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NEW ACCENTS General Editor: TERENCE HAWKES
The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction
IN THE SAME SERIES: Structuralism and Semiotics Terence Hawkes* Linguistics and the Novel Roger Fowler Reading Television John Fiske and John Hartley Subculture: The Meaning of Style Dick Hebdige Formalism and Marxism Tony Bennett Critical Practice Catherine Belsey Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching Patrick Parrinder The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama Keir Elam Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion Rosemary Jackson Translation Studies Susan Bassnett-McGuire Sexual Fiction Maurice Charney Deconstruction: Theory and Practice Christopher Norris Orality and Literacy Walter J. Ong Poetry as Discourse Antony Easthope Narrative Fiction: Contemporary poetics Shlomith RimmonKenan Literature and Propaganda A. P. Foulkes Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction Robert C. Holub Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice Elizabeth Wright Alternative Shakespeares Edited by John Drakakis Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism Edited by Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory Toril Moi Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class Janet Batsleer, Tony Davies, Rebecca O'Rourke and Chris Weedon The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature Russell J. Reising Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference 1976-1984 Edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Diana Loxley and Margaret Iversen Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History Edited by Peter Widdowson, Peter Humm and Paul Stigant Criticism in Society Imre Salusinszky The Return of the Reader: Reader-response Criticism Elizabeth Freund Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Poststructuralism Richard Harland
* Not available from Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. in the USA
Metafiction The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction PATRICIA WAUGH London and New York .
Ltd This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library. II. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic. Fiction—Technique 2. I. or in any information storage or retrieval system. Fiction. now known or hereafter invented. Rhetoric I. Title. Patricia. Title II.First published in 1984 by Methuen & Co. without permission in writing from the publishers. Metafiction: the theory and practice of self-conscious fiction.—(New accents) 1. Includes index 1. Series 808. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Waugh.953 84-9078 ISBN 0-415-03006-4 ISBN 0-203-13140-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-17557-3 (Glassbook Format) .3 PN3355 ISBN 0-416-32630-7 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-415-03006-4 Pbk Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Waugh. (New accents) Bibliography: p. Metafiction. mechanical or other means. including photocopying and recording. 2001. Series: New accents PN 333.W38 1984 801'. Patricia. © 1984 Patricia Waugh All rights reserved.
Contents General editor's preface Acknowledgements 1 What is metafiction and why are they saying such awful things about it? What is metafiction? Metafiction and the novel tradition Why are they saying such awful things about it? Metafiction and the contemporary avant-garde The mirror up to art: metafiction and its varieties 2 Literary self-consciousness: developments Modernism and post-modernism: the redefinition of self-consciousness The analysis of frames: metafiction and frame-breaking Play. games and metafiction The linguistic universe: reality as construct 3 Literary evolution: the place of parody The development of the novel The method of parody: creation plus critique The use of popular forms in metafiction vii ix 1 1 5 7 10 14 21 21 28 34 49 63 63 68 79 .
vi Metafiction 87 87 90 94 100 115 116 119 130 137 137 142 143 145 151 155 170 173 4 Are novelists liars? The ontological status of literary-fictional discourse 'Truth' and 'fiction': is telling stories telling lies? Reference. naming and the existence of characters 'Falsity' and 'non-predication' theories 'Alternative worlds' theories 5 Fictionality and context: from role-playing to language games Act I: All the world's a stage: role-playing and fictionality as theme Act II: Curtain-up: script-writing Act III: Some characters in search of an author Act IV: Notes towards the definition of radical metafiction: Contradiction Paradox Objets trouvés: metafictional collage Intertextual overkill Notes Bibliography Further reading Index .
postmodernism. dialogism. We are obliged. The New Accents series has made its own wary negotiation around that paradox. . semiotics. of course. subculture. into the central concern of a continuing project. Their 'nuts and bolts' exposition of the issues at stake in new ways of writing texts and new ways of reading them has proved an effective stratagem against perplexity. feminism. have already been the primary concern of a large number of our volumes. over the years. turning it. post-structuralism. to be bold.GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE H ow can we recognise or deal with the new? Any equipment we bring to the task will have been designed to engage with the old: it will look for and identify extensions and developments of what we already know. such as computer networks and data banks. to confront and respond to those developments in literary studies that seem crucial aspects of the tidal waves of transformation that continue to sweep across our culture. So we have sought. To some degree the unprecedented will always be unthinkable. the accents of the future the language in which we deal. Change is our proclaimed business. It is not just the impact of electronic modes of communication. politics and way of life that these bring. and the new attention to the nature and modes of language. innovation our announced quarry. But the question of what 'texts' are or may be has also become more and more complex. deconstruction. marxism. Areas such as structuralism. and still seek.
can offer positive help. Satellite television and supersonic travel have eroded the traditional capacities of time and space to confirm prejudice. Small wonder if. of placing at the centre and of restricting to the periphery. is that which covertly shapes our thoughts. we frequently find ourselves at the boundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkable: peering into an abyss out of which there begin to lurch awkwardlyformed monsters with unaccountable – yet unavoidable – demands on our attention. unphilosophical ideas about 'philosophy'. perhaps for the first time. straightforward elucidation. informative bibliographies. that give our own way of life its distinctive character. nowadays. even un-childish views of 'comics'. continuing construction. In this situation. The effect is to make us ponder the culture we have inherited. to see it. after all. to say nothing of a host of barely respectable activities for which we have no reassuring names. And that means that we can also begin to see. careful unpicking. But if the project of closely scrutinising the new remains nonetheless a disconcerting one. of stressing and repressing. and each New Accents volume will continue to include these. there are still overwhelming reasons for giving it all the consideration we can muster. The unthinkable. Ways of life and cultural practices of which we had barely heard can now be set compellingly beside – can even confront – our own. and to question. reinforce ignorance. unsettling notions of 'history'. These may involve unnerving styles of narrative. as an intricate. and conceal significant difference. those arrangements of foregrounding and backgrounding. .viii G E N E R A L E D I TO R ' S P R E FA C E that has forced us to revise our sense of the sort of material to which the process called 'reading' may apply.
my interest in metafiction. who had never heard of metafiction when I met him but who now has a thorough appreciation of its significance in his life! . I would like to dedicate this book to my husband Alec. Finally. and subsequently helped to sustain. and to Terence Hawkes for his very painstaking and extremely helpful editorial guidance.Acknowledgements I should like to acknowledge the help I have received from my colleagues Andrew Crisell and Derek Longhurst who have both commented usefully on the manuscript. I am particularly grateful to David Lodge who first inspired.
eye strain. (Laurence Sterne. Tristram Shandy. That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world. Finally I am consumed by the thought that at a certain point we all become nothing more than dying animals. 438) Fuck all this lying look what I'm really trying to write about is writing not all this stuff .1 What is metafiction and why are they saying such awful things about it? What is metafiction? The thing is this. (Ronald Sukenick. piles. . p. . I am confident my own way of doing it is the best – I'm sure it is the most religious – for I begin with writing the first sentence – and trusting to Almighty God for the second. stomach spasms. anxiety attacks. Johnson. I've gotten boils. Albert Angelo. p. The Death of the Novel and Other Stories. 49) . 163) Since I've started thinking about this story. (B. S. p.
(John Fowles. City Life. In compiling such a list. the reader would. literary form and the act of writing fictions. of the collared peccary and the nine-banded armadillo). (Donald Barthelme. novelists have tended to become much more aware of the theoretical issues involved in constructing fictions. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction. be offering a brief description of the basic concerns and characteristics of the fiction which will be explored in this book. Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. Most of the quotations are fairly contemporary. What connects not only these quotations but also all of the very different writers whom one could refer to as broadly 'metafictional'. . . 4) Fiction is woven into all . I find this new reality (or unreality) more valid. their novels have tended to embody dimensions of self-reflexivity and formal uncertainty. pp. they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text. in effect. a parodic. This is deliberate. . In consequence. such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction. most readers would immediately list two or three of the following: a celebration of the power of the creative imagination together with an uncertainty about the validity of its representations. Over the last twenty years. excessive or deceptively naïve style of writing. on the plains of the West. 86–7) If asked to point out the similarities amongst this disconcerting selection of quotations. is that they all explore a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction. an extreme self-consciousness about language. a pervasive insecurity about the relationship of fiction to reality. The term 'metafiction' itself seems to have originated in an essay by the American critic and self-conscious novelist William H. playful. p.2 Metafiction I remember once we were out on the ranch shooting peccadillos (result of a meeting. 'The French Lieutenant's Woman.
a more general cultural interest in the problem of how human beings reflect. meaningful and 'objective' world is no longer tenable. if not a picture of nature.What is metafiction? 3 Gass (in Gass 1970). The present increased awareness of 'meta' levels of discourse and experience is partly a consequence of an increased social and cultural self-consciousness. 'metarhetoric' and 'metatheatre' are a reminder of what has been. terms like 'metapolitics'. self-contained system which generates its own 'meanings'. and that it is impossible to describe an objective world because the observer always changes the observed. therefore. If. the concerns of metafiction are even more complex than this. The simple notion that language passively reflects a coherent. drawing on the traditional metaphor of the world as book. but often recasting it in the terms of contemporary philosophical. However. we now occupy 'roles' rather than 'selves'. However. In a sense. If our knowledge of this world is now seen to be mediated through language. then a picture of one's relation to . Metafiction pursues such questions through its formal self-exploration. p. metafiction rests on a version of the Heisenbergian uncertainty principle: an awareness that 'for the smallest building blocks of matter. as individuals. are required in order to explore the relationship between this arbitrary linguistic system and the world to which it apparently refers. linguistic or literary theory. In fiction they are required in order to explore the relationship between the world of the fiction and the world outside the fiction. since the 1960s. 'Meta' terms. every process of observation causes a major disturbance' (Heisenberg 1972. construct and mediate their experience of the world. problematic and regulated by convention. Beyond this. then the study of characters in novels may provide a useful model for understanding the construction of subjectivity in the world outside novels. then literary fiction (worlds constructed entirely of language) becomes a useful model for learning about the construction of 'reality' itself. it also reflects a greater awareness within contemporary culture of the function of language in constructing and maintaining our sense of everyday 'reality'. 126). Language is an independent. however. For while Heisenberg believed one could at least describe. Its relationship to the phenomenal world is highly complex.
P. Metafication sets out to explore this dilemma. which explicity and overtly lays bare its condition of artifice. . including the conventions of the novel as a whole or particular forms of that genre. refers to another language: it is a language which takes another language as its object. and this other language thus becomes its signified. the 'language' of the literary system itself. possible only to 'represent' the discourses of that world. 53). which retells. as such. more usually. Yet. the signified is the concept evoked by the word. which constitutes both an example and a critique of the popular thriller.1 In novelistic practice. The signifier is the sound-image of the word or its shape on the page. Hjelmslev developed the term 'metalanguage' (Hjelmslev 1961). and thus comments on. John Gardner's Grendel (1971). comment on a specific work or fictional mode (for example. to display the process of their construction (for example. in fact. He defined it as a language which. then. Saussure's distinction between the signifier and the signified is relevant here. the Beowulf story from the point of view of the monster. if one attempts to analyse a set of linguistic relationships using those same relationships as the instruments of analysis. metafiction shows the uncertainty even of this process. John Fowles's use of the 'omniscient author' convention in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). It may. often in the form of parody. The 'other' language may be either the registers of everyday discourse or.4 Metafiction nature. he or she realizes fairly soon that the world. or John Hawkes's The Lime Twig (1961). How is it possible to 'describe' anything? The metafictionist is highly conscious of a basic dilemma: if he or she sets out to 'represent' the world. In literary fiction it is. situations or objects in the world. this results in writing which consistently displays its conventionality. instead of referring to non-linguistic events. cannot be 'represented'. and which thereby explores the problematic relationship between life and fiction – both the fact that 'all the world is not of course a stage' and 'the crucial ways in which it isn't' (Goffman 1974. The linguist L. with particular conventions of the novel. A metalanguage is a language that functions as a signifier to another language. Metafiction may concern itself. language soon becomes a 'prisonhouse' from which the possibility of escape is remote.
journalism. are fictions like Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America (1967). although the term 'metafiction' might be new. documentary. the practice is as old (if not older) than the novel itself. the instabilities of the real world. Metafiction flaunts and exaggerates and thus exposes the foundations of this instability: the fact that novels are constructed through a continuous assimilation of everyday historical forms of communication. but still displaying 'meta' features. studying that which gives the novel its identity. They question and relativize each other to such an extent that the 'language of fiction' is always. Such novels attempt to create alternative linguistic structures or fictions which merely imply the old forms by encouraging the reader to draw on his or her knowledge of traditional literary conventions when struggling to construct a meaning for the new text. selfconscious. in effect. What I hope to establish during the course of this book is that metafiction is a tendency or function inherent in all novels. Its instability in this respect is part of its 'definition': the language of fiction appears to spill over into. . for. diaries. to draw exclusively on contemporary fiction would be misleading. conversational registers. These languages compete for privilege.What is metafiction? 5 Less centrally metafictional. and merge with. journals. The novel notoriously defies definition. Certainly more scholarly ink has been spilt over attempts to define the novel than perhaps for any other literary genre. This form of fiction is worth studying not only because of its contemporary emergence but also because of the insights it offers into both the representational nature of all fiction and the literary history of the novel as genre. histories. one is. There is no one privileged 'language of fiction'. legal records. There are the languages of memoirs. in a way that a fiveact tragedy or a fourteen-line sonnet clearly does not. By studying metafiction. Metafiction and the novel tradition I would argue that metafictional practice has become particularly prominent in the fiction of the last twenty years. if often covertly. However.
selfquestioning and culturally pluralistic. traditional values. . paradoxically functions by suppressing this dialogue. Previously.6 Metafiction Mikhail Bakhtin has referred to this process of relativization as the 'dialogic' potential of the novel. Bakhtin defines as overtly 'dialogic' those novels that introduce a 'semantic direction into the word which is diametrically opposed to its original direction. Metafictional novels tend to be constructed on the principle of a fundamental and sustained opposition: the construction of a fictional illusion (as in traditional realism) and the laying bare of that illusion. the lowest common denominator of metafiction is simultaneously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction. In fact. Realism. its prominence in the contemporary novel is unique. and breakdown of. and particularly likely to emerge during 'crisis' periods in the literary history of the genre (see Chapter 3). insecure. P. The two processes are held together in a formal tension which breaks down the distinctions between 'creation' and 'criticism' and merges them into the concepts of 'interpretation' and 'deconstruction'. the forms of fiction derived from a firm belief in a commonly . Although this oppositional process is to some extent present in all fiction. the language of fiction is always to some extent dialogic. . In other words. forms of narrative) – discourses that always to some extent question and relativize each other's authority. The historical period we are living through has been singularly uncertain. given its close relation to everyday forms of discourse. godlike author. The conflict of languages and voices is apparently resolved in realistic fiction through their subordination to the dominant 'voice' of the omniscient. as in the case of nineteenth-century realism. 106). often regarded as the classic fictional mode. Metafiction displays and rejoices in the impossibility of such a resolution and thus clearly reveals the basic identity of the novel as genre. Novels which Bakhtin refers to as 'dialogic' resist such resolution. . Contemporary fiction clearly reflects this dissatisfaction with. Metafiction simply makes this potential explicit and in so doing foregrounds the essential mode of all fictional language. The novel assimilates a variety of discourses (representations of speech. the word becomes the arena of conflict between two voices' (Bakhtin 1973.
not merely in the conventional literary. positivist and empiricist world-view on which realistic fiction is premised no longer exists. At the end of the book he asserts: . Contemporary metafictional writing is both a response and a contribution to an even more thoroughgoing sense that reality or history are provisional: no longer a world of eternal verities but a series of constructions. however. Johnson bursts into (or out of?) Albert Angelo (1964) with the words which preface this chapter. therefore. 61). artifices. objectively existing world of history. a good deal of writerly and critical confusion. as to demonstrate the artificiality of fictional form through a controlled metafictional discourse. The materialist. S. in an epistemological. fictions. overt emergence in the novel of a sense of fictitiousness: 'a sense that any attempt to represent reality could only produce selective perspectives. His comment serves in the novel as much to voice a paranoid fear that his audience will misinterpret his fiction by reading it according to expectations based on the tradition of the realistic novel. the rational connection between what characters 'do' and what they 'are'. that more and more novelists have come to question and reject the forms that correspond to this ordered reality (the wellmade plot. that is. 'scientific laws' of existence). Novels like Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) or James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) signalled the first widespread. There has been paranoia. on the part of both novelists and critics for whom the exhaustion and rejection of realism is synonymous with the exhaustion and rejection of the novel itself. impermanent structures. responded to the initial loss of belief in such a world. the causal connection between 'surface' details and the 'deep'. 'Fuck all this lying'. Modernist fiction. It is hardly surprising. written in the earlier part of this century. Why are they saying such awful things about it? This rejection has inevitably entailed. the authoritative omniscient author. sense' (Pfeifer 1978.What is metafiction? 7 experienced. Thus B. p. chronological sequence.
(Albert Angelo. through the technique of employing an ex-Earthling narrator who is now living on a different planet and has set out to 'explain' Earth to his fellow inhabitants. desperately attempting to construct identities which can only dissolve into metalingual mutterings (Lost in the Funhouse (1968). the detritus of modern civilization. 'underpants' and 'beefburgers'. p. telling themselves stories in the dark'. To dismiss such techniques as gimmicks or to refuse to take them seriously is crassly to miss the point. The strategy of this novel is to invert the science-fiction convention whereby humans are depicted attempting to comprehend the processes of an alien world. Vonnegut defamiliarizes the world that his readers take for granted. therefore I employ within the pocket of my publisher and the patience of my printer. 176) It reads rather like an anticipation of a hostile review. from within those very modes of representation. Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (1973) is written to express the sense of absurdity produced by its author's paradoxical realization that 'I have no culture'. . 95). Extreme defensive strategies are common. however. Crude diagrams replace language in order to express the poverty of the 'culture' which is available through representations of 'assholes'. The defamiliarization has more than a satiric function.2 It is expressed through John Barth's characters who – as much in the style of Sartre as in that of Sterne – 'die. p. . 15). typographical techniques beyond the arbitrary and constricting limits of the conventional novel. contemporary American society is the 'alien world'. Attempts at precise linguistic description continually break down.8 Metafiction a page is an area on which I place my signs I consider to communicate most clearly what I have to convey . . Here. p. and that 'I can't live without a culture anymore'. A similar defensiveness about the role of the novelist appears in Donald Barthelme's obsession with dreck. It reveals Vonnegut's own despairing recognition of the sheer impossibility of providing a critique of commonly accepted cultural forms of representation.
apparently oblivious of all our liberal value-systems and moral codes. and then make credible much of American reality. Indeed. describe. it has also offered extremely accurate models for understanding the contemporary experience of the world as a construction. John Irving). Beneath the fooling with representations of cows as beefburgers. Graham Swift. p. it sickens. however. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents. so apparent in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The paranoia that permeates the metafictional writing of the sixties and seventies is therefore slowly giving way to celebration. however. an artifice. Novelists and critics alike have come to realize that a moment of crisis can also be seen as a moment of recognition: recognition that. fabulatory extravaganzas. self-reflexive nature of experimental metafiction will leave it open to critical attacks. 34) In turning away from 'reality'. lurks a desperate sense of the possible redundancy and irrelevance of the artist. Yet metafiction is simply flaunting what is true of all novels: their 'outstanding freedom to choose' . novelists have discovered a surprising way out of their dilemmas and paranoia. a web of interdependent semiotic systems. it is still the case that the uncertain. M.What is metafiction? 9 What is the novelist to do? Here the 'naïve' narrative voice. Philip Roth. and back to a reexamination of fictional form. Despite this renewed optimism. and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meagre imagination. the American novelist. although the assumptions about the novel based on an extension of a nineteenthcentury realist view of the world may no longer be viable. to the discovery of new forms of the fantastic. the novel itself is positively flourishing. (Quoted in Bradbury 1977. Metafictional deconstruction has not only provided novelists and their readers with a better understanding of the fundamental structures of narrative. Gabriel García Márquez. has written: The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand. It stupefies. however. it infuriates. Clive Sinclair. D. magic realism (Salman Rushdie. Thomas. reveals through its defamiliarizing effect their often illiberal and amoral assumptions and consequences.
The existence of an unprecedented cultural pluralism has meant that post-modernist writers are not confronted with the same clear-cut oppositions as modernist writers were. This has been slow to take shape in recent years. An argument originally advanced by Lionel Trilling in Beyond Culture (Trilling 1966) and reiterated by Gerald Graff has suggested one reason for this: that the unmasking of the 'hypocritical bourgeois belief in the material and moral progress of civilization' (Graff 1975. In the face of the political. cultural and technological upheavals in society since the Second World War. The traditional fictional quest has thus been transformed into a quest for fictionality. Hence critics have discussed the 'crisis of the novel' and the 'death of the novel'. openness and flexibility which has allowed the novel remarkably to survive and adapt to social change for the last 300 years. 46). its lack of a fixed identity has now left the novel vulnerable. linear narrative and conventional assumptions about 'plot'. Metafiction and the contemporary avant-garde This search has been further motivated by novelists' responses to another feature of contemporary cultural life: the absence of a clearly defined avant-garde 'movement'. highly conscious of the problems of artistic legitimacy. they have tended to see such literary behaviour as a form of the self-indulgence and decadence characteristic of the exhaustion of any artistic form or genre.10 Metafiction (Fowles 1971. . 'character'. Instead of recognizing the positive aspects of fictional self-consciousness. An innovation in a literary form cannot establish itself as a new direction unless a sense of shared aims and objectives develops among experimental writers. Could it not be argued instead that metafictional writers. p. 'authority' and 'representation'. simply sensed a need for the novel to theorize about itself? Only in this way might the genre establish an identity and validity within a culture apparently hostile to its printed. p. It is this instability. however. 308) has been so thoroughly accomplished by modernism that the creative tension produced by opposing this 'bourgeois belief' is no longer clearly available the novelist.
Saussure distinguished between langue and parole: between the language system (a set of rules) and any act of individual utterance that takes place within this system.What is metafiction? 11 In eighteenth. Ostentatiously 'literary' language and conventions are paraded. creating greater problems for the post-modernist novelist in identifying and then representing the object of 'opposition'. however. are set against the fragments of various cultural codes. The power structures of contemporary society are. Metafiction sets up an opposition. marriage. but because the formal structures of these literary conventions provide a statement about the dissociation between. but to the language of the realistic novel which has sustained and endorsed such a view of reality. not because there is nothing left to talk about. They have come to focus on the notion that 'everyday' language endorses and sustains such power structures through a continuous process of naturalization whereby forms of oppression are constructed in apparently 'innocent' representations. Metafiction thus converts what it sees as the negative . The literary-fictional equivalent of this 'everyday' language of 'common sense' is the language of the traditional novel: the conventions of realism. the genuinely felt sense of crisis. The metafictional novel thus situates its resistance within the form of the novel itself. the individual is always finally integrated into the social structure (usually through family relationships.and nineteenth-century fiction. birth or the ultimate dissolution of death). on the other. more diverse and more effectively concealed or mystified. Metafictional writers have found a solution to this by turning inwards to their own medium of expression. This struggle necessarily involves individual alienation and often ends with mental dissolution. alienation and oppression in contemporary society and. In modernist fiction the struggle for personal autonomy can be continued only through opposition to existing social institutions and conventions. Each metafictional novel self-consciously sets its individual parole against the langue (the codes and conventions) of the novel tradition. not to ostensibly 'objective' facts in the 'real' world. on the one hand. in order to examine the relationship between fictional form and social reality. the continuance of traditional literary forms like realism which are no longer adequate vehicles for the mediation of this experience.
The problem facing writers who attempt authentically to represent conditions of rapid social change is that they may themselves produce works of art which are ephemeral and even trivial. They cannot unite to form a literary 'movement' because they exist only at the moment of reading. that there may be as much to be learnt from setting the mirror of art up to its own linguistic or representational structures as from directly setting it up to a hypothetical 'human nature' that somehow exists as an essence outside historical systems of articulation. Aleatory writing simply responds with a reply in kind to the pluralistic. in the permanent and ordered terms of literature. in fact. texts are read and forgotten. The metafictional response to the problem of how to represent impermanence and a sense of chaos. but without redundancy. 73). however. It suggests. Aleatory writing might imitate the experience of living in the contemporary world. Both are necessary because some degree of redundancy is essential for any message to be committed to memory. Such texts set out to resist the normal processes of reading. Redundancy is provided for in literary texts through the presence of familiar conventions. hyperactive multiplicity of styles that constitute the surfaces of present-day culture. In the present situation 'even a single work will be sufficient grounds for declaring a style finished.12 Metafiction values of outworn literary conventions into the basis of a potentially constructive social criticism. exhausted' (Rochberg 1971. Literary texts tend to function by preserving a balance between the unfamiliar (the innovatory) and the familiar (the conventional or traditional). frenetic and colliding surfaces of contemporary technological society) are open to these charges. has had a much more significant influence on the development of the novel as genre. p. The practitioners of so-called 'aleatory art' (which attempts to be totally random in order to suggest the chaotic. What is mainly asserted in such . Experimental fiction of the aleatory variety eschews such redundancy by simply ignoring the conventions of literary tradition. memory and understanding. offers both innovation and familiarity through the individual reworking and undermining of familiar conventions. Metafiction. but it fails to offer any of the comfort traditionally supplied by literary fiction through a 'sense of an ending' (Kermode 1966).
. a randomness designed to represent an avoidance of social control by stressing the impossibility of easily categorizing it or assimilating the reader to familiar structures of communication. ultimately. Such novels supposedly expose the way in which these social practices are constructed through the language of oppressive ideologies. from conventional ideologies. Although the reader is thereby distanced from the language.What is metafiction? 13 novels is an anarchic individualism. by refusing to allow the reader the role of passive consumer or any means of arriving at a 'total' interpretation of the text. are in the long run likely to be more successful. Such novels can thus initially be comprehended through the old structures. though apparently less 'radical'. Both take as their 'object' languages the structures of nineteenth-century realism and of historical romance or of fairy-tales. the defamiliarization proceeds from an extremely familiar base. Novels like John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman or Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descants (1969). of the definitive interpretation. it does seem questionable whether. Although it is true that much of this should undoubtedly be the task of experimental fiction. and can therefore be enjoyed and remain in the consciousness of a wide readership which is given a far more active role in the construction of the 'meaning' of the text than is provided either in contemporary realist novels or in novels which convert their readers into frenetic human word-processors. An argument sometimes proposed to justify the strategies of such fictions is that they are 'radical' because they rupture the conventional linguistic contracts that certify and/or disguise orthodox social practices (as realism. and which 'last' only as long as it takes to read them. so-called 'aleatory writing' is going to accomplish all of this. for many readers. certifies concepts like 'eternal human nature' or the assumption that authority as manifested through the omniscient author is somehow free of both gender distinctions and of historically constructed and provisional moral values). of the closure of the 'final' ending. The parody of these 'languages' functions to defamiliarize such structures by setting up various countertechniques to undermine the authority of the omniscient author. for example. Both are metafictional novels in that they employ parody self-consciously. the literary conventions and.
But the terms shift the emphasis in different ways. is emphasized rather than what has been stressed above: metafiction's continuous involvement in – and mediation of – reality through linguistic structures and preexistent texts. The 'self-begetting novel'. As I have argued. 'the self-begetting novel'. metafictional writing may include all or some of the strategies that critics have discussed in the terms that have been mentioned. 'the anti-novel'. as in the 'self-begetting novel'. metafiction is not so much a subgenre of the novel as a tendency within the novel which operates through exaggeration of the tensions and oppositions inherent in all novels: of frame and frame-break. 'irrealism'. As defined here. 'fabulation'. like 'metafiction'.3 All. for example. in fact. imply a fiction that selfconsciously reflects upon its own structure as language.14 Metafiction The mirror up to art: metafiction and its varieties It remains. Telling as individual invention. The emphasis is on the development of the narrator. of course. Raymond Federman's book of that name discusses the mode in terms of overt narratorial intrusion so that. of the development of a character to a point at which he is able to take up and compose the novel we have just finished reading' (Kellman 1976. is described as an 'account usually first person. Different categories. 'surfiction'. within this introductory chapter. p. . all offer different perspectives on the same process. 1245). 'surfictional' and 'metafictional'. on the modernist concern of consciousness rather than the postmodernist one of fictionality (as in. for example. spontaneous fabrication at the expense of external reality or literary tradition. of technique and countertechnique. These similar modes have been variously termed 'the introverted novel'. briefly to examine some alternative definitions of self-conscious writing. The entry of the narrator into the text is also a defining feature of what has been called 'surfiction'. André Gide's The Counterfeiters (1925)). of construction and deconstruction of illusion. often compete for the same fictional texts: John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse (1968) is clearly 'self-begetting'. the focus appears to be on the ironist him/herself rather than on the overt and covert levels of the ironic text.
forthcoming). 'Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius'. discovered by the 'fortunate conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopaedia'. and the existence of that text within a world viewed in terms of 'textuality'. The fact that this 'imaginary' world can take over the 'real' one emphasizes more than the epistemological uncertainty of both of them (which would he the aim of the 'selfbegetting novel'). He sees as modernist those epistemological contradictions which question how we can know a reality whose existence is finally not in doubt (McHale. are finally dependent upon the conventions of the short story (Labyrinths. The reader is always presented with embedded strata which contradict the presuppositions of the strata immediately above or below. is about a . it has already been invented by a secret society of idealists including Bishop Berkeley. Borges' imaginary kingdom Tlön. however. of course. (Gass 1970) The expression of this tension is present in much contemporary writing but it is the dominant function in the texts defined here as metafictional. Brian McHale has suggested that such contradictions are essentially ontological (posing questions about the nature and existence of reality) and are therefore characteristically post-modernist. Gass has argued is the dilemma of all art: In every art two contradictory impulses are in a state of Manichean war: the impulse to communicate and so to treat the medium of communication as a means and the impulse to make an artefact out of the materials and so to treat the medium as an end. 27).What is metafiction? 15 Metafiction thus expresses overtly what William H. and both. In all their work. the story. The metafictions of Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov illustrate this point. p. there is a more complex implicit interdependence of levels than this. as in all other metafiction. The fictional content of the story is continually reflected by its formal existence as text. It is twice a fiction because it is suggested that. for example – fiction explicitly masquerades as formalized critical interpretation. before its invention by Borges. is a post-modernist world. In some of their work – Borges' Labyrinths (1964) and Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962).
'Reality' is to this extent 'fictional' and can be understood through an appropriate 'reading' process. 11). another layer of 'interpretation'. to explain the historical world as well as offer some formal comfort and certainty. metafiction offers the recognition. Also rejected is the displacement of 'historical man' by 'structural man' advocated by Robert Scholes as the basis of what he calls 'fabulation' (Scholes 1975). David Lodge has pointed out that 'history may be in a philosophical sense. but that its formulation through social and cultural codes brings it closer to the philosophical and mythic than was once assumed.16 Metafiction story that invents an imaginary world. one obviously 'metafictional'. through an ultimately monologic discourse. while fabulation reveals instead what Christine Brooke-Rose . p. and it primarily and selfconsciously is a story which. However. structures of order which will replace the forgotten material text of the world. but it does not feel like that when we miss a train or somebody starts a war'. not that the everyday has ceased to matter. invents an imaginary world. the other more obviously 'fabulatory'. They show not only that the 'author' is a concept produced through previous and existing literary and social texts but that what is generally taken to be 'reality' is also constructed and mediated in a similar fashion. shows how metafiction explores the concept of fictionality through an opposition between the construction and the breaking of illusion.) Metafictional novels (unlike 'surfiction' or 'the self-begetting novel') thus reject the traditional figure of the author as a transcendental imagination fabricating. (Borges' story 'Funes the Memorias' (1964) shows that this need not be cause for despair. we look to fiction to offer us cognitive functions. It implies that human beings can only ever achieve a metaphor for reality. A brief comparison of two self-conscious novels. for if indeed we could not create these metaphorical images then we would all surely become insane. to locate us within everyday as well as within philosophical paradigms. like all stories.4 As novel readers. a fiction. Scholes argues that the empirical has lost all validity and that a collusion between the philosophic and the mythic in the form of 'ethically controlled fantasy' is the only authentic mode for fiction (Scholes 1967.
