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2009 :
Bakhtin and Web : 1. Carnival and 2. Dialogue -- web2.0
web.vtheatre.net -- updates in Webman's diary? filmplus.org/vtheatre/2009 -- virtual theatre pages. filmplus.org/600 2007 - visual glossary stagematrix.com 2008 Go.dot'06
... BAKHTIN sum anatoly.vtheatre.net/theory [ old page ] Rabelais and his world,/a> By Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin [my books.google.com] ***
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* bakhtin.ru (new)
[ advertising space : webmaster ] text LINKS See 12Night directory for Bakhtin's applications to Shakespeare's comedy. Webmasters Wanted Go.dot'06 ... Other Bakhtin's pages are gone with Netcolony! Read what's left. There are many references to Bakhtin in "The Book of Spectator" Several most useful concepts for classes: dialogism and polyphonic principle, carnival theory, genres... * NEW: goto.txt : AFTER 2009 : LUL pages : teatr.us Go.dot 2006 * * 100 years since Sam Beckett's birth * flickr.com/groups/stage * 2007 : the art of theatre [flickr] * 2008 : Stoppard *
new: 2003 *
SummaryBakhtin Russian The Possessed 2003  Theatre Books Master-Page * 2007 dramaturgy room : anatolay.vtheatre.net/dramaturg Dialogism and Semantic web bakhtin[W] -- and my pages in Russian? Lotman and Formalism [ pages ] W : Toward a Philosophy of the Act is one of Bakhtin’s early works concerning ethics and aesthetics and it is here that Bakhtin lays out three claims regarding the acknowledgment of the uniqueness of one’s participation in Being:
1. I both actively and passively participate in Being.
Bakhtin further states: “It is in relation to the whole actual unity that my unique ought arises from my unique place in Being”.[13] Bakhtin deals with the concept of morality whereby he attributes the predominating legalistic notion of morality to human moral action. According to Bakhtin, the I cannot maintain neutrality toward moral and ethical demands which manifest themselves as one’s voice of consciousness.[14] It is here also that Bakhtin introduces an architectonic model of the human psyche which consists of three components: “I-for-myself”, “I-for-the-other”, and “other-for-me”. The I-for-myself is an unreliable source of identity, and Bakhtin argues that it is the I-for-the-other through which human beings develop a sense of identity because it serves as an amalgamation of the way in which others view me. Conversely, other-for-me describes the way in which others incorporate my perceptions of them into their own identities. Identity, as Bakhtin describes it here, does not belong merely to the individual, rather it is shared by all.[15] ...
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Sorry, for this messy page. Anatoly.
Unfortunately, Bakhtin's theories are not developed in theatre, which operates with dramatic language. NTL, this drama language is also dialogical, heteroglossic, multivoiced, intertextual, and intonated with the usages of the ordinary and the everyday. In my opinion, the literary langauge is a shadow of dramatic language.
Alas, I have many reservations about Bakhtin's ideas; in my view many of them are marxist takes on old christian ideas, known before as theology.
THEATRE RESEARCH IN CANADA home page
JENNIFER HARVIE AND RICHARD PAUL KNOWLES
Considering that the actor often stands indexically for an autonomous subject which is easily conflated with the character the actor is playing, we are interested in looking at how the dialogism of the character's monologue might destabilize subjectivity. Looking at monologues from a range of contemporary Canadian scripts and performances, we will consider how the dialogic configuration of subjectivity affects gender, race, and sexuality. And
considering that dialogism may be (as Helene Keyssar has argued it was for Bakhtin) "key to the deprivileging of absolute, authoritarian discourses," we are interested in what specific "authoritarian discourses" contemporary Canadian dialogic monologue deprivileges.
Ric: Dialogic Monologue;
Jen: Dialogism, in its simplest formulation, involves intertext at its most profound--the creation of a textual space in which a variety of voices, styles, languages, or "speech genres"--
Ric: --Todorov's translator calls them "discursive genres"-
Jen: --contest with one another on equal terms, with no single voice dominating. No voice gains authority by being--
Ric: I've got a right to talk too. They only seem--
Jen: --more articulate, more intelligent, more erudite.
Ric: "Erudite."
Jen: As Bakhtin describes it in his discussion of Dostoevsky's
"polyphonic novel," a dialogic text consists of "a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices" (Problems 6).
Ric: If they can engage in that sort academic obfuscation--
Jen: --double talk--very dialogic--
Ric: --they can listen to me for half an hour. But the voice never shuts up. I've internalized the judgement
Jen: --voices--
Ric: --I'm anticipating. "Fraud."
Jen: Double talk.
Ric: Very dialogic.
Jen: In 1993, at meetings of the Association for Canadian Theatre Research in Ottawa, Michael Sidnell drew attention to the potential for dramatic monologue to be dialogic in ways that dialogue in the theatre rarely is, and he pointed to a recent proliferation of dialogic monologue in Canadian theatre.
Ric: (Though his observation, like much of our dialogue, is largely Toronto-centric.)
