What is metafiction

why are they sayingsuh

awfur things aboutit?

The thing is this.

That of all the severa! ways of beginning a book which <tre
nowin practice throughout the known world, l am con~dent
my own way of doing it is the best- l'm sure it is the wost
religious - for l begin with writing the first sentencf-'-arid
trusting to Almighty God for the second.
(Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shanrry, p. 438)
Fuck al! this lying look what I'm real! y trying to write abo).itis
writing not al! this stuff ...
(B. S.Johnson, AlbertAngelo, p: !63)
Since I've started thinking about this story, I'vegotteiiboils,
pi! es, eye strain, stomach spasms, anxiety attacks. Final!y I
am consumed by the thought that at a certain point w~all
become nothing more than dying animals.
(Ronald Sukenick, The Death ofthe Novel and OtherStories, p. 49)
I remember once we were outon .the ranch shooting.peccadillos (result ofa meeting, on the plains ofthe West,ofthe
colla-ed peccary and the nine-banded armadillo).
(Donald Barthelme, Ciry Life, P' 4)

What is metaJidion.?
Eictin 'is-- WOven ilto

unreality). more valid,

(Jo hu F owles, 'The French. Lieutenant.'s Woman, pp.
lfasked to point out the similarities amongst this discoucertj~
selection of quotations, most readers would immediately
two or threeofthe following: a celebration ofthepowerof
rcreative imagination together with an uncertainty about
j validity of it~ representations; an extreme self-consciousno~
\ about language, literary form and the act of writing fictions;;
1 pervasiveinsecurity about the relationship offiction to uolitv'.
'-parodie, playf11l, excessive or deceptively nai've style
In compiling such a list, the reader would, in
olfering a brief description of the basic concerns and charact
: istics of the fiction which will be explored in this book.~etafoii<
! is a term given to fictional writing which self-conscwusly
, 1. systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact:(l
'1 order to pose questions about the relationship betweeu
andreality;J In providing a critique of their own methods
\ constructOn, such writings not only examine the fundament
1structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possi
fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional
Most of the quotations are fairly contelllporary.
deliberate. Over the last twenty years, novelists have tendeq t
become much more aware of the theoretical issues involvPrli
coustructing fictions. In consequence, their novels have
t() embody dimensions of ~fl..t:l:l~ and formal
tainty. What connects not only these quotations but also
the very dilferent writers whom one .could refer to as
\., 'f'metafictional', is that they al! explore a theory offiction
' thepractice ofwriting fiction.
The term 'metafiction' itself seems to have originated
essay by the American critic and self-conscious novelist
H. Gass (in Gass 1970). However, terms like 'metapolitis
'metarhetoric' and 'metatheatre' are a reminder of what
be.en, since the I!)6os, a .more general cultural interest in
problem ofhow human beings reflect, construct and media!
their experience ofthe world. Metafiction pursues such
tions through its formal self-exploration, drawing on ilie

\!

llletaphor. oftpe worldasoook,.l:Jut ofterreC~~tingjtiu

tfi~iterms ofcqutemporary philqsophic:;~l,iiu~ui~tic or liter~I"y
as individual~, we n()w occuj.ly 'roles' ~:.tlhsrth;..r
, then the study of claracters in novels mayprovide a
modd for understanding the construction of s)lbjectivity
in the. world outside .novels. If our knowledge of this worlq is
to..be mediated throughlanguage, .then literary fictipn
Kworlds constructed en tire! y o( language) becmnes aj;se(QI
JI1odelforlearning about the construction of'reality'itself;
present iucreased awareness 0 f'meta' \evelsofdisq:mrse
e:>;perience is partly a consequence ofan increased socl
rultural self"consciousness. Beyond this, however, itals
reflects a greater awarenesswithin contemporary culture of the
function oflanguage in constructingand maintainingoursense
everyday 'reality'. The simple notion that languagepa~sively
reflects a coherent, meaningful and 'objective' world: is no
tenable. Language is an independent, self-coutained
system which generales its own 'meanings'. Its relationship to
world is highly complex, problematic and
regulated by convention. 'Meta' terms, therefore, .are reqQired
to explore the relationship between this arbitrary
linguistic system and the world to which it apparendyrefers;ln
they are required in order to explore the relationship
between the worlq ofthe fiction and the world. outside the fictiou.
a sense, metafiction rests on a version ofthe Heisenbergian
uncertainty principie: an awareness that 'for the sma!lest huild~
ingb!ocks ofmatter, every process ofobservation cause~ a major
disturbance' (Heisenberg 1972, p. 126), and that itis impossible
describe .an objective world because the .observer .always
t;hangesthe observed, However, ilie concerns ofinetafictionare
more complex 'than this. For while Heisenberg believd
coulq at least describe, if not a picrnre. of. nature, then a.
picfre of one's relation to nature, metafiction shows the uncer"
even of this process. How is it possible to 'describe'
anything? The metafictionist is highly conscious..of a ba;ic
d.ilemma:. ifhe or she sets out to 'represent' the world, he
realizes fairly soon that the world, as such,> cannot be
'represented'. In literary fiction it is, in fact, possib!e only to
'renrPsPnt'. t]:e discourses of that world. Yet, ifone attempts to

Whati~metall~tibn?

