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Xerox University Microfilms 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48100 I I I 75-19,429 DICKSON, Patricia Stoup, 1939- PRESENCE AND ABSENCE IN THE THEATER OF JEAN TARDIEU. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1975 Language and Literature, modern

Xerox University MicrofilmsAnn , Arbor, Michigan 48106

0 Copyright By

Patricia Stoup Dickson

1975

THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED. PRESENCE AND ABSENCE IN THE THEATER OF

JEAN TARDIEU

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

Patricia Stoup Dickson, B.S., M.A.

* * * * *

The Ohio State University

1975

Reading Committee: Approved By

Pierre Astier Charles Carlut Robert Cottrell

Adviser Department of Romance Languages ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to everyone who helped, supported and

encouraged me during the writing of this study, particularly my husband, Charles, my adviser, Professor Pierre Astier and my parents, Mr. and Mrs. E.M. Stoup.

ii VITA

March 1, 19394 . . Born— Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

1961 ...... B.S., Indiana University of Penn­ sylvania, Indiana, Pennsylvania

1961-1965...... French and Spanish Teacher, Churchill Area Schools, Pittsburgh, Pennsyl­ vania

1963 ...... Summer study at Universite d'Aix-Marseilles

1966 ...... M.A., University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

1966-19674 . 4 4 . French Teacher, Columbus (Ohio) Public Schools

1967-196 8 . Lecturer in French Readings and Spanish Language Courses, Ohio Dominican College

1968-197 0 . Teaching Associate, Department of Romance Languages, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: French Literature

20th Century Studies 4 Professor Pierre Astier

19th Century Studies. Professor Charles Carlut

Medieval Studies and History of French Language. Professors Eleanor Bulatkin and David Griffin

Minor Field: Spanish Literature (Spain and Latin America)

19th and 20th Century Studies. Professor Martha Frosch

History of Spanish Language. Professor David Griffin

H i *

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii .

VITA ...... ill

Chapter

I. JEAN TAEDIEU AND THE HIDDEN R I V E R ...... 1

II. T H & T R E DE CHAMBRE: DRAMES & L A I R ...... 30

III. THE&TRE DE CHAMBRE: COMEDIES 12CLAIR...... 65

IV. POEMES A JOUER...... 108

V. CONCLUSION...... 180

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 193

iv CHAPTER I

JEAN TARDIEU AND THE HIDDEN RIVER

The works of Jean Tardieu are extremely diverse. In addition

to his major collections of poetry, essays and plays, Tardieu has written a treatise on modern art, prefaces or introductions to the works of several contemporary painters, poetry evoking specific works of art or music, a preface to a selection of rondeaux by Charles d*Orleans and even a book for children. His works also include trans­

lations from the German of two plays by Goethe and a long poem by

Holderlin as well as a comedy by Paul Portner and a radio play by

Dieter Wellershoff. Even within Tardieu's major works, there is much variety: his poetry ranges from lyric to burlesque, his essays from serious and philosophical to fantastic and surrealistic, his plays from satiric to poetic. This diversity of literary production reveals

Tardieu's interest in all forms of artistic expression and it also indicates a willingness to experiment freely with language and forms.

The only son of a harpist and a painter, Tardieu grew up surrounded by the arts; thus it is hardly surprising that his own artistic talent became apparent at an early age. But rather than musical tones or paint, Jean Tardieu chose words as his medium of expression. Beginning to compose poems at seven and plays at eleven,

Tardieu was already preparing for a long and fruitful literary career. Tardieu*s happy and harmonious childhood came to an abrupt end at

seventeen when he suffered a severe psychological crisis brought on

by fatigue and an overdose of philosophy. Suddenly becoming aware

of "1'etrangetd du fait d'exister, de se connaltrt, d'avoir un

*moi* ,"1 Tardieu found consolation and satisfaction in writing:

En se voyant Strange, en se voyant etranger a lui-mime, il reconnait sa propre image et, sous les balbutiements affoies, un pouvoir: celui de 1*expression. C'est pourquoi il est et restera £crivain. Ecrire pour lui, est, trks momentand- ment, mais trbs intens&nent, accomplixj.2

Attempting to explain to himself this new awareness of the strangeness of self and the world, he wrote a play entitled Consoler in which the positive and negative poles of his thought are already quite evident:

Et je vais a nouveau d tatons parmi des objets inertes, parmi des choses dont la mati&re se ddforme et s'anime A mon con­ tact: la bizarre aventure! ma pens^e dddoubl^e se fait d'un c6t£ positive, et comprend l'unlvers. . .de l'autre, elle s'&neut d'un surnaturel monstrueux; je sais qu'ici ces meubles sont des meubles; qu'aucune ime ne parle en eux, et cependant je tremble d'epouvante. . . .3

After Consoler. Tardieu gave up writing plays completely in order to concentrate on writing poetry, publishing his first major collection,

Le Fleuve cache, in 1933. In a recent interview, Tardieu speaks of these years following his youthful crisis as a time of "silence ou

lanilie Noulet, Jean Tardieu. Po&tes d'aujourd'hui (Paris: Editions Pierre Seghers, 1964), p. 200. This work is the only major source of biographical information on Tardieu and therefore all sub­ sequent biographical material in this chapter is based upon it.

^Ibid., p. 15.

^Quoted by E. Noulet, ibid.. p. 11. de secheresse."^ Much of his time was taken up by studies and then

by earning a living, so that, although he had many notebooks full of

ideas for plays, he only managed to write short poems and was not

able to materialize any of those proposed plays. However, this latent

desire to write plays was manifesting itself in his poetry as a

progressive use of dialogue. Toward the end of World War II, Tardieu

felt the need to return to playwriting:

La technique po^tique et ses recherches n'ont ensuite dd- tourn^ de 1'expression dramatique. Seulement, celle-ci s'est progressivement manifest^e dans mes po^mes, par un gout du dialogue qui s'est d^velopp^ jusqu'4 donner mon Th^Atre de chambre et mes Po&mes a louer. Cela a correspondu particu- lierement, au temps de 1'Occupation, ^ un besoin de me lib^rer sous la forme dramatique.^

The first two plays which really gave Tardieu his start in

the theater, Qui est lei? and Un Mot pour un autre, were produced in

1949 and 1950 respectively. These two plays are representative of

the two basic categories— drama and comedy— to be found in the experi­ mental, one-act plays included in Tardieu's Th^tre de chambre. I

(1955). Tardieu describes Qui est ltL? as "une sorte de cauchemar" in which he was trying to create an essential drama: "une fiction dramatique qui ne soit pas a proprement parler une action; quelque

^See Carol Jean Beverly, Appendix A, "Parody and Poetry in the Theater of Jean Tardieu" (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana Uni­ versity, 1972), p. 198. Hereinafter referred to as Interview.

^Quoted by Paul-Louis Mignon in Le Theatre d'aulourdhui de A jusqu'A Z (Paris: Editions de l'Avant-Sc&ne/Editlons Michel Brient et Cie., 1966), p. 248. chose de tout a fait condens^ et essentiel, comme un poeme ou comme un r^ve."^ Un Mot pour un autre is a burlesque comedy based on the arbitrary nature of language which represents "le cSte recherche sur le langage, parodie du langage."7 Tardieu*s second volume of plays,

Poemes 4 iouer. Th&?tre II (1960), continues his research in the di­ rection of essential drama and parody of language but with a greater emphasis on the presentation of poetry on the stage through a har­ monious combination of poetic language and "stage language."

In all of his twenty-six published plays, Jean Tardieu boldly explores the possibilities of the theater in search of "un art dramatique nouveau, ni surrdaliste, ni rdaliste, ni irr^aliste, qui ne soit pas non plus arbitraire, raais qui d^barrasse le fait dramatique, c ’est-A-dire le fait humain, de tout ce qui n'est pas essentiel."®

Tardieu approaches the theater like a scientist investigating an un­ known element or a musician exploring a new instrument, with curiosity and with a desire to see what effects can be obtained from it. Tardieu considers the task of discovering new forms and new means of expression for the theater to be the major concern of the theater of the future.

He believes that, while the other arts (music and painting) have long since completed their mutation in form and technique, the theater still has not really found "une fusion vraiment harmonieuse entre ce que je

^Interview, p. 204.

7Ibid.

®Jean Tardieu, "Avant-propos," Th&itre de ghatnhrg (nouvelle edition revue et augment^e; Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 10. Q peux appeler les contenus et ce que Je peux appeler les formes." In

the preface to M s first volume of plays, Tardieu admits his "penchant

pour la demarche cr^atrice des musiciens lorsqu'ils composent & partir

d'une volonte abstraite" and reveals his desire to create a "clavecin

bien temp^r^ de la dramaturgie" which would be a "catalogue des

structures, des moyens et m&me des 'effets' (anciens et nouveaux) ou

l'on serait parti des themes les plus simples pour arriver aux plus

complexes.

According to three of his critics— Martin Esslin, Germaine

Bree and Alexander Kroff— Tardieu's experimental and technical approach

to the theater is both his major contribution and his major fault.

While Esslin points out the wide range of Tardieu's dramatic experi­ mentation, referring to him as "a playwright's playwright, a dedicated pioneer bent on enlarging the vocabulary of his art," and emphasizing

the importance of Tardieu's explorations as "materials for research" on which others may build, he Inexplicably declines to judge them as works of art because they are "avowedly experimental." Esslin seems to equate experimental with inconsequential or frivolous:

But by its very awareness, its experimental consciousness, its playfulness in trying out new devices, Tardieu's work misses the obsessive compulsiveness, and thus the hypnotic power, the inevitability, of some of the masterpieces of the Theatre of the Absurd.

Bree and Kroff have a similar ambivalence about Tardieu's experi­

^Interview, p. 210.

10P. 9.

^ T h e Theatre of the Absurd. Anchor Books (Revised edition; Garden City, Mew York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1961), pp. 206-07. mentation. Referring to Tardieu as "un des plus hardis novateurs"^ of the theater of the absurd, they also stress the research aspect of his plays: "Le th££tre de Tardieu se pr^sente done comme une serie de recherches, de tentatives, qu'il estime n^cessaires & un d^blaie- ment pr^alable qui permettrait de remplacer ensuite les fausses conventions du theatre du passe. But they conclude that the desire to experiment is also Tardieu's major fault:

Le d^faut de Tardieu semble Ilk k une volont^ trop appuy^e d'experimentation. La disarticulation trop consciente de formes traditionnelles n'est pas toujours compensie par un apport suffisant d’iliments essentiellement dramatiques, au sense thi^tral du mot. En insistant sur un thi4tre ou il ne se passe rien, en riduisant la part de 1'anecdote au minimum, Tardieu n'arrive pas, comme Ionesco, a crier une tension dramatique, une action dramatique qui entrafne le spectateur par une sorte de logique intirieure et de puissance. Le thiitre de Tardieu, comme disait le critique Gouhier, est \in thiiitre qui a perdu son essence, et qui, fuyant le thi^tral, a oublii la thicitraliti.'l^

The validity of this criticism obviously depends on one's definition of drama. Certainly it is an exaggeration to say that nothing happens in Tardieu's plays. Actually some of his plays do have dramatic action in the traditional sense and others are parodies of plays with action; but still others have different objectives, such as the exploration of a certain situation or the creation of a mood or the demonstration of a theory. In all of them something significant happens. As

^Twentieth Century French Drama, ed. by Germaine Br^e and Alexander Y. Kroff (New York: Macmillan Co., 1969), p. 35.

l^ibld., p. 38.

14lbid., p. 39. Robert Abirached observes, Tardieu "ne nous met jamais en presence de structures vides.

In order to facilitate his dramatic research, Tardieu deliber­ ately limits most of his plays to the one-act form. He compares his short plays to musical Etudes which explore one technique at a time:

J*envisage de faire des dlzaines de pieces courtes— des Etudes, comme un musicien qui ^crit un morceau en re mineur ou un solo de trombone— des etudes oil chaque fois j ' envisagerais une forme speciale, je dirais presque un 'true* de th£&tre: dans celle- ci il peut n'y avoir qu'un monologue: dans celle-lA un drame vu par le trou de la serrure, dans la troisiAme, des meubles rempla^ant les h^ros. C'est une sorte de vue technique et abstraite.-^

Br^e and Kroff also point out Tardieu1s deliberate restriction of his works: "Ce sont des ^bauches, des essais; tout donne 1'impression que 1'auteur s'est d^lib£r^inent born^ A travailler A une ^chelle re- streinte."!7 George Wellwarth, in his book on avant-garde drama, de­ votes a chapter to Tardieu's plays entitled "The Art of the One-Act

Play," in which he maintains that Tardieu has given new life to the one-act form "by realizing that it is inadequate for the treatment of any one theme" and by limiting himself to "the given situation or concrete object about which he has decided to write." Wellwarth be­ lieves that the one-act play should be a "self-contained entity"

15"Jean Tardieu: ThAAtre de chambre. I (Gallimard)," Nouvelle Revue francaise no. 178 (October 1, 1967), p. 717. y l^Quoted in Twentieth Century French Drama, p. 38.

17Ibid.. p. 36. which treats an object instead of a subject, as, for example, a situation rather than a plot.-*-® (Tardieu also envisions his plays as having as a motif "un objet th^atral plutfit qu'un sujet."!®) Wellwarth concludes that "The essence of Tardieu’s formula for the one-act play is that the selected situation must be carried to its logical coit- clusion."20 a more accurate statement would be that the interest of

Tardieu's plays lies in the fact that he pushes the situation beyond its logical conclusion, changing the familiar into something strange and unexpected.

According to Tardieu, his decision to limit his plays to a short form has been at the same time his "recompense" and his

"purgatoire." Because of their form and their experimental nature, they have been presented mostly by experimental theaters, young com­ panies or university theaters, thus assuring that the actors inter­ preting the plays are enthusiastic and sincerely devoted to the theater without any regard for the box-office but also limiting the outreach 21 of the plays to a relatively small audience. A This explains in part why Tardieu's theater is not well known and why it has received relatively little attention from the critics. The shortness of

Tardieu1s plays tends to make the critics write them off as cabaret

l^The Theater of Protest and Paradox; Developments in the Avant-Garde Drama. (New York: New York University Press, 1964), p. 85.

■^"Avant-propos," p. 9.

20protest and Paradox, p. 94.

Interview, p. 206. theater without giving them serious consideration. Jacques Bersani et al. in La Literature en France depuis <1945. for example, describe

Tardieu'8 theater as nothing but "une suite de curieux petits exer- 22 cices de style." Thus there is a danger that Tardieu's brevity may be misconstrued as a lack of seriousness or as an inability to write longer plays, as is suggested by Juan Guerrero Zamora in his Historla del teatro contemporclneo. 23

It seems that Tardieu has deliberately given up general acceptance by the public in order to be free to experiment. His technical and abstract approach to play writing produces a varied and unpredictable theater which often confounds the critics because it does not fit their preconceived notions of what theatrical works should be.

These plays also raise questions about the nature of poetry and drama. In fact, some critics hesitate to accept them as plays, insisting that they are really some new form of poetry. Yvon Belaval, for instance, finding that Tardieu's plays lack dramatic action, suggests that "nous assistons peut-4tre h la naissance d'une forme poetique. Aprks le po&me en vers puis en prose, apres le poeme chantd, declame, puis imprim^ et lu des yeux, voici peut-Stre ce que j'appellerais h. tout hasard le pofeme spectaculaire." Belaval further explains this definition, stating:

22(Paris: Bordas, 1970), p. 538.

^(Barcelona: Juan Flora, 1961), p. 330. 10

Les pieces de Jean Tardieu sont ouvertement des po&nes par leur brievete et par la qualite de leur langage; moins ouvertement, par la figure temporelle qu'elles constituent devant nous a partir du rythme pregnant, du schema dynamique. . .Cependant ces polities s'informent dans une mati^re th£atrale. C'est en spectacle qu'ils se donnent. L'attent— ou tension poetique n'est pas seulement aux ecoutes: elle guette les jeux de sc&ne. . .Et cette ecoute ne demeure plus int^rieure, elle s’applique A la mati&re th^trale de la voix humaine.2^

Emilie Noulet, whose Jean Tardieu in the Poetes d'aujourd- hui series is still the only book published on Tardieu, emphasizes

the poetic aspect of his works, concluding that "toute 1*oeuvre de

Jean Tardieu est po^sie, meme quand il ^crit pour le th&£tre, m£me

quand il dcrit en prose."25 Taking literally the title of Tardieu's

second volume of plays, she writes: "C'est afin qu'ils existent, afin

qu'on soit torci de les dire, que J. Tardieu a peut-ltre concu ses

Po&nes k jouer. et qu'il soit bien clair que tout est toujours po^sie."2^ However, she also suggests that Tardieu has invented a new

theatrical form as a means of exteriorization and communication for his poetry and hails Tardieu as an innovator of the poetic theater, as the creator of a hybrid genre "dans lequel po^sie et th&ktre

0 7 trouvent ^galement leur compte."

Jacques R^da and Georges Clancler both consider Tardieu's plays as a kind of staged poetry. Re7da finds that Tardieu's theatrical works do not always translate well on the stage, for "le passage & la sc&ne

24"Jean Tardieu: Les Temps du Verbe et Une Voix sans Per- sonne." Nouvelle Revue fran^aise. VII (January-June, 1956), 735.

25P. 62.

26P. 87.

2?P. 88. 11

trahit le decalage qui se produit entre le defi au vertlge et la

s^curit^ du po&te maitre de son langage." R^da concludes that In

Tardieu's plays "Le po£te reste dans les coulisses."3® Clancier states

rather abstractly,"Pour Jean Tardieu, chaque po&me est un th^4tre sans

emphase ou se joue en des mots de silence toujours le meme, le seul

drame d'etre et de ne pas £tre au monde, et le th6£tre un pokme qui

passe du silence du souffle k la dramaturgie des voix."3^

Colin Duckworth suggests that Tardieu's plays have evolved

from his poetry, for "they and his poetry are an integral part of his

vision of human existence and of his aesthetic interests and sensi­

tivities. "3® Duckworth accepts Tardieu's plays as drama, but he

cautions that "it is as a lyrical and intuitive poet, and handler of

words and phrases and rhythms and moods and atmosphere, that we should

regard Tardieu if we are to enjoy the originality of his plays to the

full."31

Actually Tardieu himself considers poetry and drama as two different but inseparable facets of a single inspiration. When asked in an interview if he considered himself first as a poet and then as a dramatist or the reverse, he replied:

28»Tardieu dans la coulisse," Mareinale. XLIX (October, 1956), 56. 29"Une Voix et des personnes," Mercure de France. Tome 348 (May-August, 1963), 135.

^"Introduction," Jean Tardieu, The Underground Lovers and Other Experimental Plays, trans. and introd. by Colin Duckworth (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1968), p. xi.

31Ibid.. p. xv. 12

Je pense que je suis a la fois, ou que j'essaie d'etre a la fois poete et dramaturge, et que ces deux aspects (de m&rae que d'autres formes que j'ai abordees, par exemple mes petits r^cits ou mes ouvrages sur la peinture ou mes ouvrages de critique ou de reflexion phllosophlque) sont les dlff^rentes faces d'une meme recherche, d'une m&me pensde et d'une m&ne intention. Surtout la poesie et la dramaturgie me semblent inseparables. . . .le dialogue est tr£s important dans mes po^mes, et la poesie est tr&s importante dans mes pi&ces.^

Tardieu, as an artist who sees the interrelation of all forms of artistic expression, considers words as a medium like musical notes or paint; but they are an impure means of expression, for la parole is

"tantot trop chargee de conventions, de souvenirs et d'images toutes faites, tantot videe de tout eclat 1" Therefore Tardieu seeks the expressive function of language rather than its utilitarian usage:

"II faut done s'adresser h. 1'autre fonction du langage, celle qui se detourne de ses fins utilitalrea et qui, elle-meme, tente d'exprimer plutot que de s' exprimerThis explains Tardieu's desire to experi­ ment with language as pure sound, to create a music of the spoken word.

Tardieu's theater has been classified as "th&itre du verbe"^ and as "thfeAtre de Babel"^ and Tardieu has been singled out from the new dramatists as "the one who is most concerned with language, and

^Interview, p. 204.

^ J e a n Tardieu, Les Portes de toile (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 107.

■^^Michel Corvin, Le Theatre nouveau en France. Collection Que sais-je? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), p. 37.

^^Leonard Pronko, Avant-Garde: The Experimental Theater in France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), p. 155. 13 with the use of it as a stage device."36 Several of Tardieu1s critics have been particularly impressed with the musical quality of Tardieu's

use of words. Corvin states that "Tardieu part de la musique a laquelle il asservit les mots. Un mot, son plutot que sens, vaut non pour lui- meme, mais par sa place et son harmonie (ou son harmonique)."37

Bree and Kroff also point out Tardieu's efforts to use words as music:

"Tardieu tente de creer une sorte de fusion du langage avec la musique."®® Similarly, Esslin realizes that Tardieu*s plays often go beyond the theater of the absurd "into the sphere of a wholly abstract theatre in which language loses all conceptual content and merges into 39 music." Colin Duckworth has a high opinion of this musical use of the sounds of words: "His essential simplicity and stylistic economy, his sheer love of the sound of the spoken word (whether it makes any sense or not), enable one to place him beside Debussy and Ravel. . . .40

But if words can be artistically expressive, they can also be deceptive. Pierre Melese says of Tardieu1s plays: "Though they may be quite different, these plays have on thing in common: the distrust of the spoken word."41 This distrust is due to the eroding of meaning in language. As Calvin Evans explains: "Tardieu is too acutely aware of

36Rosette C. Lamont, "The Nouvelle Vague in French Theatre," Massachusetts Review (Winter* 1964), p. 386.

3?Le Theatre nouveau en France, p. 45.

38Twentieth Century French Drama, p. 36.

39The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 199.

40underground Lovers, p. xv.

41"Avant-Garde Theatre in France," The Theatre Annual. XVIII (1961), 4. 14 the deterioration of words from their concrete origins to place his complete faith in them as a mode of expression.Common usage of language tends to wear it out so that "Certains mots sont tellement

Climes, distendus, que l'on peut voir le jour au travers." Usage can also add to language so that groups of words become fixed cliches,

"immenses iieux communs, legers comme des nappes de brouillard."^

Thus the writer's medium is impure because language also serves as the common means of communication for all human beings.

It is in its function as communication that Tardieu finds language to be the most unsatisfactory. Many of Tardieu1s plays satirize the language of everyday discourse for its imprecision and meaninglessness. The irony in his plays is often based on a dis­ crepancy between what the characters are saying and what they actually feel or what is really happening. Words often obscure meaning rather than express it. By satirizing the language of social exchange,

Tardieu makes us aware of its inadequacies and alerts us to its dan­ gers. As Pronko says of the "Babel-oriented" writers (Tardieu and

Vauthier), their method of using words associatively rather than logically "tacitly criticizes language for a lack of precision and at the same time concedes to it a certain subversive power.Robert

Champigny sees this subversive power as very strong in Tardieu*s plays;

42"The New Dramatists, 6: Temporal Aesthetics and the Drama­ turgy of Jean Tardieu," Drama Survey. II (February, 1963), 310.

^^Jean Tardieu, Le Fleuve cache: Poesies. 1938-1961. with a preface by G.E. Clancier, Collection Po^sie (Paris: Galllmard, 1968), p. 73.

^Avant-Garde. p. 203. 15

language controls the characters so that they are reduced to the level

of verbal puppets:

Instead of conflicts between characters or within characters, the play develops and composes conflicts between forms of language. Not only the actors but the characters themselves appear as actors: they do not express themselves; they per­ form certain verbal roles.45

However, Tardieu’s satire of language is not just a negative demon­

stration of the meaninglessness of words and of the difficulty in

communicating verbally. It is the first step towards restoring to

language its communicative power. Only by understanding language and

its influence on our behavior can we be able to control it. As Brice

Parain has said in Sur la Dialectique:

Nous ne pouvons nous lib^rer de notre servitude A l'egard du langage qu'en essayant de le connaltre et de le dominer. Tant que nous chercherons seulement A l'utiliser, c'est lui qui nous utilisera. . .[et] nous serons obliges d'admettre que notre langage n'est pas lA pour servir la vie, mais au con- traire, pour se faire obAir par elle.46

Therefore Tardieu experiments on language, dissecting it in order to

probe its secrets.

While some critics have emphasized the poetic aspect of

Tardieu*s theater and others have considered it primarily a theater of

language, still others, following the lead of Martin Esslin, have

classified Tardieu*s plays as theater of the absurd* Esslin sees

Tardieu*s theatrical works as "an attempt to find a means of expression

45"Satire and Poetry in Two Plays of Jean Tardieu," American Society of Legion of Honor Magazine. XXXV, no. 2 (1964), 87.

46qUoted by Susan Jones, "Langage et Communication dans le theatre de Jean Tardieu," pp. 56-57. 16

adequate to represent man's efforts to situate himself In a meaningless

universe."^ Similarly, Br^e/Kroff state that "Reconnaissant l'absur-

dit^ de la condition humaine dans un monde sans Dieu, Tardieu cherche

comment exprimer les efforts de ses contemprains pour se situer dans

l'univers absurde."^®

These statements are not quite accurate, for although there is an element of absurdity in Tardieu1s plays, he sees the universe not as meaningless or absurd so much as silent. Tardieu explains that

those who believe in a god have someone to talk to in the universe.

As for himself, he feels alone in a silent and neutral world:

. . .je me sens tr&s seul dans l'univers, tr^s perdu dans un monde silencieux, mysterieux, qui n'est ni hostile, ni pas hostile; qui est ce qu'il est n'est-ce pas; qui est l'univers avec ses alternances de beaut^ et d'horreur, de moments heureux et de moments tragiques.^9

It is precisely this encompassing silence which forces man to speak, both in order to express himself and also to speak for the silent world:

Mais, de toute fagon, cet universe ne 'parle*pas. Et c'est nous qui parlons pour lui, et c'est nous qui avons une sorte de. . ., comment dirais-je, de pouvoir personnel de nous ex­ primer, et c'est pour ga que, par nous, & travers nous, les arbres, les meubles parlent. Mais ils parlent dans un monde qui reste silencieux.50

While Tardieu is concerned with the difficulty of living in the world, his outlook is neither pessimistic nor optimistic. His basic attitude

^?The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 206.

^^Twentieth Century French Drama, p. 39.

^Interview, pp. 205-06.

50Ibid.. p. 206. 17

Is one of "contemplation ^tonn^e", lucid recognition of the human con­ dition and of astonishment at "le caractfere surprenant de ce qui nous arrive."51 Unlike many of his contemporaries, Tardieu manages to main­ tain a certain sense of proportion between the dark and the light sides of life:

Obscurite du jour, je t'admets sans crainte et sans regret. Ton sang noir coule dans mes veins et tu te m£les aux t^ndbres de ma propre intelligence. Sur ce fleuve d'encre brille le sel dtineelant des choses. Je descends avec lui, son flot m'em- porte lentement, tandls qu'une forme voilde me pleure sur la rive. Je ne suis pourtant pas d plaindre: je suis, au fond du sombre azur, un bienheureux naufragd qui s'^loigne et se tait.52

All of Tardieu's works are an attempt to reconcile life's contra­ dictions and find harmony with the Whole. '

Long slighted by French literary critics because of their exper­

imental nature and their brief form,Tardieu's unconventional plays have been rather recently discovered by the American academic world. Thus far, Tardieu*8 theatrical works have been the subject of two doctoral dissertations and one master's thesis.53 One of these dissertations

■^■Jean Tardieu, "Trois Visions de l'homme," Pages d'^crlture (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), p. 75.

“*^Jean Tardieu, "Memoires d'un orphelin," La Part de 1'ombre: Proses. 1937-67. with-a preface by Yvon Belaval, Collection Po^sie (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 139.

53t w o other dissertations, Adeline Abel's "Aspects de la mort dans le theatre de Camus, Tardieu, Ionesco, Genet, Beckett" (Louisiana State University, 1966) and Betty L.E. Watson's "Insolite et po^sie dans le theatre d 'avant-garde en France" (Rice University, 1966) use Tardieu's plays as one illustration of their thesis. Abel compares Tardieu*s plays with Camus, showing that Tardieu emphasizes life rather than death. Watson studies strangeness and poetry in Tardieu's Les Amants du mdtro. showing how this play reveals strangeness in everyday life and finds a high degree of originality and experimentation in Tardieu's play. Out of six plays arranged in order of the amount of insolite they contain, Watson ranks Tardieu's fifth. 18

is a general introductory study of the plays while the other disser­

tation and the thesis concentrate on aspects of language in the plays.

No study has as yet fully discussed the content of the plays nor com­

pletely developed the underlying philosophy contained in them.

The chronological approach to Tardieu1s plays taken by Patricia

Lancaster in her study of The Theater of Jean Tardieu-^ does not pro­

duce any profound insights into these works; moreover, it creates a

problem in her thesis. Attempting to show a progressive evolution in

Tardieu*s plays towards a surer mastery of his art, it is convenient

for her to assume that Le Meuble. La Serrure and Le Guichet were written between 1950-52. As these plays are undated, it is impossible i

to be absolutely sure of their chronological place in Tardieu's theater, but Br^e/Kroff suggest 1948 as a possible date of composition, and

their earlier date seems more likely because, in both subject matter and treatment, these three plays resemble Tardieu's early plays written in 1946-47. If this is indeed the case, Lancaster's thesis that those plays indicate progress towards dramatic mastery does not work.

Carol Beverly, realizing the problem of establishing an accurate chronology and finding no steady evolution in the plays,

*C. Beverly states in "Parody and Poetry," p. 8, that Edmund Kinds will soon publish a study entitled "Jean Tardieu ou l'tfnigrae d'exlster" which will treat all of Tardieu's works, concentrating on his poetry. It will be a thematic study emphasizing the fundamental unity of Inspiration in Tardieu's works.

^(Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Bnory University, 1971.) 19

approaches Tardieu's theatrical works by evaluating two key elements

of his plays: parody and poetry.^6 Beverly considers parody and poetry

as the major elements in a critique of speech (i.e. "oral language con­

sidered as a psycho-social phenomenon"). Therefore she is interested

in speech in its social context "as the tool with which the games

people play are realized," stating that this type of speech constitutes

a dramatic use of language in society. Although her work is well

organized and her terms carefully defined, her distinction between a

dramatic and a poetic use of language leads her to conclude that in

the theater dramatic language must predominate because poetry is only

effective on the stage in limited quantities. It seems to me that

Tardieu's plays show just the opposite. Moreover, by limiting her

study of Tardieu's language strictly to the verbal, Beverly neglects

the non-verbal aspects of language in the theater which can be both poetic and dramatic. Perhaps the most important contribution made by

this dissertation is its excellent appendices which include an inter­ view with Jean Tardieu, lists of first publications and first pro­ ductions of his plays, notes on three of Tardieu's directors (Michel de Re, Sylvain Dhomme and Jacques Poli^ri) and an annotated bibli­ ography, including first-run reviews of the plays.

Susan Jones master's thesis on Langage et Communication dans le theatre de Jean Tardieu also approaches Tardieu's plays through the study of their language, but because she is interested in

56"parody and Poetry in the Theater of Jean Tardieu," (Unpub­ lished Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1972), see p. 7 for the quotations in this paragraph. 20 communication, she examines both the verbal and non-verbal aspects of language, considering the plays as theatrical productions not just as texts made up exclusively of words. Prefacing each of her chapters with a quotation from Artaud, she obviously sees the connection be­ tween his theories and Tardieu's theater, although she does not sug­ gest any direct influence. Artaud’s view of the theater supports her thesis that non-verbal language surpasses words as a means of commun­ ication in Tardieu's plays and can even produce a kind of mystic communion between the mind of the spectator and that of the play­ wright.-*® Jones' beautifully developed thesis is one of the best attempts to show the true complexity of Tardieu's theater that I have found. Through her study of language and communication she reveals both the social and the metaphysical implications inherent in Tardieu's plays.

*****

The title of Tardieu's first volume of poetry, Le Fleuve cach^, is an image which characterizes all of Tardieu's works, for it sym­ bolizes the fundamental unity within the diversity of his writings.

As Emilie Noulet states:

Comme toutes les grandes paroles, ce titre, Le Fleuve cache', est done & la fois, exact, concret et symbolique, et l'on verra de plus qu'il caract^rise 1'oeuvre tout entikre, < formulant, sous les aspects et les renouvellements les plus divers, sa remarquable unit^.59

Throughout the works of Jean Tardieu runs a unifying poetic-philo-

58 Her thesis is in no way "a serious misinterpretation of Artaud'8 intentions" as C. Beverly states. ("Parody and Poetry," p. 12.)

~*^Jean Tardieu. p. 15. 21 sophlcal current, le fleuve cach^ of his dialectic:

Toute ma vie est marquee par 1* image de ces fleuves, caches ou perdus au pied des montagnes. Comme eux, pour moi 1'aspect des choses plonge et se joue entre la presence et 1'absence. Tout ce que je touche 4 sa moiti£ de pierre et sa moiti^ d'^cume.60

The above quotation from one of Tardieu's essays entitled "Mon Pays des fleuves caches" prefaces his volume of collected poetry, Le Fleuve cach<|, and ends his volume of collected prose, La Part de l 1 ombre.

A note at the end of Le Fleuve cach^ states that the title of this volume represents an "image qui ^voque un aspect essentiel de sa vision poetique."

The hidden river, a recurring image in Tardieu's poetry and essays, is a multidimensional symbol based on the alternation of two contrasting terms: presence— absence, solidity— fluidity, immobility— mobility. As Noulet puts it:

Comme le fleuve, comme le Rhone, tant&t bouillonant et present, tantdt lisse et absent, les grandes anti-theses— ombre et lumifere, amour et douleur— ont ici leur raison d'4tre ana- logique. II ne s'agit d'ailleurs plus de leur existence simul- tanee, mais bien, entre la disparition et la r^apparition, entre 1'affirmation et son contraire, d'une ligne continue, du fil non rompu, en fait, de leur identity fonci^re. La meme eau coule tantot sous terre, tantSt au jour: la meme Sme, tantdt perdue, tant&t retrouvde, mesure le temps.

The poem entitled "Le Fleuve cach4" which headed the original

^®For the context of this quotation, see "Mon Pays des fleuves caches,” La Part de 1*ombre, p. 211. (Also quoted by E. Noulet in Jean Tardieu. pp. 16-17.)

^Jean Tardieu. p. 17. 22

1933 edition of the collection of the same title^ Illustrates this

alternation of opposites (italics mine):

Pieges de la lumi&re et de 1* ombre sur l'Sme, jeux et rival!t^s de tout ce qul parait,

regards de la douleur et de 1*amour. 6 flammes immenses que fait naitre et mourir un reflet,

tout un monde appuye sur un souffle qui chante, tout le ciel qui s'^croule au fond d'une eau dormante,

le d^sir qui d^fait les cldtures du temps, les ddsastres lancds au gr^ de la parole,

partout le plus pesant soumis a ce qui vole et l'imra^diat, souverain maitre des vivantsl

Mais parfois notre esprit, fatigu^ de l'espace, s'arrlte et peut entendre, apres plus d'un detour,

un vaste grondement ^gal et bas, qui passe k l 1infini, roulant sous les jours UN seul jour.

Plus pr&s que notre coeur mais plus loin que la terre, comme du fond d'un gouffre, k travers mille 4chos,

au vent du souvenir nous parvient le tonnerre d'un lourd fleuve en rumeur sous l'arbre et sous l'oiseau.

This world of the visible, of presence, of appearances ("tout ce qui parait"), gives an impression of solidity but we find that for Tardieu, this Impression is an illusion, for the world is "appuye sur un souffle qui chante." The physical world, "le plus pesant", is "soumis k ce qui vole." This lack of stability is due to the ceaseless and secret flow of the river of time, "un vaste grondement £gal et bas, qui passe k 1'inf ini, roulant sous les jours UN seul jour." Thus "ll,imm^diat, souverain maitre des vivants" is also illusory, merely a drop of water

^Reproduced in "Choix de textes," ibid.. p. 119. The original 1933 edition of Le Fleuve cache is no longer available. 23 floating on the surface of the past and rolling on towards the future in that "lourd fleuve en rumeur sous l'arbre et sous l'oiseau."

In his poetry Tardieu often compares the flow of time with the motion of the river:

Et les fleuves? — §a s'^coule.

Et le temps? — £a se d^roule.

Most often, Tardieu sees this constant flow of time as the enemy, the silent destroyer, "ce flot qui cogne avec silence for it carries man inexorably towards death:

Je sais qui va mourir en bas: c'est moi, c*est blen moi sur les roches en pente, bleues de mousse et glissantes de glace. Le fleuve resserre entre deux parois proches, coule noir, ^troit et secret, profond abime. II parait immobile. II se tait. II attend. 5

And yet Tardieu knows that this is the primary condition of our existence and if we are to live without despair, we must make an accommodation with it, or as Tardieu writes in one of his poems:

"oeuvre en toi-m£me un flot ^gal h ce qui fuit."^ In his essay en­ titled "L'Animal du tempsTardieu concretizes the idea of con­ sciousness of time and of harmony with its flow in the story of a man bathing in time. The man explains how most people are oblivious to

^"Conversation," Le Fleuve cachl. p. 122.

64"Les leaves reconnues," Ibid., p. 61.

^"Ubiquit^," La Part de 1*ombre, p. 193.

^"Sonate," Le Fleuve cach^. p. 70.

