Voicing the Text: American Drama and the Production of Voice 144389463X, 9781443894630

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Voicing the Text

Voicing the Text American Drama and the Production of Voice By

Petra Ragnerstam

Voicing the Text: American Drama and the Production of Voice By Petra Ragnerstam This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Petra Ragnerstam All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9463-X ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9463-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Why Voice? Voice and power Voice in text Embodiment in performance and film Disposition Chapter One ............................................................................................... 11 The Dramatic Voice: Text and Performance Translation, origin and the subject Intersemiotic translation Voice as text Voice as embodiment Body as origin and writing The dramatic voice and the trace of writing Voice and alienation Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 43 The Incorporeal Voice: The Thorny Case of The Crucible The power of speech Writing and the narrator The narrator and the question of knowledge The narrator and the power of writing Filmatization and the question of writing Bringing in the narrator Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 73 Voice Representing Thought: Translating Strange Interlude The impossible subject Interiority in narration Thought and narration in Strange Interlude Filming thought: problems and solutions Thought needs a subject Differentiating speech and thought Externalizing thought

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Table of Contents

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 99 Irony, Satire and the Conundrum of Speaking: The Women The ironic voice The satiric performance Polysemic irony in The Women Irony and the specific historical situation The irony of being a woman The Women. It’s All about Men The Opposite Sex: postmodern pastiche The ironic voice on the shores of the postmodern Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 147 The Collapse of the Democratic Speech Space: Glengarry Glen Ross and the Processes of Reification Commodification, objectification and reification: the theme of the play Capitalism as a self-regulating system built upon laws Individual consequences Drama as a particular kind of dialogue Haunting the laws: the concrete and the crisis The concrete situation as text and as film Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 187 Negotiating Voice: The End Can the subaltern speak, or not? Can the subaltern speak in drama? for colored girls who have considered suicide: the sheer heterogeneity of voice Dutchman: speaking no matter what Concluding discussion Notes........................................................................................................ 225 Works Cited ............................................................................................. 235 Index ........................................................................................................ 243

INTRODUCTION WHY VOICE?

A good many people, I imagine, harbour a similar desire to be freed from the obligation to begin […].1 —Foucault, “The Discourse on Language” Putting one’s house in order, patting oneself on the back, submitting one’s account, is something highly agreeable. But describing the collapse of one’s house, having pains in the back, paying one’s account, is indeed a depressing affair, and that was how Friedrich Nietzsche saw things a century later. —Brecht, Brecht on Theatre Perhaps there is so much writing on the voice now because there has been a break, a separation from that innocence. —Chion, The Voice in Cinema

The phenomenon I explore in this book is voice. My general fascination with voice is grounded in many queries. Why is voice so important to us? What is it about voice that makes us think of everything from that which is produced by human physical activity in the voice box to what goes on in a text and even to general democratic principles? How does the concept of voice encompass such disparate practices as vocal sound, identity production, and the execution of power? And can the same term really refer to such disparate practices and operate on such disparate planes? In this general introduction, we first have to consider what defines voice. What is its function in relation to the subject and in relation to embodiment and power? It is clear that voice is closely connected to the body. It not only refers to a sound made primarily by our voice box, but also it is closely connected to language through speech. Thus, a close link exists between voice, body, and language, which is important. However, the question which remains is how to theorize their relation to each other. In what way is voice connected to language? Many critics argue that there is a crucial difference between voice and speech. For instance, in The Voice in Cinema, Michel Chion argues that the two are quite disparate:

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Introduction

voice is material, whereas speech is linguistic. In his theory, voice is the vehicle for speech, but I would argue it is rather difficult to conceptualize speech without voice and voice without speech. Even the written word is often regarded as “a record of the movements of the speech organs, and correspond[s] to the movement of the instrumentalist when he reads notes form the printed score” (Turner 2000, 5). Therefore, I assert that the line between voice and speech is not easily demarcated because voice is so closely connected to our idea of humanity. For example, we do not talk of animals as having “voices” in the same sense as humans—they only make sounds. And what makes our bodily sounds different from those of animals is our voice’s connection to speech, and subsequently, to language. Given that the boundary between voice and speech is fuzzy and difficult to demarcate, the question is if it is necessary or even fruitful to draw such sharp distinctions. The most important idea to keep in mind is that voice, in a crucial way, is connected to physicality and embodiment. However, its meaning is almost always extended to notions about speech, language, and ideas about humanity and subjectivity. In this study, I aim to find a way “to consider it as an object, without either becoming lost in the fascination it inspires or reducing it to being merely the vehicle of language and expression,” as Chion puts it (Chion 1999, 1). What I find personally interesting about voice is precisely this conundrum. It seems to be placed somewhere between body and language. Voice becomes a sign of both language, by its strong connection to speech, and the body, by being generated and produced by our bodily organs. Voice is a site for agency expressing the subject’s thoughts and experiences, but voice is also the site where language as discourse produces and controls us. This is why voice is central to my project. In many theories, voice is clearly connected to the idea of a subject creating an utterance. What characterizes voice is its origin in a subject and in a body. As such, voice is fairly unproblematic in that voice and language are produced in harmony by an embodied subject. Our voice becomes a sign of subjectivity. What is uttered acquires its meaning because it is uttered by someone: a physical body and subject. A voice without a body or a subject is no voice. This construct also works the other way around. The subject gains its subjectivity from its voice because one is not a subject if one has no voice. The voice is a sign of cognition, interiority, and of identity—that is, of subjectivity. In contrast, in poststructuralist theories of language, language is defined precisely as having no origin in a subject, but rather, language is arbitrary and constituted by a radical absence—the absence of sender,

Why Voice?

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receiver, and context. Language is what theorists would call a textual practice, meaning that voice no longer works in harmony with language in an embodied subject. Because voice is unconditionally connected to language via speech and to the subject via the body, tension arises between the theories presented. Voice can be regarded as a bodily practice, but also as a linguistic practice. Interestingly, the two positions are not compatible, and hardly even negotiable, as we shall see. The tension that forms the basis of my project is voice as a spoken utterance (grounded in the speaking subject) versus voice as language (different and deferred). It is this tension that I analyse in the transition from drama to performance and from text to embodiment. This transition is a form of translation and a form of transposition, or metamorphosis of voice. The tension is also interesting because it is closely connected to power—and to our ideas of what voice can or should do.

Voice and power Another issue central to this project is that of voice and power. Voice is closely connected to concepts of power, and I would argue the reason for this is precisely the triangulation of language, body, and subject. The strong connection between language, body, and subjectivity through voice is what makes voice such a powerful weapon. Voice is tied to the body by the production of vocal sounds, and it is connected to the subject in that the speaking body is a sign of an autonomous, thinking individual. However, having a body is not enough to have voice in a political sense. Voicing one’s ideas is not the same as making vocal sounds. Voicing one’s ideas implies making bodily sounds that generate certain effects: communication, understanding, agency, and action. This is carried out through language, and for voice to function as an individual’s political weapon, the triangulation of body, subject, and language must be in place. But language, as I have argued, is not an individual matter. Language is produced outside the subject in processes of differentiation which generate meaning. Meaning is stabilized by ideological and discursive processes rather than by its origin in a body and in an individual. This means that our voices must follow patterns and structures of meaning that are already present (the “already-said,” in Foucauldian terms) to be understood. People who produce vocal sounds that fall outside these structures of meaning are consequently not subjects. And if they are not subjects, they cannot have voice. Such a definition of voice excludes people who are

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Introduction

deprived of subjectivity—historically, and in the present. Feminists, Marxists, and postcolonialists all point to subjecthood as a concept which is not a given, but rather, something connected to power. Women, the working class, and colonized peoples are seen as (and constructed as) objects rather than subjects. They cannot have voice because they are not subjects in the first place. This means that to have voice, one must speak in a political sense, which in turn, means that one must be within the discourses of power in order to speak. Otherwise, one’s speech will come to nothing. What is said will not be acknowledged as speech, and one will have no voice. There must be someone who listens, and no one is listening if they are not already communicating within the discourses of power and speaking the right language. This is how voice and power are interconnected. This radical critique of the subject as the origin of language also means questioning the political viability of voice and subjectivity as grounds for (political) action, and this is a tricky field. Feminism, Marxism, and postcolonialism are traditionally strong advocates of voice. However, this is not surprising considering that they deal not only with power, but also with oppressed groups and their rights in the world. A harsh critique of voice, embodiment, and subjectivity would assert that these groups’ foundation for political action is fundamentally questioned. Therefore, theorists within these fields are not ready to launch a comprehensive critique of voice. Feminists fighting phallogocentrism, for instance, are not ready to give up the humanist and individualist ideology of voice because voice is seen as a fundamental democratic principle and a viable way to gain power and control. As Nancy Hartsock argues in “Rethinking Modernism: Minority vs. Majority Theories,” it’s typical that just when we have finally gained the status of subjecthood—it’s time to give it up. Why is it, exactly at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes “problematic?” (Hartsock quoted in Grewal and Kaplan 1994, 233)

Poststructuralism’s textual turn implies the critique of an ideology fundamental to our concept of the world, ourselves, and our ideas of agency and political action. Can this textual turn also have political force, or does a radical critique of voice undo our political imperatives? What I deal with in my analysis of voice is a clash between the poststructuralist critique of logocentrism and a feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial critique

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of power. In simple terms, it can be seen as a clash between writing and embodiment, and my project is an investigation of this clash. My interest in voice as an instrument of power lies in the presumed failsafe link between subject, body, and language. If voice renders power because of such a failsafe link, what happens to this power when the link is destabilized? We are faced with two theoretically opposite versions of what voice is and what it can do: voice as an individual, bodily phenomenon, where voice can function as the vehicle for the subject’s thoughts and experiences, as opposed to voice as a textual phenomenon, cut off from the speaking subject, where voice has seemingly lost that political power. The effect of this results in a problematization of voice and power, and of the possibility of seeing the individual voice as a vehicle for power.

Voice in text The clash between subjectivity and writing concerning voice is best demonstrated by literary theory. Within literary theory, we can observe two lines of reasoning. Firstly, we have literary theorists wanting texts to be an expression of voice. And secondly, we have literary theorists wanting to reveal that voice is a purely textual phenomenon. Both deal with the anxiety (or a promise, depending on viewpoint) that voice is not what we think it is. Given that literature is traditionally seen as an expression of the essence of humanity, subjectivity, and individuality, some literary critics display an incessant preoccupation with voice. Literary theory, which only deals with written material, nevertheless continues to discuss voice in text. This is the case despite voice being so clearly connected to body and embodiment, sound and orality, and despite text being obviously “bodiless,” and therefore, physically “silent.” Literary theorists circumvent this obvious lack (of embodiment) by presuming a physical speaking situation with a speaking bodily subject, which is in fact, not there. The textual turn in literary theory works to question the seemingly failsafe link between body, subject, language, and power. In Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, for instance, one could argue that Derrida, in his critique of logocentrism, analyses and questions the ontological status of voice by investigating its connection to language. He does this by investigating subjectivity, origin, and presence, all of which are crucial to our understanding of voice. This is a way to foreground the written, rather than the spoken, in an attempt to problematize the failsafe connection

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Introduction

between subject, voice, body, and language. In such theories, voice as we have conceived it, no longer exists. Drama enacts the clash between textuality and embodiment by its structural reconfiguration of text into performance, and it is here where voice undergoes a veritable transformation. However, drama’s connection to body and embodiment is problematic, if not even illusory. Drama-aswriting does not go away. Drama-as-writing constantly intervenes in drama-as-performance. In drama, there is a deferral of voice created by its status as writing. It is drama as both written text and performance that captures the clash of philosophies and theories described above. Because the intricate relation between writing and embodiment characterizes drama, it can be said to play out the problem concerning voice and presence. Nevertheless, full presence is difficult to realize even in a performance, and this problematization of presence in drama, in turn, implies a comprehensive critique of the subject, as we shall see. I have chosen to study American drama for two reasons: firstly, because the plays are often political, dealing with the questions of power, and secondly, because of their focus on the individual and his or her undertakings in relation to that power. Thus, what I analyse is if and how it is possible to posit voice as a site for individual agency expressed by characters in the play or if voice is a textual construct that problematizes its strong connection to subjectivity, individuality, and agency. In exploring these questions, I analyse several plays from different time periods that problematize voice in relation to text and performance, and to language and embodiment. We will find that what seems to be a clear-cut relation is actually quite intricate and problematic. It is not simply the case that the embodiment of voice in an actual actor—in an actual body and with an actual voice—brings stability to the text-as-différance. Rather, the relation between text and performance becomes a simultaneous deconstruction and reconstruction of voice.

Embodiment in performance and film Having outlined the main threads of this book, I still need to untangle a major knot in this project. This knot concerns what I mean by “performance.” Generally speaking, I use the term performance to discuss the translation of text to various corporeal forms, although I am aware of their differences. Thus, in using this term, I refer to both theatre and film, although corporeality materializes itself quite differently in the two. However, in my actual readings of the dramatic productions, I have had to limit my study to embodiment in film. This is because it is practically

Why Voice?

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impossible for me to find any live stage productions of the plays I have chosen to analyse. Furthermore, had there been any stage productions open to attend, I would have had to travel around the world to see them. I am aware that the choice of film as medium when discussing embodiment is problematic; theatre and film operate in quite different ways when it comes to the performance and embodiment of voice. However, having stated this, interesting aspects of voice emerge when discussing film which highlight the problems outlined above. Some of the films that I have chosen for this study also bring out problems directly involving theatre, as you will see. Although I will not discuss the difference between voice in theatre and in film at length, I would like to discuss a couple points before starting my investigation. Thus, I begin with the two main areas I feel point to their differences in the production of voice: corporeality and individuality. Schematically, one could argue that theatre is more corporeal than film in that we are presented with real, live actors with real, live bodies and voices on the physical stage. Their corporeality is palpable, so to speak. In this sense, it would be more “accurate” to speak about performance and embodiment in theatre than in film. In terms of voice, this means that the voices produced come directly from the actors’ speaking bodies. No technical aids or instruments that distort, alleviate, or alter the voices are produced. Thus, the corporeality of the actors on stage limits and enables the production of voice. In contrast, cinema cannot boast of “real” corporeality in the production of voice. In cinema, the only way we can speak of corporeality and voice is as a form of iconicity. We cannot talk of physical bodies or corporeal actors, but rather filmed actors whose bodies represent corporeality. In this, cinema faces many problems when it comes to the production of voice. Nonetheless, film is dependent on the same set of ideas or ideologies about voice and embodiment as theatre, which creates interesting problems for filmmakers. Therefore, the kind of embodiment that characterizes theatre has to be re-imagined in the production of film. As we will see, this is a continuous problem when filming voice. Although there are problems in the production of voice in film concerning corporeality, there are also advantages in its use of iconic voices. These advantages concern an aspect of corporeality that differentiates film and theatre—individuality. And to understand the ways in which film manages to produce individuality through a sense of intimacy, we again have to turn to the stage and compare it to the film’s frame. The stage is important for the production of voice in the theatre. The whole setting of a theatre, for example, how the audience is placed in

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Introduction

relation to the actors, can be argued to produce distance. The actors have to position themselves in certain ways in order to secure audibility. This means that some methods of producing intimacy and individuality by producing a wide register of voice are unavailable to theatre actors. In the theatre, the voices produced must be loud and clear to reach the spatial distance to the audience. Therefore, vocal effects that generate a sense of closeness, individuality, and realism (such as whispering, asides, and mumbling) are impossible, or at least difficult, to master in the theatre. As a result, theatre follows certain conventions of voice that stretch our suspension of disbelief when it comes to voice. This space structure stages voice in a way that makes it less realistic (in a purely representational sense) despite that it is more corporeal. In cinema, the stage is traded for the frame. Thus, we get a completely different setup for the production of voice. Gone is the stage, which tends to limit the scope and register of voice. Also, the camera is more intimate in that it can move unobtrusively and create both closeness and distance, in turn, creating a wider range of possibilities for the production of voice. Voice in film appears to be more “realistic” because of the nuances that are possible to procure with technical aids such as the microphone and camera angle. Naturally, other aspects that clearly differentiate theatre from cinema when it comes to the production of voice also exist; aspects that I will not examine in depth here. In his influential book, The Voice in Cinema, Chion conducted comprehensive analyses of voice in cinema and makes interesting comparisons to theatre. For a more thorough investigation of their relation, his book is worth reading. As argued before, my focus will undeniably be cinema. Although I am aware of the limits that such a scope brings; nonetheless, I hope that this focus renders interesting discussions, and the lack of stage productions opens up for other scholars to continue this line of research.

Disposition The structure of this book is guided by the concept of voice, wherein each chapter raises a dilemma that challenges our concept of voice in various ways. These dilemmas are theoretically different and call for different readings of the plays in question. I have allowed myself to rather freely choose such theoretical quandaries based on the plays, their construction of voice, and how voice is translated into film. What we get in each chapter is a problematization of a specific aspect of the play in question that has an impact on, and consequences for, our concepts of voice. In this

Why Voice?

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problematization, I have chosen to investigate such disparate dilemmas as the disembodied voice, thought, irony, and dialogue. More precisely, this book is structured as follows: the first chapter, “The Dramatic Voice: Text and Performance,” is a theoretical chapter outlining the main theoretical threads that will be the foundation of the forthcoming readings of the actual dramas. This chapter investigates theories of writing as well as theories of embodiment in relation to voice. However, its main focus lies in the theoretical conundrums concerning the translation between the two media. In many ways, it can be argued that this chapter sets up the questions that will guide the readings of the dramas, but without giving any answers. I have envisioned this project to be so that the readings themselves will become like answers in practice. All the chapters that follow are separate readings of various dramas whose common denominator is the questions raised in the theoretical chapter. No direct comparative element guides those chapters, but rather, it is up to the reader to make the connections. Following the theoretical chapter is a reading of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible called “The Incorporeal Voice: The Thorny Case of The Crucible.” This chapter focuses on the problems of translating what are commonly called stage directions in drama. By stage direction I mean “a direction inserted in a written or printed play where it is thought necessary to indicate the appropriate action” (Oxford English Dictionary). What role do these textual segments play in the production of the text and how can they be translated into film? What happens when the clearly textual part of a play is put into a performance that needs bodies, subjectivity, and sound? Chapter 3 consists of a reading of Eugene O’Neill’s play, Strange Interlude, and is titled “Voice Representing Thought: Translating Strange Interlude.” As the title indicates, this chapter investigates the preconceived idea that what we speak has its origin in what we think, meaning that thought and speech are intricately interconnected. The project of translating thought into embodiment is troublesome to say the least, and in the process of such translation, many preconceived notions about voice and the subject become destabilized. Chapter 4, “Irony, Satire and the Conundrum of Speaking: The Women” deals with irony precisely because irony and satire, in many ways, highlight the concerns surrounding voice and its connection to the subject. In the play, The Women, by Clare Boothe, we meet a group of women whose speech is clearly ironized. My main take on irony and voice in The Women is that voice functions as a form of ironic expression because the women do not mean what they say. What they say means something else, something about themselves which they do not have

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Introduction

control over. Thus, irony points to the instability of language itself, and it thrives on this instability—both in relation to intention and origin of speech, and in relation to the arbitrary nature of the sign. The final chapter is an analysis of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, called “The Collapse of the Democratic Speech Space: Glengarry Glen Ross and the Processes of Reification.” This chapter investigates voice in the context of postmodernity, where the concept of reification is at the centre. Voice is highly valued for its ability to communicate, and voice is nothing if it is not heard. Communication and understanding seem to be the goal of having a voice. Therefore, the question is whether or not the notion of communication is another ideological fix that cannot be upheld, at least not in postmodernity, where reification has invaded not only the subject, but also voice and communication. The conclusion, “Negotiating Voice: The End,” is not really a conclusion in the proper sense. I regard this chapter as an attempt to redeem the harsh, critical approach to voice characteristic of the other chapters by trying to negotiate other ways of perceiving voice in drama. In this new approach, I make short, interpretative attempts at understanding voice in certain dramas that possibly find a way to make voice uphold its promise to empower subjects—in particular, marginalized and oppressed subjects. I do this by studying the two dramas: for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange and Dutchman by Amiri Baraka.

CHAPTER ONE THE DRAMATIC VOICE: TEXT AND PERFORMANCE

[…] in giving his name, God also appealed to translation, not only between the tongues that had suddenly become multiple and confused, but first of his name, of the name he had proclaimed, given, and which should be translated as confusion to be understood, hence to let it be understood that it is difficult to translate and so to understand. —Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel” What is obvious is in a certain sense made incomprehensible, but this is only in order that it may then be made all the easier to comprehend. —Brecht, Brecht on Theatre

It seems fairly uncontroversial to say that voice is central to the dramatic production. But the question is, what is the relation between writing and performance when talking about voice? To understand the relation between the two, it is important to understand the actual transition. In this chapter, I will use translation theory to understand this transition. Furthermore, I will connect these theories of translation to theories of writing as well as theories of embodiment and corporeality to further unravel the relation between text and performance when discussing voice. Translation is not only a concept describing the transition from an original text to a translated copy, but also it theorizes the relation between the two in intricate ways.

Translation, origin, and the subject Traditional theories of translation set up a rather straightforward relation between translation and origin whereby the translation is seen as a copy of the original, albeit a copy with literary merits in its own right. In such theories, the focus is always on the original text because it is the original text which needs to be reconstructed in the translation. In this theoretical

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Chapter One

setup, a translation is always a failure, in that it is always secondary and derivative. It is this view of translation that Walter Benjamin tries to revisualize in “The Task of the Translator.” Benjamin’s reconstruction is not an attempt to make translation possible in the traditional sense (as in avoiding failure), but rather, it is a way to theorize failure and the impossibility of translation as such, so as to envision a new relation between the original and translation. As Paul de Man explains in “Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’” “the question then becomes why this failure with regard to an original text, to an original poet, is for Benjamin exemplary” (de Man 1986, 80). In his reconstruction of Benjamin’s text, de Man argues that “the translator has to give up in relation to the task of refinding what was there in the original” (de Man 1986, 80). This is a way to re-theorize both translation as a practical operation and the translator with his or her task. As we shall see, the translation of voice highlights these problems given that voice is a key to the construction of origin in theories of translation. One of the foundations of traditional literary theory is that a literary text is a form of communication where an author communicates intentional content to its reader. As Derrida explains in “Signature Event Context,” meaning, the content of the semantic message, is thus transmitted, communicated, by different means, by technically more powerful mediations, over a much greater distance, but within a milieu that is fundamentally continuous and equal to itself, within a homogenous element across which the unity and integrity of meaning is not affected in an essential way. Here, all affection is accidental. (Derrida 1982, 311 emphasis in original)

With this view of language, the semantic content of a message constitutes the communication. The ways to communicate are many, but they are always secondary to the content, which always stays intact. The content prevails despite the variety of communication means. This is due to one guarantor—the producer of the communication content—that is, the subject uttering an utterance. Thus, voice and subjectivity interact in ways where one functions as a guarantor for the other, reciprocally. The meaning of what is uttered is guaranteed by the idea of an autonomous thinking subject whose intention is communicated (voiced), and the construction of such a subject is made from the meaning of what is uttered (voiced). Meaning, in this sense, becomes extralinguistic in that it remains unaltered no matter what the language, linguistic form, communication strategy, or representational technique. The stability given to the idea of

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content is dependent on its foundation in an autonomous subject whose intention guarantees the stability of what is said. In the case of a literary text, that producer or utterer would be the author. In this classical theoretical setup, the task of the translator is to get at the semantic content and translate it without alteration (or at least as little alteration as possible), thus keeping the author’s voice (and intention) intact. This idea of communication presupposes what Derrida calls the “simplicity of origin,” “continuity between varieties,” and “homogeneity” (Derrida 1982, 311), an idea which will be questioned and probed throughout this chapter. This communication model points to concepts which are fundamental to translation and which are my focus: communication, meaning, origin and voice. In many ways, voice is the guarantee that the others function. Voice guarantees that there is a situation of communication (what Derrida in “Signature Event Context” calls a “context”) and that the words spoken have meaning. This is guaranteed by the existence of a speaking subject whose existence is presumed from what has been said. The subject (through voice) functions as the origin of what is uttered, which situates the entire utterance. In the communicative act, there is logic grounded in the subject which argues that “If men write it is (1) because they have something to communicate; (2) because what they have to communicate is their ‘thought,’ their ‘ideas,’ their representations” (Derrida 1982, 312). When this structure is applied to literature, the utterance or communicative content refers to the literary text (or in this case, the play). The sender, whose voice is transmitted through the artwork, is the author, and the receiver is the reader who reads and understands the utterance, in this case, via the form of a literary text. The idea of voice is left intact thanks to this communicative model. Benjamin, however, argues that translation has nothing to do with the communication of meaning or the communication of semantic content. Thus, a translator’s main task is not to reconstruct the meaning or content supposedly communicated in the original by the author. This task, on the contrary, is the “hallmark of bad translations” (Benjamin 1999, 70). It is a complete misunderstanding of the task of the translator, according to Benjamin. Rather, Benjamin argues that translation is marked by language, by form. The very starting point in Benjamin’s text is to question translation as a way of transmitting the meaning or content of a literary text: “For what does a literary work ‘say’? What does it communicate? It ‘tells’ very little to those who understand it. Its essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information” (Benjamin, 1999, 70). Benjamin’s axiom that translation has nothing to do with communication therefore breaks some fundamental tenets of not only translation, but also

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Chapter One

of literary theory. This is where Benjamin is highly radical. His definition of translation as “form” without intentional meaning “transplants the original into a more definite linguistic realm” (Benjamin 1999, 75). Benjamin’s theory of translation contains an embryo of a poststurctualist understanding of language in its insistence on form. His theory of translation thus evokes a non-innocent view of language because translation in no way centres on meaning as an extra-linguistic category. In this view, translation is a reminder that all we have is language, and no “outside” to rely on for meaning.

Intersemiotic translation So far, we have discussed translation in terms of the translation of texts. The question that must be raised when discussing drama is if a difference can be found between the translation of a text to another text and the translation of a text into a performance. Roman Jakobson speaks of three forms of translation: interlingual translation (“which interprets linguistic signs by means of some other language”), intralingual translation (“which interprets linguistic signs by means of other signs of the same language”) and intersemiotic translation (“which interprets linguistic signs by means of systems of non-linguistic signs”) (Derrida 1985,173). Jakobson’s differentiation between the three kinds of translation is interesting because of the implications inherent in such a separation, and Derrida also discusses this in “Des Tours de Babel.” The logic guiding Jakobson’s argument, according to Derrida, is the idea that “proper,” interlingual translation needs little explication. Derrida grounds this argument on that the other two kinds of translation (intralingual and intersemiotic translation) need translating to be understood. In Jakobson’s text, intralingual translation is also called “rewording,” and intersemiotic translation is called “transmutation.” However, proper translation needs no translation because Jakobson assumes that this relation is natural and uncomplicated. He supposes that it [interlingual translation] is not necessary to translate; everyone understands what that means because everyone had experienced it, everyone is expected to know what is a language, the relation of one language to another and especially identity or difference in fact of language. (Derrida 1985, 174)

Implied in this argument is the assumption that language as such is welldefined, contained, and stable, and the transition between two languages is, therefore, uncomplicated. It would seem that the other two kinds of

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translation, in some sense, are less natural and uncomplicated; hence, Jakobson’s need to translate them. However, as shown in the previous section, such a notion is something that Derrida (with Benjamin and de Man) questions. Consequently, Derrida would argue that the commonsensical belief that interlingual translation needs no translation is naive. Rather, the two other forms of translation, and their need for translation, point to a set of problems inherent in all forms of translation. Furthermore, Derrida argues that this points to an ambiguity inherent in language itself. Interestingly, the form of translation that I deal with here is precisely not interlingual (proper) translation, but rather, intralingual and intersemiotic translation. What I want to make clear is the connection between translation, as it is laid out above, and voice in drama, which is my focus for this book. It is not about translation in Jakobson’s “proper” sense, but rather, what we have is intralingual translation—translation within the same language. In this way, translation in drama and performance shows Derrida’s point that all forms of linguistic interaction are a form of translation, even within the same language. The reason for this is that language is not a stable entity; it needs constant translation to be understood. This is made clear in the translation from text to performance in drama—a transition which is in no sense stable, constant, or reliable even if the language is the same. Secondly, the translation of voice in drama is also a form of intersemiotic translation in that it also involves different forms of signs. In the transition from text to performance, the body of the actor is part of the translation itself in the form of gestures, movement, visual appearance, physiognomy, vocal tone, pitch, dialect, et cetera. However, the two forms of translation are not as separate or distinct as Jakobson makes it seem. One significant aspect when discussing voice in the translation of drama is the function of embodiment. Embodiment is central to dramatic translation in that, in the transition, voice is given an actual body. If we compare textual voices to the voices produced in a performance, the latter is (or is seemingly) more material, more corporeal, and perhaps more “truly” vocal. The issue then becomes understanding the ways in which embodiment affects the translation, and as a result, also affects the production of meaning, the stability of signification, the origin of the utterances produced, and the solidity of subjectivity. The question is if embodiment brings stability to voice and hence also to writing, language, and the production of meaning due to its connection to materiality. The dichotomy of mind and body is crucial to this discussion of embodiment because in classical philosophy, the body is placed firmly in the sphere of materiality, as opposed to metaphysics. Placing the body in

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this context immediately places it in a complex history with complex philosophical implications and political effects. However, without attempting to make an extensive philosophical exposition on the relation between mind and body, metaphysics and materiality, it can generally (and in sweeping terms) be said that the body as materiality is firmly placed on the downside (or perhaps the dark side) of the world, mainly because of philosophy’s resolve to uphold the metaphysical and the transcendental. The connection between body and materiality has, therefore, been a way to undervalue the importance of the body in the construction of the subject. This understanding is by no means politically innocent, but has had consequences in historical constructions of gender, race, and class. This is why most political theories that have engaged in this dichotomized construct have tried to resolve or find a way out of the mind–body construction. 2 However, the body as a theoretical and philosophical construct has also enjoyed continual appreciation. The historical and philosophical disqualification of the body has given it value precisely for its oppositionality. Many feminist theorists, for instance, in an attempt to reconstruct the concept of woman, have endorsed materiality and the body. The body is then valued because its materiality positions it outside ideological, hegemonic formations. As such, the body is seen as something we as subjects have a direct and authentic relation to. In such theories, the body becomes a positive definition used to redefine subjectivity, individuality, and identity.3 What becomes clear when discussing voice in general and voice in drama more specifically is that body and materiality play a major role. However, to understand (or at least strive to understand) the ways in which voice plays on materiality and embodiment in drama, it is important to recognize poststructuralist theories of language given that such theories have formed a comprehensive critique of voice (and hence of embodiment, presence, and subjectivity). Richard Aczel puts this critique of voice quite succinctly, even if he is unfairly dismissive of those theories: Voice, conceived as origin, as pure self-presence, has, for some thirty years, figured as the bugbear of a whole species of literary and critical theory. From Jacques Derrida’s anxieties about “the privilege of the phone” in Speech and Phenomena and the subsequent project of “grammatology” to subvert the hegemony of speech over writing, through Roland Barthes’s apodeictic “writing is the destruction of every voice,” to Andrew Gibson’s criticism in Towards a Poststructuralist Theory of Narrative of the hankering after “presence as source and origin” that informs the concept of narrative voice, voice has been the stand-up infidel of poststructuralism’s crusade against the “metaphysics of presence” that has apparently dominate Western thought since Plato. (Aczel 2001, 598)

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What Derrida turns against is a view of voice as a guarantor of human presence: Derrida equates the “epoch of the phone” with the “epoch of being in the form of presence, that is, of ideality” and identifies “an unfailing complicity between idealization and speech (voix)” in so far as the “signifier, animated by my breath and by the meaning-intention . . . is in absolute proximity to me.” (Aczel 2001, 598–599)

As discussed previously in this chapter, poststructuralist theories of language as “writing” dismantle the subject as the originator of language, and instead, pose a view of language as “différance, the combined operation of both differing and deferring, which ‘at one and the same time both fissures and retards presence, submitting it simultaneously to primordial division and delay’” (Derrida quoted in Aczel 2001, 599). Contrary to traditional literary criticism, the poststructuralists claim that meaning is generated only in negative terms; for example, a sign gets its meaning only in relation to other signs, and a text gets its meaning only in relation to other texts. Thus, meaning is not something that is produced inside the subject. Such a comprehensive critique comes to matter in specific ways when discussing voice in drama.

Voice as text Voice holds a special position in Western philosophy and Western culture. It is a concept which has explained and organized such vastly metaphysical ideas as origin, presence, subjectivity, individuality, identity, meaning, and communication. As such a concept, voice has also been central for analysing texts.4 Literary theory has managed to sidestep the inherent silence of the text with the idea of voice. By arguing that voice exists in texts, the idea of human presence is retained—even when it is blatantly absent. According to Andrew Gibson, in literary theory, voice has “long ago worked free of any material reference,” which means that literary critics “have more or less tacitly continued to associate it with human presences, a humanistic construction of experience or familiar humanist values” (Gibson 2001a, 640). Narratology, which aims to systematize the ways in which a narrative operates as a text, uses voice as one of its central concepts in ways that display its usefulness. Gerard Genette designates a whole chapter in Narrative Discourse to voice and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan does the same in Narrative Fiction (as do most introductions to narration following in the footsteps of Gerard Genette’s classic text). In their textual universe, voice

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is used to explain who tells the story by means of different levels of narration. As Gibson puts it, voice is the “‘fixed point’ or center within narrative theory” (Gibson 2001a, 641). Also, Searle and Austin’s theories on speech acts are central to this insistence on voice in text and is frequently used in the study of novels, short stories, drama, and poetry. All their theories are based on the presence of a speaking subject who is responsible for the utterances produced. As we shall see, also this communication model, in many ways, clashes with poststructuralist theories of literature-as-writing. What does it then mean to say that voices speak in texts? Is it even possible to say that a reader can hear those voices in the texts? In a special issue of New Literary History, Monika Fludernik, Andrew Gibson, Richard Aczel, Manfred Jahn, and Brian Richardson debate this question in depth. On a fundamental level, all critics acknowledge that it is indeed irrational to claim such a thing. In his article, Andrew Gibson argues, Literary art is the tomb of speech. It may pervasively mimic speech, may serve as a memorial to, record of, or testimony to speech or words spoken. That does not crucially change matter. To Roland Barthes’s famous question as to who speaks in the text, the answer, it would seem, is no one, ever. (Gibson 2001a, 640)

One “hears” nothing when reading because no one is actually speaking. In his article, Richard Aczel attempts to salvage voice from poststructuralism’s deconstruction of it by arguing for a “reader-oriented understanding of voice,” which he sees as “a fruitful response to the critical anxieties of deconstruction concerning voice” (Aczel 2001, 598). In his recuperation of voice, Aczel sees voice as a “historically situated event” of hearing, produced by a reader’s dialogue with “quoted speech styles” (Aczel 2001, 605). In his reformulation of voice, it becomes pressingly clear that such a voice is a far cry from what traditionally designates voice. All critics seem to agree that there can be no voice in texts, but rather, voice is, in Fludernik’s terms, an interpretative move where a textual signifier is reconstructed into voice to make the speaking voice guarantee the meaning of the text by means of a coherent, speaking subject. Voice is then a meaning–effect created by the reader and quite different from the embodied voice attributed to a human presence. Voice is then, by necessity, something else: “Insofar as the term ‘voice’ is used to designate any feature of literary narrative, when its status is neither linguistic nor technical, that status is at once metaphorical” (Gibson 2001a, 640). This means that despite this idea of a reconstruction of the textual signifier into voice, texts cannot produce voice; they cannot speak, for practical, as well

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as theoretical reasons. Texts are silent—the black marks on the page remain voiceless marks of signification. Why then, do literary critics continue to insist on voice in literary texts? Especially when texts cannot guarantee a human or a speaking subject given that text, as writing, is characterized precisely by the absence of such groundings. A clear anxiety concerning the origin of linguistic utterances can be found in much literary theory and language philosophy, and voice seems to be a construction masking, or alleviating, this anxiety. Rather than being a descriptive term, voice is a concept that produces a seemingly failsafe (and naturalized) connection between language, subjectivity, and meaning. As Gibson puts it, “There is apparently no disputing the audibility of mediation as a guarantee of full presence” (Gibson 2001a, 642). The way that voice upholds the idea of presence and keeps difference at bay is by way of the practice of attribution, that is, by attributing each utterance to a speaking subject. In textual analysis, the practice of attributing each textual segment to a subject is central. The utterances produced in a text become controlled and regulated by the construction of a subject uttering them, even if that “voice” and that subjective presence is metaphorical at best. Such a metaphorical voice nonetheless vouches for a stable theory of language based on an uncomplicated communication model. Narratology is the literary method which has most systematically grappled with the idea of attribution. It does this by structurally classifying the narrative text (the words on the page) into different voices. By sustaining the idea of voice in this otherwise technical approach to literature (what Gibson calls the “narratological ‘technology of narrative’”), it reinstates “‘life in literature’ in ‘ghostly’ form,” (Gibson 2001a, 643). And this “life in literature” is indeed characterized by “a particular valuation of reason, the conscious will, the self-identity of consciousness, the certitude and unity of inner existence,” that is, by a valuation of human presence. This human presence, in turn, “has held the specters of difference and non-presence at bay” (Gibson 2001a, 642). The way in which the narratologist goes about attribution is to divide the text into narrative levels, with each level having its own narrative voice. The most accessible voices in a text are the voices within the diegesis, that is, the voices of the characters. However, the most fundamental voice in a text, according to narratology, is not the ones who are speaking within the story (the characters), but the one telling the story. This voice establishes “the way in which the narrating itself is implicated in the narrative” (Genette quoted in Fludernik 2001a, 619). Who this teller

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is continues to be a major debate in literary theory. The idea of the author has long dominated literary criticism and is still a viable construct in literary theory. However, after poststructuralism and Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” the author has been seriously dismantled. Nevertheless, narratologists argue for a teller inherent in the text. Thus, within narratology today, the narrator is construed as the textual speaker of the story. The author is retained (in some narrative theory) in reconstructed form as the implied author—and thus functions as a guarantor of the work as a whole (its gist and core meaning). However, the main point is that each utterance (word, sentence, section) needs a distinct origin to whom it can be attributed. For most narratologists, the narrator and the construction of distinct narrative levels (extradiegetic, intradiegetic, hypodiegetic narrative levels) fulfils this need. Moreover, the narrator retains his or her “humanity” by being ascribed a voice. It is interesting to see that narratologists in their categorization of voice in narration, produce a gradation of voice in the name of mimesis. Fludernik claims that Genette “fails to take into account the mimetic illusion generated by the ‘voice’ factor” (Fludernik, 2001a, 623), and hence, fails to analyse how voice is to uphold the idea of mimesis. In her theory, she sees the practice of attribution as a strategy of narrativization. It serves a mimetic interest since the attribution of linguistic material to characters or narrators is subtended by a mimetic concept of the narrative text: the text is supposed to represent a fictional world, and—to the extent that such a world is being evoked—the reader will start to clothe the dramatis personae with bodies, minds, opinions, linguistic idiosyncracies—with speech in all its physiological and ideational qualities. (Fludernik 2001b, 708)

Thus, attribution becomes a way to construct voice, presence, and subjectivity out of words on the page. The literary form that most upholds mimesis in regard to voice is the mimetic text that foregrounds the voices of the characters. “Showing” in the classical literary sense, means “hearing” those voices “unmediated,” producing an “illusion of immediacy” (Fludernik 2001, 623). This illusion is what generates the strongest impression of voice in a text. From the perspective of voice, the narrator is more problematic in that he represents the very act of narrating itself, exposing the metalevel of the narrative. This means that the narrator fictionalizes, and thus distances, the voices in the story. However, despite this inconvenience, the narrator is nonetheless made to fit the constructions of voice by narratologists. An intradiegetic, homodiegetic narrator can be argued to have a voice in that

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the narrator is given presence, subjectivity, and identity in the text in accordance with the characters’ voices. An extradiegetic, heterodiegetic, and overt narrator is more problematic. Such a narrator can be argued to have a voice of some sort, but with no proper body or presence, which makes it difficult to accommodate such a voice even in the most metaphorical sense of the word. The most problematic narrative form in terms of the application of voice would be an extradiegetic, heterodiegetic, covert, or absent narrator (the same kind of mimetic narration described above). Although such narration foregrounds the voices of the characters, narratologists are more concerned with the central idea of a voice “telling” the story. That the characters’ voices are present or foregrounded in this kind of narration is a given; however, the debate concerning whether or not the narrator (as the “teller” of the story) is covert or absent in mimetic texts continues: Genette on principle denies the possibility of a text without a speaker (or narrator), a stance that can be rejected on the basis of redefinitions of the term narrator. In texts that do not display linguistic markers signalling the presence of a speaker (I, deictic elements, expressive markers, stylistic foregrounding), the presence of a narrator is merely implicit, “covert.” Here, according to my own proposals, the insistence on the presence of a speaker constitutes an interpretative move, in which the reader concludes from the presence of a narrative discourse that somebody must be narrating the story and that therefore there must be a hidden narrator (or narrative voice) in the text. (Fludernik 2001a, 622 emphasis in original)

Even when a text is purely mimetic, where diegetic narration is altogether missing, the idea of the narrator is retained on the grounds that somebody must be telling the story. This means that even when the narrator is absent, he is construed as covert. In Literary History, Fludernik and Aczel both discuss the role of the narrator and what they call the “reflector mode.” The question they raise is whether or not there is such a thing as a “pure” reflector mode where the narrator is presumed absent, or whether, a narrator must be presumed in all narrative forms. In his article, Aczel claims that the narrator is present in all form of narration, at least in the form of stylization, diction, and rhetoric. Fludernik, on the other hand, argues that the minimal requirement for naming something “voice” is the existence of expressive markers in the text. This means that she questions the existence of a narrative voice in literary forms that lack such expressive markers. She argues that the insistence that somebody must be telling the story relies on a communicative model that is quite unfitting to a literary narrative and

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where the ultimate teller of the story always ends up being the author: “Nothing demonstrates as clearly the weakness of the communicational thesis as this constraint to find a narrator’s voice behind the linguistic surface structure, to impute existence to a fact of diction” (Fludernik 2001a, 622).5 Contrary to literary theory’s concerned preoccupation with voice, drama theory has had a fairly unproblematic approach to voice. This is because drama theory is formed around the idea that the dramatic text incorporates the performance, wherein voice will be embodied. This approach to voice as naturally embodied is also made possible by the play’s typographic layout. Attribution in the dramatic text is a straightforward affair because each utterance is given a clear designation, that is, a name that pinpoints the utterance. In a dramatic text, you always have the name first (often capitalized, italicized, or marked in some way), and then the words spoken by the character follow. This layout generates the impression of unmediated, speaking subjects to whom the textual utterances can be attributed at all times, thus avoiding any anxiety concerning origin and presence. In this way, the dramatic text also more clearly envisions embodied communication in that each utterance is allocated a human presence (even if that presence in this dramatic expression is still disembodied). Thus, a communication model seems to be effortlessly applied to the dramatic text, downplaying any anxiety concerning origin, presence, and the unruly processes of signification. Dramatic theory’s focus on the performative aspects of drama has prompted Keir Elam to compare dialogue in drama to real conversation rather than to literary narration such as novels. In his book, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Elam argues that dramatic discourse is ordered and controlled, in that it is characterized by proper turn-taking, complete sentences, and a coherent narrative order. Such order and control is lacking in everyday conversation, which abounds with cut-off sentences, digressions, interventions, et cetera. Although this is an accurate observation, my analysis of drama is somewhat different. In my line of reasoning, what gives a sense of control and stabilization when it comes to voice is the ability to connect what is said to a speaking subject. Such a connection is routine in everyday conversation because of the bodily presence of the subject and a body creating an utterance. A text, on the other hand, is characterized by the lack of such bodily presence and origin, which in turn, gives the sense of a lack of such control. This difference in focus produces two different views of what produces order and control in dramatic dialogue (and in other texts) and embodied conversation, which drama spans from text through to performance. I would argue that the

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seeming lack of order in everyday conversation is downplayed by the security given by the bodily presence of the speaker (which grounds the utterance in a subject), whereas the orderliness characterizing textual dialogue (taking turns, speaking in coherent complete sentences, causality, et cetera) is undermined by the uncertainty rendered by the lack of such bodily presence (making language into an unstable and uncontrollable signification process). This focus on voice further emphasizes the idea that drama consists only of the characters’ voices—that it is performative, and not narrative, in its structure. Aristotle argues that drama is not a narrative because of its component of “spectacle,” which is specific only to drama. However, as Seymour Chatman argues, spectacle is “an element of the actualization of stories, and not one of the underlying components of narrative structure” (Chatman 1990, 109). In Narrative Discourse Revisited, Gerard Genette treats dramatic fiction as inherently different from narrative fiction, arguing that there is a “truly insurmountable opposition between dramatic representation and narrative” (Genette 1988, 41). The difference, according to Genette, lies in the fact that a drama is mimetic and narrative is diegetic, which means that narrative fiction is conveyed by “a verbal representation” (Genette 1988, 41), something that is missing in drama (being in itself performative). This means that, contrary to narrative fiction, drama is analysed as lacking a narrator (a narrative presence, a narrative voice). Genette argues that drama is performed and is therefore not told by anyone. Such a construction is crucial for the illusion of voice as origin and presence. However, in more recent years, narratologists have attempted to understand drama in terms of narrative. In his article, “Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratology of Drama,” Manfred Jahn clearly places drama within the narrative genre, but argues that it has two expressions—written and performed—which he demonstrates with an illustrative diagram. The question he raises is if drama, in its textual expression, “admits of the narratological concepts of a narrating instance or a narrative voice” (Jahn 2001a, 660). The overriding question is whether a film or a play contains a discourse level if that level entails a “teller” of the story. What Jahn argues is that films and plays do contain a “teller.” He discusses drama in close relation to theories on mimetic narratives, where the narrator is not seen as absent, but maximally covert. The question raised is if one can, or should, presume a narrator telling the drama as in mimetic fiction even if that narrator has more of an “impersonal, covert show-er or arranger function” (Jahn 2001a, 670) than a traditional narrator.

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The question raised is if we can imagine a text without voice. Monika Fludernik openly asks: If we can say that there is no need of a narrator persona because we are only invoking a speaker persona where there is none, then the same argument might be proffered for voice (and for focalization). We do not have any theoretical reason for assuming that certain words are indicative of a narrator’s voice, or a character’s. The text is language, but it is not a tape recording. Attributions of voice are interpretative moves. (Fludernik 2001a, 635-636)

Thus, she concludes that “this may be the point at which the usefulness of the narratological concept of voice is exhausted” (Fludernik 2001a, 636). At the same time, the most sceptical writer on voice in literary texts discussed here, Andrew Gibson, asks whether it is currently possible to think narrative without thinking voice. Do we know how to attend to the muteness of narrative, how not to hear it? To suggest that the term “voice” is always a metaphor is not ipso facto to diminish its power, or that of the discourses for which it is significant. (Gibson 2001a, 643 emphasis in original)

In Coming to Terms, Seymour Chatman attempts to find a way of talking of mimetic narration which involves the discourse level without relapsing back to an idea of voice, and with voice, human presence as the foundation of all narratives. What Chatman does is widen the idea of a narrative to include the concept of “showing”: “If ‘to narrate’ is too fraught with vocal overtones, we might adopt ‘to present’ as a useful superordinate” (Chatman 1990, 113). He goes on to argue: “To ‘show’ a narrative, I maintain, no less than to ‘tell’ it, is to ‘present it narratively’ or to ‘narrate’ it” (Chatman 1990, 113). Important for Chatman’s inclusion of “showing” as well as “telling” as the basis of narrative is that he takes away the conceptually fundamental idea of human presence: “This allows for the recognition of a kind of narration that is not performed by a recognizably human agency. I argue that human personality is not a sine qua non for narratorhood” (Chatman 1990, 115). Chatman’s argument implies a couple of things. Firstly, that voice is not the only way to narrate. Secondly, it implies that the idea of human presence is not fundamental to narration. And thirdly, with this move, he widens the idea of narration to include other forms than traditionally supposed. Hence, Seymour Chatman argues that drama is indeed a form of narrative “at least in the sense that it is based, like epic, on that component of narrative which we call ‘story’” (Chatman 1990, 109), and that ‘story’

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merely implies “a series of connected events, and that property is shared by both drama and epic” (Chatman 1990, 110). He further argues that there are differences between an epic and a drama in that dramas have a different actualization. But, he claims, “there is no great difference between the structure of the ‘what,’ the story component told by epics and enacted by dramas” (Chatman 1990, 110). He further claims that “plays and novels share the common features of a chrono-logic of events, a set of characters, and a setting. Therefore, at a fundamental level they are all stories. The fact that one kind of story is told (diegesis) and the other shown (mimesis) is secondary” (Chatman 1990, 117). In accordance with his argument concerning mimetic narration, in which he widens the concept of narration to include “presenting” or “showing” the story rather than just “telling” it, a drama is narrative in that it is “presented” to us. Further, this presenter need not be conceived as human or present in the sense invoked by the concept of voice. This, I think, is the proper answer to theorists sceptical of analogies between the presentation of stories by the performing arts that favour mimesis (stage, cinema) and by the discursive arts that favour diegesis (literature). Film and other performative media often have nothing like a narrative voice, no “tell-er.” (Chatman 1990, 113)

In the end, all critics seem to agree that voice is impossible in texts, and that they can only exist metaphorically, as an illusion or as a meaningeffect. They also seem to agree that “the voice metaphor is virtually a ‘metaphor we live by’ (to use Lakoff and Johnson’s title phrase), and it would be foolish to toss it overboard for the sake of some ill-conceived notion of theoretical purity” (Jahn, 2001b, 695). However, Fludernik’s concluding argument seems to side-step this theoretical dilemma: “The latter attitude [deconstruction] tends to have the awkward consequence of being true but not very helpful in a given situation, whereas the former [congnitivist] may not quite meet the standards or vigorous philosophical enquiry. But what the heck, it works!” (Fludernik 2001b, 110). Narratology and literary theory need to take this inherent illogicality seriously. With the concept of voice, literary theory generally and narratology specifically “continually seek[s] to restore the sense of a human presence whose loss or distance is in fact its own founding condition” (Gibson 2001b, 711). Gibson’s suggestion “would be that the concept of narrative voice can neither be taken on trust nor simply dispensed with” (Gibson 2001a, 647). Therefore, a working question for literary critics is of “how to work with ghosts. In Derrida’s terms, it is a question of choice: which part or parts of the ghostly legacy remain useful,

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and how might they be most effectively deployed?” (Gibson 2001a, 644). In many ways, this double-bind characterizes my study of voice in this book.

Voice as embodiment In the previous section, I problematized the idea that a text can produce voice—even dramatic voices. Having stated this, the transition from text to performance implies some form of embodiment of the utterances produced, which without doubt, brings voice into play. We have a proper speaker (the actor), and thus, we can trace the origin of voice to a material body. In this, we get the physical properties necessary for “really” speaking about voice. This is why a rather commonsensical, naturalized understanding of voice is readily at hand in the interpretation of performances, as we shall see. This is visible in the production of theatre. The way voice is treated in, for example, handbooks for actors, there is a practical understanding of voice as a bodily phenomenon.6 David Zinder, in his book, Body Voice Imagination, argues that voice “is the product of the moving body” (Zinder 2002, 4) and that an actor needs to focus first on the body (the physical) and then the vocal in order to reach the verbal (which I assume is both spoken language and the dramatic text conflated into one). This is a trajectory that clearly situates voice in the body, in the physical, material, and practical, rather than in the metaphysical, linguistic, or ideological. J. Clifford Turner’s book, Voice and Speech in the Theatre, also explicitly focuses on the body by explicating the various bodily organs that are involved in the production of voice. The order of occurrence may now be grasped visually. The breath is seen to be the foundation upon which utterance is built. The first modification of the breath occurs when the vibrating vocal cords cut up the breath stream and in so doing form the note. The whole resonator then modifies the note and imparts tone. The shapes the resonator assumes, and the articulatory movements it makes, modify the tone. Speech, then, is the result of a whole chain of interrelated events. It is heard in perfection only when harmony exists between them, and only then will the instrument respond with subtlety and sensitivity to the intention of the actor. (Turner 2000, 6)

This run-through is a nice reminder that voice is a process produced by a number of organs that we think little about.

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Why, then, are these kinds of descriptions of voice problematic? There is little doubt that voice is a product of our bodily organs. Therefore, it is not the focus on the body itself that is problematic, but the philosophical and ideological implications centred on such a use of the body. The books that focus on voice as body do not do so innocently. When unproblematically fixing voice to a speaking body, such theorists inadvertently talk of voice as expressing a person’s inner self. This is clearly the case when Nan Withers-Wilson argues in Vocal Direction for the Theatre that “an individual’s speaking voice is an aural autobiography” (Withers-Wilson 1993, xiii). Voice becomes not only a bodily phenomenon, but also a mark of interiority in a non-reflective sense. Voice becomes a vehicle for a person’s individual thoughts and experiences: “Thought and feeling must now be considered to be one with articulation” (Turner 2000, 129). The books focus on what the performer or actor must do to genuinely produce and convey this interiority through his or her voice, “communicating to the audience the character’s identity, thoughts, feelings, and relationships” (Withers-Wilson 1993, xiii). Further, the books teach you how to control your bodily organs to make them produce interiority, subjectivity, and identity. This is clearly a way of reinforcing the line between subject, voice, and language without theorizing their relation. A passage by J. Clifford Turner encompasses many of the issues that need explication: The actor is the link between the dramatist and the audience. The voice is the means by which the dramatist’s work is bodied forth, and is the main channel along which thought and feeling are to flow. The voice, in fact, is an instrument, a highly specialized instrument, which is activated and played upon by the actor’s intelligence and feeling, both of which have been stimulated by the imaginative power he or she is able to bring to bear upon the dramatist’s creation. The actor not only has a most rigorous standard of integrity to which he or she must adhere, but bears a definite responsibility to the dramatist, the director, fellow actors, and the audience. (Turner 2000, 2)

The first issue is the accepted idea that voice is a vehicle for interiority (thought, feeling, experience, imagination). The other is the unproblematized transition from text to performance built upon this notion of voice. Although their focus is on voice as a bodily phenomenon, these critics inadvertently move into a sphere where voice gains metaphorical status beyond the body, and this move needs further critical study. Their focus on voice-as-body (and, in turn, as interiority and subjectivity) alleviates the instability inherent in the concept itself. A commonsensical view of voiceas-body overlooks the set of problems presented by the poststructuralist theories of language presented above.

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My starting point for this critical investigation into voice and embodiment is the book, The Voice in Cinema, by Michel Chion, which is a theoretical investigation of voice in cinema. Its theoretical perspective brings up many crucial assumptions about voice that highlight this ambiguity. One of Chion’s axioms is that we live in a world grounded in “vococentrism,” something which becomes clear in cinematic representations of voice: “In actual movies, for real spectators, there are not all the sounds including the human voice. There are voices, and then everything else. In other words, in every audio mix, the presence of a human voice instantly sets up a hierarchy of perception” (Chion 1999, 5 emphasis in the original). This means that the human voice controls and organizes the space in which it appears—auditorily, as well as visually. But Chion’s term, vococentrism, has larger implications than that. Vococentrism brings up an interesting aspect of Derrida’s logocentrism in that vococentrism is concerned specifically with voice rather than merely the word. The term clearly demonstrates how the power of the logos (grounded in conceptions of a rational relation between the word and its content) is derived from a concept of voice that puts the individual at the centre of its construct. Thus, it is built on the assumption that an individual has the ability to intuitively grasp the connection between word and content by means of his or her consciousness (his or her mind). Therefore, in the humanist concept of voice, in practicable ways, it signifies both logocentrism and individualism. However, this is a construction riddled with uncertainties. With some help from Chion, I hope to refigure this concept of voice by using deconstructionist ideas about language and constructionist ideas about embodiment and make the two clearly interact in productive ways. Thus, like Derrida’s critique of logocentrism, this is a critique of vococentrism— a critique that is indebted to both Derrida and Chion. This means a slight shift of focus when it comes to the politics of voice where voice is no longer a simple guarantor of political action, but where a critique of voice might politically intervene in dominant ideology. Thus, Chion’s starting point, like mine, is that vococentrism (and logocentrism) is a strong illusion which forms our ideology of individualism and humanism. This illusion is powerful, but has its cracks, as we shall see. The fundamental axiom in this ideology is the idea that voice must have its origin in a body. Real embodiment comes only with the simultaneous presentation of the visible body with the audible voice, a way for the body to swear “this is my voice” and for the voice to swear “this is my body.” It must be a kind of marriage with a contract, consecrating the bonding of the voice to the habitat of the body […]. (Chion 1999 144)

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In the movies, Chion argues, this is best exemplified by the insistence on synchronous sound. Synchronous sound means that every vocal sound must be localized to a speaking body. Thus, synchronization becomes “a sort of guarantee that we’re in the real world” (Chion 1999, 128) and gives the voice a source, or rather, as Chion regards it, “seeing its source” (Chion 1999, 129) is what creates the illusion of speech as embodied and as individualized. Body is the origin that situates the voice and guarantees its function as a mark of interiority. The correlation between body and voice guides the whole aesthetic of filmmaking, especially in Hollywood movies. This synchronization, in turn, is what guarantees that the connection between voice (as language and body) and identity is upheld. Thus, with the use of synchronous sound, “[w]e are often given to believe, implicitly or explicitly, that the body and voice cohere in some self-evident, natural way” (Chion 1999, 126). This also means that it is possibly disturbing to have this aesthetic broken or disturbed, in situations where we get a voice without an image, for instance, or voices that do not synchronize with the bodies on the screen. Nonetheless, “if the person who’s speaking suddenly turns away from us, we’re not going to panic because we can’t verify the synchronism; we take it on faith that the voice we continue to hear continues to belong to the character. The process of ‘embodying’ a voice is not a mechanistic operation, but a symbolic one.” (Chion 1999, 129). Similarly, Metz argues that “the impression that someone is speaking is bound not to the empirical presence of a definite, known or knowable speaker but to the listener’s spontaneous perception of the linguistic nature of the object to which he is listening: because it is speech, someone must be speaking” (Metz quoted in Gibson 2001a, 649). This faith means that viewers have no problem with the constant mismatch between body and voice in the cinematic setup and take it for granted that every voice heard must be connected to a body. This is because voice would not be voice without a body. This profound faith, I would argue, is not only true of voice in cinema, but also perhaps even more so of theatre and dramatic performance. For this reason, voice is rarely acknowledged as a problematic concept, neither in theoretical discussions nor in narrative theory, film theory, or in dramatic or theatre theory. It seems that our notion of voice in everyday life, as well as in academic study, is rudimentary at best and naive at worst: “This is why people have written much more about film music and voiceover commentary than about so-called synchronous sounds, most often neglected unjustly for being ‘redundant’” (Chion 1999, 4). Synchronous sounds are seen as redundant and unimportant because they are transparent to us. This means that voice is something that we rarely

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question, critique, or even acknowledge. It is just there, taken as a natural given which guarantees our subjectivity, our materiality, and our control of language: “Of course the voice is there only to be forgotten in its materiality; only at this cost does it fill its primary function” (Chion 1999, 1). This function, I would argue, is to establish and substantiate the ideology of logocentrism and individualism. It is with its position as both body and language that voice can be said to function as, what Lacan calls objet petit a: “these part objects which may be fetishized and employed to ‘thingify difference’” (Chion 1999, 1). With its status as body and materiality, voice can bring seeming stability to a poststructuralist view of language as writing, as différance. In a brilliant formulation, Chion argues that synchronization (or the illusion of a natural connection between voice and body) “functions not so much to guarantee truth, but rather to authorize belief” (Chion 1999, 127). Chion describes this also as a “yearning for unity, and the cinema can show this yearning” rather than give any kind of real homogeneity or synchronicity (Chion 1999, 156).

