Diegetic versus nondiegetic: a reconsideration of the conceptual opposition as a contribution to the theory of audiovision

Alessandro Cecchi

Università degli Studi di Siena

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Download full text (.pdf)

The concept of diegesis and the alleged distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic have taken on such a central position in considerations of narrative cinema as to suggest their intrinsic validity. Many commentators would subscribe in toto to the idea, set out with great clarity by Robynn J. Stilwell, that the concept of diegesis is based on objective configurations of on screen reality, and that the diegetic/nondiegetic distinction corresponds to immediate perceptive data (Stilwell 2007: 184). To accept this idea means renouncing a systematic clarification of the concept, while one only need look at the various ways in which it has come to be applied to see that such a clarification is particularly urgent. I give here a philosophical analysis of the concept of diegesis articulated in two phases: first the premises and implications of the concept as it is commonly used are set out, highlighting the problem areas; then I go on to outline a critical revision in terms of a coherent but still largely hypothetical formulation of the theory of audiovision.

1. Premises and theoretical implications of a fundamental concept

The concept of diegesis had its beginnings in a notion put forward by Gilbert Cohen-Séat, promptly taken up and codified by Etienne Souriau (Souriau 1953: 7). It was then extensively used by Gérard Genette. Whereas initially he proposed a partial redefinition of the concept (Genette 1969: 211), he would later insist that it had nothing to do with the Greek term diegesis in Plato (Genette [1983] 1988: 18). Subsequently Paul Ricoeur affirmed that there could be no question of assimilating the modern concept to the term as it was used first by Plato and then, rather differently, by Aristotle (Ricoeur [1984] 1985: 179). Thus any discussions seeking to clarify the concept starting from its use in classical times, and the alleged antithesis of mimesis and diegesis (Taylor 2007), can safely be ignored.

Nor is Claudia Gorbman’s reconstruction of the history of the concept (Gorbman 1980: 194) entirely convincing. The relationship between story (fabula) and plot (syuzhet) which was so crucial to the Russian formalists in the 1920s – viewed above all as a relationship between abstract typological structuring of the narration and its concrete articulation – cannot be considered as a precursor to the relationship between diegesis and narration discussed in French cinema criticism from the fifties onwards. In any case Gorbman does not properly clarify the link between the two pairs of concepts, and fails to support it with appropriate bibliographical references, while someone more conversant with the narratological theories of the Russian formalists (Bordwell 1985) was careful not to confuse the two conceptual planes. All the same, Gorbman can be credited with giving a full account of the concept in terms of the definitions given by Souriau and Genette. Following Souriau, she includes in the diegetic perspective “all that belongs, ‘by inference’, to the narrated story, to the world supposed or proposed by the film’s fiction” (Gorbman 1980: 195), while with Genette she defines diegesis as “the narratively implied spatiotemporal world of the actions and characters” (ibid). The specific definitions introduced by Gorbman undoubtedly contribute to the discussion of the concept: in particular the role of inference – a term she herself introduced in translating Souriau’s original expression “dans l’intelligibilité” as “by inference” – has proved crucial in clarifying the strict connection that exists between diegesis and the ontological position of the narrated story within the fictional horizon of cinema.

The definitions set out above suggest that the concept of diegesis is grounded in a representative conception of film language. This can be illustrated by referring to the Tractatus logico-philosophicus, containing Ludwig Wittgenstein’s first theory of propositional language. He explains that propositions confront us with “facts”, in the sense of the “existence of states of affairs” (Wittgenstein 1922: §2), insofar as they offer a “picture” (§2.1) or “model” (§2.12). The representative theory is based on the observation that the image of a fact is in turn a fact (§2.141). What enables a fact to represent another fact is the “pictorial form” they have in common (§2.17), also referred to as “logical form” (§2.18). Whether an image does or does not really represent a fact from the real world depends not on the intrinsic characteristics of the image but on the correspondence between the image and an actual state of affairs. Thus strictly speaking the logical image represents “a possibility of existence and non-existence of states of affairs” (§2.201). What the image represents, its “sense [Sinn]” (§2.221), is only “a possible situation” (§2.202). In other words: it may or may not conform to the real world, according to whether it is “correct or incorrect, true or false” (§2.21). Non-truth, meaning nonconformity of the situation represented with an actual state of affairs, does not imply that the sense of the proposition (the representation) is invalidated, but merely the non-correspondence between the situation represented and a fact which actually happened (§2.222). Without going into the reasons for Wittgenstein’s particular conception of the relationship between sense (Sinn) and meaning (Bedeutung), with the latter being restricted to the relationship between name and object, while only the former refers to the representation of a state of affairs (§3.3), it is clear that such a conception can be easily transferred to film language. Moreover, in spite of holding a different position, Ricoeur recognised that, through the concept of diegesis, Souriau set out to “oppose the place of the signified in film to the screen-universe as the place of the signifier” (Ricoeur [1984] 1985: 179). This confirms the link between the concept of diegesis and a propositional conception of film language, implicitly setting up an ontological opposition.

The concept of diegesis also points to a realist conception (in the philosophical sense) of inference or induction. The premise is that logical induction is able to guarantee a more reliable and complete knowledge than that deriving from sensible perception. In terms of the cinema, this leads to the conviction – whether implicit or explicit – that the act of inference confronts us with knowledge of an objective and coherent world (diegesis), while what appears on screen (the narration) is merely a subjective and partial perspective on this. Given the context of the cinema, it is not, of course, a question of asserting the physical reality of the inferred world, but simply of affirming its ontological primacy with respect to the reality represented on screen. In other words: the concept of diegesis contains a ‘thetic’ moment, implicitly instituting an ontology within the fictional representation.