Roger-Daniel Bensky`s Masque foudroyé : Book

Roger-Daniel Bensky’s Masque foudroyé :
Book Review
Peter Marteinson
For the Editors
Le masque foudroyé :
Lecture traversière du théâtre français actuel
Roger-Daniel Bensky (1997) Paris : Nizet, 296 pp. ISBN 2-7078-1227-7
This new book by Georgetown University’s Roger Bensky is an investigation of the hermeneutic enterprise as applied to theatrical,
dramaturgical and ludic aspects of twentieth-century French theatre –
Ionesco especially, but not solely – as Lavaudant, Bailly, Laou, Durif and
Valletti are considered in turn. It is a series of studies by the author, and
is structured rather like a garden of related vignettes. In the first part,
Mythophanies, Bensky develops a mythical paradigm for understanding
theatre, and then examines Bailly in terms of the playwright’s own mythical imagery; next Laou is similarly treated. In the second part,
Ludiographies, Valleti, Durif and Lavaudant are explored. The third part,
an annex of previously unpublished documents, includes an interview
between the author and Eugene Ionesco.
The approach Bensky takes is interesting and original – which is to
say it at first appears methodologically somewhat quirky – but ultimately
proves entirely fruitful : he begins by “re-reading” the Dionysus myth,
seen as in Nietzsche as a classical account of the origins of theatre, and
successfully reinterprets it as a paradigm for understanding the emerVol. 1 (N o s 1 - 3)
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gence of the mask and the ontological multiplicity it deliberately creates
in the “trans-historic now” of the theatrical act. This paradigmatic imago
then, throughout the book, illuminates the hermeneutic interpretation
becoming transfiguration and thereby renewed creation in the reading of
twentieth-century French theatre, and underpins the book’s contribution
to the philosophy of theatre as well. The complexity of the methods developed, however, make it difficult to abstract their essence in a form
such as that of the book review. We therefore discuss the work in an
arbitrary vivisection, and treat many elements with a regrettable brevity.
Let us first look at this clever “re-translation “of the myth of Dionysus, which begins with the section entitled “Naître en abîme “(Birth in the
Abyss):
Situé au carrefour de nombreuses traditions mythiques, [...] Dionysos est le
fils que Zeus, maître des dieux, conçoit avec Sémélé, petite-fille de Rhéa,
l’aïeule des déesses de la Terre et l’épouse de Kronos, dieu du Temps.
Sémélé, [...] liée à la lune, portera Dionysos six mois dans son sein. Puis,
cédant à une tentation d’Héra, épouse de Zeus, qui lui suggère que son amant
divin est peut-être un démon sous forme humaine, Sémélé exige que Zeus se
manifeste sans masque, c’est-à-dire dans son essence. Ce qui advient. Zeus
paraissant dans sa toute-puissance insoutenable, Sémélé, foudroyée, est
consumée par les flammes.
Dionysos-foetus est repris par Zeus, qui le portera à terme dans sa cuisse
divine. A sa naissance Héra, toujours vigilante, enverra les Titans, puissances
démoniaques, qui démembreront sans pitié le nouveau-né, dont le sang est
répandu sur le sol. Mais Rhéa, l’aïeule, reconstituera son corps et le ranimera.
Bensky then reminds us that Dionysus, going into a frenetic and ecstatic madness and finally making his way back to Olympus through Asia
Minor and Thrace, would finally re-establish a recognition of his original
maternal bearer, but by another, new, name: descending to Hades, he
brings her back and enthrones her once again on Olympus as the goddess Thyone, before himself marrying Ariane and thereby establishing a
relationship “between mask and labyrinth."
The author underlines the manner in which Dionysus therefore belongs to several natures at once (celestial, human, infernal), has undergone a dual gestation marked by an abyssal caesura, and has been dismembered and reconstructed. The result is the following recreation of
the significance of the myth: Dionysus, an ontologically multiple entity,
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becomes the mask of the actor, and thus the characters of the stage, and
his mother, the “textual space “which originally gave birth to this last,
comes to constitute a maternity recalled into existence by its very offspring, the mise en scène.
