Diegesis – Mimesis
Stephen Halliwell
1 Definition
Diegesis (“narrative,” “narration”) and mimesis (“imitation,” “representation,” “enactment”) are a pair of Greek terms first brought together
for proto-narratological purposes in a passage from Plato’s Republic
(3.392c–398b). Contrary to what has become standard modern usage
(section 3 below), diegesis there denotes narrative in the wider generic
sense of discourse that communicates information keyed to a temporal
framework (events “past, present, or future,” Republic 392d). It is subdivided at the level of discursive style or presentation (lexis) into a tripartite typology: 1) haple diegesis, “plain” or “unmixed” diegesis, i.e.
narrative in the voice of the poet (or other authorial “storyteller,” muthologos, 392d); 2) diegesis dia mimeseos, narrative “by means of mimesis,” i.e. direct speech (including drama, Republic 394b–c) in the voices
of individual characters in a story; and 3) diegesis di’ amphoteron, i.e.
compound narrative which combines or mixes both the previous two
types, as in Homeric epic, for example. From this Platonic beginning,
the terms have had a long and sometimes tangled history of usage, right
up to the present day, as a pair of critical categories.
2 Explication
The diegesis/mimesis complex is introduced by Socrates at Republic
392c ff. to help categorize different ways of presenting a story, especially in poetry. His aim is to sketch a basic psychology and ethics of
narrative. From Republic 2.376c ff. Socrates has been concerned with
the contribution of storytelling in general, poetry (the most powerful
medium of verbal narrative in Greek culture) in particular, to the education of the “guardians” of the ideal city hypothesized in the dialogue.
From the outset (377b), he makes the important assumption that stories/narratives (muthoi, which signifies traditional “myths” but also artfully constructed stories more broadly) can embody and convey value-
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laden beliefs about the world. It is clear, moreover, that before reaching
the typology of Book 3, Socrates treats authors of muthoi as globally
and supra-textually responsible for everything “said” in their works: he
thus criticizes Homer, without apparent discrimination, for passages in
the voice of both the poetic narrator and individual characters (e.g.
3.386b–387b).
The distinctions drawn at 392c ff. add a new, more technical layer of
analysis to the discussion of muthoi which has preceded. There is, for
sure, some continuity between the two main phases of the argument
(the analysis first of logos, “what is said,” and then lexis, “how it is
said”: 392c) in so far as even in the second phase Socrates thinks of
poets (or other author-narrators) as controlling and varying their use of
“voice”: hence, when characters speak (i.e. in “diegesis by means of
mimesis”), Socrates formulates this in terms of the poet speaking “as
(if)” the character (393a–c). However, on another level the second part
of the argument involves a major shift, precisely because Socrates’
main concern is now with the psychological complications of discursive
multiplicity. Without leaving behind his earlier, global model of authorial responsibility, he pursues the idea that mimesis, whether in its own
uninterrupted form (i.e. as drama, 394b–c) or as one element in compound diegesis, such as Homeric epic, entails a particularly intense and
therefore psychically dangerous mode of narrative imagination.
The fear of narrative which powerfully foregrounds various characters’ viewpoints is brought out especially clearly at the end of the analysis (397d–398b), where Socrates brands the “mimetic” poet as manipulating a kind of multiple personality and creating works which induce
others (not least, performers of poetry) to introduce imagined multiplicity into their own souls—something which threatens the “unity” of soul
that is foundational to the psychology and ethics of the entire Republic
(see esp. 443e: “becoming one person instead of many”).
The diegesis/mimesis terminology of Republic Book 3 is therefore
the vehicle of an embryonic narratology which posits connections between narrative form (including narrating person, voice and viewpoint)
and the psychology of both performer and (by extrapolation) audience.
