Aliss by Patrick Senécal: The Narrative Metalepsis as an Instrument of the Uncanny in

Contemporary Fantastic Fiction1

Clotilde Landais

Landais, Clotilde. “The Narrative Metalepsis as an Instrument of the Uncanny in Contemporary Fantastic Fiction.”
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 28.2 (2017): 236-252.

The francophone tradition of writing fantastic fiction, initiated by Jacques Cazotte’s novel Le
Diable amoureux (1772), is very much alive, notably in Quebec with authors such as Claude
Bolduc, Joël Champetier, and Patrick Senécal. The genre, however, has evolved from its most
famous definitions by Charles Nodier (“Du fantastique en littérature,” 1830), Pierre-Georges
Castex (Le conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant, 1951), and Tzvetan Todorov
(Introduction à la literature fantastique, 1970): Nodier based his definition mostly on the works
of his contemporary E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Castex and Todorov based theirs on Nodier, Nerval,
and Maupassant’s publications. Unlike Nodier and Castex who considered the genre in itself,
Todorov tried to define “le fantastique” in relation to neighbouring genres—“le merveilleux”
(the marvelous) and “l’étrange” (the uncanny). Todorov’s definition of “le fantastique” is very
narrow because it requires a lasting hesitation from the reader—and the character—between a
rational explanation (dream, madness) and a supernatural one (29). According to this definition,
Guy de Maupassant’s Horla (1887) and Henry James’ Turn of the Screw (1898) are examples of
“true” fantastic fiction. If the reader—and the character—however, chooses one of the two
explanations, Todorov considered that they leave “le fantastique” per se. If the reader decides
that the laws of reality remain intact and do provide a rational explanation for the fantastic event,
as in Jan Potocki’s Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse (1805–1815), the narrative then belongs to
what Todorov called “the fantastic-uncanny” or “the supernatural explained” (45–46); if the
reader accepts new laws to explain the event or the creature’s existence, as in Théophile
Gautier’s vampire story “Clarimonde” (1836), the narrative belongs to what Todorov called “the
fantastic-marvelous” (52–53).

French scholars still consider Todorov’s works major in defining the fantastic genre and
its origins, but they have widened the definition to reflect the evolution of the genre and the most
recent production, notably in English. Drawing upon Denis Mellier’s call for an integrative
perspective (Fantastique 10), I give the following definition of the genre as consensually
accepted in Francophone cultures and upon which this article relies: set in the contemporary
everyday world of its author—and of his/her readers—a fantastic fiction narrative depicts “une
intrusion brutale du mystère dans le cadre de la vie réelle” (Castex 8), a brutal intrusion of
mystery into a rational and lifelike fictional world. This crisis of the real characterizes the
fantastic and distinguishes it from genres such as fantasy or science fiction. It can either result
from a tangible supernatural phenomenon coming from folklore (such as a ghost, vampire, or
Doppelgänger), composing the genre’s main megatext since the gothic novel, or it can result
from the uncertainty of the phenomenon’s nature following Todorov’s principle of hesitation. In
both cases, the narrative is built as an investigation supporting an exploration of the human
psyche, led by a usually homodiegetic, therefore unreliable, narrator. The crisis of the real,
implemented in the narrative through a reality effect and rhetoric of realism (Fabre 41), conveys
the necessary conflict between the familiar and the foreign (Lévy 42–43). It is this conflict that
Sigmund Freud named “das Unheimliche” (1919), the uncanny, which is slightly different from
Todorov’s definition: “([T]here is not an entire coincidence between Freud’s use of the term and

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our own). The literature of horror in its pure state belongs to the uncanny—many examples from
the stories of Ambrose Bierce could serve as examples here.” (Todorov 46–47). Patrick
Senécal’s novels Sur le seuil (1998), Aliss (2000), or the Malphas series (2011-2014), like many
contemporary fantastic fiction narratives written in French and in English—often labelled
“horror fiction”2— follow this integrative definition.

Drawing upon the Genettian concept of the narrative metalepsis to perform a structural
analysis of Patrick Senécal’s metaleptic novel Aliss, I show in this article how a writing
technique that plays on the transgression of ontological levels is the perfect instrument for a
genre that plays on its own fictionality. In the first section, I explain how, in fantastic fiction, the
feeling of the uncanny taken in its Freudian understanding works with Genette’s narrative
metalepsis. In the second section, I present the two kinds of metalepses in Senécal’s novel: the
authorial metalepsis and the internal metalepsis. The three-level structure of the story and the
intertextual relations of these diegetic levels then lead me to the third section where I examine
the transgression of boundaries between reality and fiction in Aliss, generating the feeling of the
uncanny per se in the novel.

