Interfictions Read Free

recent films (Pieter van Hees's short, Black XXX-Mas : a.k.a. Little Red in the Hood ).
    IV. Illuminating the Interstitial
    What the Interstitial does, actually, is transform the reader's experience of reading. Formerly invisible historical trajectories become visible to the reader. The interstitial work, in combination with the reader's particular perception of it, manifests itself in that particular way because the reader's “reality” has changed. We have figures of speech for this kind of transformation at a profound level—"I have seen the light,” for example—but the transformation caused by the Interstitial is far more subtle. Perhaps instead of something as extreme as “The scales have fallen from my eyes,” one might characterize this change as “A scale has fallen from my eye.” In any case, the reader has learned to see in a different light, and that change causes a reinterpretation of the reader's experience of the past—in general—though perhaps this begins with a re-examination and reinterpretation of other texts the reader has experienced.
    An interstitial work provides a wider range of possibilities for the reader's engagement and transformation. It is more faceted than a typical literary work, though it also operates under its own internal logic. At Readercon, on a panel discussing Metafantasy, I used the term “bilocation” (borrowed from the practice of Remote Viewing) to describe the reader's state of mind when reading works like John Crowley's Little, Big , which are Fantasy but also aware of the fact that they are Fantasy and make the reader aware of that awareness. Readers can lose themselves in the world of the novel, but simultaneously maintain an awareness of the act of reading. This “bilocation” (more precisely, a “multilocality") of the reader's awareness produces a form of engagement characteristic of metafiction and altered states of consciousness. Many readers find this state of mind so uncomfortable that they reject works of this nature (often rationalizing their rejection by focusing on some perceived flaw). Interstitial works also induce a sort of multilocality in the reader's consciousness, but at a different threshold of perception. The reader may not be aware of this phenomenon, and therefore stays with the work, achieving the effect of multilocality over repeated engagements over time. This multilocality then extends to the reader's perception and memory of other works. (And once again, this is not to suggest that interstitial works cannot be metafictions.)
    Once one engages with the underlying logic of the Revisionary Fairytale, for example, one can see its structural qualities in other works in various orders of magnitude. What Carter and Barnes do with the story of Little Red Riding Hood is to take an extant structure and then transform its elements or its structural dynamics, thereby creating a work with clear knowledge of its subtext but with a distinctly different rhetoric. This is what the Romans did with Greek myths when they renamed the Greek gods and goddesses and appropriated them into their own religious practices. This is also what the Romans did by attaching their mythic history The Aenead to the Greek epic The Iliad . This is what the writers of the Gospels did when they took the story of Jesus and worked it into a classic Hero tale that parallels the stories of Krishna, Mithras, Apollonius, Buddha, and even Julius Caesar.
    But before such historical trajectories become apparent, the works that reveal them are interstitial—sometimes only for a short while, yet sometimes for several centuries—and by being unclassifiable, they present readers with a uniquely new literary consciousness.
    In transforming the perceptions of the reader, interstitial works make the reader (or listener, or viewer) more perceptive and more attentive; in doing so, they make the reader's world larger, more interesting, more