On this account, different narrative forms are not simply technical alternatives for the telling or presentation of stories; they have differential
expressive capacities to communicate the points of view and mental
processes of characters in a story. Notice that the basic distinction
drawn by Socrates could be said to be not so much between “telling”
and “showing” (Klauk & Köppe → Telling vs. Showing), in the standard (if problematic) modern opposition, as between two modes of “telling” (itself not a bad translation of Greek diegesis: see section 3 be-
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low): telling in the voice of an authorial narrator versus telling in the
voices of the agents. See esp. 393b: “it is diegesis both when the poet
delivers character-speeches and in the sections between these speeches”
(which underlines the fundamental point that mimesis is not opposed to,
but is one type of, diegesis). Nor is the problem Socrates has with mimesis a matter of the quantity of information it conveys (contra Genette
[1972] 1980: 166); his rewriting of the first episode of the Iliad (393c–
394a) preserves much the same “information” as the Homeric text. The
problem, rather, with mimesis is what Socrates takes to be its seductively perspectival psychology and its consequent inducement to the mind
to step inside, and assimilate itself to, the character’s viewpoint. His
anxiety is about a particularly intense way of imagining what it is like
to be someone else.
We must now, however, add two important (and related) points. The
first is that the proto-narratology of this well-known Platonic text is
driven by normative, not purely descriptive, concerns. Socrates is not
attempting to explore questions of narrative or poetic technique for
their own sake, but to draw attention to what he sees as the vital implications of certain storytelling techniques for the larger ethical psychology which he outlines in the Republic. The second point, usually overlooked altogether by modern scholars, is that the typology presented by
Socrates is not only incomplete: it actually ignores a number of discursive and narrative practices found in Plato’s own work. This applies
above all to types of narrators. Socrates operates exclusively with the
idea of the heterodiegetic, author-as-narrator type (which, ironically, is
never used by Plato himself: contrast the Socratic works of Xenophon)
and paradoxically ignores homo- and intra-diegetic narrators of the
kinds which do occur in Plato, including Socrates himself in the Republic! This cannot be explained away by Socrates’ focus on Homeric epic,
since it is equally true that he takes no account of complications
brought about by the role of a secondary narrator such as Odysseus in
Odyssey Books 9 through 12, where several levels of embedded narrative come into play.
It is imperative, finally, to note that the formal diegesis/mimesis typology of Republic Book 3 is not itself repeated anywhere else in Plato’s writings. It should not, therefore, be converted into a fixed Platonic
orthodoxy. On the rare occasions when similar distinctions are mentioned elsewhere, the terminology varies: at Theaetetus 143b–c, for example, a contrast is drawn between diegesis as third-person narrative
and dialogos (with the verb dialegesthai) as the speech of characters.
Furthermore, mimesis is used in many Platonic passages, including Re-
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public 2.373b (see below), in a broader sense of poetic/literary representation which is not tied to direct character-speech.
3 History of the Terms
Diegesis is derived from a Greek verb diegeisthai, which means literally “to lead/guide through” and which came to mean “give an account
of,” “expound,” “explain,” and “narrate.” Together with the verb, the
noun diegesis itself became established in the 5th century BC as a
common term for acts of verbal narration. It could apply, for instance,
to the section(s) of a courtroom speech in which a litigant provided a
version of events relevant to the case: a reference in Plato’s Phaedrus,
266e, shows that diegesis was codified in this sense in some of the first
rhetorical handbooks (cf. Aristotle Rhetoric 1.1, 1354b18; 3.13,
1414a37–b15). It also seems that in the early forms of Greek linguistics
associated with thinkers such as Protagoras, diegesis was adopted as a
term for one of the basic modes or functions of discourse (cf. Aristotle
Poetics 19.1456b8–19, where diegesis might mean either “statement”
or “narration”). Such usage helps to explain why Plato chose diegesis to
denote the genus “narrative” in Republic Book 3.
The term mimesis has a more complex and less easily reconstructed
early history (Halliwell 2002: 15–22). Before Socrates employs it at
Republic 392d, he has already used the cognate noun mimetes (producer/practitioner of mimesis) at Republic 2.373b for all those engaged in
visual arts, poetry, drama, and music (and seemingly more besides) in
the imaginary “city of luxury.” So mimesis there designates (artistic/cultural) “representation” in a broader sense than in Book 3, and
indeed Book 10 of the Republic itself will return to that wider perspective (595c, “mimesis as a whole”). From around the late 6th century
BC, in fact, the vocabulary of mimesis had been applied in both wider
and narrower senses: in the former, to representation, depiction, expression in various media (visual and musical as well as poetic); in the latter, to “dramatic enactment” (cf. esp. Aristophanes Thesmophoriazusae
156, where mimesis refers to the imaginative-cum-theatrical process of
creating/playing a dramatic role). The category of “diegesis by means
of mimesis” in Republic Book 3, therefore, does not depend on anything like a comprehensive Platonic theory of mimesis.
