Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox by Linda Hutcheon. (review)

404 LETTERS IN CANADA 1981 the translation ofCanadian books - a decade that witnessed the formation of a Literary Translators' Association, the creation of Canada Council Translation Prizes, and, recently, a University of Ottawa 'Translation in Canadian Literature' symposium - what is the state of the art? Judging on the basis of last year's production (a representative sample), we must conclude that there is some work that can be unreservedly recommended for its intelligence, subtlety, and fidelity, but also far too much that must be classified as second-rate. There is undeniably a great need for a more serious commitment to excellence by translators and publishers alike, manifested in asubstantialinvestmentoftime and funding. Only then will the very best works in each literary tradition receive the best possible translation into the other language. It is a grave matter, indeed, that we must add to our lament that so much important work issimply unavailable in translation another, more disturbing caveat: that a large percentage of those works which are available in translation are demonstrably substandard and ought to be revised. It is, therefore, imperative that the Canada Council and others monitor their grants much more closely, thereby encouraging the excellence of translators like Larry Shouldice and Ray Ellenwood, and discouraging translators and publishers who have not demonstrated skill and responsibility in previous efforts. The ultimate objective, of course, should be to make review articles such as this superfluous. Humanities Linda Hutcheon. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 1980. xi, 168. $9.95 This book's most important predecessor in the field of self-conscious fiction is Robert Alter's Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (1975). His approach is basically historical, and the authors he discussesCervantes , Sterne, Diderot, Gide, Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet, Fowles, Barth, Borges, and others - constitute a kind of alternative tradition to that of psychological and socia! realism. There is even a chapter on the obvious gap during the nineteenth century, entitled 'The Self-Conscious Novel in Eclipse: In contrast, Linda Hutcheon's book is mainly structured around theoretical categories, and concentrates largely on postwar fiction. Thus although her coverage overlaps with the latter part of Alter's book, the two can usefully be seen as complementary, in so far as both seek to modify or dislodge what they see as the dominant definition of the novel as the genre of realism. Hutcheon's main contribution is her application of reader-response theory and semiotics to self-conscious texts. She is will versed in recent HUMANITIES 405 French literary theory, and it is appropriate that her first chapter was originally published in French in Poetique in 1977 as 'Modes et formes du narcissisme litteraire.' She seems equally at home with the Italian avant-garde in her accounts of Gruppo 6} and of Paolo Volponi's La Macchina Mondiale, as well as with the North American scene, both literary and critical. The book offers a good blend of critical theory and practice, and the distinctions between different types of metafiction are well thought out. At times, though, the claims of metafiction are pressed too hard. For Hutclteon self-conscious fiction is not merely a type of fiction or a tendency within its history, but the quintessence of it. This line of argument verges on asserting that metafiction is morally and aesthetically better than other types: better aesthetically because it raises fictiveness and hence creativity to its highest power, and better morally because it forces the reader to participate more actively in the fictional process - to become, in fact, its co-creator. Another version of the argument opens by conceding to the realist critics that the novel is indeed a mimetic genre, and that their only failure is to define too narrowly the object of the mimesis, whiclt could and should include the novel-writing process itself. Thus the highest form of realism and the highest form of fictiveness are one and the same. After all, 'life is fictive, of our making, as well' (p 19), just as fiction is itself a reality. Of course, paradox is announced in the book's title, but I remain unsatisfied by this one, as well as by the slightly comic...