real people

[TERRY CAESAR]

     Help! Anybody recall the name of that novel of a few years ago in which
Normal Mailer is murdered? Mailer sued, I believe. The Mailer who actually
lives, I mean, outside this novel or any other.

     I ask about this novel because of another. IN the penultimate chapter of
Stephen Wright's Going Native, the village chief, deep in the Indonesian
jungle, proudly displays a signed phtograph of Jack Nicolson! The couple to
whom he makes his display are astonished. So are we. We had not thought that
the postmodern world (or whatever we might want to call it) had undone so
many.

     What to make, I wondered, of so many recent works of fiction where real
people appear. Not as characters. (C.f. Ford or Houdini in Doctorow's Ragtime.)
Merely as themselves, or registers of themselves, of their actual existence--
as in Ann Beattie's story, "A Vintage Thunderbird," where a couple meet a
cabbie who brags that the other day he's just had Al Pacino.

     Is the locus classus of this sort of thing--whatever sort of thing it is--
the moment in GR where Slothrop sees Mickey Rooney?