SOURCE: Keyssar, Helene. “Drama and the Dialogic Imagination: The Heidi Chronicles and Fefu and Her Friends.” Modern Drama 34, no. 1 (March 1991): 88-106.

[In the following essay, Keyssar contrasts the semiotic differences between The Heidi Chronicles and Maria Irene Fornes's Fefu and Her Friends, refuting the contention by philosopher-critic Mikhail Bakhtin that all dramatic literature is “monologic” by demonstrating the confluence between Bakhtinian criticism and contemporary feminist thought.]

I first came to know the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin in the mid-seventies.¹ Increasingly hailed as one of the most daring and profound philosopher-critics of the twentieth century, Bakhtin was difficult to read but easy to admire.² Indeed, as striking as has been the growing interest in Bakhtin'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 terms, multi-voiced. Like several other contemporary critics, most notably Wayne Booth,³ I had found both a confluence and antagonism between some key aspects of feminist thought and some key elements of Bakhtin's ideas. At the same time, and in part because of the commonalities with contemporary feminist approaches, almost everything Bakhtin had to say about language and representations sharply illuminates my ways of thinking about drama, the cultural realm to which I was and remain particularly attached as both a critic and director; indeed, even the odd names of Bakhtin's key concepts—dialogism, polyphony, heteroglossia, carnivalization, 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 J. L. Styan's lead,⁴ meaning is made in the theatre by the interaction and, to use Bakhtin's term, the interanimation of two or more forms of communication (or semiotic systems). The performed 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, finally, the audience. The continuous recreation of meaning, what Bakhtin 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 Bakhtin argued throughout his life was key to the deprivileging of absolute, authoritarian discourses.⁵

Yet, Bakhtin 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 monologic. The passage in which Bakhtin 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 form 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 monologic 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 the unity of the world, could not link those levels together or resolve them. In drama, it is impossible to combine several integral fields of vision in a unity that encompasses and stands above them all, because the structure of drama offers no support for such a unity.⁶

For all of us who have seen drama in performance, and certainly for anyone who has ever participated in the making of a dramatic production, several of these claims seem immediately counter-intuitive: after all, the dialogue is the action in theatre, and any action on stage is refracted (to use another Bakhtinian term) through the diverse points of view of writers, actors, designers and spectators. Nonetheless, while there are several immediately available points of contestation in Bakhtin's argument, this is serious stuff, too informed by widely held convictions about drama to be easily dismissed as the ramblings of an eccentric Russian who might, perhaps, be overly taken with the novel because of the glories of its Russian instances. What Bakhtin demands is no less than that we rethink what it means to accept a still-prevalent Aristotelian understanding of drama, and, then, that we query both the accuracy and the virtues—politically, socially, aesthetically—of the Aristotelian model.

To respond to this challenge, we must return first to those Aristotelian premises to which Bakhtin points. The most obvious of these come under the rubric of the famous unities, usually taught as those of action, place and time, but in The Poetics subsumed within the more basic concept of the Unity of Plot.⁷ Aristotle's emphasis is on the avoidance of the episodic—of that which is neither probable nor necessary to the essential structural elements of Peripeteia and Anagnorisis (reversal of fortune and discovery)—and on the importance of “an action that is complete in itself.”⁸ Bakhtin does not contest these attributes; he reaffirms them throughout the passage cited above, most notably in the assertion that “in drama the world must be made from a single piece.” In Aristotle's elaboration of his concept of Unity of Plot, he notes that it is a mistake to equate Unity of Plot with focus on one character; that would not suffice to create strong dramatic effect: “An affinity of things befall that one man, some of which it is impossible to reduce to unity.” Aristotle's advice to the playwright is therefore to eliminate all incidents, and, by implication, all thoughts, experiences, actions of a character, that might “disjoin and dislocate the whole.”⁹ Bakhtin echoes this claim, too, in his assertion that “the rejoinders in a dramatic dialogue do not rip apart the represented world”; at least that is a requirement for Bakhtin of that which is “authentically dramatic.”

Bakhtin's argument, then, is not with the traditional prescription or modeling of drama, but with what he takes to be necessary and essential to the medium itself. Drama can only be fully itself, as Bakhtin understands its parameters, if it “resolves all dialogic oppositions,” if it avoids “a true multiplicity of levels.” Further, as Aristotle argues, drama must have a clear beginning, middle and end. The various qualities of the polyphonic novel that Bakhtin celebrates throughout his writings—dialogism, unfinalizability, linguistic diversity, the persistence of “loopholes” of meaning—are all, from both Bakhtin's and Aristotle's perspectives, inimical to drama as a cultural form.

This leads me to two clusters of questions. First, is this depiction and definition of drama, now two thousand years old, accurate, sufficient and necessary? And, second, what are the social and political implications of the monologic attributes of drama? Put in the most extreme terms, if drama is monologic is it a hazard to the complexities necessary for decent human life? Furthermore, as Bakhtin implies, if drama is, in an essential way, monologic, but deceives us by an appearance of dialogism, is it especially dangerous to human society because it catches us unawares and deceives us? No definitive answer to these questions is possible within the confines of an essay; nonetheless, the only way to begin to address them is to call before us an array of dramatic texts. I do so with the intent both to provoke others to argument and to delineate the kind of ground and thinking to which these questions point. That I begin with a classical text is a reflection of my conviction that many of the limits as well as the possibilities of modern drama are rooted in ancient conceptions of drama and theatre.

