Voice and Navvalion in Foslnodevn Bvana

AulIov|s) Bvian BicIavdson

Souvce Nev Lilevav Hislov, VoI. 32, No. 3, Voice and Hunan Expevience |Sunnev, 2001),
pp. 681-694
FuIIisIed I The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Voice and Narration in Postmodern Drama
Brian Richardson
In a recent discussion of narrative voice in this
journal,
Richard
Aczel observed: "As an
entity
attributed to
(silent)
written
texts,
the
concept
of voice
inevitably
raises
questions
of
ontology
and
metaphoricity
....
The
question
of 'who
speaks?'
in narrative discourse
invites the further
question
of whether texts can
really
be said to
'speak'
at all."1 Such a
formulation,
though
it
may
well
pass
unremarked on
by
most theorists of
narration,
nevertheless
betrays
a bias toward the
written text that leaves unexamined all
performed
narratives that are
indeed
literally
voiced: oral tales and
epics
as well as
spoken
narrations
in
drama, film, video,
and
performance
art. At one
level,
the answer to
Aczel's conundrum is
deceptively simple:
narrators in written texts
"speak"
in
basically
the same
way
that narrators
speak
in oral texts. A
person
who writes an
epic
is
reproducing
a format established
by
earlier
bards who
only
declaimed their narratives?and an author like
Milton,
who dictated his
epics
to his
daughters,
is
presumably
situated some
where in between these two
positions.
When he said: "all mist from
thence
/
Purge
and
disperse,
that I
may
see and tell
/
Of
things
invisible
to mortal
sight," seeing
was meant
metaphorically,
but the
telling
was
literal?and was
performed by
the
very
act of its
being
uttered.2
But if we have solved one
problem
(a
written text
may "speak"
in a
manner
entirely analogous
to that in which an oral text is
spoken),
we
have
only begun
to scratch the surface of the
larger
issue: voice
may
be
severed from what it
speaks?and
indeed from itself?in a
variety
of
ways
that have been
insufficiently explored.
The
example
of Milton
suggests
some of the
complexities
and contradictions inherent in the act of
performed
narration. What
happens
to the voice once it is read
silently
rather than heard? Whose voice is
speaking (through)
Milton: the divine
inspiration
he
claims,
or the
generic
formula he is
obligated
to
repeat?
What is the status of the voice in a
public reading,
either
by
the author or
by
another reader? When the text
speaks autobiographically,
as it does in
this
passage,
does the voice of the narrator
merge
with that of the
author,
as
autobiographical theory postulates?3 Finally,
what
happens
to the
distinction between oral and written
epics
when illiterate bards
pause
so
their words will be
accurately
transcribed,
and Paradise
Lost,
that most
seemingly
"written" of all
epics,
is in fact
composed
and delivered
orally?
New
Literary History,
2001,
32: 681-694
682
NEW LITERARY HISTORY
As we will
see,
there are numerous oddities and fissures in narration in
drama,
especially
in its more recent
permutations. Unfortunately,
this
practice
is little known and
largely
undertheorized.
Narratology's
ne
glect
of the
narrating
voice in
performance
is
actually quite surprising,
given
the wide dissemination of
important
work on narration in film
by
numerous scholars.
By
contrast,
the critical literature on narration in
drama is still
relatively slight
and
virtually
unknown
beyond
a few
theorists of drama.4 And even
among
such theorists it is not
recognized
as
fully
as it deserves to be: as
recently
as
1980,
Keir Elam could write
that drama is without narratorial mediation.5
In what
follows,
I will
provide
a brief
survey
of three basic
strategies
of
narration in drama and
go
on to note the
distinctively postmodern
transformations that some of these
strategies
have
recently undergone,
paying particular
attention to the role of literal voice
(s)
in these works.
I will not be
dealing
with brief narratives
spoken by
one character to
another,
as in the
recounting
of an
offstage
death in Greek
tragedy,
but
rather
ontologically larger
acts that
engender
or constitute the
repre
sented action. The works discussed will include narratives articulated
by
characters who are
present
in the world that their discourse creates
(homodiegetic),
as well as narratives
produced by agents
that are
external to the
storyworld (heterodiegetic).
Narration in drama is so
widespread yet
so little
appreciated
that I will
identify
several
examples
to
suggest
the
range
and extent of this
practice.
I will then look at the
unusual
deployment
of voice and narration in two
particularly compel
ling
works,
Beckett's Not I and Paula
Vogel's
Hot VT
Throbbing.
Once
again, by
voice I mean
only
literal,
human voices on or off the
stage,
particularly
as
they
inflect or
produce
the narration of the work.
Finally,
I will
speculate
on the
significance
of these
staged
narrations for
contemporary
narrative
theory
and the semiotics of drama.
Memory Plays
We
might begin
with
perhaps
the most familiar
presentation
of
narration on
stage,
the
type
of drama often referred to as the
memory
play.
