|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
One cannot stress this enough: there is no true meaning of a text. The author has no authority. Whatever he might have wanted to say, he wrote what he wrote. Once published, a text is like an apparatus which each of us uses in our own way and by our own means. It is not certain that the designer makes better use of it than others.
Paul Valéry
COULD it be that in our literature classes, especially the foreign language literature classes, we too often teach over the heads of a majority of our students? In this essay, I address the problem and contribute to the broad discussion of the teaching of literary texts not as finished works or art but as culture-in-process. I demonstrate the pedagogical benefits of a creative performative approach to the dramatic text within the context of the foreign language theater practicum. I first consider a revisionist concept of the reception of literary texts that goes a long way toward shifting interpretive authority to the readers, according them full participation in the creative cultural process of textual construction. I demonstrate how this concept is consistent with theories of drama and performance that challenge principles of mimetic representation and advocate the perpetual, active renewal of classic texts. I then deal with my “regenerative” approach to teaching texts from the French dramatic canon as culture-in-process, with the example of my technique of combining two separate written texts into an integrated performance text. Imagine a university student production of a foreign language play in which not one but two texts are performed. Imagine that Molière's Dom Juan and Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac are performed on the same stage space, not one after the other but in the same one hour and twenty minutes, through the alternation of tableaux from each of the stories, an alternation that progressively blurs until the action and characters of the two works actually merge by the end of the performance. How do you think this would affect your perception of text? More to the point, since student-actors collaborate in this integrated production, how do you think it would affect their understanding of text as a historicized vehicle of authorial intention? Would they lose respect for the cultural monuments created by Molière and Rostand? Or would they gain new insight into their own readerly and writerly participation in the textual process?
As teachers of language, literature, and culture, we are used to teaching our students through the medium of some kind of text. Usually the text belongs to the canon, which means that generations of critics, scholars, and teachers have found the text to be a valuable tool for understanding our culture and ourselves. A problem arises, though, when we tend to translate the structures of time-proven texts as fixed and their ideas as truth. Through our complacency, the texts become closed within their own authority, one that usually remains mystically distant to the noninitiated student and consequently only approachable through the mediating authority of the teacher. Much of the problem stems not from our recognizing the text as a canonical vehicle of authorial intention but simply from its status as a text, a finished cultural product. Happily, the age of imperialism of the written text is waning, and philosophical, pedagogical, and cultural definitions of text have greatly evolved in the last several decades. Today, many scholars and teachers take for granted not only that a text can be something other than a written vehicle of expression—at base, we can define text as any network of relations rather than as the bounded pages of a book—but also that the authority of a text resides as much in its reception as in the text itself. The intellectual tyranny of the illusion of an objective (textual) truth is held at bay. This reflects an increasing abandonment of the conventional, historicist-objectivist approach to texts as fixed in history 1 and a new regard for textual criticism, which Northrop Frye has referred to in terms of “presence”:
The critical principle involved is that the text is not the absence of a former presence but the place of the resurrection of the presence…. In this risen presence text and reader are equally involved. The reader is a whole of which the text is a part; the text is a whole of which the reader is a part—these contradictory movements keep passing into one another and back again. (994)
The “presence” of the reader undermines the possibility of a fixed creative message, structure, or meaning in the text, and it guarantees the reader's participation in the recurrent resurrection of the process of textual creation. Consequently, literature teachers today deal as much with textuality—the art of text production and the reader's role in this production—and intertextuality as they do with separate texts and their original authors.
Textual creation is a cultural process. On the one hand, as Gérard Genette has pointed out, all individual literary works are part of an intertextual process. 2 On the other hand, the reader has a cultural life that connects to the text through a kind of symbiosis of symbolisms. Like the culture a text reflects, the form, language, and content of the text are determined by a highly complex conjunction of forces, the most powerful of which is the presence, the particular symbolic experience, of the reader. Primarily because of the importance of reception theory and the role that sociocultural context plays in reader response, we have elevated literary texts to a status of what I call culture-in-process. Since culture-in-process is by nature always indeterminate, we apply to our reading of texts highly flexible structures of interpretation that tolerate difference as well as ambiguity, and even a little personalization.
In her seminal work in foreign language education, Claire Kramsch believes we should “sensitize the students to the process of literary creation” (“Texts” 358) and view the reading of literary texts as “an active construction process” involving text and reader: “Reading is the joint construction of a social reality between the reader and the text” (357). It is, as she describes it, a dialectical process between the author and the reader, where the authority related to the text is perhaps not eliminated but shifted to the side of the reader. Even many historicist-objectivist types of literature teachers might agree with Kramsch's stated goal, which is “to use the multiple perspective and life experiences of the readers to reach an understanding of the multifaceted world of the narrative” (361). Kramsch might only expect that the students understand, as best they can, the complex world of the fixed, objective text. But she erases any thought of textual authority when she speaks of “the negotiation of the meaning of the literary text” (357). Moreover, do we fully grasp the implications of how she envisions the interpretive situation when she speaks of “the privilege of the readers to interpret the text in a way that is meaningful to them” (361)? To be sure, Kramsch does not have in mind one individual reader but groups of readers who, through class discussion, are entitled to “negotiate” textual meaning. Yet her distinct break with the history and objectivity of the text is a step in the direction of personalized or individualized interpretation. So what is wrong with this direction? Only when we cling to some remnant notion of textual objectivity can we seriously criticize an interpretation for being too personal. Under all circumstances, through reading, we transform the text with the sociocultural as well as personal baggage we bring to it and through which we see it and act on it. The Dom Juan originally created by Molière has a different meaning depending on whether the reader is from the nineteenth or the twentieth century, the 1970s or the 1990s, man or woman, young or old, and even depending on whether or not he or she has just imbibed a strong dose of caffeine. It is not that all readings of the textual character are equally valid or profound but that a genius by the name of Molière was able to create a character who could mean something to such a great number of readers, crossing not only historical boundaries but also boundaries between cultural and even personal tastes. Hence the canonical or classical status of the work: the true literary classic allows a large number and variety of readers from different generations to become more consciously involved in its process. I believe we could be more deliberate in our break with the illusion of textual objectivity and more active in our regard for this process. So deliberate and active, in fact, that we openly deal with the “risen presence” of reception as the discovery of an autonomous, regenerated text.
