Jean Vauthier's The Struggling Protagonist: The Problem of Inner Narratives

Jean Vauthier's The Struggling Protagonist: The Problem of Inner Narratives KAREN LAUGHLIN Many recent dramatic texts are characterized by the presence ofinner narratives or stories recounted by one or more of the play's characters. These accounts, apparently set apart from the main action because of their narrative form, are in fact integrated into the dramatic and theatrical structures of the works which contain them in a variety of ways. A striking example of this phenomenon is provided by Jean Vauthier's The Struggling Protagonist or Fortissimo [Le Personnage combattant ou Fortissimo], which was published in 1955 and opened in Paris under the direction of Jean-Louis Barrault in 1956. As the play begins, the Protagonist, a professional writer, returns to a hotel room where he had once lived. Settling into these familiar surroundings, he announces his plan to write a novel about "that adventure ofa young man who, one night, near a station, became a poet.n, The ensuing portrayal ofan author at work and his rather startling contact with his past gives rise to a drama characterized by a complex interweaving of time frames, narrative perspectives , and even literary genres.' During the course of the play, the Protagonist not only composes and corrects several versions of the novel which is his present project, but also reads aloud and edits the manuscript of a short story which he had apparently written in this same room some ten or fifteen years in the past. The Struggling Protagonist thus contains two principal inner narratives - the novel and the short story - whose statuses as written narrative texts might seem to undermine the play's dramatic and theatrical qualities. It appears that Vauthier himself was aware of this problem. In his preface to the play he notes, " ... 'I must create a drama out of something anti-theatrical; life on the stage must arise from a reading presented to the audience'" (PC, p. 15). Vauthier's success in overcoming this obstacle is due in large part to the narratives themselves, which function as mirrors for the Protagonist, providing him with an image ofthe person he once was, or hoped and hopes even now to become.3 Vauthier: The Problem of Inner Narratives 37 However, the function of these inner narratives is not limited to the production of this awareness on the part of the play's main character. Following the distinctions set out in Lucien Diillenbach's study of reflexive narratives in the novel, the Protagonist's reading and composition of these texts may be seen to provide mirror reflections of the "fiction" [l'enoncll, the production/reception [l'enonciation], and the codes of the playas a whole.4 Making certain adjustments in Diillenbach's theory, in order to account for the specificity ofthe dramatic text, the following analysis therefore seeks to demonstrate the role of the inner narratives of The Struggling Protagonist "as element[s] of a metasignification allowing ... [the play] to take itself as theme" (RS, p. 62). There are many textual elements which serve as signals of this reflexive quality by setting up an analogy between the play and its inner narratives. The very fact that the Protagonist is a writer, and the identification ofhis narratives as literary works of art, establish a certain link between the accounts and the work in which they are contained (see RS, pp. 72-73). Moreover, the Protagonist's invocations, addressed to many of the objects in his room (see PC, pp. 92-93, IIo-II3, 187- 188), recall those ofthe young hero ofthe short story (see PC, pp. 75-76), thus demonstrating what Diillenbach calls a "textual reprise of one or several expressions symptomatic" of the work as a whole within a reflexive segment (RS, p. 65). But the most powerful signals of reflexivity emerge from the parallels between the play's setting and the settings of the short story and the three different versions of the novel. In fact, these texts reduplicate not only the furnishings of the Protagonist's shabby hotel room, but also certain key elements from off-stage, such as the sounds of the nearby train station and the noises coming from other parts of the hotel. Beyond their...