Meta-literature
The recurring interaction between a writer (indirectly present) and a reader takes place through writing and reading. It is proof of the practicality of the literary experience and an expression of its degree of necessity. The extent of the interaction is thus the expression of the part of the practical experience that is shared, and for what purpose. This is illustrated by the uses we give to literature: education, indoctrination, moral edification, illustration, or entertainment. Becoming who they are, the writer and reader project themselves in the reading through a process of dual reciprocal constitution, changing when circumstances change, objectified in the forms through which literature is acknowledged. It has a definite learned quality, in contrast to the arts of images, sounds, and movements, in which the natural component (as in seeing, hearing, moving) made the art possible. Accordingly, artistic writing has an instrumental characteristic and exercises virtual coordination of the experience of assigning meaning. In some ways, this instrumental characteristic begs association to music. To someone watching how the process unfolds, it seems that the recurrent interaction is triggered less by the dynamics of writing and reading, and more decisively by what comprises the act of instilling meaning of the objectified practice of the poem, play, script, novel, or short story. The fact is that language, more than natural systems of signs, pertains to an acquired structure of interactions, as humans progress from one scale to another, within which meaning is conjured. Language is influenced by the conditions of existence (human biology), but not entirely reducible to them. It constitutes as many domains of interaction as there are experiences requiring language, a subset of language, or artifacts similar to language.
The claim made from the perspective of literacy was, and still goes strong, that the universality of language is reflected in the universality of literature, and thus the universality of conveying meaning. Actually, to write literature means to un-write the language of everyday use, to empty it of the reference to behavior, and to structure it as an instrument of a different projection of the human being. It means understanding the process through which meaning is conjured as human self-constitution takes place. While it is true that when someone reads a text for the first time, the only reading is one that refers to the language of that particular reader's experience (what is loosely called knowledge of language); once the convention is uncovered, personal experience takes second place, and a new experience, deriving from the interaction, begins. The acquaintance makes the interaction possible; but it might as well stand in the way of its characteristic unfolding as a literary experience. Sometimes, the language of artistic wording establishes a self-contained universe of self-reference and becomes not only the message, but also the context. The practical experience of writing is discovery of universes with such qualities. The practical experience of reading is populating such a universe through personal projection that will test its human validity. Both writer and reader create themselves and ascertain their identities in the interaction established through the text.
It goes without saying that while literature is not a copy (mimesis) of the world, neither does it literally constitute something in opposition to it. In a larger framework, literature is but one among many means of practical human experiences resulting, like any other form of objectification, in the alienating process of writing, reading, criticizing, interpreting, and rewriting. Alienation comes from giving life to entities that, once expressed, start their own existence, no longer under the control of the writer or reader. For as long as language dominated human praxis according to the prescriptions of literacy, we could not understand how writing could be an experience in something other than language, or how it could be performed independent of language-based assumptions. Since the turn of the century, this situation has changed. Initially, there was a reaction to language: Dada was born when a knife was used to select a word from a Larousse dictionary. Between the action and its successive interpretations, many layers of practical experiences with language accumulated. The literature of the absurd went further and suggested situations only vaguely defined with the aid of language, actually defined in defiance of language conventions. There is more silence in the plays of Beckett and Ionesco than there are words.
Before becoming what many readers have regarded as only the expression of the poetics of self-reference, the experience of concrete poetry attempted to make poetry visual, musical, or even tactile. Happening was based on structuring a situation, with the implicit assumption that our domains of interactions are not defined only through language. The modern renewal of dance, emancipated from the condition of illustration and narration, and from the stifling conventions of classic ballet; the new conventions of film facilitated by understanding the implicit characteristics of the medium; and the expressive means of electronic performances only add to the list of examples characteristic of a literature trying to free itself from language and its literate rules. Or, in order to avoid the animistic connotation (literature as a living entity trying to do something), we should see the phenomena just mentioned as examples of new human experiences: constitution of the literary work as its own language, with the assumption that the process of appropriation would result in the realization of that particular language.
