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Articles & Chapters

"The Chaos of Metafiction," from Chaos and Order

It seems, at first, curious that metafictional texts possess characteristics of chaotic systems in the phenomenal world, but they do. I want to present four main characteristics shared by them: nonlinearity, self-reflexivity, irreversibility, and self-organization. As much as possible, I want to avoid using chaotic structures merely as a convenient metaphor or allegory for the structures contained within metafiction. We could easily lend the narratives we employ for the phenomenal world, or psy-chology, or politics, or metaphysics, to the investigation of texts. In fact, our instincts as critics have often led us in the past to do just that, to speak of a text as an organism which gives birth to meanings, which has a life of its own, which is fathered by so and so, which contains an Oedipal antagonism toward its progenitors, and so on. (Even to say that a text "contains" something is to give it a spatial dimensionality it only metaphorically has.) The crucial purpose in exposing the chaos and complexity of metafiction is not to provide another vocabulary through which to speak of a text; nor is it to suggest that the dynamics of mcta-fiction are like those of chaos or of complex systems. Instead, it is to show that metafiction displays the properties located in what science calls chaos, and that a metafiction text is a complex system. It is also to show that metafiction and scientific chaos are embraced by a larger revolution in contemporary thought that examines the similar roles of narrative, and of investigative procedure, in our "reading" or knowledge of the world.

A fiction text contains many strategies for metamorphosing the apparent chaos or randomness of phenomenal reality into an order comprehensible to its reader. Usually, a text employs these strategies covertly, and thereby sustains the illusion that it does not mediate between reader and world, but opens a neutral window onto that world for the reader. As a consequence, the strategies recede beneath the surface of the text's significant intentions, to counsel calmly and imperceptibly the reader's impression of the text's neutrality as the reading process continues, maintaining what Roland Barthes skeptically terms "the totalitarian ideology of the referent" ('To Write" 138). The mimetic text must maintain the reader's happy ignorance of the illusion in which he is enmeshed, and not disrupt his intuitive belief that it is permitting a linear transmission of reality to him. "Really, universally, relations stop nowhere," writes Henry James, "and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle in which they shall happily appear to do so" (vii; James's emphasis).

This linear transmission occurs across the margin between two supposedly separate entities, text and world, that share a boundary of language whose dynamics exhibit strange and frequently unpredictable behavior.1 Post-Saussurian investigation has revealed how that margin is not an unproblematic prism of decoding but a highly chaotic site where the indeterminacy of language proliferates. Previously, the writer's and reader's reliance on the linearity of the process of semantic production tended to produce texts whose ideologies reflected that linearity. A traditional nineteenth-century novel of verisimilitude, we liked to think, translated this reliance into a historical determinism, in which the language of fiction, its sequence, causality, and closure, fully articulated the past and revealed its consequences for the present. Language, like mimetic novels' fabula, had a determinable and stable effect, capable of accurate manipulation by the writer, and obedient interpretation by the reader; and this intuitive belief in the stability of the medium resulted in fiction whose social, political, sexual, and metaphysical ideologies reflected it. The measurement system of language, in other words, dictated its own results just as, in physics, the reliance on the linearity of systems created results, and paradigms, which reflected that linearity.

If language is recognized not as a neutral occasion for the direct transferral of meaning, but as a chaotic generator of significance whose interpretations are multiple, then the determinacy of the text it occasions becomes somewhat troubled. In effect, the text ceases to transmit the exterior world, and interrogates its own medium of transmission instead. This self-reflexive moment is a characteristic indicator of a metafictional text: it is a moment at which the subject under investigation is neither the ontological nor the phenomenal worlds external to it, but the complex margin of language strategy that separates the text from them.2 To investigate its indeterminacy is akin to exploring the chaotic mannerisms of deterministic disorder; one witnesses both a bewildering randomness and an elusive order.

