abstracted drawings based on ‘the idea of making patterns in which the real object
disappeared’ (1980/1987:31), descriptions of which are analogous with Carrie’s
experience of a dissolution of selfhood which she both desires and fears as she retreats
from adolescence and growing up. Lois Lowry also uses this device in A Summer to Die
(1977). Self-reflective visual images, such as mirrors, paintings and intertextual
quotations are also a common metafictive strategy in the picture books of Browne and
Van Allsburg, where they work to foreground the nature of the text as representation,
and to blur the distinctions between textual fantasy and reality.
Stories narrated within the primary narrative by a character or a secondary narrator
which reflect the story or themes of the primary frame-narrative can also function as
mise en abyme devices. For example, in Paula Fox’s How Many Miles to Babylon? (1967)
the stories which James tells reflect larger thematic concerns with the role of story-telling
in the recuperation of the past and the construction of a subjectivity. Russell Hoban
plays with the recursiveness of the ‘story-within-story-within-story’ structure in repeated
descriptions of ‘Bonzo Dog Food’ labels in The Mouse and His Child (1967). Stephens has
discussed the use of mise en abyme in three of Mayne’s novels Salt River Times, Drift
(1985) and Winter Quarters, where he sees the device as functioning to replicate the
relations between reader and text (1993:108). Similarly, the representation of relations
between a narrator and her narratees in Hunt’s A Step off the Path replicates a range of
text/reader relations.
Self-reflective images are also used to mirror the narrative processes in texts. Thus the
narrator of Price’s The Ghost Drum (1987) is a cat chained to a pole around which it
walks, telling stories, winding up the chain (that is, the story) as it goes. Similarly, the
image of story-telling as ‘weaving’ is represented literally in The Spellcoats where the
narrator’s story is literally woven into a coat.
The linguistic construction of texts and the worldThere are four main strategies whereby metafictive novels can be self-conscious about
their existence as language: parodic play on specific writing styles; thematised wordplay,
such as puns, anagrams, clichés; variation of print conventions and the use of
marginalia, footnotes and epigraphs—strategies which draw attention to the physicality
of texts; and deliberate mixing of literary and extra-literary genres, such as the journal,
letter, newspaper items, historical documents, and so on.
Pratchett’s Truckers is a metafictive fantasy novel about a group of ‘nomes’ who live
under the floorboards of a large department store. Their social system, culture and
religion is a bricolage of appropriated signs and discourses associated with department
stores, mixed with parodic forms of Biblical and religious discourse. Pratchett constantly
plays on the slippage between signifiers and signifieds, foregrounding the gap between
signs and things (in the meanings the nomes ascribe to ‘Bargains Galore’ for instance).
By foregrounding the construction of the represented world and, hence, the construction
of the text, Pratchett also draws attention to the ways in which representations of the
world outside the text are similarly constructed and ascribed with meanings. The stories
in Alhberg’s The Clothes Horse (1987) are constructed out of a play with the literal
meanings of commonplace figures of speech, such as ‘clothes horse’ or ‘jack pot’.
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