Bakhtin’s Polyphonic Novel and the Polyphonic Potential of David Mamet’s American Buffalo by Jennifer Young

The theatre is the obvious place…for [Bakhtin] to have made a stronger contribution, or at least a logical place to go to further discriminate his own set of categories, and he didn’t do it…It is a mystery.  I don’t understand it…This is a topic that needs a lot of work; I hesitate to even talk about it.  But if one were to talk about an agenda for future work, I think that Bakhtin and theatre constitutes a very rich area (Barsky and Holquist, qtd. in Joki, MBD 2).

When Mikhail Bakhtin created the genre he called the polyphonic novel, he simultaneously hailed Dostoevsky as its father and rejected the drama as being incapable of sharing its multivoicedness.  In his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin explains why the drama cannot be polyphonic.

The speeches in a dramatic dialog do not disrupt the world that is being depicted, nor do they make it multileveled; on the contrary, they require the monolithic unity of that world in order to be truly dramatic.  The world of the drama must be made of a single piece.  Any weakening of the monolith leads to a weakening of the dramatic effect…True multileveledness would destroy the drama, because dramatic action rests upon the unity of the world and is incapable of tying together and resolving multiple levels.  In the drama the combination of integral fields of vision in a unity which stands above those fields of vision is impossible because the dramatic construction offers no support for such unity.  Therefore the true dramatic dialog can play only a quite secondary role in Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel (13-14).

As Pushkin observed as far back as 1837, Russia had really never known a genuinely popular theatrical tradition, and during the Revolutionary and Stalinist periods of Bakhtin’s authorship, the emergence of an unofficial theatrical art was especially unlikely (21).

The objective complexity, contradictoriness and multivoicedness of the epoch in which Dostoevsky lived, the situation of the non-noble intellectual(raznochinec) and social outcast, the profound biographical and inner involvement in the objective multileveledness of life, and, finally, the gift for seeing the world in interaction and coexistence—all these things prepared the soil out of which grew Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel (25).

Some scholars such as Amy Mandelker and her troupe that assembled Bakhtin in Contexts: Across the Disciplines now have become so exasperated with the tired, ‘automatized’ phrasepolyphony that they refer to it as a ‘flattened-out catchword’ of Bakhtin’s, as meaningless asdialogue, chronotope, and the carnivalesque, which “now anesthetize us rather than communicate a concrete point of view” (4).  Now I hope to refresh the concept of polyphony by explicitly defining it according to its rightful musical terms, and by breaking down its components using as my illustration the playwright David Mamet’s American Buffalo.  I will show how Mamet composes his drama with rhythm, meter, and beats in mind, analyze his use of musical elements such as repetition and imitation to pass subjects and themes around, point out how he separates characters into treble and bass clefs for melody and harmony, and how his piece resembles a polyphonic-textured fugue.  As I do this, I will refer back to Bakhtin’s terms and ideas and clarify their relevance.

First of all, what exactly is musical polyphony?  A piece of music that is polyphonic (or contrapuntal) contains two or more melodies of nearly equivalent importance that are harmonically connected but still maintain their linear uniqueness.  The melodies are slightly different but explore a complementary theme.  A polyphonic-textured fugue is written for two or more parts with a set number of voices that develops a subject contrapuntally.  Fugues for three voices or instruments are most common (Miller 165).  A good example of a fugue is “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” by Johann Sebastian Bach.  According to Bakhtin, for a novel to be polyphonic, it must contain “the plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses” (PDP 4).  A fugue does not have a fixed form but varies from composer to composer.  Nearly every fugue does, however, begin with an exposition, in which a voice introduces a subject and asks a question that is answered by a second voice.  The second voice’s answer is an imitation of the first voice’s subject, but is written at a slightly different pitch.  Secondary voices follow with further developments and alterations of the original subject, ending the exposition, and leading into other sections called episodes.  Episodes are transitions in which there is no subject.  At the end of an episode, a statement of the subject with a key change occurs.  The fugue is perpetuated with other subjects that build upon the original in different keys and move the fugue toward a climax and finally, a resolution (Miller 165-67).

