JENNIFER HARVIE AND RICHARD PAUL KNOWLES
Michael Sidnell has drawn attention to the potential for dramatic monologue to be dialogic in ways that dialogue in the theatre rarely is, and he has pointed to a recent proliferation of dialogic monologue in Canadian theatre. This essay will examine the potentially dialogic function of monologue in some contemporary Canadian plays. Questions central to this examination will be: when is monologue dialogic, and what are the effects of dialogic monologue?
Considering that the actor often stands indexicallyfor an autonomous subject which is easily conflated with the character the actor is playing, we are interested in looking at how the dialogism of the character's monologue might destabilize subjectivity. Looking at monologues from a range of contemporary Canadian scripts and performances, we will consider how the dialogic configuration of subjectivity affects gender, race, and sexuality. And considering that dialogism may be (as Helene Keyssar has argued it was for Bakhtin) "key to the deprivileging of absolute, authoritarian discourses," we are interested in what specific "authoritarian discourses" contemporary Canadian dialogic monologue deprivileges.
Michael Sidnell a attiré notre attention sur le fait que le monologue dramatique au théâtre peut être dialogique d'une manière très différente du dialogue, et il a noté que le monologue dialogique est désormais très fréquent dans le théâtre canadien. Notre essai analyse la fonction potentiellement dialogique du monologue dans quelques pièces canadiennes contemporaines et il s'articule autour des questions suivantes: quand le monologue est-il dialogique, et quels en sont les effets.
Considérant le fait que l'acteur est lui-même souvent le signe d'un sujet autonome pouvant être assimilé-identifié facilement au personnage qu'il joue, nous nous attacherons à observer comment le dialogisme du monologue du personnage peut déstabiliser la subjectivité. En analysant des monologues extraits de plusieurs pièces et spectacles canadiens contemporains, nous essayerons de comprendre comment la configuration dialogique de la subjectivité influence la représentation des genres, des races et de la sexualité. Enfin, et considérant que le dialogisme (selon Helen Keyssar, Bakhtin serait d'accord avec cette théorie) dépouille de leurs privilèges les discours absolus et autoritaires, nous nous intéresserons particulièrement aux discours autoritaires que déprivilégie le monologue dialogique canadien contemporain.
Ric: Dialogic Monologue;
Jen: Or, the Mikhail Bakhtin lectures.
Ric: Every time I give an academic paper, a little voice inside me says
Jen: "You're a fraud."
Ric: "Get off the stage."
Jen: (That's an intertext- very dialogic- from Ken Garnhum's Pants on
Fire. Also Surrounded by Water. And from Geoffrey and Jeffrey's
Get off the Stage).1
Ric: But I continue anyway.
Jen: Dialogism, in its simplest formulation, involves intertext at its most
profound-the creation of a textual space in which a variety of
voices, styles, languages, or "speech genres"
Ric: -Todorov's translator calls them "discursive genres',2
Jen: --- contest with one another on equal terms, with no single voice
dominating. No voice gains authority by being-
Ric: I've got a right to talk too. They only seem-
Jen: -more articulate, more intelligent, more erudite.
Ric: "Erudite."
Jen: As Bakhtin describes it in his discussion of Dostoevsky's
"polyphonic novel,"3 a dialogic text consists of "a plurality of
independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine
polyphony of fully valid voices" (Problems 6).
Ric: If they can engage in that sort of academic obfuscation
Jen: --double talk- very dialogic-
Ric: -they can listen to me for half an hour. But the voice never shuts
up. I've internalized the judgement-
Jen: -voices-
Ric: -I'm anticipating. "Fraud."
Jen: Double talk.
Ric: Very dialogic.
Jen: In 1993, at meetings of the Association for Canadian TheatreResearch in Ottawa, Michael Sidnell drew attention to the potential
for dramatic monologue to be dialogic in ways that dialogue in the
theatre rarely is, and he pointed to a recent proliferation of dialogic
monologue in Canadian theatre.4
Ric: (Though his observation, like much of our dialogue, is largely Toronto-centric.)
Jen: This paper will examine the potentially dialogic function of monologue in some contemporary Canadian
plays, and will ask: when is monologue dialogic? and what are the-
Ric: -political-
Jen: -effects of dialogic monologue?
Ric: According to Bakhtin's "sociolinguistics," all "utterances," as he calls the basic units of communication,
which can range from a single non-verbal sound or gesture to a full-length novel, are made up of a heteroglot
polyphony of languages drawn from a variety of "speech genres"-social, professional, and cultural
communication systems, formal and informal-made unique by the historical/contextual moment of the
utterance, which takes place in the historical body of an individual subject in response to and in anticipation of
other utterances by other, real or imagined, but in any case specific
communicating subjects.5 (Beat.) Whew.
Jen: But some utterances are more dialogic than others. The epic and the lyric poem, according to Bakhtin,
aspire to a monologic unity of voice and expression that attempts to rise above the marketplace of
historically situated social exchange to a level of pure expression and disembodied, ahistorical authority. 6
Ric: The novel, on the other hand, at least at its most polyphonic-
Jen: (Bakhtin finds this in Dostoevsky and Rabelais; Kristeva in écriture feminine, in which she includes works
by Joyce, Artaud, and Bataille, as well as by women.) 7
Ric: -aspires to the free play-
Jen: -or open contestation-
Ric: -of equal and interilluminating voices, in which the authority of author and narrator is invaded by the
independent, unmerged voices of the characters, manifesting themselves through indirect discourse, parody,
"the word with a loophole"-
Jen: -or a "sideways glance"-
Ric & Jen: --double voicing
Jen: -'intonational quotation marks"-
Ric: -words spoken with a "cringe"-
Jen: -as if in quotation marks-
Jen (speaks, as Ric mouths the word): -"ventriloquism"-
Ric: -hyperbole-
Jen: -parody-
Ric: -or, not that I'd do this myself-
Jen: (self consciousness)
Ric: -using self-deprecating, overblown speech that repudiates itself in advance.
Jen: There's also "indirect speaking," "quasi-direct speech," and embedding, in which the speech or accents of
another person are-
Ric: -inserted-
Jen: -in the speaker's utterance-
Ric: -the voice of the other internalized-
Jen: -but not entirely appropriated-
Ric & Jen: -or "merged.,8
Ric: So what makes traditional theatrical modes of presentation not dialogic?
