Antichapter 4: Antimuse Redux

All the phones in the universe rang again. The antimuse’s hand picked up the plot-advancing phone on the first ring.

“Hello,” said the antimuse.

“Hello,” said the Voice. “I see from the chapter title and the prior sentence that you are an antimuse. A different voice told me that you could help me stop the book we’re in. It’s a self-referential metanovel. Can you do it?”

“Of course I can do it,” said the antimuse, “but I have to be one of its characters.”

“Great! You’re already one of its characters,” said The Voice. “Now stop it.”

“I’m a character in this antichapter but I don’t seem to be a character in the metanovel,” said the antimuse.

“You seem to be to me,” said the Voice.

“That’s because you’re assuming that the transitive property of literary inclusion applies here,” explained the antimuse. “You think, naively, because we’re characters in this antichapter and this antichapter is included in this metanovel, that transitive literary inclusion will make us characters in the metanovel. But Granger, in his classic paper The Transitive Properties Of Literary Inclusion², showed that it does not apply. The transitive property is subordinate to the need for narrative logic: if we were already characters in the metanovel then the prior antichapters and the subsequent one where you get the author to evolve a muse from a metamuse won’t be necessary. So we can’t be characters in the metanovel yet. We’re just in the antichapters. The plot has to make sense.”

“A hopeless dream,” interjected the author’s inner critic.

“I see,” said the Voice, ignoring the critic.

“Don’t feel bad,” said the antimuse. “Assuming the transitive property of literary inclusion was a common mistake before Granger’s paper. People still make it all the time.”

“Thank you,” said The Voice.

“Yes, thank you,” echoed several readers who had unknowingly and repeatedly made that mistake.

“I’ll just have introduce you in a way that maintains plot logic,” said the Voice. “I’ll get the author to evolve you in.”

“Get me in, however you do it,” said the antimuse. “I’ll do the rest.”

“I’m supposed to ask you about Catch-33, aren’t I?” the Voice asked.

“Unless you want another gaping hole in the plot,” the antimuse said.

“I don’t,” said the Voice.

“Then ask,” said the antimuse.

“I’ve read Catch-22,” the Voice said, “the book that Joseph Heller wrote. But I’ve never heard of a book called Catch-33,” the Voice said, ignoring the following inconsistency: it must have heard of Catch-33 in order to have referred to it. “What was Catch-33?” It asked.

“You’ve never heard of Catch-33 and never will,” said the antimuse, also ignoring a similar inconsistency. “Catch-33 was never published. And Joseph Heller didn’t write Catch-22.”

“He didn’t?”

“No. A brilliant man named Joseph Beller was working on a book he called Catch-33. He was two thirds through, just getting started on the 23rd catch when I was hired to stop him. So I stopped him.”

“What did you do?” The Voice asked.

“I became his muse and got him to give me a copy of what he’d written,” said the antimuse. “I read it. I told him it was crap, that he needed to throw it away and start over. He believed me. He threw it in the trash and started over. He kept writing and I kept telling him it was crap . Eventually he stopped writing. Then he committed suicide. Very sad. Brilliant talent.”

“Then where did Catch-22 come from?”

“Joseph Heller was a second-rate writer. He found Beller’s draft in a dumpster,” said the antimuse. “Heller was smart enough to know that what Beller had written was brilliant and he was honest enough to knew that he didn’t have the talent to write even one more catch that wouldn’t suck. So he cut the catches at 22, named the book Catch-22 and sent it to a publisher.”

“Amazing,” said the Voice unimpressed. “Then you’ll stop the metanovel?”

“Plot logic gives me no choice,” said the antimuse. “I’ll do it.”

Refs:

3The Antimuse64

5A Small Plot Change73