RELATED TERMS: Tragic theatre – Aristotle; Metalepsis

A Greek tragedy usually starts with a ‘flashback’ or analepsis, a recapitulation of the incidents of the story which occurred prior to those which were selected for the plot. The reader is plunged in medias res (‘into the middle of things’), and earlier incidents in the story are introduced artfully at various stages in the plot, often in the form of retrospective narration. (Selden, Widdowson and Brooker, 2005: 34)

It is analepsis which allows for prolepsis, or ‘flash forward’, to various other moments in the narration by means of which the story is unfolded through the plot.

In the design of narrative environments, such plot movements back and forth in time against a (pre-existing) story timeline may be parallelled or contradicted by the spatial movements of the body against the contours of a (pre-constructed) place, to reinforce or to unsettle the the deictic centre of the narrative environment world by playing with the narrative and spatial parameters of orientation, dis-orientation and re-orientation, as an articulation of storyworld, world of the story, the spatial processional and the embodied experiential worlds of imagination, logic and emotion.

References

Selden, R., Widdowson, P. and Brooker, P. (2005). A Reader’s guide to contemporary literary theory, 5th ed. Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman.

Use for Distancing effect; estrangement effect

RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Defamiliarisation; Literary theory; Psychogeography; Situationist International; Epic theatre – Brecht; Theatre of Cruelty – Artaud

Mode of address and mode of engagement of audience and/or participant are important aspects of the threshold and immersive experience of design interaction, in terms of narrative beginning and sequential progression as well as environmental entrance and situational flow. They concern the character of the performative invitation to engage with, and persist with, the designed entity. The question that arises, then, is whether this constitutes an empathic engagement or some mixture of empathic and intellectual engagement, which may prompt consideration of the value of the alienation effect discussed by Brecht and the defamiliarisation process discussed by Shklovsky, as devices for guiding responses and interactions.

Alienation effect is a term derived from the theoretical and theatrical practice of the German Marxist playwright and poet, Bertolt Brecht, 1898-1956. Brecht sought to discover ways of dramatising Marx’s insights into the ways capitalism works. To this end, he sought to create a ‘dialectical theatre’ by means of a set of devices in staging, music, acting, and the telling of parable. The goals was to confound an audience’s comfortable empathic identification with characters and story, as is encouraged by conventional realism [1] or naturalism (Brooker, 2003: 5), through the illusion of the real, the natural and/or the inevitable, i,e, as ‘matters-of-fact’ in contrast to ‘matters of concern’, in Latour’s terms.

Brecht introduces the term Verfremdungseffekt, translated as ‘alienation effect’ [2], in an article entitled “On Chinese Acting” [3], arguing thatthe term had been used in Germany with reference to plays that were of a non-Aristotelian kind, by which he means plays that did not rely on an identification on the audience’s part with the characters on the stage. In Brecht’s (1961: 130) words, the alienation effect refers to,

“… attempts to act in such a manner that the spectator is prevented from feeling his way into the characters. Acceptance or rejection of the characters’ words is thus placed in the conscious realm, not, as hitherto, in the spectator’s subconscious.”

Together these techniques produced the ‘alienation effect’.

Martin Esslin (1960) writes that Brecht could never successfully achieve his famous ‘Verfremdungseffekt, the inhibition of any identification between spectator and actor, in his own highly rational theatre. ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ really comes into its own in the Theatre of the Absurd, where it is impossible to identify oneself with characters one does not understand or whose motives remain a closed book, and so the distance between the public and the happenings on the stage can be maintained.

As Selden, Widdowson and Brooker (2005: 89) explain, Brecht rejected what he called Aristotelian theatre, referring to Aristotle’s formalisation of the practices of Greek tragedy, a form of drama performed in theatres across ancient Greece from the late 6th century BCE whose main proponents were Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (Cartwright, 2013). Aristotle emphasised the universality and unity of the tragic action, and the identification of audience and hero in an empathic relation which produces a catharsis of emotions. In contrast, Brecht urges that the dramatist avoid a smoothly interconnected plot and prevent any sense of inevitability or universality. The facts of social injustice, Brecht contended, needed to be presented as if they were shockingly unnatural and totally surprising.

To avoid lulling the audience into a state of passive acceptance, the illusion of reality, achieved through the audience’s empathic identification with the tragic hero figure, must be shattered by the use of the alienation effect. The actors must not lose themselves in their roles or seek to promote a purely empathic audience identification. They must present a role to the audience as both recognizable and unfamiliar (recalling Freud’s notion of the uncanny), so that a process of critical assessment can be initiated. The situation, emotions and dilemmas of the characters must be understood from the outside and presented as strange and problematic. This is not to say that actors should avoid the use of emotion, simply that they should not resort to empathy. This is achieved by ‘baring the device’, to use the Formalist term (Selden, Widdowson and Brooker, 2005: 90).

Brecht did not seek, through this effect, to reinforce alienation in Marx’s sense. Marx depicts a condition of human alienation from nature, from other people and from the products of his/her own labour. The latter, in particular, is induced by the exploitation of the worker under capitalism, enforcing an identification of the worker with the commodity value of the products of labour. Ultimately, this is seen by Marx to produce a profound alienation of humans from themselves.

