Metablog on Metafiction

because I am still considering what title I want to use. Although I have already written about the play of form in Laurence Sterne’s book (Tristram Shandy ****s Up the Page, Progressive Digressions in Tristram Shandy, and The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of), there is so much more to say! I feel I could go on exploring metafictional elements in Tristram Shandy for years and never get to the bottom of the book. So here are just a couple of additions to my earlier observations of metafiction in Laurence Sterne’s masterpiece.

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Thanks James for sending me the interesting article from the New York Times, “Next Big Thing in English: Knowing They Know That You know,” about how metacognition, knowing that you know, is tied to evolution and our love, perhaps even our compulsion to produce and read fiction.

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word though there Sterne is attention black and of aware deal recommend the stridulous parcel burn it

In Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne draws the reader’s attention to the stuff a book is made of: the pages, the spaces, the ink, the letters, and the words. I have already written about this in “Tristram Shandy ****s Up the Page,” but much more could be said about the earliest and still most complete metafictional novel ever written.

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In the mirror that morning, blinking and rubbing his eyes (the rain, the constant rain, seemed to blur everything), his reflection kept shifting, changing clothes. Why was it so hard to see himself? What was his role? Was he hung over? Too many pisco sours? What was the question he was supposed to ask himself?

He lifted his eyes from the mirror, looking around for something stable to focus on . . . a black dot on the wall, an insect, big and bloated, a mosquito, probing the cinder block with a spidery proboscis. What was it looking for? Already fat with blood, fat as a cherry. Whose blood? His own? Omar’s? The tourists’?

My blood?
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