메타픽션 속의 메타픽션을 찾아서 ─ 존 파울즈의 소설『만티사』읽기

Abstract

John Fowles argues in his novel, Mantissa, that writing about fiction has become a far more important matter than writing fiction itself. Its one of the best ways you can tell the true novelist nowadays. Hes not going to waste his time over the messy garage-mechanic drudge of assembling stories and characters on paper. And Mantissa itself is a fiction in which the writer is writing about fiction. More to the point, Fowles is using his fiction, Mantissa, as a reflexive medium now, not a reflective one. Its reflexive in the sense that he is writing about the difficulty of writing serious modern fiction, and its not reflective in the sense that he is not tempering with real life or reality. Critics of today generally call modern novel whose subject is the difficulty of writing serious modern fiction as metafiction. In particular, Mantissa is a metafiction about metafiction — a metafiction introspectively dealing not just with the difficulty of writing . . . fiction, but with the mature of metafictional mode itself. Thus, readers with traditional mind-set would feel embarrassed or insulted when they read Mantissa, which defies every bit of their expectation. As if to appease the readers of Mantissa, Fowles uses the term, mantissa, as the title of his fiction. As Fowles says in Mantissa, using a quotation from Oxford English Dictionary, mantissa is an addition of comparatively small importance, especially to a literary effort or discourse. In a sense, Fowles seems to advise the reader not to expect too much, for Mantissa is nothing but an addition of small importance. It may be true that Mantissa is an addition to the whole literary endeavor for which he has staked his life, or, in a wider sense, to what all the modern writers has aspired to achieve as writers. His novel, Mantissa, however, cannot be made light of as a mere addition, since it is filled with serious and sincere argument and speculation on what an introspective writer would do with his novel. It may even be thought to be an arena where the dominant ideas of literature of the 20th century compete with the traditional beliefs in literature. In short, Mantissa should be considered not just an addition but a center — a center of debate between the old and new ideas of literature. Thats why we want to read Mantissa in light of the dominant literary and critical ideas of our times. We begin our reading with the Barthesian assumption that Mantissa is a writerly text that invites its reader to produce meaning. Most of all, our reading will prove that Mantissa is, to use Fowless words, a kind of literary jeu desprit that unfolds its Protean aspects at its writers — and, of course, the readers — own sweet will. Also, our reading will show that it is a metafiction, which not only mystifies but also demystifies the language of literature as well as the old and new ideas of literature.