Brecht’s intentions were precisely the opposite: to induce a ‘critical attitude’ which would dispel the acceptance necessary to the maintenance of the conditions producing alienation under capitalism. Brecht intended to describe a technique of distancing the audience from intense empathic involvement in the action of a play, in order to encourage and enable them to reflect objectively on the content, themes and messages inherent in that action.

This difference can be seen in the term Brecht used in German. Marx used the word Entfremdung while Brecht wrote of the Verfremdungseffekt, for which a better translation would be ‘de-alienation’ effect. As such, it is related to similar devices in modernist theory and art such as ‘defamiliarization’ or ostranenie and ‘making strange’ or ‘estrangement’, though these have not always had the overtly politicizing intention of Brecht’s method.

Brecht’s ideas were widely adopted, often in association with feminism, psychoanalysis and the Marxism of Louis Althusser, in the film theory of the 1970s associated with the British film journal Screen.

Brecht’s concept is to a degree indebted to the theories of montage developed in Soviet cinema theory and practice of the 1920s, notably in the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein. Later examples in the ‘Brechtian’ tradition in theatre are Heiner Müller, John Arden, Edward Bond, Dario Fo; and in cinema, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Marie Straub, and Hal Hartley and Peter Greenaway, the latter two more indirectly.

The alienation effect is now pervasive. It can be found in advertising and television programming as well as cinema and theatre. Consequently such devices are no longer the province of a critical avant-garde. Scepticism about its continued value is related to arguments about a loss of distinction between the image and the real in postmodern society and the frustrations therefore attending any form of artistic or theoretical ideology critique.

Notes

[1] In particular, Brecht opposed Socialist Realism. This offended the East German authorities after he settled there in 1949. Socialist Realism favoured realistic illusion, formal unity and ‘positive’ heroes. He called his theory of realism ‘anti-Aristotelian’, a covert way of attacking the theory of his opponents (Selden, Widdowson and Brooker, 2005: 89)

[2] Henri Lefebvre discusses the adequacy of this translation and also the risks and dangers inherent in Brecht’s dialectical theatre in a passage in the Introduction to volume 1 of Critique of Everyday Life. Thus, Lefebvre (1995: 23) argues that in Brecht’s theatre,

“The spectator wavers between an externalized judgement – an intellectual state which implies high culture – and an immersion in the image proposed. Perhaps this is what the dialectic of the Verfremdungseffekt is. The spectator is meant to disalienate himself in and through the consciousness of alienation. He is meant to feel wrenched from his self but only in order to enter more effectively into his self and become conscious of the real and the contradictions of the real.”

(Lefebvre 1995: 23)

However, Lefebvre (1995: 24) continues, there is a risk that this dialectic process will fail and take on the disturbing form of fascination, which is a worse outcome than the identification that takes place in the Aristotelian model of tragic theatre: rather than ‘classic’, tragic completeness, the audience will look for satisfaction in “ a sort of bloody ecstasy” (Lefebvre, 1995: 24). Furthermore, Lefebvre (1995: 24) notes, “generalized strangeness entails a danger”, one that was avoided by Brecht but is not necessarily avoided by the people who produce his plays or write about them.

The danger is that in seeking to construct a drama that, while based on alienation, seeks to struggle against it, the drama will end up sanctioning alienation. It is significant, in this respect, that Brecht’s term Verfremdungseffekt is translated as ‘effet d’alienation’ in French and as ‘alienation effect’ in English, as if alienation were the goal of the effect rather than that which it seeks to overcome.

Lefebvre (1995: 24) concludes that it would be a cruel paradox if Brecht’s drama were “to sanction alienation by giving it all the glamour of violence”, a danger, Lefebvre thinks, that is more evident in Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty that Brecht’s epic or dialectical theatre.

[3] Min Tian (1997) warns that Chinese acting does not in fact generate anything identical with, or even similar to, the Brechtian Alienation effect, and that the influence of Asian theatre on Brecht should not be overemphasised. Long before he saw Mei Lan-fang’s performance in 1935, Brecht had formulated in his theoretical writings and theatrical practices his new conceptions of theatre and acting, in particuliar his theory of the epic style of acting. What later came to be called the Alienation effect was already firmly established and clearly articulated as the core of his epic theatre, as outlined, for example, in “The Street Scene” (Brecht, 1978a). While he later elaborated the theory in greater detail, none of the basic ideas were changed (Hecht 1961, 95-96). John Willett, furthermore, contends that Brecht’s term Verfremdung, which was virtually a neologism, appears to be a precise translation of Viktor Shklovsky’s term “priem ostranenniya”, i.e. the device of making strange (Brecht 1978b, 99).

Rather than deriving from elements of Chinese theatre, Tian argues that, to a large extent, Brechtian theatre represents a return to the mainstream of the European classical tradition. A similar point is made by Jacques Derrida (1978, 244) who, while citing Antonin Artaud’s discussion of the theatre of cruelty, noted that,

“The Verfremdungseffekt [alienation effect] remains the prisoner of a classical paradox and of “the European ideal of art” which “attempts to cast the mind into an attitude distinct from force but addicted to exaltation” (TD, p. 10). Since “in the ‘theater of cruelty’ the spectator is in the center and the spectacle surrounds him” (TD, p. 81), the distance of vision is no longer pure, cannot be abstracted from the totality of the sensory milieu; the infused spectator can no longer constitute his spectacle and provide himself with its object. There is no longer spectator or spectacle, but festival (cf. TD, p. 85).”

