طريقة تحليل نص مسرحي

[spoiler]اضف رد ليظهر المحتوى
[spoiler]Theses for the analysis of dramatic text
Before setting about analysing single works, it is wise to seek out the necessary
tools, and to be aware of what questions we wish to ask. But to organise this questioning,
we need a general diagram, or at least an open list of questions to settle, an organization
chart of the principal tasks to be accomplished in the framework of a general theory of
the dramatic text.
But is it legitimate to talk about the dramatic text in general? Would it not be
more appropriate to talk about dramaturgy, which is the art of the composition of plays
that also takes into account theatrical practice? We would then have to locate this
dramaturgy in history, check whether it is classical, romantic, realist, absurd, etc. Just as
it is quite problematic to speak of the theatre in general, we cannot make a theory of the
dramatic text in itself, we must envisage it in its specific historical framework: the theory
of the dramatic text should therefore always be checked against historical considerations
about the work being analysed.
If the study of dramatic texts has been so neglected over the last thirty or forty
years, it is probably because, in reaction to literary studies, we have wanted to recognise
the specificity of dramatic writing by highlighting its transitory state, as it waits to be
performed, and, since the end of the 19
th
Century, to be directed. In refusing, rightly
enough, to make the theatre a literary genre, we have contributed to the loss of interest in
the dramatic text and its analysis (Pavis, 2000). When stage practice, in the 60s and 70s,
virtually eliminated text, or reduced it to the status of aural scenery, dramatic writing was
completely eclipsed. When, in the 1980s, the text came back in force, owing to the
exhaustion (and the high cost) of visual theatre, we had somewhat forgotten how to read a
play: reading it on the page had become a rare luxury. The theory of the dramatic text did
not follow the recovery of the text. We haven’t yet tackled ‘new writing’, post- Beckett
and Genet. This very innovative new writing demands completely new instruments of
analysis. Will we soon have them to hand?
1The model of textual analysis that comes from our ‘intuitive’ – spontaneous and
naïve – readings of texts is strongly influenced by the rules of classical French
dramaturgy (tragedy and comedy of the 17
th
Century): this dramaturgy actually often
serves as a reference point for the new experiences that bring it into crisis or into
question. The analytical model that we propose must then both offer a certain
transhistorical universality and also adapt itself to the different historical contexts,
notably to those of contemporary works. It is firmly placed on the side of reception,
where the reader ‘activates’ the text, ‘collaborates’ with it, uses different reading
mechanisms. It is thus based on the reception of the reader when faced with the text.
This reception formalises all the different cognitive operations that take place, it is the
polar opposite of a genetic method that dedicates itself to the genesis of the work, to its
source, to the author’s working method.
Our analytical model is inspired by Eco’s, which is dedicated to narrative text,
and is described and tested in Lector in fabula. Following on from the work of Petöfi
(1976), Eco distinguishes several structural levels in the fictional text that are
“specifically conceived as the ideal stages of a process of generation and/or
interpretation” (1985:85). Our own diagram retains the infrastructure of the five levels
and the opposition between fiction and the world of reference, but is entirely adapted for
the theatre, in order to take into account this “word in action” that constitutes the theatre,
to bring the fictional model and the world of reference (putting into play) of the reader
into confrontation: two worlds that, for Petöfi and Eco, correspond to the intensional and
extensional dimensions (1985:89). The column and the four boxes on the left relate to
the fictional world and its logical properties, independently of their existence in our world
of reference. This world of reference, in the right-hand column, is the concrete place
from where the reader, or the spectator even, interprets and questions fiction through the
dramatic text that she thus puts into play, be it in a concrete way, in a production, or in an
imaginary way, in the act of reading. The mise en scène, then, is as much in the
individual’s imaginary world in reading the text as in the concrete practice of staging.
This is moreover the reason why the study of texts is only possible if we account for the
theatrical practice in which these texts can be made to signify, can be made live, and are
2put into circulation. This is why we conceive of this analysis of texts as the continuation
of performance analysis. To put it another way: dramatic texts are nothing but the trace
of a performance practice. The difficulty is to read them imagining how they have been
shaped in the writing process by the different constraints of acting and performing.
3B) SITUATION OF ENUNCIATION
How is it made to speak?
(1) Conditions of communication
(2) Conversational maxims
(3) Metatextual conscience
(4) Rhythmatization, punctuation, score
(5) Intertext
(6) Marks of theatricality
A) TEXTUALITY: STYLISTICS
How does it speak?
(1) Music and matter of the words
(2) Types of word
(3) Lexicon
(4) Isotopy and coherence
(5) Stage directions
(6) Marks of stylisation and literariness
RHETORIC OF THE DISCOURSE
DRAMATIC TEXT
4
WORLD OF REFERENCE
AND PUTTING INTO PLAY
FICTIONAL WORLD
IV IDEOLOGICAL AND UNCONSCIOUS
STRUCTURES: MEANING
(1) THESIS: What is it saying?