Sophocles' Oedipus is the most obvious text with which to begin, both because it is to that drama that Aristotle turns when he wishes to provide a model of excellence in drama and because it continues to be regarded as the paradigmatic Greek tragedy.¹⁰ Not only is the Oedipus structured on the perfect instantiations of Peripeteia and Anagnorisis, but the change from one state of things to its opposite and the “discovery” or change from ignorance to knowledge are themselves conjoined to effect the ideal Unity of Plot to which, according to Aristotle, all playwrights should aspire. In addition, “improbabilities” are kept outside the tragedy in Oedipus; the Chorus functions “as one of the actors,” thus as “an integral part of the whole”; and the diction of the dialogue exemplifies a mastery of metaphor that “implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.”¹¹

I have no difficulty imagining Bakhtin taking each of these attributes, with their emphases on integration and unity, including and perhaps especially the understanding of metaphor as a perception of similarity in dissimilarities, as evidence for the monologic framework of Oedipus. Nor can I find solid grounds on which to contest this position. Peter Euben's discussion of Oedipus in his recent The Tragedy of Political Theory complicates our understanding of the monology of Oedipus, arguing that the play “indicates the limits of one-sidedness,” that it “‘speaks’ in the ‘voice’ of Oedipus and of Teiresias.”¹² Euben contrasts his reading of Oedipus to that of René Girard in Violence and the Sacred: “Girard writes about ‘the violent elimination of differences between the antagonists, their total identity …,’ whereas I want to maintain the distinctiveness within the identity.”¹³ But while Euben presents a convincing case for the doubleness of meanings as well as of character voices in Oedipus, he also concludes that, in the end, the “self-blinding [of Oedipus] not only unites Oedipus with Teiresias, it also unites him with the god who he recognizes has been his unseen companion throughout his life.”¹⁴ I would add that, while I concur with Euben that the key agons of Oedipus “deepen” rather than solve the problems of the play, there is not only the plot solution of Thebes's problem with the plague, but also resolution for the spectator in the blinding light of knowledge at which both Oedipus and the Chorus arrive. The agons or what Bakhtin calls the “rejoinders” in the dramatic dialogue of Oedipus threaten to rip apart the represented world, but in the end, and what this play is about, is that they do not rip the world apart. Oedipus is exiled from Thebes; neither the city nor the play can hold within it the difference that Oedipus represents.

When we turn forward in time to other key moments in the history of Western drama, we find persistent recurrences both of this threat of polyphony in drama and of resistance to it. That this threat seldom triumphs, however, should not blind us to the significant fact of its presence. In at least several of the ancient Greek tragedies, for example, the world on stage is never fully unified within one omniscient field of vision, and drama appears to function, as Jean-Pierre Vernant argues, precisely by presenting a “dichotomy [dédoublement] of the chorus and the protagonists, the two types of language, the play between the community which officially represents the City as a magistracy, and a professional actor who is the incarnation of a hero from another age. …” It does so, Vernant continues, in order “both to call the City into question within a well-defined context, and also … to call into question a certain image of man, and I would even say to indicate a change in man.”¹⁵

This seems to me mostly accurate, and, therefore, an important challenge to Bakhtin's position on drama, but Vernant's claims in the end undermine their own position by blurring or refusing a distinction between “calling into question a certain image of man” and “indicating a change in man.” As I have argued in several previous writings,¹⁶ most Western dramas, pivoted on the recognition scene, are formally and ideologically conservative: they represent as heroic a process by which a character (or characters) comes to know himself (and, occasionally, herself) by unraveling and confronting his own history. In the moment of recognition, both the character on stage and the spectator acknowledge the “truth,” a stable, fixed form of meaning whose unveiling is the primary act of traditional theatre. This type of discovery, of who a person “really” is, dominates Western dramaturgical strategies from the Greeks to the present: think not only of Oedipus, but of King Lear, of Ibsen's Rosmersholm, Pirandello's Henry IV, Hellman's The Little Foxes, Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Miller's Death of a Salesman. In each of these instances, and innumerable others, a change in a character is indicated, and it is the specific change that Aristotle had called for—from ignorance to knowledge. This kind of change may, for both the characters on stage and the spectator, call into question the particular image of this particular character, but it does not necessarily call into question “a certain image of man.”

Some years ago, in my own early work, I contended (unknowingly concurring with Bakhtin's position) that the kind of change represented in recognition scenes was not only sufficient but definitive of drama: subsequently, however, informed especially by Afro-American drama and by feminist drama, I have moved to an increasingly strong conviction that drama offers another possibility, that of presenting and urging the transformation of persons and our images of each other. This latter form of change requires not that we remove or have removed disguises that conceal us from our “true” selves, but that we imagine men and women in a continual process of becoming other. In this form of drama, recognition scenes are either subordinate to transformation scenes or are counter-productive; it is becoming other, not finding oneself, that is the crux of the drama; the performance of transformation of persons, not the revelation of a core identity, focuses the drama.

