The Transparency of the Text: Contemporary Writing for the Stage ed. by Donia Mounsef, Josette Féral (review)

is an hors-sujet in this volume. Kiera Vaclavik’s well-documented treatment of the underground in children’s literature of the nineteenth century is grounded in the literature of Antiquity. Reading Alfred Jarry’s Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, Ben Fisher enumerates allusions to Jarry’s literary circle, to British scientists, and to Verne. In the twentieth-century section, Louise Lyle studies J.-H. Rosny’s concept of the Earth as a text “in which mankind’s apocalyptic destiny may be read” (219) while it unfolds according to Darwin and Lamarck. Humans sink into apathy as superior species arise to exterminate them. Rosny thus anticipates both the ecocriticism and biocentric inhumanism of our day. David Walker illuminates Gide’s Nourritures terrestres and L’immoraliste in an outstanding essay that explains how Gide literally returned to the soil while those two works were composed, managing a farm inherited from his mother in 1895, with the advice of a long-time agriculturist friend. Martin Hurcombe concludes the volume with another fine study that demonstrates how André Malraux’s conversion from a Communist fellow traveler to an ardent nationalist serving De Gaulle developed during the period that his Asian and anti-fascist novels were composed. Malraux’s vivid, vicarious experience of humanity’s bond with the Earth in the French maquis and the Spanish peasantry under Franco, merged with his evolving metaphysical humanism . The Antimémoires (1967) show how Malraux’s sense of fraternity expands to comprehend a national community. Broader framing would have enriched the introduction. For example, before the Enlightenment, eruptions and earthquakes were considered sequelae of humanity’s fall; since the nineteenth century, the French regional novel concretizes the Ancients’ cosmological vision of Concordia discors. Marjorie Nicolson’s forgotten classic Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Cornell, 1959) helps put things in perspective. Independent scholar Laurence M. Porter MOUNSEF, DONIA, and JOSETTE FÉRAL, eds. The Transparency of the Text: Contemporary Writing for the Stage. Yale French Studies 112. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2007. ISBN 978-0-300-11819-3. Pp. 174. $30. This well-conceived volume, divided into three sections, focuses on what distinguishes contemporary French theatrical texts from other writings for the stage, both from the distant past and from most of the twentieth century. Authors of the articles are especially concerned with the wild diversity of ways in which language is used in these texts. Plays are not constructed to represent the world but to show how knowledge of the world is inaccessible. Texts are no longer dialogues but are rather constituted of any utterance imaginable. Actors’ voices and bodies are not simple vessels through which an author’s words flow but are, for the playwrights discussed here, inextricably intertwined with the text. Part 1, “Avant and Après Garde,” revisits several twentieth-century French theatrical movements and emphasizes the current rupture with much theatrical tradition, including the theater of the absurd, the reign of the director, and the conventional use of myth. The articles discuss innovative forms of writing and performance and how new theatrical works are liberated from many traditional constraints. In some plays dialogue is replaced by hybrid texts where, for example, stage directions 176 FRENCH REVIEW 85.1 are spoken. Other works, epic in nature, are comprised of interminable lists and disjointed monologues, creating a theater of totality. Writing is performance and mystery, and breath is as important as words. Works by authors Valère Novarina and Claude Régy are analyzed to show how text and performance converge to create new modes of expression where writing, voice, and body exist as one. In the section entitled “(Under)writing the Stage,” attention is paid to authors whose works exemplify the explosion and expansion of the theatrical text in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. An article on Michel Vinaver shows that, for this playwright, no single point of view is enough to convey a situation. For him, fragmented scenes and open interpretations express the instability of perception. The study of Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose characters struggle within the confines of language to express desire, illustrates how theater can effectively represent...