REFLEXIVE REPRESENTA TION

Some representations are their own objects. We saw in Chapter 1 that props in children's games can be objects of the imaginings they pre- scribe. A doll directs players of the game not just to imagine a baby but to imagine the doll itself to be a baby. So it generates fictional truths about itself; it represents itself. Let's call it a reflexive represen- tation.

The reader of Gulliver's Travels is to imagine that a certain ship's physician named "Gulliver" traveled to various exotic lands and kept a journal detailing his adventures, but he is to imagine also, about the very book he is reading, that it is such a journal. (The full title of Swift's novel is Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by

Lemuel Gulliver.) The novel thus makes it fictional of itself that it is

an account of a traveler's adventures in places like Lilliput, Brob- dingnag, and Houyhnhnmland. It too is reflexive. Literary fictions in the form of letters, diaries, and journals are in general reflexive. Tris-

tram Shandy makes it fictional of itself that it is an autobiography.

Fictionally A Perfect Vacuum by Stanislaw Lem is a collection of book reviews (including a review of A Perfect Vacuum). Fictionally Beckett‟s Malone Dies is a rambling account of a man's last days scribbled in a notebook on his deathbed.

Reflexivity is a recurring theme in the drawings of Saul Steinberg. The lines constituting figure 3.2, are such that fictionally they have just been inscribed by a rather intense artist seated at a table ―and this includes the lines whereby the artist, his table, and his pen are por-trayed. Roy Lichtenstein's Little Big Painting (figure 3.3) is a larger-than-life-size painting of brush strokes, which represents part of itself .is brush strokes. It is fictional of the paint on the canvas that it was put there by four not very careful swipes with a paintbrush.

The Steinberg and Lichtenstein pieces are special. Most paintings and drawings are not reflexive, except in the way that even nonfigura- tive pictures are. (See §1.8.) It is fictional in Titian's Venus that a woman is reclining on a couch, but it is not fictional of the painting or any part of it that it is a woman or a couch. Venus does not in that way represent itself.

Some cases are unclear. One might be inclined to interpret the

fourth-century marble head of Constantine the Great in Rome as

3.1 Saul Steinberg, Drawing Table, 19 x 251/4 inches, ink on paper

(1966). Photograph courtesy of The Pace Gallery, New York.

being such that, fictionally, it―the sculpted block of marble itself―is the head of Constantine. But I find this construal much less compel- ling than understanding a doll to make it fictional of itself that it is a baby. The difference is probably due to the fact that more of the doll's actual properties are such that fictionally the baby has them. If the doll is in Decatur, Georgia, fictionally the baby is there. If Chris cuddles the doll, then fictionally Chris cuddles the baby. But it is not at all obvious that fictionally Constantine (or his head) is wherever the marble sculpture is, that fictionally he rides on a truck if the sculpture does, and so on. The sculpture is eight feet high, but surely it is not fictional that Constantine's head is that large. It is not the sculpture's function, at least, to be involved in a game in which fic- tionally a curator cuddles Constantine if he should somehow manage to cuddle the block of marble. So the doll corresponds to itself in many respects in which the sculpture does not; it comes closer to matching itself, that is (informally), the fictional baby is more like the

doll than the fictional Constantine is like the sculpture. We should not be surprised that because of this the doll is more naturally regarded as representing itself, since (as we saw in § 3.3) a necessary condition for a work's representing a given object is that it correspond, to a certain degree, to the object. But we need not stew over these uncertainties.

3.3 Roy Lichtenstein, Little Big Painting, 68 x 80 inches, oil on canvas (1965). Collection of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Pur-chase, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