Earlier in this piece I indicated my agreement with Bakhtin that drama has tended to embrace monology, but qualified Bakhtin's essentialist argument by suggesting that there are significant instances in which variant voices threaten to animate the text and performance of particular plays. I would make the same argument about transformational elements in traditional drama, and want, further, to suggest that often, and perhaps inevitably, transformational strategies go hand in hand with the dialogic imagination. I now want to pursue this further with the claim that the most distinctive quality of one type, call it a genre, of modern drama is its rejection of monologism and the patriarchical authority of the drama in performance. This genre of modern drama attempts to create a dramatic discourse that celebrates rather than annihilates or exiles difference.

Bakhtin does not have much more to say about dramatic literature written since the mid-nineteenth century (the approximate point at which I would mark the beginnings of modern drama) than he does about classical drama. The single piece that he devotes to dramatic literature, “Preface to Volume 11: the Dramas,”¹⁷ is concerned entirely with Tolstoy's plays, which Bakhtin divides into two groups: the “carelessly constructed,” “insignificant” dramas written by Tolstoy during his happy, life-affirming early period, before his “crisis,” and the plays written after this crisis, which Bakhtin further divides into the “folk dramas” and the dramas of withdrawal. Although Bakhtin concedes that Tolstoy's best-known drama, The Power of Darkness, “in many respects deserves the epithet ‘peasant drama’”: and is, conceptually, a mystery play (and thus formally, if not profoundly, dialogic), his discussion of Tolstoy's dramas, including The Power of Darkness, serves simultaneously to extend and confirm his dissatisfaction with both Tolstoy and drama. The “Preface” does, however, contribute to our understanding of Bakhtin's resistance to drama, while also suggesting that there is a dramatic realm, that of “folk drama,” that might merit Bakhtin's—and our—interest and respect.

Ironically defending Tolstoy's own dramaturgical failures, Bakhtin clarifies his own resistance to drama with the claim that, because dramatic form “must satisfy the demands of stageability, [it] is the most difficult form to free from convention.” He then proceeds, however, to turn the assault on Tolstoy, claiming that a key to Tolstoy's difficulties in writing dramatic works during his early period was Tolstoy's insistence on the transcendent and emphatic role of the authorial voice. Tolstoy, the writer of novels and short stories, aspired, according to Bakhtin, to “complete freedom and autonomy” of the authorial voice. Without any hint that we might find this disconcerting, given Bakhtin's consistent disavowal of drama and celebration of prose fiction as the terrain where dialogism is possible (although certainly not inevitable, as the case of Tolstoy demonstrates through Bakhtin's criticism), Bakhtin suggests that this authorial self-assurance and certainty were far more difficult to achieve in drama than in the novel.

The hint or clue to the way out of this apparent maze occurs in Bakhtin's references to the “almost” folk drama, The Power of Darkness. Tolstoy intended this play to be performed in the show-booths as folk theatre, a form of theatre of which Bakhtin appears to approve. But the intention that this work be a folk drama is not fulfilled, by Bakhtin's analysis, because “the deeply individualized peasant language is no more than an immobile, unchanging background and dramatically dead shell for the internal spiritual deed of the hero.” Since all of Bakhtin's comments on Tolstoy's dramas attend to the failures in these works, I can only infer what an authentic folk drama, according to Bakhtin, would be like.¹⁸ It would reflect the “real-life torrent of contradictory class evolution,” “the objective contradictions of reality itself,” and would be mobile, dynamic and unfinalized.

To infer that such a drama is imaginable does seem to contradict Bakhtin's claims that I cited at the beginning of this piece. It is possible that Bakhtin only sets up the idea of “folk drama” as a foil for his critique of Tolstoy's plays; with the exception of his reference in the discussion of Tolstoy's dramas to mystery plays, Bakhtin does not cite any examples of “folk dramas” that fulfill the criteria that Tolstoy fails to meet. We could also greet this apparent contradiction as consistent with numerous other apparent contradictions, modifications, variations in Bakhtin's writings—inconsistencies that other commentators on Bakhtin have variously addressed as reflections of particular and varying contexts in which Bakhtin was writing, as changes in Bakhtin's thinking, or as ironic confirmations of the double-voicedness in the theorist himself.¹⁹

I will not attempt to choose among these alternatives; my guess is that they all contribute to what may or may not be a “problem” in Bakhtin's writings and our own critical endeavors. What I do want to do in moving towards a temporary stopping point (but not a conclusion) to my own reflections on these matters is to follow Bakhtin's example of a critical approach to the novel by contrasting two contemporary works that I believe suggest the difference between what a dialogic and a monologic drama might look like in our own society.

Let me begin this endgame by restating that I believe there are a number of modern dramas that are arguably dialogic. My own, admittedly incomplete and contestable, list would begin with Büchner's Woyzeck (a play well worth consideration as a Bakhtinian folk drama), and would include from the corpus of works usually judged to be major modern dramas Jarry's Ubu Roi, much of Chekhov, all of Beckett's dramas, most of Brecht's dramas, Pinter's The Homecoming, and several of Handke's plays. My list of dialogic dramas would be heavily weighted, however, by selections from black American drama and feminist drama. It is in these works, as I have discussed in several recent articles, that we find the most deliberate and conscientious assertions of polyphony, of refusals to finalize or assert dominant ideologies, of resistances to patriarchical authority and to a unified field of vision. That many of these works are American seems to be not coincidental; the doubleness of the consciousness of most Americans, including and perhaps especially the doubleness of being black and American and the bilingual experience of American culture, is constitutive of the American experience. Similarly (but therefore expansively), as both Wayne Booth and I have urged, despite the overt sexism in the major texts that Bakhtin celebrates, there is a striking confluence between the attention to the construction of multi-voicedness and hybrydization in much of contemporary feminist writing and in Bakhtin's criticism.