(p. A group of entrepreneurial and enterprising servants have arranged the filming of the last moments of an eternal triangle of superannuated . The novel is a celebration of the creative imagination: it is a 'fabulation'. 111). however. 78). 86) This appears to be a piece of highly stylized descriptive prose marked particularly by the appearance of extremely bizarre metaphors. in fact. this highly obtrusive simile describes a storm: Meanwhile the lightning which strikes the clump of elms so that the two friends huddled there are killed instantly without pain.What is metafiction? 17 (1980) has referred to as a reduced tension between technique and counter-technique: a 'stylization' which enables other voices to be assimilated. In this novel. She can. afford her metaphoric flights because of the stability of her metonymic base (Lodge 1977a. trout are described waiting in streams 'like airplane tickets' (p. for example. being fundamental to metafiction). Muriel Spark's metafictional novels lay bare the process of imposing form upon contingent matter through the discursive organization of 'plot'. In the Spark example. to comment on the very paradigms that they are in the process of constructing (this embedding of strata. zigzags across the lawns. illuminating the lily-pond and the sunken rose garden like a self-stricken flash photographer. and the reader's imagination is stretched throughout by the incongruity of the comparisons. for the vehicle of the metaphor is explicitly related to what is happening at the contiguously unfolding level of the story. of course. In Not to Disturb (1971). however. Trout Fishing in America (1967). which is full of similar metaphorical constructions where the extreme polarity of vehicle and tenor implicitly reminds the reader of the way in which metaphor constructs an image of reality by connecting apparently quite disparate objects. more subtle function that is part of a sustained metafictional display. for example. and like a zip-fastener ripped from its garment by a sexual maniac. To this extent it is very similar to Richard Brautigan's fabulatory novel. p. She uses her 'flights'. there is a further. rather than presenting a conflict of voices. as David Lodge has said of Joyce.
arranges appropriate climatic conditions) and. then. Metafiction. In showing us how literary fiction creates its imaginary worlds. they too are 'fictionalized'. but to another level of artifice: the level of the 'plot'. through the formal construction of the plot. Metafiction explicitly lays bare the conventions of realism. see Lemon and Reis 1965. 'fictionalize' in terms of the content of the plot. created. The servants know their masters are going to die and also know how to capitalize on their deaths. Thus not only do the characters in this novel play roles. 61–99) is assumed to be reality. this allows for a stable level of readerly familiarity. What it does is to re-examine the conventions of realism in order to discover – through its own self-reflection – a fictional form that is culturally relevant and comprehensible to contemporary readers. by the characters. More obviously. of course. although the lowest level of the artifice (what the Russian formalist Boris Tomashevsky has referred to as realistic motivation. of course. The reader is thus reminded that pure contingency in novels is always an illusion. The elements at the metaphorical level of the construction break down not into 'natural' or randomly chosen components.18 Metafiction aristocrats. without which the ensuing dislocations might be either totally meaningless or so outside the normal modes of literary or non-literary communication that they cannot be committed to memory (the problem. The photographer and the zip fastener (which the mentally deficient aristocratic son is continually attempting to rip off in the excitement of his intermittent sexual energy) are important elements in the plot being constructed by the novelist (who also. already discussed. Very often realistic conventions supply the 'control' in metafictional texts. pp. as in the example. does not abandon 'the real world' for the narcissistic pleasures of the imagination. Aristocratic scandals provide excellent material for media sensationalism. it does not ignore or abandon them. the norm or background against which the experimental strategies can foreground themselves. The reader is alerted to the way in which the explicitly artificial construction of these connections fits in with the larger designs of the novelist playing God. of much contemporary 'aleatory' writing). metafiction helps us to understand how the .
At the centre of this spectrum are those texts that manifest the symptoms of formal and ontological insecurity but allow their deconstructions to be finally recontextualized or 'naturalized' and given a total interpretation (which constitute. 'Metafiction' is thus an elastic term which covers a wide range of fictions. There are those novels at one end of the spectrum which take fictionality as a theme to be explored (and in this sense would include the 'self-begetting novel').What is metafiction? 19 reality we live day by day is similarly constructed. it could be argued that. Indeed. The novelist at either end. he must somehow cope with reality' (Dickinson 1975. Doctorow. which can only ensure its continued viability in and relevance to a contemporary world which is similarly beginning to gain awareness of precisely how its values and practices are constructed and legitimized. however – in confronting the problem that. and much American fiction into the other half. 'whether or not he makes peace with realism. whose formal self-consciousness is limited. far from 'dying'. therefore. similarly 'written'. as in the work of Gilbert Sorrentino. . Much British fiction fits into the first half of the spectrum. the novel has reached a mature recognition of its existence as writing. Raymond Federman or Christine Brooke-Rose. L. posit the world as a fabrication of competing semiotic systems which never correspond to material conditions. 372) – has acknowledged the fact that this 'reality' is no longer the one mediated by nineteenth-century novelists and experienced by nineteenth-century readers. though with the same proviso. P. as in the work of Iris Murdoch or Jerzy Kosinski. Finally. though problematically. a 'new realism'). in rejecting realism more thoroughly. at the furthest extreme (which would include 'fabulation') can be placed those fictions that. as in the work of John Fowles or E.
Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descants (1969)). 66). Both affirm the constructive powers of the mind in the face of apparent phenomenal chaos. Modernism only occasionally displays features typical of postmodernism: the over-obtrusive. p. The metafictional writer John Barth has expressed a common feeling about the term 'post-modernism' as 'awkward and faintly epigonic. Post-modernism can be seen to exhibit the same sense of crisis and loss of belief in an external authoritative system of order as that which prompted modernism. feebly following a very hard act to follow' (Barth 1980. S. p. suggestive less of a vigorous or even interesting new direction in the old art of storytelling than of something anticlimactic. however.2 Literary self-consciousness: developments Modernism and post-modernism: the redefinition of selfconsciousness Metafiction is a mode of writing within a broader cultural movement often referred to as post-modernism. Modernist self-consciousness. x) in the manner of contemporary metafiction. ostentatious typographic experiment (B. . visibly inventing narrator (as in Barth's Lost in the Funhouse (1968). does not 'systematically flaunt its own condition of artifice' (Alter 1975a. though it may draw attention to the aesthetic construction of the text.
nearly all contemporary experimental writing displays some explicitly metafictional strategies. dehumanization of character. continuous undermining of specific fictional conventions (Muriel Spark's quasi-omniscient author. Johnson's 'A Few Selected Sentences' (1973)). Any text that draws the reader's attention to its process of construction by frustrating his or her conventional expectations of meaning and closure problematizes more or less explicitly the ways in which narrative codes – whether 'literary' or 'social' – artificially construct apparently 'real' and imaginary worlds in the terms of particular ideologies while presenting these as transparently 'natural' and 'eternal'. and explicit parody of previous texts whether literary or non-literary (Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew (1979). self-reflexive images (Nabokov's mirrors.22 Metafiction Johnson's Travelling People (1963). critical discussions of the story within the story (Fowles's 'The Enigma' (1974). mazes). obtrusive proper names (Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973)). over-systematized or overtly arbitrarily arranged structural devices (Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa (1974)). Alan Burns's Babel (1969)). Although metafiction is just one form of post-modernism. John Barth's Chimera (1972)). total breakdown of temporal and spatial organization of narrative (B. Barth's Sabbatical (1982)). acrostics. parodic doubles. use of popular genres (Richard Brautigan's A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964). infinite regress (Beckett's Watt (1953)). Gabriel Josipovici's The Inventory (1968)). explicit dramatization of the reader (Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (1979)). incantatory and absurd lists (Donald Barthelme's Snow White (1967). In 1945 Joseph Frank explained the self-referential quality of modernist literature in these terms: . In all of these what is foregrounded is the writing of the text as the most fundamentally problematic aspect of that text. S. Fowles's very unVictorian ending in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969)). Raymond Federman's Double or Nothing (1971)). Chinese-box structures (Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962). Vonnegut's Slaughter-house-Five (1969)).
Literary self-consciousness
Since the primary reference of any word group is to something inside the poem itself, language in modern poetry is really reflexive . . . instead of the instinctive and immediate reference of words and word groups to the objects and events they symbolize, and the construction of meaning from the sequence of these references, modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity. (Frank 1958, p. 73) In short, self-reflexiveness in modernist texts generates 'spatial form'. With realist writing the reader has the illusion of constructing an interpretation by referring the words of the text to objects in the real world. However, with texts like T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), in order to construct a satisfactory interpretation of the poem, the reader must follow the complex web of cross-references and repetitions of words and images which function independently of, or in addition to, the narrative codes of causality and sequence. The reader becomes aware that 'meaning' is constructed primarily through internal verbal relationships, and the poem thus appears to achieve a verbal autonomy: a 'spatial form'. Such organization persists in contemporary metafictional texts, but merely as one aspect of textual self-reflexivity. Indeed, 'spatial form' may itself function in these fictions as the object of self-conscious attention (for a discussion of this aspect of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, see Chapter 5). Post-modernism clearly does not involve the modernist concern with the mind as itself the basis of an aesthetic, ordered at a profound level and revealed to consciousness at isolated 'epiphanic' moments. At the end of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), for example, Lily Briscoe suddenly perceives a higher (or deeper) order in things as she watches the boat return. Her realization is translated, directly and overtly, into aesthetic terms. Returning to her canvas, with intensity she draws the final line: 'It was finished. Yes she thought laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision' (p. 320). A post-modern 'line' is more likely to imitate that drawn by Tristram Shandy to represent the plot of his 'life and times' (resembling a diagram of the formation of an
oxbow lake). In fact, if post-modernism shares some of the philosophies of modernism, its formal techniques seem often to have originated from novels like Tristram Shandy (1760), Don Quixote (1604) or Tom Jones (1749). For Sterne, as for contemporary writers, the mind is not a perfect aestheticizing instrument. It is not free, and it is as much constructed out of, as constructed with, language. The substitution of a purely metaphysical system (as in the case of Proust) or mythical analogy (as with Joyce and Eliot) cannot be accepted by the metafictionist as final structures of authority and meaning. Contemporary reflexivity implies an awareness both of language and metalanguage, of consciousness and writing. B. S. Johnson's 'A Few Selected Sentences', for example, is precisely what its title suggests: a series of fragments taken from a wide variety of discursive practices (ranging from a sixteenthcentury description of the cacao fruit to absurd warnings) which, although resisting final totalization, can be arranged into a number of conventional narratives. The most obvious of these is a comment on what we are doing as we read: constructing a detective story. The style is reminiscent of Eliot's technique of fragmentation and montage in The Waste Land, but there the connections are present despite the fragmentary surface, to be recovered through the mythic consciousness as the reader partakes in the modern equivalent of the Grail search. The fragments which Johnson has shored against his ruins are not at all explicable by any such a priori transcendental system, only by his readers' knowledge of the conventions of stories. There is no longer a deep, structured collective unconscious to be relied upon, only the heavily italicized and multi-coded 'Life' with which the story ends (p. 80). Whereas loss of order for the modernist led to the belief in its recovery at a deeper level of the mind, for metafictional writers the most fundamental assumption is that composing a novel is basically no different from composing or constructing one's 'reality'. Writing itself rather than consciousness becomes the main object of attention. Questioning not only the notion of the novelist as God, through the flaunting of the author's godlike role, but also the authority of consciousness, of the mind, metafiction establishes the categorization of the world through the arbitrary system of
Literary self-consciousness
language. The modernist writer whose style fits closest with this essentially post-modernist mode of writing is, of course, James Joyce. Even in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), the epiphanic moments are usually connected with a self-reflexive response to language itself. The word 'foetus', for example, scratched on a desk, forces upon Stephen's consciousness a recognition of his whole 'monstrous way of life' (pp. 90–2). Ulysses (1922) goes further in showing 'reality' to be a consequence of 'style'. However, despite parody, stylization and imitation of non-literary discourses, there is no overtly selfreferential voice which systematically establishes, as the main focus of the novel, the problematic relationship of language and 'reality'. The only strictly metafictional line is Molly's 'Oh Jamesy let me up out of this Pooh' (p. 691), though there are many inherently self-conscious devices now widely used by metafictional writers, and the 'Oxen of the Sun' section is, of course, an extended piece of literary pastiche. Each of the parodies of literary styles in this section presents a direct and problematical relationship between style and content which draws attention to the fact that language is not simply a set of empty forms filled with meaning, but that it actually dictates and circumscribes what can be said and therefore what can be perceived. When a discussion of contraception, for example, creeps into the parody of the language of courtly love, the reader is made to see contraception in a new light. The realities of procreation in the twentieth century are thrown into a different perspective through their discussion within the linguistic parameters of the medieval world. Ulysses has eighteen chapters and eighteen main styles. B. S. Johnson's Travelling People (1963), overtly both Shandyan and Joycean, has nine chapters and styles. Style is explicitly explored here in terms of negativity: how it represents certain aspects of experience only by excluding others. The novel begins by parodying the opening of Tom Jones, with Johnson setting out his 'bill of fare' and explaining that the style of each chapter should spring from its subject matter. Each shift of style is further accompanied by a Fieldingesque chapter heading, which, through its equally vacuous generality in Johnson's text, undermines the attempt of such verbal signposts to be comprehensive. The
might appear in this light: It has always seemed to me in the novels that I've read now and then. Thus Tristram begs his reader. distancing unpleasant realities such as how many dogs are required to manufacture a certain amount of glue by communicating the information to himself in the language of a strident advertising slogan: 'See that your pet has a happy home in Henry's glue' (p. the reader is reminded that not only do characters verbally construct their own realities. as dependent on the reader for identity and sympathy. The opening page of John Barth's The Floating Opera (1956). the text reveals a post-modernist concern with how it is itself linguistically constructed. . 12). they are themselves verbal constructions. it seems. 15). No. come along with me reader. . attempt to construct identities for themselves.26 Metafiction introduction. Such a plunge into someone else's life and world . much closer to Sterne's establishment of the novelist as conversationalist. for example. and don't fear for your weak heart. Through continuous narrative intrusion. headings and 'interludes' complement the Joycean stylistic shifts through which the characters. is shown continually stylizing his existence. that the authors are asking a great deal of their readers who start their stories furiously in the middle of things. But beyond this essentially modernist perspective. This seems a far cry from the plunge into the complex flow of consciousness characteristic of the opening of modernist novels such as Ulysses or To the Lighthouse. the rootless 'travelling people' of the contemporary world. p. . little of pleasure in it. It is. for example. It might seem that in its (to quote Flann O'Brien) 'self-evident sham' (At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). It also signals the . words not beings. . The reader is thus made aware of how reality is subjectively constructed. Good heavens. p. in fact. 'bear with me – and let me go on and tell my story in my own way' (Tristram Shandy. rather than backing or sliding slowly into them. Henry. the protagonist.25) metafiction has merely reduced the complex stylistic manœuvres of modernism to a set of crude statements about the relation of literary fictions to the real world. has. how does one write a novel .
that of the very public medium of language. unlike them. whether one draws on psychological. Modernism aimed at the impossible task of exploring pure consciousness. finally discours. The apparent impersonality of histoire is always finally personal. In its recognition that the limits of one's language define the limits of one's self. environmental or physical evidence. this chapter will now attempt to examine the concerns of contemporary metafiction in relation to some of the changes in the way in which reality is mediated and constructed by cultural theory . so that even when consciousness is focused on something else – when writing. 296). The attempt to trace such a source is. There is no original 'source' of one's behaviour. frustrating the modern concern to define reality in terms of a unified consciousness. Thus Todd's modernist solipsism is continually undermined by the ironic and sometimes comic use of various Shandyan devices. Its central character Todd realizes that existence cannot finally be explained in the terms of logical causality. acts of consciousness have to be conscious of themselves. be recounted as plot. Having differentiated briefly between the modes of literary self-consciousness characteristic of modernist and post-modernist writing. The incompleteness which permeates everything in Tristram's account is here present. in fact.Literary self-consciousness 27 contemporary writer agonizing – like Sterne. with a new sophisticated narrative awareness that a story never has a 'real' beginning. p. doomed in precisely the way of Walter Shandy's encyclopaedia. can only ever begin arbitrarily. A 'story' cannot exist without a teller. for example – it must remain aware of itself on the edges of consciousness or the subject cannot continue to write. a whole self. ultimately. As Sartre argued in Being and Nothingness (1956). like Tristram – over the problem of beginnings but.5 The themes of Barth's novel in many ways resemble those of much modernist fiction. Metafiction has accepted Wittgenstein's notion that 'one thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it' (quoted in Josipovici 1977. metafiction breaks into solipsism by showing that the consciousness of Todd is here caught in a net not of its own making but of that of the novelist and.
sociologists and even economists have surely proved the tremendous importance of the serious possibilities of 'play'. The analysis of frames: metafiction and frame-breaking A frame may be defined as a 'construction. Everything is framed. foregrounds 'framing' as a problem. whether in life or in novels. that 'not many people are capable of adjusting their perceptive apparatus to the pane and the transparency that is the work of art. established order. Literature should not be analysed as a form of expression which simply sets up its own traditions and conventions totally apart from those that structure non-literary culture. Instead they look right through it and revel in the human reality with which the work deals' (Ortega y Gasset 1948. and the idea of 'framing' as the activity through which it is constructed. This chapter aims to look at the ways in which metafictional techniques can be seen as a response to such non-literary cultural developments. Contemporary metafiction. Two leading ideas in the field of sociology have been the notion of history/reality as a construct. is: what is a 'frame'? What is the 'frame' that separates reality from 'fiction'? Is it more than the front and back covers of a book. however. plan.28 Metafiction and practice outside the strict domain of the 'literary'. underlying support or essential substructure of anything' (Oxford English Dictionary). The first problem it poses. Nevertheless it seems to be these aspects of metafictional writing that critics seize on to accuse it of ephemerality and irrelevance. examining frame procedures in the construction of the real world and of novels. 31 ). Psychologists. then its relevance and sensitivity to the increasing and diverse manifestations of selfconsciousness in the culture as a whole have to be established. of course. the title and 'The End'? . the rising and lowering of a curtain. system . Modernism and post-modernism begin with the view that both the historical world and works of art are organized and perceived through such structures or 'frames'. . If metafiction is to be seen as a positive stage in the development of the novel. p. in particular. pointed out. Ortega y Gasset. Both recognize further that the distinction between 'framed' and 'unframed' cannot in the end be made. writing on modernism. . constitution. build.
' (p. p. as in Graham Greene's The End of the Affair (1951): 'A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead' (p. . . Julio Cortátzar's Hopscotch (1967) presents the reader with two 'books': the book can be read according to the order in which it is printed. The final chapter printed is chapter 155 (which directs the reader back to 123). the 'happily ever after'. Alternatively. so we can go on forever. 365). the apparent 'end' of the first order. 7). it is to discover that he or she should go back to chapter 131. and that it is finally impossible to know where one frame ends and another begins. Begin with our living happily ever after' (p. The first 'book' is read up to chapter 56. Susan decides that they should 'begin it at the end and end at the beginning. They often end with a choice of endings. that they lived Happily ever after. of boundaries. Metafictional novels often begin with an explicit discussion of the arbitrary nature of beginnings. 564). . the second 'book' begins at chapter 73 and covers the whole novel except for chapter 55. so the last printed words are: 'Wait'll I finish my cigarette' (Hopscotch. but.Literary self-consciousness 29 Modernist texts begin by plunging in in medias res and end with the sense that nothing is finished. is constructed through frames. The final 'end' is now apparently in chapter 58. Contemporary sociologists have argued along similar lines. when the reader gets there. that life flows on. such novels may end with a gloss upon the archetypal fictional ending. or the ending of the writing begins the events. but her author has decided: 'we commence as we would conclude. or it can be read according to an alternative order presented to the reader in the 'conclusion'. 366) Contemporary metafiction draws attention to the fact that life. John Barth's Sabbatical (1982) poses the question whether the ending of the events begins the writing. We are still waiting . Erving Goffman in Frame Analysis has suggested that there is no simple dichotomy 'reality/fiction': . and so on and on and on. Or they may end with a sign of the impossibility of endings. to the end of Fenwick and Susie . as well as novels. .
What both Goffman and metafictional novels highlight through the foregrounding and analysis of framing activities is the extent to which we have become aware that neither historical experiences nor literary fictions are unmediated or unprocessed or nonlinguistic or. of the organization of experience. Frames are essential in all fiction. can just as well be a dramatization of events as the events themselves – or a rehearsal of the dramatization. Goffman defines frames early in his book: I assume that definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles which govern events – at least social ones – and our subjective involvement in them. or a painting of the rehearsal or a reproduction of the painting. characters reading about their own fictional lives (Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller) and self-consuming worlds or mutually contradictory situations (Coover's 'The Babysitter'. 67) Analysis of frames is the analysis.30 Metafiction When we decide that something is unreal. PP. (ibid. p. 'fluid' or 'random'. 560–1) Frames in life operate like conventions in novels: they facilitate action and involvement in a situation. Any of these latter can serve as the original of which something is a mere mock-up. obvious framing devices range from stories within stories (John Irving's The World According to Garp (1976)). the real it isn't need not itself be very real. frame is the word I use to refer to such of these basic elements as I am able to identify. 'The Magic Poker' (1971)). When applied to fiction it involves analysis of the formal conventional organization of novels. They become more perceptible as one moves from realist to modernist modes and are explicitly laid bare in metafiction. leading one to think that which is sovereign is relationship – not substance. In metafictional novels. The concept of 'frame' includes Chinese-box structures which contest the reality of each . indeed.. as the modernists would have it. in the above terms. (Goffman 1974.
that is. Sometimes overt frames involve a confusion of ontological levels through the incorporation of visions. 84). One method of showing the function of literary conventions. ensuring the continuity and viability of the established frame. dreams. Parody and inversion are two strategies which operate in this way as frame-breaks. provided only that they are 'properly' muted. where 'In order to locate Book B. is to show what happens when they malfunction. our sense of reality is strong enough to cope with minor frame-breaks. in effect. p. but it will never be discovered in a 'natural' unframed state. The alternation of frame and frame-break (or the construction of an illusion through the imperceptibility of the frame and the shattering of illusion through the constant exposure of the frame) provides the essential deconstructive method of metafiction. Thus collusive exchanges between friends at stylish gatherings can be at once a means of breaking frame and a means of staying within it. first consult Book C and so on ad infinitum' (Labyrinths. within the disattend capacity of the frame. 382) . There are only levels of form. Such infinities of texts within texts draw out the paradoxical relationship of 'framed' and 'unframed' and. Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971)). Similar are so-called 'fictions of infinity' such as Borges' 'Library of Babel'. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. . There is ultimately no distinction between 'framed' and 'unframed'. Indeed the disattend track specifically permits the occurrence of many out-of-frame acts. There is ultimately only 'content' perhaps. of 'form' and 'content'. (Goffman 1974. according to Goffman. of revealing their provisional nature. . and in fact they reaffirm it. . John Barth's Chimera (1972)). It seems that.Literary self-consciousness 31 individual 'box' through a nesting of narrators (Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). hallucinatory states and pictorial representations which are finally indistinct from the apparently 'real' (Alain Robbe-Grillet's Dans le labyrinthe (1959). p.
real documents are referred to – as. Eliot is here using the convention of the reader's presence and the author's limitations – a pretence that neither knows what will happen next – to suggest through the collusive interchange that both are situated in ontologically undifferentiated worlds. reinforces the illusion. Adam Bede can be compared with a metafictional novel. . it functions mainly to aid the readerly concretization of the world of the book by forming a bridge between the historical and the fictional worlds. for example. 63). Although the intrusive commentary of nineteenth-century fiction may at times be metalingual (referring to fictional codes themselves).32 Metafiction This comment is interesting because it offers support for an intuitive sense that although Fielding. . He will perhaps turn round by and by and in the meantime we can look at that stately old lady' (p. in Goffman's terms. we will enter. for example. . Trollope and George Eliot. . expose the literary conventions that disguise this distinctness. In the chapter entitled 'The Rector'. very softly . John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman uses the device of authorial intimacy ultimately to destroy the illusion of reality. interpretation and appeals to the reader. The narrator meticulously describes each article that she takes out: . and their respective uses in realistic and metafictional novels. in the description of Sarah unpacking at Exeter. . Throughout the fiction. it is of the minor variety which. the narrative voice intrudes: 'Let me take you into their dining room . reinforce the reader's sense that one is a continuation of the other. are new. therefore. In metafictional texts such intrusions expose the ontological distinctness of the real and the fictional world. . It suggests that the one is merely a continuation of the other. set at roughly the same time and in many ways involving similar moral issues. for example. In Adam Bede (1859). often 'break the frame' of their novels they are by no means self-conscious novelists in the sense in which the term has been discussed here. such intrusions do in fact reinforce the connection between the real and the fictional world. the walls you see. George Eliot destroys the illusion of Hayslope's self-containedness by continually intruding moralistic commentary. and it is thus not metafictional. However. . Although this is a frame-break. In order to clarify the implications of the difference between a minor and a major frame-break.
the peculiar reality forced upon the reader is that the character who is the apparent teller of the tale is its inventor and not a recorder of events that happened (this becomes the entire theme of Raymond Federman's novel Double or Nothing). We tend to read fiction as if it were history. I find this new reality (or unreality) more valid' (pp. 400). not one of those greenish-coloured monstrosities of Victorian manufacture. 84–5). (p. But unlike her I fell for the Ralph Leigh part of it. Fowles employs the convention against itself. . Throughout The French Lieutenant's Woman there is an abundance of frame-breaks more overt than this. Of course we know that what we are reading is not 'real'. By actually appearing to treat the fiction as a historical document. particularly where the twentieth-century narrator suddenly appears as a character in the histoire as well as in the discours. 241) Sarah and the toby jug appear to have the same ontological status as the narrator. he acquires a peculiar reality through the same words by which he undermines the one that was just performed' (Goffman 1974.Literary self-consciousness 33 and then a Toby Jug. This brings the reader up against the paradoxical realization that normally we can read novels only because of our suspension of disbelief. . but we suppress the knowledge in order to increase our enjoyment. . . but a delicate little thing . The effect is one which Goffman has again discussed: 'When a character comments on a whole episode of activity in frame terms. to expose the levels of illusion. instead of reinforcing our sense of a continuous reality. . So the frame-break. Fowles goes on to argue. having bought it myself a year or two ago for a good deal more than the three pennies Sarah was charged. . The effect of this. as I can testify. (certain experts may recognize a Ralph Leigh) . She fell for the smile. of course. p. the toby was cracked and was to be recracked in the course of time. When Fowles discusses the fact that 'these characters I create never existed outside my own mind' (pp. We are forced to recall that our 'real' world can never be the 'real' world of the novel. while appearing to bridge the gap between fiction and reality. in fact lays it bare. . 86–7). . is to split it open. that 'Fiction is woven into all.
. one can learn how one's sense of ordinary reality is produced by examining something that is easier to become conscious of. namely. 251) Play.34 Metafiction Despite this effect of exposure. 51). 56–7) – and it is clear that psychologists like L. the reader may revise his or her ideas about the philosophical status of what is assumed to be reality. p. To some extent each metafictional novel is a fictional Mythologies which. What writers like Fowles are hoping is that each reader does this with a new awareness of how the meanings and values of that world have been constructed and how. however. As Goffman argues: The study of how to uncover deceptions is also by and large the study of how to build up fabrications . . . therefore. As a consequence of their metafictional undermining of the conventional basis of existence. and pretending is a fundamental element of play and games' (Detweiler 1976. . It is clear that metafictional writers view play in this light – Ronald Sukenick. it can be argued that metafictional novels simultaneously strengthen each reader's sense of an everyday real world while problematizing his or her sense of reality from a conceptual or philosophical point of view. Without necessarily accepting the Freudian notion that art and literature act as compensatory forms of gratification replacing for an adult the lost childhood world of play and escapism. in a story entitled 'The Death of the Novel' (1969): 'What we need is not great works but playful ones. (Goffman 1974. it can be argued not only that literary fiction is a form of play (if a very sophisticated form) but that play is an important and necessary aspect of human society. P. aims to unsettle our convictions about the relative status of 'truth' and 'fiction'. . A story is a game someone has played so you can play it too' (pp. how reality is mimicked and/or how it is faked. . like Roland Barthes's work. they can be challenged or changed. 'fiction is primarily an elaborate way of pretending. but he or she will presumably continue to believe and live in a world for the most part constructed out of 'common sense' and routine. games and metafiction All art is 'play' in its creation of other symbolic worlds. for example.
Jean Piaget (1951) and Gregory Bateson (1972) share this perception. Play is facilitated by rules and roles. p. and the spectator does not wish for the actual suffering of the contestant. As Bateson argues in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. 20) Literary fiction. However. he only enjoys the perfection of an iconography.Literary self-consciousness 35 S. In fact the shift of context is greater because fiction is constructed with language and language is characterized precisely by its detachability from specific context. It is not true that wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an intelligible spectacle. It aims to discover how we each 'play' our own realities. The spectators are never deluded into believing that a 'real' fight is taking place. The most important feature shared by fiction and play is the construction of an alternative reality by manipulating the relation between a set of signs (whether linguistic or non-linguistic) as 'message' and the context or frame of that message. the same behaviour can be 'framed' by a shift in context which then requires very different interpretative procedures. Language does not have to refer to objects and situations immediately present at the act of . For metafiction sets out to make this explicit: that play is a relatively autonomous activity but has a definite value in the real world. The metacommentary provided by self-conscious fiction carries the more or less explicit message: 'this is make-believe' or 'this is play'. The same set of actions performed in a 'play' context will not denote what they signify in a non-play context. and metafiction operates by exploring fictional rules to discover the role of fictions in life. it is also clear that critics of metafiction either disagree with psychologists' and sociologists' view of play as educative and enlightening or disagree with the notion of art as play. The sport is praised for its 'semiotic' as opposed to 'mimetic' construction of meaning. Vygotsky (1971). as a form of play. Roland Barthes demonstrates this very entertainingly in his analysis of wrestling in Mythologies. shifts signification in the same way. its flaunting of its status as play. (Barthes 1972b. they are kept constantly aware that it is a spectacle: only an image is involved in the game.
In metafiction this level is foregrounded to a considerable extent because the main concern of metafiction is precisely the implications of the shift from the context of 'reality' to that of 'fiction' and the complicated interpenetration of the two. This is its main connexion with art' (Millar 1968. When such a shift of context occurs. 21). Bateson saw play as a means of discovering new communicative possibilities. though. Metafiction draws attention to the process of recontextualization that occurs when language is used aesthetically – when language is. all play and fiction require 'meta' levels which explain the transition from one context to another and set up a hierarchy of contexts and meanings. Most psychologists of play emphasize this release from everyday contexts. They argue that 'a certain degree of choice. the more dislocatory it is (say. Without explicit metacommentary. p. A phrase uttered in a real-life context and referring to objects actually present can be transferred to many different contexts: everyday. Fictional play also re-evaluates the traditional procedures of communication and allows release from established patterns. is inherent in the concept of play. but. the meaning of the phrase will also shift. but its 'meaning' will necessarily be different. in the sense described above. because their relationship to signs outside themselves has shifted. the process of . the more the shift itself acts implicitly as a metacommenting frame.36 Metafiction utterance. However. ensuring the survival through adaptability of the novel itself. which he sees as ensuring human survival. it does not have to be directly indexical. Metafiction explicitly examines the relation of these procedures within the novel to procedures outside it. since the 'meta' level necessary for play allows human beings to discover how they can manipulate behaviour and contexts. The subsequent discovery of new methods of communication allows for adaptation. Thus the language of fiction may appear to imitate the languages of the everyday world. journalistic. philosophical. The actual relationship of the signs within the phrase will remain the same. from the everyday to literary fantasy rather than to literary realism). used 'playfully'. materials and ideas. however. literary. lack of constraint from conventional ways of handling objects. scientific.
Literary self-consciousness 37 recontextualization is unlikely to be fully understood. the aphasic person suffers from an incapacity to 'name' objects (an incapacity to manipulate language through the activity of substitution) and a tendency to rely on metonymy. contexts shift so continuously and unsystematically that the metalingual commentary is not adequate to 'place' or to interpret such shifts. Language thus loses its central characteristic of detachability from context. the more such metalanguages are needed if the relationship between the 'real' and the 'fictive' world is to be maintained and understood. In what Jakobson referred to as 'similarity disorder'. and this may result in an unintentional confusion of planes or orders of reality. the aphasic cannot use words unless the objects to which the words refer are immediately present. for example). The more 'playful' a literary work (the more. The reader is deliberately disoriented (as in the novels of William Burroughs. Although linguistic messages can operate outside their immediate referential contexts. but without any explanatory metalingual commentary to facilitate the transition from one to the other. Ostensibly realistically portrayed characters suddenly begin to act in fantastic ways. 67).. for example. Alternatively. some contemporary novels are constructed with extreme shifts of context or frame (from realism to fantasy. Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) achieves its bizarre effects through this type of shift. the more likely is the aphasic to understand it. The more dependent the message on the immediate context. The reader is thus neither offered a rational explanation for the shift nor provided with any means of relating one context to another. a man . p. metalanguage (reference to the codes of language themselves) is needed for this to be successful. In some novels. it shifts from everyday to alternative-world contexts). for instance). therefore. This was demonstrated very clearly in fact by Jakobson's work on speech disturbances or aphasia (Jakobson 1956). In metafictional novels it is the nature of this relationship which is the subject of enquiry. Jakobson suggests that this disorder is 'properly a loss of metalanguage' (ibid. Metalingual commentary is thus fore-grounded as the vehicle of that enquiry. Characters die and come back to life. In this disorder.
where metalingual insufficiency results in a failure to distinguish between hierarchies of messages and contexts. as much as play as a form of escapism. one involving 'assimilation of' and 'accommodation to' (Piaget's terms) the structures of the everyday world. Another fictional response to the sense of oppression by the endless systems and structures of present-day society – with its technologies. Thomas Pynchon and Joseph . Here the historical world and the alternative or fantasy world merge. It is therefore play as a rule-governed activity. (Politi 1976. institutions and traditions – is the construction of a play world which consists of similar endless systems and structures.38 Metafiction is turned into a snake 'for having disobeyed his parents' (p. he deliberately uses 'similarity disorder' in reverse. and finally the narrator starts to eat his face. bureaucracies. In metafiction they are always held in a state of tension. As Gina Politi has argued: There is some truth in the historical fact that whenever man has to be defined as man equals child. p. of release from 'having to mean'. 33). ideologies. which interests metafictional writers. where information is not processed. In other words. in Leonard Michaels's 'Mildred' (1964) a tense conversation is interrupted by one of the characters literally starting to eat the womb of one of the others. the edenic period whereby he can live without structures is short-lived and another game is invented which brings in the law-maker who declares what games are and what they are not. Similarly. The effect in both of these examples is close to that of a schizophrenic construction of reality (as Bateson sees it). Michaels gives no indication that this surrealist dislocation may be based on a confusion of the metaphorical 'eating one's heart out' (based on context detachability) with its literal meaning when returned to context. and the relationship between them – between 'play' and 'reality' – is the main focus of the text. 60) Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954) achieved the success it did because of its accurate perception of this point.
which therefore becomes meaningless. The central character David Brooke. physical and metaphysical explanations break down into a total overdetermination of meaning. of the legal system. is explored as much through what the language is as what it says. contemporary culture's answer to the Grail. set against the 'absolute truth'. the languages of commerce. in the collection entitled City Life (1970). obsessional systems. However. The novel also breaks down. of advertising: hundreds of systems compete with each other. of counterfeiting. The story is a parody of an interview between an anonymous Q and A about the identity and meaning of a black box which is typographically reproduced at the beginning of the story. Mythical. suffers from total recall of information and breaks down. of popular culture. like Borges' mnemonist.Literary self-consciousness 39 McElroy both construct novels whose vast proliferation of countersystems and counter-games suggests one way of eluding the apparent predetermination of the structures of the everyday world. the concordance of origins and endings of the Bible. of forging. Neither Brooke nor the novel can absorb and organize the numerous and contradictory codes and registers of language with which they are both confronted and constructed. collectively resisting assimilation to any one received paradigm and thus the normal channels of data-processing. biblical. Documentation. of deceiving. At one level the story is . geographical. The image of the smuggler's bible is in fact just one of the many examples in recent literature of versions of the 'black box'. numerical. Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and McElroy's Lookout Cartridge (1974) function through informational overload and apparent overdetermination. The image appears explicitly in another story concerned with human attempts to resist technological and social determinism: Barthelme's 'The Explanation'. the systems and structures presented to the reader never add up to a body of meaning or an interpretation. In McElroy's A Smuggler's Bible (1966) the central motif of smuggling.
moves towards a form of play which one theorist has termed the 'illinx': an entropic. . Q introduces a series of 'error messages'. Barthelme shows that his fiction can operate through simply recontextualizing its messages within his own 'play' world. . in a 'computerized' literarycritical discourse: undefined variable . mixed mode. self-annihilating . . improper sequence of operators . . . . however. improper character in constant . or at least the raw materials of one. that one's particularly grave . a human narrative. . that's a bitch . Such fiction. an extraordinarily handsome girl stripping. . . improper use of hierarchy . invalid character transmitted in sub-program statement. . missing operator . a chair. glowing like a shopping centre. (p. . corrections by a computer of uninterpretable programs. Barthelme's story dramatizes the human propensity to construct its own systems and interpretations in order to resist technological determinism and dehumanization. 72) Halfway through. . . still manages to process the message. If the machine operates in terms of its own cybernetic game theory. sees in the black box a face. no END statement (P. however. . a river. argument of a function is fixedpoint . which in this instance all refer to the story itself.40 Metafiction simply and directly metafictional: it is 'about' the noninterpretability of itself: Q: It has beauties A: The machine Q: Yes. .' A (the reader substitute within the story). Q tells the reader: 'The issues are not real in the sense that they are touchable. 73) Later. We construct these machines not because we confidently expect them to do what they are designed to do – change the government in this instance – but because we intuit a machine out there. .