^ L a Part de lfombre, pp. 106-10. All quotations in this para­ graph are taken from this essay. 24

time as the stones in a river are unconscious of the torrent: "ils

restent imp&i^trables au courant qui les entraine." He then proceeds

to tell how he has learned to perceive time through his senses: "Moi,

je vois le Temps. Et meme, non seulement je le vois, mais aussi je

1*entends et je le sens, je 1*^prouve. je le vis.'1 He assures the

author that if his attention were sufficiently awakened, he would be

able to see and hear "le passage continu de votre Element natal, de

cette coulee ininterrompue et indivisible, de ce fleuve ^gal, sans

hate et sans tapage, auquel votre sort est li^ pour toujours: le

Temps." But perception alone is not enough, one must learn to move

with time: "II faut, pour se sentir le coeur en f&te et 1*esprit

delivr^, vivre et se mouvoir selon le temps." He describes lyrically

the happiness to be found in swimming with the current of the in­

visible river of time:

Ainsi, pour ma part, je ne vais jamais rebours de cet in­ visible fleuve. Regardez-moi m'avancer dans la rue: je ne marche plus d'un pas saccade, comme je le faisais autrefois. Je ne d^coupe plus le trajet en petits fragments ^gaux, entre les ciseaux m^caniques de mes jambes. Non! Tout mon corps se porte en avant d'un seul ^lan, comme s'il flairait d£jcl le souffle salubre de l'avenir. Souple, dispos, passionne- ment ^pris de la fuite des heures, je nage dans le courant, avec le courant, la t&te la premiere, les bras ^cart^s derri&re moi, les pieds glissant d^licatement sur le macadam.

This profound union with time puts him in accord with his destiny,

allowing him to look forward to death when he can

abdiquer toute volont^ entre les bras de l'£l^ment qui me baigne, m'^tirer sur toute la longueur des ann^es, ne faire plus qu'un avec le mouvement des choses, abandonner sans regret ma figure personnelle, comme la neige oublie sur la tiddeur de l'eau sa forme et son £clat, fondre, fondre et couler tout ^ fait, devenir le temps 1

Thus time has, if not a positive aspect, at least a neutral one, that 25 of the Element In which we live, as well as a negative aspect, that of the silent destroyer.

Although the Image of le fleuve cach^ most often symbolizes the flow of time in Tardieu's poetry and essays, it also has other dimensions. As the present moment is only a point on the surface of the constantly flowing river of time, so each individual mind is a reflection on the surface of the river of thought of its own moment and situation in time and space. The poet's words fix these re­ flections— "figures inalt^rables d'un instant sans retour"— and pre­ serves them: "Je les contiens puisque je suis le fleuve."®® Words, too, are merely points on the surface of the river of language, "les relais visibles d'un courant que l'on ne voit pas, que l'on n'entend pas, mais qui d'un terme h. 1'autre circule."®^ This river of language, constant­ ly moving and changing, transmits "le profond vouloir de 1'esprit au-dela des paroles en cendres. . . ,"70

But Tardieu'8 river is specifically a hidden river; thus its primary characteristic is its appearing above ground and then dis­ appearing underground again, its alternation between presence and absence. Like the surface and depths of the river, this alternating action of the hidden river has multiple symbolic possibilities. It

It suggests a metaphor for Tardieu's view of life and death: we come from absence, live for a moment in presence, then return again to

68"Les Deux Gisants," Le Fleuve cach£. p. 226.

69"Les Mallle8 du filet," Pages d'^crlture. p. 30.

70"La Musique," La Part de 1'ombre, p. 55. 26

absence. This cycle is repeated over and over again in the ^ternel

retour of time, producing either monotony or renewal, depending on one's point of view. (To Bailie Noulet, this alternation suggests the

idea of the soul first affirming and then denying its own existence/^)

But at the base of all opposites, is the Basic Contradiction: a world

of presence, of visible realities surrounded and interpenetrated by a world of absence, of the invisible and the unknown: "une juxtaposition

incroyable de r^alit^s et d'absences, d'Evidences concretes et

d'hypotheses ^ peine concevables. un monde qui est. face & face avec un monde qui n'est pas. . . ."72

While le fleuve cach^ is a commonly recurring image in

Tardieu's poetry and essays, he seldom mentions it explicitly in his plays. Yet the dialectic between presence and absence remains a con­ stant theme in Tardieu's theater. Presence and absence appear in the form of the plays as well as in Ihelr content, for the theater has its aspects of presence: the concrete manifestation on the stage, and of absence: the unseen images, thoughts and feelings produced in the minds of the spectators. In other words, the concrete evokes the ab­ stract. As is evident in all the works of Tardieu, what interests him the most is the absent, that which lies beyond present reality:

7-^-Jean Tardieu. p. 18.

72"M&aoires d'un orphelin," La Part de 1'ombre, p. 138 27

Ce qui est le plus inportant au theatre, ce ne sont pas les personnages que l'on nous montre qui sont visibles, c'est ce qui est entre les personnages, c'est ce qui est derribre ou au-del& des personnages, c'est ce qui est absent, c'est ce qui est invisible.

Tardieu's theater is demanding of the spectator, for in order for his

plays to be fully realized, there must be an intelligent participation

on the part of the audience: "II y a une reelle collaboration du

spectateur et du th££tre." For Tardieu, the essence of the theater,

that which makes it unique and sets it apart from the cinema, is its

suggestive power, its ability to make present that which is absent:

"Le thblltre. . .consiste k faire surgir un monde de choses absentes."

Therefore, the objective of this paper will be to attempt to show the dialectic of presence and absence in both the form and the content of

Tardieu's plays.

Since so little has as yet been written about Tardieu's plays and because the opinions on them vary so much, it is my intention to base my study whenever possible on Tardieu's own writings. Using a kind of Tardieu par lui-m£me approach, I will attempt to found my statements about Tardieu's plays on a careful reading of the texts, including prefaces and explanatory notes. Because there is such an essential unity of thought in Tardieu's works, I will also use material from his other writings to support my study of his theater. Although not having had the opportunity to see these plays on stage, I have

"seen" them many times through the direct evocative power of the word and in writing about them I will try to give some attention to their

^Interview, p. 212. All quotations in this paragraph are from this page. 28 theatricality. Accordingly, rather than tracing the dialectic of presence and absence by choosing examples from the plays at random,

I will study each play as a whole in relation to the volume in which it appears.

The plays of Theatre de chambre are a variety of brief studies, each exploring one theme or theatrical technique. Deliberately limiting these plays to the short one-act form, Tardieu set out to

"explorer methodiquement, dans ses formes passdes et ddpassdes comme dans ses possibility futures, la grande machinerie mentale et physique que l'on appelle le Thfe&tre." Although Tardieu decided against his original intention to classify these studies by categories according to the type of experiment they represented, his description of his conception of these plays reveals that he thought of them in terms of the two basic categories of comedy and drama: "J'ouvrais par intervalles la porte de ce grenier: mon 'th&4tre de chambre.1

Je percevais les fragments disperses d'une comedie, les bribes inco- herentes d'un drame." Later in the preface he refers to Qui est lA? as the first of his drames dclair and to Un Mot pour un autre as a comedie dclair. Finding these terms a significant way of grouping the plays for study, I have labeled as drames dclair:

Qui est la? La Folitesse Inutile Le Meuble La Serrure Le Guichet Monsieur Moi Faust et Yorick and as comedies Eclair t

La Soci^t^ Apollon 29

Oswald et Zena'i'de Ce que parler veut dire II v avalt foule au manolr Eux seuls le savent Un Mot pour un autre Un Geste pour un autre.

Three of the plays, however, seemed to belong in neither category.

La Sonate et les trois messieurs and Conversation-sinfonietta are re­

lated both to the comddies Eclair and to the po&nes k -jouer. Since

they provide a transition between those two categories, I will discuss

them at the end of the chapter on the comedies, immediately preceding

the chapter on the poemes h. jouer. Le Sacre de la nuit is the one

exception to my plan to discuss the plays according to the volume in which they appear. This work simply has more in common with the

poemes 4 jouer than with either the dramas or the comedies with which

it is published; therefore it will be reserved for discussion with

the works of the second volume of theater. CHAPTER II

THEATRE DE CHAMBRE: DRAMES &LAIR

In his preface to Theatre de chambre Tardieu states that he wrote these plays with "un parti pris rigoureusement et exclusivement esth^tique." Beginning each experiment with a certain "pr^texte formel" to which he later added the meanings and values, he attempted to "chercher l'humain par et a travers le rituel." As a new dramatist, he found himself tempted to approach the theater "par ses moyens plutot que par ses fins"; therefore he was more interested in creating an "objet scenique" than in writing a play which develops a subject.^-

These plays, each centered on one theme which would be more like an object than a subject, would transcend realism by revealing something beyond their apparent simplicity;

Dans la mesure oil ces essais avaient done pour motif un objet th6atral plut&t qu'un sujet, il est bien Evident aussi qu'ils tendaient & s'^carter de toute esth^tique r^aliste, soit en deformant ou transposant le langage, en superposant ou en 'surimpressionnant' les plans de signification et en laissant toujours entrevoir 'autre chose' & travers les actes et les paroles en apparence les plus naturels.2

• Tardieu's choice of the term "objet sclnique" suggests that what he envisions for the stage is a presentation which is an

^ " A v a n t - p r o p o s Th^&tre de chambre, p. 8.

2Ibid.. p. 9.

30 31

Integrated whole that can be perceived from the exterior by the

senses, like an object. It brings to mind Artaud's definition of

"langage physique" which consists of "tout ce qui peut se manifester et s'exprimer mat^riellement sur une sc^ne, et qui s'adresse d'abord aux sens. ..." According to Artaud, this po^sie dans l'espace. made up of music, dance, plastic elements, pantomine, mimicry, gesture, intonations, architecture, lighting and decor, would be

capable of producing images mat^rielles which would be the equivalent of word images.^ To be effective this poetry must be concrete, an active presence on the stage. Tardieu also envisions a total art form which would make a direct physical, emotional and intellectual im­ pact on the spectator akin to that produced by music: . .au theatre comme au concert, ce qui compte finalement, c'est la magie active et vivante d'un prestige expressif qui frappe directement nos sens et 'parle' a notre esprit k la faveur de la delectation auditive et visuelle."^

Auditory and visual effects play a particularly active role in creating the scenic object in the drames eclair. In these plays the setting is usually one of two types: (1) no decor or just a bare, empty room or (2) a pseudo-realistic set. When there is no decor, as

^Le Theatre et son double. Collection Id^es (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 54.

*Ibid., p. 55.

5Ibid., p. 56.

6jean Tardieu, "Le Signe et la Parole, ou literature et radio," Cahiers d*Etudes de Radio-Television, no. 9-10 (1956), pp. 6-7. 32 in Qui est la?. Le Meuble or Monsieur Moi. light or sound alone some­

times creates the atmosphere. These elements are more than just back­ ground accessories to the play: they are active agents calculated to produce a certain emotional response in the spectator. The light in the empty room of Qui est 1^?. for example, is described as "^gale, quelconque et un peu triste." (p. 15) Music alone can convey nuances of emotion, as, for example, at the beginning and end of Le Meuble the polka "qui voudrait Stre gaie mais qui, en fait, est d£chirante de tristesse." (p. 39)

In addition to its visual effects on the spectator, lighting sometimes has a symbolic value which underlines the theme of the play.

Darkness is used both symbolically and for visual emphasis in Monsieur

Mol and Faust et Yorick. In Monsieur Moi. a dark stage— the faces of the two travelers are lit only by light from the lanterns they carry— has the visual function of focusing the audience's attention on the two characters and their relationship and the symbolic function of indicating their solitude. In Faust et Yorick. Tardieu again uses a dark stage— only the scholar's face is lit— to suggest the protagonist's

Isolation from the world around him. The other characters in the play appear briefly from out of the darkness and then disappear into it again, thus illustrating how little their presence touches the scholar.

As these two plays concern the limitations of human understanding, the darkness may also symbolize the unknown which always surrounds man.

Sound effects are extremely active in Le Guichet: in fact,

Tardieu lists the radio, the voice of the loudspeaker and various noises— a train departing, car horns, brakes squealing and a cry of 33 pain— in the cast of characters, (p. 65) The radio and the loud­ speaker are realistic details used in a parodic way. For example, the weather bulletin on the radio has the proper official sound, but contains useless predictions:

Le temps restera nuageux sur l 1ensemble du territoire, avec baisse de la temperature amenant un sensible rafraichisse- ment. . .Quelques ond^es intermittentes dans les regions pluvieuses, des temp£tes de neige sur les hautes montagnes, le beau temps persistera dans les secteurs ensoleilles. Vous venez d'entendre le bulletin m6t£orologique. (p. 67)

Like the radio weather bulletin, the loudspeaker announcing the de­ parture of trains uses the right formulas, but also slips in two rather unusual departures:

Messieurs les voyageurs pour toutes directions, veuillez vous preparer, s'il vous pla£t... Messieurs les voyageurs, attention... messieurs les voyageurs votre train va partir... Votre train, votre automobile, votre cheval vont partir dans quelques minutes... Attention!... Attention!... Pr^parez- vous! (p. 74)

Tardieu states that this announcement is to be made "sur un ton etrange et reveur." This strange tone and the distortion of the message signal a switch in the conversation between agent and client from which train to take to "quelle direction prendre...dans la vie. . . •" The train and car noises in the play also function as signals which direct the associative flow of conversation between the agent and the client.

After having answered the agent's interminable questions, it is the sound of a train departing that finally gives the client the opportunity to change the subject to his own desire for information. Similarly, later in the play, it is a car horn (symbolic of the client's coming death by car) which ends the shared reverie of the two men, recalling them to reality. The. final noises— car horn, brakes squealing and a cry of pain— realize the agent's predictions and have an almost

physical impact on the spectator, for they*inevitably evoke a mental

image of the accident. The "chanson de charme" one hears as the

Pr^pos^ again turns on the radio, in ironic juxtaposition with the

noises of the accident, underlines bureaucratic indifference to the

human plight.

While lighting and sound effects contribute actively to the

creation of a concrete presence on the stage, sometimes functioning

symbolically as well as visually, it is Tardieu's use of objects as visual symbols which concretize the theme of the play which forms the

nucleus of the scenic object. As Artaud envisioned, they are often

"des objets aux proportions singuli&res."^ In Faust et Yorick. for example, the scholar's outsize desk, described as "une table de

travail tr^s large, tres haute— presque comme un comptoir ou un tri­ bunal," (p. 101) provides a visual focus for the play. In fact, man and object almost become one (the scholar does not move from the desk until the end of the play), thus providing a center of immobility which contrasts with the flow of time and events around the scholar, gradually leading to the inevitable ending. The desk symbolizes the grand scope of the scholar's project as well as the absurdity of it, for there is a certain parallel between the desk's abnormal size and the disproportion of the scholar's work to the rest of his life. The objects on the desk— books, papers, inkwell, scales, map— are obvious reminders of the scholar's task. But the most significant object on

^Le Th£Htre et son double, p. 148. 35

the desk is "une t£te de mort" which both indicates the learned man's

interest in craniums and ironically prefigures his death, for the skull

being shown at the end of the play will be his own.

Le guichet in the play of the same title divides the stage

into two well-defined areas, thus emphasizing the separation between

the world of the agent and that of the client. Susan Jones sees it as

symbolic of the separation between two levels of life: "C'est h.

travers le guichet que le client peut poser ses questions sur le

destin, par lesquelles il apprend qu'il va mourir."® Le guichet is also a concretization of the Fr^pos^'s arbitrary, bureaucratic

authority. The agent uses the ticket window to humiliate and further

intimidate the client by suddenly and noisily opening or closing it

in his face. The action of abruptly closing the window and the accompanying noise suggests a guillotine— an obvious symbol of authority, condemnation and death. Learning that he is to be killed upon leaving the office, the client incredously asks why he is not to die in the office itself. The agent replies that this would be more difficult because "il n ’y a pas ce qu'il faut". After angrily suggest­ ing some fatal accidents which could occur there, the client, pointing to the window, asks: "Et votre esp&ce de sale petite guillotine?" In answer, the agent raises the window and lets it fall "implacablement."

(pp. 84-85)

In La Serrure. Tardieu combines a dominating symbolic object with sound and light effects to produce a powerful impact. The most

^"Language et Communication," p. 101. 36 important element of the play's pseudo-realistic decor is the door

"d'aspect fundbre" with its unusually large keyhole. Tardieu's stage directions describe the keyhole in great detail, thus indicating its visual importance and also suggesting its symbolic aspect: "Il y a une dpaisse serrure, plus grande que nature; le trou de la serrure est, lui aussi, de dimensions peu communes, bien qu'ayant la forme classique de la cld. II semble qu'une quantity dnorme de nuit soit accumul^e et concentrde dans ce trou de serrure." (p. 47) The black­ ness within the keyhole prefigures the ndant which the client later discovers. The keyhole itself suggests man's limited point of view as well as a certain humiliation which his limitations impose on him.

At the end of the play, light and sound combine with the keyhole to create an intense physical effect. As the light in the room grows dimmer, the keyhole alone is "violemment dclaird." At the same time one hears "une note tenue, stridente et lancinante qui, d'abord faible, finira par devenir assourdissante." (p. 60) This sound seems to take possession of the client, almost physically propelling him towards the keyhole:

Mais qu'y a-t-il?... Qu'est-ce qui se passe?... Cette musique! Elle fond sur moi, s'installe sous mon crdne, non plus comme un appel... mais comme un ordre impdrieux. (p. 60)

As the client lies stretched out on the floor, having been knocked senseless by rushing against the closed door, the darkness is total and sound and light in the keyhole reach their maximum intensity.

Tardieu'8 use of large, unusual objects for both visual and symbolic purposes reminds one of Artaud's ideas and Ionesco's plays, but Tardieu's dramas are unique in that sometimes the object which 37

dominates the play is invisible. In Le Meuble. even though the

machine is not seen on stage, its working noises and its nasal human

voice make it the dominating presence of the play. Symbolically,

le meuble parodies the role of technology which humiliates its in­

ventors by reflecting too faithfully their own weaknesses and

limitations.

Monsieur Moi carries the invisible-but-talkative object of

Le Meuble a step further: the symbolic object around which this play

revolves is both unseen and unheard. Yet by having Monsieur Moi

describe the obstacle using adjectives which indicate permanence and

solidity, such as "irr^ductible11 and "opaque" and the verb "heurter" which implies an object and by having him speak and act as though it were physically present, Tardieu creates an uncanny sense of a real presence. (p. 94) For Tardieu, this power to produce presence from absence by touching the imagination of the spectator is the real goal of the theater. Artaud expressed a similar purpose: "A la visuali­ sation grossi^re de ce qui est, le th^4tre par la po^sie oppose les q images de ce qui n'est pas."

Although Tardieu often builds his scenic object around a stationary symbolic object, real or imaginary, it is not a totally static tableau. Even though some of these plays may lack dramatic action in the traditional sense, each of the dramas, like a piece of music, has its own particular movement and rhythm. Concentrating on one given situation or one moment in time, the movement of the drames

^Le Thi^tre et son double, p. 150. 38

Eclair is usually slow with occasional accelerated passages and

crescendo-decrescendo effects. This movement and rhythm often depend

on the way gesture is used in the play. In general, the more abstract

the theme of the play, the more stylized and symbolic the gestures and

the slower the movement.

In Qui est 1^?. the most abstract in content and stylized in

form of the drames Eclair, movement is carefully calculated and con­

trolled to produce a certain effect:

Par la simplicity calculee et presque effrayante de leur jeu (silences, intonations, tantfct pareilles & celles que l'on prend pour parler un enfant malade, tantot profondyment graves, gestes tr&s lents sauf aux moments path4tiques), les acteurs doivent donner 1*impression— blen connue des psycho- logues— que tout cela 'a du avoir lieu dljS. quelque part1. (p. 15)

Obviously then, in this drama gesture is of primary importance. In his avant-propos. Tardieu describes one company's interpretation of

this play which he found particularly effective:

les jeunes comydiens avaient yty jusqu'a ytudier le langage des sourds-muets reyduques, afln de dysarticuler la diction et de lui donner, ainsi qu'aux gestes et aux evolutions des personnages, le caractfere halluciny d'un 'ralenti' de cauche- mar.

In Qui est lk? gesture is used in two different ways: as a stylized, symbolic representation of emotion and as a kind of direct non-verbal communication. In response to the father's questions:

"Que voulez-vous?... Vous voulez me parler? Alors, entrezl... Qu' avez-vous a me dire?" the unknown man answers not with verbal ex­ planations but with a violent action: he stabs and strangles him and

^Thy&tre de chambre. p. 10. 39

then carries him away on his shoulder, (p. 17) The mother and son

"detournent la t&te vers la droite en cachant leur visage dans leur

mains et restent longtemps encore dans cette position" (p. 17)— a

classic stylized expression of grief reminiscent of Greek tragedy.

The killing of the father is a prelude to his rebirth. Through his

violent action, the killer communicates to the father (and vicariously

to the spectator) that his old way of life is unsatisfactory and must be done away with: the old man must die to make way for the new.

When the father comes back from the dead "ayant dans son attitude la

dignite de la mort," the mother's response is again a classic stylized

gesture: "La Mere plonge un instant son visage dans ses mains, puis se relive." (p. 18)

La Politesse inutile has two distinct parts with different

rhythms. The first half in which the professor is secure in his role

is slow, declamatory and stable; the second half after the entrance of the visitor is faster and more agitated as the visitor makes un­ expected moves; finally after the surprise slap, the ending is slow and quiet, giving the impression that perhaps this whole encounter may happen all over again the next day. This play again illustrates the power of gesture to convey messages primitively and directly. It is the visitor's attitude and unexpected actions which upset the professor the most. Like the killer in Qui est ikl, the visitor's main function is to effect a change by means of a violent gesture. This use of a violent action for shock effect recalls Artaud's theory on the force of the gesture: 40

Faire de l'art c'est priver un geste de son retentissement dans l'organisrae, et ce retentissement, si le geste est fait dans les conditions et avec la force requise, invite l'organ­ isme et, par lui, 1*individuality entiAre, k prendre des attitudes conformes au geste qui est fait.^-

This type of gesture, like effects of sound or light, reaches the spectator's senses directly.

As in Qui est la?, the content of Monsieur Mol is abstract and philosophical and the corresponding rhythm of the play is again slow. The two characters arrive slowly on stage, stop for awhile to discuss the invisible obstacle in their path and then, having "solved" their problem, continue slowly on their way. Gesture in this play is again carefully controlled, but this time Tardieu uses it to create a comic effect. Monsieur Moi's partner, a character dressed as a clown, speaks mostly in interjections accompanied by very obvious clown-like gestures such as clapping his hands to show approval and widening his eyes to show astonishment. The partner's responses, exclamations such as "Bon, bon, bon, bon!", "Oufl", "H^, h£l"» "Cracl",

"Bigrel", are a kind of verbal gesture which punctuates the wordy statements of Monsieur Moi and echo his own thoughts. Gesture is stylized in this play in the sense that it is extremely simple and direct, obviously deriving from the commedia dell'arte or from a circus or vaudeville routine.

In La Serrure Tardieu pushes the use of gesture for comic effect to the ridiculous and grotesque. The client's monologue while

» waiting to view his ideal woman recalls the lazzis of the Italian

H -Le Th4£tre et son double, p. 123. 41

comedy. Each statement provokes an accompanying gesture^ as the

client empties his pockets and his mind:

(II commence k vlder ses poches.) D'abord ma montrel... (11 retire sa montre de son gousset et la porte a son orellle.) Comme tu as blen battu, petit coeur, en attendant cette minute!... Allons, repose-toi un peu. Repose-toi un peu, dirai-je! (II la pose d&Licatement sur le gu^ridon.) (p. 56)

In addition to being comic, these gestures also symbolize the client's

separating of himself from his identity:

Et puis mon portefeuille!... (II retire son portefeuille.) Mon portefeuille!... iil-dedans sont toutes les traces de ma vie... Acte de naissance, livret de famille, livret mili- taire, photos, empreintes digitales! Allons, s^parons-nous de tout cela! Ici, je ne suis plus rien. Plus rien qu'un adorateur du Beau Sexel... Ainsi done, plus d'identlt^l (p. 56)

In this first part of the monologue the client's gestures are comic, but in the following section when he is watching Elle through the key­ hole as she undresses, they become ridiculous and grotesque:

(II fait des gestes ridicules, et, extasi^, comme s'il caressait le corps de cette femme.) ... On ne se lasse pas de voir... On voudrait toucher... On voudrait tenir... Dans ses mains, dans ses bras, ces belles... ces beaux... ces... choses... ces... comment dire... Oh! je ne trouve plus mes mots. Oh! comment cela s'appelle-t-il done?... Tout!... (II fait des gestes grotesques, desslnant dans l'air les formes d'une femme lmaginalre.) (p. 57)

Rather than accompanying words as in the first part of the monologue, gestures have now become the major means of communication as the client's ability to express himself in words is diminished by his ex-

•^Jacques Poli^ri, who has staged this play, comments that ML'incantation joue pr^cisement sur la non-presence du decor et de l'accessoire. Le verbe souligne le geste et r^ciproquement. Une mimique realiste. . .s'averait ici impossible." (Notes sur le texte, le d^cor et le geste dans le th<re de Jean Tardieu," Revue The&trale. XXXVIII (1958), 11.) 42

citement. The client's ridiculous gestures as he sheds his own

clothing in imitation of what he is supposedly seeing are grotesquely

funny in a vaudevillian way, but they also convey concretely a parodic

image of Elle.

But when all is revealed, the tone of the monologue changes

from the ridiculous to the sublime: "le ridicule de ses attitudes fait place a une sorte de grandeur dans 1'^garement." (p. 59) From this point to the end of the play gestures become less important, while words, sometimes poetic, take over as the primary means of expression.

The whole monologue is like a duet between words and gestures in which

they start out together on an equal basis; then the emphasis switches

to gesture and finally back to words again.^ Thus words and gestures share the power to create presence from absence by evoking a specific mental image in the spectator's mind.

The movement of La Serrure is slow in the first part while he is waiting impatiently to see his love; then during his monologue the tempo picks up as his excitement increases. To make a musical comparison, the monologue is like a series of crescendos^ building up to the final cymbal clash as he is knocked senseless by rushing against the closed door followed by the decrescendo of the madame's final ironic understatement: "Je pense... que le monsieur... est

1 ^ In response to some critics who emphasize the importance of the decor in this play, Poli&ri points out that "La recherche porte bien plutot sur la mimique (prise dans son sens rituel) et la musique verbale." (Ibid., p. 10.)

^Poli^ri finds a mathematical precision in the construction of the monologue as well as a crescendo effect. (Ibid.) satisfait." (p. 61)

Le Meuble is similar in structure to La Serrure. except that the period of waiting is supposed to have taken place before the play begins. Once again the expected event turns out to have an unexpected result. In the first part of the inventor's monologue the movement is slow and expansive; the emphasis is on words as he proudly explains how he invented his machine and tells what it can do. Gesture becomes more important as the demonstration progresses: the inventor pretends to push buttons and pull levers to operate the machine. Gestures support words and add to the credibility of the invisible machine. The movement of the play speeds up as the inventor's irritation increases until finally "L'Inventeur se pr^cipite, secour l'appareil, lui donne coups de pieds et coups de poings." (p. 43) After a brief pause, the inventor'8 violence is repeated in the final violent action of the machine. Once again Tardieu uses a surprise act of violence to induce a visceral reaction in the spectator. Ending a drama on a note of shock and violence (as in La Politesse inutile. La Serrure and Le

Guichet also) would have the effect of sending the spectator away with an indelible mental and emotional impression.

Le Guichet follows the same basic pattern as La Serrure and

Le Meuble: a period of waiting, then the anticipated event and finally the unexpected result. Yet the movement of Le Guichet is more agitated; the agent's arbitrary orders to the client produce a stop and go effect as the client gets up and sits down on command until the slowed-down moment of revery which removes the two men from the irritations of the everyday world. Upon their return to 44

"reality," the agitated pace resumes again until the agent tells the

client that he is to be killed on leaving the office. From this point

to the end the movement is naturally slow as the client tries unsuccess­

fully to think of ways to avoid his fate.

Le Guichet begins with the emphasis on gesture. The client, whom Tardieu describes as a "petit monsieur timide aux gestes et aux v&tements ^triqu^s," acts out his timidity as he tries to decide how

to enter the office:

La porte s'entrebaille: apparaft la t&te du Client, visage falot et inquiet, coiff^ d'un chapeau d^teint. Puis le Client s'enhardit et entre. II est effroyablement timide et craintif. II fait quelques pas sur la pointe des pieds et regarde autour de lui: en se retournant, 11 apergoit les indications dont la porte est flanquee de part et d'autre: 'Entree" et 'Sortie1. II parait hesiter un instant, puis sort comme il est entr^: mais, aussit&t apres, on l'entend frapper k la porte. (pp. 65-66)

Once inside he hesitantly approaches the guichet. The agent shows his authority by his peremptory tone of voice and by insisting that the client take a number and wait even though he is the only customer.

While the client is waiting, the agent acts out his business and his indifference:

Le Prdpose inspecte son parapluie; le jugeant sec ^ present, 11 le referme et va le pendre au portemanteau. Puis il se taille un crayon, sifflote ou chantonne l'air qu'il est en train d'entendre, enfin revient auprhs de la Radio et, en tournant le bouton, reraplace la chanson par le bulletin m^t^orologique. (p. 67)

Gestures reveal attitudes and establish a certain relationship be­ tween the two men even before they converse. Once the agent calls the client's number and begins to ask him questions, the strangeness of the dialogue shifts the emphasis from gesture to words. Although the 45 rest of the play focuses on this strange conversation— a parody of a bureaucratic interview in which banal questions unexpectedly lead to metaphysical answers^— the action of the sudden opening or closing of the guichet continues throughout the play as an important symbolic gesture.

In Faust et Yorick. the protagonist is defined by his position: the scholar remains firmly seated at his desk until his death. His immobility symbolizes his total dedication to his research and his nonparticipation in the other events of his life. The movement of the play is produced by the actions of the other characters who represent

"normal" daily life and activities as they circulate around the scholar's desk. In contrast to the slowed-down movement of dramas such as Qui est let? and Monsieur Moi. this play speeds up time so that we see the scholar's whole life pass by in a few minutes on stage. This is in itself an ironic comment on time and the futility of man's endeavors. Although I have placed this play under drames dclair because of its essentially serious theme and somber, ironic ending, it also resembles the comedies Eclair in that there are more characters and they are more active than in the other drames eclair.

In Faust et Yorick. as in the comedies Eclair, rather than individual gestures, it is the pattern of the comings and goings of the characters which create the rhythm and movement of the play.

As we have seen, Tardieu's scenic object, like Artaud's

•^According to E. Noulet, "un dialogue concret, prlcis, vivant se greffe sur des concepts exclusivement abstraits." (Jean Tardieu. p. 76.) 46

poesie dans l'espace. consists of an interplay of physical elements—

auditory and visual effects, objects and actors— which when blended

into an effective whole, are capable of reaching the spectator directly

through his senses, thus stimulating him to respond by forming corres­

ponding images in his own mind. Thus spectator and author collaborate

in creating presence out of absence. As in music or painting, all of

these physical elements have symbolic value, for although the presence

on the stage is important as stimulous, it is meaningless unless it has the power to suggest something more profound. Like Artaud's ideal of a th^Atre alchimique whose goal was to "transfuser la mati&re" by realizing "la fusion inextricable et unique de l'abstrait et du concret,"^ Tardieu's scenic object is a concrete but symbolic mani­ festation whose purpose is to transcend itself, for according to

Tardieu, "tout art digne de ce nom est concret,. puisqu'il part de la r^alit^— et abstrait parce qu'il domlne, assimile et transforme cette r^alit^."^ As Artaud stated, the theater should "mettre physiquement l 1esprit sur la voie de quelque chose," for the true theater should give us the feeling of a creation "dont nous ne poss^dons qu'une face, mais dont l'ach^vement est sur d'autres plans.Tardieu states in his preface to these plays that they tend to deviate from realism by superimposing levels of meaning and by revealing "something else" through the most natural words and actions. This something else is

^ L e Theatre et son double, p. 77.

^"Notes et fragments," Cahiers d1 Etudes de Radio-T6l6vlsion. no. 17 (1958), p. 23.

% e Theatre et son double, p. 138. 47

the world of absence— the unknown, the unreal, the supernatural, the

metaphysical— to which modern man Is oblivious because he is too pre­

occupied with the world of presence— the visible, tangible world

around him. Tardieu1s drames Eclair superimpose two levels of meaning:

(1) satire of modern man and the society he has created and (2) revel­

ation of a metaphysical dimension in man and the universe.

Tardieu sees modern man as having lost part of his former

grandeur due to the development of society and technology:

Au fur et A mesure qu'il se 'civilise', c'est-A-dire au fur et A mesure qu'il s'Aloigne de ses origines instinctives, mythiques, legendaires, 1'Homme semble perdre en grandeur et en majestA ce qu'il a gagnA en confort intellectuel et materiel. Au fur et A mesure que la machine sociale se per- fectionne, il semble que la grande figure antique de l'Homme face A face avec l 1univers, avec ses demons et ses dieux, ait peu A peu diminuA, se soit r^duite aux proportions mesquines et ridicules du 'Monsieur' des temps modernes, c'est-A-dire d'un personnage limitA de toutes parts,— dans sa vie et dans ses buts.19

Modern man, lost in the crowd and crushed by the social machine he

has created, is sadly comic in his egoistic pretensions to self-

suffiency. He has lost sight of all that is beyond him, reducing

everything to his own level:

Tout ce qu'il volt dans ce monde, nf&me les paysages les plus admirables, meme 1'immensity du ciel etoilA, il ne les voit qu'A travers ses pauvres habitudes, ses preoccupations A ras de terre. Des plus grands objets de l'univers 11 fera de petits objets d'AtagAre ou de petites fiches pour ses dossiers d'affaires.

Thus Man in the cosmic sense no longer exists; he has become a cari­

cature of himself:

19"Trois Visions de l'homme," Pages d'Acrlture. pp. 69-74. All quotations in this paragraph come from this section of Tardieu's essay in which he describes "l'homme de ce monde-ci." 48

Ce n'est plus 1'Homme, au sense dternel de ce mot, ce n'est plus Adam en conversation avec son Crdateur, non, c'est le monsieur anonyme, celui qui s'appelle 'Monsieur' ; de m4me que son veston et son chapeau ne se distinguent pas des autres milliards de vestons et de chapeaux.

And yet modern man has not completely lost his sense of grandeur

"puisqu'il a le sentiment d'un manque, d'une privation et qu'il a,

par consequent, le secret ddsir de trouver ce qui lui manque, de sortir

de ses impasses, se gu^rlr de sa maladie!" This feeling that something

is missing leads to a chronic dissatisfaction with life which at times borders on despair:

La difficulte de vivre, la 'difficult^ d'4tre' absorbant les trois quarts de ses forces, il peut se demander avec une secrete angoisse s'il ne viendra pas un moment ou il aura perdu jusqu'4 l'esp^rance, jusqu'au besoln de modifier ou d'am^liorer sa condition morale.

All of the protagonists of the drames Eclair share this sense of dissatisfaction to some degree. Qui est lA? and La Politesse inutile show man being awakened from a state of mechanical role-play­ ing to a realization of the vulnerability of existence and the un­ certainty of identity. The protagonists in these plays, only recently awakened, are just on the verge of dissatisfaction. In both plays,

Tardieu uses the absurd element, the menace from without, as a means to shock and awaken Man, dehumanized by war and mass murder, to more authentic being. In Qui est id? the author seems to be asking if Man can be resurrected and restored to humanity while in La Politesse inutile he puts the same question on an individual basis: can the professor, once stripped of his social role, of the Identity he has created for himself through words, be shocked into a more truly human existence? 49

The father's opening lines in Qui est 1 ^ ? ^ reflect the mechanical quality of his life:

Je suis le p^re. Voici ma femme et voici mon fils. Au-dehors la nuit est froide et longue, c'est l'hiver, mais ici nous nous rechauffons les uns les autres, et nous sommes assis 4 cette table pour apaiser notre faim, en ^changeant des propos affectueux. (p. 15)

While his words also suggest that he expects to find warmth, comfort and affection in his family, his emotionless attitude gives an ironic implication to this speech. The irony becomes stronger as the father continues, both asking and answering his own automatic questions while the mother and son remain silent, showing absolutely no response:

Qu'as-tu fait ce matin? J'ai dtd a l'^cole. Et toi? Je suis all£e au marche. Qu'as-tu trouv^? Des legumes plus cher qu' hier et de la viande A meilleur compte. Tant mieux, l'un compense l'autre. Et toi, que t'a dit le ma£tre? Que j'^tais en grand progr&s. Va, mon gartjon, travaille, tu verras, tout ira bien. Ah! que nous sommes heureux ensemble! Que la nuit est froide et noire au-dehorsI Rljouissons-nous de n'avoir pas h sortir...(p. 16)

This speech clearly shows the limitedness and banality of this kind of life which consists solely of role-playing and automatic responses; the last lines referring to the family's happiness together are ironic in contrast to the one-sided "conversation."

The sudden violent murder of the father is symbolic of the idea that this type of unthinking, unfeeling life must be done away with if Man is to find a more human existence. Martin Esslin sees

20 The exaggerated simplicity of the setting and the deliberate banality of the "conversation" recall the beginning of Ionesco's La Cantatrice chauve. although Qui est lk? was written two years before Ionesco's play. But Tardieu*s opening scene is very much shorter and his language much more reduced to the minimum than Ionesco's; In fact, the Ionesco beginning seems unnecessarily long and wordy by comparison. 50

this play as a poetic image of the situation at the end of the war

which shows "man faced with the fact that the routine of a bourgeois

existence is as inhuman as the mass killing of the battlefields and

concentration camps, and the need for finding a new, fully human way 21 of life. . . Coming back from the dead, the father's conversation with the mother reveals that he has come to realize that he was not

and still jLs not a man because Man does not yet exist:

LA MERE: Qui t'a tu^? LE PlSRE: Ce n'^tait pas un homme. LA M&RE: Qui es-tu? LE P&RE: Je ne suis pas un homme. LA MkRE: Qui etais-tu? LE P&RE: Personne. LA FEMME: Oil done est 1*Homme? LE P&KE: En aucun de nous.

