Adaptation and Dialogue Studies

Abstract

In this chapter, the notion of stage configurations will be linked to the concept of predications and explored in the context of adapting The Island for the stage. In addition, dialogue as the dominant form in Selimović’s novel will be analysed based on research findings in speech acts models.

Dialogue and Speech-Act Theories

Practitioners in literary adaptations could benefit from an interdisciplinary approach to dialogue that incorporates the insights from the philosophy of language to relevant branches of linguistics, such as pragmatics, sociolinguistics, or structural semantics.

There is a significant overlap in the terminology used in literary theories and criticism and linguistics and philosophy of language. The terminology stemming from the speech-act theory of John L. Austin (How to Do Things with Words 1976) has been used in theatre investigations (Ubersfeld 1999; Pfister 1988; Erica Fischer-Lichte 1992), which focus on the functioning of dialogue in drama. Since dramatic dialogue involves similar parameters to those of dialogue in natural speech, it is useful to illuminate the relationships between participants in dialogue in general, to consider their reflective and affective processes, and to situate dialogue within an intricate matrix of contextual elements. However, the terminology and theories of dialogue from those disciplines have their limitations because communication in theatre is subject to the rules governing aesthetic discourses.

In this section, I will consider relevant dialogue theories in the context of adapting The Island for the stage.

The structural semantics of Oswald Ducrot (Dire et ne pas dire 1972) offers a useful terminological framework for dialogue studies. Ducrot includes pragmatics in his analysis of utterances since the rules of pragmatics imposed by the language community constitute a part of the meaning of utterances. According to his theory, only on the surface level is one subject responsible for the utterance, while the complex meaning is shaped by the layering of various discursive elements. The subject can take responsibility for the utterance only at the surface level, while at the deep level, each utterance has its speaker. This deep level is composed of the layers of meanings formed in a specific language community and contains information about psychology and ontology (1972, p. 8). Therefore, each utterance, in addition to the conceptual content, conveys the attitudes of the speakers towards the given content. Ducrot assigns precise terminology to the elements of the deep and the surface structures. He is interested in the pragmatic aspect, the circumstances of the communication process. He revised the speech-act theories of the Oxford school (Austin and Searle), especially the concept of illocution and perlocution, positioning that illocution is inscribed in the syntactic structure, while perlocution depends on the circumstances of the speech act. He distinguishes between the linguistic component and the rhetorical component (p. 15).¹ Meaning is not detected in the linguistic component only but needs to include the information from the rhetorical component, which illuminates the circumstances of the communication. The linguistic component is embedded in the statement itself and excludes the conditions of the creation of the utterance.

Ducrot’s terminology is based on the distinction between language, as a set of abstract elements, predetermined and invariable, and speech (De Saussure’s langue and parole), as a concrete realisation of the language units, each time different and non-repeatable. The same utterance could have a different meaning, depending on the context. Utterance (the French énoncé) differs from sentence since sentence belongs to language while utterance belongs to parole. Enunciation (énonciation) is the process of creating the utterance, when one sentence attains its concrete realisation.

Ducrot’s identification of various discursive laws that give meaning to utterances is important for adaptation theories. The commanding force in dialogue is the speakers’ intentions. In conversation, speakers commonly rely less on what the other speaker say and more on the perceived speaker’s intention; in other words, speakers constantly interpret what influences the other speaker to say the given line. While speakers can refuse the responsibility for the implied message, they cannot refuse the responsibility for the explicit message (1972, pp. 5–6).² Discovering context clues to interpret speakers’ intentions is an important aspect of the adaptation process. Novels and stories offer valuable contextual information through narration in which dialogue is embedded.

Ducrot distinguishes between the présupposé, which belongs to the linguistic component, and the sous-entendu,³ which belongs to the rhetorical component (p. 20). The former represents the meaning of utterance without context, while the latter includes the conditions of the énonciation, in its context.

For Ducrot, the term speaker is the subject of the utterance and the subject to whom first-person pronouns relate. On the other hand, the enunciator is the subject on whose behalf the utterance is spoken and the one whose point of view is expressed. The speaker is merely the one who pronounces the utterance. Therefore, the speaker and the enunciator could be two different subjects. For example, in The Island, when Katarina says, “They don’t have time, they say,” she is merely the speaker, the communicating subject, and she is not responsible for the first part of the utterance, because the enunciators are their son and daughter-in-law, who are responsible for the utterance. Katarina is the enunciator only of the second part of the utterance, “they say.” In the next line by Ivan, there are two enunciators indicated by the second-person pronoun you: “You’re good there on the island, they say.” There are two utterances with two different enunciators: Ivan is explicitly responsible for the second clause “they say,” while their son and the daughter-in-law are responsible for the utterance, “You’re good there on the island.”

The difference between the présupposé and the sous-entendu could be illustrated with the following exchange between Ivan and Katarina:

K.:

“They are happy when we leave”.

I.:

“Why are they like that?”

K.:

“All children are like that.”

I.:

“Not all. They’re like you That’s why.”

K.:

“So I’m heartless?”

I.:

“How can you say the children are heartless?”

K.:

“I didn’t say that.”

To Ivan’s utterance, “They’re like you,” Katarina assigns the sous-entendu that the children are heartless, even though she does not say it. That is why Ducrot is right about l’antériorité de présupposé since its meaning emerges only when the speakers think back about the conversation. The rhetorical component offers information about the circumstances of enunciation, which includes the feelings and intentions of the speaking subjects. Just because the sous-entendu is not inscribed in the utterance, Katarina can reject the responsibility for the utterance: “I didn’t say that.” The speaker is responsible merely for the présupposé, for what is inscribed in the utterance, while the listener needs to discover the hidden meaning, the sous-entendu, in the process of interpretation, asking the question, “Why did the speaker say that?”

The third element is the speaking subject—the empirical subject who is the actual producer of the utterance—in this context, the writer, the real author of the utterance. In the novel’s narrative segment, the role of the speaker belongs to the narrator. It is a fictional subject, and Ducrot distinguishes this role from that of the author, who is outside of the narrative. The author is the producer of the utterance, the empirical speaking subject, while the narrator is the literary equivalent of the speaker (i.e. the one responsible for the enunciation). Because Ducrot does not accept the concept of the unicité of the subject and believes that the speaker does not have to be the same as the enunciator, the voice of the narrator could also become split. In other words, another point of view could be introduced into the narrative, and speakers could distance themselves from that point of view. The enunciator is the character from whose point of view the narrator depicts events. In this case, the narrator—the speaker—is not the enunciator. The narrator is the one who objectively narrates, while the enunciator is the one who sees. The point of view in the course of the narration can change. The voice of the author appears only if the author identifies with the enunciator.

Ducrot’s terminology of structural semantics helps reconcile various approaches to dialogue. The important postulate of Ducrot’s structural semantics is the “immanent efficiency” and “intersubjective nature” of speech. Ducrot discovers how the utterance changes in the course of enunciation, and he detects the factors that effect the change and bring in the difference between the meaning of the linguistic and the rhetorical component. It is the ever-evolving relations between the speakers in the course of the conversation that cause the change in meaning. The “immanent efficiency” is manifested as certain obligations assigned to the speakers by the utterance, which is related to the “power of illocution.”

Austin (1976) defined the speech act as containing illocution, locution, and perlocution. Locution and illocution are inscribed in the utterance and are detectable from the language material itself. Locution is “roughly equivalent to uttering a certain sentence with a certain sense and reference, which again is roughly equivalent to ‘meaning’ in the traditional sense.” Austin defines illocutionary acts as “utterances which have a certain (conventional) force,” for example giving orders or warnings, while perlocution is “what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading” (pp. 170–171).

Perlocution is about “the real effect of the utterance.” Illocution is about relations, and the power of illocution manifests as an obligation from the participants to react: a promise requires a fulfilment, a question an answer, a command its execution, etc. The speech act, accordingly, requires the involvement of all participants: the listener influences the choice of language elements and the way the utterance is formed. The listener applies interpretational mechanisms relying on “les conditions d’emploi,” the discursive laws (Ducrot 1972, p. 41).

The speaker identifies the perlocutionary act by asking herself why the speaker said what he said. Ducrot’s “discursive laws” take effect here, since they represent the pragmatic rules imposed on the communication by the language community. The realisation of the enunciation depends on the performance of the discursive laws which take effect when the utterance is completed. This means that the semantic level of the utterance does not affect the “realization” of the enunciation. This is where pragmatics is involved in dialogue formation, as the semantic level does not give information about the circumstances of enunciation (p. 41). The role of discursive laws is to demonstrate the pragmatic aspect of communication.

In dialogue, speakers rely more on the information from the rhetorical component than the linguistic, which makes it possible for the illocution to contradict the perlocution; for example, a question could be interpreted as a command.

Also, the cooperative principle, defined by a common goal and the direction of the conversation, requires that participants fulfil the expectations at every stage of communication.

Dialogue in Prose and Drama

The concepts of dialogue and the dialogisation of discourse resist the narrow determination of dialogue as the direct speech of characters. Instead, dialogue is viewed as “the positions of various subjects expressed in discourse” (Bakhtin 1984, pp. 183; 186).

In adaptations of literary texts, the narrative segments of a prose text could become lines of dialogue, so it would be useful to determine the underlying forces that dialogise the discourse⁴ regardless of its status as narration or dialogue. Bakhtin assigns a twofold direction to dialogue: “towards the referential object of speech, as in ordinary discourse, and toward another’s discourse, toward someone else’s speech” (p. 185). Thus, direct speech and the other forms of dialogised discourse, such as “double-voiced discourse,” must be defined based on the principle of “incorporating a relationship to someone else’s utterance as an indispensable element” (p. 186).

