SOURCE: Kennedy, Thomas E. “Fiction as Its Own Subject: An Essay and Two Examples—Anderson's ‘Death in the Woods’ and Weaver's ‘The Parts of Speech.’” Kenyon Review 9, no. 3 (summer 1987): 59-70.

[In the following essay, Kennedy examines two little-known works of short metafiction—Sherwood Anderson's “Death in the Woods” and Gordon Weaver's “The Parts of Speech.”]

The terms “metafiction” and “self-reflexive fiction” have been used to denote fiction's deliberately self-conscious employment of technique to bolster the deteriorated equipment of more conventional methods with which the art is concealed. Thus, for example, Barth employs anti-illusion as an instrument of illusion enhancement; Fowles offers alternate endings following a point-counterpoint of fiction and fact to dramatize the nature of existential choice; Calvino fabricates an interweave of reality and illusion which leaves the reader wondering over the juncture of illusion in his own reality-fiction. Conventional plot and linear story are cast aside as hopeless simplifications of the existential experience, or else they are consciously toyed with, manipulated, poked and pinched to squeeze new life from them.

Some readers and writers balk at this sort of experiment or innovation as gimmicky and decadent. They point to Aristotle's classic statement that in the greatest art, the art is least visible. During the decade of debate about this between the mid-sixties and mid-seventies, serious fiction lost many readers to subgenres working more strictly with verisimilitude—most notably the spy genre. Many readers saw these developments in fiction as an abandonment of people and events as subject in favor of excessively self-conscious concerns with technique, language, perception, imagination. Instead of portraits, the reader was offered patterns, deliberate ambiguity, discontinuity, gleefully ironic absurdities. Authors defied the master, James, to poke about visibly, demonstratively, distractingly within the guts of their own fictions.

Yet a dimension more profound than the merely technical is involved in the realm of such exploration—the use of fiction as its own metaphor of self-creation, where the process of the fiction is the ultimate existential expression toward which it progresses. In other words, the fiction-making process is used as a metaphor for the self-creation of human identity. This aspect is central to the theme of both stories to be discussed here.

The idea is not new and certainly was not born in the sixties, although the discussions of that decade may have helped to negotiate some obstacles to the understanding of this aspect of metafiction.

Sophisticated fiction wants a sophisticated reader, and some art takes decades to be comprehended. Elements of this fictional technique are as old as literature itself—found in Gilgamesh, Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Coleridge; the fully developed technique has been in use for more than half a century. Even Nick Carraway was a first-person creative narrator, composing Jay Gatsby consciously before our eyes as Jay himself shaped an identity which grew to an embodiment of the national fiction to be known as the American Dream. Sherwood Anderson, fifty years ago, after nearly a decade of trial and error on it, created a splendid example of the genre which was still being misread by Anderson scholars as recently as 1974. Such misreadings seem to result from a confusion about the borders separating literature from life. An interesting example can be seen in the decision taken by Lionel Trilling for his 1967 anthology The Experience of Literature to eliminate the prefatory note to Coleridge's “Kubla Khan, A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment” because “the researches of the American scholar, Professor Elisabeth Schneider, have brought the literal truth [of that prefatory note] into serious question; they suggest that these circumstances of composition [as reported in the prefatory note] were as much the product of the poet's imagination as the poem itself.”¹

That prefatory note, one will recall, purported to describe the manner and circumstances influencing the poet's state of mind in which he “dreamed” the poem, only to lose again the bulk of it when he was called away by business as he sat to write it down. That Coleridge chose to place the note after the title of the poem when it was published in 1816 would seem sufficient justification to consider that it belongs there, even if it was created out of so lowly a faculty as the poet's imagination. Ironic to exclude a part of a poem because it has been proven to relate occurrences which do not literally correspond to the poet's biography.