Among the most striking examples of what I might call a feminist/Bakhtinian world view in modern dramas are Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and boogie woogie landscapes, Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, Cloud Nine and A Mouthful of Birds, Megan Terry's Mollie Bailey's Traveling Family Circus: Featuring Scenes from the Life of Mother Jones, Jones-Baraka's Dutchman, and Adrienne Kennedy's The Owl Answers. In each of these works, the spectacle and dialogue of theatre mediate but do not resolve differences; the essential strategy of these plays is to bring together diverse discourses in such a way that they interanimate each other and avoid an overarching authorial point of view. We can best understand this exceptional receptivity to dialogism by turning to the social and political contexts of these works. As Bakhtin implies about folk drama, the voices we hear in many black American dramas and feminist dramas are the voices of marginal folk, voices that are both in conflict with dominant ideological positions and resistant among themselves to the reductions of uniformity.

That this is not the case in all feminist drama, despite the contiguity between feminism and dialogism, and that Bakhtin's concerns about drama remain potent despite persistent attempts by men as well as women, white people as well as people of color, to challenge the conventions of traditional drama, becomes evident if we compare two ostensible feminist works from contemporary literature: Maria Irene Fornes's Fefu and Her Friends and The Heidi Chronicles by Wendy Wasserstein.

The Heidi Chronicles was first workshopped in April 1988 by the Seattle Repertory Theatre; on 12 December 1988 it opened at Playwrights Horizons in New York City; three months later, it transferred to the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway, where it quickly became one of the major hits of the season. Awards have poured down upon the play and its author: in addition to the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony for best play of the season, The Heidi Chronicles won the Susan Smith Blackburn prize (a prize specifically meant to recognize outstanding work by women playwrights) and the Dramatists Guild Hull Warriner award which selects “the best American play dealing with contemporary political, religious or social mores.” While my experience as a spectator is that audiences take the play lightly—they laugh, giggle and chat briefly after the performance about their own experiences growing up from the sixties to the eighties, experiences that the play recalls—both the wealth of awards and the passionately mixed reviews it provoked suggest that The Heidi Chronicles commands serious attention.

Working with the same kinds of characters she has created in previous dramas (Uncommon Women and Others; Isn't It Romantic), Wasserstein takes us along for the ride on a twenty-five year journey from adolescence to adulthood of two men and a woman, all bright, upper-middle-class people who begin to come to consciousness in the mid-sixties. (Heidi's friend, Susan, also makes the journey, but she is always a foil or adjunct to the affairs of the central three characters.) Heidi, who becomes an art historian, is ostensibly the protagonist of the drama (she appears in each of the play's eleven scenes and two prologues), although she is often dominated, dramatically and politically, by the two men in her life: Peter Patrone, a caring, intelligent man who becomes “a liberal homosexual pediatrician”;²⁰ and Scoop Rosenbaum, already an aggressive entrepreneur at nineteen who rises to become editor of Boomer magazine.

In a series of eleven “anecdotes,” these characters repeatedly re-encounter each other, at each instance addressing the vicissitudes of their own lives in the context of the changing values and mores of their society. None of these three main characters ever changes, but the play does build towards and away from two quasi-recognition scenes. In the first of these (Act Two, Scene 4), Heidi loses control of the keynote address she is delivering to a luncheon gathering at the Plaza Hotel and rambles towards a conclusion in which she confesses to the audience that she is “just not happy,” that she feels “stranded” and disillusioned because she thought that the whole point of the women's movement “was that we were all in this together” (p. 62). In the next scene, Heidi visits Peter at a children's hospital ward on Christmas Eve, and Peter reveals that he, the most prominent pediatrician in New York City, is living in an increasingly narrow world because so many of his friends are dying of AIDS. He confesses to Heidi that he is hurt because she does not understand him and is not authentically there for him as a friend. She immediately responds that she could “become someone else next year” (p. 67). The two briefly transcend their differences and embrace, but if there is recognition of self or other here, some traditional movement from ignorance to knowledge, the moment is explicitly presented as transitory and private. Heidi's offer to “become someone else” is not a step towards a transformation of self but more like a proposal to wear a different dress tomorrow. Heidi neither knows what it means to “become someone else” nor does she know what kind of person she would will herself to become. Her offer to “become someone else next year” would be a good laugh line—even, perhaps, a parody of a dramatic transformation—were it not uttered in the context of Peter's suffering.

