Staging the Repertoire as Postopera
A narratological analysis of the staging of Madama Butterfly by Hotel Pro Forma (2017)
N.N.M. Nuijten 10440674
Master Dramaturgy, Universiteit van Amsterdam July, 2017
Table of contents
Introduction……….5
theoretical framework and method 8
introduction case study 10
Part 1. Narrative………. 12 1.1 narratology………12
1.1.1 different manners of speaking 12
1.1.2 narratology in the twentieth century 15
1.1.3 narrative levels 18
1.1.4 focalization 20
1.2 narratology in film……… 22
1.2.1 diegesis of sound and music 24
1.2.2 different types of song 25
1.3 ambi-diegesis………...28 1.4 narratology in opera: dramatic, epic, dialectic? ………. 30
1.4.1 Wagner 32
1.4.2 Brecht 36
1.5 concluding Part 1………38
Part 2. Madama Butterfly………... 41 2.1 story and origin……….. 41
2.1.1 the libretto 43
2.2 narrative in the libretto and music of Madama Butterfly……… 44
2.3 staging……… 47
Silent scene 50
Fontana scene 51 2.3.2 ambiguous focalization in Madama Butterfly 52 2.3.3 music and the voice in Madama Butterfly 53
2.4 ambi-diegesis in Madama Butterfly……….. 55
2.5 Madama Butterfly: dramatic, epic, dialectic? ………58
Part 3. Postopera……… 60
3.1 the postdramatic……… 61
3.2 the postmodern………. 62
Conclusion……… 65
Bibliography.……….. 69
Introduction
In the 2017 staging of Madama Butterfly at La Monnaie / De Munt in Brussels1, it is not just Puccini’s quintessential piece that we see re-staged. In this stagingit is not the music, that haunting overture, that starts the performance. It is a woman walking slowly and silently to a small podium on the front of the stage, who in turn starts the music by stepping onto this confining square, where she will remain for the rest of the performance. It is she who tells the story; it is through her eyes that the audience sees Puccini’s opera, taking place on the stage behind her. She is Madama Butterfly, or rather her ghost, coming back after being dead for more than a hundred years, to tell us her story.
The Danish director Kirsten Dehlholm, together with her collective Hotel Pro Forma, has made no cuts or adaptations to Puccini’s opera; it is left intact. However, the piece is in this case not staged as an ‘autonomous’ performance, but serves as a portrayal of the memory of the deceased Butterfly, the storyteller. It is not Puccini’s story that we see, it is Butterfly’s story, herself being present as a narrator. This staging altered the way the story is conveyed. Because of this, the whole piece transforms on multiple levels. It effects the time and space, the characters, the emotions it arouses and the way it is conceived by the audience. Hotel Pro Forma created a new performance around the original opera.
By adding a narrator, the storyteller, another layer is built around the original narrative. Interestingly in this new layer of narrative the story is not communicated with words, but with actions. It is a visual, performative narrative, built around the original, textual and musical narrative. These two narratives are represented within the storyteller, who sings Puccini’s original melodies but acts out a performance conceived of by Hotel Pro Forma. She is isolated from her memory – the original opera – in time and space, but at the same time present in it because of her voice. On the stage behind her we see a puppet – mastered by three puppeteers – carrying out Butterfly’s actions in the original opera. The storyteller seems to be ‘in between’ of everything; in between the stage and the audience, in between the past and the present. Her voice exists in her memory, but her actions exist in the present. She is inside as well as outside of the opera. In this thesis I will investigate her ambiguous position as a narrator and how this influences the narrative structures of the performance.
Matters of narrative belong to the realm of narratology. This field of study is concerned with questions of who is telling a story; of different ways of telling a story; of different layers in telling a story. Originally narratology is concerned with literature, but it
1 Premiered 2 February 2017 at Muntpaleis / Palais de la Monnaie in Brussels. See:
has been applied to other fields of study such as film and theatre.2 In opera studies, narratology has mainly been adopted from a musicologist point of view.3 This point of view is mostly concerned with distinguishing different levels in the music of an opera; with how the music tells the story. In this thesis I will aim to take a broader look by investigating and combining a variety of narratological theories to come to terms with the different narrative layers in this particular staging of Madama Butterfly.
Although touching upon different fields of study – opera, musicology, narratology, literature and film – the main objective of this thesis is dramaturgical. In simple terms, because it is not only concerned with questions of ‘how’ but also of ‘why.’ I will elaborate on this statement shortly. As many scholars have pointed out, it is difficult to define what dramaturgy is.4 I want to highlight one view that generally informs the position of dramaturgy in this thesis. In their text what is dramaturgy? theatre scholars Cathy Turner and Synne K. Behrndt quote Adam Versényi who defines dramaturgy as “the architecture of the theatrical event, involved in the confluence of components in a work and how they are constructed to generate meaning for the audience.”5 Following this dramaturgical principle I will not merely investigate how Hotel Pro Forma built their ‘theatrical event’ but also how it is ‘constructed to generate meaning’.
After analysing this staging of Madama Butterfly I will take the discussion to another level. I argue that because of the narrative strategies and their dramaturgical consequences, this staging is not a conventional one. It does not merely play out the ‘dramatic universe’ prescribed by the libretto and music, but rather uses this material and complements it with another, newly created performance – that of the storyteller – while leaving the original opera intact. Because there are now two ‘universes’ – the universe of the original opera, and the universe of the storyteller – there is a possibility for critique and reflection, not only on this specific opera but also when considering opera as an art form on a broader level. This connects to the concept of postopera, which recently found its way into opera studies but has not widely been explored. Jelena Novak coins the term in 2012 in her dissertation on the voice and the body, reflecting upon earlier mentioning of ‘post-opera’ by Jeremy
2 For example, in film: Souriau, Etienne. “La structure de l’univers filmique et le vocabulaire de la filmologie”.
Revue internationale de filmologie 7-8, 1951. In theatre: Vanhaesebrouck, Karel. “Towards a Theatrical Narratology?” Image & Narrative 9, 2004.
3 For example: Abbate, Carolyn. Unsung Voices. Opera and musical narrative in the nineteenth century. Princeton
University Press, 1991. ; Strykowski, Derek R. "The Diegetic Music of Berg’s Lulu: When Opera and Serialism Collide." Journal of Musicological Research 35.1, 2016.