Similarly, a primary obstacle to the understanding of a fiction about fiction, particularly when the fiction is presented by a first-person creative narrator, is the need to differentiate the narrative persona from the author himself. As Weaver points out, “Every fiction … is told by a fictional persona … the persona is always the mask that word's Greek root signifies.”² When the narrator in Barth's The Floating Opera tells the reader that he has never written a novel before, though he has read a few to try to get the hang of it, clearly this is not a confession by Barth, himself, of amateur status; it is an anti-illusionist technique which charges the whole fiction with an even stronger illusion of reality, born of its very anti-illusionist devices. The anti-illusion is part of the prestidigitation—a sleight of hand by which verisimilitude is created as a soil within which the fiction's thematic concerns can take root and grow.

When the reader begins to take the narrative persona literally, he stumbles out of the dimension in which fiction exists—that “middle place” which, Gass tells us, the word inhabits between thing and thought, object and idea.

In the sixties and seventies, much was said in the discussion surrounding these concerns about the border or lack of border between art and reality. We saw Capote's nonfiction novel and Mailer's novel as history/history as a novel, the so-called “new journalists” reporting the so-called “new experience,” the subjective journalism of Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and others, the glitter-free street reportage of Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill, and the resuscitation of extreme authorial intrusion by Fowles, Barth, Calvino, and others. In this climate, art and reality seemed to become even more confused with one another than they already had been by the linguistic sleight of hand by which writers like Twain and Hemingway appeared to have shortened the gap between life and literature.

By definition, however, I would think, the two are and remain distinct: art is artifact, man-made; reality the visible universe. Though I fear that I may be treading out upon spongy earth when I say it, I would think that the confusion of these two is similar to a confusion between perception and object perceived, between description and object described. While it no doubt is true that reality is but a point of view, and it may be true that each of us lives his or her private fiction, in a sense, still the fact would seem fact that the art of fiction is something other than reality per se or, in any event, is not all of reality, although it may serve as an organizing element for reality's diverse aspects.

Nor is fiction the same as journalism, subjective or otherwise. While it is no doubt true, as Joe David Bellamy says, that “even a modest understanding of the way language works leads to the realization that selection, arrangement, and attitudinal investment affect every ‘realistic’ account,”³ still journalism purports to write the minutes of external reality, to represent in a more or less photographic fashion the factual elements of a given, actual situation in order to present an objective or subjective-objective view of a given, actual, social activity which is a direct spatial and temporal reflection of the real-life images it relates. It purports to convey fact; when it is discovered lapsing into factoid or composite, the ethics committee is called to order.

Fiction makes no such claim. On the contrary, fiction is a reorganization of “real” life, a fusion of the real and imagined, half-man/half-goat, transformed and ordered in accordance with the author's aesthetic judgment. And fiction holds no guarantee that what is presented is any sort of faithful reflection of the external world, for it may as well be a Weltian landscape of the soul we are looking upon when we gaze out over the steaming countryside. Fiction is a lie told in the service of truth, in pursuit of a quintessential reality at the human soul.

I find it useful to think of the “events” and “people” in literature as having the same kind of reality as colors and forms in painting. Do they depict “real” objects, or don't they? The answer, I would think, must be yes and no. When we see a Hundertwasser house—warped, studded with blind gold windows—we have no trouble understanding it is not a “real” house; it is an image, in the same way, I think, that a fictional character—be it drawn by John Hawkes, John Fowles, John Gardner, or John Milton—is an image and has a reality similar, in a large sense, to that of a piece of math or hunk of philosophy or an image on a canvas. These are neither people nor events; they are shades, constructs of the imagination that exist on a supercorporeal plane, the essences of communication between parts of our being and between one another.

The Hundertwasser house is the image, the illusion of a house which has no parallel in the physical universe. Yes, it is a house, but it is not a house. It is a house to furnish with imaginings to complete life's insufficiencies.

In the same way, a fictional character is not a person as such, but is only an image, an illusion. Who was it that first asked where Hamlet is when he is not on the stage? The answer I would think is nowhere. Because he exists only in the words which create the illusion of him, only in the technical movements of the actor who lends his flesh to that illusion. So, too, the characters in fiction. They are people, yes, in a sense they are like people, but they are not people. They are illusions. They are like the characters in our dreams. How often do you flounder to try to describe a person in your dream: well, it was so and so, but not just him because somehow it was also my father as well as the face of someone I saw on the bus somewhere once who looked at me in a certain way.

