Brian Richardson. Voice and Narration in Postmodern Drama

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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


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


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


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.


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


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


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,


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


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


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


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


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.

Documents

Brian Richardson. Voice and Narration in Postmodern Drama