Metafiction, the late, great John Gardner says in The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, means “fiction that, both in style and theme, investigates fiction.” In Knock Knock. Who's There? Metafiction, we'll be discussing metafiction, what it is, and showing some examples.
While a great deal of metafiction came out in the 1960s with novels like Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Wife, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, and William Gass’s* Willie Master's Lonesome Wife, metafiction was around long before postmodern literature (literature characterized by the use of metafiction, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, unreliable narration, and which often deals with challenging authority, be it political or historical). Works like Laurence Stern’s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and One Thousand and One Nights or the Arabian Nights, which came out of the Islamic Golden Age, starting around 786, were precursors to the literature that became known as metafiction.
Latino writers such as Junot Diaz, Salvador Plasencia, Sandra Cisneros, Jorge Luis Borges, Valeria Luiselli, the Spanish writers Lope de Vega, Luis Leante, Leopoldo Alas and others have also delved into metafiction and successfully. Having written some, and poorly, I may add, I do find it interesting to read, when done right.
Metafiction can be an interesting exercise for new and experienced writers alike, as it removes the distance between the reader and the text. It’s the narrator and/or the characters within a work knowing that they are part of a/the text. Metafiction allows the reader to get an inside view of the fictional world of the text by revealing things within the text the reader might not be aware of, or that the author is poking fun at via parody, and it does so by having the author intrude into the work so as to nudge the reader’s understanding of what the author is trying to do, including any faults she may know exist during the writing of said text. It is self-reflexive, obviously experimental, and addresses the reader directly, which readers may find intriguing or, in other cases, unappealing and a little bit (or maybe even a lot bit) cutesy. It’s not for everyone, but it does open one’s eyes to one more tool available to writers of any genre or age group that may differentiate their writing from everything else out there.
Metafiction is fiction that, both in style and theme, investigates fiction
--John Gardner
Here’s one example of metafiction taken from chapter 15 of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (a book that I personally can’t stand, but one that’s clearly very popular with over 15 million people worldwide):
“(Excerpt from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, page 634784, section 5a. Entry: Magrathea)
“Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich, and largely tax free.”
--Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Adams’s novel follows Arthur Dent, and Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, as he saves Dent from certain death at the hands of the Vogons, who are demolishing earth to make a hyperspace expressway. So, Adams has a character (and characters) interacting directly with the novel the reader is reading, and they're doing so as a way to navigate the galaxy. Shenanigans ensue, and while I find the concept to be brilliant, it's just one of those books I couldn't get into no matter how many of my fellow writer friends commend Adams on his work.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut addresses his publisher, Sam Lawrence, directly. Talking about his “novel about Dresden,” i.e., Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut writes, “It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead. Everything is supposed to be quiet [. . .] except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?” So, Vonnegut is speaking about the novel the reader is reading and addressing the publisher of the novel he published. It’s subtle, but it works. The reader is interested, and it’s not really a distraction to the experience. At least not as distracting as it is in other novels where authors more aggressively address the reader, informing her explicitly as if she did not already understand what the author of the novel was doing.
Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, goes on to state that a “way of undermining fiction’s harmful effects is the writing of metafiction: a story that calls attention to its methods and shows the reader what is happening to him as he reads; [and] deconstructs by directly calling attention to fiction’s tricks . . .” What Gardner is referring to is the ability of fiction and books to create characters “whose life motto is ‘Never complain, never explain,’” which leads, according to Gardner, to “effects on the reader [. . .] that are “not necessarily healthy” and that, if written using metafiction, would lessen the damage said fiction might cause. While that may be true, for me there is something disheartening or infantilizing about such a view, even if I “get” what he’s saying. He’s pointing out a fact, I suppose, but it’s one I’m loathe to accept as necessary.
Gardner, on metafiction, further states that:
“The appeal of metafiction may be almost entirely intellectual.”
“We think about the writer’s allusions, his use of unexpected devices, his effrontery in breaking the rules.”
“. . . we know that much of what we read . . . has no theory, it makes no grand claims. It’s just jazzing around.”
“Metafiction, deconstructive fiction, and jazzing around . . . all delight us.”
[Metafiction] is a way of undermining fiction’s harmful effects is the writing of metafiction: a story that calls attention to its methods and shows the reader what is happening to him as he reads.
John Gardner, The Art of Fiction
I suppose they do. Or it delights a great many of us, anyway. I can’t say that, on occasion, I don’t enjoy a novel that, in the hands of a great writer, uses metafiction. I enjoyed Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. What kid doesn’t love Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, or William Goldman’s The Princess Bride? (My kids ran around for a month reciting and laughing joyously at the Inigo Montoya lines they knew by heart). Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favorite novels of all time. Like anything in literature, if done well, metafiction adds a layer of intrigue, of dare I say coolness, that few other “tricks” us writers have at our disposal can. It pulls the reader in even more than first person point of view, because it addresses the reader directly. It makes them part of the story the way the Choose Your Own Adventure books do. But be careful. Like any well-written piece of fiction, it takes time to learn how to write metafiction without coming off cheesy or gimmicky. Do some research first. Read lots of metafiction before you pick up that pen or open up your laptop. But if you do decide to take up the challenge, commit. Go all the way. You never know how deeply your readers will feel the bond between them and your characters. Or maybe, with any luck, you.
*William Gass has been credited with coining the term “metafiction” in his 1970 essay, “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction.”
Cully Perlman is an author, editor, and blogger. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com and Cullyperlman@gmail.com
I have a love/hate relationship with metafiction. Sometimes I find it intrusive, and other times I love feeling like the author is speaking to me. It's a weird style.