On narrative

[lobelia321]

From a book on Narrative by H. Porter Abbott:

... the term diegesis (which Plato originally used to refer to stories that were told, not acted) has been used to refer to the world of the story -- that "reality" in which the events are presumed to take place. Thus, if a character narrates who also plays a role in the diegesis, it is called homodiegetic narration. If a voice situated outside the action narrates, it is called heterodiegetic narration. Gérard Genette argued ... that the distinction between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrators is more adequate than that between first- and third-person narrators for specifying whether a narrator is inside or outside of the world of the story.

Interesting. Gets me out of the first-person or third-person pov conundrum. Am trying to think of slashy examples.

I guess Cordelia's FOTA is an example of first-person homodiegetic narration. Brenda's Fun & Games is an example of third-person homodiegetic narration.

Heterodiegesis seems to be rarer in slash. I guess we all love getting emotionally involved too much. Abbot Porter cites Hemingway but I'm still trying to think of a Hemingway-esque slash fic. I suppose I was trying to be heterodiegetic in "When We Are Human" but then the second-person narrator (moth, spider) most definitely is part of the story so would be homodiegetic. I suppose some of Demelza's and Gabby Hope's recent little Dom tales are heterodiegetic because they subsist almost entirely on dialogue.

It is more complex than I thought at first. This is why it is interesting.

Comments

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Cleverer than you? *snorts*

Anyway, I don't think homo and auto preclude each other. Auto is a sub-set of homo.

Here's what Shlomit Rimmon-Kenan says:

The degree of participation of homodiegetic narrators (be they extradiegetic or intradiegetic) varies from case to case. Pip [Charles Dickens, Great Expectations] (extra-homodiegetic) and the pardoner (intra-homodiegetic) play a central role in the respective stories they narrate (protagonists-narrators) -- or, put differently, they narrate their own story (auto-diegetic narrators, in Genette's terms). On the other hand, Lockwood's role is subsidiary (witness-narrator).

Homo and heterodiegetic seem to be the more commonly used terms while auto-diegetic seems to me to have been coined by Genette and used by some authors. However, Mieke Bal uses neither homo nor hetero nor auto, she talks only of external narrators and of character-bound narrators, perhaps because she was sick of the jargonic confusion.

I would think that FOTA-Orli is an intradiegetic, homodiegetic, autodiegetic narrator. Hey! Intra-auto-homo!