Contenu du sommaire : Mutations de la métafiction

The insistent presence of staged situations of writing and reading in A Collapse of Horses draws the reader's attention to the reflexive dimension of the work. Yet its aim does not seem to be so much to ascertain the writer's mastery over the text as to plunge the reader into an experience of the instability of language. Hence the modality of writing that has been called narcissistic opens onto an existential, and even possibly ontological meditation, in praise of the wonders of language.

David Foster Wallace's use of metalepsis does not corrupt the essence of mimetic illusion but rather tests the authenticity of the author-reader relationship. His story ‘Octet' aims at conflating the spheres of narration, reading and writing in order to shape new hermeneutic pathways. The story features a writer figure who stages the loss of his privileges in order to let the agency of his readership emerge; yet the latter sometimes appears more manipulated than empowered.

This essay questions the narrative regime developed by Blake Butler's 300,000,000 and aims to show that the reflexivity that the text builds upon downplays rather than enhances the hermeneutic approach. If the text constantly feeds back upon itself in order to reflect (upon) its own gestures and moves as well as its very inscription on the page, its aim is to undo any sort of relation to reading conceived of as a grasping mode and to underlie instead some form of absolute (or “severance” in its etymological sense recalled by Quentin Meillassoux) perceptible in the diverse ways the text eludes any readerly grasp. As it obfuscates its many leads, as it warps the syntax to opacify its own discourse, as it also renders problematic any analytical understanding of the text, 300,000,000 rather consists in some sort of speculative fiction understood philosophically, whose main characteristic would be to interrogate the very status of the text-as-object.

This article explores the metafictional dimension of Lance and Andi Olsen's recent productions, the novel Theories of Forgetting and the multimodal installation There Is No Place Like Time. Deeply influenced by Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, these works foreground a material and spatial reflexivity which also calls for the reader/viewer's active participation. While the hybrid novel relies on numerous photos and a complex typographical layout, the installation blurs the limits between reality and fiction, art and criticism, and expands the fictional universe into “a novel you can walk through”.