طريقة تحليل نص مسرحي 2
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طريقة تحليل نص مسرحي 2
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Contemporary texts, at least those that still use acting characters can be analysed
thanks to the actantial model, but the importance that one accords in the texts to other
levels, notably stylistic ones, challenges the use of categories of action or story, for the
benefit of a word-action where the character is no longer the central active force. That is
the reason why the category of the individual character is not central in the diagram of
textual cooperation, any individualised mimetic trace being referred to the very general
actants or to the discursive and stylistic properties of the text.
To describe the larger categories of action, it is wise to go from Vinaver’s distinction
between the “word-action” and the “word-instrument of the action”. The word-action
“changes the situation, in other words […] it produces a move from one position to
another, from one state to another”. The word-instrument of the action “helps transmit
the necessary information for the development of the overall action or of detail” (1993:
900).
22To describe the actants should not be reduced to a psychological analysis of the
characters, but should illuminate the lines of force of the contradictions. Sometimes these
oppositions can be seen in the gestus of the characters, in “the realm of attitudes adopted
by the characters towards one another” (Brecht, 1964: 198). The imaginative reader will
be able to recognise these gestus that the author suggests, and by the evocation of power
relations and by the gestural language that marks the hierarchies, she can figure them out.
Hence the rhetoric of actants, that is all the figures that contribute to the dynamics of the
drama, what Stanislavski called the through line of action with the superobjective of the
play and the principal task of each character.
IV. Ideological and unconscious structures: meaning
1. Having spotted the themes, their dramatic shaping (and deformation), their
deployment in the action of a space-time, we come to the ideological question of the
political and unconscious thesis: what does it say to those who try to access the world of
fiction? How does the reader project herself and identify herself from her world of
reference? This box is the black box of the unsaid. Ideology and the unconscious, as
Althusser (1965) demonstrated, operate side by side, since the stakes of the drama as well
as the spots of indeterminacy are the terrain on which they meet and the site of their
manipulations: these spots are as mobile as the effects produced on the reader are
unpredictable. The history of mental attitude, sociology and psychocriticism
(preoccupied with the unconscious of the author and of the textual figures), will be the
key disciplines in this approach. “Because theatre always asks for ‘live’ emotions, it
always has an ideological dimension”, notes Alain Viala (1997: 17) very pertinently.
2. The reader, like the spectator, will be aware of the historicity of the text, she will
read it in its political, cultural, social context. She will be attentive to the historicity of
the represented reality, that of fiction as envisaged in the past as much as that from our
current point of view; she will be aware of the historicity of the putting into play, that of
our point of view on the work which is not fixed for eternity. The ideological reading is
collective, it is that of the group, it is more interested in the audience than in the
individual reader. It brings together the collective conventions of this audience in a given
23historical moment, that Jauss (1978) calls the “horizon of expectation”, Iser (1985) calls
the “repertoire”, Fish (1980) the “interpretative community” and Bourdieu (1992) the
“cultural field”. This collective dimension of reception, which in the theatre is fulfilled
directly through the presence of the audience, can be felt in all levels of column B (where
the text is put into play).
3. The unconscious of the text – a slightly superficial and enigmatic formula to
describe what the text hides – is as much about the ideological contents as about the
unconscious thoughts of the author and the reader who, each in their own way, try to
access the different possible meanings. In the theatre, this implicit, latent, content is
often taken for the subtext where the essential core of the message takes refuge, while
one only perceives the surface of the text. To grasp the subtext – what the text implies or
underpins, what it carries or bears – we turn to several notions:
• (A) The implied is suggested by the text as a consequence of its enunciation, as
something that goes without saying. It is “a reasoning that the receiver does and that the
speaker anticipates, from the particular event which constitutes the enunciation” (Ducrot
in Schaeffer (1995: 570).
• (B) The presupposed: is brought by the knowledge on which the text is based when
asserting a new proposition. A presupposed indication “is introduced as a given from
which one speaks, but which is not directly at stake in the speech […]: Thanks to the
phenomenon of presupposition, it is thus possible to say something while doing as if it
had not been said, a possibility which leads to see presupposition amongst the forms of
the implicit” (Ducrot, 1972: 23). Thus the beginning of In the solitude of cotton fields:
“If you are out walking, at this hour and in this place, you must want something” (p. 17).
The dealer presupposes as true the idea that the client is walking, and draws the
irrefutable conclusion that it is desire that moves him.
• (C) The implicit is opposed to what the text explicitly says. There is an implicit
meaning beyond the lexical, syntaxical, semantic meaning of the words. The character
dialogue not only making explicit utterances, but posing as given or as a fait accompli
that which is expressed implicitly, ‘saying without saying’.
24• (D) The ideologeme: constitutes a unit that is both textual and ideological within a
social, ideological and discursive formation. For example, the term deal in the Koltès
play, which is defined outside of the play’s dialogues and is not taken up in the dialogue,
belongs to a certain social milieu; it can be perceived as a very particular type of
discourse and plays the role of an empty enigmatic element, that the reader keeps being
invited to define. This ideologeme corresponds perfectly to the strategy of the play and
to the dynamics of an unending search for otherness.