Out of all Mamet’s plays, American Buffalo most resembles a fugue.  Dennis Cunningham sees it as “very like intricate music, a wonderfully profane fugue…a song.”  David Skerritt calls the play  “A Fugue for Three Voices in a Junk Shop” (qtd. in Dean 110).  Just as Bakhtin’s polyphonic novel involves multiple voices exploring a common theme, so does Mamet’s drama contain various subjects of conversation that are passed between three characters:  Don, the junkstore owner and mentor of Bob; Bob, “the kid,” Don’s ward; and Teach, a poker-playing friend of Don’s. No character is more important than the others in the three-man show; they each make up equal parts of a trio.  Together these men, like musical parts, explore themes through repetition and imitation.  As Morson and Emerson explain, “Polyphony demands a work in which several consciousnesses meet as equals and engage in a dialogue that is in principle unfinalizable” (238-39).  Bakhtin says Dostoevsky’s heroes enjoy a “plurality of equal consciousnesses” and they are “not only objects of the author’s word, but subjects of their own directly significant word (neposredstvenno znachashchee slovo) as well” (PDP 4).

In Mikhail Bakhtin, Clark and Holquist explore Bakhtin’s ideas about folk culture, “the culture of the lower orders, of the fair tent and the marketplace from which come his three heroes, the rogue, the fool, and the simpleton” (272).  Defining Mamet’s characters inAmerican Buffalo by these terms results in Teach as the rogue, Don as the fool, and Bob as the simpleton.  Furthermore, these men are all both heroes and listeners.  As  Voloshinov and Bakhtin explain, language is inherently social and dialogic, and involves the author, the hero, and the listener, as well as the addressee and the superaddressee  (Joki, MBD 2).  Don and Bob are the first and second voices of the fugue.  Through their student-teacher relationship, they introduce subjects of  business and friendship in the fugue’s exposition. Bob’s voice echoes that of Don’s since he follows Don’s lead and rarely comes up with an original idea.  When Teach arrives, he modulates the play to a new key.  He bursts into the store and exclaims, “Fuckin’ Ruthie, fuckin’ Ruthie, fuckin’ Ruthie, fuckin’ Ruthie, fuckin’ Ruthie…Fuckin’ Ruthie…” (9).  This is an example of Mamet’s use of repetition.  Phrases and melodies or words are repeated over and over again so we remember them and think of them as significant moments in the piece.  He sprinkles repetition throughout American Buffalo, most noticeably again at the top of the second act, when Don mutters, “Great.  Great great great great great” (59).  Another musical term that stems from repetition is imitation.  In music, this is when a melody or part of a melody is repeated by another voice or instrument part (Miller 55).  Translated into “Mametspeak,” imitation is when one character repeats more or less what the other character just said.  For example, take this scene in American Buffalo:

Mamet’s words are sometimes so technical the beats are as predictable as a Ping-Pong match. In the following scene, Mamet’s three characters go from single beats to alternating between duple and triple meter, and finally to a change in rhythm altogether.

BOB:   Yes.                                                    (Single meter)
TEACH:   Why?                                           (Single meter)
BOB:   Because.                            (Duple meter)   Pause.
TEACH:   I’ll see you tomorrow, Bobby.     (Syncopation)
BOB:   Good-bye, Teach.                           (Triple meter)
TEACH:   Good-bye.                                  (Duple meter)
DON:   Good-bye, Bob.                              (Triple meter)
BOB:   Good-bye.                                       (Duple meter)
Pause.  BOB exits.
DON:   Fuckin’ kid… (2.67)                       (Syncopation)

