Christopher, for his part, does not know he is in a fictional text, though he is narratively self-aware; as he writes of his brief stay in a police cell, “I wondered how I would escape if I was in a story” (14). However, he is writing the text as he goes along, and rereading as he goes, such that he can write in chapter 181, “I realize that I told a lie in Chapter 13 because I said ‘I cannot tell jokes,’ because I do know 3 jokes that I can tell and I understand and one of them is about a cow, and Siobhan said I don’t have to go back and change what I wrote in Chapter 13 because it doesn’t matter because it is not a lie, just a clarification” (142–43). So the text has an explicit and ongoing relationship to itself throughout. Indeed, about a third of the way through Curious Incident, there is a curious incident: Christopher’s father discovers the book Christopher is writing, and realizes that Christopher is trying to find out who killed Wellington, even though he has expressly and repeatedly forbidden Christopher to do so. When Christopher replies to the effect that he has faithfully followed the letter of his father’s instructions if not their spirit, his father replies, “Don’t give me that bollocks, you little shit. You knew exactly what you were bloody doing. I’ve read the book, remember” (81).
Ed Boone has, in other words, read the book we have been reading. There ensues a complex intratextual period during which Ed confiscates the book and hides it, which leads one to ask where, exactly, Christopher is writing down the story of how he looked for the book while his father was out of the house. But that question is quickly superseded by yet another level of textuality in the narrative. When Christopher finds his book hidden in the closet of his father’s bedroom, he thinks,
I decided that I would leave the book where it was because I reasoned that Father wasn’t going to throw it away if he had put it into the shirt box and I could carry on writing in another book that I would keep secret [presumably that is where this passage has been recorded] and then, maybe later, he might change his mind and let me have the first book back again and I could copy the new book into it. And if he never gave it back to me I would be able to remember most of what I had written, so I would put it all into the second secret book and if there were bits I wanted to check to make sure I had remembered them correctly I could come into his room when he was out and check. (94)
Just as Curious Incident’s relation to its own status as a text is verging on Quixote-level involution, Christopher finds the texts that will help him solve two mysteries—the mystery of who killed Wellington, and the mystery of what his narrative is really about. For in finding his mother’s letters to him, which his father had kept from him in order to maintain the cover story that his mother is dead, Christopher discovers that he had not, in fact, understood the narrative he inhabits. Here, then, the narrative’s self-reflexivity doubles back onto the question of whether the intellectually disabled character can understand his/her own narrative and serve as a “fully qualified” narrator.
Emotionally, for Christopher (and, I suspect, for many readers), the effect is devastating: his father has been lying to him, his mother is alive, his mother abandoned him and ran off with Mr. Shears. That is the real story; that is the reason Ed Boone told his son that his mother had “a problem with her heart” (23)—a passage we learn to reread only when we have read Judy Boone’s letters. But as a formal, compositional matter, Judy’s letters represent an ingenious solution to the problem Elizabeth Moon grappled with in The Speed of Dark, the problem of how an intellectually disabled character can come to understand the broader parameters of the story s/he is telling. Moon’s solution was to invent more narrators; Haddon’s is to invent more texts.
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At this point we can ask why textual self-awareness and self-reflexivity should be of especial interest in a narrative whose protagonist has a cognitively atypical relation to narrative—and I can return to Lisa Zunshine’s work on metarepresentation. One of the questions that arises when we have a detective who cannot tell when people are lying to him is this: What happens if we posit a person with a cognitive disability that prevents him or her from source-tagging? What if we imagined a reader—or, more interestingly, a character who is not a narrator—with no capacity for metarepresentation, who cannot distinguish fiction from fact? We might get the Thermians from the film Galaxy Quest, who call upon the cast of a long-since-cancelled TV science-fiction show to save them from genocide because they believe the show’s episodes to be, in their terms, the “historical documents.” Or we might get Don Quixote.