The uncanny and the narrative metalepsis

Fantastic fiction relies upon a crisis of the real which conveys a conflict between the familiar and
the foreign. The feeling of the uncanny taken in its Freudian understanding is thus essential to
fantastic fiction. Such a feeling can notably rise from specific character representations, such as
ghosts or vampires. These characters often have in common the fact that they transgress some
kind of boundaries, like the one between life and death, as noted by Noel Carroll for instance
(55). Because fantastic fiction “is born of language” (Todorov 82), the feeling of the uncanny
can also rise from a transgression in the writing itself, as Freud explained: “[A]n uncanny effect
is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality if effaced […]
Among the many liberties that the creative writer can allow himself is that of choosing whether
to present a world that conforms with the reader familiar reality or one that in some way deviates
from it. We accept his choice in every case.” (151 and 156) The uncanny, and with it, fantastic
fiction, thus depends on a play on writing; as Denis Mellier noted: “nulle littérature, plus peut-
être que le fantastique, n’est liée à l’artifice, à la rhétorique et au jeu de langage.” (Ecriture
375—“no literature perhaps more than fantastic fiction is linked to artifice, to rhetoric, and to a
play on language.”—my translation) This type of play is based on the rules of the fantastic
discourse, starting from its roots in reality. One narrative technique, notably used by E.T.A.
Hoffmann in the tale Der goldene Topf (1814), is known to erase the boundary between reality
and fiction in the story, thus generating a feeling of the uncanny.

Because this technique is linked to the confusion of narrative levels, I refer to the
narratological definition of the concept given by the French theorist Gérard Genette: “any
intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic
characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse […], produces an effect of
strangeness that is either comical (when […] it is presented in a joking tone) or fantastic. We will
extend the term narrative metalepsis to all these transgressions.” (234–35) The narrative
metalepsis then presupposes a story composed of at least two diegetic levels in order to break
these usually impermeable boundaries—that is, to erase the distinction between the universe of

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the one who tells the story (the narration or discourse level) and the universe which is told (the
diegesis or story level). The narrative metalepsis also breaks the distinction between the reality in
the fiction, which is the diegetic level, and the fiction in the fiction, which is the metadiegetic
level. An example of a comical narrative metalepsis can be found in Woody Allen’s film The
Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), in which a fictitious character leaves his movie—and so, the
screen—to run away with a spectator and discover her “reality.” In Der goldene Topf (1814),
Hoffmann created an uncanny effect by making the tale’s narrator enter the story and interact
with the characters. In contemporary fantastic fiction, authors have continued to explore the
uncanny effect produced by the narrative metalepsis: Julio Cortázar, in Continuidad de los
Parques (1956) for example, in which a reader is the victim of a murder that happens in the story
he is reading; Stephen King, in The Dark Half (1989), for instance, in which a writer’s
pseudonym comes to life; or Patrick Senécal in Aliss.

Quebec author Patrick Senécal has often been compared to Stephen King in regards to his
favor for an aesthetic of the extreme, placing his novels in the Gothic tradition. The Hoffmannian
tradition of fantastic fiction, however, is also present in his works, notably regarding the
exploration of writing techniques to create the feeling of the uncanny. Senécal’s rewriting for
adults of Lewis Carroll’s stories, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865) and “Through the
Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There” (1871) offers a particularly interesting example of
such exploration using the narrative metalepsis. The novel Aliss (2000) explores the limits of the
real through the adventures of an adolescent from suburban Montreal who finds herself in a
version of Carroll’s Wonderland. The character’s social and physical transgressions during her
initiation quest3 are mirrored in the three-diegetic level structure of the novel. First, the level of
the story itself, that is, the events told by the autodiegetic narrator Aliss (her identity quest in
Wonderland and the difficult tasks she has to face before accepting herself); second, the level of
Lewis Carroll’s stories, with the presence of Carroll’s characters—although twisted—and of the
author himself; third, the level of another novel written by Senécal, 5150, rue des Ormes (2001),
which shows an intertextual relation with the novel Aliss. To show how the Genettian narrative
metalepsis and the Freudian feeling of the uncanny interplay in Senécal’s novel, I need to present
the two kinds of metalepses in Aliss, authorial and internal, and their effect on the narrative—and
the reader.

