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METANARRATIVE AND METAFICTIONAL COMMENTARY: From Metadiscursivity to Metanarration and Metafiction Author(s): Monika Fludernik Source: Poetica, Vol. 35, No. 1/2 (2003), pp. 1-39Published by: Wilhelm Fink GmbH & Co. Verlags-KGStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43028318Accessed: 15-09-2015 23:22 UTC

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Monika Fludernik (Freiburg)

MET AN ARRATI VE AND METAFICTIONAL COMMENTARY: From Metadiscursivity to Metanarration and Metafiction

In English narratological criticism, the terms metanarrative and metafiction are on the whole used interchangeably. Even in German narratological discourse, the term metanarrative has failed to figure prominently. This situation has now changed drastically in the wake of a landmark contribution to narrative theory by Ansgar Nünning, the prominent German narratologist. Nünning' s seminal paper,1 published in the Festschrift for Wilhelm Füger, one of the doyens of German narratology, has put the subject of metanarrative on the map of narratological enquiry. It not only makes a case for metanarrative as a key concept within narrative theory but additionally proposes an extensive typology of different kinds of metanarrative.

This essay is designed as a response to Nünning' s piece. I will attempt to complement Nünning' s categories by focussing less on the extensiveness and placing of metanarrative commentary in the text (as he does) than on what precisely is metanarration, and how it can be distinguished from metafiction. I will also be countering some of Nünning' s theoretical presupposi- tions. The article falls into four sections: (1) a summary of Nünning' s Ger- man piece; (2) remarks on the metanarrative/metafiction distinction; (3) a descriptive analysis of types of metanarration, proposing a new model and some additional terminology; (4) a summary and outlook, focussing on the remaining open questions, including a critique of Nünning' s concept of "Mimesis des Erzählens".

1 Ansgar Nünning, "Mimesis des Erzählens: Prolegomena zu einer Wirkungsästhetik, Typologie und Funktionsgeschichte des Akts des Erzählens und der Metanarration", in: Jörg Heibig (ed.), Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Festschrift für Wilhelm Füger, Heidelberg 2001, pp. 13-48.



2 Monika Fludernik

1. "Mimesis of Narration: Prolegomena to a study of the reception, aesthetics, typology, functions and history of the acts of narration and metanarration"

As Nünning' s essay is written in German, it may be useful to the reader to first have a summary of his major arguments. Since the publication of this paper Nünning has produced at least one other piece of roughly the same material2 which eliminates some errors and infelicities of the original paper3 and clarifies a number of the proposed categories by providing more examples. An English version is forthcoming in a proceedings volume from the recent ESSE conference in Strasbourg.

Nünning starts out with a criticism of narratology for having largely failed to consider the narrator as one of the central elements of fiction. Al- though narrators have figured in the distinction between first-person and third-person narrative, Nünning claims that - even in its latest theoretical manifestations - narratology has never adequately described the importance of the act of narration or bothered about metanarration at all.4 Nünning ex-

2 Ansgar Nünning, "Metanarration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie: Definition, Typologie und Grundriß einer Funktionsgeschichte metanarrativer Erzähleräußerungen", Ar- beiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 26/2001, pp. 125-164. 3 - For instance, Nünning' s summary of Genette confuses Genette' s narrative and extranarrative functions. He enumerates four " extranarrative functions", which, however, actually correspond to four out of the five narrative functions (more precisely: functions of the narrator) that Genette outlines in Gérard Genette, "Discours du récit", in: Genette, Figures III , Paris 1972, here pp. 261-262: Nünning quotes the "directing function", the "function of communication", the "testimonial" and "ideological" functions (Nünning, "Mimesis des Erzählens" [cf. note 1], p. 15; Gérard Genette, Narra- tive Discourse. An Essay in Method , Ithaca, NY 1980, here pp. 255-256), leaving out what Genette calls the function of telling the story, "la fonction proprement narrative " (Genette, "Discours du récit", p. 261). Genette's extranarrative functions , by contrast, are "addresses au lecteur, organisation du récit par voie d'annonces et de rappels, indications de source, attestations mémorielles" (p. 263; "addresses to the reader, or- ganization of the narrative by means of advance notices and recalls, indications of source, memory-elicited attestations" - Genette, Narrative Discourse , p. 257). In fact, Genette's text clarifies that he is distinguishing between functions of the narrator (in relation to histoire, discours and narration ) on the one hand, and the functions of the narrational level on the other. Nünning himself, in his Ph.D. dissertation (1989), has presented a much more extensive model of narratorial functions, which he modestly does not mention in this context. See Ansgar Nünning, Grundzüge eines kommunikationstheoretischen Modells der erzählerischen Vermittlung. Die Funktionen der Erzählinstanz in den Romanen George Eliot s , Trier 1989. See also Ansgar Nünning, "Die Funktionen von Erzählin- stanzen: Analysekategorien und Modelle zur Beschreibung des Erzählerverhaltens", Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 30/1997, pp. 323-349.



Metanarrative and Metafictional Commentary 3

plains this blind spot as the after-effect of twentieth-century devaluations of the authorial novel. He notes correctly5 that there has been a development in narrative studies in the twentieth century along a scale from excessive anthropomorphization of the narrator figure to the radical criticism of using any anthropomorphic schemata (this was my own position in The Fictions of Language6 and Towards a ' Natural ' Narratology1). As a consequence, the prototypical understanding of mimetic illusion involves a complete downtoning of narratorial mediation. In Werner Wolfs magnum opus on anti-illusionistic techniques of narration, for instance, an excess or deficit of narratorial involvement are argued to equally undermine a narrative's illusionism.8

In reaction to this supposedly wilful neglect of the act of narration, Nün- ning first proposes that the telling of the story should be regarded as the primary mimetic illusion of fiction (neatly inverting the traditional hierarchy according to which the telling of the tale provides at best a secondary mimetic illusion, Wolfs Sekundärillusion9). After all, all narratives are constituted by an act of narration (Stanzel's mediacy). In continuing this line of argument, Nünning ends up with a flexible scalar model according to which narrative mimesis can tend either towards the pole of narrational or towards the pole of diegetic (plot) illusionism. In other words, the realistic illusionism produced by the (traditional) novel can consist in the evocation of a communicational scenario (a narrator talking to the narratee), in the por- trayal of a fictional world, or in the combination of both types of illusion (as, for instance, in the authorial novel; compare Fielding's Tom Jones). The illusion of participating in an act of communication and the resultant anthropomorphization of the teller figure are linked by Nünning to the tenets of cogniti vist narratology (his characterization of my Towards a ' Natural '

Narratolo gy): textual signals alert the reader to the voice of the narrator figure, who is then invoked as a full-fledged human entity whose act of narration corresponds to familiar storytelling scripts or storytelling frames.

5 Nünning, "Mimesis des Erzählens" (cf. note 1), p. 18. Monika Fludernik, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction. The Rep- resentation of Speech and Thought in Language, London 1993. Monika Fludernik, Towards a ' Natural * Narratology , London/New York 1996. Werner Wolf, Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzählkunst. Theorie und Geschichte mit Schwerpunkt auf englischem illusionsstörenden Erzählen , Tübingen 1993, p. 307. * P. 102.



4 Monika Fludernik

Nünning then goes on to detail the communicative scenario. He claims that narratology has so far concentrated mostly on the narrator figure and on the narratee but neglected to analyse the act of narration itself. He notes the following aspects of the narrative act that enhance the illusionism of the narrational performance:10 (a) the appellative and phatic functions - establishing and maintaining the channel. On p. 34 he adds (in reference to my, The Fictions of Language11) that all narratorial functions that touch on the narrational act and the process of communication are metanarrative; (b) the manner of narration, especially the narrator's indulgence in digressive and associative asides, colloquial diction and other indications of oral delivery; (c) the subjective or expressive function - the use of those markers of ex- pressivity that establish a speaker in the text; (d) generalizing remarks: gnomic utterances and evaluative remarks by the narrator - these, according to Nünning, serve to narrow the distance between narrator and reader since the narrator engages the reader's views and opinions and tries his persuasive charms on the textual recipient; (e) metanarrative remarks: stage directions, references to previous or later sections of the narrative, and self-reflexive passages - these all invoke the narrator figure and the act of narration as well as the very process of narration.12

In the fourth section of his article Nünning proceeds to lay out a typology and poetics of metanarration. He starts out from a distinction between metanarration and metafiction, arguing that metanarration "thematizes the act and/or process of narration", whereas metafiction "discloses the arte- factual nature of the narrated or the act of narration" ("eine Bloßlegung der Fiktionalität des Erzählten oder auch des Erzählens").13 Metanarrative

10 Nünning, "Mimesis des Erzählens" (cf. note 1), pp. 29-31. 11 Cf. note 6; p. 443. I have here condensed Nünning' s seven categories, merging categories 2 and 3 as function (a) and eliding category 1 - projection of the illusion of an anthropomorphic narrator figure - because I find that it is all the categories together that produce this illusion of the "Personalisierung der Erzählinstanz" (Nünning, "Mimesis des Er- zählens" [cf. note 1], p. 29) as Nünning calls it. I have translated Fiktionalität as "artefactuality" (fictivity) rather than "fictionality" for the reasons given in my Towards a ' Natural ' Narratology [cf. note 7], pp. 38-43. Nünning does not refer to the distinction between fictional vs. non-fictional prose (autobiographies can contain metafictional comments if these relate to the constructedness of the narrative), that is to the real-life referential basis of a text; nor is he concerned with the philosophical concept of existence (hypothetical vs. real entities) usu- ally referred to as fictivity. What the German word fiktional implies is the constructed




commentary need not be metafictional, i.e. need not have an anti- illusionistic effect. On the contrary, as Nünning argues, metanarrative comments may help to substantiate the illusion of authenticity that a text tries to create.14 Metanarrative passages can therefore either "undercut the fabric of fiction"15 - in which case we are dealing with self-conscious fictions ; or they do not undercut the fabric of fiction and then are merely self- reflexive narratives.16 Moreover, self-reflexivity is a feature of both metanarrative and non-metanarrative texts. Nünning gives the example of mise-en-abyme as an instance of a self-reflexive textual device that is not metanarrative (since it does not involve a reference to the act or process of narration). (Is this the case because the device cannot be aligned with the narrator's responsibility but has to be attributed to the [implied] author?)

If I comprehend Nünning correctly, there are three categories: (a) purely metanarrative passages; (b) metanarrative passages that are also metafictional ("self-conscious" texts); and (c) metafictional narratives that do not contain metanarrative passages. We will return to the metafiction vs. metanarration distinction in section 2.2 and then deal with the terminological complications.

