Self-consciousness is a distinctive literary trait in postmodernist literature.

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UNIVERZITA KARLOVA – FILOZOFICKÁ FAKULTA

ÚSTAV ANGLOFONNÍCH LITERATUR A KULTUR

Changing Tendencies in Self-Conscious

Narratives: A Contrastive Interpretation

Proměny tendencí v sebereflexivním vyprávění:

kontrastivní studie

DIPLOMOVÁ PRÁCE

Vedoucí diplomové práce

(supervisor):

Prof. PhDr. Martin Procházka, CSc.

Praha, srpen 2017

Zpracoval (author):

Bc. Martin Sedláček

Studijní obor (subject):

Anglofonní literatury a

kultury

Prohlášení:

Prohlašuji, že jsem tuto diplomovou práci vypracoval samostatně, že jsem řádně citoval

všechny použité prameny a literaturu a že práce nebyla využita v rámci jiného vysokoškolského

studia či k získání jiného či stejného titulu.

Declaration:

I declare that the following MA thesis is my own work for which I used only the sources and

literature mentioned, and that this thesis has not been used in the course of other university

studies or in order to acquire the same or another type of diploma.

V Praze, dne 8. 8. 2017

…………………………………….

Jméno a příjmení

Rád bych využil této příležitosti a poděkoval prof. PhDr. Martinu Procházkovi, CSc.

za trpělivost, laskavost, cenné rady a podnětné komentáře během konzultací týkajících se

diplomové práce.

I would like to use this opportunity and express my gratitude to prof. PhDr. Martin Procházka,

CSc. for his patience, kindness, valuable input and thought-provoking commentaries during the

consultation of my MA thesis.

Souhlasím se zapůjčením diplomové práce ke studijním účelům.

I have no objection to the MA thesis being borrowed for study purposes.

Abstrakt

Předložená práce se zaměřuje na souvislosti mezi vybranými metafikčními texty a

narativní teorií. Výběr sestává ze dvou skupin sebereflexivních textů. První ze skupin se

zaměřuje na metafikční tendence románů 17. a 18. století. Výběr záměrně nebere v úvahu

původ textů. Kromě Toma Jonese od Henryho Fieldinga a Život a názory blahorodého pana

Tristrama Shandyho od Laurence Sterna se kapitola zabývá i Cervantesovým Důmyslným

rytířem Donem Quijotem de la Manchou. Druhá ze skupin se zaměřuje na poválečnou

americkou metafikci (Ztracen v panoptiku Johna Barthe, Sněhurka Donalda Barthelma a Jatka

číslo pět Kurta Vonneguta). Tyto texty představují souvislý celek z předem vymezeného období.

Obecně je metafikce chápána jako fikce o fikci. Předložená práce navrhuje odlišnou

interpretaci, a to v rámci Foucaultova pojetí epistémé. Metafikce tak není chápána jako

samostatný literární žánr, ale jako součást širšího kontextu chápání reprezentace. Reprezentace

je v metafikci klíčovým pojmem a rostoucí vypravěčské sebeuvědomění tak lze interpretovat

v širších souvislostech. Diplomová práce klade důraz na kontrastivní a interdisciplinární přístup.

Práce je rozdělena na pět kapitol. První kapitola představuje teoretický úvod zaměřený

na problematickou definici metafikce. Opírá se o Dvorní dámy od Diega Velázqueze a

Foucaultovu analýzu tohoto obrazu. Kapitola také prezentuje narativní teorii využitou v práci.

Druhá kapitola spočívá v analýze a intepretaci starších textů, které jsou předloženy

v chronologickém pořadí (Důmyslný rytíř Don Quijote de la Mancha od Miguele Cervantese y

Saavedry, Tom Jones od Henryho Fieldinga, Život a názory blahorodého pana Tristrama

Shandyho od Laurence Sterna). Třetí kapitola představuje poválečné metafikční texty a s cílem

intepretace na ně aplikuje narativní teorii. Čtvrtá, ústřední kapitola sestává z historického

přehledu změn v reprezentaci. Je založena na Foucaultově teorii epistémé, a metafikce je tak

chápána v rámci širšího společensko-kulturního kontextu. Mimoto obsahuje tato kapitola i

Iserův koncept významu textu a vysvětluje ho ve vztahu k rámcování. Pátá kapitola práci

zakončuje, opakuje hlavní body, shrnuje a analyzuje její výsledky.

Klíčová slova: metafikce, sebereflexivní, vyprávění, Cervantes, Fielding, Sterne, Barthelme,

Vonnegut, Barth, narativní teorie

Thesis Abstract

The present thesis investigates correlations between a selection of metafictional texts and

narrative theory. The selection consists in two sets of self-reflexive texts. The first one explores

metafictional tendencies in the 17th and 18th century novels. To achieve this, the selection

largely ignores their provenience. In addition to Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Laurence

Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, it also examines Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The latter set of texts

focuses on post-War American metafictions (John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Donald

Barthelme’s Snow White, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five). These represent a coherent

body of works from a particular period.

Metafiction is generally understood as fiction about fiction. The present thesis challenges

those assumptions and suggests interpreting metafiction within the framework of Michel

Foucault’s epistemes. Metafiction is not conceived of as a separate genre of literature but in the

context of broader cultural tendencies in the understanding of representation. Representation is

a key concept in metafiction and the increasing degree of narrative self-awareness is viewed in

this light. The thesis emphasizes this contrastive and interdisciplinary approach.

The text is divided into five chapters. Chapter one is a theoretical introduction addressing

the difficulties of defining metafiction. As a visual guide, it draws on Michel Foucault’s analysis

of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas. The chapter includes a discussion of narrative theory

employed in the thesis. Chapter two consists in the analysis and interpretation of the primary

texts from the earlier days of the novel. They are presented in chronological order: Cervantes’s

Don Quixote, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Chapter three

presents the selection of post-War American metafictional texts (John Barth’s Lost in the

Funhouse, Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five). It applies

narrative theory to them and interprets them. Chapter four is the focal point of the entire thesis.

It consists in a historical survey of the human understanding of representation which is based

on Foucault’s framework of epistemes. The present thesis views metafiction as a constituent of

broader sociocultural context, not as a separate genre of literature. In addition, Chapter four

includes a discussion of Wolfgang Iser’s concept of the meaning of the text in relation to

framing. Chapter five concludes the thesis, reiterates the primary arguments, summarizes and

discusses its results.

Key words: metafiction, self-conscious, self-aware, self-reflexive, narrative, Cervantes,

Fielding, Sterne, Barthelme, Vonnegut, Barth, narrative theory

Table of Contents

1. Chapter One: Theoretical Introduction ............................................................. 11

1.1 Defining Metafiction ....................................................................................... 11

1.2 Las Meninas: A Visual Parallel to Self-Conscious Fiction ............................. 19

1.3 From Structuralist to Poststructuralist Narratology ........................................ 22

1.4 Aims and Structure .......................................................................................... 26

2. Chapter Two: Pre-20th Century Self-Conscious Narratives ............................. 27

2.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 27

2.2 Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra’s Don Quixote de la Mancha...................... 28

2.3 Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling ............................ 35

2.4 Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman ... 41

3. Chapter Three: Post-War American Metafiction ............................................. 50

3.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 50

3.2 John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse .................................................................. 50

3.3 Donald Barthelme’s Snow White.................................................................... 57

3.4 Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five ............................................................ 64

4. Chapter Four: A Contrastive Interpretation ..................................................... 72

4.1 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 72

4.2 The Renaissance and Classical Epistemes ...................................................... 73

4.3 Modes of Representation in Contemporary Metafiction ................................. 82

4.4 Iser’s Meaning of the Text in Relation to Framing ......................................... 91

4.5 Conclusion..................................................................................................... 100

5. Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 102

Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 107

1. Chapter One: Theoretical Introduction

1.1 Defining Metafiction

In Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760), the

eponymous narrator refers to his own text as “the most religious” since he “begin[s] with

writing the first sentence” and trusts “to the Almighty God for the second.”1 Sterne’s narrator,

instead of concealing or ignoring the process of artistic creation, brings it to the fore and creates

an impression of highly immediate writing. This impression is bolstered by the reference to the

physical act of writing itself.

In addition to the thematization of the process of artistic creation, the narrator’s

commentary is “self-conscious” in the sense that it is aware of its own existence and its position

in a larger fictional body. The terms “self-conscious” and “self-aware” are used interchangeably

with the term “metafiction” in the Anglophone literary context. All three refer to the same

tendency: to suffuse the narration with references to the act of narration; to turn the process of

diegesis into the diegesis itself.

Linda Hutcheon provides the simplest definition of metafiction to this date. Metafiction

is “fiction about fiction”, or fiction including “within itself a commentary on its own narrative.”2

Hutcheon’s Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (1980) is the first coherent

book-length inquiry into the nature of metafiction, although as is argued below, the concept has

been studied before her publication, most notably by Wayne C. Booth and Viktor Shklovsky.

One of the most prominent metafictional theorists Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as

“a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to

1 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (London: Penguin Classics, 1997) 391. 2 Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press,

1986) 1.

its status as an artefact.”3 As Waugh contends, the theory of metafiction has the objective to go

beyond narrative analysis, as it “explore[s] the possible fictionality of the world outside the

fictional text.”4 According to Waugh, metafiction foregrounds its fictional status “in order to

pose questions about relationship between fiction and reality.”5 Waugh addresses the essential

part of metafictional narratives: the relationship between the fictional world and that of the

reader.

Hutcheon and Waugh attribute the term to William H. Gass, who coined it in his essay

“Philosophy and the Form of Fiction” (1970).6 Gass notes the changing attitude of the writer

towards the work of art. By becoming more aware of the medium being used, the author deals

away with the pretension of fiction attempting to capture the world, and concentrates on the

creation of the fictional world by means of language. 7 Gass reacts to the contemporary

discourse. As Waugh points out, recent postmodern texts “explore a theory of fiction through

the practice of writing fiction.”8 Waugh goes on to argue that Gass’ focus on the self-reflection

is symptomatic of the 1960s, which saw a “more general cultural interest in the problem of how

human beings reflect, construct and mediate their experience of the world.”9 This focus also

implies reflection of observations on language and can be interpreted in the context of Michel

Foucault’s notion of epistemes.

Borrowing the concept from logic (as propounded by Alfred Tarski), Roman Jakobson

introduces ‘metalanguage’ into linguistics. He defines it by its function: whenever the speaker

3 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, (London: Routledge, 1984) 24. 4 Waugh 2. 5 Waugh 2. 6 William H. Gass, “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction”, in Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: A.A.

Knopf, 1970) 3-26. Robert Scholes published an essay titled “Metafiction” the same year. Robert Scholes,

“Metafiction”, in The Iowa Review 1.4, University of Iowa (1970), JSTOR

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/20157652> 4th Mar 2017. 100-115. 7 Gass 3-8. 8 Waugh 2. 9 Waugh 3.

or listener “need[s] to check up whether they use the same code” the speech becomes focused

on the code they are using, thus performing the metalingual or glossing function.10 In effect,

Jakobson argues, we may communicate using English (as metalanguage) about English (as

“object language”). Far from being restricted to linguistics and technical discourse, the model

is used extensively in everyday communication in phrases such as: “Did you mean …?”.

Moreover, it is “the vital factor of any verbal development.”11 The concept of metafiction is

based on analogy to metalanguage. Metalanguage is the code used for reference to the code in

use, metafiction is fiction referring to the fiction itself. In both cases, the medium is the message.

Both concepts are self-referential.

The first theoretical account of self-aware fiction is presented by the Russian formalist

Viktor Shklovsky in Theory of Prose (1925). In his analysis of Laurence Sterne’s Life and

Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760) Shklovsky refers to Sterne as “a radical

revolutionary” in terms of form, which is “presented without any motivation whatsoever,

simply as it is”, and gives several examples: “the action constantly breaks off, the author

constantly returns to the beginning or leaps forward”, “the main plot […] is constantly

interrupted” and the “unfinished story” remains unmotivated.12

Shklovsky does not use the term ‘metafiction’ or ‘self-conscious fiction’ but refers to the

method wherein Sterne “lay[s] bare the device.” 13 The process is fully intentional in

Shklovsky’s reading; it is an “ingenious attempt to confound the reader.”14 Shklovsky’s reading

consists mainly in analyzing the narrative “displacement of time” as a contrast between literary

10 Roman Jakobson, The Framework of Language (Ann Arbor: Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies,

180) 86. Jakobson identifies six functions of language: emotive, referential, poetic, phatic, metalingual, and

conative (Jakobson 81). 11 Jakobson 86, 91. 12 Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991) 147,

156. 13 Shklovsky 147. 14 Shklovsky 148.

time, whose “pure conventionality” does not “coincide with the laws of ordinary time.”15 For

Shklovsky the purport of the narrative self-awareness is to parody the contemporary

conventions by “thrusting [the older conventional devices] to the fore” instead of concealing

“their conventionality.” 16 Although Shklovsky defines fiction ‘laying bare the device’

(partially) in relation to the reader, the emphasis is on the temporal structures and their

violations in the novel.

As suggested by the title of his essay “The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction

before Tristram Shandy” (1952), Wayne C. Booth examines fiction written prior to the

publication of Tristram Shandy. As is argued in the following chapters and as the selection of

the primary texts implies, metafiction is not exclusive to the 20th century. Booth compares the

reception of Sterne’s masterpiece in his day and in the twentieth century, pointing out that

modern readers “tend to see deliberate artistry where earlier readers saw only whimsy.”17 Booth

thus notes the readers’ changing attitudes towards the novel, most significantly the device that

“led earlier readers to overlook its artistry”: “the transforming presence of an intruding

narrator.”18

Booth’s reading establishes the platform for accepting Tristram Shandy as a work of art

with a multitude of possible readings, though still basing that relationship on a binary

opposition; the recipient can either view Tristram the narrator as the one “who tears the book

apart”, or “holds it together.”19 Furthermore, Booth anticipates later metafictional theories by

roughly drafting a typology of narrators intruding upon the act of narration and formulates the

concept of the ‘self-conscious narrator’ as the one “who intrudes into his novel to comment on

15 Shklovsky 148, 154. 16 Shklovsky 150. 17 Wayne C. Booth, “The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tristram Shandy”, in PMLA 67.2,

University of Iowa (1952), JSTOR: 163 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/460093> 3rd Mar 2017. 18 Booth 163. 19 Booth 163.

himself as writer, and on his book”, dismissing the “moral implications” of the narrative and

focusing on it as “a literary product” instead.20

In addition to the comic aspects of Sterne’s fiction, Booth concentrates on the historical

development of self-conscious narration by placing Sterne within a cultural context among

literary figures as varied as Montaigne, Burton and Swift. It is a context thriving with “the

devices […] within the tradition […] of what had been happening in English and continental

fiction for generations.”21 Booth’s examination questions: in what respect do the earlier self-

conscious texts differ from their twentieth century counterparts, and how has the position of the

reader changed in the course of the two centuries?

Robert Alter provides a potential answer to the first part of the question. In his Partial

Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (1975) Alter argues that the self-conscious novel

has evolved as a parallel genre to its non-self-conscious counterpart. He asserts that a “fully

self-conscious novel” endeavors to “convey to us a sense of the fictional world as an authorial

construct” through “the style, the handling of narrative viewpoint, the names and words

imposed on the characters, the patterning of the narration” and “the nature of the characters and

what befalls them.” 22 Self-conscious fiction is defined “against a background of literary

tradition and convention.”23

20 Booth 164-165. Booth asserts that all written fiction implies an author trespassing from the fictional world of

the characters upon that of the reader by selecting the subject matter of his or her fiction. Unlike Tristram this

narrator does so “unobtrusively”. The second, more explicit kind, is the narrator who chooses himself or herself

as the hero or secondary character of his own account. This narration is more obtrusive, since it poses the problems

of “the narrator’s suitability for his task”—such as the necessary knowledge, or certain skill. The third kind is the

narrator who makes a “rhetorical commentary on the characters or event of his story”, e.g. “Our hero was ...”.

Other instances listed are Fielding’s and Thackeray’s “moralizing interruptions” (Booth 164-165). 21 Booth 185. 22 Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1978) xi. Alter points out that the “phenomenon of an artwork mirroring itself as it mirrors reality” is not restricted

to the novel and can be found in other forms of art, e.g. oral poetry and drama (Odyssey, Euripides’ parody of the

Greek tragedy, or some of Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s plays) (Alter xi). 23 Alter xi.

Alter points out the potential dangers of narrative self-consciousness and argues that

exposing the work’s fictional status can possibly result in “[nothing] more than a mannerism, a

self-indulgent game.” 24 On the other hand, provided that narrative self-consciousness is

“integrated into a large critical vision of the dialectic interplay between fiction and reality”, it

has the potential to “produce one of the most illuminating dimensions of the experience we

undergo in reading a novel.”25 Using the form of the novel, Alter’s examination interprets

narrative self-consciousness as part of a continuous tradition. Most importantly, self-

consciousness is defined by its relation to the reader and the interaction between the fictional

and the recipient’s world.

Linda Hutcheon’s Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (1980) is taken to

be the first comprehensive account of metafictional practices. For Hutcheon, the narcissism of

metafiction does not have pejorative connotations. It refers to the narrative self-awareness, or

to use Hutcheon’s wording, to “fiction about fiction.”26 Hutcheon follows Alter’s inquiry into

the alleged rupture from tradition and poses the question whether we are dealing with a long

tradition of self-reflexive texts.

To illustrate this, Hutcheon provides a distinction between overt and covert metafiction.

Texts belonging to the former category “reveal their self-awareness in explicit thematizations

or allegorizations of their diegetic or linguistic identity within [themselves].”27 Their narcissism,

or “self-consciousness and self-reflection” is “clearly evident” and the reader of overtly self-

conscious works “learns that he is indeed in a paradoxical position.”28 The narrative narcissism

24 Alter xiv. 25 Alter xiv.

26 Hutcheon 1. Its fundamentally paradoxical nature in relation to the reader is discussed in the last chapter. 27 Hutcheon 7. 28 Hutcheon 23, 117.

in the covert metafictions, on the contrary, is “internalized, actualized”; these texts are “self-

reflexive but not necessarily self-conscious.”29

As the definitions show, covert narrative narcissism is much more elusive than its overt

counterpart. Accordingly, it is more difficult “to generalize concerning the various shapes [it]

might adopt.”30 Overt metafiction brings its fictionality to the fore, but owing to its implicit,

elusive and internalizing nature, covert metafiction questions the “outer limits of the novel as a

narrative mimetic genre.” 31 Hutcheon extends the metaphor of Narcissus and asks: “Has

Narcissus […] died by the pool” or has he killed himself, being “lured by his own reflection?”32

The implications and possible uses of Hutcheon’s dichotomy are examined below.

Hutcheon distinguishes between “mimesis of product” and “mimesis of process.”33 In the

former category, the reader is “required to identify the products being imitated” such as

“characters, actions, settings”, to “validate their literary worth” and to “recognize their

similarity to those in empirical reality.”34 In the “mimesis of process”, on the other hand, the

conventions are bared and codes disrupted by being openly acknowledged. 35 In her

poststructuralist reading, Hutcheon brings forth the reader. In the mimesis of the product, the

reader is a passive participant, while in the mimesis of the process, he or she is required to

partake in the co-creation of the fictional universe. 36 This implies a transference of

responsibility from the author onto the reader, who is forced to acknowledge his or her

accountability “for the act of decoding, the act of reading.”37

29 Hutcheon 7 30 Hutcheon 31. 31 Hutcheon 31. 32 Hutcheon 31-32. 33 Hutcheon 5. 34 Hutcheon 38 35 Hutcheon 39. 36 Hutcheon 39. 37 Hutcheon 39.

Hutcheon’s emphasis on the mimesis of process can be paralleled to Roland Barthes’s

distinction between readerly and writerly texts. While readerly texts largely ignore the reader

and approach him or her as a consumer, rather than a producer, writerly texts are “a perpetual

present” defiant to totalizing structures, since “no consequent language […] can be

superimposed” upon them.38 The writerly texts are “ourselves writing” before “the infinite play

of the world […] is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system […].”39

Barthes argues that the objective of literature is to transform the reader from a consumer into a

producer of the text and relies on the new novel in achieving this distinction.40

Hutcheon refers to the recipient as the “co-creator” of the fictional universe and equals

the act of writing to the act of reading, in that they both have “the creative function to which

the text draws attention.”41 Rather than concealing the process of artistic creation, the author-

narrator highlights them. According to Hutcheon, the novelist “actualizes the world of his

imagination through words”, and using the same words, the reader “manufactures in reverse a

literary universe that is as much his creation as it is the novelist’s.”42 These tendencies have

already been articulated by previous theoreticians. Hutcheon’s approach differs in her selection

of texts (the majority of them are twentieth century metafictions), in her emphasis of the role

of the reader, and in her familiarity with French criticism. In addition to Barthes, Hutcheon’s

study incorporates the respective theories of Julia Kristeva, Tzvetan Todorov, Gérard Genette

and Michel Foucault.