Change in rhythm, or syncopation, is characteristic of jazz music and polyphonic-textured fugues, and it is easy to spot in American Buffalo (Miller 27).  Mamet italicizes words that are to receive primary stress in order to indicate the rhythm of a scene.  Italicized words are clues as to how lines should best be delivered and ensure that the text moves along at a steady, pulsating pace.  In David Mamet:  Language as Dramatic Action, Anne Dean notices how “the rhythms and syncopations of Mamet’s language authentically reflect both the inner pressures of his characters and the pace and confusion of their urban environment” (31).  If actors do not obey the rhythmic technique Mamet dictates, they will destroy his poetry.  The musical rhythm conveys the communication (or lack of it) between his men.  To have the three men use simple and ordinary speech in his plays is not enough for Mamet, for the vernacular would be too sluggish and dull to articulate the duress his characters find themselves under.  Instead, Mamet elevates real and natural dialogue, altering spoken words into musical notes or lyrical verse with highly technical beats in order to reverberate the stress and anger felt by his men.

This idea of elevated dialogue that shares both traditional and defamiliarized characteristics is addressed by Bakhtin in “The Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse.” When discussing Hellenism’s polyglossia, he shows how this “powerful and illuminating model of other-languagedness…turned the direct word of barbarian peoples—their epic and lyric word—into a discourse that was somewhat conventional, somewhat stylized” (141-42).  Mamet, too, is representative of such a blend of the ordinary and the extraordinary.  Just as Bakhtin shows how Hellenism served as a springboard for the “parodic-travestying double discourse” and Roman laughter, Mamet also distances his dialogue from rigid reality and allows a multitude of ideas to be expressed.

Here is an example of Mamet switching a regular rhythm in favor of an irregular metric scheme to convey tension within his characters:

DON:   I’m going to have Fletch come with us.
TEACH:   Fletch.
DON:   Yes.
TEACH:   You’re having him come with us.  (1.50-51)

When a word is to receive even more prominence than a stress can give, Mamet extends the letters.  This tactic is like a composer placing a fermata over a note to signal the holding out of a note.  In the second act of American Buffalo, Teach says, “Aaah, fuck.  I’m sorry.  I spoke in anger.  I’m sorry, I’m sorry  (Everybody can make mistakes around here but me.).  I’m sorry, Bob, I’m very sorry” (65).  This line contains several musical elements.  Mamet places a fermata over the word “Aaah,” uses repetition to convey Teach’s apology, and indicates that his volume should change when he speaks the words bracketed in parentheses.

The pauses that abound in Mamet’s plays (and originated with Pinter and Beckett) are examples of musical rests and cadences.  Rests are symbols that denote brief moments of silence.  Cadences last even longer, signifying not only silence but a conclusive end of a phrase (Miller 49).  For Mamet, this would indicate a pause followed by a change in intention by one of the characters.  The three types of pauses inAmerican Buffalo are:

1.      TEACH (Pause):   Don’t send the kid in.  (1.33)

2.      TEACH:   What are we saying here?  Loyalty.

Pause.  (1.33)

3.      TEACH:   “You set it up with him.”…You set it up and then you told him.

Long pause.

DON:   I gave Earl ten percent.  (1.36)

The first pause is like a musical rest in which Teach takes a quick breath and continues speaking.  The second pause is longer than a rest; it is a way for Teach to redirect his focus and to try a different tactic of manipulation.  The third pause occurs only once in the play; it is when Teach is planting seeds of doubt in Don’s mind about his friends.  Don takes a long pause before he speaks because he is allowing  Teach’s poisonous words to sink in.  InMamet, Bakhtin, and the Dramatic:  The Demotic as a Variable of Addressivity, Ilkka Joki suggests that Mamet’s pauses are key elements in which to uncover his stylistic intentions:

In Mamet, language should always be the starting point for analysis, but a vital interest also relates to what he leaves non-verbalised, and to what might be described in Russian Formalist terms as an estrangement (or de-familiarization) of everyday reality…In more Bakhtinian terms, the estrangement in Mamet is a carnivalization of realistic dialogue.  In one sense, Mamet may even be said to be carnivalizing himself (21).

