Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox

NARCISSISTIC NARRATIVE

LINDA HUTCHEON

Narcissistic Narrative

The Metafictional Paradox

With a New Preface

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Hutcheon, Linda, 1947–

        Narcissistic narrative : the metafictional paradox / Linda Hutcheon.

Originally published: Waterloo, Ont. : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980. This edition

includes new preface with new front and end matter.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued also in electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55458-502-1

        1. Fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Fiction—Technique. I. Title.

PN3365.H87 2013 809.3’04 C2013-901968-5

_______

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        1. Fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Fiction—Technique. I. Title.

PN3365.H87 2013 809.3’04 C2013-901969-3

© 2013 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

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Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox was originally published in conjuction with the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature and Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 1980.

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All great fiction, to a large extent, is a reflection

on itself rather than a reflection of reality.

Raymond Federman

Les grands récits se reconnaissent à ce signe que

la fiction qu’ils proposent n’est rien d’autre que

la dramatisation de leur propre fonctionnement.

Jean Ricardou

Contents

Preface to the 2013 Reissue of Narcissitic Narrative

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Modes and Forms of Narrative Narcissism: Introduction of a Typology

CHAPTER TWO

Process and Product: The Implications of Metafiction for the Theory of the Novel as a Mimetic Genre

CHAPTER THREE

Thematizing Narrative Artifice: Parody, Allegory, and the Mise En Abyme

CHAPTER FOUR

Freedom Through Artifice: The French Lieutenant’s Woman

CHAPTER FIVE

Actualizing Narrative Structures: Detective Plot, Fantasy, Games, and the Erotic

CHAPTER SIX

The Language of Fiction: Creating the Heterocosm of Fictive Referents

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Theme of Linguistic Identity: La Maccina Modiale

CHAPTER EIGHT

Generative Word Play: The Outer Limits of the Novel Genre

CHAPTER NINE

Composite Identity: The Reader, the Writer, the Critic

Conclusion and Speculations

Index of Subjects and Names

Preface to the 2013 Reissue of Narcissistic Narrative

Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox was written in response to the flood of self-reflexive fiction about fiction-making that washed over the literary shores of Europe and the Americas in the 1960s. It was an attempt, made in the 1970s, to map the consequences for narrative theory of these novels that, in effect, theorized themselves as they went about telling their stories. It began life as a doctoral dissertation, and I suspect now that I was guilty of not a little perverse delight in writing a thesis theorizing literature that pre-empted the need for theory—and theorists: after all, metafiction, by definition, contains its own critical commentary.

Within a decade, this kind of self-reflexive fiction would be claimed as part of what came to be called postmodernism. While completing this book version a few years later, I debated whether to refocus the whole study on that temporal aesthetic category that was flexing its cultural muscles at the time; I decided against it, as will be clear from what follows. One of the reasons was that metafiction, as a general and generic category, has been with us for a much longer time: think of Tristram Shandy, Don Quijote, At Swim-Two-Birds; what we label today as German romantic irony also often took metafictional form. Another reason was that without the hindsight I now have (and thus its 20/20 vision), I had no idea that postmodernism would become the cultural category of the late twentieth century.

But, in retrospect, I can now see that the postmodern was actually something different: it added a whole other dimension to the self-reflexive fictional strain that I was studying—and that was an intense awareness of history and its modes of telling. Postmodern fiction would engage with the contemporaneous rethinking of historiography, asking such questions as: what gets recorded of the past? Whose stories get told, and why? What gets saved in the archive and why? In the discipline of history at this time, it was not only the usual stories told about kings and politicians, victors and imperialists that were being taken into account: now the colonized, women, native peoples, in other words, the ones who didn’t win the battles, finally got to tell their story and make it into History. And historiographic metafiction, as I came to call it, followed suit. Of course, the same was happening in postmodern architecture, with its ironic revisiting of our built past: the theme of the 1980 Venice Architectural Biennale was The Presence of the Past. Parallel to this in the visual arts, appropriation art made us rethink who owned the art of the past with which it parodically engaged.

In a sense, Narcissistic Narrative is a kind of historical document of the moment just as the postmodern umbrella term was gaining currency. In deliberately avoiding the debates that would erupt in the decades after its first publication, it has the advantage of not getting enmired in those endless terminological and definitional squabbles. Its focus is, instead, on an issue of narrative theory: the forms of metafiction and their implications for the theory of the novel as a mimetic genre. From this perspective, it posits a continuum from a familiar novelistic mimesis of product (that describes realist fiction) to a mimesis of process (that, as in Aristotle’s definition, includes diegesis or story-telling, but also language itself).

