North America, Circa 1960: Help! Help! The author is dead! Literature is dead! Ahhhh! What am I to do? Where am I to turn? I am lost in a post-structuralist world! Oh, no, wait, it’s all right, I’m gonna be O.K., post-modernist meta-fiction is here to fill the void! Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, John Barth, Donald Bartheleme, Samuel Beckett, these are the men for the job, these are the paladins of the new literary era! With an over-developed sense of irony, cynicism in excess, and, above all, the ability to suck the meaning right out of any idea, these men will save the day!

While the ideas of self-referential author-as-god-figure and novels about novels date back to Proust and Joyce, and the idea of the author actually being "metaphorically" dead dates back to D.H. Lawrence, it was not until "meta-fiction" that the readers had the pleasure of reading novels about how art was useless and empty.

This was a bold step in fiction, and a useful one as well, for now, instead of reading extensively only to finally discover that literature was pointless, one could save their time by reading meta-fiction, and being beaten over the head with the worthlessness of novels. Thus, meta-fiction became the only viable art form, for in the post-modern world use is meaning and metafiction was inherently useful.

It told you how you shouldn’t waste your time reading books. Thanks meta-fiction!! Wait a second, there’s just one thing. What if art’s not really dead? What if it is meta-fiction that employed a cheap trick to convince us all of this?

Let us examine, first, what it is that meta-fiction does (and what it is, but these two concepts are coterminous). An excellent example of this is John Barth’s novel, Chimera, which won the world book award, and truly is an example of the mastery of prose. Barth examines the heroic cycle of literature, as both macrocosm and microcosm. More specifically, he examines the internal patterns of narrative throughout the history of literature, and he examines the dynamic with which these patterns shift. Barth then writes a story in three parts, each part a self-sustaining whole, and each evolving from, but also in a strange mobius-like inversion, enfolded within the previous story. Eventually in this hyper-cyclical narrative Barth emerges as a character in his own story, writing that very story, and not only that, writing that story in accordance with a set of strict mathematical models of the narrative (I’m not certain if Barth actually modeled the narrative extensively, or just did so vaguely, but it is irrelevant to the point here) which govern the individual stories, the set of stories as a whole, and supposedly, all stories, including Barth’s autobiographical exerpts (fictionalized autobiography to be certain). All of Barth’s main characters are aware of this model, and are aware that their life is governed by it. All of these textual acrobatics are quite impressive, and one is left, after reading Chimera, with a very high opinion of Barth’s writing ability. However, one is also left feeling cheated and uninspired.

In Chimera, the idea of the author searching for a magical treasure key, and then learning that the key is the treasure, and thus finding said key with the mere realization of its true nature, is greatly stressed. This metaphor embodies the ideas of meta-fiction, and Barth’s book masterfully embodies all of meta-fiction (and, he would have us believe, all of fiction). The idea is that the thing to write stories about in the age of cynicism, when everyone is sure they’ve seen and heard it all before, is writing stories. All one has to do is write a novel that tells the reader why they are so cynical and jaded about literature, and incorporates this idea into literature at the same time. It is ingenious. It is, however, a one trick pony. Chimera pretty much covers it all. How could any true meta-fiction be anything but a post-script to such a work? If Barth is right, then Chimera is the temporally ultimate piece of valid fiction.

This work leeches the worth out of other works of literature. It robs them of their wonder and the meaning they held for those who read them. If all narrative is merely an application of certain mathematical works, why even have literature anymore? Why not just put down a series of numbers and equations and patterns on paper? And who, other than extremely specialized scholars, would have any great interest in studying such a construction? I hold that literature serves a very important purpose that is not encompassed in John Barth’s "formula." Great works become so because they are able to communicate something difficult to express, but nonetheless universal and important, to a substantial amount of people. This is largely true of any art form. It is about communication and expression, and inciting empathy; it is about drawing the audience into one’s context, and then affecting interface with them. The general patterns of literature and art have been built up over hundreds of thousands of years of human communication. They are not arbitrary, meaningless constructions, they are organic, functional constructions, built up because they tend to work. The narrative cycle tends to work for bringing the audience into the place the author needs them to be brought. Once there, the audience is more receptive to that which the author is attempting to communicate.

Meta-fiction is not attempting to communicate emotion and feeling; it is not art in the traditional sense. Its sole function is proclaiming that art is worthless. I say, that we leave meta-fiction to the post-modernists, and continue to experience and create art.