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Prefacing Plays Michael Issacharoff Mais que font les préfaces? La logique n’en est-elle pas plus surprenante? Ne faudra-t-il pas en reconstituer un jour l’histoire et la typologie? Forment-elles un genre?1 S OME FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, Derrida raised the issue in those terms. My purpose here is to respond to the first of these questions, using a corpus which neither Derrida nor, I believe, anyone else has considered—modern playscripts. The latter throw a significant light on prefaces, particularly since they raise the question of voice in ways not manifest either in philosophy or in fiction. What then is a play preface? How does it differ from a prologue or from an interview with a playwright? Indeed, can it be differentiated from other types of authorial statement, such as theoretical writings, literary correspondence, diaries and so forth? And what about stage directions (otherwise known as didascalia), or even titles of plays? Are they all “ prefaces” of a kind? All the foregoing, of course, attempt to shape if not to govern literary response. Titles are the minimal “ governing texts” that channel our per­ ception of a (play)script. As I have shown elsewhere, titles function variously as signals of parody, intertextuality, dramatic sub-genre, and so on.2Ionesco’s title Macbett (with its two t’s) immediately elicits aware­ ness that its author will be using Shakespeare’s, play as an intertext in some form or other. Prologues (soliloquies or scenes) belong to the fic­ tional frame of the drama and consequently should be considered part of the dialogue. Didascalia or stage directions frame dialogue and attempt to determine its manner of delivery. Stage directions have a glossing function, and are thus a type of metatext. The length of the didascalic portion of the playscript varies considerably—from maximum fore­ grounding, as exemplified by Beckett’s Act Without Words whose didas­ calia displace dialogue completely, to Racine or Shakespeare who use stage directions very sparingly. All plays contain minimal didascalia that I have called the nominative function—the authorial naming of charac­ ters and division of the script into individual speeches.3Together with the title, the nominative function is the author’s basic means for imposing VOL. XXVII, No. 3 79 L ’E sprit C réateur focus and channelling the emphases and thus the meaning of the text. Literary correspondence has identifiable senders and receivers, though the act of publication enlarges the circle of the receivers. But prefaces, theoretical pronouncements in the form of interviews in the media, or collections of essays (such as Ionesco’s Notes et contrenotes , Adamov’s Ici et maintenant, Brecht’s Schriften zum Theater) as well as published correspondence, and the like, also attempt to influence or shape response. Titles and stage directions, though, form an integral part Of the playscript. For the purposes of performance, no play can do without a title (however misleading or playful) or the attributive func­ tion: we need to know at least the identity of the speaker and addressee (if not the circumstances and location of the utterance). One might wonder, then, whether it is possible to establish a distinc­ tion between the playscript, stricto sensu, and what is extraneous to it. At first glance, it seems problematic to claim that there can be any distinc­ tion between the various paratexts—be they theoretical writings, pub­ lished letters, interviews or, indeed, prefaces. The etymology certainly does not help: the preface (< praefatio—“ a saying beforehand” ), even if it may be “ read before” is rarely if ever “ said before” (written before) the playscript it frames. As Derrida reminds us, the preface is really a postface masquerading as a foreword (La Dissémination, p. 20). Seeing that all the other extraneous texts are also written or spoken after the playscript, is there then no natural hierarchy, no way of differentiating between preface and non-preface? To place all so-called extraneous texts in the same bag would seem to defy commonsense. Perhaps the only useful criterion is provided by the identity and status of the preface’s addressee. Whereas theoretical writings, inter­ views, and so forth, are addressed to the general public interested in the playwright and his work, the preface is a text published with the play­ script, addressed specifically to the reader, director and cast of a given play. An exaggerated illustration of this