which can be read in two directions and in two opposite senses as a love letter or as a break-up note, to scene four’s transcription of the son’s homework on heroes, read between the lines by the narrator as an expression of his son’s disappointment with him, then scene five’s reflections on his self-image, and finally the closing scene affirming that he is taking back control over his life. What is more interesting, however, are the ways in which the work puts its reader in a position where they are obliged to enact the loss of grasp the narrative thematises. In scene one, moving the mouse and clicking first helps generate the next (predefined) sentence on the black screen and create colorful spots, but these soon become independent of the user’s action and happen alone, simultaneously with the text’s progression from the narrator’s previous control over his life to his current sense of everything slipping away. The user’s loss of control over what happens on the screen thus mirrors the life experience described in the text. At the end of the scene, three choices are offered as to when “your” date should arrive – in ten years, in three hours, or now – but whichever the user chooses, the same scene two will happen. There, the mouse action will have the effect of scrambling the questions the narrator poses to the woman he meets for the first time, showing his confusion under the effect of her beauty. Then clicking on a big question mark on the screen, further questions in color begin to appear and moving the mouse in an area of the screen will gradually reveal a woman’s portrait as if painted by the multiplicity of superimposed questions (Figure 2).

11 https://bouchard.pers.utc.fr/deprise/home

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Figure 2: Loss of Grasp, scene two.

The letter in the following scene, twenty years later, changes again according to the user’s action on the mouse: moving it to the lower half of the screen, the order of sentences is inversed, together with the meaning of the love letter into a break-up note, and the accompanying sounds of “Habanera” from Bizet’s Carmen are also distorted accordingly. In scene four, the son’s text on heroes explodes when the user clicks on it, and a short sentence is formed in the remaining hole from the flying letters, as if revealing another message under the surface, expressing the son’s alienation from his father (“I don’t love you,” “I don’t want anything from you,” etc.) (Figure 3). Scene five then, where the narrator wonders about his own image, brings the user on camera and moving the mouse distorts the picture. Finally, in scene six, when the narrator decides that “[i]t’s time to take control again,” moving the mouse will make random letters appear on its trace. This ends with the sentence “Stop going around in circles,” when a text window with a cursor invites the user to start typing. Whatever keys they hit, however, the same text will appear, stating that “I make choices / I control my emotions [. . .] At last, I have a grasp . . ., ” where the text fades out and we reach the end of the work.

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Figure 3: Loss of Grasp, scene four.

Rather than working through simple textual and visual semiotic and rhetorical means then, which the user can and need only to interpret and reinterpret, this work does and makes the user do things, both offering them a sense of agency and denying them that agency, while giving them another kind of agency. Throughout the piece, the user’s (inter)activity works in conjunction with the text to constitute meaning. Bouchardon (2014b) himself has theorized the semiotic-rhetorical potential of “gestural manipulation” in digital fiction, proposing a “five-level analysis model” that builds up the “rhetoric of interactive writing” from the basic semiotic unit of the “gesteme” (“the coupling of a physical act and an input interface (for example, the act of moving the mouse or pressing a key” (163)), through their sequence constituting an “acteme,” which can be combined into “semiotic units of manipulation” (SUMs), “bring[ing] to mind actions in the physical world” (164), and then further into “media couplings” of SUMs with media content. All of this comes to constitute the “interactive discourse” of the whole work. The key feature in the interactive discourse of Loss

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of Grasp is nonconventional media coupling, where “the reader is confronted with a figure that relies on a gap between his or her expectations while manipulating and the result on screen” (172), culminating in a “perturbator” gesteme in which the software “take[s] control [and] perform[s] an act that seems incompatible with the user’s instructions” (164). This framework reflects the creators’ perspective and the process of conceptualization and translation that needs to think simultaneously both the computer’s and the code’s (semiotic) functioning and the desired output. The latter will in this case appear to the user as a virtual object or “operational simulation” (Baudrillard 1994) including sounds, animated texts, and images to interact with. The “reception” of all this by the user is, then, very different from the semiotic interpretation involved in non-processual, non-interactive representational media. As Hayles (2008, 133) points out, “[t]o know something in the body is not the same as to know it in the conscious mind, just as to know something consciously is not the same as knowing it in the body.” Gestures call upon a “technological nonconscious” (Hayles 2008, 135), an understanding through the body as much as through the intellect, reliant on the virtual halo of our interactions with the machine, as it were, which defines our expectations – here mostly disrupted – based on conventions and experience as to the machine’s re-action. Semiotics as meaning-making through referring and representational thought cannot do justice to the (inter)active process through which meaning emerges here. The application of Wolf’s criteria will highlight again their insufficiency to grasp Loss of Grasp: 1. Scope of metareference: We have seen that this criterion, implying that the composition has clear limits, becomes a problem with processuality. Sophie Lavaud-Forest highlights how interactivity further opens a dialogue, and therewith, the work: L’œuvre s’étend, se complexifie, devient système. Elle englobe son environnement réquisitionnant la présence, les actions et les comportements de l’interacteur sans lequel elle demeure fœtale. Le cadre, le parergon, c’est l’interacteur. Il donne lieu à l’œuvre. Il la fait exister. Il l’aborde et il la borde, il construit la forme, la forme de l’histoire. Et cette forme n’est plus seulement réflexive, mais dialogique. (Lavaud-Forest 2015, 33) [The work expands, becomes more complex, becomes a system. It encompasses its environment, appropriating the interactor’s presence, actions, and behaviors, without which it would remain fetal. The frame, the parergon, is the interactor. The interactor makes the work happen. He makes it exist. He approaches it and defines its limits, constructs its form, the form of the story. And this form is no longer simply reflexive, but dialogical.]