In outlining the various types of metanarrative, Nünning then presents a very detailed typology in "Modell 2" consisting of four basic aspects which in turn give rise to subsidiary distinctions (described in scales or axes).17 The four basic aspects are (I) formal, (II) structural, (III) content-related, and (IV) reception-oriented types of metanarrative. In Nünning, "Metanar- ration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie"18 this diagramme is extended by some further subcategories.

nature of the literary artefact. This is dealt with in Wolf, Ästhetische Illusion (cf. note 8, here pp. 38-39) under the distinction between the fictio and th efictum aspect of narrative fictionality. The uncovering of the fictio nature of narrative discourse foregrounds the 'fictionalizing' quality of the narrative act, the process of invention; whereas the fictum aspect refers to the inventedness, the counterfactuality of the plot, the narrative agents, the dialogue etc. 14 Nünning, "Mimesis des Erzählens" (cf. note 1), p. 33. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film , Ithaca, NY 1978, p. 248. The latter term comes from Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratolo gy, Lincoln 1987, p. 51, s.v. metanarrative ; compare Nünning, "Mimesis des Erzählens" (cf. note

„ IX p. 33. Nünning, "Mimesis des Erzählens" (cf. note 1), here pp. 36-37. See Diagramme 1 below. 18 Cf. note 2, here pp. 148-150.



6 Monika Fludernik

Aspect (I) includes the distinction between diegetic, extradiegetic and paratextual metanarratives (i.e., it refers to the placing of the metanarrative commentary on the story level, the discourse level, or on the level of paratextual features like headlines or editorial material), and the distinction between explicit and implicit metanarration. In "Metanarration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie" Nünning also notes metaphoric (vs. non-metaphoric) metanarration - an insight which I find truly exciting. (This concerns, e.g., the description of the reading process in terms of a journey, or in terms of consuming a multiple-course meal.)19 Nünning additionally introduces a distinction between metaleptic and non-metaleptic metanarration.

Aspect (II) concerns the quantitative and qualitative relationship between metanarrative and non-metanarrative parts of a text (I skip the details).

Aspect (III) refers to the "object" of metanarrative comments and includes the referential parameters of the passage: e.g. whether the metanarrative comment concerns the current narrator's own narrative practice, storytelling in general, or criticism of the peculiarities of other authors. In "Metanarration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie" Nünning adds some subcategories, including the distinction between discourse and story-centered metanarration. (Ill) also includes a consideration of the focus of a metanarrative section, i.e. whether the narrator figure himself, the channel of communication or the narratee are focussed on (I skip some further subcategories).

Aspect (IV), finally, concerns the functions of metanarrative commentary. Nünning mentions two of these, the degree of anti-illusionism and the extent to which metanarrative comment may enhance or narrow the distance between the reader and the protagonists, and adds a third subcategory in "Metanarration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie".

For those readers of this article who are able to read German, I print out Nünning' s diagramme in full. Unfortunately Nünning in "Mimesis des Er- zählens" does not provide any examples to illustrate these categories. I will attempt some examples in section (3) below. Nünning' s "Metanarration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie"20 is very helpful in elucidating a number of the questions raised by "Mimesis des Erzählens" since this piece spends more space on explaining and illustrating categories.

19 P. 138. 20 Cf. "Mimesis des Erzählens" (cf. note 1) and "Metanarration als Lakune der Ezähltheorie" (cf. note 2).




Diagramme 1 - Nünning' s "Modell 2: Unterformen bzw. Arten von Metanaration"

Arten von Metanarration Kriterien zu deren Bestimmung

I. Formal bestimmte Arten von Kommunikationsebene und Vermittlungs- Metanarration modus

1. Diegetisch vs. extradiegetisch vs. textuelle Ebene, auf der der Akt des Erzäh- paratextuell vs. hypodiegetisch lens thematisiert wird, d. h. Vermittlung vermittelbare Metanarration durch die Figurenebene, Erzählerebene,

Herausgeberebene, weitere Rahmungen, sy- noptische Kapitelüberschriften oder andere paratextuelle Elemente

2. Gleichgeordnete vs. metaleptische Überschreitung der Grenze zwischen der Formen von Metanarration extradiegetischen Kommunikationsebene und

der diegetischen Ebene des Geschehens

3. Verdeckte/implizite Metanarration Vermittlungsmodus von Metanarration

4. Metaphorische vs. nichtmeta- sprachliche Realisationsform von Meta- phorische Metanarration narration

II. Strukturell bestimmte Formen Quantitative und qualitative Relationen zu von Metanarration den nichtmetanarrativen Teilen und

syntagmatische Integration der metanarrativen Äußerungen in den Kontext der erzählten Geschichte

5. Marginale vs. zentrale Meta- Position der metanarrativen Äußerungen im narration Romanganzen

6. Punktuelle vs. extensive Metanar- Frequenz und Umfang der metanarrativen ration Äußerungen in Relation zur erzählten

Geschichte

7. Integrierte vs. isolierte Meta- Grad der Einbindung in bzw. Abgrenzung der narration metanarrativen Äußerungen von der erzählten

Geschichte

8. Motivierte bzw. funktionale vs. Grad der begründeten Anknüpfung an bzw. unmotivierte bzw. ornamentale plausiblen Herleitung aus der erzählten Metanarration Geschichte

9. Nichtdigressive vs. digressive vs. Grad und Ausmaß der Abschweifung vom metadigressive Metanarration erzählten Geschehen

21 Nünning, "Modell 2" in "Metanarration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie" (cf. note 2), pp. 148-150.



8 Monika Fludernik

Arten von Metanarration Kriterien zu deren Bestimmung

III. Inhaltlich bestimmte For- Das jeweilige Objekt metanarrativer Äu- men von Metanarration ßerungen

10. Selektive vs. umfassende Metanar- Skopus der metanarrativen Referenzen ration

1 1 .Eigen- vs. Fremd- vs. Allgemein- Referenzbezug und Reichweite der meta- metanarration sowie intratextuelle narrativen Äußerungen, d. h. das eigene Er- vs. intertextuelle Metanarration zählen, die Erzählweise anderer Autor/Innen

oder Erzählen allgemein 12. Story- orientierte vs. discourse- dominante Bezugsgröße der metanarrativen

zentrierte Metanarration sowie ex- Äußerungen, d. h. Bezug zur Geschichte bzw. pressive, phatische und appellative zur erzählerischen Vermittlung (erzähler- Metanarration bezogene, kanalbezogene und leserbezogene

Formen von Metanarration)

13.Gattungs- bzw. textsortenspezifie- die Frage, ob durch metanarrative Äußerun- rende Metanarration bzw. nichtspe- gen eine Erzählung als Ganzes im Hinblick zifizierende Metanarration auf ihre Gattungs- bzw. Textsortenzugehörig-

keit charakterisiert wird

14. Affirmative vs. untermininierende Einschätzung der eigenen narrativen Kompe- Metanarration tenz durch die Erzählinstanz

15. Kritische vs. nichtkritische Me- Bewertung der thematisierten Erzählformen tanarration

IV. Wirkungsästhetisch bzw. Das Wirkungs- und Funktionspotential funktional bestimmte Formen metanarrativer Äußerungen von Metanarration

16.MUndlichkeits- vs. schriftlichkeits- evozierte mediale Kommunikationssituation fingierende Metanarration und implizierte Neutralisierungsschemata

17. Distanz verringernde vs. distanz- die Frage, ob metanarrative Äußerungen Re- vergrößernde Metanarration zipienten dazu anregen, sich in die Figuren

einzufühlen oder Abstand zum erzählten Ge- schehen zu gewinnen

18. Illusionskompatible vs. illusionsstö- Grad der Illusionsdurchbrechung meta- rende Metanarration narrativer Äußerungen

In the final section of his paper22 Nünning summarizes his approach and provides a brief survey of the prevalence of narratorial illusion in the history of English fiction, sketching areas of future research within a cultural stud-

22 Nünning, "Mimesis des Erzählens" (cf. note 1), pp. 38-44.




ies framework of narrative theory. The historical survey mentions the common Victorian strategy of having the narrator and the narratee mentally translated to the story level, where they seem to observe the fictional protagonists as if narrator or narratee were metaleptically present on the scene themselves; it also notes the fact that in postmodernist texts metanarrative comment may display a whole spectrum of quite varied functions. These preliminary insights already indicate that Nünning is expecting a wealth of useful results from the kind of analyses that he proposes.

In "Metanarration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie" Nünning moreover provides a summary of the functions of metanarration in English fiction from Elizabethan times to postmodernity.23 He distinguishes between illusionistic and anti-illusionistic functions of metanarration and groups them along a scale in his "Modell 3" (here reprinted as Diagramme 2).

24 At the illusionistic end of the scale are placed the authenticating, coherence-enhancing and mnemotechnic functions; the centre of the scale is taken up by the phatic, communicative, suspension-inducing, didactic and comic functions; and the anti-illusionistic side comprises the parodie, poetological and metafictional functions as well as the anti-illusionistic function proper.

Diagramme 2: Nünning, "Modell 3: Skalierung der Funktionen metanarrativer Erzähläußerungen"25

^ ^ ^ . o* ^ ^

/ / // / /

.

/ / / / / /

^ / /

/ / / / ./ / / / / ./ / / / y / / / / / ■/ # / / /

/ / y

/ / s / / /

/ ■/

/ / / /

/ • - • • § i § i • • • i § • illusionskompatible illusionsdurchbrechende Metanarration Metanarration

To summarize: Nünning presents a plea for the reintegration of the study of the narratorial level into the practice of narratology. He substantiates the claim that the narrative discourse qua narration has been woefully neglected by narcologists by focussing on metanarrative commentary which, it is

23 Nünning, "Metanarration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie" (cf. note 2), pp. 150-159. 24 P. 152. Nünning, "Modell 3" in: "Metanarration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie" (cf. note 2), p. 152.



10 Monika Fludernik

quite true, has been largely ignored and in any case has been consistently mixed up with metafiction.

Nünning' s re-balancing of the narcological discrimination between the act of narration and the illusionistic manifestations of telling is based on cognitivist narrative theory, on the invocation of the frames of the communication model. In this he heavily relies on my own work, quoting Towards a ' Natural ' Narratology and The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction throughout.26 Indeed, in his most radical comments Nünning even seems to imply that the narcological privileging of plot (the story level) was a dead alley from which we should try to escape.27 On the basis of our theoretical agreement, I will now proceed to outline a number of questions which, I believe, are raised by Nünning' s paper. These remarks are not in any way meant to denigrate the originality of Nünning' s proposals, but should be read as a tribute to their importance and centrality in the context of current debates in narratology. It is because Nünning' s paper targets key issues of narrative theory that it also raises questions that concern the entire structure of the narcological enterprise.

2. Metanarrative vs. Metafiction 2.1. The Terminological Quagmire Surrounding Metanarrative and

Metafiction: German vs. English Configurations

Before turning to the major issues, I would like to preface my discussion by pointing out the considerable terminological difficulties besetting a treatment in English of the topic under consideration. Nünning' s essay reads very smoothly and convincingly in German, but as I was paraphrasing his arguments, I was stumped in several places since the German both provided some easy distinctions unavailable in English and was glossing over differ- entiations that are current in English criticism but seem to have no equivalent lexical differentiation in traditional German terminology.

