Scene Shift, Metalepsis, and the Metaleptic Mode

Abstract

When Gerard Genette coined the term in the fifth chapter (on Voice) of his Discours du recit, he defined it as any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse (as in Cortazar) [...] (Narrative Discourse 234-35; Figures IH 244). Genette had already given an example of metalepsis in the second chapter (Duration) when he refers to a typically Balzacian narrative pause in La Vieille Fille in which narrator and together the Cormon townhouse in order to gain a view of the scene: we know that the Balzacian novel, on the contrary, established a typically extratemporal descriptive canon [...], a canon where the narrator, forsaking the cause of the story [...], makes it his business, in his own name and solely for the information of his reader, to describe a scene that at this point in the story no one, strictly speaking, is looking at. For example, as the sentence in the Vieille Fille that opens the scene at the Cormon townhouse certainly indicates: Now, however, it will be necessary to enter the household of that elderly spinster toward whom so many interests converge, and within whose walls the in this are to meet this very evening. This entering is obviously the doing of the narrator and alone, who are going to wander over the house and the garden while the real actors in this Scene continue to attend to their business elsewhere, or rather wait to go back to their business until the narrative agrees to return to them and restore them to life.(100-01; 134-35) In this passage the narrator accompanied by the reader seemingly moves into the world of the fiction, pointing out to the narratee the setting of events to be described in the following pages. This technique is very similar to one common in Fielding's novels, first pointed out in his doctoral dissertation by Wilhelm Fuger, one of the doyens of German narratology: But we will be more courteous to our than he [the coachman] was to Mrs Slipslop, and leaving the coach and its company to pursue their journey, we will carry our on after Parson Adams [...] (Joseph Andrews 2.7). In these examples, two characteristic features are to be noted. First, the discourse level and story level in an authorial narrative (heterodiegetic narrative with zero focalization) seem to merge ontologically or existentially (the narrator and narratee seem to have entered the story world at least in imagination if not in real fact). Second, this curious imaginative transgression of narrative levels occurs in a pause of the story, as a narratorial insertion corresponding to no action on the plot level. term transgression, actually, is quite inadequate to the effect of these passages since they tend to enhance the realistic illusion of storyworld representation, aiding the narratee's (as well as the reader's) imaginative immersion into the story rather than foregrounding the metafictional and transgressive (nonrealistic) properties of such an imaginative stepping into the story world. In the footnote attached to the paragraph in chapter 2 of Narrative Discourse from which I began by quoting, Genette in fact compares the device to a metaphoric Gygean ring--a figure that Genette borrows from Theophile Gautier--that allows narrator and narratee to be present but invisible on the scene: Gautier will use this technique to the point of a flippancy that bares it, as the Formalists would say: The Marquise inhabited a separate suite, which the Marquis did not enter unless he was announced. We will commit this impropriety that authors of all times have allowed themselves, and without saying a word to the buttons who would have forwarned the lodger, we will penetrate into the bedroom, sure of disturbing no one. …

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