THE FORM!

One genre that I did always like since I first stumbled upon it in comic books is “Metafiction”. I haven’t really tried writing serious metafiction, although I have made a few unsuccessful attempts at it before temporarily abandoning it to again become a mere reader, but I do still go on with my elementary theorising on the subject quite regularly. As an enthusiast, I’ve picked up quite a few things and made my own observations about it through the years, and have sorted it out to three distinct groups made distinct by their approaches.

The first “chronologically” is “Metafiction As A Modernist Exercise”, made distinct by the approach of the Fiction being Self-Aware, and by effect Manipulative. The prime example is Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night, A Traveler..., whose Second-Person Point-Of-View manipulates the Reader into becoming an unwilling participant in the Narrative, essentially becoming the Character of the book.

The second is “Metafiction As A Postmodernist Exercise”, made distinct by the approach of the Author being Aware of the Act of Writing, and by effect Manipulative of the Reality of the Fiction and its Contents and Elements. The prime example is Grant Morrison’s Animal Man, where the Author appears in the final chapter and tells the title character that the root of all his Pain and Suffering and Joy and Cheer was the Author’s Whim and Wants, Mood and Attitude, of the Author’s Creative Process, essentially the Author as God, or sometimes even as Deus Ex Machina.

The third is “Metafiction In The Age Of PostIrony”, made distinct not only by the approach of the Author being Aware of the Act of Writing, but also of the Fiction being Aware. But instead of having that Awareness manipulate the Reality of the Fiction or the Reader’s Role, the Author lets the Reality of the Fiction affect the Fiction Itself, as well as the Author’s Self, with the Reader only as Captive Audience. It is also made distinct from the other two types by its unapologetic experimentation with the Form.

PostIronic Metafiction has its pioneers in comic books, where formal experimentation is more obvious, with Chris Ware and Seth and Eddie Campbell exercising its potentials long before any of the other media that would eventually try it out. Prose has a handful of PostIronic Metafictionists, with Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Jonathan Lethem leading the pack.

It started out as a reply to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, in the same way that Postmodernism started out as a reply to the atrocities of World War II. PostIronic Metafiction is marked mainly by its enthusiasm to tinker with things “broken”, to fix them, to rebuild.

PostIronic Metafiction are (so far) written with World-Weary Tones, the patient weathered voice of someone who had just lost her home to a fire and lived to crack wise about it. It knows it has survived something, and is grateful for its (mis)fortune.

The topic is mainly A Quest For Lost Things: Jonathan Safran Foer’s debut novel Everything Is Illuminated is about the author physically and mentally lost in Ukraine, his translator whose efforts to communicate with others are lost in translation (so to speak), and an entire shtetl physically and historically lost in the maps; Dave Eggers’ debut novel You Shall Know Our Velocity! is about two carefree American youths on a trip around the world to free themselves of $32,000 in one week, all to feel something, to achieve something that the characters themselves cannot/do not really understand or know, but can/do recognise by book’s end; Eddie Campbell’s Fate Of The Artist is an account of the author mentally reassessing his achievements and success in context with his family life and future goals.

PostIronic Metafiction always (so far) end in Pyrrhic Yet Strangely Optimistic Victories: the authors/characters walk away knowing/feeling something has been achieved, but at such great cost, but decide not to dwell on it, because they recognise that the true measure of the achievement is what to do about it when all is said and done.

And, of course, the Formal Experimentation, the manipulation of the reading experience through play with the readers’ expectations of the form of the text: Jonathan Safran Foer’s short story “A Primer For The Punctuation Of Heart Disease” is a compilation of new (fictional) punctuations in the English language, complete with demonstrations on when they are appropriate to use, using his own (true) family history of heart disease as examples; You Shall Know Our Velocity! starts out with the narrator confessing that “EVERYTHING WITHIN (the book) TAKES PLACE AFTER JACK DIED AND BEFORE MY MOM AND I DROWNED”, an impossible proclamation that is then questioned by the novel’s secondary character, now given space and time to voice out his concerns in an Interruption within the book’s narrative itself, saying that “there’s no way, of course, he could have written that first page, being no longer with us, and therefore not close to a word processor”; Fate Of The Artist begins with the literal literary death of the author, after which he is subsequently replaced with a real (nonfictional) actor playing the part of the author within the book’s many narratives, where the author chronicles his life employing a variety of comic book narrative devices: one-panel-gags, fumetti, illustrated prose, comic strips, basic comic book progressions.

PostIronic Metafiction holds a lot of potential for a lot of wonderful things, my book plans included, but of course it should never be enough to just pick a gang and dress like them. One should also effort to contribute to the culture and fashion, to its history and tradition!

With my interests on PostIronic Metafiction tinged by my semi-regular stints as bookdesigner, I felt my angle towards it would be from a literally structural point-of-view, concerning itself more with the physicality and look of the book than some, putting it in equal importance with the actual text in terms of “reflecting the metaphor”.

And so, as any bookdesigner worth his salt (as I think I am) would ask himself at the start of every job: how does one go about doing it as a bookdesign problem? Although with this project, it was more: how does one go about doing it as a bookdesign problem for an autobiographical reportage of the Contemporary Philippine Writing Scene?

I have finally found my excuse to set out to make a self-referential book!