— This blog post was written by Marie Vandensande, MA student.
The popular British dramady Fleabag (2016) revolves around a young woman (‘Fleabag’) trying to figure out her life in London, navigating complicated family relations and finding love. In the opening scene of the first episode, Fleabag suddenly looks straight at the camera and addresses the viewer: “You know that feeling when…”. In a split second, she effectively breaks the fourth wall and turns from your standard TV show character into an intriguing (yet sometimes bewildering) narrator.
Throughout the show, Fleabag continues to alternate between these two roles, consistently implicating the viewer in her various adventures by speaking to them directly. Interestingly, the other characters are unaware that this dialogue is taking place (in literary studies, this phenomenon is called a ‘metalepsis’: an intrusion that disturbs or complicates the distinction between the different narrative levels). It’s almost as if time in the TV show – the ‘story time’ – stops when Fleabag talks to the viewer. As a result, the fictional illusion of Fleabag is consistently disturbed by its main character. In other words, Fleabag herself constantly reminds us that she is not real but a fiction. If you have watched the show, you might initially have been taken aback by this unusual storytelling technique. We are not used to being acknowledged as viewers, especially by a character on our TV screen. How does that acknowledgement affect our experience as an audience? Does it bring us closer to the character, or rather push us further away?
Fleabag’s dialogue with the audience, which freezes the story time, might seem particularly modern, but in fact it is not. While Fleabag achieves this effect by breaking the fourth wall, there are other ways to achieve it. In the 10th century, a collection of Greek stories based on the lives of Christian saints already features interventions that raise similar questions to Fleabag’s, even ten centuries earlier.
The collection in question is called the Menologion, and it was composed by the Byzantine author known as Symeon Metaphrastes. It includes 148 stories revolving around Christian saints and martyrs, collected and edited by Metaphrastes, and it was immensely popular with the Byzantine audience. The Menologion’s narrator intervenes constantly in the narrative, sometimes moralizing or explaining events to the audience. The most striking way he intervenes is by addressing the audience directly. To be sure, since the narrator in the Menologion is not himself a character in the story, such interventions are by no means metalepses; yet, what they have in common with the interventions in Fleabag is that they too effectively interrupt story time.
The stories in Metaphrastes’ Menologion were meant to be performed aloud for a congregation at Christian festivities and religious gatherings in churches. Consequently, they have a highly performative value. As such, the addressing of the audience might have been less striking in its original setting than it may seem to us today. Just as in Fleabag, the narrative takes its audience into account and plays with its extratextual dimension, not by breaking the fourth wall, but by exploiting the performative setting. It anticipates a viewer or listener and creates a sense of connection between text and audience.
Which effects does this have on the audiences in question? In Fleabag, the most straightforward effect is related to humour. Since the dialogue between Fleabag and her audience goes unnoticed by the other characters, it provides a way for her to say whatever she thinks, whatever she feels, whenever she feels like it, without impacting the plot or characters around her. The tension between her (often rather outrageous) musings and the obliviousness of the other characters, in combination with a viewer who is ‘in the know’, creates an entertaining way of storytelling.
The lives of saints in the Menologion – although they can sometimes be quite funny to a modern reader: who wouldn’t chuckle at the devil’s frustration as he fails to seduce an especially virtuous girl?[1] – were probably not intended to be humorous. Since the stories are often centred around the suffering of a particular saint or martyr, the audience is instead invited to sympathise and maybe even relate to the struggles of a fellow Christian. Thus, the narrator’s interventions may deepen the audience’s sense of engagement with the narrative.
Despite their obvious differences, and depending on the audience, the same could be said for Fleabag. When watching, I at least felt like a friend, watching Fleabag figure things out, sometimes having to avert my eyes from her most problematic mistakes, but always involved, always by her side. I think we can imagine a similar feeling capturing the audience of Symeon Metaphrastes’ texts, especially in those cases where they are invited to put themselves in the characters’ shoes. In The Miracle of Euphemia, for example, the narrator asks the audience: “What do you think the woman would feel?” or “What else could she have done?”[2] These interventions invite the audience to sympathise with the main character, Euphemia, and to imagine what it would be like to share her experiences. Thus, in both Fleabag and the Menologion, story time is technically frozen for a moment when Fleabag/the narrator addresses the audience directly, yet these interruptions nonetheless stimulate the audience’s emotional involvement in the story. This suggests that the two examples of story-telling, a millennium apart, develop rhetorical dynamics of reader/viewer engagement that are comparable at least in some respects.[3]
[1] This example is taken from Metaphrastes’ Life and Passion of Saints Cyprian and Justina.
[2] From The Miracle of Euphemia (Θαῦμα εἰς Εὐφημίαν τὴν κόρην), §§ 13 and 6 respectively, in the edition and translation of Papaioannou, S. (2017), Christian novels from the Menologion of Symeon Metaphrastes. Cambridge, MA: HUP.
[3] This blog post benefited from guidance and helpful suggestions by Koen De Temmerman and Julie Van Pelt.