The Hollywood movie Stranger than Fiction (2006) centres on a tax inspector, Harold Crick, who begins to hear a voice inside his head. This voice, he gradually realizes, belongs to the narrator of a book in which he is the central character. As the plot unfurls, the narrator begins to drop hints that Harold will die at the end of the story. Understandably disturbed by these intimations, Harold decides to confront a university professor, and between the two of them they identify the author as one Kay Eiffel. Harold then tracks down the author and begs her not to kill him off.

The film's plot rests centrally on a very singular type of narrative device. Characters within a fiction simply cannot meet their own authors. The frontier between fiction and reality is sacred and infrangible. In a few famous pages from Figures III, also translated in the anglophone anthology Narrative Discourse, Gérard Genette named this device ‘metalepsis’, a term that he adapted from classical French rhetoric: he argued that it is ‘if not always impossible, at any rate transgressive’.Footnote ¹ We might intuitively suppose that this device is limited to experimental modern fiction of this kind, but, as I aim to show in the following discussion, such instances of ‘frame-breaking’Footnote ² are also central to classical Athenian drama.

In itself, the claim that metalepsis predates modernity is not new. Recent studies have argued that metalepsis can already be found in premodern European literature,Footnote ³ and most notably Irene de Jong has argued extensively for its presence across a range of ancient texts.Footnote ⁴ To my eyes, however, the instances that she cites lack the forceful shock of Stranger than Fiction. Take, for example, the case of epic apostrophe:Footnote ⁵ when the Iliadic narrator addresses Patroclus in Book 16 (‘Then who was the first and who the last that you killed,/ Patroclus, when the gods called you to your death?’; 692–3), is it – we might wonder – so very different from Kay's voice appearing inside Harold's head? Yet the differences are telling. In the Iliad, there is no question of the narrator and Patroclus actually meeting; the apostrophe is, rather, the vehicle for a stylized rhetorical question, along the lines of Aristophanes of Byzantium's celebrated utterance ‘O Menander! O life! Which of you imitated the other?’Footnote ⁶ We do not imagine in that case that Aristophanes has summoned the ghost of Menander, and still less that he has somehow physically encountered a personification of ‘life’. In Homer, analogously, it seems intuitively wrong to view the apostrophizing narrator as (in de Jong's phrase) ‘entering the narrated world’.Footnote ⁷ It would come as quite a surprise – both to Patroclus and to the audience – if he manifested himself on the battlefield. Quite the opposite, in fact: we might suggest that it is the narrator's very externality to the events he describes, and his full awareness of their inevitable outcome, that authorizes his baleful fatalism.

We can distinguish, then, between two types of metalepsis, which we can call ‘strong’ and ‘weak’.Footnote ⁸ The one boldly represents the transgression of the frame separating the fictional from the real world, thereby raising powerful questions about the sharpness of the boundary between the two.Footnote ⁹ The other, however, is a non-intrusive stylistic feature, whereby narrators temporarily affect a convergence between their act of narration and the events described, as in Genette's example from Balzac's Illusions Perdues: ‘While the venerable churchman climbs the ramps of Angoulême, it is not useless to explain…’.Footnote ¹⁰ The two types have a superficial similarity, but in fact they are entirely different in both operation and effect: weak metalepsis has to do with the act of narration (hence the interest of the narratologists Genette and de Jong), whereas the strong form addresses the very act of creation, ceding to the human imagination the powers to generate new realities.Footnote ¹¹ Strong metalepsis is, I believe, the hidden motor of all fictional creativity,Footnote ¹² but has a distinctive function within classical drama. I argue that performance drama is always implicitly metaleptic, in that it depends for its effect on the interpenetration of the ‘fictional’ world of the drama and the ‘real’ world of the author and the spectator; and so the explicitly metaleptic moments on which we shall be focusing are merely visible manifestations of the very processes that lie at the heart of the dramatic experience. Hence the ‘radical cognition’ of my title: metalepsis in drama has nothing to do with narrative techniques and everything to do with acting out the disturbing sensation of perceiving in the theatre a double world, one that is simultaneously real and fictional.

