Textual Practice

ISSN: 0950-236X (Print) 1470-1308 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpr20

Metaffective fiction: structuring feeling in post-

postmodern American literature

Ralph Clare

To cite this article: Ralph Clare (2018): Metaffective fiction: structuring feeling in post-postmodern
American literature, Textual Practice, DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2018.1509269

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1509269

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 TEXTUAL PRACTICE
https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2018.1509269

Metaffective fiction: structuring feeling in

post-postmodern American literature
Ralph Clare
English, Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA

ABSTRACT
This essay will suggest that post-postmodern literature does not simply ‘return
to affect’ but that it simultaneously reflects upon the limitations and
construction of affect in ways that recall postmodernism’s penchant for
metafiction and self-conscious textuality. Such writing might fittingly be called
‘metaffective fiction.’ After a brief summary of Affect Theory as it pertains to
contemporary literature, this essay offers as its case study a reading of J.J.
Abrams and Doug Dorst’s post-postmodern S. against Nabokov’s classic
postmodern text Pale Fire. My contention is that if metafiction breaks the
frame of narrative in order to call attention to its fictive status, metaffective
fiction breaks that frame so as to interrogate self-consciously the construction
of emotion and affect. Where metafiction underscores the ways in which
reality is framed and constructed through narrative, metaffective fiction
highlights how emotion and affect themselves are realised and ‘framed’ or
codified. And while metaffective fiction realises that fictionalised emotions
aren’t real emotions and that affect can never be fully accessible in language,
it still both expresses emotion and realises the insufficiencies of that
expression. These metaffective fictions attempt to do so as a way of renewing
the potential of affect in a neoliberal age that is increasingly commodifying
affective labour, leisure, and our everyday emotional lives.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 9 November 2017; Accepted 9 July 2018

KEYWORDS Post-postmodern literature; affect; neoliberalism

In distinguishing post-postmodern American literature from its postmodern

predecessor, several critics have characterised post-postmodernist fiction as
one or another kind of a ‘return to the real’ and focused on the representations
of fleshed out characters, emotion, feeling, and affect as key features of such
literature.1 In so doing, this criticism closely follows the avowal of David
Foster Wallace and other contemporary authors to commit to creating a lit-
erature that values human connection, empathy, emotion, belief, and other-
directedness as correctives to the perceived narcissism, cynicism, solipsism,
media saturation, and debilitating forms of cultural irony of the postmodern

CONTACT Ralph Clare ralphclare@boisestate.edu

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

I want to agree on some aspects with DFW, however I believe it

is not narcissistic and solipsistic; but it hasn't been looked on all
the aspects
 2 R. CLARE

world and what was seen as an aesthetically bankrupt and co-opted postmo-
dern literature.2 As Robert McLaughlin puts it in an essay heralding Wallace
and Jonathan Franzen as representative of this new generation of writers,
these authors see literature as ‘valuable’ for ‘finding ways to be human in
[the world], and of truly connecting with others.’3
Rachel Greenwald Smith’s Affect and American Literature in the Age of
Neoliberalism, however, has challenged these fairly optimistic critical takes
on post-postmodern literature’s ‘return to the real’ via its emotional and
affective registers. Greenwald Smith argues against what she calls ‘the
affective hypothesis, or the belief that literature is at its most meaningful
when it represents and transmits the emotional specificity of personal experi-
ence,’4 chiefly because in the neoliberal era a new subjectivity has been formed
– an entrepreneurial subject that is always managing individual or ‘private
emotions’ like commodities and reducing human connections to so much net-
working. In short, Greenwald Smith claims that novels employing formal
innovation to make emotional connections merely conform to the demands
of a neoliberal market, while works that stoke
Agree,
[i]mpersonal feelings do not conform to a market model, because they [the feel-
those
ings] are not easily codifiable or recognizable; they do not allow for strategic
feelings emotional associations to be made between readers and characters; [and]
are not they emphasise the unpredictability of affective connections.5
easily Ultimately, these ‘impersonal works […] question the expectations that
codifiable underpin the model of the neoliberal entrepreneurial subject.’6
, but What makes Greenwald Smith’s trenchant analysis of feeling and literary
hidden, form so convincing is its grounding in affect theory, which differentiates
it doesnt between emotion and affect, in contrast to the aforementioned studies of
mean it post-postmodern literature that tend to conflate emotion with affect and/or
could not accept the return to the ‘real’ or ‘human’ fairly uncritically.7 As Masssumi
explains, emotion and affect ‘follow different logics and pertain to different
reach.
orders.’8 Emotion, or what is often called affect,

But agree is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of […] experience
which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified
on what intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into
DFW semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-
says reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and
about the recognized.9
'seriousn Emotion, then, is a feeling that becomes consciously recognised or named by a
ess' subject and hence becomes ‘qualified’ or ‘semiotically’ codified and
understood.10
Affect, however, is the very preconscious capacity of bodies to affect and be
affected in the first place. Affect involves, as Michael Hardt writes, ‘both our
power to affect the world around us and our power to be affected by it, along
Esto me sirve para relacionarlo con la teoría del yo
y el otro, porque están interrelacionados
TEXTUAL PRACTICE 3

with the relationships between these two powers.’11 In this formulation, affect
is intensity, vitality, and it ‘arises in the midst of in-between-ness’ and
is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-
body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and
sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations
between these intensities and resonances themselves.12

