The Pictures
are gone, obviously. I will get them back on-line in a week or two. They have been moved to a new server and I have to go in and copy and paste the new web address. Unless there´s a faster way to do it.
So my blog is a lot less exciting now. The pictures felt like clothing. Without them I´m naked.
Naked words. Nothing here but just naked words.
I still have another month in Spain. I will go to Salamanca in a week or so; other than that it´s just Burgos Burgos Burgos. I have been investigating the limits of this little city. It´s quite beautiful. And the other parts that aren´t so beautiful remind me in a melancholickly, nostalgic way of Aurora and other places I have lived and visited.
Guermantes Way is a much better and easier read than Swann´s Way and In a Budding Grove, just so you know.
I saw there was a comment about my sudden boredom with Picasso. I have to say, after seeing the Barcelona Picasso museum, I´ve reversed my opinion. I relent, he´s amazing, genius, etc. His copies of Las Menininas were pretty invigorating. And, yes, his erotic work is spicy. I really like his pottery, too.
While we wait for more pictures, maybe we could have a discussion about the state of fiction. Is fiction still a valid art form? I am not saying that it necessarily is. As a sub-investigation of this question, what is your opinion of meta-fiction? I submit to the investigators that all fiction is meta-fiction; what I mean by this is that every author in writing his or her fiction must decide¨"what" his or fiction is, and therefore his or her fiction is unavoidably a statement about what fiction is, therefore it is¨"meta."
3 comments:
I think that although your definition of ¨metafiction¨ is technically correct, it is not useful. Generally, metafictional fictions are those fictions that the text draws attention to itself as fiction--the narrative depends on this self-reference. Because narratives are based on conventions, and all narratives depend on these conventions, we could say that index of meta-ness is generally quite low for most narrative fiction. Don Quixote may rate a high meta-ness score, but I think that´s an exception, not the rule. I don´t think we should judge a narrative based on it´s meta-index--to dismiss something because its merely ´meta-fiction´ is sloppy. But it is a valid criticism of a piece of writing to say that it is unnecessarily drawing attention to its artifice. Everybody knows its artifice. We don´t need it pointed out to us.
I seems to me that there is a genre of metafiction, for example, a fictional author such as Kilgore Trout publishes a book. I believe Dune was also a meta-fiction-- a fictional psych-historian writes and comments on fictional history. Perhaps you would disagree, but then, perhaps I do not exist?
No you exist. At least in the context of the blog-narrative. I believe you are right, that there is a meta-fiction genre distinct from the notion of meta-fictionality.
Meta-fiction as a genre is a newer phenomenon. Post-modern, would you not say? Even though there were narratives with metafictional elements, such as Don Quixote, long before.
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