Understanding Metalepsis

Julian Hanebeck

• Editore: De Gruyter
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110515251
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Letteratura
• Categoria: Critica letteraria

Understanding Metalepsis provides a state-of-the-art overview of the narratological concept of metalepsis and develops new ways of investigating the forms and functions of metaleptic narratives. Informed by a hermeneutic perspective, this study offers not only an account of the complexities that characterize the process of understanding metaleptic phenomena, but also metatheoretical insights into the hermeneutics of narratology.

1Introduction

Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries – a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in an

Extra-Moral Sense”

Angela Carter’s short story “The Loves of Lady Purple,” written in Japan in the early 1970s, challenges the conventional construction of spatiotemporal and logical distinctions created by narrative embedding: the embedded tale (the metadiegetic story told by a puppeteer) deals with the grotesque career of Lady Purple, a prostitute who kills her male clients. One evening, the puppet with which the puppeteer narrates this story comes alive, kills the puppeteer and enacts the metadiegetic story in the diegesis. Seemingly, and in violation of representational logic, the character Lady Purple literally leaves the world of which the puppeteer tells and enters the world in which he tells. Gérard Genette’s Discours du récit (1972), which was written at the same time, offers a simple yet ingenious model for such a phenomenon: ‘Narrative metalepsis’ designates a disruption of the hierarchical structure of diegetic levels of narratives, that is, any violation of the boundary that separates the world of the narrating from the world of the narrated. Metalepsis is based on and questions one of the most fundamental assumptions that govern the understanding of narrative: according to representational logic, narrational acts and the events of the story they tell are situated in spatiotemporally distinct contexts. This is how we conventionally make sense of narrative: the space and time of narrated events cannot coincide with the space and time of the narration.

Yet the metaleptic denial of conventional narrative sense-making belongs to the conventions of narrative: ever since the publication of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767), metalepsis has been part of the repertoire of narrative techniques employed by novelists. In one of the initial chapters of Sterne’s novel, Tristram, the narrator, claims that his narration is guided by the expectations of his narratees. Supposedly obliging those “who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last” (I.iv)1, the narrator justifies the excessively detailed account of his birth by a “backwardness in [his] nature to disappoint any one soul living” (ibid.). The ensuing suggestion of the narrator has often been read as a metaleptic move across diegetic levels:

To such, however, as do not choose to go so far back into these things, I can give no better advice, than they skip over the remaining part of this Chapter; for I declare before hand, ’tis wrote only for the curious and inquisitive.

────────────Shut the door.────────────────
I was begot in the night, betwixt the first Sunday and the first Monday in the month of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighteen. I am positive I was.— (Ibid.)

Monika Fludernik cites this passage from Tristram Shandy as a bona fide example of metalepsis, claiming that “the narrator in Book 1.4 orders the narratee to shut the door (on the story level!)” (2003b, 386), which would constitute the literal movement of the extradiegetic narratee into the diegesis. According to Werner Wolf, on the other hand, this passage, in which “the extradiegetic narrator asks the – equally extradiegetic (!) – fictional reader to ‘Shut the door’ […], does not fulfil the criterion of transgression” (2005, 90; emphases in the original) which is the defining characteristic of metalepsis. Both Fludernik and Wolf follow Genette’s definition, and both agree that speaker and addressee belong to the extradiegetic level, but they differ when it comes to judging on which diegetic level the door to be closed can effectively be located.

There are good reasons for both Fludernik’s and Wolf’s structural analyses of this excerpt – reasons which substantiate their respective decisions whether or not to regard this as an instance of metalepsis. Even though their accounts disagree, they share a tendency that is typical of narratological approaches to metaleptic narratives; metalepsis is usually presented, if not conceptualized, as a possibility of narrative that is independent of individual acts of understanding. Taken together, however, Fludernik’s and Wolf’s analyses suggest that metaleptic transgressions neither invoke some deep-structure logic that precedes and may become manifest in the structural analysis of given narratives nor are they a place of stable meanings that transcend the hermeneutic situation in which they come into being.

One way to account for this is the elusive nature of the circular metaleptic form. Like all taxonomies and categories of narratology, metalepsis is based on a structural relation: it presupposes what Nietzsche has termed the “construction of a pyramidal order […] and clearly marked boundaries” (Nietzsche 1992 [first German ed. 1896], 84) that exist beyond the contingent historical attempt to make sense of a particular narrative. But unlike all taxonomies and categories of narratology, metalepsis per definitionem denies the very structural relations that are the phenomenon’s prerequisite. Metalepsis is thus not only a structuralist category that presupposes a structural form that emerges unchanged in contingent attempts to understand, say, a passage from Tristram Shandy, but also the very category that challenges – but at the same time extends and enriches – narratology’s “pyramidal order.”