I already noted the problem with regard to the German Fiktionalität (see footnote 13) which, although translatable as fictionality, bears less immedi-

26 "Mimesis des Erzählens" (cf. note 1), p. 29-31, in reference to Towards a ' Natural * Narratology (cf. note 7), pp. 96-98, 275-278. It is therefore astonishing that, in the final section of „Mimesis des Erzählens" (cf. note 1), he devotes a full paragraph to a critique of Towards a * Natural ' Narratology which he faults for deliberately ignoring the mimetic illusion of the narrational act. Nünning, "Metanarration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie" (cf. note 2), by contrast, does not include any criticism of Natural Narratology. In fact, Towards a ' Natural ' Narra- tology' s frame of TELLING already anticipated Nünning' s mimesis of narration.



Metanarrative and Metafictional Commentary 1 1

ate reference to the fiction/non-fiction distinction current in English and subliminally implied by the term. These kinds of faux amis proliferate as soon as one looks at the terminology for metafiction and Metanarration (I am advisedly using Nünning' s German term here). As Nünning explicates, the current English translation for German metanarrativ (adj.) is metafictional .28

Now, Nünning is perfectly correct in saying that, due to the widespread denigration of the narrator in Modernism and due to the critical hostility towards the author and narrator under structuralism and poststructuralism, the tendency has been to see narratorial comment as inherently harmful, as in- terfering with mimetic illusionism and, therefore, as anti-illusionistic. (He is also right to observe that the realist novel, that victim of enlightened critical abuse, displays rather a lot of such narratorial interference - a contradiction rarely faced by those engaging in wholesale condemnation of supposedly facile Victorian realism which they oppose to more circumspect later prod- ucts of the narrative genre.) Since metafiction is taken to be unalloyedly anti-illusionistic, the tendency in English criticism to equate statements about the narrative process with metafiction easily explains itself. In fact - and again Nünning is quite correct to pillory this state of affairs - the term metafiction has been used rather loosely and randomly in English critical prose to refer to all sorts of techniques that explicitly or implicitly 'break' what is called the mimetic illusion generated by fictional narrative. Meta- fiction, in short, frequently includes anti-realist devices, parody, mise-en- abyme , just anything that is not 'realist' (in the caricature sense of a verisi- milar fictional representation of a fictional world that looks much like our real world). A good example of the current English usage of the term is provided by Jeremy Hawthorn's entry on metalanguage [sic] in his A Con- cise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory :

Metafiction is, literally, fiction about fiction. To a certain extent the term overlaps with metanarrative because any work which contains a metanarrative will contain a metafictional element. It is generally used to indicate fiction including any self- referential element (not necessarily resulting from a metanarrative: thematic pat- ternings can also contribute to the formation of a metafictional effect in a work). Metafiction typically involves games in which levels of narrative reality (and the reader's perception of them) are confused, or in which traditional REALIST conventions governing the separation of MIMETIC and DIEGETIC elements are flouted and thwarted.

28 Nünning, "Metanarration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie" (cf. note 2), p. 129. Jeremy Hawthorn, A Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory , London 1992, p. 104, s.v. metalanguage.



12 Monika Fludernik

Hawthorn's use of the term metanarrative here refers to Genette' s usage as 'story within the story' - Hawthorn is therefore linking metafiction and mise-en-abyme.

In German terminology, the lexeme Metafiktion (as an abstract noun) is a clear borrowing from the fashionable English term,30 itself presumably a borrowing from the French métafiction. It is not the standard term in Ger- man literary criticism, being, for instance, ambiguous, like the English term, between the meaning of 'device' or the meaning of 'text(s) that display such devices'. The genuine German terms are Metafiktionalität (to contrast with Fiktionalität ) and the adjective metafiktional. Note that, whereas these German terms have an exclusive 'device' reading, the English adjective metafictional collocates most commonly with a 'textual' meaning, as in metafictional prose. Next to that, I take it, the phrase metafictional devices (or strategies) can be found most frequently, whereas metafictional comment or metafictional commentary are rare and would tend to imply that the effect of the narratorial expression was metafictional rather than that the comment itself was 'about fictionality'.

Whereas the English usage is therefore quite loose, Nünning' s and Wolfs31 terminology is much more precise. The German Metafiktionalität designates the effect of uncovering the artefactuality of a piece of fiction (or an aspect of it), whereas Metafiktion

32 - in analogy with Metanarration - has to be 'a discourse or text about fiction [Fiktion] '

just as Metanarration is 'a discourse about narration'. There is no equivalent lexical distinction available in English since metafictionality , used very rarely indeed, generally occurs only in collocations like the metafictionality of Beckett's prose (where a good stylist would immediately wince and substitute: the metafictional quality of Beckett's prose). To all intents and purposes, metafictionality in English is not a critical term but a nominalization of the adjectival usage.

30 The English term seems to have first emerged in the wake of Robert Scholes's essay "Metafiction" (The Iowa Review , Fall 1970) and of William Gass' s book Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York 1970), although the first OED entry is from 1960 where the Times Literary Supplement referred to John Cowper Powys's All or Nothing as a "metaphysical discourse, a mockery of nationalism, meta-fiction or space poetry" (TLS 17/6/1960, pp. 381-383). The lexeme metafictional in the OED precedes the oc- currence of metafictive in adjectival function. 31 *• See Wolf, Ästhetische Illusion (cf. note 8); Werner Wolf, "Formen literarischer Selbstbezüglichkeit in der Erzählkunst: Versuch einer Typologie und ein Exkurs zur ' mise en cadre ' und 'mise en reflet/série in: Heibig (ed.), Erzählen und Erzähltheo- rie im 20. Jahrhundert (cf. note 1), pp. 49-84. Lately, Metafiktion also occurs in the sense of English metafiction as a loan 'translation' referring to a genre of postmodernist writing.




The waters get even murkier when we turn to metanarrative. For one, the term has at least three different technical meanings. First, it is used by Genette for a story on the metadiegetic level, i.e. a story within a story.33 This is the meaning that Hawthorn used, as we have seen. Second, and more famously, the term refers to a 'narrative about narrative' as the translation of Lyotard' s métarécit.34 This is the use of the term that Brian McHale em- ploys in Constructing Postmodernism.35 Compare, for instance: "So perva- sive is this apocalyptic metanarrative of the postmodernist breakthrough [...]"36 And then there is the third non-Genettean narcological meaning, to which I now turn.

The reader will have noticed that I have tended to translate Nünning' s noun Metanarration with the English noun metanarrative and not with metanarration (except where the process of narrating was implied rather than the abstract concept). Although Gerald Prince37 is quoted approvingly by Nünning for having included an entry on metanarrative in his Dictionary of Narratology, the term metanarrative is actually little used in English, and where it is used (so far as I am aware) almost never in the sense in which Prince defines it. Prince's entry lexicalizes metanarrative as a noun and as a specific noun at that: "a narrative referring to itself and to those elements by which it is constituted and communicated, a narrative discussing itself, a Self-Reflexive Narrative, is metanarrative."38 Prince's definition therefore does not refer to the abstract (as do Metafiktion and Metanarration ), but to a specific 'narrative about narrative'. His identification of metanarrative with a self-reflexive narrative therefore tends to equate it with metafiction in the loose Anglo-American sense of the term. This is the case because Prince's concept requires the defined entity to be a narrative itself, and a whole narrative text can be metanarrative (i.e. about narrative) only by being in fact metafictional (even if individual statements and devices within that text are properly metanarrative passages). Indeed, Prince's metanarrative seems to be the mirror image of mise-en-abyme - according to Nün- ning, "a self-reflexive but not metanarrative" device.39 Since Prince gives

33 Genette, Narrative Discourse (cf. note 3), p. 228, note 41. 34 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984), transi. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, foreword Frederic Jameson, 9th print- ing, Minneapoli 1993, p. xxiii-xxiv. "I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives" (p. xxiv). 35 Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism , London 1992. P. 23. 37 Cf. note 16. P. 51; qtd. Nünning, "Mimesis des Erzählens" (cf. note 1), p. 33. Nünning, "Mimesis des Erzählens" (cf. note 1), p. 35.



14 Monika Fludernik

no examples, it is difficult to tell what precisely he had in mind, but if he was thinking about a novel representing a novelist writing a novel, that is a scenario definitely included under the label metafiction.

As Nünning notes himself, there are the terms self-conscious and self- reflexive narrative to deal with as well. Chatman's alignment of self- consciousness with metafiction is extremely current in American and Cana- dian academia, but surely the term self-reflexive is used interchangeably with it, and it is so in Prince's definition. All of which goes to show that in its current usage in English the term metanarrative has little terminological bite and that no distinction is made between metanarrative and metafiction. The term metanarration , which I have avoided, does not occur at all in English. This is also due to the fact that the equivalent of German Narration or Erzählu n g is narrative rather than French or English narration (which is the equivalent of Erzählakt).40 In the abstract sense intended by Nün- ning, metanarrative would therefore seem to be the more idiomatic translation.

Re-emerging from this cross-cultural terminological minefield, I would like to emphasize that the above analysis was not meant as a facile criticism of Nünning' s terms but as a taste of the linguistic divide that will, I much fear, render Nünning' s proposals unpopular and difficult to appreciate by Anglo-American critics. However, the great service that Nünning has per- formed by foregrounding this very incompatibility lies in the revelation of an Anglo-American failure to produce a consistent terminology on metafiction which might lend itself to easy delimitation from metanarrative in the way in which Metafiktion and Metanarration can be distinguished in Ger- man. English usage does condone the collocation metanarrative comment , which is the topic that Nünning is most interested in, but for various reasons (among which Genette' s metadiegetic level for the story within the story concept needs to be emphasized), metanarrative as a noun and metanarration have not figured prominently in English. It is the structure of the Ger- man language that enables Nünning to draw a distinction that so far has had little idiomatic encouragement from English usage.

