Adapting Similes: Metalepsis and Narrative in <i>The Apple</i> and <i>Paradise Lost</i>

ABSTRACT This article explores the formal similarities between epic similes and musical numbers within a musical film, specifically Menahem Golan’s 1980 movie The Apple, a parable about the corruption of artistic ideals by a Satanic and fascistic record executive. Both of these self-consciously artificial and metaleptic features challenge narrative immersion as the primary aesthetic experience. The simile and the song interrupt the story, but also serve as defining formal elements of the art object. Yet even within such formal unity, musical number and epic comparison rely upon a metaleptic skein of levels that distinguishes story from world, that reminds readers, redundantly, that they are reading and viewing an artificial object. In the end, Paradise Lost and The Apple reveal how much “gratuitousness,” “digression,” and “irrelevance” are the nature of both the art work and the real itself and, in so doing, challenge the presumed centrality of story-telling to human social orders.