Metalepsis and Monstrosity: The Boundaries of Narrative Structure in Beowulf

We have come to understand the narrative of Beowulf to be structured by means of the interaction between the poem's two primary frames of reference: Christian and pagan. With the rejection of the critical attitude that the Christian elements of Beowulf are mere "coloring," irony becomes a fundamental structural component of the poet's narrative strategy.¹ The relatively benighted pagan perspective is thus circumscribed by the broader Christian worldview possessed by the poet and his audience. An ironic divide is established between these two levels (or frames) of narration: between what narratology terms the diegetic level of the main story and the extradiegetic level at which the Christian poet is narrating (the embedded Lays of Sigemund and Hildeburh, by contrast, occur at the hypodiegetic level of narration).² The poet can employ this superior, ironic vantage to explore and critique the limitations of the pagan-heroic code which guides the actions and motivates the desires of his heathen heroes. For the influential exponents of this view of the poem, Beowulf is a sympathetic, if uncompromising, account of a noble ancestry utterly lost because of its limited vision.³

The purpose of this essay is not to oppose directly this widely accepted assessment of the poem's theme and structure, but rather to suggest that the ironic stage of reading Beowulf, while necessary, cannot be terminal. Instead, an understanding of the text's narrative structure may be furthered by a consideration of metalepsis, a narrative trope potentially antagonistic to irony.⁴ Where irony functions via a disjunction between levels of awareness or knowledge, metalepsis breaks down the barriers between these levels (often contrary to logic). In the study of narrative, metalepsis refers to the transgression of frames of narration.⁵ The French structuralist critic Gérard Genette, one of the founders of modern narratology, states of this rupture of narrative boundaries that "any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse, produces an effect of strangeness that is either comical or fantastic."⁶ Although far more common in explicit form in postmodern fiction (such as that of Samuel Beckett), an example in medieval literature of a metaleptic intrusion originating from a "lower" narrative level (particularly relevant to this essay) is provided by Chaucer's Merchant's Tale, when a fictional character within the tale told by the Merchant mentions the Wife of Bath, since she exists on another narrative level as one of the pilgrims listening to the Merchant. But the ludic potential of metalepsis is matched by its unsettling and disturbing effects: Genette observes that "the most troubling thing about metalepsis . . . lies in this unacceptable and insistent hypothesis, that the extradiegetic is perhaps always diegetic and that the narrator and his narratees—you and I—perhaps belong to some narrative."⁷ Indeed, an investigation into the metaleptic potential of the text of Beowulf may serve to unsettle somewhat the comfortable and superior vantage of the ironic reader.⁸

A consideration of narrative boundaries (and their rupture) in Beowulf can proceed most fruitfully by means of a consideration of the depiction of boundary-space in the text itself—the formation of the former, in fact, depends critically on the latter. More specifically, this essay will focus first on the boundaries of the gigantic and monstrous body and, second, on the physical border upon which, the poet tells us, the monster treads.⁹ It is along these "seams" in the text that the narrative is under the greatest stress and the potential for a metaleptic irruption manifests itself.

We can begin with the observation that bodies in Beowulf are unstable sites with highly elastic borders—a persistent motif within the poem is the tendency of both the monstrous and heroic body to swell unnaturally, seemingly under the internal pressure of excessive vitality. Critical scrutiny into the dimensions of the monstrous and heroic body in Beowulf has focused particular attention on the moral associations that attach themselves to the gigantic corpus. Stephen C. Bandy offers a wide-ranging...