❝ Postmodern novelists continue to make up fictions, but they want to do so on different terms, the most prominent being that they simultaneously acknowledge that they are making up those fictions. So the metafictional or self-reflexive novel tends to have an atmosphere of confession, of knowing or ironic acknowledgment—admitting to, sometimes atoning for, often knowingly and joyfully delighting in the fact that it is a fiction. Of course, there are multiple ways of performing such acknowledgment. There is the story within the story, or the character with the same name as the author (Paul Auster likes to use both of these devices); the novel that is about the experience of reading the novel you hold in your hand (Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler); the novel that is being written by one of the characters you are reading about (Alejandro Zambra’s Ways of Going Home, Ian McEwan’s Atonement). There are books that offer the reader the chance to arrange the order in which they read them (Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, Ali Smith’s How to Be Both), or to choose between different endings (John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman), or to ask that the reader construct a coherence—a story—that the fiction itself seems to refuse or obstruct (Claude Simon’s The Flanders Road, Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives).
Such writers reach back into the novelistic tradition, because one of the first great novels, Don Quixote, is a vibrant, funny, tender, and deeply serious fiction that is also a joyous commentary on the making of fiction, and indeed on the fictionality of reality. (...) Perhaps most profound fictions—even ones we don’t think of as experimental or avant-garde or postmodern—include or encode some acknowledgment of their own fictionality, or some kind of critique of the perils and obligations of fiction-making; that’s a part of what makes them serious and profound. Serious artists like Cervantes are engrossed by the ways in which we go about constructing our realities, the fictions that we use to support and propel our often fantastic interior lives; so by implication (and often explicitly), they are interested in their own, analogous methods of such construction. I have in mind, for instance, the way that Shakespeare often reminds us of the staginess of the stage (in King Lear, when Gloucester thinks he is falling off a cliff, he is just dropping down onto the stage); the intrusive authorial narrators of many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, who break in with advice and exegesis and thus disrupt the illusion, the flow, of novelistic artifice (Fielding, George Eliot, Gogol, Melville, Stendhal, Tolstoy); the many supposedly “conventional” novels, following Cervantes’s model, that are about heroes and heroines who have been reading too much fiction (Eugene Onegin, A Hero of Our Time, Notes from Underground, Madame Bovary, Niels Lyhne, A Confederacy of Dunces, The Fortress of Solitude). ❞
— JAMES WOOD, from How Fiction Works.