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If the work’s “border” involves the user and their contribution, however, this will change with each actualization and the “composition” cannot be extracted from this dialogicity. 2. Semantic discernability: Can we call a “message” that passes through bodily action and knowledge “explicit”? Is the explosion of a text and the appearance of another an explicit indication of what it suggests? The user will most likely get the “message,” but we need to think in terms of the directness and success of the processes and interactive potential built in the algorithms, rather than in terms of an opposition between implicit and explicit, which remain grounded in representational thinking. 3. Content of metareference: Interactivity, as we have seen, establishes a direct link between content and medium and builds on their intertwining. The user’s actions are constitutive of the sense and reflexivity of the work no less than the animated texts, images, and sounds: it is their very intertwining that makes Loss of Grasp self-reflexive. 4. Frequent functions of metareference: This work can be “read” as a critical commentary in and through action on the illusion of agency facing the digital tool. This critique is not discursively stated, however, and we find ourselves facing again the (wrong) question of the “semantic discernability” of this “procedural rhetoric.” It seems more fruitful again to observe how all three senses of the virtual are mobilized: the work thematizes, dramatizes, and makes us enact and live through the experience of losing grasp in and through technology, actualizing the actions inscribed in the software as its virtuality in the scholastic-Deleuzian sense of potential, calling upon a repertoire of available modes of interaction, while revealing our interactive gestures to be mere illusions of action, with the actual progression of the narrative coded in a predesigned virtual environment, again in both the optical and the technological senses. Yet at the same time, the disrupted or denied agency actively contributes to the sense of the work, which cannot operate without the user enacting the powerlessness that is coded in the work and that is part of the primary (interactive) discourse of Loss of Grasp. In other words, the non-agency needs to be actively enacted, and the user’s participation is essential for the work to work. Interactivity is required even in/ for its own denial. Yet another almost-mirror for losing grasp. While we might recognize the logic of such disruption from non-digital literature that plays with the reader by both (seemingly) giving them power (of understanding) but also withdrawing it while giving the reader the responsibility of reading and interpretation – as it happens from Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605, 1610) to Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) – such a performative enactment of the liar

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paradox is only possible in the processual and interactive programmable (meta) medium.12 Bouchardon notes that digital creativity is a mode of reflection in itself (2014a, 30–31), and Cayley argues that [t]here is no intrinsic necessity for writing that is digitally mediated to be self-reflexive [. . .]. However, digital language arts have emerged and developed at a time when literary critical discourse has come to give significant recognition to “conceptual literature,” and the concurrent major transformation and reconfiguration of media supports for writing and reading as cultural practices does generate a tendency, if not an obligation, amongst practitioners to apply themselves to the concerns of formal mediation, often going so far as to make them, as it were, the “subject” of the work. (Cayley 2015b)

Bouchardon (2014a, 277) also cites Berry (2011) pointing out that the third wave of digital humanities would look at “how medial changes produce epistemic changes,” a process in which digital literature offers a “laboratory” to explore the medium, inviting us to revisit processes, modes of communication, and the production of meaning. The two works examined here highlight well that the nature and complexity of the medium is directly linked not only to the “subject” of the work’s reflexivity, but also to the medium’s reflexive potential. The programmable (meta)medium represents not only a combination of the channels of communication, but a fundamental difference in the mode of communication and sense-making: while continuing at one level to rely on semiosis and representation, it integrates them with the affordances of processuality and interactivity. Ian Bogost, whose concept of procedural representation I cited earlier, proposes “procedural rhetoric” to describe the mode of communication of video games, which applies to digital literature as well: Procedural rhetoric is a general name for the practice of authoring arguments through processes. [. . .] [I]ts arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic

12 Technically, a similar experience of loss of agency could be provided in an interactive theater performance or role play, but the spectator-player is then facing other humans who can adjust their behavior according to the spectator-player’s action, and the experience is inevitably a social one, with the parameters of the interaction much less tightly predefined. Bogost (2007, 5–6) gives a powerful illustration of the differences between the human and the computer application of predefined procedures: the first allows space for negotiation and deviation, the second does not – unless such deviation is part of the programmed procedure or its ability to learn. Weissberg (2002) also emphasizes the difference between human-to-human interaction and human-machine interactivity.

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models. In computation, those rules are authored in code, through the practice of programming. [. . .] [V]erbal, written, and visual rhetorics inadequately account for the unique properties of procedural expression. (2007, 28–29)

We are indeed facing not only the epistemic change mentioned by Berry, but also an aesthetic, poetic, and ontological one. I have introduced these through the lenses of the notions of the virtual and simulation applied in their historical and conceptual complexity, which highlighted how digital literature goes beyond the representation-based binaries, including those used by Wolf and the opposition between fictionality and factuality. The distinction between the somewhat more straightforward representational thought and the conceptually slippery and elusive “order” of simulation and the virtual also mirrors an ongoing paradigm shift in narratology and beyond, from a reductionist analytic approach to a complex systems (CS) theory based one. While the latter’s use in the humanities has been as much criticised for sloppy application as it has enthused postclassical narratologists (see Polvinen 2007; 2008, Poulaki 2011; 2014, Pier 2017, Walsh and Stepney 2018), and the ways in which it may best serve literary analysis remains to be elaborated, the role CS attributes to dynamic feedback loops and its ability to accept diffuse modes of emergence of meaning from the interactions among the components and agents of the system make it particularly appealing as a potential avenue for thinking about digital artefacts, be they narrative in nature or other. Katherine Hayles has already proposed to “consider the human and the digital computer as partners in a dynamic heterarchy bound together by intermediating dynamics” (2008, 47).13 If an intermedial framework for reflexivity that includes digital artefacts is possible at all, it does indeed need to acknowledge the differences in degrees of complexity and the dynamic heterarchy that characterizes the virtual space and its simulations, as well as the way in which the virtual complicates ontological, epistemological, and discursive constellations. The examples I presented here are still relatively simple compared to what computer simulation and generation, artificial intelligence, and large digital networks can achieve today. Digital arts often point at the potentials and risks involved in the medium, many of which are related to the new modes in which information can be generated, processed, manipulated, and circulated – often without that the users have any insight into what happens and how what they see and

13 Intermediation – not to be confused with intermediality – here refers to the mechanism “whereby a first-level emergent pattern is captured in another medium and re-represented with the primitives of the new medium, which leads to an emergent result captured in turn by yet another medium, and so forth” (2008, 45).

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interact with is produced. Since these new affordances increasingly define our communication, culture, and society, it is crucial that we become aware of how they challenge the conceptual frameworks we often continue to rely on – and that we work on revising, refining, and enriching these to come closer to the reality of our times.

