Intertextuality and parodyThe term intertextuality covers the range of literary and cultural texts, discourses,
genres and conventions used to construct narrative fictions. In metafictions these are
often foregrounded so as to heighten their conventionality and artifice. Intertexts include
specific literary texts, as well as generic and discursive conventions—such as Leon
Garfield’s parody of nineteenth-century narrative genres in The Strange Affair of
Adelaide Harris (1971)—and cultural texts and discourses—such as Terry Pratchett’s
parodic appropriations of department store jargon in Truckers (1989). The relationship
between the focused text and its intertexts in metafiction is frequently parodic, though
not always—for example, references to the work of John Fowles in Caroline Macdonald’s
Speaking to Miranda (1990) indicate interpretive possibilities to readers (McCallum 1992).
A common metafictive strategy is the production of a re-version of a specific text— such
as Jan Needle’s Wild Wood (1981), a re-version of The Wind in the Willows—or of well-
known fairy stories, or folk-tales. Overt forms of intertextuality have three main effects:
they foreground the ways in which narrative fictions are constructed out of other texts
and discourses; they work to indicate possible interpretive positions for readers, often
distancing readers from represented events and characters; and they can enable the
representation within a text of a plurality of discourses, voices and meanings.
Narratorial and authorial intrusionsThere is a strong tradition of intrusive narrators who by drawing attention to their story-
telling function seek to validate the status of their narrative as ‘truth’. A common self-
reflexive narrative strategy is to use narratorial intrusions to comment on the processes
involved in story-telling and to implicitly or explicitly foreground the fictionality of the
narrative. In implicit forms of metafiction, such as Edith Nesbit’s The Story of the
Treasure Seekers (1899) the narrator draws attention to the act of narration through
direct address to readers, discussion of narrative choices about material, tone, register,
diction and order, self-conscious parody of conventionalised narrative discourses, and
references to the relations between ‘life’ and fiction. Anita Moss (1985) argues on these
grounds that the novel is an explicit form of metafiction. However, although the
narrative is self-reflective and readers may go on to infer the status of Nesbit’s text as a
literary artefact, this is not a position constructed within the text. More explicit forms of
metafiction, such as Terry Jones’s Nicobobinus (1985) Gene Kemp’s Jason Bodger and
the Priory Ghost (1985) or Aidan Chambers’s Breaktime (1978) overtly parody the
intrusive narrator so as to break the fictional illusion. In the final paragraph of
Nicobobinus the narrator, Basilcat, discloses that the whole narrative—including himself
—is a fiction. Anachronistic narratorial intrusions in Jason Bodger also break the
fictional frame by alerting readers to the gap between the time of narration and the time
of the story.
In experimental fictions narratorial and authorial intrusions often function quite
overtly to position readers in relation to a text. An authorial note at the end of Kemp’s I
Can’t Stand Losing (1987/1989) almost demands that readers take a moral stance in
relation to the text. Kemp morally censures the behaviour of the main character, thereby
confirming the implied reader position constructed through the novel and implicitly
METAFICTIONS AND EXPERIMENTAL WORK 397