Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 4 Number 2, July 2003
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The
Phonostylistics of the Dramatic Character
By
Guy
Nadon, Gérard Depardieu, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Pierre Lebeau[i],
four accomplished actors each playing the role of Cyrano de Bergerac, have
produced four very different characters: one of them is bitter and acrimonious;
one is a poet, lyrical and sad; the third is a clown playing to the audience;
the fourth is a strong and witty musketeer. To some extent, Rostand's play
contains all of these possibilities: an essay could analyze how the French
Romanticist theory of "mélange des genres",
skillfully followed by Rostand, has helped him create many tableaus (the kiss,
the battle, the death...), each of them calling for a different facet of the
hero's versatile persona. But the four videotaped performances cited here are
themselves potent interpretations. No explicit scholarly hermeneutics are
presented by these performances but, if we focus on the way the actors deliver
their lines, it becomes clear that their vocal craftsmanship highlights and
moves and informs the text so as to reveal meanings listeners would not have
noticed had they read the play in silence. These vocal, although implicit,
interpretations are commonly the object of an intuitive cognitive practice: the
public does understand the subtle meanings that make for the Musketeer or the
Buffoon Cyrano. This lay practice and its vocal object are the starting point of
a new breed of performance analysis: the phonostylistics of the dramatic
character[1].
This article addresses some of the challenges we encountered in the course of
six years of research aimed at the elaboration of phonostyle[2]
as an object of its own (hopefully one day at the center of a new discipline of
its own), while constantly borrowing concepts and methods provided by related
disciplines such as linguistics and literary studies.
Intonation,
or voice pitch, is a phenomenon that has been widely studied at infra-semantic
levels, both in French and in English. In this area, for the French language,
one important step was finding out that listeners are able to discriminate
between five pitch frequencies[3]
and many more dynamic patterns (like "rise-fall" for instance). The
discreteness of these perceived structures provides the basis on which a
linguistic description of intonation can be attempted with concepts parallel to
those used in phonology. Where phonemes are found in phonology, intonemes
are the first distinctive units of intonation. It should be stressed
that, like the phonemes, the intonemes are not defined as carriers of a
referential meaning: their coherence remains solely perceptual, gestalt-like
organization. For that reason, one should not speak, for instance, of the "intoneme
of continuation" or "of interrogation", but only of the
"short static medium" intoneme. In the field of intonation studies,
such periphrases serve more or less the same purpose as does the International
Phonetic Alphabet in phonology and, likewise, there are lists of the most useful
intonemes in the two languages considered here.
In
linguistic theories, conceptual meaning is located at the next level of
analysis, where Martinet places the vast category of the monemes. Whether such a
thing as an intonative moneme or lexeme exists or not is a hard question and, as
we will see, the answer may well depend upon the semantic theory one places
behind the units of this level.
The
sentence "Cristina, where did you put the milk!", said with an angry
voice implying that the speaker has been looking for the beverage and is now
accusing Cristina of having displaced it, has a different meaning from the same
words used with love instead of anger: "Cristina..." Between the two
sentences, the difference is clear: in the first case, anger is more than
implied by the voice, it is expressed by it and, in context, it may constitute
the most important part of the whole message. Nonetheless, this anger is still
technically implicit information and this precise word,
"anger", may not quite fit everybody's understanding of the accents
performed on the "p" of "put" or on the vowel of
"milk": harshness, aggressiveness, intimidation, recrimination are all
plausible alternative explicitations. So, if the intonational or, more largely,
the phonostylistic pattern manages to work as a signifier for the signified
[anger or harshness or...], it does it through connotation,
i.e. using an alternative encoding and focusing on the relation between the
speaker and the propositional content of the sentence.
According
to many theorists[4],
this connotative functioning relegates phonostylistic patterns to the margins of
the linguistic structure, in an area of the system that is less rigidly
organized than syntax or lexicon. The rules followed by the phonostylistical
components of expression are elusive and researchers fail to grasp them firmly
enough to propose something that would resemble a true grammar or a thesaurus of
vocal devices, and thus a hermeneutic approach of phonostyle must describe the
semantic aspect of its object using less linguistic references.
To
figure out the best way to describe formally the cognitive treatment applied by
listeners to the voice of an actor, we interviewed people, presenting them with
video excerpts from the four Cyranos and asking them to react freely to
the voices. Quite commonly, our respondents avoided any sort of reification of
the voice patterns and, instead of using visual references to the shape or
intensity of the intonational curves, they would rather underline the specifics
they heard by using their own voice (and all of their body) to sustain an
approximate paraphrase of the excerpts. On other occasions, respondents made up
narratives to explain in what type of situations such patterns could be
expected. For example, upon listening to a clip where Belmondo's Cyrano says
"Je vous délivre"
to DeGuiche (whom he then stops withholding on his way to Roxane's), one lady
said that Belmondo sounded "like a schoolmaster addressing very young
pupils". In all the cases, they struggled to name precisely the attitude or
the emotion of the character, and they were more satisfied with their narratives
or their impersonations than with any lexical tag they could think of.
