ABSTRACT
Nowhere is the playful or ludic nature of fiction more evident than in those
moments when a character in a fictional work begins reading or writing (or in a
play or film, watching or directing) the very work in which he himself or she
herself appears: when Don Quixote, in Part Two of Don Quixote, becomes aware
of the existence of Part One; when Edouard, in Gide’s Les faux-monnayeurs,
reflects on his plans for the novel he is writing, also entitled Les faux-monnayeurs;
when a character in Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves reads House of Leaves.
These are supremely ‘‘artful’’ moments, with no parallel in real-world experi-
ence, and are valued or disparaged precisely because of their artfulness. Such
moments are paradigms of fiction at play (playing with itself, skeptics might say).