The metalepses in Aliss

The authorial metalepsis

According to Yves Reuter, the narration level consists of the main technical choice that
organizes the fiction in the diegesis (40). It is thus what signals the story as being fictional. In
Aliss, such a narration level is indicated by an intradiegetic narrator functioning in the narrative
mode of telling and who presents the story to the narratee as a tale: “Our tale, as is right and
proper, starts with an initial situation which appears to be stable […].” (my translation)4 This
intradiegetic narrator does not hide: s/he appears at the start of each new chapter, in italics,
presenting him/herself as a storyteller. Due to his/her omniscience about the story, this narrator
could be understood as the author of the book, Patrick Senécal. However, this enunciator,
positioned inside the story, is to be differentiated from the flesh and blood writer. Indeed, even
though this narrator is external to the story because s/he does not belong to Aliss’s adventures,
s/he is internal to the narration, unlike the author of the novel who belongs to the real world:

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“Well, well, well! That was quite an eventful first adventure! What happened to Aliss? Is she
hurt? Or, worse, dead? Come on, dear reader, do not worry so much. Do heroes usually die in
tales? And we have not even reached the first third of our story… We do need her till the end…”
(my translation)5 Such a shift between narration and diegesis—Aliss’s adventures—is known as
“authorial metalepsis” and constitutes the first form of metalepsis in Senécal’s novel. It
“combin[es] the principle of narrative levels with the rhetorical figure of metalepsis originating
in ancient legal discourse” (Pier) and aims at reinforcing the fictional effect by presenting “une
rupture radicale de la frontière habituellement ferme et fermée entre l’action narrative et l’acte
narrateur, ou (pour employer les termes de Jean Ricardou) entre le récit d’une aventure et
l’aventure du récit.” (Cohn 125—“a complete break in the usually firm and closed boundary
between the narrative action and the narrating act, or, to use Jean Ricardou’s terminology,
between the story of an adventure and the adventure of the story.” (my translation) The
adventure of the story is carried by the intradiegetic narrator who, at the beginning of each
chapter, summarizes the situation, asks questions, or gives clues regarding what will happen next
to the heroine—in other words, assumes a metanarrative function: s/he comments on the text by
showing its internal organization. Such a role supplements the function of organizing the story
and highlights the confusion of the narration and diegesis levels. This is visible when the narrator
makes an explicit reference to the structure of the tale as defined by Vladimir Propp in
Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928): “Our tale, as is right and proper, starts with an initial
situation that appears to be stable […]. However, if one looks more closely, one can see that our
heroine, Aliss, has already made a decision that has disrupted this stability.” (my translation)6

This metanarrative function also appears in a play between the narrator and the narratee.
Just as the intradiegetic narrator should not be confused with the author, the reader should not be
confused with the narratee, even though s/he is also intradiegetic: the former is an ideal reader,
imagined by the author and bearing no necessary relation to the real readership. In this level of
narration, the narratee is the intradiegetic narrator’s interlocutor and, following the narrator’s
communicative function, s/he sees him/herself repetitively addressed as “dear reader:” “Tell me,
dear reader, what is essential to any hero during his adventures in foreign lands? You guessed
right: a mentor, a guide, a helper! For this, our heroine knows where to go… But in such an
adventure and in such a country, would a helper know how to follow the rules of the
conventional actantial model?” (my translation)7 In this excerpt, the intradiegetic narrator
assumes that the narratee has a theoretical knowledge of literature and knows not only Propp’s
study of Russian folk tales and their division into functions, but also Greimas’ actantial model
(1966), which organizes and analyzes the relations between actions in an initiation tale. The
metanarrative function of the intradiegetic narrator, reinforced by the narrative metalepsis,
highlights the novel’s fictionality.

The last confusion of the narration and diegesis levels induced by the authorial metalepsis
in Aliss happens when the narratee is encouraged to follow the narrator into the story, as if they
were at the same level as the characters: “Aliss is here, in that car… Let’s go with her!” (my
translation)8 Such confusion between levels not only creates a fictional effect, but also produces
a feeling of the uncanny in the actual reader’s mind.

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The internal metalepsis

Another kind of metalepsis than the authorial one, however, is more favorable to generating a
feeling of the uncanny necessary to fantastic fiction: this form of metalepsis, which Dorrit Cohn
calls an “internal metalepsis” (125–130), does not happen between the narration and diegesis
levels, but between two levels of the story itself. This second type of metalepsis best generates a
fantastic effect as it creates in the reader’s mind “un désarroi, une espèce d’angoisse ou de
vertige” (Cohn 129), a sort of distress, anguish, or vertigo by transgressing two diegetic levels.
As previously mentioned, the novel consists of three different levels of diegesis that belong to
three universes, different but linked to each other. I first present each universe separately before
studying the intertextual relation that unifies them all.