The major task of today's literature teacher is not to teach students to worship the canonical text as some kind of historical monument but to discover nonnormative methods to reveal the text's cultural process by engaging it in open collaboration with the students. Kramsch finds that the “fundamental paradox of education” materializes in the teacher-student dichotomy: “Teachers have to impart a body of knowledge, but learners have to discover that knowledge for themselves in order to internalize it—how can teachers at the same time give it to them and make them discover it on their own?” ( Context 6 ). As part of her strategy of negotiating meaning, she feels that “the only valid approach to teaching literary texts is to be ready to discover every one anew with every new group of students and to be surprised by their insights” (“Texts” 364). Textual engagement entails discovery for the teacher as well as for the student. We should place the students in a position to discover our discovery, one which we too must genuinely experience because we truly believe in the text's openness and transformability. By joining the students in generating a “risen presence” for the text, we can transport their attention from the apparent and superficial subject of the text to the deeper levels of its textuality and intertextuality—to what Roland Barthes has described as the “plurality” from which the text was made—and teach students something about literature and its cultural context instead of the details of just another book. The students will learn not simply something about the text's original production (i.e., the world and the genius that produced it) but, more important, something about the text's continual reproduction, that is, about their own world and their critical participation in the text's regenerative process.
I have found that an excellent way to train students to approach literary texts as a regenerative process is through the foreign language theater practicum. By nature, the dramatic text is explicitly designed to generate another (performance) text. But do we allow ourselves enough freedom in applying this process? The theater practicum has been around for a long time in the modern language departments of American universities. Usually introduced at the intermediate-to-advanced level of study, it is generally considered a project that bridges the gap between language and literature studies through the added contextualization of the language offered by performance. Too often, teachers do not exploit the creative potential of the performance project for teaching textuality. Margaret A. Haggstrom argues that “a performative approach” to the study of theater in the foreign language classroom will help students become “critical and independent readers of the wide range of literary texts” (8–9). Performance requires a conscious, complex adherence to the reading process. But readers should consider seriously what a performative approach entails. To expose the textuality of the foreign language dramatic text through the performative approach, teachers must deal with two distinct receptive challenges for students, challenges that can be turned into pedagogical advantages. First, the concept of text has a special status when the text is presented to a reader from another culture and another language. The reader of the foreign language text is always a nonintended reader. 3
The other challenge to reception, the one on which this essay focuses, concerns the performative aspect of the dramatic text, a text that does not present the same (tyrannical) illusion of completeness or wholeness that narrative texts do. Since the art of mise-an-scène came into its own in the late nineteenth century, we consciously write and read drama as a regenerative process whose reception implies the generation of another (performance) text, the mise-en-scène. Because of the “holes” in the dramatic text, reader reception becomes both more complex and more active. 4 All readers of drama are in some way metteurs-en-scène , producing and spatializing stage as well as text in their minds. When, to create meaning, the structure of the text openly calls for the collaboration of the reader, for a graphic and personalized visualization of the transformation from page to stage, the shift in authority is enormous. A performative reading of the dramatic text is quite obviously an individualized cultural process, one that fills in the holes (with corporal and vocal expression, movement, costuming, scenery, objects, lighting, etc.). Discovery is imminent. Since dramatic texts have a greater potential to make students aware of their role as readers in the production and process of textual meaning, we would do well to introduce drama and performance at the earliest stages of literary studies. My strategy of combining dramatic texts into an integrated performance text helps turn students into willing and critical participants in textual process.
Before describing this method, I look at theorist of theater who, like Kramsch, regard text and the symbolic act of performance not as a finished cultural product but as an ongoing cultural process and who consequently consider individual and communal reception to be the primary determinant of the meaning of text.
Long before literary theorist began to break with their historicist-objectivist approaches to narrative texts, many of the great theorist-practitioners of theater since Alfred Jarry in the late nineteenth century challenged the objective authority of the dramatic text. Gordon Craig, Jacques Copeau, Antonin Artaud, and Bertolt Brecht have all argued against the privileged status of the written text and advocated creating through mise-en-scène rather than simply reproducing or even reinterpreting the original text. These theorists understood that theater involves real human beings engages in communication and that the performers of theater have the potential to engage in a highly expressive form of textual communion. 5 They understood that, because of its active participation in cultural process, its explicit demand for communal reproduction, theater is the most socially oriented of the arts and that to a great extent its social dynamic depends on its capacity to transcend the static state of mimesis in order to pass into a process of poiesis.
