Metafiction

The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction

Patricia Waugh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134970728
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Metafiction begins by surveying the state of contemporary fiction in Britain and America and explores the complex political, social and economic factors which influence critical judgment of fiction. The author shows how, as the novel has been eclipsed by the mass media, novelists have sought to retain and regain a wide readership by drawing on the themes and preoccupations of these forms. Making use of contemporary fiction by such writers as Fowles, Borges, Spark, Barthelme, Brautigan, Vonnegut and Barth, and drawing on Russian Formalist theories of literary evolution, the book argues that metafiction uses parody along with popular genres and non-literary forms as a way not only of exposing the inadequate and obsolescent conventions of the classic novel, but of stuggesting the lines along which fiction might develop in the future.

1
What is metafiction and why are they saying such awful things about it?

What is metafiction?

The thing is this.
That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, 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.

(Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, p. 438)

Fuck all this lying look what I’m really trying to write about is writing not all this stuff . . .

(B. S. Johnson, Albert Angelo, p. 163)

Since I’ve started thinking about this story, I’ve gotten boils, piles, eye strain, stomach spasms, anxiety attacks. Finally I am consumed by the thought that at a certain point we all become nothing more than dying animals.

(Ronald Sukenick, The Death of the Novel and Other Stories, p. 49)

I remember once we were out on the ranch shooting peccadillos (result of a meeting, on the plains of the West, of the collared peccary and the nine-banded armadillo).

(Donald Barthelme, City Life, p. 4)

Fiction is woven into all . . . I find this new reality (or unreality) more valid.

(John Fowles, ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman, pp. 86–7)

If asked to point out the similarities amongst this disconcerting selection of quotations, 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; an extreme self-consciousness about language, literary form and the act of writing fictions; a pervasive insecurity about the relationship of fiction to reality; a parodic, playful, excessive or deceptively naïve style of writing.

In compiling such a list, the reader would, in effect, 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. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text.

Most of the quotations are fairly contemporary. This is deliberate. Over the last twenty years, novelists have tended to become much more aware of the theoretical issues involved in constructing fictions. In consequence, their novels have tended to embody dimensions of self-reflexivity and formal uncertainty. What connects not only these quotations but also all of the very different writers whom one could refer to as broadly ‘metafictional’, is that they all explore a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction.

The term ‘metafiction’ itself seems to have originated in an essay by the American critic and self-conscious novelist William H. Gass (in Gass 1970). However, terms like ‘metapolitics’, ‘metarhetoric’ and ‘metatheatre’ are a reminder of what has been, since the 1960s, a more general cultural interest in the problem of how human beings reflect, construct and mediate their experience of the world. Metafiction pursues such questions through its formal self-exploration, drawing on the traditional metaphor of the world as book, but often recasting it in the terms of contemporary philosophical, linguistic or literary theory. If, as individuals, we now occupy ‘roles’ rather than ‘selves’, then the study of characters in novels may provide a useful model for understanding the construction of subjectivity in the world outside novels. If our knowledge of this world is now seen to be mediated through language, then literary fiction (worlds constructed entirely of language) becomes a useful model for learning about the construction of ‘reality’ itself.

The present increased awareness of ‘meta’ levels of discourse and experience is partly a consequence of an increased social and cultural self-consciousness. Beyond this, however, it also reflects a greater awareness within contemporary culture of the function of language in constructing and maintaining our sense of everyday ‘reality’. The simple notion that language passively reflects a coherent, meaningful and ‘objective’ world is no longer tenable. Language is an independent, self-contained system which generates its own ‘meanings’. Its relationship to the phenomenal world is highly complex, problematic and regulated by convention. ‘Meta’ terms, therefore, are required in order to explore the relationship between this arbitrary linguistic system and the world to which it apparently refers. In fiction they are required in order to explore the relationship between the world of the fiction and the world outside the fiction.

In a sense, metafiction rests on a version of the Heisenbergian uncertainty principle: an awareness that ‘for the smallest building blocks of matter, every process of observation causes a major disturbance’ (Heisenberg 1972, p. 126), and that it is impossible to describe an objective world because the observer always changes the observed. However, the concerns of metafiction are even more complex than this. For while Heisenberg believed one could at least describe, if not a picture of nature, then a picture of one’s relation to nature, metafiction shows the uncertainty even of this process. 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, he or she realizes fairly soon that the world, as such, cannot be ‘represented’. In literary fiction it is, in fact, possible only to ‘represent’ the discourses of that world. Yet, if one attempts to analyse a set of linguistic relationships using those same relationships as the instruments of analysis, language soon becomes a ‘prisonhouse’ from which the possibility of escape is remote. Metafication sets out to explore this dilemma.