One thinks immediately of the affective charge of a crowd at a concert or

sporting event as constituting a transmittable ‘atmosphere’ that affects and
is affected by everyone gathered there, yet which no single individual actually
‘owns,’ even though one’s perception and cognition subjectivise emotional
states related to the experience. Affect is thus ‘outside’ the subject, only to
be ‘registered’ when consciousness, by necessity, captures, organises, and
codifies what we later call experience from the chaotic welter of the world,
much like a cookie cutter presses familiar shapes and bite-sized morsels out
of a mass of dough. As Massumi writes, ‘[w]ill and consciousness are subtrac-
tive. They are limitative, derived functions that reduce complexity too rich to
be functionally expressed.’13 Yet affect, despite its being a kind of invisible pre-
conscious force or bodily capacity, has decidedly material and bodily registers
as well, as evidenced in the body’s autonomic responses, such as a pupil dilat-
ing, a shiver, or a sudden reflex, in which the body acts on its own or ‘before’
consciousness recognises the need to do so.14 To return to the example of the
crowd, it is the rush, excitement, or anxiety that one might find oneself already
bodily transformed by or getting carried away by (the cheer, tapping foot, rapt
stare) that speaks to affect’s material dimensions. Affect thus always involves
the interaction between mind and body, though it scrambles any hierarchical
mind/body binary or simple cause/effect logic connected to such a duality.
Affect is, in a way, feeling felt both mentally and physically.
This provocative view of affect is at odds with the aforementioned scholar-
ship on post-postmodernism that is, to varying degrees, sympathetic to or
supportive of the ‘affective hypothesis,’ and, at the very least, does not proble-
matise the distinction between emotion and affect. In response, I would like to
stake out a middle ground between these two positions, one that does not
necessarily brush off post-postmodern literature’s move to immediacy and
emotional grounding as mere neoliberal capitulation, as per Greenwald
Smith, yet in turn complicates the ‘return to affect’ and its attendant recon-
structed humanism, as per Mary Holland and others. I would like to
suggest that post-postmodern literature does not simply ‘return to affect’
but that it simultaneously reflects upon the limitations and construction of
affect in ways that recall postmodernism’s penchant for metafiction and
self-conscious textuality. Such writing might fittingly be called ‘metaffective
fiction.’ To recall Patricia Waugh’s famous definition, ‘[m]etafiction is […]
fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically calls attention to
 4 R. CLARE

its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship

between fiction and reality.’15 In kind, what I am calling metaffective fiction
is that fiction that self-consciously calls attention to the ways in which
emotion and affect are represented in order to interrogate the relationship
between them. This can happen in myriad ways. Metaffective fiction may
radically break the narrative frame in order to highlight the construction,
framing, or codification of emotion and character; it may insist on self-con-
sciously establishing a particular affective relationship with a reader and
Non- text that both makes and breaks bonds, compels and repels identification; it
linear may intensify emotional states to the point of over-saturation or excess that
narrativ bleeds ‘out’ of characters and narrative frames to become the very tone or
es atmosphere of a text; it may foreground the materiality of texts as distinctive
(Calvino ‘embodied’ reads through its formal play; and metaffective fiction might
, Kurt gesture toward affect as that which escapes language and signification
Vonneg altogether in the face of the ineffable or what cannot be adequately rep-
ut) resented in language or emotional terms – the so-called unproblematic
‘return to the real.’ Therefore, the ‘meta’ of metaffective fiction does not
just refer to an awareness of textuality itself but to an awareness of affect
that may be said to resonate with affect theory’s distinction between
emotion and affect in addition to its conception of affect’s materiality and
potentiality.
What I hope to show is that metaffective fiction is literature that, although
it may indeed indulge in realist characters and sentiment, is nevertheless able
to tap into or register affect and affective states that go beyond the seemingly
‘shallow’ representation of emotions – indeed this is what the most successful
examples of this literature accomplish. To establish immediacy, sincerity, and
closeness between a text and reader, for instance, only to break or discourage
those connections a few pages or chapters later not only underscores the fra-
gility and constructed nature of such bonds but can appear an even more
cruel, cold, and impersonal practice than establishing a medium-cool tone
from a story’s outset. Thus, even texts with emotionally identifiable subjects
can instigate ‘impersonal feelings’ or affective charges that might then circu-
late outside of neoliberal market dictates; for metaffective fictions seek, though
not always successfully, to renew the potential of affect in a neoliberal age that
is increasingly commodifiying affective labour, leisure, and our everyday
emotional lives. Metaffective fictions comprise a literature that has arisen
within and in response to neoliberalism and its affective economics. Metaffec-
tive fiction, therefore, does not involve emotion recollected in tranquillity, but
affect reconstructed in adversity.
Moreover, the influential work on immaterial or affective labour by
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri offers a theory of neoliberalism’s
affective economics that leaves open the possibility of rejecting and transform-
ing neoliberal subjectivity.16 For Hardt and Negri, affective labour – examples
Politics of Affect in Neolib. TEXTUAL PRACTICE 5

