Off-Stage Voices: Interviews with Modern French Dramatists by Bettina Knapp, and: The Contemporary French Theater ed. by Bettina Knapp, and: Céline: Man of Hate by Bettina Knapp (review)

1 80 Comparative Drama apparently young, energetic scholar coming to grips once again with the possibility that there is more than one way to learn about the past. Guided by Herschel Baker, Godshalk may not be as startlingly new as he thinks he is, but his attack on the mass of Marlovian scholarship is reminiscent of Tambu'.rlaine's own dreams of infinite conquest. WILLIAM M. JONES University of Missouri-Columbia Bettina Knapp. Off-Stage Voices: Interviews with Modern French Dramatists, ed. Alba Amoia. Troy, N.Y.: The Whitson Publishing Co., 1975. Pp. iii + 324. $13.50. Bettina Knapp, ed. The Contempo­ rary French Theater. New York: Avon Equinox Books, 1973. Pp. 51 1. $4.95. Bettina Knapp. Celine: Man of Hate. University of Ala­ bama Press, 1974. Pp. vii + 262. $10.00. With these three practical hooks Professor Knapp surely establishes her reputation as a leading Franco-American popularizer. There will be monolingual American undergraduates who know French drama of the seventies only through her patient mediation; colleagues who find these works saving them hours of drudgery. These books, by conception and realization, skim their subject matter systematically. The review copies, presumably the finished volumes, are editorially unfinished. Extensive copy-editing and proofreading are needed in order to remove Gallicisms, inept translations, eccentric punctuation, and typo­ graphical errors. O.fJ-Stage Voices, potentially the most useful of the three, is not yet ready for either class or library on this account. However, anyone who can figure out what the French original must have been will find it helpful immediately. Mistitled, since nine of the 26 interviews are with directors and actors, this reference work brings together 20 previously published interviews of the past decade and six new ones (with Jacques Borel, Liliane Altan, Nathalie Sarraute, Jeanine Worms, Marie Bell, and Daniel Ivemel). Knapp is an adroit interviewer. She leads her subject either to revelation or exposure, as the case de­ serves; "when," she asks Arrabal, "did your megalomania first begin?" (p. 92) . By accretion and contrast, she demonstrates that Henry James was probably right when he pontificated that the quality of the writer determines the quality of the writing. Sarraute and Pinget are, as their work would lead us to expect, kindly, direct, sincere; serious about the interview, distanced about their own importance. Vauthier is pretentious. Gatti and Rezvani protest too much. Since Sarraute and Marguerite Duras are the only major writers interviewed (and their major contribu­ tion is to other genres) , all the rest sound as if they have an inflated no­ tion of their own reputation. However, this is partly an inescapable fea­ ture of the interview format. We should feel grateful to Knapp for having spent her time on a project so informative for the rest of us. For those who teach French drama in translation and need a sequel to Benedikt and Wellwarth's Modern French Theatre (which has better Reviews 1 8 1 translations) , Knapp's anthology will be useful also. She has chosen Cousin's Le Voyage de derriere la montagne, Vauthier's Le personnage combattant, Gatti's La vie imaginaire de l'eboueur Auguste G., Michel's L'Agression, and Rezvani's Body. The translations will suffice for a class­ room where the instructor can make rectifications from the original. In­ troductory materials provide passwords; e.g. of the Absurdists, "Plays, therefore, no longer analyzed man's anguish; they showed it. The play became the action" (p. 92) . ( Compare this with the third sentence in Off-Stage Voices: "French theatre throughout the centuries has been particularly beguiling," p. 1.) Knapp's commentaries on Celine's plots bear only peripherally on contemporary drama. This is quite simply because he wrote only one play L'Eglise ( 1928, 1933 ) , yet to be produced professionally. For an understanding of celine's literary merits and his inner motivations, read­ ers should still rely on Erika Ostrovsky's Celine and His Vision and Voyeur Voyant: A Portrait of Lauis-Ferdinand Celine. Knapp demon­ strates that celine's work, apart from Le Voyage au bout de la nuit, belongs not to literature, but to psychopathology. But once again, we should be grateful, for her careful plot summaries will spare...