Metafiction and Romance

METAFICTION AND ROMANCE Daniel Green Iowa State University The "romance" has become a widely accepted concept in the critical and theoretical discussions of American fiction. Richard Chase's The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957) was the first and perhaps most important of the books that have reemphasized the important differences between the self-reflexive, hermetic, nonverisimilar American romance and the more objective, socially engaged, realistic novel.1 Chase in particular highlights the tendency in the romance "to render reality in less volume and detail," "to prefer action to character," and to present characters who are "probably rather twodimensional types" not "complexly related to each other or to society or to the past." "Being less committed to the immediate rendition of reality than the novel," Chase concludes, "the romance will more fully veer toward mythic, allegorical, and symbolistic forms."2 At the same time, Chase warns against "trying to define 'novel' and 'romance ' too closely," advice which subsequent commentators on the romance have generally taken.3 "Romance" can perhaps most profitably be seen as an inclination on the part of many American writers toward a more flexible view of the relationship between fiction and ordinary reality. Since Chase, several scholars, including Joel Porte and Edgar Dryden, have examined the elements of romance in provocative ways, firmly establishing that it is a central impulse in American fiction.4 They have emphasized the ways in which the romance draws attention to the form itself, from the depiction of artist-figure characters to a preoccupation with the very act of reading. They have also focused on a predilection for exuberant, at times even excessive, stylistic effects, showing how a reliance on metaphorical language and other rhetorical devices results in a high level of abstraction and a ruminative, at times self-conscious, tone. Although most of these studies concentrate on nineteenth-century fiction (Dryden, however, does include John Barth in his The Form ofAmerican Romance), it is clearly possible to trace the impulse through the twentieth century, especially into that fiction notably identified by Robert Scholes as "fabulation" and "metafiction."5 One of the best of the recent books on the American romance, Michael Davitt Bell's The Development of American Romance (1980), offers a perspective that illuminates the attempt to see classic American fiction and postmodern fiction in such a continuum. Bell writes of the status of the romance in nineteenth-century America that the 230Ñores romance-novel distinction itself was not necessarily as significant as "the more general distinction between all fiction and what conventional thought took to be fact."6 Bell continues: Indeed, the novel/romance distinction was often used to obscure the larger dichotomy. The avowed "romancer" admitted or proclaimed what the "novelist" strove to conceal or deny: that his fiction was a figment of imagination.7 The romancer's proclamation is, of course, quite postmodern. Perhaps the hallmark of metafiction is its open admission that it is indeed a "figment of imagination," a "fiction" not to be mistaken for "fact." Writers like John Barth and Vladimir Nabokov insist that their stories and novels be taken as writing, not as reflections of literal reality. The celebration of sheer artifice in these writers' work validates the romancer's emphasis on imagination as the essence of literary creation. But this celebratory gesture in such books as Losr in the Funhouse, Pale Fire, or Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descants reveals an attitude toward literature not really shared by the classic American writers. As Bell establishes in his discussion of the romances of Charles Brockden Brown, early American fiction writers simultaneously embraced and suspected romance, seeking it out as a more suitable mode for the expression of American experience but also exposing in the fiction itself a "basic fear ... of the origins and effects of imaginative fiction": The romancer's unreal and delusive picture of life unsettles the natural balance of the mind—both the reader's and the author's. In doing so, it releases a repressed imaginative energy that threatens not only the order of society but also the order of fiction, the narrative communication between author and audience.8 Postmodern writers clearly do not express such a fear. The...