What Fourth Wall?

What I'm finding most noticeable about Parzival is Wolfram von Eschenbach's regular insertions of himself into the text. We've seen the authors pop up here and there before, such as in the Nibelungenlied where an opinion is offered on the characters' behaviors that obviously comes from a source. We've never, however, had one who tears down the curtain and comes tapdancing out on stage singing, "Hello, I'm the author," quite the way Wolfram does. I'm looking into figuring out how he functions as a character in the text, and what purpose does dragging reality into this serve.

Wolfram's Apology is probably the most obvious place to look. While his other tangents are at least embedded in the page and do not break up the narrative, Apology is a separate chapter that happens right after Parzival's birth. Coming onto it in narrative form is an incredibly disorienting experience. What does it mean for the text that we are taken completely out of it at the moment it's just getting good, so to speak?

I wonder if, in some ways, Wolfram's constant removal of the curtain helps to both blur and reinforce our concepts of fantasy vs. reality in the text. What we have is an author who is announcing he is there, which serves to ground the reader in reality, to relate the story to something tangible. Wolfram insists upon relating events to reality, such as during the famine when he mentions "I, Wolfram von Eschenbach, have to make do with such comfort." (102) This lends credibility to the narrative, takes it out of the realm of pure fantasy and makes it cross a border into reality.

On the other hand, the Apology seems to enact an entirely different kind of transformation upon the text. Apology interrupts the narrative at the place of Parzival's birth to discuss, specifically, the issues brought up by another narration (a love-song, I assume of a bawdy nature, dedicated to Lady), and brings up the idea specifically of Parzival being a "story." (69) This enacts a kind of violence against the reader, who is now unable to lose themselves in the narrative, suspend disbelief in terms of fairies, and we, in fact, lose this fantasy of the perfect knight.

I have my ideas but they aren't fully fleshed out, so I'm wondering what everyone thinks the discursive repercussions of such an action could be?