AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 32 (2007) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen From Descriptive to (Meta)-Metafictional Form and Meaning in David Foster Wallace’s Short Fiction Jaroslav Kušnír Descriptive passages in literary works have traditionally evoked the idea of the mimetic representation of reality on which traditional realistic literature was based. It is especially postmodern metafictional literature, however, which - through the use of metafictional narrative strategies including complicated allusions, false quotations, parody and irony - has undermined the idea of a clear and unproblematic relationship between language and the reality it represents. One of the aims of these narratives is to show the difference between language and reality and between different ontological systems. These relationships are further complicated by some of the authors loosely known as post-scientific authors, crack-pot realists, or meta-metafictional authors (Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, and to a limited extent Jonathan Franzen), who construct their vision of the world by the use of knowledge from various sciences, which form a symbolic framework for their construction of meaning (biology, computer science, mathematics, physics), as well as by the use of references to already metafictional works (that is to say, already undermining passages in the works of the earlier generation of postmodern authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon or William Gaddis). In this way they become, as some authors suggest, metametafictional. Descriptive passages from these authors’ works often evoke an illusion of mimetic representation of reality, its comprehension, however, depends on the understanding of a complex referential chain which is used for creating meaning. In my paper I analyze several short stories, mostly from David Foster Wallace’s short story collection Oblivion, to show - how Wallace’s use of narrative strategies undermines the realistic and complicates the metafictional frames of reference; - what the role of these elements is in the production of meaning; and - how the alteration of a descriptive form/ passage in Wallace’s short fiction creates an alternative ontological level or vision of the world, and presents a critique of traditional and metafictional representations of reality Jaroslav Kušnír 320 1 See Wallace, D.F. (1998). A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays & Ruminations. Boston: Little Brown & Co. Descriptive passages in fiction have mostly been understood as expressions of the mimetic and rather realistic nature of a literary work. Since the credibility of traditional realistic narrative and its ability to give a clear and objective picture of reality has been systematically undermined since the late 19th century by modernist, and later by postmodernist and other contemporary authors, these descriptive passages, realistic narrative methods, and the associated vision of the world have become understood as an unreliable, artificial, and “exhausted” (Barth 1967) means of the representation of reality. Even the most experimental authors, however, often use descriptive passages which are further juxtaposed and contested by other, rather fragmentary, psychological (interior monologue, stream of consciousness) and selfreflexive passages in order to both relativize the meaning, the traditional (and rational, seemingly logical) realistic vision of the world and the binary oppositions presented in traditional realistic narratives. The authors of these works also try to subvert the idea of a clear, uncomplicated and natural relationship between form and meaning. Many - not only American - postmodern authors create complex narratives with several ontological levels including descriptive passages reminiscent of realistic narrative techniques, but these passages form only one pole and one site out of which other ontological levels and layers of meaning are developed. However apparently realistic and trustworthy, because of their complicated and often unreliable narrative voices and other narrative techniques, these descriptive passages become only a textual space out of which other versions of reality, ontological levels and meanings are derived. By the use of fragmentation, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, parody, mixture of genres and other narrative strategies, postmodern literature often attacks realistic visions of the world and implies a relativity and multiplicity of the universe and the complexity of the human perception of it. David Foster Wallace’s short stories and novels complicate both the traditional (realistic), subjective psychological (modernist) and the postmodernist visions of the world even more by transgressing the space between realistic, postmodern and what perhaps can be labeled postpostmodern narrative poles. Descriptive passages in his works evoke the idea of mimeticism and objectivity, only to be severely subjectivized by a psychological narrative further undermined by fragmentation, digressions and metacommentaries, ultimately both returning to and eventually abandoning the idea of mimeticism. Quite paradoxically then, these descriptive passages have a controversial function, first evocating traditional mimeticism and then undermining it, to be understood as a resistance against what Wallace has called the commercialization and exhaustion of literature and narrative techniques of postmodernism. 