Algunos elementos metaficcionales

 Algunos elementos metaficcionales: https://narrativetheoryandnarratology.hcommons.org/2022/11/11/algunos-elementos-metaficcionales-2/

Frame Theory

 Retropost, 2012:

Frame theory has many antecedents in literature and critical thought, but it was explicitly developed by Gregory Bateson and Erving Goffman in the second half of the 20th century. It is very useful to account for any kind of phenomena in semiotics and in social life, but it is especially relevant to the analysis of literature and of performance.

According to frame theory, we structure reality in frames—that is, in groups of signs that "go together", big composite structures of signs which have a clear border, a frame, separating them from other sign structures. Frames are useful therefore to organize signs, to allow our mind to process a number of signs as having something in common, and to isolate chunks of reality from one another. As such, frames also serve to organize the structure of reality, and to make it manageable: we can easily move frames around, transform them, open and close them. We can recycle one frame in one context and apply it to another.

Frames organize social life and activities. For instance, in engaging in a coordinated activity, we open up a frame, and we behave accordingly: we focus our attention on the elements of the frame, and temporarily we disattend things that fall outside the frame.

An example: a class is a frame. It is a shared activity with delimited borderlines, in time and space. It has rules and conventions of its own, we assume specific roles when we are in class.  Notice that architecture also helps: a classroom helps to isolate the frame of the class, it gives it architectural coherence so to speak, and prevents interruptions from other coordinated activities (other classes, people engaging in social conversation, etc.). A class is a piece of socially structured reality, a conventional reality if you want, which we attend more or less to while we are engaged in it. Many other examples from work may come to mind: a meal in a restaurant, a social encounter with a friend in the street, the interaction between the shop assistant and the customers in a shop, etc. Frames are a handy way to understand and organize how social activities are carried out and coordinated.

Now, literature and drama are one such social activity. Even if we speak of solitary reading, the reader is interacting with a text. Reading requires disattending in part the physical world around you and opening up a frame in the middle of it—the frame we may identify with the work. A dream is of course a frame in our reality, and perhaps our oldest experience of virtual reality. A literary work is partly like a dream in this sense: a technology of virtual reality, through the use of language, texts, and frames of discourse. A literary work, a poem, a narrative, is a frame which opens in our reality and allows the presence, or the embedding, of a different reality while we read the work. Reality is suspended for the time being, and we are transported to Middlemarch, or to Robinson Crusoe's island, or to ancient Rome. We attend the represented speech of virtual characters, and we reconstruct the virtual world of the book thanks to our imagination, the speech of the characters, and the narrative discourse of the authorial voice.

The occasion for the literary frame may be solitary reading, or some kind of communal interaction: for instance, recitation by a poet or a storyteller. In this case the frame opens up within a social encounter, an event. Something similar happens in the case of drama: the oral performance of literature is already half dramatic. A narrative opens up a space of imagined reality, different from the here-and-now, but this imagined reality may become much more immersive if it becomes multimedia—I am not speaking of videogames here, but of the first multimedia experience in virtual reality—drama.

Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis (1974) is the most elaborate discussion of frame theory in all aspects of social life, including drama. Goffman often discusses drama, which is an important analogy of social life in his theory, but we shall not go further into his analysis in that book. It is a book which must be read by those who want a deeper insight into the nature of reality, but it would require a course in itself. We shall examine, though, his dramatistic theory of social behaviour as expounded in an earlier book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

There are several important elements to take into account in frame analysis:

1) the establishing of frames: the kind of framing which is established to separate one frame from another, the "material" used to delimit the border of the frame, and the ways in which framing is sustained.

2) The formal structuring of frames relative to each other: i. e. whether they coexist on different planes, whether one is contained by another, whether they are sequential….

3) The managing of frames—how initial assumptions about framing change along with the experience of the frames. For instance, how a piece of experience which seemed to be lacking a frame is shown to be contained by a frame which appears retrospectively, retroactively "reframing" the whole.

4) The transformations of frames: how frames may be "keyed" to use Goffman's vocabulary. For instance, in drama, a performance may be a "serious" performance or a rehearsal. Keyings are a way to organize a new aspect of experience by transforming or reusing an existing frame.

5) Frame-breaking.  It is essential to establish and separate frames, and it is also essential to know when and how to break them. Depending on the kind of activity and of frame there may be many ways of breaking frame—but let us use as an instance the most obvious one, the image stepping outside of the picture and becoming real, crossing the frame which seemed to contain it.

6) Related to frame-breaking, but really a different issue: interferences between frames. For instance, the way a framed  section of experience is altered in subtle ways by the very fact that it is framed: the image which adapts itself to its frame, in painting or photography—or the dialogue in drama which is not "natural" because the characters are not really speaking only to one another, they are also speaking for the benefit of an audience whose presence they ignore.