Reference List Aarseth, Espen J. 1997. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1994 [1981]. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 2016. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: SAGE Publications. Berry, David M. 2011. “The Computational Turn: Thinking About the Digital Humanities.” Culture Machine 12 (0). http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/440. Berry, David M. 2015. The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bogost, Ian. 2007. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bolter, J. David. 1991. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Bouchardon, Serge. 2014a. La Valeur heuristique de la littérature numérique. Paris: Hermann. Bouchardon, Serge. 2014b. “Figures of Gestural Manipulation in Digital Fictions.” In Analyzing Digital Fiction, edited by Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, and Hans Kristian Rustad, 159–175. New York: Routledge. Bouchardon, Serge, and Vincent Volckaert. 2010. Déprise. https://bouchard.pers.utc.fr/de prise/home. Cayley, John. 2002. “The Code Is Not the Text (Unless It Is the Text).” Electronic Book Review. October. http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/the-code-is-not-the-text-unless-it-isthe-text/. Cayley, John. 2010. “ImageZC0304: ProcessProse.” P=R=O=G=R=A=M=M=A=T=O=L=O=G=Y (blog). November 2010. http://programmatology.shadoof.net/?p=contents/proces sProse.html. Cayley, John. 2015a. “The Gravity of the Leaf: Phenomenologies of Literary Inscription in Media-Constituted Diegetic Worlds.” In Beyond the Screen, Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, edited by Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer, 199–226. Berlin: transcript. Cayley, John. 2015b. “Beginning with ‘The Image’ in How It Is When Translating Certain Processes of Digital Language Art – Electronic Book Review.” Electronic Book Review, March. http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/beginning-with-the-image-in-how-it-iswhen-translating-certain-processes-of-digital-language-art/. Cayley, John. 2018. Grammalepsy: Essays on Digital Language Art. Electronic Literature Ser. New York: Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ lancaster/detail.action?docID=5515124.

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Cayley, John, and Daniel C. Howe. 2009–2018. The Readers Project. http://thereadersproject. org/. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. “The Method of Dramatization.” In Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953–1974, translated by Michael Taormina, 94–116. Los Angeles: Semiotexte. Diodato, Roberto. 2012. “Reale e Virtuale.” http://www.filosofiaincircolo.it/testi/diodato.pdf. Downes, Daniel. 2005. Interactive Realism: The Poetics of Cyberspace. Oxford Dictionaries | English. Accessed 15 November 2018. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/ Ensslin, Astrid. 2014. Literary Gaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/10.2307/j.ctt9qf59z. Ensslin, Astrid. 2015. “Video Games as Unnatural Narratives.” In Diversity of Play, edited by Mathias Fuchs, 41–70. Lüneburg: meson press. https://meson.press/wp-content/ uploads/2015/07/978-3-95796-076-4-Diversity-of-Play.pdf. Eskelinen, Markku. 2004. “Six Problems in Search of a Solution: The Challenge of Cybertext Theory and Ludology to Literary Theory.” Dichtung Digital 6 (33). http://www.dichtungdigital.org/2004/3/Eskelinen/index.htm. Eskelinen, Markku. 2012. Cybertext Poetics: The Critical Landscape of New Media Literary Theory. New York: Bloomsbury. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lancaster/detail. action?docID=894569. Foundry. 2017. “The New Hyperreality.” Foundry. 8 February 2017. https://www.foundry.com/ trends/vr-ar-mr/hyperreality. Fülöp, Erika. 2014. “Dramatizing the Virtual: A Deleuzian Reading of Three Recent Metafictions.” Revue Critique de Fixxion Française Contemporaine (9):5–15. Gibson, William. 1995. Neuromancer. New ed. London: HarperCollins. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2008. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Ward-Phillips Lectures in English Language and Literature. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame. Howe, Daniel C., and John Cayley. 2013. “Reading, Writing, Resisting: Literary Appropriation in the Readers Project.” ISEA International. https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/ 9708. Jannidis, Fotis. 2009. “Metareference in Computer Games.” In Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies, edited by Werner Wolf, Katharina Bantleon, and Jeff Thoss, 543–565. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Kay, A., and A. Goldberg. 1977. “Personal Dynamic Media.” Computer 10 (3):31–41. https://doi.org/10.1109/C-M.1977.217672. Lillemose, Jacob and Mathias Kryger. 2015. “The (Re)Invention of Cyberspace.” Kunstkritikk. 24 August 2015. http://www.kunstkritikk.dk/kommentar/the-reinvention-of-cyberspace /?do_not_cache=1. Lavaud-Forest, Sophie. 2015. “Un cadre e-mouvant pour la désignaion de l’oeuvre.” In Les frontières de l’oeuvre numérique. E-Formes 3, edited by Alexandra Saemmer and Sophie Lavaud-Forest, 25–37. Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne. MacCallum-Stewart, Esther, and Justin Parsler. 2007. “Illusory Agency in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.” Dichtung Digital. http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2007/ Stewart%26Parsler/maccallumstewart_parsler.htm. Manovich, Lev. 2002. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Manovich, Lev. 2013. Software Takes Command: Extending the Language of New Media. International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1962. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam.

