Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox

by Linda Hutcheon

Linda Hutcheon, in this original study, examines the modes, forms and techniques of narcissistic fiction, that is, fiction which includes within itself some sort of commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic nature. Her analysis is further extended to discuss the implications of such a development for both the theory of the novel and reading theory. Having placed this phenomenon in its historical context Linda Hutcheon uses the insights of various reader-response theories to explore the "paradox" created by metafiction: the reader is, at the same time, co-creator of the self-reflexive text and distanced from it because of its very self-reflexiveness. She illustrates her analysis through the works of novelists such as Fowles, Barth, Nabokov, Calvino, Borges, Carpentier, and Aquin. For the paperback edition of this important book a preface has been added which examines developments since first publication.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Theory, Philosophy, 20th Century, Criticism, Literature

176 pages, Paperback

First published February 23, 1981

Reviews

[Маx Nestelieiev · Rating 5 out of 5]

прекрасна Гатчен-1: стиль, як завжди, на початку надто науковий (експліцитні гетерокосми й тематизації поезиса тощо), але потім втягуєшся і бачиш, що авторка чудово формулює важковловлювальне. цінне про металітературу, самосвідомість і завжди активну роль читача.

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hutcheon writes a very compelling text, citing a large number of texts in her presentation of her theory of the self-referential metafictional narrative. Intellectually most seductive is the central role she assigns to the reader and the reading process, which in the wake of post-structuralism and postmodern attempts to debunk the authority of the author offers a new source of meaning. Looking at many texts of the 1980s and 90s this obsession with the reading process and the experimentation of a dialogue between narrative and reader became one of the defining features of a certain segment of literature. Some were interesting, many more simply annoying. Rarely did someone achieve the same effect as If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.

Hutcheon rescues this literature from the ivory tower of academia and makes it more approachable by convincing her readers that this concept and its role in literature is not really a radical departure from literary tradition, simply the natural extension of a text's occupation with its own narrative, of which traces can be found as far back as antiquity, to include the process of reading as well as writing it.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the terms Hutcheon employs (such as "diegetic") could be defined a little more rigorously, in general this is a useful overview of self-reflexive devices in literature. For me, her most convincing claim is that the novel is a parodic and self-reflexive genre of literature, and the "realist" novel of the 18th and 19th centuries only a brief aberration in that tradition.

Hutcheon's work could be read as a continuation of Robert Alter's Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre--where she extends this is in her employing many more works of fiction in her argument than Alter did in his book.

Acquired May 29, 1999
Used bookstore in London, Ontario (closed now, and I do not remember the name)

[Ryan Rebel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for my senior thesis.

Hutcheon is smart. The first chapter of this book was tremendously helpful to me as a way to restructure my theoretical understanding of metafiction. The rest of the book sort of dragged though. The later chapters are more about close-reading and the minutiae of competing metafictional theories. Not much was helpful or particularly interesting past the first 1/3 of the book. She ends up repeating herself a lot.

[Aidan Vick]

Gotta love untranslated French quotes

[Dominic Pakenham · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the author indicates early on the text, the term narcissistic is not intended as derogatory. Quite the opposite, in fact: a narcissistic narrative is one that contains within itself reflections on its own creative process. Within narcissistic narratives - henceforth 'metafiction' -, the author addresses the reader directly, inviting them to step out of the flow of the story itself to reflect on, and even engage in, the act of story-making. Although metafiction possesses a pedigree of precedence that stretches back to the Greeks, its most recent and striking iteration should be seen as a rebellion against 19th century traditional realism, wherein the fictional reality was defined almost exclusively by the author and taken as a Rortyesque mirror onto an empirically valid external reality. In this model, the extent to which a novel should be considered 'good' is a function of its verisimilitude to those externalities to which it supposedly refers. As she puts it, the 'reader is required to identify the products being imitated - characters, actions, settings - and recognize their similarity to those in empirical reality'. The problem with this approach is twofold. Firstly, it implies a philosophically naive and ultimately untenable vision of the relationship between the 'interior consciousness' and 'exterior realities' (though as she points out the modernist authors like Virginia Woolf had already made this point). Second - and this is the more interesting suggestion -, the paradigm of referential correspondence emblematic of the traditional novel is flatly self-contradictory inasmuch as both the reader and the writer operating within that framework were both aware that the story being told was, at the end of the day, a fictive creation. Consequently, in order to enjoy the traditional novel on the terms intended, both parties would have to engage in a strange performance in which they would pretend that what was being read or written was, in fact, real - at least for the duration of the time spent within the author's reality. Paradoxically, this act of suppression made the traditional novel more rather than less artificial than those metafictions that pointed out the constructedness of the narrative world. By contrast, the metafictional author, in recognising that the construction of the novel was an act of co-creation between reader and writer, opened up all sorts of generative possibilities closed off to those operating within the earlier paradigm.

The problem with the argument is that many of the examples she uses show metafictional authors drawing attention to the constructedness of the narrative within their fictional worlds but rarely do they show how this act of drawing attention enhances the richness of the world they wish to shape. That is, it seems to me that many of the examples stall in the cul-de-sac of reflection for reflection's sake whereas effective metafiction uses the reflective and co-creative aspects of the new novel to improve the world of the novel itself. I believe that authors like Nabokov and Italo Calvino - both of whom are mentioned at points throughout the text - do use the principles of metafiction to enrich their narratives. For example, Calvino uses the constructedness of the book and the compact between reader and writer to generate insights into our philosophical-existential condition outside of the work itself. Nabokov, meanwhile, uses reflections on his own creative process within his writing to mirror, say, the solipsism of Humbert Humbert or the derangement of Botkin. But the works of John Fowles or even John Barth can often become repetitive in their tendency to merely point out the limits and artificiality of the fictive construct; and this alone is neither insightful nor particularly creative . In her wholesale defence of metafiction, I think the author fails to distinguish between poor or dreary metafiction and its opposite.

[J.S Tiu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read because of my interest in magical realism as a metafictional genre.

If I have to offer two major issues with this book as an introduction towards metafiction, it's that the first half is filled with structuralist terminology that can be hard to get through in order to elaborate on some key aspects of metafiction that are explained much more clearly towards the second half anyway, and that the lack of discussions regarding postcolonial metafiction aside from the obvious (Ficciones and Rayuela) make sifting through this even harder for somebody who has little interest in the majority of Hutcheon's examples, which are drawn from continental European literature. With that being said, this is still a stellar, if slightly dated vibe into the vitality of reader-author-text interactions in the mode.

[Amel El-Rayis · Rating 2 out of 5]

it is good and informative, but I failed to understand the French terms and the excerpts from the French texts, I wish they were translated. Another thing to pinpoint is the repetition all over the book.

[Skyler · Rating 2 out of 5]

At lot of the book references French writings and no translations are given.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Text itself a great introduction to metafictionality (albeit, as Hutcheon notes in her new introduction, very much of its time). The 2013 edition, however, is a copy-editing nightmare.