When the time of the story meets the time of the telling: On temporal metalepsis

Abstract

In literary studies, temporal metalepsis is defined as a seemingly inconsistent transgression between the time of the telling and the time of the told. For instance, the past time of the told story may appear to overlap with the present time of the telling, as in 'Ada began to climb the mountain. While Ada is climbing the mountain, we have time for a digression.' This paper tackles temporal metalepsis from a primarily linguistic point of view. It first draws attention to unexplored semantic properties of temporal metalepsis, focusing on the grammar of time (subordinators, tense, and aspect) and on anaphoric relations. This shows that the phenomenon deserves linguistic scrutiny. Second, a pretense-based analysis is proposed. Specifically, the temporal entanglement between narrative layers is argued to result in an ontological conflict that licenses the accommodation of an event in pretense at the actual layer. The proposal is spelled out in terms of a dynamic semantics that factors a game of pretense into transgressions between story worlds and actuality as known from para- and metafictional discourse.