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Pier, John. 2017. “Complexity: A Paradigm for Narrative.” In Emerging Vectors of Narratology, edited by Pier Krogh Hansen, John Pier, Philippe Roussin, and Wolf Schmid, 533–565. Berlin: De Gruyter. Polvinen, Merja. 2007. “The Ends of Metaphor.” European Journal of English Studies 11 (3): 273–284. https://doi.org/10.1080/13825570701409581. Polvinen, Merja. 2008. “Reading the Texture of Reality: Chaos Theory, Literature and the Humanist Perspective.” Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Portela, Manuel. 2013. Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Poulaki, Maria. 2011. “Before or beyond Narrative?: Towards a Complex Systems Theory of Contemporary Films.” Amsterdam: Rozenberg, Universiteit van Amsterdam. Poulaki, Maria. 2014. “Network Films and Complex Causality.” Screen 55 (3):379–395. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2001. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2006. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2007. “Looking through the Computer Screen: Self-Reflexivity in Net.Art.” In Self-Reference in the Media, edited by Wilfried Nöth and Nina Bishara, 269–290. Berlin: De Gruyter. Sterling, Bruce. 2014. The Hacker Crackdown / Bruce Sterling. Adelaide: The University of Adelaide. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/sterling/bruce/hacker/complete.html. Strickland, Stephanie. 2006. “Writing the Virtual: Eleven DImensions of E-Poetry.” Leonardo Electronic Alamanc 14 (5). https://www.leoalmanac.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/ 06Writing-the-Virtual-Eleven-Dimensions-of-E-Poetry-by-Stephanie-Strickland-Vol-14-No -5-6-September-2006-Leonardo-Electronic-Almanac.pdf. Trésor de la langue française. http://www.cnrtl.fr/. Walsh, Richard, and Susan Stepney, eds. 2018. Narrating Complexity. Cham: Springer. Weissberg, Jean-Louis. 2002. “Qu’est-ce que l’interactivité? Éléments pour une réponse – Jean-Louis Weissberg.” Paris. http://hypermedia.univ-paris8.fr/seminaires/semaction/ seminaires/txt02-03/seance2/seance2.htm. Wolf, Werner. 2009. “Metareference across Media: The Concept, Its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Functions.” In Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies, edited by Werner Wolf, Katharina Bantleon, and Jeff Thoss, 1–85. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wolf, Werner, Katharina Bantleon, and Jeff Thoss, eds. 2009. Metareference across Media: Theory and Case Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Zetterberg Gjerlevsen, Simona, and Henrik Skov Nielsen. 2020. “Distinguishing Fictionality.” In Exploring Fictionality: Conceptions, Test Cases, Discussions, edited by Cindie Maagaard, Marianne Wolff Lundholt, and Daniel Schäbler, 19–40. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark.

Notes on Contributors Pierre Cassou-Noguès is Full Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris 8 ‒ Vincennes-Saint-Denis. He uses fiction as a theoretical method in exploring the possible and its limits, analyze new technological forms of life, and conceptualize fields that philosophers tend to ignore or repress, such as wasted time, phobias, or seashores. He has published Mon zombie et moi: La philosophie comme fiction (Seuil, 2010), La mélodie du tic-tac (Flammarion, 2013), Technofictions (Cerf, 2019), Virusland (Cerf, 2020). He has recently co-authored a web documentary, Welcome to Erewhon, about the images of automation. Fátima Chinita is the equivalent of an Associate Professor at the Theatre and Film School of the Lisbon Polytechnic Institute in Portugal. She holds a PhD in Art Studies with a thesis on metacinema, and conducted postdoctoral research in Sweden on intermediality and interarts. Her research continues to focus on these subjects as well as on essay film and complex narratives. She is the author of the book The (In)visible Spectator: Reflexivity in the Film Viewer’s Perspective in David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE (published in Portuguese by Labcom in 2013) and another article on Agnès Varda (New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 2017). Michal Beth Dinkler is Associate Professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School. She is the author of the monographs Silent Statements: Narrative Representations of Speech and Silence in the Gospel of Luke (De Gruyter, 2013), Literary Theory and the New Testament (Yale UP, 2019), Influence: On Rhetoric and Biblical Interpretation (Brill, 2021), in addition to a number of peer-reviewed articles related to fact, fiction, and reflexivity in antiquity. Christian Folde earned a doctoral degree at the University of Hamburg and is a member of the Phlox Research Group. His research focusses on issues related to fiction, in particular truth in fiction. His broader interests include aesthetics, philosophy of language, metaphysics and literary theory. He has published in a number of journals, including the British Journal of Aesthetics, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the Journal of Literary Theory. His monograph Exploring Fictional Truth is forthcoming. For more information see his webpage: https://christianfolde.wordpress.com. Erika Fülöp is Lecturer in French Studies at Lancaster University. After a thesis on Proust published under the title Proust, the One, and the Many: Identity and Difference in À la recherche du temps perdu (Legenda, 2012), she held a College Lectureship at New College, Oxford, and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship at the Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology at the University of Hamburg. Her research interests include the intersections between literature and philosophy, especially the forms of reflexivity, narrative theory, and digital literature. She has published three edited volumes, articles on Proust, contemporary literature, narrative theory, and digital authorship, and recently completed a co-authored book on “littératube”, or literature on YouTube. Lukas Hoffmann is Director of University and Academia at Caussen-Simon-Foundation in Hamburg. His main research focus is contemporary U.S. literature, in particular creative nonfiction and the autobiographical. He published a monograph titled Postirony: The Nonfictional Literature of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers (transcript, 2016).

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Mathias Kusnierz is an Associate Researcher at the University of Paris (CERILAC research center). His research focuses on contemporary Hollywood cinema and its ideological and technological aspects, and on intermediality. His PhD dissertation on the classical Hollywood B movie is forthcoming at the Presses universitaires de Rennes. Françoise Lavocat is a Professor and the Chair of Comparative Literature at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle. She has an honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago. She was formerly fellow at the Wissenschaftkolleg zu Berlin (2014-1015), and is currently member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is specialized in theories of fiction (fact and fiction, possible worlds, characters), early modern literature, and narrative of catastrophes. She has published Arcadies malheureuses, aux origines du roman moderne (Champion, 1997), La Syrinx au bûcher: Pan et les satyres à la renaissance et à l’âge baroque (Droz, 2005), and most recently Fait et fiction: pour une frontière (Seuil, 2016) and Les personnages rêvent aussi (Hermann, 2020), and edited the collective volumes Usages et théories de la fiction: la théorie contemporaine à l’épreuve des textes anciens (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004) and La théorie littéraire des mondes possibles (CNRS, 2010). Jean-Marc Limoges earned a doctoral degree in “Littérature et arts de la scène et de l’écran” from Laval University. His interests focus on reflexivity, mise en abyme, and metalepsis in literature and cinema, and more recently, on narration, focalisation, and ocularisation in film. He has published chapters on “The Gradable Effects of Self-Reflexivity on Aesthetic Illusion in Cinema” (Metareference across Media, ed. W. Wolf, Rodopi, 2009), “Metalepsis in the Cartoons of Tex Avery” (Metalepsis in Popular Culture, ed. K. Kukkonen and S. Klimek, De Gruyter, 2011), and “Mises en abyme cinématographiques” (Les œuvres d’art dans le cinéma de fiction, ed. P.-H. Frangne, A. Fiant, and G. Mouëllic (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2019), as well as articles in Syn-these, Cinema & Cie, Humoresques, Les Cahiers de narratologie, Textimage, and Cinergie. Graham Priest is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Boyce Gibson Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne. He has published widely in logic and related areas, metaphysics, Buddhist philosophy, and the history of philosophy (East and West). When not doing philosophy, he likes to do philosophy. Full details can be found at grahampriest.net. Richard Saint-Gelais is Professor in the Department of Literature, Theatre and Cinema at the Laval University, where his research and teaching focus on literary theory, 20th-century literature, and paraliterature. His recent work has explored the concept of transfictionality. He is the author of Châteaux de pages (Hurtubise, 1994), L’empire du pseudo: modernités de la science-fiction (Nota Bene, 1999), and Fictions transfuges (Seuil, 2011). Some of his contributions in English may be found in Counterfactual Thinking — Counterfactual Writing (eds. D. Birke, M. Butter, and T. Köppe, De Gruyter, 2011), Archeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication (ed. D. A. Vakoch, NASA, 2014), and Contemporary French and Francophone Narratology (ed. J. Pier, Ohio State University Press, 2020). Stefan Schubert is the equivalent of an Assistant Professor at the Institute for American Studies at Leipzig University, Germany. His main research interests include U.S. popular

