Scenes of misrecognition (Koltès, Duras)
What is it about confession scenes that makes them such a productive heuristic device in late twentieth-century French theater, given that so often playwrights only tease us with the prospect of confession’s truth-telling potential, all the better to quash it? Whether these disclosures are extracted...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Journal article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Duke University Press
2024
|
| _version_ | 1811139821240844288 |
|---|---|
| author | Killeen, M-C |
| author_facet | Killeen, M-C |
| author_sort | Killeen, M-C |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | What is it about confession scenes that makes them such a productive heuristic device
in late twentieth-century French theater, given that so often playwrights only tease us
with the prospect of confession’s truth-telling potential, all the better to quash it?
Whether these disclosures are extracted under the glare of courtroom or police
interrogations, or elicited in the more intimate settings of the bedroom or the analyst’s
couch, modern theater’s interest in confessions appears to reside less in their
probative value than in the questions they raise about the dramatic form and our
investment in it. I propose to pursue this inquiry through a discussion of two plays:
Marguerite Duras’s oft-staged récit from 1982, La Maladie de la mort, and Bernard-
Marie Koltès’s 1986 play Dans la solitude des champs de coton. What fascinates me
most about these “postdramatic” works is the curious way in which they appear to
bear all the markings of confessions yet pointedly refuse to behave like them,
thwarting our desire for revelation, catharsis, and closure at every turn. As
performative utterances, these abortive confessions ultimately perform little apart
from their own undoing. This failure is due in no small part to the persistence with
which they direct our focus elsewhere: instead of the familiar spectacle of a
character’s full and frank confession (assuming such a thing were even possible), the
disquieting theater of Koltès and Duras demands instead that we attend to what we
disavow. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-25T04:12:10Z |
| format | Journal article |
| id | oxford-uuid:6b23b716-4710-46f4-8f09-1427cf9763a0 |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-25T04:12:10Z |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| publisher | Duke University Press |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:6b23b716-4710-46f4-8f09-1427cf9763a02024-06-27T12:23:27ZScenes of misrecognition (Koltès, Duras)Journal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:6b23b716-4710-46f4-8f09-1427cf9763a0EnglishSymplectic ElementsDuke University Press2024Killeen, M-CWhat is it about confession scenes that makes them such a productive heuristic device in late twentieth-century French theater, given that so often playwrights only tease us with the prospect of confession’s truth-telling potential, all the better to quash it? Whether these disclosures are extracted under the glare of courtroom or police interrogations, or elicited in the more intimate settings of the bedroom or the analyst’s couch, modern theater’s interest in confessions appears to reside less in their probative value than in the questions they raise about the dramatic form and our investment in it. I propose to pursue this inquiry through a discussion of two plays: Marguerite Duras’s oft-staged récit from 1982, La Maladie de la mort, and Bernard- Marie Koltès’s 1986 play Dans la solitude des champs de coton. What fascinates me most about these “postdramatic” works is the curious way in which they appear to bear all the markings of confessions yet pointedly refuse to behave like them, thwarting our desire for revelation, catharsis, and closure at every turn. As performative utterances, these abortive confessions ultimately perform little apart from their own undoing. This failure is due in no small part to the persistence with which they direct our focus elsewhere: instead of the familiar spectacle of a character’s full and frank confession (assuming such a thing were even possible), the disquieting theater of Koltès and Duras demands instead that we attend to what we disavow. |
| spellingShingle | Killeen, M-C Scenes of misrecognition (Koltès, Duras) |
| title | Scenes of misrecognition (Koltès, Duras) |
| title_full | Scenes of misrecognition (Koltès, Duras) |
| title_fullStr | Scenes of misrecognition (Koltès, Duras) |
| title_full_unstemmed | Scenes of misrecognition (Koltès, Duras) |
| title_short | Scenes of misrecognition (Koltès, Duras) |
| title_sort | scenes of misrecognition koltes duras |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT killeenmc scenesofmisrecognitionkoltesduras |