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  • Metafiction, Narrative Metalepsis, and New Media Forms in The Neverending Story and the Inkworld Trilogy
  • Poushali Bhadury (bio)

Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story (1979, translated in 1983 by Ralph Manheim) and Cornelia Funke’s Inkworld trilogy—Inkheart (2003), Inkspell (2005), and Inkdeath (2008) (translated by Anthea Bell)—were written more than two decades apart, yet we may discern fundamental philosophical similarities between these two sets of children’s fantasy novels, beyond the fact that both are texts originally written in German and then translated into English to become children’s fantasy bestsellers. Apart from their common national origin, they both belong to the class of “children’s books whose protagonists are bookworms” (Nelson 223) and are, therefore, prime examples of novels that showcase the complex relationship between books and their readers. More significant, however, is the fact that they are works of children’s metafiction as well. In her 1984 book-length study, Patricia Waugh proposes one of the most influential definitions of “metafiction”:

Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text.

(2, italics in original)

Both Funke’s and Ende’s texts fit neatly within the limits of Waugh’s definition: they are self-conscious narratives that display an extraordinary consciousness of books as both material artifacts and imaginative objects that occupy in a sense a dual position in the world, capable of influencing and changing material reality at different discursive levels. These fantasy texts thus extend and celebrate the unique position of books as objects intrinsic to the human experience. The novels are also remarkable for the ways in [End Page 301] which their narrative structures deliberately dissolve diegetic boundaries and engage in what Gérard Genette terms “narrative metalepsis,” that is, the act of fictional characters and/or narrators breaching different nesting narrative levels.1 In the process, these literary works display a highly philosophical stance about the webbed, intertextual, contingent nature of reality or life itself.

A number of literary critics—Dudley Jones (1999), Virginie Douglas (2004), and Joe Sutlifff Sanders (2009), among others—previously have explored the category of children’s metafiction, teasing out the various narrative strategies these texts display, and theorizing about their didactic, moral, or critical functions. Some of this scholarly commentary has taken note of Ende’s and Funke’s texts in particular.2 Other narrative and media theorists, such as N. Katherine Hayles and Marie-Laure Ryan, have commented on the moral and ideological implications of the concept of metalepsis, in texts both literary and extra-literary. Following these scholarly explorations, this article delves into the various ways in which Ende’s and Funke’s novels manifest as well as negotiate their metatextual status, with special focus on their instances of narrative metalepsis. It then explores Funke and Ende’s own ambiguous treatments of the transgressive breaches in which their narratives abound, considering such representations in the context of morally-loaded critical receptions of the concept of “metalepsis” by certain narrative theorists. While celebrating the power of the imagination, the “violence” inherent in such transgressions also lays down the essentially negative, cautionary aspect of excessive imaginative play by the child reader.

This article argues further that the self-reflexive narrative strategies in Ende’s and Funke’s fantasy novels—especially the depictions of complex reader-book relationships—mimic certain interactive user-text dynamics inherent within other (new) media forms, such as electronic literature or hypertext fiction. I conclude by addressing the desire for accessing the fictional realm that such immersive, metaleptic narratives generate in their readers. The aspiration to metaleptic transgression is more openly embraced in new media forms; I contend that these works of children’s metafiction invite their readers to (inter)actively engage with the story beyond just the book (i.e., codex) format, and implicitly gesture toward other media—commodities and spinoffs such as video games...

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