It is a
partially
enacted
homodiegetic
narrative in which the
narrator is also a
participant
in the events he or she recounts and
enacts.6 In Tennessee Williams's The Glass
Menagerie,
for
example,
an
actor comes on
stage,
identifies himself as "the narrator of the
play,
and
also a
character in
it,"
sets the scene
("I
turn back
time"),
and describes
the other characters and the concerns of the
play.7
He indicates that
what is to follow is a
memory play
and observes that it is
consequently
not realistic. Here the
diegetic portion
ceases and the mimetic
part
VOICE AND NARRATION IN POSTMODERN DRAMA 683
begins,
as what was uttered
by
a
single, governing
voice becomes enacted
by
several
speaking
characters. Later in the
play,
the
protagonist
resumes
his functions as narrator to introduce the third and sixth
scenes,
and to
comment on the action in the fifth scene. At the end of the
perform
ance,
he narrates the
gist
of his
subsequent
travels and
brings
the
story
up
to the time of its
telling.
The
stage
directions also
encourage
variation in this
figure's performance
to enhance its effect: "The
narrator is an
undisguised
convention of the
play.
He takes whatever
license with dramatic convention is convenient to his
purposes"
(22).
The alternation between narration and enacted events is
quite compa
rable in
may ways
to a
homodiegetic
narrator's shift between
presenting
scenes as
they
unfolded in his or her life and the
retrospective
commentary
that takes
place during
the time of the
writing,
as found in
the first
person
fictions of
Dickens,
to take a standard
example.
The
drama further marks such differences in tone and
temporality by
the
narrator
moving
in and out of
character,
and
addressing
the audience
rather than the actors.
Memory plays
have
regularly appeared throughout
the twentieth
century.
In
postmodern
variations of this
type
of
play, many
hitherto
standard dramatic conventions are
challenged
or contested. Most of the
action of Tom
Stoppard's
Travesties takes
place
within the
memory
of
Henry
Carr,
a
historical
figure
who worked in the British Consulate in
Z?rich
where,
in
1918,
he met
James Joyce.
The
play
is set several
decades
later;
Carr is an old man
thinking
about
writing
a record of his
encounters with the
great figures
he
ran into
during
World War I. His
memory
is
clearly
in
decline,
but it is no
ordinary
bad
memory.
His
misrememberings
are
grotesque
deformations
(or rather, antimemories)
of the events
they purport
to recall and are
humorous in their own
right;
thus,
since Carr
always
felt
Joyce
was
something
of a bad
joke, many
of
Joyce's speeches
are trivial and
presented
in the form of limericks. His
mind is also
subject
to "time
slips"
so
that,
in the words of the
stage
directions,
"the
story (like
a
toy
train
perhaps) occasionally jumps
the
rails and has to be restarted at the
point
where it
goes
wild."8
Obviously,
such scenes owe more to
experimental styles
of
plot
construction than to the
representation
of
any
actual
patterns
of
memory
in the
elderly.
At other times Carr's reminiscences are
impossi
bly
accurate,
as
Joyce
is recalled
composing
works that Carr never
read,
or Lenin is
speaking
in Russian?a
language
Carr cannot understand.
Finally,
all the events of Carr's
past merge
with the
plot
of The
Importance
of Bang
Earnest which Carr acted in at
Joyce's request
in Z?rich. This is
not then a
memory play
so much as an
ingenious
intertextual
collage
that travesties the
memory play,
as the consciousness
purported
to
contain the
thoughts
is revealed at
every
scene to be instead a
playful
684 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
fabrication. Carr is a clear
specimen
of what I have elsewhere termed the
"fraudulent
narrator,"
whose averred narrative stance is so
clearly
preposterous
that it is not intended to be believed.9
David
Henry Hwang's
M.
Butterfly
is
primarily
a
memory play,
but it is
one that also allows the
protagonist,
Ren?
Gallimard,
the
opportunity
of
direct address to the
audience,
metatheatrical
commentary
on the
scenes of his earlier
life,
and the
staged
enactment of occasional
fantasies. More
audaciously,
the
play
also dramatizes the
workings
of his
subconscious,
as well as the
incomplete
efforts of his consciousness to
suppress
this
embarrassing
material. When
Song,
whom Gallimard has
believed to be a
woman,
prepares
to disrobe and reveal his male
genitalia,
Gallimard
protests
in the
following
terms:
Gallimard: No!
Stop!
I don't want to see!
Song:
Then look
away.
Gallimard: You're
only
in
my
mind! All this is in
my
mind! I order
you!
To
stop!
Song:
To what? To
strip?
That's
just
what I'm?
Gallimard: No!
Stop!
I want
you?!
Song:
You want me?
Gallimard: To
stop!10
The
figure
of
Song
thus voices the
revealing slips
of the
tongue
that
Gallimand's
ego
seeks to
repress.
It
hardly
needs to be added that the
conscious mind is no match for such an assiduous
subconscious,
one
that has been
given bodily
form and
a
voice that can utter the
protagonist's unspeakable
desires. At the same
time,
the realistic
pres
ence of
another,
antagonistic figure
within Gallimard's
memory
drama
suggests something
more than mere
psychic repression;
it would seem
that another mind has entered the drama and contaminated the
autodiegesis
of the enacted narration.
