Towards a Semiotic Theory of Transmedia Characters

ABSTRACT

On the basis of a recognition of the semiotic theories on character, this paper aims to identify some cornerstones useful for developing a theory of transmedia characters. Firstly, we will reconstruct the troubled fortune of the notion of character in French structural semiotics which reduced it to a combinatorial conception, according to which the identity of the character relies first of all on the fact of being a lexical unit that can be analyzed and decomposed, like the phoneme, into a series of "distinctive features" (Lévi-Strauss) or "semes" (Barthes; Greimas). Greimas even rejects as useless the idea of character and splits the concept into the dichotomy actant/actors, on the basis of a distinction between the being and the doing that refers to Aristotle and the privilege he conferred upon action. Hereafter we will focus on two broader visions which go beyond textual immanence: the semio-pragmatic conception of Philip Hamon—where a character effect produced by a text is linked to the reader's memory synthesis—and the socio-semiotic conception proposed by Marrone, for which the construction of characters is the result of a combination of intertextual relations. On the basis of these developments, in the last part we will re-read the observations on the nature of the character developed by Ferdinand de Saussure in his still little known studies on the Germanic legends. Ultimately, Saussure's conception of the character as a cultural construct may offer a significant contribution to a transtextual study of the character.

The Contribution of Semiotics to a Theory of Transmedia Characters

Paolo Bertetti

1. Character as a Semiotic Problem

The paper aims to propose some mainstays useful for developing a semiotic-based theory of transmedia characters. We can define a transmedia character as "a fictional hero whose adventures are told across different media platforms, each one giving more details on the life of that character" (Bertetti, "Toward" 2345). I have already presented in other works (Bertetti; Scolari, Bertetti and Freeman) a semiotic model to help analyze variations in the identity of a character that can occur during its migration across different texts and media. The analytical model refers to a dynamic conception of the character and conceptualizes it at the same time as a unit of meaning that circulates in the culture, coagulates in texts, and unfolds in the minds of the readers.

A semiotic theory of the character that aims to be useful in a transmedia perspective should consider it from three different interrelated aspects. First, from a perspective of textual semiotics, characters are textual entities; second, from a semio-pragmatic perspective they are effects of meaning arising from the interrelation between the text and the reader/viewer; finally, in cultural semiotics they can be studied as cultural constructs. In the next paragraphs I will expound upon these concepts and relate them to the semiotic tradition of studies on the character.

2. Character as Textual Entity

One way to approach the character is to consider it as an entity that manifests itself within the texts, be they written or audiovisual, literary, mythical, fairy-tale, etc. From a semiotic-based textual conception characters are recognizable semantic units ("signs" for Hamon and Saussure, or "figures" for Greimas), the overall result of their combined appearances in texts related to them (Marrone, Montalbano). Below we will specifically refer to the narrative and discursive theory of Algirdas Julien Greimas, which is probably the most complete semiotic oriented model of textual analysis.

In fact, Greimas gave up using the term "character" in favor of the dichotomy actant/actors, based on an analytical distinction between the doing and the being of the character. This dichotomy refers directly to the difference between a character's functions and attributes discussed by Vladimir Propp, and indirectly to the Aristotelian concept of plot and character. Actants are abstract entities identifiable by their role in the development of the action; actors instead are actual entities, "recognizable in the particular discourses in which they are manifested" (Greimas, "Actants" 106). Actors possess figurative attributes (appearance, physical and psychological traits, etc.) and are subject to individuation by a name (Greimas "Actants"). Greimas says that they are figures—i.e., "linguistic units that can be analyzed as a series of "figurative traits" (Greimas and Courtés 120), whose presence or absence determine the features of the character itself, or rather between the character as one who acts, and the character as one who is.

In doing this, Greimas takes up a combinatorial conception of the character that can be traced back at least to Claude Lévi-Strauss. According to Lévi Strauss, characters belonging to a myth can be analyzed and decomposed, in the same way as the phoneme, as a series of "distinctive features." Analogously, in S/Z Roland Barthes refers to character as a linguistic unit, identifying it with a Proper Name that can be decomposed into "Semes" for the analysis.