Following Hutcheon’s emphasis on the “mimesis of process”, metafiction is interpretable

as a narrative method highlighting the process of representation. The present thesis builds on

Hutcheon’s theory and draws from Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966) which deals

38 Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, Richard Miller, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974) 5. 39 Barthes, S/Z 5. 40 Barthes, S/Z 4. 41 Hutcheon 39. 42 Hutcheon 27.

with the changing tendencies of representation. Metafiction is therefore understood as a part of

broader tendencies in human thought, not as a separate genre of literature. Foucault’s

examination is used to venture beyond narratology and to approach metafiction in a contrastive

and interdisciplinary manner.

1.2 Las Meninas: A Visual Parallel to Self-Conscious Fiction

Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966) opens with the analysis of Diego

Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). With the elision of the object of mimesis, the painting is

“finally freed from the relation that was impeding it.”43 Las Meninas is the representation of a

representation in its purest form; it is the artistic rendering of the process of mimesis. This effect

is achieved by undertaking the arduous task of “represent[ing] itself […] in all its elements,

with its images, the eyes to which it is offered, the faces it makes visible, the gestures that call

it into being.”44 Velázquez’s painting foregrounds the complex interpretative question of our

understanding of the artistic representation of reality and the recipient’s role therein. Despite its

focus on mimesis, Foucault’s interpretation of Las Meninas is applicable to self-conscious

fiction as well and is used as a visual parallel to the textual representation of diegesis.

Foucault attempts to identify the initial center of Las Meninas: the only rectangular object

on the wall is not a painting but a shining mirror in which the painter’s original object is

reflected. In Foucault’s reading, it becomes “the perfect duplication” and mirrors what it should

according to the laws of physics.45 Although hardly noticeable, the two sovereigns are in the

artist’s (as well as the rest of the figures’) focus, and in effect, the “entire picture is looking out

at a scene for which it is itself a scene.”46 If we follow the interpretation of the two sovereigns

43 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An archaeology of the human sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (London:

Routledge, 2002) 18. 44 Foucault 17. 45 Foucault 8. 46 Foucault 15.

being the object of the painting, it must be emphasized that though their presence is not

discarded completely, it is considerably sidelined. The picture creates an illusion in which the

gaze of the painted figures appears to be fixed upon us. Foucault provides a different, self-aware

reading.

Las Meninas exposes its artificiality by breaking several ontological horizons. Foucault

asserts that the painter’s gaze is fixed towards “that space in which we are, and which we are”

and consequently, we as onlookers cannot evade his gaze, since “it runs through the real picture

and emerges from its surface to join the place from which we see the painter observing us.”47

The objects within the painting (and the painting itself) are aware of being watched (by

implication, of their own artificiality) and manifest their knowledge of this fact by peering in

our direction. The painting disregards the ontological layer designated for the work of art, and

departs from its original position to intrude upon the recipient’s reality to interact with it.

Foucault hypothesizes another instance of breaching of the ontological levels. He

contends that “[w]e are observing ourselves being observed by the painter” (although not

visually represented) and most importantly that we are “made visible to his eyes by the same

light that enables us to see him.” 48 The illuminating light is shared both by the artistic

representation and the recipient’s realm. It is the same light that brings into focus the objects of

Las Meninas: the gazes of the painted figures, which appear to be fixed on us, the observers.

The light coming in is natural. There is no artificial light in the form of candles and there are

no chandeliers in the room, almost as if to let the rest of the paintings be illuminated by natural

light, leaving them in relative obscurity. One can only trace the shape of their frames, but not

the actual paintings. By blurring them, their existence is acknowledged, but only as a distraction

47 Foucault 4. 48 Foucault 7.

to be disposed of. To represent the finished painting is to represent the mimesis of product.

Velázquez probes into the mimesis of process instead.

The two interpretations are not mutually exclusive. Even if one chooses to refuse the self-

conscious reading, he or she cannot dismiss its implications. The reading has already coerced

the recipient into interpreting the work of art in a certain way. In the case of the self-conscious

reading, it has undermined the well-established dichotomy of reality and work of art by

questioning the viability of the ontological layers (through their subsequent breaching): the

meaning of the work of art cannot be so easily identified or classified. Foucault’s reading of

Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas can be linked to Jacques Derrida’s concept of decentered texts.

Dealing away with the notion of a single-centered meaning (taken to be the author’s

“message” to the reader), the reader arrives at an infinity of meanings. Derrida’s conceives of

the text as “a world of signs without fault” where there is no truth nor origin—such a world is

“offered to an active interpretation.”49 Derrida claims that the reader is no longer asked to

choose just one possibility. If there is no center and consequently no authority, the recipient can

fully appreciate the text itself, the pleasure and amusement that arises from acknowledging its

multiple meanings as moveable, rather than stable entities. Not only can the reader enjoy the

multiplicity of the meanings, but also the freedom to choose (and conversely, not to choose).

Las Meninas achieves this multiplicity by neither confirming nor disproving the

recipient’s conjectures. One is free to follow the more conventional interpretation of being at

the back side of a transparent mirror, or that the gaze of the figures is indeed strong enough to

penetrate the ontological boundary between their and the recipient’s realms. In his analysis,

Foucault appears to favor two foci: the boundary between the two ontological realms, and the

painter’s canvas. He refers to it as “stubbornly invisible” as it “prevents the relation of [the

49 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, Writing and Difference,

trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978) 278-294. 292.

figures’] gazes from ever being discoverable or definitely established.”50 A potential meaning

of Las Meninas lies in the absence of one definite meaning. It is not merely relocated (the

sidelined sovereigns), it is dislocated and in effect multiplied.

Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas is not only an investigation into the possible meanings

of Diego Velázquez’s painting. By choosing Las Meninas, a visual work of art, Foucault

demonstrates self-aware tendencies in art in general. It is a painting that represents a

representation in the process of creation, a mimesis of a mimesis. Although dealing with

mimesis, Foucault’s analysis was used as a point of departure for the present study, which

focuses on textual representation of diegesis. Its visuaflity facilitates the recipient’s

understanding of self-awareness in other forms of art, including narrative fiction. Artistic self-

consciousness varies in its degree, and is used in the mimetic as well as in the diegetic mode.

1.3 From Structuralist to Poststructuralist Narratology

Monika Fludernik provides a critique of the structuralist exorbitant reliance on binaries

and structural dichotomies. The most notable one is Genette’s “panoply of binary oppositions”

wherein he “takes three categories and turns them into a hierarchy of binaries”: homodiegetic

vs. heterodiegetic, extradiegetic vs. intradiegetic, internal vs. external focalization. 51 The

narrator is either a character in the story or an entity outside it; he or she is either inside or

outside the story; the focalization takes place either internally or externally. Genette’s theory

therefore leaves very little space for narratives disregarding the conventional narrative

structures, be it deliberately or unintentionally.

50 Foucault 5. 51 Monika Fludernik, “Structuralist Narratology: The Rage for Binary Opposition, Categorization, and Typology”,

A Companion to Narrative Theory, James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, eds. (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005)

38-59. 38.

Mieke Bal, herself a structuralist, identifies the most problematic area of structuralist

narratology: it strives to create a model that is “so abstract that it may be considered universal”,

a model that is then contrasted with the investigated text and either “rejected or improved.”52

According to Bal, the goal of the structuralist narratology is not “to force the text into a general

model and then to conclude that the text is indeed a narrative”, but to examine “doubtful

cases.”53 This confrontation creates background for a more precise description. Bal concludes

that a perfect instance as well as “any deviations from the basis model can influence the

meaning of text.”54

The structuralist tendency to emphasize “binarism and typology” reflects the two primary

aims of structuralist narratology, as defined by Fludernik: “its aspirations to scientificity” and

“its ultimately descriptive aims”, both striving to provide “guidelines to interpretation

uncontaminated by the subjectivism of traditional literary criticism.” 55 However, the

structuralist theories largely ignore the reader’s role in the process and approach the work of art

as a stable and isolated entity.

Poststructuralism, on the other hand, embraces the multiplicity of meanings that a single

text implies. Instead of focusing on the structures internal to the text, poststructuralist

interpretations consider the recipient as an indispensable variable in the process of reading.

Ronald Barthes defined this tendency in his seminal essay “The Death of the Author”, in which

he proposes dethroning the concept of the real-life author for the sake of the reader’s

interpretative freedom.56

52 Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1999) 188. 53 Bal 188. 54 Bal 188. 55 Fludernik 38. 56 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”, Image-Music-Text, Stephen Heath, trans. (London: Fontana, 1977)

142-148.

Furthermore, the openness of a text discloses an essential aspect: its volatile and elusive

nature. Poststructuralism reveals that the meaning of the text is unstable, stemming from the

poststructuralist understanding of language and its “belief in the incommensurate qualities of

language.” 57 In Elements of Semiology, Barthes argues that structuralism is capable of

explaining any structure, but requires an interpretation. This interpretation is achieved through

the use of “metalanguage”; this “second-order” or “beyond” language is the medium for

referring to the “first-order” language, and most importantly, it bridges structuralism and

poststructuralism.58

Poststructuralist narratology is therefore viewed as a reaction to structuralist narratology,

but the two trends are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Although frequently viewed as “old-

fashioned” and “quaint” by poststructuralist narratology, James Phelan describes structuralist

(or classical) narratology a “stable landing, a theoretical bedrock of the fundamental and

unchanging principles on which narratives are built.”59

Fludernik points out that narratological analyses do not produce new readings of a text,

but frequently “highlight how the text manages to have certain effects and explain why these

occur.”60 The popularity of narrative theory lies in this focus. Fludernik contends that it “has

performed so well with postmodernist narrative” because of its “instruments”, which are

“eminently suited to demonstrating how mimetic traditions are being contravened and playfully

refunctionalized.”61 The individual classifications and typologies are not an end in themselves,

but a useful set of theoretical tools to be employed in the process of interpretation.

57 J. A. Cuddon, Claire Preston, eds. “Post-structuralism”, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary

Theory (London: Penguin, 1999) 690-693. 691. 58 Cuddon, Preston, “Post-structuralism” 691. 59 James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, “Introduction: Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Narrative Theory”,

A Companion to Narrative Theory, James Phelan, Peter J. Rabinowitz, eds. (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005)

1-16. 1. 60 Fludernik 39. 61 Fludernik 39.

Structuralist distinctions are functional in interpreting any complex narrative situation.

They are applicable to Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

(1760) as much as they are to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). One of the aspects

to be addressed in this respect is the distinction between the author and the narrator. As Mieke

Bal argues, it guides the reader in “disentangl[ing] the different voices that speak in a text” in

order “to make room for the reader’s input in the relative persuasiveness of those voices.”62

Dividing the work of art into separate structures implies assigning a post for the recipient.

I take the view that the poststructuralist emphasis on meaning is an extension of the

structuralist achievement in terms of defining and explaining structures, manifested in fiction

in the form of diegetic levels. Monika Fludernik identifies the trend wherein classical

narratology moved from the analyses of postmodernist texts as deviations from parameters,

both realistic and verisimilar, including the absence of plot, “contradictory character” or

“illogical concatenation of action sequence.” 63 The objective is to venture beyond mere

“description of defamiliarizing device” and head towards the analysis and interpretation of

metafictional practices.64

In a narrative analysis of metafictional texts the relationship between reality and fiction

must be addressed. The following analysis therefore first classifies the primary texts in terms

of narrative structures. This classification is used as a point of departure for subsequent

interpretation stressing the meaning in relation to the recipient. Therein lies the focal point of

the present thesis.

62 Bal 18. 63 Fludernik 43. 64 Fludernik 43.

1.4 Aims and Structure

The primary objective of the present thesis is to map correlations between narrative theory

and metafiction in a selection of self-reflexive texts. As Mark Currie argues, metafiction is a

genre located between fiction and critical writing.65 This status enables it to thematize the

process of artistic creation. This aspect is addressed in a different manner by respective authors.

Some of the selected texts overtly refer to the process of writing and include the character of

the writer. Other metafictional practices include framing, frame-breaking or addressing the

audience. The thesis traces metafictional elements in a selection of earlier texts and contrasts

them with a selection of post-War American metafiction.

Chapter two consists in a survey of pre-20th century texts with metafictional elements

(Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy). These representatives provide a contrast for the

following study of changing tendencies of representation. Chapter three makes use of the

metafictional theories and applies them to the selected post-War metafictions. Chapters two and

three are used as a point of departure for the Chapter four which attempts to interpret the

changing tendencies in representation within the framework of Foucault’s epistemes. The

chapter also addresses the meaning of metafictional texts in the light of Wolfgang Iser’s theory.

Chapter five provides a summary of the entire thesis, reiterates its main arguments and discusses

its results.

65 Mark Currie, “Introduction”, Metafiction, Mark Currie, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013) 1-20. 2.

2. Chapter Two: Pre-20th Century Self-Conscious Narratives

2.1 Introduction

The objective of the present chapter is to provide a brief historical survey of pre-20th

century texts with metafictional elements, not only from the Anglophone canon (Henry

Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,

Gentleman (1760)) but from world literature as well (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don

Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615)). The prose texts are selected as representatives of self-

reflexive tendencies in the earlier days of the novel, and most importantly, they provide a point

of departure for the contrastive study of historical development of narrative in metafiction in

Chapter four.

Patricia Waugh observes that although postmodern philosophies descend from those of

modernism, “its formal techniques seem often to have originated from novels like Tristram

Shandy (1760), Don Quixote (1604) or Tom Jones (1749).”1 The analysis of the selected texts

focuses on manifestations of narrative self-consciousness, such as the question of authorship,

narrative time, extra-linguistic means of expression and the character of the narrator. Chapter

three concentrates on the same areas in the selection of post-War American metafictional texts.

From the field of narratology, Chapters two and three draw on Shlomith Rimmon-

Kenan’s Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse: An

Essay in Method and touch upon Franz Stanzel’s A Theory of Narrative. Rimmon-Kenan’s

Narrative Fiction is used as a frame of reference to the narrative structures in the primary texts.

Genette’s theory provides a framework for the study of intrusions (metalepses); some of the

selected texts include narrative transgressions, wherein a character from one diegetic level

1 Waugh 24.

trespasses upon different diegetic level (typically from the extradiegetic on the diegetic level).

Stanzel’s A Theory of Narrative is used to differentiate between the ‘narrator’ who is wittingly

involved in the story, and the ‘reflector’, a character whose psyche is the mirror of the events

within the novel. Stanzel’s distinction is essential for metafiction, since it implies narrative self-

awareness.

2.2 Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra’s Don Quixote de la Mancha

The following paragraphs illustrate some of the manifestations of narrative self-

consciousness in the earliest of the selected texts, Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra’s Don

Quixote (1605, 1615). Bran Nicol characterizes Cervantes’s magnum opus in relation to

postmodernism and argues that it features “layering of authorial frame […], narrative

digressions, references to other works by Cervantes and to its developing story” and in effect

“parod[ies] the conventions of the novel form […] before it has properly begun.”2

From the opening, Don Quixote exposes the process of creation. In the “Author’s Preface”,

the author-narrator (purported to be Cervantes himself) discusses the character of Don Quixote

and voices his fear that his character “shall remain buried in the archives of his own La Mancha”

until “Heaven provide[s] some one to garnish him with all those things he stands in need of.”3

In particular, the author-narrator refers to his being “shy and careless about hunting for authors

to say what [he himself] can say without them.”4 The first focus of the narrator’s analysis are

“the sonnets, epigrams, or complimentary verses”, which “ought to be by persons of importance

and rank”—these could be written by the narrator himself and later “baptise[d]”: he is to “put

2 Bran Nicol, The Cambridge Introduction to Cambridge Fiction (Cambridge: CUP, 2009) 38. 3 Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra, Don Quixote, trans. John Ormsby, (Project Gutenberg, 2004)

<http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/996/pg996-images.html> 15 Jan 2017. 30. PDF. 4 Cervantes 30.

any name [he] like[s] to them, fathering them on Prester John of the Indies or the Emperor of

Trebizond” who “were said to have been famous poets.”5

It is suggested that the narrator should make use of “aphorisms and sayings”, preferably

in Latin, as he will be “take[n] for a grammarian at all events” which is “no small honour to

profit.”6 The narrator is encouraged to use clichés, such as calling every giant in the story a

“Goliath”, or mentioning the river Tagus in a platitude-ridden description: “it has its source in

such and such a place and falls into the ocean, kissing the walls of the famous city of Lisbon,

and it is a common belief that it has golden sand etc.”7

Patricia Waugh argues that Cervantes “parodied the outmoded conventions of the

Romance.” 8 The narrator’s friend’s suggestions are therefore critiques of Romances and

overused practices of the obsolete genre. It needs to be emphasized that the parodic effect is

achieved by exposing the process of creation. Before its beginning, the narrator discusses the

method which he is to employ in the novel. The bulk of Don Quixote is evidence that he adheres

to these rules, as discussed in the preface. One such manifestation is Cervantes’ use of

metalepses. Gérard Genette defines metalepsis as the “transition from one narrating level to

another” and describes the boundary as “a shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds”, the

first one being “the world in which one tells” and the second one “the world of which one tells.”9

In the sixth chapter of the first volume, the curate and the barber decide to eliminate

Quixote’s books, considered to be “the authors of all the mischief.”10 At first, they are set to

browse through them to see if “there might be some […] among them that did not deserve the

5 Cervantes 31. 6 Cervantes 31. 7 Cervantes 31. 8 Waugh 70. 9 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Ewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1983) 234, 236. Emphasis mine. 10 Cervantes 50.

penalty of fire”, but end up burning virtually all of them, the most prominent exception being

“The ‘Galatea’” whose author is Miguel de Cervantes.11 The example involves metalepsis:

characters from the intradiegetic level (the barber, the housekeeper, the curate) intrude upon the

realm of extradiegetic characters (the author-narrator). The metalepsis is further elaborated on

when the two characters discuss the author. The curate refers to him as a “great friend of [his]”

and states that “he has had more experience in reverses than in verses.”12

Though spared of flames, the author of the book is not spared of criticism, as the curate

points out that although Cervantes’s “book has some good invention in it, it presents us with

something but brings nothing to a conclusion.”13 The curate affirms his position in the universe

of the author-narrator and by doing so, an interconnection between the realm of the characters

and that of the author is brought about. More importantly, the curate anticipates the second part,

saying that “we must wait for the Second Part it promises” and goes on to say that “perhaps

with amendment it may succeed in winning the full measure of grace that it is now denied it.”14

By commenting on La Galatea in hindsight (it was published in 1585, twenty years before the

first part of Don Quixote), Cervantes violates and problematizes the levels within fiction, but

also between fiction and reality.

The passage is a reference to “Author’s Preface”, in which his friend assures the author

that should “any pedants or bachelors […] attack [him] and question the fact” about the veracity

of the author’s quotations, “they cannot cut off the hand [he] wrote it with” not “even if they

prove a lie against [him].”15 The curate’s criticism is related to the author’s statement that since

the book has been composed by “this sterile, illtilled wit of [his]”, it is a “dry, shriveled,

11 Cervantes 50, 53. 12 Cervantes 53. 13 Cervantes 53. 14 Cervantes 53-54. 15 Cervantes lost his arm in the battle of Lepanto (Edward C. Riley, Anne J. Cruz, “Miguel de Cervantes”,

Encyclopedia Britannica, < https://www.britannica.com/biography/Miguel-de-Cervantes> 22 Jan 2017). The

friend’s advice alludes to Cervantes’s injury. Cervantes 31.

whimsical offspring, full of thoughts of all sorts and such as never came into any other

imagination.”16 In addition, its conception was exacerbated by the conditions in which it was

written—in prison. In Don Quixote, the characters and the author inhabit the same realm and

are free to interact with each other.

Linda Hutcheon points out that Don Quixote is “one of the self-informing fictions that

thematize the power, the consequences, and the very workings of both the creative imagination

and the language of literature.”17 This effect is achieved by the protagonist’s overinterpretation.

