The definition of metafiction has undergone a long debate since the first use of the term. Mark Currie comments in the opening of his book Metafiction that “the first use of the term… is attributed to William Gass in the late 1960’s, who wanted to describe recent fictions that were somehow about fiction itself” (1). The elaboration of the critical term came only after many texts – mostly novels – had shown a sense of fictional self- consciousness. For example, for Currie, metafiction refers plainly to “novels which reflect upon themselves” (1). Patricia Waugh defines it as a “fictional writing which self- consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (40). Linda Hutcheon who describes it as “fiction about fiction — that is, fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity” (1), has offered a third definition. Finally, Norman Holland has sought to be more specific in his definition: “metafiction tells a story in which the physical medium of the story becomes part of the story” (74 emphasis in the original). The one thread uniting these definitions is the complication in fiction of several levels of reality.3 This initial concern gets tackled from two main approaches: thematic: the story deals with the writing and reading – the
(re)creation of the story – as the basis of the fiction itself, or with the difficulties of navigating the different levels of reality; and material: the story deals with the coming into being, literally the complex realization of the fiction we are engaging with.
3 Metafiction also has a variety of sibling terms to account for specific incarnations of it. Aside from the
term metafiction, mise-en-abime, Chinese box narrative, self-reflexive novel, faction, metanarration, among others, have all been used to refer to stories dealing in some way with fiction creation and recreation within fiction itself.
As soon as the notion of metafiction was first established, a little look backwards made scholars realize that, although there was a definite proliferation of these texts during the second part of the twentieth century, instances of metafiction could be found much earlier. Depending on which literary tradition we follow, the origins might shift a little, but it is generally accepted, and highly significant that the first modern novel Don Quijote de la Mancha is also the first metafiction. Nevertheless, different degrees of fictional self-consciousness that can also be considered metafictional can be traced back to, for example, Homer’s invocation of the muses at the beginning of the Iliad, or to the framed narratives of the Arabian Nights, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron.
The meeting of cognitive science and literary studies was still to take place at the time of the publication of these definitions of metafiction, except for Holland’s. And still, each one of them intuits essential aspects of metafiction that seem related to my cognitive- evolutionary approach. Metafiction, Currie proposes, “is less a property of the primary text than a function of reading” (5) an insight we can tie up to theory of mind and worldmaking. Likewise, Waugh posits that metafiction is an exploration of a theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction. Although her focus is on the creation of metafiction, her proposition foreshadows the awakening of the reader to the cognitive apparatus, the fiction making mechanism, put into play when recreating a story.
Hutcheon rightly points out that “what has always been a truism of fiction, though rarely made conscious, is brought to the fore [in metafiction]: the making of fictive worlds and the constructive, creative functioning of language itself are now self-consciously shared by author and reader” (30). Metafiction, in this sense, deals precisely with how we negotiate different levels of reality and how we become deeply involved with narrative worlds, while still being able to distinguish them. In other words, it deals with the processes of fiction creation and re-creation not only as an artistic craft, but as a human craving; it is an instantiation of what goes on cognitively when we construct a story. Metafiction stages the very processes of metarepresentation as worldmaking. During this first wave of metafiction studies in the 70’s and 80’s, the focus was very much on prose and more specifically novelistic writing. Patricia Waugh went against this,
to release the idea of metafiction from the novelistic, and even the purely textual. For her, metafiction is a tendency that might be present in any narrative media. That consideration makes it possible to characterize metafiction on the basis of the aspects that recur in many examples of it; and which can, in fact, appear in other types of fictional narrative discourses including non textual ones such as visual arts. Elaborating on that, I argue that a current working theorization of metafiction has to include perspectives coming out of both media studies and biocultural criticism. If the physical medium is part of the story in metafiction, in our days, the materiality through which we access a fiction is complicated by media convergence. Furthermore, I propose that metafiction makes our cognitive processing of fiction also part of the story. Even if the cognitive processing of
metafiction is a mental process, fiction making is moving towards literalization because of new media: video sharing sites, blogs, and participatory platforms, make it explicit for their audience that they are constructing fictions, giving them form, even living them not just cognitively but materially. Moving away from very specific metafictional
phenomena, I wish to pin point three key characteristics that might take diverse forms, but are bound to appear in current metafictional narrative: fictional self-consciousness and self-reference, thematization of the writing and reading processes, and the
manifestation of the reader’s own awareness of her role in the fiction making.
I am proposing is a redefinition of metafiction as a tendency of story that, together with all narrative, has adapted through history and through different analogue and digital media. If metafiction is a recurrent story type, it is likely because it tries out the very idea of creating and recreating fiction in our minds. As a simulation, metafiction teaches fiction and exercises our mental abilities both for creating other worlds and distinguishing them from the here-and-now. As I explore in depth in the following chapter, some
characteristics of digital media seem to have reinforced the metafictional tendency due to the multiplicity of media options available and the high levels of participation and
interactivity they invite. Metafiction, I argue, has the capacity to be even more immersive than other kinds of narrative because it plays with the very issue of being immersed in the fictional world and the mental processes that allow it. The particularity of interactive fiction in digital media is that, because of its mediation process the practice of recreating
a story is made explicit as participation, and, as a result, displays metafictional traits since a reader first approaches the narrative. The implication of this is very significant for the developments that literature and other narrative forms are having in the present time as produced for, by and in the social interaction of participatory media. Most important is that such narrative interaction happening online and then spilling off the screen
constitutes an actualization of metafiction. It is also a social narrative since reader involvement does not only occur with the narrated world, but with the other readers that help construct it. I characterize the collective construction of a shared world of interaction in digital media as a metafictional narrative engagement.
To conclude this chapter, I want to argue that story and fiction are not media dependent and, being human constants, will manifest no matter what new platforms, digital or analogue, we find available. The pervasiveness of media devices and narrative content in our networked life nowadays, I advance, is amplifying how we approach stories, and might even be augmenting the possibility of metafictional engagement with narratives. Newly available platforms in the Web 2.0 are new embodiments and solutions to the need to share stories and could only lead to the explosion of storytelling we are witnessing. Since narrative constitutes such a fundamental component of the way we make sense out of our world on a daily basis, our interactions with narrative in digital media platforms are bound to operate under the same narrative organizing principle. In the following pages, I return to many of the premises outlined so far. Evolutionary and cognitive concepts remain the underlying theories. I develop my argument proposing that in our current media ecology there is an overt consciousness of the use of media and the
processes of mediation that can be viewed as metafictional. The ultimate result of this is a literalization of the reader’s engagement with the fiction. Stories are being actualized physically too, becoming more a part of our ‘real’ lives. By establishing an actual, social engagement with their audience stories are refashioning how we are immersed in them and how they keep themselves alive. Digital media, far from being the end of fiction, even literary narrative, is giving way to new manifestations of story that carry on our fascination with it.