Investigating metafiction in The Songs of Maldoror

Despite many of the nineteenth-century narrative texts that seek to use various techniques to conceal narration and foster referential fallacy, The Songs of Maldoror constantly reminds the reader that it is fiction and prevents them from drowning in the world of fiction. This can only be done by using two frequent tricks that interrupt the flow of the story and engage the reader into a discourse space; the strong presence of metafiction in text and the constant dialogue between the narrator and the audience. The current study tries to show the aspects of metafiction in Lautréamont’s text and analyses its various functions in different levels of the text. This study will allow us to understand the fundamental ideas on which this text is based and at the same time challenges the foundations of traditional narrative literature. Therefore, this study combines two fields of narratology and theory of literature. This research suggests that the emergence of The Songs of Maldoror is a turning point in the history of the evolution of literary text and utterance since the reader finds himself reading a modern text constantly showing it’s forming process and demands an active and literary reading. The study also shows that a modern text like The Songs of Maldoror and narratology have the same interpretation as literature and basically texts like this provide the ground for text-analyzing researches in the twentieth century.