VIVA VOCE: THE EFFICACY OF ORAL INTERPRETATION

1 0 8 Y V I V A V O C E T H E E F F I C A C Y O F O R A L I N T E R P R E T A T I O N J O S E P H R O A C H The year was 1952, and W. K. Wimsatt wouldn’t budge. Pleading overwork, the Yale English professor politely but firmly declined an invitation to speak to the faculty and students of the newly reorganized Department of Oral Interpretation of Literature in the School of Speech at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He told Wallace Bacon, the new chair and his would-be host, that he was busy writing a book on ‘‘general literary theory.’’ Very likely that book was The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954), which collected revisions of some earlier essays, including his oft-cited collaboration with Monroe Beardsley, ‘‘The Intentional Fallacy.’’ Bacon’s unrequited wooing stemmed from a deep ambition to reform his department. Since shortly after the Civil War, his predecessors had been teaching ‘‘Elocution’’ – platform declamations of Pericles’ funeral oration and the Gettysburg Address in pear-shaped tones – to Women’s Christian Temperance Union aspirants and daughters of Chicago meatpacking magnates. Bacon sought to use the opportunity of his appointment to bring critical rigor to the relation between literature and speech. As revealed by the voluminous correspondence and manuscripts of the Wallace Bacon Papers in the Northwestern University Archives, 1 0 9 R Wimsatt’s note of regret was but a momentary setback in a long campaign of program building. Bacon and his departmental colleagues Charlotte Lee and Robert Breen aspired to join forces with the New Critics. They did so in the cause of interpreting poetry according to what the words of the poems themselves said, free from the distractions of literary biography, which they saw as the bottomless source of the poet’s ‘‘intention,’’ among other excrescent considerations. Rather than publishing their interpretations of poems and other literary works in the form of books and articles, however, the Northwestern Interpretation faculty performed them out loud – viva voce, as it were, or with ‘‘the living voice’’ – in their o≈ce studios, fitted with lecterns for that purpose, and on auditorium stages, for the better edification of their students, colleagues , and a local public of aurally literate cognoscenti. While their colleagues located across the courtyard in University Hall performed on the pages of PMLA and Tri-Quarterly, the oral interpreters gave recitals. The New Critical stance made up only one tenet of the programmatic reform, however, and other ideas, some of them richly contradictory, flourished in the fifty-year expansion of the department and its eventual transformation into ‘‘Performance Studies.’’ When Wallace Bacon died in 2001, he was eulogized by the Tony Award–winning director-adaptor Frank Galati (The Grapes of Wrath, 1990). Galati reminisced about his formative experience as Bacon’s doctoral student, and he took stock of what he was able to pass on to his doctoral students, including the Tony Award–winning director-adaptor Mary Zimmerman (Metamorphoses, 2002). What Galati described as the experience of Bacon’s teaching resembles the inculcation of the ‘‘negative capability’’ that John Keats attributed to Shakespeare’s empathic creation of his characters . Bacon believed that the oral interpretation of literature, by requiring the reader to enter fully into the words of the poem, drew the interpreter out of himself or herself, and that what he or she gained from acting a role or embodying a poetic voice was ‘‘a sense of the Other,’’ an imaginative grasp of ‘‘what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes.’’ That experience is physical and emotional as well as intellectual – and that, as I want the following memoir to show, is the e≈cacy of oral interpretation, which compels embodied attention to the voices of the poems, not the poets. 1 1 0 R O A C H Y The word e≈cacy is cognate to e√ort, e≈ciency, e√ectiveness, e√ervescence , e≈gy, and e√eminacy through their shared connections to the idea of producing, bringing forth, bringing...