Ben Hania 1

Narcissistic Narrative: the narrative and its diegetic and

linguistic masks

Abstract
This paper examines the theoretical underpinnings of narcissistic narratives or
metafiction. This form of narrative foregrounds an intense awareness of the literary alteration
of paradigms as well as the theoretical problematization of the narrative ontological status.
This kind of texts is aware of itself as narrative or artifice, and of its functioning and its
mechanisms of construction, of its past conventions and its mutation, and of the contentious
processes of production and reception of fiction. The metafictional text follows critically and
self-consciously the tracks of the overall history of literary composition and criticism and of
its own metamorphoses from the past till the present moment taking as its main challenge and
aim the exercise of self-exposition, self-criticism and self-evaluation. One of the main
premises of narcissistic narrative is tracking the literary trajectory from "art conceals" to "art
reveals" through mainly making recourse to parody and parodic strategies. All the previous
diegetic and linguistic masks have become not only exposed and dropped down but also and
more importantly questioned and criticized.

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The emergence of literary narcissism is due to an incremental need for fiction to
reconsider its paradigms and to identify its stand in regard to the numerous suspect literary
concepts such as reality, language, and representation. In Narcissistic Narrative: the
Metafictional Paradox1, Linda Hutcheon explains that the drive toward self-reflexivity is a
three-step process, as a new need, first to create fictions, then to admit their fictiveness, and
then to examine critically such impulses (19). To admit its fictiveness, narcissistic narrative
goes through a long process of inward self-investigation and mask-revelation overtly
declaring what it is and what it is not. Basic to this study of novelistic self-consciousness is
the awareness that narrative narcissism is neither a literary genre nor a thematic concern. It is
a theoretical project that lies under the postmodernist widespread metafictional corpus. Being
primarily postmodernist in its grounding and aspiration, narcissistic narrative bears within it
most of the postmodernists issues and paradoxes. Through the lens of postmodernist and
poststructuralist approaches, this paper will attempt to perform a theoretical contextualization
of metafictional narcissism at first stage, then a determination of its poetics and taxonomies.
Finally, it studies narcissistic criticism of the masks of realism and explains that metafiction
does not emanate to the death of the novel as much as it declares its rebirth in an openly
mask-free environment.
The label Narcissistic narrative was first suggested by the postmodern Canadian
literary theorist Linda Hutcheon in her book Narcissistic in1980, to designate a type of fiction
that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity (11).
Soon after, the use of such a label has become more common among other critics and theorists
like Robert Scholes, Lucien Dllenbach, and Patricia Waugh2. In her study of textual

Henceforth referred to as Narcissistic

While Robert Scholes has performed a thorough study on metafiction labeling it an antinarrative or stillborn literature, Lucien Dllenbach has invested heavily on the study of the

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narcissism, Hutchon starts from the assertion that the term has to be approached in a neutral
way as devoid of any pejorative or psychological connotation . Narcissism, here, is a
figurative adjective that is rather descriptive and suggestive as the ironic allegorical reading
of the Narcissus myth, and is allotted to the work itself and not to the author (1). It is,
thereby, the fictional work which is exposed to its linguistic and diegetic double. While
narcissism is mainly a form of writing not restrictive to one particular period or literary genre,
it is worth noting that such a strategy has become rampant in the 1960s in Europe and the
United States, a period that witnessed the swift growth of numerous literary theoretical
discourses and the heyday of postmodernism . In the criticism of the 70s the term
postmodernism began to appear to refer to contemporary self-conscious texts, equating
hence its theoretical approach and strategies with the metafictional narcissistic phenomenon ,
rendering narcissism a prime determining feature of most postmodernist fiction (4). It is
noteworthy that postmodernist texts are not altogether metafictional, nor do all metafictional
writings restrictively range under the postmodernist corpus. Narcissism has, in fact, surfaced
from the very rise of the novel tradition, through the use of authorial intrusions in the
narrative level and direct allusion to the reader, with works such as Don Quixote, Tristram
Shandy, and Vanity Fair (44). In a nutshell, its practice has long preceded the theory though
its use was ways less important and explicit than it actually is in the contemporary context.
Studying narcissistic narratives that is fiction reflecting on its own genesis and
mirroring the strategies of fictional writing and fictive worlds construction entails a
movement inward to the recesses of the work itself. This analysis is chiefly based on Linda
Hutcheons study of poetics, politics and narcissism of postmodernist texts. Accordingly,
Hutcheon outlines two levels of metafictional underpinning, one is diegetic narcissism
occurring at the level of narration and narrative techniques and the other is linguistic
mise en abyme as a literary device basic to doubling the narrative structure. In 1984,
Patricia Waugh published her meticulous study on the theory and practice of metafiction.