Michel Foucault points out that Don Quixote “read so many books that he became a sign”, one

that is “wandering through a world that [does] not recognize him.”18 The narrative of Don

Quixote thematizes and problematizes the potential of the language of literature. Fiction

becomes reality for Quixote.

Foucault asserts that “[t]he written word and things no longer resemble each other.”19

Their existence blends into a seamless continuum where fact and fiction are no longer

recognizable. Foucault observes that

Flocks, serving girls, and inns become once more the language of

books to the imperceptible degree to which they resemble castles, ladies,

and armies—a perpetually untenable resemblance which transforms the

sought-for proof into derision and leaves the words of the books forever

hollow.20

The humorous potential of Don Quixote relies on the reader’s understanding that Don

Quixote misinterprets reality and takes it to be fiction.

In one episode Quixote’s niece and housekeeper fabricate a story about the sudden

disappearance of Don Quixote’s library. To succeed they accept the language and logic of the

16 Cervantes 29. 17 Hutcheon 37-38. 18 Foucault 53. 19 Foucault 53. 20 Foucault 52.

chivalric romance. The housekeeper informs Quixote that it was “the devil himself”, while the

niece suggests that it was “the Sage Munaton.”21 After a minor correction (Don Quixote states

that the sage’s name was “Friston”22), he is willing to accept their story. The niece and the

housekeeper provide Don Quixote with evidence that the fictional world of romance is actual

reality. To attribute his apparent gullibility to madness alone is to miss an essential implication:

Quixote believes them because they reach out to him in his own code, in the code of the chivalric

romance. Don Quixote begs the following question: are there any limits for us as readers in our

participation in the process of interpretation? When we co-create the fictional universe, are we

still to distinguish between fiction and reality?

Metalepses as used in Don Quixote imply problematic authorship. In “Author’s Preface”,

the author-narrator refers to himself as “the stepfather of Don Quixote”, although he hints at his

unreliability by confessing that he merely “pass[es] for the father.”23 On a different occasion,

Don Quixote’s fight with the gallant Biscayan is interrupted. The narrator announces that

Quixote’s “delightful history came to a stop” in which “the valiant Biscayan and the renowned

Don Quixote with drawn swords uplifted” were ready to strike one another.24 Having reached

a halt in the narration, the narrator inserts a digression describing the acquisition of the missing

part.

Wandering through “the Alcala at Toledo”, the narrator chances upon a script written in

Arabic, which happens to be a manuscript of the missing exploits of Don Quixote.25 The

interpreter confirms that the text is indeed about Don Quixote by translating: “This Dulcinea

del Toboso so often mentioned in this history, had, they say, the best hand of any woman in all

21 Cervantes 56. 22 Cervantes 56. 23 Cervantes 29. 24 Cervantes 62. 25 Cervantes 62.

La Mancha for salting pigs.” 26 The interpreter’s laugher is the same as the reader’s: he

recognizes the discrepancy between his and Quixote’s misunderstanding of reality. Moreover,

this remark is “written in the margin of the book”27, a device recommended to the author-

narrator in the preface. The chapter is inserted between two chapters which form a part of

Quixote’s narrative. By exposing the circumstances of the story’s origin, the position of the

chapter widens the gap between fiction and reality, which is further corroborated by the

narrator’s miraculous discovery of the story.

Noticeably, the narrator does not refer to the adventures prior to Quixote’s fight with the

Biscayan and continues from the interrupted moment. The author of the book is said to be “Cid

Hamete Benengeli, an Arabian historian”, and his account is translated by an unnamed

“Morisco.”28 The original text is first translated from Arabic into Spanish, and then edited by

the author-narrator. The self-consciousness of the narrative is further bolstered by the editor’s

intrusions on the narrative, such as his commentary on Cid Hamete Benengeli’s “asseveration,

‘I swear as a true Catholic!’”29 In his study of Don Quixote, John Parr argues that “one voice

undermines its predecessor”, thus “subverting its authority” in order to “have the process

reinforce itself in a regress until all narrative authority, and implicitly the authority of the printed

page itself, is called into question.”30 The problematized authorship in Don Quixote emphasizes

the convoluted and sometimes indiscernible relationships between different levels of fiction, as

well as between fiction and reality. To write about the mad Quixote, the narrative becomes mad

as well.

When Don Quixote speaks to Gines, the former learns that the imprisoned author is

writing a book about himself, entitled “The Life of Gines de Pasamonte”. Gines stresses the

26 Cervantes 62. 27 Cervantes 62. 28 Cervantes 63. 29 Cervantes 405. 30 James A. Parr, An Anatomy of Subversive Discourse (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta: 1988) 9.

veracity of his account, stating that “it deals with facts, and facts so neat and diverting that no

lies could match them.”31 Similarly, the author-narrator of Don Quixote repeatedly emphasizes

that the book he is writing is ‘a true history’, as is propounded even in the titles of some chapters,

e.g. “one of the rarest Adventures in this veracious history.”32 In the preface to the second part

of Don Quixote it is stated that the Knight is “at last brought to his death” so that “nobody may

presume to raise any more stories of him.”33 The idea of killing Quixote to finish his story (and

thus preventing other copies to be published) echoes Quixote’s discussion with Gines. When

asked whether the book he is writing about himself, “The Life of Gines de Pasamonte”, is

finished, the imprisoned author retorts: “How can it be finished, when my life is not yet

finished?” 34 Gines and the author-narrator share the obsession with the veracity of their

respective accounts.

In the second part of Don Quixote one of the characters, Samson Carrasco, introduces the

first part to Quixote and Sancho Panza themselves. The passage includes commentaries on

receptions of the novel. Carrasco states that some readers “swear by the adventures of the

windmills”, while others by “that of the dead body on its way to be buried in Segovia.”35 The

narrative reaches its peak in terms of self-reflexivity: the characters become fully fictionalized,

fact and fiction completely indiscernible. Foucault observes that “[t]he first part of the hero’s

adventures plays in the second part the role originally assumed by the chivalric romances.”36 In

the first part of Don Quixote, the eponymous character experiences the adventures in his highly

subjective way and in the second part, he is presented the ultimate proof of the veracity of his

31 Cervantes 125. 32 Cervantes 128. 33 Cervantes 292. 34 Cervantes 125. 35 Cervantes 303. 36 Foucault 53.

vision of reality. For Don Quixote the first book is the confirmation that his exploits were indeed

‘a true history’.

2.3 Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling

Franz Stanzel juxtaposes two narrative extremes: narrator and reflector. To fully

differentiate between the two concepts, Stanzel introduces the concept of ‘mediacy’. In case of

the reflector character, the events are reflected on his or her mind. Since he or she does not

narrate, the reflector does not verbalize his or her thoughts.37 The events are presented “in actu”

and the narrative establishes an illusion of immediacy.38 In other words, the reflector character

is not aware of being in the story, of his or her fictive status. One of the implications is that he

or she cannot comment on the story and anticipate its future development. In contrast, the

narrator’s status allows him or her to comment on the story, and in case of omniscient narrator,

to foreshadow events yet to happen.

As is argued below, the narrator of Tom Jones is strongly self-aware. Creating an ‘illusion

of immediacy’ is not required and would have detrimental effect on the narrative strategies of

the story. Using the authorial narrator, the narrative in Tom Jones repeatedly refers to the act of

narration, comments on the story and discusses the role of literature. This is perceptible from

the opening chapter to which the narrator refers to as “a general bill of fare to our whole

entertainment.”39 Literature is likened to feasts: “An author ought to consider himself […] as

one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money” and like

“the master of the ordinary” it should attempt to “prevent […] giving offence to their customers

by any […] disappointment.”40 The conceit is down-to-earth; the narrator does not “disdain to

borrow it or wisdom from any man who is capable of lending [him]” and has “condescended to

37 Franz K. Stanzel, Teorie vyprávění, trans. Jiří Stromšík (Praha: Odeon, 1988) 180. Paraphrased by the author. 38 Stanzel 178. 39 Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1992) 1. 40 Fielding 1.

take a hint from these honest victullers.”41 He goes on to pursue the metaphor by comparing

“true nature” in with the authors to “the Bayonne ham, or Bologna sausage.”42 The chapter

concludes by the narrator stating that he “shall proceed directly to serve up the first course of

[his] history for [the readers’] entertainment.”43

From the opening the narrative establishes a link between a work of fiction and

consumption. This link is parallel to the fictional world of the characters and the material world

of the readers. Linda Hutcheon argues that in Tom Jones, “[t]he presence of an authorial

narrating figure served as mediator” and that “the act of narration oriented the reader temporally

and spatially in the fictive universe.”44 The narrator’s metaphor approximates the fictional

universe to that of the reader by concentrating on a shared point of interest. The narrator

announces that chapters such as the first one are to be prefixes to the individual volumes. It is

stated that he “shall give the reader particular bills to every course which is to be served up in

this and the ensuing volumes.”45 Apart from the mundane connotations of food consumption,

the narrator refers to a “feast.” Literature is both everyday and festive.

From the total of eighteen, every book of Tom Jones is prefaced by an introductory

chapter. The regular alternations are an example of Franz Stanzel notion of ‘narrative rhythm’,

or alternations between the narrator’s involvement and inactivity in the story.46 Joan Douglas

Peters points out that in early novels, including Tom Jones, “the authors use their prefaces

straightforwardly to assure readers and patrons of their proper moral intentions.”47 From the

variety of other possible motivations for the introductory chapters, the most relevant one for the

41 Fielding 1-2. 42 Fielding 2. 43 Fielding 3. 44 Hutcheon 44. 45 Fielding 1. 46 Stanzel 83. 47 Jean Douglas Peters, Feminist Metafiction and the Evolution of the British Novel (Gainesville: University Press

of Florida, 2002) 37.

present discussion is that it enables the narrator to disclose the gap between literature and real

life. By doing so, the narrator establishes an intimate relationship between the reader and

himself on the basis of shared knowledge. Hutcheon points out that in Tom Jones, “it is almost

as if the reader’s primary relationship were meant to be with the guiding narrator-writer, rather

than with the characters.”48

The link between the narrator and the reader is created outside the introductory chapters

as well. Later in the novel, the narrator points out that “the reader may have hitherto concluded”

that “[t]he coach which had brought the young lady and her maid” was “her own” but it was in

fact “a returned coach belonging to Mr King, of Bath.”49 Mr King, the narrator tells us, was

“one of the worthiest and honestest men that ever dealt in horse-flesh” whose “coaches we [the

narrator] heartily recommend to all our readers who travel that road.” 50 Apart from the

humorous effect (an advertisement in a novel), the narrator exposes another instance of shared

elements between the fictional universe and the reader, as he suggests that the reader “may,

perhaps, have the pleasure of riding in the very coach, and being driven by the very coachman,

that is recorded in this history.”51 This phenomenon is further examined in Chapter four.

Tom Jones includes opposite tendencies as well. Patricia Waugh contends that the

practice of the speaking names (e.g. Squire Allworthy) “is deployed explicitly to split open the

conventional ties between the real and fictive worlds rather than to reinforce them by mapping

out a moral framework”, as “what is referred to has been created […] through a ‘naming’

process.”52 As a result, “[i]n metafiction such names remind us that, in all fiction, names can

describe as they refer.”53 Speaking names therefore serve to undermine the realism of the novel.

48 Hutcheon 27. 49 Fielding 36 (2nd part). 50 Fielding 36 (2nd part). 51 Fielding 36 (2nd part). 52 Waugh 94. 53 Waugh 94.

The position of the narrator has similar effect. He is a mediator between two worlds. This

status ostensibly establishes a connection between the two different realms (that of the

characters, and that of the readers), but in fact it widens the gap between them. The narrator

affirms his supreme status over his fiction when he proclaims that he is not “accountable to any

court of critical jurisdiction whatever” since he is “in reality, the founder of a new province of

writing” and therefore is “at liberty to make what laws [he] please[s] therein.”54 He claims that

his characters, “whom [he] consider[s] as [his] subjects, are bound to believe in and to obey

[these laws]”, only to contradict himself immediately by saying that he does not “imagine that

they are [his] slaves, or [his] commodity”, and concludes that he is “set over them for their own

good only.”55

The narrator’s alleged omniscience is in stark contrast with recurring avowals of not

knowing. After Tom’s full recovery, the eponymous character ventures to look for his sword

and the narrator openly admits that he does not know the motivation why the “centinel” fired

at Tom: “Whether fear or courage was the occasion of his firing, or whether he took aim at the

object of his terror, I cannot say.”56 Through his self-awareness as a mediator between the

fictive universe and the reader, the narrator underscores the problematic link between them.

F. Kaplan contends that “Fielding’s prefaces not only embody his concern about the

problems of fiction he must confront in the writing of the novel, but also the problem of how to

write about the problems.”57 Kaplan’s observation can be illustrated by the narrator’s discussion

of intertextuality. The narrator points out that he has “often translated passages out of the best

antient authors, without quoting the original, or without taking the least notice of the book from

54 Fielding 38. 55 Fielding 38. 56 Fielding 294. 57 F. Kaplan, “Fielding’s Novel about Novels: The ‘Prefaces’ and the ‘Plot’ of Tom Jones”, Studies in English

Literature, 1500-1900, Rice University 13.3 (1973): 538, JSTOR <http://www.jstor.org/stable/450005> 18 Jan

2017.

whence they were borrowed.”58 He then complains that “by suppressing the original author’s

name” he has been “suspected of plagiarism than reputed to act from [an] amiable motive.”59

The narrator claims the right to use freely the writings of “Homer, Virgil, Horace, Cicero, and

the rest” and concludes: “I absolutely claim a property in all such sentiments the moment they

are transcribed into [his] writings, and [he] expect[s] all readers henceforwards to regard them

as purely and entirely [his] own.”60

The narrator’s discussion anticipates the modern problems of copyright. He argues that

appropriating the works of ancient authors is legally legitimate, but should he borrow “any of

that little of which [his contemporaries] are possessed” he swears to “put their mark upon it” so

that “it may be at all times ready to be restored to the right owner.”61 Kaplan asserts that Fielding

foregrounds the “poet, novelist, painter […] of the nineteenth and twentieth century whose self-

conscious concern with himself and his art is a measure of the intense importance with which

he invests his role.”62 Equally modern is the employment of intratextuality. In the beginning of

Book III, the narrator states that

The reader will be pleased to remember, that, at the beginning of

the second book if this history, we gave him a hint of our intention to

pass over several large periods of time, in which nothing happened

worthy of being recorded in a chronicle of this kind.63

The relation of Tom Jones to the 20th century fiction is discussed in depth in Chapter four.

Tom Jones is narrated using the first-person narration. However, narrators who are fully

involved in the story need to be distinguished from those who do not directly partake in it. In

case of Tom Jones, it is the latter: the narrator is peripheral to the story and it is this narrative

58 Fielding 99 (2nd part). 59 Fielding 99 (2nd part). 60 Fielding 100 (2nd part). 61 Fielding 100-101 (2nd part). 62 Kaplan 549. 63 Fielding 69.

distance allows him to voice his observations on the story. The introductory chapters frequently

include literary discussions, such as the observation that “every book ought to be read with the

same spirit and in the same manner as it is writ.”64 The narrator refers to literature in general,

as well as to his own writing. He is aware of the literary status of his own work.

The title of the chapter is equally self-conscious, as it alludes to its own material

properties: “Containing five pages of paper.”65 As is discussed above, the narrator’s detachment

from the story allows him to anticipate events of the story. Gérard Genette discusses the

“avowedly retrospective character” of the first person narration and argues that it “authorizes

the narrator to allude to the future […] situation.”66 He refers to such instances as “advance

mentions” and “insignificant seeds” whose “importance as a seed will not be recognized until

later, and retrospectively.”67 One of the implications is that the narrator is free to manipulate

the order of the story and that of narration (Shklovsky’s fabula and sujet, Genette’s histoire and

discours).

The name of the introductory self-conscious chapter is “Showing what kind of a history

this is; what it is like, and what it is not like.”68 It announces that the narrator will take

considerable liberties in terms of selecting events that he deems important and the ones that he

does not: “When any extraordinary scene presents itself […], we shall spare no pains nor paper

to open it at large to our reader”, but should the case be opposite, such as “if whole years should

pass without producing anything worthy his notice, we shall not be afraid of a chasm in our

history.”69

64 Fielding 97. 65 Fielding 97. 66 Genette 67. 67 Genette 75-76. 68 Fielding 37. 69 Fielding 37-38.

As has been pointed out above by Linda Hutcheon, the narrator establishes a relationship

between himself and the reader. The reader is to trust the narrator, as the latter bears the reader’s

good in mind. Not to bore him or her, he “shall hasten on to matters of consequence” and leave

uneventful periods “totally unobserved.”70 The narrator supremely affirms his fictional status

when he proclaims that he “was created for [the use of his characters], and not they for mine.”71

2.4 Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Having reached the end of the sixth volume (from the total of nine), the eponymous

narrator of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman states that

he is now “beginning to get fairly into [his] work” and hopes to continue his and his uncle

Toby’s story “in a tolerable straight line.” 72 As an illustration of his narrative strategies,

Tristram provides a sketch of the first four volumes for the reader:

It is contrasted with the graphic representation of the fifth volume:

70 Fielding 38. 71 Fielding 38. 72 Sterne 391. 73 Sterne 391.

In the chapter, Tristram analyzes his own narrative method and argues that “[i]n the fifth

volume [he has] been very good.”75 He describes every curve with the corresponding divagation,

stating that except for these exceptions, he has “not taken the least frisk of a digression.”76

Tristram completely disregards the chronology in his story with the reader in mind,

because “when a man is telling a story in the strange way [he does his]”, he is inevitably

“obliged continually to be going backwards and forwards to keep all tight together in the

reader’s fancy.”77 As Patricia Waugh argues, Tristram’s free use of narrative time exemplifies

the difference between Shklovsky’s terms fabula and sujet. By being a “novel about itself”,

Tristram Shandy is “thoroughly aesthetic in Shklovsky’s use of the term”, since it is “a novel

about the transformation of its ‘story’ into ‘plot’.”78 Tristram compliments himself on his

progress and proclaims that he “may arrive […] at the excellency of going on even”79, as a

perfectly straight line:

74 Sterne 392. 75 Sterne 392. 76 Sterne 392. 77 Sterne 383. 78 Waugh 70. 79 Sterne 392. 80 Sterne 392.

Linear time measured by the clock is referred to from the opening of the novel, when the

conception of Tristram was interrupted by his mother asking his father: “Pray, my dear […],

have you not forgot to wind up the clock?”81 The narrator attributes his misfortunes precisely

to that moment, “because it scattered and dispersed the animal spirits, whose business it was to

have escorted and gone hand-in-hand with the HOMUNCULUS” and whose task it was to have

“conducted him safe to the place destined for his reception.”82 In his endnotes based on the

Florida edition, Melvyn New argues that Sterne relied greatly “arcane learning” when writing

Tristram Shandy and that “the animal spirits” were “intended to account for the interaction of

mind and body.”83 Given the power that the narrator attributes to the obsolete knowledge and

symbolism, it could be argued that he is conceived under the sign of stopped clock. If the reader

accepts Tristram’s logic, it influences his idiosyncratic and self-reflexive handling of narrative

time.

Walter Shandy attributes equal significance to the narrator’s name. As has been argued

above in relation to Tom Jones, in fiction, “names can describe as they refer” but by doing so,

they undergo a “naming process” which “split[s] open the conventional ties between the real

and fictive worlds.”84 Susannah the servant misremembers the propitious name of Trismegistus

and delivers ‘Tristram’ instead.85 Accepting the Shandean logic, even the naming process was

under the influence of “the animal spirits.” Although his parents conceived Tristram physically,

he conceives himself artistically: he writes himself. In addition to being his own biographer,

Tristram interprets the events of his life. What appears to be a misattribution of the influence

of his name or of “the animal spirits” (being devoid of causal links) is an integrated part of

Tristram’s understanding of reality, a reality that he himself constructs.

81 Sterne 6. 82 Sterne 6. 83 Melvyn New, in Sterne 546. 84 Waugh 94. 85 Sterne 235-236.

The last of the three sketches above includes a commentary on the medium of its creation.