The anthropologist Victor Turner has written extensively on the “ritual of performance,” theater at its most primitive cultural level. For him, performance is a kind of ritual text whose primary task is not so much to reflect or to imitate culture as to produce it, to form a productive part of cultural process. The basic difference between poiesis and mimesis amounts to the difference between “making” ( poiesis ) and “faking” ( mimesis ) (93). Since culture is never fixed, it is never fully representative of itself and, in a sense, never mimetic. So Turner explains the task of poiesis as one of “remaking cultural sense” (87). He further argues that the poiesis-mimesis dichotomy relates analogically to the grammatical categories of the subjunctive and indicative moods. He explains cultural renewal, that is, the passage from an older and possibly obsolete cultural form to a new one, as
a unidirectional move from the “ indicative ” mood of cultural process, through culture's “ subjunctive ” mood back to the “ indicative ” mood, though this recovered mood has now been tempered, even transformed by immersion in subjunctivity.… The subjunctive, according to Webster's Dictionary, is always concerned with “wish, desire, possibility, or hypothesis”; it is a world of “as if”, ranging from scientific hypothesis to festive fantasy. It is “if it were so,” not “it is so”. The indicative prevails in the world of what in the West we call “actual fact.” (82–83)
Like all ritual process, performance is at its sociocultural best when it is in the subjunctive mood of poeisis, when it is active production rather than passive representation or interpretation. Creative tampering with cultural texts can lead to the productive tempering of obsolescent cultural forms.
This theory of ritual process is remarkably consistent with the sociodialectical approaches to theater of socialist theorist-practitioners like Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal. In fact, the subjunctive “what if” mood of Brecht's plays has guaranteed their continued survival. The Marxists were aware of the political dangers of culture's indicative mood, of the world of “actual fact” and objective truth, which for them amounted to mere ideological illusion. To cut through that illusion, Brecht's epic theater rejected conventional dramatic theater's emphasis on “man as a fixed point” for “man as a process” (Brecht 37); it sought to displace the emphasis from the dramatic character as a free individual to the situation (both dramatic and socio-political), a situation that the dramatist as well as the reader-spectator should regard as conditional rather than natural. Like Turner, Brecht was interested in sociocultural renewal by means of the creative manipulation of fixed cultural texts. Many of Brecht's theatrical works were, in fact, reworkings of the classics and classical myths. He criticized traditional theater's superficial, mimetic approach to the classics, an approach that was interested only in a “false greatness” of the original text, a “surface greatness,” and that failed “to see the work afresh” and to “bring out the ideas originally contained in it” (272–73).
After Brecht, the Brazilian Agosto Boal decries our misreading of the Aristotelian concept of mimesis, which he prefers to read in a poietic light, translating the Aristotelian dictum “Art imitates nature” as “Art re-creates the creative principle of things created” (1; trans. modified). Determined to be re-creative in his theatrical projects, Boal was ever vigilant of the “limitations of copying” (164), and he writes of his experience in mounting the masterpieces of the classical canon (Lope de Vega, Molière, Gogol) in twentieth-century Brazil, explaining how “the modification of the whole structure of the text was necessary in order to restore, centuries later, its original idea” (164). 6 Like Brecht, when Boal refers to “original idea,” his main concern is the original cultural effect of the text, that is, the original reader's response to the process of the text. The original idea, deriving directly from the creative principle that inspired and forged the original written text, may be thoroughly disguised or obscured by the historicocultural coloration of the text's form and content. Writers write and reader read (directors direct and actors act) through the inspiration of the creative principle underlying the forms, and we can recuperate that principle through the regenerative, subjunctive mood of culture. Questioning whether it is really possible for one historical period to read either literally or figuratively the text of an earlier period, Boal seeks to re-create a deep archaelogical structure. So a major objective of the socialist agenda is to find dialectical solutions for reconciling classical creative principles with, as Brecht put it, “the increasing difficulty of reproducing the present-day world” (274). Like Turner's and Brecht's arguments for an interventionist “what if?” approach to our performative production of culture and to our reception of cultural forms, Boal's revisionist search for the creative principle is entirely consistent with revisionist theories of text; it illuminates the dialectical notion of mutual text production through reception. Turner, Brecht, and Boal realize that, beyond the original text, the creative principle appeals to the deep cultural consciousness of the reader, whose primary task is to renew the principle, and the culture of which it is part, by reproducing the present-day world through the medium of the text.
My belief in text as a dynamic, concentrated form of cultural process leads quite naturally to a fascination for the cognitive and affective potential of foreign language performance. For many years now I have had the unique opportunity to direct students of French in theater practicum projects, projects designed to exact from the student reader-performers first an acute awareness of textual process, then a creative contribution to this process through a complex reconstruction of the performance text. Two of my recent theater productions were based on the regenerative process. “ Ubu roi déformé” (Dec. 1993, U of Louisville) and “Dom Juan et Cyrano: La passion démasquée” (Apr. 1995, U of Tennessee, Knoxville). 7 The multidimensional complexity of these two productions involved three major strategies, the first two of which are (1) a collaborative effort to re-create, by rewriting, the original dramatic texts (Jarry's Ubu roi , Queneau's Exercise de style , Molière's Dom Juan , and Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac ) while integrating a narrator and contemporizing some of the action; and (2) the double- and triple-casting of roles, that is, the sharing of the principal roles (the roles of narrator, Père Ubu, Mère Ubu, Dom Juan, and Cyrano were shared by two or more actors). The first strategy begins as a reading-and-writing exercise at the level of the written text. 8 The second strategy is emphasized at the level of performance. This essay focuses on the third strategy for textual complexity: the composing (original sense of the Latin cumponere to put together') of two very different, previously written texts into a new, integrated performance text. The primary questions are, How was the integration carried out? What do the students and the teacher discover about literary-dramatic textuality that they could not have discovered through the conventional practice of reading and performing a single canonical text? Does the integrated production work for the audience? Should it?
