User:DionysosProteus/Drama

Material I'm preparing for Drama and mimesis

ELAM:
"Dramatic worlds are hypothetical ('as if') constructs, that is, they are recognized by the audience as counterfactual (i.e. non-real) states of affairs but are embodied as if in progress in the actual here and now. The spectator will conventionally interpret all stage doings in the light of this general 'as if' rule" (102)

If they don't, they're mistaking drama for actuality. Could bring in Kirby's discussions on acting here.

"classical narrative is always oriented towards an explicit there and then, towards an imaginary 'elsewhere' set in the past and which has to be evoked for the reader through predication and description. Dramatic worlds, on the other hand, are presented to the spectator as 'hypothetically actual' constructs, since they are 'seen' in progress 'here and now' without narratorial mediation. [...] This is not merely a technical distinction but constitutes, rather, one of the cardinal principles of a poetics of the drama as opposed to one of narrative fiction. The distinction is, indeed, implicit in Aristotle's differentiation of representational modes, namely diegesis (narrative description) versus mimesis (direct imitation)." (110-111)

"Dramatic worlds, then, are revealed through the persons, actions and statements which make them up, and not through external commentary." (112)

"Mimesis is thus equivalent to definition through ostentation of the represented world" (112)

Others
"Drama and theater, however, are not necessarily identical. While drama may be said to shape action and theater to make it visible, action itself is the medial realm composed of both shape and visibility. Dramatic texts serve to reinforce the dimension of action as representation where theater and performance offer the dimensions of its visibility and actuality." (Rayner 1994, 7)

"If the play of action is the medium for drama and theater (not of them) then performance need not be understood either as an embodiment of a text or a freedom from textuality or structure." (Rayner 1994, 5).

"Oedipus's action is mimetic not because it refers to an absent, true act but because it appears to coalesce with a set of possibilities from the temporal field analogous to an individual's span between birth and death. [...] The Oedipal narrative of Sophocles' play has nothing left over or on the margins. It makes the life of Oedipus a total form that describes the shape of self-awareness and self-knowledge, unifying past and present through the unfolding investigation. Time and identity are constituted by the form. Narrative in effect is not a reflection but a creation of how they are known; but as de Lauretis and others have pointed out, it also excludes alternative constructions and suppresses other voices." (Rayner 1994, 17)

Fuzzy reasoning (from the Diegesis talk page)
The section “Diegesis in film” seems conceptually weak and confusing. The text makes a hard distinction between theater and cinema; yet narration, parallel/simultaneous action, attention getting techniques (e.g. lighting; scrims), and music are all common parts of live theater. The distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic elements seems clear enough, but would appear to apply equally in both media. Both media show and tell; both include elements from within and without the “world” being presented. But to say that stage is dramatic and film narrative is to make a false distinction. One gets the feeling that some academic has taken the Aristotelian dichotomy and run with it. I suppose the arcana of textual criticism deserve a place in this all-inclusive encyclopedia; but I submit that this article does more harm than good. Jim Stinson 20:44, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

No, it's your distinctions that are confusing you. You're failing to make the distinction between theatre and drama. On the one hand you describe metatheatrical devices (lighting etc.); these are a feature of modern theatre only, since its technological basis didn't exist before the end of the nineteenth century (and modern theatre, as described below, involves a 'crisis of dramatic form'). Music was used in a way analogous to cinematic underscoring only with the invention of melodrama (melo=music and drama), which required a new term to distinguish its genre, precisely because it conflicted with neoclassical understandings of what drama was (and it was incorporated in order that its theatrical entertainments weren't drama, because of the legal interdiction against unlicensed drama). Other than that, it only ever existed in what you would call a non-diegetic form in rare cases and then to cover act divisions. When you have music relating to dramatic form in more significant ways than this, it is given a new generic name--opera.

