Please Stop Trying to Write Metafiction

Photographed by the author at Tsinghua Garden

The piece I wrote yesterday happened to mention the "metanovel."

Which reminded me of an old thing I had stumbled on a while back, Please Stop Trying to Write Metafiction.

A few tweaks, one draft sent to two places, just for a laugh 🥳

So what on earth is metafiction?

Let me tell you something. Ningjinghai is absolutely in love with the idea of the "meta," so much so that he is forever itching to write a piece of metafiction and drop it into the very account you are reading right now, "Ning Ning Ningjinghai." Take this article you are looking at this very moment. It started life as homework for a writing class. He could have just turned in something he had already written, like a normal person, but no, he had to cook up a piece of metafiction instead, all to show off this so-called "personality" of his.

I want to talk him out of it. Talk him out of writing it. If you happen to have a free moment, come help me talk him out of it too. Unless something has gone wrong, you will probably find him studying in reading room 227 of the Li Wenzheng Library at Huaqing University. Please walk right up to him, open this article on your phone, hold it out, and say: "Come on, read this thing properly. How many times do I have to say it? Please stop trying to write metafiction!"

Wait. Since you are reading this article, it seems Ningjinghai went ahead and wrote it after all. I have failed, completely and utterly. I could not stop him.

Well, fine. Even so, even though he labored over this thing so seriously and so hard, I really do not think he managed to make it any good. So just bear with it and read on, would you, as a favor to me.

Not very good, right. By the time you have gotten this far, all you have seen is me rambling on about nothing in particular, and I have not even told you what "metafiction" actually means.

That is correct. This article exists only to mess with you. It has no real substance whatsoever, and now you are furious about it.

You throw the phone to the floor; you would really like to throw it out the window, even through the closed window. If the slats of the blinds are down, all the better, you fling the phone toward the bladelike slats, slicing it to ribbons, scattering the words, morphemes, and phonemes of the article every which way, never to be reassembled into an article again; if the windowpane is shatterproof glass, even better, you hurl the phone out and let it become photons, become sound waves, become light waves; you would really like to throw it straight through the wall, let it become molecules, become atoms, let them pass through the molecules and atoms of the reinforced concrete, breaking down at last into electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, ever smaller elementary particles; you would really like to throw it out down the phone line, let it become electromagnetic pulses, become a stream of information, shaken by redundant data and noise, degraded into spinning entropy. You would really like to throw the phone out of the house, out of the yard, out of the street, out of the city, out of the county and the municipal district, out of the province and the region, beyond the national territory, out of the European Common Market, out of Western civilization, off the European continent, out of the atmosphere, out of the biosphere, out of the stratosphere, out of the gravitational field, out of the solar system, out of the galaxy, out of the Milky Way, beyond the farthest edge to which the galaxy can expand, into the place where space and time no longer divide, where it will be received by that region's "nonexistence," that is, the past, present, and future that do not exist, letting it vanish into an absolute negation, a negation that can never be negated again. That is the end this article deserves.

Still have not thrown the phone away? All right then. Carry on enduring the dismal experience of reading this article.

I did warn you. Do not come back at the end crying that you were tricked, regretting the few minutes of your life and the precious attention you squandered on these meaningless words.

By the point you have now reached, Ningjinghai figures the length is about right. After you have read somewhere around a thousand characters, this is the paragraph where he is finally supposed to tell you what "meta" means, so let me explain it for you, poor bewildered reader. Let me think how to put it. The "meta" thing is, well, meta, what some translators render as "the post-set." The language used to describe language is "metalanguage." The theory used to explain theory is "metatheory." The novel that discusses novels is the "metanovel." Extend the pattern a little further and you will more or less get what "meta" means. It is a tiny word, abstract and bewitching, and no wonder Ningjinghai's fingers keep twitching to make something out of it.

So then, what exactly is metafiction?

I would say that if an article shows the following traits, it has earned the right to be called metafiction:

The article discusses the author of the article himself.
The article discusses its own reason for being written.
The article reaches out to the medium it is published in.
The article interacts fully with its own readers.

And if the article goes so far as to design a whole paragraph just to explain to you what metafiction is, then that is even more impressive. You could call it meta-metafiction.

Metafiction is no new invention of Ningjinghai's. Writing a preface for something fictional, or letting a character inside a novel read the novel itself, these are tricks the great writers have been playing for ages.

