ABSTRACT
Simplifying to the extreme, I define metafiction as a text’s incredulity towards both itself and the presupposed truth-building power of narrative and the written word. It is usually discussed in terms of the text’s self-consciousness or self-awareness, and often results in a revelation of the writing process: as this moves to the fore, the stitching itself not only becomes visible, but comes to be essential to the very pattern of the narrative’s texture. The coinage of the term metafiction is attributed to William Gass. In his 1970 essay ‘Philosophy and the Form of Fiction,’ Gass put forth the term as a counterpart to the ‘lingos to converse about lingos’ that many disciplines possess, such as meta-ethics in ethics or metatheorems in logic and mathematics (Gass 1970: 24). He drew a line, however, rejecting ‘those drearily predictable pieces about writers who are writing about what they are writing’; under the category of metafiction, Gass included those works ‘in which the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed,’ drawing a distinction between metafiction and the anti-novel (Gass 1970: 24–25). It would be erroneous to describe metafiction as either a literary form or a genre, as it may take different formal configurations and be classified under a number of stylistic categorizations; it is a mode. It also bears mentioning that some narratives fully embrace the metafictional mode throughout – as is the case with Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper (2005) – whilst others merely dip their figurative toes in its waters – like Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) – though the effect remains within a spectrum that includes narrative destabilisation and purposeful readerly alienation.
