Procedimiento y diseño experimental para la evaluación in vivo de la

The transformation from literature to drama is not a simple process. Like two different species, literature and drama have their own skeletons and organs. The obstacle in the way of adapting a work of narrative fiction into a play, as O’Neil indicates ‘exists in the nature of narrative structure which obeys very different laws from those of drama’. (1995, p.40) Reproducing such a work into a play literally will not necessarily cohere with the internal nature of drama. Hence, I shall here outline the different narrative structures of literary fiction and drama.

2.5.1 Memory and Destiny

“Narrative is a…doubly temporal sequence…: There is the time of the thing told and the time of the narrative’ (the time of the signified and the time of the signifier)… More basically, it invites us to consider that one of the functions of narrative is to invent one time scheme in terms of another time scheme.” (Metz, cited in Genette; 1980; p.33)

According to Christian Metz, narrative is a mechanism that deals with time, therefore the study of the different narrative functions of fiction and drama can be elucidated by considering how they work with time. Here Suzanne Langer proves to be most helpful. She writes: ‘literature creates a virtual past, drama creates a virtual future. The literary mode is the mode of Memory; the dramatic is the mode of Destiny’. (1953, p. 307) Past and future, memory and destiny, are the four words that frame my argument below.

The art of narrative fiction, according to Langer, is essentially the art of memory, which narrates in the mode of remembrance and meanwhile reproduces the memory in a creative way. The remembrance of the writer is not merely a repeating of the past, but an activity of awakening the fragments of memory and projecting them through words. During this process, writers narrate retrospectively (ibid).

Different from the narrative of literary fiction, drama is an art of ‘now’. Langer argues that ‘its (drama’s) basic abstraction is the act, which springs from the past, but is directed toward the future, and is always great with things to come’ (ibid, p.306). From her perspective, one can see that drama is under the double gaze of both past and future. So it is endowed with a unique tension, which derives exactly from the specificity of ‘immediacy’. Drama is pregnant with things unknown. To be present means to be in suspense; “the form of suspense,” as Langer suggests, ‘is the illusion of Destiny itself that is given in drama, and that arises chiefly from the way the dramatist handles circumstance’. (ibid, p. 309) In other words, drama is a great seducer that can lead audiences into a particular kind of emotional tension, under which is raised the sense of destiny.

The main act of translation that I performed in this project was between the two narrative modes. As Heathcote suggests: ‘stories suggest diachronic time unfolding from past to present, while drama demands synchronic time, a dramatic present, …as the web of interaction within the frame of a selected environment and event’. (Cited in O’Neill; 1995, p.40) Nevertheless, it does not mean that transformation or adaptation is impossible. Modernist short

stories and drama, after all, both deal with time, although modernist writers – including playwrights such as Beckett – are particularly obsessed with time and innovative in their treatment of it. Basically, what my translation needed to do was to put the ‘past’ into the moment of the ‘present’ and to suspend ‘memory’ under the control of ‘destiny’.

2.5.2 Telling and Showing

Apart from the concept of time, narrative effects can also be influenced by the tendency, the attitude, and the perspective of the narrative voice, namely its ‘point of view’. “The most important differences in narrative effect”, as Booth suggests, “depend on whether the narrator is dramatized in his own right and whether his beliefs and characteristics are shared by the author”. (1983, p.151)

Through the lens of the ‘point of view’, narrative can be distinguished into two forms: narrating from the perspective of the writer’s authorial view; and

speaking through the voices of the characters. In addition, although narrative fiction can provide several different points of view, only one can be present at any one time. Writers can transfer the perspective from one character to another but all of them cannot be shown at the same time. Lodge claims that ‘even if it adopts an “omniscient” narrative method, reporting the action from a God-like altitude, it will usually privilege just one or two of the possible points of view from which the story could be told, and concentrate on how events affect them’. (1992. p.26)

Drama, however, is different. All the impressions that the audience receives are from a series of acts. Unlike literary fiction, whose aim is to tell a story,

theatre tends to present one (Lodge, 1992, 122). Dramatists have no voice to describe or comment on their creations and audiences have only the period they spend within the theatre to know the story from what these creations say and do’.

However, the discourse of narrative fiction also alternates between “showing

us what happened and telling us what happened”. The purest form of

showing is direct speech and that of telling is authorial summary. (Lodge,1992, p. 122) In narrative fictions, telling and showing often mix together. Moreover, as Booth indicates: “since Flaubert, many authors and critics have been convinced that ‘objective’ or ‘impersonal’ or ‘dramatic’ modes of narration are naturally superior to any mode that allows for direct appearances by the author or his reliable spokesman”. (1983, p. 8) The common reader will find it easy, then, to follow limited viewpoints offered through either the author’s voice or the perspectives of a few main characters. Participatory drama can become an ideal form for emulating these different viewpoints. Fleming suggests that presenting alternative perspectives is a “pragmatic as well as an aesthetic” technique in this form of drama and “in its simplest form is very accessible to pupils” (1997, p.14).