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culture and literature, narrativity, game studies, and gender studies. He has published a number of articles on the intersection of these topics as well as a monograph titled Narrative Instability: Destabilizing Identities, Realities, and Textualities in Contemporary American Popular Culture (Universitätsverlag Winter, 2019). He is a member of the DFG research network “Narrative Liminality and/in the Formation of American Modernities” and an associate member of the collaborative research center on “Invectivity: Constellations and Dynamics of Disparagement” in the subproject on “Pop-Cultural Poetics and Politics of the Invective.” Jobst Welge is Professor of Romance Studies at the University of Leipzig. His main research interests are the theory and comparative history of the novel, with publications on authors such as Gide, Svevo, Borges, and Guimarães Rosa, as well as on historical representation in the contemporary Latin American novel. He has published the comparative study Genealogical Fictions: Cultural Periphery and Historical Change in the Modern Novel (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) and recently co-edited a volume on infinity in literature, entitled Unendlichkeiten. Lesarten einer (post)modernen Denk- und Textfigur (Königshausen & Neumann, 2020). Nathan Wildman is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University and a member of the Tilburg Center for Moral Philosophy, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science (TiLPS). His research concerns topics in metaphysics, philosophy of language, logic, and aesthetics. He has published in a number of journals, including Analysis, the British Journal of Aesthetics, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and Philosophical Studies. For more information, see his webpage: nwwildman.wordpress.com. Robert F. Wittkamp teaches and works at Kansai University (Ōsaka, Japan) and his main field of research is the beginning of Japanese literature with a focus on writing and narratology. He has published the two-volume monograph Altjapanische Erinnerungsdichtung: Landschaft, Schrift und kulturelles Gedächtnis im Man'yōshū (Ergon Verlag, 2014), followed by Arbeit am Text: zur postmodernen Erforschung der Kojiki-Mythen (Ostasien Verlag 2018,) and Altjapanische Texterzeugung und die chinesischen Wurzeln: Dargestellt an einer Korrespondenz aus dem Man'yōshū (Harrassowitz, 2021). He also has started a series of “Lectures on classical Japanese literature” on YouTube to provide free education.

Index of Names Aarseth, Espen J. 214, 244 Abe, Akio 112–113 Akiyama, Ken 112 Alber, Jan 84, 134 Alberca, Manuel 139 Alexander, Loveday 93 Alter, Robert 91, 94, 98 Altman, Robert 185, 200 Alward, Peter 29 Anderson, Melissa 155 Andersson, Bibi 180 Andrews, Chris 61, 63 Ankersmit, Frank 90 Antonioni 203 Aristotle 43 Arnold, Matthew 93 Atkins, Barry 216 Aune, David 96 Avery, Tex 176–180, 182 Badir, Sémir 171 Bal, Mieke 60 Balzac, Honoré de 192 Barjavel, René 71 Barthes, Roland 175, 191, 239 Bartlett, Steven J. 1 Barton, Carlin 89 Bast, Florian 216 Bastide, Bernard 157 Bataille, Georges 201–202 Baudrillard, Jean 190, 229, 232–235, 248 Belford, Pauline Helen 217 Bellamy, Joe David 90 Beller, Jonathan 12, 192–197, 200 Bellour, Raymond 157 Bénézet, Delphine 152, 155, 164 Benl, Oscar 113 Bergman, Ingmar 179 Bergson, Henri 50–52, 54–55 Berry, David M. 230–231, 238, 250–251 Bhaba, Homi K. 119 Birkin, Jane 11, 152–154, 156–158, 160–165 Blake, Nicholas 68 Blüher, Dominique 157, 166

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Boccaccio, Giovanni 74–76 Bogost, Ian 233, 250 Bolaño, Roberto 138 Booth, Wayne C. 91 Borges, Jorge Luis 16, 21, 138, 147–148 Boswell, Marshall 130 Bouchardon, Serge V, 12, 229, 239, 245, 247, 250 Bougeant, Guillaume-Hyacinthe 82 Bowersock, Glen 96, 98 Bowring, Richard 114, 119–120 Boyarin, Daniel 89 Braun, Herbert 145–147, 149 Bredekamp, Horst 192 Brewer, Marilynn 94 Brooks, Mel 179, 185–186 Bruce, Leo 68 Buarque, Chico 11, 138–144, 149 Buarque de Holanda, Sérgio 141, 143 Burn, Stephen 123 Busch, Andrew A. 205 Bushnell, Rebecca 218, 221 Butor, Michel 59 Cage, Nicolas 185–186 Camus, Jean-Pierre 78–80 Cappelen, Herman 30, 32 Caputo, John 101, 103 Carr, John Dickson 66 Cassirer, Ernst 88, 90, 104 Cassou-Noguès, Pierre 46 Castronova, Edward 215 Cavandoli, Osvaldo 177, 179 Cavell, Stanley 192 Cayley, John 12, 229, 234, 238–240, 242–244, 250 Cerisuelo, Marc 174 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 91, 249 Chalhoub, Sidney 141 Charpentier, Jarl 19 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith 67 Chinita, Fátima 165 Christie, Agatha 68 Chrostowska, Dorota 155