Despite the late twentieth century's revolutionary incursions on the imperialism of the written text, to my knowledge very few directors have given serious thought to the practice of combining texts, other than the medley-like presentation of excerpts from a variety of thematically related plays. 9 The most likely explanation for this is the myth of textual integrity leading to a fear of tampering with the autonomy of a written document. The act of combining one text with another to create a new performative, contextual whole clearly violates this principle of integrity, this author-ity. Notwithstanding the evident risks involved with copyright laws, the lack of experimentation in the combining of texts surprises me, considering the revolution of the mise-en-scène in this century. If dramatic texts constitute an intensely rich form of cultural-in-process, if they are inherently more open than narrative texts to create and personal reception, and if they cry out for transformation in the form of a mise-en-scène, then why not explore the opportunity to engage the creative process of one classic text by confronting it with another? What better way to divert the attention of the student from the interpretation of a single text to the creative, dialectical processes of textuality and intertextuality?
To be sure, any mise-en-scène of a prewritten text has some creative and subjunctive quality, especially with the inevitably individualized characterization carried out by an actor guided by a director (“What if Dom Juan wore a lily-white cowboy hat?”). In my projects, however, in our collective search to reassert creative principle rather than message or interpretation, I have added another parameter of creativity, the rewriting of the original text. The practice of structurally altering one story to accommodate another further increases the students' awareness of and control over textual structure; and it toys with Aristotle's belief that the arrangement of the actions (plot) constitutes the soul of the tragedy. If left untouched, the once subjunctive mood of an original written text belonging to a former generation of Western culture—be it Ubu (What if an outrageously gluttonous cartoon character came to lead a nation?), Dom Juan (What if a man devoted his entire existence to the conquest of women?), or Cyrano (What if there were a soldier whose military prowess, poetic nature, and passion for one singularly “precious” woman were equaled only by his physical ugliness?)—will necessarily fall back into an indicative mood. But the complex architectural reinvestment required by the practice of combination deliberately and radically breaks with the indicative rigidity of the canonical text and embeds the project in the subjunctive. What if Queneau's absurd exercises interrupted and eventually infiltrated the story of Père Ubu? What if Dom Juan, victimizer of all women, and Cyrano, victim of one unrequited love, were forced to cross paths on the theatrical stage?
In the first of my theatrical projects, “ Ubu Roi déformé”, the written Ubu text was integrated with theatrical adaptations of a small selection of the ninety-nine different styles of Raymond Queneau's Exercises de style . Why combine these two particular works? How arbitrary was the choice of plays? While there are few common threads to link these two plays, the looms from which they are woven have a fundamental similarity: the stories of Ubu and Exercices are both examples of what critics have called absurdist texts. There is, of course, a difference in the historical time frames. Ubu was written at the end of the nineteenth century, while Exercises was written over a half century later. There is also a difference in the theatrical time frames. While not clear in this regard, the action of Ubu definitely takes place centuries before the action of Exercices . Despite these divergences and others ( Exercises was not even written specifically as a play), both works are constructed around denaturalized characters and action. So having characters from both plays alternately occupy the same stage during the one-hour duration of the performance was initially probably more curious than shocking for actors and spectators alike.
Admittedly, during the first four acts our theatrical version did not substantially integrate the two plays. A total of nine exercises were presented: two at the end of each of the first four acts of Ubu , one at the play's conclusion. Throughout the first four acts, the transitions between Ubu and Exercices were cued by signs displayed by the actors. So most of the combining of Exercises with Ubu was a matter of alternation and juxtaposition instead of real integration. While the need to weave the exercises into the Ubu story forced the students to take a closer look at the content of both works, the weaving did not automatically transcend the indicative mood of performance. Only at the beginning of the fifth and final act did the integration become more evident and poietic, more regenerative.
