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.
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