(Derrida, 1978, 244)

References

Brecht, B. (1961). On Chinese acting. Tulane Drama Review, 6 (1), 130–136.

Brecht, B. (1978a). The Street scene: a basic model for an epic theatre. In: Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited by John Willett. London, UK: Methuen Drama, 121–129.

Brecht, B. (1978b). Brecht on theatre, edited by John Willett. London, UK: Methuen Drama.

Brooker, P. (2003). A Glossary of Cultural Theory, 2nd ed. London, UK: Arnold.

Derrida, J. (1978). The Theater of cruelty and the closure of represenation. In: Writing and difference. London: Routledge, 232-250.

Esslin, M. (1960) ‘The Theatre of the absurd’, The Tulane Drama Review, 4(2), pp. 68–70. Available at: http://web.iitd.ac.in/~angelie/courses_files/TOA/esslin essay tdr.pdf.

Hecht, W. (1961). The Development of Brecht’s theory of the epic theatre, 1918-1933. Tulane Drama Review, 6 (1), 40–97. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1125006 [Accessed 22 March 2016].

Lefebvre, H. (1995). Critique of everyday life. Volume 1: Introduction. London, UK: Verso.

Selden, R., Widdowson, P. and Brooker, P. (2005). A Reader’s guide to contemporary literary theory, 5th ed. Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman.

Tian, M. (1997). ‘Alienation-effect’ for whom? Brecht’s (mis)interpretation of the classical Chinese theatre. Asian Theatre Journal, 14 (2), 200–222. Available from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1124277 [Accessed 11 March 2016].

Related terms; Alienation-effect (Verfremdungseffekt); Alltäglichkeit; The Commodity; Historical materialism – Marxism; Lefebvre; Reification;

In general, alienation refers to the sense of distance from nature, separation from others, and helplessness that is an effect of modern existence since the time of the Industrial Revolution in the West, from approximately 1750 onwards.

In Karl Marx’s writings, alienation is depicted as a condition of human alienation from nature; from other people; and of a person from the products of his/her own labour. The last form of alienation, from the products of one’s own labour, is induced by the exploitation of the worker under capitalism, Marx argues, enforcing an identification of the worker with the commodity value of the products of labour. Ultimately, this is seen by Marx to produce a profound alienation of humans from themselves.

In psychoanalytic theory, alienation refers to the split in subjectivity between the ego cogito and the unconscious, and the recognition that one is not in control of one’s thoughts, actions, and desires because of the existence of unconscious drives brought into play in interaction with one’s social and material environments.

Continue reading “Alienation”

RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Ergodic; Historicism; Interaction Design; Literary theory; Music

The term aleatory derives from the Latin word alea, meaning dice or game of chance. In composition, whether literary, poetic or musical, it implies the use of the element of chance and dependence on contingencies.

Marc Saporta’s novel, Composition No. 1, which is entirely loose-leafed, and its 150 pages can be read in any order, is an extreme example of the genre of aleatory literature or interactive literature. Each of these two terms, however, has very different connotations. The first potentially points towards meaninglessness, futility or absurdity, with no connection other than chance. The second potentially points towards co-created meaningfulness, with accumulated choices revealing patterns of interaction as meaning-creating. Both terms, nevertheless, imply contingency and consecution. Other examples of aleatory literature cited by Jonathan Coe (2011, 28 October) are Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch and Milorad Pavic’s Landscape Painted With Tea.

While Coe does not use the term ‘ergodic’, it might be said to occupy a similar territory to aleatory literature and interactive literature. Bringing together two Greek roots, ergon meaning work and hodos meaning path, ergodic is a term borrowed from physics by Espen Aarseth (1997: 2) who uses it to suggest that a “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” in the context of cybertextuality and hypertextuality.

Hypertext can be considered an example of ergodic discourse in which, rather than ‘nothing follows’, it might be argued that ‘everything follows’, an abundance of sequences are possible which undermine contingency, and hence, ‘narrative drive’.

In music, John Cage became a strong proponent of aleatoric techniques. Such techniques are an important element of 20th century musical composition. In aleatory music, either an element of the composition is left to chance or a primary element of a composed work’s realisation is left to the performer; or perhaps both.

Reference

Coe, J. (2011, 28 October). Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta – review. The Guardian, 28 October 2011. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/28/composition-no-1-saporta-review. Accessed on 18 April 2013.

RELATED TERMS: Agon; Avant-Garde Movements

As is noted under the term Agon, the terms, agonism, agonist, antagonist and protagonist can be of great value in developing and understanding the dynamics of narrative environments, particularly when considered from the point of view of dramatic conflict. Renato Poggioli (1968: 65), furthermore, argues that agonism is a moment of enormous import as a disposition within modern culture. The particular significance of agonism within avant-garde art is his specific area of interest, however.