The play concludes on a note of hope, for although Man is dead, one day he will exist again:

LE PilRE: En chacun de nous, 1'Homme est mort. II n'est plus, il n'est pas cu pas encore. LA FEMME: Oil est-il? LE P&RE: Cherchons ensemble: un jour, au milieu de nous... il sera, (pp. 18-19)

La Politesse inutile again raises the question of the in­ security of being and the uncertainty of identity. As the play opens, the professor is lecturing his student on the necessity of being cer- 22 tain of one's existence and identity:

^The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 169.

^The situation recalls Ionesco's La Lejon (although Tardieu's play antedates La Legon by three years), but in reverse; for this time it is the professor whose confidence in his own being is destroyed and this destruction is brought about by a lack of words rather than by a surfeit of them, as in the Ionesco play. Like La Lecon. the play ends when words give way to violence. 51

Si vous n*Ates pas, vous ne sauriez prAtendre A devenir quoi que ce soit... Et comment, jeune presompteux, oseriez-vous paraitre A un examen en vue d'obtenir un diplfime d'Etat, sans vous 4tre assure au pr^alable de votre propre existence? Qui se portera garant de votre identite, sinon vous-m&me, je vous le demand? (p. 24)

This self-assured speech is made ironic by the professor's actions in

the second half of the play, for the insolent visitor, by simply re­

fusing to play the game of social exchange, strips the professor of

his identity and his self-respect. As in Qui est lA?. it is the dis­

crepancy between words and actions which produces irony. The pro­

fessor's exhortations to his student are mere verbalizations, for

although he is not yet sufficiently aware to be dissatisfied with him­

self, he recommends dissatisfaction to the student as the first step

in discovering being:

Allonsl Je vois que vous vous posez la question essentielle. C'est le premier pas de 1'insatisfaction A la curiosit^, de la curiositA a la recherche, de la recherche A la deception, de la deception A l'angoisse, et... de l'angoisse au dAs- espoir. Allez, mon ami et bonne chance! (p. 24)

This mock-philosophic speech (as well as a similar one in Le Guichet

in which the agent recommends metaphysical despair as the answer to

the client's problems) is a parody of contemporary philosophies which offer anguish and despair as the answer to the problem of being, for

Tardieu does not accept this type of negative thinking.

Yet becoming conscious of one's existence leads inevitably to

the discovery of its fragility, for man is a victim of time: "Nous portons en nous le Temps comme un mdcanisme fragile mais parfait qui 52

ne cesse qu'k notre mort: il nous pousse du dedans et nous tire au-

a 23 devant de nous-memes." Moreover, this constant pressure of time

from within and from without causes man and the world to be in a state

of perpetual motion and change: "Bien plus, il [le Temps] nous invite

h mouvoir toutes choses autour de nous afin que celles-ci ne cessent

de se transformer, de m&me que nous bougeons et changeons nous-memes

a tout moment."^ Retreating within himself, man discovers "le grand

silence de l'Etre, l'espace immobile et profond, ce lieu qui contient

tout sans s'alterer jamais et ou ^voluent, fugitives, les figures du

Temps.But he also finds his own nothingness, the opposite of his

temporal self, "presence informul^e, pressentiment, menace et reproche,

tribunal secret ou toute vie,— pire: oh tout fetre est condamn^."^

In order to fill this void, "L'homme se nourrit de la substance du monde."2^ Man tries to dominate being by incorporating things in order to create new things:

Non seulement dans son corps, mais dans son esprit, il s'im- prkgne des choses, il les d^truit et il les distille, pour en composer on ne salt quels Stranges objets— les 'machines'— , on ne salt quels bizarres Elixirs— les 'id^es', les 'paroles' — , les uns et les autres ktant propres k lui donner puissance sur lui-m^me comme sur tous les fitres vivants ou non vivants qui peuplent la nature.

But even creativity does not always bring satisfaction, for

^"Fixit^," Pages d'^criture. p. 22.

2^Ibid., pp. 22-23.

25Ibid.. p. 23.

26»Le Tribunal secret," Pages d'^crlture. p. 25.

^This and the following quotation are from "Trois Visions de l'homme." ibid.. p. 66. 53 man's creations sometimes get out of control, as the inventor of Le

Meuble discovers. The inventor's pride in his marvelous machine be­

comes frustration as he tries in vain to get the contraption to function as programmed. In creating his machine the inventor seems to be trying to cheat time by capturing the past (both his own past and the collective past), thus putting it under his control inside the machine. He also seems to be seeking a certain fullness of being which he himself lacks, for he stresses that he is selling the machine with all that it contains: "C'est que ce n'est pas un meuble vide,

£a, monsieur, un meuble sans 4me, comme il y en a tant, un meuble qui n'aurait rien dans le ventrel Je vous le dis, c'est plein & craquer!" (p. 41) Above all, the contraption gives its owner a sense of security— albeit a false one— because it supposedly furnishes what­ ever he demands, repeats whatever he wants to hear and is infallible:

"II est infaillible, lui; c'est nous, pauvres humains, qui sommes exposes k l'erreur!" (p. 42) Actually there is an uncanny resemblance between man and machine, the one reflecting the imperfections of the other. On a more abstract level, Le Meuble expresses Tardieu's dis­ satisfaction with modern man, "l'homme de ce-monde-ci," and with the society he has created:

Cet homme-lk. . .a presque tout abandonn^ de lui-mime au profit d'une societ^ gigantesque, tyrannique, (scrasante qui, elle, par un redoutable paradoxe, ne semble plus rien avoir d'humain, d'une soci^t^ qui se prdsente comme une ^norme machine souple et aveuglante, comme un etre k demi incon- scient, comme une machine en tout cas qui n'aurait plus de maitre, car l'homme est devenu trop petit— ou elle trop grande— si bien que cette machine risque a tout moment de s'enrayer ou mkme d'^clater. . . .28

28ibid., p. 71. This view of man "nous montre un homme tantot douloureux, tantdt 29 franchement et tristement comique."

The next two plays, La Serrure and Le Gulchet. are the best illustrations of this view. The pathetic little man is both ridiculous and sublime in his struggle to find what is missing in his life, but he learns that dissatisfaction can lead to anguish and despair and ultimately to nothingness or death. The client in La Serrure thinks he knows what he wants:

Qa n'a rien de drole, une passion pareille! Depuis des jours, des nuits, des ann^es, je ne pense qu'a Elle!... Je me disais: Oh! si seulement je pouvais la voir!... La voir!... M&me sans qu'elle me voiel L'apercevoir seulement! A tra- vers un rideau dechir^, une porte entrebfiill^e, au bout d'une longue-vue!... Oui, je me disais cela. Je me disais que £a suffirait pour que je sois content. Et maintenant, tout k coup, voil^! Voil&: cette minute est arriv4el (p. 50)

Yet the closer he comes to realizing his dream, the more dissatisfied he becomes. Having just declared that he would be satisfied if he could see Her, even through a torn curtain or an open door, he balks when the tnadame tells him he must peep at Her through a keyhole. The madame makes fun of his discontent:

Comment! Monsieur pr^tendait tout k l'heure qu'il voudrait la voir k tout prlx! Qu'il se contenterait de voir sa Belle ^ travers une tenture d^chir^e, une porte entreb&ill^e, que sais-je!... Et maintenant que Monsieur tient k sa dispos­ ition un point de mire exceptionnel, un beau grand trou de serrure dans une belle grande porte, Monsieur n'est plus content! (p. 53)

The client's dissatisfaction is further augmented by his in­ ability to feel the reality of the long-awaited moment and to be sure of his own participation in it. While waiting for the signal that

29Ibid. 55

She has arrived, he tries to convince himself of his own good fortune:

Dis, est-ce que tu peux croire a ce qui t'arrive?... Est-ce que tu le peux vraiment?... Est-ce que c'est bien toi. toi dont il va £tre question?... Est-ce que ce jour est bien aujourd'hui? Oui, il semblerait... Est-ce que je suis bien ici? Sotte question!... Ce qui est ici est bien ici, du moins a ce qu'il paralt... Et toi, mon bonhomme, es-tu bien toi- m&me? (p. 55)

This feeling of unreality troubles the client even while he is actually watching Her: "Allons, allons, comment: je rive. Je ne vois pas tout cela." (p. 57) When at last she has completely revealed herself, the client believes that he is satisfied; but his ecstasy increases as she continues to strip to the bone. The paradox is that, as the situation becomes more and more unreal, the client's particip­ ation in it seems to increase. Rushing to embrace nothingness, the client is knocked senseless by the closed door.

La Serrure suggests two sources of man's dissatisfaction in the world of presence: first, his inability to grasp the whole of

Truth and secondly, his inability to seize the moment. Man's per­ spective in this world is as limited as peeking through a keyhole and even when he does glimpse the truth, he is unable to possess it, for the moment of revelation is fleeting and illusory. A sense of un­ reality haunts even the most intense experience: "Les anges de l'irr^el nous guettent, les anges du n^ant. L'espolr, le d^sir 30 immense, c'est toujours un moment de r^alit^, rien qu'un moment!"

Le Guichet could be a sequel to La Serrure. for the client, once again described as a "petit monsieur timide aux gestes et aux

^"Les Anges de l'irrlel," Pages d'^criture. p. 26. 56

v^tements ^triqu^s," could be the same client who previously appeared

in La Serrure (that is, if one postulates that he was merely knocked

out rather than killed in the previous play). At any rate, this

client is even more timid and fearful, perhaps because he is not sus­

tained by a dominating passion as was the client in La Serrure and perhaps also because, having come to seek information, he feels more dependent on the ticket agent.

Tardieu has a great deal of fun satirizing bureaucracy in the

first exchanges between the client and the agent. The agent takes full advantage of his position, humiliating the customer by making him wait

till his number is called even though they are alone and by asking him all kinds of routine questions before permitting him to ask anything.

After much frustration, it finally comes out that the little man wants to know not only what train to take but also what direction to take in life and how to live. When the client rejects all of his frivolous suggestions, the agent ironically proposes despair:

Pr £p OS]£: Avez-vous essaye du d^sespoir? CLIENT: Du... quoi?... PR^POS^: Du d^sespoir m^taphysique. Oui, enfin, de encore l'angoisse, de l'angoisse du d^sespoir ou encore de la fr^quentation de votre inconscient, de 'l'homme souterrain'? CLIENT: Hdlas! je ne le connais que trop, l'homme sou- terrain! II est particuli&rement abondant sur la ligne Ivry-Porte de la Chapelle. PRj£P0Sl£: Eh bien, mais justement! N'avez-vous pas ^prouv^ une sorte de soulagement moral en constatant com- bien les philosophies crdpusculaires, les theories de l'angoisse et du ddsespoir ^talent... comment dire... identiques k votre sort? II y a 1& une sorte d'harmonie, de convenance esth^tique, qui devrait vous r^jouir, non? CLIENT: Dites plutdt que la peinture del'Enfer me ramfene £ mon enfer quotidien, de sorte que je m'y enfonce un peu plus chaque jour. (pp. 78-79) 57

While a philosophy of metaphysical despair might be in accord

with the client's dissatisfaction with his daily life, it does not

help him to come to terms with reality. He tries to escape into

dreaming, but even his dreams are unsatisfactory: "Malheureusement, mes r£ves sont flous. Oui, ils manquent de nettet^. Je voudrais

leur donner un peu plus de 'corps', un peu plus de coloris." (p. 79)

Since the client has failed to find what he is looking for in the

present world, the agent suggests that he try the absent world, the world of the spirit. When the client enthusiastically accepts his

proposition, the agent suddenly switches from disinterested, matter-

of-fact responses to lyrically poetic phrases, leading the client in a flight into absence:

Je vous emm^ne plus loin que le bout du monde: lh ou les formes ne sont pips que des iddes, ou les Stres ne sont plus que des essences, oh rhgne une immobile clart^, en £quilibre entre un avenir d£jh r^volu et un pass^ qui devient! (p. 80)

This shared fantasy of living in the world of the spirit is an ecstatic and joyful experience:

CLIENT: Je vois... je vois... quelle plule d'^toilesl PRl£P0s£: II n'y a mfene plus d'dtoilesl CLIENT: Quelle pluie d'absence d'dtoilesl PR^POS^: Quelle absenceI Quelle absence' Ou &tes-vous? (p. 80)

All sense of earthly limitations and suffering is left behind: "Je ne suis plus: j'dtals. Je ne souffre plus: J'ai souffert. Je ne vis plus: j'ai vdcu." (p. 81) This is the positive aspect of the world of absence: "la libre expansion de 1'esprit dans les espaces infinis. Yet man cannot live for long as a disembodied spirit,

^"Permanence et nouveaut^," ibid., p. 86. 58 for his body attaches him firmly to the present world. And, as the

conclusion of the play shows, no matter how dissatisfied man is with his daily life, it has become a habit he is reluctant to give up. Al­

though the client seemed ready enough to leave earth behind, when he finds out that he is to die and leave it forever, he is unwilling. The negative aspect of absence is death and non-being.

In Monsieur Moi. Tardieu*s dissatisfaction with life and his impatience with man's limitations are still central to the play; but, in spite of the difficulty confronting him, Monsieur Moi finds a way

to cope with his situation. In this play, Tardieu*s irony is directed at himself, for Monsieur Moi and his partner could be a parody of the double nature of the poet. As Tardieu states in one of his essays:

"Tout poAte, lorsqu'il se sent poussA A Acrire par quelque n&cessite 32 intArieure, se dedouble instantan^ment." He describes this doubling of the personality as two separate entitles: the rational thinking artisan who manipulates the words and the impulsive intuitive specta­ tor who provides a link with humanity and the universe:

En lui, deux etres s'opposent et se complAtent:— d'une part un &tre de raison, un homme parmi les hommes, empruntant leur langage pour exprimer les joies et les souffranees person- nelles d'un vivant: — d'autre part, un Etre inconnu, impulsif, intuitif, inex­ plicable, multiforme, infini, l'otage, en quelque sorte, de tout un monde beaucoup plus vaste que n'en peut contenir une conscience humaine, l'otage et le messager qui relie l'&tre personnel non seulement A tous les autres hommes, mais encore A tout l'univers animA, A toutes les choses inanimAes, A ce qui est visible, A tout ce qui est invisible.33

32t|Trois Visions de l'homme," ibid., p. 63.

33Ibid.. p. 65. 59

Monsieur Moi is an ironic exaggeration of the rational side of the poet. He does all the thinking and the talking. The partner is a parodic version of the intuitive part of the poet. He thinks not at all and speaks very little, merely reacting to whatever his friend has said with the appropriate emotion and exclamation. From an objective point of view, the partner appears to be such a total ninny that one wonders what relationship could exist between the two travelers. Yet

Monsieur Moi seems to value his company and depend on his exclamations for moral support. Monsieur Moi, unsure of his own being, needs a yes- man for reassurance: "RAponds-moi! Veux-tu me dire si je me vois bien tel que je dois £tre: parvenu au milieu du chemin, un homme de raison, n 1est-ce pas l A ce que je suis?" "Ah, £a oull Ah oui, ouil Parbleu ouil" answers the partner obsequiously, (pp. 92-93) His constant flattery of the partner reveals his need to convince himself of his friend's value to him: "Tes reflexions prouvent surabondamment l'interet que tu me portes. Tu m'es vraiment d'un grand secours."

(p. 95)

When confronted with the absurd, with the inexplicable, both companions are equally at a loss; for the man of reason and the stupid clown are one: "Je ne sals pas, dls-je, pourquoi nous nous sommes arrAtAs, mals, vois-tu, c'est pr^cisAment pour cela que nous nous snmmea arr£t^sl" (p. 94) Monsieur Moi is not even able to explain what the obstacle is which impedes their progress: "C'est dire qu'il y avait, A cette Atape de notre chemin, un obstacle: quelque chose d'inexplicable, quelque chose d'irr^ductible et d'opaque contre quoi nous nous sommes heurtAs." (p. 94) 60

Yet he realizes that life is full of the inexplicable and that he has

encountered it before:

Oui, il y a dans ma vie je ne sais quoi d*incomprehensible et d'inacceptable, une chose peut-£tre grandiose, peut-^tre atroce — en tout cas, sans commune mesure avec moi-mime et autour de laquelle, cependant, toute ma vie, tu m'entends, toute ma vie est construite. Souvent j'y pense et chaque fois j'ai peur, car je ne puis meme pas deviner ce que c'est: on dirait un mauvais souvenir, quelque ev^nement qui m'est Stranger et qui pourtant pAse A mes ^paules comme un fardeau personnel* Ce fut peut-Atre un moment de d^nence gliss^ au centre de ma raison, peut-^tre l'immensit^ de rien au milieu de mon Atre. (p.95)

What is this bad memory which weighs on his conscience? The past crimes of humanity? A personal guilty secret? A moment of madness?

Nothingness at the heart of being? Perhaps all of these combined— the unknown may seem unacceptable to us but it must be admitted as a part of the Whole. Tardieu explains in an essay that, as the result of a nightmare, he came to understand "qu'il auralt desormals A admettre l 1inadmissible et que si je voulals rester fidAle, 11 fallait que je \ 34 m'habitue a d^passer les contradictions de mon entendement."

Even though complete understanding of the Whole is beyond our

Intellect, reason can contain the absurd and make it bearable:

Vois-tu, c'est un grand reconfort que de pouvoir cerner ce qui vous menace. J'entends: cerner par la pens^e, ou par une simple image, par un geste peut-etre... Je ne vais pas au coeur du gouffre: comment le pourrais-je? Mais je fais le tour de ses bords et, quand je sais que ma d^mence, avec la d^mence du monde, est contenue dans ma raison, quand je fais tomber dans mon regard ce grand d e l incomprehensible qui se melange A mes propres tenAbres, quand ma vie protege ma cendre avec sollici- tude, alors je tlens tous les tonnerres dans un fil et mon crime lnconnu dans ma royale innocence* Je m'endors reconcilie* (p. 97)

Tardieu respects reason and the power of the word but he also

^"Memoires d'un orphelin," La Part de 1'ombre, p. 138. 61

recognizes their limitations: "Toutes choses que je connais, au nom

de cette raison qui nous dclaire encore pour un peu de temps, je les

ai nominees. Cependant, la nuit de ce qui n'a pas de nom les d^borde 35 de toutes part"; however, we must recognize this darkness in order

to be able to combat it: "A moi de combattre pied k pied l'envahisse- ment des ten&bres, de repousser le plus loin possible mes limites— mais quelle folie de croire que je pourrai continuer a vivre et k

lutter si, des ce monde-ci, je ne fais pas la part de l'ombrel"3^ The

solution— 'for the poet at least— seems to be containment, for the ab­ surd can be contained in the poem or play, enabling the author to go on living: "Et mon sac sur le dos, je pourrai enfin continuer a marcher." (p. 97) Tardieu expresses the same idea in an essay entitled

"La Redevance":

J'ai mis ma folie k part... Implacable, inevitable, ir-r^-vo- cable, 'mais il le faut' (ici un profond soupir). La sant^ est A ce prix. La part ^tant faite, de 'cela', je peux vivre, parler, agir.3^

Faust et Yorick reemphasizes the limits of reason and the futility of trying to understand man and his situation in the world with the Intellect alone. This approach leads only to dissatisfaction and despair because the mind can never encompass the whole of reality.

As the scholar discovers, man can never aller au but by reason alone:

Ahl L'Echelon sup^rieurl Que de veilles il m'a cout^l Que de travaux, que de voyages 1 J'ai mesur^ des milliers et des milliers de cranes sous toutes les latitudes; j'ai accumul^

35"La Part de 1'ombre," Pages d'^criture. p. 20.

36Ibid.

3 ^La Part de 1'ombre, p. 165. 62

les observations, j'ai fait la critique de toutes les hypo­ theses et je n'apercois, apr^s tant d'efforts, que je suis bien de toucher au but. (p. 102)

Even honors and recognition do not bring satisfaction, for the in­

tellectual is always conscious of having failed to attain complete

understanding:

En effet, mes collogues franpais avaient enfin, aprks ceux des autres pays, reconnu l'int£r&t de mes recherches. . .j'^tais combld d'honneurs!... Et cependant, une amertume subsistait au fond de mon coeur; je touchais au but, certes, mais je ne 1'avals pas encore atteint. (p. 107)

Moreover, complete dedication to the intellectual search blinds the

scholar to all other aspects of life. He has little awareness of his

own being and even less of that of the others closest to him. Yet

time flows on bringing death before discovery. The irony of the play's

ending— the super-skull for which he had been searching being his own—

shows the folly of neglecting one's own life. Indeed, this play is an

object lesson in what happens when man, in attempting to understand the

Whole, fails to see his own role in it.

Although the best examples of Tardieu's experiments with

language are in the comedies Eclair and the po&nes ^ iouer. the drames

Eclair clearly reveal Tardieu's virtuosity with the spoken word. He

admits that he deliberately limits his vocabulary to the simplest, most common words: "J'ai longtemps cherch£ les mots les plus simples,

les plus us^s, m£me les plus plats.However, as with the . ontint

of the plays, the appearance of simplicity in the language is decep­

tive; for Tardieu knows that in the proper combination, the most

^®"Les Mots de tous les jours," Pages d'^crlture. p. 32. familiar words are also those which have the most power to touch and move us: "Quiconque saurait le secret usage des mots de tous les jours aurait un pouvoir illimit^,— et il ferait peur."39 Tardieu uses the familiar sounds of common words and expressions to produce an in-* stant "shock of recognition" in his audience. For example, anyone who has ever been a student can Immediately recognize the exhortations of the professor and the humble, respectful replies of the student in the opening lines of La Politesse inutile and anyone who has ever had to ask Information of an impersonal employee can empathize with the plight of the client in Le Guichet. Yet clearly Tardieu is not trying to reproduce "realistic" conversation, for his imitations of ordinary language are always tongue-in-cheek, a satire of language on language, which reveals the emptiness of stock words and phrases such as the professor's maxims in La Politesse inutile, as well as the gratuitous­ ness of much that is said, such as the ticket agent's routine questions in Le Guichet or the father's daily inquiries .in Qui est 1&? As the satiric intent of the words becomes apparent to the audience, the ini­ tial identification created by the familiar-sounding words is broken and the impact of their irony is intensified.

While the drames iclair show Tardieu's ability to mimic banal conversation, they also remind us that he is a poet. When the absurd suddenly strikes, changing the "normal" situation, language too changes from the banal to the poetic. Tardieu uses this switch in linguistic tone to indicate that the protagonist has reached a state of heightened

39Ibid. 64

perception in which he gets a glimpse, at least momentarily, of the

unknown which lies beyond reality. These moments of greater awareness

bring revelation: the father in Qui est lA? discovers his lack of

humanity, the clients in La Serrure and Le Guichet find that nothing­

ness and absence lie beyond the physical world and Monsieur Moi bumps

into the inexplicable. Perhaps Tardieu hopes that the contrast be­

tween these poetic Interludes and the ordinary conversation in the plays will help to enlarge the audience's perception of reality. In

an essay on the artist Jacques Villon, Tardieu writes that if Villon

tends to lose track of objects in color, "c'est pour mieux nous ouvrir

cet espace profond qui est notre eldment natal, c'est pour que

l'essentiel des choses se concentre et soudain cristallise— pour que

notre vision s'^largisse aux dimensions d'un r£ve ^veill^, immense et

radieux comme une aurore— pour que ce monde devienne un autre monde.

sans cesser d'etre ici. " ^ Tardieu's own drames Eclair produce a similar effect. By expanding our idea of reality to include the un­ known and the inexplicable, Tardieu gives back to man his missing meta­ physical dimension, restoring his lost grandeur by making him a parti­ cipant in something greater than himself.

40 Les Portes de toile. p. 100. CHAPTER III

THEATRE DE CHAMBRE: COMEDIES ECLAIR

The seven plays of Th£4tre de chambre which I have called

comedies Eclair differ from those I have grouped as drames Eclair in

tone and purpose. As these labels imply, the dramas are predominantly

serious but sometimes include burlesque elements while the comedies are mostly burlesque but sometimes hint at serious themes. The dramas

often reveal the pessimistic side of Tardieu's nature, but the come­ dies show his sense of humor. The ironic satire of modern man and his society in the dramas gives way to a burlesque parody of social langu­ age and behavior in the comedies. Although Tardieu*s main purpose in

the drames Eclair seems to be to make us aware of the missing meta­ physical dimension in our lives by expanding our conception of reality to include the unknown and the inexplicable, his goal in the comedies appears to be to warn us of the missing meaning in our language. While the dramas illustrate the difficulty of being, of living a meaningful life in modern society, the comedies show the difficulty of communicat­ ing, of conveying meaning in words. Tardieu seems to hope that by be­ coming aware of these difficulties, man can restore himself to a more authentic existence and perhaps restore a greater communicative power to his language.

The dramas take place in either a mock realistic contemporary

65 66 setting or in an undefined time and place, but five of the seven comedies are set in the past, being parodies of nineteenth century farces. Yet in most of these plays the decor is not particularly em­ phasized, usually representing "un salon bourgeois a la campagne" in the 1800s. Why then would Tardieu choose such a setting for his comedies? Several possible reasons come to mind. First of all, this atmosphere seems appropriate to these plays brcause they concern social language and behavior. Social rituals were more important and social roles more clearly defined in the nineteenth century than at present.

Secondly,, placing the plays in the recent past gives an air of melan­ choly or nostalgia to some of them. More important, the format of the farce leads the audience to expect frivolity and amusement (Tardieu's serious lines stand out by contrast with the comedy) and allows the playwright freedom to exaggerate and to indulge in melodramatic coups de theatre.

Nearly everyone who has written about these plays points out that by satirizing the theater of the past, Tardieu is preparing the way for new theatrical techniques. And in fact, in the stage directions of three of the seven comedies— Oswald et Zena'ide. Il v avait foule au manoir and Eux seuls le savent— Tardieu states that he is parodying old techniques such as asides, monologues and obscure, involved plots. While all of Tardieu's plays imply criticism of old techniques by their very departure from them, it seems that it would have been unnecessary (in the early 1950s when these plays were written) to satirize such long out-moded devices as asides and mono­ logues. Therefore, I think that Tardieu has chosen these devices 67 primarily because they permit him to show something about the nature of language and communication.

While the scenic object in the drames eclair often centers on dominating objects, the scenic object in the comedies emphasizes the human element: language and gesture. In contrast to the scenic ob­ ject in the dramas which appeals first to the senses, these comedies appeal to the mind, often having an object in the sense of a goal or a didactic purpose. They are like games or demonstrations revolving around language and social behavior. In fact, five of the seven come­ dies are presented by narrators who explain the "rules" of the game before the play begins.

In these plays Tardieu takes an almost scientific approach to language. As Robert Champigny has noted, because the interest in these plays is centered on language, the characters are reduced to voices: they are what they say.^ Champigny's view of another of

Tardieu's plays applies equally well to these comedies: "The only character which assumes full stature in the play is human, but not a human being: it is language itself, more precisely social language.

Therefore, language itself, observed from the exterior, becomes the scenic object. Tardieu places language on stage in a social situation, changes some aspect of language or situation and watches what happens.

Robert Ranters believes this technique is a way of awakening the mind to the mystery of language:

^"Satire and Poetry in Two Plays of Jean Tardieu," p. 87.

2Ibid.. p. 90. 68

II part du quotidien, du drolatique, il superpose volontiers deux r^cits ou deux textes, comme on superpose un caique sur un dessin, mais en faisant expres de mdnager une bavure, un ldger ddplacement des lignes qui devient suggestif. Sugges- tif de quoi? D'un myst&re dans le fonctioimement du langage quand on le d^traque un peu.3

Susan Jones suggests that this objective view of language puts us in a

% strange position and shocks us into the realization of how much human

reality is determined by the word.^

While the scenic object in the drames dclair challenges the

spectator to respond by forming mental images, the scenic object in

the comedies dclair requires a different kind of Intellectual parti­

cipation from the audience. There is an element of mystery in these

comedies; in each one something is missing. In each play we are con­

fronted with a set of appearances and it is up to us to discover the reality behind these appearances. Like the drames dclair. these come­

dies transcend realism by suggesting something beyond what is present­

ed on stage. At first glance, they appear to be merely humorous parodies of social language and behavior, but through the frivolity,

each one teaches us something about the nature of language.

As we have seen, for Tardieu, the most important aspect of the dramatic production is not what is presented on stage but rather what this presentation can evoke. Likewise in language, the words them­ selves are less important than what lieB behind or within them. Words, like things and men, are part of the world of presence: mere symbols

^"D'un art a l’autre avec Jean Tardieu," Figaro Litt&ralre. no. 1238 (February 9-15, 1970), p. 21.

^"Langage et Communication," p. 56. 69

for something that remains hidden behind them. Words are appearances with which man creates the identity he projects to others, and as such,

they are deceptive and sometimes tyrannical, often giving a false

illusion of understanding or communication. Words are difficult to control because they are not solid or stable but porous and flexible, like liquids in motion. Words are treacherous, being either empty of meaning or too full of implications. As Tardieu writes in Les Portes de toile:

Quant aux mots de notre langue, ils me parvenaient eclatants et sonores, mais souvent vid^s de toute signification et toujours prets (m&me les plus simples) & exprimer autre chose que 1'usage: poreux et disponlbles, ils ^talent faits pour £tre traverses, beaucoup plus que pour contenir, beaucoup plus pour l 1explosion que pour la fixation des sons,-href des fluides en mouvement plutot que des 'termes' imposes.5

Like all other aspects of the world of presence, words are haunted by absence. Carried along in the constant flow of the river of time, language, like man, never ceases to change. Thus Tardieu calls language a pursuit: "Cette poursuite exaltante ^tait bien le

Langage, lorsqu'il se meut jusqu'au bord*de lui-m&ne, lorsqu'll meurt a mesure qu'il change."^ The passage of time erodes the meaning of words, so that in time authors may find that a part of their work "sera peut-etre 'mangle' par le temps, comme le griffonnage d^s-

4sper^ d'un naufrag^ est devor^ par le sel de la mer."^ Some words lose meaning through common usage while others become rigid, a part of

5P. 10.

^"La Musique," La Part de 1*ombre, p. 54.

^Jean Tardieu, Un Mot pour un autre (Paris: Galllmard, 1951), p. 67. 70 fixed expressions; still others acquire too many meanings so that they lose their precision and clarity. Because of this element of ab­ sence— ambiguity or lack of meaning— in words, they have lost part of their communicative power.

Words alone are Inadequate for communication because of this element of absence within them; but communication does not depend en­ tirely on words: gestures convey their own messages at the instinctual level. As Tardieu explains through his Professor Froeppel in the humorous prose work Un Mot pour un autre, there is a whole language within a language made up of verbal gestures like exclamations and imitative noises as well as physical gestures such as body movements, attitudes and expressions. Social gestures also form a part of this

"langage muet" which underlies the spoken language. Professor

Froeppel becomes convinced that these agreed-upon gestures are part of a vast conspiracy among men. Gradually the professor becomes conscious that this "entente secrete" exists not only between human beings but

Q also in all nature. Nature is in itself a perfect language of ges­ tures, but it is a forgotten language to which we have lost the key:

J'ai souvent pense que l'univers visible dtait une langue oubliee,une 'grille' dont nous avons perdu la cl^. Alors cet dnorme echafaudage de surfaces, ce fragile Edifice de couleurs et de formes, dressd aux quatre coins de l'espace, traverse de rayons, coupd de pans d'ombres, tremblant de frissons, me paraissait d^pourvu de profondeur et compost de simples allu­ sions & quelque insondable rdalitd situde dans les tdndbres, A des distances infinies. Chacune de ces apparences avait dtd projetde dans nos regards pour slgnifier quelque chose— mais la signification nous dtait inconnue...

8Ibid., pp. 35-37. Q Lea Portes de toile. p . 58 • Although this instinctive, gestural side of language is im­

portant as a link between man and nature, man must get beyond this

level of language if he is to speak for the world rather than merely

imitate it. In order to restore to language its maximum power of communication, man must somehow get control of his words: for language

is fragile, always threatening to disintegrate and return to a more primitive level. As Professor Froeppel observes:

II semble, en effet, qu'a travers la noble langue fran^aise, encore tout emperruq^e par les souvenirs du Grand Si^cle, on apergoive soudain, en filigrane, je ne sais quels reflets effrayants du balbutiement primitif des soci^tds. C'est comme si, derri^re les panaches et les 'verdures' d'une rh^torique solemnelle, on voyait grimacer tout A coup quelque langage immemorial, tot^mique, barriol^, enfantin, ^ la fois pauvre et rutilant, gauche et genial, comme une poterie barbare ou comme une danse rituelle de 'sauvages': galops de dadas, furie de zi-zis, tambours de boum-boum, piques de toc-toc, fracas de coupes-coupes, danses de totos, de niams-niams, de fric-fracs et plic et ploc et digue-dlgue et pampanpan, dagada tralala, crac, bing, ploc, plouf, hop-lk, poumP-0

The com&iie Eclair entitled Ce que parler veut dire is a demon­ stration of the fragility of language, showing its tendency to dis­ integrate into verbal and physical gestures. Tardieu takes Professor

Froeppel from Un Mot pour un autre and places him on stage, allowing him to demonstrate his theories on language in a series of four sketches. Professor Froeppel's specialty is the "infiniment-petits" of language and the "infra-langages" by which he means the inter­ jections, noises and body movements which accompany spoken language, and which are usually ignored by written language.^ He is also in­

% n Mot pour un autre, p. 82. 72

terested in "langages familiaux" which he defines as "le langage con-

sid^r^ comme un secret de famille."^2 Three of the four linguistic

examples in Ce que parler veut dire concern various types of family

communication. Professor Froeppel explains in his introductory re­

marks that he has studied and catalogued "toutes les deformations que

subit le langage i l'int^rieur des groupes sociaux— principalenent

dans les families." (p. 162) Language within the family tends to de­

generate even further toward primitive gestures than language in

society in general because of the more intimate relationship between

the speakers and because of the more instinctual level of the messages

being relayed. In the first example of family language, "Rite du

Retour-a-la-Maison,"^ showing the greetings between husband and wife

when the former returns home from work, the couple communicate their

feelings, moods and desires by imitating animal noises. For example:

Monsieur B..., par sa mimique expressive, s'efforce d’^voquer une bete fauve, un lion probablement, ou encore un jeune puma: il a les pattes en avant, les griffes dress^es, il secoue sa crini&re et son rictus semble celui d'un animal feroce. (pp. 162-63)

Madame B. reciprocates by playing "la com^die de la femelle du f^lln,

surprise par le retour du male." (p. 163) According to Professor

Froeppel1s explanations, the tone of these noises can convey an ex­

plicit message, so that a certain Interrogative roar means "Veux-tu

venlr te promener avec mol?" and a response "sur un ton lasse, chroma-

tique et descendant" means "Non! Je suis fatigu^e, restons k la

12Ibid., p. 17.

^-^Tardieu's Professor Froeppel calls this "Langage Jaguar" in Un Mot pour an autre, p. 17. 73

maison." (p. 163) While it might be possible for this couple to con­

vey specific messages through roars and gestures because they have

agreed upon their meaning and established their conventions, this ex­

change would look ridiculous to the outsider and he would understand

little from it. This type of secret communication through verbal and

physical gestures provides a kind of security against the masses of

society, making the couple a separate and closed "society" with its

own language and customs.

The professor's second example shows another couple with a

secret language. This time it is a verbal language using ordinary

French structure and vocabulary, but the words are put together in

strange combinations so that they seem to the outsider to form non­

sense statements. For example, Monsieur X. makes the following pro­ posal to his wife: "Dis done, Arlette, ma ch£rle, si nous allions

reviser la Constitution!... Tu sais, les noisetiers sont couverts de

kangourous." Madame X. states a refusal in the following terms:

"Non, mon chkri! II y a des nuages de sainfoin sur les coteaux de

Suresnes et le rossignol n'a pas repu k l'Agr^gationl" Or she may accept in these words: "0 mon ami, tu sais bien que le cri des canards sauvages rejouit le coeur du Samourai." (p. 164) Once again

% the couple separates itself from society by creating its own language, but this time, rather than a playful ritual, the special language is regarded as a real secret: "C'est, en effet, un langage k cld, un secret jalousement garde par les deux sujets en presence..." (p. 164)

Because this ritual language is used to refer to the "delicate" sub— 74

1 I ject of the devoir coniugal. it has an euphemistic quality. It is as though the couple is trying to keep a secret from themselves as to what they are discussing as well as to exclude others. This nonsense language, being free of emotional content, permits them to express their feelings with less inhibition.

Professor Froeppel's fourth example concerns another type of family language called "Dialecte d!fensif d'appartement" or more simply "le blabla de b!b!."^ This kind of private language "pour

1'usage interne" consists of baby talk made up of "mots inventes par les petits enfants eux-m&mes" as well as "ces mots touchants et ridi­ cules qu'inventent les grandes personnes. . .sous le pretexte de 'se mettre h. la portae des enfants'." (p. 172) Less esoteric than the previous example, this secret language is sometimes comprehensible to the outsider and can be translated into normal French, at least by

Professor Froeppel. The professor explains, for example, that Madame

Z's question "L'avait ben cavaill!, le che peussieu k la dadame?" means "Mon cher !poux a-t-il bien travaill!?" Madame Z. having ex­ pressed some doubt as to this, Monsieur Z.'s indignant reply "Coba, pas cavalll!] A fait bla-bla poum-poum av! les plouplous du tralala!" translates as "Commentl Je n'ai pas travalllll Je n'al pas cess! de parler et de dlscuter avec les plus importants d!l!gu^s du Comit!l" (p.

174) This childish use of language seems to represent not so much a desire for security against the masses as a kind of playful intimacy

1 / This type of language is referred to as "patois Champagne nature" in ibid.