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Cleary, Thomas 22 Cocteau, Jean 157, 171 Cohl, Émilie 178–179 Cohn, Dorrit 2, 94, 96 Collins, Robert M. 205 Colonna, Vincent 157 Colvile, Georgiana M. 152, 155 Conrad, Joseph 144 Cook, David 202 Coover, Robert 38 Cornutus 101 Correira, Fabrice 3 Craven, Wes 185 Cruise, Tom 196–197 Cullhed, Anders 108 Cumming, Sam 32 Dafoe, Willem 196 Dalí, Salvador 160 Dällenbach, Lucien 2, 60, 169, 184–185 Damon, Matt 199 Davidson, Donald 30 De Amicis, Edmondo 192 de Man, Paul 126 de Wildt, Lars 215–216 Del Lungo, Andrea 72 Deleuze, Gilles 192–193, 196, 198–199, 235, 239 DeLillo, Don 148 Delvaux, Claudine 152 Demoulin, Laurent 169, 171 Depp, Johnny 201 Derrida, Jacques 1, 43, 55, 103, 191–192, 239 Descartes, René 41–42, 54 Dinkler, Michal Beth 88, 94, 96 Diodato, Roberto 234 Domsch, Sebastian 215–216, 225 Donnarumma, Raffaele 11, 138, 148–149 Doody, Margaret Anne 92, 95 Doubrovsky, Serge 140, 157 Douglas, Andrew 182 Ducrot, Oswald 88 Dumarsais, Cesar Chesneau 82 Dyer, Richard 194 Ebersole, Gary L. 119 Eco, Umberto 28

Edwards, Blake 182 Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Simon 212 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 24, 236 Ensslin, Astrid V, 218, 238, 245 Eskelinen, Marku 237–238 Falconer, Kenneth 21 Farrell, Colin 198 Fellini, Federico 185 Fest, Bradley 213, 216, 224–225 Févry, Sébastien 185 Fforde, Jasper 9, 62, 70, 72–74, 82–83 Fincher, David 179 Fludernik, Monika 95, 97 Folde, Christian 27, 30, 37 Ford, John 191 Foucault, Michel 1, 28, 239 Fowler, Robert M. 214 Freud, Sigmund 16, 29, 94 Friend, Stacie 27–28 Fulda, Daniel 97 Fuller, Samuel 191 Gainsbourg, Serge 153, 163 Gaitán, Jorge Eliécer 145–147, 149 Garrity, Thomas 97 Genette, Gérard 37, 59–60, 72, 79, 82, 94 Gerhardsson, Birger 93 Gerstenkorn, Jacques 170, 172, 174 Geurts, Bart 32 Gibbs, Raymond W. 133 Gibson, William 232, 234 Gide, André 59 Gill, Christopher 96 Godard, Jean-Luc 179 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 28 Goldberg, A. 231 Gomery, Douglas 202 González, Sady 149 Gorki, Maxime 192 Gosling, Ryan 201 Goya, Francisco de 161 Graves, Robert 37 Greene, Gayle 90–91 Greg, Michel 62, 64 Groensteen, Thierry 9, 61–64 Gu, Ming Dong 108

Index of Names

Guattari, Félix 193, 239 Günther, Sergio 140–143 Hamburger, Käte 71, 94 Hammond, Adam 218, 222 Harman, Graham 40 Harrigan, Pat 212 Harris, Neil 213 Harris, Robert 38 Hayles, Katherine N. 229, 238, 248, 251 Hegel, Georg Wilhem Friedrich 42 Heidegger, Martin 17, 104 Heine, Heindich 91 Heldt, Gustav 121 Hellman, Monte 179 Hemingway, Ernest 27 Hendeles, Ydessa 152 Heron, Michael James 217 Herrmann, Sebastian M. 213 Hezser, Catherine 93 Hippolyte, Francis 194, 200 Hoberek, Andrew 1 Hofstadter, Douglas R. 6 Holland, Mary K. 123, 136 Homer 88 Horn, Eva 148 Horton, H. Mack 116–117 Howe, Daniel C. 12, 229, 239–240, 242–244 Huizinga, Johan 215 Husserl, Edmund 41–42, 47 Hutcheon, Linda 1, 49, 88, 91, 123, 139, 236 Jameson, Fredric 92, 94, 190 Jannidis, Fotis 238 Johnson, William A. 93 Jones, Chuck 176, 178 Jonze, Spike 185 Jullier, Laurent 190 Juul, Jesper 214 Kaakinen, Kasia 144 Kac-Vergne, Marianne 204 Kafka, Franz 44 Kahler, Erich 94 Kamei, Takashi 121 Kamens, Edward 111

261

Kant, Immanuel 42–43, 45–47 Kaplan, David 30, 32 Kasprowicz, Laurent 194, 200 Kaufman, Charlie 185–186 Kay, A. 231 Kearns, Michael S. 97 Kemp, Simon 1 Kennedy, John F. 146–147 Kidd, Sue Monk 28 Kim, Lawrence Young 96 Kindt, Tom 30 Kirby, Alan 123 Klevjer, Rune 222 Kline, Jefferson T. 155, 158, 165 Klug, João 141 Kolker, Robert P. 198 Kōnoshi, Takamitsu 109, 121 Köppe, Tilman 30 Kosztolányi, Dezső 64–65 Kranvig, Jonathan 70 Kraus, Christina S. 97 Kremer, Nathalie 72 Kristeva, Julia 191 Kucinski, Bernardo 144 La Fontaine, Jean de 61, 63 Landow, George P. 239 Lang, Fritz 191 Lange, Dieter 141 Lauter, Paul 215 Lavaud-Forest, Sophie 248 Lavocat, Françoise 4, 70–71, 74, 78–79 Léaud, Jean-Pierre 163 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 42 Lejeune, Philippe 10, 124–128, 156 Lepore, Ernie 30, 32 Leroux, Gaston 67 Leveratto, Jean-Marc 194, 200 Lewis, David K. 20, 29 Lewis, Jeff 212 Lindberg-Wada, Gunilla 113–114 Lipovetsky, Gilles 11, 138 Lukács, Georg 92 Lurie, David B. 109–110 Luther, Susanne 96 Lynch, David 187 Lyotard, Jean-François 9, 40, 46, 48–51, 239

