Materializing Metafiction: Embedded Media and Embodied Reading in Ruth Ozeki's <i>A Tale for the Time Being</i>

Abstract The term metafiction is widely used to describe fiction that foregrounds its own narrative and linguistic construction. It also has historically specific roots in reflexive postmodernist literary experimentation. This article asks how contemporary metafiction inherits postwar traditions of self-conscious narration within the context of twenty-first-century social and technological mediation. At a time when digital media compels written literature to take stock of its print lineage, this article argues that narrative reflexivity is accompanied by a reflexive materiality: an ethical concern with the material conditions of reading and writing. It examines how Ruth Ozeki's novel A Tale for the Time Being tethers reflexive narration to material media, drawing attention to the collaborative exchanges and fleshly encounters that inflect and animate any act of reading. Told partly through handwritten diary entries and partly through the online searches, emails, and editorial efforts of a fictionalized version of Ozeki, the novel blends multiple modes and media into its depiction of intimately embodied reading practices. At the same time, its depiction of gendered and racialized violence shows how bodies are often read in cruel and undesirable ways. In effect, the novel materializes metafiction, embedding within textual self-awareness an ethical attunement to the materialities that complicate and exceed written inscription. It thereby resists the involuted loops of postmodern linguistic self-reference, instead deploying a feminist insistence that fiction choreographs a constant torsion between discursive structures and fleshly bodies and enticing readers to imaginatively enact fictional meaning in whatever postures are particular to their own bodies.