Social Minds in Drama. Golnaz Shams
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Narrative Studies
Postclassical narrative studies have the potential to provide a starting point for a structured narrative theory of drama. One would assume that a broader definition of narrative and the advent of numerous postclassical approaches to narrative studies would have paved the way for an abundance of theories on the long-neglected genre of drama, but surprisingly this did not happen. At least the playscript still remains ignored and undiscovered in the great leap from classical narratology to the more modern approaches. Only a little practical analysis has been done on the playscript so far. What the emergence of the newer turn curbed was an active interest in drama as performance. Great, seminal work has been done on theatre and drama studies, which has added a whole new niche for narrative studies and transmediality.
Whereas Genette was interested in a special representation of events that would only allow regarding novels as narratives, the postclassical’s redefinition of narrative – what would include storytelling regardless of medium and mode – broadened their reception of a more transgeneric and transmedial approach that would readily embrace drama. Chatman believes that the similarities between the genres are more important than the differences. Adopting a more liberal attitude, Chatman states that any text devoted to storytelling is a narrative, and all narratives share narrative features such as temporal structure, characters and setting (1990). Jahn writes about the importance of stage directions and different narrative levels in drama that had been neglected thus far (2001). Richardson (1997 and 2001) begins to write on the narrativity in drama and some of its narrative features like frequency, point of view and voice. Pfister (1991a) focuses on a communicational theory of drama, Elam (1980) on the semiotics of drama. Fludernik, taking the cognitive aspect into account, underlines the importance of characterisation with regards to experientiality (1996). Nünning & Nünning, see the need for a narratology of drama and address this in their Erzähltheorie (2002). With the exception of Jahn, all of these works have a strong preference for the performative aspect of drama. The playscript in these studies is only one aspect to be considered among other aspects such as sound, light, costumes, the acting, audience response and much more. By neglecting the playscript once again, narrative studies are missing out on a wealth of narrative material that, by means of postclassical analytical tools and frames, could provide a new method of analysis. The modern paradigms could provide a different reading and a better appreciation of the playscripts.
As was mentioned before, traditionally, the main arguments against drama as narrative have been predominantly either due to its mimetic nature or the ←56 | 57→lack of an overt narrator. These differences seem to matter more than obvious similarities between the novel and drama, such as plot or storyworld, characters, temporal features and so on. These arguments became outdated once narrative studies moved further away from their formalist/structuralist heritage and critics started to argue about the degrees of narrativity. The ongoing debates about to what extent the stage directions are actually diegetic and on whether dialogue sequences in a novel are mimetic underlines the fact that the boundaries between the concepts of the diegetic and mimetic are “more porous and unstable than is usually imagined” (Richardson 2001: 691).
As far as the concept of the narrator is concerned the more traditional approaches opted for a narrator figure or agent who mediates a narrative, who tells the story. This type of approach excludes most types of drama. With the emergence of postclassical narrative studies, however, these arguments lost, or rather, should have lost their validity. The definition of narrative became broader. It included plays because plays tell stories, stories about particular people and what happens to them in particular circumstances and of what these experiences feel like. Chatman, for example, is one of those theorists who believes that plays tell stories and consist of storyworlds; thus they contain a narrative world, a “diegesis”. He argues:
Is the distinction between diegesis and mimesis, telling and showing, of greater consequence (higher in the structural hierarchy) than that between Narrative and the other text-types? I find no reason to assume so. To me, any text that presents a story – a sequence of events performed or experienced by characters – is first of all narrative. Plays and novels share the common features of a chrono-logic of events, a set of characters, and setting. Therefore, at a fundamental level they are all stories. (Chatman 1990: 117)
And, thus, he introduces his new diagram of text-types:
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The realisation that drama also narrates is not really a new idea, but ironically the conclusion that “therefore it is a narrative” remained unacknowledged for a long time. This might be due to the only recent interest which postmodern narrative studies have taken specifically in the genre of drama. Manfred Jahn (2001: 675), for example, elaborates on and updates Chatman’s diagram:
Jahn uses the term “genre” as the overarching term in his diagram and does not use the term “text-type” as Chatman did. He continues with the division of narratives and non-narratives. Then within the category of narratives, he makes the distinction between the written and the performed. This distinction is very important. Jahn’s essay is one of the early texts that makes this distinction and categorises different approaches to drama accordingly. Jahn’s narratology of drama is widely acknowledged and very practical because his categories embrace different ways in which drama can be analysed. Jahn situates himself within a more modern and seminal postclassical narrative trend and a reception-oriented one. He notes that there are three interpretive ←58 | 59→approaches to drama: Poetic Drama, Theatre Studies and Reading Drama (2001: 660). In the first approach drama is seen as purely text-based, in the second it is performance-based and the third approach is a synthesis of these two as it calls for studying or reading the playscript and simultaneously taking into account its performative potential. Jahn himself seems to favour this synthetic approach and develops most of his later theories off of it. What seem to be missing though are illustrative examples and analytical work, taken from playscripts. All of Jahn’s examples are either from the staged performances or from the plays that are considered to be the exceptions: the memory plays or plays with overt narrators. It seems that even though postclassical theorists are eager to break away from the restrictions of classical narratology, they still feel uncomfortable to completely do away with those traditional concepts.
Even more radical and influential in embracing drama are cognitive narrative studies, with their shift to the concept of mind and consciousness. Once the focus of the narrative becomes the nexus of the mind of readers and/or characters, the concept of the narrator or the mimesis/diegesis dichotomy become less relevant. The best example of this trend is Fludernik’s concept of experientiality. Within the parameters of cognitive studies and experientiality, the discussions of character construction, and perception become important, rendering the notion of drama as narrative unproblematic. The absence of the narrator or of certain textual features is no longer of importance since
[a];ccording to Fludernik, narrativity does not consist in a set of properties that characterise narratives, but can rather be conceptualised as a sort of measure of how readily a given text can be processed as a story. Since her understanding of narrative and narrativity centers on an anthropomorphic kind of experientiality, it can readily embrace drama as a narrative genre: the fact that plays always feature characters on stage guarantees that they project consciousness, experience, speech, and stories. (Nünning/Sommer 2008: 334)
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