Unfolding and crossing the augmented space: Metaleptic tools and processes within graphic narrative installations

Abstract

Abstract Based on the notion of interactional metalepsis as described by Karin Kukkonen, Astrid Ensslin and Alice Bell, this article aims to contribute towards the study of metalepsis in terms of the specificity of installations. Particularly, installations of graphic narratives comics, which, I argue, propose metaleptic effects implied and generated by specific navigational devices and characteristics that suggest an ongoing co-influence between spatial (re)configurations and narrative. In their turn, these (re)configurations occur as a consequence of the conjunction of the actual space with the composition of the installation, which are, at the same time, influenced by, and an influence for, the narrative focalization through the textual, virtual and tridimensional spaces. In this sense, the analysis of Daniel Goodbrey’s The Archivist and Dave McKean’s The Rut will take into account the ways in which the expository and narrative routes inscribe themselves in the physical space of the gallery and the ways in which spaces relate with characters’ and readers’ behaviours. Therefore, by relating the notion of interactional metalepsis with spatial and discursive dynamics, the resulting article will also question the architectural and compositional characteristics not only as constraints but also as promoters of a dynamic context that might function as a kind of interference in the overall narrative. This way, I argue that it is this simultaneous intertwining and interference between space and narrative that, in the end, comply with the specificity of the media and calls for an ‘augmented reading’, which ends up absorbing transgressions as means of expansion, hence contributing towards a blurring of narrative, aesthetic and conceptual borders.