Neurotic Narrative: Metafiction and Object-Relations Theory

Introduction At a minimal level, all psychoanalytic definitions of refer to turning back of self upon itself. This defining quality of clearly resonates with self-reflexive turn of metafictional literature and has paved way for a rather loose and often pejorative invocation of term to characterize metafiction as a genre. narratives, to use Hutcheon's phrase, are denigrated by some for their excessive enchantment with textual web of tiresome antics that comprises their solipsistic self-absorption. John Barth, probably pre-eminent American metafictionist of contemporary period, is clearly aware that his metafictional work will alienate some readers when he quips only half ironically Oh God comma I abhor self-consciousness (1968, 110). In contrast, a critical study such as Hutcheon's Narcissistic Narrative (1984) valorizes epistemological and ontological implications that arise from relentless scrutiny of narrative codes and literary conventions in metafiction. While Hutcheon's groundbreaking study displays a clear awareness of both pejorative connotations and psychoanalytic implications of term narcissism, Narcissistic Narrative declines to examine with any rigor potential relationship between psychoanalytic concept of and literary genre of metafiction. Instead, Hutcheon argues that These psychological associations [of narcissism], while likely inevitable, are here, however, irrelevant in that it is narrative text, and not author, that is being described as (1984,1). Hutcheon appears unable to conceive of how can be anything other than a means of diagnosing authorial psyche; by refusing this easy gambit, Hutcheon neatly avoids theoretical pitfalls that accompany such authorial psycho-pathologizing. But her refusal also reveals a certain limitation in theoretical scope: an unwillingness to stretch parameters of possible relationship between psychoanalytic inquiry and literature. In following discussion, I propose to take up where Hutcheon leaves off by examining how various psychoanalytic models of can productively illuminate some of features of metafictional literature. At basis of this discussion lies assertion that libidinal economies of narcissistic personalities provide models for consideration of metafictional texts. By developing these models in conjunction with some tools of narratology, and by exploring implications that arise when these models are placed in conjunction with a handful contemporary American metafictional works, this discussion will not only examine textual economies of metafictional texts in light of psychoanalytical theories, but it will also refract some of thematic concerns of metafiction through that same psychoanalytical and narratological lens. In so doing, narcissism is developed from a pejorative epithet into a new tool for examination and understanding of metafictional texts. The implications of this approach have direct bearing on how we can read and understand implications of metafiction. The predominantly Formalist approach to metafiction tends to marginalize what Fredric Jameson would identify as the dimension of metafictional novels. When these Formalist analyses approach political dimension of metafictional textuality, they do so almost exclusively through lens of Russian Formalism and, in particular, through concept of defamiliarization. For example, Waugh notes how exposure of literary codes and conventions in metafiction leads to a quasi-Marxist process of demystification. She asserts that narrative innovations of metafiction self-consciously examine their own construction, and in so doing, explore possible fictionality of world outside literary fictional text (1984, 2). Because metafiction offers extremely accurate models for understanding contemporary experience of world as a construction, an artifice, a web of interdependent semiotic systems (9)- point that is echoed by others (see Hutcheon 1984, 24; Imhof 1986, 98; Boyd 1983, 26)-readers of metafiction are invited, though not compelled, to question how their own worlds are similar textually Textuality is ubiquitous because reading and writing belong to processes of 'life' as much as they do to those of 'art' (Hutcheon 1984, 5). …