A Diverting But Intellectually Hollow Blog Post

We live in an age of overwhelming paranoia and self-awareness. Well, I do, at least.

This morning, I was musing (over some muesli) on the role of self-awareness in contemporary fiction. Ever since Dave Eggers legitimised the role of the twitchily self-conscious narrator in his Promethean doorstopper A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, millions of would-be staggering geniuses have dabbled in the realm of ‘self-aware’ fiction, or ‘metafiction’ as some label it – I don’t. Then again, I am a bespectacled bumfinger.

Now, you might be wondering why I put myself down like that. Well, I’ll tell you, dopey-doo. This self-deprecating character trait is infiltrating our books! In life, we are surrounded by hundreds of people who are unsure of themselves: charming folks who are constantly aware of being found out to be hopeless, incompetent and ludicrously idiotic. This is understandable. We are. I am.

In the olden days, we bit our tongue and carried on regardless, hoping no one would out us as useless. Nowadays, we express our fears through giddiness and excessive dithering – “Oh, what do I do? Oh, what if I mess it up? Oh, I’m such a clumsy idiot!” – as though we’re living in a Jennifer Aniston vehicle. Well, I do.

So how does this impede upon fiction? Well, I recently wrote a book addressing this question: what if fiction meta-stasises itself so much, we reach a state of pretentious deadlock? A neverending cycle of continuous self-referential hogwash – a self-regurgitating series of books referencing themselves, the other books being written during the writing of these books, and the books about books that attempt to be books in their own right. Still with me? No? I don’t blame you.

My book was an (attempted) satire on Eggers’ hatched phenomenon. Although it’s amusing to have books poking fun at themselves and other books – there becomes a point when this grows tiresome. Like the person constantly questioning their every move and requiring reassurance about the quality of their actions (how we love a pat on the head from time to time), after two weeks in their company, you want to stab their nipples off.

I believe we live in an age permeated by so much self-awareness, and literary awareness (esp. the nothing-is-new-only-reworked syndrome), that the future of fiction will fork out twofold: self-consciously throwback novels. i.e. novels that acknowledge their tradition and attempt new things, and self-consciously ‘original’ novels. i.e. novels that acknowledge their form and arrogantly attempt to prove there is still such a concept as literary innovation.

The latter is the most reassuring to me. True innovators can whiff out a passé trend at fifty paces and pioneer their own cutthroat ideas that go on to spawn the next passé trend. So, although literature might stumble from one passé trend to the other, while this trend is new, dazzling and original, we should appreciate it as a temporal but outstanding piece of genius, and lap it up. The greatest crime of the novelist is mining the same concept ad nauseam. Diversification is good, silly-cheeks.

Then again, I am so enamoured with the self-referential quirks of modern fiction, I doubt these will escape my writing for quite some time. For, as you might have been able to detect by my overwhelming use of the word ‘self’ – there is no one more interesting to write about than me.

May fiction crawl inside itself and snuggle up tight for many years to come.