Epilogue

The epilogue takes stock of the volume’s insights, reflects on the connections and tensions between the contributors’ individual approaches, and delineates how the kinds of critical intervention and conceptual recalibration offered here can set the scene for future interdisciplinary work. It sums up and explores the variations in perspective that remain in the light of the volume as a whole, while also sounding out the emerging common ground that can be established in spite of the sometimes irreducible—and productive—differences. It also draws out and comments on the recurring concerns of this volume—which cluster in particular around the issues of historically contingent reception aesthetics, dynamics of performance, affect, intermediality, narrative ontology, and differences between genres—in order to show how the volume as a whole advances the developing theoretical field of historical narratology. In doing so, it makes the case for the importance of expanding the scope and methods of narrative theory through incorporating specifically classical parameters of narration to confront and address some of the unsatisfactory dimensions of structuralist narratology. In this way, the epilogue also sketches avenues for future research and points out the ways in which the present volume seeks to set an agenda for new directions in classical and interdisciplinary scholarship.

Narrative and Lyric Levels in Catullus

This chapter revisits the challenges of thinking about narrative metalepsis in lyric contexts by considering the diverse corpus of Catullus. Catullus’ most obviously narrative poem—poem 64—offers rich possibilities for metaleptic readings, and the chapter particularly investigates the ways in which the boundary between the poem’s outer narrative and its inset, ostensibly ecphrastic story is navigated by two powerfully subjective presences, the narrator and Ariadne, by such means as apostrophe and mise en abyme. Yet Catullus is typically classified as a lyric poet, and the chapter also examines poems that fuse the narrative and lyric modes, looking at potentially hymnic addresses to divinities across the corpus, and the tension in poem 68 between, on the one hand, the tendency to establish a whole series of nested narrative levels through ring composition and simile, and, on the other, the pull of the lyric mode towards a unified poetic ‘present’. There is a particular emphasis on the interaction among speech acts in the first, second and third person. Catullus himself appears in all three ‘persons’ as a character in the corpus, but is also a Roman author in whose real existence we believe, and the chapter concludes by returning against this background to Genette’s concern that metalepsis prompts us to ask whether we may belong to some narrative—as Catullus indeed does.

Metalepsis and Metaphysics

This chapter examines the narratological concept of metalepsis in relation to metaphysical texts, investigating how competing metaphysical assumptions affect the ways in which metalepsis is thought to operate in relation to empirical experience. It takes as a major point of reference Christopher Nolan’s 2010 movie Inception, in which three distinct narrative levels are troped as dreams within dreams. The film’s closing scene raises and leaves unanswered the question whether the level inhabited at that point by the central character is his ‘reality’ (as he believes) or whether he is still within a dream. For many people who inhabit the world of empirical experience, that world is not ultimate ‘reality’, which lies at one level removed. As examples of this attitude in texts concerned with metaphysics, the chapter explores Fate in Virgil’s Aeneid and the apostrophized God in Augustine’s Confessions before focusing on the Platonic appeal to the world of the Forms. In the emergence of a ‘classical’ metaphysics of an ultimate reality lying beyond time, change, and narrative, however, the key ancient figure is Parmenides; but ancient texts that embrace those very features, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, already point to the ‘counter-classical’ metaphysics which has come to the fore in the wake of Heidegger’s Being and Time and has recently achieved remarkable prominence. The conclusion of the chapter explores how, within such a ‘counter-classical’ metaphysics, the narrative frames by which we order and project our empirical experience break in on each other as they establish what we accept as our ‘reality’.

Secondary Metalepsis?