4 Turner, Cathy, Synne K. Behrndt. Dramaturgy and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 17-19. 5
Tambling and the notion of the ‘post-operatic’ coined by Nicholas Till and Kandis Cook.6 Novak defines postopera in connection to the postdramatic – as defined by Hans-Thies Lehmann7 – and the postmodern. The research on postopera and the postoperatic is mostly concerned with newly written work. In an interview on this subject, Till and designer Kandis Cook state: “…as far as we’re concerned the post-life of opera in contemporary culture is something that’s way more interesting to investigate than most of the works in the repertory.”8 Next to this Jelena Novak states: “the notion of postopera that I plead for does not refer to conventional opera and its contemporary reworkings, but only to unconventional recently created pieces.”9 However, looking at the calendar of the big opera houses in the Netherlands and Belgium, one notices that there are only a few contemporary pieces programmed. This seems to apply to opera houses all over the world. According to the statistics of operabase – an online database keeping track of the events in opera houses all over the world – works by Verdi, Mozart and Puccini are performed the most, by far. Richard Strauss is the first twentieth century composer in the list, at position 10; the highest ranked living composer is Philip Glass at position 41. The forty people before him, as the operabase-website mentions, are all ‘DWEM’s’: Dead White European Males.10 It seems safe to state that the main practice of opera houses is staging repertoire operas. Whether that is good or bad is not a discussion I am concerned with in this thesis, but it seems interesting to look for new possibilities in the common practice of staging the repertoire. In light of this I want to quote musicologist Matthias Rebstock, who mentions that “there is hardly a more urgent question in the field of opera than that of how we can treat the special cultural legacy these repertoire operas represent, and how we can manage to live up to the demand they address to us, namely that we meet them head on.”11 That is why in this thesis, through analysing the staging of Madama Butterfly by Hotel Pro Forma, I will research the possibilities of staging a repertoire piece as postopera, using narrative strategies and thereby opening up the possibility that the staging of a repertoire piece can also be regarded as postopera.
6 Novak, Jelena. Singing corporeality: reinventing the vocalic body in postopera. PhD diss. University of
Amsterdam, 2012; Tambling, Jeremy. “Post-Opera? After Brecht.” Opera and the Culture of Fascism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 229-248; Till, Nicholas. “‘I don’t mind if something’s operatic, just as long it’s not opera’. A Critical Practice for New Opera and Music Theatre”. Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 14, no. 1, 2004, pp. 15-24.
7 Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Postdramatic Theatre. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. 8 Till and Cook in Novak 2012, 29.
9 Novak 2012, 29.
10 Operabase, ‘Opera statistics 2015/16’. http://operabase.com/top.cgi?lang=nl&splash=t. accessed 12 June 2017. 11 Rebstock, Matthias. ‘Varieties of Independent Music Theatre in Europe’. Independent Theatre in
theoretical framework and method
The main question of this thesis is: in what way do narrative strategies inform the dramaturgy of the staging of Madama Butterfly by Hotel Pro Forma? This results in sub-questions like: what is narrative? How does Hotel Pro Forma use narrative as a strategy? How do these strategies influence the original piece? In what terms can this staging be defined? Are conventional narrative terms adequate to analyse this staging? In addition to this main part of my thesis I conclude with a discussion on the possibilities of this staging – of a repertoire piece – to be considered as a postopera. This leads to the following structure.
The first part of this thesis is concerned with narratology, which can be defined as “the study of structure in narratives.”12 I will outline the origins of this field of study and its most important terms for the purpose of this thesis. Starting with Plato and Aristotle I will discuss the polarization of the terms diegesis and mimesis. These two categories of ways to convey a story, in simple terms by recounting it (diegesis) or imitating it (mimesis), will form the basis for my analysis later on. After this I will move on to one of the leading structuralist narratologists of the last century, Gérard Genette. I will discuss his views on diegesis and mimesis and his narrative theories concerned with different levels of narration and the concept of focalization, on which I will elaborate with a book by Maya van den Heuvel-Arad in which she analyses theatre adaptations of films through the concept of focalization, as outlined by the influential narratologist Mieke Bal.13 I will illustrate some of the theories in this first part by my own examples, mainly the books the Neverending Story by Michael Ende and A little life by Hanya Yanagihara, to which I will at times refer in the rest of this thesis.14
Moving from literature to the realm of the audio-visual, I will discuss narratology in film. I will especially discuss the transformation of the term diegesis and the use of its adjective diegetic in combination with the negative counterpart nondiegetic, which became a common practice in film studies after Etienne Souriau proposed them.15 These terms are often used to describe sound in film as coming from the inside of the visible realm of the film (diegetic), or from the outside (nondiegetic).16 To illustrate the theories in this part, I
12 ‘Narratology’. Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/narratology Accessed 19 July
2017.
13 Heuvel-Arad, Maya van den. Focalizing bodies: visual narratology in the post-dramatic theatre. Marburg:
Tectum-Verlag, 2011.
14
Ende, Michael. The Neverending Story. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1983; Yanagihara, Hanya. A little life. United States: Doubleday, 2015.
15 Souriau 1951.
16 Neumeyer, David. “Diegetic/Nondiegetic: A Theoretical Model”. Music and the Moving Image, vol. 2, No. 1,
will take the musical film The Sound of Music as a main example.17 As a bridge from film narratology to narratology in opera, I will shortly discuss some comparative arguments between the two made by Robbert van der Lek in his book Diegetic Music in Opera and Film.18 In opera, as in theatre in general, narratology connects to categorical notions such as
‘dramatic’ and ‘epic’. To get into this terminology I will discuss the book Leitmotiv and Drama. Wagner, Brecht, and the Limits of ‘Epic’ Theatre by a scholar in German Studies, Hilda Meldrum Brown.19 For my thesis it is interesting to discuss what Brown has to say about the dramatic and epic qualities in operas by Richard Wagner and Bertolt Brecht, because they represent two different positions in terms of genre, respectively drama and epic. I want to take a look at these genre classifications because I will argue that while the original opera Madama Butterfly is a dramatic piece, its 2017 staging is not, because of its particular way of contrasting the drama with narrative. Contrasting drama with other (non-dramatic) elements is an important feature of the Epic theatre, as defined by Brecht.20 I discuss the positions of Wagner and Brecht to later help analyse how the particular staging of Butterfly fits into these categories.
A lot of the narratological terminology is based on (assumed) polarizations – between mimesis-diegesis, diegetic-nondiegetic, dramatic-epic – that might not prove to be sufficient in analysing ambiguous elements in the staging, such as the storyteller I mentioned above. In light of this I will introduce in this thesis the notion of ambi-diegesis, a term coined by professor Morris Holbrook (2003), to help analyse those traits that do not easily fit in just one category or the other. Although he specifically applies his concept of ambi-diegesis to classify certain types of song in the genre of the musical film, I will explore the broader possibilities of this term for the purpose of narratological analysis.
At the end of this first, theoretical part, I hope to have accumulated and clarified the notions needed for the second part, which will be analytical. In this chapter I will analyse the opera Madama Butterfly according to the theoretical framework I provided in the first chapter. I will investigate the textual source of the opera, the score and libretto before moving on to the (audio-visual) staging of it, in this case the staging by Hotel Pro Forma in 2017. I will aim to clarify the narrative structures of this staging and how they are used as
17 Wise, Robert. The Sound of Music. United States: 20th Century Fox, 1965.
18 Lek, Robbert A. van der. Diegetic music in opera and film: a similarity between two genres of drama analysed in
works by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897 - 1957). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991.
