Metafiction being a fiction that eludes the category of fiction becomes emblematic of the transient nature of postmodernity. In the fiction of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor and Ntozake Shange the metafictional mode has been deployed to jolt the reader into accepting the reality of the self-reflexive narrative technique.
Origins of Metafiction
Theorists of African American literature and theorists of Western literature also agree that self-consciousness is as old as the story-telling tradition itself. Roland Barthes defines work as story and also as everything that the story hermeneutically suggests; that is, it involves all thematic readings and character analyses, including the psychological and ideological positioning of the fictional narrator in relation to the story being told. In contrast, he defines the text as the language of that literature, which is unanchored to the fiction and produces its own autonomous, constantly changing systems of meaning.
According to Bakhtin, metalinguistic structures are often there within the larger arrangement of the novel’s language formats and thus give the narration a dual function — to tell the story and, at the same time, to expose the limitations of another literary language through imitation of that language.
Language as an Arbitrary System
Most of the readers share a twisted habit of seeing language as a kind of lens through which we see the internal thoughts of others; through stories told by people, we believe that we can actually reach out to past times to see how they “really” were through the means of language. All this is an illusion for most scholars of postmodernism.
Toni Morrison
The foreword and the afterword provided by Toni Morrison in her earlier novels are a treasure trove in themselves in as much as they delineate the author’s intention and targeted results. The using of the sentence “Quiet as it’s kept” to begin the novel at once divulges the ambiguity of the language of this novel. Morrison explicates such a choice in the afterword of The Bluest Eye.
That language alone is insufficient for communicating the meaning of her novel is clarified yet again by Morrison in the foreword to her 1981 novel, Tar Baby. The foreword to Jazz (1992) was a necessary appendage to the comprehension of its convoluted narrative structure.
Gloria Naylor
Gloria Naylor’s 1996 (2005) is the author’s attempt at constructing a memoir of the year of 1996 in her life that changed its course forever. Language becomes the medium through which Naylor explicates the trauma that she was forced to undergo. It is up to the readers to discern, if they choose to do so, whether to believe or to disbelief whatever the author has to say in her defense.
Ntozake Shange
Ntozake Shange in her Liliane (1995) has played around with language in such way as to rivet the readers’ attention to what is being said and how. This language game of the author has been accentuated by her insertion of the passages that are actually conversations between Liliane and her psychiatrist but since the speaker of the lines is not clarified hence the intent of the words become ambiguous.
The above discussion entailed the ways in which Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor and Ntozake Shange have tried to defy readers’ expectations by frequently engaging the metafictional technique in their novels. Most importantly the arbitrary nature of language has been upheld for the scrutiny of the readers.
Works Cited
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