L’Autre scène: Le théâtre de Marguerite Duras by Lilian Papin (review)

L ’E sprit C réateur Liliane Papin. L ’A utre scène: L e théâtre de M arguerite D uras. Stanford French and Italian Studies 54. Saratoga: ANMA Libri & Co., 1988. Pp. 165. This is an elegant and persuasive reading of the theatre of Marguerite Duras by a critic who combines an undisguised empathy for the Durasian world with a sound knowledge of performance. Such a pairing allows Liliane Papin to ease Duras’s some 20 dramatic pieces out of the usual critical realm which sees them as part of one self-engendering text into an analytical domain which locates the unobtrusive but nevertheless potent theatricality in each potential production. Papin divides her study—the first monograph devoted to Duras’s theatre—into five areas of concern. Initially establishing Duras’s complete break with the conventions of stage realism, Papin examines among other aspects of this rupture the creation of a new kind of character —such as the Interrogator in L ’Amante anglaise. Observor, and marginal to what might be termed Duras’s stage “action,” this witness like the public can never reconstruct the motivations of the main characters. He/she (as is true, for example, of the voices off in L ’Eden Cinéma) make palpable through their own seduction by the principles the para­ doxical sweetness of the on-stage madness. Papin’s second chapter, which looks at love as a fundamental topos, shows how the dialectic of fusion and separation characterizing love in Duras’s work functions not only on the thematic level but also as a tenet of dramatic construction. Characters such as AnneMarie Stretter and the Vice Consul in India Song, for example, who are dispossessed of their selves in the act of loving, are also without voice in the working out of the play. Off­ stage voices speak in characters’places: indeed they speak at odds with what the characters “do.” The notion of “doing” as discussed by Papin in chapters treating the “political” and the “sacred” is, in fact, shown to be inoperable in any conventional sense. According to Papin, in Duras’s theatre “political” means refusing to do. She convincingly argues that even the most seemingly committed political pieces (Un homme est venu me voir and Yes, peut-être) posit characters whose real radicalism stems from their passivity. Likewise, the sacredness which Papin accords to Duras’s theatre pieces lies in their stasis, in the invention of a stage space which is but the space of memory or of unchanging myth. This sacredness would seem to confer upon the actors the status of officiant. However, Duras’s actors do not transport the spectators to a higher or transcendant plane. As Papin qualifies in her fifth chapter focused on aspects of staging, the actors, when they are per­ forming as they should, serve as the connection between the unconscious resonances in the author’s voice and the public’s imagination. Throughout—as also in the six lively interviews with actors, directors, and Duras herself appended to the end of the study—Papin returns to key notions which define Duras’s theatre for her. She insists, for instance, on the absence of any moral lesson or any attempt to transcribe or prescribe normalcy. In this Papin refutes those critics who would wish to see Duras’s theatre as a feminist statement. Like Claude Régy, the director who has worked almost in symbiosis with Duras, Papin places the author in the context of the post-modern theatre practice which foregrounds writing while simultaneously neutralizing more “com­ fortable” aspects of drama—at least comfortable for the audience and critics—such as plot, decor, and especially characterization (or psychology). This may well be the intent of Duras’s work. And Papin eloquently articulates the importance of performing Durasian texts as musical partitions, with the actors operating as instruments in the text’s service. Nevertheless, Papin’s acuity in de-constructing Aristotelian-associated dramatic codes does not prevent her from thinking about charac­ terization in more traditional terms. In fact, in all five sections of her monograph some of 100 Sprin g 1990 Book Re v iew s the most probing comments reveal the temptation of...