Eudora Welty elucidated the point finely in 1955 in “How I Write”:

… subject, method, form, style, all wait upon—indeed hang upon—a sort of double thunderclap at the author's ears: the break of the living world upon what is stirring inside the mind and the answering impulse that in a moment of high consciousness fuses impact and image and fires them off together …⁴

The fusion of impact and image of physical world and imagined one. This includes, I would think, both the arguments of Gass when he tells us that there are no events in fiction, but only words, and of Hemingway when he insists that there is no symbolism in his work—that the old man is simply an old man, the fish a fish, the boy a boy, and the shark only a shark, no better and no worse. I believe that one can say yes and no to each of those arguments, for fiction is the fusion of the real and imagined, of object and language, a model of reality which might contain a deeper truth.

I'm sure we all construct models of reality within which to function, and these models also are fictions—or rather lies perhaps. Fiction, too, is a lie of sorts, a lie we tell or believe that we might know that which cannot be known, what we cannot see, that which has occurred in our absence, that which is beyond human ken. Huck Finn says of his own author, “Mr. Mark Twain … he told the truth mainly. There was things which he stretched, but … I never seen anybody but lied one time or another.”

Face it: we are all born liars. We lie and we accept lies, both private and public. Sometimes we are ruefully, ironically, or gleefully aware of how flimsy the lie is: we go about a day's work which we despise pretending we don't; we manufacture enthusiasms for family gatherings or business functions which in truth bore us sick; we encourage a fool with flattery to be free of him; we transcend alienation to perform a role in an organization which on some level we judge useful and necessary, though we have profound misgivings about it which we are powerless to resolve. We engineer our ensnarement in situations which keep us from doing what we ought or would wish to or would like to be able to think we otherwise might have been able to do. These are some of the sorts of lies by which we live.

We lie of necessity, creating artificial structures of our perceptions which enable us to communicate and to gain access to an orderly understanding of our experience and surroundings. Ronald Sukenick speaks of writing as a process of making up his own character; he says that fiction “… is at the very center of everybody all the time at any period … a way of making up the world and making sense of it.”⁵ Raymond Federman speaks of “the kind of fiction that constantly renews our faith in man's imagination and not in man's distorted view of reality … [which] expresses the fictionality of reality.”⁶ And Weaver says, “Language is, in one sense, the only reality. … Man looks out at the void, then utters words … begins to make order, to make, as it were, life possible. Language is order, perhaps the only pervasive order we know. It both defines and creates ‘reality’ …”⁷

The difference perhaps between the fiction writer and the pedestrian liar is that the fiction writer, in his fiction, though not necessarily in his life, elevates lying to art, and art may well be the purest truth available to us.

We live by lies, or we live by fiction. We live by both. What else are stories, but collections of perceptions based upon omission, selection, rearrangement, and a conscious, perhaps often automatic structuring process? Lies, however, are lies. Fiction is art. Lies perpetuate something that is false, or at least partially untrue. Fiction, at its best, reaches for the quintessential truth with the objective of clarifying, illuminating the mysterious fact of our existence, of enhancing emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually the existential experience.

When the President of the United States looks into the lens of a camera, imagining the people of the nation, and says, “Now I am going to tell you something, and I want you to listen very carefully; I will never lie to you,” we shudder at the gross naïveté of the untruth he seeks to convey. When Franz Kafka tells us that a man has been transformed into a cockroach, we shudder at the profound, invisible truth he has grasped and offered us.

The fiction writer tells lies which lead to truth or to reality, which allow us to slash the extraneous and the film of familiarity from our sight and approach that which is quintessential to our condition. Fiction writers spend long periods of time alone with themselves, looking at their words appear on blank pieces of paper. Little wonder that they begin to become taken by the very processes entailed, by the ways in which their words do their will (or perhaps by the way in which they do the will of their words), and use that confrontation to enhance and further the realization of the creation, or that the sophisticated reader can wander with delight through the halls of mirrors created in the process of confronting the process of fiction.