Gender—its roles and consciousnesses—provides the thematic thread that links the episodes in the twenty-five-year time line of The Heidi Chronicles. Since there is neither beauty in the language nor surprise in the events or characters of this play, I can only surmise that it is the topical interest in gender issues that has called forth so much critical attention, both positive and negative. Those who praised The Heidi Chronicles found it to be “enlightening” (Mel Gussow, The New York Times), “wise” (Howard Kissel, The Daily News), and “important” (Linda Winer, Newsday) in its depiction of feminism and feminists, and of men's and women's relations to each other. Negative commentary on the play, most thoroughly and bitingly presented in a long piece by Phyllis Jane Rose in American Theatre, also focused on gender issues. “The absence from the stage of images of women acting on their own beliefs in truth, beauty or justice implies that women do not act in this way in the world,” writes Rose in her letter to Heidi. “Or, if they do,” Rose continues, “it is not important enough to be dramatized. In your Chronicles, your struggle for women artists, your professed dedication to content over form, are secondary to your relationships with men. Your intelligence becomes wit in their presence. Your imagination settles for fantasy.”²¹

The Heidi Chronicles is all that, or worse than, Rose contends. And here Bakhtin comes to my aid in understanding why I find this drama—and its mostly celebratory public reception—so disturbing. It is precisely because this drama does not represent the heteroglossia of the world, precisely because it is aggressively monologic, self-contained, a seemingly perfect picture without loopholes of a particular historic moment that is so pleasing to some and distressing to others. Heidi does an adequate job of recuperating women artists, but even when she speaks of her subjects it is in the monologic discourse of professional academia. On the one occasion—a television talk show—where Heidi is explicitly positioned to speak her own different voice, she is silenced by the voices of two men, Scoop and Peter, her old friends who also appear on the show. Afterwards she is angry, but even in her anger we are given no sense of what her own voice might sound like. And if we are meant to see this scene as a dramatization of difference as absence, as an assault on patriarchical monology, such a vision is quickly undercut by the subsequent scene, a meeting among Heidi and her women friends, where the women's talk and ideologies are indistinguishable from that of Scoop and Peter. Heidi only briefly finds an alternative voice during her rambling speech at the women's luncheon, and that utterance is inaccessible because it is framed as the self-pitying ramblings of a woman in the process of a nervous breakdown.

The characters in The Heidi Chronicles neither acknowledge each other as other—indeed, their persistent attempt is to be like each other—nor do they, to use once more a Bakhtinian term, “interanimate” each other. The world they comprise is coherent, consistent and stable, despite superficial changes from involvement in leftish politics and the women's movement to a kind of mushy humanism. Reaction is not revolution, as Rose urges, quoting Laurie Stone,²² and the world of The Heidi Chronicles is adamantly one of reaction, not revolution or change. When we meet Heidi for the last time, with her newly-adopted baby, she is “waiting” for something, perhaps for a new world and new generation in which her baby daughter's voice will be different and will be heard. Her world is not provocatively open, unfinalized; Heidi and her baby are just sitting there rocking, bathed in the nostalgia of an old fifties song. As my twelve-year-old daughter commented immediately after seeing the production, the play could have ended at any of several of its last few scenes. Had it done so, it would not have made any difference—to those on stage or in the audience.

In “Discourse in the Novel,” an essay that is central to Bakhtin's reflections, Bakhtin urges that this “verbal-ideological decentering will occur only when a national culture loses its sealed-off and self-sufficient character, when it becomes conscious of itself as only one among other cultures and languages.”²³ In its refusal of such a “decentering,” The Heidi Chronicles reveals a national culture that remains “sealed-off,” “authoritarian,” “rigid” and unconscious of itself as only one among other cultures and languages. And it does so to a dangerous degree. There is no place in the world of this drama for the voices of women and men who can speak the discourses of feminism; there is no room in this drama for the poor, the marginalized, the inarticulate, for those who are not successes in the terms of the eighties, for those who wish to transform and not react. If this is what drama today is at its best, then it is less than that which Bakhtin claimed it to be initially.

This is, however, not all there is within the realm of contemporary drama. Maria Irene Fornes's Fefu and Her Friends, first performed in May 1977 by the New York Theatre Strategy, and produced in numerous regional theaters throughout the eighties, offers a distinctly different way of thinking about both drama and its relations to gender. The play has received slow and steady respect from producers, audiences and critics, but has never received the loud public applause that greeted The Heidi Chronicles (or, notably, a comparably monologic prize-winning drama, Marsha Norman's 'night, Mother). Only recently, a production at my university was hesitantly supported, and the sounds of unease and perplexity in the small audience of mostly men at a dress rehearsal confirmed the difficulties Fefu and Her Friends continues to pose for even sophisticated spectators.

Initially, Fefu and Her Friends conforms to the conventions of traditional theatre. A small group of women come together for a reunion meeting to rehearse a series of presentations for a public event. The play preserves the unities of time, place and action: all events occur during one day, in one house, among a group of people who form a temporary community. From the start, however, the differences among the women's voices are striking, as are their abilities to re-accentuate each other's lives and the meanings of each other's utterances. Fefu opens the play, declaring to no one in particular, “My husband married me to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are.” “What?” Cindy asks. “Yup,” Fefu responds.²⁴ Often, one or another of the women does not understand each other, but what one says to another changes the other before our eyes.

Central among these women are Fefu, the hostess in whose house the gathering occurs, and Julia, a friend of several of the women, including Fefu. Julia, for most of the play, is confined to a wheel-chair, the result of a bizarre accident in which a hunter shot a deer, and, after falling as if shot herself, Julia found herself to be paralyzed. Julia and Fefu are the most complex and perplexing of the characters, but each of the other women assembled has her own specific voice, her own desires and differences. In a 1985 interview with Scott Cummings, Fornes described her relationship to these characters in the context of a change in style in her work: “The style of Fefu dealt more with characters as real persons rather than voices that are the expression of the mind of the play.” She goes on to say that instead of writing in a “linear manner” she “would write a scene and see what came out and then I would write another as if I were practicing calligraphy.”²⁵ This absence of “voices that are the expression of the mind of the play” (emphasis mine) and the concomitant resistance to linearity point to precisely those attributes that Bakhtin uncovers in the heteroglossia of the novel.