It was written by “a writing-master’s ruler […] borrowed for that purpose.”86 In contrast with

the previous two schemata, the last one seems to be sterile, “turning neither to the right or to

the left.”87 It lacks Tristram’s subjective perspective, marked by the meandering narrative. The

commentary is one of many instances in which the narrator refers to the physical medium used

for writing. Tristram’s proclamation that his “[l]ife follows his pen”88 is a subversion of the

genre of autobiography. The implication is that by narrating his life Tristram writes himself. He

is his own creator. On a different occasion, Tristram states that he is “confident of [his] own

way of [beginning a book]”, which is at the same time “the most religious” as he “begin[s] with

writing the first sentence—and trust[s] to Almighty God for the second.” 89 The pen that

Tristram as the creator of his own life follows is also influenced by what he believes to be a

deity. The implications are discussed below.

In a letter to Dr. John Eustace, Sterne referred to the walking stick of his friend: “Your

walking stick is in no sense more shandiac than in that of its having more handles than one”;

the parallel between the two “breaks only in [that] in using the stick, every one will take the

handle which suits his convenience.”90 Sterne continues that “[i]n Tristram Shandy, the handle

is taken which suits [the readers’] passions, their ignorance or sensibility.”91 In passing the

metaphorical walking stick to the reader, the author not only bestows the right to interpret on

the reader. It is a demand: the reader must assume a stance, or drop the stick. As the narrator

writes, the “truest respect which [one] can pay to the reader’s understanding is to halve this

matter amicably” which would “leave [the reader] some things to imagine in his turn, as well

86 Sterne 392. 87 Sterne 392. 88 Sterne 571. 89 Sterne 450. 90 Laurence Sterne, Letters of Laurence Sterne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935) 411. 91 Sterne, Letters of Laurence Sterne 411.

as [to the author].”92 Reading and writing is a joint enterprise: the author provides the material

and the reader interprets it.

When the narrator recalls the death of Yorick, he includes the description of his friend’s

grave, followed by two black pages.93 Melvyn New’s endnote states that “Sterne’s black page

may reflect an earlier elegiac tradition in which words were printed with white letters on black

paper.”94 However, Tristram does not include an inscription. Arguably, the narrator deliberately

avoids any linguistic medium, thus relying on purely extra-linguistic means of expressing his

grief. Similarly, when uncle Toby and Corporal Trim discuss the advantages of celibacy, the

latter states: “[w]hilst a man is free” and instead of finishing the utterance, the narrator provides

another extra-linguistic feature:

92 Sterne 88. 93 Sterne 29-30. 94 New, in Sterne 553. 95 Sterne 506.

The narrator chooses an allegedly straightforward feature to disambiguate: “A thousand

of [his] father’s syllogisms could not have said more for celibacy” and immediately contradicts

himself when the stick becomes a “wand” with which Trim “had unwarily conjured up the Spirit

of calculation” and had to “conjure him down again with his story.”96 Instead of preventing a

potential ambiguity, the extra-linguistic sign produces a digression. The flourish reaches outside

the text and generates double-meaning in relation to the recipient as well. As Melvyn New

argues, “Trim’s flourish seems to resemble eighteenth-century illustrations of the motions of a

spermatozoon.”97 Even an illustration used to simplify the communication between the reader

and the narrator complicates the process.

At its most extreme, the narrator includes a blank page. Hutcheon asserts that “Fielding

tells his reader […] how to read” since he or she is “the consumer of his wares”, a notion

parodied in Tristram Shandy: “in order to show the respect for his reader’s imagination” the

narrator leaves blanks as a means of “promot[ing] active reader involvement.”98 The blank page

calls for contrast with a different extra-textual medium, illustration. Illustration serves as a

graphic representation of an event in the story, but it is already mediated through the perception

of the author.99 When ‘reading’ an illustration, the reader is interpreting not only a different

medium but an already existing interpretation of the original. The blank page, on the contrary,

is devoid semantically, and demands the reader’s participation in the process of interpretation.

The narrator encourages the reader to imagine the widow Wadman who was more

“concupiscible” than “any thing in this world.”100 Providing the reader with a blank, the narrator

urges the recipient to “call for pen and ink” and “paint her to [the reader’s] own mind—as like

96 Sterne 506. 97 New, in Sterne 658. 98 Hutcheon 142. 99 The authorship and degree of mediacy of illustrations are problematized in the works of Kurt Vonnegut, who

authored them in his own books. It is discussed in Chapters three and four. 100 Sterne 388.

[the reader’s] mistress as [the reader] can” and “as unlike as [his] wife as [his] conscience will

let [him].”101 Whether the narrator means painting the widow Wadman figuratively or literally

is unimportant: the emphasis is on the interpretation, not on its form. Following the blank page,

the characters react as if there were an actual illustration of her or her description: “Was ever

any thing in Nature so sweet!---so exquisite!”102 The chapter is concluded by the narrator’s

commentary in which he confirms the self-conscious nature of his narrative: “Thrice happy

book! thou wilt have one page, at least, within thy covers, which MALICE will not blacken,

and which IGNORANCE cannot misrepresent.”103 As the quotation shows, granting the reader

the interpretative freedom implies transference of responsibility. It is the reader who is

responsible for the final image, not the author or the narrator.

Tristram conceives of literature as of a dialogue between the narrator and the reader. He

states that “[w]riting, when properly managed […] is but a different name for conversation”

and claims that the reader “may be sure [Tristram] think[s his] is.”104 Tristram’s stances towards

the reader vary and the range is wide: one extreme is the amiable Tristram, who takes the reader

to be a friend and equal partner in the process of interpretation and creation (as discussed above

in relation to the reader’s interpretative freedom), an attitude propounded from the beginning

of Book I:

As you proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance which is

now beginning betwixt us will grow into familiarity; and that, unless

one of us is at fault, will terminate in friendship.—O diem

praeclarum!—then nothing which has touched me will be thought

trifling it its nature, or tedious in its telling.105

101 Sterne 388. 102 Sterne 390. 103 Sterne 390. 104 Sterne 88. 105 Sterne 11.

The other extreme is that of a superior who rebukes the reader: “Read, read, read, read, my

unlearned reader, read.”106 On a different occasion, the narrator explains the narrative steps to

the reader: “’Tis for an episode hereafter; and every circumstance relating to its in proper place,

shall be faithfully laid before you.”107 Hutcheon contends that Tristram Shandy anticipates

modernism and postmodernism. Her assessment is partially based on these addresses, though

not on the direct ones, but instead “through the characters who act as surrogates for the reader,

anticipating his various interpretative responses.”108

These surrogate characters are called “narratees”. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan defines

narratee as “the agent addressed by the narrator” who is “sometimes fully personified,

sometimes not.”109 Similarly to the narrators, narratees can be extradiegetic or intradiegetic (i.e.

outside or within the story, respectively).110 Tristram Shandy includes instances of both. The

narrator’s frequent addresses to the reader are examples of the extradiegetic narratee (a term

which coincides with ‘implied reader’111). The text is rife with instances of the intradiegetic

narratees, such as the frequent references to a member of the fictional audience, which are very

specific. For instance, the narrator distinguishes between the sexes (“Sir” or “Madam”).

Rimmon-Kenan points out that similarly to narrators, narratees can also be reliable or unreliable.

An example of the latter that she provides comes from Tristram Shandy: “—How could you,

Madam, be so inattentive in reading the last chapter?”112 Rimmon-Kenan contends that “[i]n

addition to undermining the separation between narration and story, Tristram Shandy also

places narratee and story on the same level.”113 By including a fictional audience, the narrator

106 Sterne 184. 107 Sterne 55. 108 Hutcheon 142. 109 Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Routledge, 2002) 106. 110 Rimmon-Kenan 107. 111 Rimmon-Kenan 107. 112 Rimmon-Kenan 108, Sterne 48. 113 Rimmon-Kenan 96.

creates an illusion of immediacy—the recipient is not reading the book on his or her own, but

in a group of addressees.

3. Chapter Three: Post-War American Metafiction

3.1 Introduction

Using Genette’s structuralist approach as a point of departure, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan

analyzes narratives within narratives that “create a stratification of levels whereby each inner

narrative is subordinate to the narrative within which it is embedded.” 1 The structure is

hierarchical: the highest level, which is “concerned with its narration” is called “extradiegetic”,

while the events of the story, or the “level narrated by it” is referred to as “diegetic.”2

Analyzing the narrative structures poses the danger of marginalizing the meaning of the

text itself. However, John Barth assumes a disinterested, almost scientific approach to the

narrative self-awareness in his Lost in the Funhouse (1968). Structuralist distinctions

(extradiegetic and diegetic, diegetic and hypodiegetic narrative layers) are vital for discussing

the self-conscious author-narrator. The present chapter makes use of those distinctions as a

point of departure, and attempts to provide possible interpretations, included in this chapter and

in Chapter four, which focuses on interpretation and historical development. In addition to

Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, the present chapter introduces the remaining primary texts:

Donald Barthelme’s Snow White (1967) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

3.2 John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse

Bran Nicol contends that given the way “writing functions as a separate realm from the

real world” the distinction “between the author and narrator” is still “technically preserved” in

John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, but it is “at the closest it can be to being broken down.”3

This is the case in the eponymous story “Lost in the Funhouse”, where the author-narrator’s

1 Rimmon-Kenan 94. 2 Rimmon-Kenan 94. 3 Nicol 76.

commentaries freely cooccur with the text of the story itself. Ambrose likes “Magda G_____”,

who “lived not far from them on B_____ Street in the town of D_____, Maryland.”4 The author-

narrator provides his commentary, thus transgressing from the extradiegetic onto the diegetic

level: “Initials, blanks, or both were often substituted for proper names in nineteenth-century

fiction to enhance the illusion of reality.”5

Despite his efforts to convince the reader otherwise, the author (possibly authors) in

Barth’s stories is not a real person, but a literary construct. The character of the author is further

problematized in Lost in the Funhouse by the author’s forewords, “Author’s Note” and “Seven

Additional Notes.”6 The authorial commentary in them does not seem to be different from the

commentaries of the author-character in the stories. The complex narrative queries: in what way

is the author-character different from the actual author, apart from being a literary construct?

Barth replies to this question himself in his seminal essay, “Literature of Exhaustion”. He

argues that his own novels are “novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who

imitates the role of Author.”7 Turning away from realism, a “used-up” form8, Barth rejects to

imitate life in his writings and imitates the Novel instead, turning a representation of real world

into a representation of a representation. Having reached its limits, literary realism has

exhausted itself. The response for Barth is to turn the medium into part of the message and

follow the example of Jorge Luis Borges who “doesn’t merely exemplify an ultimacy” but also

“employs it.”9 Barth turns the medium into part of the message. The self-consciousness of his

4 John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse”, Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (New York:

Doubleday, 1988) 72-73. 5 Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse” 73. 6 Barth, “Foreword” v-viii, “Author’s Note xi-xii, “Seven Additional Notes 203-204. 7 Barth, “Literature of Exhaustion”, The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction (London: The Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1984) 62-76. 72. 8 Barth, “Literature of Exhaustion” 64. 9 Barth, “Literature of Exhaustion” 71, 68.

fiction is not the end, but the means. Using it as an instrument, Barth leads the reader to the

core subject matter of his fiction: the “used-upness” of literature.10

The commentary originating on the extradiegetic level is not the only narrative interaction

that John Barth utilizes. Rimmon-Kenan asserts that “[n]arration is always at a higher level than

the story it narrates”: the “diegetic level is narrated by an extradiegetic narrator, the

hypodiegetic by a diegetic (intradiegetic) one.”11 For the sake of clarity, narratives within

narratives generally contain a limited number of narrators, e.g. Don Quixote and Tom Jones.12

Brian McHale likens this structure to “a set of Chinese boxes or Russian babushka dolls” and

argues that such “recursive structures” are the result of performing “the same operation over

and over again” with “each time operating on the product of the previous operation.”13

Barth exaggerates the number of frame stories in “Menelaiad”, where the narrator inserts

stories within stories. The second part concludes: “After an exchange of pleasantries we settled

down and drank deep in the dark while I told the tale of Menelaus and his wife at sea:”14

“ ’ Seven years, ’ ” I say et cetera […].15

To facilitate the reader’s navigation between the individual recursive layers, each one appears

in a separate subchapter. This also bolsters the narrative self-consciousness, as it is aware of its

own divisions based on the narrative levels. The third part ends by setting frame for the next

one: “Nothing for it but rehearse the tale of me and slippery Eidothea:”16

“ ‘ “ ‘ Troy was clinkered […].17

10 Barth, “Literature of Exhaustion” 64. 11 Rimmon-Kenan 94-95. 12 Frame stories in general and in relation to Don Quixote and Tom Jones are discussed in greater depth in Chapter

four. 13 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987) 112. 14 Barth, “Menelaiad” 139. 15 Barth, “Menelaiad” 139. 16 Barth, “Menelaiad” 144. 17 Barth, “Menelaiad” 145.

Until arriving at the extreme framing:

“ ‘ “ ‘ “ ‘ “ Love!” ‘ “ ‘ “ ‘ “18

“Menelaiad” then proceeds in the opposite direction and recedes from the last narrative

layer until the narrator reappears at the former extradiegetic level. The quotation marks serve

as a reminder to the reader that he or she is reading a series of frame stories. They are a visual

device asserting the self-consciousness of the story.

The subtitle of Lost in the Funhouse is “Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice”. Barth

envisions his series of short stories to be narrated in multiple forms. Although the title of the

story suggests following the Greek tradition of oral narration, in “Author’s Note”, Barth clarifies

that “though suggestive of a recorded authorial monologue” the short story “depends for clarity

on the reader’s eye.”19 Barth’s instruction (whether obeyed or not) eliminates the narrative

immediacy that would be achieved by oral narration. Barth concludes that “Menelaiad” is in

fact a combination of both spoken and written form, as it “may be said to have been composed

for “printed voice”.”20

Paul Douglass contends that “Menelaiad” “carries the concept of the frame-tale to absurd

lengths” in that by the sixth section “the narration has buried itself six levels.”21 Furthermore,

Barth’s concept of historicity (as exemplified in “Menelaiad”) is “always fatal to spontaneity

[as] presented multiple times in Funhouse.”22 In “Menelaiad”, the quotation marks disrupt the

act of reading visually, but also force the reader to ponder the narrative levels as he or she reads,

thereby enhancing the text and the reader’s experience.

18 Barth, “Menelaiad” 155. 19 Barth, “Author’s Note” xi. 20 Barth, “Author’s Note” xi. 21 Paul Douglass, “Barth, Barthes, and Bergson: Postmodern Aesthetics and the Imperative of the New”, Pacific

Coast Philology 47, Penn State University Press (2012) JSTOR: 34-51 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/41851033>

20th Feb 2017. 43. 22 Douglass 43.

In the final story of the collection, “Anonymiad”, the narrator exposes its fictional status

using different metafictional devices. In the opening, he refers to the physical instrument used

for recording, the “piebald […] pelt” on which “[he] write[s]”, and later mentions the “ink of

the squid.”23 The minstrel’s inserted text proceeds: “Amphora’s my muse: / When I finish off

the booze, / I hump the jug and fill her up with fiction” only to comment on the act of narration:

“I begin in the middle—where too I’ll end, there being alas to my arrested history as yet no

dénouement.”24 Barth’s texts incessantly affirm their fictional status, be it in the form of

narrative commentaries or by alluding to the instruments used for recording.This is a tendency

manifested throughout the text. The narrator of “Menelaiad” recollects how he told stories

before: “Once upon a time I told tales straight out, alternating summary and dramatization,

developing characters and relationships, laying on bright detail and rhetorical flourish, et

cetera.”25 In “Title”, the act of narration is exposed by recurrent references to the grammatical

structures. The narrator faces “the final test”, which consists in the imperative: “Try to fill the

blank” with “words or more words, otherwise I’ll fill in the blank with this noun here in my

prepositional object.”26

Rimmon-Kenan refers to “diegesis” as to the ‘story’, or the events of the story, a level

that is “[i]mmediately subordinate to the extradiegetic level.” 27 To use the structuralist

terminology, the extradiegetic and the diegetic levels merge, with the act of narration (the

extradiegetic level) becoming the narration itself (the diegetic level). John Barth’s “Title” lacks

conventional plot. There are no events, only the act of narration. The story narrates its own

narration, that is, the story narrates itself.

23 Barth, “Menelaiad” 168, 171. 24 Barth, “Menelaiad” 169. 25 Barth, “Menelaiad” 177. 26 Barth, “Title” 105. 27 Rimmon-Kenan 94.

The act of framing is exaggerated to the extreme in the opening “Frame-Tale”. Barth

refers to it as to “the shortest short story in the English language” with the total of ten words,

but at the same time he maintains that its potential is “endless.”28 As the reader delves into the

book, an unknown voice dictates that he or she: “Cut on dotted line. / Twist end once and fasten

/ AB to ab, CD to cd.”29 Barth’s experiment tests narrative theory: leaving the nature of the text

aside (it reads like instruction, not prose), it is positioned between the title (“Frame-Tale”) and

the story itself. Narrative interpretation of the story is questionable: Is the instruction a part of

the extradiegetic level, with the first round of “Once upon a time there was a story that began”?

Or are we to read the instruction as a part of the diegetic, rather than extradiegetic level? Barth

exhausts the limits of fiction at the expense of sacrificing the story’s plot and content: “Frame-

Tale” does not communicate meaning, but creates an infinite chain of hypodiegetic levels. What

has been argued above about “Title” can be said about “Frame-Tale”: the story narrates its own

narration.

Although “Frame-Tale” fails to communicate meaning by means of its content, it does

communicate meaning in the context of the entire story collection. Barth insists that Lost in the

Funhouse is “neither a collection nor a selection”, but a “series” which is “meant to be received

at once” and in the arranged order.30 When interpreting it, one must bear the order of the stories

in mind: “Frame-Tale”, being the opening story, indicates the nature of the whole text and

heralds the narrative techniques such as framing (“Menelaiad” and “Anonymiad”), the

obsession with narrating stories (“Title”), and the general narrative self-consciousness of the

short story collection.

Far more important than its anticipatory function is the interaction between “Frame-Tale”

and the reader. It is created by being performed, and it requires the reader’s involvement for its

28 Barth, “Foreword” vii. 29 Barth, “Frame-Tale” 1. 30 Barth, “Foreword” xi.

performance. The existence of “Frame-Tale” as a work of art relies on the repetitive

performance, possibly by the reader’s physical interaction with the book, although the note at

the bottom of each page states “(continued)”31, which suggests that the reader is to turn the

pages back and forth rather than to create the Möbius strip by cutting into the book and gluing

its ends together. In addition, the performance of the story may be carried out in the recipient’s

psyche as a thought experiment.

The narrator frequently makes use of blanks to be filled by the reader (as discussed above

in relation to “Lost in the Funhouse”). Blanks appear in different forms. At the end of “Ambrose

His Mark” the narrator refers to the measure that his mother took before naming him by leaving

a blank on his birth certificate.32 According to Hutcheon, Barth “directs the reader’s attention

to the conventions of traditional realism-verisimilitude, dialogue, factuality” and goes as far as

“the actual printing” including “the use of italics for emphasis or the legalistically cautious

blanks.”33

“Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction” includes a different type of blanks. The

narrative voice cuts the narrative off by stating that since “Dad among his other failings failed

to end me when he should’ve”, he (or she) will “turn [himself or herself] off if [he or she] can

this instant.”34 After a blank the narrative voice observes that he or she is not capable of doing

so and begs the recipient to “do us both a kindness”, after yet another blank he comments on

the fact that the reader didn’t do so.35 The narrative voice interacts with the recipient. At first,

it begs the reader to end the suffering of the narrative voice (to perform a narrative coup de

grâce) by ceasing to read. If the story ceases to be read, it ceases to exist. The narrative

31 Barth, “Frame-Tale” 1, 2. 32 Barth, “Ambrose His Mark” 34. 33 Hutcheon 52. 34 Barth, “Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction” 38. 35 Barth, “Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction” 38.

emphasizes the importance of the interaction between the text and the reader. Should the reader

obey, the following lamentations would not take place and could not be interpreted.

The narrative utilizes similar methods in “Life-Story”. After the narrator insults the reader

in a series of bouts of aggression, he exploits the linear character of the text, when he wonders:

“You’ve read me this far, then? Even this far?” 36 Barth’s fiction relies on the reader’s

interpretation as a means of sustenance. This is achieved through exposing and foregrounding

the relationship between the recipient and the interpreted text. Other forms of interaction are

discussed in Chapter four, in contrast with the rest of the primary texts.