The first level of the diegesis is the main story, that is, the level of the diegesis itself. This
is thus the adventures lived and told by the novel’s heroine, Aliss:
I cross the bridge.
Weird feeling. Not because I’m walking on the Jacques-Cartier bridge per se (I’ve done it
hundreds of times), but from crossing it while knowing I won’t do it again. Not for a long
time anyway. (my translation)9
The autodiegetic narrator here activates her narrative function, which is to tell a world. Unlike
the omniscient storyteller, Aliss tells what is happening to her in the present tense, using the
showing mode and an internal focalization. Such a position forbids her to have any distance with
respect to the events. All these narrative choices favor the reality effect, already well established
through the initial place of action that is the city of Montreal and the use of the vernacular
language by the characters. The reader thus feels close to the heroine and can suspend his/her
disbelief as what is told corresponds to the character’s reality. However, unlike the intradiegetic
narrator/storyteller, there is no doubt regarding the nature of the narrator Aliss: she is a fictional
character who lives in a world that is also fictional, even though it seems real to her. As such, she
is a diegetic character who belongs to a narration and to a diegesis.

The second level of the diegesis is Lewis Carroll’s universe (taking the Looking-Glass
world as continuous with Wonderland). The adventures of the teenager Aliss are guided by
Carroll’s tales and his characters that serve as a framework to Senécal’s novel: for example,
Aliss follows Charles/the rabbit/Lewis Carroll into a tunnel and arrives in Wonderland, she
meets the “caterpillar” Verrue who introduces her to drugs, and she risks her life to enter the
Queen’s palace. The Victorian tales are thus also found at the level of the narrated events, and
they constitute the second level of diegesis in the Quebec novel. Introducing a pre-existing
diegetic universe into a story, even if rewritten as it is here, presents this level of diegesis as a
metadiegetic universe, a diegesis within a diegesis, which generates a feeling of the uncanny in
the reader’s mind.

The third and last level of diegesis in Aliss is the universe from 5150, rue des Ormes,
another novel by Patrick Senécal. It is not uncommon for an author to cross over characters from
different stories; Stephen King, for instance, often transforms secondary characters from one
novel into main protagonists from another one, or vice versa. Such a technique is not foreign to
Senécal himself, as a character from 5150, rue des Ormes, Dr. Lacasse, becomes the narrator of
the novel Sur le seuil. Crossovers create what Linda Hutcheon called “a self-sufficient aesthetic

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system of internal relations among parts that aim at an Aristotelian harmony which the reader
actualizes” (7). Such a technique thus develops a kind of connivance between an author and
his/her readership and highlights the text’s fictionality. The link is made in Aliss through the
character of Michelle Beaulieu, alias the Red Queen. Michelle is the daughter of Jacques and
Maude Beaulieu, the torturers from the “house of horrors” (my translation)10 located at 5150, rue
des Ormes, in Montcharles. A refugee in Wonderland, this recidivist murderer has become the
queen of the neighborhood two years before Aliss’s arrival. She rules over her kingdom
according to her own logic: there are no taboos and no rules except to be true to oneself in
everything one does. All the things that are not accepted in the “normal” world (drugs,
unrestrained sexuality, gratuitous violence) are welcome there. Michelle is the one who devises
Aliss’s difficult tasks in order to help her discover who she truly is through the quest of “the right
question” (my translation).11

Due to the temporal continuity between the two novels and the character of Michelle,
Aliss could be considered 5150, rue des Ormes’s sequel. Even though Michelle and Aliss belong
to two different diegetic levels in the eponymous novel, they come from the same reality.
However, in a conventional sequel, recurring characters are clearly identified. In Aliss, however,
Michelle’s identification is made through an accumulation of clues that only the readers of the
first novel are able to see. Such a play establishes the relationship between the two novels as one
of intertextuality, taken from Julia Kristeva’s general acceptation (1969) designating “the
relations between any text (in the broad sense of signifying matter) and the sum of knowledge,
the potentially infinite network of codes and signifying practices that allows it to have meaning,”
as summarized by Gerald Prince in the Dictionary of Narratology (46). For any Aliss reader who
knows 5150, rue des Ormes, the link between The Red Queen and Michelle Beaulieu is quickly
apparent. The first suspicion appears as soon as Charles mentions the Red Queen:
“Wow, no! Not acceptable! No information on the Red Queen will pass my lips, rest
assured!”
“The Red Queen? That’s what you call her?” (my translation)12
The Red Queen is indeed what Michelle likes to call herself in 5150, rue des Ormes: “I’m not
crazy… […] The Red Queen ain’t crazy…” (my translation)13 Such suspicions are confirmed
when the reader learns that the Red Queen is known under no other name and that, sexually
speaking, she has “a specialty, which made her famous very quickly” (my translation).14 Such a
particularity refers to an episode in 5150, rue des Ormes, where the reader discovers that
Michelle is able to ejaculate: “Michelle tipped her head back and screamed with pleasure, a long
and heartrending, wild cry. A shiver contracted her thighs’ muscles and, from between her
fingers which rubbed her clitoris, a liquid, colorless and sticky, spurted out from her vagina.”
(my translation)15 Another clue is given to the reader when Chess describes the Queen as
someone who knows “no limits” (my translation),16 which echoes the following passage from
5150, rue des Ormes:
“I don’t give myself reasons, or code, or anything! That’s the problem, with Pa. His
supposed moral rules prevent him from fully enjoying power.”
[…] I ask her of which power she is speaking.
“The power of being free. […] From everything.” (my translation)17

