David Galef

Preface 

Let’s start with a story. The protagonist, Maddie, owns half the doomed relationship between her and Lily. Unfortunately, the characters are flat, their actions predictable. Door slamming is followed by some angry texts, then the usual confrontation scene, but just when Lily cries, “You never loved me!” Maddie replies, “I’d like to, but the author of this story won’t let me. All my responses are tightly scripted.” 

What’s happened here? How has this woman suddenly realized that she’s a character in a narrative? What implications does that have for Maddie going forward? Can a word mass achieve consciousness? Has the author, whoever she is, become a character herself? What kind of reality does writing create? 

These are points for discussion, but they’re also existential questions, asking where art and reality intersect and diverge. In short, what we have here is metafiction. 

Engaging in metafiction may wreck the illusion of life that you’ve so carefully arranged. But shouldn’t readers—those who can take it—be debriefed about the circumstances of creation? Break into that breakup scene and reveal the two women for what they are: an authorial construct. Show the reader just what went into that densely woven chapter you worked on for three months. The Latin phrase ars est celare artem, “art is to conceal art,” evades the point that revealment itself is a kind of art. Consider the performances of Penn and Teller, who made their reputation with stage magic in which they exposed how the tricks were done while simultaneously upstaging the revealment with even more amazing magic: the old trick of sawing a person in half, for instance, shown as an illusion—that goes terribly wrong and ends up in a person being sawed through. Or seems to. 

Argument 

What is metafiction, anyway? On the most basic level, it’s when the author exposes the narrative as a mere construction, an artifice rather than what usually seems real. Granted, every made up story is art, but in naturalism, we rig it so that the audience imagines it’s real—or real enough for readers to engage with the plot, feel empathy for the characters, immerse themselves in the setting, and even appreciate the dialogue as if overhearing it from close by. They have faith in this world. 

Adroit metafictionalists provide all those furnishings, but at some point, they pull the rug out. The omniscient narrator remarks that Michael’s car crash wasn’t in an earlier draft of the story. Or Michael himself may wish out loud that the author had endowed the car with an airbag because then he, Michael, wouldn’t be in the hospital. Yet you, the reader, so believed in Michael, sympathized with him, and hoped he’d soon recover from his concussion! You may even feel betrayed. Maybe from now on you’ll be more skeptical of such authorial manipulation. 

But suppose that “Michael” is a conflation, a confusion, a confabulation of the author (named Michael) with his character Michael, so that readers start to question what’s real and what’s fictional or even get lost in what they thought they knew was true. This is writing in which one of the key players is the act of writing itself. 

On the other hand (there are so many), metafiction doesn’t have to be so treacherous or multi-leveled. A direct address to the reader, as in the kind that William Makepeace Thackeray makes in Vanity Fair, is a convention in a lot of literary work, even if Thackeray calls himself a stage manager and his characters puppets: 

What more has the Manager of the Performance to say?—To acknowledge the kindness with which it has been received in all the principal towns of England through which the Show has passed, and where it has been most favourably noticed by the respected conductors of the public Press, and by the Nobility and Gentry. He is proud to think that his Puppets have given satisfaction to the very best company in this empire. 

These interludes, sometimes frontal assaults, may be rhetorically powerful and indeed are often quoted even by people who haven’t read the work, but they do tend to break the spell of the narrative. They make us aware that the author is present and has some opinions on the creation itself. As such, they allow the author not just to orchestrate the work but even to intrude on it. They also demonstrate the importance of telling, not showing—the opposite of the old workshop dictum “Show, don’t tell.” 

But what about verisimilitude, a literary tradition going back to the prescription ut pictura poesis, “as is painting, so is poetry,” the aim to produce words as vivid as a picture? Or Stendhal’s famous definition of a novel in The Red and the Black as a mirror carried along a roadway, though Stendhal’s declaration itself, coming in the middle of the novel, is itself a metafiction aside. 

These examples show authors using metafiction to annotate their own writing, but in fact a piece of metafiction may even be a parody of the very plot it’s enacting. Martin Rowson’s complex graphic novel The Waste Land, a mash-up of T. S. Eliot and classic noir, pairs the plots of Eliot’s The Waste Land and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, where private eye Chris Marlowe, standing in for Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, breaks in on Eliot’s clairvoyant Madame Sosostris dealing the tarot, and the murder suspect turns out to be Ezra Pound. 

But above all, metafiction is writing about writing, self-reflexive and self-conscious. In an age that privileges so-called authenticity and one’s true voice and that tends to equate art with sincerity, consider Vladimir Nabokov’s rejoinder: “Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.” 

