Metatextualities

Metatextualities Richard-Laurent Barnett . . . works repeatedly draw attention to the nucleus of the artistic transaction, the place where process and product turn inside out to offer a style of illusion. . . . —Jackson I. Cope Au lieu d’être de nature politique, l’engagement c’est, pour l’écrivain, la pleine conscience des problèmes actuels de son propre langage, la conviction de leur extrême importance, la volonté de les résoudre de l’intérieur. —Alain Robbe-Grillet . . . le sujet s’y défait, telle une araignée qui se dissoudrait elle-même dans les sécrétions constructives de sa toile. —Roland Barthes O NE OF THE MOST ALLURING, engaging, yet least coherently explored lines of inquiry promulgated by contemporary critical enterprise is that which post-modern thinkers have aptly dubbed the “ meta-textual dimension” of literary production. In its least elabo­ rate of configurations, meta-textuality refers to texts, sub-texts, or textual segments referring to, or focusing upon, themselves: auto­ reflexive commentaries, self-centered scripts, readings embedded within readings, discourses discoursing upon, attending to, perhaps yet haunted by the stuff of their being—their manner of engenderment, their intratextual demeanors, their very modes of operativity. Meta-texts not infre­ quently pose as sublimations of self-consciousness or surge forth as secondary instruments which bespeak an outwardness from within. Alternatively, they act as vehicles of accompaniment, kinds of paratextual phenomena escorting or bestriding their counterpart(s). Ultimate­ ly, such supra-strata participate in the elaboration, construction, or, as some see it, the deconstruction of the work to which they are annexed or of which they are an unseverable component. Whatever their specific comportments with a given frame, meta-texts constitute always and unfailingly a discourse on discourse of sorts—exponential, involuted— and lead, ineluctably, as it were, to a re-thinking of the very nature, the cast and the poetics of literarity—its alterity, its resonances, its ludic contortions. VOL. XXXI, No. 2 3 L ’E spr it C réa teu r Inscribed in otherness and over-determined by it, the essays to follow share in the expansiveness, partake of the difference which is the metatextual dimension. 4 S u m m e r 1991 ...