Nünning' s most important new term, however, is Mimesis des Erzählens , literally 'mimesis of narrating'. I have attempted a more idiomatic (if awk-

40 German also has the curious term Narrativik (*narrativics) which refers to narrative as a literary genre. This term, apparently coined by Köttelwesch in 1977 (Clemens Köt- telwesch [ed.], Bibliographie der deutschen Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft , Frankfurt 1977, p. 576), is listed as an entry in Gero von Wilperťs German reference work Sachwörterbuch der Literatur from its seventh edition onwards (7th ed., Stutt- gart 1989). Wilpert is the standard German equivalent of M.H. Abrams' A Glossary of Literary Terms (7th ed., Fort Worth, TX 1999).




ward) formula with 'mimesis of the act of narration' in the section title since it seems to me that this includes both the processual meaning which Nünning intends and the implications of narratorial prominence that he refers to by way of expressive markers and evaluative comments. German again has a very broad spectrum of terms and can easily create new com- pounds. For instance, English lacks the useful Erzählvorgang ('process of narration') or the distinction recently proposed by Nünning between Er- zählperspektive and Erzähle r perspektive (narrative perspective vs. narratorial perspective). In using the term Mimesis des Erzählens (mimesis of narration) Nünning implies a contrast with Mimesis der Erzählung (mimesis of narrative), or perhaps Mimesis des Erzählten (mimesis of the narrated), since mimesis traditionally has tended to refer to the level of the narrated, the fictional world.41 So thoroughly and so generally has mimetic illusionism been focussed on the fictional protagonists and their actions, the setting of a novel and the verisimilitude of characters' dialogue, that Nünning' s proposal seems revolutionary. I will return to this new concept and its implications for narrative theory in the final section of the present essay.

2.2. Models of Meta-ization

The preceding discussion has uncovered a number of murky spots in the conceptualization of metanarrative and metafiction that require further clari- fication. Thus, most importantly, two issues are never explicitly dealt with in the current definitions of meta-entities: the quality or hierarchical status of the referents of metanarrative/metafiction; and the status or quality of metanarrative/metafiction themselves.

Let me start with the second point. The terms metafiction and then metanarrative are based on the model of metalanguage/metalinguistic, and the meta-ization process has expanded to cover concepts like metadramay metadiscourse or metahistory . Metalanguage refers to a language (system) situated on a level above the ordinary use of words for referential purposes. Metalanguage is an instance of mention rather than use. The concept relies on Russell's solution of the paradox that statements like All Cretians are liars, uttered by a Cretian, produce. The statement All Cretians are liars is to

41 French terminology, by contrast, is much clearer since it has a lexical set of three different terms: mimèse de narration, du récit, de l'histoire. Vivat Genette! Compare also Hutcheon's distinction between "mimesis of process" and "mimesis of product" (Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative. The Metafictional Paradox , London 1984, pp. 36-39).



16 Monika Fludernik

be situated on a meta-level about statements and divorced from application to specific referential situations. Note that here a statement about (groups of) statements qualifies for the meta-level.

On that pattern, metafiction would need to be a fiction about fiction(ality), and metanarrative a narrative about narrative (story-telling). Prince's definition is therefore entirely logical. Whereas many uses of metafiction as 'self-reflexive texts' do indeed follow this logic, Nünning's use of metafiction , based on his definition of metanarrative/metanarration , focusses exclusively on the narratorial discourse Ç Erzähleräußerungen ), or the narrational level of narratives which self-reflexively discuss narrative.

The main definitional problem relating to metanarration, as noted, concerns the location of metanarrative and its objects. Is metanarrative one of the functions of narratorial discourse? (Nünning explicitly says so.42) If so, it needs to be located on the discourse level. The objects of metanarrative comment, by contrast, can then be situated in the story (commentary on the histoire ), on the discourse level (commentary on the act of narrating), on the paratextual level (comment on the frame, title of a novel), and on the inter- textual or intermedial level (comment on the novel, on aesthetics, on the novel and society, on poets and writers, etc.). The fact that Nünning starts out from a reconsideration of the act of narration argues for the placing of metanarrative on the discourse level.

Unter dem Begriff der metanarrativen Erzähleräußerungen sind also diejenigen Kommentare und Reflexionen einer Erzählinstanz zu subsumieren, die Aspekte des Erzählens in selbstreflexiver Form thematisieren und damit die Aufmerksamkeit auf den Erzählvorgang richten. 'Metanarrativ' in einem weiteren Sinne sind daher alle vermittlungsbezogenen Funktionen von Erzählinstanzen, d.h. Erzähleräußerungen mit primärem Bezug zum Erzählvorgang bzw. zur Kommunikationssituation auf der Ebene der er- zählerischen Vermittlung. / Diese Definition verdeutlicht außerdem, daß keines- wegs alle Formen selbstreflexiven Erzählens als metanarrativ zu bezeichnen • a 44 sind. • a

42 Nünning, "Die Funktionen von Erzählinstanzen" (cf. note 4), pp. 334, 340. Nünning, "Mimesis des Erzählens" (cf. note 1), pp. 33-34. 'The label metanarrative narratorial comments comprises all comments and reflections of the narrating instance which self-reflexively thematize and foreground the narrational process.' (my translation). P. 34. 'Metanarrative in a more extended sense are also all narratorial functions that relate to the mediation (of the story), for instance narratorial comments on the process of narration or on the communicative situation between narrator and narratee./ This definition moreover clarifies that not all forms of self-reflexive narration are automatically metanarrative.' (my translation).




In fact, traditionally, metanarrative commentary has been subsumed among the evaluative and explanatory functions of narratorial discourse.45

Conversely, metanarrative comment in the sense of self-reflexive strategy - whether by linguistic or non-linguistic means, whether explicit or implicit - can be positioned on several planes. The story can comment on itself by means of a mise-en-abyme ; the framing of the story by means of editorial prefaces can imply a comment on the text, as can photographs, title pages and diagrammes. Juxtaposition and collage are powerful techniques of implicit authentification or de-authentification of texts. The reason why I am raising this issue relates to the fact that Nünning' s essay, in its parallelizing of metanarrative and metafiction, suggests that, as with metafictional devices, metanarrative may involve several levels of a narrative and that metanarrative strategies need not all be linguistic devices.

Nünning' s "Modell 2" (= our Diagramme 1) does not clarify this point. Thus, in Nünning' s first category, which refers to the "textual level on which the act of narration is thematized, i.e. mediation on the level of the characters, the level of the narrator's discourse, the level of the editor's remarks or that of other frames like synoptic chapter headings or other paratextual elements",46 it is quite open from the mere definition whether metanarrative thematized on the character level means that the characters, in their dialogue or in their hypodiegetic acts of narration, thematize the act of narration (my preferred reading), or whether it is the plot that does the the- matizing (this interpretation would seem to be corroborated by the category of implicit metanarration in the second slot - cp. Diagramme 1 ["Modell 2"] above).47

45 Compare Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction. Contemporary Poetics , Lon- don 1983, pp. 96-100; Franz K. Stanzel, A Theory of Narrative, trans. Charlotte Goed- sche, Cambridge 1984, pp. 22-26, 37-38, 143-152; Nünning, Grundzüge eines kommunikationstheoretischen Modells (cf. note 4), pp. 84-123; Nünning, "Die Funktionen von Erzählinstanzen" (cf. note 4), pp. 334-342; Werner Wolf, "Erzählerische Objek- tivität, 'Authorial Intrusions' und Englischer Realismus", Poetica 27/1995, pp. 314- 338, here pp. 322-331. 46 Nünning, "Mimesis des Erzählens" (cf. note 1), p. 36. It also remains a puzzle to me what "critical and non-critical metanarration" (defined as having as its object the "evaluation of the thematized forms of narrative [or narration?]") could refer to. One example which perhaps suggests itself is the title of Book I, chapter 13 of Fielding's Jonathan Wild: "A chapter of which we are extremely vain, and which indeed we look on as our chef d'oeuvre [...]" (Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild [1743], London 1986, p. 72). Nünning, "Metanarration als Lakune der Er- zähltheorie" (cf. note 2, p. 146) supplies some examples that suggest a different reading, namely a thematization of the norms of narrative conventions and the narrative persona' s ironic or openly critical reference to them. The issue is complicated by the fact that Nünning takes his categories from Wolf (implicit vs. explicit metafiction,



1 8 Monika Fludernik

The question is whether narrative in metanarrative (adj.) refers to the histoire level, the discours level, or all three Genettian levels together (histoire/discours/narration). Traditionally, on the parallel with metalinguistic, it seems to me the term has been used to refer to the discours/narration level only, and metafictional has been used to designate comments on the plotting of the tale. Nünning48 explicitly says that category 1.1 of his diagramme concerns metanarration on the extradiegetic, the diegetic or para- diegetic levels, and gives as example characters that tell their own lives in embedded tales.49 That definition seems to relate to the plot and not to the narrative discourse of the intra-diegetic narrators; it therefore jibes with the definition quoted earlier which focussed on "commentaries and reflections on the part of narrative instances ".50 What I am saying is that Nünning' s schema is ambiguous between a definition of metanarrative as, on the one hand, one type of narratorial commentary , and, on the other, a function of narrative which can be manifested in narrative discourse but also on other levels.

Nünning distinguishes very clearly between metanarrative and metafiction, defining metafiction as the disclosing of fictionality (here he agrees with Wolf), but discussing metanarrative as the thematization of narrating (i.e. the act of narration). He therefore distinguishes between the reference of a metanarrative statement (it's about narration) and its function or effect (it tends to make the reader aware of the fictionality of the act of narration/the story). He then proceeds to argue further that there are metanarrative statements that do not have a metafictional effect and metafictional (self-reflexive) strategies that do not use metanarrative but other fictional techniques to create their specific undermining of the mimetic illusion.51

Nünning' s model therefore implies a tripartite structure of self-reflexivity (self-reflexive texts?):

critical/non-critical metafiction, etc.), and critical metafiction criticizes the fictionality of the narrative - but can metanarration criticize the 'narration of the narrative'? Cf. Wolf, Ästhetische Illusion (cf. note 8), d. 220-265. 48 1 Nünning, "Metanarration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie" (cf. note 2), p. 136. "Beispiele dafür finden sich etwa in vielen Romanen des 18. Jahrhunderts, in denen Figuren in Form von interpolated tales bzw. embedded stories ihre Lebensgeschichten erzählen (vgl. Williams 1998: Kap. 2), sowie in Briefromanen wie Samuel Richardsons Clarissa ; or, The History of a Young Lady (1747/48) und Tobias Smol- letts The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771)." (Nünning, „Metanarration als La- kune der Erzähltheorie" [cf. note 2], p. 136). Compare Jeffrey J. Williams, Theory and the Novel : Narrative Reflexivity in the British Tradition , Cambridge 1998. Nünning, "Mimesis des Erzählens" (cf. note 1), p. 33; my emphasis. M PP. 33-35.



Metanarratíve and Metafictional Commentary 19

Diagramme 3 - Nünning on Metanarratíve vs. Metafiction

self-reflexive

pure metanarration metafictional metanarration pure metafiction (= Chatman's

self-conscious narrative)

My question mark concerning self-reflexivity refers to the fact that mise-en- abyme does not necessarily correspond to a narrator's utterance but to a constructional point. The first two items are therefore narratorial statements with or without metafictional effect ; metafiction that is not metanarrative is also not a narratorial statement, apparently, but something else. Let us now turn to Werner Wolfs proposals. Wolf defines metafiction as

[...] ein[en] Sammelbegriff für selbstreflexive "Aussagen und Elemente einer [fiktiven] Erzählung, die nicht auf Inhaltliches als scheinbare Wirklichkeit abheben, sondern den Rezipienten Textualität und 'Fiktionalität' im Sinne von 'Künstlich- keit, Gemachtheit' oder 'Erfundenheit' und damit zusammenhängende Phänomene zu Bewußtsein bringen"52 (my emphasis).