Thus, the identity of the character (or actor according to Greimas) relies first of all on it being a lexical unit—a "name," although not necessarily a proper name—that is associated with a bundle of properties that are tendentially (but not exclusively) recurrent and non-contradictory. The actor's identity, Greimas argues, is constructed inside the text with a series of anaphoric recurrences that go beyond the limits of the sentence and is maintained throughout the whole discourse (Greimas and Courtés 7). In doing this the actor can subsequently assume different actantial roles.

Similarly, Philip Hamon, who assimilates the character to a linguistic sign, writes that "The character can be defined […] as an articulated morpheme, a migratory morpheme manifested by a discontinuous signifier (a certain number of marks) that refers to a discontinuous meaning (the sense and 'value' of the character)" ("Pour un statut" 125). The expression "discontinuous meaning" underlines the fact that the character is not a static entity, but one that undergoes changes and transformations throughout the text (for example, at the end of Les Misérables Jean Valjean is a very different from the person who appears on the first pages).

Moreover, Hamon refuses to define the character as simply an accumulation of properties, but also as "a bundle of relations of resemblance, opposition, hierarchy and organization (its distribution) which it establishes on the level of the signifier and of the signified and/or simultaneously, with the other characters and elements of the work" (125), and even outside it. For example, Harry Potter, is defined as a character not only by his being a young wizard, but also by his being the son of James Potter and Lily Evans, friend of Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, and by his living in London and studying in Hogwarts. In "Typology," presenting a model of the character's identity, I picked up on this difference in the distinction between proper identity and relational identity.

As Marrone observes in Sei autori, one critical aspect of structural semiotics, however, is that by dividing the analysis between different levels of description and dissolving the concept of Character into the study of its constituents, it fails to fully account for the character as an overall and unitary effect of meaning. In particular, in Greimas's theory the definition of the Actor and its position in the context of the generative trajectory of meaning (Greimas's multi-level textual model) remains a problem. Greimas himself remarks that an actor is "a meeting point and locus of conjunction for narrative structures and discursive structures, for the grammatical and the semantic components. […] Although being implicated with both narrative and discursive structures, it is no more than the locus of their manifestations. It does not belong exclusively to one or the other" ("Actants" 120).

A semiotic theory of character must therefore not only analytically break down the character into a series of substructures, but also return later to the unity of the character as an overall effect of meaning (Marrone, Sei autori). This means moreover leaving behind a semiotic conception linked to the immanent level of the texts, as with Greimas and his followers.

3. Character as Meaning Effect

From a semio-pragmatic perspective characters are the result of textual procedures, they are "textual effects" (Hamon) but not textual entities in a strict sense. Characters, in fact, rather than entities inside the text, seem to be entities of a pragmatic nature; scholars such as Philippe Hamon and Vincent Jouve have described a character effect (effet-personnage) produced by a text. For them the fictional character is not actually an entity inscribed in the text itself, rather a semio-pragmatic effect produced by the text while reading. The text provides information, hints, clues, and signals that allow the receiver to identify a character-effect, i.e., the illusion of a unitary human figure (or even a non-human one), logically necessary for the development of the story. In this it is similar to other text effects such as the reality-effect (Barthes, "L'effet") or the world-effect (Odin). In a similar way, Marie-Laure Ryan considers characters to be, like other fictional entities such as stories or worlds, cognitive constructs assembled by the reader in response to the text and, in some ways, the product of mnemonic synthesis ("Theoretical Foundations"). Even Greimas, moreover, had reluctantly admitted that the problem of character must be placed beyond a strictly textual sphere: "A character in a novel, supposing that it is introduced by the attribution of a name conferred on it, is progressively created by consecutive figurative notations extending throughout the length of the text, and it does not exist as a complete figure until the last page, thanks to the cumulative memorizing of the reader" (Greimas, "Actors" 119).

