Roles of metalepses in post-symbolist novels

This article deals with the narrative functions of metalepsis (in Gerard Genette's terms), a device that shows a transgression of the boundaries between the reality of characters and the reality of a narrator. It is devoted to the analysis of the "I-narration" fragments of mostly third-person narrated texts (so-called 'authorial intrusions'). The article suggests that the meanings of those fragments correlate with the concept of personality, worldview and narrative mode manifested in the work. Post-symbolist authors are always in search of new ways to influence their readers. The authorial position becomes a field of experiment (said experiments having various ideological, aesthetic and pragmatic reasons) as a part of a general concept of 'overcoming an aesthetic crisis'. The image of the creator represented in the narrative, relationships between the "I" and the "Other" (in Bakhtin's terms, "one's own words" and "alien words") appear to be questioned. Therefore, the intrigue of a post-symbolist work is centered around not only the lives of the characters but also the 'event of narration' and, in particular, interactions between the narrators. Such interactions can be studied via the analysis of metalepsis due to it being one of the most popular narratological categories describing the system of narrative levels. The research is based on the novels by Valentin Kataev, Konstantin Vaginov, and Boris Pasternak, which belong to different paradigms of literariness (socialist realism, avant-gardism and neotraditionalism). Authorial intrusions of the novels, which belong to avant-garde aesthetics, fulfill the "natural" role (as described by Genette) of representing the game nature of the discourse. Socialist-realistic novels tend to include dialogues between the reader and the narrator as part of regulation of the narrated world. Here, authorial intrusions do not manifest the freedom of imagination, instead showing self-debasement in the face of the world order. In neotraditionalistic novels, authorial intrusions are the signs of a convergent nature of the narrative. These novels feature "double focalisation", a form of interaction between the narrator and the protagonist where they are no longer on the different sides of the dialogue but rather merge into a united narrative voice, a supernarrator. The article concludes with a statement that the semantic potential of a metalepsis (Ivanov and the self-esteeming narration, Kataev and the disappearing authorial "I", Pasternak and the convergence of the author's and the protagonist's consciousness) depends on the chosen narrative strategy (configuration of subject, object and addressee of discourse). Metalepsis is described as a strong way of representing the narrator's actions. It indexes the three main communicative models of post-symbolist fiction: "provocation", "agitation", "revelation".

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