4. The spots of indeterminacy, be they hermeneutic, ideological or unconscious do
not necessarily refer to the theory of the concretisation of the schematic view of the text
(Ingarden, Jauss, Iser). They oblige the reader to figure out actants and events, to reestablish a coherence and an isotopy from isolated and silent elements, to fill in the
oversights and the silences of the plot and the fictional world evoked by the text. They
constitute the enigma of the text that the reader makes an effort, in vain, to resolve. This
reader’s route or walk through a textual labyrinth is the place where the text and its reader
are able to meet. The text proposes, but the reader disposes (and the director makes off
with the takings).
Finally, the reader is invited to legitimise, i.e. to understand and admit, a certain
world view. She does not always have the freedom to question or to refuse this vision, as
would be possible in Brechtian alienation, but she is often constrained by the text to
accept the social and unconscious rhetoric – even if she then refuses it wholesale.
5. The atmosphere of the play, this somewhat outdated notion used by Stanislavski,
describes in an intuitive manner the general impression produced in the story, in the
action of the effect produced on the reader. What does one globally and intuitively feel,
at the end of the reading process? To be precise, the final result of all the indications, of
the way of presenting the actions via the actor, emotions in the reader and the spectator.
Reader-spectator (we should say readator or rather readactor, since the reader of theatre
is always already or still a bit of a spectator and actor, the moment she imagines a scene,
25a piece of stage business, a system of gestures, something theatrical that goes beyond the
text).
The effect produced oscillates between identification and distance. In identification,
the readactor throws herself body and soul into the situation, she is taken by the dramatic
illusion; with distance, she stands removed from the event, she takes her distance from it
in a political (Brecht) or aesthetic way.
It is more generally a question of putting your finger on what, in the theatrical work,
touches the readactor: “To every fictional text we can and we must ask, beyond the
already formulated questions, an additional one: what does it desire? (What does it
fear?)” (Monod, 1977: 106).
This diagram of the textual cooperation of the reader of the dramatic text is only of
interest and only functions if one conceives of its many levels as stages in an open
journey rather than as a fixed hierarchy or an imposed and unchanging path. It has the
advantage of situating the levels and the greater categories of analysis:
(A) Stylistics
I – Plot
II – Dramaturgy
III – Action
IV – Meaning
One must however beware of separating the levels in an authoritarian way and of
hermetically sealing the boxes: it would be better to fit bridges between them. Thus, for
example, the themes (in I) are still dependent on textuality (A), on the music and the
matter of the words, and only take their meaning if they are anchored in the dramaturgical
form (in II and III) and if they are problematised through a thesis (in IV). As for the
actants (in III), they are torn between the effects of character, sensitive to the
dramaturgical analysis (in II) and the hidden forces of the drama, outlined in the
ideological configuration.
To use this diagram in a living and productive manner, one must therefore establish
transversal relationships between the levels and find the tools and the notions that lend
themselves to this function. The notion of rhetoric and of figure can, for example, guide
us from one level to another:
26(A) Stylistic figures organise the text according to its tropes, its images; they are
applied to the score and to the theatricality of the situation of enunciation (B).
I. The choreographic figures, the “dance with words”, the discursus, “originally the
action of running here and there, comings and goings, measures taken, ‘plots and plans’”
(Barthes, 1990: 4), organised in networks, in leitmotivs, in ways of telling.
II. The “textual figures” (Vinaver) are those of characters in conflicts, verbal and
dramaturgical fencing. Even space and time, when they manifest themselves in the form
of chronotopes, are figures that are both abstract and concrete.
III. The figure, in the German sense of die Figur, which designates the character and
the silhouette, is the point of intersection of the action and the actant, i.e. of the actions
and the characters in an Aristotelian sense: an empty centre, but a nerve centre where the
story and the characters meet.
IV. The figure as dream work or ideology work, meaning as much figurability
(Darstellbakeit) as defiguration (Entstellung),the figural in the Lyotardian sense (1971),
and the Deleuzian figure (2003).
The relationships of transition are also those that are forged between the fictional
world (left-hand column) and the world of reference (right-hand column). The rhetoric of
the social and unconscious discourse is moored in our own world, notably through belief,
evidence, identification, produced effect and cathartic effect on the reader or the
readator. For the dramatic text, the world of reference of the reader is constituted by the
putting into play of the speakers, of their psychic and social forces via the act of reading.
To appropriate the fiction by the interpellation and legitimatization of the reader, is to
bring it toward us, it is to pragmatically replace it in the concrete context of a situation of
enunciation.
Textual cooperation obliges the reader to choose her path of meaning, deciding at
which box, and consequently with what degree of abstraction, the journey should begin
and what route it should continue to take.
The classical route, that of the dramaturgy of the same name, will consist of going
down, one level at a time from textuality to ideology, then gradually climbing back up
27while checking the abstract results obtained with the discourse at the surface of the
textuality.