(2) IDEOLOGY: What is inferred?
(3) UNCONSCIOUS OF THE TEXT: What is it
hiding?
(4) SPOTS OF INDETERMINANCY
(5) ATMOSPHERE: What do we feel?
RHETORIC OF THE SOCIAL DISCOURSE AND
OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
HISTORICITY OF THE TEXT, OF THE
REALITY AND OF THE PUTTING INTO PLAY
(1) What access is there to the fictional world
from the reader’s world of reference
(2) Social, historical, cultural code of the work
and of the reader
(3) Inferred, implicit, presupposed, maxim,
ideologeme
(4) Latent content, text and subtext
(5) Effect produced, legitimation, interpellation
(6) What is known and what is believed?
STRUCTURES OF THE WORLD
(1) What action?
(2) What forces are present? How can we figure
them out?
How does the action unfold?
III ACTANTIAL STRUCTURES: ACTION
(1) ACTION: What is done? What events?
What situations?
(2) ACTANTS: Who acts? What type of
character? What gestus?
RHETORIC OF ACTANTS
CHECKING THE HYPOTHESES
(1) What codes do we have at our disposal?
(2) What does that confirm? Reading
hypotheses
(3) Where and when?
(4) What happens?
(5) What interaction?
(6) Through which genre frame are we reading?
How is the story told?
II NARRATIVE STRUCTURES: DRAMATURGY
(1) CONVENTIONS: how are things
represented?
(2) STORY: what is it about?
(3) CHRONOTOPES (SPACE/TIME)
(4) DRAMATURGY: what is the conflict? How
does it work? What does it represent?
(5) TEXTUAL FIGURES
(6) GENRES AND DISCOURSES: tones,
registers, rules
RHETORIC OF THE NARRATIVE
I DISCURSIVE STRUCTURES:
THE PLOT
(1) THEMATICS AND SUBJECT: what is it
about? (themes, leitmotiv, topoï, mythos,
characteristics)
(2) PLOT: how is it told?
RHETORIC OF THE THEMES
HYPOTHESES ON THE PUTTING INTO PLAY
OF THE MEANING
(1)What might it mean?
(2)What might it be telling us?
What does the reading (or the acting) bring out? The diagram distinguishes in the left-hand column, in A, the text in its internal
constitution and in the right-hand column, in B, the same text, but as we might bring it
into play, how we are capable of receiving it in order to construct it and bring its meaning
into play.
Each reception of a dramatic text is obviously relative: it depends on from where
we ask the questions. What theory of reception are we proposing? We are proposing that
of a reader, anchored in and conscious of her situation of enunciation, her search for
meaning (I,A), her hypotheses as a reader (II,B), the structures of the world in which she
lives, her own historicity (IV,B).
The questions in the right-hand column (excluding those in B) thus correspond,
number by number, to those in column A, and they even extend them, centre them on a
more personal perspective for the reader. They extend them so well that it becomes
difficult to differentiate between those on the left and those on the right, since it is not
possible to radically separate the fictional discourse from the world of reality (Schaeffer,
1995:376).
In reading the fictional world, the reader updates the contents of the text. She
sounds out its depths, establishes its different levels: discursive (I) for the thematics and
the plot; narrative (II) for the dramaturgy and the story; actantial for the events, the
actions and the actants (III); ideological and unconscious (IV) for the theses and the latent
contents. In immersing herself beneath the surface of the text, the reader accesses,
progressively passing through four levels each more abstract and secret than the last, the
successive layers of the text; at each step she endeavours to ask the relevant questions
using the necessary tools.
Before proceeding to these ‘depths’ or at least to these more abstract and less
accessible layers, the reader observes the linear and visible manifestation of the text, its
surface, which results from its textuality, its stylistic properties, its literary devices (in A)
and from its theatricality, its situation of enunciation (in B). Textuality and theatrical
5enunciation thus make up the first visible and superficial layer of the text, this surface
layer obviously being of major and central importance.
This model of textual cooperation thus organises itself according to the opposition
of surface and depth, visible and invisible. The most visible, and readable, is made up of
the textual (A) and theatrical (B) surface; everything here is given to be seen, like a
textual matter offered up to sight. The invisible is the domain of ideology and the
unconscious, everything here is latent, implicit, destined to be deciphered. Between these
two extremes, between (A) and (IV) we find the trinomial of dramaturgy in the wider
sense, and thus of dramaturgical analysis:
- in I, the plot and the thematics,
- in II, the story
- in III, the action and the actants.