Aristotle follows Plato Republic Book 3 in seeing a distinction between first- and third-person modes of storytelling as important to poetics. He does not, however, follow either Plato’s precise terminology or
his ethico-psychological priorities. In the Poetics, Aristotle uses mime-
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sis as the master-concept of representational art-forms (this is arguably
in line with Book 10 rather than Book 3 of the Republic). He then categorizes different art-forms according to the media, objects, and
“modes” of representation. Where poetic mimesis is concerned, Aristotle’s typology of modes—that is, of “how” the poet represents actions
and events (Poetics 3.1448a19–24)—is obscured by some knotty syntax and textual corruption. Two main construals of the typology are
possible: 1) a binary distinction between (third-person) “narrative” and
fully dramatic representation (of the characters “all in action,” as he
puts it), with a further subdivision of narrative into (a) the Homeric
kind where the narrator’s voice is interrupted by passages of characterspeech (the author “becoming a different person,” as Aristotle puts it in
quasi-Platonic fashion, 3.1448a21–22; but cf. section 5 below) and (b)
continuous third-person narrative; or 2) an explicitly tripartite scheme
comprising the mixed Homeric mode of third-person narration alternating with direct character-speech; unbroken third- person narrative; and
fully dramatic representation.
The second of those interpretations aligns Aristotle with the tripartite typology in Plato Republic Book 3, though Aristotle curiously does
not here use the terminology of diegesis at all (a fact obscured by e.g.
Genette 1969: 52) but denotes narrative by the verb apangellein, “to
relate/report” (cf. the noun apangelia at Poetics 5.1449b11, 6.1449b26–
27; Plato uses the same terms of both the author-narrator and the characters, Republic 3.394c2, 396c7). In addition, as mentioned, he makes
mimesis, in a broader sense of representation, the genus of which the
narrative and dramatic modes are species. But the first interpretation, by
contrast, makes Aristotle insist on a fundamental distinction, of the kind
favored by some modern narratologists, between narrative and drama:
on this view, even though he knows that each mode can be used “inside” the other, he draws a sharp line between their status as frames of
representation in particular works. On either interpretation, however,
Aristotle strips his categories of the normative judgments made by Socrates in the Republic. He shows no sign of taking dramatic representation to be intrinsically more powerful, or less psychologically “distanced,” than narrative; nor, accordingly, does he think that the one
raises greater ethical concerns than the other.
Aristotle’s position is complicated, however, by his later treatment
of epic poetry in Poetics Chapters 23 and 24. Here, in the first place, he
introduces the vocabulary of diegesis which he had not used earlier (for
the different case of Poetics 19.1456b8–19, see above). Epic is now
classed as diegesis (24.1459b26), where before it was apangelia, and
three times it is called “diegematic mimesis” (23.1459a17, 24.1459b33,
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36). Moreover, he proceeds to single out Homer as the only epic poet
who understands that he should say very little “in his own person/voice” and who accordingly builds his work around richly presented characters; other epic poets, by contrast, engage only a little in mimesis (1460a5–11). Aristotle clearly thinks of Homer as a strongly
dramatic poet (cf. the explicit praise of him as “dramatic” and as a proto-dramatist at 4.1448b34–49a2). But the puzzle is that the present passage appears to treat plain third-person narrative, contrary to Chapter 3
and indeed to the preceding references to “diegematic mimesis,” as nonmimetic (see e.g. Halliwell [1986] 1998: 126–127). It is as though Aristotle were momentarily slipping back into the terminology of Plato Republic 3.392c–398b. But the difficulties of that reading make it attractive to follow the alternative of taking Aristotle to be decrying the
tendency of epic poets other than Homer to include in their work many
self-referential remarks on themselves and their poetry. This would
leave intact the status of all epic narrative as, in Aristotle’s terms, mimetic, and would also emphasize a conception of the Homeric narrator
as an “impersonal” voice (see de Jong 2005).