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Theatre is profoundly, if often implicitly, metaleptic,Footnote ¹³ for drama always operates on (at least) two levels. Individuals onstage are simultaneously actors and characters, space is at once the physical architecture of the theatre and the imagined world of the ‘fiction’, dramatic time is at once concurrent with the spectators' and the represented world of the past (or, conceivably, future). This is distinctively true for Athenian tragedy, which – as a series of classic studies have shown – depicts a context that is usually spatially and temporally distanced from contemporary Athens, but nevertheless intimately concerned with the fifth-century city's preoccupations (justice, gender roles, the place of the individual in the collective, and so forth).Footnote ¹⁴ In a general sense, the gap between the represented mythical past and the here and now can be momentarily crossed through a variety of techniques. One such means is the process that Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood memorably named ‘zooming’, that is, the presentation of themes that signify in both contexts: thus, for example, in Iphigenia at Tauris the story of the heroine's survival after her attempted sacrifice to Artemis speaks both to the mythic tradition and to the local Attic cult of Artemis Brauronia.Footnote ¹⁵ A different kind of ‘zooming’ occurs at the generic level, when features that are distinctive to contemporary Athenian discourse – notably sophistry and rhetoric – are imported into the mythical world of tragedy, with an anachronistic force that was surely perceived by contemporary audiences.Footnote ¹⁶

Such instances may, however, be thought to represent nothing more than the kind of contemporary resonance that we would expect to find in any literature (just as, for example, at an obvious level the orcs in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings represent industrialization). But they are more immediate and meaningful in performance drama, where the worlds of fiction and reality converge spatially before the spectators' eyes. What they behold is neither contemporary Athens nor ancient myth but the simultaneity of both, telescoped into a single, liminal environment. This lends a particular metaleptic force to those moments (typically in Euripidean prologues) where a character designates the dramatic space as a given location, usually with a proximal pronoun (i.e. a part of hode): ‘these (haide) are the beauteous maiden streams of the Nile…’ (Hel. 1);Footnote ¹⁷ ‘I have come to this (tēnde) Theban land…’ (Bacch. 1); ‘Demeter, guardian of this (tēsde) land of Eleusis…’ (Supp. 1), and so forth. Such utterances are at one level (the level of the dramatic character) blandly descriptive, for no inhabitant of Egypt, Thebes, or Eleusis would need to be told this. But of course that is the point: prologues do not embody intra-dramatic realism but serve rather as metaleptic embassies from the world of the fiction to the Athenian spectators. Such prologues exploit the ambiguity of what linguists call deixis, that set of linguistic functions that have no intrinsic semantic value but depend on context for their reference: pronouns such as ‘this’ and ‘I’, adverbs like ‘today’ and ‘here’.Footnote ¹⁸ It would, of course, be aggressively anti-realistic to say ‘The theatre of Dionysus, from now on, is Thebes’; but to say ‘this is Thebes’ metaleptically glues together the real, Athenian set-building and the imaginary world of the drama.

This convention is brilliantly deconstructed in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae, in the paratragic scene where Euripides, disguised as Menelaus, seeks to rescue his in-law, who plays the role of Helen (850–928). (Note that this scenario is already metaleptic, as it stages the author Euripides entering the world of his own play.) While the two act out their roles, and use deixis to pretend that they are in Egypt, the priestess Critylla punctures the illusion by keying the references to their Athenian context. The in-law begins with the line from Euripides' Helen quoted above: ‘these are the beauteous maiden streams of the Nile…’ (855), which prompts Critylla to call him a ‘ruffian’ (panourgos; 858). Presently, the in-law asserts that ‘these (tade) are the halls of Proteus’ (874),Footnote ¹⁹ to which Critylla responds with more abuse, a claim that he is ‘lying’ (pseudetai; 875), and a misrecognition of the mythical Proteus as the Athenian general Proteas (876). Most spectacularly, the in-law argues that ‘this (tod’) is his tomb, on which we are sat' (886); Critylla again responds aggressively, berating him for calling the altar (bōmos) a tomb (887–8). The physical artefact in question is indeed an altar within the world of the Thesmophoriazusae; but it is also a real altar in the theatre of Dionysus, on which the sacrifices preceding the performances would have been enacted. The feature right in the centre of the spectators' visual field serves in tragedy as a kind of metaleptic portal between the different dimensions; the brusquely realist Critylla seeks to slam it shut, but of course ‘realism’ in this context operates within the already fictive world of comedy.

Ancient viewers processed such information with great cognitive sophistication: holding both ‘realities’ in their heads simultaneously, they could appreciate the technical and material resources supplied by the production team and the liturgist at the same time as immersing themselves in the ‘fictional’ world of the drama.Footnote ²⁰ This is the context within which we should understand Gorgias' famous comment that tragedy is a ‘deception in which the deceiver is more just than the non-deceiver, and the deceived is wiser than the undeceived’:Footnote ²¹ where Gorgias refers to ‘deception’, we would speak more precisely of ‘illusion’, an illusion moreover that is voluntarily sustained.

