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Yale French Studies NUMBER 113

Yale University Press

Contents

Editors' Preface: The Transparency of the Text DONIA MOUNSEF AND JOSETTE FRALI. Avant and Aprs Garde....................................................................................................7Whatever Happened to the Avant-Garde? TOM BISHOP...........................................................................14Speech in Tatters: The Interplay of Voices in Recent Dramatic Writing JEAN-PIERRE RYNGAERT.................................29Drama Out-of-Bounds: Theater of Totality BERNADETTE BOST...................................................................39Myth in Contemporary French Theater: A Negotiable Legacy ARIANE EISSEN.....................................................50Moving Across Languages JOSETTE FRALII. (Under)writing the Stage................................................................................................71Michel Vinaver and A la renverse: Between Writing and Staging DAVID BRADBY.................................................84The Desire for Language, the Language of Desire in the Theater of Bernard-Marie Kolts DONIA MOUNSEF.......................99Voix/Voie/Vie: The Voice in Contemporary French Theater CLARE FINBURGH.....................................................116L'art de l'crit s'incarnant: The Theater of Nolle Renaude MARY NOONANIII. Disputed Texualities...................................................................................................131Is There a Specifically Francophone African Stage Textuality? JUDITH G. MILLER.............................................145Contemporary Francophone Drama: Between Detours and Deviations SYLVIE CHALAYE..............................................157Lost in Translation, or Why French-language Plays Are Not Often Seen on American Stages PHILIPPA WEHLE

Chapter One

Whatever Happened to the Avant-Garde?

So whatever did happen to the avant-garde? Not so long ago (at least for those of us who actually witnessed that extraordinary explosion of creative theatrical innovation in the 1950s), the very notion of the avantgarde, so much a part of the esthetics of French art in all its varied forms since the middle of the nineteenth century, finally triumphed in the theater with Eugne Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov. La cantatrice chauve in 1950, followed immediately by Les chaises, En attendant Godot, and the dazzling theatricality of Genet's plays, and eventually numerous other dramatists writing in French and then throughout Europe and the Americas, radically changed theater, first in France and soon throughout the western world. This was an iconoclastic avant-garde that sought to change the rules of the game, to do away with what was left of realistic techniques after half a centuryofbrilliantanti-realistreactionsagainstthesuccessfulfourth-wall realist brainwashing initiated and exemplified by Andr Antoine and his Thtre Libre in the 1890s.

And it was an immensely successful avant-garde. Word went out from the little Left Bank playhouses that new concepts of theatricality were undermining some of the mainstays of even the best of the playwrights of the time-Sartre, Camus, Montherlant, Anouilh: plot, character, psychology, coherent stories. The new playwrights did not offer a common vision; what united them to some extent though was their opposition to the status quo. Soon they were being performed in larger, more important theaters, like the Odon and eventually the Comdie Franaise, and became the playwrights of the fifties and sixties. It is rare for an avant-garde to impose itself so thoroughly and for the experimentalists in revolt to become so quickly the established figures of an art form. But astonishingly, that is, what happened with what came to be known for better or for worse as the "theater of the absurd."

Serious playwrights could legitimately propose that after Beckett, after Ionesco, one could no longer write theater as before. Obviously, some dramatists did continue to write theater as before, just as many twentieth century novelists continued to produce good or bad nineteenth century novels as if Joyce, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Beckett, Borges, and the nouveau roman had never existed. But for those who thought critically and creatively about the stage, the Parisian avantgarde of the 1950s had shattered the mold and made it impossible to go back to even the best of former models. But it also revealed a new, serious problem.

Ionesco, in a brilliant definition of the avant-garde, had pointed out that as soon as an avant-garde is so successful as to become the new establishment, it necessarily engenders its own opposition: another avant-garde which, in turn, seeks to destroy and replace it. However, following its fifteen or twenty years of undisputed triumph, the avant-garde of the absurd yielded not to new writing but rather to the reign of the director.

To write after Ionesco was difficult, after Beckett, impossible. The towering figures, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, remained; others faded or disappeared. A few important playwrights, like Fernando Arrabal and Michel Vinaver, have continued right to the present time creating absurdist-related yet highly idiosyncratic works. No powerful group emerged to take their place; some splendid writers did turn to the stage but at no point formed anything resembling an avant-garde movement. Among the best of these are Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Copi, Hlne Cixous, Valre Novarina, and somewhat later, Xavier Durringer, Bernard-Marie Kolts, Philippe Minyana, and Yasmina Reza.

The only "movement" to speak of was the brief period of success in the seventies and eighties of the thtre du quotidien. Influenced by several brilliant German and Austrian playwrights, notably Franz Xaver Kroetz, peter Handke, and Botho Strauss, a few French authors, especially Michel Deutsch and Jean-Pierre Wenzel, both working in Strasbourg, and later the very talented Parisian Tilly (no first name, like Brazilian soccer players) put a new focus, however briefly, on the text and with it, on the preeminence of the dramatist. They dealt with the things of everyday life, especially in the lives of simple, inarticulate people, implying a social critique though eschewing Brechtian didacticism. Most notably, the thtre du quotidien is the first important movement on the French stage since 1900 to go against the almost continuous, century-long reaction against theatrical realism. If this new movement, late in the century, did not revert to truly outmoded, nineteenth century forms of theatricality, it certainly did not point to a new, experimental direction and it did not incarnate some new avant-garde attitude.

But of course it is doubtful whether by the end of the twentieth century, a theatrical avant-garde was still even possible in France. Many important elements conspired against it. Strangely enough, one of these was the accession to the Ministry of Culture in 1981 of Jack Lang, a long-time enthusiast of the avant-garde in all its manifestations and especially in the theater. It had, after all, been Lang who had created the seminal Nancy Theater Festival of New Theater in the seventies. Lang obtained a commitment from President Franois Mitterand for an unheard-of 1% of the country's budget for his ministry. Culture, the arts, and...