Wolf, like Nünning, allows for metafictional narrative statements53 and has an equivalent non-narratorial category (the "elements" of the above quotation).

Wolfs definition of metafiction as a "thematization of fictionality"54 moreover emphasizes that metafiction and anti-illusionism do not completely overlap either: there are metafictional comments by the narrator that

52 Werner Wolf, "Metafiktion", in: Ansgar Nünning (ed.), Metzler Lexikon der Litera- tur- und Kulturtheorie , Stuttgart 1998, p. 362; qtd. Wolf, "Formen literarischer Selbstbezüglichkeit" (cf. note 31), p. 71. The first square brackets in this quotation are Wolf's. '[Metafiction is] a hypernym designating all sorts of self-reflective " utterances and elements of a fictional narrative which do not treat their referent as apparent reality but foreground for the reader the textuality and fictionality of the narrative in terms of its artefactuality, fictivity or inventedness [...]'" (my translation). 53 ~ "Metafiktionale Kommentare beziehen sich nicht auf Erzählinhalte als scheinbare Wirklichkeit, sondern implizieren immer eine mehr oder weniger deutliche Thema- tisierung von Fiktionalität." (Werner Wolf, "Metafiktion. Formen und Funktionen eines Merkmals postmodernistischen Erzählens. Eine Einführung und ein Beispiel. John Barth, Life Story", Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 30/1997, pp. 31-50, here p. 35). Wolf, "Ästhetische Illusion" (cf. note 8), p. 224.



20 Monika Fludernik

tend to enhance the illusion of realism,55 and there are anti-illusionistic techniques that do not thematize fictionality.56 Wolfs most crucial distinction, however, is that between explicit and implicit metafiction which, on closer inspection, turns out to be equivalent to narratorial vs. non-narratorial thematizations of fictionality.57

Diagramme 4 - Wolf on Metafiction

metafiction

explicit implicit (= narratorial)

fictio fictum story discourse

Wolfs explicit metafiction therefore corresponds to a narratorial statement that thematizes the narrative's fictionality (on whatever level), whereas the discovery of implicit metafiction remains based on interpretation.

This takes me to the next point. In Wolf, the thematizations of fictionality can refer to the fictionality of the narration centering on the fictio character of the narrative, or to the fictionality of the story (the inventedness of the histoire, fictum quality). In the context of implicit metafiction and 'irony of fictionality' ( Fiktionsironie ) Wolf moreover distinguishes between story- centred and discourse-centred metafictional Fiktionsironie .58 It would therefore seem that Nünning' s metanarrative commentary that has a metafictional function is equivalent to Wolfs left-most category in the above diagramme.

Before going on to present my own reshuffling of these categories under 3.2, let us now turn to some textual evidence and do some bottom-up rather than top-down theorizing.

55 P. 255. 56 P. 227. 57 PP. 226-236. 58 PP. 236-238.




3.1. Metadiscursi vity and Metacompositionality

I recently did an analysis of narrative directives (which are clearly metanarrative).59 Some of these were 'mere' directives like " We go back for a moment to the preceding night, to account for Henchard's attitude [...],,6° Oth- ers were clearly metafictional since they involved metalepsis: "But me- thinks I hear the old shepherd Dorus calling me to tell you something of his hopeful adventures."61 However, a large number of eighteenth- and nine- teenth-century phrases were, I thought, incipiently metafictional but not clearly so. Compare, for instance:

As we cannot therefore at present get Mr. Joseph out of the inn, we shall leave him in it, and carry our reader on after Parson Adams [...]

This is neither unequivocally metanarrative nor unequivocally metafictional. To the extent that the narrator manages a scene shift, the passage is metanarrative; to the extent that this scene shift is clearly stage-managed, it foregrounds the constructedness of the narrative text and has a metafictional load. The decision between the two options may have something to do with the reader's metaphoric or non-metaphoric interpretation of carry. In the literal meaning of the phrase, the narrator metaleptically transgresses the existential divide between story and narration, a strategy that clearly has to be categorized as a metafictional one; on the other hand, when read simply as a humorous alternative to 'Let's leave Joseph behind and turn to Parson Ad- ams', the phrase appears to be metanarrative but not really metafictional.

In the paper to which I was referring I also remarked on the combination of metaleptic and metanarrative aspects in the narrative constellation that Genette first discussed: " While the venerable churchman climbs the ramps of the Angoulême, it is not useless to explain the network of interests into which he was going to set foot."63 Here the metaleptic aspect concerns the

59 Monika Fludernik, "The Diachronization of Narrative", Narrative 1 1/3 (forthcoming in 2003). hO Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Harmondsworth 1986, p. 218. Compare also "We must now go back a little in our story" (Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now [1875], Oxford 1989, p. 429). All emphases are my own. 01 Sir Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia (1590), Oxford 1994, p. 162. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews , London 1977, p. 104; also qtd. Wilhelm Füger, Die Entstehung des historischen Romans aus der fiktiven Biographie in Frankreich und England unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Courtilz de Sandras und Daniel De- foe , Ph.D. Dissertation, Univ. Munich 1963, p. 124. Honoré de Balzac, Les souffrances de l'inventeur , qtd. Genette, Narrative Discourse (cf. note 3), pp. 68, 235.



22 Monika Fludernik

temporal parallelization of the act of narration with the story. The narrative uses the supposed simultaneity between them to create space for a flashback of delayed orientation.

Leaving it [the coach] to pursue its journey at the pleasure of the conductor afore- mentioned [...] this narrative may embrace the opportunity of ascertaining the condition of Sir Mulberry Hawk, and to what extent he had by this time, recovered from the injuries consequent on being flung violently from his cabriolet, under the circumstances already detailed. And so, with consent of both parents [...] their marriage day was appointed; which, because it fell out in this time, I think it shall not be impertinent to remember a little our shepherds while the other greater persons are either sleeping or otherwise • i 65 occupied.

• i

These English examples both return to a different set of characters by explicitly foregrounding the narratorial gear-shifting. In addition, they metaleptically imply the narrator's freedom to turn to other topics when nothing noteworthy is happening regarding the subject at hand. Both passages have an implicit metafictional effect. I will return to a proposal for linking metanarrative, metafiction and metalepsis below, combining my sugges- tions with Nünning' s typology.

Let me first turn to narrative commentary as such. Since metanarration can take a variety of forms, I would now like to use two example texts and inductively establish some types of metanarration. The example texts are Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now (1873-1874), popularized by the recent BBC1 production, and Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wild (1743). In the following remarks I will use a broad definition of metanarrative, allowing comments on the novel as a whole, on the discourse, the plot and on the act of narration.

Let us start with the title, The Way We Live Now. This can certainly be taken as a comment on and an evaluation of the novel as a whole (cp. Dick- ens's Hard Times). I wonder whether or not to see it as properly metanarrative. Are not all titles metanarrative? (The Ambassadors is just as appropri- ate as a characterization of the meaning of that novel.) Besides, no fictional persona (narrator or editor), but the author is ultimately responsible for the title (though it is certainly part of the text, if on a paratextual level). The example Nünning quotes ( Vanity Fair : A Novel without a hero) is a self- reflexive title. I would therefore hesitate to ascribe a clear metanarrative character to this title. At most, it is implicitly metanarrative.

The novel's first chapter, titled "Three Editors", starts with

64 Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), Oxford 1982, p. 488. Sidney, Old Arcadia (cf. note 61), p. 212.




Let the reader be introduced to Lady Carbury, upon whose character and doings much will depend of whatever interest these pages may have, as she sits at her writing-table in her own room, in her own house in Welbeck" Street.66

This sentence contains two metanarrative features - a reference to the fact that the reader needs to be introduced to one of the major characters, and a reference to "these pages". One could additionally regard as metanarrative the remark that Lady Carbury is a central character of the book. The title and this orientational passage both correspond to what in natural narrative would be called the abstract of a story (This is a story about camping, and how Julie was frightened out of her wits').

First conclusion: If material that goes into the abstract is supposed to be metanarrative (this is a story about ...), then titles could be argued to be implicitly metanarrative too.

Second insight: The phrase "the reader" (as the reader will note) is a sign of metanarrativity, unlike perhaps a direct 'Dear reader' formula.

Third thesis: Metanarrative statements referring to the ordering of dis- cursive elements in the text will be called metadiscursive. Metanarrative statements addressing the narrational process and its participants will be called metanarrational.

Fourth point: Only explicit metanarrative statements by a narrator are properly metadiscursive/metanarrational.

Let us turn to another passage:

Lady Carbury in her letter had called herself an old woman, but she was satisfied to do so by a conviction that no one else regarded her in that light. Her age shall be no secret to the reader, though to her most intimate friends, even to Mr. Broune, it had never been divulged.

Although suitably stilted, this conveys as much as, 'but I will tell you what her age is', and that promise is kept in the next sentence. This directing strategy corresponds to the mechanics of textual deixis and constitutes, I posit, a separate category of meta-statements, namely one in which the order of enunciation on the discourse level is the object of the metanarrative comment. Genette has labelled this "advance notices and recalls".68 Genette, too, denies the reader the benefit of examples, but I presume he prefers phrases like: As we will see in the next chapter or as we saw at the outset of

66 Trollope, The Way We Live Now (cf. note 60), p. 1. 67 P. 3. Genette, Narrative Discourse (cf. note 3), p. 257.



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our tale.69 I label such metanarrative references to the writing process and the textual ordering metadiscursive. Compare also:

One reason why we chose to end our first book, as we did , with the last chapter , was, that we are now obliged to produce two characters of a stamp entirely different from what we have hitherto dealt in. These persons are of that pitiful order of mortals who are in contempt called good-natured, being indeed sent into the world by nature with the same design with which men put little fish into a pike-pond, in order to be devoured by that voracious water-hero.

Trollope's novel is studded with evaluative remarks and with generalizing comments in the gnomic present tense. However, although these prominently emphasize the act of narration, they cannot be called metanarrative since they are not self-reflexive in the required sense. Thus, the narrator's remarks after Mr. Broune has dared kiss Lady Carbury are not metanarrative:

When a man has kissed a woman, it goes against the grain with him to say the very next moment that he is sorry for what he has done. It is as much as to declare that the kiss had not answered his expectation.71

The comment explains by a general remark how Mr. Broune felt after the kiss. Here is another gnomic passage:

The caricaturist who draws only caricatures, is held to be justifiable, let him take what Überties he may with a man's face and person. It is his trade, and his business calls upon him to vilify all that he touches. [...] Mr. Alf never made enemies, for he praised no one [...]

