Hard-to-Google Lit. Crit. Queries...

[steepholm]

Is there a general term for novels (or other fictions) that contain/mention themselves? I mean, the novel is called The Book of Glum, and it's about someone who turns out to be writing or reading a book called The Book of Glum, or we're at least given to know that this is a world where The Book of Glum already exists?

Also, is there decent existing discussion (in journals or elsewhere) of this phenomenon?

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I once used the term "recursive novel" for this, but I found it impossible to make clear in others' minds a distinction between a novel which is itself supposed to be a text in its own imaginary world, like The Lord of the Rings or, in a slightly different manner, The Princess Bride, and what I meant by a recursive novel, which is a book which is about an entirely different book with the same title, e.g. The King in Yellow or The Throme of the Erril of Sherill.

Anyway, I'd suggest making a list of them - somewhere in print I have my old list - and looking up discussions of those individual books to see if anyone uses a name for the phenomenon.

(sorry, I keep thinking of more) There are detailed literary discussions of Tolkien's narrative voice, of who's supposed to be telling the tale and to whom, of which Verlyn Flieger's Interrupted Music is the most sophisticated, and I'm sure the same exists for other authors.

(and more) The most extensive example of recursiveness I can think of is one in which both referenced texts are 1) real and 2) cross-art. Tolstoy's story "The Kreutzer Sonata" is about a real Beethoven sonata known by that name, and Leos Janacek wrote a musical piece inspired by the Tolstoy story which he in turn also called "The Kreutzer Sonata"; confusingly, it's not a sonata but a string quartet.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Those are useful distinctions - and seem very clear to me, thanks! The book that prompted the query is Margaret Mahy's The Catalogue of the Universe, in which a popular astronomy book called The Catalogue of the Universe plays a part. To make it interesting, though, there really is a popular astronomy book of that name (minus the first definite article), which appears from its date and general description to be very much like the one mentioned in Mahy's text.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Naturally I had to rush and look them up to discover which one came first, and the astronomy book did, so it may be that this is another factual, rather than fictional, reference. However, Worldcat says there are more library copies of the Mahy than of the astronomy book, so the tail wags the dog this time. Delightfully, my local library of choice has both. May have to look into this.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I have copies of both by my left foot as I type this! (As far as I know, the existence of the astronomy book has hitherto escaped Mahy scholars.)

At one point a character in Mahy's novel actually stands on the astronomy book, to give him the extra height required to kiss the girl he likes at approximately equal height. I can confirm from my own field work that the book is precisely one inch thick.

[sue-bursztynski.livejournal.com]

Plenty of those around. I'm remembering one of Kathy Reichs's YA fantasy novels in which the heroine, a niece of forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan, whose adventures have been turned into the TV series Bones, sits down to watch Bones on TV. The author refused to discuss it when I asked about it at a session she did while in Melbourne. I think it was a promotional thing; she didn't expect anyone to say,"That doesn't make sense" and was probably hoping no one would notice, but might watch Bones. ;-)

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Yes -- I've been looking for a term, or for some narratological account, of the very simple distinction between first person fictional worlds where what you read can be found (e.g. epistolary novels, journal novels, etc.) and where it can't. Sometimes you don't know you're in the former until late: e.g. Double Indemnity, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night.

As for your "recursive novel," the first one I think I ever read is Irving Wallace's The Seven Minutes, one of my earliest sources of sexual information. In it a novel called The Seven Minutes is put on trial for obscenity.

Then there are recursive novels that actually contain the novels that give them their titles. They're on the tip of my tongue, but the only thing that leaps to mind is Mark Strand's My Life, by Somebody Else.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Maybe we need additional categories. The Lord of the Rings, though it's not in first person, has vague claims to be the narrative assembled by Frodo to which the narrative itself refers near the end. It also retroactively claims The Hobbit to be Bilbo's memoirs, though there is nothing in The Hobbit itself specifically to suggest that.

Another book that actually contains, or largely consists of, the novel that gives it its title is the other one I mentioned in my first comment, The Princess Bride by William Goldman, which purports to be an abridgement of a novel by somebody else, to which Goldman has added (not overwhelmingly extensive) commentary.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Yes, your comment was very helpful, and I'll plan to look for old Mythprints in the library next week. If I find it I can send you a scan if you want one.

Pale Fire the novel contains the poem "Pale Fire."

And I once did a list of titles like Gene Wolf's "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" and Other Stories.

I can't remember if the fictional memoir in The Swimming Pool Library is called that or not. Roth's Operation Shylock might barely count as a limiting case? In the novel "Roth" says he is compelled by CIA to post a paratextual disclaimer that it's fiction at the end. And indeed there is such a disclaimer. If there weren't, its "logical status [as] fictional discourse" (the title of an essay by John Searle) would be untroubled.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The Mythprint piece would have been sometime between the 1980s, probably after 1986, and 1995. I have all these issues, I just couldn't find the article on a brief perusal.

Gene Wolfe also wrote a book called The Castle of the Otter, which began life as an announcement that he had a book by that title in press, run by Locus which had somehow garbled the actual title, The Citadel of the Autarch. Wolfe then decided to make this true.

There was also a case of a composer who - if I recall the story correctly - was said in some encyclopedia to have written four string quartets when he'd in fact only written three. So he wrote a piece titled "String Quartet No. 4", but the joke was that it wasn't for string quartet at all.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Gene Wolfe also wrote a book called The Castle of the Otter, which began life as an announcement that he had a book by that title in press, run by Locus which had somehow garbled the actual title, The Citadel of the Autarch. Wolfe then decided to make this true.

The urge to make such things true is quite a strong one, I think. (I seem to recall that Armand Hammer bought Arm and Hammer largely because the universe wouldn't feel quite "right" unless he did.) Also, a book title that's mentioned in another book or thrown up by happenstance like that calls out to be written, if not by the author then by a fanficcer, and has something of a Pandora's box aura until that happens.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Authors have also been known to indulge in wishful thinking, listing nonexistent titles in the "also by this author" page in their books, perhaps in hope that this will encourage them to get around to writing them. An author I won't name except that his initials are Harlan Ellison has been particularly prone to this.

Re Hammer: 19th-century US President Grover Cleveland, as a young man, considered moving to Cleveland, Ohio, because he liked the idea of a town sharing his name. He decided against it when someone pointed out that this wasn't a very cogent reason.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

In Don DeLillo's The Names people are murdered (by a cult) when they go to cities that bear their initials. This was pointed out to me by my friend Neil Hertz, who knew, wistfully, that he'd never get a job at Yale, and saw that as a silver lining. He wrote an article once about Tocqueville's glee in signing his letters, when he was home, as "Tocqueville, de Tocqueville" (which is in Manche).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Either initial, or does it have to be both, as in your friend's case?

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Both. A moment of revelation comes when the narrator, James Axton, realizes he's in Jebel Amman.