What
can be learned from these interviews is, first of all, that the linguistic point
of view does not seem natural to the respondents: they do not try to articulate
their comments by dividing intonation into smaller units or by making references
to more abstract functions. In lieu of this, they spontaneously associate voice
patterns with connoted pragmatic situations; and, by paraphrasing Rostand, they
also reveal that similar patterns can be adjusted to noticeably different
phraseologies while keeping their original meaning.[5]
Using
the tags suggested by the first informants, a second and more extensive
experiment was conducted, on one hand, to assess the level of objectivity
listeners can reach while commenting dramatic voices, and on the other hand to
prepare the grounds for a comparative study of the four performances. Twelve
groups of approximately 30 students were showed a total of 144 video clips
integrated into PowerPoint™ multiple choice questionnaires. Students first
listened to the four Cyrano saying the same lines and then had to choose, for
each of them, which of a series of tags best described the phonostylistical
patterns.
The
software processing of the raw data was conducted at the University of Montreal
in the Laboratory of the Cours
Autodidactique de Français Écrit.
Over the past twenty years, its team has developed a methodology to analyze with
surveys the language used by targeted groups and to prepare didactical tools
aimed at teaching them exactly and exclusively the linguistic rules that they
are prepared to understand. What is particular about this methodology is that it
does not need a correction grid (provided by the researcher) to determine
"by itself" who in a group forms the elite capable of answering
questions on the basis of a coherent reflection –and who answers more
randomly, showing they do not really understand what they are doing. At the end
of the process, not only does every student receive an individual grade, but
every possible answer of the questionnaire (choices a, b, c and d of each
question, plus rejection and abstention) also receive a similar grade, or level,
indicating which students are more likely to choose it. This layering of the
class according to the relative difficulty of the demands makes it possible to
isolate competing theories, or sub-rules, that are alive in the group. For
example, a question about the third person "s" in English present
tense verbs could reveal that in a group of francophone speakers, if only the
very best students apply the rule perfectly, relatively good students tend to
add an "s" also to the third person plural (because they apply their
French plural rule), while the weakest students commit this mistake at random.
There are two "theories" in the class, plus one layer of random
answers.
The
144 questions, answered by 367 students generated close to 9000 statistics. For
every possible answer we know the average grade of those who chose it; the
standard deviation of their grades; the precise grade a student must have to
start having more than 50% of the chances to choose this answer; and, finally, a
factor indicating the power this answer has to discriminate between two distinct
layers of respondents. All of this without the researchers knowing in advance
which answers should be considered good or bad.
Since
the questionnaires were based on tags provided by the first inquiry, they were
not designed to test a given theory concerning the four performances. In other
words, there were no "kinds" of questions, just individual questions
asking people whether this line was performed, for example, "with irony, as
a lie, as a truth or as an excuse", "with indifference, surprise,
disdain or admiration". In general, we had chosen excerpts showing notable
contrasts between at least two actors, but outside of this consideration, they
came from all parts of the play and they showed Cyrano in interaction with most
of the protagonists.
Globally,
this "reader-response" methodology made it possible to affirm,
statistics in hand, not only that phonostyle is a litigious phenomenon,
upon which people often disagree, but also that some individuals are
significantly better than others at interpreting it. Knowing that the researcher
himself scored 94% when his own answers were corrected with the grid computed
according to the group's elite choices, we could even propose that, in this new
field, a well-trained listener could practice phonostylistics from disciplinary
grounds similar to those supporting the practice of a more traditional literary
criticism, without the absolute need to engage in large scale reader-response
verification of his hermeneutic insights.
On
a more theoretical level of analysis, the possibility of a connotative process
relating phonostylistical patterns to some form of "pragmatic
situations" also required further investigation. The first step in this
direction is to define the type of pragmatic circumstances that are chiefly
involved by vocal connotations. For example, the schoolteacher used above in a
comparison with Cyrano could connote a profession, a certain imperiousness, a
way to address young people, or large audiences, etc. Theories focused on
classical or modern rhetoric, on literary genre, on speech acts, on dialogue or
even on the psychology of emotions could all provide useful taxonomies capable
of structuring this concept of "situation", but none seemed to fit our
object as closely as the theory of role put forward by Robert J. Landy[6]. To him, roles are what personalities are made
of, and the same person can have many: lover, professor, daughter, consumer
–the list has no end. Each role is organized in such an organic way that the
memory of one grin, one gesture, one single intonation belonging to a role is
enough to bring it completely back to mind with its many ways, states of mind
and relational styles.
Among
the interviews of the first investigation, a few cases similar to the schoolteacher
cited above led us to search for such roles in the play. Indeed, as
mentioned in the introduction, Cyrano de Bergerac is written to provide
the actor with a diversity of scenes putting forward many aspects of the hero's
personality. We thus hypothesized that an actor could accentuate one or more of
four latent roles, which we designated with the names of archetypal occidental
personas: Harlequin, D'Artagnan, Werther and Nero. The question now becomes:
does a Cyrano who is "more Harlequin than D'Artagnan" use his voice in
a specific manner?