On the other hand, you describe elements of dramatic form - narration, parallel/sim. action. This is a complicated question, since it relates to two different aspects - pre-c19th Realism and c20th non-naturalism. As far as pre-Realism goes, throughout the history of drama the elements you describe have been decried by just about every major theorist precisely for violating dramatic form (see below). The big problem, of course, is Shakespeare, who violated neo-classical decorum frequently and looked great doing it. At the opposite end of the spectrum you have Jean Racine. The history of dramatic theory describes Shakespeare as incorporating 'epic' elements into a dramatic form.

With the c20th it gets more complicated, and the interaction with cinema becomes significant. In a nutshell, the techniques you describe begin at the level of theatrical production rather than plays - Erwin Piscator in Germany and Vsevolod Meyerhold (i.e. Eisenstein's teacher) first incorporate cinematic projection into the theatre as a way to get past the interpersonal limitations of drama (towards the social overview of the epic). Hence, simulataneous action. In playwrighting terms, it's first fully-realised by Brecht, who calls his drama "epic theatre" for that very reason. He 'solves' the crisis of dramatic form (see below).

Drama is traditionally a mimetic art form. As you observe, though, it has often incorporated 'epic' elements. Shakespearean drama, Restoration comedy and modern non-naturalistic forms all depart from strict dramatic form. Many, however, do not - Stanislavskian acting and its descendant Method acting in performance terms and Ibsen and his c20th imitators (Arthur Miller, et al) all observe the neo-classical autonomy of drama and exclude the epic. In terms of elements that depart, rendered in the vocabulary of classical poetics, there is also a tradition of the incorporation / articulation with the lyrical; Anton Chekhov and Maurice Maeterlinck and other Symbolists, Expressionism in the theatre and drama (Sophie Treadwell, some of Elmer Rice and Eugene O'Neill, Federico Garcia Lorca, all incorporate lyrical dimensions to their dramatic form. This is part of a historical poetics, traceable to the 'crisis of drama' at the turn of the twentieth century. Dramatic form, it was realised, couldn't cope with the full-representation of reality as we were coming to understand it, and in two contrasting directions: the social (mass movements happening outside the window of the bourgeois drawing-room) prompted the incorporation of the epic (most fully-realised in Bertolt Brecht; and the inner, subjective world (happening inside inarticulate characters' heads that in realistic terms we can only hear about, not experience directly), perhaps most fully realised in Samuel Beckett. That, in a nutshell, is the story of the crisis of dramatic form in the twentieth century. When you are dealing with Brechtian epic theatre, you could argue that diegesis becomes relevant; but Brecht has his own term to deal with the non-mimetic narrational aspects of his theatre... what he calls the gestic principle (Deleuze discusses this briefly in relation to cinema in his second book). By and large, however, when talking about the dramatic world in drama, you are talking about mimesis - the representation of a world (not its report).

As far as cinema goes, it is 'epic' from the word go (i.e., it can narrate, do the dramatic and do the lyrical, just as it pleases). That is inherent to its technological foundations. The epic, Aristotle says, combines imitation/representation and narration. This is why cinema studies uses the word 'diegesis' at all. It would make far more intuitive sense to use the word mimesis to refer to the film's fictional world, were it not for its epic form. Because of this epic form, cinema is not subject to the interpersonal limitation of drama That is, you can see nature directly, like all those long, lingering lyrical shots at the opening of the original Solaris; you can hear a character's thoughts directly through voice-over narration. You can see the representation of vast social movements like the revolution in Eisenstein or the movements of the AIDS pandemic in And the Band played on. In brief, that is, drama gets mighty jealous of the technical and dramaturgical possibilities of the cinematic medium - you guys can do all the things we can't but wished we could. If you are interested in these debates, there is plenty of literature on the subject - in the drama, at least, it stretches back for centuries and is a major axis of dramatic theory.