Body as origin and writing What I have argued so far is that voice is theorized in two ways. Firstly, in relation to text and performance, and secondly, in relation to translation and embodiment, both of which are highly problematic. The first is connected to the classical notion of translation as a kind of copy of the original text. The original text in this construct is seen as stable and full, whereas the translation is an interpretation, and therefore, also unstable and a failure. This is because the original text is constructed as the voice of the author, where the author’s inner intentions are made manifest in the text. Transposed to the relation between text and performance, this means that the performance is incomplete, necessarily a failure in relation to the original text. The embodied performance is then partial and lacking, and the dramatic text complete. Embodiment is connected to materiality (in a negative sense) whereas the text represents transcendence and conceptuality. Many traditional (and traditionalist) theories on drama favour the text to the performance for this reason. However, such an assumption is incompatible with Benjamin’s and later poststructuralists’ theories on language. In poststructuralist theory, the original text loses its position as origin; instead, the text (and hence, the drama) is always already indebted to other texts, and therefore, never original. With such theories, the relation between origin and translation is reconfigured, and the translation becomes a mark of form rather than of

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(reconstructed and failed) content. The translation proves that the original is as marked by processes of signification (différance) which the subject producing the utterance (the author) cannot control. Thus, the original loses its power as being primary and singular. Drama and theatre theory logically draw upon this instability by means of theories of embodiment, and the corporeality of the performance may be constructed as a form of grounding of meaning, stabilizing the subject by means of voice. Thus, body becomes a way to envision a final grounding of the written processes of signification in actual subjects. It would seem that the possible embodiment of voices in plays thus limits the free play of the text and the anxiety concerning the lack of origin of voice. In several theories of drama, the performance is constructed as the realization of the text, where the performance becomes the “true” dramatic expression and not at all secondary or derivative. Performance is inherently part of drama, the latter being able to fully come into existence solely through a metamorphosis in time and space. Hence, performance is not an added bonus that can be dispensed with; it is an end in itself. This is true in two ways: on the one hand, drama is written to be performed, wherein lies its finality; on the other hand, performance constitutes an accomplishment, the moment during which drama finally reaches completion. (Henri Gouhier, quoted in Sarrazac 2002, 66)

This view is grounded in theories of voice and corporeality as a sort of fulfilment and presentification of the dramatic text, and where voice “brings words to life,” as Clifford Turner puts it (Turner 2000, 7). However, this position is problematic to uphold. The translation of voice as a restitution of the text’s proliferation of meaning is not possible precisely because the origin is not stable, something Paul de Man reminds us of: “Translation to the extent that it disarticulates the original, to the extent that it is pure language and is only concerned with language, gets drawn into what he [Benjamin] calls the bottomless depth, something essentially destructive, which is in language itself” (de Man 1986, 84). The question that burdens the argument about performance-as-completion is consequently what the performances supposedly embody, reconstruct, or complete. Derrida argues that the original from the start is no original. It signifies the already-written and the discursive. As a result, nothing is there to presentify, not even in drama, where voice in the very act of translation is given a material form. This materiality only gives false security. There is no presence, no stability of meaning. Every translation is a quotation of a text that is not original, but polysemic, disseminated. Thus, the body does

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not give the stability desired, longed for, or imagined. On the contrary, with the translation into embodiment, the whole construct becomes extremely volatile. As Chion argues, embodiment—the synchronization between voice and body—is also an illusion, albeit a powerful one. Thus, it is more of a yearning than a reality, and is also present in practical representations, as we shall see. In the cinema, there are constant mismatches that point to the unreliable and unstable correlation between voice and body. In Chion’s analysis, three clear points of mismatch in synchronization are found. The first is a form of doubling. In a situation where “an actor may be dubbing her own lips, or the lips of another” there is a doubling of voice which implies a mismatch in which the voice is not fixed to the body, but rather “loiters around the image like the voice around the body” (Chion 1999, 153). This situation implies that the original utterance is lost, and I would argue that, in the Derridean sense, it is absolutely absent. Chion argues that the original utterance cannot be forgotten, but exists as the absent present (like the Derridean trace) reminding us of the mismatch that can never be fixed. The second mismatch Chion mentions is playback. In many ways, this situation is reversed to the previous one, although the effect is the same. Playback implies that “it is the body that molds itself precisely to the voice, the image that is constructed to match the sound” (Chion 1999, 153). Nonetheless, this synchronization effect is clearly an illusion. The third erring synchronization that Chion takes up is the acousmetre, which is the form that he gives the most attention. “Acousmatic, specifies an old dictionary, ‘is said of a sound that is heard without it cause or source being seen’ ” (Chion 1999, 18). According to Chion, this is a clear transgression of the illusion of synchronicity. The acousmatic clearly points to the possibility of having voice without an origin, without embodiment. This makes the acousmetre feared, but also a powerful acoustic image which produces a sense of omniscience and ubiquity. The way that the cinema most often deals with the acousmetric voice is deacousmatization: “De-acousmatization roots the acousmetre to a place and says, ‘here is your body, you’ll be there, and not elsewhere’” (Chion 1999, 28). Having mentioned these three rather strong examples of mismatches in synchronization in cinema, it is not surprising that Chion argues that erring synchronization is actually constantly prevalent in cinema. However, this is rarely recognized, either because viewers do not wish to acknowledge it, or because the body–voice couple entails such a strong illusion that the

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constant mismatches remain invisible. This futher means that the principal cinematic mismatch is easily forgotten or ignored. But if people wanted to look for its short-comings (as we do today for films in stereo), they could note with Alexandre Anoux the effect of voices being “glued” onto bodies, and the perceptible mismatch between the position of characters’ mouths onscreen and the real source of the sound (the central loudspeaker behind the screen). Today our brains are entirely accustomed to plugging sounds into whatever images we see—sounds whose real localization is much more dispersed and dissociated with respect to what we see. (Chion 1999, 11)

The vocal setup in the movie theatre is such that there cannot be real synchronization. The sound of the voices speaking always comes from elsewhere, from the loudspeaker placed somewhere other than in proximity to the characters speaking. Thus, this etiquette of “nailing down” voices to bodies is, in a way, “a form of cheating” as Marguerite Duras calls it (Chion 1999, 129). It is a form of cheating that is difficult to uphold at that. As we shall see, there are more ways to problematize voice in relation to embodiment. The connection between voice and body is a problem that seems to pervade every instance of a translation into performance.

The dramatic voice and the trace of writing With such a destabilization and problematization of voice, does voice on stage or in film really have the fundamental properties of speech? Does the embodiment of voice in actors produce voice as origin and presence or is such a notion of origin a mere illusion? In the theatrical and cinematic performance of drama, the utterances produced do not originate in the actors. The words that the actors speak are not their own words. They are literally only citing the written, that is, the play. Thus, the production of voice in a theatrical or filmic performance orchestrates that the utterance comes before the speaker rather than the other way around (utterance–subject–utterance, rather than subject– utterance–subject). Thus, a performance sets up a so-called real situation with so-called real people speaking to each other (rather than words on a page). But, this is only an illusion, as voice in drama always bears the trace of writing—of original dissemination. With this, it also becomes clear how Searle’s and Austin’s speech-act theories do not work well in drama. The problem with practicable theories about illocutionary and perlocutionary acts in drama is precisely that such

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theories are grounded in the intention of the speaker and on the accountability of what is spoken. When it comes to uttering promises, Searle and Austen ground their theories on the intention of the speaker to fulfil that promise (even if the promise is not fulfilled, this implies a break with the intended meaning—not a break with meaning itself). In contrast, if an actor promises something, he is saying it, but it is not his or her intention to fulfil the promise. Therefore, when comparing this to everyday dialogue, Keir Elam agrees that “it is evident that much of the drama is structured precisely on the abuse of these conditions” (Elam 1980, 163). Given that a play or a theatrical performance “is not a case of genuine communication,” (Elam 1980, 33) the actor “has no illocutionary intentions in saying them—the request, say, as a request belongs only to the dramatic context, defined according to the interpersonal relations obtaining in it” (Elam 1980, 170). So, if dramatic dialogue is seen as a series of speech acts, the question is, who actually performs the illocution? Is it the dramatis persona or the actor? Who, in other words, is really “speaking”? Can a textual construct (the dramatic speaker) be said to perform anything at all? Can a character really promise anything? If the actor is the speaker, should he or she then be held responsible for the things said? Quite logically, the actor has no responsibility for the utterance because the words uttered are only quotations of a textual “speaker.” The actor is not the subject to which the utterance can be attributed, even if he or she is the one uttering it. This shows that conversation in drama is clearly a representation and cannot be analysed on the same premise as conversation. What takes place in a dialogue on stage is absolutely not “everyday conversation,” but something that is part of a textual universe of generic codes of signification which change the whole setup. This situation, I would argue, sets all speech-act laws aside. This is also why it is fruitful to connect Derrida’s critique of logocentrism to speech in drama. Searle’s and Austen’s speech-act theory becomes problematic in drama because the actor has no intention of fulfilling what he or she says. The problem lies precisely in the theory of intention. This is also why intention, as the organizing principle of communication, is criticized by Derrida. Focusing on Austin’s speech-act theory, Derrida identifies intention as the structural centre of logocentrism: He [Austin] then defines the six indispensable, if not sufficient, conditions for [conversational] success. Through the values of ‘conventionality,’ ‘correctness,’ and ‘completeness’ that intervene in the definition, we necessarily again find those of an exhaustively definable context, of a free consciousness present for the totality of the operation, of an absolutely full

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meaning that is master of itself: the teleological jurisdiction of a total field whose intention remains the organizing center. (Derrida 1982, 323)

In response to this construction, Derrida claims that the traditional idea that speech comes before writing and that the individual owns his speech is thoroughly ideological and in need of deconstruction. When conversation does not abide by the rules set up by Searle and Austin, such conversation is riddled with what they call “infelicities,” which according to them, points to the general applicability of the laws outlined by them. Their argument asserts that the infelicities that indicate that language does not abide by generalizable and logical laws actually do uphold the laws of language as such. However, Derrida disagrees with this. The overall presence of infelicities, Derrida argues, is produced by nonpresence (of speaker and receiver), which decentres language and meaning in radical ways. Nonpresence is, according to Derrida, the mark of writing. By displacing communication with writing, Derrida displaces intention with nonpresence: “I must be able simply to say my disappearance, my nonpresence in general, for example the nonpresence of my meaning, of my intention-to-signify, of my wanting-to-communicatethis, form the emission or production of the mark” (Derrida 1982, 316). Thus, I would argue that Searle’s notion of intention is part of the illusion constituting speech and drama, and writing points to these illusions. In Derrida’s terms, what constitutes dramatic discourse is not voice, but the mark of writing. Thus, what we are faced with in dramatic dialogue is not a form of communication, but signification. As a form of signification, dramatic dialogue ceases to have the active, agency-based countenance favoured by Austin, Searle, and Elam. Instead, a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. This applies in a similar manner to any and every utterance— a sea-change in special circumstances. Language in such circumstances in special ways—intelligibly—used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use—ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language. (Derrida 1982, 324–325 emphasis in original)

Derrida’s point is that this is something Searle and Austin are “excluding from consideration” (Derrida 1982, 325). Again, Derrida means that theatre openly cites, which takes away the so-called meaning of an utterance. This takes away its original function and becomes something else. What Derrida questions, and what I also question, is whether it is inconceivable that the citationality of dramatic performance points to the

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citationality of all utterances—and that it is this possibility that Austin must do away with. In the following passage, Derrida indicates that Austin must exclude this from his notion of communication because it implies the recognition that this is a possibility in every utterance. In other words, does the generality of the risk admitted by Austin surround language like a kind of ditch, a place of external perdition into which locution might never venture, that it might avoid by remaining at home, in itself, sheltered by its essence or telos? Or indeed is this risk, on the contrary, its internal and positive condition of possibility? this [sic] outside its inside? the [sic] very force and law of its emergence? In this last case, what would an “ordinary” language defined by the very law of language signify? (Derrida 1982, 325)

Derrida argues that “risk,” or what Georg Lukács calls “crisis,” constitutes language in every aspect, and that this risk is conditioned by the mark of writing. Derrida wishes to do away with the idea of failure, which in Austin’s theory is relegated to the periphery of language. Austin’s failure is built upon notions of origin and intention. If these concepts are removed as the basis for communication or dialogue, we enter a completely different situation. This situation is well exemplified by dramatic dialogue, which so apparently flaunts the citational character of dialogue. And this is precisely the mark of writing—not speech. By dislocating communication from the intention of the speaker, and emphasizing the arbitrariness of sign and nonpresence instead, the rigour of laws are set out of play: “Austin has not taken into account that which in the structure of locution […] already bears within itself the system of predicates that I call graphematic in general, which therefore confuses all the ulterior oppositions whose pertinence, purity, and rigor Austin sought to establish in vain” (Derrida 1982, 322 emphasis in original). Locution already contains what Derrida characterizes as writing; therefore, Austin’s system of purity and rigour does not hold. And thus, Derrida’s formulation of writing structures all marks—written, as well as spoken. The mark breaks every given context, which gives the possibility to engender new contexts. Thus, a mark cannot be saturated. This is what constitutes the mark. This is its normality, which means that there is “a paradoxical, but inevitable consequence” where “a successful performative is necessarily an ‘impure’ performative” (Derrida 1982, 325). Derrida contradicts Elam, who argues with Searle that the performative aspect of dialogue is based on the presence of speaker and listener (“dramatic discourse is always tied to speaker, listener and its immediate spatio-temporal coordinates” (Elam 1980, 138). He also contradicts

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Bakhtin who defines word as “a two-sided act” which is “determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As a word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee” (Bakhtin 1994, 58 emphasis in original). Where Bakhtin asserts that meaning is conditioned by the active participation of concrete speakers, Derrida argues that dialogue is conditioned by the mark of writing, which is defined by absence and dissemination. Although both Elam and Bakhtin argue that this kind of presence is “dynamic to the extent that the participants and the time and location of utterance indicated undergo continual change,” (Elam 1980, 138) they both disregard the fundamental principle of chaos which Derrida puts forward. Thus, the translation of a text into the voices of the actors does not give origin, intention, or grounding. The voice appears more real, but only because it resembles or represents the real, and is consequently only representative of the real (which is always absent). The actor’s situation could be described as follows: “Here I am on stage, using my mouth and my body as speech, but I am only pretending to be speaking. I am only representing speech in the absence of real speech (which in the end is the only speech we have).” Rather than saying that dramatic dialogue abuses Searle’s and Austen’s rules, dramatic dialogue, as signification, points to a set of problems inherent in all dialogue. Therefore, my main point is that intention, as an impossibility, is played out in dramatic dialogue. To refer back to the analysis of voice in writing, I come to the same conclusion as Gibson: Voice is never self-contained or wholly present to itself, wholly “pure and free” in its spontaneity. Rather, “discontinuity, delay, heterogeneity and alterity” are always “working upon the voice, producing it from its first breath as a system of differential traces.” (Gibson 2001a, 642)

However, it is also important to acknowledge that “to think of voice as inhabited by writing is not to disallow voice” (Gibson 2001a, 643).

Voice and alienation These critical analyses of the ideologies involving communication and translation show that voice, when seen as an ontological and individualist idea, is not innocent. On the contrary, a fundamental problem with voice shows that, rather than stabilizing language by giving it origin and presence, it may produce alienation—a form of defamiliarization—the kind de Man speaks of when describing translation. What “translation

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reveals is that this alienation is at its strongest in our relation to our own original language, that the original language within which we are engaged is disarticulated in a way which imposes upon us a particular alienation, a particular suffering” (de Man 1986, 84). To further explain how translation can function as a form of alienation, de Man is supported by disciplines which he argues are intralingual and thus incorporate an alienating effect: All these activities—critical philosophy, literary theory, history—resemble each other in the fact that they do not resemble that from which they derive. But they are all intralinguistic: they relate to what in the original belongs to language, and not to meaning as an extralinguistic correlate susceptible of paraphrase and imitation. They disarticulate, they undo the original, they reveal that the original was always already disarticulated. They reveal that their failure, which seems to be due to the fact that they are secondary in relation to the original, reveals an essential failure, an essential disarticulation which was already there in the original. They kill the original, by discovering that the original way already dead. (de Man 1986, 84)

The act of translating reveals that what seems natural and given is not so. Paul de Man’s formulation means that a dramatic performance demonstrates that the original is already disarticulated. The relation between dramatic text and performance points to the case that the original is “already written” (in poststructuralist terms) and that the text is actually written and not spoken (an extremely powerful illusion in literary studies). Voice in a text is an illusion marked by writing, but it works the other way around as well. The disarticulated original shows that the embodied performance cannot be fully present either, as traces of writing disarticulate the embodied performance. Because the original is not simply there as presence, there is nothing that can be completed or fulfilled in the performance. It is the very transition from text to performance which disarticulates both and is revealed in the impossible situations produced in the translation of voice. When one examines the two in relation, the disjunctions between them are striking. The translation reveals voice as an illusion, albeit a very powerful illusion. A naturalized version of voice-as-body and subjective interiority is defamiliarized by the impossibilities engendered in the translation of voice from text to performance. In the translation of a text into the voices of actors, what happens is not only the translation of the text. The voices also undergo a veritable transformation: a conversion into a kind of embodiment. In the performance, the voices appear more real, but because they always bear the marks of writing, they only resemble or signify the real. We have a situation where an actor is on stage, using his or her mouth and body to

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produce voice, but is only pretending to be speaking. He or she is only signifying speech in the absence of real speech (which, in the end, is the only speech we have). The performance can thus be argued to be a form of citation of the original text. It cites the original text, which is also always already a citation. What we end up with is regression and dissemination rather than stability. Do dramas produce this infinite instability? Often, yes, although it rarely is acknowledged. But the translation itself is marked by its instabilities, incoherencies, disjunction, and mismatches, as we shall see. This is also Chion’s main point in The Voice in Cinema when discussing the naturalized union between voice and body in film: But in truth, what we have here is an entirely structural operation (related to the structuring of the subject in language) of grafting the non-localized voice onto a particular body that is assigned symbolically to the voice as its source. This operation leaves a scar, and the talking film marks the place of that scar, since by presenting itself as a reconstituted totality, it places all the greater emphasis on the original non-coincidence. Of course, via the operation called synchronization, cinema seeks to reunify the body and voice that have been dissociated by their inscription onto separate surfaces (the celluloid image and the soundtrack). But the more you think about synchronization, the more aware you can become […] of the arbitrariness of the convention, which tries to present as a unity something that from the outset doesn’t stick together. (Chion 1999, 126)

This is not only true of cinema, but also it seems to be a structural phenomenon in all dramatic translation. It is not the case that theatre, because of its supposed materiality, avoids the fallacies of synchronization or the problems of voice. Even if Chion argues that the idea of synchronization originates from the theatre (Chion 1999, 4), not even theatre manages to unproblematically translate textual voices to an actual body. What voice renders (or can render) in dramatic translation is alienation, a verfremdungseffekt, because of its ambiguous status between body and language, and performance and text. The translation to performance leaves a scar; a scar that defamiliarizes the conventionalized notions of voice. It breaks the illusion. The problem is that the scar has to be acknowledged and analysed. When talking about alienation and drama, one man comes to mind— Brecht. Why is his concept of verfremdung important, and what does it imply of dramatic translation and the concept of voice? There are a couple key terms which form Brecht’s epic theatre, and the most important for us here is the lack of illusion: “It is most important that one of the main features of the ordinary theatre should be excluded from our street scene:

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the engendering of illusion” (Brecht 2001, 122). Given that illusion has also been a key phrase in this chapter on the translation of voice, I hope that it is clear in what ways Brecht’s distaste for illusion has a bearing on my project on voice in performance here. Voice is a major bearer of the illusion of the autonomous subject, of individuality. Also, voice bears the illusion that language is ordered and always communicates, and thus, may mislead one into thinking that translation is an unproblematic process. Many of the dramatic techniques discussed by Brecht in Brecht on Theatre involve voice. To avoid illusion, one of the most important techniques for the actor is never to assume that the character he is acting is a subject. He never forgets, nor does he allow it to be forgotten, that he is not the subject but the demonstrator. That is to say, what the audience sees is not a fusion between demonstrator and subject, not some third, independent, uncontradictory entity with isolated features […]. (Brecht 2001, 125)

One way to produce the effect of being a demonstrator is to never assume that the voice the actor speaks is his own. Interestingly, Brecht compares this technique to quotation: “Once the idea of total transformation is abandoned the actor speaks his part not as if he were improvising it himself but like a quotation” (Brecht 2001, 138). This points to one important assumption put forward in this chapter: the idea that voice in a performance is actually a quotation of a text (a text that is always already a quotation). Thus, the idea of quotation not only points to the lack of origin of language, but also to the inability of the subject to be stabilized by the idea of voice. In precise terms, Brecht argues that the use of voice as quotation is a form of alienation technique: “Speaking the stage directions out loud in the third person results in a clash between two tones of voice, alienating the second of them, the text proper” (Brecht 2001, 138). I would say that the use of voice as an alienating technique does not only alienate the original text, but also the concept of voice itself with the help of the original text (as dissemination). And this sensation is transposed to the actual performance. According to Brecht, the objective of using alienating effects in drama is to accentuate the social gest underlying every event: “By social gest is meant the mimetic and gestural expression of the social relationships prevailing between people of a given period” (Brecht 2001, 139), and thus “to allow the spectator to criticize constructively form a social point of view” (Brecht 2001, 125). Given that voice is such a strong illusion, it is a highly appropriate bearer or producer of individualist ideology. As such, it naturalizes concepts which are highly ambiguous and politically charged.

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This is why it is important to understand the functions voice has in the production of a dramatic performance. The difference between naturalized theatre and theatre that problematizes naturalized concepts and ideologies is clear to Brecht. The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too—Just like me—It’s only natural—It’ll never change—The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are inescapable—That’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world—I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh. (Brecht 2001, 71)

With alienating techniques, “[t]he epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it—That’s not the way—That’s extraordinary, hardly believable—It’s got to stop—The sufferings of his man appal me, because they are unnecessary—That’s great art: nothing obvious in it—I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh” (Brecht 2001, 71). This does not mean that I think that all theatre should alienate voice. Nor do I mean to say that voice does not play an important role in the production of drama and performance. This does not mean we should scorn those who seek an absolute coincidence, who attempt scrupulously to re-establish the truth of original sound on original images, to recreate a totality. Such a quest partakes in those wild dreams of unity and absolutes that motivate people to tread the paths of creativity. (Chion 1999, 126)

This project aims to conduct a critical investigation of voice in dramatic translation without dismantling the need for voice in our understanding of the world and of ourselves. I regard the dramatic translation of voice from text to performance as a dialectical situation where voice signifies both writing as well as embodiment. Thus, the voice as body, as individuality, and as communication, is beset by language and by writing, meaning that the embodied state is by no means full, complete, or implies the presentification of voice. The realization that voice bears traces of writing means that voice is non-individual, discursive, and ideological. Voice brings out the anxiety between writing and embodiment in the very act of translation from drama to theatre or film. It seems that the two concepts of language (as writing) and embodiment (as materiality) are entangled in ways that make the one implicate the other. Thus, the idea that “just as the external action of a play must appear to spring directly form the inner, mental action of the characters, so must the thought of the actor appear to prompt and bring about utterance itself” (Turner 2000,

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132) is grounded on an idea about writing that spills over to the idea of performance, both of which are radically questioned here. Instead, the translation is a critical revelation. When it comes to voice, it reveals the ideologies of voice (as original, subjective, and individual) by being precisely both writing and performance. Voice in drama has a unique position because it both exists as a textual construct (with all the implications of writing) and as an embodied voice (with its connections to notions of materiality and individuality). As body, voice is a site for agency expressing the subject’s thoughts, critiques, and experiences. But voice is also the site where language as discourse produces and controls us. This is why it is central to this analysis of American drama. In the following chapters, I analyse if and how it is possible to posit voice as a site for individual agency expressed by characters in the play or if voice as writing problematizes or defamiliarizes such a connection to subjectivity, individuality, and agency.

CHAPTER TWO THE INCORPOREAL VOICE: THE THORNY CASE OF THE CRUCIBLE

We know perfectly well that we are not free to say just anything, that we cannot simply speak of anything, when we like or where we like; not just anyone, finally, may speak of just anything. —Foucault, The Order of Discourse What the audience sees in fact is a battle between theatre and play. —Brecht, Brecht on Theatre

I have chosen to analyse The Crucible for this study because it highlights a set of problems connected to voice as writing, voice as embodiment, and the difficulties informing the translation of voice. The play intricately combines writing and voice in ways that problematize the two. Accordingly, this chapter deals with the problems that come with upholding the illusion that a play consists of voices in the traditional sense of the word. This problem is also highlighted in the translation of the play The Crucible into its film version. My starting point for this analysis originates in the idea that the production of voice in drama is not as uncomplicated as it might initially seem. Given that dramatic discourse consists mainly of the voices of the characters who produce a polyphony of voices (in that no voice is privileged over any other), a play like The Crucible offers a challenge to such conceptions in its rather surprising use of rather lengthy narrative segments as a major structural form. By not being part of the character dialogue, but rather part of the narrative (the extradiegetic level), these segments are incorporeal (not connected to a defined speaking body), which makes them more openly textual (lacking body, subjectivity, origin, and full presence). To analyse the effect, that is, the ideological consequences of this use of the narrative, I will connect theories of writing to Foucault’s discourse theory by analysing how truth is produced in the play—which also happens to be its theme.

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The play is about the ability to produce statements of truth (that is, being “within the true” in Foucauldian terminology), and this is achieved through speech: public, personal, and confessional. This is shown in the ways the characters speak and in how every word must be weighed up because a single utterance might literally lead to death. Spoken words have material effects beyond belief. However, in the play, the production of truth is heavily dependent on both voice and writing, albeit in very different ways. As one of its major narrative forms, the play’s use of (incorporeal) writing in the form of a narrator stands in sharp contrast to its thematic focus on voice. I aim to theoretically connect the narrative structure of the play to its theme by investigating how truth and power are established by means of speech. Also, by analysing the complex use of both voice and writing in the play and their relation to truth production, I aim to show that the theoretical considerations about voice and writing have political implications concerning power. I could simply connect voice to power and show how those without power have no voice and those without voice have no power. However, instead, I will complicate the relation between voice and power by analysing the ideological stakes involved in promoting voice as the foundation for the ability to gain power and to act politically. I want to discuss the play’s narrative structure in relation to the theme of the play because it has bearings on its translation into film and, in this transition, on the play’s ideological setup and its take on power. This is how form and content as well as aesthetics and theme work together in an interesting interaction. In this reading of the play, I take the function of the stage directions (and the narrator) to bear directly on the meaning and the political setup of the play as a whole.

The power of speech Let us start with the theme of the play—the power of speech. The play stages the amount of power given to speech and the individuals with the skills to use it. It stages the classical injustice concerning who has the right to speak and who has not; whose voice is to be heard, and whose is to be silenced. The Crucible is set in the town of Salem in 1692, which is ruled by a strict hierarchy that governs all areas of interaction, from the economy to communal work, religious matters, household management, child-raising, expressions of love, and even everyday conversation. Arthur Miller describes the situation in his play as “a combine of state and religious power whose function was to keep the community together, and to prevent any kind of disunity that might open it to destruction by

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material or ideological enemies” (Miller quoted in Griffin 1996, 62). Those hierarchies are based on class, gender, race, and age and are grounded in a well-established discourse of religion—which, in turn, distributes the organization of power accordingly. The people at the top of the hierarchy are the judicial lot and the clergy (Deputy Governor Danforth, Judge Hawthorne, Reverend Parris, and Reverend Hale). In the middle, we have a motley crew of farmers ranging from religious, irrational fanatics (the Putnams) to hard-working, rational people (Elizabeth and John Proctor, Rebecca and Francis Nurse) to naive, genial inhabitants (the Coreys). Lower in the hierarchy are the young girls and servants (Abigail, Betty, Ruth, Mercy, Mary Warren, and the others), and finally, at the very bottom is Tituba, a slave from Barbados. The story begins with an incident which has caused an avalanche of accusations of witchery. The characters accuse each other of sinfulness and witchery and try to talk their way out of such accusations. These accusations take many turns and invariably lead to the upheaval of the established hierarchy, thus causing mayhem in the community. As Bigsby states in Arthur Miller: A Critical Study, “What is at stake in The Crucible is the survival of Salem, which is to say the survival of a sense of community” (Bigsby 2005, 148). The power of speech is interesting here because it plays a central role in the confusion of the established hierarchy and the dispersal of truth, something which problematizes both voice and power and their relation to each other. The most common interpretation of The Crucible analyses it in terms of good and evil, much in line with the comments Miller has made about the play: “Evil is not a mistake but a fact in itself . . . a dedication to evil, not mistaking it for good but knowing it as evil and loving it as evil, is possible in human beings who appear agreeable and normal” (Miller quoted in Bigsby 1984, 185). However, rather than dealing with evil as a metaphysical concept, scholars and critics agree that the play elaborates on what happens to the individual when confronted with such evil. As a result, most critics analyse the psychology of the characters and focus on related concepts such as conscience, guilt, dignity, and self-betrayal. Richard Hayes argues that the play’s “characteristic theme is integrity, and its obverse, compromise” (Hayes 1972, 33), and similarly, John Ferres argues that it, in fact, is a “personal crucible of self-discovery” (Ferres 1972, 17). This again falls much in line with comments made by Miller who argues that the play “is examining . . . the conflict between a man’s raw deeds and his conception of himself; the question of whether conscience is in fact an organic part of the human being” (Miller quoted in Bigsby 1984, 193).

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Critics also discuss the underlying, individual motives in the play such as love, desire, jealousy, greed, lust, and rivalry, where the characters are unintentionally “showing us their own personal hostility and helpfully bringing in some additional exposition concerning the land war, the rivalry over ministerial appointments, and the issue of Parris’s salary” (Popkin 1972, 78). According to Henry Popkin, “These are the real, underlying issues that motivate the men of Salem” (Popkin 1972, 78). In these interpretations, the meaning of the play is based on individual characters in the play and their suffering, faults, and misdemeanours where “the central action may be described in the case of The Crucible as ‘to find Proctor’s soul’ ” (Hill 1972, 89). The individual voices of the characters thus reveal the human subjects’ inner beings, with all their faults and strengths. However, rather than focusing on good and evil in the play or how it affects the psyches of the individual characters, I will analyse how good and evil are constructed by means of discourse. This line of reasoning touches upon Bigsby’s interpretation of power in the play in Arthur Miller: A Critical Study, but I will try to more clearly frame how power functions in relation to voice by means of discourse. I argue that good and evil are rhetorical constructs that can be analysed in relation to the play’s narrative setup. The play sets up such moral distinctions by way of what Foucault calls “to be within the true,” that is, within the discursively true. Discourse defines what is true, real, and good, and therefore, to act morally is to act within what is discursively true and not according to any universal understanding of goodness. As Bigsby puts it, “It is the essence of power that it accrues to those with the ability to determine the nature of the real” (Bigsby 2005, 153). What is at stake is the power to tell the truth about the world and reality. In analysing the characters, Bigsby argues, the essential point is not the nature of her [Abigail’s] motivation nor even the substantiality or otherwise of witches, but the nature of the real and the manner in which it is determined. Proctor and the others find themselves in court because they deny a reality to which others subscribe and in which, whatever their motives, they in part believe, until, slowly, scepticism begins to infect them with the virus of another reality. (Bigsby 2005, 152)

Thus, the play makes clear that what is true and real is not clear-cut, but a matter of construction. And those truth constructions are already in conflict at the beginning of the play. This is why voice plays such an important role. What is “within the true,” or what Bigsby calls “the nature of the real,” (Bigsby 2005, 153) is mainly constructed by means of the characters’ speech.

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Discourse is a way for me to theoretically bind together the social with the individual, personal, and even psychological, rather than seeing them as opposites, as some critics sometimes tend to do.7 This means that my analysis of a character’s actions in the play will focus on the function of discourse in the community presented, meaning that which is possible to say, act, and even think within a given cultural context. In concordance with Foucault’s theories in The History of Sexuality, I will discuss religion in terms of ways to keep (mostly sexual) discourses at bay, mainly by controlling the multiple voices wanting to be heard in the community. The play exemplifies well how modes of prohibition and suppression cannot hinder language and speech. In fact, it is the contrary. It shows how prohibition, through desire, uncontrollably produces language and speech in the stories told throughout the play. The Crucible is about how language seeps through discursive control by the incessant production of stories through speech. Here, the very act of speaking is an act of desire because it is an enactment of the repressed—of sexuality, desire, sin, and guilt. It is also clear that the desire of speech is connected to power in intricate ways. The sexual theme is established at the outset of the play. Some young girls have been caught dancing naked in the woods, and out of fear of repercussions, they stage or act out various forms of psychological illnesses. Those performances are followed by stories that are meant to regulate the relatively sexual nature of the event. Counterproductively however, those stories invariably generate more sexual discourses. Speaking about the incident is a major part of the desire of the play rather than the incident itself, as in the following instance when Abigail talks of Tituba: “Sometimes I wake and find myself standing in the open doorway and not a stitch on my body! I always hear her laughing in my sleep. I hear her singing her Barbados songs and tempting me with—” (Miller 2003, 41). It is this dialectic of speech and desire, and silence and repression which forms the language of the play. This dialectic makes omissions and moments of silence equally as important as the utterances themselves. Sexuality plays a major role in the society portrayed in the play, something that both Miller and critics have observed: “The sexual component, which Miller probably correctly identifies as a vital element in Puritan repressions and the consequent explosions of Dionysian rituals, becomes the fulcrum of the play” (Bigsby 2005, 195). However, I want to emphasize a difference that is important in my analysis of speech in the play. The play represents a culture where sexuality is not supposed to be repressed, but unknown. There is a marked difference between the two. To repress something is to have known it and rejected it (although not consciously), which is quite different than being ignorant of it. Repression

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is thus a result of knowledge itself, and the attempt to do away with it, which is clearly voiced by Abigail: I look for John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put knowledge in my heart! I never knew what pretence Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian woman and their covenanted men! And now you bid me tear the light out of my eyes? I will not, I cannot! (Miller 2003, 22)

The ignorant cannot (intentionally or unintentionally) use or misuse knowledge about sexual matters. To have knowledge about what is supposedly repressed, however, is to have power. Sexuality and sin are expressed through speech, which is always implicated in the power discourses that are created to establish what is right and true. Therefore, speech is also potentially dangerous. What becomes clear to the men in power is that these stories cannot remain uncontrolled because they threaten the regulating structure of repression and suppression which guarantees the power structure in the settlement. Rather than simply silencing the stories, they are used in social discourses of power in various ways to monitor and restrain them. For this to work, the stories told have to conform to the pre-existing structures of speech that are regulated by, for instance, religion. The act of conforming to such orders of discourse, in turn, produces the power of being within the true. Thus, in the play, a connection can be found between the ways discourse controls the speech of the characters and how the characters learn to use speech in relation to power, knowledge, and truth. A compelling connection exists between sex, repression, and knowledge, which is interconnected with truth and power in intricate ways. In its theme, the play demonstrates the power of voice and how voice and speech play a central role in the culture portrayed. In line with Chion’s theories of voice in The Voice in Cinema, I would argue that the play performs what he calls “vococentrism,” whereby everything in the play centres on speech and the power connected to it. In relation to its focus on voice and speech, the play also focuses on the individual and his or her ability to gain power through speech. Thus, the individual is constructed as both a cause and an effect of this power of speech. It is important to remember that many of the characters who gain power through speech do not hold any power in the original organization of the settlement. This brings up the question of the hen and the egg: power and speech—which came first? Is initial power necessary for the power of speech, or does speech, as such, render power? The play shows how this is an intricate game that all the characters try to master.

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It is clear that some characters in the play have (original, basic, and uncontested) power, and such power is organized in the settlement according to classical alignments such as wealth (landed property), prestige (organization of authority and influence in the settlement), knowledge (educated clergy, physicians, et cetera), gender (organization of the relation between men and women) and race (Caucasian and Other, that is, Tituba and the primordial, invisible threat represented by the indigenous population). This organization of power is integrated into the characters’ speech, for instance, in Reverend Hale’s authoritative (and simultaneously condescending) address to Elizabeth, where several structures of domination come into play: “And you, woman?” (Miller 2003, 66), an address also used by the play’s protagonist and hero, Proctor, to his wife. Proctor also addresses Abigail in similar terms of power, which function as integral parts of his language: PROCTOR, gently pressing her from him, with great sympathy but firmly:

Child— ABIGAI, with a flash of anger: How do you call me child! (Miller 2003,

22)

The confused situation in Salem is a result of the breakdown of this uncontested order. As a result, subordinate characters gain power: On the one hand stands the Church, which provides the defining language within which all social, political and moral debate is conducted. On the other stand those usually deprived of power—the black slave Tituba and the young children—who suddenly gain access to an authority as absolute as that which had previously subordinated them. Those ignored by history become its motor force. Those socially marginalised move to the very centre of social action. Those whose opinions and perceptions carried neither personal nor political weight suddenly acquire an authority so absolute that they come to feel they can challenge even the representatives of the state. Tituba has a power she has never known in her life. (Bigsby 2005, 150)

My main argument is that this power is the power of voice. The subordinate characters manage to gain power by producing stories that are within the true. In the play, it is this kind of established, conventional, and naturalized structure of power that is disseminated by the characters without original power, which means that they gain knowledge about the functions of speech and are thus able to use the discourses available to them. The girls who are found dancing in the woods come to represent this reversal of power. At the beginning of the play, it becomes clear that the

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confessions, naming, and accusations of the girls give them power. As the play progresses, the power assigned to the girls grows as they learn to understand the mechanisms of discourse and speech, and thus, how to control their power. Rebellion, when it came, was thus likely to take as its target firstly those with least access to power, then those for whom virtue alone was insufficient protection. Next would come those who were themselves regarded as politically vulnerable and finally those who possessed real power. (Bigsby 2005, 151)

In a conversation with Deputy Governor Danforth, Abigail reveals the power she has been given. She is in so much in control of the discourse that she can cast doubt on Danforth himself without hesitation and without punishment. ABIGAIL: I have been hurt, Mr. Danforth; I have seen my blood runnin’ out! I have been near to murdered every day because I done my duty pointing out the Devil’s people—and this is my reward? To be mistrusted, denied, questioned like a— DANFORTH, weakening: Child, I do not mistrust you— ABIGAIL, in an open threat: Let you beware, Mr. Danforth. Think you to be so mighty that the power of Hell may not turn your wits? Beware of it! (Miller 2003, 100)

It becomes clear that the girls have been given supreme power and that this power is closely associated with knowing and speaking the truth (meaning the regulated and regulating practices producing the discursive space of what is known as true). It turns out that the power given to such discursive practices is almost limitless, and once given to someone, that person can use this discourse without discretion and apprehension. However, the power is not theirs to use in any way they want, but rather, power is consciously given to them to as a way to control and administer the unruly speeches about sex and desire that are spreading. It is a way to put those speeches in a discursive formation of evil and sin which then enables them to be spoken without social destabilization. As such, theirs is a directed, limited power (even if it is a power over life and death), which in the end, also ends up being a form of entrapment. The way in which power is established is a result of the use of certain discourses generated through speech. And the power given to those discourses is connected to how they fit into the production of truth within the play. In The Crucible, it is clearly displayed that certain discourses are “true” or “within the true,” whereas others are not, no matter how well

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reasoned they may seem. The characters who use the right discourses in the right ways have power. Important in relation to this is that the establishment of certain discourses as true are not based on force and threat, but by following a logic of fact construction accepted by the majority of people in the play. In The Crucible, this logic is based on empirical grounds—the procurement of evidence through observation of material reality. The irony is that because witchery is “ipso facto, on its face and by its nature, an invisible crime” as Danforth has it (Miller 2003, 93), all the evidence of witchery in the play in general, but especially in court, is precisely speech. The idea of evidence is consequently built on a circular argument where, in order to establish a discourse as true, you need evidence. The evidence is built upon the speech of someone who speaks the right discourse. Thus, evidence has to do with the privilege of being within the true rather than any material fact. Those in power are right and have the right to speak the truth. Therefore, most talk of evidence in the play revolves around speech rather than material objects or events; for example, ceasing to pray or even mumbling can be taken as evidence of witchery. This evidence, in turn, is established by circumspection. The evidence of Goody Good’s witchery is that she mumbled at Mary Warren’s door. When asked about this mumbling, Goody Good claims to have said the commandments, which she is then asked to repeat. When she cannot, the explanation for her mumbling is proven to be a lie. The spoken lie is evidence of witchery: “It’s hard proof, hard as rock, the judges said” (Miller 2003, 55). Furthermore, the function of speech as evidence is clearly connected to the general structure of the play, which is based on the retelling of events. The play is not based on any real action, but retold action, which increases the possibility for deception, fabrication, and invention in the construction of truth. The events that are used as evidence of witchery are, in fact, produced by the girls in the stories told and retold by them. Confession is the most common evidence of witchery used in the play. Also, given that truth is built on the establishment of evidence, and this evidence is, in fact, speech, this means that silence is also suspect. This suspicion can only be relieved by confession—by speaking it aloud—and often in public. The confession is a relief of sin in itself. Once a confession has been told, it is established within the world of absolute truth. It is stone-hard evidence and cannot be otherwise. In line with this, Reverend Hale proclaims, “Nonsense! Mister, I have myself examined Tituba, Sarah Good, and numerous others that have confessed to dealing with the Devil. They have confessed it.” (Miller 2003, 65 emphasis in original). The

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situation presented is consequently reversed to the idea that what is repressed should be silenced. With the uncontrollable speeches of desire spreading in the village, organized speech is privileged over silence. Thus, silence, speech, and confession are all interconnected in a world of desire, sin, and repression. It is not a simple relation, but they stand as logical effects in a system of truth. In addition, confession is established as a way to organize the system of truth, not only concerning one specific discourse (sexuality), but also all discourses that organize the structures of authority and power in the settlement, which explains its unquestioned status in the village. It is “ritual speech” as Griffin calls it (Griffin 1996, 59). Confession is thus a brilliant way to conform speech to certain discourses. And in The Crucible, the control of divergent speeches and voices is more important than anything. The strength of confessions is derived precisely from its strong connection to body and subjectivity as a way of connecting what is spoken to an origin; a body that is construed as hard, material fact. Consequently, the idea of confessional redemption is played out on several levels in the play. It is not only something that is demanded by the religious authorities in official contexts, but also it structures personal relations. John Proctor’s confession of adultery to his wife, and later in court, follows the same structure of speech, accusation, and potential redemption. Proctor’s confession is also an accusation of Abigail, who he calls a whore. It is clear how these structures of power are integrated into the characters’ identities. They all operate within the logical/ideological sphere of truth and speech and accept the structure. This means that, in this upheaval of order and hierarchy, speech remains the foundation for truth production, and the regulation of order in the play. Within the play’s universe, the general principle is that speech takes precedence over any other form of communication, as so much faith is put into the characters’ confessions, accusations, and spoken stories. However, there is another dimension to the play which must be put in relation to these hierarchies. That dimension is produced by the stage directions and narrative segments that, in many ways, dominate the text. Those elements function as textual counterparts to the voices of the characters. Although speech is favoured within the play’s universe, the narrative structure seems to say and do something else. The narration plays an important role in establishing the different discourses and their function, and it is also crucial for establishing the truth of the play as a whole.

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Writing and the narrator As argued in the previous chapter, the vococentric setup of all plays, especially in connection with future or possible performances, generates the notion that a play consists of its dialogue. This is grounded in the idea that a drama is not a narrative medium, but a performative one. In his article on narration in drama, Manfred Jahn explains how narratologists like Genette make a sharp distinction between drama and narrative genres in that drama is performed, whereas narrative “is conveyed by ‘a verbal transmission’” (Aczel 2001, 667). This is important because it means that the voices of the characters or actors take precedence over any other textual practice. Following Jahn’s argument, drama can be seen as a type of narrative if one does not construe the narrator as absent, but as covert. This means, that rather than seeing the play as a “the illocutionary force of a recipe for baking a cake,” as Searle does (Searle, 1975, 329), it should be regarded as a narrative similar to mimetic fiction. As Jahn rightly notes, this view of the dramatic text not only “circumscribes the problematic of textual ‘voice’,” (Jahn 2001a, 663) but also it fails to properly consider the function of the stage directions and other forms of narrative text in the drama.8 The relation between the drama and the “real” world is fundamental to this differentiation because the grounding principle is that certain texts are more apt or more competent to mirror the world as “it is.” The classic showing–telling distinction in literary studies implies that the representation of the characters’ voices generates showing (mimesis), whereas other kinds of narration generate telling (diegesis). As discussed in the previous chapter, narratologists mainly debate how to handle the narrating agent who is more or less covert in dramatic texts. Along with Chatman, Jahn argues for the view of drama as a narrative genre, claiming that drama always has a narrative voice: “As long as he is physically present, he is an overt narrator, and in the scenes in which he is physically absent, he is the behind-the-scene show-er agency in control of selection, arrangement, and presentation. Basically, then, an ‘absolute drama’ (Pfister’s default type of play) is like an epic play without overt (but not without covert) narratorial presence” (Jahn 2001a, 671). In this conceptual framework, narrators can be said to have a voice only when they have speech of their own, that is, when they are the manifest enunciator of narrative and descriptive statements or of commentary discourse. Such a discussion of the narrator has not actually informed theatre theory because drama in such theories is seen as performative. If the

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drama is seen as performative, any narrative form that is not construed as the voices of the characters are, at best, treated as the author’s instructions. In such a construct, the stage directions (which all forms of non-dialogue text seem to be called) are merely auxiliary texts and not actually part of the play itself. They are not spoken by anyone embodied on stage; they are not attributed to a clear-speaking, embodied subject, and therefore, do not belong to the drama. This creates a differentiation (of function and status) between different kinds of text: dialogue (as voice) and the rest (as writing). As we have seen, this idea has been criticized by Andrew Gibson, among others, who questions the privileging of voice in narrative texts. In drama, there is a focus on voice as “showing,” which is connected to its immanent translation into performance. And the embodiment of performance demands voice. Thus, it could be argued that it is the embodiment of voice which guides what should and can be translated into performance in drama. Consequently, the idea of translatability is built around the notions of origin, embodiment, subjectivity, and individuality. In this sense, the situation is not changed by the introduction of a narrator in the play. Even if the stage directions are no longer perceived as the voice of the author, they are conceived as ontologically different from the voices of the characters. This, in turn, leads to the compulsory omission of other kinds of clearly narrative segments in the translation of the play because, in many respects, they remain untranslatable—that is, if the translation suggests the embodiment of voice. This construction produces several, and in many respects unsolvable, problems in the translation from text to performance. The Crucible is interesting as it plays with and problematizes the distinction between voice and writing in several ways. The most obvious way is by means of diegesis. Except for the dialogue itself, the play consists of both stage directions, written in italics, and other narrative segments described as the “author’s note” (Moss 1072, 39), Miller’s “introductory note” (Griffin 1972, 69), and “Miller’s accompanying notes” (Popkin 1972, 83) or summaries (Murray 1972, 48), all of which are interesting considering need to always designate utterances to an origin. Although these two kinds of narration are similar in that they are narrative, the two are different in form and function. In The Crucible, many of the stage directions are traditionally structured. They describe where things (props) are and how characters should move. However, they can also be quite descriptive, and even narrative, giving more information than merely how to stage a certain scene. One example is in the description of Abigail: “He is bending to

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kneel again when his niece, Abigail Williams, seventeen, enters—a strikingly beautiful girl, an orphan, with an endless capacity for dissembling. Now she is all worry and apprehension and propriety.” (Miller 2003, 8). This quotation shows that the stage directions are not only directive, but also descriptive and narrative (which could be argued about many kinds of stage directions). The stage direction above describes the inner properties of a character (i.e. Abigail’s endless capacity for dissembling, apprehension, and propriety) and narrates a sequence of events (“He is bending to kneel again when his niece, Abigail Williams, seventeen, enters”). Thus, this stage direction does not only indicate how this scene should be acted out, but also it narrates a sequence of events and gives a fuller picture of the character (and her inner qualities) than what would be conveyed by her speech and actions alone. Such stage directions are not uncommon in plays. On the contrary, they are quite commonplace and central to the dramatic universe of the play. To place the stage directions within a theoretically comprehensible narrative system, it must be argued that it also operates within the narrative universe of the play, as it is not extra-textual (and ascribable to the author). Despite The Crucible’s predilection for descriptive stage directions, the most obvious way in which it is different from more traditional plays is its extensive use of a narrator in segments found throughout the first act of the play. These narrative segments are not curt instructions aimed at possible or future directors of the play, but rather they describe the background of the characters, comment on the actions of the play, point forward and backward in time, and produce general musings about the era and its mores—all in a clearly narrative manner. The play opens with a few stage directions, but then continues with a 4–5 page description of all the characters, not just those who appear in the opening scene. This description also frames the play as a whole with words such as: “This predilection for minding other people’s business was time-honored among the people of Salem, and it undoubtedly created many of the suspicions which were to feed the coming madness” (Miller 2003, 4). Taking into consideration the elaborateness of these narrative sections, to describe them as “comments by the author” appears unduly dismissive of contemporary narrative theory, as it does not take seriously the implications of the various textual forms which constitute the play. On the contrary, I would argue that from a literary and narratological perspective, these segments must be treated as integral, which means that they demand the same coherent theoretical analysis as the dialogue itself. For reasons that I will explain throughout this chapter, to assign these narrative segments to an author alters their function in the play because they are

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given a different status than the rest of the text—a status which has a direct bearing on the ideology of the play. Another, perhaps more narratological, way of thinking about or theorizing the narrative parts would be to talk of different narrative levels or levels of detachment from the dialogue, something that Jahn does in his analysis of drama when he presumes that all plays have a first-degree narrator (maximally covert and abstract) and a (possibly more personalized) second text (a proper narrator). However, with such a theory, it nonetheless becomes possible to divide the play into two, where the “real” play is constituted by the voices of the characters and the other, more indefinable and unacknowledged elements are more or less redundant, albeit theoretically interesting. It is possible to make such a distinction, but it is important to acknowledge that the distinction is made for reasons dealing with ideological and preconceived ideas about voice, speech, and subjectivity. Having stated this, more often than not, the play itself makes such a differentiation between these various forms of narration to produce illusions of speech and voice. This differentiation might be part of the ideology of the play—forming the ways in which it establishes its own discourses of power and truth—something that should be taken into consideration in an interpretation of The Crucible in particular. To be able treat all types of narration seriously, I claim that the author has no place in the narrative, especially given that the author is not a textual construct. Once the author is out the way, the question is how to interpret these clearly narrative aspects of the play and their relation both to each other and also to the voices forming the play. Such an interpretation is crucial for understanding the play and for its translation into film. Furthermore, the theoretical assumptions made about the narrative parts are crucial for the translation of the text into performance.

The narrator and the question of knowledge It is important for this analysis of The Crucible to understand the intimate relation between voice and power as it is staged within the play’s universe because power seems to operate quite differently in the play’s own narrative setup, that is, in its own organization of the discourses of power and truth. Within the play’s universe, the means in which the settlement organizes its power relations all concern voice. Voice is given the ultimate power to produce and outline the truth—a truth that places a strong emphasis on the subject’s body and voice. However, The Crucible as a play does not organize its own discourses of power in this way. Instead, it places those lengthy narrative parts on the highest level of discourse. This

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problematizes the embodiment of voice as well as the play’s translation into embodiment. To analyse the different forms of text and their relation to The Crucible, it is necessary to examine their role in the establishment of knowledge as well as their role in the dispersal of information. Different kinds of text get a more or less conclusive role when it comes to establishing how truth is constructed in the play. The different functions given to the different forms of text establish what Catherine Belsey calls a “hierarchy of discourses,” and this hierarchy is crucial when analysing the ideological and discursive foundations of a text. In Critical Practice, Belsey argues that realism always works by a hierarchy of discourses and that this hierarchy is connected to the ideology of the text. Thus, Belsey means that all realist texts create one discourse “which places as subordinate all the discourses that are literally or figuratively between inverted commas” (Belsey 2002, 70). However, Belsey’s insightful claim seems to be based on the assumption that there are texts that do not establish a hierarchy of discourses. Drama could be seen as such a text because a more traditionally structured play is mainly based on dialogue without an omnipresent narrator who organizes the truth claims in the text. The dialogue form also evokes Bakhtin’s idea of polyphony, as polyphony is based on a plurality of voices, which is valued by most critics of drama. This is because polyphony seemingly shatters narrative hierarchies by letting all voices be heard.9 Although both the stage directions and the narrative sections are similar in that they are clearly not part of the play’s dialogue, they are different in function and effect, as we now shall see. First, the stage directions are, without doubt, the textual segments with the highest level of credibility in the play. There is no reason (and no possibility) to doubt a stage direction that states “Betty doesn’t stir. Mercy comes over” (Miller 2003, 17), which perhaps seems self-evident. However, because the stage directions have this status, there is no reason to question a stage direction that is more descriptive and more judgemental, for example, “Enter Mary Warren, breathless. She is seventeen, a subservient, naïve, lonely girl” (Miller 2003, 17). This short passage clearly gives directions for how to interpret Mary Warren by ways other than her own speech. Here, the stage direction has a very different function than Mary Warren’s “own voice” in that it is placed on a different level in the hierarchy of discourses, and as a consequence, has the same degree of credibility as the stage directions which are more practical and directorial. Therefore, the statement remains more or less indisputable. This degree of credibility given to the statement can be traced to the idea that the stage directions do not really belong to

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the play, but to the voice of the author, who naturally has full control of the play as a whole. In other words, it could be argued that the stage directions are so true that they are not even part of the play, which in turn, gives them a status in the text that differentiates them from all other forms of narration. However, because the stage directions are not regarded as part of the play’s theatrical universe, they are often omitted from the translation of the play into performance, something that makes it extremely deceptive in the establishment of power, knowledge, and truth. The stage directions counteract the idea of polyphony because they reveal that the characters’ voices are clearly dictated, formed, or controlled by narrative writing. As such, the stage directions have enormous power when it comes to the establishment of knowledge and truth because they are attributed to a body and a subject, but that subject is extrafictional as the voice of the author. Having analysed the function of the stage directions, I now turn to the other narrative sections which dominate the first act of the play. The question is how to theorize those sections. The most common and commonsensical way of analysing the narrative parts of the text is to also label them as the voice of the author, which would make them extratextual and extrafictional. I would argue that the reason for making such an interpretation is to give them origin and human presence, and it is a way to attribute such texts to a subject by giving them a clear origin against which to analyse them. Lastly, given that those parts would then not belong to the fictional universe, they do not belong to any performance of the play either and remain untranslated. The negative side to such an analysis would be that it sidesteps any serious theoretization of the function and meaning of those segments and would fail to understand the function of those segments in the construction of truth in the play. The second way of analysing the narrative parts of the drama would be to see them as the voice of a narrator. This would turn the narrative segments into what Jahn calls a “second text,” whereas the stage directions belong to the “first-degree narrative.”10 If analysed as such, the narrator must be seen as an intricate part of the textual universe. Also, given that the narrator in The Crucible is properly subjectivized and openly intervenes in the events of the story, it is important to theorize his position in the hierarchy of discourses. 11 The narrator is describing, discerning, judging, and moralizing. He distinguishes between the characters and gives clear guidelines for how they should be interpreted. The very opening of the play (“An Overture”) is a proper condemnation of Parris: “In history he cut a villainous path, and there is very little good to be said for him” (Miller 2003, 3). Furthermore, Thomas Putnam is described as

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having a “vindictive nature” who regards himself “the intellectual superior of most of the people around him” (Miller 2003, 14), whereas Proctor is described as having “a sharp and biting way with hypocrites” and that in his presence, “a fool felt his foolishness instantly” (Miller 2003, 19). 12 Naturally, this gives clear guidelines for how to understand the characters, their actions, and their functions in the play. Thus, the narrator is placed on a level of knowledge high above any of the other characters by having the power to deliver the truth about the characters and the play. This is common in literature, but not all that common in theatre, and even if it is present, it is often not recognized or analysed. Often, the narrator is schematic and abstract, something which vouches for his sweeping knowledge of what is being told: “Probably more than the creed, hard work kept the morals of the place from spoiling, for the people were forced to fight the land like heroes for every grain of corn, and no man had very much time for fooling around” (Miller 2003, 4). The power of the narrator is produced precisely because he is outside the fictional universe, and therefore knows more of it than any of the characters. He is not part of the story itself, yet he is part of the narrative and is indeed given a voice, although not properly embodied or subjectivized. This makes his voice stronger than any other in the production of meaning and the construction of truth. The narrator is, in fact, so dominant that he completely takes over at times. He wants to tell the story before the play even reveals itself. So it is not surprising to find that so many accusations against people are in the handwriting of Thomas Putnam, or that his name is so often found as a witness corroborating the supernatural testimony, or that his daughter led the crying-out at the most opportune junctures of the trials, especially when—But we’ll speak of that when we come to it. (Miller 2003, 14)

Here we are presented with a traditionally intrusive narrator who shows that this kind of narrative most certainly is part of the play, and as such, deserves attention—even in a translation.