The story, i.e. the dramaturgy in a restrictive sense, is the intermediate stage, the
hub between the detail of the episodes and the generality of an action. At each of the
three levels of the trinomial, one same element takes on a specific dimension. For
example, the way of telling: on the surface (I) one describes the story by enumerating a
series of facts and episodes; one will address the depths (II) of the story by sticking to
generalities (“it’s the story of a man who…”); one will clarify next the deep motivations
behind the actions (III), before coming to conclusions about the the hidden, parabolic or
unconscious meaning of such and such a conduct, thereby revealing explanatory
messages (IV). In the practice of analysis, it is not always easy to distinguish between
the plot, the story, and the action, notions often used interchangeably, but it is
recommended to maintain the distinction in order to clarify the level of abstraction where
the observation is made, and to fine tune the questions we ask of the play.
Beyond the differences of level between surface and depth one should be able to
navigate from one box to another and to connect the apparently separate instances, which
are in fact linked by an internal logic. The bridges between the boxes (that the theory
endeavours to establish and to justify) allow access at all moments and in all directions,
6they enable a reading map and thus an order of questioning that is neither fixed nor
imposed, particularly in the case of contemporary plays.
The universality of this model in terms of telling stories exempts us from defining
a priori a specificity of dramatic writing that authors in fact scarcely manage to establish;
it leaves open the question of dramatic writing’s relationship with writing in general, and
that opening is indispensable for the study of contemporary dramatic writing.
We will systematically comment on this diagram of textual cooperation in order
to spot the explanatory theories as well as the disciplines from which they originate. This
might provide the necessary tools to analyse the plays, be they classical, contemporary or
even ‘still to come’. The diagram should thus be seen more as a set of tools the reader is
invited to use according to her own needs than as an imposed route where all the tools
necessarily have to be used.
A)Textuality
1. Music and the matter of the words. Analysing a dramatic text is not just establishing
what the story is, reconstituting the actions, following the verbal exchanges; it is firstly
about immersing oneself in the textuality, in the matter and music of the text; it is also
living the concrete, sensory and sensual experience of materiality, learning to hear the
sounds, the rhythms, the games of the signifier.
In keeping with its etymology, the dramatic text is a fabric of words, a weave of
sentences, lines, sounds. But this fabric is not always made of the same stuff: it carries
the trace of a voice, of a language, of a given situation, of a mental representation where
language merges with non-verbal elements. This trace of practice, this trademark of the
text, thus varies from one period to another.
The text carries a material trace of a particular stage practice. There is a real
difference between a text transcribed from an existing performance, that the author puts
on paper after the show, and a published text, waiting to be read or staged. The status of
the text confronted with a performance will not be the same. In analysing written texts,
7we must remember that they carry the mark of a particular stage practice, be it anterior or
posterior, in that they anticipate the performing conditions at the time when the text was
written. The stage directions which are more or less present is often the trace of these
playing conditions.
The textual analysis, which works only on the trace of the text (a trace which,
moreover, is unstable and which is only a momentary reflection of its history),
rediscovers stylistics, a discipline that has long been neglected and discredited by
structuralism, hardly developed for and inappropriate to the study of theatre. It asks the
text ‘how it speaks’. The immense field of stylistics offers its services to the reader to
recognise the devices used, notably the lexical, grammatical and rhetorical ones. Applied
to the theatre and to stage enunciation, stylistics does not necessarily have to analyse the
text in a specific mise en scène; it is content to observe the volume, the visibility, the
relay of a voice and a body in order to feel the value of the textual material awaiting
performance. It notably takes on the task of studying:
- the stylisation of the language, its way of mounting diverse fragments by
simplifying, unifying, homogenising, aestheticising heterogeneous materials.
Dramatic language is not an imitation of normal language, it is always its
stylisation;
- the oralisation of language, its way of adapting to the phonetic laws of diction, to
the text being placed in the mouth of the actors;
- the plasticity of the text, its ability to mould itself to the actors’ voices and bodies.
2. Types of words. These concern the form used to generate this word matter. It is not a
question, or not at this stage, of ‘textual figures’ (Vinaver, 1993: 901), of the strategy of
the use of words in the universe of fiction, but of the verbal forms used, of the dividing
up of words between the speakers, of their blocks of text.
We establish whether the text is in prose or in verse, in a ‘natural’ language or a
‘formalised’ one. The alexandrine, for example, obeys very particular laws and has very
particular constraints, which are not simply stylistic or decorative, but have repercussions
on the dramaturgy and the global meaning of the play.
8The types of speech boil down to a few simple forms: monologue, soliloquy,
lines, dialogue, polylogue. Each of these has a particular function: dialogue is for
example by turns dramatic, philosophical, lyrical, etc. The form varies considerably :
large chunks of text, asides, lively exchanges, or direct address to the audience.