Metafiction functions through the problematization rather than the destruction of the concept of 'reality'. The way out of this problem (and the perspective asserted by most metafictional writing) is implicit in the second part of Caillois's book where he argues that it is precisely an awareness of play as play which constitutes the civilizing. Huizinga defines play as a free activity which 'transpires in an explicitly circumscribed time and space. is carried out in an orderly fashion according to given rules and gives rise to group relations which often surround themselves with mystery or emphasize through disguises their difference from the ordinary world' (Huizinga 1949. The positive emphasis thus shifts to the laying bare of the rules of the game. for example. . Such novels usually set up an internally consistent 'play' world which ensures the reader's absorption. which is precisely where metafictional interest is focused. This accords with the notion of 'play' implicit in most metafictional novels. Two theories of play will briefly be considered here: that of Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1949) and that of Roger Caillois in Man. 'Illinx' becomes associated with attempts at pure mimesis and is seen to result in alienation. It depends on the regular construction and subversion of rules and systems. p. The player loses him or herself in a fantasy world and actually becomes the role being played (a favourite metafictional theme – as. . There is a central contradiction in both Huizinga's and Caillois's definition of play. Yet elsewhere he argues that he sees 'man' as becoming more and more civilized. Fictions of aleation or randomness can be placed in this category. They appear to argue that the main significance of play is its civilizing influence. but Huizinga explicitly states at one point that he sees civilization becoming less and less playful. 25). possibilities of play. the concept of 'pretence'. a kind of seizure or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness' (Caillois 1962. Play and Games (1962). as opposed to the brutally instinctual. pp. however.Literary self-consciousness 41 form which represents an attempt to 'momentarily destroy the stability of perceptions and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind . in Muriel . and then lays bare its rules in order to investigate the relation of 'fiction' to 'reality'. 34–5).
the interregnum may be experienced as total freedom. A new emphasis on the importance of discovering fresh combinations in probability and risk is shown in the application of game theory. more than aleatory art. game theory is an increasingly important aspect of systems analysis. In fact. As Michael Beaujour suggests: The desire to play a game in reverse usually arises when the straight way of playing has become a bore . Although only a system can replace a system. The reader of The French Lieutenant's . . the rules of the game. realism. and metafiction becomes the mode most conducive to it! The current 'playfulness' within the novel is certainly not confined merely to literary form but is part of a broader development in culture which is registered acutely in all postmodernist art. Even in the commercial world. becomes the mode most threatening to full civilization. then. now seem artificial. the existential notion of reality as a game of being. p. Metafiction is in the position of examining the old rules in order to discover new possibilities of the game.42 Metafiction Spark's The Public Image (1968)) or attempts to impose it on others as 'reality'. it in fact echoes some of the major concerns of twentieth-century thought: Piaget's work on the educational value of play. had somehow become 'natural' to the players. which although arbitrary.). to economic or political problems. for example. the proliferation of popular psychology books such as Eric Berne's Games People Play. the possibility of the endless play of language through the release of the signifier in post-structuralist theory such as that of Lacan or Derrida and. but the rules of the new one are not yet defined and are therefore experienced as the 'waning of former rules' (ibid. Some metafictional novelists make the reader explicitly aware of his or her role as player. Wittgenstein's view of language as a set of games. (Beaujour 1968. In its awareness of the serious possibility of play. of course. it is but the moment of a new deal. tyrannical and dead: the system does not allow for sufficient player freedom within it and must be discarded. . In literature. 60) Freedom is the moment when the game or the genre is being discarded.
Metafiction very deliberately undermines a system. one very much modelled on the Heideggerian game of being. as you are inclined' (p. aleatory or Dadaist art which attempts to embrace randomness or 'illinx'. becomes a player in the game. Johnson's Aren't You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs (1973).) Only a common deployment of the title links the separate sections of the novel. say. (The effect is perhaps closer to that of Márquez's fictions. The latter. traditionally a metaphor for life. unlike. having to choose an ending. The 'Dear Reader' is no longer quite so passive and becomes in effect an acknowledged fully active player in a new conception of literature as a collective creation rather than a monologic and authoritative version of history. as in Coover's 'Panel Game' (1971) or The Universal Baseball Association.Literary self-consciousness 43 Woman. Barthelme and Federman present the reader with acrostics. where fantastic events and situations are integrated into a basically realistic context with no narratorial hint of their impossibility or absurdity. addresses the reader in the second person and explicitly discusses the supremacy of his or her activity in realizing the text imaginatively. puzzles to be solved. S. for example. there is playfulness but none of the systematic flaunting characteristic of metafiction. or to explore the mode of fictional presentation. and black boxes or blank pages to interpret. Inc. Another sort of fiction is that built around the idea or rules of an actual game. but not all playfulness in fiction is of the metafictional variety. is used here as a metaphor for the strategies of art. it is fabulatory because the reader is never required systematically to connect the artifice of the narrative with the problematic 'real' world. the reader is told to 'provide your own surmises or even your own ending. Calvino's novel. an adventure story in which nothing happens. 41). (1968) and Nabokov's The Defence (1964). In the title story of B. All metafiction 'plays' with the form of the novel. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. In a novel like Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America. is close to metafiction in that the game of chess. according to the reader's own fictional predilections. Luzhin is one of Nabokov's . It is metafictional only to the extent that it foregrounds the arbitrary relationship between words and things and lays bare the construction of meaning through metaphorical substitution. For the most part.
with the apparent structure of his life. The 'problem of the equality of appearance and numbers' (Pricksongs and Descants. 93). Writers employing such techniques.44 Metafiction familiar artist manqué figures. p. of play with combination and permutation – is a favourite device in metafiction. He provides variety in this life by means of the slightly shifting repetitions that . through his own conceptualizations. playing blind games of chess in order to achieve abstract perfection until the 'consecutive repetition of a familiar pattern' (p. he throws himself out of the window and dies in what his chess-obsessed mind has taken to be a real-life game. activities and tangible objects which could be invoked in the repertoire of actions' (Calvino 1970. through a heightened sense of the randomness of the world. that in ancient times 'the storyteller would delve into the natural resources of his own stock of words. In a state of paranoia similar to Woolf's Septimus Smith. Italo Calvino suggests that the combinative impulse has been basic to literature from the beginning. but that the mistake is to search for a perfect form of order. Samuel Beckett begins with the perception that habit and routine form the substructure of most individual existences. in whatever mathematical or other combination they choose. 168) becomes an invincible opponent taking over his life. the element of chance in combination may throw up a whole new possibility which rational exploration might not have discovered. 8) – that is. as just as correspondent with reality as the paradigms of realism. Combinative play in metafiction is concerned with the self-consciously performed reintroduction into the literary system of previously outworn modes and the exposure of present exhausted forms often unrecognized as such. The novel suggests that each person is to some extent the victim of his or her own games with reality. He did this by combinations and permutations of all the characters. He therefore uses both as the starting point for his fiction and pushes them to a logical extreme which reveals not only their absurdity but also their necessity in a world that has no innate structure of its own. Malone tells himself stories that are made to correspond. which itself turns out to be only the story he narrates. Further. He suggests that this forms a kind of generative grammar of narrative which makes renewal possible. p. have come to see its configuration.
Literary self-consciousness 45 he consciously forces upon the narrative process. on the one hand. 20). Nothing' (p. as Mr Nixon tells Mr Hackett. The human mind is a fallible instrument of measurement and the external world a chaos. to end with: 'that meant nothing' (p. an abstract . like the half-page of combinations of 'man' and 'woman' in the attempt to settle the question of whether Mrs Gorman is a 'Man's woman' and whether she and Watt will therefore suit each other. however exhaustive the account. The passage begins with an oscillation between polarities – of gender. In Watt (1953) the protagonist totally replaces the world with his verbal constructs when he realizes the impossibility of transcribing it. 141) (not even the binary opposition of all or nothing but the identity of all with nothing). The Lynch family. attempting to total one thousand years of age between them. the reader's attention has anyway been called to the ontological status of the fictional text. Watt's life is full of similarly fruitless calculations. 'I tell you nothing is known. The problem is that to cover the infinite number of possible situations that can arise from a finite number of experiences would involve the use of infinite numbers of words and repetitions. doubly erroneous' (p. Beckett's attempt to show this makes the text become rather like an official form which asks one to delete the irrelevant information. 101). Even if the figures were not in some epistemological doubt. Knowledge derived from human calculation or generalization can only demonstrate the epistemological distance between consciousness and objective reality. for the patterns Malone sets up seem to bear not even an analogous relationship to the meaning of the world outside him. The consequent calculations are . have their calculations completely undermined by the textual superiority of the footnote informing the reader: 'The figures given here are incorrect. in an attempt to construct a system which will offer him a stable identity. . In attempting to grasp the meaning of phenomena. of rhymes (the arbitrary soundrelations in language such as 'Watt' and 'not'). The contradiction between. he enumerates every possible combination and permutation he can think of for each set of circumstances. of terms like 'call' and 'countercall' – but this simple binary opposition is abandoned. Malone Dies (1951) has to be understood in these terms. . However.
three feet from ground. azure. . the apparent concrete illogical 'reality' of experience in the world (which Realism chooses to treat as one and the same) is.' The human subject is suddenly inserted into the geometry problem – 'the head against the wall at B. In Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) the second sentence. . one glimpse and vanished. as in Waiting for Godot (1956): 'Let us not then speak ill of our generation. he simply ignores the world. on the other. irreconcilable. suggests that poetic descriptions are no longer valid. attempting to come to terms with this problem. . as in the end of 'Dante and the Lobster' (More Pricks than Kicks. This spiralling sentence structure is very common in much of his work. endlessly omit'. It is true the population has increased' (p. So Watt constructs his own system of 'Kriks' and 'Kraks'. . . . . Combination is foregrounded even on a stylistic level. waters. heat/ ice. . These combinations and selections. which functions in a way and with effects similar to the footnote in Watt. . produce individual utterances (paroles) or stories which have meaning only through their . 33). 7–14). Calvino's fiction also uses these strategies of combination. 1934): 'Well. human/mathematical. drawing from a total system of literature (a langue). It is not' (p. thought Belacqua. in a sequence again of colliding combinations which reduce this world to variations on the alignments of ABCD (pp. In The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969) a footnote tells the reader that the 'author' (who is effectively made redundant by the information) generated the text in the manner reproduced in fact by the narrative situation: a group of characters who are mute tell their stories by selecting and combining the images from a pack of tarot cards. verdure. light/dark. the arse against the wall at A.46 Metafiction methodology which constructs a 'system' and. the knees against the wall between B and C' – and the text breaks down into a series of oppositions: white/black. Let us not speak of it at all. Many of Beckett's characters spend their fictional lives in various forms of serious play. So is the use of contradiction. 'Islands. in fact. 19). Let us not speak well of it either. . . and substitutes the mathematical: 'Diameter three feet. God help us all. Two diameters at right angles AB CD divide the white ground into two semicircles ACB BDA. Instead of trying to force correspondence between his system and the world. it's a quick death. .
disordered pages. a cloud of smoke hides the first part of the paragraph' (p. (Again this is a very common metafictional device. B. Johnson. is himself produced through the textual combinations. The novel opens with a direct address to the reader in the situation of reading. We are reminded also of its intertextual existence through the fragments of novels. 120). an operation that made sense only as theoretical hypothesis' (p. which. Two examples of this literary production in a . an ultimate intertextual key. S. This confuses the ontological levels of the text with descriptions like: 'The novel begins in a railway station . pages stuck together. . John Irving and Donald Barthelme. The possibilities of 'literature as system' begin to obsess him. Hamlet. and in particular parodistic. Macbeth.Literary self-consciousness 47 differential relation with implied archetypal stories recurring throughout: Oedipus. now the contemporary categorizer. by Flann O'Brien. 8). Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller discovers a more effective way out of this endlessly permutating system: the use of overtly metafictional. metafictionally reflect back on the conventional contracts which legitimize 'meaning'. He believes that to write a 'great work' of literature simply involves the provision of a reference catalogue of existing 'great works'. Here the situation of narration is confused with the situation of the histoire. Throughout we are reminded of the status of the book as an artefact through references to missing pages. . used extensively. but through techniques like irony provide themselves with escape routes from the endless permutations of systems which might continually change their surface forms but which retain their inherent structures. stories and narratives embedded within the outer frame.) Both Beckett and Calvino metafictionally 'play' with possibilities of combination. reminding the reader that descriptions in novels are always creations of that which is to be described: that the language in this sense refers ultimately to itself. until he realizes: 'It was absurd to waste any more time on an operation whose implicit possibilities I had by now explored completely. in their arbitrariness. Lear. and a metalingual discourse upon the construction of the plot and the relation of histoire to discours. Other novelists may choose to impose extreme formal constraints on themselves. the Grail legend. devices. for example. The contemporary 'author'.
for example. At 'M'. yet it is close to art in that it is so narrowly itself: it does not stand for anything else' (p.48 Metafiction very closed field are Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa (1974) and Gilbert Sorrentino's Splendide-Hotel (1973). . one is always driven by insane but meticulously considered needs. The linguistic structure dictates both formal effects and meaning. A similar example of what Abish has referred to as language as a 'field of action' is Sorrentino's Splendide-Hotel. 14). though never defined. it is the stylistic norm until well into the novel. At 'O' the reader is told: 'One is always either moving forwards or backwards. therefore. seen as intrinsically playful rather than intrinsically aesthetic. the non-person existing outside the discourse. However. the letters of the alphabet merely serve to trigger off verbal musings. tend to point the direction from metafiction to a 'literature of silence'. a literature solely concerned with its own linguistic processes. and so on. The Splendide-Hotel. therefore. He literally awaits creation through language. He thus offers a view of literature similar to that formulated by Roman Jakobson: the view that literature is a message for its own sake. a murder can occur which could change the whole course of the action. through an arbitrary order and set of distinctions). The narrator. or a pure formalism. Alliteration cannot function because. Alphabetical Africa works on the principle that every sentence in the first chapter is composed only of words beginning with 'A'. however. in their self-contained linguistic play.' Thus even the historic 'one'. Here. instead of being a technique of linguistic deviance and thus foregrounded. is ultimately constructed through it (explicitly. Chapter 2 adds 'B' words. cannot be introduced as a person until 'I'. The narrator intrudes with the information that 'I insist I do not speak of this game as art. both Abish and Sorrentino. is clearly the verbal imagination itself. Even the story and the development of the plot are determined by what can be constructed out of the available linguistic elements. or a message about itself (Jakobson 1960).
however. aspects of a broader shift in thought and practice whereby reality has increasingly come to be seen as a construct. reveals an intense preoccupation.) A close analysis of The History Man. p. They are each. for in retrospect it 'reads' like a novel: its end is known. The continual use of deliberately well-worn phrases about the Kirks (Howard's 'two well-known and disturbing books'. He. in fact. I'll buy the food'.Literary self-consciousness The linguistic universe: reality as construct 49 Frame analysis and play theory are areas of contemporary social investigation which illumine the practice of metafiction and show the sensitivity of its reponse to cultural change. clearly recognizable as a surrogate for Bradbury himself. scurries across the corridor of Watermouth University where the novel is set. suggested that history be contemplated as a work of art. Hegel. The only blatantly metafictional moment is when an academic novelist. the novel manages to suggest the fictionality of 'reality' without entirely abandoning realism. like fiction. the juxtaposition of normally unrelated items such as 'a new kind of Viennese coffee cake to eat and a petition to sign' (p. interestingly. (He is. 3). This is the theme of Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man (1975). however. The Kirks are explicitly 'types' who exist in the service of plot: the plot of history/fiction which envelops the plotter Howard through the superior shaping powers of the novelist himself. presented as a very minor and ineffectual character. reminds the reader of his ultimate control through the ironic repetition of events at the end. Metafiction suggests not only that writing history is a fictional act. with interrelating plots which appear to interact independently of human design. the antithetical structures and parallelisms ('You buy the drinks. but that history itself is invested. Even the opening paragraph is less a piece of realistic prose than a parody of realism. 3): these function not only to parody the Kirks' lifestyle but to foreground the ways in which that lifestyle is also a consequence of Bradbury's obtrusive linguistic style. ranging events conceptually through language to form a world-model. with the notion of history as fiction. Like much British self-conscious fiction. though. allowing Howard the delusion of freedom. 8). . formally as well as thematically. p.
the numerous plots that can be drawn out of. It is she who exposes Howard's plot as 'a piece of late nineteenth-century realism' (p. The characters in both novels self- . has suggested that Americans have always treated reality as their own construction. Howard acts as though he were the embodiment of history and thus in control of both his own and others' destinies. He functions to set fictional desire against fictional reality and to show how one is translated into the other. . fails to grasp. for example. the novelist. is submerged in the main narrative to suggest the ways in which our individual interpretations are always parts of larger ones. The notion of the fictionality of the plots of history is textually reinforced through a variety of techniques. with those of history – here constructed through language by Bradbury himself. A comparison of the exploration of plots in John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) with that undertaken by Bradbury in The History Man illustrates very well such differences between these two fictional traditions. of course. Thus the notion of history as either a rather badly made plot or a fiendish conspiracy is more deeply rooted in the American than in the British novel.50 Metafiction The significance of these events Howard. . 52). p. To some extent the idea that life involves the construction of plots has always been a preoccupation of the novel. Although 'the days may lie contingently ahead of them . This foregrounds the provisional status within the overall discours of any character's or narrator's speech act. The reader is taken into the dynamic present tense of Howard's plots. as escape from plot) who points out the multiple possibilities of interpretation. 209). any historical or fictional situation. the Kirks always have a plot of many events' (p. yet reminded of Freud's law of displacement – that it is impossible to see the world other than as we wish it to be – by the ostentatious entries of the greater plot-maker. into the text. trapped as he is both in his own 'lifestyle' and in Bradbury's 'fictional style'. however. It is Miss Callendar (whose name suggests time as contingency. in fact. they have always realized that 'through language it is possible to create environments radically different from those supported by political and social systems' (Poirier 1967. 16). or imposed on. Richard Poirier. Howard confuses his own plots. The dialogue.
however. They set out to show that 'reality' is not something that is simply given. One of the clearest sociological expositions is in Peter L. The consequence of this. Hegel and undergraduate innocence. The reader is presented. proliferating and uncontrollable. all the characters are selfconsciously plotters. that 'the very universe is nought but change and motion' (p. Even Barth's demonstration of his authorial control through the overplot of the mythic quest is continually and ironically undercut to give the sense. his characters embrace nothing but the 'baroque exhaustion of the frightening guises of reality' (Barth 1967. In the novel as a whole. p. These social forms operate within particular historical structures of power and frameworks of . Berger and Thomas Luckmann's book. though. is that. whether of their own or others' making. while using it like Howard to gain personal advantages. 'Reality' is manufactured. in this world. in attempting to embrace all. where history lessons teach that 'already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another.Literary self-consciousness 51 consciously participate in plots. But in The Sot-Weed Factor there is no such area of narrative stability. Plot is all. However. the metafictional bones are often left obtruding from a very thin human covering. 81). The concept of reality as a fiction has been theoretically formulated within many disciplines and from many political and philosophical positions. The Social Construction of Reality (1971). moreover. because the plots are so much more anonymous. In The History Man the stable ironic voice of the author ensures that the reader can observe and evaluate Howard's version of the past and his imposition of various images and plots upon the present. It is produced by the interrelationship of apparently 'objective facticities' in the world with social convention and personal or interpersonal vision. as Burlingame expresses it. a past of which we know nothing with certainty – not even that it is false' (Labyrinths. 137). in fact. and Burlingame gives philosophic respectability to the notion of plotting. 42–3). Ebenezer argues that what the cosmos lacks human beings must supply themselves. with a fictional world in many ways akin to Borges' Tlön. In Barth's novel. pp. the characters' behaviour appears far more desperate and absurd than Howard's self-assured exploitation of Marx. Freud.
Problems that interrupt this flow are seen to be translated into its terms and assimilated: 'Consciousness always returns to the paramount reality as from an excursion' (ibid. At this point they need to be re-examined. It opens up a 'foreground for deliberation and innovation' (Berger and Luckmann 1971. 'I am obliged to suspend this doubt as I routinely exist in everyday life' (ibid. 71). and confers an apparent homogeneity upon social experience. completely naturalized. normally disguises movement between levels. of course. Everyday reality is. 'reality par excellence'. both in life and in fiction. however. we are not conscious of these shifts. Contemporary reality. although we may doubt its reality. If this were not so. Conventions can. in particular. 35–7). p. but as a web of interrelating. Most of the time.) Habitualization provides for direction and specialization. (This is also. p. multiple realities. Berger and Luckmann suggest that convention and habit are necessary because human beings need to have their choices narrowed for significant action to take place...52 Metafiction knowledge. It imposes itself massively on consciousness so that. the action could not be effortlessly performed. by freeing our energies for more productive ends. the novel never gets under way as an histoire but functions only as a self-regarding discours which never quite manages to get the story told. 58). According to this view. become oppressive and rigidified. instrumented through social institutions and conventions. the basis for realistic fiction. for Berger and Luckmann. however. When the conventions regarding fictive time. however. are undermined in Tristram Shandy. Habit ensures that patterns can be repeated in such a way that the meaning of an action is not retained at the level of consciousness. the 'meta' levels of fictional and social . It is only when a convention is exposed as such that the lacunae between levels are also exposed. It is no longer experienced as an ordered and fixed hierarchy. is continually being reappraised and resynthesized. for example. Continual shifts in the structures of knowledge and power produce continual resyntheses of the reality model. pp. Habit. Moving through this reality involves moving from one 'reality' to another.
The first sort employs structural undermining of convention. using a specific previous text or system for its base (novelists like Fowles.) What has to be acknowledged is that there are two poles of metafiction: one that finally accepts a substantial real world whose significance is not entirely composed of relationships within language. life with and by means of the language I share with my fellow men [sic!] (ibid. Spark. Brautigan. which has provided the main critique of realism. inauthentic language of 'Free Women' which freezes the everyday – 'British life at its roots' – into a mocking parody of itself. Ishmael Reed. . The second is represented by those writers who conduct their fictional experiments even at the level of the sign (like Barthelme.Literary self-consciousness 53 discourse might shift our notion of reality slightly but can never totally undermine it. that language is the main instrument for maintaining this everyday reality: 'Everyday life is above all. for example. for example. . presenting reality as a set of equally non-privileged competing discourses. Berger and Luckmann argue further. 39–40). (Doris Lessing's protagonist Anna. however. can be seen as resisting assimilation into the terms of the everyday. because in this novel 'reality par excellence' is represented by the misrepresentational. as long as literature maintained a totalitarian ideology of the . radically to unsettle our notion of the 'real'. It is this exposure of 'reality' in terms of 'textuality'. in fact. 462). Vonnegut. Thus texts which move towards a breakdown of the language system. and one that suggests there can never be an escape from the prisonhouse of language and either delights or despairs in this. Berger and Luckmann do not. As Barthes argued: These facts of language were not perceptible so long as literature pretended to be a transparent expression of either objective calendar time or of psychological subjectivity . give enough attention to the centrality of language in constructing everyday reality. pp. in fact. in The Golden Notebook. Joyce's Finnegans Wake) and therefore fundamentally disturb the 'everyday'. Lessing) because language is so pre-eminently the instrument which maintains the everyday. They attempt.. loses her precarious hold on this 'everyday life' when she feels 'at a pitch where words mean nothing' (p. or parody.
as long as literature was 'realistic'. rather than in their reference to objects outside that text. finally. The passage could almost be a deliberate flaunting of Jakobson's notion of literary form (for a full discussion of this. Seaman: semen. attention is drawn to the formal organization of words in literature and away from their referential potential. p. poetic. rhyme and image. p. Jakobson argues that the poetic function of language manifests itself by projecting the paradigmatic or metaphorical dimension of language (the vertical dimension which functions through substitution) on to the syntagmatic or metonymic plane (the horizontal dimension which works through combination). of course. Metafictional texts often take as a theme the frustration caused by attempting to relate their linguistic condition to the world outside. referenial. Stickleback. In this passage. Freshwaterfish. or more commonly speaking. 138) By 'these facts'. but green: raw? spoiled? vigorous? Stickle: stubble. Back: Bach: Bacchus: bachate: berry. (Pricksongs and Descants. Freshwaterfish: green seaman. the speaker is wholly at the mercy of these internal operations of language.54 Metafiction referent. see Lodge 1977a). metalingual – whirl around him: So think. conative. phatic and. while all the possible functions of language – emotive. of paroles with no discoverable langues. Yes. condemned to the substitution of one arbitrary phoneme for another: 'Stickleback. (Barthes 1972c. Coover's 'Panel Game' (1969) parodies the attempt to find an all-encompassing truth in language. by showing the narrator caught up in a maze of the myriad possibilities of meaning. Or maybe scruple. 63) Through the emphasis on the arbitrary associations of sound. he means the extent to which language constructs rather than merely reflects everyday life: the extent to which meaning resides in the relations between signs within a literary fictional text. Rawberry? Strawberry. Freshwaterfish .
is now firmly embedded in the contemporary novel. Muriel Spark's work is a good example of this development. The novel. The incongruous tagging of an adjective normally tied to objects as physically palpable as Mrs Hogg to something as intangible as a 'public response' brings into focus the relationship between her spiritual and physical reality. spiritually absent. When Caroline (the central character who becomes aware that her life is writing itself into a novel) opens the door to Mrs Hogg's knock. She appears. goes on to delight in demonstrating the impossibility of this presence. the narrator informs us that 'as soon as Mrs Hogg stepped into her room. . to be a full presence. however. Yet. Mrs Hogg's absence becomes as troublesome and problematical as her huge and physically grotesque presence. She had no private life whatsoever. This alerts the reader to the condition of the text. massively. she at first receives the impression that 'nobody was there'. she disappeared. for she uses textual strategies of self-reference. . yet still maintains a strong 'story' line. Her physical grossness appears to be metaphorically (and conventionally realistically) related to her inner moral condition. In Spark's first novel The Comforters (1957) the character Mrs Hogg (the name itself undermines the tendency of realistic fiction to assign apparently 'arbitrary' non-descriptive names to characters) forces her overwhelming physical and mental presence upon the other characters and upon the reader. just as much as a novel by Sorrentino or Sarraute or any other more obviously postmodernist writer whose embodiment of the paradoxes of fictionality necessitates the total rejection of traditional concepts of plot and character. even in those novels that appear to eschew radically experimental forms or techniques.Literary self-consciousness 55 [metonymic] Freshwaterfish: green seaman [metonymic/ metaphoric] seaman: semen [metaphoric] . and afterwards Mrs Hogg is described as 'pathetic and lumpy as a public response' (p. She is simultaneously. physically present and totally. explored through textual self-reference. 154). 182). in this sense. shortly after one of the characters utters the familiar metaphorical cliché that Mrs Hogg appears to be 'not all there'. to its state of 'absence'. she simply disappeared.' The notion of reality as a construct. . God knows where she went in her privacy' (p.
