Meta-Fiction: Books by fictional characters, S/D

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For some reason, a mystery novel "written" by a character from TV's One Life to Live has come into my possession. Though I've yet to actually "read" it, it's set my mind reeling. What other fictional characters have been published?

I know Clark Kent has had his novel Under A Yellow Sun published, and I'm pretty sure Peter Parker had a coffeetable book. Was Lois Lane credited for The Unauthorized Biography of Lex Luthor?

Then there's Neal Pollack.

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Thursday, 1 September 2005 15:43 (twenty years ago)

The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer?

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 1 September 2005 15:48 (twenty years ago)

Funny funny: it's "meta" "fiction" but not "metafiction!"

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 1 September 2005 15:53 (twenty years ago)

There's also The Autobiography of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper.

Are there any real metafictional books by fictional characters?

― walter kranz (walterkranz), Thursday, 1 September 2005 15:57 (twenty years ago)

What about the Diary of Adrian Mole?
though that's explicitly credited to Sue Townsend.

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:02 (twenty years ago)

Not exactly fictional, but perhaps in the same league?

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0688119131.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:03 (twenty years ago)

http://www.hartleyfamily.org.uk/images/HARTLEYjr%20%20%20flyfishing.jpg

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:07 (twenty years ago)

"The Princess Bride" by William Goldman. An apparently abridged version of a non-existent book by a non-existent writer named S. Morgenstern.

― Roz (Roz), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:09 (twenty years ago)

Gulliver's Travels by Lemuel Gulliver.

― Aimless (Aimless), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:11 (twenty years ago)

The little subbook by Frank Dillon (as Knarf Nollid) as he's going crazy in A Hell of a Woman are great!

― Alex in SF (Alex in SF), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:15 (twenty years ago)

Oh god, if you count The Princess Bride you're counting like tons and tons of vaguely-meta fiction -- e.g. practically everything Paul Lafarge writes. (I think his newest is even bilingual, with the "original French" included.) Not to mention loads of the late 19th century ("this account is presented as it was penned by Admiral Snorgheath, whose log was discovered among the wreckage of the ill-fated H.M.S. Dorkupine").

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:18 (twenty years ago)

Right: "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle" were "found among the papers of Diedrick Knickerbocker" and printed in The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:20 (twenty years ago)

(Although that's early 19th. And I misspelled Diedrich. But yes.)

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:20 (twenty years ago)

Actually, I seem to recall reading something about the early age of the novel that said that it was common to dress up fiction as an autobiographies or historical accounts because it conferred legitimacy on what were otherwise made-up tales. (Which should tell you something about the public's attitude toward fiction in general!)

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:24 (twenty years ago)

Lemony Snicket, then.

― Roz (Roz), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:30 (twenty years ago)

Yeah, where's the line between a simple pseudonym and a fictional character, though? I think Lemony Snicket should probably count, in that there's a whole persona that Handler has created. But it's a fine line, I think.

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:31 (twenty years ago)

xpost to Jaymc

Yeah, totally! The thing I can't really seem to separate, though, is how much that attitude was morality-based and how much it just had to do with genre. I mean, obviously there were these ideas of moral frivolity attached to fiction, ranging from soft versions to full-on Puritan "fiction is lying and lying is immoral" attitudes: it wasn't classical/educational, it wasn't morally instructive, and it wasn't pure-poetry, which was considered to have some sort of power of moral instruction by default (something to do with "beauty"). But really I think the issue was just that people had no concept of the novel as a form and therefore didn't know what to do with it: it read like a truthful "educational" account of something, but it was all just a bunch of made-up crap! So what to do?

And along with that, of course, you didn't have any novelistic techniques available -- if people weren't familiar with the novel as a format, they weren't going to be ready to suspend disbelief about something like, say, an omniscient narrator. So all those early novels are basically just fake versions of "found" written documents -- epistolary (Harrison / Pamela gets credit as one of the first novels, right?), fake journalism (Aphra Behn Oroonooko same credit), ship's logs, etc. etc.

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:36 (twenty years ago)

Yeah, the thing with Lemony Snicket is that him and his family frequently appear in his own books, always in peril or something like that. Also, Handler goes to great lengths posing as Snicket's manager in interviews and things, so I think it's definitely more than just a pseudonym.

― Roz (Roz), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:36 (twenty years ago)

xp, i meant.

xo, anyway. ;)

― Roz (Roz), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:37 (twenty years ago)

Ah, cool, Roz. Yeah, I haven't read the books, so I wasn't sure.

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:40 (twenty years ago)

I thought this was about characters who already exist in one work of fiction (be it a book or a TV show) "writing" a book of their own.

― walter kranz (walterkranz), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:41 (twenty years ago)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/86/Goldstein-book.png

― Fushigina Blobby: Blobania no Kiki (ex machina), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:41 (twenty years ago)

I mean okay, this is a super-obvious thing to say, and I'm sure someone wrote a monograph on it in 1923 and since then new schools of criticism have come along to say that the sky actually isn't blue, but basically the form of the "novel" seems like an inevitable result of written communication growing out to some kind of switching point -- you know, whenever a certain class of people gets accustomed enough to reading letters / accounts / reports enough that it becomes natural to start making up really interesting ones for them to spend their time on.

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:41 (twenty years ago)

Nabisco, should I read that Lafarge book I bought about Hausmann but never read?

