Natural, Mannered, and Parodic Dialogue

Abstract

In our culture 'natural' and 'mannered' have always been opposed concepts, and even in our relativistic age, judgements are often made about behaviour and language which seem to give these twins an air of normative precision. When applied to the languages of the theatre the terms are, even at first sight, elusive and 'problematic' in two respects. A 'natural' language in dramatic dialogue cannot be a neutral language, shared by speakers in the community, for any dramatic language includes a degree of stylization (or deviation or distortion). And the theatre is a place, as one popular connotation of 'theatrical' implies, where the stylized, the 'artificial', the festive, the rhetorical, and the incantatory are often felt to be at home. Nevertheless, there has been a recurrent, possibly constant, association between dialogue in drama and everyday speech: from Aristotle pointing out that the iambic was appropriate for dialogue as the most colloquial of all metres (Poetics, I449a, I3), to the journalistic, and grossly simplified, celebration of Pinter's 'tape-recording' ear. In Modernist and 'post-modern' drama, dialogue has acquired a new inner complexity, partly in a formal and many-sided reaction against naturalistic dramaturgy, which in turn reflects the fall in the status of any notion of 'the natural', and of norms that can be shared in wider moral, psycho-social, and stylistic contexts. The enrichment of dramatic dialogue itself was achieved through a deliberate 'defamiliarization' or denaturing of the languages of drama. Roughly speaking, and postponing the task of definition, the literary subtilization of dramatic dialogue and the intensification of theatricality have now reached a point where we can speak, respectively, of a new mannerist drama and a new pan-parodic theatre. In adopting a questioning approach I have no wish to resuscitate neoclassical or naturalistic norms, to turn the clock back or commend prescriptively that the contemporary playwright might seek to 'return to nature' in his language. My concern is dialogue, the supposed vehicle of verbal interaction, and I shall not deal directly with other types of dramatic language (the soliloquy, the set speech, the modernist monologue). I want to ask whether the concept of a 'natural language' in dialogue is completely arbitrary, or whether it is a useful concept pointing to a constant mimetic pull in drama. If there is such a thing as a 'natural dialogue', how far is it