Читать книгу Social Minds in Drama - Golnaz Shams - Страница 14

Most narrative studies on drama have concentrated on its performative aspect. The performed version requires a completely different mode of interpretation than the written version since the medium is different. Unlike the latter where the ←22 | 23→only medium used is language, in the former there is a strong tendency towards the deployment of the visual and auditory medium. With the playscript, there is a fixed and unalterable product at one’s disposal for analysis, whereas each and every performance is actually a different reading of its original playscript. Referring back to Jahn’s definition, it can be said that one is analysing a written form of the narrative genre.

I would like to overcome the shortcomings of the two disciplines, drama studies and narrative studies, and bring them closer together. I will do so by dealing with the playscript as a narrative form and focusing on characterisation from a new, different angle: their intermental and collective function. In the past few decades, narratology and narrative studies have evolved and changed a great deal and have come to include a broad range of genres and media within their theoretical approaches. Whereas classical narratology mainly saw the novel and short fiction as the exclusive material of analysis, nowadays there are no objections to including drama in its portfolio as well. Moreover, classical narratologists dismissed drama on the grounds that it does not have a figure who narrates. There have been many attempts to overcome these shortcomings by regarding all text-types as narrative. Chatman (1990), applying a more liberal method, argues that all texts that tell a story share the basic necessary narrative elements such as characters, temporal structure and a narrator (even a covert one). Chatman introduced the term “playscript mode” – which is not exclusive to drama, but also applies to novels – that facilitated a more nuanced categorisation of different types of narratives.

However, even though following the inclusion of all text-types into a model of literary genres, literary scholars have often made use of narratological tools to analyse drama, there continues to exist an unease in studying the written form of drama (hence playscript) as narrative. Since the 1970s, most work on drama has been primarily focused on the performance and the staging of drama and the playscript is no longer the main point of interest.

In drama studies, there are many approaches to characterisation, but there is no systematic theory of characterisation in drama (and none with a focus on groups). It is generally believed that characters can have a textual value or a referential value. Many scholars have discussed this aspect and have given it different names: text-embedded and lifelike characters, or textual and referential characters, or as Margolin puts it, semiotic and representational characters (Margolin 1990b: 105). No matter what one prefers to call these two poles, critics agree that characters in a narrative move along this scale from the textuality pole to the representational one. They never have a fixed position and they oscillate between the two poles. As purely textual elements, characters ←23 | 24→are regarded as mere linguistic devices, proper names or pronouns in a text. Moving closer towards the referential end of the scale, but still close to the textual end, they are no longer treated as mere grammatical entities, but as complex literary constructs in the text. They are thus, more or less aesthetic objects in the narrative work. On the next level, characters become more of what Margolin refers to as “theme anthropomorphized” (1990b: 106): this means that they represent an idea, ideology or theme in the text. Here they become more context-bound than text-bound. Finally, at the other end of the scale characters are regarded as if they were real persons, as if they conformed to real-world paradigms. Their actions and thoughts are seen and analysed as if they were real human beings. As I will explain later (Chapter Three), it will be most fruitful to have both poles in mind while analysing a playscript. In the context of this study, and specifically for the construction of the characters’ minds, it will be profitable to treat the characters’ minds like a real person’s mind. On the other hand, one should never lose sight of the fact that the character is ultimately a narrative agent, a construct, and that only by nature of that constructedness are we able to reconstruct, to a certain degree its mind and its interaction with other minds.

Typically in drama the characters, occupying the storyworld make an appearance on its textual level. Rare exceptions to this rule include instances when a play uses disembodied voices of characters, that is when we just “hear” but do not “see” them, or on occasions where there are pivotal characters whom we get to know exclusively through the descriptions and discourses of the other characters. Manfred Pfister provides a very detailed and comprehensive analysis for this. Most of my initial characterisation techniques described in this study (see Chapter Three) are based on the model he proposes in his The Theory and Analysis of Drama (1991b).⁹ The reader is provided with information to construct the characters through two different information channels, either the author/authorial agency or the characters themselves in the play. The authorial information in a play is usually restricted to minimal information provided in the prologues (if existing), in the introductory parts to the play or each scene, or more dominantly, in the stage directions (whose extensiveness varies from playwright to playwright). Most of the information the reader gains about the characters in drama is provided through figural characterisation techniques: from the characters themselves. Characters are constantly providing ←24 | 25→us with information about themselves (what Palmer calls embedded narratives) or other characters (what Palmer calls doubly embedded narratives).

In the case of authorial presentation, it is clear that any information about the character that is directly provided, for example, details about his/her physical appearance or character traits, is considered an explicit characterisation statement. Implicit statements are more subtle and might be found in inherent comparisons and contrasts between the characters indicated by the author; moreover, they can be manifested in the employment of techniques such as character foils, where the reader is able to compare and contrast the behaviour and actions of two characters in different dramatic situations. Other implicit statements serving as part of authorial characterisation involve ideological positioning of the characters, as in certain catchphrases that connect them to specific ideological beliefs or groups. In drama studies, there is an unease about treating a playscript as a whole, autonomous narrative consolidating all the parts – stage directions, introductions and the dialogue. I would like to introduce a model where all these parts contribute to telling a story about fictional characters interacting in a storyworld; an inclusive model where one can make use of the clues available in all the parts of the narrative.