Metafiction

Metafiction is a form of literature that emphasizes its own constructedness in a way that continually reminds the reader to be aware that they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and storytelling, and works of metafiction directly or indirectly draw attention to their status as artifacts. Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art. Although metafiction is most commonly associated with postmodern literature, its use can be traced back to much earlier works of fiction, such as Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1387), Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605), William Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre (c.1608), Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759), William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847), as well as more recent works such as Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. Metafiction, however, became particularly prominent in the 1960s, with authors and works such as John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Robert Coover's 'The Babysitter' and 'The Magic Poker', Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and William H. Gass's Willie Master's Lonesome Wife.It is with LOVE as with CUCKOLDOM——But now I am talking of beginning a book, and have long had a thing upon my mind to be imparted to the reader, which if not imparted now, can never be imparted to him as long as I live (whereas the COMPARISON may be imparted to him any hour of the day)—I'll just mention it, and begin in good earnest.The thing is this.That of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best—I'm sure it is the most religious—for I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.Has it ever occurred to you that novelists are using up experience at a dangerous rate? No, I see it hasn't. Well, then, consider that before the novel emerged as the dominant literary form, narrative literature dealt only with the extraordinary or the allegorical – with kings and queens, giants and dragons, sublime virtue and diabolic evil. There was no risk of confusing that sort of thing with life, of course. But as soon as the novel got going, you might pick up a book at any time and read about an ordinary chap called Joe Smith doing just the sort of things you did yourself. Now, I know what you're going to say – you're going to say that the novelist still has to invent a lot. But that's just the point: there've been such a fantastic number of novels written in the past couple of centuries that they've just about exhausted the possibilities of life. So all of us, you see, are really enacting events that have already been written about in some novel or other. Metafiction is a form of literature that emphasizes its own constructedness in a way that continually reminds the reader to be aware that they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and storytelling, and works of metafiction directly or indirectly draw attention to their status as artifacts. Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art. Although metafiction is most commonly associated with postmodern literature, its use can be traced back to much earlier works of fiction, such as Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1387), Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605), William Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre (c.1608), Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759), William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847), as well as more recent works such as Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. Metafiction, however, became particularly prominent in the 1960s, with authors and works such as John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Robert Coover's 'The Babysitter' and 'The Magic Poker', Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and William H. Gass's Willie Master's Lonesome Wife. The term 'metafiction' was coined in 1970 by William H. Gass in his book Fiction and the Figures of Life. Gass describes the increasing use of metafiction at the time as a result of authors developing a better understanding of the medium. This new understanding of the medium led to a major change in the approach toward fiction. Theoretical issues became more prominent aspects, resulting in an increased self-reflexivity and formal uncertainty. Robert Scholes expands upon Gass' theory and identifies four forms of criticism on fiction, which he refers to as formal, behavioural, structural, and philosophical criticism. Metafiction assimilates these perspectives into the fictional process, putting emphasis on one or more of these aspects. These developments were part of a larger movement (arguably a 'metareferential turn') which, approximately from the 1960s onwards, was the consequence of an increasing social and cultural self-consciousness, stemming from, as Patricia Waugh puts it, 'a more general cultural interest in the problem of how human beings reflect, construct and mediate their experience in the world.' Due to this development, an increasing number of novelists rejected the notion of rendering the world through fiction. The new principle became to create through the medium of language a world that does not reflect the real world. Language was considered an 'independent, self-contained system which generates its own 'meanings.'' and a means of mediating knowledge of the world. Thus, literary fiction, which constructs worlds through language, became a model for the construction of 'reality' rather than a reflection of it. Reality itself became regarded as a construct instead of an objective truth. Through its formal self-exploration, metafiction thus became the device that explores the question of how human beings construct their experience of the world. Robert Scholes identifies the time around 1970 as the peak of experimental fiction (which metafiction is an instrumental part of) and names a lack of commercial and critical success as reasons for its subsequent decline. The development toward metafictional writing in postmodernism generated mixed responses. Some critics argued that it signified the decadence of the novel and an exhaustion of the artistic capabilities of the medium, with some going as far as to call it the 'death of the novel'. Others see the self-consciousness of fictional writing as a way to gain deeper understanding of the medium and a path that leads to innovation that resulted in the emergence of new forms of literature, such as the historiographic novel by Linda Hutcheon. According to Werner Wolf, metafiction can be differentiated into four pairs of forms that can be combined with each other.