Spark raises a moral point about the ethics of those who 'stand for' goodness and righteousness and ultimately become slaves to the public image of their cause. an actress. but always with some realistic motivation. In The Comforters this self is a moral reformer. . sustains the plot momentum by her desperate search for a man to murder her. the public medium of language. a heroine of D. Mrs Hogg. and exists through. absenteeism is downright immoral' (p.56 Metafiction Through an ostensibly whimsical trick. Percy Mannering (Memento Mori (1959). The self can even be a mask. The moral and existential points are both made through the metafictional exposure. Humphrey Place in The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) is given a similar point of view when he replies to the chameleon-like Dougal's suggestion that he take time off: 'No I don't agree to that . and he later affirms. 71) – a remark which could stand. Characters are never presented merely as words on the page. having been designated a minor role in the plot. Not to Disturb (1971) . 22). and because they are morally deficient. Characters are absent because they are linguistic signs. when not essential to its unfolding. Such people. the lack of an absence' (p. 87). of course. Jean Brodie. In the earlier novels the connection between the aesthetic and the moral interpretation of the word 'absenteeism' is based on the perceived connection between inventing a character in fiction and fictionalizing in life in order to escape moral responsibility and to glorify the self. like Hogg with her fanatical moral intrusiveness. Georgiana Hogg is a public figure in all senses of the word because she is contained by. 'something between Jane Eyre. 20). . p. Lise. Lawrence and the governess in The Turn of the Screw' – Annabel in The Public Image (p. she does not exist. thereby corrupt the inner worth of their causes. The device is used throughout Spark's work. She does not know the man but can confidently identify him: 'not really a presence. Spark also makes an ontological point concerning the status of fictional objects. Beyond this. H. In the later novels. 49). in The Driver's Seat (1970). 'once you start absenting yourself you lose your self-respect' (p. as a definition of any character in fiction. however. or a great aesthete ('each new death gave him something fresh to feel'). Thus. The self might be a great pedagogue and leader.
that he could not die without me' (p. rather than an appurtenance of. although this awareness of the problems of representation is far from new. so the Abbess does not long for beatification but declares at the end of the novel: 'I am become an object of art' (p. Johnson uneasily accommodates a notion of 'absence'. The selfconscious literary irony is clearly secondary to the pathos and absurdity of the represented human situation. within a broadly based realistic framework. that in most British writing the problem tends to . an awareness of the linguistic construction of the reality of the text. The author visits Christie in hospital.Literary self-consciousness 57 or The Abbess of Crewe (1974). Again. though. It is true to say. of course. the necessary human awfulness of the situation forces Johnson to abandon his focus on verbal interaction and to shift to apparent interpersonal relationship. Johnson. In Christie Malry's Own Double Entry (1973) Johnson continually intrudes into the text to remind the reader that Christie is whatever fortuitous collection of words happened to enter his head during composition. or even of such British fiction as that of Christine Brooke-Rose and Ann Quin or Brigid Brophy's In Transit (1969). 180). of American writers such as Barthelme or Brautigan. for example. not knowing who I was. is clearly drawn towards a traditional liberal-humanist treatment of his characters and yet displays the conviction that they exist merely as the words he chooses to put on the page. it has clearly come to dominate contemporary critical theory. 125). Characters in fiction are. self-consciously a replacement for. The implications of this provide a fairly simple creative starting point for much metafictional play. Yet. S. He never abandons realism in the manner of the nouveau roman. To be aware of the sign is thus to be aware of the absence of that to which it apparently refers and the presence only of relationships with other signs within the text. at his death-bed scene. and increasingly fiction itself. Is a character more than a word or a set of words? B. The novel becomes primarily a world of words. the everyday world. literally signs on a page before they are anything else. aesthetic and moral issues become interchangeable. In many of these writers' novels the sign as sign to a large extent overtly replaces any imaginary referent such as realism might offer. 'and the nurses suggested I leave.
as his son's ex-girlfriend suggests. without which we would have no access to empirical reality. as in Spark's novels. to have been in the wrong story: 'There was an author in his life. rather than 'radical' position. thematic concerns are picked up at a level of . In a way not a man. The missing-person motif is. Again. The exploration is provided with a foundation in psychological realism through the disappearance of the establishment figure of John Marcus Fielding. A system. p. The given can thus be known only through the non-given (the symbol). 237). the work of intuition can acquire no fixed form' (quoted in Iser 1975. or through macro-structures like plot and narrative voice. John Fowles explores the concept from a similar. in Pirandellian fashion. Writing necessitates 'absence'. The sign as sign is still. Fielding. self-effacing in such fiction. seems to have disappeared because he felt himself. and ultimately to construct it for ourselves and be constructed within it. a view of things? Something that had written him. to a large extent. As Cassirer puts it: 'Without the relations of unity and otherness. The problem of 'absence' is here an extension of the notion that a fictional world is created by a real author through a series of choices about the deployment of linguistic units. but nevertheless in some sense constitutes a version of the everyday world. it is because symbols are not reality and do not embody any of the actual properties of the world that they allow us to perceive this world. finally realistically motivated position in his story 'The Enigma' (1969). An existing object is made knowable only through a symbol – by being translated into something it is not. it is used in contravention. of similarity and dissimilarity. the motif is used to suggest possibilities which totally confound rational solution. of identity and difference. of course. the detective story. and to this extent metafictional writers like Muriel Spark can be seen fictionally to embody this ultimately 'commonsense'.58 Metafiction be explored thematically. Ernst Cassirer made the point that signs and symbols have to annul presence to arrive at representation. P. Had really made him just a character in a book' (The Ebony Tower. however. Here. In other words. Through the metafictional play with definitions of fictional character. one of the best-established conventions of that supremely rational genre. 17).
only to change its interpretation through his disappearance.Literary self-consciousness 59 formal self-reflexivity. and is then forced to admit. The 'I' continually turns the 'he' into a 'you' in his or her sous-conversation. Once he has become a mystery. metaphorically. As the novel opens. fictions. feels himself to lack identity. of the story itself. A nutcase. with a fairly restricted notion of absence. however. she suggests. and the only way of escaping his 'typicality' is to disappear: from the story. A nervous breakdown. is not real. often this is in order to suggest that we are all. Here the readings of The Golden Fruits by the readers in The Golden Fruits is the novel we are reading. He is no 'different' from the stereotype of the upper-class member of the British establishment. Whatever' (p. and from the 'typicality'. for 'Nothing lasts like a mystery. then it all crumbles again. for example: . If he's traced. Fielding. he exists as an individual. But Fowles as author can also remind the reader that Fielding exists only if he cannot be 'traced'. On condition that it stays that way. however much we operate in terms of its metaphorical extensions. the effect of reading the hypothetical version of this disappearance is another reminder that the character Fielding is at the disposition of the author Fowles. the text continually turns its own third-person narrative into a first-person discourse. found. He never allows Fielding to rewrite his own story. Thus Fielding. He's back in a story. Although characters are paraded as fictions. the print. becomes a real presence for the first time to the other characters in the story. The fiction of Johnson. which might be satisfactory 'in reality'. This can even be reassuring: an affirmation of a substantial everyday world. The subject of the book is its non-existence outside its own repetitions. Spark and Fowles is concerned. As the characters read the book we are reading. through a recognition or 'laying bare' of his absence. Attention is thus shifted away from the solution of the mystery towards an examination of the conventions governing the presentation of enigma in fiction. The 'disturbance' in a novel like Nathalie Sarraute's The Golden Fruits (1963) is much more extreme. only if he is more than a literary-fictional 'character'. In fact. 239). being written. appears to the reader as part of a text which he or she knows. The theory of his disappearance.
on the other side walking away without turning round . This involves its defects – 'absence of presence to name one' (p. 36). Lost in the Funhouse. towards you . it would be as if a part of me had become dead tissue' (p. . who has to die for the story to become text. 11) Desiring communication which is impossible because the level of narration is separate from the level of story. . what did you think of it? (p. However. The irony is that the text. . . who of course depends on the story for existence. Tell me have you read? . . they are dependent upon each other for existence (a more radically metafictional treatment of the problem examined in Johnson's Christie Malry's Own Double Entry). take hold of what I'm throwing you. And he. is the speaker. operate metafictionally at the level of the sign. Gabriel Josipovici's Moebius the Stripper (1974) directly confronts the problem of absence by reproducing the text typographically in the form of a representation of a Möbius strip and exploring the crisis of Möbius. . . he should come back . the 'I' attempts to treat the text itself as an addressee. This coming together of speaker and text is described as if they were lovers: 'We are so close to each other now. in fact. . . . 142). Like 'starcrossed lovers'. In John Barth's 'Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction' (to which a note is added: 'the title "Autobiography" means self-composition: the antecedent of the first person narrator is not I but the story speaking of itself. p. . you are so much a part of me that if you ceased to exist. is the extent to which the dominant issues of contemporary critical and sociological thought are shared by writers of fiction. but who cannot exist because of the story. on your side . . with you . the story explicitly discusses its own 'identity' crisis. What the various fictional examples of this chapter suggest. given these defects. some British and American writing does. and vice versa. that: . . don't abandon us . . 1). of course. as one critic has said. like Sarraute's. . . 38) – and its attempts to 'compose' itself (p. I am its father.60 Metafiction the earth opens up. its mother is the recording machine'. This reveals. Enormous crevasse. .
(Forrest-Thompson 1973.Literary self-consciousness 61 the case of being trapped inside an outworn literary tradition may be taken as a special symptom of the feeling that we are all trapped in our systems for measuring and understanding the world: that in fact there is no 'reality' except our systems of measuring. 4) The next chapter will examine the nature of this 'outworn literary tradition' and the centrality of metafictional writing in its renewal. . p.
and still be seen as a point of renewal rather than a sign of exhaustion? Ultimately. but a given period of such experimentation will find an audience 'programmed' to receive innovative messages and contacts only if the sociocultural context is such as to sustain an audience whose experience of that context corresponds to the modes of message formulation and conveyance adapted by a given writer. Significant literary changes. He goes on to argue that writers may. then. as well as within the context of non-literary culture. Such questions can only be examined through some consideration of how literary genres develop or become exhausted. This certainly supports the view suggested here so far. experiment with different systems of encoding and decoding. Hayden White argues that literary change of a generic nature reflects changes in the general social-linguistic codes and that these reflect changes in this historico-cultural context in which a given language game is being played. in any given period. can only take . questions about the viability of metafiction lead to questions about the viability of the novel itself and its possible future development.3 Literary evolution: the place of parody The development of the novel How can metafiction be 'placed' within the evolution of the novel.
The well-worn conventions of realism or of popular fiction are used to establish a common language which is then extended by parodic undermining and often amalgamated with cultural forms from outside the mainstream literary tradition. This. however. more perceptible set. for. Added to this. The forms and language of what is offered to it as creative or experimental fiction should not be so unfamiliar as to be entirely beyond the given modes of communication. 108) To be successfully decoded. In metafiction it is precisely the fulfilment as well as the nonfulfilment of generic expectations that provides both familiarity and the starting point for innovation. This audience. by undermining an earlier set of fictional conventions which have become automatized. to the rise of new commercial and technological languages that cannot be translated into the terms of more familiar linguistic codes. (White 1975. p. television influences such as soap opera. In fact. The problem arises because parody is doubleedged. or such fiction will be rejected as simply not worth the reading effort. cinematic devices and the effects of such genres as space opera. is an essentially negative view of the parodic basis of much contemporary writing – in particular. however. experimental fiction of any variety requires an audience which is itself self-conscious about its linguistic practices. There has to be some level of familiarity. to some extent. These conditions are surely provided by the contemporary attention to communication problems. accounts for the critical refusal to accept that if the novel does not meet these challenges then it will become obsolescent. A novel that uses parody can be seen either as destructive or . metafiction – whereby parody is regarded as inwardlooking and decadent. parody in metafiction can equally be regarded as another lever of positive literary change.64 Metafiction place at times when the audiences are so constituted as to render banal or unintelligible the messages and modes of contact of those preceding. Some critics maintain that the 'death of the novel' has occurred as the result of suffocation and dislocation by these popular cultural forms. including journalese. then. has its own requirements. the parodist clears a path for a new.
If metafiction is to be viewed optimistically from both cultural and formal perspectives. repeated in . are. Parody. metafiction represents a response to a crisis within the novel – to a need for self-conscious parodic undermining in order to 'defamiliarize' fictional conventions that have become both automatized and inauthentic. Apparently obsolete devices. which have been relegated to the level of the 'popular'. The most positive view both of parodic devices and of the integration of popular forms within the development of a literary genre is provided by the Russian formalist theory of literary evolution. and through its absorption of elements outside the literary system. such parody would be seen as a point of positive renewal in literary development. Russian formalist theory begins with Viktor Shklovsky's notion of ostranenie or defamiliarization.6 Literature here becomes a means of renewing perception by exposing and revealing the habitual and the conventional. Literature can thus be seen as inherently self-conscious. that of 'laying bare the device' in order to achieve defamiliarization. in this view. however. therefore. for 'laying bare the device'. when applied to the literary work itself. Russian formalist theories offer valuable insights. This leads Shklovsky to the second main concept in his theory. It is useful anyway to look more closely at the specifically literary system to discover to what extent generic change may be brought about by internal pressures (see Bennett 1979). And this optimism can be strengthened by considering one of the other main strands of formalist theory: the notion of literature as a system that develops itself through the realignment of units within that system. In the Russian formalist terms of literary evolution. results in self-conscious parody. deliberately sets itself up to break norms that have become conventionalized. for the concept of 'making strange' or defamiliarization implies a literary dynamism: things cannot remain strange. as a literary strategy. and to release new and more authentic forms. Russian formalist theory can thus be seen to offer an optimistic view of metafictional strategies within the evolution of the novel.Literary evolution 65 as critically evaluative and breaking out into new creative possibilities. In these terms.
Instead it 'lays them bare' and realigns the still viable components with elements considered to be 'popular'. Parody of an earlier literary norm or mode unavoidably lays bare the relations of that norm to its original historical context. through its defamiliarizing contextualization within a historical present whose literary and social norms have shifted. for example. then. the spy thriller. If literature deviates from a norm in order to renew perception. instead of remaining a set of implicit cultural and literary codes which are activated by the reader in the reading process. the space opera. science fiction and the historical romance. then the older literary norm necessarily constitutes the 'background' against which the new textual innovations foreground themselves and can be understood. at the very least. metafiction examines the relations between literary and historical systems and. . Certainly Juri Tynyanov's work (Tynyanov 1971) suggests that a text is 'literary' depending on its differential relation to the extraliterary system in which it operates. Parody of a literary norm modifies the relation between literary convention and culturalhistorical norms. Metafiction explicitly and selfconsciously performs these functions. where the literary norm(s) become the object of parody. for it seeks to avoid a radical break with previous 'literary' traditions. In focusing on the issue of 'literariness'. it becomes a dynamic category which constantly redefines itself through the popular and the non-literary. At present this might include. causing a shift in the whole system of relations. the reader is educated in the relationship of historical and cultural to literary systems. and has therefore continually to change its structures. The problem at present is that there is no commonly agreed norm to provide a background. the family saga. therefore. Later formalist theory reveals the extent to which Shklovsky's formalist concentration has an implicit historical dimension. Although the notion of 'high art' remains. The norm has therefore to be made explicit as a literary structure – as the basis for parody – within the contemporary text.66 Metafiction a new and often incongruous context and made to function again. In reading metafiction. implicitly historicizes literary tradition. but perhaps also having extreme relevance for a contemporary readership.
cannot be 'original'. forcing the reader to revise his or her rigid preconceptions based on literary and social conventions. for example. The text is freed from the 'anxiety of influence' (Bloom 1973) by the paradoxical recognition that literature has never been free. It exploits the indeterminacy of the text. Russian formalist theory helps to show how parody and the assimilation of the 'popular' or the 'non-literary' (which ultimately breaks down distinctions between 'high' and 'low' art and reveals the terms in which they are set up) can promote a very positive and long-overdue renewal of the novel. has now and again to stop and examine the process. it also cannot be free either in its relation to the historical world or in its relation to readerly desire. and which has its historical roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Literary evolution 67 So. in order to show its historical provisionality: to show. The use of parody and the assimilation of popular and nonliterary languages in metafiction thus helps to break both aesthetic and extra-aesthetic norms. in metafiction. that the use of an implicitly male omniscient author in popular continuations of realism is tied to a specific ideological world-view which continues insidiously to pass itself off as 'neutral' or 'eternal' or 'objective'. Metafictional parody reveals how a particular set of contents was expressed in a particular set of conventions recognized as 'literature' by its readers. to see where it is going. always inherently provisional in its process of relativizing language through continuous assimilation of discourses. of course. and it considers what relevance these may still have for readers situated at a different point in history. Throughout its history. by playing off contemporary and earlier paradigms against each other and thus defeating the reader's expectations about both of them. a convention is undermined. the implicit tendency of the novel to draw attention to its linguistic construction has . but has always been 'created' or produced. to find out what it is. rather than its exhaustion. the reader is able to proceed through the familiar to the new. or laid bare. always inherently self-conscious. however. The reader is freed from the anxiety of meaninglessness by the recognition that not only can literature never be free in terms of literary tradition. Because both languages operate through very well-established conventions. The novel.
(Kiremidjian 1969. diction. or in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818). intellectual reserve and a sense of the deadly extension of the kingdom of the banal.68 Metafiction emerged. it is clearly emerging as the dominant characteristic of the contemporary novel as a whole. but to a renewed vigour. not only is such self-consciousness the dominant function within individual novels of the type. 'now and again'. 148) Parody fuses creation with critique to replace. metre. for example. paralysing it with fixed associations which . as the dominant function in individual works: in Tristram Shandy. as one observer has remarked. The specific method of parody. by upsetting a previous balance which has become so rigidified that the conventions of the form can express only a limited or even irrelevant content. the actual process involved in this substitution. (Thomas Mann. 19). p. The breaking of the frame of convention deliberately lays bare the process of automatization that occurs when a content totally appropriates a form. its strong tendency towards self-consciousness has quite clearly led already. The parodist proceeds by imitating as closely as possible the formal conventions of the work being parodied in matters of style. The method of parody: creation plus critique In truth parody was here the proud expedient of a great gift threatened with sterility by a combination of scepticism. p. In contemporary metafictional writing. has been usefully explained as: a kind of literary mimicry which retains the form or stylistic character of the primary work. However. but substitutes alien subject matter or content. 232) In other words. what had become 'a matter of course' with what now becomes a 'matter of discourse' (Stewart 1979. rhythm. Dr Faustus. p. I would argue that at present the novel is coping with it as most major crisis. parody renews and maintains the relationship between form and what it can express. vocabulary. not to a decline or a 'death'.
The critical function of parody thus discovers which forms can express which contents. Parody has. This dislocates both past and present texts: the rearrangement of the original text or genre reveals the potential rearrangements of the present one. for example. new developments in fiction have always tended to evolve through the parody of older or outworn conventions. for example. but with the 'message' here involving the whole literary system. John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman. it provides a more general insight into the very essence of narrative – its inescapable linearity. is on one level a direct critique of the mimetic fallacy of Richardson's exhaustive attention to detail. 'rewrites' the Victorian realistic novel and the historical romance but also explicitly offers itself as one out of many possible 'versions'. However. On another level. pp. Taking as its starting point a previous work or genre. however. it inserts a metaphoric version of this into the ongoing (metonymic) literary tradition. always performed these functions: Walter Shandy's hovering foot.Literary evolution 69 gradually remove it from the range of current viable artistic possibilities. for a critique of this definition). 88–93. of course. its necessary selectiveness as it translates the non-verbal into the verbal – and finally creates its own comedy out of its critique. This is precisely what parody does. in this sense. and its creative function releases them for the expression of contemporary concerns. As one critic has said: the devices of parody are absorbed into the valances of the new form as though the stammering novelist had first to lisp his alphabet in mocking echo of what he said in order to pronounce . in Tristram Shandy (1760). There has always been an 'Is the Novel Dead?' debate. it has been regarded as a sign of generic exhaustion. In fact. Jakobson argued that the poetic function 'projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination' (Jakobson 1960): in other words a metaphoric substitution is forced into an ongoing metonymic plane (see Lodge 1977a. and it could be argued that the Novel began the formulation of its identity through parody. because parody has been considered mainly as a form of criticism. These functions of parody can be understood in terms of Jakobson's definition of the aesthetic funcion as a focus upon the message for its own sake.
The parody of the novel of sensibility thus provides the starting point for the development of the 'epic' or 'panoramic' novel and establishes the two mainstreams of English fiction. Fielding broke away from Richardson's psychologically oriented detailism to create his panoramic comedies by parodying Pamela (1740) in Shamela (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742). Fielding parodies the moral dubiousness of Pamela by imitating the epistolary form but using it to establish the foundation in inconsequentiality of the exalted sentiments of Richardson's text. (Rovit 1963. At all levels of Tristram Shandy. In Shamela. Particularly with Joseph Andrews. base its metafictional subversion on the laying bare of the most fundamental set of all narrative conventions: those concerning the representation of time. Viktor Shklovsky referred to it as the most 'typical' novel. if it had existed) and 'plot' (the shaping of that material) (see note 5). Such displacements lay bare the relations in fiction between what Shklovsky referred to as fabula and sujet – more recently Genette's histoire and discours: the nearest equivalent in English would be 'story' (the raw material. Throughout the novel there is a continuous displacement of normal causal narrative sequence. fundamental to all narrative. the withholding of the final resolution. p. nothing is . The basic strategy of the novel is retardation through incompletion. Only a few years after their initiation. 80) Cervantes' Don Quixote (1604) parodied the outmoded conventions of the Romance. however. of course. and it does. which. a novel about the transformation of its 'story' into 'plot'. thoroughly 'aesthetic' in Shklovsky's use of the term. Tristram Shandy is thus thoroughly a novel about itself. can be seen as the prototype for the contemporary metafictional novel. based on the virtues of the good heart in relation to a benign Providence. In this sense the novel has always been involved with parody to some degree.70 Metafiction his own word. he goes beyond a mere critique of Richardson's style and moral norms to establish his own. as I have argued. which explicitly illustrates the process of retardation. both were being parodied in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760).
Literary evolution 71 completed. the closer language attempts to come to 'life' (to the actual relations of things in space-time) the further away and the more regressive it appears: 'the more I write the more I shall have to write' (p. stranded in odd voyeuristic poses at keyholes. When there is explicitly no fixed point of origin or reference. then 'history' becomes a non-category.7 Trapped within the sequential. for example. Historical dates have significance within patterns of personal rather than world history. Doris Lessing wrote The Golden Notebook (with its continual parodies of style and its 'Free Women' outer frame which parodies conventional realism) to resolve a personal crisis in her development as a writer: a 'writer's block' caused by her feeling . Subjective time continuously assimilates external events. 230). The phenomenon seems to be paralleled in the personal development of novelists themselves. itself dependent upon a large measure of selfparody concerning the definition of 'good sense'.7 Parody appears again and again at points of crisis in the development of the novel. The novel begins with a description of the coitus interruptus which brings Tristram into the world. and past and future in novels is shown to be merely (on one level) the before and after of the order of the narration. The undermining of time is itself undermined by the subjectivism of a novel 'written' by a narrator desperately trying to catch up with himself and dissolving all events into the present of his discourse. The central narrative is never finished because it is continually punctuated by descriptions of events whose relevance to the main story is apparent only to Tristram himself. In Northanger Abbey. or left in strange physical positions. Characters are repeatedly 'frozen' in time. and the battle between these and the real and implied chronological duration of the reading. Writing develops as a problem of compound interest. and identity escapes. Walter's encyclopaedia is never written. The subject of the novel becomes the battle between the chronological duration of the 'writing' and that of the events in 'history'. When events which are looked forward to on the level of the histoire have already been narrated by the discours. then digression becomes progression. Jane Austen parodies the gothic novel and in so doing sets up a dialogue about the function of novels which initiates her own form of comedy of manners.
that subjectivity is inauthentic; 'but there was no way of not being intensely subjective' (pp. 12–13). She finally achieves, through the critical function of parody, what a lot of women writers were later to achieve through the women's movement: creative release in her realization that 'writing about oneself is writing about others'. John Barth's work Chimera (1972) is another response to a writer's block which is resolved through the process of writing about it: 'the key to the treasure is the treasure' (p. 56). Barth realizes the possible value of myth as a way out of the sterility and inauthenticity of realism: Since myths themselves are among other things poetic distillations of our ordinary psychic experience and therefore point always to daily reality, to write realistic fictions which point always to mythic archetypes is in my opinion to take the wrong end of the mythopoeic stick. . . . Better to address the archetypes directly. (p. 199) However, Bellerophon (the 'hero' in the novel, who also suffers from a writer's block) attempts an exact imitation of the myth and, instead of becoming a hero, becomes a parody of one. He becomes the story of himself: 'I'd become not a mythic hero, but a perfect reset' (p. 203), 'a number of printed pages in a language not untouched by Greek' (p. 307). Barth, though, by treating the myth parodically through his two middle-aged heroes, Perseus and Bellerophon, goes on to create his own original story and overcomes the problem of his writer's block. Parody in metafiction may operate at the level of style or of structure. B. S. Johnson's novel See the Old lady, Decently parodies the conventions of the history textbook and the tourist guide at a stylistic level in order to show how they are both very partial and limited means of suggesting the infinite variety of human history, and yet constitute our staple approach to the past as 'heritage'. He undermines their style mainly through ellipsis, which highlights features through their omission. (Again this is a widely used metafictional technique: Donald Barthelme's Amateurs (1976) uses it in a similar and equally effective manner.) The history textbook is heavily dependent on the use of nouns that appear to
Literary evolution
refer to real names and places: so, of course, is much realist fiction. Johnson often omits such nominatives. Sometimes he replaces them with pronouns which do not appear to relate directly to the nominatives within the text: They feasted in the Norman keep. He built the chapel and the third king's house in the wall. His son rebuilt the chapel. This one was formerly the seat of the Earl of, based within the boundaries of what is left of what used to be the outlaw's favourite haunt, the Forest of. (p. 19) A similar strategy involves a parody of the guidebook. From Pass, a couple of miles to the east, half a dozen glaciers can be seen at once, and so near that their green fissures are clearly. Light and shadow upon the cluster of peaks are magical in their changes at, or and the traveller who has looked up from the green to watch a snowstorm trailing its curtain across the crests, with, perhaps a white summit standing serene above the cloud will not readily. Wooded but infertile are the most magnificent pastures. (p. 34) This preserves the essential stylistic features of the original form. These include: generally a subject–verb–object construction or a passive, hence impersonal, form. There is liberal use of colour adjectives; continual modification and qualification with much embedding of clauses to draw the reader into the scene; heavy use of the pathetic fallacy, such as summits standing serene, a snowstorm 'trailing its curtain'. The aim of this is to envelop the reader in an idyllic, neatly humanized world which unfurls itself in orderly fashion. The omission of locating nominatives, therefore, the overt contradiction of the last sentence, the gradual descent into incomprehensibility as the gaps become harder to fill, and the absurd use of anthropomorphism, emphasize that this is not only a humanly but also a verbally ordered 'natural' scene. It is an essay in rhetorical and commercial persuasion rather than a 'true' transcript.
Yet the guidebook, with its own aim of appealing to as many tastes as possible, merely exaggerates the methods of all prose discourse in making the specific carry the general implications of a particular ideology. Here this is laid bare as the height of generality is achieved by the complete omission of the substantial. As a result the reader appears to have total freedom to substitute individual needs and desires. Johnson thus manages, through syntactical disruption, to convert the apparently 'objective' language of history into a postmodernist comment on the writing of history. More commonly, metafiction parodies the structural conventions and motifs of the novel itself (as in Tristram Shandy) or of particular modes of that genre. Thus Muriel Spark uses the omniscient-author convention, not benevolently to signpost the reader's way through the text, but to express a disturbing authority whose patterns are not quite so easy to understand. David Lodge in How Far Can You Go? (1980) also flaunts this convention. The author steps into the text and refers to himself in a list of characters, nervously reminding the reader that he has labelled each character with a recognizable trait, so that their fortunes might more easily be followed. This reverses the effect of heightened credibility and authority usually attributed to the convention, and expresses formally some of the doubts and concerns expressed thematically, in the text, about sexual morality and finally the Catholic Church itself. A metafictional text which draws on a whole plethora of parodistic effects, both stylistic and structural, is Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. The novel uses parody both to achieve a comic effect by exposing the gap between form and content, and to reveal frustration and despair. The novel is constructed from five notebooks, divided into four sections, each 'framed' by a section of a novel called 'Free Women', which also provides the outermost frame of The Golden Notebook itself. Everything in the text is apparently written by the central protagonist. Anna Freeman is searching for a means of fixing and relating her several identities – as woman, writer, mother, lover, communist – and she decides to separate them out into different notebooks, each written in a different style. She comes to realize, however, that her experiments with style serve only to undermine it as a reality-defining concept,
People stay sane by blocking off. this role conflict can only be resolved through the submergence of the individual self into the collective unconscious by means of the artistic process. to syntactify it – is always a betrayal of experience . Mother Sugar. But the essence of living now. She loses faith in the ordering possibilities of art and language and increasingly experiences dreams which share . the Golden Notebook) shows 'truth' to reside in muddle and breaks out of this constricting outer frame. 171). Lessing's novel itself exists within these terms. 116) 'Free Women'. based on the experiences of the notebooks. to categorize. (p. . into which all the others finally break down. but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man alive and kicking. For her Jungian analyst. is precisely such an expression of the need for categorization to preserve sanity. It also expresses her desire for 'wholeness. is conflict. The parody throughout The Golden Notebook expresses the division its heroine feels within herself. the 'realistic' novel which Anna writes. . Her search is partly for a reconciliation of the woman Anna with the artist Anna. not blocking off what goes on.Literary evolution 75 and she is finally saved only by her recognition of an insight very well expressed in John Barth's The End of the Road (1958): to turn experience into speech – that is to classify. In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say – he or she. to grammatize. they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. But Anna as woman cannot accept this sacrifice of self. allowing some of the 'essence of living now' to escape the necessary novelistic formal 'blocking off'. 456) But they live – which is true sanity – by not doing so. (p. Anna reflects: The essence of neurosis is conflict. However. unsatisfactory way we all live' (p. to conceptualize. fully. divided. the novel as a whole (and particularly the fifth notebook. for an end to the split.
her diary. 231) is even more thoroughly exposed in this frame than in the Yellow Notebook. The structure of 'Free Women' is circular. 'Free Women' is the final stage of 'petrification'. The Golden Notebook is conical in shape. 'Free Women'. In its parody of realism. If anything. This 'frame' overtly parodies the conventions of realism. Characters are introduced through formal casehistories. fictionalized version of herself (Ella). Anna comes to learn that all representation involves some parody. Even this is exposed in its inauthenticity by the novel as a whole. the novel she writes. beginning and ending in a room with Molly and Anna. in particular. It offers an apparently well-made plot and well-placed climax. This allows her to draw on the conventions of popular romance or of the agony column to explore aspects of personality that she cannot face directly in the Blue Notebook. The latter represents a sort of halfway stage in the petrification of 'experience' as it is mediated through the form of the traditional realist novel. The Black Notebook then presents the rejection of the past. its revelation of the extent of the inadequacy of realist writing. The inauthenticity of realism as 'analysis after the event' (p. 'Free Women' is presented first (though last in the supposed chronological order of the events). recording external. but she has further to learn to distinguish between the authentic parody of true art and the false representations of inauthentic art. the experience of women. is the ironic end of self-discovery. Experience does not describe perfect circles.76 Metafiction 'the same quality of false art. Anna offers a more stereotypical. The 'divided self' theme is presented discursively and analytically. It reveals the . 238). The frame presents a wholly dissatisfying version of Anna's experience. caricature. In terms of the narrative order of the novel. parody' (p. The notebooks begin with the historical events set in the vast South African plains of the Black Notebook and end in a small room in the present of writing about the individual self. refined annihilated experience. it also represents the ironic end of self-discovery for Doris Lessing the novelist. It is clearly a deliberate aesthetic strategy on Doris Lessing's part to 'lay bare' the conventions of realism as entirely inadequate vehicles for the expression of any contemporary experience and. In the Yellow Notebook.
becomes confused. This 'release' function is central to parody. he or she experiences the enlightenment and creative release provided by all successful parody. Doris Lessing has not yet formulated a viable alternative to the traditional novel. It operates on textual. is presented consciously in the terms of R. large-scale political and social concerns coming to focus on a single individual in each case. the two 'personal' notebooks. Through the stylistic dislocation. and therefore to metafiction. The reader is forced to enter the process of the construction and breakdown of this fiction. D. parody and representation are accepted as the same process. 'Frontiers of War'. the parody of social and fictional convention. Stylistic homogeneity replaces the previous swing from detached analysis to near-hysteria. She does. Here. Certainly what Freud argued for the release . become more complex and creative. can only become whole by 'going down' into herself. On one level. nor a viable alternative politics to the male-defined discourses of the Communist Party. about her South African experience. of course. the novel is a failure. This novel is now rejected as unhealthily 'personal' and obsessive. Within each notebook there is also a gradual breakdown into a more personal vein. The breakdown of Anna. in these terms. 'lay bare' their inadequacies and thereby achieves a measure of release which breaks her own writer's block. colours and imagery that relates the inner to the outer world. generic and historical levels. so the novel performs the same act of subversion. Finally the reader is taken into the Golden Notebook which is 'inside' Anna. Just as Anna. psychological. The Red Notebook develops Anna's sense of public self-betrayal in her growing disillusionment wth the Communist Party. Time breaks down. Laing's breakthrough. as in Martha Quest's breakdown in Lessing's The Four-Gated City (1969). The Yellow Notebook presents a consciously fictive and parodic account of recent events in Anna's private life.Literary evolution 77 fallibility of memory and offers parodic versions of a novel previously written by Anna. of the novel form itself. The Blue and Gold. The Blue Notebook attempts to reconcile past and present Annas through a diary account which becomes implicitly parodic. full of textures. however.
Parody in metafiction. using an established mode of fiction. often regarded as 'escapist'. despite what its critics might argue. In Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious he shows that the power of jokes is a consequence of their form. The parodist/metafictionist. 180) In metafiction. This is partly a consequence of their tendency to assimilate so-called 'escapist' popular forms. in fact. this is based on a process of condensation plus substitution. and with that end in view every peculiarity of vocabulary and every combination of thought sequences must be exploited in the most ingenious possible way. to examine . the joke-work shows itself in a choice of verbal material and conceptual situations which will allow the old play with words and thoughts to withstand the scrutiny of criticism. He sees the function of jokes (as I have argued in the case of metafiction) as an extension of the play instinct. the criticism is provided in the work itself by the process which produces the joke or parody. It remains.78 Metafiction potential of the joke could be argued for parody. (Freud 1976. Metafictional novels are. This is then displaced through exaggeration and the substitution of a new content. As in dreams. Freud argues further that what is special about jokes is their procedure for safeguarding the use of methods of providing pleasure against the objections raised by criticism which would put an end to the pleasure . lays bare the conventions that individual works of the mode share (which therefore define it) and fuses them with each other to extrapolate an 'essence'. however. The last two sections have attempted to suggest how such novels are. elicits only an immediate release response. is itself laid bare. . for this method of displacement and substitution carries with it an implicit critical function. p. of course. The joke. as in the joke. so that the relationship of form to content. extremely responsible both in socio-cultural terms and in terms of the development of the novel itself. therefore. . Metafiction elicits both this and a release within the system of literary history. is more than a joke.
Thus the thriller. . it becomes a vehicle. in particular. Roman Jakobson refined the Russian formalist concept of literature as a system and introduced the notion of 'shifting dominants' (see his essay 'The Dominant' in Matejka and Pomorska 1971). for conveying present political and moral insecurities. This involves the idea that what one age has considered to be trivial or of purely ephemeral entertainment value. the need to come to terms with popular forms can be seen as central to the survival of the novel as a widely read form of cultural expression. a novel whose standing as modernist or postmodernist might be debated. It is not in its concerns so very far removed from the parodistic treatment of the same issues in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). plot and situations. It is a process which. escapism and often sensationalism. has been given much prominence by writers of metafiction. however. may be regarded as 'popular' because of its stereotypical characters. but the defamiliarization of the popular form within the new context uncovers aesthetic elements that are appropriate for expressing the serious concerns of the new age. Furthermore. has been defamiliarized in this way over the last ten years. The entertainment value is still maintained. The use of popular forms in metafiction The assimilation into mainstream fiction of 'fringe' or popular forms was an important feature of the Russian formalist view of literary evolution. it can be seen to contain within its conventions the potential for the expression of a deep human ontological insecurity through its central image of a man or woman threatened and on the run. In an age of uncertainty. another age will see as capable of expressing more profound anxieties and concerns. like the parodistic impulse. as in Smiley's People (1980). and to answer the charges of escapism. but whose status as 'literature' clearly is not.Literary evolution 79 the popular forms upon which metafiction draws. for example. for example. and its simplistic moral affirmations. In the work of the still essentially 'popular' Le Carré. The spy thriller. and expressing the isolation of liberal values in a world of professionalization and amoral systems.
and embedded in them by a range of processes from repressive imposition to commercial saturation' (Williams 1975. They are not tagged on to it in order to attract a 'thinking' audience. Leavis. His notion of 'popular culture' thus in many ways resembles Raymond Williams's 'culture that has been developed by a people'. he attempts to return to a preindustrial homogeneous mythical past. Like Eliot and Leavis. T. Fiedler's view of culture similarly opposes a separation of 'high' and 'popular'. as opposed to 'a different kind of culture that has been developed for a people by an internal or external social group. in order to survive. however. but are actually discovered through it by successive audiences. The works of Angela . S. The critic Leslie Fiedler was one of the first to argue that. It is based less on an analysis of the function of literary formulae in relation to cultural expectations and readerly satisfactions than on the necessity for 'the machine age' to assimilate past traditions of fable and myth. . in its implicit rejection of the technological base of much contemporary popular culture. 348). Yet. R.8 Thus certain popular forms are more likely than others at particular times to be taken up as modes of serious expression. The dynamism of the aesthetic function in Russian formalist theory must not be overlooked. the favoured few . 128). Eliot and F. and to the degree that it is able to intensify the dynamism of their mutual connection. His notion of popular forms is somewhat restricted. the novel must return to its origins in the popular forms of a collectivist folk ethic which can 'bridge the gap' between the 'notion of one art for the cultivated. . The choice depends upon each set of historical and cultural circumstances. p. and another sub-art for the "uncultured"' (Fiedler 1975. say. unlike the cultural theory of.80 Metafiction The important point about the formalist concept of 'shifting dominants' is that these possibilities for serious analysis are actually inherent in the popular form. As Jan Mukarovsky pointed out: the value of an artistic artefact will be greater to the degree that the bundle of extra-aesthetic values which it attracts is greater. Fiedler's position still perpetuates this division. p.
