Deriving the paradoxical effects of metalepsis with Nerval, Balzac and Genette

Deriving the paradoxical effects of metalepsis
(A joint work with Dag Haug)

In Gérard de Nerval’s novella, Sylvie, a first-person narrator describes what he sees as he travels, concluding with (1), where the text paradoxically identifies the narration time and the story time:

1. While the coach is making its way up to the hills, let us piece together the memories of the days when I often visited these parts.

This paradox is related to metalepsis, discussed by Genette (1980). However, he focused on third person narration, viz. (2), from Balzac’s Illusions perdues, which gives the impression of a transgression of an ontological boundary when the narrator suddenly enters the text. 

2. While the venerable churchman climbs the ramps of Angouleme, it is not useless to explain...

While there is extensive work on metalepsis in literary studies (see, e.g., Fludernik 2003; Matzner & Trimble 2020), we know of only one semantic analysis, by Bücking (2023), who treats metalepsis as a species of copredication, which occurs when a sentence receives a true reading despite prima facie ascribing categorically incompatible properties to a single entity (see, e.g., Liebesman & Magidor 2023). We argue that this analysis cannot account for (1) and propose a new analysis that can account for both (1) and (2), while also doing justice to potential differences in their aesthetic import. In particular, we use tools in Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp & Reyle 1993, Kamp et al 2011) to model (1) as involving the identification of the narration and story time in the scope of a fictional operator (in the style of Lewis 1978). In (2), we propose the paradox arises from narrator accommodation, modelled based on Altshuler & Maier (2022)’s analysis of ‘imaginative resistance’.

In sum, we analyse a phenomenon, metalepsis, that hasn't been discussed in semantics until recently, but is important because it sheds new light on the semantics and pragmatics of paradoxical statements, fiction and narrator accommodation.

Image credit: Title page of Honoré de Balzac's Lost Illusions, Adrien-Moreau, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons