In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Book Reviews 445 MICHAELISSACHAROFF. Discourseas Performance. Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press 1989. pp. vi. 161. $27.50. Discourse as Peiformance is Michael Issacharoff's translation of his earlierLeSpectacle du discours (Paris: Corti, 1985), and whil.e such an effort obviously involved many tenninological decisions and modifications, the book is little changed in outline and argument from its earlier version. A study of " the specifically theatrical use of language in the broadest sense, from verbal utterances to nonverbal uses comprising the visual elements. including gesture. facial expression, movement, costume, players' bodies, properties. and decor" (p. 3), Discourse as Performance groups its thirteen chapters within three sections: a section dealing with "the specifics ofdramatic discourse" (p. 7), and sections exploring the different manipulations of space, reference, and verbal utterance in non-comic and comic dramatic modes. Most ofthe chapters in these last two sections revolve around the discussion of individual (mostly nineteenth- and twentiethcentury French) plays. As the author acknowledges in his first chapter, the material gathered under these headings relates to separate projects begun and contmued elsewhere, and Discourse as Performance often suffers (like its French original) from the divergent nature of these projects. Although the book promises a more integrated, systematic study of dramatic discourse, Issacharoff moves, with little transition, between topics ranging from speech acts and didascalia to stage space and comic theory. The book's argumentative discontinuity is heightened by the brevity of its individual essays: Chapter 4 (on "theatrical intertextuality' ') is 24 pages long, but the book's other chapters range from only five to thirteen pages. These micro-chapters give a conciseness offocus to individual topics. but they subvert the book's broader theoretical project and the potentia1 power of its terminology. The definitions of terms such as discourse, text, sign, reference, space, and ideology, for instance. are very thin - especially given the theoretical elaboration which they have received elsewhere-and the use of concepts like intertextualiry, speech act, and comedy are left tantalizingly undeveloped, liable to unexplained shifts of meaning. A reader used to more rigorous analyses of the theater's disursive and semiological operations - the kind of analysis found in Pavis, Ubersfeld, Eco, and Elam - wilJ read Discourse as Performance with an awareness of missed opportunities. This disappointment should not obscure the book's actual achievements, which merit note. Issacharoffoffers a number offascinatingobservations concerning the elements and operations ofdramatic discourse, and he often combines these points with an attention to the individual playtext rare in recent theoretical writing. His discussion of visibility and reference in Ionesco'sLes Chaises is splendid, as are his analyses ofmimesis and diegesis in Sartre's Huis c/os and neologisms in Jarry's Ubll roi. Issacharoff's remarks linking the blind Mr. Rooney's diegetic discourse (in Beckett's All That Fall) with the perceptual "blindness" ofthe radio listener is representative ofDiscourse asPerformance at its best. In theoretical tenns, the book's most sustained (and promising) analysis lies in its final two sections, which focus on the system of linguistic referentiality as it operates within the individual thea~cal performance. Issacharoff discusses the relationship between Book Reviews dramatic utterance and its signifieds and referents. offering convincing analysis of such issues as onstage vs. offstage reference, the demarcation of physical and linguistic space, and the subversion of signification and reference. The very success of this "microcosmic " analysis, though, and its implicit positing of a self-contained mise-en-scene, points to a limitation in the book's semiological superstructure. Although th<: author acknowledges that the stage's non-linguistic components are themselves signifying elements, theseelements are all too often presented as non-signifying' 'things," material end-points of semiological reference. This tendency has the effect, in Issacharoff's analysis, of robbing the stage of its plurality of theatrical and non-theatrical codes, and its discursive richness, through which even objects "stand in" (to use Bruce Wilshire's expression) for absent signifieds and referents. At other times in Discourse as Performance, the author's reliance on both the written and spoken word lead him to downplay the stage's physical components. Employing the dramatic script as his principle discursive field, lssacharoff acknowledges the stage almost exclusively as it is signalled by the author's written specifications and reinforced by the verbal reference of dramatic characters. This leads him into claims concerning perfonnance field and its elements which are tenuous at best given the complexities of actual theatrical response. To suggest that verbal language "creates" visual language in the .theater (p. 68), or to define stage comedy in tenns of "the universe of language" (p. 119) without at least acknowledging the equally comic' .universe ofthe body," is to risk overprivileging the spoken word and its authorial source. Theater, after ail, is as closely allied to the material arts and pantomime as it is to literary narrative. and even a study that stresses its verbal components does well to keep these kinships in mind. In tenns of the plays chosen to support its theoretical claims, Discourse as Performance would find more authority if it were grounded in a greater range of dramatic examples. The author's discussion of the avant~garde in Chapter 13. for instance. would benefit from a consideration of figures more experimentally radical than 10nesco, Beckett, and Tardieu, and his generalizations concerning tragedy and comedy require the theoretical testing of drama outside the French handling of these categories. Though Issacharoff is to be commended on his use of plays that he is most familiar with, French drama since Racine constitutes a body of drama with often limited dramaturgical parameters.The distortion of signifier and the destruction of reference that he considers a signature of comedy. for example, is also operative in non-comic plays such as Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare's Macbeth, and the history of tragedy features many plays that do not fit generalizations derived from the Racinian model. The book's theoretical and critical discussions obviously represent a stage in the author's continuing investigation of dramatic discourse and reference. These are important topics, and one looks forward to their further refmement and development through Michael Issacharoffs lines ofinquiry. As a preliminary handling ofthese topics, Discourse as Performance is a theoretical treatise of mixed success. STANTON B. GARNER, JR., UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ...

pdf

Share