It is not just, however, in the autonomy and multiple fields of vision of the characters that I find the dialogic imagination at work in Fornes's drama. The second act of Fefu and Her Friends elaborates the differences among the voices of the women but also removes them and us to separate spaces. During Part II, four different scenes occur simultaneously in four different spaces—the lawn, the study, the bedroom, and the kitchen. The audience is divided into four groups, each of which is guided to a different space where one or more of the women is speaking. After a scene is completed, the audience moves to the next space, and the scene that has just occurred in that space is repeated until all members of the audience have viewed all four scenes. The remarkable achievement of this device is to move the spectator from his or her single, unified perspective without, as Bakhtin worried, destroying theatre itself by removing the footlights. Fornes has created a dramatic correlative for the multiple points-of-view narrations of the modern novel of the parallel montages of film.

My experience as an audience member for several different productions of Fefu and Her Friends is that the audience is disconcerted, not only by being moved from our stable and familiar positions, but by our proximity to each other and to the characters; we are in their spaces but not of them. Their world remains separate from ours, and there is nothing we can do to make a difference in their world. We are thus not in the distracting position of the kind of interactive theatre that emerged in the sixties, where the divisions between the world of the stage and the world of the theatre were wholly destroyed and where I did not know to whom I was talking—an actor or a character.²⁶ Instead, in each viewing of each scene of Fefu our position as audience members is re-accentuated and our relationship to the characters is re-mediated. My experience is similar to that of my reading Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury; each character's telling of the tale re-mediates my relationship to all of the characters and their various meanings.

The most difficult and disturbing scene in Part II of Fefu and Her Friends is that in which we witness Julia, lying on a mattress on the floor so that we must look down upon her, speaking what the other characters refer to as her “hallucinations.” The setting itself is a hybrid place, a mixture of cultural artifacts that do not normally belong together: “There are dry leaves on the floor although the time is not fall,” the stage directions indicate (p. 23). Julia speaks of “they”: they who clubbed her, tore out her eyes, took away her voice. Then her pronoun changes to “he”: “He said that women's entrails are heavier than anything on earth and to see a woman running creates a disparate and incongruous image in the mind. It's anti-aesthetic” (pp. 23-24).

Julia's hallucination is the discourse of an other, a male other, ventriloquated by Julia.²⁷ That this is a specifically and ominously gendered discourse we hear in an emission from Julia's lips that she calls a prayer:

The human being is of the masculine gender. The human being is a boy as a child and grown up he is a man. Everything on earth is for the human being, which is a man. To nourish him. … Women are Evil.—Woman is not a human being. She is: 1.—A mystery. 2.—Another species. 3.—As yet undefined. 4.—Unpredictable; therefore wicked and gentle and evil and good which is evil. …

(p. 25)

In the midst of these hallucinations, Julia has cried out of concern for Fefu, whom the other voices appear to be telling her they will have to kill. What “they” want from Fefu is her light. Julia has become aware of herself as one among other cultures, but she also fears that that “other” culture has good reason to dominate, control and destroy her own different voice. It is not anything that Julia has done or had done to her that makes her speak so strangely or that causes her paralysis. She is no more or less mad, no more or less paralyzed, than Hamlet. She is the figure whom Nietzsche presents in The Birth of Tragedy, the figure for whom Shakespeare's Hamlet stands as the paradigm, the one who experiences nausea in his own knowledge and in that knowledge cannot move. Like Hamlet, Julia is paralyzed from too much knowledge, and she fears that Fefu is approaching the same state. Julia is always conscious of death; death is constantly present, and it is only because “[s]omething rescues us from death every moment of our lives” (p. 35) that she remains alive. But Julia is also threatened by the knowledge that “they” who control insist that “the human being is of the masculine gender,” and she suffers because she can neither believe nor resist that dictum. Those whom she calls the “judges” have told her that once she believes the prayer that denigrates women, she will be well. They tell her that all women have come to believe the prayer.

Until the last moment of the play, Fefu and Her Friends is a dialogic drama, and is, more precisely in Bakhtin's terms, “an intentional novelistic hybrid.” In “an intentional novelistic hybrid” differing points of view on the world collide within one cultural form; “the novelistic hybrid is an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another.”²⁸ The world that Fornes has created in Fefu is one in which not only Julia and Fefu herself but each of the women struggles with her own voice and brings into the conversation the diverse historical elements of her own linguistic consciousness. Emma, the incomparable performer, pontificates in the inflated rhetoric of a long passage from “The Science of Educational Dramatics” by Emma Sheridan Fry (pp. 31-32); Paula weeps her contempt for “those who, having everything a person can ask for, make such a mess of it” (p. 38). Her American “plain style” tale of her own early envy of the rich might be heard as sentimental in another context, but here, as one utterance in an authentic conversation, it interanimates the whole of the drama.