^^This is known as "Langue Auguste" in ibid. 75 or perhaps a desire to return to childhood. The speakers seem to realize that their special language would sound ridiculous to others, for as soon as the maid enters the room they immediately regain the use of the normal language, even though they are still speaking only to each other.

All three of these examples of secret languages show commun­ ication on its most basic, primitive level, that of security and re­ assurance. They also show that communication can take place through almost any agreed-upon sign, be it physical or verbal. It is also clear that as far as language is concerned, words in themselves have no absolute meaning. Their content is dependent upon the speakers using them. As Mikel Dufrenne points out, speech is an exchange of signs and not of meanings.^ Therefore, perhaps the most important element in human communication is the degree of agreement which exists between the speakers. According to William £. Hocking, communication depends on a sharing of the same world: "In order that any two beings should establish communication, they must already have something in common.Within the couple, this degree of agreement is greater than that which exists within the larger society, and therefore, language can degenerate to a more primitive level without hindering communi­ cation.

Even within society as a whole language has a strange tendency

•^Language and Philosophy, trans. by Henry B. Veatch, forword by Paul Henle (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), p. 84.

^"Knowledge of Other Minds," Floyd W. Matson and Ashley Montagu, eds., The Human TMalogue: Perspectives on Communication (New York: The Free Press, 1967), p. 542. 76

to degenerate into primitive noises and verbal gestures. Professor

Froeppel1s third example consists of words and definitions taken from

his dictionary of the "mots sauvages" of the French language which he

defines as "termes qu'empruntent les humains pour parler aux animaux

domestiques, aux enfants et aux Strangers, diminutifs familiers, mots

vagues, monosyllabes b&tifiants a repetition, expressions enfantines

ou gateuses, mots et grommellements imitatifs, interjections et ex­

clamations, argot ^dulcord, etc."^® The professor claims to be the

first person to group these words which have become so familiar that we no longer notice them. When taken out of the mass of language and

examined side by side, these words "nous frappent par leur £tranget^

et voici que soudain leur caract^re insolite, rev^lateur d'une inson-

dable pr^histoire, nous appara^t, k la faveur d'une sorte de vertige

d'imb^cilit^."^9 These strapge little words which infiltrate our

common tongue are like residue of an earlier, more primitive state of

language.

Why is our language so full of these nonsensical expressions?

Are they due to mental laziness or do they indicate some unconscious desire to return to a simpler stage of development? Professor

Froeppel reflects on this question:

Serait-ce que l'homme subit en permanence la tentation d'abolir en lui le langage? de revenir en arri&re, du langage au grognement, du signe k l'infrasigne, comme le subconscient

18 Un Mot pour un autre, p. 80.

19Ibid., p. 82. 77

freudien tend A retrouver le nirvannah du seln maternel? le devoir social seralt le mot, mais 1'instinct serait le geste, et en de§a du geste— quoi? L1immobility?...

Tardieu does not really answer the question of why language tends to

go back toward the primitive. His purpose in Ce que parler veut dire

and in the prose work Un Mot pour un autre seems to be merely to show

that this tendency exists and that, if we remain unaware of it, it will take over more and more, eventually impoverishing the spoken

language. The final lines of Ce que parler veut dire reveal that even

the professor who has studied these peculiarities of speech is not un- 21 affected by them:

Ainsi, mesdames et messieurs, se termine notre promenade h. travers les curiosit^s sociales du langage contemporain. Elle n'^tait gu&re rassurante, cette promenade! Nous avons vu par- tout 1'A-peu-pr^s se substituer au mot propre, le geste remplir les vides brants du vocabulaire et le galimatias en­ fant in envahir le langage des adults!... (Changeant brusque- ment de ton.) Et maintenant, au dodo! (p. 175)

As the "oeuvres posthumes" of Professor Froeppel prove, after imi­

tative noises the next step backward is silence: "Le langage atteint

ici son ultime signification: le silence, en passant par le simple

'bruit' imitatif, s'identifiant avec les manifestations sonores de

1*universe, c'est-a-dire du dieu Pan." The following poem concludes

the professor's works:

20Ibld.. p. 15.

^Leonard Pronko states a bit too pessimistically that "Even the linguistic expert, when he becomes a simple human being, reverts to the imprecise babbling he had criticized and which is apparently the most frequent (if not the only) means of communication among men." (Avant-Garde, p. 158.) 78

'Roum-pchi, roum-pchi,1 faisait lamer. 'Fu, fu, fu, £ur r£pondait la for&t. Et mol qui ne sals plus que dire nl que faire, Je me talsais.22

The play Un Mot pour un autre originally appeared in the prose work of the same title as part of the posthumous works of Professor

Froeppel. A note about the play by one of the professor's disciples explains that it was written to "mieux r^pandre ses iddes sur la grandeur et la fragility du langage humain."23 Although written some years apart, the comedies Un Mot pour un autre and Un Geste pour un autre demonstrate the same premise: that social language and customs are entirely arbitrary, depending on habit and cultural acceptance.

Un Mot pour un autre shows what happens when a strange

"epidemic" strikes the vocabulary of the more fortunate classes: "Les miserables atteints de ce mal prenaient soudaln les mots les uns pour les autres, comme s'ils eussent pulse au hasard les paroles dans un sac." (p. 209) But the strangest thing of all is that those affected by the malady were not even aware of it and conversations went right on as usual. According to the narrator introducing the play, this example shows:

(1) que nous parIons souvent pour ne rien dire, (2) que si, par chance, nous avons quelque chose A dire, nous pouvons le dire de mille facpns diff^rentes, (3) que les pr^tendus fous ne sont appel^s tels que parce que 1'on ne comprend pas leur langage, (4) que dans le commerce des humains, bien souvent les mouve- ments du corps, les Intonations de la voix et 1*expression du visage en disent plus long que les paroles,

22 Un Mot pour un autre, p. 79.

23Ibid.. p. 52. 79

(5) et aussi que les mots n'ont, par eux-m&mes, d'autres sens que ceux qu'il nous plait de leur attrlbuer. (pp. 209-10)

Thus social communication depends primarily on agreement between the speakers as to the terms to be used: "Car enfln, si nous d^cidons ensemble que le crl du chien sera nomm^ hennissement et abolement celul du cheval, demain nous entendrons tous les chiens hennir et tous les chevaux aboyer." (p. 210)

Yet in this play, agreement on vocabulary does not exist as the speakers are not aware that they are substituting one word for another. Still they seem to understand each other. How can commun­ ication go on under such circumstances? Presumably, it is possible because communication takes place through many channels of which words are only one: "le seul organe atteint ^tait: le ‘vocabulaire1." (p.

209) First of all, language itself furnishes clues to meaning both through its structure and through phonetic and semantic associations.

Secondly, non-verbal elements of communication provide additional clues. And thirdly, the familiarity of the social situation Itself leads one to expect certain language and behavior.

Let us examine a typical conversation from the play to see how these means of communication work together. As the play opens,

Madame is alone in her living room, reading a book. The maid enters to announce a guest and the following conversation takes place:

LA BONNE: Madame, c’est Madame de Perleminouze. MADAME: AhI Quelle grappel Faites-la vlte grossirl LA BONNE: Madame la contesse de Perleminouze! MADAME: Ch&re, tr&s chhre peluchel Depuis combien de trous. depuis combien de galets n'avais-je pas eu le mltron de vous sucrer1 MADAME DE PERLEMINOUZE: H&Las! Chfere! j'£tais moi-mfime trfes, vltreusel Mes trois plus jeunes tour- teaux ont eu la citronnade. l'un aprks l 1autre. Pendant tout le d^but du corsaire. je n'al fait que nicher des moulins. courir chez le ludion ou chez le tabouret, j'ai passe des pults A surveiller leur carbure. a leur donner des plnces et des mous- sons. Bref, je n'al pas eu une mlnette a mol. MADAME: Pauvre chfere! Et mol qui ne me grattals de rlen! (pp. 210-11)

Situation, sentence, structure and Intonation make these

speeches comprehensible, but It Is the phonetic and semantic assoc­

iations which create the comedy by adding undertones of humor to this

parody of an ordinary conversation. While Madame de Perleminouze's

name sounds quite dignified and noble, the semantic association of the

combination perle and minou. suggesting something like "worthless

pearl," make it a parody. In the second line, the expected words might

be "Quelle chance! Faites-la vite entrer!" Instead, the substituted

words, grappe and grossir. suggest a surreal image of the lady as a

bunch of grapes which is commanded to swell up! Could this perhaps

have something to do with the lady's corpulence or it it merely a

funny image? One can only speculate. Madame addresses her friend as

dear peluche which seems appropriate for its connotations of softness

and luxuriousness. The substitutions trous and galets used after de­

puis combien de seems particularly appropriate for time, perhaps sug­

gesting days which were empty (trous) and things or events which were

used to fill them (galets) or more simply, the two terms could merely

« indicate larger and smaller units of time. Mitron and sucrer, referring to pastry cooks and sweetening, replace more familiar expressions

of affection. In the fifth speech, the opening H&Las! warns us that what follows will be a recital of some misfortune and since In a social

conversation the first thing discussed after the greetings have been

exchanged Is usually health, one has little difficulty understanding

Mme. de Perleminouze1s statement that she has been very vitreuse. The word itsef suggests "glassy-eyed" which is associated with Illness.

The idea of illness having been introduced, one can follow the next

sentence fairly easily by resubstituting enfants for tourteaux and

some disease (perhaps jaundice) for citronnade. After that, although

one is sure that Mme. de Perleminouze Is describing the care of her

sick little ones, it is harder to establish phonetic or semantic

associations with the substituted words. There are some rather ob­ vious substitutions as for example, pults for nuits. carbure for

temperature, minette for minute. The word moussons combines phonetic associations to suggest a mixture of boissons and medicaments. In the sixth line, the appropriate expression would probably be se douter de rien, but se eratter adds a physical connotation which intensifies the idea of concern or in this case, lack of it.

Indeed, the entire play is a game of word associations, for each substituted word, being a bona fide French word, has two meanings: its accepted, dictionary definition and its contextual meaning within the framework of the play. This in itself is not unusual: all words have both a dictionary meaning and a contextual one, but the two meanings are not usually so disparate as they are in this play. By widening the gap between the two meanings, Tardieu risks making the word incomprehensible, but sometimes this technique results in a word 82

f % / or expression with a heightened suggestivity. For example, later

in the play,one finds the statement "On voit que vous ne le coulissez

pas!" (p. 212) The context makes clear that the word should be

connaissez. but coulissez. suggesting coulisse, adds to it the idea of

intimacy, of a behind-the-scenes kind of knowing. The expression

"Je grippe tout" (p. 213) for "Je comprends tout" gives a physical

connotation to a mental concept. Examples of humorous associations

like those already cited are found throughout the play. Tardieu simply

cannot .resist the temptation to play with words in a way that is both 25 playful and intellectual.

Although Tardieu postulates that the characters in this play

are able to communicate in spite of their verbal malfunction, one wonders how much of this game of double entendres would be understood

and appreciated by an audience seeing and hearing the play on stage

for the first time. Perhaps Tardieu was mainly amusing himself by

the justness of his substitutions, for according to his statement in

the preface, the problem to be dealt with was simply how to convey

"un sens" by gestures and intonations alone, while "l'arbltraire du

^ I n his essay "Les Mailles du filet," Tardieu speaks of this kind of suggestivity in regard to poetry: "Ce qui fait que certains po^mes nous impressionnent plus que d'autres,c'est sans doute un plus grand £cart entre les mots et la plus grande quantlt^ de pressenti- ments qui se trouve prise dans leur intervalle, comme dans les mailles d'un filet." (Pages d'^criture. p. 30.)

^^Robert Kanters says of Tardieu's character: " H y a chez lui beaucoup d'humour.de cocasserie, 11 aime rire du rire des pofetes, jouer avec les mots. • ■ ." ("D'un art k 1'autre avec Jean Tardieu," p. 21.) 83 26 langage" is pushed to the absurd and the unintelligible. Perhaps the main purpose of using one word for another is to produce a kind of "alienation effect" whereby we as an audience are again placed in the position of outsider as was the case with the secret family languages in Ce que parler veut dire and are thus forced to focus our attention on language in a more objective and critical way. Reducing our normal dependence on words for meaning also forces us to be more conscious of the non-verbal cues to meaning which would ordinarily be taken for granted. Not understanding all the words, we must pay closer attention to gestures if we are to follow the action.

While we are outsiders to the language in Un Mot pour un autre.

Tardieu places us in the position of foreigners to the social gestures in Un Geste pour un autre. As the narrator, Admiral S^pulcre, ex­ plains, the play reconstructs a social gathering as it would take place on a certain island known as "l'archipel Sans-Nom" where, in spite of a rather advanced civilization,^ the social rituals are re­ versed so that it seemed to the admiral that "un malin g^nie se fut amus4 k faire de nos propres coutumes une absurde salade, en amenant les citoyens k prendre une attitude pour un autre, un geste pour un

^Thfe^tre de chambre. p. 10.

^Tardieu's satire of modern society breaks through here in the admiral's description of this "advanced civilization":. ". . .nous nous trouvames, el notre vive surprise, en presence d'une civilisation fort avancee: des villes toutes neuves (grace k de frequents bombarde­ ments) , des citoyens libres (grace a une police omnipresente), des moeurs paclflques (d^fendues par une milice arm^e jusqu'aux dents), un gouvernement solidement £tabli sur 1'instability des opinions— bref, toutes les conquStes du progr&sl" (p. 22.) 84

autre..." (p. 222) At first the admiral and his men were surprised

by these customs, but they gradually became accustomed to them so that

upon returning to their own country, they were struck by the strange­

ness of social gestures they had once accepted unquestioningly. As

the admiral puts it:

De retour dans ma patrie d'origine, je ne comprends plus tr&s bien pourquoi les gens de chez nous se serrent la main lors- qu’ils se rencontrent, enldvent leur chapeau lorsqu'ils franchissent une porte, s'assemblent pour manger, prennent plaisir k faire de la fumde ou se frottent les uns contre les autres au son de la musique...(p. 222)

Obviously, social actions are just as arbitrary as social language

and both depend on a mutual agreement between the members of a

culture.

As the play beings, we are struck first by the differences in

social behavior. The Admiral, greeting Madame de Saint-Ici-Bas, re­

spectfully kisses her foot. Then, having removed his shoe, he presents*

her with his socks which she receives with delight, assuring him they will have a place in her collection. The next guests to arrive, Mon­

sieur and Madame Grabuge, also remove their shoes and give them to

the butler who carefully arranges them on a shelf. Each guest re­

ceives a different kind of hat to wear before going to seat himself on a table. The admiral and Monsieur Grabuge greet each other by rubbing noses. But in spite of these differences, we recognize the language of politeness and the intention on the part of both hostess and guests to please and to be sociable* It is like looking at our social selves in a slightly distorted mirror.

At first glance, values also appear to be reversed so that the 85

highest praise goes to those showing the least talent. The admiral

compliments Mme. Garbuge on her ability to make her husband worth­

less :

J'ai beaucoup entendu parler de vous, Madame, au cours de ma derniere campagne. On salt que votre mari n'a aucun talent et que c'est a vous qu'il le doit. C'est le privilege d'une jolie femme de regner ainsi sur le coeur d'un dpoux, au point de le priver de toute valeur personnelle. (p. 224)

The highlight of the evening is Monsieur Grabuge, the national poet,

reading one of his worst poems. Before reading it, he explains that he wrote it on one of his worst days, so he has dedicated it to his wife. Entitled "Ode de Mer," the poem is a silly play on the words mer— m&re. The guests respond by coughing between "compliments":

MME DE S-I-B: Dieu, que cela est mauvais! (Elle tousse.) C'est absolument mauvais. Et comme c'est mal ^crit, mal compost, ne trouvez-vous pas? LES INVITES: C'est affreuxl Cela n'a aucun sens, c'est stupide. J'ai rarement entendu un aussi vilain po&me! Ohl quelle horreur, quelle merveilleuse deception! (p. 226)

Rather than a reversal of values, what we are witnessing is a parodic version of our own hypocrisy, for although we do not openly aspire to be worthless, we do often honor those who least deserve it and neglect the truly talented. What shocks us in this situation is that this society does knowingly what we often do without realizing it. In fact, there is enough of an element of familiarity in most of these social actions so that they suggest some corresponding custom in our own culture; for example, blowing up balloons takes the place of smoking and gymnastics is substituted for dancing. Taboos are also displaced so that eating is considered vulgar and embarrassing while spitting is the elegant thing to do. 86

Not only are these strange customs parodies of our own social actions, but the conversation also mildly satirizes typical "light conversation":

M. SUREAU: Que pensez-vous de la situation politique? LA BARONNE: Je pense que le gouvernement va tomber ce soir et sera remplac^ par un autre demainl MME. GRABUGE: C'est une bien grande preuve de gouvernement que de tomber! LA BARONNE: Avez-vous lu le dernier livre de Motus? M. GRABUGE: Je pense que c'est un livre qui vlent A point. MME. DE S-I-B: Que voulez-vous dire? M. GRABUGE: II vient A point pour nous faire oublier les precedents! MME. GRABUGE: C'est une bien grande preuve d 1amour pour la littArature que d'oublier ce qu'on a lul (p. 231)

This conversation is a perfect example of the narrator of Un Mot pour un autre's remark that we often speak to say nothing. Moreover, to say "something" is very often not the main purpose of social con­ versation. Social speech can be, and often is, merely a way of interacting with others and of indicating our sociability. This type of speech, although obviously not of the highest level of language, is necessary to the social order. Mikel Dufrenne speculates that

"Perhaps conversation that is unreflecting’ and mechanized manages to say something even without realizing it. To talk about the weather is still to evoke the world order; to exchange politenesses is still to 28 adjust oneself to the civic order."

But, on the other hand, speaking to say nothing can sometimes be dangerous, for, as La Socidt^ Apollon illustrates, words are de­ ceptive, often creating false appearances or giving the illusion of meaningfulness when none exists. Tardieu warns in one of his essays

28 ^Language and Philosophy, p. 99. 87

that: "Il faut se m^fier des mots. Ils sont toujours trop beaux,

trop rutHants et leur rythme vous entra£ne, pr 6 t a vous falre prendre

un murmure pour une pens^e."^^

Words for abstractions are particularly Insidious. If one

knows how to manipulate them so as to sound erudite, one can even

convince oneself of one's Intelligence and knowledge. Mademoiselle,

the monltrlce of the "Conf^rences-Promenades" of the Socl^td Apollon.

Is taking her group to visit a sculptor's workshop. Not finding the

artist at home, Mademoiselle and her charges tour the workshop while

she "explains" modern art to them. Before an object described in

the stage directions as "une sellette surmontee d'une armature geom^trique en fer, de forme ind^finlssable, mais tres sch^matique:

une tige centrale et verticale, d'ou partent une roue dent^e et deux

ou trois bras coud^s k angle droit," (p. 138) Mademoiselle rhapso­ dizes about Art and Shape:

Ici, 1 1 n'y a m£me plus de volume: l"art parvient enfin a 1'essence meme de son expression! Qu'importe le volume, puis- qu'il y a le Contour! Le Contour qui est ant&ieur au Volume, dans l'absolu de la Verity platonicienne, le Contour, qui n'est plus qu'un signe, le signe magique... faisant apparaltre, pour ainsi dire, en 'n^gatif', l'infinie possibility des formes et des mouvements au sein de la Creation...(p. 140)

She continues, insisting that the subtlety of the work lies in its ability to "laisser entrevoir ce que pourrait £tre un volume. 4

partir d'un contour donn^.(p. 141) and concluding that this lack of volume and opacity permits us to see directly the essence of its

form which constitutes a fourth dimension. Alphonse, who has arranged

^ " L e s Mots de tous les jours," Pages d'ycriture. p. 32. 88

this whole excursion to discredit Mademoiselle, baits her by asking

about the fifth dimension and she takes the bait, replying that it is

discussed but is still very little known. The final coup de theitre

demolishes completely Mademoiselle's pretentions as an art critic:

the "master," having returned, explains to the group the problems in­ volved in creating an object, finally revealing that he is an inventor, not a sculptor, and that the "sculpture" is actually a vegetable chop­ per.

Like the monitrice, the master chooses his words for their

impressive sound. Flattered to be considered an artist, he does his best to sound like one as he begins his explanation of his creative process:

J'ai longtemps r^fl^chi avant d'arriver k concevoir ce que vous voyez ici... Bien des soucis m'ont retard^! Et surtout, j'avals la conviction que ma pens^e n'^tait pas encore m&re! La maturite de la pens^e: tout est la! Une id^e germe dans votre esprit: deviendra-t-elle quelque chose ou rien? Cela depend en partie de vous-m&me, mais en partle aussi des cir- constances £trangeres a l'id^e: votre sant^, le temps qu'il

fait, une histoire d 1 amour, des difficult^ d'argent, que sais-je?... (p. 145)

At least one member of the group is impressed: Nanine remarks to

Alphonse about how well the master speaks. Gradually he gets carried away by his own rhetoric until finally, dropping the artistic pre­ tentions, his speech turns into a fast-talking sales pitch with appropriate gestures:

Enfin, apres milie tatonnements... mllle essals infructeux... dont le recit serait trop long... je parvins k... concevoir le module que voici: c'est le prototype, non encore industri­ alise, d'une moulinette k capsules interchangeables, permet- trant ins-tan-ta-n^-ment— et dans les cuisines les plus humbles comme les plus luxueuses— de convertir les carottes les plus dures, les navets les plus intr^pides, les pommes de terre les plus inattaquables en toutes sortes de croquettes, tortillons, frIsons, spirales, bdtonnets, et autres brimbori- ons comestibles, tant pour parfumer le potage que pour orner les rotis et les volallles de toutes conditions! (p 146)

Both Mademoiselle and the master use language to impress others. Like the professor in La Politesse inutile, the madame in La Serrure and the ticket agent in Le Guichet. these characters try to project a certain authoritative image of themselves to others by the way they speak. This is a dangerous use of language, for as Susan Jones states

"Celui qui utilise la parole pour ^tablir sa puissance peut aussi en devenir la victime."^®

Some critics have seen this play as a criticism of modern, non-figurative art; however, this is made unlikely by the fact that

Tardieu appreciates this kind of art and has written texts evoking the works of such artists as well as texts for several exhibition catalogues. Emilie Noulet finds at least a gentle parody of such art:

"En vlrite, dans La Soci^t^ Apollon. Tardieu se moque un peu de lul- m&ne, s'amuse un peu des autres, ridiculise un peu les theories artis- tiques modernes et notamment celles de l'art non figuratlf, avec les-

quelles au demeurant il est profondement d 1 accord.

There may be some truth in Noulet's view, for Mademoiselle's ecstasy about le Contour resembles Tardieu’s own pleasure in shapes.

Even though the object is not "art," its form gives pleasure to its viewers. The members of the group turning in circles about the fascinating object reminds one of Tardieu*s essay, "Grilles et

^"Langage et Communication," p. 51. 31 Jean Tardieu. pp. 79-80. 90

Balcons," in which he describes his own pleasure in form:

Avec quelle avidit^ l'oeil appr^hende un signe, un simple con­ tour ou un r^seau et avec quelle gourmandise (avec une patience d'insecte), il suit chaque trait, passe d'un point au plus proche, se ldve, s'abaisse, tourne a gauche, k droite, revient sur ses pas, h£slte, palpe et repart en glissant!^

There is something definite about the shape of an object which re­ assures: "rien d'autre ne peut me rassurer que le Contour qui brise

et s£pare et vengera de son fouet les pires metamorphoses. " 3 3

Susan Jones sees La Soci^t^ Apollon as an example of lyricism which becomes ridiculous because it can not express itself in words.

She believes that Tardieu is sympathetic to Mademoiselle because she shows an intuitive sensitivity to beauty. Jones concludes that "le message de Tardieu dans La Soci^t^ Apollon est que les valeurs esth^tiques resident dans l'^me humaine et peuvent &tre ^voqu^es m£me

/ par la vue d'un objet 'ordinaire' si l'on y est sensible." She is right in saying that esthetic values, for Tardieu, are in the mind of the viewer, but I do not agree that Tardieu is sympathetic to Made­ moiselle because she is sensitive to beauty even in an ordinary object.

She is more interested in impressing others with her knowledgeable- sounding jargon than in expressing any "delire int^rieur" evoked by the object. She becomes ridiculous not because she cannot express her feelings, but because she has no feelings to express. Her speeches about art are meaningless verbalization, designed to project to the

3^La Part de 1'ombre, pp. 27-28.

3 3 Ibid.. p. 29.

3^"Langage et Communication," pp. 72-73. 91 others her idea of herself as an art critic. Carol Beverly finds that this constitutes a dramatic use of language, adding that Mademoiselle’s words "are necessary accessories to the leader's role as an intellectual." Beverly sees the main point of the play to be the influence of labels on behavior: the group accepts the vegetable chopper as a sculpture because that is what they had been prepared to

q r see. George Wellwarth's view of the play emphasizes the "sheep­ like stupidity of the art club members" who accept any authority in

order to relieve themselves of responsibility. ^ 6 However, it is not only a question of the club members' gullibility, but also of our own.

Were we as an audience also duped by Mademoiselle's artistic jargon?

Rather than a statement on modern art, I think the main purpose of the play is to alert us to the deceptive nature of words.

Even though words can be deceptive and create false appear­ ances, we are often dependent on them. In II v avait foule au manoir.

Tardieu develops the theme of appearance versus reality into a parody of a murder mystery. Although there are seven characters in the play, the parts can be acted by only two actors; for the entire play con­ sists of monologues, each character appearing alone on stage and speak­ ing directly to the audience. The Baron of Z. has conspired with the detective, Dubois-Dupont, to deceive the baroness by giving a ball during which he stages his own "murder" and then runs away with his mistress, Miss Isslppee, leaving Dubois-Dupont to play the "dead

35"parody and Poetry," p. 23.

~^®Protest and Paradox, pp. 92-93. 92 body.” The baroness, bored by her solitary life in the country far from her friends and ignored by her husband, whose only interest is hunting, is delighted at the idea of a ball; at last she will be happy and gay, for il v a foule au manoir» But her evening of happiness turns first into a seeming tragedy and then into total confusion, which finally resolves itself when Dubois-Dupont explains all.

This play is unique in that all of the action, except for the discovery of the "corpse" in the closet, takes place off stage. There­ fore our knowledge of the action depends totally on what is suggested by noises and sound effects and on what each character tells us is happening. Since there is no dialogue or communication between the characters, we know them only by their appearances, by the way they speak and by what they tell us they are. As Monsieur Moi revolved around an invisible object, Il v avait foule au manoir centers around an absent character. The baron, one of the main characters in the play, never appears on stage at all; yet we "know" him as well as we know any of the characters through what the others have to say about him.

The character's exclusive use of monologue suggests a secondary theme underlying the main theme of appearance versus reality: the iso- lation of each individual within himself. This isolation makes it difficult to know what is real and what is merely appearance in deal­ ing with other people. The idea of the limitations of our ability to know anything in this world is a recurrent one in Tardieu's works.

In II y avait foule au manoir. there is a kind of hierarchy of degrees of comprehension of the situation, ranging from Dubois-Dupont, the double agent and meneur du ieu. who is both himself and the baron,

both detective and "victim," and who knows what is going on, down to

the baroness who has a totally different view of the situation and is

completely fooled by Dubois-Dupont*s machinations. In between we have

the four servants. The second maid and valet, crude and wily peasant

types, are suspicious from the beginning and pretend to know what is happening, but they will not tell anyone. The first maid and valet, more polished and refined, are helpful and unquestioning of their

superiors. Although fooled at first by the strange events of the

evening, they are still able to figure out that "Tout cela n'etait qu'une ridicule comedie!" (p. 188) The baroness, involved with her own search for happiness, is totally out of touch with the reality of the situation. Like the little man in La Serrure. she thinks she knows what she wants; but when the moment of happiness arrives, it is fleeting and illusory, dissolving at once into confusion and unreality

LA BARONNE: Quelle soiree! Quelle s^rie de coups de th&&tre! Et comme un fragile bonheur a tdt fait de s'effondrer sous la main cruelle du destinl... A peine avais-je pris conscience de ma joie, au milieu de la foule brillante des invites, k peine avais-je fait un ou deux tours de valse— et voici que l’atroce nouvelle me terrassait, par la bouche d'un enfant innocent!... Ah! Tant que je vivrai, je me souviendrai de cet air de valse! (p. 185)

While the characters in II v avait foule au manoir ignore each other, addressing the audience individually and directly, the char­ acters in Eux seuls le savent totally ignore the spectators. A narrator presents the play as an example of a theatrical plot in which the motivation is unclear, speculating as to the reasons for this vexing ambiguity by asking the members of the audience to 94 consider the following questions as they try to figure out what is happening:

Est-ce par suite d'une infirmit^ propre a l'art dramatique? Est-ce parce que la vie des autres, & la sc^ne comme dans la r^alite, ne nous livre guere son secret? Est-ce parce que les personnages— surtout dans les drames dits 'realistes'— croient necessalre de s'occuper uniquement de leurs propres affaires, et pas du tout de celles des spectateurs, attitude qui denote un manque de courtoisie regrettable? Serait-ce enfin parce que les auteurs, abusant de leur situation privil^gi^e, tiennent k nous laisser sur une p^nible impression de myst^re?... (p. 194)

The play itself consists of a discussion among four characters— Hector,

Simone, Justin and Janine— of a problem of some sort in which they are all involved, but about which the audience remains totally uninformed.

As in II y avait foule au manoir. having no direct knowledge of the situation, we are forced to depend on the character's words. Since what they say has no factual content for us, we must concentrate on

^ B o t h Martin Esslin and Br^e/Kroff see this play as an example of "pure" theater. Esslin: "By presenting a wholly motiveless action that still holds the public's attention, Tardieu is in fact demonstrating the possibility of a pure, plotless theater." (Theatre of the Absurd, p. 172.) Br^e/Kroff: "C'est la demonstration qu'un th££tre sans intrigue peut exister, un exemple de th^ t r e pur." (Twentieth Century French Drama, pp. 36-37.) Both of these statements seem less than accurate to me. First of all, the play is not really plotless: the character's reactions are not gratuitous but follow a pattern which implies a plot. Although we do not know exactly what the situation is, we can imagine what it might be. Secondly, what is "pure" theater? If it consists of "ab­ stract scenic effects," as Esslin defines it (Theatre of the Absurd, p. 282), this play contains almost none. If it is '"synthetic and creating, on the margin of reality, a reality based on symbols, " 1 as Esslin quotes Henri Gh^on's definition (p. 312), that does not apply either; for this play, being a parody of real conversation, exaggerates reality but is hardly on its margin. 95

the way they say it: all we know are the character's reactions to

their problem.

The play is composed of four conversations which follow the

pattern (1 ) argument,(2 ) friendly reassurance,(3) argument and (4)

resolution of problem. These conversations are parodies of dis­

cussions conducted in cliches and ready-made expressions, so that one

expression automatically triggers another, as, for example, in the

argument between Hector and Simone which opens the play:

HECTOR: On ne m'y reprendra pas de si tot, je t'en reponds1 SIMONE: C'est bien vite dit! HECTOR: C'est encore plus vite fait I SIMONE: Je t'en dAfie! HECTOR: C'est ce que nous verrons! SIMONE: A ta place, j'y renoncerais tout de suite1 HECTOR: Y renoncer, moil Apres tout ce qui s'est passe! Ja­ mais, entends-tu, jamaist... Et c'est toi qui me donnes ce... conseill... Ah merci, merci vraiment! (p. 194)

This kind of verbal gesture is roughly equivalent to physical gesture

in its ability to communicate; it can convey feelings and emotions,

but it does not inform or give us any facts about what is happening.

This kind of language can express agreement or disagreement, or re­

assurance, as when Justin promises to be there when Simone needs him:

JUSTIN: Voyons, Simone! Vous savez bien: tant que je serai l A, auprks de vous, je ne vous abandonnerai pas!. . . Lk, lA, ma pauvre amie! Ne vous mettez pas dans des £tats pareilsl A quoi bon!...Puisque je vous dis que je suis lA! SIMONE: C'est vrail... II faut me le dire pour que je le croie. JUSTIN: Mais oui, je suis lA, vous l e voyez bienl SIMONE: C'est si bon de le savoir! JUSTIN: Et maintenant, Simone, maintenant que vous savez que je suis lA... il faut que je m'en aille* (pp. 199-200)

Being parodies of the language of argument and reassurance, these con- 96 versations are, of course, exaggerated to produce a comic effect. But, as with the distorted social customs in Un Geste pour un autre, in spite of the exaggeration we can recognize that much of our own daily language is made up of this type of clich^d expression. In this play as in La Soci^t^ Apollon. Tardieu reminds us of the illusory quality of the sound ofwords. As Mademoiselle convinced herself and her group of her ability as an art critic by her jargon, the characters in Eux seuls lesavent use words to convince themselves that they are in control of the situation. Discussing the problem gives them a false illusion that they are accomplishing something or that they are clarifying the situation. In the argument between Hector and Simone, both claim to know what should be done, although (like the second valet in II y avait foule au manoir) neither one will explain what it is:

HECTOR: Tu n'as done qu'un parti a prendre: te talre et me laisser agirl SIMONE: Non, je ne me tairai pas! Je sals qui j'ai raison et je veux que tu te rendes h 1*evidence. Ne compte pcLS • • • HECTOR: Te tairas-tu, 4 la fin! SIMONE: Ne compte pas me reduire au silence. J'ai mon role ^ jouer ici, autant que toi-m£me. HECTOR: C'est faux! Je sais ce que j'ai ^ faire. SIMONE: Non, tu ne sais rienl Tandis que moi j'ai le devoir, entends-tu: le devoir de te renseigner. Je veux que

rien ne reste dans 1 'ombre! HECTOR: Je sais ce que je sais. . (p. 195)

Yet ironically, after all the empty arguments and ambiguous dis- cussions, the problem is finally resolved by a telephone call during which we "learn" that everything was the fault of the truck driver!

(p. 204) Once again, as in II v avait foule au manoir. an absent character is the cause of the action. While in 11 v. avait foule au 97

manoir we "knew" the baron through the words of others, in this play

the truck driver is a completely gratuitous deus ex machina. an ab­

surd coup, recalling Ionesco's absent cantatrice chauve. The point is

simply that the participants in the situation are as surprised by the

happy resolution of the problem as is the audience. As Hector re­

flects: "Qui aurait dit que les choses prendraient cette tournure!"

(p. 205)

Like II y avait foule au manoir. the play illustrates the

difficulty of knowing the truth of any situation. Words sometimes

act as a smoke screen to conceal the truth from us, if indeed there

is any truth to conceal. Janine, left alone with Simone, demands an

explanation of the mystery to which Simone replies that she will not

find out anything. Janine, becoming increasingly hostile, insists:

"Je te dis que j'en mourrai peut-etre, mais qu'au moins, avant de

de mourir, je t'aurai arrach^ ton secret!... Ah, on ^touffe icil...

Des mots, toujours des mots, et jamais la W r i W l La W r i W , tu en-

tends, Simone, je veux toute la v^ritel" Simone answers enigmatically

(or perhaps honestly): "II n'y a pas de secret et la W r i W n'est pas

pour toi, ni pour moi! Je ne sais rien, je te l'ai d^jk dit!...

Pauvre folle! Comment pourrais-je t'aider ^ comprendre, puisque je

n'y comprends rien moi-m&ne!" (pp. 202-03) This inability to find

out the truth drives Janine to violence: she threatens to shoot

Simone. It is just at this moment that the reconciliatory phone call

averts the impending violence, turning the play into a comedy, (p. 203)

As in II y avait foule au manoir. the unexpected resolution of the mystery leaves the characters with a sense of unreality: "Tout cela ne sera bientot plus qu'un mauvais souvenir..." (p. 204) For the audience, however, the mystery remains unsolved, for the characters

do not deign to explain.

In all of the comedies eclair thus far discussed, we as an audience have been in the position of an outsider to either words or situation in order to give us a more objective view of social language and behavior. Each of the previous plays provided us with a set of appearances which required our active mental participation to deter­ mine what lay behind them and to give them meaning. Now in Oswald et

Z^na‘£de. this procedure is reversed. Just the opposite of Eux seuls le savent in which the characters were Involved in a problem which the audience did not understand, in Oswald et Z&iaifde. the audience understands the problem but the characters do not. The excessive use of asides in Oswald et Z^najfde is somewhat similar to the exclusive use of monologues in II v avait foule au manoir because the characters communicate directly with the audience and very little with each other, again suggesting the isolation of the individual and the dif­ ficulty of communication. The difference is that in II v avait foule au manoir we had only an external view of appearances, while in

Oswald et Z^na^de. through the means of asides, we are given an in­ ternal look at the character's thoughts. The play revolves around the striking contrast between the poverty and banality of the char­ acter's words and the passion and poetry of their thoughts.

Two lovers, Oswald and Z^na'ide, each having just been Informed by a parent that their proposed marriage cannot take place, are trying unsuccessfully to break the news to each other: 99

Aloud Aside

ZIiNAIDE: Entrez, Oswald I VoilA bien ma chance! Que pourrai-je lui dire? Jamals je n'aurai le courage de lui apprendre la triste v^rit^l

OSWALD: Vous, vous, Z 6 na'ide! Que lui dire de plus? Elle est si confiante, si insou­ ciant e! Jamais je n ’aurai la cruaut^ de lui avouer la grave decision qui vient d'etre prise ^ son insu!