Perhaps
the ultimate variation on this
genre
is
produced by
Paula
Vogel
in The Baltimore
Waltz,
a
very
curious
memory play
that reenacts
scenes of what
appears
to be the
protagonist's strange trip
to
Europe
with her
brother,
Carl?scenes that seem to owe more to movies about
Europe
and other
popular
simulacra than
any
actual or
recognizable
experience
there.
Explanatory
narration,
including
a third
person
account of the
thoughts
of the
protagonist,
is
spoken by
an actor with
a
thick,
Peter Sellers French accent
("It
was a
simple
bistro affair
by
French standards.
. . .
He
barely
touched his meal.
...
As their meal
progressed,
Anna
thought
of the lunches she had
packed
back
home")
,n
As it turns
out,
the
trip
was never
taken,
and the memories are invented.
The
play
is instead a fabricated
narrative,
the sister's
imagining
of what
VOICE AND NARRATION IN POSTMODERN DRAMA 685
her memories
might
have been had
they
traveled
together
before her
brother died of AIDS.
Generative Narrators
In his
essay,
"Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction?" Bertolt
Brecht,
in
outlining
the
development
of the distinctive features of the
epic
theater he
created,
stressed its use of narration: "The
stage began
to
tell a
story.
The narrator was no
longer missing, along
with the fourth
wall."12 Not
only
did Brecht
employ
narrators in
many
of his
plays,
he
also
displayed
written texts before each scene that
frequently
had a
narrative function. And in The Caucasian Chalk
Circle,
a
bard is
actually
brought
on
stage
to narrate a
story.
In
doing
so,
he
generates
a
fictional
world
(hence my
name for this
practice)
in a manner similar to that of
an
omniscient narrator. Brecht's
storyteller
narrates
diegetically,
in the
third
person,
until,
pointing
to the
stage,
he directs actors to
numerically
enact the narrative he
gives
voice to. This oscillation between the two
representational
modes then continues
throughout
the
play.
In contrast
to the
memory play,
this
type
of work is a
heterodiegetic
narrative in
which the narrator resides in a distinct
ontological
level from that
occupied by
the characters. Other
generative
narrators include the
Stage Manager
of Wilder's Our
Town, and,
more
radically,
the
storytelling
characters of Milan Kundera's
Jacques
and His Master. One of the most
compelling contemporary
dramatists to extend this
technique
is Samuel
Beckett,
especially
in his later
work,
whose dramatic narrators and
monologists
create the world around them as
they
name it
(for
example,
A Piece
of Monologue).
Seymour
Chatman observes that there is a basic difference between
heterodiegetic
narration in fiction and film. In the
former,
"the narrator
of the novel tells the whole
story, mediating everything
we
read. Even as
we
plough through long passages
of
dialogue,
...
we assume the
continuing presence
of the narrator." In
film, however,
"the narrator's
presence
is
only
salient at the moment he or
she
speaks.
Otherwise,
the
combined force of the
diegetic
visual and sound
images
dominate,
giving
the
impression
that
things
are
happening right
there before us."13
Narration in a
theater
occupies
a
position
closer to fiction than film?
especially
if the narrator is on
stage engendering
the
events,
as he is
Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle. It is true in the other cases as
well,
since
we never
entirely
feel that
"things
are
happening right
there,"
because
we know what is "there" is a
stage,
not a battlefield in France. A
disembodied voice or
voice-over
invariably
creates a
pronounced
dra
matic effect:
hearing
words
being
uttered in
an
auditorium defamiliarizes
686 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
the more usual
(and
usually
mimetic)
conventions of
representation.
Likewise,
deep
traditions of
stylization
(verse drama,
and so
on),
nonillusionistic theater
(for
example,
asides),
and the material condi
tions of the
playing space (lighting
effects,
coughing)
all work
against
the illusion of
representation;
in the theater there is
considerably
more
disbelief to
suspend
than in a cinema.
Tom
Stoppard,
however,
reveals how
thoroughly
voice-over in a video
medium can be destabilized. His 1984 television
play, Squaring
the
Circle,
is a kind of
postmodern documentary
about the events
surrounding
the
Solidarity
union in Poland
during
1980 and 1981. It
pushes
the
generative
narrator to new extremes
by applying
the
technique
to
historical events that were at the time of its
filming largely
unknowable.
It has a
narrator,
whose role at first seems to be
merely
that of the
conventional
pseudo-objective
voice-over.
Soon, however,
the voice
contradicts the enacted events. After
introducing
Brezhnev and Gierek
talking together
on a
beach at a resort on the Black
Sea,
the narrator
goes
on to state
that,
"This isn't
them,
of course?." In close
up
we then
see the
(suddenly)
bodied narrator
who,
looking directly
into the
camera,
continues
speaking,
"and this isn't the Black Sea.
Everything
is
true
except
the words and the
pictures.