We will examine the specific properties of each type of word. Thus for dialogue:
- the order in which lines are spoken;
- the number and the nature of the speakers;
- the visible segmentation of the text (sequences, scenes, acts, tableaux);
- the source, the direction and the goal of speech: its vectorisation (Pavis 1996);
- silence and speech;
- the character’s word or the author’s word;
- the marks of orality (examined later as an aspect of theatricality).
3. Lexicon. The study of the lexicon informs us about the vocabulary used. The lexical
field is made up of verbal occurrences expressing the same idea, which allows one to
grasp a theme (in I). Thus the lexical field of the deal in the Koltès play In the solitude of
cotton fields, covers terms around the notion of exchange: blows, weapons, caresses,
drugs or words. The semantic field of a single term, that of desire, for example, in the
same play, opens up the panoply of interpretation, without ever giving a definitive
answer.
4. Isotopy and coherence. Isotopy is the guideline for the reader crossing these
semantic and lexical fields, organising them into more or less coherent networks. The
reader feels the need to know by what guideline she will be able to organise the
information and indices that her reading reveals. One can read, for example, In the
solitude of cotton fields as recounting a commercial transaction, a drug deal, but also as a
verbal duel where one tries to have the last word and to delight in the pleasures of the
word.
The coherence of the text depends on the way in which we find and bring together
terms or compatible themes. It manifests itself through characterisation in the words of
9the lexicon (‘rhetoric of the sentence’ in A), through the emergence and the rhetoric of
the themes (in I), the logic of the arguments and the narrative (rhetoric of the narrative in
II), the logic of the actions (in III), and finally in the free associations of the unconscious
and of ideology that analysis endeavours to assemble as a narrative (in IV).
5. Intertext. The intertext is made up of the sum of allusions or sources of other texts
that the reader is in a position to discern. It is not only linguistic or literary, it is also
visual, gestural, mediatic or cultural. The dramatic text is located at a crossroads of
several networks of texts that have laminated it as much as enriched it; it is thus never
isolated, but interwoven into different intertexts. In crossing the different (cultural,
mediatic or artistic) intertexts, the text keeps transforming itself. It concentrates,
accumulates, amalgamates a series of specific properties that the analysis must, almost
hopelessly, try to reconstitute and redeploy.
The intertextual competence of the reader lies in their capacity to associate the text
with numerous other texts, be it thematically, generically, mediatically or stylistically
thanks to a trace deposited in them by other works, including visual traces.
6. Marks of literarity. When one remains at the surface of the text, one can observe, as
if through a window or with a magnifying glass, the linguistic characteristics, the stylistic
devices, the rhetorical figures, in short all that comes from the literarity of the text, what
distinguishes the literary text from an ‘ordinary’ text, what constitutes its ‘poetic
function’ (Jakobson). The first commandment of analysis is to stay at the surface of the
text in order to appreciate its texture and materiality. Next, one endeavours to link this
surface to ‘deeper’ questions (less ‘visible’ ones) that are posed by its dramaturgical
analysis (in I, II, III, IV).
The literary character of a text does not depend on its literary quality or its stylistic
refinement, but on its insistence on its own stylistic devices. Thus the slang spoken by
the youths in Une envie de tuer sur le bout de la langue originates from a sophisticated
montage of expressions borrowed from several different eras and milieux that Xavier
Durringer has carefully brought together to give the impression of an authentic milieu.
10The literarity expresses itself in the skill of the composition and montage of the
discourses and not in the intrinsic aesthetic qualities of the slang.
The literary analysis of the dramatic text certainly uses numerous devices of literary
texts in general, but adapts them to the possibility of a theatrical performance of this text.
Practically, this means that we can analyse the plays as literary works, with all the
sophistication of literary analysis and theory, but that we must also adapt them to
theatrical enunciation (dramaticity and theatricality, which is not, let us remember, the
same thing as mise en scène).
The marks of literarity correspond, in B, to the marks of theatricality, which anchor
the text in a stage situation.
B) Situation of enunciation
The situation of enunciation (or situation of discourse: Schaeffer, 764-775) gives the
text ‘on paper’ an imaginary life onstage, it gives the reader a mental representation
of the stage and of the acting, it represents the circulation of the word. In studying the
influence of the situation on the words (the discourses, in A), we call on pragmatics.
1. The conditions of communication need to be reconstructed from the situation of
the speakers and the ‘given circumstances’ (Stanislavski) of their words, their
actions and their gestures. It is a question of determining who is speaking, to
whom and to what end, to identify the verbal and non-verbal enunciators, to
specify at what moment of the play we situate ourselves in which dramatic
situation. To understand the scene is to grasp what is at stake in the game, one’s
‘superobjective’ (Stanislavski). The characters produce language acts that are
subject to a constant exchange. Theatrical enunciation is a “dynamic progression
of speech acts interaction” (Schaeffer, 1995: 746).
