Formal mimesis

A literary technique — sometimes called mimetic form, enactment, or iconicity — in which a work's structure, style, or texture performs the thing it is about, rather than merely describing it. Tristram Shandy's digressions enact the swerve of consciousness; The Waste Land's fragmentation enacts cultural collapse; a war novel that is mostly tedium punctuated by sudden violence enacts the actual phenomenology of war; Ubik's loose ends and broken internal logic enact the unreliability of reality the book is about. The defence and the complaint sit in the same place — what one reader experiences as thematically resonant, another reads as the author failing to tie things together. Whether the form is the content or whether the form is just sloppy is often the central interpretive question.