As a comment on the genre of caricature this is not narrowly meianarrative since caricature belongs to a different (not necessarily narrative) medium. However, if one assumes the comment to suggest that The Way We Live Now is to be compared to a piece of caricature, and that its author is pursu- ing the very strategy here attributed to Mr. Alf, then the comment becomes self-reflexive (at least implicitly so) and can be argued to be a metanarrative comment. Nünning' s insightful distinction between Eigenmetanarration (proprio-metanarration), Fremdmetanarration (allo-metanarration) and All- gemeinmetanarration (general metanarration) allows one to describe the

69 I take it that Genette is consistent about the extranarrative function and would place a phrase like In later years she would come to regret her decision as a real prolepsis among the properly narrative (diegetic) functions of the narrative discourse. 70 Fielding, Jonathan Wild (cf. note 47), book H, ch. i, p. 83. Trollope, The Way We Live Now (cf. note 60), p. 4. 72 P. 8.




passage as a move from alio- to proprio-metanarration.73 Let us contrast this with a passage in Lady Carbury's letter to Mr. Alf, in which she writes:

I have no patience with the pretensions of would-be poets who contrive by toadying and underground influences to get their volumes placed on every drawing- room table.

The passage continues with more of the same outrage at achieving an unde- served reputation by what she calls "puffing".75 These remarks strike the reader as supremely ironic since the very letter in which they occur is, precisely, an exercise in puffing or toadying, trying to get Mr. Alf to give her book (of whose mediocre quality the narrator has left the reader in no doubt) a good review in his literary magazine. The passage is self-reflexive not in relation to the story-level but by means of a comment situated on the embedded (hypodiegetic) level which implicitly refers to the fictional situation on the story level, thereby resembling the device of mise-en-abyme. Lady Carbury gives herself away (she is an unreliable narrator in her epis- tolary writing) and supplies an effect of irony. Would Nünning categorize this as implicit metanarrative located on the hypodiegetic level in reference to the actions of Lady Carbury on the diegetic level? Or would he say that this is a case of allo-metanarrative on the hypodiegetic level (Lady Carbury on other people's toadying) which functions as a (non-metanarrative) mise- en-abyme for the diegetic level? As Wolf already remarked with regard to metafiction, implicitness directly depends on interpretation.76

A clearly metanarrative passage occurs at the beginning of the next chapter:

Something of herself and her condition Lady Carbury has told the reader in the letters given in the former chapter, but more must be added. She has declared she had been cruelly slandered; but she has also shown that she was not a woman whose words about herself could be taken with much con- fidence. If the reader does not understand so much from her letters to the three editors they have been written in vain.77

73 These distinctions are loaned from Werner Wolfs Eigenmetafiktion , Fremdmetafik- tion and Allgemeinmetafiktion (Wolf, Ästhetische Illusion [cf. note 8], pp. 250-251). In Nünning, "Metanarration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie" (cf. note 2; p. 134), Nün- ning acknowledges this debt. The passage is indeed a good example of Wolfs Fremdmetafiktion/ Eigenmetafiktion and it very clearly demonstrates the problematics of distinguishing between meta narrative and meta fiction. Trollope, The Way We Live Now (cf. note 60), p. 9. ° P. 10. 76 Wolf, Ästhetische Illusion (cf. note 8), pp. 235-236. Trollope, The Way We Live Now (cf. note 60), ch. ii, p. 1 1.



26 Monika Fludernik

The passage continues with an evaluation of Lady Carbury's situation. The heavy-handed explicitness of the quoted passage does not concern us here, only the remark about the three letters. The passage refers to the narrator's writing of Chapter 1, and to the design of the novel. Lady Carbury has been made to write these three letters to the editors in order that the reader recognize her insincerity. The passage is therefore both metanarrative (referring to the narrative discourse level) and metafictional since it implies that she did not write these letters, but that the narrator-qua-author arranged for her to do so. Moreover, this passage discusses the construction of the narrative discourse not in terms of metadiscursivity but in terms of the decision of what topics and elements to include in the narrative account on the discourse level.

Fifth point: Besides metadiscursivity I introduce the term metacompositionality which relates to the fictio (rather than fictum) status of the narrative discourse.78

The following passage refers to the narrator's decision on what to put into the narrative and what to leave out. It is therefore clearly metanarrative in the sense of metacompositional.

He [Miles] did, however, go to Germany, finding that a temporary absence from England would be comfortable to him in more respects than one -, and need not be heard of again in these pages.

Such compositional references to the selection mechanisms at work in the story frequently acquire a clearly metafictional emphasis and often combine with metaleptic devices:

This was so cruel a disappointment to Wild and so sensibly affects us, as no doubt it will the reader, that, as it must disqualify us both from proceeding any further at present, we will now take a little breath and therefore we shall here close this book80

Compare the conclusion to chapter xcix of The Way We Live Now , where the metanarrative comment includes a Fielding-like "carry" that might be interpreted metaleptically if we were to take it as a literal remark:

The writer of the present chronicle may so far look forward, - carrying his reader with him, - as to declare that Marie Melmotte did become Mrs. Fisker very soon after her arrival at San Francisco.

78 Wolf, Ästhetische Illusion (cf. note 8), pp. 38-40. Trollope, The Way We Live Now (cf. note 60), ch. xcii, p. 400. Fielding, Jonathan Wild (cf. note 47), book I, ch. xiv, p. 80-81. Trollope, The Way We Live Now (cf. note 60), ch. xcviii p. 457.




The reader is here confronted with an omniscient narrator, who already knows the outcome of the story. By metacompositionally referring to his proleptic faculties, the narrator thematizes his role as omniscient narrator. The metanarrative quality of the passage is additionally enhanced by the narrator's metadiscursive self-reference as "writer of the present chronicle". Similarly opaque metanarrativity arises in connection with forms of reader address:

At three o'clock in the morning, Sir Felix had lost over a hundred pounds in ready money. On the following night about one he had lost a further sum of two hundred pounds. The reader will remember that he should at that time have been in the ho- tel at Liverpool.

Here the veiled address to the reader implies that the reader has earlier read a passage about Sir Felix's schedule for that evening. Although a point of time is mentioned, the passage mainly has a metadiscursive function.

The above examples naturally cannot exhaust the full range of possibili- ties. What they do show, however, is the strong prevalence of directive metanarrative passages, which I have dubbed metadiscursive, and also how metanarrative aspects link with chapter beginnings and chapter endings and how they get integrated into the ongoing text as appendices to evaluation or generalizing commentary. It is this last aspect which particularly deserves the notice of future narcological research. In addition, I have introduced the term metacompositionality to account for numerous structural references which are neither properly metadiscursive nor plot-oriented. In what fol- lows, some additional finetuning will be presented.

3.2. A New Model

On the basis of the above discussion, I wish to propose an alternative schema linking metafiction, metanarrative and metalepsis.

This alternative schema answers more to the practical micro-textual emphasis of my own work. In this schema I start by setting self-reflexive narrative strategies on the topline of my diagramme and subdividing self- reflexive devices into those touching on the discourse and narration levels of a narrative and those touching on the plot level.

82 Ch. xlix, p. 467.



28 Monika Fludernik

Diagramme 5 - A new model

narrational level structural / thematic / symbolic level

self-reflexive function

metanarrative metafiction non-narrational self-reflexivity (Wolfs explicit (Wolfs implicit metafiction) metafiction)

a) plot construction: plot construction: fictio fictum (inventedness)

• metacompositional • mise-en-abyme etc. • illustrations • metaleptic plot configurations

^ metalepsis ►

b) discourse/narration:

• metadiscursive • metanarrational • meta-aesthetic

The self-reflexive strategies considered in the left-most column here ex- clude those outside narratorial language. It would then make sense to label as metanarrative all self-reflexive statements referring to the discourse and its constructedness. The term metafiction , by contrast, is here limited to self- reflexive statements about the inventedness of the story. It therefore coincides with Wolfs explicit metafiction. This curtailing of the meaning of metafiction has the advantage of circumventing the problem that we en- countered most frequently in this essay - whether or not a given metanarrative passage was or was not metafictional. In each and every case the issue was related to an exposure of selection mechanisms, the ordering of elements, evaluative aspects and the like, but never to th e fictum quality of the narrative.




The model therefore agrees with Nünning' s diagramme "Modell 3" (our Diagramme 2 above) that sees metafìction as one of the functions of metanarrative statements. By redefining metafìction as one of two types of self-reflexivity, the metanarrative, and the metafictional - with other types of self-reflexivity relegated to yet another column -, my proposal manages to downplay the metanarrative vs. metafìction conundrum which kept besetting me throughout this article.

Secondly, while metanarrative statements need not have any distancing effect on the aesthetic illusion projected by the narrative, metafictional statements in the given definition do seriously impair the mimetic effect. It is for this reason, indeed, that I have placed metalepsis in the area between metanarration and metafìction. This device clearly draws attention to its realistic impossibility in logical terms, but many passages actually fail to de- stroy the mimetic effect in the manner frequently discussed in books on metafìction. What I see as a particularly exciting area of future research is the combination of metaleptic techniques with mimesis-enhancing metanarrative. Metalepsis of course frequently remains a strong indicator of metafictionality, and it figures prominently as an independent self-reflexive strategy in the third column. This third column, which I have dubbed non- narrational self-reflexivity, basically corresponds to Wolfs implicit metafiction. It consists of mise-en-abyme (a story within the story whose plot or theme echoes those of the embedding narrative), visual paratextual elements such as illustrations or typographic arrangements echoing the theme of the tale, as well as metaleptic plot configurations which involve a transgression of narrative levels (characters talking to their authors, narrators embracing their heroine, etc.). This last category, incidentally, is not dependent on a narrative setting. All these devices can occur in drama, poetry, film or other artistic media.

Third, I have subdivided the metanarrative side of the diagramme into metadiscursive, metanarrational and meta-aesthetic slots. My reasons for doing so relate to my impression that references to the articulative level of the discourse (the narrational text-deixis, if you want) constitute a group by themselves, and that narratorial disquisitions on generic peculiarities, the reader's response to the text, production-related issues, politeness83 and authorial intention likewise involve a separate realm of reflection that does not often overlap with the main narrational category and therefore could be awarded a separate term (the meta-aesthetic). This middle and most extensive metanarrational slot then includes all references to the utterances and

83 Cp. "concluding with a phrase too coarse to be inserted in a history of this kind" (Fielding, Jonathan Wild [cf. note 47], book I, ch. xii, p. 71).



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disquisitions of the narrator, to the role of the narratee (cp. Nünning' s expressive and conative types of metanarration) and references to the narrational process:

[...] and thus the poor lady [Lady Booby] was tortured with perplexity; opposite passions distracting and tearing her mind different ways. [...] Or as it happens in the conscience, where honour and honesty pull one way, and a bribe and necessity another. - If it was only our present business to make similies, we could produce many more to this purpose; but a similie (as well as a word) to the wise. We shall therefore see a little after our hero, for whom the reader is doubtless in some . 84 pain.