Agonism derives form the Greek root words agone and agonia but, Poggioli suggests, its modern sense transcends the purely etymological meanings of the two terms. Thus, he reasons, if agonism meant no more than agone, it would simply be a synonym for activism and would express the modern cult of contest, sport and game, that is, of competition and competitiveness. On the other hand, if agonism meant no more than agonia, it would allude to the tragic sense of life so intensely felt by Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, a sense that was rendered popular by the existentialist philosophy of the 1960s.

However, within the context of avant-garde art, what is meant by agonism is more pathetic than tragic, and is neither Christian nor Dionysian. It represents the deepest psychological motivation behind the decadent movement, Poggioli asserts, and also the general currents, from which the decadent movement emerged, that reach back to romanticism itself.

In these currents, the agnostic attitude is not a passive state of mind, exclusively dominated by a sense of imminent catastrophe. Rather, it strives to transform the catastrophic into a miracle. By so acting, through its very failure, it tends toward a result that both justifies and transcends itself.

Thus, in this context, agonism means tension; and it means sacrifice and consecration. As an hyperbolic passion, a bow bent toward the impossible, it forms a paradoxical and positive form of spiritual defeatism, such as exemplified by Mallarme’s “Un coup de des”.

For Mario Praz, the romantic agony is among the most extreme and symptomatic themes of modern literature, keenly suggesting a continuity between romantic and avant-garde mentalities. The presence of an agonistic mentality in the avant-garde aesthetic consciousness can be demonstrated through the frequent appearance of the hyperbolic image in modern poetry. Within critical discourse, similarly, the contrast between a work and the atmosphere in which it is produced presupposes that the creative act takes place in a state of crisis.

Poggioli proposes that in an epoch such as that which encompassed the 1960s, which is dominated by an anxiety or anguish that is impervious to any metaphysical or mystical redemption, agonism must be conceived of as a sacrifice to the Moloch of historicism, in which history is made into a divinity.

This, Poggioli contends, is precisely the transcendental function (ideal mission) of avant-garde agonism as futurism, understood as a general tendency or orientation toward the future, and not the determinate movement that took on that name. Thus, Poggioli defines the agonistic variant of futurism as a self-sacrifice to the glory of posterity (an agonistic sacrifice to the future). Nevertheless, he points out, avant-garde artists sometimes permitted themselves to be seduced by an agonism that was almost gratuitous, that is, by a sense of sacrifice and a morbid taste for present suffering that was not conceived of as self-immolation on behalf of future generations.

Massimo Bontempelli concludes that the avant-gardes of the first fifteen years of the 20th century in general submitted to the fate of the military avant-gardes, from whom the image is taken: they were destined for the slaughter so that after them others might be able to build.

Furthermore, this immolation of the self to the art of the future must be understood not just as an anonymous and collective sacrifice, but also the self-immolation of the isolated creative personality. This agonistic sacrifice is felt as the fatal obligation of the individual artists.

In the ideologies of more recent avant-gardes (post-1945), the agonistic sacrifice is conceived in terms of a collective group of men and women born and growing up at the same moment in history, i.e. a lost generation.

This destiny, while accepted as an historic one, is also accepted as a psychological one, suggesting that the agonistic disposition in avant-garde psychosis represents the masochistic impulse while the nihilistic disposition represents the sadistic impulse.

References

Poggioli, R. (1968). Agonism and futurism. In: The Theory of the avant-garde. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 61–77.

RELATED TERMS: Actant; Agonism and Avant-Gardism; Antagonist; Dissensus – Ranciere; Dramatic conflict; Focalisation; Human Actantiality; Narratology; Protagonist

The word agon and its cognate terms, agonism, agonist, antagonist and protagonist are of great value in developing and understanding the dynamics of designed entities, particularly when considered in conjunction with a notion of dramatic conflict. Agon is a way of developing the intricacies of dramatic conflict through such notions as contest and struggle, opening the potential to discuss these in playful or in political terms.

It is generally held that the root meaning of the Greek word ‘agon’ is a gathering or an assembly, a group of people brought together for some purpose. It is a term, however, which over time acquired a number of distinct connotations. For example, in the Oresteia, Aeschylus employs the word to refer to struggles of various types, while in The Eumenides the image of a wrestling match is used to describe a deadly contest. Aeschylus’ use of agon in The Eumenides explicitly links the image of athletic contest with that of legal proceedings.

Debra Hawhee (2002: 186) comments that,

” … the word agôn suggests movement through struggle, a productive training practice wherein subjective production takes place through the encounter itself. As Nietzsche suggests, the Greeks produced themselves through active struggle; their pedagogy depended on agonism.”

Thus, in the time of Aeschylus, agon came to connote competition and contention. A generation or so later, the historian Thucydides employs agon to mean extreme anxiety, where agonia signifies the most agonising and conflicting emotions. In this way, agon comes to refer to conflicts which are external, such as competition between opposing forces, and conflicts which are internal, such a mental and emotional agony.

In the English language, agonist was used to mean champion or contender for prizes in the 17th century and now, in the 21st century, it is taken to refer to a person engaged in a contest or a struggle. The more generally used form of the term agonist in English is protagonist against whom is set an antagonist.