Goffman: La realidad como expectativa autocumplida

La realidad flojea

Inception

Tragedies Deep and Dire

From Mary Shelley's novel on apocalyptic pandemic, The Last Man (1826), ch. 19:




July is gone. August must pass, and by the middle of September we may hope. Each day was eagerly counted; and the inhabitants of towns, desirous to leap this dangerous interval, plunged into dissipation, and strove, by riot, and what they wished to imagine to be pleasure, to banish thought and opiate despair. None but Adrian could have tamed the motley population of London, which, like a troop of unbitted steeds, rushing to their pastures, had thrown aside all minor fears, through the operation of the fear paramount. Even Adrian was obliged to part to yield, that he might be able, if not to guide, at least to set bounds to the license of the times. The theatres were kept open; every place of public resort hwas frquented, though he endeavored so to modify them, as might best quiet the agitation of the spectators, and at the same time prevent a reaction of misery when the excitement was over. Tragedies deep and dire were the chief favourites. Comedy brought with it too great a contrast to the inner despair; when such were attempted, it was not infrequent for a commedian, in the midst of the laughter occasiones by this disproportioned buffoonery, to find a word or thought in his part that jarred with his own sense of wretchedness, and burst down from mimic merriment into sobs and tears, while the spectators, seized with irresistible sympathy, werpt, nad the pantomimic reverlry was changed to a real exhibition of tragic passion.

It was not in my nature to derive consolation from such scenes, from theatres, whose buffoon laughter and discordant mirth awakened distempered sympathy, or where fictitious tears and wailings mocked the heart-felt grief within; from festival or crowded meeting, where hilarity sprung from the worst feelings of our nature, or such enthralment of the better ones, as impressed it with garish and false varnish; from assemblies of mourners in the guise of revellers. Once however I witnssed a scene of singular interest at one of the theatres, where nature overpowered art, as an overflowing cataract will tear away the puny manufacture of a mock cascade, which had before been fed by a small portion of its waters.  

I had come to London to see Adrian. He was not at the palace; and, though the attendants did not know whither he had gone, they did not expect him till late at night. It was between six and seven o'clock, a fine summer afternoon, and I spent my leisure hours in a ramble through the empty streets of London; now turning to avoid an approaching funeral, now urged by curiosity to observe the state of a particular spot; my wanderings were instinct with pain, for silence and desertion characterized every place I visited, and the few beings I met were so pale and woe-begone, so marked with care and depressed by fear, that weary of encountering only signs of misery, I began to retread my steps towards home.

I was now in Holborn, and passed by a public house filled with uproarious companions, whose songs, laughter, and shouts were more sorrowful than the pale looks and silence of the mourner. Such an one was near, hovering round this house. The sorry plight of her dress displayed her poverty, she was ghastly pale, and continued approaching, first the window and then the door of the house, as if fearful, yet longing to enter. A sudden burst of song and merriment seemed to sting her to the heart; she murmured, 'Can he have the heart?' and then mustering her courage, she stepped within the threshold. The landlady met her in the passage; the poor creature asked, 'Is my husband here? Can I see George?'

'See him,' cried the woman, 'yes, if you go to him; last night he was taken with the plague, and we sent him to the hospital.'

The unfortunate inquirer staggered against a wall, a faint cry escaped her—'O! were you cruel enough,' she exclaimed, 'to sen him there?'

The landlady meanwhile hurried away; but a more compassionate bar-maid gave her a detailed account, the sum of which was, that her husband had been taken ill, after a night of riot, and sent by his boon companions with all expedition to St Bartholomew's Hospital. I had watched this scene, for there was a gentleness about the poor woman that interested me; she now tottered away from the door, walking as well as she could down Holborn Hill; but her strength soon failed her; she leaned aggainst a wall, and her head sunk on her bosom, while her pallid cheek became still more white. I went up to her and offered my services. She hardly looked up—'You can do me no good,' she replied; 'I must go to the hospital; if I do not die before I get there.'

There were still a few hackney-coaches accustomed to stand about the streets, more truly from habit than for use. I put her in one of these, and entered with her that I might secure her entrance into the hospital. Our way was short, and she said little, except interrupted ejaculations of reproach that he had left her, exclamations on the unkindness of some of his friends, and hope that she would fin him alive. There was a simple, natural earnestness about her that interested me in her fate, especially when she assured me that her husband was the best of men,—had been so, till want of business during these unhappy times had thrown him into bad company. 'He could not bear to come home,' she said, 'only to see our children die. A man cannot have the patience a mother has, with her own flesh and blood.'

We were st down at St Bartholomew's, and entered the wretched precincts of the house of disease. The poor creature clung closer to me, as she saw with what heartless haste they bore the dead from the wards, and took them into a room, whose half-opened door displayed a number of corpses, horrible to behold by one unaccostumed to such scenes. We were directed to the ward where her husband had been first taken, and still was, the nurse said, if alive. My companion looked eagerly from one bed to the other, till at the end of the ward she espied, on a wretched bed, a squalid, haggard creature, writhing under the torture of disease. She rushed towards him, she embraced him blessing God for his preservation. 