If there was a
beach,
Brezhnev
and Gierek
probably
didn't talk on
it."14 The
deceptively
omniscient
documentary
voice is here
demystified
and revealed to be a
single,
situated
speaker
with his own
positionality
and limited
knowledge.15
What is
ultimately
contested here is
nothing
less than
any
claim to the
epistemic privileges
of
heterodiegetic
discourse
(such
as
omniscience),
at least in
genres
like the
documentary
that
purport
to be nonfictional.
Offstage
Narrative Voices
Unique
to
performance
is the disembodied narrative voice that sets
the
stage,
comments on
events,
and
propels
the action.16 The first
examples
I will set forth
are
heterodiegetic
ones,
though homodiegetic
cases also
exist;
in this
area,
theatrical
options
resemble those of the
cinema,
as Sarah Kozloff and
Seymour
Chatman have
similarly
noted
concerning
voice-over in film.17 The Voice in Cocteau's The
Infernal
Machine is a
representative example:
omniscient, ironic,
and inter
ventionary,
it informs us at the
beginning
of the second act that it will
wind back the clock and
represent
other events
unfolding
at the same
time as those that have
just
been
displayed.
In The
Singular Life of
Albert
Nobbs,
Simone Benmussa starts with an
offstage representation
of the
voice of
George
Moore,
the author of the
story
the
play
is
adapted
from.
VOICE AND NARRATION IN POSTMODERN DRAMA 687
Actors then
appear
and dramatize the
story
he has
begun
to
tell;
throughout
the
production,
he will also
present
various narrative asides.
H?l?ne
Cixous,
in Portrait
of
Dora,
further extends the
subjectification
of
the narrative
voice,
as an
entity
referred to as "The Voice of the
Play"
draws attention to
slippages
of
identity
in the drama and the
impossibil
ity
of
determining
what
actually happened,
as
opposed
to what was
desired,
projected,
transferred,
or misremembered.18
A still more radical transformation
appears
in
Marguerite
Duras's
India
Song.19
This work contains four
offstage
voices which
usually
comment on or
inquire
about the events
being
enacted on
stage.
At
other
times, however,
their comments take the
place
of or echo the
characters'
dialogue,
or seem to
engender
the next
sequence
of actions.
It is a
shifting, utterly
unstable
relation,
that recreates and relativizes the
offstage
voice in new
ways.
As Elin Diamond has
observed,
"though
the
stage
enactment seems to
emerge
from the
memory
of the
voices,
the
voices are
incapable
of
assuming
a stable
narrating position;
rather
they
react
fearfully, helplessly, anxiously, erotically,
both to what
they
witness
and what
they partially
remember."20
This narrative fascination is so
complete
that the voices' interactions
constitute a
second,
offstage
drama that is both
parallel
to and
depen
dent on the
play
enacted on the
stage,
as the voices
speak
for the actual
audience and at other times seem to
usurp
the
prerogatives
of the
author.
They dislodge
the
fixity
of critical
categories grounded
in
mimetic
assumptions,
as
memory
and
invention,
narration and
descrip
tion,
seeing
and
speaking glide
into one another. As Andrew Gibson
notes in this
issue,
Sarah Kozloff has
suggested
that voice-over narration
in film humanizes and tames an
otherwise
"odd,
impersonal
narrative
agency"
(IS 128).
I
suggest
that in the
plays just
described the
opposite
is
the
case,
as
offstage
voices work to decenter
identity
and defamiliarize
conventional
practices
of dramatic
representation.21
Pinter's
Family
Voices transforms the use of voices in drama in still other
innovative
ways,
and
suggests yet
another
strategy.
The
play
consists of
three voices?those of a
mother, father,
and son?that seem to be
reading
aloud letters
they
have sent each
other;
as the
play progresses,
it
becomes
apparent
that the mother's letters have never been
read;
the
son's never sent
(and
probably
never
written);
while the third set are
voiced
by
the
father,
who is dead and is
literally speaking
from
beyond
the
grave.
The work was first broadcast as radio
play?a genre
that is
constituted
by nothing
but human
voices,
sound
effects,
and
silence;
a
few weeks
later,
the work was
presented
in
"platform performance"
in
which the
physical proximity
of the actors
speaking
the texts contra
dicted the
unbridgeable ontological
chasms between the characters.22
688 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
Voice and Narration in Not /and Hot V
Throbbing
Any
account of unusual voices and anomalous narrators on
stage
must
include some mention of Samuel Beckett's theatrical
work,
much of
which
interrogates
the limits of narration and
subjectivity. Krapp's
Last
Tape
consists
primarily
of an old
man
listening
to and
commenting
on
taped
narratives he has made
many years
earlier. It is also in
part
a
meditation on
voice,
since the actor's words on
tape
and his
speech
in
the theater are
utterly disparate,
both
stylistically
and
aurally.
In the
1977
performance by John Cluchy
directed
by
Beckett,
the
young Krapp
is
suave, sleek, metallic,
and
self-satisfied,
while his older incarnation is
harsh,
rasping,
and at times
vaudevillian;
the two
incompatible
articula
tions of the same
voice,
that
is,
underscore the
disjunction
of "the" self
that utters them.