1 From Descriptive to (Meta)-Metafictional 321 In the short stories from his collection Oblivion, David Foster Wallace does not make any considerable artistic or stylistic progress, if this book is compared with his previous novel Infinite Jest, The Broom of the System, or with his short stories and novellas such as “Westward the Course Empire Takes it Away”, and short story collections such as Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, or Girl With Curious Hair. He continues with his interest in such themes as the commercialization of people’s lives and language, the (in)ability of language to communicate truth about outer experience, the relationship between language, philosophy and science, psychology of human beings, frustration of living in various kinds of partnership, and various kinds of violence. Marie Mudaca adds other themes she considers prominent in this collection. In her review of this book she suggests themes such as “horror, detachment, and the inability to describe human experiences with mere words” (Mundaca 2004: online). These themes indicate the author’s interest in modernist epistemology (Mc Hale 1987: 9), postmodernist and post-structuralist issues and ontology. In the short stories from his collection Oblivion, for instance “Incarnations of Burned Children”, “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”, “The Soul is not a Smithy” or “Good Old Neon”, Wallace uses descriptive passages to both establish, develop, further transform and finally undermine the narrative credibility of mimeticism and traditional realistic writing. What is interesting about Wallace’s style is that lengthy descriptive passages, especially those describing events and feelings, become the very means through which they undermine their own mimeticism and persuasion of the vision of the world as conveyed through the mimetic narrative strategies they themselves had established before. The linear narrative and description of the event passes into a description of a feeling (as in “Incarnations of Burned Children”, “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”), which further converges into a narrative in which objectivity and subjectivity, outer observation and inner feelings merge with the imagination (“The Soul is not a Smithy”), create a metacommentary on the process of creation of reality through language and on the relationship between mind, language, and physical reality. In “Incarnations of Burned Children”, Wallace also gives a meticulous description of the event, an incident in which parents see their child scalded to death, narrated from a traditional omniscient narrator’s perspective now: The Daddy was around the side of the house hanging a door for the tenant when he heard the child’s screams and the Mommy’s voice gone high between them. He could move fast, and the back porch gave onto the kitchen, and before the screen door had banged shut behind him the Daddy had taken the scene in whole, the overturned pot on the floortile before the stove and the burner’s blue jet and the floor’s pool of water still steaming as its many arms extended, the toddler in his baggy diaper standing rigid with steam coming off his hair and his chest and shoulders scarlet and his eyes rolled up and mouth Jaroslav Kušnír 322 open very wide and seeming somehow separate from the sounds that issued, the Mommy down on one knee with dishrag dabbing pointlessly at him and matching the screams with cries of her own, hysterical so she was almost frozen. (Wallace 2004: 114) This close observation of the incident continues further with a close longsentence description of the following actions in the parents’ attempt to save the child from scalding. As can be seen from the example, the descriptive sentences evoke a realistic atmosphere of frustration, but their length points out the process of perception of the event and its reconstruction in the human mind which is loosely reminiscent of a flow of ideas, or an interior monologue. Thus narrative objectivity turns into narrative subjectivity through the interiorization of the event and is further dramatized by the close description of the action and frustration: […] their baby’s diaper burned their hand and they saw where the real water’d fallen and pooled and been burning their baby boy all this time while he screamed for them to help him and they hadn’t […] (116). Dramatic and seemingly linear and realistic narrative conveyed through these descriptive passages is suddenly, just before the end of this short story, interrupted by the narrator addressing the reader: If you’ve never wept and want to, have a child. Break your heart inside and something will a child is the twangy song the Daddy hears again […] (116) This ironic and sarcastic