and on whether dialogue sequences in a novel are mimetic underlines the fact that the boundaries between the concepts of the diegetic and mimetic are “more porous and unstable than is usually imagined” (Richardson 2001: 691).
As far as the concept of the narrator is concerned the more traditional approaches opted for a narrator figure or agent who mediates a narrative, who tells the story. This type of approach excludes most types of drama. With the emergence of postclassical narrative studies, however, these arguments lost, or rather, should have lost their validity. The definition of narrative became broader. It included plays because plays tell stories, stories about particular people and what happens to them in particular circumstances and of what these experiences feel like. Chatman, for example, is one of those theorists who believes that plays tell stories and consist of storyworlds; thus they contain a narrative world, a “diegesis”. He argues:
Is the distinction between diegesis and mimesis, telling and showing, of greater consequence (higher in the structural hierarchy) than that between Narrative and the other text-types? I find no reason to assume so. To me, any text that presents a story – a sequence of events performed or experienced by characters – is first of all narrative. Plays and novels share the common features of a chrono-logic of events, a set of characters, and setting. Therefore, at a fundamental level they are all stories. (Chatman 1990: 117)
And, thus, he introduces his new diagram of text-types:
←57 | 58→
The realisation that drama also narrates is not really a new idea, but ironically the conclusion that “therefore it is a narrative” remained unacknowledged for a long time. This might be due to the only recent interest which postmodern narrative studies have taken specifically in the genre of drama. Manfred Jahn (2001: 675), for example, elaborates on and updates Chatman’s diagram:
Jahn uses the term “genre” as the overarching term in his diagram and does not use the term “text-type” as Chatman did. He continues with the division of narratives and non-narratives. Then within the category of narratives, he makes the distinction between the written and the performed. This distinction is very important. Jahn’s essay is one of the early texts that makes this distinction and categorises different approaches to drama accordingly. Jahn’s narratology of drama is widely acknowledged and very practical because his categories embrace different ways in which drama can be analysed. Jahn situates himself within a more modern and seminal postclassical narrative trend and a reception-oriented one. He notes that there are three interpretive ←58 | 59→approaches to drama: Poetic Drama, Theatre Studies and Reading Drama (2001: 660). In the first approach drama is seen as purely text-based, in the second it is performance-based and the third approach is a synthesis of these two as it calls for studying or reading the playscript and simultaneously taking into account its performative potential. Jahn himself seems to favour this synthetic approach and develops most of his later theories off of it. What seem to be missing though are illustrative examples and analytical work, taken from playscripts. All of Jahn’s examples are either from the staged performances or from the plays that are considered to be the exceptions: the memory plays or plays with overt narrators. It seems that even though postclassical theorists are eager to break away from the restrictions of classical narratology, they still feel uncomfortable to completely do away with those traditional concepts.
Even more radical and influential in embracing drama are cognitive narrative studies, with their shift to the concept of mind and consciousness. Once the focus of the narrative becomes the nexus of the mind of readers and/or characters, the concept of the narrator or the mimesis/diegesis dichotomy become less relevant. The best example of this trend is Fludernik’s concept of experientiality. Within the parameters of cognitive studies and experientiality, the discussions of character construction, and perception become important, rendering the notion of drama as narrative unproblematic. The absence of the narrator or of certain textual features is no longer of importance since
[a];ccording to Fludernik, narrativity does not consist in a set of properties that characterise narratives, but can rather be conceptualised as a sort of measure of how readily a given text can be processed as a story. Since her understanding of narrative and narrativity centers on an anthropomorphic kind of experientiality, it can readily embrace drama as a narrative genre: the fact that plays always feature characters on stage guarantees that they project consciousness, experience, speech, and stories. (Nünning/Sommer 2008: 334)
Because of these new articulations, one would assume that there are now no more obstacles standing in the way of a narratology of drama and that the field was levelled for the analysis of playscripts. However, the corpus of theoretical and analytical work done on drama in general and on playscripts, in particular, is surprisingly sparse. Most of the existing bibliography deals with theatre studies or performance studies; that is to say, with the performative aspects of the genre. By predominantly focusing on the intermedial and transmedial aspect of drama as performance, the playscript is seen only as one of the subsidiary aspects belonging to the production of the play on stage. As I have already noted ←59 | 60→in section 2.1, the playscript has been ignored in classical narratology as well as in postclassical studies.
Fludernik, for example, in her “Narrative and Drama” makes a compelling argument for drama as narrative and criticises the “blind eye” narratology has turned to the similarities between novels and plays (355). She argues that “the absence of a narrator persona or an act of narration does not inevitably disqualify drama from the narrative genre” (358). Later she adds “a definition of narrativity that does not focus on plot, but on fictional worlds and/or experientiality, can likewise absorb drama” (359). But then, every explanation and every elaboration she makes is automatically about the performative aspect of drama. It seems as if the only way she visualises drama when talking about the genre is on stage:
All drama, in fact, need, to have character on stage, and from this minimal requirement narrativity is immediately assured, if one defines narrativity as I do in Towards ‘Natural’ Narratology. A character on stage guarantees consciousness and usually speech; by dramatic convention, he or she is additionally located in a space-time frame that resembles human experience of space and time: the clock is ticking, time moves forward as the dramatic figure stands on stage, and this staging of the space-time continuum provides the concreteness of dramatic space which narratologists have traditionally found a necessary condition for narrativity. (360) [my emphasis]
Fludenik does not dismiss the concept of the playscript. The playscript is on a different narrative level; the discourse level. It is there that she states that reading playscripts and reading novels are different because when reading playscripts, the dramatic conventions call for, albeit metaphorical, a staging of the play in the reader’s mind (363). In this regard, the performative aspect of drama becomes more important.
The same preference for performance holds true in Richardson’s case. He too disagrees with narrative theorists’ lack of interest in drama (1991), and in numerous seminal essays he tackles with different narrative concepts in the genre of drama (1987, 1988, 1991, and 2001). However, all the example he uses too are taken from performances and it seems he too sees the realisation
