Metafictional Texts Research Articles

Ice, Glass, Snow: Fairy Tale as Art and Metafiction in the Writing of A. S. Byatt

Everybody knows it's fiction, but then everybody knows the whole thing is fiction. A. S. Byatt, qtd. in Wachtel 88 The award of the Booker Prize to A. S. novel Possession: A Romance in 1990 cemented position as a literary figure and sparked the steady stream of academic attention that has greeted both Possession itself and other works. Among her works, fairy tale and folklore form a recurring theme, both explicitly and implicitly within larger works. Her interest in fairy-tale and folk forms is, however, both subsidiary to and emblematic of her far larger interest in form, writing, and narrative tradition as a whole. An intensely intellectual and literary writer, Byatt betrays in all her works an interest in the presence and repercussions of literature itself. Much of her work is highly self-aware and self-reflexive, her protagonists tending to reflect her own identity as academic, writer, or narratologist. This gives her writing an intelligence that James Wood has identified as Byatt's greatest problem as a writer. Wood argues that while part of her imagination yearns for a visual immediacy, the other pan constantly peels away into analogy, allegory, metaphor, and relations with other texts (121-22). As a result, she continuously explores and deconstructs the nature and workings of her own narratives as well as the problematic relationship between narrative and reality. Fairy tale, as one of the more essential forms of story, is the vehicle by which this interest is most strongly expressed. In her self-consciousness about the artistic process, Byatt is thus a recurrently and integrally metafictional writer, continually aware of the operation of narrative form. Patricia Waugh has defined a metafictional text as one that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and (2). In the structures of fairy tale, Byatt finds a form whose deliberate nonmimetic artificiality exemplifies precisely those metafictional elements Waugh describes. Propp comments: Obviously, the fairy tale is born out of life; however, the fairy tale reflects reality only weakly (96). Participation in the marvelous universe of fairy tale-the enjoyment of the wonder that fairy tale can evoke-depends entirely on recognition of the artificiality of that universe, the fact that it is a work of art that makes no attempt to reproduce reality with any accuracy. Once upon a is a precise evocation of constructedness that signals an explicitly nonmimetic function, a transition to a different reality from our own. Fairy tale's unashamed presentation of the marvelous, as well as the unrealistic use of pattern and repetition in describing events, similarly draw attention to a nonrealist form of representation-to tale as crafted object, artifact. In this sense, then, fairy tale has some elements that could be said to be inherently metafictional, and thus it is particularly well adapted to the kind of self-conscious play in which Byatt engages. Her sophisticated play with fairytale form, however, conforms more powerfully to Waugh's definition than does traditional fairy tale, in that the shift and play between realist depiction and fairy tale is often consciously explored within a single work, questioning the status not only of the text but of the reality it purports to describe. In her essay 'SugarTLe Sucre1 Byatt recounts her delight in the discovery of Proust and the possibility for a text to be realist and at the same time to think about form, its own form, its own formation, about perceiving and inventing the world (Passions 22-23). writing, realist as well as fairy tale, highlights constructedness as inherent to narrative in a way that problematizes reality itself as well as the literature that represents it. In her work art and literature both reflect and create the world. Issues of story are thus inextricable, in lexicon, from issues of art itself, the status of text as artifact. …

Engendering Metafiction: Textuality and Closure in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

