on METALEPSIS
FROM "Interactive Narrative " chapter one of The Automatist Storytelling System: Putting the Editor's Knowledge in Software. Michael Murtaugh
Masters Thesis, MIT Media Lab
(C) 1996 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In storytelling we find a similar "split between worlds." The world created by the narrative, the diegesis, and the act which produces it, the narrating, are necessarily distinct.
Genette defines the idea of narrative levels by stating that "any event a narrative recounts is at a diegetic level immediately higher than the level at which the narrating act producing this narrative is placed." [2] Thus the foundation or bottom-most level of any narrative consists of a narrating act. It is at this level that the intended reader, or narratee, receives the narrative. Events which occur within the world of the narrative, or diegesis, are termed diegetic. Events occurring at the level of the narrating act are considered extradiegetic.
Genette goes on to define any shift between two levels of narrative, such as between the diegetic and non- or extradiegetic, as a metalepsis.
In its most straightforward form, a metalepsis occurs when the narrator tells the story of a character telling a story. At that point, the character assumes the role of narrator in a new higher level or meta-narrative. Genette designates any other form of metalepsis transgressive. In these cases, metalepses occur unexpectedly as an element initially perceived at one level is revealed to be or treated as if it occurs at another. Genette sites Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy as a prime example of this latter use.
On Sterne's use of metalepsis in the narration of Tristram Shandy, Genette notes that:
Sterne pushed the thing so far as to entreat the intervention of the reader, whom he beseeched to close the door or help Mr. Shandy get back to his bed, but the principle is the same:A quintessential set of examples of such an effect in film involves background music. If, for instance, as lush romantic music swells, one character says to the other "Sorry? I couldn't hear you over the music," or in the style of Tristram Shandy, a character asks that the sound be turned down (and then it is), the effect is typically comical. Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire presents an example tending more toward the fantastic when music in the soundtrack abruptly ceases as a character, an angel, clasps his hands over his ears. [4]
[Any] intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or [reader] into the diegetic universe ... produces an effect of strangeness that is either comical ... or fantastic. [3]Summing up the subject of transgressive metalepsis, Genette states that:
All these games, by the intensity of their effects, demonstrate the importance of the boundary they tax their ingenuity to overstep, in defiance of verisimilitude -- a boundary that is precisely the narrating (or the performance) itself: a shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells.Philosophical concerns aside, transgressive metalepsis are at the very least exceptional and disruptive points in a narrative. The repetition of such effects tends to distract the viewer from the depicted story and undermine the integrity of the diegesis.The most troubling thing about metalepsis indeed lies in this unacceptable and insistent hypothesis, that the extradiegetic is perhaps always diegetic, and that the narrator and his narratees -- you and I -- perhaps belong to some narrative. [5]
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NOTES[2] Genette, G. Narrative Discourse. Cornell University Press. 1980. p. 228
[3] Genette, pp. 234-235.
[4] This reference was suggested to me by Kevin Sawad Brooks.
[5] Genette, p. 236