Metafi!o<m

,@y~e aseto[Iin~uistic reiati<m~hips usi11~.those samerel<!.ti?l

~hips as the i11st-uments of ;malysis, la11gu,ge
'pris9nhouse' from which the possib,ility of escape
Metafication.sets out to e'fplore.this dilemma.
The linguist L. Hjelmslev developed the. term 'metlangll>tg.<
(Hjeln\slev 1961). Hedefined itas a language which, i
refefring .to non"linguistic events, situations or objects .in
world, refers. toanother language: it is a language which
4nther language as its object. Saussure's distinction
t.he signifier and the signified is relevan! here; Thesignifier is
s<:m1;1d-image of the word or its shape onthe page; the signifieq
the conceptevoked by the word. A metalanguage is a langu'l
hat functions as a signifier to another language, .a11d this
language thus becomes its signified. 1
In novelistic practice, this results in writing which consis.f
ently displays its conventionality, w hich explicity and oveitl
lays bare its condition of artfice, and which thereby
problema tic. relationship between life and fiction- both t.he
that 'al! the world is not of course a stage' and 'the crucial
in whichit isn't' (Goffman 1974, p. 53). The 'other' langw.g
may be either the registers of everyday discourse or,
al!y, the 'language' ofthe literarysystemitself, including
ventions of the novel as a whole or particular forms of that
Metafiction may concern itself, then, with particl]lar conver
tions of the novel, to display the process of theircons
(for example, John Fowles's use of the 'omniscient
convention in The French Lieutenont's Woman ( 1969). lt
in the form ofparody, comment on a specific work or
mode (for example, John Gardner's Grendel (1971),
retells, and thl1s comments on, the Beowulf story from
ofview ofthe monster; or John Hawkes's The Lime Twig (1
which constitutes both an example anda criti
thriller. LesscentraJy m~tafictional, but still displayng
features, are fictions lke Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishinv
Ame,.jca (1967). Such novels attempt to create alternative
l]isticstructures or fictions which merely imply the oldformsr
encouraging the reader to draw on his or her knowledge
trditionalliterary conventions when struggling to construc(
meaning for the new text.

~~Jid rgue that metaficti<mal practice has becn; part$li~!YP~()Ininen tinthe ficti?n ofth~Ias(tw~ntyyear.s. H()WeY!'.r,
drw exclusive!y on conten\porary fictio~wo!Jld bt: misleap-

term 'metafiction' might benew, thepr~cticr

old (ifnot older) than the novel itself. What I ho~ l()
establish during the course of this book is that metafiction is<a
orfllllctio~i11herentinall novels. This r;~mofllcii\);;;; '
ayng ot onlybecaise ofits contemporary emer!ence
?u'.".,v beca use ofthe insights it olfers into both the represeqta"
<< (Ftional nature of all fiction and the literary history of the novel as
.:;)l'enre. By studying metafiction, one is, in effect, studying that
'<<which gives the novel its identity.
~ertainly more scholarly ink has been spilt overattempts t?
<"rieline the novel than perhaps for any otherliterary. genre. The
notoriously defies defintion. lts instability in thisrespect
ispartofits 'definition': the language offiction appears to'spill
into, and merge with, the instabilities of the realworld,in .a.
that a five-act tragedy ora fourteen-line so'unetdearlydoes
Metafiction flaunts and exaggerates and thus exposesthe \
fol1ndations of this instability: the fact that novels are cn~tructed through a continuous assimilation ofeverydayhistri~
forms of communication. There is noone privikged 'lan, 7
'guageoffiction'. There are the languages of memoirs;journals,
piaries; histories,conversational registers, legal records,jol]r'
ll;tlism, documentary. These languages compete for privl!;ge.
question and relativize ea eh other to suchan extent t);t
of fiction' is always, if often covertly, self~
~<as

Bakhtin has refeiTd to this process ofrelativiztion

'dialogic' potential of the novel. . Metafiction ~imply
Il!aKes this potential explicit and in so doing foregrounds the
mode of all fictional language. Bakhtin defines is
:~?\'frtly 'dialogic' those novels tht introduce a 'semantic direc. ;-;\O~ into the word which is diametrically opposed to .its original
-;direction .... the word becomes the arena of conflict between
.
(Bakhtin 1973, p. 106). In fact, given its close
;r~Jat;on to everyday forms ofdiscourse, the language offictio11 is

6 .. MHafiction

What.is.metafictiofr?

alzpaystosome extent dialogiG,The . nov,elassimila.tesa.