Jen: In Bakhtin's view, the freedom and independence of the authorial voice, the politics of speech reported in
indirect discourse, and participation-
Ric: -the absence of "footlights," which may be interpreted as anything which "separates the aesthetic event
from lived life" (Art and Answerability 217)9 -
Jen: -are essential for dialogism, but are excluded from drama, which he sees as "alien to genuine polyphony,"
primarily because it "is almost always constructed out of represented, objectified discourses" (Problems 34,
188).
Ric: He argues that "pure drama strives toward a unitary language, one that is individualized merely through
dramatic personae who speak it." "Dramatic dialogue," he insists, "is determined by a collision between
individuals who exist within the limits of a single unitary language" (Dialogic Imagination 405).10
Jen: It's this conflation in drama of character and unitary voice-the sense that a dramatist represents a subject
through the use of an individuated voice-which Michael Sidnell focused on in Ottawa. In counterdistinction
to this, he argued, "[Guillermo] Verdecchia's Fronteras Americanas is about a failure of social integration,
and, more fundamentally, about the lack of self-coherence that is desired both for its own sake and as the
condition of communality. The problem for performance- a problem that Verdecchia's performance confronts
head-on-is that these desiderata are conventionally assumed as the very basis of theatre, which may be said to
celebrate them" (3-4).
Ric: What, then, makes a monologue in the theatre dialogic?
Jen: According to Paul Castagno, "dialogizing monologue" involves three "dematrixing" techniques:
Ric: His emphasis. His word, too.
Jen: "The actor/character can be de-matrixed if they 1)
Ric: "fracture the mould of a specific character
Jen: "2)
Ric: "directly acknowlege or address the presence of the audience
Jen: [Hello audience]
Ric: "or
Jen: "3)
Ric: "foreground the presence of the actor over character" (137).
Jen: We found that useful-
Ric: And we hope you did too.
Jen: Sidnell argued, moreover, that the "dialogism of theatrical monologue is quite different ... from the
virtuosity of one actor playing many roles.... And ... is also distinct from the representation of one character in
conflict with himself."
Ric: "It's not," he argued, "a character that the dialogic monologue represents but a fractured, incoherent or self-alienated subject through which various voices are heard" (5).
Jen: Not all monologues, then, are equal: some, again, are more dialogic than others,-
Ric: -even if you don't get into generic distinctions involving story telling, performance art, stand-up-
Jen (cutting him off): -which we won't get into. There are, for example, monologues-or soliloquies-that occur
within plays whose central mode is dialogue, and in such plays as Judith Thompson's these are central, and
often dialogic, devices. There is also, for economic reasons, a current proliferation of Canadian monologues
as plays, in many of which a single character is played throughout by a single actor. Some of these, such as
Michael Cook's Terese's Creed, Joan MacLeod's Jewel, Wendy Lill's The Occupation of Heather Rose, Judith
Thompson's Pink, and so on, are not notably dialogic, but in the case of work such as Daniel MacIvor's See
Bob Run or Wild Abandon, Cook's absurdist monodrama, Quiller, Tom Cone's Herringbone, or Thompson's
Perfect Pie, the single character is fragmented, her "voice" dialogically invaded and fractured.
Ric: Some monodramas, such as Dan Needles' Wingfield Trilogy, involve splitting the link between actor and
character by requiring the actor to perform multiple roles. Such performances, nevertheless,
remain predominantly monologic-at least from the point of view of
the audience-in that the virtuosity of role switching produces the
illusion of dialogue among discrete characters for whom the need to
create distinct, unitary voices is felt, for reasons of clarity, to be
particularly urgent.
Jen: There are also plays such as Michel Tremblay's Albertine en cinq
temps and David Young's Glenn, in which several actors collectively
play one character, a potentially dialogic device, but one that is often
neutralized, as in these plays, by the fact that the actors represent the
character at various stages in his or her life, employing a unitary
voice for each distinct role. A more complex, more dialogic variation
on this device occurs in Daniel MacIvor's 2-2-Tango: A Two-Man
One-Man-Show, in which the "characters" are named James and Jim,
are identically dressed, and interact with one another in the present.
Ric: Finally, there is a sub-genre of "lecture/plays," such as John
Palmer's Henrik Ibsen on the Necessity of Producing Norwegian
Drama, and Daniel Brooks and Guillermo Verdecchia's The Noam
Chomsky Lectures, in this last of which the actor/lecturers
Jen: -playing "themselves," incorporate-
Ric: --contradictions-
Jen: -disagreements-
Ric: -and fragments from different genres,-
Jen: -in a very sophisticated, assertively, and self-consciously-
Ric: -and therefore dialogically?-
Jen: -monologic dialogue.
Ric: Somewhat like these lectures, in fact.
Jen: Except not
Ric (Looks at her): In fact, we considered doing for the ACTR what
Brooks and Verdecchia did for Theatre Passe Muraille.
Jen: Rather Ric considered it.
Ric: A sexual flow chart. Complete with little arrows saying "you are
here."
Jen: But I vetoed it.
Ric: Too many straight lines?
Jen: What about a line of stars?
Ric: OK:
*****
Jen: We are most interested here in a particular kind of monologue, plays in which a single character engages in
a dialogical accounting for a "life" that is in some sense represented autobiographically. These include Verdecchia's Fronteras Americanas; Monique Mojica's Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots
(not, strictly speaking, a monologue); Margo Kane's Moonlodge; Daniel MacIvor's House and Wild Abandon;
Ken Garnhum's Beuys, Buoys, Boys, Surrounded by Water, and Pants on Fire (also not strictly a monologue);
and three plays that are not notably autobiographical, except perhaps in form: Margaret Hollingsworth's Apple
in the Eye and Diving (Willful Acts 17-32, 113-118), and Sharon Pollock's Getting it Straight.' 11
Ric: Each of these reveals the "salient features of novelization" as Bakhtin describes them in "Epic and Novel":
"they become ... free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglossia....
they become dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally-this is the
most important thing-. . . an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with
unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the openended present)" (Dialogic Imagination 6-7). "In these
plays," as Sidnell says, "performance becomes ... theory in action" (2).