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indicating an awareness of the medium used in fiction which is language, and of its power as
well as its limits (Narcissistic 23). In relation to both levels, there are two varieties of
narcissism: overt and covert modes (56). Thereby the four main categories of narcissistic
texts are as follows: overt diegetic narcissism, overt linguistic narcissism, covert diegetic
narcissism, and covert linguistic narcissism (23). Overt narcissism is palpable diegetically
through the fictive self-awareness of the narrative status as a literary artifice and the laying
bare of its fiction making processes using self-reflective devices such as parody, mise en
abyme and intertextuality.
Parody, one of the major literary devices in postmodernist writing, conforms to the
very nature of narcissistic narrative, since it enacts self-reflexivity through the double
movement of appropriation and subversion (128 my emphasis). Parodic art, as Hutcheon
outlines, is both a deviation from the norm and includes the norm within itself as
backgrounded material (50). The dual ontological status of the narrative is pointed out
through parody which works to background a given convention in an attempt to foreground
the new creation and the way in which it may be measured and understood (Hutcheon,
Theory of Parody 31). New literary conventions evolve in fact from previous ones and
postmodern texts in particular acknowledge such a give-take movement through setting a
dialogue with these conventions and criticizing them in order to aspire to new forms of
literary construction. Henceforth emerges the view of parody as a prototype of the pivotal
stage in that gradual process of development of literary forms (35). Hence metafictions
cannot mirror their own mechanisms of construction while ignoring previous literary
productions since their own emergence is due to their dialogic relation with the past in
general. Such a dialogue is given legitimacy through the employment of parody which is
both a personal act of suppression and an inscription of literary-historical continuity (35).
This continuity is marked mainly by the use of irony which signals out that this return is not

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an innocent nostalgic return, yet it is rather triggered by an intensive critical awareness
(3). Hence, the use of parody reflects a consciousness of the mechanisms of literary
constructions and their evolvement in accordance to each other and never in isolation. It does
not conceal as far as it reveals past conventions in its formation of a new poetics.
Using Genettian terminology to account for the meaning of mise en abyme, it can be
said that the latter device refers to the embeddedness of a second degree narrative or metadiegesis3 in the first degree narrative or diegesis (Narrative Discourse 231). Palpably, this
writing device works on the level of the diegesis exposing the narrative to its mirrors as
Lucien Dllenbach calls it.
Overt linguistic narcissism, on the other hand, is depicted through the thematization
of language and linguistic issues in the narrative. This explicitness works to position
fictionality, the mysteries of language and language use, and the self-consciousness at the core
of postmodernist fiction as well as to place the reader in a bewildering space where he is
overtly taught his or her contributory role through the thematization of the act of reading itself
(71). On the other hand, covert narcissism can either be structuralized or internalized
within the text and necessitates actualization on the part of the actively participating reader
(7). Such implicitness requires an active response to itself through the process of
actualization that takes place at the act of reading and transforms words into fictive and
literary worlds (Iser 20). Here, the dyadic interaction that relates the aesthetics of
production and response are triggered in order for meanings to be optimized (85),
concretized (178), and actualized (66) through the readers interactive response to the
verbal structure of the text. The reader is no longer a passive agent who reads in order to
decode the message that the author has encoded in the text, he is rather an active force which
3

In order to determine the narrative level to which an event relates, it has to be considered
that any event a narrative recounts is at a diegetic level immediately higher than the level at
which the narrating act producing this narrative is placed ( Genette, Narrative Discourse
228).

