According to Todorov and a number of other critics, all literary fiction is in some way about itself. Some certainly are more so than others, however, especially in the twentieth century, which saw what Werner Wolf terms “metareferential turn”. Three recent French novels, Brice Matthieussent’s Vengeance du traducteur, Éric Chevillard’s L’Auteur et moi, and Tanguy Viel’s La Disparition de Jim Sullivan nevertheless manage to push the exploitation of the possibilities offered by the birth of fiction as constitutive of a story and as a structuring principle farther than anyone before, offering a new perspective on fiction’s self-defining potential.

All three novels feature a narrator whom we see in the process of writing and/or commenting on his fiction. This article explores the narratorial comments on the embedded fiction through the perspective of the Deleuzian concept of the virtual. It argues that beyond the apparent laying bare of the process of production and reading through the comments, the novels employ a complex set of strategies which dramatize the virtuality of the narratives and the process of virtualization.