Dialogisation presumes at least two voices in the discourse of the same character. Also, there is constant intersecting or harmonising of a character’s speech with that of other characters. Bakhtin demonstrates how all segments of Dostoevsky’s novels possess “the essential dialogicality”: “The polyphonic novel is dialogic through and through” (Bakhtin 1984, p. 40). For Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s novels are polyphonic because of the utmost presence of the principle of dialogue: all voices are equal. There is no dominant point of view, and between the writer and the characters, the principle of dialogue is established.

In a close reading of the adapted text, the following questions need to be addressed: Who is the sender of the message? Who enters into the dialogue relationship and with whom? How do these voices intersect and create meaning?

In adapting The Island for stage, it is necessary to transform its dialogue, embedded in narration, to dramatic dialogue. Dramatic dialogue is structurally different from dialogue in prose. In drama, apart from stage directions, dialogue is the only form of expression and functions to advance dramatic action. Dialogue in prose is reported, not performed (Käte Hamburger 1973, p. 198).⁵ The essential difference between dialogue in drama and prose stems from the lack of a mediating communicative system in drama. Since the role of the fictitious narrator is absent in drama, dramatic dialogue is autonomous, while dialogue in prose is embedded in narration. In transforming a dramatic text into a performance, both textual elements, stage directions and dialogue, are transcoded into the visual or acoustic codes of theatre. In this sense, dramatic dialogue is not absolutely autonomous; stage directions, to some extent, play the role of the novel’s narrative discourse.

Unlike in narration—not including indirect speech—in theatre, characters perform enunciation; they are the speakers, and their speech is marked by the use of the first-person pronoun, while the author and the actors are speaking subjects. In prose, the speaking subject is the author, and, not unlike in theatre, the author allows the characters to speak in their own name in the lines of open dialogue.

The structural differences between the dialogue in prose and drama stem from the fundamental feature of drama, which is the immanent “performativity” of the dramatic text (Ubersfeld 1999, p. 8). Ubersfeld uses the term textual “matrices of performativity” to maintain that this characteristic of drama is already inscribed in the text. That is why the dramatic text requires an imaginative reading, searching for the “kernels of theatricality” in the text. The dramatic text is, unlike other genres, filled with gaps to be filled out in the theatrical production (p. 8). Ubersfeld points out that “the fundamental characteristic of theatrical discourse is that it can only be understood as a series of orders given with a view to stage production, with a view to performance …” (1999, p. 164).

Hamburger specifies another distinguishing feature of drama—“the absence of the narrative function”; as a consequence, dramatic characters “are formed through dialogue” (p. 198). Since the narrative function is reduced to zero, the dramatic character, unlike that in prose, is “self-presenting.” The essential characteristic of drama is that its dialogue and characters “possess the potential for mimic-scenic embodiment” (p. 199).

Hamburger emphasises that only in drama do characters speak in their name, while in prose, dialogue is the report of the narrator. This relates to Ducrot’s terminology. The speaking subject, the author, is always outside of enunciation; she is only the empirical subject, the producer of the utterances, while the speakers and enunciators are the narrator and the characters. In my view, there is no fundamental difference between the role of the author in prose and drama. The difference that Hamburger points out relates to the “independence” of the characters in dramatic dialogue compared to characters in prose. Dramatic characters, unlike those in prose, are “self-presenting.” In prose, the narrator determines the context, while in drama the narrator is absent.

Dramatic characters act as autonomous speakers while characters in prose are conditioned by the narrative context. In the analysis of the dialogue in The Island, the nature of this conditioning will be explored.

Dialogue in the dramatic text creates its communicative situation, and the absence of the narrator allows for the autonomy of dialogue to be established. Dramatic dialogue is also more effective in relaying content information compared to dialogue in prose. Una Ellis-Fermor points out that dramatic dialogue conveys more content information through combining, suggesting, or contradicting statements, compared to a prose section of the same length (1964, p. 115).⁶

The efficiency of dramatic dialogue stems from its status as the sole structural form in drama (disregarding didascalies). Dialogue in drama must convey the content that is carried by various forms in prose, so it needs to compensate for the missing prose structures. Thus, dialogue in the novel is less efficient than in drama because its functions are limited.

Adaptations often select segments of the adapted text that possess dramatic tension. Švacov believes that even if there is no significant dramatic tension in the adapted text, the performance could “compensate by creating dramatic montage and action on the stage independent of the adapted text” (p. 113). Also, segments of the adapted text exposing raw emotions or passionate conflict are not necessarily the most suitable for stage adaptation. In the dramatic dialogue of characters on stage, Ubersfeld discovers less of the characters’ psychology and more of “interpersonal relations which regulate the action and are regulated by it” (p. 176). The author concludes that “the basis of dialogue is the relation of power between characters” (p. 179).

Georg Lukács emphasises a lack of lyricism as a relevant feature of drama. He writes that in tragedy, “characters are entangled only in the relations of strife and destruction”; lyricism is possible, but “desperation never transforms into elegy,” “exaltation into yearning for the inner depths of the self,” and “the soul can never with psychological contempt wish to renounce its abyss to narcissistically admire itself in the mirror of its own depth” (1990, p. 40).⁷ To Lukács, dramatic dialogue needs to be polyphonic, while “the speech of a profoundly lonely being is lyrical, monologic” (p. 40).⁸

Dialogue is often associated with conflict, with a juxtaposition of confronting elements. For Ubersfeld, dialogue in theatre is characterised by situations “in which characters confront each other rhetorically and passionately” (p. 179). Dialogue operates based on a certain number of contradictions: between “speech and discursive positions,” and between “the conditions of enunciation and content of discourse” (pp. 182–183). Dialogue in theatre represents the ever-changing conflicting discursive positions of the characters (p. 182). The discursive positions of the participants in dialogue are defined by social relations, outside of dialogue. However, Ubersfeld views discursive positions as a dynamic category as they change over the course of dialogue. The positions depend on the “relation of power” between characters, which is the essence of dialogue. Relations of power are manifested as the “verbal relation,” which is predominantly conditioned by a “relation of domination” (p. 179). The relationships between dramatic characters constantly change as “dialogue is the development or the shaping of two discursive positions in confrontation with one another” (p. 183). In the course of the confrontation, the characters’ speech “modifies its own conditions of production” (p. 184). A change in relationships could occur if the “presuppositions,” which are regulated by social relations outside of dialogue, conflict with the discursive positions of the speakers acquired in the course of the dialogue itself. Dramatic dialogue is autonomous and has its own laws, and a dynamic relation between the participants is its pertinent characteristic (p. 182).

This is to the above point that dialogue in drama reveals less subjective expressions and more relations between subjects.

The sources of dynamism in dialogue could be various, but the constant re-establishing of the relations between speakers, as a result of the underlying contradictions, is its pertinent feature. When the contradiction is between the circumstances of communication—conditions of enunciation (Ubersfeld, p. 183)—and the content of the discourse, there is a discrepancy between the linguistic and the rhetorical component, as Ducrot elaborated. The elements of the linguistic component are static and subordinated to the elements of the rhetorical component, because only the latter changes in the course of dialogue. Such elements are the source of dialogue’s dynamism. The application of Ducrot’s systematisation is useful in an attempt to separate the elements of the dialogue present in the text from those that depend on the conditions of enunciation.

For dialogue to be initiated, there has to be a shared core, a preposition about which all participants agree, present in the utterance itself, independent of the conditions of enunciation. This is related to Ducrot’s présupposé, inscribed in the utterance itself. On the other hand, the sous-entendu belongs to the rhetorical component, and its meaning is interpreted based on the circumstances of enunciation.

Jan Mukařovský (1981) believes that the surface manifestation of dialogue and monologue through the speaker’s choice of language reflects much deeper underlying conditions that render the discourse monologic or dialogic. These conditions are decisive in the speaker’s choice of language elements; they include the “relations between the participants in conversation.” Mukařovský distinguishes between passive and active subjects. The main aspect of dialogue is the I-You relation, which presumes a constant shift between the role of the speaker and the listener. This is perceived as tension and constitutes “the psychological circumstances of conversation.” The second constituent of dialogue is the relations between the speakers, on the one hand, and the actual situation surrounding the communication, on the other hand. The third aspect is the presence of at least two contexts that permeate each other and constantly change. In contrast, monologue constitutes one uninterrupted context (Mukařovský 1981, pp. 264–292). This third aspect of dialogue Ubersfeld calls “the confrontation, juxtaposition, the montage or collage of different voices,” and this is what makes dialogue possible (p. 185).

Mukařovský also distinguishes between the theme of dialogue and its context. The theme is the same for all participants, while the context represents “the meaning that the speaker brings into the topic by taking a stance on and by evaluating the topic.” Speakers’ contexts often clash, so “sharp reversals of meaning occur” where speakers’ dialogue lines interchange. However, in most cases, it is not possible to detect speakers’ “discursive positions” based on the language they use since some aspects of the circumstances of communication remain unstated and are only detected in the rhetorical component.

Mukařovský rejects the formal distinction between dialogue and monologue, where dialogue is marked by characters’ lines (open dialogue). He finds that inner monologue becomes dialogue if “one individual consciousness is split into two subjects of language manifestation.” The main difference is the emphasis on “you” in dialogue and “I” in monologue. Dialogue monologises when there is a tendency towards “an uninterrupted logical connection without reversals of meaning” and when “speakers’ consensus reaches the level where multiplicity of contexts, necessary for dialogue, completely disappears” (p. 220).

In monologue, the emphasis on “I” manifests as an uninterrupted speech that disregards the immediate reaction of the listener and the circumstances of speech that situate the speakers in a specific place and time.

Similarly, Tomaševskij (1972) believes that a lengthy character’s line is borderline monologue, since it makes the listener passive and develops independently of the other speaker, so the crisscrossing of the speakers’ intentions lessens.