The significance of an agonistic approach to narrative environments is that, as Debra Hawhee points out, it highlights the notions of ‘virtue’ (as goodness) and of ‘virtuosity’ (as skill) and it draws out the performative dimension of virtue and virtuosity. Thus, Hawhee notes, at the heart of the ancient agon lies the concept of arete or virtue. Thus is because the struggling contest served as a stage of sorts. Arete was associated with the goodness, courage, and prowess of a warrior.

Furthermore, Hawhee (2002: 187) continues,

” … one cannot just be virtuous, one must become virtuosity by performing and hence embodying virtuous actions in public. In addition to depending on acknowledgement, then, arete also had a performative dimension, which is to say that it must be enacted, embodied. Arete was thus not a telos, but rather a constant call to action that produced particular habits. As a repeated/repeatable style of living, arete was therefore a performative, bodily phenomenon, depending on visibility — on making manifest qualities associated with virtuosity. As such, it was produced through observation, imitation, and learning.”

(Hawhee, 2002: 187)

Thus, Hawhee (2002: 190) concludes, in ancient Greece, one is what one does, or better still, one is what one is perceived as doing.

References

Hawhee, D. (2002). Agonism and Arete. Philosophy and Rhetoric, 35 (3), 185–207. Available from http://muse.jhu.edu/content/crossref/journals/philosophy_and_rhetoric/v035/35.3hawhee.html [Accessed 24 November 2012].

Russo, R. (2002). A Natural history of ‘agonist’. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 45 (3), 350–358. Available from http://muse.jhu.edu/content/crossref/journals/perspectives_in_biology_and_medicine/v045/45.3russo.html [Accessed 11 November 2015].

RELATED TERMS: Diegesis; Storyworld; Narrative environment design

Rather than the process of story-telling, that is, diegesis contrasted with mimesis in Greek philosophy and poetics, the term ‘The diegesis’, i.e. as the English translation of Gerard Genette’s term diégèse, is understood, here, as the world of the story in its entirety. This includes unseen or not presented parts of it, the beliefs and feelings of the characters and the past and future of that world, in short, all that belongs consistently, ‘logically’ or by processes of ‘reasonable implication’ or ‘inference’ to that world.

It is different from mis en scene, i.e. the arrangement of the scenery, props and so on on the stage of a theatrical production or on the set of a film (the pro-filimc events).

It differs from ‘storyworld’, which is the world generated by the reader, viewer or spectator from the diégèse.

Bob Rehak (2003, 124, n3) notes that,

“Diegesis, from the Greek term for “recounted story,” is conventionally employed in film theory to refer to the “total world of the story action” (David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art, 6th ed., New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001, 61). I use it here to designate the narrative-strategic space of any given video game — a virtual environment determined by unique rules, limits, goals, and “history,” and additionally designed for the staging and display of agency and identity.”

Diegesis is the process of telling or narrating. In Plato’s and Aristotle’s writings, as reported discourse, diegesis is contrasted with mimesis, the process of showing or enacting.

Diegesis has been converted into a narratological category denoting the imagined story-universe as opposed to the discursive or textual constituents of a narration. The earliest modern usage of French “diégèse” originates in film theory, where diegesis designates everything which constitutes or belongs to the world projected by a film, and not only visually (Metz, c1971, 1974: 97–8)

In this case, The diegesis [diégèse] is taken to mean the world of the narrative. It includes objects, events, spaces and the characters that inhabit them, including things, actions, and attitudes not explicitly presented in the work but inferred by the audience. That audience constructs a diegetic world from the material presented in a narrative. The narrator may be inside the diegesis, i.e.intra-diegetic, or may not, in which case they are outside, i.e. extra-diegetic.

Note that this formulation of extra- and intra- diegetic differs from and is simpler than the initial formulation of Genette, which includes homo- hetero- extra- and intra-diegetic categories, and combinations thereof [1]. This difference is made for two reasons: the first is that the diegesis in a narrative environment is typically constructed of real things: real place, real objects, real people; the second is that we have found that we do not need such a complex formulation as Genette proposes – inside and outside suffices.

A diegesis may contain other narratives, in which case the narrative it belongs to is called a framing narrative. Stories that are told (usually by characters) within the main narrative are part of its diegesis, but also each has its own internal diegesis. If the diegeses of these subnarratives are related to the diegesis of the framing or master narrative, then in narrative environment design we call the framing narrative a meta-narrative.

The diegesis is an important concept in narrative environment design because it will most likely contain real places, spaces, objects. Because the audience (narratee) is in direct physical relationship to these elements, the borderline between intradiegetic (part of the narrative’s world) and extradiegetic (outside the narrative’s world) can be extremely porous, making metalepsis comparatively easy. This is a powerful tool for engaging the narratee.