It was the latter process-oriented mode that I saw becoming dominant in the Boom generation fiction in Latin America, in the nouveau roman and the nouveau nouveau roman in France, the works of the Gruppo 63 in Italy, but also in post-war fiction in North America and Europe more generally. In all of these, not only the formal properties of fiction, but its very process of creation (poesis) were being transformed into the subject matter of the novels themselves. Part of the new pleasure of reading came from learning how the fiction worked; the processes of reading as well as writing were now accepted and acknowledged to be as much a part of the mimetic as are empirical objects or characters’ social, moral, or psychological interactions in realist fiction. And both affect and intellect are equally engaged in both kinds of mimesis—as experienced by the reader.

Enter the main character in this book’s story: the reader. Here I have a confession to make: because of a set of personal, historical events, I have a traumatic relationship with what came to be called reader response theory. When I was completing that dissertation upon which this present study is based, the eminent theorist of reading, Wolfgang Iser, came to give a graduate course at the University of Toronto. The material in that course would later become his second landmark book, The Act of Reading (after The Implied Reader). At that moment, however, I was holed up in the library, trying desperately to complete my dissertation. I had donned what I thought of as my intellectual blinkers—I did not want to learn anything new; I simply wanted to finish writing my thesis. But I fatefully decided to attend the opening lecture of Professor Iser’s course. After 90 minutes, the blinkers came off and I panicked: with both horror and excitement, I realized I would have to rewrite my entire dissertation. How could I have thought I could theorize self-reflexive fiction without thinking of the reader—the workings of whose creative imaginative processes were being redefined by metafiction? My formalist, semiotic-trained frame of reference was suddenly challenged, or rather opened up and expanded outward.

Needless to say, that formalist frame didn’t get written out completely of either the dissertation or this later rewriting of it in book form, as the many footnotes to narratologists as well as structuralist and Russian formalist theorists will attest. And the typology of overt (thematized)/covert (actualized) types of metafiction obviously owes much to what the French would call that original professional deformation, in part induced by my being a student in Europe (in Bologna, Italy) at the structuralist moment. I remember lining up at a local bookstore to get my hands on one of the first copies of Roland Barthes’s S/Z. And I now see, again with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, that its theorizing and categorizing impulses made their way into Narcissistic Narrative. That said, there did seem to me to be significant differences between metafictions that overtly thematized the role of the reader or the ontological status of the text through parody, allegory or the mirroring mise en abyme, on the one hand, and those that covertly internalized structural devices (detective plots, fantasy, games, the erotic; or on the level of language, riddles, jokes, anagrams, puns) that pointed to the text’s self-referentiality.

It is always narratives that are narcissistic here, not narrators, and especially not authors. Indeed, narcissism (not as pathology, but as descriptor of engaged self-reflection) is presented here as the natural condition of the novel as a genre from its bourgeois origins to the present. In deliberately using what some would see as a negative term—narcissistic—I wanted to answer the increasingly loud critical voices at the time decrying the death of the novel, by which they usually meant the realist novel. Yes, over the years between what we like to label as romanticism and modernism, there had been an increasing focus on the artist (the Künstlerroman), on aesthetic design, and on an internalization of action (psychological realism), but with the increased self-consciousness about both language and narrative itself came new claims of the depletion, indeed the demise, of the art form known as the novel.

I, instead, saw the novel genre as alive and thriving, carrying on a long tradition that had paralleled realism from the start—from Don Quijote and Tristram Shandy onward, through the modernist emphasis on psychic and imaginative processes. Writing—and reading—had always been as much a part of reality as any empirical object described in realist fiction ever had been. It was as if the theory and criticism of the novel had become fixed, reified in the nineteenth century: in other words, a period description of the genre had become its very transhistorical definition.

What got lost in this critical reification was the newer, even more active role of the reader—interpreting, ordering, selecting, processing, making sense—created by the fiction of Joyce, Woolf, and others. This new role meant new responsibilities but also new freedom for the reader, who now was seen to consciously create a fictive world in his or her imagination while reading words on a page. In thus reversing the order of the work of the author, the reader of metafiction now openly became the creative accomplice, the co-producer of the work. This has always been the reader’s role, of course, even in realist fiction, but metafiction made this creative dimension of reading impossible to ignore. While there are chapters in this book centred on individual texts as test cases (John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Paolo Volponi’s La macchina mondiale), each chapter deliberately theorizes from multiple novelistic examples across national languages and cultures— from Italo Calvino and Luigi Pirandello to Vladimir Nabokov and John Barth, from Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez to Alain RobbeGrillet and Rayond Roussel, from John Barthelme and Robert Coover to Leonard Cohen and Hubert Aquin. These metafictionists created differently compelling works that are literally about the power of both storytelling and fictive language to create other worlds.

