Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratology of Drama

I'm not a theorist. I am not an authoritative or reliable commentator on the dramatic scene, the social scene, any scene. I write plays, when I can manage it, and that's all. That's the sum of it. So I'm speaking with some reluctance, knowing that there are at least twenty-four possible aspects of any single statement, depending on where you are standing at the time or on what the weather's like. A categorical statement, I find, will never stay where it is and be finite. It will immediately be subject to modification by the other twenty-three possibilities of it. ¹

I. A Note on Method

Speaking on the occasion of the National Student Drama Festival in Bristol in 1962, Harold Pinter presents a pointedly personal statement and at the same time rides a barely hidden attack against theory. Drama theorists, Pinter alleges, may think they know what they are doing, but they are actually prone to pronouncing "categorical statements" based on contingent positions. Once one acknowledges all the "possibilities," however, as Pinter does on his part, it is easy to get lost in the multifacetedness of modern reality. I believe this is an accurate representation of the dilemma that threatens both literary theory and interpretive practice. But does this mean that these enterprises are doomed to failure? Hopefully, this is not necessarily so.

Oddly enough, Pinter's dilemma is explicitly addressed in statistical theory, and perhaps there is an interdisciplinary lesson to be learned here. In statistics, the validity of a hypothesis depends on an assessment of the dangers of accepting or rejecting it, and on setting suitable error tolerances. There are two prominent errors: (1) to accept a hypothesis as right when it is wrong (given a fuller set of data), and (2) to reject a hypothesis as false when it is actually true. ² Of course, truth and falsehood are not so easily accessible in the literary field, and literary theory in particular has to rely on argumentative values such as plausibility, face validity, efficiency, and productivity. In principle, however, the statistical precept applies. Methodologically, then, this paper will assess the relative costs and merits of interpretive hypotheses and attempt to construct a plausible, consistent, and position-conscious conceptual framework which "explains more phenomena more adequately." ³

The specific question I am addressing is whether and to what extent drama, like epic narrative, admits of the narratological concepts of a narrating instance or a narrative voice. Heeding Pinter's critique, I will first make an attempt to situate myself within a range of competing approaches to drama (section two). Section three tackles the voice issue by discussing traditional speech-act accounts of drama. Finally, section four reviews Seymour Chatman's argument for a show-er narrator and begins a tentative investigation of voice and other "signs of the narrating" ⁴ both in the dramatic text and in the dramatic performance. Complementing to some extent Brian Richardson's project in this issue and in earlier articles, ⁵ the overall aim is to prepare the ground for a narratology of drama.

II. Situating Oneself

In order to address the first of Pinter's charges, let us accept that every modern critic and theorist must identify and question his or her position. The most natural way of doing this is to associate onself with what Stanley Fish calls an interpretive community, a move that often also amounts to dissociating oneself from other interpretive communities. ⁶ The basic idea is that it is only by balancing competing beliefs that one can take a stand and meaningfully contribute to the issues, politics, and agendas of one's discipline. Of course, any one person can belong to several communities, and each community is likely to break down into several subcommunities. One can be a structuralist or a poststructuralist, one may be interested in the production side or the reception...