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Speaking in Tongues
Language at Play in the Theatre
By Marvin Carlson The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2006 University of Michigan
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-472-03392-8
Chapter One
The Macaronic Stage
The theory and practice of postmodern and postcolonial theatre and performance has given new prominence to heteroglossia, but it is not a new phenomenon. Despite Bakhtin's attempt to deny its operations in the drama, examples of multiple voices can be found throughout theatre history, not only in the limited and abstract sense of voices taking positions at odds with those of the author, but also in the literal sense of voices that speak a language not that of the author or the presumed audience. The practice and motives for this most extreme form of theatrical heteroglossia are the concern of this chapter.
The very idea of a drama utilizing an alien language seems to run counter to a normal communications model of theatre, such as that put forward by classic semiotic theory. According to this model, based like classic linguistic theory upon the work of Saussure and his followers, the primary operations of theatre depend upon a model speaker (the author, or in the case of production, the entire production apparatus) creating the complex "message" of the play or production in a "code" (or a language) that is shared in its entirety by the model receiver (the audience). In such a monoglossic or monologistic system, the introduction of any heteroglossic code or language element must be viewed as distracting or, worse, seriously disruptive, threatening a breakdown of the entire system. However, just as more recent linguistic theory and cultural practice has unsettled the Saussurian model of monolithic communication, so the study of postcolonial and other recent theatre and performance practice has unsettled the related monologistic semiotic model in these fields.
Modern cultural theory recognizes that few cultures or languages have ever been as monologistic as the formal and abstract linguistic and anthropological analyses of the earlier twentieth century depicted them. Neither theatre communities nor the larger cultural communities that surround and include them are ever totally isolated from intercourse with other communities. Thus the theatre, committed to reflecting mimetically upon the culture of which it is a part, has had to find, in all times and periods, strategies for depicting not only the perceived social operations of its audience but also the impact of external forces that invariably affected that audience, however homogeneous it may have been.
The Speech of the Outsider
Surely nothing so immediately marks an outsider as representing another culture than the fact that he speaks an alien language, and the alien voice of the outsider has always been a major contributor to heteroglossia in the theatre. As I have already remarked, however, there is an inevitable theatre tension between the often cited goal of "truth to nature" and the demands of meeting audience expectations, including, of course, comprehensibility. An excellent example of this tension at work can be seen in one of the most famous documents of Western theatrical theory, Victor Hugo's Preface to Cromwell, the central manifesto of French romanticism in theatre. The main thrust of Hugo's argument is that the artists of the future should no longer be content to follow academic rules and to copy previous artists, but should seek their inspiration directly from nature and from truth. Approximately half way through this lengthy essay, however, he introduces an important qualification: that at least in his opinion there is an "impassable limit" that must always separate "reality according to art from reality according to nature," a limit unrecognized by "certain ill-informed partisans of romanticism." He then proceeds to illustrate the foolishness of such "unreflective advocates of absolute nature" by imagining the reactions of one of them attending a performance of Corneille's Le Cid. Interestingly enough, he begins with the matter of verisimilitude in language:
"What's that?" he will say at the first word. The Cid is speaking in verse! It is not natural to speak in verse!-How then would you have him speak?-In prose. So be it. Then, an instant later:-"What," he will continue if he is consistent, "The Cid is speaking French!"-"And so?"-"Nature requires that he speak his own language; he can't speak anything but Spanish." We will not understand anything he is saying, but once more, so be it. But you think that is all? By no means. Before the tenth sentence in Castilian, he is certain to get up and ask if this Cid who is speaking is the real Cid, in flesh and blood. What right has this actor, whose name is Pierre or Jacques, to assume the name of The Cid? That is false. And there is no reason why he should not go on to demand that the sun should be substituted for the footlights, real trees and real houses for those deceitful wings. For, once you have started down that path logic has you by the collar, and you are unable to stop.
From a twenty-first-century perspective, Hugo's straw man, the "ill-informed" advocate of romanticism, turns out to have been far more prescient than Hugo imagined. The assumption that a tragic hero must speak in verse, virtually inviolate since the crystallization of French classicism two centuries before Hugo wrote, was given up during Hugo's own lifetime, a once universally accepted "stage language" that fell before the demands of realism. Later still, the growing incorporation of real materials into stage fictions and the conscious mixing of art and life in twentieth-century experimental theatre saw copious examples of actors from Buffalo Bill to Spalding Gray appearing on stage as their flesh-and-blood selves, not to mention the sun being substituted for footlights and real trees and real houses for deceitful wings.