include cognitive labour (computer programming), service work (restaurant

work or health care), or household labour (domestic work) – has become
the hegemonic mode of capitalist production.17 Affective labour has not
replaced material labour or quantitatively eclipsed it, but it gestures to a
new capitalist dynamic that aims, through the bio-production of affects
(mental and bodily things), to create life itself: ‘the production of ideas,
images, knowledge, communication, cooperation, and affective relations,
tends to create not the means of social life but social life itself.’18 Biopower
constitutes neoliberalism’s way of managing bioproduction, but affective
labour has the very same qualities of emergence, potentiality, and autonomy
as does affect understood in the Deleuzian/Spinozist vein detailed above.
Despite biopower’s attempt at containment, Hardt and Negri assert, ‘[b]iopo-
litical labour power is becoming more and more autonomous,’19 and ‘[b]iopo-
litical products […] tend to exceed all quantitative measurement and take
common forms, which are easily shared and difficult to corral as private prop-
erty.’20 Thus, in a neoliberal economy that harnesses affective labour, a surplus
of affect always escapes recapture by the processes of production that generate
it to begin with, for affect is always autonomous.
The same is true of literature and affect. Pieter Vermeulen reminds us that
‘[l]iterary works are defined by a restless interplay between emotional codifi-
cations and affects that inevitably escape them; even if they attempt to control
unruly affect and contain it as individual emotion, affect always exceeds these
efforts’ (9). Since all reading is, of course, bioproductive in a sense – from the
tactile sensation of holding a book or device to the cognitive and emotional
aspect of the act of reading – one might be tempted to formulate a biopolitics
of reading. As Deleuze and Guattari, write, any successful philosophy, art, or
literature, ‘produce[s] affects that surpass ordinary affections and perceptions’
(65), thus forming an independent, autonomous ‘bloc of sensations, that is to
say, a compound of percepts and affects.’21 A biopolitics of post-postmodern
fiction, then, might argue that by sharing and spreading affect intersubjec-
tively or by establishing affect as something transmittable between reader,
writer, and text, metaffective fiction provokes new literary forms, new poten-
tial affects and affective relationships, and perhaps even new subjectivities.
Moreover, what makes metaffective fiction unique in contrast to the literature
of any period that can be said to be affective, is that metaffective fiction must
self-consciously, through a variety of hardcore and softcore metafictional
techniques, negotiate the very problem and production of affect in a neoliberal
era where it is easily captured and commodified.
Indeed, there are interesting parallels between affective labour and the
‘labour’ of reading metaffective fiction. Affective labour is, Hardt and
Negri write, ‘of the head and the heart’ and ‘[o]ne distinctive feature of
the work of head and heart […] is that paradoxically the object of production
is a really a subject, defined, for example, by a social relationship or a form of
 'Work through the text -> call to engage in a
6 R. CLARE
affective labour of reading
life.’22 Because metaffective fiction at times asks its reader to ‘do work’ when
encountering a text’s formal breaks, interruptions, recursions, or meta-
moments, we might see this invitation to ‘work through’ the text not as
an emotional investment opportunity or chance to learn about strategic
identification and networking by identifying with realistic-seeming charac-
ters but as a call to engage in an affective labour of reading or a form of
meta-affective reading. For the aesthetic techniques of metafiction help to
create ruptures, reflexivity, and distance – the very ‘in-between’ spaces
where affect thrives and pulses. As Patricia Ticineto Clough writes, summar-
ising Massumi, affect is always ‘potential and emergent’ and its temporality
should be understood ‘in terms of thresholds, bifurcation, and emergence.’23
The encounters that can take place in these textual thresholds and spaces
where affect is percolating can be spaces where shared and communal
affects are produced and distributed, creating an affective virtual commons
of a sort, a virtual reading community that may later be actualised in a
number of possible ways.
Despite the ‘return’ to the real, to character, emotion, or affect, these
metaffective fictions are aware of the ways in which they construct emotion
and affect in an age typified both by cynical disaffection and giddy Millennial
optimism. A study of metaffective fiction, then, ought to be concerned with
the ways in which emotions, feelings, and affects circulate in, through, and
outside of post-postmodern texts (even personal ones) that are produced, dis-
tributed, and consumed in a neoliberal affective economy.
For the remainder of this essay, then, I would like to consider how one
radically metafictional post-postmodern text creates an affective relation-
ship and sense of immediacy between reader and text through its tone
and formal devices, yet simultaneously calls awareness to affect’s textual
and material (re)productions. My abbreviated case study will be to set
J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s post-postmodern S. alongside Vladimir
Nabokov’s classic postmodern novel Pale Fire (1962), since both of these
texts are metafictions from different eras that indulge in linguistic play
and puzzles and are concerned, in both form and content, with a
reader’s relationship to a text. What I hope to show is that S. as a metaffec-
tive fiction employs emotional and affective aesthetics ‘personally’ in ways
antithetical to the ‘impersonal’ and metafictional Pale Fire that nevertheless
provoke affect’s potentiality and power. For this reason, S. provides a very
different sort of affective charge – one fitting for the neoliberal era – than
Pale Fire, which nonetheless has the ability to produce affects as does a
work of literature from any period. S., therefore, emerges not merely as
another metafiction generating affects but as a truly metaffective fiction
that is responding to the emotional and affective challenges and capacities
of its contemporary moment. In short, S. is a metaffective fiction, whereas
Pale Fire is a metafiction.
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 7

Pale Fire and metafictional economies of affect

Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a curious, metafictional novel that challenges the
novel’s very generic form by mimicking a scholarly edition of a poem. As
such, the novel is composed of four parts: first, a foreword by editor
Charles Kinbote; second, ‘Pale Fire,’ a 999 line poem purportedly written
by John Shade; third, Kinbote’s novella length ‘commentary’ on the poem,
which tells what appears to be a completely unrelated and bizarre story
about the adventures of an exiled King of Zembla, Charles Xavier (who
seems to be a thinly disguised Kinbote), as well as about Kinbote himself
(also a Zemblan ex-pat) and his struggles to adapt to life in America; lastly,
is a seemingly scholarly index. The obvious challenge to the reader is to put
these parts into some sort of order to make sense of it all. In typical Naboko-
vian fashion, Pale Fire displays a variety of puns, allusions, and linguistic clues
(some productive, others dead ends) sprinkled throughout its pages that offer
up tempting thematic connections between the novel’s disparate parts.24 The
variety of possible solutions that critics have considered over the years – that
Kinbote invented Shade; that Shade invented Kinbote; that Kinbote is mad
(and may actually be someone named Botkin) and is critically hijacking the
poem; that Kinbote/Botkin is or is not the true King of Zembla, is greatly
suffering and hoping Shade’s art might redeem his life25 – speaks to the
baffling nature of the book. Even premier Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd’s elab-
orate and stunning book-length solution to the novel, while it may be said to
‘solve’ the novel’s central riddle, still does not clear up many delightful textual
ambiguities, which is a testament to the novel’s interpretive richness.26
Pale Fire thus foregrounds postmodern concerns with textuality and auth-
ority, such as the relationships between text and context, author and critic,
and author and reader. But it might be said to do so in a purely formalist
fashion with limited linguistic ends. Ultimately, the novel is inwardly
turned, due to Kinbote’s obsession, solipsism, and mental illness as well as
the novel’s linguistic game playing itself. For although these games are some-
times purposefully cyclical, closed linguistic systems – innocent games such as
‘word golf’ (in which a player seeks the least number moves between two
words by changing one letter per move) and Kinbote’s amusing circuitous,
wild goose chase citations in the index – even the ‘open’ games that partake
in what the poet Shade calls ‘combinational delight,’27 such as the multilingual
play, hidden codes, and numerous intertextual allusions, become like so many
brain teasers that the reader is invited to try to solve, but which makes her ever
aware of the absent presence of the puzzle master, Nabokov himself. When
asked why he wrote Lolita, Nabokov answered,
[w]hy did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the
sake of difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I’ve no general
ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.28
8 R. CLARE