This is a new and fruitful way of rethinking the “debate “exemplified
in this issue of Applied Semiotics / Sémiotique appliquée by Übersfeld on the
one hand, who considers the theatre as a birth of the play from within
the text, and by Sarrazac on the other, who views the passage “from text
to stage “rather as a merely metaphoric truth, preferring a conception
which “goes from the director or author to the public “through a genesis
of meaning dependent on form alone. In the former framework, we
have a view of the mise en scène as a manner of solving, in part at least,
the riddle of Vitez’ “Sphinx that is the text, “whereas in the latter, this
riddle is not solved, but rather brought to bear, to fruition, and is thus
deliberately posed as an unanswered question by the mise en scène.
Bensky’s paradigm constitutes one way of arriving at a compelling synthesis of these paradoxical mutual geneses. Dionysus is therefore, as the
dramatic character deconstructed and thus understood through “dismemberment “by the hermeneutical process in the spectator’s mind, the
masque foudroyé, the shattered mask.
The author then goes on to look at Ionesco’s work in terms of this
mythographical paradigm, which he continues to develop and enrich. A
section entitled “Ionesco : Dionysos en amont et en aval “examines such a view
of La cantatrice chauve (the reader of course recognises the work translated
as The Bald Soprano) and La leçon. Here he exploits the “heterodox teachings “promoted along the erring path (the “creative folly”) of the god of
theatre.
In Ionesco we come to understand mise en scène as mise en chaos,
the creation of a destructive abyss, a nothingness that is the absurd of
Ionesco’s theatre, which is identified as the maelstrom brought about by
two conflicting elemental forces, as meaning, or absence of meaning, is
created through language out of a bottomless void and which nevertheless must pass through chaos, an excess of meaning, and through the
destruction of meaning which limits interpretation through the creator’s
guidance. In Ionesco this destruction is complete, and the very nothingness from which chaos sprang is contained within, and reborn through,
the chaos’ self-destruction. That at least is our interpretation of Bensky’s
poetic account of these conflicting elemental forces. He observes this
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turation / destructuration; emergence / submergence; progression/ retrogression. This analysis is sufficiently abstract that one is obliged to
turn to the book itself, which develops and explores the ambiguities of
the model, rather than attempting to it sum up in terms which tend to
eliminate them. Bensky, however, is entirely clear about the very ambiguities of his model, which reflect exactly those of the theatre of the absurd, or, as Ionesco himself preferred to call it, the theatre of derision. If
we may paraphrase him in translation: “Here, we discover the nodal
structure of the abyss in which the evolution (differentiation) and involution (de-differentiation or “paedo-morphism”) of the Dionysian ontogenetic scenario coincide. We shall later see that the apparent discontinuity of these structures – their divergence and diffractedness – constitute the dramaturgical Urgrund ‘(the “tektonikos”) of the so-called “absurd
theatre.”’
The next section of the book, entitled “Jean-Chrisophe Bailly : le corps
même plus à venir,” introduces into the author’s paradigm a pragmatic element articulated on the relationship between the body, mask and language of the actor, a dimension he exposes very pertinently through the
theatre of Bailly:
Porte béant sur le rien, pivotant sous “le souffle d’un dieu”; masque tendu
entre le fil de l’Amour et celui, contraire, d’un “dehors revenu et délivré de
tout présupposé”; corps qui demeurerait invisible” entre la main nue du réel et
la main gantée de l’irréel ; la parole de Jean-Christophe Bailly – qu’elle
s’affuble du nom féminin d’Ariane ou du nom masculin de Thésée – semble
obéir, en effet, à une “puissance envoûtée” se tenant “dans le pli du langage”.
