The Creation Of Metafiction By American Black Humor Writers

The Creation of Metafiction by American Black Humor WritersAs a literary genre, metafiction underlines the author's self-consciousness. There are self-references from time to time, revealing the fictional text creation process. Metafiction not only reflects the author's view about the relationship between literature and reality, but also shows the author's attempt to get rid of "anxiety of influence". It is not accidental that the late 1960s witnessed its boom. It was an age at which there were different tones (the surge of counter-culture movement, poststructuralist literature, the boom of experiment of Literary and artistic forms) in the cultural sector both in U. S. and in the world. Many black humor novelists wrote metafictions. They interpret their own vision and confidence on the future of the novel. Among them,Vladimir Nabokov,Kurt Vonnegut and John Barth were representative.Nabokov had a passion for details. With his profound literary, artistic knowledge and game awareness, his writings are as colorful as the butterflies that he loved. His writing is full of mysteries. And he was skillful in playing words and created riddles with elegant answers. His writings are like literature and art dictionary due to the subtle details which surge passion of art. Compared with other writers, his writings are prominent in intertextuality. Not only could he write ingeniously with exquisite description, but also he was skillful in using the golden key. Moreover, many of his writings were associated with other writers whose writing practice itself revealed the literary fiction.Among the black humor novelists, Vonnegut is the one with most future awareness and social responsibility. He hated that his works was labeled science fiction. But to be honest, the sci-fi elements were his invincible weapon. With this weapon, he could have a time travel between reality and dream; he could show his concern about our planet and the survival of human race; he could reveal the essence of literary creation freely and multi-dimensionally.John Barth's theory, the Literature of Exhaustion is more famous than his novel. It also reflects that there is a widespread sense of literary crisis. He probed how to get rid of the crisis by means of his creative practice. He thought that fiction could not transcend the history. He is the one who concerns most about the mythology. His consciousness ran through the ancient myths when he rewrote them. It also revealed his attention on the tradition of literature and its relation. At the same time, he questioned the holy status of the myths. All these contributed to the special connotation of his metafictions.Truly, metafiction is the effective method that the writers fight against the realistic conventions and remove the "idealism" and all its restrictions. It gets rid of the superstition on truth and dismantle the authoritative status of the realism, and it reveals the false and deceptive factors of the conventions of realism mercilessly. In order to break the traditional concept of the novel, the writers attempt to explore the way of novel creation in the future. The creation of metafiction reaches one climax after another and excellent works emerges in a large number, including Lolita and Slaughterhouse-Five. These are influential works which can suit both refined and popular tastes. Metafiction shows that literature will not dry up, but will show its ever-changing beauty. That is why it is adopted by writers of different nationality. But some of the metafictions engage in the play of words. These works could only offer empty referential signs to the readers. Such kind of writing is no more than a game which plays with literature, words, readers, criticism and even the writers themselves. As a result, the works are hard to understand and they are out of touch with the real life. Therefore, these can not close the distance between the readers and the works, but push the readers, the central consumers of the literature far away. At the same time, many interpreters come into being. Undoubtedly, it puts novels which are public and popular texts in an awkward situation.