Two types of metafiction

One might think: if philosophy speaks of the use of the word "philosophy" there must be a second-order philosophy. But it is not so: it is, rather, like the case of orthography, which deals with the word "orthography" among others without then being second-order.
                                                                                                                     --Wittgenstein

I've been thinking about two types of metafiction, or at least metafictional moments: the type we're all too familiar with in recent years, where the metafiction is the point, and the (what to call it?) target fiction is in its service, and another more common, more exhilarating type (as I have come to think), where metafictional moments are actually in service of the story itself.

The first type - let Susanna Moore or Charlie Kaufman, or Borges, or Philip Roth or K. Dick stand for its practitioners - keeps you checking on its coherence. Does the level of self-reflexivity interact coherently with the other level, that which it self-reflexively circles or twists back into and out of? I guess all the paradoxes of time-travel SF form a subset of this kind of metafiction. It's a game, and the game is to see how the first-level fiction can unfold with at least some of its characters, and some putative or plausible audience members, unaware of its metafictional, metaphysical determinants. The fun is to get it, to see how well or how cleverly it works. And that is fun, but only one kind of fun. Of course in Roth or Nabokov or Dick, there are other kinds of fun as well. But somehow the metafictional perfection of their metafictional narratives subordinates all other aspects of those narratives to the self-reflexive theme.

The result is a kind of defensive irony, or at least the knowingness of an endlessly self-aware irony to which all events, characters, hopes, recognitions, resolutions reduce. Nothing really matters as its own moment: it's all the fulfillment of the typological structure of metafiction. The tone wears thin after a few decades of this.

The other kind of metafiction is exuberantly undefensive. Cervantes or Shakespeare "Nay, then, God be wi' you, an you talk in blank verse") are two obvious examples, but we could add Austen (especially Northanger Abbey), Melville, Thackeray, Marías, Bolaño and the more recent work of Steve Erickson (right now I am thinking in particular of These Dreams of You) to the list. There the metafiction is just a quick, convenient, fun, and pre-eminently local part of the fiction. The fiction isn't dragooned into serving the metafictional demonstration; the metafiction forms part of the series of events or incidents that the fiction delights in displaying.

So I guess this is really a post about fictional delight. It takes a long time to learn or relearn to read, and probably to write, fiction which knows about all the ways that it can be made to thematize itself, without being much concerned to show its mastery of such things. It's got other fish to fry - it's got fish to fry, is the point, and metafiction is one fish among others, tasty enough in convenient quantities in a varied diet, but not (as Blake said Swedenborg believed of himself) "the single one on earth that ever broke a net."

Rhyme and meter, part 3: What we can hear, and what they could

I'll want to return to my previous set of examples in a future post; here I want to start by considering one more.  A naive historian of rhyme might think that what doesn't sound like a rhyme to us ("hand or eye / symmetry") would have been more natural in a different dialect or pronunciation.  True we can hear eye as diphthongized (as the unlovely linguistic term has it): the slow-motion pronunciation would decompress it to "ah-ee" (the way Mark Twain or Kate Chopin might write it).  That tweak would turn this into a natural rhyme, which sounds forced only to those who pronounce as we do, here, now.

But it's harder to say the same of the near parallel, and very frequent rhymes on internal "i" sounds.  Shakespeare and Donne, to quote the two most obvious examples, rhyme such words as wind and mind. (The doggerel rhyme to Rosalind in As You Like It in my first example has taught generations of actors how to pronounce her name: majority rhyme seems to win, though I think it would be interesting to go with the early returns that turn out to be the minority: Ind and wind.)

From the east to western Ind,
No jewel is like Rosalind.
Her worth, being mounted on the wind,
Through all the world bears Rosalind.
All the pictures fairest lined
Are but black to Rosalind.
Let no fair be kept in mind
But the fair of Rosalind. 

* * *

If a hart do lack a hind,
Let him seek out Rosalind.
If the cat will after kind,
So be sure will Rosalind.
Winter garments must be lined,
So must slender Rosalind.
They that reap must sheaf and bind;
Then to cart with Rosalind.
Sweetest nut hath sourest rind,
Such a nut is Rosalind.
He that sweetest rose will find
Must find love's prick and Rosalind. 

