This week: No Book Is an Island Edited by: Max Griffin 🏳️🌈  
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| A colleague of mine recently got a response from an editor praising his story for being “almost metatextual.” He wondered what that meant. I wondered, too. So, I went to trusty old Widkipedia and found this: Metatextuality is a form of intertextual discourse in which one text makes critical commentary on itself or another text.
Like that was helpful. Not.
I know what “metadata” is. It’s “data about data.” For a phone call, for example, metadata might include the phone numbers, the location of those numbers, the duration of the call, or the service provider. It might also include the names of the callers, and whether or not there is court-approved surveillance of one of the phone numbers, i.e., a wiretap. But “meta-data” does not include the topic of conversation: it’s not a wiretap. It’s data about the call, not the call itself.
So, by analogy, “metatext” must be text about text. Just like Wikipedia said. Or not.
Anyway, for an easy example, think about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The title page of the 1818 edition includes a passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost. a bit of text that’s about the story that people are going to read: That makes it metatext. It alerts the reader that this novel is about life, death, creation, and religion. Anytime an author uses quotes as headers—including made-up quotes—they are metatextual comments on the fictional content.
But it’s deeper than just quotes that stand outside the novel. The first American haunted house appears in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The story features a failed artist and a haunted house that destroys him, his family, and his art with false promises of immortality. The house becomes a malevolent character in the story. But wait. Doesn’t that basically describe the plot of the The Shining? Indeed, many critics have noticed the links, the metatextual links, between the two works. There are even places where King paraphrases Poe’s story. That makes King's work metatextual both in structure and in detail.
Another way that text can be referential is the story-within-a-story. In Hamlet, for example, the eponymous prince stages a play in which the principals re-enact the murder of his father. The play-within-a-play form of metatext is pervasive, especially in cinema. Singing in the Rain is a movie about making a movie. Innumerable Andy Rooney and Judy Garland movies involve putting on shows. White Christmas is a movie about a show. Christopher Nolan’s Inception is a multilayered sequence of dreams, each a metatextual commentary on the characters that ultimately leave the audience to wonder if anything was really real. Poe’s “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream” could be metatext for Nolan’s masterpiece.
Genres can have common elements that, when deployed by authors, become metatextual, providing context for the readers and helping to stimulate their imaginations. Haunted houses hearken back to Poe. Detectives hearken back to Poe, too, but also to Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, or many others. Indeed, the nature of the detective is metatext—a detective like Sam Spade signals a different kind of story from one featuring a detective like Miss Marple.
Characters in fiction live in the real world. In modern-day fiction, they watch TV, listen to music, and read books. What they watch, listen to, and read becomes metatext for the events of the novel. “The Devil went Down to Georgia,” and “Country Roads” both could be metatextual, albeit with different commentaries on main text. Iconic phrases, like Star Wars’ “I’ve got a bad feeling about this…”, can also be deployed as metatext.
Metatext can also be humorous. Commercials that feature characters in horror movies “choosing badly” provide humorous metatext for buying insurance.
The title for this essay, a riff on John Donne's famous poem, serves as metatext for its content.
Sometimes metatext can be as simple as the author’s name.
During the 1950’s, numerous Hollywood artists had been blacklisted by the Hollywood studios, most for refusing to “name names” before the infamous McCarthy committee. One of these was Dalton Turmble, who, after being blacklisted, managed to make a living by ghost-writing scripts. Some of these, like the one for Roman Holiday, wound up winning Academy Awards for which he did not receive credit. When Kirk Douglas decided to produce Spartacus in 1960, he hired Trumble to write the screenplay. Douglas used his own company to produce the film, and decided to give Trujmble screen credit. This resulted in considerable negative publicity during the pre-release of the film, especially from the conservative press. But Douglas was adamant, and Trumble’s name stayed in the credits.
That screen credit is metatext for the most powerful scene in the movie.
In that scene, the Roman general Crassus has just defeated and taken prisoner Spartacus and his army of slaves. Crassus demands the prisoners, on the pain of death, identify Spartacus. First one person, then many, then the entire army responds, “I am Spartacus.” Trumble’s name in the credits gives special meaning and power to this scene. It came to stand for the artists of Hollywood, led by Douglas, standing up to the Blacklist. This movie, and the response to it, ended the practice of blacklisting.
Metatext has power.
Metatext is everywhere. Authors use it all the time, often without thinking about it. It can arise in the haze that’s part of the creative process, or it can be a deliberate addition after the fact. Metatext deploys the fact that no reader is an island. Our readers, like us, swim in an ocean filled with cultural and emotional references, just waiting for metatext to call them out.
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For Authors: May 03, 2023 Issue [#11936]
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