To varying degrees many fiction texts, not solely postmodern ones, are actually metaflctional.3 The novel, a product of the suspicion of genre itself, was pressured into existence as an escape from the accrustation of conventional form. It is no coincidence that one of the first, Tristram Shandy, remains one of the clearest examples of a metafictional text, for it contains the anxiety of an absence of predecessors, and a consequently obsessive self-inspection that is one of its subjects, and delights. Metafiction, in other words, is a synchronic response to the chaotic nature of its medium, and the structures inherent in it are a consequence of the dynamics of language, not a reflection of the chaotic phenomenal or ontological realities that all art, in some way, engages. We could say, then, that metafiction is an investigation of the chaos of meaning's production.

The random patterning within a simple phenomenal system is creative, because it generates "richly organized patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable" (Gleick 43). The system of the metafictional text is creative as well, producing what Barthes terms the "jouissance" of an inexhaustible possibility of interpretations.4 A simple example of this is in John Cheever's Bullet Park. Through a series of circumstances, both diabolical and innocent, two characters previously unknown to each other become adversaries. One is named Hammer, the other Nailles. This "mysterious power of nomenclature," as Cheever terms it, causes the reader to question the text's relationship to the actual world he knows. If the text does not present him with too many of these coincidences, he is likely to be forgiving, to say they lie (so to speak) within the realm of possibility, and to persist in reading it as a mimetic novel of realism. If the text presents the reader with several linguistic coincidences like this one (and Bullet Park does) the reader is forced to recognize that it is deliberately disrupting his assumptions concerning the linear relationship between text and familiar world. Cheever's naming of names reveals the conventionality of that process, and also reverses expectations of causality, for here a name is contingent upon its character's function in the text, not upon a familiar corpus of names in reality. This disconnects the text from any stable external referent, and calls attention to its artifice.5 It is a maneuver that demands the reader's creative interplay with the text, for in the absence of any realistic model for nomenclature, the reader must generate possible motives himself. If we were to spend more time with Bullet Park, we would see how this creative process is both enlisted and frustrated, for the text refuses to confer significances upon the characters that correspond to their names (as in David Copperfield, for instance, where Agnes is the element of purity in the hero's life) or that are simple ironic inversions of that correspondence (as in The Great Gatsby, where Daisy is the opposite of innocence).

One result of this is a disruption of our familiar system of cause and effect (in the case of a text, the "cause" is the author's intention, and/or the donnée of the phenomenal world, and the "effect" is the text's obedient transmission of it); replacing this system in the metafictional text is the very provisional status of cause, origin, presence, and absolute truth. This amounts to a refusal of the hierarchical structure of meaning dependent upon an authorial creation and a passive readerly consumption, a refusal of "God and his hypostases -- reason, science, law" (Barthes, "Death" 147), and undoes the one-way transmission of the author-reader connection. Metafiction exploits the understanding that a text cannot be an author's wind-up watch confidently demarcating the universe, submissively consulted by the reader, and that instead it is a chaotic system created by the text's limitless potential for interpretation, and the author's relinquished power. This diminished status of the author precludes a magnetic north of truth in the text, and frees signification to disseminate in ever-burgeoning patterns, as we shall see.

This is one way of saying that within the finite space of any text are an infinite number of possible meanings, whose hierarchy metafiction refuses to arbitrate. It can do this by disregarding the codes that we rely on to guide our interpretation of a text, or by exposing them as artificial, the product of conventions which themselves have only a very tenuous (and usually arbitrary or nonlinear) relationship with the signified.6 With this refusal to arbitrate between an infinite number of possible meanings comes a metafictional text that is ostensibly meaningless for the reader of mimetic fiction, or at least ostensibly so random in its structure that it allows no communication-a chaotic text that contains no differentiation and hence no significance, anarchistically makes and shatters framing structures, and dissolves the primacy of the referent. Yet, as in the phenomenal world, hidden structures exist within this apparent chaos, which emerge when instability is given its due.7