Your criticism of fuzziness may be valid insofar as it's a complicated subject and could do with a substantial citation drive in its narration here. However, the terminology is sound and the distinctions well-established. You imply it's the eccentric theory of a solitary academic. I'd point you to an overview of the history of dramatic theory like Marvin Carlson's Theories of the Theatre--that would give you an idea of just how fundamental and persistent these debates have been. Take a glance at the debates between Goethe and Schiller, for example, who were loving Shakespeare but unable to reconcile him with traditional dramatic form. In theatre, what cinema calls 'non-diegetic' is, in its theatrical equivalent, called 'non-mimetic' (which is why the section in the article on musical theatre will struggle to find some reputable citations). It might be that the reason this isn't clearer to a layman is that we live at the end of a century in which just about every major form of theatre rebelled against its mimetic foundation (there is a similar relationship in painting thanks to the emergence of 'abstract art').

Sorry if that's information overload. If you'd prefer to investigate yourself in the sources, let me know and I'll point you in further relevant directions.
 * DionysosProteus 19:18, 11 September 2007 (UTC)


 * It would take far too long to wade through this reply; but to take just one example, you absolutely cannot see (or hear) anything directly in cinema, not only because you are in the presence of recordings only, but also because even the simplest and most straightforward presentation is mediated by the characteristics and constraints of its medium and shaped by that medium's users. Even the most rabid verite documentarist can never escape the decisions of 1) where to aim the camera, 2) what to frame (and frame off), 3) when to start and end recording, 4) whether (and what parts) to include in the eventual presentation and 5) where to place the material in the presentational sequence.


 * More broadly, I suspect that the term diegesis, originally signifying narrating/telling, in contrast to mimesis (imitating/showing) has now been burdened with the additional and completely different meaning of fictive world creating. It's easy to see how this happened. Mimesis became the depiction of an action and diegesis became everything else. Understandable. Jim Stinson 00:11, 14 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, it's precisely the inherently-mediated aspects you describe that mean that cinema's storytelling is a narrative form; it's not so much determined by the presence of an agent with volition, though, since this dimension is present in theatre also (the playwright, director and actor all select action in different ways, without it becoming narration), but rather is inherent in the technology. This is why, though, the sense of fictive world-making in cinema is identical to its traditional meaning - it's the same thing... A world created through cinematic narration (that is, 'narration' isn't merely a linguistic thing but in cinema is embodied in the technology, in just the ways you describe; this is the really original development that cinema inaugerates, as far as this critical tradition is concerned). Cinema narrates with the audio-visual, not merely the written (or spoken, as it was with Plato and Aristotle, of course) word.


 * Mimesis is the embodiment of action, traditionally (rather than depiction - that gets complicated); it isn't narration because there is no 'mediating communication system' (usually). It's not an action vs. everything else distinction, but a distinction of means.


 * In terms of cinema, there isn't a shift where you're sensing one; diegesis means 'the world that is narrated'. Take the OED definition: "A narrative, a report of action, a plot, now especially in a cinema or television film"; note the 'of action' - that's there to provide the contrast with mimesis. The definition doesn't recognise a difference report/world. I suspect you're hearing a shift of meaning because you're aware that there's a difference between narrating and what is narrated - the report (how) and the world (what); the same tension exists in the use of the word mimesis (indeed, that tension, under the rubric 'representation', is a preoccupation of much post-structuralist philosophy; the rise of semiotics, more generally, is an anti-mimetic approach, which unpicks the difference). This hasn't been helped by a c20th development in literary studies, which used mimesis to describe 'realism' in the Western literary tradition more generally, which introduces a completely different axis (Auerbach - what he's actually talking about is more properly described as diegesis, since it's literature for the most part. But that's a tangent).
 * So what I'm struggling to say clearly, is that its meaning as 'report' or 'narrative' is the same thing as its meaning as 'created world' in cinema, because cinema is inherently narrational (if that's even a word). Even when cinema mimics theatre, there is still a 'narrator' standing in-between. But this is also why one can't use 'diegesis' to talk about the fictional world created by the drama - the technological basis is absent. DionysosProteus 01:16, 14 September 2007 (UTC)