Finally, when Aliss discovers some of her deceased neighbors stuffed and displayed like
taxidermic animals in one of the “Queen’s exhibition rooms” (my translation),18 there is no doubt

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left for the reader: the Red Queen is indeed Michelle and, in a way, she has pursued her father’s
legacy, as Aliss tells her: “Your name is Michelle Beaulieu, you come from Montcharles, your
family got mixed up in a terrible story […]! And even if I don’t see why, you stuff people in
memory of your father.” (my translation)19 Thus, through intertextuality, a play on enunciative
knowledge (Reuter 56) takes place, which allows the reader to know more than the character.
Aliss must indeed wait until almost the end of the novel to discover the identity of the one she
perceives as the superwoman, whereas the well-informed reader could have known from the first
third of the story that “Michelle Beaulieu [is t]he Queen’s real name” (my translation).20

Because Michelle’s character is both extra- and intradiegetic, she makes visible the
complexity of the connections between the diegesis levels in the novel, thus highlighting the
text’s fictionality as well as creating a feeling of the uncanny. Two of these levels, which belong
to different and independent stories from Aliss, develop an intertextual relation with the novel.
One of the characteristics of this novel is thus to borrow places, characters, and even a part of its
framework from extradiegetic stories. The presentation of these different diegetic levels in Aliss
reveals the relations it has with two prior texts. However, in 5150, rue des Ormes, Senécal
already created an intertextual relation with Carroll’s tales, which is the basis of Aliss’s plot. It is
in this earlier novel that the genesis of Aliss’s adventures in the eponymous novel is found.
Michelle is presented as a teenager fascinated by the Queen of Hearts from Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland, whom she calls the Red Queen, conflating characters from the two Carroll texts. As
her mother says, she draws her, paints her room in red, dresses herself in red, etc.:
[Michelle] reads a lot, to my great pleasure. The other day, she read Alice in Wonderland
and loved it. So much so that she started to draw one of the story’s characters on a large
cardboard box.
“Are you drawing Alice, darling?” I asked her.
“No, it’s the Red Queen! She is the one who decides everything! And if someone blocks
her way, she cuts his head off!” (my translation)21
The intertextual relation is explicitly indicated here through the direct reference to Carroll’s tales.
Moreover, throughout the whole novel, Michelle does not hide her wish to become the Red
Queen. As mentioned earlier, she calls herself so several times. Finally, at the end of 5150, rue
des Ormes, Michelle disappears after having covered the Queen of a chess game with her own
blood:
On Yannick’s chess board, one of the white pieces was covered in a red and sticky
substance. It was the Queen, which had been moved next to the Black King, putting it in
checkmate. […]
“What is most curious,” said the psychologist, “is that the Queen could not make such a
move.” […]
“The aggressor probably does not know the rules,” suggested a policeman, shyly.
[…]
“I think she knows them, but she does not follow them…” (my translation)22
The reader then understands that Michelle went deeper into her fascination with the Red Queen
and her way of exercising power, which is confirmed by the reading of Aliss, where she has
become the Red Queen personified.

Such different intertextual relations suggest that the interactions between the three
diegetic levels in Aliss are deeper than simple influences or borrowings: it seems that each