2. Conversational maxims are indispensable in order that communication be
established. Grice (1979) thus names the principles of cooperation (to accept and
facilitate dialogue), pertinence (to stick to the subject), truth (to affirm established
things), quantity (to mention only what is strictly necessary), manner (to avoid
11ambiguities). In the theatre, these maxims of good communication are regularly
broken : a constant source of comic or dramatic tension.
3. The metatextual consciousness of the play is used whenever the play refers to its
own enunciation, speaks of the act of speaking instead of representing the world,
thus breaking the convention of an intangible fiction. With Genet, Pinget or
Beckett, the text seems more concerned with reflecting on itself and on
theatricality than with a description or a representation of the world. Sometimes
this awareness of a very narcissistic theatricality allies itself with the mechanism
of guiding reception: the text thus lets us understand how it should be understood;
it can also do everything in order to destabilize the reader by refusing her any
overall explanation, any cooperation. This mechanism of guiding goes hand in
hand with the search for spots of indeterminacy (in IV, A); it also concerns the
effect produced on the reader and her interpellation (in IV, B).
When the characters’ text refers to language in order to check its devices, its way of
communicating, its lexicon and its syntax, one refers more precisely to the metalinguistic
function (Jakobson).
4. Rhythmatization is the art of giving the text a particular rhythm; it is the result
of the concrete act of reading, a voluntary act that immediately engages a
particular understanding of the text, of a possible syntax, of its priorities, of its
speaking strategy, of its intonation and thus of the identity of the speakers.
To give rhythm to a text is to follow or to establish particular punctuation, spot
the repetitions, the constants, the isocolies of the sentence (i.e. the equal lengths of
its elements), determining the score of the silences, decelerations and
accelerations, watching out for the emergence of the meaning, trying several
possible rhythms and meanings. One has to segment the text continuum
according to several longitudinal systems that analysis undertakes at each level,
from I to IV:
- narratology: according to the temporal or causal logic of the narrative, the division
into acts, sequences, scenes, movements, tableaux, etc.;
12- rhetoric: in the progression of the arguments and the supporting points of the
discourse;
- dramaturgical: in the concatenation of events, situations, actions;
- respiratory: according to a real breathing plan for its “units of breath” (Claudel).
It is the ‘out of sync’ moments and the interferences between these networks with
different rhythms that give the impression of varied and open punctuation.
In its respiration and its enunciation, the text is punctuated by different moments that
organise the development of the action (cf. later in III, A). The rhythmatization ends up
creating an almost musical score for the actor, with its supporting points, its turning
points, its intonation, its tempo, its moments where it stops or accelerates, where the
spectator becomes conscious of the passage of time or where, in the spirit of Brecht, she
can even “intervene with the judgement” (Pavis, 2000: 67-93).
5. The stage directions can be spotted thanks to the typographic convention that
distinguishes them from the text spoken by the actors. They contain useful
information for the reader to imagine the scene and the stage as it was envisaged
by the author. As a text that overhangs, controls and comments on the dialogue
that is explicitly spoken, they are sometime the key to the textual dialogue and to
the play as a whole. Any in-depth analysis must imagine their dramaturgical
function, their relationship with the spoken text, their way of welding literarity
and theatricality. This analysis proposes a typology to evaluate which elements of
the acting and of the performance the stage directions express.
The title of the play or of the tableaux, the list of characters, the foreword or the
prefatory note, the notes or advice for directing are also part of the author’s
indications, they are the paratext (Thomasseau, 1985). We should not consider
the spatio-temporal indications of the text as internal stage directions: they are
part of the dialogue and not of the text written by the author for the practitioners’
use. The true stage directions, those written in italics and not spoken by the
actors, do not make up the mise en scène of the text, but a series of directives to
make the characters’ words signify.
136. The marks of theatricality in the text (thus distinct from the stage theatricality
inferred by the acting) are recognised by the tools of communication and the
theatrical situation: an exchange between an I and a you; a reference to time, to
space, to stage action; the self-referentiality of theatre, of artificiality and of
conventions; the signs of orality.
Orality is an important domain of theatricality: like theatricality it is more or less
implicitly inscribed into the text. One should particularly seek its trace in the
following indices:
- hesitations, silences, pauses, the insistent presence of the un-said.