And if we get Don Quixote, then we get the novel Don Quixote—and that has some interesting implications not only for our metarepresentational capacities (or lack thereof) but also for the way a disabled metarepresentational capacity can produce metafiction. Zunshine cites the neuropsychiatrist Christopher Frith to the effect that “self-awareness cannot occur without metarepresentation,” that is, the “cognitive mechanism that enables us to be aware of our goals, our intentions, and the intentions of other people” (qtd. at 55). But Zunshine does not pursue what this might mean for textual representations of characters who lack the capacity for metarepresentation, even though she mentions Don Quixote briefly. Cervantes’s representation of Don Quixote, after all, is not simply the spectacle of a man so addled by his reading of chivalric romances that he is willing to tilt at windmills, though this is by far the most common image of the character. Rather, what makes Don Quixote interesting in this respect is Cervantes’ gambit of making Book 2 an extended metacommentary on Book 1, by introducing Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to a world in which untold thousands of people all across Europe have read a book titled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha.
Cervantes’s readers will recall the “ridiculous conversation”—for so it is titled in the headnote to chapter 3 of Book 2—that takes place between Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and Sansón Carrasco, after Sancho meets Carrasco and learns that Carrasco has somehow read all about him. Just before Carrasco’s arrival, Don Quixote wonders how such a book can have been produced, since it is less than a month since he returned home at the close of Book 1, and he worries to himself about how he has been portrayed in this book. He consoles himself with the thought that “if, however, it were true that such history was in existence, seeing that it was about a knight-errant, it must of necessity be grandiloquent, lofty, distinguished, and true” (544). Let us attend first to the recursivity here: if it is true that such a book exists, then, given its subject matter, the narrative must be true. We are already in a hall of mirrors, because Book 1 started out with Don Quixote narrating to himself the manner in which his adventures will be narrated, and after the narrative trails off in mid-episode in chapter 8, Cervantes continues the novel by “discovering” the manuscript, “History of Don Quixote of La Mancha, written by a Cide Hamete Benengali, Arabian historian.” (Perhaps this is the secret second book, analogous to Christopher Boone’s.) So within the fictional universe of Book 2 of Don Quixote, it is in fact true that there is a book about Don Quixote (which we know as Book 1), and that book even contains evidence of another true book about Don Quixote, written by an Arab historian, though at one point Cervantes very wisely cautions us to take such claims with a grain of salt, because Arabs “are much inclined to lying” (109). And of course within that fictional frame of reference, everything in the first book of Don Quixote is “true,” just as it is “true” that Lyra Belacqua is good at reading the alethiometer and at telling lies to talking armored bears. It cannot be otherwise: the book we hear about in Book 2 is in fact the book we have just read, we know it exists, and when Carrasco arrives, he, Sancho, and Don Quixote proceed to discuss the properties of this book as well as its popular and critical reception.
When Carrasco mentions that some readers have objected to the inclusion of a small inset novel in Book 1, “The Tale of Ill-Advised Curiosity,” taking up chapters 33–35, Don Quixote objects strenuously: “Now I am sure . . . that the author of my story is no sage but some ignorant prater
who set himself blindly and aimlessly to write it down and let it turn out anyhow” (549). Apparently, the narrator of Don Quixote has no capacity for distinguishing significant from insignificant detail, and is incapable of writing a proper novel; Martin Amis has emphatically agreed, writing that “reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies” (427). But nestled safely within the garrulous text of Don Quixote, Carrasco assures Quixote that there is no cause for concern, for “this story, in fact, is the most delightful and least harmful entertainment ever seen to this day,” whereupon Quixote replies, “To write in any other way . . . would be to write not truths but lies, and historians who resort to lying ought to be burned like coiners of false money. But I do not know what induced the author to make use of novels and irrelevant tales when he had so much to write of in mine” (549). The remainder of Book 2 is based on the premise that the characters in Book 2 have read Book 1, and are willing to humor Don Quixote accordingly; and matters take a still stranger turn when, in 1614, Cervantes gets word of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda’s spurious Book 2 (a counterfeit lie, told by a counterfeit coiner of false money), and decides to work that text into his own. In chapter 59, headed “In which is recorded the extraordinary event that might pass for an adventure of Don Quixote,” Sancho and Quixote stop at an inn in which they hear someone say, “I beseech you, till supper is brought in, let us read another chapter of the second part of Don Quixote of La Mancha” (949). Our heroes burst in on their fellow-travelers; Quixote flips through the book and pronounces it “wholly stupid” (952), and his interlocutors note that the scene of Don Quixote’s appearance at the tournament in Saragossa is “a measly account, defective in contrivance, mean in style, wretchedly poor in devices, and rich only in absurdities” (953).