Cervantes's Don Quixote is the grandfather of the metanovel, and after it came Jorge Luis Borges's Ficciones, Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, and Stanisław Lem's A Perfect Vacuum. All of these are fine works. I recommend a read.

So where, then, lies the originality of Please Stop Trying to Write Metafiction?

In my view, it lies in Ningjinghai's brazen plagiarism of works that came before. Take that passage you read above, for instance (I quietly marked it off for you with quotation marks). It is in fact lifted whole from a paragraph in the second chapter of If on a winter's night a traveler, not a single word changed. For plagiarism to turn up in an account that prides itself on being "original" is, I think, an offense against heaven itself. It is high time we reward Ningjinghai with a notice of expulsion. Even if he truly wanted to borrow a few lovely lines, the least he could do was find some way to tell the reader where they came from.

What is even more outrageous is this. Look up four paragraphs from here, and the first sentence, "Metafiction is no new invention of Ningjinghai's," is also essentially copied from the opening of A Perfect Vacuum, "Reviewing nonexistent books is not Lem's invention." You could say this whole article does not contain a single original idea, which makes it staggeringly boring. Ningjinghai will of course not agree with the criticism above. I imagine he will try to defend himself in the next paragraph, and the reader is welcome to listen to him with a skeptical eye.

Actually, the charge of plagiarism is not quite fair. Even if the words on the page come out identical, the era is different and the author is different, and how we, as commentators, understand and appreciate them is bound to be different too. Go read Borges's Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. The author here, um, deliberately lets the seams of his copying show, and then, with no mercy at all, points them out and mocks them himself, in order to walk the reader through a kind of, um, art, what is that term again, it is on the tip of my tongue, performance art, yes, yes, that is it, a piece of performance art made of words. It does not stop at lecturing the reader to "write carefully and avoid academic misconduct." It also pushes out the boundaries of what literature and performance art can reach.

The author knows that the reader is also an author who takes part in academic writing, so here he deliberately scrambles the subject-object relation between reader and author. Instead, he plays the reader who admonishes the author to build good writing habits. And so every author, once they have read this article, will from then on, whether they dutifully follow academic conventions or actually go and commit some act of academic misconduct, be able to say they were profoundly influenced by this very piece. So when an author who has read this article sits down to write, should they cite it or not? If they cite it, they are citing a work that dared to plagiarize whole swaths of text, which damages their own good name as an author. But if they do not cite it, is that not even worse misconduct? The author cleverly tosses this paradox onto every author who is also a reader, thereby fulfilling the true spirit of metafiction.

The reader really need not take the paragraph above too seriously. Just look at it. At first the author was hemming and hawing, trying to explain his behavior and not knowing how to say it, and then he suddenly found a nice little opening and went scrambling up to the moral high ground to point fingers from above. It is comical to a degree that is honestly both laughable and a little sad.

Still, I do sympathize with the spot Ningjinghai is in. He was told not to try writing metafiction, and he insisted on doing it anyway. The result is that he discovered he could not produce anything of substance, and yet he insisted on padding out a heap of words, and on top of that he demanded that the article convey some value and meaning. And this is what you get: an article that is neither here nor there, with nothing much to recommend it.

So I say again: please do not try to write metafiction!

Having written this far, I suddenly find myself curious. Could this article actually count as literature? I suddenly feel my earlier criticism was a bit harsh. By the modern, or shall we say postmodern, era, both art and literature have been drifting in this strange direction. Could it be that the standards by which we judge a work have wandered far from the traditional templates, turning toward some peculiar logic where the more unusual the better, the more unconventional the better? In which case, is this article, in some sense, actually a rather fine piece of work?

And so our subject has lurched all of a sudden into postmodern theory and literary criticism, and on that topic Ningjinghai has an awful lot to say. He would love to take you from Duchamp's Dadaism all the way to the land art of Wrapped Arc de Triomphe, and hold forth at length on the brilliance of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses.

But I think that, since the word count is more or less filled, we may as well stop here and leave a little something unsaid. That is not so bad either.

I am done writing.

I am Ningjinghai. Thank you for reading my article.

You are welcome to reach me by any means. My email is lunar_mare_official@outlook.com. Write to me and let's chat. I reply to every message 🙂.

References:

Please Stop Trying to Write Metafiction, by Ningjinghai