<liscnrses . <repr~s~ntations .. of speech, .forms .of narr.lti.ve)~
qi~c?nrse~ that alzpays to some extent question and ~elativiit
ea(:~ qther'sauthority. Realism, often regarded as th~
fi~tional mo<:le, paradoxic;Jly ftinctions by suppressing
dialogue, The confiict of languages and voices is apparent
reslyed in realistic fiction through their s1.1bordination
dorninant 'voice' of the omniscient, godlike authpr. N()v~l;~
Which Jhkhtin refers tp as 'dialogic' resist such resolutior}
Metafiction displays and rqoices in the impossibility of
resolutipn and thus clearly reveals the basic identityofthe
asgenre;
Metafictional novels tend to be constructed on the princi:>\i
0 f a fundamental and sustained opposition: the constructionof~i
fictional illusion (as in traditi.onal realism) and the laying
ofthat illusion. In other words, the lowest common.denomi!l:if.
torof metafiction is simultaneously to crea te a fiction and to
make a statement about the creation of that fiction. The
processes are. held together in a formal tension which
down the distinctions between 'creation' and 'criticism'
merg~s t~em int.o the concepts of 'interpretation' an<:l 'decp[i,,

even more thoroug-hgoing sellkthiitxrealitY

are provisional: no longer
of:constructio_ns, arti~ces,_ :iiTlj>erm~rlent St~u:ture~--;
!The materialist, positivist and empiricist .world-yiew .on.w!li<:h
reallstic fiction is premised no longer exists
that more and more novelists have c.ometo
q!lestion and reject the forms that correspond to
: .reality (the well-made plot, chronologicalsequence,
omniscient author, the rational connection b~tween
what characters 'do' and what they 'are', the causal cqn[}ecti()n
hetween 'surface' details and the 'deep', 'scientific laws' of

are iliey saying such awful iliings aoout it?

. _struct1on -.

Although this oppositional process is to sorne extent presn\"

inallfiction, and particularly likely toemerge during
:>eriods in the literary history of the genre (see Chapter -
prominence in.the contemporary novelis unique. The historie
period we are living through has been. singular!y uncertai~
insecure, self-questioning and culturally pluralistic. Conte.m
porary fiction dearly reflects this dissatisfaction with,
breakdown of, traditional values. Previously, as. in he case
nineteerith-century realism, the forms of fiction derived
firm belief in a commonly experienced, objectively existil:r
world ofhistory. Modernist fiction, written in. the earller
this century, responded to the initial loss of belief in
world . Novels like Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse (19~7)
Jamesjoyce's Ulysses (1922) signalled the first widespre@;'
qvert emergen ce in the novel of a s.ense of fictitiousness: 'a
that.any at(empt to represen! reality could onlyproducesetec,
tive perspectives, fictions, that is, in an epistemological,

This rejection has inevitably entailed, however, a good dea\ of

~riterlv and critica! confusion. There has been paranoia,on the
both novelists and critics for whom the exhaustion and
rejecti<>n of realism is synonymous with the exhaustionand
rejection of the novel itself. Thus B. S. Johnson bursts into (or
(ll.lt. of?) Albert Angelo (1964) .with the words which prefacethis
thapter, 'Fuck all this lying'. His comment serves in thenovel.as
wuch to voice a paranoid fear that his audience wiil n1sinterprethis fiction by reading it according to expectations based on
tradition of the realistic novel, as to demonstrate the artic
liciality of fictional forro through a controlled metafi.ctio.nal
discourse. At the end of the book he asserts:
.~

page is an area on which I place my signs I considr.to

communicate most clearly what I have to convey ...herefore I employ within the pocket of my publisher all.d(he
patience of m y printer, typographical techniques beyond lhe
arbitrary and constricting limits of the conventional novel.
To dismiss such techniques as gimmicks or to refuse to take
them seriously is crassly to missthe point.
(Albert Angelo, p. 1 "j6)

What is
I.tr~adsrather like.an,anticipation 'ofa hostibrevi~~v.
.sirrlar .defensiveness about .the role of the novelist appeap~
Porald B<trthelme's obsessionwith dreck, .the
cvilization,~ It.is expressed through John Barth's
)"hp~as muchin thestyle o[S.artreas in that ofSterne~
tell!lg themselvesstores in thedark', desperately attemptiug
mnstru~t identites whch can only dissolve into metalirg\1'
m\ltterngs (Lost.in the Funhouse ( 1968), p. 95). Extreme defe(l~~~
strategies are common, Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast qf Champ{o
(1973) is written to express the sense of absurdity produced ]j
its author's paradoxcal realzation that 'I have no
that 'han't live without a culture anymore'; p. 15). Attempts
precise linguistic description continually break down.
diagrams replace language in order to express the novertv
the 'culture' which is available through

'fii

)tssholes' ,- '.uriderpallts' and 'heefburgers'.

