The Literary Blog Hop is hosted by the amazing, thoughtful and brilliant girls of The Blue Bookcase. It's a blogging activity that allows readers of literary fiction to find each other on the internets and share opinions, book suggestions, mutually assured destruction and merry things of the sort. This week's writing prompt is:
What is one of your favorite literary devices? Why do you like it? Provide a definition and an awesome example.
I'm not too big on "devices" when I read literary fiction. A lot of writers are read are through with those and play with them anyway. Yesterday evening, I finished Girl With Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace, a very difficult book where he tests the solidity of structure and devices. Somewhat, it turned out to be a cornerstone in his career and send him on a quest that would make him a legend: get over the deception and trickery employed by postmodern writers and accomplish what he deemed fiction was really for, reduce the alienation of the human condition. Make us feel "less alone inside". That was thoroughly achieved through burning sincerity and a very loose form, turning Wallace into probably the most beloved literary writers of his time.
That said...
Literary devices are not always the enemy. They can be quite fun when done right and (more important) done with the appropriate level of seriousness. Metafiction can transform a flat story into a trapezoidal challenge of the mind. In his infamous metafictional piece Westward The Course Of Empire Takes Its Way, Wallace affirms that writers like Robbe-Grillet and Coover were master at the art of fucking themselves. They were both renowned metafiction writers and were (at least for Robbe-Grillet, I never read Coover) disgustingly serious. Even when he joked around, Robbe-Grillet took himself seriously. What metafiction is, is a text that is self-conscious. It can be about a writer and his story, a reader and his book, a story about a story. You know, the text on the page itself is conscious that it's not real. Finding out who's writing what and who's a character of who and what the hell are you reading can be really fun...sometimes.
That said...
Mr. Wallace itself wrote one of the best metafictional story I've ever read in The Broom Of The System. His protagonist, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman is a telephone switchboard operator with emotional issues. The day her great-grandmother disappears from her nursing home along with a bunch of other residents. The great-granny (also named Lenore) was a students of the late Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most proeminent philosophers of language. Lenore will then start wondering whether she's real of a creation of language. Testing Old Lenore's theories on language, Young Lenore's boyfriend Rick will start telling stories about her, to see if they have influence on her. And they do.
If The Broom Of The System works so well, despite discussing difficult concepts, it's because Wallace doesn't take himself too seriously and give blunt, comical tips to his reader, about what's going on, rather than hiding behind his own culture. The world of Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman is deliciously out of joint. She has a talking, swearing and weirdly talkative cockatiel, an important and self-destructive man is in love with her. It's all a part of the story that Lenore is. These are all telltale signs of what's REALLY going on (which I'm not going to tell you).
That said...
Maybe I didn't understand the question well this week? What's a literary device? Would metafiction be more of a sub-current of postmodernism? Does metafiction uses devices itself? Oh man.