Introduction

This chapter both gives an account of the critical treatment of post-World War II metafiction and introduces the key terms that guide the book. The existing critical debates about postwar metafiction have tended to emphasize metafiction’s incorporation of critical and philosophical discourse, and have suggested that it either makes the novel newly responsible to political communities or disables literature from intervening into political situations. More recent criticism based on literary institutions has tended to overlook key questions of literary value. The terms the chapter develops to renew discussion about postwar metafiction are ‘self of writing’ and ‘public author as signature’. These terms are derived from a reading of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote and J. L. Borges’s ‘Borges and I’. The self of writing refers to the figure of the author that a writer may imagine exists independent of discourse. The public author as signature represents the public understandings of an author that emerge from biography and the author’s corpus itself.

Conclusion

This chapter briefly examines the endurance of debates about ‘irony’ today. It argues that contemporary claims about the politics of irony in fact reflect unresolved debates from the reception of ‘postmodern metafiction’ more generally. This is especially the case following the emergence of a ‘new sincerity’. The chapter suggests that the contemporary public reception of ‘postmodernism’—its aesthetics and politics—generally misrecognizes the object of critique. This reception does not recognize what career metafictionists such as J. M. Coetzee, Janet Frame, and Philip Roth were actually doing. The chapter concludes by suggesting the history of postwar fiction, freed from the encumbrances of various critical enterprises, should now proceed by paying closer attention to the careers and archives of the writers we are examining.

Foes

This chapter examines the work of South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, drawing throughout from his archive at the Harry Ransom Center (housed at the University of Texas at Austin). The chapter begins by tracing Coetzee’s long-standing scepticism about whether literary criticism can access the significant knowledge of literature. The author voices his scepticism through different critical idioms. The chapter then continues to examine three of Coetzee’s books in particular—Dusklands, Foe, and Elizabeth Costello. Whereas Coetzee in his earliest fiction sought to integrate critical debates as he understood them, his later work seeks to disorient schematic literary critical discourse. The chapter demonstrates how in these later works Coetzee’s writing intervenes in specific ways into the literary culture in which he was enmeshed, and how these fictions think through the demands made on writers to contribute to political struggles and forms of flourishing. The chapter concludes with an account of how the self-reflexivity of Coetzee’s literary archive itself may be read, asking whether it may be considered another incursion into the author’s reception and the procedures of contemporary criticism more generally.

Faces in the Water

This chapter examines how New Zealand author Janet Frame responded to both the demands of a national literature and biographical enquiry into her life. Frame in her early work courts the idea that madness provides special insight, an understanding that was read biographically by the masculine cultural nationalist coterie surrounding her at this time. However, in her later work she seeks to replace this public image with her own vision of authorship. Between two pairs of novels from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as her 1980s autobiographies, this chapter shows a dimension of metafiction that is less discussed, in which the form is used by an author to attempt to control her reception and to prescribe certain approaches. In particular, Frame would become preoccupied with an understanding of public attention as a form of contamination, and would in turn seek a purity of literary vision. The chapter closes by showing how representations of Frame’s life by biographers and film-makers, even after her death, have continued to participate in battles over the public reception of the author within New Zealand literary culture.

Ghosts

This chapter examines how Philip Roth responds to Jewish American readers and contexts in his fiction. Roth exploits the tensions and transitions in Jewish American political aspirations in the period, setting heated political debates about assimilation and particularism against different measurements of value in the novel. By using live cultural debates from the period, Roth courts ethnic categorization, while ultimately relativizing such categories in his attempt to pursue alternative understandings of literary value. In Roth’s earlier ‘Nathan Zuckerman’ fictions, the comedy and intelligence emerge through his practice of contrasting the ‘humble needs’ of a desiring body with the rush either to pass political judgement or to withdraw the novel from the complications of embodied life. The second half of the chapter demonstrates how Roth engages both directly and indirectly with the work of Hannah Arendt and the 1950s context for thinking about the Holocaust. This section of the chapter focuses in particular on an unpublished screenplay housed in Roth’s literary archive.