The labyrinth is one of the metaphors that metafiction summons most frequently in the face of structure's absence. In its crossings and recrossings that rupture straight lines (by which we traditionally image "plot") it represents metafiction's disruption of linearity, and hence of fiction's previous hierarchical systems. (It also obscures the intuitive Western concept of linear genealogy; one example of this is Cheever's Hammer and Nailles, but Nabokov's parody of genealogical filiation in Humbert Humbert's history, Pynchon's opaque etymology of Oedipa Maas, Eco's William of Baskerville are others). The activity of the labyrinth involves an infinite repetition or retracing that obstructs memory, and hence origin, and in this way is metonymic of fiction's violated descent from reality that metafiction makes explicit. When extended to the dimensions of time, or voice, or causality, or symbolism, or closure, its relevance multiplies exponentially. In the mythic template of the labyrinth story, its relevance is evident too. In one happy version of the Dionysus-Ariadne romance he says to her, "I am your labyrinth"; a connection exists here between the Iabyrinthine patterning of fiction that finds no mimetic release, and Barthes' concept of "jouissance." It is Thesean logic which allows escape from the labyrinth, but as J. Hillis Miller points out, even Theseus "cannot free himself from his bondage with Ariadne herself, however much he tries to forget her" (62). Daedalus, the labyrinth maker, accidentally identifies himself to his enemy Minos while solving a labyrinth problem of how to negotiate a thread through the chambers of a seashell, thus imprisoning himself once again. As Miller writes, "[t]hread and labyrinth, thread intricately crinkled to and fro as the re-tracing of the labyrinth which defeats the labyrinth but makes another intricate web at the same time-pattern is here superimposed on pat-tern" (61).8 Both Borges's Labyrinths and Barth's Lost in the Funhouse play with these various associations.

The Lorenz "strange attractor," in its display of an infinite number of paths in a finite space,9 is analogous to Barth's description of the labyrinth as "a place in which, ideally, all the possibilities of choice (and direction, in this case) are embodied, and . . . must be exhausted before one reaches the heart" (Barth, "Literature of Exhaustion" 34).10 Ambrose, the enmeshed protagonist of Barth's short story "Lost in the Funhouse," recognizes some of these possibilities at the end of the fiction in which he is enmeshed, lamenting that "the plot doesn't rise by meaningful steps but winds upon itself, digresses, retreats, hesitates, sighs, collapses, expires" (96), and witnessing "how readily he deceived himself into supposing he was a person. He even foresaw, wincing at his dreadful self-knowledge, that he would repeat the deception, at ever-rarer intervals all his wretched life" (93). And Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman places the tantalus-like figure at the center of the intricate, and self-replicating, web of fiction and history from which there is no escape.

Barth's labyrinth is in the guise of a house of mirrors, which allows him to point out that if fiction's mimetic lineage from reality is necessarily severed, one of its ensuing patterns involves self-reflexivity. Mandelbrot's studies of chaotic systems revealed just such patterns, beautifully embodied in fractals, which "above all . . . meant self-similar" (Gleick 103). Self-reflexivity in metafiction is the product of its desire to expose the covert structures that allow fiction to masquerade as reality; it is always involved in the simultaneous processes of manufacturing illusion and revealing its artifice. It thus becomes an eternal system of creating and deconstructing,11 whose self-interpreting pattern is realized in the mise-en-abyme that eternally defers the revelation of truth or knowledge, again raising the specter of Lorenz's strange attractor, which "displays infinite regress, like an unending sequence of Russian dolls one inside the other" (Gleick 150). In "The Circular Ruins" Borges makes this order, latent in the chaos of text production, apparent in a dialectic of dream and shattered image that emerges from the chaos of fire. In the story a man desires to dream another into fictional existence, and is assisted by "Fire . . . [who] animate[s] the phantom dreamt by the wizard in such wise that all creatures . . . would believe the phantom to be a man of flesh and blood" (72). Before long, the dreamer fears that his creation will "meditate on his abnormal privilege and somehow discover his condition of mere simulacrum. Not to be a man, to be a projection of another man's dream-what incomparable humiliation, what vertigo!" At the point of death (which takes place at the center of the circular ruins, in fire), he realizes that he too is dreamed; the creator is himself a fiction, imprisoned in a world whose author is, by extension, no less fabricated. The paradox is not limited to the musings of a metaf-ictionist. In Order Out Of Chaos Prigogine and Stengers ponder whether we are 'mere fictions produced by our imperfect senses? Is the distinc-tion between life and death an illusion?" (252).

