Postmodernist metafiction first got big in the late 1960s and saw its peak in the '70s, though many writers (Robert Coover, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace) have kept experimenting with it right up to the present day.  Most of its practitioners have been academic writers -- that is, writers who get read mainly by English and philosophy profs and have university teaching jobs themselves.  Interestingly, though, metafictional techniques have "leaked out" of postmodernist literature and into stuff like pop music, TV, and film way more frequently than into popular literature: you're more likely to find "meta" techniques in an episode of The Simpsons or in songs by Beck or Outkast than in a book by Stephen King or Michael Crichton.

Before we deal with why it's "postmodernist," let me define "metafiction" for you.  And it's easy: a metafiction is any work of fiction that takes either itself or some other work of fiction as its subject matter.

So why is this "postmodernist"? 

Essentially, postmodernism (a trend in philosophy and the arts, for our purposes) is all about anti-rationality.  And one of the main staples of Western rationality has always been a "hermeneutics of representation," to use an over-complicated but fun term.  Hermeneutics is just a grotesque word for "the art or science of interpretation."  And representation, not surprisingly, is simply the practice of having one thing stand in for another.

According to the rules and precepts of rationality, a word or image can "represent" a real thing -- thus when you read the word "cat," you know it's just "standing in" for, or representing, a certain four-legged furry animal.  Same as if you see a photo of a cat.  You interpret the word or image as being the equivalent of the animal, or as being its "representative."  And so you're practicing, without even knowing it, a "hermeneutics of representation."

The word cat, or the picture of the cat, we can say, is a signifier: it signifies, or stands in for, a real cat.  And the real cat, then, is the signified, or the thing that's being represented.  

While this all seems really simple and common-sensical, maybe, the fact is that such vast and important cultural institutions as science and the law, to name just a couple, couldn't do their eminently rational work if we didn't believe that signifiers can stand in for signifieds.

Here's the thing, though: postmodernists (like Robert Coover) suggest there is no "signified" out there -- that is, they think there's no "real" thing to which our signifiers point.  The maybe liberating, maybe scary, fact, they say, is that signifiers only ever spawn other signifiers: they never actually get us close to (much less do they "stand in" for) anything absolutely "real."  You might believe there's a furry four-legged animal (general or specific) to which the word "cat" simply points, but in expressing this belief all you're doing is using words like "real," "furry," "four-legged," and "animal."  Just more signifers.  The "real" thing remains elusive and ungraspable.

And this is where things take an anti-rational turn.  Rationality can't go on -- can't operate or get things done -- if there's no "reality" for it to name and govern.

Of course anyone could have said these things about signifiers and signifieds at any point in history.  So why do a lot of artists and philosophers start espousing these ideas in the second half of the 20th century? 

Because we're living at a time in history, they'd probably say, when there are so many signfiers surrounding us -- words, images, and copies of every sort -- that the fact of their being in charge and reality having been totally eclipsed is now unignorable in a way it never was before.

A for-instance: even if you're not famous, as a contemporary person, there are still way more representations of you in the world than there is real you.  There are hundreds of photos of you; you're probably on video in a number of places; you've put God knows how many signatures out there in the world, all of them "standing in" for you....  And even when you get to your "real" person, you'll find it's wearing clothes advertised in mail-order catalogues, that it's speaking "discourses" (or types of language) that existed before it, that it switches discourses depending on where it is and who it's talking to....  It gets really hard to say where, precisely, the real you is.  You may begin to seem like just another big tangle of signifiers.

This is all to say that signifiers, in the contemporary world, have become so abundant, have gotten so out of control, that they've made the idea of a "real" reality down beneath them all a little bit laughable.  They're running the show now, postmodernists would say.

So what influence do these "pomo" ideas have on artists?  

Lots of artists go "meta."  They start writing songs about songs (Beck or Outkast), painting pictures about pictures (Andy Warhol), and writing stories about stories (John Barth).  You also see movies and TV shows that very self-consciously quote other movies and TV shows, and you see architecture that incorporates and "quotes" lots of architectural styles from the past.  All this happens because many artists get the feeling there's no point in describing "real" people and situations anymore.  You can only create pictures about pictures, movies about movies, novels about novels -- signifiers about signifiers.

One last possibly helpful thing: good modernists (like Hemingway) often believed modern people were becoming alienated from everything fundamental and natural and "real," and they tried (again like Hemingway) to write in a way that would re-capture reality and give it back to readers.  A postmodernist (like Barth) is someone who's given up any hope of ever getting back to nature or reality, or maybe doesn't believe those things were ever there to begin with.  One way a postmodernist can express his or her belief that there is no way to get back, or that there's no nature or reality to return to, is to write metafiction -- stories about stories -- instead of stories about what's "real."

Back to Dr. d's homepage