There has also been an ideological shift involving the perception of reality as a construct (as discussed in Chapter 2). it could be argued that these forms are merely the different explicit historical shapes which manifest. Gerald Rosen and Robert Coover. though. westerns. popular romance. Tom Robbins. while allowing for a limited amount of individual variation. The familiar surfaces 'allow' for the expression of these desires (in Freudian terms) and are both socially acceptable and pleasurable. Like parody. at a surface level. Calvetti has defined a literary formula as a 'combination or synthesis of a number of specific cultural conventions with a more universal form or archetype'. appeal as much to the reader's experience of popular detective fiction as to his or her experience of the 'real world' . detective stories. they are in effect self-referential. 7). therefore. do provide examples that support Fiedler's argument. and it is clear that such fiction has had a revitalizing influence on the novel as a whole. however. G. however (writers who draw on the magical and the mythical but who rework popular fable in self-conscious and often metaficational ways). The formula works by gradually imposing itself upon consciousness until it becomes the accepted vehicle of a particular set of attitudes. Taking an 'archetypal structural' or Jungian view of this (a view ultimately not incompatible with Fiedler's). Again like parody. This view. J. This is 'useful primarily as a means of making historical and cultural inferences about the collective fantasies shared by large groups of people and for identifying differences in these fantasies from one culture or period to another' (Calvetti 1976. there has been a shift involving an adjustment to material developments consequent upon huge technological expansion. ignores the continuous shift in historical consciousness at the level of both the everyday and the deeper social paradigm. Agatha Christie's novels. ghost stories. writers experiment more commonly with the formulaic motifs of popular literary traditions which have often passed into cinematic forms of representation in the twentieth century: science fiction. In metafiction. archetypal desires that remain unchanged at a deep level. p. for example. for example. the specific individual realizations of popular literary forms carry with them a continuous implicit reference to the collective base. At present.Literary evolution 81 Carter.
and he saw it as an obvious basis for studying plot. yet until the end he or she has been able to participate vicariously in the anarchic pleasure of the criminal's 'run'. Victor Shklovsky. Formulaic fictions thus construct ideologically powerful but intensely 'literary' worlds. Detective fiction is a form in which tension is wholly generated by the presentation of a mystery and heightened by retardation of the correct solution. Thus the reader enjoys the triumph of justice and the restoration of order. . Thus the reader may escape vicariously into the comforts of aesthetic certainty but he or she is certainly not allowed to rest complacently in this condition. are merely functions of the plot. Even characters. The reader is offered the temporary consolation of a release from contingency: the comfort of a total 'sense of an ending'. In metafiction the detective-story plot is useful for exploring readerly expectation because it provides that readerly satisfaction which attaches to the predictable. and therefore a very effective marker of change when used explicitly against itself.82 Metafiction outside it. 43). selective restriction of any 'formulation'. for the most part. Todorov sees this as the masterpiece of popular literature because individual examples of the form most completely fit their genre (Todorov 1977. Pure detective fiction is extremely resistant to literary change. What is interesting about their use in metafiction is that. when they are parodied. was attracted by its almost exactly definable disposition of structural motifs. The reader is kept in suspense about the identity of the criminal until the end. metafiction always simultaneously undermines such satisfactions and thereby reminds the reader of the necessarily. in particular. Probably the most formulaic of the popular fictional forms used in contemporary writing is the detective story. the release effect of such forms is to do with disturbance rather than affirmation. However. Like metafiction. They provide collective pleasure and release of tension through the comforting total affirmation of accepted stereotypes. the world is made comprehensible. The detective story celebrates human reason: 'mystery' is reduced to flaws in logic. when the rational operations of the detective triumph completely over disorder. it foregrounds questions of identity. but not always apparent. p.
However. in John Irving's The World According to Garp (1976) and Fay Weldon's Praxis (1979)). The strongest code in Robbe-Grillet's fiction. They exist to reveal to the reader how enigma is generated in narrative. is all their significance. Angela Carter) or the anti-rational (Fowles.Literary evolution 83 Pointing out that the high point of the pure form was reached during the high period of modernism (usually placed between 1910 and 1930). Barthelme). as in all detective fiction. This. formulated. No amount of obsessive and exasperated revisiting can discover their significance. The question 'What happens next?' is subordinated to the question 'Why did it happen?' through the fairly simple device of giving away the ending near the beginning of the narrative. Nabokov and Spark. In La Jalousie. which thus seem to be offered as clues. in the post-modern period. the hermeneutic code is ultimately a metaphysical one. though. p. In Spark's fiction. how mystery is produced. for example. They are clues. posed. This is immediately apparent in the French New Novel. Such writers use this supremely rational form of the novel in the service of the supremely super-rational (Borges. perhaps. the reader is not offered a resolution of the enigmatic dispositions of the text. the reader is reminded of a detective story by the way in which the narrative backtracks repeatedly to the same images. Michael Holquist has suggested that the detective story developed out of a need to escape the obsession with the irrational and the unconscious (Holquist 1971). the hermeneutic code functions in reverse. and his or her attention begins to focus on how the code is constructed. 26). to a mystery which remains mysterious. the detective plot is being used to express not order but the irrationality of both the surface of the world and of its deep structures. In Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie (1957). however. Spark). the irrational (Nabokov. delayed. finally resolved' (Barthes 1970. For writers like Borges. The hermeneutic code is thereby translated into the terms of a metaphysical or moral enquiry (a technique also used very effectively in Marge Piercy's Braided Lives (1982) and Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). is what Roland Barthes has referred to as the 'hermeneutic' code 'through which an enigma is isolated. This device of the 'flashforward' gives importance to apparently contingent details which are normally passed over in .
Over recent years the spy thriller has undoubtedly become extremely popular. This is perhaps partly because of its suitability to television. The thriller is another form that provides a basis for such metafictional writing. John Hawkes. because 'in detective stories. Finally. and by a twist of logic it emerges that he himself is the victim. The spy. of the insecurity of human life. that he is the next victim. As a good detective. during a second reading. he has total belief in the logical powers of the mind. In Spark's fiction they are rendered significant. Such details normally only become significant in the light of knowledge of the ending. whereas in the spy story civilization itself is undermined' (Harper 1969. does not know who he or she is looking for. The reader is led to the full realization of the irony of constructing patterns and mistaking them for an ineluctable 'reality'. perhaps. in a state of semiotic intoxication. It is much closer to what appears to be the experience of living in the contemporary world. Like Agatha Christie's Poirot. he is led to the point where Scharlach fires the bullet. Muriel Spark. Italo Calvino and Anthony Burgess have all produced metafictional thrillers. his detective sets out to calculate by rational methods where the next murder in a series will occur. not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber' (p. but like contemporary men and women. p. unlike the detective. of disorder. Jorge Luis Borges uses an inversion of the detective story to expose the absurdity of faith in human reason in his story 'Death and the Compass' (1964). Every detail becomes a sign to be interpreted. in much more than the terms of narrative action. donning one disguise after . He seeks 'a purely rabbinical explanation. The spy moves in a Kafkaesque world whose laws remain unknown. Thus he fits together the clues with their (as he sees it) cabbalistic meanings to form a 'tetragrammation' of time and space which allows him to foretell the time and location of the next murder. They become the vehicles of a moral and religious enquiry into the nature of 'absolute truth'.84 Metafiction a first reading of a detective story. 106). Thomas Pynchon. 81). He or she is forced continually to shift identity. He discovers. John Fowles. The thriller is based not upon the same faith in human reason as the detective story but much more upon the fear of anomie. but also. crime only threatens to destroy or upset a portion of society. however. too late of course.
It is a comic exploration in many ways.Literary evolution 85 another. Kinbote has undertaken a detailed 'academic' commentary on John Shade's poem 'Pale Fire'. p. are shown to pervert the artistic act in the manner in which they project their fantasies on to the world as 'realities'. Or is he? Or is the poem about him at all? Or is everything an invention not only of Nabokov himself but of an hallucinated psychotic? The 'shade' is introduced in the first lines of the poem winging its way in the 'reflected sky'. however. the limitation of reason is exposed. Kinbote's footnotes to the poem appear to begin rationally but break down into irrational egotism. The pursued 'exile' of the spy story is here primarily an 'exile' from himself. Yet the irrationality of madness. Both. who is really Charles the Beloved. Like Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1955). 114).. In Nabokov's Pale Fire. who is thus allowed to play through the uncertainties of his or her own existence. The existential boundary situations that recur frequently in the thriller are experienced vicariously by the reader. all along. Again. Harper suggests further of the thriller that its quality of delight is a mixed one: 'the exhilaration of freedom combined with fear and dizziness before the potential loss of self altogether' (ibid. artistic invention. Here. He is mad. the first-person narrator who may or may not be the King of Zembla. the possibility soon emerges that Kinbote's 'pursuer' may be his mad self whose projections are both the basis of. is contained within the supremely rational framework of the pedantic critical apparatus. and beyond reason. However. because conveyed through the idiosyncratically expressed solipsism of the mad Kinbote (or is it Botkin?). of the uncertain world of the thriller. they . the outer frame of the narrative. forms of the double. Kinbote's perversions appear to be confined to the sexual sphere. Reflections. the thriller form is used experimentally to explore precisely the dizziness of a total loss of self. and inimical to. have always been important in the thriller (and particularly in Nabokov's use of it: in Despair (1965) the protagonist commits a crime on the absurd assumption that a man who looks nothing like him is his double). The poem appears to be a biography of Kinbote himself. the King of Zembla. and which therefore destroy the poetic Shade.
Brigid Brophy's In Transit. 188): a person such as a psychotic or an artist. A full study of the use of popular forms by metafictional writers would have to include the use of romance (John Barth's Sabbatical. a 're-reading'. Richard Brautigan's The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971)). Vladimir Nabokov's Ada (1969)) and forms like the western (Richard Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974). As Shade says. Margaret Drabble's The Waterfall (1969). Reason/ unreason is shown as an inadequate dichotomization of life (hence the many allusions to Pope's The Dunciad). since the term should not be applied to a 'person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention' (p. William Kotzwinkle's The Fan Man (1974)). These forms not only are entirely 'appropriate' as vehicles to express the serious concerns of the present day. Robert Coover's 'The Babysitter'). and the thriller form provides a very useful set of conventions for upending the normal application of such distinctions. Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan (1959). but are forms to which a wide audience has access and with which it is already familiar. we should not refer to people as 'loony'. Barthelme's 'Paraguay' (1970)). Motifs from pornographic writing often appear in metafiction novels employed to explore fundamental problems about human identity (Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge (1968).86 Metafiction testify to the truth of the fact that every interpretation is necessarily subjective. the use of the family saga (John Irving's The World According to Garp. The study might also look at the language of comic books (Clarence Major's Emergency Exit (1979). The use of popular forms in 'serious fiction' is therefore crucial for undermining narrow and rigid critical definitions of what constitutes. . both the experimental and the innovative with the popular and the traditional. It would have to include the use of science fiction (Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. or is appropriately to be termed 'good literature'. necessarily a reconstruction. Certainly the novels mentioned' in this chapter have managed to bring together. Their continuous assimilation into 'serious fiction' is also crucial if the novel is to remain a viable form. very successfully.
'in touch'. the shift is towards an acknowledgement of the primary reality not of this 'commonsense' context of everyday reality but of the linguistic context of the literary text. in philosophical terms. The language of realism is generally metonymic: descriptions are presented as a selection from a whole which is the real world. as one moves from realism through modernist forms to contemporary metafiction. Authorial comments serve to reinforce its general 'truths' and continually refer the reader to the content of everyday reality. 'Seeing is believing'. Literary realism appears to be a continuation or extension of this 'commonsense' world. 'It's common sense'.4 Are novelists liars? The ontological status of literary-fictional discourse 'Truth' and 'Fiction': is telling stories telling lies? What is the status. 'I saw it with my own eyes'. This chapter will explore the philosophical implications of this ontological shift through an . 'Out of sight. for most people the everyday world is the only 'real' world: it is 'reality par excellence' (Berger and Luckmann 1971). of 'universes' outside the domain of the everyday world? As Berger and Luckmann point out. out of mind': all implicitly invoke the belief in such a common phenomenological world. Previous chapters have explored how.
All literary fiction has to construct a 'context' at the same time that it constructs a 'text'. whilst also forming. brings it into existence. This will include a variety of factors present in the immediate context: the relation of speaker to hearer. Such language has to be highly conventional in order to perform simultaneously the function of creating a context and that of creating a text.88 Metafiction examination of the notion of 'context' offered by the metafictional text. It depends upon the operation of the conventions of what J. Metafiction. the fictional context which is finally the words on the page. tone of voice. L. The meaning of an utterance in an everyday context is shaped by this context: the historical 'context' of an utterance does not merely surround it but occasions it. Doctorow. over the precise relation of the verbal world of fiction to the everyday world. Vladimir Nabokov. L. (Smith 1979. then. 16) The successful comprehension of a so-called 'natural utterance' therefore depends on the resolution of indeterminacies of context. in laying bare this function of literary conventions. Writers such as E. through entirely verbal processes. Austin has termed the 'appropriateness conditions' relevant to each speech-act context (Austin 1962). The context of an utterance. All written language. Descriptions of objects in fiction are simultaneously creations of that object. indexical reference to the immediate surroundings.) Thus the ontological status of fictional objects is determined by the fact that they exist by virtue of. has to be organized in such a way as to recreate a context or to construct a new context verbally. is best thought of not simply as its gross external or physical setting. Muriel . (Descriptions of objects in the context of the material world are determined by the existence of the object outside the description. p. however. but rather as the total set of conditions that has in fact determined its occurrence and form. draws attention to what I shall call the creation/ description paradox which defines the status of all fiction. however. Metafictional writers differ among themselves. paralinguistic gestures.
but may only be reached through 'text'. (Jameson 1981. . for it is fundamentally non-narrative and nonrepresentational. walk into the page. what can be added. or in other words. 82) Fiction is here a means of explaining a reality which is distinct from it. The more I inject it. and break up. 46) Literary fiction simply demonstrates the existence of multiple realities. Kurt Vonnegut suggest that 'reality' exists beyond 'text' certainly. Writers like Gilbert Sorrentino and Donald Barthelme. as one of the characters in Donald Barthelme's novel Snow White (1967) says: The moment I inject discourse from my universe of discourse into your universe of discourse. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things 1971. p. is the proviso that history is inaccessible to us except in textual form. (Gilbert Sorrentino. that History – Althusser's 'absent cause'. or make them 'walk off the page'. So why the obsession with the possibility or the implications of the charge that 'telling stories is telling lies'? Certainly a Platonic . will be excised. for example. the yourness of yours is diluted. however. that it can be appropriated by way of prior (re)textualisation. I'm making them up as they go along. p. They should. 15). Lacan's 'Real' – is not a text. that These people aren't real. 27) The everyday world is merely another order of discourse so that.Are novelists liars? 89 Spark. p. however. It means. Iris Murdoch. the more you dilute. it is 'an instrument for finding our way about more easily in this world' (Vaihinger 1924. (p. . . suggest that the only difference beween literary fiction and reality is that the former is constructed entirely with language and this allows certain freedoms. disappear. any section that threatens to flesh them out. rather.
In the rest of this chapter. the . suggested by John Fowles's reference to fiction as 'worlds as real as. second. in fact. but on the whole most have collectively constructed a third category. and thus expose how the construction of contexts is also the construction of different universes of discourse. the paradox concerning the identity of fictional characters. Second.90 Metafiction concept of literature demands that imaginative freedom be morally justified. be telling lies. its practitioners are Platonists. philosophers have traditionally fallen into two categories. To the extent that this is a concern of all metafiction. for whom fiction is clearly lies. Reference. all address themselves to two problems: first. metafictional writing will be related not only to the first two positions but more particularly to the third position (referred to as the 'alternative worlds' theory). In attempting to define this ontological status of literary fiction. So all metafictional novels have. naming and the existence of characters Whatever their philosophical view of fiction. Some metafictional writers adopt these positions. finally. but until one has established the nature of 'truth' it will be impossible to know. Or was' (The French Lieutenant's Woman. in exploring the relations between 'fiction' and 'reality'. but other than the world that is. there are the 'non-referentiality' theorists (sometimes adopting the terms 'non-predication' or 'quasi-judgement') who argue that it is simply inappropriate to talk about the 'truth' status of literary fiction. and of necessity therefore with the question of the 'truth' status of what is taken to be 'reality'. p. 86). Telling stories may not. Metafictional texts explore the notion of 'alternative worlds' by accepting and flaunting the creation/description paradox. First. The rest of this book will examine how and to what extent metafiction destabilizes 'commonsense' contextual constructions of the everyday world. aestheticians and metafictional writers. to engage with this question of the 'truth' status of literary fiction. there are the 'falsity' theorists. It will examine how this is achieved by preventing the reader from settling into any given context and by making him or her aware of possible alternatives to this 'commonsense' reality.
The dreamer is then terrified that this man might discover he is only an image. he or she is a non-entity who is a somebody. but then discovers that he himself has been dreamt into existence by the man. . Throughout many metafictional novels. In Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds the 'author' of the novel within the novel is tried by his characters while asleep for the injustices he has done to them. have never been born. realizes that he is sitting on a bench next to his younger self and concludes that the younger self must have dreamt him. characters . To take the first problem: a fictional character both exists and does not exist. Yet it has no power to stop the utterance. characters suddenly realize that they do not exist. it appears. when the dream is paradoxically accomplished: mad as it may be my dream is that some unimaginable embodiment of myself. . text which is reality. The narrator of 'The Other' (1975). beyond an author. 12) Here is a character that is only a voice. In Barth's novel Letters (1979). will come to find itself expressing in however garbled or radical a translation. cannot act. Or they start to perform impossible acts. This paradox is a favourite one of Jorge Luis Borges. a character in a fiction. do what I cannot: terminate this aimless brutal business. and John Barth's Sabbatical. some reflection of these reflections. (p. The embodiment longed for is of something outside language. may you to whom. In another of Borges' ficciones. cannot die. 'The Circular Ruins' (1964).Are novelists liars? 91 status of literary-fictional discourse (the problem of referentiality). The characters at the end of Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. through whom I speak. an old man called Jorge Luis Borges. . language which is the totality of existence. having knowledge of its existence only. begin to write the novel we have just been reading. The speaker in John Barth's 'Night Sea Journey' (1968) thus cries out at the end of the story. If against all odds this comes to pass. but it is of course the author's 'voice' which is the utterance. when it utters. a man dreams another man into existence.
(Raymond Federman.92 Metafiction from Barth's other novels – Jacob Horner. Barth himself has commented in an interview: The tragic view of characterization is that we cannot. Fictional characters who are narrators exist in the same condition: Through all the detours that on e wishes. the condition of fictional characters is one of absence: being and not being. Metafictional novels continually alert the reader to this consequence of the creation/description paradox. and the other characters then address him as 'Mr John Barth'. We can only make verisimilitudinous people. Double or Nothing. I take the tragic view of the tragic view of character. . Fictional characters do not exist. (Quoted in Ziegler and Bigsby 1982. unnumbered page between 146 and 147) Our statements about literary-fictional characters can be verified only by consulting the statements which are those characters.: 'I felt a familiar uneasiness about the fictive life of real people and the factual life of "fictional" characters – familiar because. expresses reservations to the author. Ambrose Mensch – write letters to themselves. . make real people by language. yet we know who they are. who has previously read Barth's The Floating Opera and has met Todd Andrews. ex cludes him . . to each other and to 'the Author'. "I've been there before"' (p. All statements have 'meaning' in relation to the . . by definition. Mr B. That view itself is on the minds of the characters themselves in a novel like Letters. which have brought them into existence. p. Another character signs his name 'The Author'. no matter how hard we try. its hero. 58). 38) As linguistic signs. as I'm sure I have intimated. One of the characters. the subject who writes will neve r seize himself in the novel: he will onl y seize the novel which. We can refer to them and discuss them. . To make a statement in fiction is to make a character. Todd Andrews.
but perfectly normal within the logic of the fictional world of which they are a part. However much 'fiction' is seen as interchangeable with 'reality'. as John Searle argues in Speech Acts. 'A proper name can only be a proper name if there is a genuine difference between the name and the thing named. the notion of naming and referring can have no application' (Searle 1969. They may travel in time. The use of names in traditional fiction is usually part of an aim to disguise the fact that there is no difference between the name and the thing named: to disguise this purely verbal existence. The question of the ontological status of fictional characters is ultimately inseparable from that of the question of the referentiality of fictional language. or placed in an overtly metaphorical or adjectival relationship with the thing they name. Searle might well now modify this statement.Are novelists liars? 93 context in which they are uttered. Thus characters in metafiction may explicitly dissolve into statements. Some may read about the story of their lives or write the books in which they appear. If they are the same. the crucial difference remains that in literary fiction the world is entirely a verbal construct. Metafiction. on the other hand. but it is still a useful way of pointing to the crucial fact that in fiction the description of an object brings that object into existence. However. die and carry on living. p. omitted altogether (as in Nathalie Sarraute's work). Here. Names in fiction refer to impossibilities that yet can be affirmed. Sometimes they know what is going to happen to them and attempt to prevent it. but in fiction the statement is the character is the context. proper names are often flaunted in their seeming arbitrariness or absurdity. aims to focus attention precisely on the problem of reference. We can refer to fictional characters by their names in the way that we refer to friends or relatives. 75). Gilbert Sorrentino breaks into his novel Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971) to comment on a character called Dick: . They may act in ways totally deviant in terms of the logic of the everyday 'commonsense' world. Both are fascinating to metafictional writers. In the everyday world the object determines the description. murder their authors or have love affairs with them.
217) Names are used to display the arbitrary control of the writer. Oedipa Maas. Basically. The degree of transparency in each case is dependent on the degree of adherence to realistic illusion. in all fiction. Sarah Woodruff. (p. In metafiction such names remind us that. Such theories begin to move towards an emphasis on the special nature of the relationship between utterance and context in fiction. Benny Profane. Such a view would argue that fictional statements do not 'really' refer but only appear to do so. Although linguistic signs normally denote the nonlinguistic entities for which they are signs. Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim. is not mirrored in the syntactic or other features of the sentence. that what is referred to has been created anyway through a 'naming' process. the object must be distinguishable from the speaker's utterance of it. this is not the case with literary fiction. . Hamm. and the arbitrary relationships of language: Pynchon's Stencil. because the proposition that the object exists cannot be said to be true. Roderick Random. 'Falsity' and 'non-predication' theories Searle argues that the 'principle of identification' establishes that. names can describe as they refer. he was a gatherer of information. Or in all events. This . The technique is reminiscent of eighteenth-century fiction – Tom Jones. the relations between word and word. This is the basis for his view that in fiction the proposition containing the reference cannot be said to be 'true'. Fowles's Ernestina Freeman. in order to exist. . Krapp. Beckett's Watt. This is broadly a 'non-predication' position. rather than word and world: the difference between a sentence used as an actual assertion and the same sentence used as a mock assertion . one certain thing.94 Metafiction The first thing you should know about Dick (Detective) is that he is given this impossible name in order that the reader may ascertain certain things about his character. Lessing's Anna Freeman. Squire Allworthy – but is deployed explicitly to split open the conventional ties between the real and fictive worlds rather than to reinforce them by mapping out a moral framework.
pp. Such underminings thoroughly remove the fictional text from the context of 'common sense' and emphasize its special linguistic status. light it with a match forefingered from its book and thumbed against the flint paper without being detached. Even sentences that appear to be reliable sources of information are so stylized as to offer an implicit comment on realism: Peter and Ambrose's father. After the description of a character. however. The text exists as a dialogue between the reader and different narrators about the validity of the conventions available for telling stories. more remarkably. Texts that consistently undermine every assertion with a reminder to the reader of its quasireferential status must obviously occupy a 'non-predication' position. but into acceptance of its reality as a sentence in a book. (p. (Olsen 1978. while steering the black 1936 la Salle Sedan with one hand. the reader is immediately informed: 'Descriptions of physical appearance and mannerisms is one of several standard methods of characterization used by writers of fiction' (Lost in the Funhouse. not into acceptance of the scene as real. using long pronominal phrases and extremely long qualifiers. In John Barth's story 'Lost in the Funhouse' (1968) almost every sentence is undermined and exposed as fictional. The attempt exhaustively to describe anything constructs not an illusion of that object but a reminder of the presence of language. 47) To some extent nearly all metafictional writers are aware of this quasi-referential status of fiction. remove the first cigarette from a white pack of Lucky Strikes. could with the other. and. choose to develop it in terms of an 'alternative reality' rather than privileging the 'everyday world' as the 'real reality'. 75) A mundane action is thus represented in a highly parenthesized. Some. p. . 73–4). The effect of this is to lull the reader. progression is always digression. adjectivized sentence. As with Tristram Shandy's attempt to recount his life-story.Are novelists liars? 95 difference is a matter of the purpose the receiver assumes the utterance to have.
Johnson uses a similar technique to remind the reader of the material existence of the book. Laurence Sterne's blank-page 'description' of the Widow Wadman is probably the most famous example of this. Raymond Federman in Double or Nothing continually rehearses possible narrative strategies. In fiction. agonizes about the many possible ways of telling the story (which becomes the story of its telling): FIRST PERSON or THIRD PERSON FIRST PERSON is more restrictive more subjective more personal harder is more objective more impersonal more encompassing easier I could try both ways: I was standing on the upper deck next to a girl called Mary . . there can be no existence. the 'noodleman'. The 'description' serves to draw attention to the fact that what is described in the real world exists before its description. he . with a novelist inside it writing a novel which is a commentary on the practice of writing fiction. p. The novel as a whole is a commentary on the practice of writing fiction. No Peggy He was standing on the upper deck next to a girl called Mary . 99) THIRD PERSON Throughout Double or Nothing Federman also draws the reader's attention to the book as artefact through typographic experiment and manipulation of white space. the reader perceives part of a passage describing Christopher Marlowe's death. the outer narrator.96 Metafiction Similarly. No Peggy (comes out the same). Through it. In Albert Angelo (1964) a hole is cut into a page describing a routine conversation in a school staffroom. . It is a demonstration of Roland Barthes's view of how a metalanguage can become in its turn the languageobject of a new metalanguage (Barthes 1967). . S. Turning over the page. . if there is no description. B. (Double or Nothing. At each stage in the novel.
another hole. Gass's Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife (1968). In its pure form a 'non-predication' position would be (and is) clearly restrictive. letters to publishers – inclusion of the physical 'scaffolding' of the text – these again are reminders of the text's linguistic condition. who completes the 'stories' of the personages in Humbert's story. He admits that such a commentary may strike the reader as 'an impersonation of Vladimir Nabokov talking about his own books' (p. and William H. of his coat. 'Brain Damage' (1970) presents the reader with pictorial images of disembodied heads and surrealistic rearrangements of the human body. Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers (1965). In G. Elaborate introductions to the novel. Federman's Double or Nothing and Take it or Leave it (1976). Philosophers who argue for a 'non-predication' position . The novel ends with a comment on the book by Nabokov himself. The reader is thus forced to reflect upon the conventions not only of narrative suspense (which works essentially by deliberately impeding the completion of the action or the explanation of a story. beginning at the point where Humbert's story ends. the typographic arrangements on the page visually imitate the content of the story. further deferring the appearance of a context which will 'explain' the Marlowe passage. 280–3). Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew (1979) begins with a series of parodic (?) letters written by editors who have rejected the novel for publication. while gradually filling in 'blanks' in the text) but also of the contextual basis of 'meaning' both inside and outside fictional texts. Barthelme's 'At the Tolstoy Museum' (1970) reproduces a pencil sketch of Tolstoy. Lolita begins with a foreword by John Ray (the friend of Humbert Humbert's lawyer). 328). a section heading 'Some Revelations' is followed by four blank pages (pp. marginalia. footnotes. Although most of these writers draw attention to the 'quasireferential' linguistic status of the fictional world.Are novelists liars? 97 or she discovers the description of a contemporary café brawl. There is also. of the museum. Christine Brooke-Rose's Thru (1975) and Between (1968). however. In Ronald Sukenick's Out (1973). Several of Vladimir Nabokov's novels begin in a similar fashion. they also allow the reader to construct an imaginative reality out of those words.
