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Stepping from the treacherous passage at last into the mirror-maze, he saw once again, more clearly than ever, how readily he deceived himself into supposing he was a person.
-John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse.
Why would Ambrose, John Barth's protagonist in Lost in the Funhouse (1968), interpret his reflection in the mirror as an instance of self-deceit? Why has Oedipa Mass, Thomas Pynchon's protagonist in The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), "tried to find her image in the mirror and couldn't" (27) or could only see reflected "a beach ball with feet" (23)? In other words, why would a fiction writer appeal to the trope of the mirror to subvert conventional characterization and the representational impulse of literary narrative? It is this seemingly contradictory strategy used by postmodern metafictional texts that this work means to explore.
Indeed, in an endeavor to contribute to the renewed critical debate about the scope of experimental self-reflexive fiction, this essay will attempt to shed light on the poetics of the mirror trope in the narratives of canonical Postmodern metafiction. Through an examination of the game of doubling the authorial figure, the compositional process, and the interpretive act, the argument developed here revolves around the tendency of the experimental and the self-reflexive vein of American Postmodern metafiction to inform its poetics with a highly paradoxical appeal to the trope of the mirror and to motifs that constitute variations on it. The experimental ethos of American Postmodern metafiction will be pinpointed through a discussion of "Cartesian Sonata" by William Gass (1998) and Whistlejacket (1988) by John Hawkes in relation to the deliberate questioning of literary and artistic representation that mediates it. This work means also to shed light on the pivotal role played by the trope of the mirror in demystifying the paradoxical terms in which experimental metafiction gauges the possibilities of literary meaning and literary significance by implementing and imparting the representational modes but also submitting them to a (meta) critical scrutiny.
I, Poetics of (self)Reflexivity & experimentation: "All done with mirrors"?
In a relatively recent work that they edited and introduced on the generic facets and aesthetic implications of literary experimentation, Joe Bray, Brian McHale, and Alison Gibbons (2012: 1-18) surveyed and discussed the shifts that conceptualizing the...