Is Metaleptic Fiction Paradoxical?

Narrative metalepsis, first systematically recognized by Genette (1972/1980), consists in what is commonly called the "mixing up" of otherwise distinct "narrative levels" or the "transgression" of "borders" between such levels. Core examples of the phenomenon include Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), where a movie character steps down from the screen, and Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), where fictional characters are conspiring against their author.¹

Let us call the claim that the "mixing up" of "narrative levels" that is part and parcel of metalepsis centrally involves a paradox the paradox analysis of metalepsis. So what is a paradox? As a quick glance in any dictionary reveals, at least two main notions need to be distinguished. The first is a colloquial sense of paradoxical. Something is paradoxical in this sense if it is strange or odd or difficult to understand, given what we believe.² Thus a person can be said to show paradoxical behavior in the colloquial sense if her behavior is difficult to understand. In a second, terminological sense, paradoxical applies to linguistic entities only, such as assertions or sentences. Something is paradoxical in this sense if it seems to imply a contradictory or otherwise unacceptable conclusion.³ A slightly more precise formulation is found in the introductory pages of R. M. Sainsbury's discussion of classical examples of paradoxes: a paradox is "an apparently unacceptable conclusion derived by apparently acceptable reasoning from acceptable premises" (1995: 1). Again, the clearest case of an unacceptable conclusion is a contradictory one such as, say, "Peter flew to India yesterday and Peter did not fly to India yesterday"

Is metalepsis paradoxical? As long as we take paradoxical to mean odd, strange, or difficult to understand, presumably everybody will agree on the evaluation of the phenomenon: that a movie character steps down from the screen or some fictional character conspires against her author is indeed strange. Also, there should be little difficulty in explaining why this is so: both The Purple Rose of Cairo and At Swim-Two-Birds are set in a world that is in other respects very similar to ours, and we are surely entitled to regard such blatant departures from the ordinary as strange.

However, claiming that metalepsis is paradoxical in the colloquial sense is not only (trivially) true but also uninformative. In saying that metalepsis is strange (or odd, or difficult to understand, given what we believe) we do not learn much, if anything, about the phenomenon. In particular, we do not learn what makes it so, that is, what mechanisms are involved in or responsible for the apparent strangeness. This is not the case with the terminological notion of paradox. Claiming that something is paradoxical in the terminological sense involves a much more precise statement about the target phenomenon; moreover, it involves an idea of how to deal with it. Let us elaborate on this thought a bit.

If some phenomenon is paradoxical in the terminological sense, then one's description of the phenomenon is unacceptable. In the clearest case of paradox, this is so because our description is contradictory.⁴ Consider an example from aesthetics. The fact that some people pursue art genres such as tragedies or horror movies, which exhibit dreadful or shocking or simply ugly scenes or plots, has, in the case of tragedy, a long history of puzzling philosophers.⁵ When discussing what he calls the "paradox of painful art," Aaron Smuts presents the following three sentences:

1. 1. People avoid things that provide painful experiences and only pursue things that provide pleasurable experiences.

2. 2. People have painful experiences in response to putatively painful art (e.g., tragedies, melodramas, religious works, sad songs, and horror).

3. 3. People pursue putatively painful art. (2009: 42)

This way of expressing the paradoxical fact that people pursue what is painful for them has the nice benefit of stating the problem at hand as clearly as possible: all three sentences seem to be true. But not all three can be true simultaneously. So we need to give up at least one. A...