Jen: This is so because, as a form, autobiography can expose the falsity of the concept of the single
consciousness, by publicly constructing the "life" of the "self." Bakhtin argues, in Problems of Dostoevsky's
Poetics, that "no human events are developed or resolved within the bounds of a single consciousness" (288).
When a single consciousness stages her attempt to represent the development and resolution of her life, the
fiction that (auto)biography "discloses" a pre-existing character by accounting for its "development" (or its
social construction) is made manifest.
Ric: And as Bakhtin says elsewhere, in a different context,
This is not merely a matter of the author's image appearing within his own field of representation-important
here is the fact that the underlying, original formal author appears in a new relationship with the
represented world. Both find themselves now subject to the same temporally valorized measurements, for
the "depicting" authorial language now lies on the same plane as the "depicted" language ... and may enter
into dialogic relations and hybrid combinations with it. (Dialogic Imagination 27-8)
This, in a sense, is what happens in Ken Gamhum's Pants on Fire-
Jen: "a one-man show for two people"-
Ric: -when the author and represented autobiographical subject, "Ken" (played by Ken Garnhum), tells the
fictional character, "Gabe," (played by Andy Massingham), "that's a stupid thing to say," to which Gabe
responds, "you wrote it."
Jen: At the centre of the show, which consists in part of a self-portrait that stitches together a series of self-portraits, is a portrait of the self as the Tower of Babel-
Ric: -which is defined in the show itself as "a confusion of voices."12
Jen: The fact that much Canadian autobiographical monodrama-including Gamhum's plays, Daniel MacIvor's
House, See Bob Run, and Wild Abandon, and Sharon Pollock's Getting it Straight- is confessional in form, is
a complicating factor (Wilson).
Ric: Confession is problematic for Bakhtin.
Jen: In the 1961 Appendix to Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, he discusses confession
as an encounter of the deepest I with another and with others.... But the I in this encounter must be the
pure, deep I from within oneself, without any admixture of presumed and forced or naively assimilated
points of view and evaluations from another.... Without a mask ... without loopholes, without a false
ultimate word, that is, without all that is extemalizing and false. (Problems 294)13
Ric: From anyone else this would seem like romanticism, but Bakhtin is referring to the true, internal, social
self.
Jen: And besides, Bakhtin wasn't always very consistent.
Ric: But as Dennis A. Foster says, "introspection is a delusion, since each person has to seek his meaning
through the speech of others" (10). "The confessional narrative occurs ... between two substantial, unsettled
subjects" (3). Foster sees the confessional narrative as a site of struggle between writing and interpreting
subjects, which "unsettle[s] the listener's sense of self-possession," and thereby "sets the listener to work" (5).
It is this capacity to "set the listener to work" that we are interested in here. At least I am.
Jen: I'm interested in looking at how the dialogism of monologue in the theatre might destabilize subjectivity,
given that the actor-
Ric: -particularly the solitary actor-
Jen: -often stands indexically for an autonomous subject, which is easily conflated with the character the actor is
playing. 14
Ric: When this conflation takes place in an autobiographical monologue, written and performed by its subject,
the theatrical frisson can be both powerfully effective and representationally confusing. Who, precisely, are
we watching, and what are we analyzing as a work of theatre when, in Come Good Rain-
Jen: -billed as "a true story, written and performed by George Seremba"- 15
Ric: -we see the scars on the actor/character's body through which thebullets passed earlier in the life/narrative; or when Ken Garnhum tells us, in Pants on Fire-
Jen: -a play that is largely about representation, including the representation of AIDS-
Ric: -that "he" is HIV positive?
Jen: And who is "he" anyway?
Ric: The question is made even more complicated by the fact that "he" has made it clear earlier in the play that
he is a liar, and that theatre is his favourite kind of lying.
Jen: At one point, the stage floor opens, and a "Trojan Cat" enters, bearing on a slip of paper a one-word
invasionary force:
Ric: -"liar."
Jen: Fraud.
Ric: Get off the stage.
Jen: One of the functions of Pants on Fire is to interrogate what Ann Wilson calls "the nostalgic belief that
theatre involves presence" (35), by drawing attention to the fact that these moments of full confessional
presence are rehearsed-"répétitions"-and that the powerful, "forced" confession that "Ken Garnhum" has
AIDS, to which audiences respond with stunned silence, 16 is performed night after night for the length of the
run.
Ric: Each of the plays we are considering, then, is in some sense about what Michael Holquist calls "the
Bakhtinian just-so-story of subjectivity," or, "how I get myself from the other," since "in order to forge a self,
I must do it from outside. In other words I author myself " (Dialogism 28).
Jen: And consequently, as Bakhtin says, "we have no alibi for existence" (quoted in Holquist, Dialogism 29). He
insists that "human being is the production of meaning" (Holquist, Dialogism 162), and he is careful, in a
passage that goes some distance towards explaining his reticence about dialogism in the theatre, to distinguish
between "person"-which is dialogic, in process, unique, unpredictable, and constructed; and "character"-which is monologic, completed, generalized, and determined. 17
Ric: As Michael Gardiner puts it, "for Bakhtin, human consciousness is not a unified whole, but always exists in
a tensile, conflict-ridden relationship with other consiousnesses, in a constant alterity between self and other.
Jen: "In fact ... the very process of acquiring self-consciousness from birth to maturity is, in Bakhtin's eyes,
utterly dependent upon discursive interaction with another 'I"' (Gardiner 28).
Ric: "We are," as Gary Saul Morson puts it, "the voices that inhabit us" (Morson, "Who Speaks" 8).
Jen: Consequently, "since this process [of coming into subjectivity] is fundamentally historical," "the subject in
Bakhtin's eyes is unfinalized
Ric: "(and, yes, 'decentered'),
Jen: "in a perpetual state of 'becoming'" (Gardiner 165).
