Quotes About Metafiction

In a way, metafiction breaks down the story and makes it less real. But in another respect, by that very breaking down, it actually makes things feel more real than they would to begin with.

I think it's no coincidence that people who are good at writing far-out fiction are also good at meta-fiction. Think of all the best Phillip K. Dick stories, where you experience a sort of dislocation, and suddenly what you think you've been reading is, in fact, something else entirely.

I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

First literature came to refer only to itself, the literary theory.

When a character bears the same name as the author it's just an invitation to have some fun.

Ik ben van plan een verhaal te schrijven, waarin een vent bezig is een verhaal te schrijven. En in het verhaal, dat die tweede vent schrijft is ook een vent bezig een verhaal te schrijven. En in het verhaal weer, dat die vent schrijft, is weer een vent bezig een verhaal te schrijven, en zo tot in het oneindige. En weet je nu wie die vent is, die het verhaal schrijft in het verhaal van de oneindigste vent? ... Ik.

Real life is generally very haphazard in its plotting, and I think a lot of people lament that, and turn to fiction to briefly experience, albeit vicariously, a more satisfying sort of reality. We want to see *sense* -- not necessarily happy endings, but effectual actions and significant outcomes. (Postmodern fiction and metafiction, I gather, aim to call attention to the falsity of these things, which is like selling liquor that perversely makes you more sober).

If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

Metafiction is untrue, as a lover. It cannot betray. It can only reveal. Itself is the only object. It's the act of a lonely solipsist's self-love, a night-light on the black fifth wall of being a subject, a face in a crowd. It's lovers not being lovers. Kissing their own spine. Fucking themselves. True, there are some gifted old contortionists out there. Ambrose and Robbe-Grillet and McElroy and Barthelme can fuck themselves awfully well.

For Metafiction, in its ascendant and most important phases, was really nothing more than a single-order expansion of its own great theoretical nemisis, Realism: if realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see.

Recursive metafiction worships the narrative consciousness, makes "it" the subject of the text. Minimalism's even worse, emptier, because it's a fraud: it eschews not only self-reference but any narrative personality at all, tries to pretend there "is" no narrative consciousness in its text. This is so fucking American, man: either make something your God and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it. -Interview with Larry McCaffery (1993)

Realism: if Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.