Already from the start, narrative metalepsis has been associated with its effects. According to Gérard Genette’s first definition from 1972, it “produces an effect of strangeness that is either comical […] or fantastic”. Eleven years later, Genette added the possibility of an aesthetic effect: Metalepsis, he said, can produce ”an effect of “humor” or of “the fantastic” or “some mixture of the two […], unless it functions as a figure of the creative imagination”.

Later research on metalepsis (Ryan, Wagner, Malina) has taken up the aesthetic aspect, arguing that metalepsis has an anti-immersive effect, thanks to its “potential for self-reference and thus for laying bare the fictionality of the work in which it appears” (Pier). But what is interesting is that this “laying bare” of the creative process is neither always anti-immersive, nor necessarily separated from the other effects mentioned by Genette. I will study some examples in which the self-reflexive dimension is related to “the fantastic effect” (or rather what Rita Felski would call shock as a mode of textual engagement), or to the “comical” effect on a recipient. I will concentrate on the represented effects (that is the reactions of the characters inside the diegesis), but I will briefly mention the possibilities to study the effects on empirical recipients.