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The Fragility of Beginnings: The First Genetic Stratum of Le Square by Marguerite Duras (1956)1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2008

MARIE-MADELEINE MERVANT-ROUX
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Abstract

It was as a branch of ‘genetic criticism’ that a genetics of the theatre first established itself in France as a scientific field of study. Applied to literature alone in the first place, it has since then gradually widened its scope of investigation. Taking Marguerite Duras's first play, Le Square (1956) as an example, this essay aims to demonstrate the main effects of such a disciplinary gestation on the ‘French’ approach to the creative processes as regards the theatre. On the one hand, the existence of well-tried methodological procedures for the study of manuscripts permits both a dynamic re-examination of dramatic works and a criticism of the myths which often surround them. On the other, apprehending the different textual materials and the other kinds of genetic documents produced around the stage according to a methodologically coherent manner reveals the constant interdependence of techniques and arts, and the need to improve models constructed for altogether different studies.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 33 , Special Issue 3: Genetics of Performance , October 2008 , pp. 263 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2008

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References

NOTES

2 Grésillon, Almuth, Éléments de critique génétique: Lire les manuscrits modernes (Paris: PUF, 1994), p. 7.Google Scholar

3 Ibid.

4 ‘Scènes de genèses théâtrales’, in Grésillon, Almuth and Léger, Nathalie, eds, Genesis. Manuscrits, Recherche, Invention, 26 (Théâtre) (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 2006), pp. 19–34.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., p. 19.

6 Another untimely death: R.-J. Chauffard, who played ‘He’ and was responsible for Duras and Claude Martin meeting, died in 1972.

7 Introductory note on the play, in Théâtre I (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 52.

8 Le Square, in Les Cahiers de la Comédie-Française, 14 (Winter 1994–5), pp. 43–80. This is a previously unpublished version.

9 Duras, Marguerite, Romans, cinéma, théâtre, un parcours, 1943–1993 (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 1997), p. 458.Google Scholar

10 Blanchot's article was originally published in the NRF (Nouvelle Revue Française), 39 (March 1956).

11 Duras, Combat, 15 September 1956.

12 For a description of the set, see the author's interview with Jacques Noël, 12 November 1997.

13 Dullin to Elise Jouhandeau: ‘I will put you in a bag, if you persist. Physical action is not imperative throughout the text. Your drama should be smouldering, smouldering.’ See Monique Surel-Tupin, Charles Dullin, Arts du Spectacle (Louvain-la Neuve: Cahiers Théâtre Louvain, 1985), p. 233.

14 Ibid., p. 134.

15 Interview with Gilles Costaz, in ‘Théâtre: la plainte-chant des amants’, L'Arc, no. 98 (1985), pp. 58–67, here p. 65.

16 Other states of the text may still exist.

17 The program, which ran for one hour and forty-five minutes, was broadcast on France Culture on 4 June 1995. A recording is conserved at the Inathèque de France in Paris.

18 For all the variants of T1, see Appendix 2 below.

19 See Blanchot, ‘La Douleur du dialogue’.

20 Interview with Gilles Costaz, ‘Théâtre: la plainte-chant des amants’, p. 59.

21 The conference ‘Genèse d'un texte, gésine d'un théâtre’, by Almuth Grésillon, Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Ropux (and Michael Lonsdale, who kindly attended), can be consulted online on the website of the ENS of the Rue d'Ulm, sector ‘Diffusion du savoir’, http://www.diffusion.ens.fr/index.php?res=conf&idconf=455.