Beckett's later short
play,
Not
I,
as its title
suggests,
also
interrogates
self and
identity
as well as
any
traditional,
fixed narrative stance. The
work consists
primarily
of a torrent of words that are uttered
by
a
single
illuminated
mouth,
an
arrangement
that draws full attention to the
function and nature of this
strange, nearly
disembodied voice. The
drama can even be called a
"pseudo-third-person"
narration,
as the
mouth sets out a sad account of the miserable existence of someone
identified
merely
as "she." But this attribution is
illusory;
the
jumbled
narrative refers not to
another,
but rather to the
speaker
herself.
Mouth's truncated and
repetitive
life
story
is however
so
wretched that
the
speaker
refuses to
acknowledge any
connection to
it,
despite
reiterated
promptings by
another voice that
only
she can hear. This
strange
communication adds to the
epistemological
drama of the
work,
as the
audience,
like
Mouth,
struggles
to
identify
and
keep
distinct the
various
subjectivities
that are
invoked,
as the
following
selection should
suggest:
back in the field
. . .
morning
sun
. . .
April.
. .
sink face down in the
grass
. . .
nothing
but the larks
...
so on
.. .
grabbing
at the straw...
straining
to hear
.. .
the odd word
. . .
make some sense of it.
. .
whole
body
like
gone
. . .
just
the
mouth
. . .
like maddened
. . .
and can't
stop
... no
stopping
it.
. .
something
she?
. . .
something
she had to?.
. .
what?
. .
who?
. .
no!
. .
she!
.
,23
We
find,
that
is,
a
m?lange
of
description
and
narration,
invention and
memorial
reconstruction,
and self-correction and the contradiction of
another
(internal? internalized?)
voice.
To add to this rich confusion of
subjectivities,
there is also the
physical
presence
of
another,
silent
figure,
dressed in
black,
on
stage
as well.
Even after we solve what
might
be called the modernist riddle of the
VOICE AND NARRATION IN POSTMODERN DRAMA 689
work,
that
is,
that the "other" described in the third
person
is
actually
a
displaced
version of the self that
speaks,
the
postmodern enigma
remains:
just
who or what is
Mouth,
and to whom
(or what)
is she
speaking?
Numerous
possibilities suggest
themselves: she
may
be an
image
of a
madwoman,
a
figure
in
hell,
an
allegory
of the
dispossessed,
or a
parody
of authorial
creation;
she
may
be
addressing
the
imagined
voice of
another,
another version of
herself,
or the metadramatic
image
of a
stage prompter.
But more than
anything
else,
the
very physicality
of
this
staging
of a contaminated consciousness?the disembodied mouth
and the
unexplained
auditor?ensures that no critical
gesture
will be
able to
unify
these
defiantly inorganic fragments.
Richard Aczel is
entirely right
in
affirming
that "narrative
voice,
like
any
other
voice,
is a
fundamentally composite entity:
a
specific configuration
of voices"
(HV
483).
Beckett's work shows
just
how
composite
a
literal voice can be.
We
may
move on to an account of the
play
of voice and consciousness
in Paula
Vogel's
Hot 'n'
Throbbing,
one of the most
recent, innovative,
and
powerful developments
of several of the strands of narration and
subjectivity
that have been traced above. There are two
primary figures
in the
play,
a woman who is
trying
to
scrape together
a
living by writing
erotic film
scripts
for a feminist film
company,
and her former
husband,
a
physically
abusive man
who, drunk,
breaks down her door as she is
working
at her
computer.
There are also two narrative voices:
one,
designated
the
"Voice-Over,"
is
female,
a kind of
muse,
the woman's
inner voice and source of the narrative material that the woman
types;
it
is
also,
at other
moments,
a voice of
temptation,
of her feminist
conscience,
and of the
language
of horror films. The
other,
called
"Voice,"
is a
protean
male discourse that uses a number of
styles
and
accents,
speaks
in male
clich?s,
proffers diagnoses
in the
language
of
early sexology,
and reads out
phallocratie passages
from
figures
like
D. H.
Lawrence,
Henry
Miller,
and Nabokov's Humbert Humbert.24 Its
different voices form a
collective social discourse of male domination
and control.
As if this were not
experimental enough, Vogel pushes
the medium
still further: both voices are
literally
embodied on
the
stage:
the
playing
space
is
dual,
at once an
ordinary living
room and at other times a
fantasy
erotic dance
hall,
and the voices in the former
space
are
physically present?that
is,
portrayed by
actors?in the latter.
Here,
Voice-Over is also a sex
worker,
located in a
glass
booth where she
dances
during
the
play.
The Voice is also
corporeally present
as the
owner/bouncer
of an erotic dance
hall,
acting
"like a live
DJ, spinning
the score of the
piece,"
and often
breathing heavily
into his micro
phone
(BW2S2).