In the five years since Margaret Atwood's novel Alias Grace (1996) appeared, a number of readers have been attracted to the implications of the quilting trope. Each of the novel's fifteen parts takes its name from a traditional pattern in quilt making. It becomes clear, as Margaret Rogerson has noted, that Atwood offers a linear equivalent to the spatial arrangement of blocks in a quilting pattern, and Grace herself is aware of the function of quilting as a metaphor for her own storytelling (Rogerson 8, 19). Thus, it is highly unlikely that most readers will miss the way in which the patchwork trope functions as the organizing principle in this narrative. The novel offers patches of found texts stitched together in a manner which foregrounds both their provenance as received texts and the constructedness of the larger text(ure) into which they have been worked. In this sense, Alias Grace may be read as a text whose stitches and seams are anything but blind, being so obtrusive as to be unmistakable. And because quilting has been an almost exclusive cultural expression of women's s work, this novel, written by a woman, about an historical woman's crime and punishment in mid-nineteenth-century Canada, is inevitably implicated in issues. In Alias Grace it might be argued that Atwood has constructed a text whose obtrusiveness as construction so blatantly expresses metafictionality that it may be read as gendered, not by the sexual identity of either its central consciousness, Grace Marks, or its author, so much as by a postmodernity that might itself be usefully explored as a feminine binary opposite of a masculine modernism. Because both of these terms, and gender, have been problematic for contemporary discourse, this project of examining Alias Grace as engendered metafiction requires a critical or theoretical framework before a discussion of the text can begin. Of the two terms, may be the more manageable. The term has been a part of critical discourse for a generation and thus should nor require a lengthy rehearsal here. Metafiction denotes a fictional text that draws attention to itself as text in a variety of ways. The metafictional text stands in marked contrast to the realist text, which may be conceived of as one whose language aims at its own invisibility, so that the reader looks through the realist's language at the world represented, as though the text were a transparent window. The metafictional or postmodern text, on the other hand, brings itself inescapably to the reader's attention so that the text foregrounds itself as though it were a Tiffany windowpane: a world may exist on the other side of the windowpane, but it is the text or representation that seems to have become more important. Accordingly, reality becomes textual. At the same time, such reflexivity is not synonymous with and the metafictionality of postmode rn texts is implicated in an effort at a more radical subversion than the self-referentiality of older texts. From a number of conventional examples of earlier, self-reflexive texts, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760-67) will serve the purpose here. Despite its playful subversions of the reader's expectations and its calling attention to its own textuality, Sterne's novel demonstrates little effort at subverting a reality outside itself in the more radical manner in which a novel such as Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) or John Barth's Once Upon a Time (1994) seems intent on affirming that textuality itself may be reality. As with the term metafiction, gender ought not to require extensive rehearsal. A generation of theorists, many of whom at least began as readers of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic writings, has encouraged us to think of as culturally constructed, rather than fixed by differences of sex, or biology. Of particular importance to our shared notions of have been French writers such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, as well as American theorists such as Jane Gallop and Barbara Johnson, who have followed Irigaray in reading differences in Lacan's tropes. …

Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature

Reviewed by: Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature Ashraf H. A. Rushdy Madelyn Jablon. Black Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in African American Literature. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997. x + 209 pp. It wasn’t long ago that those of us who spent our professional lives writing about the experiences and representations of people of color, women, and working people were troubled, a few scandalized, by some of the antihumanist claims of postmodernity. The author seemed to be dying just as African American authors were being brought to renewed life; the subject became split, internally divided, eternally deferred, unintelligible, and essentially absent, just as women, workers, and otherwise colonized peoples were finding their voices and their subjectivities. For some, it appeared that the ontological claims of modernity (death and absence) and the epistemological pronouncements of postmodernism (deferral and aporia) were yet another means of ensuring that those wounded by the material realities of history would continue to be misserved by the intellectual climate of the present. The “other” emerged to find the self absent; the ethnic author was born into a cemetery. This history, for Madelyn Jablon, seems to be repeating itself from the other side. Anglo-European theorists are now claiming the end of postmodernity just as African American authors are beginning to get recognition for a long history of theories and practices of self-conscious artistic representation. Just as African American authors otherwise [End Page 502] as diverse in subject matter and style as Ishmael Reed, Al Young, Albert Murray, Xam Cartiér, Leon Forrest, Reginald McKnight, Clarence Major, John Edgar Wideman, and Ntozake Shange produce works of heightened self-consciousness, of “Black metafiction,” William Gass, the critic who coined the term “metafiction,” is condemning the practice as a form of solipsistic, bourgeois self-indulgence, and advocating a “new realism.” Intellectual trends, it seems, just keep exceeding the grasp of ethnic literary practitioners, just keep excluding the rabble from the elite. Black writers in the seventies found themselves serious subjects in an age of play, and in the nineties become playful artists in an age turning serious. It is hard to tell whether this historical repetition is tragedy or farce. In this study of self-conscious texts in contemporary African American fiction, Jablon offers two challenges to those who have theorized and renounced metafiction. First, she claims that earlier theoretical descriptions of metafictional practices were radically flawed because they did not take into account the developments in Black metafiction. Second, she argues that rumors of the death of metafiction are premature given the vitally robust quality of metafictional texts in contemporary African American literature. The study falls into five parts, Jablon demonstrating how African American artists since the sixties have written about the “thematization of art,” revised the trajectory of the künstlerroman, practiced and shown the limits of intertextuality, employed the oral tradition to exemplify the play of voice in written texts, and transformed popular genres such as science fiction and detective novels. After an introduction in which she draws on the mainstream theories of metafiction formulated by Linda Hutcheon, William Gass, Patricia Waugh, and Mikhail Bakhtin, and then shows in what ways these theories are reconfigured by African Americanists like Deborah McDowell, Henry Louis Gates, Gwendolyn Mae Henderson, Donald Gibson, and Houston Baker, Jablon turns to extended readings of ten novels that exemplify the five techniques of Black metafiction. She reads Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage and Alice Walker’s Temple of My Familiar as expressions of artistic self-consciousness in which the characters who are artists represent “black metafictionists” and the artistic process itself becomes a metaphor for African American self-fashioning. Rita Dove’s Through the Ivory Gate and Arthur Flower’s [End Page 503] Another Good Loving Blues are texts that redefine the künstlerroman’s conception of who can be an artist and what constitutes conflict. Taking as her exemplary texts Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, Jablon shows how contemporary African American texts revise and rewrite their predecessor texts (for A Lesson it is Native Son, for Tar Baby, the mythic folktale and Their Eyes Were Watching God). Charlotte Watson-Sherman’s...

Breaking the Silence: Michèle Sarde's Histoire d'Eurydice pendant la remontée

WOMEN IN FRENCH STUDIES Breaking the Silence: Michèle Sarde's Histoire d'Eurydicependant la remontée Le mythe ne disait rien de l'itinéraire d'Eurydice après le retournement d'Orphée, après la mort d'Orphée, pas même, si cheminant seule sur un chemin de traverse, elle n'aura pas fini par atteindre le bout de la remontée. Michèle Sarde The past few decades have seen the emergence of what could be viewed as a new genre in fiction writing: the female-authored rewriting of a classic or mythic text. Grounded in the belief that what we read matters to the ways in which we conceive of ourselves, this type of rewriting, taking its point of departure in a muted character of literary history, aims at replenishing and supplementing our stock of available role models. Since "there is," as Jean Rhys famously claimed, "always the other side, always" (128), contemporary women writers attempt to devise alternative scripts to tell, in Molly Hite's phrase, "the other side of the story."1 Yet if their texts often resort to the strategy ofdisplacing or delegitimating a well-known tale2 to redress the gender asymmetries it embodies and reproduces, the re-appropriation of culturally sanctioned texts in fact serves a double purpose: it allows women (re)writers to inscribe their texts in a "high" literary tradition from which they in turn, in a gesture of mutual legitimation, derive authority and prestige (Ostricker 318; Purkiss 441); and it enables women (re)writers to intervene in that tradition in ways that effectively affect it. Women writers who choose to rewrite classical myths (rather than, say, Jane Eyre or the Bible), however, have to face an additional challenge: because a myth is an open structure whose pragmatic purpose is to be told and retold and whose fundamental character is therefore to be appropriated (Barthes 204), the supposedly transgressive gesture of its feminist reappropriation is, in effect, already anticipated. Obfuscating that its rewriting from yet another perspective is foreseen and hence forestalled, the apparent malleability of myth, masking a true rigidity, forces us to consider whether it is, then, possible to avoid the recuperative mythopoetic imperative. Or, to put it in Diane Purkiss' words, "how might women writers rewrite the discourses of myth while rewriting individual myths?" (448). In this article, I propose to look at Michèle Sarde's Histoire d'Eurydice pendant la remontée (1991) as an instance of women's rewriting of myth which succeeds in transforming a silenced and objectified character into a subject while altering our understanding of what myth is and 90 WOMEN IN FRENCH STUDIES does. As I will argue, Sarde's novel opens a discursive space for the emergence of a female subject of history through the twin strategies of a dialogic text that locates the protagonist's self-actualization in-between a scholarly grasp of the mythological tradition and its applicability to her own condition, and a metafictional text which demonstrates the living reality of myth and its power to shape human destiny. Recording the coming into being of a modern Eurydice, Sarah Solal (a.k.a. Sophie Lambert), Michèle Sarde's Histoire d'Eurydice pendant la remontée is as much a rewriting of the classical tale of fated love as it is an attempt to resist the ways in which, "pour tous les amants du monde, ce couple deviendra un modèle et leur histoire" (273). This resistance is dramatized in the novel's opening pages, wherein the reader is first introduced to the protagonist through the eyes of a man who had been following her through the streets of Paris, and is then made privy to her recollection of a conversation with her Parisian dissertation director. Setting the stage for the drama which is to unfold, this scene immediately casts the reappraisal of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice from a feminist perspective as a controversial issue. Although Sarah finally managed to have her dissertation title, "Fonction et symbolique d'Eurydice dans les arts lyriques," accepted—though not without compromise, for as she reflects, "les arts lyriques bornent trop le champ du mythe" (12...