Hamon relates the character effect only to a single text; however, in a broader perspective, the mental reconstruction, as pointed out, can be the overall result of a series of different texts, each of which will enrich the awareness that the reader (or spectator) has of the character. This is the case with serial narratives: the fan who has read all the Harry Potter novels will have a more complex mental image of the wizard than that of the reader who has only read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

Hamon also specifies that the character—as a mental reconstruction—is not linked to an exclusive semiotic system. As cognitive constructs, characters have some sort of existence independent not only of texts, but also of the semiotic system (or medium) of manifestation (Harry Potter is still Harry Potter whether he appears in the novels or in the movies), even if every semiotic system can actualize a character in its own peculiar ways (Harry Potter in the movies could be different in some ways from the literary one).

In his study of Inspector Montalbano, a character who made his first appearance in a famous series of detective stories by the Italian writer Andrea Camilleri before appearing in a successful TV series and in other media, Gianfranco Marrone proposes a socio-semiotic conception of character which is not embedded exclusively within textual immanence but comes into being across and through the texts and the media. A character is "a figure that, in one way or another, escapes [from] the text to establish itself in the wider cultural universe to the point of competing and blending with the objects and people of the world of experience […] a real hero who becomes disengaged with a text and its author and lives in the mind and conscience of readers" (Montalbano 25–26). In other words, the character is a semiotic object that finds its own being or "making sense" in a wider socio-cultural dimension. Understanding a character therefore involves studying its intertextual recurrences, transtextual changes, and intersemiotic translations.

4. Character as Cultural Entity

A character, as a product arising from the act of reading (or viewing), is a sort of mental image, but not an idiosyncratic and private one; characters are not subjective entities but are rather subjective modulations of a socially shared cultural competence. On closer inspection, however, the origin of the mental image we have of a character is more complex. It is based not only on the texts—in the same or in different media—that are related to the character, but, more generally, on all the different discourses, even secondary ones, that refer to it. For example, although I may never have seen a Harry Potter film or read a novel, it is still very likely that I have built a certain idea (albeit less accurate) of the apprentice wizard from reviews, newspaper articles, Wikipedia entries, daily conversations, and so on.

Characters are, therefore, on the one hand the result of the interaction text–reader and on the other, from the perspective of Cultural Semiotics, they are cultural entities ("figures", as Courtés calls them). Just like other textual contents such as stories or fictional worlds they circulate through the different texts and media in which they appear but belong to a more general cultural competence that we all share to a varying degree. Ferdinand De Saussure, in his studies on the Nibelungenlied and other Germanic legends¹, assimilates the characters of a legend (like Siegfried or Tristan, that he calls "symbols") to linguistic signs. As this character is concretely present in the cultural competence of each individual, that is to say in what Eco would call the Encyclopedia: each of us will therefore have a private conception of the character, based on how we deal with the texts. However, in its entirety the character is present, as a cultural unit, in the abstract only at the level of the social mass (Saussure Course). In the words of Saussure, the character finds its reality only in relation to its permanence within the memory of the social mass when it is "put in circulation" (Saussure Le leggende 30), that is to say "poured into the social mass which fixes its value at every moment" (Ibidem). In other words, the character in its entirety does not reside in a single legend (i.e., in a single textual version of a legend), but only—in an abstract but effective way—as a class, within culture (that Saussure considers a social fact). It is the same as the linguistic sign, which has an abstract but effective existence within the language (langue), and this regardless of its concrete realizations in speech (parole) or rather, in some way, contemplating and including them all (Saussure Course). The object of study of Semiotics is precisely this abstract cultural unity, and not the individual knowledge of it.

This is a central point for the construction of a semiotic theory of transmedia character. In fact, as Marrone correctly observes in Montalbano, this conception goes beyond Hamon's, which considered the character as an effect of pragmatic nature. For Marrone, the entirety of the character does not correspond to the image that the reader has gleaned from the various texts (or the different legends, in the case of Saussure); neither does it reside in the memory and cultural competence of the individual, but precisely in the whole of culture as a social fact. In this perspective the character should not even be identified with the experience of the single user during fruition of the text. Consider a cross-media icon like Tarzan. No one could ever read in its entirety the boundless set of materials (books, films, comics, etc.) related to it. The mental image that each of us can have will always be partial; the complete and exhaustive portrayal of Tarzan is present only in abstract form in collective knowledge.

