Mimesis

NaokoSmith

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Mimesis is the sort of opposite of diegesis (according to Plato). It means representation, and also the physical world as a model for truth, beauty and goodness. Diegesis is narrative.

I suppose you could sum it up as "show" vs. "tell". There are two ways of doing background in stories. One is to show it through mannerisms, behaviour, objects. I wrote a blogpost on my writing blog about how luxury items like fine wines can be used to flesh out erotic fiction characters. (No, LaRascasse, I have still not forgiven you for creating a character so evil that he drank champagne with ravioli :eek::eek::eek:).

The other way to do background is to tell it:
She had recently been divorced.
Vs. There was still a pale band on her ring finger.

Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature describes how through the ages different writers have made us feel we were there, part of the action. I'm slowly reading it, so I'll post some thoughts on the chapters as I go.

Feel free to post your thoughts on mimesis or diegesis here. :)

ETA:
The edition of Mimesis I am using is
Auerbach, E. (1968) trans. Trask, W.R. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey.

Auerbach originally wrote the book between 1942 and 1945 in Istanbul and it was first published in 1946 in Berne.
 
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Gosh! Even more things that I didn't even know there were names for.

I need a cup of tea and a lie down in a dark room.

:)
 
Mimesis is the sort of opposite of diegesis (according to Plato). It means representation, and also the physical world as a model for truth, beauty and goodness. Diegesis is narrative.

I suppose you could sum it up as "show" vs. "tell". There are two ways of doing background in stories. One is to show it through mannerisms, behaviour, objects. I wrote a blogpost on my writing blog about how luxury items like fine wines can be used to flesh out erotic fiction characters. (No, LaRascasse, I have still not forgiven you for creating a character so evil that he drank champagne with ravioli :eek::eek::eek:).

The other way to do background is to tell it:
She had recently been divorced.
Vs. There was still a pale band on her ring finger.

Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature describes how through the ages different writers have made us feel we were there, part of the action. I'm slowly reading it, so I'll post some thoughts on the chapters as I go.

Feel free to post your thoughts on mimesis or diegesis here. :)

I'm not familiar with those terms so I look forward to hearing your further thoughts on it. The first thing that jumps out at me about the examples that you give is that the 'show' example requires active interpretation from the reader, which is usually a good thing, because you are increasing engagement. I'm a big fan of always making the reader work at least a little bit and draw conclusions (even obvious ones), because that's what I enjoy as a reader.

I'm curious about whether the book addresses these things as they relate to voice. Writing in the first person sometimes poses a different challenge, because we're trying to mirror thoughts, which are sometimes observational, and sometimes simply knowledge. If I'm describing a woman sitting across the table from me on a date, and I notice for the first time the pale band on her finger, then it entirely makes sense to note it. But, if this is an old friend who I know to be divorced, then I wouldn't take note of that feature each time I meet her. I'd simply think, 'there's my friend who is divorced,' not 'there's the pale band on my friend's finger that indicates she's divorced.'
In other words, 'showing' what should already be familiar to your narrator or viewpoint character can ring false. Unless the woman is doing something that actually would draw you're character's attention. "She looked wistfully out the window, and the index finger of her right hand drew along the ring finger of the left, stopping when it reached that still pale band of skin." It makes sense that the narrator describes it because they're looking for meaning in the gesture, they're describing a gesture which is new; but the reader gets multiple layers of information: not only that the woman is divorced, but that there are some sort of lingering feelings, and that the narrator is perhaps watching for a sign of these feelings.

Of course, there's always going to be some readers who want you to spell everything for them... I tend to not think about those readers when I'm writing.
 
Of course, there's always going to be some readers who want you to spell everything for them... I tend to not think about those readers when I'm writing.

I'm not sure how hard general erotica readers want to work to 'get' a story. I write challenging tales with snarky in-jokes, clever intrusions and allusions, etc. They get some appreciative comments but low votes. I write pandering stories with everything laid out as explicitly as possible. I get some favorable comments and high votes.

