Development of Iranian Performance from a Diegetic World

The concept of Diegesis (telling or recounting a story) originally appeared in Plato's thesis as opposed to Mimesis (showing or enacting a story). Plato described Diegesis as the third person style of expressing a fiction mediated by an author/narrator, whereas he proposed Mimesis as the first person style of presenting a story by means of characters and actions. Aristotle then applied Mimesis for the craft of writing plays and developed the notion to study dramatic and epic arts. In the current era, the notion of Diegesis and Mimesis has been reconsidered in the field of Narratology, and developed as the key elements for making difference between verbal narratives and drama, arguing that the sequence of events is generally mediated through a given narrator in a fiction, while it is presented in a play by an actor. Using historical documents and applying an analytical-descriptive method, the development of Iranian indigenous performance from traditional styles of story-telling would be discussed in this paper. By this way, the process of transferring narrative strategies into dramatic language and the connections between “Diegesis and Mimesis in Iranian plays will be traced. In the origins of Iranian performance, however, Diegesis and Mimesis, regardless of today's disagreements, are intertwined as such that the Rhapsodist (Naghal) functions as a narrator-actor who recounts the event from a third person view, at the same time that he attempts to perform his dramatic role from a first person view. In Taziyeh, which many historians argue that it is inspired by Rhapsody (Naghali) and might be taken as the oldest type of traditional performance in Iran, performative elements are in alignment with narrative elements in such a way that they would be no longer accounted for an absolute narration, or an absolute imitation. The main features of Diegesis in Taziyeh and Naghali could be explained in the style of developing dramatic elements such as character, dialogue, time and place. Although character has bodily and lively presence in Taziyeh, it is needed more to narrate the role than to represent it. The world of Taziyeh is often more composed of verbal elements rather performative or dramatic ones; Instead of being represented, the place is simply described. The time, like a narrative fiction, is also encompassed a wide range of temporality. With the respect to rich tradition of storytelling in Iranian history, Taziyeh gradually could turn the style of narrating a story from a literary form into a dramatic one. Narrative techniques such as the play within the play, asides, parabasis, metalepsis, direct audience address, verbal summaries of offstage action, embedded narratives and metanarrative comments had fortune to enter into Taziyeh and being steadily combined with its mimetic language. In conclusion, the subject of “Diegesis and Mimesis” in narratology will be reconsidered to prove that both terms are not simply descriptions for separating drama from narrative, but in fact, those are the unique natural features of both of them.