Metafiction in ‘Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry’

Gray’s dictionary of literary terms defines metafiction as:

‘Fiction about fiction, in particular novels which examine the nature of novel-writing, most often by breaking away from the illusions of realism and the omniscient narrator and addressing the reader directly, thereby drawing attention to the act of fiction-making (and reading).’

(2003, p.173).

As such, we find that this type of fiction will usually feature a self-conscious narrator who will ‘refer continually to the fact that they are creating a work of art for the purposes of explaining or exploring the conventions of narrative’ (Gray, p.259).

Although not exclusive to the postmodern era of the late twentieth, early twenty first century, metafiction is associated with the movement as a central approach. The difference is that while early attempts at metafiction, such as Sterne’s ‘Tristam Shandy’ drew attention to themselves as constructions while simultaneously revealing how they are constructed, Postmodern texts do this for different political and ideological reasons. Sterne seems to do this in jest, to show how impossible it is to capture reality completely in a work of fiction; postmodern writers like Johnson do so to show that any attempts at realism are cunningly constructed falsities. This is a post-nineteenth-century stance, a reaction against the realist novel which had become the dominant, almost universal form of the novel. This explains the disparaging response to conventions like the omniscient narrator and obsessive detail in describing characters and settings to make them seem real, what Barthes terms ‘realist operators,’ in the post-modern work (Montgomery et al, 1996, p.214). Johnson mocks realist operators by describing the Shrike’s armpit hair, claiming this makes her a ‘real girl’ (p.58).

Moreover, exploring the constructed nature of works of fiction reveals a concern central to post-modernism that extends beyond the text, that our reality too is a clever, artificial composition: ‘Fiction is fictional, but no more so than reality’ (Nicol, 2002, p.7).

Here, we are particularly thinking of the way in which advertising and the media shape our everyday lives, which were not a part of everyday life for pre-post-modern metafiction writers.

B.S. Johnson’s ‘Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry’ is typical of metafictional narrative strategy. An obvious example is the way in which the narrator makes the reader constantly aware of his presence, in opposition to realist convention, where the narrator is usually godlike: omniscient but also hidden. The appearance of ‘I’ in what is mostly an omniscient text third person text flags up a warning: usually ‘I’ is only encountered in the first person, a narrative strategy we are more ready to suspect of being limited and biased. Johnson’s use points out that omniscient narrators are capable of being fallible or even malicious, plus it generally draws attention to the narrator.

Johnson’s narrator also attention seeks through the use of words not in common usage to bring the reader out of the text. We can take the example of ‘exeleutherostomise (p.12);’ the meaning of this word is ‘to speak out freely,’ exactly what Johnson does here, using the language he wants rather than the language best suited to retain the spell of realism (OED).

The word ‘Xmas’ is chosen (twice) over ‘Christmas’ because the latter is the proper Christian, religious term, but what the majority of people experience now is ‘Xmas’ – the capitalist festival with a similar name which seeks to relieve the proletariat of its money in exchange for constructed holiday sentiment created by watching certain films and buying certain food rather than praying (p.15).

The ‘curious distancing effect’ Christie encounters in his life is a metafictional comment on the tactics Johnson employs to stop his audience becoming absorbed or comfortable in their reading (p.15).

Elsewhere we find the narrator confirming that he will now be using the realist passage of time in his story, ‘time now being more or less continuous’ (p.27). Rather than reassuring the reader as it constatively implies, it ironically undermines our idea of time passing in the novel, performatively we are thrust out of the story world again and actually reminded that the passing of time in fiction not just here but all works which pretend to follow realistic chronology, is an illusion. The characters do not seem to know they should be talking in terms of real time however; instead of saying they were happy a few minutes ago, the Shrike says ‘a few lines back’ (p.139).

A similar effect arises when Johnson switches to a dialogue format for Christie’s conversation with the Office Supervisor, ‘as if it had happened’ (p.39). The proposal to maintain realism conflicts ironically with the very effect such an utterance has, which is to sarcastically prompt readers into remembering the novel is a construct. We also get the comment that ‘one has to put incidents like that in; for suspense, you know’ but there can be no suspense when the author refuses to let the audience believe in his created world (p.107).

