Prof. Derek P. Royal

ENG 522 – Major Figures in American Literature

Metafiction and Intertextuality

Metafiction

In her important work, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, Patricia Waugh defines “metafiction” this way:

a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact [sic] in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text. (2)

Working from Waugh’s definition, Paul Cobley, in his work Narrative, goes on to explore the postmodern implications of metafiction. This narrative impulse, for him, is characterized by a “rupturing effect,” one that is “associated with postmodernism because it involves one narrative mode being ‘ruptured’, ‘undermined’ or ‘invalidated’ by another, as when a narrative mode such as discours [language used by a present-tense speaker] may throw into question a passage of histoire [a language of past events]” (235).

Linda Hutcheon, in Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox, concurs, but nonetheless presents a more elaborate definition of metafiction, one that differentiates among its separate modes. For her, there are four ways in which metafiction can be structured, produced by the interrelationship of two different sets. In the first set, she distinguishes between metafiction foregrounding itself as a constructed narrative and metafiction emphasizing its linguistic structures. The first type of texts are “diegetically self-aware, that is, conscious of their own narrative processes. [The o]thers are linguistically self-reflective, demonstrating their awareness of both the limits and the powers of their own language. In the first case, the text presents itself as diegesis, as narrative; in the second, it is unobfuscated text, language” (23). Hutcheon makes further distinctions by introducing a second set of metafictional forms, the overt and the covert types:

Overt forms of narcissism [or textual self-awareness] are present in texts in which the self-consciousness and self-reflection are clearly evident, usually explicitly thematized or even allegorized within the “fiction.” In its covert form, however, this process would be structuralized, internalized, actualized. Such a text would, in fact, be self-reflective, but not necessarily self-conscious. (23)

Intertextuality

Whereas metafiction acknowledges its own textual constructedness and draws attention to that very fact, intertextuality is a reference to texts beyond the immediate instance. The work of Julia Kristeva stands as the critical starting point here. Inspired by the work of M. M. Bakhtin, she describes, in Desire in Language, a three-dimensional textual space whose three “coordinates of dialogue” are the writing subject (or author), the addressee (or ideal reader), and exterior texts. This textual space is comprised of intersecting planes that have horizontal and vertical axes. As she describes,

The word’s status is thus defined horizontally (the word in the text belongs to both writing subject and addressee) as well as vertically (the word in the text is oriented towards an anterior or synchronic literary corpus) . . . each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read . . . any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. (66)

As such, the term emphasizes the relationship between one text and any knowledge of other text(s) that the writer or the reader brings to the narrative in question. In other words, an understanding of any one text is necessarily informed by a reader’s encounter with previous texts. However, it is not necessary for the reader to be able to accurately pinpoint a specific exterior text, or intertext. According to Michael Riffaterre in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, all one needs to do to sufficiently interpret a text is to assume that some intertext is being transformed by the text in question. As he states,

Intertextual reading is the perception of similar comparabilities from text to text; or it is the assumption that such comparing must be done if there is no intertext at hand wherein to find comparabilities. In the latter case, the text holds clues (such as formal and semantic gaps) to a complementary intertext lying in wait somewhere. (626)