The strategy of this novel s to invert the science-ficti<ir

convention whereby humans are depcted attempting to
prehend the processes of an alen world. Here, contemp ..
American society is the 'alen world'. Vonnegut defamiliariz.e!
the world that his .readers take for granted, through the

nque of employing an ex-Earthling narrator who is .now

on a different planet and has set out to 'explain' Earth to
fellow iuhabitants. The defamiliarization has more
satiric function, however. It reveals Vonnegut's own despairini
recognition of the sheer impossibility of,providng a critique~
commonly accepted cultural forms of representation, from
in !hose very modes of representation.
What is the novelist todo? Here the 'nalve' narrative
appareutly oblivious of all.our liberal value-systems and
codes, reveals through its defamiliarizing effect their
illiberal and amoral assumptions and consequences. Benea
fooling with representations of cows as beefburgers, however
lurks a desperate sense of the possible redundancy
vanee of the artist, so apparent in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five
(1g6g).Indeed, Philip Roth, the American novelist.
ten:
The American writer in the middle of the twentieth centur
has his hands full in trying to understand, dscribe, and

m~.tafidion?

wdible .IIIuc.h of J\.merican re<tlty. lt SllJPeli~~; it

;\JWisitkeris, it infuriates, al1d finallyit isevena kind ofe'(1~llrrass,
!i?ji)m... e.ntto.

on. outdoingour
e'.s.o..w
.. n. me. a.gre
im.a. 'nat.ion. T
.... h.e actn. al i t Y . . ..'.. s
:.c!ltinw;lly
talen(s.
(Quoted in Bradb1.1ry 197hP' 34)
g.

away from 'reality', however, and back to a

J'e:examination of fictional form, novelists have dscov.erfd a
~pprising way out of their dilemmas and paranoia, Metafi.c.
deconstruction has not only provided novelists and their
fiaders with a better understanding of the fundamental str~C
- of narrative; it has also offered extreme!y accuratemod"l~
understanding the contemporary experience of the world as
c~nstruction, an artfice, a web of interdependent. semiotic
ivstems. The paranoia that permeates the metafictional writng
the sixties and seventies is therefore slowly givil1g wa)' to
to the discovery of new forms o[ the faritastic,
. extravaganzas, magic realism (Salman Rus.hdie,
C"hrid Garca Mrquez, Clive Sindair, Graham Swift, D. M,
Irving). Novelists and critics alike have cometo
a moment of crisis can also be seen as a moll1ent of
f!;cognition: recognition that, although the assumptionsabot
novel based on an extension of a nineteenth-century realist
of the world may no longer be viable, the n.ovel itselfis
oositively flourishing.
Despite this renewed optimism, however, it is still theea~e
t thP nncertain. self-reflexive nature ofexperimental '!letaficopen to critica! attacks. Y et metafictionjs
~iJ1lply flaunting what is true of all novels: their 'outstanding
f~eedom to choose' (Fowles 1971, p. 46). It is this instabi\ity,
~P~Ilness and flexibility which has allowed the. noyel remark""'; <n survive and adapt to social change for the last 300. years.
of the poltica!, cultural and technological upheavals
society since the Second World War, however, its lack ofa
identity has nowleftthe novel vulnerable.
nence critics ha ve discussed the 'crisis of the novel' and the
of th novel'. Instead of recognizing the positive aspects of
lictiorial self-consciousness, they have tended to see such literiry behaviour as a form ofthe self-indulgence and deqdence
characteristic of the exhaustion of any artistic form or genre;

Whitis~ct~~:tion?

