fourth wall: one construct, many systems

The fourth wall is the imaginary vertical plane at the front of a stage through which the audience watches, as if the missing fourth side of a room had been removed; the convention asks actors to behave as though no audience were present, sustaining the illusion of a self-contained world. The idea is associated with Diderot and the rise of theatrical realism, and Pavis's Dictionary of the Theatre sets out the convention and what it means to break it by addressing the audience directly. The referent is the boundary that separates the fictional world from the spectators and the realist illusion it protects.[1]

Unit

The imagined boundary separating a performed fiction from its audience

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Observed by whether performers acknowledge the audience or maintain the self-contained fiction

Film, television, and narrative fiction inherited the same convention and its violation: breaking the fourth wall means a character turning to address the audience or acknowledging that they are in a story, a move narratologists analyse as metalepsis, a crossing between narrative levels. Abbott's The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative discusses such level-crossing and direct address as deliberate disruptions of narrative illusion. It is the identical boundary construct as in the theatre, transposed to screen and page and measured the same way, by whether the fiction's frame is kept intact or deliberately pierced.[2]

Unit

The boundary between a screen or textual fiction and its audience

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Detected by direct address or other crossings that acknowledge the audience or the fiction's own status