Searching the wiki-entry related to metalepsis, stimulated by the article on “Barth, Barthes, and Bergson: Postmodern Aesthetics and the Imperative of the New,” [Paul Douglass, San Jose State University, 2012] Cf. http://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=eng_complit_pub, I came to a reference to Pale Fire:
“In narratology (and specifically in the theories of Gerard Genette), a paradoxical transgression of the boundaries between narrative levels or logically distinct worlds is also called metalepsis." …In general, narratorial metalepsis arises most often when an omniscient or external narrator begins to interact directly with the events being narrated, especially if the narrator is separated in space and time from these events…There are so many examples of forking-path and metaleptic narratives by now that my recommendations will have to seem arbitrary. One of the most thoroughly enjoyable constructions of enigmatic worlds within worlds is Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962). A good short text is Robert Coover's The Babysitter(1969). In film, a frequently referenced forking-path narrative is Peter Howitt's Sliding Doors (1998)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalepsis
Paul Douglass (see former paragraph) writes:
“The image of life-energy (the “mobile”) as it endures an inevitable slump into sentience also appears in postmodern fiction. Vladimir Nabokov ‘s Lolita, for example, is filled with scenes and jokes based on mechanical or habituated responses drawn from a Bergsonian theory of life—a comedic technique based on the contrast between the fluidity of the living élan and the stubbornness of material forms. As Michael Glynn argues, Humbert Humbert “apprehends Lolita, Charlotte, and Valeria not as vital changing entities but as his creatures, as static objects who will act in conformity with his own preconceived notions” […]The novel is one long delusional escapade haunted by the image of “Hourglass Lake,” in which Time has had its neck wrung by a mind as desperate to stop the relentless flow of durée as Quentin Compson’s in The Sound and the Fury.” [ ] Late in life, Nabokov spoke in an interview included in Strong Opinions about the nature of durée réelle (the flow of real duration) versus clock time. His vocabulary is expressly Bergsonian:
“We can imagine all kinds of time, such as for example “applied time”—time applied to events, which we measure by means of clocks and calendars; but
those types of time are inevitably tainted by our notion of space, spatial succession, stretches and sections of space. When we speak of the “passage
of time,” we visualize an abstract river flowing through a generalized landscape. Applied time, measurable illusions of time, are useful for the purposes of historians or physicists, they do not interest me, and they did not interest my creature Van Veen in Part Four of my Ada. He and I in that book attempt to examine the essence of Time, not its lapse. Van mentions the possibility of being “an amateur of Time, an epicure of duration,” of being able to delight sensually in the texture of time, “in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum” (Strong Opinions 185). Nabokov was keenly aware that Time is all-too-human, known not through clocks, but in “the dim hollow between two rhythmic beats, the narrow and bottomless silence between the beats, not the beats themselves, which only embar Time. In this sense human life is not a pulsating heart but the missed heartbeat” (ibid.). Time outruns perception, giving rise to limitless tricks of illusion and delusion, as Nabokov’s narrators, from Humbert to Pnin and Kinbote, testify. Nabokov’s narrators, like Faulkner’s (Vardaman, Darl, Quentin, Jason) are mirrored in the azure produced by Barth’s and Pynchon’s narrators in V., The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow quest for their own pasts and personalities, driven by the imperative of constant, exhausting self-re-invention in the face of devolution and disintegration. Pynchon’s paranoia was part of a contagious outbreak following World War II, which was both the product and the cause of a continued feverish dismantling of literary form—in this case, the novel—in which I believe one can detect the continuing power of Bergson’s aesthetic challenge to art that it must perpetually reinvent itself. (Cf.p 40/41)