As discussed above, I have also added a metacompositional slot to refer to comments relating to plot construction, or the temporal relation between story and discourse and the problems of representation. This category also includes titles, prefaces in so far as they contain narrative statements and are not merely visual paratexts like title pages and illustrations.

One of the advantages of the proposed diagramme lies in its avoidance of privileging narrative realism. In fact, I hope that it opens the way to ana- lysing the combination between realistic techniques and in principle anti- illusionistic strategies. Much work will still have to be done on elucidating the functions of metanarrative comment which are now suddenly - thanks to Wolf and Nünning - looking much less clear than they used to do only a while ago.

It also seems to me that what this entire project is moving towards is a réévaluation of the term realism in the sense of Ian Watt. It is high time that the rather impressionistic labels used to 'define' realism be replaced by a textually more precise set of definors. Metanarrative may well be one of the terms rising to prominence in the course of these efforts. Victorian fiction is in any case due for a renaissance, and with the current emphasis on cultural studies, such a renaissance may well be in the offing at last.

4. Conclusions and Outlook: Mimesis of Narration

In summary of these pages, I would like to begin by acknowledging that one has to be grateful to Ansgar Nünning for discovering another lacuna in narrative theorizing. The extensiveness and variety of metanarrative commentary has certainly so far been undervalued in the theoretical work of narratologists, and the evocation of an act of narration in fictional texts was focussed on too sparsely. Having said that, much work still needs to be done

84 Fielding, Joseph Andrews (cf. note 62 ), book I, ch. ix, pp. 62f.




in close textual analysis that carefully distinguishes different modes of metanarrative and different uses and functions of these - over and above the function of enhancing or undermining aesthetic illusionism. Nünning' s scalar model (here Diagramme 2) and his stunning range of categories (here Diagramme 1) will provide a necessary starting point for such an enterprise.

Nevertheless, a few additional points should be considered, and some questions clarified. For one, the discussion seems to me to require a clear distinction between first-person and third-person texts. In fact, it does make a great deal of sense to preliminarily focus on heterodiegetic texts, leaving comparisons with homodiegetic narratives until later. The metanarrative aspect has been neglected most thoroughly in the omniscient narrator tradition of Victorian realism, and this is where one should perhaps start. Neverthe- less, the limitations of metanarrativity in the first-person realm are important to register and describe.

Secondly, despite Nünning' s presentation of a lucid diagramme that promises complete satisfaction in terms of terminological precision and categorizational practicability, I do not myself find this table very helpful in sorting the passages that I have collected, nor does this schema explain how the functional level of metanarrative relates to the numerous categories and subcategories proposed.

By way of an outlook I would now like to turn to issues which Nünning' s paper raises and which have larger implications for narrative theory.

In his article Nünning extends traditional conceptualizations of mimesis by proposing a new type of mimesis which he calls 'mimesis of the act of narration'. This section is concerned with the narcological repercussions of this extension of the notion of mimesis, and it attempts to correlate Nün- ning' s proposals with the fundamental story/discourse distinction and the 'narratorless narrative' issue.

Traditionally, narratology defines narrative as - in Prince's words - the "recounting (as product and process, object and art, structure and structura- tion) of one or more real or fictitious events communicated by one, two, or several (more or less overt) NARRATORS, to one, two, or several (more or less overt) Narratees".85 In this formula both the narrating and the narrated are present in equal measure. These traditional definitions are accen- tuated in Franz K. Stanzel's narrative theory86 since he makes mediation through the narrative discourse ( mediacy ) a constitutive element of narrative, contrasting it with drama, in which the story (histoire) is not mediated by a narrative discourse. In Stanzel's schema even so-called reflector narra-

85 Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology (cf. note 16), p. 58. Stanzel, A Theory of Narrative (cf. note 45).



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tives that do not have a prominent narrator figure (or teller), although they try to achieve an illusion of immediacy, are in fact mediated by the narrative discourse. Stanzel's narrative theory is therefore one that places the act of narration in the centre of narrative theory and distinguishes between texts that foreground an active narrator figure (teller character) and those that, despite having a mediating narrative discourse, pretend to access the fictional world 'directly' through the mind of a reflector character or figurai consciousness (Stephen Daedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Mrs. Dalloway in Virginia Woolf s novel). It is therefore somewhat disin- genuous on Nünning' s part to condemn narratology as a whole for completely failing to take the act of narration seriously or failing to appreciate its mimetic qualities. In first-person narratives and authorial types of narration ( Tom Jones), mimesis of narration (though not under this name) has certainly been a subject of narratological inquiry. It is, however, true that the emphasis in Stanzel and others has lain on the anthropomorphization of the narrator and the narratee rather than on the act and process of narration. It is also true that narrative theory since Stanzel, especially in the work of Seymour Chatman and Mieke Bal,87 has proceeded to include drama, film, cartoons and other media among the narrative genres and that these discussions have understandably tended to down play the status of narration (as a constitutive element of narrative) or to metaphorically extend it to non- verbal types of presentation (Chatman's "cinematic narrator"88).

One of the most heated debates in recent theory has been the controversy sparked by Ann Banfield in her book Unspeakable Sentences .89 In this study of free indirect discourse and related phenomena Banfield had argued that sentences of represented speech and thought have only one deictic center, that of the protagonist whose viewpoint is being rendered; and that, by contrast, sentences of narration are 'speakerless' and have no expressive node (as do sentences of discourse which have a speaker). In sentences of represented speech and thought the E(xpression) node coincides with the deictic center of the fictional protagonists. I do not have time to revisit this debate

87 See Chatman, Story and Discourse (cf. note 15); see also Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film , Ithaca, NY 1990; and Mieke Bal, Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (1977), Toronto 21999 (11985). See Chatman, Coming to Terms (cf. note 87). Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences. Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction, Boston 1982.




in detail here,90 except to note that Banfield's examples were all taken from what Stanzel calls reflector mode narrative in which the narrative discourse is backgrounded to allow an illusion of immediacy to arise. Banfield in her corpus failed to include any eighteenth-century novels in which prominent narrator figures clearly falsify any notion of 'unspeakable' sentences.

The question after Banfield has therefore been to what extent "there exists a narrator" in texts like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Chat- man, Stanzel and, I believe, Nünning would argue that a "covert" narrator is at work in the narrative discourse of these novels even though the text does not display any indications of such a narrator figure. (Compare all the features that Nünning notes on p. 29-3 191 and which I summarized above - expressive, appellative, directional, metanarrative functions of the narrator's discourse). My own position, by contrast, was and still is to argue that to hypostatize the existence of an anthrophomorphized narrator figure in reflector mode narratives is a type of naturalization on the part of literary critics. Like ordinary readers, critics import a scenario of 'somebody must be telling this story' into the text - which is quite O.K. as a reading strategy - but then go on to raise this narrator figure on the theoretical plane of narrative theory, thereby positing that we always have a communicational basic frame, that there always is a narrator figure even if the narrative pretends hard that there is not.92

Now it is in relation to this very specific context , namely the example of reflector mode narratives, that I have argued against a universal communicational frame in narrative theory: "One can therefore explain the entire communicative analysis of fiction as an (illicit) transferrai of the frame of real-life conversational narrative onto literary personae and constructed entities."93 All I was saying in this remark is that it is of course the case that

90 See Brian McHale, "Unspeakable Sentences, Unnatural Acts. Linguistics and Poetics Revisited", Poetics Today 4/1983, pp. 17-45, and Fludernik, The Fictions of Language (cf. note 6), for discussions. Nünning, "Mimesis des Erzählens" (cf. note 1), ch. 7. See Klaus Weimar, "Wo und was ist der Erzähler?", Modern Language Notes 109/1994, pp. 495-506, for a highly entertaining version of the same argument. For a critic sharing my misgivings about the communicational model see Richard Walsh, "Who Is the Narrator?", Poetics Today 18/1997, pp. 495-513. 93 - Fludernik, The Fictions of Language (cf. note 6), p. 448, qtd. Nünning, "Mimesis des Erzählens" (cf. note 1), p. 38. It is therefore not correct when Nünning generalizes my remarks to apply to all types of narrative, contending that Towards a ' Natural ' Nar- ratology , by supposedly privileging the EXPERIENCING and VIEWING frames, is one- sidedly excluding from consideration the equally valid frame of the communicational scenario (Nünning, "Mimesis des Erzählens" [cf. note 1], p. 38). This fails to note that Towards a ' Natural ' Narratology proposes four major frames that capture four modes



34 Monika Fludernik

readers, in narrativizing narrative texts, resort to a variety of cognitive scripts and frames, but do narcologists have to take these over uncriti- cally? Just because readers - on the model of the intentional fallacy - see every text as emanating from the author and therefore assume that even in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the narrator must be assumed to exist as a source for the discourse, do narratologists have to assume the same? After all, it was Nünning who destroyed the fiction of the implied author with much the same argument, namely that it is an illicit anthropomorphization of the level at which narrative meaning is being constituted. Could not the same be said for figurai narrative and its narrative discourse which should not as a matter of course be aligned with an anthropomorphized originator of that discourse?

The central issue is indeed whether or not - on the theoretical level - there needs to be a communicational framework or whether one always has to assume mediacy and, if so, always as communicational mediacy. This issue is related to an ideological point, namely to the point whether the theoretical models of narratology need to be realistic or not. What I mean by this is that if one assumes a scenario of communication on the theoretical level of narratology, this implies that the cognitive strategies of natural narratology are located not only in the text (produced by writers) and in the reading process (readers also being humans) but also on the level of theorizing about those cognitive parameters. This issue is an ideological one in the sense that it presupposes a commonsense (no-nonsense) model of the disci- pline and assents to the tenets of realism throughout even on the theoretical level. A contrary view sees theory as precisely not getting trapped (or at least trying not to) in the same categories that it is proposing,94 and it also insists on narrative fiction as ultimately resisting a completely realistic re- cuperation. Cognitive models used to narrativize fiction, in my view, never exhaust their potential meanings, and it is precisely those texts that engen- der ambiguity and do not allow for clear-cut resolutions that tend to have the highest literary quality. Nünning' s emphasis on communication, therefore, backgrounds all the typically literary and non-natural features of the literary artefact and leaves too little space for poststructuralist, symbolic or ideological approaches which I would like to be combinable with natural narratology.

of constituting mediatory consciousness. Of these four basic modes of constituting mediacy, two relate to a prominent teller figure (Telling and Reflecting) - and these are the two that Nünning unaccountably elides from discussion. See Monika Fludernik, "Cognitive Narratology: Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters", in: David Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences , Stanford (forthcoming in 2003), for an extensive treatment of this issue.




The most important questions raised by Nünning' s article, however, relate to the process of mediation itself - does mediation always have to oper- ate by means of a teller-narrator? - and to the centrality of the story/ discourse distinction, or, in other words, to the question to what extent the (communicational) distinction between story and discourse may be allowed to affect all other narcological categories on the theoretical level.

