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Fabulation and Metafiction

1980; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/saf.1980.0013

2158-415X

Richard Pearce,

Themes in Literature Analysis

114Reviews Scholes, Robert. Fabuhtion and Metafiction. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1979. 222 pp. Cloth: $12.50. A disciple was sometime, which took his pleasure to rehearse and tell many fables; the which prayed to his master that he would rehearse unto him a long fable. To whom the master answered, "Keep and beware well that it hap not to us as it happened to a King and his fabulator." And the disciple answered, "My master, I pray thee to tell me how it befell." And then the master said to his disciple: "Sometime was a King which had a fabulator. ..." In one of the first books printed in English, both translating and reworking a fable introduced into Europe almost four centuries earlier by a Christianized Spanish Jew, William Caxton established not only the name "fabulator" but a form of fabulation that Robert Scholes would adapt in 1967 to define an important movement in contemporary fiction. The form is as involuted in the short fable as it is in my brief history of its development , for the fabulator goes on to tell a tale to "rejoice" and relax the king, although the master is telling the tale to teach his disciple a lesson about the danger of long stories. The structure of Caxton's fable reveals four impulses of fabulation that are as strong today as they were in the original: a delight in design, especially that of stories within a story; the authority of the shaper, the fabulator being to the king as the master to his disciple; the joy of art, the fabulator "rejoicing" and refreshing his auditor; and a worldly lesson being taught not through direct representation of reality but "ethically controlled fantasy." I must admit to feeling something like still another auditor transformed into another fabulator as I set out to review a book about a literary movement which was first written when that movement was still young and, indeed, at a time that seems to have been at the end of an age of innocence. Robert Scholes is one of the few savants in a period of accelerating specialization, a master humanist in a world where genuine literacy declines in proportion to the proliferation of facts, a professional who still professes a dedication to knowledge and to discerning values. Since the publication of The Fabulators in 1967, he has explored the fields of structuralism, science fiction, and semiotics. Therefore, in Fabulation and Metafiction we would expect a new perspective on what he was so close to twelve years ago, a sense of how fabulation has developed as the world reflected in its fantasies has changed, and a formulation enlarged by the knowledge he has acquired and advanced since first considering the subject. In comparing the two editions, that is, we might expect something like the complex interaction of a story within a story and something of the joy in our new discoveries. But while the new material is new, it is also uneven, and while the new organization helps in some instances, it detracts in others. Nor does the new work as a whole produce the joy ofseeing new relationships and gaining new perspectives. Nonetheless, the project is important, so the aim of this review is to discover what it tells us about the contemporary humanist's dilemma. The Fabulators opened on a personal note, as Scholes declared a "love for fabulation" that had "its roots in the reading I first learned to like" and the recognition "in the writers I have called fabulators the proper grown-up fare for such a boy as I was. . . . This book, then, is written partly just to express my own joy in discovery." Its format was simple: six chapters, introducing his subject and describing fabulation as the revival of romance (in Durrell'sA/eamdrto Quartet), as satire (in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and Mother Night), as picaresque (in Southern's Magic Christian and Hawkes's Lime Twig), as allegory (in Murdoch 's Unicorn), and as epic vision (in Berth's Giles Goat-Boy). Studies in American Fiction1 15 Fabulation and Metafiction opens in the first person but without being personal, for Scholes has eliminated the page describing...