The reflexive novel is a novel in which the author calls the reader’s attention to the fact that he or she is writing (or has written) a novel. Thus, what Roland Barthes would call a ‘writerly’ novel.
A classic and early example of such a work is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy(1760–67), an attempt at autobiography in which virtually no progress is made. Sterne uses many devices to show a discrepancy between reality/life and art, and that it is impossible to provide a coherent and rational picture of anything as complex as life and reality.
Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) are other reflexive novels of that period. In the 19th c., most novelists tried to give form, shape, and rationality to their versions of reality. However, this often tended to falsify reality in the cause of artistic and aesthetic coherence. Periodically, novelists were aware of the inherent shortcomings of the endeavour to impose form on the disorderly or chaotic.
In the 20th century, numerous novelists developed various forms of reflexive novels. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is an outstanding example. So is Andre Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs (1926). Since the 1950s, we should also mention the work of Vladimir Nabokov, Flann O’Brien, William Burroughs, Christine Brooke-Rose, Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Thomas Pynchon, and John Fowles. This fiction is sometimes called ‘self-conscious’ or ‘self-referential’.
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