-----------------

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
            And find
            What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

Remember that Wyatt, too, knows where is an hind, though in a net he seeks to catch the wind.  Nor let us forget Arlo Guthrie's great motorcycle song, which has him, as needed, rhyming pickle with motor-sickle, and die with motor-sigh- / (cul), as his folk rock pronunciation allows.

So wind/mind is okay, but you'll never find (I do not think) weened/mind, though that would seem a closer parallel to eye/symmetry or (say) we/my.

So here's the passage I want to think about, from Sidney, the octet of Atrophel and Stella 86:

Alas, whence came this change of lookes? if I
Haue chang'd desert, let mine owne conscience be
A still felt plague, to selfe condemning me:
Let wo gripe on my heart, shame loade mine eye,
But if all faith, like spotlesse Ermine ly
Safe in my soule, which onely doth to thee
(As his sole object of felicitie)
With wings of Loue in aire of wonder flie....

Note that the rhyme scheme is obvious here abbaabba.  But this isn't inevitable: some of the sonnets rhyme (in their octets) abababab, and if eye can rhyme with me, it would seem that some could argue that the latter rhyme scheme governs here as well. We're facing here an example of the sort of thing that Wittgenstein ponders when he considers the problem of rule-following: there is a rule that can justify any sequence.  (My favorite recent example is the sequence that begins sweetly enough as 0, 1, 2, but whose fourth member (scroll down if this isn't of tremendous interest to you) is

260,121,894,356,579,510,020,490,322,708,104,361,119,152,187,501,694,578,572,754,183,785,083,563,115,694,738,224,067,857,795,813,045,708,261,992,057,589,224,725,953,664,156,516,205,201,587,379,198,458,774,083,252,910,524,469,038,881,188,412,376,434,119,195,104,550,534,665,861,624,327,194,019,711,390,984,553,672,727,853,709,934,562,985,558,671,936,977,407,000,370,043,078,375,899,742,067,678,401,696,720,784,280,629,229,032,107,161,669,867,260,548,988,445,514,257,193,985,499,448,939,594,496,064,045,132,362,140,265,986,193,073,249,369,770,477,606,067,680,670,176,491,669,403,034,819,961,881,455,625,195,592,566,918,830,825,514,942,947,596,537,274,845,624,628,824,234,526,597,789,737,740,896,466,553,992,435,928,786,212,515,967,483,220,976,029,505,696,699,927,284,670,563,747,137,533,019,248,313,587,076,125,412,683,415,860,129,447,566,011,455,420,749,589,952,563,543,068,288,634,631,084,965,650,682,771,552,996,256,790,845,235,702,552,186,222,358,130,016,700,834,523,443,236,821,935,793,184,701,956,510,729,781,804,354,173,890,560,727,428,048,583,995,919,729,021,726,612,291,298,420,516,067,579,036,232,337,699,453,964,191,475,175,567,557,695,392,233,803,056,825,308,599,977,441,675,784,352,815,913,461,340,394,604,901,269,542,028,838,347,101,363,733,824,484,506,660,093,348,484,440,711,931,292,537,694,657,354,337,375,724,772,230,181,534,032,647,177,531,984,537,341,478,674,327,048,457,983,786,618,703,257,405,938,924,215,709,695,994,630,557,521,063,203,263,493,209,220,738,320,923,356,309,923,267,504,401,701,760,572,026,010,829,288,042,335,606,643,089,888,710,297,380,797,578,013,056,049,576,342,838,683,057,190,662,205,291,174,822,510,536,697,756,603,029,574,043,387,983,471,518,552,602,805,333,866,357,139,101,046,336,419,769,097,397,432,285,994,219,837,046,979,109,956,303,389,604,675,889,865,795,711,176,566,670,039,156,748,153,115,943,980,043,625,399,399,731,203,066,490,601,325,311,304,719,028,898,491,856,203,766,669,164,468,791,125,249,193,754,425,845,895,000,311,561,682,974,304,641,142,538,074,897,281,723,375,955,380,661,719,801,404,677,935,614,793,635,266,265,683,339,509,760,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 --

a number with 1,747 digits. But there's a rule for that.*  Wittgenstein wants to know what makes a rule the right rule to follow, when there's no rule that could make it the right rule to follow that couldn't itself be followed in an infinite number of different ways.  His answer, more or less, is practice ratified by the relationship of learning and teaching the belongs to "agreement in forms of life."  Hannah Ginsborg, more or less in agreement with Stanley Cavell, calls such agreement in forms of life "primitive normativity."

