Metalepsis plays an integral part in understanding how electronic literature can engage users and create immersive experiences with scholars, such as Bell1, Ensslin2 and Ryan3, discussing how metaleptic techniques can be used to break down the barrier between digital spaces and the real world. Metalepsis is used in digital texts to inform which narrative and interactive elements will break down barriers to the reader. There is, therefore, potential for these immersive experiences to be empathetic and enhance our own understanding of personal trauma.
Having won many awards, Depression Quest aims to do exactly this, using non-linear hypertext, and by limiting choice, to show the user how alienating depression can be. The digital format worked well for Quinn, Lindsey and Shankler’s goal of raising awareness about depression, because the ways we try and make sense of trauma narratives are as non-linear and chaotic as electronic literature can be.
As Quinn, Lindsey and Shankler have already demonstrated, electronic literature can be used to encourage empathy in more engaging ways. By using both rhetoric and ontological metalepses, there is potential for electronic literature to break down the barrier to the reader so that they can explore other people’s responses to trauma in more immersive and engaging ways. In explaining the different ways people try and make sense of trauma (and the different narratives that need representation), Coleman paraphrases Herman, explaining; “often the survivor finds it difficult to make sense of the chaotic, unworlding, nonsensical and harrowing memories stored in nontraditional and somewhat abnormal pathways (177)”4. Likewise, according to Clark and Rhyno; “The flow of human thought does not always follow a purposeful, task-oriented, reasoned, or intended path. Instead the natural world of human thought is frequently punctuated with unwanted cognitive activity that interferes with our ability to engage in productive thought and performance” (Sarason, Pierce, & Sarason, 1996)5.
There is a parallel here to metalepsis, which is likewise considered an intrusion with Genette defining it as “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe”6. Intrusive thoughts can be represented in electronic literature using these intrusions. Metaleptic techniques can break down barriers, allowing one narrative or diegetic universe to be intruded upon by another. In this case, the narrative set in the present is intruded upon by the narrative of past trauma. For patients with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) intrusions can be referred to as ‘flashbacks’ and often feel real and present7. When representing these intrusions, as Bell, Ensslin and Ryan have demonstrated, it is possible, not just to represent break down barriers between diegetic universes inside a text, but to intrude into the user's own world as well, creating true empathy when discussing trauma narratives and personal memory.