Jen: This paper will examine the potentially dialogic function of monologue in some contemporary Canadian plays, and will ask: when is monologue dialogic? and what are the--
Ric: --political--
Jen: --effects of dialogic monologue?
Ric: According to Bakhtin's "sociolinguistics," all "utterances," as he calls the basic units of communication, which can range from a single non-verbal sound or gesture to a full- length novel, are made up of a heteroglot polyphony of languages drawn from a variety of "speech genres"--social, professional, and cultural communication systems, formal and informal--made unique by the historical/contextual moment of the utterance, which takes place in the historical body of an individual subject in response to and in anticipation of other utterances by other, real or imagined, but in any case specific communicating subjects. (Beat) Whew.
Jen: But some utterances are more dialogic than others. The epic and the lyric poem, according to Bakhtin, aspire to a monologic unity of voice and expression that attempts to rise above the marketplace of historically situated social exchange to a level of pure expression and disembodied, ahistorical authority.
Ric: The novel, on the other hand, at least at its most polyphonic--
Jen: (Bakhtin finds this in Dostoevsky and Rabelais; Kristeva in Qcriture feminine, in which she includes works by Joyce, Artaud, and Bataille, as well as by women.)
Ric: --aspires to the free play--
Jen: --or open contestation--
ic: --of equal and interilluminating voices, in which the authority of author and narrator is invaded by the independent, unmerged voices of the characters, manifesting themselves through indirect discourse, parody, "the word with a loophole"--
Jen: --or a "sideways glance"--
Ric & Jen: --double voicing--
Jen: --"intonational quotation marks"--
Ric: --words spoken with a "cringe"--
Jen: --as if in quotation marks--
Jen (speaks, as Ric mouths the word): --"ventriloquism"--
Ric: --hyperbole--
Jen: --parody--
Ric: --or, not that I'd do this myself--
Jen: (self consciousness)
Ric: --using self-deprecating, overblown speech that repudiates itself in advance.
Jen: There's also "indirect speaking," "quasi-direct speech," and embedding, in which the speech or accents of another person are--
Ric: --inserted--
Jen: --in the speaker's utterance--
Ric: --the voice of the other internalized--
Jen: --but not entirely appropriated--
Ric & Jen:--or "merged."
Ric: So what makes traditional theatrical modes of presentation not dialogic?
Jen: In Bakhtin's view, the freedom and independence of the authorial voice, the politics of speech reported in indirect discourse, and participation--
Ric: --the absence of "footlights," which may be interpreted as anything which "separates the aesthetic event from lived life" (Art and Answerability 217)--
Jen: --are essential for dialogism, but are excluded from drama, which he sees as "alien to genuine polyphony," primarily because it "is almost always constructed out of represented, objectified discourses" (Problems 34, 188).
Ric: He argues that "pure drama strives toward a unitary language, one that is individualized merely through dramatic personae who speak it." "Dramatic dialogue," he insists, "is determined by a collision between individuals who exist within the limits of a single unitary language" (Dialogic Imagination 405).
Jen: It's this conflation in drama of character and unitary voice--the sense that a dramatist represents a subject through the use of an individuated voice--which Michael Sidnell focused on in Ottawa. In counterdistinction to this, he argued, "[Guillermo] Verdecchia's Fronteras Americanas is about a failure of social integration, and, more fundamentally, about the lack of self-coherence that is desired both for its own sake and as the condition of communality. The problem for performance--a problem that Verdecchia's performance confronts head-on--is that these desiderata are conventionally assumed as the very basis of theatre, which may be said to celebrate them" (3-4).
Ric: What, then, makes a monologue in the theatre dialogic?
Jen: According to Paul Castagno, "dialogizing monologue" involves three "dematrixing" techniques:
Ric: His emphasis. His word, too.
Jen: "The actor/character can be de-matrixed if they 1)
Ric: "fracture the mould of a specific character
Jen: "2)
Ric: "directly acknowlege or address the presence of the audience
Jen: [Hello audience]
Ric: "or Jen: "3)
Ric: "foreground the presence of the actor over character" (137).
Jen: We found that useful--
Ric: And we hope you did too.
Jen: Sidnell argued, moreover, that the "dialogism of theatrical monologue is quite different...from the virtuosity of one actor playing many roles.... And...is also distinct from the representation of one character in conflict with himself."
Ric: "It's not," he argued, "a character that the dialogic monologue
represents but a fractured, incoherent or self-alienated subject
through which various voices are heard" (5).
