Reader, the violence they did’: Employing Metalepsis Towards a Collective Narrative in the Historical Novel

By its own conventions, the historical novel as genre has been saddled with a somewhat Herculean task: it is expected to portray the spirit of the epoch which it addresses and represent the social, cultural, and political conditions of its age all while doing so with the strictest attention to accurate and realistic detail in illustrating the fictional (or fictionalized) characters, events, and objects within. Although a great deal has been written about the historical novel—its formal qualities, its attempts at realism, its bourgeois origins and constraints, etc.—few scholars have identified the rhetorical device of metalepsis, as described by Gerard Genette, as a formal and critical method of disrupting the violence of traditional narratology in the historical novel. In this paper, I argue that in two historical novels written in and portraying vastly different historical periods, Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855) and Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox (2018), the authors employ metalepsis, or narrative intrusion in some form, to two distinct ends: first, to alert the reader to moments of violence—cultural, imperial, racial, or otherwise—and second, to create a dialectic space which allows for the construction of a more collective history in their texts.