11

identifying and then, rt:present.I)g ~~~, qbjept .()f

. .:, _-, :,,._"'
_,- ._-'.: __ ",
ppOSltlOn
.
,
,
;t.:ktafictional wnters havefound asolutwnt() th\~;by t~rn1ng
)$;ards t<> their ownmedium ofexpress()Il, in,()rder,t() (!Xafili~te
rrere!ationship between fictio~talf()rm ami social rcality. They
come to focus on the notion that 'everyday' Ja~tguage
'C ~jdorses ;md sustains sueh power struc,tures thrqugh ~e()Iif
iin,ous process of naturalization whereby forms ofoppressiop.
constructed in apparently 'innocen\' representations,. The
Jiterary-fictional equivalent of this 'everyday'language,of'corn!on sense' is the language ofthe traditional novel: the conven~
M:etafictio11 and the contemporary avant-garde
of realism. Metafiction sets up an oppositi()n, not to
;stensibly 'objective' facts in the 'real' world, but to the lanThis search has been further motivated by novelists' respon~:
the realistic novel which has sustained and e~tdorsed
to;another feature of contemporary culturallife: the absence,
clearly d~fined avant-garde 'movement'. The existence
a view ofreality.
unprecedented cultural pluralism has meant that
metafictional novel thus situates its resistan ce withinthe
rnodernist write,rs are not confronted with the same clear-<)ij
mnu of the novel itself. Saussure distinguished between langue
oppositions as modernist writers were. An innovation
paro/e: between the language system (a set of rules) and any
literary form cannot establish itself as a new direction unlessJ;
ofindividual utterance that takes place within this system.
sense of ,shared aims and objectives develops among
metafictional novel self-consciously sets its individual
perimental writers. This has been slow to tal;:e shap in
parote against the langue ( the codes and conventions) of the novel
years, An argument originally advanced by Lionel Trilung1
.tradition. Ostentatiously 'literary' language and conventions
are set against the fragments of vari<>us cult.ural
Bryond Culture (Trilling 1966) and reiterated by Gerald
suggested one reason for this: that the unmasking of the
not because there is nothi11g left to talk ab()l1t, but
criti<eal bourgeois belief in the material and moral pro<>"rP<~ i>'
b~cause the formal structures of these literary conventions
provide a statement about the dissociation between, on the.one
civilization' (Graff1975, p. 308) has beenso thoroughly
plished by modern,ism that the creative tension producea
hand, the genuinely felt sense of crisis, alienation and. oppres"
, ()pposing this 'bourgeois belief' is no longer clearly availahl
in contemporary society and, on the other, the contin1lance
C)f traditional literary forms like realism whch are no l<>nger
the,novelist.
In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, the individ~
adequate vehicles for the mediation of this experience, .Metaficis always finally integrated into the social structure (usual!)
tion thus converts what it sees as the negative values ofoutwor~t
through family relationships, marriage, birth or the ultimat,c
literary conventions into the basis of a potentially constructive
dissolution of death). In modernis.t fiction the struggle
so.tial criticism. I t suggests, in fact, that there rnaybeas m.uch to
personal autonomy can be continued only thron"
be learnt from setting the mirror of art up to its own linguistic.or
eXisting .Social institutions and conventions.
representational structures as from directly setting it up to a.
necessarily involves individual alienation and
hypothetical 'human nature' that somehow exists as an essence
rnental dissolution. The power structures of contemporary
outside historical systems of articulation.
ar~, howeve~, more di verse and more effectiv~ly
The problem facing writers who attempt authentically to
filystified, creating grea(er problems for the
. rpresent conditions of rapid social change is that they may
,,_-

,-

0
,'

,,

',

.,

Whatismetafidion?i 13
tpe~selvesprodt1ce'Nor~sofart.whith are.ephener~lan9

r example, certifies ccmcepts like feter~al ~l.llllan

'even a single wprk >,ViJ
theassumptipn thatal!thorityas.m~nifest~q,~hroug.~
a .style finished; exhat1~
somehow freeofboth.;gender<:listin<;c
(Rochberg 197 1, p. 73). The practit
co!lstrt~cted and .. prpvisio!l"} U'loraJ
lj.rt' ( whichattempts to be totally randomI1orderto suggeiic
sl.lpposedly expose the way ii}Wilit!i tb~s.~
ch,.otic, Jrenetic and colliding surfaces of contemporary .t'l
are constructed through the language of ()Pe
llologicalsociety) are open to these charges. Literary
ideologies, by refusing to allow the reader the role of
toJunctionby preserving a balancebetween the unfamiliap
consumer or any means of arriving at a 'total' interpre"'
innovatory) and the familiar.(the conventional or traditio',
iOnofthe text.
! Both are necessary beca use sorne degree of redunda~>cy.
Although t is true that much of this should midoubte(Hy
' essential for any message to be committed to memory.
of experimental fiction, it does seem questionable
d.ncy is provided for il1 literary texts through the prese!'lse
(~hether, for many readers, so-called 'aleatory writing' is goi!'lg
faJllilir conventions. Experimental fiction of the aleatory y:
Joaccomplish all ofthis. Novels likeJohn Fowles's TkeFrench
ety .eschews such redundancy by simply ignoring the
{f:ieutenant's Woman or Robert Coover's Pricksongs and D~sc(lnl~
tions ofliterary tradition. Such texts set out to resist the no~"-'
(:.'h96g), though apparently less 'radical', are in the long run
processes ofreading, memory and understanding, but wi
to be more successful. Both are metafictional novels in
requndancy, texts are read and forgotten. They cannot
they employ parody self-consciously. Both take as their
form a literary 'movement' because they exist only
1',c\(>?ject' languages the structures ofnineteenth-century realism
moment ofreading.
1 a:rd ofhistorical romance or offairy-tales. The parody ofthese
The metafictional response to the problem of how to
liinguages' functions to defamiliarize such structuresby setting
sent impermanence anda sense of chaos, in the permanent,~
1pvarious counter-techniques to undermine the authority oftht:
ordered terms of literature, has had a much more signifie~1
mniscient author, of the closure of the 'final' ending; of the
influence on the development of the novel as genre.
, ~~~nitive interpretation. Although the reader is ther~by dis"
writing might imita te the experience ofliving in the. contemp'c
' t!';nceq from the language, the literary conventions and, llltiary world, but it fails to offer any of the comfort tradition;_
mately, from conventional ideologies, the defamiliarizationprosupplied .by literary fiction through a 'sense of an
an extremely familiar base. Such novels can thus
(Kermode 1966). Metafiction, however, offers both innova.t
be comprehended through the old structures, and c"l'l
and. familiarity through the individual. reworking and
be enjoyed and remain in the consciousness of> wide
mining of familiar conventions ..
which is given a far more active role in the co.nstrucc
Aleatory writing simply responds with a reply in kind
; ' of the 'meaning' of the text than is provided either i[).
pluralistic, hyperactive multiplicity of styles that constitute
1
~Qntemporary realist novels or in novels which convert their
surfaces of present-day culture. What is mainly asserted
r~aders into frene tic human word-processors, and whiC:h 'last'
novels is an anarchic individualism, a randomness designed
as long as it takes toread them.
represent an avoiaance of"social control by stressing
possibility of easily categorizing it or assimilating the reader
mirror up to art: metafiction and its varieties
familiar structures of communication. An argument sometirn
pl"oposed (o justifY the strategies of su eh fictions is .that
:~ti"emains, within this introductory chapter, briefly to examine
'.radical' because they rupture.the conventional linguistic e~:
> \~?file alternative definitions of self-conscious writing. These
tr.actsthat certifY and/or disguise orthodox socialpractices
sirnilar modes have been variously termed 'the introvert'ld
t~iyi~l. I11 the prese~>t. situ'!-tion
~ufli.cieflt grot1nds for declaring