While there is some communication of emotion between them through gestures, both are aware of their unnatural silence:

ZENAiDE: Bonjour, Oswald! Se peut-il que tout soit fini! Ah! tandis qu'il presse ma main sur ses l&vres, mon Dieu, ne prolongez pas mon supplice et faites que cette minute, qui me para£t un sl&cle, passe plus vite que l'alcyon sur la mer ^cumantel OSWALD: Bonjour, Z^naldel Ah! ce geste gracieux et spon- tan^, plus Eloquent que le plus long discours! J'ai toujours aim^ le silence qu1- elle r^pand autour d'elle:

1 1 est comme anim^ de paroles myst^rieuses que l'oreille n'entendrait pas, mais que l'&me comprendrait. (p. 152)

Mysterious at first, silence begins to hang heavy between them.

Anxiety builds within them so that even their thoughts degenerate into nonsense. As in Eux seuls le savent not being able to know the truth led to frustration and hostility, so in Oswald et zdna'ide the inability to express what is troubling them builds to a crescendo of frustration and anger:

Aloud Aside

ZENAIDE: II fait encore Jour! Mais les volubilis ferment leurs corolles, ma grand- 1 0 0

mAre pr^fere les pols de senteur et le jardinier a rang^ ses outils. OSWALD: C'est le printemps, Aux Antipodes, c'est l'hlverl Z&iajfdel Au Congo, les Lapons s'as- semblent sur la banquise; en Chine,'les Bavarols vont boire de la biAre dans les tavernes; au Canada, les Espagnols dansent la sdgu^- dille. ZJSNAIDE: Oui, 11 fait jourl Ce silence m'accable! La canne de mon oncle avait un pommeau d'or, la marquise sortit A 5 heures: ma raison s'^gare! Dois-je tout lui dire? Ou bien jeter mon bonnet pardessus les moulins? OSWALD: II fait jour! Vous Feu et diable, sang et enfer!

l'avez d 6 jA dit, Les- sorciAres vont au sabbat, Zenaidel la lune court dans les ajoncs! Allons, du calme, du calme! Je ferais mieux de lui rAv^- ler ce secret qui m'^touffe! ZENAIDE:• Je n'en puis plus! OSWALD: C'est intolerableI ZENAIDE: Je meurs! OSWALD: Je deviens foul ZENAIDE and OSWALD: H&LAs ! ma fa-mille ne veut pas de no-tre mariage! (pp. 153-54)

Still they are unable to say to each other the very words they have just shouted at the audience. This crescendo is followed by a de­ crescendo of unsuccesful attempts to speak:

ZENAIDE: Vous disiez? OSWALD: Moi? Rien! ZENAIDE: Ah! bonl Je croyais...etc.

Finally, just as they are about to give it up and say good-bye, the situation resolves Itself happily. Monsieur Pommechon, Zenaide's father, enters to announce that they have been "les jouets d'une affectueuse mystification." (p. 156) Shades of Marivaux! The whole 1 0 1

situation was planned by the parents of the couple to test their

feelings for each other. Having passed the test by showing enough

chagrin, the couple will be allowed to marry.

Having given up trying to communicate, Oswald and Zenaide are

still unable to say anything directly to each other or even to commun­

icate by gesture. After a silence, Oswald beings to speak to Z^na‘£de, but in Italian: "0 Primaveral Gioventu dell'anno! 0 gioventuI

Primavera della vital" (p. 156) She answers him, but in English:

"Oh! who is me to have seen what I have seen, to see. what 1 seel" (p.

157) Yet in spite of the strange words, both have communicated their happiness in their tones of voice. As Z^nalLde says: "Je ne comprends pas ce qu'll dit, mais un accent de m£le gaiet^ r^sonne dans ses paroles." Oswald expresses the same thought: "Quelle est cette langue inconnue? 0 musique de la voix bien-aim^el Sa mllodie fait vibrer notre Jbne, alors mime que nous ne comprenons pas ses paroles." (p. 157)

Yet externally, they return to impersonal conversation about time. In­

ternally they disagree with each other even about these simple state­ ments, but neither will dare to contradict the other. The final lines of the play suggest a tenuous hope that these two isolated moil's may yet learn to form a nous:

Aloud Aside

OSWALD: Vous voilA done k moi, cher ange? z£NAfr>E: Eh oui, nous voilA enfin Encore une erreur, k nous, vous et moil c'est lui qui est k moi, mais peu im- portel OSWALD: Pour toujours? A nous, elle a dit 4 nous I Elle est & moi, mol k elle, 1 0 2

## nous & nous. ZENAIDE: A jamais 1 A la vie? OSWALD: A la mort. (p. 157)®®

This final nous, the first truly communicative word the couple has

uttered, shows the importance of learning to communicate through

words in spite of the difficulties, for although some communication

does take place non-verbally, the word is also necessary to complete

the transaction. We must have the courage to master language and make it express our true thoughts and feelings, for we have no other

choice but silence. As Joost A.M. Meerloo states: "The dilemma of

every communication is the choice between verbal communication and

silence."^9 in Oswald et Z&iaide Tardieu suggests that the ambiguity

of silence leads to frustration, hostility and despair; therefore,

even though words are deceptive and illusory, we must learn to control

them.

Having demonstrated the limitations of language as a means of

social communication in the comedies Eclair. Tardieu begins to play with the possibilities of words as a creative medium in Conversation-

Sinfonietta and La Sonate et les trois messieurs. The most audacious of Tardieu's experiments in Th^tre de chambre. these two plays are so far from traditional theater that they resemble musical performances more than theatrical performances. While both of the plays are organ­ ized like musical compositions, following the sonata form, they are

®®This conversation begins to resemble the lover's conversation based on pronouns in Tardieu*s po^me k louer. Les Amants du m^tro.

^"Conversation and Communication," The Human Dialogue, p. 143. 103

quite different In tone and purpose.

Like the comedies Eclair. Conversatlon-Slnfonletta Is

burlesque and humorous. While the humor of the comedies often centered

on a contrast between appearance and reality, Conversation-

Sinfonietta is based on an iicongrous contrast between form and con­

tent: the formality of the presentation and musical structure con­

trasts with the banality of the content. The abstract tone of the narrator's explanation of the various movements and themes of the

"symphonie vocale" we are about to hear suggests a parody of program music while the concrete content— banal social conversation arranged

in a musical pattern— implies a satire of language.

This vocal symphony is performed by six choristes— a soprano, a tenor, first and second contraltos and first and second basses—

conducted by a mute chef d'orchestre. The choristes do not sing their parts as in opera, but speak them "avec simplement des effets de rythme ou dfintensite." In order to carry out the musical parody, they are to maintain a detached, Impersonal attitude like that of professional musicians; thus "Ils ne joueront pas le sens de ce qu'lls disent, comme des comediens, mais le son comme des instrumentistes."

(p. 239) While the comedies showed the potential for deception in the sounds of words, this play toys with their potential for creativity.

However, Conversation-Sinfonietta is strictly a parody of a musical piece rather than a serious attempt to Imitate a musical com­ position. Its humor lies in the contrast between what the musical structure leads us to expect and what actually happens. For example, the narrator describes the second movement as a dreamy lamentation

featuring the feminine voices whose recitatives on Spirits and

Apparitions take us into the "domaine inqui^tant de l'au-del^ (p.

238) Although the mention of apparitions should warn us of the

burlesque nature of what is to follow, the other words remind us of

a typical description of a symphonic movement; thus we are jolted when

the tone of the sinfonietta, instead of uplifting us to the realms

beyond, actually becomes increasingly concrete and physical. Thus in

the second movement Esprit soon degenerates into les eaprits and a

discussion of ghosts and their pranks, concluding that "Les esprits

ne sont pas des anges..." (p. 250) The third movement lowers the

tone completely to the physical. It begins and ends with multiple

repetitions of J 'aime followed by various foods and drinks and a discussion of how to prepare them. The soprano and tenor, having

started out in the first movement as representatives of the dream of love, have been reduced to the level of everyday practicality by the

end of the third movement. Love is now secondary to food and the

sinfonietta concludes on 1 faime and a multiple repetition of et tout which parodies some interminable symphonic endings.

La Sonate et les trols hessieurs is a slightly more serious attempt to "speak music." Like Conversation-Slnfonietta. it is based on a contrast between what is being said and the way it is said. Yet this musical parody is just the opposite of the musical experiment in

Conversation-Sinfonietta. In the latter, the contrast was between the formal situation and structure and the informal language of the con­ tent. In La Sonate et les trois nessieurs. the informal situation 105

contrasts with the formal content. Three men in business suits sit

in a half-circle discussing "sur le ton de la conversation la plus

banale" what happened in a piece of music they had heard at a con­

cert. (p. Ill) While the choristes in Conversation-Sinfonietta remained detached and impersonal, parodying instrumentalists, the gentlemen in La Sonate et les trois messieurs are involved in what

they are discussing. But although the tone is conversational, the

content of the "conversation" is musical, being composed of abstract phrases expressing themes organized according to the sonata form.

Although the three movements are indicated in the text, there is no narrator to point out the themes in this piece. Still it is possible to make a rough outline of the themes and their development.

The first movement, (pp. 1 1 1 - 1 1 8 ) marked largo, introduces two sub­ jects: une grande ^tendue d*eau dans le soir (principal subject) and

11 sfest pass^ quelque chose (secondary subject). The principal subject, ^tendue, is then qualified as Indistinct with rien & voir.

Two statements are advanced under the secondary subject of something happening: ouelaue chose de doux s'avancait and nous nations pas effrav^s. After this there is a return to the principal subject of

Jtendue. Then the secondary subject, il s'est pass4 quelque chose is developed by being turned into a question. This question, que s'est-il pass^?, is in turn answered by the phrases c'est reparti comme c '^tait venu and nous ^tions contents. There is a recapitul­ ation of the secondary subject:

Oui, au fond, on £tait contents

quand 5 a venait ou quand

The movement concludes with a coda— ca montalt. trks haut. tr^s vite. ca continualt en bas— and a return to the original subject of une grande 4tendue d'eau dans le soir.

In the second movement, (pp. 118-123) andante, the tone changes, becoming more Intimate and confidential. Rien & voir which was only a minor development of the principal subject in the first movement, opens this movement and quickly leads by phonetic association to the dominant theme of the movement: savolr. This theme is developed in the question En somme. qu*avez-vous su? and the answer:

Eh bien, mais nous avons su que nous £tions tout prfes de savoir ce qu'il y a k savoir quand il y a quelque chose & savoir!

This theme is then repeated in slightly different words, following which the last phrase of the theme is repeated. We then return to the question ^tes-vous arrives & savoir quelque chose? The ambiguous answer to this question En tout cas. nous avons su que cela se passait... l£.... leads us back to the principal subject of the first movement: une grande ^tendue d'eau dans le solr and the repetition of soir ends the movement.

The third movement, (pp. 123-24) finale, features a complete reversal of tone and movement. The seriousness and slowness of the first two movements gives way to a joyous, carefree expression while the tempo becomes increasingly rapid. The language also changes, becoming more casual and popular. The main theme of this movement is gaiety and laughter expressed in leaping, dancing and turning dans un petit espace (which contrasts with grande dtendue). 107

This change in attitude seems to result from the decision that there

is rien k comprendre and the soir of the previous movement becomes

matin. The movement concludes with a very long repetition and varia­

tions on matin.

To summarize briefly, the first movement poses a mystery in vague, poetic terms; the second movement discusses the possibility of

solving the mystery and the third movement rejects the problem alto­

gether. As in Eux seuls le savent. the theme of our inability to know

leads to the conclusion that perhaps there is nothing to understand.

In Conversation-Sinfonietta and La Sonate et les trots messieurs Tardieu begins to develop the creative possibilities of

the phonic and rhythmic qualities of spoken language. While they are

clever parodies, these two plays perhaps go too far towards imitating music, towards substituting sound for sense and form for content. In

his Poemes a louer Tardieu continues to explore the musicality of

language, but he does not again try to Imitate musical composition

so closely. Although the Poemes k louer often use musical principles

such as rhythm and repetition, crescendo and decrescendo and silences which resemble rests, only one of them (L'ABC de notre vie) uses a musical form per se and even then, the emphasis is more on content

than on the structure itself. In his second volume of works for the

theater, Tardieu achieves a better balance between form and content as well as between the sounds of words and their meaning. CHAPTER IV

POfeMES A JOUER

Tardieu's second volume of works for the theater, Poemes A louer. represents an even more daring departure from traditional theater than does Theatre de chambre. As in the first volume, there is a variety of experimentation, but generally speaking, these works tend to deemphasize dramatic action in favor of staged poetry which is often organized according to a rhythm and presented by theatrical means including music, dance, mime, color, lighting and projected pictures. As Tardieu explains in a note following one of these works, although a poAme A louer is not a play in the traditional sense of the

word, "c'est tout de m 6 me le th£&tre qui est son plus proche parent

et c'est sur une scfene de thddtre qu'il doit 6 tre repr^sent^."-*- The principal means of expression in these works is the spoken language, but "ce langage ne prend son plein sens qu'en &tant non seulement r^cit^, mais jou^ par des acteurs, avec tout l'appareil de l’art 2 dramatique. ..." Yet these works differ from ordinary plays pri­ marily by their higher degree of abstraction or "atmosphere de

^■Jean Tardieu. Poemes A louer. p. 135.

2 Ibid.

108 109

transposition,as Tardieu calls it.

All art is a matter of transposition for Tardieu. It is con­

crete because it has its genesis in reality and abstract because it

dominates and transforms that reality. All the arts have what Tardieu

calls (in speaking of painting) "un double pouvoir d'envo&tement."^

On one level, we take pleasure in the artistic medium itself— the

color and texture of paint, the varied sounds of music, the theatrical

effects in a play— and on another level, in the imaginary world evoked

by these media. Thus, like a tree, all the arts have their roots in

the world of presence but extend their branches into the world of

absence. Paul Klee compares the artist to the trunk of this tree:

"Art is not a mirrored reflection of a given reality, but the trans­

formation of one element (which has its roots underground, in the un­

conscious) into another element (made conscious in time and space).

The artist is merely a channel whose function is to transmit the forces

of nature into the forms of art."'*

It is this fundamental similarity in all the arts which makes

it possible to combine art forms or even to substitute one kind of art

for another. As Tardieu writes in Les Portes de toile. substitution

is the key to intellectual operations, but also, it is the key to the

"th6 £tre int^rieur" of the imagination:

3 Ibid.. p. 136.

^Jean Tardieu, Les Portes de toile. p. 7.

^Quoted by Herbert Read in The Origins of Form in Art (New York: Horizon Press, 1965), p. 14. 1 1 0

Dans le r£ve comme dans la raison tout peut £tre ' egal d...' et, de proche en proche, nous ^loignant des bords frustes de

1 'experience, nous condulre vers des empires lnterdlts de flamme et de glace, dont nous avons le pressentiment, mais qui ne nous ressemblent plus.

For Tardieu, substitution is also the basic operation in the creation of poetry:

Sans cesse le peintre substitue la couleur seule ou le trait seul d 1'image perdue qui leur a donn^ naissance. Ainsi le

po^te substitue la sonorit£ des mots k leur sens, 1 *allusion

k la designation, 1 'image k la nomination.7

Creating a poetic, expressive language is a question of transposition, of releasing the esthetic qualities of ordinary language, thereby raising common speech to the level of art:

il s'agit. . .d'extraire du langage commun son pronre langaee qui, en tant que valeur esth^tique, ob^lt, comme tous les autres arts, d la n^cessit^ souveraine de transposition.

It is not a matter of creating complex imagery nor of seeking an eso­ teric vocabulary— indeed Tardieu mistrusts the image, using it only with caution and deliberately chooses "mots nuls" which are common to everyone— but rather of trying to render the sounds of the voices within one's head, much as a composer writes down the music he hears internally:

cette qu£te de l'^cho int^rieur m'invitait k attacher une im­ portance capitale au corps physique des vocables, con§us plu- tdt comme des notes de muslque que comme les slgnes des con­ cepts et k les agencer selon des comblnaisons formelles sub- ordonnant le 'sens' au mouvement, d la cadence, au contrepoint.

6 P. 155.

7 Ibid.

^"Permanence et nouveaut^," Pages d'4criture. p. 82. q JJean Tardieu. pp. 54-55. Ill

Although Tardieu's fascination with the musicality of language

goes back to his childhood,^ it was perhaps his work in radio broad­

casting which made him fully aware of the significance of the phonetic and rhythmic aspects of spoken language:

la Radio nous a surabondament montre (et les sp^cialistes de l'art dramatique le savent bien) que la Parole humaine est aussi riche que la musique en inflexions, en mouvements, en rythmes, en nuances et que ces ^l&aents non not^s font pour- tant partie integrante du contenu et du sensmeme d'une oeuvre.H

As Tardieu hints in the above quotation, the theater, as well as the radio, can be an Instrument for playing the music of the human voice. Theatrical language which takes advantage of its musical possibilities can alert the spectator's sensibilities and communicate directly with the individual consciousness. L.W. Cor states that:

The accessory meaning due to sound alone goes below the surface of publicly accepted connotations and denotations, and touches what is most imtlmate in the individual psyche. ^

Thus musical language on the stage can be "a sensory phenomenon, an 13 experience in its own right.

In addition to its sensory impact, musical language has an

In an essay entitled "La Conversation" (La Part de 1'ombre, pp. 95-99) Tardieu describes an experience he had as a small child. Having been sent to his room while his parents were entertaining, he discovered an old listening tube through which he was able to hear the sounds of the adults' conversation without being able to understand the sense. The intonations, tones of the voices and other interesting vocal noises delighted the young Tardieu, causing him to imagine all sorts of strange behavior on the part of the guests.

ll"Le Signe et la Parole," p. 15.

12Laurence W. Cor, "Phonic Aspects of Language in the Theater," French Review. XXXVII (1963), 31.

13Ibid.. p. 39. 1 1 2

Increased suggestivity. As Susanne K. Langer postulates:

an articulate sound is an entirely unattached item, a purely phenomenal experience without externally fixed relations; it lies wide open to imaginative and emotional use, synaesthetic identifications, chance associations.

It has been said that musicality in poetry is "la forme lyrlque de

l'analogie et de la correspondence."-^ This artistic suggestivity in

the sounds of words is the positive side of the deceptive quality of

language which Tardieu exposed in Theatre de chambre. Playing on this

positive suggestivity of word sounds in his Poemes a louer. Tardieu

furthers his goal of creating theatrical works which evoke more than

they present.

On the other hand, one must be careful not to over-emphasize

the musicality of language in the Poemes ^ louer. for it is not a

question of total substitution of sound for meaning (or form for

content) but rather of making the two inseparable:

La musique des vers est d£jsl elle-m&ne la moit^ de leur signi­ fication, en m&me temps que la signification entre pour plus

de moit^ dans 1 'enchantement musical que procurent les oeuvres des pofetes.16

As we have seen in the introductory chapter of this study, for Tardieu

the main task of the theater of the future is to discover new forms which fuse harmoniously with their contents. The Poemes It louer are

•^Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of . Reason. Rite and Art. 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1967), p. 125.

l^Henri Lemaitre, La Po^sie depuis Baudelaire. Collection U, S^rie "Lettres frangaises," 2d ed., revue et mise IL jour (Paris: Librarie Armand Colin, 1965), p. 36.

1 6 Quoted by E. Noulet in Jean Tardieu. p. 26. 113

Tardieu's best contributions toward realizing this ideal.

In his book on The Origins of Form in Art. Herbert Read puts forth the idea that formal relations in art are a metaphor of an entire universe. ^ This is certainly true of Tardieu's Poemes I louer. for these plays concretize the dialectic between opposites which forms the basis of his thinking. While the plays of Th44tre de chambre are primarily concerned with man and his problems in the world of presence

(appearances, everyday life, social exchange) with occasional glimpses of the world of absence (higher reality, the unknown, the metaphysi­ cal) , the Poemes a louer take a more cosmic view of man, showing him in a more balanced relationship with both the world of presence and of absence. In Th4atre de chambre Tardieu considers the world of presence mainly in its social aspects; in the Poemes k jouer the world of presence still includes society, but there is a new emphasis on man in relation to the inanimate. Because of this contrast between man and nature or between man and object, the themes of mobility versus immobility and of silence versus speaking become important in these works. In Th4Atre de chambre the world of absence generally reveals itself in sudden glimpses of the unknown or the inexplicable or in the mystery behind the appearances; in the Poemes 4 jouer the world of absence expands to include the cosmic dimensions of time and space as well as the interior space of human consciousness.

In his Po4mes A louer Tardieu shows man that his rightful place in relation to the Whole is in maintaining a delicate balance

^Read states that this idea has its basis in Henri Focillon's "essential aesthetics," p. 7. 114

between the worlds of presence and of absence and between the positive

and negative aspects of each of these worlds. As in Chinese thought

where the yin and the yang emerge from the universal energy to form

the first harmonious whole, so in Tardieu*s Poemes fe jouer the positive

and the negative poles of his thinking confront each other and unite

to form a reconciling whole. This dialectic between opposing forces

is for Tardieu the basis of life as well as of thought: "Qui ne volt

que ces couples de notions simples, ces mouvements opposes et in­

separables sont ceux-lfe m&mes qui animent toute vie, comme aussi bien

toute pensfee."^® According to Herbert Read,this dialectic is also the

basis of art. He defines the force which transforms an object into a work of art as the power to play with the opposition between spirit 19 and matter, attempting to eliminate it.

In the Pofemes k jouer this dialectic of opposing forces re- t

suiting in a harmonious resolution is often expressed through precisely

controlled forms based, like music, on a mathematical relationship

in which the key numbers are 1, 2, 3. Tardieu*s propensity for a

ternary rhythm is obvious in the structure of Rvthme fe trois temps

and to a lesser degree in Les Amants du m^tro and L'ABC de notre vie.

At other times this rhythm expresses itself visually as, for example,

in Trois personnes entrfees dans des tableaux or Tonnerre sans orage.

In Des arbres et des hommes and Les Temps du verbe. it exists as a dramatic tension between three characters. This three-beat rhythm

^ies Portes de toile. p. 74.

^ f h e Origins of Form in Art, p. 75. 115 seems to correspond to Tardieu's desire to balance the opposing forces at work in these plays.

There are three basic forms in the Pokmes k louer: (1) very short abstract transpositions of an emotional state: Maledictions d'une

Furie, Le Sacre de la nuit: (2) longer and more concrete transpos­ itions of everyday life into a rhythmic or a musical structure: Les

Amants du metro. L'ABC de notre vie; and (3) complex transpositions of philosophical ideas into rhythmic poetry and/or prose: Tonnerre sans orage. Trois personnes entrees dans des tableaux. Des arbres et des hommes. Les Temps du verbe. Une Voix sans personne and Rvthme ^ trois temps. Within these basic forms, there are generally two types

of content: (1 ) a concrete, specific view of man in relation to

others and (2 ) an abstract, mythic view of man in relation to the universe. Some of the more complex Poemes et iouer combine the two.

The shortest and simplest of the Poemes k louer. Maledictions d ’une Furie is a cri du coeur against Time, man's ultimate enemy.

This poem is atypical of Tardieu's works in its violent one-sided expression of a negative point of view. It is an exorcism of anger and frustration worthy of Henri Michaux. Delivered by a beautiful white fury against a kaleidoscopic background of shadows, lights and colors which are to evoke "une sorte de lieu vague, sans &ge, sans forme et sans limite, ^ la fois obscur et fasclnant ou passent les couleurs fugitives d'un univers en fusion, pleln de flammes et de cendres, sans cesse agit£ d'enfantements et de d^sastres," (p. 293) this curse against time builds up in a rhythmic crescendo of terms beginning with par to the climactic line: "Je te maudls, temps 1 1 6

insondable." (p. 294) After a pause for breath, the fury continues

in a decrescendo which elaborates on this key line, personifying time as Chronos, both the father and the devourer of the existent, who causes both the death of the individual and the monotonous repetition of life and who remains distant from and unconcerned for the suffering he causes. This classic curse is almost symmetrical in structure, having thirty-three lines of enumeration of the things by which the curse is invoked building up to the curse itself and then twenty-nine lines of elaboration of the reasons for the curse following it. The poem begins and ends with a group of nine lines.

The key feature of the first half of the poem is a stacatto rhythm created by the obsessive repetition of par and et. in the enumeration of the terms of the curse. In the first nine lines

Tardieu invokes the dead who nourish the living— "toutes les races dont la chair morte nourrit la terre et porte la vie"— accumulating words of physical violence, suffering and death. The next ten lines suggest the fragility of life, invoking the living who are in the process of dying: "0 flamme qui se meurt a tout moment1" Within these lines we learn that the fury both tortures man and is incarnated in human form. As both the wound and the inflictor, she incarnates the opposing forces of life: she is absence made present. Because she takes on man's form and speaks with his voice, she also shares in his suffering: "j'ai cent mille ans de cris amasses dans ma gorge..."

The twelve lines leading up to the curse suggest the disorder of life and invoke the earth:

terre, terre, terre, terre, sifflement 117

de tous les serpents de tous les ouragans dans ma chevelure, de tous les sillages de toutes les ailes, de toutes les d&nences de toutes les vagues, de tous les chariots grin^ant dans le ciel, terre, oc^an, azur, abfme, astres, astres, poussifere d'astres, ah! pluie, ah! d^lire, ah!

This passage is filled with initial t and s sounds which give a whistling, shrill effect while the repetition of terre and tous. toutes both fix the concepts in mind and augment the crescendo as the climax is reached. In the progression of the next to the last line from terre to ab£me. each word suggests an increasing distance and an enlarging space leading to the disintegration and delirium of the final line.

Following the declaration of the curse are three variations on 1e te maudis. personifying time as Chronos, "P&re et Devorateur de ce qui est," ending with a summarizing statement which leads into the final nine lines:

je maudis le torrent des creatures dans ta bouche et la vaine circulation de toutes choses sous ton front, danse cruelle, danse fatale, danse hagarde qui te fait rire!...

Prolonging the JL in rire until she is "renvers^e en arri&re comme en

proie ^ 1 'amour et k la mort," the fury suddenly becomes "droite, grande, majestueuse, lente, solennelle-— presque humaine." The first four lines of the concluding passage develop from the jr and jL sounds of the word rire;

Je ris avec toi, du rire de l'4pouvante et de la honte et du d£gout, car il est inutile et d^rlsoire. le sacrifice ^ternel des vlvants 1 1 8

This phonetic tension suggests the opposing forces incarnated by the

fury: she shares the cruel laughter of Time but feels a human fear,

disgust and shame in it.

Although published in Thfe&tre de chambre. Le Sacre de la nuit

is, by its greater degree of abstraction, its poetic language and its

cosmic theme, much more akin to the Poemes k jouer. . Moreover, it

forms a striking contrast with the work we have just considered,

Maledictions d'une Furie, because it presents the other side of the

argument: the positive aspect of man's relationship with time and

space. While Maledictions d'une Furie is a curse against time, Le

Sacre de la nuit is a blessing from time and space. Both plays are

realizations of an emotional state: Maledictions d'une Furie gives

vent to anger, hatred and frustration while Le Sacre de la nuit ex­

presses the opposite feelings of peace, joy and love.

As in Maledictions d'une Furie. the protagonists in Le Sacre

de la nuit are presented against a background of color and light which

set the mood of the play and symbolize its theme. In both works, the

characters remain stationary until the end and speak facing the

audience, giving somewhat the effect of a talking picture which

communicates directly with the audience* Le Sacre de la nuit takes

place in an empty, dark room with a large window opening onto a sky

glowing white with starlight. A young man is seated at the right front of the stage and is lighted by a blue light from a projector. A young woman is standing by the window at the back left of the stage, sil­

houetted by the starlight. The emptiness of the room and the darkness

suggest the frightening negative side of absence while the transparent 119 blue light creates a mood of repose and symbolizes the positive nature of space as a place of unlimited expansion. The whitish starlight emphasizes the sky, almost bringing it into the room, and also symbol­ izes the unearthly. The total effect of the scene is one of unreality

(or perhaps of reality lifted to a higher plane) but also of harmony.

As in Maledictions d'une Furie. the rhythm of the language further develops the mood of the work. In contrast to the rapid, stacatto rhythm of Maledictions d'une Furie. the poetic language of

Le Sacre de la nuit is slower, more legato, but still quite emotional

"sur le ton d'un ravissement continuel, allant jusqu’au d^lire."

(Th4Atre de chambre. p. 31) The rhythm of the lines does not depend on syllabication or rhyme but rather on the way the stresses fall on the important words. The line seems to surge from stress to stress:

"Allez & la fenetre. ma beaut^, mon amour— et dites ce que vous vovez." Sometimes the stresses in the line fall into a three-beat pattern: "J'apergois une ^toile dans le ciel." This ternary rhythm seems to indicate harmony, for it is often apparent in the language of lovers . (Les Amants du m£tro. L'ABC de notre vie).

Le Sacre de la nuit illustrates a moment of perfect harmony, for although there are two characters physically present, they share one state of consciousness. The woman is the link between man and the earth as well as between man and the sky: she represents per­ ception through the senses. The man directs her perceptions and interprets them: he is the intellectualizing force, the power of reason. This relationship is quite evident in the conversation be­ tween the two lovers. All of the man's lines are either questions or 120

commands or explanatory statements while the woman's lines consist of

reactions to these questions, commands or statements expressing her

feelings. While this relationship obviously shows a certain view of

the interdependency of the masculine and the feminine, it also suggests

the two sides of the poet's nature: the rational and the intuitive.

Not only is there harmony In the relationship between the

couple, but also in their relationship to the universe. Through the woman's ability to look and to perceive, the man knows what is

happening outside: he accepts her as his window on the world and

his link with the sky: "J'entends ton regard dans ta voix. Je n'ai pas besoin de me retourner ni de regarder. Cette fenStre t'appartient.

Par toi je sais ce qui se passe au-dehors." (p. 33) Tardieu often

attaches a great deal of symbolic importance to the art of seeing.

Le regard is a way of spanning the gap between presence and absence, between the real and the unreal. As Tardieu writes in an essay en­

titled "Le Ciel ou 1'irr^alit^': "^levant mon regard, je passe, en

une seconde, de ce qui vlt k ce qui fut, ou qui jamais ne fut et 20 jamais ne sera." According to Rudolf Arnheim in Art and Visual

Perception, vision is a creative activity which is in itself a way of understanding. Sight allows us to "touch" with our eyes things 21 that lie beyond our reach. So in Le Sacre de la nuit. active contemplation of the night sky is like a sensory contact with

"l' 6 ternelle absence" of time and space:

2 0 La_ Part de 1'ombre.' p. 47.

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), pp. 28-31. 121

L 1 HOMME: Tu veilles par amour et ton regard attelnt ce que tu ne peux connaitre, puisqu'il plonge dans cette nult.

LA FEMME: Je sense comme un immense bien-6 tre, dans mes yeux, sur mon front, puis dans tout mon corps. L'HOMME: C'est la nuit de l'espace qui se melange 4 ton regard.

This contact brings joy and freedom for the spirit:

LA FEMME: Mon coeur r^sonne d'une joie inconnue, haute et profonde comme une vo&te. L'HOMME: C'est l'espace £ternel qui descend dans ton esprit et ouvre toutes ses fen£tres. LA FEMME: Ma bouche ne peut plus parler. Mon £me chante. (p. 34)

Thus illustrating the positive side of absence, Le Sacre de la nuit balances the negative view presented in Maledictions d'une Furie.

Le Sacre de la nuit also resembles the Pokmes k Iouer in its lyrical but serious treatment of the theme of love. (The other plays of Theatre de chambre treat love only in a farcical or a burlesque way.) In the Po^mes k iouer love becomes an important motif running throughout most of the plays, sometimes as a major theme, sometimes as a minor one.

Thus far in our study we have defined presence as the world of appearances which we usually take to be reality and absence as the hidden world behind these appearances or as the cosmic world of time and space. Now in the context of love, presence and absence take on new meanings. In Les Amants du m4tro. for example, presence is the presence-to-each-other, the living fully in the present moment of the lovers and absence is the absence-from-each-other of the strangers in a crowd or of the quarreling lovers. Presenting this play in

Le Figaro. Tardieu says of it: "C'est un jeu. Un jeu entre 1'Ab­ sence— repr£sent^e par l'anonymat des voyageurs inconnus,— et la 122

0 o Presence,— figur^e par 1'amour.'

One of Tardieu's best known plays. Les Amants du m£tro is a

modern burlesque version of the classic story of two lovers separated

by a series of obstacles which must be overcome by the hero in order

to win the heroine. In this case the obstacles separating the lovers

are six other passengers on the subway car. Lui must "overcome" each

of them in turn not by physical prowess but by his linguistic or

psychological skill. In order to get them to respond to his predic­

ament, he must first break through the shell of anonymity into which

each one of them has retreated. He must find a way to bring them out

of their state of absence into a moment of presence.

The play is divided into two "tableaux." The first tableau,

which takes place on the platform of the subway station, consists of

a series of short scenes played against the background of the comings

and goings of the crowd. This first act is made up of movements which

give an impression of random activity but which are actually quite

precisely controlled so that the whole effect resembles "une sorte de

ballet, avec transposition de la r£alit^ dans le rythme . 11 (p. 14)

In Les Amants du m£tro. Tardieu continues the satire of man in modern society begun in the drames Eclair. The setting of the

play is somewhat similar to that of Le Guichet. The new element in

Les Amants du m£tro is the rhythm which is the organizing force

0 9 "Jean Tardieu pr^sente sa pi&ce," Le Figaro. April 24,

1952, p. 6 . 123

running throughout the play. Some estheticians find that rhythm is

the essence of all a r t . 23 Since the most essential characteristic of

life is movement and since all creatures have an internal rhythm, art

is just a projection of these natural rhythms: '"Every artist is a

transformer; all artistic creation is but a transmutation.'"^ For

Tardieu, rhythm is a way of organizing movement and this organization

has meaning in itself:

S'il est vrai que, dans le cercle de lp vie, le rythme a pour mission d1organiser un mouvement qui se prolonge, de lui per- mettre de durer, en lui offrant des points d'appui et de repos, on aper§oit comment le rythme, en organisant de telle

ou telle mani&re 1 'expression de 1 *Emotion, prend un sens, est lui-m£me un s e n s . 25

The first act of Les Amants du m£tro contrasts the usually

rapid, chaotic rhythm of the travelers' fragmentary conversations with

the slew waltz tempo of the lovers' essential speech. The lovers form

a calm center around which the agitated movement of the crowd swirls.

Holding hands, they almost dance on stage to the rhythm of their words:

LUI: Un, deux, trois, amour. ELLE: Un, deux, trois, s&jour. LUI: Un, deux, trois, Adour. ELLE: Un, deux, trois, toujours. (p. 16)

Although Tardieu calls it a waltz rhythm, it is actually three beats

plus two as the last word is always two syllables. Because the lovers

23see, for example, "Art and Feeling" by Otto Baensch and "The Essence of Rhythm" by Raymond Bayer in Reflections on Art: A Source Book of Writings by Artists. Critics and Philosophers, ed. by Susanne K. Langer (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 195B).

^Quoted from Jean d'Udine's L'art et le geste by Susanne K. Langer in Philosophy in a New Key, p. 227.

25Quoted by E. Noulet in Jean Tardieu. p. 26. 124

are In tune with each other at this moment, there is little need for

words. Single words are enough to suggest the harmonious relationship

between them. Although language and rhythm have almost become one in

this conversation, it still manages to convey a content through the

suggestive power of the final words in each phrase. Tardieu emphasizes

these words by having them end in a slightly prolonged syllable, as,

for example, -our. The conversation consists of five groups each

made up of four lines, except the last group which has only three

lines. Within these groups, the first and last end with words in

-our. In the second, third and fourth groups of lines, there is an

alternation between two endings: ficelle, plalsir, nacelle, partir:

je t 1 aime. balance, quand meme. Constance: riviere, content, mystjhre,

longtemps. In this conversation, Tardieu shows the suggestive power

that very common, simple words can have when they are arranged assoc- 26 iatively, playing upon their phonetic and rhythmic possibilities.

On the other hand, the parody of social exchange in the con­

versation between the two gentlemen saying goodbye to each other also

uses common language, but rather than being poetic and suggestive,

it is merely repetitious and empty of meaning. In contrast to the

smooth, harmonious rhythm in the lovers1 conversation and movements,

the rhythm in the words and gestures of the two men is brusque, choppy

^^Martln Esslin calls this play "a fascinating tour de force" which "shows the richness of the textural and rhythmic possibilities of language, as well as the feasibility of a purely poetic, as dis­ tinct from discursive, use of dramatic dialogue which replaces the ex­ change of ideas or information between the characters by the striking up and development of poetic Images and themes by a new logic of association." (Theatre of the Absurd, p. 173.) 125

and mechanical:

ler HOMME: Alors, au revoir, mon cher! 2e HOMME: Vous vouliez dire: au revoir, mon cher? ler HOMME: Quoi done, n'ai-je point dit cela? 2e HOMME: Si, si, vous l'avez dit: vous avez bien dit: au revoir, mon cherI ler HOMME: N'est-ce done point ce qu'il fallait dire? 2e HOMME: Exactement ce qu'il fallait dire. Et je r^- pondrai... ler HOMME: Et vous r^pondrez? 2e HOMME: Je r^ponderai: au revoir, mon cher. ler HOMME: Allons, tout est bien ainsl. Au revoir! (pp. 14-15)

In spite of the meaninglessness of this exchange, the last line in­ dicates that the main function of these formulas is that they give

the speakers a sense of order or security. These two conversations show that the essential difference between poetic language and ordinary language lies not in vocabulary but in the Intention and in the relationship between sound and sense. As Paul Valery has said, ordinary language is a practical instrument whose goal is compre­ hension while poetry is dominated "par un sentiment musical conscient, 27 suivi, maintenu." While emphasizing rhythm and word sound in poetry creates a musical, suggestive effect, stressing the same qualities in everyday conversation annihilates meaning.

