Sociocritique de la traduction: Théâtre et altérité au Québec (1968-1988) by Annie Brisset (review)

Book Reviews 473 between good and bad art and refuses to differentiate between bourgeois and workingclass culture. His belief in enlightenment is not impaired by any suspicion of its destructive potential, as exposed by Horkhcimer and Adorno. While in Pinter's Birthday Party the individual collapses under the pressure of the social nonn, Beatie Bryant in Roots achieves individuation. While Pinter's protagonist ends speechless. since he rejects language as an ideological .construct, Beatie makes the dialectic leap from citation to free speech. Popper and the dystopias from Huxley to Orwell denounced the totalitarian danger latent in utopian dreams, while Marcuse and the student revolution proclaimed their end. Wesker, by contrast, staged historical cycles ranging from the belief in utopia to the failure of its implementation and the attendant disillusionment, while continuing to insist on the necessity of a vision which provides meaning. The idealist Wesker, who believes in the unity underlying the diversity of appearances, is frightened by postmodemist pluralism proclaiming the equality of differing points of view and forms of art as well as lhe autonomy of the part over and against the whole. Worried aboUl the fragmentary character of the work of art, Wesker relies on vision to impart a premonition of the order of the whole. The decentring of the subject and the critique of essentialist humanism maintained by poststructuralist philosophy cannot shake his idealist humanist convictions. His plays stand out against the new political theatre of the 1970S and 19805, which developed on the fringe and staged situationist and feminist views. The reason for his lack of success from the 1970S onwards lies in the discord between his convictions and the prevalent thinking of the time rather than in the di~acticism of·his characters, which is balanced by the contrapuntal mise ell scene of contradictory points of view. From The Four Seasons (1966) onwards Wesker repeatedly displaced the focus of his plays to the private sphere and confronted his audience with repressed problems such as old age and death or the meaning of Jewish identity in a Christian context. Andy Cobham already demonstrated idealist self~delu si on, but only the fate of the anchorite in Caritas (198 I) clearly exposed the danger of spiritual immuring by ideology. The individual's loss of freedom in the socialist states increasingly provoked Wesker's criticism. His political faith finally shrunk to "a body of humanist thought, a roll call of rational, sound, sane actions" (Distinctions, 1985). This position, too, is opposed by the antihumanisl dramas of younger playwrights such as Brenton or Barker. HEINER ZIMMERMANN, HEIDELBERG UNlVERSITY ANNIE BRtSSET. Sociocritiqlle de la tradllcliofl: Theatre et alterite au Quebec (1¢8-1988). Preface d'Antoine Berman. Collection l'Univers des discours. Montreal: Editions Le Preambule, 1990. Pp. 347. (PB). To praise all the riches of this innovative work on contemporary Quebec theatre is impossible in a short review. The significance of Sociocritique de la traduction has 474 Book Reviews been recognized by the 199 r prize of the Association for Canadian Theatre History to Annie Brissel. Working with a repertoire of some 256 plays written in a language other than French and performed in Quebec during a twenty-year period from 1968, Brissel analyses the role of translation in the construction of a "national" theatre in Quebec as it foregrounds issues of alterity in the constitution of identity, Translation, Brissel concurs with Antoine Berman, is "I'epreuve de ,'etranger," the encounter with an other that is a "making strange," and a self-inscription, the genius of the Quebec translator of theatre consisting in the ability to equal or surpass the text of a foreign author. Drawing on the quantitative methods of sociology, and the discourse analysis of Foucault, this study establishes the system of recent Quebec theatre and its categories (values) that motivate choice of translation strategies. These in turn (re)produce a national(ist) programme, as they work to transfonn Quebec dialect (deterritoriali~ed) into a language (territorialized) aiming to rival Shakespeare's English. First Brisset outlines the theatrical system and its nonnative (and nonnalizing) discourse. Through analysis of the paratextual apparatus presenting plays (title, author's credits, prefaces, illustrations, etc.) in "L'image de I...