Metatextuality, Tales of Two Jacksons, and Wyoming’s Antler Arches
Reading Carmen Maria Machado, ElkFest in Jackson Hole, and Jet Fuel Fragrances on Etsy
Hello Writing Atlas community!
We’re back to you with our fourth newsletter (one month of newsletters!), and as always, we’d like to share some of our adventures and our stories with you. Contrary to last week’s sunny Miami day, we’re bringing you messages from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. (Perhaps we should’ve saved our winter Gothic newsletter for that …)
One of the most interesting things about the Jackson Hole area is all the arches built from elk antlers, which give off a very Game of Thrones vibe everywhere. (You walk under one at the airport, for example). Many of the antlers are collected by local Boy Scouts at the National Elk Refuge and sold off in a ginormous auction known as ElkFest every year (this year’s is on May 18, 2024), where the proceeds are split one-fourth to local Boy Scouts and three-fourths to the refuge. Then there are all of the Jackson Hole cuisine that incorporate elk (also known as wapiti from the indigenous name)—like elk burritos and elk bolognese—which has all of us at Writing Atlas wondering if we will ever see vegetarian friendly Impossible Elk? We’ll leave that to Jackson Hole’s Impossible scientists, if there are any.
Just as enlightening as the snowy, secluded hills of Jackson Hole, Wyoming is our fourth newsletter, a captivating study of what our curator and writer Danielle Sherman decidedly considers “metatextuality.” Danielle Sherman is from Phoenix, Arizona and studies creative writing as an undergraduate student of Emory University. We’re excited she’s taking a rather meta look at things: the fundamental stuff of stories, how narrative works, what ultimately is at the root of such a longstanding tradition.
Metatextuality by Danielle Sherman
I am a writer as well as a reader, and so I cannot read a story without searching for what its author is saying about storytelling. When I read fiction, I always ask myself whether reading, writing, and text are present in the story—and the answer is always yes. Look closely enough, and just about any story you read will include underlying messaging regarding stories in general. The next, better questions are: how is this metatextuality represented? What does the metatextuality mean?
I say “metatextuality” to refer to this theme of stories-about-stories, though the term itself is slippery. Generally, “metatextuality” refers to one text’s comment, critique, or incorporation of another specific text (a popular example is the frequent inclusion of Milton’s Paradise Lost within Shelley’s Frankenstein). There are also related subtypes such as intertextuality, paratextuality, architextuality, hypo/hypertextuality, and so on. None of these exactly capture the story-ception I describe here, so I will use and transform the word “metatextuality” to suit my own definition until someone smarter thinks of a better name for it. To clarify what I generally mean by my version of “metatextuality”—and the various ways it can manifest—I will use some examples from Writing Atlas.
“What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie (full text here) is a story narrated by Jackson Jackson, a homeless Spokane Indian who has twenty-four hours to earn enough money to buy back his late grandmother’s regalia from a pawn shop. It is also a story about stories, which it makes clear from its first paragraph: “I’m not going to tell you my particular reasons for being homeless, because it’s my secret story.” Alexie quickly cues his readers into the importance of stories here, and, interestingly, frames stories as things that are coveted and hidden. Indeed, stories assume a particular, unconventional function in Jackson’s world: they are a currency. As our protagonist barters in a pawnshop and stumbles across several unusual methods of acquiring (and losing) his ever-fluctuating amount of money, storytelling itself appears to have monetary or material value.
Take, for instance, when Jackson tells the pawnshop owner that the stolen regalia was his grandmother’s: Jackson’s friend interrupts to mention that it has been missing for fifty years, and Jackson admonishes him because, “It’s my family’s story. Let me tell it.” The friend apologizes. The characters’ conversation treats the family story as a resource, one that Jackson must protect and assert ownership of; the family story is Jackson’s possession, Jackson’s property.
Later in Alexie’s piece, a kind police officer gives Jackson a ride. Jackson tells Officer Williams about his grandfather’s death because “I knew he’d listen closely to my story.” Before Jackson leaves, Williams gives him thirty dollars to help him with his quest for the regalia. Here Jackson essentially tells Williams a story in exchange for cash. This family story is converted to literal currency. In a narrative about homelessness and the protagonist’s perpetual struggle for survival, stories prove to be just as valuable—indeed, equivalent to—American dollars.
The particular position of stories-as-currency asks us to consider how stories function as currency in our real, nonfictional world. An obvious example is the publishing industry: writers produce, publish, and sell books to earn money. In this way, stories become liquid assets. Alexie’s piece calls this to attention while also pointing out the more subtle manifestations of the story(t/s)elling practice.
In Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” (full text here), a young woman raises her son with a loving husband who constantly asks to untie the ribbon around her neck. Like Alexie, Machado establishes the metatextual thematics of her story from its beginning: the very first line is, “If you read this story out loud, please use the following voices.” Machado is referencing the oral mode of storytelling, which becomes highly relevant as the narrator constantly recalls “old wives’ tales” she heard in her youth.
As with most of such circulated folktales, all of these anecdotes involve women, and all of them end badly; the female characters meet the usual fates of death, torture, insanity, etc. So, too, does the protagonist, despite her defiance and self-assertion: she allows her husband to untie her ribbon, and her head rolls off her neck. Machado writes: “When you think about it, stories have this way of running together like raindrops in a pond.” Each of these myths of dead or punished women are really about the social continuity of femicide in all its forms. Through “The Husband Stitch,” Machado examines the real effects of these stories on perceptions of gender and marriage. She shows that stories not only reflect our societal expectations but actively shape them: stories about violence toward women reinforce actual violence toward women.
The narrator, for instance, tells the story of an old woman who feeds her violent husband a liver taken from a corpse, only to wake up bleeding to death from a hole in her belly. “That may not be the version of the story you’re familiar with,” she says. “But I assure you, it’s the one you need to know.” In other words: when wives try to appease cruel husbands, the women are the ones ultimately punished. And that does not just happen in stories—it happens in real life, as the ending of “The Husband Stitch” makes apparent. Machado’s use of metatextuality critiques the well-known truism that “art imitates life;” according to Machado, stories shape life. “Old wives’ tales” become true, not only metaphorically but physically.
“The Third Tower” by Deborah Eisenberg (full text here) is one of my favorite stories ever. It is infinitely complex, but one way to scratch the surface of the elusive narrative is by looking at the place of authorship and of writing within the story. The protagonist, Therese, arrives at a hospital to be cured of an illness: when she thinks of words, she sometimes envisions a whole scene. For instance, when the doctor says “tree,” she imagines a child playing piano by an open window—instead of just thinking, “tree.” Her coworker gives her a journal in which to write down these visions.
Therese is sent to the hospital because these “episodes” prevent her from working effectively. But what exactly is Therese’s affliction? Her doctor explains it as, “Word stabilization reflex far below average. Mental ‘crowding’ or ‘smearing,’ excess liquidity of intellection.” He prescribes “elaboration-suppressants” for her “hyperassociative state.” Therese transforms words into other words; she envisions unreal scenarios and writes them down. In short, her illness is that she is an artist, an author. She expands words past their literal meanings: she makes metaphors. But this imagination interferes with her productivity. Therese is a writer, and her art must be suppressed in her capitalistic society.
The doctor even notes that some consider those with Therese’s sickness to be “in some way viable: Visionaries of the Banal.” (Translation: artists.) “In any event, it has been demonstrated that productive work can often be found for such individuals—for instance, in the field of branding.” Therese’s society considers her creativity only in terms of labor, how productive or non-productive it can be. Through a speculative premise, Eisenberg is herself metaphorizing the way capitalist systems either discourage artistry as non-lucrative or manipulate artistry into a sellable product. We may connect this with Alexie’s constructed association between stories and currency. Metatextuality in “The Third Tower” is concerned with the way capitalism seeks to kill art—and how art may thus resist capitalism.
Now I will briefly touch on two stories I personally added to Writing Atlas. I think these examples are less obvious: the metatextuality is there, but the takeaway is not quite as clear-cut. (I would love to hear others’ thoughts, if you have ideas.)
In “Kelso Deconstructed,” Zadie Smith presents a fictionalized account of the death of Kelso Cochrane, a victim of racially motivated murder. Cochrane’s murder was a real event—you can look it up. By turning a real event into narrative, Smith comments on the process by which actual tragedies become parable-like political lessons or historical narratives—especially because, as suggested by the title, Smith uses a variety of deconstructionist literary techniques. She seems to be in conversation with the post-structuralist theorist Derrida’s famous saying, “there is no outside text.” This means that we constantly interpret the real world as if it were a story to pick apart; nothing escapes the human instinct to historicize, contextualize, and analyze what is happening around us. We have all seen a movie that takes some recent, horrific tragedy and turns it into a blockbuster hit.
“Kelso Deconstructed” ends with a man who attends Kelso’s funeral to hand out pamphlets that say “ALL THE WORLD IS TEXT.” And the world really is text in Smith’s story, where Kelso struggles to read a magazine while his girlfriend Olivia embroiders the phrase “Words are to be taken seriously.” The two listen to a French poet give a speech about the inherent inauthenticity and manipulation of narrative. Then they see newspapers with the headlines “SIGNS AND SYMBOLS” and “FORESHADOWING.” When Kelso visits the hospital with a broken thumb, the doctor gives him a prescription in the form of creative writing advice regarding “show don’t tell.” Smith presents the police statement of Kelso’s murderer in the form of a poem.
Through these authorial interventions, Smith underscores the way people actively narrativize nonfictional occurrences so as to better understand them and fit them into a digestible story-form. Hundreds of people who did not know Kelso attend his funeral as a means of protesting racial violence: “The time for transforming a dead man into words, into argument and symbol and history, this moment will surely come.” Smith calls into question the ethics of converting a tragedy into words, a symbol, or a constructed narrative. Is the narrativization and politicization of a man’s death exploitative? If so, is Smith’s own story exploitative?