Jen: Not all monologues, then, are equal: some, again, are more
dialogic than others,--
Ric: --even if you don't get into generic distinctions involving story
telling, performance art, stand-up--
Jen (cutting him off): --which we won't get into. There are, for
example, monologues--or soliloquies--that occur within plays whose
central mode is dialogue, and in such plays as Judith Thompson's these
are central, and often dialogic, devices. There is also, for economic
reasons, a current proliferation of Canadian monologues as plays, in
many of which a single character is played throughout by a single
actor. Some of these, such as Michael Cook's Terese's Creed, Joan
MacLeod's Jewel, Wendy Lill's The Occupation of Heather Rose, Judith
Thompson's Pink, and so on, are not notably dialogic, but in the case
of work such as Daniel MacIvor's See Bob Run or Wild Abandon, Cook's
absurdist monodramas Tiln and Quiller, Tom Cone's Herringbone, or
Thompson's Perfect Pie, the single character is fragmented, her
"voice" dialogically invaded and fractured.
Ric: Some monodramas, such as Dan Needles' Wingfield Trilogy, involve
splitting the link between actor and character by requiring the actor
to perform multiple roles. Such performances, nevertheless, remain
predominantly monologic-- at least from the point of view of the
audience--in that the virtuosity of role switching produces the
illusion of dialogue among discrete characters for whom the need to
create distinct, unitary voices is felt, for reasons of clarity, to be
particularly urgent.
Jen: There are also plays such as Michel Tremblay's Albertine en cinq
temps and David Young's Glenn, in which several actors collectively
play one character, a potentially dialogic device, but one that is
often neutralized, as in these plays, by the fact that the actors
represent the character at various stages in his or her life,
employing a unitary voice for each distinct role. A more complex, more
dialogic variation on this device occurs in Daniel MacIvor's
2-2-Tango: A Two-Man-One-Man-Show, in which the "characters" are named
James and Jim, are identically dressed, and interact with one another
in the present.
Ric: Finally, there is a sub-genre of "lecture/plays," such as John
Palmer's Henrik Ibsen on the Necessity of Producing Norwegian Drama,
and Daniel Brooks and Guillermo Verdecchia's The Noam Chomsky
Lectures, in this last of which the actor/lecturers--
Jen: --playing "themselves," incorporate--
Ric: --contradictions--
Jen: --disagreements--
Ric: --and fragments from different genres,--
Jen: --in a very sophisticated, assertively, and self-consciously--
Ric: --and therefore dialogically?--
Jen: --monologic dialogue.
Ric: Somewhat like these lectures, in fact.
Jen: Except not...
Ric: (Looks at her) In fact, we considered doing for the ACTR what
Brooks and Verdecchia did for Theatre Passe Muraille.
Jen: Rather Ric considered it.
Ric: A sexual flow chart. Complete with little arrows saying "you are here."
Jen: But I vetoed it.
Ric: Too many straight lines?
Jen: What about a line of stars?
Ric: Ok.
Ric: Each of these reveals the "salient features of novelization" as
Bakhtin describes them in "Epic and Novel": "they become... free and
flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary
heteroglossia..., they become dialogized, permeated with laughter,
irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally--this is the most
important thing--...an indeterminacy, a certain semantic
openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving
contemporary reality (the openended present)" (Dialogic Imagination
6-7). "In these plays," as Sidnell says, "performance becomes...
theory in action" (2).
Jen: This is so because, as a form, autobiography can expose
thefalsity of the concept of the single consciousness, by publicly
constructing the "life" of the "self." Bakhtin argues, in Problems of
Dostoevsky's Poetics, that "no human events are developed or resolved
within the bounds of a single consciousness" (288). When a single
consciousness stages her attempt to represent the development and
resolution of her life, the fiction that (auto)biography "discloses" a
pre-existing character by accounting for its "development" (or its
social construction) is made manifest.
Ric: And as Bakhtin says elsewhere, in a different context, this is
not merely a matter of the author's image appearing within his own
field of representation-- important here is the fact that the
underlying, original formal author appears in a new relationship with
the represented world. Both find themselves now subject to the same
temporally valorized measurements, for the "depicting" authorial
language now lies on the same plane as the "depicted" language...and
may enter into dialogic relations and hybrid combinations with it
(Dialogic Imagination 27-8). This, in a sense, is what happens in Ken
Garnhum's Pants on Fire--
Jen: "a one-man show for two people"--
Ric: --when the author and represented autobiographical subject, "Ken"
(played by Ken Garnhum), tells the fictional character, "Gabe,"
(played by Andy Massingham), "that's a stupid thing to say," to which
Gabe responds, "you wrote it."
Jen: At the centre of the show, which consists in part of a
self-portrait that stitches together a series of self-portraits, is a
portrait of the self as the Tower of Babel--
Ric: --which is defined in the show itself as "a confusion of voices."
Jen: The fact that much Canadian autobiographical monodrama--
including Garnhum's plays, Daniel MacIvor's House, See Bob Run, and
Wild Abandon, and Sharon Pollock's Getting it Straight--is
confessional in form, is a complicating factor (Wilson).
Ric: Confession is problematic for Bakhtin.
Jen: In the 1961 Appendix to Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, he
discusses confession as an encounter of the deepest I with another and
with others.... But the I in this encounter must be the pure, deep I
from within oneself, without any admixture of presumed and forced or
naively assimilated points of view and evaluations from another....