3.3 Donald Barthelme’s Snow White

Robert Scholes describes John Barth and Donald Barthelme as the chroniclers of the

current “despair over the exhausted forms” of “our thought” and of “our existence.”37 Donald

Barthelme deals with the same problematic area of exhausted forms of literature through the

medium of metafiction, albeit in a fundamentally different manner from John Barth. In his Snow

White (1967), Barthelme presents an idiosyncratic retelling of a story well rooted in the Western

tradition. The act of “recycling” of a well-known story is symptomatic of the artistic problem

of “used-upness”, as expressed by Barth in his essay “Literature of Exhaustion”, and also bears

similarities to Barth’s method in “Menelaiad”. The character of Snow White questions the

existence of Paul (the prince figure equivalent) and allows for the possibility of having projected

him “in the shape of [her] longing, boredom, ennui and pain” 38 , thus underscoring the

fictionality of the narrative.

Barthelme transposes the fairytale into modern day America. The metafictional nature of

Snow White relies precisely on the self-conscious inversion of the original. The fairy tale was

36 Barth, “Life-Story” 127. 37 Hutcheon 21. 38 Donald Barthelme, Snow White (New York: Atheneum, 1978) 102.

of interest to the structuralists, most notably to Vladimir Propp in his Morphology of the

Folktale (1928)39 who tried to reduce the genre into its most fundamental structures. Barthelme

innovates the genre by disregarding such structures and prescribed characteristics. Instead of

being a divine innocent being, the eponymous character is a highly sexualized attractive modern

woman, who engages in sexual intercourse with the seven males. This is made evident in a

series of her thoughts while having a shower, as she refers to the “anti-erotic” Clem whose ideas

of “sexual congress” and “Western confusion between the concept” of “pleasure” and

“increasing the size of the herd” she finds highly disinteresting,40 or in a later scene in which

she reflects on her naked body.41

The same applies to the seven male characters. Their professions are adjusted to the 20th

century—apart from “washing buildings”, they make living by making and selling “baby food,

Chinese baby food.”42 One of them, Bill, talks openly about sex (similarly to Snow White). He

states that he is fond of her because “when sexual pleasure is had, it makes you fond, in a strange

way, of the other one, the one with who you are having it.” 43 Equally subversive is the

alternative plot line in Snow White. Instead of the happy ending, Paul (the potential prince

figure) drinks the poisoned drink, “a vodka Gibson on the rocks”44 that Jane (analogous to the

evil stepmother) prepared for her. Snow White describes Paul’s death in a literary, unnatural

and self-aware language:

And look at all that green foam coming out of his face! And look

at those convulsions he is having! Why it resembles nothing else but a

death agony, the whole scene! I wonder if there was anything wrong

with that drink after all? Jane? Jane?45

39 Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin: University of Texas, 2001). 40 Barthelme 34. 41 Barthelme 144-145. 42 Barthelme 18. 43 Barthelme 36. 44 Barthelme 174. 45 Barthelme 175.

By rewriting a narrative so firmly ingrained in Barthelme’s culture, the author rejects the

convention of happy ending, as well as the well-arranged world of fairytales where the good

prevails. These inversions are indispensable for the narrative Barthelme’s Snow White.

The fictionality of the narrative is further unveiled in discussing the characters as literary

concepts and abstract entities. While singing the father hymn, the characters, as well as the

“words of the hymn” notice that father was not “very interesting” and the narrative states that

it is “explicitly commented upon, in text”.46 Paul questions the existence of the people standing

under his window, asking: “Why are all these people existing under my window?”47 Those

people seem to him “as palpable as [he himself]”, since they are “as bloody, as firm, as well-

read.”48 In becoming a monk, Paul breaks the convention of the prince figure and as a result is

capable of seeing Snow White as a human being. While spying on her from under the tree, Paul

recalls the “dancers one sees from time to time on Bourbon Street.”49 He breaks the convention

as he likens the idealized Snow White to the down-to-earth dancers.

The voyeuristic moment marks the breakaway from the boundary between Snow White

as a literary character and what Paul understands to be a human being. The narrative depicts it

directly: “Paul has never before really seen Snow White as a woman.”50 Paul therefore becomes

the prince figure, but by sexual urge. When Snow White is described as letting her hair go

outside the window, the narrative voice refers to it as another one in the series of literary

conventions: “This motif, the long hair streaming from the high window, is a very ancient one,

I believe, found in many cultures, in various forms” and then declares to repeat it “for the

astonishment of the vulgar and refreshment of [his] venereal life.51 However, the reiteration

46 Barthelme 19. 47 Barthelme 55. 48 Barthelme 55-56. 49 Barthelme 148. 50 Barthelme 150. 51 Barthelme 80.

does not take place and the statement could be interpreted as an instruction for the reader to

reread the passage. Similarly to Paul, Snow White breaks away from the literary conventions

by asserting her free will: “From now on I deny myself to them.”52

Bran Nicol maintains that in Snow White Donald Barthelme exploits “a self-conscious

use of the fairy-tale form” in order “to explore contemporary social issues such as liberation of

women.”53 Barthelme grants the modern-day Snow White something that has been denied to

her fairytale counterpart: education. The narrator enumerates the college courses that Snow

White has taken: “Modern Woman, Her Privileges and Responsibilities”, “Classical Guitar I”,

“English Romantic Poets II”, “Theoretical Foundations of Psychology”, “Personal Resources

I and II”, “Realism and Idealism in the Contemporary Italian Novel.”54 On a different occasion,

Hogo comments on education of women, stating that with the “spread of literacy you now tend

to get girls who have thought and feeling” and who “will probably belong to the Royal

Philological Society or something” and “have their own ‘thing’”, which “must be respected”,

only to subvert it by admitting the irony of his statement: “just as if you gave shit about all this

blague.”55

Barthelme’s Snow White enacts the role of a servant of the seven males. After her

epiphany, she pledges not to work as a “horsewife” anymore.56 After Snow White’s decision,

the seven male characters descend into alcoholism, which leads some of them to evaluate their

situation and reflect on society. For instance, Clem states: “What is troubling me is the quality

of life in our great country, America”, where everyone seems to be “deprived.” 57 Clem

comments on the historical context, claiming that “[e]galitarianism precludes princeliness.”58

52 Barthelme 135. 53 Nicol 73. 54 Barthelme 25-26. 55 Barthelme 75. 56 Barthelme 135. 57 Barthelme 140. 58 Barthelme 141.

As a consequence, Snow White is deprived of her Prince. Barthelme exploits the limits of a

“used-up” form to address some of the ailing social issues of his time, as opposed to the self-

absorbed short fiction of John Barth, which focuses solely on its own form and content.

Barthelme appropriates the text of the fairytale, similarly to the president who appropriates the

nationality of the characters: “And they are Americans, Bill, Hubert, Henry, Kevin, Edward,

Clem, Dan and Snow White. They are Americans. My Americans.”59

Paul Maltby contends that through examination and exposure of the “processes of its own

composition” Barthelme’s fiction reveals “its meaning as the construct of so many literary

codes and conventions.”60 Throughout the novel, the narrative disobeys such conventions. In a

non-sequitur, Kevin inquires: “Where is the figure in the carpet? Or is it just … carpet?”61 It is

an intertextual remark referring to Henry James’s novella, “Figure in the Carpet”, in which the

unnamed narrator becomes obsessed with the meaning of Hugh Vereker’s novel.62 Striving to

discover its meaning, the narrator of “Figure in the Carpet” fulfills the meaning of Vereker’s

novel: the existence of the enigmatic work of art is perpetuated through interpretation. The

narrator of “The Figure in the Carpet” never learns the hidden meaning and the meaning the

narrator sought for eludes the reader too. The character’s unease reflects the frustration ensuing

from the inability to interpret a work of art, applicable to Barthelme’s character as well.

The author renounces his authority and transfers the interpretative responsibility onto the

reader. Barthelme explores this possibility in Snow White, notably in one of the dialogue

sections, where both Jane and Snow White react to an “apelike hand” reaching through the

mailbox. While Jane is adamant to find out its meaning, her stepdaughter advises her to “[t]hink

59 Barthelme 81. 60 Paul Maltby, Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia

Press, 1991) 42. 61 Barthelme 129. 62 Henry James, “Figure in the Carpet”, Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, Frank Kermode, ed. (London:

Penguin Classics, 1986) 355-401.

nothing of it” and not “give it another thought” since it is “just an ape that’s all.”63 Snow White

reproaches Jane, urging her not to “go reading things into things.”64 The scene is an implicit

critique of readers who “read things into things”, and in particular to those who “dismiss these

things too easily”, which is shown in Snow White’s circulatory argument: “It means what it

means.”65

This dialogue and Jane’s reaction to the apelike hand are parallel to the interaction

between the reader and Snow White. The narrative relies on the fact that the reader will “read

things into things” and attempt to interpret the meaning of Barthelme’s collage. At the same

time, Jane’s urgent search for meaning reflects the dread of meaninglessness of one’s existence:

she sees the existing hand, but fails to comprehend its meaning.

At the end of the first part, the reader is presented with a questionnaire with a series of

predominantly unrelated questions, ranging from “Do you like the story so far? Yes ( ) No ( )”

to “In your opinion, should human beings have more shoulders? ( ) Two sets of shoulders?

( ) Three? ( )”66 As Hutcheon argues, in one of the questions, “Do you stand up when you

read? ( ) Lie down? ( ) Sit? ( )”, the recipient is brought back “to his concrete nondiegetic

identity outside the text.”67 By referring to the physical aspects of the act of reading, the

narrative acknowledges its own fictional status and widens the gap between the fictional world

and the reader’s reality.

In narratological terms, the locus of the narrative is transferred from the individual

diegetic levels to a location outside the text, to the recipient’s physical world. This boundary

between individual realms is violated when the reader is asked about his or her opinion about

63 Barthelme 107. 64 Barthelme 107. 65 Barthelme 107. 66 Barthelme 82-83. 67 Hutcheon 143. Barthelme 83.

the copyright problems of the “Authors Guild”, or when asked to evaluate Snow White based

on his or her cultural experience: “Holding in mind all works of fiction since the War, in all

languages, how would you rate the present work, on a scale of one to ten, so far?”68 The

questionnaire invokes the reader to interact with the book physically, most notably in the last

of the quoted questions, by asking him or her to circle the answer. Its relation to the narrative

and to the reader is questionable. Arguably, it is located between the diegetic realm of the

characters and the material world of the reader. Barthelme disregards the narrative levels and

such dichotomies to enhance the reader’s experience: the importance of the questionnaire lies

in its interaction with the reader, as it forces him or her to partake in the act of interpretation.

Moreover, Snow White challenges the concept of literary parallels: would the parallels be

strong enough without the assistance of the title and number of the seven male characters? The

text itself inquires: “Have you understood, in reading to this point, that Paul is the prince-figure?”

or “That Jane is the wicked stepmother-figure?”69 In case the reader has ignored the analogies

between the version of Snow White he or she is most familiar with and Barthelme’s Snow White,

he or she is now coerced into drawing parallels between the fairytale archetype and Barthelme’s

rendition, such as is the case with Paul (the prince figure) or Jane (the evil stepmother figure).

The text is aware of the deficiency of these analogies and self-consciously draws the reader’s

attention to it. Donald Barthelme’s Snow White deconstructs the typical fairytale characters as

classified by Propp in his distinction. In addition, Barthelme’s text represents a constant

confrontation of the archetypal fairytale set of themes. This indicates the possibilities of

variation of the archetype and reflects Barthelme’s treatment of the “used-up” form.

68 Barthelme 83. 69 Barthelme 82.

3.4 Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five opens with a framing introductory chapter, in

which the author-narrator quotes the following song:

My name is Yon Yonson,

I work in Wisconsin,

I work in a lumbermill there,

The people I meet when I walk down the street,

They say: “What’s your name?”

And I say, My name is Yon Yonson,

I work in Wisconsin …”70

And then comments on its repetitive nature: “And so on to infinity.” 71 The self-

perpetuating nature of the quoted excerpt is reminiscent of Barth’s “Frame-Tale.” Similarly to

Barth’s opening story, the song appears in the introductory chapter and anticipates the narrative

method of the entire book. Despite the similarities in their metafictions, Kurt Vonnegut presents

a very different relationship between the author-narrator and his fiction in Slaughterhouse-Five

(1969) and Breakfast of Champions (1973).

From the opening chapter the narrator draws the recipient’s attention to the blurry

boundary between fiction and reality: “All of this happened, more or less. The war parts,

anyway, are pretty much true.”72 The narrative is based on true events, which complicates the

relation between fiction and reality, and it also reflects the cultural context. Bran Nicol observes

that this style of “self-reflexive historical reconstruction” was widespread in the 1970s and

1980s, which saw the tendency favoring “staging a confrontation between metafiction and

history.”73

70 Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death (Dial Press Trade

Paperback, 2007) epub file, 9-10. 71 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 10. 72 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 9. 73 Nicol 100.

Using Slaughterhouse-Five as one of her examples, Linda Hutcheon defines

“historiographic metafiction”, one of the metafictional sub-branches.74 The extent to which the

presented events are real or not is debatable, in particular “the war parts”, but it is impossible

to dismiss them as pure fabrication. Linda Hutcheon argues that postmodern theory and art

challenges the “separation of the literary and the historical” and that “recent critical readings of

both history and fiction have focused more on what the two modes of writing share than how

they differ.” 75 Historiographic metafiction therefore involves practices symptomatic of

metafiction, as well as of historical fiction.

The text questions: why does the author-narrator choose fiction as a medium of

expression? The query becomes more prominent after the narrator comments on “what this

lousy little book cost [him] in money and anxiety and time.”76 He makes it clear that in the

beginning, he indeed had the intention to write a factual report of his war experience and

“thought it would be easy for [him] to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all [he]

would have to do would be to report what [he] had seen.”77 The narrator himself disbelieves

that the book could possibly have a positive impact on society after being discouraged by his

friend, Harrison Starr, who likens the potential of an anti-war book to an “anti-glacier” one.78

It is concluded that “there would always be wars” which would be “as easy to stop as glaciers.”79

Bran Nicol asserts that the introductory chapter makes use of “the device of fictionalizing

the past”, which is not disguised, “as it might be in a more realist version of the same novel”

but, it is “always foregrounded” instead. 80 Nicol’s reading consists in viewing the act of

74 Linda Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction: The Pastime of Past Time”, A Poetics of Postmodernism:

History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988) 105-123. 75 Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction” 105. 76 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 9. 77 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 9. 78 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 9. 79 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 9. 80 Nicol 89.

narration as “fictionalizing the past”, an act correspondent to the “displacement exercise” in

psychoanalysis: the narrator approaches his traumatic experiences through fiction, and in this

“indirect way” protects “the psyche from unbearable material.” 81 The narrator on the

extradiegetic level creates a character on the diegetic level (Billy Pilgrim), whose abduction by

the Tralfamadorians allows for at least two readings. Pilgrim’s encounters with the aliens can

either be taken at face value, or as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (he is

hallucinating). In terms of narratology, the latter involves creating an additional narrative level

(hypodiegetic).

Patricia Waugh provides a reading based on the distinction between fiction and reality

and refers to the individual levels in Slaughterhouse-Five as “real”, “fictive” and “ultra-

fictional.”82 The narrator creates a fictional realm in which his character creates an “ultra-

fictional” realm. To conceive the fictive realm costs the narrator considerable effort (both

financial and mental, as he informs in the opening chapter). Billy Pilgrim, on the contrary,

fabricates the fictional Tralfamadorian universe unaware, as a subconscious defense mechanism.

Waugh asserts that despite its fictional status, the diegetic level in Slaughterhouse-Five is still

considerably “more ‘real’ than Tralfamadore.”83

Waugh’s assertion implies that the process functions in the opposite direction as well: the

diegetic level is less real than the extradiegetic one. Both Billy Pilgrim and the author-narrator

respond to the same traumatic experience (their experience as prisoners of war, and their

witnessing the firebombing of Dresden), and they do so in a similar fashion, by fabricating a

fictional realm (a form of escapism). Billy’s hallucinations are parallel to the framing of the

81 Nicol 89. 82 Waugh 128. 83 Waugh 129.

author-narrator: the frame story of Billy Pilgrim allows for another frame story within the

former one, that of his abduction by the aliens.

The relationship between the individual ontological levels is complex, marked by

narrative intrusions. Carol Gluck contends that Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five “mixes

eyewitness accounts of war and shards of the firebombing of Dresden with a science-fiction

narrative, inaccurate facts, and naïve, even reluctant author-narrator.”84 As has been argued, the

introductory chapter anticipates the nature of the entire narrative, which disregards linear

arrangement. This is announced by the author-narrator, although the anticipation takes place

more implicitly too.

When the narrator mentions Gerhard Müller’s mother, he proclaims the mantralike “So

it goes.” 85 The narrator utters the omnipresent “So it goes” seven times before Billy’s

explanation of the Tralfamadorian concept of time. Whenever an extraterrestrial sees a corpse,

he does not merely see the dead person at that moment. He sees that “the same person is just

fine in plenty of other moments”; the person “does not die” but only “appears to die.”86 The

narrator therefore acquires Billy’s method of coping with death, who in turns acquires it from

the Tralfamadorians. In terms of narratology, the phrase advances from hypodiegetic level

(Billy’s fantasy) to the diegetic and extradiegetic levels.

Already in the epigraph it is made evident that the narrator accepts and makes use of this

conception of time. The novel is written “somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of

tales of the planet Tralfamadore.”87 The fragmentary nature of the narrative is also reflexive of

the Tralfamadorian notion of time. Billy Pilgrim is “unstuck” and “spastic in time”, which

84 Carol Gluck, “Infinite Mischief? History and Literature Once Again”, Representations 124.1 University of

California Press (2013) JSTOR <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2013.124.1.125> 19 th Feb 2017. 128. 85 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 9. 86 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 25. 87 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 6.

means that he “has no control of where he is going next.”88 Other possible readings of Billy’s

time travels are discussed in Chapter four.

To follow Billy in his time travels the narrative assumes equally fragmentary quality.

Billy’s time travels take place in the wake of traumatic moments. After the American soldiers

give up, Billy wakes up to find himself back in the hospital89; or before the plane crash,

“knowing the plane was going to crash pretty soon”, he “closed his eyes, traveled in time back

to 1944.”90 The narrative commentary suggests that Billy’s psyche unconsciously fabricates

time travelling as a way of coping with traumatic experience. As a result, the narrative is

disconnected and disregards linearity. The author-narrator describes the book in the preface as

“so short and jumbled and jangled” because “there is nothing intelligent to say about a

massacre.”91

Patricia Waugh asserts that the author-narrator of Slaughterhouse-Five is a “personalized

figure who is given a spatio-temporal dimension within the fictional world.”92 The narrator

reappears in the narrative, as a character of flesh and blood, rather than as an abstract concept.

The narrative refers to an “American near Billy” who “wailed that he had excreted everything

but his brains” before saying “There they go, there they go.”93 The author-narrator identifies

himself in that moment, stating “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.”94

The narrator’s intrusion can be interpreted as a means of fictionalizing his own existence, a

process by which he decreases the impact of the horrendous war experience. This process is

parallel to Billy Pilgrim’s subconscious fabrications. He also invents a realm and places himself

in it to alleviate his war experience and his mental condition. At the same time, the author-

88 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 23. 89 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 74. 90 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 101. 91 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 20. 92 Waugh 133. 93 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 84. 94 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 84.

narrator intrudes upon the world of his characters: an extradiegetic character appears in the

diegetic realm.95

The author-narrator’s appearance in his own narrative reinforces the reader’s awareness

of the book’s fictional status. Patricia Waugh asserts that such frame-breaks, “while appearing

to bridge gap between fiction and reality, in fact lay[…] it bare.”96 The reader is aware of this

breaching of the narrative levels. The narrator’s appearance, instead of forming a continuum

between the fictional and the reader’s realm, disrupts the flow of reading. At the same time, the

established relationship between fiction and reality allows the author-narrator to interact

between them. Bran Nicol points out that the “indirectness of Slaughterhouse-Five’s

convoluted metafictional form thus packs a profound emotional punch.”97 In addition to the

possibly therapeutic effect, the narrator’s appearance also has the potential to deconstruct.

Waugh contends that it “provides the essential deconstructive method of metafiction”, which is

one of the methods of “showing the function of literary convention” and “of revealing their

provisional nature.”98 Metafiction, such as Slaughterhouse-Five questions and challenges the

conventional boundaries delineated for fiction and reality. The diegetic level reflects the

hypodiegetic one.

