Once I Metablog on Metafiction

Meta:

A playful and pretentious prefix! Use it today and impress your friends.

From the Greek μετά, meaning ‘with’, ‘after’, ‘between.’ The Oxford English Dictionary says, “The earliest words in English beginning with meta- are all derived ultimately from Greek (frequently via Latin or French); in most the idea conveyed by meta- is that of ‘change,’” as in metamorphosis, metaphor and metaplasm. English formations with meta- meaning ‘beyond’ (and that is the sense that will concern us here) appeared in the first half of the 17th century, as in metatheology. Scientists from the 19th century onwards also used the prefix to mean “behind,” as in metaphrenum, “situated between,” as in metasomatome, and “after,” as in metasperm (I like that one).

Many new academic disciplines began using the prefix, especially in the social sciences, with the sense of “beyond,” or dealing with second-order questions, questions about the nature of the field itself. It has even become a common word online. The blog program I am using, Wordpress, has a heading called, “Meta,” where I can see meta-data, or data about the data, how many people have visited this blog, for example. (So there really are real people out there reading this! Thanks for joining me. Don’t forget to comment.)

The OED defines “meta-” so: “Prefixed to the name of a subject or discipline to denote another which deals with ulterior issues in the same field, or which raises questions about the nature of the original discipline and its methods, procedures, and assumptions.” The last part of this definition is particularly appropriate for our purposes, because I want to raise questions about the nature of fiction itself and its “methods, procedures and assumptions” (as well as language, blogs and classes)

Metafiction:

The Oxford English Dictionary defines metafiction as “Fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions (esp. naturalism) and narrative techniques.” Here the OED makes a point of contrasting metafiction with naturalism. Naturalism is the convention of pretending that the writing you are doing is natural by leaving out imaginary things, focusing on more somber topics, and including details which give the illusion that readers are reading a real, particular story, rather than an invented one.

(By the way, who is the speaker in the dictionary? Nobody? Well, I can tell you something about the nobody who wrote the definition above. He or she was not a professor or student of literature. These days, a literary scholar would have said, “the narrator self-consciously alludes to the artificiality….” rather than “the author.”  The writer does not distinguish between author and narrator, and so we can get a hint of his or her own perspective. We have caught the nobody speaker being somebody. Using a “nobody” speaker is a common convention in dictionaries and many other kinds of academic writing, but it is a convention, a rhetorical technique to make information seem unbiased, true. Don’t be fooled.)

All writing is fiction, so all writing is a lie. Unless that fiction is metafiction. The fiction that admits that it is fiction. Then, oh then, it is true! The truest story is the story that lays its own self bare and says, “Look at me! I am a cheat and a liar. This is what I am and I have a story to tell and the story is about you and the story goes that you are a story, a cheat and a liar, and yet somehow magic happens and we share a dream, not the same dream, but a parallel one and that dream can change us both and reshape our world. For everything, everything, religion, music, art, science, philosophy, manga, porn, fanfics, blogs, and text messages are all stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. We are the stories we tell about ourselves. And the story goes something like this….”

Even metafiction, which questions the conventions of fiction, has its own set of conventions. What are the conventions of unconventionality? You can find the themes that I have come across under my page: An Overview of Metafiction and a Guide to Posts. Also, check out George Fragopoulous’ excellent article “Ten Theses on the Nature of Metafiction (And a Parenthetical Review of Salvador Plascenia’s The People of Paper.“) The list below is adapted from a Wikipedia article on Metafiction. (The * below means the book is on my syllabus, ** means it is on the extra reading list. Hop on the Silly Bus and read some of these books with me.)

• A novel about a writer creating a story, such as Misery, The World According to Garp, At Swim Two Birds**, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide.**
  
• A novel about a reader reading a novel, like The Neverending Story** and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.*
• A novel which features itself as its own prop or McGuffin, as in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
• A novel or other work of fiction within the novel, for instance The Princess Bride,** The Crying of Lot 49,* Pale Fire,* and Steppenwolf.
• A story addressing the specific conventions of story, such as title, character conventions, paragraphing or plots, as in The Last Unicorn and Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth.*
• A novel where the narrator intentionally exposes him or herself as the author of the story, such as BFG, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• A novel in which the book itself seeks interaction with the reader, for example House of Leaves** or  Willie masters’ Lonely Wife (by William H. Gass, the guy who coined the word metafiction).
• A non-linear novel, which can be read in any order other than from beginning to end, and there are a million of these Naked Lunch, Finnegans Wake, and Dahlgren by Samuel R. Delaney.
• Narrative footnotes which continue the story while commenting on it, like Infinite Jest**, Pale fire*, and the discworld novels of Terry Pratchet.
• A novel wherein the author (not merely the narrator) is a character, for instance Stephen King’s Dark Tower serious, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Valis** and Radio Free Albemuth** by Philip K. Dick, Life of Pi, Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse Five, The Monkey Wrench Gang and “City of Glass” by Paul Auster*
• A novel in which the author/narrator spends the entire book comparing life notes with an author-ghost from another era, such as A Visit from Voltaire by Dinah Lee Kung
• A parallel novel which has the same setting and time period as a previous work, and many of the same characters, but is told from a different perspective, as in Wicked, The Alesandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, Wide Saragasso Sea by Jean Rhys, and Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card
• Magical realism, like stuff by Jorge Louis Borges* and Garbiel Garcia Marquez and Alvarez and many more!