All the Disc’s a Stage: Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters as Metafiction

<p>Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is a post-structuralist landscape where stories are real and magic is a mediating force between reality and representation. Pratchett’s Discworld novels possess a strong undercurrent of the recognition of the power of words and the ways in which stories or representations threaten reality. This article examines <i>Wyrd Sisters</i> as a work of metafiction, that is, a work that acknowledges its existence as a representational text and experiments with the idea of “representationality.” <i>Wyrd Sisters</i> takes three witches of the Discworld and places them in Shakespeare’s <i>Macbeth</i>. The novel’s parodic relationship with its hypotext highlights its existence as a work of fiction and, furthermore, draws upon the Shakespearean <i>mise-en-abyme</i> to illuminate the power of representation as a form of magic which has the power to transform, alter, and replace reality. By exposing the artifice of representation, metafiction issues a challenge to the ontological distinction between fiction and reality: by exposing the ways in which texts are constructed by language, the linguistic construction of reality is manifest. By implication, the existence of a verisimilar reality independent of subjective representation is challenged. </p>