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diegetic level is embedded in at least another one and that the so-called impermeable boundary
between each level can be penetrated. In Aliss, the two female protagonists, Aliss and Michelle,
are intradiegetic characters who belong to different diegetic levels but who meet in the story.
Moreover, both share a link with Lewis Carroll’s tales. Thus, both characters go from their
diegetic universe (Aliss and 5150, rue des Ormes) to a metadiegetic one (Lewis Carroll’s). In
other words, thanks to the internal metalepsis, two characters leave their real world to enter a
fictional one. However, while Aliss’s entry into Carroll’s metadiegetic universe is explicitly
described, Michelle’s happens off-screen, to use a cinematographic term. Her arrival in
Wonderland is told neither in her original story, 5150, rue des Ormes, nor in the novel Aliss. This
metalepsis is thus induced by intertextuality. However, unlike Aliss, Michelle is a diegetic
character who is conscious of the intertextuality that unites her to Carroll’s stories. This is what
makes her smile when, without realizing it, Aliss repeats her Victorian homonym’s words
(Carroll 161):
Then, without thinking, I say something absurd, insane, something I don’t even
understand myself:
“Who cares about your orders! You’re nothing but a… a pack of cards!”
Everybody in the room bursts out laughing. […] The Queen only smiles and nods… (my
translation)23
Through this level of consciousness, Michelle shows a metaleptic dimension superior to Aliss’s,
which intensifies the feeling of the uncanny provoked by the permeability of ontological
boundaries. The notion of boundary is all the more visible because Senécal insists on its presence
in the discourse, notably through the to-and-fro movement in each chapter between the fictional
effect created by the intradiegetic narrator/storyteller and the reality effect created by the narrator
Aliss. Such an idea is also present in the diegesis: “I think again of Verrue’s boundaries. Maybe
it ain’t that stupid, what he said. When I came here, all things considered, I did cross a border.”
(my translation)24 Such an ontological permeability indeed reflects a territorial permeability in
the novel.

Ontological permeability as a symbol of territorial permeability

The passage between reality and fiction, enabled by a permeability of ontological boundaries,
symbolizes a territorial permeability between the two universes. First, as in Carroll’s first tale
with the rabbit-hole, it is a tunnel that allows the character Aliss to go from reality to fiction:
The subway obviously goes faster than I do, and, three seconds later, when I finally reach
the end of the platform, the mocking lights are already far away in the tunnel.
[…] I still try to guess the name of the station, despite the few letters that are still visible:
W D R D. (my translation)25
However, where Carroll’s heroine was completely cut off from her reality when she was in
Wonderland, Senécal’s keeps a visual contact with Montreal, thanks to the Jacques-Cartier
bridge: “The horizon extends, and I see, very far away in front of me, slightly on my left, the
Jacques-Cartier bridge. At least there’s a landmark I know! That feels good.” (my translation)26
Permeability between the two worlds thus seems more extensive than in Carroll’s tales.
Nevertheless, Aliss cannot go freely from one into the other, as she quickly realizes. First,
there is only one way to go back to reality: by subway (Aliss 165). Second, even by taking the
subway, it is not possible to go back and forth between the two worlds:
“One can thus leave this neighborhood and come back easily?”

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 “It is more complicated than that.”
“Which means?”
“It’s all a question of choice and of real desire.” (my translation)27
Such limited permeability between reality and fiction is visible through the fact that, whichever
end of the neighborhood Aliss is at, she always sees the Jacques-Cartier bridge from a cul-de-
sac. Thus, what was at first reassuring quickly becomes harrowing:
After forty-five minutes, I get to the cul-de-sac. The same as last week. […]
I walked down Lutwidge in the other direction, I can’t end up in the same place!
I stare at the Jacques-Cartier bridge in the distance […]. All of a sudden, I turn around.
[…] About fifteen minutes later, the buildings disappear… abandoned lots appear and…
and…
… the Jacques-Cartier bridge, over there…
Wait… wait! It ain’t working, it ain’t working at all! (my translation)28
The deconstruction of writing through shorter or unfinished sentences and blank spaces
highlights the feeling of the uncanny experienced by the character. In comparison to Montreal,
Wonderland is everywhere and nowhere. It is like a parallel universe but also internal to the
heroine’s reality. For this reason, the other characters of the novel refer to the “real” Montreal as
being “over there” (my translation)29 while Aliss keeps repeating to herself that she is
“elsewhere” (my translation)30 in Wonderland. The fact that a real universe and a fictional one
can coexist to the point that one can go from one to the other without realizing parallels the
permeability between reality and fiction symbolized by the ontological permeability. As for the
character, such permeability generates a strong feeling of the uncanny in the reader’s mind.

The structural analysis conducted in this article illustrates that, due to a three-level story
and to the intertextual relations of these diegetic levels, Patrick Senécal goes beyond the usual
play between the diegetic and metadiegetic levels to generate a feeling of the uncanny in the
reader’s mind. In Aliss, the Quebec author employs the technique of the authorial metalepsis to
transgress boundaries between the narration and diegesis levels on the one hand, and the
technique of the internal metalepsis to transgress boundaries between three levels of diegesis on
the other hand. Moreover, by insisting on the notion of boundaries in the narration and in the
diegesis and the possibility of their transgression, Senécal highlights the permeability of the
ontological boundaries. The metaleptic structure of the novel Aliss thus represents a literary
universe coming to life (Lewis Carroll’s) as well as reality entering fiction through Aliss’s and
Michelle’s adventures in Wonderland. By implying the negation of supposedly impermeable
boundaries—that is the frontier between reality and fiction, but also the line between different
levels of fiction—, the narrative metalepsis allows a play on writing that Susan Stewart links to
what she describes as the specificity of the genre: “[T]he horror story takes place in a peculiar
place between the real and the fictive […]. In the horror story the boundary between the real and
the fictive, the interpretations of experience by the audience and the characters, is continually
drawn and effaced.” (35) Stewart’s moving boundaries of fantastic fiction are the same ones
Senécal transgresses in Aliss to generate a feeling of the uncanny in the reader’s mind. The
narrative metalepsis thus appears as a favored ontological instrument of a genre depending on the
play on writing.
The authorial metalepsis, however, in combination with the intertextual relations among
the three levels of diegesis highlights the text fictionality and thus destroys the reality effect
supposedly necessary to the fantastic effect. One can wonder then why the fictional effect does