comment subjectivizes and psychologizes the seemingly objective and linear description of events and relativizes the seriousness of the representation of objective reality to point out the nature of suffering and frustration, which is finally further ironized, thus creating another level of meaning which abandons the mere realistic and objective record of the incident. In the process of his narration, the narrator continues in describing the parents’ attempt to save the child, and says that […] the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child’s body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self’s soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo. (116) This last passage enriches the stylistic hybridity of Wallace’s narrative, through which the story acquires another dimension and level of meaning. The child’s death does not produce a narrative and realistic closure, but is further extended into lyrical, fantastic and poetic mood, which relativizes both the understanding of death as finality, description of the event for description’s sake, and opens up another level of meaning which is the relationship between the physical, material (body) and abstract (soul, death, language), and perhaps a necessary separation between the materiality of human From Descriptive to (Meta)-Metafictional 323 existence and the soul as an abstract phenomenon having a different ontological status. Thus, in this short story, descriptive passages, despite dominating the whole text, are gradually modified into a subjective rendering of experience and, finally, by abandoning their role of traditional (mimetic) bearer of meaning and creating another level of meaning, they undermine the expected role of the dominant descriptive narrative. A similar, although much more complicated use of descriptive passages and narrative strategies can be seen in Wallace’s short story “The Soul is not a Smithy” from the same collection. In this short story Wallace is interested in the human mind, its perception of reality, and the (in)ability of language to convey human experience. The story is narrated from the perspective of a young boy who tries to give a detailed description of a past traumatic incident from his childhood, and this is connected with a substitute teacher of civics who suffered a nervous breakdown during a lesson. As the narrator says, This is the story of how Frank Caldwell, Chris DeMatteis, Mandy Blemm, and I became, in the city newspaper’s words, the 4 Unwitting Hostages, and of how our strange and special alliance and the trauma surrounding its origin bore on our subsequent lives and careers as adults later on.(Wallace 2004: 66) A close desription of the event evoking a mimetic and realistic imitation of reality continues with the narrator’s further description of his classmates, political situation, and the classroom: The Civics classroom at R.B. Hayes consisted of six rows of five desks each. The desks and chairs were bolted securely to each other and to the floor and had hinged, liftable desktops, just as all primary classroom’s desks tended to in that era before backpacks and bookbags. Inside your assigned desk was where you stored your No. 2 pencils, theme paper, paste, and other essentials of primary school education. (68) The detailed description of the situation, people, places and the incident evokes a realistic quality of the presented event and a strong realistic effect, as well as the belief in the capacity of language to convey human experience objectively. This convincingness and realistic narrative becomes, however, doubtful further on in the story, when the narrator admits that my real attention directed peripherally at the fields and street outside, which the window mesh’s calibration divided into discrete squares that appeared to look like the rows of panels comprising cartoon strips, filmic storyboards, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Comics, and the like […] it led my attention not merely to wonder idly, but to actively construct whole linear, discretely organized narrative fantasies, many of which unfolded in considerable detail […] anything in any way remarkable in the view outside […] a city bus flowing stolidly from right to left through the lower three the lowest three horizontal columns of squares - became the impetus for privately imagined films’ or Jaroslav Kušnír 324 cartoons’ storyboards, in which each remaining square of the window’s wire mesh could be used to continue and deepen the panels’ narrative - the ordinary looking C.P.T. bus in reality commandeered by Batman’s thenarchnemesis, the Red Commando, and my terrified older brother and his piano teacher […]. (71-72) As can be seen from the above extract, the narrator - then a 9 year-old boy - admits he has created parallel worlds constructed from reality but working on a principle of linearity and thus accepted, in the child’s mind, as real and conveyed in the realistic narrative, as part of his inner experience including the reflection of the outer world in his mind (classroom, parents, school), the parallel world constructed from reality