Another metafictional device Johnson uses is to have characters knowing they are characters. While some metafictional texts feature characters who start to feel paranoid or are aware their lives are being controlled such as in ‘Sophie’s World’, Johnson’s text is much more overt. Christie’s mother jarring declares that she has been his mother ‘for the purposes of this novel,’ exposing not only her nature as a cipher but other stock characters, often nurses or distant relatives the orphan has lived with in the Bildungsroman genre who serve as a realist operator: to explain who cared for the protagonist up to the point we join them but serve no further purpose in the plot itself (p.27). She also makes what in reality would sound like paranoid statements, referring to audience as ‘them’ and making an omniscient prediction as to what ‘will no doubt be passed onto readers in due course’ later in the text (p.28-29).

The utterance ‘Parsons looks like being indisposed for the rest of this novel’ is another example of how the realist genre is undermined, individual characters having knowledge of the overall plot is humorous because it clashes with our expectations, usually such information is only available to us through the omniscient narrator and even then not so bluntly (p.95). This serves to make us as readers question the strangeness of the concept of an omniscient narrator –an impartial but all seeing bodiless figure – a bizarre fantasy figure existing in what is meant to be a realistic art form.

Christie makes a booby-trap ‘in an unusual way which I am not going to bother to invent on this occasion’ the narrator says (p.101). Whereas a realist narrator might say ‘I shall not go into the details’, as if the event still exists independently of the narrator, Johnson makes it very clear that anything we see is of his own creation. This approach is used more explicitly when Christie suggests Shrike go work for ‘Pork Pie Purveyors…now that they’ve been invented,’ aware that this will appeal to the audience in a way that his realist counterpart would be unaware of (p.139). The metafictional approach of constantly repeating the fact that fiction is a creation with a creator is found much more frequently in Coover’s ‘The Magic Poker’.

When Christie exclaims that his cancer ‘may have been caused by those misshapes I had on page 67!’ he frame-breaks, forcing the reader to recognise once again that they are reading a physical book with page numbers, not passively absorbing someone’s life story (p.180).

Just to push metafiction even further, the narrator/author meets and interacts with characters within the text, a technique also used in other Post-modern texts such as ‘Slaughter House 5’ and ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman.’

Johnson continually intrudes into the text to remind the reader that Christie is whatever fortuitous collection of words happened to enter his head during composition.

(Waugh, 1984, p.57).

What Johnson does is reminds us that fiction is ‘merely words’, as such his characters do not feel tangibly real (Gass, as quoted in Nicol 2002 p.7). Unlike a realist character, we are not allowed to imagine them as if they were living breathing people with personalities, who we could become friends with – the characters of ‘Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry’ themselves know they are constructed non-entities and even comment on the author’s over enthusiasm with exclamation marks (p.166).

The following extract comes towards the end of the novel, with the narrator/author commenting on Christie:

‘The nurses then suggested I leave, not knowing who I was, that he could not die without me’

(Johnson, 1985, p.180).

In metafiction, because ‘the story is undermined by its form,’ a Baudrillardian blur between reality and fiction occurs (Nicol, p.6). This means that the author/narrator is just as ‘real,’ or indeed ‘fake,’ as any of his characters – this is why they can interact; they both exist on the same plain of reality, on the ‘Map of the Real’ because there is no other kind of existence in the post-modern condition.

In many ways, metafiction is about bringing to the foreground that which is normally hidden - like their architectural counterparts, the Llyods building and the Pompidou centre, buildings with exoskeletons. Speaking of things on the outside, it is interesting to note that ‘Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry’ makes more use of what Genette terms ‘paratexts’ than works which are not metafictional (p.261). The contents page cannot just be flicked past because it shouts out at us strange chapter titles that comment as much on the author’s writing style than what ‘happens’ within the plot, for example: ‘Chapter VI. Christie Described; and the Shrike created’ (p.5). We also find direct addressing of the reader in chapter titles, ‘an Exposition without which You might have felt Unhappy,’ note the capitalisation, just as we are made very aware of the author’s presence, ‘You’ makes the reader very aware of their own presence within the text (p.9). This happens more obviously with the delayed ‘description’ of Christie; ‘what writer can compete with the reader’s imagination!’ (p.51).

In addition to the main text, Johnson’s novel is propped up by paratexts such as Pacioli’s quotations and the illustrations of Christie’s double entry sheets.

The very title itself, ‘Double-Entry,’ hints at the ‘double-coding’ theorized by Hutcheon, Jencks and Eco, a knowing irony, the twin layers of fiction and metafictional mockery.