IMHO it boils down to author satisfaction. We write what we want, somehow.
 
I'm curious about whether the book addresses these things as they relate to voice. Writing in the first person sometimes poses a different challenge, because we're trying to mirror thoughts, which are sometimes observational, and sometimes simply knowledge.

Auerbach does talk about POV, and ways in which using it makes for a particular kind of realism. More soon.

You're right that you have to manage the 'show' and 'tell' according to POV. Although sometimes you can combine the two:

I've known Jean since kindergarten and I was there all through the divorce. I was the one she grumbled to when he started staying longer and longer at the office. When she found the final damning text message, I was the one who handed her the tissues as we sat in my kitchen figuring out what next for my friend.

Sitting opposite her in the restaurant now, I saw her tracing the still pale mark round her ring finger with a look that had some traces of sadness.


(You, Sam, sitting at the back of the class chatting and texting your mates, you can come up and see me in my office later :) .)
 
I'm another who didn't know about these words. Thanks for teaching me something new today, Naoko ;)

It strikes me that Mimesis is probably the root word for those face-painted silent interpretive actors so famously depicted as wandering the streets of Greenwich Village. :p

I don't have any personal rules regarding when I show or tell something. I mix them up in my writing. Generally, I like to give a lot of indirect references to something important (which would be showing) as opposed to blatantly telling the reader, "hey! This is important!" But showing a reader something can get lost in the dialogue or narrative. So to keep it effective, I'll indicate something important more than once. But not always. There are times when I'll just shove something into the narrative and leave it alone, when it turns out later that it was something important. That's sort of my way of saying, "I told you x was coming, or x happened, or she thought x, so it's your own fault if you're surprised."

Showing and telling both have their strengths when it comes to writing. But don't ask me for any formulae. Fuck if I know how best they work. ;)
 
Well, I am going to have a button badge made saying: "I taught slyc_willie a new technique!" ;) Yes, yes, I know it was only the name of it that I taught him but a gurrlll has to exaggerate a bit, so men feel comfortable too when they talk about size. (I mean when they are telling fishing stories of course.)

Keep posting the thoughts on representation and narrative, folks. I was kinda taken with the notion of "the physical world as a model for truth, beauty and goodness" too. I should read the original Plato I guess.

Meanwhile, the first chapter of Mimesis: 'Odysseus' Scar'.

In this chapter, Auerbach discusses a passage in The Odyssey. It's typical of Homer's writing in that in the middle of an important narrative event, the story goes off on a sidetrack - in this case, a long account about how Odysseus got the scar by which his old nurse has just recognised him. Not only that, but Auerbach points to the way that this, as with all of Homer's writing, is set in the present. It's not that we are getting the story about Odysseus's old nurse suddenly recognising him, then we are told that previously this is how he got his scar. It's as if it's all happening in the here and now - time is flat for Homer's characters.

Modern writers might use this to increase suspense, leaving the reader going: "And ... and? What about the nurse recognising him!" However Homer intends this to relax tension, not create it. His stories are full of these sideways meanderings which offer enormous detail about the characters. Indeed the characters, rather than the action, are everything for Homer. He often breaks the tension before he even starts. There will be a long passage where he says: "Of course Achilles knew he was destined to die and he was wandering about mourning the fact that his old dad would never see him come home again." Except of course Homer says it very poetically and beautifully - cuz Achilles is like :p:p:p.

Fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez might remember this technique from his Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

Auerbach compares this to another ancient piece of writing from the Bible: the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. What he points to is how in complete contrast, the Biblical writing uses no descriptive background.

And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said to him, Abraham! and he said, Behold, here I am. (Genesis 22:1)

We're not told where the speakers are, whether there was a table for them to sit at. Although we know God doesn't usually come down and sit at table, we are not told if Abraham was taken up to some heavenly location. Did Abraham kneel down? Bow his head? We don't know. The rest of the story continues in this spare and unremitting fashion: a three day journey is undertaken. Through harsh desert? Lush farmland? We don't know.