19 Brown, Hilda Meldrum. Leitmotiv and drama: Wagner, Brecht, and the limits of epic theatre. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991.
20 Brecht, Bertolt. 1949. "A Short Organum for the Theatre". Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an
dramaturgical strategies to generate meaning for this opera and on a broader level to bring this repertoire opera into the present.
In the third and last part I take the discussion to another level. I will take the conclusions of the previous parts of my thesis and contribute to the ongoing discussion on postopera described above. I will critically engage with its terminology and definitions, focusing on the theories of Novak and Till. I will take the outcomes of my analysis of the staging of Madama Butterfly and shortly reflect upon their connections to the postdramatic – following Lehmann’s theories on the matter – and the postmodern; combined in the term postopera. I argue that not only contemporary written pieces but also a staging of a repertoire opera, in particular the concerned production of Madama Butterfly because of its narrative strategies, should be considered in the postoperatic discourse.
introduction case study
As mentioned above, the major case study for this thesis is the production of Madama Butterfly at the Royal Theatre La Monnaie / De Munt in Brussels, in February 2017. The creation of this staging was in the hands of the Danish Kirsten Dehlholm, with her conceptual theatre collaboration Hotel Pro Forma, together with the Ulrike Quade Company (puppet theatre). Hotel Pro Forma was founded in 1985 by Dehlholm and developed into an “international laboratory of performance, installation and opera.”21 Exploring the work of Hotel Pro Forma, keywords like ‘collaboration’, ‘visual’, ‘conceptual’ and ‘experiment’ are dominant. It is a changing collective of artists, like a hotel full of guests. Some just stay for one project, others become residents. Key is that every piece of Hotel Pro Forma is the product of a collaborative process, not only in rehearsals but also in building concepts for performances, which forms an important part of their projects.22 Over the years Hotel Pro Forma has taken on some projects involving repertoire operas and music. For example Operation: Orfeo (1993), in which “causal and dramaturgic sequence in libretto and music is replaced by a series of tableaux and compositions informed by purely visual and auditive principles rather than by dramatic modes of narration. The performance is a visual interpretation which comes to rediscover the basic elements of traditional opera.”23 The emphasis on the visual (rather than narration) is something that also characterizes Hotel Pro Forma’s later engagements with opera, like Parsifal (2013) and Rachmaninov Troika (2015). The latter was the first production of Hotel Pro Forma at La
21 ‘About Hotel Pro Forma’. http://www.hotelproforma.dk/about-us/about-hotel-pro-forma/ 22 ‘About Hotel Pro Forma’. http://www.hotelproforma.dk/about-us/about-hotel-pro-forma/ 23
Monnaie in Brussels. It was based on three short operas by Sergei Rachmaninov; Aleko, The Miserly Knight and Francesca di Rimini. Every piece is based on a distinct visual and dramaturgical concept, developed to construct the staging and to generate meaning. After this engagement the Danish Hotel Pro Forma came back to Brussels in November 2016, to rehearse for their newest repertoire staging: Madama Butterfly.
For this staging Hotel Pro Forma made some interesting basic choices in forming a concept for this production. The most important one is the ‘doubling’ of Madama Butterfly, there is not one, but there are two Butterflies. I already mentioned one of them as the storyteller at the start of this introduction; the woman walking to her small podium in front of the stage where she – apart from one moment – remains the entire performance. This woman is the singer, she sings the melodies Puccini wrote. She is however by herself, in her own ‘universe’ on that small square, where she remains alone. Behind her on the stage we see all the other characters and we also see the other Butterfly; not in human form, but as a puppet. It is as if what we see on the stage is the memory of the woman on the podium, with the puppet portraying her younger self. Or rather, herself when she was still alive. Different times and spaces are shown alongside each other in this performance; something that is only happening in this staging, not in the original dramatic piece, which shows only one ‘universe’. In the discussion of this staging I will analyse how Hotel Pro Forma’s dramaturgical concept for their Madama Butterfly, based on narrative strategies, influences the piece and the way it is perceived. Next to this doubling of Butterfly in the storyteller and the puppet I will touch upon other elements in this staging, such as a group of dancers (the ‘ninjas’), costumes and set design. Although the choice for a puppet in this staging is very interesting for further research, my main focus in the analysis will be on the storyteller. Unfortunately the limited space of this paper does not allow getting into details about the puppet, but I will reflect upon it when necessary. Next to analysing these particular elements, I will also highlight some specific moments in the performance (which I call the ‘Silent scene’ and the ‘Fontana scene’) and discuss them in terms of narratology.
Part 1. Narrative
1.1 narratology
Narratology is a discipline concerned with the “logic, principles and practices of narrative representation.”24 The term was proposed by writer Tzvetan Todorov in 1969 but gained widespread recognition after the publishing of Narratologie. Essais sur la signification narrative dans quatre romans modernes (1977) by literary theorist Mieke Bal.25 Narrative
became a much-discussed subject in light of the structuralist movement that originated in Paris in the second half of the twentieth century. Their focus on narrative changed the discourse of narrative study and analysis. Narrative theory finds its origins in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. I will outline their perspectives on narrative before moving on to discuss the contributions to this field by the French structuralist Gérard Genette.
1.1.1 different manners of speaking
In his book The Republic (around 380 BC), Plato recounts a ‘Socratic dialogue’ between Socrates and his companions Glaucon and Adeimantus. In discussing poetry, Socrates makes a distinction between simple narrative and narrative through imitation. At this point they are concluding their conversation about education, in particular the education of the guardian class that would protect an ideal, ‘fevered’ state. The guardian’s exposure to imitative poetry should be limited as much as possible in favour of the simpler form of telling a story. Socrates clearly favours this ‘simple narrative’ for the educational reason that the guardian is not tricked by the poetry and mistakes the imitation for the real thing.26
Plato elaborates on the two domains proposed by his teacher. He makes a distinction between logos, “the contents of stories” and lexis, “the manner in which they are told”.27 Lexis can be broken down into three main categories: haple diegesis (“simple narrative”), diegesis dia mimeseos (“narrative through imitation”) and diegesis di’amphoteron (“combined narrative”).28 Plato supports this theoretical claim with the Iliad. In some parts the author, Homer, presents his text as if someone else was speaking the words, pretending
24 Meister, Jan Christoph: "Narratology". In: Hühn, Peter et al. (eds.): the living handbook of narratology.
Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. 8 March 2013, [17].
25 Meister 2013, [18].
26 Plato, G.R.F. Ferrari. The Republic. Trans. Tom Griffith. Cambridge University Press, 2003, 392c-394d,
396c-397d.