In an essay by John Cheever on how he came to write the story “Goodbye, My Brother,” we learn that, first-person narrator notwithstanding, Cheever did not actually club his brother on the head with a piece of driftwood, but he did use elements of real experience in the story: “I know almost no pleasure greater,” he writes, “than having a piece of fiction draw together incidents as disparate as a dance in Minneapolis and a backgammon game in the mountains so that they relate to one another and confirm that feeling that life itself is creative process, that one thing is put purposefully upon another, that what is lost in one encounter is replenished in the next and that we possess some power to make sense of what takes place.”⁸

We note with interest that Cheever borrowed elements from real events, and we accept that is so. Why should he lie? Or if he is lying, or mistaken, it hardly matters to the story he is talking about because what he is saying is basically extraliterary. It has no function in the story. However, in a metafiction, everything of it is fiction. If within the fiction the narrator tells us he wrote a scene about circling dogs because he actually saw that happen once in the woods in Illinois, the narrator or narrative persona is telling us that, and the narrative persona is a mask, fiction. If, in reading the memoirs of the author of that fictional narrator, we learn that the author himself thinks he did see those circling dogs in Illinois, but actually can't be certain for he may only have dreamed them, this is extraliterary. In the metafiction with a first-person creative narrator, what the “I” says is fiction. Any statement of fact by that “I” is, in fact, fiction, a part of the metafiction or self-reflexive fiction. Whether or not it is literally true is irrelevant. All that matters is the role the statement serves in the overall fiction of which it is part.

Fifty years ago, Sherwood Anderson gave us such a fiction, “Death in the Woods,”⁹ which, while generally recognized as a story of enduring excellence and beauty, is not always seen as the sophisticated, complex, polished piece of self-reflexive fiction that it is. In the same year that Joe David Bellamy was gathering his interviews with “innovative writers” for publication as the volume, The New Fiction, in 1974, even so eminent an Anderson scholar as Irving Howe, in an essay on Anderson's short stories, was qualifying his high praise for this story by saying: “‘Death in the Woods’ has only one significant flaw: a clumsiness in perspective which forces the narrator to offer a weak explanation of how he could have known the precise circumstances of the old woman's death [alone in the woods]. But in every other respect the story is unblemished.”¹⁰

Yet precisely these so-called clumsy explanations bring the story to its ultimate climax of expression. That the groping of consciousness of the story's creative narrator was fully intended by Anderson, invented by him to bring his story a further dimension in its fulfillment of an act of “imaginative sympathy” with another human life would seem implicit in the fact that Anderson tried to write the story over a dozen times in as many years, and that the creative narrator does not appear in any of the earlier versions.

A detailed recapitulation of the story might help make the point.

The story, about six to seven thousand words long, is arranged in five parts of more or less equal size. The first section begins with a sentence mentioning a particular woman about whom virtually no information is given. Then, instead of beginning to describe her, the narrator describes her “type” for the next two paragraphs, even forgetting her for a few sentences to talk about how his family had sometimes eaten free liver from the butcher when he was a child because they were so poor. Then he returns to the woman again, but only for a moment before lapsing into the “type” again: “People drive right down a road and never notice an old woman like that.” Finally, in the fourth paragraph, three or four hundred words into the story, he lights in on her and begins to tell about her.

She used to come into town one summer and fall when he was a boy and return home with a heavy sack of food, two or three large, gaunt dogs at her heels. Unspecial, nameless, unknown. But the boy remembers her years later and realizes that what happened to her “is a story.”

Her husband was a horse thief, her son an ex-convict. The husband is shunned by the locals, even when he tries to approach them. His father had made money from a sawmill, but between the two of them and drink and women, their money and land had dwindled away. He (Jake Grimes) got his wife off a German farmer, a bound girl, parentless, whom the farmer may have been misusing. The narrator tells about this in dramatic detail, in the middle of which he interrupts himself parenthetically to ask, “(I wonder how I know all this. It must have stuck in my mind from small-town tales when I was a boy.)” (This is the first signal, two and a half pages into the story, of the sub- or perhaps superior theme.) Her duties for the farmer were to feed him and the household and the stock.

In part two, she marries and has a son and daughter, but the daughter dies. “Then she settled down to feed stock. … She had to scheme all her life about getting things fed. … Horses, cows, pigs, dogs, men.”

