Metafiction.

Henry, Richard

In his essay "Philosophy and the Form of Fiction" William Gass, professor of philosophy, critic, and composer of fiction, introduced "metafiction" as a critical term to describe many of the preoccupations displayed in novels that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Gass lurks behind the essays in Mark Currie's collection; his critical and fictional works are discussed, referred to, and alluded to, but Gass himself is never allowed to speak. His absence is entirely understandable, however, for in identifying a set of discursive practices as "metafictional," Gass was merely giving a name to what has been brewing throughout the twentieth century: the dissociation between a sign and its referent, and the crisis of representation such a dissociation engenders.

Currie devotes much of his introduction to tracing metafiction's twentieth-century antecedents - literary modernism and Saussurian linguistics (especially through Barthes and Derrida). He concludes by situating metafictions within a postmodern context which "is not one divided neatly between fictional texts and their critical readings, but a monistic world of representations in which the boundaries between art and life, language and metalanguage, and fiction and criticism are under philosophical attack." Metafictions, he argues, are "borderline phenomena," but the borders Currie foregrounds are not those between fiction and fact/truth/reality that lead to what John Barth identified as "metaphysical disturbances." Instead, metafictions "dramatis[e] the boundary between fiction and criticism," as they are concerned with "a reflexive awareness of the conditions of meaning-construction." The emphasis in these essays, therefore, is upon narrative and its conventions. Robert Scholes, Patricia Waugh, Linda Hutcheon, and Gerald Prince, for example, all demonstrate how metafictions invoke a variety of discursive conventions, not only to subvert or play with those conventions, but, as Prince says, to "point out the set of norms and constraints according to which the text deploys itself and makes sense."

Despite his emphasis on representation, Currie cannot escape metaphysics. The essays in part 1, "Defining Metafiction," do presume there is some thing to define. Part 2, "Historiographic Metafictions," interrogates the discursive norms informing the genres of fiction and history, but the two terms also resurrect the old boundaries between fiction and fact/truth/reality. Part 3, "The Writer/Critic," with essays by David Lodge, John Barth, and Umberto Eco, posits an odd category for a collection arguing the monistic world of representation. The category revives existence; one wonders the extent to which these denizens of the borderlands suffer their own crises of existence. Reading Eco against Dipple's reading of Eco suggests they might; the more Eco argues that interpretation is an open process between text and reader (thereby effacing his authorial presence), the more Dipple demonstrates how Eco uses his critical discourses to constrain interpretations. One begins to wish for more, for critical readings of Lodge's and Barth's metafictional work, and, of course, the voice of Gass.

Currie might argue that "the critical text is the literary text and vice versa," but the essays throughout this volume, and especially in the fourth part, "Readings of Metafiction," clearly reside on the critical side of the border with their commentaries on Gass's Willie Masterson's Lonesome Wife, Coover's Public Burning, Fowles's French Lieutenant's Woman, and Eco's Name of the Rose. These essays deserve the wider audience Metafiction should afford them. The absence of metafictional texts, however, is somewhat surprising given their concern with the conditions of their own construction. In that way, the collection seems slightly out of balance.

Richard Henry Ramsey, Mn.