There are various means by which representations pick out them- selves as objects. The usual techniques for referring to other things are available. A Perfect Vacuum and the film Blazing Saddles refer to themselves by name. If a picture depicts a room with a picture on the wall, whether the depicted picture is the depicting one itself is to be decided in the same way one would decide whether another picture is its object: Did the artist intend it to represent itself? Does it come reasonably close to matching itself? Can spectators be expected to

recognize that it prescribes imaginings about itself? Did attention to the picture (when unfinished) guide the artist's hand in (finishing) painting it? It is perfectly possible, in these cases, for one not to realize that the represented work is identical with the representing one. If a moviegoer has forgotten the name of the movie he is watching, he may miss the fact that it is the one that, fictionally, the characters go to see when they walk under the marquee advertising Blazing Saddles. We shall be more interested in cases in which the fact that a given thing is identical with the representation or part of it is crucial to establishing that that thing is represented. If (per impossibile, per- haps) figure 3.2. had been composed of lines different from the ones that actually compose it, it would represent those other lines rather than the ones it does represent (even if it looked no different from how it actually does). Being part of the work is part of what makes its lines its objects. One can scarcely notice that it represents lines with- out realizing that the lines it represents are those of the drawing itself. Let's say that figure 3.2 refers to itself as itself. Gulliver's Travels does also: what makes its words among the objects it represents is in part their presence in the work, and a reader will not notice that words are represented without realizing that those of the text itself are.

Blazing Saddles and the picture depicting itself hanging on a wall, by

contrast, do not refer to themselves as themselves.

Reflexive representations (of both of these sorts) may but need not represent themselves as representations. Little Big Painting does not; it represents itself as merely an inert brush stroke. But Steinberg's drawing does. Fictionally the lines of the drawing constitute a depic- tion of an artist seated at a table. This gives us one fictional world nested within another: it is fictional that the lines make it fictional that an artist is seated at a table. In fact we have infinitely many embedded fictional worlds, each of them containing the actual lines of the drawing. Fictionally a man has just drawn those lines, thereby making it fictional that a man has just drawn them, making it fictional that . . . , and so on ad infinitum. It is fictional in Blazing Saddles that some of the characters watch a movie, Blazing Saddles, which makes it fictional (by implication anyway) that its characters watch a movie,

Blazing Saddles, which . . . John Barth's "Frame-Tale" consists of the

words "ONCE UPON A TIME THERE" on one side of a page, and "WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN" on the other, with instructions to twist the paper and fasten the ends together, forming a Möbius strip.8

So the story reads: ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN ONCE UPON A TIME . . . ad infinitum. These words (the word types anyway) represent themselves as representa- tions representing themselves as representations representing . . .

Of course representations need not be reflexive in order to establish fictional worlds within fictional worlds. All representation-represen- tations do, whether or not they represent themselves as representa- tions (or as anything else). There are pictures of pictures (Matisse's

Red Studio), stories about stories (Keith Fort, "The Goal Shoveller"),

plays about plays (Hamlet), sculptures of sculptures (there is a 30 B.C.

sculpture of a Roman patrician with busts of his ancestors circa 30 B. C.), films about films (Truffaut's Day for Night), novels about nov-els (Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler], novels about pictures (Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray), poems about pic- tures (Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"), novels about films (Manuel Puig‟s Kiss of the Spider Woman), and so on. All representation- representations make it fictional that there is a work that makes various other propositions fictional. It is possible to construe some of them as making it fictional of themselves or parts of themselves that they are such works, but others need not or cannot be so construed. It is not The Picture of Dorian Grey-fictional that any part of that novel is a painting of Dorian Gray.

Many reflexive representations represent themselves not as works of fiction but as works of nonfiction. Some represent themselves as biog- raphies, histories, journals, essays (Tristram Shandy, A Perfect Vac-

uum, Gulliver's Travels). Since biographies and the like do not have

fictional worlds, such works do not give us nested fictional worlds. Julio Cortázar's story "Blow-Up" is studiously ambiguous between representing itself as fiction or as nonfiction. Beckett's Malone Dies is, fictionally, nonfiction for the most part but with interpolations of what seem to be story fragments, works of fiction. Fictionally Malone scrib- bles (nonfictionally) about his deathbed experiences but apparently tries his hand on several occasions at storytelling. But there are hints that his story fragments are autobiographical and possibly nonfic- tional, so it is arguable that Malone Dies represents itself as entirely a work of nonfiction.

There is a lot of fun to be had with the devices of representation- representation and reflexive representation. But reflexivity, especially, is also of considerable theoretical importance and will play a signi- ficant part in the development of my theory.