Discourse Deixis in Metafiction by Macrae Andrea;

Author:Macrae, Andrea;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2019-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

4.2 Metaleptic Awareness

Thoss uses the term “metaleptic awareness” to describe an instance of a “protagonist’s growing awareness that he is merely a character in a […] book” (2011, p. 194). Hanebeck follows Nelles in terming metaleptic awareness “figurative […] epistemological metalepsis” (cf. Nelles, 1997, pp. 154–155) and defines it as “a character’s display of knowledge of superordinate diegetic universes in a paradoxical violation of representational logic” (Hanebeck, 2017, p. 85; cf. McHale, 1987, p. 123). Metaleptic awareness is not a particularly postmodern phenomenon. For example, Wolf discusses the “ ‘unnatural’ awareness of the existence of spectators on the part of characters” in some medieval religious drama (2013, p. 131). It is, nonetheless, a more frequent phenomenon in postmodern metafiction.

Metaleptic awareness, though always ‘upward’, can involve awareness of various different aspects of superordinate levels. Within Thoss’s description of his category of “storyworld-reality metalepsis”, he includes instances of characters who “seemingly perceive reality from inside the storyworld” (2015, p. 28, p. 30). He also includes instances in which storyworld entities “perceive […] their own medium, [and] the means of narration or representation that create them and their world” within his description of “storyworld-discourse metalepsis” (p. 31). As an example of the latter, Thoss describes an instance in which a character in a novel refers to “the previous chapters” (Rankin, 1997, p. 126), seemingly aware that he is in a novel, conscious of its physical materiality, and also “up-to-date on what happened in [those] previous chapters, despite the fact that he was not present in any of them” (Thoss, 2015, p. 66). In its “weakest form” this upward metaleptic awareness would involve characters who “simply know they are in a novel” (p. 34), but other (implicitly ‘stronger’) forms would involve awareness of the physical text (font, pages, etc.) (p. 35). Through analysis of examples of this kind of character metaleptic awareness in Johnson, Barth, and Katz, the nature of this kind of metaleptic awareness, and the role of discourse deixis within it, can be investigated.

There are several instances of Thoss’s ‘weakest’ form of characters’ metaleptic awareness of their discursive context and construction in Johnson and Katz. Johnson’s protagonist, Christie, plus the two unnamed mothers in the book and a further minor character called Headlam all refer to the ‘novel’ within which they exist. Both Christie’s mother and the mother of his girlfriend, the Shrike, use constructions which simultaneously affirm and disrupt the suspension of disbelief. Christie’s mother says “My son: I have for the purposes of this novel been your mother for the past eighteen years and five months” (1973, p. 27), and later the Shrike’s mother says “it was worth it, all those years of sacrifice, just to get my daughter placed in a respectable novel like this, you know” (p. 156). The references to the past made by the two mothers—“for the past eighteen years and five months” and “all those years of sacrifice”—construct the illusion of a real historical past for themselves and for the chronology of the world of the

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