is provided by Beaumarchais’ Barbier de Séville whose preface is presented in the form of a letter to the reader: L’AUTEUR VÊTU MODESTEMENT ET COURBÉ, PRÉSENTANT SA PIÈCE AU LECTEUR Monsieur, J’ai l’honneur de vous offrir un nouvel opuscule de ma façon. Je souhaite vous ren­ contrer dans un de ces moments heureux où, dégagé de soins, content de votre santé, de vos 80 F a l l 1987 ISSACHAROFF affaires, de votre maîtresse, de votre dîner, de votre estomac, vous puissiez vous plaire un moment à la lecture de mon Barbier de Séville-, car il faut tout cela pour être homme amusable et Lecteur indulgent. Mais si quelque accident a dérangé votre santé; si votre état est compromis; si votre belle a forfait à ses serments; si votre dîner fut mauvais, ou votre digestion laborieuse, ah! laissez mon Barbier, ce n’est pas là l’instant; [...]4 As we shall see, though the play preface accompanies the playscript, it stands outside the fictional frame of the drama. Yet frames like rules are made to be broken. Hence the atypical case of Jarry who performed his foreword at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre on the opening night of Ubu roi and, in so doing, provided a literal instance of “ saying beforehand” (praefatio). The Jarry example serves to remind us that the norm is a two-channel system. By walking on stage and speaking his foreword, Jarry fictionalized himself, thereby discarding the regular nonfictionality of the authorial channel. The logical consequence of this is that Jarry’s famous prefatory comment, “ Quant à Faction, qui va com­ mencer, elle se passe en Pologne, c’est-à-dire Nulle Part,” should be taken as no more than the words of a fictional character, framing the rest of the fictional world. The dramatist thus seemingly undermined his own authority (on the night of the performance, at least).5To complicate mat­ ters still further, however, a brochure-programme was distributed to first-nighters, in which Jarry stated, among other things, that the set was designed to represent a hypothetical Somewhere, which equals Every­ where, especially one’s present location [“ Nulle Part est partout, et le pays où l’on se trouve, d’abord,” Tout Ubu, p. 22], So for the first-night audience who witnessed this twin-preface device, the experience was a referential labyrinth. They could choose between allowing the author’s program statement referential precedence over the author’s unreal real discursive presence—or vice versa! Matters have been somewhat simpler for audiences or readers since that famous first night. As the “ Discours d’Alfred Jarry” is not usually performed in productions of Ubu, the two prefaces now have equal referential status, unless one considers that the order in which they appear in editions of the play can determine a possi­ ble hierarchy.6 The prefatory norm is far less complex than what occurs in Ubu roi. The voice in the preface, in contrast to the dialogue, can be identified (permanently) as that of the author who uses this channel to address existents who are readers of the script—namely, the general reader, director and cast. Furthermore, the playwright is speaking to them either about VOL. XXVII, NO. 3 81 L ’E sprit C réateur persons or things which exist in the fictional universe he has created or, in some cases, as we shall see, about extratextual, that is, real-world existents . The preface is thus a real speech act distinct from the fictional speech acts of the dialogue. Like the didascalia, the preface is therefore a “ serious” utterance, as Austin would say. Unlike participants in real speech events, though, the preface’s addressees constantly change, since they are not fixed in time and space. In short, the preface is a partly open-ended speech act. What is significant, then, about the preface of a literary work—but more so in a play than in a novel—is that we are dealing with a nonfictional voice in a fictional context. I say more so, since prefaces of twentieth-century novels are frequently fictional or contain fictional elements, as in the “ Avertissement des éditeurs” of Sartre’s La Nausée, (completely fictional), the “ Avant-'propos” of Vian’s L ’Ecume desjours (a mixture of statements intentionally absurd [“ l’histoire est entière­ ment vraie puisque je l’ai imaginée d’un bout à l’autre” ], surrealist ones [“ une projection de la réalité, en atmosphère biaise et chauffée, sur un plan de référence irrégulièrement ondulé...” ] and demonstrably false information [“ La Nouvelle-Orléans, 10 mars 1946” : Vian never set foot in the United States])7 