Primary Colors: metafiction and metarhetoric

One of the interesting features of modern literary fiction is its propensity for self-consciousness – critics call this ‘metafiction’. Such self-consciousness is hardly new: Homer's Odyssey contains many representations of song and story-telling which make it a self-reflexive epic. But the modern metafictional novel is often an explicit departure from the ‘classic realism’ of nineteenth-century fiction. Modern novelists like to make you aware that they are not representing reality or ‘truth’. Their metafiction sometimes comes close to the old tenets of so-called ‘Romantic Irony’: reality is beyond theirs or anybody's representation. They can also evoke the Shakespearean suggestion that ‘all the world's a stage’: social life involves the adoption and discarding of quasi-theatrical roles, the manipulation of one's self-representation according to context, the realisation that cherished realities are in fact illusions or illusions in fact.