The vertiginous mise-en-abyme of metafiction is sustained by its per-petual dialectic of interpretation and deconstruction. It creates a pattern that stretches, not toward revelation, but around it. To reach the center of Borges's "circular ruins" would be to abolish the mediation of the imagination and the forms such as language that it assumes, and to apprehend directly, to be consumed by the referent as by fire (to reach the center of the labyrinth would be similarly fatal, and paradoxical, for it holds the minotaur, "dual and ambiguous," as Foucault terms both it and language [14]). But this cannot be done, except in solipsism (which the blind Jorge, Eco's reverent parody of Borges in The Name of the Rose, approaches, though he too is ultimately consumed by fire). Instead, man exists within, and is defined by his own burgeoning circles of interpretation, within the circular ruins of metaphor. The more information he gathers, the greater the number of intervening circles of language to carry it, the larger the indeterminacy, the more complex the interpreta-tion, and the wider the abyss whose circumference he travels. As Nabokov's Humbert laments to his Lolita (but at the same time to his reader, both objects of his desire), "I have only words to play with!"12 The Lorenz-like infinite tracings of interpretation suggest the Lolita-like elusiveness of truth. They also postulate a universe of appearance, interpreted into being by the observer-reader, whose private "labyrinth of lines traces the image" of his own face (Borges, Dreamtigers 93).

Many metafictional texts, styled with deceptive naiveté, attempt (with a premonition of their own defeat) to discover simplicity, to abolish redundancy and reduce communication to determinate elements of expression that would filter metaphor out and release a text from its linguistic imprisonment. The "simpler" a text becomes, however, the more it is aware of its own medium, because the discrepancy between itself and the multifaceted world is larger and calls attention to the artifice of the text. A text is inevitably involved in some kind of reduction process. From the chaos of the world outside itself, it processes the smallest amount of information that is necessary to communicate it. This is, as Foucault points out, because of the "simple, fundamental fact of language, that there are fewer terms of designation than there are things to designate" (14). Yet its result is always in the form of language, and hence always a metaphor, and metaphor always generates the labyrinthine structure of the text.13 The indeterminate process of meaning-production in metafiction is a complex system, for it organizes itself into a pattern which is responsive to the metaphoric character of language. At the center of the pattern, around which text and reader carry on their inexorable dance, would be the abolition of metaphor, the unmediated truth whose guise is logic. Theseus's logic allowed him escape from the labyrinth, but just as he was doomed to replay the chaos of his desire, so is logic fated to break against the paradox of metaphor, which simultaneously asserts and denies identity by stating the impossible lie "this is that."

Frequently, metafictional texts are constructed so as to frustrate and reorient the logical reader they posit. In Nabokov's story "Signs and Symbols," a central (and anonymous) character is inflicted with a condition called "referential mania," an inability to refrain from recognizing metaphoric relationships between the phenomenal world and himself. He

imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy -- because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. (69)

The reader of the story attempts, among other tasks, to decide whether or not the boy is successful in doing this. Although the reader may not suspect it, he is interested in the problem because, as a reader himself, he shares the boy's fate. Hence the reader is much like the man in Borges's "The Circular Ruins" who recognizes his own identity at his peril. (In fact, just as Borges's man is immolated in the fire of chaos at the point when he realizes his own fictitious status, so does the sun permeate "Signs and Symbols" in various verbal disguises, whose decipherment would reveal to the reader his identity with the referential maniac.) The reader is thus compelled to follow various paths of possible disclosure in the text, none of which are conclusive.14 Because we read early on in Nabokov's story of the (provisional) connection between the boy and a bird, a following description of a dying bird "helplessly twitching in a puddle" seems foreboding (68). At the end of the story, the parents' phone rings ominously three times at night. Is this the hospital calling to say their son has died? These possibilities, two of many imbedded in the text,15 reverse the story's tendency to achieve closure. Out of the chaos of indeterminate meaning the reader arranges possibilities that sustain his disseminating journey around the unknowable truth of the boy that lies at its center. Operating as a complex system, "Signs and Symbols" defeats closure by eternally adapting to new interpretations, which are essential to its generative process.16 Disorder, randomness, and nonlinearity, all characteristics of a metaflctional text's understanding of language, can create their own order. This will in turn give way to another phase of deconstruction, for that order is dependent upon a reading of it, which will inevitably be interrogated. As Prigogine and Stengers write, "nonlinearities may produce an order out of the chaos of elementary processes and still, under different circumstances, be responsible for the destruction of this same order, eventually producing a new coherence beyond another bifurcation" (206).