In the third section, she starts back from town with the load of food she has bartered for eggs. Weary and ill, she takes a shortcut through the snowy fields, sits down against a tree, closes her eyes, and is unable to rise again. While she dies, the dogs—seven of them, hers and some strays—begin to run around in a circle in the clearing under the wintry moon and snow-laden trees, running silently. The narrator speculates about the woman's dreams as she dies. They couldn't have been pleasant, for her life had not been pleasant. Perhaps she dreamed about the time before her mother gave her up as a child. Now and then one of the dogs would thrust its face into hers, its tongue hanging out, to see if she were dead yet, then go back to the other silent, circling dogs. The running may have been a death ceremony, carried over from when they were wolves.

“Now we are no longer wolves. We are dogs, the servants of man. Keep alive, man! When man dies we become wolves again.” (This quote appears without being attributed.) Then the narrator tells he knows this happened even though he wasn't there because he saw it happen like that once in a woods in Illinois, when some dogs thought that he was dying. (Interestingly, Anderson also recounts this circling dogs incident in his Memoirs but questions whether he actually saw or only dreamed it.¹¹

When the woman was dead, the dogs stopped running and gathered around her, aware of the pack of food on her back.

In section four, the dogs tear open the sack and in so doing drag the woman out from the tree and tear her clothes. She is found by a hunter who goes to town and leads a group of men back, including the narrator and his brother. The hunter reports that the woman was a beautiful young girl, for in death, frozen as she is, half-naked, she appears young and smooth as marble. It is the first time the boy has seen a woman's naked body and to see it “there in that light, frozen and still” makes him tremble with “some strange mystical feeling. … It might have been the cold.”

In the final section, the narrator sums up once again what he had seen in the woods: the dead woman, the oval in the snow where the dogs had run round and round. His brother tells the story of what had happened to his mother and sister. The narrator was dissatisfied with the way his brother told it. Now he moves forward in time and tells how he learned the real story by assembling its fragments years later, by collecting bits of his own experience to fit in and inventing that which he did not, could not, know about the woman—the details about the German farmer are invented from his own experience, as is the running of the dogs. As he grew older, the story was “like music heard from far off. The notes had to be picked up slowly one at a time. Something had to be understood.”

The story is that all her life and even after her death this woman's whole purpose was to feed animal life. “A thing so complete has its own beauty.” But that, of course, is only the woman's story; the true completion of the story is in the narrator's progress from youthful indifference to the woman through the experience of his life, remembering her, listening to the distant music that would, in the words of Lawry, bring him into “imaginative and creative communion with the woman—by discovering her, he discovers a greater reality within himself.”¹² As Burbank describes it, “The narrative moves from fact to mystery, ordinariness to wonderment, recollection to imaginative perception … the real meaning of the story lies in the total effect the episode has upon the teller himself.”¹³ The narrator progresses from recorder to creator; he creates meaning and in this progress transcends indifference.

Thus, the real story, the one he has searched for all his life, is the story of how the artist's imagination can perceive the likeness of scattered elements, can find the unifying nature of distant events, can hear the music which unites them, and make of the hard facts to which we all are subject an image of beauty which transcends self and brings human beings into communion in the creations of the imagination, with a force stronger than death.

The woman fed animal life to keep it alive and in so doing helped maintain the preeminence of humankind upon the earth (“Keep alive, man! When man dies we become wolves again.”); the artist feeds spiritual life, listening hard and long to the distant music, picking it up a note at a time, seeking the harmony of elements and understanding which unite human beings in imaginative sympathy.

Imagination and perception are probably of necessity involved as some part of theme or subject in a metafiction or self-reflexive fiction, but that they can be involved in widely differing fashion and significance can be demonstrated by examining Gordon Weaver's “The Parts of Speech.”¹⁴

“The Parts of Speech” is a ten or twelve thousand word story, a novella really, divided into three distinct parts bracketed between a brief preface and an even briefer epilogue, the whole work launched by a tantalizing epigraph from Peter Taylor's “Daphne's Lover”:

I tell myself that a healthy imagination is like a healthy appetite and must be fed. If you do not feed it the lives of your friends, I maintain, then you are apt to feed it your own life, to live in your imagination rather than upon it.

