Post on Omniscient POV

[sartorias]

Posting on the fly here--workshop still going on.

But recently Cat Rambo read my book Inda and asked me
>for a mini-interview on omni POV. A subject I am always intensely interested in discussing.

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Comments

[whswhs]

I have to confess that I'm perplexed by the use of "mimetic" and "diegetic" (a word I only learned in the past few weeks!) as contrastive terms.

I tend to think of "mimetic" as opposed on one hand to "expressive" (influenced by Nietzsche: mimesis comes from Apollo and expression from Dionysus) and on the other to "fantastic." I only know of "diegetic" as meaning, for example, music that's played during a film or video because there are musical performers in the scene being shown, whereas nondiegetic music is soundtrack music that's used to suggest an emotional response to the audience (and I think, on one hand, of the Buffy episode "The Body" where there is no music to give cues to Buffy's reaction to her mother's death, and on the other, of "Once More with Feeling" where the music actually becomes diegetic, two different ways of playing with the opposition). Does it mean something different in relation to literary works?

[sartorias]

Dieesis: only known to narrator and readers, not to characters. Mimesis, inside the story--that which is known to characters.

[whswhs]

That sounds akin to something I read many years ago, I think in my teens, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica: A discussion of classical literary theory as distinguishing three categories: the lyric, in which the poet spoke of or for themself in their own voice; the epic, in which the poet spoke of or for other people in the poet's voice; and the dramatic, in which the poet presented other people who spoke of or for themselves in their, the other people's, voices. The second of these seems to be akin to what you call "diegetic" and the third to what you call "mimetic

[sartorias]

I've been on the road (still am) so have not had a chance to catch up. Basically, writers invent all kinds of terms for various types of process and prose. It's not like math. One person's overwriting is another's scaffolding, and someone else's purple prose is a fourth's "lyrical" prose.

Film terminology is something similar, I think. Some impose literary terminology over a visual medium, others use differing terms.