33
Metafictions and Experimental Work
Robyn McCallum
The term ‘metafiction’ is used to refer to fiction which self-consciously draws attention to
its status as text and as fictive. It does this in order to reflect upon the processes
through which narrative fictions are constructed, read and made sense of and to pose
questions about the relationships between the ways we interpret and represent both
fiction and reality (Waugh 1984:2). Although they are not interchangeable, there is
considerable overlap between contemporary categories of metafiction and experimental
fiction. Texts which are experimental are often also metafictive, and vice versa. As
categories of fiction both are, to some extent, context bound, definable in relation to
other forms of narrative fiction—the category ‘experimental’ changes through time, socio-
historical context, and critical conceptions of what constitutes the mainstream. With
children’s literature this category can shift between ‘literary’ and popular, neither of
which is exempt from experimentation, depending on which aspects of a text are the
focus of attention: the discursive and stylistic techniques, narrative technique and
structures, content, social, ideological, intellectual and moral concerns and so on.
A key distinction between metafictive and experimental texts and the majority of
fiction written for children lies in the kinds of narrative and discursive techniques used
to construct and inscribe audience positions within texts. Briefly, the narrative modes
employed in children’s novels tend to be restricted to either first person narration by a
main character or third person narration with one character focaliser (Stephens 1991:
63). Texts tend to be monological rather than dialogical, with single-stranded and story-
driven narratives, closed rather than open endings, and a narrative discourse lacking
stylistic variation (Moss 1990; Hunt 1988). These are strategies which function to
situate readers in restricted and relatively passive subject positions and to implicitly
reinforce a single dominant interpretive stance. Restrictions on narrative point of view in
particular frequently have the effect of restricting the possible interpretive positions
available to implied readers (Stephens 1991:63; 1992b: 27).
Metafictive and experimental forms of children’s writing generally use a broader range
of narrative and discursive techniques: overly obtrusive narrators who directly address
readers and comment on their own narration; disruptions of the spatio-temporal
narrative axis and of diegetic levels of narration; parodic appropriations of other texts,
genres and discourses; typographic experimentation; mixing of genres, discourse styles,
modes of narration and speech representation; multiple character focalisers, narrative
voices, and narrative strands and so on. These are strategies which distance readers
from a text and frequently frustrate conventional expectations about meaning and