While it is true that Nabokov’s formalism is not strictly linguistically solipsis-

tic – Shade’s art (much like Nabokov’s), as his poem puts it, is based not on
‘text but texture’ (PF l. 808) and aspires not toward ‘flimsy nonsense, but a
web of sense’ (PF l. 810) – it nevertheless forces one to seek, ‘Some kind of
link-and-bobolink, some kind/Of correlated pattern in the game’ (PF ll.
812-13).
Nabokov’s intricate game is carefully designed after Nature, the artist of the
universe. If Nature is the unseen uber-artist who makes a sublime and decep-
tively ordered web of the world, the genius artist such as Nabokov replicates
this elegant complexity textually in linguistic patterning via his own finely
spun web of words. The author figure thus functions allegorically, as in
much metafiction, as a kind of god or creator of the fictional world. Indeed,
Nabokov calls himself an ‘anthropomorphic deity’ in the preface to Bend Sin-
ister29 and often left linguistic clues of his role as creator in his novels, from
the use of personal fatidic dates to anagrams of his name at key textual
moments that serve as kinds of ‘divine signs’ or ‘seals’ of his unseen presence,
similar to how patterns in nature suggest some deeper, unknowable principle
of design.30
This author-deity, the stereotypical Mandarin Nabokov, also casts a fore-
boding shadow over his pages at times, since ‘the Glory of god is to hide a
thing, and the glory of man is to find it.’31 To be sure, we are invited to
play the textual game, to have a seat and work out the novel’s ‘chess
problem’ that Nabokov so loved composing in both the game itself and his
writing, but there is always the sense that we might miss a clue or the
overall point, and there remains something slightly adversarial or condes-
cending about the relationship. That Nabokov enjoyed lightly taunting and
goading even his most acute readers may be read, on the one hand, as a
simple mischievousness and impish delight in winning a devious if harmless
game; on the other, it suggests a fundamental imbalance between the compo-
ser of the chess problem and its solver or between what Nabokov once called
‘the satisfied writer and the grateful reader.’32 At worst, it is evidence of a
solipsistic puzzle master who could not care less about his reader, since
‘[h]is best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every
morning’33 and ‘[i]n the long run […] it is only the author’s private satisfac-
tion that counts,’ 34 a satisfaction that grows the more the reader remains
puzzled. 35
Affects are stimulated and transferred in Nabokov’s texts mainly through
the translation of Nabokov’s ‘private language’36 of memory into sensuous
images and details that are then conveyed to the reader through a literary
synesthetic method in which mirrored images and suggestive wordplay
create enough slippage in meaning to thereby cross modes of feeling,
knowing, and sensing in ways that create and multiply new affects instead
of capturing and recoding them in familiar ways. Yet this transaction often
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 9

appears to be a closed-circuit transmission of a privately experienced pleasure

of sensation – or affect – to the individual reader who, the more sophisticated
she is, the better the payoff. There is always a kind of affective blockage by, or
rerouting to or through, the authorial figure. Here is Nabokov as pure
aesthete, the one who prized the individual’s ability to note and recall the
singular detail and was not concerned with the social, the political, or with
notions of community in any larger sense. If the reader does not ‘feel’ like
playing the game, however, and the circuit shorts, Nabokov’s enjoyment is
not abated. Thus, while Nabokov’s novels could well be said to generate
more affects than most, the reader’s affective relationship to the text and its
authorial figure can be a fraught one, even for his admirers.
Of course, this is not to say that Nabokov did not have a grander aim to his
work, one that probed the constitution of the world, the universe, and reality
itself.37 It could be argued that affect is radically stimulated in much of Nabo-
kov’s work in a much less ‘private’ manner (and particularly by Pale Fire)
because it poses nature and the nonhuman (even if the nonhuman element
is a recognisable anthropomorphised afterlife/metaphysics) as the hidden
order(er) behind the chaos of human reality – especially if one is lucky
enough to ‘solve’ the text and arrive at this conclusion. Both Greenwald
Smith and Vermeulen, for example, trace the potential of affect to nonhuman
networks where affect may be seen to circulate outside of human subjectivity
and/or trouble the very notion of the human.38 Considering Nabokov’s scien-
tific and naturalist bent, as well as his metaphysical probing of consciousness
within and without Time, his work would appear ripe for a unique exploration
of affect and the nonhuman in a Deluezian/Bergsonian vein.39
It is not, therefore, that Pale Fire does not produce affects or have affective
dimensions, for it most certainly does, but that its meta or self-aware qualities
do not pertain to a consideration of emotion or affect itself. Yet what makes
metaffective fiction unique is not simply that it creates and contains affects,
but also its acceptance of the limits of emotional codification, its willingness
to explore the ways in which communities are composed by transpersonal
affective bonds, and its awareness of affect’s importance and potentiality as
well as its excessiveness and elusiveness. All of this is evidence of a specific
kind of literary engagement with affect, one not witnessed in quite the same
way in earlier periods and other literary genres and traditions.