The episodes in a fugue are concluded in cadences, just as Mamet’s characters discuss a topic, settle it, and move on to another.  In one sense, the episodic phrases in American Buffaloserve as important events that carry the story a stage further.  In another sense, they are nonsensical events that trap the men into a never-ending and circular dialectic web, devoid of meaning.  Through such musical cadences and turn taking, Mamet shows how language fails his characters and adds more confusion to their pathetic hamster wheel existences.  So many times in American Buffalo, Teach, Don, and Bob misunderstand one another because they are not equipped with the tools to express themselves properly.  It is both tragic and hysterical to hear the men mutter such nonsensical sentences as “Cocksucker should be horsewhipped with a horsewhip,” “Action talks and bullshit walks,” and “You make life of garbage.”

In “The Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” Bakhtin addresses such “appropriating of another’s discourse and language” in the Middle Ages in ways that can easily be compared to Mamet’s men in American Buffalo:  “The boundary lines between someone else’s speech and one’s own speech were flexible, ambiguous, often deliberately distorted and confused” (145-46).  Regarding the characters’ violent interaction with one another, Bakhtin exposes this ‘marketplace speech of praise and abuse as false, stereotyped, narrow, and especially incomplete’ because of its ‘intimate and frank familiarity’ (qtd. in Joki, MBD 88).  In his essay The Dialogicality of Grotesque Realism, Joki examines how Mamet’s characters appear to be on familiar terms but are in actuality far from it:

For male characters this kind of bonding through the carnivalistic demotic is sometimes possible, but only under exceptional circumstances.  Such positive, open familiarity is not very common in Mamet, as there are so few fully realized human relationships between his characters.  Most often, verbal abuse retains its uglier face…Don and Teach use abusive speech genres constantly.  Although [Mamet] labels Teach as Don’s ‘friend and associate,’ there is little extreme familiarity between them.  This is an ironic commentary by Mamet on the nature of business, which correlates with egoism.  Both Don and Teach maintain that when they are talking business friendship has to be set aside.  Because the ‘business’ between Don and Bob is very small, familiarity and a touch of friendship may enter into their interaction more easily—but on Don’s terms.  This means that absolute demotic familiarity does not come about between Don and Bob.  The use of demotic language is subordinate to the power structure existing between the three of them (89-91).

Though Teach, Don, and Bob do not have enough words in their vocabulary to properly express themselves, they are nonetheless expressive in spite of their shortcomings.  These men communicate through the musical rhythm of their words, as Mamet illustrates:

My main emphasis…is on the rhythm of language—the way action and rhythm are identical.  Our rhythms describe our actions—no, our rhythmsprescribe our actions.  I am fascinated by the way, the way the language we see, its rhythms, actually determines the way we behave, rather than the other way around (Dean 16).

TEACH:   Every goddamn thing.

DON:   Yes.

TEACH:   If I kept the stuff that I threw out…

DON:   …yes.

TEACH:   I would be a wealthy man today.  I would be cruising on some

European yacht.

DON:   Uh-huh.

TEACH:   (Shit my father used to keep in his desk drawer.)

DON:   (My father, too.)

TEACH:   (The basement…)

DON:   (Uh-huh.)

TEACH:   (Fuckin’ toys in the backyard, for chrissake…)

DON:   (Don’t even talk about it.)

TEACH:   It’s…I don’t know.

Pause.

You want to play some gin? (1.19)

This scene illustrates perfectly why David Mamet has been called “the Aristophanes of the inarticulate” (Kroll 109).  Teach, after convincing Don to take Bob out of the “business” transaction and to put him in his stead, arrives late.  Don is furious and tensely awaiting their impending robbery scheme.  The men trade themes around, exhibiting imitative polyphony and syncopated rhythms, and failing to comprehend one another.  Bakhtin would call this contrapuntal relationship “only the musical variety of broadly understood dialogical relationships” (PDP 36).

DON:   Do you know what time it is?

TEACH:   What?  I’m late?

DON:   Damn right you’re late.

TEACH:   I’m fucked up since my watch broke.

DON:   Your watch broke.

