WHAT IS CALLED METALEPSIS?

Stories within stories are anything but rare in the cinema. An arbitrary and highly selective list of films where they feature strongly would include Mabel's Dramatic Career (1913), Sherlock Jr. (1924), Hiroshima mon amour (1959), The Saragossa Manuscript (1965), La Nuit américaine (1973), Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1980), Videodrome (1983), eXistenZ (1999), Adaptation (2002), Hable con ella (2002), Synecdoche, New York (2008), Inception (2010), Cloud Atlas (2012) and The Forbidden Room (2015). When we encounter a narrative within another narrative we are dealing, in a certain sense, with an ontological hierarchy. In the most general sense (from the perspective of our ‘real’ world) everything in a narrative is on the same ontological level – is, precisely, narrative. When, however, a narrative contains another narrative, then from the perspective of the containing narrative (according to which the ‘container’ is not narrative but reality), the contained narrative is, nevertheless, still narrative. The two narratives are thus ontologically distinct and, generally, there cannot be direct exchange between the two: such exchange is as impossible as it would be for J. K. Rowling to meet Harry Potter. But, nevertheless, nested narratives not infrequently do feature such supposedly ‘impossible’ crossovers. Entanglements between nested stories within a single work are increasingly being studied under the rubric of metalepsis (see, for example, Kiss 2012 and Buckland 2013). Gérard Genette, whose Figures III (1972) formulated the basics of the modern understanding of metalepsis, subsequently devoted a whole book to the subject (Genette 2004).

The origins of the term and the history of its usage are complicated and at times contradictory. Genette has sorted through these various meanings and come to the conclusion that the clearest and most useful application of the term is to call metalepsis any procedure ‘which unites, in one sense or another, the author and their work, or more generally the producer of a representation with that representation itself’ (ibid: 14; my translation). This definition comes, in the course of Genette's book, to broaden out slightly to refer to any situation where ontologically distinct levels (whether properly so, or merely fictionally so, from within the diegesis) encounter one another.