If the character is a cultural and not a textual entity, it nevertheless manifests itself and, indeed, is based on texts. It lives and can be found in the different texts in which it is actualized inside the intertextual network where it is constantly retranslated. Paradigmatic by nature, characters thus belong in the first instance to the system and are realized syntagmatically in the text.

5. The Identity of Character

In his Notes Saussure poses another pivotal problem for a theory of transmedia character; namely, that of the identity of the character: what is it exactly that remains unchanged throughout all the different incarnations of a character and that allows us to establish an identity?

Anticipating the combinatorial conception of Lévi-Strauss, Saussure observes that the identity of the symbol is something that increases in length over time, constantly changing, but which can nevertheless be studied, as it is founded on a "combination of features" or "elements." Saussure is explicit as to what these elements are: "each character is a symbol that can be subject to variation in […] a) the name, b) the position towards others, c) the personality, d) the function, i.e. the actions" (Le leggende 31).

Saussure, ultimately, aims to find a principle of invariance, he tries to identify a series of elements that remain constant through the different incarnations of the legendary character. However, the nebula of diachronically changing elements makes it impossible to define the identity of the character. It is only the relatively long duration of some traits which gives us an illusion of reality, but this unity is nothing but "a soap bubble" (Le leggende 192).

Unlike the linguistic sign, whose identity can be precisely defined on the basis of negative and differential relations with the other elements of the language system, in Saussure's Notes the identity of the character is given by a heterogeneous sum of features and positive properties (see Ferraro). Lacking in Saussure is the concept of transformation, which we can find in Lévi-Strauss, and that of intertextuality.

For Lévi-Strauss, who applies Saussure's concept of value in the folkloric context, the elements of myth are never given absolutely, but depend on the network of relationships within which this is inserted. The semiotic identity of each mythical unit (even of a character) is therefore defined according to the relationships it has with the other units. For Lévi-Strauss a myth is never included in its entirety in a single text. Thus, the mythical character, like any other mythic unit, can be identified only within the mythical "corpus," and more generally within the totality of the culture that produces the myth. According to Lévi-Strauss, the differential identity of a mythical sign is determined on the basis of the transformations it is exposed to as it moves from one version of the myth to another.

On the basis of Levi-Strauss's reflections, Marrone describes "an intrinsic mythism of the character that allows it to be translated between texts, speeches and different media. In this sense, the character does not exist in a single text or in a generic context with no textual links; it exists instead in the intertextual network in which it is constantly being retranslated" (Montalbano 28; emphasis added). Its identity will emerge from the study, within the system constituted by the intertextual corpus of the character, of the constant elements and the variations it is subjected to over time when passing from one text (and/or) media to another.

6. Conclusion: Toward a Transmedia Conception of Characters

Characters have an ever-changing but recognizable identity. Characters may vary in many ways (physical appearance, social status, relationships with other characters, the reasons for their actions, and so on) and the transtextual identity of a character cannot always be defined univocally; however, it is important that the character be recognizable to the reader. From a socio-semiotic viewpoint, the identity of the character is achieved not only by accumulating properties (as in Hamon or Saussure), but also emerges from an analysis and comparison of those texts that contribute to defining it, in a perspective in which the diachronic transformation becomes a synchronic system.

Endnote

1. Dating from 1903 to 1910, the notes were first published by d'Arco Silvio Avalle in Saussure Note. More comprehensive publications are Saussure Le leggende and Turpin "Légendes".

Works Cited

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Barthes, Roland. "L'effet de reel." Communications 11 (1968): 84–89.

———. "An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative." New Literary History 6.2 (Winter 1975): 237–272. Originally published as "Introduction à l'analyse structurale des récits." Communications 8 (1966): 1–27.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970.

Bertetti, Paolo. "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Transmedia Extensions of a Pulp Hero." Frontiers of Narrative Studies 5.2 (2019): 200–219.

———. "Toward a Typology of Transmedia Characters." International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 2344–2361.

Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976.

Ferraro, Guido. Il linguaggio del mito. Roma: Meltemi, 2001.