or in the playful “ prologue” of Robbe-Grillet’s Djinn, that half “ pretends” to be outside the fictional frame but that, despite the authentic details in the footnotes and references to the “ Ecole américaine de la rue de Passy,” is nevertheless very much part of the fic­ tion that it claims to frame.8 The fictionality of the novel preface is sometimes taken even further. Nabokov, for example, makes a fictitious character, one John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., the author of the (totally fictional) Foreword, who claims that Humbert Humbert is the author of the pages that he, John Ray, Jr. has been requested to edit after Humbert Humbert’s death. Using the cover of this character, Nabokov adds a mixture of serious statements (“ ...not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed the robust philistine who is conditioned by modern conventions into accepting with­ out qualms a lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by their absence here.” ) and satirical ones (“ ‘Lolita’ should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply our­ selves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.”).9The fictionalized prefaces favored by Nabokov in novels such as Lolita and Pale Fire (both are signed by fictitious characters) should be contrasted with the same author’s prac82 F a l l 1987 ISSACHAROFF tice in his only play, The Waltz Invention, whose Foreword is signed by Nabokov and is mostly “ serious,” that is, it noticeably avoids the fic­ tional elements used in the novel prefaces. It would be difficult, I think, to find many theatrical parallels of referential playfulness, at least in French drama. My point is that theat­ rical prefaces tend to be more “ serious” (in Austin’s sense) than novelistic ones, the distinction between the real voice in the play preface and the fictional voices of the dialogue being more clearly marked. As I have shown elsewhere, though, what can be found from time to time—in plays by such authors as Ionesco, Ring Lardner, J. P. Donleavy and others—is unruly didascalia that are allowed to slip out of their charac­ teristic subservience to the dialogue, acquiring virtual (and humorous) autonomy.1 0In such generally parodie practice, exemplified by the case of the non-striking clock in La Cantatrice chauve, the distinction between fictional dialogue and non-fictional stage directions is inten­ tionally blurred. But such instances are exceptions to the rule. As a general principle, it is probably true to say that the more “ experimental” the dialogue is, the more the didascalia and preface need to be “ straight,” so as to facilitate stage production. Plays such as Stoppard’s Dogg’s Hamlet, where the stage directions “ translate” the otherwise incomprehensible dialogue, provide an amusing illustration of this.1 1 Apart from the fact that the speaker and addressees are real people and the persons and things mentioned in the preface exist either in the playscript or in the real world, the “ seriousness” (non-fictionality) of the play preface is demonstrated by the fact that it has often served as the author’s platform for the discussion of politics or aesthetics. Shaw’s plays are the locus classicus of the use of the preface as a forum for polit­ ical debate. His prefaces are often lengthy essays on the political issues of the day—in plays such as The Doctor’s Dilemma, Getting Married and Saint Joan. Tom Stoppard goes further by mentioning in prefaces the names of real people who are either characters in his plays: Lech Walesa, General Jaruzelski (in Squaring the Circle), Lenin, James Joyce and Tristan Tzara (in Travesties) or, as in Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Russian dissidents Victor Fainberg and Vladimir Bukovsky, whose experiences in Soviet psychiatric “ hospitals” provided the inspiration for his play:1 2 The off-stage hero of Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, referred to as ‘my friend C’, is Vladimir Bukovsky. The Bukovsky campaign, which was supported by many people in Vol. XXVII, No. 3 83 L ’E sprit C réateur several countries, achieved its object in December 1976, when he was taken from prison and sent to the West. In June while we were rehearsing I met Mr Bukovsky in London and invited him to call round at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s rehearsal rooms in Covent Garden. He came and stayed to watch for an hour or two. He was diffident, friendly, and helpful on points of detail in the production, but his presence was disturbing. For people