L'homme En Marge De La Societe Dans L'œuvre Theatrale De Henry Millon De Montherlant

L'HOMME EN MARGE DE LA SOCIETE DANS L'(EUVRE THEATRALE DE HENRY MILLON DE MONTHERLANT dear SHIRLEY LEISSNER Verhandeling voorgele ter vervulling van die vereistes vir die graad D. LITT. et PHIL. in die Lettere en Wysbegeerte in FRANS aan die RANDSE AFRIKAANSE UNIVERSITEIT Studieleier : Professor D. A. Godwin November 1999. REMERCIEMENTS Je tiens a exprimer mes remerciements sinceres au professeur Denise Godwin qui a Oriente ma recherche et en a suivi le deroulement avec une patience inlassable. Sans son soutien, son assiduite, son encouragement et ses conseils precieux, je n'aurais pas pu mener a bout cette etude. Fen suis vivement reconnaissante. Je voudrais egalement remercier Monsieur David Bancroft, directeur de CPEDERF a Paris, ainsi que ses collegues, qui ont pris a cur de faciliter l'accessibilite de la documentation. Que soient remerciees Mlle Ronel Smit, bibliothecaire a la RAU, les bibliothecaires a la Bibliotheque Brenthurst et ma collegue, Marie- Helene Wilreker qui a accept& de relire les epreuves et m'a fait part de ses remarques. Je garde a tous ma reconnaissance, qu'ils en soient persuades. 2 ABSTRACT A sense of isolation pervades all of Montherlant's writings -- the notebooks, the essays, the novels, and the plays. Although cognisance has been taken of his oeuvre as a whole, we have limited our study to that of Montherlant's theatre, for it is in his theatre that many of the thematic interests dispersed throughout the novels and the essays are crystallised in a striking and concrete form. We have, however, had recourse from time to time to his other writings. The object of this study is to examine in both intellectual and theatrical terms, the way in which Montherlant presents the voluntary distancing of the self in his plays. Almost all of his protagonists appear isolated within their family groups and social frameworks, but they seem voluntarily to have embraced that condition, and, furthermore they actively seek this isolation. Montherlant's first play, L'Exil, establishes a leitmotif that recurs time after time in all his subsequent plays. Chapter One of this study is de'voted to a brief general discussion of the phenomenon of solitude and some of its manifestations from the Middle Ages to the present day. The concept of Einsamkeit, Entfremdung and estrangement has been recognised today as one of the tragedies of the human condition. Kafka, Beckett, Camus, Nabokov, Pynchon -- seminal figures of 20th Century Literature -- all in different ways, explore the isolation of the individual. His contemporaries do not necessarily share Montherlant's sense of separation. Montherlant's work effectively defies simple categorisation. Montherlant is not of the 'absurd school' of Beckett or Ionesco. His tragedies are not tragedies in the pure Aristotelian sense, nor is he an adherent of the existentialists like Sartre or Camus. Antiquity and the solitude of ancient heroes, Banes, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer all exerted a profound influence on his thought. In Chapter Two we consider certain biographical details that pertain directly to his work. Montherlant was himself a solitary figure. Referred to as 'le separe, Texil', `le bourreau de soi-meme', Montherlant was haunted by an abiding sense of alienation, social and cultural exile, and self-destruction until his suicide in 1972. His obsession with loneliness and alienation sterns from episodes in his own life, such as his expulsion at a young and impressionable age from the College Sainte-Croix de Neuilly. An only child, born into a minor aristocratic family, Montherlant was always the bearer of a self- 3 constructed consciousness of his own sense of superiority and his difference. He was imbued with lofty ideals, a sense of pride and a growing distaste for the hypocrisy of bourgeois existence. In this chapter we discuss various influences on Montherlant's personal life, such as that of his mother and his devoutly religious maternal grandmother. His discovery of ancient Rome through reading Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis? stimulated his permanent interest in antiquity. Another important influence was his introduction to bullfighting. For Montherlant, the bullfight with its contest between two creatures pitted against each other for physical and encoded sexual domination, represented in microcosm, the nature of man's existence. The importance of solitary sports, the discovery of sensual pleasure, the First World War and the virile comradeship he found in the French army, the communion of belonging to an 'order' for which he longed, all played a major role in defining Montherlant the man and Montherlant the writer. At the age of thirty, Montherlant suffered a family crisis. Filled with a personal sense of futility he set off on lengthy peregrinations in Europe and North Africa where he steadily came to experience a sense of sexual and intellectual reintegration and a reconstructed attitude towards France, its society, to