Johnson is a good example of a writer whose literal and obsessive application of the notion of fiction as lies became damaging to his work. to reduce the area of indeterminacy and potential misinterpretation.9 Fiction. Willard Quine and A. not the class containing as members. 491). David Hume. (Fiction is 'lies' for Johnson because it exists within the public medium of language. Thus Johnson becomes a . he swings desperately into extreme. Metafictional writers come up against the problem that. and readers cannot be prevented from constructing imaginative worlds from these words based on their own 'everyday' experiences. language in literature is at a secondary level of signification. is the 'falsity' position. reduces the freedom of the reader. 'there are no unreal individuals. His aim is to discover an ideal language which could directly transfer his state of mind to the reader's. Philosophers who view literary fiction in this light would include Plato. of course. Even more restrictive. unpag. It does not set out to inform. even if the text is purely a linguistic construct which does not 'hook on to' the real world. It therefore cannot be 'owned' by an 'author' who is its sole creator. Occasionally he experiments with concrete poetry. words carry their everyday significances into fictional texts. Plato excluded it from his ideal state.98 Metafiction come up against the problem that it suggests that sentences in fiction are the same as those that predicate something to an obviously nonexistent (nonsensical) person. metafictional subversions of the text. For Russell. nothing exists that does not exist within the laws of time and space of the world that we inhabit. S. David Hume dismissed poets as skilful liars. Thus metafictional writers who attempt to view it in this light place upon themselves huge constraints which are ultimately extremely counter-productive. defensive. He begins by attempting to write obsessively 'factual' autobiographical accounts 'to understand without generalization' (The Unfortunates (1969). all unreal individuals' (Russell 1905.). however. through the resemblance of signifier and signified in the iconic sign. Ayer. It is as if he hopes. though. is clearly not a case of simple falsehood. For Quine. so that the null-class is the class containing no members. He also. When this fails. p. J. B. dismissing it as lies. Bertrand Russell.
untidily. its biological maternal function. Johnson's discovery is that the ironic consequence of writing is its annihilation of what it attempts to 'represent'. He is a metafictionist second and a romantic first. bays. the desperate search for new forms makes 'the dredged up material more available' (Alvarez 1966. rooms. Alvarez has suggested. ships. As A. but under the pressure of an intense internalization. Writers can extract a story from life only by strict. kingdoms. as the gap between feeling and form grows inevitably clearer. Like Hugo. Gass's Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife) the arrangement of the letters 'mammarytit' in the shape of a female breast serves to provide a wider perspective on the main theme of the novel: motherhood. fishes. . . In attempting to express it. Both believe in the supremacy of the self and the incapacity of language to express that self. What he discovers. life is chaotic. not under the controlled abreactive situation of psychotherapy. He resembles the character Hugo in Iris Murdoch's Under the Net (1954). islands. What threatens to take over. 14). Johnson also failed. fluid. Johnson's work represents his search for a lost 'sincerity'. Here (in a manner very similar to William H. p. 73). His use of typographical experiment can be seen as a progression of the view expressed in Travelling People (1963) that 'the style of each chapter should spring naturally from its subject matter' (Introduction). 174). and this must mean falsification' (Memoirs (1973). The concrete form allows Johnson to focus simultaneously on the female shape. random. close selection.) Often he falls into a naïve imitative fallacy. it leaves myriads of ends untied. mountains. Shortly before his death. the writer relives it. He discovers that 'life does not tell stories. the idea of the Virgin Mary. the infantile phonetic representation of the word 'mother' and the demotic term for the breast. is the lack of correspondence. though. England as the motherland. a truth to the inner human being which will correspond with what he perceives outside. the existence of what Borges describes in A Personal Anthology (1961): 'through the years a man peoples a space with images of provinces. p. .Are novelists liars? 99 metafictionist through a frustrated romanticism. he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face' (p. Such techniques are probably used most successfully in See the Old Lady Decently (1975). is solipsism. tragically and .
inevitably, to get out from under a 'net' which increasingly closed in on him until his suicide. His work and life reveal the tragic potential in the assumption by a self-conscious writer of an extreme 'falsity' position. 'Alternative worlds' theories Most metafictional writers, however, eschew both 'nonpredication' and 'falsity' positions. They are self-consciously anxious to assert that, although literary fiction is only a verbal reality, it constructs through language an imaginative world that has, within its own terms, full referential status as an alternative to the world in which we live. Fictional statements exist and have their 'truth' within the context of an 'alternative world' which they also create. Statements in the real world have their 'truth' in the context of a world which they help to construct. Fiction is merely a different set of 'frames', a different set of conventions and constructions. In this view, a fictional character is 'unreal' in one sense, but characters who are not persons are still 'real', still exist, within their particular worlds. As William H. Gass suggests: 'Worlds? But the worlds of the novelist I hear you say do not exist. Indeed. As for that – they exist more often than the philosophers' ' (Gass 1970, p. 4). Metafiction lays bare the linguistic basis of the 'alternative worlds' constructed in literary fictions. Through continual shifts in and therefore revelations of context, metafictional texts expose the creation/description paradox. The more a text insists on its linguistic condition, the further it is removed from the everyday context of 'common sense' invoked by realistic fiction. Metafictional texts show that literary fiction can never imitate or 'represent' the world but always imitates or 'represents' the discourses which in turn construct that world. However, because the medium of all literary fiction is language, the 'alternative worlds' of fiction, as of any other universe of discourse, can never be totally autonomous. Their linguistic construction (however far removed from realism they may be) always implicitly evokes the contexts of everyday life. These too are then revealed as linguistically constructed. As Umberto Eco points out in a
Are novelists liars?
discussion of 'possible worlds' (here referred to as 'alternative worlds'): No fictional world could be totally autonomous, since it would be impossible for it to outline a maximal and consistent state of affairs by stipulating ex nihilo the whole of its individuals and of their properties. . . . it is enough for a story to assert that there exists an (imaginary) individual called Raoul; then, by defining him as a man, the text refers to the normal properties attributed to men in the world of reference. A fictional text abundantly overlaps the world of the reader's encyclopedia. But also, from a theoretical point of view, this overlapping is indispensable, and not only for fictional worlds. (Eco 1981, p. 221) Metafictional texts thus reveal the ontological status of all literary fiction: its quasi-referentiality, its indeterminacy, its existence as words and world. They may exaggerate the consequence of the creation/description paradox: that language in fiction has to be carefully organized in order to construct contexts which are more fully 'given' or assumed in the real world. Such texts, however, emphasize that the ability to manipulate and construct hypothetical, alternative or ontologically distinct 'worlds' is also a condition of social existence, of life outside novels. Because of the creation/description paradox, as Wolfgang Iser points out: 'if the literary communication is to be successful it must bring with it all the components necessary for the construction of the situation, since this has no existence outside the literary work' (Iser 1975, p. 21). Metafiction not only exposes the inauthenticity of the realist assumption of a simple extension of the fictive into the real world; it also fails deliberately to provide its readers with sufficient or sufficiently consistent components for him or her to be able to construct a satisfactory alternative world. Frames are set up only to be continually broken. Contexts are ostentatiously constructed, only to be subsequently deconstructed. At first glance, this might appear to be merely an extension of an essentially modernist strategy. Novels with multiple narrators or
points of view axiomatically shift context. In modernist fiction, however, the reader may be temporarily dislocated when point of view, for example, is shifted, but is allowed to reorient him or herself to the new perspective and recontextualize each new piece of discourse. Metafiction sets mutually contradictory 'worlds' against each other. Authors enter texts and characters appear to step into the 'real' world of their authors. Words self-consciously displayed as words appear to get up and walk off the page to haunt the author or argue with the reader. In modernist texts such as The Waves (1931), To the Lighthouse (1927), The Sound and the Fury (1931), the contextual shifts can be 'naturalized' by the construction of a narrator whose ontologically non-problematical 'full' subjectivity gives significance to the discourse. The reader soon realizes that the incoherence of Benjy's discourse in The Sound and the Fury is a result of its restriction to a purely perceptual point of view, a lack of reflective consciousness. The complexities of Quentin's discourse, in the same novel, are the result of an excess of reflectiveness. The shift from one to the other causes some uncertainty about the nature of the 'reality' they perceive, but never any doubt whether it exists. The reader is given enough 'components' to construct a context for these discourses which stabilizes their meaning. B. S. Johnson uses a similar technique throughout House Mother Normal (1971). Here the interior monologues of the nine old people are prefaced at each utterance with a dwindling intelligence count. In its 'scientific' accuracy, this provides the only stable context (albeit a highly abstract and dehumanizing one) for the increasingly meaningless monologues. However, the shifts can be recontextualized in terms of a hierarchy of provisional authorities: the individual characters, the scientific information, the author himself. What happens at the end, though, is a shift from modernist perspectivism to post-modernist doubt, for the house mother steps out of the frame of the world in the fiction to declare her reality in the world of the fiction: to declare her reality, therefore, as language, as B. S. Johnson's invention. Up to this point, the text can be understood in terms of the modernist strategy of unreliable narration, where histoire and discours become discrepant. The reader makes sense of such
which are borderline examples. Within a 'commonsense' order of discourse. M. This implicitly draws attention to the process of the construction of the 'world'. however. The final resolution of the textual contradictions. the case-history of Frau Anna G. 'the camp'. effected through what may or may not be a shift in the definition of reality involving Elisabeth's special 'psychic' powers. The future is revealed through a documentary account of the Babi Yar massacre and a vision of the 'New Jerusalem' which Lisa discovers after death. the poem 'Don Giovanni'. It is thus possible to read The White Hotel.. Post-modernist texts draw attention to the process of the construction of the fictive 'world' through writing. the Gastein journal. of course. literary productions to be analysed. Thomas's The White Hotel (1981) is. within the novel The White Hotel there is no ambiguity about the fact that this place. but through consciousness. documents. however. by means of a modernist aesthetic. or to . There are many texts. The 'symptoms' which Freud explains by reconstructing Elisabeth's personal past turn out to be her intimation of future historical events in relation to her racial identity as a Jew. Unlike Pale Fire. her historical foreknowledge. however. as a text which foregrounds uncertainty about our perception of the world. journals – become the text. final resolution can only be through either an awareness of the linguistic reality of the text itself or the acceptance of the existence of mutually exclusive realities or 'worlds'. are discrepant 'interpretations' and manifestations of the neurotic symptoms of Elisabeth Erdman. footnotes. these essentially interpretative shifts. D. 'about' interpretation. The reader does not have to solve the contradictoriness of the narrative shifts through a recourse to the linguistic status of the worlds constructed through the narrative. Freud's correspondence. It offers an array of textual devices so that the accoutrements of textuality – letters. exists. in the manner of Nabokov's Pale Fire. He or she does.Are novelists liars? 103 narratives by recontextualizing the discrepancies at progressively higher levels of the text until an authoritative norm is discovered. the possibility of clairvoyance and the possibility of life after death are not unusual assumptions. is. have to recognize the ontological flexibility of the norms of the 'everyday' world. In texts that employ such overtly metafictional strategies.
the reader matches them with a general type. . or demonstrates what Searle refers to as the 'principle of identification'). In The Literary Work of Art (1973). However. Ingarden suggests how realist texts are concretized. the author projects. . . the reader would match these with determinate individual states of affairs existing historically. by readers. Such novels reveal the duality of literaryfictional texts: all fiction exists as words on the page which are materially 'real'. the reader is further reminded that this act cannot create anything that could exist outside the dialectic of text and consciousness (anything that has what Ingarden calls 'ontic autonomy'. As in all literary fiction. or produced. the practice is open to abuse. Worlds of words: history as an alternative world Metafictional novels allow the reader not only to observe the textual and linguistic construction of literary fiction. However. this world is as 'real' as the everyday world. an act of consciousness creates an 'object' that did not exist before. Because of the similarity in the processes of constructing historical texts and realistic fictional texts. xxx). through quasi-judgemental statements. based on the particulars of a given historical time but not coincidental with them. For the duration of the reading at least. but also to enjoy and engage with the world within the fiction. The reader is made aware that.104 Metafiction read it perhaps as a post-modernist text which foregrounds uncertainty about its 'reality' status through a flaunting of its condition of textuality and its ostentatious construction of 'alternative worlds'. in the fiction-reading process.' philosophy. It could be argued that in realism one of these potential abuses is the appropriation and reduction of historical particularity for the support of assumptions about a timeless 'human nature' or a 'Plus ça change . p. If the work were a 'real' historical or documentary account. in realism. and also exists in consciousness as worlds created through these words: 'the aesthetic object belongs to the ideal but has its basis in the real' (Ingarden 1973. the 'states of affairs' which form the imaginary world.
And certainly 'non-fiction' novels like Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1965). suggested that both 'non-fiction' and the metafictional novel anyway share 'a radical refusal to neutralize the contingent nature of reality by transforming it into a safe zone of unified meaning' (Zavarzadeh 1976. They go on to argue that the novel is at present breaking down into its original components but reverting to the purely 'fictional' (Scholes and Kellogg 1966). but other than. as one critic has said: 'the longest lasting and most incestuous of the novel's many marriages and affairs has been with journalism' (Raban 1970. 71). Doctorow's The Book of Daniel (1971) and Robert Coover's The Public Burning (1977) are both 'non-fiction' and metafictional novels. Scholes and Kellogg have argued that the novel emerged as a resynthesis on the one hand of the 'empirical' components of epic (history/mimesis) and on the other hand of its 'fictional' components (romance/fable). these novels do present the reader with 'perfect matches'. p.Are novelists liars? 105 There is a sub-category of metafictional novels which are particularly effective in foregrounding such abuses. the collection in The New Journalism (1973) by Tom Wolfe and E. 90). L. They offer not 'general matches' (as realism) but historically determinate particulars. Historical writing matches a determinate individual object with a direct representation of a determinate individual object (remaining within Ingarden's terms). Mas'ud Zavarzadeh has. the worlds of novels. 41). p. W. history is seen as a provisional construct. In the midst of their overtly fictional or 'alternative' worlds. p. Novels like E. In both cases. Such novels suggest that history itself is a multiplicity of 'alternative worlds'. as fictional as. and metafictional novels suggest that fictions are facts. Johnson. David Lodge has suggested that 'it would be equally possible to move in the opposite direction – towards empirical narrative and away from fiction' (Lodge. Fictional writing matches an imaginatively constructed fictional object with a general class of . They suggest this by inserting real historical events or personages into an overtly fictional context. 1977b. or more recently Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark (1982) remind us that. Non-fiction novels suggest that facts are ultimately fictions. in fact. 'empirical' and 'fictional'. Discussing the development of narrative.
always to be completed by a reader. also a set of 'alternative worlds'. anachronistically. however. Fiction is thus always incomplete. The people and events here may 'match' those in the real world. from factual historical sources about the events leading up to the Rosenberg execution and. on the one hand. So history. It is shown in the novel to depend for its success on its linguistic and symbolic embodiment in the idols of popular culture: in John Wayne and Walt Disney. that of 'the illusion . and particularly the days leading up to the all-American entertainment phantasmagoria of the trial itself. to this extent. The cold war period. always uncertainly awaiting completion. clearly shaped in terms of post-Watergate (1973) experience. on the other hand. The paradox is explored in Robert Coover's novel The Public Burning. is also 'fictional'. and sections of manic carnivalistic prose featuring the circus acts of Uncle Sam. As part of an imaginary world they are always ontologically indeterminate. although ultimately a material reality (a presence). Their meanings and identities always change with the shift in context.106 Metafiction possibly real objects. for example. is shown to exist always within 'textual' boundaries. which draws. The mystical experience of the pilgrims gathered together outside its central offices is. in figures like Ben Franklin. and a total belief in material progress and in the United States as superpower. metafictional texts which introduce real people and events expose not only the illusion of verisimilar writing but also that of historical writing itself. in the American constitution. but these people and events are always recontextualized in the act of writing history. However. (Chapter 10 presents a parodistic 'Pilgrimage to the New York Times'. Uncle Sam is a comic-book embodiment of the dominant ideology of American society during the last thirty years – an ideology predominantly constructed out of a paranoid fear of communism. however. are not epistemologically indeterminate in the way of 'real' people (because the words on the page are the people in fiction). from the patently unreal fantasy figures of American myth and popular culture. Fictional characters. is shown in a kaleidoscope of perspectives. in the 'objectivity' of its mass media. History. What is revealed. The novel alternates between a narrative provided by a Richard Nixon whose consciousness is. is the fictional construction of history.
He is also shown to be the victim of ideology in that he naïvely believes that one individual can oppose its hegemony – its pervasive reinforcement and dominance. the Isaacsons. They do not. Joe McCarthy. Robert Lowell and Richard Burton. History textbooks are cited (with authentic references) along with sociological analyses of aspects of American culture such as Disneyland. Dr Spock. however. It proposes also that our personalities are finally always constructed out of ideology. displaces it. L. 243). These include persons such as Norman Mailer. He naïvely believes that political power can be invested in individuals. The subject of this novel is also the execution of a couple for supposedly betraying the secret of the atom bomb to the Russians (though this couple. that reason can overcome generalized madness. E.) This ideology is nowhere present more fully than in Nixon's 'personal' chapters. 'History' is the victim of 'fiction'. . Yet all the characters are similarly victims of this ideology. His identity merges totally with the all-American ideology until he becomes merely its victim. Their 'fictional' story is told. are a fictional version of the Rosenbergs). of course. and that individual heroism and sacrifice in a political cause is therefore ultimately futile. and the tangible world dissolves even as it is being proclaimed' (p. Bob Taft. he becomes no man. by sodomizing him in the last few pages of the novel). so that history can start again' (p. annunciating reality. Since he is a piece of public property. 244). Julius Rosenberg is determined to 'destroy all this so-called history. He thus becomes a figure ripe for media scandal and 'historical' reconstruction when the tide of success turns. He is absurd because in his desperation to embody Uncle Sam (who finally and ironically as 'Sam Slick the Yankee Fiddler' proves that Nixon has become 'his boy' at last. in his urge to go down in the history of a superpower as its superman. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel similarly suggests that history is the ultimate fiction we are all living. within a context of references to historical 'facts'. the public can choose to 'sell' him how and when it wishes. and events like the march on the Pentagon. notice the writing on the subway walls – the Hegelian 'OBJECTIFICATION IS THE PRACTICE OF ALIENATION'.Are novelists liars? 107 suffered by mystics throughout the ages: the Spirit. He completely loses his 'personality'.
mild or extreme. In this novel. He even refers to his professor. the fictional lives. Sukenick (who is an actual living writer and critic of metafiction). of the effects of his parents' optimistic. imprisoned for betraying their country. or even at the level of language. he is). of course.108 Metafiction What emerges again is history as text: history as personal reconstruction. He cannot escape at a personal level. are shown throughout as constructed by 'history'. the 'story' (at the level of discours) of Daniel and Susan in 1967. or at a social level. Daniel writes instructions to himself to 'strike that' (p. He cannot escape the fiction that is history or the history that is fiction. and ending with the ending of the novel. through his acts in the world. The personal stories. however. The narrative is presented through three levels: the 'story' (histoire) of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson. austere and fervent socialist commitment in the fifties. is shown as a consequence of his childhood history. 98). 74). as Daniel sits composing it in the library of Columbia University. The level of narration keeps the process of fictional/historical construction continually in the reader's mind. as a character in a novel. for whom Daniel seems to be writing the story we are reading. the 'personal' lives of the fictional characters carry far more of the weight of narrative interest than in The Public Burning. He has no more freedom than a character in a fiction (which. and the 'story' (at the level of narration itself) of the progress of the novel we are reading. There is. He is the son of a traitor and therefore a traitor himself. writing like Holden Caulfield his 'David Copperfield kind of crap' (p. Daniel's 'character' and place in it have been fixed by his parentage. At each narrative level the transformation goes on. 'nothing I can do. ending with the Isaacsons' execution. through his own wife and child. 24) or to 'explore the history of corporal punishment as a class distinction' (p. Daniel's despair and cynicism about revolutionary protest against Vietnam in the sixties. and of their children Daniel and Susan. for example. beginning with the failure of Susan's attempted suicide but still ending with her funeral. 133). Yet 'history' is itself shown as a fictional construction. he says. that they cannot have planned for' (p. .
10). a city recovering from a nuclear holocaust. for example. Thomas's 'hotels'. The symbol of this world is not a city (always in Lessing's work suggesting the alienated contemporary consciousness) but a room (again in her novels suggesting the fragile inner psyche). Italo Calvino's invisible cities of Kubla Khan's realm: these are all explicitly 'alternative'. it occurred to me looking at this room that the raw. unfinished. In The Golden Notebook Anna's Jungian analyst Mrs Marks tries to persuade her to see her personal past in terms of a Jungian collective unconscious. Significantly. raw. As with all 'alternative worlds' positions. Many of them pursue their questioning through the self-conscious construction of alternative worlds which contest the 'reality' of the everyday world. broadly 'fantastic'. is a futuristic projection of the everyday world. he begins with the view that 'literary discourse cannot be true or false. M.Are novelists liars? Worlds of words: the 'fantastic' as an alternative world 109 An interesting version of the 'alternative worlds' view of fiction is that presented in Todorov's work on the fantastic. 167). Set against this is a second. tentative . p. . unfinished . All metafictional texts question precisely this 'existence of an irreducible opposition between real and unreal' (ibid. Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974). The essence of the 'fantastic' in his view is that it 'hesitates' both understanding and definition of the 'reality' outside the fiction. it can only be valid in relation to its own premises' (Todorov 1973. mental world mediated through Jungian symbols and mythic archetypes. or outer frame. Anna identifies Mrs Marks with a room: Nothing in my life corresponds with anything in this room – my life has always been crude. Gilbert Sorrentino's and D. to heal the divisions within herself by submerging her identity as an individual into that of the archetypal artist-seer. or of each other. p. The first. is not overtly metafictional but it does 'hesitate' the distinctions between 'fiction' and 'reality' by setting two alternative worlds against each other. The alternatives are familiar ones in Lessing's fiction.. John Fowles's Bourani. Angela Carter's strange and mythically allusive kingdoms. John Hawkes's surrealistic portrait of an occupied Germany (The Cannibal (1949). .
She enters a mental world where she journeys back into a personal and collective racial and female past. as the narrator. perhaps. Freudian oral fantasies and Jungian motifs – the child. This vision divides in The Memoirs of a Survivor into two possible alternative realities: the city is a development of the 'something new'. Art that expresses such an order is invalidated by contemporary experience. Allusions to Alice in Wonderland. that the everyday world exerts a massive force to resist the attempts of alternative worlds or symbolic systems to become paramount reality. 190). that she rejects the possibility of discovering unity in archetypal patterns. historically materialist break (such as that presented in The Four-Gated City) will not save civilization. the reader settles into the basically realistic outer frame of the city world (an extension of the 'everyday'). and the inner world of the room is a development of Mrs Marks's 'old and cyclical'. city world into the inner world of the rooms behind the wall. The narrator gradually withdraws from the outer. (p. . It has been seen through Berger and Luckmann's work. Lessing tries to assert in this novel that a radical. but something new' (p. However. 460). As the novel begins. but he or she is suddenly plunged into a different reality and a different frame (through the wall) where laws of time and space are suspended. 239) Anna feels her world at this particular historical moment to be so radically different from any other. Emily and Hugo walk resolutely towards the wall at the end of the novel. the garden. for the future may be a completely different reality: 'Terrible. 'Out of this collapsed little world into another order of world altogether' (p. It has been seen through Goffman's work that the outer frame always defines 'reality'. This inner world finally triumphs over the historical one. however. or marvellous. Hope lies only with the reassertion of the inner psyche through its submergence in the greater mind of the collective unconscious.110 Metafiction quality in my life was precisely what was valuable in it and I should hold on fast to it. She rejects tradition. however. It becomes the outer frame. the strange woman – intermingle.
It is continually indicated that Bourani. because it is mediated through a character who is not only involved but sceptical too. John Fowles's The Magus (1965. and responds with the involvement that Todorov sees as essential in securing the reader's identification. either in the city world or in the world of the everyday. Nick. fantastically. even though Lessing tries to resolve this hesitation at the end of the novel by asserting the primacy of the inner world. but they ignore each other. 85). ambiguities. They even contradict each other. He is immediately drawn into Conchis's (ultimately Fowles's) 'godgame'. Nick. however. unexpectednesses' (p. They continue. is a metafictional affirmation of the inadequacy of a mutually exclusive opposition of the concepts 'reality' and 'fiction'. 1977) is another novel which explicitly constructs an 'alternative world' as a metaphor for the processes of fictionality. and the hesitation that forces him or her to question the ontological status of what is happening. looking back at his inauthentic existence at Oxford. The protagonist. The reader is warned early on of this. like the novel itself and Conchis's masques. David Storey's Radcliffe (1963) and Ian McEwan's The Comfort of Strangers (1981)). The inner world takes over the superior reality status accorded to the outer frame. The validity of this symbolic world has just not been firmly enough established for the reader to abandon his or her historical perspectives. The reader accepts the shift. Bourani shifts realism to gothic (similar to the structure of Iris Murdoch's The Unicorn (1963). Bourani provides a classic 'fantastic' setting: 'second meanings hung in the air.Are novelists liars? 111 The frames change. What the novel does powerfully assert. The two worlds question each other throughout. reflects that he misinterpreted 'metaphorical descriptions of complex modes of feeling for . is explicitly an art-world. Framed by the humdrum scenes of everyday life in London. The explicitly symbolic inner world is never integrated with the apparent historical world. arrives there to take up a job. however. a metaphor. The weighty symbolism has no anchorage in any reference to 'literal' objects. to 'hesitate' each other. but the historical world (now the inner frame) exerts the special claim to paramount status of the 'everyday'.
Todorov argues further in his work on the fantastic: If certain events of a book's universe explicitly account for themselves as imaginary. the everyday world. He steers Nick through a Jungian night journey under the sea. as Fowles recognizes.112 Metafiction straightforward presentation of behaviour' (p. They refuse such closure. 17). Conchis demonstrates to Nick the need for existential authorship in all human beings. He takes over the telling of the story for much of the central section of the novel and is frequently compared with a novelist creating 'a world where nothing is certain' (The Magus. then everything around it is real. and Nick is made aware of the existence of multiple worlds or 'realities' which cannot be contained between the covers of any book. in Conchis's own words. the imaginary world generated by the words of a novel is not less real than. is clearly a . He is a novelist like Fowles himself and. the score of a symphony or the parameters of a stage. He is a version of the Jungian 'shadow' who seems to be 'hiding meaningful contents under an unprepossessing exterior' (Jung 1972. Nick. The reader is being warned not to do the same. 150). the reality of fiction is primarily verbal. One way of reinforcing the notion of literary fiction as an alternative world is the use of literary and mythical allusion which reminds the reader of the existence of this world outside everyday time and space. of its thoroughgoing textuality and intertextuality. they thereby contest the imaginary nature of the rest of the book. (Todorov 1973. The Magus is about Nick's attempts to learn to perceive the fictional basis of everything and to distinguish between different orders of fiction. but an alternative to. the tarot's and Jung's (trickster) magus figures. p. 168) Although. the curtain never falls and the play always goes on acting. because. has 'freedom' and 'hazard' as his first principles. If a certain apparition is only the fault of an overexcited imagination. 339). p. unravelling Conchis's mysteries. like the definition of a god in The Aristos (1965). p. Fowles's character Conchis is explicitly derived from Shakespeare's (Prospero).
of course.Are novelists liars? 113 Theseus figure for much of the novel. 48) The Prospero figure. has the technological apparatus to enable any enterprising entrepreneur to take over the role of its artistic producer. but on his return to London. in Muriel Spark's Not to Disturb (1971). Excelling in the ad hoc conversion of apparently fortuitous events (though nothing. alienated. thoroughly mechanized world: tape recorders and food processors have cut the servants off from their . they take over the whole drama (the novel is arranged in five sections which correspond to the structure of a Jacobean tragedy). makes frequent appearances in metafictional novels. This society. p. however. he busily and effectively organizes chaos. In the figure of Lister the butler. he becomes an Orpheus bringing back his Eurydice from the dead (Alison's 'suicide'). Here is a divided. is ultimately fortuitous in the Spark world). recalled here explicitly in the figure of Conchis. (Stewart 1979. 85). Lister uses the gadgetry that modern science and affluence has put at his disposal in order to arrange the future (the foretold deaths of the aristocrats) into sensationalist documentary art. in a parody of classic theatrical tradition. informing those around him: 'we have been such stuff as dreams are all through the night' (p. This novel is about the production of art in a society as degenerate in integrity and coherence as that portrayed in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (to which it constantly alludes). for the boundaries of universes of discourse are constantly merging into one another and reemerging as transformed fields of meaning. ironically cast. to hold the stage. The Magus sets out to explore the artistic process of constructing novels and lives. Their servants are left. Ostentatious use of literary and mythic allusion reinforces the notion of fictionality. As the capitalist entrepreneurs of the future. Its aristocracy shut themselves away in large rooms full of useless miniatures. and the reader's awareness of the construction of alternative worlds. He is there. and before he reaches the centre. however. for example. Such explicit intertextual reminders are common in metafictional novels and suggest to the reader that The ongoingness of tradition – of social process – makes a 'finite' province of meaning impossible.
but Victor Passerat's coat.114 Metafiction traditional 'modes of production'. carefully documented on celluloid. The servants refer to the future as a thing of the past. in our everyday lives. allow them success within their world. as self-determined predestination is also revealed to be merely an aspect of eternal form. technological society which registers the significance of 'art' in terms of cash value. Its essential application is not to reality. 44). is that. It remains credible because the truthfulness of publicity is judged. 'speaks volumes' (p. They are opportunists. (Berger 1978. are created by a higher authority. In this world. . They exist within a present-tense narrative but discourse in the future tense because they know they are a work of art. artistic virtuosity has become ingenuity and publicity. What Lister sees as his self-determined predestination is thus revealed to be merely an aspect of literary form. Yet. What we see. however. while they are in the process of creating 'publicity'. She does. . They have realized a lucrative truth expressed by John Berger. but to daydreams. They might produce the 'story' of their lives to sell to the international press. not by the real fulfilment of its promises. 69). . but by the relevance of its fantasies to those of the spectator-buyer. complacent within the world of high-technology production. 146) What the servants do not realize. . but their lives are Muriel Spark's story. In the Klopstock household 'the books are silent' (p. however. They are 'successful' according to the norms of a consumerist. Art is produced in the same way as the sliced carrots which stream out of Heloise's food processor. and creating an alternative world which refers not to 'daydreams' but to the 'reality' of the novel as a work of art. In an amoral and irreligious world. Spark implies. art is touted – as so often in Spark's novels – as so much 'real estate'. We too. comparing art to advertisement: Publicity speaks in the future tense and yet the achievement of this future is endlessly deferred. they are unaware of an ironic authority outside their world creating them. Muriel Spark is in the process of creating them. p.
in fact. Even a cursory examination. with an attendant growth in political and psychological awareness about issues such as race. It is dangerous. The fictional legacy from the late fifties and early sixties in America was strongly marked by . of course. but many British writers seem to fit comfortably into the first half of the scale and many American writers into the second half. gender and technology. Other factors have differently affected the development of both fiction and metafiction in the two countries.5 Fictionality and context: from role-playing to language games This chapter aims to trace the 'sliding scale' of metafictional practices from those novels which still implicitly invoke the context of the everyday world (though questioning its representation as simply a domain of commonsense) through to those novels which shift context so frequently and so radically that the only 'frame' of which the reader is certain is the front and back covers of the book he or she is holding. America in the sixties saw the emergence of a much more influential youth 'counter-culture'. would reveal the earlier sensitivity of American fiction to the concept of reality as a construct. war. to make simple distinctions between British and American fiction.
John Braine. Such novels assume there is an a priori reality which can to a large extent be taken for granted. P. Gass has written that 'we select. Act I: All the world's a stage: role-playing and fictionality as theme William H. becomes enslaved by her own fictional images of herself .or undersystematized. Muriel Spark's novel The Public Image (1968) follows the career of Annabel. nor with questions of its ontological status. The consequence of this has been a strong tendency in US writers to respond to the anonymous. for example) rather than the anti-modernist. It is not concerned with the linguistic existence of the fictional text. to disappear with her baby whose 'existence gave her the sense of being permanently secured to the world' (p. we construct. we compose our pasts and hence make fictional characters of ourselves as it seems we must to remain sane' (Gass 1970. writers or painters. It is a form that can be 'naturalized' ultimately to fit realist assumptions.116 Metafiction absurdism and black humour (Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961). Spark's Jean Brodie. frenetic and mechanized society they see around them with fiction that is similarly depersonalized. though. is the most minimal form of metafiction. Such novels tend to present characters who are involved in a duplicitous situation requiring the perpetration of some form of pretence or disguise. 125). The examination of fictionality. empiricist writing of England (Kingsley Amis. Eventually. 128). Or they may be artists because they assume roles which destroy their own and others' integrity and existential freedom. C. through the thematic exploration of characters 'playing roles' within fiction. or of appearance with reality. she becomes aware of the fictionmaking process and decides to step out of the image. the 'English Tiger Lady'. These characters usually appear as inauthentic artists. hyperactive and over. an actress whose life comes to be determined by the publicity image that has been constructed for her. however. through the confusion of 'role' with 'self'. but which is flexible enough to accommodate fictional departures from its norms. p. They may be professional artists such as actors. Snow).
Iain Crichton-Smith's Goodbye Mr Dixon (1974) and John Gardner's Freddy's Book (1980). he can inform her: 'I've become a Rubens woman' (p. who is a projection of his deepest desires and conflicts. and 'he knew that Nancy must be seeing the contrast between Rubens and his admirer' (p. Bernard Malamud's The Tenants (1971). By the end. An unusual exploration of the theme of fictionality occurs in Brigid Brophy's Flesh (1962). Another character. Some metafictional novels present characters who are explicitly artist figures. At their first meeting. 17). in Joe's. he has told Nancy his favourite painter is Rubens. as in many of Iris Murdoch's novels. in Jacob's case. Joe Morgan. an avoidance of real responsibility and. is a logician who obsessively categorizes experience according to the rules of pure logic. Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer (1979). the inflexibility and inhumanity which is the result of distorting experience to fit predetermined categories. The novelist finds . S. In Goodbye Mr Dixon. disgustingly fat. the reader is presented with a novelist haunted by the role he has created for his main character. where Marcus's diffuse and ineffectual aestheticism is taken in hand by Nancy's selfassertiveness and culinary skills to function as the raw material from which an objet d'art can be produced. Dixon. A. Marcus himself is turned into a Rubens woman in order to be worthy of Nancy. as in Gide's The Counterfeiters (1925). a form of compulsive role-playing. in Fowles's The Collector (1963). 123). Jacob Horner is a grammar teacher who lives his life on the principle of the generative possibilities of substitution and combination offered by 'mythotherapy'. Between them they bring about the death of Joe's wife (Jacob's lover) through. Nigel Williams's My Life Closed Twice (1977). They may be novelists writing novels. More sinister still is.Fictionality and context 117 and in attempting to impose them upon the schoolgirl minds around her (from advice about skin-cleansing to praise of Mussolini) reveals the fascism latent in a misapplied and obsessive mythologization. Byatt's The Game (1967) or Martin Amis's Success (1978). for example. John Barth's The End of the Road (1958). Some involve characters who manipulate others explicitly as though they were playwrights or theatrical directors.
Certainly this theme is explored in most of her novels. As Pearson explains. They feel trapped and they elect other people to play roles in their lives. Alternatively. Pearson and Baffin. 138). however. because we 'see only the salient points of these lives without taking into account the details of corrosion. editor and dramatis personae. to the 'crystalline'. Envy and personal dissatisfaction. p. 23). a novelist is revealing secrets of this sort' (Murdoch 1977. to the inauthentic fictionalizing of others. similar to those in Nabokov's Lolita. in fact. Ironically. Most of her novels. The title of the novel is itself an indication of its self-referential status. she often reveals an attraction to systems of complete abstract significance. p. forewords. as Albert Camus suggests. Novels like The Black Prince (1973) and A Word Child (1975) involve professional artists who self-consciously explore such formal problems: Iris Murdoch's own dilemmas. . p. The novel is framed by an array of mock textual accoutrements. are not so explicit in their metafictional situations. however. are then dominated by the myths. as she herself has said. for example. . are frequently shown in these novels to lead to obsessive and uncontrolled practices of self-fictionalization. Hamlet is the play in which Shakespeare gave the role of himself to its hero. In A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970). Iris Murdoch has suggested that fictionalization in life occurs because 'people create myths about themselves.118 Metafiction himself unable to lead a normal life because he continually measures this 'real' life against the impossible standards set by the character's life. editorials and postscripts by narrator. despite her argument for preserving the contingent opacity of characters. and in The Black Prince Murdoch seems to be exploring the two sides of her fictional dilemma through their embodiment in the two writers in the novel. which. they may lead. implicit references to theatre replace overt references to novelists writing novels. . 226). Thus we make these lives into works of art' (The Rebel 1951. Bradley Pearson (the 'crystalline' novelist set against the 'journalistic' writer Baffin) is the narrator of The Black Prince. Here she explores the complications that arise from the assumption that we are the heroes or heroines of our . results in 'far too shallow and flimsy an idea of human personality' (Murdoch 1977.
the author is still a god. Rupert.Fictionality and context 119 own life-dramas rather than part of a larger drama in which we are merely walk-on extras. 433). at one with the Iago role. both tragic and comic.' says Sister Georgiana. p. but 'what has changed is that we are no longer the Gods of the Victorian image. For Fowles too. 'He's much kinder and allows his people an extraordinary freedom of choice. 173) For Spark. Act II: Curtain-up: script-writing Why do metafictional novelists so frequently concern themselves with the problem of human freedom? Malcolm Bradbury's parody of Muriel Spark and John Fowles in Who Do You Think You Are? (1976).' says Sister Mercy as they walk back in their black habits. not authority' . trapped in Julius's flat. Three nuns are walking in a garden (an imitation of the opening scenario of Spark's The Abbess of Crewe): 'I wish we could get ourselves into the hands of Mr Fowles. left with 'how very little any of us actually know at any given moment about the consequences of our actions' (p. of what happens when people try to fit others into preordained roles in their own dramas.' (p. 'but it's a very secular judgement. 'pretending your characters are free can only be a game' (Fowles 1976. A play within a play within a play is presented: Morgan dresses up as a girl dressed up as a boy. for example. 456).' 'We understand your feelings. focuses precisely on this aspect of their work. essentially absurd. with freedom our first principle. and in 'reality' people are part of the book written by the hand of God. like Othello. Comic misunderstandings proliferate. cannot comprehend the depth of human passion. Simon and Julius eavesdrop in a manner reminiscent of Jacobean revenge drama. For him. kills himself because of the deception worked upon him and because Julius. Julius is presented as an enchanter/voyeur rather like Iago. freedom is limited to self-conscious role-playing because in fiction characters are trapped within the novelist's script. The reader is left with a vision.
