Theatricality: The Burden of the Text

Abstract

In this concrete language, which Artaud considers the very embodiment of theatricality, we can see the otherness of a literary genre, an otherness which reduces its literariness to the status of an adjunct. Even Barthes, in spite of his usual concern with linguistic structures, appears to agree with Artaud's conception of theatricality: Qu'est-ce que la theatralite? C'est le th$itre moins le texte, c'est une 6paisseur de signes et de sensations qui s'6difie sur la sceine a partir de l'argument ecrit.. . 3 Although he recognizes that naturellement la th6atralit6 doit etre pr6sente des le premier germe ecrit d'une oeuvre, elle est une donn6e de creation, non de realisation,4 theatricality remains an opaque and impenetrable body, at the center as well as at the periphery of critical discourse. The text would generate theatricality which would then exist as a separate and independent structure, because the passage from text to stage, from written word to top performance has somehow been conjured away and thus appears unrepresentable. By definition the dramatic discourse would become the discourse of a fault, of a rupture between subject and object-in essence a discourse without content.