Metafiction raises the fictional world off the page. It becomes visible when the author aludes to the artificiality of the fiction itself. Do I do this? You bet. But before I own up to it, I’d like to work with its dimensions. I’d like to explore metafiction including alusions to the constructed nature of language and critiques of the role of books and reading in social life. It begins in the first chapter of the novel.
Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash
Holy Writ
“Reading only gets in the way.”
Jebediah could say prayers at dinner that gave me goosebumps, Eliza too. He smiled and said, “You can feel the holiness of the Word when its rightly spoken. Reading only gets in the way,” he’d say, “especially for girls and those that can sing.” Then he’d look at Eliza. He taught her to read shape notes on a paper he carried in his pocket, and to sing the Ozark and Appalachian songs. “So you know, your education is not sorely lacking,” said Pa. He did not want us girls to read words, that was clear.
The Compromise, Stoneville 1839″
Of course this says something about character. The father, Jebediah was a preacher, so he lets me spin a story around his relationship to a sacred text, the Bible. To him, the Word “rightly spoken” determines how it can be experienced. Mariah believed that Jebediah did not want his daughters to learn to read. This theorizes a special cast of preachers who deliver the experience of holiness to others, especially females, through the masculine and priestly skill of enlivening words. It’s a sort of division of labor when the pews are full of listening and appreciative women and the preachers are men who feel like they’ve been elected, entitled to deliver sacraments. There is nothing new here!
Jebediah makes an exception. Eliza may learn to read shape notes so that she can sing from a paper. The shape notes are a visual representation of tones. For him, knowing songs was the sign of being educated, not reading words composed of the alphabet, as it is to us. As a metaphor, reading can be an ideology that polices its borders.
Visual Metaphors
Making meaning is like making honey in the hive.
Mariah circumvents the requirement to decode the words. It is especially significant when she takes the ancient illuminated manscript to the garden. The image of light spilling from the sky or rising from the book into the sky compels her to see the image in the direct sunlight of the garden. She follows the metaphor of light in the garden until the words on the page are like the internal parts of flowers; readers are like bees, and making meaning is like making honey in the hive. Later she refers to this metaphor to understand how new information can change networks of meaning in her own mind. The 12th century monks who made the manuscript provided the labor for her realization and in her mind are also fulfilled by it. This works against any prohibition or faith to the contrary, i.e. that the ancient documents are like holy relics and should not be touched by common people. To her they are icons in the most traditional sense.
Mariah’s knowledge of the natural world gives her alternative perspectives and modes of resistance to the dominant narrative. Next, the lesson is about bookworms, but the message is also a cryptic one about semantics.
“Even I must not open this book, Mariah. But you can see from the outside. It has tiny holes from bookworms long since decayed. Only special antiquarians know what this book means. We are not antiquarians, Mariah.”
“Yes, Ma’am. You are right.” I knew that worms always had the final say about the meaning of things, books or no books.
I can’t tell how many times I use visual metaphors in the novel! They are tucked in everywhere.
Written Words
“One day words will not be lies.”
Readers have expressed the concern that particular words I use in the novel seem too advnced for my characters who lack education. Constraints in the ability to use words are associated with limited access to schooling and the ability to read. These readers may not have heard of educational theories which delay reading instruction until the child develops the concepts through oral language and hands-on experience.
My characters share this fascination with writing. Otis compares written words to a plan for a building. Until we build inhabitable structures acording to our written sentiments, we are only telling lies. In this case the lies are about American equality and justice. Those who built the university did not benefit from their labor. Now we work to right the wrongs. Georgetown University has done this for its actions in 1838. Words come first, and they come true through making them so in the physical world. This sounds platonic to me, or maybe Masonic.
He pointed behind us and said, “Today the shapes of buildings are drawn with string and their designs are words on paper. One day Jefferson’s words will not be lies. My old friend said, ‘Truth advances and error recedes, step by step only.’”
“Who taught you to think that?” I asked.
“A few people. Miss Ada for one. Always giving me things to read and asking questions. You listen to her.”
The Compromise, “Columbia 1839”
Mariah recognizes that Otis is demonstrating a way of thinking that he has learned. He says a teacher told him to read and answer questions. Sound familiar? Though much can be made of access to formal schooling, it becomes apparent that freedom of expression requires fewer material resources and more willingness to work at it.
Doctrine of Liberation
Words are never isolated from contexts of use and education is never politically neutral. Education is loaded with doctrine about self, society, authority, and institutional control even if we cannot recognize it. Miss Ada is particularly interested in teaching those who are subject to the prohibition on teaching. Teaching was a mode of resistance in 1840, and maybe it always has been.
“And I will be heard.”
Miss Ada said, “The Liberator, a new one came from Mr. Garrison in Boston.” She raised her right hand solemnly, “Our country is the world--”
Hester and Otis said together, “Our countrymen are mankind.”
...
She spoke her next words as if they were part of a liturgy. “I am in earnest. I will not equivocate. I will not excuse.” Otis and Hester nodded and hummed their agreement.”
Hester said in a quiet and determined voice, “I will not retreat a single inch.”
Otis added in a firm voice, “And I will be heard.”
The Compromise, “The Liberator, 1840” Quotations in italics are from The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper popular in the 1840s.
I could spin a story here about the rituals of instruction and about an unexamined pedagogy of liberation. Miss Ada is a reformer, much like many women I have known. Mariah observes the lessons and is burdened by fear of breaking the law. History shows that the rhetoric on both sides did not lead to compromise or gradual change, but to civil war.
The Storyteller Enters
Metafiction leads to a watching state of mind. I act and I watch the action. This lets me act on a theory and remake it as I go. I have felt the duplicity of this, which can be found in the passages of metafiction that follow. These were written for a different work of fiction begun several years ago, called Watching the Homeland. Much of this is about the “suspension of disbelief,” a term coined in 1817 by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I liken the willingness to read to being led to a drop-off for a flying lesson over a lake.
People in text can live in the sun, cross-pollinate, and shade us like overlapping leaves. But that is a promise I cannot keep. These characters vomit, shake, pound the walls, and lose the center. How do we answer them? Do we become removed by language from the politics of fear? Or do we become conscious of how human life remakes itself? I have no control over which you choose.
The Storyteller enters, and smiling, points to a lake in the forest, to the trail up to the cliff, and to the emptiness above the lake. Two people climb the path together. The Storyteller stops, like an insincere friend, steps back, and does not hold his friend’s hand. The friend plunges ahead, too late to see that he could have trusted less, and for a few moments, he flies.
Educators would be wise to see reading for what it is, a very intimate interplay in stillness. The reader must be prone and open to a trusted otherness. Am I conjuring when I write metafiction, positioning fiction next to telepathy, prayer, and magic spells? Is it dangerous like a spider to a fly? Or am I asking for metacognition, that chief educator in our own minds?
They twist in and out of each other’s thoughts forming harmonic webs among them. Patterns are invisible to those who are in them. We can only wonder at the effect— untied from the present earth, untied from the human past, then tied together again to make a story; they cannot hold more than a prayer or a spell.