Ric: What we are witnessing in these monologues, as Wilson says, is "the self-consciousness of the performer
producing his identity in the context of a wide range of social forces," a self-consciousness that "disrupts the
notion of a coherent self which can be told in a story" (Wilson 37).18
Jen: A play such as Daniel Maclvor's House, as Robert Wallace notes, openly and self-consciously presents the
construction of a character, Victor, as "the sum of his texts" (8). House "draws attention to ... the audience's
overt participation in the creation," and nevertheless "resists their interpretation" (Wallace 10), finally
drawing attention to the incompleteness and inadequacy of coherent and unified concepts of a stable human
identity. By becoming aware that we are watching, not Victor, but "the performance of Victor" (Wallace 13),
we are made conscious of both the fragmented, processual nature of subjectivity, and of what Caryl Emerson
calls "the indispensibility of otherness" ("The Tolstoy Connection" 155).
Ric: The indispensibility of otherness is, in one sense, what Garnhum's Pants on Fire is about, as the
performance artist who writes, designs, and performs his own work faces the onset of an illness that
undermines his self-sufficiency. But it also confronts him with the ongoing need for the other as a necessary
part of representation, whether that other is allowed onto the stage, as in this play-a self portrait that requires
two people-
Jen: -very Bakhtinian-
Ric: -or is merely acknowledged as a necessary part of the construction of the self, requiring the audience's
complicity, as in House, or indeed most of the plays under discussion.
Jen: These plays do not shrink, however, from representing the dangers of the fracturing of subjectivity. It is not
incidental that Victor is "fucked up," or that Eme, the central character in Sharon Pollock's stream-of-consciousness monologue, Getting it Straight, is represented as schizophrenic, an escapee from her
"keepers"-
Ric: -even if those plays might seem to suggest that schizophrenia is an appropriate response, to a world that's
"fucked up."
Jen: Ultimately, however, the plays we are looking at exemplify Bakhtin's insistence on the responsibility of the
historically situated subject, and what Michael Holquist calls "the need for choice."
At all the possible levels of conflict between stasis and change, there is always a situated subject whose
specific place is defined precisely by its in-between-ness. To be responsible for the site we occupy in the
space of nature and the time of history is a mandate we cannot avoid. (Dialogism 181)
*****
Ric: We are interested, then-
Jen: -in spite of the danger that dialogism, like carnival-or "the degraded carnival of postmodernism," as
Michael Gardiner calls it (95)-will turn out to be-
Ric & Jen: -just another liberal humanist form of all-embracing pluralism.
Ric: OK, OK, not we: I'm interested-in the potential for social change that the dialogic construction of
subjectivity makes possible (see O'Connor 201), in the free play of voices which disrupts the currently
dominant, "socializ[ing]-
Jen: [-as opposed to psychologizing-]
Ric: -internal conflicts," as Caryl Emerson says, "exposing their mechanisms to the light of day. If enough
individuals experience the same gap," she argues, "it is resocialized: there develops a political underground,
and the potential for revolution" ("The Outer Word" 32).
Jen: And I want to consider the potential for dialogism to "deprivilege," as Helene Keyssar says, "absolute,
authoritarian discourses" ("Drama and the Dialogic" 89). How, for example, may the dialogic configuration of
subjectivity affect the construction of gender, and can it be used to deprivilege the discourses of
phallocentrism?
Ric: Bakhtin did not, in his writings, analyze any texts produced by women; he assumed a male readership for
his work; and he chose to discuss a great deal of overtly sexist writing. As Wayne C. Booth asks "is it not
remarkable to discover no hint in such a penetrating and exhaustive inquiry-
Jen: [-penetrating and exhaustive-]
Ric: -"into how our various dialects are constituted ... of the influence of sexual differences, no hint that women
talk or have ever talked in ways different from men's?" (Booth 154)19 (Beat. Looks to Jen.)
Jen: Carry on.
Ric: Nevertheless, as Keyssar says, "there is a striking confluence between the attention to the construction of
multi-voicedness and hybridization in much of contemporary feminist writing and in Bakhtin's criticism"
("Drama and the Dialogic" 95).
Jen: The contributors to Bauer and McKinstry's Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, addressing "The
Dilemmas of a Feminine Dialogic," tend to focus on the ways in which dialogism "questions the 'normalcy' of
monolithic, hierarchical social relations" (Herndl 19), and helps to get beyond the "problematical binary
opposition 'in here/out there'" (Schwab 67). As Dale Bauer says,The feminist struggle is not one between a conscious "awakened" or natural voice and the voice of patriarchy
"out there." Rather precisely because we all internalize the authoritative voice of patriarchy, we must
struggle to refashion inherited social discourses into words which rearticulate intentions other than
normative or disciplinary ones. (2)
Ric: Margaret Hollingsworth's The Apple in the Eye and Diving illustrate the dissident, as opposed to
hegemonic, potential of internalizing, refashioning, and ventriloquizing the voice of patriarchy, as the central
characters, Gemma in Apple and Viveca in Diving, assimilate-with-a-twist words, phrases, and constructions
that are explicitly external to them.
Jen: In The Apple in the Eye, Gemma picks up words that she has "never heard of' from her husband's crossword
puzzle, words like "arcane" and "behemoth," and, eschewing his "first order logic" together with his "artificial
intelligence," she internalizes them in a gesture of anti-hegemonic appropriation, recontextualizing them in a
dialogic play of associative "little funnies," as her off-stage husband condescendingly calls them.
Ric: Diving does something similar with a voice-over discourse of command and obedience appropriated from
animal training, athletic coaching, and parenting, as Viveca employs a carnivalesque "grotesque inversion"20
to rewrite herself into the discourse-
Jen: -as a sort of "Trojan femme"?-
Ric: -and "capture," on a tape that she herself controls, the instructional voice of authority.
Jen: Finally, Sharon Pollock's Getting it Straight discursively carnivalizes patriarchal languages in a textbook
exercise in écriture féminine. At the end of the play Eme, too, "confesses": "I let the briefcase hang from my
hand," she says, "as I walk to / the water I sit on the shore and I use the key I tear / the papers to pieces I chew
and I swallow" (125). Having chewed and swallowed the words contained in the throbbing and threatening
briefcase, symbol of her husband's patriarchal corporate power, she turns to address the audience, "the egg
talkin' to all members a the female / sex," imagining spinning "a gossamer net of women's hands and
rapunzel's / hair," and wondering, in the play's final lines, "what would it spell?" (126).