27 Halliwell, Stephen: "Diegesis - Mimesis". In: Hühn, Peter et al. (eds.): the living handbook of narratology.
Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. 17 October 2012, [5].
to be the character that is speaking. Here Homer tells the story on someone else’s authority, thus in a mimetical diegetic way; as an imitator. In the very last sentences for example, the author takes on the role of King Priam:
“Then King Priam spoke to them, saying, ‘Bring wood, O Trojans, to the city, and fear no cunning ambush of the Argives, for Achilles when he dismissed me from the ships gave me his word that they should not attack us until the morning of the twelfth day.’ ”29
In other parts the author recounts the story in a simple diegetic way; as a narrator. He tells the story on his own authority, not pretending it is someone else who is speaking. Homer ends his poem in this way, with the sentence:
“Thus, then, did they celebrate the funeral of Hector tamer of horses.”30
Plato prefers this last manner of speaking, and states that Homer should have written his whole poem in this way of ‘simple narrative’, avoiding imitation. For example, he could have written:
“Then King Priam spoke to the Trojans, telling them to bring wood to the city, and not to fear a cunning ambush of the Argives, for Achilles gave him his word that they should not attack until the morning of the twelfth day.”31
In the Iliad however, Homer combines the use of haple diegesis and diegesis dia mimeseos, thus the whole work can be defined as diegesis di’amphoteron.
In book 10 of the Republic Plato argues that ‘imitative poetry is the last thing we should allow’.32 According to his philosophy the imitator of an object is twice removed
from the truth. He uses the example of a player of the ‘flute’.33 The player uses the flute, is therefore closest to the truth and can instruct the maker of the flutes which instruments are good and which are not. Whereas the imitator, say a painter of the flute, will not have used or made the instruments and does neither have knowledge, nor correct opinion about the goodness or badness of the things he imitates. “What a wonderful guide the poetic imitator
29 Homer. The Iliad & The Odyssey. Trans. Samuel Butler. 30 Ibid.
31 My example. 32 Plato 2003, 313.
33 Note: the English translation I use translates the Greek αὐλός with ‘pipes’, I chose the clearer, and probably
must be, then, if we want wisdom on the subjects he writes about.”34 Plato continues with his dismissal of the poetic imitation based on its removal from the truth and thereby the ‘bewitching’ of the one who sees it, the audience, claiming that this imitation is the truth. Theatre scholar William Gruber writes that Plato’s attack on poetry is not an attack on dramatic literature itself. Plato rejects drama ‘insofar as it consists of imitative
performances done in the presence of spectators.’35 In another text Gruber insists that Plato is not simply opposing theatre – however this is the common misunderstanding – he is opposing mimesis specifically because of the soporific quality of it: it invites an audience to be fooled and “sleep through the deluge that threatens them.”36 This notion is related to the subject matter of the Socratic dialogue Plato is recounting. As mentioned above, they are talking about the guardians of an imaginary city. Certainly, a guardian must not mistake the fake thing for the real one, must not be seduced by a threat guised as a reassurance, or the city would be in danger.
Aristotle, a contemporary of Plato, also discusses diegesis in his Poetics. Like Plato he recognizes different forms of telling a story. He mentions the differences between the mode of the dithyramb, the mode of tragedy and comedy and the mixed mode represented by the epos.37 Right at the start of the Poetics he states that all poetry is a form of mimesis (imitation).38 So, although he does make distinctions between different ways of telling a story, he assigns them all to be mimetic. Aristotle is not so much concerned with the ethical and psychological connotations of the different modes. The Poetics is mostly concerned with aesthetic merit and characteristics of well-written tragedy. Thus, when Aristotle does discuss the prevalence of one mode over the other, he does not argue in the same way Plato does in the Republic but compares them based on aesthetics, and comes to a different conclusion. Aristotle notes that because traditionally the epos appealed to the educated segment of society and tragedy appeals to everyone, the latter is often considered vulgar. For him, however, this is an argument outside of the art form itself and he gives four arguments as to why tragedy is the most ideal. Firstly, because tragedy possesses all the same elements of epos and more, like dance, music, singing, décor. Secondly, because of the purely imitative quality of tragedy it creates greater illusion than the epic, and thus comes closer to reality. This is of course exactly the argument that Plato uses when
34 Plato 2003, 322.
35 Gruber, W. Offstage space, narrative, and the theatre of the imagination. Place of publication not identified:
Palgrave McMillan, 2016, 201.
36 Quote Theodor Adorno in Gruber 2016, 82.
37 Aristotle. Poëtica. Trans. N. Van Der. Ben and J.M. Breemer. Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep,
2004, 47a8-47b24.
38
opposing the imitative art form. In his last two arguments on the matter Aristotle states that the effect of tragedy is greater because of its unity. The unities of time, space and plot are most important throughout the Poetics. Because tragedy is only concerned with one mode of diegesis and does not alter between first- and third-person narratives, like the epos, it is the better of the two, in the eyes of Aristotle.39
Though Plato and Aristotle both acknowledge the same differences in ‘ways of telling’, lexis in Plato’s words, their approach is very different. Plato rejects purely imitative poetry because of its deceptive power on the audience, while the mode of imitation is actually why Aristotle prefers it. But, as mentioned above, Plato argues from a philosophical, even political point of view (Republic) and Aristotle from an aesthetic one (Poetics). These conflicting views on imitation will come back time and time again throughout (art) history. In the context of this I will discuss the ideas of Wagner and Brecht on these matters later on, which are reminiscent of this classical opposition in terms of (respectively) drama and epic. These genres are connected to the diegetic notions of Plato and Aristotle; drama connecting to mimesis, and epic to ‘epos’, thus a mixed form between mimesis and diegesis. For now it is important to remember that Plato and Aristotle, however discussing poetry as a literary art as well as a performance practice, are concerned in their analysis with literary and textual matters. This is also (still) the case in this first part of my thesis.
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, narrative became a much-discussed topic in the second half of the twentieth century. In light of structuralism, concerned with the structure of language, the discussion on diegesis and mimesis and all the matters it implicates flared up. Writers like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes reflect upon the structures of language and text.40 Another important scholar to contribute to this field of narratology (avant la lettre) is Gérard Genette. He takes the terminology of narrative from the classics into modern times and provided an elaborate taxonomy of narrative, generally concerned with literature.
1.1.2 narratology in the twentieth century
In his essay Frontières du récit (1966) Genette writes that Plato and Aristotle agree on a primary distinction between two modes of poetic representation, namely narration (diegesis) and imitation (mimesis). He carefully explores the similarities between the ideas
39 Aristotle 2004, 61b26-62a14.
40 See: Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Anthropologie Structurale. Paris: Plon, 1958; Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Les
of the two writers and concludes that they both meant to say the same thing and that the difference is only a variation in terms.41 He states that their two classifications “agree on the essential opposition between the dramatic and the narrative”, in other words the opposition between the mimetic and the diegetic. According to Genette the difference between the two Greeks is not their classification system, but the reversal of value42 – as I also mentioned above.
