The Paraleptic Effect

Abstract

This article examines the alleged narratological paradox of paralepsis. It is argued that the first-person narrators of Moby-Dick, À la recherche du temps perdu and The Great Gatsby (to name but three prominent examples) occasionally display an inexplicable awareness of facts that would be naturally inaccessible to them (knowledge of other people’s thoughts, minute familiarity with unwitnessed events, etc.). Paralepsis, as Genette calls it, can be defined as the class of situations in which a first-person narrator seems to exercise the impossible epistemic privilege. This paper argues against the existence of genuine paraleptic events on two levels. First, it is argued that this kind of narration is rarely epistemically paradoxical. Even some of the strongest candidates for paralepsis could be naturalized (the reader can detect possible natural ways in which the narrator might have obtained the seemingly impossible information). Second, even in cases where they cannot be convincingly naturalized, “paralepses” need not be mysterious. It is often possible to read them (as P. Dawson has done) as “authorial performances.” They can be explained as instances of a specific rhetorical procedure that we have termed raconteural narration: a mode of narration in which, for the sake of more convincing exposition, mere conjectures are offered without the usual modal phrases that indicate the speculative quality of such assertions and thus create the erroneous impression of uncanny narrative knowledge.