Jenn Stephenson: Aspiring
Divinities: Writing Subjectivity and the Paradoxes of Fictional
Citizenship
Instead
of looking at citizenship in the conventional
terms of affiliation to a geopolitical entity, this paper recasts the
notion of
citizenship in terms of a character’s authenticity in a fictional
realm. Two
new Canadian plays, Eternal Hydra by Anton Piatigorsky and Shadows
by Timothy Findley, take up this question of the birth of the fictional
citizen
and his subsequent emigrations. The traveling act of transgressing
borders
between fictional worlds – metalepsis – triggers perceptual paradox.
Debra
Malina in Breaking the Frame: Metalepsis and the Construction of
the Subject
takes as her thesis that metalepsis “bears a mimetic relation to
subject-construction processes in our own world” and that via this
parallel
process of frame-breaking these radically metaleptic works reflect on
our
constructed subjectivity outside the fiction (9). Whereas Malina
applies her
theory to postmodern novels, I propose to transfer these ideas about
narrative
metalepsis and the reader to the crossing of dramatic frame-boundaries
and the
effect on audiences. The thematic connection between acts of artistic
rapine
and metalepsis, and the implications for the similarly constructed
audience-self will be the principal concerns of the paper.