working on a piece of theatre, terra firma is a self-contained world even while it mimics the real one. That is the necessary condition of making theatre, and it is also our luxury. There was a sense of worlds colliding. I began to feel embarrassed. One of the actors seized up in the middle of a speech touching on the experiences of our visitor, and found it impossible to continue. But the incident was not fatal. The effect wore off, and, on the night, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour had recovered its nerve and its own reality. (Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, pp. 7-8) Prefaces such as these (despite Austin’s hasty comments about fictional discourse being necessarily “ parasitic”)1 3 fulfill the most stringent criteria for definite reference, namely, the axioms of existence and iden­ tification. The axiom of existence requires the existence of a particular object to which an utterance applies; the axiom of identification specifies that the addressee “ be given sufficient means to identify the object from the speaker’s utterance.” 1 4Clearly, the Stoppard preface just cited owes its effect to the separation of the non-fictional and fictional channels— the authorial voice vs. those of the characters. Had Stoppard followed Jarry’s example and performed his preface on stage on the opening night, its (non-fictional) impact would have been lost. Perhaps the most interesting example of a “ serious” preface is one which is far better known than the play it purportedly introduces: Hugo’s Préface de Cromwell whose important discussion of Romantic aesthetics has completely displaced the play Cromwell, which is rarely, if ever, staged, and perhaps rarely even read. This preface has subverted the regularly subservient role of the foreword, becoming instead the word, an instance of the non-fictional channel ousting the fictional. The referents in the “ serious” mode of twentieth-century play prefaces range from aesthetics to ideology, from staging to sociology. Such authors as Cocteau and Genet are concerned with the use of the dramatic medium or specifically with how their own play is staged; hence Genet’s series of prefaces, “ Comment jouer Les Bonnes,” “Pour jouer Les Nègres,” “ Comment jouer Le Balcon.” Genet provides the most detailed instructions in the case of Les Paravents, in which he includes a page of “ Commentaires” after all but three of the 16 Tableaux of the play. Cocteau is concerned above all with the stage and its possibilities, and tends to use the preface to make important dramaturgical state­ 84 Fa l l 1987 ISSACHAROFF ments, as in La Voix humaine, Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel and Les Parents terribles. Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias exemplifies the farcical treatment of a sociological problem—the birth rate in France after World War I. Prefaces have also served as the locus for the discus­ sion of major political events of this century including Vietnam and its impact on American society (Adamov’s O ff Limits), a fascist massacre in Italy (Dario Fo’s Accidental Death o f an Anarchist), recent events in Poland including the rise and fall of Solidarity, the advent of Jaruzelski, Russian dissidents (Tom Stoppard’s Squaring the Circle and Every Good Boy Deserves Favour), and so on. Of course, many twentieth-century French dramatists deliberately avoid prefaces. Some never use them: Giraudoux, Anouilh, Audiberti, Ionesco, Ghelderode, Sarraute, Vian, Beckett, Pinget and Sartre; and the list could easily be extended.1 5 Others, such as Genet, confine com­ ments to problems of stage production, even in an overtly political play, Les Paravents, whose topic is the Algerian war. In comparing contem­ porary practice with earlier French theatre, it is interesting to observe that Racine wrote prefaces for all of his plays, Corneille included an “ Examen” for nearly all of his, while Molière wrote prefaces for three plays—Les Précieuses ridicules, L ’Ecole des Femmes, and Tartuffe and used the stage itself as preface in L ’Impromptu de Versailles and in La Critique de L ’Ecole desfemmes. The use of the stage as preface subverts both stage and preface, since the two typically separate channels are fused into one. On the other hand it might seem surprising that playwrights such as Ionesco, who have not hesitated to “ explain” or defend their works in the media, avoid prefaces. But the decision is significant. It means that the script is considered self-sufficient by its author, or as Molière