Virtual Representations of the American Far West in 20Th Century French Theater

University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2012 Virtual Representations of the American Far West in 20th Century French Theater Sarah Christine Lloyd [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the French and Francophone Literature Commons Recommended Citation Lloyd, Sarah Christine, "Virtual Representations of the American Far West in 20th Century French Theater. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2012. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/1323 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Sarah Christine Lloyd entitled "Virtual Representations of the American Far West in 20th Century French Theater." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Modern Foreign Languages. Les Essif, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: John Romeiser, Sébastien Dubreil, Stanton B. Garner Jr. Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Virtual Representations of the American Far West in 20 th Century French Theater A Dissertation Presented for the Doctorate of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Sarah Christine Lloyd May 2012 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the members of my committee who helped me pull this together, especially my very patient director, Dr. Les Essif, who reviewed most of my dissertation as I sent it from France. I would also like to thank my family for their support during this process, most especially my beloved Max. Thank you. ii Abstract The American Far West is, perhaps, one of the foremost images of the United States, one that has influenced many authors, especially during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a place of vast, empty spaces, of adventure and danger, of heroes and villains. It is a space that excites the imagination in its grandeur and possibility. Writers such as Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco have written of this grandeur, of the space of the American Dream. There they find the hyperreality of America, the constant drive to re-create aspects of European history and culture to fill the cultural void. Yet it is a place that promises the fulfillment of one’s dreams, and this is what makes the space so alluring. Between 1965 and 2003 five plays written in French attempted to place this cinematic space on the stage: Obaldia’s Du vent dans les branches de sassafras , Arrabal’s Sur le fil ou ballade du train fantôme , Fenwick’s Calamity Jane , Duparfait’s Idylle à Oklahoma: Une offre d’emploi, and Anne’s Le Bonheur du vent . In these five plays the American Far West is presented, not on the stage, but in the virtual space—the space of the imagination, beyond the confines of the stage. This is done in part because the Far West is difficult to represent in the theater due to the sheer size associated with it; it is a cinematographic space. However, America itself is an imagined space, a space that not only physically overwhelming, but also one that is void of culture as the French perceive it. These five plays, in a variety of styles, portray the hyperreality and emptiness of the virtual space that is America. iii Table of Contents Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 1: Absurdity and America: René de Obaldia’s Du vent dans les branches de sassafras ……………………………………………………………………………………...17 Defining a Structureless Space……………………………………………………………....20 European Morality Reflected in American Reality………………………………………….32 America as Cinema, Cinema as a Mirror…………………………………………………….39 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...41 Chapter 2: The Line Between Europe and America: Fernando Arrabal’s Sur le fil ou La Ballade du train fantôme ……………………………………………………………………………..43 America the Consumer………………………………………………………………………49 Madrid Reflecting Madrid…………………………………………………………………..53 Liberation Through Spectacle……………………………………………………………….59 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...63 Chapter 3: A Historical Calamity: Jean-Noël Fenwick’s Calamity Jane ………………………..65 Masculine Space, Feminine Space ………………………………………………………….71 Europe and America ………………………………………………………………………...78 America on Display………………………………………………………………………….81 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...85 Chapter 4: The Surrealist Stage: Idylle à Oklahoma: Une offre d’emploi by Claude Duparfait...87 Theater Without Boundaries…………………………………………………………………92 America the Frightening……………………………………………………………………..95 Europe in America………………………………………………………………………….101 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….107 Chapter 5: Dreaming the Desert: Catherine Anne’s Le Bonheur du vent ………………………110 A Woman’s role ……………………………………………………………………………116 Emptiness…………………………………………………………………………………...122 Future Hopes………………………………………………………………………………..127 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….129 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...132 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………141 Vita……………………………………………………………………………………………..153 iv Introduction: Staging the Other Ever since their discoveries, the Americas have excited the European imagination. Here could be found the Fountain of Youth or El Dorado, the city of gold. The New World was a land of untold promise, an undefined, unmapped space full of unknown wonders and dangers. This expectation of sensationalism exists even today, although perhaps in a slightly different manner, especially in regards to the United States. While people no longer exactly come expecting to find the streets paved with gold in the U.S., there is no doubt that many arrive with hopes of a better life. They come in search of the American Dream in the form of religious freedom, of wealth and fame, of escape from persecution. Some succeed and others do not; some find their heart’s desire and some just find heartbreak. But nonetheless they all share a belief in this Dream—a dream that is perpetuated from within America as well as without. America is presented in the media as a place where one can come and discover new and strange things, untold wealth, instant success, but against a background of rough, dangerous wilderness, in other words, it presents the pioneer spirit. While America is no longer a nation of settlers trekking through the wilderness in search of new and exotic lands, this mindset still exists. It both fascinates and repulses their European brethren, and the French are no exception. Through literature, especially theater, the French are able to better comprehend the foreign culture and thus situate it in context to their own culture and have been doing so for centuries. There are many examples of America in French theater, such as René de Obaldia’s Du vent dans les branches du sassafras , Bernard-Marie Koltès’ Sallinger , or Michel Deutsch’s Dimanche . These plays cover a variety of aspects of America—American business strategies, the American cheerleader, etc—but I wish to focus on the presentation of the American Far West. It is the Far West that is often used as the prime example of the United States. In fact, many 1 Europeans associate the United States with cowboys, and a certain cowboy mentality does continue to exist in America, a mentality of adventure and acquisition. The setting for this image is the American Far West, but this setting is rather vaguer than the image of the Cowboy. As will be later seen, the “Far West” encompasses places such as Kentucky to Oklahoma or Montana, and even stretches as far as Arizona or California. Geographically speaking this is an area of open prairies, rugged mountains and arid deserts. It is a wild and untamed land. However, it is interesting to note that this space is, in a way, the boundary between the comprehensibility of a more European east coast—the realm of business and politics—and the absolute fantasy of the west coast—the realm of the cinema and the computer. There are quite a few French plays that deal with this space, but I wish to focus on five in particular: René de Obaldia’s Du vent dans les branches de sassafras (1966), Sur le fil ou Ballade du train fantôme (1974) by Fernando Arrabal, Calamity Jane (1991) by Jean-Noël Fenwick, Claude Duparfait’s Idylle à Oklahoma : une offre d’emploi (1998), and Le Bonheur du vent (2003) by Catherine Anne. All of these plays are set in America and the Far West plays some part in each of them, but more importantly the Far West is of primary importance in the virtual space of each of them. Despite the very different genres of these plays they all represent the American Far West as a sort of utopia, an empty space where dreams can be realized, and by placing it in the virtual space they heighten the sense of hyperreality as Umberto Eco presents it—where the borders between reality and fantasy become blurred. It is important for me to clarify my definition of virtual space. This space is, in general, that which lies beyond the view of the spectators. It can be suggested by the décor—by the presence

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