Hence, the traditional supremacy of order over disorder is negated in chaotic systems and in metafiction, and the hierarchy is neutralized to a dialogue between the two which generates the patterns of the natural world and of the text. In the case of metaflction, this neutralization prevents New Criticism's dream of organic unity, in which components (such as symbol) can be isolated and then extrapolated to serve as the text's message. It also disturbs the pre-Saussurean dream of unified meaning over multiple interpretations. The "irreversibility" Prigogine and Stengers postulate is manifested in a metafictional text's resistance to the reader's urge to trace back from a text's local detail to its comprehensive meaning. This urge in the reading process, which creates a hierarchy among components in the text to the point where disclosure of truth is achieved, defers in metafiction to the continual bifurcations of construction and deconstruction, any of which are comprehensible on the local level but incapable of extrapolation to a unified meaning. Order is therefore manifested in pattern, and hence the metafictional text's absorption with style, and suspicion of "the whole and the one ... of the transparent and the communicable experience" (Lyotard 81). Any literary text, as Barthes claims, "is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological meaning' (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash" ("Death" 146). Metafiction, in making this explicit, sustains a complexity which is initially experienced by the reader as disorder or noise, incapable of reduction to authorial intention or ordered message. To "understand" a metafictional text, one must reject seeing it as a vertical organization of a text's components into a closed order that is interpreted as meaning. Rather, one replaces this view with the recognition of lateral patterns in which disorder becomes order, mystery becomes illumination and then fragments into a new disorder. This pattern generates the reader's continual interpretation of the metafictional text and also the text's self-generation, for the pattern is a manifestation of the text's reading of itself.

The metafictional text alerts its reader to the possibilities of self-generative readings that are latent in any text; in fact it produces a multiply-interpretative and highly self-conscious reader. Marked by an absence of theological "meaning" and a celebration of superficial pattern over significant depth, metafiction sensitizes the reader to transcoding rather than to certainty. Its "order" is contingent upon the disorder whence it emerged and is always susceptible to fragmentation, whence a new order must arise. Inevitably, this consequence of "reading" a metafictional text reorients subsequent reading of nonmetafictional texts for that reader. Metafiction's reciprocity between order and disorder, whose source is the language which is shared by all texts, stimulates the reread-ing of a supposedly realistic text. It unravels the stability of the ordered happy ending, for example, and sees in its place the "unresolved tensions of dialogic oppositions" (Garret 221) that masquerade as closure. Ultimately, it wakens readers from the Romantic dream of the linear relationship between a text's microscopic and macroscopic aspects and alerts them to the "recurrent tensions between individual and general perspectives in [for example] Victorian multiplot novels" (Garrett 223). Ironically, the literary legacy of metafiction is not so much to fiction as yet unwritten as it is to previous texts; it retrospectively causes readers to see, in the limits to readings that a text erects, the possibility for new readings that examine what is excluded, and why.

Another of its legacies must concern our reading of our world. This takes us into the territory of narratology, which I only want to touch on, because it is discussed more fully in this volume by Paulson, Knoespel, and Hughes and Lund. If we were now to take into consideration the possibility that the phenomenal world itself is chaotic, infinitely self-replicating and fractally ordered, the antimimetic properties in metafiction bespeak a nice irony. Metafiction begins with a distaste for purportedly referential or realistic literature and yet, in its reaction against such, nevertheless manifests the structures of the chaotic phenomenal world. The difference is that metafiction generates those structures in itself, and so, although not mimetic of a chaotic world, nevertheless shares its aspects. Just as "the approximation of a coastline to a fractal is better than its approximation to a smooth curve" (Davies 60), so are reality's contours closer to metafiction's than to mimetic fiction's. All of which raises the problem posed by O. E. Rossler in "How Chaotic is the Universe?": "It could turn out . . . that a universe that is chaotic itself ceases to be chaotic as soon as it is observed by an observer who is chaotic himself" (317). A mimetic fiction text masquerades as a copy of the world but is not. Metafiction reveals, on the other hand, how the emergent chaos of a text and of the world are one. This is made explicit in Borges's "The Library of Babel," where the world is postulated as a library of texts, where the margin between text and world, in other words, does not exist.17 Like phenomenal reality, the library is infinite, self-reflexive, and chaotic: "If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (58). And reminiscent of Rossler's postulate that chaos is interpreted as order by the chaotic observer, Borges writes that to this traveler who is within the "disorder" of the universe (or in our case the text) and hence chaotic himself, his surroundings would become "an order, the Order" (58). For Borges, Pynchon, Nabokov, and most writers of metafiction, the world is a text that is read, and our interpretation of our world is a function of our reading of texts.