A
procedure was developed to verify whether the respondents of our questionnaires
had or had not interpreted the 144 clips as connoting some cognitive structure
resembling these hypothetical roles. But the multiple-choice questions
had not been designed to reveal general and lasting tendencies of the character:
they solely assessed the punctual decoding of phonostylistical devices. So, to
link the many questions to the four roles, the researcher evaluated every tag
that the questionnaire had proposed, asking himself if this tag was compatible
with each role. For example, if the choice "A" was "Cyrano sounds
arrogant", he had to decide if the word "arrogant" suited
Harlequin, D'Artagnan, etc. To translate this into statistics, compatible
choices were given 1 point, indifferent choices were given 0 and dissonant
connotations were given -1.
Comparing
the average score the four actors received on these scales allows us to confirm
some clear tendencies: for example, the best respondents generally selected tags
that the researcher associates with Nero, except for Depardieu who is the only
one to receive a negative score for this role. But Depardieu generates also the
answers found the most compatible with both Werther and d'Artagnan. As for
Belmondo : Harlquin, bien sûr. Of course these four archetypal
personas have themselves nothing to do with Cyrano. Their function is heuristic,
as their helping us is limited to evoking personality configurations that our
culture would be prompt to accept as probable and coherent. Our phonostylistic
methodology could do without them and produce a more literary form of critic — if
it were not for the last step of our research, a comparison of the response
between two culturally distinct groups of students.
The
inquiry was conducted mainly in a private French speaking Quebec "collège"
providing the equivalent of high school and undergraduate college education.
Respondants were found to divide themselves into two statistically relevant
groups : those who declared Quebecois French as their mother tongue, and
the others (Anglo-Canadians, Vietnamese, Haïtians, Europeans). As required by
this elite institution, all spoke French with native or native-like
fluency, but their cultural background was not primarly French-Canadian.
The "others" reacted collectively to our test in a surprisingly homogeneous fashion, thus permitting the emergence of a
second set of coherent role structure perceptions. For example, their best
answers were found to reflect quite positively the Harlequin structure of
Depardieu's Cyrano, whereas the Quebecois' answers contributed negatively to the
same structure : listening to him, they consistently avoided answers
pertaining to any dimension of laughter. The Nero structured also revealed an
important difference : the Quebecois thought he was the less
"Nero" of the four characters, but the others show just the opposite :
to them, he is by far the most "Nero" Cyrano., and they also respond
to his performance with more answers compatible with d'Artagan. On the other
hand, the Quebecois found him funny, an idea the others do not share at all.
*
* *
We
could summarize our research by saying this: what the vocal style of an actor's
performance may connote is a group of idiosyncratic characteristics that
listeners recognize as making sense together. As we see, the phonostylistics of
the drama character reaches very deeply into the human experience, at the limit
between person and character, and the concept of style underlying this
reflection reunites content and form at an existential level where we can
strongly affirm with Buffon that "Le style c'est l'homme".
[1] The word "phonostylistique" was popularized in French by Pierre Léon, according to whom it comes from Cantineau's French translation of the word "Lautstylistik" as put forward by Troubetzkoy. Cf. LÉON, Pierre, Précis de phonostylistique, Paris, Nathan Université, 1993, p.17.
[2] We define the phonostylistics as inclusive of prosody (accents and melody, or intonation, with intensity, duration, pitch, rythm) and voice quality, as well as, generally, any component of stylistic intentionality found in the vocal aspect of the discourse.
[3] The number of these levels ranges from four to six depending on the sources. Cf. LÉON, Pierre R., Phonétisme et prononciation du français: avec des travaux pratiques d'application et leurs corrigés, Paris, Nathan, coll. "Nathan Université –Fac Linguistique", p. 125.
[4] Like linguist Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni and semanticist Mortéza Mahmoudian. See MAHMOUDIAN, Mortéza, Le contexte en sémantique, Peeters, Louvain-La-Neuve, coll. "Bibliothèque des Cahiers de l'institut de linguistique de Louvain", no. 89, 1997, 163p., p.56, and KERBRAT-ORECCHIONI, Catherine, La connotation. Lyon, Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1977, pp. 113-122.
[5] A suitable explanation of this could be found in the "scenes and frames" semantic theory put forward by Charles Fillmore. See: FILLMORE, Charles J. Scenes-and-frames semantics. in ZAMPOLLI, A., (editor) Linguistic structures processing, Amsterdam, New York, Oxford, North-Holland Publishing Company, 1977, coll. “Fundamental Studies in Computer Science”, vol. 5. pp.55-81.
[6] Robert J. Landy is Program Director at the Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions, New York University. See LANDY, Robert J., Persona and Performance: The Meaning of Role in Drama, Therapy, and everyday life, New York & London Guilford, 1993, 278 p.
[i] Guy Nadon and Pierre Lebeau held succesively the same role in the same production at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, Montreal, in 1995. We thank the TNM for letting us use their private video archives. Jean-Paul Belmondo played Cyrano in Paris, at the théâtre Marigny, in 1990, in a production directed by Robert Hossein. His version is available comercially on videotape. Depardieu filmed his Cyrano in 1990, under the direction of Jean-Paul Rappeneau. This performance is widely available on videotape, in many languages.