Here the author borrows the symbolic imagery of the playwright in
question and rather ingeniously articulates a further structural metaphor
which seems to explain the nature of his work, going beyond description
and into the real anthropomorphic subconscious which, it seems certain,
allows us to understand the structures at hand in a new manner, in a way
which focuses on the self-genesis of the medium. When one transcends
the impulse to “translate” these images into an objective-descriptive
symbolic logic or similar terms, one sees that Bensky has put his finger
on the very imaginaire social on which the theatre depends, and in whose
meta-language it is spoken beneath and beyond translation into discursive language.
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Although he does not go into Dilthey’s or Heidegger’s philosophy of
mind, we see that he has seized certain of the same psychological truths
these two thinkers recognised. In the following passage, which heralds a
later chapter devoted to phantasia and mimésis, one is reminded of the former philosopher’s concepts of Erlebnisphantäsie and Erlebnis-ausdrücken,
also further examined by the latter, and their common Greek ancestry
then seems to come as no surprise in an artistic and aesthetic context:
Nous reviendrons à la distinction capitale - voire à la synthèse conflictuelle
– entre “phantasia” et “mimésis”. Pour l’heure, articulons plutôt une
contre-vision : derrière l’apparence d’une saisie extra-humaine, “olympienne”,
des choses, l’illumination de Bailly signifie en même temps une occultation,
peut-être volontaire. De l’autre côté du fil d’Ariane – de la main de Thésée
tenant cette attache à l’Amour, au passé, à la porte du réel, se tient non pas
une apesanteur où la Figure redevient virginale [...] m ais le Minotaure, tératos
archétypal auquel il faut faire face. Or, celui qui ne sait point que le monstre
intra-psychique l’attend, qui ne le voit même pas au creux de son labyrinthe, se
trouve déjà en état d’hypnose. Il se peut que le secret véridique des monstres
fabuleux – qu’ils se nomment Chimère, Méduse ou Minotaure – c’est de faire
croire à leurs victimes éprises d’infini qu’ils n’existent même pas et que la dévoration de leur moëlle psychique est le chemin inexorable de l’extase.
Here, in short, Bensky uses the mythical structures he elaborates to
explain the characteristics peculiar to Bailly’s theatre, notably his treatment body, voice and time, which in turn, appear to enhance our view,
in light of Bensky’s paradigm, of theatre as a form.
This he achieves in the next section of his examination of Bailly for
instance, “Le devenir-théâtre,” in which he evokes the image of the Egyptian night-goddess Nout, which the playwright himself describes in
Phèdre en Inde: “Rien, nulle part, n’atteint à la beauté du mythe égyptien de la
Nuit. Nout, la déesse au corps tatoué d’étoiles qui chaque jour avale et enfante le
soleil, penchée en voûte sur la terre qu’elle n’effleure que de l’extrémité de ses mains et
de ses pieds.” This Bensky employs to explain the ontological ambiguities,
the deliberate multiplicity of the character, the act, the stage and language itself in Bailly’s works. This rich development is considerably too
subtle to explain fully here.
Laou is then treated in terms of social identity-alterity, where the
images of mask (and dress), folly, blindness and ontological ambiguity
are again fruitfully applied in a very appropriate manner. Mindful perhaps of Durand’s anthropological perspective, and his imaginaire,
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Bensky develops a deep new understanding of the playwright without
any sense of forcing the work’s structures into the mythical paradigms,
which seem once again to coincide nicely with the very nature of the
theatre at hand.
The second section, Ludiographies, begins with a look at Valetti.
Here he examines the ludic aspect of theatre as a “manifest trap,” a
chaos of possible meanings which becomes purposefully and gaily lost in
itself, and in answer to the question of why this is so, he articulates a
four-tiered analysis based on the contexts of 1) the Work-in-progress, 2)
the wisdom of “not knowing,” 3) metatheatrality, and 4) The return of
the myth of the actor.