In the second conversation between the lovers harmony is ex­ pressed in the use of a single verb, for the entire dialogue consists of j_e— tu. moi— toi plus £tre (usually in the present tense). To make a musical analogy, this conversation might be subtitled "vari­ ations on the verb &tre." The dialogue contains eighteen lines; each six lines constitutes a group. The first group is a set of three

27»Droits du po^te sur la langue," Pieces sur l'art (Paris: Galllmard, 1934), p. 58. 126

questions and three answers stating the lover's basic relationship

in that moment:

ELLE: Oil suis-je? LUI: Aupres de moi. ELLE: Oh es-tu? LUI: Prbs de toi. ELLE: Tu es? LUI: Je suis. (pp. 22-23)

In each line the stresses fall on the first and last word, giving a certain feeling of stability and certainty. Made up almost entirely of one-syllable words, the lines are approximately equal in length.

In the second group of six lines the lovers remember the past, state

the present and look ahead to the future (with some anxiety):

ELLE: Je n'^tais rien. Tu es venu. Je suis. LUI: Je suis avec toi. ELLE: Je ne suis rien sans toi. LUI: Nous sommes. ELLE: (implorante): Dis: nous seronsl LUI: Nous serons. (p. 23)

In contrast to the balanced stability of the first group of lines, the greater variation of the length of these lines and the tendency for the stress to fall on the last word of each sentence gives more movement and a slight feeling of insecurity. The theme of the last part of the conversation is the desire for unity of the two lovers:

ELLE: Je voudrais §tre toi. LUI: Tu es moi. ELLE: Pour toi, autour de toi. LUI: Par toi, vers toi, h. travers toi. ELLE: £tre l'un pour 1*autre. LUI: Un seul 4tre. (pp. 23-24)

The stressed repetition of toi expresses the reciprocity of this desire. Although the lines become more unequal in length than at the beginning of the conversation, there is an equality and a balance 127

In the way each word Is equally stressed, equally Important.

The lover's next conversation is quite another matter, for

harmony has given way to a dispute. In the first seven lines — tu. moi— toi. &tre still predominate, but now the verb is in the past

tense or in the negative. The next eight lines are built around quoi and que:

LUI: Mais quoi? Mais pourquoi? Mals qu'est-ce? ELLE: Tu sais bien quel LUI: Que quoi? ELLE: C'est toi-m&ne qui l'as ditI LUI: J'ai dit quoi? ELLE: Tu le sais bien. Tu n'avais qu'k ne past LUI: Mais je n'ai pas voulul J'ai dit quel Mais tu as compris que ne pasl ELLE: J'ai compris que j'ai comprisl (pp. 26-27)

The new feature, the fragmentary sentence structure, is disturbing, tantalizing and symbolic of the rupture in communication between the couple. As in Eux seuls le savent. although we do not know the facts behind the quarrel, we have no difficulty in getting the gist of the situation from the intonation pattern alone.

With the next appearance of the lovers the quarrel has become more violent. Accordingly, sentence structure has disintegrated further and the tempo has increased. Now the conversation is almost entirely in pronouns and its only content is the emotion conveyed by the rhythm of the phrases:

LUI: Et tu, et tu, et tu, et tul ELLE: Pas moi, mals toi, pas moi, toll LUI: Pardon, tu mel ELLE: Comment, je te? LUI: Oui, je tel ELLE: Je te jamais, moll LUI: Si, tu mel (p. 30)

Communication finally breaks down to the point where Lui no longer 1 2 8 seems to remember Elle's name. Or Is It that Elle no longer recognizes it when he says It? In any case, the act ends with a crescendo as Lui calls out various girls' names and with an accelerando as he runs after Elle, "traduisant par sa hate croissante le sentiment tragique de la perte de son amour, et son d^sir path^tique de le retrouver."

(p. 32) During this action, a monotonously rhythmic voice off stage continues to enumerate girls' names. The rhythm and the actions gra­ dually accelerate until the stage is clearpd.

While the first act emphasizes presence in the sense of the bustling physical activity of the crowd and in the mental and emotional sense of the presence-to-each-other of the couple, in the second act, absence predominates. Now the setting of the play has moved from the qua! of the station onto the subway train itself. The train is crowded so that when the lovers get on, they find themselves at opposite ends of the subway car separated by six other travelers.

The "game" or the action of this tableau consists of Lui working his way toward a reunion with Elle. The major difficulty for him to over­ come is the anonymity of the other passengers who are "d£personnalis£s, inexpressifs, fig^s, absents, comme s'ils ^talent, tous, de simples mannequins." (p. 34) When they speak in this state of absence, their voices are "voix de marlonnettes, cassantes, aigues, irrbelles."

Act II opens with the passengers repeating the same question and answer to each other in this strange, mechanical tone of voice:

"Vous m'connaissez? Vous connais pas!" This repetition of conna^tre forms a monotonous four—beat rhythmic pattern which corresponds to the mechanical nature of the passengers. After this opening, the 129

travelers have individual identity only when Lui succeeds in engaging

them in conversation. The rest of the time they are simply la foule.

Acting as a chorus, they often provide a background rhythm which mimics

the noises and rhythm of the train. Just as Lui begins his task of

trying to reach Elle, they call out boys' names and then girls' names

rhythmically in groups of three. This rhythm repeats the ending of

Act I as well as recalling the 1,2,3 rhythm of the lover's speech.

This rhythmic pattern of names increases in loudness and speed until

Lui's voice is almost drowned out; then suddenly it.changes into a

new rhythm and a new technique: "Des voix se r^pondent trfes vite et

se lancent des noms comme des balles de tennis." (p. 37) This new

rhythm continues in a crescendo, followed by a decrescendo and finally

drops off into a rhythmic, indistinct background murmur. This rhythmic

name calling seems to affect Lui in an almost physical way. It

accentuates his separation from Elle and establishes the presence of

the others as the obstacle:

LUI: Ce sont eux quil... ce n'est pas unt... ce n'est pas deux!... ce n'est pas trois! c'est trois multipli£ par trois... multiplid par mille au carr^, que multi- plie dix, plus trente, molns quatorze, plus deux mille!... Ce n'est pas moi, ce n'est pas toi! C'est toi plus moi plus tousI... Tous plus tous £gale un mur! tous plus tous, le sable, plus tous, la mer, plus les autres, personnel... Je veux te rejoindre!... Je-n'y-arrive-pasl (p. 38)

Suddenly the murmuring stops and two voices repeatedly call each

other: "Raymond? Roger..." Elle, speaking for the first time in

this act, sums it all up: "Tous... ^gale un plus un!" (p. 39) La

foule picks up her last three words, turning them into a rhythmic murmur which goes decrescendo into silence. This ends the rhythmic 130 transition from Act I to Act II and now Lui begins the game of chang­ ing places until he reaches Elle.

Lui's progress through the "obstacles*" the six passengers between himself and Elle, illustrates the theme which has just been stated by Lui, Elle and the crowd: within the anonymity of the masses, individual identity is lost and man is absent; yet he can be made present again through communication established on a one-to-one basis, if a common interest or a mutual empathy can be found.

The first obstacle, l 1amateur de lournaux. has the greatest difficulty in coming out of his anonymous state. He speaks in a kind of telegraphic language interspersed with rhythmic nonsense syllables as though the rhythm of the train (or perhaps of modern life) has per­ meated his being and become a part of it. Lui first establishes con­ tact with him by imitating his manner of speaking:

LUI: Niom, niom, niom, niom, niom, mots crois£s?

L 1 AMATEUR: Tioc, tioc, tioc, tioc, tioc, tioc, politique..."p. 40)

L* amateur* s main interest is in the bad news he has been reading in his newspaper. As it happens, it concerns a certain crime d1amour which he recounts to Lui in telegraphese and rhythmic syllables. Since amour is the subject uppermost in Lui's mind, the two can communicate in spite of the strange way of speaking. Due to this mutual concern,

Lui becomes quite proficient at speaking in this way, thus gaining the amateur*s sympathy and help:

LUI: Elle, zig, zig, zig, voulu partir, (8 )

moi, tic, tic, tic, la rattraper! (8 ) L'AMATEUR: Vite, zou, zou, zou, la retrouver! (8)

LUI: Pas possible1 Trop serr^st (6 ) L'AMATEUR: Prenez ma placet (4) LUI: Merci, monsieur1 (4) (p. 42) 131

This empathy is evident in the rhythm of their language, for they

often respond to each other in phrases containing the same number of

syllables. This understanding has resulted in a gradual humanizing

of 1 'amateur, so that in his parting statement, the rhythmic syllables have left his speech entirely:

L'AMATEUR: Soyez heureux, jeune homme, et toujours amoureux! LUI: Vous £tes bien bon, monsieur. Nous penserons k

vous quand nous serons 'nous deux.' (p. 4 3 )

The identity of the rhythm of both of the lines just quoted (based on groups of six syllables) and the rhyming of the words heureux. amour­ eux and deux suggest a genuine identification between the two men.

In contrast to the reticence of 1*amateur, the second obstacle, la dame offens^e mais provocante. is extremely voluble. As soon as

Lui has arrived at her side she turns and begins to speak "comme un m^canisme que l'on d^clenche," launching into a rapid, animated mono­ logue in which she denounces Lui for having mistreated Elle. The effect of this monologue depends partly on the repetition of key words and sounds: it is built around voir and f*aire and the sounds v.» J.» and m. Carried away by emotion and the sound of her own words, the lady eventually loses control to the point where words run away with her, one word leading associatlvely to another until she is making nonsensical and contradictory statements:

Espkce de vilain individu! En voilk un v o i d I En v o i d un voilkt Je veux dire un voyou! Ahl si la grand-tante de ma soeur ainke voyait cela! C'^tait une vraie femme, vous savez, une vraie armoire, une armoire aux secrets, et pas commode, une vraie commode, un vral tombeau, le tombeau des secretsI £a n'est pas elle qui serait icil II y a trop longtemps qu' elle est mortel Elle est morte avant sa naissance. Je la connais sans la connaltre. (p. 44) 132

After the mechanical nature of these first two passengers, the

third, l'ouvrier compr^hensif. seems refreshingly human. Lui's dia­

logue with him is a "normal" prosaic conversation with no particular

rhythm or phonetic effects. The subjects of the first part of the

conversation are equally commonplace: conna£tre. travailler. aimer.

Like a clever servant in an eighteenth-century play, the worker shows

himself to be a keen observer of the situation with an intuitive under­

standing of human relations. Impressed by his observations which

come uncomfortably close to the truth, Lui asks him to explain what

came over Elle during their recent quarrel. There is a certain wry wisdom in the worker's explanation of the difficulties of verbal

communication:

L'OUVRIER: Peut-etre bien que vous lui parliez avec des mots... LUI: Comment cela? Et elle? L'OUVRIER: Elle? Elle vous repondait avec des mots qui sont pas des mots. LUI: Les mots sont des mots. L'OUVRIER: II y a mots et mots: les siens et les v&tres. C'est pas les mimesI (p. 48)

Once again Tardieu warns of the pitfalls of language as communication: each person has his own "langue moi" which is different from every no other. Perhaps we would be better off not speaking at all:

LUI: Vous allez m'empicher de lui parler? L'OUVRIER: (Ja serait pas plus mal.

And yet we cannot seem to stop trying:

9ft Professor Froeppel in Tardieu's humoristic prose work Un Mot pour un autre (Paris: Gallimard, 1951, pp. 24-27) decides that since all language is false because we must translate it into our own terms of thought, the only true language would be the "langue moi," but of course this language is incomprehensible to anyone other than its speaker. 133

LUI: Mais comment lui dire?...

For the worker the question is simple; the word JLs_ the thing:

Oh! les mots, c'est pas des mots, c'est des choses. Quand on dit un tuyau, cela veut dire un tuyau; quand on dit un marteau- pilon, aussi; et quand on dit un pied broy4 ou une main d£- chir^el (Ja dit ce que ja veut dire. (p. 49)

Contrasting with the naturalness and simplicity of the worker,

the fourth obstacle, la star imaginaire. is all appearance and exagger­ ation. Appropriately, Lui establishes contact with this pretend per­ son through games of make-believe. After several fruitless attempts

to get her attention, he finds the "right" approach to be "Ch&re et illustre amie! Quoi! vous icl!" (p. 49) Taking out a notepad and a pencil, Lui pretends to be a reporter interviewing a "personality."

The content of this conversation reveals the absence of any interior qualities to this personality. She has no "Impressions" on any subject and in regard to her next film, she has decided to have her name on the marquee but she will not appear in the movie:

LA STAR: J'ai pr^f^r£ donner simplement mon nom. Cela

suffit. Je suis sur l'affiche. pa vaut d 6 jA quelques millions. Alors, tout le monde viendra pour me voir et... LUI: Et vous n'y serez pas! LA STAR: Et je n'y serai pas!... C'est une publicity follel... la publicity par 1'absence!...29 Ce sera merveilleux, merveeeeeil-leux! (pp. 50-51)

With Lui's next question as to there she had been, the star answers that she had been having lunch. At this reply, Lui changes roles from reporter-interviewing-a-personality to waiter-taking-an-order.

This game consists of inventing names of dishes:

Perhaps this is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Ionesco's famous-though-absent cantatrlce chauve. 134

LA STAR: Voyons!... D'abord des hors-d'oeuvre: ^crevettes, navettes, poivri&res, carons, p&t^s-de-t£te-de-chef- indien, salade de bacilles, mandolines frites... (p. 51)

The first four of these "dishes" resemble the name of some real food,

but they become progressively inventive, reminding one of surreal

images. After playing this game for several more lines, Lui and the

star return rather abruptly from the land of make-believe:

LA STAR: . . .Eh, dites, c'est pas la peine de noter tout £aI... On ne j oue plus! LUI: On joue quand mfene... (p. 52)

Even in the "real world" we are only playing roles. Behind the mystery

of invented appearances the star reveals herself to be a simple person who lives alone with her little brother. Receiving a jealous note

from Elle saying that she will get off the train if he does not stop

his conversation with the star, Lui moves on, but with a certain amount

of regret for the passing of this brief moment of amusement. Like the

dialogue with the worker, this has been a human exchange with no

particular rhythm. Although it has less "content" than the preceding

conversation, it has been even more successful in establishing a

relationship between the two speakers. Tardieu suggests that since we are all only playing roles anyway, we might at least do it with imagination and enjoy ourselves.

As the fifth obstacle, le 'protecteur*. proves, the only alternative to responding to others in words is silence. Yet this is not a viable option, for silence provokes anger. Being only a dummy, the protector cannot respond. The fact that Lui does not even notice that the mannequin is not a real person ironically underlines the 135

theme of anonymity and lack of humanity of all the passengers. Lui on berates the protector for supposedly having abandoned la star.JU grow­

ing increasingly abusive as he continues to get no response until at

last he seizes the dummy and forceably changes places with him.

The last obstacle, 1'individu-en-traln-de-fondre-dans-la-foule.

personifies the theme of absence in anonymity. Although unremarkable

in appearance, his voice and manner of speaking express "une angoisse

terrible, comme s'il ^tait d£jk l£ch£ par les flammes de l'Enfer."

9P. 55) As soon as Lui arrives beside him, he begins to tremble from

head to foot. Lui, thinking he is ill, offers to get a doctor, but

l'individu explains that he is rot sick or dying. It is worse than

that, for he is disappearing:

Non, pas mourirl... Non, pas maladel... Pire que celal II y a quelque chose d'absent, de vide, d'anonyme qui tourne. tourne, tourne autour de moil En moil Je vais disparaitrel D'un instant a 1'autre! Dis-pa-ral-tre!... vous ne comprenez done pas? (p. 56)

When Lui asks how one can disappear without dying, l'individu tries to describe his fear of melting and getting mixed into the world or of being absorbed into the crowd:

Pas mourir: disparaitrel Fondre, si vous pr^f^rez. Fondrel Se confondre avec l'air, avec le sol, avec les autres, sur- tout! Avec les autres! Les autresl Tous! Tous ceux-lk! (p. 56)

As with the first two passengers (but to a lesser degree), this pathetic character's speech tends toward the rhythmic. His anguish often expresses itself in short lines of four or five syllables

^®It is interesting to note that Lui has now become the in- flictor of the same kind of treatment which he had earlier received from the offended lady. 136

delivered in a "voix haletante." Repetition of key words like

disparaltre. fondre. les autrea reveal the obsessive nature of his fear.

Finally having reached file, Lui finds that she, too, has become absent and no longer recognizes him. Just as she seems about

to "disappear," a whistle blows and the train suddenly stops, jolting her back to presence. She looks at Lui and once again finds her identity: "Je te regarde et je me reconnais: je suis, puisque tu es." (p. 59) Lui's answer states the same idea in a sort of magic formula: "L'homme est visible de pres. Chacun pour chacun!" The passengers, released from their enchantment by these words, quickly come to life and get off the train. Elle and Lui waltz away hand in hand to the original rhythm:

LUI: Un, deux, trois, anonyme. ELLE: Un, deux, trois, ab:Dme. LUI: Un, deux, trois, conna£tre. ELLE: Un, deux, trois, renaitre. LUI: Un, deux, trois, amour. ELLE: Un, deux, trois, toujours... (pp. 59-60)

As we have seen, in Les Amants du m^tro Tardieu transposes everyday reality into a pattern of rhythmic movements resembling a ballet. In L'ABC de notre vie, he fits this same world into the musical structure of a concerto. L'ABC de notre vie is constructed out of the interweaving of three dominant themes expressed primarily by three different "instruments" or voices. The Protagonist "joue le role de 1'instrument concertant" (p. 63) to the accompaniment of the orchestra represented by the chorus and by Monsieur Mot and Madame

Parole, who together form one role. In his preface to the play, 137

Tardieu outlines the three themes: (1) each individual's Illusion of his own separateness and uniqueness contrasted with the constant. In­

escapable presence of others, (2 ) the power of love to negate this presence, creating "le splendide isolement du couple," and (3) speech:

"le commentaire perp£tuel de l'homme par l'homme." (p. 63) The first theme is expressed by the relationship between the Protagonist, re­ presenting the individual, and the chorus, symbolizing the mass of humanity. According to the preface, the chorus is there "pour rappeler a l'homme seul qu'il n'en est pour rien et pour lui faire prendre conscience de la pression qu'exerce k tout moment sur lui le monde humain, dans le temps et dans l'espace, dans les profondeurs loin- taines du pass^ historlque, aussi bien que dans le moment imm^diat,

^tendu a tout l'univers." (p. 63) The second theme is personified by a pair of lovers who come out of the chorus to play a special scene and the third theme is incarnated in Monsieur Mot and Madame Parole as well as suggested by the words of the chorus.

After a short musical introduction, the play beings with a prologue which is a microcosm of the entire work:

Ici va commencer la symphonie de la grande ville, symphonie sans musique, falte de paroles, de cris, de mur­ mur es. Ici. avant que le jour ne se leve, les citadins endormls jouent leurs songes confus. Un homme parmi tant d'autres va lentement s'^veiller. II veut retrouver son r&ve d'enfant: la libert^ dans le vent, les arbres, la mer... Mals la rumeur 4norme de la 138

ville ne le laisse pas s'Evader. Le voll&

repris par 1 'Implacable mul­ titude, enchain^ k l'Histoire, k l'^v£- nement, k ce qu'il n'a pas connu, & ce qui se passe loin de lui. Seul 1'amour recommence, oublieux et neuf comme au premier jour du monde.«.

(Un bref silence.)

...Non, l'homme n'ichappe pas k l'homme,

1 1 est son propre paysage et le murmure qui l'endort, apres tant de tumulte et de tourments, est son propre murmure, l'oc^an de paroles, monotone et priv£ de sens comme le bruit du vent dans la for&t. (pp. 71-72)

In Les Amants du m^tro reality is transposed into rhythm and the analogy is to ballet; therefore the play develops as a progression in space. In L'ABC de notre vie, however, reality is placed within a musical framework, so it is appropriate that this work develops as a progression in time as the Protagonist, "l'homme de tous les jours," lives out his "day off." As the subway setting situates Les Amants du m^tro in the everyday world, so in L'ABC de notre vie the unfolding of the day provides the play with a basis in reality. In both plays, the very human protagonists contrast with the anonymity and imperson­ ality of the secondary characters. In both plays, but particularly in L'ABC de notre vie. Tardieu achieves a higher degree of fusion of the concrete and the abstract than in most of his earlier plays. 139

Rather than attempting literally to create a pseudo-musical composition as in La Sonate et les trois messieurs, in L ’ABC de notre vie Tardieu uses the musical principles of repetition and of contrast as well as the interweaving of themes; but the content, while poetic at times, stays closer to the human. The main interest is no longer in the technique but in the Protagonist and his relationship to others.

The first theme, that of the individual versus the masses, is the predominant one and as such, it is repeated three times in the play. In this theme Tardieu reveals the negative aspect of presence: the presence of others both in this moment and in the past exerts a pressure on the individual which weighs him down. Thus the Protagonist dreams of a day of solitude and freedom from this burden:

Je serai seul tout le jour sans remords. Je me d^fais du poids du monde! Je ne sais pas ce qui s'est pass& sur la terre avant l'heure que voicil Je ne sais pas ce qui se passe loin de moi en ce moment! Je suis l^ger... l^ger... (p. 87)

In order to realize this dream the Protagonist decides to imitate the natural world by giving up his mobility and taking root like a tree.

But the chorus reminds him that he cannot escape the murmuring of language and that he cannot block out others. Like it or not, he is a part of humanity and must share its suffering as well as its joys.

Even though separated from others in time or space, he is aware of their presence:

A toute heure, quelqu'un crie, que je ne peux entendre et que j'entends quand m£me, car son cri est plus fort que la distance, plus fort que les ann£es, plus fort que l'oubli. (p. 108)

Moreover, the Protagonist finds that although he would like to 140

separate himself from it— "Non!... non, je n'^tais pas lh, depuis

l'aurore de ce mondel" (p. 124)— historical mankind with its horrors

and its glories is a part of him which cannot be denied:

et tant d'£v^nements surprenants et tant de ddcouvertes et tant de chefs-d'oeuvre ont At6. scellds et parachev^s long- temps avant ma vie et cependant je les porte en moi-m&me et ils sont devenues ma chair et ma raison... (p. 126)

This meditation on man as a historical being leads directly to the

climax of the work, the essential question which man has always asked

himself:

Qu'est-ce que je suis? Est-ce que j'existe, moi qui n'ai rien connu de tout ce qui m'a fait tel que je suis? Ne suis-je done rien, rien d'autre qu'une halte d'une heure dans un d&- roulement sans fin? (p. 127)

The second theme, the power of love, is introduced near the

beginning of the play as the Protagonist dreams of an ideal woman and

joy in love. Although this theme is developed only once, its position

near the center of the work and its connection with the title Indicate

its importance. In Les Amants du m^tro the power of love is that of

creating presence, of heightening the sense of being-in-the-present of

the two lovers; while this is true in L'ABC de notre vie as well, in

this play love also has the power of negating presence in the sense of

separating the lovers from the burdensome presence of the world and of others. Watching the couple, the Protagonist envies their solitude

together:

II y a des millions et des millions de gens dans cette ville et dans toutes les villes et tous les faubourgs et ces deux- 1^ sont seuls! Pour eux, le monde est un desert, mais un desert pareil & un diamant. (pp. 115-116)

Love not only removes us from the pressures of the masses for a little 141 while but also renews our sense of wonder at life. Immediately follow­ ing the climax of the first theme in the "Qu'est-ce que je suis?" speech, the Protagonist states the culmination of the love theme:

Et cependant, il y a ici, aujourd'hui, comme si rien n'avait exist^ auparavant, un gargon et une fillet Un gargon! Une fillet Comme si cela n'avait jamais £td, comme si c'^tait la premiere fois, comme si le monde commengait avec eux, (Un temps.)

comme si c'dtait l'A.B.C. de notre vie... (p. 127)

And yet love is fragile, always threatened by absence. The lovers in

L'ABC de notre vie are keenly aware of the possibility of non-being.

The young man enjoys watching his lover walking in front of him: "Se mouvoir! Quel miracle! L'air ne r^siste pas: il te porte." (p. 118)

But when she begins to get too far away he becomes anxious:

Ah!... Pas si loinl Tu serais reprise par ce monde inconnut Tu cesserais d'existerl L 1absence nous guettel (p. 119)

Apart from each other, the young man and woman feel the same fear as

L 'indivldu-en-train-de-fondre-dans-la-foule in Les Amants du m^tro. that of being swallowed up by the world or of disappearing into the crowd. Separation, for them, is a form of non-being.

The third theme, speech, man's commentary on man, runs through­ out the play in the background murmur of the chorus and in the word games of Monsieur Mot and Madame Parole. When the chorus is perform­ ing as a group, their role consists of an Incessant repetition of a phrase such as "Je t'attendais et tu n'es pas venu!" or "Je t'avals dit, tu m'avals dit." or "Tu sals ce que je t'ai dit? N'oublie pas!"

These phrases suggest the social pressures of our dally relationships with others and their repetition symbolizes the pervasiveness of such 142

phrases In our lives. According to Tardieu's preface, Monsieur Mot

and Madame Parole are semi-burlesque characters "qui incarnent en

quelque sorte les pages du dictionnaire, rdduit, par gout de la con-

trainte, aux premieres lettres de 1*alphabet." (pp. 63-64) Their role

consists mostly of words or short phrases which they toss back and

forth like tennis balls. Tardieu describes these words as "plut&t des

notes de musique ou des touches de couleur que des vocables." (p. 67)

And yet the meaning of the words are also important to their effect.

Sometimes these words have the relatively passive role of connection or

transition, as, for example, the sequence of words suggesting morning

and getting started which come just before the Protagonist awakens:

M. MOT: Aurore! MME PAROLE: Appareillage! M. MOT: Avril! MME PAROLE: Alliance! M. MOT: Armure! MME PAROLE: Abordage! M. MOT: Aurore! MME PAROLE: Avrill (p. 89)

At other times Monsieur Mot and Madame Parole take a more active part,

their words being calculated to produce a reaction in the Protagonist

or to remind him of his role or to provoke him to act as in the se­ quence just before the Protagonist begins his day:

M. MOT: A l'ouvrage! MME PAROLE: Au chantler. M. MOT: A 1'abordage! MME PAROLE: A la cuisine! M. MOT: Au bureau! (p. 96)

Here Monsieur Mot and Madame Parole resemble a social conscience or 143 31 the call of duty. The chorus, when acting as Individuals who step

forward to deliver monologues, often exerts an even stronger pressure on the Protagonist, reminding him of what he would like to forget:

Encore un jour qui commence! Dieu salt ce qu'il nous amenera! Comment? Qu'est-ce que vous dites? Je dis, je dis toujours: qu'est-ce que §a peut bien nous r^server, je vous le demande? Et ci et 1&, et par-ci et par-l&! Et je te tire par-ci et je te pousse par-let! Et pour quoi faire, tout ga, pour quoi faire, je vous le demande? A quoi ga sert? A quoi j:a nous m&ne? Et toujours il y en a qui vivent et il y en a qui meurentl Et il y en a qui souffrent et qui travaillent et qui ont de la peine et de la souffrance. Un jour, c'est l'un, un jour, c'est 1'autre. Et pour quoi faire, tout ce trafic et tout ce cham- bardement et toute cette souffrance, je vous le demande? Et quand c'est fini, $ a recommence, et ga recommence et ga n'a ni fin ni cesse. Et aujourd'hui! Et demain! Et encore! Et encore! (pp. 105-06)

Both Monsieur Mot and Madame Parole and the chorus represent the intrusion of everyday reality into the private dreams of an 32 individual. Language is the instrument of this intrusion and, like humanity itself, cannot be ignored.

While Les Amants du m^tro and L'ABC de notre vie put forth a stereotyped, modern view of the ordinary man in relation to his society, Tonnerre sans orage. Tardieu's ea’rliest play, presents a stylized, classical view of mythic man in relation to both the natural world (presence) and the supernatural world (absence). Reminiscent of a Greek tragedy in its reduction to three actors portraying mytho­ logical characters, in its classic form and stylized staging, in the

Robert Champlgny states that M. Mot and Mme Parole personify the power of social language. ("Satire and Poetry," p. 92.) 32 Calvin Evans believes that this play shows a discrepancy be­ tween two time levels— the inner and the outer— and between two dlf- ferent worlds— dream and reality. ("Temporal Aesthetics," p. 308.) grandeur of its theme and the nobility of its language, Tonnerre sans

orage combines a simple dramatic structure with a complex philosophical

content which suggests at least two possible interpretations. Set in

"les temps fabuleux de la Gr&ce, avant l'Histoire," the play is built

around three mythological characters: Asia, Deucalion and Prometheus.

The resemblance to the Greek theater is enhanced by the slow studied speech and gestures of the actors. They speak facing the audience in a manner which "doit Stre lente, psalmodi^e d'une voix forte avec le minimum d'effets." In this early play, Tardieu's only technical inno­ vation is in presenting each actor against a "d£cor personnel" which moves with him, acting as a symbol of his character, (p. 205)

The first level of meaning is in the plot itself. As in

Greek theater, there is little action in the sense of events. The play consists of narration, discussion and speculation concerning a situation. The mainspring of the plot is the opposite reactions of

Deucalion and Prometheus to the idea that the gods do not exist.

Asia, the mother of Prometheus, is the catalyst that triggers these reactions when she reveals to her grandson, Deucalion, the secret of how she created the gods to curb the willful nature of her son, Pro­ metheus. Deucalion, who has always loved the gods and believed in them, is at first unwilling to accept this idea; but gradually and regretfully, he reconciles himself to it. Prometheus also believes in the gods, but hates them for having remained hidden from him.

Therefore his sole purpose in life has been to fight a war against the gods: he intends to destroy their creation in order to force them out of hiding. When Deucalion points out that this task is useless 145

since the gods do not exist, Prometheus flies into a rage. But upon

reflection he realizes that Deucalion is right: he has been waging a

war against an absent enemy and in the process he has brought the world

to the brink of disaster. He tries to stop the destruction, but it is

too late: "L'heure est venue.1* Everything has been destroyed includ­

ing Asia. Deucalion leaves to seek a new god and a new life. Prow

metheus, left alone, continues in his chosen parth toward destruction,

realizing that he is both his own god and his own enemy.

As is often the case in Greek tragedy, it is man's will to con- 33 trol which causes the unfortunate outcome in this play. Asia created

the gods to control Prometheus. Although based on good intentions, her

plan backfired: "Voulant le blen, j'ai fait le mal et j'attisai dans

le coeur de ton pfere une haine inexpiable, une r^volte sans limite."

(p. 211) In his revolt against the gods, Prometheus seeks first to

control nature: "prendre la nature enti^re dans des mains puissantes

pour la lancer enfin A l'assaut de vos s^jours rayonnants..." (p. 215)

The will to control, whether based on love or on hatred, leads to

destruction.

Realizing too late his mistake, Prometheus blames Asia for his

crime. But the fault is in Prometheus and not in Asia, for as children,

Deucalion and Prometheus had both received the same teaching about the gods. Asia told them of the loves of the gods as well as of their crimes, but something within the character of Deucalion and Prometheus

33 Charles S. Baldwin sees human will as "the mainspring of every tragic crisis" in the ancient Greek theater in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic: Interpreted from Representative Works (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959), p. 179. 4

146

made them hear these tales differently. Deucalion, "plus tendre qu'un

jeune olivier," heard only the positive side of the story, accepting

the gods with love, while Prometheus heard only the negative side,

hating the gods for their supposed crimes. His anger at the gods was

based on his own willful mininterpretation of Asia's stories: "Pro-

mAth^e n'^coutalt que la fable et non la legon." (p. 2 1 1 )

From one point of view, Asia's creation of the gods was a lie

and she realizes the enormity of it: "Comprends-tu quelle fut l'&ior- mltd de ma feinte et quel secret je te confie en te disant, A toi

ch^tif, que j'ai menti?" (p. 208) And yet from another point of view

she did not lie:

Non, certes je ne mentals pas quand je nommais du nom de personnes invisibles et augustes les grands moments du jour et de la nuit du monde, les Aliments qui m'ont vu naltre et les saisons qui m'ont consol^e et les astres qui ont guidA mes pas de jeune fille puis de femme puis d'anc&tre. Tout ce qui est ici-bas et lA-haut dans le ciel qui tourne sur son aile comment l'aurais-je aim^ sans le nommer et comment le nommer sans lui prdter mon image? (p. 209)

Naming the elements and personifying them as gods enabled her to love

them. Through the original power of the word to create being by nam­

ing, Asia established a comprehensible world: "Tout avait une voix, un visage, une parole, un geste pour indiquer, un cri pour interdire, j'ai

nommA chaque voix, chaque geste, chaque cri, c'^tait bien." (p. 2 1 0 )

But the power of the word to create being also implies a power

to destroy. In one simple statement— "fils de Prom^thie, entends-moi, je te dirai la vArit^: les dieux n'existent pas I" (p. 207)— Asia changes the world for Deucalion and through Deucalion, for Prometheus, 147 forcing them to face a new situation. Characteristically, Deucalion reacts with sadness and Prometheus with anger. For Deucalion— the artist, the sensitive, thinking man— the loss of the gods means a loss of the essential harmony between man and nature which was the basis for the word: * Elies ne r^pondront plus les voix harmonieuses que roon chant de berger appelait chaque solr, et les feuilles des ch&nes anim&es par le vent garderont pour eux seuls leur langage secret et les vagues du rivage mourront h. mes pieds sans me confier un seul

mot. (p. 2 1 2 )

Loss of this vital communion means loss of his power to speak for the world, for the individual alone is not a sufficient basis for the word:

1 1 me faudra chercher la parole en moi seul et l'azur qui ^tait pour moi la vie ne sera plus qu'une mort indiff&rente et vaine. Ah! certes je saurai bien vous aimer, n^ant pur et serein, quand ma barque flottera entre l'eau bleue et le ciel bleu, car j'^tais fait pour vous entendre et pour me dlssoudre avec delices dans vos profondeurs lumineuses, Mais je ne saurai plus vous nommer et je serai muet dans un monde qui semble parler tout le temps et ne r^pond k personne. (p. 213)

For Prometheus, "celui qui batit et qui cr^e," the builder and man of action, the gods are the only justification of his existence and the goal of all his actions: "Les dleux existent, pulsque je suis." (p.219)

Therefore he fights harder than Deucalion to retain the old order. His tasks demands that he not question his assumptions: "Pour agir et cr^er, la certitude est n^cessalre." (p. 220) Yet, left alone to think, his doubts about the gods' existence question his own identity: "S'ils n'ont jamais iti, qu'es-tu done toi-m4me?" (p. 222) Gradually he begins to realize the absurdity of his undertakings and to understand how much wiser it would have been to have lived in harmony with the 148 world. Too late to stop the destruction. It is also too late for Pro­ metheus to change his course of action:

Seul! Je suls seul. Je suls las, je suls seul, mes ennemls sont morts et j'ai perdu les £tres que j'aimals. Cependant je refuse le desespoir et la faiblesse. A rlen je ne renonceral. Je sulvral jusqu’au bout ma route. Je finirai ce que j'ai comnenc^. Si douloureux que soit le prix de mon audace je ne veux pas savolr vers quelle horreur je vais. (p. 227)

Thus in a sense, though both the man of words and the man of action have suffered a tragedy in the loss of the justification for their existence, nothing has really changed for them. Both continue in the direction of their original choices: Decualion towards wisdom, harmony and love and Prometheus towards folly, solitude and hatred.

Looking at this play from a more abstract point of view, one

can see the1 possibility of a second level of meaning: an allegory of the historical development of man's relationship to the natural and to the supernatural in which Asia represents the past, Prometheus the present and Deucalion the future. Asia symbolizes ancient, primeval man who lived in harmony with both the natural and supernatural worlds because there was no separation between them; they were part of a whole, uni­ fied "ordre ^ternel" and man shared in both of them. Asia sees herself as the daughter of the earth, but also of the sky. She is love made manifest, a reconciliation of the two worlds of presence and absence:

. . .j'^tais moi-m&ne 1 'Eclair d'amour des ^l^roents parce que je suis n£e, enfant, de la reconciliation de toutes les choses parce que je suis la rencontre du d e l et de la terre parce que j'ai les longs couteaux des astres dans mon sang, que les plerres souterraines et le feu des profondeurs et l'eau bouillonnante de l'oc^an sont montes dans mes veines parce que mes regards comme la surface de la tner sont la 149

rencontre de deux mondes, parce que toute la vie est entree en mol triomphale

comme le fleuve dans son lit. (pp. 2 1 0 - 1 1 )

Asia reflects both a humility and a pride in her lineage: she is

both "la servante et la souveraine des £l&nents." (p. 205) For

Tardieu, wisdom lies in equilibrium.

Prometheus represents technological man who lives out of harmony with both the natural and the supernatural. Like Asia and

Deucalion, Prometheus felt the presence of the gods in nature, but unlike his mother and his son, he could not love what he had not seen:

Nul ne saurait aimer ce qu'il n'a jamais vu. Ce qui se d^robe aux embrassements, ce qui fuit devant le d^sir, ce qui decoit l'esp^rance, ce qui se cache et se tait bientot se change en objet de haine. (p. 214)

A frustrated "chasseur de dieux,"; Prometheus' pride is hurt because he was never permitted to catch them: "l'homme naif et fier que j'ltais ne fut jamais admis A vous voir face ^ face." (p. 214) And yet there is a nostalgia for what he could not find:

0 dieux, d puissances inconnues et malfaisantes, reconnalssables seulement par vos effets, par l'^cho de votre voix, par le reflet de vos regards embras^s, comme je vous aurais aim^s si vous aviez daign£ m'apparaftre! (p. 214)

When frustrated love and hurt pride turn into hatred, Prometheus de­ clares war on the gods. Taking the fire that he stole from the gods,

Prometheus makes it into a weapon of destruction. So great is his hatred he is even willing to destroy the world to get at the gods.