Metafiction can bring an awareness of writing’s limits and limitations, or its boundaries and its drawbacks. Because it dispenses with many fictional conventions, it can also say and do things that you can’t say and do in regular stories. It can describe an author’s shortcomings—or the reader’s. Maybe the end-sentence is a comment about you. Baudelaire 

ends his famous preface in Les Fleurs de Mal by yoking you and him: “hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!”—hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother! 

Entering the Labyrinth 

Let’s progress to the next level. Here’s where metafiction begins to take on the aspect not of a mirror but of a maze. We’ll start again with a story. We’ll call it “Reversals.” 

Sharon is having problems with her ex, Rachel, who’s just published a flash fiction story called “Reversals,” featuring a woman named Sharon. In 1,000 words, Rachel narrates a vicious fight between two women, at the end of which Sharon leaves, slamming the door. The other woman is called Raitch, and the Sharon in the story is pretty much like the real Sharon, down to her navy blue sweater and the scowl that makes her forehead crease in a W. Sharon says some awfully nasty things before she exits, leaving Raitch sitting on the sofa, in tears. 

The problem, other than the hokey dialogue, is that Rachel has the breakup exactly reversed: She was the one who insulted Sharon and then broke up with her. What should Sharon do? 

She decides to compose her own piece of flash fiction, in which events proceed as in Rachel’s story, but at the end she informs the audience, “That’s not the way it happened, of course. Authors are tricky characters, and art loves reversals.” 

And there we leave her, typing those last lines—but the author of the story “Reversals” provides her own ending: “Poor Sharon! She’ll never publish this piece, and Rachel will literally have the last word. How do I know? Perhaps I’m Sharon—or Rachel, though I won’t tell you which. Or maybe I’m also just a character constructed by [insert author’s full name, which begins with Sharon].” 

The proper model for a narrative like this may be a labyrinth, the complex kind that you may roam haplessly for days without getting outside. Not coincidentally, Labyrinths is the name of a short story collection by Jorge Luis Borges, a master of metafiction. In his classic tale “The Circular Ruins,” for example, a man dreams up a boy whom he thinks of as his son, only to realize at the end that he himself is a dreamed-up character. Borges was obsessed by the world as a creation of writing, and who creates it and how. In the story “Borges and I,” Borges confronts his own self, distinguishing the writer from the persona who sometimes appears in his work, ending, “I am not sure which of us it is that’s writing this page.” 

At base for much of this form is the postmodernist assumption that reality is merely a construct, an agreed-upon set of conventions that we mistake for something fixed and permanent. Underlying this proposition is the point that the truth doesn’t exist, or if it does, it’s rolled under the refrigerator and can’t be reached. Robert Coover’s classic short story “The Babysitter,” with its dizzying levels of marital issues, social occasions, and sex, not to mention pinball and what’s playing on TV, is enthralling. It’s also amusing and somewhat frustrating. The ostensible plot is simple enough: A babysitter watches over the kids while the parents go across town for a dinner party, though the babysitter’s boyfriend intends to visit her. But the point of view keeps shifting from paragraph to paragraph, the father to the babysitter to the boyfriend, the action moving along with it, until it’s not always clear whether what’s going on is “real,” imaginary, or simply what’s playing on the TV in the living room. Ingeniously, some of the action fits more than one part of the story, whether it’s the husband’s sexual fantasies or the babysitter’s tussle with the children or a scene with the boyfriend. By the end, the setup is revealed to be—what? A sham? Maybe. But the paragraphs don’t all add up to a whole, and the complete truth never emerges. 

The Case for the Prosecution and the Defense 

Those against metafiction have some valid points, at least regarding bad metafiction. They accuse it of sterility, of creating not living, breathing characters but puppets. They proclaim that it retreats from the real stuff of life. They accuse it of navel gazing and involution, of not looking outward to the world but inward to almost nothing. They may even accuse it of being overly obvious: who, after all, doesn’t know on some level that the novel they’re reading isn’t real life? 

To mount a defense: first of all, nothing prevents the skilled metafictionalist from including all the lively character and plot found in a Dickens novel. And why this entrenched bias in the real, the true, as if that had to be the fiction’s aim, and all else was fakery? Note that the term art comes from artificial. And note the clever dictum, “Art is a lie that tells the truth,” usually ascribed to Picasso but also to Jean Cocteau (is a confusion of authors also metafiction?).

