The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme and William H. Gass by Larry McCaffery, and: Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists by Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery (review)

Abstract

118Reviews McCaffery, Larry. The Metafictional Muse: The Works ofRobert Coover, Donald Barthelme and William H. Gass. Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1982. 300 pp. Cloth: $22.95. LeClair, Tom and Larry McCaffery. Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983.305 pp. Cloth: $15.95. "The contemporary writer—the writer who is acutely in touch with the life ofwhich he is part—is forced to start from scratch: Reality doesn't exist, time doesn't exist, personality doesn't exist. God was the omniscient author, but he died; now no one knows the plot." With his aggressiveskepticism aboutfiction's traditional goals, playful vitality, and insistenceon the medium as part of the message, the author-narrator of Ronald Sukenick's short story "The Death of the Novel" reflects a new fictional impulse emerging out of the sixties. Surely the novel was not dead or dying, only the kind of fiction that disguised thefacts oí its fictionality and the fictionality of those systems—time, space, personality, language—we impose on the flux, contradictions, and discontinuities ofwhatever is "out there." To be in touch is no longer just a matter of sensitivity and consciousness; it is also to be aware of the limits of our senses and consciousness, especially as they are conditioned by language. For language is not only part ofthe life we experience, it may be all we can know. In The Metafictional Muse, Larry McCaffery explores the philosophic, aesthetic, and ethical implications ofpostmodern American fiction by focusing on Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William Gass. In most postmodern fiction—including that of Heller, Vonnegut , Barth, Nabokov, and Pynchon—we find a characteristic pattern. An alienated character feels victimized by a cold, repressive, social order. He therefore creates a system that supplies order, value, and meaning to his life (it would be interesting to compare the typical male to the rare female protagonist, Oedipa Maas in particular). When a character fails to realize that his system is a fiction, he becomes its victim and is controlled by his creation—though "any system of order, whether derived from aesthetic principles, paranoia, madness, or superstition, is preferable to a life ofemptiness and chaos." In contrast to the character, the reader never loses sight ofthe fiction, the character's or the author's, since the author either intrudes his presence upon us, brings the act of his writing into the action of his story, or makes the reality of his medium a part ofthe reality it seems to reflect. McCaffery uses the term "metafiction" to identify two related forms: the first examines its own constructions as it develops, as well as the forms and language of previous fictions; the second asks how all fictional systems operate. McCaffery is thoroughly immersed in the postmodern scene, though not infected by its jargon. He has assimilated the philosophical and linguistic background, knows the pop culture that has changed our sensibilities, and can explicate Coover, Barthelme, and Gass in ways that lucidly illuminate his thesis. Indeed, one of the values of his book is its usefulness to the student or teacher working with this material for the first time. This very strength, however, leads to two shortcomings. First, the clarity is achieved at the expense of reductionism and oversimplification. He must summarize even though he warns us that summary is impossible. He often makes the writers seem didactic, losing sightofthe playfulness he intellectually recognizes . Nor does he spend sufficient time working out his allusions (a grammatical error on p. 50, which should have been caught by the editor, illuminates a hasty connection between the interference of a quantum physicist's observations and Henry Waugh's interventions into the Universal Baseball Association's "original system of order"). This first shortcoming may be due to McCaffery's attachment to his thesis, and it is ironic that his thesis illuminates the dangerofrelyingon systems. Perhaps he should have begun with a point he makes at the end of his "personal conclusion," that his study should be viewed not as a polemic but "as a tentative beginning to the investigation of an enormously rich period in American literature." Studies in American Fiction119 To capture the sense of...