Strategii ale metaficțiunii postmoderniste în povestirea ,,Insula” de Ioan Groșan

Abstract

The writer Ioan Groșan distinguishes himself, in the context of the 1980s generation, through the complexity of the postmodern metafiction, which also includes realistic and existentialist influences. I chose this story as a literary support for my research because it is a self-reflexive narrative which depicts the theme of reading and fictionalises the reader. We will take over the concept of intradiegetic reader, through which Paul Cornea, in the study "Introduction in the Theory of Reading”, defines those characters which pursue the act of reading, in order to distinguish them from the narratee, from the implied reader and from the ideal reader. Our aim is to prove that the character who reads represents a strategy of the postmodern fiction, through which the writer parodies the theme of reading. We shall use the concept of metafiction from Linda Hutcheon’s study, "Narcissistic Narrative. The Metafictional Parador” and from Patricia Waugh’s study, "Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction”, in order to identify the literary functions of the reading characters in the context of the postmodern strategy of the supporting text: building a narcisistic representation of the dream-palimpsest, the fictionalisation of the postmodern writer seen in the position of reader, the fictionalisation of the narratee and of the real reader, the allegory of the act of reading, intertextuality, the relativisation of reality. From Linda Hutcheon’s study, "A theory of parody”, we will use the concept of parody to identify the forms it takes in Groșan’s text ( quotation, irony, satire) and
the purpose of these forms in relation to the reading characters, namely the targeted
aims (canon and decanonisation, high culture vs pop culture, the distopic artificiality of reading, the language crisis, reading as a form of alienation from the creative self, the reader, intertextuality). We will therefore reach the conclusion that the parody in Ioan Groșan’s text uses the strategy of the reading character to target, narcissistically, postmodern literature itself, to which he relates through a deriding and, at the same time, reverential ethos. We will analyse the satire associated with parody, through which the author exploits the topics of language and freedom in a totalitarian regime.