his peers and to his own creativity. Chapter Three is concerned with the essential solitude of the male protagonist that Montherlant delineates in his plays and the different types of males he compels us to encounter there. We meet bachelors, young and old; widowers, Don Juan types, and married men. These personages are all characterised by their boundless egotism and their scorn for those they regard as the weak and the mediocre. Their love of grandeur and inner glory, power, struggle and victory affirm their moral superiority in their own eyes. Thus they are set apart and alone. However, since the people who surround them are, in their judgement, wholly lacking in moral, intellectual, social and spiritual fibre, these heroes of Montherlant are consequently overwhelmed by feelings of indifference and despair, and desire death. In Chapter Four we consider the striking ambivalence of Montherlant's attitudes and beliefs. The contradictions and the multitude of antitheses in both Montherlant's works and his being are well recognised. Montherlant is of the opinion that human instinct and experiences are compounds of conflicts and contrasts. This is his doctrine of Syncretisme et Alternance, which holds that the qualities of pride and humility, self-restraint and self-indulgence, kindness and cruelty, should be equally desirable and equally acceptable expressions of a proper and fulfilling way to live. This chapter examines this juxtaposition of 4 pessimistic and optimistic speculations about the human condition to show that this ambivalence is directly linked to the idea of alienation as Montherlant dramatically defines it. It is also an important factor in the development of his attitude to life and to those attitudes with which he invests his characters. «Je construirai et, ensuite je detruirai. Aedificabo et destruam », is one of the innumerable maxims that epitomise this dichotomy. Chapter Five is devoted to the female personages, who also share the destiny of the pariah as Montherlant presents it. In Montherlant's theatre we meet a variety of different types of women: the mother, the widow, the wife, the young girl and the nun. These women are, in Montherlant's perception and presentation of them, either morally weak, poor of intellect and unworthy of serious attention, or they are courageous, lucid, strong and admirable. In some of the plays the women oppose the men and rise above them, but in others they are subjected to the power and the cruelty of their male counterparts. Although Montherlant is often accused of misogyny, his presentation of the female protagonist is highly ambivalent. The majority of these women, like the heroes, are ultimately alone, alienated or abandoned. Montherlant claims that the tragic in his theatre stems from the internal inadequacies of human beings and not from external situations outside their control. He builds his philosophy on a base of nihilism, which he explains in his essay Service Inutile. Montherlant postulates the premise that conscious action is useless action. Consequently action without faith is the credo of many of his heroes. He also asserts that all action is, in fact, equally useless in a world that has always been, and always will be, futile. Chapter Six discusses the tragic isolation suffered by many of the characters in his plays. We define certain aspects of classical tragedy and how such concepts, mutatis mutandis, are perceived in Twentieth Century French Drama. We illustrate how the solitude of Montherlant's heroes is in fact a tragic isolation. Montherlant has often expressed his predilection for the adolescent. Thus the abandonment and rejection of children by their fathers in several of these plays are indeed tragic in the terms we define. Many of the other protagonists are old men who reflect on the taedium vitae and on the futility of old age, which leads inexorably to death. This pessimism is an increasing reflection of Montherlant's obsession with suicide which, we show, was in turn carried out with the calculated fixation on his doctrine of Syncretism et Alternance that increasingly dominated his ever darkening dramatic 5 vision with an almost obsessive precision. For example, he killed himself on the day of the autumn equinox, that day of the year in which day and night are of equal length. In Chapter Seven we demonstrate how Montherlant's dramatic art and 'stylistic perfection, his detached observation, his purity and sobriety of language, as well as the skill of his stage directions and mise en scene are all deliberately designed to bring into sharp relief the essential solitude of his heroes. Scenery, costumes and special effects are all therefore measured to emphasise the state of mind of the protagonists as he successively presents them. Much use is made of bare stages, prolonged silences which are all designed to accentuate the isolation of his personages. Montherlant's stage techniques are simple and precise, most of his plots are skeletal, because all interest as well as all action, is centred within the minds of his characters.

Load more