Physiologies of the Modern: Zola, Experimental Medicine, and the Naturalist Stage

Abstract

I open with Neveux's tribute because it foregrounds an important intersection in the discourse of modem drama. In his reference to "today's theater," Neveux employs the language of the modem familiar to the late-nineteenth and early/mid-twentieth-century theatre's discourse about itself. Theatre "today" — and by this Neveux means the theatre of Jean Giraudoux, Almand Salacrou, Jean Anouilh , and himself — achieves its contemporaneity through reference to an earlier moment of disclosure. The newness of this disclosure — its modernity — is represented, in part, through the language of bodies and bodily penetration. If the "real" world is a body, then Pirandello's theatre constitutes an operation on that body, crossing its thresholds, turning it inside out, revealing in the organic matter of its entrails "the other side of ourselves". To the extent that the world of the "real" and of "ourselves" is something living, then the drama of Pirandello offers itself, before the spectatorial gaze, as a kind of theatrical vivisection.