One of the defining features of modernist (including postmodernist) literature is its tendency toward reflexivity, toward the establishment and simultaneous undermining of referential illusion, in comic and non-comic genres alike. Thus James Joyce, after giving very believable life to Molly Bloom, has her beseech him in the middle of her monologue O Jamesy let me up out of this; Marcel Proust constructs an extraordinary elaborate fictional world, only to let a narratorial voice announce that everything has been invented by me in accordance with the requirement of my demonstration; on the first page of Gides Paludes, the narrator blithely mentions that he happens to be writing a novel called Paludes; M.C. Escher depicts a pair of hands, each impossibly drawn by the other; close to the conclusion of Samuel Becketts tragedy Endgame, Hamm announces Im warming up for my last soliloquy; Eugène Ionescos king, in Le roi se meurt, is told he will die at the end of the play; Bertolt Brechts actors deliberately show that they are actors, rather than attempting to disappear behind the characters they are playing; Italo Calvinos novel If on a Winters Night a Traveller begins You are about to begin reading Italo Calvinos new novel, If on a winters night a traveller; and so on, and so on. Serious representation - undermining self-reflexivity - which until then had been something of a rarity (the German Romantics had theorised it, but few major works had instantiated it in recognisable ways), now becomes the dominant literary mode. — Joshua Landy, How To Do Things With Fictions
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 13:07:20 +0000
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