To deliberately sustain this heteroglossia is dangerous, however; it is dangerous to the living of daily life and to drama itself. In the end, Fefu can no longer bear the multiple voices in her head. She goes outdoors and shoots a rabbit; indoors, blood appears on Julia's forehead, and Julia dies. The women surround Julia in a protective circle and the lights fade. Few in the audience agree on what this ending “means.” Somewhat earlier in the play, yet another of the women, Christina, when asked if she liked Fefu, said she did but that Fefu confused her. “Her mind,” Christina says, “is adventurous. I don't know if there is dishonesty in that. But in adventure there is taking chances and risks, and then one has to, somehow, have less regard or respect for things as they are. That is, regard for a kind of convention, I suppose” (p. 22).

In Fornes's play Fefu kills Julia and reconstructs the circle of monology only in the end and only as a last, desperate effort to ward off the threat to her own stability of consciousness. Other modern plays have ended similarly. Lula kills Clay at the end of Baraka's Dutchman because he has broken the conventions of his servile pseudo-discourse, the white middle-class discourse of the New York subway that still demands (even if it is now losing) its dominance. At the end of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, Krapp's lips move, but there is no sound: “Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.”²⁹ Only the tape runs on in silence.

Beckett, perhaps not unlike Bakhtin, foresees, proclaims, the end of drama. Why? Because there are not two words, two different utterances to speak? Because if you kill the conventions you kill the form? Bakhtin proclaims the dialogic novel to be different, to transcend other forms because, for him, as re-articulated by Michael Holquist, “Other genres are constituted by a set of formal features for fixing language that pre-exist any specific utterance within the genre.” In contrast, Holquist argues, “‘novel’ is the name Bakhtin gives to whatever force is at work within a given literary system to reveal the limits, the artificial constraints of that system.”³⁰ Should we, then, give the name “novel” to Fefu and Her Friends or Dutchman or Krapp's Last Tape because they reveal the “artificial constraints” of the system we call drama, reveal and disrupt those constraints?

Bakhtin would likely respond that these and other instances that you and I might cite of dialogic dramas are evidence that we are in an era “when the novel becomes the dominant genre.” At such a time “[a]ll literature is then caught up in the process of ‘becoming,’ and in a special kind of ‘generic criticism.’ … In an era when the novel reigns supreme, almost all the remaining genres are to a greater or lesser extent ‘novelized’: drama (for example Ibsen, Hauptmann, the whole of Naturalist drama), epic poetry. … Those genres that stubbornly preserve their old canonic nature begin to appear stylized.” “What are the salient features of this novelization of other genres suggested by us above?” Bakhtin asks. “They become more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglossia and the ‘novelistic’ layers of literary language, they become dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally—this is the most important thing—the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic open-endedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the openended present).”³¹

The carnival spirit, the artistic representation of heteroglossia, is evident in modern drama, but if this is a sign of good living in the theatre, which I would take it to be, it is at best a weak sign struggling for acknowledgment. As The Heidi Chronicles attests, even in a world where the discourses of patriarchy and the discourses of feminism must encounter each other, they need not re-accentuate the other. The reason they do not is not a matter simply of formal attributes of a genre. Despite Bakhtin's claims about the rigid conventions of drama and their inherent resistance to polyphony, it is, paradoxically, central to Bakhtin's own theorizing that literary genres do not transform themselves from within nor do individual authors and readers simply decide to write and read dialogically. As we well know, our own new technologies of communication offer decidedly alternative paths: one which would include and subsume into dominant Western patriarchical culture the diversity of voices that inhabit the earth; another that would break the seal and authoritarian self-sufficiency of its character and take on the adventure of speech diversity.

There is ample evidence that we live, more each day, not in a “novelized, polyphonic” society but in what Raymond Williams once called a dramatized society, a world whose most succinct image is that of the self-enclosed living room in which every utterance completes a monologue. Our inclination has been to embrace and proliferate certain of the conventions of drama, to teach the foreign character who enters the stage for the first time the decorum of the given, wholly contained space which is the only space in which he can act.

This is not the only option, however, for ourselves or our drama. When we approach drama in this way, we forget what Bakhtin also forgot in his initial pronouncements—that is, that while drama may press always towards a single field of vision, it is also the cultural space that most readily locates the viewer/reader outside, separate from an other. Drama, especially in its contemporary, televised form, may lure us to see and shape others as identical to ourselves, but that is not what its best work is ever about. In my own work over the last ten years, I have tried to recall drama's ability to enable us to acknowledge the otherness of others. With colleagues in the United States and the Soviet Union, I have tried to do this by creating a new kind of stage, a stage that literally exists simultaneously in two cultures in a form of drama that has come to be called a “space bridge.” When a space bridge occurs, two groups of people from two distinctly different cultures come together using satellite technologies for a conversation, nothing more or less but exactly that activity that Bakhtin locates as the essential site of dialogism (and which must be also the primary site of drama). In this context, we attempt what Bakhtin once urged: “We raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not raise itself; we seek answers to our own questions in it; and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us new aspects and new semantic depths.”³² Most often these “space bridges” have been failures in any conventional terms of dramatic value: they have no clear beginning, middle or end, they lack a Unity of Plot, there are loopholes and misunderstandings and unresolved collisions. They are resisted and monologized by most American producers who demand total control of the event and who attempt to substitute the conventional drama of dispute for authentic dialogue. They are but whispers from the dialogic imagination, neither first words nor last words about novels or dramas, but words towards a genre in search of a name—and an audience.