The narrator and the power of writing The play thematizes the idea of voice as central to power by making it clear that it is crucial for the characters to have the right voice to be able to speak the “truth” and obtain power. Whereas some characters in the play promote certain discourses as “true” (most clearly, the Church), placing them at the top of the hierarchy in Salem, the play itself promotes another discourse as true—the discourse opposing the dominant discourse in the

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play. As Bigsby puts it, “Proctor and the others find themselves in court because they deny a reality to which others subscribe and in which, whatever their motives, they in part believe, until, slowly, scepticism begins to infect them with the virus of another reality” (Bigsby 2005, 152). Interesting here is how these different “realities” are produced in the play, and how the play favours one reality over another. It is important to recognize that Proctor is presented as having power (the right kind of power) produced by his reasoned and reasonable speeches of right and wrong, despite his temporary loss of power in the settlement. The question is how the play establishes his voice as true. Is Proctor’s voice powerful because it represents what is right and true? Is the power the girls gain through their use of voice false or untrue, and therefore, evil? It is clear that Proctor’s speeches about truth and what is right are produced as true and right only with the help of the narrator. Proctor has a privileged role in the play, but not because he is right, but because his discourse is established as right in the narrative sections.13 Although much moral sentiment is constructed through Proctor, it is clear that the narrator’s knowledge of the story being told is of crucial importance for the establishment of what is politically and morally right in the play. The play’s narrative segments (rather than the characters’ voices) show how concepts such as truth and goodness, and falseness and evil, are rhetorical and produced by an intricate hierarchy of discourses. Thus, the play-astext adds another dimension to the function of power through the narrative segments. These segments establish a clear hierarchy of discourses and the ultimate expression of what remains “within the true” of the play. One feature that places the narrator on the highest level of discourse is temporality. Temporality establishes the narrator’s authoritative position by his having access to a timespan which encompasses historical, as well as contemporary, contexts. The narrator has the ability to refer both forwards and backwards in time, which means he can clearly tell the story in the past tense from a position in the present, much like a traditional extradiegetic, heterodiegetic narrator. Further, he hints of the coming story in the future tense. In contrast, the dialogue and the stage directions are in present tense. Consequently, the play has two presents—two “nows”: the now of the narrative segments (talking of the story in the past tense) and the now of the story (spoken in present tense by the characters), which is indicated by both the dialogue and the stage directions. But why do this? It is to connect the past and the present in a way that presentifies the past and historicizes the present—giving the narrator godlike knowledge about the events which take place and also places him on the highest level of discourse. The narrator produces long philosophical and political

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expositions (such as that of Hale’s character in act 1). Furthermore, the narrator is someone who has the knowledge to connect past events to the present and to give admonitions of how we should learn from history: “They believed, in short, that they held in their steady hands the candle that would light the world. We have inherited this belief, and it has helped and hurt us” (Miller 2003, 5). To emphasize this connection between past and present, the narrator also directly relates the events in Salem to the Congressional hearings conducted by the House of Un-American Activities in the 1950s: “[…] and in America any man who is not reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with the Red hell. Political opposition, thereby, is given an inhumane overlay which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized intercourse” (Miller 2003, 32). Having been given such a position, the narrator opens up for the use of different rhetorical devices in the construction of truth. Through the narrative parts, the play is set up as a true story where the events presented are historically accurate. The narrator’s main function in the play is consequently to give a historical basis for the text—hence his high position on the hierarchy of discourses. The narrator carefully explains that he has access to historical annals (“No hint of such speculation appears on the court record” [Miller 2003, 6]) which vouches for his credibility and that the story is told truthfully: “He need not have been a partisan of any faction in the town, but there is evidence to suggest that he had a sharp and biting way with hypocrites” (Miller 2003, 19 my emphasis). At the same time, the narrator tells of things that obviously cannot be discerned from the annals—not even according to himself: “No one can really know what their lives were like” (Miller 2003, 4). There is a tension between what the narrator knows and what he claims he cannot know, but narrates nonetheless. There is a constant claim that he cannot know things: “[…] but a faction stopped his acceptance, for reasons that are not clear” (Miller 2003, 13), and yet, at the same time, he tells of things which are difficult to see how he can know: “[…] since he regarded himself as the intellectual superior of most of the people around him” (Miller 2003, 14). This gives the narrator power over the construction of historical truth as well as the truth within the play, and this becomes a way to make the narrator’s position in the text unassailable. The intermingling of different discourses of truth can be represented by the use of quotation marks in the following passage: “To top it all, Mrs. Putnam […] soon accused Rebecca’s spirit of ‘tempting her to iniquity,’ a charge that had more truth in it than Mrs. Putnam could know” (Miller 2003, 25). In this passage, it is unclear what the quotation marks stand for. Are they meant

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to indicate something Mrs. Putnam will say later in the play (which is uncertain, as it is never actually spoken by her character) or does it refer to the so-called original sources? I would argue that this passage points to how the play establishes truth and veracity by means of different discourses and rhetorical devices. The narrator is given a position where he has access to supposedly historical documents which guarantee the veracity of the events, as well as access to the characters’ minds and psychology because he is the one narrating, and thus constructing them. Given that the narrator has such a privileged position in the text, it is ironic how the narrative sections nonetheless operate much by the same system of truth as the characters’ speeches within the play. There is a systematic intermixing of narration, which blurs the difference between fact and fiction—a rhetoric used by the characters within the play as well. The narrator is placed on the highest level of discourse in his ability to be within the narrative (as a subjectivized narrator having a voice—albeit a metaphorical voice) and also outside the story (as a disembodied god) simultaneously. His voice is the incorporeal voice of ultimate power because it is both subjective (having a voice) and objective (his knowledge not being situated in any body) at the same time. When analysing how the play establishes its moral truth through the narrator, it becomes clear that truth is a relative construct produced in such discourses and by such narrative devices themselves. The play ends with a narrative called “Echoes down the Corridor” which shows this. This epigraph once again refers to the annals, whose historicity gives the appearance of truth. However, the historical specificity suggested by such annals is complemented with sweeping information about, for instance, Abigail. In reference to Abigail, it states that “legend has it that Abigail turned up later as a prostitute in Boston” (Miller 2003, 135), which again, is a conglomeration of fact and fiction, for where and how does the narrator have access to legend? And how does legend establish truth if not by word-of-mouth, that is, by speech? Thus, it becomes clear that the narrator provides the readers with the parameters to interpret the play. These parameters are rather explicitly formulated. In the same structure of exegesis, explanatory narratives are given to Salem (in general), the Puritans, the farmers, Parris, Putnam, Proctor, Rebecca, Reverend Hale, and Giles Corey, but nothing explanatory is ever stated about Abigail or any of the other girls. The text remains silent about them, which is quite telling in itself. Thus, the narrative clearly sets up a structure of value concerning whose actions are worth explaining. This easily clarifies why so many critics argue that the girls are evil, as evil needs no explanation.

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This brings us to the crucial question: Do we have to trust the narrator and his version of truth? This analysis is, in some sense, a way of saying no. The narrative parts are vocal in that they present a narrator with a voice, albeit a textual “metaphorical” voice in Gibson’s terms. However, that narrator is not properly subjectivized in that he is disembodied and plays no part in the story; for example, he is not given a clear character: no name, no history, and no personality. Without a body and without embodiment, he lacks clear presence or origin. His voice is the incorporeal voice of a god/man (what Chion calls the acousmetre) whose power to construct the truth is an integral part of the play’s political and moral universe. Being disembodied (without origin and presence), he should perhaps be theorized in terms of writing (absence) rather than voice (presence). The combination of voice and writing makes him omnipotent, and his knowledge becomes the conglomeration of what is the best of both worlds. Thus, the truth established by the narrator seems to be universal and eternal and subjectively grounded simultaneously. But, on closer examination, it becomes clear that the narrator is a rhetorical device used to promote one discourse, one version of reality, as true. The pressing issue is how to deal with such a narrator in the translation of the text into performance. And what consequences for the construction of truth does the narrator have in the film?

Filmatization and the question of writing When confronting a play like The Crucible, it becomes clear that the task of the translator is indeed a dire one. The question of failure is inherent in the task itself, in that the narrative sections must turn into something else in the film. The question is how the director of The Crucible deals with the inherent failure of this task. As Benjamin shows, the translator needs courage to grapple with such failure. If failure is seen as an integral part of translation, something productive might come out of it. In a play like The Crucible the otherwise smooth translation into corporeality becomes practically impossible. The translation has to be a veritable transformation where the copy no longer is a copy and is indebted in other ways to the original. However, having stated that, the overall presence of the narrator in the text implies that voice no longer can innocently take its place in the production. The translation of voice has consequences for the politics of representation that characterizes the play as a whole. Thus, although it is necessary for the translator to acknowledge the impossibility of the task and to be indebted to the original in new and different ways in the

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production of the film, it is equally important for him to acknowledge that there are traces of writing also in the film. And those traces invariably produce meanings that are ideological and discursive. Because The Crucible produces narrative sections whose corporeality is problematic, to say the least, and because those narrative sections play a crucial role in the establishment of a hierarchy of discourses, and thus, in the production of moral right and truth in the play, a producer encounters problems when it comes to voice in the translation of the text into performance and embodiment. The pressing issue in the translation of The Crucible is what to do with the narrator. As already established, the narrator has such a dominant position in the play that it is impossible to ignore him. In The Crucible, this means that there are three different narrations to deal with: the voices of characters, the disembodied voice of the narrator, and the stage directions. The three different narrations may take very different forms in the performance, and as such, they also have very different functions. These functions are connected to their translatability into embodied performances. The first kind of text that must be considered is of the voices of the characters, all of which can be translated into embodied voices in the performance. The dialogue is comparably unproblematic from this perspective. The stage directions represent what I would call “pure writing,” in Derrida’s terms, in that they clearly destabilize the idea of voice in terms of embodiment. In this sense, the stage directions flaunt what all writing is—absence and différance (as they have no origin in a subject and no body which grounds what is being said). Because of this, and in order to handle the anxiety caused by such absence, the stage directions are most often regarded as auxiliary text not included in the performance. In this way, the anxiety connected to writing is quite easily done away with. However, the narrator takes a special position in this setup which makes his function and position so interesting. The narrator provides interesting possibilities for the translation as such. Whatever any director chooses to do with the narrator in the performance (here, the film), the narrator is inevitably integrated into the performance. He is structurally present in any performance because of his all-encompassing and overriding dominance in the text. In the case of The Crucible, in the process of translation, the narrator has three possible functions: first, to represent the highest level in the hierarchy of discourses (whether overtly present or covertly absent); second, to discursively produce the truth; and lastly, to break the illusions of voice. No matter which form the narrator takes in the future performance, it is clear that the narrator affects the ideology of the performance itself.

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The film that I analyse here was produced in 1996 and directed by Nicholas Hytner. In many ways, the film brings out these problems concerning the narrator. 14 If the textual segments are treated as, for instance, the voice of the author, they are given the ultimate level of credibility and truth-production. This is generated by the knowledge that, as they reflect the author, these passages do not “belong” to the play, neither in the text, nor in the production (especially not in the production). If such narrative segments are attributed to the narrator, they most certainly do belong in the text’s universe, producing a voice, but interestingly, not necessarily a body. As such, the narrator should be dealt with in the production of the play. However, the uncertainties concerning the status of the narrator (his embodiment or not), in turn, causes problems for the performance of the play and anxiety concerning the origin of the voices produced. Therefore, it is less surprising to see that in the filmatization analysed here, the narrator’s texts are altogether omitted from the film, which says something about the aesthetics and politics of the play and those of the film. Why then, were the narrative sections omitted? One major reason would be to uphold the seamless aesthetic produced by the polyphony of voices. If included in the film, the narrative segments would alter the aesthetic of the production completely, something that would probably affect its accessibility and public appeal. The radical reworking of the text done for the film production, which in some sense, highlights the directoras-translator’s will to see the production as something inherently different from the text simultaneously reveals that the reworking is a way to sidestep important issues concerning voice. As the film stands, the omission of the narrative segments produces a film that hides, rather than acknowledges, the traces of writing inherent in the embodiment of voice even in this production, and as a consequence, it also hides the rhetorical devices used in the production of truth. The main problem when translating textual elements as dominant as those in The Crucible is not whether or not they should be translated into a staged performance or a film, but rather, how? Where do such blatant textual elements go in the translation and metamorphosis of the text? Furthermore, if the narrator’s segments are omitted from the production, are they indeed missing or are they present in some other way (meaning that they too have been translated into the other medium, but in a different form)? I would claim that much of the information given in the narrative sections (the narrator’s text as well as stage directions) is translated into the film in terms of characterization or setting and are interpreted as a

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gesture or facial expression or even a camera angle. They are an intricate part of the actors’ characterization. In the film, Wynona Ryder exemplifies this as she plays out the desires of Abigail, making sexuality overt in her facial expressions, her gestures, and explicit actions which are, in fact, translations of stage directions such as “Winningly she comes a little closer, with a confidential, wicked air” (Miller 2003, 20), A trill of expectant laughter escapes her, and she dares come closer, feverishly looking into his eyes” (Miller 2003, 20), and “Her concentrated desire destroys his smile” (Miller 2003, 21). Emotions and sentiments described in the stage directions are often translated with the help of, for instance, film music. This is exemplified by the soft music that plays when Rebecca, by her mere presence, calms Betty in act 1. In the same sequence, the stage direction reads: “Gentleness exudes from her” (Miller 2003, 24). Rather than complicating the structural performance of the play (its focus on embodied voice), such a sentence is transformed into emotional content attached to Rebecca with the help of effective film music which not only emphasizes her gentleness, but also the uneasiness the other characters feel at Rebecca’s power. In this way, the stage directions become part of the production of the play, although not explicitly. Many of the narrative sections (both the narrator’s texts and the stage directions) also rely on filmic techniques such as frames, camera angle, close-ups, lighting, et cetera. For instance, in the wake of Tituba’s confession (done in a desire of speech, talking in a language forbidden to her, expressing her longing for Barbados and the desire to name and target white people), when Abigail and the girls in ecstatic screams start naming names at random, there is a dramatized close-up of Tituba which emphasizes the critique of this kind of hysteria given in the narrative sections rather than representing any reaction from Tituba. In a way, the close-up of Tituba is an embodiment of the disclosure given in the narrative sections that discuss the power of speech. Tituba, being the ultimate “Other” or “Subaltern” in the play, is the only one who could embody this critical distance, which makes this close-up an effective strategy. In this way, many narrative elements have been incorporated into the film, albeit only as absently present. Thus, it could be argued that many of the narrative sections are indeed not missing or absent from the production at all, but rather, simply made invisible. It is a trace of writing not explicitly acknowledged in the film. This means that we have a situation where the hierarchy of discourses is quite visible in the play, but it is completely concealed in the film. In the text, the narrator is placed on the highest level of discourse and with the power to construct truth. However, he is also visible as an intrusive

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narrator which, in a sense, lays bare the ways in which truth is constructed. When the narrator is made invisible, we get different politics of representation which have consequences for the politics of truth production. This is well exemplified in the opening scene of the film. Whereas the play clearly constructs a hierarchy of discourses where the textual segments are placed on the highest level of truth, it simultaneously works by means of the dissemination and disintegration of truth by having the characters’ speech dominate the action. By telling and retelling events without ever knowing which version is true or right, the play underscores the power of speech. In the opening scene of the play, the girls’ dancing in the woods is discussed and debated. The event is rehashed by the girls, by Parris, the Putnams, Proctor, Rebecca Nurse and the others, displaying not only the power of speech and the power of retelling, but also that truth is constructed in the moment of telling. The narrator’s role is to “help” the reader sort between the different stories by giving the characters different degrees of credibility. Thus, we as readers surmise that Abigail (being sexually aggressive, deceitful, and vengeful) is lying, whereas Proctor (being righteous, regretful, and logical) is telling the truth. However, this “help” is also a way of constructing truth in the play. This power is simultaneously counteracted by the fact that the narrator is given a (disembodied) voice in the play. This means that the narrator’s contributions simultaneously show that truth is always in a process of construction and always has to be put within quotation marks. Thus, even if we as readers are able to discern between the different stories due to the narrator, no conclusive knowledge of what has happened is ever available. In contrast, the film has as its opening scene the girls dancing in the woods, in full view and fully translated into embodied action for the viewers. This scene is displayed as the actual event (rather than as a retold version of it) constructed by means of an objectivizing camera lens. In his analysis of the film in Arthur Miller: A Critical Study, Bigsby sees this actual portrayal as a way of enhancing the characters’ sexual emotions and their repression in the play. This is no longer a report of the young girls’ dancing in the forest but their actual and hesitant performance, their shedding of inhibitions and, indeed, clothes, their playful abandonment of repressions which anticipates the more lethal abandonment of repressions that follows and which makes the girls offer evidence of supposed depravities that will lead to the execution of their elders. (Bigsby 2005, 169)

This may be so, but I would argue that this portrayal has great consequences for the unfolding of the coming events because, later on, it is

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revealed that Abigail lies about it happening in a fairly straightforward way. This aesthetic choice downplays the idea that truth is constructed in the moment of speech and in relation to who is speaking. Furthermore, it downplays the power given to voice in the play.15 This is clearly connected to the hierarchy of discourses, as the combination of power and knowledge connected to the narrator-as-voice in the play is transferred to visual aspects in the film. The knowledge provided by the narrator has, nonetheless, been included in the film by means of optic (seemingly objective) techniques. We get a seamless filmic aesthetic that, in turn, produces truth as objective and universal. Thus, Abigail is a lascivious, devious woman, and Proctor is a righteous man. But the aesthetics involved in this construction are hidden. The representation of the characters (and the play as a whole) is naturalized in ways which emphasize emotion and intuition rather than artistic fabrication and construction. Thus, it can be argued that in the filmatization of the play, voice and speech gain a privileged position over the narrative segments wherein voice becomes destabilized. With this, structures of power are obscured and turned into an aesthetic of individuality and speech (vococentrism). Thus, the film (and Arthur Miller, in his screenplay) follows the fairly realist aesthetics characterizing Hollywood films, at least when it comes to voice. As Chion argues in The Voice in Cinema, American film has always, in very strict ways, followed the aesthetics and politics of voice, which goes hand in hand with American individualism. It also goes hand in hand with Arthur Miller’s focus on the individual and his experiences in modern American society. This is also why so many critics talk of the play in terms of individual sin, angst, and moral corruption. What I argue is that the narrative sections of the play do not, in any affirmative sense, produce what Monika Fludernik calls “the linguistically generated illusion of a voice factor” (Fludernik quoted in Aczel 2001, 615); that is, they do not, in any clear sense, generate what is required to be named a proper voice. Instead, they are haunted by writing—the very absence of voice. By foregrounding aspects of the play that are not directly connected to the voices of the characters and that do not conform to the polyphonic, individualist understanding of performance, they become a problem in the play, which explains why they are omitted in the film.

Bringing in the narrator The choices made for the film, The Crucible, are not conclusive. The narrative sections could have been brought into the film with radically

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different effects. Writing, if it were in some sense retained in the production of the play, would function as a form of problematization, or even defamiliarization, of speech and individuality and also as a technique that lays bare the operations which establish certain discourses as true. The first possible way of including the narrator into the film would be to add him as a narrator character. 16 Construing him as an embodied character narrating the information given in the text could have worked. Given that the narrator’s segments only exist in the first act of the play, they could be seen as a narrative frame that would later disappear. This take on the narrator would give the story the contextual frame of a man who finds the court reports, which he then studies and subsequently narrates. All this could have been done without seemingly breaking the concepts of voice and subjectivity. However, this was not done for reasons I would like to discuss further. The narrator-as-character in the film would imply a great extension of the narrator’s function by arranging him into a more coherent character. The film would have to create a life story for him (if only a rudimentary one), give him a body and a context, which would no longer give him the position of a narrator objectively knowing and interpreting the actions within the play. He would be part of the construction of the play, which would alter his position in the hierarchy of discourses. He would not hold the highly elevated position he is given in the text of a disembodied textual narrator. Furthermore, the question of how the narrator-as-character knows what he knows would have to be narratively and logically motivated in the film. Also, an embodied narrator would, in some sense, at the very least destabilize the seamless dialogue between the characters. The narrator’s fictionalizing of the story (even if in terms of truth and fact) by giving a frame to it, introduces this problem. It breaks the mimetic representation of voice by fictionalizing the persons (the actors, their voices and bodies) as being simply characters. This is further enhanced by him being an intrusive narrator who intervenes in and interrupts the dialogue in quite intricate ways. Another position that the narrator could take in the film would be as a voiceover introducing the film. In accordance with Chion’s theories in The Voice in Cinema, I would argue that the narrator in The Crucible could be translated as acousmetric, that is, a voice without a body. The role of the narrator as an acousmetric voiceover would go very well with the allknowing disembodied (textual) narrator in the text, a position which, as I have argued, is one of power, knowledge, and truth. To connect the narrator to such a voice (an acousmetric voice) means that the narrator in

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the performance has the position of a “commentator-acousmetre, he who never shows himself but who has no personal stage in the image” (Chion 1999, 21). In accordance with my textual analysis of the narrator, Chion argues that the commentator-acousmetre has four powers: to be everywhere; to see all; to know all; and to have complete power. Echoing Foucault, the commentator-acousmetre represents “the paranoid often obsessional panoptic fantasy, which is the fantasy of total mastery of space by vision” (Chion 1999, 24 emphasis in original). The acousmetric voiceover can have this function precisely because of its disembodiment— meaning its lack of grounding in a subject and a body. However, the narrator’s connection to writing means that he cannot hold this position unproblematically in the performance (in this case, the film). The disembodiment of voice brings out the issue of writing in performance. Furthermore, it brings out problems of embodiment and writing in relation to voice in translation. I want to emphasize that this argument is not grounded in the idea that the text is the origin and the performance is the copy. Neither is it an argument grounded in the idea that the performance is the fulfilment and completion of the text, produced by the embodiment of voice. The way I see it, the narrator could represent the simultaneous existence of text and voice in the translation of a play. The translation of text to embodiment enhances this simultaneous existence because theatre and film is built on idea of bodily presence and textual absence simultaneously. The acousmatic voice in film would imply a voice that is “neither entirely inside nor clearly outside” (Chion 1999, 4 emphasis in original) the screen, which means that it represents writing and voice at the same time. Thus, the function of the narrator-as-writing would be enhanced in a possible performance because of the power of the acousmetre. When Chion argues that “[t]he acousmetre is everywhere, its voice comes from an immaterial and non-localized body” (Chion 1999, 24 emphasis in original), I want to argue that the commentator acousmetre represents not a non-localized body, but writing-as-absence. Thus, I would argue that the acousmetre evokes the idea of voice as lacking both origin and presence— just like writing. Having pointed out the possibilities inherent in the acousmetre, that is, to have a commentator-acousmetre without body and without grounding in a subject would also be quite disturbing because this would imply a voice without origin of speech in a clear subject. Usually, such grounding is given a voiceover by means of actual presence in the film or by means of a characterization and explanation of his or her absence.

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There are additional problems with the two alternative uses for the narrator in the film. The narrator not only creates a realist frame for the story, but also plays an active role in the idea of the production of it in ways which mean that he cannot really be partially included. The narrator could therefore not function merely as an introductory frame to the film. Many of the narrator’s comments are clearly metafictional, where he discusses the very foundations of the narration itself, which would be difficult to include into a film or a performance. How would a director stage the clear intervention into the events and actions of the characters in the following passage: “And while they are so absorbed, we may put a word in for Rebecca” (Miller 2003, 24)? And more importantly, how could a director include it without breaking the vococentric conventions of film? Comments such as the one above are not haphazard or incidental in the play. They are further elaborated and do not only comment on the play-as-text, but also on the play-as-performance. The following is a strange comment because it does not refer to a play that is to be performed, but a play that has already been performed. “Better minds than Hale’s were—and still are—convinced that there is a society of spirits beyond our ken. One cannot help noting that one of his lines has never yet raised a laugh in any audience that has seen this play” (Miller 2003, 31). It is clear that such intermissions halt the events of the play and clearly break its aesthetic. Such metafictional comments always break the illusion of voice and subjectivity by intervening in the story, revealing it to be simply a representation, a construction causing the audience to metafictionally ponder the play or the performance itself. By connecting text, performance, the real world, and their complex relations to each other, it points to the constructedness of the events presented in the play. The last option of how to include the narrator into the performance would be to include the narrative segments as written segments in the film. This would mean filming the passages as text and pasting them onto the screen in various ways. This would be the most fundamental break with notions of vococentrism. And such an aesthetic device would immediately place the play within a specific tradition: that of Brecht’s epic theatre. In his wish to transform the theatre, to make it break with the ruling apparatuses of social and artistic activities, Brecht implemented devices that would break such seamless aesthetics. One such device was what can be described as a literalization of the theatre: Literalizing entails punctuating ‘representation’ with ‘formulation’; gives the theatre the possibility of making contact with other institutions for intellectual activities; but is bound to remain one-sided so long as the

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Such literalizing strategies could imply screening titles for the audience to read, all in order to avoid what he called the “hypnotization of the audience.” However, such strategies clearly go against dramatic aesthetics which proclaim that “the dramatist ought to say everything that has to be said in the action, that the text must express everything within its own confines” (Brecht 2001, 44). As argued before, such an aesthetic implies a focus on voice, and what cannot be voiced on the stage does not belong. But with Brechtian aesthetics, it is precisely that which does not belong which should be included. In the case of The Crucible, this would mean the narrator. If included in the film, the narrator-as-text would completely break the polyphonic version of voice, showing voice without origin in a subject without embodiment. This implies breaking the mimetic aspect of performance which is primarily constructed by a highly naturalized connection between voice and subject. Furthermore, this is something that is thematized on a metafictional level in the play, but completely absent in the film. Breaking this ideology would have had interesting effects, but would also have placed the film in a completely different genre, and in turn, would target a completely different audience. What the director has done, with the agreement of Henry Miller as screenwriter, is omit any such devices. This was to create a realist film which focuses on the characters, their struggles, and misdemeanours, so they both, at some stage, chose to ignore the narrator altogether. What we get is a film that follows a vococentric aesthetic focusing on the voices of the actors and their ability to embody all the words produced in the play. The film thus follows an individualist, logocentric, and vococentric ideology. With the visual or aural omission of textual elements in the film, it further universalizes, rather than historicizes, the problem of speech, discourse, and power. 17 With the aesthetic choices made in the film, we are presented with an individualist ideology where speech is cental, but also with an essentialist ideology concerning truth, since the film hides the ways in which truth is constructed. However, a different translation would break the seamless aesthetic of the film and break the power of both voice and individualism. And to include the narrator as an acousmatic voice or as text would result in the telling of a completely different story.

CHAPTER THREE VOICE REPRESENTING THOUGHT: TRANSLATING STRANGE INTERLUDE

When you think about it, synchronism, this factor we hold to be so important for knitting the voice to the body, is a strange thing indeed. —Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema Her voice jumps startlingly in tone from a caressing gentleness to a blunted flat assertiveness, as if what she said then was merely a voice on its own without human emotion to inspire it. —Eugene O’Neill, Strange Interlude In thinking all things Become solitary and slow. —Heidegger, “The Thinker as Poet”

At first glance, this chapter might seem less political than the previous chapter on The Crucible, as it deals neither with structures of power, nor race, class, or gender in any specifically political way. However, this chapter is political in that it expands on a radical critique of the idea of the autonomous subject as the foundation of action (political and other)— where voice plays a central role. If the first reading dealt with both a critique of voice and the ways in which power is implicated in speech and writing—where it becomes clear that language is implicated in power structures and where subordinate groups fight to gain power over voice— then this chapter is, rather, a radical critique of the subject as such. Nevertheless, the central issue for both chapters is the ways in which a logocentric, vococentric ideology informs the translation of text and performance in ways that reveal the complexity of such an ideology. I chose to analyse Strange Interlude in this context because it brings up another issue that is fundamental to the idea of voice as the foundation for subjectivity and individuality, namely, thought. The relation between voice and thought forms our concepts of identity and language in terms of voicing our ideas and expressing our thoughts. In this humanist construct, the idea that every utterance must have an origin in a subject—that an

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utterance is the effect of an inner process made by the consciousness of the subject—is central. Thus, a strong connection exists between voice and thought, where the two establish the idea of the autonomous subject: cogito ergo sum. Thought should be the basis for a causal relationship where a subject thinks something which he or she then voices. Thought is supposedly the content of what is voiced, and our voice supposedly renders what we have thought. The subject then becomes the origin in the sense of full presence. As shown in the chapter, “The Dramatic Voice,” my theoretical approach is based on Derrida’s critique of logocentrism and the traditional emphasis on speech in modern philosophy. Derrida’s critique of logocentrism can be paralleled with a critique of the subject. By connecting a critique of logocentrism with a critique of the subject, I will investigate the long-established and naturalized concept of voice and thought as a failsafe sign of the autonomous subject. Thus, by analysing voice and thought in Strange Interlude, I will show that the relation between the two is in no way unproblematic or natural. On the contrary, drama and the translation from text to performance highlight the complexity of the relation. Drama presents this anxiety concerning thought, voice, and subjectivity in its double aspect as both text and performance. The translation between the two aesthetic forms brings out many anxieties concerning thought and voice. Strange Interlude explores the idea that the interaction between voice and thought is neither harmonious, nor given. It does this thematically, as well as structurally. In Strange Interlude, the idea of thought as the representation of interiority is problematic. As we shall see, the aesthetic forms constituting drama result in a version of thought that is highly problematic, but it cannot be otherwise. In the play, thought can never represent interiority because thought invariably is implicated in structures of difference and discourse. This is accentuated in the transition from text to performance.

The impossible subject Strange Interlude as a play is focused on the idea of impossibility—the impossibility of a harmonious, functional subject. In many ways, the play’s theme is comparable to that of “The Lost Generation” paired with Freudian psychology because of the characters’ futile search for meaning and mental satisfaction in a world that cannot give it. The theme of subjectivity and interiority is a theme recognized by most critics of O’Neill’s plays: “Traditionally, scholars approaching Strange Interlude have taken one of two tacks: either they relate the concerns of the play to

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O’Neill’s life, or they examine the historical context for the play by focusing on high culture influences such as Schopenhauer, Freud, and Henry James” (Wolff 2003, 216). 18 The combination of psychology (or “pop psychology,” as Joel Pfister puts it) with biographical analysis is overwhelming in O’Neill scholarship: “O’Neill’s biographers like to stress that he ‘was one of the most autobiographical playwrights who ever lived’” (Pfister 1995, 16). Thus, in O’Neill scholarship, “biographical depth and drama merge—the writing of drama read subjectively as personal crucifixion” (Pfister 1995, 17). Although my topic is closely connected to notions of interiority and subjectivity, my focus is slightly different, as we shall see. In the play, an emphasis on the inner lives of the characters signifies the dysfunctional relation between individual desires and the demands of society. It also represents the disjunction between repressed desires and conscious wishes. C.W.E. Bigsby claims that “[i]t was clearly his [O’Neill’s] attempt to make the theatre enact the tension between inner and outer life which he felt to be the essence of Freudian thought” (Bigsby 1982, 71). My take on this theme is that, in the play, it is consistently played out as an interaction between voice and thought. The relation between voice and thought in the text is there to emphasize thought as that which is suppressed or repressed and should not, or cannot, be voiced. As O’Neill puts it, “My people speak aloud what they think and what the others aren’t supposed to hear” (O’Neill quoted in Wolff 2003, 222). These disjunctions are primarily conveyed in the impossibility to express thoughts; there is a gap between what the characters think and what they say. The play is formed around the inability of words to convey the interiority of the individual. In the play, many examples can be found of words being described as “hollow” and having lost their meaning: NINA (forcing a smile) You look frightened, Charlie. Do I seem queer? It’s because I’ve suddenly seen the lies in the sounds called words. You know—grief, sorrow, love, father—those sounds our lips make and our hands write. You ought to know what I mean. You work with them. […] Say lie— (She says it drawing it out) L-i-i-e! Now say life. L-i-i-f-e-! You see! Life is just a long drawn out lie with a sniffling sigh at the end! (She laughs.) (O’Neill 1959, 91)

In the play, words do not correspond to thought, which means that words do not convey interiority: “How we poor monkeys hide from ourselves behind the sounds called words!” (O’Neill 1959, 91). 19 The Freudian theme is repeated in the idea that words cannot convey thought and also in the notion that voice and thought function as a disharmonious couple.

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The tension between voice and thought is both social and psychological. It is psychological in that the words are unable to convey the subject’s thoughts. The words do not function because the characters cannot live up to their socially assigned roles and identities. In this sense, words are clearly social constructs that are unable to render what the subject needs or desires. There is a sense that the words that come out of their mouths are, in fact, exterior to the subject uttering them, as when Marsden says to Nina that “You’ve been reading books. Those don’t sound like your thoughts” (O’Neill 1959, 74). The tension between voice and thought reveal the subject as conflict-ridden, distorted, warped, and unfulfilled. Finding happiness, which is a mantra in the text, means finding contentment in the subject, something that becomes apparent in Mrs Evans’ speech to Nina: Being happy, that’s the nearest we can ever come to knowing what’s good! Being happy, that’s good! The rest is just talk! […] I love my boy, Sammy. I could see how much he wants you to have a baby. Sammy’s got to feel sure you love him—to be happy. Whatever you can do to make him happy is good—is good, Nina! I don’t care what! You’ve got to have a healthy baby—sometime—so’s you can both be happy! It’s your rightful duty! (O’Neill 1959, 111)

Thus, the theme of unfulfilled wishes and desires is not only played out on a subjective and individual level, but also as a social and national concern. Further, happiness as central theme also connects the subjective and the individual to the communal and national. It could be argued that the play stages one part of The Declaration of Independence to see the degree to which happiness is part of national consciousness: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The characters in Strange Interlude are all trying to live the American dream of happiness declared in the Declaration, but are without success because the word “happiness” from the outset is an empty sign. All the characters try to fill this void, but it does not work because the words are always constituted by lack. The hollowness of the concept of happiness connects to the emptiness characterizing all the characters in the play. Thus, the emptiness constituting the word “happiness” runs parallel to the emptiness constituting the subject. There is a longing for an impossible situation where you voice what you think, and where voice and thought in harmony constitute the autonomous subject, which in turn, should produce happiness. But instead, happiness becomes an empty word signifying the

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impossibility of such an identity. Happiness is set up as a concept demonstrating lack in both the Derridean and Lacanian sense. Further, words in general cannot be filled with meaning (and as such, cannot be fulfilling) because there is nothing to fill in the first place. Words are only arbitrary, different, and deferred. The characters’ search for a voice that expresses their thoughts, along with their search for a harmonious subject where thought and voice correlate, is therefore futile. Language cannot produce this longing because language is constituted by radical absence and by différance. Having said this about the theme of the play, Strange Interlude sets up this impossibility as a paradox. This paradox is produced by a complex interaction between the theme as described above and its representational form. Although voice and thought are disharmonious in the theme of the play, the two are representationally set up to work in a causal interaction where thoughts produce certain verbal and non-verbal actions. 20 This means that the impossibility characterizing the theme of the play is a representational possibility in the text—built upon literary conventions of conveying thought. This possibility builds upon the idea of gaining complete knowledge of the subject (albeit a disharmonious, split subject) and the possibility of representing it in writing and performance. This is the case even if the subject no longer is autonomous, homogenous, and harmonious. However, this possibility contains its own defamiliarization because thought in translation invariably becomes something else.

Interiority in narration In narrative genres like the novel, a naturalized interaction between voice and thought exists which endorses this tradition (at least in the realist novel and its offspring). A novel is based on characterization where the interiority of a character explains his or her behaviour in logical causality. The focus on interiority has even grown in narrative, from writers such as Henry James and later modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf right up to contemporary writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Ian McEwan, to name but a few. It could be argued that there has been a withdrawal from plot to interiority, where characters are in focus rather than the events.21 This too shows a growing interest in subjectivity and interiority. In narratives, this focus on interiority often, but not necessarily, means a focus on thought. To draw the human psyche truthfully has become an emblem for verisimilitude (which even experimental writers mostly adhere to22). Many narrative techniques have as their main objective to represent

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the interior of a character, such as internal focalization, autodiegetic narration, interior monologue, stream of consciousness, and Free Indirect Discourse. Generally, it can be said that interiority in novels, in all these forms of narration, is based on the interaction of narrator and characters in ways that endorse the interconnection between thought, voice, and action. These three are seen in a logical sequence of cause and effect, where the subject is always the cause of both voice and action. This also makes it possible to play with what the readers are told about a character and what the other characters can understand of his or her voice and action. Even when there is a discrepancy between what is thought and what is spoken by the characters, this causal logic produces a narrative which is guided by the idea of providing full knowledge about a character. As a result, it can be argued that the novel, and the realist novel specifically, endorse an ideology where voice and thought are signs of the humanist, autonomous subject. The causal and logical interaction between the two guarantees a homogenous subject as the origin of language. Furthermore, the novel bolsters the strong belief that this subject (in its entirety) can be represented. Even as the subject slowly disintegrates, and psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, and postcolonialism point to the historical, ideological foundations for such a belief, the belief in the causal relation between voice and thought—and the possibility of being able to represent such a subject (even in this disintegrated state)—prevails. A play, contrary to the novel, is mainly based on the voices of the characters having an ordered dialogue, which means that it obscures or omits all narrative elements not constructed as voice. This excludes the smooth interaction between narrator and character characterizing the novel. This is done to emphasize speech.23 In this context, the idea of thought poses a problem for drama, as it must be presumed, but never articulated. Traditionally, interiority is dramatized by way of exteriorizing it as speech or action (and props) from which we then surmise (or construct) a character’s interior. All that is known about the interior of a character has to be surmised from his or her voice and actions. By actions, I mean everything from pivotal events and major activities to casual behaviour, small gestures, and facial expressions. In dramatic dialogue, all we get is what is voiced, not what is thought, contrary to the representation of the subject in most novels. Therefore, no clear structure of knowledge explaining the speech and actions of the characters in plays is to be found. In this sense, drama is not really a genre open for this kind of focus on interiority. Drama is often seen as being based on plot and action, by which we consequently surmise the existence of the interiority of the subject.

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But simultaneously, with the novel’s exploration of interiority and subjectivity, the same explorations are carried out in drama. Eugene O’Neill’s plays can be described as “melodramas of the individual,” where for instance, Mourning Becomes Electra and Desire under the Elms focus on psychological states and events. In his plays, O’Neill is fascinated by actions that have psychological consequences or psychological conditions which have consequences for the characters’ actions, like incest, adultery, sexual repression, and the Oedipus complex. This does not mean to say that drama does not, or does not wish to, explore interiority. However, the question is what happens when such interiority is brought into drama. The possibility of representing the subject as a whole (the idea of providing complete knowledge) is built on the possibility of representing interiority. Interiority is what is not voiced, which is difficult to produce in drama. Strange Interlude tries to bridge the problem of interiority. Thus, while the play’s main focal point seems to be the idea that words have no content, that words cannot adequately represent our interior, the play does the opposite aesthetically by letting words convey the whole of the subject via thought, as well as speech. A traditional play, structured around the speech of the characters, could be said to follow the theme of Strange Interlude by representing voice without content (interiority and thought). This aesthetic produces ambiguity grounded in the lack of interiority. However, Strange Interlude, with its holistic ambitions, experiments with the dramatic form to convey the subject as a whole, albeit a subject in disintegration. This means that the ambiguity forming much drama is traded for an aesthetic of complete knowledge. The play adds thought as a way to give interiority to voice, thus providing content to what is spoken. Voice renders what is thought, and thought produces what is voiced (even if it is complex and contradictory). This holistic view of the subject is transferred to a representation that supposedly has the ability to render it. But this aesthetic is not unproblematic, as we shall see.

Thought and narration in Strange Interlude When a play like Strange Interlude sets out to understand the subject in full, it also sets out to explicate the complexities of the subject. This means that the subject is no longer an unproblematic given. In Strange Interlude, this becomes evident in its various methods to create interiority. Although the play deals with the collapse of the humanist subject, the methods used to create interiority nonetheless uphold a holistic view of the subject, in that the play believes in its ability to unfold, understand, and explicate all

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matters of the subject—what is visible to the human eye, and what is not— that is, the interior of the individual subject. Having read Strange Interlude with the aim of deciphering the narrative situation of the text, I divided it into five narrative forms: stage direction, dialogue, monologue, monologue thought, and dialogue thought. These narrative forms operate quite differently in the play and have quite different functions. A general description of the aesthetics of the play would divide it into fifty percent spoken dialogue and fifty percent writing which is not spoken (the stage directions and various forms of thought). I would argue that this is a lot of non-spoken text for drama, which makes the aesthetic of Strange Interlude quite interesting. The most traditional way to construct interiority in drama is by using stage directions. There is an interaction between text and voice in the stage directions which is crucial for the construction of a character’s interior. Narrative explanations and expositions that describe characters’ interiority are exteriorized in the performance as gesture, posture, speech, and bodily action by the actors. The narrative segments disappear and are traded for speech and action which are indispensable for a performance of the play. As argued in the previous chapter on The Crucible, the narrative parts (not voiced) problematize our vococentric ideology and have to be minimized to accentuate voice and corporeality. Therefore, the stage directions are most often brought to a minimum in the text and omitted in the performance of a play. Nonetheless, if a dramatist wishes to create interiority in the characters, the stage directions play an important role. In line with my reasoning on the representation of interiority in drama, Strange Interlude makes extensive use of stage directions. The stage directions are sometimes so detailed that they function like Roland Barthes’ “reality effect.” The main function of the descriptions is to produce a strong sense of reality, and this effect is a result of their emphasis on minute detail. This also regards descriptions which are meant to render psychological depth. The narrative aim of the stage directions is to create a deeper understanding of the characters, both socially and psychologically, and there is often a symbolic correlation between descriptions of the surroundings, props, appearances, and the characters’ psychology. In the following passage, the first description of Nina openly links appearance to psychology: She is twenty, tall with broad square shoulders, slim strong hips and long beautifully developed legs—a fine athletic girl of the swimmer, tennis player, golfer type. Her straw-blond hair framing her sunburned face is bobbed. Her face is striking, handsome rather than pretty, the bone

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structure prominent, the forehead high, the lips of her rather large mouth clearly modelled above the firm jaw. Her eyes are beautiful and bewildering, extraordinarily large and a deep greenish blue. Since GORDON’S death they have a quality of continually shuddering before some terrible enigma, of being wounded to their depths and made defiant and resentful by their pain. Her whole manner, the charged atmosphere she gives off, is totally at variance with her healthy outdoor physique. It is strained, nerve-racked, hectic, a terrible tension of will alone maintaining self-possession. (O’Neill 1959, 69)

It can be argued that the stage directions in the play have two main functions: to produce a reality effect and to reflect the psyche of the characters. In this sense, the stage directions are directive as well as descriptive, as a kind of preparation for the stage, where interiority has to be exteriorized. This means that the states of the characters’ psyche must be surmised from the surrounding objects as well as from action and speech. Although the use of stage directions is quite extensive in Strange Interlude, it is by no means exceptional or unusual to dramatic texts. Stage directions are more integrated in a play’s narrative form than often acknowledged. Compared to the complex use of different narrative forms in The Crucible, the stage directions in Strange Interlude are not exceptional, even if they are noticeable. The innovation created by O’Neill in Strange Interlude is to add thought. This was seen as quite extraordinary for its time, and the play was praised by critics and playwrights alike for its ability to unfold the complexities of the subject. Both Pfister and Wolff explain how adding thought became part of the psychological discourse at the time and which made the play immensely successful and popular. Reviewer Dudley Nichols praises O’Neill for his experimentation as it enabled him [t]o dive deep in the waters of life, as a deep-sea diver who invents for himself a new kind of armored suit, and brings up the monstrous forms which inhabit there. . . . [O’Neill] has not only written a great American play but the great American novel as well . . . a psychological novel of tremendous power and depth. (Nichols quoted in Pfister 1995, 5)

Tamsen Wolff shows how well this experimentation with form worked with the discourses of the time, making the play “a national phenomenon,” and changing the “theatre-going etiquette” of its audiences because of its considerable length (Wolff 2003, 219). 24 Throughout the drama, the characters think about their actions, relationships, and psychological histories. Dialogue and thought often

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interact in the play in quite intricate ways. Together, their main function is to accentuate, oppose, and problematize the characters’ inner lives. EVANS Gordon did! (Eagerly—with intense admiration) In the war! He was an ace! And he always fought just as cleanly as he’s played football! Even the Huns respected him! MARSDEN (thinking cynically) This Gordon worshipper must be the apple of Nina’s eye! (Casually) Were you in the army? EVANS (shamefacedly) Yes—infantry—but I never go to the front— never say anything exciting. (Thinking glumly) Won’t tell him I tried for flying service . . . wanted to get in Gordon’s outfit . . . couldn’t make the physical exam…. never made anything I wanted . . . suppose I’ll lose out with Nina, too ... (Then rallying himself) Hey, you! . . . what’s the matter with you? . . . don’t quit! (O’Neill 1959, 83)

Interestingly, the representation of thought is not only interpersonal but also intrapersonal in the form of dialogue thought. This form of thought is more exceptional for plays. Without hesitation, O’Neill produces a text with what seems to be a dialogue between different characters, but where the utterances are thought rather than uttered. DARRELL (thinking—with a sad bitter irony)

Sam . . . wonderful father . . . lose his reason . . . little Gordon! . . . Nina called my son after Gordon! . . . Gordon, Sam and Nina! . . . and my son! . . . closed corporation! . . . I’m forced out! (Then rebelling furiously) No! . . . not yet, by God! . . . I’ll smash it up! . . . I’ll tell Sam the truth no matter what! NINA (thinking with a strange calculation) I couldn’t find a better husband than Sam . . . and I couldn’t find a better lover than Ned . . . I need them both to be happy . . . MARSDEN (with a sudden despairing suspicion) Good God . . . after all, is it Sam’s child? . . . mightn’t it be Darrell’s! . . . why have I never thought of that? . . . No! . . . Nina couldn’t be so vile! . . . to go on living with Sam, pretending . . . and, after all, why should she, you fool? . . . there’s no sense! . . . she could have gone off with Darrell, couldn’t she? . . . Sam would have given her a divorce . . . there was no possible reason for her staying with Sam, when she loved Darrell, unless exactly because this was Sam’s baby . . . for its sake . . . (Hectically relieved)

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Of course! . . . of course! . . . that’s all right! . . . I love that poor baby now! . . . I’ll fight for its sake against these two! (Smilingly gets to his feet—thinking) I can leave them alone now . . . for they won’t be alone, thanks to me! . . . I leave Sam and his baby in this room with them . . . and their honor . . . (Suddenly raging) Their honor! . . . what an obscene joke! . . . the honor of a harlot and a pimp! . . . I hate them! . . . if only God would strike them dead! . . . now! . . . and I could see them die! . . . I would praise His justice! . . . His kindness and mercy to me! ... NINA (thinking—with horrified confusion) Why doesn’t Charlie go? . . . What is he thinking? . . . I suddenly feel afraid of him! (O’Neill 1959, 163–164)

Even if the different kinds of narration are clearly separated in the layout (as is routine in drama), the interaction between the different forms of narration makes Strange Interlude resemble the novelistic genre rather than drama. As Bigsby puts it, “The asides were in part his attempt to breathe life into a theatrical cliché; in part an appropriation of the novel’s ability to present an inner world” (Bigsby 1982, 72). To emphasize the difference between voice and thought (what is thought and what is said), the parts where a character is thinking are stated as such in the stage directions. Such textual demarcations are important for accentuating the difference between repressed desires, conscious wishes, and voiced words. Although the play shows great discipline in separating thought from speech, there are instances of confusion concerning what is thought and what is spoken in the play, as exemplified in the following stage direction framing Marsden’s monologue: “His voice takes on a monotonous musing quality, his eyes stare idly at his drifting thoughts” (O’Neill 1959, 62). Because the stage direction starts off by indicating that the character is speaking by referring to his voice and ends by indicating that the whole narration is thought, this creates uncertainty as to what is spoken and what is thought. This uncertainty, however, is not immediately disquieting for the reader, in that the closeness between thought and voice is naturalized, and in fact, ascertains the autonomous subject. What such a stage direction does indicate is that thought and voice work as a logic of cause and effect, and as such, are closely related. My point here is that in the drama-as-text, such an interaction between thought and speech is unproblematic, even conventional. The stage direction, dialogue, monologue, monologue thought, and dialogue thought all create quite an intricate textual pattern of thought, voice, and dialogue.

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84 NINA (thinking strangely)

That look in his eyes—what did he mean? . . . (With the same monotonous insistence) You must know what to think. I can’t think it out myself any more. I need your advice—your scientific advice this time, if you please, Doctor. I’ve thought and thought about it. I’ve told myself it’s what I ought to do. Sam’s own mother urged me to do it. It’s sensible and kind and just and good. I’ve told myself this a thousand times and yet I can’t quite convince something in me that’s afraid of something. I need the courage of someone who can stand outside and reason it out as if Sam and I were no more than guinea pigs. You’ve got to help me, Doctor! You got to show me what’s the sane—the truly sane, you understand!—thing I must do for Sam’s sake, and my own. DARRELL (thinking confusedly) What do I have to do? . . . this was all my fault . . . I owe her something in return . . . I owe Sam something . . . I owe them happiness! (Irritably) Damn it, there’s a humming in my ears! . . . I’ve caught some fever . . . I swore to live coolly . . . let me see . . . (In a cold, emotionless professional voice, his face like a mask of a doctor) A doctor must be in full possession of the facts, if he is to advise. What is it precisely that Sam’s wife has thought so much of doing? NINA (in the same insistent tone) Of picking out a healthy male about whom she cared nothing and having a child by him that Sam would believe was his child, whose life would give him confidence in his own living, who would be for him living proof that his wife loved him. (Confusedly, strangely and purposefully) This doctor is healthy . . . DARRELL (in his ultra-professional manner—like an automaton of a doctor) I see. But this needs a lot of thinking over. It isn’t easy to prescribe—(Thinking) I have friend who has a wife . . . I was envious at his wedding . . . but what has that to do with it? . . . damn it, my mind won’t work! . . . it keeps running away to her . . . it wants to mate with her mind . . . in the interest of science? . . . what damned rot I’m thinking! . . . NINA (thinking as before) This doctor is nothing to me but a healthy male . . . when he was Ned he once kissed me . . . but I cared nothing about him . . . so that’s all right, isn’t it, Sam’s Mother? (O’Neill 1959, 128– 129)

The way that this dialogue is presented as an interaction of thought and speech, in many ways, demonstrates this turn to interiority. It also shows the accentuation of thought in the play. This is quite an intricate way to convey thought, but it works quite well textually. It is a logical interaction

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which we readily accept upon reading the text because we are familiar with it in other narrative forms. Together, these narrative methods produce the idea of gaining complete knowledge of the subject as a complex entity. The play-as-text is characterized by the possibility of representing this— and does so without any obvious interruption or problem.

Filming thought: problems and solutions The problem for drama is how to add interiority when the play is performed, that is, when it is staged or filmed. The question is how to translate such an intricate narrative pattern to stage or film where quite different methods and techniques are needed. The lack of interiority in dramatic performance demands specific methods to produce such information. This is why there is a clear difference between reading and watching a play like Strange Interlude. This analysis of the play will focus on thought and speech in a comparison between the text and two filmatizations of the play: one from 1932 directed by Robert Z. Leonard (starring Norma Shearer and Clark Gable, among others) and one TV version, which is a filmed stage performance from 1988 directed by Herbert Wise (starring Glenda Jackson, David Dukes, and Ken Howard, among others). Watching the two films, it becomes evident how thought brings back the problem of translating the text into an embodied performance. In “Performing Degree Zero: Barthes, Body, Theatre,” Timothy Scheie explains that interiority in most performances (films and stage productions) is surmised from exterior action: The men of ancient Rome portrayed in Hollywood films, for example, are riddled with internal conflict. How does the spectator know this? Not by apprehending the character’s interior psychology but by viewing a simple exterior sign: the beads of sweat on their foreheads. (Scheie 2000, 167–168)

Thus, interiority is produced from “signs borrowed from a cultural code” (Scheie 2000, 168); in this case, the code of thinking in and of itself. In Strange Interlude, interiority does not have to be surmised because it is actually displayed, which puts any director of the play in a different situation. Without thinking about the transition as a relation between a copy and an original, there is the challenge which arises from the relation itself. The interaction between text and performance brings out and dismantles a set of ideas forming the subject and the possibility of representing it. It also shows that the naturalized interaction of thought and speech forming our logocentric, vococentric ideology in no way involves imitating (or mirroring) reality, but rather consists of a set of aesthetic conventions

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establishing that ideology. Here, I argue that the possibility of representing both thought and speech constitutes Strange Interlude as a text, whereas it is the impossibility of doing so that constitutes any performance of the play. Thought is defined as something that is not spoken. However, in performance, this must be spoken. This means that the tension between voice and thought—what is said and heard, and what is not—is impossible in the performance. Thought represented textually works well precisely because a text is characterized by absence (of sender, receiver, and context); no embodied subject claims the thought. Subjectivity, voice, and thought are all textual constructs without materiality or embodiment. Therefore, the drama-as-text can play with different forms of interiority without claiming the actual presence of either. In contrast, in a performance, embodiment becomes a necessity; a necessity that also has its challenges. The embodiment of thought in a performance implies that it has to be materialized in some way. And the way that thought is materialized is by means of voice, although this need for thought to be spoken causes a set of problems that the films must solve. The problem that thought presents is made obvious at the opening of the 1932 film. In a written epigraph, the film hails O’Neill’s innovation: “In order for us fully to understand his characters, Eugene O’Neill allows them to express their thoughts aloud. As in life, these thoughts are quite different from the words that pass their lips.” I would argue that this epigraph has been included to make a few things clear. Firstly, to explain why the film includes both speech and thought; secondly, to explain why the characters express their thoughts aloud; thirdly, to emphasize that there is a difference between thought and speech in the film; fourthly, to explain that this gives a fuller picture of the human psyche; and lastly, to emphasize that the inclusion of thought is realistic. In this, the epigraph also says something else. The need for an explanation in the first place indicates that the inclusion of thought actually breaks realistic film codes and that the performance of thought is quite problematic to pull off. Interiority is not really action-based, to say the least, and this markedly influences the pace of the film. This must be seen as a sign that the presence of thought in a performance changes the aesthetic of representing interiority in ways that I will now examine. Both films show that the translation from text to performance demonstrates how the idea of faithfulness is futile and that the task of the dramatic translator has to be radically revised. The play as performance cannot simply conform to the ideology of voice as presented in the text. Because thought has to be represented through voice, it is spatialized as well as temporalized. That thought is embodied (voiced) implies that thought cannot occur as

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simultaneously as speech or cannot be made into a moment of incoherent, flickering thought. This, in turn, means that it takes time and space to represent thought, which changes the aesthetic of the play. When thought is spatialized as voice, its ideology also changes. Thought clearly cannot remain within the not-voiced, and with this change, all metaphysical beliefs that such a stance induces change too. As previously argued, the theme centres on the characters’ futile endeavour to correlate their thoughts with their voices. This idea creates a theory concerning language where words are empty signifiers without semantic content. In the interaction between voice and thought, words such as “happiness” are shown to be empty signifiers impossible to give any positive content. We get a rather cynical view of life where no meaning is to be found (in social interaction, in life’s journey, in personal relations), and in the end, there is no wish, hope, or endeavour to create such meaning. One way to deal with the overwhelming amount of thought that characterizes the play is to exclude it (or radically shorten it) in the performance of the play, which is also done in the two filmatizations. 25 However, the moment this is done, the ideological perspective changes. The cynical disbelief in words and their meaning is downplayed. Also, it is impossible to distinguish between cause and effect when it comes to the exclusion of thought and the change of ideological perspective in the play. This means that it is impossible to say whether thought has been left out because the inclusion of thought makes the film too cynical for the movies or if the cynicism played out in the interaction between thought and speech is excluded as an effect of the comparative absence of thought in the films. Nevertheless, it is clear that the inclusion of thought in the performance of the play sets up its ideological frame. As such, it should be noted and analysed. Interestingly, for my investigation of voice and subjectivity, the two films have chosen two different strategies. These strategies generate different ideological effects concerning voice, thought, embodiment, and subjectivity. They also represent different ways of dealing with certain theoretical issues, all of which concern embodied thought. The film from 1932 used voiceover to represent thought. This means that the actors’ voices are projected vocally in the film without the actors moving their lips. In contrast, the film from 1988 opted for a more traditional theatrical solution (especially as it is a filmed stage performance). In this film, the actors actually speak what is thought in so called “asides,” which means that lips and voice are synchronized even when producing thought. Both

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solutions have interesting effects which highlight the problems in focus here.

