The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction Page: 27
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compete to acquire replicators: us. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, memetics argues
that before we could read about this collision, before it could motivate focalization and
determine its own inclusion in narration, it had to come from someone, it had to be replicated
in this case by Irvine. Memes exist as easily in consciousness as they do in the pages of a story.
So how does any of this change how we read stories? After all, one might argue that all I
have done is map, in very complicated terms, how authors put stories together. The end result is
the same-the text does not change. Really, what I have proposed here is a new awareness about
internalizing worlds-real or fictional. A story is never about a world-it never even involves a
world. Unless we make allowances for non-human yet capable-of-human-thought narrators, all
stories are reports and assemblies of how the real we will never truly know can come together in
ways that destabilize or question (via the story's inherently memetic nature) how we have
internalized existence-how our ideas and memes have internalized it. In "Lull" the text moves,
in large part, metonymically. That is, subordinate ideas or images in one paragraph link, like the
processes of cognition themselves, to the content of the next paragraph. The same applies to the
various sections of the story, wherein each time, the created in one becomes the creator in the
next. We find the same idea in Jeffrey Ford's "The Yellow Chamber," in Jonathan Lethem's
"The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door," in Forrest
Aguirre's "The Reverie Styx."37 Are these maps of authorial internalization? Perhaps. We
cannot know. They are, however, maps of causality and creation. They are not Scholes's
"nonsense"-they "mean" (like E. Sedia's "Munashe and the Spirits," like Jason Erik
Lundberg's "One Less," or like Barth Anderson's "We Stand on the Verge of Getting it On")
their own creation, and we realize, as we leave the stories, that they cannot point, even as
hypothetical fiction, to how anything "actually happened."38 If the agents in any of the above27
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Bradley, Darin Colbert. The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction, dissertation, May 2007; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc3703/m1/31/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .