A prism of comparison : Mrs. Dalloway and The hours

Abstract

'I wanted to write about it all. Everything that happens in a moment. The way the flowers looked when you carried them in your arms. This towel, how it smells, how it feels. This thread. All our feeling, yours and mine the history of it, who we once were. Everything in the world. Everything all mixed up... like it is all mixed up now. And I failed. I failed. No matter what you start with, it ends up being so much less'. 'How is it possible to "describe" anything? The metafictionist is highly conscious of a basic dilemma: if he or she sets out to "represent" the world, he or she realizes fairly soon that the world, as such, cannot be "represented". William H Gass, an American critic and novelist, wrote an essay in which he first dubbed the novel's self-reflexive tendency as 'metafiction'. 'Any metalaguage functions as a signifier to another language, and this other language thus becomes its signified'. The prefix meta- is often added onto other terms like 'metapolitics', 'metarhetoric', and 'metatheatre' reflecting the recent 'cultural interest in the problem of how human beings reflect, construct and mediate their experience of the world. Metafiction pursues such questions through its formal self-exploration, drawing on the traditional metaphor of the world as a book'.