Ric: Appropriately, then, these monologues can be seen to employ Bakhtinian dialogics for feminist ends,
deprivileging patriarchal discourses, internalizing them antihegemonically, and reconstructing them
dialogically as wild and whirling words.
*****
Jen: Dialogism can also be used to deprivilege other authoritarian discourses, and in Canadian monologues it
has been particularly effective recently in deprivileging the discourses of ethnocentricism, or, in English
Canada, "anglo-conformity," as Donna Bennett has recently called it.21 In Canada, at least, ethnicity itself
seems to be dialogically constituted, while ethnocentrism is, of course, determinedly monologic.
Ric: As Bakhtin says (though he wasn't at this point thinking of ethnicities),
Monologism denies that there exists outside of it another consciousness, with the same rights, and capable
of responding on an equal footing, another and equal I (thou). For a monologic outlook ... the other remains
entirely and only an object of consciousness, and cannot constitute another consciousness.... The
monologue is accomplished and deaf to the other's response; it does not await it and does not grant it any
decisive force. Monologue makes do without the other; that is why to some extent it objectivizes all reality.
Monologue pretends to be the last word.22
Jen: In doing so it absorbs, assimilates, and colonizes the discourses of the other (constructed and objectified as
stable and unchanging), and thereby reifies existing asymmetrical power relations.
Ric: Ethnographic theorists see the dialogism of ethnicity itself as a potential fissure in ethnocentrist discourse.
As Michael Fisher says, "a process of assuming an ethnic identity is an insistence on a pluralist,
multidimensional, or multifaceted concept of self [that] can be a crucible for a wider social ethos" (Fischer
196).23
Jen: Though as Bakhtin says, shifting the ground to discourse and nation, 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" (Dialogic Imagination 23). 24
Ric: Bakhtin's thoughts on these and other issues were influenced, according to Katerina Clark and Michael
Holquist, by his having grown up in the multi-ethnic Vilnius, "a realized example of heteroglossia" (22), and
one that in this sense resembled the Toronto of the 1990s, where Sidnell's prime example of dialogic
monologue, Fronteras Americanas, was first produced and is in part set.
Jen: Written and performed by its Argentinian-Canadian autobiographical subject, Guillermo Verdecchia,
Fronteras is notable-
Ric: -quite apart from those things it shares with most of the plays under consideration: its use of disruptive
laughter, its "linguistic
carnival" (Spanish and some French as well as various modes of
spoken English),25 its disruptions of subjectivity, its mixture of styles,
its use of parodic exaggeration and inversion, and its Bakhtinian
employment of a hero, "Wideload McKennah," as jester 26 _
Jen: -as I was saying, it is notable for its recognition and development of the idea that, as Peter Stallybrass and
Allon White have said, "cultural identity is inseparable from limits, it is always a boundary phenomenon"
(200).27
Ric: In fact, the play is an example as well as a discussion of cultural production as a boundary, or border
phenomenon.
Jen: When Verdecchia argues that we all must learn to "live on the border" (77), he echoes Bakhtin's various
arguments that "a person has no internal sovereign territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary"
(Problems 287). The borders, or "fronteras" to which Verdecchia refers are also, in a bilingual pun, a new
28
Verdecchia echoes Bakhtin's position that "a cultural domain has no inner territory. It is located entirely upon
boundaries....
Ric: "Every cultural act lives essentially on the boundaries, and it derives its seriousness from this fact.
Separated by abstraction from these boundaries, it loses the ground of its being and becomes vacuous,
arrogant; it degenerates and dies" (Art and Answerability 274).
Jen: And when Verdecchia issues his "manifesto"-not a "plea for tolerance" but a "summons to begin
negotiations, to claim your place on the continent" (54), and asks, "will you call off the Border Patrol?" (77)
because "the border is your home" (74), he evokes Bakhtin's call late in life for "benevolent demarcation.
Without border disputes" (Speech Genres 137).
Ric: Finally, near the end of Fronteras, Verdecchia locates himself on the border in a way that sounds
archetypally Bakhtinian-
Jen: -isn't that a contradiction in terms?-
Ric: -yes-in its heteroglossia, its insistence on the processual nature of identity as a highway, and its parodic wit:
Jen:
I'm not in Canada; I'm not in Argentina.
I'm on the Border. I'm Home.
Mais zooot alors, je comprends maintenant, mais oui,
merde! Je suis Argentin-Canadien! l'm a post-Porteno neo-
Latino Canadian! I am the Pan-American highway! (Verdecchia 74)29
*****
Ric: Dialogic monologues can disrupt ethnocentric and other authoritarian discourses in a variety of ways,
including what I think of as the structural, or formal heteroglossia of a play such as Monique Mojica's
Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots.
Jen: Princess Pocahontas is not, strictly speaking, a monologue, since it includes a musician-Alejandra Nuñez
in the original production-who also plays several small supporting roles.
Ric: Nor is it autobiographical in the same ways as the other plays we are discussing-
Jen: -though its form is in some sense autobiographical, and as an anti-hegemonic revisioning of dominant
myths of Native women, written and performed by Mojica out of a strong and resisting subject position, from
which its various characters, historical and contemporary, seem to emerge, it can be seen as a kind of
spiritual/historical autobiography. 30
Ric: On one level, Princess Pocahontas, like Margo Kane's Moonlodge, would seem to function counter- rather
than anti-hegemonically, in that, like Moonlodge, with its transhistorical and perhaps nostalgic mission of
recovering a lost sense of self, it posits and asserts a strong, stable, and empowering community of Native
women-
Jen: -a counter-hegemony-
Ric: -who share what seems to be an essentialist identity as both Native-Canadians and as women.
Jen: Princess Pocahontas explicitly ties this essentialist identity to the biological marker of the "blue spot at the
base of the spine-the sign of Indian blood" (Mojica 20). Even as this authenticating signifier functions-
Ric: -like post-colonial nationalisms-
Jen: -as an empowering device for a marginalized group, however, the play simultaneously cuts across the
boundary lines and "border patrols" of the colonizing dominant, emphasizing that even though it is counter-
rather than anti-hegemonic, it is nevertheless not normative. Princess Pocahontas does not reinscribe, or even
acknowledge, the geo-political divisions that Fronteras Americanas confronts; the myths of Native identity
that it attacks or constructs are indiscriminately drawn from all of North, Central, and South America; and the
hybrid nature of Native and other ethnicities is asserted at every turn, as well as embodied in the author-performer. Mojica's heritage as a Native-Canadian half-breed born in New York City to a Kuna-Rappahanock
mother and Jewish father positions her' as an embodiment of Bakhtin's hybridization, and of the
Bakhtin/Verdecchia border phenomenon.
