| Contemporary discussions of metafiction generally lead one to believe that the genre is comprised entirely of white, male authors, who self-reflexively investigate their own writing process. Such authors engage in what Linda Hutcheon calls "complicitous critique," whereby an author draws on a historical figure or event and simultaneously undermines the historical accuracy of that representation; in doing so, the author effectively highlights the ideology behind that representation. This same type of self-reflexive investigation plays a prominent part within the black tradition, but when it occurs the text is not labeled a work of metafiction and its author is not said to be engaged in "complicitous critique." Rather, when Henry Louis Gates, Jr. examines self-reflexivity within the black tradition, he does not provide a lengthy comparison to other traditions and he refers to the black tradition of self-reflexivity as Signifyin(g), which is a means of repetition with a difference similar to Hutcheon's "complicitous critique.".;My dissertation bridges the gap between (white) metafiction and (black) self-reflexivity by examining the representation of the artist in Don DeLillo's Mao II (1991), Michael Ondaatje's Coming through Slaughter (1976), and Toni Morrison's Jazz (1992). I demonstrate that DeLillo's method of "complicitous critique" resembles both Ondaatje's method of improvising on history and Morrison's method of Signifyin(g). Additionally, each novel constitutes what Roland Barthes, in "The Death of the Author" (1968), calls a "multi-dimensional space," wherein fiction, photography, history, and identity "blend and clash" to prevent any definitive interpretation of the work or the author's artistic identity. In this way, each author indicates that the "Author" is dead and cannot be used to provide a stable meaning. At the same time, whether one calls the artistic process "complicitous critique" or Signifyin(g), the term one uses is, to some extent, dependent upon the author's race, suggesting that the author is not entirely dead, which DeLillo, Ondaatje, and Morrison indicate in various ways through their characters. I argue that this similarity in artistic approach and representation across generic, cultural, and national boundaries problematizes the racial and intellectual divisions traditionally maintained between (white) metafiction and (black) self-reflexivity. To maintain this division is to promote a politics that is as old as American literature itself. |