― k/l (Ken L), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:42 (twenty years ago)

Arf: I have not yet had a chance to read Hausmann! I hear it's great, but that's largely from people who were in his classes with me, so there may be bias involved: judging from the author himself it's safe to assume the book will be worth reading.

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:46 (twenty years ago)

If you're including The Princess Bride, you also have to include The Name Of The Rose.

― Forest Pines (ForestPines), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:55 (twenty years ago)

And if you include The Name of the Rose you have to include Chimera, and if you include Chimera you have to include everything ever, and ...

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 1 September 2005 16:56 (twenty years ago)

well Chimera is the most metafictional book ever so I don't know why you wouldn't count it.

― kyle (akmonday), Thursday, 1 September 2005 17:05 (twenty years ago)

I think the key to this thread is that the fictional author's name has to be on the cover of the book. Otherwise, I was going to say Pale Fire.

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 1 September 2005 17:10 (twenty years ago)

Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino, following a prescription from At Swim-Two-Birds, only uses pre-existing characters, and so the narrator, Anthony Lamont from ASTB investigates the death of his roommate, Ned Beaumont from Red Harvest. There are various characters who are from footnotes in Finnegans Wake and other strange places.

― k/l (Ken L), Thursday, 1 September 2005 17:11 (twenty years ago)

(xpost with jaymc, who I might want to agree with, except I think the wider concept makes for a better thread)

― k/l (Ken L), Thursday, 1 September 2005 17:12 (twenty years ago)

(Possibly, Ken!)

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 1 September 2005 17:13 (twenty years ago)

[Re: Barth I dunno about "most ever" (apart from Barth slipping into the first third), but that's kinda the thing I'm thinking of -- it deliberately pivots around the idea that every piece of fiction is just the process of a "fictional character" (borrowed or not) telling a tale. Character-name on cover -- or borrowed characters from pre-existing works -- seem like required rules.]

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 1 September 2005 17:32 (twenty years ago)

The new Bret Easton Ellis, then?

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 1 September 2005 17:34 (twenty years ago)

(And even "pre-existing characters" is a bendy rule, what with stock characters, real figures, and commonplaces as possibilities. Superman, the devil, Romeo, etc!)

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 1 September 2005 17:35 (twenty years ago)

It's almost more a question of marketing, then?

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Thursday, 1 September 2005 17:38 (twenty years ago)

mailer's "The Gospel According to the Son."

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Thursday, 1 September 2005 18:13 (twenty years ago)

except not really coz it would have to be a silly book written by jc insteada an actual gospel?

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Thursday, 1 September 2005 18:14 (twenty years ago)

In Laurence Durrell's "Alexandria Quartet", particularly in the first book "Justine", a lot is made of the eponymous Justine's former lover M. Arnauti who wrote a thinly disguised roman a clef about her called "Claudine". or "Claudia"? I can't remember.

― DV (dirtyvicar), Thursday, 1 September 2005 20:06 (twenty years ago)

A.S. Byatt's Possession includes lengthy passages from works by fictional Victorian writers "Randolph Henry Ash" and "Christabel LaMotte."

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 1 September 2005 20:10 (twenty years ago)

― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 1 September 2005 20:46 (twenty years ago)

I don't think that shade of green's quite right - it looks a bit too bright to me

― Forest Pines (ForestPines), Thursday, 1 September 2005 20:47 (twenty years ago)

― Momus (Momus), Thursday, 1 September 2005 20:48 (twenty years ago)

Nick, those things is a few years old, no? You still haven't fixed the grammar on the German one.

― k/l (Ken L), Thursday, 1 September 2005 20:50 (twenty years ago)

This thread makes me tihnk of Geoff Ryman's 'Was', althogh that clearly isn't what we have termed 'meta-fiction' its kind of the inverse - a fictional account of a real author?

― , Thursday, 1 September 2005 21:44 (twenty years ago)

"House of Leaves"

― jed_ (jed), Thursday, 1 September 2005 22:10 (twenty years ago)

I believe a fictional character from the interweb called Aimless seemed to have written a book.

― k/l (Ken L), Thursday, 1 September 2005 22:16 (twenty years ago)

What about Venus On The Half Shell, by Kilgore Trout?

― k/l (Ken L), Friday, 2 September 2005 12:01 (twenty years ago)

Dr Watson to thread.

― Come Back Johnny B (Johnney B), Friday, 2 September 2005 12:08 (twenty years ago)

Moominpapa's memoirs.

― jel -- (jel), Friday, 2 September 2005 15:48 (twenty years ago)

I was going to mention Kilgore Trout, but I haven't actually read any Vonnegut (I know, I know), so I didn't know the specifics.

― jaymc (jaymc), Friday, 2 September 2005 15:51 (twenty years ago)

four years pass...

Not to mention loads of the late 19th century ("this account is presented as it was penned by Admiral Snorgheath, whose log was discovered among the wreckage of the ill-fated H.M.S. Dorkupine").
― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, September 1, 2005 12:18 PM (4 years ago)

This is very funny. And now I am picturing the Admiral Snorgheath girl. In an H.M.S. Dorkupine t-shirt.

― Garnet Memes (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 27 September 2009 00:59 (fifteen years ago)

Funny funny: it's "meta" "fiction" but not "metafiction!"
Meta:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3189/2442729848_9c3165d538_o.jpg

― Garnet Memes (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, 27 September 2009 01:03 (fifteen years ago)

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