At
times,
he also sounds like the abusive husband. No
wonder the
protagonist
asks in an aside after a
passage
of
fallacious,
690 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
turn-of-the-century sexology
is uttered
by
the
Voice,
"Where is that
coming
from?"
(J5W249).
As will be
readily imagined,
the drama is as much about the
struggle
between two
competing
discourses as it is about the individuals who
happen
to
speak
them. This discursive clash occurs in
seemingly
minor
areas as well as in those of mortal
significance.
As the
woman, Charlene,
sits at her
computer
and tries to come
up
with
synonyms
for
"throbbing,"
Voice-Over
proffers "pulsating"
and
"heaving,"
while Voice in turn
sug
gests
the more violent
"beating"
and
"battering"
(BW 243-44).
The
play
also documents the circulation of
public
discourses about
gender
and
sexuality,
as
speeches
and ideas overheard or
adapted by
the woman are
incorporated
into her
text,
and will
presumably go
on to animate other
individuals who will view her film once it is finished.
Here,
a
creative,
nonviolent
recursivity
is offered as an alternative to the more
deeply
ingrained
verbal habits and behaviors of the culture at
large.
This kind of
reflexivity,
which
might
be called materialist
metatheater,
is further
articulated in other statements about the
power
of
representation.
Discussing
the difference between feminist erotica and traditional male
pornography,
the
protagonist explains
the difference in terms of narra
tive
progression:
"desire in female
spectators
is aroused
by
cinema in a
much different
way. Narrativity?that
is,
plot?is emphasized"
(BW261).
At the end of the
play,
individual acts of discursive resistance are
overwhelmed
by
male
agencies
of institutional control.
Voice,
now
taking
the role of a film
producer,
demands that the
script
be inverted so
that the woman in it is bound and
helpless.
On the other
set,
the abusive
man
gains physical
control of the
situation,
and
proceeds
to batter and
finally
kill his former wife. In this final
scene,
the two characters
lip-sync
the almost
predictable
words of
contemporary
domestic violence that
are
provided by
The Voice and
Voice-Over,
as the man acts out the
horrid social
script
he knows so well.
Implications
Narrative and
performance
are two of the most
widespread
and best
appreciated
cultural forms in our time:
now,
both seem to be
every
where. It is
only appropriate
that the site in which
they
are fused
together
is
given
the attention it deserves. One
oddity
of
literary theory
that needs to be
rethought
is the belief that narrators and narration do
not exist in
drama,
but are found
exclusively
in narrative fiction
proper?a
belief which in one form or another stretches back to Plato
and Aristotle. If this were the
case,
what are we to call the man who walks
on
stage
in The Glass
Menagerie
and identifies himself as the
narrator,
or
VOICE AND NARRATION IN POSTMODERN DRAMA 691
the
storyteller
whose narration is enacted in The Caucasian Chalk
Circle,
or the voice of
George
Moore in The
Singular Life of
Albert Nobbs? If one
grants
that narration exists in the cinema?a
proposition
that seems
impossible
to
deny?then
it makes no sense to refuse the same status to
comparable techniques
in
drama,
some of
which,
as in the case of the
voice-over
or
techniques
derived from
Godard,
themselves have been
drawn from the cinema.
Narration has
long
been a basic feature of the
twentieth-century stage,
and one that
ought
to be more
fully appreciated
and
extensively
theorized. Narrative
theory
in
particular
has
neglected
a valuable
resource in the various
performed
narrations and
stagings
of mental
events in the theater. The
play
with voice and narration is even more
prominent
in
postmodern
drama,
which
regularly fragments
and recom
bines the
subjectivities
it cannot resist
interrogating;
accounts of
postmodernism
would do well to look more
thoroughly
into the realm
of the
theater,
where numerous wonderful
specimens
wait to be discov
ered and named. Monika Fludernik's article in this
issue,
which
enjoins
us to
resist
equating
each narrative
agency
with
a
hypostatized
narrator
figure, provides
an
especially
useful
way
to
theoretically
situate the
narrators in
postmodern
drama who exceed the limits of
an
individual
consciousness.
One wishes to see a
thoughtful,
sustained
comparison
between the
narrator of
a
standard
homodiegetic
novel or oral tale and the narrator
of a
memory play.
In each
case,
a
fictional
figure
narrates his or her
life,
goes
on to
provide
unmediated,
mimetic
dialogue,
comments discur
sively
on the
action,
and returns for additional narrative and
dialogue.
It
should be further
pointed
out that all three works can either be read
alone or
publicly performed
(the
novel read
aloud,
the tale told to
listeners,
the drama
performed
on
stage).
It is not clear to me that
any
distinction between the three sets will
outweigh
the shared features of
each
pair.
At the
very
least,
it needs to be
recognized
that
drama,
like
fiction,
often contains a
complex
mix of
diegetic
and mimetic modes.
Furthermore,
as Manfred
Jahn
has
suggested
in his
stimulating paper
in
this
volume,
we need to consider the
implications
of
postulating
a
narrator as the
principle
of
organization
and selection in
every play,
as
we do for
every
novel and
(according
to
Bordwell) film,
whether or not
the narrator is otherwise visible.