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participates in the process of meaning construction (41). Page by page the reader creates the
meaning of the text, reshaping, and reordering former unities into new ones as he proceeds,
transforming the text from a mere aesthetic object to an elaborate performance (Hutcheon
Narcissistic 145). The authorial intention and objectivity are no longer tenable in a
postmodernist self-critical and discursive context and hence the assertion of the centrality of
an enunciating subject is overtly denounced. The concept of subject, self, and subjectivity
are, therefore, highly criticized in a center-free postmodern context.
Enunciation, which is the focal point in narcissistic narratives, requires an enunciating
producer and a Brechtian receiver, and the communication between both parts in a contextdependent situation. For instance, Iser opines that the pragmatic nature of language which
depends on the act of enunciation as such has developed concepts which, although they are
not meant to be applied to fiction, can nevertheless serve as a starting point for our study of
the pragmatic nature of literary texts (54). The trajectory of meaning actualization has shifted
from the enonc to the act of enunciation, from the product to the process, from langue to
parole, from fixed codes and conventions to ever-changing performance, and from
semiotization to pragmatism. This pragmatism puts into consideration what Benveniste calls
language put into action, that is the contextual and situational underpinnings of language
(qtd. in Hutcheon, Poetics 82). Since literary language operates in the same way as everyday
speech and implies a performative function, it could be subject to pragmatic interpretation.
Searle, for instance, views literature as an imitation of a speech act (60). The aim of literary
language here does not revolve around what it says that is the content itself, but rather
what it does that is how it affects the receiver and constructs meaning (Iser 26).
Wolfgang Isers theory of aesthetic response or dyadic communication which
treats the text as a performative act and Wayne C. Booth view of literature as an art of
communication seem to be the closest and the most relevant to the needs of metafictional

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criticism (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 147). To read is to act and consequently to perform
thereby opposing any claim to a fixed structure or a unilateral kind of response (Iser 62).
Since no performance can be repeated in the same way, each reading becomes an antirepresentational force in the sense that it cannot proceed in a similar unique way making from
the end of one reading the beginning of another one. Narcissistic texts, therefore, rely on both
productive-responsive aesthetics in order to concretize its meanings and in the endless
unfixed systems of signification to construct its open uncontrollable processes.
One of the major strategies of action of postmodernist narcissism is its critique of
realism. Laconically, the realistic novel reached its apogee in the eighteenth century and is
said to be the offspring of the Age of Reason that is the age of logic, progress, and
universalism as underlined in Hutcheons A Poetics of Postmodernism (26). One of the major
premises of realistic literature is the mimetic view of art which accords to the latter the quality
of being representational of a pre-established transcendental truth (Abrams 7-8). Such a
view has its own repercussions in the definition of art, literary criticism, and reality in general.
The work of art acquires its importance from its being an aesthetic product originated by an
artist who takes upon his shoulder the exercise of representing reality as it is, or better say
a slice of life (McCaffrey 12). Subsequently, to write in the traditional realist vein is to
uphold criteria as the order of the narrative, chronological plots, continuous narratives
relayed by omniscient narrators, [and] closed endings (82). This paradigm has allotted
cardinal substantiality to the artist who is treated as the meaning-initiator and truth-mediator.
The artist becomes, in fact, the center who holds all the threads leading to the ultimate
meaning of the novel. According to this view, literature turns out to be an item for
consumption in which the sole role allotted to the reader is the passive reception of a hidden
meaning (Iser 4).
Realism has, in fact, gone beyond being a defining feature of a particular literary genre