The fatal flaw in Tardieu's Prometheus is an excess of pride and a tendency to set himself apart from the rest of mankind. His war against the gods is"un effort solitaire et autonome." (p. 215) At *

150

times he even seems to impute to himself the role of God the creator:

Les hommes, n£s de l'argile sous mes mains s'affairent, tisonnant le feu que j'ai cr^e; leurs clameurs saluent l'approche de mon triomphe

et la venue d'un nouveau rfegne sur la terre. (p. 2 2 0 )

Not only does modern man want to play God, Tardieu seems to be suggest­ ing, but also he seems to have a conscious death wish. Prometheus knew what destruction he was preparing for the world: "Ne me dis rien.

Je connais les effets de ma science. J'avais tout pr^vu, tout cal­ culi." (p. 224) As Deucalion reminds him after the disaster, his will has been done: "A quo! sert de g£mir, o mon pere, vous avez voulu cela votre volont^ est faite." (p. 225) Prometheus illustrates the tragedy man risks when he tries to impose his own will against nature and his fellow creatures. As on the Individual level the will to control leads to destruction, so on the collective level man's desire to dominate the world, rather than to live harmoniously with it, leads to disaster. As Tardieu warns in an essay,

BientSt, vous qui vouliez §tre et dominer, vous ne r^gnerez

que sur le desert et vous vous en irez seul, pleurant 1 'an­ tique univers disparu, jusqu'au jour ou tant de larmes seront enfin venues k bout de votre orgueil, jusqu'au jour ou vous consentirez fk votre propre desert.34

Deucalion represents post-technological man, the man of the future, who, having survived the disaster perpetrated by Prometheus and having reconciled himself to the loss of the old gods, sets about to seek an alliance with the new god: "j'irai loin devant moi pouss^ par les vents favorables, cherchant dans le reflet des deux ab^mes

^"El&nents d'une m^thode de reconciliation," Pages d'ecrlture. pp. 15-16. 151

une alliance avec mon nouveau dleu: le ndant!" He sees le ndant not

as a threat or an enemy, but as something pure and peaceful which he

can love. Deucalion resembles Tardieu's "homme retrouvd":

1 'Homme qui, ayant une connaissance exacte de tout ce qui le menace— k l'intdrieur de son propre esprit comme au de­

hors— , et ayant 1 reconnu', slnon acceptd, sa condition d'homme, cherche k triompher de son propre destin par cette reconnaissance m@me, par une sorte de nouvelle sagesse,— ou de nouvelle folie.35

Although Asia, Prometheus and Deucalion represent three

different stages of human consciousness, there is a basic similarity

in all three: they are all "chasseurs de dieux." Man is by nature

a seeker after gods or God; human consciousness must find its source.

For Tardieu, this source seems to be "une sorte d 1absence vague et

dpouvantable." (p. 222) Human consciousness contains a portion of

this cosmic absence; thus Prometheus, becoming aware of the folly of

his task, reminds himself that he is "Ndant toi-mSme, ab£me dans

l'abime. . . ." (p. 223) Man must come to realize that the super­

natural is an integral part of the natural and of his own being: "le

sumaturel est jen lui."3^ This reflection of the cosmic absence within himself links him with the universe; thus man should feel a pride which Tardieu describes as

I'orgueil de sentir en nous un reflet ,de ce qui nous dchappe, de capter en nous des ondes invisibles venues des confins du monde, d'etre relids secrdtement aux plus lointaines £tolies

33"Trois visions de l'homme," ibid.. pp. 74-75.

3 6 Ibid., p. 75. 152

et d 1avoir pu, ne serait-ce que pendant la dur^e d'un Eclair,

tendre k 1 'inaccessible, k 1 'incomprehensible et k l 1 in­ commensurable le miroir d'une conscience d'homme.^

In Trois personnes entries dans des tableaux, his most recent play, Tardieu further develops the stage technique he used in his earliest play, Tonnerre sans orage. While in Tonnerre sans orage

each of the three mythological characters has a symbolic "d6 cor personnel" which moves with him, in Trois personnes entries dans des tableaux there is an even greater fusion of actor and setting, for

Tardieu places each of the three stylized characters within a project­ ed painting which symbolizes that character's world view. As in

Tonnerre sans orage the characters always speak facing the audience.

This "dialogue k jouer" is made up of three short conversations:

(1) Man-Woman, (2) Woman-Traveler, and (3) Man-Traveler, followed by a concluding passage presenting all three views in juxtaposition.

In Trois personnes entries dans des tableaux the world of presence and the world of absence are expressed through the polarity of male and female. Tardieu uses the woman as symbol of presence, la

vie de ce monde-ci. and the man as a symbol of absence, 1 'au-delA ou l'en deck. The traveler represents the artist who combines these two worlds in a fantastic universe of his own creation.

Dressed in browns, beiges and blacks, the woman feels at ease in her Braque painting:

Depuis que je suis entree dans ce tableau je me sens blen. Je suls dans mes ^paisseurs dans mes solides

3 7Ibld.. pp. 77-78. 153

Autour de mol tout est plein tout est cult A point, je me sens vraiment une bonne m&nagfere d'aujourd'hui midi plein jour. (pp. 279-80)

She has reached a state of harmony with her surroundings which borders

on melting into them; yet, unlike 1 *individu-en-train-de-fondre-dans-

la-foule in Les Amants du mAtro. this loss of self is not frightening

but rather a source of happiness: "Je sens que peu A peu c'est un

bonheur je m*efface dans ce qui me soutlent dans ce qui me porte dans

ce qui me comble m'entoure me remplit." (p. 280) Like the young man

in L fABC de notre vie, who, holding his beloved in his arms, feels

that he is embracing the whole world, the man in this play sees the

woman as his own portion of the earth:

Je caresse des yeux ta rondeur de pichet fendu ton anse ton cou ton bee arrondi pichet du haut en bas fendu mon pichet de terre de terre cuite A point, de terre de pomme, de terre de feu de terre mienne, de terre bruise de terre A bois de terre A moi. (p. 280)

In spite of her tendency to blend with her surroundings, the woman

remains as present as an object: Tu ne me quittes pas cependant tu es prAsente, objet, objet present calme assurA bonifi^ retrouvA A plat dans tes bords tu t'dtales, heureuse et brune. (p. 280)

Yet to be seen as an object is, in this case, not derogatory, but

rather Tardieu's poetic expression of Braque's view that "I'objet

c'est la poAtique."3® Like Tardieu, Braque begins with the world of

38The material about Braque in this paragraph is from Werner Hoftmann's Painting in the Twentieth Century (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1960), pp. 257-58. 154

things. Submitting objects to a creative process, he composes "an ensemble which is a concentrated visual expression of his experience of the beauty and lyricism of the object." This process leads to "a new poetry extracted from the world of things, an almost classical harmony between objective and pictorial form." The "serene and in­ evitable quality" of Braque's art suits perfectly the supreme content­ ment in presence of Tardieu*s woman: "Mol regarde ici je ne m'en vais pas." (p. 281)

While appreciating fully the woman's qualities of serenity and contentment, the man also finds them limiting. Feeling the need

of freedom and adventure, he sets off into,a Mlr6 painting, a "grand bleu." Different from all of Mird's other works, these paintings— in which a blue ground predominates— are sometimes called "dream

qq paintings." For Tardieu, they suggest the positive aspect of ab­ sence— freedom in a pure and limitless space:

Je m'enfonce dans une ^tendue ldg^re une £tendue peupl^e seulement par la lumi&re un ^l&ment sans limite une sorte de ciel

conju par 1 'esprit plus pur que l'air sans echo sans ombre sans reflet: un ^l^ment absolu dl£ment de mon oeil navigateur absolu 4l£ment de mon plaisir de voir

39 Jacques Dupln, Joan Miro: Life and Work (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., n.d.), pp. 153-54. Dupin devotes a chapter to Miro's "dream paintings" in which he states that they are like the Tibetan ascetics' "comprehension of the void," a method of mentally destroying and then recreating reality until one attains a comprehension of the true void which is not the purely negative idea of nothingness but a positive understanding of it which is "at once identical with and dia­ metrically opposed to nothingness. . .the absolute. ..." (pp. 159- 60). 155

ponctu^ de taches d'or, de rouge £clat^, de slgnes pour mol seul de noirs, profond velours vivant,

de points de points, moi-m6 me un point je vogue je plane et vals sans fin sans peur j'lnvente ravl ail^ libArd dispos. (p. 283)

Feeling the need to test his limits and expand his horizons, man,

the adventurer, always wants to discover more:

L'homme a toujours faim et solf de tout ce qui le prolonge ou trAs au-delA ou en profondeur ou trAs en de^A

dans tous les sens 1 1 faut qu'll s'efforce qu'll brlse, qu'll delate, qu'll solt davantage, davantage en sol-mSne enfoncA davantage en vrille dans les choses davantage au-dehors dans les grands vlrages dans le pults ou sur l'aile sifflante en sol-m£me enfoncA hors de sol dApassA... (p. 286)

In contrast to the man's chronic dissatisfaction, the woman has no need of anything more; she Is content just to be: "Ce qui est par sol-mAme n'a pas besoin d'autre chose que d'etre et je suis." (p. 284)

Within their respective paintings, each is at home in his own kind of space.

The man having gone off to seek adventure in the Miro, the woman is left alone. After a silence, she hears a village church bell and a "violon naif," then a knock at the door. She seems to know in advance who it will be: "Entrezl Je sals qui vous Ates: sautez done par-dessus la porte par-dessus la malson, ^a n'est pas difficile pour voust" (p. 284) The traveler in the Chagall painting, at the same time smiling and melancholy, confirms her estimate of his magic qualities:

C'est vrai: quand Je m'avance tout cAde sans effort et tout est possible je peux faire voler dans l'air 156

le laboureur avec sa charrue je peux donner la ra&me dimension

aux mari 6 s de la noce de village et k la petite £glise qu'ils tlennent en lalsse comme un animal domestique. (p. 286)

He contains the world of presence, for Chagall, like Braque, begins with objects. But since for Chagall and the traveler, everything is possible, reality is raised to the level of a legend:

Moi je m ’^l&ve au-dessus des paysages ou il y a beaucoup de choses figur£es, des moutons, des

des enfants, des maisons, des arbres, des 6 glises, de la neige pourpre, des anges paysans en casquette un grand va-et-vient ldgendaire... (p. 285)

Yet one thing is not possible, even for the traveler. Each character is enclosed in his own painting, in his own world and he cannot enter into any other, for they are too different: "Comment un avion pourrait-il pntrer dans une pomme?" (p. 285) They can only remain side by side in their respective universes: "Nous voil^ done r£unis mals s^par^s k jamais dans trois univers difflrents qui peuvent se connaltre mais non se p4n£trer. Rien ne nous unit, mais rien ne nous s^pare." (p. 287) The play continues with all three paintings and all three characters side by side as they make contrast­ ing statements, each expressing his own point of view:

LE VOYAGEUR: La vie est un vin ivre qui fermente et bouillonne A travers toute la creation. L'HOMME: Les grands absolus dont nous sommes faits le temps l'£tendue tout est aboli. LA FEMME: Tout ce qui vlt devlent objet, Tout 1'incertain devient solide et se con­ centre dans son &tre. (p. 289)

The three final lines summarize the essential direction of each world view: 157

LE VOYAGEUR: Tout va vers le Dleu. L'HOMME: Tout va vers le rien. LA FEMME: Tout demeure. (p. 289)

For Tardieu, it is not a question of choosing between these views, but

of realizing that all are true because each one reflects a different portion of the Whole.

While Trois personnes entries dans des tableaux presents three possible attitudes toward life existing side by side, Des arbres et des hommes suggests a more integrated view., exploring the relationship of man and the natural world. Although man is a part of the natural world in his body, he is also different from it because he is con­ scious of his being. Man's consciousness links him to the absent world that exists both within his mind and beyond it. Enabling him to be physically present but mentally absent (or vice versa), the freedom of the spirit Increases the difficulty of true communication. Be­ cause to be conscious is to realize the insecurity of one's being, man often envies the unconscious "pure being" of a tree. In addition to his consciousness, man is set apart from tree by his ability to move and to speak. But mobility and speaking also have negative as well as positive aspects: mobility means freedom, but also danger of separ­ ation; speaking can created a bond between lovers, but it can also destroy their love. Des arbres et des hommes argues the positive and negative sides of both states of being— man and tree— concluding that they come to resemble each other in the end.

Des arbres et des hommes shows progress toward a greater fusion of the concrete and the abstract, of the real and the unreal, of the banal and the poetic. As in Tonnerre sans orage and Trois 158 personnes entries dans des tableaux, characters and decor form an In­ separable unit: "Les personnages et la sc&ne forment une for&t." But

In Des arbres et des hommes. the characters alternate between two forms, being sometimes human beings and sometimes trees. Therefore, on one level, the play is a concrete drama involving a lover's triangle which ends in tragedy, and on another level it is an abstract ex­ pression of contrasting world views as well as a dialectic between the positive and negative aspects of reality. The alternation between tree state and human form also affects language: when the characters speak as people, they discuss their problem in normal, conversational language; but when they speak as trees, their language is poetic and abstract. These two different uses of language contrast the der- structive and the creative power of words.

As in L'ABC de notre vie. Des arbres et des hommes begins with a poetic prologue. (pp. 233-34) The first part of this prologue sets the mood of the play by evoking the forest:

Une foret combine de silence une foret bruissante de paroles paroles qui n'ont pas encore de forme bien que les feuilles qui les prof&rent aient le dessin d'une bouche, bien que le vent qui les anlme ressemble au souffle des hommes.

This passage suggests both the fundamental similarity of man and forest and the essential difference: although the forest is

"bruissante de paroles," it remains "combine de silence" because it cannot give form to these words. There is an Interdependency between man and nature: nature provides the message in its unformed state and man gives it form and expression in language. The second part 159 of the prologue states the framework of the play: the drama which un­ folds at the same time as the storm develops: "Dans l'ombre qui commence, le drame lentement s'amoncelle, en m&me temps que l'orage."

The three questions which follow reemphasize the similarity of man and tree. Immobility and mobility are equally futile states, each having its own douleur; both man and tree are subj ect to the conditions of the physical world and in death, they come to the same end:

Arbres de la foret, amants pourchassis, peut-etre serez-vous foudroy£s par le meme ouragan? Peut-£tre celui qui se plaint d’etre enchain^ et celui qui se plaint d’etre libre vont-ils ^changer leur douleur et peu h peu devenus semblables finir la bouche pleine de terre, ^galement lmmobiles silencieux et s£par^s?...

Since Des arbres et des hommes consists of a dramatic structure superimposed on a philosophical discussion, there are two statements of the situation: (1) Lul and Elle as real people discuss their problem in regard to l'Autre and (2) Lul and Elle as trees state their situation in regard to the world. These two situations build up to i two climaxes when l'Autre confronts the lovers (1) as a tree-man and

(2) as a real man. The first climax is a philosophical struggle be­ tween Elle and Lui, representing the power of love in the couple and l'Autre, symbolizing the enemies of love: death and physical destruction and the solitary quest for the absolute. The second climax is the tragedy resulting from the lover's triangle. Since both situations result in death, the play concludes with Elle, Lui and l'Autre as trees in a state after death discussing their new situation. 160

As the play opens, Elle, having just run away from her

husband, l'Autre, meets Lul, her lover, In the forest. This play

begins where Les Amants du m4tro ends, with the lovers together after

having overcome a series of obstacles. They have been able to get

through the obstacles because the hope of freedom and happiness

•> together sustained them: "Et l'espoir de nous retrouver nous em- portalt, de nous retrouver pour toujours, d'etre llbresl" (p. 236)

But although they are far from l'Autre In space, they are not free of his presence: "Nous avons ful? C'est pour le retrouver. En pleine

foret, 1 1 est 1 ^... la... la... partout... derrl^re chaque arbre, dans chaque arbre!" (p. 243) Elle cannot escape her thoughts of him; her obsession Is exteriorized In her words* As Lul observes,"II est sans cesse present dans tes paroles." (p. 237) Lul, realizing that she Is not free of l'Autre, becomes discouraged. Their happiness Is marred because Lul, knowing that Elle's mind escapes him, cannot quite trust her: "Ah! J'ai toujours peur que tu ne retournes k cet homme!...

Pas seulement ton corps: ton esprit!" (p. 244)

Running throughout the play is the contrast between the ordinary language of dally communication which serves to convey

information and the poetic "langage de 1 'amour et celui des arbres"

(p. 242) which the lovers use as a protective device. Both Elle and

Lui realize that ordinary conversation is dangerous to their relation­ ship. Not only does It reveal the lingering presence of l'Autre in

Elle's mind, but it also threatens to cause him to quarrel about vhat they mean. As we have seen in several other Tardieu plays, everyday language has a tendency to get out of control, one word leading to 161

another In cliches and associations. Thus, Elle, who seems to be the

most sensitive to language, wisely counsels Lui: "Allons! Nous

8 ommes aussl fatigues l'un que l'autre! Nous devrions nous tairel Au moment de la plus grave decision de notre vie, nous lalsserons-nous

aller k des paroles inutiles et douloureuses, que nous regretterons, mais qui ne changeront rien?" (p. 241) Yet silence is not a satis­

factory answer: "Alors? Nous taire! Apr&s l 1 immobility, voill que

tu souhaites le silence! Est-ce l£i le bonheur promis?" (p. 241)

Rather, it is necessary to find a new way to communicate. Their mutually invented poetic language takes them back to childhood. In­ stead of speaking of "useful things," they speak to please each other.

It is a form of reassurance, a kind of magic protection against 1'Autre and all hostile forces. Elle tries to make a magic potion of words to assure Lui of her presence: "Je suis tout enti^re avec toi. Rien ne nous sypare." (p. 244) Lui accepts her offering: "Rypfcte souvent ces mots— ce sera le contrepolson, le talisman!" (p. 244)

This distinction between ordinary language and poetic language parallels the theme of mobility and immobility. Mobility, like discursive language, is futile, illusory and dangerous. Im­ mobility, like poetic language, is essential, real and secure. For « the lovers, assuming a state of immobility, like speaking poetically, is a kind of magic protection: "Nous sommes deux arbres, n'est-ce pas? Et notre immobility nous protege?..." (p. 246)

Speaking in their tree state, the lovers argue the merits of mobility and immobility, speaking and silence. As in Trois personnes entrdes dans des t a b l e a u x . Elle represents the passive, feminine point 162

of view and Lul the masculine, agresslve orientation. As a tree Lul

soon becomes restless and misses the activity of the world: "La

foul^e, la foul£e des hommes et des b£tes qui vont et viennent sur

la terre!" (p. 249) On the contrary, Elle Is quite content to remain

motionless beside Lul: "Je suis plus pr&s de toi nous sachant

immobiles: Tu ne peux pas m'4chapper!" (p. 249) From her point of

view, movement is dangerous:

Le mouvement unit les &tres et les sypare en m&ne temps. On ne fait jamais que quelques pas dans ce monde mais ils peuvent suffire & nous arracher l'un h l'autre! (p. 249)

Lui wishes to move, not to leave her but to get closer to her:

Ce n'est pas pour te fuir que je voudrals sortir mais pour @tre encor plus pr^s de toi mais pour briser ta propre solitude

et que 1 *amour enfin nous confonde. (p. 249)

While Lui dreams of adventure, change and exploration, Elle fears

these things would threaten their love.

Although their approaches to the world are opposite, both Elle

and Lui see themselves as incorporating that world, either expressing

its silent message or responding to it:

ELLE: C'est notre propre voix qui est l'^cho. Nous croyons chanter ou g4mir mais c'est le silence des choses qui parle par notre bouche. LUI: S'il veut parler et se plaindre

l'£tre inachev6 qui se tait, je suls done icl pour r^pondre. Et si mon corps grandit, vieilllt et meurt c'est pour donner la vie au monde inerte et d^sol^ qui frissonne de frold sous ses ^toiles. (p. 251)

Yet Elle realizes and accepts more fully her participation in both

the worlds of presence and of absence: 163

Je n'al pas peur du secret des pierres qui me nourrit, ni du m^tal lointain des astres dont je suis transperc^e. (p. 252)

Lui is both more dissatisfied with the present world and more afraid

of the absent one. Hearing thunder in the distance, Elle wonders if

it might be the unknown signaling them: "C'est peut-£tre le signal,

obscur de ce que nous ne savons pas nommer?" (p. 253) Lui rejects the

unknown as something horrible: "Ce qui n'a pas de nom est horribleI"

When Elle asks if man must fear what is beyond him, Lui vehemently

condemns the unknown: "Craindre, pas seulement, mais hair ce qui nous

emporte et nous d^vorel Je hais les t^nbbres et leur visage informe."

Elle reminds him that each form las its corresponding shadow and at night they become one. Here night is seen as a unifying force which overrides the frightening aspects (f absence: "La nuit suraaturelle est au-del4 et ne menace que de loin." Yet Elle cannot sustain this attitude of acceptance of the darkness. A little later in the con­ versation the roles have switched. Now Elle is the one who is afraid and Lui the one who reassures. In the darkness she feels the presence of others and wonders if they are watching. The silence around them seems ominous. Yet it is not the unknown which frightens Elle, but the krown: "Ce n'est pas l'inconnu qui m'effraye mais tout ce que je sals!" (p. 257) Her fear is justified, for just at this moment,

1 'Autre appears in his tree form.

In accord with the two levels of the play, the characters

have a double function: (1 ) as human beings involved in a drama and

(2) as representatives of contrasting points of view. L'Autre is 164

particularly complex. As the wronged husband, he is proud and silent,

a man of action and not of words. In this first confrontation with

the lovers, l'Autre, in his tree state, represents physical reality

in its most hideous forms. There is something Villonesque in this medieval view of death and rotting as the ultimate enemies of the

lovers:

Les b&tes sur vous et en vous, chair trop tendre! Les bees les dents les griffes, les b£tes sur vous en vous, les millions de b£tes imperceptibles, patientes, implacables, crissements, claquements, craquements, m&choires, alguillons, cisailles, grouillement de cette vie en vous, pour votre mort et votre pourriturel Les b£tes! Les b&tes! Les b&tes sur vousI (p. 259)

In response to these horrors, Lui is noble as he utters one of Tar-

dieu's most positive statements of acceptance of life's conditions:

"La vie est A ce prixl Je 1'accepte pour une gorg^e de pluiel" (p.

259) But 1 'Autre continues to attack verbally, attempting to strip

the lovers of their illusions:

A la gloire de ces deux-lAl A leur fdlicit^, h 1'illusion de leur solitudel Vous avez cru que vous ^tiez seuls icii... Ouvrez les yeuxl Vous fetes sur une sc&ne, des millions de regards brillants dans la nult autour de vous! Et moi, moi j'^tais l4 dans la nuit au premier rang, pour vous applaudlr! (p. 260)

This self-conscious theatricality is a very clever device in this

Instance, for the audience stands revealed and stripped of their illusions along with the lovers. Like Prometheus, 1'Autre also re­ presents the solitary defiance of the nautral order. Seeing life in the world only from the negative side, he rejects it to seek the absolute or the au-del£: 165

Moi qui suis plus grand que vous tous j'aurai du moins le secours du premier rayon, de la premiere dtoile et le pouvoir de ddtourner mes yeux vers les cimes et de cesser de voir ramper l'horreur. (p. 263)

In contrast to this attitude of solitary rebellion, Elle and Lui symbolize the power of shared love:

ELLE: L 1amour partagd est un ddfi plus fort et plus salubre encore! LUI: Nous connai8sons l'un par l'autre la vie mais aussi tout ce qui est au-del^ de la vie! (p. 264)

L'Autre persists in his pride: "Je ne partage rien. Je suis voud k la splendeur solitaire et sans limite!" (p. 264) Tardieu criticizes this attitude of separation and rebellion in both Prometheus and

1*Autre, for it leads to destruction. Man'cannot go it alone and remain human. In rejecting life in this world because of its negative qualities, l'Autre also gives up what is good in life: "ces biens, ces pauvres biens terrestres qui sont pourtant les vrais trdsors

. . . ." (p. 264)

As he curses the lovers, 1'Autre is struck to the ground by a bolt of lightning. After a few moments of silence and darkness, he reappears as a man and finds the two lovers (now in human form) sleeping at the foot of a tree. The medieval feeling resurges in this scene; one is reminded of King Marc standing over the sleeping

Tristan and Iseut: "Comme lls ont l'air calmet... Sdpards, chastes!... On dlrait que chacun est k cent lieues de l'autre!..."

(p. 265) Yet modernity prevails, for l'Autre has neither the nobility of spirit to pardon the lovers nor the courage to kill them.

He hesitates, and in that moment's hesitation, absurdity overcomes 166

him, turning his anger against himself: "Ridicule, ridicule, je suis

ridiculel A jamais! Quoi que je fasse!... C'est moi qu'il faut

punir!" (p. 266) The climax of the drama is reached when Elle and Lui,

awakened from sleep by the sound of a shot, find l'Autre's body.

Immediately Elle turns against Lui, insisting that he is responsible

for his death. Lui replies that it was their love that killed him

but Elle will not accept that. Lui tries to remind her of their

dream of being trees, but the physical reality of l'Autre's death

destroys all pretense. Suddenly they are strangers to each other and

their love is totally blotted out. L'Autre was right; love is not

stronger than death. Seeing no way out ofa an insupportable situation,

Elle shoots Lui and then herself.

The last scene of the play shows the three characters as trees

in a state after death. This condition seems to resemble sleep but

there is also a heightened consciousness: "Je dors au combie de

moi-m^me mes feuillages berets dans l'air superieur." (p. 271) It

seems like a pessimistic ending at first glance: mobility and

immobility result in the same end; all our earthly activity and

business is nothing but useless appearance:

L'AUTRE: Je sais que tout cela n'est qu'apparences que toutes choses et tous les Stres sont fixes pour l'^ternit^ et que la fuite affol^e des ^toiles n'est qu'immobility. ELLE: Rien n'^talt done possible? L'AUTRE: Rien n'est possible en ce monde. LUI: On ne peut rien atteindre. (p. 272)

Even after death, conditions remain basically the same. As in life,

Elle and Lui can never be totally present to each other: 167

ELLE: Sonimes-nous done r^concili^s? L'AUTRE: Absent l'un de l'autre jamais. ELLE: Oh! Cependant celui qui fr&nit prks de moi de toutes ses feuilles dans le matin ne m'est-il pas present et proche? L'AUTRE: Plus loin de toi que la plus lointaine ^toile! Vous ne vous trouverez jamaisI (p. 273)

Absence wins in the end. Even in life, one has already on his lips

"le gout de la disparition." That absence which is within man, which is man's spirit, creates insecurity even between lovers. Two human beings can be together physically but they may be far apart in mind:

"Nous ^tions cSte a cote et d^jk s£par^s de nous-m&mes." (p. 273) Or the opposite may be true: as trees the lovers could be together in spirit but they could not reach each other in a physical embrace.

But in spite of the pessimism of the play's ending, there is a final note of acceptance and sagesse. What remains for Elle, Lul and

1'Autre? "La solitude, et lorsque la foudre a frapp^, Un grand silence. Et lorsque tout est consum^ la legkreti de la cendre." (p.

273) There is peace in reunion with the immobile, silent world.

Les Temps du v e r b e ^ explores further the consequences of the absence within the human spirit. As we have seen in Des arbres et des hommes. while the body holds man in the world of presence, his mind is free to be present or absent, icl or ailleurs. Les Temps du verbe illustrates the case of a man who deliberately absents himself from the present, choosing, through an effort of the will and by means of

^Although Les Temps du verbe is related to the Pofemes 'k louer in its philosophical content, from the point of view of technique and structure it is not a po&me it iouer. It is a conventional two-act play in a realistic setting and concerns three characters who have a psycho­ logical reality and who speak in prose. 1 6 8 language, to live In time past. Robert, having suddenly lost his wife and children In an automobile accident, has decided to retreat from the present in order to rejoin his loved ones In the past. Yet it is more than a question of living in the past through imagination:

Son ddlire est un d^lire logique. II dit que, par un simple

effort de la volont^, par un trAs l 6 ger decalage, on peut vivre comme si, k tout moment de notre vie, tout itait toujours aboli, comme si nous vivions, non pas dans ce temps present ou nous sommes, mais dans un temps constamment d£pass^, dans le monde des £tres et des choses disparus... (pp. 169-70)^-

Language is the instrument through which he accomplishes this act of will. By speaking in the past tense, each action is thrown into the past the moment it occurs: "Lorsqu'un visiteur sonnait. je montais aussitot dans ma chanbre..." (p. 165) As in Des arbres et des hommes the lovers tried to use language as a magic talisman to protect them­ selves from 1'Autre, in this play Robert uses this immediate separation of the act from the actor as a way of putting himself out of the reach of time and thus of defending himself against chance and suffering:

Quel apaisement de se dire qu'aucun de nos gestes, aucune de nos paroles ne nous appartient jamais. Aussitot dit, aussitot fait, tout s'£loigne de nous..., que dis-je: tout s'^lolgnaitl Si nous parlions tou­ jours ainsi, nous serlons d'avance disparus, nous ef- facerions toutes nos traces au fur et A mesure de nos pas..., rien ne pourrait plus nous attelndre. Plus de surprises, plus d'&vdnements, plus d*accidents pour qulconque s'est d^llb^r^ment jetrf lui-m£me dans le pasadl (p. 178)

This rejection of the present and retreat into the past is a constant temptation even for those who have not suffered a loss. Anna,

Robert's niece, who lives with him and cares for him, tries unsuccess**

^ F o r another expression of this same idea, see Tardieu's essay "Le Futur anterieur" in La Part de 1*ombre, p. 208. *

169

fully to bring him back to the present. Although, like the other

women in Tardieu's Po^mes ^ iouer. Anna is a realist who is usually

able to live in this world and in this present moment, she finds that

as she begins to speak in the past tense she is being drawn into

Robert's world of absence. When Jacques, Anna's childhood friend who

is now a doctor, comes to visit, he takes a professional interest in

Robert's case. Hoping to cure him of his delusions, he adopts

Robert ' 8 linguistic conventions only to find that he is also beginning

to lose contact with the present: "Vrai, tout m^decin que je suis,

je me sens presque gagn£ par ce vertige." (p. 191) Jacques seems to

be torn between his desire to share the present with Anna and his

empathy with Robert's withdrawal into the past. Like the client in

La Serrure, he feels the irreality of the present moment: "Je com­

mence & me demander si le present existe." (p. 191) In a sense

Robert is right: "I*homme ne vit qu'au pass4; tout ce qu'il est,

tout ce qu'il poss^de n'est que du pass^; Histoire, prestige, gloire,

faits d'armes des h£ros, chefs-d'oeuvre des artistes, tout ce qui

compte le plus pour nous, ici-bas, est pass^." (p. 191) Absence inter­

penetrates presence so that a gap exists between human consciousness

and the world:

Je me suls souvent demand^: ce que je vois, est-ce bien moi qui le regarde? Est-ce que jpa existe, maintenant? Est-ce qu'll n'y a pas un d£calage— ^norme ou imperceptible ou les deux k la fois— entre ma conscience et ce qu'elle consid^re? (p. 192)

Jacques speculates that it is perhaps in this gap— "dans cet incom­ prehensible d£faut de la realitd"— that Robert is living "comme quel- qu'un qui salt, qui a d^couvert le secret, qui est 'de l'autre 4

170

c6td’.” (p. 192)

Just as Anna and Jacques are discussing this Idea, they hear

Robert's footsteps coming down the stairs, then Into the middle of the

room and down the hallway to the door leading outside; but while the

characters on stage appear to be seeing a ghost, the spectator sees

no one. In the Irreality of the moment, It seems quite comprehensible

to Anna and Jacques that Robert has left them to join his family:

"II est parti les rejolndre... II vivalt avec eux..., 1 1 falsait

semblent d'etre aupr&s de nous, mals 1 1 vivalt dans un autre temps

que le nStre..." (p. 194) Then suddenly they are aware that something very strange has just happened. Realizing that Robert is not in his

room, they rush outside where they find his body. He is not only dead, but his body is like that of a person who has been dead for a

long time.

Although saddened by her uncle's death, Anna is also relieved,

feeling that she has finally regained the present and reality, but for

Jacques this corpse is no more real than Robert's ghost had been:

"Rien n'est r^el, que ce qui a conscience de l'£tre..» Ce corps, si lourd soit-il a nos bras et k notre coeur, n'existe pas plus que

1'ombre de tout 4 l'heure..." What is real is what exists in our minds: "Ce qui est vrai, ce qui existe, c'est 1'image de cet homme dans notre m&noire." (p. 197) Human consciousness is the meeting place between the worlds of presence and absence, for the internal absence is able to absorb and contain the external presence: "Tout est present pour ceux qui vivent. Notre esprit contient tout. En dehors de ce moment que nous vivons, rien n'existel" (p. 197) Yet i7i

this moment is so fragile, so fleeting— an infinitesimal point

separating the absence of the past from tfye absence of the future— that

it requires a conscious and constant effort to live in it: "II faut,

pour vivre, un effort... de tous les instants..." (p. 198) The play

leaves us with the hope that Anna and Jacques will make that effort

and succeed in creating a moment of presence for each other through

their love.

While in Les Temps du verbe the protagonist is physically present but mentally in the process of making himself absent by means

of language, in Une Voix sans personne the protagonist is physically absent but makes himself mentally present through his voice. Punning-

ly subtitled po^me it iouer et A ne pas louer. Une Voix sans personne

is one of Tardieu's most audacious experiments, for it is either a play without actors or a staged poem with dramatic tendancies.

Tardieu's own comment on this work stresses the interrelatedness of

theater and poetry: "Cette pi^ce, c'est un pofeme pour la schne, un

poeme ^ jouer. Au lieu de mettre de la po£sie dans le th6 &tre j'ai voulu amener le th^itre dans la po^sie."^ While it is a play (or a poem) staged without the physical presence of actors, it is not with­ out characters; voices and theatrical effects evoke three unseen

presences: (1 ) the protagonist, (2 ) a woman and (3) an unknown visitor.

Reducing the protagonist to a disembodied voice, Tardieu

^Quoted by G.L. in "Supreme audace au th4£tre: une pifece sans personnages," Le Figaro Litt&raire (Feb. 4, 1956), p. 2. 172

presents a direct confrontation between human consciousness and the

/ *3 inanimate world as well as between the present moment and the past.

The invisible protagonist returns (presumably from the dead) to the

room represented on stage, the living room of a country house, to

find that it is both familiar and unfamiliar. He seems to be coming

back to a place where he once lived in order to discover some hidden

truth. Calvin Evans sees his return as an attempt to recapture a

moment of his previous existence "in order to seize or to sense the

ultimate meaning of its 'correspondances'."44 Although the furniture

has remained in the same order "de telle facon qu'ils semblent prendre

un sens a force d'&tre toujours 1&," (p. 144) the protagonist is no

longer the same person. While the furniture seems to have some mean­

ing or some message for him, he cannot quite decipher it. There is a

kind of double Interrogation between two separate worlds— human and

inanimate— which share a common temporal bond and yet are too different

to understand each other:

nous restons alnsi longtemps dans notre commun silence parce que nous avons k creuser ensemble cette menace parce qu'il nous faut retrouver le secret de notre double interrogation, parce que nous nous demandons o\i nous sommes, qui nous sommes— — Et cependant nous n'avons rien ^ nous dire. (p. 145)

^^There is some disagreement among critics as to which is more Important in this play, the Voice or the Object. E. Noulet stresses the voice and the text, but Jacques Poli£ri sees the object as the main character: "Le texte et la volx de l'acteur servent cette fois de contrepolnt au d^cor, personnage principal." ("Notes sur le texte, le d^cor et le geste," p. 1 1 .)

^"Temporal Aesthetics," p. 313. 173

The human and the inanimate have nothing to say to each other because

only man is conscious of his being and capable of expressing it in words. Man is a stranger in a silent and indifferent world:

les meubles s'^veillent et me regardent Ils me regardent sans colfere mais sans dme ils me regardent sans rancune mais sans tendresse Ah! fauteuils, tables, lampes, rideaux comment vous faire comprendre qui j '^tais? Comment vous faire comprendre qui je suis? Un Stranger qui ne vous connait pas qui ne veut pas vous connaitre, bien qu'il vous ait tout de suite reconnus! (p. 148)

His inability to get any response from the silent world pro­ vokes man to frustration and anger: "j e NE COMPRENDS RIEN A TANT DE

SILENCE." (p. 148) Man longs for another conscious being to answer him; thus the sound of a human voice is reassuring and pleasing in itself: "Comme elle me plait, cette voixl" The sound of a woman's voice calling to him— "trois syllabes sans aucun sens sur trois notes joyeuses"— seems to promise happiness and yet he cannot believe that this call is meant for him:

Vraiment il serait fou de croire que c'est moi qu'elle appelle! Non non! Toutes les volx tous les pas de femmes vont au-devant de quelqu'un:

pourquoi done moi plut6 t qu'un autre? (p. 146)

Man longs to make contact with another person, but this is almost as difficult as communicating with the inanimate. The doorbell rings, the door opens and someone invisible but familiar enters the room: 174

Fuisque tu es la, entre! oui entrel C'est cela assieds-toi, lk sur ce fauteuil qui avait pris ton em- preinte au cours des ann^esl (p. 149)

But like the silent visitor in La Politesse inutile, the unseen guest

refuses to speak. Who is this mysterious person? Apparently it is ,

someone who had formerly lived in this room. Perhaps his own self of

the past? Perhaps his wife? In any case time has made them as much

strangers to each other as the human is to the inanimate.

Yet in spite of the differences between man and object, man

can empathize with the inanimate because both are subject to time.