Ric: Princess Pocahontas uses a truly camivalesque blending of musical and performance styles, including what
Bakhtin calls "extraliterary" (Dialogic Imagination 411) and "proclamatory" genres (Speech Genres 132),
together with parodic exaggeration and inversion, to deprivilege both ethnocentric and phallocentric
discourses.
Jen: It also explicitly employs a structural principle that Keyssar has articulated as being both Bakhtinian and
feminist.
Ric: Mojica includes in the prefatory material to the published script an explanation of its structure:
Jen: There are 13 transformations, one for each moon in the lunar year.... There are 4 sections where there is a
transfiguration of three women or entities who are one.... 13 moons, 4 directions; it is not a linear structure
but it is the form and the basis from which these stories must be told. (Mojica 16)
Ric: The playwright, then, explicitly rejects what Keyssar describes as the "resistance to [polyphony]" of
traditional western dramaturgical structures, adopting one based on Native mythologies and "transformation,"
which "requires not that we remove . . . disguises that conceal us from our 'true' selves," as in Aristotelian
"recognition," "but that we imagine men and women in a continual process of becoming other."
Jen: "It is becoming other, not finding oneself, that is the crux of the drama," Keyssar argues-
Ric: -and she argues further that such "transformational strategies go hand in hand with the dialogic
imagination" ("Drama and the Dialogic" 92-3).31
Jen: Like all of the plays under discussion, then, Princess Pocahontas functions in a variety of formal ways as
dialogic monologue, emphasizing not simply heterogeneity but "'social/ideological' contradictions" (Yaeger
244), to destabilize, subvert, or carnivalize authoritarian discourses, and to open the way for effective and
ongoing social change.32
*****
Jen: As with all utopian visions, there are problems with Bakhtin's. The most apparent of these have to do with
how to construct a space in which dialogue can take place-an arena of free contestation between equal voices-when hegemony dictates that the consciousnesses and voices of marginalized groups are inevitably inflected
with the discourses of the dominant.
Ric: Can voices be equal?
Jen: Who, and what, controls the construction of dialogic space?
Ric: This problem reveals itself clearly in Bakhtin's construction of carnival and carnival laughter as healthy and
socially disruptive-
Jen: -when in practice both frequently reinforce social stereotypes, andtherefore aid social control of ethnic minorities, women, gays, lesbians, and others. Heard any good Newfie
jokes lately?
Ric: At the heart of this is the question of power, and the fact that "communication is by nature more coercive
and disproportionate than we think," as Aaron Fogel notes, "when we sentimentalize terms like dialogue and
communication" (195)-and as Deborah Jacobs points out, when we "romanticise marginality" (73).
Jen: And as Ken Hirschkop says, "dialogue" must be understood to include "not only the liberal exchange of
views but also questions of cultural oppression and power" (75)33 _
Ric: -an understanding that will inevitably-and especially in the
Stalinist context of Bakhtin's own historical place and time- include
coercion, interrogation, force, and unequal societal, grammatical, and
rhetorical forms and relationships.
Jen: Shut up, Ric.
Ric: Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the ACTR?
Jen: Finally, as Michael Andre Bernstein points out, it is important not to sentimentalize the potential for
genuinely unstructured polyphony to trap the individual in an "intolerable babble of voices" that is akin to
madness or neurosis, as represented in House and Getting it Straight, or that can produce a reactionary
monologic attempt to shout down and control the "noise. ,34
Ric: The voices of polyphony, Bakhtin would argue, must be firmly grounded in the utterances of an individual
and historicized subject.
Jen: In spite of these concerns, and of Bakhtin's own awareness of the fragility of "the dialogic sphere" (Speech
Genres 150), there is surely hope, as well as trepidation, in a model in which dialogic questioning has the
potential to "change the consciousness of the individual" (Speech Genres 136), and therefore of the culture.
Ric: Even acknowledging the possibility of abuse deriving from unequal power relations in the theatre and in
the world, the monologues we've looked at, as historical utterances in the context of Canadian theatre today,
when initiated and controlled by the societally disempowered, can provide a tentative model of contesting and
unmerged voices with the ongoing and open-ended potential to change consciousnesses, societies, and social
structures.
Jen: The potential provided by dialogism lies, then, in its ability to change, structurally, the ways in which we
perceive the world, as Bakhtin believed that Dostoevsky and Rabelais did and continue to do, and as we
believe plays such as the Canadian dialogic monologues that we have been discussing are able to do.
Ric: For as Michael Holquist points out, "we experience the world in all
its most common and frequent occasions as fonns" (Holquist,
Dialogism 15 1).
Jen: Perhaps it's appropriate here to give the last but hopefully not
closing words of this dialogue to Bakhtin.
Ric: And perhaps appropriately, they constitute Bakhtin's last but not
closing writings.
Jen:
There is no first or last discourse, and dialogical context knows no limits
(it disappears into an unlimited past and in our unlimited future). Even
past meanings, that is those that have arisen in the dialogue of past
centuries, can never be stable they will always change (renewing
themselves) in the course of the dialogue's subsequent development
At every moment of the dialogue, there are immense and unlimited masses
of forgotten meanings... th[at] will return to memory and live in
renewed form (in a new context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every
meaning will celebrate its rebirth. The problem of the great temporality.
(Quoted in Todorov I 10)
NOTES
We would like to acknowledge the writers whose work we cite, together with those whose work and voices we have dialogically and unconsciously internalized. We quote extensively, and employ extensive footnotes, in an attempt to create a kind of critical polyphony-to admit as many voices, positions, and genres as possible into the text. A version of this dialogue was presented at the meetings of the Association for Canadian Theatre Research/Association de la recherche théâtrale au Canada in Calgary, 5 June 1994.
