s.penkevich > Books: metafiction‎ (14)

‘That’s why I’m talking to you like this. I am, you may have realized, a bit chattier than your usual detectives in these books. I’m not going to hide anything from you. This is a fair-play mystery, after all.’

I know I need a structure full of holes so that I can always find a place for myself on the page, inhabit it; I have to remember never to put in more than is necessary, never overlay, never furnish or adorn. Open doors, windows. Raise walls and demolish them.

In One Thousand and One Nights the narrator strings together a series of tales to put off the day of her death. Perhaps a similar but reverse mechanism would work for this story, this death. The narrator discovers that while she is stringing the tale, the mesh of her immediate reality wears thin and breaks. The fiber of fiction begins to modify reality and not vice versa as it should be. Neither of the two can be sacrificed. The only way to save all the planes of the story is to close one curtain and open another...change the characters’ names, remember that everything is or should be fiction. Write what really did happen and what did not.

Perhaps it’s right that words contain nothing, or almost nothing. That their content is, at the very least, variable.

There are people who are capable of recounting their lives as a sequence of events that lead to a destiny. If you give them a pen, they write you a horribly boring novel in which each line is there for a reason…

[T]he screenwriter starts thinking he should imagine his script not as a series of concentric layers like an onion, but of a series of parallel planes, each successive one subsumed in the next…Should he exist in the same world in wich she moves, or should he exist in the world she imagines?

The story is his own invention, but he knows he borrows heavily from the girl, from the stories she tells him, from the extracts of her novel she reads to him or that get delivered to his hotel, with commentaries scribbled in the margins, which he incorporates into his own narrative.

What really matters is not the object in itself, whether it exists objectively, so to speak, but the fact we can perceive it at all, and perception, being subjective, is as multifarious as the number of people that comprise the human race.

his yearning, is symptomatic of a man who’d have mourned the loss of any age, any time, because the only thing that truly vanishes is the self located there, located then, so the narrator interprets the end of his age as the end of the self, and the end of the self as end of world entire.

[I]n the explosion, thoughts began expanding outward, creating a universe that exists only within its own solitude, although it appears so real that it eventually created beings who were convinced it was real, that they were real, and so convinced were they, it was inconceivable to even admit to the possibility that all they saw around them, all they knew and loved and hated, was only a product of thought. These beings eventually thought other universes into existence…always refusing to admit to the possibility that the constantly expanding universe they lived in was just a mind that thought them into existence.

All the prisoners were my dad, and I loved him...now I knew that love was more, much more than that. I had to become the guardian angel of all the desperate men to discover what love really was.

’The support of third-rate artists should be left to those who can best support them – universities and foundations. It tends to prevent them from prostrating you with boredom as they go into their nobody-has-the-courage-to-listen-to-me act. Everybody gets a piece of the action and art remains a game for the intelligent.’

’There is no body of work in literature that, conceived of as some kind of diversion from the stringencies of art, will not rot and its putrescence affect the population…they think they can insult language and it not matter. I see those lusterless words putrefacting, sinking into a soured mulch that will poison the earth the writers thought to celebrate.’

’But one of the basic reasons for this list is to allow numbskull reviewers to tell their readers that it is merely an avant-garde convention, employed since Joyce. Further, that the use of these lists is a method whereby the writer avoids the responsibility of narrative and plot. But this book has both narrative and plot. Subtly disguised I grant you, but there.’

[T]exts withstand time only when they are associated with an author whose actions in life—of which their texts are the only tangible testimony—excite the curiosity of posterity.

he was a theoretician, one could almost say a “writer,” and the only thing that linked him to the Miracle Cures was a kind of metaphor…Hence, their miraculous charm would never coincide with any proof, and the underlying theory would be left untouched. Only by dint of useless miracles could one prevent a theory from degenerating into a dogma.

Under these conditions, a miracle was simply impossible. But it could be created indirectly, through negation, by excluding from the world everything that was incongruent with it occurring.

The trick was to put into play the greatest of encyclopedias and to compile the relevant list from that. Who could do that? The customary response, the one that had been offered since oldest antiquity was: God. And to remain with that meant Miracles would have stayed within his jurisdiction. Dr. Aira’s originality was in postulating that man could do it, too.

’The reader who won’t read my novel if he can’t know all of it first is my kind of reader, he’s an artist, because he who reads only seeking the final resolution is seeking what art should not provide, his interest is in the merely vital, not in a state of consciousness: the only artistic reader is the one who does not seek resolution.’