The enthusiasm that inpired her with this strange joy, blinded her to the horrors about her; but they were intolerably agonizing to me. The ward was filled with an effluvia that caused my heart to heave with painful qualms. The dead were carried out, and the sick brought in, with like indifference; some were screaming with pain, others laghing from the influence of more terrible delirium; some were attended to weeping, despairing relations, others called aloud with thrilling tenderness or reproach on the friends who had deserted them, while the nurses went from bed to bed, incarnate images of despair, neglect, and death. I gave gold to my luckless companion; I recommended her to the care of the attendants; I then hastened away; while the tormentor, the imagination, busied itself in picturing my own loved ones, stretched on such beds, attended thus. The country afforded no such mass of horrors; solitary wretches died in the open fields; and I have found a survivor in a vacant village, contending at once with famine and disease; but the assembly of pestilence, the banqueting hall of death, was spread only in London.

I rambled on, oppressed, distracted by painful emotions—suddenly I found myself before Drury Lane Theatre. The play was Macbeth—the first actor of the age was there to exert his powers to drug with irreflection the auditors; such a medicine I yearned for, so I entered. The theatre was tolerably well filled. Shakspeare, whose popularity was established by the approval of four centuries, had not lost his influence even at this dread period; but was still 'Ut magus,' the wizard to rule our hearts and govern our imaginations. I came in during the interval between the third and fourth act. I looked round on the audience; the females were mostly of the lower classes, but the men were of all ranks, come hither to forget awhile the protracted scenes of wretchedness, which awaited them at their miserable homes. The curtains drew up, and the stage presented the scene of the witches' cave. The wildness and supernatural machinery of Macbeth, was a pledge that it could contain little directly connected with our present circumstances. Great pains had been taken in the scenery to give the semblance of reality to the impossible. The extreme darkness of the stage, whose only light was received from the fire under the cauldron, joined to a kind of mist that floated about it, rendered the unearthly shapes of the witches obscure and shadowy. It was not three decrepid old hags that bent over their pot throwing in the grim ingredients of the magic charm, but forms frightful, unreal, and fanciful. The entrance of Hecate, and the wild music that followed, took us out of this world. The cavern shape the stage assumed, the beetling rocks, the glare of the fire, the misty shades that crossed the scene at times, the music in harmony with all witch-like fancies, permitted the imagination to revel, without fear of contradiction, or reproof from reason or the heart. The entrance of Macbeth did not destroy the illusion, for he was actuated by the same feelings that inspired us, and while the work of magic proceeded we sympathized in his wonder and his daring, and gave ourselves up with our whole souls to the influence of scenic delusion. I felt the beneficial result of such excitement, in a renewal of those pleasing flights of fancy to which I had long been a stranger. The effect of this scene of incantation communicated a portion of its power to that which followed. We forgot that Malcolm and Macduff were mere human beings, acted upon by such simple passions as warmed our own breasts. By slow degrees howerver we were drawn to the real interest of the scene. A shudder like the swift passing of an electric shock ran through the house, when Rosse exclaimed, in answer to 'Stands Scotland where it did?'

        Alas, poor country;
Almost afraid to know itself! It cannot 
Be called our mother, but our grave, where nothing,
But  who knows nothing, is once seen to smile;
Where sighs, and groans, and shrieks that rent the air,
Are made, not marked; where violent sorrow seems 
A modern extasy: the dead man's knell 
Is there scarce asked, for who, and good men's lives
Expire before the flowers in their caps, 
Dying, or else they sicken.

Each word struck the sense, as our life's passing bell; we feared to look at each other, but bent our gaze on the stage, as if our eyes could fall innocuous on that alone.The person who played the part of Rosse, suddenly became aware of the dangerous ground he trod. He was an inferior actor, but truth now made him excellent; as he went on to announce to Macduff the slaughter of his family, he was afraid to speak, trembling from apprehension of a burst of grief from the audience, not from his fellow-mime. Each word was drawn out with difficulty; real anguish painted his features; his eyes were now lifted in sudden horror, now fixed in dread upon the ground. This shew of terror encreased ours, we gasped with him, each neck was stretched out, each face changed with the actor's changes—at length while Macduff, who, attending to his part, was unobservant of the high wrought sympathy of the house, cried with well acted passion:

         All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? —O hell kite! All?
What! all my pretty chickens, and their dam,
At one fell swoop!

A pang of tameless grief wrenched every heart, a burst of despair was echoed from every lip.—I had entered into the universal feeling—I had been absorbed by the terrors of Rosse—I re-echoed the cry of Macduff, and then rushed out as from an hell of torture, to find calm in the free air and silent street.

Voice to the Soundless Thought

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Consecuencias económicas de la pandemia

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