American Postmodern Metafiction Through the (Un)looking Glass: “Cartesian Sonata” by William Gass and Whistlejacket by John Hawkes

Abstract

American Postmodern Metafiction Through the (Un)looking Glass: “Cartesian Sonata” by William Gass and Whistlejacket by John Hawkes* Saloua Karoui-Elounelli (bio) Stepping from the treacherous passage at last into the mirror-maze, he saw once again, more clearly than ever, how readily he deceived himself into supposing he was a person. —John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse. Why would Ambrose, John Barth’s protagonist in Lost in the Funhouse (1968), interpret his reflection in the mirror as an instance of self-deceit? Why has Oedipa Mass, Thomas Pynchon’s protagonist in The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), “tried to find her image in the mirror and couldn’t” (27) or could only see reflected “a beach ball with feet” (23)? In other words, why would a fiction writer appeal to the trope of the mirror to subvert conventional characterization and the representational impulse of literary narrative? It is this seemingly contradictory strategy used by postmodern metafictional texts that this work means to explore. Indeed, in an endeavor to contribute to the renewed critical debate about the scope of experimental self-reflexive fiction, this essay will attempt to shed light on the poetics of the mirror trope in the narratives of canonical Postmodern metafiction. Through an examination of the game of doubling the authorial figure, the compositional process, and the interpretive act, the argument developed here revolves around the tendency of the experimental and the self-reflexive vein of American Postmodern metafiction to inform its poetics with a highly paradoxical appeal to the trope of the mirror and to motifs that constitute variations on it. The experimental ethos of American Postmodern metafiction will be pinpointed through a discussion of “Cartesian Sonata” by William Gass (1998) and Whistlejacket (1988) by John Hawkes in relation to the deliberate questioning of literary and artistic representation that mediates it. This work means also to shed light on the pivotal role played by the trope of the mirror in demystifying the paradoxical terms in which experimental metafiction gauges the possibilities of literary meaning and literary significance by implementing and imparting the representational modes but also submitting them to a (meta) critical scrutiny. [End Page 105] I. Poetics of (self)Reflexivity & Experimentation: “All done with mirrors”? In a relatively recent work that they edited and introduced on the generic facets and aesthetic implications of literary experimentation, Joe Bray, Brian McHale, and Alison Gibbons (2012: 1–18) surveyed and discussed the shifts that conceptualizing the experimental has undergone. Highlighting the divergent and sometimes opposed poetics that the conception of literary experimentation has been assimilated to, Bray, McHale, and Gibbons suggest that beyond such plurality, the experimental has been construed through the constancy of—at least—two axes. First, a proclivity for formal innovations (deemed vital to the efficient communication of literature’s message), and second, a necessary rethinking of the mimetic impulse of literature, either for the sake of maximizing it, or to challenge its very relevance to the construal of literary meaning.2 In relation to self-reflexive fiction, the critical discourse has, since the 1960s, assimilated the question of literary experimentation to the metafictional turn that marked the second half of the twentieth century. Thus, as early as 1963, scholarly journals started to explore the forms of novelistic experimentation, binding it to the urge to recast the poetics of the genre. In his contribution to a special issue of Daedalus, Peter Brooks (265–79) examined, under the title of “In the Lab of the Novel,” the axes of the experimental modes in the French Nouveau Roman, namely its rethinking of conception(s) of the real, and its recasting of the poetics of characterization. Brooks pinpointed the French New Novel’s rejection of psychic depth and complexity in character, its move towards a sense of the “literal,” and its retrieval of the novel’s active reading of the world and evaluation of novelistic method (273).1 Those features have equally been substantial to the American metafiction of the Postmodern age as its recasting of character portrayal within a poetics of surface involved not only a repudiation of depth claims but also a subversive play on the effect of reflecting or...