perceived through the window and reminiscent of a cartoon’s linearity, and then the other metaworld as represented by the story, cartoon, fairy tale and film characters appearing in this meta-world (Batman, Robin, etc.). This is a world and “reality” which becomes complex, multilayered but modelled after the real, physical yet also multilayered reality. All these worlds become part of the narrator’s inner experience, influencing his vision of the world and both complicating and problematizing the credibility of his narrative and realistic vision of the world itself, however realistically it appears to the reader. In contrast to other authors of his generation, the close description of these parallel worlds in Wallace’s short story evokes the convincingness of subjective and imaginary experience of his characters. The narrator also admits that he was daydreaming (p. 72), that he is probably a dyslectic child, and that “These imagined constructions, which often took up the entire window, were difficult and concentrated work” (72). Thus the alternative world the narrator creates represents a replacement of physical reality by a constructed combination of the stimuli from various sources (reality, popular fiction, film) which is also a replacement of the process of reading and writing as a way of transferring physical reality to human consciousness through language. It seems thus that Wallace is interested in the process of the construction of the mental image of the world in the absence of a written language that at the same is time being used, for which he does not only apply the metaphor of a dyslectic and daydreaming child, but also the image of language and parallel stories. Through stylistic mastery, with unexpected and often unnoticed narrative turns, Wallace’s protagonist develops parallel, often comic, but also horrific, violent stories reminiscent of cartoon strips and comics (p. 2) in which the realistic (narrator’s family and classmates) acquire these genres’ qualities. They are not juxtaposed to, but merge with the realistic narrative, with characters and situations modeled after both reality and meta-reality, as can be seen from the following example, in which a description of fact (narrator classmate’s mother) and situation (classroom) merge with the story he had constructed about them: From Descriptive to (Meta)-Metafictional 325 2 The term used in Harshaw (Hrushovski’s) understanding, and it refers to the real, physical world, see bibliography. Then we see Ruth Simmon’s mother - whom we have already seen take several pills throughout the day from a small brown prescription bottle in her handbag, by way of another upper row’s backstory - […] Just which specific aspects of the U.S. Bill of Rights were being covered by Mr. Johnson while this story of Ruth Simmons and her lost Cuffie filled in panel after panel of the window I cannot say […]. (80) It then seems that the imagined world works and functions as real, trustworthy and present, and that both imagination and fantasy change their roles in a recursive cycle of unfolding narrative of mind rather than through the act of direct storytelling. A person from the actual world 2 , Ruth Simmon’s mother represented in a realistic narrative frame, becomes a part of the window narrative which the boy further develops but, at the same time, she becomes part of the realistic world since she is presented in detail and as fully functioning within it. On the other hand, to come back to the role of language, both the abstract phenomena, language and characters, invade the realistic (actual, physical) world; they become an indistinguishable part of it, and are often associated with the imagery of death. The Civics teacher’s writing on the blackboard and trying to explain a modified version of part of the Constitution to the children has the same powerful effect as reality itself. This can be seen in the following example: In the midst of writing on the chalkboard, illustrating that the phrase due process of law appears identically in both the V th and XIV th Amendments, Mr. Richard Allen Johnson inadvertently inserted something else in the phrase as well - the capital word KILL. Ellen […] discovered that they had written due process KILL of law (86) […] Richard A. Johnson writing on the chalkboard, ostensibly about the XIII th Amendment’s abolition of Negro slavery, except instead it turned out that he was really writing KILL THEM KILL THEM ALL over and over again […]. (91) The children’s horror stemming from the teacher’s gradual running amok and obsession with death is juxtaposed to a similar horror scene the narrator creates in his panel window scene as part of another story he has constructed. Thus what Wallace seems to imply is that the power of language and imagination as represented by the above parallel narratives achieves equality with real, physical reality. Language is not only a source of manipulative power in a Foucauldian sense, but also, in a post-structuralist sense, an important medium of the construction of reality, able to evoke the same effects as the phenomena from the real world. The ontological