G.W. Turner also concludes that the condition of dialogue is an active exchange of thoughts, where both speakers “influence the direction of the discourse,” while in monologue, only one speaker is “searching for the truth” and decides on the direction of the discourse (1973, p. 195). Turner points out that speakers in dialogue constantly adjust to each other. He calls it “a mutually adjusting mechanism of progress” (p. 195). It is instructive to observe Turner’s view of ordinary dialogue as opposed to the dialogue in novels and dramas. Authors of novels and dramas simulate real-life conversation, where the author plays a dual role by advocating for an argument and, at the same time, criticising it. Turner compares this situation with playing chess with oneself, where “you always let yourself win” (p. 195). In contrast, a real-life conversation is always unpredictable.

Dialogue in drama is closer to real-life conversation than dialogue in prose since in drama the circumstances of enunciation are less explicit, so it allows for more autonomy.

Bakhtin broadens the understanding of dialogue and monologue by establishing the general principle that renders Dostoevsky’s novels fundamentally dialogic. In Dostoevsky’s novels, there is “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices” (p. 8). Drama, on the other hand, requires “utmost monolithic unity of that world” (p. 17). Drama requires the unity of dramatic construction, since “in drama, it is impossible to combine several integral fields of vision in a unity that encompasses and stands above them all because the structure of drama offers no support for such a unity” (p. 17). Dialogue in drama is the result of the “vision of author, director, and audience” (p. 17). He says the “concept of dramatic action, as that which resolves all dialogic oppositions, is purely monologic” (p. 17).

This is seemingly in contradiction with the position presented earlier that characters in drama are subjects, not objects, and are self-presenting. This is related to the fact that drama lacks narration, so dialogue creates its own conditions of enunciation. In drama, all voices are reflected through the prism of the author’s conceptualisation. Bakhtin’s view is not in contradiction with the fact that dramatic characters are self-presenting because of the missing role of the narrator. Dramatic dialogue creates its own circumstances of enunciation, while Bakhtin views the dramatic form in general as fundamentally monologic.

Ubersfeld, on the other hand, affirms the “theory of the four voices in theatrical discourse”—that of the scriptwriter, the character, the director, and the audience—which is manifested as a constant fluctuation of voices. It is futile to search for the authorial voice; instead, she affirms that “theatrical discourse can be no more than a relation between these voices” (p. 167).

Like Mukařovský, Bakhtin views monologue as a discourse that does not anticipate an answer, while dialogue anticipates a reaction. This principle applies to Dostoevsky’s novels, which represent “the rigorous unfinalizability and dialogic openness of Dostoevsky’s artistic world” (p. 272).

Roman Ingarden emphasises the concept of influence in dialogue: the anticipation of the voice of the other speaker. This influence is significant in dramatic conflict only if it moves forward the action of the performance (1981, p. 249). It could be concluded that Ingarden assigns illocutive power to dramatic dialogue, which represents an utterance that obliges the listener to talk back or to act. Ingarden identifies the ways participants in dialogue can influence each other: “through the content of the speech,” or “through the speech manner,” mostly through the tone of voice. This illustrates Ducrot’s distinction between illocution and perlocution, where the former belongs to the language component, while the latter to the rhetorical one. Ingarden’s influence through the content of the speech belongs to illocution, while perlocution is decoded only through the discursive situation, the rhetorical component, which includes “the speech manner.” Accordingly, Ducrot clarifies that “if an utterance, marked as question, is used as command, the command must be perlocution because it is decoded solely based on the information pertaining to the discursive situation” (p. 80). This is echoed in Ingarden’s conclusion that the situation in which words are used “can modify their real performance.”

Ingarden highlights the further consequences of the speech on the listeners and is interested in the reactions of the speakers to the words by which they are addressed. In the course of an active conversation, speakers “get connected psychophysically and participate in a congruous play of reactions,” and in all kinds of affective behaviour. Dialogue is thus a process in which speakers “through confrontation and acting together go through psychological transformations” (p. 257).

The characteristics of dialogue that are detailed in this section are its important aspects, but it should be noted that dialogue, first of all, is an “interpretative activity” of the participants in the conversation who are capable of detecting meaning in unspoken words by situating them in the speech situation in which they are used.

Ingarden notes that in theatre speech is not the only means of “constituting the represented world,” but has a complementary function. As was mentioned earlier, drama possesses the quality of “performativity” present in the dramatic text, which enables a “concretisation of dramatic discourse” by the means of actual objects on stage (p. 244). Drama is only partially realised through the verbal component, and on stage, didascalies are transformed into a live performance. The two segments of the dramatic text—dialogue lines and didascalia—have a fundamentally different status. Ubersfeld assigns didascalia to the author, who is “the subject of enunciation,” while dialogue “is not only the voice of one other but of several others” (1999, p. 9). Didascalia defines the conditions of enunciation, while dialogue lines are the discourse of the characters.

The question is to what extent didascalia is similar to the narrative segment of the novel. In the novel’s narration, the role of the speaker is performed by a fictional narrator, while the real author is outside of the discourse. In theatre discourse, the author is responsible for didascalia. The voice of the author is explicit and has the illocutionary power since it represents “a series of orders given with a view of stage production,” the author’s instructions “to stage practitioners to create conditions of enunciation for the theatre discourse” (Ubersfeld, p. 164). On the other hand, in prose, the conditions of enunciation in which characters’ dialogue lines are embedded are more precisely defined, which leaves less space for the reader’s free interpretation. As mentioned earlier, dramatic dialogue is more autonomous and creates its own conditions of enunciation, compared to dialogue in prose, which is subordinated to the structure of the literary text. Ubersfeld finds that in theatre, “the conditions of the production of utterances” are at times more important than “the content itself, the utterances of the discourse” (p. 183).

Dialogue in prose is structurally embedded in narration, and both textual segments have equal status. In drama, dialogue is independent, and a change of one line modifies the status of dialogue as a whole. Ubersfeld illustrates this by demonstrating how expressions of modality in theatre discourse affect the content of the discourse, as opposed to dialogue in prose:

Modality in theatre discourse is not so much a matter of giving it a particular ‘colour’ as giving it another meaning; the modalisation in fact becomes the content of the message. What is said is not the object of a given instance of questioning and uncertainty; rather that questioning and uncertainty bring into play certain type of relations of language with the interlocutor. (p. 177)

Because dialogue in prose does not have autonomy but is structurally embedded in narration, expressions of modality do not change the meaning of discourse but its tone, while modal expressions in dramatic dialogue create a completely new situation.

The following is a summary of the main conclusions about dialogue in drama and prose:

• In both forms, characters perform the role of the speaker—the author allows the characters to speak in their name.

• Dialogue in drama has a different status because of the “immanent theatricality” of the dramatic text; its constitutive feature is that it is meant to be performed, so only one aspect of the dramatic action has its verbal expression. Thus, speech is not meant to be the only means of creating the world of the performance.

• The missing narrative function renders autonomy to dramatic dialogue, so dramatic characters are self-presenting subjects and are not the objects of the author’s reporting. Consequently, dramatic dialogue is more efficient, while narration in the novel limits the functions of dialogue.

• Dramatic dialogue takes over the function of advancing dramatic action. Dialogue lacks lyricism and focuses on “interpersonal relations that control the action and are controlled by it.”

• Dialogue in prose is integrated into and subordinated to narration, while dramatic dialogue creates its own circumstances of enunciation.

• Didascalies only suggest the context of the communication between characters, while narration in the novel precisely defines the circumstances of enunciation. Dialogue in drama is dominant and autonomous, while dialogue in prose is subordinated to narration.

The following is a summary of the main characteristics of dialogue in general:

• Dialogue as a form, regardless of its origin (prose, drama, real conversation), always assumes the “I”—“You” relation and a sort of symmetry in the exchange of lines. This relation carries tension.

• There is a common core, a premise, that all participants agree about.

• Conflict originates from a “clash of different contexts,” that is, the confrontation between “different frames of reference.”

• Speakers’ discursive positions constantly change in the course of the dialogue, which results in dialogue dynamism, manifested as a number of contradictions, such as “between the speech of the characters [speakers] and their discursive positions” and between “the conditions of enunciation and the content of discourse.” The dynamism of dialogue has its source in a constantly renewed relation “between the character and his own subjectivity and between his subjectivity and that of the others.”

• A premise of dialogue is that it is always directed towards the listener, “anticipating and reacting to” the speech of the other.

• The illocutionary power in dialogue is constituted by relying more on the meaning the speaker assigns to the utterance and less on what the speaker actually said. In this way, the responsibility is assigned to the speakers, which enables dialogue to progress.

• There is no dominant consciousness suppressing the voices of speakers.

• Discursive laws control the process of enunciation.

• The speakers engage in the process of interpretation to decode the meaning of the utterance, considering the “conditions of the production of dialogue.”

• The meaning of the utterance is not inscribed in its linguistic component but is inferred, after the utterance is completed, from its rhetorical component.

A Close Reading of the Dialogue in The Island

Two textual components of The Island, the open dialogue (the characters’ speech) and the narration, will be analysed to determine the level of dialogisation of the discourse regardless of its surface manifestation. Both elements of the literary source could be used in the adaptation.

In the selection stage of the adaptation, the dominant concern is what segments possess the quality of performability—whether they are suitable for the transformation from “matrices of performativity” (Ubersfeld 1999, p. 8) to their stage realisation. The concept of perceptibility emphasises the role of the senses in theatre perception—the power of seeing and hearing. The principle of dialogue and the level of perceptibility guide the selection stage in the adaptation. At the same time, the structural coherence of the new text must be observed at all stages. It is precisely the dramatic action and tension that provides this coherence.