The syntactic or rhythmic breaks, the defective or hesitant construction indicating
reticence or a difficulty in speaking for the speaker (figures of anacoluthon)
“rupture in the concatenation of the syntactic dependences “(Molinié, 1992: 47) or
of the aposiopesis (interruption in the expected sequence of syntactic
dependences) (Molinié, 1992: 61);
- the phatic marks of the discourse
- the slang, the familiar style, with all the avatars of everyday communication.
The marks of literarity and the marks of theatricality are not identical, but they do
tend to merge. In the theatre, literarity – the beauty of a verse or of an image, for
example – does not have any importance in itself. It must be taken up by the dramatic
situation. There is an implicit theorem that consists of saying that the poetic effect of the
text is multiplied by the dramatic efficiency of the scene, thus by the capacity to
theatrically translate certain stylistic properties of language. However, to assert itself and
unfurl, the literary (poetic, according to Jakobson) function and the theatrical (dramatic)
function need to be confronted with the fictional world and its construction, from I to IV.
We could therefore define dramatic writing as the relationship between textualitytheatricality and the fictional world.
But what is the relationship between the textual surface (in A and B) and the
dramaturgical mechanisms in I-II-III-IV? According to Vinaver, author and theorist of
Ecritures Dramatiques (1993), the method of ‘analysis of theatre texts’ is based on the
14following postulate: “a) to understand a theatre text means primarily to see how it
functions dramaturgically; b) the mode of dramaturgical functioning can be understood
by the exploration of the surface of speech” (1993: 895). The first of Vinaver’s
propositions seems irrefutable: certainly dramaturgy gives the key to the functioning of
the play, particularly as regards the action and the characters. The second hypothesis is
more open to debate. It surely applies in most cases, but it happens that a textuality, an
avant-garde stylistics might hide a classical dramaturgy (or vice versa). This is the case
in neo-classical plays that, under the guise of newness, draw on very well established
recipes (Le Visiteur, by E.E. Schmitt). Sometimes the ‘innovative’ or ‘daring’ textuality
is merely masking dc of a very dated dramaturgy and ideology. It is thus appropriate to
carefully check Vinaver’s postulate and to observe the possible gaps between the form of
the text and the contents of the dramaturgy. We recall that Szondi (1987) made of this
criterion of gaps the foundation of his theory of the evolution of drama from 1880 to
1950.
Once the surface and the materiality of the text have been experienced by the reader,
the thematic, narrative and actantial contents become accessible to her and one can thus
sound out the themes, the story, the action of the play.
I. Discursive structures: the plot
The structures form the framework that both underpins the organisation of the
different textual levels and allows us to observe the four levels or layers from the visible
surface of the text. At the first level, that of the structures of discourse, i.e. of the fairly
immediate perception of the plot and of the themes, the reader perceives two axes
simultaneously: the horizontal axis, the syntagm (the events told) and the vertical axis,
the paradigm (the themes tackled). It is located at the intersection of these axes, of these
sets and of these two types of gaze.
The question that the reader spontaneously asks herself is hermeneutical: what does
this play mean for me, what is it talking about and who am I to understand it in this way?
We must immediately be more specific: am I a naive reader having found the play by
15chance, reading it for pleasure? Or am I professional reader-director, bent on putting on
the play at hand? The actor’s perspective (how would I play that?) and that of the
director (how will I interpret the whole text?) appear the most complete, demanding and
adequate and it will be the one we propose for these reflections. This perspective,
however, is not the only one: the perspective of the historian, the philologist, the
aesthetician, the cultural or intercultural expert is just as valid and possible. We would
hope nevertheless to put these specialists at the service of an actor- (or director-) reader,
who is supposed to be reading in order to then realise the act of reading in a (real or
virtual) staging.
1. The thematics is the totality of themes, motifs, leitmotiv and topoï that one notices
in a first reading, without yet knowing how to organise this material. It is not yet
observed in a precise form or structure (a dramaturgy); it is not formulated in the light of
explicit or implicit theses either, even if every theme aspires to assert itself in the form of
a thesis.
The theme is present throughout the text; the reader endeavours to identify it and to
integrate it according to the semantic oppositions or a constellation of nuances and
variations. The theme is punctual, locatable, it dynamically makes its way towards a
thesis that ends up structuring all the thematic occurrences.
The motif is more like the background, the fundamental situation, the general frame
within a larger narrative unit.
Themes and motifs do not exist in a ‘pure state’, they become horizontally integrated
into a plot, a way of telling, to link up events. The plot only becomes clear in relation to
a story which constitutes itself in a global narrative content, which only truly finds its
meaning according to the causal and temporal logic of a thesis.
The question of the thematic (‘what is it about?’) is asked by the reader from her
world of reference: the reader asks herself what the text can tell (her), what hypotheses of
reading and narrative would be able to organise and to functionalise the themes, since the
themes remain, as long as they have not been connected to other boxes, ‘free electrons’,
fleeting and subjective impressions, hypotheses to be tested, implicit theses that must be
translated into words by the reader in order to exist as language.
