By Patricia Waugh
Metafiction starts off through surveying the nation of up to date fiction in Britain and the United States and explores the complicated political, social and financial components which effect severe judgment of fiction. the writer indicates how, because the novel has been eclipsed by way of the mass media, novelists have sought to keep and regain a large readership by means of drawing at the subject matters and preoccupations of those kinds. applying modern fiction through such writers as Fowles, Borges, Spark, Barthelme, Brautigan, Vonnegut and Barth, and drawing on Russian Formalist theories of literary evolution, the publication argues that metafiction makes use of parody in addition to well known genres and non-literary kinds as a fashion not just of disclosing the insufficient and obsolescent conventions of the vintage novel, yet of stuggesting the traces alongside which fiction may improve sooner or later
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Additional info for Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction
Example text
S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), in order to construct a satisfactory interpretation of the poem, the reader must follow the complex web of cross-references and repetitions of words and images which function independently of, or in addition to, the narrative codes of causality and sequence. The reader becomes aware that ‘meaning’ is constructed primarily through internal verbal relationships, and the poem thus appears to achieve a verbal autonomy: a ‘spatial form’. Such organization persists in contemporary metafictional texts, but merely as one aspect of textual self-reflexivity.
Invalid character transmitted in sub-program statement, that’s a bitch . . no END statement (P. ’ A (the reader substitute within the story), however, still manages to process the message, sees in the black box a face, an extraordinarily handsome girl stripping, a river, a chair, a human narrative, or at least the raw materials of one. Barthelme’s story dramatizes the human propensity to construct its own systems and interpretations in order to resist technological determinism and dehumanization.
This accords with the notion of ‘play’ implicit in most metafictional novels. There is a central contradiction in both Huizinga’s and Caillois’s definition of play, however, which is precisely where metafictional interest is focused. They appear to argue that the main significance of play is its civilizing influence, but Huizinga explicitly states at one point that he sees civilization becoming less and less playful. Yet elsewhere he argues that he sees ‘man’ as becoming more and more civilized.
