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]

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.