1 Geoffrey and Jeffrey are Toronto clowns, Jim Warren and Andrew Massingham, whose Get
off the Stage satirizes Canadian theatre from the points of view of two aging British actors of
the old school. The appearance of Andrew Massingham in Garnhum's Pants on Fire reinforced
the intertextuality of the moment in which Garnhum's sign, reading "Keep off the stage," was
altered to "Get off the stage" by Massingham.
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2 See Bakhtin, Speech Genres, especially "The Problem of Speech Genres," 60-102; and
Todorov, 82. Michael Gardiner provides a useful summary analysis of Bakhtin's concept of
speech genres, 81-5. What we are referring to as intertexuality, here and elsewhere, Bakhtin
usually called "metalinguistics," or "translinguistics" (Speech Genres, xv, 114).
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3 Todorov usefully notes that "what [Bakhtin] described under this name [novel] is not a genre,
but one or two properties of discourse, whose occurrence is not confined to a single historical
moment" (91). Or as Michael Holquist says in his introduction to Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination "'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" (xxxi).
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4 Sidnell argued that "the Elizabethan soliloquy and the modem monologue would appear to be
more profoundly dialogic than dialogue as it is usually written, played, and understood.... I
propose that dialogue in the theatre is a more monologic position ... than monologue, and that
novelistic polyphony has infiltrated into contemporary theatrical monologue" (5). We are citing
here a draft faxed to Ric Knowles, 27 May 1993. Paul C. Castagno has also pointed to ways in
which recent monologue in the American theatre "moves from its monologic aspect ... towards
various forms of dialogism" (135).
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5 According to Volosinov/Bakhtin, and his/their critique of Saussurean linguistics,
Utterance ... is constructed between two socially organized persons.... The word is oriented
toward an addressee, toward who that addressee might be: a fellow member or not of the
same social group, of higher or lower standing.... someone connected with the speaker by
close social ties ... or not. There can be no such thing as an abstract addressee.
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*****
Word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee. Each and every word expresses the "one" in relation to the "other." I give myself verbal shape from the other's point of view. (Volosinov, Marxism 85-6)
(This, together with Freudianism: A Marxist Critique- see note 18, below-is a disputed text, first published under Volosinov's name and later claimed for Bakhtin. In the areas with which we are concerned, however, the views expressed in both volumes are congruent with those of Bakhtin elsewhere; we will treat them as his.) It is important to note, in this context, that while Bakhtin is here focusing on verbal communication between speaking subjects, he elsewhere, if minimally, extends this construction of "language" to other sign systems. Also important is Luce Irigaray's extension of the implications of Bakhtin's "sociolinguistics": " 'I' is sometimes truer than 'one' or 'he.' It's truer because it tells its origin," Parler n'est jamais neutre (Paris, 1985), 9, quoted and translated by Schwab, 58, 69.
6 See especially the essay "Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,"
in The Dialogic Imagination, 3-40.
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7 Bakhtin refers to Dostoevsky and Rabelais throughout his work, particularly of the middle
period, but see especially Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and Rabelais and His World. See
also Kristeva. Bakhtin's concepts of degradation, abuse, and carnival inversion are of course
also related to Kristeva's analysis of the abject in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
(New York: Columbia UP, 1982).
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8 These concepts and coinages permeate Bakhtin's writing from beginning to end, but for some
of the more idiosyncratic ones, see, for examples, Problems 196 ("word with a loophole,"
"cringe," and "sideways glance"); 51 (self-consciousness); Speech Genres 115 (indirect
speaking); 120 (double voicing); 154 (hyperbole); The Dialogic Imagination 69 ("intonational
quotation marks"); and Marxism 141-159 ("quasi-direct speech"). "Ventriloquism," on the
other hand, is a useful term introduced, not by Bakhtin, but by Michael Holquist in "The
Politics of Representation."
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9 See also Rabelais 7, where Bakhtin asserts that "the absence of footlights would destroy a
theatrical performance."
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10 See also Dialogic Imagination 266, 330, & 332. It is clear that Bakhtin's views were based
on a very specific type of drama and theatre, and that he failed to consider that, as Helene
Keyssar points out, "any action on stage is refracted (to use another Bakhtinian term) through
the diverse points of view of writers, actors, designers and spectators" ("Drama and the
Dialogic" 89). This and other points are argued convincingly by Keyssar 89ff, Carlson, and
Wise. Bakhtin himself discusses medieval theatre admiringly and at some length in his analyses
of carnival, particularly in Rabelais 15, 347-9; he acknowledges "the influence of popular
theatrical forms on Rabelais" (Rabelais, 349, and elsewhere); and he admits that, "to some
extent, comedy is an exception" to his rule (Dialogic Imagination 405). The best example of
Bakhtin's treatment of drama as a genre (a subject which he never addressed systematically or
at length) is in Problems 34, but relevant passages are in that volume, 17-18, 122, 128, 188,
and 239; in Art and Answerability 73-4, 76-8; in Rabelais 7-8, 39-40, 257-8, 265, and 347-9;
and in Speech Genres 110, 122, and 126. Deborah Jacobs, writing about applications of
Bakhtin to Renaissance drama, argues that "these readings 'novelize' non-novelistic materials
and pre-novelistic literature; they gobble up semiotically the materials even of another culture
and time, asking them questions specific to novelistic (middle-class, individualized) subjectivity
as if they are the only questions in town" (74). Something might equally be argued of our
present application of dialogism-Bakhtinian dialogics have tended to be gobbled up by
ahistorical applications of all sorts-except, we would argue, that drama, and particularly
dramatic monologue in Canada, has become "novelized" in ways that make relevent questions
that were previously specific to novelistic discourse, including questions of novelistic
subjectivity.
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11 Robert Lepage's Needles and Opium and Pol Pelletier's Joie are excellent examples of the
kind of monodrama we are interested in, but Québec theatre and cultural production are
beyond the scope of this dialogue.
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12 We don't have a copy of the script, which is as yet unpublished. The line is quoted in
Wagner. Reviews consistently describe the show in dialogic terms, as when Jon Kaplan and Jill
Lawless call it "a toybox of insights, paradoxes and shards of beauty both linguistic and ...
visual."