Rereading Narcissistic Narrative, I can see the seeds of my own later critical obsessions, ranging from parody and irony to, yes, postmodernism. At this early stage, however, it is the generative potential of parody, as theorized by the Russian formalists, that is emphasized: how its ironic unmasking of conventions that have become mechanical has always lead to new syntheses that, from Don Quijote onward, have helped create the self-reflexive novel form we see still today in such abundance. Arguably it is the fiction itself that has taught us, through these internalized theoretical implications, what is needed to understand the novel genre’s history and its evolving forms over time.

Narcissistic Narrative is a temporal snapshot, and as such it is a historical document. (A sure sign: the use throughout of the male pronoun for the generic—pointing to a publishing practice in which such gendered universalization was once acceptable.) Many others have written on metafiction before and since, and have done so with great insight and scholarly range. They have enriched immensely the theoretical and critical terrain that looked much more bare when I started working on this project back in the early 1970s. That metafiction has flourished in the interim is clear, but it has also morphed. The long tradition that began with Don Quijote’s parodic engagement with romance lives on, but its form changes constantly—as it should.

Linda Hutcheon

2012

Acknowledgments

Since the original impetus for this book came from ideas generated by my doctoral dissertation, my thanks are obviously due to those whose guidance and expertise helped shape my thinking over the years: Brian T. Fitch, Gian-Paolo Biasin, Mario J. Valdés, S. B. Chandler, Robert A. Greene, Cyrus Hamlin, S. P. Rosenbaum and other teachers too numerous to mention. I should further like to express my thanks to Tzvetan Todorov and Wolfgang Iser for their advice and encouragement. Thanks are also extended to my friend, Janet Paterson, for those many hours of auto-referential discussion and to my husband, Michael, for his aequanimitas. For help with the manuscript, my gratitude is due to A. Alexander, S. Harper, and L. Rabkin.

Parts of this work have previously appeared in print and are published here with the permission of the editors of the respective journals. Chapter One was first printed in French as Modes et formes du narcissisme littéraire in Poétique 29 (février 1977). Part of Chapter Four appeared as "The ‘Real World(s)’ of Fiction: The French Lieutenant’s Woman" in English Studies in Canada 4, 1 (Spring 1978), and part of Chapter Eight also appeared as The Outer Limits of the Novel: Italy and France in Contemporary Literature 18, 2 (1977) and appears with the permission of the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin. An expanded version of Chapter Seven was published by Forum Italicum (1980) as "Paolo Volponi’s Automa-autore."

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Toronto      

1975, 1980

Introduction

1

Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox was originally conceived as a defence of a kind of fiction which began to run rampant in the 1960s. Metafiction, as it has now been named, is fiction about fiction-that is, fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity. Narcissistic–the figurative adjective chosen here to designate this textual self-awareness–is not intended as derogatory but rather as descriptive and suggestive, as the ironic allegorical reading of the Narcissus myth which follows these introductory remarks should make clear. Nor are the inevitable psychoanalytic connotations to be taken negatively, as many who have not read Freud himself on the subject might tend to do. In fact, it was Freud who conferred on narcissism the status of the universal original condition of man, making it the basis of more than just pathological behaviour.¹ These psychological associations, while likely inevitable, are here, however, irrelevant in that it is the narrative text, and not the author, that is being described as narcissistic. Other potentially pejorative terms, such as introspective, introverted, and self-conscious, are likewise meant to be critically neutral. Many other adjectives will be used to describe the modes of narcissism in the pages to follow–self-reflective, self-informing, self-reflexive, auto-referential, auto-representational–and while these are not exactly synonymous, their minor tonal and formal distinctions should be evident in context.

These admittedly rather defensive sounding comments reflect the fact that many reviews of new metafiction, especially in the early 1970s, were negative: cries of lamentation over the death of the novel genre abounded. Since then we have perhaps erred in the other direction: we now accept metafiction–that is, we have institutionalized it–and presume it to require no further defence. I would suggest that this change has come about largely because we now have a name for such works. Labels are always comforting, but often also castrating. In the criticism of the seventies, the term postmodernism began to appear to refer to contemporary self-conscious texts. John Barth conferred upon this label the status of fact in his recent address to the Modern Language Association in December, 1979 and in his subsequent article in the January, 1980 issue of the Atlantic, entitled The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction. In this study, however, I have deliberately not used this label, no matter how tempting its institutionalized convenience proved to be. The reasons for this choice are many, and not the least important is that the term postmodernism seems to me to be a very limiting label for such a broad contemporary phenomenon as metafiction. This is not to suggest, then, that the name hangs loose about the fiction like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief. Quite the contrary–for if it is a temporal, historical designation, as some critics have implied, it is much too inclusive. Barth himself quite obviously does not mean to include the work of equally contemporary but more traditional novelists within this category. So the term must denote a technically definable literary entity. The post of post-modernism would therefore suggest not after, so much as an extension of modernism and a reaction to it.

