Tag: Truth and Fiction

The Conventions of Unconventionality: An Overview of Metafiction

An overview of major themes I found while studying metafiction for the Metaclass, a self-study course for a masters of literature at San Francisco State University. This summary will also serve as a guide to the posts I have written over the last four months (with notes about a few others I intend to write). It is not meant to be a comprehensive list of meta conventions, but an addition to the the list found under Meta-Meta and Metafiction. (Nor is this intended to be a summary of themes I developed about writing and teaching, the metaclass aspect. Those themes may be found in Putting It All Together: Collaborative and Integrated Reading and Writing.)

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I am the One the Writer of This Sentence is Referring to

Who is I? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “I” is “used by the speaker or writer to refer to himself or herself.” Simple enough, but let’s think this out. The dictionary says that “I” is “used by the speaker or writer,” implying that “I” and “the speaker or writer” are not the same. How can this be? Well, one is a word and the other is a person. That “I” appears in the dictionary proves that “I” is a written or spoken symbol. Okay, so? The problem is that we confuse ourselves with that symbol. I think I am the “I.”

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Once Upon a Neanderthal

Once, near Shanidar in northern Iraq, a young Neanderthal saw his cousin Nandy, who was trying to catch a wild goat, slip on the loose stones and tumble out of sight. The hunter had time enough, as he scrambled down the cliff, to realize that his friend Nandy would be dead before he reached the dessert floor.

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History is an Angel Blown Backward Through Time

Walking Backwards Through Time

We walk backwards through life, only seeing where we have been, not where we are going. From a physicist’s perspective, it is not clear why this is true. If we accept time as the fourth dimension and state that the universe is a four-dimensional object, why does our consciousness seem to move only in one direction along only one of four possible axes, yet we are only able to see in the direction opposite to our movement? This is not the only possibility imaginable. Many claim, for instance, that God is omnipresent in time as well as space, existing in all epochs at once, in other words he is outside of the illusion of time.

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The Burden of Life: Tim O’Brien’s Metafictional Classic “The Things They Carried”

Things They Carried“The Things They Carried” is a short work of fiction. The Things They Carried is also the name of what could be called a short-story collection or perhaps a meta-fictional novel. It’s a pastiche of fiction, nonfiction, fantasy, memoir, author’s notations, and literary commentary.

Although the opening story stands alone as a work of fiction, it also functions as an introduction to the larger book. It establishes the major characters that recur throughout the “novel” and introduces many of the topics the book explores, themes as concrete as the Vietnam War and as abstract as how someone tells the truth about a historical event. O’Brien felt that straight facts could not convey an experience as ambiguous and disturbing as the Vietnam war. Yet O’Brien does not wholly rely on fiction either. He interweaves fact and fiction in the story (and throughout the book) to give the reader a more comprehensive sense of what it was really like to fight in Vietnam, to live in the face of death, and to carry on a purposeless existence.

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Grab Your Ledgers: Writing is Accounting

(This post is best read with a beer and a piece of toast.)

Accountants were the first writers. Well, maybe it’s more accurate to say that merchants in ancient Sumeria developed the cuneiform script around 2500 B.C. for accounting purposes. We want to be factual. Let me remind you that this is non-fiction. (Nevermind that the date is appoximate.) But to tell you the history of writing, I need to talk about grass and how we learned to eat it, the technology that has most drastically transformed the face of the planet.

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Hunters Reading Signs: The Origin of Writing?

The technique of examining and interpreting signs, which may be called “reading,” can be traced back to hunting. Was hunting, then, the origin of writing?

Many animals track by smell, which communicates directly to the instincts. Does it smell bad? Stay away! Does it smell good? Follow it and eat it! When a wolf comes across the scent, it doesn’t wonder which direction to go, it doesn’t interpret the smell. If the wolf turns left and the yummy deer smell fades, it turns to the right where the smell is fresher.

Hunters read signs like these tracks in the mud.

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Apples in a Basket: Is Absolute Truth Absolutely True?

Absolute truth: In response to posts on my blog in which I attempted to show that everything is fiction, my dad wrote, “There are countless absolute truths. Example: Two apples added to a basket containing two apples will make a total of four apples in the basket.” I agree absolutely. I believe in baskets and apples. I believe in reality. (What a ridiculous statement!)

Four apples in a basket on a wooden table

Subjective truth: Let me take out the “I believe–” and say, “Reality exists.” (Was I able to remove the “I believe–“? I wrote the statement “Reality exists,” so it must be what I believe. Strangely enough the existence of reality has been in question for quite some time, maybe even some of you readers doubt reality.)

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What Does “Meta” Mean?

Meta, meta, meta! This little prefix is getting more and more popular.

After fairly steady usage, in the 1940’s, the prefix “meta” started becoming more common. However, since the 70’s, it has really taken off. (Check out Google Books Ngram Viewer, which tracks its usage over time.) Now it seems you can attach the prefix to just about any word: metafiction, meta-painting, metacomic, Metamucil, and so on.) But what the hell does it mean?

The prefix "meta"

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