IVIV Hope Harlingen: ( spoilers)

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Umberto Rossi questioned this statement of Alice's:
 
"This because these readers distrust metafictional humor and comedy 
and/or refuse to acknowledge that the  joke they cannot get is on  
them."
 
I absolutely agree (with Umberto, not the Alicism). Listen, we've
all read John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, and chuckled along with
its 'radical critique' of our old, naive realistic expectations. Wow,
a story whose title is 'Title'! How innovative. How radical! How naive
of us to expect a story with a traditional title. The joke sure is on
us!
 
Been there, done that. But metafiction's getting really, really old. 
Metafiction by now is just as much a convention as the Realism it
was trying to debunk, and the idea that educated readers can still be 
fooled by metafictional humor is, well, pretty naive.
 
The ironical reader has the easiest job of all: He can always posit
yet another ironical frame around those moments of tenderness, passion,
anger, kindness etc. that 'naive' readers find in the novels. But I
suspect the real joke may be on the masterful ironic reader who can 
always debunk the findings of others with a cynical smirk: He always
finds the same underlying (and frankly reductive) message in each and 
every novel, and he doesn't really know what he's missing.
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