After Aristotle, most ancient critics take a narratological line which
broadly follows the tripartite typology of Plato’s Republic Book 3, but
with a terminological adjustment: diegesis ceases to be a genus with
“plain diegesis” and “diegesis by means of mimesis” as its species and
instead is equated with “plain diegesis,” i.e. third-person narrative in a
narrator’s voice (as in Chapters 23 and 24 of Aristotle’s Poetics). The
resulting scheme distinguishes, then, between diegesis, mimesis and a
“mixed” mode which combines the first two. Somewhat ironically, given what was said in section 2 above about the discrepancies between
the typology in Republic Book 3 and Plato’s own practices as writer, a
diegesis/mimesis distinction came to be used in antiquity to classify the
discursive forms of the Platonic dialogues themselves. There was more
than one version, however, of such a classification. In Plutarch Moralia
711b–c, for instance, we find a bipartite scheme of “diegematic” (diegematikos, i.e. introduced/framed by third-person narrative) and “dramatic”: the Republic itself would be an example of the first kind, Crito
of the second. In Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Philosophers 3.50, on the
other hand, the classification is tripartite—”dramatic,” “diegematic,”
and mixed”—but without discussion of any of the ramifications of the
“mixed” form (see above). Proclus’ Commentary on the Republic 1.14–
15 (Kroll 1899–1901) also has a tripartite typology but with further and
more complex terminology: “dramatic/mimetic,” “non-mimetic” (also
aphegematikos, a term akin to diegematikos), “mixed.” (For these and
other variants of classification/terminology, see Haslam 1972: 20–21;
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Janko 1984: 126–133; Nünlist 2009: 94–115. On the tripartite schema
in Diomedes’ Ars grammatica, which proved especially influential in
the Middle Ages, cf. Curtius 1953: 440–441).
The distinctions of literary mode first drawn by Plato and Aristotle
were often picked up and adapted by Renaissance critics. Castelvetro,
for instance, in his commentary on the Poetics (1571), produced a critical analysis of Chapter 3 which allowed him to work towards the “unity
of time,” thought by him to be intrinsic to the dramatic mode (Bongiorno ed. 1984: 27–35). Just one year later, in his treatise in defense of
Dante’s Divine Comedy, Jacopo Mazzoni combined the Poetics with
elements from Plato’s Sophist (the distinction between “phantastic” and
“eicastic” mimesis), as well as from the Republic, to produce his own
elaborate typology of narrative and dramatic forms of “imitation” (Gilbert ed. 1962: 361–364).
It was not, however, until the 20th century, with the development of
modern narratology, that the vocabulary of diegesis/mimesis was given
a new currency. That currency has brought with it some complications.
In the most widely adopted usage, Plato’s terminology has been simplified in such a way as to equate diegesis exclusively with third-person
narrative, whereas the Republic, as explained above, treats diegesis as
an overarching category which is then split into the two main types of
“plain” (or, in a sense, “single-voiced”) diegesis and “diegesis by
means of mimesis.” (Examples of this near-universal simplification are
Genette 1969: 50, [1972] 1980: 162–164, [1983] 1988: 18; RimmonKenan [1983] 2002: 107.) The theoretical consequence of this simplification is to foist onto the Platonic argument, which might be said to be
concerned with different kinds of narrativity, a strict division between
modes conceived of as respectively narrative and non-narrative. (For
one discussion of this issue see Chatman 1990: 109–118.)
In addition, some modern theorists have converted diegesis into a
narratological category denoting the imagined story-universe as opposed to the discursive or textual constituents of a narration. The closest we come to this distinction in ancient criticism is in Aristotle’s pair
of terms praxis, “action” qua events depicted, and muthos, the structuring of depicted action into a dramatic/narrative representation (see esp.
Poetics 6.1450a3–5). In French, this other sense of diegesis is denoted
by “diégèse” (Genette [1972] 1980: 27, 280, [1983] 1988: 17–18),
while “diégésis” is reserved for the narrative mode contrasted with mimesis. This further terminological splitting has led to a somewhat confusing variation in the sense of the adjective “diegetic”/”diégétique,”
together with related compounds, in the hands of different theorists.
