A transmedial process

Metalepsis has been increasingly present in several artistic fields, by enhancing a self-reflexive porosity between narrative levels and by provoking a very special kind of ontological sliding. When Gérard Genette (1972) transferred this figure from the field of rhetoric to that of narratology, in order to describe the subversion of boundaries between narrative levels, or the non-distinction between the diegetic and extradiegetic worlds, he associated the disquieting nature of the metalepsis with the following “unacceptable and insistent” hypothesis: we, as recipients of a work structured by this narratological figure, may find ourselves in the (Borgesian) odd circumstance of noticing that the extradiagetic could already be the diegetic.