After this statement, Genette carries on by making an observation with which “neither Plato nor Aristotle seems to have been concerned.”43 He argues that the opposition
between mimesis and diegesis in literary representation is a false observation on the part of the ancient writers. Because diegesis as well as mimesis are both conveyed via the same medium: text. In other words: letters can never imitate a thing existing in the real world, “language can but perfectly imitate language.”44 (He quotes Williams James’ “the word dog doesn’t bite” to strengthen his argument). Genette concludes his argument by stating:
“Platon opposait mimèsis à diègèsis comme une imitation parfait à une imitation imparfaite; mais l’imitation parfait n’est plus une imitation, c’est la chose meme, et finalemet la seule imitation, c’est l’imparfaite. Mimèsis, c’est diègèsis.”45
Genette mentions that Plato opposed mimesis to diegesis, like a perfect imitation to an imperfect one. Let us rewind a little bit in analysing this statement. Did Plato actually regard mimesis as opposed to diegesis? Did he not distinguish three different forms of lexis or manner of speaking? This alleged opposition between diegesis and mimesis is the basis for most discourse on the matter in the past fifty years.46 One of the main reasons for this, I want to argue here (following professor Stephen Halliwell)47, is a simplification of Plato’s terminology. What Plato defines as haple diegesis is now abbreviated into diegesis and diegesis dia mimeseos simply becomes mimesis. This simplification in terminology paves the way for a dichotomy between the two terms. The confusion arises because the term diegesis is not only used as an overarching ‘umbrella’ term, but also as one of its own categories. Furthermore, Plato mentions a third, mixed style: diegesis di’amphoteron. Genette and his contemporaries do not ignore this style, but the focus is on the dichotomy of the
41 Genette Gérard. ‘Frontières du récit’. In: Communications, 8, 1966, 155. 42 Ibid., 152 and 155.
43 Ibid., 155. 44 Ibid., 154.
45 Ibid., 156. “Plato opposed mimesis to diegesis as a perfect imitation to an imperfect imitation. However, a perfect
imitation is no longer an imitation; it is the thing itself. Ultimately the only imitation is the imperfect one. Mimesis is diegesis.” Trans. Ann Levonas, 1976.
46 Halliwell 2012, [18]. 47
other two. Although they are different categories I would argue that they are not simply opposing each other, because of the fact that Plato named them ‘simple diegesis’ and ‘diegesis through mimesis’. In his very terminology he makes clear that mimesis does not oppose diegesis, but is itself a form of diegesis. Imitation is one way of telling a story, next to using narration to convey a message, or a style that mixes both manners of speaking. Although the two terms are useful as categories, also for the purpose of this thesis, it feels important to note that they should not be so easily polemicized but imagined as complementing each other. I would argue they oppose each other like our right and left leg oppose each other, both on the other side but actually being quite alike.
It is not surprising that this dichotomy between mimesis and diegesis arose in studies of literature. Because even if a text is of a ‘mixed’ form (which most texts are)48, the two modes present themselves one after the other. They are presented within the same medium, the text, which shifts almost unnoticeably from one mode into the other. But no matter how smoothly the shifts go, the text can only be one of the two at a time. Or rather, the reader can only read one thing at a time.
To illustrate the different forms in a text, I want to take the fantasy-book The Neverending Story by Michael Ende as an example. The book features two stories that come together in a magical way. It starts with the story of Bastian, a chubby boy that gets picked on at school. We follow him into a bookshop where he is drawn to one book in particular: “The Neverending Story”. It attracts him so much that he cannot resist the urge to steal it, since he cannot afford to buy it. He takes it back to the attic of his school and starts to read. Up till now, the text we read in the book is printed in red. But once Bastian starts reading the book, we read along with him, in blue.49 The blue text is at times interrupted by the red text, or rather; the ‘book-story’ is interrupted by the ‘Bastian-story’. More and more, Bastian is immersed into the story he is reading; he starts hearing sounds he reads about, and eventually he reads in the book about sounds he is making in the attic. He realises that he is becoming part of the story he is reading. The red text appears less and less, and eventually he is literally becoming part of the book-story, so we continue to read in blue. The precise moment of Bastian getting immersed into the story cannot be represented in the form of the text. In the text, he cannot be in two places at once. What in film or theatre could be happening simultaneously, is here indicated by the sentence: “In that moment several things happened at once.”50 The two worlds remain strictly separated; it is red or
48 Genette 1966, 154.
49 In other versions the colors differ, or the text is all black but the difference exists in italics/non-italics. 50
blue, never purple. The simultaneity is fabricated in our minds, but not represented in the form of the text. This mechanism is something that will become more complicated when discussing narrative in film or theatre, not only using text but all kinds of elements.
1.1.3 Narrative levels
After treating narrative in a more general and stylistic way above, I want to take the discussion from how something is told into the realm of by whom something is told, the narrator. This evokes questions like: ‘who is telling this story?’ and ‘whose story is this?’ These are questions with which Genette is also concerned in his book Narrative discourse: an essay in method (1983). In this work he distinguishes five concepts with which narrative is concerned: order, frequency, duration, voice and mood. In ‘Voice’, Genette writes about different voices and presents a taxonomy of possible kinds of narrators in a literary work (in his case mostly Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu). First he distinguishes the intradiegetic and the extradiegetic narrator: where is the narration coming from? The intradiegetic narrator exists in the text; is a character in the story. Consequently, the extradiegetic narrator does not exist in the text, but outside of it. Next to this Genette provides two possibilities to answer the question if the narrator is a character in the story. If the narrator is, then it is a homodiegetic narrator. If the narrator is not a character in the story, Genette speaks of a heterodiegetic narrator.51 These notions always come in pairs. For example Genette defines Homer as a heterodiegetic-extradiegetic narrator, while he classifies Odysseus as a homodiegetic-intradiegetic narrator (in books IX-XII, Odyssey).
These diegetic classifications are closely connected to first and third person perspective, ‘I’ or ‘he/she/it’. It is however not necessarily the case that in a first-person narrative the ‘I’ is actually the narrator. To illustrate this I will take a look at the book A little life (2015) in which writer Hanya Yanagihara writes about four friends, describing their lives in the third person. When she writes about what is going on in their minds, she keeps writing ‘he felt like…’ or ‘Jude thought…’. Yanagihara is an extradiegetic-heterodiegetic narrator. This role of the writer as the (absent) omniscient narrator is probably the most common in modern literature. However, two chapters in the book are written from a first person perspective.52 At first it is hard to define who is the ‘I’, but it gradually becomes clear it is Harold speaking, the godfather of protagonist Jude, a character we already get to know throughout the story. Now, in these chapters the narrator is homodiegetic-intradiegetic.