One reason for this state of affairs is the fact that the earliest modern
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usage of French “diégèse” originates in film theory, where diegesis designates everything which constitutes or belongs to the world projected,
and not only visually, by a film (Metz [1971] 1974: 97–98; Pier [1986]
2009: 217–218).
4 Topics for Further Investigation
Book 3 of Plato’s Republic apparently draws no distinction between
heterodiegetic narrators and the authors of the works in which those
narrators are found. Nünlist (2009: 132–133) claims that such a distinction was simply unknown in antiquity. Lattmann (2005: 39–40), however, attempts to locate a concept of the fictive narrator lurking in
Chapter 3 of Aristotle’s Poetics: this is Lattmann’s unorthodox interpretation of the description of Homer as “becoming a different person”
(Poetics 3.1448a21–22; cf. section 3 above). More work would be justified on the pre-modern history of critical assumptions about the relationship between authors and narrators.
How far can a version of the diegesis/mimesis schema be applied
beyond literary art-forms? In Plato’s Republic Socrates appears at one
point, if rather mysteriously, to imply that all discourse involves diegetic variations of “voice,” above all in the extent to which the mimesis of
direct speech is employed (397c). But he nowhere hints that his terms
of reference extend beyond the verbal. Aristotle, however, introduces
his typology of “modes” in Poetics Chapter 3 as part of a classification
of mimetic art in general: does he therefore believe that there are equivalent modes in visual or musical art? He never provides the answer to
this question, but Berger (1994: 415–433) offers some independent reflections in this direction. More might be done to explore how far the
issues of diegesis/mimesis can be extrapolated/adapted from verbal to
other media.
5 Bibliography
5.1 Works Cited
Berger, Karol (1994). “Diegesis and Mimesis: The Poetic Modes and the Matter of
Artistic Presentation.” Journal of Musicology 12, 407–433.
Bongiorno, Andrew, ed. (1984). Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry. Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies.
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Chatman, Seymour (1990). Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Film and
Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Curtius, Ernst Robert (1953). European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Genette, Gérard (1969). Figures II. Paris: Seuil.
–
([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Oxford: Blackwell.
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([1983] 1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
Gilbert, Allan H., ed. (1962). Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden. Detroit: Wayne State
UP.
Halliwell, Stephen ([1986] 1998). Aristotle’s Poetics. London: Duckworth.
–
(2002). The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Princeton: Princeton UP.
Haslam, Michael (1972). “Plato, Sophron, and the Dramatic Dialogue.” Bulletin of the
Institute of Classical Studies 19, 17–38.
Janko, Richard (1984). Aristotle on Comedy: Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics II.
London: Duckworth.
Jong, Irene J. F. de (2005). “Aristotle on the Homeric Narrator.” Classical Quarterly
55, 616–621.
Kroll, Wilhelm (1899–1901). Procli Diadochi in Platonis Republicam Commentarii. 2
vols. Leipzig: Teubner.
Lattmann, Claas (2005). “Die Dichtungsklassifikation des Aristoteles.” Philologus 149,
28–51.
Metz, Christian ([1971] 1974). Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Chicago:
Chicago UP.
Nünlist, René (2009). The Ancient Critic at Work: Terms and Concepts of Literary
Criticism in Greek Scholia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Pier, John ([1986] 2009). “Diegesis.” T. A. Sebeok et al. (eds.). Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics. vol. 1. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 217–219.
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith ([1983] 2002). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics.
London: Methuen.
5.2 Further Reading
Halliwell, Stephen (2009). “The Theory and Practice of Narrative in Plato.” J. Grethlein & A. Rengakos (eds.). Narratology and Interpretation: the Content of the
Form in Ancient Texts. Berlin: de Gruyter, 15–41.
Jong, Irene J. F. de (1987). Narrators and Focalizers. The Presentation of the Story in
the Iliad. Amsterdam: Gruner, 1–14.
Kirby, John T. (1991). “Mimesis and Diegesis: Foundations of Aesthetic Theory in
Plato and Aristotle.” Helios 18, 113–128.