The infinite self-reflexivity of Don Quixote is made possible chiefly by the fact that the two books were published ten years apart, but it makes sense, when one’s protagonist is unable to distinguish fiction from nonfiction, that the fiction he inhabits should explore the parameters and presuppositions of fiction. This aspect of Don Quixote has been commented on from the moment the real (that is, not the fictional) Book 2 of Don Quixote appeared, and the idea that Don Quixote is a novel about the writing of Don Quixote has resonated for centuries, all the way to Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in which “Menard’s fragmentary Quixote”—which is no less than an exact word-for-word recreation of the original—is judged to be “more subtle than Cervantes’” (42). But it is striking that no one has framed this question in terms of disability: Don Quixote is intellectually disabled. He has become synonymous with a kind of madness, the madness of one who takes fiction for reality. And yet his disability, which is inevitably a textual disability, winds up producing a text, Book 2, in which his delusions effectively become real. This is also the premise of Pirandello’s Henry IV, although there, the Italian actor whose family is going to great lengths to honor his apparent delusion that he is Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor (a delusion that began on the day he played Henry IV in a pageant), has in fact recovered from that delusion years before the action of the play begins, and has now chosen to live as if he is suffering from the delusion that he is Henry IV. But Don Quixote’s delusion is based on his relation to texts, so that the premise of Book 1 of Don Quixote—that a dotty old country gentleman gets it into his head that the chivalric romances written three centuries earlier are in fact historical accounts of a world that needs to be revived today—turns, in Book 2, into a world where everyone behaves as if the chivalric romances written three centuries earlier are in fact historical accounts of a world that needs to be revived today. The disability, Don Quixote’s lack of a metarepresentational capacity, warps the text, turning it back on itself in a dizzying series of metafictional reflections on the nature of fiction and the nature of reflection—just as Christopher’s father has read the book you have read up to the point at which Christopher narrates to us his father’s discovery of the book, and just as Henry IV and Henry IV reflect on “reflection,” mental and physical (“When I was a child, I thought the moon in the pond was real” [193]).
Something similar, though on a much smaller scale, happens in Galaxy Quest. Galaxy Quest also opens in a metafictional mode, with an old episode of the show being screened at a Galaxy Quest convention; it is from the start a film about Star Trek and Star Trek fandom. It is also deeply literate about the clichés of popular science fiction—the reptilian aliens, the mysterious Omega-13 substance, the escape through the ducts of the ship (“Why is it always ducts?” asks Sigourney Weaver, nodding at one of the tropes of the film Aliens), the unnamed crewmember who dies before the first commercial break, the self-destruct mechanism aborted at the last instant, and the obligatory magical unobtainium substance that makes interstellar travel possible (the beryllium sphere).7 But once the narrative centers on characters—the Thermians—who lack the metarepresentational capacity to distinguish fact from fiction, a funny thing happens. The film’s labyrinths are not as rich or elaborate as those of the Quixote, but they do induce a hyperawareness of the fictional nature of the fiction we are watching (even though the idea that the events within that fiction are “real” to the characters is, as in Curious Incident, never abandoned), inasmuch as the film’s denouement turns on all the plot clichés the film has been satirizing. Where Quixote’s misreading of chivalric fiction as history parodically reanimates the clichés of late medieval romances, the Thermians’ belief in the veracity of the historical documents redeems all the clichés of mainstream science fiction, as the narrative stages its relation to its own genre by revivifying all the dead elements with which it began. The coup de grace in Galaxy Quest, for the fan narrative, comes when the teenage fan who approached the captain at the Galaxy Quest convention with an arcane question about the ship, and who was angrily rebuffed by the actor playing the captain (“There’s no quantum flux, there’s no auxiliary, there’s no goddamn ship”), saves the crew from destruction thanks to the minutely detailed blueprints of the ship he and his friends have stored on their hard drives.