Om inteendeel te sê: oor selfskepping - wanneer lewe en vertel deurmekaar raak

To say ‘on the contrary’: On self-creation - when life and narration mergeIn Brink’s novel, Inteendeel (On the Contrary) of 1993, Estienne Barbier rewrites his life while imprisoned in the Dark Hole. A close relationship between life and narration thus develops. This problematic relation is often foregrounded in metafictional texts. On the one hand, mimetic representation of reality is undermined, while on the other, the textuaiity, the linguistic quality of life, is emphasized. The dialogic character of self-creation prevents this metafictional text, in which self-creation also plays an important role, from being narcissistic. It is also argued that self-creation and metafictional comments are processes by means of which the aesthetic dimension and life merge, with the hope of creating a more humane world.

<i>In memoriam lingua</i>: ’n linguistiese ondersoek van ’n metafiksionele teks deur Etienne van Heerden

In memoriam lingua: A linguistic investigation of a metafictional text by Etienne van HeerdenMetafictional texts always problematize explicitly and/or implicitly the ability of language to signify a reality beyond itself It follows that an assessment of a metafictional text should benefit by an investigation of its linguistic fabric. A similar investigation of Etienne van Heerden's short story "Die wederopstanding van Olive” in Liegfahriek (a) outlines a number of the author-narrator's strategies - verbal and non-verbal - in order to circumvent the insignificance of his medium; (b) brings the reader to a realisation of his/her own participation in the stultification of language, and (c) reveals the inherent content of all literary texts.