16 The rhetoric of the themes sometimes translates as a leitmotiv (a recurrent theme) or
a topos (“a stable configuration of recurrent motives in literary texts”, according to
Curtius, 1948). It then reveals an already codified, or even stereotyped, thematics,
awaiting a dramaturgical structuring (a testing of the story and of the action) and an
ideological confirmation (a testing of the meaning as well as of the social and
unconscious discourse).
2. The thematics organises itself all along the plot, in its very movement, since theatre
does not put up with, though there are exceptions : long thematic stoppages where the
motives would be made explicit; it is caught up in an unstopping dynamic where dramatic
action inscribes itself.
To describe and resume the plot invites one to notice the moments of the play, its
dispositio: in classical dramaturgy, one can clearly distinguish the exposition, the nodus,
the peripeteia, the dénouement. Epic theatre proceeds differently, but it too can be
broken down into distinct episodes. The plot is the linking up of the events of the play,
the narrative and figurative part of the discursive structure, and notably the segmentation
of the text.
The exterior, visible, division into acts, scenes, tableaux, sequences, fragments never
entirely coincides with the interior division, which is the result of different narrative,
rhetorical, dramaturgical and respiratory rhythms that the reader endeavours to piece
together.
II. Narrative structures: dramaturgy
Narrativity, the way of telling a story with theatre, is the object of dramaturgy. The
narrative structures are located between the themes and the theses, between the study of
explicit forms, at the surface of the discourse (in A and I), and the study of implicit
contents (in III and IV). It is a question, in the end, in the spirit of Szondi (1987), of
bringing together form and content inside the dramaturgy, this hub of analysis that asks
two distinct, but complementary, questions: How is it effective? What does it represent?
171. One must first consider the acting conventions used by the text, observe the manner in
which they participate in the representation of the dramatic universe, the type of
codification that they imply. Every piece of dramatic writing presupposes a knowledge
of stage conventions, it is inspired, if only a contrario by the stage practice of its time or
of a previous era. Every reading needs this same knowledge of the practice and of its
conventions.
Conventions operate at all levels of the text, and not only at the level of dramaturgy.
There are stylistic conventions (A), narrative conventions (I), conventions of human
actions (III), ideological conventions (IV) charged with clarifying how the text refers to
ideas and theses. It is thanks to these conventions, on every level, that the text represents
the world, situates itself in a relationship of mimesis with the exterior world.
2. The story is composed of all the events that make up the history, the contents of the
narrative (‘what is being told?’), and is not interested in the details nor the twists and
turns of the story. The story, then, is the narrative contents, the signified of the narrative,
the action expressed at its most simple which can be summarised in a single sentence.
At this level of abstraction, the reader or the dramaturg (who undertakes the
dramaturgical analysis on behalf of the director) tries to understand the principal
hypotheses to check whether the plot matches, at a deeper and more general level, what
the story says in detail. The reader pieces together and constructs the story by
representing a space and a time where the actions can take place. One cannot however
mechanistically apply narratology to the study of the story, since the dramatic text
(usually) takes the form of a dialogue, that is, as a dynamic series of speech acts.
3. This alliance of space and time, that Bakhtin calls a chronotope (the “fusion of spatial
and temporal indications in an intelligible and concrete whole”, 1978 b: 137), constitutes
an indissociable unit of fiction whose intimate signature it becomes. It is sometimes
possible to extract the chronotopes of a text, by noting the places and the events, seeking
the theme and the term designating this strange union. One could thus speak, for
example, of the chronotope of the margin in Une envie de tuer sur le bout de la langue, of
the deal “in neutral, unspecified territory, not set aside for the purpose” (p. 15) in In the
18solitude of cotton fields, of the childhood home in J’étais dans ma maison et j‘attendais
que la pluie vienne by Lagarce thanks to these chronotopes, the meaning is deployed
and the action finds its representation and figuration.
4. The nature of conflict gives an indication of the dramaturgy used: nodus/dénouement;
enigma/revelation; imbroglio/recognition, plot/clarification for a ‘closed’ classical
dramaturgy. Dramaturgy studies the stakes of the action, its conditions, its ends; it
establishes (with Stanislavski) the main task or the superobjective of the play and the
through line of action by which one gets there.
5. Dramaturgy is the science of conflicts which it tackles according to a typology of
“textual figures” (Vinaver, 1993: 901). Vinaver makes an inventory of twenty or so such
figures that he establishes from the type of conflict between the characters in Western
theatre, from the Greeks to our time. Every typology, even Vinaver’s, is nonetheless
little more than an attempt at classifying forms of exchange between the characters.