A fundamental problem in the design of narrative environments

Let us consider the manifold confusions and ambiguities around the term ‘diegesis’ in the English language as it has been used over the years in film studies and narratology. [2] For example, Halliwell (2015) states that, 

“… some modern theorists have converted diegesis into a narratological category denoting the imagined story-universe as opposed to the discursive or textual constituents of a narration. The closest we come to this distinction in ancient criticism is in Aristotle’s pair of terms praxis, “action” qua events depicted, and muthos, the structuring of depicted action into a dramatic/narrative representation (see esp. Poetics 6.1450a3–5). In French, this other sense of diegesis is denoted by “diégèse” (Genette [1972] 1980: 27, 280, [1983] 1988: 17–8), while “diégésis” is reserved for the narrative mode contrasted with mimesis. This further terminological splitting has led to a somewhat confusing variation in the sense of the adjective “diegetic”/”diégétique,” together with related compounds, in the hands of different theorists. One reason for this state of affairs is the fact that the earliest modern usage of French “diégèse” originates in film theory, where diegesis designates everything which constitutes or belongs to the world projected, and not only visually, by a film (Metz [1971] 1974: 97–8; Pier[1986] 2009: 217–18).” 

One set of confusions arises from the situation that, as Halliwell notes above, there are two terms in French, diégèse and diégésis, which have different meanings but both of which are translated into English as diegesis. Henry Taylor (2007) also delves into the confusions surrounding the terms diegesis and diegetic in English, particularly the way in which they have come to supplant the vocabulary of mimesis and the mimetic [3].

Let us look now at the meaning of diégèse.

4. Diégèse and diégétique universe

Diégèse is an invention, or perhaps more properly re-invention, of Etienne Souriau. He coined it for the mode of representation specific to cinema.
Souriau contrasted the diégétique universe, based on the notion of diégèse, with the screen universe. The former universe (diégétique) is the place of the signified (the sense derived from the signifier); while the latter universe (screen) is the place of the signifier (the material or substantial means of representation). 
Genette (1988: 17) notes that, 

“Used in that sense, diégèse is indeed a universe rather than a train of events (a story); the diégèse is therefore not the story but the universe in which the story takes place”. 

To clarify this point, Genette explains that ‘universe’ is used here in, “the somewhat limited (and wholly relative) sense in which we say that Stendhal is not in the same universe as Fabrice.” Crucially, he concludes, “We must not, therefore, substitute diégèse for histoire [story].”

Elsewhere, Genette (1997: 295) explains that,

“the diegesis, in the meaning suggested by the inventor of the term (Etienne Souriau, if I am not mistaken), which is the meaning I shall be using here, is the world wherein that story occurs. The obvious metonymic relation between story and diegesis (the story takes place within the diegesis) facilitates the shift in meaning, deliberate or not; moreover, there is an easy derivation from diegesis to diegetic, an adjective that has sometimes come to mean “relating to the story” (which historical could not have done unambiguously).” 

The importance of this conclusion is that it signals a change in Genette’s use of the term diégèse (rendered in English translations of his work as diegesis). Previously, in Discours du recit, he partly proposed that diégèse (diegesis) was an equivalent for histoire (story). Thus, in defining the term diégétique, Genette suggested that, 

“As currently used, the diegesis (diégèse) is the spatio-temporal universe designated by the narrative; in our terminology, therefore, this general sense diégétique = ‘that which has reference or belongs to the story’; in a more specific sense diégétique = intradiegetic” (translator’s note, cited in Genette, 1988: 17n)

Genette’s revised view of diégèse and the diégétique universe brings him into consistency with Souriau’s (1952: 11) more general submission to the principle that, 

“… in all the arts without exception … the main business is to present a whole universe – the universe of the work – en patuite, in a state of patency. This rather rare philosophical term … denotes manifest existence, existence that is clearly evident to the mind.”

Souriau (1952: 11) continues that such a universe, 

“… exists manifestly before us … a universe presented with all its power to stir us deeply; to overwhelm us; to impose its own reality upon us; to be, for an hour to two, all of reality.”

For Souriau (1952: 11), 

“… it is impossible … to reduce the universe of a work to what is presented concretely on the stage.”

All of a play’s elements, constituting its universe or world, 

“… must exist for us, surround us, take hold of us, be given to us. But given – ab unglue leonem – in the form of a tiny fragment, a nucleus cut out of that immense universe, whose mission will be to conjure up for us, all by itself, the universe in its entirety.” (Souriau, 1952: 11)

Metz (1991: 97-98) explains the term diegesis in the following way:

“The concept of diegesis is as important for the film semiologist as the idea of art. The word is derived from the Greek διηγησις, “narration” and was used particularly to designate one of the obligatory parts of judiciary discourse, the recital of facts. The term was introduced into the framework of the cinema by Étienne Souriau. It designates the film’s represented instance (which Mikel Dufrenne contrasts to the expressed, properly aesthetic, instance)―that is to say, the sum of a film’s denotation: the narration itself, but also the fictional space and time dimensions implied in and by the narrative, and consequently the characters, the landscapes, the events, and other narrative elements, in so far as they are considered in their denoted aspect.” 

Furthermore, Metz explains the distinction between the diegetic elements of a film and ‘the diegesis’ itself in the following way:

“The autonomous segments of film correspond to as many diegetic elements, but not to the “diegesis” itself. The latter is the distant significate of the film taken as a whole: Thus a certain film will be described as “the story of an unhappy love affair set against the background of provincial bourgeois French society toward the end of the nineteenth century,” etc. The partial elements of the diegesis constitute, on the contrary, the immediate significates of each filmic segment. The immediate significate is linked to the segment itself by insoluble ties of semiological reciprocity, which form the basis of the principle of commutation.” (Metz, 1991: 144)

Let us now turn to the meaning of diégésis. 

