US Metafiction:

Coover, Barth,
Nabokov
Mehrnoosh Bahmei
Kharazmi University
Context
• political and social factors
• ‘counter-culture’
• This moment in US culture
Metafiction
• ‘Fabulation,’ ‘Surfiction,’ ‘Metafiction’
• Relentless storytelling, with endless tales within tales and parallel versions of
the same tale
• Repeatedly draws attention to the process of constructing fiction
• Frequently concerns itself with what we might call the ‘philosophical’
dimension of writing
• The stories draw frequently on fairy tale and myth
• profoundly intertextual, constantly referring directly or indirectly to other texts
and genres
• Playfulness, labeled as ‘black humour’, or ‘absurdist’ or ‘humorous’ fiction
Everyday existence in 1960s and 1970s America

• The determination to explore fictionality in the 1960s was

motivated by a sense that everyday reality was always
already fictionalized
A more direct
political
function in
metafiction,
Coover’s 1977
novel The
Public Burning
• Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, left-wing Jewish activists
• Comments on the intense media hysteria of the original case
 Barth’s Funhouse and Coover’s Descants
• John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968)
• Robert Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants (1969)

• Exhuberant invention, extreme playfulness, and appropriation of myth, fairytale and fantasy

• stories in the process of being constructed

• The distinction between author and narrator is at the closest it can be to being broken down here

• They invoke the oral or even musical storytelling tradition

• The musical idea of ‘variations on a theme’: reworking similar ideas about the existential implications
of authoring, the process of composition and the relationship between author and reader.
Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse
• The eponymous funhouse, an analogy for the fictional text
• The Mobius strip
• “Under the boardwalk, matchbook covers, grainy other things. What
is the story’s theme? Ambrose is ill. “
• The difference between Borges’s labyrinth and Barth’s own funhouse
• Writing fiction = a question of dramatizing reflections of oneself until one
realizes that the self is not the unified, autonomous entity it is presented as
in realist fiction, but something that continually changes.
‘Once upon a
time there was
a story that
began “Once
upon a time
there was a
story that
began ““Once
upon a time
there was a
story that
began”” . . . ’
• The term ‘self-conscious’ applies to Barth’s fictions
• ‘Life-Story’
• ‘Autobiography’
Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants
• The role of the reader as co-creator
• ‘The Magic Poker’
• Turns the subtle erotic undercurrents which operate in fairytales
into overt, obscenely sexualized elements
• The eponymous object in ‘The Magic Poker’ is a parody

• Exhaustion with used-up forms

• The overt presence of the author in the act of composing
• Still, ‘anything can happen.’
• ‘A love letter! Wait a minute, this is getting out of hand! What happened to that
poker, I was doing much better with that poker, I had something going there,
archetypal and maybe even beautiful.’
• Inconsistency on inconsistency
• The End: a succession of openings to new stories each beginning with the
conventional fairytale opening “Once upon a time.”
• ‘baring the device’ of literary composition
• Postmodern buildings: Lloyds Bank building or the Pompidou Centre
• not a finished story but a story in process
• The real story of ‘The Magic Poker’ is left to us, the readers and ‘co-writers’
• The logic of Borges’s ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ informs ‘The Magic Poker.’
• ‘Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl,’ the kind of story only imagined in ‘The Garden
of Forking Paths’
• The ‘forking paths principle’ in Barth’s ‘Lost in the Funhouse’
• ‘Naturally he didn’t have nerve enough to ask Magda to go through the funhouse
with him. With incredible nerve and to everyone’s surprise he invited Magda, quietly
and politely, to go through the funhouse with him’
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

• Pale Fire, The most brilliant example of using Borges’s ‘forking paths
principle’
• ‘late modernist’ or ‘postmodernist’
• Lolita
• the classic modernist form of the retrospective narrative composed by an
unreliable narrator
• first-person narration
• Pale Fire, Ada and Look at the Harlequins, three remarkable
metaficional works by Nabokov
• The ‘unreliable narrator’ in modernist fiction
• The unreliable narration in Pale Fire
• The first impression on encountering Pale Fire
• The main text, a poem by John Shade entitled Pale Fire, is framed by texts written by
the critic, Charles Kinbote.
• The poem is prefaced by a Foreword and then followed by a Commentary, which is by
far the most extensive part of the book.
• The volume concludes with an Index.
• All three of these texts are written by Kinbote.
• Gerard Genette’s theory of ‘paratexts’, the various kinds of texts which supplement a
‘main’ text.
• Peristext
• Epitext
• fiction as a battle for meaning between author and reader.
• their explicitness about their purpose expressing what most ‘real’ paratexts keep
implicit
• ‘Let me state that without my notes Shade’s text simply has no reality at all since
the human reality of such a poem as his . . . has to depend entirely on the reality
of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my
notes can provide’
• For better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word’
• ‘that crystal land’, ‘Perhaps an allusion to Zembla, my fair country’
• yet another possibility
• these are not the ‘levels of meaning’, typical of modernism, but ‘planes in a fictive
space’
• Rather than being a set of hierarchies which obliterate another each time a more
plausible scenario becomes possible, each story, each reading of the text, is
potentially as valid as the other.
• The interpretive gymnastics Pale Fire invites is a way of asking us not to solve the
mysteries of the text so much as to consider what a legitimate reading of a text is.
• This is what accounts for the postmodernism of Pale Fire: the novel exposes the
partiality of all narration.
• postmodern fiction and the act of reading
Thank you for your attention.