At the beginning of act 5, the narrator interrupts the action. 10 He admonishes Père Ubu for jumping too far ahead in the story, and he blames this deviation on the confusion caused by the interruptions of the exercises. This was, in fact, the only written dialogue in our revised text contributing to integration. It is nevertheless noteworthy that the rehearsals (the first active phase of performance) had created a conclusion to the play that fully absorbed Exercices into the Ubu story. At the end of act 5, the four actors who have alternated in the roles of Père and Mère Ubu are all reasembled aboard a ship in search of a new country to plunder. After they recite the final line of the “ Ubu roi déformé” (“What a delight it will soon be to get back to sweet Louisville, our old friends and our Churchill Downs chateau!”), 11 they dance out into the audience space, still holding their cardboard model of a ship around them. Then the music stops, the action freezes, and the theater goes dark. When the stage lights come on, the final exercise of the performance (“Comédie”) is played out as a short dramatic sketch. I assigned one of the students to direct this sequence, a move that permitted me to follow Kramsch's advice and join with the students to “discover anew” the Ubu and Exercices texts as we generated our own integrated text. Noteworthy were the parallels between the Ubuesque behavorial patterns of the Exercices protagonists and those of Mère and Père Ubu, not to mention the absurdist staging techniques. The Exercices characters acknowledge their Ubu stage companions by shouting “Merdre,” a metathetical rendering of the French merde ‘shit.’ Either wittingly or unwittingly, the student director and his players were creating a poem: Merdre is the first and most memorable word in the original Ubu text, whereas merde has theatrical application as the French equivalent of the expression “Break a leg!” (It was the first time I thought of Père Ubu's famous “ Merdre ” from this metatheatrical angle.) Following the brief sketch, there is another blackout. When the lighting is restored, the reanimated Ubu characters dance their way back to the stage for the grand finale. The students were involved in a process. Their Ubuesque alteration of the Exercices sketch and the smoothness of the transition from one text to the other demonstrated that they were developing a unique hands-on, comparative-analytic approach to absurdist texts as they participated in a creative renewal of French, Franco-American, and foreign language literary cultures.
This creative fusion of the two plays was profound from both theatrical and pedagogical points of view. The intervention of Exercices required the active participation of the student actors in an intensification of the theatrical process of Jarry's text, and consequently this intervention increased the students' textual, theatrical, and cultural consciousness. As teacher, I had avoided the normative authority that Kramsch says “discourages the reconstruction of the text necessary for its appropriation by the reader” (“Texts” 358). My simple proposal to confront these two works exploded the dialectical aspect of our encounter with their stories and characters. I began to see textual integration as a navigational process based on triangulation. In the same way that a ship at sea finds its bearings by reference to not one but two known geographical points, we construct a meaningful point of reception (the integrated text) with respect to the two original textual references.
Planning my next theatrical project, I decided to go further with the integration strategy. I chose two plays that deal with the theme of passion: Molière's Dom Juan and Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac . At the very beginning of our-created and integrated play, the narrator, Sganarelle, explains this common bond:
( Pointing to state right ) Voilá Dom Juan. He loves women, lots of women, all kinds of women, all women. And ( pointing to stage left ) voilá Cyrano. He loves only one woman, but boy does he love this woman and boy is she beautiful, his cousin Roxane!…Dom Juan and Cyrano, two great stories of passion on the French stage. Unfortunately for these heroes—but fortunately for the stage—the expression of their passion is not without a problem. For Dom Juan, the problem is the Church and the notion of honor. For Cyrano,…it's a certain appendage.
The narrator thus registers the theme of passionate love, which at once connects the two plays and separates them. I realized by this point that our performance text would not produce answers to the operational “what if?” questions. Instead, the juxtaposition of the stories and characters would provoke and sustain an elaborate interrogatory process, within which my students would read and respond actively as second-degree authors. I also hoped that the confrontation of the Dom Juan structure of passion with the Cyrano structure would tease out for my students an interrogatory attentiveness to the creative decision made by authors actively involved in textual production—by all authors, including the original ones. For example, why did Molière decide to create the street-smart Sganarelle to accompany the aristocratic Dom Juan, and why does Cyrano seem such a loner? These questions became more relevant for my students when Sganarelle imposes himself on Cyrano in the conclusion of the integrated text, a text they helped to produce.
In our integrated story, based more on the intensity of passion-as-process than on the object of passion (thus the “passion unmasked” of the title), the major chain of events of the original plays remains largely intact; but there is some revision, much of which stems from the confrontation of the two texts. Already at the point of the project where the students were engaged in the rewriting of the original texts, a substantial linkage between the works materialized in the dialogue, the action, and the characters. As with the Ubu project, I divided the students into four groups: two groups worked on acts 1, 2, and 3 of both plays, and two groups on acts 3, 4, and 5. In this way we would have two versions of acts 1 and 2 to compare, two versions of acts 4 and 5, and four versions of the transitional act 3. For the re-creative exercise, I instructed the groups to (1) juxtapose the two stories, alternating chronologically between each of the acts of Dom Juan and each of the acts of Cyrano ; (2) create a narrator's role for each of the stories; and (3) seek new ways to tie the two stories together, especially by having the two narrators and the two protagonists (Dom Juan and Cyrano) exchange dialogue. As before, once the students completed their rewriting, copies of the rewritten versions were distributed to all, read, and discussed in class, before I prepared a first written version of the integrated text. 12 If still a long way from total integration, the students' versions included ideas that I wrote into the recreated text as a series of remarks made by the narrators of each of the stories about the protagonists of the other story; and there was some dialogue exchanged between the characters of the different stories. An example is the exchange between Dom Juan and Cyrano at the point of transition between the end of act 2 of Dom Juan and the beginning of act 2 and Cyrano . After Dom Juan declares his eternal love first for one countrywoman (Charlotte), then for another (Mathurine)—a situation our mise-enscène transformed into a stylized Dating Game sketch moderated by Sganarelle—Cyrano crossed the stage composing his love letter to Roxane. Dom Juan calls to him, “Would you like to play, Cyro?” Cyrano replies, “No thanks. I've made my choice,” and he returns to writing his letter, a move that launches act 2 of Cyrano . There are also a number of exchanges between the two narrators (Juan's valet, Sganarelle, and Roxane's governess, la Duègne) as well as between the narrators and the protagonists belonging to different stories. The narrators also address the audience. Most of these exchanges and comments are judgments about the amorous protagonists' behavior, judgments that contribute to the comparative and analytic bent of our integrated version. 13
The rewritten text also enhances the integration through the use of props and character crossovers. The introduction of the telephone, a modern tool that many generations of young people associate with amorous relationships, dehistoricizes and contemporizes the imagery and the action of our play. What is more, the telephone conversation becomes probably the most prominent action linking the two separates stories. But how do we integrate such an anachronism while attempting to safeguard some of the semblance of honor and solemnity constructed within the original texts? We decided to tone down the assault on history by employing an archaic telephonic device: a tin can. This way, the device would still provide support for the notions of distance, mediation, and deferral that undermine the passion of both Dom Juan and Cyrano, though in different ways for different reason. 14 So the famous expression-of-love scene with Cyrano, Christian, and Roxane is carried out by telephone. The climactic first kiss between Christian and Roxane, too, is telephonic. Alternately, on the Dom Juan side, the portentous visits from Done Elvire, the Father, and the Commander with their warnings of divine retribution are likewise communicated by phone.