(italics mine)¹⁵

Weaver's story is narrated by a fiction writer, a first-person creative narrator. Of its three main parts, the first two purport to be “true,” the third a fiction based upon a third-hand anecdote received by the narrator at the end of part two.

The story is about identity as fiction and as lie, and about the consequences of this, about the lives that are fed to this process. A young woman comes to die, to be killed in the process of a lie, a deceit—or perhaps as the result of a series of lies or fictions in which she herself is a participant.

In the preface, the narrator identifies himself as a creator of fictions, considers briefly what that entails, and explains the structure of the story to come, a mixture of two parts “truth” and one part fiction.

In the first part, we see the narrator as a sixteen-year-old high school transfer student hiding the pain of his insecurity in the garb of an impenetrable, self-imposed anonymity. However, his protective isolation is threatened by the invasion of an English teacher who never asks her students “to speculate as to the relationship of literature to life,” but who insists that they participate in a daily flash card drill on the parts of speech. The narrator has never learned this aspect of grammar. As the drill works toward him, he dreads what he knows can only be the penetration of his shell of aloofness, by which he survives in this alien school. But he is saved. The girl behind him, Cynthia von Eschen, whispers the correct answer to him, allowing him to preserve his anonymity—a girl who “seemed to embody, as naturally as light or air or motion itself, the impenetrable anonymity” which the narrator has made for himself through “unblinking alertness and unstinting effort” (in itself a kind of differentiation between nature and art). The whispering of the saving answer becomes a daily ritual and is the only contact the narrator ever has with this anonymous, plain, isolated girl. He never so much as thanks her.

In the second part, ten years later, the narrator learns that the girl is dead.

In the third part, he presents his fictional account of her death, told from the third person point of view of a Chicano soldier who is an habitual liar. The Chicano creates a false identity for himself as a war hero in order to seduce women, comes upon Cynthia, now a college student and still steeped involuntarily in the anonymity which makes her victim to the created identities around her. In the course of his deceit, as a result of it, she is scalded to death, unconscious with drink, in a bathtub.

The epilogue addresses itself to the meaning of the story: “… the truth … is real only in the substance (italics mine) of the language that embodies it … if a fiction works, the lie is well told; then it becomes real, the truth again, because the reader is not the same person anymore when he or she believes something new.”

The lie that kills Cynthia, in a sense perhaps, begins with the fiction of the narrator's pose, which would not permit him to respond to her act of friendliness and compassion and leads her via her continued loneliness to the situation which causes her death. She, too, of course, was partner to the lie which “saved” the narrator from exposure in his guise of aloofness; to an extent she was also a voluntary victim of the false hero's lie. Ironically, the future fiction writer is ignorant of grammar, and it is this very ignorance which is his tie to Cynthia, who has grammar without the substance of language that might have given her sufficient identity to change her fate. Stepping back from this structure, we see that this intricate construct of lies is itself presented to us by a fictional fiction writer, within a fiction which he informs us is built of a mix of truth and fiction, the total of which is a story.

In the epilogue, we are told that the goal of the fiction writer, the driving desire, is to make “real things [which] last.” And though fiction is identified as a lie, it differs from the lie in that its words embody substance; it builds on elements of truth and on (as Weaver says in the first part) the “solid little foundation building blocks” of language and grammar to create what is real and enduring, while the lie seeks to create only illusion and deceit.

Thus, identity is fiction or identity is lie. Fiction is truer than fact, an arrangement of fact and imagining, a trespass of fact to something real enough to endure. The lie is a solitary, ill-founded guise behind which men hide in weakness, continually subject to exposure, “apt … to live in … [their] imagination rather than upon it” (italics mine), prey to “the immediate, excruciating present,” where “yesterday [is] a figment of memory, tomorrow a shifting unreliable rumor.” Fiction, ideally, contains no arbitrary element, no stray word, no coincidental image; to accept a looser standard than this would be to reduce fiction to lie, where all that matters is illusion. In this sense, one might say that lie is technique without cosmic structure or perhaps without an ordered aim greater than the self.