The contemporary route, on the other hand, is very subjective and random. Instead
of systematically and classically starting with thematics (I) and dramaturgical forms (II),
too linked to figuration and to the notion of a psychological character, the contemporary
path will often begin with the description of the situation of enunciation (notably from an
attempt at rhythmatization), then will go to the ideological box, leaving the search for the
plot and the character, the story and the action to one side. One can note this in analyses
of contemporary plays: the contemporary dramatic text often takes a route of random
choices, relativizing any pretence of a global interpretation, infinitely relaunching the
reading and interpretation by a new enunciation of the text. It remains to be seen whether
contemporary dramatic writing tends to use a certain number of typical circuits between
the instances of cooperation and whether we are in a position to attempt a typology of
these writings based on these circuits.
To return to Vinaver’s hypothesis of a homology between surface and dramaturgy,
we will examine whether the current writing is born of a new, and often conflictual,
relationship between surface textuality and deep dramaturgy. For the contemporary
plays, textuality is the ‘solvent’ of dramaturgy: it scrambles and even dismisses the
classical categories of character, action and meaning.
But what actually distinguishes the classical work and the contemporary text, from
the 1980s and 1990s, and how can we adapt our diagram of cooperation to the analysis of
plays? Let us make one simple observation: owing to the temporal distance, the historical
and ideological distance in time, classical work imposes its dramaturgical choices and its
systematic circuit on us from one instance to the next; on the other hand, the temporal
proximity of the contemporary text, the immediacy of the ideologies that inform it, incite
the reader to risk everything and try anything, since any route is permissible, as long as it
helps unfold the text and surprise the reader. The contemporary route will thus be
voluntarily summary, incomplete, gratuitous, since its mission is no longer to explain or
convince. The reading of the contemporary text has in short changed meaning, since it no
longer has to find a perfect route, one marked out in advance. It must, more or less
arbitrarily, decide on a device destined to make different, almost independent (discursive,
28narrative, actantial, ideological) series meet, instead of stringing them together and going
over them methodically.
What is more, this incites us to change the presentation of the diagram, to avoid the
impression of a hierarchy and a dualism between surface and depth. A layout with the
levels as concentric circles would be closer to the embedding of the instances and of the
reality of the exchanges. Each level is contained and encompassed by the next one, the
passage from one to another takes place like a series of shockwaves distancing us ever
more from the textual identity and materiality.
At the centre, textuality (A) is surrounded by its situation of enunciation (B). The
discourses and the themes (I) are included in the story told, the story, in II, the story reads
itself in a series of physical actions and events (III), which are themselves encompassed
in the shoreless sea of the unconscious and ideology (IV).
We define writing as the sum of textuality/theatricality (A and B) and of dramaturgy
(I, II, III, IV).
From (A)-(B) to IV, we go from the visible to the invisible, from the trace to the
untraceable.
The story (II) is at the heart of the dramaturgy, caught between the plot and the
action.
29I and II, the alliance of plot and story, form a conglomerate constantly repeating a
general and parabolic story.
II and III, the alliance of the story and the action, are located where the narrative
transforms itself into a series of actions.
In IV all the theses and hypotheses on the unconscious and the sociality of the text
drift without mooring. These floating thoughts sometimes inscribe themselves into
events, actions (III), acting forces, concatenated into a story (II), readily spotted in the
text in the form of a linear plot, with its own themes, parts of the discourse (I) and textual
materiality (A).
In analyses of plays, we will take care to distinguish, in each box, the tools used,
according to the historicity of the work or the reading.
The analysis of works, and particularly of more recent plays, should show whether
the categories of analysis are all necessary and sufficient or if it is appropriate to
eliminate some or, on the contrary, invent some new tools. The programme outlined
claims to be maximalist, planning for all possible questioning, but contemporary writing
might sometimes renounce certain aspects, propose others and establish an original
circuit between these instances. It is just as likely that contemporary texts will be
particularly unreadable if we do not know how to imagine a situation of enunciation and a
stage practice inside of which they are inserted and put into play, that is to say handled,
unfolded, vectorised, carried by the readactor. This means that the general model offered
here, necessarily ahistorical, must be adapted, updated according to historical
circumstances of the moment, notably for the performing conditions and the ideological
and legitimating expectations of the spectator (their reading practice).
It remains to be determined whether each type of contemporary play corresponds to a
specific circuit, with its priorities and oversights ; in short we check whether a theory that
is as ‘broadminded’ as possible is still in a position to account for the lush and anarchic
wealth of today’s dramatic texts.
رد: طريقة تحليل نص مسرحي 2
great work
سعد الدهيمي- عضو مميز
- عدد المساهمات : 262
تاريخ التسجيل : 07/12/2010
الموقع : منتديات الأدب واللغة الانجليزية
مواضيع مماثلة
» طريقة تحليل نص مسرحي
» تحليل King Lear Commentary - Act IV
» تحليل King Lear Commentary - Act V.
» King Lear Commentary - Act I. تحليل
» King Lear Commentary - Act II. تحليل
» تحليل King Lear Commentary - Act IV
» تحليل King Lear Commentary - Act V.
» King Lear Commentary - Act I. تحليل
» King Lear Commentary - Act II. تحليل
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