However, could one not then argue that modernism is here a culturally limited and limiting label as well? That is to say, what we (in our European and North American context) see as the root of "post-modernisme can be–and has been–perceived in totally different terms, for instance, the Latin-American frame of reference. But this is an area of fiction that Barth most definitely wants to absorb into his own modernist" tradition. Cuban expatriate novelist and critic Severo Sarduy would not agree; he has clearly shown² that the origins of the techniques of what Barth calls the postmodernism of García Márquez, for example, lie instead in the Spanish tradition of the baroque. What Sarduy calls contemporary neo-baroque still uses the technical devices of the baroque–that is, linguistic artifice, inter- and intra- textuality, and narrative mirroring. The change in the present usage of these techniques is in intention: the baroque search for consonance is replaced by a willed neo-baroque lack of harmony and homogeneity which is literally, and figuratively revolutionary in its transgressions of contemporary, literary and linguistic norms.

Barth admits the difficulties in defining modernism; he probably could not define it as precisely as Sarduy defines the baroque. And yet it is not hard to agree with Barth–and with Gerald Graff and Robert Alter³–that there is a certain continuity of concern between contemporary self-reflective texts and those of the earlier modernist period. However, when Graff defines postmodernism in terms of a calling into question of the claims of literature and art to truth and human value, does one not feel the need to point out the continuity as well between postmodernism and Don Quijote? In other words, that post is here too exclusive, too limiting, not to say too awkward and anticlimactic, as Barth himself has noted. This is another reason why I have chosen to restrict myself to the more purely descriptive term of contemporary metafiction. This choice allows as well for the suggestion that the kind of postmodernist fiction of which Barth speaks and writes is only one of many forms that metafictional self-consciousness can and does take today.

There is yet another reason for avoiding the postmodernist debate in this particular kind of study. Most discussions of postmodernism are concerned primarily with the psychological, philosophical, ideological or social causes of the flourishing self-consciousness of our culture. This book, however, makes no pretence to contributing to the interesting controversy that has engaged Robert Alter, James Sloan Allen, Gerald Graff and Ihab Hassan, among others.⁴ Instead, it merely accepts that something has happened and that it has its roots deep in our culture, most strongly in the Romantic and modernist periods. The focus of a debate on the causes of the change must necessarily be on the perpetrator of the change–the author. The interest here is rather on the text, on the literary manifestation of this change, and on the resulting implications for the reader. Unlike Gerald Graff, I would not argue that in metafiction the life-art connection has been either severed completely or resolutely denied. Instead, I would say that this vital link is reforged, on a new level–on that of the imaginative process (of storytelling), instead of on that of the product (the story told). And it is the new role of the reader that is the vehicle of this change.

For these reasons I have deliberately rejected the term postmodernism and chosen to limit my discussion to metafiction, that is, to restrict my analysis to the textual forms of self-consciousness, and only then to allow myself to consider their literary critical implications. The broader cultural issues that an inquiry into causes and sources reveals are assumed as givens and indeed are implied in the diachronic development of self-consciousness in the novel that forms the temporal backbone, if you like, of this book. But what appeared to be most needed in discussions of this contemporary form of narrative was rather more analytic and descriptive work on the texts themselves and on the effects they were having, or ought to have been having, on literary criticism.

This is not to say that extended critical studies of metafiction do not exist. They do, but they are few in number. The cultural impact of the nouveau roman in France in the 1950s and 1960s did stimulate the provocative works of Jean Ricardou⁵ and, more recently, Lucien Dällenbach’s⁶ study of one of the major modes of textual narcissism, the mise en abyme. In North America Robert Scholes⁷ began the examination of this new taste in fiction. Rut it was not until 1975 with the publication of Robert Alter’s Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre that the critical implications of narrative narcissism began to be confronted. Alter begins with the premise that in many important novelists from Renaissance Spain to contemporary France and America the realistic enterprise has been enormously complicated and qualified by the writer’s awareness that fictions are never real things, that literary realism is a tantalizing contradiction in terms.⁸ As this statement suggests, Alter proposes, as a critical framework, a dialectic between fiction and reality–essentially a metaphysical, ontological, experiential, and epistemological focus. This he combines with a diachronic progression of the novel form which begins with Don Quijote (as a study of the moral and ontological implications of the realization that fiction is only fiction) and continues through the eighteenth century to the modern period, with what he sees as an eclipse of novelistic self-consciousness in the realism of the nineteenth century.

While this study begins from this same initial assumption–that Cervantes’ parodic text is indeed not only the first realistic novel but also the first self-reflective one–it diverges from Alter’s in the consideration of nineteenth-century realism. The critical framework here is not to be one of the dualism of consciousness and world, as it is for him. Instead, the frame of reference will be