Anyhow, back to our example.  Sidney likes partially ambiguous forms.  The famous "night and day" sonnet has only two rhyme words:

Now that of absence the most irksome night,
With darkest shade doth ouercome my day;
Since Stellas eyes wont to giue me my day,
Leauing my Hemisphere, leaue me in night,
Each day seemes long, and longs for long-staid night,
The night as tedious, wooes th'approch of day;
Tired with the dustie toyles of busie day,
Languisht with horrors of the silent night;
Suffering the euils both of the day and night,
While no night is more darke then is my day,
Nor no day hath lesse quiet then my night:
With such bad mixture of my night and day,
That liuing thus in blackest winter night,
I feele the flames of hottest sommer day.

Two rhyme words, but what's the rhyme scheme?  I think it's too easy to stay with just a and b: most sonnets in Astrophel and Stella have four or five different rhyme pairs, typically rhymed abbaabbacdcdee, sometimes, e.g. the sonnet previous to this one, ababababccdeed, and again sometimes, as in the one before that, ababbabaccdccd.  I think it would be better, and more natural, to "chunk" the night and day sonnet as rhymed abbaabbacdcdee: the rule of the sonnet form seems to require that.

Note that we're already chunking by taking homoteleuton (or repetition of endings) as rhyme.  "Night" doesn't rhyme with "night," not even richly.  It repeats the word (as in a sestina, the form Sidney introduced into English).   You might almost call it a duina, at least the part that cycles night day day night night day day night. (On the relation of n-inas to prime numbers, see this short paper which proves that if an n-ina cycles, 2n+1 is prime: 5 in the case of a duina, where n=2. The converse doesn't hold, though.) In Dante, except for the repeated endings on "Christ" - which must not be adulterated by the arbitrary similarity of rhyming words - repetition is always rime riche: this is a principle of interpretation, so that you can understand an ambiguous word (such as torna, palma, and pianta, all rhymed with homonyms in Paradiso IX) as requiring difference in meaning between its orthographically identical homonyms, which can help solve the ambiguity.

The point is that in reading rhymed poetry we assess similarity pretty subtly, and assess as well the difference that prevents similarity from just being identity. Rhymes have a lot of give, but (as with stress) how much give they have is always contextualized by the rhyme scheme that determines them, and by the rhymes that surround them.  Night and day rhyme with themselves because they belong to a sonnet with a familiar rhyme scheme; piante and piante rhyme because they belong to a rhyme schemes that eschews self-rhyming, so that they therefore don't mean the same thing.

And this allows us to return to sonnet 86, where we can have no doubt that the rhyme scheme is abbaabba. Why no doubt?  Why not abababab?  Because the prosodical context and the closeness of sound brings out, here, the difference between I and be, me and eye.  Sidney takes pains to prevent our being misled by the conventional rhyming of, say, me and eye, by making sure that the first, the a, rhyme-pair is homophonic: I/eye. We then have to work to separate them via their different meanings, and that very work of separation (as in Dante) pairs them: very similar but still different.

Sidney's fearless symmetry makes sure we keep track of what's rhyming with what, even when doing so requires some involved and subtle distinction.

And here's the payoff of the always pain-in-the-ass subtlety of following a formal analysis.  Making us keep track of the rhymes, especially in a fairly monochromatic context, is a way of infiltrating our sense of rhyme with a sense of meaning and vice versa.  These are considerations that we're used to understanding when it comes to poetic meter, where the interaction of metrical and semantic stress contributes to our understanding of what's being said.  It's interesting that there's a subtle analogue of this in rhyme as well, which suggests that the interaction, both prosodically and semantically, between rhyme and meter is closer than has usually been suspected.

-----
*viz., 0 followed by 0 bangs = 0; 1 followed by 1 bang (1! or 1 factorial) = 1; 2!! (2 factorial factorial, 2 followed by 2 bangs = 2; 3!!! (3 factorial factorial factorial) = 720! = the foregoing.

Rhyme and meter, part 2: Non-regular rhyme

Try this little experiment.  Read these passages of rhymed poetry:

Girls and boys, come out to play,
The moon doth shine as bright as day;
Leave your supper, and leave your sleep,
And come with your playfellows into the street.
Come with a whoop, come with a call,
Come with a good will or not at all.
Up the ladder and down the wall,
A half-penny roll will serve us all.
You find milk, and I'll find flour,
And we'll have a pudding in half an hour.
                                                              --Mother Goose

* * *

Hush-a-by baby
On the tree top,
When the wind blows
The cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks,
The cradle will fall,
And down will fall baby
Cradle and all.
                                 --Ibid.

