ABSTRACT
In a certain way, the Pirandello manner of Six Characters in Search of an Author or Tonight We Improvise, where the same actors are in turn characters and players, is nothing but a vast expansion of metalepsis […] characters escaped from a painting, a book, a press clipping, a photograph, a dream, a memory, a fantasy […] All these games, by the intensity of their effects, demonstrate the importance of the boundary they tax their ingenuity to overstep, in defiance of verisimilitude – a boundary that is precisely the narrating (or the performance) itself: a shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells. Whence the uneasiness Borges so well put his finger on: ‘Such inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious.’ The most troubling thing about metalepsis indeed lies in this unacceptable and insistent hypothesis, that the extradiegetic is perhaps always diegetic, and that the narrator and his narratees – you and I – perhaps belong to some narrative.