The choice of the genre plays an essential role in the dramaturgy of the performance. If the novel is read as an existential piece, the adaptation will amplify the conflicts but not resolve them. The performance would stage the characters’ existential angst but would not offer a resolution to the polyphony of the novel’s voices. Even if the performance takes this path, the stage must be transformed into a profoundly dramatic space and the action into a dramatic one. The characters’ angst must be palpable, the futility of their actions intensified to its highest, their bursts abruptly silenced, and the stage becomes pregnant with their unspoken words. The characters’ lines, the novel’s narration, and the characters’ monologues could all become suitable transformation into the discourse of the performance. The basic dramaturgical principles will guide the selection of the textual elements. Regardless of the genre of the adaptation, the performance must follow the pattern of the initial situation, the organised direction of dramatic action, and the subsequent closing point (Švacov 2018, p. 148).

The outlined selection process will first focus on the forms of the novel’s narrative discourse that could be defined as characters’ indirect speech and experienced speech.

In the opening story, Exile, the speaker and the enunciator are the same, but the point of view changes over the course of the narration. The initial objective description is interrupted by the exclamation, “Oh, what she could have been! Oh, what he could have been!” It becomes a narration from the point of view of the character enunciator. The narration becomes permeated with the character’s point of view, and the objective and the subjective become interwoven. Over the course of the narration, the roles of the speakers and enunciators constantly shift; for example, the voice of the speaker splits into two voices.

She went along the shore, powerful waves splashed her with their spray.

Where are you, darling?

Where are you?

She ran along the shore: where are you?

He isn’t anywhere: there is some hope.

In the first utterance, the speaker is the narrator, while in the second, the second-person pronoun you indicates that the speaker is Katarina.

Whether this segment of the text is suitable for the performance depends on both criteria, the perceptiveness and the structural coherence. We could imagine Katarina running across the stage—her long dress, blown by the wind, trailing her, her hair dishevelled, the off-stage sound of crashing waves—so her “Where are you, darling?” becomes integrated into the visual and acoustic signs that conjure her complex and ambiguous state of mind: repressed joy and horror. The scene is also in function of the dramatic action: it reveals the character’s motivation.

The inserted poem in the last section of the novella creates ambiguity about the identity of the speaker and the responsibility for the utterance:

The wind blows—the maiden sways

And the stormy wave carries her

through the sea’s open water

on frothy billows.

The wind brings fruit to the maiden,

she conceives by the sea.

Wonderful Luonotar, happy Luonotar!

The poem about Luonotar belongs to the fictional I of the character. The border between the discourse of the inserted poem and the narrative discourse is blurred. The inserted poem is embedded into the discourse of the novel and is perceived as its integral part. However, the poem would break the flow of the action of the performance. The omission of this segment in the performance attests to the demand to be uncompromisingly selective to preserve the intensity of the performance and its tight dramatic structure.

In the novella The Morning of Victory, various voices join in, and the speaker and the enunciator are different. The description of the scenery is the character’s experience, not an objective description in which the speaker “does not react to the stimuli but just observes, takes in, and informs” (Kravar 1986).

In the utterance “This is the morning of his victory,” “his” marks the fact that the character is not the speaker, but in the very next utterance the pronoun is omitted: “This is the morning of victory,” while in the next utterances it becomes clear that the speaker is now the character: “The rain didn’t drown us” and “Why did I think that my destiny’s paths had come to an end?”

The dialogisation of the discourse becomes even more complex. The voice of the character is split. He asks questions, has doubts, and gives orders to his alter ego:

Throw off the patched red-striped pajama; they’re it’s not for this great journey Whirl the slippers into the room’s farthest corner […] But what suddenly happened? Where are you, hot sun? Where are you, crimson flowers? Where are you, you the victorious one? You were there, I saw you …

This segment is the character’s inner dialogue. It is related to “the hero’s monologic discourse,” which, in Dostoevsky’s novels, is marked by the character’s “sideward glance at his absent interlocutor” (Bakhtin 1984, pp. 204–206).

Another example of the dialogisation of the character’s voice is the following section:

What if he appears in front of her in some special way, if he leaps out before her from a branch, if he says something beautiful and unexpected to her. What could he say to her?

“Miss, you’re all I think of…”

Banal.

“My heart trembles when I see you”

Intrusive.

“You light up my life”.

Stupid.

“Let me be your shadow.”

Frivolous.

The roles of the speakers change. First, the speaker is the narrator “What could he say to her?” who mediates the inner dialogue of the character, and the two discourses become interwoven: the quotation marks indicate that it is the discourse of the character, but they are missing in the lines: “Banal,” “Intrusive,” “Stupid,” “Frivolous.” The lines belong to the discourse of the character split into several voices. Formally, the discourse is an open dialogue visually marked by the character’s lines, attributed to one speaker.

Bakhtin points out that “the function of [the dialogue] with the self” is that it “allows [the character] to substitute his own voice for the voice of another person” (p. 213).

The sections above could be condensed into one scene where Ivan’s lines “The rain didn’t drown us” and “Why did I think that my destiny’s paths had come to an end?” are followed by his “throwing off the patched red-striped pyjama” and by “whirling the slippers into the [stage’s] farthest corner.” The Luonotar of his dreams could appear on the stage, and the tension in his dialogue with himself, “Miss, you’re all I think of … Banal …” is amplified by the presence of Luonotar. The two predications are juxtaposed, creating two communicative acts. The communicative acts do not merge; each participant stays in their world; the tension emerges from a lack of response to Ivan’s line. The performance creates a tense dramatic situation in which Ivan reaches the limit of his narrow horizons. He becomes entirely limited by his dramatic situation (Švacov, p. 157).

When the speaker and the enunciator are not identical, the speaker could subtly allow the voice of the enunciator to be heard, so the speaker does not explicitly distance herself from the discourse of the enunciator, which is not the case in indirect speech. Thus, the discourse becomes the experienced speech (Fr. style indirect libre) defined as a discourse permeated by the voice of the character.⁹ When addressing different categories of narration, Hamburger refers to one type of fictional narration in which the characters are portrayed as “subjects who, so to speak, ‘present themselves’” (p. 150). She rejects the criterion of objective versus subjective narration. Rather, the difference between various types of narration is established based on how characters are depicted: “in acts which are directed outward, as being in the stream of external occurrences” or “in their subjective experiencing, in their quiet (or disquiet) of their inner being” (1973, p. 149).

In the narrated monologue—“erlebte Rede” (Hamburger, p. 84)—the voice of the speaker is suppressed, and another subjectivity (that of the enunciator) emerges. Hamburger points out that “the narrated monologue cannot always be clearly distinguished from ‘the voice of the narrator’” (p. 171).

On the other hand, in “the indirect discourse form,” the voice of the speaker is explicit, as the speaker distances himself from it through the use of “verbum dicendi.” In indirect speech, the speaker is merely “a person reporting”: “I am only repeating what the other person has said, I myself take no responsibility for it” (p. 185). The form of indirect speech is marked by formal markers to be distinguished from the experienced speech: the use of the verbs “say,” “claim,” etc., followed by “that,” affirms indirect speech.

In the novella The Sweet-Scented Amoeba, in the indirect speech, the narrator assigns responsibility for the utterance to the characters:

At first, they were silent and averted their eyes, then she said their daughter-in-law was strange, and he added, sighing, their son was strange, too. She said, moreover, their son wasn’t at all happy, and he said their son was a fool, and their daughter-in-law a snake.

This approach allows different voices to be heard, and the story to be illuminated from various angles; it differs from open dialogue because the speaker is not one of the characters. At the same time, the narrator distances himself from the utterance by assigning it to the characters:

It was hatred and fury that led them to talk: their daughter-in-law had stung them to the quick, and their son had also upset them. So it was hard to know whether or not everything was really the way they said it was, maybe it was better, maybe worse. But they probably didn’t know how it really was. They just believed it was that way.

The discourse dialogises and leaves the reader doubtful about who is telling the truth or whether there even is a truth to be discovered.

In the novella The Miracle, the indirect speech has a double reference.

She wasn’t pretty, or good-natured, or elegant, or especially intelligent, and only he could know why he had married her. (They’d heard that her family said the same thing about him, but of course they were wrong)

The presence of three voices could be detected in the utterance: the voice of the narrator, who is the speaker, the voices of Ivan and Katarina, and the voice of the daughter-in-law, as well as that of the family. The narrator is a double referent. He refers to the utterance of Ivan and Katarina (“they’d heard”) and distances himself from it, while through their utterance refers to the utterance of the family, and in the end, again refers to Ivan and Katarina’s utterance and distances himself from it through irony: “of course they were wrong.”

Unlike indirect speech, in experienced speech there is no explicit distancing from the enunciator since the distancing is subtle. Objective narration imperceptibly becomes the experienced speech, and it is often difficult to perceive where one starts and the other stops.

In respect to his life, there wasn’t anything to reproach herself with. She’d given him his complete freedom, she’d offered to let him go if he wanted when that shameless girl was after him, but he hadn’t wanted to leave his wife. That meant he loved her.

In the discourse above, the narrator is merely a mediator illuminating the character’s point of view but does not explicitly distance himself from the utterance, even though it is clear that the responsibility for the utterance is assigned to the character.

This section needs to be transformed into a “visual perceptualisation of words in action” (Švacov, p. 132). The backstory of their son’s marriage could be effectively condensed into the lines “[our] son [is] a fool, and [our] daughter-in-law a snake.” At the same time, the dialogue needs to be strategically placed into the plot structure of the performance. The lines illustrate the depth of the couple’s desperation and their loneliness on the island; thus, the performance preserves the novel’s existential angst, while avoiding spinning side stories that would convolute the dramatic action.

The following examples from the novella Excitement reveal the conditions when narration becomes monologue and when it retains its dialogic nature. Generally, when conflicts are resolved, discourse becomes a monologue, and if it stays open, its conflicts unresolved, it is still dialogue regardless of its formal characteristics. In the novella, Ivan’s inner dialogue is resolved on its own:

He’ll go off to sea into the unknown. For once.