tells us in his preface to L ’Ecole des femmes, the dramatist prefers to com­ municate through a different channel, in the case in point, through La Critique de l’Ecole desfemmes. The preface to L ’Ecole desfemmes thus both differs (from the norm) and defers (the occasion for responding to the playwright’s critics). It may also be a sign of implicit respect for free­ dom—the reader’s and the director’s. For a writer like Sartre who attached considerable importance to the role and the freedom of the reader, prefaces would have seemed out of place. Sartre is an interesting case in point in which it is again possible to contrast playful practice in a novel (in La Nausée, as we have seen) and serious practice in drama—in the only case where he used the prefatory Vol. XXVII, No. 3 85 L ’E sprit C réateur channel—in the “ Note préliminaire” to Les Séquestrés d ’Altona. While the “ Avertissement” in La Nausée is entirely fictional, the note in Les Séquestrés raises precisely a delicate referential problem. As Sartre points out, he did not intend to refer to the real Von Gerlach: he had used the name, imagining it to be fictitious. He later discovered that what he thought was an imaginary name belonged to a real person, and what made matters worse, to a German, Hellmuth von Gerlach, who had courageously fought against the nazis. As I have pointed out elsewhere, this example demonstrates that successful reference is not contingent on intention. The example also shows a very clear case of demarcation between the non-fictional channel of the preface and the fictional mode of the playscript. Or perhaps one should say here between the nonfictional channel and the intended fictional mode of the playscript. Despite Sartre’s liminal statement, however, it is evident that it may not prevent his text from referring otherwise than intended. If, as noted earlier, titles and didascalia can be seen as mini-prefaces, there is what might be called a form of theatrical maxi-preface. I am thinking of a handful of instances, from Molière to the moderns, in which the dramatist has decided to subvert the normal authorial channel (of the preface and stage directions), choosing instead a mode of selffictionalization . I am, of course, referring to the series of impromptus inaugurated by Molière with his L ’Impromptu de Versailles, that con­ tinue with Giraudoux (L ’Impromptu de Paris), Ionesco (L’Impromptu de I’Alma) and Cocteau (L ’Impromptu du Palais-Royal). The referential status of texts such as these is particularly significant. The Molière play exemplifies the greatest degree of self-fictionalization possible, seeing that not only did its author use his own name for one of the characters, but he played the part himself. In this respect, one could argue that L ’Impromptu de Versailles is comparable to Jarry’s perform­ ance of his own Ubu roi preface. It differs from it, of course, insofar as Molière, unlike Jarry, inserted himself completely into his own creation. Giraudoux, Ionesco and Cocteau did so to a lesser extent. Ionesco is the least inhibited of the moderns, since he lends his name to one of the characters, thereby putting himself on stage, though he did not play the part himself. Giraudoux uses Jouvet’s theatre company as his cover, while Cocteau, more subtly than the others, subverts the stage/ auditorium division, using the device of a spectator-actress in the auditorium as his mouthpiece. This strategy enables the dramatist to have the pseudo-spectator comment on what is happening on stage, as if 86 F a l l 1987 ISSACHAROFF she is outside the frame. A theatrical equivalent of having your cake and eating it! * * * In examining types of play prefaces, I have deliberately chosen exam­ ples across time and place in an attempt to discover the norms and limits of what amounts to a discursive genre. I have tried to show that the preface is distinct from other paratexts—be they prologues, titles, stage directions, correspondence, essays or the like. If one puts aside the exceptional practice of fictionalized prefaces, which are in any case usually confined to novels, one can conclude that the play preface con­ stitutes an authorial channel referentially distinct from the playscript. The distinction lies in the difference between the addressees of the two parts of the playscript. The dialogue is addressed to the audience, whereas the preface is addressed to the reader of the playscript and thus disappears in performance. Furthermore, the distinction between the two becomes apparent if one applies the criterion