Isaac carries the wood, Abraham "took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together." It's like the first sentence for the current FAWC. Because there is nothing else described around them, the objects acquire some extraordinary intense meaning. This is the physical world as a model for truth, perhaps.

This is the crux of the difference between the two styles of writing.

"Delight in physical existence is everything to [the Homeric poems]" says Auerbach. In between the gory accounts of battles (see my blogpost on The Iliad) the poet lingers on accounts of hunts, banquets, athletic competitions. "And thus they bewitch us and ingratiate themselves to us until we live with them in the reality of their lives; so long as we are reading or hearing the poems, it does not matter whether we know that all this is only legend, "make-believe"....

"It is all very different in the Biblical stories. Their aim is not to bewitch the senses, and if nevertheless they produce lively sensory effects, it is only because the moral, religious, and psychological phenomena which are their sole concern are made concrete in the sensible matter of life. But their religious intent involves an absolute claim to historical truth."

Homer's poetry with its wealth of detail aims to be true-to-life, to produce a representation of reality in which we feel as Achilles feels, as Odysseus and his nurse feel, we see what they do, we have the memories of how scars were got, knowledge of the myths and legends which they know.

The Bible is The Word of God, the Truth. It does not embellish, instead it seeks to speak direct to the core of our being, to be our reality.
 
It strikes me that Mimesis is probably the root word for those face-painted silent interpretive actors so famously depicted as wandering the streets of Greenwich Village. :p
Mimesis is from the Ancient Greek mīmeisthai, "to imitate," and Mime is from mimos, meaning "imitator, actor", so yes, from the same root!
:nana:
 
Gosh! Even more things that I didn't even know there were names for.

I need a cup of tea and a lie down in a dark room.

:)

I fill a glossary with such words.

Yesterday I added EXCRESENCE. Its not what I imagined. Its an abnormal growth such as a wart or tumor or mole. Its not an injury or transient condition.
 
I think part of the effectiveness (for their purpose) of the biblical passages is that fact that when detail is sparsely-described, we fill in the rest with detail from our own mind. Which makes it easier to place ourselves in the story. It becomes much easier to relate to Abraham and Isaac as being like people we know or being like people in our lives. While richly drawn characters and experiences are a little more escapist, less relatable, because they put you inside a very specific world.
 
I think part of the effectiveness (for their purpose) of the biblical passages is that fact that when detail is sparsely-described, we fill in the rest with detail from our own mind. Which makes it easier to place ourselves in the story.
Cf McLuhan on 'hot' vs 'cold' media. A high-resolution cold medium (print) can offer deep detail, transmitting exactly what the creator wishes. A low-res hot medium (TV) provides less detail. The human mind fills-in the blanks, promoting active involvement.

Literatures, and their intentions, vary. A tech manual should eschew ambiguity and obfuscation. A speech-maker may want to 1) tell an audience what she's going to tell them, 2) then tell them, 3) then tell them what she told them. (Communications theory: redundancy is vital.) In either case, the likely intent is to clearly deliver data the consumer understands.

Propaganda and proselytizing texts, exalting religious / political programs, are not data- nor detail-driven. They may provide instruction, yes, but also mood and texture, which thrive on ambiguity and obfuscation. The gist of an idea may be more important (and absorbable) than its details. We seem to live by the ideas and fight over the contentious details.

Writing for entertainment can (should?) include a balance of both approaches, each employing SHOWing and TELLing. My tech-writer background demands clarity. My song-writer background demands inference, suggestion, ambiguity. I try to merge those in storytelling.
 
Nice, with the McLuhan. The communication theory angle I was thinking about was Dawkins' idea of Memetics (which has the same linguistic root as Mimesis but for this conversation is totally different, possibly even opposite); effective religious texts that are scant on details make them more easily adaptable to other cultures, and thus more widely propagated memes.
 