Next, about the so-called naturalistic story that used to be the model for fiction workshops across the country (and which drove David Foster Wallace in the MFA program at the University of Arizona to distraction): What is so compelling about a tired plot stocked by characters you’ve seen umpteen times before, uttering lines that also bespeak “umpteen”? Perhaps it’s time to interrogate those techniques. And if the accusation is that the metafictionalists have had their day, so has every other writerly movement, yet each has always managed to come up with new presentations. 

Precedents 

Of course, any literary form has a history. The metafictional turn in writing has fascinated readers since its inception, so far back that it has no origin story. In short, metafiction is not merely the stuff of postmodernism but has quite a distinguished lineage. 

In the Book of Job, for example, when Job is decrying his miserable plight, he isn’t satisfied with listing his misfortunes but wishes his travails were written—“Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book!”—which of course is exactly what we’re reading, millennia later. 

Even the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, thought to be one of the oldest available texts in the world, describes its hero as the one who immortalized his own deeds— “He carved on a stone stela all of his toils, / and built the wall of Uruk-Haven”—and we are reading what he wrote about himself. 

Centuries later, in a different place and time, at the end of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer addresses what he has written: “Go, litel book, go, litel myn tragedye, / Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye, / So sende myght to make in som comedye!” 

Or consider Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which parades the unforgettable figure Don Quixote, misled by endless accounts of knight errantry in books and trying his hardest to live up to those fictional ideals. And he does succeed after a fashion: In Part 2 of the novel, he and his servant Pancho discover that their lives in Part 1 have been written about; in short, that they have become characters. 

In fact, the list of literary works that embody metafiction in one way or another seems endless, so here are only a few more: 

In Julio Cortázar’s short story “Continuity of Parks,” a man reading in an armchair in his study becomes engrossed in a narrative in which a man is reading in an armchair . . . The epitome of this figure within a figure pattern is Italo Calvino’s novel If on a winter’s night a traveler, in the opening of which the reader encounters a direct address to the reader reading Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. 

Bharati Mukherjee’s brief story, “Courtly Vision,” features a minutely detailed scene of an emperor on horseback departing a palace—until the end, which reveals the whole as a painting in a museum. 

An author like Percival Everett always seems to be examining the world of letters, as in his mid-career novel, Glyph, which features a horribly precocious baby who absorbs literature from Laurence Sterne to Joyce and becomes an enfant terrible literary critic. Everett’s novel Percival Everett by Virgil Russell features a character—well, you get the idea. 

Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, rests on a bed of chatty but pedantic footnotes to continually inform us of historical background we need to know as it relates to the fat, nerdy Oscar (Diaz’s description, not mine). 

Margaret Atwood’s sketch, “Happy Endings,” a commentary on both literature and life, traces the trajectory of a standard couple, John and Mary, then retraces it over and over while altering what seem like key details, only to conclude just how predictable most plots are. 

One assumption in postmodernist metafiction is that any part of the narrative is open to question. Consider the unreliable narrator in Beckett’s novel, Molloy, who concludes the novel, “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.” From Beckett’s point of view, language itself is always uncertain, a layer between the self and what it labels as experience. This realization is almost reason for despair because, in a sense, all fiction will necessarily be metafiction; all art, artificial. Yet note the qualifier almost: artists proceed despite failure because that’s what we do. 

On the other hand (there are so many hands; see Galef earlier in this essay), some late twentieth century authors take metafiction and make it a game. John Barth’s short story, “Lost in the Funhouse,” is one of the prime exemplars of this approach. Continually, Barth narrates the story from a third person omniscient point of view while simultaneously commenting on the narration and fiction-writing in general: 

En route to Ocean City he sat in the back seat of the family car with his brother Peter, age fifteen, Magda G, age fourteen, a pretty girl and exquisite young lady who lived not far from them on B Street in the town of D, Maryland. Initials, blanks, or both were often substituted for proper names in nineteenth-century fiction to enhance the illusion of reality. 

At times the voice-over is subtly devastating: 

“Maybe I want to lay here with Ambrose,” Magda 

teased. 

Nobody likes a pedant. 

(If you don’t get this kind of picky humor, you need to review the verb tenses of lie and lay.) 

“Lost in the Funhouse” remains a paradigm of metafiction, the funhouse itself a metaphor for the artist’s acts of creation. Adding another metafictional layer, David Foster Wallace made fun of “Lost in the Funhouse” in his own, far longer metafictional story, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes 

its Way,” which features a certain Professor Ambrose in the East Chesapeake Trade School Writing Program who’s written a book entitled Lost in the Funhouse. Presenting its own reflective angles on MFA programs and other constructs, is Wallace’s story an example of a) art imitating life, b) life imitating art, or c) both? 