TEACH:   I just told you that.

DON:   When did your watch break?

TEACH:   The fuck do I know?

DON:   Well, you look at it.  You want to know your watch broke, all you

got to do is look at it.

Pause.

TEACH:   I don’t have it.

DON:   Why not?

TEACH:   I took it off when it broke.  (What do you want here?)

DON:   You’re going around without a watch.

TEACH:   Yes, I am, Donny.  What am I, you’re my keeper all of a

sudden?

DON:   I’m paying you to do a thing, Teach, I expect you to know where

you are when.

TEACH:   Donny.  You aren’t paying me to do a thing.  We are doing

something together.  I know we are.  My watch broke, that is my

concern.  The thing is your and my concern.  And the concern of

Fletcher.  You want to find a reason we should jump all over each other

all of a sudden like we work in a bloodbank, fine.  But it’s not good

business.

Pause.  (2.63)

The robbery plan gets botched up, Teach accuses Bob of lying, and the play reaches a violent and heartrending climax when Teach manages to turn Don against his most beloved young friend.  Musically, Teach’s tirade is described as the fugue’s climax, the musical and emotional high point of a melodic line.  The music modulates, or changes keys, and lines becomes faster and faster, as Mamet employs the technique of accelerando.  With Don now on his side, Teach viciously strikes Bob with a blunt object.  Don regrets allowing Teach to resort to violence, but truly believes that Bob betrayed him.  When Don concedes that his ward is a traitor, Mamet provides the stage direction “sotto voce,” meaning “with a soft voice,” and further adds to the mood of the music by placing his lines in parentheses to indicate a more introspective reading (94).  As Don sees his student lying on the floor of the shop, beaten and bloody, he receives news that Bob was in fact not lying after all.  The musical key turns minor here, as Don realizes he has been duped by Teach and has failed as a father figure.  Mamet explains that “because he [Don] abdicated a moral position for one moment in favor of some monetary gain, he has let anarchy into his life and has come close to killing the thing he loves” (Schvey 94).

Don then turns on Teach, punching him and blaming him for the violence, saying, “You have lamed this up real good” (100).  Teach trashes Don’s store, screaming out mixed-up clichés and not making sense.  His language has completely atrophied into mass media-induced jargon and unoriginal ideas; all that is left is an enumeration of his disappointments:   “My Whole Cocksucking Life.  The Whole Entire World.  There Is No Law.  There Is No Right And Wrong.  The World Is Lies.  There Is No Friendship.  Every Fucking Thing.  Pause.  Every God-forsaken Thing…We all live like the cavemen” (103).

Mamet elaborates on his musical, poetic, and sometimes absurdist language:

I was talking to my daughter last night, and she was (she’s about two), she was making a strange sound.  I said what are you doing?  She says, “I’m hicking up.”  I was talking to a cop in Chicago and he says, “Yeah, I was walking that blankety-blank over at the station house” (he was talking about some criminal).  And he says, “We’re walking across the street and I wouldn’t have cared if he got hitten by a cab.”  So it’s the same thing—where “hicking up,” “got hitten by a cab,” obviously that expresses…it’s poetic language.  It expresses the thought absolutely perfectly, unbound by the self-consciousness of the fact that the locution is not the correct English (Benson).

Mr.  Mamet has not tried to make poetry out of the way [his characters] talk…: he has made music instead.  That is, he has not tried to work up his crummy lowlifes to the point where they are inspired to give eloquent descriptions of their experiences and beliefs, but he has developed the rhythms of their lassitude, their bitching, their rising excitement, their fear, their negotiating, quarreling, cross-examining, with a subtle, beautiful dexterity that has to be heard to be fully enjoyed (qtd. in Joki, MBD 16).