of definite reference, which is a discursive characteristic of the preface as opposed to the dialogue. Play prefaces are thus usually “ serious” : their referents almost always exist—either in the real world or in the fictional world of the drama. This means that prefaces, be they the hyperrealistic Stoppard variety or those whose remarks are restricted to the existents of an imaginary universe, qualify as loci of what philosophers of language call definite reference.1 6 It thus seems reasonable to place prefaces in almost the same category as stage directions, namely, a form of quasi-valid speech acts—quasi, since they are necessarily open-ended, given that the addressees are not fixed, but must change constantly. But that is true of most published texts. The limits of the play preface as genre are perhaps exemplified by Hugo, Jarry and Molière—Hugo because his preface outdid his play, Molière because he turned a preface into a play, and Jarry because he staged his person as preface.1 7 University o f Western Ontario Vol. XXVII, No. 3 87 L ’E sprit C réateur Notes 1. Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 14. On the general issue of the preface in (nineteenth-century) fiction and other non-dramatic texts, see Henri Mitterand, “ La Préface et ses lois: avant-propos romantiques,” in his Le Discours du roman (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), pp. 21-34; Claude Duchet, “ L’Illusion historique. L’enseignement des préfaces (1815-1832),” Revue d ’Histoire Littéraire de la France LXXV (1975), 245-267; Ora Avni, “Dico vobis: Préface, pacte, pari,” Romanic Review LXXV (1984), 119-130; G. Genette, Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987). 2. See my Le Spectacle du discours (Paris: José Corti, 1985), pp. 41-48. 3. Cf. M. Issacharoff, “Texte théâtral et didascalecture,” M L N 96: 4 (1981), 809-823. 4. Lettre modérée sur la chute et la critique du Barbier de Séville, in Beaumarchais, Théâtre complet (Paris: Gallimard [Bibliothèque de la Pléiade], 1964), p. 151. 5. “ Discours d’Alfred Jarry prononcé à la première représentation d’Ubu roi au Théâtre de l’Œuvre le 10 décembre 1896,” in Jarry, Tout Ubu (Paris: Le Livre de poche, 1962), p. 21. 6. Surprisingly, both the referential status and the hierarchy of the two liminal texts have been overlooked by Jarry scholars. See, for example, Michel Arrivé, Les Langages de Jarry (Paris: Klincksieck, 1972), pp. 255-6. 7. Boris Vian, L ’Ecume des jours (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1963), p. 5. The March 1946 date is plausible (excerpts of L ’Ecume appeared in Les Temps Modernes in October the same year, and the novel was published by Gallimard in April 1947). The indications of place, however, both in the Avant-propos and on the last page of the novel (i.e., Memphis and Davenport) are fictitious. Cf. Michel Rybalka, Boris Vian. Essai d ’interprétation et de documentation (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1969), pp. 208-9. 8. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Djinn (Paris: Minuit, 1981), pp. 7-10. 9. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Medallion Books, 1966), Foreword, pp. 5-7. 10. See my “ Stage Codes,” in M. Issacharoff & Robin F. Jones, eds. Performing Texts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987). 11. Tom Stoppard, Dogg’s Hamlet (London: Faber, 1980). 12. Tom Stoppard, Squaring the Circle (London: Faber, 1984), pp. 9-18; Travesties (Lon­ don: Faber, 1975), pp. 11-13; Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (New York: Grove Press, 1978), pp. 5-9. 13. J. L. Austin, H ow to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 22. 14. John Searle, Speech Acts. A n Essay in the Philosophy o f Language (London & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 82. 15. Thus, for example, contrary to what might be expected, Dadaists and Surrealists such as Roussel, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Tristan Tzara, Vitrac (except in Les Mystères de l’amour) and Picasso also eschew prefaces. 16. On the issue of “definite reference” (or “definite descriptions”), see, for example, Keith S. Donnellan, “ Reference and Definite Descriptions,” The Philosophical Review LXXV (July 1966), 281-304. 17. A shorter version of this paper was read at an International Colloquium in TwentiethCentury French Studies hosted by Duke University in March 1987. It is a pleasure to record my thanks here for the invitation extended to me. 88 F a l l 1987 ...

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