Venus’ Polyphony——a Bakhtinian Interpretation Of Parks’ Venus

Modern African-American writer Suzan-Lori Parks has composed eight important plays in only two decades, winning Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Whiting Award, Alton Jones Bush Award and National Endowment for the Arts and being nominated by Obie Award, MAC Arthur Genius Award and Tony Award. Her play Topdog/Underdog won her the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in2002, making her the first black female playwright winning this award.Praised as the "year’s most promising playwright" by Mel Gussow in the New York Times in1989, Suzan Lori-Parks remains a playwright difficult to pigeonhole and summarize. The play Topdog/Underdog is appraised as the most realistic play from the most innovative playwright. Her early plays are mostly history plays shaped with innovative experimental style. Parks embraced upon new direction since the creation of Venus when she started to probe into specific insightful theme with her unique dramatic techniques, such as spell, chorus, rev.&rep., and fragmented time. Most critics chose to illustrate this turning-point play in terms of post-colonialism, feminism and style analysis. Few contemporary reviews yet have explored the unity between content and form in her plays and even fewer attempted to illustrate the play in light of Bakhtin’s polyphonic theories. Therefore, this thesis aims to approach elements of freak show, time, space, dialogue and voice in the play Venus in light of Bakhtinian theory.Bakhtinian polyphonic theory is specifically analyzed on account that Bakhtin openly rejected the literary form of drama in his theoretical works. In spite of Bakhtin’s rejection, it is undeniable that many polyphonic elements can be found in the plays, which verify the unfinalization and polyphony of certain dramas. The polyphonic elements on the other hand illustrate how Parks achieves the unity of form and content with the help of polyphonic elements. This thesis extends in three directions:carnivalization, chronotope, and dialogism. Parks employs carnival elements like grotesque body, mask, market speech and parody to revise the official document of Saartjie Baartman on whom the figure Venus is based and to launch a challenge against the official. The linear chronology is abandoned and circular chronology helps construct an open and unfinalized one that starts from the death of Venus and ends with the death of Venus and helps keep the plot and character in a state of unfinalization. Multi-layer of dialogues is taking place and different consciousnesses are salient:"self consciousness and "other" consciousness battle within one character. The consciousnesses within different characters converse with each other. The author, characters and audiences vigorously participate in an open and unfinished dialogue. Having done a detailed analysis of charnivalesque elements, time and space and dialogues in Venus, this thesis comes to a conclusion that Venus is a play of delicate polyphony which embodies the unity of form and content. Venus is not only a modern classic but also a testimony to the illegitimacy of Bakhtin’s rejection against drama while the perfect combination of ideological content and delicate narrative form is a manifestation of Parks’capability of and achievement in unraveling and representing history.