Chapter 6

Metatheatre and Metafiction

Metafiction

A so called ‘realistic’ novel that gives the impression of being unconscious about the process
of telling a narrative. It pleads innocence about its artifice and attempts to assert its status as
presenting a verisimilitude of life. Metafiction, on the other hand, reveals the ‘make believe’
nature of creative arts. In its self-consciousness, it shows that literature is not a mirror of life.
The significance of metafiction lies in the fact that as its corpus grows, literature is becoming
increasingly aware of itself.

The concept, of course, is not so novel. In fact Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1615) is one of the
earliest known works of mtetafiction. Metafiction is aware of other fiction as well, thus, in
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), the narrator sets out to document his whole life but
confesses that it is an impossible task. Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), offers
a Borgesian history of the modern world, and combines highbrow with pop cultural
sensibilities. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998)is a homage to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs
Dalloway (1925) and A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990 ) is a tribute to the poets of the
Romantic Age; while John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981) evokes the
Victorian period following a ‘novel within novel’ device. Donald Bartheleme and Angela
Carter’s postmodern narratives are metafictional in nature, as is the popular Shrek series.
None of these works could work without other literature they constantly refer/allude to.

Metalepsis

Metalepsis is that threshold where there is a cross-over , for example, when the author steps
into the fictional world of the novel; or when a character escapes from the novel into the real
world. For a more detailed explanation of metalepsis, see Gerard Genette’s Narrative
Discourse (1980).

Given below are few examples from seminal works of metafiction:

 John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor

John Barth (1930- ) is one of the most prominent writers of metafiction. He is also a major
name of American literary postmodernism. In his Lost in the Funhouse (1968) Barth
describes the experience of reading his work. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) anticipates
postmodern attempts to capture the complexity and totality of modern life in sprawling,
encyclopedic novels. In the novel, Barth explores the storytelling process and highlights the
interaction between author and his readers.

Barth’s penchant is to explore fiction-writing as is clearly evident from his 1967 essay, “The
Literature of Exhaustion” where he suggests writing fiction about fiction and fiction-writing.
His metafiction Chimera won him the National Book Award in 1973.

 John Fowles and The French Lieutenant’s Woman

In The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) , Fowles locates the setting in the mid-Victorian
period, which contains 20th century sensibilities and perspectives. His heroine, Sarah
Woodruff seems to display several of the characteristics of a modern liberated woman.
Fowles famously gives his readers three alternative endings : “These characters I create never
existed outside my own mind.” At one place, Fowles even makes an appearance as an
anonymous bearded character to give us the final ending.

Metalanguage

It means ‘beyond’ language, which is used to describe, explain or interpret

something implicit in a language. This means that language implicitly relies
on a metalanguage by which it is explained. Roman Jakobson discusses this at
length in Linguistics and Poetics (1960), where he talks about various orders
of language.

Assignment

Read the following passage from Milan Kundera’s Immortality. Discuss the metafictional
elements contained here:

"At last Avenarius broke the silence: 'What are you writing about these days, anyway?'

'That's impossible to recount.'

'What a pity.'

'Not at all. An advantage. The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to
transform it into films, TV programs, or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely
what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing bit the
nonessential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect
them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such
a way that they cannot be retold.'

He disagreed: 'I can retell the story of The Three Musketeers by Alexander Dumas with the
greatest pleasure, anytime you ask me, from beginning to end!'

'I feel the same way, and I love Alexander Dumas,' I said. 'All the same, I regret that almost
all novels ever written are much too obedient to the rules of unity of action. What I mean to
say is that at their core is one single chain of causally related acts and events. These novels
are like a narrow street along which someone drives his characters with a whip. Dramatic
tension is the real curse of the novel, because it transforms everything, even the most
beautiful pages, even the most surprising scenes and observations merely into steps leading to
the final resolution, in which the meaning of everything that preceded is concentrated. The
novel is consumed in the fire of its own tension like a bale of straw.'

'When I hear you,' Professor Avenarius said uneasily, 'I just hope that your novel won't turn
out to be a bore.'

'Do you think that everything that is not a mad chase after a final resolution is a bore? As you
eat this wonderful duck, are you bored? Are you rushing toward a goal? On the contrary, you
want the duck to enter into you as slowly as possible and you never want its taste to end. A
novel shouldn't be like a bicycle race but a feat of many courses. I am really looking forward
to Part Six. A completely new character will enter the novel. And at the end of that part he
will disappear without a trace. He causes nothing and leaves no effects. That is precisely what
I like about him. Part Six will be a novel within a novel, as well as the saddest erotic story I
have ever written. It will make you sad, too.'

Avenarius lapsed into a perplexed silence. After a while, he asked me in a kindly voice, 'And
what will your novel be called?'

'The Unbearable Lightness of Being.'

'I think somebody has already written that.'

'I did! But I was wrong about the title then. That title was supposed to belong to the novel I'm
writing now'" (pp. 265-267).

What is Metatheatre?

First of all, let me give you the etymology of the word. The word “meta-” marked by change
or transformation; later in time or development; behind, beyond; transcending, more
comprehensive; above, upon, or about. Fr. Greek meta-, beside, after.