Notes

1. M. M. Bakhtin's first book to be translated into English was Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA, 1968). In 1975 my colleague, Neal Bruss, brought this and other Bakhtin texts to the attention of an Amherst reading group of which I was a member. Included in the texts we read, in addition to Iswolsky's translation of Rabelais, were unpublished translations of portions of the four essays originally published in Moscow in 1975 as Voprosy literatury i estetiki and subsequently published as The Dialogic Imagination, trs. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin, 1981); and translations of two works whose authorship remains a matter of dispute: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language and Freudianism: A Critique, both of which are variously attributed to V. N. Voloshinov or M. M. Bakhtin or both.

2. Lest this seem to be an overstatement or an idiosyncratic judgment, I call attention to the “Introduction” to M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, tr. Vern. W. McGee, edd. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1986), pp. ix-x. Holquist supports claims to Bakhtin's eminence with quotes from Todorov that hail Bakhtin as “the most important Soviet thinker in the human sciences and the greatest theoretician of literature in the twentieth century.” Holquist also notes that the executive director of MLA in 1985 located Bakhtin among a pantheon of thinkers that included Karl Marx, Freud, Levi-Strauss, Derrida and Barthes.

3. Wayne C. Booth, “Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism,” in Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work, ed. Gary Saul Morson (Chicago, 1986), pp. 145-176.

4. J. L. Styan, Elements of Drama (Cambridge, 1960).

5. See Helene Keyssar, “Hauntings: Gender and Drama in Contemporary English Theatre,” Englisch Amerikanische Studien, 8 (December 1986), 449-468, esp. 456-457.

6. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, tr. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, 1984), p. 17.

7. See Tracy B. Strong, The Idea of Political Theory (Notre Dame, 1990), pp. 45-46.

8. Aristotle, Poetics, tr. Ingram Bywater, in Rhetoric and Poetics (New York, 1954), Ch. 7, pp. 233-234.

9. Ibid., Ch. 8, p. 234.

10. See J. Peter Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory (Princeton, 1990), p. 100.

11. On Peripeteia and Discovery, see Poetics, Ch. 11, pp. 236-237; on avoidance of “improbabilities,” Ch. 15, p. 243; on the Chorus, Ch. 18, p. 248; and on Diction and Metaphor, Ch. 22, p. 255.

12. Euben, p. 108.

13. Ibid., fn. 4, p. 97.

14. Ibid., p. 125.

15. Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Greek Tragedy: Problems of Interpretation,” in The Structuralist Controversy, edd. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore, 1972), p. 284.

16. Helene Keyssar, Feminist Theatre (London, 1984; New York, 1985), pp. xiii, xiv; see also “Hauntings: Gender and Drama in Contemporary English Theatre.”

17. Bakhtin, “Preface to Volume 11: The Dramas,” in Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, edd. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson (Evanston, IL, 1989), pp. 227-236.

18. See my “Theodore Dreiser's Dramas: American Folk Drama and Its Limits,” in Theatre Journal, 33 (October 1981), 365-376, for a detailed discussion of modern folk drama. My comments on Dreiser's interest in the grotesque are especially relevant to Bakhtin's interests in carnival and folk theatre.

19. See Rethinking Bakhtin and Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work, both cited above, as well as the various lengthy introductions to Bakhtin's works for some examples of these explanations of contradictions or complexities in Bakhtin. Also see David Lodge, After Bakhtin (London, 1990).

20. Wendy Wasserstein, The Heidi Chronicles (New York, 1990), p. 28. All further page references will be cited in the text.

21. Phyllis Jane Rose, “Dear Heidi: An Open Letter to Dr. Holland,” in American Theatre (October 1989), p. 29. The encomia from Gussow, Kissel and Winer are all cited by Rose (p. 29).

22. Ibid., p. 114.

23. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination, p. 370.

24. Maria Irene Fornes, Fefu and Her Friends, in Wordplays [1]: New American Drama, edd. Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta (New York, 1980), p. 7. All further page references will be cited in the text.

25. Scott Cummings, “Seeing with Clarity: The Visions of Maria Irene Fornes,” in Theater, 17 (Winter 1985), 53.

26. See Helene Keyssar, “I Love You. Who Are You? The Strategy of Drama in Recognition Scenes,” PMLA, 92 (March 1977), 297-306, for a fuller discussion of the significance of acknowledgment of otherness in theatre. While I hold to the position I argue in this piece concerning the theatre's special ability to allow the spectator an intensification of the recognition of others as others, my more recent work, including this current essay, calls into question the claim I made in 1977 that the recognition scene clarifies the freedom of the audience.

27. See Michael Holquist, “The Politics of Representation,” in Allegory and Representation: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979-80, ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt (Baltimore, 1981), pp. 162-183, for this specialized use of “ventriloquation,” a term I and others have come to use frequently as if it were one of Bakhtin's own terms.

28. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 360, 361.

29. Samuel Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape, in Krapp's Last Tape and Embers (London, 1965), p. 20.

30. Michael Holquist, “Introduction,” The Dialogic Imagination, p. xxix.

31. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 5-7.

32. Bakhtin, “Response to a Question from Novy Mir,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, p. 7.