Silent Rage in Marie Laberge's L'Homme gris: The Mutism of Cri-Cri

Silent Rage in Marie Laberge's L'Homme gris: The Mutism of Cri-Cri CARA GARGANO Marie Laberge, one of Canada's new generation of theatre autew'es, addresses the complexities of female rage within a patriarchical bourgeois social construct in her play, L'Homme gris (translated as Night by Rina Fraticelli). First performed in 1984, this play deals with possible expressions of female rage, the sad reality that this rage usually finds its outlet not in violence towards the persecutor but towards the female victim/self, and the need for women to break the cycle of self-destruction that rage perpetuates. A father and his daughter have stopped for the night at a motel. The daughter is no longer able to speak and the spoken words of the play are the father 's alone: she will sit mutely for nearly the whole play, while the father searches for the cause of her problem. What he will never realize, and what we come to see through their performance, is a chilling truth: he himself, as a representative, participant, and victim of repression within a destructive parent/child system, with his concern for social appearance and his need for personal justification, has robbed his daughter of her identity, her selfhood, and most important for Laberge, her power of speech. It is Laberge's greatest strength as an artist that we do not see this example of victimization in black and white (the all too frequent good guylbad guy syndrome), but rather as a complex tapestry of interconnected and pathetic human failures, the result of a wider, systemic failure. It is through Roland's personal account that we understand Christine's destruction. This significant narrative device allows Laberge to superimpose several points of view and to employ several levels of communicative language, Roland's, Christine's and Laberge's own. The playas a genre is in a peculiar position regarding both the power of speech and literary tradition. A written script and a spoken text, it straddles ecriture as a system of signs to represent and make permanent human thought and speech and the spoken word as a fleeting, momentary representation of human experience. It is because Roland's language is so human that we are Modern Drama, 36 (1993) 383 CARA GARGANO able to feel sympathy for him while at the same time deploring his metaphorical blindness that is a foil for Christine's mutism. As Jean-Cleo Godin and Laurent Mailhot point out, theatre holds a peculiar relationship to literature as a body of work: "iI est lilteraire parce-qu'iI est ecrit, mais il est ecrit pour Hre joue et entendu, non pour etre lu.'" According to Godin and Mailhot, a play contains elements of both a written literary tradition and a spontaneous spoken language; as a genre it bridges a widening gap between spoken and written language and as a text its first reading in fully realized form must be on opening night in front of an audience. Roland Barthes posits ecrillire as an encoded system that reaffirms a social and literary slatus quo and turns writing into a fixed (mirror) image of itself, just as we will see Laberge's Roland attempt to do to his daughter Christine.' To counteract the negative implications of this aspect of writing, Barthes suggests trying to achieve a "degre zero" of writing which would not be an encoding of the existing system but would look towards freeing the work from this dominant structure. This raises interesting questions for a playwright , who depends on a sense of spontaneity and "living in the moment" to reflect and discuss social constructs. Laberge's answer is to use ecriture to interrogate and expose itself as code and to take this to a radical conclusion by mixing up notions of ecriture and parole to the point where, within her script, Roland's speech may function as both, while Christine's silence and pathetic efforts at speech become both eloquent parole and mythic writing. It is through this juxtaposition of parole and ecrilure that Laberge's theatre offers the opportunity for one to comment and act directly upon the other, and this commentary is fully realized only...