Thought needs a subject With the representation of thought in the two films, two major problems arise. The first concerns the means available to assign thought to a character, and the second concerns the issue of differentiating between thought and speech. In the 1932 film, with its choice of voiceover, the former problem is most acute, whereas the 1988 film clearly has to deal with the latter. Rather than agreeing with the cover of the new release of the 1932 film which states that “O’Neill’s ‘asides’—sidelong soliloquies which provide a glimpse of the characters’ innermost secrets—lent themselves so well to film that numerous critics lauded the innovation,” I would argue that the thoughts represented in the film necessarily break realistic codes of how to represent subjectivity. Furthermore, I disagree with its proposal that the film does indeed contain soliloquies. According to the OED, a soliloquy is “An instance of talking to or conversing with oneself, or of uttering one's thoughts aloud without addressing any person,” or the literary representation of this kind of discourse. Strange Interlude does not attempt to represent people speaking to themselves, but rather, tries to represent thought. And the 1932 film had taken great pains not to convert thoughts into classical soliloquies. To represent thought in film, voiceover seems to be the rather logical choice because of the stylistic techniques available in the production of film. What marks thought as non-voiced in the film is that the actors’ mouths do not move, which is a clever move because there is no hesitation concerning what is thought and what is spoken. However, with voiceover, another theoretical concern becomes pressing. In his book, The Voice in Cinema, Chion speaks of the necessity of providing each voice with a subject so as not to create ambiguity in a film. This is even more the case when discussing thought. Thought can never be without subject because thought, in many ways, constitutes the subject as such. Thought is the primal representative of consciousness; therefore, it becomes all the more important to clearly connect thought to a subject. The problem with the performance of thought is that thought has to be spoken. When spoken, thought enters the same domain as voice, which opens up for uncertainty and discomfort. Chion discusses the existence of “off-screen” voices which belong to those who have left the frame or screen: “These sounds and voices that are

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neither entirely inside nor clearly outside” (Chion 1999, 4 emphasis in original), which makes them signify in specific ways. Performing thought as voiceover, in many ways, resembles these kinds of voices in that they have a presence in the film, even if they are not clearly in the film. However, because the actors’ mouths do not move, there is a feeling that the voices hover over or around the film itself. In this, thought in cinema as voiceover risks becoming what Chion calls the “acousmetre”: For the spectator, then, the filmic acousmetre is “offscreen,” outside the image, and the same time in the image: the loudspeaker that’s actually its source is located behind the image in the movie theater. It’s as if the voice were wandering along the surface, at once inside and outside, seeking a place to settle. Especially when a film hasn’t yet shown what body this voice normally inhabits. (Chion 1999, 22–23 emphasis in original)

The difference here is that there is a kind of on-screen presence, but this does not guarantee the correlation between voice and subject because the actors’ mouths do not move. However, because the voices being heard actually represent thought, they do not necessarily stay in this uncertain position. The illusion of attaching a voice to a character is so strong that the ear always “tries to localize and if possible identify the voice” (Chion 1999, 5 emphasis in original). This is also the case with thought-voices. Even if the voices are not clearly assigned to a speaking actor, they do not remain unlocalized. Thus, to keep up the illusion of correlation, a form of de-acousmetization that normalizes the thought-voices in the film is needed: “For at that point the voice loses its virginal-acousmatic powers, and re-enters the realm of human beings” (Chion 1999, 23). Chion even refers to this act of embodying voice as a symbolic act “dooming the acousmetre to the fate of ordinary mortals” (Chion 1999, 27–28). This is normally done by the synchronization of voice and moving lips. Chion states that “there is an end point of de-acousmatization—the mouth from which the voice issues” (Chion 1999, 28). Naturally, this cannot happen with thought, as thought must be separated from speech. Thought is marked as thought precisely by not being spoken, meaning that the lips of the actors do not move. When using voiceover to signify the act of thinking, thought-voice can never reach this position, but it nonetheless has to signify mortality and subjectivity. It could even be argued that the film strives to never bring thought into an embodied position by dismissing soliloquies as a possible way to represent thought. Thus, the 1932 version struggles with its need to stabilize the semi-acousmetric voices by correlating them to the subjects

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that supposedly think them without turning thought into conventional speech. How then, is thought conveyed by the non-speaking actor (whose voice is heard, but understood as thought)? The film uses different techniques which are crucial in upholding this division. Because there must be no ambiguity concerning whose thought-voice is heard, this means that thought has to be performed by the actor. To be honest, there is nothing that says that the thought of a subject must sound (as sound really has nothing to do with thought) the same as when he or she speaks. There is no logical correlation between the sound of a person’s voice and that of his or her thoughts. However, given that voice is so strongly connected to thought, and as such, to the identity of a speaking subject, this is an assumption that is never questioned. This is also taken for granted in the film. It is practically impossible to imagine projecting a completely different set of voices representing the thoughts of the characters in the film. This would be aesthetic suicide—but not necessarily less realistic in representing interiority. Therefore, the film uses the same voices that the actors use to speak in the representation of thought, but marking them off as thought by means of tone and pitch of voice. The voices are often hushed and lagging when signifying thought, but are otherwise the same as when spoken. However, this is not enough to secure the spoken thoughts to the subjects thinking them. When producing thought, the body plays an important role. One way of making a certain thought “belong” to a certain actor is by means of facial expression. By matching thought to a face, it automatically “glues” the thought to a body and a subject, as in the close-up of Marsden at the start of the film. The combination of a facial expression with a close-up shot excludes all other possible thinkers, which is of crucial importance when there are several actors on screen. However, this technique has other, unforeseen effects. How thought is presented in the film appears to be in line with Brecht’s formulation of gestus, both in terms of embodiment and in terms of demonstration. The gestic is described by Brecht: “The realm of attitudes adopted by the characters towards one another is what we call the realm of the gest. Physical attitude, tone of voice and facial expression are all determined by a social gest: the characters are cursing, flattering, instructing one another, and so on” (Brecht 2001, 198). Doherty argues in “Test and Gestus in Brecht and Benjamin” that gestus indicates “the embeddedness of a particular gestic element of speech or posture in a complex of social relations and processes” (Doherty 2000, 457). Thus, the gestic demonstrates bodily habits. What the characters do in Strange

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Interlude (perhaps contrary to Brecht’s correlation between gestus and social class) is adopt the habit of the subject (as an ideological, humanist construct). In the performance, thinking becomes one such habit, albeit a very vague and unidentifiable one, which makes it interesting in terms of gestus. The embodiment of thought is by no means innocent or uncomplicated, but rather, socially and ideologically informed. Gestus is important because it turns habit into a demonstration of habit. In a description of his instruction to a female actor, Brecht explains the difference between habit and gestus: She has not only learned to act, but, for example, she has learned how to wash herself. Up to then, she had washed so as not to be dirty. That was completely beside the point. I taught her how to wash her face. She acquired such skill in this that I wanted to make a film of her doing it. (Brecht quoted in Doherty, 2000, 459)

It is as if the act of washing is simultaneously a demonstration of the act— and as such, perhaps even a comment on the act. When a habit is demonstrated as a habit it becomes like a comment on the habit itself. The fact that it is commented on by demonstrating it turns it into something other than mere imitation or representation. Thus, “pure imitation does not represent the Gestus” because it needs another element to function (Doherty 464–465). In its use of voiceover, the 1932 film necessarily produces this effect. This is because the voiceover technique has bodily effects (such as facial gestures, bodily gestures, vocal gestures) that make thought visible as thought: “Once instruments are used even the novelist who makes no use of them is led to wish that he could do what the instruments can: to include what they show (or could show) as part of that reality which constitutes his subject-matter” (Brecht quoted in Doherty 2000, 473). The voiceover technique reveals the gestic quality of thinking. It makes it visible through technique, and demonstrates it as precisely technique. Important for my analysis is that gestus does not ridicule or make thought absurd in any simplistic sense. As Fredric Jameson argues in Brecht and Method, it is not so that “gestus marks some radical simplification of the movements or the action” (Jameson 2000a, 100), but rather the gestic quality of thinking in the film is produced by the form itself, its embodiment as performance. In this, thinking becomes observable as such. The interesting thing about thought in film is that it works. It does not produce a simple form of verfremdung, or alienation effect. On the contrary, it is smooth, but nonetheless points to its gestic quality. It does not work by shock, but rather it is close to boredom in its

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spatiality, focusing on the triviality of everyday existence, or “identifying the heightened and the everyday with each other” (Jameson 2000a, 100), as Jameson puts it, which falls in line with the Lost Generation theme of the play. Another way in which the gestic quality of thought-as-voice is established in the film is by means of bodily posture. In the absence of moving lips, facial expression is used to represent what is thought or said in the voiceover in order to produce a failsafe connection between thought and subject. The technique of gluing the thought to a subject by means of facial expression becomes a gestic act. A good example of this can be seen at the end of the film when all the actors are gathered on the yacht to watch Gordon row. In this scene, Norma Shearer’s contorted face signifies her thoughts about revealing her hellish secret to her son. Inherent in such a filmic technique is the naturalized idea that thought is so individual and personal that it becomes a bodily expression. Thought becomes visible (as a sign) on the body. With this technique, thought becomes a flagrant mix of body and voice, where what is thought has to be reflected in the actor’s body to make it understandable. This technique simultaneously places thought in a domain other than the purely realistic. I would argue that the gestic quality of thought in the 1932 version of Strange Interlude is in discord with thought as personal and private. While thought is seen to be so personal that it becomes a bodily expression, in this instance, it simultaneously becomes exteriorized in such a way that it becomes social haltung—that is, gestic. However, rather than taking us back to an archaic, organic stage, as Chion says the acousmetre does (Chion 1999, 27), I would argue that thought-as-gestic-acousmetre destabilizes the naturalized ideology of subjectivity as a logical combination of thought and speech. Thus, the gluing of the thought-voice to a body in no way normalizes or stabilizes the voices that “command, invade, and vampirize the image” (Chion 1999, 27). The very act of “gluing” highlights the artificiality and the social nature of the whole construct.

Differentiating speech and thought In the 1988 version, this causes no theoretical dilemmas because thought is spoken by the actors in asides or soliloquies. This means that synchronization is conclusive (as conclusive as synchronization gets, that is). There is no ambiguity about who is thinking what, and the film does nothing to problematize synchronization as such.

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Given that this form of thought follows a long theatrical tradition, the solution is so conventional that it cannot be seen in any way other than as a filmatization of a stage production. Also, the fact that it follows theatre conventions despite being filmed has certain effects. It means that the film also follows theatrical conventions when it comes to the spatial problems of spoken thought. Contrary to the 1932 version of the play, the fact that thought is articulated vocally by the actors means that thought, when embodied as voice, operates like voice spatially—a fact that clearly needs consideration. In the film, spoken thought works best in classically theatrical poses. This means that this technique functions best when thought is voiced in long monologues by actors who are alone on stage, or in the frame. This is a way to suspend the disbelief caused by the fact that thought is spoken and thus clearly spatialized in the film. Take, for example, the opening scene: when Marsden is introduced, his monologue thoughts are spoken aloud by the actor. As he ponders life in general and his own life specifically in a long, coherent monologue, it is possible to motivate the monologue realistically. Further, because the text in the opening scene does not specify whether it is thought or spoken and is used in the film, the uncertainty concerning what is spoken and what is thought in the text causes little problem in the film. In such situations, the theatrical conventions of asides are operable as suspensions of disbelief characterizing thought in theatre and film. However, at the same time, this convention can be said to create another anxiety, that of differentiating between speech and thought. Because both thought and speech are spoken by the on-screen actors, thought has to be more clearly marked as thought than in the voiceover solution so as not to confuse the two. The risk facing this version is that thought as well as voice becomes exterior to the subject, meaning that what represents interiority is externalized. Therefore, it is important that thought is clearly marked as thought in the film. To mark what is spoken as not spoken, the film makes use of a couple classic techniques. The first one implies that the actor turns his or her head to the side as a way of marking that the character no longer is addressing the audience or another character—although the actor clearly speaks aloud. Turning away is a mark of interiority, signalling that what is spoken is not public, but private. The same can be said of turning away from the camera, as Professor Leeds does several times during his first long conversation with Marsden. Again, this is a way to remove the illusion that a dialogue is being conducted between characters or between the actor and the audience. Other ways to signal interiority is to change the tone or pitch of voice, and

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again, facial expression. These techniques represent ways to suspend the disbelief that arises from the fact that what is voiced, as well as what is not voiced, is articulated by the actor. However, because the play by no means follows the classical monologue form of asides, such solutions generate new problems. Contrary to classic theatre where the soliloquies are long, coherent speeches, thought in Strange Interlude is represented as more disrupted and incoherent. Furthermore, thought and speech are represented as following an integrated and intricate pattern of interaction where the two are continuously intertwined. In line with this intricate textual (rather novelistic) construct, the transition between thought and voice in the film has to be made in such short intervals that it makes (spoken) thought and speech disturbingly similar. Frequently, one of the characters stops his or her speech mid-sentence to think. Although this is a frictionless aesthetic in the text, it generates a very different aesthetic in the film because the actor has to break off his or her speech with thought that, in fact, is spoken by him or her. Again, this gives thought a gestic quality by the constant need to differentiate thought from speech. This continual need to mark off speech as thought turns the act of thinking into a demonstration of the act itself. The lack of difference between the two produces anxiety concerning the idea of interiority—which it supposedly represents. Interiority is precisely what is not said, which is an impossibility in the film. In this way, the film makes thought appear estranged and forced rather than the natural, causal counterpoint to voice. The problems facing the 1988 filmatization are theoretically connected to the problems of the 1932 film in that they problematize thought. Both films, in different ways, make thought into something that it supposedly is not. Thought becomes an overtly artistic, representational form by its transformation into voice. Nonetheless, the films manage to suspend our disbelief by means of theatrical and filmic conventions. However, theoretically, with these conventions, both films turn thought into gestus. In its inability to properly differentiate thought and speech, the 1988 film uses gestures to aid speech in its representation of thought. This is needed because what is thought is spoken. These gestures point to the thinking quality of thought. In contrast, the 1932 film needs to use gesture to attach thought to a body to de-acousmetricize the voices hovering over the bodies in the film. This bodily act of attaching thought to a body and a subject turns from a naturalized habit into gestus. As argued before, the films do not imitate the habit of thinking. Doherty clearly separates the two when she claims that “pure imitation does not represent the Gestus” (Doherty

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2000, 464-465). The spatialization of thought through voice becomes a clear representation, or a demonstration, of the act of thinking itself.

Externalizing thought What I intend to argue here is that this aesthetic solution to the problem of embodying thought lies in the spatialization of thought; that is, it takes a certain amount of time to say the thought aloud. That spoken thought takes time also implies that it fills space in the film. Thus, the films demonstrate how time and space are conflated. If thought is spoken, it takes up a certain amount of room, which has to be dealt with technically. The gestic quality of thought is also produced by the spatialization of thought. Both films use different techniques—those of voiceover and asides—to represent thought. However, both techniques are very different and present different problems with thought which need to be solved technically. Nonetheless, what characterizes both films in their necessity to speak thought aloud (to represent it in its embodied state) is the temporalization and spatialization of thought. In both films, the spatialization of thought produces a temporal dilemma. In the 1932 version, where thought is represented by voiceover, thought produces a temporal–spatial lapse. When the actors think (and their facial expressions represents thought) during a conversation, there is an awkward “silence” in the film; a silence produced by the fact that the actors’ lips do not move. This silence becomes spatial, in that it does not exist temporally. As the thought is heard by the audience, but presumably not by the other characters, a temporal interlude appears, which is also spatial in that the voices of the characters take a certain amount of space in the film. Because thought takes up space without this space existing fictionally, the actors have to let this space be filled with bodily action or non-action. This is naturally the case because with the embodied spatialization of thought, the simultaneity of speech and thought is impossible to convey. When the characters do much thinking, the actors have problems representing what goes on in the meantime. One example demonstrating this from the 1932 film is when Darrell delivers his long voiceover soliloquy during his conversation with the Evans. To fill the spatial gap produced by his voiceover, the film shows a close-up of Evans while Darrell is thinking. The actor in this close-up remains in a pose of non-action. Although this works quite well because the focus turns our attention away from the thinker, this aesthetic move also makes it appear as if Evans is listening to Darrell’s thoughts—just like the audience. Thus, I would argue that in the 1932 film, the spatialization of thought produces

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a “strange interlude” which can be said to characterize the film’s entire aesthetic. Speaking thought, as it is done in the 1988 version, redeems the strangeness of the strange interlude in the 1932 version by its use of vocalized thought. The spatial silence that thought generates in the 1932 film is gone because the actors actually do speak throughout the film— even when thinking. But the 1988 film’s representation of thought as spoken by the actors presents other, similar problems with time and space. Because thought is spoken by the actors and is synchronized by their moving lips, it is spatialized in a different manner. In this version, little room to play with space and time exists because thought, in every way, resembles speech—it sounds like it, looks like it, and operates like it. This means that simultaneity of thought and speech is as impossible in the 1988 film as it is in the 1932 film. In the 1988 version, a situation develops where Leeds speaks, and his speech is interspersed with rather extensive thoughts by Nina and Marsden, meaning that they are thinking at the same time as Leeds is speaking. These simultaneous actions need to be represented as happening simultaneously, although the voices and thoughts are actually sequential or serial. This has the spatial–temporal effect that Leeds, after the spatial presence of the other characters’ thought, continues his monologue verbatim. This creates a spatial gap in Leeds’ conversation, which makes the viewer wonder what the professor was doing while Nina and Marsden were thinking. The fact that his speech continues as if Nina’s and Marsden’s thoughts did not take any space again creates a spatial gap in the film. The gap is, in fact, absent (given that the actors do speak their thoughts), but it is a fictional gap producing thought as something other than interior. In the 1988 version, another quite interesting attempt to produce simultaneity of thought and speech is produced by means of filmic techniques. In the previously described scene, when professor Leeds is talking, and Nina’s and Marsden’s thoughts are interspersed mid-sentence in his speech, Leeds’ voice fades out into the distance (meaning it becomes more quiet), whereas Nina’s thought-voice remains close (meaning it becomes loud and clear). This means that the film indicates that Leeds’ speech continues as Nina thinks. However, although this is a filmic technique meant to represent thought and speech as being simultaneous, the fact nonetheless remains that thought-as-voice is spatialized in a way that makes it into something else ideologically. The spatialization of thought creates much anxiety concerning the status of thought. The major ideological effect of such spatialization is that thought-as-voice no longer represents interiority. Spatialized thought

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implies a form of externalization of thought. This means that thought no longer follows a causal interaction where it is the origin of what is spoken. Thought no longer functions as the supposedly intentional content of what is spoken. This, in turn, means that spoken language no longer renders what we have thought. This is the effect of the gestic quality of thought in the films. What characterizes the representation of thought in both films is a signifying quality which is clearly connected to its externalization of thought. And because both films must embody thought as voice, thought no longer represents interiority in any naturalized and uncomplicated way. Both films (try to) uphold the illusions of thought by means of theatrical and filmic techniques, such as the voiceover and the aside. However, in both films, thought becomes a bodily surface (rather than psychological depth) in that the techniques that produce voice as thought leave marks upon the actors’ bodies. Such marks are gestic, in that they turn thought into a signifying practice. Thus, thought becomes a sign that enters the signifying system of difference and deferral, something which Barthes expands upon in his analysis of Brecht’s epic theatre: For Barthes, the Saussurian principle that a sign has no value in and of itself and makes no sense outside of the whole system from which it differentially derives its meaning, or even its very existence, is analogous to the Brechtian gestus that reveals how the characters’ identity and worldview are shaped by the social, economic, and political situation in which they find themselves, and to which they are often blind. The task of a Brechtian/Saussurian critic is to find the means to alienate the apparent autonomy of an individual entity, be it a character in a play or a sign, to reveal its situation in the system in which it circulates and that grants it meaning. (Scheie 2000, 171)

When thought becomes a bodily surface, it is transformed into a sign (signifying thought rather than being thought). This, in turn, reveals that it is part of the signifying system, which makes it textual. Strange Interlude does not imitate thought, but signifies it: “There is no stable performer, no psychology or interiority under or within the body, but in their place the weave or text of a plurality of signifying gestures, the construction site of an imaginary subjectivity” (Scheie 2000, 176). Strangely enough, O’Neill’s attempt to faithfully represent the human subject in its entirety by including thought in his play has the opposite effect. Again, this makes Strange Interlude echo Brecht’s epic theatre rather than realistic drama: “For Brecht, the externality of the epic theater and its protagonist stand in opposition to the Aristotelian drama, in which ‘the plot leads the hero into situations where he reveals his innermost

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being’” (Doherty 2000, 452). Thought in the films comes to represent interiority as a sign, where the habit of thinking becomes a bodily surface. The causal relation between thought and speech is thus reversed. It is not that speech arises from thought, but rather that thought is a construct which is constructed from the bodily (habitual) understanding of bodily actions (gestus). Thus, as Brecht explains, “weeping arises from sorrow, but sorrow also arises from weeping” (Brecht quoted in Doherty 2000, 459–460), which is in line with the Marxist contention that believing comes from praying and not the other way around as Althusser argues in Lenin and Philosophy.26 Thus, what I want to argue is that the tension between thought and speech as a representation of the fully exposed, albeit irrational, subject is impossible in performance. What represents surface and depth in the text is revealed as pure surface in the performance. This is because everything has to be voiced. What supposedly is unvoiced and unarticulated is all displayed by speech. We are presented with a situation on film where the actors are saying, “Here I am speaking what I am thinking—what I am speaking represents my thought.” In this, the interaction between thought and speech as a full representation of the subject becomes something else. In contrast, O’Neill’s modernist, experimental aesthetic turns long-hidden, secret, and subconscious thought into social signifying language. When thought takes over the screen in such an overwhelming way, it forces thought to inhabit a social, communal signifying space rather than an internal, subjective one.

CHAPTER FOUR IRONY, SATIRE AND THE CONUNDRUM OF SPEAKING: THE WOMEN

SYLVIA: (Shrugging) Then let the story ride. It will be forgotten tomorrow. You know the awful things they printed about—what’s her name?—before she jumped out the window? Why, I can’t even remember her name, so who cares, Edith? —Clare Boothe, The Women But it is also clear by now why irony causes so much trouble. An aggressively intellectual exercise that fuses fact and value, requiring us to construct alternative hierarchies and choose among them; demands that we look down on other men’s follies or sins; floods us with emotion-charged value judgments which claim to be backed by the mind; accuses other men not only of wrong beliefs but of being wrong at their very foundations and blind to what these foundations imply—all of this coupled with a kind of subtlety that cannot be deciphered or “proved” simply by looking closely at the words: no wonder that “failure to communicate” and resulting quarrels are often found where irony dwells. —Wayne Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony

For this study, I chose Clare Boothe’s play, The Women, because it is a satire which uses various forms of ironic discourse to produce its satiric effects, and this has interesting consequences for the voices produced. Also, the play satirizes a group that is highly political and simultaneously highly protean.27 Satirizing a group that is not only extremely amorphous, but also submissive in society always involves some risk. My own theoretical and political take on satire and irony always concerns power. Political satire for me always means ironizing upward and never downward. The socalled victim must be placed high on the social scale to generate a politically interesting satire. Given that The Women clearly targets women in its satire, the play becomes an easy target for feminists who accuse it of

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ridiculing women.28 This has caused me to approach the play The Women with some trepidation. Satirizing a group like women risks lumping women into a homogenous group without differentiation. This is a classic feminist concern or dilemma (whether to treat women as a group or as individuals), and there are political advantages and disadvantages of both. What has been highly criticized by feminists from Mary Wollstonecraft to Judith Butler is the supposition that all women have the same experiences, that being a woman constitutes an autonomous identity, and that women all share the same relation to power in their state of submission. The outcomes of such suppositions are generalized conjectures such as women are weak and inferior (if on that side of the fence), or that women are strong, but victims of a patriarchal order (if on that side) without taking the complexity of power and power relations into consideration. Another danger lies in substituting politics for morals. When discussing irony and satire from a moral perspective, one runs the risk of analysing women as good or bad, morally sound or morally corrupt, and sympathetic or malicious—without having taken power into consideration. What is needed to analyse irony or satire politically, and to analyse the political implications of satire and irony, is the conscientious attention to power. When bringing power into the picture, women as a group can be problematized, and differentiation can be made in relation to, for instance, class and race. Then we can also seriously discuss the question of victimization and women’s relations to existing power structures. With power in focus, the question of morally good or bad women becomes highly political—and clearly ideological and discursive. Therefore, to conduct such an analysis of satire, I will use discourse and ideology as central theoretical concepts. Discourse is crucial for understanding political satire and is also the case with irony because it directly deals with complex power structures and power relations. To refer to The Women as a political play implies positioning it in a particular discursive, ideological, and historical situation. My starting point in this study of The Women is the political nature of satire and irony. From there, I give my theoretical take on voice as it is dealt with in the previous chapters. The two, as we shall see, are not easily conjoined. In this chapter where I discuss voice in relation to irony and satire, I have chosen four versions of the play. The first version I examine is the play, The Women, meaning the textual product. In addition, I will study a filmatization of the play from 1939, a musical remake from 1956, and a fairly recent film production from 2008.

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These four versions of the play, in different ways, highlight different sets of problems concerning voice and power. However, the transition between these versions not only highlights problems of irony and voice generally, but also points to political differences that cursorily can be called a move into postmodernity and a postmodern form of irony and a postmodern form of voice. In dealing with the play as text, I will focus on problems of voice generally and in drama specifically—but with the extra twist that irony brings. This means that my focus will be on problems concerning intentionality, origin, and meaning production, which are core concepts in the study of irony and satire. The question is if the embodiment of voice in the films generates different forms of irony and, with this, different notions of what voice is and what it can do—particularly from a political perspective. The starting point for my analysis of the translation into the first film is that the text and the first film produce irony by forcing the reader to produce a demarcation between what is said and what is meant, which is the foundation of irony. This also means producing demarcations between surface and depth, real and performed—although both versions work with polysemic structures. In the translation to the second film, it becomes clear that irony has moved to a different level. Whereas the voices are less ironic (although this, in a rather complicated way, implies that they are more classically “organic” or “serious”), irony has moved into the realm of the visual—and it is in this transition that I argue irony transforms into postmodern pastiche. The third film is different in that we have now entered a period where irony has been completely implicated in a postmodern logic of representation where the production of openly ironic voices built on a differentiation between ironic and real has turned into an incessant production of real voices, but where the idea of reality is forever changed. The play has moved into a period where simulation, the never-ending production of representations, has made reality into an art unto itself. The desire for reality in hyperreality (where reality virtually has disappeared) does something to voice; something that has consequences for its politics, as we shall see.

The ironic voice Thus far, I have argued that drama highlights the ways in which voice does not operate as voice in the traditional sense because the nature of drama problematizes voice’s origin in a subject and in a body. Drama highlights

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this problem in the translation from text to performance. With irony, the rather precarious relation between voice, body, origin, and subject becomes all the more volatile. Irony plays with the idea that the speaker does not have control over what he or she says. The voice of the speaker is suspiciously disconnected from the subject, his or her intentions, his or her will to communicate, and his or her ability to make voice empower himself or herself. Can you talk about voice at all when the ironic voice clearly does not work on behalf of the speaker and when the voice runs someone else’s errands? And what does that mean for the idea of power and politics of voice? More precisely, what is the ironic voice, then? Irony can be described in a number of ways. Traditionally, irony would be defined as a person saying one thing, but meaning the opposite. However, this rather restricted definition can be supplemented by a number of interpretative possibilities: as a person saying one thing and meaning another; as a person saying one thing and not saying another; as a person saying one thing and saying another thing simultaneously; or as a person saying one thing and making that saying into something more than what is said. No matter what, irony can be said to pinpoint the conundrum of speaking, of saying something, of making a voice mean or communicate something—or not. On another level, this “saying” can be textual, vocal, or visual, or all of these simultaneously. This is the case in the situation I will discuss in this chapter. In a play, irony has the ability to invade all these areas, producing a complex web of voices, intentions, and silences. When it comes to irony, traditional theories are deeply indebted to notions of subjectivity and embodiment (speech, voice, and intention). The classical hermeneutical question of irony is easy to pose but not as easy to answer: how does one know when irony is at work? This problem is centred on the question of intentionality. The standard definition of irony found in most dictionaries involves an opposition between something that is said and what is meant by it, and as this rhetorical definition is rarely questioned, irony is almost always treated as a verbal phenomenon that is a result of an intentional act. (Elleström 2002, 30 emphasis in original)

Poststructuralism, on the other hand, finds renewed interest in irony because it highlights problems that such theorists describe as inherently textual. Who speaks? In what way do things acquire meaning? How do we communicate? Can we communicate? Is language stable? Is there a stable meaning that can be traced to a stable subject whose intention guarantees what is said? Irony points to the instability of language itself and thrives on this instability, both in relation to intention and origin of speech, and in

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relation to the arbitrary nature of the sign. But it is, nonetheless, a favoured way of communicating; an appreciated form of language, whose “mysteries” intrigue theorists such as Wayne Booth in A Rhetoric of Irony, Linda Hutcheon in Irony’s Edge, and Lars Elleström in Divine Madness. These theorists present two fairly opposing views of irony: a more traditional take represented by Wayne Booth and a poststructuralist take represented by Linda Hutcheon and Lars Elleström. To summarize those positions, either irony is built on stable differences in language, that is, the difference between what is said and meant, or else irony demonstrates precisely how language is never stable and how such seemingly clear differences are erased. To tackle these opposing views, one has to deal with the question of intention. Irony is heavily indebted to intention, but this is not to say that this indebtedness is unproblematic. Why? This is a classic poststructuralist concern best demonstrated by Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author.” How can we know the intention of an author? Does the text only mean what an author intends or does the text carry meaning in more and different ways than those intended by the author? To transpose the same kind of reasoning to irony, can a text be ironic contrary to the addressor’s intentions? If this is the case, can we rely on intention in understanding irony at all? The situation is aggravated in a play because of the problem concerning who is “intending.” Is it a character, the narrator, the actor, the voiceover, the author, the director, or the screenplay writer? All of these possibilities show that intention muddles the issues at hand rather than explicate them. Further, we might as well ask ourselves the opposite: Can we do without intent in understanding irony? How can we understand an ironic utterance without imagining the utterer intending something different from that which is spoken? The other “intended” meaning must be there for us to see, trace, or reconstruct to understand irony. However, taking the poststructuralist concern with intention seriously, intention must take another form and function than the classical one. Thus, the question is, how this “intended” meaning is “there” for us to see and understand. It can no longer be argued to be simply there as a fact—a truth hidden beneath what is said, and something to reconstruct from the intention of the utterer. The problem with intent is further aggravated by the idea of an antiphrastic relation as grounds for interpreting irony. This antiphrastic relation implies that, if what is said is not the “true” meaning of the utterance, it is simply the opposite that is true. The question is how we can guarantee a stable antiphrastic meaning. As Hutcheon points out, an opposite can be construed in so many ways that the idea of opposition

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becomes somewhat useless as a guide to interpreting irony. Hutcheon asks herself what the opposite of the question “Isn’t she a lovely dancer?” would be. Is it that she is a bad dancer? Or is it that she is a wrestler or that she, in fact, is a he? Instead, Hutcheon discusses irony in terms of what is said and what is unsaid where “the ‘ironic’ meaning is not, then, simply the unsaid meaning, and the unsaid is not always a simple inversion or opposite of the said […] it is always different—other than and more than the said” (Hutcheon 1995, 12 emhpasis in original). Having questioned two of the foundations for interpreting irony, the problem now is how to retrace the unsaid if both intention and antiphrasis is out of the picture. Irony, as Booth discusses it, is compiled of a stable meaning in the presence of what is said, and an unstable meaning in the absence what is meant. The unstable meaning is reconstructible from the stable meaning, which in fact, is a way of stabilizing the whole ironic structure. From a poststructuralist perspective, this is not so. According to the poststructuralists, meaning itself is polysemic and unstable because it is not simply reconstructible; that is, it is not possible to find a “true” or “real” meaning (what is meant) out of what is said. Why? Because the text is already marked by absence on several levels. In my terms, what is said is also marked by absence because the subject (author, speaker, utterer) is cut off from the sign (the text, the utterance, the message). As a consequence, the said does not have the stability needed for Booth’s idea of reconstruction. Thus, it is impossible to reconstruct the absent meaning (meant) from the present meaning (said) to gain what Booth calls “stable irony.” It then becomes clear that Booth’s reconstruction of meaning, in fact, implies a construction of meaning. Intention is a construct that is constructed by the reader out of different kinds of knowledge (knowledge of reading itself, genre, history, culture, and tradition, et cetera). Importantly, such knowledge is always ideological and discursive. This, in turn, means that what is said and what is unsaid have the same value in the process of meaning production, contrary to Booth’s assertions, which poses problems in the interpretation of irony. In the admittance that the intended meaning is an unstable construct constructed out of another unstable construct (the said), Booth’s stable irony seems remote. However, other problems have to be confronted in poststructuralist theories of irony. When Elleström asks himself, “Is the effect of irony necessarily some kind of consensus where one of the opposed meanings wins, or may irony include a floating meaning that perhaps never comes to an end?” (Elleström 2002, 26), he suggests that irony does not need firm positions or antiphrastic relations. By arguing that irony consists of saying one thing and not saying another simultaneously, Elleström and Hutcheon

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make both stances equally valid for meaning-production (both what is said and what is not said). Antiphrastic opposition, in contrast, demands position-taking where either the said or the meant is valid for meaningproduction. Either what is said is “true” or what is meant is “true.” Both cannot be true, and it could be argued that such position-taking is the foundation of irony. Hutcheon’s and Elleström’s levelling of meaning implies a conflation of binaries such as surface/depth, false/genuine, and sign/referent. I would argue that such conflation generates a problem for political interpretations of irony, interpretations that are highly dependent on the idea of taking a stance (by producing an either/or situation). The danger in this case is twofold: The first problem concerns what Douglas Colin Muecke in The Compass of Irony calls “general irony.” Muecke describes general irony in terms of something being wrong with the world where mankind as a whole is afflicted, which is a non-political take on the world and on irony. What I am after in this study of The Women, however, is “a wrong” that does not afflict mankind as a whole, but only certain people connected to power, and historical and social power structures.29 These wrongs can be seen, are meant to be seen, and are consequently meant to be challenged and changed. Irony’s political task would, in this case, be to articulate what Marxists would call “false consciousness” to produce change. The second problem is connected to irony’s political stance and concerns the danger of turning political irony (either this or that) into postmodern relativism where two sides have equal status (both this and that), which in the end, comes dangerously close to the supposition that neither this nor that matters. We end up with a laissez-faire, and possibly cynical, attitude to the issues raised. Therefore, what I argue is that political irony demands certain differentiations to be made; differentiations that imply that the reader takes one meaning as true and another as false in a fairly absolute sense. This produces an either/or stance of irony where either one meaning or the other is true, but never both. The spoken utterance is not compatible with the intended or non-present meaning. This means that irony gains its strength from clearly established differentiations between, for example, surface/depth, true/false, fake/real, presence/absence, said/unsaid, and imitation/being. Woman cannot be both an ontological being and a social construct. She is not both inherently submissive and a product of historical forces. She is not both an autonomous subject and an ideologically subjected subject. Woman does not both have free will and submits to discursive formations. We cannot argue that all women are “the same” in their submissive state and simultaneously claim that upper-class women

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prey upon working-class women. We cannot argue that women and men, in the end, are all “human beings” while simultaneously arguing that women’s identities are construed in relation to a male norm in ways that produce oppression. We cannot argue that money creates class identity in very material ways and simultaneously argue that all women are suppressed in similar ways. A political reading of a play like The Women demands that the reader take a stand: The differences matter. The question is how to produce a theory of irony that allows for such strong positions while simultaneously recognizing the instability inherent in all processes of signification, especially irony. My problem with theories of irony is that they tend to be too general or too specific. In the poststructuralist take on irony, irony becomes the essence of language. In a more traditional take on irony (as saying one thing meaning the opposite, where this “other” true and real meaning is reconstructible and undeniably there), this seems to me to put too strong a belief in language’s possibility to generate specific stable meanings. Thus, in this chapter, I try to negotiate between these positions, and Hutcheon’s use of discourse is a pragmatic clue to such a modified position. The question that follows this kind of reasoning is how to interpret the unsaid without reverting to a traditional theory of intention or to a postmodern theory of polysemy. Given that intention seems to do little good in interpreting irony, putting intention under erasure is a reasonable, if not necessary, course of action. However, putting intention under erasure does not mean doing without it. In Hutcheon’s take on irony, intention is seen as a construct created by the interpreter. Because intention does not exist outside the moment of interpretation, intention only exists as an effect of the situation of interpretation itself. The situation of interpretation, in turn, is always discursive, meaning that it is dependent on structures of power and knowledge which exist in specific cultural and linguistic spheres. Therefore, Hutcheon argues that the interpretation of irony is dependent on discursive communities. Thus, to misread irony has nothing to do with failure on behalf of the utterer producing the ironic utterance or with failure of understanding on the behalf of the interpreter, but with the existence of different or overlapping discursive communities guiding our acceptance or refusal of irony. The idea of discursive communities can be a way of retaining the political either/or stance of irony without having to rely on stable ironies reconstructible from the utterer’s intentions. In line with this, Hutcheon’s theory suggests that nothing is ironic in and of itself. The “other” meaning is not “there” to be found, but to be constructed in the moment of interpretation. Irony can only be seen or

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interpreted when different discourses overlap, producing a moment of defamiliarization. This means that irony is not “there” if we don’t make it “happen,” as Hutcheon puts it. The relative stability necessary for irony to work is maintained because an ironic reading depends on such aspects as a familiarity with genre, tradition, culture, history as well as a familiarity with reading in general and reading irony specifically. Hutcheon argues that because discursive communities are highly political and indebted to power and identity, the initial relativization of irony does not take away irony’s edge. Irony is something we learn to read out of different and overlapping discourses; discourses that are highly charged. Thus, the simultaneity of Hutcheon’s version of irony (both/and) nevertheless forces the interpreter to take a position (either/or), even if such a position is only temporary and pragmatically bound by structures of power and knowledge, that is, by discourse. Because discursive communities are simultaneously social and personal, our discourses are emotionally charged and loaded with high personal stakes. And this is what produces irony’s edge, despite its relativization. In addition, this view of irony is crucial from a political perspective, and in this case, also from a feminist perspective considering the group ironized in the play (The Women). The different adaptations of The Women show that the interpretations of irony heavily rely on discourses of specific historical situations. Having sorted out the problems of irony and having found a potentially productive take on irony, it is now fruitful to discuss what irony, in fact, does to voice. What makes irony so interesting from the perspective of voice in The Women is that irony involves dissociating voice from the speaker. What characterizes The Women is a form of dramatic irony. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, dramatic irony is a literary device by which the audience’s or reader’s understanding of events or individuals in a work surpasses that of its characters. Dramatic irony is a form of irony that is expressed through a work’s structure: an audience’s awareness of the situation in which a work’s characters exist differs substantially from that of the characters’, and the words and actions of the characters therefore take on a different—often contradictory— meaning for the audience than they have for the work’s characters.

When it comes to dramatic irony, this means that the focus moves from the speaker to the reader. Dramatic irony implies that the speaker does not mean what he or she says and does not have control over his or her voice. The voices produced in The Women are not meant to signify subjectivity, nor are they meant to signal presence, originality, or identity, but rather the

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opposite. The voices produce a critical distance between what is said and the speaker. Thus, the ironic voice in The Women is not there to empower the women, but to comment on them and their actions. Such detachment moves our attention away from the speaker who utters the words (questions of intention and power of speaker) to the reader or listener, who all of a sudden has the power to decide whether the speaker intends the words uttered or not; whether the voice heard is connected to an intending subject or not; or whether the voices produced do something different than intended by the speakers. The reader constructs a difference between what is said what is meant, which produces a critical distance between what is spoken and the speaker, which in turn, means that we as readers can uphold a political perspective and see the absurdity in the voices produced (political defamiliarization). This means that it is in the hands of the reader/listener to decide where the political verve of irony lies. Interestingly, detaching voices from the identities (subjects, bodies) of the women removes power from the women to the reader/listener. This is irony’s political force in The Women.

The satiric performance Having shortly outlined Hutcheon’s take on irony with my specific perspective in mind, I now examine another term closely related to irony: satire. The play, The Women, is not only ironic on several levels, where the characters utter verbal utterances throughout the play that can be interpreted as irony, but also it is satiric. The differences and similarities between the two concepts have been debated at length—something I do not have the time, nor the will to do here given that this is not a study of such concepts. Nevertheless, I will try to find a way of discussing the two and what makes them interact in interesting ways in relation to voice. Satire is most often described in somewhat derogatory terms compared to irony. Booth and Muecke call it a simple, ridiculing form of irony, “desired simply to correct absurdities of opinion or behaviour” (Muecke 1969, 25). As Morton Gurewitch puts it, Perhaps the fundamental distinction between irony and satire, in the largest sense of each, is simply that irony deals with the absurd, whereas satire treats the ridiculous. The absurd may be taken to symbolize the incurable and chimerical hoax of things, while the ridiculous may be accepted as standing for life’s corrigible deformities. (Gurewitch quoted in Muecke 1969, 27)

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A more fruitful and interesting way of approaching satire is taken by Charles A. Knight in The Literature of Satire, where he talks of satire in terms of imitation, the imitation of a discourse, which I find constructive in relation to voice generally and the ironic voice specifically. However, according to Knight, satire is not merely imitation, but rather imitation with a difference, producing an ironic effect. This makes Knight’s definition of satire work alongside classic dramatic irony. In Wayne Booth’s discussion of dramatic irony, he argues that a play positions two discourses next to each other for us to see, evaluate, and eventually choose between. One discourse is to be construed as false, and the other as true; one should be seen as the intended (real, true) discourse, whereas the other should be seen as false and simulated. Like dramatic irony, satire can thus be argued to display an ironic relation between performances (based on Elleström’s definition of parody as an ironic relation between texts). And in the case of drama, it is clear that voice plays a central role in those performances. What is interesting about this definition is the relation between imitation and performance, two central concepts within poststructuralist feminist theory (Judith Butler’s theories of performativity in particular). Imitation and performance are both forms of quotation; the quotations of already existing discourses. In The Women, satiric imitation could be described as a kind of vocal performance of a discourse—but with a difference—producing an ironic effect. However, noticeable differences exist between theories of performance, which are crucial to an interpretation of satire (and also clearly connect satire to my previous discussions of irony). One fairly reasonable way of talking about performance is in terms of role-playing. This is a classic view of satire where the interpreter can see a performance as ironic because it suggests something “real” or “genuine” underlying what is performed. Thus, we can differentiate between satiric role-playing and “real” identity. However, with Judith Butler’s theories of performativity, this setup becomes precarious. Performance in the Butlerian sense is identity production. Performance, imitation, and quotation are all forms of being, all with equal standing. The imitation of a discourse is not only a form of role-playing, but is indeed a way of being. The difference between playing the role of woman and being a woman is erased; hence, the idea of performance as a form of imitation or roleplaying becomes perplexing, to say the least. To once again connect back to voice, what does all this mean? The questions that Butler’s theories of performance raise are, firstly, if a female character speaks in a drama, is this, in fact, a woman’s voice? Or is

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the voice an imitation or performance of how a woman should speak to be a woman? Or, alternatively, is it an imitation or performance of how a woman should speak, where the performance is put in relation to the idea of “a real woman speaking,” producing a difference between the two and thus generating an ironic effect? The problem with Butler’s theories is that the first two concerns are conflated, which makes the third stance difficult to uphold. The third (ironic, satiric voice) becomes an imitation of an imitation—which causes great concern. The question that a play like The Women raises is, therefore, what happens if the discourse quoted or imitated is already an imitation? How can we then separate the two from each other? When performance, imitation, and quotation become integral parts of being itself, it becomes impossible to see the difference between the performances in the play. The idea of satire (and dramatic irony) is dependent on a distinct differentiation between the two forms (performance and being) to produce an ironic effect. As such, it is dependent on the possibility of seeing the difference between the two and evaluating them in terms of surface and depth, false and real (just like the difference between said and meant in ironic discourse). The one is supposed to reveal the truth about the other, meaning in this case, that seeing the satiric performance of a woman supposedly says something about “real,” “true” women. But with a Butlerian theory of performance, we are threatened by a relativization of satire similar to Hutcheon’s and Elleström’s theory of irony. There is no ontological difference between voices or performances. All we are left with are different vocal (and other) performances where none can be seen as more genuine or real than the other. In this study, this means that I analyse the voices in The Women as forms of ironic verbal performances (connecting satiric performance to dramatic irony) because the women do not mean what they say. What they say means something else, something about them which they do not have control over. The voices are not their own but are cut off from their identities in disturbing ways. The voices are also performative imitations of a discourse (women) that is highly charged. But in the play, the voices are quotations of a quotation, where the ironic quotations are quotations of a discourse that has no stability, no reality, and no corporeality. The voices are real and corporeal only as imitations or performances, hence, the difficulty in upholding an accountable difference between the quotations in the text. What we end up with is a radical relativization not only of irony and satire, but also of the idea of voice and identity as a whole. The question concerning this postmodern take on satire and irony is how to separate different vocal performances and different quotations

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from each other; how to evaluate one vocal performance as more true, more real, than the other; and how to see the vocal performance of discursive utterances as ironic or not. For I do believe that such differences are crucial to understanding the political implications of a play like The Women. This brings up the questions, what do the different filmed versions of the play do with voice, and what are the problems inherent in the vocal performance of the ironic voice? The power of irony and satire lies in their ability to precisely disconnect voice from the speaker and give the power of interpretation to the reader or listener instead. The power lies in the reader or listener’s will or desire to differentiate between voice-as-being and voice-as-performance and to construct irony and satire out of the difference. But it is a very different kind of power than to perceive voice as empowering the speaker. Rather, the power lies with the reader or listener to see that the discourses used by the speaker/s are not their own. The problem is that because the difference between voice-as-being and voice-as-quotation has collapsed, the reader/listener is left without certainties in his or her interpretation. The task confronting the reader or viewer of The Women is daring to take the risk to disconnect the voices from the women and to argue that they are ironic or satiric. This is an act of construction, not an act of reconstruction. It is also a political act, as it involves constructing an either/or position (producing a necessary “edge” in Hutcheon’s terms) out of different forms of vocal performances where there are no certainties to lean on. Furthermore, it is a leap of faith because it demands faith in the political potential of irony and satire, and the power that comes from the act of disconnecting voice from subjectivity. Such an act is necessary because what is otherwise at risk is the depoliticization of irony where differences, and the political implications of such differences, are erased. The key to my reading of The Women as a highly political text is found in discourse because the play is characterized by vocal performances of different, highly political discourses. The political force of irony and satire lies in the ability of the reader/listener/viewer see the vocal performances performed and have the political courage to interpret some voices as “true” and others as “false,” some vocal performances as precisely performances, and others as genuine and real—without having any ontological certainties to base such interpretations on. Importantly, in such a theoretical stance, the real is no longer actually real in the ontological sense, but rather, it is an ideologically constructed real. Nevertheless, what is constructed as real is crucial for the political momentum of the text.

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Polysemic irony in The Women It is important to see that the weight of the play, The Women, is in the dialogue. Clare Boothe’s masterly repartee between the women shows how irony and satire invade their voices and discursive performances. It is in the characters’ use of voice that woman-as-performance and woman-asbeing is played out. It is also through the analysis of voice that the difference between “said” and “meant” or “unsaid” can be best constructed. It could be argued that the play sets up a number of characters who play out (perform, imitate, quote by the use of their voice) different roles/identities/discourses available to women, for example, mother, wife, friend, nouveau riche, romantic, materialist, New Woman, just to mention a few rather conspicuous ones. However, it is unclear whether these vocal performances in any way suggest a real, genuine subject. Is there such a thing as a “real woman” or a “good woman” as the norm underlying the voices against which we valuate the vocal performances in the play? Can we construct a reliable difference between a woman speaking as woman and a woman speaking as “woman,” or does the poststructuralist take on performance, where woman already is “woman,” erase the difference between imitation and “real” altogether? When the character, Miss Trimmerback, utters: “I wish I could get a man to foot my bills. I’m sick and tired, cooking my own breakfast, sloshing through the rain at 8A.M., working like a dog. For what? Independence? A lot of independence you have on a woman’s wages. I’d chuck it like that for a decent, or an indecent, home,” (Boothe 1994, 116) are we confronted with ironic performances that somehow suggest the existence of real, true women, against whom to valuate the utterances at hand? Or are they performances of “women” that suggest no such existence, making an ironic difference difficult to maintain? When the women speak, do they mean what they say? Or are the words disconnected from their own intentions? Do the words belong to the voices or are they mere quotations of a discourse outside of, and out of the control of, the subjects uttering them (in this case, Miss Trimmerback)? That is, do their own voices critically comment on their own identities, their own performances, in some way? Dramatic irony implies that we as listeners supposedly can understand the difference between “real” voice and ironic quotation, but the women using their voices do not. That is the ironic input and the political verve of voice in The Women. The task of the reader/interpreter lies in deciding that such a difference exists and interpreting the political implications of such a difference. The Women is a highly political play, saying something about certain people in certain positions having to do with power, knowledge,

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and material wealth. The play sets up differences that force the reader to choose one interpretation over the other, where the two interpretations are exclusionary. One voice (one performance) has to be supposed as more “true” or “real” than the other, producing an either/or situation for the reader. This dilemma can be discerned in the difference between the voices of Sylvia and Mary in the play, which also shows that the task of the interpreter of irony and satire is not a trivial one. I, for instance, have great difficulty in interpreting the different voices or performances as either ironic or straight-forwardly genuine. On one level, Sylvia gives a clearly a satiric performance of a spoilt, kept woman (materialist and opportunist), where her voice is clearly disconnected from her subject. This means that the words she utters come to mean something different for the reader than they mean for her, revealing the corruption and depravation of such a woman. The opening line of the entire drama runs as follows: SYLVIA: So, I said to Howard, “What do you expect me to do? Stay home

and darn your socks? What do we all have money for? Why do we keep servants?” (Boothe 1994, 71)

The interpretation of this speech depends on the reader’s ability, or will, not to take the speech at face value, but rather to understand the meaning of it differently than the way it is spoken by Sylvia. To analyse Sylvia’s performance as ironic relies on its differentiation from an unsaid discourse—something like the “good” woman, whatever that might be (the slippery road of this construction is omnipresent in the text). Sylvia’s vocal performance is a quotation with a difference; it lays bare the falsity of such an ambitious, scheming woman and simultaneously suggests that such a person as a “good” woman (“darning socks”) actually exists, causing the two discourses and the two performances to clash. However, this “good woman” is not necessarily in the play (as voice), but rather, she exists as a discursive construct in the reader’s (my) mind and points to the ideological and discursive nature of woman, rather than any actual or real woman. This means to say that the underlying, unsaid discourse is heavily ideological and culturally coded. It is the reader who constructs the “good” woman out of the ironic and satiric woman in the text and decides to interpret Sylvia’s voice ironically. However, the discrepancy between the two discourses (construed here as real and fake, true and false, good and bad) is fraught with controversy. Given that economics and men actually are the foundation for these women’s lives, the openness to these issues performed by Sylvia and Miss Trimmerback (in the quotation earlier) seems very “real,” “true,” and

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utterly un-ironic. This, in turn, suggests that Sylvia’s voice simultaneously functions as a Butlerian performance. It is as real and valid as the unsaid (meant) discourse—making it un-ironic. For me personally, when constructing the ironic voice, I continuously find myself taking it at face value (rather than agreeing with the unsaid, meant discourse). This means that the moment I construct the ironic voice out of a strongly ideological discourse (“the good woman”), I see the ideological force of such a construct while I simultaneously see the how the ironic voice can be constructed as “true and “real” equally well. From this perspective, the “good woman” constructed out of Sylvia’s speech seems idealistic or naive at best and ideologically suspect at worst. In A Rhetoric of Irony, Wayne Booth argues that dramatic irony arises when two discourses (voices, styles) clash. Such a clash allows for the reader to see, discern, judge, and then finally choose between the discourses displayed. Such a clash becomes all the more clear as Sylvia’s voice is matched by another character’s, that of Mary. Mary’s voice represents what initially seems to be the “good woman,” where her identity as the faithful, affectionate, supporting, and nurturing wife is performed out of love and respect for her husband. For us to understand her voice as identity producing (and not ironic), we must agree with this discourse, which does not seem too difficult, as it coincides with a discourse of love that is predominant in at least my historical time and cultural space. However, as this voice is presented in the text, Mary’s voice also becomes disturbing, allowing for an interpretation of her performance of woman as ironic. The situation is this: Mary gets a divorce on the grounds of her husband’s infidelity. He has broken the bond of love and trust upon which their marriage was built. After filing for the divorce, Mary utters these words: MARY: Oh, God, why did I let this happen? We were married. We were

one person. We had a good life. Oh, God, I’ve been a fool! (Boothe 1994, 132)

Within the romantic discourse of love, her act to file for divorce must be construed as a grand failure, which Mary’s speech concurs with here. We want to believe that love is worth fighting for and that it conquers all— especially conniving, rival women (the other woman). In contrast, Mary refers to what she has lost: “A good life,” again highlighting the material and economic aspects of the institution of marriage. This means that her utterance lays bare two discourses characterizing marriage which are supposedly quite distinct: love and economy. Even within the discourse of love, the quotation is disturbing because Mary’s speech also reveals how

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unequal and hypocritical the romantic construction of marriage is, in that she says that she has been a fool, when we know that it is the unfaithful husband who has been the fool. Again Mary’s belief in a discourse of love clashes with a patriarchal and materialistic one, where a husband has the “right” to have a kept woman—as long as he also maintains his home (economically supporting his wife and child). Thus, the two discourses of marriage clash, producing irony. This destabilizes not only Mary’s role as “the good woman,” but also the whole discourse of the “good woman.” This means that the discursive clash that Booth talks about (a clash which allows the reader to see, discern, judge, and finally choose between the discourses displayed) is too unsophisticated for The Women. Instead, the discursive clash demonstrates the insecure position of the reader. Instead of presenting a clear either/or situation, the clash calls for a both/and position, where both positions seem valid—and fall in line with Elleström’s and Hutcheon’s postmodern problematization of irony. Therefore, it is impossible for me to simply reconstruct the unsaid, or the underlying true meaning of such utterances. We find that the status or value of the different discourses underlying those utterances causes hesitation, if not complete confusion. This conundrum cannot be solved by reverting back to Booth’s safehold, authorial intention. The ambiguity presented above is inherent in both the text and in the interpreter of the text. I would have been little helped if Wayne Booth provided actual proof that the author intended one voice to be real and genuine, true and right (Mary’s), and the other ironic (Sylvia’s). Such proof would not have altered my specific interpretation of the text. This is because I cannot see why the notion of “marrying for love” should represent a real, genuine, and true discourse for the women in the text, whereas “marrying for money” comes to represent a false, artificial, and ironic one. Such an analysis disregards the ideological status of the notion of “good woman.” The problem for me lies in constructing the unsaid as the ideological norm that underlies the women’s performances. The norm (in this case, being a woman) is justifiably unclear to me. The ideological norm informs how “real” women are (or are supposed to be)—how they live their lives, use their bodies, act, and interact in the material world. Such norms are materialized in women’s daily behaviour, bodily manners, and voices. The problem is that I am aware of several such norms simultaneously, some of which I agree with, and some of which I strongly reject. I have to construct the women’s voices in The Women in relation to those norms—norms that are simultaneously ideal, real (and perhaps, at times, even surreal). Thus, when reading Sylvia’s witty and sharp comments, do I relate them to a discourse that suggests that women are loving, caring, loyal, and satisfied,

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or in relation to a norm that suggests that they are driven, struggling, cognisant, but economically dependent and socially oppressed? If I interpret the text in relation to the first discourse, Sylvia’s comments can be read as ironic. Her comments are then disconnected from her intention, and her voice is seen as an ironic comment on her own actions as a woman. However, if read it in relation to the second discourse, her comments are not ironic, but rather seen as a straightforward, spoken comment on women’s limited possibilities for sustenance in the 1930s. The question thus becomes, do such uncertainties lessen the play’s political edge? Not necessarily. The voices produced in The Women make the reader aware of such discursive practices and their impact on the women’s lives (bodies, voices, actions). Interestingly, the reader has to navigate between these discourses in the reading of the text and then construct a position where the difference between different discourses, positions, and standpoints matter without having to revert back to the notion of an ontological belief in surface and depth, or true and false. This, I would argue is possible even in a polysemic text like The Women, precisely because it plays on the uncertainties of the ironic voice. This act, in turn, produces The Women as a politically important text.30

Irony and the specific historical situation The historical situation is one condition found in the text which helps the reader construct the voices of the women as ironic and political. The historical situation represents both what Booth calls external and internal clues to irony. It becomes clear that historical and material circumstances play an important role in how The Women produces irony and satire. In the text, a specific meaning is attached to the 1930s which is important to the interpretation of its irony. Specific characteristics of the 1930s that are important to take into consideration when reading the irony of The Women not only includes the Women’s Liberation Movement, but also the Great Depression. The historical setting of the 1930s is a way for the reader to understand the implications of being a woman in that specific historical period, which plays both on gender and class. With the help of history, the play can be said to be ironic concerning a specific group of women: a small, privileged group of upper-class women who are set against the working-class majority within the play. The play’s irony lies precisely in playing out differences between women by means of class differentiation. Whereas Susan Carlson emphasizes how the play displays “exclusively female domains” (Carlson 1984, 564) and how these domains lack a sense of female community, I argue that it is necessary to see that

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the play’s political force lies precisely in accentuating that those communal female domains are, in fact, very different. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how The Women plays with such differentiations rather than simply argue that it presents “a vicious battle within one sex over the other” (Carlson 1984, 565). The main way in which the play ironizes class differences is precisely by its use of voice. This becomes clear not only in the way the characters speak, but also of what they speak. I would argue that in The Women, the voices of the working-class women play a much different role than the voices of the upper-class women. The Women plays out social and economic inequalities by contrasting upper-class and working-class women in those female domains: in their homes (Mary’s home, and once in Crystal’s), beauty salons, fashion shops, exercise rooms, maternity wards, in Reno, and in a powder room in a fashionable casino. A differentiation is set up between the women who visit, consume in and live in those places and the women who work there. The class distinctions are not played out as alternative, complementary discourses that coexist, but as highly charged, exclusionary discourses. The voices of the workingclass women are set in harsh contrast to those of the upper-class women. In this, gender identities (performances) are pitted against each other, producing an ironic effect where the “real,” “true,” and “factual” discourses (against which the ironic discourses are measured) are historically specific and materially grounded. This becomes clear at the beauty salon, where the working-class women address the visiting women in chorus: CHORUS (SECOND HAIRDRESSER, OLGA, PEDICURIST): Oh, yours is lovely! Why, not nearly as lovely! Lovelier than yours? (Boothe 1994, 81) CHORUS (SECOND HAIRDRESSER, PEDICURIST, OLGA): Why, no one would believe it! Why, not a day! Oh, you don’t look it! (Boothe 1994, 81) CHORUS (PEDICURIST, OLGA, FIRST HAIRDRESSER): Oh, thin as a shadow! Why, terribly thin! Oh, just right, now! (Boothe 1994, 81)

It becomes clear that the voices of the working-class women are quoting a discourse which is clearly not their own. Instead, it is a performance of voice to suit the upper-class women. The ironic input of these voices is visible for the readers, as well as the other working-class characters, to see and laugh at. However, and importantly, the irony does not target the working-class women, but the upper-class women who do not see the artificiality of such speech.

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Further, the irony of such utterances by the working-class women is enhanced in the conversations between the working-class women in the absence of the upper-class women. Their speech is clearly not ironic: OLGA: That old gasoline truck! Fifty-two if she’s a day! FIRST HAIRDRESSER: One more permanent and she won’t have a hair left

on her head. OLGA: There’s plenty on her upper lip. (Boothe 1994, 81)

The working-class women and the upper-class women’s voices do not operate in the same way. Most often, the voices of the working-class women are hard-hitting and extremely conscious of the socioeconomic situation they are in. In this way, the working-class women act as a kind of political gauge against which the readers judge the upper-class women. The voices of the working-class women’s speech become the discourse against which we read the upper-class women’s voices and speech, which in fact, stabilizes our ironic reading of the text, as in the following quotation where two working women talk to each other: SECOND WOMAN: Yes, but it’s the moral satisfaction. Just bananas and milk for one whole week! That called for enormous character! (They exit, right.) CIGARETTES: (To SADIE) Enormous character! Well, she’ll need it, all right. Comes the Revolution, she’ll diet plenty! (Boothe 1994, 149)

This quotation shows the political awareness represented through the working-class women’s voices. Furthermore, this awareness is contrasted with the upper-class women’s unawareness of their own privileges, producing a fierce class clash, as in the following quotation where two upper-class women converse: FIRST WOMAN: My dear, won’t he let you? SECOND WOMAN: No, he won’t. FIRST WOMAN: How incredibly foul! SECOND WOMAN: I’m heartbroken. But I have to be philosophical; after

all, missing one winter in Palm Beach really won’t kill me. (Boothe 1994, 146-147)

This is precisely how The Women ironizes the upper-class women, by showing us two distinct class discourses that reveal awareness and ignorance (in working-class and upper-class women, respectively). Knowledge of the historical and material circumstances of the 1930s, where unemployment and poverty reign, reinforces the clash even further.

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However, having stated this, class awareness penetrates the entire play. It is so predominant that, at times, it also becomes visible in the upperclass women’s utterances. INSTRUCTRESS: But, Mrs Potter, it’s such a foolish waste of money— EDITH: Listen, relaxing is part of my facial. INSTRUCTRESS: (Coolly) Then you should relax completely, Mrs. Potter,

from the chin up. (Exits.) EDITH: Honestly, the class feeling you run into these days! (Struggles to her feet) I’m so tired of paying creatures like that to insult me— (Boothe 1994, 108)

The awareness that is apparent in Edith’s comment changes the ironic input slightly. Rather than just pointing a finger at the upper-class women (their voices and performances), such awareness points to another, less ironic function of voice in the play. The impact of class in the performance of female identities is enhanced by the characters themselves being well aware of the situation in which they act: the harsh reality of finding a man to support you, and then keeping him at all costs. In this sense, the play does not act as an example of dramatic irony where the characters are unaware of the discourses informing them (discourses made clear for the reader). In the quotation, Edith knows what the stakes are, and she knows she is being ironized, which enhances the clash between the discourses and performances, but on a more openly political level. The sensitive nature of these discourses is what produces the play’s edge, by pitting them against each other. Class awareness is set against women’s liberation in ways that show that irony cannot simply be produced against some of the women in the play. What the upper-class women have achieved in landing a rich man is something that is not simply ironized by the working-class women. It is seen as a veritable, if unlikely, option for them as well. It is in this context that Miss Trimmerback’s quotation must be understood: MISS TRIMMERBACK: I wish I could get a man to foot my bills. I’m sick

and tired, cooking my own breakfast, sloshing through the rain at 8 A.M., working like a dog. For what? Independence? A lot of independence you have on a woman’s wages. I’d chuck it like that for a decent, or an indecent, home. (Boothe 1994, 116)

This suggests that the either/or situation produced in The Women is not simply about women as a generalized group, and neither is it about morality (distinguishing between good and bad women). Rather, it is a play about women and power, which is best exemplified by means of class. The voices of the working-class women are clearly there by which

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to gauge the upper-class women. And the working-class women’s voices clearly hone in on class rather than on gender. Thus, the voices of the upper-class women are satirized. Having stated this, it is also clear that the voices of the working-class women and the upper-class women meet in the awareness that they are all limited by a privileged group over which they both have very little power—men.

