It’s just fiction from a different point of view.) Rather than clarifying things, this complicates the story in the pages which, in fact, more closely mirrors the complications of life.)Ī better term, to my mind, would be “inside-out fiction.” Not only does it avoid the arcane and academic pretension of a Greek prefix slapped onto a good solid English word, but it has a nice Anglo-Saxon ring to it - and it calls to mind an image of what it describes. In addition, the autobiographical and writing-as-mechanics details that an author, such as Barth, weaves into this kind of fiction isn’t done for how-to reasons. (After all, writing from an outside perspective about the act of creating fiction as part of a piece of fiction turns the “outside” into the “inside.” There’s no full objectivity.

I’ve never liked the term “metafiction.” I know, “meta” is from Greek, meaning “above” and “beyond,” and it indicates a type of fiction that looks at itself from the outside. Which is to say, is tempted to certain failure.įrom his third novel The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) to his 17th book-length work of fiction Every Third Thought (2011), Barth has caroused in the funhouse of metafiction.įew have delighted so much in playing the game or sparked so much delight in those who have taken part.

Which is to say, to try to be as inventive and witty and playful and erudite and literary and subtle as Barth is. She represented … the eternal feminine.” James, Henry, The Princess Casamassima ( London Penguin, 1987 first published 1886), 289 Google Scholar, 159.I suspect that anyone writing a review of a John Barth book is tempted to Barth Barth. Robinson's political mentor, Paul Muniment, is an abstemious ideologue who remarks that “the world is full of unclean beasts whom I shall be glad to see shovelled away by the thousand,” whereas Robinson's lifelong friend Millicent Henning indulges “an appetite for beer and buns, for entertainment of any kind. Again, attitudes towards alcohol play a significant role, and are couched in gendered terms according to which masculinity is associated with deferment, abstraction and purity, and femininity with pragmatism, sensuality and fulfilment in the present. Hyacinth swears allegiance to a revolutionary cadre, but is seduced by the attractions of aristocratic and bourgeois life. 40 In Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886) – the novel being read in Against the Day by the dog Pugnax – the principal character, Hyacinth Robinson, experiences a similar dilemma that ends in his own self-annihilation.

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