Beyond Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in Soviet Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in Soviet Literature Edith W. Clowes David Shepherd . Beyond Metafiction: Self-Consciousness in Soviet Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. xii + 260 pp. No price given. Beyond Metafiction deals with metafictional texts from that tense transitional stage in Soviet literary history, the late 1920s. All were written by fellow traveling authors at various stages of accepting the new aesthetic of social command that preceded Socialist Realism as official literary policy. David Shepherd's rather enormous goal is "to ask whether there is anything specific to self-conscious prose fiction produced in the Soviet Union that might contribute to a consideration not only of some well-established conceptions about such writing generally but also . . . of Soviet literary history." Shepherd succeeds in stimulating some slight reassessment in both of these areas. In its earliest uses, the term "metafiction" described self-referential art concerned with probing itself as art and with meditating on the key aesthetic figure of the author. Typically, it has been characterized as extrahistorical, hermetic, self-sufficiently "narcissistic" and, because of its position outside of accepted aesthetic norms, it has been labeled subversive by critics of all stripes. In this view, metafictional writing engages in current social and cultural polemic least of all. Beyond all else, this writing has been thought to stand for the defense of artistic autonomy. Shepherd challenges this view and makes a convincing argument for reading metafictional texts as participants in historically situated, cultural dialogue. Russian metafiction of the late 1920s responded to a general crisis of art that the Formalist theorist Boris Eikhenbaum characterized as a shift of emphasis from the question of "how to write" to the issue of "how to be a writer." [End Page 419] Metafiction was as likely to subvert its own self-sufficiency as to challenge attacks on art by the radical left. Shepherd's discussion of each text is set in the context of contemporary critical debate. Two works, Leonid Leonov's The Thief and Marietta Shaginian's Kik are seen to confront key issues, respectively, the "politically correct" literary canon for a new Soviet literature and the border between fact and fiction laid down by such radical literature-of-fact theorists as Nikolai Chuzhak. These and other texts, such as Konstantin Vaginov's Works and Days of Svistonov and Veniamin Kaverin's The Troublemaker and Artist Unknown, call into question the possibility of literary originality and challenge the notion of the writer's authority and autonomy. All four authors are clearly concerned about the disappearance of the creating subject. Perhaps surprisingly, the focus of their debate is not to criticize the aesthetic of social command. They are more likely to engage in polemic with radical "factological" theorists who denied any value to fiction and saw all writing not as creation but as production. But still more surprisingly, while questioning the concept of a "fact" and showing the fictional framing that all facts inevitably receive, these writers often agree with the basic premise of the radical critics that fiction writing is indeed production rather than inspired creation. Shepherd is concerned to move beyond a model of Soviet literary history that focuses on a simple opposition between "daring dissidence" and "cosy conformity." As he suggests in his analysis of Leonov's revision in the 1950s of his novel The Thief, despite Leonov's intentions of discrediting metafictional aspects of his text, these very aspects are strengthened, making this version of The Thief the most "radically and unremittingly metafictional of all the texts" considered here. Clearly this revision does not square with Leonov's reputation as an orthodox Soviet author. Shepherd sees this instance as proof of the considerable autonomy of the existing literary text and the limitations on the authority of the author: for all their intentions, status-seeking writers cannot simply rewrite their existing works conveniently to serve a political purpose. This optimistic analysis raises a number of questions. One concerns the practice of revising literary texts. The group of texts that Shepherd interprets is very small (five in all), and he discusses only one revised text. What is lacking is a sense of the standard practice of revision. One wonders whether other metafictional...

Turning La incognita into Realidad: Galdos's Metafictional Magic Trick

La incognita holds a unique position within Gald6s's literary production: it is the only novel which deliberately is left incomplete and requires a companion text, Realidad, to bring it to resolution. As Stephen Miller has pointed out, other interrelated Galdosian texts such as Tormento and La de Bringas or Nazarin and Halma are self-contained novels, while La incognita has no life apart from Realidad. I The complementary relationship between the two texts is stated explicitly in the penultimate chapter of La incognita where that text's narrator, Manolo Infante, speaks of his work as only half of a creation-the body to which Realidad provides the soul. Whereas La incognita is la cara exterior, la superficie, la verdad aparente; Realidad is la cara interna, la descripci6n interior del asunto, la verdad profunda. This narrative declaration has prompted considerable critical discussion concerning the nature of reality as expressed in these novels and the interplay of the subjective and objective viewpoints provided by the epistolary and dialogue formats.2 Surprisingly, however, in these discussions the fundamental question has not been raised as to why Realidad is presented as a magical transformation of La incognita rather than simply being offered as Equis's written response to Infante's text? Perhaps the answer lies in the metafictional dimension added to La incognita through this narrative premise. Not only does this miraculous violation of verisimilitude call attention to the fictionality of the text, but more importantly, the generation of Realidad out of La incognita serves as a metaphor for the creativity inherent in the act of reading. In her book, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox, Linda Hutcheon speaks of the acts of writing and reading as mirror images-the same creative process but occurring in reverse. Although this reciprocal procedure is in operation within any fictional work, literary conventions traditionally have sought to conceal it. Metafictional texts, however, ex-