Voice and Narration in Postmodern Drama

In a recent discussion of narrative voice in this journal, Richard Aczel observed: "As an entity attributed to (silent) written texts, the concept of voice inevitably raises questions of ontology and metaphoricity . . . . The question of 'who speaks?' in narrative discourse invites the further question of whether texts can really be said to 'speak' at all." ¹ Such a formulation, though it may well pass unremarked on by most theorists of narration, nevertheless betrays a bias toward the written text that leaves unexamined all performed narratives that are indeed literally voiced: oral tales and epics as well as spoken narrations in drama, film, video, and performance art. At one level, the answer to Aczel's conundrum is deceptively simple: narrators in written texts "speak" in basically the same way that narrators speak in oral texts. A person who writes an epic is reproducing a format established by earlier bards who only declaimed their narratives--and an author like Milton, who dictated his epics to his daughters, is presumably situated somewhere in between these two positions. When he said: "all mist from thence / Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight," seeing was meant metaphorically, but the telling was literal--and was performed by the very act of its being uttered. ²

But if we have solved one problem (a written text may "speak" in a manner entirely analogous to that in which an oral text is spoken), we have only begun to scratch the surface of the larger issue: voice may be severed from what it speaks--and indeed from itself--in a variety of ways that have been insufficiently explored. The example of Milton suggestssome of the complexities and contradictions inherent in the act of performed narration. What happens to the voice once it is read silently rather than heard? Whose voice is speaking (through) Milton: the divine inspiration he claims, or the generic formula he is obligated to repeat? What is the status of the voice in a public reading, either by the author or by another reader? When the text speaks autobiographically, as it does in this passage, does the voice of the narrator merge with that of the author, as autobiographical theory postulates? ³ Finally, what happens to the distinction between oral and written epics when illiterate bards pause so their words will be accurately transcribed, and Paradise Lost, that most seemingly "written" of all epics, is in fact composed and delivered orally?

As we will see, there are numerous oddities and fissures in narration in drama, especially in its more recent permutations. Unfortunately, this practice is little known and largely undertheorized. Narratology's neglect of the narrating voice in performance is actually quite surprising, given the wide dissemination of important work on narration in film by numerous scholars. By contrast, the critical literature on narration in drama is still relatively slight and virtually unknown beyond a few theorists of drama. ⁴ And even among such theorists it is not recognized as fully as it deserves to be: as recently as 1980, Keir Elam could write that drama is without narratorial mediation. ⁵

In what follows, I will provide a brief survey of three basic strategies of narration in drama and go on to note the distinctively postmodern transformations that some of these strategies have recently undergone, paying particular attention to the role of literal voice(s) in these works. I will not be dealing with brief narratives spoken by one character to another, as in the recounting of an offstage death in Greek tragedy, but rather ontologically larger acts that engender or constitute the represented action. The works discussed will include narratives articulated by characters who are present in the world that their discourse creates (homodiegetic), as well as narratives produced by agents that are external to the storyworld (heterodiegetic). Narration in drama is so widespread yet so little appreciated that I will identify several examples to suggest the range and extent of...