Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (New Accents)

187 Pages·2016·1.37 MB·English

by  Patricia Waugh

NEW ACCENTS
General Editor: TERENCE HAWKES
Metafiction
The Theory and Practice
of Self-Conscious Fiction
IN THE SAME SERIES:
Structuralism and Semiotics Terence Hawkes*
Linguistics and the Novel Roger Fowler
Reading Television John Fiske and John Hartley
Subculture: The Meaning of Style Dick Hebdige
Formalism and Marxism Tony Bennett
Critical Practice Catherine Belsey
Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching Patrick Parrinder
The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama Keir Elam
Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion Rosemary Jackson
Translation Studies Susan Bassnett-McGuire
Sexual Fiction Maurice Charney
Deconstruction: Theory and Practice Christopher Norris
Orality and Literacy Walter J. Ong
Poetry as Discourse Antony Easthope
Narrative Fiction: Contemporary poetics Shlomith Rimmon-
Kenan
Literature and Propaganda A. P. Foulkes
Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction Robert C. Holub
Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice Elizabeth Wright
Alternative Shakespeares Edited by John Drakakis
Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism Edited by Gayle
Greene and Coppélia Kahn
Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory Toril Moi
Rewriting English: Cultural Politics of Gender and Class Janet
Batsleer, Tony Davies, Rebecca O’Rourke and Chris Weedon
The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature
Russell J. Reising
Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference
1976-1984 Edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Diana
Loxley and Margaret Iversen
Popular Fictions: Essays in Literature and History Edited by
Peter Widdowson, Peter Humm and Paul Stigant
Criticism in Society Imre Salusinszky
The Return of the Reader: Reader-response Criticism Elizabeth
Freund
Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and
Poststructuralism Richard Harland
* Not available from Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. in the USA
Metafiction
The Theory and Practice
of Self-Conscious Fiction
PATRICIA WAUGH
London and New York
First published in 1984 by
Methuen & Co. Ltd
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.
© 1984 Patricia Waugh
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Waugh, Patricia.
Metafiction.—(New accents)
1. Fiction—Technique 2. Rhetoric
I. Title II. Series
808.3 PN3355
ISBN 0-416-32630-7 (Print Edition)
ISBN 0-415-03006-4 Pbk
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Waugh, Patricia.
Metafiction: the theory and practice of self-conscious fiction.
(New accents)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index
1. Fiction. I. Title. II. Series: New accents
PN 333.W38 1984 801'.953 84-9078
ISBN 0-415-03006-4
ISBN 0-203-13140-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-17557-3 (Glassbook Format)
Contents
General editor(cid:146)s preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
1 What is metafiction and why are they saying such
awful things about it? 1
What is metafiction? 1
Metafiction and the novel tradition 5
Why are they saying such awful things about it? 7
Metafiction and the contemporary avant-garde 10
The mirror up to art: metafiction and its varieties 14
2 Literary self-consciousness: developments 21
Modernism and post-modernism: the redefinition
of self-consciousness 21
The analysis of frames: metafiction and frame-breaking 28
Play, games and metafiction 34
The linguistic universe: reality as construct 49
3 Literary evolution: the place of parody 63
The development of the novel 63
The method of parody: creation plus critique 68
The use of popular forms in metafiction 79
vi Metafiction
4 Are novelists liars? The ontological status
of literary-fictional discourse 87
(cid:145)Truth(cid:146) and (cid:145)fiction(cid:146): is telling stories telling lies? 87
Reference, naming and the existence of characters 90
(cid:145)Falsity(cid:146) and (cid:145)non-predication(cid:146) theories 94
(cid:145)Alternative worlds(cid:146) theories 100
5 Fictionality and context: from role-playing to
language games 115
Act I: All the world(cid:146)s a stage:
role-playing and fictionality as theme 116
Act II: Curtain-up: script-writing 119
Act III: Some characters in search of an author 130
Act IV: Notes towards the definition of radical
metafiction: 137
Contradiction 137
Paradox 142
Objets trouvØs: metafictional collage 143
Intertextual overkill 145
Notes 151
Bibliography 155
Further reading 170
Index 173
GENERAL EDITOR’S
PREFACE
H
ow can we recognise or deal with the new? Any
equipment we bring to the task will have been
designed to engage with the old: it will look for and identify
extensions and developments of what we already know. To some
degree the unprecedented will always be unthinkable.
The New Accents series has made its own wary negotiation
around that paradox, turning it, over the years, into the central
concern of a continuing project. We are obliged, of course, to be
bold. Change is our proclaimed business, innovation our announced
quarry, the accents of the future the language in which we deal. So
we have sought, and still seek, to confront and respond to those
developments in literary studies that seem crucial aspects of the
tidal waves of transformation that continue to sweep across our
culture. Areas such as structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism,
marxism, semiotics, subculture, deconstruction, dialogism, post-
modernism, and the new attention to the nature and modes of
language, politics and way of life that these bring, have already
been the primary concern of a large number of our volumes. Their
‘nuts and bolts’ exposition of the issues at stake in new ways of
writing texts and new ways of reading them has proved an effective
stratagem against perplexity.
But the question of what ‘texts’ are or may be has also become
more and more complex. It is not just the impact of electronic modes
of communication, such as computer networks and data banks,
viii GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
that has forced us to revise our sense of the sort of material to
which the process called ‘reading’ may apply. Satellite television
and supersonic travel have eroded the traditional capacities of time
and space to confirm prejudice, reinforce ignorance, and conceal
significant difference. Ways of life and cultural practices of which
we had barely heard can now be set compellingly beside – can even
confront – our own. The effect is to make us ponder the culture we
have inherited; to see it, perhaps for the first time, as an intricate,
continuing construction. And that means that we can also begin to
see, and to question, those arrangements of foregrounding and
backgrounding, of stressing and repressing, of placing at the centre
and of restricting to the periphery, that give our own way of life its
distinctive character.
Small wonder if, nowadays, we frequently find ourselves at the
boundaries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkable:
peering into an abyss out of which there begin to lurch awkwardly-
formed monsters with unaccountable – yet unavoidable – demands
on our attention. These may involve unnerving styles of narrative,
unsettling notions of ‘history’, unphilosophical ideas about
‘philosophy’, even un-childish views of ‘comics’, to say nothing
of a host of barely respectable activities for which we have no
reassuring names.
In this situation, straightforward elucidation, careful unpicking,
informative bibliographies, can offer positive help, and each New
Accents volume will continue to include these. But if the project of
closely scrutinising the new remains nonetheless a disconcerting
one, there are still overwhelming reasons for giving it all the
consideration we can muster. The unthinkable, after all, is that which
covertly shapes our thoughts.
Acknowledgements
I should like to acknowledge the help I have received from my
colleagues Andrew Crisell and Derek Longhurst who have both
commented usefully on the manuscript. I am particularly grateful to
David Lodge who first inspired, and subsequently helped to sustain,
my interest in metafiction, and to Terence Hawkes for his very
painstaking and extremely helpful editorial guidance. Finally, I
would like to dedicate this book to my husband Alec, who had never
heard of metafiction when I met him but who now has a thorough
appreciation of its significance in his life!