Le Sens et les Signes: Etude sur le théâtre de Marivaux by Jean Terrasse (review)

Henry Reed, for one, that 'the very accomplishment of Reed's cultivation of the Eliotean manner seems to hinder the development of a personal voice' (p 49), and of Terence Tiller that 'the life of the surface is overdeveloped , with the consequence that feeling is less effectively brought into focus' (p 52). To be avoided was the painfulness of the everyday and immediate. Laurie Lee escapes into an innocence that 'actually involves a prettification' (p 171), Lawrence Durrell focuses on 'heraldic' images immune from the 'destructive element' of time (p 41), and Vernon Watkins writes that 'I could never write a poem dominated by time' even as he concedes that 'Natural speech may be excellent, but who will remember it unless it is allied to something artificial?' (p 129). The myth and ritual of Christianitycould also provide shelter, and Tolley observes that 'a related tendency is seen in the large number of works that explore the world of childhood as ... a mysterious source of a rightness of feeling that experience and sophistication have destroyed' (p 281). Buried in this rush for shelter was a whole literary generation who either had to wait until later to write a poetry of more candid, precise observation (as the Movement poets did), or who went largely unappreciated if they wrote such poetry in the forties (as Bernard Spencer and R.S. Thomas did). Ironically, it is this kind of poetry that constitutes the finest of the work cited in The Poetry ofthe Forties; Tolley's work sends one back most eagerly to the forties poems of Spencer and R.S. Thomas, of Alun Lewis and of (in part) Lawrence Durrell. But theirs were not the voices that people wanted to hear. Much more characteristic of forties poetry are these lines from Roy Fuller'S 'Soliloquy in an Air Raid: which embody in their own verbal schizophrenia the problem they diagnose: Something was set between the words and the world I watched today; perhaps the necrotomy Of love or the spectre of pretence; a vagueness; But murdering their commerce like a tariff. (JOHN REIBETANZ) lean Terrasse. Le Sens elles Signes: Etude sur Ie theiitre de Marivaux Editions Naaman. 1)6. $15.00 Dans ce petit livre, Jean Terrasse presente une premiere lecture semiologique complete du theatre de Marivaux. n y combine 1 / un survol des principaux ecrits theoriques, choisis pour leur utilite dans l'analyse des textes dramatiques; 2 / les resultats d'un depouillement minutieux de la critique marivaudienne recente; et 3 / une connaissance ala fois sure et solide d'un corpus de quelques 38 pieces au textes theatraux de Marivaux. L'entreprise est ambitieuse, car Terrasse ne vise rien de mains qU'une HUMANITIES 135 nouvelle definition du marivaudage. Son approche s'annonce des Ie titre: en partant des structures profondes de l'oeuvre, Iii ou reside son unite et sa signification, Le Sens et les signes suit un trajet vers les structures de surface que sont les personnages, les elements concrets de la representation et Ie dialogue marivaudien. Dans sa conclusion, Terrasse propose une nouvelle typologie du theatre de Marivaux laquelle, etant fondee sur une analyse actantielle des pieces, differe considerablement de celles proposees auparavant par Fleury, Arland et Ratermanis. L'etude se divise en six chapitres: 1/ Les Conflits; 2/ Les Actants; 3 / Les Fonctions; 4 / L'Intrigue; 5/ Le Signe: L'Espace-Temps et les personnages; 6 / Le Dialogue. Chaque chapitre commence par la presentation d'un probleme theorique (l'ideologie au theatre; pour un systeme actantiel du theatre de Marivaux; les fonctions "narratives"; reperage des sequences de I'intrigue; l'analyse d'une representation theatrale; Ie 'style' d'un dramaturge ), suivie par une serie d'applications selectives aux pieces individuelles . Le resultat en est tout a fait heureux, car de la confrontation theorie(s)/texte(s) sortent des ape,,;us importants sur, par exemple, la part sous-estimee des conflits ideologiques chez Marivaux, Ie cumul des fonctions de sujet et d'opposantdans les comedies iI obstacles interiorises et l'illustration de I'utilite du schema actantiel dans des enquetes d'attribution (La Commere et La Provinciale). II ne fait aucune doute que Le Sens et les signes comble une lacune...