S. as metaffective fiction
The attempt to solve a puzzling text is also ostensibly what Abrams and
Dorst’s S. is about, but with very different ends than those of Pale Fire and
with oodles of tonal sentiment and sentimentality where Nabokov’s novel
is, notwithstanding Kinbote’s bathos and Shade’s pathos, coolly and plea-
santly detached. S. can also be seen as a kind of bioproductive fiction in
10 R. CLARE

that it labours to affect ‘the head and the heart’ and to create new forms of
literature and life. In S. we follow the story of a budding romance between
a non grata grad student, Eric Husch, and undergraduate, Jen Heyward,
who meet via notes in the margins of a book – which turn out to be the
very marginal notes we are reading, reproduced in the pages of the novel.
Jen, having found Eric’s misplaced copy of V.M. Straka’s Ship of Theseus in
the university library where she works, returns it with a comment written
in the margins. So begins a conversation between the two about the
meaning of Straka’s existential mystery novel, who the mysterious author
really was (he may have been a spy, a revolutionary, a nom de plume for a col-
laboration of authors, etc.), and who the book’s confounding editor F.X. Cal-
deira is. Similar to Pale Fire, this investigation entails finding and breaking
secret codes in the editor’s footnotes, as well as detecting and unscrambling
hidden messages in Straka’s novel (S. even includes a decoder wheel). By
the novel’s end, the contours of a vast conspiracy begin to take shape sur-
rounding Straka’s legacy that may have great historical and political relevance.
All of this is presented to the reader in spectacular form. One purchases a
copy of S. in a slipcase bearing the novel’s title, but the book inside carries the
embossed title Ship of Theseus by V.M. Straka, and is a perfect simulacrum of
a 1950s library book – complete with the scent of an old book and library
markings, Dewey decimal and all. Inside the book we find the editor F.X. Cal-
deira’s foreword, followed by Straka’s unfinished novel that Caldeira anno-
tates, and a final chapter written by Caldeira to complete Straka’s novel.
More important is the marginalia itself, which includes Eric’s early notes
handwritten in pencil, the first conversation between Eric and Jen that runs
at times non-linearly the length of the book in ink pen, and several other of
the couple’s semi-non-linear conversations from different times that appear
in differently coloured inks. Also tucked inside the book are loose postcards,
letters, photographs, and various ephemera. It is as if the reader has found the
very book that Eric and Jen have been writing messages back and forth in.
The book as object, then, is the first way that S. reveals its affective biopo-
litical dimension, which Nabokov’s novel does not have. Certainly, there are a
number of high postmodern texts that call attention to the book as object does
Pale Fire. Early examples include William Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome
Wife, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, and Raymond Federman’s
Double or Nothing, each of which demonstrates typographical and/or pictorial
play. Perhaps the most experimental are Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch and B.S.
Johnson’s book in a box, The Unfortunates, both texts that allow the reader
to make her way, fragment by fragment, through the text in her own
fashion (though at the behest of a frame/introduction). These novels
remind us that the literary artefact is an object, that novels and words are
autonomous things in the world, and that what we consider to be reality is
largely a linguistic and textual construct.
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 11

S., in contrast, is an even more radical read in that it overtly stresses the
embodied, physical act of reading itself over the (re)turn to text, much like
Mark Z. Danielewski’s The House of Leaves. For S. does not just compel the
reader to flip back and forth through its pages, it also alerts the reader to
the traces of the novel’s prior readers’ (characters’) readings in the personally
handwritten notes. The novel thus foregrounds its own status not merely as a
physical object but as an object circulating between any number of readers,
and it extends this idea metafictionally to the reader herself who picks up
the novel. The novel, in a sense, attains a kind of subjectivity and agency
here, as opposed to the apparent objective and static autonomy of the tra-
ditional literary artefact. Moreover, S. physically enacts the very ship of
Theseus paradox that Straka’s novel of the same name considers philosophi-
cally in terms of identity: that a thing (subject or object; S. himself or Theseus’
ship) can completely change yet somehow remain the ‘same.’ S. itself, stuffed
full of ephemera that falls out when you open it and ‘defaced’ by marginalia, is
a book that is the same yet not the same as when it first rolled off the presses.40
This book, then, is an object that matters (as if ‘to matter’ were a verb as well):
it generates affects, indeed, but it also calls attention to how a nonhuman
object can provoke and transmit affects that transpersonally circulate
between readers outside of the text.
As such, S.’s marginalia becomes the novel’s true story – decentring
Straka’s novel while commenting upon it – and suggests the way in which
readers-as-subjects and their extra-textual relationships (reading commu-
nities of any size) are formed and matter. S. is in many ways a literary render-
ing of reader-response theory that speaks to the difficulty of the high
postmodern text by allegorising the reader’s encounter with a sometimes
adversarial text that produces affects that dazzle and/or puzzle the reader. It
is as if the interpretive problematic of Pale Fire is raised to a second meta-
level in S., in which the reader’s struggle with the puzzle-text is now the
real or more important story, underscoring the visceral pleasure of reading
and, most importantly, the affective relationship between reader and text
and between readers themselves. As a metaffective fiction S. therefore
updates the postmodern Barthesian notion that, as an early Eric note puts
it, ‘Storytelling transforms writer/speaker and reader/listener,’41 in a properly
bioproductive fashion by expanding this binary relationship via affect (the ‘in-
betweeness’ of which challenges such binaries) into a larger, potentially more
communal one. This entails not simply changing something that already
exists but producing something entirely new – new forms of reading (such
as compelled by S. itself) and new forms of community (Eric and Jen’s anti-
quated version of ‘texting’).
The embodied act of reading, moreover, is a reminder of the extra-textual,
of the material world. This move away from the strictly textual and to what
cannot be represented – affect, life itself – except in (literary) forms pertains
12 R. CLARE