This analysis of metalepsis in the Expositio Virgilianae Continentiae, an allegorical exposition of Virgil’s Aeneid by the sixth-century Christian Fulgentius, enables the formulation of a new critical concept, ‘secondary metalepsis’. In this phenomenon, the diegetic levels of author, narrator, and narrative are blurred not by the same author but by another, who employs the figure of the first author and their text within their own new (‘secondary’) work. The chapter identifies Genette’s ‘Virgil has Dido die’ as an example of secondary metalepsis rather than (as Genette claims) authorial metalepsis, before discussing key hermeneutic dynamics in the Expositio, a work whose most striking feature is its necromantic conceit that the exegesis is not in fact Fulgentius’, but is delivered by the shade of Virgil himself. In doing so, the chapter demonstrates how considering the metaleptic dynamics of literary criticism—both ancient and modern, both ‘nonfictional’ and embedded within unequivocally fictional frames—can help refine our understanding of metalepsis itself, its use in classical antiquity, and its far-reaching implications for literary-critical practice in general.

Close Encounters

This chapter explores the metaleptic incursions of deities into various spheres of narrative and acts of narration, focusing on two cases in Latin love elegy. It first sketches some of the key dynamics of divine epiphany in Greco-Roman poetry from Homer on, differentiating epiphanies in which the divinity inspires the poet from those in which characters receive prophetic information. In Latin love elegy, these categories can overlap, since the elegist is both the hero of his own story and simultaneously the omniscient extradiegetic narrator. So in [Tibullus] 3.4, Apollo appears to the poet Lygdamus, but, instead of acting as the god of poetic inspiration, simply informs Lygdamus of the infidelity of his puella Neaera, tells the story of his own love affair with Admetus, and offers advice about love. This epiphany is compared with its primary intertext, the visit of Amor to the exiled poet in Ovid, Ex Ponto 3.3. The chapter argues that elegy, as a genre in which author and narrator usually share a name but fulfil multiple narrative functions, is especially liable to a strong form of metalepsis; and that these two poems in particular use metaleptic divine epiphany to elide the differences between gods and poets, revisit the Augustan-era obsession with who has the authority to say what to whom, and thereby show how the forces of elegy destabilize hierarchies beyond those of gender and class. The chapter suggests in conclusion that both poems may owe something to the lost work of their predecessor Gallus.

Metalepsis and the Apostrophe of Heroes in Pindar

This chapter is an analysis of the metaleptic effect of apostrophe in narratives that are embedded in a lyric frame, using the example of the Pindaric epinician ode. In apostrophe, a narrator ‘turns away’ from his default addressee, but in contrast to epic, Pindaric lyric has many addressees: the chapter therefore begins with an analysis of the Pindaric ‘you’, a topic much less explored than the Pindaric ‘I’, and concludes that in an epinician ode the victor and his family are the default addressee. Turning to the three instances of narrative apostrophe in Pindaric myths, the chapter argues that, owing to the hymnic associations of early Greek apostrophe, these instances serve to anticipate a mythical (Pelops) or historical (Battus) character’s status as a hero enjoying hero cult. These apostrophes suggest the movement of a character into the world of the ode’s performance (epiphany) rather than the movement of the narrator and his narratee into the world of the mythical past (immersion or enargeia). The conclusion is drawn that whereas modern metalepsis usually has an illusion-breaking effect and is typically found in experimental texts, the narrative apostrophes in Pindar show that ancient metalepsis rather tends towards increasing the authority of the narrator and the ideological force of his tale.

Representation Delimited and Historicized

This chapter enriches the volume’s overall diachronic approach with an additional transmedial perspective as it compares cases of metalepsis in archaic and classical vase-painting with violations of levels of representation in epic and lyric poetry. It focuses, first, on how characters in texts and figures in painting address the recipients, either with apostrophe (in texts) or en face gaze (in pictures). It then considers cases in which the represented world of a painting seems to acknowledge its own representation, for instance when figures apparently lean against the edges of the vessel on which they are painted. The chapter argues that medial differences have a significant impact on metalepsis: not all textual metalepses have pictorial parallels, nor can we find equivalents to all pictorial metalepses in literature. However, it concludes that ancient literature and vase-painting nevertheless share traits that reveal a distinct tendency of ancient metalepsis: in both media the boundaries between the representation, the represented object, and the recipient were less clear-cut than in our modern view. The chapter concludes by suggesting a possible reason for this in the rootedness of ancient representations in specific contexts: specifically, performative settings for literature, and pragmatic utility for painted pots.