I will end with Yoko Ogawa’s “ Tomatoes and the Full Moon,“ perhaps the most mystifying of the examples I have chosen. The narrator is assigned to write a travel article about a hotel, and is essentially stalked by an anonymous woman who gradually tells him the story of a stranger saving her from freezing to death. The woman always carries a bundle. When the two characters talk in the hotel library (what is more metatextual than being surrounded by books?), the woman reveals that the bundle contains the pages of her manuscript. She is paranoid that someone will steal her writing, especially after a hunchbacked woman once published a novel exactly like the one she had been writing at the time. Later, when the narrator finally unties her bundle, he discovers “a ream of blank paper.”
Obviously there are questions of authorship, writing, and art in general at hand. Could it be about the distinction between high and low art? The woman is a proclaimed novelist while the narrator recycles the same cliché phrases for his stale travel article. But, in the end, the novelist is no better than the narrator—she does not seem to have actually produced anything. Maybe Ogawa is collapsing the distinction between writing forms considered prestigious and those deemed inferior.
Or maybe the story is about the battle for authorship: the woman feuds with the hunchbacked woman over claim to the novel; she tells the story of her near-death to the narrator, who is himself telling us “Tomatoes and the Full Moon.” And that makes me think about narrative unreliability. If the woman lied about her manuscript, did she lie about the plagiarism? Did she make up her story about almost dying? Is she therefore actually a writer? (So is writing all about making stuff up?) The narrator is himself a writer—do we even trust that the details of this story are not fabricated by him (in his world)? That blank manuscript seems to lie in the center of the story’s metatextuality, and it is likewise difficult to draw anything but a blank as to its meaning.
These examples and questions serve to explain the many different, nuanced ways in which stories comment on their own textuality. My definition of “metatextuality” remains variable and broad—as the examples show, the term can apply to the inclusion of literature, authorship, storytelling modes, etc.—but the common subject is what stories have to say about aspects of storytelling. I think the questions this poses are important for any lover of writing or reading: Why do we tell stories? How do they affect us? How do stories teach us what stories are about?
Danielle Sherman
Writer and curator
Danielle’s Wikipedia Article to Note: California English
Anybody heard of the Vampire Weekend songs “California English” and “California English Pt. 2”? I’m from the Southwestern United States and have spent a lot of time in California, noting how the people there, depending on their different demographics, speak in a distinctly Californian way. I looked it up, and it turns out there’s a whole dialect of Californian English! I’ve been getting into linguistics lately, so I thought this was interesting.
The Wikipedia entry explains the California Vowel Shift, the basis for the separate dialect—the diagrams and explanations for the linguistic phenomena are so detailed and precise. Then the entry effectively explains the different subsets: urban coastal, rural inland, mission brogue, Valleyspeak, Chicano, etc. All of this turned out to inspire edits for a story I had written which takes place in California. Now Californian dialects are a key part of my updated story—I have Wikipedia to thank for that.
Danielle’s Favorite Emoji: 🏺
This amphora 🏺 emoji caught my eye for a couple reasons. One: I just took an art history class on ancient Greek art and architecture where I had to memorize all these different kinds of forms and patterns on vessels, so when I saw this emoji, my brain immediately went, “that’s an Early Geometric amphora with a meander pattern register on the neck and belly.” I wonder why that kind of period/design was chosen for the amphora emoji. Maybe because it is the most simplistic?
Two: I noticed the amphora is placed among other emojis associated with mysticism and religion (prayer beads, evil eye, hamsa, crystal ball (?)) as well as death (coffin, gravestone, funerary urn). I am delighted by how much that makes sense, because we might see an amphora and think amphora → ancient Greece → Greek mythology → mystic religion, or we might see an amphora and think amphora → container of ashes → funerary context. It is interesting that the placement relies on those layers of association, and how the amphora is strategically placed to transition the emojis from mysticism to death!
Danielle Sherman publishes fiction, poetry, journalism, and literary research. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, learning new languages, and making elaborate Notion pages.
Other Items That Surprised Us This Week at Writing Atlas
Jet Fuel-Scented Candles
Waiting in the Jackson Hole airport because of many delayed and canceled flights, we smelled aviation fuel, which, of course, was unnerving (we were inside the airport, which we note is the only commercial airport entirely in a U.S. national park). But someone (a Wikirace champion and Writing Atlas developer) mentioned that he loved that smell of jet fuel and pointed out he clearly was not the only one since there were many companies which sold jet fuel-scented candles. And indeed there are!
Another thing we hadn’t seen before at an airport. Bear spray recycling bins (which are a thing in the Mountain West)!
If you’ve made it this far, thank you again for joining us on our fourth newsletter! It’s been officially a month since we left the AWP conference—and a month since we heavily workshopped our first newsletter all over WhatsApp; in Kansas City, Missouri coffee shops; on connecting planes across the United States delayed and deferred. That calls for something like a birthday celebration, and we’d like to celebrate with you! If you would like to curate stories, or share quirky photos, foods and stuffed animals with the community, please let us know by leaving a comment or otherwise reaching out to us! You’re a part of us too. As always, keep visiting our Writing Atlas homepage as we keep rolling out exciting changes and updates!
Sincerely,
Your Writing Atlas team