The Epigraphic Character: Fiction and Metafiction in the Twentieth-Century Novel Open Access
Wendt, Kerry Higgins (2011)
Published
Abstract
This dissertation identifies the epigraphic character - a
character who overtly
voices ideas about fiction, writing, or literature. Epigraphic
novels are not metafictions,
but lie somewhere between conventional fiction and metafiction.
Unlike metafictions,
epigraphic novels are not primarily interested in the relationship
between fiction and
reality, but with the relationships among literature, life,
aesthetics, and
literary theory. When the epigraphic statement is compared with
other aspects of the
novel, a dialectical relationship is initiated. Theory and practice
synthesize into a third
entity: what the book, as a whole, says. Readers strive to
reconstruct and understand the
author's deeper meaning, the meaning that is not simply the
epigraphic statement or the
story but results from the two in dialogue.
I have analyzed the epigraphic character along biographical,
dialogical, rhetorical,
and narratological lines in James Joyce's A Portrait of the
Artists as a Young Man, Flann
O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, and Graham Greene's The End
of the Affair. The
biographical approach includes consideration of what Joyce did
during the years he wrote
Portrait, what Flann O'Brien read, Greene's interest in
religion, and information culled
from manuscript drafts and letters. I have also addressed the
epigraphic character along
literary-historical lines to show how it developed and evolved, and
have closely analyzed
the epigraphic passages and their placement in the novel. Readings
of fictional
presentations of writers writing provide additional context for
understanding the
epigraphic passages. This dissertation classifies epigraphic novels
as comic - usually
satirical - and noncomic, the most prevalent themes of which are
life, sex, passion, and
God.
Although the epigraphic character is inherently metafictional,
it is also inherently
fictional: it relies on the story and builds a dynamic by putting
story, discourse, and
rhetorical elements into dialogue. Postmodern works often flatten
out; their stories fall
through or they evade meaning. They cannot support the epigraphic
dynamic. The
epigraphic novel uses metafictional means to talk about how stories
work; metafiction
uses stories to talk about how fiction works. Fiction and
metafiction are a continuum,
and the epigraphic character is a metafictional element that exists
as a central part of conventional fiction.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
1 Introduction: The Epigraphic Character 1
2 "Pitiful Compassion": The Roots of the Modern Epigraphic
Character in the Making of James Joyce's A Portrait of
the
Artist as a Young Man 26
3 Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds and the Reification of
the
Epigraphic Character 92
4 Graham Greene's The End of the Affair and the God of
Narrative
Structure 141
5 Conclusion: The Epigraphic Dynamic and the Epigraphic Novel
214
List of Figures
1 The narratological structure of fiction 16
About this Dissertation
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