RELATED TERMS:
Stuart Jones writes:
Hairyland is an imaginary world where Hairy (a dog), the alter ego of Louis (a young boy), lives. Hairyland used to be in our geographical) world (somewhere around the US/Canada border, west of the Lakes) but is now in a parallel universe.
The ‘placeness’ of ‘The Sofa’ derives from Louis having consecrated it as the arena of action for Mr Dog and Rabbit. As such it is a ‘sacred’ place, and when he and I are ‘doing Mr Dog’, nobody else is allowed on it.
It also functions as a sofa.
Things are unpredictable there: the laws of physics and behaviour of objects are in constant flux. Places here have counterparts in Hairyland: for example The Natural History Museum; however, in Hairyland a dinosaur can get from the museum to Australia in half an hour. Although Hairyland is ‘imaginary’, it can be considered a narrative environment because for Louis it is real, palpable and spatial. Louis is in control of the diegesis and narrates some of the stories (I narrate some, some we co-narrate).
All the stories take place in the present and often are told mimetically as well as diegetically. If I am narrating, I would say that I am an extradiegetic, heterodiegetic narrator; if Louis is narrating he is an intradiegetic, homodiegetic narrator.
When he is narrating he is usually protagonist (as Hairy); if I am narrating a story about Mr Dog and Rabbit he typically acts as a Deus ex Machina. Since he is the principal audience for the stories at the same time as being inside the story (as either Louis or Hairy) I would say that as well as being (sometimes) the intradiegetic, homodiegetic narrator, he is also an intradiegetic narratee.
As a theory proposition, I would suggest that young children are almost always in the intradiegetic narratee position, and would propose that moving into the extradiegetic narratee position is part of ‘growing up’. I would also propose that this underpins a potential power of narrative environments, especially if they incorporate interaction: they typically move the narratee into the intradiegetic position, which puts them into a ‘child’ state.
Reference
Jones, S. (2010) Louis, Mr Dog and Rabbit: metalepsis in an interactive narrative. In: R. Aylett et al. (Eds.): ICIDS 2010, LNCS 6432. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp.248-251. Available at http://www.stuartjones-wawamoz.com/essays/Louis-Mr-Dog-and-Rabbit.html [Accessed 10 March 2021]