- Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as “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.
- “Its relationship to the phenomenal world is highly complex, problematic and regulated by convention.” (I like that phrase ‘phenomenal world’ to what I’ve always problematically referred to ‘the real world’)
- Why do we need words for talking about metafiction? To distinguish between the world within fiction and the world outside it.
- This distinction is more important now that more and more writers are deliberately violating logic and using language for its own sake.
- Although metafictional elements can be found in pretty much any work of fiction, metafiction as a literary device is relatively new in Western literature — perhaps 40 years old. (I adjusted from 20 years in a book which is 20 years old.)
- Examples of metafiction in children’s literature first occurred from the 1980s.
- There are two main types of metafiction.
- The first is to parody a well-known work of literature.
- The second is to consciously discuss the art of writing.
- Metafiction is prevalent in experimental post-modern literature, but shouldn’t be regarded as only an experiment for experiment’s sake.
- The message of a metafictional story is often that the world itself is artificial, constructed, man-made. It asks the question: What is the boundary that delimits fiction and reality?
- In books for young readers, polyphony is one example of a metafictive device. Polyphony is “multi-voicedness”.
- Metafiction isn’t a genre. It’s a trend within a genre.
- Metafiction in children’s books is different from metafiction in books for adults. This is because metafiction always relies on past experience of the reader. Young readers don’t have much experience.
- In children’s literature, metafiction is sometimes obvious to both the child and the adult co-reader, but often it is obvious only to the adult co-reader, resulting in a story which can appeal to all ages.
- Daniel Handler is a good example of a modern metafictive children’s author. His books are written by ‘Lemony Snicket’, and he even continues this gag with him to his stage presentations. Adult readers know that the Series Of Unfortunate Events wasn’t written by one of the characters from inside, that a publishing world exists, with a real-world author behind the name. As for picture books, Mo Willems is a good example.
- A Pack Of Lies by Geraldine McCaughrean, Fade by Robert Cormier and Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers are also metafictive in that their endings make the reader wonder how much of it is really true.
- Directly addressing the reader is a type of metafictive narrative device. Maria Gripe used it in her books about Elvis, and it has been developed by many modern Scandinavian children’s writers in particular.
- A metafictional work has: the writer (e.g. Daniel Handler), the implied writer (e.g. Lemony Snicket), the narrator (the “I” of the novel), the implied reader (“you”) and the real reader. Other (non-metafictional) works might have the writer, the narrator and the reader. Simple.
- “As long as anything can happen in a book it can also happen in real life, since it always happens more in real life.” – Tormod Haugen, “A Novel About Merkel Hanssen, and Donna Winther, and The Big Escape (1986), a metafictional YA Norwegian book
Reference: Maria Nikolajeva’s Children’s Literature Comes Of Age, with a couple of more up-to-date examples of my own.