to the characters as well. For although it may be emotionally sentimental at

times, S. resists recreating humanist characters that may easily reinforce neo-
liberal subjectivity. S. takes seriously the postmodern view of the linguistic
construction of the self and its existence in the trace, what Straka’s novel
calls the self ‘rewritten from a lost first draft’ (S., p. 126), yet it also insists
on the physical embodiment of self and its extra-textual existence as well. It
appeals, bioproductively, to ‘the head and the heart.’ For we do not encounter
Eric and Jen as typical characters ‘represented to us’ or ‘fleshed out’ via phys-
ical descriptions and actions. Indeed, there is no actual narrator of the novel.
The characters are only their words in the margins – even to each other for
most of the novel – which gives rise to a meta-aware performative aspect to
their relationship, which relies on textuality and materiality. Early on, the
budding scholar Eric sees textuality as the primary reality. He states that
‘books, docs, artifacts … that’s where I think the answers are,’ whereas Jens
reminds him of the world outside of the text: ‘Don’t forget PEOPLE, Eric.
People have answers’ (S., p. 14). Eric is also angered that the university has
deleted his personal records, and fears that he ‘existed only administratively.’
But Jen’s reply, that this erasure is, ‘Part of your history – not part of you,’
gestures again to an extra-textual and linguistic reality of being (S., p. 43).
While Eric’s postmodern notions of textuality and the self can at times be
problematic, so can Jen’s naïve belief that the material world is what is truly
real. Since the two meet textually in ‘the margin world’ (S., p. 47), Jen con-
fesses her fear to Eric that ‘I don’t really know you at all,’ to which Eric
responds, ‘You know me a little, right? There was a time when people
relied on letters to get to know each other’ (S., p. 51). And later when Jen
tells him, ‘[y]ou don’t know anything about me … ,’ Eric replies, ‘I know
the you who’s in the margins’ (S., p. 83). Eric’s comment recalls the decon-
structive critique of a metaphysics of presence by pointing out the ways in
which ‘letters,’ in the linguistic sense, have long constructed the self and its
(non)existence in the trace. In a sense, we can only ever know the self in
the margins of language, but for Eric this eventually becomes not something
about which to despair but something in which to have faith. Thus, Jen’s later
fear before the two finally meet that ‘You’d better be real’ (S., p. 191), takes on
the more figurative meaning that one should ‘be real’ through the stories that
one tells about oneself – since the two eventually recognise how memory and
storytelling can be deceptive to self and other but that it is still necessary to tell
stories in order to make sense of the world. In the end, the two learn about the
necessity and limits of language in the marginal language game that they play,
and realise that the stories they tell each other must be sincere and thus
require personal faith in, or belief that, the person to whom they are speaking
will reciprocate in kind. If the emotionally feel-good post-postmodern novel
can unwittingly produce entrepreneurial neoliberal subjectivity, then it also
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 13

retains the ability to produce new ethical subjectivities that escape this form –
ones that are based upon trust and openness.
The gesture as to what lies outside of representation also extends to the
characters’ feelings and emotions in a way that calls attention to affect as
an autonomous, preconscious force. S.’s insistence on a reader’s nebulous
‘feeling’ or intuition as forming an affective and productive reading of the
text is clearly at odds with Pale Fire, in which such a reading (Kinbote’s
own) is considered to be madness or a wilful misreading. In S. Eric and Jen
sometimes follow an instinctual ‘feeling’ in their reading of Straka, as often
as they respond to a ‘feeling’ that the text generates in them. Early on Eric
tells Jen that she needs more than a ‘feeling’ to support her reading (S.,
p. xiv) and warns her, ‘Careful re: linking everything in a book to the
author personally. Sometimes fiction’s just fiction’ (S., p. 17). But Eric
learns that the logic and restrictive textual economy of the affective and inten-
tional fallacies, both of which S. challenges, has its limits and that an open
transaction or circulation of affect between text and reader can challenge
them. This culminates in Jen’s answer to one of Eric’s first reader’s notes
that, ‘Pain is necessarily a private experience,’ to which she replies, ‘Not if
you have the right person with you’ (S., p. 182). Jen’s empathic comment
here is reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s dismissal of a ‘private language’ in his
late work and his argument that language is a kind of game that takes place
in a physical form of life, not in a solipsistic vacuum: for meaning can only
occur in a shared intersubjective space.
In kind, S. points to language’s failure to codify affect through sense or sen-
sibility by demonstrating the way in which feelings, as both bodily and mental
affects, actually ‘make’ or ‘construct’ meaning in non-logical ways that should
be respected. By the novel’s end, Eric and Jen conduct an ethical reading of the
mysterious Straka and his one-time lover-turned-editor Caldeira that attends
to the affective textual and extra-textual dimensions of identity and knowl-
edge as they resist judging of Straka and accept certitude only in the ambiguity
of feeling. This acceptance marks a departure from the paranoid postmodern
text – say, as in the search for V. or the elusive Tristero in Thomas Pynchon’s
V. and The Crying of Lot 49, respectively, which the search for ‘S’ echoes – as
the paranoia of conspiracy subsides when Eric and Jen embrace the limits of
knowledge and opt out of the chase.42 In this context, Jen’s final note tells Eric
to ‘put the book down. Come in here and stay,’ to which he replies putting the
novel’s last word under erasure, serves not as a playful postmodern game but
as a reminder what language cannot represent. In the end, what remains open
to the couple thanks to their appreciation of affect and extra-textual materi-
ality is potentially new forms of feeling and being (together) that escape hege-
monic, or even postmodern counter-hegemonic, discourse.
As an example of metaffective fiction, then, S. deals in emotion and senti-
ment in a way that both invites and frustrates readerly identification with the
14 R. CLARE