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13 Bakhtin's emphasis. Confession is problematic for Bakhtin in part, one suspects, because it is an instance in which the power relationships that always problematize dialogical space (as discussed below) are particularly apparent. As Michel Foucault says, confession is
a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession.... (61)
In this context, the ways in which confessional monologues in the theatre construct their
audiences is an intriguing question, but one well beyond the scope of this dialogue.
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14 Sidnell, 4, takes this one step further when he refers to "the major corollary following from
the phenomenal presence of the actor, which is that the human subject is present: present to the
subjects that constitute the audience. For in theatre it is commonly assumed that the physical
entity is coterminous with a functional or metaphysical one" (4). Consider also Sidnell's
definition of performativeness: "it accepts the inextricability of the performing subject from the
object of representation, yet acknowledges the impossibility of self-representation." He goes on
to argue that, thereby, "performance becomes, as it were, theory in action" (2).
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15 Publicity material for Toronto's Crow's Theatre/Canadian Stage production. The published
script does not refer to the actor/writer's showing of his scars to the audience, but in
performance the moment when Seremba rolled up his sleeves (saying "not with these wounds,"
56), was quite carefully orchestrated, and functioned as a kind of documentary authentication.
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16 At least they did so at the premiere production at the Back Space, Tarragon Theatre, 17
March-17 April 1994.
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17 See the appendix to Problems, 283-302.
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18 For Volosinov/Bakhtin's discussions of subjectivity, and his quarrel with Freud, see
Voloshinov, Freudianism. See also Art and Answerability, 22-3, 25-6 (on empathy), 61, and
63-80; as well as Emerson, "The Outer Word," especially 25-7; Mathew Roberts, "Poetics
Hermeneutics Dialogics," especially 120-124.
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19 Booth notices, 165-6, that Bakhtin's assumed readership is male. Bakhtin's only even
moderately extended discussion of gender issues is in Rabelais, 240-241, where he exonerates
Rabelais from the charge of offering a "negative, hostile attitude toward women."
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20 Grotesque realism and grotesque inversion are discussed primarily in Rabelais and His World.
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21 There is a bumper sticker circulating in Ontario that says "ENGLISH, the universal
language."
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22 From appendix Il of Problems in Dostoevsky's Poetics, quoted and translated in Todorov,107.
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23 We are indebted to Liana Shannon-Appleford for referring us to Fischer
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24 Bakhtin's understanding of "the dialogic encounter of two cultures" (Speech Genres 7) is related to his understanding of empathy, and it often sounds uncomfortably appropriative (though he insists that it "does not result in merging or mixing"). "Each retains its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched." It also relies heavily on a conceptualization of other cultures as "foreign":
There exists a very strong, but one-sided and thus untrustworthy, idea that in order better to understand a foreign culture, one must enter into it, forgetting one's own, and view the world through the eyes of this foreign culture. This idea, as I said, is one-sided. Of course, a certain entry as a living being into a foreign culture, the possibility of seeing the world through its eyes, is a necessary part of the process of understanding it; but if this were the only aspect of this understanding, it would merely be duplication and would not entail anything new or enriching. Creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place in time, its own culture; and it forgets nothing. In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding-in time, in space, in culture.... 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 its new aspects and new semantic depths. Without one's own questions one cannot creatively understand anything other or foreign. (Speech Genres 6-7)
This raises, of course, the same questions as do carnival and the "free" dialogic play of equal
voices in discourse: how is equality ensured when such "freedoms" typically favour the
powerful?
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25 Discussions of "linguistic carnival" in Bakhtin include (but are not limited to) Rabelais, 473
and throughout; and The Dialogic Imagination, 33, 50, 60, 285, and 308. Sidnell, 5-6,
provides a brief analysis of Vercecchia's use of "tongues."
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26 Discussions of the hero as jester and related concepts appear frequently in Rabelais, but see
especially The Dialogic Imagination, 24-5, 273-4, 402, and 404-5.
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27 For discussions of boundaries and borders in Bakhtin, see Problems 287, 301; Speech
Genres 137; Art and Answerability 274; Holquist, Dialogism, 61 ("the utterance ... is a border
phenomenon"); and Kehde 27 ("the psyche ... is a boundary phenomenon").
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28 See note 24, above. Like that of many left-wing cultural theorists (perhaps most notably
Marcuse-see Martineau), Bakhtin's vision was, ultimately, utopian-in fact a "deep popular
utopianism" that he attibutes to Rabelais (Rabelais 23), and that Verdecchia's vision of the
border would seem to share.
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29 For a useful post-colonial analysis of the way the play "refuses the unifying colonial gaze by
creating and occupying a space on or within American borders," and thereby constructs an
anti-colonial discourse, see McKinnie. For an analysis of the play in the context of official
multiculturalism policies in Canada, and the tension between their constructions of "cultures"
and "ethnicities," see Gomez.
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30 It is notable that, of the plays under discussion here, those by women tend to be less explicitly autobiographical than those by men. This might suggest that, for these women
performers, the authority of the performer as a performer is less taken for granted than it is for
the men. The women are thus less inclined explicitly to represent themselves
autobiographically, and to interrogate "themselves" in those terms. Considering the prevalence of autobiographical form in women's
non-dramatic writing (particularly journals, letters, and diaries) this resistance to "pure"
autobiography is intriguing, suggesting that interrogation of the self's representation involves,
as it does in performance, the material body, a materiality which potentially imbricates the performer in so many
physical and visual phallocentric discourses and in spectatorial consumption.
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31 See also Keyssar's Feminist Theatre, especially xiii-xiv.
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32 We have used patriarchal and ethnocentric discourses as examples here, but classist, heterosexist, scholarly, theatrical and other authoritarian discourses may also be the
objects of deprivileging or subversion by the contemporary Canadian dialogic monologue. The
Noam Chomsky Lectures, for example, by Daniel Brooks and Guillermo Verdecchia, gains much
of its impact through its theatrical interrogation of the monologism of the lecture format itself;
House foregrounds the power relationships inscribed in theatrical space and conventions (not to
mention mental health group sessions and supermarkets); Gamhum's plays deprivilege heterosexist
discourse; and so on.
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33 See also note 13, above.
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34 See Bernstein, especially 221.
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