This letter is about how reading Faulkner reminded me of the concept of metalepsis. Some aspects of that word’s meaning are quite useful, but I likely won’t be using it again in future letters.
As I Lay Dying is a stone-cold masterpiece of Faulkner’s early period. The story of a troubled family’s odyssey to bury the mother figure in her hometown is like a page-perfect screenplay, but delivered in a subjective and experimental form. As the book unfolds through nearly a hundred vignettes from different first person perspectives, we have to surmise the narrative that’s taking place around these characters.
So what the hell is metalepsis?
Metalepsis is a rhetorical figure that uses a word or phrase from a well-known expression in a new context. “I gotta catch the worm tomorrow” is an utterance that leans on the idiom “early bird gets the worm” (this example from Wikipedia feels hard to top). Miklos Szentkuthy describes a character in Prae as “analphabetic in matters of elegance,” alluding to “knowing the ABCs” to refer to rudimentary knowledge of something. Perhaps the phrase “blind as a bat” could be considered one, since bats only fly as if they couldn’t see. Harold Bloom said that metalepsis is a “metonymy of a metonymy” because of the way it links tropes together by way of the tropes’ constituent parts.
Metalepsis is also relevant to kennings in ancient Scandinavian and Nordic literature, because they marshal different images together to determine a noun in a circumlocutory way, like a ship being called a horse of the waves.
Finally and most relevant to us, metalepsis has a metaphorical application to modern narrative studies. It’s used to explain what are called “ontological impossibilities.” Some plotlines flagrantly violate the nature of our being, like when a protagonist gets transported into the book or film they were consuming. Or a novel can consist of an array of separate realities that leave impressions on each other, like the air raid siren over London in the opening of Gravity’s Rainbow that faintly echoes through one of the book’s concluding scenes in California. The mock reality of these works are in fact multiple realities incorporated and stitched together.
But metalepsis doesn’t merely apply to these imaginary worlds increasingly produced by fiction after the emergence of modernism. Metalepsis describes how what we call the “voice” of prose fiction is not itself a static entity but split into logically distinct, interdependent, and in many ways oppositional worlds. “World” here is metaphorical too, referring not to the fictive landscape or other narrative levels that the characters of a story reside in, but the intellectual structuring of the characters, their attitudes, their way of perceiving their circumstances, and all the rest. Not reality per se, then, but social reality—the social reality we refer to when we say “What’s the color of the sky in your world?”
As I Lay Dying presents a few chapters from the point of view of Vardaman Bundren, and this is a great example of the narrative metalepsis I’m talking about. Vardaman is maybe ten at the oldest, and the way he narrates his chapters is clipped and simple, sometimes just declaring that Cash is his brother, Dewey Dell is his sister, etc. He can only acknowledge the death of his mother with the single striking line “My mother is a fish.”
But take a look at this passage early in the novel, when Vardaman runs off to the woods to deal with his feelings about his mother being nailed shut in a coffin, after he’d cleaned and butchered a fish:
It is dark. I can hear wood, silence: I know them. But not living sounds, not even him. It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components—snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a coordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is. I see him dissolve—legs, a rolling eye, a gaudy splotching like cold flames—and float upon the dark in fading solution; all one yet neither; all either yet none. I can see hearing coil toward him, caressing, shaping his hard shape—fetlock, hip, shoulder and head; smell and sound. I am not afraid.
Vardaman never demonstrated this kind of vocabulary before (scattering of components? ammoniac?). We don’t suspect that Vardaman is a secret baby genius; this expression is not purely his own. Another agent is lending him this language to express what he is perceiving, namely his older brother Cash passing through in the woods without noticing Vardaman. This is another “mind” that has a wide vocabulary (and some philosophical training) and can verbalize what Vardaman is trying to think about (and also how Vardaman reflects on himself), the way we can only go off our sense impressions, the way we only have our first-person conscious experience and everyone else has their own, a “mind” that does a little editorializing with “gaudy splotching.”
A fundamental implication of this understanding of metalepsis is that no matter what perspective you employ as a writer, your story’s characters are actually articulated fusions of themselves and the “narrator.” This fact has been immeasurably important for me to understand in order to write decent fiction. A story world is not one world, but one already split into the world of agents and events and the world of the narration. Part of Faulkner’s high modernism was to “deconstruct” this basic mechanism and foreground it for us in such a pronounced way. It can easily get more extreme, such as when Anthony Burgess and Alan Moore wrote from the perspective of Neanderthals, thereby relating an experience of beings with a linguistic capacity they could not have had. But it can just as well be a subtle and incremental approach toward the metafictional, like Robert Musil’s ditzy Viennese socialites in The Man Without Qualities, who dully come to the realization, over many hundreds of pages, that they may in fact be characters in a fiction.
I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m convinced that this level of incorporated “worlds” is most fundamental to understanding the content of fiction, as opposed to poetry. The assemblage of worlds is what draws readers through the text, not some flat formalist appeal to sounds and image, without the “vulgarities” of plot and character. Purely formal distinctions for poetry and prose, line breaks vs. pragraphing etc., have felt inadequate and artificial for a long time; what about Eugene Onegin or anecdotal poems? A compelling demarcation of prose may lie precisely on this narrative metalepsis, this “alloy” of worlds, to evoke the original chemistry context of the term.
So, as you read: ask not what world you are in—ask by what means are the many worlds bound together to represent an experience of a world. Then check the color of the sky.
See Gerard Genette’s work for more rhetoric-orientated approaches to postwar narrative theory, and Harold Bloom’s A Map of Misreading.
A thorough presentation of metalepsis is in its entry in the Living Handbook of Narratology.
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A couple of passages, if only to have more of Faulkner’s language in this letter. In this vignette, Darl observes his father, evoking a motif of human sweat:
The shirt across pa’s hump is faded lighter than the rest of it. There is no sweat stain on his shirt. I have never seen a sweat stain on his shirt. He was sick once from working in the sun when he was twenty-two years old, and he tells people that if he ever sweats, he will die. I suppose he believes it.
Sweat is picked up again by Anse in a later chapter, after the famous river fording sequence, and having stopped by a town:
It’s a hard country on man; it’s hard. Eight miles of the sweat of his body washed up uten the Lord’s earth, where the Lord Himself told him to put it. Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hardworking man profit. It takes them that runs the stores in the towns, doing no sweating, living off of them that sweats. It aint the hardworking man, the farmer. Sometimes I wonder why we kept at it. It’s because there is a reward for us above, where they cant take their autos and such. Every man will be equal there and it will be taken from them that have and give to them that have not by the Lord [Cf. Matthew 13:12].
But it’s a long wait, seems like. It’s bad that a fellow must earn the reward of his right-ding by flouting hisself and his dead. We drove all the rest of the day and got to Samson’s at dust-dark and then that bridge was gone, too. They hadn’t never see the river so high, and it not done raining yet. There was old men that hadn’t never see nor hear of it being so in the memory of man. I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastised. But I be durn if He dont take some curious ways to show it, seems like.
But now I can get them teeth. That will be a comfort. It will.