levels of physical reality, daydreaming, “narrative tableaux” further merge with dreams, nightmares and meta-commentaries on them and various other Jaroslav Kušnír 326 subjects, as well as with the juxtaposition of the real world and its imitation (statues, papier-mâché models). The narrator comments on his perception of reality and says that the thoughts themselves are replaced by images and concrete pictures and scenes. You move, gradually, from merely thinking about something to experiencing it as really there, unfolding, a story or world you are part of. (107) He thus becomes entrapped in “the prisonhouse of language” (Jameson, 1974) of many realities and admits that he “HAD NO IDEA WHAT WAS GOING ON” (80) and that he “was absent in both mind and spirit” (80). At the same time, as suggested above, all “realities” as represented by the various ontological levels in this short story form an inseparable whole suggesting both the power and unreliability of language to create an entirely objective, clear and exact image of reality. The meaning of descriptive passages in Wallace’s short story is subverted by another kind of description serving as a weapon against mimeticism, which invokes the idea of an unproblematic connection between language and reality. In addition, Wallace’s descriptive passages are also descriptions of the process of formation of the mental image of reality in the human mind conveyed through language, showing not only the funny, but also the manipulative impact of various kinds of popular culture (films, comics, cartoons) and metarealities (dreams, nightmares, various forms of mass literature and culture) on human consciousness. Wallace thus presents a critique of linearity understood as a process operating differently from that of the human mind and its perception of reality. The narrator claims that for it is true that the most vivid and enduring occurrences in our lives are often those that occur at the periphery of our awareness […]. We often can remember the details and subjective associations far more vividly than the event itself. (97) The human mind is thus understood as not always being a reliable mediator of the complexity of reality, and the narrator’s comments allude to the notion of free association of ideas and randomness rather than chronology in the transfer of data from the outside world to the human mind. All these themes, the mixture of dream and reality, fact and fiction, metafictional elements, selfreflexive metacommentaries as well as Wallace’s treatment of the relationship between outer reality, language and the human mind contribute to the postmodern character of the story. While in his short story “Incarnations” descriptive passages dominate and are further transformed into a lyrical mood evoking the author’s interest in modernist issues such as the psychology of human consciousness and human experience, in “The Soul is not a Smithy” Wallace transforms descriptive passages into postmodern narrative, and in “Good Old Neon” he further complicates the interaction of realistic, modernist and postmodernist visions of the world. Descriptive passages and From Descriptive to (Meta)-Metafictional 327 3 See Rother below. linearity pass into subjective description of human consciousness, to be further undermined by fragmentariness and metacommentaries evoking a postmodernist effect which represents, to a certain degree, a further narrative turn into a post-neorealistic vision of the world. According to Tom Rakewell (n.d.), who has reviewed his short stories, David Foster Wallace, could be said to be a writer of ‘metafiction,’ perhaps the original brand of postmodern fiction, but that his fiction is so often fiction about fiction-making is really a function of the essentially realist strategy […]since the artificial discourses permeating postmodern culture are themselves used to construct stories about the world […]. One of the short stories Rakewell refers to is “Good Old Neon”. The above quotation shows the ambiguity in critics’ perceptions of Wallace’s fiction. Rakewell considers him to be, in a quite oxymoronic way, both a realist and metafictional writer, and many critics qualify him as being either an author dealing with modernist themes and issues, or as a post-scientific, metametafictional author 3 , which confirms the stylistic ambiguity of his writing. As in the previous stories, what dominates in the last one is a subjective and quite meticulous description of the first person narrator’s reconstruction of his experience, his depression, his relationship with his therapist and his motivation for committing suicide. This narrative, like in the “The Soul is not a Smithy”, is further complicated by various other narrative levels, self-reflections and meta-commentaries on various subjects that create metafictional effect. This would point to a postmodern character for the story, which is, however, further modified. Through a complicated process of narrative twists it creates what could be tentatively labeled a meta-metafictional, perhaps neo-postmodernist effect. What dominates on the macro-narrative level of this short