A realization, in literature as much as in science, is a description of a system which would behave as though it had this description. Accordingly, the day described in Joyce's Ulysses (Thursday, June 16, 1904) was not a sequential description, but a mosaic in which rules of language were continuously broken and new rules introduced. There is no character by the name of Ulysses in the book. The title and the chapter subtitles were meant to enforce the suggestion of a parallel to Homer's Odyssey. ("A beautiful title," wrote Furetière almost 300 years ago, "is the real pimp of the book.") Language-rather, the appearance of language-provided the geometry of the mosaic. For Joyce, writing turned out to be a practical experience in segmenting space and time in order to extract relations (hopeless past, ridiculous tragic present, pathetic future), an aesthetic goal for which the common use of language is ill equipped. The allusion to the Odyssey is part of the strategy, shared in advance with the critics, a para-text, following the text as a context for interpretation. But before him, Kafka and others, following a tradition that claims Cervantes' Don Quixote as a model, seemed no less challenged by the experience of designing their own language, ascertaining characters who transcend the conflict put in words, of using the power of para-text. Dos Passos, Laurence Sterne, and Hermann Hesse are examples from the same tradition. Gertrude Stein was a milestone in this development. In poetry, designing a language of one's own is strikingly evident, although more difficult to discuss in passing (as I know I am doing with some of the examples I give). Many poets-Burns comes easily to mind-invented their own language, with new words and new rules for using them. Others-and for some reason Vladimir Brodsky comes first to mind-wrote splendid para-texts (political articles, interviews, memoirs) that very effectively framed their poetry and put it in a perspective otherwise not so evident.
The experience of artistic writing does not happen in a vacuum. It takes place in a broader frame. To realize and to understand that there is a connection between the cubist perspective, Joyce's writing, and the scientific language of relativity theory will probably not increase reading pleasure. It will change the perspective of interpretation, though. The connection between genetics, computational models, and post-modern architecture, fiction, and political discourse is even more relevant to our current concern for literature. Recurrences of interactions come in varieties, and each variety is a projection of the individual at a precise juncture of the human practical experience of self-constitution as a writer or reader. Language split, and continues to split, into languages and sub-languages. Rap frequently subjects the listener of its rhythmic stanzas to slang. Gramsci, the Sardinian leftist philosopher, suggested the need for a language of the proletariat. Pier Paolo Pasolini, an admirer of Gramsci and a very sophisticated artist, wrote some of his works in the Friaul dialect and in the argot used by the poor youngsters of the streets of Rome. His argument was aesthetic and moral: corrupted by commercial democracy, language loses its edge, and people living in such a deprived language environment undergo anthropological mutation. Art, in particular literature, can become a form of resistance. A new language, reconnected to the authentic being, becomes an instrument for new literacy experiences. Tolkien wrote poems in Elvish; Anthony Burgess made up a language by combining exotic languages (Gypsy, Malay, Cockney) and less exotic languages (English, Russian, French, Dutch). An entire magazine (Jatmey) publishes fiction and poetry written in Klingon.
In a broader perspective, it is clear that in order to effectively create literary domains, people need instruments and media for new experiences. Meta-fiction is such an experience. It unites special types of illustrated novels, photographic fiction (which proliferates in South America and the Far East), and comic books. In Further Inquiry, Ken Kesey offers a documented journey in order to recapture the spirit of the sixties. Images (including some from Allen Ginsberg's collection) make the book almost a collective oeuvre. Using similar strategies, a text of meta-fiction first establishes the convention of the text as a distinct human construct made up of words, but which behave differently from informative, descriptive, or normative sentences that we use in interhuman communication. The strategy is to place the domain of the referent in the writings. The writer thus ensures that the potential reader will have no reason to look for references in empirical reality. This act of preempting the practice of reading, based on reflex associations in a different systematic domain, is not necessarily a warranty that such associations will not be made.
There are many people who, either due to their cognitive condition, or to their relative illiteracy, take metaphors literally. However, the writer makes the effort to establish new kinds of recurrent, inter-textual, and self-referential relations that signal the convention pursued. When the act of writing becomes, overtly or subvertly, the object of the writing experience, writers, and possible readers with them, move from the object domain to the meta domain. The writer knows that in the space of fiction, as much as in the space of the empirical world, people write on paper, tables are used to set dinner on, flowers have a scent, subways don't fly. But artistic writing is not so much reporting about the state of the world as it is constituting a different world, along with a context for interactions in this world. The validity and coherence of such worlds stems from qualities different from those that result from applying correct grammar, formal structure of arguments, syntactic integrity, and other requirements specific to the practice of language within the convention of literacy.
Writing as co-writing (painting as co-painting, composing as co-composing…)