Book review: Metalepsis in Animation: Paradoxical Transgressions of Ontological Levels

Abstract

Erwin Feyersinger’s Metalepsis in Animation investigates a term that has been traditionally associated with the literary arts, offering a fascinating and compelling account of its central role in animation history. In classical rhetoric, ‘metalepsis’ is a verbal trope that uses far-fetched, ‘House that Jack Built’-style chains of metonymic association to represent characters and other story elements. The opening lines of Euripides’ Medea, for example, establish Jason as the author of the heroine’s sorrows not by naming him directly but by lamenting the mountain (Pelion) that bore the trees (pine) that produced the implements (oars) that propelled a ship (the Argo) to Medea’s home (Colchis). Literary theorist Gérard Genette later adopted the term, drawing on the element of spatial distance implicit in metaleptic representation to describe and analyze the complex effects of narrational perspectives in literary fiction. Genette argued that, in any act of storytelling, different ‘levels’ of embedded narratives might exist depending on who ‘sees’ and ‘tells’ story events, representing their content, frequency, duration, and order from a particular point of view. In the context of narratological theory, metalepsis has come to refer to the variously focalized voices of authors, narrators, and characters, and the dynamic effects that emerge based on their relative proximity to the story events they narrate. Feyersinger’s exploration of metalepsis builds on Genette’s approach by mapping the latter’s taxonomy of narrative voice onto an expressive visual form that routinely flouts expectations for verisimilitude. Animation, of course, has been defined since its origins precisely by its freedom from mimetic styles of realism, and this includes the diegetic separations of voice and perspective those styles typically employ. Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908), for example, features an artist’s hand breaching a story space in which figural metamorphosis dissolves notions of stable character; Chuck Jones’s Duck Amuck (1953) presents its visual narrative as the work of an artist who is himself a cartoon; Robert Stevenson’s Mary Poppins (1964) places live-action and drawn figures in a shared world where they interact directly with one another. In such cases, narrative voices and perspectives are not discrete or fixed; they do not stay ‘home’, but instead traverse and transgress ontological demarcations to subvert viewers’ expectations of reality rather than endorse them. Metalepsis in Animation explores such ‘paradoxical transgressions of ontological levels’ as a defining feature of animated media, suggesting that metalepsis offers a way to understand both the mechanism and the appeal of animation’s persistent disruptions of verisimilitude. Sandwiched between a brief introduction and conclusion, Feyersinger’s inquiry proceeds in two halves, each heralded by a short, discursive chapter defining terms followed by three lengthier investigative chapters. This neat, symmetrical structure belies the complexity of the topic 1102500 ANM0010.1177/17468477221102500animation: an interdisciplinary journalBook review book-review2022