Posted: November 7, 2024

Self-Reference

"If this were a Sherlock Holmes case, he would discover ash [at the crime scene] that came from a tobacco sold by only one tobacconist in London, who has only one customer."

I've written before about how I will reflexively edit out anything in your writing that calls your readers' attention to the fact that they're reading a book -- foreshadowing, asides to the reader, heavy-handed narrative voice that is the same for all characters, everything must go.

And yet, I've always had a soft spot for self-reference -- those little observations where the writer uses characters in their stories to make comments about the stories themselves, or other stories, or the genre as a whole. Like the quote above, from G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown series, which has been lodged in my memory for decades.

These self-referential asides often act as inside jokes -- a nod and a wink to readers, inviting them to compare the story they're reading to other stories. It's tricky to pull this off without breaking the fourth wall. This is why self referential asides work best in lighter novels. And as I've written before, readers are more willing to hold onto suspension of disbelief when the entire novel is being played for fun. This is why The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy can get away with the book-within-the-book commenting on the action of the book.

Subtler self-reference comments on the action can often be blended into the story if they come from the characters themselves, as in the Chesterton quote. After all, Chesterton's characters had also read Sherlock Holmes. The point of that quote was to show how real police work wasn't like fictional detective work because real policemen relied on hard, investigative effort rather than special knowledge and luck. That's something a real detective might feel. And this makes readers less likely to notice that the speaker isn't a real detective but is as fictional as Sherlock Holmes. He is comparing the story they're currently reading to Conan Doyle's work. And, if I remember correctly, the Chesterton story has the added twist that the case is eventually solved by specialized knowledge and luck.

Ruth is currently reading Ngaio Marsh's Inspector Allyn books and finding a lot of examples of this sort of in-world self-referential commentary. (Incidentally, Ruth often contributes enough to these articles to deserve co-author credit.) For instance, there's this from The Nursing Home Murders. Inspector Allyn and his friend Nigel Bathgate are listing the possible suspects, whom Nigel refers to as the "dramatis personae." Then Allyn asks whom Nigel would pick.

"For a win," Nigel pronounces at last, "the special nurse. For a place the funny little man."

"Why?"

"On the crime-fiction line of reasoning. The two outsiders. The nurse looks very fishy. And funny little men are rather a favorite line in villains nowadays. He may turn out to be Sir Derek's illegitimate brother and that's why he's so interested in heredity. I'm thinking of writing detective fiction."

"You should do well at it."

"Of course," said Nigel slowly, "there's the other school in which the obvious man is always the murderer. That's the one you favour at the Yard, isn't it?"

"Yes, I suppose it is," agreed Alleyn.

"Do you read crime fiction?"

"I dote on it. It's such a relief to escape from one's work into an entirely different atmosphere."

If you really want to step up self-reference, you can write yourself into your novel as a character. When Agatha Christe introduces her thinly veiled alter-ego Ariadne Oliver into the Poirot books, it gave her a chance to comment on both the mystery at hand (and sometimes help solve it). It also gave her a chance to lampoon Poirot, whom she once referred to as a "detestable, bombastic, ego-centric little creep," through Ariadne's principal detective, the Finn Sven Hjerson. ("Of course he's idiotic," she said of him, "but people like him.")

If you'd like an example of how self-reference can go terribly wrong, there's the end of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut already had his own fictional avatar -- his Ariadne Oliver -- woven into the plot in the person of Kilgore Trout. But at the end, he writes himself literally into the story, simply to make larger points about fiction writing that, in the process, destroy any involvement in the story and insult his readers. The book ends with Trout running after Fictional Vonnegut begging to be made young again.

Maybe I have such a soft spot for writers who comment on their own writing because I comment on writing for a living. But while there's a risk of driving readers out of the story, a good self-referential passage can also invite readers further in. Marsh's readers were probably going over the same possibilities that Nigel was, and seeing him share their thoughts takes those thoughts and weaves them into the narrative. And Allyn's skepticism can warn them that things may be more complicated than they think.

You can't use self-reference very often. But in its place, it gives you a new and deep way to connect with your readers.