14

Metafittion

riv~l'-,_ :':th?_-" -=anti-,.novel\ "',rreaJism' ,_ 'Surfi~tiqn\_--"- /

begetting. npyel', 'fabulation' .' All, like 'metaliction', lnpl)
liction that selfcconsciously reftects upon its own structJ!fc~
language; all offer different perspectives OJ1 tbe
But the. terms shift tJ:e emphasis in different waysc
begetting novel', for example, is described as an
usuallyfirstperson, ofthe development of a character to
al which he is able to take up and compose the novel we
just finished reading' (Kellman 1976, p. 1245). The emphasisf:
on thedevelopment ofthe narrator, on the.modernist C<>ncern;9:
consciousness rather than tbe post-modernist one offictwnality ..(a
in, forexample, Andr Gide's The Counterfeiters (1925)).
The entry ofthe narrator into the text is also a defining
of what has been calld 'surliction'. Raymond F ederman's
of that name discusses the mode in terms of overt narratoria
intrusion so that, as in the 'self-begetting novel', the
appears to be on the ironist him/herself rather than on the
and covert levels of the ironic text. Telling as individual
tion; spontaneous fabrcaton at the expense of externa!
or literary tradtion, is emphasized rather than what has

\z

stressed above: metafiction's continuous involvement in-

mediation of- reality through linguistc structures and

existent texts.

As delined here, of course, metalictonal writing may mclu(1

al! or sorne of the strategies that critics ha ve discussed in
terms that have been mentioned. Different categories, in
often compete for the same lictional texts:John Barth's Lost zntl
Funhouse (1968) is dearly 'self-begetting', 'surfictional'
'me.talictonal'. As I ha ve argued, metaliction is not so
sub-genre of the novel as a tendency within the novel
opera tes through exaggeration of the tensions and oppositiJli
inherent in al! novels: of frame and frame-break,
and counter-technique, of construction and deconstruction
illusion. Metafiction thus expresses overtly what William
Gass has argued is the dilemma of all art:
In every art two contradictory impulses are in a state
war: the impulse to communicate a11d so to
1 Manichean
the medium of communication as a means and the impulse

Whatis inetafidin?

15

Ifiake a11 artefact out of the rnaterials and so i treat ithe

;:<.rnediumas an end.
(Gass 197())
expression of this tension is present inmuch coriteiTipoi.-a..-y
\{\,fiting but itis the dominantfunction in tl:e.texts delined hereas
ialictional.
The metalictions ofJorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabqkov
this poinL In sorne of tbeir work- Borges' LahJrinths
and Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), for example- liction
i~plicitly masquerades as formalized critica! interpietationc. In
work, however, as in all other metafiction, there is a
complex implicit interdependence oflevels than this: The
reader is always presented with embedded strata which contrathe presuppositions of the strata immediately above or
helow. The lictional content of the story is continually reftected
ts formal existence as text, and the existence of that .text
,;ithin a world viewed in terms of 'textuality', Brian M cHale
.has suggested that such contradictions are essentially ontologico)
(.posing questions about the nature and existence ofreality)and
are therefore characteristically post-modernist. He sees asmodc
emist those epistemological contradictions which question how
we can know a reality whose existence is finally not in doubt
(McHale, forthcoming).
Borges' imaginary kingdom Tlon, discovered by the 'fortunate conjunction ofa mirror andan encyclopaedia', is a postmodernist world. I t is twice a fiction beca use it is suggested that,
before its invention by Borges, it has aiready been invented by a
society of idealists induding Bishop Berkeley, and both,
of course, are linally dependent u pon the conventions of the
short story (Labyrinths, p. 27). The fact that th.is 'imaginary'
world can take over the 'real' one emphasizes more than the
epistemological uncertainty of both of them (which would be the
aim ofthe 'self-begetting novel'). 'Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius',
the story, is about a story that invents an imaginary world, and
itprimarily and selfcconsciously is a story which, like all stories,
invents an imaginary world. It implies that human beings can
.nly ever achieve a metaphor for reality, another !ayer of
'inteq>retation'. (Borges' story 'Funes the Memorias' ( 1.964)
shows that this need not be cause for despair, for if indeed we