One aspect of this relationship is our impulse to enlist narrative structures for our understanding of life; to see our lives, or our social and political histories, or the dynamics of our phenomenal world,"' reassuringly as narrative emplotments that we are practiced at reading on the page or hearing told. It is inconceivable, then, that metafiction's distortion of sequential narrative, of the relationship between author and reader, of causality and of closure, will not have consequences for our narrativistic reading of our world, our history, and our lives. Metafiction's reluctance to allow narrative to exist independent of its medium might also illuminate the anthropomorphic profile of our worldly narratives. The noise that any narrative contains is contained by these larger narratives as well, though we try to disregard it in our desire for sequential and closed structures. It is precisely this desire that also makes the initial reading of metafiction difficult. Our worldly narratives, through which we construct what we think of as reality, are themselves a tissue of previous narrative texts with which they blend and clash, and which we choose to interpret in various ways. Whatever we call reality is revealed to us through the narratives we compose or, as Prigogine and Stengers word it, "through the active construction in which we participate" (55). A Euclidean narrative produces a Euclidean understanding of a Euclidean world. The metafictional "narrative of chaos" produces a metafictional understanding of a metafictional or chaotic world. The difference is that in the latter the process of self-interrogation is built into the narrative, freeing it from the tautological determinism that inhabits earlier narratives. This is why the introduction of a metafictional narrative into our world is a juncture that, like a complex system's development, is irreversible. With it, we operate in a cultural mise-en-abyme, where we can neither escape the self-conscious reading of our own imposed narratives nor fail to see, as Borges might have put it, the recognition of our own face in our narrative tracings.

NOTES

1. David Porush, in the preceding Chapter 3, discusses a different boundary, that between the writer's "mind" and "the page," which Porush regards as "a magical leap" that "crosse[s] the threshold from natural to artificial in a sharper and more distinct way than in any other kind of organized behaviour save speech, perhaps." It is partly because he has already discussed that threshold that I restrict myself to the next two in the sequence of a text's production -- the boundary between the text and the world it communicates and, later in the chapter, the boundary between the text and the reader -- but more importantly because metafiction self-consciously engages with these boundaries more relentlessly.

2. Waugh suggests three different types of texts occasioned by what I would term self-reflexive moments": the "self-begetting novel," the "new realism" novel, and "those fictions which . . . posit the world as a fabrication of competing semiotic systems which never correspond to material conditions" (18-19).

However, it becomes difficult to make these distinctions clearly: a metafictional text is usually a hybrid of all of them.

3. Eco even undercuts the historical category of postmodernism: it is "not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category -- or better still, a Kunstwollen, a way of operating. We could say that every period has its own postmodernism, just as every period would have its own mannerism (and, in fact, I wonder if postmodernism is not the modern name for mannerism as a metahistorical category" (Postscript 66). See, also, Fredric jameson's foreword (to Lyotard) where he writes that Lyotard characterizes "postmodernism . . . not as that which follows modernism and its particular legitimation crisis, but rather as a cyclical moment that returns before the emergence of ever new modernisms" (in Lyotard xvi; Jameson's emphasis).

4. Eco refers to texts that do this as "open texts" which "have been planned to invite their Model Readers to reproduce their own processes of deconstruction by a plurality of free interpretive choices" (Role Reader 40). Or, from a different angle, see William Carlos Williams's Paterson: "A dissonance / in the valence of Uranium / led to the discovery // Dissonance / (if you're interested) / leads to discovery" (Book IV, 176).

