Narratology is the study of narrative, or the study of the relations between different aspects of narrative.

I. What we think of as NARRATIVE actually has three parts:

1. Story, or history;
2. Narrative, or the text itself, the structure and form; and
3. Narrating, or Discourse.

1. The story is literally the content. Story is a chronological account, a history of events.

2. Narrative is the text. Narrative is the word, the focus and overall form, in which the story is revealed. Narrative is plot, the structure that (re)orders and then presents the (hi)story.

3. Narrating is the condition that makes the narrative necessary, that makes the narrative possible. Narrating is the conscious and subconscious of the work. Narrating is NOT story; it is the act of telling; narrating is the environment in which narrative takes place.

MFA fiction writing programs have a bit of dogma that goes like this: literary writing is character-driven story writing. But that bit of tripe, frankly, is wrong.

The MFA dogmatic companion to the mantra above reads as follows: plot-driven writing is mechanical writing. Two pieces of tripe. MFA programs should know better. But they don't.

Traditional (new-critical) writing theory allows for very little distinction between story and plot; and the paltry distinction that exists is usually a matter of sneer. Additionally, writing programs live and breathe realism. The best writer, they say, works like a mirror: he produces the illusion of reality.

Every different branch of theory today, however, suggests that reality (the way we experience reality) is relative, has a context. Physics, psychology, cultural and social theory today all argue that what we experience is only an image of our relation to reality. That's a complicated concept, and not worth the time we'd need to unpack it for the purpose of this discussion.  Still, here's an example: painters discovered this concept a long time ago. Think about impressionist painting with its long seductive brush strokes and its short textured swipes. The artist acknowledges her relation to reality, not objective reality, in these strokes.

This is why the notion of character-driven "story" is dated. Every device a writer uses to create a book is a device. In realist or naturalist texts, the illusion of reality is a device. In modernist texts, the visibility of style is a device. And device is structure, or plot, or narrative. It's the way we tell the story.  It's true that stories, the chronologies, are driven by characters and their desires; but the act of telling (narrating) and the text itself is what drives the entire process of communication.  When we tell a story, what's important is not the story itself; it's the relation between the teller and story that offers meaning.

II. Metanarrative is how we talk about the way we tell the story. Metafiction, to give a very broad definition, is a narrative that talks about itself.

Realist fiction, always trying to maintain the illusion of reality, believes that metanarrative has no place in fiction. Modernist fiction in general feels the same way realist fiction does, with one significant difference: modernist fiction believes that hiding the structure is a detrimental lie--worse, a lie told by a poor writer. Structure always calls attention to itself, whether the writer tries to hide it or not. If this effect, this calling attention to itself can do so in a way that directly refers to itself, that talks about itself, then it is metanarrative.

Metanarrative: the relation between story and narrative can be thought of like this:

A1 (story)
B1 (narrative)
C1 (the story subject)

A, B and C when put together on paper, bound up and printed are a book. Narrative (B) is the text, the word produced by a narrator who tells us the story (history - A). The whole point of the story is the subject (C).

Have you ever read a book where the narrator was part of the story? There are a couple out there, but perhaps not as many as you think.

Here's my favorite test case: Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield is in the story, isn't he? Not exactly. The story is a series of events, the "madman stuff," that happened "about a year ago" to, yes, Holden. These events are Holden's history, of course. But the Holden who tells this (hi)story is a different Holden. He's an older, arguably wiser Holden who is currently spending some time in a mental hospital.

So: the story is told by a narrator who has finished living the story he is narrating. Holden has learned the lesson of that story (though unreliably so), and therefore he can tell it. He can narrate his old story.

So: Holden becomes the metasubject (C2) of a new story (A2), telling (B1) his old story (A1). Holden isn't really talking about himself.

So: the book in itself is not a metanarrative. In fiction or in "real life" it's not that easy to talk coherently about the story that you're living. If you're a teacher, can you teach a lesson you haven't learned? Sure, but your students won't learn anything, either.  You won't have a distinguishable relationship to the lesson; you won't have anything to communicate.  And the same goes for narrators trying to narrate their own stories: the reader won't learn anything, either.  We can't communicate reality, only an image of our relation to reality.

Related Writing Posts: 

1. Care to Revise Your Story? Introduction
2. Novel Workshop: Testing Your Idea

Other Related Posts:

1. Your Limited Perspective: A Woman Problem
2. The Angel of Progress
3. Waking and Dreaming, Thought and Sound
4. Fascination with Heavy Objects
5. Ecclesiastes, Simulacrum, Baudrillard, Disneyland 

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