Anachronism as a Form of Metalepsis in Ancient Greek Literature

This chapter discusses anachronism as a form of metalepsis and different ways of understanding anachronism in the ancient and modern worlds. The chapter begins by highlighting potential complexities in applying Genette’s model of metalepsis to ancient literature, drawing out the differences between the case of a character about to murder a reader in Cortázar’s ‘Continuity of Parks’ (discussed by Genette) and that of a character, Helen, blinding and then healing an author in Stesichorus’ Palinode. It then turns to anachronism, a phenomenon which renders synchronous things that, from a historical/chronological perspective, do not belong to a shared temporal plane, and can thus be understood as metaleptic when the time periods involved are ‘the world in which one tells’ (the present) and ‘the world of which one tells’ (often, in the ancient world, the remote heroic past). The chapter moves from a modern instance which highlights anachronism’s pointedly transgressive potential (the use of 1970s music in Brian Helgeland’s 1370s-set movie, A Knight’s Tale) to the dominant ancient discourse about anachronism, according to which most anachronism is inadvertent and the critic’s job is to correct it. But the chapter argues that despite this, ancient sources such as Plato’s Symposium do recognize a more artful use of anachronism and potential modes of audience response to it, and concludes by asking what a pointedly erudite astronomical anachronism in a poem of Theocritus tells us about the audience envisaged by its author.

Metalepsis and Readerly Investment in Fictional Characters

This chapter is a critical discussion of the metaleptic phenomenon of apostrophizing fictional and/or long-dead characters. It asks what model of engagement with fiction emerges if one takes the gesture of speaking to a fictional character literally, not merely as a rhetorical trope but a meaningful speech act. In this mode of reading, modelled by an apostrophizing author as first reader of their own text, apostrophe suggests that characters are, somehow, still available to be interacted with. Apostrophe therefore serves as an invitation for readers to invest in characters and form relationships with them, for instance loving them or mourning for them. By discussing four rather different examples—Homeric epic, Sapphic lyric, a bucolic poem by Theocritus, and a progymnasma by Musonius Rufus—the chapter argues that apostrophe not only repays reading as a model of how readers engage with fiction, but that each text offers its own version of this engagement.

By Way of Introduction Back to the Future?

This chapter offers a succinct account of metalepsis in its modern (re-)conceptualization, largely following Genette, both to set the scene for the subsequent chapters and to interrogate the state of modern theorization from a classical perspective. While Genette’s intervention has arguably given the concept a more cohesive outlook than it ever had in its long (if now largely obliterated) history, might current debates have something to gain from revisiting earlier theorizations of metalepsis avant Genette? Rather than seeking to reconstruct a genealogy of the concept’s transformation from ancient rhetoric to contemporary criticism, this chapter offers a critical reappraisal of current thinking on narratological metalepsis by way of bringing back into the debate the voices of classical rhetoricians, critics, and grammarians who dealt with metalepsis in its earlier incarnations. The chapter examines how the logics, mechanics, structural principles, and effects attributed to metalepsis by scholars in antiquity and today compare. In particular, it asks what conceptual relationship exists between the trope ‘metalepsis’ (often discussed as a variant of metonymy), the narratological concept of metalepsis (which shares with metonymy a story of structuralist reinvention), and notions of metalepsis as literary allusion; and proposes that thinking of metalepsis in all three cases in terms of either a trope or a figure can not only help to safeguard the concept’s critical acumen, but also renders visible how theorizing metalepsis from a rigorously transhistorical perspective requires a built-in account of the variabilities that arise under the conditions of changing literary and cultural-historical contexts.