Donald Barthelme is another practitioner of metafiction, one whose every narrative seems self-conscious of the narrative tradition, often satirizing the very mode it’s following. “Views of My Father Weeping” sends up nineteenth century literary descriptions, gives us many takes on one incident, engages in impossibly surrealistic scenes in the midst of the regular narration, and ends with a reveal in which one character (or is it just one character’s opinion?) declares of another, named Bang, who has just explained the sequence of events, “Bang is an absolute bloody liar.” But the story ends one word later, with a dismissive “Etc.” in its own little section, showing how this kind of tale-telling and tattling can go on forever. 

Other Media 

To return to the gist (something that metafiction often does after leading the reader astray): Isn’t the point to immerse your audience in the world you’re creating? Certainly, but good authors can do that and rivet their readers. In drama, this violation of verisimilitude is called breaking the fourth wall. One of the most noted instances of this effect in drama is Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which the family dynamics of lust and betrayal achieve poignancy even though the characters are clearly constructs—or are they? Even if the ostensible plot starts with a rehearsal of Pirandello’s play The Rules of the Game, the characters who intrude from the netherworld of wherever fictional constructs come from have their own compelling story, involving sex between the father and a stepdaughter he didn’t know about. Whether these people are “real” in the play or a fabrication within the play, they steal all the drama.

The playwright Bertolt Brecht actually made a point of distancing the audience from involvement with the characters as real people. What he termedVerfremdungseffekt, or the alienation effect, may involve placards that announce the theme of scenes, for instance, rather than let the audience completely immerse itself in the story. Told and re-told that the performance was just that, a performance, the audience might better achieve a critical perspective—or so thought Brecht, though 1) his staging of sex and violence certainly drew in those watching, and 2) who says that artists are always correct about what they’ve created? 

Tom Stoppard’s breakout play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which two minor characters from Hamlet achieve center stage, pulls us in even though we know, and the playwright knows we know, that these are actors. Stoppard does the same in The Real Inspector Hound: in one scene, two of the characters are located in the audience, remarking on the play. David Ives often delivers multiple takes on reality, as in his short play Sure Thing, in which two characters play and replay meeting in a café, always with a different outcome. 

Naturally, film has also explored this technique, though perhaps less so, since the illusion of reality inaugurated the medium. Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich and Adaptation (both written by Charlie Kaufman) come to mind: filmmaking about filmmaking, actors who act as themselves, and a lot of others tricks. In each of these works, some quite real-seeming business is exposed as mere artifice, yet somehow becomes even more compelling. The convolutions themselves beguile. 

Metafictional references exist even in paintings: Think of the newspaper clipping pasted into Picasso’s Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper. Or a painter can muse on the disjunction between words and image, as in Magritte’s well-known Ceci n’est pas un pipe, in which a realistic rendering of a smoking pipe is declared to be not a pipe. In another direction is a Jasper Johns painting of a flag that, with its over-thick brush strokes, declares itself to be paint. And most of us have seen some version of a comic strip where the heroine slowly realizes that her world ends at a frame of black lines. 

The Prospects for Metafiction 

At this point, perhaps it’s time to intrude a practical note. Market share in metafiction, never that great to begin with, has suffered a downturn. Who wants to play games when today’s reality seems so urgent, and please, not another story about a writer writing! Make it more real: a frontline worker, maybe, driving a bus during the worst days of the pandemic. 

But if the elements of your own craft fascinate you, whereby the illusion of words on a page take on the hues of real people and events, you may want to investigate further, maybe even in the course of the narrative you’re setting up. And you are setting it up, even if it seems like your characters have taken over your story and are doing whatever they want. To quote Nabokov again, this time on the idea that characters can take on a life of their own, sometimes directing the author: “Nonsense. My characters are galley slaves.” In a response to Nabokov, perhaps someone in Lolita can protest that she’s at least semi-autonomous. 

Lessons 

All that said, what are some pointers for those starting out to write metafiction—or for those who, in the middle of such an attempt, have lost their way (all too easy to do)? Here’s some craft advice: 

Begin—with anything, from a line of dialogue to a memorable character or a beguiling setup—but with the aim of eventually exposing it for what it is: words that create the illusion of life. As E. M. Forster notes in Aspects of the Novel: 

The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shall come later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently. These word-masses are his characters.