This is achieved through the plot device of prematurely revealing the ends of the characters in 'flashforwards' near the beginning of the book. The device is an obvious theatrical strategy because of the prima facie existence of the script in drama. In most of Spark's novels the author is flaunted as God in the novel. One common metafictional strategy is to present characters who are aware of this condition. with its exaggerated sense of an ending and technique of advanced significance. In their sociological work Escape Attempts. though necessarily a humanly fallible one. is like the second reading of a conventional novel. and do not ultimately have identity within the script. trying to explain how his life has been imposed upon by a morally sick author who has imprisoned him in 'This dirty Book' (p. Causal relationships and . They suggest. It is a concern with the idea of being trapped within someone else's order. this is to be trapped within language itself. begins with its oversexed 'hero'. for example. however. ideology or fate. For 'real' people there are always alternative scripts. within an arbitrary system of signification which appears to offer no means of escape. Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor discuss the implications of living within a daily routine which can be compared to the experience of living in a prison. 86). The 'script then is simultaneously the launching pad for identity work and a battleground on which to fight for a separate identity' (Cohen and Taylor 1978. At the furthest metafictional extreme. as do Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Luigi Pirandello's six characters. p. characters normally know of their condition through knowledge of their relationship to an author. Fictional characters have no identity outside the script. In fiction. however. that any analogy between fictional characters and real people finally breaks down. an alternative to destiny. p. The concern with freedom in both cases is. The characters in Samuel Beckett's Endgame (1957) know the script to be a machine. 68). Denis Potter's novel Hide and Seek (1973). Reading such a novel for the first time.120 Metafiction (The French Lieutenant's Woman. 7). and who thus implicitly draw attention to the fictional creation/description paradox. Daniel. a consequence of the perceived analogy between plot in fiction and the 'plot' of God's creation.
which are the novel she is in: On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena. It is counterpointed. not of the everyday. and certainly not the reader. however. 60). It stopped. is allowed to. 42) Sometimes the characters believe they are creating their own fictional identity. was 'to give me something to work on as a satirist. but of the eternal and absolute. to the divine plan) are foregrounded. p. which are perfectly possible within a world of art placed always in relation to the context. and was immediately followed by a voice remarking her own thoughts. In The Driver's Seat (1970) the present-tense narrative describing Lise in search of a man to murder her suggests that Lise is in control. Caroline in The Comforters (1957). Muriel Spark's novel-writing career began shortly after her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1954. however. It seemed to come through the wall on her left.Fictionality and context 121 perfect systems of order (or almost: this is the closest we can get. is creating her own history. They facilitate her satirical treatment of the irrationalities of a world where everyone has forgotten God. (p. in human terms. So too is the traditional novel. has her thoughts taken over continually by the thoughts of her author. listening to the typewriter creating the novel in which she is a character. Acceptance and simultaneous subversion of both her faith and the novel form provide her metafictional base. through the stylized creation of fictional worlds where absolutely no one. It said: on the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena. Sometimes her characters know they are being written into a fiction. The Catholic faith is a norm from which one can depart' (Spark 1961. but the reader always knows that it is being created for them. Just then she heard the sound of a typewriter. the effect of which. she has said. where the end cannot be known: in ways. by the analeptic use of the future tense which reveals her 'end' to the reader (and the 'end' of Spark's plot) . Events immediately take on significances in ways which are impossible in life.
As George Steiner has suggested: Future tenses are an example of the more general framework of non. surreal distillations of the absurd and equally grotesque events of his 'real' life in Irving's novel. Helen. worried at 'becoming a public figure – a leading character in someone else's book before he'd even written a book of his own' (p. the base tense of the novel. suggests that his fiction is. decides also to write." Garp wrote. In The World According to Garp (1976) John Irving uses an array of similar strategies. is continually broken into by forms of the future tense. publishes her autobiography and becomes a feminist cause célèbre.122 Metafiction very near the beginning of the book. S. 61) Ironically. The impersonal narrative version of events uses simple flashforwards itself: 'Jenny's only other brother would be killed in a sailboat accident long after the war was over' (p.and counter-factuality. This base narrative is counterpointed at intervals by Garp's mother's version – 'In her autobiography Jenny wrote: "I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone. in fact. his mother. The novel contains several of his stories. Garp himself. "was a lone wolf"' (p. 4). He is a 'war baby' born of the last act of wounded ballturret gunner Technical Sergeant Garp. The final authority here is only T. That made me a sexual suspect"' (p. the past historic. no . 130). (Steiner 1975. 10). Garp's wife. They are a part of the capacity of language for the fictional and illustrate absolutely central powers of the human word to go beyond and against 'that which is the case'. Garp. 13) – and by Garp's version (inserted into the narrative at intervals well before Garp has even been conceived in the order of the plot): '"My mother. 'an idiot with a one-word vocabulary' (p. but the apparently everyday world in this novel is even more bizarre and surreal than the overtly fictional worlds also presented. Jenny Fields. p. 18) – 'Garp!' As in Spark's fiction. their use here reminds the reader that Lise's 'script' exists within a larger 'script' (Spark's) which exists within a final script (God's). which act as constant reminders of fictionality.
this no longer seems to be the case. Like Spark. 162). Fowles prefers to set centuries – nineteenth and twentieth – against each .Fictionality and context 123 different from autobiography: 'You have your own terms for what's fiction and what's fact. in predetermined fictional 'scripts'. In a post-modernist age. in a different world. and also in the possible outcome of setting past against present in the sphere of fiction. we write our own autobiographies. any autobiography. offers an infinity of possible endings (though he might prefer the term 'history' to 'life'). Fowles offers the reader three endings – alternatives to both Victorian morality and historical-romance conventions – but he himself would agree with the critics that life. Irving reiterates Roth's view of the American writer's relation to 'reality' – there's no outdoing it. of course. given the bizarre world in which he lives – the context which. Fowles is interested in endings as they relate to the problem of freedom. although a human being will always try to 'live his life as if he were recounting it' (p. however much you make up. The individual recounting his or her life is a different individual from the one who lived it. The novel. especially in novels. is supposed to approximate in its 'realistic' presentation to our own everyday world. which are about 'characters' before they are about 'human beings'.' she tells him. the 'scripts' of our lives. 'Jenny Fields' is fictional not only because she is created by John Irving but because as soon as any of us put ourselves on paper we create fictional characters of ourselves. This is not surprising. in the novel. however. 61). however. And as soon as any of us put fictional characters on paper. 'It's all your experience – somehow. Spark. can never really be free. John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman is interesting in that it attempts to explore an existential concern with human freedom through a writerly awareness that characters in fiction. For him. however. even if it's only an imagined experience' (p. 1938). with a different script. also suggests that any history. is always a reconstruction. works through an opposition of present and future verb tenses. An earlier character who pondered the relationship between fiction and autobiography was Sartre's Roquentin (Nausea. however. a fiction. there was finally a choice between living and recounting.
a new direction. However. when to mystify and when to reveal. categorize and define. Like Spark's temporal dislocations. At one point. clearly. can also preserve freedom by preserving mystery. He suggests (both in the novel and elsewhere) that realism. has to be led by Sarah Woodruff. 90). who can fix images upon screens but who shuns the area of imaginative freedom allowed by the verbal sign. 284). since we have in destroying so much of the mystery. In The French Lieutenant's Woman Charles Smithson. the difficulty. Just in case he or she might be settling into a state of passive complacency. His characters. as it is of Daniel at the beginning of Daniel Martin (1977). the dilettante palaeontologist and leisured aristocratic hero. having spent several pages spoofing Victorian sexual hypocrisy. Fowles's too are designed to shake the reader's conventional moral and aesthetic assumptions. Each minute requires a fresh choice. . the aura of the forbidden. as author. each minute the nail waits to be hammered in' (p. with its blanks and silences. fix. he can choose. its repressions. like Victorian sexuality and nineteenthcentury history. (p. Through his manipulation of both realistic convention and Victorian history. destroyed also a great deal of the pleasure. do not have this choice. he intrudes to comment: By transferring to the public imagination what they left to the private. 234) Fowles would be the first to admit that laying bare the conventions does not always increase the pleasure of the text. we are the more Victorian – in the derogatory sense of the word – century. p.124 Metafiction other and has described the novel as a 'science fiction journey back in time' (Fowles 1969. he shifts the historical context to implicate the reader. . to a recognition of what freedom entails: 'Escape is not one act . the Victorian social outcast of the title. He also learns that only thus will history cease to be 'always this being caught in the same . in all of his novels. the characters who deny the possibility of freedom (in existential terms) are those who compulsively label. This is true of the butterfly-collecting Clegg in The Collector.
Hardy in its mysterious heroine. Arnold is rehearsed through its suggestion of a suspension between two worlds. It rehearses Dickens in its portrayal of characters like Charles's manservant Sam. 179). however. but clearly. He can know them only from his own twentieth-century perspective. 75). the narrator has only hindsight and the epigraphs to rely upon for his. Fowles has to admit that his characters cannot be 'free' because they are written into his script. The lesson. p. admit the provisionality of one's constructions. which can recount their lives but not live them. The important thing is to admit one's authorship. if done with ironic intent by a composer quite aware of where we've been and where we are' (Barth 1977. The novel illustrates John Barth's comment that 'if Beethoven's sixth were composed today. given an author who often treats him as 'a poor living fossil' (p. She is. But if they are in his 'script' he is also in theirs. than any proper fragment . his own version of history. Yet he has also to admit that they are 'free' to be reconstructed in other people's imaginations. even in her introduction. Fowles's novel rehearses George Eliot in its intrusive moralizing. continually reconstructed and open-ended can one make responsible choices within it and achieve a measure of freedom. or even a Harold Robbins – suggesting that only if one is self-consciously aware that 'history' like 'fiction' is provisional. will be a difficult one.Fictionality and context 125 fiendish machine' (p. confidently and flamboyantly display in an array of epigraphs and documentary footage his knowledge of the Victorians. He may demonstrate that he knows them in ways that they could not possibly know themselves. as a twentieth-century 'Manager of the Performance'. necessarily. presented more like 'a figure from myth. Quotes from Marx. an author who reveals him to be apparently trapped within both the script of history and the script of the fiction we are reading. or a French New Novelist. Linnaeus and Darwin provide a subtext for the drama. it wouldn't be. and even in other people's (film) scripts. 257). The epigraphs offer a commentary on the age from within its own perspective. But always the rehearsal is under the direction of a Roland Barthes. it would be an embarrassment. He may. The exploration of history and freedom is focused through the characterization of Sarah.
the fictional conventions of Victorian realism). and as a creation of John Fowles. that she is possibly an aspect of his psychic creativity. mysterious and unpredictable. Yet it is in the presentation of Sarah that Fowles. and exploiting. using fictional wiles to avoid existential bad faith. Sarah constructs a fictional version of her life (that she is a 'fallen woman') in order to stand outside conventional Victorian society in the role of social outcast (just as Fowles seeks fictional freedom by standing outside. now desired or even demanded. She is 'mythical': she stands outside 'history' and outside fiction. seducing. existing necessarily in a state of 'alienation'. The narrator never allows her perspective or voice to be heard through his own. But she achieves this condition in the novel through deliberate artifice. He admits that she haunts him. treacherous. paradoxically. 'Now feared by the male. it is Sarah who carries the responsibility for demonstrating most thoroughly Fowles's philosophy of freedom and fiction.126 Metafiction of the petty provincial day' (p. confusing. deliberately deceiving. She haunts Fowles in his 'real' life. the virgin would seem to represent the most consummate form of the feminine mystery. Like Conchis. And. this detracts from her 'mystery'. In fact. The reader is given no access to Sarah's thoughts. both women in the novel – Sarah and Ernestina – conform to stereotypical male images of women. Simone de Beauvoir has argued that. 184). Sarah is a trickster figure. Fowles ensures that his narrative presentation reinforces her mysteriousness. Within the world of the fiction. Sarah is the femme fatale: seductive. She is not free because contained within and constructed through the patriarchal ideology embodied most powerfully in the narrator himself. perhaps unintentionally. 9). If Ernestina is the little angel in the house. Fowles creates a heroine who determines the course of most of the novel (and its possible interpretations) through her apparently lost virginity. his anima. p. He can resist the crude labels of 'hysteric' or 'fallen woman' but not the more subtle implications of virginity combined with predatoriness. her . she is therefore its most disturbing and at the same time its most fascinating aspect' (Beauvoir 1979. violates his own principles of freedom.
we. p. Fowles suggested of Sarah that she 'haunted' him. 'Partial Magic in the Quixote': Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators. but over the sound of the words which are her body and are her clothes. a Greenwich Village actress. tyrannically.just as he. discussed the effect of such novels in his essay. She is a heroine who thus ultimately conforms to a male concept of female contradictoriness embodied in the femme fatale figure. of course. almost at the end. Carlyle observed that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write and read and try to understand. Fowles's notion of fictional 'possession' in relation to fictional freedom is often treated much more literally in metafictional novels. In Clarence Major's Reflex and Bone Structure (1975) the author is one of the lovers of the central character Cora Hull. then. creates a heroine who at one and the same time fulfils contradictory male desires. however. explicitly as a verbal construction. Borges has. possesses them when conscious. its readers or spectators. Nineteenthcentury 'mystery' in this context merges with twentieth-century oppression. (Labyrinths. 84). 231) . in this novel the characters much more literally possess their author when he is unconscious. In 1833. can be fictitious. he determines a re-reading of that novel by revealing her decision to deceive society into believing that she is a 'fallen woman' while actually never having lost that virginity which it values so highly. Fowles. not over her body or the clothes she wears. is both apparent seductress and in fact virgin.Fictionality and context 127 label 'whore'. and in which they are also written. Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds is about a writer called Trellis whose characters assert their autonomous identities and devise rebellious plots against him while he is asleep and therefore not in 'possession' of them. He lingers seductively. He is in love with her. but it is perhaps unfair to expect Fowles to know that perhaps these are 'the shadows' out of which Sarah comes (p. Then.
Its artificial form and philosophical beliefs are echoed in the form of the novel we are reading with its overtly spatial structure. is fixed for ever. The latter. It is a Symbolist world. Art should aim simply at creating . later an optometrist who prescribes 'corrective lenses for Earthling souls'. why not escape? Realism. 'isn't enough anymore'. the relationship of fictions like the one we are reading ('fantasies') to atrocities like the Dresden fire-bombing. realism presents characters. presents characters in the terms of liberal humanism. like art. Its own art is created to reveal that art cannot change the world because the world. the planet Tralfamadore. is explicitly an art-world. is that people are discouraged from being characters. Tralfamadore offers Billy an escapist 'Imaginative Space' from which he can view human atrocity with equanimity. The 'real' world (how Vonnegut comes to write a book about the fire-bombing of Dresden) is here set against a fictional world (the bombing seen through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim. but. But the novel implies that events like Dresden invalidate such liberal assumptions. explicitly an aesthetic fantasy world premised upon a rejection of the philosophical and aesthetic assumptions underpinning realism. after all. but There are almost no characters in this story and almost no dramatic confrontations. p. if 'there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre'. however.128 Metafiction An interesting version of this is presented in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. allows for the possibility of free will and responsible moral choice. Tralfamadore is. because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. 26) and an ultra-fictional world with which Billy communicates. 110) Realism presents history as linear chronology. its circular songs. The motif of script-writing is implied here in the exploration of the relationship of moral and aesthetic responsibility. (p. it is suggested. One of the main effects of war. in fact. its repetitious phrases like 'So it goes'. They are revealed to be inadequate fictions which are possibly as much evasions of responsibility as the construction of Tralfamadorian kingdoms.
What we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time. teaching 'that those who die are meant to die. He need no longer despair or protest or resist. Vonnegut's 'historical' world stands in relation to Tralfamadore as Nabokov's Anti-terra (another self-conscious artistic world) stands in relation to Terra (a world of atrocity clearly analogous to our own historical world) in the novel Ada (1969). past. no moral. 62–3) The Tralfamadorians look with some amusement upon the Earthling world of history (and realism) because. always have existed. no suspense. Slaughterhouse-Five is more 'real' than Tralfamadore. no causes. They suggest that the construction of alternative worlds should not be an activity that ignores the events and logic of the historical world but should provide an unfamiliar perspective on that world. Human schemes of progression are seen to be based on a fundamental stasis: life occurs so that death occurs so that life occurs. he cannot (nor does his novel) embrace an aesthetic that ignores the responsibility of literary fiction to engage with history. and therefore no anxiety. from their perspective within a frozen aesthetic eternity. 'So it goes. no effects. However. There is no freedom. with the temporal world. Certainly Slaughterhouse-Five suggests that realism is an inadequate means of portraying experiences like Dresden. Billy ceases to feel pain. 9). But Vonnegut is not Billy. 25). that corpses are improvements' (p. There is no beginning. the script is fixed: 'all moments. Thus. 140). Vonnegut even breaks the frame of the Dresden section by appearing in it himself – 'an old fart with his memories and his pall malls' (p. Darwin is for them the most engaging human figure. therefore. if novels cannot prevent disasters like Dresden. present and future. for 'everything was beautiful and nothing hurt' (p.Fictionality and context 129 an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. they can at least change people's attitudes to them. (pp. If the novelist . no middle. Both novels reject realism and extreme fabulation. even within the covers of Slaughterhouse-Five. no end.' Within the perspectives of Tralfamadore. 84). always will' (p.
the grotesque. the balance between the construction of realistic illusion and its deconstruction gives way. in which the reader can still become absorbed. creating an alternative world.' Of course. the tension breaks down. randomness. and metafictional elements are superseded by those of surrealism. merely to assert more emphatically that 'one' exists. It is not at all certain that Vonnegut does not believe this to be already the case. From this point. however. From here on. 137). Such an admission functions. become one of providing 'touches of colour in rooms with all-white walls' or of describing 'blow-jobs artistically' (p. They slide more and more towards the pure assertion of not only their own linguistic condition but also that of this 'everyday world'. For some metafictional novelists. All metafiction draws attention to the fact that imitation in the novel is not the imitation of existing objects but the fabrication of fictional . 'one' is the source of this world. however. 'So it goes. then worlds. an alternative to rejecting a simplistic concept of mimesis (the belief that verbal constructions can somehow directly imitate non-verbal ones) is to assert the opposite narrative pole of diegesis: 'telling' instead of 'showing'. However.130 Metafiction does not assume some such responsibility. texts slip further and further away from the construction of worlds whose 'meaning' is finally dependent on reference to everyday contexts. 'one' is an author. But he does continue to write. once 'one' is recognized as itself a construction produced through textual relationships. cut-ups and fold-ins. Act III: Some characters in search of an author Until this point on our necessarily somewhat arbitrary scale. then (as the discussion at the end of Slaughterhouse-Five suggests) the function of the novel will. metafiction maintains a finely balanced tension between awareness of its literary-fictional condition and its desire to create imaginative realities. indeed. the metafictional tension of technique and counter-technique is dissolved. A last. alternative worlds. texts and authors are subsumed by language. desperate strategy before the game is handed over entirely to language is to admit that one is telling a story.
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objects which could exist, but do not. For some writers, however, the text may be a fictional construction, but the author is not. All else may be ontologically insecure and uncertain, but behind the uncertainty is a lone Creative Figure busily inventing and constructing, producing the text from His (sic) position in the Real World. And the text, it is usually asserted, is finally the author's: I want my ideas to be expressed so precisely that the very minimum of room for interpretation is left. Indeed I would go further and say that to the extent that a reader can impose his own imagination on my words, then that piece of writing is a failure. I want him to see my (vision) . . . (B. S. Johnson, Aren't You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?, p. 28) While modernism pursued impersonality ('showing'), such contemporary metafictional texts pursue Personality, the ironic flaunting of the Teller. They reveal, in Genette's words, that, '"montrer", ce ne peut être qu'une façon de raconter' (Genette 1972, p. 187). The appearance of mimesis, of 'showing', is produced, however, by constructing an ostensibly autonomous reality through maximum information and minimum narratorial presence. Metafictional novels which hang on to the concept of author as inventor of the text, which aim to show there are only 'degrés de diegesis' ('degrees of telling'; Genette 1972, p. 186), exaggerate authorial presence in relation to story or information. Very often the Real Author steps into the fictional world, crosses the ontological divide. Instead of integrating the 'fictional' with the 'real' as in traditional omniscient narrative, he or she splits them apart by commenting not on the content of the story but on the act of narration itself, on the construction of the story. Vonnegut's appearances in Slaughterhouse-Five have already been mentioned. In Breakfast of Champions (1973) his character Kilgore Trout (a trans-textual being who turns up frequently in Vonnegut's fictions) refers to a 'body bag': 'It was a new Invention. . . . I do not know who invented the body bag. I do know who invented Kilgore Trout. I did' (p. 39). Malcolm Bradbury scuttles,
in the manner of Hitchcock, across a corridor at Watermouth University in The History Man. John Barth corresponds with his characters in Letters. He explains as 'J.B.' his role along with the computer WESAC in producing the novel Giles Goat-Boy (1966) in the first few pages of the novel. B. S. Johnson foregrounds autobiographical 'facts', reminding the reader in Trawl (1966): 'I . . . always with I . . . one starts from . . . one and I share the same character' (p. 9). Or, in See the Old Lady Decently, he breaks off a description in the story and informs the reader: 'I have just broken off to pacify my daughter . . . my father thinks she is the image of my mother, my daughter' (p. 27). Steve Katz worries in The Exaggerations of Peter Prince (1968) – among many other things – about the fact that he is writing the novel under fluorescent light, and wonders how even this aspect of the contemporary technological world will affect its literary products. Alternatively, novelists may introduce friends or fellow writers into their work. Thus, irreverently, in Ronald Sukenick's 98.6 (1975) the 'hero' decides to seduce a girl and her roommate: 'Besides the roommate is a girl who claims to be the lover of Richard Brautigan maybe she knows something. . . . I mean here is a girl saturated with Richard Brautigan's sperm' (p. 26). Federman, Sukenick, Katz and Doctorow make appearances in each others' novels. Steve Katz, in fact, appeared in Ronald Sukenick's novel Up (1968) before his own first novel, The Exaggerations of Peter Prince, had been published (in which Sukenick, of course, in turn appears). Vladimir Nabokov playfully introduces himself into his novels very often through anagrams of variations on his name: Vivian Badlock, Vivian Bloodmark, Vivian Darkbloom, Adam von Librikov (VVN is a pun on the author's initials). Occasionally authors may wish to remind the reader of their powers of invention for fear that readers may assume fictional information to be disguised autobiography. Raymond Federman writes:
Fictionality and context
I have a feeling that if I go on giving specific details like these eventually they'll think I am talking about myself all the time whereas in fact this is not so I insist on this point I am inventing most of this (Double or Nothing, p. 114) In fact, third-person narrative with overt first-person intrusion allows for metafictional dislocation much more obviously than first-person narratives (whether the intruding 'I' is the 'real' author or not). In first-person narration the 'telling' is realistically motivated because produced by a personalized figure who is given a spatio-temporal dimension within the fictional world. In thirdperson/first-person intrusion narratives (such as SlaughterhouseFive and The French Lieutenant's Woman), an apparently autonomous world is suddenly broken into by a narrator, often 'The Author', who comes explicitly from an ontologically differentiated world. The author attempts desperately to hang on to his or her 'real' identity as creator of the text we are reading. What happens, however, when he or she enters it is that his or her own reality is also called into question. The 'author' discovers that the language of the text produces him or her as much as he or she produces the language of the text. The reader is made aware that, paradoxically, the 'author' is situated in the text at the very point where 'he' asserts 'his' identity outside it. As Jacques Ehrmann argues, 'The "author" and the "text" are thus caught in a movement in which they do not remain distinct (the author and the work; one creator of the other) but rather are transposed and become interchangeable, creating and annulling one another' (Ehrmann 1971, p. 32). Certainly many metafictional writers are themselves aware of, and flaunt, this paradox. Christine Brooke-Rose's Thru (1975) ends with an index of 'authors' and sources, beginning (logically?) with Adam, and ending with Yorick, poor. Gilbert Sorrentino points out
'Borges' and 'I' have a hostile relationship: I live. the traveller. By breaking the conventions that separate authors from implied authors from narrators from implied readers from readers. ('Borges and I'. is an 'I' who is possibly the 'I' of the author addressing his readers ('by the very fact of writing "I" the author feels driven to put into this "I" a bit of himself'. They are themselves 'invented' by readers who are 'authors' working through linguistic. and this literature justifies me. The more the author appears. artistic and cultural conventions. Finally. but those pages cannot save me. and so on. 15). as metafiction shows. . the more noticeable is his or her absence outside it. so that Borges may contrive his literature. The more the author flaunts his or her presence in the novel. the novel reminds us (who are 'we'?) that 'authors' do not simply 'invent' novels. this alone is reason enough for you to invest a part of yourself in the stranger "I"'. 142–9). he becomes part of the reader's own subjectivity ('because I am called "I" . pp. 15). 'Authors' work through linguistic.134 Metafiction in Splendide-Hotel (1973): 'One wishes simply to say that the writer cannot escape the words of his story. not even to him. p. perhaps because what is good belongs to no one. in Labyrinths. let myself go on living. he cannot escape into an idea at all' (p. but rather to the language and to tradition. the less he or she exists. Perhaps the definitive statement of the paradox is in Borges' Labyrinths. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages. . and therefore exists at the level of story and at the level of discourse. . It is a paradoxical concept. artistic and cultural conventions. p. It is suggested that the narrator. He is also an 'I' who talks to the characters in the novel. p. as an 'I'. Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller is a fictional completion of Barthes's statement: that the death of the author makes possible the birth of the reader (Barthes 1977b. 13). 282) Roland Barthes has made familiar the concept of 'the death of the author'.
Barthes's Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977). I have nothing to compare myself to. the pronoun of the imaginary 'I' is im-pertinent. And finally. but it is also a simple idea: simple as the idea of suicide. but 'I am writing a text and I call it R. p. .B. In most first-person narratives (Jane Eyre. however. Metafictional novels which shift from the personal form 'I' of discourse to the impersonal 'he' of story remind the reader that the narrating 'I' is the subject of the discourse.10 'I' is always at the same time both a universal category and a specific speaker defined in relation to a specific speech event. there is yet another level of subjectivity. Great Expectations) the narrating subject is non-problematically at one with the narrated subject (Jane Eyre. 56) To write of 'I' is to discover that the attempt to fix subjectivity in writing erases that subjectivity. I am the story which happens to me: freewheeling in language. both situated in the fictional world created through the speaker's discourse. child). for behind the whole discourse is the authorial 'I'. . recounting her experiences as Jane Eyre. I myself am my own symbol. and in this movement. A common strategy is to begin a novel in the first person and then to shift to third-person narration and then back again. of course. 'I'. the symbolic becomes literally immediate: essential danger for the life of the subject: to write oneself may seem a pretentious idea. (Barthes 1977a. Tristram Shandy . The first person. is a member of a grammatical category of words referred to as 'shifters' or 'indexical deictics' – words that can be defined or situated only in relation to their immediate linguistic context or discourse. his autobiography-as-fiction or fiction-as-autobiography.Fictionality and context 135 There are an increasing number of metafictional novels which similarly play with the relations between story and discourse. and is a different 'I' from the 'I' who is the subject of the story. a subjectivity (as the examples in this section have shown) present only in terms of its real absence. woman. continually draws attention to this paradox: I do not say 'I am going to describe myself'. The insight is not entirely post-modernist. constructs a new subject.' .
347). 1962. John Fowles's Daniel Martin uses the shift between the discursive 'I' and the historic 'he' to explore his favourite theme of existential authorship. John Irving's The WaterMethod Man (1972). in the words of the twentieth-century phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty. all explore this process through shifts of grammatical person.136 Metafiction desperately attempts to dissolve past. This finally entails the recognition that others may indeed possess one in ways that one may not possess oneself. (p. The novel shows Daniel's attempt to realize authentically his condition of subjectivity. the 'now' of his act of narration. p. to narrate or historicize oneself as a character in one's own discourse. are characters in others' fictions. present and future 'selves' into the moment of discourse. making myself the chief character in a play so that I was not only the written personage. To write about onself is implicitly to posit oneself as an 'other'. Saul Bellow's Herzog (1964). though not overtly metafictional. but also the person who sits in the back of the stalls admiring what he has written. Jerzy Kosinski's The Devil Tree (1973). they are also situated within others' discourses. He discovers. 'I am never at one with myself' (Merleau-Ponty. He comes to realize: I was writing myself. He uses the pronominal shifts to reject the modernist premise that consciousness (the certainty that 'I' exist for 'myself') defines existence. 80) Fowles extends the motif of script-writing along a new axis of grammatical/phenomenological awareness (though not without a large measure of self-indulgence and occasional pretentiousness on the way). He has to learn that his fictional versions of himself and of others are being used to avoid moral and aesthetic responsibility in the present. the character and its actor. And 'I' never will be. Ann Quin's Passages (1969). Daniel comes to recognize his inauthenticity in terms of the relationship of himself as character (as a third person) to the fictional discourse of his own self as narrator (as first-person . He sets out to show that individuals not only construct their own positions in the world and narrate their own histories.
say.Fictionality and context 137 'author' of himself). radical shifts of context which suggest that 'reality' as well as 'fiction' is merely one more game with words. . 220–46) has categorized it in terms of contradiction. . 'lies'. Naturalized or totalizing interpretation becomes impossible. 'hallucination'. excess or randomness) which most significantly distinguishes metafiction from other forms of post-modernist fictional writing. permutation and short circuit. 'dream'. etc. The logic of the everyday world is replaced by forms of contradiction and discontinuity. The novel thus becomes the story of writing as much as it is the writing of story. 'truth'. In an excellent survey of post-modernist fiction. Contradiction In realist or modernist writing. 'an I in the hands of fate . very often) and have embraced a Wittgensteinian concept of 'language games'. The rest of this chapter will attempt (very briefly) to organize 'radically' metafictional strategies into categories of CONTRADICTION : PARADOX OBJETS TROUVÉS : INTERTEXTUAL OVERKILL All of these strategies depend upon a tension of opposition (rather than. textual contradictions are always finally resolved. short circuit. 72). They function through forms of radical decontextualization. 'vision'. 'reality'. They deny the reader access to a centre of orientation such as a narrator or point of view. excess. or a stable tension between 'fiction'. randomness. discontinuity. a paper person in someone else's script' (p. either at the level of plot (realism) or at the level of . Metafiction particularly draws on contradiction. Act IV: Notes towards the definition of radical metafiction Metafictional novels at this end of the scale have abandoned 'roleplaying' (even the fiction that they are a Fiction. David Lodge (1977. The reader is also continually made aware that Daniel exists in the fictional discourse of Fowles. pp. permutation.
' Contradiction implies simultanaeity. They offer a set of alternative stories as one story. p. slightly shifted." said the metafictionist.138 Metafiction point of view or 'consciousness' (modernism). Readers of the French New Novel will immediately recognize the form this strategy takes in the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. mutually contradictory. goes round in circles. which can be explained neither as happening simultaneously (because they can only be substitutions for each other) nor as happening in sequence (because they cannot be combined according to normal logic: they erase or cancel out each other). which might run something like this: '"All novelists are liars. Each section forms . 53). Space destroys time in them. contradicts itself. and time sabotages space. Jorge Luis Borges 'The Garden of Forking Paths' (in Labyrinths) is both a discussion and an example of such fiction. he chooses – simultaneously – all of them' (p. Description marks time. 51). 151) Robert Coover's stories present similar problems. The obsessive repetition of incidents within new contexts. occurs throughout The Voyeur (1955) or In the Labyrinth (1959). (Robbe-Grillet 1965. These always seem to be challenging themselves. only a reworking of the Liar Paradox. truthfully. The moment repudiates all continuity. for example. A fourth dimension is posited where numerous possibilities of time and space coexist: 'in some you exist and not I: in others I and not you: in others both of us' (p. he chooses one and eliminates the others: in the fictions of Ts'ui Pên. Stories like Coover's 'The Babysitter' (Pricksongs and Descants) and Barthelme's 'Views of my Father Weeping' (in City Life) take the modernist concept of spatial form to a logical conclusion. 'The Babysitter' (1971) is divided into 108 sections. It is a story of a maze which is a maze of a story. each time a man is confronted with several alternatives. casting doubt on themselves all the time they are being constructed. there can be no final certainty (no FINAL CURTAIN either). The theory is made explicit in the story: 'in all fictional works. In metafictional texts that employ contradiction.