The irony of being a woman The inescapable presence of the women’s voices and performances in the play is marked by a significant absence which enhances the politically ironic verve of the play. This is done by way of the text’s use of “man” as the absent norm informing the performances in the text. This way of producing difference (between voices and performances) is built upon the construction of women as a group—a clearly gendered group. Thus, to create a satire like The Women is highly risky, for reasons discussed before. The risk lies in portraying women as a homogenous group and making that group as a whole into a ridiculous mass fraught with disturbing generalizations, as demonstrated in the quotations below which feed on stereotypical notions about women. SYLVIA: I forget what she said next. You know how those creatures are,

babble, babble, babble, babble, and never let up for a minute! (Boothe 1994, 76–77) PEGGY: Oh, Edith—John and I are getting a divorce! EDITH: (Patting her hand) Well, darling, that’s what I heard! PEGGY: (Surprised) But—but we didn’t decide to until last night! (Boothe

1994, 121)

The women are not lumped together as a group in The Women. Instead, the play stabilizes the ironic input and upholds its ironic, political edge by signalling a norm against which all performances and utterances are produced. Contrary to initial suppositions, this norm is not woman (neither “real” nor “ideal”). This norm is “Man.” Women as a group are made to signify in their relation to that norm, which gains its strength from being both absent and unsaid. In correlation to Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist theories, man is the subject, which means that he is unmarked and naturalized into representing humanity as a whole, and thus, is not in need of explanation. Woman, on the other hand, is the Other, and as such, is in need of explication. The Women plays out this gender structure in a highly conspicuous, but intricate, manner. It pits different performances against

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each other, making them interact, collude, conjoin, and coexist. Interestingly enough, all these performances are voiced by women; the play does not contain a single male character. This is quite extraordinary for the twentieth century. This noticeable absence of men can be seen as a critique of, and even hostility towards, women, given that they are the ones being satirized. However, I would argue that the absence of men points to something else. The absence of men does not point a finger at the women and their fraught performances, but rather it directs attention to the men and their function as precisely such an unsaid, naturalized, and all-overriding norm. Their absence enhances their presence, not as individuals, but as a structure that guides the performances and voices of all the women (whether ironic or performative). Although the women’s performances are difficult to sort and interpret and also impossible to judge, all the performances seem to converge in relation to one overpowering thing: the male norm. This is where all divergent performances meet—in its absence. It is also in relation to men that it becomes clear that all the women’s performances are quotations of previous performances, all to please and conform to the unsaid norm. Thus, it also becomes clear that voice does not necessarily represent power. As readers, we make choices and produce qualitative judgements concerning the voices we hear, but an underlying tragic difference remains which produces an ironic edge that overshadows all: the marked difference between the unsaid male norm (that informs, limits, controls, and generates all the women’s performances and voices) and the voices of the women in the play. In the play, the women are voicing (performing, imitating, quoting) all the different roles, identities, or discourses women can have—all of which are defined in relation to a male norm. Even a character like Nancy, the clever New Woman who has no man, is defined precisely by this lack. The same can be argued by the office-wife, Miss Watts. This does not mean to say that the male norm is only seriously portrayed. Although the male norm is absent and unsaid, the women’s voices are used in intricate ways to make the norm visible and which enhances the irony of The Women. One could argue that the irony lies in the fact that the male norm that informs these women’s performances is not authoritative, powerful, demanding, or threatening. This becomes apparent when Crystal talks to her lover, Buck, on the phone. It is only Crystal’s voice we hear, but Buck’s voice is present in its absence, both as a norm against which Crystal performs her version of woman, and also as a way to make this structure visible—downplaying the power of the norm.

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We hear Crystal’s voice, but it is her quotation of his voice that gives the male norm a punch: CRYSTAL: You ought to know—Oh, Buck, I’m going to miss you like

nobody’s business. I can’t tell you what it did to me, locking the door on our little apartment—I’ll say we had fun! Coma ti-yi-yippy, what? Oh, no, say anything you like. (Boothe 1994, 133).

However, this ironic take on the male norm is also tragic in that in its risibility, it is nonetheless quite all-encompassing for the women. This is what makes the play refrain from regressing into permanent polysemy or into ridiculing comedy. The very relation between what is present (the women’s performances and voices) and what is absent (the male norm) produces political irony and satire in the play. Another scene which brilliantly shows how the text plays on the complex (various and varied) performances of the women (producing polysemy) and simultaneously reminds the reader that all the performances by women are marked by their relation to the male norm is when Mary and Stephen are supposedly having a great row about Stephen’s infidelity. I use “supposedly,” because the row itself is not in the scene. Instead, two servants recount Mary and Stephen’s argument. What we get are the servants’ voices quoting Mary and Stephen’s conversation, and the servants’ own comments on the row. This scene plays out similarities between the discourses performed at the same time as it plays out their differences. This produces an ironic complexity which guarantees that the play never reduces the political stakes involved to formulaic, simplified demarcations of power. In maid Maggie’s recap of the row to the household cook, the cook comments on the row as follows: She’s indulging a pride she ain’t entitled to. Marriage is a business of taking care of a man and rearing his children. It ain’t meant to be no perpetual honeymoon. How long would any husband last if he was supposed to go on acting forever like a red-hot Clark Gable? What’s the difference if he don’t love her? (Boothe 1994, 112)

This quotation reveals the class elements that inform the women’s vocal performances. A romantic discourse of love is only for the upper-class, and a privilege that working-class women cannot indulge in. As such, the comment ironizes the expectations of life by upper-class women, namely, wanting to live a “perpetual honeymoon.” But this class reaction simultaneously becomes (for me, a rather troublesome) discourse on women’s liberation. The two discourses are difficult to separate; therefore,

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it is also difficult to interpret the irony. In this sense, the cook is not simply saying only one thing, but also something more (and not simply the opposite). But importantly, the scene also points to what the different women (upper class as well as working class) have in common—their dependence on men. The voices of the women are all produced by, and in relation to, the absent norm. This norm makes it possible to interpret the voices of the women in an ironic way by disconnecting the voices from the women uttering them. In such an analysis, they merely quote the discourses and performing practices available to them, something they themselves are not in control of. As such, we are allowed to laugh at the women, and perhaps even despise them, for the performances they perform: for being upper class, for their absurd consumption, for their conceitedness, for their behaviour towards each other, and especially, for their behaviour towards workingclass women. The underlying tragic irony is that the male norm informs all the women’s behaviour, upper class as well as working class. This political irony does not ridicule or diminish women as a group, but shows the deeply ironic situation of all women, that being woman is a quotation, a quotation of a discourse that is not in her own control or of her own making, but a discourse that is controlled and generated by the male norm. This makes us, as readers, sympathize with even the most satiric performances of the women in the play, even while it allows us to despise the consumption, rivalry, narcissism, and self-righteousness of the upperclass women. The tension between different forms of irony produced by the voices of the characters, the historical situation, and the absent male norm is what makes The Women such a complex and politically challenging satire.

The Women. It’s All about Men The political power of voice in the text, The Women, lies in the hands of the reader because the text, as such, is characterized by absence—the absence of a bodily speaker. There are no “real” voices, no “real” bodies in which to ground the utterances, making the textual voices polysemic. Such a situation is augmented by irony because irony plays precisely on the inability to stabilize the sign. It is clear that the ironic voices in the text demand a reader to construct them as such, something I have attempted to do in the previous section analysing voice, the historical situation, and the male norm in The Women. In the filmatization of The Women from 1939, we are still within the domain of classical satire and irony, but this time, in the form of embodied

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voices. The question is if the embodiment of voice enhances the vocal performances as precisely performances (by being able to more easily disconnect voice from speaker through irony) or if the embodiment of voice assigns the voices to a speaking subject more conclusively, thus lessening the ironic input. Interestingly, the grounding of voice in speaking bodies (with synchronized moving lips) does not secure the voices which are produced. It does not tie the voice to the subject making the utterance. On the contrary, the presentation of a gesturing body that “owns” the voice makes it all the easier to disconnect the voice of the character from the subject and see that someone else has an intention that the character is not aware of. The act of embodiment (grounding voice in a body and subject), in fact, alleviates the act of disconnecting voice from body and subject. If the text is characterized by a preoccupation with the not-said (meant), the film The Women seems to be dominated by presence, where the supposedly absent (meant) is made present in the gesturing body. This could be seen as the stabilization of irony, which helps any interpretation of it as such. There is a telling example of this in the scene where Sylvia and Edith talk about Stephen’s infidelity at the beginning of the film: EDITH: But Sylvia, suppose Mary should hear about it? Wouldn’t it be

terrible? SYLVIA: Wouldn’t it be ghastly? EDITH: But darling, we’ve got to face her at lunch today. SYLVIA: Won’t it be too tragic? […] It wouldn’t be so bad if only Mary’s

friends knew. We can keep our mouths shut.

In this dialogue, the tone of voice of the women and their cunning, smiling faces clearly suggest an ironic performance. The body signals ironic distance contrary to the voice speaking the words. While uttering a sentence, a smile is made to signal that the speaker either does not mean what she says (“Wouldn’t it be terrible?” “Wouldn’t it be tragic?”), or else, that she is not in control of what she is saying (“We can keep our mouths shut”). The gesturing body (as visual presence) signifies what is absent (what is meant) in the words that are spoken. The smile, as a bodily gesture, thus becomes a sign of irony that we as viewers can interpret. Another telling example appears further into the film, but the situation is fairly the same. Edith and Sylvia meet in Mary’s bathroom to discuss Stephen’s infidelity. Sylvia talks of the manicurist from whom she got the story of the affair:

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SYLVIA: That girl never stops talking. You know how those creatures are.

Babblebabblebabble. Never let up for a minute. A lot they care whose lives they ruin. What 10 cents a cake? Of course it’s ok to be homespun in the country, but really . . .

In this dialogue, Sylvia speaks about the manicurist, but her speech can also be separated from her speaking body and come to mean something about herself instead. This is intensified by her own body, which signals what is absent (meant). What is meant is, of course, that she is also implicated as a babbling creature who cannot keep her mouth shut. Her body speaks against her—signifying irony for us readers to interpret.31 Thus, it becomes clear that, in the film, the embodiment of voice in some sense does work to stabilize irony, in that the unsaid is made visible by processes of signification on the actresses’ bodies. As such, irony becomes easier to interpret. However, the stabilization of irony in the film has other consequences. What is stabilized is the construction of the idea of the “good woman.” The performances are more clearly pitted against this idealized idea, an idea with which I have political problems. The “good woman” is both absent and present in the film. The “good woman” as an idea is absently present as the antiphrasis of Sylvia’s and Edith’s voices and actions, as shown in the previous quotations. This idea is also present in the character Mary as the good mother/wife/friend. Mary’s position in the film is never questioned or ironized, which again, stabilizes and emphasizes the satiric performances of Sylvia and Edith. As a result, the women are more clearly divided into good and bad women, but it is a division which does not clearly agree with my own discursive interpretation of how women’s identities work and are constructed in the textual play. To put it plainly, I do not agree with the film’s interpretation of the play where the good woman is Mary, and the bad woman is Sylvia in a fairly straightforward way, especially as Mary comes to represent an ideal that does not acknowledge the socioeconomic conditions of the women’s lives (represented precisely by the voices of Sylvia and Edith). What is at risk of being left out by such omissions and alterations are the complexities of gender that are informed by their socioeconomic situation, income level, and class rank. Having stated this, the film nonetheless manages to uphold a level of political irony by actually adhering to some of the structural characteristics of the text. Interestingly, the film was made in 1939, which sets it in the same historical situation as the play. It is clear that both the film and the play enact the 1930s in structurally similar ways, especially when it comes to the representation of the socioeconomic situation of that time. It could even be argued that the visual realm of film adds to the historical

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materiality of the situation by being able to spatially situate the acts in specific (signifying) places. We not only get to hear, but also see the inequality in the women’s situations, and it becomes all the more clear that the places the upper-class women visit, live in, consume in, and enjoy themselves in are places where the working-class women try to earn a living. This is exemplified in the opening scene in the beauty parlour where the rich women’s bodies are handled by working-class women. There is a sharp division between the two, which is scenically outlined for us by the working women talking in one way when performing their duties (being in the same room as the upper-class women) and talking another way when passing through the door to their separate quarters: “Why you don’t look a day over 35! That old gasoline truck. She’s 60 if she’s a minute.” Furthermore, with the help of visual means, the glaring consumption of goods is contrasted with the working women who handle or peddle them. It is the combination of visual and vocal differentiation that allows for an ironic interpretation of the women in the film. Such visual means makes it all the more easy to see that it is the voices of the women workers in the film that produce a clash with the upper-class women in the film—a clash which has an ironic effect. This is visually portrayed in the clash between actually possessing against the desire to possess (goods/homes/money/husbands) in the film. This makes the film politically strong. Similarly, the absent male norm is also retained in the film. The filmatization has even added a subtitle to its title to enhance this structure, The Women. It’s All about Men. The film adheres to the principle of leaving all the men out. It has no male actors, which makes the film as radical as the play in similar ways. The total absence of men is further enhanced by filmic visuality because the lack becomes all the more obvious when no male bodies are shown on screen. Gender differentiation works much by way of visual signification, where certain attributes are made to signify gender in specific ways. This means that when the women are giving their performances (producing them as women), the absence of the male norm becomes all the more structurally present. In the scene where Chrystal talks to Buck on the phone (also analysed in the section on the male absent norm in the play), the actual, bodily presence of Chrystal’s voice (hearing it) and her ironic quotation of Buck’s voice underscores the actual (physical) absence of his voice. Thus, despite their quite different expressions, and despite that the film does not dare to take the political impetus of the play all the way in its enactment of it, the first filmatization of The Women uses both voice and

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visual means to produce satire and irony in ways that makes it politically powerful in regard to both gender and class.

The Opposite Sex: postmodern pastiche We now turn to the second filmatization of The Women, the musical, The Opposite Sex, from 1956. With The Opposite Sex, we have turned the scales in ways that have substantial consequences for the politics of voice. Both the text and the first filmatization of The Women are aesthetically and politically founded on a tension between absence and presence, where absence (as in the unsaid) is important for understanding the politics of ironic and satiric voice. The Opposite Sex, as a contrast, is built on an aesthetic of presence in a number of ways. The most obvious and noteworthy difference between the two films is that in The Opposite Sex, the male norm is present. The men have been included in the film and a substantial part of the film consists of their performances. When the male norm has been made present, embodied, and individualized in actual actors and actual bodies, it becomes eclipsed in ways that I will return to presently. With this aesthetic construction, a very different idea of “women,” and their voices is produced. The presence of the male norm is only one instance of this turn towards presence. Such presence is further augmented by its use of various techniques that enhance the film’s visuality, which has become The Opposite Sex’s major aesthetic device. The turn from voice (and its play with absence) to visuality (and a play with presence) also highlights a change in irony—and its function and effect. One of the most conspicuous ways of accomplishing this turn is by means of Technicolor. The turn to colour is neither innocent, nor inconsequential in this film. Rather than producing a realistic effect, Technicolor draws attention to colour itself. The colours used in this film are not subtle ones such as brown, beige, grey, or navy, but rather outrageously conspicuous colours like (primarily) shock-pink, chickenyellow, cobalt-blue, pea-green, and lime. Crystal’s home is decorated entirely in pink, and most of the women’s dresses dazzle us with their radiating cerise. In one of the musical numbers, the five ornamental basses played by equally ornamental men are shock-pink. Similarly, the country kitchen in Lucy’s boarding house in Reno is in full colour—this time with lime-coloured pots and pans. This visual turn is indeed ironic because the lime-coloured pots and pans make even the orange oranges seem ironic. There is nothing realistic or genuinely organic about any of these visual effects—they comment on themselves in a clearly ironic way.

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However, the ironic effects produced here are quite different from those discussed before. Throughout the film, I catch myself studying the actresses’ lipstick colour rather than listening to the voices or the dialogue. I am more dazzled by the colour of the dresses or the instruments than by any ironic voices. Technicolor produces a spectacle of colour that draws attention to itself. Whereas the first film can be said to be a critique of spectacles (spectacles of conspicuous consumption) through voice, The Opposite Sex is a spectacle produced by visuality itself. The passage between the two films and their use of irony can be found in the fashion show scene in The Women. The 1939 film is shot in black and white. In contrast to this, there is a conspicuous and significant scene where the women are watching a fashion show, which is in colour. What is produced is a striking clash between black and white and colour, which marks their difference. Even the film itself points to this as the presenter at the fashion show utters: “Here is our little peek into the coming season and, a glimpse of the future too”—meaning, of course, the clothes, but also hinting at the use of Technicolor. Even if the fashion show must be seen as a spectacle of sorts, given that it has no narrative function in the film and thus halts the narrative flow in favour of a narcissistic fascination for the images themselves, the fashion show stands out as precisely such a spectacle in the first film. It is presented as being a remarkable and slightly avant-garde moment, which means that it highlights the novelty of this colour technique, even as it presents it as a spectacle. The consumption of images (and indeed, the consumption of clothes) is bracketed by the rest of the film, and thus, the fashion show stands out as an ironic comment on such consumption. In The Opposite Sex, no such contrast exists because its use of colour is ever-present and overwhelming. The consequence of such use of colour is that the images-as-spectacles take over, and the consumption of images (and clothes) is all we are left with. We have no idea of the depth against which this consumption of surfaces can be measured; there is no “real” against which this spectacle can be judged, and consequently, there is no coherent, recognizable critique directed against the visual spectacles as such. As a contrast, it produces a form of ironic play by the consumption of surfaces and spectacles which does not necessarily involve a direct critique of them. It produces a sense of awareness of spectacles, but without a traditional political position where the reader chooses or judges the spectacles in terms of “depth” or “real” or “originality.” In The Opposite Sex, we end up with a postmodern positioning where the images make the viewer aware of the overwhelming consumption of images and goods, but this awareness does not necessarily lead to a political position

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against them (an either/or positioning). Instead, such awareness seems compatible with an acceptance of consumption as a viable way of life (a both/and positioning). The production of surfaces in the film is also closely connected to the film’s turn to showbiz and the entertainment industry. The Opposite Sex is set on Broadway, and the action revolves around the people in showbiz, the jostle around setting up shows and musicals, and the promotion of existing and up-and-coming stars. With this focus, the voices produced also have a different meaning. In the other two versions (the text and the first filmatization), voice forms the foundation for the ironic/satiric situation produced. In those versions, irony is primarily vocal in the sense that it is the voices of the characters/actors which produce irony. Similarly, the satiric performances in those versions are primarily vocal in that they are founded on the ironic repartee of the characters. The voices produced in The Opposite Sex have a quite distinct meaning and function in that they are not only used for dialogue, but also for singing in designated musical numbers. These musical numbers are not by-products or offshoots of a supposed narrative centre in the film, but rather play a significant part and have significant value in the film. As the film is all about performance, singing, staging, and stardom, the musical numbers, in many ways, constitute the film’s centre. As such, the musical numbers draw attention to themselves as performances, producing a slightly acute and absurd presence by halting the narrative and producing the experience of what Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism calls “a series of pure and unrelated presents in time” (Jameson 1984, 27), but I suppose this could be argued for all musicals. Nevertheless, because the musical numbers are interspersed in the film, they further chop up the narrative and produce what Jameson calls “postmodern schizophrenia” or “fragmentation”: “a breakdown in the signifying chain” (Jameson 1984, 26). This goes hand and hand with the film’s production of an intense presence. Schizophrenia is the effect of the lack of referentiality; the lack of a clear relation to reality and depth. Meaning on the new view is generated by the movement from signifier to signifier. What we generally call the signified—the meaning or conceptual content of an utterance—is now rather to be seen as a meaning-effect, as that objective mirage of signification generated and projected by the relationship of signifiers among themselves. When that relationship breaks down, when the links of the signifying chain snap, then we have schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers. (Jameson 1984, 26)

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Although voice plays a central role, the meaning of the musical numbers is clearly visual in its connection to the extravaganza of décor, staging, and colour, as described before. Despite the film’s specific use of voice (as singing), which could have suggested a traditional ironic/satiric stance in the film, all we get (through singing voices in a showbiz setting) is a barrage of images as pseudo-events, as spectacles. These spectacles could be argued to be ironic in that they actually play with our concepts of how voice and visuality should interact to produce any sense of “reality,” “depth,” or “truth.” This use of a showbiz setting, musical numbers, and visual selfpresence makes every voice, every act, and every image into performanceas-spectacle. This is primarily because the performances in the film are performances also in the sense that the actors actually perform musical numbers, dance, and act. Such performances imply the production and imitation of heavily coded performances. Otherwise, the performances would not be musical numbers, nor would the performers be stars. The heavily coded performances are also easily accepted as such because they are set in particular spatialized situations (for example, musical numbers, dance routines, and dramatic scenes). Thus, performance becomes not so much the imitation of a discourse (upper class or woman) which supposedly produces a difference between acted and “real,” or identity-asperformance and identity-as-being, which in turn, has the capacity to produce an ironic effect, but rather all the performances are more coherently and openly performances. This means that the performances in The Opposite Sex reveal “woman” as the effect of coded, performative actions: There is no such thing as an “original” or “real” woman outside the performances of woman that produce her. As Judith Butler states, Hence, within the inherited discourse of the metaphysics of substance, gender proves to be performative—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed. (Butler 1990, 24-25)

And the production of this woman is not free, voluntary, or innate, but rather it follows a pattern of repetition through which women perform already coded acts. The performances cannot be measured or judged (as phoney, false, wrong, or bad) in relation to a “real” that we “know” before the performance. Gender, in Butler’s words, “is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Butler 1990, 33). This means that the “acts, gestures, [and] enactments” that constitute the performance

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are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. (Butler 1990, 136 emphasis in original)

However, rather than simply being naturalized into an ontology “which produce[s] the effect of an internal core or substance” (Butler 1990, 136)—into woman as being—the bodily performances in the film, in some sense, create awareness of the performative nature of gender (woman-aseffect) because the performances draw attention to themselves as precisely performances. Performances are spectacles, and no depth is to be found in them and with no subject as substance underpinning them. This becomes all the more clear by the inclusion of men in the film, which highlights and contrasts their respective performances or performative acts. Some of the musical numbers exemplify not only what I am trying to say about performance as spectacle, but also how the differentiation between performance and “being” is erased. In the song number, “There is gold in the trees, the banana,” a man performs a version of masculinity that can be called ironic or satiric in that it could be argued to comment on masculinity through the performance itself. This is produced by the clothes he wears, his dance routine, what he is singing, and the way he is singing it. However, no sense of masculinity against which to judge this supposedly ironic performance exists. This, in turn, produces uncertainty as to whether this performance really is ironic or even if the difference between ironic and non-ironic performance is of any importance. Do we even care if a performance is identity producing or if the performance is commenting on such an identity ironically? If all performances are performative, is there such a difference to uphold? The same could be argued about the song number with the psychiatrist, which is clearly an ironic comment or satiric performance of men’s obsession with women. More importantly, it is noteworthy that the song numbers by men are almost always complemented with performances by women whose status in the performance is indeed highly uncertain. Again, the women’s clothes (or perhaps “costumes” is a more fitting word), choice of colour (pink), and dance style (erotic and suggestive) make the performance seem ironic as they all enhance the ways in which woman is clearly an effect of such performative acts. Every movement is studied and heavily coded. The performance becomes too obvious a performance to be naturalized into “being.” This suggests the performative status of women. In this sense, the dance by Crystal Allen (played by Joan Collins), which is

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a separate performance within the psychiatrist’s musical number, is indeed an imitation of womanhood as we are made to “see,” and therefore also analyse, the ways in which a woman repeats coded, discursive, and repetitive patterns. At the same time, it plays on male voyeuristic fantasies where “[t]he determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly” (Mulvey 2001, 2088). In the scene, such patterns are enhanced when all the lights are directed at Joan Collins because “the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation” (Mulvey 2001, 2086). What happens in the song numbers is clearly a production of womanhood, meaning that there is no other “real” woman outside these performative, repetitive patterns. Joan Collins is clearly an object of desire, the object of the male gaze, and openly performs this role for us (and the other male characters) to see. The close-ups of her body and body parts suggest a fetishization of the female body and of woman, in Mulvey’s terms, “so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous” (Mulvey 2001, 2091). Such focus on the beauty of the female body “builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself” (Mulvey 2001, 2091)— what Mulvey calls “scopophilia”—which is a convention that goes hand in hand with the production of woman through heavily coded imagery. However, as argued before, this fetishist focus in The Opposite Sex simultaneously makes us aware of the structures underlying such fetishization. The fetishization of the female body also halts the narrative of the film (something which is enhanced by the women being displayed in actual musical numbers) because the “erotic instinct is focused on the look alone” (Mulvey 2001, 2091). The repetitive interruption of the narrative creates a situation where the performances are given extraordinary space and time, which make them ironic and performative simultaneously. The performance of womanhood as a sexual object of the male gaze carried out by Joan Collins in the musical number is clearly performative in that it produces the woman it claims to imitate, at the same time as it creates awareness of this process. The scene could be argued to produce an ironic stance at the same time as it reproduces what it claims to ironize. In this, it also becomes clear that voice has a different function. Voice is an integral part of the performance, but only insofar as the voices ground the visual spectacle in specific bodily subjects. Voice is no longer a way of producing irony by being detached from the speaker and thus indicating a difference between said and unsaid, but rather voice is only a minor part of the visual performance.

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The doubly ironic and performative stance produced by the musical numbers is transferred to all the other performances in the play. Crystal Allen clearly performs woman in her musical numbers, but this performance is carried over to all the other scenes in the film as well. She performs woman to trap men. She performs woman to win female friends. She performs woman to gain power. In other words, she performs woman to create a sense of being, to produce subjectivity. However, it is uncertain whether the film presents another version of woman which would function as a comparison; a contrast producing a “real woman” against whom we judge Crystal’s performance. June Allyson, who plays Kay, the supposedly “good woman” (called “Mary” in the play), is in fact, a musical artist and is just as involved in the performance of womanhood as Crystal—in all senses of the word. This whole setup is exemplified in the scene where Kay and Amanda (“Nancy” in the play) come home from Bermuda. They are both talking at the same time in elevated, pitched voices, clearly performing an imitation of woman. However, this imitation does not mean to say that it is traditionally ironic. Neither does it mean to say that it is wholly serious. The scene suggests that all performances of woman are clearly performative. Woman is produced through performative acts without any genuine gender on which the performance rests. Another such obvious example is Jane, the woman hosting the divorcees in the countryside. Jane clearly suggests an open ironic imitation of a countryside woman because it is so clearly a performance (clothes, dialect, bodily movement, and gesture). At the same time, it is a production of woman through the same performance. As mentioned before, a similar observation could be made about the male characters in the film. The men in The Opposite Sex do not represent an absent norm against which the female performances can be judged, but rather the male performances are included in a way that suggests that their performances must be judged in the same manner (as structures of gender production) as the women. The best example of such a performance is Buck Winston. The first couple times we meet him in the film, it is clear that his performance is an ironic imitation of masculinity. And most of the women (at least the clever women) see his performance as precisely a performance of masculinity and not genuine, which means that they do not accept it and even laugh at it and comment on it ironically: “He’s a feature of the place. His moonlight rides in Indian canoe.” Having stated this, no such awareness is displayed by Buck, which enhances the irony. However, as the film continues, something happens, and Buck’s performance at the Starlight nightclub marks this transition. Again, I must mention his clothes, which seem to be an ironic comment on cowboy masculinity (tight

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black trousers, jacket with fringes, silvery spurs, and a phallic, gleaming silvery gun), and also his song, which seems to be an ironic imitation of country and western music, or perhaps it’s some kind of eclectic fusion of country, jazz, and hillbilly musical, which takes away any sense of an organic musical performance. However, his performance is a success, which contradicts the idea that the clever women (Mary, Amanda, and Kay) see the irony in Buck’s performance (judging it against a sense of “real” masculinity), whereas the ignorant women (Sylvia and Crystal) do not. What this suggests is a performance of masculinity that is not ironic in the traditional sense because it is done without depth. There is no identity, no subjectivity, and no “origin” before or outside the performance itself against which we can judge his performance as purely ironic. In the film, the performance of masculinity is a success—accepted and hailed by the male and female audience alike—and thus functions as a performative production of the male gender. This is further augmented by Buck also becoming a voiceover at this moment in the film, giving him the power of voice (a power that Amanda is the only other character to enjoy). However, arguing that the performances are not satiric or ironic in a traditional sense, is not to say that such performances are dealing with identity production in any realist way. What we get is a performance where masculinity and femininity ostensibly are the effect of the repetition of performative laws. Buck’s and Crystal’s performances of masculinity and femininity respectively are openly coded and easy to observe. Thus, the performances do signify “performance”—the film is all about performance—and we can see and judge them as such. In this, we find great potential for irony, although perhaps not specifically vocal irony. However, this is problematic, as no discourse or norm against which to interpret the performances exists. The film does not insist on notions such as depth, truth, or reality; such concepts have been made obsolete in the film. Like Judith Butler’s concept of “drag,” the performances point to the constructedness of all identities, genders, and sexualities. All performances are ironic, in that they comment on the lack of reality, and the lack of sincerity and of genuineness in them. The musical scenes, the overwrought costumes, and some of the characters make the film ironic or satiric, in that they show them as performances. But something happens to our sense of irony and satire when there is no sense of what is “real,” and no referent against which to judge the performances. The major difference from The Women (text and film) is that the differentiation between performance and “real” has become superfluous; that is, it has stopped being relevant. The both/and position that proposes that performance can be both ironic and productive simultaneously gives way to a position

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where the difference between the two becomes irrelevant (a neither/nor position). This means that such performances are not as absurd or painful as they would have been in a modernist or realist aesthetic. This also means that the schizophrenic experience that comes from the breakdown of the signifying process, “from the rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers” (Jameson 1984, 26), is no longer distressing. We have the production of surfaces which creates “joyous intensities” (Jameson 1984, 29), a pleasurable, schizophrenic consumption of images, or what Jameson calls a form of euphoria typical of postmodernism. With this, we enter a postmodern form of irony that Fredric Jameson calls pastiche, which in his terms, suggests the death of individual style in favour of imitation, and even the “cannibalization of all the styles of the past” (Jameson 1984, 18). Irony and satire, as argued before, are precisely forms of performance, quotation, and imitation, hence my use of Judith Butler’s theories on gender suggesting that the repetition of gender structures is what constitutes women (and men). Her theories, however, also seem to suggest there is critical input in this realization. If all genders are produced in the repetition of arbitrary (although historically and culturally deeply rooted) structures, this means that we can repeat differently. The awareness that gender is constructed thus allows for repetition which makes these structures visible; hence, her theory of drag. Jameson, on the contrary, calls this structure of repetition a form of addiction, and a form of consumerism grounded in the consumption of sheer images as “pseudo-events” and “spectacles” (Jameson 1984, 18), which is a much more critical take on the production of surface structures. Being a Marxist, one critique Jameson has of postmodern aesthetics is its lack of historical grounding. He argues that this lack is one way in which the production of surfaces becomes spectacles, simulacrum. In The Opposite Sex, the construction of the historical situation is quite different from the first film as well as the play, due to its use and production of an intense presence, its use of visuality, and its function as pastiche. The spectacles produced in the film are produced by a lack of any sense of historicity. Whereas the textual play and the film The Women are both guided by an idea of faithfulness to the idea of origin (historical situation, play-as-text) and adhere to the production of a referent (“real” woman, “real” problems, “real” politics of the 1930s), The Opposite Sex not only lacks such dependence, but also plays with this lack. As a result, the lack of historicity (the 1930s or even contemporary 1950s) is one instance that marks this film as a spectacle. The Opposite Sex was produced in 1956, which is significant for Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism. He argues that the 1950s is

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America’s “privileged lost object of desire” (Jameson 1984, 19), which means that postmodern representations display nostalgia for this period, which in turn, also means that the representations are appropriations of this lost past. Therefore, in these representations, it also becomes clear that the past is not a historical “real,” “material” past (in a Marxist sense), but a reproduction of this past in certain ways. The postmodern representations are clearly heavily coded versions of this past “through stylistic connotation, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image, and ‘1930s-ness’ or ‘1950s-ness’ by the attributes of fashion” (Jameson 1984, 19) that are in no way faithful to any sense of “real” or historical reality; in other words, the production of the 1950s in these films has nothing to do with the 1950s, but is merely a spectacle, a “cannibalization” of the styles of the 1950s. What becomes clear in The Opposite Sex, however, is that the 1950s was already a spectacle, devoid of any sense of “real” or historical reality. What we desire in postmodern, nostalgic pastiches of the 1950s was already pastiche in the 1950s when The Opposite Sex was produced. The production of the 1950s in the 1950s, which later movies nostalgically imitate (cannibalize), was already a visual spectacle. With this visual spectacle, the performances become pastiche without reference to a norm, to reality, or to originality which would hold together the fragmented pieces. We have what James calls “pure surface” producing “euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity” (Jameson 1984, 28), which according to his theories, would reify the performances and produce a fetishization of the women (and men) in question. This is also how the satiric performances become real, in the sense that this is the moment when true/false, real/fake, and performance/imitation is truly erased. Also, Jameson differentiates parody from pastiche by arguing that parody is the imitation of a norm that reasserts itself, that is, imitation with a difference. In postmodern pastiche, the norm has been eclipsed. We only have imitation. Like parody, we have imitation, the sense of wearing a mask, but without the original. Pastiche is without a norm to which we can securely go back. Therefore, it cannot imitate with a difference, which means that we have nothing to compare it to; this is also suggested by a postmodern theory of satire. Hence, we get a neutral form of imitation “without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction,” as Jameson puts it (Jameson 1984, 17). This means that Butler’s performance theory has gone completely askew. The lack of reference, lack of reality, and lack of originality then produces simulacrum, which means that the performative

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acts no longer matter in relation to reality. We have lost a sense of history, of authenticity, and with this, the possibility to resurrect dead, silenced generations. The performances have all become a collage of images and photographic simulacra, where ironic performative acts are all we are left with. In the postmodern take on irony as represented in The Opposite Sex, voice is left behind as a vital moment of aesthetic production in favour of visuality. The visual takes precedence over all other forms of signification. And the visual exists not to signify “reality,” “origin,” or what is “genuine” (not even in the ironic sense), but rather signification itself. The question is if this means that voice has lost its significance in the postmodern age. Has voice lost its ability to criticize, especially by means of irony and satire? One might argue that voice is retained as a powerful emblem of subjectivity and identity precisely by postmodernism’s preoccupation with images. Maybe then, voice can be seen as a reserve, or a safe haven, where postmodernity has yet to invade.

The ironic voice on the shores of the postmodern When I started working on this project, I felt a bit surprised and perhaps even slightly aggravated that no new filmatization of the play The Women had been made. Considering the present situation, one in which we have lived through another capitalist boom, with its happy-go-lucky focus on material consumption, reification of the visual, and fetishization of the body, and then a subsequent harsh recession, where the poor are getting increasingly poor and the rich seem to be getting all the more rich. Furthermore, in addition to this, because we live in an age where the media puts an unrelenting focus on appearance and consumption, and where the suburban housewife (especially the absurdly rich housewife) is back on the scene, I felt a strong political urge for such a film. And then, to my great relief (and cheerful surprise), I discovered a more recent film version was made. In 2008, the unknown-to-me director, Diane English, released The Women with the rather witty pre-title: It’s All about . . . as a comment on the 1930s filmatization. The full title consequently reads It’s All about . . . The Women. Although pleased that the film had been made, I became apprehensive the moment I saw the choice of main actress, Meg Ryan—the undisputable star of romantic comedy. However, because she plays the supposedly “good woman,” Mary, I decided that such a choice might, in fact, be ingenious. I was initially confused upon seeing the film: a confusion that was traded for amazement, considering how well it suits the major theories of postmodernism by, for instance, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard.

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This amazement was therefore also inevitably followed by distress in the realization that we so indisputably are embedded in processes of simulation, producing a society where reality indeed is forever gone, but where reality production is all the more pressingly present. This film seems to prove that we indeed live in hyperreality. Moreover, voice seems to play a central role in such simulation processes. Not surprisingly, the theme of the original play works quite well in our sociohistorical time, something which is played out in the 2008 filmatization. Women with children-accessories, styled lap dogs, intensely decorated villas, conspicuous shopping trips to Saks, never-ending manicures and facials as well as their oversized, thematized dinner parties and cosily arranged luncheons seem extremely compatible with an ironic representation of women in the present. The opening of the film shows this quite well. Annette Bening, who plays Sylvia, enters Saks and registers the surroundings—products and people alike—as an automaton (an intertextual wink at Terminator perhaps?), ranking what she sees according to set rules of economic and aesthetic value. The performances and codes will be quite familiar to a present-day audience. The lapse of almost 80 years from the original production is scarcely (and scarily) unnoticeable. Importantly, in this filmatization of The Women, voice is again foregrounded. The film focuses on voice and vocal performances by means of dialogue and repartee. The film’s ironic tone is again played out on the level of voice. It is also satirical, in that the actors perform different “women” for us to see, discern between, sympathize with, and/or despise. The film’s focus is not mainly visual as was the case in The Opposite Sex, but focuses on the women and their supposedly ironic comments on their surroundings and their respective social situations. The voices are used to produce irony, along with embodiment, as in classical irony and satire. As in the first filmatization, this is done by contrasting utterances with, for instance, facial expressions, as exemplified in the scene where the girlfriends go to Saks to scrutinize Chrystal Allen, but Edie’s (“Edith” in the play) daughter desperately wants to go home. EDIE: We can’t go. Aunt Sylvie is stalking somebody. When she’s finished we can leave.

In Edie’s comment, irony is produced in the contrast between what is spoken and the way it is spoken, which can be further exemplified in the following comment by Sylvie (“Sylvia” in the play), who, in a serious tone, gives life advice to Edie’s daughter in the same scene.

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SYLVIE: I want you to listen to me . . . I’m gonna say something very important, and I want you to remember it for the rest of your life. Nobody hates Saks.

The tone of voice and facial expression in both cases is very serious, clashing with what is said and thus creating an ironic effect. Although the film continuously produces this kind of witty irony, something is nonetheless different from both the play and the other two filmatizations, something quite difficult to pinpoint. This chapter has focused quite heavily on the idea that irony and satire have to be exclusionary to be political, meaning that political and ironic plays have to produce an either/or situation where the viewer or reader is forced to choose to retain “irony’s edge,” as Hutcheon puts it. It is a situation where the reader has to construct some voices as ironic, as disconnected from the subjects uttering them, and other voices as not ironic. It is this demand to choose that is political, even if the choice is not based on ontological grounds. Irony means daring to differentiate and to discern, and enjoy the political consequences of such choices. And it is in this that I think something interesting happens with this filmatization of the play. What I see here is that this film’s main focus is not the production of irony, where reality is the absent or unsaid (meant) against which the vocal performances are gauged, but rather its focus is the production of reality itself. In the play and the first film, the irony produced destabilizes the failsafe connection between voice and subject. Voice is, in fact, disconnected from the subject and becomes uncontrollable when the subject speaks. The 2008 production does not/cannot/will not take this political leap. Although the film initially makes a political statement by once again removing the men from the scene, and in this way, produces a sharp division between the sexes, something has changed in this version. I would argue that the form of irony represented in this version of The Women (despite the omission of men) is inclusionary irony, which produces a specific kind of politicality that I would call “postmodern feminism” (or what is commonly referred to as “postfeminism”), a political stance that has pervaded representations on TV since Sex in the City. So, in what way is the film ironic, yet inclusionary? And what does this do to voice? The first indicator of this change is the new title of the film: It is all about . . . the Women. Instead of focusing on the sharp division between the sexes (as in the title The Women. It is all about men), where the identity of being woman is performed in relation to an invisible system of power, this film represents women as a homogenous group with which any

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woman (all women) can or are supposed to identify with. Furthermore, women are performed as a group which is self-identical, that is, not produced in difference to anything else (men). This lack of any sharp division is the first step towards inclusionary irony. From my perspective, the most interesting way in which irony plays on inclusion rather than exclusion is the way the voices of the women are not disconnected from the subject uttering them in any clear way. As argued before, irony is dependent on the viewer being able to construct some voices as ironic and some not, and disconnecting some voices from the speaker so as to not to take their words at face value. Irony, in this sense, produces distance, where the voices are distanced from the speakers or subjects themselves. In this film, the voices of the women work on familiarity and closeness rather than unfamiliarity and distance. Let me explain. Rather than producing distance to the life represented, the ironic utterances produce an intense sense of “everyday life,” with which I, as a woman, am supposed to identify. MARY: I don’t understand why they put florescent light in the dressing rooms. Why would a woman buy anything if it looks like her thighs have been hit by a meteor shower?

Even if I might argue that this utterance is, in some sense, ironic, the question is what is ironized or satirized, and why? In no way does such an utterance produce political differentiations based on class or gender, where the conditions of upper-class women are contrasted with those of workingclass women, and where women’s conditions are contrasted to those of men. Instead, what is produced is an involvement in women’s own (seemingly inherent, ontological) identities (as a group or as individuals within such a group). Men are not in the film. But they are not the unsaid structure guiding the women’s performances and voices, but rather a point of conversation around which a genuinely feminine identity for the women is produced. An example of this is in the development of Mary’s ongoing conversation with her mother and friends about Stephen’s infidelity. It is a dialogue that initially seems politically ironic, such as Mary’s comment to her mother when she suggests that Mary should not act or react against Stephen: “What do you think this is, some kind of 1930s movie?” This intertextual comment makes an open comparison between the two historical periods of the films, which is interesting and funny. Mary seems to argue that women in the twenty-first century have come much further (and are so intrinsically different) from the women represented in the 1930s filmatization, although we as viewers can see that nothing has really changed, which is quite ironic. However, as the film continues, such

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intertextually ironic content is slowly transformed; for example, when Mary and Sylvie once again argue about Mary’s actions (or non-actions) against Stephen: SYLVIE: So he cheated on you and still you said nothing. This is not

modern, Mary. MARY: Maybe this is the new modern thing. SYLVIE: When did you become French?

Even if Sylvie’s comment is rather amusing here, the tone has changed somewhat. Mary, even more than in the 1930s play or the film, adheres to the idea of the classically faithful, loyal wife and even argues that this is the new modern thing. There is a commonsensical understanding that love and marriage are central to women’s lives, something that is also true of the original play, but here this fact is ironized and politically criticized. This turn towards traditional women’s roles becomes all the more clear when, later on, Sylvie has a change of heart concerning Mary’s actions and concedes that the new modern thing is love and marriage, and a woman’s role is to stand by her man: “Listen, Mary, it is the twenty-first century. It is ok for people to fight for their relationships.” This is a slow, almost unnoticeable, but decisive turn that is quite different from the play. The awareness of socioeconomic circumstances surrounding love and marriage in the play and the first film is traded for an ideologically bourgeois, representationally romantic view of love and marriage that does not question neither gender or class inequalities that inform such an ideology. Even more so, it is a film that draws no sharp distinctions between the women either. This means that the class clash is completely omitted. A natural consequence of these strategic and political choices is that Mary makes friends with the housekeeper and the au-pair, picks up their laundry, and even utters the words “I love you guys” to them more than once in the film without any indication of irony present in bodily expression or gesture. Whereas the text and the first film produce exclusionary distinctions to produce irony, for example, in distinctions between women and men, and distinctions between women, the women in this film are presented as an amorphous group where no sharp distinctions are drawn, even though they are a small and distinct group of women: upper-class, privileged, leisured, cosmopolitan fashionistas, with or without careers. Thus, a film is produced where we, as women, are supposed to identify with the voices produced, and with the women’s performances and their struggles. The film draws a picture where we (all women) are the same; that is, the same as the women represented. It presumes we have the same worries, the same preoccupations, and

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struggle with the same problems as they do (such as craters in thighs). There is no mention of abusive husbands, economic inequality, nor the rapacious behaviour among women in need of husbands for economic survival or sustenance. This lack of any sharp division creates a film that says yes to everything. Yes, you can be filthy rich and a good person; yes, you can be wealthy and “down to earth”; yes, you can be leisured, yet lead a simple life; yes, you can be a housewife and be friends with the housekeeper; yes, you can be a career woman and a good mother; yes, you can have close girlfriends and a loving relationship with your husband; yes, you can be a feminist and cherish marriage and traditional family life; and yes, you can be a cynical, lesbian writer and be in agreement with the traditional housewife. I could go on. What does this mean? The lack of any sharp distinctions creates a film that produces a group of women who are represented as “ordinary women” leading “everyday lives,” with “everyday worries” and “everyday joys.” In this, the film actually produces a sense of reality, but it is important to recognize that it is a production of “reality,” with certain effects. When it comes to voice, we have come full circle. The ironic voices have turned “real.” What we have is a film that, once again, tries to connect voice to the subject in an attempt to, once again, place political action in the hands of the speaker of the words uttered. It is a way of empowering the women by means of voice, and by means of inclusion, reality, and familiarity. In doing so, it also individualizes the women, for example, in a scene where Mary takes advice from the sassy, street-wise, ever-divorcee, Leah Miller (played by Bette Midler). Not surprisingly, her voice is one of the wittiest in the film. Her performance of woman is also the most clearly satirized. However, Mary’s reaction to her advice transforms Leah Miller’s words into something very un-ironic—even messianic: “Let me give you Leah Miller’s secret to life. Don’t give a shit about anybody. Be selfish. Because once you ask yourself the question: ‘what about me?’ everything changes to the better.” After this (what I initially presumed to be an ironic vocal performance, showing the corrupt thoughts that guide the filthy rich), Mary lies down and opens her eyes, which is a rather simple metaphor for the fact that these words work as an eye-opener for her. Leah Miller’s words are seen as practical advice actually produced for Mary to follow. Rather than disconnecting Leah Miller’s voice from her so as to see the utterances as ironic, they become extremely straightforward and true. In the next scene, Mary writes the words “What do I want” as if to make them even more real. This is a way of making Mary’s life produce

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a sense of reality—all women’s reality, in fact. What could have been an ironic comment on such women’s lives and thoughts—and how selfcentred, self-sufficient, and self-absorbed they are—instead, has been turned into a mantra for all women to follow. The film turns a politically ironic utterance targeting a specific economic, gendered group into a viable reality for every woman. This produces inclusion in a politically suspect way. This production of reality is not innocent, and it is not haphazard. In his text, Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard theorizes how postmodern signs relate to reality. The relation between representation and reality is a theoretically complex and an incessantly discussed conundrum which has bearing on irony. Because irony is dependent on clear divisions, such as said and meant, true and false, and representation and real, the question is what happens to such concepts in a film that produces inclusionary irony. Baudrillard sees a couple of historically successive phases of the image, which he argues, change the relation between representation and reality: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever, it is its own pure simulacrum. (Baudrillard 1994, 6)

The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point for Baudrillard. Let me describe these changes in terms of the films discussed here. The relativization of irony, which I, along with Hutcheon, saw as a potential threat to the political edge of irony, is counteracted in the first film by distinct differences producing a demand for such position-taking by the reader. It implies a leap of faith by the reader, but the text and first film demand such choices to be made which means that both retain their ironic stance. In the play and the first filmatization of The Women, voice works as a marker, differentiating what is ironic and what is real. We are presented with women’s voices and women’s vocal performances, but we as readers see that the women do not have the power to mean what they say, but instead, that the power lies within us as the readers or viewers. We construct another reality, another “truth,” and another meaning from the women’s voices. The women’s voices and vocal performances demonstrate that there is a reality that is other, more real than the reality in which these women live, talk, and act. Reality is elsewhere, but also unmistakably there.

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In the second film, The Opposite Sex, voice as such has ceased playing a major role and has become subordinate to the production of visual spectacles. Instead, irony has moved into the visual realm, indicating the unreality of the performances by means of Technicolor, among other things. The major difference to the other versions is that those performances have lost a sense of “real” against which to judge them. The film masks “the absence of a profound reality,” as Baudrillard puts it, and only highlights the unreality of the performances. Like Disneyland, it produces the sense of a limited, “represented” (false, illusionary) life, but in doing so, masks that there is no other “reality” to be found. The inclusionary irony presented in the 2008 film does something else. At first, what seems to be an ironic production of women’s voices and performances, on closer inspection turns out to be a production of them as real. This, in Baudrillard’s terms, is the process of simulation: “presentday simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation” (Baudrillard 1994, 2). This means that the producers of representations, like the producers of the film The Women, try to make the representation real, where the representations of women becomes the real, viable life of women. A sense of reality (of real women) is traded for representations where any difference between the two has ceased to exist. By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials—worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all vicissitudes. (Baudrillard 1994, 2)

Therefore, we can no longer say that the film, The Women, is ironic because irony must retain the difference between representation and real, and between true and false, to exist. But here, irony has been traded for simulation, where differences have stopped mattering. Instead of showing how unreal their lives are—how absurdly unreal they are—unconnected to the everyday life of ordinary people (revealed through their voices in film one and heightened visual effects in The Opposite Sex), the film produces (through inclusionary irony) a simulation where the world represented in the film is the only “real” available to us.

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When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality—a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity, and authenticity. Escalation of the true, of lived experience, resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. Panic-stricken production of the real and of the referential, parallel to and greater than the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us—a strategy of the real, of the neoreal and the hyperreal that everywhere is the double of a strategy of deterrence. (Baudrillard 1994, 6–7)

We have traded an ironic and satiric comment on a group of women who live a privileged life they do not deserve for the construction of the same group of women as “real” and even “everyday.” “Panic-stricken production of the real” (Baudrillard 1994, 7) is what we are confronted with here. This is also present in the voices produced and actions related to these voices. Rather than being ironic, these women’s voices seem to have become real and seem to be dealing with real problems. However, in line with Baudrillard’s theories, I would argue that because the voices are constructed as real, they in fact, are hyperreal (where the differences between real and unreal, real and representation, and surface and depth have ceased to exist). This means that irony can no longer work. Hyperreal voices are the only real voices a postmodern reader has access to. Voice is not real, but it is not unreal either. Voice has become hyperreal. Such production of reality in films like this one shows how far from reality we have come. We are not even faced with the nostalgia for a nonexistent past, as Jameson argues; we are not faced with postmodern pastiche, as in The Opposite Sex. We are presented with the production of represented realism as real. This is well exemplified in the ending of the film when Edie’s water breaks, something that signifies reality in specific ways. What is the most “real” experience a woman can have? Giving birth. It is an experience that is real in material, physical, and bodily terms. Therefore, I would argue that this scene’s primary function in the film is to produce reality. Furthermore, it is construed as something that involves all the women—all their bodily experiences of being a woman. It is a veritable production of reality and a veritable production of these women as real. In this scene, the connection between voice and the production of reality is made clear by means of embodiment. The film shows Edie in a hospital bed screaming—not wording anything or speaking, but screaming. This produces the sense of something really coming from within, from her body. Furthermore, she looks ugly in contrast to the other chic women,

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which also enhances the reality effect. These are signs that signify reality. Importantly, it is in this situation of intense reality that the voices have the ability to speak the truth. In line with this, Edie confesses to adultery and that her husband Allan has forgiven her. This confession is followed by Mary’s moment of clarity, which also is a moment of identity production: Ok Stephen here it is. I’m going to hold up to my part in this. How could I assure myself with you when I had no idea who I was? But I want things now that I have put aside, and I am going to get them. And anyone who is a part of my life is going to have to want those things for me too.

When saying this, Mary speaks rapidly, instinctively signifying that what she says is directly connected to her inner being. This is as far from irony as we can come, but we are also far from the traditional notion of voice as a sign of interiority. It is in the “panicstricken production of the real” that the voices come to signify in different ways. In this scene, we have come a full circle: voices now produce reality again. They are once again connected to the subjects uttering something; the voices are once again safely harboured within the body of the individual. But with one major difference—it is a simulation, a production of reality by means of figuration. The film is a “perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all vicissitudes” (Baudrillard 1994, 2). The film is a production of a limited, restricted version of reality as reality itself and it is a production of reality where voice plays a major role.

CHAPTER FIVE THE COLLAPSE OF THE DEMOCRATIC SPEECH SPACE: GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS AND THE PROCESSES OF REIFICATION

Despite the clearly democratizing impulse that motivates coalition building, the coalitional theorist can inadvertently reinsert herself as sovereign of the process by trying to assert an ideal form for coalitional structures in advance, one that will effectively guarantee unity as the outcome. Related efforts to determine what is and is not the true shape of a dialogue, what constitutes a subject-position, and, most importantly, when “unity” has been reached, can impede the shelf-shaping [sic] and selflimiting dynamics of coalition. The insistence in advance on coalitional “unity” as a goal assumes that solidarity, whatever its price, is a prerequisite for political action. —Judith Butler, Gender Trouble And my job is to marshall those leads. —David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross

When talking of voice in terms of “making one’s voice heard” or “voicing one’s ideas,” a specific meaning becomes attached to it. The symbolic meaning given to voice does not stem from the rather trivial fact that an individual can use his or her vocal chords to produce sounds; sounds that, when produced in relation to language, become speech. Such symbolic value is not generated by the bodily functions of most individuals. Rather the symbolic, metaphysical, political, and humanist idea of voice lies in its ability to be heard by someone. This is how voice enters the political domain of power. Voice is given its symbolic meaning and value the moment the voices engage in some sort of interaction. Voice is nothing if it is not understood, and understanding demands another person to interpret. Therefore, understanding is crucial for voice, and for communication generally and dialogue specifically. Thus, the ideological meaning within this interaction is the focus of this chapter.

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The idea of dialogue maintains a definite status in our Western culture, in that it incorporates the possibility for individuals to verbally interact with each other, for reaching out, building bridges, overcoming differences, and creating communities. Thus, dialogue is not only a concept characterized as the very foundation of language, but also it constitutes our social and cultural life. Social life would not exist without dialogue. Thus, although this book deals with voice, it becomes clear that the value given to voice is connected to the value given to dialogue. In this chapter, I further argue that dialogue has a special role in this postmodern age. Dialogue specifically and communication in general have become key terms to describe fruitful, effective, and regulated interaction between people. In various areas of social critique and cultural theory, dialogue is seen as a redeeming feature which makes it possible to negotiate in a hostile environment. It is a thin humanist thread in an increasingly cynical world. And to analyse the function of dialogue as such a device, I will connect it to the social and economic period of today, which encompasses the main theme of the play, Glengarry Glen Ross. Glengarry Glen Ross is a play about capitalism. It features a group of men who interact in the midst of the operations of capitalism in a shoddy real estate office in Chicago. As they sell land to unwitting buyers, Roma, Levene, Ross and Aaronow try to cope in what can be named late capitalism or the postmodern age. This is not in any way a new or original claim. Much scholarly work on Glengarry Glen Ross focuses on capitalism, but it does so mainly in moral terms; how the play represents the underside of the capitalist system whereby the characters function as predators in it. Matthew Roudané analyses the play as depicting a situation where “entrepreneurial greed has devolved into a vaudevillian leitmotif; in this play, the pursuit of money under the guise of free enterprise becomes an excuse to deceive and steal” (Roudané 1992, 12). The salesmen are described as “petty thieves masquerading as businessmen” (Roudané 1992, 3), “voracious salesmen of worthless land” (Hudgins 1992, 194) representing “something perverse in human nature” (Carroll quoted in Hudgins 1996, 31). They are characterized as swindlers and fraudsters who prey on innocent people. Contrary to such interpretations, I will analyse the play as depicting the fundamental mechanisms of late capitalism, not its downside nor its fringes. This is more in line with, for instance, Richard Brucher’s analysis in “Pernicious Nostalgia in Glengarry Glen Ross,” where he argues that the play “distills a history of capitalism into ninety minutes of sleazy real estate dealing and an office robbery” (Brucher 1996, 221). Rather than seeing the salesmen as representing the extreme of the system, “[t]he

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salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross are more like us, almost mainstream, in their struggles to make livings in an abusive economic system” (Brucher 1996, 221). The characters are not predators, but rather workers working within and for the system while simultaneously trying to understand what it means to labour within such a system in the postmodern age. Thus, I partially agree with Schvey when he claims that “[t]he true villain of the play (and this accounts for its great success) is the system, not the tribe of hustlers who implement it by cheating others out of their hard-earned savings” (Schvey 1992, 106). Nevertheless, rather than maintaining a moralizing tone in my argument, where the characters or the system are seen as either “villains” or “good people,” I will try to understand the mechanisms of the system presented in the play. To analyse the ways the play sets up this economic period, I will focus on a couple of mechanisms in this chapter, and in doing so, refer to Marxist theory and terminology. My starting point for this Marxist analysis of Glengarry Glen Ross is the idea of objectification. The objectification of relations of production changes not only the relation between the worker and the product, and the relation between products, but also the relationships between workers. Objectification of this kind organizes the totality of social life. Such objectification leads to the reification of both the object and the subject. In the play, Glengarry Glen Ross, this implies the reification of the land the characters are selling, and more importantly, the reification of their own labour and social interaction, which is also vocal or verbal, as we shall see. Thus, we have an economic system labelled “late capitalism” whose workings lead to the increased reification of economic and social life. And accompanying this system is the cultural condition of postmodernism, which upholds this reification. My focus will be on the setting of the play in a specific economic system and also on the play as a cultural artefact of that system, which has consequences for the play’s treatment of voice. To connect voice to the processes of reification, embodiment plays an important role, in that the dialogue signifies actual (bodily) interaction between people. Whereas communication in the OED is defined more generally as the “Interchange of speech, conversation, conference,” or “The imparting, conveying, or exchange of ideas, knowledge, information, etc. (whether by speech, writing, or signs),” dialogue is more specifically characterized by vocal interchange: “A conversation carried on between two or more persons; a colloquy, talk together” or “Verbal interchange of thought between two or more persons, conversation.” Even more than in communication, dialogue is grounded in the idea of speech—of two or several people actively interacting with each other by way of their voices. Embodiment is crucial for understanding of how dialogue works as a form

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of interpersonal interaction. In this book, I have continually had a critical eye on commonsensical ideas concerning voice and embodiment, arguing that such a connection is never failsafe. Dramatic dialogue has continually shown how voice is an ideological construct that can never be fully realized. In this chapter, I will analyse how voice in dramatic dialogue both is and is not implicated in structures of reification. And its position within this process can be analysed precisely in the translation from text to film because of the effects on voice in the process of embodiment. The question guiding my analysis of the play is whether dramatic dialogue can be said to lay bare (to demonstrate) the capitalist system (in Brechtian terms) or if it is merely a symptom of that system (something which Jameson fears might be the fate of all postmodern art). Is the play’s specific use of dialogue a comment on, or a sign of, the system in which it operates? To study this, I start by analysing dialogue in a general, theoretical context and then go on to analyse dramatic dialogue as a textual construct and its translation into embodied dialogue in the film. Does the translation into film produce a different operation for the dialogue—a difference that can be framed by the classical modernism/postmodernism split? And, if so, what does this mean?

