Mirror Held To Fiction―Barthelme's Metafiction

The historical period we are living through has been singularly uncertain, insecure, self-questioning and culturally pluralistic. The theoretical development in linguistics and literature has deconstructed the basic principles of literature, and there is an unprecedented mistrust of language, writing and imagination. Influenced by the self-directed modern culture and confronted with literary crisis, fictionists have become more aware of the theoretical problems in writing and started to examine in the narration of fictions some important issues concerning writing such as the problematic creative process, language identity and conventional literary forms, which finally developed into a literary trend "metafiction" dominant in western fiction in the 1960s and 1970s. At first many reviews of metafiction were negative, regarding it as self-indulgence and decadence characteristic of the exhaustion of artistic forms. Perhaps that is due to some extreme cases, in which fictionists, obsessed with the artifice of fiction writing, do not seek to tell a story at all but to examine the story-telling process itself, discarding almost everything traditional like plot and character, and their works become so theoretic and narcissistic, more like criticism than fiction that they are taking the risk of losing readers. However, metafictional fictions vary a lot in the degree of self-reflexivity, and besides the extreme ones, there are mild ones, for example, Donald Barthelme's metafiction. Alan Wilde once called Barthelme's fiction "midfiction", that is, a fiction between the extreme metafictional and the traditional. Barthelme's metafiction is an excellent combination of creation and critique - on the one hand, he follows in the steps of traditional novels in plot and character, maintaining some traditional appeal for readers, on the other hand, he probes into the nature and problems of fiction, giving a somewhat critical self-depicting of fiction. In his metafiction, Barthelme exposes the limitations of literary conventions in the hope of reviving them; he concerns himself about what is reality, and how to narrow the gap between fiction and reality; he explores into linguistic identity, worrying about the decadence of language and its failure to convey meaning; he muses over his complicated relationship with the traditional realism. Metafiction at its best enables Barthelme to have created more realistic and convincing works, established a bond of intimacy between writer and reader and finally promoted the development of fiction.