51 Genette, G. Narrative discourse: an essay in method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1980, 248.
52 Yanagihara, Hanya. A little life. United States: Doubleday, 2015, chapters: IV The Axiom of Equality – 2 and
But one must not forget that Harold is a fictional character, sprung from the mind of Yanagihara. So in this case the reader is tricked by the writer into believing we are reading the words of Harold, a fictional elderly man, when we are actually still reading the words of Yanagihara, a real young woman.53 So, on the level of the story, Harold is the narrator, but
on the level of the text as a whole, the narrator is still the writer. Genette reflects on these different levels in Narrative discourse.
Under the title ‘Narrative levels’ Genette describes a “sort of threshold represented by the narrating itself, a different level.”54 A classification of narratives can be made: first,
second, even third or fourth narratives can be defined. In the case described above, Harold’s narrative is contained within the first one “[…] in the sense that the narrator of the second narrative is already a character in the first one, and that the act of narrating which produces the second narrative is an event recounted in the first one.”55 He goes on to define this difference in level: “any event a narrative recounts is at a diegetic level immediately higher than the level at which the narrating act producing this narrative is placed.”56 Genette notes that, in literature, the first level of narration is always extradiegetic. This is the level of the writer, the creator, without whom the second level, or the intradiegetic would not exist. The chapters where Harold is the narrator can in turn be defined as metadiegetic, embedded in the intradiegetic narration, which is in turn the product of Yanagihara, the extradiegetic narrator. Thus a story, any story, cannot exist without at least one extradiegetic narrator.57
The fact that there can be multiple narrative levels to a story does not mean that those levels are always strictly isolated. Genette coins the term metalepsis and describes the possibility of the narrator to travel into another narrative level, and its effect:
“Any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator […] into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse […], produces an effect of strangeness that is either comical […] or fantastic.”58
53 Interestingly the authority of Yanagihara to write as and about these characters and their traumas has been
scrutinized in multiple reviews. A discussion sparked by diegetic levels. For example Christian Lorentzen who states “I blame the author” in his review in London Review of Books, vol. 37, no. 18, 24 September 2015.
54 Genette 1980, 228. Original emphasis. 55 Ibid., 228.
56 Ibid., 228.
57 Musicologist Karol Berger notes the same precondition, yet in her terms of ‘immediate’ and ‘reported’
speech, when stating: “…a literary work, any literary work, must present its content by means of at least one voice and it may employ many voices. All of the voices heard in a literary work may speak immediately, or only some voices may speak immediately, while others have their speech reported by those speaking immediately. When the work employs only one voice, this must speak immediately. When several voices are heard, they may all speak immediately and at least one of them must speak immediately.” Berger 1994, 410.
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Genette emphasises that this leap between narratives is quite unconventional – either comical or fantastic. I already gave an example of metalepsis in describing The Neverending Story. Bastian – being an intradiegetic character produced by the extradiegetic writer Ende – leaps into the universe of the story he is reading, which can be described as metadiegetic. In terms of Plato and Aristotle, the whole book of Ende is of mixed narrative form. Sometimes Ende is narrating in his own voice, sometimes he pretends to speak with somebody else’s. In simple terms, he shifts between ‘he’ and ‘I’. In the understanding of Genette however, all kinds of different narrative levels and universes can be distinguished.
The notions of diegesis and narrative analysis have evolved since Plato’s times. Where he and Aristotle used diegesis as a ‘flat’ term, meaning narrative and distinguishing between a simple, imitative and mixed form, Genette (and others) have elaborated on the term and opened it up to a lot more possibilities. This is what Tzvetan Todorov stressed when he proposed narratology as a new field of study, arguing for “a shift in focus from the surface level of text-based narrative (i.e. concrete discourse as realized in the form of letters, words and sentences) to the general logical and structural properties of narrative as a univers de representations.”59 Following this idea, one does not merely distinguish the singular noun diegesis, but can also use its adjective, ‘diegetic’, to analyse and classify between multiple diegeses; between different ‘universes’ that are represented in the (literary) work. This understanding of narrative is not founded by Todorov or Genette, or any literary theorist whatsoever, but is derived from the notion of diegesis in film studies. Since this thesis is concerned with an audio-visual art form, opera, it is helpful to see how diegetic terminology has been applied outside of the realm of literature. Before moving on to the audio-visual I will first discuss the notion of ‘focalization’, which serves here as a bridge between literary and visual narratology.
1.1.4 focalization
In her book Focalizing Bodies, visual narratology in the Post-Dramatic Theatre, Maya van den Heuvel-Arad applies narrative theory to theatre, focusing on focalization. This is a term also coined by Genette in Narrative discourse. It is concerned with the question of perspective; through whom we are seeing (reading, imagining) the story? Genette makes a threefold distinction between narratives of zero focalization, internal focalization and external focalization. The first denoting a narrative by an omniscient narrator, who oversees
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everything and knows more than all the characters. The second notion, internal focalization, signifies narrative coming from the point of view of a character. The last one, external focalization, meaning the perspective of a narrator who knows less than a character.60 As already becomes clear in these definitions, focalization is concerned with
point of view and perspective (terms that Genette considered to be “too visual connotations.”)61, and is a helpful term to move to the realm of visual narrative.
Van den Heuvel-Arad notes that the concept of focalization has been undergoing a lot of debate since its origin. In her dissertation she follows the view on focalization as outlined by narratologist Mieke Bal, who considers Genette’s notion of the concept to be too limiting, since it only concerns the relation between narrator and character.62 Bal broadens focalization into the realm of visual narratology. Following van den Heuvel-Arad, I want to mention two distinctions Bal makes. The first one is between subject and object of focalization; the focalizer and the focalized. The focalizer being “the point from which the elements are viewed”, ‘the elements’ meaning what is focalized; like another character, an object or landscape.63 The second distinction is made on the part of the focalizer, who can be an entity external or internal to the narrative. Bal mentions that the boundaries between these two are not always clear and that one can speak of ambiguous focalization.64 An example of an ambiguous focalizer can be found in the character of Harold that I mentioned when discussing the book A little life some pages ago. As an example I will take the following fragment:
“Later, when things got bad, I would wonder what I could have said or done. Sometimes I would think that there was nothing I could have said – there was something that might have helped, but none of us saying it could have convinced him.”65
As I discussed Harold serves a narrator in two chapters of the book, telling the story from a first-person perspective. In terms of focalization it is interesting that he uses ‘I’ in combination with the past tense (‘I could have’). Van den Heuvel-Arad analyses that the use of ‘I’ in combination with the past tense, signifies that the character that is speaking as an older version of himself in his narration. The older version focalizes the story in which
60 Genette 1980, 188-192. 61 Ibid., 189.
62 Heuvel-Arad, Maya van den. Focalizing bodies: visual narratology in the post-dramatic theatre. Marburg:
Tectum-Verlag, 2011, 17.