* * *

He holds him with his skinny hand,
"There was a ship," quoth he.
"Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!"
Eftsoons his hand dropped he.
                                     --Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

* * *

Your pain still hangs in air,
Sharp motes of it suspended;
The voice of your despair —
That also is not ended:

When near your death a friend
Asked you what he could do,
"Remember me," you said.
We will remember you.

Once when you went to see
Another with a fever
In a like hospital bed,
With terrible hothouse cough
And terrible hothouse shiver
That soaked him and then dried him,
And you perceived that he
Had to be comforted,

You climbed in there beside him
And hugged him plain in view,
Though you were sick enough,
And had your own fears too.
                                           --Thom Gunn, "Memory Unsettled"

* * *

He thought he saw an Elephant
That practised on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
A letter from his wife.
"At length I realize," he said,
"The bitterness of life!"

He thought he saw a Buffalo
Upon the chimney-piece:
He looked again, and found it was
His Sister's Husband's Niece.
"Unless you leave this house," he said,
"I'll send for the police!"

he thought he saw a Rattlesnake
That questioned him in Greek:
He looked again, and found it was
The Middle of Next Week.
"The one thing I regret," he said,
"Is that it cannot speak!"
                                       --Lewis Carroll, "The Mad Gardener's Song."

* * *

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
                                                              --Wyatt

* * *

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –

The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –

I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portions of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –

With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –
                                                              --Dickinson

* * *

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
                                                              --Blake

* * *

Then gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,
Of that same time when no more Change shall be,
But stedfast rest of all things firmely stayd
Vpon the pillours of Eternity,
That is contrayr to Mutabilitie:
For, all that moueth, doth in Change delight:
But thence-forth all shall rest eternally
With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight:
O thou great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoths sight.
                                                               --Spenser, The Mutabilitie Cantos

* * *

Ye blessèd creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
                                                               --The Intimations Ode

Each of them contains what Pope (the purest of English rhymers) would regard as a false rhyme.  And not only Pope, but Pope can set the standard.  How quickly do you notice them?  What words did you think rhymed that didn't, at least by what you might call standard standards?

Anyhow, I am going to propose that we call these non-regular rhymes ("irregular rhymes" would be misleading, since we're used to talking about as irregularly rhyming poems, e.g. poems, Lycidas).  Non-regular rhymes would be pairs that register as rhymes the way irregular past tenses register as past tenses, without our generally noticing them.

In my next post I want to think about how and why they work.

Here I'll just draw attention to the way Auden's rhymes are sometimes an anthology or cento of rhymes like those above:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful. --Auden, "Lullaby"

We sense rhyme here, and it takes a while to figure out what rhymes with what.  That's an interesting perceptual combination.

The second in a series of short posts about rhyme's relation to meter

Another grammar, another interlocutor

I was thinking about a post of Jeff's, on the last entry in Wittgenstein's Zettel (since you're no doubt already a FB friend of his, you should be able to read it).  That last entry reads:

"You can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed". — That is a grammatical remark.

It's of some, though only some, importance to note that the clauses in quotation marks belong to the intermittently changing person conventionally known as the interlocutor (the narratee, the person who says what a student might say, or a teacher).  Wittgenstein's interlocutor is of immense importance, not as a straw man or "idiot questioner" (Blake) but as a figure who experiences language and the world and other people as one does, as we do.  Where he goes wrong, sometimes more than other times, is when he starts philosophizing. He tries to systematize his experience, and the value of this attempt is always in the first step that he takes, the immediate experience that he offers as premise for what follows.  (As the minor premise, I am thinking: the major premise is some philosophical truism that will then lead to an equally truistic conclusion.  The minor premise becomes its confirmation.  The syllogistic form would probably be the one called Bocardo.)

So the interlocutor notices -- remarks (bemerkt), that is, observes -- that you can't hear God speaking to someone else. By this he means to show something like a conventional view of privacy.  God has access to the innermost reaches of the soul, and a fortiori those reaches, that innerness, exists, inaccessible to the outside world.  So thinks the interlocutor, and this is the idea that Wittgenstein is undercutting.