story is Wallace’s subjectivized narrative, the exploration of the human mind and the relationship between outer reality and inner subjectivization of experience as filtered through the mind’s response to a complicated outer space created by various discourses. The story is thus reminiscent of the confession of a young man and his frustration at his inability to achieve a successful life, which finally leads to his suicide. The story develops with the narrator’s convincing pseudo-subjective narration on his relationships with his family members, friends and other people, especially with his therapist, which only intensifies the modernist character of the story and the subjectivization of outer experience in the narrator’s mind, implying the creation of a solipsistic universe. At the very beginning of the story, however, the narrator says: Jaroslav Kušnír 328 Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. (Wallace 2004: 141) This passage expresses not only the narrator’s confession, but it points out Wallace’s narrative trick - the narrator’s reconstruction of events and confessions will not be only about his feelings, but also about the process of the construction of an “impression”, i.e. of an image about himself in connection with his relationships with his therapist, family and friends. This process of construction of an image includes the narrator’s description of the main relationship, i.e. the one with his therapist, which forms the basis from which further connotations evolve. This description is not of a therapy session, or the narrator’s subjective feelings only, but of his construction of the image of himself. While during a therapy session the therapist becomes a dominant and authoritarian figure controlling the whole process of therapy, in Wallace’s short story it is a self-conscious narrator aware of his position as an object of manipulation who manipulates the whole relationship, who self-consciously creates a constructed, false image about himself and reveals the therapist’s weaknesses. As he puts it: I seemed to be so totally self-centered and fraudulent that I experienced everything in terms of how it affected people’s views of me and what I needed to do to create the impression of me I wanted them to have. (145) Fraudulence and manipulation associated with both image and reality construction through language evoke postmodern connotations, especially the idea of a problematic notion of reality and its construction through language. This is confirmed by the fantastic and metafictional elements by which Wallace’s narrator addresses the reader and predicts a future death from the post-mortem perspective after his death itself: Here are some of the various things I tried: EST, riding a ten-speed to Nova Scotia and back, hypnosis, cocaine, sacro-cervical chiropractics, joining a charismatic church, jogging, pro bono work for the AOL Council, meditation classes, the Masons, analysis, the Landmark Forum, the Course in the Miracles, a right-brain drawing workshop, celibacy […] I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies. (142-143) The first part of this extract including the enumeration of the narrator’s activities represents a mock parodic treatment of some of the most typical activities of the young and their sensibility, i.e. the obsession with traveling and cars, health and physical condition, interest in religious sects and cults, and experimentation with drugs, all representing the shallowness and superficiality of their sensibility. The second part draws the reader’s attention to the fictitiousness of the presented events, which makes it metafictional. At the From Descriptive to (Meta)-Metafictional 329 same time, death does not become a tragic event, but only another contribution to a catalogue of extreme and perhaps deviant activities characteristic of the contemporary way of life of the young generation. Wallace thus uses subjective psychological narrative and stream-ofconsciousness as a pretext for creating other kinds of narration evoking various levels of meaning. These can be identified as follows: 1) First of all, Wallace wants to express the inner feelings of the protagonist and his subjective perception of the world and reality; 2) this subjective narration is, however, neither a modernist stream-of-consciousness nor a traditional interior monologue describing the human mind but turns out to be the narrator’s meta-narration, i.e. a narration on his self-conscious construction of his psychological identity; 3) this is further complicated by the inclusion of various meta-commentaries, reflections or dreams, all creating an embedded narrative and metafictional effect which implies a postmodern narrative; 4) all this is, however, problematized by another, meta-metafictional level created by: a) a metanarrative, i.e. a reference to already metafictional and thus postmodern narrative; b) by the narrator’s eventual revelation of the narrative ambiguity in the final scene, for example, in which the narrator comments on David Foster Wallace and his feelings about his observation of the class photo in which the narrator