Old Fiction - Riffing on Beckett

Riffing on Beckett

Always the same – sometimes different, but basically the same. Always the frustration and anxiety, always the fear of ridicule by contemporaries. Must write about something. Could write about nothing. Cannot write about writing - tired worn out, muck on boots, metafiction. Nobody likes shit-kicking metafiction anymore, even in the slippery-when-wet halls of academic discourse where people used to find it witty and insightful – a comment on the fractured nature of contemporary consciousness living in a post-industrial age, coming to grips with the society of the spectacle, like mirrors in a funhouse, always reflecting, refracting, laughing – nope, can’t go there anymore, too pretentious even for the pretentious. Question: How come this insurgence of pretentious metafiction happened at a time that corresponded with the death of the author, birthplace of the equally pretentious post-modern? Is it possible that metafiction is a reaction, a psychological condition whereby an author, attempting to live, thrive and survive, will not only reinsert himself in the text, but assert that he knows, is fully cognizant of, his insertion back into his own text? Related question: Should Barthes have refused to sign his name to his text, after he claimed that there was no author to be found in or behind the text? What matter who’s speaking. No matter, but somebody is speaking. But who is this somebody – that is the question we always get to. No answer. Never an answer. No matter no answer.


Like wiping shit off boots, shit still ends up somewhere. What matter who’s shit. No matter, still shit.


Today, unlike the destructive and insincere days of meta this and post that, we are interested in real things – authentically real, quantitatively verifiable, easily understandable and applicable datum, that has been known to be real and to predictably work, unless at really teeny, tiny, sizes, where nothing works or pretends to or makes any sense anyways. Some people say the teeny-tiny things do make sense, but what do they know – they have shit on their boots like the rest of us. Maybe the muck – that is what we can all turn to – the muck on our boots is the one real thing we can count on in this god-forsaken (literally and figuratively) world of authentically verifiable people writing themselves both into and out of their writing like some kind of high-tech revolving door, where one is both the operator and the operated. Kill god, replace with people, some assembly required.


Back to the drawing board. New beginning – Need a story. Things must happen. Events must be meaningful – lives will be changed.


Tom and Dick were sitting in the muck firing AK 47’s at a rebel insurgence. They were close friends, brothers in arms, and would die for each other. Don’t know enough about war. But war’s real if anything’s real, Baudrillard said so and he says the real is vanishing. Real go poof. Do they really use AK-47’s anymore? I don’t know enough about war. War stories are meaningful, people cry their eyes out, especially people who were really in the muck – they get together with their friends, those that co-habitated in the muck laden muck, and talk about old times in a meaningful and moving way.


New story. Tom and Jane were having moving and meaningful sex, outside in the grass, next to a tablecloth, one of those that’s red and white in a checkerboard pattern, but where both red and white bleed into each other, (maybe revise word “bleed”) under a tree, next to a picnic basket, contents emptied. After completing the moving and meaningful sex act Tom commented on how he felt all mucky from rolling around in the dirt and what he could use was a beer. No, no beer. Tom can’t drink beer - if he drinks beer he’ll turn into an alcoholic and morph into an abusive miscreant causing pain to both his woman and his child, which must now be born from Jane’s womb as they just had moving and meaningful sex, implying a child, as opposed to unmoving and meaningless sex, which would have no child-bearing obligations. But they can’t have meaningless and unmoving sex as this must be a meaningful and moving story.


Tom sitting all alone in a dimly lit, smoke filled apartment, together with vermin that usually remained out of sight, let out an expectorant cough, causing slimy colored microscopic bacteria to be propelled out of his mouth. Tom was sick and drunk – he had been drunk for a long time, ever since Jane took his son, and ran out to live with her mother in Nebraska. Tom has revelatory moment upon running out of liquor, as his body begins to feel hollow, whereby he believes his pernicious past can be overcome via hard work and determination. Tom turns his life around – stops drinking… Why does he have to stop drinking – how about a flair of originality – Tom keeps drinking, but is fine – he is given a rare gift, by divine forces, to live a meaningful drunken life. No, nobody will ever buy that – alcoholism always equals destruction, except when Humphrey Bogart is a detective.


Tom was a hard working detective on the case to find his son, who had been kidnapped and held for ransom by Dick, his former partner. Tom goes from place to place, asking witty, insightful questions with hidden intentions, all the while being flirtatious with the females, all of which are attractive, and drinking expensive whiskey or brandy from carafes. Well this won’t work, Humphrey Bogart has already done all of this shit – I need a meaningful and moving story, also containing originality, as to give me a sense of self-hood – I must be able to say, “I wrote this witty, and insightful story, originally told, full of moving and meaningful events.”


Dick, Tom’s long lost brother, was having an affair with Jane, Tom’s fiancée. Neither Tom nor Dick knew about each other. Jane knew about both, but was unaware of their kinship. When Dick discovered that someone was sleeping with his fiancée he plotted a complicated, yet believable murder, which he got away with. However, after a while it was revealed to Dick, via the court, that his brother had been murdered and that his brother had managed to accrue a substantial number of debts, which could not be expunged, and would have to be paid by Dick’s closest living relative, Tom. Tom had to slave away day and night paying off Dick’s debt, which he felt obliged to, being as though he now knew he had killed his brother. Then, about nine-months later Jane has a son. Tom forces her to have a paternity test; he says he needs peace of mind – he does not get peace of mind when he finds out that Jane’s son is not his son, in fact he is the uncle. When the boy grows up he begins to be suspicious, and discovers what happened, in a believable yet obscure way and then vows, in a samurai liked manner, that he must assert revenge. But now it’s become Hamlet, and Kurasawa already did Japanese Shakespeare, though I don’t think he did Hamlet. But I don’t want to do Japanese/American noir-ish Shakespeare – I want to do something deep and meaningful, yet personal. Besides this story is getting too far away from the muck – the one thing we’ve all decided is real and worth fighting for.


Dick and Tom are kids, playing in the muck – throwing muck back in forth, becoming consumed in muck, when Jane comes. (Maybe, less muck in revision – but we’ll keep it in for now) Jane is carrying an AK 47 that she had obtained from her dad, who obtained it while he was in the muck in Vietnam. She lays waste to both Dick and Tom, who hold each other, proclaim their child-hood love for each other, then die face down, together, in the muck. Original, moving, but we need a moral. Maybe the moral is not to play with AK 47s. A reasonable moral, but not quite good enough – we need hidden, understated, meaningful, full of complexity because humans are complex, morality. New moral: You cannot transcend the muck.