The story. . from 'reality' to dream. I make a sun for it. there is also a very intrusive author who keeps up a continuous commentary on his own ingenuity: 'I wander the island. a corpse in the bath and the house wrecked (surely this one ends with just a little too much overkill?). The story makes no indication of a difference in 'reality' status of the various sections.e. The parents have departed (though not before Mr Tucker's eyes have lustfully lingered over the girl).Fictionality and context 139 a narrative unit (narreme) but none of them – read consecutively (i. The reader may begin by attempting to construct a causal plot. I don't know. her husband gone. it can only be the 'reality' of itself. In this story. It is perhaps a horrifying story of a sadistic young child-murderer. a detective story. 193). Probably a tale of a babysitter installed with the children. chooses all of them. or epistemological shifts. He invents. It ends with Mrs Tucker's reception of the news that her children are murdered. 'Hell. 14). the parents departed (though not before . however. In 'The Magic Poker' (1971) Coover uses similarly contradictory series.e. with the associative logic of modernism) – combines to form a unified noncontradictory story. What about a savage tale of teenage lust? Or the obsessional fantasy life of a latter-day Humbert Humbert? The story is all of these stories. say. the poker: the fairy-tale Magic . It may be about the decline of a middle-class American marriage. The scene is set with the babysitter installed with the children. however. 'let's see what's on the late night movie' (p. . inventing it. The babysitter's boyfriend is then seen wandering round pinball-machine arcades debating whether to attempt a first adolescent seduction while the adults are safely at their party. of course. with the causal logic of realism) or even spatially (i. and trees' (p. Nor can the reader naturalize the contradictory alternatives through a modernist reading in terms of shifts of consciousness. The outlines of a thriller. a tale of middle-class American domestic life? The opening offers a variety of possibilities for narrative development. The story is possibly a gentle and ironic tale of adolescent sexuality including oedipal and castration complexes. The 'plots' of many possible 'stories' (including those offered by the television films the babysitter watches) cut across each other in a kaleidoscopic display of arbitrary invention. a romance.).' she says.
but exists only as its own transformations. In effect. the rusty bit of old iron. the Poker which is the reader reading this story. Beckett's Watt. 'Do you ask of your bookmaker that he will explain?' (p. like the story and the imagination of its inventor. The story then contradicts such questionable finality by suggesting that the reader might simply supply his or her own. p. It fans out like the wings of a wild goose. 'bedded deeply in the bluegreen grass' (p. is more interested . 34).000 endings per second' (p. the text asserts. such strategies are similarly radical. 116).140 Metafiction Poker. This 'bookmaker' certainly will not. however. Borges' 'Tlön Uqbar' or Nabokov's Ada present mutually contradictory 'worlds'. Contradiction is the basis for many of the metafictional strategies already discussed in different contexts here. Metafiction. Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman has already been mentioned. this results in the incorporation of the principles of surrealism into metafiction: Lautréamont's 'fortuitous meeting on a dissection table. of a sewing machine and an umbrella' (quoted in Stewart 1974. Contradiction may occur at micro. Karen notices the pubic hair of the suave young man who magically appears when she kisses the poker (which poker?). Nabokov's Pale Fire and Murdoch's The Black Prince set up contradictions between text and textual accoutrements or footnotes. Brautigan's A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964) offers five endings and then suggests 'this book is having 186.as opposed to macrostructural levels. the Freudian Poker. 41). A wild goose flies out of an old piano. the Poker which can vandalize and destroy the story. 31). Novels like Slaughterhouse-Five. B. they can be). exists through its power to transform. When such contradictions cannot be resolved (in The Black Prince. after all. Johnson. is not in the business of tidying up life. Johnson's 'Aren't You Rather Young to be Writing your Memoirs?' offers the ending its author had hoped for. 159). The reader seeking to construct an interpretation has also been taken on a very 'wild goose taste'. Alternative endings present another type of contradiction. Literal dissolves into metaphorical into allegorical into the words of the story flaunted as the words of the story. sentences or even phrases. The poker. The man laughs at the end and a 'wild goose taste' is left in his mouth (p. within paragraphs. for example. S.
. It must mean something. But no. Matty . Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America is entirely constructed through the strategy of metaphorical substitutions taking an apparently literal status in the story. . it doesn't mean more than that . . 26). a crop of legs. the characters from books 'full of words. In Barthelme's Snow White. lips. each had a slit for dropping in pieces of pie' (p. leave things alone. a burial is described entirely in terms normally associated with vitality. In Darkness Visible (1979) does Golding's Matty exist 'really' as a strange child who walks out of a bombed city? Is he really a twentieth-century reincarnation of Ezekiel? Or is he an allegorical clarification of the ambiguities of good and evil which are explored through the apparently more 'realistic' characters in the novel. 47)? (Characters who exist. The idea of raining cats and dogs becomes a literal reality (it seems) in Barthelme's story 'The Falling Dog' (in City Life). In Alan Burns's Celebrations (1967). Sometimes writers take a figurative cliché and de-automatize it through a translation into literal terms. In Steve Katz's story 'Parcel of Wrists' (1973) a box of human wrists is received through the post. start to produce fruit: eyes. 'the judges retired to consider their verdict. when planted. physical reduplication of that endless cackle of men' (p. At an inquest. 107). rather than the surrealistic juxtaposition of extremely disparate images and objects. 'It's just an ape that's all . Such strategies disorientate the reader by offering no indication of the literal or figurative status of descriptions. It means what it means' (p. The confusion of literal and allegorical worlds is another strategy which offers the reader irresolvable contradictions. The two drank the thin white wine.Fictionality and context 141 in the juxtaposition of contradictory words and phrases which foreground processes of linguistic selection. . limbs. the green and tasty stomachs stood on the polished table . which. Synechdoche and metaphor often take on literal status. symbolically. 161 ). . Jane's mother watches an 'apelike hand' appear through the mailbox. In the title story of Barthelme's Great Days (1979) we are told of a guy who 'wore his stomach on his sleeve' (p. for example. Like the reader she wants to interpret it metaphorically. where a dog falls from the heavens. says Jane. It must stand for something else. .
Another is Beckett's exhaustive description of Watt taking a step forward. or is he an allegorical reflection. further reinforces the image of linguistic imprisonment in its implicit reference to Keats's pattern of versification. It makes an assertion at the moment that it denies that assertion (and vice versa). It offers a finite statement which only infinity can resolve. of course. Watt himself.) Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (1959) offers a similar resistence to total interpretation. Borges' library of Babel is such a fictional world. driven by feelings of spite. if he has to write upon his life as he writes.' appear in novels like Cortázar's Hopscotch and 62: A Model Kit (1972) and Barth's Letters. then sentences in a period . only through the endless duplicities of language. where the novel returns again and again to its (apparent) beginning. words in a sentence. with infinite variations. with its hero a detective who becomes the murderer he has been seeking (apparently). . One such image is Tristram Shandy's impossible problem of compound interest as he writes his autobiography and realizes that. of the anarchic. the stunted childlike narrator. libidinous infantilism of Danzig society as it partakes in the rise of Nazism? Paradox A paradox is a form of contradiction. he will never finish. lust. and so on. First. These fictional embodiments of 'There was an old man called Michael Finnegan . rage and destructiveness. destructive. Images of infinite regression remind the reader of the fictive nature of the chronology assumed by realism. . begins to speak in reverse order. The authors who step into their fictions (discussed in the last section) are locked into a system of endless regress. Is Oskar. and then letters in a word. Such paradoxes of infinity involve the possibility of endless repetition or circularity. The title of Anthony Burgess's Abba Abba (1977) both palindromically suggests such circularity and also. a 'real' midget. . Their identity . in an otherwise realistic fiction.142 Metafiction reminds us. Such fictions again resist resolution within the terms of everyday logic. . contexts of 'common sense'. of course. So are novels like Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers (1953).
The potentially endless nesting of quotation marks in Barth's Chimera is one of the most overt recognitions of this. An 'Author's note' informs the reader at the end: 'This piece is an objet trouvé. 'The Glass Mountain'.' In most of Barthelme's work. City Life. to show what a sentence can do. It was originally published in Godey's Lady's Book in 1850 under the byline of Hickory Broom. there is also no longer a distinction between 'frame' and 'frame-break'. 64–5). If they become uncontrolled. then the oppositional tension which is central to metafiction dissolves. The device of the tale within the tale. Objets trouvés: metafictional collage Barthelme's story 'The Question Party' (Great Days (1979). bits and pieces of undigested 'real life' appear to float into the fictional frame. 63–71) is a 'comedy of manners' into which an absurd murder obtrudes. nestings. pp. circlings) have to be controlled ultimately by an apparent outer frame. pp. such images (doublings. which systematically flaunts its status as a literary artefact. composed of sentences which . In another story. .Fictionality and context 143 disappears the moment that it appears in the fictional text. mirrorings. Metafiction. Barthelme's story 'Sentence' (City Life) sets out to be a sentence. at this point ceases to be the dominant principle of the text. I have cut it and added some three dozen lines. 'The Fantastic Orange Tree'. This functions as a reminder of the impossibility of defining a stable 'norm' of literary discourse when the incorporation of any discourse into the literary frame assimilates it to the alternative world of fiction and detaches it from normal . The text thus breaks down into randomness. the nesting of narrators. is another means of suggesting infinite circularity. . Not only is there no means of distinguishing the nested representation from the nesting frame. the narrator climbs to the top of a glass mountain whose pinnacle is not just a symbol but the symbol of a symbol which disappears at the moment of identification and turns into 'a beautiful princess' (Barthelme. It shows how a sentence can be a clause within a clause within a clause which has at its centre a story. However.
natural history. can supply a kind of "sense" of what is going on' (Snow White. 173). . p. may be or imply a comment on the other reality from which it came. and may be also much else. In Michel Butor's Mobile: étude pour une représentation des États-Unis (1962) a crazy (and impossible) journey across America is constructed through tourist . his stories are 'entirely without design. in the best case. They explicitly create 'anxious objects'. (Barthelme. as opposed to say. In Snow White. In the same collection is a story called 'Roast Beef: a slice of life': the ultimate objet trouvé? Vonnegut. . B. S. in Bellamy 1974. The point of collage is that unlike things are stuck together to make. Barthelme has referred to such matter as dreck: 'matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed at all relevant) but which carefully attended to. 51–2) Ronald Sukenick's fiction is a mélange of journalism. in the best case. 106). bits and pieces of American 'trash' culture float into the contemporary rewriting of the fairy-tale. precedent or orderly planning. a new reality. Barthelme has referred to these fictions as 'anxious objects': they do not know whether they are works of art or piles of junk: New York City is or can be regarded as a collage. Such works reflect what Christine Brooke-Rose has referred to as 'a new consciousness of the real having become unreal because brutally endowed with significance and then as brutally deprived of it' (Brooke-Rose 1981. . Pynchon and Clarence Major all use the technique extensively. It's an itself if it's successful . 10). 'Chix' and 'Rats'. Johnson. quotations from Chairman Mao and references to breakfast cereals like 'Fear'. geography textbooks. As a character in 'What's Your Story?' (The Death of the Novel and other Stories (1969)) suggests. pp. p. This new reality. duplicated. created bit by bit on sheer impulse' (p. political texts. are the same hut. .144 Metafiction referential functions in the everyday context. works of art which have a suspicion they may be piles of rubbish. They are accompanied by fragments of psychoanalytic discourse. a tribal village in which all the huts .
yet nothingness is never allowed to appear' because the list always 'leaves us with the list itself' (Ziegler and Bigsby 1982. chronological time dissolves into textual space. Like the parts of a mobile. It is a series of lists in memory. Gabriel Josipovici's novel The Inventory (1968) presents again and again. 40). but in a different context – 'reality'. adrift in time and space. of the emergence of nothingness at the end of the series. a character comments on both the nature of memory and of fiction. memory. the list keeps reminding us of possible exhaustion. a place where fictions are produced. films. is repeated on page 35. advertisements for ice-cream or cars. pop songs. The technique. in which not only is Literature as sacred system challenged . the parts of the collage can be endlessly reassembled to produce infinite images of America. the inventory of a house: lists of meaningless objects adrift in time and space. for example. the imagination? As with Coover's fiction. again a favourite strategy. 153). to reflect the feelings of some of the characters that life itself is merely an 'inventory'. These function. medical journals. however. for in its 'extolling the principle of substitution instead of contextuality. Experience is presented as repetition with shifts: a conversation on page 28. the reader cannot stabilize the shifts of context. the technique merges with displays of intertextual overkill. a creation/description paradox. You invent him as you talk' (p. The possibility is suggested throughout by the continual recurrence of lists. He or she comes to realize that an 'inventory' – a list of items which 'fixes' 'reality' – is also an 'inventory': a set of lies. 'You make things up as you go along. Intertextual overkill The technique of presenting objets trouvés has its roots in surrealism. In metafiction. newspaper copy and lists of place-names. however.Fictionality and context 145 pamphlets. The surrealists attempted to incorporate into 'artistic works' elements traditionally considered beneath art (such as urinals) which challenge the concept of Art as a sacred system of values. p. with increasing absurdity. still privileges the artist as creator in suggesting that he or she is somehow a Magical Transformer. As in the French New Novel.
Ishmael Reed. It is a technique that appears again and again in American postmodernist fiction: Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow is constructed out of the languages of science. Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew endlessly and comically embeds all sorts of metafictional motifs and techniques. that sort of pop-brutalistic tabbying. an underlying System or Text or Deep Structure which manically and insidiously proliferates itself through the linguistic diversity of its surface manifestations. those curds of canned plum-juice declining to integrate with custard. Christine BrookeRose. journalism. texts/writing is explicitly seen to produce texts/writing. letters. 23) . to disguise the silhouettes of Victorian buildings. characters protesting to their authors. psychosexual therapy. to total anarchy. Alan Burns and Ann Quin have produced novels based on similar techniques of intertextual overkill. and simultaneously to the possible existence of a massive conspiracy. In one novel he collects together characters in novels writing novels. though there are exceptions: Brigid Brophy. Instead. In Brigid Brophy's In Transit (1969) the narrator asks: What's the nearest to twentieth century style? Why. Far fewer examples could be drawn from British fiction. cybernetics (to name but a few). . Much of the writing of Clarence Major. a character called Trellis and a book called The Red Swan (both from At SwimTwo-Birds). Fitzgerald and Nabokovian sections complete with butterflies. (p. Spillane. gangster movies. journals. These collectively point. pornographic writings. bits of jig-saw free-drifting in space an amateur method of do-it-yourself exterior house painting . music hall. to break up the outlines of their structure. on the one hand. spy thrillers.146 Metafiction but also the Artist as inspirational alchemist. Linguistic codifications break down into further linguistic codifications. . Steve Katz and Ronald Sukenick could be placed within this category. technology. imitations of westerns. history. an interview which takes place in the Splendide-Hotel. James. The effect is often highly parodically comical. characters from or parodies of Joyce. reviews.
is made impossible by its very vehicle of communication: language. there is even a diagram of Jakobson's model of communication with an arrow pointing to 'CODE' (metalinguistic) and the inscription 'you ARE HERE' (p. In Brooke-Rose's novel Thru (1975). (p. nicht wahr. by a void. dependent upon the elusive 'other' of the interlocutor: How can I address you. tickingly. the reader is informed. 51). We live between ideas. and the international conference which takes place. is flight. escape from identity into language. It is impossible. not to mention platitudes si-mul-ta-né-ment. its implied reader explicitly . his/her brain inundated by a macaronic bricolage of the jargons and languages of contemporary society. existence as fiction: 'being nibbled at. a text where 'everyone has a voice' (p. I have to summon my weightiest resources of gravity to take you seriously' (p. No one requires us to have any of our own. Translation. interlocutor. finally. 40).Fictionality and context 147 The hero/heroine sits in an airport lounge. though. spoken with an angliccent' (p. 12). 41) What the airport lounge offers. Even his/her gender cannot be established. Specialized jargons encapsulate characters (signs on the page) in private worlds which they attempt to transcend by plugging into computerized translating machines which produce noises like the tuning of an old wireless. interpretation and intertextual overkill replace originality and monolithic authorship: 'We merely translate other people's ideas. The theme of the novel is explicitly writing as absence. frenched. duty-freedom. 19). the enlightened exchange of ideas. 70). Sigfried' (p. when the only language I so much as half command is one in which the 'you' does not even reveal (stepasiding the problem of where you are) how many there are of you and what sex. to construct any sort of context. 'Italian. In Christine Brooke-Rose's Between (1968) the condition (now situated in an aeroplane between destinies on either side of a contemporary Waste Land) is even more acute. identity is thoroughly provisional.
sufficient direction for the novel genre as a whole. Writing. Contempoary radical metafictional writing has taught the novel its nature: there can be no simple 'forgetting' of either its lessons or the lessons of realism. In my opinion. Thru fails to provide. Thru is a critical commentary on the novel form itself: on its capacity to absorb transform and question the discourses of which it is constructed. There is. It shows how the novel always retraces its boundaries. 163) It is an experiment in discourse (which reveals there can be no escape from discourse). the future of the novel will depend upon a transformation. beyond itself. except.148 Metafiction the mOre dwIndles structUred éLite To a (p. in its excessive self-referentiality (conducted for the most part through a critical discourse accessible only to the initiated for whom Jakobson and Derrida are household terms). p. how it ingests the 'real world' as discourse and is. almost no level of realistic motivation for the text. 'When on purpose I create something realistic and then destroy it' (in Hayman and Cohen 1976. However. at this stage in the post-Saussurean critical and fictional 'revolution'. It is thoroughly self-referential rather than referential. to their furthest extreme. unlike Between. a castration of reality. and the metafictional novel. Christine Brooke-Rose takes the novel. 4). Thru shows how all fiction is thus implicitly metafictional. not an abandonment. in turn reabsorbed by it. In Transit or Mulligan Stew. resisting contextualization because it exists almost entirely on phatic and metalinguistic planes. It is impossible. is presented as découpage. as she has commented. Yet Thru simply makes explicit the dialogic nature of all novels. though it may well be a transformation based on lessons learned from radical texts like Thru. as the Freudian imagery suggests throughout. to provide a thorough evaluation of the different styles and degrees of post-modernist self-consciousness . of the traditional conventions of fiction.
This book has attempted to indicate some of the relationships between ideology and literary form in the context of debates about contemporary experimental fiction. is the question of the politically 'radical' status of aesthetically 'radical' texts. and which may only be resolved once post-modernism has itself become a 'post' phenomenon. An issue which is of crucial importance. (Russell 1980. The only possible answer is neither confrontation nor destruction but only theft: to fragment the old texts of culture. implies a political response to culture. now familiar with the ways of metafiction. of literature. but the strategies of demystification. (Hassan 1980. in a state of 'hesitation': The reduction of all experience and phenomena to elements of sign systems which can be 'demystified' as arbitrary. must make his or her own choice or remain. and to disseminate and disguise the fragments in the same way that we disguise stolen merchandise. remains locked within it. In the manner of metafiction. 37) Today. 17) A final comment from John Barth: 'Oh God comma I abhor selfconsciousness'. returns to it. disruption and improvisation are techniques played out solely within the formal dynamics of the semiotic system and are consequently of questionable efficacy. I can only end by offering the reader two alternative (and intertextual) endings as comments on this ongoing debate about aesthetics and politics. p. there is no area of language exterior to bourgeois ideology: our language comes from it.Fictionality and context 149 examined in this chapter. . like this writer. p. fictive constructs. of science. The reader.
in Mark Spilka (ed. 100. in Modernism: 1890–1930 (Harmondsworth. The Novel Today (London. Towards a Poetics of Fiction (Bloomington. Vladimir Nabokov and Günter Grass. PMLA. 1970). 4 David Lodge. Ill.). 143–4. 1 (Fall 1970). 1975). Also useful is Jameson's essay 'Metacommentary'. 2 For a discussion of Barthelme's dreck (a term he uses in Snow White (1967). See also Lodge's essay 'Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach through Language'. 'Metafiction' itself is first used as a term by William H. Gass. 3 The 'introverted novel' is referred to by John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury. 25. p. and Tomorrow (Chicago. in Malcolm Bradbury (ed.Notes 1 See Frederic Jameson's The Prisonhouse of Language (Princeton and London. Ind. and London. 'The Novelist at the Crossroads'. 1977). They distinguish between eighteenth-century introversion. which draws 'attention to the autonomy of the fictive structure itself' (p. 1976). For an introduction to 'surfiction'. and twentieth-century introversion. 109. see Raymond Federman's Surfiction: Fiction Now .). 106). p. 159. in The Iowa Review.. see Chapter 5. 1977). . in Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York. 86 (1971). .. 'Anti-novel' is a widely used but rather vague term covering any novel whose structure seems to form a protest against traditional fictional forms. which draws attention to the narrator (as in Tristram Shandy). 394) – as in novels by Muriel Spark. . pp. It is discussed extensively in Robert Scholes's essay 'Metafiction'. p. p. p. 1972).
'Continuity and Change in Russian Formalism. Genette and Todorov have all expanded and elaborated upon this basic distinction. pp. broadly. W. See Chapter 5. Sujet is the actual telling of the story. Czech Structuralism. retardation resulting in infinite regression. which correspond. The fabula. that an attempt at exhaustive representation produces anti-narrative. Fokkema. Russell. in PTL. Soviet Semiotics'. PTL. voice.152 Metafiction 5 The Russian formalists made a distinction between fabula and sujet. to fabula and sujet. of course. In Beckett's Watt (1953). since it can only be extrapolated from the sujet. histoire will refer to the story material and discours to the artistic shaping. pp. the attempt to describe thoroughly a simple act of physical progression. 9 See David Hume. 1. discours (which he calls récit) can be defined only through histoire (for without telling a story it would not be a narrative) and through what he calls narration (the act of utterance). etc. involving a selection of possible narrative structures: point of view. 1961). leads to extreme (and finally absurd) narrative regression. has been taken up by a number of contemporary metafictional writers. Barthes. 8 Quoted by D. A Treatise of Human Nature (New York. including the act of utterance. whereas Brecht's aim was to defamiliarize the practices of theatrical realism for political ends. I have chosen here to use the terms histoire and discours. pp. 141–2. for further discussion. order. 1 (1976). Verbal Categories and the Russian Verb'. 1972). among others. Jakobson . For the sake of simplicity here. Shklovsky's distinction between mechanical perception (static) and poetic perception (dynamic) makes the renewal of perception in itself the aim of art. see Shlomith Rimmon's 'A Comprehensive Theory of Narrative: Genette's Figures III and the Structuralist Study of Fiction'. Quine and Ayer clashed in the fifties with non-predication theorists in a general debate on the problems of referring. For a lucid account of these distinctions. Fabula is a set of actions that we can imagine taking place in the real world (the raw materials of the story). 1971). 174–5. for example. does not really exist. 6 The concept of defamiliarization has similarities with the more familiar Brechtian concept of the Verfremdungseffekt but. As Genette points out in Figures III (Paris. of taking a step forward. 32–62. 1 (1976). Selected Writings 11 (The Hague. 7 The insight. 10 See Roman Jakobson's essay 'Shifters.
Jakobson goes on to present them in terms partly borrowed from Benveniste (1966) as a category of personal discourse as opposed to the impersonal (discours as opposed to histoire). not the speech event.Notes 153 discusses shifters in terms of C. and therefore does not refer back to the enunciation but usually to a proper name in the narrated event. underlines all usages of language. S. but it cannot represent it without being in existential relation to it and is therefore an index. but is also a general term which has no meaning until filled out by each particular speech-act or situation. 'I'. emphasizing their lack of constant meaning. What all of them stress is that the interpretation of such utterances involves a reference to the speaker and his or her part in the communication act. . Peirce's idea of the indexical symbol: 'I' cannot represent its object without being associated with the latter by a conventional rule and is therefore a symbol. therefore. 'He' refers to a participant in a message. Russell called shifters 'egocentric particulars'.
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New York and London. 7. Brian (1975) The Story-Shaped World. Raymond (1975) 'On High and Popular Culture'. Lionel (1966) Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning. Trans. Boris (1973) A Poetics of Composition: The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form. Whorf. Baltimore. M. Mass. V. Thought and Reality. In The Common Reader. Haufmann and G. Amherst. John (1974) The Logic of Fiction: A Philosophical Sounding of Deviant Logic. (Autumn). and London. H. C. NLH. S. London. Carroll. (1971) Thought and Language. Benjamin Lee (1956) Language. Heide. Wicker. . Zvarin and S. —— (1975) 'The Problem of Change in Literary History'. B. Ill. Woods. White. Christopher (1982) The Radical Imagination and the Liberal Tradition: Interviews with Contemporary English and American Novelists. and Bigsby. L. Juri (1971) 'On Literary Evolution'. Vaihinger. London. E. London. Vakar. Zavarzadeh. (1924) The Philosophy of As If: A System of the Theoretical. (1976) Fictions: The Novel and Social Reality. Cambridge Review (May). K.Bibliography 169 Trilling. Zeraffa. Trans. Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind. Los Angeles and London. Vygotsky. Ogden. and London. Woolf. Williams. Trans. London. J. Uspensky. The Hague and Paris. Berkeley. Ziegler. Wittig. Virginia (1925) 'Modern Fiction'. In Matejka and Pomorska (1971).. Md. Tynyanov. Harmondsworth. Cambridge. Urbana. Mas'ud (1976) The Mythopoeic Reality. Hayden (1973) Metahistory : The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Ed.
John Fowles. Wisconsin. Austin and London. published by Cambridge University) contains both original contemporary fictional writing and critical essays. . Titles so far have included Donald Barthelme. eds). Contains some useful material towards an understanding of the 'dialogic' potential of the novel and the method of parody. General studies Bakhtin. eds). contemporary fiction and the theory of fiction which do not appear in the secondary references list. Methuen Contemporary Writers Series (Malcolm Bradbury and Christopher Bigsby. Richard Brautigan. Lovitt. Particularly relevant are: Issue 1 3 4 7 (1979) (1980) (1981) (1983) New American Writing The End of the English Novel Beyond the Publishing Crisis Best of Young British Novelists Sub-stance 27 (1980) Current Trends in American Fiction (Raymond Federman and Carl R.Further Reading This section includes a selection of useful general studies on metafiction. Mikhail (1981) The Dialogic Imagination. Useful journals and series Granta (edited by Bill Burford. Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut.
A selective survey. Barth and Beckett. The last chapter is a survey of developments in contemporary American fiction. Kermode. Frank (1983) Essays on Fiction 1971–1982. London. An attempt to define 'metafiction' through an author approach. London. New York. Nabokov. Christensen. Oslo and Tromsø. An interesting example of the application of theories of narrative to fictional texts. London. Inger (1981) The Meaning of Metafiction: A Critical Study of Selected Novels by Sterne.) (1983) Society and Literature 1945–1970.Further Reading 171 Bradbury. Chatman. but helpful for readers unacquainted with contemporary writing. and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Alan (ed. . One of the earliest and best attempts to synthesize Anglo-American and continental narrative theory. Hassan. Sinfield. Offers an account of contemporary English literature in relation to social developments after the Second World War. Seymour (1978) Story. Ihab (1973) Contemporary American Literature: an Introduction 1945–1972. Malcolm (1983) The Modern American Novel. Lovell. Politics and Pleasure. Terry (1980) Pictures of Reality: Aesthetics. Bergen. Oxford and New York. An excellent discussion of the political implications of the realism debate. Ithaca and London.
137. 5–6 Barth. The Hawkline Monster. 22. 51. 22. Snow White. 140. 17–18. Brigid: Flesh.L. 99. Malone Dies. J. and Luckmann. Gregory. Mythologies. 149. 91 Bradbury. Saul: Herzog. 30. 144. Thru. 110 Borges. 22. Letters. 22. Walter: Alphabetical Africa. The Sot-Weed Factor. 87. Mikhail. on metalanguage. The Abortion. Giles Goat-Boy. Trout Fishing in America. 137–8. 22 . 15. 91–2. 86.: A Personal Anthology. 140. 95. 88 Bakhtin. 21.: on speech acts. 91 Barthelme. 139. Christine. 96. Sabbatical. Anthony: Abba Abba. 91. Amateurs. 43–50. City Life. Babel. 84. 119 Brautigan. The Book of Sand. Samuel: More Pricks than Kicks. Watt. 8. 45. 146–7. 142. 143. 91. 16. J. Who Do You Think You Are?. 131. 152n. Alan. Lost in the Funhouse. 44. 86. Great Days. 46. 135 Berger. 83. 142 Burns. Malcolm: The History Man.L. 60. Chimera. 26. 117. 86. 14. 97. Roland: hermeneutic code. Between. 51–3. The Floating Opera. Richard: A Confederate General from Big Sur. 46 Bellow. Waiting for Godot. 47–8 Austin. 35–6 Beckett. 22. 133. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. 39–40. 117. 72. 22. 141. 34. Labyrinths. 86 Brooke-Rose. 143 Barthes. 44–5. Donald: 'dreck'.: The Social Construction of Reality. 43. 142. 140. 131. John. 4.L. 29. 86.140–1. 147–8 Brophy. In Transit. 89. T. 142. 50–1. 142. 143. The End of the Road. 8. 75. 146 Burgess. 35.Index Abish. 133. 72. 135 Bateson. Imagination Dead Imagine. 97. 31. 125. 97. P. 127. 131 .
124. 77–8 Gardner. 54. 41 Ingarden. Travelling People. 13. 33. Pricksongs and Descants. 69. 4. Aren't You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?.: Three Trapped Tigers. A. 144 Byatt. 54. John. The Magus. 42. 14. 42. E. 43. Roman. Michel: Mobile. 79 Johnson. Albert Angelo. 132 Fowles. William H. 110 Golding. 141 Hawkes. 100–1 Eliot. 14. 130–6 detective fiction. 22. 47. 95–7. 97. 118 Capote. the. 122–3 Jakobson.: The Game. 97 Caillois. 110–11. 38. 90. 86. 28–34. 119. 26. 100. Johan: on play. 96–7. 107–8 Drabble. Umberto: on possible worlds. 124. John: Grendel. 42. 4 Huizinga. Freddy's Book. 30. 30.174 Metafiction French Lieutenant's Woman. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. 131–2 Butor. 133. John: The Water-Method Man. 98–9. 60. 22. 115 Hjelmslev. The Castle of Crossed Destinies. George: Adam Bede. 105. 44. 131. See the Old Lady Decently. 142–3 Frank. Margaret: The Waterfall.: on metalanguage. L. Iain. 30. 123–7. 104–8 Irving. André: The Counterfeiters. The Public Burning. 21. 82–4 Doctorow.L. 32–4. Ernst. Christie Malry's Own Double Entry. William: Lord of the Flies. G. Joseph: on spatial form. 41 Calvino. 22. 22–3 Freud. 37. Trawl. The Ebony Tower. 72. 134 Camus. 56–7. 108–12 Federman. 102. 17 Goffman. 138–9. 117 death of the Author. The Collector. Robert: The Universal Baseball Association. Italo: on combination. Raymond: on surfiction. 86. 137. Julio. 106–7 Cortázar. John. 14. 83. 21. 69. Truman: In Cold Blood. Günter: The Tin Drum. 135. B. 29–34. 32–3 fantastic. 16.S. Sigmund: on jokes.S. Roger. The . the. 109 Heller. 141 Grass. 21. 57–8 Coover. 27. 43. 111–13. 24. House Mother Normal. Daniel Martin. 6. Roman.. 117 Cabrera Infante. The Aristos. 29. 4.131. The World According to Garp. Albert: The Rebel. 117 Gass. 46–7. 2. 140. 117. 142 Crichton-Smith.. 4. Darkness Visible. 116 Gide. 135 frames. Double or Nothing. 13. Joseph. 22. 112. 86 Eco.: The Book of Daniel. 105 Cassirer. 92. 105. Erving. 9. 58–9.
David: Radcliffe. 152n Sorrentino. 52. 85–6. How Far Can You Go?. The Driver's Seat. 104. 97. 25. 18. 123 Scholes. 137. 135 realism. 39 McEwan. 89. Flann: At Swim-twobirds. Briefing for a Descent into Hell. 96.76. 93–4 Shklovsky. 111 Major. 69–71. 124. 135 Kotzwinkle. 22. Thomas: Dr Faustus. Doris: The Golden Notebook. Jerzy. 93. 119–21. 140 Nabokov. 138. 41. 121. Alain. 23. Nausea. 83. 74 McElroy. 128– 9. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. 10–11. 67. 138 Murdoch. 17–18. 6. 48. 97. 57. 26. 10. Marge. 67. 105. 91 Merleau-Ponty.: The Inventory. 147. 144–5. Leonard. 16. Thomas: Schindler's Ark. 43 O'Brien. 86. 44. Mulligan Stew. 132. 31. Iris. 134–6 Pynchon. 142 Storey. 145 Spark. 6–7. G. Joseph. Lolita. 132. Muriel. 49. 71. 22. 111 Sukenick. 117 Mann. 105 Kosinski. 111. 16. Nathalie: The Golden Fruits. 135 Michaels. David. 39. 103. 113–14 Sterne. 116. 8–9. 100–1. Gabriel García: One Hundred Years of Solitude. 54. 37. Not to Disturb. Ulysses. 109–11 literary evolution. John. 145 Quin. 22. 34. 117 Sarraute.. The Death of the Novel. 144. 26. Ann: Passages. 15. Ian. 6. 137. Steve. 22. and Robert Kellogg. 101–3. 127 Malamud. 45. 133. 142. 141 Kenneally. 138. Vladimir. The Defence. 31. James: A Portrait of the Artist. 83 pronominal shifts. 25 Katz. 31. Russian Formalist theory of. Bernard: The Tenants. 31. 30. 17. 41. 70. Ronald: Up. 105 Searle. 132. Gilbert. 59–60 Sartre. Viktor. 52–3. 21–7. Laurence: Tristram Shandy. 97 . Philip. 60 Joyce. 123. 142 Roth. 74. Pale Fire. 118. 91. 47 Márquez. 121–2. William. 22. 116. 127 175 Piercy. 65–6. 15. Thomas: Gravity's Rainbow. 28. 99. Jean-Paul: on consciousness. 72. 135. 86 Lessing. SplendideHotel. The Public Image. M. 74–7. Robert: on fabulation. 38 modernism. 86. Moebius the Stripper. Out. 65–86 Lodge. 83. Clarence. 52–3.Index Josipovici. The Memoirs of a Survivor. 95. 27. 13. 55–6. The Comforters. 148 Robbe-Grillet.
176 Metafiction Slaughterhouse-Five. 18 Vidal. 133 Weldon. Boris: on realistic motivation. 103 thriller. Fay: Praxis. Virginia: To the Lighthouse. 83 Williams. 8.W. 6. 22. E. 84–6 Tomashevsky. Breakfast of Champions. Kurt: The Sirens of Titan. Gore.M. 127–9. 105 Woolf. 23 Thomas. D. 131 . 86 Vonnegut. 8. the. . 86.: The White Hotel. 117 Wolfe. Tom and Johnson.: The New Journalism. Nigel: My Life Closed Twice. 79.