5. Diégésis

Genette (1988: 18) argues that the two terms diégèse, as defined by Souriau, and diégésis, the French translation of the Greek term διήγησις (diegesis, “narration”), should not be ‘telescoped’ into one another. Specifically, he states, diégèse “is by no means the French translation of the Greek diégésis”. Such a telescoping of story (i.e. train of events) and storyworld (diégèse – the universe or world in which the story takes place) is what David Herman (2009: 183) might be seen to be doing when he states that,

“In one sense, the term diegesis corresponds to what narratologists call story; in this usage, it refers to the storyworld evoked by the narrative text and inhabited by the characters.”

The term diégésis draws into play the Platonic and Aristotelian theory of the modes of representation, where diégésis is distinguished from mimesis. Diégésis, for Plato, is pure narrative, without dialogue. It is contrasted to the mimesis of dramatic representation and to everything that enters narrative along with dialogue, in the process making narrative impure or mixed. For his part, following Souriau, Genette derives the adjective diégétique from diégèse and not from diégésis.

6. Diegesis as story, diegesis as universe and imaginary worlds If ‘diégèse’ is translated into the English language as ‘diegesis’, then Genette’s explanatory sentence, “the diégèse is therefore not the story but the universe in which the story takes place” becomes, in English, “the diegesis is therefore not the story but the universe in which the story takes place”. In this case, diegesis in English has three distinct senses: story (synopsis or synoptic discourse); universe (or ‘world’) in which story takes place; and translation of the Greek term διήγησις (“narration”). Awareness of this state of affairs, led Noel Burch (1982: 16) to state that,

“Diegesis … seems to me a word that has lost much of its usefulness, because it is either too vague to accommodate dialectical rigour or too mechanical …”

Rather than use the term diegesis by itself, Burch borrows a term from the earlier film semiotics of Souriau and Metz, referring to the general experience of the classical film in terms of diegetic production, at the level of transmission, diegetic effect, at the level of reception, and diegetic process to encompass both.
The distinction made by Souriau, and followed by Genette, between the story-diegesis, as train of events, and the universe-diegesis, as real or fictive ‘world’ within which the story-diegesis takes place, might then be termed diegetic production and diegetic effect, respectively, to deal with the ambiguity of the term diegesis by itself. 
For Burch (1982: 16), this opens up the possibility of distinguishing the diegetic process from narrative. Thus, he argues, the diegetic process, 

“can be triggered off in a filmic context independently of the presence of any narrative structure, and that one may consequently see it [i.e. the diegetic process], rather than narrative, as the true seat of cinema’s ‘power of fascination’.” 

This represents a clear departure from Genette, for whom, as already noted, diégèse (diegetic effect in Burch’s terms and story (narrative) are inextricably linked. One might also wish to distinguish these two worlds, one denoted (or explicitly stated and shown) the other connoted (or implicity suggested and evoked) and the imaginary world which the reader/viewer constructs from story-diegesis and universe-digesis. One way of approaching this second can be suggested with reference to Dominique Sipiere’s reconsideration of the work of Souriau. Sipiere (2008: 13) comments that,

“Souriau (re)introduced the word diegesis in its modern sense: it is the world within the film as it would be if it were a real complete universe. In other terms, the world as it is for the characters in the movie. The concept was successfully reinvested by Gérard Genette for literary studies but it brings a little more to film studies because it helps separate the two great statuses of objects: movies can be both a re-presentation of the ‘real’ afilmic world and the creation of an artificial diegetic world.” 

In putting it in these terms, that diegesis (i.e. diégèse) is “the world as it is for the characters in the movie”, it can be clearly seen that it is a secondary question as to whether the members of the movie’s audience put themselves in the position of one or more of the characters in the movie, for example, through processes of (imaginary) identification or ‘suture’, as a process of securing and closing. These secondary questions concern the ‘mode of address’ of the movie; and by extension of the ‘diegesis’, in all its glorious ambiguities, of ’narratives’ and ’stories’, including those embedded in academic curricula, themselves considered as narrative environments and learning environments.

Notes

[1] Because of the ambiguities surrounding the term ‘diegesis’, Monika Fludernik explains the reluctance of German-speaking academics to use Genette’s terminology,

“Genette’s use of the root term diegetic in many technical terms (homo-/heterodiegetic, extra-/intradiegetic, metadiegetic, etc.), though usefully allowing distinctions of person and level, at the same time introduced the problem that diegesis, in the Greek original, actually referred to the narratorial discourse, that is, to the act of telling, rather than to the story (the muthos or – in later narratological parlance – the histoire).” (Fludernik, 2005: 40)

[2] For a discussion of these categories, see Genette, G (1980) Voice, in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980, pp.212-262.

