Horizontal metalepsis in narrative fiction

Abstract

This article presents a paradoxical narrative device that is controversially discussed in narratology. Since the introduction of metalepsis into narratology by Gérard Genette in the “Discours du récit” (1972) – “Tous ces jeux manifestent […] l’importance de la limite qu’ils s’ingénient à franchir au mépris de la vraisemblance, et qui est précisément la narration (ou la représentation) elle-même; frontière mouvante mais sacrée entre deux mondes: celui où l’on raconte, celui que l’on raconte” “All these games show […] the importance of the boundary that they try so hard to cross, in defiance of verisimilitude, and which is precisely narration (or representation) itself; a moving but sacred boundary between two worlds: the world in which someone tells, and the world that someone tells” (my translation).  – metalepsis was always modelled vertically. As early as 2005, Sabine Schlickers and Klaus Meyer-Minnemann proposed a horizontal modelling of this narrative device at a Paris conference on the metalepsis. In the following, I would like to take up this proposal once again, present the more recent criticism of this concept and then demonstrate the functioning of horizontal metalepsis using a series of examples from Argentinian literature and the visual arts.