Metafiction

Like other aesthetic concepts, “metafiction” makes unavoidable the problem of all concepts, that they do not precede, either logically or historically, their application. The word first appears in 1970 in William Gass’s essay, “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction,” originally written for a volume edited by Robert Scholes and then included later that same year in William Gass’s first collection of critical essays, Fiction and the Figures of Life. Gass uses the word only once, in a characterization of the work of Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, and Flann O’Brien, “in which the forms of fiction serve as the material upon which further forms can be imposed” (Gass 1970: 25), deriving his neologism by analogy from terms fashionable in philosophy at the time, e.g., “metatheory,” “metalanguage,” “metaphilosophy.” Citing several of his other essays for elaboration, Gass seems to have in mind the already textual constitution of these three authors’ texts, their construction from previous constructions or from the constituents (genres, tropes, plots, types) of previous constructions. In the cited essays, he quotes Borges saying that “Perhaps universal history is the history of a few metaphors” (Gass 1970: 130–1), remarks that we all live inside the library of Babel (133), and says of Donald Barthelme that the pop songs, television shows, movies, newspapers, books, and magazines his fiction quotes “supply us with our experience” (100). However, it is far from clear how this inclusion of parts of other fictions in a fiction could be analogous to Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophical aphorisms in Philosophical Investigations (2001: §109–§133) or Roman Jakobson’s metalingual function of speech, “I don’t follow you – what do you mean?” (Jakobson 2001: 1263). Gass’s term occurs at the conclusion of a polemic in which the metafictional works he mentions instance his claim that “the art of the novel is now a mature art” (Gass 1970: 26), its maturation consisting in the novelist’s “ceasing to pretend that his business is to render the world; he knows, more often now, that his business is to make one” (24). That is, the metafictional impulse seems continuous for Gass with a particular cultural development, one in which earlier pretenses to representational fidelity have been repudiated. When in the twenty-ninth section of Part Two of Lolita Humbert narrates, “Then I pulled out my automatic – I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did,” Nabokov’s 1955 novel exemplifies a familiar version of this repudiation, breaking its own mimetic illusion in the fashion of Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect or René Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” Gass’s flat assertion, “There are no descriptions in fiction, there are only constructions” (17), would seem, at least on first reading, to align his new concept with disillusionments of just this kind.