Greimas, Algirdas J. "Actants, Actors, and Figures." In On Meaning. Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, 106–120. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987. Originally published as "Les actants, les acteurs et les figures." In Sémiotique narrative et textuelle, edited by Claude Chabrol and Jean-Claude Coquet. Paris: Larousse, 1973.

———. "La structure des actants du récit, essai d'approche generative." In Du sens, 221–238. Paris: Seuil, 1970. Originally published as "Approche générative de l'analyse des actants." Word 23.1–3 (1967).

Greimas, Algirdas J. and Courtés Joseph. Semiotics and Language. An Analytical Dictionary. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1982. Originally published as Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Paris: Hachette, 1979.

Hamon, Philippe. Le personnel du roman. Le système des personnage dans le Rougon-Macquart» d'Emile Zola. Genève: Droz, 1983.

———. "Pour un statut sémiologique du personage." in Poétique du récit, 115–180. Paris: Seuil, 1977.

Jouve, Vincent. L'effet-personnage dans le roman, Paris: PUF, 1992.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Le cru et le cuit. Paris: Plon, 1964.

———. L'homme nu. Paris: Plon, 1971.

———. Du miel aux cendres. Paris: Plon, 1966.

———. L'origine des manières de table. Paris: Plon, 1968.

Marrone, Gianfranco. Sei autori in cerca del personaggio, Torino: Centro Scientifico Torinese, 1986.

———. Montalbano. Affermazioni e trasformazioni di un eroe mediatico. Roma: Rai-Eri, 2003.

Odin, Roger. De la fiction. Bruxelles: De Boeck & Larcier, 2000.

Propp, Vladimir J. Morphology of the Folktale Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1968. Originally published as Morfologija skazki. Leningrad: Gosudarstvennij Institut Istorii Iskusstva, 1928.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. "On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology." In Narrative beyond Literary Criticism, edited by Jan Christoph Meister, 1–23. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005.

Saussure, Ferdinand De. Course de Linguistique Générale. Paris-Genève: Payot, 1916.

———. Le leggende germaniche. Edited by Anna Marinetti and Marcello Meli. Este: Zielo, 1986.

———. Note sulle leggende germaniche. Edited by D'Arco Silvio Avalle. Torino: Giappichelli, 1972.

Scolari, Carlos; Bertetti, Paolo and Freeman, Matthew. Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Turpin, Béatrice. "Légendes et récits d'Europe du Nord: de Sigfrid à Tristan." In Ferdinand de Saussure, edited by Simon Bouquet, 351–429. Paris: L'Herne, 2003.

Copyright © 2022 The Ohio State University

Rethinking Characters with Semiotics

Mattia Thibault

WITH THIS PIECE, I aim to start a dialogue with Paolo Bertetti. His paper in this volume offers an overview on different semiotic approaches to the study of characters, especially by French structuralism, and concludes on the importance of having a transtextual (or transmedia) perspective on the topic. In my response I present a complementary perspective, by proposing a critical take on the concept of character and additional ways for semiotics to contribute to its study.

Semiotics and Narrative

As Bertetti shows thoroughly, the interest of semiotics in the study of characters is based on the historical interest in narrative of the discipline, inspired by Propp's study on the morphology of Russian folk tales. If Propp considers characters as relational entities defined by their interactions with other characters, later authors have a similar attitude, but generalised it to other forms of narrative (Bremond; Greimas, On Meaning).

French structuralism continued to work on folk tales and mythology (e.g., Claude Lévi-Strauss), but also grounded much of the expansion of the discipline on analysis of French novels (Greimas, Maupassant; Genette). Additionally, scholars like Metz adapted semiotic analysis to other media, notably cinema.

In the last decades, semioticians have been confronted by convergence culture (Jenkins) and by an increasing hybridisation and reorganisation of media. These cultural shifts challenged many of the concepts and tools developed for traditional textual analysis, forcing semiotics to adapt. While Kristeva's idea of intertextuality becomes insufficient to describe the new media landscape, new semiotic approaches to transmedia emerged (Scolari). While interactive media interactivity complicated the relationships between readers and texts, new approaches to the semiotics of games where born (e.g., Idone Cassone). While extended reality reinvents media perception, new models to engage it from a semiotic standpoint where created (Giuliana and Momchil).