I think part of the effectiveness (for their purpose) of the biblical passages is that fact that when detail is sparsely-described, we fill in the rest with detail from our own mind. Which makes it easier to place ourselves in the story.

Literatures, and their intentions, vary. A tech manual should eschew ambiguity and obfuscation.
...
Propaganda and proselytizing texts, exalting religious / political programs, are not data- nor detail-driven. They may provide instruction, yes, but also mood and texture, which thrive on ambiguity and obfuscation.

The religious text is looking to be the tech manual for our lives. It does this by appearing to be spare, unambiguous and plain-speaking. We place ourselves in the narrative, filling in the detail, particularly details of feeling and emotion. Thus the mood and texture becomes more intense than in a Homeric piece of writing. There, the mood and texture are vivid in a more superficial way, and only so long as we are reading the story.

This is not necessarily the same for a short story. However a (well-written) spare and lean story can draw us in more immediately and strongly, as callmeismael suggests. This is particularly when using the 'show' rather than 'tell' means of kicking the story off.

God said Do it. Abraham did it.

Abraham was standing on the mountain. He had come there because God appeared to him three days previously and told him to do it.
 
But ... but... Champagne goes with everything!
Well ... I was having oysters and champagne once with an otherwise lovely guy who suddenly asked for a tissue. He had been sipping his champagne through his 'chewie'!

:D - at least he didn't take it out and stick it under his chrome bar stool.
 
Chapt. 2 of Mimesis, with added Point of View

Auerbach starts with an excerpt from Petronius’s Satyricon, from the part in which Petronius writes sarkily about the nouveaux riches of his day. The narrator of the novel, Encolpius, has asked his neighbour about a woman he sees rushing around at a banquet and the answer describes not only her (wife of the host Trimalchio), also a number of other guests who have come from nowhere, sometimes from slavery, to ridiculous heights of wealth. A scornful account is given of the behaviours of people who have so much money they hardly know what to do with it.

This piece is unusual in classical literature, it’s comic and low in tone and about lower classes of people. Auerbach points to the ‘twofold mirroring’, the PoV being from an ‘I’ who is not even the narrator, let alone Petronius. In the chat about the people from the PoV of someone dining at Trimalchio’s table, Petronius not only gives us background information about Trimalchio and his guests, but passes judgement on them: ‘’if you asked for chicken milk, they’d fetch it’. Auerbach points out the way that this gives us a much better flavour of the world we are reading about: using the PoV of someone moving in its inner circles gives us the tone as well as the facts about this social group.

Auerbach also highlights the comic character of the writing. In antiquity, this kind of commentary happens only in comedy, he says. He compares this to the account in the Bible of Peter denying Christ three times before the cock crows. He says the presentation of a lower class hero (a mere fisherman) would not have been possible in serious classical literature. Raskolnikov, Père Goriot, Jude the Obscure, the tragedies of these lower class heroes are only possible in modern writing.

Auerbach suggests that New Testament texts force the reader/listener away from sensory references and focus attention on meaning. Peter’s realisation that he has betrayed Christ is laden with a bitter sorrow we feel with him, but we are more focussed on realising the fallibility, the predictable and beloved fallibility, of humans: Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. (Matthew 26: 34). An account like Petronius’ description of the nouveaux riches at their banquet focuses us on feeling scorn and hilarity, there is no ethical blueprint in the description of people whose fortunes rise and fall by chance, fate or their happening to suit the sexual palate of their former masters.

NB, PoV is straightforward in the Bible, unlike in Petronius’ writing.
 