For Wittgenstein, God is not a mind-reader.  Or to put it more accurately, he's no different a mind-reader than human beings are (though he might be better, sure).  God can't know, any better than you can, how I'll follow a rule.  (Not that he can't know: he just can't know better than you can know it.)  As Kripke more or less gets right, not only can't we tell whether I'm adding or quadding until our results diverge, God can't tell either.  (I'll note in passing that this is related to some profound remarks of Wittgenstein on forced mates in chess: the only "proof" of a forced mate is playing out all the possible moves.) It's not that mind-reading is impossible. That's what the interlocutor thinks, with God as the name for that impossibility.  No, mind reading goes so deep into the mode of possibility as to come out on the other end, in necessity.  It's something we all do, and all must do, by virtue of being human.

I can know what someone else is thinking, not what I am thinking. It is correct to say ‘I know what you are thinking’, and wrong to say ‘I know what I am thinking.’ (A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar.)

If we couldn't mind read we couldn't learn to speak. We learn to speak because we know what others are thinking.  That's the point of Wittgenstein's saying that the interlocutor's observation is grammatical. It's a remark about what we talk about when we talk about God.  And the point is that God is one of the things we talk about, and neither the origin nor privileged interpreter of our talk.


Which allows for a connection between this post and my previous. Jeff alludes to the great Abrahamic response to God: הנני (Hineni) "Here I am."  That's Abraham hearing God speak to him.  (And of course Isaac clearly hasn't heard God.) But Kafka imagines various Abrahams, including one who can't believe he's the one being summoned:

Aber ein anderer Abraham. Einer, der durchaus richtig opfern will und überhaupt die richtige Witterung für die ganze Sache hat, aber nicht glauben kann, dass er gemeint ist, er, der widerliche alte Mann und sein Kind, der schmutzige Junge. Ihm fehlt nicht der wahre Glaube, diesen Glauben hat er, er wurde in der richtigen Verfassung opfern, wenn er nur glauben könnte, dass er gemeint ist. Er fürchtet, er werde zwar als Abraham mit dem Sohne ausreiten, aber auf dem Weg sich in Don Quixote verwandeln. Über Abraham wäre die Welt damals entsetzt gewesen, wenn sie zugesehen hätte, dieser aber fürchtet, die Welt werde sich bei dem Anblick totlachen. Es ist aber nicht die Lächerlichkeit an sich, die er fürchtet - allerdings fürchtet er auch sie, vor allem sein Mitlachen - hauptsächlich aber fürchtet er, dass diese Lächerlichkeit ihn noch älter und widerlicher, seinen Sohn noch schmutziger machen wird, noch unwürdiger, wirklich gerufen zu werden. Ein Abraham, der ungerufen kommt! Es ist so wie wenn der beste Schüler feierlich am Schluß des Jahres eine Prämie bekommen soll und in der erwartungsvollen Stille der schlechteste Schüler infolge eines Hörfehlers aus seiner schmutzigen letzten Bank hervorkommt und die ganze Klasse losplatzt. Und es ist vielleicht gar kein Hörfehler, sein Name wurde wirklich genannt, die Belohnung des Besten soll nach der Absicht des Lehrers gleichzeitig eine Bestrafung des Schlechtesten sein.

Schreckliche Dinge - genug.

Terrifying things: enough indeed.  Another Abraham who always wants to do the right thing and has the right temperament for the situation, but can't believe that he's the one who's meant, he and his grubby young man.  He has true belief, but fears that on the way with his son he'll be transformed into Don Quixote, and that everyone will make fun of him, that the teacher is punishing him for being the class dunce by exposing him to his fellow-students' laughter.


The very idea of laughter is the social. There is no God without language, and no language without other people.  This Abraham knows that it's a grammatical, not an ontological, remark to say "You can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed."  If he's a bad student he might not get the grammar right ("glamour," as in its original meaning of supernatural or magical powers, is a corruption of grammar, which the literate scholars know). God is a game in our language, and like many games, the one in which God calls on you can be cruel, with the punishment for grammatical error humiliation in front of the whole class.

He feels just like his "schmutzig" son, who risks becoming grubbier still, and so he imagines himself sitting at his schmutzig desk in at the back of the class.  This Abraham fears God and protects himself and his son by refusing to believe in his exceptional, his private importance.  Grammar is about how we speak to others.  He stays in the back of the class, with his son, with the others.