I've Done My Act: An Exercise in Gravity

Abstract

THE PRINTED TEXT of a play generally utilizes three different sorts of typographic elements: roman capitals, roman text, and italic type faces. Names of characters appear in block capitals, while the words they exchange follow in a roman capital type face and lowercase text. Finally, in italics-inserted at times between parentheses within the characters' lines, or at other times isolated in the space between those lines-come the stage directions intended for the play's director and actors, and also for the person who reads the play without seeing it performed. In performance, however, only those passages printed in Roman type are read, while the capital letters of the characters' names and the italicized stage directions are passed over in silence. This usage prompts me to begin my remarks concerning Sartre's theatrical writing by pointing out what constitutes a noticeable typographic anomaly with regard to the traditional layout of a page of drama. A reader of Les Mouches, as well as of any other of Sartre's plays, can hardly help but be surprised by the heavy load of italicized words within the very lines the characters are to speak. Sartre once described how Charles Dullin, the director to whom he had submitted the manuscript of this, his first play, had suggested and even demanded that he make certain changes in spots where the text did not seem dramatic enough. But it seems that this experienced man of the theater was not at all bothered by the presence or the number of italicized words since they all survived his scrutiny and persist in the printed text. Nonetheless, I find it difficult to understand how this director managed to render visible, audible and somehow perceptible in performance this strictly typographic artifice which consists of printing a word in a type face different from that of the context in which it appears. This mark, perceptible only to the reader's eye, is condemned to remain inaccessible to the ear of the audience. This mark is the place of a desperately silent insistence, of an insistence that despairs of making itself heard. But the interest of these italicized words strewn bizarrely throughout a text that can not give them hearing extends as well to the lexical zone within which they occur. This is a very narrow, specific zone: the vast majority of these words in Les Mouches are possessive pronouns or adjectives and, among these possessives, the vast majority once again are in the first-person singular. When Orestes, a native of Argos, returns to his city for the first time since his childhood, he gazes at it and describes its skyline-a view which leaves him quite cold. That is not my gate or my palace. This is Orestes' line, but, in order to make it clear, I should