Are Characters a Thing?

The interest of semiotics for narrative touched many different media across the years, from folk tales and mythology to novels, films, and games. The approaches and definitions of characters can vary greatly, as well outlined by Bertetti. Some semioticians focus on their relational or positional values, some on the cultural units the characters embody, and some others on their linguistic qualities.

Here, however, I wish to add a layer of complexity to the discussion. In particular, I wonder if what we define as "characters" across these media are, in fact, similar objects. Is "character" an appropriate category, applicable to these different kinds of texts? Or are we taking for granted that there is some similarity between their different materializations because of the similar textual effects they produce?

Characters in folk tales, for example, do indeed appear to be defined mostly by their relational position within the narrative, to be mostly actants with a simple layer of thematization. The same cannot be said about characters in novels, who can often be defined more by their interiority and personality than by their actions. And what about characters like Hello Kitty, which are not univocally related to any popular narrative, but are still clearly defined in the collective imagination?

Interactive characters, such as the protagonists of digital games, seem also to be a rather different semiotic object, as they are hybrid entities, modalized not only by the narrative, but also by the players, who always have some degree of control over the characters' actions and decisions (Thibault).

Looking at the diverse set of signs, textualities, and text effects that we define "characters," it is easy to wonder if what they have in common is not, after all, just a "family resemblance" (Wittgenstein).

A Transmedia Typology of Characters

If we set aside the idea that characters exist as a specific semiotic entity, and we look back at the many formulations that semiotics has produced, it seems that we are looking at a transmedia typology of representations, rather than a set of different ways to look at a unique object.

While the formulations and theories behind them are not necessarily easy to combine, it could be that the strongest contribution that semiotics has to offer to the study of characters is the deconstruction of the very idea of "character" as a unique, granitic concept. This typology, hence, would not be concerned with the variations of characters across different media, as the one proposed by Bertetti elsewhere ("Toward"), but with how different media produce characters. This, in turn, would lead to a change in our standard discourse: the use of the term character would need to be always accompanied by the medium, or specific semiotic system, that produces it. Therefore, we would have folk characters, film characters, game characters, and so on.

Developing the typology should follow two directions: on the one hand, making use of semiotic analysis to deconstruct the simplistic and naturalistic understandings of characters (as attempted by Greimas). On the other hand, contribute to the creation of a new and more nuanced understanding of the concept by investigating the roots of the family resemblance: is it based on similar semiotic devices or on textual effects? Is it based on the lines of interpretation afforded or on a specific kind of cultural unit?

Some existing semiotic concepts could help us articulate future research questions.

• • First, the concepts of thematic role and actantial role (Greimas, On Meaning), can be used to investigate what kind of different equilibria between the two emerge from different media. Are there media that reinforce thematization? Do others highlight actantial qualities? How does the specificity of media afford and influence the balance between the two?

• • Second, as characters are expressed, at some levels, with signs, Umberto Eco's modes of sign production could offer some insights on the textual strategies and forms of representation that are used to produce them. What kind of signs do different media produce to represent a character? How do the modes of sign production influence our interpretations of them?

• • Third, semiotics of culture can offer some tools to investigate the role of cultural units that constitute different characters in the collective imagination. Their position and dynamics in the semiosphere (Lotman) could help differentiate the cultural roles that characters have in their narratives. What kind of different cultural roles have characters from folk tales and transmedia storytelling? Do the characters of contemporary mythologies (Barthes) have the same role of those of classical mythology? How can we differentiate between such roles?

In conclusion, this response is not a criticism of Bertetti's paper, but on the contrary is an invitation to think even more ambitiously about what semiotics still has to offer the multidisciplinary study of characters.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Les Lettres nouvelles, 1957.

Bertetti, Paolo. "Toward a Typology of Transmedia Characters." International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 2344–2361.

Bremond, Claude. "La logique des possibles narratifs." Communications 8.1 (1966): 60–76.

Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, Cornell Univ. Press, 1980.

