Abstract
The " metafictions " betray their own fictionality in a certain sense that needs to be explained. The term is often associated with so-called " postmodern "fictions, but the phenomenon has existed as long as there has been fiction, and is conceptually independent of any literary current. They can be defined abstractly as " narcissistic " (Hutcheon 1980 " NarcissisticNarrative: the Metaphysical Paradox "), or " reflexive " (Friend 2007 " Fictional Characters "). This reflexive betrayal (or " transgression " to reuse a term dear to Genette and his readers) shows that metafiction is fiction whose intended purpose is to dysfunction. Metafictions derail the normal fictional structure they presuppose. In so doing, they draw readers' attention to the fictional edifice, rendering it unstable and triggering a highly characteristic aesthetic effect. Thus, a paradigmatic metafictional figure consists in staging an encounter between a character and his or her author (cf., for example, " Niebla " 1915 by Miguel de Unamuno ;" ABreakfast of Champions " 1973 by Kurt Vonnegut ;" The People of Paper " 2005 by Salvador Plascencia). This kind of " ontological metalepsis " (Nelles 1997 " Frameworks. Narrative Levels and Embedded Narratives "), whose literary and philosophical interest is well established, will be a case study.