Character transplants help interweave the structures of the stories and generate new text. Sganarelle functions not only as Juan's valet but also as a double narrator, narrating on one level the Dom Juan story and on another the integrated Dom Juan-Cyrano story. In the transition between the last act of Dom Juan and the last act of Cyrano , Cyrano is mortally wounded when he tries to intervene against the Commander, who is sending Dom Juan to his death. After Sganarelle's “ Mes gages ” (“My wages”) tirade, which for over three centuries has provided the literal-textual conclusion to the Molière Dom Juan , in our play Sganarelle lives on, though briefly, as Cyrano's valet. The subjunctive fusion of his textual, then visual (stage) presence alongside Cyrano provokes a critical reaction to the “ultimate” meaning of both texts. First, students are forced to hypothesize whether the two characters could meaningfully come together. Then, after an attempt to better understand not simply who the characters really are but, more important, who they can be and what they can mean, the students help recover a new, meaningful context. In the presence of a mortally wounded Cyrano, they are obliged to rethink Sganarelle's famous line “I am the most unfortunate of men” and correct it to “Ah, yes. We two are the most unfortunate of souls!” And when Sganarelle asks Cyrano if by chance he could use a good valet, the second-degree authors of this text are more likely to reflect on the fact that in the context of his original story, Cyrano does not have a valet. Indeed, before Christian, Cyrano has no one in whom to confide. Why not? Is Cyrano more of a loner than Dom Juan?
What about the relationship between Juan and Sganarelle, a relationship whose complexity becomes more evident to students when performatively juxtaposed and integratively compared with the Cyrano text? Characterization, dialogue, and action of the rewritten text all contribute to regenerate the creative principles of the two plays. The students have witnessed and participated in creative, analytic, and conditional performance responses to subjunctive questions such as How would Cyrano react if he happened upon Dom Juan's fall into hell? and What would Sganarelle do if given the opportunity to have Cyrano as a master? 15
The linkage of dialogue, action, image, and characters was extended, solidified, or reinvested during the performance rehearsals. An additional character transplant was realized during one of the final rehearsals. We decided that the Specter, a supernatural, veiled woman who delivers to Dom Juan the final warning to repent (by phone, of course, in our play), should have a place beside Roxane at center stage during the Cyrano portion of the final act. Her presence would replicate—or, more precisely, as the French would say, “send into abyss” ( mettre en abyme )— the idea-image of the abandoned, cloistered female love object-subject. This performative integration of the two separate feminine discourses from the two works—one in which the female is overloved, one in which she is under-loved—forces a close-up comparison and raises questions about the ways in which the female love object can be objectified and victimized in a patriarchal society, and it generates insight into the ways in which authors inscribe these discourses into their texts.
Finally, the scenic architecture that graphically supports the transformation of the two separate texts into an integrated performance provides a spatial metaphor for our reading of the text(s) as cultural process. On our open stage, there were no wings, no backstage areas; the actors were at all times visible to the audience. Our first decision, then, was to establish a visible offstage area divided from an onstage area or, more precisely, an area where the audience would perceive the actors as onstage. We decided to make use of the multilevel aspect of the stage for this purpose. Since the semicircular state area consisted of four distinct tiers—the lowest tier was no more than a kind of step—the wide top tier would serve as off-stage. Spatially, the play begins with the well-defined segregation of the two camps of players, those mostly involved with Dom Juan roles on the upper level of stage right and the Cyrano camp on the upper level of stage left. In other words, the remnants of the two original, classical texts are separated physically. When the action begins, the two camps alternate their occupation of the playing field, the central stage space. In this respect, the performance still supports the indicative mood of the original texts and their illusion of textual authority. As the action progresses, however, the indicative mood is bombarded by a series of verbal exchanges between the two camps, and there is a breakdown in clear-cut transitions from the action of one play to that of the other—such as the exchange between Cyrano and Dom Juan in the Dating Game scene, as noted above. Finally, in act 5, we see a structural reversal of the human component of the scenic architecture as it was displayed at the beginning of the play. The offstage area is progressively abandoned; the characters of both plays, who were all (except Sganarelle, the narrator) offstage at the beginning, come together onstage, representing a spatial metaphor for the fusion of the two stories. In the grande finale of the performance, Cyrano's rancorous farewell to the world, all the actors form a semicircle to background Cyrano and the two female figures, Roxane and the Specter-Elvire. The players have moved from an offstage area, where textual authority segregated on story and its characters from another, to an onstage area, where cultural process and creative reception have negotiated a new integrated and contextual meaning for the themes of passion instigated by the original texts. My students helped guide the canonical characters out of textual bondage into an adventure in creative performance, an adventure that responds to Brecht's challenge to find solutions for “the increasing difficulty of reproducing the present-day world.”
