The Distinction Between Metfiction And Non-Metafiction

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The distinction between metafiction and meta-metafiction can be seen in a comparison of the beginnings of two metafictional texts: Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962). Traveller exemplifies the metafictional mode of writing in what Linda Hutcheon identifies as its “overt” form of self-awareness enacted through its explicit reference to the text’s title (Narcissistic Narrative 7). However, there is no additional degree of commentary about the self-reflexive nature of the text in the first chapter; this only appears later on in a more covert way. On the contrary, the beginning of Pale Fire explicitly begins with layers of commentary, exemplifying a meta-metafictional mode of writing. Near the start of the Foreword (this term is used interchangeably with “Preface” in the novel), the narrator, Charles Kinbote, comments that “Frank has acknowledged the safe return of the galleys I had been sent here and has asked me to mention in my Preface—and this I willingly do—that I alone am responsible for any mistakes in my commentary” (Nabokov 15). It is evident that Kinbote’s comment illustrates a self-reflexive mode of narration as he records what another character “has asked [him] to mention in [his] Preface,” (Nabokov 15) thus referencing the writing of the Preface in the Preface itself. However, the self-reflexivity of his comment does not stop there. Kinbote’s mention of the “mistakes in [his] commentary” (Nabokov 15) refers to the “Commentary” section of the novel. The Commentary is also narrated and supposedly written by Kinbote as a commentary on the poem “Pale Fire” by the character John Shade. These textual cues show us that Pale Fire contains at least two layers of commen...

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...ing, not literary genres, which belong to the broader mode of fictional writing. In the same way, meta-metafiction belongs to the broader mode of metafictional writing. These modes of writing are not mutually exclusive to each other, but indicate different degrees of self-reflexivity that can be simultaneously present within the same text. In order to shift from one degree of self-reflexivity to another, the text alternately exposes and conceals the frames of reference—the literary structures—that organise the reader’s experience and interpretation of fictional texts. These frames can range from literary conventions such as the “happily ever after” ending in a fairy tale, to narrative techniques such as stream of consciousness narration in modernist novels like Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), to the framing device of stories within stories in metafiction.

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