Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 3/4
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A Review of Linda Hutcheon’s Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox / Fariba NoorBakhsh
<1>In Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox, Linda Hutcheon defines metafiction as a type of “fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity” (1). She chooses the adjective “narcissistic” to describe the “textual self-awareness” of narratives (1). She refers to the negative commentary on metafiction in the early 1970s and the following defense of it; she believes that both trends have gone wrong (2). She states that if today metafiction is not defended anymore, it is because this type of fiction has a “name” which is both “comforting” and castrating” (2). She indicates that in the seventies, self-conscious texts were known as post-modernist ones. Surprisingly, to Hutcheon, the term “post-modernism” is too “limiting” to include the vast scope of metafiction (2). She believes that postmodernism is “an extension of modernism and a reaction to it” (2). She agrees with Barth, Graff, and Alter who consider post-modern self-reflexive texts to be a continuation of modernistic techniques (3). However, she states that the kind of fiction Barth describes as post-modernist is just one type of metafictional fiction (3). She argues that most discussions concerning “the causes of the flourishing self-consciousness” are related to psychological, philosophical, ideological, or social issues, but she prefers to limit her analysis to “textual forms of self-consciousness” (3-4). She states that the realization that “[r]eading and writing belong to the processes of ‘life’ as much as they do to those of ‘art’”, establishes “one side of the paradox of metafiction for the reader”. The other side is that the reader has to “acknowledge the artifice, the ‘art’ of what he is reading”. Furthermore, “as a co-creator”, he is asked “for intellectual and affective responses comparable in scope and intensity to those of his life experience” (5). The two methodologies she mostly makes use of in this book, as she says, are Saussurian structuralism and Iserian hermeneutics because metafiction focuses upon “linguistic and narrative structures” and “the role of the reader” (6). She points to the discussion of the “functions of the reader” by hermeneutic critics such as Wolfgang Iser and Roman Ingarden who talk of the reader’s concretization of the text and his “thematized” and “actualized” role within the text (6).
<2> Hutcheon argues that language of fiction represents “a fictional ‘other world’”; in case of metafiction, it is quite “explicit” since in the process of reading, “the reader lives in a world which he is forced to acknowledge as fictional” (7). But simultaneously he is asked to take part in the process of the story. She calls such a “two-way pull” as the reader’s “paradox”, and the text’s being both “narcissistically self-reflexive” and “oriented toward the reader” as the paradox of the text (7).
<3>She presents four types of metafiction mentioning that some of the metafictional texts are “diegetically self-conscious” and some other ones show “an awareness of their linguistic constitution”. Furthermore, she says each of these modes can have “overt” and “covert” forms. Overt ones explicitly thematize or allegorize their diegetic linguistic identity within the texts, while covertly narcissistic texts “this process is internalized, actualized” (7).
<4>In her allegorical reading of Narcissistic myth, she equates those who mourn Narcissus’ transformation to a flower with the critics who “lament the death of the novel” denying the fact that only “the form of fiction” has changed (8).
<5>Hutcheon believes that self-consciousness of the novel is not restricted to the “modern metafiction”; she offers examples of Stern’s and Diderot’s fiction and Gide’s mise en abyme. (9). With reference to “The Betrothal of the Arnolfini”, she mentions that there is not only the presence of the author but also his signature as parts of the composition (9). Similarly, the “aesthetic presence” of the novelist draws the attention of the reader to the process of “storytelling” (9).
<6>Hutcheon finds the roots of self-reflexivity in her contemporary novels in “that parodic intent basic to the genre as it began in Don Quijote, an intent to unmask dead conventions by challenging, by mirroring” (18). She traces the employment of the technique of self-consciousness from Cervantes’ novel, through Sterne and Diderot, and to the Romantic writers of Kunstlerroman (18). She says that in the “novels about novels” of the early twentieth century, the nineteenth-century realism is challenged. She indicates that the realistic novel causes the reader to feel that “either human action is somehow whole and meaningful, or the opposite, in which case it is art alone that can impart any order or meaning to life” (19). However, the contemporary open-ended novel may arouse “a certain curiosity about art’s ability to produce ‘real’ order […] through the process of fictional construction” (19).
<7>She says that it is possible to take Don Quijote as the first novel because “its parodic intent is essential to its formal identity” (23). She refers to the Russian formalist concept of parody as the consequence of the conflict between “realistic motivation” and “an aesthetic motivation which has become weak” (24). She believes that “[i]f a new parodic form does not develop when an old one becomes insufficiently motivated, the old form tends to degenerate into pure convention” (24). She continues that “defamiliarization” or “laying bare of literary devices” causes the reader to pay attention to “those formal elements of which, through over-familiarization, he has become unaware” (24). In this way he would be attentively and actively involved in the act of reading (24). She states that metafictional parody asks for “a more literary reading”, and its objective is not “mockery, ridicule, or mere destruction” (25). Furthermore, it is not necessarily anti-mimetic; rather, it imitates as “a way to a new form which is just as serious and valid” (25).