In a dialogue with Maggie White, Kilgore Trout fabricates a law dictating that every

author must include in his or her books facts only: “If I wrote something that hadn’t really

happened, and tried to sell it, I could go to jail” and defines it as a “fraud.”99 Trout’s ironic

remark thematizes the problematic relationship between fiction and reality. Through its self-

awareness, Trout’s statement points to the opening sentence of the novel: “All of this happened,

95 This interpretation takes the author-narrator as an extradiegetic narrator, rather than as a character on the diegetic

level. His appearances are scarce and he takes considerable liberties when referring to Billy’s psychological

processes and approximates the omniscient narrator in this respect. 96 Waugh 33. 97 Nicol 89. 98 Waugh 31. 99 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 111.

more or less.”100 Kilgore Trout, himself a production of the author-narrator, comments on the

truth status of fiction.

Kilgore Trout reappears in Vonnegut’s following novel, Breakfast of Champions (1973).

After receiving a letter from Eliot Rosewater, the infuriated author refers to a “body bag”, which

triggers a chain of associations in the author-narrator’s brain: “I do not know who invented the

body bag. I do know who invented Kilgore Trout. I did.”101 The author-narrator acknowledges

the fictional status of the fictional writer, an impression bolstered by his unusual name, and by

the reference to the process of artistic creation.

Patricia Waugh defines Kilgore Trout as “a trans-textual being” who reappears frequently

in Vonnegut’s fiction.102 Although a minor character in Slaughterhouse-Five, he is a major one

in Breakfast of Champions, in which the process of artistic creation is given much more

prominent role. Dwayne Hoover takes Trout’s fiction to be literal truth, similarly to Maggie

White in Slaughterhouse-Five. Misreading reality and fiction is a permeating motif in Breakfast

of Champions. For instance, the author-narrator comments on gun violence in America, stating

that “the reason [why] Americans shot each other so often” was that it “was a convenient literary

device for ending short stories and books.”103 Creation leads the author-narrator to one of the

prominent themes of the novel, that of free will. In Trout’s Now It Can Be Told, a book that

“turn[s] Dwayne into a homicidal maniac”104, The Creator is amused and intrigued by the free

will of his creation, The Man. The former “never knew what [the latter] was going to yell” and

sometimes yelled “Cheese!”, other times “Wouldn’t you rather drive a Buick?”105

100 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 9. 101 Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday! (Dial Presstrade Paperbacks, 2006) epub

file, 29. 102 Waugh 131. 103 Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 132. 104 Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 111. 105 Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 112.

The content of Now It Can Be Told is parallel to the ending of Breakfast of Champions,

where the author frees Kilgore Trout, his creation. Before liberating him, the author-narrator

exerts his creative powers and transports Trout to “the Taj Mahal and then to Venice and then

to Dar es Salaam and then to the surface of the Sun, where the flames could not consume

[Kilgore Trout]—and then back to Midland City again.” 106 The author-narrator sees his

creations as his loyal servants, and finding himself in similar circumstances as the “spiritual

conditions” of Count Tolstoi when he “freed his serfs” or Thomas Jefferson when he “freed his

slaves” decides to let Kilgore Trout go free.107 Facing the ultimate freedom, Trout’s face

morphs into the face of the author-narrator’s father and Trout begs him in his father’s voice to

make him young again.108 The ending is enigmatic and it is not clear whether Trout affirms the

newly acquired free will or whether he is still under the control of the author-narrator.

The reader’s confusion is analogous to that of Trout. Waugh asserts that “an apparently

autonomous world is suddenly broken into by a narrator […] who comes explicitly from an

ontologically differentiated world.” 109 However, the ending of Breakfast of Champions

includes a description of the author-narrator’s regression “through the void”, his “hiding

place.”110 The “void” appears to correspond to the extradiegetic level, where the narrator returns

from the diegetic one, thus terminating the frame break. The narrator had to undergo this

journey to interact successfully with his characters. The author-narrator’s decision to do so can

be interpreted as an assertion of his own free-will and it reflects the self-reflexive tendencies of

the entire narrative. Disregarding the narrative levels allows Vonnegut to pose questions about

the problematic relationship between fiction and reality.

106 Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 185. 107 Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 186. 108 Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 186-187. 109 Waugh 133. Waugh discusses the ontological levels in connection to Slaughterhouse-Five (and French

Lieutenant’s Woman). The author deems her observation as pertinent to Breakfast of Champions as to the earlier

novel by Vonnegut. 110 Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 187.

4. Chapter Four: A Contrastive Interpretation

4.1 Introduction

Garry Gutting defines Michel Foucault’s concept of epistemes as a series of “systems of

thought and knowledge […] governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic” which

“operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual

possibilities.”1 The epistemes determine “the boundaries of thought in a given domain and

period.”2 However, as Foucault points out in the preface to The Order of Things, in using the

archaeological method, he is not attempting to prove that human history has been heading in

the direction of “growing perfection.”3 This conceptualization enables us to acknowledge the

changing trends in representation and to reflect on them in an impartial manner. The transitions

from one episteme to another are frequently marked by their abruptness. In such cases, they are

not understood as a continuation of their predecessor, but defined against it.

According to Sara Mills, Foucault attempts to pinpoint discontinuities which took and are

taking place “at particular historical conjectures”, dismissing “the importance of certain great

thinkers” and focusing on “radical and shocking changes” in “the global way of thinking”

instead.4 Foucault views literature as a constituent of a broader socio-cultural context and his

analysis is therefore applicable to the primary texts of the present thesis. Particularly important

is the notion of representation and the role of language in the human endeavor to capture reality.

Foucault’s framework of epistemes is employed to compare the different tendencies in self-

conscious fiction, where representation is brought to the fore.

1 Gary Gutting, “Michel Foucault”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014), Edward N. Zalta, ed.

<https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/> 29 June 2017. 2 Gutting, “Michel Foucault” <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/> 29 June 2017. 3 Foucault xxiii. 4 Sara Mills, Michel Foucault (London: Routledge, 2003) 27.

The present chapter examines the primary texts in the framework of Foucault’s epistemes.

A brief theoretical introduction to the individual parts is therefore necessary. The first

subsection interprets the earlier texts and traces the shift from similarity as the primary element

of the Renaissance episteme to representation as the building block of the Classical episteme.

The following part addresses the problematic area of our current episteme in contrast to the

Modern one before interpreting the primary post-War American metafiction. Before the

conclusion of the chapter, the penultimate subsection deals with Wolfgang Iser’s meaning of

the text and relates it to framing and frame-breaking.

4.2 The Renaissance and Classical Epistemes

Michel Foucault contends that resemblance played the dominant and constructive role in

the knowledge of the Western culture until the end of the sixteenth century: “[p]ainting imitated

space” and resemblance “guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts.”5 He ventures beyond

the sphere of art and identifies the end of the sixteenth century as the historical moment when

“resemblance was about to relinquish its relation with knowledge and disappear […] from the

sphere of cognition” and affect the organization of human knowledge as well.6 Signs and

similitudes “were wrapped around one another in an endless spiral”; microcosm and

macrocosm were by definition “conceived as both the guarantee of [the] knowledge and the

limit of its expansion.”7 Using analogy, such interpretation validated magic to be accepted on

the same level as erudition.8 The birth of modern science gradually abolished those practices.

Progress is therefore not understood as a steady process, but as an abrupt rupture from the

previous episteme.

5 Foucault 19. 6 Foucault identifies four major subtypes of similitude: conventia, aemulatio, analogy, sympathies (19, 20-28). 7 Foucault 35. 8 Foucault 35.

In the Renaissance, language was understood as “ternary”. It necessitated “the formal

domain of marks, the content indicated by them, and the similitudes that link the marks to the

things designated by them.”9 Resemblance was both the form as well as the content of the sign

and the three elements were “resolved into a single form.”10 The Renaissance concept of

language is key in analyzing representation in Don Quixote.

The narrator of Don Quixote introduces the unfortunate hidalgo as unkempt and

characterizes him by his reading habits. Don Quixote favors complex conceits which “Aristotle

himself could not have made out or extracted had he come to life again for that special

purpose.”11 From the opening Don Quixote is defined against fiction and literature, which is a

tendency that increases in the novel. Combined with the little sleep that Don Quixote gets, it

has resulted that “his brains got so dry that he lost his wits.”12 Following the narrator’s depiction

of Don Quixote as an outdated anachronism both in terms of appearance and intellect, the

protagonist of Cervantes’s novel is interpreted as a relic of the past.

Don Quixote heralds a new era in the human knowledge; not by setting down its new

principles, but by exaggerating the old ones. In so doing, “the old interplay between

resemblance and signs” contains “the beginnings of new relations.”13 Don Quixote consults

fiction to assess reality and misinterprets the relation between them. He is “the hero of the same”

who “reads the world in order to prove his books.”14 The narrator describes the protagonist in

the following manner:

His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books,

enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooing, loves,

agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his

9 Foucault 46-47. 10 Foucault 47. 11 Cervantes 34. 12 Cervantes 34. 13 Foucault 51. 14 Foucault 52.

mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true,

that to him no history in the world had more reality in it.15

The ontological levels are violated. For Foucault, Don Quixote is no longer a fictional character,

but “a sign, a long, thin graphism, a letter” escaping from “the open pages of a book”, who has

both already been written down and is still writing himself, “wandering through the

resemblance of things” in “a diligent search over the entire surface of the earth for the forms

that will prove what the books say is true.”16 Fiction invades Quixote’s reality and prevails.

The paradoxical tension between being already written down and writing oneself lies in

the fact that Don Quixote is not aware of having interchanged reality and fiction. Other

characters, as well as readers, are fully aware of the discrepancies between the two ontological

levels, as is the case with the translator from the original Arabic manuscript. Being based on

the extradiegetic level, the translator’s laughter is a result of his ability to discern fiction and

reality. The reader understands the situation from a superior position and is conscious of the

translator’s status as a fictional character. In the context of Don Quixote, the translator’s

commentary is highly self-conscious: a fictional character is judging the fictional status of a

different fictional character and his misinterpretations.

Such reading does not view Don Quixote as a literary work, but rather as a work of art in

a broader cultural context. Cervantes’s masterpiece presents an implicit critique of the outdated

Renaissance model: no longer reading fiction against his empirical experience, Don Quixote

reads reality against his reading experience, against fiction.

Foucault’s interpretation of Don Quixote goes beyond reading it as a parody of the

Renaissance conventions. Being the first modern work of literature in which the Classical

notions of language are voiced, it establishes the platform for the upcoming episteme. This

abrupt shift from the former to the latter is located in “the narrow gap” between the two parts,

15 Cervantes 34. 16 Foucault 52.

where Don Quixote achieves what he believes to be his reality. This conviction is brought about

by language in itself, and “resides entirely inside the words.”17

In the second part of Don Quixote the eponymous hidalgo no longer reads himself. He

reads about himself, that is about the linguistic representation of his misreading of reality and

fiction. The Classical episteme caused the breakdown of the Renaissance understanding of

language. The three aspects of the sign (the formal domain, the content, and the similitude) no

longer form a coherent whole. While the relationship between its formal domain and its content

still exists, the Classical thinking has abolished similitude and substituted it with representation.

The Classical understanding of language does not rely on words-to-world relation but on the

“relation woven between themselves by verbal signs”: words “have swallowed up their own

nature as signs.”18

The implications are far reaching. Using fiction, Don Quixote first establishes a code

which he uses to interpret reality, and then operates in reality as if it were fiction. To him reality

is fiction. Don Quixote’s misunderstanding of the similitude between “words” and the

phenomena they mean in the “world” is a death knell for the Renaissance episteme. Language

has become self-conscious and self-referential; it is aware of the discrepancies between the

object in the real world and the corresponding abstract idea: the relationship between the two

is not that of similitude, but of representation. Don Quixote ushers in a new epoch of the human

knowledge, in which relationships based on similitude become obsolete.

We may now view the reference to Mr King of Bath in Fielding’s Tom Jones using the

framework of Foucault’s Classical episteme. Although Mr King may be read as an actual link

between the reader and the fictional world, interpreting him as a representation of that link is

more fitting. While the author-narrator parades the artificiality of his own fiction throughout

17 Foucault 54. 18 Foucault 54.

the novel, in this case he displays the relevance of his fiction to the reader’s realm. The

advertised coaches of Mr King are shared both by the characters in Tom Jones and by its

recipients, establishing a contact between the two parties.

The short reference to Mr King of Bath perhaps seems indistinct. However, Tom Jones

contains more solid links between the reader’s and the fictional realms. The narrator considers

his artistic capabilities insufficient and calls for the skill of “a more able master, Mr Hogarth.”19

William Hogarth (1697-1764) was the first English-born internationally acclaimed artist and a

friend of Henry Fielding’s.20 In total, Fielding’s novel includes five references to the painter,

which frequently parallel the author-narrator’s fiction with Hogarth’s painting. The comparison

tends to view the latter in a more favorable light, as is the case in the following excerpt: “O,

Hogarth! had I thy pencil! then I would I draw the picture of the poor serving-man, with pale

countenance, staring eyes […].”21 The narrator acknowledges the artificial status of his creation

by contrasting it to a different medium of artistic expression.

The narrator’s artistic creations break the ontological horizon and appear to invade the

reality of the eighteenth century. As a result, the reader finds out that Miss Bridget had been the

object of the painter’s interest and has been “lately exhibited by that gentleman in his print of a

winter’s morning.”22 The violation of the narrative layers bridges the gap between fiction and

reality. This instance is far more substantial and applicable, since it is both the link between the

fictional realm and England of the eighteenth century (Hogarth as a verifiable historical persona,

unlike Mr King), as well as a representation of that connection.

19 Fielding 28. 20 Susan Elizabeth Benenson, “William Hogarth”, Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc.,

2017. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Hogarth> 16 July 2017. 21 Fielding 42 (2nd part). 22 Fielding 28.

Lionel Gossman traces the trend of eighteenth-century fiction authors to distance

themselves ironically from their novels. By doing so, they establish a complex relationship

between the narrator and the narrative.23 More importantly, the narrator’s professed superiority

to his narrative allows for complicity between the narrator and the reader to be set up.24 Henry

Power follows this interpretation and asserts that the narrator makes “his presence felt” and that

through the constant lecturing, teasing and cajoling the reader, he “ponders the difficulties of

his task and draws attention to his deft arrangement of material.”25 The narrative thus affirms

its self-conscious nature. The narrator is aware of the fictional status of his own narrative and

continually reaffirms his presence. He asserts the superior position to the fiction he creates and

underscores its fictionality for the sake of reader’s awareness. The two parties thus establish a

relationship of compliance.

Such reading does not dismiss the reader’s role in the process of interpretation, the degree

of which remains unchanged. It reverses the roles and concentrates on the author-narrator.

Coming to the fore as a master of puppets, the narrator (extradiegetic level) asserts his authority

to the set of fictional characters (diegetic level) as their creator, and claims his position in the

same ontological horizon as the reader. By pointing out to the fictional status of his creation,

the author-narrator also points out to his awareness of the nature of fiction. We witness the

narrator’s assertion of superiority by parading his extradiegetic status, and the attempt to

relocate himself to the ontological realm of the reader.

The narrator of Tom Jones asserts his superior status to his fiction also in his treatment of

the metaphor. He establishes a book-long metaphor based on food and consumption in the

23 Lionel Gossman, “History and Literature: Reproduction or Signification”, The Writing of History: Literary Form

and Historical Understanding, Robert H. Canary, Henry Kozicki, eds. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

1961) 3-39. 22. 24 Gossman 22. 25 Henry Power, “Henry Fielding, Richard Bentley, and the ‘Sagacious Reader’ of Tom Jones”, The Review of

English Studies 61.252 (2010) 749-772. <www.jstor.org/stable/40961116> 24 April 2017. 749.

opening chapter. Timothy D. O’Brien points out that in focusing on food, the narrator asserts

“his control over the plot.”26 Furthermore, the author-narrator metaphorically provides food for

the characters and the readers. Again, he strives to assert his role in relation to the reader’s

reality. O’Brien claims that the narrator’s extended use of metaphor, as well its nature, reflects

the tendency “to make the treatment of the story, rather than the story and its characters, the

central concern of the story.”27 Self-awareness is therefore one of the primary properties of the

narrative in Tom Jones and most importantly, it presents multiple possible meanings. Tom Jones

then becomes the food for thought to be consumed and contemplated.

The narrator claims his supreme status in the use of a different metaphor as well. In the

opening of the second book he explains his idiosyncratic handling of narrative time. To present

an “extraordinary scene” the narrator “shall spare no pains nor paper” and conversely, matters

of no consequence will be skipped and a “chasm” will appear instead.28 Using “blanks in the

grand lottery of time” the narrator manipulates the story and the direct reference to the act of

narration confirms his self-awareness. Through the metaphor, the narrator equates himself with

a fraud who influences the result of a lottery in his favor. The narrator thus presents himself as

unreliable.

Although formally still falling into the category of the Classical episteme, Tristram

Shandy adumbrates some of the problematic areas of the upcoming period. Sterne’s primary

concern consists in presenting the problems of narration. This is reflected in the narrator’s

frequent intrusive commentaries on the difficulties of constructing the account of his life.

Jeffrey Williams argues that Genette’s structuralist distinction between histoire, recit and

narration does not hold in a narrative as self-conscious as Tristram Shandy, where the “act of

26 Timothy D. O’Brien, “The Hungry Author and Narrative Performance in Tom Jones”, Studies in English

Literature, 1500-1900, 25.3 (1985) 615–632. <www.jstor.org/stable/450499> 28 Apr 2017. 616-617. 27 O’Brien, “The Hungry Author and Narrative Performance in Tom Jones” 616. 28 Fielding 37-38.

narration is inseparable from the narrative” since “it is precisely the narrating or the act of

narrative that forms the [recit] of Shandy.”29

Williams compares Tristram Shandy to Tom Jones as an example of a fairly stable

narrative recounted in a linear and non-fragmentary fashion. Even in such an organized

narrative the relation between the story and the plot is not “exact or mimetic”; it is

“proportionate and consistent”, the plot “sequentially ordered, in accordance with the

chronological order of events.”30 This sequential ordering is the result of manipulating the story,

as discussed above, and is interpretable in the light of the Classical episteme. The proportionate

ordering is the representation of the narrated events.

Even fiction which is not overtly aware of its fictional status must reflect the difference

between time as a measurable entity and its representation. Fielding is aware of the difference

between the two when he justifies the freedom he takes in narrating some events while ignoring

others. Since it cannot be constricted within a sign, narrative fiction inevitably presents a

linguistic distortion of the abstract concept of time. Cervantes is conscious of the difference too

and parodies it. As Gines, one of the characters, explains, when writing his life-story he faces

an insurmountable obstacle: he cannot finish it since his life itself has not yet been finished31

(discussed above). Fielding and Cervantes follow the Classical episteme in their respective

conceptions of time. They are aware that it is a representation of an abstract entity.

Sterne heralds a radically different approach to temporal relations, which is the most

prominent difficulty that Sterne’s narrator faces. The use of narrative time reflects Tristram’s

treatment of the narrated material. Unlike Fielding’s narrator, who makes a selection based on

the importance of the recounted events, Tristram’s seemingly haphazard narration is based

29 Jeffrey Williams, “Narrative of Narrative (Tristram Shandy)”, MLN, 105.5 (1990) 1032–

1045. <www.jstor.org/stable/2905166> 14 May 2017. 1034. 30 Williams 1035. 31 Cervantes 125.

mostly on associations. In this respect, Tristram Shandy anticipates later tendencies of

representation. In his defiance of clear structure, linear plot and in his disregarding of narrative

conventions, Sterne’s method appears to resemble the narration of Slaughterhouse-Five.

Vonnegut’s narrator also stresses the randomness of the plot and challenges the traditional

narrative structures in prose (in his case, science-fiction prose). In the case of the latter, this

effect is achieved by the idiosyncratic use of “gag” (discussed below).

Similarly to the narrators of Don Quixote and Tom Jones, Sterne’s narrator is aware of

the fact that the difference between time measurable by clocks and time in fiction is that

between the object and its representation. In contrast to them, he exaggerates this discrepancy.

Digressions from the expected plotline grow out of proportion and provide material for the

narrator to contemplate and present in the form of illustrations. This strategy exerts the

distinction between fabula and sujet: the sheer amount and prominence of self-aware narrative

commentary overwhelms the actual contents of the plot. Diegesis becomes the object of diegesis.