Of course the demands of comprehensibility made the speaking of an actual foreign language one of the most intractable of the "natural" manifestations Hugo would ban from the stage, but had he looked beyond the specific classical tradition in which he was seeking to place his own work, he could have found examples, even in the contemporary French theatre, of characters shown speaking languages other than French in the interest of truth to nature. These could be found in the work of writers of melodrama like Guilbert de Pixérécourt and other pioneers, whose works inspired French romantic drama and who were even more dedicated to verisimilitude than Hugo and his colleagues. Pixérécourt accompanied his dramatic scripts with extensive notes and incorporated historical documents and recorded conversations as obsessively as any subsequent naturalist. Writing for a popular theatre and a popular audience, he had even less need to accommodate the formal conventions of the classic drama than did Hugo, who was attempting to storm the citadel of high art, the Comédie Française. Hugo took liberties with the alexandrine, the traditional poetic line of French classic tragedy, that caused near riots by the conservative Comédie audiences, but he kept the form itself, and even defended it (to "speak in verse") in the passage just quoted. Pixérécourt felt free, in the name of verisimilitude, to abandon the alexandrine altogether. Even more radically, Pixérécourt, again in the interests of authenticity, created non-French-speaking characters, to whom he attempted to give an accurate representative voice. Just as he consulted memoirs and accounts of battles to guarantee the facts in his historical spectacles, he utilized a recently published dictionary of "Caribbean" language to create the quite extensive speeches of the natives Columbus encounters in the New World in the final acts of his melodrama Christoph Colomb. His preface to that play, "The Author to His Public," concludes with a paragraph that takes precisely the opposite position from Hugo, but with equal conviction and appeal to logic:
The public will no doubt think, as I do, that it would be completely ridiculous to use our own language, even corrupted, for men who are seeing Europeans for the first time. Fully confident that my innovation could not fail to be approved by persons of taste, I made the inhabitants of Guanahani speak the language of the Antilles, which I have taken from the Dictionnaire Caribe created by R. P. Raymond Breton and published in Auxerre in 1665. Within the play will be found the translation of all those words which I felt, in any case, I ought to use in moderation.
Indeed, had Hugo looked in any detail at dramatic traditions outside the monologic classic French serious theatre, he could have found examples of heteroglossia in almost every previous period. Bert States's astute observation about the theatre's drive to absorb external reality is not of course directed at the realist movement in particular, but points to a general characteristic of the art form, and since cultural contact (or conflict) has been a part of the human experience at least as long as the drama, it is hardly surprising that there is a long tradition of theatrical attempts to negotiate with, if not absorb, this contact, often by means of contrasting languages.
The first extant Western drama, Aeschylus's The Persians, is in fact a drama dealing with such cultural confrontation. Here, at the very beginning of the tradition, we find an attempt, modest but significant, to give dramatic expression to the voice of the Other. The chorus, made up of Persians, speaks (or sings) primarily in Greek, but Aeschylus also provides them with specific exotic words and with mourning laments in at least an approximation of Persian, providing his audience with the impression of a distinct confrontation with that alien language. Persian being the non-Greek language best known to the Greeks, it was the one most likely to appear, even if corrupted in form, in the plays. Thus Pseudartabas in Aristophanes' The Acharnians speaks in what J. M. Starkie identified as "perfect Old Persian," but which most commentators have more cautiously identified as an imitation of Persian. The Scythian archer in Thesmophoriazusae speaks in an artificial nonsense supposedly representing this Persian-related language. One of the most famous "barbaric" speakers in Aristophanes is the Triballian god in The Birds, whose barbaric speech is not in fact that of the Thracian Triballi, but an incomprehensible corrupt Greek that Heracles interprets according to his own interests. These comic uses of "other" languages may be said be inspired by verisimilitude, or perhaps more accurately, by exoticism (a later example would be the mock Turkish in Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme), but they serve other functions as well. Chief among these is the particular type of humor they involve. An important element of humor has always been laughter at the expense of an outsider, whose actions, assumptions, or in this case language, mark him as someone who does not understand or follow the cultural codes of the dramatist and his presumed audience and is therefore offered as a fit subject for laughter. Aristophanes' barbarian Triballian god and Scythian archer are very early but quite clear examples of this dynamic at work.