<8>She argues that the focus of the “expressionistic” novel is upon the writing process and its product. In “metafictional narcissism”, this focus is enlarged to include “reading” (27). The reader creates the “novelistic world” “through the accumulated fictive referents of literary language” (27). Therefore, both the writer and the reader are equated in the act of the creation of the literary universe. According to Hutcheon, this is one of the points of difference between “modern metafiction” and the “previous novelistic self-consciousness” (27). She refers to the examples of the novels which magnify the role of the reader, such as Tristram Shandy, Tom Jones, and epistolary novels in which the reader is addressed or referred to. She states that such “thematizing and structuralizing of the reading role is close to that of overt narcissism” (27).
<9>She mentions some of the techniques of the overt narcissism, such as “mise en abyme”, “allegory”, “metaphor”, and emphasis upon narration “by either making the ‘narration’ into the very substance of the novel’s content, or by undermining the traditional coherence of the ‘fiction’ itself (28). Among the models of the covertly linguistic mode, she mentions the riddle or joke, the pun, and the anagram (34).
<10>In her study, Hutcheon elaborates on the “parallels” between “the acts of reading and writing” in self-conscious texts, on “the subsequent paradox of the reader (drawn into yet out of the text)”, and on “the responsibility of freedom demanded of the reader” (36). Further, she investigates the difference between “mimesis of process and mimesis of product” (36).
<11>Hutcheon believes that accusing metafiction of being “solipsistic” or “self-destructive” demonstrate inadequacies of novel criticism. She believes that the “theories” of novel have not developed along with its “form”: “What was a temporary stage in literature became a fixed definition in criticism” (38). She argues that during the last century, the forms which have surpassed that stage have been treated “as not really a novel, or at best as a new novel or perhaps as a metafiction” (38). She considers the reason of such negative views towards metafiction to be “the mimesis of product” in the “traditional realism” (38). In traditional realism, in order to confirm the literary values of the imitated “products”—“characters, actions, settings”, their similarities to those in “empirical reality” must be recognized by the reader who is quite passive because no convention is acknowledged for his role (38). But, baring the conventions, metafictions “disrupt the codes that now have to be acknowledged” (39). Now the reader has to accept the responsibility of his “act of reading” for which the mimesis of product is not adequate; that is why a mimesis of process is demanded (39). In Hutcheon’s view, no “order’ or “meaning” is expected of the reader to recognize anymore; instead, he must be “conscious of the work, the actual construction, that he too is undertaking, for it is the reader who, in Ingarden’s terms, ‘concretizes’ the work of art and gives it life” (39).
<12>Hutcheon parallels the acts of reading and writing in terms of their creative functions. She mentions that although in metafiction there is a shift of attention from the “product” to the “process”, it is still fiction. In Hutcheon’s view, challenging the concept of “realism”, metafiction “re-evaluates” the novels of the past (39). She traces “[a]uto-referentiality even before Don Quijote and Tristram Shandy “to the epic practice of having a character relate part of his own tale” to produce a mise en abyme structure”, as in Odyssey. She concludes that the mimesis of process is not a “new critical need” (40).
<13>Hutcheon believes that “product mimesis” of realism is “exclusive and denies the validity of any process orientation” (40). She proves that even Aristotelian mimesis, which is “objectivist in nature”, is “not limited to a naive copying at the level of product alone” (41). She continues that metafiction demands “recognition of diegesis or narrative process as part of mimesis” (41).
<14>According to Hutcheon, poiesis or “the act of making”, together with mimetic code, is “a process shared by writer and reader”. Poiesis, she says, makes the reader “acknowledge his active creative role” (41). Traditionally, she says, the writer had to “unite shared language and his private imaginative experience”, and the reader “approached that same language, bringing to it all his own experience of life, of literature, and of language, in order to accumulate enough fictive referents to bring the autonomous fictional universe into being” (41). But the “diegetic and linguistic self-consciousness” of the metafictional writers such as Fowles and Borges “bare[d] this process by thematizing it within fiction” (41). She continues that “[m]imetic literature has always created illusions, not literal truths” (42). She believes in metafiction “the reader is made aware of the fact that literature is less a verbal object carrying some meaning, than it is his own experience of building, from language, a coherent autonomous whole of form and content” (42).
<15>She concludes that reader-aesthetics and mimesis of process are the two replies “to the needs of modern metafiction” (47). She states that metafictions must be located “within the boundaries and terms of reference of the mimetic genre we call the novel” (47). She continues: “By claiming that it is nothing but art, nothing but imaginative creation, metafiction becomes more ‘vital’: it reflects the human imagination, instead of telling a secondhand tale about what might be real in quite another world” (47).
Bibliographical Information:
Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980.
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