Formal,geographic and cultural metalepsis: The fiction of Russell Banks

Abstract

This article investigates how narrative form and thematic content work in conjunction to encourage a reader’s support for specific political, cultural and social views, using examples of metalepsis that mirror and support thematic socio-political stances in Russell Banks’s fiction. Metalepsis (the crossing of a text’s narrative levels) and plot themes of geographic and cultural boundary crossings play together in Banks’s writing, which explores the permeability of divisions between African American and European American, the Caribbean and continental North America, male and female, and parent and child, consistently emphasizing issues surrounding national, cultural, gender and generational borders. Mirroring these more obvious sociological themes and arguments of his plots, Banks’s structural border crossings force us to consider the permeability of conceptual boundaries between author and reader, reader and character, and narrator and narratee. Banks examines these boundaries’ porosity — on both levels — by exploiting an increasingly common technique for shifting focalization in contemporary fiction — episodic use of second-person narration. This metaleptic technique, crossing the borders of narrative levels, not only reflects, but inherently supports Banks’s themes of geographic border crossings as a means of intercultural, interracial and interclass understanding.