1/6 Chapt 3 – sensual realism

In Chapt 2, Auerbach undertakes a short analysis of a passage from Tacitus describing a soldiers’ riot. Chapt 3 starts with a passage from Ammianus’s work describing a popular uprising in Rome. What Auerbach points to is the way in which, what in Tacitus was a human and objectively rational account, becomes in the later historian’s writing something sensual:

omething sultry and oppressive appears, a darkening of the atmosphere of life... a magical and sensory dehumanization. (Auerbach 1968 p.53 - tee hee hee! I love that, it makes me shiver and giggle.)

An example from the account by Ammianus is this one:

Insidens itaque vehiculo, cum speciosa fiducia ontuebatur acribus oculis tumultuantium undique cuneorum veluti serpentium vultus

Sitting in his carriage, with imposing confidence he scanned with piercing eyes the faces of the company raging all round like snakes.

Auerbach points to the way realism is becoming pictorial and sensual. Later he talks about the way Ammianus describes historical personages: “[g]rotesque and sadistic, spectral and superstitious, lusting for power yet constantly trying to conceal the chattering of their teeth”. (Auerbach 1968 p.55.)

Auerbach argues that Ammianus still belongs in the tradition of historians who eschew realistic imitation because they see it as only fit for low comic writing. But in Ammianus, tensions are starting to emerge between style and content. The style aims for reserve and refinement, but the subject matter forces inharmonious change: “The diction grows mannered, the constructions begin, as it were, to writhe and twist .... The elevated style becomes hyperpathetic and gruesome, becomes pictorial and sensory.” (Auerbach 1968 p.57.)
 
2/6 Chapt 3 – Stoicism

Auerbach comments on the stoicism of the classical historical tradition of Tacitus, Sallust and Ammianus. They choose serious subjects of moral corruption, which they contrast with ideals of simplicity, purity and virtue. This, it seems to me, is part of the idea of mimesis as being a depiction of truth and beauty, although here it is done in a roundabout way through exploring the mirror opposite.
 
3/6 Chapt 3 – Eroticism in Ovid

As this is of particular interest for us on here, I have extracted Auerbach’s comments on the ‘silly’ eroticism of Ovid’s writing:

With an extreme emphasis on desire, which all the spices of rhetoric-realistic art are employed to arouse in the reader too, there is a complete absence of human warmth and intimacy. There is always an admixture of something spectrally sadistic; desire is mixed with fear and horror; though to be sure there is a good deal of silliness too.
(Auerbach 1968 p.60.)
 
Mark Twain on mimesis:

“Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.”
 
4/6 Chapt 3 – Jerome’s epideictic style.

Auerbach moves on to show how the style of the later writer Jerome draws on the way the Bible depicts a dense human tapestry of the poor and suffering, but also – and more significantly – he draws on pictorial rhetorical devices from late antiquity. This work prefigures the rich splendour of the Baroque.

In the passage quoted, Jerome offers a heavily sensual account. He describes jewels which are no longer adorning the neck of a now deceased woman, having been sold for money to give the poor. He describes in detail the flowers which her husband does not scatter on her grave – he is scattering “balsam of mercy” (to the poor).

(Epideictic rhetoric is that of display and demonstration, including playful self-display. Used at celebrations, and for the demonstration of virtue and vice. Aristotle says its use depends on the audience, you have to consider where the audience is coming from, “or as Socrates used to say, it is not difficult to praise Athenians in Athens”. It’s about readers being persuaded by the rhetor in line with the ideas they already have, or persuaded to put those aside in order to go with the rhetor’s thinking.)
 
That's it! Show, don't (kiss and ;) ) tell.

I liked your Byron quote too, you could bring usefully that in here.
:rose:

OK, but you do know that Mark Twain/Samuel Clements stole it. Most Americans attribute it to him rather than Byron...

from Don Juan by Lord Byron, 1823

' Tis strange - but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction; if it could be told,
How much would novels gain by the exchange!
How differently the world would men behold!
How oft would vice and virtue places change!
The new world would be nothing to the old,
If some Columbus of the moral seas
Would show mankind their souls' antipodes.
 
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