Abstracts
Henrik Scharfe: "Diegetic Displacements. Narrative as Madness"
The depiction of madness often addresses borders between the real and the imaginary. Seeing things that are not there, or things that only exist in the mind of a character is a powerful way of portraying madness. Not surprisingly, the themes of such focalizations are often of narrative form, and because they are embedded fragments residing in some particular mind, they can quite easily be distributed across the embedding narrative. But in some cases, madness is not just described through narrative techniques; rather narrative itself is pointed to as the cause and essence of madness. In such cases it is common to challenge the diegetic borders of the narrative. The resulting diegetic displacements can be seen as an unusual narrative technique that embodies the notion of madness.
In visual media, the notion of seeing things is of vital importance, and consequently, visual media offer a range of narrative techniques to convey the blurring of ontological borders through fuzzy arrangements of focalization. This, in turn, feeds the epistemic game between narrator, character, and reader. For instance, a character may:
- See things that are not there (E.g. John Nash in a
Beautiful Mind - Howard 2001)
- See things he knows are not there (E.g. the 'Eye' in In the Eye of the
Beholder - Elliott 2000)
- See things that are real but only visible to some (E.g. Constantine -
Lawrence, 2005)
- Not see things that others can see (E.g. Dr. Crowe in The Sixth
Sense - Shyamalan, 2000)
In this study I address a specific kind of epistemic game, namely instances where narrative itself becomes the primary means of depicting madness through diegetic displacements of narrative elements. Here, the ontological question of what exists is accentuated by addressing the borders of the diegesis, and more precisely: by challenging the diegetic limits by displacing characters, items, and events between diegetic levels. In other words, the central questions become: 'What is narrative and what is real?' and 'Where does stuff belong?' Since the frame introducing these questions is de facto a narrative one, the question becomes not only an example of self reference, but also a way of questioning the possible world structure of narratives. In terms of possible world semantics, we may say that the relations between aletic and epistemic systems are addressed.
Filmic examples of diegetic displacement include: Videodrome - Cronenberg, 1983, eXistenZ - Cronenberg, 1999, and The Mouth of Madness, Carpenter, 1995. In these films, narrative texts of various kinds are depicted as the locus of madness, and engaging with these texts happens at the cost of risking your sanity. In each case, reading leads to displacement of fictitious entities - and of the reader. When narrative is portrayed as madness we must inevitably ask: 'Is this real?'