The present is as insubstantial as the wind blowing through the rooms of a house: "Tel est done le present ddrlsoire le l^ger l^ger testa­ ment que laisse un souffle considerableI" (p. 148) Therefore even while they are present, objects contain a potential absence; man also carries within him this potential for non-being. Conscious of this sharing in absence, man can love the inanimate:

A travers toutes les choses passe une absence inutile, peut-etre mekne cette absence est-elle dans les choses comme leur secrete ivresse et nous l'entourons de tout notre amour, (p. 148) i In addition to his consciousness of his being and his ability to speak, his capacity to love distinguishes man from object. Foolish thought it may be, man still continues to wait and to hope to love another person:

. . .je veille avec joie je veille et je t'attends dans cette malson qui n* est & personne. 175

. . .mon coeur bat quand j'entends ta voix car ma folle est £gale au hasard qui nous assemble et nous disassemble dans le profond disordre de tout. (pp. 151-52)

In the end, as in Des arbres et des hommes. absence triumphs but also

brings peace:

Au fond tout au fond 11 y a 1 'absence 11 y a la paix! (p. 152)

Like Une Volx sans personne. Rythme k trois temps is "un

essai de po^sie sur seine." Even more abstract and reduced to the minimum than Une Voix sans personne. it is organized according to a slow, ternary rhythm like the lovers' speech in Les Amants du mitro.

Through this precisely controlled form, Tardieu attempts to express an emotional state:

j'ai tenti de traduire l'imotion qu'iprouve le voyageur lors- qu'il aper^oit, par un plein jour d'iti, le temple de Sigeste, debout et solitaire au milieu des monts siciliens, entre la profonde carriire de pierre qui enfanta l'idifice, les vallons secs recouverts d'herbe rase et 1'horizon aveuglant,— un paysage immobile, comme flxi dans l'iternel. (p. 301)

Every aspect of this work is carefully calculated to contribute to the total effect of beauty and harmony. The temple is evoked by six girls of equal size who represent its six columns. Dressed simply in flow­ ing tunics, they move slowly to form gradually changing geometric patterns, each gesture accompanying a word according to the 1,2,3 rhythn while lights and colors show the passage of time from daylight to dusk to starry night to moonlight. A mysterious voice from no­ where, "une voix dans l'espace," speaks the opening lines which evoke the atmosphere of silence and immobility surrounding the temple.

Rythme ct trois temps not only evokes the emotional state in­ duced by the temple but also presents Tardieu's whole world of opposites reduced to single words in juxtaposition, for the temple, like any work of art, incorporates and attempts to balance the con- trasting forces of life:

Clart^— Ombre Chemin— Abime Raison— Mystfere (p. 320)

It also evokes the process of artistic creation, the transformation of nature by human consciousness, through which the temple was built:

J'^tais le rocher: je devins la Forme. J'£tais le chaos: je devins le Nombre. J'£tais le sommeil: je devins le Songe. (p. 320)

The work of art is man's attempt to remain:

Immuable, Je demeure, J ’attends, (p. 321)

It is a defiance of time:

R&gne, r&gne, Espacet Hors du temps, hors du temps, cigales, pierres, cigales, pierres, hors du temps... (p. 321)

It both affirms man's creativity, his ability to give form to the un­ formed, and denies his power to preserve himself, for although the work of art may endure longer than its creator, ultimately it, too, will succomb to the ravages of time:

Jadls je fuel Toujours je suls! J'affirme, je nie! (p. 321)

Time destroys all and comes full circle: 177

L'homme effac^, Les clges r^volus, Le cercle parfait. (p. 322)

The two worlds of presence and absence exist in confrontation:

Face contre face, Le gouffre et la pierre, La mort et la vie, L'espace et 1'instant, Le secret des Dieux.^S (p. 322)

As we have seen, Tardieu's Poemes k iouer show human conscious­

ness in the process of trying to reconcile this confrontation between

the worlds of presence and absence. Each of these worlds has its

positive and its negative aspects and man vacillates between them (Des

arbres et des hommes). On the one hand the presence of the world is

reassuring, but on the other it is also limiting (Trois personnes

entries dans des tableaux). The presence of others is a necessity

but also a burden (L'ABC de notre vie'). Man feels a certain kinship

with objects but,more acutely, he experiences his difference from them

(Une Voix sans personne). He alternately longs to be one with nature,

living as a harmonious part of it, and to set himself apart from it in

order to subjugate it (Tonnerre sans oraee). Absence means both

freedom from limitations (Trois personnes entries dans des tableaux)

and npn-being (Les Amants du m4tro). In privileged moments man is

able to feel his participation in what lies beyond his understanding

(Le Sacre de la nuit). but at other times, he sees time or the super­

natural as the enemy (Maledictions d'une Furie). He realizes that

% reality is in the present moment as he lives it, but he also experi-

45 Perhaps this secret is love. In Tonnerre sans oraee. Asia says of the gods "leur seul secret dtait lfamour." (p. 210) 178

ences a sense of irreality In that moment (Les Temps du verbe).

Yet moments of reconciliation are possible because human consciousness is the lieu de rencontre between presence and absence:

D^passant toute cause et toute fin, la conscience exulte, car elle reconnalt qu'elle ne cherchait rien d'autre que 1 'abolition de ses propres limltes et elle se r^sout en f^licit^ au moment ok, dans un Eclair, elle se congoit elle- m&me, a la fols, comme le lieu de passage du N^ant k l'Etre et comme le lieu de retour de l'Etre au sein du N£ant. ^

The artist expresses this reconciliation through his medium and fixes it in his work of art (Rvthme k trois temps). The ordinary person may find a sense of harmony in appreciating the artist's work, but he can also create his own moment of reconciliation by loving another person (L'ABC de notre vie). Both art and love are attempts to create presence in the sense of a moment of communication by overcoming the absence of separation in which each individual normally lives. Both the artist and the lover face great difficulties: the former that of controlling his medium so that there is a harmony between form and content and a balance between positive and negative and the latter that of controlling his words so that they create rather than destroy

presence (Des arbres et des homines). In both cases the reconcili­ ation is only partial and temporary, for time eventually destroys both the work of art and the moment of love. Yet beyond the final departure into absence lies peace and an ultimate return to harmony:

^^Jean Tardieu, "Le Lieu de passage," La Part de 1'ombre. p. 201. Au-dela de toute vie et de tout d4clin, de toute presence et de toute absence, de tout salut et de toute perdition, au-dela m&me de toute parole, une reconciliation avec ce qui nous d ^ a s s e et nous d&vore, la fusion, le retour des litres s4par4s, dans l'unit^ et la paix orlginelles.47

^ Je a n Tardieu, "La Voix," in ibid,. p. 199. 4

CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

While the theater of the past dealt with a generalized reality

expressed mostly in verbal dialogue, the new theater presents a

particularized view of reality as the author sees it by means of a

poetic image which conveys a certain sense of being.^ The theater of

Jean Tardieu is a direct expression of his perception of reality. For

Tardieu, both the theatrical world and the real world consist of two

contrasting dimensions: presence and absence. The theatrical produc­

tion, like the physical world, is a living presence which delights

our senses and stimulates our minds; but as the visible world is not

the whole of reality, neither is the visual and auditory presence

the ultimate goal of a stage production. Both of these are appear­

ances— figurants^— which witness by their presence to the absent

world which lies hidden behind them.

In contrast to the realistic theater of the recent past which

reflected modern man's preoccupation with his everyday problems,

dealing mainly with psychological and sociological concerns, the new

^"Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 353. 2 See Tardieu's essay "Un peu de logique ldlote" in Pages d'^criture. pp. 17-18.

180 181

theater "attempts to reveal man's situation both as a member of society

O and as an inhabitant of a universe." The new theater seeks to reveal

a "dimension of the Ineffable," to shock man out of his complacency

and restore his sense of cosmic wonder.^ For Tardieu, the importance

of the theater is its ability to make present that which is absent, 5 to suggest the mysteries behind the appearances.

The plays of Th^ltre de chambre shock the spectator into a

reevaluation of the type of life and/or language he usually takes for granted. In both dramas and comedies Tardieu is questioning

appearances and challenging the audience to look beyond them. The dramas provide a glimpse into the world of absence, reminding the

spectator of the existence of a supernatural dimension. The comedies

explore the mysteries of language, warning the audience of the absence within words which makes them difficult to control. Through parody, with occasional poetic moments, both dramas and comedies present con­

cise, unified images which give an objective view of man in relation­

ship to the world of presence.

Having suggested the mysteries behind the appearances of the present world in Th^tre de chambre. Tardieu develops the absent world more fully in his Poemes k iouer. In these works Tardieu presents a more complete view of man, showing him in relation both to society

•a Leonard Pronko, Avant-Garde, p. 198.

Slartin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 351.

‘’Tardieu stated (in a letter to me dated January 30, 1975) that the most important task of a truly human mind is to try to penetrate— even with the poorest and most derisive tools— the mystery of its own existence. 182

and to the universe. The Po&mes h. Iouer are complex metaphors which

raise reality to a more abstract, poetic level, transforming it into

works of art which deal with the opposing forces of life, attempting

to reconcile them. In accordance with this higher degree of ab­

straction, Tardieu transposes ordinary speech into an artistic medium

by taking advantage of its phonetic and rhythmic possibilities. In

these works language maks a direct sensory impact which increases the

evocative power of the whole play. Combining verbal poetry and stage

poetry, Tardieu's Poemes a iouer fuse form and content into poetic

images which are no less than attempts to present the truth, as

Tardieu sees it, about man and the world.

The philosophical basis of the new theater stems from modern man's anguish as he realizes that "the certitudes and unshakable basic

assumptions of former ages have been swept away"*’ and that he must redefine his position in regard to the world. Tardieu begins his

theater by showing man coming to terms with his new situation in his

earliest published play, Tonnerre sans oraee. This play illustrates two opposite attitudes toward an unjustified life in a world without gods: rebellion (PromEthEe) and acceptance (Deucalion). While Tardieu sees the world as absurd in the sense that it cannot be understood I completely by reason, it is as it is and man can do nothing to change the basic conditions of his existence. Thus the question is simply one of how man responds to his situation: "la fameuse 'mesure' et la fameuse 'raison' partent d'une Evaluation prEalable de la dEmesure et

^Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, pp. 4-5. *

183

la d^raison du monde. Toute la question est de savoir si l'on accepte

ou si l'on refuse.” ^ Through Prom^th^e, Tardieu shows that pride

and rebellion lead to destruction of man and of the natural world. In

Deucalion, Tardieu suggests that man must learn to accept his situation

lucidly and find a new harmony with the world. While most other

dramatists of the new theater, Ionesco and Beckett, for example, go

around in circles within a limited, pessimistic, end-of-the-world

view of reality, Tardieu's theater evolves toward a more balanced and

hopeful vision of the world.

Yet it is apparent from Tardieu's early dramas that he under­

stands the reasons for pessimism in regard to man and society, for a

poet is particularly sensitive to the discrepancy between his dreams

and the reality that confronts him:

II est vrai que, d'une fa^on g^ndrale, la vie, la soci^t^, la condition humaine, meme l'univers tout entier paraissent toujours plus ou moins inacceptables au po&te, dans la mesure ou la splendeur de ce qu'il r&ve pour l'homme— dans ce monde-ci ou dans 1'autre— est hors de proporition avec la mesquinerie, la cruaute ou 1'incompl^tude de la rhalite telle qu'elle est.®

This dissatisfaction with man and society is especially evident in

Qui est !&?, La Politesse inutile. Le Meuble. La Serrure and Le

Guichet. In these plays Tardieu presents a rather pessimistic view

of man as a helpless nonentity who is brutalized by external forces.

Not only is Tardieu's petit monsieur the victim of his own creations,

society and technology, but also of the absurdity of a monotonous life

^Jean Tardieu, Les Portes de toile. pp. 18-19. Q Jean Tardieu, "Permanence et nouveaut^," Pages d'dcriture. p. 87. in which he does not understand his role as well as of the final

absurdity, sudden and unexpected death. Many of Ionesco's characters

are also oppressed by society, victimized by others and thwarted by

objects, but these characters are generally exaggerated to the point

of inhumanity. By contrast, there is something touching and human

in Tardieu's protagonists. Moreover, because Tardieu's man is dis­

satisfied with his lot and searching for something to give life mean­

ing, there is an implied hope for his future development. Both Qui

est 1^? and La Politesse inutile suggest that there may be a second

chance for humanity and/or the individual to be reborn or reawakened.

In spite of his dissatisfaction with reality, it is obvious

from his comedies that Tardieu can also see the humorous side of man

and society. In a lighthearted and playful way these plays show the

strangeness of roan's attempts to communicate with his peers. Although

Tardieu parodies social language in order to show its Inadequacies

and dangers as well as the gratuitousness of much that is said, in

comparison with the dramatists of the absurd, his parody is gentle

and his laughter reflects sympathetic amusement and not derision. As a poet, he is committed to renewing language, not to destroying it.

Probing the secrets of language and communication, Tardieu reveals how much we rely on verbal and physical gestures as well as on social contexts to convey meanings. As a means of communication, words are deceptive, often creating false appearances or concealing the truth and yet we are often dependent on them. Although much of the intu­ itive and emotional side of life is conveyed non-verbally, the word is necessary to complete the rational side of the transaction. While 185

dramatists of'the absurd like Ionesco and Beckett give the impression

that language has become meaningless to the point where communication

is no longer possible, Tardieu shows communication going on in spite

of the ambiguity of language. As Robert Kanters says of Tardieu's

theater, "C'est la communicabilit^ plus que 1'incommunicabilite qui

est illustr^e ici."^

Tardieu's spiritual evolution toward acceptance of life with

all its contradictions reaches its culmination in his Poemes k Iouer. i ■ ■' i

While the theater of the absurd rarely gets beyond the violent and the

grotesque, Tardieu's Poemes a iouer sometimes reach the lyrical and

the sublime. The parody of social language which predominates in the

plays of Th^Atre de chambre. while still included in several of the

Poemes k Iouer. generally gives way to consciously poetic speech.

Thus in their mood and in their attitude toward language, these plays

are akin to the poetic avant-garde theater of such dramatists as

Audiberti, Ghelderode, Vauthier, Pichette and Sch^had^. Yet Tardieu's poetic theatrical works manage to avoid some of the pitfalls of the poetic avant-garde theater in general. In comparison to the above- mentioned poetic dramatists whose works generally tend toward the baroque and the fantastic, Tardieu appears to be a neo-classic. While many poet-dramatists tend toward wordiness and excessive verbal lyri­ cism which often leads to obscurity, Tardieu's Poemes a iouer are relatively restrained, using simple language often reduced to a minimum of words. While the poet's elan often produces plays lacking

^"D'un art k l'autre avec Jean Tardieu," p. 21. 186

in structure, Tardieu's dramatic works are precisely controlled, some­

times using a musical organization or a rhythm to bind works and

gestures together. While poetic theater often creates a fantastic

universe which is almost totally alien to the spectator, Tardieu's

plays retain a basis in reality. Even in Tardieu's most abstract works, a human element remains, attaching theater to reality.

Because Tardieu's plays explore the entire range of new

theater from the absurd to the linguistic to the poetic, they are

difficult to situate and to evaluate.^ On one hand, critics have

recognized the importance of Tardieu's experimentation in expanding

the scope of the theater, but on the other hand, they have criticized his plays for being too experimental, for departing too much from

traditional forms. While limiting most of his plays to the short one-

act form has facilitated Tardieu's experimentation, it has also

limited his acceptance by drama critics as well as his access to the general theater-going public. Tardieu's intimate combination of poetry and drama has caused confusion among the critics as to how to approach these works. Tardieu himself sees no problem in the inter-

-*-®In response to my question as to which of his plays he personally felt had best accomplished his goals, Tardieu replied (in a letter dated January 30, 1975) that he prefers precisely the ones which are least played because they are among the longest and the most abstract: Les Amants du m^tro and L'ABC de notre vie. Among his shorter plays he prefers La Sonate et les trois messieurs, Une Voix sans personne. and Qui est I k l , especially the last of these. 187

mingling of the two genres, for he considers his poetry and his drama 11 as two inseparable facets of a single inspiration. To fully

appreciate and understand Tardieu's theater, it must be viewed as a

part of a very unified body of work based on a poetico-philosophical

view of reality. However, the unity of thought within Tardieu's works

may actually be a detriment to his theater, for if one were to see

only a single play, having not read any of Tardieu's poetry or essays, 12 one might not see beyond the surface simplicity of the plays.

Although it is difficult to evaluate Tardieu's theater with­

out having actually seen the plays on stage, one can try to imagine

which of them might be most successful as theatrical productions.

The plays of Th^Atre de chambre are exemplary models of the

one-act form because they remain within their deliberate limitation 13 to develop fully one technique or one situation. These works are

primarily dramatic (with the exception of La Sacre de la nuit. La

Sonate et les trois messieurs and Conversation-Sinfonietta) because

t a r dieu further explained (in a letter to me dated January 6, 1975) that his poetry and his theater rub shoulders and become one in his conception of a universe where everything is constantly going from non-being to being as though these two states were just two different modes of existence of a single thing comparable to the different states of water: ice and steam (solid and gas, visible and invisible). He referred to this point of view as primitive or naive.

-^Apparently Jacques Guicharnaud sees this unity as a fault, for he dismisses Tardieu's theater as "an occasionally theatrical illustration of the rest of his writings." Modern French Theatre from Giraudoux to Genet. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 180n.

•^George Wellwarth develops this point in his chapter on Tardieu'8 theater in Protest and Paradox, pp. 97-110. 188

they begin as Imitations or parodies of traditional plays, but they

either renew or tacitly criticize the old forms by giving them an

unexpected twist through use of shock effects and coups de th4i?tre.

Tardieu's drames Eclair present simple but striking images

composed of an interplay of auditory and visual effects, objects,

gestures and movements which have both a sensory impact and a symbolic

function. Although it is my opinion that all of the dramas would be

effective on stage, perhaps La Serrure presents the most compelling

image. It combines a powerful sensory effect with a precisely con­

trolled use of words and gestures which mutually support each other,

building up to the final impact like a musical crescendo. Both comic

and tragic, grotesque and sublime, La Serrure suggests a perfect meta­ phor of man's longing for Truth or Beauty and his inability to possess

it.

While the focus of Tardieu's experimentation in the drames

Eclair is on creating a concrete but suggestive presence on the stage,

in the com4dies dclair Tardieu explores social language and commun­

ication. Being parodies of farces, these plays consist of mini-plots rather than poetic images. Since these plays are illustrations or demonstrations of the functioning of verbal and gestural language,

their main appeal is intellectual; they lack the sensory stimulation of the dramas. While they show the discrepancy between appearance and reality, between words and the meaning hidden behind them, they are not as intense as the dramas nor as universally significant.

Martin Esslln finds these plays to be Tardieu's least successful 189

experiments because they resemble "the more hackneyed procedures of

the little revue.Yet Eux seuls le savent and Un Mot pour ut. autre

received more consistently favorable reviews from the drama critics

than any other of Tardieu's plays.^ Therefore, these plays must at

least be effective as amusements which please the audience.

Tardieu's most audacious experiments with the creative

possibilities of the sounds and rhythms of spoken language, Convers-

ation-sinfonietta and La Sonate et les trois messieurs, are innovative

and fascinating, but they emphasize sound to the exclusion of all

other effects. They would make excellent radio plays, for there is

no reason to see them. On stage they would be too static and have

too little visual appeal.

Except for Conversatlon-sinfonietta. La Sonate et les trois messieurs and Le Sacre de la nuit. one has little difficulty accepting

Tardieu's Theatre de chambre as dramatic works. With the Poemes ^ jouer, however, the distinction between poetry and drama is more

difficult. Some of the Pohmes & Iouer are essentially staged poetry:

Le Sacre de la nuit. Maledictions d'une Furle and Une Voix sans per­ sonne are primarily expressions of mood and emotion presented as tableaux with very little movement. And yet the poetry of which they are made is not static, but dramatic, because— particularly in Le

Sacre de la nuit and Maledictions d'une Furie— it builds toward a

^ T h e Theatre of the Absurd, p. 202.

^■^This statement is based on Carol Beverly's research of the first-run reviews of Tardieu's plays; see "Parody and Poetry," pp. 240- 54. 190.

climax which makes one feel that something has definitely happened.

Rvthme & trois temps and Trois personnes entries dans des tableaux

are also primarily poetic, conveying emotion; but, although not

dramatic in the traditional sense of conflict between characters, they

do present contrasting ideas or points of view which create a feeling

of tensions being balanced.

As Carol Beverly has pointed out, Les Amants du mitro and

L'ABC de notre vie combine parody and poetry. ^ While Tardieu's

highly poetic plays tend toward the abstract, showing tension between

ideas or viewpoints, Les Amants du m^tro and L'ABC de notre vie com­

bine the concrete and the abstract. These two plays center on the

human, presenting poetic images of how it feels to be a human being

in society and in history. Therefore the conflict is now between the

individual and the masses. While there is an elemental drama in Lui's

progress through the obstacles which separate him from Elle and in

the individual's struggle to be free of others, these works are still more poetic than dramatic since they are organized like music, accord­

ing to rhythm or musical structure.

Tardieu'8 most complex works, Tonnerre sans oraee and Des arbres et des hommes. combine a dramatic structure and a poetic one.

From a concrete point of view, they have a plot based on a conflict between characters with a certain amount of psychological reality and from an abstract point of view, they present a mythic view of man or illustrate contrasting philosophical ideas. They combine poetic

^ S e e ibid., Chapter VI. 191

language with the concrete poetry of theatrical effects. One would

imagine that these plays might be quite effective on stage, for,

appealing both to the senses and to the mind, they present a complete

image of man and the world. At present one can only guess at their 17 effect, however, for they have not yet been produced.

In my opinion Les Temps du verbe is Tardieu's least successful

play since it is basically traditional in structure with little of

the poetic or the innovative. Like the comedies Eclair. Les Temps du verbe is a further exploration of language in which Tardieu suggests

that language can have the power to control time. The form of the

play makes no particular contribution to the total effect. Moreover,

the play as a whole gives a somber, heavy feeling in spite of the

lovers' finding freedom at the end. Yet this play is sometimes men­

tioned favorably by critics because it has a plot, action, and "real" %

characters I

One of the major contributions of Tardieu's theater is in

suggesting that a play can be successful without adhering to tradi­

tional forms. Yet his theater does not suggest that a play can do without form all together. In fact, one of the things which dis­ tinguishes Tardieu's plays from those of other avant-garde dramatists is the discipline which he imposes upon the material. Even when he is not using musical forms per se. his plays are carefully controlled.

^This is also based on Beverly's research, p. 254. Tardieu "manie de la dynamite avec des gestes rares et mesur^s

1 ft d'offbvre hollandias ou de musicien de chambre."

Tardieu's plays, particularly his Poemes & Iouer. suggest that

poetry and theater can be combined successfully and that the result

is not necessarily anti-theatrical. The careful balancing of po^sie

au theatre and podsie du thd^tre can produce theatrical works which,'

at their best, create a suggestive presence which points beyond Itself

to an expanded reality which includes the unknown as well as the

known, the irrational as well as the rational, emotion as well as in­

tellect. In his article on Tardieu's Poemes 4 Iouer Claude Bonnefoy

sums up the essence of Tardieu's theater:

Cependant, aussi abstrait, aussi proche de la muslque qu'il soit, son th£^tre est essentiellement sc&nique, appelle le geste et le d^ploiement dans l'espace. II suppose une in­ carnation des voix, une mise-en-sc&ne,.. non point r£aliste, mais transfigurant les ^ldments de la r^alit^, suggdrant rapprochements et metamorphoses.

Moreover, he concludes that Tardieu has brought to the contemporary

theater "un apport extremement pr^cieux, analogue k ce que fut pour

la peinture, la d^couverte de l'informel."^® Whatever Tardieu’s

eventual place will be in the history of contemporary theater, it is

certain that he is an important innovator whose talents have been

Ignored for too long and whose theatrical works deserve to be better known and appreciated.

18 Claude Bonnefoy, "Poemes A jouer," La Qulnzaine Litt^raire. no. 89 (February 16-28, 1970), p. 13. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Works by Jean Tardieu

1. Plays

T h ^ t r e de chambre. I. Paris: Gallimard, 1955 (reprinted in 1966).

Poemes A Iouer. Th61tre II. Paris: Gallimard, 1960 (revised and expanded in 1969).

2. Poetry

Accents. Paris: Gallimard, 1939.

Choix de poemes (1924-1954). Paris: Gallimard, 1961.

Figures. Paris: Gallimard, 1944.

Histoires obscures. Paris: Gallimard, 1961.

Jours p£trifi^s (1943-1944). Illustrated edition. Paris: Gallimard, 1947.

Jours p^trifi^s. pofemes 1942-1944. Ordinary edition. Paris: Gallimard, 1948.

Le D^mon de l'irr^allt^. Neuchdtel and Paris: Ides et Calendes,1946.

Les Dieux 4touff^s. Paris: Seghers, 1946.

L'Espace et la Flute, variations sur douze dessins de Picasso. Paris: Gallimard, 1958.

Le Fleuve cach^. Paris: Editions de la Pl^iade, 1933.

Le Fleuve cach^: Poesies. 1938-1961. Paris: Gallimard, 1968.

Le Temoin invisible. Paris: Gallimard, 1943.

Monsieur Monsieur. Paris: Gallimard, 1951.

Pofemes. Paris: Editions du Seull, 1944.

193 194

Une Voix sans personne. Paris: Gallimard, 1954.

3. Essays

De la peinture que l'on dit abstraite. Lausanne: Mermod, 1960.

La Part de 1*ombre: Proses. 1937-1967. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.

La Premiere Personne du singulier. Paris: Gallimard, 1952.

Les Portes de toile. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.

Pages d'^criture. Paris: Gallimard, 1967.

Un Mot pour un autre. Paris: Gallimard, 1951.

4. Other Works

Anita de Caro, peintures r^centes. po&me de Jean Tardieu. Paris: Galerie Coard, 1968.

"A propos du Th^ttre de Chambre.” Pour l'art. Lausanne, no. 46 (January-February, 1956), 19.

Bazaine, Jean. Hollande. texte de Jean Tardieu. Paris: Maeght, 1962.

Cent Tableaux de Jacques Villon. Paris: Galerie Charpentier, 1961.

Charles d*Orleans. choix de rondeaux. Paris: Egloff, 1947.

Conversation-sinfonietta. essai d1orchestration tvpographlaue. La Lettre et 1'esprit. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. v

Dessins de Raoul Dufy. Preface de Jean Tardieu. Paris: Mermod, 1958.

Dubuis. Paris: Galerie Jacques Massol, 1968.

Goethe. "Iphigenie en Tauride" and "Pandora." Translated by Jean Tardieu in ThMtre. Biblioth^que de la Pl&Lade, Vol. 63. Paris: N.R.F., 1942.

Hans Hartung. Collection "Peintres d'aujourd'hul." Paris: Gallimard, 1962.

Holderlin. "L'Archipel." Translated by Jean Tardieu in his Accents. Paris: Gallimard, 1939, pp. 64-92.

II ^tait une fois. deux fois. trois fois... ou la table de multipli­ cation en vers. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. 195

"Jean Tardleu presente sa piAce." Le Figaro. April 24, 1952, p. 6.

Lambert, Jean-Clarence. Un R^ve collectif. prAc^d^ de dlverses activit^s sc&iiques. Preface de Jean Tardieu. Paris: Editions Georges Fall, 1968.

"Le signe et la parole, ou literature et radio." Cahiers d'Etudes de Radio-T^l^vision. no. 9-10 (1956), pp. 3-19.

"Notes et fragments." Cahiers d fEtudes de Radio-Til^vision. no. 17 (1958), pp. 14-24.

Tardieu, Jean, Andr^ Breton, Lise Deharme and Julien Gracq. Farouche A quatre feuilles. Paris: Grasset, 1954.

______, AndrA FrAnaud and Jean Lescure. Bazaine. Est&ve. Lapicque. Paris: Louis Carr^, 1945.

"The Club d'essai." British Broadcasting Company Quarterly. VII, no. 4, 227-34.

B. Critical Works on Jean Tardieu's Theater

1. Articles

Abirached, Robert. "Jean Tardieu: ThA&tre de Chambre. I (Gallimard)." Nouvelle Revue francaise. no. 178 (October 1, 1967), 716-18.

Alyn, Marc. "L'Espace de Jean Tardieu," Arts-spectacles. no. 827 (June 21-27, 1961), 4.

Arland, Marcel. "Jean Tardieu: ThA^tre de Chambre." Nouvelle Revue francaise. 3e ann^e, no. 32 (August, 1955), 334-35.

Belaval, Yvon. "Jean Tardieu: Les Temps du Verbe et Une Voix sans Personne." Nouvelle Revue francaise. VII (January-June, 1956), 734-36.

Bislaux, Marcel. "Jean Tardieu." Preuves. 4e annAe, no. 35 (January, 1954), 13-14.

______. "Notes pour Memoire: Jean Tardieu." Arts-spectacles. no. 410 (May 8-14, 1953), 5.

Bonnefoy, Claude. "PoAmes A jouer." La Ouingaine LittAraire. no. 89 (February 16-28, 1970), 13.

Bruder, Lou. "Avant-garde. Le ThA&tre de Babel." ThAAtre de France. VI (1956), 21-29. X96

Capron, Marcelle. MLes Amants du M^tro." Combat. April 28, 1952.

Champigny, Robert. "Satire and Poetry in Two Plays of Jean Tardieu." American Society of Legion of Honor Magazine. XXXV, no. 2 (1964), 87-95.

Chonez, Claudine. "Jean Vauthier, Ionesco, Jean Tardieu. 'Notre th4£tre est une experience pour demaln.111 Arts (February 15— 21, 1956), p. 3.

Clancier, Georges Emmanuel. "Une Voix et des personnes." Mercure de France. Tome 348 (May-August, 1963), 131-142.

Dumur, Guy. "Un petit chef-d'oeuvre." Le Nouvel Observateur. no. 28 (May 27, 1965), 24.

Evans, Calvin. "The New Dramatists, 6i Temporal Aesthetics and the Dramaturgy of Jean Tardieu." Drama Survey. II (February, 1963), 305-21.

Faggi, Vico. "Ayme, Tardieu, Anouilh." Nouva Corrente. no. 22 (April-June, 1961), 64-67.

Gouhier, Henri. "Un th4&tre contre le th44tre." La Table Ronde. 141 (September, 1959), 172-74.

II Caff4: giornale artistico, letterario. umoristico con litografia e musica (Rome), XIII, no. 4 (August-Deeember, 1965), 1-55. [Special issue dedicated to Tardieu.]

Jaccottet, Philippe. "Notes k propos de Jean Tardieu." Nouvelle Revue francaise. XVI (July-September, 1960), 107-11.

J.C. "Experiencias de Jean Tardieu." Sur, no. 282 (May-June, 1963), 108-10.

Kanters, Robert. "D'un art k 1*autre avec Jean Tardieu." Figaro Littlraire. no. 1238 (February 9-15, 1970), 21-22.

♦ "Le Spectacle Jean Tardieu: une Langue nouvelle." 1*Express, no. 418 (June, 1959), 38.

Lacdte, Ren^. "Jean Tardieu." Lettres franchises, no. 1308 (November 12-18, 1969), 10. 3

Lamont, Rosette C. "The Nouvelle Vague in French Theatre." Massa­ chusetts Review (Winter, 1964), pp. 381-96.

Lemarchand, Jacques. "Goldoni et Jean Tardieu par la communaut^ th&dtrale." Figaro Litt^raire. no. 895 (June 15, 1963), 20. 197

______. "Jean Tardieu et la scdne." Preface to the program of the "Spectacle Jean Tardieu," Th&itre de l'Alllance francaise, June, 1959.

______. "Les Amants du Mdtro." Figaro Litt^raire. May 3, 1952, p. 10.

L., G. "Supreme audace au th^ftre: une pidce sans personnages." Figaro Lltt^ralre (February 4, 1956), p. 2.

Melcher, Edith. "The Use of Words in Contemporary French Theater." Modern Language Notes. LXXVII (December, 1962), 470-83.

Mel&se, Pierre. "Avant-Garde Theatre in France." The Theatre Annual. XVIII (1961), 1-16.

Noulet, Emilie. "Th££tre II. Pobmes A louer." Syntheses, no. 168 (May, 1960), 236-41.

Poli^ri, Jacques. "Notes sur le texte, le d^cor et le geste dans le th^tre de Jean Tardieu." Revue Th^trale. XXXVIII (1958), 10- 12. R^da, Jacques. "Jean Tardieu." Nouvelle Revue francaise. XXXII (September-December, 1968), 494-501.

______. "Tardieu dans la coulisse." Marginale. XLIX (October, 1956), 55-56.

Saurel, Ren^e. "Les Amants du M^tro." Lettres Francaises. (May 2-8, 1952), p. 6. 3

Vanham, Jean-Louis. "Un Essai sur Jean Tardieu." Le Thyrse. Brussels, January, 1964, p. 342.

Vicari, Gianbattista. "Jean Tardieu ou le terrain d^blay^." Trans­ lated by Alix Baudo and Luciano de Maria. Les Lettres nouvelles. May-June, 1966, pp. 41-48.

Vigorelli, G. "II teatro cioe' la poesia di Tardieu." L'Europa letteraria. no. 3 (June, 1960), 184-85.

2. Books

Baecque, Andr^ de. Le Th^Atre d ’aulourd'hui. Clefs du Temps Present. Paris: Seghers, 1964, p. 101.

Beigbeder, Marc. Le Th^tre en France depuis la Liberation. Paris: Bordas, 1959. 198

Bersanl, Jacques, et al.. eds. La Literature en France depuis 1945. Paris: Bordas, 1970, pp. 537-38.

Br^e, Germaine and Kroff, Alexander Y.. eds. Twentieth Century French Drama. University of Wisconsin: Ma^uillan, 1969, pp. 34-39 and 621-47.

Champigny, Robert. Le Genre dramatique. Monte Carlo: Editions Regain, 1965.

Cohn, Ruby. Currents in Contemporary Drama. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1969.

Corvin, Michel. Le T h ^ t r e nouveau en France. Collection Que sais- je? Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963, pp. 41-42.

Dejean, Jean-Luc. Le T h ^ t r e francais d^ulourd*hui. Paris: F. Nathan, 19TL. 3

Dictionnaire des homines de th^citre francais contemporains. Preface de Armand Salacrou, Henri Sauget et Serge Lifar. Paris: Olivier Perrin, 1967.

Duckworth, Colin, trans. and introd. The Underground Lovers and Other Experimental Plays by Jean Tardieu. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1968, pp. xi-xviii. _

Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Anchor Books. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1961, pp. 199-207, 282, and 403.

Guerrero Zamora, Juan. Historia del Teatro contempor^neo. Barcelona: Juan Flors, 1961, pp. 325-31.

Guicharnaud, Jacques. Modern French Theatre from Giraudoux to Genet. Revised edition. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967.

Larthomas, Pierre. Le Langage dramatique. Sa Nature, ses proc^d^s. Paris: Armand Colin, 1972.

Ludvigsen, Christian. Modern fransk dramatik: Adamov. Ionesco. Tardieu. Fredensborg: Arena, Forfatternes Forlag, 1959, pp. 149-81.

Mignon, Paul-Louis. Le Th^fftre d'auiourd'hui de A lusqu'a Z. Paris: Editions de l'Avant-Sc&ne/Editions Michel, Brie et Cie, 1966.

Noulet, Emilie. Jean Tardieu. Po&tes d’aujourd'hui. Paris: Editions Seghers, 1964. 199

Pillement, Georges. Le Theatre de Jean-Paul Sartre k Arrabal. Paris: Le Belier, 1970.

Pronko, Jeonard Cabell. Avant-Garde: The Experimental Theater In France. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962, pp. 154-58.

Serreau, Genevieve. Histoire du "nouveau th4^tre." Collection Id^es. Paris: Gallimard, 1966, pp. 148-49.

Surer, Paul. Cinquante Ans de theatre. Paris: Soci^t^ d fedition d'enseignement sup^rieur, 1969, pp. 341-47.

Wellwarth, George E. . The Theater of Protest and Paradox: Develop­ ments in the Avant-Garde Drama. New York: New York University Press, 1964, pp. 84-97.

Wolf-Kesting, Marianne. Panorama des Zeitgenoisslschen Theaters. Munich: Piper, 1962, pp. 113-18.

3. Unpublished Works

Beverly, Carol Jean, "Parody and Poetry in the Theater of Jean Tardieu." Unpublished Ph.D. disseratlon, Indiana University, 1972.

Jones, Susan. "Langage et Communication dans le th^t r e de Jean Tardieu." Unpublished M.A. thesis, Rice University, 1969.

Lancaster, Patricia Anne. "The Theater of Jean Tardieu." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1971.

C. Other Works Cited

Amhelm, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eve. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali­ fornia Press, 1965.

Artaud, Antonin. Le Th^ttre et son double. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.

Baldwin, Charles Sears. Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic interpreted from representative works. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959.

Cor, Laurence W. "Phonic Aspects of Language in the Theater." French Review. XXXVII, no. 1 (1963), 31-40.

Dufrenne, Mlkel. Language and Philosophy. Translated by Henry B. Veatch. Foreword by Paul Henle. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968. 200

Dupln, Jacques. Joan Mir<4: Life and Work. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., n.d.

Hoftmann, Werner. Painting In the Twentieth Century. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1960.

Langer, Susanne K. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason. Rite and Art. Third edition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.

______, ed. Reflections on Art: A Source Book of Writings by Artists. Critics, and Philosophers. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1958.

Lemaitre, Henri. La Po^sie depuis Baudelaire. Collection U, S^rie "Lettres Francaises." Second edition. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1965.

Matson, Floyd W. and Ashley Montagu, eds. The Human Dialogue: Per­ spectives on Communication. New York: The Free Press, 1967.

Read, Herbert. The Origins of Form in Art. New York: Horizon Press, 1967.

Valery, Paul. Pieces sur l*art. Paris: Gallimard, 1934.