The linguist L. Hjelmslev developed the term ‘metalanguage’ (Hjelmslev 1961). He defined it as a language which, instead of referring to non-linguistic events, situations or objects in the world, refers to another language: it is a language which takes another language as its object. Saussure’s distinction between the signifier and the signified is relevant here. The signifier is the sound-image of the word or its shape on the page; the signified is the concept evoked by the word. A metalanguage is a language that functions as a signifier to another language, and this other language thus becomes its signified.¹

In novelistic practice, this results in writing which consistently displays its conventionality, which explicity and overtly lays bare its condition of artifice, 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, P. 53). The ‘other’ language may be either the registers of everyday discourse or, more usually, the ‘language’ of the literary system itself, including the conventions of the novel as a whole or particular forms of that genre.

Metafiction may concern itself, then, with particular conventions of the novel, to display the process of their construction (for example, John Fowles’s use of the ‘omniscient author’ convention in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). It may, often in the form of parody, comment on a specific work or fictional mode (for example, John Gardner’s Grendel (1971), which retells, and thus comments on, the Beowulf story from the point of view of the monster; or John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig (1961), which constitutes both an example and a critique of the popular thriller. Less centrally metafictional, but still displaying ‘meta’ features, are fictions like Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America (1967). 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.

Metafiction and the novel tradition

I would argue that metafictional practice has become particularly prominent in the fiction of the last twenty years. However, to draw exclusively on contemporary fiction would be misleading, for, although the term ‘metafiction’ might be new, the practice is as old (if not older) than the novel itself. What I hope to establish during the course of this book is that metafiction is a tendency or function inherent in all novels. 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. By studying metafiction, one is, in effect, studying that which gives the novel its identity.

Certainly more scholarly ink has been spilt over attempts to define the novel than perhaps for any other literary genre. The novel notoriously defies definition. Its instability in this respect is part of its ‘definition’: the language of fiction appears to spill over into, and merge with, the instabilities of the real world, in a way that a five-act tragedy or a fourteen-line sonnet clearly does not. 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. There is no one privileged ‘language of fiction’. There are the languages of memoirs, journals, diaries, histories, conversational registers, legal records, journalism, documentary. These languages compete for privilege. They question and relativize each other to such an extent that the ‘language of fiction’ is always, if often covertly, self-conscious.

Mikhail Bakhtin has referred to this process of relativization as the ‘dialogic’ potential of the novel. Metafiction simply makes this potential explicit and in so doing foregrounds the essential mode of all fictional language. Bakhtin defines as overtly ‘dialogic’ those novels that introduce a ‘semantic direction into the word which is diametrically opposed to its original direction. . . . the word becomes the arena of conflict between two voices’ (Bakhtin 1973, P. 106). In fact, given its close relation to everyday forms of discourse, the language of fiction is always to some extent dialogic. The novel assimilates a variety of discourses (representations of speech, forms of narrative) – discourses that always to some extent question and relativize each other’s authority. Realism, often regarded as the classic fictional mode, paradoxically functions by suppressing this dialogue. The conflict of languages and voices is apparently resolved in realistic fiction through their subordination to the dominant ‘voice’ of the omniscient, godlike author. Novels which Bakhtin refers to as ‘dialogic’ resist such resolution. Metafiction displays and rejoices in the impossibility of such a resolution and thus clearly reveals the basic identity of the novel as genre.

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. In other words, the lowest common denominator of metafiction is simultaneously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction. 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’.

Although this oppositional process is to some extent present in all fiction, and particularly likely to emerge during ‘crisis’ periods in the literary history of the genre (see Chapter 3), its prominence in the contemporary novel is unique. The historical period we are living through has been singularly uncertain, insecure, self-questioning and culturally pluralistic. Contemporary fiction clearly reflects this dissatisfaction with, and breakdown of, traditional values. Previously, as in the case of nineteenth-century realism, the forms of fiction derived from a firm belief in a commonly experienced, objectively existing world of history. Modernist fiction, written in the earlier part of this century, responded to the initial loss of belief in such a world. Novels like Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) or James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) signalled the first widespread, overt emergence in the novel of a sense of fictitiousness: ‘a sense that any attempt to represent reality could only produce selective perspectives, fictions, that is, in an epistemological, not merely in the conventional literary, sense’ (Pfeifer 1978, p. 61).

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, artifices, impermanent structures. The materialist, positivist and empiricist world-view on which realistic fiction is premised no longer exists. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that more and more novelists have come to question and reject the forms that correspond to this ordered reality (the wellmade plot, chronological sequence, the authoritative omniscient author, the rational connection between what characters ‘do’ and what they ‘are’, the causal connection between ‘surface’ details and the ‘deep’, ‘scientific laws’ of existence).

