One of my supervisors has, a couple of times now, asked that all-important, maddening question "What's at stake?" Well, damned if I know.
That's not true, actually. There are probably a half-dozen things at stake, on the table, to be determined, part of the battle, the conversation, the tug-of-war, the arm-wrestling match that's going on between me and the comics, the comics and themselves, the Revision and the Silver Age, etc, yadda yadda, blah blah blah.
The most fundamental implication of metafiction/metapictures/metacomics is that, if you take their implications to their logical conclusion, you start to lose any sense of an objective universe. The short version is that meta---- demonstrate that they are mere simulations, constructs of paper and pigment. That painting is not a three-dimensional figure. It only tricks you into thinking it is. That novel does not contain people, but you voluntarily treat them like real people, befriend them, even fall in love with them a little. Meta---- reminds you, and at is extreme won't let you forgot, that art is a medium that specializes in lies. Once you're constantly aware of how much those representations are mediated, you realize how much vision and language can be simulated, you realize that your own sense function based on the very same principles, and before you know it, you're living in a radically subjective world.
That's not to say that there's definitively no external reality, just that we don't have access to it. This is not a new thought, of course. Like most of your more esoteric concepts, the spiritual thinkers got to it long before anybody else. Reality is but an illusion, a veil of tears, shadows on the wall. The difference, as is often the case with postmodern forms, is that instead of then offering some kind of authoritative organizing principle to compensate for taking away the universe, metafiction just says "Tough shit. Deal with it." Or maybe it's Modernism that says that. Frankly, I can never tell. I suspect Modernism says "tough shit" and postmodernism says "quick rubber armpits" and then laughs. No no. I kid. It probably says "then make your own reality, because you don't have a choice." Let's cut the crap. I say that because I can see no alternative.
The immediate impact, the "stake," is that determining your practical necessities and moral requirements is suddenly extremely difficult. How can we condemn or praise anything knowing that in addition to our own, personal reactions, there are hundreds more? I think in this case, the problem contains its solution. The multiple points of view that the metafictional collapse of the concept of "reality" force us to acknowledge are the not the destruction of moral certainty but instead the source of moral problem-solving. Only when we have looked at the problem from many points of view and acknowledged that point of view makes a big difference can we then say we have the evidence at our disposal to make a moral determination.
I'm reading Brian McHale right now, Constructing Postmodernism, who recommends that pomo should continue to avoid metanarratives, as it has traditionally done since at least Lyotard, but that doesn't mean it has to avoid all stories. It just means we "turn them down" to "little narratives" (p24). That means a couple of things. First, we don't have to ignore the manifest facts in front of our noses just because we know that perception is subjective. They're only little narratives now, these means by which we understand the universe, but they're still narratives and we can still use them. Second, we have to listen to them all, watch them all. In short, we have to actually do our homework before we barge out into the world, kicking ass and taking names. It's a pretty simple idea, really.
But that's a Big Idea. What about the smaller stuff? Well, one of my recent entries was on fixity and mulstability as narrative models. The real problem here is that I honestly don't want to endorse one over the other. My research is specifically about how fixity is slowly revealed to be impossible, given the givens of the American comicbook industry, and it is certainly true that I prefer a more fluid structure, that I think multistability can contain an astounding "payload" of information, of meaning, of ideas when handled well, but that doesn't mean I think it's unequivocally or morally "better" than a continuous, logical, causal, semi-realistic narrative. Total disengagement with reality usually results in narratives that are impenetrable.
Experiments done with avantgarde art (or the writerly or whatever you want to call it) tend to end with the creation of some new, radically different formal structure that was designed to reverse the implicit mythologies of the mainstream... but no one can understand it, which makes them just another form of élitistspeak. It keeps people out, disavows the participation of precisely the people it's supposed to emancipate. Which means that a popular form that can represent radical notions of epistemology, metaphysics, and ontology in a way that people actually understand is in the perfect strategic position. I mean, propaganda works, after all. Brr! This is how every tyranny starts, isn't it?
The really scary part (other than tyranny) is that if you do "speak" the avantgarde "language," the structures of the system itself can easily fool you into thinking you're saying something meaningful and/or radical, when really it's just repetition with affection, an elaborate form of duckspeak. I'm realizing more and more how much people are capable of saying things with conviction and sophistication, and yet don't mean or believe a word of it (in fact, multistability relies on this very human quality!). We are not logical, consistent creatures, after all. So as much as I like fluidity and multistability, I know that it's not necessary the magic ticket to enlightenment and liberation. It's been tried. I'm not saying we should stop trying, but so far it hasn't worked.
Another stake: faulty "realism." I've talked about this before, the "realistique," the genre that masquerades as reality but in fact just follows its own set rules, and which we regard as real not because it matches reality, but because we are simply accustomed to its forms (once again, see Todorov, "An Introduction to Verisimilitude"). This is more of that repetition with affection, thing. Any genre feels "real" if we're acclimated to it, including the highest of the high-fantasy genres, thus any genre, even the highest of the high-fantasy, follows a certain set of baseline rules about how reality is supposed to work (and I don't mean "ought" to work, I mean "supposed").
There are radically experimental books, of course. Reading Philip K. Dick proves that literature exists that doesn't follow reality's rules, and although he seems to have come by those perceptions honestly (he was probably bi-polar and possibly mildly autistic, or something), they're still a hell of a shock. Dick's novels embrace something other than the common conception of this thing called "reality." I'm not sure what that something is, mind you. My point is that real experiments with form figure out what the medium is capable of doing, performing, demonstrating, saying, representing, instead of how to find ways to make the form appear to duplicate reality.
The surrealist painters, for example, were all about showing off how unreal the form could be and yet follow some of the rules of visual art. There's a certain honesty to that. As I said before, once you just admit that art is a complex system of rhetorically effective lies--told to the ear, shown to the eye, aimed at the heart, etc.--you can appreciate it better, on its own terms, for what it is, not what you'd like it to be. Even better, you don't expect it to dictate the nature of reality to you, which is a bit of a problem when it's effectively incapable of replicating reality in such a way that isn't just filtered through a singular perception. Knowing that it's all "lies" (in this cordial sense) means that you can do what McHale says, make it all into little narratives and experience them all instead of listening to one, and only one, and thereby dooming yourself to a life of tunnel vision.
So frankly, there's a lot at stake. I just have to decide which bits of it I feel strongly enough about to go ahead and endorse, for whatever my opinion's worth.
Posted by orion at August 30, 2007 11:10 PM