Metalepsis and Myth: the Myth-making of Estevan / Jerusalem as a Homeland of the Jews in Selected Verse/ Prose Texts of Eli Mandel’s Out of Place

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Lecturer teaching English Language at the Higher Institute of Art Criticism in the Academy of Arts

Abstract

As a Canadian Jewish poet, Mandel indulges with his wife Ann, who acts as a cinematic photographer, in a narrative poetic journey returning to the Canadian town of Estevan Saskatchewan. It foreshadows another past journey undertaken by Mandel’s fathers to the same place which forms a hypodiegesis/ a subtext in the main text. The image of the deserted Jewish colonies of Estevan is a metaphor for the Zionist ancestral quest of a homeland.  Consequently, the researcher relates her study of metalepsis to that of Northrop Frye’s views of myth. In order to elucidate the major forms of metalepsis in Mandel’s literary texts, the researcher studies views of a number of critics such as Gérard Genette, Karin Kukkonen and D. Malina. Genette believes that metaplesis is a transgression in the narrative borderline between diégèse/ the textual universe and reality. Kukkonen builds upon Genette’s views in her division of metalepsis into ascending and descending. Malina adds that metalepsis occurs as a form of a transgression in the borderline between reality and the other extradiegetic, diegetic and hypodiegetic levels of the text.  Mandel finally realizes that he neither belongs to Estevan nor to Jerusalem. Through the analysis of the diverse forms of metalepsis, the reader becomes aware that the Zionist assumption that Jerusalem is the lost promised land is only just a myth.

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