Metaficton
~olcl

not cr;eate.these.metaphorcalim~gesthen we woiliJ;>

surelybecome insane,)
Meafictionalnovels ( unlike 'surfiction' or 'the self"begetti~
novel') thus reject the traditional figure of the author a
tran~cendental.imaginationfabricating, through.an ultiii!ats.
III()nologic discourse, structures of order which will replac~>~h
forgotten material text of the world. They show not only thattlJ!
'author' is a concept produced through previous and ('OXsti~
literary and social texts but that what is generally
'rea!ty' is also constructed and mediated in a similar fashi()ll
'Reality' is to this extent 'fictional' ;md can be understqoj
through an appropriate 'reading' process.
Also rejected is the displacement of 'historical man'
'structural man' advocated by Robert Scholes as the
what he C;llis 'fabulation' (Scholes 1975). David Lodge
pointed out that 'history may be in a philosophical sense,a
fictior:t, but it does not feel like that when we miss a train
somebody starts a war'. 4 As novel readers, we look to fictiontt
offer us cognitive functions, to loca te us within evervdav as
as within philosophical paradigms, to explain
world. as well as offer sorne formal comfort and
Scholes argues that the emprica! has lost allvalidity and
collusion between the philosophic and the mythic in the
'ethically controlled fantasy' is the only authentic mode
fiction (Scholes 1967, p. 11). However, metafiction offers
recognition, not that the everyday has ceased to matter,
its formulatiQn through social and cultural codes brings
to the philosophical and mythic than was once assumed.
A brief comparison of two self-conscious novels, one obvios
!y 'metafictional', the other more obviously 'fabulatory',
how metafiction explores the concept of fictionality through at
opposition between the construction and the breaking
sipn, while fabulation reveals instead what Christine BrooJ<e
Rose ( 1g8o) has referred to as a reduced tension betwed
technique and counter-technique: a 'stylization' which enabks
other voices to be assimilated, rather than presentng a conflict
voices~-

Muriel Spark's metafictwnal novels !ay bare the process

imposing form u pon contingent matter through the <li<rn.-.ive

rl:rianizatipn of 'plot'. She . can, hpwever> as\David L:o<l~e' l!~s

afford her. rnet;lphpric fiights b~c;lUSe ()~ the
> . . . . metonymicbasc(Lodge I9J7a,p, III}.Shel!ses
,;r 'Aiahts', infact, to commenton the very paraligrns tbat~hey
process of constructing. (thisernbedding ofstrat~, of
's~()11rse, being fundamental to metafiction). I~ Nqt (q Dist~rb
lio7I ), for example, this highly obtrusive simile describ.es a
!Yfeal1while the lightning which strikes the dl!II!j) ofehps ~o
that the two friends huddledthere arekilled inst;lntly wi@ut
pain, zigzags across the lawns, illuminating the lily,pqn~ and
the sunken rose garden like a self-stricken flash photo"
grapher, and like a zip-fastener ripped from its garm~nt by a
sexual maniac.
(p,86)
appears to be a piece of highly stylized descriptive prose.
. marked particularly by the appearance of extremely bizarre
metaphors. To this extent it is very similar to Richard Bra,utfabulatory novel, Trout Fishing in America ( 1967), whichis
of similar metaphorical constructions where the extreme
polarity of vehicle and tenor implicitly reminds the reader of the
which metaphor constructs an image of reality by
connecting apparently quite disparate objects. In. this novel,for
"xample, trout are described waiting in streams 'like airplar:te
tickets' (p. 8), and the reader's imagination is stretched
lhroughout by the incongruityofthe comparisons. The novel is
icelebration ofthe creative imagination: it is a 'fabulatiqn':
In the Spark example, however, there is a f11rther,. rnPre
function that is part of a sustained metafictionaldisplay;
the vehicle of the metaphor is explicitly related to what is
})appening at the contiguously unfolding leve! ofthe stQry. A
entrepreneurial and enterprising servants. have
arranged the filming ofthe last moments of an eterna! triangle of
superannuated aristocrats. The servants know their masters are
going to die and also know how to capitalize on their.deaths.
Aristocratic scandals provide excellent material for media sensationalism. The photographer and the zipfastener (which the
mentally deficient aristocratic son is continually attempting to

--_,_:---'.--.<_ ::>;:-__:,-'- -

>'-:'__ :_:__:<

~h:tis~;ta~tiori?