9
not consequently prevent the feeling of the uncanny. According to scholars such as Marshall B.
Tymn (Horror Literature, 1981), Michel Dentan (“Le Horla ou le vertige de l’absence,” 1995),
Lise Morin (La nouvelle québécoise, 1996), and Denis Mellier (Textes fantômes: fantastique et
autoréférence, 2001), the explanation lies in another specificity of fantastic fiction, especially in
its contemporary form: “Modern fiction of supernatural horror is a literature of consciousness,
and the genre itself manifests this attitude toward its own existence as a genre. […] As modern
fiction of cosmic and psychological horror almost ritually reminds us, we must always face the
dark; and this element […] makes the literature of terror in this century a reflection of itself, a
conscious form produced by a conscious being.” (Tymn 276) Because fantastic fiction relies on a
game of textuality, postmodern mechanisms of metafiction—such as a highlighted fictional
effect, strong intertextuality, mise en abyme, and other self-reflexive techniques, or a confusion
of narrative levels, which Brian Attebery collectively called “metafantasy” (Stories about
Stories, 2014) and which, following Gérard Genette, I call “narrative metalepsis”—prove to be
the perfect instruments to generate the fantastic effect of the uncanny in the reader’s mind.

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Notes
1. A version of this article has previously been published in French in the journal @nalyses 8.2
(2013): 321-340. It was chosen in 2014 as a Semi-Finalist for the 8th Annual Jamie Bishop
Memorial Award given by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA).
2. See for instance Noel Carroll, “The Nature of Horror.”
3. For more on this aspect, see my articles “Aliénation et altérité: la construction identitaire dans
Aliss de Patrick Senécal.” and “Aliss de Patrick Senécal : le corps violenté comme représentation
métatextuelle.”
4. “Notre conte, comme il se doit, s’ouvre sur une situation initiale en apparence équilibrée
[…].” (Aliss 7)
5. “Hé bien, hé bien ! Voilà une première péripétie assez mouvementée ! Comment s’en est
sortie Aliss ? Est-elle blessée ? Ou, pire, morte ? Allons, ami lecteur, ne t’inquiète pas trop. Les
héros ont-ils l’habitude de mourir dans les contes ? Et puis, nous n’en sommes même pas au tiers
de notre histoire… Nous avons besoin d’elle jusqu’à la fin…” (Aliss 131)
6. “Notre conte s’ouvre, comme il se doit, sur une situation initiale en apparence équilibrée. […]
Mais si on y regarde de plus près, nous constaterons que notre héroïne Alice a déjà pris une
décision qui est venue briser cet équilibre.” (Aliss 7)
7. “Dis-moi, ami lecteur, qu’est-ce qui est indispensable à tout héros dans ses aventures en terres
étrangères ? Bien deviné : un conseiller, un guide, un adjuvant ! Pour cela, notre héroïne sait à
qui s’adresser… Mais dans une telle aventure et dans une telle contrée, un adjuvant saura-t-il
respecter les règles du schéma actantiel conventionnel ?” (Aliss 239)
8. “Alice est là, dans cette voiture… Allons la retrouver !” (“Aliss 7)
9. “Je traverse le pont.
Drôle de feeling. Pas d’emprunter le pont Jacques-Cartier comme tel (je l’ai quand même fait une
centaine de fois), mais de le traverser en sachant que je ne le reprendrai plus. Pas avant un bon
bout de temps, en tout cas.” (Aliss 7)
10. “maison des horreurs” (Aliss 424).
11. “la bonne question” (Aliss 207).
12. — Ho, non ! Non decet ! Aucune information concernant la Reine Rouge ne franchira mes
lèvres, sois-en assurée !
— La Reine Rouge ? Vous l’appelez comme ça ? (Aliss 135)
13. “Je suis pas folle, moi… […]. La Reine Rouge est pas folle…” (Rue des Ormes 200)
14. “une spécialité, qui l’a rendue bien vite célèbre” (Aliss 246).
15. “Michelle renversa la tête en poussant un long cri de plaisir déchirant, sauvage. Un frisson
contracta les muscles de ses cuisses et, d’entre ses doigts qui frottaient son clitoris, un jet de
liquide incolore et poisseux gicla de son sexe.” (Rue des Ormes 336)
16. “pas de frontières” (Aliss 250).
17. — Je me donne pas de raisons, ni de code, ni rien ! C’est ça le problème avec p’pa. Ses
supposées règles morales l’empêchent de profiter pleinement du pouvoir.
[…] Je lui demande de quel pouvoir elle parle.
— Le pouvoir d’être libre. […] De tout. (Rue des Ormes 199)
18. “salles d’exposition de la Reine” (Rue des Ormes 288).
19. “Tu t’appelles Michelle Beaulieu, tu viens de Montcharles, ta famille a été mêlée à une
horrible histoire […] ! Pis même si je comprends pas le rapport, tu empailles des gens en
souvenir de ton père !” (Rue des Ormes 503)
20. “Michelle Beaulieu [est l]e vrai nom de la Reine” (Aliss 424).

