Well, not really, but that’s the idea behind the literary concept of meta-fiction.
I was recently reorganizing my bookshelves and I found my copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. When I first read about the time-jumping hero Billy Pilgrim, I was in college and it was in the context of a discussion about meta-fiction. That sounds like a big, fancy college word, but when I started to think about it, meta-fiction really is everywhere these days.
Meta-fiction is a “type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction. It is the literary term describing fictional writing that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually, irony and self-reflection.” (Thanks, Wikipedia!)
It can basically take many different forms, whether it’s fiction taking place within fiction (think of the play scene in Hamlet), a writer creating a story within a novel (e.g., Atonement or The French Lieutenant’s Woman), a novel within a novel (The Princess Bride) or even a story that occurs in the same time and place as another story, but told from a different perspective (Ender’s Shadow, Wicked, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead). Most obviously, meta-fiction also comes from stories that “talk” directly to the reader, breaking down the invisible “fourth wall” and force the reader into awareness of the fiction itself.
It’s a literary application that opens up all sorts of doors for character and plot development. Several popular films and television shows even use it to some degree. Think about the off-screen narrator in Arrested Development, the tongue-in-cheek approach to most episodes of The Simpsons, or the entire plot of the Will Ferrell-Emma Thompson movie Stranger than Fiction.
As a former (and ardent) English major, I can appreciate the academic side to meta-fiction. But sometimes academics get too caught up in the “scholarly-ness” of it all and forget to make it accessible to every reader. It’s easier to think about meta-fiction in a real sense.
Sometimes when you read, you’re escaping to another time, place or world. You’re Harry Potter on the Quidditch pitch, searching for the Snitch or you’re Arthur Dent, bemoaning the destruction of your home (both small and large). And the, sometimes, you’re reading and you’re suddenly confronted with the fact, via the book/text, that you are reading. That’s meta-fiction.
[Photo Credit: Getty Images]