characters by self-consciously calling attention to the textual and extra-textual

material capacities of affect and its potentiality as an autonomous, transmit-
table, and communal force. The marginal notes, inscribed in each character’s
unique handwriting, sometimes underlined, written in bold, or punctuated
with exclamation marks that typify emotional cadence, points to a kind of bio-
productive fiction that testifies to the importance of affect generated off, and
in part by, the page. That there is a world that exists off the page, so to speak,
one that lies outside official records, suggests the potential of affect to escape
or to challenge even a neoliberal affective economy that attempts to capture it
and put it to work through the production of neoliberal subjects and high-tech
products. After all, Eric has stolen his copy of Straka’s novel, pulled it out of
official, institutional circulation, where it has become a covert, pilfered object
that generates surplus affects outside of any specific system. The cliché that
books can change the world is thus actualised by the novel’s metaffective, for-
mally self-conscious production and transmission of transpersonal affects that
emerge as pure potentiality as we trace the live circuit from word to world and
back again.

Notes
1. See Stephen Burn’s Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (New York:
Continuum, 2008); Robert McLaughlin’s, ‘Post-Postmodernism’, in Joe Bray,
Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Exper-
imental Literature (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 212–23; and Mary Hol-
land’s Succeeding Postmodernism (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013),
which argues that contemporary literature marks ‘a return to affect’ because
it bends antihumanist postmodern and poststructural theories toward the
‘humanist ends of generating empathy, communal bonds, ethical and political
questions, and, most basically, communicable meaning’ (pp. 8, 17). In another
vein, see Adam Kelly’s, ‘David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in Amer-
ican Fiction’, in David Herring (ed.), Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical
Essays (Los Angeles, CA: SSMG Press, 2010), pp. 131–46; and Lee Konstanti-
nou’s Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard, 2016). What each of these critical views shares, either pointedly or
more broadly, is an interest in the particular emotional and affective dimen-
sions of post-postmodernist literature, whether because of its return to more
fully realised or ‘human’ characters that validate the individual (Burn and
McLaughlin), its potentially reconstructive empathic humanism (Holland),
its desire for sincere and open dialogic communication with the reader
(Kelly), or its ‘post-ironic’ ethos of belief and re-enchantment with the world
(Konstantinou). See David Cowart’s The Tribe of Pyn: Literary Generations
in The Postmodern Period (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2015) for an
enlightening look at the complex influence of postmodern writers upon their
successors that challenges a simple top down model of influence. Cowart’s con-
clusion, for instance, even considers the younger generation’s influence upon
the older, as well the continuing function of irony in contemporary fiction
and culture, and stresses the continuities between generations rather than
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 15

positing any clear break – or even the end of postmodernism (192–200). For a
consideration of first generation postmodernists’ responses to their supposed
‘end’, see my essay ‘The End of Postmodernism’, in Stephen J. Burn (ed.),
American Literature in Transition: 1990–2000 (New York: Cambridge UP,
2017), pp. 91–104.
2. For early post-postmodern ‘manifestos,’ see David Foster Wallace’s, ‘E Unibus
Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’, in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do
Again (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1997), pp. 21–82 and ‘An Interview with
David Foster Wallace’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13.2 (1993), pp. 127–
50; Jonathan Franzen’s, ‘I’ll Be Doing More of the Same’, Review of Contempor-
ary Fiction, 16.1 (1996), pp. 34–8 and ‘Why Bother?’, in How to Be Alone
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002), pp. 55–97; and William
T. Vollmann’s, ‘American Writing Today: Diagnosis of the Disease’, Conjunc-
tions, 15 (1990), pp. 355–58. For a later but related take, see Zadie Smith’s ‘Two
Paths for the Novel’, The New York Review of Books (November, 2008). http://
www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/11/20/two-paths-for-the-novel/ [Date
accessed: 15 November 2016].
3. Robert McLaughlin, ‘Post-Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and
the Social’, symplokē, 12 (2004), pp. 53–68 (p. 67).
4. Rachel Greenwald Smith, Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliber-
alism (New York: Cambridge, 2015), p. 1.
5. Ibid., p. 2.
6. Ibid., p. 59.
7. Pieter Vermeulen’s, Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel (Basing-
stoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015) also employs a theoretically informed view of
affect to argue that American and British contemporary ‘fictions dramatise the
end of the novel in order to reimagine the politics and ethics of form in the
twenty-first century’ (p. 2).
8. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham,
NC: Duke, 2002), p. 27.
9. Ibid., p. 28.
10. Deleuzian/Spinozist takes on affect are well represented in Massumi and the
collections mentioned below. These collections also contain essays drawing
upon Sylvan Tompkins’ work on affect. For more work in Tompkins’ vein,
see Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativ-
ity (Durham, NC: Duke, 2003). See Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (Durham,
NC: Duke, 2001) and other works for a take on negative affects and public feel-
ings. For a work that blends affect and emotion into an analysis of ‘feeling’ see
Sianne N’Gai’s Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2005).
11. Michael Hardt, ‘Foreword: What Affects are Good For’, in Patricia Ticineto
Clough (ed.), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke,
2007), pp. ix–xii (p. ix).
12. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, ‘Introduction’, in Melissa Gregg and
Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke,
2010), pp. 1–25 (p. 1).
13. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 29.
14. Ibid., pp. 28–9.
15. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction
(New York: Routledge, 1984), p. 2.
16 R. CLARE