5. This frame-break is doubled, in fact, when Nailles recognizes the absurdity of their names, as if he is becoming suspicious of his own existence as fictional artifice: "Lying in bed that night Nailles thought: Hammer and Nailles, spaghetti and meatballs, salt and pepper, oil and vinegar, Romeo and Juliet, block and tackle, thunder and lightning, bacon and eggs, corned beef and cabbage, ham and cheese, curb and snaffle, shoes and socks, line and sinker" (Cheever 54).

6. A famous example of this is the opening paragraph of John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse":

For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers. For Ambrose it is a place of fear and confusion. He has come to the seashore with his family for the holiday, the occasion of their visit is Independence Day, the most important secular holiday of the United States of America. A single straight underline is the manuscript mark for italic type, which in turn is the printed equivalent to oral emphasis of words and phrases as well as the customary type for titles of complete works, not to mention. (72)

8. The reader might also be interested in Miller's "Narrative Middles: A Preliminary Outline" (Genre 11, no. 3 [1978]: 375-87) and Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982) for later discussions and expansions of these concepts.

9. See Gleick: "[The attractor's] loops and spirals were infinitely deep, never quite joining, never intersecting. Yet they stayed inside a finite space, confined by a box. How could that be? How could infinitely many paths lie in a finite space?" (140).

10. Barth is playing on the word "heart" here. It is not only the center of the labyrinth, but of desire. The Dionysus-Ariadne myth, of course, illuminates the connection in another way. In a recently' published interview, Barth again conflates the two, when he says that "The formal energy of the [Funhouse] stories comes from [their self-reflexive] concerns . . . which are really of a fairly technical nature. But the juice [jouissance?] of the fiction, the heart of the fiction. comes from such other concerns. . . . Those are love stories, no question about it" (in Lampkin 488).

11. Or, as Waugh writes, metafiction breaks down the distinctions between 'creation' and 'criticism' and merges them into the concepts of interpretation' and deconstruction'" (6).

12. Borges playfully points to the infinite imperfection of language and its interpretations in "The Library of Babel": "for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences" (53). As Borges also frequently shows in his texts, language's degeneration of its own preexisting forms is an occasion for the generation of significance. As Porush argues in this regard: The result is never-ending loops of interpretation and ever-widening circles of meaningfulness" (134).

13. The search is doomed not only because language itself is inescapably metaphorical, but because the mind, conscious of itself being conscious, operates inside its own mise-en-abyme. Metafiction, that is, reveals as much about consciousness as it does about fiction and language. As Gabriel Josipovici points out in a discussion of fictional framing: "we are condemned to see through frames. And recognition of this brings with it a kind of freedom, for it stops us from falling into the trap of thinking that meaning inheres in words, objects or events" (296). And Paul Ricoeur paraphrases Sartre: "to imagine is to address oneself to what is not" (152).

14. See Barthes, S/Z 210. Curiously, in the hermeneutic code the apparently opposite terms "closure" and "disclosure" beget one another and become interchangable.

15. In fact, the reader's urge to create determinate meaning out of chaos in "Signs and Symbols" inevitably leads him to read it symbolically. One impoverished, indeed parodic, result of this is the tantalizing mythological origin of the entrapped son and the father who seeks to design his son's escape from the sanatorium. The implicit early connection of both of them with a fallen bird, coupled with the pervasive use of the word "sol" (sun) in almost all surnames in the story, recalls the proud decoder to the Daedalus and Icarus myth. Yet that too merely raises the spectre of the labyrinth.

16. Eco defines an "open text" as "a paramount instance of a syntactic-semantico-pragmatic device whose foreseen interpretation is part of its generative process" (Role Reader 3).

17. See Hayles (151-52) for a full discussion of this passage in "The Library of Babel." She argues that the story is one example of Barges's questioning of "the assumption that there is a 'reality' to reflect."

18. ". . . a scientist is before anything else a person who 'tells stories.' The only difference is that he is duty bound to verify them" (Lyotard 60).

WORKS CITED

Barth, John. "Lost in the Funhouse." Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction For Print, Tape, Live Voice. New York: Doubleday, 1988. 72-97.

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