Without a mask...without loopholes, without a false ultimate word,
that is, without all that is externalizing and false. (Problems 294)
Ric: From anyone else this would seem like romanticism, but Bakhtin is
referring to the true, internal, social self.
Jen: And besides, Bakhtin wasn't always very consistent.
Ric: But as Dennis A. Foster says, "introspection is a delusion, since
each person has to seek his meaning through the speech of others"
(10). "The confessional narrative occurs...between two substantial,
unsettled subjects" (3). Foster sees the confessional narrative as a
site of struggle between writing and interpreting subjects, which
"unsettle[s] the listener's sense of self-possession," and thereby
"sets the listener to work" (5). It is this capacity to "set the
listener to work" that we are interested in here. At least I am.
Jen: I'm interested in looking at how the dialogism of monologue in
the theatre might destabilize subjectivity, given that the actor--
Ric: --particularly the solitary actor--
Jen: --often stands indexically for an autonomous subject, which is
easily conflated with the character the actor is playing.
Ric: When this conflation takes place in an autobiographical
monologue, written and performed by its subject, the theatrical
frisson can be both powerfully effective and representationally
confusing. Who, precisely, are we watching, and what are we analysing
as a work of theatre when, in Come Good Rain--
Jen: --billed as "a true story, written and performed by George
Seremba"--
Ric: --we see the scars on the actor/character's body through which
the bullets passed earlier in the life/narrative; or when Ken Garnhum
tells us, in Pants on Fire--
Jen: --a play that is largely about representation, including the
representation of AIDS--
Ric: --that "he" is HIV positive?
Jen: And who is "he" anyway?
Ric: The question is made even more complicated by the fact that "he"
has made it clear earlier in the play that he is a liar, and that
theatre is his favourite kind of lying.
Jen: At one point, the stage floor opens, and a "Trojan Cat" enters,
bearing on a slip of paper a one-word invasionary force:
Ric: --"liar."
Jen: Fraud.
Ric: Get off the stage.
Jen: One of the functions of Pants on Fire is to interrogate what Ann
Wilson calls "the nostalgic belief that theatre involves presence"
(35), by drawing attention to the fact that these moments of full
confessional presence are rehearsed-- "rQpQtitions"--and that the
powerful, "forced" confession that "Ken Garnhum" has AIDS, to which
audiences respond with stunned silence, is performed night after night
for the length of the run.
Ric: Each of the plays we are considering, then, is in some sense
about what Michael Holquist calls "the Bakhtinian just-so-story of
subjectivity," or, "how I get myself from the other," since "in order
to forge a self, I must do it from outside. In other words I author
myself" (Dialogism 28).
Jen: And consequently, as Bakhtin says, "we have no alibi for
existence" (quoted in Holquist, Dialogism 29). He insists that "human
being is the production of meaning" (Holquist.Dialogism 162), and he
is careful, in a passage that goes some distance towards explaining
his reticence about dialogism in the theatre, to distinguish between
"person"-- which is dialogic, in process, unique, unpredictable, and
constructed; and "character"--which is monologic, completed,
generalized, and determined.
Ric: As Michael Gardiner puts it, "for Bakhtin, human consciousness is
not a unified whole, but always exists in a tensile, conflict-ridden
relationship with other consiousnesses, in a constant alterity between
self and other.
Jen: "In fact... the very process of acquiring self-consciousness from
birth to maturity is, in Bakhtin's eyes, utterly dependent upon
discursive interaction with another 'I'" (Gardiner 28).
Ric: "We are, "as Gary Saul Morson puts it, "the voices that inhabit
us" (Morson, "Who Speaks" 8).
Jen: Consequently, "since this process [of coming intosubjectivity] is
fundamentally historical," "the subject in Bakhtin's eyes is
unfinalized
Ric: "(and, yes, 'decentered'),
Jen: "in a perpetual state of 'becoming'" (Gardiner 165).
Ric: What we are witnessing in these monologues, as Wilson says, is
"the self-consciousness of the performer producing his identity in the
context of a wide range of social forces," a self-consciousness that
"disrupts the notion of a coherent self which can be told in a story"
(Wilson 37).
Jen: A play such as Daniel MacIvor's House, as Robert Wallace notes,
openly and self-consciously presents the construction of a character,
Victor, as "the sum of his texts" (8). House "draws attention to...the
audience's overt participation in the creation," and nevertheless
"resists their interpretation" (Wallace 10), finally drawing attention
to the incompleteness and inadequacy of coherent and unified concepts
of a stable human identity. By becoming aware that we are watching,
not Victor, but "the performance of Victor" (Wallace 13), we are made
conscious of both the fragmented, processual nature of subjectivity,
and of what Caryl Emerson calls "the indispensibility of otherness"
("The Tolstoy Connection" 155).
