Patricia Waugh

This blog is about the problems that can arise when reading postmodern fiction.  The difficulty is in separating fiction from reality when reading meta fictional novels. Patricia Waugh is a postmodernist critic who wrote Metafiction, and she explains that ‘meta fiction is a term given to fictional writing…in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality…and the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text’ (Waugh 1984) this means that the real world and the fictional world can be hard to distinguish. When reading a novel we find ourselves questioning the reliability of the text, whether it is real or not. We then find ourselves questioning everything around us, not just what we are reading. Waugh further explains that although the writer does not set out to confuse the reader about what is real and what is fictional, ultimately it is the reader that will construct an 'imaginative reality' from the text.  Waugh further states that meta fiction, ‘self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its own status as an artefact’ (Waugh 1984) This account of meta-fiction shows that fiction and reality are constructed and that authors use post modernistic concepts to show how fabricated the novel is.  To illustrate meta fiction postmodern writers use literary devices to emphasise the fact that the novel is a construct by deconstructing the narrative style.  Our world, according to Waugh ‘is mediated through language…and the more it shifts from every day to alternative –world contexts’ (Waugh 1984) the more disorientating the relationship between the real world and fictional world becomes. Therefore I believe that the traditional novel has been subverted with the complexity of meta fictional styles to create pandemonium for the reader.

Waugh, P. (1984)  Metafiction. Methuen