Ultimately,
the
approach
I
employ
in
these
pages
calls for a
thorough
reexamination of the
mimetic/diegetic
dichotomy:
the
boundary
between the two is much more
porous
and
unstable than is
usually imagined.
In
addition,
many
conceptualizations
basic to narrative
theory
can be
enhanced
by
reference to
approximate equivalents
in
performance.
Questions
such as those
concerning
the status and
gender
of otherwise
692
NEW LITERARY HISTORY
unmarked narrators are clarified
(or intensified)
when the voice that
speaks
the lines is male or female. Issues of focalization can be
nicely
complicated
when we are
presented
with a full
staging
of the
protagonist's
consciousness?or
told,
as we are in India
Song,
that the voices now "see"
the action on the
stage.
A number of Bakhtinian
concepts
take on
greater immediacy by
reference to their theatrical
incarnations,
such as
polyphony
or interior
polemical speech,
when the
disparate
or
conflicting
voices within a
single
consciousness are
spoken by
different actors. Even
the narratee becomes more
complex
when he or she is
present
on the
stage,
or
gestured
to in the audience. One
hopes
for more studies of
narration in the
corpus
of authors
who,
like Beckett or
Duras,
experi
ment with voice in fiction and drama.
Likewise,
comparative
studies that
traverse the
disciplinary
boundaries between drama and film are
clearly
in order.
At this
point,
I wish to
emphasize
the
distinctively
theatrical
aspects
of
stage
narration that exist
only
in
performance: Stoppard's
reenactments
of narrative
revisions;
Duras'
multiple, incomplete
voices;
Beckett's
contradictory,
disembodied
Mouth;
and Paula
Vogel
's fabricated memo
ries. The
primacy
of the
stage
is
particularly
evident in the
physical
embodiment of the
Voice-Over,
as what
appears
to be an inner voice is
given
distinct
bodily
form.
Similarly,
the distance between the character
and "her" inner voice can be
perceived
to be narrowed
or extended
depending
on whether the actor
playing
Voice-Over
physically
re
sembles the
protagonist
or,
as in the case of a recent
Washington,
D.C.
production,
she is
played by
a woman of another
ethnicity.25 Together,
these are
significant developments
of voices and their
representation
that
only
exist in
performance
and deserve to be
acknowledged
as such.
In much dramatic
theory
and the semiotics of
theater,
one still finds
all too little
recognition
of this kind of drama. Keir
Elam,
as
already
noted,
does not even
imagine
narration as a
theoretical
possibility
in
drama. Others follow the
example
of Manfred
Pfister,
who
acknowledges
the existence of what he terms
"epic
communication" in the
plays
of
Brecht and some
others,
but
goes
on to
theoretically
delimit and contain
the
practice: epic
narration "is
always interpreted
as a deviation from the
normal model of dramatic
presentation"
(TA 4).
Such
a statement tends
to
beg
the
question
it should
demonstrate,
and is
certainly
false when
applied
to the most
interesting
drama of the last
seventy-five years,
where the "deviation" has become
unusually
"normal."
The
pieces
I have discussed
above,
in addition to
providing
extensions
and reinventions of the
figure
of the
narrator,
also share in modern
literature's continued
transgressions
of conventional boundaries as well
as its
general
dissolution of the notion of a unified individual conscious
ness.
They
also
display
a
distinctively postmodern
take on the intersub
VOICE AND NARRATION IN POSTMODERN DRAMA 693
jectivity
and even
intertextuality
of the self?the
way
individuals are
constructed
by
the discourses that surround them.
Perhaps
even more
significantly, they foreground
the extent and
importance
(as
well as the
instabilities)
of the
performance
of narration in
everyday
existence,
how
we
continually
construct and reconstruct our
public
selves and our ideal
audiences
through
the act of
narration,
and how
arduously
we work to
elude the social texts that threaten to overwhelm the voices that we call
our own.
University
of Maryland
NOTES
1 Richard
Aczel,
"Hearing
Voices in Narrative
Texts,"
New
Literary History,
29
(1998), 467;
hereafter cited in text as HV.
2
John
Milton,
Paradise
Lost,
ed. Scott
Elledge (New York, 1975),
3. 53-55.
3
See,
for
example,
Dorrit
Cohn,
The Distinction
of
Fiction
(Baltimore, 1999), pp.
123-30.
4 The most
important existing
studies include Manfred
Pfister,
The
Theory
and
Analysis of
Drama,
tr.