Giuliana, G. T., & Momchil, A. "Deconstructing the Experience: Meaning–Making in Virtual Reality Between and Beyond Games and Films." In Meaning-Making in Extended Reality. Senso e Virtualità, edited by F. Biggio, V. V. Dos Santon, and G. T. Giuliana. Rome: Aracne, 2020.

Greimas, A. J. Maupassant: La sémiotique du texte: Exercices pratiques. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1976.

———. On Meaning. Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Idone Cassone, Vincenzo. "Through the ludic glass: a cultural genealogy of gamification." AcademicMindtrek '17: Proceedings of the 21st International Academic Mindtrek Conference, 54–62. New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2017.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: New York Univ. Press, 2006.

Kristeva, Julia. Le texte du roman: approche sémiologique d'une structure discursive transformationnelle. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1979.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983.

Lotman, Y. M. On the semiosphere. Sign Systems Studies 33.1 (2005): 205–229.

Metz, Christian. Langage Et Cinéma. Paris : Larousse, 1971.

Propp, Vladimir J. Morfologija skazki. Leningrad: Gosudarstvennij Institut Istorii Iskusstva, 1928.

Scolari, C. A. "Transmedia Storytelling: Implicit Consumers, Narrative Worlds, and Branding in Contemporary Media Production." International Journal of Communication 3 (2009): 586–606.

Thibault, Mattia. Ludosemiotica: il gioco tra segni, testi, pratiche e discorsi. Rome: Aracne, 2020.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1953.

Copyright © 2022 The Ohio State University

Characters as Transtextual and Transmedial:A Reply to Mattia Thibault

Paolo Bertetti

IN HIS LUCID CONTRIBUTION Mattia Thibault revives a consolidated semiotic tradition that tends to relegate the concept of character to "an 'empty' category, if not a useless one, since it brings together a series of heterogeneous phenomena and mechanism" (Ducrot and Todorov 221; see also Marrone, Sei autori). Personally, I believe that characters maintain a heuristic value when considered as recognizable (and recognized) cultural entities, which circulate primarily in the collective imagination rather than in the texts in which they are manifested and in the mental reconstructions performed by individuals during textual interactions.

This does not mean that the notion cannot be ramified by identifying different kinds of characters. However, Thibault raises two very different questions: the materialization of a character through the different media, and its "diegetic" variations in the different texts.

With respect to the first question, from a transmedia perspective distinguishing between film characters, video games characters, etc. seems untenable. Characters are entities that transcend different media: they are abstract content elements that are immanent to their manifestation in different semiotic systems (Greimas); they can be actualized or derived across a variety of media—semiotically intended as discursive forms—and are therefore at least in part transversal to them. That is to say: Harry Potter is always Harry Potter whether in novels, movies, or plays.

If anything, we must investigate the different ways each medium articulates the character, sometimes to the point of deforming it. In fact, saying that a character is "at least in part" transversal to the media also means that each medium contributes in a different way to its construction. Although my studies on transmedia characters have often focused on invariant elements, the analysis of the different ways in which the various media actualize the character is central. Semiotics can certainly offer us valuable tools in this study, but I am skeptical that Eco's typology of modes of sign production, created for different purposes, can be useful in this regard.

With respect to the second question—i.e., the problem of distinguishing between narratively coherent transtextual characters and characters without a univocal narrative representation—Denson and Mayer's distinction between "serial characters" and "serial figures" or even more that of Thon between work-specific characters, glocal transtextual characters and global transmedia character networks raise interesting questions. However, I prefer to keep the term "character" for these different forms. In my conception, characters are not entities univocally defined by the texts once and for all, but dynamic cultural units that circulate and are recognizable in the collective imagination with or without a consistent and coherent narrative representation.

Works Cited

Denson, Shane and Mayer, Ruth. "Border crossing: Serial figures and the evolution of media." NEC SUS: European Journal of Media Studies 7.2 (2018): 65–84.

Ducrot, Osvald and Todorov, Tzvetan. Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979. Originally published as Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage. Paris: Seuil, 1972.

Thon, Jan-Noël. "Transmedia Characters: Theory and Analysis." Frontiers of Narrative Studies 5.2 (2019): 176–198.

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