Each of these narratives—Curious Incident, Don Quixote, Henry IV, and Galaxy Quest—involves a character or characters (in one case, a narrator) whose intellectual disability entails a diminished or nonexistent capacity for metarepresentation, and who thereby (a) produce metafictional textual effects, and (b) in the course of producing metafictional effects, break their narratives’ fictional frame in such a way as to confirm it. Christopher, believing he is writing a murder mystery novel about a dog, uncovers in the course of his “detections” a real mystery, whereby his narrative becomes an adventure story of an epic journey to London. Quixote, living among the characters in Book 2 who have read the first book you have just read, creates a narrative in which his delusions reshape the world. The Thermians, believing in the reality of the N.S.E.A. Protector, create an actual version of it that allows the fictional world of “Galaxy Quest” to become a real world within the fictional world of Galaxy Quest; Henry IV offers a variation on the theme, in which the mad king decides, upon regaining his senses, that he would rather remain—for his own amusement and edification, and for revenge against his family—in the fictional world they have created for him. In each case, intellectual disability becomes the occasion or the device for forging a link between the mechanics of metarepresentation and the machinations of metafiction.
It is therefore possible to see why Nabokov’s Pale Fire would be germane to this discussion, even though Charles Kinbote, like Don Quixote, is not usually considered to be a person with an intellectual disability. Like Henry IV, though to a considerably greater degree, the text is explicitly about reflection and resemblance; much is made of the pun on Zembla and Zemblans, and the title itself alludes to a passage in Timon of Athens on the subject of reflection: “the moon’s an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches fr
om the sun” (IV.iii. 437–38). In this light, Kinbote’s protestation that “I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel” (86) is this novel’s wry (or merely cute?) statement of its own ars poetica. A more sustained metacritical moment appears in Kinbote’s aside on the work of the painter Eystein:
While unable to catch a likeness, and therefore wisely limiting himself to a conventional style of complimentary portraiture, Eystein showed himself to be a prodigious master of the trompe l’oeil in the depiction of various objects surrounding his dignified dead models and making them look even deader by contrast to the fallen petal or the polished panel that he rendered with such love and skill. But in some of these portraits Eystein had also resorted to a weird sort of trickery: among his decorations of wood or wool, gold or velvet, he would insert one which was really made of the material elsewhere imitated by paint. (130)
This sounds roughly analogous to what Kinbote’s creator, himself a master of trompes l’oeil and weird sorts of textual trickery, is on about in Pale Fire; the text is so extravagantly a hall of mirrors that when “a really fantastic mirror” appears in it, a “secret device of reflection,” “signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of Bokay” (111), we know at once to hold a mirror up to the mirror and discern there the name of Jakob Gradus, a/k/a Jack Grey, also listed in the index as “Jack Degree, de Grey, d’Argus, Vinogradus, Leningradus, etc.” (307). Ironically yet fittingly, therefore, Kinbote repudiates Eystein’s aesthetics as firmly as he repudiates any desire to write a novel:
This device which was apparently meant to enhance the effect of his tactile and tonal values had, however, something ignoble about it and disclosed not only an essential flaw in Eystein’s talent, but the basic fact that “reality” is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average “reality” perceived by the communal eye. (130)
The Secret Life of Stories Page 15