16. See also Maurizio Lazzarato’s, ‘Immaterial Labor’, in Paolo Virno and Michael
Hardt (eds.), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 133–46.
17. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age
of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 103–15.
18. Ibid., p. 146.
19. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 2009), p. 142.
20. Ibid., pp. 135–6.
21. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), pp. 65, 165.
22. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, pp. 132, 133.
23. Patricia Ticineto Clough, ‘The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia,
and Bodies’, The Affect Theory Reader, pp. 206–25 (p. 209).
24. See D. Barton Johnson’s, Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir
Nabokov (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1985) for an in-depth examination of Nabo-
kov’s complex linguistic-formal play and especially his literary development of
synaesthesia via a personalised colour alphabet; his frequent use of anagrams;
and his construction of plots and themes on the model of chess problems.
See also Nabokov’s discussion of letters and colours in Speak, Memory: An
Autobiography Revisited (New York: Putnam, 1966), pp. 34–5.
25. Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton UP, 2001), pp. 107–26. Boyd provides a comprehensive account of
the critical debates between the Shadeans, Kinboteans, and others who
attempted for decades to solve the novel’s riddle.
26. Boyd’s Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery is a fascinating book
that argues the case for a hitherto unseen ontological textual element in which
ghosts and butterflies covertly prompt various characters – the primary textual
evidence being various literary allusions and anagrams of certain butterfly
species – to commit certain actions that invisibly link the here and the hereafter,
so that the randomness and disconnected nature of life and text are made whole
and harmonious in an invisible realm that only Shade’s poem [and Nabokov’s
novel] can speculate upon.
27. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Vintage, 1989).
28. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 16.
29. Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Preface’, in Bend Sinister (New York: Time Life Books,
1967), p. xvii.
30. See Gavriel Shapiro’s, ‘Setting his Myriad Faces in His Text: Nabokov’s Author-
ial Presence Revisited’, in Julian W. Connolly (ed.), Nabokov and His Fiction:
New Perspectives (New York: Cambridge, UP, 1999), pp. 15–35.
31. Nabokov, Bend Sinister, p. 94.
32. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, p. 40.
33. Ibid., p. 18.
34. Nabokov, ‘Preface’ in Bend Sinister, p. xvii.
35. See Leland de La Durntaye’s excellent, ‘The Pattern of Cruelty and the Cruelty of
Pattern in Vladimir Nabokov’, The Cambridge Quarterly, 35.4 (2006), pp. 301–
26, which explores the critical and reader reaction to the various forms of
‘cruelty’ in Nabokov’s work. I do not wish to perpetuate that myth of
Nabokov as merely an unfeeling stylist here but to point out that the cool and
arrogant side of Nabokov, while blown out of proportion, nevertheless retains
 TEXTUAL PRACTICE 17

a few grains of salty truth. Thus while, as William W. Rowe writes, Nabokov’s
puzzles are based upon an ‘honest deception’ that is ‘scrupulous’ because the
intentional misleading of the reader is simply what a novel calculated like a
chess problem ought to do (‘The Honesty of Nabokovian Deception, in Carl
R. Proffer (ed.), A Book of Things About Vladimir Nabokov (Ann Arbor, MI:
Ardis, 1974), pp. 171–81 [pp. 179–80]), this does not foreclose on what
Maurice Courturier notes is the ‘near tyranny’ of Nabokov’s godlike ‘authorial
figure’ or his intentional prodding of his readers inability to solve his riddles
(‘The near-tyranny of the author: Pale Fire’ in Nabokov and his Fiction,
pp. 54–72 [p. 71]).
36. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, p. 35.
37. Briefly, Nabokov’s metaphysics, which is expansive and fairly optimistic, recog-
nises the human limits of consciousness and knowledge while accepting the
possibility of something – an afterlife or other plane of existence – beyond
the known world(s). Since nature and reality are deceptive, full of duplications
and duplicity, there is no reason to think that our species, caught up in patterns
and designs not of our making, is not subject to a hidden order(er) just as char-
acters in fiction are. As a result, one ought to revel in the particulars and patterns
of life rather than accept generalities and pre-made categories, thus embracing
the private (experience) over the common(sense). A succinct summary of Nabo-
kov’s metaphysics appears in Brian Boyd’s Stalking Nabokov (New York:
Columbia UP, 2011), pp. 57–68. In Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic
Discovery Boyd writes: ‘the generosity of his [Nabokov’s] method is more
than a matter of method, for it reflects the generosity of his metaphysics, his
hunch that the world itself sets before us the possibility and pleasures of
endless discovery, inexhaustible excitement, which far from stopping even at
death might then merely shift into a higher gear’ (p. 247). See David
S. Rutledge’s Nabokov’s Permanent Mystery: The Expression of Metaphysics in
His Work (Jefferson, NC McFarland, 2011) for a similar defence against the
‘mystery’ of Nabokov’s cosmic vision even as scholars begin to elucidate it.
38. Greenwald Smith’s Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism
ends with a consideration of the environment and nonhuman ecologies
(pp. 100–130). Vermeulen’s Contemporary Fiction and the End of the Novel
considers the anthropocene and nonhuman scale (pp. 137–52).
39. While Nabokov easily lends himself to Darwinian and evolutionary scientific
readings – see Johnson and Coates,’ Nabokov’s Blues: The Literary Odyssey of
a Scientific Genius (Cambridge, MA: Zoland, 1999) and Boyd’s Pale Fire: The
Magic of Artistic Discovery (pp. 233–62) – there remains the potential to read
Nabokov through chaos theory as well.
40. I owe this point about the book’s relation to the ship of Theseus paradox to the
editors of this issue, Christopher K. Coffman and Theo Savvas.
41. Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams, S. (New York: Mulholland, 2013), p. 149. (All other
references to this edition are given using the abbreviation S. in parentheses).
42. Courtney Jacobs considers S.’s move away from postmodern paranoia in
‘Rekindling Metaphysical Insight: The Many faces of S’, EAPSU Online: A
Journal of Critical and Creative Work (fall, 2014), pp. 47–57.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.