Dennis W. Allen asserts that the foremost problem of language lies in its instability:

words do not refer to the objects themselves, but to their abstract counterparts, which are highly

subjective, being grounded in “sensory impressions of an ultimately ineffable empirical

reality.”32 As has already been argued, the understanding of knowledge is prone to change,

reflected in the understanding of language, and mirrored in the changing attitude to

representation. Sterne addressed this inconsistent relation between language and reality, most

notably in Walter Shandy’s vain attempt to compose the Tristrapedia. As Allen contends,

Walter Shandy’s futile attempt to control language is the result of the struggle to make use of

language as a means of recording the truth.33 Walter Shandy’s failure is the result of the unstable

nature of words and the unrealizable task to capture reality within a linguistic system.

32 Dennis W. Allen, “Sexuality/Textuality in Tristram Shandy”, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 25.3

(1985) 651–670. <www.jstor.org/stable/450501> 4 May 2017. 654. 33 Allen 658.

Walter Shandy’s ineffective process of writing is analogous to Tristram’s inefficient and

meandering narration, a parallel which implicitly bolsters the narrative self-consciousness. The

son reenacts his father’s folly: both the father’s and the son’s attempt to capture reality within

a linguistic system is doomed to failure and it reflects the mode of representation of the previous

episteme. Just as the narrator of Tom Jones distances himself from the characters, so does

Tristram the narrator assume a superior position to the narrated events. This step allows him to

establish relationship similar to the narrator of Tom Jones. They both affirm their complicity

with the reader by frequent personal addresses. However, they differ greatly in their respective

treatment of temporal relations. From the opening of the novel, Tristram Shandy depends on

fragmented and non-linear narration.

From Cervantes through Sterne a considerable re-conception of representation has taken

place. While Cervantes broke away from the pre-Classical episteme by bringing forth the

problems of its representation, Fielding affirmed the foundations the Classical episteme in his

self-awareness of representation. Sterne adumbrated later understanding of time through his

portrayal of distorted temporal relations.

4.3 Modes of Representation in Contemporary Metafiction

In the following period, in which the Modern episteme was prevalent, man found himself

to be paradoxically both the “enslaved origin” and the “observed spectator” who appeared in

the ambiguous position “as an object of knowledge and as [the] subject that knows”;

consequently, representation ceased “to have validity as the locus of origin of living beings,

needs, and words, or as the primitive seat of their truth.”34 If that is the case, how does our

current episteme differ from the Modern one, if it does at all?

34 Foucault 340-341.

In “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault elaborates on this proposition and suggests giving

up the possibility of “ever acceding to a point of view” which could grant access “to any

complete and definite knowledge of what may constitute our historical limits.”35 At the same

time, he announces the collapse of the Modern episteme. Owing to the “positivity of knowledge”

and the scientific achievements of the nineteenth century, man has discovered his own mortality.

The human kind traded the accomplishments of modern biology and medicine for the ignorance

of the workings of the human body: the knowledge thereof was “given to [man] only against

the background of his own finitude.”36 The termination of the Modern episteme implies the

inception of a new one. However, one cannot define epistemes that have not been concluded.

They lack the temporal and cultural distance necessary for their evaluation.

The human kind is conditioned by historical forces outside its control. Foucault argues

that the arrangement of philosophy propounded by anthropology (from Kant to our day) is

“disintegrating before our eyes” as “we are beginning to recognize and denounce it, in a critical

mode” most prominently for “forgetfulness of the opening” which as a “stubborn obstacle

[stands] in the way of an imminent new form of thought.”37 Just as in Las Meninas Velázquez

visually articulated the Classical mode of representation (heavily reliant on self-consciousness

and voiced half a century prior to him by Cervantes), so does René Magritte’s The Treachery

of Images (1928-1929) announce the new mode of representation. The caption reads: “This is

not a pipe”38, emphasizing the tension between the signifier and the signified. The picture of a

pipe is not the pipe itself, it is its visual representation.

35 Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” The Foucault Reader, Paul Rainbow, ed. (New York: Pantheon

Books, 1984) 32-50. 47. Italics mine. 36 Foucault 342. 37 Foucault 373. 38 René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (1928-1929) <https://www.renemagritte.org/the-treachery-of-

images.jsp> 2 July 2017.

The closed system whose demise Foucault announces is reacted against in the postmodern

thought. Jean-Francois Lyotard articulates the crux of postmodernism (in his own words an

extreme simplification) in defining it as “incredulity towards metanarratives.”39 A variety of

approaches is suggested by different critics and theorists.

James Phelan suggests that we may be “undergoing some kind of universal cultural

morphing with the emergence of a new episteme”, characterized by abandonment of “the grand

narratives (Lyotard)” and “an embrace of ‘rhizomatic’ thinking (Deleuze).”40 This is reflected

in the postmodern conception of the meaning of the text (more precisely, a meaning of a text),

which disregards totality for the sake of multiplicity. This approach is discussed below in

relation to Wolfgang Iser’s concept of the meaning of the text.

Jacques Derrida proposes deconstructing texts, effectively disposing of the centered

notion of a text. By implication, the narrative in metafiction is difficult to assess, interpret, and

impossible to categorize. The selection of the contemporary primary texts is a coherent body of

work from a particular context in a given period. Despite their apparent unity, the texts evince

recalcitrance towards classification. More than by unity in terms of content, they are to be

defined against the closed system symptomatic of the previous episteme.

Self-conscious fiction frequently reacts against literary conventions. As the primary texts

indicate, metafiction has become increasingly aware of history. In “Pierre Menard, Author of

the Quixote” (1939)41, Jorge Luis Borges presents a fictional writer who rewrites segments of

Cervantes’s Don Quixote verbatim. The narrator juxtaposes two identical passages. Cervantes’s

“catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century” is dismissed as a “mere rhetorical

39 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian

Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984) xxv. 40 H. Porter Abbott, “The Future of All Narrative Futures”, A Companion to Narrative Theory, James Phelan, Peter

J. Rabinowitz, eds. (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) 529-541. 531. 41 The English translation did not appear until 1962.

praise of history”, having been “written by the ‘ingenious layman’ Miguel de Cervantes.”42 In

contrast, Menard is William James’s contemporary who defines “history not as an investigation

of reality, but as its origin.”43 While in the original text, the author engaged in “the provincial

reality” of the 17th century Spain, the modern rendition writes of the distant past, of the “century

of [the battle of] Lepanto and Lope.”44

“Pierre Menard” is a meditation on meaning, authorship, the role of fiction in our lives,

and how those variables change under the influence of history. The text acquires a radically

different status as the historical and cultural contexts change. Borges’s reading emphasizes the

importance of the reader and his or her reaction to the text. Don Quixote is not merely an early

17th century parody of the Chivalric romance, which ushered in the Classical episteme through

the exaggeration of the Renaissance mode of representation. It is an indicator of everything that

has happened between 1615 and the time of its reception.

To retell a story is not only to rewrite it, it is also to reread it. Similarly to Borges’s

fictional writer, Donald Barthelme provides such combination of rereading and rewriting,

although with profound changes. Barthelme’s Snow White consists in a continual confrontation

with the fairy-tale archetype. In a series of fragmentary episodes resembling a collage, it defies

the conventions of the fairy-tale. The author’s free use of stylistics reflects the self-conscious

violation of the narrative and can be read as a reaction against the conventions of the genre. The

reader is required to interact with the text and to reflect on the nature of Barthelme’s

idiosyncratic and ironic retelling.

Without commenting on John Gardner’s Grendel (1971) in greater depth, Patricia Waugh

defines it as metafictional, since it consists in “the form of parody” and “comments on a specific

42 Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”, Ficciones, Anthony Kerrigan, ed. Emecé Editores,

trans. (New York: Grove Press, 1994) 45-56. 53. 43 Borges 53. 44 Borges 51.

work or fictional mode.”45 Gardner’s achievement is far greater. Not only does Grendel reflect

the exhaustion of literary realism as a “used-up form”, it is also a recycled story. It is used here

to present similarities to Barthelme’s Snow White as an elaboration of the previous chapter.

It is not only the form but also the subject matter which is exhausted. Gardner questions

the Western cultural tradition. In contrast to the animalistic and violent Beowulf, Grendel the

character is capable of reflecting on “the pain” and “the stupidity” of his own “idiotic war.”46

As if aware of being created, the monster is shown to possess potential imposed upon him by

an entity beyond his comprehension. The monster’s strength is shown to cause anxiety in

himself, a tendency further corroborated by his repeated failure to form a relationship between

himself and a different creature in the novel. Owing to his internal existential doubts Grendel

is closer to the contemporary reader than Beowulf, who remains unnamed in Gardner’s retelling.

The narrative self-consciousness in Grendel is very subtle. The reader is presented with

Beowulf’s story, but from the inversed perspective of the reviled monster. In contrast to the

original where the poet invokes the listener’s attention, and thus affirms his position within the

extradiegetic level, Gardner chooses the more personal first person narration. More than a work

of metafiction, Grendel is a study in cultural relativism: the monster is no less cruel than the

celebrated Beowulf, whose violence is justified by the culture from which he comes, and further

affirmed by the mob mentality. Similarly to Borges, Gardner is aware of the historical and

cultural load. However, unlike Borges’s protagonist Gardner does not narrate the story of

Beowulf verbatim, but from a different point of view, whereby he stresses its decenteredness.

Jeffrey T. Nealon argues that Donald Barthelme furnishes the story of Snow White with

ironic aesthetics, which functions “as compensation for the absence of a transcendental

45 Waugh 4. 46 John Gardner, Grendel (New York: Knopf, 1973) 5.

signified.”47 This transcendental signified is made absent for the sake of a multiplicity of

meanings. Nealon characterizes Barthelme’s ironic retelling as a manifesto wherein “an ironic

and deflating poetics” are “characterized by an appreciation for the necessary failure of all

totalizing ordering principles.”48 The question posed is: how should the reader face the absence

of a finite meaning?

Snow White stubbornly refuses to provide an answer and prods the reader to interpret it

on his or her own, a quality that is consistent with the contemporary primary texts. More

importantly, it is a reaction against totalizing structures predominant in the previous episteme.

Snow White rejects the final moral and instead provides a sarcastic retelling. This is much more

suited to the contemporary period in which the fairy tale form can be interpreted as a “used-up”

form desperately calling for innovation. The necessitated sense of novelty is achieved through

the distinct and self-conscious narration.

Barthelme’s treatment of language is equally subversive. In the opening of the novel, one

of the characters invents the idiom “to suck the mop”, which makes its way to the mental lexicon

of other characters (including the narrator), thus disregarding the narrative levels. Reacting to

the deficiencies of language, the narrator alters the “graceful cello shape” of Jane’s body into

“the viola da gamba-shaped Snow White.”49 Other characters comment on and violate the

conventional use of language as well. Dan (one of the equivalents of the dwarves) refers to the

“blanketing effect of ordinary language”, identifying it to “stuffing” and trash before moving

on to discuss the average production of actual trash.50 By doing so, he links an abstract notion

(a linguistic description) to a concrete and material thing, based either on the analogy between

47 Jeffrey T. Nealon, “Disastrous Aesthetics: Irony, Ethics, and Gender in Barthelme's ‘Snow White’”, Twentieth

Century Literature, 51.2 (2005) 123–141. <www.jstor.org/stable/20058759> 125. 48 Nealon 129. 49 Barthelme 152. 50 Barthelme 96-97.

the two (trash as a byproduct of human activity) or on the association brought about by the word

used in the given context.

The narrator of Snow White defines the term “dreck” as a possibly irrelevant matter,

which “can supply a kind of ‘sense’ of what is going on” and proclaims that the sense to be

obtained from “dreck” is not to be found “between the lines” since “there is nothing there, in

those white spaces.”51 As if capable of understanding only the literal meaning, the narrator

dismisses metaphorical readings and seeks the referent in the real world. This strategy is parallel

to Dan’s treatment of ‘trash’. The analogy between the shape of a musical instrument and a

human body is more direct and palatable; the only thing that remains is to modify the metaphor

and make it more accurate. If the reader is unwilling to invest time and energy into the text, the

whole text becomes one such blank.

Slaughterhouse-Five is equally subversive and resistant to metaphorical reading. In his

reading of the novel, Martin Procházka juxtaposes the narrative and the “event”. Event is

emphasized in the novel as the “other time”, that is the “time of Billy’s experience, as opposed

to his time travel.”52 The event is the main element of Vonnegut’s grotesque. Referred to as

“gag”, it shatters all forms of conventional narrative and prevents all attempts to interlink the

individual narrative layers.53

The final sentence of the novel is the concluding gag which disrupts any metaphorical

interpretation: “One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, Poo-tee-weet?”54 As Procházka argues, the

question mark (possibly an indication of rising intonation) “precludes all possibilities of

metaphorical reading.”55 In addition, it disables asking questions and “affirms the power of

51 Barthelme 106. 52 Martin Procházka, “Apocalypticism in American Cultural History 2: Revelations of the Other”, Litteraria

Pragensia (2005) 15.30, 79-106. Word file 16. 53 Procházka, word file 16-17. 54 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 139. 55 Procházka, word file 17.

humor which consists in the difference between designation and signification.”56 Humor in the

novel is employed in order to defy traditional narrative structures symptomatic of conventional

science fiction.

The narrator reflects on the book’s fragmented and random narration in a conversation

with his friend. He states that the book is “so short and jumbled and jangled” since “there is

nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” 57 The narrative discards any possibility of

metaphorical reading as a reaction to the atrocities that had taken place in Dresden. The world

is “supposed to be very quiet after a massacre” with the exception of the bird-singing.58 The

interjection “Poo-tee-weet?” therefore cannot be a response to the past atrocities, as the

metaphorical reading would suggest. Its humorous potential lies in the mentioned tense

relationship between designation and signification. Notably, the bird’s signing in

Slaughterhouse-Five is a linguistic approximation of non-human means of communication.

The lines and flourishes used in Tristram Shandy present an extension to the narrator’s

expression by means of extra-linguistic sign. In the opening chapter of Breakfast of Champions,

the narrator (signed as “Philboyd Studge”) bemoans having no culture and having “no humane

harmony in [his] brains” and states: “I can’t live without culture anymore.”59 In contrast to

Tristram Shandy, the extra-linguistic signs in Vonnegut (in the form of drawings) fulfill a

different function. Patricia Waugh argues that “[c]rude diagrams replace language in order to

express the poverty of the ‘culture’ which is available through representations of ‘assholes’,

‘underpants’ and ‘beefburgers’.”60 Facing what the narrator deems a cultural crisis, he resorts

56 Procházka, word file 17. 57 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 20. 58 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 20. 59 Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 14, 13. 60 Waugh 8.

to accompanying his fiction with a series of drawings. No longer a continuation of the artist’s

expression, they are a sign of his deprivation.

Waugh argues that beneath the narrator’s misleading representations “lurks a desperate

sense of the possible redundancy and irrelevance of the artist.”61 This anxiety is applicable to

Slaughterhouse-Five as well. Vonnegut’s narrator voices his fear of the inability of art to

prevent atrocities from happening. Having witnessed the horrors of war first-hand, the narrator

opts for the metafictional mode to demonstrate that his experience can never be mediated

directly, but always through the intrusive presence of the narrator. The narrative cannot and

does not represent war itself. It represents the subjective experience instead.

John Barth is arguably the most overt of the selected metafictional authors. His work is

the most neatly structured from the present selection of primary texts, as has been shown in his

experimental attitude to the recursive strategies (“Menelaiad”). In Lost in the Funhouse Barth

achieves the peak of narrative self-consciousness by completely dismissing the plot (“Frame-

Tale”) and turning the medium into the subject matter. While diegesis is traditionally taken to

be the medium, in this story it occupies the most prominent position.

The exposure of the narrative self-awareness entails the presence of the author. Marjorie

Worthington asserts that in exposing the narrative self-awareness, John Barth “directly

confronts issues of selfhood and authorship.”62 As a result, Barth’s narrators are so painfully

aware of their own existence that they can no longer resists the temptation to include themselves

(be it by their physical appearance or in the form of a narrative commentary) in the stories they

narrate.63 The prominence of Barth’s author-narrators and their respective commentaries form

a complex interpretative problem. The commentary itself appears to be more significant than

61 Waugh 9. 62 Marjorie Worthington, “Done with Mirrors: Restoring the Authority Lost in John Barth's Funhouse”, Twentieth

Century Literature, 47.1 (2001) 114–136. <www.jstor.org/stable/827859> 114-115. 63 Worthington 114-115.

its content. The structuralist delineation of the narrative levels is destabilized and intruded upon

from a different level, which coerces the reader into acknowledging the relationship between

fiction and reality and subsequent interpretation of that link.

Paul Douglass points out that in case of John Barth’s fiction the drama of self-

consciousness originates from “the struggle of life-writing”, “the endeavor to push words into

life” and “to dislocate their reality into something living and fluid.”64 Barth’s metafiction exerts

itself into the realm of the reader, most notably through invoking his or her attention and asking

for participation. Be it in the form of blanks (“Autobiography”), by including a box to be filled

as in a form (“Lost in the Funhouse”) or by invoking physical participation by cutting and

pasting (“Frame-Tale”), Barth’s fiction seems to ask the reader to stop reading, but in fact relies

on the opposite. It relies on the recipient’s interaction with the text.

4.4 Iser’s Meaning of the Text in Relation to Framing

Wolfgang Iser contends that the meaning of a text is not a singularity invested with

semantic weightiness by the author, but a dynamic and interactive procedure of the “unfolding

of the text as a living event.”65 The lexical choice is essential, with both “unfolding” and “event”

implying a process, instead of a single finite happening. Moreover, the text itself is “living”,

that is, it comes to life by being interpreted. This process reflects the context of its own exegesis.

Iser asserts that the text and the reader “merge into a single situation”; the division between the

subject and the object is effaced and the meaning “is no longer an object to be defined, but […]

an effect to be experienced.”66

64 Douglass 42. 65 Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach”, New Literary History, 3.2 (1972), 279-

299. JSTOR < www.jstor.org/stable/468316> 28 June 2017. 296. 66 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1980) 9-10.

The reader’s involvement in the act of reading is key and the text requires individual

participation. The effort to restrict the meaning of a work of art to a single interpretation is futile

and detrimental to the process and joy of reading. According to Iser, an interaction between

“the textual signs” and “the reader’s act of comprehension” takes place during the act of

reading; provided the reader’s cooperation, the link strengthens and the reader “cannot detach

himself from such an interaction”—this connection “induce[s] him to create the conditions

necessary for the effectiveness of that text.”67 The necessary conditions vary with each text,

depending on its openness to interpretation. Individual reading habits, as well as cultural and

social contexts, are also variables to be considered.

Iser does not locate the meaning inside but outside the text: it is brought about by the

reader’s interaction. This view is applicable to metafiction, which exposes the discrepancy

between the literary and the reader’s world. These are still experienced in the process of

“unfolding” as a “living event”. As is the case with non-metafictional texts, the reader becomes

encompassed in a fictional realm. The difference is that in the metafictional texts the reader is

coerced into acknowledging the text’s artificiality. Unlike Waugh, who allows for the reading

of all literature being self-conscious68, Hutcheon defines metafictional texts against literary

realism: the former focuses on the “mimesis of process”, the latter on the “mimesis of

product.”69 Robert Alter, as has been pointed out, argues that self-conscious fiction can hardly

be considered a rupture from the convention, since it has existed virtually from the beginnings

of fiction.

Brian McHale offers a fundamentally different reading and views the “metafictional

gesture of frame breaking” as “a form of superrealism.”70 The author-narrator narrates the story

67 Iser, The Act of Reading 9-10. 68 Waugh 65. 69 Hutcheon 5. 70 McHale 197.

itself (Genette’s hypodiegetic level), and at the same time exposes the making of the story

(diegetic level) to the reader. In McHale’s interpretation, the superrealism of metafiction affirms

itself in that the author “foregrounds his superior reality.” 71 The reader becomes aware of

reading a work of fiction, based on the exposure of the individual ontological layers. The

discrepancies between the fictional levels are exposed through the revealed process of artistic

creation.

Metafictional texts almost universally include the minimum of two narrative levels. The

relationship between the two narrative levels is to be paralleled to the relationship between the

reader and the work of art. This effect is frequently achieved in the strategy of frame breaking,

which is discussed below.