It is around the figure of the actor, more even than dramatic space, that tragic metalepsis most significantly clusters. In the first place, the actor, like all the elements of the theatre, has a double role as both character and player; this phenomenon became ever more intense from the late fifth century onwards, as individual actors were increasingly recognized as stars in their own right.Footnote ²² An actor onstage is at once the flesh-and-blood actor and the character.Footnote ²³ Aulus Gellius preserves a famous anecdote about Polus the actor, who played the role of Sophocles' Electra using an urn containing the ashes of his own son. Polus' grief, Gellius tells us, merged with that of the actor: ‘he filled everywhere not with the appearance and imitation, but with real grief and living laments’.Footnote ²⁴ Explicit ‘frame-breaking’ is not a feature of the actual surviving texts of tragedy, but instances like this show us how it could arise in performance, with the actor himself serving as the hinge between the mimetic world and reality (and note that it is precisely the boundary between fiction and reality that Gellius sees the story as testing).

Tragedy's distinctive combination of distance and approximation springs from its nature as an emotive genre, and in particular (an inheritance from the final book of the Iliad) from the aim to solicit pity (eleos, oiktos) in the audience.Footnote ²⁵ In the Rhetoric, in a discussion of how to engender pity in one's audience (2.8), Aristotle points to precisely the need for both similarity and difference.Footnote ²⁶ On the one hand, ‘one who is likely to feel pity must be such as to think that he, or one of his friends, is liable to suffer some evil’ (2.8.2); in other words, pity is fundamentally an empathetic projection of oneself or one's friends into the person of the victim – it is assimilation.Footnote ²⁷ Yet to feel pity we cannot be too close to the victim: ‘The persons men pity are those whom they know, provided they are not too closely connected with them, for if they are, they feel the same as if they themselves were likely to suffer’ (2.8.12). If one is too close to the victim, one simply feels that person's suffering directly, rather than pity itself; perhaps this was the problem with Phrynichus' Capture of Miletus, to which the Athenians objected (Herodotus tells us) on the grounds that it reminded them of ‘their own situation’ (oikēia). Pity, by contrast, is emotion mediated. Pity, we might therefore conclude, is metaleptic suffering: not the direct impact of suffering itself, but the sensation of mediation between frames, between another's representation of suffering and one's own experiential reality.

Metaleptic pity in tragedy, however, is not necessarily felt as transgressive, for emotional empathy is a naturalized feature of all non-psychopathic human behaviour.Footnote ²⁸ I shall return to tragedy presently and argue for other metaleptic modes; but to feel the fully transgressive force of metalepsis we need to turn to the fantastic world of old comedy, where frame-transgression is common, particularly in the form of the insertion of the author-figure into the world of the fiction. In Acharnians, Dicaeopolis famously addresses the audience in the guise of the poet:

Dicaeopolis breaks the frame of course by acknowledging the presence of spectators, and by adopting the persona of Aristophanes himself, who had been sued by Cleon. However, he also remains in character to the extent that he refers to himself as a beggar – although in a complex twist that is characteristic of Aristophanic identity play, this ‘character’ is in fact a disguise borrowed from Euripides' Telephus (a now lost play; Euripides' version of the ‘beggar's disguise’ would surely itself have alluded to the Odyssey).Footnote ³⁰ This instance of the (partial) identification of an individual character with the poet is not found elsewhere in old comedy, although the Euripides portrayed in Acharnians, Thesmophoriazusae, and Frogs has sometimes been thought to embody – albeit not in a straightforward way, for he is hardly a straightforwardly positive character – Aristophanes' own virtues of inventiveness and cleverness.Footnote ³¹

The primary location for comic metalepsis is the parabaseis, where choruses ‘step across’ and address the audience directly. As several important studies have demonstrated,Footnote ³² we need to be cautious about how exactly we describe the phenomenon of parabasis. The chorus does not simply ‘become’ the poet, for three interconnected reasons. First, parabaseis vary enormously in style and content. Some give direct, specific advice to the audience, focusing on recent events and prominent contemporary personages: thus, for example, Frogs (675–737), with its programmatic assertion that ‘it is right that the holy chorus should give excellent advice (xumparainein) and teaching (didaskein) to the city’ (686–7). One might take this kind of advice as intended earnestly by the poet, and indeed it is hard to imagine that it does not carry authoritative intellectual weight. But other parabaseis, by contrast, contain material that is stunningly weird. That of Birds, for example, is dominated by a spectacular ‘ornitheogony’ detailing the primal emergence of the birds and their deities (676–800).

