| |
1) How many voices do you hear in "Ellen West"? Mark the
places in your text where you hear/see the voice changing. What clues
(in vocabulary, in layout on the page, in line length, in punctuation,
etc. alert you to a change in the voice?
2) As you all displayed so dramatically in the performances
of "My Last Duchess"voice also changes in tone throughout
a monologue, sometimes angry, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes cold
and controlled. How does Ellen's voice change within her sections
of the poem. Where is she angry or despairing, or self-doubting or
confident or....
3) Helen Vendler catalogues some of the components
Bidart pours into his dramatic monologues. How many of these can you
see in Ellen West and where do you find them?
4) What do you think Vendler means by 'cinematic'
in her comment on Bidart's construction of the monologue?
5) Use of punctuation varies throughout the poem.
Thinking as an actor, what would you read about the character of the
speaker (s) from their use of punctuation, and how would you perform
that punctuation?
Note
From the Little Brown Handbook (Jane E. Aaron, New York 1995):-
The dash is mainly a mark of interruption: it signals
a shift, an insertion or a break. (p. 171)
The ellipsis mark [...] indicates that material
is omitted from the source when the omission would otherwise not
be clear. (p. 173)
Notes on Frank Bidart
(quotations from the Contemporary Authors article on Bidart)
Frank Bidart turns the dramatic monologue into an
investigation of the contemporary individual's most traumatic relationship,
that of the body to the self (the psyche, the soul, the..). In three
brilliant dramatic monologues (which give voice to an amputee, a child
murderer and an anorexic, Ellen West) and an extended symphonic meditation
in the voice of the radical, early 20th century dancer, Nijinsky,
Bidart ruthlessly unveils the self's struggle to control the body.
In a society where we control so much so easily,
we discover we cannot impose our will on out most intimate possession,
our body. Instead, we become the objects of our bodies' actions. The
body's brutal resistance to the individual's will emphasizes our vulnerability
to imminent physical disorder and dissolution. In Ellen West, Bidart
follows that struggle with the body to its extreme, the elimination
of the recalcitrant body in a death which also extinguishes the self.
The critic, Helen Vendler, writes of Bidart's monologues:-
Bidart's method is not narrative; unlike the seamless
dramatic monologues we are used to, his are spliced together, as
harrowing bits of speech, an anecdote, a reminiscence, a doctor's
journal notes, a letter, an analogy, follow each other in a cinematic
progression."
The 'how' of the writing enriches the 'what' of the
story. In a 1983 interview with Mark Halliday, Bidart explains how
just one aspect of that 'how,' the manipulation of punctuation, brings
voices alive.
the only way I can sufficiently ... express the
relative weight and importance of the parts of a sentence -- so
that the reader knows where he or she is and the `weight' the speaker
is placing on the various elements that are being laid out--is [through]
punctuation.... Punctuation allows me to `lay out' the bones of
a sentence visually, spatially, so that the reader can see the pauses,
emphases, urgencies and languors in the voice.
Again speaking to Halliday, Bidart explains what
he tries to express through language:-
again and again, insight is dramatized by showing
the conflict between what is ordinarily seen, ordinarily understood,
and what now is experienced as real. Cracking the shell of the world;
or finding that the shell is cracking under you.
back
to questions
|
|