Commodification, objectification, and reification: the theme of the play In Glengarry Glen Ross, we are confronted with characters who believe themselves to be capitalists, or at least central actors on the capitalist market. Why? Because they are selling land as a commodity. Importantly, Glengarry Glen Ross is set during a stage of capitalism where commodification is taken to the highest degree of abstraction. To explain the consequences of commodification in relation to Glengarry Glen Ross, I will briefly explain the exchange of commodities in Karl Marx’s terms. In Capital I, Marx differentiates between two forms of commodity exchange: C-M-C (commodity–money–commodity) and M-C-M (money– commodity–money). Whereas C-M-C is the “simplest form of the circulation of commodities” (Marx 2001a, 212) which represents “the transformation of commodities into money, and the change of the money back again into commodities,” M-C-M implies “the transformation of money into commodities, and the change of commodities back again into money” (Marx 2001a, 212). The C-M-C form “starts with one commodity and finishes with another” (Marx 2001a, 216) qualitatively different commodity (use-value), and the M-C-M operation is based on the quantitative value produced by the exchange of money (exchange-value).

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This means that in order to not make the M-C-M transaction meaningless, there has to be a quantitative difference between the money at the start of the process and the money at the end. There must be “increment or excess over the original value,” which Marx calls surplus-value (Marx 2001a, 217). In this expansion of exchange value, value therefore now becomes value in process, money in process, and, as such, capital. It comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within its circuit, comes back out of it with expanded bulk, and begins the same round ever afresh. (Marx 2001a, 224)

With this, we have a process which Marx describes as M-C-M’ (with the apostrophe representing surplus), where surplus value implies that the process is commenced over again in order for capitalism to continue: “The circulation of money as capital is, on the contrary, an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits” (Marx 2001a, 219). What is interesting in this process is that the commodity itself becomes of less interest because it is the exchange of money that is in focus. This becomes evident in Glengarry Glen Ross, where the land they are selling is of less importance than the money it generates. It is even uncertain if the commodity actually exists; a question which Elizabeth Klaver raises in her analysis of the processes of simulation in her article, “David Mamet, Jean Baudrilland and the Performance of America”: What are the real estate salesmen actually selling? Is there any evidence in the play to suggest that they are selling real land? Do Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms exist even as good old American swampland? Or are these parcels simply the signs of an American dreamscape completely divorced from any referential anchorage? (Klaver 1996, 177)

The process of simulation discussed by Klaver can, in interesting ways, be connected to the processes of reification discussed here in that the loss of referentiality characterizing the sign in postmodernity can be seen as a form of reification of the sign, just as the land the salesmen are selling only matters as exchange value, not as an actual product. That the land called Glengarry Highlands is, in fact, Florida swampland is fraudulent not only because the buyers expect to live there and use the land, but also because it will not generate the surplus that they all (buyers, as well as sellers) expect. The land as commodity is downplayed so as to make the M-C-M’ exchange appear to be M-M’ exchange, a form of capitalism

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where money seems to generate itself: “M-M’, money which begets money” (Marx 2001a, 224). This kind of transaction, in turn, has two effects that are crucial for my understanding of Glengarry Glen Ross, namely objectification and its consequence, reification. The best way to explain objectification and reification is by using Marx’s own words in Capital III, and thus, to quote at length. In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish, self-expanding value, money generating money is brought out in its pure state and in this form it no longer bears the birth-marks of its origin. The social relation is consummated in the relation of a thing, of money, to itself. Instead of the actual transformation of money into capital, we see here only form without content. [...] It becomes a property of money to generate value and yield interest, much as it is an attribute of pear trees to bear pears. And the money-lender sells his money as just such an interest-bearing thing. But that is not all. The actually functioning capital, as we have seen, presents itself in such a light that it seems to yield interest not as functioning capital, but as capital in itself, as money-capital. This, too, becomes distorted. While interest is only a portion of the profit, i.e. of the surplus value, which the functioning capitalist squeezes out of the labourer, it appears now, on the contrary, as though interest were the typical product of capital, the primary matter, and profit, in the shape of profit of enterprise, were a mere accessory and by-product of the process of reproduction. Thus we get a fetish form of capital, and the conception of fetish capital. In MM’ we have the meaningless form of capital, the perversion and objectification of production relations in their highest degree, the interestbearing form, the simple form of capital, in which it antecedes its own process of reproduction. It is the capacity of money, or of a commodity, to expand its own value independently of reproduction—which is a mystification of capital in its most flagrant form. For vulgar political economy, which seeks to represent capital as an independent source of value, of value creation, this form is naturally a veritable find, a form in which the source of profit is no longer discernible, and in which the result of the capitalist process of production—divorced form the process— acquires an independent existence. (Marx 2001b, 521-522)

Objectification is consequently a way to describe a process where money and capital are cut off from their origin, where capital is seen as a selfgenerating system independent of any form of production or labour. This obfuscation of origin is the life-nerve of the idea of M-M’ capitalism and of late capitalism. Reification is a term developed by Georg Lukács in History and Class Consciousness to describe the objectification of commodities and its social

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consequences. In basic terms, reification means that “[t]he finished article ceases to be the object of the work-process” (Lukács 1968, 88), but rather acquires value independent of that process. Use-value is swapped for exchange-value. Thus, the product becomes a commodity, and in this process, acquires an objective existence seemingly separate from the social relations of production. As Georg Lukács argues, The essence of commodity-structure has often been pointed out. Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people. (Lukács 1968, 83)

The people, their bodies, and their work are systematically turned into an abstract force of value, exchange value, which is disconnected from them. The reason why the impact of reification is tantamount is twofold: There is both an objective and a subjective side to this phenomenon. Objectively a world of objects and relations between things springs into being […]. The laws governing these objects are indeed gradually discovered by man, but even so they confront him as invisible forces that generate their own power. [...] Subjectively—where the market economy has been fully developed—a man’s activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a commodity which, subject to the non-human objectivity of the natural laws of society must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer article. (Lukács 1968, 87)

As argued before, this implies that the social relations governing the production and exchange of commodities are objectified and seen as belonging to the objects and their internal relations. Similarly, the subjective side of reification implies that the worker has to treat his own actions and activities as a commodity for sale on the market, hence, the commodification of his or her labour power. What I argue is that this double objectification of products and people makes things appear as if they are generated and perpetuated by self-sufficient and self-regulating laws without any connection to social actors and social actions. The effect on the subject is that man’s actions are objectified as commodities, which in turn, is subject to the same laws of exchange as any other commodity. The characters in Glengarry Glen Ross are presented as reproducing this form of capitalism by seeing exchange value as a form of value that is selfgenerating while simultaneously experiencing (although perhaps not realizing) its origin in their own labour. This is the effect commodification,

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objectification, and reification has on people, according to Marx and Lukács; something which the play sets up as its theme. The question is—what does this have to do with voice and dialogue? Bear with me. I will theorize how reification in social processes has effects not only on money and goods, but also on cultural activities as well as on individual behaviour (such as dialogue) and thought. In the end, this theoretization will lead to an analysis of how this reification affects art and its possibility to represent this situation, in this case, in the play Glengarry Glen Ross.

Capitalism as a self-regulating system built upon laws For me personally, there is a specific function in the proposition of laws regulating human interaction connected to reification. “When use-values appear universally as commodities they acquire a new objectivity” (Lukács 1968, 92), which in turn, make them appear autonomous and “strictly rational and all-embracing” (Lukács 1968, 83). Relations between things are construed as being unconnected to human interaction, which implies an abstraction of those relations. And such interaction seems to be guided by the idea of logical regularity, a regularity that appears to spring from itself independent of any social construction. The atomisation of the individual is, then, only the reflex in consciousness of the fact that the ‘natural laws’ of capitalist production have been extended to cover every manifestation of life in society; that—for the first time in history—the whole of society is subjected, or tends to be subjected, to a unified economic process, and that the fate of every member of society is determined by unified laws. (Lukács 1968, 91–92)

Capitalism gives the impression of being guided by natural, logical laws that determine every product, commodity, person, and action within that system. The idea of rational, regular laws guiding capitalism produces, or is aligned with, the processes of reification—on all levels of late capitalism. The formulation of regularity and logical law-bound processes can be seen as constituted by an aesthetic vocabulary, even when referring to economics. My starting point for this argumentation resides in Mary Poovey’s article “Aesthetics and Political Economy in the Eighteenth Century,” where she traces the separation of aesthetics and economics back to moral philosophy. Focusing on philosophers such as Adam Smith and Shaftesbury, she argues that the separation of aesthetics and economics was never successful. On the contrary, she claims, “[T]heorists

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of both discourses continued to deploy the same vocabulary, even when they intended to reinforce the difference between the two enterprises” (Poovey 1994, 85). Thus, with Poovey’s help, I argue that an aesthetic vocabulary on regularity and law-bound rationality generates the seemingly ethical foundations that constitute both economics and intersubjective contact stemming from this historical alignment. Therefore, aesthetics continues to inform both political economy and moral philosophy, mostly by way of concepts such as proportion, regularity, and fit. These are aesthetic terms connoting what is good, beautiful, and right and are much in line with Enlightenment ideas where what is regular is also rational, and therefore, good. In economic terms, the idea of regularity can be connected to operations of objectification described above, which in fact, are grounded in an aesthetic vocabulary formulated as rational and good. In Lukács terms, such regularity and rationality hide the “real” social relations underlying such operations and legitimize the operations of capitalism. Thus, Poovey argues “that the apparent separation of ethics and the economy, the apparent divorce of aesthetics from politics and the economy, and the apparent discovery of two separate sets of natural laws were all contributing to mask and produce the constitutive dynamics of market society” (Poovey 1994, 95 emphasis in original). This means that the subjects implicated in this exchange are actors in a system of capitalism that seems uncontrollable and inevitable—and naturally good. The subjects’ interactions are guided by the idea of logical regularity; a regularity that appears to spring independently from any social construction. The idea that capitalism works by natural(ized) laws regulating its workings is part of the structure of reification, a process which spills over into other areas of social and cultural activity. As such, they become explanatory models for human interaction, hiding their “conditions of possibility,” as Poovey puts it (Poovey 1994, 80). Given that postmodernity, or late capitalism, is defined by its level of objectification and reification and how such reification spills over into all walks of life, it is also possible to argue that the aesthetisizing vocabulary of rational regularity and logical order is very much part of the postmodern condition. The idea of rational laws does not merely explain human interaction, but regulates it in certain ways and thus obfuscates other ways of doing things or thinking about things. As naturalized (rational) laws regulate all forms of practices, it becomes clear that they also stipulate the cultural condition of postmodernity. Fredric Jameson’s main argument about the postmodern condition in Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and elsewhere is that the conflation of the economic and the

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cultural has increased due to an increasing reification of all elements in cultural life. To say that my two terms, the cultural and the economic, thereby collapse back into one another and say the same thing, in an eclipse of the distinction between base and superstructure that has itself often struck people as significantly characteristic of postmodernism in the first place, is also to suggest that the base, in the third stage of capitalism, generates its superstructures with a new kind of dynamic. And this may also be what (rightly) worries the unconverted about the term; it seems to obligate you in advance to talk about cultural phenomena at least in business terms if not in those of political economy. (Jameson, 1984, Xxi)

As a result, according to Jameson, the cultural condition of late capitalism forces us to talk of cultural phenomena in economic terms. According to Poovey, it also causes us to talk of economics in aesthetic terms. In accordance with this, Jameson claims that late capitalism and its cultural condition, postmodernism, are defined by an intensified process of reification that influences all aspects of social and cultural life. Similarly, Lukács’ main point in History and Class Consciousness is how these structures of commodity exchange and condition “the total outer and inner life of society” (Lukács 1968, 84). To connect capitalism to dialogue, I will look into the concept of exchange. This is a key term in the process of reification in that it suggests a rational and regulated system independent of human interaction. It is the transition from use-value to exchange-value that commences objectification by its quantitative measurement. In the process of exchange, where the commodity is sold only to produce surplus value, value is dislodged from origin of production, that is, from the relations of production. Because of the laws (of proportion, regularity, and fit) characterized as guiding the process, the practice of economic exchange is envisioned as logical, rational, and in extension, inevitable and good. Thus, it seemingly takes on value of its own. In similar ways, dialogue is commonly characterized as a form of exchange and is, as we shall see, formulated as being constituted by laws that I argue, in accordance with Poovey, are aesthetic in origin. In this, dialogue-as-exchange is seen as having value in itself, disconnected from concrete and actual interaction between people. The question is if dialogue is implicated in the processes of reification characterizing postmodernity? Does the formulation of rational, constitutive laws of communication, rather than signalling what is good, in fact, co-align it with processes of reification characterizing economic exchange? If this is

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so, can dialogue produce what it is supposed to—communication, interaction, and understanding? When it comes to dialogue, understanding is formulated as the ultimate (and highly valued) goal of this interaction and logical regularity and rationality is needed for this to be achieved. Or, rather, the idea is that if rational regularity is upheld in human vocal interaction, understanding is its logical outcome. Writers such as Austin, Searle, and Grice are theoretically unified in their focus on language and their formulation of aesthetic laws governing linguistic exchange. Even if their ideas are quite distinct and have different functions within social language theory, they all try to stipulate dialogue (or communication generally) as regulated, and as such, rational and good. What characterizes both Austin’s and Searle’s theories is the idea that communication, or dialogue, is regulated by laws or rules. Thus, Searle, for instance, argues in The Philosophy of Language that “[t]o perform illocutionary acts is to engage in a rule-governed behaviour” (Searle 1971, 40). When defining and explicating these rules, he differentiates between regulative and constitutive rules in a way that is symptomatic of his view of linguistic interaction: “Regulative rules regulate a pre-existing activity, an activity whose existence is logically independent of the existence of the rules. Constitutive rules constitute (and also regulate) an activity the existence of which is logically dependent on the rules” (Searle 1971, 41). What is important about this differentiation is that regulative rules are placed ad-hoc to a pre-existing practice, which means that the rules are transitory, provisional, and haphazard, whereas the constitutive rules make up the practice as such. Not surprisingly, Searle argues that the laws of linguistic interaction are constitutive. This means that there is no interaction, no language, without these rules. In similar ways, Austin argues that communication or dialogue is clearly regulated: If, for example, the speaker is not in a position to perform an act of that kind, or if the object with respect to which he purports to perform it is not suitable for the purpose, then he doesn’t manage, simply by issuing his utterance, to carry out the purported act. (Austin 1971, 14)

According to Keir Elam in The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Grice similarly argues that “the exchange is regulated by indispensable principles of decorum allowing coherence and continuity. These principles are stated as maxims implicitly governing the participants’ contributions” (Elam 1980, 171).32 With this idea of regularity as their starting point, all three theoreticians try to explicate and explain these rules, laws, or maxims.

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What is interesting for my analysis is that Searle’s, Austin’s, and Grice’s views of social interaction are grounded in ethics connected to the formulation of rational laws. The formulation of laws is a way to imagine, or construct, human and social interaction as generally good or beneficial. The participants in verbal interaction are all intent on “the achievement of an effective and coherent exchange” (Elam 1980, 171). This is clearly a view of ideal exchange, an ideal that is formulated in aesthetic terms rather than the other way around. Connecting back to Searle and his idea that these laws are constitutive, this makes such laws appear logically coherent and independent from concrete situations and the social situation producing them; that is, “the relation between people,” as Lukács puts it (Lukács 1968, 83). Hence, the kind of reification I claim constitutes human interaction in the postmodern age. Thus, the overall presence of aesthetic laws is how I connect late capitalism to dialogue in Glengarry Glen Ross. The idea of such laws is what points to the reification of both commodity exchange and social interaction such as linguistic communication. My focus on regularity, law, and proportion in my analysis of capitalism and dialogue is therefore not coincidental or haphazard. The main idea forming my analysis of both dialogue and capitalism in Glengarry Glen Ross is, consequently, the idea of a smoothly running system working for the benefit of everything—from the individual to the cultural and economic. The question guiding this investigation is, if an aesthetic vocabulary of rationality, logical regularity, and law-bound interaction characterizes the economic sphere (late capitalism), can dialogue (being guided by the same aesthetic vocabulary) generate understanding of the workings of capitalism? Rather, is it not that to understand the workings of capitalism, language and communication needs to break out of the hold reification processes have on all social action? Can we reach understanding by means of the linguistic and aesthetic means available to us at the moment? Glengarry Glen Ross is noted for its use and elaboration of dialogue, with Mamet being a “master of linguistic versatility,” as Anne Dean puts it (Dean 1996, 49). Ruby Cohn, who has conducted a close examination of the dialogue in Glengarry Glen Ross in “How Are Things Made Round?” characterizes it well: “On the eve of the twenty-first century, however, the frenzied pace of contemporary life is echoed in the rapid rhythm of Mamet’s dialogue, which he controls by various devices” (Cohn 1992, 109). Cohn further argues that “Mamet bases his grammatical chaos on the solecisms, digressions, and tautologies of everyday speech, but on stage they become symptomatic of the chaos in the seemingly different worlds of petty crime, real estate speculation, and film production” (Cohn 1992,

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113). As Cohn well establishes, this elaboration of language in many ways positions the text within a specific cultural period, postmodernity, and I would argue that it is its function within this period which makes the play so interesting for the analysis of voice. When analysing voice and dialogue in such a play, I feel that it is more or less necessary to try understand the function of dialogue within this cultural and social setting. As argued earlier, dialogue has become a highly valued concept, mainly for its focus on intersubjective understanding. A play like Glengarry Glen Ross questions this positive evaluation in that it situates language within a social and economic context that highlights its “condition of possibility,” as Poovey puts it. With my focus on reification, I will approach dialogue by analysing the presence and operation of aesthetic laws to question and understand these conditions. In basic terms, I argue that the dialogue constituting Glengarry Glen Ross works in two possible ways: dialogue as a means to sell, and dialogue as a means to understand. All the characters-as-workers are trying to construct a dialogue that works with the structures of capitalism in their sales-talk at the same time as they are trying to dissect and understand the same system through their dialogue. The dialogue in the play thus both signifies how voice is used to advance the structures of late capitalism and is simultaneously used to understand the characters’ situation within the same system. However, the play shows how reification has transformed not only the characters-as-workers, but also their social interaction and their use of voice. What I argue, then, is that reification has affected not only the entire economic structure, but also what should be able to break this reification—relationships between people.

Individual consequences So far I have argued that it is the formulation of rational laws (aesthetic in origin) that, among other things, upholds reification in our postmodern time, both economically and culturally. Such laws are upheld by being detached from actual interaction between individuals. However, at the same time, I would argue that the laws get their strength and power from individualism. In the same way as Lukács argues that capitalism operates by making the worker believe that his only value lies in the idea that he is the owner of his labour-power, dialogue as the cultural counterpart to this reification makes people believe that they are the owners of their own voice.

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The question is, thus, how the worker becomes an individualist. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács shows how the commodification of labour-power is turned into an individualist enterprise: As emphasised above, the worker, too, must present himself as the ‘owner’ of his labour-power, as if it were a commodity. His specific situation is defined by the fact that his labour-power is his only possession. His fate is typical of society as a whole in that this self-objectification, this transformation of a human function into a commodity reveals in all its starkness the dehumanised and dehumanising function of the commodity relation. (Lukács 1968, 92)

By setting up the parameters of action for the worker, the processes of reification are naturalized. The idea that the worker is the owner of his own labour-power to be sold on the work market (that is, he becomes an employee) is no longer questionable, but formulated as a given. This has become one of the laws of being, of existence. However, this is not enough for the system to work. The laws have to be formulated in ways that make them work unobstructed to impose real power. The laws have to be not only natural(ized), but also unknown to the worker. And because the laws that govern the objectification of labour-power are transparent to us, they function perfectly with individualism: But such a ‘law’ would have to be the ‘unconscious’ product of the activity of the different commodity owners acting independently of one another, i.e. a law of mutually interacting ‘coincidences’ rather than one of truly rational organisation. Furthermore, such a law must not merely impose itself despite the wishes of individuals, it may not even be fully and adequately knowable. (Lukács 1968, 102)

The laws must be built upon the unconscious interaction of independent commodity owners.33 Their actions must be voluntary, and the laws must not be fully known to work. Rather than seeing and understanding the situation, the forces of individualism construct the processes conditioning the labourer as individual, enabling choices, which means that reification has become a part of the subject and is, as such, constructed as “real.” For that very reason the reified mind has come to regard them as the true representatives of his social existence. The commodity character of the commodity, the abstract, quantitative mode of calculability shows itself here in its purest form: the reified mind necessarily sees it as the form in which its own authentic immediacy becomes manifest and—as reified consciousness—does not even attempt to transcend it. (Lukács 1968, 93)

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More than that, for the reified mind, the options given by capitalism imply that the act of obeying and reproducing the system might be beneficiary for the individual. Following the laws (perhaps without knowing it) can make the individual feel that he or she is doing what is good and right, as the laws themselves are formulated ethical terms. Such a path also renders the sensation of being in control, and even of mastering the system, which becomes apparent in Glengarry Glen Ross. Lukács’s formulation of reified consciousness implies that we cannot see the real relations of production and people’s relation in society other than as objectified commodities governed by abstract, natural, and inexorable (aesthetic) laws of reification. Reification precisely implies that everything seems to be governed by natural (rational) laws that structure our ways of being, and all we can do is to relate to those laws in our actions. We also do so willingly because they appear appealing, right, and good. Simultaneously, the individual is seen as a free actor who can make individual choices from those laws, hence, his acceptance of those naturalized laws. This means that even if the laws are not there (other than as a process of reification produced much by an aesthetic vocabulary of logic, rationality, and regulation)—are not “real”—they become real in the process because people abide and act by them. In similar ways, individualist ideology in cohort with aesthetic laws constitutes our concept of dialogue in postmodernity. How individualism and aesthetic laws come together in dialogue is by way of intention. Both Searle and Austin build their rule-governed linguistic universe on the intention of the speaker. When analysing the locutionary act of the promise, for instance, five of the rules enumerated by Searle concern intention (Searle 1971, 50), which demonstrates that the laws of dialogue are combined with the idea of the individual owning and being in control of his or her own voice. Thus, individual intention seems to work frictionless and in harmony with the idea of naturalized laws guiding communication and dialogue, both contributing to the “reification of consciousness,” as Lukács puts it. As speakers, we feel that we are producers of meaning, that we can communicate what we want, that people listen to what we say, and that we have a functioning dialogue. This means that, by following the abstract and aestheticized laws of conversation set up by Searle and Austin, we feel that we are following the right path, are in control of the situation, and can even master the system of communication, just as with the characters’ relation to capitalism in Glengarry Glen Ross.

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If reification not only affects products and their relation, and people and their relations, but also the individual and his/her consciousness, the question which necessarily presents itself at this stage of the analysis, and which will guide my actual reading of dialogue in Glengarry Glen Ross, is if it is possible to see through or counteract these processes of reification, and also, if it is possible to imagine other relations of production and other social and cultural relations. In Karl Marx’s vocabulary, an undoubted formulation of “real” relations of production is found which underlies the illusions of reification. However, later theorists such as Lukács, Foucault, and Jameson increasingly come to doubt this possibility. When people have turned their identities, personalities, and skills into commodities for sale, this becomes a “permanent ineluctable reality of their daily life” (Lukács 1968, 90). This is the co-work of capitalism, individualism, and language, which is precisely what Glengarry Glen Ross is about. With the reification of consciousness, the naturalized laws become real—a part of our physical selves. Returning to Glengarry Glen Ross, this means that the play sets up a difference between the characters’ work for and within the capitalist system, and the attempts of the characters to understand it. Thus, the situation described in the play is created by way of the characters’ actions and that their interaction is grounded in two factors, selling or understanding; both of which are interesting in terms of reification. That the play is about selling has been much discussed by scholars. Anne Dean, for instance, claims that in “In Glengarry Glen Ross, relationships appear to exist only to facilitate commercial success and to establish which party is in control” (Dean 1990, 197) and that “[t]here are very few moments in the play when the characters use any language that is not expressly concerned with business and even when they do it quickly becomes apparent that it is a ploy designed to coerce a colleague or cheat a client” (Dean 1990, 192). Similarly, Dorothy H. Jacobs argues that “[w]ords can only buy and sell” (Jacobs 1996, 117), and Linda Dorff asserts that the men “cannot stop selling” (Dorff 1996, 205). What is interesting here is that when the characters use language as a means of selling, it clearly follows an aesthetic of flow. It is evident that sales talk builds upon the idea of verbosity, keeping the words coming, and thus avoiding any type of interruption or critical thinking on the part of the listener: “In the brutally competitive world in which he moves, the salesman must become expert in linguistic technique; so long as he can keep his narrative flowing and uninterrupted he is able to feel, at least momentarily, safe” (Dean 1990, 193). This language of flow is, however, more or less successful. When the characters are at their best, the words do

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not only flow, but also they seem to render and produce what the characters “want.” The best example of this is a rather lengthy monologue by Roma, who is the best salesman in the office. The extract below is taken from the scene in the Chinese restaurant where Roma starts up a conversation with an unknown person, Lingk. The monologue is a perfect example of how everyday speech becomes sales talk: ROMA. I don’t know. For me, I’m saying, what it is, it’s probably not the orgasm. Some broads, forearms on your neck, something her eyes did. There was a sound she made . . . or, me, lying, in the, I’ll tell you: me lying in bed: the next day she brought me café au lait. She gives me a cigarette, my balls feel like concrete. Eh? What I’m saying, What is our life: (Pause.) it’s looking forward or it’s looking back. And that’s our life. That’s it. Where is the moment? (Pause.) And what is it that we’re afraid of? Loss. What else? (Pause.) The bank closes. We get sick, my wife died on a plane, the stock market collapsed . . . the house burnt down . . . what of these happen . . . ? None of ‘em. We worry anyway. What does this mean? I’m not secure. How can I be secure? (Pause.) Through amassing wealth beyond all measure? No. And what’s beyond all measure? That’s a sickness. That’s a trap. There is no measure. Only greed. How can we act? The right way, we would say, to deal with this: ‘there is a one-in-a-million chance that so and so will happen . . . Fuck it, it won’t happen to me’ . . . No. We know that’s not right, I think, we say the correct way to deal with this is ‘There is a one in so-and-so chance this will happen…God protect me. I am powerless, let it not happen to me . . . ’ But not to that. I say. There’s something else. What is it? ‘If it happens, AS IT MAY for that is not within our powers, I will deal with it, just as I do today with what draws my concern today.’ I say this is how we must act. I do those things which seem correct to me today. I trust myself. And if security concerns me, I do that which today I think will make me secure. And every day I do that, when that day arrives that I need a reserve, a) odds are that I have it and, b) the true reserve that I have is the strength that I have of acting each day without fear. (Pause.) According to the dictates of my mind. (Pause.) Stocks, bonds, objects of art, real estate. Now: what are they? (Pause.) An opportunity. To what? To make money? Perhaps. To lose money? Perhaps. To ‘indulge’ and to ‘learn’ about ourselves? Perhaps. So fucking what? What isn’t? They’re an opportunity. That’s all. They’re an event. A guy comes up to you, you make a call, you send in a brochure, it doesn’t matter. ‘There these properties I’d like for you to see.’ What does it mean? What you want it to mean. (Pause.) Money? (Pause.) If that’s what it signifies to you. Security? (Pause.) Comfort? ‘Some schmuck wants to make a buck on me’; or, ‘I feel a vibration fate is calling’ . . . all it is is THINGS THAT HAPPEN TO YOU. (Pause.) That’s all it is. How are they different? (Pause.) Some poor newly married guy gets run down by a cab. Some busboy wins the lottery . . . (Pause.) All it is, it’s carnival.

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In this passage, Roma seems to be in control of the situation and in control of language. Language is used by him to reach his goal, which is to sell. As Christopher Bigsby states in Contemporary Writers—David Mamet, what we are confronted with in Roma’s monologue are “mismatched phrases and random ideas strung together in a protective flow of sound” (Bigsby 1985, 124). Deborah R. Geis further argues that the “monologue is, after all, the consummate sales pitch: not only does it preclude interruption, but it allows the speaker to appear ‘personal’ and confessional” (Geis 1992, 61). Given that language and selling are so intricately intertwined, language seems to work without friction in these passages. Although such situations represent brief moments in the play, they are significant in that they demonstrate how language and capitalism go hand in hand. This is also how the characters believe themselves to be in control of the system. Having reified minds, the characters cannot see the laws of capitalism other than as natural and inevitable. They have accepted the terms of action as given. Therefore, they also believe in individual agency and that their speech and actions are their own. They even believe (at times) that they are controlling (or at least are in control of) the system—in moments of prosperity. Levene, for instance, repeats like a mantra after his big sell that “you have to believe in yourselves” (Mamet 1984, 39). In his subsequent (rather abusive) speech to Williamson, Levene clearly shows how working with the system aligns with a vocabulary of individual action and control: LEVENE. Yes. I did. This morning. (To WILLIAMSON:) What I’m saying to you: things can change. You see? This is where you fuck up, because this is something you don’t know. You can’t look down the road. And see what’s coming. Might be someone else, John. It might be someone new, eh? Someone new. And you can’t look back. Cause you don’t know history. You ask them. When we were at Rio Rancho, who was top man? A moth . . . ? Two months . . . ? Eight months in twelve for three years in a row. You know what that means? You know what that means? Is that luck? Is that some, some, some purloined leads? That’s skill. That’s talent, that’s that’s . . . (Mamet 1984, 44)

Even if such moments generate a sense of control of individual talent and action, the main problem for the characters is that they cannot understand the capitalist system and their position within it because they are an

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intricate part of it. In other words, all the characters’ speech and dialogue is characterized by their inability to see and understand, which is a sign that the characters and their activities have become abstracted and objectified—hiding the real relations of production. The consequence of this is that no one in the office can fathom what is going on. This is reflected in language, which cannot communicate properly. It is clear that, more often than not, the dialogue is characterized by broken-off sentences, ellipses, and questions: “‘What?’ is by far the most frequently asked question in the play, and ‘What does that mean?’ or ‘What do you mean by that?’ occur at least a dozen times. Similar questions, like ‘What are you saying?’ or ‘What are you telling me?’ also abound” (Worster 1996, 73). This situation is well exemplified by the opening scene of the play when Levene tries to convince Williamson to give him the premium leads. Although, in this dialogue, Levene clearly tries to use his sales techniques, language cannot give him what he wants, because he does not understand how the system works. This dialogue clearly represents disrupted language: WILLIAMSON. Murray said . . . LEVENE. John. John . . . WILLIAMSON. Murray said . . . LEVENE. John. John . . . WILLIAMSON. Will you please wait a second. Shelly. Please. Murray told

me: The hot leads . . . LEVENE. . . . ah, fuck this . . . WILLIAMSON. The . . . Shelley . . . ? (Pause.) The hot leads are assigned according to the board. During the contest. Period. Anyone who beats fifty per . . . . LEVENE. That’s fucked. That’s fucked. You don’t look at the fucking percentage. You look at the gross . . . (Mamet 1984, 6–7)

In his analysis of Glengarry Glen Ross in “How to Do Things with Salesmen: David Mamet’s Speech-Act Play,” David Worster argues that the play abounds in misunderstandings and that language is used to control other people rather than to communicate. According to speech-act theory, the characters do not follow the laws of communication resulting in “felicitous and infelicitous speech acts” and “ineffective talk and effective talk” (Worster 1996, 66). However, rather than seeing this inability to communicate as a failure to uphold the laws of language, I would argue that this failure of language to communicate is due to its implication in structures of reification upheld precisely by the ideas of law-bound interaction. The sense of disruption represented by the dialogue above, I

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would argue, is therefore a consequence of the reification of language, where it can be used to sell, but not to understand (the capitalist system). The reason why the characters cannot understand the system of which they are such an intricate part is because language itself has become reified. The ways in which processes of reification are made visible in the play is by turning people and their relations into things and relations between things. This is an intricate part of “sales talk.” As Anne Dean states, “It is the almost incomprehensible jargon of the real-estate world in which ‘leads,’ ‘the board,’ ‘Glengarry,’ and ‘closers’ are the main components of linguistic exchange” (Dean 1990, 199). The concept of “leads” clearly emphasizes how language in capitalism objectifies people, in that “leads” are actually prospective clients (that is, people who might be interested in buying or investing). In the play’s elliptic speech, this is further intensified in the “odd transformation in which the indirect object (object of the preposition ‘to’) of the sentence: ‘I sell the land to the customer’ becomes the direct object, and the original direct object (‘the land’) is deleted, producing the sentence ‘I sell the customer.’ Moss advises Aaronow, ‘Don’t ever try to sell an Indian’” (Worster 1996, 78 note 14). In one sentence, the processes of reification transform the customer: “Levene speaks of actually ‘selling’ the customer, as if he is no longer a human being but merely a commodity to be exploited” (Dean 1990, 203). This kind of language plays an intricate part in the characters’ inability to understand what is really going on. Not even Williamson, the office manager who is “a company man” as Roma puts it (Mamet 1984, 57) and who therefore supposedly represents the abstract power which sets the laws, can understand the workings of capitalism: I do what I’m hired to do. I’m . . . wait a second. I’m hired to watch the leads. I’m given . . . hold on, I’m given a policy. My job is to do that. What I’m told. That’s it. You, wait a second, anybody falls below a certain mark I’m not permitted to give them the premium leads. (Mamet 1984, 6)

By using vocabulary which is clearly a part of the capitalist system, “And my job is to marshall those leads” (Mamet 1984, 5), people and their actions are turned into a “sales force,” which demonstrates how reification works by means of “thingification.” In a language which clearly is not his own, Williamson reproduces the processes of reification. Therefore, Williamson can never use language to understand his own position within that system. The reification of language becomes all the more evident in the dialogue between Moss and Aaronow in act 1, scene 2. In this scene, the

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way in which Aaronow and Moss attempt to grasp what is happening to them is precisely by means of “the leads.” From the standpoint of reification, the “leads” have a special function in that the mystification surrounding them is increasingly intensified throughout the play. The leads are clues to the system which all the characters are trying to grasp. The “leads”—what are they? Where do they come from? They (Mitch, Murray, and Graff) are buying them, but from whom? Who is selecting (and thus producing) them as “leads”? The fragmented information given in the play makes the idea of “leads” seem natural, as if this is a natural process of transformation which happens to people when they become prospective buyers. They start out as people, but turn into “leads.” This, I would argue, is part of the process of reification where people are turned into abstractions whose only function is to become objects in the exchange process. And the characters in the play accept and reinforce this process by their use of language. Even Moss, who at times seems to have intimations of what is going on, is unable to use language to understand and to act. He is clearly onto something when he argues that the reason why the leads are so important in understanding what is going is because the leads, in fact, are people and that “the system” is, in fact, people and relations between people: “You missed a fucking sale. Big deal. A deadbeat Polack. Big deal. How you going to sell ‘em in the first place . . . ? Your mistake, you shoun’a took the lead” (Mamet 1984, 11). To understand the system, you have to penetrate reified language by concretizing such concepts as people and their actions. In his conversation with Aaronow, Moss is trying to figure out the system: “For some fuckin’ ‘Sell ten thousand and you win the steak knives’ ” (Mamet 1984, 14). He also realizes that the formulation of such a system as an abstract system with laws of its own implies that there is no clear adversary against whom to fight. As Benedict Nightingale notes, what gives Glengarry Glen Ross “bite” is the fact that “Murray and Mitch, company directors who remain safely offstage yet are frighteningly omnipresent” (Nightingale 2004, 91). In an attempt to concretize the system, Moss names Mitch and Murray: “And you know who’s responsible? You know who it is. Its Mitch and Murray. Cause it doesn’t have to be this way,” (Mamet 1984, 14) which shows that he thinks that the system can be understood and thus be made vulnerable. The problem with Moss, and his attempts to come to some understanding in his dialogue with Aaronow, is that he is working within the system he is trying to understand. The dialogue is dysfunctional when it comes to understanding the system because what appears to be a way to get at the system is made in the language of the system—sales talk. When he tries to

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get Aaronow interested in corrupting the system, it turns out he is doing so by trying to use the language he is used to. This means that rather than trying to understand and subvert the system, he tries to sell him the idea of robbery as any other commodity. Contrary to Anne Dean, who claims that Moss’s speech is characterized by flow: “A man like Moss resembles a shark—to stop is to die. He—and by implication, his language—must always keep moving” (Dean 1996, 56), I would argue that language clearly fails him in this scene. Thus, it becomes clear that the characters’ use of dialogue as a means to understand the system is undermined by dialogue itself. In an attempt to use dialogue to concretize what appears to be abstract, they only favour the system. The structures of late capitalism (the increased commodification, objectification, and reification of social relations) remain unknown to them, and the language they try to use clearly does not function as a means to get to any form of understanding of that system. Rather, it is constituted by that system. The characters see each other as competitors in a (smoothly run and inevitable) capitalist system without being able to understand the system itself. This is the situation for the characters in the play. Dialogue is clearly part of the system, and as such, cannot be used to understand it.

Drama as a particular kind of dialogue Thus far, I have discussed dialogue in general terms, showing how dialogue as a social interaction is implicated in the same processes of reification that condition political economy. One of the reasons given is that the idea of naturalized laws (that are rational and good) hide the real relations of production—the actual interaction between people. However, what I study here is a specific form of dialogue—dramatic dialogue. It is apt to analyse drama when discussing dialogue because the “dialogic exchange […] does not merely [...] refer deictically to the dramatic action but directly constitutes it” (Elam 1980, 157 emphasis in original). However, when we discuss dramatic dialogue, we are discussing artistic representation, and this naturally has consequences for my analysis. Dramatic dialogue has a specific position in the reification process, in that, historically (at least), artistic production has been seen as autonomous or at least semi-autonomous in relation to what Marxists call the “base.” As such, dramatic dialogue should theoretically be able to counter the processes of reification. Can it? To answer this, we have to study how dramatic dialogue functions as “cultural logic of Late Capitalism,” as Jameson puts it.

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One aspect of dramatic dialogue that I will analyse as possibly counteractive to the processes of reification is the concrete speech act. To discuss this, I will have to discuss the particularities of dramatic dialogue. When analysing drama, two important observations must be considered. The first is that dramatic dialogue seems to be more law-bound than ordinary language. Even if Austin’s and Searle’s constitutive laws concerning dialogue and communication produce language as quite rational, Keir Elam rightly argues that dramatic dialogue is even more so. Elam claims that Dialogic exchange in the drama, in the first place, is organized in an ordered and well-disciplined fashion quite alien to the uneven give-andtake of social intercourse. The exchange proceeds, usually, in neat turntaking fashion, with a relative lack of interruption and the focus firmly centred on one speaker at a time. Sentences are syntactically complete and always fluently enunciated, larger units being marked, as a rule, by a semantic coherence unknown in improvised conversation. (Elam 1980, 91)

In The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, Elam analyses in detail the ways in which dramatic verbal exchanges differ from their “real life” equivalent. The first difference concerns syntactic orderliness. This means that the actors perform syntactically self-sufficient utterances that are welldemarcated units. There are requirements of comprehensibility and followability in dramatic language. Theatre also demands repeatability. This means that everyday exchanges are difficult to re-enact because they are too fragmented. The second concerns information intensity. There is not as much phatic communication in dramatic dialogue as there is in social interaction, and semantic information is frequently scarce in everyday speech, contrary to dramatic speech: “Even characters—like Shepard’s—who have a supposedly established relationship exchange informationally rich utterances” (Elam 1980, 181). This means that “In the drama […] the information-bearing role of language is normally constant: every utterance counts, everything said is significant and carries the action and ‘world-creating’ functions forward in some way” (Elam 1980, 178). The third difference concerns illocutionary purity. Whereas much social intercourse is taken up with keeping itself going, illocutionary progress that forwards the action is much more important in drama. By floorapportionment control, which is the fourth difference, Elam means to describe dramatic dialogue as constituted by well-defined contributions or speech. It seems that dialogue happens in a sequence of cause and effect— which enhances the illusion of language as a benign, orderly, and

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democratic system. Generally speaking, Elam argues that it is the overarching textual coherence which is specific to dramatic dialogue: What accounts for these systematic differences is, in short, the degree of textual control to which dramatic discourse is subject. While a spontaneous conversation can be considered as a text to the extent that it forms a distinct unit more or less coherently structured semantically and pragmatically […] it is clear that the textual constraints governing its progress are far looser than those regulating dramatic dialogue. (Elam 1980, 182)

Given that I have argued that the idea of constitutive laws are the main components in the reification of language and dialogue, does this mean that dramatic dialogue, being even more regulated than everyday speech, is now more reified than ever? Dramatic dialogue is regular and regulated in that characters speak one at a time; that language has to be understood; that each character’s speech space is more or less respected; that what is said means something; and that what is said has certain consequences. However, modern drama is also an artistic space where playwrights try to envision another (different) form of interaction between people. I would even argue that ever since the era of modernism (at least), dramatists and playwrights have systematically worked to reinvent language to break the type of reification produced by regularity and rationality. I will further investigate if Glengarry Glen Ross represents such an instance. As I see it, two ways of using language can break the processes of reification (economic, cultural, and linguistic). This is by means of a reformulation of concreteness and crisis. What I analyse here is if a play like Glengarry Glen Ross, as an artistic production enacting a concrete dialogue fraught with crisis can break the veils of reification because of its attempt to disavow the aesthetic laws of communication—and thus lay bare the processes of reification pervasive in all areas of life. In this study, I analyse both film and text to see if embodiment as a form of concreteness, or crisis, gives dialogue a different position or a different function within postmodern culture.

Haunting the laws: the concrete and the crisis The idea of the concrete is a theoretical attempt to envision a break in the processes of reification made by both Lukács and Michail Bakhtin. Thus, Lukács argues that

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This rationalisation of the world appears to be complete, it seems to penetrate the very depths of man’s physical and psychic nature. It is limited, however, by its own formalism. That is to say the rationalisation of isolated aspects of life results in the creation of—formal—laws. All these things do join together into what seems to the superficial observer to constitute a unified system of general ‘laws’. But the disregard of the concrete aspects of the subject matter of these laws, upon which disregard their authority as laws is based, makes itself felt in the incoherence of the system in fact. (Lukács 1968, 101)

What the focus on laws and regularity fails to acknowledge is the possibility of the opposite, that “the economy is totally rationalised and transformed into an abstract and mathematically orientated system of formal ‘laws’ that creates the methodological barrier to understanding the phenomenon of crisis” (Lukács 1968, 105). The idea of a law as formulated both in economics and in speech-act theory (Searle and Austin) is unable to understand the phenomenon of crisis, or worse, refuses to consider its overall presence. This also goes for the crisis of meaning, of communication and dialogue. I connect this idea of crisis to Bakhtin’s theory of the concrete, by seeing both as representing the opposite of the formulation of aesthetic laws. The concrete, in many ways, links the idea of variation and unpredictability inherent in all systems to Lukács’ idea that the “relation between people” is the only way out of the processes of reification. The question is what the concrete-as-crisis actually means when talking of reification, both on the level of economics as well as on the level of cultural (linguistic) production. Interestingly, it is not only theorists like Searle and Austin who are accused of abstracting and objectifying language, but also Michel Bakhtin’s linguistic theories are clearly formulated against the abstract laws that he thinks characterizes structuralist theories of language. Throughout Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, he attempts to bring dialogue and verbal (vocal) interaction down from a level of abstraction (and objectification), which Bakhtin argues characterizes Saussure’s general linguistics, for example: What interests the mathematically minded rationalists is not the relationship of the sign to the actual reality it reflects nor to the individual who is its originator, but the relationship of sign to sign within a closed system already accepted and authorized. In other words, they are interested only in the inner logic of the system of signs itself, taken, as in algebra, completely independently of the ideological meanings that give the signs their content. (Bakhtin 1994, 29 emphasis in original)

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The reason for Bakhtin’s dislike of the structuralists’ understanding of language is threefold—and all connected to ideas of concreteness. Firstly, he dislikes the synchronicity of the system and argues that it goes against the historical specificity which he sees characterizes language and language use: “Thus a synchronic system, from the objective point of view, does not correspond to any real moment in the historical process of becoming” (Bakhtin 1994, 32 emphasis in original). Secondly, he argues that this system disregards the concrete situation characterizing every single utterance or word: “In point of fact, the linguistic form, which, as we have just shown, exists for the speaker only in the context of specific utterances” (Bakhtin 1994, 33). The reason why this kind of concreteness is crucial for Bakhtin and his linguistic theory is that it opens up language for variability and creativity, which the structuralists disregard—and which is his third objection. Language, according to Bakhtin, is “always changeable and adaptable” (Bakhtin 1994, 33 emphasis in original), a characteristic produced by the concrete situation of “reciprocal understanding” producing language as such. Thus, for Bakhtin, It is clear that the system of language in the sense characterized above is completely independent of individual creative acts, intentions, or motives. From the point of view of the second trend [the structuralist], meaningful language creativity on the speaker’s part is simply out of the question. Language stands before the individual as an inviolable, incontestable norm which the individual, for his part, can only accept (Bakhtin 1994, 27 my emphasis).

Just as the capitalist market is for Lukács, language for Bakhtin formulated as an objectified, closed, self-regulating system out individual people’s control. 34 Therefore, Bakhtin’s dialogic theory formulated as the interaction between individuals in a movement understanding where meaning is only generated in a specific moment dialogue:

is of is of of

Therefore, there is no reason for saying that meaning belongs to a word as such. In essence, meaning belongs to a word in its position between speakers; that is, meaning is realized only in the process of active, responsive understanding. Meaning does not reside in the word or in the soul of the speaker or in the soul of the listener. Meaning is the effect of interaction between speaker and listener produced via the material of a particular sound complex. (Bakhtin 1994, 35 emphasis in original)

Consequently, for Bakhtin, “Verbal communication can never be understood and explained outside of this connection with a concrete

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situation” (Bakhtin 1994, 59 emphasis in original). Thus, it is clear that in his theory, Bakhtin attempts to bring language down from its reified heights. He does this by means of a form of situated, embodied dialogue. The concreteness in this theory can consequently be seen as a way out of the reified use of language, which in my analysis, is represented by Austin and Searle. I want to connect the idea of crisis to concreteness precisely through Bakhtin’s formulation of a concrete situation, which I see as fraught with mess, chaos, and disarray. Applying Bakhtin’s ideas concerning the concrete situation allows a way to envision dialogue as more haphazard, irregular, and chaotic, and Glengarry Glen Ross as such a concrete situation. Thus, I regard Glengarry Glen Ross as an attempt to envision a concrete situation through its dialogue by showing how crisis is inherent in all dialogue. It is quite obvious that the play, Glengarry Glen Ross, does not follow Elam’s description of dramatic dialogue as “well-disciplined,” “syntactically complete,” and “fluently enunciated.” It does not proceed in a “neat turn-taking fashion,” “centred on one speaker at a time.” Furthermore, it is not characterized by a “lack of interruption” (Elam 1980, 91). On the contrary, the play is characterized by the characters’ elliptical, abstruse, and often unfocused dialogue. Although I call this form of dialogue “dysfunctional,” this is a problematic term to use. In accordance with Bakhtin’s (and Derrida’s) analysis of language, ordered language, in Searle’s and Austin’s terms, does not exist. “Dysfunctional” seems to indicate that there is language which is functional. As Lukács asserts, crisis is inherent in all systems. Thus, what I mean to argue is that the concrete situation shows how language is constituted by dysfunctionality and not by rational laws. Hence, the term “dysfunctionality” has been put under erasure, in Derrida’s terms. What this argument implies for this analysis of Glengarry Glen Ross is that language’s dysfunctionality is present on several levels. Law-bound, regulated language which seems to be constituted by regulated interaction and which supposedly leads to mutual understanding, is in fact, reified language visible during moments of prosperity and sales talk. This means that, within my understanding of regularity and rational laws, it is an utterly dysfunctional form of language because it is reified, and as such, cannot lead to understanding. Language is further dysfunctional in the play in the form of crises of communication. Glengarry Glen Ross shows language that is fraught with interruption, ellipses, fragmentation, aggression, and chaos, which Derrida and others argue characterize language as such. The characters seem to communicate, but do not; they seem to interact, but do not. This means

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that language-as-crisis, which would represent the “real” situation hidden by reification, cannot yield understanding either. We end up with a situation where language seems to have nothing to do with understanding and nothing to do with interaction. This, of course, is a highly dystopic view of dialogue in postmodernity. What then, can we do to understand the cultural and social logic of late capitalism? While the situation for the characters in the play seems dystopic, to say the least, there might be a way of confronting the problem by looking at the play Glengarry Glen Ross as a work of art, and in doing so, find a way out of reification. What becomes clear is that, in dealing with drama, there are two kinds of concreteness to deal with. If the concrete, in Bakhtinian terms, is built upon actual interaction between people, it is only the performance of Glengarry Glen Ross that can function as an example of this. For Elam, who likens dramatic dialogue to real dialogue and argues that both are constituted by regulated interaction between active agents, concrete dramatic dialogue can only be realized in performance. Dramatic dialogue, Elam argues, is deictic, which means that it is characterized by its frequent use of shifters, or “empty signs” (Elam 1980, 140). This, according to Elam, makes dramatic discourse quite vague until contextual elements are provided. Such elements can only be realized in the performance. The concretization of dramatic dialogue is produced by actual speaking, gesturing bodies which give it meaning. A mode of discourse, like the dramatic, which his dense in such indexical expressions, is disambiguated—acquires clear sense—only when it is appropriately contextualized, therefore. It is, in other words, incomplete until the appropriate contextual elements (speaker, addressee, time, location) are duly provided. (Elam 1980, 140 emphasis in original)

Such a differentiation between text and performance is crucial for my analysis of the translation of dramatic dialogue in postmodernity. If dialogue is defined as a concrete interaction between active agents, as Elam argues, I agree that the embodiment provided by performance is needed for its actualization. This actualization is the concrete form I wish to confront here because “stage performance [or, in this case, film adaptation] provides precisely the kind of contextualization—by representing the appropriate elements of communicative context and situation—which the otherwise ambiguous references call for” (Elam 1980, 141). The performance-as-embodiment thus provides what is needed for concretization—real people. However, drama is not only performance. The play-as-text is also ever present in the performance of a play. This textuality represents a different

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kind of concreteness that is not built upon ideas of embodiment and individuality. Thus, the concrete situation of communication is not simply dependent on just the embodiment of voice in actual people. As we shall see, concreteness in the play Glengarry Glen Ross differs dramatically from the film. However, both kinds of concreteness remind us that the play, Glengarry Glen Ross, and its use of dialogue, is formed by both text and performance in a process of translation. What Bakhtin and Lukács argue is that concretization produces what is needed for breaking the processes of reification. In Glengarry Glen Ross, we are confronted with two different forms of concretization in the text and performance, where the latter in actual terms implies the involvement of actual (embodied) people. However, embodiment does not necessarily produce what both Bakhtin and Lukács hope in their theories of concretization as a way out of reification. What must be theorized in relation to the film is what happens when the voices are embodied, considering the illusions and ideologies involved in the production of voice. The play’s use of dialogue demonstrates the individual’s position in postmodern society as precisely dysfunctional. The way in which this dysfunctionality works in the play is dependent on its function as text or as film. The text is characterized by absence whereas the performance is characterized by some kind of embodiment and presence. As we shall see, because of its lack of voice (and body), the play-as-text produces a very different aesthetic and politics of voice. Further, the translation of the dialogue into film has consequences that affect the ideological setup of the play.

The concrete situation as text and as film The ways in which text and film interact in the translation of Glengarry Glen Ross are very intricate. The dialogue renders this complexity by its translation into embodiment. When reading a play like Glengarry Glen Ross, it is clear that the play as a textual practice renders a special form of dialogue. On the page, the written dialogue resembles a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation. When reading a text like Glengarry Glen Ross, it does not advance smoothly. The dialogue is characterized by its short intervals between the characters speaking, producing a highly fragmented text. The best way to characterize this form of writing is through the dialogue between Moss and Aaronow in act 1. It starts in the office, continues in Moss’s car, and then continues after a failed sit (that is, a meeting with a prospective client) and is resumed at the restaurant.

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. . . you’re absolu . . . they’re too important. All of them. You go in the door. I . . . ‘I got to close this fucker, or I don’t eat lunch.’ ‘Or I don’t win the Cadillac . . .’ . . . we fuckin’ work too hard. You work too hard. We all, I remember when we were at Platt . . . huh? Glen Ross Farms . . . didn’t we sell a bunch of that . . . ? AARONOW. They came in and they, you know . . . MOSS. Well, they fucked it up. AARONOW. They did. MOSS. They killed the goose. AARONOW. They did MOSS. And now . . . AARONOW. We’re stuck with this . . . MOSS. We’re stuck with this fucking shit . . . AARONOW. . . . this shit . . . MOSS. It’s too . . . AARONOW. It is. MOSS. Eh? AARONOW. It’s too . . . MOSS. You get a bad month, all of a . . . AARONOW. You’re on this . . . MOSS. All of, they got you on this ‘board . . . ’ AARONOW. I, I . . . I . . . MOSS. Some contest board . . . AARONOW. I… MOSS. It’s not right. AARONOW. It’s not. MOSS. No. (Mamet 1984, 12–13)

This rather shortened passage hopefully demonstrates that dialogue is not regulated or ordered in Glengarry Glenn Ross. In this play, dialogue represents crisis. As argued before, the only time the dialogue seems to run smoothly for the characters, when language seems to flow, is when the characters try to sell something. But every time they try to use language to understand the situation they are in, it falters. There seems to be no interaction, no response, and no mutuality. It is a form of dialogue where the characters seem to be talking next to each other or parallel to each other, rather than with each other. The voices of the characters try to reach out to be heard, but instead, they are constantly tentative and provisional, interrupted, and misunderstood. But simultaneously, all the characters seem to be talking about the same thing. No matter what, language never reaches what Bakhtin hopes for: “responsive understanding” (Bakhtin 1994, 35).

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But crisis for the characters within the play does not necessarily imply that it is negatively chaotic for the readers. The fragmentation of the dialogue produces a text that can be said to “stutter,” or “stammer,” to borrow some Deleuzian terms. Both terms function as a strategy to produce “a foreign language within language, a grammar of disequilibrium” (Deleuze 1998, 112), to “fight against language, invent stammering” (Deleuze 1987, 34). Stuttering is not only an aesthetic effect of a certain kind of writing, according to Deleuze, but a linguistic strategy. Deleuze clearly envisions stammering, or stuttering, as a linguistic strategy to reinvent language, which in turn, can be seen as a way to disrupt the reification of language, as argued before: This is not a signifying structure, nor a reflected organization, nor a spontaneous inspiration, nor an orchestration, nor a little piece of music. It is an assemblage, an assemblage or enunciation. A style is managing to stammer in one’s own language. It is difficult, because there has to be a need for such stammering. Not being a stammerer in one’s speech, but being a stammerer of language itself. Being like a foreigner in one’s own language. Constructing a line of flight. (Deleuze 1987, 4)

As the passage from the play suggests, the dialogue in Glengarry Glen Ross is not a traditional form of dialogue where the interaction follows a regulated and smooth turn-taking procedure. Rather, we get a dialogue that becomes practically illegible in its fragmented form. Thus, the concrete situation characterizing the text, Glengarry Glen Ross, is the materiality of the signifier, which constitutes the dialogue. The materiality of the signifier creates gaps in the text, stuttering (or stammering), which counteracts the idea of logical and ordered interaction between people whose sole aim is to reach a common understanding. These gaps, however, create understanding on a different level—as crisis—which allows for reflection and recognition. Stammering is a way to envision the concrete situation as such, but it is also a way to show that the concrete situation implies some kind of dysfunctionality, a crisis in communication. The idea of dysfunctionality, which in Searle’s and Austin’s theories in negative terms implies the end of language (because regulated laws constitute it), is turned into a critical frame which has the possibility to lay bare the structures of reification for us. This means that the stuttering we find here, in my view, implies a way of showing that the laws of communication are set aside (or rather, are shown to be illusionary) both thematically and structurally. There is no regularity, no law-bound interaction—only confusion. This is clearly visualized in the text’s physical appearance, its concreteness, displaying

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the dialogue as both fragmented and disorderly. As a textual practice, I would argue that fragmentation can be seen as a modernist aesthetic (Deleuze’s theory being modernist in many aspects) produced as a way to reinvent language. But this textual strategy invariably changes when translated into performance and into film. The embodiment of the dialogue in actual subjects in a concrete situation changes the preconditions of such a modernist analysis. The embodiment of voices counteracts fragmentation by producing what I choose to call flow.35 Flow in this sense functions as a contrast to the modernist aesthetics of stuttering. Flow, according to Jameson, is a sign of how postmodern art is always immersed in the economic structures of late capitalism. The idea of critical distance is no longer operative, which means that postmodern art no longer can invent aesthetic categories that produce such a critique. What we then have are two seeming opposites: the text and its modernist aesthetics of fragmentation (stuttering) and the film with its postmodern aesthetics of flow. This would mean a version of translation where text, and its typographic stuttering, is transformed into postmodern embodied flow in the film. This does not mean to say that because there is flow, the dialogue is ordered, frictionless, or rational. On the contrary, the characters talk past each other, interrupt each other, misunderstand each other, and abuse each other. However, the flow of words function as a rapid exchange, a repartee, which leaves no time or space for the characters or the listener (me) to ponder or reflect. This rather rapid and swift form of dialogue gives way to form without content. And it is this kind of flow that falls in line with late capitalism and postmodernity—and in line with the processes of reification. Another way of demonstrating the interaction between text and film, and between stuttering and flow, is to investigate the function of simultaneity in the film; that is, the concept of speaking all at once. Simultaneity in dialogue is clearly a quality only possible in embodied voice. Directly after Levene’s successful sale (with the Nyborgs), and after the interrogation of Moss and Roma, Moss and Levene take part in a dialogue that exemplifies this. Again, just as before, they talk past each other, interrupt each other, misunderstand each other, and abuse each other. In this dialogue, speaking at the same time plays a major role. In the text, this means that the disparate voices have to be presented separately, despite their presumed simultaneity. On the page, the voices appear as if they occur in different moments in time; a feature produced by the spatial prerequisites of the text:36 MOSS. Those fucking deadbeats . . . LEVENE. My ass. I told ‘em (To ROMA) listen to this: I said . . .