The idea of relocating the meaning of the text to the relationship between itself and the

reader can be linked to the approaches to literature emergent in the second half of the twentieth

century. Barthes’s distinction between readerly and writerly texts was alluded in the

introductory chapter. In contrast to reducing “the plurality of entrances” 72 symptomatic of

readerly texts, post-structuralism has shown that such pluralities are to be embraced, and has

conceived of the reader as an indispensable variable in the process of artistic creation. This is

revealed in revisiting the meaning of the literary work of art. Iser redefines our understanding

of a meaning of a text: although he identifies two poles, the author’s and the reader’s, the

meaning is “a general meeting place” where the narrator, the characters, the plot, and the

fictitious reader converge.73

Iser contends that the “interpreter should perhaps pay more attention to the process than

to the product”74, and thus stresses the same part of the interpretative process as Barthes and

71 McHale 197. 72 Barthes, S/Z 5. 73 Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response 29, 35. 74 Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response 18.

Hutcheon. The reader’s involvement in self-conscious fiction is essential, since he or she is

confronted with a representation of a representation: the meaning is relocated from the text

itself to a realm between the text and the reader. Iser’s conception views the reader, the author

and the text itself as a continuum. Linda Hutcheon provides a similar interpretation and defines

the reader as “actively mediating presence” who establishes “the text’s reality” by his or her

response and who reconstitutes it by his or her “active participation.”75

The difference between a metafictional and a non-metafictional text is that in the former

category, the recipient is a composite identity of the reader, the writer and the critic.

Accordingly, all texts are writerly to a certain extent and narcissistic narratives “merely make

the reader conscious of this fact of his experience.”76 The difference between a writerly and a

readerly text is one of degree, rather than kind, since they both claim their influence on the real

world of the reader. Having introduced the concept of the meaning of the text as a moveable

entity, the present subchapter now turns to apply the theory to individual instances of framing.

Although treated in a different manner, all primary texts (with the exception of Snow

White) include frame stories. The device of the frame story is exploited frequently in

metafiction. Brian McHale likens the strategy of the “recursive structures” to a (potentially

infinite) set of Chinese boxes or Russian babushka dolls and asserts that it is domestic to

metafiction.77 Frame stories are parallel to the interplay of narrative levels discussed in the

theoretical introduction.

The protagonist of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) is an unnamed student

striving to write a book (to be precise, he writes three books at the same time). In one of the

stories the characters on the hypodiegetic level—creations of the author-narrator’s work—

75 Hutcheon 141. 76 Hutcheon 138-152, 141. 77 McHale 112.

conspire to kill Dermot Trellis, their author (on the diegetic level).78 O’Brien’s literal death of

an author by the hands of his own creations appears to anticipate Barthes’s figurative death of

the author. To pursue the metaphor, the extradiegetic narrative (the student writing the books)

produces a diegetic level (the Pooka and his fellow characters); this set of characters in turn

produces an additional level (hypodiegetic). The most important implication is that the

characters on the hypodiegetic level violate the ontological layer and intrude upon the diegetic

level (by killing the writer within the book) by means of frame-breaking.

O’Brien exploited the same metaphor in The Third Policeman (1967). In a discussion

with the narrator, one of the policemen produces a chest that he had made and gives a

comprehensive list of objects to be included in it. None of the items is worthy of such a splendid

receptacle and responding to the narrator’s curiosity, the policeman begins revealing a series of

identical copies of the original box, each smaller in size as to fit in the previous one, the last

one being almost invisible.79 The infinite set of Chinese boxes is parallel to the strategy of

recursive structures. However, one should question the meaning of the scene. Each frame

contains another frame instead of a meaningful content. A potential reading is that of a parody

of the practice of frame stories as a senseless narrative tour de force. The meaning is not located

inside the frames but within the structure itself.

Although framing is a device frequently employed in metafiction, to identify it as a purely

metafictional practice is a simplification. A number of non-metafictional works of narrative

fiction include the strategy in question. Charles Marlow, the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s The

Heart of Darkness (1899), narrates his quest for Kurtz in a frame story to his listeners aboard

the Nellie (The Heart of Darkness). In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Lockwood

78 Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005). 79 Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman (London: Harper Perennial, 2007) 72-77.

(the narrator on the extradiegetic level) listens to the events prior to his arrival as narrated by

Nelly Dean (hypodiegetic level).

The examples above and the selection of the primary texts from the 17th and 18th centuries

show that framing has been thriving for centuries. It is a long-lasting literary practice and its

use extends well beyond the Middle Ages (Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Giovanni

Boccaccio’s Decameron) into antiquity (frame stories in The Odyssey). Its tradition outside the

Western cultural context is as permanent, with Sanskrit epics such as Mahabharata and

Ramayana. The situation requires specification: in what ways are the earlier texts different from

the later ones? We now turn our attention to a contrast of a selection of narratives containing

framing.

The earlier texts tend to be less self-conscious than the later ones. To interpret a work of

art one must go beyond analyzing the structural components and question its meanings. The

inclusion of the frame story implies a parallel between reading a narrated story and the act of

reading, and consequently the parallel between the fictional and the real world, but this

relationship is very implicit and internalized.

In contrast, a strongly metafictional narrative thematizes the problematic relationship

between art and reality. It exposes the links between what we believe to be reality and the

processes of artistic creation. While Conrad’s and Brontë’s novels include characters narrating

to other characters, O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds is far more self-aware, being narrated by the

author-character who creates a fictional author. The Third Policeman parodies the frame story

by demonstrating it in a semantically devoid tour de force. The treatment of the same practice

by the respective authors differs radically, as exemplified by the following analyses.

The narrative of “the Man on the Hill” in Tom Jones is a frame story embedded in the

extradiegetic level. The Man on the Hill narrates his life story and is occasionally interrupted

by Partridge’s musings, as well as by the narratorial commentary paralleling the events in the

narration to the logical structure of the text. For instance, the Man on the Hill takes a deep

breath, which puts an end to the chapter. On a different occasion, the narrator announces that

he is about to proceed after giving “a short breathing time to both [himself] and the reader.”80

The narrator frequently announces chapter and book endings and advocates for their

timeliness. At the end of Book XII he leaves Partridge sleeping and surmises that the reader

“may perhaps be at this season glad of the same favour” and decides to “put an end to the eighth

book of [his] history.”81 The reader’s submersion in the fictional world is interrupted by the

intrusive narrator who highlights the discrepancies between the two realms. The frame is

created only to be broken.

The nature of the commentaries also serves to expose the novel’s artificiality, since its

division structurally parallels its contents. Partridge and his commentaries are redundant in the

discussion following the Man on the Hill’s frame story. Consequently, the author-narrator has

him sleep through it. Although Tom Jones and the Man on the Hill are both characters on the

diegetic level, in their discussion of the frame story (hypodiegetic), Tom Jones assumes a

similar position to the author-narrator on the extradiegetic level by commenting on it.

The reflections on the frame-story are more important than the frame-story itself. It

represents an alternative to Tom Jones’s plotline, and it also furnishes the eponymous hero with

the opportunity to articulate his life views and contrast them with a different approach. The

main purport of the very implicit narrative self-consciousness of the Man on the Hill’s story in

the narrative of Tom Jones lies in allowing Tom Jones to voice his opinions. By employing the

recursive structures, the narrative imitates the relationship between the reader and the work of

art.

80 Fielding 362. 81 Fielding 372.

In Tom Jones the embedded story of the Man on the Hill provides a parallel to Tom’s

story. In this arguably more conventional use of framing, the narrative furnishes additional

information by showing an alternative path that Tom might have taken had he followed a similar

course of decisions to the Man on the Hill. In Decameron, Canterbury Tales and The Heart of

Darkness framing is also used among people who share their stories. It represents a clear

structure and a framework for a series of disparate stories, frequently authored by different

characters. In The Wuthering Heights, framing fills in the gap in the narrative; Nelly Dean

recounts the events that had taken place during Lockwood’s absence.

In contrast, John Barth approaches framing as a possible answer to literature as a “used-

up” form. This can be exemplified by “Menelaiad”, whose narrative consists in re-using the

subject matter of Greek mythology, which is sidelined in favor of extreme framing. Barth’s

experimental use of the frame device was discussed in relation to “Frame-Tale” in the second

chapter. Unlike the authors above, who use the frame device as a means of providing additional

context, Barth foregrounds the structure of framing with profound implications for the recipient.

“Frame-Tale” is a touchstone in the practice of frame storytelling, including only the

frames and the formulaic opening of a fairy-tale without any content following it. The semantic

void is to be filled by the reader’s reflections on the structure of the frame narrative. In addition,

“Frame-Tale” has the potential to exist physically in the reader’s realm. The implicit presence

of the narrator in frame narratives is viable in all texts involving the practice in question, but to

a varying degree. Even more important for interpreting the frame narratives is their respective

context.

Framing is used to achieve different ends in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. The

fictionalized version of the author appears in the opening chapter to comment on the genesis of

the book. Through fictionalizing it, the narrator addresses his horrific war experience from a

distance. This reading stresses the therapeutic potential of fiction and was examined in the

previous chapter.

The author attempts to ground himself in reality by providing a number of details related

to the real world, including references to the “Guggenheim money”82, World War II, or even to

the world of consumerism and pop-culture (Frank Sinatra and John Wayne83). The imperative

“Listen”84 marks the transition from one ontological and narrative level (the author-narrator’s)

to another (the fictionalized retelling of his war experience). The author-narrator breaks the

ontological layer established in the introductory chapter and settles in the diegetic level to

narrate Billy Pilgrim’s war experience. The framing is occasionally broken, until the author-

narrator reappears in the tenth chapter. He leaves his fictional creations, Billy Pilgrim and

Montana Wildhack, on the planet Tralfamadore, and reasserts his superior position by alluding

to historical events: assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and to the

Vietnam War.85 He comments on his own war experience in hindsight.

Martin Procházka compares the use of time travel in traditional science fiction and in

Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. The former is exemplified by Darko Suvin’s analysis of H.

G. Wells’ The Time Machine and is marked by symmetry and linear development. Time travel

takes place “through a linear succession of worlds related on the basis of mirror inversion, or

the mathematical rule of proportion.”86 In contrast, Billy Pilgrim “travels in time but in more

ways and dimensions than those which can be generated by any structuralist system.”87 The

narrative in Slaughterhouse-Five defies structural ordering of the plot and follows the manner

of Pilgrim’s time travel. As Procházka points out, the style itself “prevents us from making any

82 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 9. 83 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 17. 84 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 23. 85 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 135. 86 Procházka, word file 14. 87 Procházka, word file 15.

100

symmetrical patterns which would redeem the horror of the scene [of the bombing of Dresden]

and assimilate the absolute otherness of death.”88

Disobeying the narrative levels and frame breaking results in a highly fragmented

narrative, in which the author-narrator’s reaction to the war experience is reflected. Billy

Pilgrim’s vision of reality is also distorted and shattered in the wake of the destructive effect of

the war experience. The fragmented narration parallels the fragmented reality. This tendency is

mirrored in Vonnegut’s idiosyncratic use of time travel as well.

4.5 Conclusion

Michel Foucault’s investigation into the history of epistemes was used to illustrate the

changing attitudes to representation, which is a key concept in metafictional texts. The

exaggeration of the ternary concept of language in Cervantes’s Don Quixote marks the rupture

from the Renaissance understanding of language and establishes the upcoming Classical

episteme, which emphasizes representation instead of similarity. It was exemplified by Henry

Fielding’s Tom Jones and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Sterne takes considerable liberty

in his handling of narrative temporal relations, and presents their linguistic distortion in the

form of endless digressions.

According to Foucault, one cannot transcend his or her historical, social and cultural

limits to evaluate the current episteme. However, it has been suggested that the contemporary

period is definable by multiplicity of meanings and more inclusive thinking as opposed to the

closed systems symptomatic of the previous episteme.

This trend is reflected in the selected fiction, which stresses interaction with the recipient.

In case of Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, the narrative self-consciousness and rejection of

metaphorical reading result in a complete subversion of narrative conventions. Vonnegut’s

88 Procházka, word file 15.

101

handling of narrative time is equally subversive. By his use of the grotesque and its main

constituent, the gag, Vonnegut’s narrator violates the conventional narrative structures in

science fiction prose and devaluates metaphorical readings. Barth’s method consists in

foregrounding the commentary and marginalizing the content of the story and plot.

Although frequent in metafictional texts, framing and frame-breaking is not an

exclusively metafictional practice. Acknowledging the interplay of the narrative levels and

Iser’s understanding of the meaning of the text as a dynamic entity, the third subsection of the

present subchapter attempted to locate the meaning of a metafictional text in the discrepancy

between the fictional and the reader’s realm. This divergence is not located in the content of

metafiction texts themselves, but comes to life through the interaction between the recipient

and the text. This interaction differs in its effect. While Barth’s “Frame-Tale” lacks any

meaning outside the structure, Fielding parallels the act of narration to the event in the story

and provides an opportunity for Tom to articulate his thoughts. Vonnegut disregards the

conventional narrative strategies used in science-fiction in favor of randomness of the plot. The

three texts were used to demonstrate the rising prominence of the originally integrated structure.

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5. Conclusion

The objective of the present thesis was to examine correlations between narratology and

metafiction in a selection of self-reflexive texts. The post-War American metafictional texts

examined in Chapter three were chosen as a coherent body of works from a particular period.

In contrast, the earlier texts presented in Chapter two were selected as representatives of self-

conscious tendencies in fiction from the earlier days of the novel. To achieve this goal, the

selection largely ignored their origin. The narratological analyses in Chapters two and three

were used as a point of departure for the contrastive interpretation of the changing trends in

representation in Chapter four. It is the contrastive approach and emphasis on the process of

interpretation that constitute the focal point of this thesis.

The predominantly analytical Chapters two and three made frequent use of narrative

theory. As was outlined in the theoretical introduction, structuralist narratology was not

employed dogmatically but as a reliable framework for further investigation into the selected

metafictional texts and their subsequent contrastive interpretation. The structuralist distinction

between individual narrative layers provides a clearly delineated structure, which is

indispensable in analyzing any complex narrative situation. The thesis endeavored an

interdisciplinary approach and ventured beyond narratological analysis in Chapter four, where

its results were employed in a broader historical and cultural context of changing tendencies of

representation (using Foucault’s theory of epistemes).

Metafiction is a fruitful and rewarding field of study. Drawing on the propounded

framework, future researchers could investigate areas that could not be addressed in the present

thesis, whether caused by my unfamiliarity with the particular area or the limited extent of the

thesis. The framework could be extended to include other theoretical accounts and thus provide

a more encompassing foundation. Self-awareness in other forms of art can be examined

(painting, film, drama). The different attitudes to representing time deserve an in-depth analysis

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of their own as well. Given the extent of the thesis, only a fragment of metafictional texts has

been analyzed and interpreted. This sphere of study deserves more critical attention and should

be studied in relation to other than Anglophone literatures as well.

The introductory chapter presented the problems of defining metafiction. Based on an

analogy to metalanguage, metafiction is understood as fiction including a commentary on its

own fictional status. It is therefore defined against fiction, on the basis of deviations from

narrative conventions. While non-metafictional texts immerse the reader in the fictional world,

metafictions accentuate their fictional status and hinder the recipient’s submergence in the

fictional realm. Deliberate violations of this norm are the defining feature of self-conscious

texts.

This effect is achieved through means as varied as discussing the problematic authorship,

breaking the ontological horizons, intrusive narrative commentaries, references to the act of

writing, framing and frame-breaking, or discussing the effect of the fiction with the narratee.

The enumerated items are not limited to metafiction and the list is by no means exhaustive.

With more of these practices becoming conventionalized, authors are coerced into innovation.

The innovation can take the form of reacting against those conventions, such as parading the

fictional status of the work. To provide a solid basis for subsequent interpretations of these

elusive aspects, these problematic areas were submitted to narratological analyses.

Understanding metafiction as fiction about fiction is an encompassing definition indeed,

albeit with potential drawbacks. If we assume Alter’s and Hutcheon’s propositions that self-

conscious texts evolved in a parallel tradition alongside their non-metafictional counterparts,

we run the risk of dismissing the historical and cultural implications. Equally problematic is

Waugh’s assertion that all literature is inherently self-conscious. The implicit presence of the

author is arguably traceable in every text, but there is no evidence within the text itself and it is

more likely a construct within the recipient’s mind.

104

The present thesis suggested approaching this interpretative problem using Foucault’s

theory of epistemes. The proposed framework does not conceive of metafiction as a separate

genre of literature but as a constituent of broader cultural tendencies in the human understanding

of representation. As Foucault’s analyses of fine art, philosophy, medicine or economy

demonstrate, the notion of representation is not a matter of narrative fiction exclusively. The

increasing degree of self-consciousness in fiction is to be viewed in a broader context of human

development.

Metafiction is fundamentally a matter of representation. In contrast to non-metafictional

texts, it brings the process of diegesis to the fore and highlights the process of artistic creation.

For this purpose, Foucault’s analysis of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas was invoked in the

introductory chapter. It includes the problems of mimesis in the form of painting and serves as

a visual parallel to the problematic area of imitating diegesis in narrative fiction, that were

analyzed in Chapters two, three and four.

Foucault traces the transformation from the original focus on similarity to the priority of

representation in the Classical episteme, before reexamining the Renaissance concepts in the

Modern episteme. Despite Foucault’s argument that the current episteme cannot be analyzed

without sufficient temporal and cultural distance, it was argued that one of its characteristics is

the lack of unifying features. Contemporary theorists react to this absence in their respective

accounts (e.g. Derrida, Lyotard, Phelan).

Although the present episteme cannot be delimited, it is safe to conclude that the

contemporary primary texts as well as the variety of secondary sources reflect the changing

trends in our understanding of representation, such as the increasing amount of self-

consciousness. This was exemplified most notably by Barth’s “Frame-Tale”. It was argued that

framing is a literary device used from Antiquity through the Middle Ages until the present day.

However, a comparison between a more conventional instance of framing with Barth’s

105

innovative use demonstrates the rising self-awareness and prominence of the initially integrated

structure. Framing and frame-breaking is a complex area that requires an examination of its

own.

In the analysis of Don Quixote, Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy we have witnessed a

constant interplay between the object and its linguistic representation, stemming from the artists’

conscious disobedience of the conventional distinction between the two. Foucault suggests

answering this too strict delimitation with a philosophical, that is partially silent laugh. It is a

response to

all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his

liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what

man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting

point in their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other

hand, refer to all knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all

those who refuse to formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to

mythologize without demystifying, who refuse to think without

immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all these warped

and twisted forms of reflection.1

Foucault’s critique of over-reliance on binaries as well as of the ignorance of interdisciplinarity

appears to be symptomatic of the contemporary episteme, which explodes in multiple directions

and which is mirrored both in the critical accounts as well as in the selection of the primary

texts from the 20th century.

The contemporary approaches emphasize the role of the reader. The present thesis

implemented Wolfgang Iser’s theory of meaning. Iser conceives of the meaning as a dynamic

entity which is relocated from the text itself to the relationship between the text and its recipient.

The thesis attempted to link Iser’s theory to the selection of metafictional texts and it was argued

that potential meanings are to be derived from highlighting the discrepancy between the

1 Foucault 373.

106

fictional and the reader’s realms. This effect is frequently brought about by the practice of frame

breaking.

It has been argued that through acknowledging its fictional status metafiction poses

questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. The parallels between the

ontological horizons have the potential to cause anxiety in the reader. Jorge Luis Borges

questions:

Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the

thousand and one night in the book of the Thousand and One Nights?

Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and

Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet?2

Borges’s query implies the following: if the fictional characters can be readers or spectators,

their readers or spectators can be fictional too. Self-conscious fiction reaches out to the reader

using his or her own code (language) in an attempt to breach the ontological horizon designated

for fiction. Such reading suggests that by venturing beyond itself metafiction parallels itself to

the human endeavor to go beyond oneself and to comprehend one’s existence within the cosmos.

To rephrase Borges’s observation: we as readers read the characters, but who reads us?

There is no answer and there should not be one. The topicality of metafictional texts is

perpetuated by the endless quest for the meaning, which is an elusive entity located between

the text and the reader. To address this complex interpretative area, the present thesis employed

various sources, including narrative theory, Iser’s concept of the meaning of the text, and

Foucault’s epistemes as a framework for the historical survey of changing tendencies in

representation. It is my belief that this task should be undertaken in this manner, that is

interdisciplinary.

2 Jorge Luis Borges, “Partial Magic in the Quixote”, Labyrinths, Donald A. Yates, James E. Irby, eds. Emecé

Editores, trans. (New York: New Directions Books, 2007) 193-197. 196.

107

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