fiction can be self-reflexive in any simple way, however, is to confuse the signifying and
referential functions of the linguistic signs that constitute a text —that is, it is indicative
of a failure to distinguish between signs and things. It is precisely this distinction that
theorists such as Britton see as important in the encouragement of an ‘openness to
alternative formulations of experience’ associated with the move out of egocentricism
(1970/1972:86), and which metafictions frequently foreground and exploit. We use
language and narrative to represent, mediate and comprehend reality, as well as to
construct fictions. By ‘laying bare’ the artifice through which fictional texts mean,
metafictions can also lay bare the conventions through which what we think of as
‘reality’ is represented and ascribed with meanings.
Defining MetafictionMetafiction tends to be defined in two main ways: as a distinctive sub-genre of the
novel, defined in opposition to literary realism; or as an inherent tendency of the
novelistic genre (Ommundsen 1989:266). Waugh (1984) and Lewis (1990) both stress
the relation between metafiction and the classic realist text. Metafictions appropriate
and parody the conventions of traditional realism in order to construct a fictional
illusion and simultaneously expose the constructedness of that illusion (Waugh 1984:6).
Our understanding of a metafiction will depend to some extent upon the conventions
and intertexts which it parodies, but more specifically upon assumptions about the
verbal sign inscribed within these conventions. The narrative conventions of realist
fiction work to mask the gap between linguistic signs and their fictive referents and to
construct an illusion of an unmediated relation between signs and things. In doing so,
these conventions obscure the fictionality of referents and imply a reading of fiction as if
it were ‘real’. In metafiction, however, the ontological gap between fiction and reality is
made explicit; that is, the fictionality of the events, characters and objects referred to is
foregrounded.
While the relations between metafiction and literary realism are important, to define
one in opposition to the other excludes from consideration a vast number of (often
ostensibly ‘realist’) texts which have self-reflexive elements but which are not
‘systematically self-conscious’ (Ommundsen 1989:265), as well as early forms of
metafictive writing. Hutcheon has stressed that the use of self-reflexive narrative
strategies is part of a long novelistic tradition: ‘Art has always been “illusion” and it has
often, if not always, been self-consciously aware of that ontological status’ (1980:17).
Anita Moss’s (1985) inclusion of early writers such as Nesbit and Dickens acknowledges
this tradition in children’s literature.
Much of the critical discourse around children’s metafiction has been situated within
a theoretical frame which opposes metafiction and realism and has focused on recent
and unambiguously ‘metafictive’ examples. However, an approach which proceeds from
an opposition between mainstream children’s writing and ‘counter texts’—texts which
don’t fit unproblematically into the category of children’s literature—excludes all but the
most explicitly self-conscious forms and, by implication, suggests a simplistic correlation
between metafiction and subversion (for example, Moss 1990:50). On the other hand, to
over-emphasise the novelistic potential for self-reflexivity at the expense of specific
METAFICTIONS AND EXPERIMENTAL WORK 395