Winters (2010) notes that the first scholar to use the term diegetic in the modern sense, and in connection with film no less, suggests little of this idea of narrative levels, and offers instead a concept more appropriate for cinema. Étienne Souriau used the word to describe one of seven levels of ‘filmic reality’ by which the spectator engages with film. In that sense, diegesis indicates the existence of a unique filmic universe, peculiar to each movie. As Edward Lowry describes it, Souriau conceived of this unique universe as containing ‘its own rules, systems of belief, characters, settings etc. This is just as true of a Neorealist film like Bicycle Thief as it is of a fantasy film like René Clair’s I Married a Witch. Souriau refers to this unique realm specific to each film as its diegesis.’14 

This, evidently, has little to do with the idea of narrative levels encountered in literary fiction, and instead emphasises diegesis as a narrative space more suited to the distinct realm of the cinema (Souriau’s comparative aesthetics, after all, saw each of the nine arts occupying their own individual universe). More importantly still, nothing in this description justifies the automatic exclusion of music from the diegesis, since the presence of music in the space of the filmic universe might be considered an aspect specific to a particular film, whether realist or fantastic in its aesthetic. This idea of a unique non-realistic filmic universe that may operate according to laws different from our own, where music does not underscore our actions or erupt from us spontaneously, is an important one to which I will return.

Like Souriau before him, the semiotician Christian Metz used the term diegetic to indicate the ‘reality’ of the fictional world, “a reality that comes only from within us, from the projections and identifications that are mixed in with our perception of the film.”15 However, building on Souriau’s statement that diegesis encompassed “everything which concerns the film to the extent that it represents something”,16 Metz defined diegesis in typically semiological terms as “the sum of a film’s denotation: the narration itself, but also the fictional space and time dimensions implied in and by the narrative, and consequently the characters, the landscapes, the events, and other narrative elements, in so far as they are considered in their denoted aspect.”17 According to Metz’s definition, then, whether music belongs rightfully in the diegesis depends on whether it is understood as denotative. Although ‘nondiegetic’ music is widely assumed to be connotative, and to have little to do with denoting objects in narrative space, one of Adorno and Eisler’s chief criticisms of Hollywood scoring was precisely music’s redundant, almost denotative character—in short, its implied role within the diegesis.

[3] Henry Taylor (2007) traces the history of the term diegesis, which brings to light the difficulty of using it in design practices such as the design of narrative environments. He points out that the terms diegetic, non-diegetic, meta-diegetic, homo-diegetic, and so on are used extensively in literary and film studies. However, he argues, the term diegesis is a misnomer.

As he explains, book three of The Republic (Politeia), Plato distinguishes between two kinds of narrative: the simple narrative, haple diegesis, and mimesis. The former features a narrator speaking directly in his own, undisguised voice. In the latter, mimetic or imitative representation, the author speaks indirectly, for example, through other characters and voices.

Plato regards mimesis as an inferior, degraded form of storytelling and, moreover, one that is dangerous, because it simply copies the appearance of the real, providing us only with reproductions of shadows. Nevertheless, this judgement cannot be taken at face value since Plato himself does not speak to us directly in his dialogues, but through the voice of Socrates and other characters.

Plato’s pupil Aristotle re-contextualises and expands the significance of mimesis and mimetic narrative in his Poetics. Mimesis for Aristotle does not reproduce reproductions or shadows, but reality itself. It is therefore a first and not second order imitation. Aristotle still adheres to Plato’s term diegesis, but reassigns it to the mode of mimesis. This means that, while all narrative is mimesis in the wider sense, simple or direct narrative, such as in voice-over narration in film, is diegetic mimesis, whereas dramatic representations, for example, of actors in a scene, are, in this conceptualisation, mimetic mimesis. Mimesis, for Aristotle, is the umbrella term designating all kinds of creation of poetic or fictional worlds, as Paul Ricœur explains in Time and Narrative.

This complication is further exacerbated by the fact that what Aristotle called mimesis and mimetic has now come to be called diegesis and diegetic. Before being established as an academic discipline, the French term diégèse was introduced around 1950 by Etienne and Anne Souriau, although there is some dispute about its precise origin. This dispute about origin not withstanding, the English terms diegesis and diegetic, referring to the spatial story worlds primarily of fictional texts and films, are translations of the French words diégèse and diégétique.

Yet more complications are added by the fact that Genette, taking his orientation from Etienne Souriau, asserts that these terms are not derived from the Greek diegesis.

As Taylor comments, by now this terminology has become so well established that it would be futile not to use it in its now accustomed sense. It has been particularly useful in designating aspects and features of filmic sound as it relates to the relatively closed story-worlds of fiction. In regard to non-fiction, and to documentary film in particular, Taylor notes, the terms remain problematic.

The expression transdiegetic has been used to refer to the propensities of sound to cross the border of the diegetic story world to the non-diegetic (life-)world of the audience. The example that Taylor cites is that of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, when a boat crew member played by Laurence Fishburne turns up the radio playing the Rolling Stones song “Satisfaction”. The music, at first simply located in on-screen diegetic, filmic space swells to encompass on- and off-screen, cinematic space.

References

Winters, B. (2010) ‘The non-diegetic fallacy: film, music, and narrative space’, Music and Letters, 91(2), pp. 224–244. doi: 10.1093/ml/gcq019.