The Ghost of the Literary in Recent Theories of Text and Performance

Abstract

In Book 3 of Plato's Republic, Socrates refers to the beginning of the Iliad in order to take Homer to task for switching from a purely narrative voice to actually “speaking” in the voice of a character—the Trojan priest Chryses—who is attempting to get Agamemnon to return his daughter. Socrates then demonstrates in his own third-person narrative of that same story how it could have been told without the imitation provided by the priest's speech. Socrates also makes the point that it is in tragic drama where the opposite condition obtains: tragic drama is comprised entirely of direct, imitative speech instead of a distanced, third-person narration. The distinction being made between diegesis (narrative) and mimesis (imitation) marks the beginning of the concept of theatricality, a concept still hotly debated today. Interestingly enough, as is often the case with concepts, it is born in a negative fashion, from antitheatrical criticism.