In this Book
- Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox
- Book
- 2013
- Published by: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Linda Hutcheon, in this original study, examines the modes, forms and techniques of narcissistic fiction, that is, fiction which includes within itself some sort of commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic nature. Her analysis is further extended to discuss the implications of such a development for both the theory of the novel and reading theory.
Having placed this phenomenon in its historical context Linda Hutcheon uses the insights of various reader-response theories to explore the “paradox” created by metafiction: the reader is, at the same time, co-creator of the self-reflexive text and distanced from it because of its very self-reflexiveness. She illustrates her analysis through the works of novelists such as Fowles, Barth, Nabokov, Calvino, Borges, Carpentier, and Aquin. For the paperback edition of this important book a preface has been added which examines developments since first publication. Narcissistic Narrative was selected by Choice as one of the outstanding academic books for 1981–1982.
IntroductionLinda Hutcheon
The Introduction explores paradox of what is called “metafiction”—that is, fiction about fiction, stories that simultaneously distance the reader (by reminding us that we are reading stories) and yet demand that we participate actively in its creation. The chapter provides a history and definition of this important form through an allegory of the myth of Narcissus and Echo in order to set up a typology of kinds of metafiction that Chapter One explores in more detail.
CHAPTER ONE
Modes and Forms of Narrative Narcissism: Introduction of a Typology
Linda Hutcheon
Chapter One is based on the fact that some fictions are self-conscious about the process of storytelling, while others make us aware of the fact that they are made of words. Some works are explicit or “overt” in their use of themes or allegories of their narrative or linguistic identity, while others internalize this awareness in their structures and are thus “covert.”
Chapter Two
Process and Product: The Implications of Metafiction for the Theory of the Novel as a Mimetic Genre
Linda Hutcheon
Chapter Two traces the difference between metafiction and realist fiction’s “mimesis of product” where the reader identifies products being imitated — characters, actions, settings — and compares them to empirical reality. In metafiction, instead, a “mimesis of process” calls attention to the process of reading and writing shared by the co-creators of the work: author and reader.
Chapter Three
Thematizing Narrative Artifice: Parody, Allegory, and the Mise En Abyme
Linda Hutcheon
Chapter Three explores through many examples the overt variety of narrative narcissism through metafiction’s use of parody, extended allegory, and the story-within-a story convention to point to its artifice and its critical self-awareness, and yet its demand that we extend its implications into the world.
Chapter Four
Freedom Through Artifice: The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Linda Hutcheon
In Chapter Four, the “intertextual” fabric of the novel is examined to show how self-conscious narrative artifice leads to moral and social commentary: new links are forged between art and life through the idea of liberation through fiction-making.
Chapter Five
Actualizing Narrative Structures: Detective Plot, Fantasy, Games, and the Erotic
Linda Hutcheon
Chapter Five turns to the covert form of novelistic narcissism to show how the four structures named in the title are used to signal narrative self-awareness by making the act of reading into one of active “production” — imagining, interpreting, decoding, ordering, constructing a literary universe.
Chapter Six
The Language of Fiction: Creating the Heterocosm of Fictive Referents
Linda Hutcheon
Chapter Six discusses how Readers reverse the process of the author: from black marks on the printed page, we construct ordered worlds that have been created in language by the author. The novel is not a copy of the empirical world, then, but offers us a continuation of our normal imagining, ordering and world-creating processes.
Chapter Seven
The Theme of Linguistic Identity: La Maccina Modiale
Linda Hutcheon
Chapter Seven, “The Theme of Linguistic Identity: La macchina mondiale”, uses Paolo Volponi’s 1965 novel to explore precisely the mimesis of process through language.
Chapter Eight
Generative Word Play: The Outer Limits of the Novel Genre
Linda Hutcheon
Chapter Eight asks how far this linguistic self-consciousness can go before we leave the novel — and narrative — behind. Verbal play — from Joyce to Nabokov and beyond — is an important part of the novel’s identity, but it has to be self-evident, not a hidden (though fruitful) generating play known only to the author, not the reader.
Chapter Nine
Composite Identity: The Reader, the Writer, the Critic
Linda Hutcheon
Chapter Nine links together the person who brings a fictive imaginative world to life in and through language and the ones who work backwards from that to co-create that world as we read those words. If the reader/character identification is often broken in metafiction, it is replaced by the reader/author relationship. Fiction that presents its own frame of critical reference in a sense, however, renders the critic obsolete!
Conclusion and Speculations
Linda Hutcheon
The conclusion summarizes the book’s argument, stressing that the theory of metafiction developed in it is drawn throughout from the fiction itself; theory has not been imposed upon the fiction. It ends, therefore, with a theorizing analysis of the works of two Montreal novelists, Hubert Aquin’s 1968 Trou de mémoire and Leonard Cohen’s 1966 Beautiful Losers, to show the political and ideological implications of even the most self-conscious of narcissistic novels, for they teach us that to read is to act; to act is to interpret and to create anew.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xiii-xiv
- Introduction
- pp. 1-16
- Conclusion and Speculations
- pp. 153-162
- Index of Subjects and Names
- pp. 163-168
Additional Information
Copyright
1981