Why are they saying such awful things about it?

This rejection has inevitably entailed, however, a good deal of writerly and critical confusion. 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. Thus B. S. Johnson bursts into (or out of?) Albert Angelo (1964) with the words which preface this chapter, ‘Fuck all this lying’. 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, as to demonstrate the artificiality of fictional form through a controlled metafictional discourse. At the end of the book he asserts:

a page is an area on which I place my signs I consider to communicate most clearly what I have to convey . . . therefore I employ within the pocket of my publisher and the patience of my printer, typographical techniques beyond the arbitrary and constricting limits of the conventional novel. To dismiss such techniques as gimmicks or to refuse to take them seriously is crassly to miss the point.

(Albert Angelo, p. 176)

It reads rather like an anticipation of a hostile review. A similar defensiveness about the role of the novelist appears in Donald Barthelme’s obsession with dreck, the detritus of modern civilization.² It is expressed through John Barth’s characters who – as much in the style of Sartre as in that of Sterne – ‘die, telling themselves stories in the dark’, desperately attempting to construct identities which can only dissolve into metalingual mutterings (Lost in the Funhouse (1968), p. 95). Extreme defensive strategies are common. 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’, and that ‘I can’t live without a culture anymore’; p. 15). Attempts at precise linguistic description continually break down. Crude diagrams replace language in order to express the poverty of the ‘culture’ which is available through representations of ‘assholes’, ‘underpants’ and ‘beefburgers’.

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. Here, contemporary American society is the ‘alien world’. Vonnegut defamiliarizes the world that his readers take for granted, 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. The defamiliarization has more than a satiric function, however. It reveals Vonnegut’s own despairing recognition of the sheer impossibility of providing a critique of commonly accepted cultural forms of representation, from within those very modes of representation.

What is the novelist to do? Here the ‘naïve’ narrative voice, apparently oblivious of all our liberal value-systems and moral codes, reveals through its defamiliarizing effect their often illiberal and amoral assumptions and consequences. Beneath the fooling with representations of cows as beefburgers, however, lurks a desperate sense of the possible redundancy and irrelevance of the artist, so apparent in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Indeed, Philip Roth, the American novelist, has written:

The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meagre imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents.

(Quoted in Bradbury 1977, p. 34)

In turning away from ‘reality’, however, and back to a re-examination of fictional form, novelists have discovered a surprising way out of their dilemmas and paranoia. Metafictional deconstruction has not only provided novelists and their readers with a better understanding of the fundamental structures of narrative; it has also offered extremely accurate models for understanding the contemporary experience of the world as a construction, an artifice, a web of interdependent semiotic systems. The paranoia that permeates the metafictional writing of the sixties and seventies is therefore slowly giving way to celebration, to the discovery of new forms of the fantastic, fabulatory extravaganzas, magic realism (Salman Rushdie, Gabriel García Márquez, Clive Sinclair, Graham Swift, D. M. Thomas, John Irving). Novelists and critics alike have come to realize that a moment of crisis can also be seen as a moment of recognition: recognition that, although the assumptions about the novel based on an extension of a nineteenthcentury realist view of the world may no longer be viable, the novel itself is positively flourishing.

Despite this renewed optimism, however, it is still the case that the uncertain, self-reflexive nature of experimental metafiction will leave it open to critical attacks. Yet metafiction is simply flaunting what is true of all novels: their ‘outstanding freedom to choose’ (Fowles 1971, p. 46). It is this instability, openness and flexibility which has allowed the novel remarkably to survive and adapt to social change for the last 300 years. In the face of the political, cultural and technological upheavals in society since the Second World War, however, its lack of a fixed identity has now left the novel vulnerable.

Hence critics have discussed the ‘crisis of the novel’ and the ‘death of the novel’. Instead of recognizing the positive aspects of fictional self-consciousness, 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. Could it not be argued instead that metafictional writers, highly conscious of the problems of artistic legitimacy, 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, linear narrative and conventional assumptions about ‘plot’, ‘character’, ‘authority’ and ‘representation’. The traditional fictional quest has thus been transformed into a quest for fictionality.

Metafiction and the contempora...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1: What is Metafiction and Why are They Saying Such Awful Things About it?
• 2: Literary Self-consciousness: Developments
• 3: Literary Evolution: The Place of Parody
• 4: Are Novelists Liars? The Ontological Status of Literary-fictional Discourse
• 5: Fictionality and Context: From Role-Playing to Language Games
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Further Reading