Multistability in the Novel

Mitchell, through the use of "metapictures", derives this idea of "multistability" within pictures, pictures that are stabilized through multiple interpretations. The metapictures he discusses thrive on a "co-existence of contrary or simply different readings in the single image"(45). For an image to be able to comment on multiple things (like "New Worlds" factual and fictive interpretations) it must have these multiple readings and they must be stable. And not only stable, they must also depend on both readings as balanced and co-dependent interpretations. Like "My Wife and My Mother-In-Law", neither interpretation can be favored over the other; the image relies on both to comment on each other.

These metapictures work in a much similar way to the "novel", as Bahktin describes it, and multistability relates even more so to multivocality, Bahktin's heteroglossia. The stability in the "multistability of images" comes from a set of balanced figures within the same image. Although the figures are obviously different (a duck looks nothing like a rabbit), both must be seen as a means of describing the whole image. In this same way, novels rely on a stability of voices (author's, implied author's, narrator's, character's) within the text. The voices must be recognized as different to view the meaning of the novel as a whole. And further, the novel necessitates that these voices work together, or play off of each other (this is what, Bahktin says, makes a work "heteroglossic"), in a way that progresses the meaning of the work. Meaning is not created in seeing either a rabbit or duck in the "Duck-Rabbit". It is created by seeing both and realizing the image is neither. Similarly, the novel is advanced through multiple, stable (in that the voice of a character or narrator doesn't completely smother the voice of another) voices.

This too relates back to the idea of "intentional fallacy". If a work, like a metapicture, needs the ability to have equally competing interpretations, if a novel needs to have competing voices to balance its points, then find one overarching "intention" truly is an erroneous task. These images and novels that have "multistability" act as "emblems of resistance to [single] stable interpretations" (50). There is never only one way to see anything; metapictures force us to realize this and how it applies to the novel's balanced "multi-voiced-ness".