Drama and the Dialogic Imagination: The Heidi Chronicles and Fefu and Her Friends

Drama and the Dialogic Imagination: The Heidi Chronicles and Fefu and Her Friends HELENE KEYSSAR I first came to know the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin in the mid-seventies. [ Increasingly hailed as one of the most daring and profound philosopher-critics of the twentieth century, Baklnin was difficult to read but easy to admire.' Indeed, as striking as has been the growing interest in Balchtin's ideas has been the range of people whose interest he has aroused - feminists and nonfeminists, Marxists and anti-Marxists. modernists and postmodernists. social scientists, linguists, psychologists, literary critics and philosophers. Few seemed to notice that they were in strange company. The only people blatantly missing in the crowd were others like me - drama critics and practitioners of theatre. From the start, however, my interest in Bakhtin's ideas was troubled or, in Bakhtin's own lenns, multi-voiced. Like several other contemporary critics, most notably Wayne Booth,) I had found both a confluence and antagonism between some key aspects of feminist thought and some key elements of Balchtin's ideas. At the same time, and in part because of the commonalities with contemporary feminist approaches, almost everything Balchtin had to say about language and representations sharply illuminates my ways of thinking about drama, the cultural realm to which I was and remain part~cularly attached as both a critic and director; indeed, even the odd names of Bakhtin's key concepts - dialogism, polyphony, heteroglossia, camivalization , hybridization - seemed to me not just applicable to drama but centered in the most elemental attributes of dramatic forms. As I have previously argued, following 1.L. Styan's lead.' meaning is made in the theatre by the interaction and, to use Bakhtin's term" the interanimation oftwo or more forms of communication (or semiotic systems). The perfonned drama is understood as simultaneously entire unto itself and part of the whole culture; the cultural material from which the drama is created is repeatedly mediated and revised as it interacts with the playwright, the performers, and, The Heidi Chronicles/Fefu and Her Friends finally, the audience. The continuous recreation of meaning, what Balchtin calls the heteroglossia of communication, is the basic condition and phenomenon of theatre. This condition is not only inherently present in any dramatic performance but is represented in the interaction of human voices or consciousnesses on stage. The natural condition of drama is thus that of dialogism, the quality that Balchtin argued throughout his life was key to the deprivileging of absolute, authoritarian discourses.' Yet, Balchtin not only ignored drama in most of his writings, in explicit favor of the dialogic or polyphonous novel, but in one of his most important works, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, he explicitly denounced dramatic literature.. assaulting it with his unique curse: drama was monoiogic. The passage in which Balchtin pronounces this malediction is uncharacteristically straightforward, and, because it sets the ground for what I have come to think of as the central issues relevant to the roles of drama in society, it merits quoting in full: Literature of recent times knows only the dramatic dialogue and to some extent the philosophical dialogue weakened into a mere fonn of exposition, a pedagogical device. And, in any case, the dramatic dialogue in drama and the dramatized dialogue in the narrative forms are always encased in a firm and stable monoiogic framework. In drama, of course, this monologic framework does not find direct verbal expression, but precisely in drama is it especially monolithic. The rejoinders in drama do not rip apart the represented world, do not make it multi-leveled; on the contrary if they are to be authentically dramatic. these rejoinders necessitate the utmost monolithic unity of that world. In drama the world must be made from a single piece. Any weakening of this monolithic quality leads to a weakening of dramatic effect. The characters come together dialogically in the unified field of vision of author, director, and audience, against the clearly defined background of a single-tiered world. The whole concept of a dramatic action as that which resolves all dialogic oppositions, is purely monologic. A true multiplicity of levels would destroy drama, because dramatic action, relying as it does upon...