Ric: The indispensibility of otherness is, in one sense, what
Garnhum's Pants on Fire is about, as the performance artist who
writes, designs, and performs his own work faces the onset of an
illness that undermines his self-sufficiency. But it also confronts
him with the ongoing need for the other as a necessary part of
representation, whether that other is allowed onto the stage, as in
this play--a self portrait that requires two people--
Jen: --very Bakhtinian--
Ric: --or is merely acknowledged as a necessary part of the
construction of the self, requiring the audience's complicity, as in
House, or indeed most of the plays under discussion.
Jen: These plays do not shrink, however, from representing the dangers
of the fracturing of subjectivity. It is not incidental that Victor is
"fucked up," or that Eme, the central character in Sharon Pollock's
stream-of-consciousness monologue, Getting it Straight, is represented
as schizophrenic, an escapee from her "keepers"--
Ric: --even if those plays might seem to suggest that schizophrenia is
an appropriate response, to a world that's "fucked up."
Jen: Ultimately, however, the plays we are looking at exemplify
Bakhtin's insistence on the responsibility of the historically
situated subject, and what Michael Holquist calls "the need for
choice." At all the possible levels of conflict between stasis and
change, there is always a situated subject whose specific place is
defined precisely by its in-between- ness. To be responsible for the
site we occupy in the space of nature and the time of history is a
mandate we cannot avoid. (Dialogism 181)
Jen: --in spite of the danger that dialogism, like carnival--or "the
degraded carnival of postmodernism," as Michael Gardiner calls it
(95)--will turn out to be--
Ric & Jen: --just another liberal humanist form of all-embracing
pluralism.
Ric: Ok, ok, not we: I'm interested--in the potential for social
change that the dialogic construction of subjectivity makes possible
(see O'Connor 201), in the free play of voices which disrupts the
: --internal conflicts," as Caryl Emerson says, "exposing their
mechanisms to the light of day. If enough individuals experience the
same gap," she argues, "it is resocialized: there develops a political
underground, and the potential for revolution" ("The Outer Word" 32).
This prize-winning article is taken from THEATRE RESEARCH IN CANADA/ RECHERCHES TH. TRALES AU CANADA, Vol 15, No. 2 (Fall 1994), pp 136-63 and may be found in its full form there. (In its electronic incarnation, here, the article lacks its "NOTES" section -- due to this 'Web' editor's inability to handle endnote numbering within a HTML text.) The rewards of reading this article in its original, published, format will quickly become obvious to all who take the trouble of chasing it down on their library shelves. Such rewards can be brought to your very door through joining The Association for Canadian Theatre Research (and receiving TRIC as part of your membership) or by subscribing to TRIC, [for $22 Canadian], Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, University of Toronto, 214 College St 3rd Floor, Toronto, Canada M5T 2Z9.
DIALOGIC MONOLOGUE: A DIALOGUE
Michael Sidnell has drawn attention to the potential for dramatic monologue to be dialogic in ways that dialogue in the theatre rarely is, and he has pointed to a recent proliferation of dialogic monologue in Canadian theatre. This essay will examine the potentially dialogic function of monologue in some contemporary
Canadian plays. Questions central to this examination will be: when is monologue dialogic, and what are the effects of dialogic monologue?
Jen: Or, the Mikhail Bakhtin lectures.
Ric: Every time I give an academic paper, a little voice inside me says--
Jen: "You're a fraud."
Ric: "Get off the stage."
Jen: (That's an intertext--very dialogic--from Ken Garnhum's Pants on Fire. Also Surrounded by Water. And from Geoffrey and Jeffrey's Get off the Stage).
Ric: But I continue anyway.
Jen: And I want to consider the potential for dialogism to
"deprivilege," as Helene Keyssar says, "absolute, authoritarian
discourses" ("Drama and the Dialogic" 89). How, for example, may the
dialogic configuration of subjectivity affect the construction of
gender, and can it be used to deprivilege the discourses of
phallocentrism?
Ric: Bakhtin did not, in his writings, analyse any texts produced by
women; he assumed a male readership for his work; and he chose to
discuss a great deal of overtly sexist writing. As Wayne C. Booth asks
"is it not remarkable to discover nohint in such a penetrating and
exhaustive inquiry--
Jen: [--penetrating and exhaustive--]
Ric: --"into how our various dialects are constituted...of the
influence of sexual differences, no hint that women talk or have ever
talked in ways different from men's?" (Booth 154) (Beat. Looks to
Jen).
Jen: Carry on.
Ric: Nevertheless, as Keyssar says, "there is a striking confluence
between the attention to the construction of multi-voicedness and
hybridization in much of contemporary feminist writing and in
Bakhtin's criticism" ("Drama and the Dialogic" 95).