On p. 20-22 of his article95 Nünning argues - quite logically - that one should foreground the mediation of the story through a teller figure, through the act of narration, since, after all, there would not be any story except for the telling of it. This useful reminder clearly points up a major presupposi- tion of standard narcological models, namely the assumption that - even though, in reading a narrative, we first get the discourse and then proceed to construct from it what the story is - the discourse is merely the surface- structure manifestation of the deep-structure, the plot. This assumption relates to three factors: (a) the fact that the same story may be narrated in different ways; (b) the fact that the story may be "real" in historical narrative (and is therefore prior to textual renderings); and (c) the viewpoint of the writer , who supposedly first encounters the story material and then casts around on how to put it into language. There is thus a conceptual priority of story over discourse, enhanced by the realist tradition in criticism that emphasizes unproblematic access to the fictional world. Although intrusive narrators are felt to be marring the realist illusion, the authorial narrator nevertheless is taken to be the guarantor of fictional meaning, the reliable trustworthy guide of the reader.

Nünning is quite correct in pointing out that - despite the rehabilitation of the authorial narrator in the wake of Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction96 - narrative theory has never quite come to terms with the contradiction just sketched. Indeed, the advent of postmodernism has tended to exacerbate the facile equation of realism with mimetic naivety.97 My question is, therefore, to what extent Nünning' s emphasis on the reader decoding the text and on

95 Nünning, "Mimesis des Erzählens" (cf. note 1). Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Chicago 1983. Nünning is also correct in pointing out that studies like Wolfs magisterial treatment of illusionism and anti-illusionism fail to do full justice to the ways in which the authorial narrator and the other aspects of narratorial discourse can be enhancing rather than destroying the illusionistic quality of the narrative. Actually, Wolf explicitly included affirmations of authenticity among the metafictional devices, and emphasized that metafiction could not automatically be equated with anti-illusionism (Wolf, Ästhetische Illusion [cf. note 8], pp. 224, 255). Moreover, in a later article ("Erzählerische Objektivität", cf. note 45), Wolf significantly revalorizes the authorial narrator as a mimesis-enhancing device.



36 Monika Fludernik

the narrational process rather than the story (or in tandem with the story) has repercussions on the narratological paradigm. What Nünning is saying in effect is that all narrative is mediated by a process of narration and that therefore all narrative is ultimately mediated by a teller figure, and that narrative texts purvey not merely an illusion of a fictional world but in addition - and not merely secondarily - create the illusion of an act of narration. There is no disagreement about the fact that skaz narration (repeatedly noted in Stanzel and in my own work and discussed extensively in the publica- tions of the Freiburg research group on orality and literacy98) clearly estab- lishes an illusion of oral narrating; nor is there any doubt that the many first- person narrators (reliable and unreliable) that people postmodernist texts are presented as the focal point in these novels, with the stories they tell - if they tell any at all - taking second place after the foregrounded performance of communication with the reader." By contrast, however, there are narratives in which the illusion of a teller figure is not forthcoming (interior monologue novels, radical reflector mode texts, dialogue novels) so that one gets at best the remnants of a narrative discourse without any illusionistic features - except when they are transported into the text by the reader on the basis of 'every text has to have a writer, hence there must be a source for this discourse'.

Secondly, but more importantly, the status of the authorial (extradiegetic) narrator versus the first-person narrator has to be considered. It should be fairly obvious that first-person narratives have a much more extensive mimetic potential since the existential link between the experiencing and the narrating self helps to give flesh to the act of narration, foregrounding the narrative's "confessional increment"100 and testimonial function.101 In fact, Genette in his Nouveau discours du récit explicitly admitted that the testimonial function really only occurs in first-person texts.102 The case is more

98 SFB 321 "Ubergänge und Spannungsfelder zwischen Mündlichkeit und Schrift- lichkeit", see e.g. Paul Goetsch, "Fingierte Mündlichkeit in der Erzählkunst entwick- elter Schriftkulturen", Poetica 17/1985, pp. 202-218, and various other volumes in the series ScriptOralia, published in Tübingen. 99 Compare Monika Fludernik, "Second-Person Narrative as a Test-Case for Narratol- ogy: The Limits of Realism", Style 28/1994, pp. 445-479, and Fludernik, Towards a ' Natural ' Narratology (cf. note 7), pp. 274-278, where I even questioned the useful- ness of the story/discourse distinction for such texts. 100 David Goldknopf, "The Confessional Increment: A New Look at the I-Narrator", Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28/1969, pp. 13-21. Yet in first-person reflector mode texts and in neutral narrative on the Hemingway or Chandler model that "I" does not acquire such a narratorial function. 102 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited (1983), transi. Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca, NY 1988, pp. 130-131.




complex with the extradiegetic narrator figure in, say, Tom Jones . Nün- ning' s examples nearly all relate to heterodiegetic narrative, to the authorial narrator figure. We presumably all agree that in a novel like Fielding's there exists a pronounced illusionistic evocation of the act of narration. Never- theless, it has to be observed that this illusion fails to invoke a fictional world because we learn next to nothing about the narrator as a person, nor do we know where he is doing the writing, whether he has a wife, what his job is, etc., or when precisely the text was written. The mimetic illusion of the act of narration - even in those texts where it exists in full manifestation - is therefore significantly curtailed. It relates to the act of narration, including the narrator's evaluation of the fictional world, but excludes those cognitive schemata that involve embodiment.103 Narratorial illusionism is therefore different in quality from the illusionism attaching to the representation of the fictional world.

Nünning proposes to treat the two kinds of illusionism on a scale, presumably locating cases of texts with a preponderant illusion of the act of narration at one end of the scale, both types of illusion in the middle, and a preponderant illusion of the fictional world at the other end. However, this scale puts both types of illusionism on the same level. From the reader's perspective, this may even be adequate, but it is not from the writer's perspective, nor should it be from the narcologist's. As long as the text pur- veys a clear distinction between story and discourse, the nature of the narratorial illusion will be secondary. It is only in anti-illusionistic texts in which the discourse is the story that the act of narration starts to substitute for the story level and then begins to acquire the very features denied to the authorial narrator: a specific setting, embodiment, even a minimal plot.

Moreover, Nünning' s schema in fact relies on the dichotomy of story vs. discourse in its explication of mimetic illusionism. It thereby splits up what used to be a category seemingly unaffected by the story/discourse distinction - a text was supposed to be 'realistic', enhancing mimetic illusion, as a whole - into two levels, providing for two objects of mimetic illusionism ([a] the story; and [b] its framing and transmission). In traditional narratology, I take it, the mimetic illusion was seen as being sometimes expanded to include the frame as well as the inset (editor's prefaces, etc.), but it would be part of the same kind of mimetic illusion. What Nünning seems to have in mind is a different type of illusionism. The illusionism related to the act of narration is two-fold: it realistically evokes a storytelling scenario; but it

103 There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, for instance in postmodernist texts like John Barth's "Life Story" (in: J.B., Lost in the Funhouse , New York 1968, pp. 116- 129).



38 Monika Fludernik

also authenticates (or does not authenticate104) the veracity and persuasiveness of the story. It can therefore support or undermine the mimetic illusion on the story level. For this reason, it seems awkward to move away from the traditional concept of a secondary framing illusionism of the discourse level.

Where Nünning' s proposals are most exciting, they end up deconstruct- ing this hierarchy of primary and secondary illusionism, claiming in fact that the creation of a teller figure is primary for the macrostructural appreciation of realistic narrative and that the story world is a secondary (and not a neccessary) constituent of aesthetic illusionism. Constructivist theorists of historiography concur since 'the story out there' emerges only through em- plotment. Such a recruiting of traditional narratological tenets would place a premium on common-sense storytelling frames and regard literary techniques like reflector-mode narrative or the more playful postmodernist techniques that do not foreground a teller figure as oddities.

What Nünning' s model also does, and this can be regarded as both a sa- lutary and a deleterious move, is to cast the entire question of mimetic illusionism into the hands of the reader. If the existence of a prominent narrator figure no longer immediately undermines the illusionism of the text - or does so only when using self-reflexive strategies -, then the onus of finding Victorian pompous moralistic narrators a nuisance because they interfere with the reader's appreciation of the story falls on the reader. In effect this means that the determination of whether or not a text is illusionistic is clearly influenced by historical changes in taste. For a culturalist narratology this is certainly good news, widening its horizons. As a drawback, it also narrows the range of formal items whose presence or absence would allow one to make incontrovertible statements about the quality of a text. As with Nünning' s superb treatment of unreliable narration, it is ultimately readerly norms that determine the definition of narratological concepts.

Summarizing the arguments in this final section, I wish to point out that Nünning' s radical reconception of mimesis has great persuasiveness and develops and refines his previous cognitivist and culturalist preoccupations (as in his work on unreliability and perspective structure105). However, the price that has to be paid for the reconceptualization of mimesis involves the transfer of the story/discourse distinction from the how of narrative to the

104 Remember: Never trust the teller, trust the tale. Ansgar Nünning (ed.), ť Unreliable Narration 'ģ Studien zur Theorie und Praxis un- glaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur , Trier 1998; Ansgar Nünning/V era Nünning (ed.), Multiperspektivisches Erzählen. Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Perspektivenstruktur im englischen Roman des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts , Trier 2000.




what of narrative. It also conveys a resolutely realistic model of narrative fiction which can treat experimental texts only as deviations from the realistic norm. However, Nünning' s extensions of the schema in "Metanarration als Lakune der Erzähltheorie"106 include a diagramme ("Modell 3", reprinted as Diagramme 2 above) in which a scale of metanarrative functions is outlined and which places the authenticating and empathy-inducing functions of metanarration on the 'illusionistic' end of the scale, and the paro- distic, metafictional and anti-illusionistic types of metanarration on the other end. This diagramme and the historical comments to which it gives rise107 significantly compensate for any deficiencies of the model and provide an exciting starting point for further analysis. Moreover, once there is a concept of narrational or narratorial mimesis, this category can be extended in significant ways, for instance to cover the illusionism of direct address experienced by readers of second-person texts.108

Metanarrative - for many years the stepchild of narrative study - has now acquired narcological legitimacy. Nünning' s seminal contribution to the reintroduction of the teller into focal position in narrative theory is a timely intervention into current debates and promises to be a catalyst for further searching questions and major narratological revisions. What I hope to have contributed to these larger and more long-term prospects is a preliminary sketch of a number of problem areas and an emphasis on actual textual evidence which, as usual, proves to be much less neat than the theoretical schémas illusionistically suggest. Much more and more systematic evidence is needed for a thorough evaluation of theoretical positions. So Nünning, it seems, will keep narcologists in business for some time to come.

106 a. note 2, p. 152. 107 PP. 151-154. 1 0x Fludernik, Towards a ' Natural ' Narratology (cf. note 7), pp. 223-230.



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