Don Quijote and the Neuroscience of Metafiction

Don Quijote and the Neuroscience of Metafiction

What is metafiction? Its original meaning was "a fiction that both creates an illusion

and lays bare that illusion."1 But the term has expanded and expanded to include any

fiction that even mentions the idea of fiction. That can cover a lot of things, starting with the

Iliad.2

I'd like to go back to the original idea. In my understanding, metafictions tell stories

in which the physical medium of the story becomes part of the story. Among contemporary

writers of fiction one could mention: my erstwhile colleagues John Barth, Donald Barthelme,

and Ray Federman. Others are Borges, Calvino, Nabokov, Umberto Eco, John Fowles,

Salman Rushdie, and on and on. Metafiction has become very popular in our questioning

centuries, the twentieth and twenty-first. But, from previous times, one could point to

Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste or Sterne's Tristram Shandy. The events of Tristram Shandy

include the very copy of Tristram Shandy I am holding in my hand.

Metafictions lead to some of the more dizzying effects possible in literature. In Doris

Lessing's The Golden Notebook, for example, one of the notebooks tells about a novelist

trying to write a novel. A friend asks her to give him the first sentence, and the novelist

rattles off the first sentence of The Golden Notebook itself.

Drama--metadrama--gets this effect in the metatheatrical tradition of Pirandello's Six

Characters in Search of an Author or Henry IV, and many of the absurdists like Genet or

1

Ionesco or Weiss, in which characters point to the "play" they are acting in. In movies, you

could also point to Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo or Bergman's Persona or Alejandro

Amenábar, Abre los Ojos, and espcially Sp...

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