. 19

r~poffinth(' excitement.ofhis i~termitt.ent sexual ~~ergy)

.of Iris. Murdoch orj e-zy Kosins~i, ~hos~ [of~;>f ~~If,
importantdements inthe plotbei~g ~onstructed by th~
;nnness is limited: At th~ ~entreofthisspe~tr\lrp~r~W!)t:
mani[est .the symptoms pfforna]a~d,ontolc:>&i.s~I
(:"~ also, as in the ex"-mple, arranges appmpriate
conditjons) and, .of course, by .the characters . .The
securitybut
allow their deconstructionsto befin;>llyreco.~tex;
1
ale:rfed tpthe way in which the ex>licitlyartificialconstrust
:~~alized or 'naturalized' and given a totalinterpretation ('hich
ofthese connections fits in with the larger designs of the novPI
\:onstitute, therefore, a 'new realism'), as in thework ql'J!)hn
playing. God. The .elements at the metaphorical leve!
or E. L. Doctorow. Finally, at the furthest extnme
construction break down not into 'natural' or randomly
livhich would include 'fabulation') can be placed those fic!ions
c<>mponents, but to another leve! of artfice: the leve! of
in rejecting realism more thoroughly,. posit the world
a fabrication of competing semiotic systems which. never
'plot'. The reader is thus reminded that pure contingency
to material conditions, as in the work of Gill:>ert
~9vels is always an illusion, although the lowest leve! of
Sorrentmo, Raymond Federman or Christine Brooke-Rose.
artfice (what the Russian formalist Boris Tomashevsky
referred toas realistic motivation; see Lemon and Res 1
Much British fiction fits into the first half of the .spectrum,
61~9) isassumed to be reality. Thus not only do the char~rf,;:
tiJ.ough proble!Ilatically, and !Iluch American fiction into the
inthis novel play roles, 'fictionalize' in terms ofthe content
other half, though with the same proviso. The novelist at either
plot; they too are 'fictionalized', created, through the
however- in confronting the problem that, 'whetherqr not
!Ilakes peace with realism, he must somehow cope with
construction of the plot.
(Dickinson 1975, p. 372) -has acknowledged the fact
Metafiction explicitly lays bare the conventions of realis!Il;:i
'reality' is no longer the oue mediated by nineteenthdo.es not ignore or abandon them. V ery often realistic conve~
tiolls supply the 'control' in metafictional texts, the norm ,~ . rentury novelists and experienced by nineteenth-century re;>d'
Indeed, it could be argued that, farfrom 'dying', thenpvel
background against which the experimental strategies can
reached a mature recognition of its existence as writiT!g,
ground themselves. More obviously, of course, this allows
stable leve! of readerly familiarity, without which the ensui!l:
which can only ensure its continued viability in and relevan ceJo
dislocations might be either totally meaningless or so
a. contemporary world which is similarly beginning to gai11
the normal modes of literary or non-literary communicati~
awareness of precisely how its values and practices are conthat they cannot be committed to memory (the problen
structed and legitimized .
._airead y discussed, of much contemporary 'aleatory' writin
Metafiction, then, does not abandon 'the real world'
nartissistic pleasures of the imagination. What it does
recexamine the conventions of realism in order to discover
through its own self-reflection - a fictional form

.CQ!!.t.emporary readers
us how literary fiction creates
metafiction helps us to understand how the reality welive
by da y is similarly constructed, similar! y 'written'. .
'Metafiction' is thus an elastic term which covers a
range of fictions. There are those novels at one end of
spec(rum 'hich take fi~tionality as a the!Ile to be PxnlnrPcl
inths sense would include the 'self"begetting

Li terary self-consciousness:
developments

_Mooernism and post-modernism: ilie redefinition of

etahctwn is a mode of writing within a broader cultural
movement often rcferred to as post-modernism. The metaficwriter John Barth has expressed a common feeling about
term 'post-modernism' as 'awkward and faintly epigonic,
snggestive less of a vigorous or even interesting new directio.n .in
the old art of storytelling than of something anticlimactit,ftiebly
following a very hard act to follow' (Barth Ig8o, p. 66).J.?ostc
ernism can be seen to exhibit the same sense of crisis and
ofbeliefin an externa! authoritative system of orderas that
prompted modernism. Both affirm the constructive
powers of the mind in the face of apparent phenomenal chaps.
Modernist self-consciousness, however, though it may draw
aention to the aesthetic construction of the text, does not
'systematically ftaunt its.own condition ofartifice' (Alter I975a,
x) in the manner ofcontemporary metafiction.
Modernism only occasionally displays features typical of
post-modernism: the over-obtrusive, visibly inventing narrator
(as in Barth's Lost in the Funhouse ( rg68), Ro.bert Coove.r's.
Pricksongs and Descants ( rg6g) ); ostentatious typographic experiment (B. S.Johnson's Travelling People (rg63), RaymondFeder"
man's Double or Nothing (I97I)); explicit dramatization of the