This project is only a beginning, an effective prototype for the subjunctive art of combining texts. Instead of focusing on the interpretation of one canonical story, through the process of textual confrontation 16 we have induced a meaningful performance event, one that is not as inconsequential or ephemeral as it may appear at first. At the outset, neither I nor any of my students could foresee where the combining of the two hitherto self-sufficient and sovereign texts would lead in terms of a theatrical performance. Together, we made discoveries about textuality. With every day of rehearsal the integration grew, expanding our insight into how texts work and how they can and cannot work. Instead of searching for normative answers to the critical question of why Cyrano seems to be more of a loner than Dom Juan by using such ideas as Romanticism versus classicism, we responded inductively to the question by creating a visible, interrogatory realm of intertext. Continued rehearsals would have dissolved additional borders between the two works, implying critical investigation into creative ways to dissolve those borders, to expand the intertext. What began as a performative textual reading, which was guided by a dialectical contract giving negotiatory power to the reader, continued into a writing exercise based on the same dialectical and performative point of view; eventually it was liberated altogether from the page in its transition to the stage. Even during the three days of the three public performances, some of the mise-en-scène was subtly adjusted in the direction of fusion.
Such is the way of performance art, particularly subjunctive, regenerative performance art. Unlike the indicative mood of performance, the “what if” mood restimulates and redirects our attention to process, involving perpetual renewal. Turner says that the subjunctive is not a fixed cultural mood but a necessary step in the cultural process. The indicative mood will eventually recover “the subjunctive antistructure of the liminal process” (82). Today's avant-garde is tomorrow's convention. But a transformation has taken place, one that in some way rejuvenates the human spirit and raises our level of cultural awareness, especially the awareness that the cultural processes of literary texts transcend historical and geographical boundaries. The subversion of literary history can actually bolster historical as well as cultural awareness, because new connections have been made between the old world and the new, connections we could not have realized by reading and telling either of the stories in isolation. Actors and spectators will never again think of Dom Juan without Cyrano or Cyrano without Dom Juan; and neither will they think of the texts of these characters, or text in general, in the same way.
Speaking as a teacher-scholar of foreign language and culture, I do not expect to have provoked among my peers a stampede toward the local costume-and-prop shop or toward the drama stacks of the library to locate texts to combine. In teaching, it is more productive to transform than to inform, to construct than to instruct, to create an awareness of context than to teach the rules of the text. Yet teachers have different roads to the poiesis of textuality, and they all diverge in their understanding of the role of reader reception in cultural development and awareness. But perhaps my fellow teachers and scholars will be a bit more disposed to accept the potentially profound aesthetic, critical, and pedagogical consequences of regenerative reading, writing, and performance in general and, in particular, of the simple technique of confronting one text with another with an eye to performance. Perhaps this acceptance and this technique will form part of a liminal critical approach to all types of texts in the academy. 17
The author is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
1 See, for example, Serge Doubrovsky's study of the Barthes-Picard controversy in his The New Criticism in France. In the introduction to this study, Edward Wasiolek explains that the Barthes-Picard feud was not simply “a feud between the historian and the critic” but that “both the American New Critics and the historians of literature against whom they argued believed in the existence of an objective text , which could be elucidated by critical process” (9; my emphasis).
2 Genette has developed an elaborate theory of intertextuality, involving terms such as paratextuality, transtextuality, architextuality , and hypertextuality (see esp. 7–19).
3 Molière could not have imagined perfectly the social, political, ideological, and personal makeup of each reader (or theatergoer) from his seventeenth-century bourgeois culture let alone the makeup of the modern American reader. Conversely, modern American readers will never understand either Molière or his culture with the same assurance that they do contemporary authors and their own culture. It is not just history that separates our students from the original production of the written text but also national culture and its language. The opportunity for “misreading” increases dramatically. Yet, if the text is genuinely a classic, if the student's reading ability in the language and the student's knowledge of literature are competent, and if the dialectical formula for the reading of the text as discussed above is valid, then foreign language reception is valid, not only despite its divergence but because of it as well. (If this were not the case, many of us nonnative-speaking teachers of foreign literature would have little justification in writing critically about the texts we read.) What is more, in a class where text is taught as process, this divergence can be turned to advantage, because the conscious employment of the foreign language code (the grammar) tends to allow students a more playful and imaginative role in the creative (re)production of texts.
4 Anne Ubersfeld has described the dramatic text as characteristically more full of holes than other literary texts (23). The holes left by the dramatist are there precisely for the process of performance.
