Diégèse

The diégèse , of the Greek διήγησις (diêgêsis) , has two meanings:

in the mechanisms of narration, the diégèse is the fact of telling the things, and is opposed to the principle Mimesis which consists in showing the things;
it is the universe of a work, the world which it evokes and of which it represents a part.

In narratology

In a work, one can often distinguish several levels diegetic:

the level extradiegetic : it is the level of the narrator when this one does not form part of the fiction (for example omniscient Narrateur), knows all that is external with the fiction;
the level diegetic or intradiegetic : it is the level of the characters, their thoughts, their actions;
the level metadiegetic or hypodiegetic : it is when the diègèse contains itself a diégèse, for example a character Narrateur; the typical case is Shéhérazade in the Thousand and One Nights , or the many digressions of Jacques in Jacques the fatalist and his Master of Denis Diderot.

On the level metadiegetic, when the character-narrator takes itself leaves to the elements the account which he tells, he is known as “ homodiegetic ”; when he tells stories of which he is absent, he is known as “ heterodiegetic ”.

Universe interns of a work

This term appeared for the first time in 1951 under the feather of Etienne Souriau in an article entitled the structure of the filmic universe and the vocabulary of the film studies in the international Revue of film studies n°7-8; according to its Vocabulary of esthetics , he was invented in 1950 by Anne Souriau. But this concept applies to any representative art and not only with the cinema.

Etienne Souriau offers this definition of the diégèse term to us:

all that is supposed to occur, according to the fiction which the film presents; all that this fiction would imply if it were supposed true.

(p.240)

For example, a place represented, fictitious, fact part of the universe and diegetic reality, while the real place which made it possible to offer the framework during turning belongs to “filmophanic” reality. They are thus the fictitious world, its coherence and the laws which govern it, inside whose the told history will take seat. However, this term does not apply to reality external with work: this concept does not embarrass borders between fiction and reality.

Gerard Genette developed the concept of diégèse to apply it to the literature, borrowing it from the theorists of the cinematographic account. It means for him the whole of the events reported by the narrative speech which it defines, in Discours of the account , as “an account like history”. Thereafter, in Figures II (1972), the diégèse differently represents all the “space-time universe indicated by the account” all the parts temporal and space concerning the account.

In works of representation (radiophonic part, theater, cinema, televised series…), the border between what is diegetic and extradiegetic is sometimes fuzzy. For example, with the cinema, the border between a sound diegetic - audible by the characters - and a sound extradiegetic - as the background music, or sound effects punctuating an event - are not always clear, and the realizer exploits this ambiguity sometimes. In the case of lyric works, like the opera, the Operetta S and the musical comedies, the songs are at the same time diegetic - they are Dialog S between characters, or of the Monolog S - and extradiegetic, since the characters are not “aware” to sing; for the spectator, that requires a voluntary Suspension of incredulity. However, certain songs can be diegetic, the character interpreting an air in the history (for example song of Olympia in Tales of Hoffmann of Jacques Offenbach).

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