He’ll abandon this hot stone cliff on which

even the lizard is breathing his last,

and this scorched hard grass without any juice, around

which live only coiling snakes,

and this ugly house in which joy is dying out,

and this dead place in which there is no humanity, no love,

not even desire.

He doesn’t want to turn into gray stone.

He stepped into the shallow water and stopped, surrounded

by the sea up to his ankles.

I’ll go away for once.

Where?

Anywhere.

When?

Never.

As soon as th.e devil of precision whispers definitive questions, his imagination stops working. Only sadness remains.

The voices of the narrator and the character are interwoven. The experienced speech is dialogue as there are two voices: one that wants to leave, to find meaning in life, and the other that has doubts and contemplates solutions, but concludes there aren’t any. The two voices converge, eliminating conflict, so dialogue dies out. The voice of the narrator unifies the two dissolved voices of the character and concludes the discourse. However, the dialogue is only seemingly monologised and closed because Ivan’s split voice reemerges.

This segment, if preserved in the performance, would constitute a repetition because, in the earlier scene with Luonotar, we saw Ivan determined to leave, to do something, and to change his life. Repetition would make sense only if the performance punctuates the moments of Ivan’s bursts into action only to conjure the desperation of his resignation. Ivan’s words are accompanied by a contrasting image—the actor stands motionless. The resolution of Ivan’s conflict is dramatic.

In the novella Excitement, Ivan’s inner conflict is not resolved, unlike in the previous example. Ivan’s sudden excitement, his desire to do something different, and a stream of inner voices urging him to save the drowning man—at the same time doubting and asking how to do this in the storm—are resolved through the events outside of Ivan’s discourse.

He couldn’t pull the boat forward, he knew it was impossible, fortunately, but he pulled and pulled, and the people were silent. If only they’d answer him. If only they’d stop him.

If only they’d say a single word of approval or disapproval. They stood stiffly and kept quiet. His position became ridiculous. After giving the rope one more tug, unconvincingly and slowly, fearing that he’d be able to raise the anchor in spite of it all, he glanced up hopefully to see whether his wife was coming, she’d pull him away from danger.

His wife wasn’t there.

Then he straightened himself up, shook off the wet foam from his coat and trouser legs, ashamed of his excitement, which had suddenly dwindled.

The people kept quiet and looked at the sea.

The principle of dialogue is perceived in the conflict between the two elements: Ivan’s strong desire to do something and the external circumstances that obstruct that desire. Ivan’s discourse can be labelled as a performative speech act since the performative means “not only to pronounce something but also to do something” (Austin 1976, p. 34). However, the tension in the above discourse is not resolved through action since Ivan does not perform the desired action. The inner conflict is resolved through the external circumstances that prevent Ivan from saving the drowning man.

The circumstances of enunciation contrast with the content of Ivan’s discourse. On the level of illocution, Ivan’s line “Men, someone’s out on the sea” is the statement representing urging. However, on the level of perlocution, Ivan’s urging does not result in the desired response. Ivan’s experienced speech in the narration defines his discursive position: “He was compassionate, He was excited by his own humanity.”

The rhythmic structure of the sentence, broken by commas, mirrors Ivan’s excitement. The narration breaks into the dialogue by providing the lines of the other speaker. The inserted narration illuminates the context of the group speaker. The villagers’ discursive position (The crowd was silent) discloses their understanding that nothing could be done for the man, and their discursive position is compatible with the circumstances of the enunciation. On the other hand, the content of Ivan’s discourse is not compatible with the circumstances: “His position became ridiculous.” The dialogue closes with Ivan accepting his actual discursive position:

After giving the rope one more tug, unconvincingly and slowly, fearing that he’d be able to raise the anchor in spite of it all, he glanced up hopefully to see whether his wife was coming, she’d pull him away from danger.

The description of Ivan pulling the rope of the boat and the spectators/the villagers watching manifests the tension of an extreme dramatic situation. If co-ordinated with the sounds of the friction of the rope, crashing waves, and the screams of the drowning man, it could be effectively staged. The concrete theatre signs—the boat, the rope, the screams—transpose their immediate referents. The image of the crowd watching a man drown off-stage conjures an uncomfortable image of our lack of humanity. The actualisation of another layer of the meaning of the text, that of our contemporary historical moment, intensifies the emotional impact of this scene.

In the novella Man Does Not Live by Bread Alone, Ivan’s inner dialogue is the continuation of the preceding open dialogue with Katarina, except that Katarina’s lines are replaced by Ivan’s inner voice:

Why should he think about whether his heart is full or empty, whether his soul is happy or sad? What would his heart be full of? Of the years weighing him down more and more oppressively? Of treacherous desires? Of this unfortunate captivity from which he couldn’t free himself. Of the futile dreams which are left on his life’s path like many empty snake skins? Of love, from which not even the ashes are left? Of loneliness? Of a senseless prolongation of life?

The question about how to find solace and joy, which Ivan asks himself, does not end in monologue, in a solution. However, another possibility emerges: Ivan is carried away by the music performed by a young nun, and he wonders to whom she dedicates her music:

And then he remembered that the young nun had played for an entire hour all alone, for herself or for some chance unexpected guest: she seeks neither recognition nor understanding, a listener can come, but he doesn’t have to. She performs her duty or gives herself pleasure. All alone. Complete spirituality self-contented. Maybe not. Maybe she’s happy he listened to her play. Maybe she doesn’t even know how long it lasted. What’s time for her? She has neither past nor future; time is for her an old and new today, always the same.

The dialogue is not closed; another voice is added to Ivan’s: the voice of the nun, introduced by the narrator. The narrator reports on the voice of the nun through Ivan’s perspective. The dialogue becomes more complex and a final answer is not offered.

The novel contemplates different possibilities of giving meaning to one’s life, while the performance can only show action in progress or dramatise a lack of action. If the image of the nun playing is materialised, it must be firmly in service of tightening the dramatic action. It must be entirely integrated into “simultaneous partial threads of activities” on the stage (Švacov, p. 129). In one possible staging of this scene, the nun is playing, impervious to the parallel actions on the stage: Ivan pulling the rope, the crowd watching, and the man screaming.

The voice of the narrator is missing in theatre discourse. Characters could appropriate the narrator’s point of view and express it in dialogue lines. Dramatisation of the novel blurs the line between the two segments of the text—the dialogue and the narration. Selection of the novel’s sections suitable for dramatisation focuses on conflicts. A dramatised and amplified clash of conflicting positions on the stage could have its source in the novel’s narration or dialogue.

The voice of the narrator is often split, such as in the discourse of the narrator in the novella The Miracle: Maybe all that is happening with them is hatred.

The principle of dialogue is present throughout the novella because various voices enter into conflict: the voice of the narrator, the characters’ voices, the inner voices of the characters, and the split voice of the narrator. The novella ends with the split discourse of the character, the wife of their son, who was killed in an accident, but the dialogue does not close: What did he want to say to her?

The events also confirm the principle of dialogue: The son is killed in an accident before he has a chance to talk to his wife. For years, they lived in silence, and just before his death, he decided to break the long silence and resolve the dilemma: Is it hatred that keeps them together, or his desire to make things worse, or even something else? The events do not offer an explanation, so the conflict is not resolved, and the discourse does not monologise.

In the novel, the wife receives the information about the tragic accident in a phone call. The unity of dramatic action is disturbed if another character is added to the world of the performance. An intuitive choice would be to omit this section of the novel in the adaptation. If, on the other hand, the dramatisation pursues the space organisation of simultaneous unrelated parallel actions on the stage, the side characters could enter and leave, and Ivan and Katarina are present all through the performance. Each section would stage simultaneous dramatic situations to amplify the intensity of the unresolved conflicts.

The novella The Wild Horses is loosely related to the novel’s main plotline.

On the island’s Vidovo mountain (Vidova Gora), wild horses live free, and, surprisingly, people allow them to be free. Therefore, there is a place on earth where freedom is possible. Ivan’s monologised voice is lyricised through rhythmic repetition. The rhythmic repetition of the words, a format typical of poetry, through the principle of iconicity, relates Ivan’s exaltation; he has no doubts about the truthfulness of his discovery. The other voice, present in the proceeding discourse, doubting such unbelievable freedom on Vidovo mountain, emerges subtly, in a demi-tone like a shadow of doubt to be immediately silenced, only to reappear and prevail in the end.

There was, however, a blot on his sunny mood, for he didn’t know the true aim of this expedition. To round up a few horses, they’d said. But why?

The other voice is immediately silenced, monologised: It’s a great shame, it’s a blow against this complete freedom.

The twist happens through the ensuing action: the horse hunt makes Ivan realise the real purpose of the expedition. The force that monologises the discourse comes from the events and leads Ivan to a very different conclusion:

The freedom on Mt. Vidova is just an illusion, for this is a preserve, like a great chicken coop, with no visible fences, with no barbed wire, with no guards, and freedom is just an empty trick, a decoy.

Ivan’s initial voice that believes in freedom in this small part of earth is silenced in the open dialogue between Ivan and the leader of the hunting party:

“Where are the horses going?” he asked the leader.

[…] “To Italy” The leader took his time to reply.

“What will they do there?”

“They’ll get slaughtered for cutlets and sausages.”

The segment with the horses would work in film, though perhaps not in the performance. Although screens integrated into theatre discourse are common, this approach would not resolve the structural problem that the insertion of the segment would pose. The coherence of the dramatic action would be sacrificed for the visual effect.

In the novella Life Is a Dream, the narrator relates Ivan’s inner monologue:

Life is a dream …

Did he say that?

No, he didn’t. He doesn’t know if life’s a dream.

No one’s there, but someone said it. He didn’t fall asleep and dream the words.