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or movement or a historical period to becoming a characteristic mode of thought governing or
better say monopolizing Western literary discourses until the end of the nineteenth century
(Hutcheon, Narcissistic 18). It advocates the mimetic view of art as representational of life
and universal truth, of reality as pre-existing language, and of language as transparently
mirroring the world (Abrams 33). This reductive view of language and its functions is the
central tenet behind the humanistic universalizing insight into literature as being realistic
and referential: realistic in the sense that it represents a transcendental reality as it is, and
referential in the sense that the words it uses have actual referents as objects in the real world
that is they refer to an external heterocosm transforming fiction to a mirror that reflects the
outer world (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 10). Based on conventional premises like verisimilitude4,
plausibility, authorial authenticity and on beliefs in the objectivity and truthfulness of the
historical discourse or the chastity of history as Fustel Coutages describes it, realist fiction
focuses mainly on the work of art as a product that works faithfully to aesthetically reproduce
an extraneous universal and orthodox reality (qtd. in Barthes, The Discourse of History5 3).
Its claims to the universality of truth and values, or what Barthes calls the germ of the
universal and John-Franois Lyotard classifies under the category of metanarratives or
grand narrative, are put under ruminative scrutiny (34). The attack on such foundationalist
and essentialist ideas is an attack on the whole ethos of the Enlightenment humanistic
philosophy which was the leading force behind rooting such stances in literary criticism until
the mid-nineteenth century (35). Postmodernism is to be considered as one of the contesters of

Verisimilitude is an attempt to satisfy even the rational, skeptical reader that the events and
characters portrayed is very possible. ... Far from being escapist and unreal, the novel was
uniquely capable of revealing the truth of contemporary life in society. The adoption of this
role led to detailed reportage of the physical minutiae of everyday life -clothes, furniture,
food, etc. - the cataloguing of people into social types or species and radical analyses of the
economic basis of society. The virtues pursued were accuracy and completeness of
description (Childs and Fowler 198-9).
5

Henceforth referred to as Discourse

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such a view. It is an incredulity toward metanarratives working to subvert them and
highlighting that what realism has always presented is not reality but only its guise or
illusion since it overtly masks arts own conventionality (Lyotard xxiv). Modern
philosophical thinking has, in fact, paved the way for such findings through initiating the
questioning of notions of truth, facts, and representation. For instance, Frederick Nietzsches
assertion that there are no facts, only interpretations, constitutes a battle cry that has marked
the shifting trajectory of philosophical and literary paradigms and the move towards a more
relativistic view of reality and universals.
The critical return to the past shows the metafictional critique of the classical view of
reality, especially the claims to objectivity, foundationalism, teleology, and transcendentalism
(Lyotard 37). On the level of discourse, as Roland Barthes argues for, objectivity appears
as a form of imaginary projection, the product of the referential illusion and the real is
never more than an unformulated signified, sheltering behind the apparently all-powerful
referent creating no more than a realistic effect (Discourse 6). Deconstructive in intent
and critical in impulse, metafictional narcissistic texts veer towards a provisional view of
realities, a skeptical attitude towards language, a focus on the processes of literary production
and reception rather than on the final aesthetic product. Similarly, it relies upon the mechanics
of signification rather than those of imitation, and disbelieves the essentialist claims to
orthodox truth, universal values, and factual knowledge (Hutcheon, Poetics 89).
Metafiction is defined by Patricia Waugh as a term given to fictional writing which
self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to
question the relationship between fiction and reality (3). It is hence related to the idea of
meaning and fiction as constructs rather than as having representable essences (Currie
15). The term was first introduced in 1960 by William Gass who sought a label for recent
fiction that thematizes its own fictionality (4). This postmodernist metafictional self-

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reflexivity is further problematized by its alliance with historical grounding and referencing.
Part of the postmodernist fictional narcissism revolves around the works awareness of the
presence of the past which it critically rethinks and consciously reworks (Hutcheon, Poetics
12). The knowledge of the past is only textually possible since the past is palpable in the
present through its traces like records, documents and texts (81). The past becomes,
consequently, a textualized space that is inscribed in discourse or semiotized (97). Its
inscription in discourse implies its being socially and ideologically loaded (112). Therefore,
the dialogism6 that characterizes the fictional discourse, as suggested by Mikhail Bakhtin in
his study of the novelistic discourse, challenges any assertion about the objectivity and the
transparency of the historical discourse. As Roland Barthes notes in Discourse, the historian
is not so much a collector of facts as he is a collector of signifiers or a fabulator (147).
History creates a realistic effect and not transparent reality, since what it nominates as fact
has no more than a linguistic existence in the shell of signifiers (148). The historical
discourse is nothing more than a form of ideological elaboration, an imaginary elaboration
that depends on the narrative mechanisms of selection, ordering, and plotting in its
construction (147). Once again, essentialism, factuality and truthfulness prove to be fallacious
and hence put under question. Historiography that is the narration of what happened, as
Hayden White accounts for it, is a highly problematized process in narcissistic narratives
which openly acknowledge the pasts own discursive contingent identity (Hutcheon,
Poetics 24). Each literary discourse is grounded in a context and simultaneously uses a
metatext to divulge this grounding. Therefore, even the most self-conscious of contemporary

