Eccentric Noveling; Metafiction

You are probably familiar with the feeling when you are totally lost in the pages of your favourite book that makes you lose the track of time and it’s been pages that you have been reading. Once you raise your head up, you feel like you were in a time travel or maybe transported to parallel universes, and now you are back to your reality. Well, it might be surprising to know that this is not how all novels are constructed; because this is what metafiction is all against.

Mostly acknowledged novel type is considered to be traditional novels which we all are familiar with; they are not reader-involved and their plots are constructed in traditional perspectives such as first-person, second-person, third-person omniscient, and so on. The characters of the traditional plot and the reader exist in two independent dimensions; The characters are unaware of the reader’s reality; or in the same way, the reader has just a limited perspective shaped by the author which is like a keyhole that the reader is spying on the lives of the characters. However, that can also go upside down; with Metafiction!

Shortly described as “beyond fiction” metafiction is when the author breaks the limits of authorship and gets involved with his plot and his characters. Metafiction requires its readers to be involved in the plot and it becomes so disturbing that it squeezes the reader with the fact that the reality of the literary work is just existing there poking the reader. In short, metafiction never lets the reader get lost between the pages.

One of the most obvious examples of metafiction is John Fowles’ Mantissa. Starting with the character Miles Green opening his eyes in a hospital, doesn’t remember anything about what happened or who he is, encountering a female doctor who is trying to do some weird sexual treatment on him, and ending up in neither the hospital nor the doctor was real, John Fowles’ Mantissa is a metafictional novel that is quite absurd compared to traditional fictional works.

Mantissa is such a novel that it leaves you in a literal mess from the beginning while you are totally deceived by the idea that it is going to be an ordinary story for you. In the beginning, we cannot even be introduced to our main character Miles Green, because he lost his mind, and we can grab some information about him only from the weird doctors and a woman who claims to be his wife while he also tries to understand what happened and who he is in the weird no-window hospital room.

After Green’s supposed-wife leaves, the doctors left in the room seem to apply non-medical treatments on him (mostly sexual checkouts and requests) and Green tries to understand why and rejects them though the doctors do not let him and utter “there is no shame in health”. Miles Green does whatever the doctors say, and the first chapter ends with a “CRASH”.

I can imagine what most readers may be thinking now; what the hell?

Next up, we see the female doctor entering the hospital room in a sexy guitarist costume, later on crashing the guitar. <okay, wait what is really going on? Did I skip some pages accidentally?> Not really… Let’s clear up what is going on. Towards the end of chapter one, with “CRASH” and at the beginning of the second chapter, the reader is welcomed into a whole another story. However, the thing is there is not a story in the plot, the reader expects the story of Miles Green but the only thing that is told to the reader is that this is the story of how Miles Green builds a story with the help of his character Erato (being one of the nine muses in Greek mythology) in his brain. In that, Erato is aware that she is to be a character in the fiction of Green and through “metamorphoses” she can change into different characters, and with her resistance to Green’s ideas, she exists.

“It’s not my fault that I’m equally the programmed slave of whatever stupid mood you’ve created. Whatever clumsy set of supposed female emotions you’ve bodged up for me. To say nothing of your character. I notice there’s not been a single word about his exceedingly dubious status. I wonder who’s pulling his strings?” -Erato pp. 66

Though all these happen under the control of Miles Green, Erato here as a fictional character has ideas so she can communicate with Green. As seen above, Erato is such a character that she even makes an utterance to John Fowles as he is the author of this whole book charging him for he owns Miles Green with “pulling strings”. Thus, Erato continuously imposes that this is a fiction; she is under the control of Miles Green’s mind -so is Green under the control of Fowles- and that she can disappear if Green wants to do so. Here, we are reading about how a fiction becomes a fiction. Further on the discussion of Green and Erato, Green explains some essentials of a metafictional novel;

“Serious modern fiction has only one subject: the difficulty of writing serious modern fiction. First, it has fully accepted that it is only fiction, can only be fiction, will never be anything but fiction, and therefore has no business at all tampering with real life or reality. Right?”

“...At the creative level, there is, in any case, no connection whatever between author and text. They are two entirely separate things. Nothing, but nothing, is to be inferred or deduced from one to the other, and in either direction. The deconstructivists have proved that beyond a shadow of doubt. The author’s role is purely fortuitous and agential. He has no more significant a status than the bookshop assistant or the librarian who hands the text qua object to the reader.” pp. 90

On this point, as a reader, it is undeniable how disturbing to bear with this book in your hand because it is neither aimed to educate people on how to write fiction nor it is a proper fiction as we are used to reading.

Yet, of course, as the writer of most known novels such as The Collector, The French Lieutenant's Woman, A Maggot, and so on, John Fowles' Mantissa can be a new experience for book lovers who seek for some change in literary taste with the contentious dialogues between Erato and her creator-writer Miles Green.

The traditional works written throughout the years have always been inspired to be “real” or from “the inside of life”; however, they could never go further than being fictitious because the characters are only some tools of the plot and the reader is only reading a chain of words created by the author. However, in metafictional works, the self-consciousness of the characters is more likely to become real because they have their own consciousness, they are connecting to readers' reality, and they are aware of who or what they are, similar to human beings which makes metafictional works closer to reality more than ever.