John Halliday (Cambridge,
1988), pp. 71-76, 120-31;
hereafter cited in text as
TA. Brian
Richardson,
"Point of View in Drama:
Diegetic Monologue,
Unreliable
Narrators,
and the Author's Voice on
Stage," Comparative
Drama,
22
(1988), 193-214;
Stanton B. Garner
Jr.,
The Absent Voice: Narrative
Comprehension
in the Theater
(Urbana, 111.,
1989);
Michael
IssacharofF,
"'Vox Clamantis':
L'Espace
de
l'interlocution,"
Po?tique,
87
(1991), 315-26;
and
John
Kronik,
"Invasions from Outer
Spaces:
Narration and the
Dramatic Art in
Spanish
America,"
Latin American Theatre
Review,
26
(1993),
25-47. Kristin
Morrison's Canters and Chronicles: The Use
of
Narrative in the
Plays of
Samuel Beckett and Harold
Pinter
(Chicago,
1983)
is the first extended treatment of this
subject
in the dramas of
either
playwright.
5 Keir
Elam,
The Semiotics
of
Theatre andDrama
(London, 1980), pp.
110-11,
119. There
are of course a number of excellent critical accounts that
explore
narration in individual
plays,
but a
satisfying comprehensive survey
of this
practice
has not
yet
appeared.
6 As defined in these
terms,
as the dramatization of a
first-person
narrative,
the
memory
play
can be
readily distinguished
from
superficially
similar
experimental
forms that
present
a
single
consciousness,
such as dream
plays, psychomachias,
and so on.
7 Tennessee
Williams,
The Glass
Menagerie
(New York, 1970), p.
23;
hereafter cited in text.
8 Tom
Stoppard,
Travesties
(New York, 1975), p.
27.
9 Brian
Richardson,
"Narrative Poetics and Postmodern
Transgression: Theorizing
the
Collapse
of
Time, Voice,
and
Frame," Narrative,
8
(2000),
3S-34.
10 David
Henry Hwang,
M.
Butterfly
(New York, 1989), p.
87. Other violations of the
autonomy
of Gallimard's consciousness occur on
pp.
47 and 78.
11 Paula
Vogel,
The Baltimore Waltz and Other
Plays
(New York, 1996), p.
20;
hereafter
cited in text as BW.
12 Brecht on
Theatre,
ed.
John
Willett
(London, 1964), p.
71.
13
Seymour
Chatman,
"New Directions in Voice-Narrated
Cinema,"
in
Narratologies:
New
Perspectives
on Narrative
Analysis,
ed. David Herman
(Columbus, Ohio, 1999), p.
328.
14 Tom
Stoppard, Squaring
the Circle: Poland 1980-81
(London, 1984), pp.
21-22.
15 It should be noted that the drama also includes a character identified as the
Witness,
who
explains many
of the issues to the narrator and at times corrects him and criticizes his
presentation
of
images (Stoppard, Squaring
the
Circle,
pp.
54, 66-67, 78, 82).
The
694 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
potentially
authoritative voice that most documentaries strive to achieve is
individualized,
democratized,
and shown to be fallible.
16 It can also function as a
generative
narrator,
as it does in the cases of Cocteau and
Benmussa described below.
17 Sarah
Kozloff,
Invisible
Storytellers:
Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film
(Berke
ley,
1988), pp.
41-53;
hereafter cited in text as
IS; Chatman,
"Voice-Narrated
Cinema,"
pp.
317-18.
18 Simone
Benmussa,
The
Singluar Life of
Albert
Nobbs,
tr. Barbara
Wright;
H?l?ne
Cixous,
Portrait
of
Dora,
tr. Anita
Barrows;
both in Benmussa Directs
(London, 1979).
19
Marguerite
Duras,
India
Song,
in India
Song.
Texte, Th??tre,
Film.
(Paris, 1973);
in
English
as India
Song,
tr. Barbara
Bray (New York, 1976).
20 Elin
Diamond,
"Refusing
the Romanticism of
Identity:
Narrative Interventions in
Churchill, Benmussa, Duras,"
in
Performing
Feminisms: Feminist Critical
Theory
and
Theatre,
ed. Sue-Ellen Case
(Baltimore, 1984), p.
102.
21 Of
course,
narration in drama
(like
all
practices)
can become
entirely
conventional,
as it is in classic
Japanese
Noh theater.
22 Harold
Pinter,
Family
Voices,
in his
Plays,
rev. ed.
(London, 1993),
IV. For a deft
analysis
of the
interplay
of voice and text in this
intriguing
work,
see Kristin
Morrison,
Canters and
Chronicles,
pp.
214-18.
23 Samuel
Beckett,
Collected Shorter
Plays
(New York, 1984), p.
221.
24 I am here
describing
the voices and events that
appear
in the
published
text of the
play.
In a version
staged
at the Arena
Stage
in 1999 in
Washington,
D.C.
(where
Vogel
is
playwright
in
residence),
the lines of the Voice and Voice-Over have been cut
somewhat;
they
now
occupy
the same
stage space
as the other characters
(no
more blue
lights
or
glass
booths),
the discourse of
early sexology
has been
removed,
and several lines from Othello
have been added.
25 In the Arena
Stage's production
of this work
(14 September-24
October
1999)
Voice
Over was
played by
an Asian
American,
Sue
Jin Song,
a
casting
decision that underlines the
way
Asian women are constructed as the
exotic,
sensual Other in the conventional
American
psyche.