63 Ibid., 20. 64 Ibid., 21. 65
his younger version is the focalizer. Which means that he is both an external and internal focalizer. In my example, the ‘older’ Harold is the external focalizer and the younger Harold the internal focalizer in his narration. Van den Heuvel-Arad concludes that when “…the level of focalization is not clear we might speak of ‘ambiguous focalization’.”66 In this
case the character of Harold is thus an ambiguous focalizer.
The more we go into the realm of the ‘three-dimensional’, the more ambiguous the narratives get. Literary narratology will prove insufficient in studying narrative in film “…because the two media are essentially different. Whereas literature relies on language as its exclusive medium, film contains, apart from language, also images, sounds, music, etc.”67 In this field of study, narratology is not only concerned with language, but also with image and sound. Before moving on to the medium of opera it is therefore helpful to look at the application of narratology to this audio-visual art form.
1.2 narratology in film
The French cinematographic theorist Etienne Souriau coined the terms diégèse and diégetique.68 As Genette and others point out, the two terms are not derived from the Greek diegesis, for the French use ‘diegesis’ for this narratological term. In fact, though the words are very similar, they are part of two very different discourses.69 The distinction between diegesis and diégèse in French is lost in English and other languages. It is however an important one. In the writings of Souriau and many others, diégetique is opposed by non-diégetique, translated with diegetic and nondiegetic. In its meaning of ‘story-world’, the terms are used to categorize whether something is part of that world (diegetic) or not (nondiegetic). In various texts there is variation in terms, such as part of the action or not part of the action, the story, the fiction, the universe, etcetera, but it all comes down to the same thing. The terms were first used by Souriau to make an analytical distinction between elements of a film that are part of the world the characters live in and elements that are part of the film but not part of the world that is portrayed in the film.70 A nondiegetic element in film would be an informative text pasted onto the screen in the editing room, imagine for example “Paris, 1945”, or “three years later…”. Although Genette borrowed the terms diégèse and diégetique from Souriau, he does not make the distinction between
66 Term by Mieke Bal in van den Heuvel-Arad 2011, 22. 67 Ibid.
68 Souriau 1951, 233.
69 Genette 1980, 27; Neumeyer 2009; van der Lek 1991, 29. 70
diegetic and nondiegetic, or at least not in the same words. Musicologist David Neumeyer clarifies the confusion of terminology:
“Regardless of whether or not diégèse had any roots in ancient writings, it enabled (perhaps even forced) the separation of two levels of narration in which the diegetic/nondiegetic pair are easily situated: the narration proper and extradiegetic narration. (Extradiegetic is Genette's term for what is called the nondiegetic in film theory; intradiegetic = diegetic.)71 Instead of the separation between diegetic and nondiegetic, Genette insisted on intradiegetic and extradiegetic. So why didn’t Genette use this opposition? I want to argue that it is easier in film to make a categorical dichotomy between diegetic and the negative nondiegetic, because of the use of different media to bring about the message. Genette is only concerned with one medium, text. All of the diegesis is text, whether it is extra, intra, mimetic, diegetic, etc. In film the reader becomes the spectator. The story-world is not an imagination in the readers mind, but actually presented visually. Usually the visual story-world in a film forms a coherent whole; one presented universe in which the characters exist. If this universe is interrupted by a black screen with white letters stating, for example, that we are now in “Amsterdam, 2017”, it is clear that this is a visual from another universe than the coherent world inhabited by the characters. So, everything that happens in the ‘coherent whole’ just described is designated as diegetic in film theory, the textual “Amsterdam, 2017” as non-diegetic. Although this seems like a very logical distinction I want to stress that it can be a misleading one. The negative ‘non’ implies that the elements or parts designated as nondiegetic, have nothing to do with diegesis, which is not correct in my opinion. The so-called nondiegetic elements are narrative elements that constitute a diegesis themselves and influence the ‘diegetic’ universe of the film. Imagine, for example that the three ‘nondiegetic’ interventions that I just made up appear in a film: Paris, 1945 – three years later – Amsterdam 2017. Those textual interventions frame the ‘diegetic’ part of the film, and thereby influence it. If the ‘diegetic’ visual is of a man in a room and I did not see “Paris, 1945”, the image has a different meaning than it would have whether I had seen the text. Which brings me to another point; those ‘nondiegetic’ instances do form the diegesis in the minds of the spectator. As far as the film-spectator is concerned this extra information does help to constitute the narrative in his imagination. To call these elements nondiegetic would be a bit too careless in my view, since nondiegetic implies that the elements have nothing to do with diegesis or the diegetic universe. Just because those
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elements come from another place than the visual diégèse, does not mean that they do not affect it. Hence in this thesis, I would like to stick with Genette’s terminology of extra and intradiegetic, though the conflict of terms will arise time and time again, since it seems to be at the core of these matters.
1.2.1 Diegesis of sound and music
Up till now I only discussed visual/textual interventions, though the diegetic analysis can also be, and is very often, applied to sound and music in film. The distinction between diegetic/nondiegetic is turned into a question: does the character hear the same thing as the audience? If the character does hear it, the sound (music or otherwise) is coming from within the story-world. In film analysis this kind of sound is labelled as diegetic sound.72 If the character does not hear the sound, but the spectator does, that would be called nondiegetic. As argued in the previous I prefer the terminology of intradiegetic and extradiegetic and will continue with these terms. A good example of intradiegetic sound would be a phone ringing, a knock on a door, a gunshot – mostly sounds that connect directly to the action of a character in some way.73 The same goes for music. It can come from within the world of the characters – Rose and Jack dancing to a gipsy band on a below-deck of the Titanic – or only be audible to the audience – to stay on the same boat, Celine Dion crying out “My heart will go on.” Filmmakers often play on the border of this division, which can inspire some interesting scenes. For example, to stay with miss Dion, the Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan uses her song “On ne change pas” in his movie Mommy (2014). A son, his mother and their neighbour have a little get-together in the kitchen. The son takes out his stereo and puts on the song. They start dancing and singing along. In the quality of the sound the spectator hears that the music is coming from the stereo, it is intradiegetic. We still hear the other sounds the three are making – laughing, singing, drinking. But then, right at the climax of the song, the quality of the sound changes into ‘direct’ sound, suddenly blasting out of the cinema’s speakers. We still see the characters dancing to the same music, but we don’t hear the laughing and singing sounds of the characters anymore, i.e. the intradiegetic sounds. The song shifted from within the universe of the film to another level outside of it. The intradiegetic music seamlessly
72 Ibid., 26.
73 On a critical note, and to strengthen my argument in opposition of the diegetic/non-diegetic polarization:
what part does the Foley-artist play in this respect? Luke Skywalker does not hear the whooshing of the lightsaber, it is actually the sound of microphone feedback of a tube TV added later in a sound studio. To state that there is only one diegetic world and everything else is non-diegetic is just not enough in my opinion. There are many layers to the construction of the narrative.
became extradiegetic. More variations on this theme can be found in films by him and many others.