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MOSS. Hey, I don’t want to hear your fucking war stories . . . ROMA. Fuck you, Dave . . . LEVENE. ‘You have to believe in yourself . . . you,’ look ‘alright . . . ?’ MOSS (to WILLIAMSON). Give me some leads. I’m going out . . . I’m

getting out of . . . LEVENE. ‘. . . you have to believe in yourself . . . ’ MOSS. Na, fuck the leads, I’m going home. LEVENE. ‘Bruce, Harriett. . . . Fuck me, believe in yourself . . . ’ ROMA. . . . we haven’t got a lead . . . MOSS. Why not? ROMA. They took ‘em . . . MOSS. Hey, they’re fuckin’ garbage any case . . . This whole goddamn . . . LEVENE. ‘. . . You look around, you say “this one has so-an-so, and I have

nothing”. . . ’ MOSS. Shit. LEVENE. ‘Why? Why don’t I get the opportunities . . . ?’ MOSS. And did they steal the contracts . . . ? ROMA. Fuck you care . . . ? LEVENE. ‘I want to tell you something, Harriet . . . ’ MOSS. . . . the fuck is that supposed to mean . . . ? LEVENE. Will you shut up, I’m telling you this . . . (Mamet 1984, 38-39)

When presented textually as a consequence, the dialogue is clearly fragmented. However, in the film, the capacity to speak at the same time makes the conversation flow, which counteracts the stuttering. The scene presents a highly confusing situation where all the characters are concerned with their respective precarious situation without ever really caring about the other person’s troubles or what he is trying to say. They all speak at the same time, which means that the dialogue is confusing. However, in the film, the dialogue is never interrupted. Instead, it functions as repartee in which words flow constantly without disturbance. Thus, whereas the dialogue in the text represents a kind of interruption of the flow of language, it does not interrupt the flow of words in the film. This means that the text follows a modernist aesthetic, whereas the film follows a postmodern aesthetic. However, it is important to see and remember that neither in the text, nor in the film can the dialogue be said to be simply riddled with “infelicities” which break the laws of communication, and which in turn, would lead to a lack of understanding. On the contrary, both the text and the film show that the dialogue itself is not aimed at understanding, nor reaching any common ground or to bridge differences. In the text, the stuttering can be seen as a way to lay bare the structures of reification for the reader to see (although the characters are struggling with the aim to understand). In the film, the characters struggle in the same manner, but

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the aesthetics of flow take away the function of demonstration because flow is clearly inherent to postmodernity and late capitalism. Flow creates a surface of interaction giving the impression of things running along, leaving little time to think or reflect. In this sense, flow augments a failure to understand given that understanding is not necessary for flow to work. Thus, postmodern flow shows how understanding is not a necessary, failsafe constitutive part of communication (neither between the actors nor between the film and its audience). The relation between flow and stuttering is made more complex in that the film produces other unique strategies to simulate stuttering by means of filmic techniques, in particular, in the editing. To once again return to the dialogue between Moss and Aaronow, how this dialogue flows verbally (although characterized by its inability to communicate or produce understanding) while it simultaneously appears to stutter visually has certain effects, and these effects are connected to the film medium. To enhance the fragmented effect of their dialogue, the scene is made up of a sequence of extremely short cuts. In the conversation, the camera cuts back and forth between the two characters for each of their contributions, despite each contribution consisting of abrupt stammering and broken-off sentences. What this scene shows is that, through the editing, the fragmented nature of the visual sequence mimics that of the dialogue; they both “stutter” simultaneously and are unable to produce complete or fulfilling results. This happens because the time lapse between each line of speech is so brief. The two characters’ dialogue never seems to come together into a coherent whole, and thus, yields no understanding. The same thing happens in the restaurant as the two continue their conversation. Not only is their dialogue fraught with questions never clearly answered, but also, the film, with its extremely short cuts, produces a dialogue which is both fragmented and dysfunctional. It cannot help the the speakers penetrate the workings of reification nor understand their role within it. Thus, the dialogue cannot produce any understanding of their situation. The question is whether this “stuttering” can frame, or lay bare, the situation for the audience as I have previously argued that stuttering has the ability to do. Does the aesthetic of stuttering in the film produce a certain time and space awareness which alters the viewer’s perception of the entire film? I would argue that, in the scene just described, the fragmented aesthetic produced by dysfunctional dialogue and the rapid editing technique does produce speed and pace. The actors’ use of repartee combined with the fast editing of the shots produces a form of MTV aesthetic where fast-

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shifting images never rest; an aesthetic which focuses more on form than on content. The film sets up a situation where the characters’ voices are characterized by different forms of dysfunctionality. The characters cannot understand their situation because the language they use that seems to run smoothly (their sales talk) is fraught with reification—which means that it is aligned with late capitalism. This means that this kind of language cannot penetrate the layers of reification. However, it is not meant to because it is used in a capitalist situation to sell commodities, to turn objects into commodities, and even to turn people into commodities or objects. This language also inevitably objectifies the speaker and transforms him into a commodity. The language they use to question late capitalism and to understand their position within it is dysfunctional in the sense that it does not seem to function at all. The characters’ communication is fraught with misunderstandings, broken off sentences, hesitations, and stuttering, and their interaction does not lead to understanding in any sense of the word. However, contrary to the text, the film as a medium in general does not stutter or stammer. With an aesthetic of flow, the film produces a swift repartee which, in turn, creates a surface of pace and flow that leaves no space or time for reflection. As such, on the surface, the impression of interaction is upheld. Thus, it could be argued that Glengarry Glen Ross cannot communicate; it can only stage communication as an impossible event in postmodern times. Whereas the idea of concrete interaction clearly opens up for a linguistic situation quite different from Searle’s and Austin’s logical and regulated, aestheticized construct of communication, the idea of the concrete in the film brings us other problems with understanding. Given that it stages communication as non-functioning, the play also breaks with Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue or communication as a motion of understanding. Consequently, concreteness is not a way to reinvent understanding as the basis for individual interaction, as Bakhtin wishes. The ethical perspective constituting language as dialogue becomes problematic. Dialogue can no longer be constructed as ethical in its ability to produce understanding. The haphazard, irregular, and chaotic nature of the concrete situation is not necessarily ethical, which Bakhtin seems to presuppose in his formulation of “responsive understanding” (Bakhtin 1994, 35). I would argue that understanding is not the only, or even main, issue in the concrete interaction between people, but that the dialogue between the characters is also characterized by this inability and by the character’s desperate attempts to nonetheless produce something through dialogue.

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This kind of surface communication, paired with smoothly running sales talk, produces a very different role for dialogue in postmodernity, wherein understanding, mutuality, and dialogicity have nothing to do with it. In Searle’s and Austin’s terms, this would be the characterization of a dysfunctional dialogue at best, and a non-existing dialogue at worst. Glengarry Glen Ross represents a form of breakdown in dialogue where this break could be theorized as a way to cut the veils of reification by displaying the dialogue’s workings in specific situations. Simultaneously, the breakdown is countered by flow, represented by voice as embodiment and camera movement. Thus, dysfunctionality does not produce awareness concerning its function in postmodern culture. The smoothness of the dysfunctional dialogue in the film is an example of this. The concrete situation-as-crisis no longer functions as a form of critique, but rather is a sign of postmodern flow: “For it seems plausible that in a situation of total flow, the contents of the screen streaming before us all day long without interruption [. . .] what used to be called ‘critical distance’ seems to have become obsolete” (Jameson 1984, 70). 37 Dialogue is always already implicated in the structures of exchange of late capitalism. Even when dialogue appears dysfunctional and fragmented, it is nonetheless implicated in the smoothness of exchange of late capitalism. So, although the two aesthetics, fragmentation and flow, have different operations in the two media, the two are implicated in each other. The translation into performance is already in the text. The fragmentation characterizing the text is, at the same time, a precondition for the flow which characterizes the film. What I mean to say is that the stuttering that appears on the pages of Glengarry Glen Ross is an aesthetic necessity produced by the desire for possible flow in the production of the text. This is a precondition for the production of dialogue as a concrete situation in the film, that is, to represent dialogue as a concrete interaction between people. The concrete situation presented in the film is built on the embodiment of voice. Thus, it could be argued that the fragmented appearance of the text is produced by the idea of performance as a precondition of the play. The stuttering produced in the text is formulated by the idea of a swift repartee in the embodiment of the words produced. In the scene described above, the staccato-type character of the dialogue is traded for a smooth and speedy interaction of the actors. The gaps produced in the text (because of the aesthetic of the textual presentation of the dialogue) are completely absent in the embodiment of the words in voices in the film, where embodiment is built on individuals actually speaking and interacting with each other. This, in turn, generates flow in the film

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because the dialogue appears to come from concrete people speaking and where interaction is the main result. Even when the dialogue is fragmented, the interaction of the characters flows. It is this kind of flow that changes the aesthetics and politics of the film. Therefore, it seems that the oppositions of stuttering/flow, modernism/postmodernism, and distance/immersion no longer hold. In the postmodern era, stuttering (fragmentation) and flow are not opposites. It is clear that, with a film like Glengarry Glen Ross and in its function as both text and film, both are at work at the same time. One could argue that the combination of the two is, in fact, a sign of the postmodern cultural condition. A theoretical sign of this is that Deleuze, in his theory, combines modernist aesthetics of stuttering and stammering with postmodern theory of speed and pop: Speed is to be caught in a becoming—which is not a development or an evolution. One must be like a taxi, queue [ligne d’attente], line of flight, traffic jam, bottleneck, green and red lights, slightly paranoid, brushes with the police. To be an abstract and broken line, a zigzag which glides ‘between’. The grass and speed. What you misnamed style just now— charm or style—is speed. (Deleuze 1998, 32)

This would imply that stuttering and flow are, in fact, different moments of the same movement. The play, Glengarry Glen Ross, and its translation of text and film shows how both are implicated in each other. This means that modernist aesthetics are no longer a guarantee of any sort of critical distance or counter-discursive practice, but rather, that modernism has become something else in this postmodern era. Jameson argues that the cultural condition of postmodernity is quite different from that of the modernist era, which means that the modernist aesthetic has lost its value: “But I mainly wanted to show that way in which what I have been calling schizophrenic disjunction or écriture, when it becomes generalized as a cultural style, ceases to entertain a necessary relationship to the morbid content we associate with terms like schizophrenia and becomes available for more joyous intensities, for precisely that euphoria which we saw displacing the older affects of anxiety and alienation” (Jameson 1984, 29). He says that this schizophrenic language, which could be likened to the dysfunctional dialogue in Glengarry Glen Ross, is normalized and can even become joyful. At least it is no longer associated with negative intensities or its positive effects in its ability to shock or defamiliarize. But now, in the period some people like to call post-Fordist, this particular logic no longer seems to obtain; just as in the cultural sphere, forms of

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The aesthetic of fragmentation has become “decorative” (Jameson 1984, 30). In its translation into film, the modernist aesthetic of fragmentation no longer stands as a shocking strategy, although it works extremely well with the film as a medium. It becomes a form of MTV aesthetic, where the serial fragmentation of images are edited together to create something which becomes flow. This means dialogue in both text and film no longer functions as counter-discursive. It is all immersed and then implicated in the processes of reification. The production of an artistic artefact like Glengarry Glen Ross in this postmodern age implies that its aesthetic practices are constituted by the cultural condition of late capitalism. Therefore, there is no point in valuing or discrediting postmodernism, but rather it is simply a sign of its time: “The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt” (Jameson 1984, 62 emphasis in original). This means that although the characters cannot analyse and cannot communicate, the dialogue runs smoothly nonetheless. In Jameson’s terms, the film’s use of dialogue is therefore not simply counteractive to reification—it does not merely demonstrate the social situation. On the contrary, with these filmic techniques, “The world thereby momentarily loses its depth and threatens to become a glossy skin, a stereoscopic illusion, a rush of filmic images without density” (Jameson 1984, 34). Dialogue as a theoretical idea and the dialogue in Glengarry Glen Ross are not only reactions to our economic and social situation, but also symptoms of late capitalism and its cultural condition— postmodernism. And the question that I now ask with the help of Jameson: “Is this now a terrifying or an exhilarating experience” (Jameson 1984, 34)? It is not surprising that Jameson argues that the reification of everyday language hides its social relation and becomes an aestheticized diversion. Reification is explained as a form of aestheticization, an aestheticization that spills over into all areas of cultural practices. Therefore, there is no end to reification. All is immersed, and there is no linguistic strategy against it, neither stuttering nor flow—not even as a concrete situation. Glengarry Glen Ross shows how language as dialogue is reified both in the formulation of it as lawful, as well as a formulation of its breakdown. Both operations are signs of the postmodern condition of late capitalism.

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This also why the film ends the way it does. All goes back to normal. Roma’s speech “We’re members of a dying breed” occurs at the same time as the new telephones arrive. Levene, in his destitute moment, is not able to make contact with Roma because, for Roma, it is business as usual. Aaronow sits down to make a call. Thus, the robbery has achieved nothing. Nothing in the system changes because nobody can communicate the need for such a change.

CHAPTER SIX NEGOTIATING VOICE: THE END

For us, true speaking is not solely an expression of creative power; it is an act of resistance, a political gesture that challenges politics of domination that would render us nameless and voiceless. As such, it is a courageous act—as such, it represents a threat. To those who wield oppressive power, that which is threatening must necessarily be wiped out, annihilated, silenced. —bell hooks, Talking Back i dont wanna write in english or spanish i wanna sing make you dance like the bata dance scream twitch hips with me cuz i done forgot all abt words aint got no definitions i wanna whirl with you —Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide Just let me bleed you, you loud whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be your murder. —Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Dutchman

So far, this project has shown in great detail how difficult it is to make voice operational. Something has happened to our understanding of voice, which becomes clear in my analysis of all the plays, with varied acuteness. With some relief and some regret, I notice that voice is unable to produce or signify individuality and unable to empower the individual and produce human interaction. This loss is not only philosophical, but also political. The political need to make voice operational for unprivileged groups stands in sharp contrast to the philosophical deconstruction of the fundaments of voice: origin, presence, and subjectivity. The irony of the

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situation is that the deconstruction of those fundaments was done for the empowerment of the same groups because those categories were used to exclude them from structures of power. The question is now, what can voice do?—as investigated from a political literary dramatic context. Having approached voice from different angles, with different approaches, and with different theoretical outcomes, it is now time to try to negotiate voice as an end commentary to this project. One common denominator in all the interpretations of voice in this study is that voice can never simply function as a guarantee of a coherent, stable subject; that voice is never simply an embodiment of thought; and that voice is not simply a vehicle of power—that voice never simply is. Voice is clearly not simply what we think it is, and it cannot simply do what we hope it can do. If these are the questions which form the foundation of my study, why have I chosen to study drama? I chose to study drama for two reasons: firstly, drama is, in and of itself, an investigation of voice of sorts, no matter what its content or theme. It cannot do or be otherwise. Therefore, drama seems to be a valuable study object when investigating the ideologies surrounding voice. Secondly, one precondition of drama is voice and its connection to a subject and a body through its promise of a future performance. This precondition seemingly vouches for the grounding of voice in a body and in a subject, which motivates our preconceived ideas about voice, origin, and identity. However, as this study has shown, the translation of voice simultaneously puts preconceived ideas about voice to the test. The translation from text, and in this case to film, does not imply a process where the voices are grounded in bodies and actual subjects. As we have seen, the translation process becomes rather a radical questioning of precisely such ideas. As argued earlier, the process of translation becomes like critical philosophy in that it does not resemble what it reconstructs. In drama, voice is translated, but in the translation, it becomes something entirely different. It is this tension between voice as a desire or a necessity and voice as impossibility that makes drama so interesting to investigate voice. And importantly, the way the dramas handle voice always implies a critical investigation into voice. The Crucible does this by way of the narrator, showing how text-asabsence always intrudes on voice-as-presence. This means that the drama stages the possibility that voice is not connected to a failsafe origin (the subject). The play enhances this by showing how voice is always implicated in power structures that limit (and enable) what is possible to say, showing how discursive structures outside the subject establish what

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is spoken. Thus, it is never simply our intention which determines what is actually said. Strange Interlude further problematizes voice by placing thought at the centre. The play stages how voice and thought do not make a failsafe connection, destabilizing one of our most precious ideas—intention. Intention suggests that voice emanates from our inner thoughts, and that what we say has its origin in what we think. The Women further highlights the question of origin and intentionality by means of irony and satire. What does it mean to say that one does not mean what one says? Is it possible to argue that someone else means what we say, and who is to say if this is so? The very foundation of irony and satire is to destabilize the supposedly failsafe connection between what is said and what is meant, and in this, voice is disconnected from the speaker. Irony, in this sense, destabilizes the foundations of voice. The different filmatizations of The Women problematize the political possibilities inherent in this destabilization, especially in the postmodern age. The last chapter on Glengarry Glen Ross shows how voice does not belong to us because voice in the postmodern era is implicated in processes of reification which abstract and objectify not only our own voices, but also our very being. The question raised by the play and the filmatization is whether voice in the form of dialogue is necessarily implicated in the cultural logic of late capitalism, or if voice can counteract such processes of reification. The tentative answer given in my analysis of the play seems rather dystopic, despite the play’s and the film’s resourceful attempts at doing so. Thus far, my analyses of voice in drama have stranded on the shores of impossibility. Even if my initial aim for this study was to analyse voice and power to see if voice could find a way to meet my personal hope for it—to stabilize subjectivity, to embody language, and to give power—this aim receded as the study proceeded. Instead, such claims seem to belong to a past of which its innocence is long lost. But, as argued before, drama stages voice both as impossibility and necessity. Maybe voice forces itself on us despite theoretical and philosophical reservations. And maybe, with a powerful suspension of disbelief, voice nonetheless fulfils its purpose. Despite my project’s constant rejection of such a possibility (that voice can uphold its promise of presence, subjectivity, and power), I nonetheless want to revisit voice, but this time with the sole focus on the possibility of voice to render power to its user. The question that remains after this study is—can voice be used to make our inner selves heard? Is it possible to voice one’s thoughts? Can voice be used to strengthen, to empower a subject or a subject position? Does drama have a politically and

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ideologically important role to play in this? In other words, is there any way for voice to fulfil its unspoken promise of individuality, subjectivity, and power? Theoretically, I will approach these questions by confronting Spivak’s relentless “Can the subaltern speak?” with bell hooks’ [sic!] Talking Back. Artistically, I will do so by studying two pivotal African American plays which have both been filmed: Ntosake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman.

Can the subaltern speak, or not? Having the right to make oneself heard is crucial to our understanding of democracy and to our understanding of power and oppression. For political theorists such as Marxists, feminists, and postcolonialists, giving voice to minorities and oppressed groups has always been an important political strategy. The correlation between voice and power is a given, which means that having a voice implies having power. Furthermore, having a voice also means being a subject, something that is seen as a cornerstone for political action. One critic whose work is built on the powerful relation between voice and political action is bell hooks. By confronting public and private domains in Talking Back, bell hooks outlines a political strategy where voice is the key. This strategy concerns African Americans generally and African American women specifically and entails a strong, personal voice that is meant to oppose structures of power. It was in that world of woman talk […] that was born in me the craving to speak, to have a voice, and not just any voice but one that could be identified as belonging to me. To make my voice, I had to speak, to hear myself talk—and talk I did—darting in and out of grown folks’ conversations and dialogues, answering questions that were not directed at me, endlessly asking questions, making speeches. Needless to say, the punishments for these acts of speech seemed endless. They were intended to silence me—the child—and more particularly the girl child. Had I been a boy, they might have encouraged me to speak believing that I might someday be called to preach. There was no “calling” for talking girls, no legitimized rewarded speech. The punishments I received for “talking back” were intended to suppress all possibility that I would create my own speech. (hooks 1973, 5–6)

hooks’ political strategy firmly connects voice to a strong, autonomous subject, a firmly grounded body, and a cultural identity. It also entails a

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strong sense of doing rather than thinking, dissecting, or questioning. In this, hooks strategy for political action promises much. Contrary to hooks’ confident and powerful voice on “voice” in Talking Back, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in “Can the subaltern speak?” produces a voice that cautiously navigates the pitfalls of essentialism. Spivak agrees that voice is central the idea of political action and sees reasons for this in the history of colonial rule. It is the epistemic violence of colonial rule and the “complete overhaul of the episteme” (Spivak 2001, 2115) which changed the reality for colonized peoples and which calls for a recognition of their voices, identities, and knowledge. Perhaps it is no more than to ask that the subtext of the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism be recognized as “subjugated knowledge,” “a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.” (Spivak 2001, 2115)

According to Spivak, the critic’s job is “to continue the account of how one explanation and narrative of reality was established as the normative one” (Spivak 2001, 2115). Spivak argues that such violence produces the need for other voices to be heard and for other forms of knowledge to be produced and acknowledged. The way I will use Spivak’s and hook’s texts here is not only to negotiate political theories of voice, but also to connect the role of the critic to the role of the playwright in terms of political action. I will then briefly look into the possibilities of the playwright to produce a play that acknowledges the knowledge, identities, and voices of such colonized subjects, and I will see if this can be done by means of an elaboration of voice. Spivak’s central query is thus: “On the other side of the international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic text, can the subaltern speak?” (Spivak 2001, 2117 emphasis in original). The question is put in the negative in that the conditions surrounding the subaltern are such that the task seems insurmountable. Why? Spivak sees several problems with the idea of creating space for the subaltern to speak. The major problem that Spivak grapples with is essentialism. As argued earlier, it is naive to believe that a voice (as both text and body) is traceable to a simple, homogenous origin. Further, it is naive to believe that voice represents full presence in that it is manifestly and essentially tied to a specific identity, to a specific body, or to a specific culture. It is

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also naive to believe that voice can be used to simply voice the concerns and inherently distinct problems of a specific group of people. Spivak clearly rejects the idea of pure identity, pure origin, and pure voice as grounds for political action. Being a poststructuralist, she sees insurmountable problems with the idea of going back to such beliefs. However, it is simultaneously not easy to do away with essentialism when it comes to identity and voice. This becomes clear in many of the theories that grapple with these issues. Spivak means that Marx, as well as Foucault and Deleuze, believe in pure identity, pure consciousness: “All three are united in the assumption that there is a pure form of consciousness. On the French scene there is a shuffling of signifiers: ‘the unconscious’ or ‘the subject-in-oppression’ clandestinely fills the space of ‘the pure form of consciousness’” (Spivak 2001, 2120 emphasis in original). This means that even poststructuralist theorists who supposedly go against purity, origin, and essence reclaim all three in the name of difference. Why does she think this is so bad? Her reaction against essentialism is not simply a philosophical one. Coming from a postcolonial situation, she knows the dangers of such a position, which brings us to the second problem. The second problem concerns the problem that the production of voice always also implies the production of silence. In the process of defining the subaltern (as essence, purity, origin), a process of exclusion simultaneously takes place. This means that in the process of differentiating, the double bind of sexual difference, for instance, is effaced. “In the contest of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow” (Spivak 2001, 2120). In this way, the female subaltern is doubly silenced. The problem of silencing is something that must always be taken into consideration when the subaltern speaks. Any investigator must take this problem seriously: “No contemporary metropolitan investigator is not influenced by that formation. Part of our ‘unlearning’ project is to articulate our participation in that formation—by measuring silences, if necessary—into the object of investigation” (Spivak 2001, 2122). The third problem concerns the process of turning the subaltern into an object of study. When the subaltern is seen as a subject or a group who have pure origins and a pure essence, the subaltern is defined by his or her difference, which in turn, transforms the subaltern into an object rather than a subject. As such, the subaltern also becomes an object of study (for the critic, or in this case, the dramatist or the audience): “It is a transformation from a first-second person performance to the constatation in the third person. It is, in other words, at once a gesture of control and an

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acknowledgment of limits” (Spivak 2001, 2121–2122). The critic’s relation (or the dramatist’s relation) to the subaltern, changes from an “I– you” relationship to a scientific study about him or her. The fourth problem is closely intertwined with the third. The transformation of the subject into an object of study is actually more than a transformation. It is, in fact, an elaborate production of the subaltern. Spivak argues that knowledge of the other subject is theoretically impossible because the theorists (read dramatists) are not gathering already existing knowledge about the subaltern, they are producing the subaltern through semiosis (hence her focus on epistemic violence). Thus, the academics, critics, and theorists produce the subaltern by making him or her into an object of their own study. The fifth problem concerns that fact that the subaltern cannot be slumped into an object, the subaltern cannot be grouped, named, or branded. The subaltern has no essence. The theorists’ (or dramatists’) attempts to approach the subaltern turns him or her into otherness, into an object of study. The process of transformation shows that they have produced something that is radically different from the subaltern. The process of transformation is therefore, in fact, a production of the other rather than a confrontation with the subaltern. The subaltern remains absolutely heterogeneous and impossible for the critic (dramatist) to reach: “But one must nevertheless insist that the colonized subaltern subject is irretrievable heterogeneous” (Spivak 2001, 2118). Spivak’s definition of the subaltern is precisely grounded in the fact that the subaltern cannot be defined. Rather, the subaltern is “sheer heterogeneity of decolonized space” (Spivak 2001, 2125). Therefore, in Spivak’s terms, a drama that in any way essentializes, objectivises, silences, or actively produces the subaltern as an object of study has missed the point. In such dramas, the subaltern is nonetheless absent and ultimately silent. The sixth and final problem puts these worries into a more troublesome perspective. This problem concerns the fact that when the subaltern is given a voice and is heard—he or she is no longer subaltern. When a line of communication is established between a member of subaltern groups and the circuits of citizenship or institutionality, the subaltern has been inserted into the long road to hegemony. Unless we want to be romantic purists or primitivists about “preserving subalternity”—a contradiction in terms—this is absolutely to be desired. (It goes without saying that museumized or curricularized access to ethnic origin—another battle that must be fought—is not identical with preserving subalternity). (Spivak 2001, 2125)

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This would mean that the subaltern, as ultimately subaltern, is forever silenced. There is no way for the critic (or dramatist) to give voice to a subaltern without forever altering that subaltern. The conclusion to Spivak’s theory of the subaltern and voice must be that the subaltern cannot speak. But for Spivak, the problem still remains: How to hear those voices and how to acknowledge the existence of muted knowledge? Spivak clearly means that the issue cannot be left with such a negative conclusion. It is here that a confrontation with bell hooks’ theories of voice becomes interesting. Rather than pursuing the questions raised by Spivak and rather than trembling at the weight of the problems at hand, bell hooks lunges forward. Her approach is that of doing and acting, rather than dissecting and problematizing. She consciously and contemptuously disregards the political and philosophical pitfalls, and produces voice nonetheless. Therefore, bell hooks argues that, “[s]peaking becomes both a way to engage in active self-transformation and a rite of passage where one moves from being object to being subject. Only as subjects can we speak. As objects, we remain voiceless—our beings defined and interpreted by others” (hooks 1973, 12). Having dismantled the subject to the extent that we have done here, such a statement rings both true and false, simultaneously. We need to find a way to endorse bell hook’s engagement while simultaneously taking Spivak’s concerns into consideration. Hence, the central question for Spivak becomes: can the subaltern be both a subject and an object of investigation? This is something Spivak seems to think necessary for the subaltern to be able to speak in postmodernity: For the (gender-unspecified) “true” subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself; the intellectual’s solution is not to abstain from representation. The problem is that the subject’s itinerary has not been left traced so as to offer an object of seduction to the representing intellectual. In the slightly dated language of the Indian group, the question becomes, How can we touch the consciousness of the people, even as we investigate their politics? With what voice-consciousness can the subaltern speak? (Spivak 2001, 2119)

The question that remains to be solved is how to create space for the subaltern voice without turning that voice into an object of study. How to hear the palimpsestic voices as ultimately heterogeneous? How to do this without producing the voices so as to suit postmodern Western knowledge and ideology? How to hear them without making them into “us”—or into “them” for that matter? Is it possible to construct a voice that is single and

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clear, representing a subaltern group without turning that group into an object—without turning the subaltern into controllable otherness? Is it possible to imagine a strong single voice that is not construed as one, but as “sheer heterogeneity”?

Can the subaltern speak in drama? One central problem when speaking of voice and subaltern groups is that of silencing. Historically, such groups have not been able to voice their ideas. Their ideas have not been heard. Does this necessarily have to be the case? Can drama play a role in creating space for such groups to make their voices heard? Can drama enable strong, powerful voices to reach into the centre of power? So far, voice in drama has caused more problems with power and identity than solved them. As argued before, drama seems to produce disorder when it comes to voice rather than enabling the production of voice. The problems with voice in drama surmount those raised by Spivak by their very form. The primary problem of silencing is not an easy one when it comes to drama. This, once again, is the case due to its very form. So far, we have questioned the very preconception that drama is even about voice. Considering the texts and films that we have investigated so far, the question is, if speaking is possible at all in drama. There seems to be a general tendency in drama to have writing-as-absence overpower the powers of voice, which questions the preconditions of voice and speech— such as origin, subjectivity, and presence. Therefore, it can be argued that if we, by “speaking,” mean a subject (an individual, a body) who utters something over which he or she has control; or if we, by “speech,” mean that which is said can be traced back to a unified, coherent subject who is the sole origin of what is uttered; or else, if we, by “speech,” mean that the subject utters his inner thoughts or his inner self—then this is not possible in drama. In this sense, silence constitutes drama as such. Alternatively, it could be argued that in the staging of the text (on stage or in film), the play cannot be silent. If we suspend our disbelief and embrace the metaphorical voice as the only voice we have (voice under erasure); if we thus disregard the all the impossibilities of voice and proclaim that voice nonetheless exists and operates, it could be argued that the staged play or the film cannot be silent. Drama is nothing but a staging of voices. This becomes especially clear in the stage production or the filmatization of plays because unspoken action is scarce in drama. Rather, the embodiment of voice is the precondition of any action in the performance. Most action happens in verbal dialogue—not by physical

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action. The idea of posing a subject in a play who remains silent is only possible in really avant-garde drama and can be seen in plays by, for instance, Beckett. However, it could be argued that even those plays are constituted by voice, precisely in their glaring absence of voice. This means that there are two positions that must be negotiated. The first position concerns voice and the idea that voice has its origin in an autonomous, thinking subject. The dramas investigated so far suggest that this connection is shaky at best and non-existent at worst. This, in turn, would imply that voice as we perceive it does not exist, which means that voice in fact is constituted by a form of silence. The subject cannot speak in the traditional sense. The theatrical subject or actor can absolutely not speak, because the actor is never the origin of what is spoken. If we, on the other hand, see voice as a part of a textual/discursive universe of difference or of the already-written, then it could be argued that a drama cannot be silent. However, voice does not function in the traditional sense either. The second position implies that, in a drama or in a play, the characters cannot be silent—they must always speak. Otherwise, we have no play. Can we find a way of talking about voice where the two positions have been negotiated? That is, can we find a voice that avoids the traps of naivety typical of traditional formulations of voice; a voice that acknowledges the textual/discursive aspects of voice? And if this is possible, can we even continue naming that thing “voice”? Furthermore, could such a voice, despite its involvement with writing (as absence), fulfil its promise of power, subjectivity, and presence? Thus, what we are looking for is a voice which avoids the traps of essentialism; that is, a voice that speaks without naively connecting that voice to any group, subject, or body. We have to find a voice that does not objectify the subaltern, that is, that does not turn the subaltern into an object of study. But we must find a voice that nonetheless is strong enough to at least partly fulfil its promise of power, subjectivity, and presence. We must find a voice that, in bell hook’s political theory, disregards the seemingly insurmountable problems and speaks nonetheless. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak argues that for the subaltern to speak, he or she has to be an object and a subject simultaneously. Thus, we have to find a voice that signals the subject as origin, but only insofar as the subject is a textual/discursive process whose meaning never is absolute. It may be possible to find a voice which relies on a subject position to gain power and legitimize itself as voice, while it simultaneously reveals that voice (and the subject) is actually an ideological/discursive construct. To do this, we have to find a voice with the power and strength to stretch our

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suspension of disbelief while, at the same time, constantly reminding us that voice is grounded in a number of ideological beliefs. Further, we must find a voice that avoids the traps of silencing, but does not fall into the trap of believing to speak in any naive sense of the word either. In other words, we must find a voice that does not simply speak, but rather “speaks”; that is, it acknowledges the problems of speaking while doing it at the same time. The question is if such a voice exists or if the textual turn (the dismantling and deconstruction of presence) undercuts the subaltern’s possibility for speech by radically questioning concepts such as subjectivity, origin, and presence. Does this mean that the subaltern is forever silenced in drama? There is hope, in that American drama has produced many noteworthy voices that are political in that they represent, or target, a specific social group (be it ethnic, racial, gendered, or a group based on class). A second aspect that speaks for the prevalence of such a voice is that drama simultaneously questions some of the categories that concern us here, which could vouch for an inherently sceptical approach to voice. A third aspect that further speaks in favour of voice is that American drama seems to elaborate on many of the issues brought up by Spivak: essentialism, objectification, and silencing. However, what remains to be seen is if this helps us here in any way. To investigate if such a voice is possible to procure, I have been researching dramas originating from minority groups who are subjected to various power structures. This pursuit is grounded in the hope of finding dramas that stage the need—and the possibility—to make voice speak clearly. It is grounded in the hope of finding a writer or director who manages to find a clear, single-embodied voice that speaks to us; a voice that indicates a subject position which fulfils the promise of intention, of interiority, and of individuality, without turning him or her into an object of investigation, without essentializing that position and without naively believing in that voice. I conduct this final search perhaps in the hope that the problems I have found with voice in the dramas investigated so far turn out to be a postmodern, white-middle-class-academic problem. The problems illustrated and analysed in this study may be a luxury problem of a Western culture that has lost its faith and its innocence to a culture of ironic detachment and cynicism. Such a culture has seemingly lost its need to produce such a single strong voice—because power is already with them/us. Thus, I ask, can voice be used to let minority groups speak and be heard even within such a culture?

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In the following, I analyse two dramas and their filmatizations in relation to hooks’ and Spivak’s theories of voice. Interestingly, the two seem to approach voice in a way that roughly corresponds to their two theories.

for colored girls who have considered suicide: the sheer heterogeneity of voice Having thus far analysed fairly classic plays, and plays that more or less take voice for granted, I felt the need to look into more experimental plays. My choice fell upon a now-classic African American drama whose very form focuses on voice and what voice can do, Ntosake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf from 1976.38 The play has been hailed by critics and audiences for its ability to bring out “vital expressions of black female experience, voicing the lives and concerns of black women and girls, voices that have been left out of both dominant white culture and African American culture” (Frank 2012, 215). 39 The connection between the experiences of African American women, and subjectivity and voice is continuously emphasized: “By giving voice to experience—or, rather, by allowing experience to discover its own voice—one enables subjectivity to be both known and shared” (Garner 1994, 213) and, “creative success can only be achieved outside the realm of commercialism and by speaking to and for those without an officially sanctioned cultural voice” (Fisher 2007, 90). It is this seemingly failsafe connection that I will investigate. What I find interesting is that the play is experimental in its form, and this unique form has consequences for the voices produced. The play consists of diverse poems, which have been brought together in what Shange calls a choreopoem. According to Sally Burke, the term was coined by Shange “to describe a drama in which the speakers dance or move while delivering their lines—which combines metered prose and jazz rhythms” (Burke 1996, 184). The play, according to Fisher, is “as much poetry as drama, as much dance as theatre, as much music as language” (Fisher 2007, 85). Thus, it is also a term which connotes intertextuality, or intermediality, in that it describes “a kind of writing that ‘fits in between all’ genres” (Timpane 1990, 201). The term choreopoem also flaunts its difference from other dramas. In its very structure, it is inherently non-realistic in that it “chooses to eschew realistic approaches to character or structure” (Fisher 2007, 88). As we shall see, although the stories told in the play depict the harshness of everyday existence of African American women, “For Colored Girls does not claim to enact

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‘real life’; its audience is not intended to feel that they have stumbled onto a picture-window overlooking some middle-class, Ibsenesque living room” (Mahurin 2013, 329-330). The play’s intermedial structure gives rise to many analyses of the play’s use of body, most specifically, through dance. Stanton B. Garner Jr.’s analysis of the play in Bodied Spaces, Sarah Mahurin’s “‘Speaking Arms’ and Dancing Bodies in Ntozake Shange,” Dalia El-Shayal’s “Nonverbal Theatrical Elements in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls . . .” and Intissar Abdel-Fatah’s Makhadet El-Kohl (The Kohl Pillow)” all focus on the embodied nature of the staged performance and its use of bodies in dance. Sarah Mahurin most strongly argues for the primacy of body, calling for colored girls a “theatre of the physical,” (Mahurin 2013, 330) connecting body to history and the complex grid surrounding ownership, consumption, production, and reproduction: “She [Shange] offers their physical bodies, rather than their histories, as proof of their being” (Mahurin 2013, 330). Mahurin argues that the opening of the play “gives us bodies well before she gives us words” (Mahurin 2013, 333) which, according to her, “enforce[s] the primacy of the body” (Mahurin 2013, 333). She even claims that “[t]he black female body presents the production’s only constant” (Mahurin 2013, 329). Although I agree with parts of Mahurin’s analysis, I also question Mahurin’s resilient emphasis on body over and against voice. She sets up a division between body and mind/voice that becomes problematic, also for Mahurin. For instance, the examples Mahurin uses to advocate the primacy of body in the play do not concern the physicality of dance/body as performed on stage as much as the way dance/body is talked about in the poems. In her analysis of “graduation nite,” for instance, she argues that “the lady in yellow affirms her sexual readiness physically rather than verbally,” but she fails to see that the example she uses is, in fact, voiced by lady in yellow. Further, Mahurin often takes a voiced utterance concerning the body to signify the body rather than voice. My point is rather that voice and body are constructed as a dyad in the play. It is the construction of voice as both body and mind which gives it its strength, “‘ellipsing’ the abstraction of thought and the physicality of sensation,” as Garner has it (Garner 1994, 208). My focus in this book is voice, but as I have argued throughout, it is also clear that the body plays an important role in the construction of voice. This is so especially in for colored girls, but in a different way than suggested in the quotations above. What characterizes the play is the lack of story, lack of plot, and lack of characterization, and it is precisely this lack of order and coherence

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which makes this play so interesting for this analysis of voice. I would argue that because of its use of a number of diverse drama poems rather than a linearly progressing narrative, it does not in any clear sense rhetorically outline a specific voice, identity, or group, but rather focuses on the voices themselves and their operation. What is fascinating is that, despite its focus on voice in this avant-garde manner, the play nonetheless manages to delineate a specific area of contention: the need to make black voices heard. i can’t hear anythin but maddening screams & the soft strains of death & you promised me you promised me… somebody/anybody sing a black girl’s song bring her out to know herself to know you but sing her rhythms carin/struggle/ hard times sing her song of life she’s been dead so long closed in silence so long she doesn’t know the sound of her own voice her infinite beauty she’s half-notes scattered without rhythm/ no tune sing her sighs sing the song of her possibilities sing a righteous gospel the makng of a melody let her be born let her be born & handed warmly (Shange 1977, 4-5)

The question that has to be raised is—why this particular form? And does the dramatic form work to seriously tackle the problems of the African American community without falling into the discursive pitfalls of essentialism described by Spivak above? Just as with many of the other plays, for colored girls produces quite different politics of voice in the text and the filmatization. Without judging or evaluating the two different media, it is interesting how the same

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political “content” can turn out so differently due to the different media’s forms of engagement. for colored girls plays with two different aesthetics of voice: abstraction and concretization. These two aesthetics, I would argue, are grounded in the two media’s production of voice and the concerns raised by them. The play’s aesthetic of abstraction implies that the characters are abstract, the setting is abstract, and the movement of the women on stage is abstract, suggesting a minimalistic performance. This aesthetic of abstraction, I would argue, creates a textual world where we end up with voices without subjects in quite interesting ways. The characters in for colored girls are seven women: lady in brown, lady in yellow, lady in red, lady in green, lady in purple, lady in blue, and lady in orange, who all take turns in delivering the separate poems.40 Most critics notice the technique of how these colours correspond to the rainbow of the title: Shange’s performers are not named; instead, they are ‘colored girls,’ identified largely by the blue, red, brown, yellow, purple, orange, and green of their dresses. At moments, particular colors stand out and occupy configurations with each other, but the overall visual effect is of a painter’s canvas or a rainbow, with colors continually changing place in their shared field. (Garner 1994, 214)

But their analysis of what this technique means varies. Daria El-Shayal sees this use of colour as a way to render interiority with “each color signifying a different mood” (El-Shayal 2003–04, 365). Contrary to ElShayal, I would argue that this emphasis on the colour of the clothes is actually a turn away from interiority because the characters are never individualized. The characters are neither given proper names to individualize them, nor are any detailed descriptions given about their physical features, their ways of being, or any idiosyncrasies that would turn them into subjects. Emphasizing the text’s experimentalism, Mahurin points out that the text “flouts conventions of theatrical ‘differentiation’” because the characters “are ‘differentiated’ from one another only by the colors they wear” (Mahurin 2013, 329). Thus, the ladies in the play cannot be spoken of as characters in any ordinary sense. Although individual stories are spoken by individual performers, these stories are by no means linked to their speakers by that relationship of identity we call ‘character.’ The performers slip into and out of poems, speaking in multiple voices and of multiple lives over the course of the play, while several of these poems (such as ‘sorry’) are delivered by a sequence of different speakers. As a result of this fluid, collaborative mode

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of utterance, the pronoun I acquires a complex referentiality, where the personal is at the same time the collective and where the account of individual experience becomes—in the midst of its particularity—a shared expression. Stories, songs, lines, and images are passed from performer to performer like movements of their dance, and language both reflects and generates the intersubjectivity that characterizes the fluid movements of their bodies in space. (Garner 1994, 213–214)

This aesthetic technique is by no means innocent or naive. It is part of a literary strategy that also is political: Critics chided Shange for a lack of traditional character development in for colored girls […] but they miss a central point of her overall achievement by failing to recognize that she consciously chooses to eschew realistic approaches to character or structure […] (Fisher 2007, 88).

My take on the play’s experimentalism is that, with this lack of characterization, the text allows the voices to speak for themselves (so to speak) and is not in any way attempting to create living subjects in which to ground the voices. The text’s minimalistic setup thus foregrounds voice in highly specific ways, quite differently from traditional notions of voice. The text thrives on its textuality and never tries to create realistic subjects that would ground the words on the page. This, naturally, is quite different from what we have seen so far. The question is, what effects such abstraction has on the politics of voice. The first and most immediate effect of this abstraction is that without concretization, without individualization, and without bodies in which to ground the voices, the text might seem groundless and unsubstantial, and with this comes the need to let go of any dramatic expectations of voice. The text’s focus on voice (rather than identity) is enhanced by its repartee. The text is written in a way that it resembles a poetry slam in its rhythm and pace. never mind sister dont pay him no mind go go go go go go sister do yr thing never mind i usedta live in the world really be in the world free & sweet talkin good morning & thank-you & nice day uh huh

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i cant now i cant be nice to nobody nice is such a rip-off reglar beauty & a smile in the street is just a set-up i usedta be in the world a woman in the world i hadda right to the world then i moved to harlem for the set-up a universe six blocks of cruelty piled up on itself a tunnel closin (Shange 1977, 38–39)

Shange’s language is discussed by many critics, and again, their analysis of its meaning and effect varies. It comes close to hand to see Shange’s use of language as a way to represent “African-American vernacular” (ElShayal 2003–04, 363) or “embodied experience,” as Garner has it (Garner 1994, 212). The rhythm and pace, together with African American slang and phonetic writing, can be seen as a way to embody that language in future staging. However, such an interpretation also risks essentializing that voice. Vernacular African American or feminine language (écriture feminine) always carries with it this risk, something which Mahunin also recognizes, as we shall see. However, contrary to this form of analysis, I would argue that Shange’s use of language does three things. The first thing it does (in combination with its aesthetic of abstraction) is create voices without any subject to stabilize them, to give them presence or any sense of originality (which, in accordance with my own theories, means that they, in fact, are not voices). Instead, what is produced are voices that point to writing: olá my papa thot he was puerto rican & we wda been cept we waz just reglar niggahs wit hints of spanish so off i made it to this 36 hour marathon dance con salsa con ricardo ‘suggggggggggar’ ray on southern blvd (Shange 1977, 11)

This section from the poem “now i love somebody more than” aptly demonstrates how Shange’s language points to writing rather than traditional notions of voice. Mahurin argues that “though its visible impact

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on the printed page is certainly striking, a listener who had never read the text of For Colored Girls would be unable to identify Shange’s pointed alterations of the King’s English. Onstage, the spoken ‘abt’ must be articulated with vowels and sounds just like the ‘about’ it replaces. Shange’s linguistic intent (intnt?) is lost” (Mahurin 2013, 332). Thus, to interpret the repartee in for colored girls as phonetic writing of vernacular African American fails to explain how these experimentations with language actually point to writing. According to Timpane, the alterations of “King’s English” should not be seen as being vernacular, but a “counterothography” (Timpane 1990, 204); “A sort of altered English” where Shange plays with writing “when the ‘correct’ version of a word is somehow disagreeable” (Mahunin 2013, 332). Having once again shown how voice-in-text is always metaphorical, the text nonetheless produces strong “voices” where the moment of speech is in focus, rather than the origin of the utterance. Rather than pointing to stable subjects or autonomous identities, the voices become performative in the sense that voice becomes an event rather than an identity. Voice is not a sign of an original subject, but rather, voice is an assembly of meaningful utterances where no stable subject exists outside of the words “spoken.”41 The second thing that the repartee does is produce a text characterized by a lack of targeted listeners for the poems—neither within, nor outside of the drama itself. Given that the text does not target or specify the listener as a counterpart in any dialogue or conversation, that listener remains indeterminate and unknown. Two of my own personal favourites, “somebody almost walked off wid all my stuff” and “sorry,” produce this kind of address. When it comes to “somebody almost walked off wid all my stuff,” the “speaker” is a woman, and it targets a man (any man), but the words are addressed to nobody/anybody/somebody: hey man/this is not your perogative/i gotta have me in my pocket/to get round like a good woman shd/& make the poem in the pot or the chicken in the dance/what i got to do/ i gotta have my stuff to do it to/ (Shange 1977, 51)

I would argue that the man is not the ultimate receiver of the words spoken. The same goes for “sorry,” where the women deliver short takes on the theme “men who are sorry” until the lady in blue takes over. one thing i dont need is any more apologies I got sorry greetin me at my front door you can keep yrs

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i dont know what to do wit em they dont open doors or bring the sun back they dont make me happy or get a mornin paper didnt nobody stop usin my tears to wash cars cuz a sorry (Shange 1977, 52–53)

Here, the target is also a man, but once again, he is not the end recipient of this speech and neither are we, the audience. This, again, can be seen as a political act because the text “quietly resists the need for, and certainly the authority of, a set of ‘outside’ spectators” (Mahurin 2013, 331). This argument counteracts many other theorists who argue that Shange uses “language to speak to her target audience” (Fisher 2007, 86) and where her use of language produces closeness and even interaction between audience and the characters: “Rather the spectator becomes an actor, invited to join in the chanting or singing at the end of the play” (Splawn 1998, 388). With Mahurin, therefore, I would argue that the repartee form does not engage any counterpart whatsoever. This means that the listener is nobody, anybody—creating a wide open address. Having stated this, it is an openness quite different from Timpane’s analysis of the use of collage and the fragment in for colored girls, where he argues that “colored girls is distinctly democratic” (Timpane 1990, 204) in that “[t]he women of colored girls will speak to anyone who will listen” (Timpane 1990, 205). This lack of concern for the audience, I would argue, is not democratic, but rather politically arrogant in a positive sense by not giving the audience such authority and power over the voices, as Mahurin puts it.42 This means that we are presented with a different kind of openness; one that does not imply that the text is inclusive in the sense that it universalizes the problems at hand or includes everyone into the “world” it depicts. Thus, I disagree with El-Shayal when she argues that “[b]y not giving them names or defining their characteristics, other than color, each character becomes representative of any and all women, thus emphasizing the universality of women’s experience” (El-Shayal 2003–04, 365). Thus, the rather idealistic claim that “their camaraderie leads to an awareness that the human condition is universal” (El-Shayal 2003–04, 369) runs quite contrary to what I am suggesting here. Similarly, the text does not invite men to feel acquitted for the actions described or included in any sense of sisterhood, which Fisher comments on:

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I agree with Fisher in that men and men’s “stories are by no means Shange’s concern beyond the impact of men on the lives of her young women characters” (Fisher 2007, 89). In the same way, white women are not included in the sense that white women should identify with the women on stage or the stories told: “Shange discounts the notion of identification from the outset, refusing the presumption that something like ‘white counterparts’ might exist—in her audiences or elsewhere” (Mahurin 2013, 331). The play does not suggest identification in the sense suggested by identity politics. Furthermore, by not specifying its address, the text (in a positive sense) avoids essentializing both the characters in the text and the supposed listeners. This means that the unspecified listener has the privilege to respond to the performative voices in the text by performing the role of listener. The listener does not have to produce a subject position that corresponds or responds to any subject position in the text. Rather, the listener is allowed to perform his or her response to the text—in the most generous sense of the word. What we are presented with in for colored girls are abstract characters (identity-less and unsubjected), delivering poems with open disregard for the audience. This produces a minimalistic, abstract form of voice. Voice is disconnected from any sense of an autonomous identity or an essentialized subject position. What we get instead are performative voices describing quite specific situations. By being performative, the poems manage to speak of and as women, specifically as black women in their everyday toils. Thus, the text is simultaneously abstract and specific: “Its undeniable power as a piece of performance art derives from that openness, which is, ironically, its best defence against being ‘mis-cast,’ ‘mis-directed,’ or ‘misunderstood’” (Timpane 1990, 200); as “an ‘opening’ technique, it is tamed, as it were, by a strong political program. The tendency towards closure (Shange’s politics) somehow coexists with the tendency away from it (Shange’s technique)” (Timpane 1990, 204), and this is the power of the voice presented in the text. Thus, it is a feminist play which racializes feminism without making identity or origin its main point. The third effect of this aesthetic is that it produces a sense of lack of conversation or interaction. Given that the characters seem to deliver their

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lines to nobody, anybody, or everybody, I would say that the text also is characterized by a lack of dialogue, although the text includes other people. The repartee itself is in the centre with its specific pace, rhythm, and orthography. Even in the parts where the women do converse, a feeling of them speaking parallel to each other rather than to each other results. Mahurin observes this when she argues that the monologue, which mostly characterizes the text, is “a form that neatly separates their lines into individual rather than communal performances” (Mahurin 2013, 335). This is seen as problematic by several critics who sense a lack of community in the text. Although Sarah Mahurin seems slightly concerned about this, she nonetheless claims that the “play presents an alternate universe of sorts, a single-sex, single-race universe inhabited solely by black women” (Mahurin 2013, 331). She calls it a “strategy of exclusion, or, perhaps, seclusion” (Mahurin 2013, 331). I would call the text “introverted”—in a positive sense. It manages to be specific, in that it addresses an important issue (the situation of African American women and their need to be heard), and yet, the text simultaneously avoids representing this situation in essentialist or stereotypical ways by using an aesthetic of abstraction whereby the voices do not signify individuals or communal subjects. It is not as if the women in the text are sharing experiences in the sense that they want a response, but rather that they are sharing experiences that need no response precisely because they are shared, and therefore, common. The characters are taking turns in telling the same story rather than taking turns in speaking and listening to their respective stories. lady in blue you gave it up in a buick? lady in yellow yeh, and honey, it was wonderful. lady in green we used to do it all up in the dark in the corners . . . lady in blue some niggah sweating all over you. lady in red it was good! lady in blue i never did like to grind (Shange 1977, 10–11)

Contrary to Splawn, who argues that Shange “appeals to the audience to listen” (Splawn 1998, 390), I would claim that the text’s lack of conversation makes the text strong precisely because it does not plead for listeners—it does not plead to be heard. It would seem that it does not

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believe in dialogue, in communication as the ultimate goal for voice, which actually seems to be a way to avoid Spivak’s question altogether. To her question—can the subaltern speak?—the text seems to answer, “What do I care? I am subaltern. I speak, and I don’t care if you listen.” This makes the voice introverted, but simultaneously, intensely strong and powerful in its arrogance, “an act of resistance, a political gesture that challenges politics of domination that would render us nameless and voiceless” (hooks 1973, 8), as bell hooks states it. So far so good. I was thrilled to find a text that manages to produce voices that are subject-less and abstract, but nonetheless political. And I was amazed to find a play where the voices are strong and powerful despite their lack of identity and subjectivity. The question then is, what should the filmatizations do with such voices? Because the text creates such an experimental and openly provocative use of voice, it seems unavoidable that the filmatization of the drama must do something quite different with those voices. It would seem that with its focus on visuality, the embodiment of voice in film is inevitable, which in turn, demands a different aesthetic to be effective. Two films have been made of the play. The first was made by the director, Oz Scott, in 1982 (who also was the stage director for the first staged performance in New York) 43 and the second by Tyler Perry in 2010. Both have opted for an aesthetic of concretization to produce strong voices in the film. To create concretization, the first film created a setup where the poems are presented in different scenes, with different settings, and with individualized women who present the different situations of the play. The second film has taken this concretization even further by creating a narrative out of the poems. The poems have been stitched together to form a coherent plot. The film has placed four of the women in the same apartment building, and all the women’s lives revolve around that building or else by way of their work or family relationships. They are all given their individual life narratives which are meant to stitch together the poems into a narrative whole. This means that what we get in both films are voices that do have bodies attached to them. The differently coloured women (lady in red, lady in yellow, lady in brown, et cetera) are traded for specific individuals— black women with their idiosyncrasies intact, with proper names, regular (historically specific) clothes, mannerisms, et cetera. The individualization of the characters implies that the words in the text are grounded in a body, in a subject. The narrative structure of the second film enhances this even further because the narrative structure as such creates a logic of cause and

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effect, motivation, and progression, and as a consequence, characters that evolve over time.44 The grounding of the voices in bodies implies that the voices are made specific. The voices are clearly connected to specific actors whose use of voice implies an interpretation of the words spoken. This means that the words are given sound-specificity (intensity, pitch, intonation, et cetera); they are set in physical bodies with gestures, facial expressions, and physical characteristics. Naturally, this has consequences for the voices produced. In the filmatizations, such embodiment and subjectification are closely connected to emotion. The characters in the text move around the scene in what could be seen as a choreographed, minimalist dance where the women (of different colours) are highlighted by position and light, and the words are delivered without any given (recorded) emotion or sentiment; in contrast, the characters in the film work to concretize the words by expressing them with passion and verve. This means that in the first filmatization in particular, some of the poems, such as “somebody almost walked off wid all my stuff” and “no assistance,” are expressed with attitude and sassiness where the women actors use intonation, gestures, and body posture to enact and enlarge the words—enhancing both blackness and individual articulation. Other poems, such as “abortion cycle #1” and “a nite with beau willie brown” are expressed with tears and emotional outbursts, giving life to the pain rendered by the words. By giving voice a body and individuality, the film also brings flesh and pain to the words spoken. The flesh and pain is individual in that it is tied to a body, an identity, and a specific person whose pain is expressed. However, the flesh and pain is not only individual. It could be argued that the history of woman, and the history of the African American woman in particular, needs a body to give her life and to tell her story of exploitation, exclusion, and suffering. In this sense, the concretization of the voices is vital to the story told in the text. So, where does this lead us? The text for colored girls who have considered suicide can best be described in terms of abstraction and minimalism. In terms of voice, it is emotionless and bodiless, and without individuality and concreteness. In this sense, it produces no voice in any “real” sense of the word. What might be negative about this setup is that the abstraction creates a lack of individuality, body, and concretization, and therefore also a lack of pain, flesh, and ache. In this sense, it could be argued that because there is no life, the text is frictionless, spotless, and as such, harmless. Thus, it risks stranding on the shores of reification. On the other hand, the aesthetic characterizing the text can be said to do

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something else, which is important. By being abstract and openly textual, the power of voice is not connected to the body, but to the ability of words to stretch beyond body, beyond dialogue, and beyond the subjective or the individual. The text-as-abstraction points to the power of words and to voice precisely by being bodiless and unsubjected. Power lies precisely in the fact that voice is more and other than the subject or individual. As such, it creates the body and the individual not as the origin of voice, but as something made in the moment of speech. Without targeted listeners, the text creates an open address that avoids categorization or delineation. The use of monologues spoken in repartee by characterless women makes the words spoken open for response and participation. Thus, the text is open for the kind of heterogeneity that Spivak strives for. The films operate quite differently. Both films adhere to an aesthetic of concretion, which implies that they are always specific: characters, setting, situation, and listener. Here, we are presented with realistic actors, with embodied voices, emotions, and realistic scenes with real people and targeted listeners. In the second film, we even have a coherent plot. The positive thing about this setup is that we get real voices, real bodies, and real situations. This is a form of concretization that situates the words on the page in the real world, so to speak. As such, it also brings flesh and pain to the words spoken. Thus, it could be argued that the film gives the voices life. Thus, the politics of voice produced in the films seems to argue that the power of voice lies in specificity, in embodiment, and in individuality. There is no voice without the specific and the individual, and power should always be specified and made material, otherwise, power remains unreachable. However, the films’ strengths are also their weaknesses. The negative side to the films’ aesthetics of concretion is that it limits, excludes, and essentializes the voice to such an extent that it, at times, seems almost like stereotyping. Such stereotyping is enhanced by placing the women and their actions in a specific time. The text’s topography and repartee (with its black lingo as its mark of difference) risk becoming a brand of difference when materialized. By adding body, emotion, and pain, the films gain in strength, but in some cases, become too black in their blackness—indeed, a verification of preconceived notions about blackness. As such an observable entity, that person has furthermore ceased being a subject, but is indeed an object—an object of study. When a character is objectified, she is seen as essentially different. Naturally, such a transformation happens more easily with people who we already do not consider as subjects, such as subaltern groups. Thus, by adding body, emotion, and pain, the film has simultaneously brought difference and distance into its aesthetic. This results in strong voices that

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strongly point to an essence and do not question the precondition of those voices. Consequently, we are left with two distinct aesthetics of voice and two distinct politics of voice. What appeals to me with the text for colored girls who have considered suicide is that it produces voices that break the illusions of voice in its minimalism and abstraction while remaining politically strong voices for black women in the United States (and elsewhere) due to its specificity. It clearly avoids essentialism with its aesthetic of abstraction, and perhaps even manages to represent the “sheer heterogeneity of decolonized space” (Spivak 2001, 2125), which is something the films never manage to do. Individualization may create strong voices, but not the productive and performative kind of voices that manage to break the ideology of individualism and the idea that power of voice (and the politics of voice) must be closely tied to a body and an individual.

