Postmodern Metafiction

Postmodern literature often calls attention to its own artificiality, its own status as fiction So it pays attention to not just the story, but how the story is constructed—makes the construction “visible” “How to Tell a True War Story” Often breaks the “fourth wall” Postmodern Literature and Self- Reflexivity

Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris Postmodern architecture sometimes does this as well.

Postmodern literature often about language and storytelling Because reality itself often seen as linguistically determined, language becomes extremely important Thus, often books about books, about language, about how language shapes and interacts with reality We call this characteristic metafiction

Metafiction “Metafiction is a term given to 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. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text.” --From Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction

Tim O’Brien on The Things They Carried If there is a theme to the whole book it has to do with the fact that stories can save our lives... What I discovered in the course of writing this book is the reason I love story: not just for its titillation, its instance gratification of what next, what next, but for the livingness that’s there as you read and that lingers afterward. Jake Barnes is alive for me. Though he is a fictional character in the taxicab at the end of The Sun Also Rises, he is alive in that cab with Brett. That’s what I love about writing them and reading them—that quality of immortality that a story is—doesn’t contain— just is. …My hope is that when you finish the last page of this book, or any book, there is a sense of having experienced a whole life or a constellation of lives; that something has been preserved which, if the book hadn’t been written, would have been lost, like most lives are.

Metafiction Raises Questions about What’s True, What’s Real Indeterminacy No TRUTH, only truths Suspicion of history as TRUTH- -history becomes “story” Tim O’Brien, from The Things They Carried: “Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth” (from “How to Tell a True War Story”) “Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (from “Good Form”)