5 In theatrical performance, communication occurs among actors on the stage as well as between audience and actor. In this discussion I am particularly interested in communication (and communing) at the level of the performers, which I consider the initial and primary level.
6 Our century's most articulate metaphysician of theater, Antonin Artaud, shared this interest in poietic cultural renewal with the Marxists and the anthropologists. “Masterpieces of the past are good for the past; they are not good for use,” says Artaud, because they are “fixed in forms that no longer respond to the needs of the time” (74–75).
7 Both works were produced for the general public. “Dom Juan et Cyrano” was a more elaborate production, mounted on one of the two main stages of the campus with the technical and material support of the theater department. The three one-hour-twenty-minute performances drew a total audience of about five hundred people, including not only students and teachers of French but also Francophiles and Francophones from a rather wide geographical area. This project was generously supported by a University of Tennessee Practitioner Research on Teaching Award. I am also grateful for the university's Professional Development Award to research theatrical production in France.
8 I say “begins,” because in my project the written text is always handled from a performative point of view. The very first day of class, the students are required to perform the first page of a written dramatic text. Then they read a sequence of the dramatic text individually for homework. Then they meet with a subgroup to reread the same sequence and re-create the scene by rewriting it and performing it in petites mises en scène for other members of the class, who may or may not have re-created the same sequence in their subgroups. To encourage individualized re-creations, I instruct the students to devise an original presentation for the sequence, one they believe will be more meaningful to them and their peers. After the groups have presented all versions of one sequence, I ask the students to compare them.
9 See “intertextualité” in Pavis's Dictionnaire (178). See also Bernard Dort's brief discussion of the director Roger Planchon's search for “totality” by “assembling” an assortment of scenes from different plays published as La petite illustration (176).
10 The use of a narrator, played alternately by four different actors, was one of our modifications to the original version of the work.
11 The translation of this and all further quotations from the original French text of our productions is mine.
12 I realize, of course, that in this group work some students contributed more than others and consequently were more actively involved than others in the re-creation process. It is also true that, despite my efforts to avoid a position of authority, after discussion with the students I determined the final form of the written text. I still find this kind of direction to be necessary; but I placed the students in a position to undermine my monarchy because the collectivist phases—smaller groups to larger groups—of the decision making in the re-creation process helped dissipate my influence and because the simple presence of the students at each of the phases and the mere solicitation of their opinions gave them power. Even the most passive, submissive of students was a witness to the process of textual re-creation.
13 At the beginning of the Dom Juan sequence of act 3, for example, Sganarelle intimates to the audience, “Oh if I only had a master as faithful and devoted to love as Monsieur Cyrano.” And la Duègne introduces and Cyrano part of the same act with “No threats from heaven for Cyrano…but he does suffer a great deal from heartache.”
14 During the action of both original texts, none of the principal characters (or any other character, male or female, for that matter) has the opportunity to sexually consummate a relationship. Sexual possession between potential sexual partners is frustrated at every turn. Cyrano and Christian die virgins, the same fate that awaits Roxane, and the only specific sexual episode that forms a part of the Dom Juan story, the one between Juan and Elvire, predates the action of the play and is merely implied.
15 Costuming and makeup too played a significant role in bringing the two plays together poetically. Cyrano's Pinocchio nose was refracted in the feline nose for Dom Juan. Both protagonists wore knee-length black boots and a black fedora. But while Dom Juan wore only a period shirt with breeches, Cyrano wore a breastplate over his shirt.
16 Richard Schechner believes that “the emphasis in making a performance text is on systems of relationships: confrontations , or otherwise, among words, gestures, performers, space, spectators, music, light—whatever happens on stage” (33; my emphasis). The combining of text provides a more fundamental approach to reconstructing these systems of relations.
17 In March 1996, this project served as the topic of a session titled “The Creativity-Complexity Matrix in Foreign Language Performance: Combining Works, Sharing Roles, and Rewriting Text” for the Theatre in Academe Symposium at Washington and Lee University. I am grateful to Dominica Radulescu, director of the symposium, for providing a forum for the presentation and discussion of this type of performance-practitioner research project.
Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove, 1958.
Boal, Augusto. Theater of the Oppressed. Trans. Charles A. McBride and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride. New York: Urizen, 1979.
Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Trans. John Willett. New York: Hill, 1964.
Dort, Bernard. La représentation émanicipée. Arles, Fr.: Actes Sub, 1988.
Doubrovsky, Serge. The New Criticism in France. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1973.
Frye, Northrop. “Literary and Linguistic Scholarship in a Postliterate World.” PMLA 99 (1984): 990–95.
Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré. Paris: Seuil, 1982.
Haggstrom, Margaret A. “A Performative Approach to the Study of Theater: Bridging the Gap between Language and Literature Courses.” French Review 66 (1992): 7–19.
Kramsch, Claire. Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
———. “Literary Texts in the Classroom: A Discourse.” Modern Language Journal 69 (1985): 356–65.
Pavis, Patrice. Dictionnaire du théâtre. Paris: Dunod, 1996.
Schechner, Richard. The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance. New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1982.
Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ, 1982.
Ubersfeld, Anne. Lite le théâtre. Vol. 1. Paris: Sociales, 1982.
Wasiolek, Edward. Introduction. Doubrovsky. 1–34.
© 1998 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
|
|---|
|
|
|
