has been exploited by writers such as Gillian Rubinstein and Pratchett. In Beyond the
Labyrinth (1988) Rubinstein’s main character attempts to transpose the rules and
conventions of the Fighting Fantasy fiction which he is reading on to life. In Only You
Can Save Mankind (1992) Pratchett inverts and parodies the conventions of computer
games. Both writers are concerned with the interrelationships between the ways in
which we perceive, think and behave in game fictions and in life. Pratchett’s novel
implicitly suggests that the modes of action and interpretation used in both fiction and
life are very similar; Rubinstein makes more clear-cut distinctions between them.
Narrative disruptions and discontinuitiesDisruptions to the causal, logical or linear relationships between narrative events,
characters and narrators, and between primary and secondary narratives have the effect
of foregrounding the narrative structuring of texts. There are two main strategies for
disrupting narratives: narrative metalepsis, and the representation of heterotopias.
Metalepsis refers to the transgression of logical and hierarchical relations between
different levels of narration (Genette 1980:234–235; McHale 1987/1989:119);
heterotopias are fictional ‘spaces in which a number of possible orders of being can
coincide’ (Stephens 1992a: 52).
A classic example of narrative metalepsis occurs in Browne’s Bear Hunt (1979). By
literally drawing his way out of each predicament, Bear functions as both a character
constructed within the text and as an authorial figure who actively creates and changes
the discourse of the text. By transgressing his narrative function, Bear disrupts the
conventional hierarchy of relations between character, narrator and author. A more
subtle use of metalepsis occurs in Diana Wynne Jones’s The Spellcoats (1979) where
through the process of narrating her story, Tanaqui realises that the act of narration is
itself a performance which can influence events in the world. Implicit here is an
awareness that any narration of a past simultaneously re-constructs (and fictionalises)
that past, but Tanaqui’s narratorial role literally shifts from scribe to that of author.
What begins as retrospective narration of past events (that is a secondary narrative)
becomes a narrative which simultaneously shapes and changes events in the present
(that is a primary narrative).
The relationships between authors, primary narrators, secondary narrators and
characters are usually hierarchical. By inverting or transgressing these hierarchical
relations, metalepsis can be used to articulate questions about authority, power, and
freedom, such as who has control of the story and its characters—the narrator, her
narratees, an author, his readers, or the socio-cultural context within and
through which stories are told, heard, interpreted and appropriated. In A Step off the
Path (1985) Hunt makes extensive use of metalepsis to articulate complex concerns with
forms of textual and cultural appropriation and displacement. This is a multistranded
novel, in which a story told by a character (Jo) in one narrative strand is a version of
events occurring in another strand. The story concerns a group of knights (descendants
of their Arthurian namesakes) who exist on the margins of mainstream society and
culture. The novel hinges on a discrepancy between these knights, and their ‘fictional’
counterparts represented in the popular medieval romance fictions of mainstream
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