It was not until the late twentieth century that language scholars began to study what came to be known as sociolinguistics, investigating how variations in language not only mark their speakers as belonging to particular social groups but also participate in the process of privileging or subordinating their members. A recent work in the field explains:
Often, people want to be considered a part of a particular social group as opposed to other groups, and so they project their identity with this group in a number of ways, including "talking like" other members of the group. Sometimes, group membership is voluntary and sometimes it is rooted in consignment to a particular social group without choice. In either case, though, group membership may end up carrying connotations of pride and loyalty.
The first major work in this area was William Labov's The Social Stratification of English in New York City (1966), which considered the relationship between language and social class, studying how language variables reflect class and style stratification, as well as gender and ethnicity. 7 These relationships were the subject of an outpouring of studies in Europe and America in the 1970s, and the new attention to the relationship between language and social power received particularly powerful expression in Pierre Bourdieu's 1982 book, Ce que parler veut dire: L'économie des échanges linguistiques, translated (in a somewhat different form) into English in 1991 as Language and Symbolic Action. Although Bourdieu does not, in this collection of writings, address theatre, his discussion of language and power is obviously relevant to the theatrical use of a foreign language, already present in the Greek drama, to mark and often to disparage the "outsider." Bourdieu focuses, as most sociolinguists have done, not upon the interplay of languages but upon that of dialects, where the social dynamics are more clearly in play. I will therefore consider his observations in more detail later when I turn to dialect theatre. Here I wish only to indicate that the "connotations of pride and loyalty," of group membership "as opposed to members of other groups," has in the theatre been often involved whenever the speaker of an alien language is depicted.
An early clear example of the use of language to express social stratification is the classic Sanskrit theatre of India, in which Sanskrit is spoken by noble or upper-class characters while the local vernacular languages (the pakrits) are spoken by common characters. This tradition is carried on in much Eastern folk theatre, especially in India, where if the drama is serious in tone, it is likely to draw upon ancient epic verse, while a clown, master of ceremonies, or other intermediary character provides a running translation or commentary in the vernacular for the audience.
This use of multiple languages has been developed in far more elaborate fashion in both the puppet theatre and dance-drama of Southeast Asia, whose traditions go back at least to the fourteen century, but which are still performed today. Both the Topeng dance-drama of Bali and the Wayang shadow theatre employ a wide variety of languages, some still in active use, others once active but now heard only in performance, and still others entirely artificial, never living languages, but existing only in poetic texts.
In an analysis of the Topeng drama Jelantik Goes to Blambangan, ethnographer J. Stephen Lansing describes the operations of seven different languages or registers operating in this single text: Sanskrit, Old Javanese, Middle Javanese, High Balinese, Middle Balinese, Low Balinese, and modern Indonesian. The first three are ancient languages, now spoken only in performance. These have a semimystical and incantatory quality, and are used evocatively, in the words of A. L. Becker, to "speak the past." To "speak the present" one uses Balinese or Indonesian, which still provide a wide linguistic choice. "High Balinese is courtly language; Middle Balinese is formal speech between equals; Low Balinese, the vernacular of the villages." Modern Indonesian provides yet other associations, invoking "a modern urban context." It may seem that what is involved here is less verisimilitude to actual language uses than the following of an extremely elaborate performance code, but in fact the operation of a variety of linguistic levels within normal social discourse is one of the features of the culture, as ethnographer Linda Conner explains:
The stratification of Balinese speech structure into various high and low forms imposes a highly patterned mode of interaction between inferiors and superiors, both in this and the other world, based on relations of ascribed authority and unquestioning subservience, of willfulness and restraint.... In everyday interactions, ignorance or violation of the elaborate formulas governing polite discourse is interpreted not merely as a breach of good manners, but as a transgression against cosmological order, and in more extreme cases, as a statement of one's political opinion vis-à-vis the holders of power.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Speaking in Tongues by Marvin Carlson Copyright © 2006 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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