Intertextuality is another post-modern convention which ties into metafiction because it breaks the spell of being absorbed into a stand alone world, making us aware that a text is not completely isolated, it is part of a web of earlier and contemporary texts (as all books are) but in post-modernism these references are especially self-conscious and ironic. This is explored more fully in Eco’s ‘Reflections on ‘In the Name of the Rose’.

The character ‘The Shrike’s name for instance could be read as a reference to the play of the same name, although Malry’s girlfriend does not seem as cruel and controlling as the name ‘butcherbird’ implies, it could be referring to the control of the author over the narrative world or simply a pun on her vocation. Johnson’s text pre-empts this argument, saying her name ‘will be obvious to some, too obscure to others’ but refuses to spell it out (p.52). Other intertexual examples are to the historical figure of Guy Fawkes (p.171) and the film version shows shots of the ‘Anarchist’s Cookbook’ as a source for Christie’s D.I.Y terrorist book balancing (Winterbottom, 2001).

It is a shame that the film adaptation of ‘Christie Malry’ avoids tackling metafiction altogether, as this was central in providing humour in B.S. Johnson’s original (Tickell, 2000). As a result, the film can come across as a simple celebration of terrorism without the tongue-in-cheek authority figure there to remind us that Christie’s actions are, like everything else, an imaginary construct.

It is not impossible to include metafictional elements in the film format however. ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ manages to retain some of the metafictional quality of the original by introducing an extra frame which comments on the artificiality of the film-form; by presenting a film about the making of the film of a book (Karel Reisz, 1981). ‘A Cock and Bull Story’ also takes this route as the equivalent film form of the original novel’s metafiction (Winterbottom, 2006). Even the website for this film takes on the metafictional spirit; hidden within a deleted email on the confusing homepage disguised as a computer desktop you find this statement:

‘Just as the movie is a really fun movie about making a movie based on the first post-modern novel (Tristam Shandy), the Web site should be a really fun Web site about making a Web site for a post-modern movie about making a movie base [sic. based] on the first post-modern novel...Visitors could watch us build the Web site…sort of a ‘Meta’ Web site.’

(Re: Idea for Tristam Shandy Website, 2005).

The reason metafiction is so important as a narrative strategy to post-modernism is its ability to depict how:

Real life is now just as false and constructed as any work of fiction. Fiction is woven into all.

(John Fowles, ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman, pp. 86– 7; as quoted in Waugh, 1984, p.2)

Nicol makes this point in particular reference to money, which while it has always been purely symbolic, the evolution of banking (especially on the internet, although this does not apply to Christie) means we seem further distanced than ever from what is increasingly becoming the most centre of life in our post-modern existences as constant consumers (2002, p5). We should not be surprised then when money appears by only the second sentence of Johnson’s novel, because when Christie feels ‘divorced from those aspects of life which are regarded as authentic, genuine, real,’ placing himself within the world of banking to be close to money makes ironical sense - at least until he discovers a real way to credit himself! (Nicol, 2002, p.5).

Bibliography:

• Exeleutherostomise. n.d. The Oxford English Dictionary [electronic version]. Retreived from www.oed.com

• Genette, G. (1991). Introduction to the Paratext [electronic version]. New Literary History, 22 (2), 261-272. Retrieved 26 November 2008 from JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/pss/469037

• Gray, M. (2003). ‘Metafiction, metanovel’. In A Dictionary of Literary Terms. Edinburgh: York Press.

• Johnson, B. (1985). Malry’s Own Double Entry. New Direction Press: Yew York.

• Montgomery, M. et al. (1996). Ways of Reading: Advanced Reading Skills for Students of English Literature. London: Routledge.

• Nicol, B. (2002). Introduction. In Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburugh.

• Re: Idea for Tristam Shandy Website. (2005). Retrieved 26 November 2008 from Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull story Website: /www.tristramshandymovie.com.

• Reisz, K. (Director). (1981). The French Lieutenant’s Woman [motion picture]. UK: Juniper Films.

• Tickell, P. (Director). (2000). Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry [Motion Picture]. Netherlands: Delux Productions.

• Waugh, P. (1984). Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction [electronic version]. Methuen: London

• Winterbottom, M. (Director). (2006). A Cock and Bull Story. UK: BBC Films.

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