Jen: The contributors to Bauer and McKinstry's Feminism, Bakhtin, and
the Dialogic, addressing "The Dilemmas of a Feminine Dialogic," tend
to focus on the ways in which dialogism "questions the 'normalcy' of
monolithic, hierarchical social relations" (Herndl 19), and helps to
get beyond the "problematical binary opposition 'in here/out
there'"(Schwab 67). As Dale Bauer says, the feminist struggle is not
one between a conscious "awakened" or natural voice and the voice of
patriarchy "out there." Rather precisely because we all internalize
the authoritative voice of patriarchy, we must struggle to refashion
inherited social discourses into words which rearticulate intentions
other than normative or disciplinary ones. (2)
Ric: Margaret Hollingsworth's The Apple in the Eye and Diving
illustrate the dissident, as opposed to hegemonic, potential of
internalizing, refashioning, and ventriloquizing the voice of
patriarchy, as the central characters, Gemma in Apple and Viveca in
Diving, assimilate-with-a-twist words, phrases, and constructions that
are explicitly external to them.
Jen: In The Apple in the Eye, Gemma picks up words that she has "never
heard of" from her husband's crossword puzzle, words like "arcane" and
"behemoth," and, eschewing his "first order logic" together with his
"artificial intelligence," she internalizes them in a gesture of
anti-hegemonic appropriation, recontextualizing them in a dialogic
play of associative "little funnies," as her off-stage husband
condescendingly calls them.
Ric: Diving does something similar with a voice-over discourse of
command and obedience appropriated from animal training, athletic
coaching, and parenting, as Viveca employs a carnivalesque "grotesque
inversion" to rewrite herself into the discourse--
Jen: --as a sort of "Trojan femme"?--
Ric: --and "capture," on a tape that she herself controls, the
instructional voice of authority.
Jen: Finally, Sharon Pollock's Getting it Straight discursively
carnivalizes patriarchal languages in a textbook exercise in Qcriture
feminine. At the end of the play Eme, too, "confesses": "I let the
briefcase hang from my hand," she says, "as I walk to/ the water I sit
on the shore and I use the key I tear/the papers to pieces I chew and
I swallow" (125). Having chewed and swallowed the words contained in
the throbbing and threatening briefcase, symbol of her husband's
patriarchal corporate power, she turns to address the audience, "the
egg talkin' to all members a the female/sex," imagining spinning "a
gossamer net of women's hands and rapunzel's/ hair," and wondering, in
the play's final lines, "what would it spell?" (126).
Ric: Appropriately, then, these monologues can be seen to employ
Bakhtinian dialogics for feminist ends, deprivileging patriarchal
discourses, internalizing them antihegemonically, and reconstructing
them dialogically as wild and whirling words.
***
Jen: Dialogism can also be used to deprivilege other authoritarian
discourses, and in Canadian monologues it has been particularly
effective recently in deprivileging the discourses of ethnocentricism,
or, in English Canada, "anglo-conformity," as Donna Bennett has
recently called it. In Canada, at least, ethnicity itself seems to be
dialogically constituted, while ethnocentrism is, of course,
determinedly monologic.
Ric: As Bakhtin says (though he wasn't at this point thinking of
ethnicities), Monologism denies that there exists outside of it
another consciousness, with the same rights, and capable of responding
on an equal footing, another andequal I (thou). For a monologic
outlook...the other remains entirely and only an object of
consciousness, and cannot constitute another consciousness.... The
monologue is accomplished and deaf to the other's response; it does
not await it and does not grant it any decisive force. Monologue makes
do without the other; that is why to some extent it objectivizes all
reality. Monologue pretends to be the last word.
Jen: In doing so it absorbs, assimilates, and colonizes the discourses
of the other (constructed and objectified as stable and unchanging),
and thereby reifies existing asymmetrical power relations.
Ric: Ethnographic theorists see the dialogism of ethnicity itself as a
potential fissure in ethnocentrist discourse. As Michael Fisher says,
"a process of assuming an ethnic identity is an insistence on a
pluralist, multidimensional, or multifaceted concept of self [that]
can be a crucible for a wider social ethos" (Fischer 196).
Jen: Though as Bakhtin says, shifting the ground to discourse and
nation, this "verbal-ideological decentering will occur only when a
national culture loses its sealed-off and self-sufficient character,
when it becomes conscious of itself as only one among other cultures
and languages" (Dialogic Imagination 23).
Ric: Bakhtin's thoughts on these and other issues were influenced,
according to Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, by his having grown
up in the multi-ethnicVilnius, "a realized example of heteroglossia"
(22), and one that in this sense resembled the Toronto of the 1990s,
where Sidnell's prime example of dialogic monologue, Fronteras
Americanas, was first produced and is in part set.
Jen: Written and performed by its Argentinian-Canadian
autobiographical subject, Guillermo Verdecchia, Fronteras is notable--
Ric: --quite apart from those things it shares with most of the plays
under consideration: its use of disruptive laughter, its "linguistic
carnival" (Spanish and some French as well as various modes of spoken
English), its disruptions of subjectivity, its mixture of styles, its
use of parodic exaggeration and inversion, and its Bakhtinian
employment of a hero, "Wideload McKennah," as jester--
Jen: --as I was saying, it is notable for its recognition and
development of the idea that, as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White
have said, "cultural identity is inseparable from limits, it is always
a boundary phenomenon" (200).