Second, the identity adopted by the chorus also varies. In the Birds parabasis cited above, they retain their birdy identity throughout. The parabasis of Thesmophoriazusae (785–845) is even more extreme: not only do the women, despite ‘stepping across’ (parabasai, 785), retain their full characterization as women, but their claims to moral authority are ironized, in part by the very fact that they are women: thus, for example, their argument for the superiority of women over men depends on comparing the military-sounding names of women to those of men (804–7). In Acharnians, by contrast, the choral identity seems partially to merge with that of the poet: ‘ever since our teacher first presided over the “trugic” choruses, he has not yet stepped aside (parebē) into the theatre to say how clever he is’ (628–9; the chorus similarly claims to represent ‘the teacher’ or ‘the poet’ at e.g. Ar. Eq. 507–11, Vesp. 1015–16). The chorus continues to speak of Aristophanes in the third person, but they signal that they are speaking for him, that the parabasis is, in effect, his. Not that we should take these passages as the views of the flesh-and-blood Aristophanes, despite the rhetoric of disclosure that accompanies this episode (627: ‘let's strip off and get to the anapaests’);Footnote ³³ rather, the poet partially enters the comic fiction as a character in his own right.

Finally, although parabaseis are marked off, formally and metrically, from the rest of the play, they nevertheless maintain (to a greater or lesser degree) a similar thematic focus: thus, to take one brief example, when the Frogs parabasis mentions the freeing of slaves after the battle of Arginusae, the assertion that they ‘become masters instead of slaves’ (694) picks up the earlier scene in which Dionysus and his slave Xanthus have repeatedly exchanged roles (464–533).Footnote ³⁴

Scholars of the last thiry years are undoubtedly right, then, to see Aristophanic parabaseis not simply as a suspension of dramatic fiction, where the chorus becomes the ‘mouthpiece’ of the poet, but as

Yet we should not, in all of this, lose sight of the transgressive nature of the parabasis, signalled in its very name. Parabasis, which I have translated as ‘stepping across’, is the Greek equivalent of the Latin transgressio; it implies the crossing of a boundary, either physically or morally (or both). The parabasis, then, is not simply of a piece with the play of representations elsewhere in the play; it marks a distinctive moment of frame-breaking.

It is likely, indeed, that the ‘stepping across’ involved the chorus in a physical transgression of theatrical space, crossing a symbolic line between actors and audience, and partially entering ‘their’ space. We know so little about the physical realities of the pre-Lycurgan theatre that it is risky to speculate how and where this line may have lain, and indeed whether it had any fixed reality at all.Footnote ³⁶ But the wider point, I think, is that in all probability the chorus (and here we are returning to classical drama as a whole) already, even before ‘stepping across’, inhabited an intermediary space between the actors and the audience. While it is clear that the actors themselves made use of the orkhēstra (or ‘dancing-space’), and indeed that the altar in the centre was the point of greatest dramatic intensity,Footnote ³⁷ their primary points of reference in terms of physical space are likely to have been the set-building (skēnē) and the entrances to its side.Footnote ³⁸ The chorus, on the other hand, always danced in the intermediary spatial position that reflected their wider liminality, as simultaneously agents within the action and external commentators upon it.

There is thus a latent metalepticity in all dramatic choruses, whose ambiguous participation in the action is signalled, in tragedy at any rate, by their adoption of a patina of Doric dialect, and (usually) by lyric metres. These stylized features signal the chorus' detachment from the regular spoken idiom, and in a way function according to a different metalepsis: as the more abstract, aesthetically ‘higher’ features of the play, they are vehicles for the poet's own creative expression. Every hyperpoetic word sung by a tragic chorus concedes the illusion of tragic mimesis and becomes instead a vehicle for the poet's own ostentation.

