Koltès, une poétique des contraires (review)

Françoise Bernard looks in careful detail at the whole range of Bernard-Marie Koltès's writing: his early dramatic adaptations of Gorky, Dostoevsky, and The Song of Songs, his narrative texts and film scenarios, and his translations and adaptations of Shakespeare, as well as the more familiar major plays. The work originates from her thesis, presented in 2008 and here introduced by her supervisor, Marie-Claude Hubert. Researchers will particularly welcome the informative account of the relatively little-known early work. Bernard has worked assiduously in the archives, especially but by no means exclusively the Bibliothèque-Médiathèque de Metz, to bring together unpublished texts, early manuscript versions, and correspondence, and has also benefited from unpublished material supplied by François Koltès, Bernard-Marie's brother. The argument of the book is not an unfamiliar one: that Koltès's writing resists assimilation to conventional categories, and rejoices in the indeterminate, the fragmented, and the disordered, and in the exploitation and explosion of oppositions. Bernard takes the proposition systematically through her accounts of his approach to space and time, pointing to the jumbled traces of real referents and real history through which Koltès seeks to raise real life to the status of myth. She explores perceptively how he plays with stage time, contracting and expanding the duration of his dramas through flashback, ellipsis, and retrospective monologue, in order to blur the frontiers between reality and dream. She has distinctive comment to offer on his presentation of the terrain of the body, and its transformations by the writer's imagination; her text provides sections on his grotesque distortions of physicality, his disproportionate emphasis on the corporeal extremities, his foregrounding of bodily fluids, an animalization of characters that, she argues, goes beyond mere metaphor, and, of course, his evocation of gender instability. Relations between characters are shown to be marked by the struggle for dominance, violence and intensity, and, again, oscillation and instability. A substantial account of the language of Koltès's texts includes comment on the generic interpenetration he practises between novel and drama, and the mistrust of language spelt out at every level of his plays. Characters confess to their inability to control words spilled out under the pressure of their own aggression, or the drive to lie. Interpretations proliferate among the mixture of registers, the tension between familiar and formal structures, and the striking admixture of foreign languages. A discussion of the musicality of his language shows the skill with which all contradictions come together to create the distinctive oneiric mode in which his drama operates. The value of Bernard's study is in the detail and tight focus that together make the best theses, although that necessarily comes at the expense of larger perspectives. This is a French Koltès, written in the ambit of scholarly studies produced in France and in French. The bibliography is correspondingly limited in scope, and anglophone researchers may regret the absence of any attempt to capture the full European and indeed international impact of his work, or to explain how and why his work has had such resonance for contemporaries.