Dialogism is a term suggested by Bakhtin to describe the fictional language, which he

sees as inherently heteroglot, i.e. formed of diverse (hetero-), speeches (glossia). The
language of fiction becomes a form of hetroglossia where different discourses dialogically
encounter. Each word is thus loaded with different voices and ideologies that stratify it from
within. Bakhtin opines consequently that the dialogic process of language constitutes a
constant and simultaneous play between centralizing and decentralizing forces of language
or what he terms as centripetal and centrifugal forces (Bakhtin 272).

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works do not try to escape, but indeed foreground the historical, social, ideological contexts in
which they existed and continue to exist (25). Narcissistic narratives foremost revealed
criterion is that it is art as discourse, which is intensively related to the ideological and even
the political spheres (35).
As a miscellaneous site of dialogic encounter, postmodernism goes on in its exercise
of mixing and blending contradictory scopes and fusing them into an all-encompassing
dialogic literary paradigm. The blurring boundaries between popular art and high art, of the
aesthetic and the theoretical, of poetics and politics, of history and fiction, of powerholders and eccentrics, of old and new , of what it is and what it is not are distinctive features
of narrative narcissism which heighten its commitment to duplicity and double-coding
(Hutcheon, Poetics 30). It is, in fact, a patchwork of numerous and contradictory elements,
which explain its owing the label the literature of unrest par excellence (42).
The interdiscursivity of narcissistic texts flashes the mounting awareness of their
cultural and ideological inscription and of the impossibility of determining definite lines of
separation between the numerous discourses of a given culture (130). It does not seek in any
sort of way to camouflage these ontological lines as it really endeavors to highlight them.
Such a narrative occupies the borderline through positing itself on the edges of many
oppositional poles, never favoring or prioritizing one to another, nor ceasing to pose endless
questions about them. The narrative self-consciousness alludes to its own perpetual selfquestioning and self-evaluation. It never refrains from posing all kinds of queries about its
ontological status aiming not at clear-cut answers or compromises but rather at exposing its
ambivalences and problematizing the nature of all forms of writing and knowledge in
general. Hence, one can refer to the problematics of narcissistic narratives rather than to its
poetics (222).
Narcissistic texts attempt to reveal all its literary problematics, its ontological doubts,

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and its byzantine literary constructions. Thus, narcissism in fiction is a stage of maturity, a
form of resistance, and an art of sincerity. It is mature insofar as it self-informingly places its
own fictional mechanisms in the position of self-exposition and evaluation, resistant since it
defies any inclination towards conformity and subjugation, and sincere because it denounces
any pretention to disguise its own fictionality. It should be noted that narcissistic texts
stipulate a narcissistic reading fully aware of its unattainable partiality for fixed, monolithic,
and closed parameters of interpretation. The overt and covert self-exposition of metafictional
texts does not emanate to the death of the novel as much as it declares the rebirth of the latter
in a mask-free environment where the narrative decides not only to drop its masks silently but
also to parody them and to criticize its past and even present masquerades.

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Reader. By David Lodge. London and New York: Longman, 1972. (1-26)
Barthes, Roland. The Discourse of History. Structuralism: A Reader. Ed. Michael Lane.
London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1970. (145-55)
Currie, Mark. Ed. Metafiction. New York: Longman Group Ltd., 1995.
Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. New York:
Cornell University Press, 1980.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London and New
York: Routledge, 1988.
---. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier U.P., 1980.
---. Theory of Parody: the Teachings of Twentieth-century Art Forms.London: Methuen an
Co. Ltd., 1985.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: a Theory of Aesthetic Response. The Johns Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore and London: 1978.
Lyotard, Jean-Franois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1984.
Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: the Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London and
New York: Routledge, 1984.