Abstract

Since its heyday among playwrights like Beckett and Ionesco, the genre of "tragic farce" has continued to interest playwrights, both in France and around the world, as a means of dramatizing such existential concerns as the fragility of identity, the relativity of truth, the plurality of meaning, and the isolated condition of the individual in the modern, technocratic world. Contemporary French dramatists, Michel Azama and Hervé Blutsh, are two such play-wrights. They represent voices from what Patrice Pavis has identified as a "new generation" of playwrights who, in recent decades, have moved French theatre beyond a strict adherence to any one particular ideological influence, including Existentialism and Absurdism, and who have instead moved it into a period of "interpellation."

Drawing on Althuser's psychoanalytic understanding of the term, which views "interpellation" as "the central operation by which ideology assigns to the individual human being an identity as a subject/object" (The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism 158–59), this article argues that, through their interpellation of ideology, this new generation of play-wrights is forcing the contemporary French stage to look into the "Lacanian mirror" in a perpetual process of self-discovery and self-refinement. It argues that this "age of interpellation" reflects a larger trend in French literature in general, known as auto-fiction – a fiction whose creation is based on "facts" and that serves as a conduit into the subconscious. Ultimately, through a close reading of two contemporary tragic farces, Azama's Croisades and Blutsch's Anatole Felde, "interpellative theatre" is seen as being left to grapple with a whole host of simultaneous paradoxes as it attempts to "subject" itself in a contemporary context, caught between the polarities of ambiguity and polyvalence, absolutism and relativity, singularity and pluralism, globalization and cultural identity.

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