appears: The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever […] David Wallace blinks in the midst of idly scanning class photos from his 1980 AURORA WEST H.S. yearbook and seeing up my photo and trying, through the tiny little keyhole of himself, to imagine what all must have happened to lead up to my death in the fiery single-car accident he’d read about in 1991 […]David Wallace happening to have a huge and totally unorganizable set of inner thoughts, feelings, memories and impressions of this little photo’s guy a year ahead of him in school […]. (Wallace 2004: 180) As can be seen in this extract, the narrator eventually and surprisingly reveals his multiple status as narrator, writer and “real” person, which points out the difference between the real, physical world and the world of fiction that is achieved especially by the distance created by third person narration referring to David Foster Wallace, who is a real being and a writer as well. This extract thus also points to the symbolic death of physicality and the material world meant as a metaphor of the difference between this physical and fictional world of literature, since despite his physical death, the narrator tells the story about his death, which is physically impossible but acceptable for the world of fiction. In addition, narrative ambiguity is caused by the Jaroslav Kušnír 330 reference to David Wallace as a narrator, since it is not sure, however probable it might be, that David Foster Wallace is the narrator of the above extract and story. Conclusion In his short stories “Incarnations of Burned Children” and “The Soul is not a Smithy” David Foster Wallace uses descriptive passages to establish a traditional, either realistic or modernist subjective psychological narrative situation evoking a convincing depiction of the world. This situation is, however, later problematized by the inclusion of lyrical and fantastic elements and thus by a transformation of this narrative into a subjective psychological account of some traumatic experience, and by the symbolic depiction of the relationships between the material, physical and the abstract. Descriptive passages in “The Soul is not a Smithy” evoke almost a naturalistic and meticulous mimetic record of reality passing into a subjective psychological narration that is, however, further complicated by other parallel narratives constituting various different kinds of reality (fantastic, metafictional), through the use of which the author points out not only the mental perception of the outer physical world by the mind, but also the process of the construction of both reality and story through language. And, finally, in his short story “Good Old Neon” Wallace introduces a subjective psychological narrative reminiscent of modernist fiction describing the psychology of his protagonist, a frustrated and mentally unbalanced young man. The protagonist’s confessions are, however, further problematized and their truthfulness relativized by dreams, reflections, and meta-commentaries, which problematize both the modernist psychological narrative and the postmodernist narrative level. Further manipulating the modernist subject and postmodern narrative, Wallace extends initial descriptive passages to other kinds of narratives which change a story from a psychological subjective and modernist story into a story on the symbolic death of physicality and the material worlds and a story self-consciously and symbolically treating a difference between the reality and fiction. Works Cited Barth, John (1967). “The Literature of Exhaustion.” Atlantic Monthly 220. 29-34. Boswell, Marshall (2003). Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Harshaw (Hrushovski), Benjamin (1984). “Fictionality and Fields of Reference: Remarks on a Theoretical Framework.” Poetics Today 5: 2. 227-251. From Descriptive to (Meta)-Metafictional 331 Jameson, Frederic (1974). Prison House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton Essays in Literature). Princeton and Chicester, West Sussex: Princeton University Press, 1974. McHale, Brian (1987). Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge. Mundaca, Marie (2004). “David Foster Wallace. Oblivion. Review.” http: www.themodernworld.com/ reviews/ Wallace_oblivion.html (accessed April 2006). Owen, Craig (1992). “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism.” In C. Owens (ed.). Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.52-87. Rakewell, Tom (n.d.). “Consider Oblivion”. http: / / noggs.typepad.com/ the_reading_ experience/ 2004/ 08/ reviewers_of_da.html (accessed April 2006). Rother, James (1993). “Reading and Riding the Post-Scientific Wave: the Shorter Fiction of David Foster Wallace.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13: 2. 216-234. Wallace, Foster David (1998). A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays & Ruminations. Boston: Little Brown & Co. Wallace, Foster David (2004). Oblivion. New York and Boston: Little Brown & Co. Jaroslav Kušnír Dept. of Engl. Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Natural Sciences The University of Prešov, Slovakia