Ric: In fact, the play is an example as well as a discussion of
cultural production as a boundary, or border phenomenon.
Jen: When Verdecchia argues that we all must learn to "live on the
border" (77), he echoes Bakhtin's various arguments that "a person has
no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the
boundary" (Problems 287). The borders, or "fronteras" to which
Verdecchia refers are also, in a bilingual pun, a new frontier,
perhaps a "new national culture" such as Bakhtin posited in his
utopian vision, and in this, too, Verdecchia echoes Bakhtin's position
that "a cultural domain has no inner territory. It is located entirely
upon boundaries....":
Ric: Every cultural act lives essentially on the boundaries, and it
derives its seriousness from this fact. Separated by abstraction from
these boundaries, it loses the ground of its being and becomes
vacuous, arrogant; it degenerates and dies. (Art and Answerability
274)
Jen: And when Verdecchia issues his "manifesto"--not a "plea for
tolerance" but a "summons to begin negotiations, to claim your place
on the continent" (54), and asks, "will you call off the Border
Patrol?" (77) because "the border is your home" (74), he evokes
Bakhtin's call late in life for "benevolent demarcation. Without
border disputes" (Speech Genres 137).
Ric: Finally, near the end of Fronteras, Verdecchia locates himself on
the border in a way that sounds archetypally Bakhtinian--
Jen: --isn't that a contradiction in terms?--
Ric: --yes--in its heteroglossia, its insistence on the processual
nature of identity as a highway, and its parodic wit:
Jen: I'm not in Canada; I'm not in Argentina.
I'm on the Border.
I'm Home.
Mais zooot alors, je comprends maintenant, mais oui, merde! Je suis
Argentin-Canadien! I'm a post-Porteno neo-Latino Canadian! I am the
Pan-American highway! (Verdecchia 74)
***
Ric: Dialogic monologues can disrupt ethnocentric and other
authoritarian discourses in a variety of ways, including what I think
of as the structural, or formal heteroglossia of a play such as
Monique Mojica's Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots.
Jen: Princess Pocahontas is not, strictly speaking, a monologue, since
it includes a musician--Alejandra Nu±ez in the original
production--who also plays several small supporting roles.
Ric: Nor is it autobiographical in the same ways as the other plays we
are discussing--
Jen: --though its form is in some sense autobiographical, and as an
anti-hegemonic revisioning of dominant myths of Native women, written
and performed by Mojica out of a strong and resisting subject
position, from which its various characters, historical and
contemporary, seem to emerge, it can be seen as a kind of
spiritual/historical autobiography.
Ric: On one level, Princess Pocahontas, like Margo Kane's Moonlodge,
would seem to function counter- rather than anti-hegemonically, in
that, like Moonlodge, with its transhistorical and perhaps nostalgic
mission of recovering a lost sense of self, it posits and asserts a
strong, stable, and empowering community of Native women--
Jen: --a counter-hegemony--
Ric: --who share what seems to be an essentialist identity as both
Native-Canadians and as women.
Jen: Princess Pocahontas explicitly ties this essentialist identity to
the biological marker of the "blue spot at the base of the spine--the
sign of Indian blood" (Mojica 20). Even as this authenticating
signifier functions--
Ric: --like post-colonial nationalisms--
Jen: --as an empowering device for a marginalized group, however, the
play simultaneously cuts across the boundary lines and "border
patrols" of the colonizing dominant, emphasizing that even though it
is counter- rather than anti-hegemonic, it is nevertheless not
normative. Princess Pocahontas does not reinscribe, or even
acknowledge the geo-political divisions that Fronteras Americanas
confronts; the myths of Native identity that it attacks or constructs
are indiscriminately drawn from all of North, Central, and South
America; and the hybrid nature of Native and other ethnicities is
asserted at every turn, as well as embodied in the author-performer.
Mojica's heritage as a Native-Canadian half-breed born in New York
City to a Kuna-Rappahanock mother and Jewish father positions her as
an embodiment of Bakhtin's hybridization, and of the
Bakhtin/Verdecchia border phenomenon.
Ric: Princess Pocahontas uses a truly carnivalesque blending of
musical and performance styles, including what Bakhtin
calls"extraliterary" (Dialogic Imagination 411) and "proclamatory"
genres (Speech Genres 132), together with parodic exaggeration and
inversion, to deprivilege both ethnocentric and phallocentric
discourses.
Jen: It also explicitly employs a structural principle thatKeyssar has
articulated as being both Bakhtinian and feminist.
Ric: Mojica includes in the prefatory material to the published script
an explanation of its structure:
Jen: There are 13 transformations, one for each moon in the lunar
year.... There are 4 sections where there is a transfiguration of
three women or entities who are one.... 13 moons, 4 directions; it is
not a linear structure but it is the form and the basis from which
these stories must be told. (Mojica 16)
Ric: The playwright, then, explicitly rejects what Keyssar describes
as the "resistance to [polyphony]" of traditional western
dramaturgical structures, adopting one based on Native mythologies and
"transformation," which "requires not that we remove...disguises that
conceal us from our 'true' selves," as in Aristotelian "recognition,"
"but that we imagine men and women in a continual process of becoming
other."
