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Abstract: The aim of this study is to challenge the view that narrative metalepsis is incompatible with the writing about the past and history. I study three works by francophone writers in which metalepsis and another similar narrative device, syllepsis, are used in interesting ways in stories dealing in different ways with the past. In C F Ramuz's short story Scene dans la foret, both devices are used in order to give the reader the impression of being in physical contact with past events and with the fictional events represented in the story. The past here is of an individual type. In Marie NDiaye's first story of her novel Three Strong Women, the individual past can be read as an allegory of France's postcolonial relation to the former African colonies. Metalepsis is used in order to suggest that the character accepts her past. In Patrick Chamoiseau's novel Biblique des derniers gestes, metalepses are used in order to suggest a physical contact with the forgotten history of slavery.
Key words: Metalepsis, syllepsis, narratology, historiography, postcolonialism, historiographic metafiction.
The aim of this study is to challenge the view that narrative metalepsis is incompatible with the writing about the past, especially when this past is meant to belong to the real world. In this process, I will therefore distinguish between the past of individuals, both fictional and real, and history, which is the common past and concerns the real world. All these forms of the past can appear in fiction and can be connected in intricate ways. The works analyzed in this article have been chosen in such ways as to highlight some such intricate connections.
Paradoxical in nature, narrative metalepsis is considered as one of four paradoxical narrative devices by the Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology in Hamburg. These devices are paradoxical because they undermine the doxa of realistic fiction by violating the boundary between the world of the telling and the world of the told (cf. Klaus Meyer-Minnemann and Sabine Schlickers). Indeed, according to Gérard Genette's first definition, narrative metalepsis is "any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by the diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse" (1988:234-235). The paradox of metalepsis is highlighted even more clearly...