The various analyses, explications and reconceptualizations of metaleptic transgressions and their effects that have been developed in narratological monographs and articles since the 1980s are indicative of how metalepsis functions as a nodal point in a system of narratological categories. What ‘metalepsis’ denotes in narratological parlance is often subtly different from Genette’s initial account; analyses of metalepses are often contradictory (as in the case of Fludernik’s and Wolf’s description of the metaleptic form of the passage from Tristram Shandy) and there is no general consensus about the phenomenon’s scope or theoretical implications. Its unique position in a system of narratological distinctions and categories makes metalepsis indeed, as John Pier puts it, “a threshold of discovery” (2011, 275). A threshold which, as a narratological category, defies definition: in the introduction to the volume Metareference Across Media: Theory and Case Studies (2009), Wolf concedes that “metalepsis does not (yet) have a generally accepted definition” (50–51). More recently, Jeff Thoss has maintained that “one cannot but wonder whether, when we talk about metalepsis, we always talk about the same thing” (2015, 1–2).

The problem of narratological accounts of metalepsis, I maintain, lies in the relationship of tension between a simple definition of structural relations and a complex event of understanding2 which playfully questions and calls attention to the various elements of the hermeneutic situation in which it comes into being: the structuralist category relies on a complex set of historically situated prerequisites (which can never be defined once and for all). Wolf rightly points out that “the defining paradoxicality of metalepsis […] can refer to logical impossibilities (the contamination of the ontologically different realms of ‘nature’ and ‘art’/‘artefacts’) or to what goes beyond, and is therefore impossible according to reigning ‘doxa’ (e.g., the ‘orthodox’ idea that the present cannot influence the past)” (2013, 117). I would like to add that what Wolf terms “doxa” is not only incidental to but the very basis of the construction of a metaleptic contamination of “ontologically different realms” (ibid.). A close analysis of the realization of metaleptic potential makes visible what the structuralist category models: The construction of “ontologically different realms” (ibid.) relies on manifold relations (past and present, representation and represented, subject and object, cause and effect, etc.) which in turn rely on whole bundles of ‘orthodox’ ideas that specify what it means, say, that a past event is the cause for an effect in the present.

Considered as a dynamic, as an event of understanding, metalepsis foregrounds what narratological analyses conventionally bracket and what can be described from a Nietzschean perspective as the genesis of “the more solid, more universal and better known […] world” (Nietzsche 1992 [first German ed. 1896], 84) of narratological categories: “A continuum stands before us from which we isolate a pair of fragments, just in the same way as we perceive a movement as isolated points and therefore do not properly see but infer it […]. There is an infinite set of processes in that abrupt second which evades us.” This comment from The Gay Science (Nietzsche 2006 [first German ed. 1882], 112) is taken up again by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil:

One should not wrongly reify [verdinglichen] “cause” and “effect,” as the natural scientists do (and whoever, like them, thinks naturalistically) […] One should use “cause” and “effect” only as pure concepts, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication – not for explanation. […] [T]he effect does not follow cause, there is no rule of “law.” It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-eachother, relativity, constraint, number, law, the freedom, motive, and purpose; And when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed “in itself,” we act once more as we have always acted – mythologically. (1989 [first German ed. 1886], 29)

Along these lines, it could be argued that to designate a certain narrative as metaleptic does not offer an explanation, but constitutes a conventional fiction “for the purpose of designation and communication.” If we bracket the metaleptic dynamic (the event of understanding metalepsis) and consider metalepsis a formal property of a narrative object, we “act once more as we have always acted – mythologically” (ibid.) – that is, we think the category and its “symbol world” (ibid.) into the (narrative) continuum before us. This is a decidedly Nietzschean reading of narratological practice. Yet whoever thinks ‘naturalistically’ (or narratologically in the sense of restrictive theorists) is hard pressed to provide a sound basis for thinking, in Nietzsche’s words, the ‘myth’ of narrative structure into the ‘thing’ read or understood. As the radically different findings by Fludernik and Wolf demonstrate, the ‘causes,’ the ‘after-one-anothers,’ etc., are dependent on a complex hermeneutic situation in which a given narrative emerges.

I propose to answer this Nietzschean challenge to narratology by offering an account of how the narrative structuring that is the prerequisite of metalepsis can be traced back to the conditions and possibilities of the hermeneutic situation in which metaleptic transgressions come into being. Even though a Nietzschean denial of structuralist thought is an epistemological quandary that is relevant to understanding the metaleptic ‘form,’ this approach is based on the assumption that the (narrative) structuring of the continuum in which understanding takes place is inevitable, albeit a conventional fiction “for the purpose of designation and communication” (Nietzsche 1989 [first German ed. 1886], 29). Thus, this book is concerned with the intricate relation between a structuralist category and the event of understanding to which it belongs; it describes metalepsis narratologically; it explores the limits of structuralism; it offers an explanation of why and how metalepsis resists (but at the same time enhances) the narrative structuring of understanding; and it offers an account of the complexities that narratological categories cannot model.

As a ‘threshold of discovery,’ metalepsis offers a perspective on narrative that is dialogical: metalepsis can be taken to exemplify how hermeneutic experience and structural description depend upon one another. Ricoeur claimed in a contribution to the French magazine Esprit in 1963 that ‘it will never be possible to do hermeneutics without structuralism’ (cf. 622; this is a loose translation offered by Alison Scott-Baumann in 2009, cf. 22). Acknowledging that a consideration of the event of understanding metalepsis begins with a precise outline of the structure of narrative, Chapter 2 considers the history of narratological contributions that describe the metaleptic form, discusses their merits and problems, and offers, very much in a structuralist tradition, a reduction of complexity that provides a heuristic framework for understanding certain representational possibilities and phenomena: I propose a transmedial model of metalepsis, a scalar model of the metaleptic denial of diegetic properties, and a tree diagram of metaleptic types. This tree diagram introduces a new systematization of preceding types and offers new distinctions and terms. The new terms I propose are ‘figurative metalepsis’ (a category that subsumes what in narratological parlance is referred to as ‘epistemological’ and ‘rhetorical’ metalepses) and ‘immersive’ and ‘recursive’ metalepsis (a new distinction between types of ‘ontological’ transgression).

If we think of narratological categories as the structures established from an analytical distance, then twentieth-century hermeneutics offers the reintegration of those structures into an act of understanding that belongs ontologically to that which it understands. Proceeding from a structuralist account, this book traces the metaleptic dynamic from a hermeneutic perspective, based on the insight (to turn Ricoeur’s quip on its head) that ‘it will never be possible to do structuralism without hermeneutics.’ The experience of metalepsis has hermeneutic repercussions that throw light on the conditions and limitations of narratological analysis; metalepsis sheds light on narratology in general. Chapter 3 therefore considers the hermeneutics of narratology (a lacuna of narratological research) and argues that narratological practice and its explanatory paradigms still tend to be informed by a hermeneutics of ‘distanciation,’ a hermeneutics that strives for the methodological distance of the understanding subject. From this distance the object of narrative is seen in terms of a methodological reflection that allows the description of what is untouched by the contingency of the historical event of an understanding subjectivity. Such an analysis is, in other words, based on and directed towards what is common to the experiences of many (if not all) recipients of a given narrative (if not narrative per se). I assume that narratologists (no matter whether they think of their approach as restrictive or postclassical) generally do not expect the students they teach to consider the famous instance in chapter 55 of John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) as non-metaleptic (at least not once they are familiar with the concept). In view of this, I describe narratology (and this includes postclassical narratologies) as a practice that conceives of the experience of understanding narrative teleologically – that is, narratology is structured towards, and outlines, the unity of experiencing narratives from an analytical distance.

Yet, and this is one of the central arguments of this book, understanding metalepsis foregrounds how the conceptual prerequisites of narratological categories rely on unstable acts of understanding: Following Gadamer and Ricoeur, Chapter 3 argues that it is the dialectic between the hermeneutics of distanciation and the hermeneutics of belonging that characterizes the understanding of (metaleptic) narratives. What follows from this is that in the event of understanding metalepses one potentially encounters what Hans Georg Gadamer has termed the ‘negativity of hermeneutic experience,’ the experience of a selfreflexive, dynamic and dialogical structure that results in an oscillating openness. This is the second aim of Chapter 3: to show in how far the negativity of hermeneutic experience can be described as belonging to the hermeneutic situation in which metalepsis is understood; how the frameworks with which narrative is approached are subjected to an aporetic movement in the event of understanding metalepsis. Metalepsis, considered in the context of the conceptual frameworks with which narratives are approached (and, from a hermeneutic perspective, shaped), is characterized as the ‘impossible’ narration that highlights the limitations of these conceptual frameworks.

These insights into the hermeneutics of narratology and the event of understanding metalepsis inform the readings of metaleptic narratives in this book. The narratological concept of metalepsis has been applied to phenomena in a wide variety of genres and media, from drama (Landfester 1997, Fludernik 2003b, Genette 2004, Klimek 2009/2010) to pop lyrics (Ben-Merre 2011), from film (Genette 2004, Limoges 2008, Klimek 2009, Thoss 2011a, Sarkhosh 2011, Thoss 2015) to videogames (Harpold 2008, Ryan 2006) and comic books (Kukkonen 2011a, Thoss 2015). The transmediality of metalepsis is undisputed today. There i...