Who is responsible for the above discourse? The narrator is the mediator of the character’s inner life. He assigns the responsibility for the utterances first to himself then to the other character. It is not clear whether it is the split voice of the narrator that asks if we’re only dreaming that we are living or if those are the questions that Ivan asks himself. Such an approach multiplies the number of voices and the questions requiring answers. The lines “Is death the awakening? Does life begin at death?” implicate the reader.

Dramatists generally avoid monologues that do not emerge from dramatic action unless a genre and a period in the history of drama overwrite this rule. The tight dramatic structure requires all parallel stories to create a polyphony of threads of action contributing to “the density of simultaneous action” (Švacov, p. 129).

Similar to the novella The Wild Horses, in Life is a Dream, Ivan’s exaltation at the beauty of the girl, in the profoundly lyricised discourse, is confronted with a different voice that, like the voice of the hunter, presents facts, voiced in the line of the open dialogue with the innkeeper:

“What does that girl do?” Ivan asked the kafana owner.

He smiled. “Eh, you’re really gullible.”

The literal meaning of the utterance is different from the meaning detected in the rhetorical component. This is different from the previous example in the novella The Wild Horses, where the meaning of the innkeeper’s lines is the same in the linguistic and rhetorical components. The meaning inscribed in the linguistic component is detected in the words used in the utterance, while the complex meaning is brought about through the circumstances of the utterance, its speech situation. The preceding discourse “And does this boy know what you do?” illuminates “the circumstances of the enunciation” and helps assign the meaning to the earlier exchange between Ivan and the innkeeper.

The performance relies on the power of the image to illuminate the circumstances of enunciation. The body and face of the actor become the all-telling image that anchors the meaning of the words and unambiguously renders the meaning of the rhetorical component.

The novella The School of Dolphins, with its long monologues, offers the most intense and disturbing dramatic action of the novel. In the novella, the narrator interprets the character’s inner world, that of the husband whose wife killed him:

Something was oppressing him, something was dragging him off, but he didn’t have the strength to change anything in his life. Maybe it was only dissatisfaction with everything around him, everything connected with him. He would hit himself and the thing closest to himself, his wife. With each blow he dissipated the pain he had amassed, liberated himself from the unbearable tension which stretched him out like a drawn bow of unseasoned wood. He didn’t know that he was disgusted with life that there was no hope for him. He would have suffered no matter what, died from drinking, been killed in a fight, jumped into the sea from a rock.

In this discourse, which represents the narrator’s view of the character’s inner world, one could detect the same kind of unresolved anxiety as Ivan’s. To go somewhere, but where? There is also some of Ivan’s late son’s lack of resolve to change things. Similarly, The Wild Horses on the Island Brač cannot leave: men, like horses, are not free. The points of view keep changing.

Thus, Ivan’s line “How can people be so cruel?” is the continuation of the monologue of the wife who killed her husband:

“Why did you have to do it?” she asked him reproachfully. “Now neither of us is here. But what else could I have done? Did we have to lose our life and property? Did we have to lose our heart, for we would have grown soulless? Did we have to lose our love, for we would have begun to hate each other? No, we didn’t, it couldn’t have been different. I brought misery on myself, but I had no other way out. I brought no misery on you, only a live man can be unhappy, it’s all the same to you know. […] If I’d been able to cut her out of your head, I would have stifled it, but because of the fear of growing old without having anything anywhere.”

The wife’s voice is single; no other voices that express doubt or regret for the committed murder are present. The cruel logic that rejects poverty in old age, even if it calls for murder, is monologised.

The divided stage of the performance could dramatise this section of the novel. Ivan and Katarina, along with the audience, watch the murder enacted on the other half of the stage and hear the wife’s monologue, shortened and intensified by the image.

In the novella How Are You? Ivan, in the explicit role of the speaker, asks the question that is central to all his dilemmas:

It’s not right for my story to die so hopelessly and for the memory of me to die out as if I were a chicken. But what must one do to prevent it? God, since you gave me this thought, give me the solution!

What should people do to give meaning to their lives? Ivan temporarily resolves this dilemma by getting excited about building his own monument. However, his other persistent inner voices do not allow the dialogue to close and to end in a resolution. Summarising his own life, Ivan asks himself: Did life give him an opportunity to distinguish himself in anything and to leave his name to posterity? He doesn’t know.

One of his voices blames destiny for not being kind to him, so instead of joining the partisans, he was sent to a prison in Germany. The narrator allows Ivan’s voice to flare up:

But if that stupid accident hadn’t happened, he might have joined the Partisans. Yes, of course, he would have. And he would have done something heroic right away, he would have stopped a German battalion with his machine gun …

His imagination, completely separated from “reality,” is confronted every time by the doubtful voice of the other, which becomes stronger and stronger:

Fate didn’t give him any mark of distinction. But maybe that’s how his capabilities are, modest, maybe he’s ordained to spend his life unnoticed and unimportant as an insect.

The performance needs to create a bridge between the novel’s fixed historical place and time and that of the spectators. It needs to vividly “sublimate the experience of a specific world” by relating it to the world of the contemporary audience. The line “he might have joined the Partisans” fixates the text into a specific world, while the space of the performance must, at the same time, “liberate” the words from their context and “direct” the spectator’s perception (Švacov, p. 171).

Characters’ Direct Speech in The Island

In the adaptation, the characters’ direct speech will be trimmed, sections omitted, and new ones added.

In the novel The Island, characters’ lines are often imbedded in the narration, while the discourse of the narrator intrudes into dialogue lines. The main difference between open dialogue and narration—which includes characters’ inner dialogue and indirect and experienced speech—is that the speaker is one of the characters and is formally responsible for the utterance, which is marked by the first-person pronouns and quotation marks. However, speakers are not always responsible for their lines, in the same way the narrator rejects responsibility for the utterance by assigning it to someone else.

The responsibility for utterances in the performance is less ambiguous. The image is the key to detecting the hidden layers of meanings behind words. Often, the most expressive visual elements on the stage are characters’ facial expressions, gestures, and movements. The ambiguity of spoken words is reduced because the image engages the spectators’ heightened perception; at the same time, the image reduces the ambiguity of words and deepens the spectators’ instant realisation of the many layers of the utterance. Only through the image can the fullness of sensation be grasped (Švacov, p. 133).

In the following open dialogue, the speakers refuse the responsibility for the utterance.

“Why are they like that?”

“All children are like that.”

“Not all. They’re like you. That’s why.”

“So I’m heartless?”

“How can you say the children are heartless?”

“I didn’t say that.”

To the speakers, the sous-entendu is more important than the présupposé, as they reply to the inferred meaning from the rhetorical component to the unspoken. On the other hand, the speakers can purposefully “hide” behind the spoken words and react to the présupposé. For example, in the performance, the line “I didn’t say that” could be delivered as a sincere reply to express the character’s self-deception, or it could be fashioned as a momentary realisation of the truth dawning on the speaker as the words are being spoken, the character not yet ready to accept it. The nuances of meanings are suggested by the fine instruments of the voice, gestures, pauses, and movements.

In the novella Exile, the narration, embedded in the dialogue, situates the conversation between Ivan and Katarina in a precise frame of reference. The reader discovers that Katarina’s hairstyle is the same as hers of thirty-five years ago. Katarina’s experienced speech reveals her desire to bring back her youth. Ivan’s experienced speech reveals his frame of reference, confronted with Katarina’s even before they address each other. He hates her hairstyle; he is angry at her. The narration frames the conflict between the two confronting contexts:

His are a net, a rowboat, talks, sorrow and rage, wandering around the island. Hers are cooking, cleaning, flowers, chickens, a piano she dreams of, endurance and melancholy memories.

The transition to dialogue seems imperceptible since the dialogue is firmly embedded in the narration. The narration offers information that further clarifies the status of the dialogue: They often had this conversation. After the contextual frame is established, the author allows Ivan and Katarina to speak in their name:

“Your hair looks awful.”

“It flatters me.”

“You look like a freak”.

“Your eyes aren’t telling the truth. Neither are your thoughts. And you don’t see anything nice.”

The lines represent the confrontation between the two contexts, and at the borders of the characters’ lines, a sharp turn in meaning happens, manifested in the contrasting lexemes.

Ivan’s utterance has the phatic function—to initiate and to keep the conversation going. This information is communicated in the narration inserted in the dialogue. If the performance renders the characters’ existential situations, the narration It would be a shame if the conversation suddenly stopped must have its perceptible manifestation on the stage. The time in drama is “existential time” and shows only those events that are crucial for building the characters’ self-awareness of their existence (Švacov, p. 181). The performance could select and punctuate the characters’ heightened moments of anguish. If Katarina and Ivan’s existence is reduced to talking for the sake of talking, because nothing else is left for them, then the image of the old couple, their futile gestures, arrested before they reach their destination, their voices flat to contrast the intensity of their words, all these theatrical devices could conjure the depths of their desperation.

The confronting discursive positions of the speakers are manifested as Ivan’s verbal attacks and Katarina’s defences. The narrator reveals the discursive positions of the characters: the reader is informed that Katarina “never explodes, she prefers to be a martyr.” The performance needs to make visible the speakers’ discursive positions.

The verbal relationship between Ivan and Katarina (the attacker vs. the self-defender) is reflected in the specific direction of each speaker towards the reactions of the other. Ivan’s lines instigate Katarina’s reaction:

“You’ve grown old. You’re dying your hair so you can’t see how much gray you have.”

“All women dye their hair.”

“Not all. Only those who want to hide something.”

Again, the phatic function is detected in the dialogue: Ivan’s desire to prolong the conversation because “it would be a shame if the conversation suddenly stopped, better for something unpleasant to happen than nothing at all.”

In The Island, the dialogue compensates for the missing action since the entire novel is about a world in which nothing happens except a prolonged, aimless conversation. The performance could stage a world in which nothing happens, and the absence of action is protracted and intensified, creating a profoundly dramatic space.

