Instructing the Reader of Metafiction: Nabokov & Gombrowicz

Abstract

This article compares and contrasts Vladimir Nabokov's and Witold Gombrowicz's various kinds of instructions in order to find out how they work in metafiction. The complicated relationship with the readerdom—a struggle (Gombrowicz) or a clash (Nabokov)—is discussed within an intertwined framework of theoretical approaches to audiences, readers, and the texts. This examination aims at a shift of the study of metafiction—fiction which problematizes its fictional reality—to an aesthetic-response perspective while characterizing a specific type: instructive metafiction. In Gombrowicz's case, one and the same instruction may appear several times, because it is only that way that mythology is created, and instructions turn out to be what Gombrowicz calls "Form," which is to be wrestled with by the implied reader. In Nabokov's case, instructions place the implied reader in the created world, in which he is "the perfect dictator" so that he could also control the reader as a fictional character, for as long as we "live" in his house, we ought to obey his house rules. Thus, this essay probes a scholarly discussion on metafiction with a self-reflexive layer by not only (re) reading with authorial instructions, and (un)reading against them, but also by analyzing instructions themselves and their interaction with various audiences.