262

Index of Names

MacCallum-Stewart, Esther 245 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria 80 Magné, Bernard 60 Magritte, René 160 Maier, Emar 32 Malabou, Catherine 40 Malausa, Vincent 190 Manovich, Lev 230–231 Margolin, Uri 29, 37, 94 Martinez, Matias 37 Marx, Karl 193–197, 200–201, 203 Mastroianni, Marcello 185 Mauss, Marcel 200, 202 Mäyrä, Frans 212 McCaffery, Larry 126, 129, 131 McDonald, Paul 194 McHale, Brian 49 Meillassoux, Quentin 4, 9, 40, 46–55 Meretoja, Hanna 1, 139, 150 Metz, Christian 172, 181, 185, 194 Metz, Walter 191 Minamoto, Tamenori 111 Mittell, Jason 213, 225 Modiano, Patrick 140 Moine, Raphaëlle 197–198, 201, 205 Molkou, Elisabeth 157 Moore, Gregory M. 70 Moreno-Durán, Humberto 146 Morin-Ulmann, David 200 Mostow, Jonathan 108, 114–115 Motoarca, Ioan-Radu 27 Moulier-Boutang, Yann 194, 196 Mouratidou, Eleni 171 Mouren, Yannick 166 Mukherjee, Souvik 225 Mulligan, Kevin 3 Murasaki, Shikibu 112, 114 Murray, Janet 214 Nabokov, Vladimir 59, 63, 249 Nacache, Jacqueline 194, 197 Nancy, Jean-Luc 43 Narihira 114 Natoli, Joseph 191 Nicholson, Brantley Garett 147 Nielsen, Henrik Skov 2, 96, 242

Odin, Roger 190 Ooms, Herman 116 Ōtomo no Tabito 118 Ovid 102 Owen, Clive 199 Parsler, Justin 245 Partee, Barbara 30 Paterson, Janet 58–60, 63, 67 Patterson, Lee 96 Pavel, Thomas 60, 63 Pelc, Jerzy 4 Perec, Georges 61 Pérez Galdós, Benito 80–81, 83 Perron, Bernard 212 Péter, Ádám 65 Peters, Joan Douglas 90 Phelan, James 10, 89, 99, 132–134 Phelps, Robert 157 Pier, John V, 82, 251 Pikkanen, Ilona 95 Pitt, Brad 181 Plantinga, Alvin 31 Plato 41–42, 49, 101 Polvinen, Merja 251 Portela, Manuel 238, 241, 244 Potter, Dennis 67 Pouivet, Roger 70 Poulaki, Maria 251 Pratt, Mary Louise 119 Priest, Christopher 57 Priest, Graham 2, 16, 18, 20, 23–24, 33, 38, 71 Prince, Gerald 29 Proust, Marcel 59 Quenzer, Jörg B. 113–114 Quintilian 97, 103 Rabinow, Paul 1 Rabinowitz, Peter J. 132–133 Raimi, Sam 197, 200 Ramirez, Edgar 199 Rascaroli, Laura 166–167 Rastier, François 82 Ravizza, Eleonora 215 Renard, Maurice 44 Reynolds, Simon 191

Index of Names

Riambau, Esteve 164–165 Ricardou, Jean 9, 58–59, 61–63, 65–67 Riffaterre, Michael 94 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 29 Roa Sierra, Juán 149 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 185 Ross, Steven J. 204 Rossinow, Doug 204 Roth, Philip 68 Rothberg, Michael 143 Roy, André 175 Ruby, Jay 1 Russell, Bertrand 15–16, 23, 42 Ryan, Marie-Laure 59–60, 63–64, 79, 83, 201, 214, 234, 238 Rydholm, Lena 108 Sainsbury, Richard 2 Saint-Gelais, Richard 64, 73 Salen, Katie 215 Salmon, Christian 8 Sandywell, Barry 1, 5 Santos Molano, Enrique 147 Sartre, Jean Paul 17 Saura, Carlos 185 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie 2–4, 71 Schaffer, Jonathan 19 Scheffel, Michael 37 Schlickers, Sabine 82 Schmid, Wolf 29, 94 Schmidt, Karl Ludwig 93 Schubert, Stefan 244 Seager, Nicholas 92 Searle, Ronald 71 Sebald, W. G. 144–145, 149–150 Seethaler, Robert 28 Siegle, Robert 88 Smith, Zadie 132, 134–135 Sorel, Charles 82–83 Sorensen, Joseph T. 119 Spinoza, Baruch 42 Stam, Robert 94, 172 Stepney, Susan 251 Sterling, Bruce 232 Sterne, Laurens 123, 236 Stevens, George 191 Strickland, Stephanie 231

263

Stühring, Jan 30 Suzuki, Kazuo 111 Szakolczai, Árpád 1 Szendy, Peter 12, 190, 192–196 Tacitus 89 Tarantino, Quentin 191 Tenmu Tenno 116 Thomas, Rosalind 93 Thoret, Jean-Baptiste 190, 202, 204 Timmer, Nicoline 1, 129–130 Tinel, Muriel 164–165 Titian 161 Tolstoy, Leo 27, 29, 31, 60 Tompkins, Jane 215 Torres, Miguel 145 Tozzi, Federico 80 Tyler, Royall 108, 112, 114–115 Uribe Uribe, Rafael 146–147 Valantin, Jean-Michel 200 van Inwagen, Peter 31 Varda, Agnès 6, 11, 152–158, 160–166 Vásquez, Juan Gabriel 11, 138–139, 144–150 Velázquez 164 Venkatesh, Sudhir Alladi 1 Verhoeven, Paul 198 Vermeer, Johannes 160 Volckaert, Vincent 12, 229, 245 von Ranke, Leopold 101 Vonnegut, Kurt 37 Vovin, Alexander 116, 118 Wallace, David Foster 10, 123–136 Walsh, Richard 251 Walton, Kendall 29 Wardrip-Fruin, Noah 212 Warhol, Robyn 10, 135 Washburn, Dennis 112 Watt, Ian 92 Waugh, Patricia 219, 226 Webb, Mark 197 Weissberg, Jean-Louis 230, 244, 250 Wells, Herbert G. 41–44 Wera, François 165 White, Hayden 1, 90

