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Extra Diegesis, or, Gee Whiz, That Is Another Story
Wrestling again with the contradictory conundrums of Fowles’ magus novel of the better part of a lifetime ago: which were also the conundrums of Joe Campbell in his pre-"follow-your-bliss" Masks of God phase; about which I wrote my M.A. thesis at U.C. Santa Barbara. Feeling that I have spent forty years trying to figure out the real situation beyond this fake initiation into “a truly dis-illusioned world beyond postwar existentialism.” Feeling that I haven’t gotten very far.
Having learned again and again the predictability of our machinic arrangements; the pleasures of recognition and the pleasures of discovery, and all the rest. Having seen most recently, and without intending to do so, the predictable reactions to predictable outbursts by the predictable writer of this journal.
And yet. The forking paths of history unfold or ratchet on, and yet it is as though there really were forces, for good and/or for ill, that have no power to change them for good and/or for ill, other than to drop small instrumentalities, or sometimes bigger and more improbable ones, into the clanking gears of the machine. The predicted rebound from the spring on the impossible frictionless surface cannot be calculated or even occur, because there is an elephant in the way.
It is a pretty myth, a pretty tale to be told. Perhaps to incorporate into a piece of performance art. Or a mystery-laden installation.
“The social function of art” does intrigue me, in spite of an insistence on the priory of aesthetic immediacies (i.e., if it doesn’t hold our attention visually, it doesn’t have a chance to operate socially, either).
The word “extradiegetic” from literary theory found its way into a review of a body of photography the other day (okay, you can guess in which magazine you will soon be able to read it), and it brought me up short to see the obvious links between my analysis of the narratology of everyday life and the narratology of the photograph or the abstract painting.
I insist, re the abstract painting or the installation, that the extradiegetic factors, the tale that can be told only from outside the tale, are even more operative there. They are even more critically important in the case of the lumps of coal scattered across the gallery floor than in the case of the photograph that elegantly, with compositional subtlety, records the real objects that somebody chose to place in their kitchen. In both cases, something we cannot see in the work is an intrinsic part of the work. It may not be the same something.
In like fashion, something we cannot see in our daily life is an intrinsic part of our daily life, whether that something is the society that contains us, the forces of nature, or something else entirely.
We are the framers outside the frame tale that contains the tale being told, and the question with which human beings have been concerned from the Paleolithic caves onward is how far beyond us there is somebody else studying the tale which we have, unknowingly, begun to tell by living our lives the way we do.
Wrestling again with the contradictory conundrums of Fowles’ magus novel of the better part of a lifetime ago: which were also the conundrums of Joe Campbell in his pre-"follow-your-bliss" Masks of God phase; about which I wrote my M.A. thesis at U.C. Santa Barbara. Feeling that I have spent forty years trying to figure out the real situation beyond this fake initiation into “a truly dis-illusioned world beyond postwar existentialism.” Feeling that I haven’t gotten very far.
Having learned again and again the predictability of our machinic arrangements; the pleasures of recognition and the pleasures of discovery, and all the rest. Having seen most recently, and without intending to do so, the predictable reactions to predictable outbursts by the predictable writer of this journal.
And yet. The forking paths of history unfold or ratchet on, and yet it is as though there really were forces, for good and/or for ill, that have no power to change them for good and/or for ill, other than to drop small instrumentalities, or sometimes bigger and more improbable ones, into the clanking gears of the machine. The predicted rebound from the spring on the impossible frictionless surface cannot be calculated or even occur, because there is an elephant in the way.
It is a pretty myth, a pretty tale to be told. Perhaps to incorporate into a piece of performance art. Or a mystery-laden installation.
“The social function of art” does intrigue me, in spite of an insistence on the priory of aesthetic immediacies (i.e., if it doesn’t hold our attention visually, it doesn’t have a chance to operate socially, either).
The word “extradiegetic” from literary theory found its way into a review of a body of photography the other day (okay, you can guess in which magazine you will soon be able to read it), and it brought me up short to see the obvious links between my analysis of the narratology of everyday life and the narratology of the photograph or the abstract painting.
I insist, re the abstract painting or the installation, that the extradiegetic factors, the tale that can be told only from outside the tale, are even more operative there. They are even more critically important in the case of the lumps of coal scattered across the gallery floor than in the case of the photograph that elegantly, with compositional subtlety, records the real objects that somebody chose to place in their kitchen. In both cases, something we cannot see in the work is an intrinsic part of the work. It may not be the same something.
In like fashion, something we cannot see in our daily life is an intrinsic part of our daily life, whether that something is the society that contains us, the forces of nature, or something else entirely.
We are the framers outside the frame tale that contains the tale being told, and the question with which human beings have been concerned from the Paleolithic caves onward is how far beyond us there is somebody else studying the tale which we have, unknowingly, begun to tell by living our lives the way we do.
