Ontological Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology

Abstract

In this article, we focus on ontological metalepses that involve represented transgressions of world boundaries as one manifestation of the unnatural. We first discriminate between ascending, descending, and horizontal metaleptic jumps a three types of unnatural metalepses, or, more specifically, metalepses physically or logically impossible (Alber 80) and, in a second step, try to determine their potential functions. We also propose a new cognitive model that modifies Gerard Genette's structuralist model to conceptualize ontological metaleptic jumps as (1) vertical interactions either between the actual world and a storyworld or between nested storyworlds, or as (2) horizontal transmigrations between storyworlds.2 We argue that our postclassical method offers a more effective way of analyzing metalepsis because it allows us to describe the nature of ontological metalepsis more accurately and also because it embraces interpretation. We place this article on the overlap between unnatural narratology and transmedial narratology insofar as we analyze ontological metalepsis, an unnatural phenomenon, in both print and Storyspace hypertext fiction.