In 1963, Lionel Abel’s Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, was published where
Abel introduced the term ‘Metatheatre’. According to him, ‘metatheatre’ is the right term to
describe the only form possible to the contemporary playwright who wishes to treat a subject
gravely. He held that tragedy, invented by Greeks to describe pain and yet give pleasure, is
unfeasible today. In the late Renaissance, a revolution occurred in human consciousness
which made tragedy impossible. But playwrights such as Calderon and Shakespeare wrote
‘serious’ plays which were self-reflexive: the illusion that sustains the play worlds also
sustains the world outside the plays - the so-called ‘real world’.

Metatheatre is essentially used to create multiple ‘layers’ of illusion. The prefix, ‘meta-’,
here, suggests ‘beyond’, ‘above’, or ‘within’. Lionel Abel attempts to explain “metatheatre”
as a dramatic category or kind. In the context, he mentions such plays as Shakespeare’s
Tempest and Calderon’s Life is a Dream and works by Genet, Brecht, and Beckett.

Metatheatre, at one level, can be viewed as one make-believe world superimposed upon
another make-believe dramatic world. The most easily understandable example of this
relationship is the ‘play-within-the-play’. Of course, this idea did not come into being in the
age of Calderon and Shakespeare. The idea of multiple layers of illusion is as old as theatre
itself. But it is only since Abel’s book was published in 1963 that a whole area of criticism
and theory has sprung up in the West under the general heading of ‘metatheatre’ or
‘metadrama’.

Richard Hornby, in Drama, Metadrama, and Perception (1986), has given a clear and
concise analysis of different types of ‘metatheatre / metadrama’:
 1. The play within the play:

i) The Inset type - the inner play is secondary.

ii) The Framed type – the inner play is primary.

2. The ceremony within the play:

In all cultures we find plays that contain feasts, balls, pageants, tournaments, games,

rituals, trials, inquests, processions, funerals, coronations, etc.

3. Role playing within the role:

i) Voluntary, ii) Involuntary, iii) Allegorical

4. Literary and real-life references:

i) Citation, ii) Allegory, iii) Parody, and iv) Adaptation

5. Self-reference:

The play directly calls attention to itself as a play, an a work of creative writing.

(Source: Metatheatre and Sanskrit Drama. Michael Lockwood and Vishnu Bhatt, 2005).

Assignment

Go to the website:  http://www.art.com/products/p10215898-sa-i1148947/roy-lichtenstein-

masterpiece-1962.htm

Look at a painting by the American artist Roy Lichtenstein entitled “Masterpiece”. Why do
you think it is called “meta-art”?

Metatheatre and Play within play structure

In Luigi Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author, the dramatist explores on
the nature of theatrical process. The Characters have already found the author who created
them, and now wait for their realisation through performance. Throughout the play, the
Characters protest that the performers are not real enough. By the end the actors can no
longer distinguish between acting and reality. The Producer cancels the rehearsal, the actors
leave, but the theatre is still haunted by the Characters.

Read the following excerpt from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Notice how the dramatist
uses the ‘play within play’ device to blur the boundary between play and real life:

Hamlet. [aside] Wormwood, wormwood!

Queen. The instances that second marriage move

Are base respects of thrift, but none of love.

A second time I kill my husband dead

When second husband kisses me in bed.

Player King. I do believe you think what now you speak;

But what we do determine oft we break.

Most necessary 'tis that we forget

……………………………………

To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt.

What to ourselves in passion we propose,

The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.

The violence of either grief or joy

Their own enactures with themselves destroy.

Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament;

Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.

This world is not for aye, nor 'tis not strange

That even our loves should with our fortunes change;

For 'tis a question left us yet to prove,

Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.

So think thou wilt no second husband wed;

But die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead.

Player Queen. Nor earth to me give food, nor heaven light,

Sport and repose lock from me day and night,

To desperation turn my trust and hope,

An anchor's cheer in prison be my scope,

Each opposite that blanks the face of joy

Meet what I would have well, and it destroy,

Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife,

If, once a widow, ever I be wife!

Hamlet. If she should break it now!

Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967), Stoppard takes two of the minor
characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet and makes them into the unwitting stars of the show.
The play is self-consciously theatrical and much of the humor is derived from the fact that the
audience is aware of the famous dramatic context in which the two characters are operating.
Critics have found a relationship between the dramatic predicament of Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern and that of Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.
Stoppard undoubtedly plays with dramatic styles in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; this is
seen most obviously in his combining techniques from both Renaissance and Absurdist
theater. However, his dramatic manipulation of Shakespeare's material is highly original.
Hamlet, widely regarded as one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, becomes an absurdist
farce.

QUIZ

1. Match the writers with their works:

a Luigi Pirandello i Linguistics and Poetics

b Roman Jakobson ii Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic

Form

c Lionel Abel iii Narrative Discourse

d Genette iv Six Characters in Search of an Author

2. Say whether the following are true or false:

i. Milan Kundera’s Immortality contains passages that conform to metadrama.

ii. A ‘realistic’ novel claims to be unselfconscious about its process of writing.

iii. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is the first ever attempt at metatheatre.

Suggested readings

 Campbell, James. ‘An Interview with John Fowles,’ Contemporary Literature, 17, 4,
Autumn (1976), 455-69.

 Currie, Mark. Metafiction. Longman: NY, 1995.

 Hasan, Ihab. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Post-Modern Literature.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

 Kundera, Milan. Immortality. Peter Kussi (trans.). Calcutta: Rupa & Co., 1991.

 Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966.

Suggested links

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metatheatre

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafiction

 https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/jdtc/article/viewFile/1959/1922

Answer key

1. a-iv; b-i; c-ii; d-iii

2. i-True; ii-True ;iii-False