Mamet criticizes and ironizes certain sociolinguistic and socio-ideological phenomena.  But as far as demotic man-and-man speech is concerned, although he criticizes some of its features and typical contexts and voices carrying it, Mamet participates in it without reserve.  He does not hide the fact that he is made of the same linguistic metal as some of his male characters. Therefore he is in a position to put the centralizing and decentralizing forces within street genres—genres which basically belong to disunifying forces—to the test from the inside.  He is capable of doing this without distancing or elevating himself above the level of such characters and the varieties of language they use, or at least not more so than is necessary for maintaining his overall speech plan for the artistic utterance (MBD 5).

Therefore, David Mamet’s American Buffalo does exhibit polyphony after all, though not in the same manner in which Bakhtin applied it to the polyphonic novel.  Whereas Bakhtin, who was censored and exiled and yearned for a multitude of distinct and valid voices, both those belonging to the author and to the characters, Mamet is politically freer but still seems to yearn for boundaries in the postmodern world.  Joki points to how both Bakhtin and Mamet have resided “in times of rapid cultural change, albeit in opposite directions” (MBD101). When Bakhtin speaks of many voices, he is thinking of the manner in which Dostoevsky juxtaposes contrasting viewpoints of persons from different social realms. On the other hand, Mamet’s men banter back and forth in a dialogue that can easily be deemed polyphonic, but these men are from a similar social strata.  This is the primary distinction between the different forms of polyphony—Bakhtin’s version and my own that is based in music.

Though Bakhtin rejected the drama on the grounds that it was incapable of being polyphonic, Booker and Juraga discover in Bakhtin, Stalin, and Modern Russian Fiction:  Carnival, Dialogism, and History that his “seemingly cavalier dismissal of the polyphonic potential of drama must be viewed in light of his suggestions elsewhere that essentially any genre can be infused with the spirit of dialogism and therefore “novelized” (15).  So perhaps Bakhtin did realize in his later writings the enormous potential for polyphony in the drama, though he never expressed it directly.  As Joki says, “drama, like the novel, can be dialogic; drama can contain several languages, independent voices, centres of consciousness which possess integrity, and multiple worlds” (MBD 216).  It is now time to reclaim the bastard child, the drama, and to include her as the final missing piece of Bakhtin’s elusive poetics

Works Cited
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—.  Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics.  Trans.  R.  W.  Rotsel.  Munster, W. Ger.:  Ardis, 1973.

Booker, M.  Keith, and Dubravka Juraga.  Bakhtin, Stalin, and Modern Russian Fiction:

Carnival, Dialogism, and History.  Contributions to the Study of World Literature 58.  Westport:  Greenwood P, 1995.

Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist.  Mikhail Bakhtin.  Cambridge:  Harvard UP, 1984.

Dean, Anne.  David Mamet:   Language as Dramatic Action.  Rutherford:  Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1990.

Joki, Ilkka.  “David Mamet’s Drama:  The Dialogicality of Grotesque Realism.”Bakhtin:

Carnival and Other Subjects:  Selected Papers from the 5^th International Bakhtin Conference.  Ed.  David Shepherd.  Amsterdam:  U of Manchester, 1991.

—.  Mamet, Bakhtin, and the Dramatic:  The Demotic as a Variable of Addressivity.

Turku, Fin.: Abo Akad, 1993.

Kroll, Jack.  “Mamet’s Jackals in Jackets.”  Newsweek (April 1984):   109.

Mamet, David.  American Buffalo.  New York:   Grove, 1976.

Mandelker, Amy.  Bakhtin in Contexts:  Across the Disciplines.  Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1995.

Miller, Hugh M.  Introduction to Music.  3^rd ed.  New York:  Harper Perennial, 1991.

Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson.  Mikhail Bakhtin:  Creation of a Prosaics.  Stanford:  Stanford UP, 1990.

Profile of a Writer 6:   David Mamet.  Dir. Alan Benson.  R. M. Arts, 1985.

Schvey, Henry I.  “David Mamet.”  New Theatre Quarterly  4.13 (1988):  89-96.

Wise, Jennifer.  “Marginalizing Drama:  Bakhtin’s Theory of Genre.”  Essays inTheatre 8.1 (Nov. 1989):  15-22.