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21. [Michelle] lit beaucoup, à mon grand plaisir. L’autre jour, elle a lu Alice au pays des
merveilles et a adoré ça. Tellement qu’elle s’est mise à dessiner un personnage du livre sur un
grand carton.
— Tu dessines Alice, ma chérie ? lui ai-je demandé.
— Non, la Reine Rouge ! C’est elle qui décide tout ! Et si quelqu’un est sur son chemin, elle lui
coupe la tête ! (Rue des Ormes 262)
22. [S]ur le jeu d’échecs de Yannick, l’une des pièces blanches était recouverte d’une substance
rouge et poisseuse. Il s’agissait de la reine, que l’on avait déplacée jusqu’au roi noir, le mettant
ainsi “et mat”. […]
— Le plus curieux, fit le psychologue, c’est que la reine ne pouvait effectuer un tel mouvement.
[…]
— L’agresseur ne doit pas connaître les règles du jeu, suggéra timidement un policier. […]
— Je crois plutôt qu’elle les connaît, mais qu’elle ne les suit pas… (Rue des Ormes 363–364)
23. “Alors, sans réfléchir, je lance quelque chose d’absurde, d’insensé, quelque chose dont je ne
comprends même pas le sens moi-même :
— Qui se soucie de vos ordres ! Vous n’êtes qu’un… qu’un jeu de cartes !
Tout le monde dans la salle éclate de rire. […] La Reine se contente de sourire, tout en hochant
la tête…” (Aliss 489–490)
24. “Je repense aux frontières de Verrue. C’est peut-être pas si idiot, ce qu’il racontait. En venant
ici, au fond, j’ai traversé une frontière.” (Aliss 77)
25. “[L]e métro va évidemment plus vite que moi et, trois secondes plus tard, lorsque j’arrive
enfin au bout du quai, les phares moqueurs sont déjà loin dans le tunnel. […] Je tente quand
même de deviner le nom de la station, malgré le peu de lettres encore visibles : W D R D.”
(Aliss 23 and 26)
26. “L’horizon s’allonge et je vois, très loin devant moi, légèrement sur ma gauche, le pont
Jacques-Cartier. Enfin un point de repère connu ! Ça fait du bien.” (Aliss 80)
27. — On peut donc quitter ce quartier et y revenir sans problème ?
— C’est plus compliqué que ça.
— Ce qui veut dire ?
— Tout est une question de choix et de désir réel. (Aliss 277)
28. Au bout de trois quarts d’heure, j’arrive au cul-de-sac. Le même que la semaine passée. […]
J’ai fait Lutwidge dans l’autre sens, je peux pas arriver à la même place !
Je fixe le pont Jacques-Cartier au loin […]. Tout à coup, je tourne les talons. […]Au bout d’une
quinzaine de minutes, les immeubles disparaissent… les terrains vagues apparaissent et… et…
… le pont Jacques-Cartier, là-bas…
Minute, là… Minute ! Ça marche pas, ça, ça marche pas pantoute ! (Aliss 164)
29. “là-bas” (Aliss 78).
30. “ailleurs” (Aliss 171).

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Abstract
In his novel Aliss (2000), Patrick Senécal pays homage to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland (1865) and its fictional universe. Drawing upon the Genettian concept of the
narrative metalepsis and through a structural analysis of Patrick Senécal’s novel, I show in this
article how a writing technique that plays on the transgression of ontological levels is the perfect
instrument for a genre that plays on its own fictionality.

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