In terms of content too, the chorus' well-known preference for the proverbial and the sententious reinforces the metaleptic force of choral utterance, since such features proclaim a truth that is equally true in both the fictional and the real world. Let us have a quick look at a famous example from the second stasimon of Sophocles' Oedipus the King:

The issue here is not the exact text and translation of this vexed passage.Footnote ³⁹ My point is rather that the connection between hybris and tyranny is part of a store of proverbial knowledge both within and without the play's dramatic world: it is, and was surely felt at the moment of performance as, both a relevant comment on Oedipus' predicament and a prop of the democratic worldview shared by Sophocles and his fellow-citizens, and indeed (on one view) enshrined in the self-promoting institution of the Great Dionysia itself.Footnote ⁴⁰ The metalepsis is encapsulated in the present tense of the word ‘begets’ (later shifting into the so-called ‘gnomic aorist’), which is keyed deictically to these two different presents at once. Yet if the chorus speaks at this point simultaneously with the voice of the poet and that of the old men in the play, the two are not absolutely aligned. On the poet's side, we can note that this is high lyric, with grandiose (not to say opaque) phrasing, the Doric alpha (matan for Attic matēn), imagery of loftiness that invokes sublimity, and a city-scaling metaphor that points towards such lofty hypotexts as the Iliad and Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes. As Laura Swift's work has recently emphasized, such authoritative didactic passages are part of tragedy's self-aware inheritance from lyric poets such as Pindar.Footnote ⁴¹ In other words, this kind of utterance fits exactly the template that a lyric poet speaking in his own voice would follow.

At the same time, however, the audience will recall that the chorus, as figures within the play, have limited cognition. This kind of insight may strike them (the audience) as non-negotiably ‘correct’, in that it coheres with their fundamental worldview, but they do not yet know (though they may have strong suspicions) how it will work out in relation to Oedipus himself. Let us remember that this very stasimon ends with the chorus wrongly assuming that the Delphic oracle has misfired, and shockingly concluding that ‘religion (ta theia) is dead’ (910). What is more, their next intervention (1086–1109) is a brutally misconceived display of false optimism over the likely outcome of events. Thus, the chorus' vatic pronouncements about the nature of the world are far from automatically guaranteed Sophocles' own authoritative imprimatur.

Choral odes, I argue, always haver metaleptically in this way, performing at the same time the didactic authority of the poet's own voice and the limited cognition of the passive agents within the play. But this ode in particular underlines the metaleptic tone, with its famous conclusion to the second strophe: ‘If such [i.e. morally trangressive] actions are to be held in honour, why should I dance (khoreuein)?’ (895–6). Roger Dawe observes in his commentary at this point that khoreuein ‘is precisely what the Chorus who are acting in this play are doing’.Footnote ⁴² It has been noted elsewhere, indeed, that this verb seems markedly ill-suited to the activities of the elderly Thebans whom the chorus represent within the dramatic fiction.Footnote ⁴³ Yet as Henrichs argues in a classic discussion of ‘choral self-referentiality’, this couplet is best seen neither as a perpetuation of the dramatic illusion nor as a fantastical teleportation of the Thebans into the theatre of Dionysus, but as an instance of momentary convergence between the two worlds: the dancing ‘takes place in the concrete space of the orchestra where they perform, yet it is simultaneously projected into the imaginary past of the dramatic action, as if this chorus were dancing in Thebes as well as in Athens’.Footnote ⁴⁴ In Henrichs' view, choral self-referentiality serves primarily to coordinate the religious themes of the play with the religious context of the festival of Dionysus, and so to ‘reduce the distance between the orchestra and the imaginary space of the drama’.Footnote ⁴⁵ As he simultaneously acknowledges, however, the same phenomenon also signals how far tragedy has travelled from its own (perceived) ritual origins, and therefore – here I go beyond what Henrichs says, but not far – the extent to which tragedy's mimetic telescoping of the mythical past is an artificial projection.

In classical Greek drama, then, there is a constant cognitive traffic between the world of the play and the world of the audience. For the strongest forms of metalepsis, analogous to that of Stranger than Fiction, we must look to comedy, where the spatio-temporal rules of the universe can be bent at will; for metalepsis at its most visceral can, as Genette notes, only ever operate in a self-consciously fictive world that admits of ‘implausible impossibilities’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet tragedy, too, can strain its own ‘realism’ to the limits, and at such moments of extreme strain the experience is undoubtedly metaleptic. Metalepsis in drama is best understood, I submit, not in narratological terms – as a technique of narration – but as ‘radical cognition’, an awareness prompted by the text that the worlds of representation and reality are distinctively convergent in the theatre. As I have said, performed drama is always implicitly metaleptic: that is the very condition of its being. Explicit metalepsis, then, is but the realization of that implicit potentiality, in these vertiginously fleeting moments of theatrical self-awareness.