Metafictional Traits
Metafictional Traits found in Flaubert's Parrot and in John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, before comparing these with the elements of realism in Isaac Singer's The Family Moskat.
"For some, Life is rich and creamy ... while Art is a pallid commercial confection ... For others, Art is the truer thing, full, bustling and emotionally satisfying, while Life is worse than the poorest novel: devoid of narrative, peopled by bores and rogues, short on wit ... and leading to a painfully predictable denouement."1
Thus Barnes compares Life and Art in Flaubert's Parrot; but these words could just as easily refer to the different perspectives of realist and metafictional writers.
Bearing these perspectives in mind, this essay will examine the metafictional traits found in Flaubert's Parrot and in John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, before comparing these with the elements of realism in Isaac Singer's The Family Moskat. By considering the advantages and disadvantages of these novelistic schools of thought, it shall then be demonstrated that the reader's own views on Life and Art may determine the value one assigns to these alternative styles.
When Braithwaite muses, "If I were a dictator of fiction,"2 the process of creating fiction itself becomes the subject matter of the narrative. Barnes himself is clearly a dictator in the sense that he has control over the content of his own novel, but in this instance, Braithwaite is referring to all fiction. This reference to the production of fiction is a common quality of metafiction, and it recurs frequently in Flaubert's Parrot. The theme is picked up later when Braithwaite says, "Many critics would like to be dictators of literature,...
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...out, for example, p. 87.
19 Ibid., throughout, for example, p. 108.
20 Ibid., p. 97.
21 Ibid., p. 261.
22 Ibid., pp. 262-4.
23 Ibid., p. 59.
24 Ibid., p. 98.
25 Barnes, p. 47.
26 Ibid., p. 169.
27 Ibid., pp. 50-2.
28 Ibid., pp. 160-70.
29 Ibid., p. 87.
30 Ibid., p. 108.
31 Fowles, p. 390.
32 Barnes, p. 88.
33 Ibid., p. 68.
34 Ibid., p. 88.
35 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, The Family Moskat, translated by Gross, A. H., Penguin, London, 1980, p. 582.
36 Ibid., p. 193.
37 Ibid., p. 606.
38 Ibid., p. 179.
39 Ibid., p. 636.
40 Ibid., pp. 132, 490, 543.
41 See Barnes, p. 46.
42 See Fowles, p. 268.
43 Ibid., p. 98.
44 Barnes, pp. 49-65.
45 For example, Singer, pp. 239-242 (Letter from Adele to her mother), 444-52 (Hadassah's diary entries).
46 Barnes, p. 88.
Moliere, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin. "Tartuffe." The Norton Anthology Western Literature. 8th ed. Eds. Sarah Lawall et al. Vol 2. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2006. 19-67. Print.
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