Written, as Wallace puts it, “in the margins” of John Barth’s seminal piece of metafiction “Lost in the Funhouse,” Westward is a sort of belligerent deconstruction of metafiction by its own methods. As Barth’s narrator in “Lost in the Funhouse” repeatedly interrupts the coherent narrative to self-consciously reference the generic conventions or tropes he’s employing to create literary verisimilitude—famously including a drawing of Freytag’s Triangle within the text of the story itself—Wallace constantly interrupts Westward to bring attention to the conventions of metanarrative. And there is some ambiguity about the degree to which this succeeds. As Wallace told McCafferey, he got “trapped [in Westward] trying to expose the illusions of metafiction the same way metafiction had tried to expose the illusions of the pseudo-unmediated realist fiction that came before it.” But in the end, he says, it’s possible “Westward’s only real value’ll be showing the kind of pretension loops you fall into now if you fuck around with recursion.” Westward’s recursive self-consciousness of its own self-conscious recursivity is, Wallace says, a “horror show…a permanent migraine.”[10]
[10] Recently I was exchanging flirty text messages with a pretty girl (we’ll call her Deirdre) when I realized just how stuck we all are, how incapable of resisting the impulse to self-reflexivity. The way our conversation worked was like this: I would send her a message that said something mundane and inoffensive like, “Hey there!” and Deirdre would respond with something like, “Oh, wow. Such a versatile opening line. So many levels of interpretation.” And the exchange would devolve into a conversation about the way we were flirting, what codes and strategies we were each using to keep the other interested. i.e. Meta-flirting. It was amusing and cute and allowed us both to show how clever we were, how cynically self-aware, but it was also somehow deeply unsatisfying. Ultimately, the only thing we were communicating was that we both knew all the rules, that we’d played the game before, that we weren’t going to be fooled by any pretense of unmotivated authenticity. And I think part of what sucked about it was that we both knew it couldn’t possibly go anywhere. Flirting requires some resistance to cynicism. It depends on plausible deniability. On some level, you know when you’re flirting, and when you’re not, but you maintain the pretense, for yourself and for the other person, that you might just be having a pleasant conversation. It creates safety, comfort, a way out and an excuse to stay in. The logical extension of the alternative—of constantly bringing attention to the fact that, hey, here we are flirting—is both of us acknowledging to each other that beneath the veil of subtle complements and witty repartee, what it comes down to is a negotiation over the possibility of intercourse, and that’s just not terribly appealing.