The narration in which the dialogue is embedded clarifies the context of the characters’ lines.

“Tonight it’s exactly thirty-five years since that concert.”

“Can’t you remind yourself some other way?”

“This is all that’s left for me.”

“Nothing’s left for you.”

The ensuing narration continues Katarina’s lines:

She has a Spanish hairstyle and hoop earrings this evening. Thirty-five years before in the same hairstyle and the same earrings she played a Chopin mazurka at a benefit concert; the man in charge was thrilled with her, he stroked her cheek. She played that mazurka often, at many shows, during the national holidays, before all the prominent people in town. For this reason she loved to bring back the pleasant memories of that time when she experienced life most intensely.

In the theatre discourse, the mixing of fictitious levels could be staged or, like in the novel, could be conjured through characters’ speech. The narration that describes the past events could be transformed into characters’ lines. In this way, the space in the theatre is multiplied as each spectator imagines the off-space that the characters’ words conjure (Švacov, p. 167). The other possibility is to transform the off-space of past events into the on-stage space. We could see young Katarina playing the piano, wearing hoop earrings, and we could hear the off-stage applauding of the concert crowd. The juxtaposition of the two communicative situations—predications—in the performance would have two functions: to inform about past events and to create dramatic tension.

In the adaptation, Katarina’s and Ivan’s lines need to be transformed into condensed and pointed utterances. Katarina’s strategy in the novel is not to accept the confrontation, while Ivan’s discursive position is to prolong the conflict. Katarina, as the narration clarifies, plays the role of the suffering victim; she is the object of Ivan’s verbal attacks and generally refuses to attack back. Her response to Ivan’s attacks is acceptance:

“You hemmed me in, crushed me. We should separate.”

“Whatever you decide, darling.”

The speaker’s refusal to engage in confrontation, which would move the action forward, signifies that the dialogue illustrates the conversation between the characters never resolved in action. This is related to the novel’s central theme: the characters on the island have nowhere to go, and they don’t have the necessary resolve to change their lives.

The theatre discourse needs to condense Ivan and Katarina’s long conversations and navigate the dialogue in the general direction of the performance.

The following lines illustrate Katarina’s verbal strategy of not accepting conflict:

“I won’t give you the children.”

“The children are mine.”

“Let them decide.”

“Are the children all right, darling?”

“They’re fine.”

“Are the grandchildren all right?”

“The grandchildren are fine. They’ve grown. Go to school. Study hard.”

“It’s fun to be with children.”

If the performance takes the direction of increasing the level of absurdity of the situation, Katarina could hold a rag doll, clutch it tightly, sing to it, or cradle while shielding it from Ivan. This could only work if synchronised with the organised and focused direction of the adaptation. The adapted text does not cross the line into the absurd, while the performance could play between stepping into the absurd—Katarina cradling the rag doll—and a moment later centring the conversation on Ivan’s gallbladder:

“Why wouldn’t you go to town with me, darling?”

“I was sick, darling. You know how congested my chest was. And my gallbladder was bothering me, too.”

“I remember.”

In the course of the dialogue, the characters become aware of their situation. The intensity of their revelation is amplified if the characters take turns and pronounce the lines as if speaking in unison.

“They look at us apathetically. They look at us angrily. They don’t have room for us, they say. They don’t have time for us, they say.”

After the consensus is reached, the dialogue monologises. There is a temporary pause; for a moment, there is a break in confrontation between the speakers’ frames of reference.

“You’re fine over there on the island, they say.”

“They’re glad to see us leave.”

The dialogue gradually closes as the positions of the speakers harmonise. They are two people sharing the same fears of death and old age. The dynamism of the dialogue stems from the constantly renewed relations between the “characters and their subjectivity and between the subjectivity of other participants.” Ivan’s anger—blaming Katarina for his failures—abates as he accepts his new discursive position—a man scared of death:

“And the children are good to us.”

“Maybe they aren’t good, but they love us.”

“They love us, they just don’t have time for us.”

“Or room for us. It’s cramped. It keeps getting more cramped.”

“It keeps getting closer.”

“Are you afraid of the cemetery? We’re too close to it”

“I’m afraid. Are you?”

“I’m afraid, too.”

“Of what?”

“The cemetery, death, old age, life.”

The contexts of the speakers reconcile both in the linguistic and the rhetorical component: the speakers assign the same meaning to two different utterances: (It’s cramped. It keeps getting more cramped. It keeps getting closer). For the first time, Ivan is explicit about his fears, which both participants recognised in the utterances of the other: (Are you afraid of the cemetery?)

In the continuation of the dialogue, Katarina’s lines take a new direction:

“Do you want some wine, darling?”

“I don’t. Let it hurt me. When I drink I forget, and then it doesn’t hurt.”

“But you should forget.”

However, Ivan does not accept the new direction of the conversation. His position changes: now he refuses to accept his fate: “I don’t have to forget. I don’t want to forget. If I forget, I’ll be reconciled to it. But I don’t want to be reconciled. It’ll be what I want.”

It is interesting to detect how the speakers decipher the meaning of their partner’s lines and how each speaker’s subjectivity (desires) affects the interpretation of the other speaker’s lines:

“Do you want to be by yourself, darling?”

“That’s my affair.”

“And yet, I don’t want to die, darling.”

“I know. No one wants to.”

“Why are you so mean, darling?”

“Because it’s hard for me.”

“You’re making it even harder for yourself.”

In Ivan’s line “It’ll be what I want,” Katarina detects Ivan’s desire for her death and responds to its hidden meaning: “I don’t want to die, darling.” The narration that follows the dialogue lines includes Katarina’s experienced speech, where she expresses the same desire for the death of her partner. Since speakers assign real meaning to the utterance only by thinking back about it, the reader also thinks back about the characters’ lines by incorporating the information from the narration.

She would arrange a beautiful funeral for him, though he’d be missing if the sea didn’t return him. She’d bring two priests to read a requiem for him, she would buy the most beautiful wreath of artificial flowers to throw on the open sea, and every day she’d bring a bunch of wildflowers, in memory of her late husband. Until she joined the children. But maybe she’d rent a little apartment herself, she’d live on his pension, she’d sell this place …

In the performance, the narration above could be transformed into Katarina’s monologue. Another possibility is to stage conflict: Katarina could say the lines directly to Ivan. However, that would ask for Katarina to be a different character, not a passive sufferer but one who challenges her partner, turning back his words against him. Each stage in the adaptation needs to conform to the general direction of the new text.

In the novella Excitement, the narrative frame defines the circumstances of enunciation—the narration reveals the impossibility of Ivan’s attempt to save the drowning man. On the other hand, the conversation between Ivan and Katarina in Exile represents their usual and repetitive exchange, so the circumstances outside of the conversation are not substantial for the flow of the dialogue.

The narrative context and the circumstances of enunciation perform a different function. The narration is the segment of the text in which dialogue is embedded, while the circumstances of enunciation are part of the discourse determined by “the discursive mechanism that conditions it.”

The following dialogue is preceded by an affective description of the scenery. The speaker is not the enunciator since the description is Ivan’s experience, not objective narration. The description begins with a piling of nouns: “Heat. Summer. Emptiness.” The repetition of noun phrases suggests the immobility of the scenery and Ivan’s mood, and the omission of finite verbs in the compound sentences suggests the same: “In the middle of the cove is a motionless boat, in it something like a man, lifeless, killed by the heat.” The listing of the sentences of the same syntactic structure marks the monotony, the stillness in which nothing stirs: “Boredom creeps about the yard,” “The cat warms her swollen belly.” The repetition of the negations has the same effect: “The donkeys in the village aren’t braying, the children aren’t shouting, the women aren’t quarrelling.” The use of commas expresses stillness. The compound sentence is broken into shorter repetitive clauses, which suggests endless inactivity: “Just a little effort of the sun, just one greater degree of force, and everything will pass from a sluggish sleep into death.” In the narration, Ivan’s frame of reference is marked by the non-neutral choice of words: “The woman is snoring with her toothless mouth.” The imagery reveals Ivan’s subjective experience.

Conversation is a rescue from the unbearable stillness. The chief function of the dialogue is phatic since it compensates for the missing action. Thus, the narration situates the dialogue in its specific context and illuminates the characters’ discursive positions and frames of reference. However, the dialogue itself also reveals the context: The lines of the dialogue reveal that Ivan purposefully pushed the flower pot to initiate the conversation. The border between the narration and the dialogue is blurred:

Maliciously and sluggishly, slowly cruising his tired eyes, he waited and he wished for something to happen, lightning to strike, the roof to fall in, someone to die of fear.

The wife woke with a start.

“What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Something scared me.”

“What?”

“I heard a noise.”

“You were dreaming.”

“I wasn’t even asleep. I was thinking about the book. It’s wonderful.”

“You were asleep.”.

“I just closed my eyes. It’s easier to think that way.”

“You were snoring.”

“No, that’s not true.”

“I was by the sea. I could hear you from below.”

“You exaggerating, dearie”.

Ivan’s intention to prolong the conversation is reflected in his dialogue strategy: to have the dialogue progress slowly and to postpone conflict so that the conversation lasts longer. The conflict is marked by the contrasting words and the change of the rhythm: Katarina’s lines are followed by Ivan’s short, often one-word responses: (Nothing. What. You were dreaming. You were asleep. You were snoring.) The same grammar form of the last three lines rhythmically punctuates Ivan’s context and his subjectivity: an image of his wife, “snoring through the toothless mouth.”

The poetic function is detected in the discourse. Roman Jakobson maintained that the principle of equality is reflected from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination. Similarly, the linguistic and the rhetorical components are mirrored in each other through the language’s expressive elements. The expressive language reveals the contexts of the speakers.

The narrator presents Ivan’s intentions and his discursive position. Katarina’s strategy is a refusal of confrontation, but the relationships between the speakers are constantly renewed.