The lies and fiction by which we live are serious matters. Each present moment is the link between past and future, each generation the vital link in a culture's survival. Every man is charged to make of his past a viable fiction for the future, “a meaning worth the living.” Of our memories of our fathers we shape meanings for our sons (which was the theme of another of Weaver's fictions—the novel Give Him a Stone).

Yet still there is the unidentified, perhaps unidentifiable, element that Weaver mentions in his story, with which a writer creates his fictions (and, presumably, with which a man creates his identity): there is “skill, imagination, and an unknown of which [he is] a little bit afraid,” an unknown which Weaver's narrator tells us in the first part of the story, he is sometimes “not entirely certain … is a wholly good thing.”

He leaves this thing unnamed. But perhaps the suggestion is that that unknown thing which drives the artist to make art may, for example, be not unlike that which lays at the source of a surgeon's desire to put a knife into human flesh. Perhaps, in a sense, the surgeon is a civilized killer, using murderous instincts as a dynamo to achieve their opposite result: the saving of life. Perhaps that unknown in the fiction writer is the same source from which springs the liar's compulsion for substanceless self-aggrandizement at the expense of others, even sometimes of others' lives—but in the case of the fiction writer, turned round to the production of truth. Thus, if the surgeon is a civilized killer, perhaps the fiction writer is a civilized liar.

After all, don't fledgling writers begin by trying to create in their imagination and on the page a world which will protect them from reality—a world of romance, of soluble mysteries, a world of uncomplicated heroism, love, and glory, most of which is enjoyed by the main character, who is virtually identical here with the implied author and actual author. But such paper walls cannot long withstand the push of the real, and before long fledglings either quit, go into advertising, or find they have developed a taste for the spice of reality, of truth. The lies with which they have begun lose their attraction as the exploration of their imaginations deepens, and as their craft improves, as the reach of their language extends, they find lies unworthy to be treated by their tools; they turn their force to the discovery or creation of truth—or in any event to the creation of a lie so strong, so solidly founded, that it might well be truth.

Despite all one's misgivings about metafictional explorations of the processes of fiction, despite the concern to avoid gimmicks and not to welcome decadence, I think it is clear that one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.

Notes

1. Lionel Trilling, The Experience of Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 871-875.

2. Gordon Weaver, Introduction to The American Short Story, 1945-1980: A Critical History (Boston: Twayne Publications, 1983).

3. Joe David Bellamy, ed., Superfiction, or The American Story Transformed, An Anthology (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. 6.

4. Eudora Welty, “How I Write,” in Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Fiction, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1959), pp. 526-643.

5. Ronald Sukenick, in The New Fiction, Interviews with Innovative American Writers, ed. Joe David Bellamy (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1974), p. 74.

6. Raymond Federman, ed., Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975), pp. 6-7.

7. Gordon Weaver, in “Nuts, Bolts and Sheer Plod: An Interview with Gordon Weaver,” by Thomas E. Kennedy, Western Humanities Review, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 4 (Winter 1984): pp. 363-371.

8. John Cheever, “What Happened,” in Understanding Fiction, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1959), pp. 570-572.

9. Sherwood Anderson, “Death in the Woods,” in Sherwood Anderson's Short Stories, ed. Maxwell Geismar (New York: Hill & Wang, 1962), pp. 121-132.

10. Irving Howe, “The Short Stories,” in Sherwood Anderson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Walter B. Rideout (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974), p. 113.

11. Jan S. Lawry, “‘Death in the Woods’ and the Artist's Self in Sherwood Anderson,” in Sherwood Anderson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Walter B. Rideout (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1974), p. 123.

12. Ibid., p. 122.

13. Rex Burbank, Sherwood Anderson (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1964), p. 128.

14. Gordon Weaver, “The Parts of Speech,” The Kenyon Review—New Series, Vol. VI, No. 3 (Summer 1984), pp. 76-101.

15. Peter Taylor, “Daphne's Lover,” in In the Miro District (New York: Carroll & Graff, 1983), p. 130.