The lines become a bit blurry in the musical film. Do the characters hear themselves singing or not? As a common and interesting example I want to take the famous musical film The Sound of Music. There are, of course, many songs in the movie, but not all of them are of the same kind. The songs can also roughly be divided into the two categories concerned here. When the nuns sing “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” they are singing something that they would ‘normally’ discuss, in a speaking manner. An interesting paradox arises: it is clear that the characters are singing, though they do not seem to be aware of it themselves. Hence, can their song be considered extradiegetic or intradiegetic? For now, I would argue that the fact that they are not aware that they are singing means that their singing in that moment is only meant for the spectator. The singing is helping the spectator in constructing the narrative, but is not heard by the characters, ergo it is extradiegetic. I will come back to this statement in a few pages. Later on in the movie, the Von Trapp family sings “Edelweiss”. In this moment they know that they are singing, the song is intradiegetic. It does not carry the plot forward, but is meant as a performance in the movie. In other words, the characters hear themselves singing. Since I am concerned here with music and singing, I want to start turning to the realm of opera.
1.2.2 different types of song
The diegetic sound analysis has been adopted by musicology and in particular opera studies. Though, of course, also in this field, different overlapping terms are omnipresent. To be clear: I use intradiegetic song as a song that can be heard by the character, they know that they are singing. Concerning extradiegetic song, the character is not aware that they are singing. In other words: the actor is singing, the character is communicating by means of what is said, not in what way it is said (through singing). This is the paradox of opera, we accept that everyone is singing, but the singing itself is not how the characters communicate and carry the plot, it is what they are singing, the language.
Musicologists have picked up on the diegetic theories in film studies, and applied them to opera. In analysing Alban Berg’s Lulu, Derek R. Strykowski for example states that: “…diegetic music is audible from within the fiction of the opera, and the audience will gather clues from stage as well the score to ascertain this fact.”74 He derives this definition from another musicologist, Robbert van der Lek, who wrote the book Diegetic music in opera
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and film in which he analyses film- and opera-music from composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
Van der Lek explains the term diegetic in the words of Souriau, as meaning “within the action.”75 Although he makes clear that he derives his terminology of the diegetic from
film studies, he makes some critical statements about its negative counterpart, nondiegetic. He states that the dichotomy of diegetic/nondiegetic is useful in the case of film (note: he is talking about ‘normal’ film, not musical film), but does not suffice in analyzing opera music. Music “within the action of an opera or film may in both cases be referred to as ‘diegetic’ and the other music may in both cases be referred to as ‘non-diegetic’.” With this ‘other music’ in film he means the soundtrack, the background music. But, he carries on, in opera the “other music – the operatic music proper – gives the impression of being the medium by means of which the characters communicate and, for that reason being part of the action.”76 He comes to the same conclusion as I just did: the other music is not part of the action because the characters do not communicate through singing, but through what they are singing, ergo the text. The music is not diegetic since the characters do not hear themselves singing as the audience does. But, to state that this music is nondiegetic, coming from outside the ‘story-space’, is also a bridge too far since it is not an “externally added element like background music in film.” He concludes his critical terminological note by writing:
“The two “musical strata” which can be distinguished in opera are both in a sense “diegetic”, albeit for different reasons. “opera music” is diegetic because it represents the action (in this sense, “nondiegetic opera music” is a contradiction in terms); the diegetic music itself is diegetic because it is an element in the action. The fact that part of the opera score is performed in a separate area, the pit, cannot be regarded as a nondiegetic element, either. The music performed there is part of the action on stage just as much as the sung text is, as its function goes far beyond that of a mere accompaniment.”77
Van der Lek is struggling with the same issues as I have in the past chapter: how to define music that is external to the story-world, yet also helps to construct it? Van der Lek however only includes this as a critical note, after which he continues to use the distinction in the rest of his book. He uses nondiegetic not as a ‘terminological category’ but as a helpful negative counterpart to the term diegetic. I already discussed that I refrain from using the term nondiegetic in this thesis. I stated that what is commonly called ‘diegetic’
75 van der Lek 1991, 29. 76 Ibid., 31.
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should change into ‘intradiegetic’ and ‘nondiegetic’ into ‘extradiegetic’. Why then, this discussion on Van der Lek’s ideas? Because his critique on the nondiegetic in opera carries an argument in which the use of extradiegetic also does not suffice. In discussing “How do you solve a problem like Maria” two pages ago, I assigned this song to the realm of the extradiegetic. Here I used the preposition ‘extra’ instead of ‘non’ because, although it does not technically exist in the story-world of the characters, it is part of the diegesis; it does help construct the narrative. However, I might have jumped to this conclusion a bit too quickly. As Van der Lek points out, the singing of the character is different from the externally added background music. It exists on a different plane. Van der Lek leaves this in the middle by stating that it is not diegetic, but also not nondiegetic. The same goes for my preferred terms: it is not intradiegetic, but also not extradiegetic. The singing is actually coming from within the story-world of the characters, we see the nuns singing in the depicted world. On the other hand it has no effect on the depicted world, on the awareness of the character. This type of song exists in between the intra and the extra. Next to the ‘pure’ intradiegetic song (like “Edelweiss”) that remains intact, its counterpart is in need of a new term.
Musicologist Peter Kivy also describes different types of song in opera. He makes a similar distinction as the one made above, but uses different terminology. He introduces this as follows:
“When Desdemona sings the “Willow Song” in Verdi’s Otello, she sings a song in the world of that work, her world, just as I sing a song in the real world, my world, when I sing “Melancholy Baby” in the shower. But when Desdemona converses with Iago, she also sings, whereas when I converse with my plumber about why my shower won’t work I do not sing: I speak.”78
Following Edward T. Cone, Kivy uses the terms ‘realistic song’ and ‘operatic song’ to distinguish between the two forms.79 Realistic song is when Desdemona sings “Willow Song”; operatic song is when she converses with Iago. In this terminology the problem of getting stuck in the different levels of diegesis is omitted. However I would argue that it does not suffice in this context, since this terminology is only concerned with song. In opera there would still be a problem in analysing the other intradiegetic-extradiegetic elements such as the music played by the orchestra. The term ‘ambi-diegetic’, coined by
78 Kivy 1994, 63.
79 Cone, Edward T., and Robert P. Morgan. Music, a View from Delft: Selected Essays. Chicago: University of
