Le Théâtre de Dérision by Emmanuel Jacquart (review)

Book Reviews ..LE THEATRE DE DERISION, by Emmanuel Jacquart. Gallimard, 1974.313 pp. Criticism has long been prone to adopting mix-and-match methodologies. In discussing any artistic movement, early critics will analyze the work of each of the member artists, in order to characterize the whole. Later critics will then generalize about themes and techniques, choosing examples at will. So with Le Theatre de derision, which will inevitably be compared with Martin Esslin's Theatre ofthe Absurd; the former mixes, and the latter matches. Esslin, to whom Jacquart pays tribute, was the first critic to see the relationship between postwar non-realistic plays of various countries, and his book remains indispensable for anyone interested in the phenomenon of the absurd (for which derision is a poor synonym). Esslin devotes separate chapters to Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov, Genet; Jacquart omits the last of these (as did Esslin in the first draft of his own book), and Genet's affinities do today seem more lyrical and grandiose. In analyzing the different plays of his giants, Esslin comes to various conclusions about the movement. Jacquart presents several of the same conclusions more systematically - metaphysics of the absurd, tonality of the tragicomic , suspicion about the efficacity of language. Using these characteristics as definitional, Jacquart goes on to analyze the various rejections of the Theater of Derision, its Themes and Attitudes, Characters, Subject Matter, Techniques, Style, Dialogue, Language, and Structures. Esslin wrote his book with infectious enthusiasm for a recent drama that was both theatrical and conceptual, radically new and yet linked to certain traditions. Jacquart writes his book with systematic lucidity about a less recent drama that has been widely read, played, and criticized. A thorough scholar, Jacquart acknowledges many of his predecessors, and yet he inadvertently conveys the impression that his analyses are original, when they are often syntheses of Esslin and his successors. It is in the last third of his book that Jacquart makes an original commentary , by way of the concerns of contemporary French criticism - language, 393 394 BOOK REVIEWS structures, semiology. Stressing that language is only one detail of the total theatrical effect, Jacquart examines his dramatist's predilection for verbal oppositions, stichomythia, repetition, associational rather than logical dialogue. He analyzes the oral quality of their language, as well as the new theatrical importance of stage silence. Following Umberto Eco, Jacquart maintains that plays of Derision are deliberately "open" or polysemic. With a minimum of jargon, Jacquart attempts to describe the "code" of the Theater of Derision, which he finds is sensual and theatrical, rather than verbal and logical. Finally, Jacquart swiftly summarizes more contemporary theater, from Arrabal to Grotowski, which seeks to escape from literature. Retrospectively, then, the Theater of Derision is the last theater movement that can be linked with literature . Jacquart's book is a useful and systematic analysis of its history, methods, and attitudes. RUBY COHN University of California, Davis, SIX DRAMATISTS IN SEARCH OF A LANGUAGE: STUDIES IN DRAMATIC LANGUAGE, by Andrew K. Kennedy. Cambridge at the University Press, 1975. xiv & 271 pp. $6.50 paper, $16.50 hardcover. In the conclusion to this book of rich insights into the word struggles of modern English playwrights, Andrew Kennedy makes a plea for the development of a method of criticizing dramatic language. His book is a challenging essay at this desirable object. Yet his title implies a search for the illusory: and so it turns out to be. Moreover, the reader's own implicit search beneath Kennedy's excellent arguments is for some whole notion of what language must be and do in a play, for what makes it different from the language of a novel, or even of a packet of cereal. It is not until the penultimate page that there is a reference to the implications of stage communication in the "speech-act" - "the words uttered, the frame of utterance, and the effect of the utterance on the hearer" - and then only "in the play," not in the theatre. The mimetic power of words, the context of the theatre Dccasion, and their force acting upon a spectator's perceptions, are mIssmg. Kennedy points conclusively to a "crisis of language" in all the playwrights of...