Vinaver’s “textual figures” recall the category of ‘figures of thought’ in classical rhetoric:
the orator connecting with her discourse. Fundamentally, these textual figures go from
the violent, rapid (stichomythia) open conflict to the absence of conflict (series of
remarks, lyrical notes, absurd constellations). The classical conflict sometimes crosses
the individual conscience of the hero: matters of conscience, of dilemma, and of tragic
choice.
One should carefully distinguish between these ‘textual figures’ which describe the
conflictive relations of the protagonists and the types of speech (A 2) which can be
defined by the mode of writing, the textual surface or the verbal forms used.
6. If we consider that theatre is a genre, in the same way as poetry and the novel are, we
will speak of sub-genres, not only in the tragedy/comedy dichotomy, but for all the
existing historical forms. We will distinguish these forms according to themes, styles and
dramatic structures.
A knowledge of genres and discourses of the text provides information on the rules,
registers and tones of the work being analysed. Knowledge of the genre and the
19hypothesis emitted regarding the genre of the work studied determines its interpretation
to a great extent.
The rules of a sub-genre are more or less codified by the literary canon; the invention
of new forms creates the obligation to state the rules, renewing or transforming a subgenre.
The register or the tone of a speech concern the way of speaking, the level of style
and the implications of this type of speech for the action and the fictional universe.
Determining all of these factors of dramaturgy helps the reader to understand little by
little what history is being recounted, and how. The rhetoric of the resulting narrative is
the key to the story and to the conflictive exchanges; it arises from and across the ‘textual
figures’ carried out by the characters in their transactions.
Dramaturgy is as much about the production of texts (and of stagings) from the point
of view of the author and of the dramaturg (in the German sense), as the reception of the
texts (and the stagings) by the reader-director who must piece together from the theatrical
object the hermeneutic options that have been the author’s. It is always only a hypothesis
that must ceaselessly be clarified and checked as regards the meaning of the action and
the frame in which it takes its meaning.
III. Actantial structures: the action
Having tackled the play from its textual surface, the rhetoric of words, of themes
and of textual figures, having compared what the story is and how the plot tells it, the
reading continues its progression from the specific to the general, from the concrete to the
abstract and finally reaches the more remote levels of action (III) and ideas (IV).
The reader identifies bit by bit the forces that govern the actions and the motivations
of the characters and, more generally, the actants, forces which are not necessarily
anthropomorphic that feed the conflicts. If theatre is about, as Brecht asserts, “making
live representations of reported or invented happenings between human beings” (1964:
180), the reader reconstitutes these events, she attributes to the characters social
motivations which vary with each period”.These actions, these situations, these
20motivations illuminate the events, sometimes from the dramatic text, the stage directions
or the behaviour of the characters embodied by the actors.
1. The action is what is given to be seen, the continuous series of events. It is organised
according to a ‘through line’ (Stanislavski) or, by contrasts, in a fragmented way. It is
central or reduced into parallel partial actions. Its progression can be continuous and
regular or halting and random.
The through line of action forms the spine of the drama; in particular, we note:
- the turning points in the action: where it suddenly takes a new course, or the narrative
goes into a different phase;
- the supporting points, be they dramaturgical or gestural or vocal, that become
foundations for the reader, then the actor;
- the points the action goes through: obstacles, conflicts, climaxes, stops.
2. The actant, a notion inherited from Greimas’ semiotics (1966), is more or less
abstract and anthropomorphic. It is handy to distinguish all the nuances and gradations of
the character from the abstract actant to the concrete individual, and to arrange a
continuous and regular passage between the abstraction of doing and the concreteness of
being. In their human form, the actants as characters will have psychological,
behavioural, moral, cultural personalities. In the abstract form, they will be lines of force,
contradictions, ‘intercharacters’. Thus the approach of the characters takes place through
textual, discursive, actantial mechanisms and not at all through a psychological
identification with the character, and psychological identification uses poorly defined
categories.
3. The actantial model is useful in making an image of the configuration of forces, to test
the various characters one by one from the side of the actant and in their confrontation
with the others. It is important to not reduce the actants to the existing characters in the
play, but to mobilise all the live forces of the drama. We will be careful not to be
mistaken in the subject/object arrow (see diagram) and to attach the sender/receiver to the
21object and not the subject, to locate the helper/opponent in relation to the subject of the
action.
We will benefit from merging the too abstract and general semiotic model from
Greimas, with the often psychologising and anecdotal Stanislavski:
Sender Object Receiver
(=motivation of the character) (=superobjective) (=Ideology and unconscious of the ‘given
circumstances’)
(=the through line of the action and series of physical
actions)
(=the conscious through the unconscious)
(=overcoming of obstacles)
Helper Subject Opponent