Jen: "It is becoming other, not finding oneself, that is the crux of
the drama," Keyssar argues--
Ric: --and she argues further that such "transformational strategies
go hand in hand with the dialogic imagination" ("Drama and the
Dialogic" 92-3).
Jen: Like all of the plays under discussion, then, Princess Pocahontas
functions in a variety of formal ways as dialogic monologue,
emphasizing not simply heterogeneity but "'social/ideological'
contradictions" (Yaeger 244), to destabilize, subvert, or carnivalize
authoritarian discourses, and to open the way for effective and
ongoing social change.
***
Jen: As with all utopian visions, there are problems withBakhtin's.
The most apparent of these have to do with how to construct a space in
which dialogue can take place--an arena of free contestation between
equal voices--when hegemony dictates that the consciousnesses and
voices of marginalized groups are inevitably inflected with the
discourses of the dominant.
Ric: Can voices be equal?
Jen: Who, and what, controls the construction of dialogic space?
Ric: This problem reveals itself clearly in Bakhtin's construction of
carnival and carnival laughter as healthy and socially disruptive--
Jen: --when in practice both frequently reinforce social stereotypes,
and therefore aid social control of ethnic minorities, women, gays,
lesbians, and others. Heard any good Newfie jokes lately?
Ric: At the heart of this is the question of power, and the fact that
"communication is by nature more coercive and disproportionate than we
think," as Aaron Fogel notes, "when we sentimentalize terms like
dialogue and communication" (195)--and as Deborah Jacobs points out,
when we "romanticise marginality" (73).
Jen: And as Ken Hirschkop says, "dialogue" must be understood to
include "not only the liberal exchange of views but alsoquestions of
cultural oppression and power" (75)--
Ric: --an understanding that will inevitably--and especially in the
Stalinist context of Bakhtin's own historical place and time--include
coercion, interrogation, force, and unequal societal, grammatical, and
rhetorical forms and relationships.
Jen: Shut up, Ric.
Ric: Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the ACTR?
Jen: Finally, as Michael Andre Bernstein points out, it is important
not to sentimentalize the potential for genuinely unstructured
polyphony to trap the individual in an "intolerable babble of voices"
that is akin to madness or neurosis, as represented in House and
Getting it Straight, or that can produce a reactionary monologic
attempt to shout down and control the "noise."
Ric: The voices of polyphony, Bakhtin would argue, must be firmly
grounded in the utterances of an individual and historicized subject.
Jen: In spite of these concerns, and of Bakhtin's own awareness of the
fragility of "the dialogic sphere" (Speech Genres 150), there is
surely hope, as well as trepidation, in a model in which dialogic
questioning has the potential to"change the consciousness of the
individual" (Speech Genres 136), and therefore of the culture.
Ric: Even acknowledging the possibility of abuse deriving from unequal
power relations in the theatre and in the world, the monologues we've
looked at, as historical utterances in the context of Canadian theatre
today, when initiated and controlled by the societally disempowered,
can provide a tentative model of contesting and unmerged voices with
the ongoing and open-ended potential to change consciousnesses,
societies, and social structures.
Jen: The potential provided by dialogism lies, then, in its ability to
change, structurally, the ways in which we perceive the world, as
Bakhtin believed that Dostoevsky and Rabelais did and continue to do,
and as we believe plays such as the Canadian dialogic monologues that
we have been discussing are able to do.
Ric: For as Michael Holquist points out, "we experience the world in
all its most common and frequent occasions as forms" (Holquist,
Dialogism 151).
Jen: Perhaps it's appropriate here to give the last but hopefully not
closing words of this dialogue to Bakhtin.
Ric: And perhaps appropriately, they constitute Bakhtin's last but not
closing writings.
Jen: There is no first or last discourse, and dialogical context knows
no limits (it disappears into an unlimited past and in our unlimited
future). Even past meanings, that is those that have arisen in the
dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable...they will always
change (renewing themselves) in the course of the dialogue's
subsequent development.... At every moment of the dialogue, there are
immense and unlimited masses of forgotten meanings...th[at] will
return to memory and live in renewed form (in a new context). Nothing
is absolutely dead: every meaning will celebrate its rebirth. The
problem of the great temporality. (Quoted in Todorov 110)
_________________________________________________________________
NOTES
We would like to acknowledge the writers whose work we cite, together with those
whose work and voices we have dialogically and unconsciously internalized. We
quote extensively, and employ extensive footnotes, in an attempt to create a
kind of critical polyphony--to admit as many voices, positions, and genres as
possible into the text. A version of this dialogue was presented at the meetings
of the Association for Canadian Theatre Research / Association de la recherche
theatrale au Canada in Calgary, 5 June 1994.
_________________________________________________________________
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