We then are led into an examination of Durif in a section entitled
“Vers un théâtre de l’aboli.” Here Bensky returns directly to the ontological perspective we spoke of earlier in comparing this work to
Heidegger’s thinking: reason, in Durif, is treated as an exorcism of
“thinking by negating” which “threatens the wholeness of the speaker,”
resulting in the liberating establishment of his Dasein’s legitimacy, his
In-der-Welt-Sein. Here we are again dealing with the central question of
identity and alterity. Durif’s theatrical character then, in keeping with
Heidegger’s perception of the Dasein as a lack, a need, a form of concerned questioning, is considered as an “être-pour-la-fugue,” a manifest
errancy in search of his own identity, and figuratively, as a “flight toward
the inside” which appears to signify the character’s “hauntedness by
alterity” that prevents immanent self-identification. Bensky sees the playwright’s theatrical character in light of an existential question: thrown
from the “paradise of his being,” he exists in an ontological marginality,
exiled as it were in time and space. Thus we see the image of the banished.
The last chapter, apart from the interesting appendix of first-hand
sources, is entitled “Lavaudant/Hamlet : paroles proférées paroles tuées. Journal
de bord à la Comédie-Française.” Here we meet with a fascinating look at
Lavaudant’s scenography in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. An extremely pertinent suite to the previous section, this chapter describes Bensky’s separation of the efficient being, the existence, of the words of the ghost,
Hamlet’s dead father, and their presence. Bensky points out that in this
production, the spectre is not in fact an immaterial presence, but a real
physical entity. The meaning of this? Prince Hamlet, driven into a hallucination on the “mnemic reality and the unresolved enigma presented by
this ghostly father,” is in fact “killed,” driven from life-in-the-world, by
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his father’s words, and therefore, is “unable to attain the existential.” In
other words, Hamlet, through the unseemly existence of his dead father’s command, like a poison in the ear of the son, is existentially neutralised, his “Dasein turned into a no-man’s-land.” This is an extremely
new and interesting way to conceive Hamlet’s resultant hesitating and
loss of purpose, and coincides quite perfectly with an interpretation of
his most famous soliloquy. This Bensky wryly interpolates with the existential question of the ghost’s seeming realness: the author poses it as
“(SP)E(C)TRE ou ne pas (SP)E(C)TRE?”
The final section of the book is an interesting collage of first-hand
writings never made public before – including some of the author’s correspondence with Lavaudant and Ionesco, a lengthy and interesting interview with the latter, and some short essays on Mesguich’s Romeo and
Juliet and theatrical noesis in Maldiney.
***
Clearly, Bensky’s understanding of Le Masque foudroyé is one which
penetrates beyond that of the actor, being merely his portrayed role, and
shatters the surface of the mask as illusory self-conception by and of the
character himself. In this way the collection of studies goes straight to
the heart of the enigmatic ontological question of identity and alterity,
and their confounding admixture in a misleading fusion of materiality
and immateriality becomes the central riddle which the theatre brings to
fruition, without solution. This is a work which deserves considerable
attention.
The only caveat we might wish to proffer is a matter of form. While
an approach which seems to harmonise so well with Heidegger might
well be expected to present some kind of rejection of Kant, we are nevertheless brought, by the wealth of loosely structured neologisms Bensky
coins, to think of Kant’s admonition against unnecessary lexical innovation in his preface to the Critique of Pure Reason. For while it is true that a
certain recul allows us sometimes “to understand the great thinkers of
yesteryear better than they themselves were able to explain their thinking,” there is nevertheless a strong argument against “inventing new
terms where existing ones, even in the dead languages, might serve us
better.” We therefore warn the reader ahead of time: the author of Le
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Masque foudroyé has created so many new words that some might find certain passages tiresome or confusing.
Nevertheless, there is a wealth of very interesting new conceptual
material here. The work appears only this month – and as Anne
Übersfeld said while we were discussing preparations for this issue some
months ago, it often takes a decade or more for new ideas to “penetrate
the minds” of the academic community. Bensky’s latest ideas may take
somewhat longer. Let us hope they do not.
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