264

Index of Names

Whitehead, Alfred N. 51, 54–55 Wiener, Norbert 232 Williams, Jeffrey 89, 93, 96 Wills, Lawrence 95 Wilson, George 29 Wiseman, Len 197 Wiseman, Timothy 96 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 42, 47 Wittkamp, Robert 109–110, 116–117, 120 Wolf, Mark J. P. 212 Wolf, Werner 7, 12, 169–170, 229, 233, 236–238, 242, 244, 248, 251 Wolfe, Cary 49

Wollen, Peter 165 Wood, Robin 204 Woods, John 2 Yamaguchi, Yoshinori 120 Yuki, Masaki 94 Zanger, Antat 198 Zetterberg Gjerlevsen, Simona 2, 139, 144, 242 Zhang Zhou 117 Zimmerman, Eric 215 Zipfel, Frank 4, 94

Index of Concepts agency 12, 74, 79, 213, 216, 220–226, 244–245, 247, 249–250 ancient narratives 10, 88–90, 92–94, 96–98, 104 ars poetica film 166 autobiography 11, 126–128, 133, 140, 147, 156–157 auto-reflexivity 173, 175, 179, 184, 186 body 8, 44–46, 48, 52, 54, 73, 91, 97, 102, 146–147, 149, 157–158, 161, 165, 196, 233–234, 242, 248 Buddhism 22, 114 cine-vision 11, 152–167 correlationism 9, 40, 46–47, 49–55 cyberspace 231–232, 234

hyperreality 231, 234 ideology 196, 202 illusion – aesthetic 11, 169, 174, 179 – disruption of 11, 58, 82 n. 19, 169–186 – realist 82, n.19, 140 – referential 169–170 immersion 8, 58, 73–75, 80, 83–85, 131, 212, 219 impossible narrator 80–81 interactivity 3, 12–13, 213, 221, 225–226, 229–231, 244, 248, 250 intertextuality 11, 147, 172–173, 192 Jaina philosophy 20 logos 99–103

denotation 30, 32, 34–36, 38 dialetheia (true contradiction) 16, 23–24, 71, 85 digital literature 8, 12, 229, 231, 235, 237–239, 249–251 dream 57–58, 68, 142, 192, 234 dys-narrativity 186–187 electronic literature 229, 231 ergodic literature 244 essay film 11, 158, 166–167 fact and fiction 2, 8, 10–11, 13, 70–72, 75, 78–79, 83–84, 133, 141, 155 factual narrative 3–4, 38, 76, 135 fake 152, 155, 161, 242 fakeness 234–235 fictional narrative 3–4, 29–30, 37, 76, 78, 125–126, 128, 212 fictional pact 81–82, 134, 179, 184 first-person narrative 78 fractals 21 hiragana syllabary 109, 111, 115 historiography 94–98, 139, 147 horizon of expectations 179, 184, 187 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722031-018

memory 50–52, 54, 55, 116, 125, 142–144, 147–150, 152, 242 metacinema 11 metadiscourse 83 metafiction 7, 9–10, 57–64, 67, 76, 90–91, 93, 123–124, 126–127, 133, 136, 144, 219, 235–236 – historiographic 1, 11, 139 metafictionality 83 metafilm 7, 174, 184, 186, 190, 236 metagame 7 metaization 7 metalepsis 3, 11, 72, 79–83, 175, 186, 218 metamedium 231 metanarrative 7, 236 metareference 7, 12, 170, 229, 233, 236–238, 242–243, 248–249 metareferentiality 237 mise en abyme 11, 63, 158, 162, 166, 169–170, 172–174, 184–186, 190, 199, 217 n. 12 mis-self-representation 60, 62 modernity 48–49, 89–90, 92–94, 104, 138 monogatari 10, 108–109, 111–115

266

Index of Concepts

motivation 36, 126, 179–182, 184, 186 narcissistic fiction 7 narrative contract 179, 186–187 opacity 173, 186–187 panfictionalism 4 paradox 58, 66–67, 70, 75–76, 80–81, 83–84, 92, 114 n. 14, 166, 185–187 – Cantor’s 23 – Liar 70, 250 – of fiction 83–84 – of metafiction 59, 123 – of mutual inclusion 81 – Russell’s 15–16, 23 – temporal 76 paratext 66, 78–80, 140 persona 11, 16, 57, 75, 124, 128, 157, 163–164, 166 pleasure 12, 15, 82, 131, 213, 225–226 popular culture 191 portals of fiction 9, 70–84 possible, the 40, 42, 46, 51, 125, 139 postmodernism 1, 49–50, 123, 138–139, 149, 213, 237 post-postmodernism 149, 213 processuality 13, 229, 231, 235, 248, 250 programmable media 229, 238, 242

– coefficient of 175–179, 181–184, 186–187 – effect of 175 – mixed 231, 234 – virtual 234 referentiality 1–2, 11, 78, 139, 191–192, 205 reflexive indexical pronoun 26, 28–29, 32, 34–38 reflexivity, narrative 10, 89–91, 93, 96, 98, 104 regress 17, 19–20 rhetoricity 10, 89, 97–98, 104 self-portrait 11, 152, 157–158, 160, 162, 166–167 self-reference 1, 6, 23, 58, 75, 90, 94, 236 semantic monsters 32 simulacra 232, 242 simulation 229, 232–235, 242, 248, 251 speculation 9, 11, 40, 46, 49–50, 52, 139, 146, 150, 199, 205 syllepsis 82 Tower of Maitreya 22 trauma 45–46, 148 true contradiction See also: dialetheia truth value 59 truth-in-fiction 33 unlikelihood 186–187

quotation – direct 30–31 – indirect 30–32, 148 – mixed 30, 32

vertigo, reflexive 170 video game 8, 12, 212–226, 238, 250 virtual, the 3, 12, 229, 231–235, 239, 242–244, 248–249, 251

realism 40, 67, 138, 141, 144, 149 reality – augmented 8, 234

xiaoshuo (fictional speech) 108, 119