Ivan’s lines—questions on the level of illocution and a challenge on the level of perlocution—serve his purpose to lead the conversation in the direction he wants, to influence Katarina to show she is hurt. Eventually, she responds to his urging by explicitly revealing the hidden meaning of her earlier lines: “Did you do it out of malice?”

The speakers exchange the roles of guiding the dialogue in the desired direction:

“The flowerpot with the tuberose broke.”

“Let it be. It doesn’t matter.”

“I thought you liked that flower.”

“I was never especially fond of it.”

“Strange. Why did you water it so much?”

“Did you do it out of malice, did you, darling?”

“Why would I do it out of malice?”

“Because you’re bored.”

“You’re right. I’m bored. I don’t have anything to do. What could I do that would make sense?”

“Do anything.”

“Stand on my head?”

“Why don’t you read something? Take a book from the Ružićes.”

“Don’t want to.”

“Go to the sea, go swimming.”

“Don’t want to.”

The dialogue and the action on the stage are in harmony. The characters, their temperaments, their life choices, and everything we learned about them are expressed in their actions, or more precisely, their lack of action. Ivan’s meanness out of desperation is embodied in his hand pushing the flower pot. Katarina’s resignation is vividly expressed in the image of her body slumped in the chair, refusing to add the intensity of anger to her line, “Did you do it out of malice, did you, darling?” Rather than staging dramatic action that evolves in the course of the performance, the adaptation could focus on selected dramatic situations in which characters face the limits of their horizons; in other words, the dramatic situation becomes extreme (Švacov, p. 157).

The dialogue in the novella Memories of the Beginning functions as a context for the dialogue in the preceding novellas:

In September, it will be thirty-five years since their wedding. After Amalia unexpectedly married a lieutenant in the artillery, he decided on a quick revenge. He remembered the neighbour who played Chopin at all monthly festivals, and when he met her on the street he said hello to her and added, thinking venomously of Amalia.

“Can I make you company, Miss?”

“The pleasure is mine, Sir.”

“I’ve been thinking about you for days. Will you marry me, Miss? Immediately, if it’s all right with you. I hope you’re free. I am.”

“Dear Sir, why so sudden? I’m free, but your offer comes too unexpectedly. We have to get to know each other better.”

“I know all about you, Miss Amalija.”

“Katarina, Sir.”

“We’ll get to know each other during our marriage, Katarina.”

In the dialogue, young Katarina’s strategy is to delay the answer as she is aware of the discrepancy between Ivan’s discursive position and the content of his discourse. Also, Ivan’s actual context, his frame of reference, is in contrast with his utterance: “He said hello to her … thinking venomously of Amalia.”

Katarina cannot detect Ivan’s actual context, so she responds to the information in the linguistic component. Ivan’s discursive strategy is to hide his context, but it surges onto the surface without his control: “I know all about you, Miss Amalia.” This demonstrates how speakers’ context—their frame of reference—is often inscribed in the utterance without the speakers’ control.

The adaptation needs to address the problem of incorporating the information about the characters’ past into the action evolving on the stage. Typical theatre devices for relating past events are monologues, reports, or changes in stage setting. Multiplying the space by evoking the off-stage space has the potential to be the least intruding. For example, Katarina and Ivan’s remembering of their past could be integrated into their lines: “In September it will be thirty-five years since [our] wedding,” and the characters could walk back and forth between the past and the present. In that way, the lines between the fictitious levels are blurred. Ivan could address Katarina as Amalia; she could get angry—she is angry in the present thinking back to the past when she did not have the full knowledge of the circumstances of the communication and Ivan’s discursive position. The dialogue of the performance could be fashioned in a way that mixes the characters’ lines of the past with those of the present.

Another possibility is the stage configuration of two simultaneous predications—the past and the present. Like with the earlier scene in which young Katarina plays the piano to the off-stage audience applauding, the juxtaposition of the two predications would clarify the characters’ discursive positions by providing information from the past and would intensify the present conflict.

In The Island’s last novella, The Morning of Victory, the speakers’ contexts have nothing in common; each speaker is a world to himself.

“This disaster isn’t natural.”

“Our Father who art in Heaven.”

“Maybe it’s already taken the house.”

“Hallowed be Thy Name.”

“Maybe we’re already in the waves. Can you feel us rocking?”

“Hail, Mary.”

“It’ll take us out of the harbour into the open see.”

“Full of Grace.”

There is no meeting point between the contexts of the speakers, so the main condition of dialogue is not fulfilled. The speakers do not respond to each other’s lines. The lack of common ground necessary for communication creates an extreme dramatic situation. This most intense scene of the novel embodies the historical and existential tension shared with the audience.

However, the performance could choose a different point of closure. The discourse of the young man in the novella Should the Old Mandarin Die? could be interpreted as the voice of the author:

“Every era has its problems, but ours are the worst,” he was saying softly. “As opposed to the caveman’s time, when floods, wild beasts, and epidemics threatened man’s survival, today it’s the element of absurdity that’s threatening life itself. Worse than any blind element of nature ever did …”

The narration that follows the young man’s monologue could be understood as instructions for a meaningful conversation:

And perhaps they had never felt so intensely aware of the fullness of life and the beauty of human speech as in those evening hours as the quiet pallor of a pale night was lingering on. You don’t know exactly what it is in the end, you can’t grab hold of its root, like an overgrown plant’s, but your heart is full of an inexpressible joy when listen to the way the words are strung together, like a necklace. It was a little bit like prayer, or confession, or fortune telling, or fables, but there was more warmth and sense in what the young man was saying, even though it was hard to understand.

The discourse affirms the very communication as a source of joy; the novella offers the preconditions for an effective dialogue. One of the conditions is the premise that the listener is capable of detecting the actual meaning of the speaker’s utterance. As a counterpoint to the characters’ desperation, the performance could, for a brief moment, conjure an atmosphere of warmth in a conversation among the equals.

And they were especially thrilled because he believed them to be mature and wasn’t afraid they wouldn’t understand him: he approached them with confidence, speaking to them seriously about whatever crossed his mind and troubled him.

Moments before the lights go off, we see just three people talking their anguish away. The discrepancy between the linguistic and the rhetorical components of their utterances is gone. The music of the human voices becomes more important than the words they are saying. They talk and talk in good faith “as the quiet pallor of a pale night [is] lingering” on the stage.

Conclusion

In Selimović’s works The Fortress and Death and the Dervish, the prominent function of dialogue is a sharp and vivid illustration of the characters’ predicament in a specific cultural context. The dialogue in The Island, on the other hand, heightens dramatic tension by staging the characters’ extreme dramatic situation and anguish, which they hopelessly try to talk away. In staging The Island, the visuals will accompany and intensify the selected segments of the adapted text—its dialogue or narration—to create a profoundly dramatic space. When narration is transformed into the discourse of the performance, as characters’ lines accompanied by acoustic and visual signs, the narrative segment will be transformed into the pointed and condensed lines of dramatic dialogue.

The principal aspect of dialogue in drama is contradiction, stemming from confronting discursive positions of speakers, manifested as power relationships where one speaker becomes dominant. However, the discursive positions change over the course of dialogue, demonstrating dialogue’s inherent dynamism. Often, the initial premises of speakers change during conversation, and the relationships between speakers evolve constantly. This is typical of dialogue in drama, while in prose, the interpretation of speakers’ discursive positions is defined by the narration in which dialogue is embedded. The premises about the other speaker’s discursive position are subjective. Frequently, the source of misunderstanding between speakers is the false initial premise. In the course of dialogue, the initial premise could change.

The discrepancy between the circumstances of enunciation and the content of the utterance is a common cause of conflict. Speakers tend to rely on the information from the rhetorical component to decode the intentions and strategies of the other speaker. Speakers activate various discursive laws in the course of conversation based on the signals they detect in their partner’s utterances. They respond to the unstated rather than the explicit message. In the process of interpretation, the participants also bring in their intentions, strategies, and emotions. One speaker leads the dialogue in the desired direction, but this role often alternates between participants.

In the discourse of the characters in dialogue, the voice of the absent enunciator is occasionally present. The speakers take responsibility for the utterance or create an ironic distance to mock or denigrate the absent party. In both cases, the speaker and the enunciator are not the same.

The analysis of the dialogue in The Island illustrates the complex interplay of the discursive elements. The narration situates the dialogues in a precise context and offers information about the circumstances of the enunciation and the speakers’ discursive positions, so the dialogue has limited autonomy. The speakers’ frames of reference could already be confronted in the narrative discourse in which the dialogue is embedded, so the dialogue and the narration form a cohesive structure, and the transition from narration to dialogue becomes imperceptible. Lines of dialogue continue in narration while narration intrudes in dialogue and voices the speakers’ unspoken lines. Still, dialogue allows the speakers to develop and constantly renew their mutual relationships over the course of conversation. Thus, the dialogue in the novel shares some characteristics of the dramatic dialogue. It reveals the conflicts between the characters’ frames of reference, the conflicts between their discursive positions and the circumstances of the enunciation, and the discrepancy between the discursive laws and the content of the utterance. The conflicts are not resolved in the ensuing action. This also illustrates a weakness of human communication, the impossibility of conveying meaning through words.

The selection of the textual elements of the adapted text suitable for the performance will disregard the distinction between narration and dialogue. Sections of the novel will be integrated into the new discourse, its coherence determined by the general direction of the new text.

The performance will situate the dialogue into the specific context of the performance and reduce the ambiguity of the speakers’ discursive positions. When spoken on the stage, dialogue is stripped of its ambiguity: every line, accompanied by a gesture, by a pitch of voice, by a particular reaction of the other speaker, like a dagger, raptures the layers of ambiguity, conferring a singular mode of perception on each line of dialogue. Paradoxically, the heightened and focused perception allows for a full grasp of the complexity of the utterance.