Dutchman: speaking no matter what As with for colored girls, Dutchman is a play that is canonized within the African American literary tradition. It was first staged in 1964 and “clearly defined a new movement for its followers,” that is, The Black Arts Movement (Löfgren 2003, 424). Lotta Lövgren argues that “because of its refusal to bow to hegemony,” the play was instrumental “in giving not only African-Americans but subsequently feminist playwrights of the late 1960s and eventually a broad range of silent minorities a new voice” (Löfgren 2003, 424). Amiri Baraka’s play, Dutchman, is interesting for my project in that it unmistakably positions voice in close relation to power. Contrary to Shange’s for colored girls, the play analyses power by aggressively confronting gender and race. However, it is not a play that equalizes those two categories, but nevertheless clearly has race as its main object in its analysis of power. It would be an understatement to state that it does not use the Spivakean method of carefully investigating the inherent problems involving voice. The play works well by creating clashes across the race–gender divide by staging a sexual encounter between a bohemian white woman (Lula) and a bourgeois, black man (Clay) on a subway train. A feminist might have objections to the play’s portrayal of women in its representation of Lula, arguing that its focus on race has diminished the subtleties of power in the intersection of race and gender. However, it is important to recognize that Dutchman takes a completely different approach than

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subtlety. And I think the approach concerning voice in Dutchman is interesting precisely because it aims for neither subtlety nor circumspection. It is an approach that shamelessly focuses on one specific group: African American men. This relentless focus on the “war,” in the ongoing race war is something that C.W.E. Bigsby has difficulty in handling, lamenting Baraka’s “refusal to accept a humanistic interpretation of the racial situation” (Bigsby 1968, 141) and claiming that “his attraction to violence becomes little more than an aspect of revenge while his plays are dedicated less to urging a humanistic commitment than a revolutionary separatism” (Bigsby 1968, 142). In a similar vein, John Ferguson claims that Baraka is an “unabashed racialist [sic], answering racialism with racialism and he has written words which are an incitement to violence, answering violence with violence. In doing so he has become something of an oracle,” and this, according to Ferguson, “is dangerous for a writer” (Ferguson 1970, 399). Whether in favour of, or critical of, this approach, all critics agree that Dutchman is an openly political play. However, it is not political in a realist way. Instead, many critics analyse it in terms of anti-realism. Sollors defines it as a “theatre of the absurd which effectively integrates social myths with private themes, literary surrealism and political ethnocentrism” (Sollors 1978, 117). According to Sollors, the “‘realistic’ elements of Dutchman are outweighed by absurdist drama techniques, which make the play provocative and unsettling” (Sollors 1978, 118). The play, according to Löfgren, is a way to “reject realism as far too limiting aesthetically and too complicit with white cultural hegemony” (Löfgren 2003, 426). This turn against realism means that it is not fruitful to analyse the characters in terms of realism either. Sollors argues that “the protagonists are not fully individualized ‘characters’ in the sense of realistic drama, but reified types whose encounter takes place in a dreamlike, Kafkaesque setting that is both specific and vague” (Sollors 1978, 118). This means that most critics analyse the characters in terms of symbols, representatives, or archetypes rather than individualized characters. Not surprisingly, Lula is described as “white America” (Hudson 1973, 149), as the “representative of white power” (Williams 1978, 136), and an “agent of repression” (Sollors 1978, 128). But she is also described as a “symbol of sexuality” (Williams 1978, 136), a “white phallic mother” (Piggford 1997, 79), and a “demonic psychotherapist” (Piggford 1997, 76). Similarly, Clay is said to be “Christ, Uncle Tom, Bigger Thomas” (Sollors 1978, 129), a “black loser” (Lindberg 1978, 141), or a martyr (Piggford 1997, 76). What is interesting about Clay is his role as an Ivy League

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intellectual, a poet, a “Black Baudelaire.” Both Spivak and Fanon emphasize the role of the educated elite in the postcolonial situation, something that is clearly dramatized by Baraka in this character. Whereas Spivak dejectedly claims that “[w]hen a line of communication is established between a member of subaltern groups and the circuits of citizenship or institutionality, the subaltern has been inserted into the long road to hegemony” (Spivak 2001, 2125), Fanon more clearly sees a role (albeit a complex role) for the intellectual in the struggle against colonialism and its effects. As Löfgren puts it, “[t]he intellectual elite are most apt to lead an easy life in the white world, but they are indispensable to the revolution” (Löfgren 2003, 441). As such, Clay is not a random black man picked out by Lula, but rather, he plays an integral role in the race war. What critics consequently claim, a claim that I agree with, is that none of the characters are realistic, but have another function in the play. In what follows, I in many ways, join Löfgren in her analysis of Lula, but taking a somewhat different take on her function by my use of Fanon. In defence of the play’s unmitigated focus on race, it must be argued that Lula in Dutchman is not a realistic representation of a woman. She plays a central part of a symbolic, historically constructed, psycho-social drama that stages preconceived notions of race. The relation between the white woman and the black man is, according to Frantz Fanon in Black Skin White Masks, guided by the black man’s desire to be white. I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white. Now […] who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man. Her love takes me onto the noble read that leads to total realization. . . . I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine (Fanon 1967, 63).

The desire to be white is expressed by the potential possession of a white woman. Lula’s role in the play is to represent this desire (and peril) and lure Clay into a discourse of such desire (what bell hooks calls “blonde ambition” in her book, Yearning). But, interestingly enough, her use of voice also makes her into something more: a catalyst “to test Clay’s mettle,” as Löfgren puts it (Löfgren 2003, 438). As both a temptress, in the sense implicated by Fanon above, where gender (female) and race (white woman) merge, and as a catalyst, she provokes speech from Clay, and it is through this aggressive provocation of speech that the play stages race as its main area of investigation. Rather than complicating the role of Lula by

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seeing her as Baraka’s mouthpiece and that she “in fact represents Baraka himself, wearing the mask of a white woman” (Löfgren 2003, 438), which means that Lula is “a double persona at the two extremes of the spectrum, that of the white woman and that of the black man” (Löfgren 2003, 440) or that she represents “different temporal aspects of an artistic consciousness [Baraka’s] which has divided itself into opposing forces” (Sollors 1978, 123), I would argue that it is precisely her role as a white woman within the historical psycho-social drama described above that she can function as such a catalyst. The provocation by Lula culminates in Clay’s powerful speech, “I could kill you,” which is my focus here. Clay’s speech alters the power relations in the play in that Lola dominates the dialogue preceding Clay’s speech: “[F]rom the moment she enters the coach, Lula does control the situation. She picks Clay up. She encourages him. And it is she who goads him into revealing things” (Williams 1978, 140). Contrary to this initial dialogue that is dominated by Lola, Clay is wordy, straightforward, and articulate in his speech. Also, his speech no longer interacts in a lustful play with Lula, but is clearly directed against her and what she represents. Thus, the speech implies a clear difference from the previous dialogue in its clear distancing from any “blond ambition.” Rather, the speech is all about delineating an abysmally deep demarcation between black and white. As Fanon argues in The Wretched of the Earth, such differentiation is part of the colonial subject’s identity. That identity is part of the world in which the colonized are raised and created. The zone where the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers. The two zones are opposed, but not in the service for a higher unity. Obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous. (Fanon 2001, 30)

As such, Clay’s speech is an open threat, but also an account of, and justification of, blackness, black culture, and black art—all of which cannot be discussed other than in relation to whiteness and white culture in the United States. Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys scream for Bird. And Bird saying, “Up your ass, feebleminded ofay! Up your ass.” And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker. Bird would’ve played not a note of music if he just walked up to East SixtySeventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I’m the great would-be poet. Yes. That’s right! Poet. Some kind of bastard literature... all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you

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loud whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You understand? No. I guess not. If Bessie Smith had killed some white people she wouldn’t have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors. No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane. (Baraka 1964, 35)

One danger with such a political position lies in the essentialism inherent in such harsh demarcations, something Spivak is concerned about. When creating a political position based on exclusionary opposites, the question of how to define the two opposites always arises. Black is black because it is not white. It is not white, therefore, it is black. In this way, black and white are constructed as opposites that are inherently, essentially, and ontologically different. And this is a problem that the play deals with, as we shall see. What intrigues me about Clay’s speech in Dutchman, is not only its brilliant wordiness and rhetorical intensity, but also how it manages to closely tie voice to a body, an identity, an oppressed subject, and a suppressed people. It does this mainly by pitting that voice against another body, identity, subject, and group of people—and making that seem like the sane thing to do. It seems to sidestep the concerns about essentialism, which such strong embodiment and such strong differentiation risks doing. Why is that? I would argue that (perhaps surprisingly) violence plays an important role in this acceptance. As Fanon argues in The Wretched of the Earth, The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters. (Fanon 2991, 31)

Violence is a central part of colonial rule. Therefore, it is not surprising that it is a central part of the colonial subject, and consequently, will be used by him. Dutchman is a violent play, and follows this path of violence, a theme that Amiri Baraka also explores in his text, “The Revolutionary

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Theatre.” In this manifest, he sees both hate and its accompanying violence as an intricate part of the race war: “They have been trained to hate” (Baraka 1968, 210), but where this hatred must be used by black artists to produce change. Baraka further argues that “It is a political theatre, a weapon to help in the slaughter of these dim-witted fatbellied white guys who somehow believe that the rest of the world is here for them to slobber on” (Baraka 1968, 212). What is needed is a theatre whose effects are immediate: “When the final curtain goes down brains are splattered over the seats and the floor” (Baraka 1968, 212). To create such theatre, violence must be a central part of it. Violence is part of the black man’s identity, his consciousness, his voice, and his bodily movements. Therefore, in a play that stages, advocates, and celebrates black identity and culture, violence should not be shunned either. Importantly, for Amiri Baraka, violence is part of black America, but it is never stated as a given. Violence is rather a historical process—something which is exerted by whites on blacks (a historical fact that cannot be negotiated)—and which has become an unsolicited part of black identity. It cannot be done away with, but it is not essentially black. A way in which Dutchman negotiates essentialism and historicism when it comes to violence is by clearly connecting violence to voice. The violence represented in Clay’s speech is a form of vocal violence that is clearly part of black identity and culture, as represented here: I could murder you now. Such a tiny ugly throat. I could squeeze it flat, and watch you turn blue, on a humble. For dull kicks. And all these weakfaced ofays squatting around here, staring over their papers at me. Murder them too. Even if they expected it. (Baraka 1964, 33)

The voice expressing those words is a strong and lucid voice which brings the dialogue to the heart of the matter: violence and power. And the mere expression of violence by Clay is an act of power—liberating power. The film manages to represent this voice and violence excellently, especially in the aforementioned speech. Embodiment strengthens the voice in the text in specific ways. Al Freeman Jr. manages to embody voice in a way that no other play examined here has been able to. The words on the page (really acts of violence) gain force by being embodied. Suppressed anger and hatred expressed in an explosion of speech reveals the hatred that has been built up over the years. Freeman also physically demonstrates how the colonial man has been physically restrained, restricted, subjugated, and abused, which makes him and his body always on the verge of action.

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Confronted with a world ruled by the settler, the native is always presumed guilty. But the native’s guilt is never a guilt which he accepts; it is rather a kind of curse, a sort of sword of Damocles, for, in his innermost spirit, the native admits no accusation. He is overpowered but not tamed; his is treated as an inferior but he is not convinced of his inferiority. He is patiently waiting until the settler is off his guard to fly at him. The native’s muscles are always tensed. (Fanon 2001, 41)

Al Freeman, repeatedly wiping his face and mouth with his handkerchief, with his eyes set on Lula, but often flickering in the direction of all the passengers, reveals the black man’s controlled fury. But his speech is, at the same time, not really a revelation. The threat of the black man’s violence is a “reality” that the white man (and specifically, the white woman and her fear of rape) has to live with. The true, real black man is the man who murders, according to this speech. It is a violent threat generated by centuries of violence and atrocities against him. And this is an historical effect, not a natural condition. Therefore, the play avoids making difference (being black) into an essence (as Spivak fears). Clay clearly states that blackness is not. It is something that has been produced over time in a process. In the end, it is the white man and the white man’s abuse that has produced the black man we see in front of us. So while Clay’s speech is an affront, a threat similar to Amiri Baraka’s slogan that “(t)his is a theatre of assault,” it is also a plea for the white man to leave the black man alone, to refrain from defining what he is or should be. You telling me what I ought to do. [Sudden scream frightening the whole coach] Well, don’t! Don’t you tell me anything! I’m a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way I want. [Through his teeth] I’ll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It’s none of your business. You don’t know anything except what’s there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don’t ever know that. And I sit here, in this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. (Baraka 1964, 34)

So while the speech is a threat built upon the reinforcement of difference, the speech also voices a need for black men to define, or not define, those differences themselves. In this sense, it points to a kind of introversion characterized by Shange’s for colored girls. So, Dutchman goes against some of the points made by Spivak in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by using differentiation as the play’s main strategy to promote African American identity and culture. In this, it is an

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affirmation of black culture more in line with bell hook’s theory of voice. According to Spivak, such differentiation risks essentializing the subaltern and turning him or her into an object of study. Furthermore, a strong differentiation also disregards the “sheer heterogeneity of colonized space,” meaning that it produces the subaltern and turns him or her into something he or she is not. Although I agree with Spivak in her concerns about the process of differentiation, Dutchman simultaneously demonstrates that although heterogeneity has a place that is valuable to consider when creating subaltern voices, such heterogeneity is not always the most effective political and powerful strategy to use. Instead, Dutchman argues that there are times to reinforce difference—where difference is power, and that this difference needs to be voiced. To create space for the colonial subject, the subaltern, to speak, something radical has to be done. As with Amiri Baraka, Frantz Fanon sees violence as unavoidable in the process of liberating the subaltern. In decolonization, there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question of the colonial situation. If we wish to describe it precisely, we might find it in the well-known words: “The last shall be first and the first last.” Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence. (Fanon 2001, 28)

Dutchman is fascinating in that it manages to balance the aggressive assertion of voice with identity production. Thus, it manages to wield power generated by asserting difference through not allowing essentialism to become its ground for such differentiation. By using violence as the mark of difference and a tool of power, the play historicises identity. Furthermore, violence, by its sheer intensity in the speech and by its menacing threat, also diminishes the risk of becoming an object of study. By using hate, violence, and threats, Clay, in his speech, fills the space of the train (and the film) in a way that avoids turning him into an object. So far, Clay’s speech comes close to the production of a voice that, indeed, voices the concerns and the identity of a subaltern group—and it does so provocatively. The speech disregards concerns about essentialism, objectification, and silencing and lets Clay speak nonetheless, something that bell hooks argues is necessary for African American voices to be heard. But, importantly, Clay never commits a violent act. In the play, blackness is the repression of justified violence, which at most, can be expressed in words. The irony in the play is that the vocal violence articulated by Clay is expressed against the backdrop of real, physical violence exerted by white people and culture. While Clay’s speech turns to exasperated defeat: “Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I’d rather be a fool.

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Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new conquests” (Baraka 1964, 35), a defeat which simultaneously sets voice and speech before violence and black culture against violence (in favour of music, literature, and dance), this is not the case with the white woman. While Clay bends over her to pick up his things and leave the train, Lula “brings up a small knife and plunges it into CLAY’s chest. Twice” (Baraka, 1964, 35). So, in the end, the black man is the one who is killed, and the play shows that it can be done without any incrimination from the other passengers.45 In one sense, Dutchman stages voice as theoretically empowering, but lethal in practice. It can therefore be questioned, even in this drama which produces one of the strongest speeches in American dramatic history, if voice can carry the kind of power implied in bell hooks’ Talking Back. Speaking in Dutchman is possible, and the articulation of power by voice is demonstrated in Clay’s speech, but the brutal silencing of Clay turns out to be all the more powerful (no matter what the reasons are for this silencing). Voice cannot counteract centuries of violence or the physical effects of such violence. But at the same time, there is no doubt about it, the black man has spoken, and his speech is strong and unforgettable. As such, the voice of the subaltern is heard as the “palimpsestic narrative” that has continually been silenced. Thus, the play demonstrates an ambivalence concerning a proposed dichotomy: voice and action. This dichotomy has wider implications, something that Baraka himself has voiced in terms of literature/poetry versus violence/action. In an interview with William J. Harris, Baraka says, there are two elements: one, the element of action or acting, doing, that always in my mind, has been contradicted by the traditional intellectual posture of theory, the statement or literature as a passive kind of enterprise rather than trying to see one’s ideas implemented in the real world. (Harris 1985, 139)

In a sense, the violence characterizing Clay’s speech and the violent silencing of him on the train makes violence a centrepiece for voice and power. The only way for the white woman to silence the black man’s voice is by taking recourse to physical violence. This act is historically negotiated. However, although the play ends with Clay’s death, the power of his speech and the inability to make him shut up by means of words, lingers. Dutchman demonstrates the advantages with this approach to voice. By working with differentiation and exclusion as its modus operandi, it shows that voice, when it is clearly connected to a physical body, to a strongly defined identity, to a coherent subject, might be the most powerful

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political weapon. The play clearly calls for the need for the black man to speak. By re-routing the risks of essentialism and objectification, it gains in political force. Dutchman is the play that clearly speaks, and it does so in a voice that is loud and clear. It produces a voice that is embodied, specific, fleshy, and full of pain. Both the text and the film disregard notions of heterogeneity in the production of voice, but they gain their strength by historicizing essentialism and identity construction. This historization shows that Clay’s harsh silencing of Lula, along with his vocal violence and his threats to her life, is a reaction to already existing power structures. This becomes all the more clear at the end of the play, where the imbalance of power is restored, and white woman eliminates the black man by means of physical violence. By providing Clay with his speech, the play uses stereotypes as realities, but realities that are part of African American history (not their essence); it is a history created, controlled, and served by the white man. In doing so, the play turns the stereotype into something else—a discursive and historical product. This demonstrates how black identity is not inherently black, but a historical process. Blackness is turned into an atrocity committed by white culture, and what black identity “really” entails is never an issue in the play.

Concluding discussion The problem of speaking in Spivak’s terms is slightly different from that which is discussed in the previous chapters, but the foundation for her discussion is the same, in that she asks herself whether or not voice can fulfil what it promises: power, subjectivity, presence, and originality. From her perspective, the question acknowledges that the subaltern does not have any of the above and that the bestowal of voice might provide these to them. For subaltern groups, such voice might be a matter of life and death and not a philosophical and/or theoretical concern. The reason why I have shifted perspective slightly in this concluding chapter is that the two dramatists studied here put all their energy and all their efforts into producing a voice that upholds its promise despite such problems. This is the main object of their dramas. Rather than merely discussing the ways in which voice cannot fulfil what it promises by way of philosophical arguments about the absence of presence and the impossibility to trace language to one origin that would be the subject, this concluding chapter aims at something different. It aims to find a strategy that allows for a political voice more in line with bell hooks’ theories. However, the danger in such an enterprise lies in believing in the power of voice and letting such belief turn into naivety.

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Speaking out is not a simple gesture of freedom in a culture of domination. We are often deceived (yes, even those of us who have experienced domination) by the illusion of free speech, falsely believing that we can say whatever we wish in an atmosphere of openness. (hooks 1973, 15)

By retaining bell hooks’ gist for political activism and combining it with Spivak’s unrelenting criticism, I had hoped to find a way of discussing voice that allows for activism without naivety. What is so interesting is that the plays studied here not only tackle the problems of voice, but also circumvent or re-route the theoretical problems surrounding voice and produce voices that nonetheless allow the subaltern speak. The dramas analysed in this study destabilize voice in ways that question simplified concepts of voice. This is most clearly connected with ideas of writing, in poststructuralist (Barthesian or Derridean) terms. However, at the same time, drama cannot do away with the concept of voice. The need for voice is also a political dilemma, which is highlighted in for colored girls and Dutchman. For voice to retain its political verve while avoiding the pitfalls of essentialism, what is needed is a reconfiguration of the whole concept and its role in the establishment of subjectivity. What is also needed is a negotiation of voice which makes it possible to speak of voice without falling back on politically naive notions of presence, origin, and subjectivity. In short, what is needed is a negotiation of voice that makes it possible for it to be used as a political weapon against dominant ideologies, oppression, and even physical violence. Voice is impossible, but nonetheless necessary for political action. Voice, as we have conceived it, does not exist. Voice exists as a different entity, and as such, we cannot do away with it. What is needed is a different voice; a voice that is not autonomous and not stable, but rather openly displays itself as a discursive process, and as such, is temporary and eclectic. What is needed is a voice that follows deconstructive and poststructuralist reconfigurations of subjectivity, or what Spivak calls the subject-effect: A subject-effect can be briefly plotted as follows: that which seems to operate as a subject may be part of an immense discontinuous network (“text” in the general sense) of strands that may be termed politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language, and so on. (Each of these strands, if they are isolated, can also be seen as woven of many strands.) Different knottings and configurations of these strands, determined by heterogeneous determinations which are themselves dependent upon myriad circumstances, produce the effect of an operating subject. (Spivak 1996, 213)

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What might come out of such a theory of voice is a voice that points to another of Spivak’s key concepts: strategic essentialism, as in “a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (Spivak 1996, 214). Without using the term as a “union ticket for essentialism” (Danius 1993, 35), as Spivak argues is often done, I think of it as a way to negotiate positivism and deconstruction. It would allow the critics (dramatists) to use “the critical force of anti-humanism, in other words, even as they share its constitutive paradox: that the essentializing moment, the object of the criticism, is irreducible” (Spivak 1996, 214), which necessarily makes critical scepticism a part of the use of essentialism. The reason why I feel such a negotiation has to be done at all is because I fear that cynicism might take hold of deconstructionist and poststructuralist theories on subjectivity and identity. However, importantly, I do not see this negotiation as a path back to essentialism. In fact, it is not essentialism at all in the sense that it is originally understood, but rather a way to discuss categories such as voice, which allows it to function in a political context. For voice to be political, we have to consider the presence of a subject—a body that grounds what is said. With deconstruction, such a body, such a subject, is impossible. There is no way for me to dismiss this fact in order to be political. That is, I cannot go back to having a naive position when it comes to voice and subjectivity. Hence, I cannot pretend the problems of essentialism do not exist. However, I do not want to end up in a political blind alley where theoretical and philosophical considerations dismantle any form of political action, nor do I want to end up where deconstructionist ideas become arguments for an ultimately cynical Western standpoint towards the actual problems of nonWestern peoples. Therefore, what is needed is a position that allows for both—a voice without naivety, but also without cynicism. In a sense, it could be argued that the plays analysed in this conclusion allow for such an interpretation. This is not to say that African American plays do not face the problems of voice studied in the previous chapters. Many of the problems discussed there also apply to these plays. However, with their unrelenting need for the subaltern to speak, both plays have the nerve to consciously elaborate the constant theoretical and philosophical dismantling of voice in favour of voice. The need for strong voices to be produced and for alternative voices to be heard outweighs the need for theoretical disclaimers. At the same time, the aesthetic and topical setup of the dramas allow for a subtle elaboration of voice which questions voice as we have conceived it. On one hand, it could be argued that Dutchman

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follows the same strategy as bell hooks, in that it manages to produce voice as an individual embodied concept, but it does so without falling into the traps of essentialism and objectification. Here, voice produces a sense of originality and presence, but without essentializing that origin or that presence. It feeds on ideas of difference, but uses difference as a historical and discursive concept, and dismantles the historicization of voice in the very moment of its production. On the other hand, for colored girls works within an opposing strategy where it produces voices that are never individualized and never made corporeal. If an identity is produced, it is produced only in the moment of speech. In this moment, voice retains its political power while successfully steering clear of essentialism and objectification.

NOTES

1

The typographical layouts of the dramas I analyse contain many punctuation marks indicating specific pauses in the text. To prevent any confusion, I will use brackets to indicate ellipses found in the original quotations. 2 For a general overview of the philosophical history of the mind–body problem (and a more complex and varied discussion), see for instance, Robert Scholes’ Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English, Toril Moi’s Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies, Iris Marion Young’s On Female body experience: “Throwing Like a girl” and other essays, Linda McDowell’s Gender, Identity and Place, and Malcom MacLachlan’s Embodiment: Clinical, critical and cultural perspectives on health and illness. Some philosophers and theorists who have attempted to find a way out of the mind–body problem as well as other dichotomized constructions are, for instance, Moira Gatens’ Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality, Carolyn Heilbrun’s Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, and Alice A. Jardine’s Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. 3 See, for instance, Richard Zaner’s The Problem of Embodiment. Also, phenomenologists can be argued to endorse the body as a starting point for discussing individuality. Even constructivists can be argued to endorse the body— albeit a body that has been radically reconfigured. See for instance, Judith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz. 4 Narratology is central to the establishment of voice in texts. Some of the most classic examples are found in Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s Narrative Fiction, Seymour Chatman’s Story and Discourse and Ann Banfield’s Unspeakable Sentences. 5 Other literary forms of narration, which highlight the complexity of the situation, are collected under the name double-voiced discourse. What characterises such discourses is that it is more or less impossible to ground the textual utterances in a coherent subject. One such classic narrative technique is called free indirect discourse, which builds on the uncertainty of who is saying what. Also, we have ironic discourse, which thrives on the uncertainty of what is said and meant (who is saying and who is meaning?). However, even if specific narrative techniques thrive on such uncertainty, even the most straightforward literary texts abound with utterances (sentences) that cannot be traced to a single subject in any clear way. Such instances or techniques highlight not only our (seemingly desperate) need to always assign textual segments to specific subjects, but also the problems that such a need faces. 6 For books on voice in the theatre, see for instance, Nan Withers-Wilson’s Vocal Direction for the Theatre, J. Clifford Turner’s Voice and Speech in the Theatre,

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David Zinder’s Body Voice Imagination, and Kristin Linklater’s Freeing the Natural Voice and Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice. 7 In A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century Drama 2, for instance, Bigsby argues that “Miller was not concerned with the conflict between classes but with a public challenge to the private conscience” (Bigsby 1984, 193) and that it deals with the “battle of an individual not only, or even primarily, with a world external to the self but with a personal fallibility and, beyond that, a deeply flawed human nature” (Bigsby 1984, 197). Instead of having to do with society, class hierarchies, or ideology, Ferres argues that “more important are the suspenseful conflicts within the characters themselves” (Ferres 1972, 18). Some critics have often pointed out the connection between the social and the individual, but primarily for highlighting the individual and psychological: “The Crucible may well be called a ‘social play,’ since it analyses a public phenomenon with historical precedent and current actuality. But it focuses on the ‘subjective reality’ of that phenomenon” (Moss 1972, 38). In Arthur Miller: A Critical Study, Bigsby conducts an analysis of power, which also points to this. I will return to this interpretation later in this chapter. 8 In the following I will use the term narrative segments to refer to those parts of the text that are “conveyed by a verbal transmission” as Jahn has it, that is, the parts that are clearly narrated. Those parts are set in opposition to the parts of the drama that will be performed by actors. 9 Interestingly, Bakhtin claims that drama is an art form that is monologic per se. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin argues that drama never can be polyphonic without giving any conclusive arguments as to why because the dramatic form is clearly based on the voices of the characters working in dialogic form. However, it is difficult to grasp what Bakhtin really means by “polyphonic.” He clearly denies that it should be based on simple narratological or aesthetic techniques observable in a text (of the sort I am giving here). But rather, he claims that polyphony is based on a vague sense of a decentred worldview that comes out in certain texts. However, as argued before, this decentredness must somehow be framed in ways that differentiate it from traditional arguments about why this should be so. The only possible explanation for this argument against drama would be the Aristotelian idea of unity of time, place, and action, which in some way, brings about the unity of vision in drama in ways other than that of a novel. However, such an analysis would not really hold for realist, modernist, or contemporary drama. There would be no such controlling aspect in a modern play. Rather, within this line of reasoning, modern drama seems more dialogic than many novels in that they both present no clear idea or a simple argument. It must also be separated from the concept of the author (which, in itself, is a concept of unity) as the creator of this decentredness. According to this analysis, one way to do this would be to discuss writing and speech as two opposing ideologies in a text, where the narrative segments are opposed to the dialogue of the characters, but where the ideological implications of these different forms of discourse are theorized. Bakhtin talks of the merging of voices as characterizing polyphony, for instance, the mingling of narrator and character, which produces a kind of double

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voice, but such a theory depends on how one interprets the narrator. Is the narrator’s position in a text simply one voice among others? Or does the narrator have a different function and status from the rest? It also brings up the question of voice. Do the narrative texts (the narrator’s texts and the stage directions) represent voice in the sense of individuality and subjectivity in the play? Or do the narrative segments have another function in the play? And do all the narrative segments have the same function? 10 Whether those two texts are construed as two narrators or one is of little importance to my analysis, as you shall see. However, given narratologists’ obsession with attribution, it is highly important to clarify the relation between those texts. For my analysis, it is of the great importance to understand their function as writing and/or as voice. 11 It is interesting that I feel the need to give the narrator a gender and that I inadvertently call the narrator a “he.” Firstly, this clearly shows that the subjectification of the narrative segments in the text implies the placing of this subject within a social, cultural, and ideological sphere, which in turn, proves my point that the narrative parts deserve attention. Secondly, such subjectification implies the positioning of the text in a cultural sphere, hence, giving the narrator a gender. Thirdly, this genderization is both the cause and effect of certain issues. The reason I call the narrator a male is because 1. Of its inadvertent connection to the author. This is not a way of securing the author’s position in the text. Rather it proves Foucault’s point that the author has been given a supreme position in today’s culture. 2. Of the narrator’s position of power, knowledge, and truth in the text, which marks the subject as male. This is not a way of arguing that the male position inadvertently implies power, but that this is a cultural construction difficult to do away with. 12 The role of the narrator in characterization has been noted by, for instance, Edward Murray in “Dramatic Technique in The Crucible.” However, whereas he argues that the “summaries presented in this chapter should indicate that preparation, especially foreshadowing of character development, is expertly handled” (Murray 1972, 48), I want to understand the role of the narrator in the production of truth and moral right in a powerful play like The Crucible. 13 The closeness between the narrator and Proctor has been noticed by critics. Christopher Bigsby argues that “John Proctor’s sensibility is too close to our own not to make his judgements seem the touchstone by which to convict the prosecutors of judicious tyranny” (Bigsby 2005, 196). Similarly, Ferres sees Proctor as not a Puritan, but a “modern” man who represents “Enlightenment thinkers” who allow reason to rule over belief (Ferres 1972, 10). 14 Another famous filmatization of The Crucible was made by Jean-Paul Sartre. It is called Les Sorciéres de Salem and is a loosely adapted version of the play with major changes made due to Sartre’s Marxist critique of The Crucible. However, despite the major changes, this version offers no interesting interventions concerning the narrator in this adaptation. 15 Another way in which the film lessens the power of discourse and the ways in which discourse produces and controls individuals and their speech, experience,

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and actions, is the inclusion of direct violence. The play shows how power works by discourse alone. It shows that people can be controlled and persuaded by speech, whereas the movie explains these actions by means of violence. The clearest instance of this is the beating of Tituba, which directly leads to her confession. This persuasion is accomplished by speech and rhetoric in the play. Thus, it could thus be argued that whereas the play shows the ways in which ISAs (Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatus) direct and construct our beliefs, actions, and experiences, the film is more focused on RSAs (Althusser’s Repressive State Apparatus), which is a more direct, straight-forward construction of power. This kind of violence saves the construction of the characters as individuals because the oppressive power clearly is situated outside them, rather than being an integrated part of them. 16 In Arthur Miller. A Critical Study, Bigsby briefly mentions that the offBroadway production employed “a narrator called ‘The Reader’ to set the scenes and convey the historical background” (Bigsby 2005, 155). Naturally, this is highly interesting for my analysis, and would have been interesting see to analyse how they solved the idea of voice and corporeality in this stage production. 17 On the other hand, because of the narrative segments pointing out the links to the analogy, the play-as-text is a bastard allegory. With all the narrative segments missing, the film would supposedly become a proper allegory. However, given that the film does not have any direct markers (aesthetic, rhetorical, or representational) directing attention to the contemporaneous dimension of the situation, I would argue that this is not so. 18 For autobiographical studies on O’Neill, see Doris Alexander’s text, Eugene O’Neill’s Creative Struggle: The Decisive Decade, 1929–1933, Travis Bogard’s Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill, Arthur and Barbara Gelb’s O’Neill, and Louis Sheaffer’s two books, O’Neill: Son and Artist and O’Neill: Son and Playwright. For a critical examination of how biographical writing is related to psychological discourses or pop psychology, see Joel Pfister’s Staging Depth: Eugene O’Neill and the Politics of Psychological Discourse. 19 In her article, “‘Eugenic O’Neill’ and the Secrets of Strange Interlude,” Wolff strongly argues that this idea of deception, that is, that there is a discrepancy between what Wolff calls “appearance and reality” (Wolff 2003, 222), is not only perceptible in the characters’ use of words and in their voices, but also it also characterizes the visual: “Moreover, if O’Neill suggests directly that words are deceiving and indirectly that looks may be, the play’s environments are they are detailed in the stage directions continue to raise the issue of visual reliability” (Wolff 2003, 223). 20 Bigsby makes a similar observation in A Critical Introduction to TwentiethCentury American Drama 1, 1900–1940, where he states that “unspoken motivation, as exposed by asides presumed to be ‘voiced’ by the mind, is fully formed and coherent, expressing emotional truths. The irrational claims itself rationally – a paradox which seems not to disturb O’Neill” (Bigsby 1982, 1 72– 73).

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It could be said that postmodern writers brought the epic narrative back on the scene, with its focus on plot and events (for example, in works by Pynchon, Barthes, and DeLillo). However, the focus on interiority has nonetheless prevailed. 22 See, for instance, my book, Language Subject Ideology: The politics of representation in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, and Gertrude Stein’s Lucy Church Amiably. 23 On the problem of representing the narrator and other textual constructs in plays, see Chapter 1, “The Incorporeal Voice: The Thorny Case of The Crucible.” 24 When the play was revived in 1963, the reviews were not favourable, “prompting, for example, Richard Gilman’s rejection of the play as the ‘most atrociously ill-written and ill-conceived play of our time’ and Robert Brustein’s indictment of ‘what may be the worst play ever written by a major dramatist’” (Wolff 2003, 215). However, Wolff claims that in the 1984 revival, “critics offered a wider range of opinions about O’Neill’s ‘problem play’” (Wolff 2003, 215). 25 One cannot help wondering what the films would be without thought. Would they work at all? Such thoughts are generated by the instances where thought is left out in the film, such as when Darrell in Act 8 cheers for Navy, rather than Gordon’s team. As his thoughts have been left out, the reasons for his cheering become more inexplicable and ambiguous. Would leaving out thought have made the play ambiguous, incomprehensible or more compassionate, in that much of cynicism is represented in thought and in the interaction between thought and speech? 26 Althusser puts it as follows: “Besides, we are indebted to Pascal’s defensive ‘dialectic’ of the wonderful formula which will enable us to invert the order of the notional schema of ideology. Pascal says more or less: ‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe’.” (Althusser 1971, 168) 27 Whether the play is indeed a satire can be debated. In her article, “Comic Textures and Female Communities 1937 and 1977: Clare Boothe and Wendy Wasserstein,” Susan L. Carlson places the play within the comedy genre: “As a comedy it is troubled and troubling. Like a comedy, it is propelled by the humorous unmasking of human frailties and double standards” (Carlson 1984, 654). This generic analysis, I argue, shows that Carlson has missed the political fierceness of the play. 28 In her article, Carlson maintains that the play is misogynous, an analysis that is closely connected to her analysis of the play as comedy rather than satire: “While Boothe labors in her foreword to allay charges that The Women is misogynous, the misogyny she did not intend persists, embedded in her adoption of traditional comic attitudes to sexual double standards and social roles” (Carlson 1984, 568). 29 Here, I also want to differentiate my take on irony from, for instance, Susan Carlson’s analysis of comedy and analyses of the play as, for instance, a comedy of manners. Where the earlier two forms seem to point to the silliness of certain situations and behaviours, I argue that the position-taking of irony is political. 30 This is also why it is important for me to analyse the text as a satire rather than as a comedy of manners. Placing the play in the genre of comedy of manners

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sidesteps the political implications of voice that are highlighted in an analysis of it as satire. 31 However, in this, it also becomes clear that the act of embodiment is an act of interpretation. The bodily performance by the actor implies that certain choices have been made. This is necessary because such choices are essential for the production of irony. The Women is a rather daring satire in its capacity to poignantly ironize not only the upper class, but also preconceived ideas of what it means to be woman. As such, it is a political text. Certain gendered identities and privileged subjects are criticized by means of voice. Even if the film retains much of the political verve of the text, modifications have been made that have an impact on both irony and its political momentum. Scenes and repartees where the women are clearly ironized have been left out, and certain discourses that lessen the ironic impact have been added. In those scenes, voice is given the rather commonsensical function of establishing identity rather than criticizing it. One such example is the character Edith. In the text, she is a character whose voice is used against her in quite funny ways. She is the character who represents “the mother” and motherhood, and she is constantly pregnant or giving birth. This evident in Mary’s question, “Edith, are you Catholic or just careless?” (Boothe 1994, 139). The performance of motherhood is, in the text, a highly ambivalent affair, invoking brilliant moments of irony: PEGGY, Leans over baby. Oh, let me see. Oh, Edith, isn’t he divine! EDITH. I hate that milky smell. PEGGY, Alarmed. What’s that on his nose? EDITH. What nose? Oh, that’s an ash Blows away the ash. Hands PEGGY a letter from bedside table. (Boothe 1994, 120) PEGGY. Edith, did I tell you how little John said da-da? EDITH. Listen, I wouldn’t care if this one stood up and sang The StarSpangled Banner! (Boothe 1994, 140) Racy (ironic) performances of motherhood, such as the one in this dialogue, have disappeared in the film in favour of performances of Edith as “the good mother.” In the text, Edith has different roles: mother, upper-class woman, good wife, friend, pragmatist—who verges towards a cynic. In the film, these roles are not all ironized. Even if she is still rather racy, she is only so in relation to the roles of woman, wife, upper-class woman, and friend—but never in relation to that of being a mother. Motherhood seems sacred and is left intact, without any ironic input. 32 Only to give one short example, Grice names these maxims as 1. Maxim of quantity, which means that one should be as informative as necessary; 2. Maxim of quality, which means that a speaker should not say what the speaker knows is false (he should not to say things for which he lacks evidence); 3. Maxim of relation which simply means that one should always be relevant; and finally, 4. Maxim of manner, meaning that one should avoid obscurity, ambiguity, and unnecessary prolixity (always to be orderly).

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33 This can be compared to Foucault’s notion of discontinuous systematization in “The Discourse on Language”: “If, on the other hand, discursive events are not to be dealt with as homogeneous, but discontinuous series, what status are we to accord this discontinuity? Here we are not dealing with a succession of instants in time, nor with the plurality of thinking subjects; what is concerned are those caesurae breaking the instant and dispersing the subject in a multiplicity of possible positions and functions. Such a discontinuity strikes and invalidates the smallest units, traditionally recognised and the least readily contested: the instant and the subject” (Foucault 1982, 231). 34 Note the paradox that poststructuralist theories presented in the previous chapter’s face. On the one hand, theories on voice are indebted to individualist ideas on intention, which is a heavily ideological construct. The idea that language originates in an autonomous subject disregards other operations producing language. Individualism is a way of gluing voice to a subject to waive the ideological, discursive formations forming language. Here, on the other hand, the idea that language is clearly connected to a speaking subject implies a breach of the processes of reification which marks language in the postmodern age. The question is if this connection between voice and subject is different from the one envisioned by individualism. 35 I borrow the term “flow” from Raymond Williams in Television. I also use it in a way that connects it to the postmodern analysis made by Jameson (Postmodernism and Jameson Reader). Both these writers use it slightly differently with their focus on television as the ultimate postmodern media format. However, I would argue that it is possible to transfer this to film, especially a film that is made in and by the means of production (and cultural practices) of the postmodern era. I realize significant differences exist between film and television, but I nonetheless wish to emphasize the flow that characterizes the film precisely as an opposite operation to the stuttering that goes on in the text. 36 Textual simultaneity would have to be rendered in a fashion where one text was written over the other—veritably so. However, this would, again, create an extremely experimental, modernist aesthetic, even more in opposition to the flow of the film. 37 Even if Jameson and Williams differentiate between TV and film in the film’s ability to produce a proper conclusion, I am not sure that this conclusion counteracts the reification process implicated in flow: “Turning the television set off has little in common either with the intermission of a play or an opera or with the grand finale of a feature film, when the lights slowly come back on and memory begins its mysterious work. Indeed, if anything like critical distance is still possible in film, it is surely bound up with memory itself” (Jameson 1984, 70). Thus, I am not sure that film, because of its absolute conclusion, necessarily creates critical distance. 38 Noticeably, the play’s experimentalism is, indeed, an effect of its production process. Both James Fisher in “‘Boogie Woogie Landscapes’: The Dramatic/Poetic Collage of Ntozake Shange” and Janet Brown in Feminist Drama: Definition and Critical Analysis describe how the production process informs its experimentalism.

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Because it “began as a performance of poems, dance, and music by Shange and friends in San Francisco Bay area bars,” it also evolved as an interactive project where the “selection of poems and music changed frequently during this period and continued to evolve when the performers took their production into New York” (Brown 1979, 116). In this, it becomes clear that we are not faced with an original text that is subsequently to be performed, but rather a piece where performance is part of its origination. Thus, the play evolved out of Ntozake Shange’s involvement in dance, poetry readings, theatre, and the Women’s Movement, rather than being written as a coherent dramatic piece. Indeed, Brown argues that Oz Scott, the stage director for the New York opening, “suggested final changes to make the performance more theatrical and cohesive” (Brown 1979, 117). 39 Having said this, it has also been criticized for its “harsh depiction of black men,” and its “perceived attack upon the chauvinism of males” (Fisher 2007, 86 and 88). 40 Many critics point out how the different colours form the colours of the rainbow—all except the colour brown. In her analysis of the joker figure in for colored girls, Jane Splawn sees the lady in brown as the principal “Joker” “because it is she whom the audience sees and hears first, and it is she who establishes the theme of the play” (Splawn 1998, 388). El-Shayal argues that the lady in brown is “the only character who does not represent a color of the rainbow,” and by this, she “is meant to stand out by this distinction, to observe and to comment on the action” (El-Shayal 2003–04, 365). Shange’s use of colour, I would argue, is a very nice, slightly ironic comment on the concept “women of colour” by having the colours represent the colours of the rainbow, rather than skin colour. The fact that colour resides on the women’s clothes rather than on their skin adds to this ironic touch. 41 Note how the idea of performativity works differently here than in The Women, where I argue that the relativism inherent in the concept becomes troublesome. 42 Again, notice the difference in argument to my analysis of irony in The Women where power is transferred from the speaking subjects to the reader or the viewer. 43 In his run-through of the play’s history, James Fisher explains that the play was an immediate success and “gave 867 performances in New York, leading to a cast album and a PBS TV ‘American Playhouse’ film in 1982. For colored girls won numerous honours, including an Obie Award, an Outer Critics Award, an Audelco Award, and a Mademoiselle Award, as well as nominations for a Tony Award, a Grammy for the cast album, and an Emmy for the television film” (Fisher 2007, 85). 44 The second film is set in an apartment building where a group of women live. Those women are amalgamations of the different women of colour in the play, produced as coherent characters. For instance, we are introduced to a woman named Juanita Simms who runs a charity organization helping young women in the neighbourhood. This is a frustrating and tiring job, and she is in need of comfort from her boyfriend who is constantly cheating on her and letting her down. When we meet her the first time, she leaves a plant outside her boyfriend’s door and recites the poem “no assistance” (delivered by lady in red in the play). Later on,

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when she has once again taken him back and is, once again, let down by him, she recites “somebody almost walked off with all my stuff” (a poem delivered by lady in green in the play)—this takes place while we are simultaneously shown images of all the other women—as if it is directed at all of them. When the boyfriend (called Frank) makes a final attempt to get Juanita back, she delivers the poem, “No more lover poems #1”: “leave bitterness in somebody else’s cup—I couldn’t stand being colored and sorry at the same time” (Shange 1977, 42). This example shows how the film ties the poems together by means of characterization and plot. Other characters we meet are the sexually aggressive, Tangy, her sister, Nyla, and their crazy mom (played by Whoopi Goldberg). Also included is the social worker, Kelly Walkin, the career woman, Mrs Bradmore (played by Janet Jackson), and the always nosy, but always caring, manager of the building, Gilda. Thus, the film, in its entirety, creates clearly differentiated characters who recite poems in a narratively comprehensible way. It ends with all women meeting on the rooftop reciting “my love is too beautiful to be thrown to be thrown back in my face” in a way that brings closure to the whole film. 45 The ending has been extensively discussed. The most classic interpretation is that Lula, as a representative of white culture and white supremacy, kills Clay (out of necessity or will), precisely because he has revealed his “black throbbing heart.” John Lindberg claims that “when Clay turns to stone defiance, her only recourse to protect herself from her own ignorance is to kill him” (Lindberg 1978, 142). Sollors similarly argues that “Lula must crucify Christ, must silence Clay in order to bring the Dutchman ritual to an end. Before Clay’s speech, Lula represented aesthetic protest as a challenge to Clay’s middle-class mask; now, Clay symbolizes the surrealist-realist threat of Black Nationalism to Lula as white America” (Sollors 1978, 128). However, Löfgren opposes such an interpretation, claiming that the text “does not support this interpretation” (Löfgren 2003, 438). Löfgren makes a strong point when she emphasizes that Lula does not kill Clay when he is angry at the height of his aggressive speech, but rather after his exasperated defeat. According to Löfgren, this suggests that Lula kills Clay not because he is too violent and threatening, but because he is too white and middle class. She kills him because of his defeat; that is, when he is revealed as a failed revolutionary.

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INDEX

absence absence/presence dichotomy, 70, 105, 127, 220 and acousmetre, 70 and irony, 104, 127 and writing, 2, 19, 37, 39, 63, 64, 68, 70, 77, 86, 104, 188, 195, 196 of male norm, 120, 121, 126 of reality, 143, 144 abstraction aesthetics of abstraction, 199, 201, 202, 203, 207, 209, 210, 211 and reification, 150, 154, 167, 171, 184 acousmetre, 32, 63, 70, 72, 89, 92 deacousmatization, 32, 89, 94 Aczel, Richard, 16, 17, 18, 21, 53, 68 African American, 190, 198, 200, 203, 204, 207, 209, 211, 212, 218, 220, 222 agency, 2, 3, 4, 6, 23, 24, 35, 42, 53, 164 alienation, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 91, 97, 183 Althusser, Louis, 98 antiphrasis, 103, 104, 105, 125 arbitrariness, arbitrary, 2, 10, 36, 39, 77, 103, 135 Aristotle, 23 aside, 8, 34, 83, 87, 88, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 146, 177 attribution, 18, 19, 20, 22, 34, 54, 58, 65, 126, 136, 152 Austin, J.L., 18, 33, 34, 35, 36, 157, 158, 161, 169, 171, 173, 177, 181, 182

Bakhtin, Michail, 37, 57, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 181 Baraka, Amiri, 187, 190, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219 Barthes, Roland, 18 Baudrillard, Jean, 137, 143, 144, 145, 146 Belsey, Catherine, 57 Benjamin, Walter, 12, 13, 14, 15, 30, 31, 63, 90 Bigsby, C.W.E, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 60, 67, 75, 83, 164, 212 Booth, Wayne, 99, 103, 104, 108, 109, 114, 115, 116 Boothe, Clare, 9, 99, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122 Brecht, Bertolt, 1, 11, 39, 40, 41, 43, 71, 72, 90, 91, 97, 98, 150 Brucher, Richard, 148, 149 Burke, Sally, 198 Butler, Judith, 100, 109, 110, 114, 130, 131, 134, 135, 136, 147, 225 camera angle, 66, 180 Carlson, Susan, 116, 117 Chatman, Seymour, 23, 24, 25, 53, 225 Chion, Michel, 1, 2, 8, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 39, 41, 48, 63, 68, 69, 70, 73, 88, 89, 92 choreopoem, dramapoem, 198, 200 class, 16, 45, 73, 91, 100, 116, 118, 119, 120, 122, 125, 127, 140, 141, 152, 156, 160, 197, 199 and identity, 106 class distinction, 116, 117 middle-class, 217

244 upper-class, 105, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 126, 130, 141 working-class, 4, 106, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 126, 140 close-up, 66, 90, 95, 132 Cohn, Ruby, 158, 159 commodification, 150, 153, 160, 168 community, 44, 45, 47, 207 African American community, 200 female community, 116 concreteness, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 181, 209 confession, 44, 50, 51, 52, 66, 146, 164 consumption, 199 cultural consumption, 184 of goods, 123, 126, 128, 129, 137 of images, 128, 135 of surfaces/spectacle, 128 crisis, 36, 170, 171, 173, 174, 176, 177, 182 and the concrete, 170, 171, 173 cynicism, 82, 87, 105, 142, 148, 197, 222 dance, 199 Danius, Sara, 222 de Beauvoir, Simone, 120 de Man, Paul, 12, 15, 31, 37, 38 Dean, Anne, 158, 162, 166, 168 deconstruction, deconstructionist, 5, 6, 18, 25, 35, 187, 188, 197, 222 defamiliarization, 37, 69, 77, 107, 108 Deleuze, Gilles, 177, 183, 192 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 25, 28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 64, 74, 77, 173, 221 desire, 1, 46, 47, 50, 52, 66, 75, 76, 79, 83, 101, 108, 111, 126, 132, 136, 188, 213 diegetic, 21, 23, 54

Index différance, 6, 17, 30 dissemination, 31, 33, 37, 39, 40, 49, 67 Doherty, Brigid, 90, 91, 94, 98 Dorff, Linda, 162 drag, 134, 135 Dutchman, 10, 187, 190, 211, 212, 213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 221, 223 Elam, Keir, 22, 34, 35, 36, 37, 157, 158, 168, 169, 170, 173, 174 Elleström, Lars, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 110, 115 El-Shayal, Dalia, 199, 201, 203, 205 epic theatre, 39, 41, 71, 97 essentialism, 191, 192, 196, 197, 200, 211, 215, 216, 218, 220, 221, 222, 223 strategic essentialism, 222 exchange-value, 150, 153, 156 exteriority, 85 Fanon, Frantz, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218 feminism, feminist, 4, 16, 78, 207, 225 postmodern feminism, postfeminism, 139 Ferguson, John, 212 Ferres, John, 45 fetishization, 30, 132, 136, 137, 152 film music, 29, 66 Fisher, James, 198, 202, 205, 206 Fludernik, Monika, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 68 for colored girls, 10, 187, 190, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206, 209, 211, 217, 221 Foucault, Michel, 1, 3, 43, 46, 47, 70, 162, 192 fragmentation, 129, 173, 175, 177, 178, 182, 183, 184 Frank, Rebecca Morgan, 198 Freud, 75 Garner, Stanton B., 198, 199, 201, 202, 203 Geis, Deborah, 164

Voicing the Text: American Drama and the Production of Voice Genette, Gerard, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 53, 225 gestus, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 97, 98 Gibson, Andrew, 16, 17, 18, 19, 24, 25, 26, 29, 37, 54 Glengarry Glen Ross, 10, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 158, 159, 161, 162, 165, 167, 170, 173, 174, 175, 177, 181, 182, 183, 184, 189 Glengarry Glen Ross film, 183 Grewal, Inderpal, 4 Griffin, Alice, 45, 52, 54 Haltung, 92 Harris, William, 219 Hayes, Richard, 45 heterogeneity, 37, 193, 195, 198, 210, 211, 218, 220 hierarchy of discourses, 57, 60, 61, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69 Hill, Philip, 46 hooks, bell, 187, 190, 191, 194, 198, 208, 213, 218, 219, 221, 223 Hudgins, Christopher, 148 Hudson, Theodore, 212 humanism and individualism, 4, 28, 78, 79 and voice, 28, 73, 147 humanist ideology, 17, 91, 148, 212, 222 Hutcheon, Linda, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 115, 139, 143 hyperreality, 101, 138, 145 Hytner, Nicholas, 65 imitation, 38, 85, 91, 94, 105, 109, 110, 112, 121, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 144 implied author, 20 indebtedness, 28, 30, 63, 102, 103, 107 individualism, individuality, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 16, 17, 28, 30, 37, 40, 41, 42, 54, 68, 69, 72, 73, 159, 160, 161, 162, 175, 187, 190, 197, 209, 210, 211, 225

245

intentionality, intention, 10, 12, 13, 14, 17, 26, 34, 35, 36, 37, 97, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 108, 115, 161, 189, 197 interiority, 2, 27, 29, 38, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 90, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 146, 197, 201 interlingual translation, 14 intersemiotic translation, 14 intralingual translation, 14 introversion, 207, 208, 217 irony and intention, 103, 106 dramatic irony, 107, 109, 110, 112, 119 general irony, 105 inclusionary irony, 139, 140, 143, 144 political irony, 99, 100, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 122, 123, 125 polysemic irony, 112 postmodern irony, 101, 110, 135, 137 relation to satire, 108 relativization of irony, 107, 110, 143 stable irony, 103, 104, 107, 124, 125 Jacobs, Dorothy, 162 Jahn, Manfred, 18, 23, 25, 53, 56, 58 Jakobson, Roman, 14 Jameson, Fredric, 91, 92, 129, 135, 136, 137, 145, 150, 155, 156, 162, 168, 178, 182, 183, 184 Klaver, Elizabeth, 151 Knight, Charles A., 109 late capitalism, 129, 148, 149, 152, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 168, 174, 178, 180, 181, 182, 184, 185, 189 Lindberg, John, 213 literalization, 71 Löfgren, Lotta, 211, 212, 213, 214 logocentrism, 4, 5, 28, 30, 34, 74

246 Lukács, Georg, 36, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175 Mahurin, Sarah, 199, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207 male gaze, 132 Mamet, David, 10, 147, 151, 158, 164, 165, 166, 167, 176, 179 Marx, Karl, 150, 151, 152, 154, 162, 192 marxism, marxist, 4, 78, 98, 105, 135, 136, 149, 168, 171, 190 masculinity, 131, 133, 134 materialization of body, 6 metafiction, 71, 72 metaphor, metaphroical, 18, 19, 21, 24, 25, 27, 62, 142, 195, 204, 215 Miller, Arthur, 9, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 71, 72, 142 mimesis, mimetic, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 40, 53, 69, 72 monologue, 78, 80, 83, 93, 94, 96, 163, 164, 207, 210 Moss, Leonard, 54 Muecke, Douglas, 105, 108 Mulvey, Laura, 132 Murray, Edward, 54 musical, musical numbers, 100, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134 narratology, narratological, 17, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 55, 56, 225 narrator, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 44, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 78, 103, 188 and knowledge, 59, 60, 61, 68 and power, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64 covert narrator, 21, 23, 53, 56 intrusive narrator, 59, 69 overt narrator, 21, 53 subjectivized narrator, 24, 56, 62, 63 Nightingale, Benedict, 167

Index norm male norm, 120, 121, 122, 123, 126, 127, 133 unsaid norm, 106, 112, 115, 116, 121, 123, 134, 136 nostalgia, 136, 145, 148 O’Neill, Eugene, 9, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 88, 97, 98 objectification, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 160, 168, 171, 197, 218, 220, 223 palimpsestic, palimpsest, 191, 194, 219 pastiche, 101, 127, 135, 136, 145 performativity, 130, 204, 206, 211 and irony, 109, 110, 121, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137 performative/narrative dichotomy, 22, 23, 25, 35, 36, 53, 54 Pfister, Joel, 75, 81 Piggford, George, 212, 213 polyphony, 43, 68, 72 Poovey, Mary, 154, 155, 156, 159 Popkin, Henry, 46, 54 postcolonialism, postcolonialist, 4, 78, 190 postmodernity, postmodern, postmodernism, 10, 101, 105, 106, 110, 115, 127, 128, 129, 135, 136, 137, 139, 143, 145, 148, 149, 150, 151, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161, 170, 174, 175, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 189, 194, 197 poststructuralism, 2, 4, 16, 17, 18, 20, 27, 30, 38, 102, 103, 104, 106, 109, 112, 192, 221 race, 16, 45, 49, 73, 100, 197, 206, 207, 211, 212, 213, 214, 216 race-war, 212, 213 rationality, 155, 158, 161, 170 realism, realistic, 8, 57, 68, 71, 72, 77, 78, 86, 88, 90, 92, 93, 97, 127, 145, 198, 202, 210, 212, 213

Voicing the Text: American Drama and the Production of Voice reality effect, 80, 81 reconstruction, 16 and irony, 103, 104, 106, 111, 115, 188 and translation, 12, 13, 30, 31 and voice, 18 referentiality, 105, 129, 134, 135, 144, 145, 151, 202 reification, reified, 10, 137, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184, 189, 210, 212 and language, 165, 166, 167, 173, 184 reified mind, 160, 161, 164 relations of production, 149, 153, 156, 161, 162, 165, 168 repartee, 112, 129, 138, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 202, 204, 205, 207, 210 repression, 47, 48, 52, 67, 75, 79, 83, 212, 218 Richardson, Brian, 18 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 17 Roudané, Matthew, 148 sales-talk, 159, 181, 182 Sarrazac, Jean-Pierre, 31 satire, 9, 99, 100, 101, 109, 111, 113, 116, 120, 122, 123, 127, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 189 and imitation, 109 and irony, 9, 99, 108, 109, 110 and perfomance, 109 and performance, 109, 112 and satire, 108 political satire, 99, 100 relativization of satire, 110 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 171 Scheie, Timothy, 85, 97 schizophrenia, 129, 135, 183 Schvey, Henry, 149

247

Searle, John, 18, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 53, 157, 158, 161, 169, 171, 173, 177, 181, 182 sexuality, 47, 48, 52, 66, 67, 79, 132, 134, 192, 199, 211, 212, 221 Shange, Ntozake, 187, 190, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 211, 217 showing/telling, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 53, 54 signification, signifying, 15, 19, 22, 23, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 76, 89, 90, 97, 98, 106, 107, 120, 125, 126, 129, 134, 135, 137, 146, 177, 187, 201, 207 signifier, 17, 129, 135, 192 empty signifier, 87 materiality of the signifier, 177 textual signifier, 18 simulacrum, 135, 136, 137, 143 simulation, 101, 138, 143, 144, 145, 146, 151 Sollors, Werner, 212, 213, 214 spectacle, 23, 128, 130, 131, 132, 135, 136, 144 speech-act, 18, 33, 34, 165, 171 Spivak, Gayatry Chakavorty, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 200, 208, 210, 211, 213, 215, 217, 218, 220, 221, 222 Splawn, Jane, 205, 208 stage direction, 9, 40, 44, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 60, 64, 65, 66, 80, 81, 83 stammer, stammering, 177, 180, 181, 183 stereotype, 120, 207, 210, 220 Strange Interlude, 9, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 88, 91, 94, 97, 189 Strange Interlude film, 92 stutter, stuttering, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184

248 subaltern, 66, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 208, 211, 213, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222 suppression, 47, 48, 75, 106, 215, 216 surface, 22, 39, 89, 128, 129, 135, 136, 180, 181, 182 and flow, 181 and spectacle, 128, 135 bodily surface, 97, 98 surface/depth dichotomy, 98, 101, 105, 110, 116, 145 surplus-value, 151 suspension of disbelief, 8, 93, 94, 189, 197 synchronization, 29, 30, 32, 33, 39, 73, 87, 89, 92, 96, 124, 172 Technicolor, 127, 128 temporality, 36, 60, 86, 95, 96, 214 the already-said, already-written, 3, 31, 196 The Crucible, 9, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 63, 64, 65, 69, 72, 73, 80, 81, 188 The Crucible film, 63, 68 The Opposite Sex, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 144, 145 The Women, 9, 99, 100, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123, 127, 134, 135, 137, 189 The Women film, 107, 123, 124, 126, 128, 137, 138, 139, 143, 144 Timpane, John, 198, 204, 205, 206 translation, 3, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 31, 32, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 54, 59, 63

Index and alienation, 38 and copy, 11 and drama, 39, 41 and embodiment, 57 and failure, 12, 30 and origin, 11, 12, 30, 31 and performance, 15, 33, 37, 39, 54, 58, 63 and text/performance, 15, 30, 38 instersemiotic translation, 54 interlingual translation, 14, 15 intersemiotic translation, 14, 15, 41, 42, 44, 56 intralingual translation, 14, 15 translation text/film, 9 translation text/performance, 14, 56 truth, 30, 39, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 50, 51, 52, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 82, 103, 110, 130, 134, 143, 144, 145, 146 within the true, 44, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 60 Turner, Clifford, 2, 26, 27, 31, 41 use-value, 150, 153, 154, 156 verfremdung, 39, 91 violence, 191, 212, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221 epistemic violence, 191, 193 vococentrism, 28, 48, 68, 71 voiceover, 29, 69, 70, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 103, 134 Williams, Sherley Anne, 212, 214 witchery, 45, 51 Withers-Wilson, Nan, 27 Wolff, Tamsen, 75, 81 Worster, David, 165, 166 Zinder, David, 26