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‘Each in our open-ended way, we are multitudinous’—Les Nombres, by Andrée Chedid
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Extract
The Lebanese-French playwright Andrée Chedid begins her play, Le Montreur (1967), with a song sung by ‘une—ou plusieurs—voix’. As the voice becomes voices become voice, the song addresses the audience saying, ‘Ce soir, ce soir, ce soir, amis, / Le Sire Montreur nous dévoilera: / L'unité et la pluralité des choses!’ Like the image of many voices among one voice, the trope of the ‘unity and plurality of things’ is arguably Chedid's vision of human consciousness—a consciousness that is both one and many; a consciousness that is embedded in a relationship with the other, which is figured as a connectedness that makes society. In Les Nombres (1965) and Bérénice d'Egypte (1962), through her writing and use of theatrical space and sound, Chedid constructs a unique vision of consciousness—configured as a vital empathy with the multitudes. She centres her revolutionary vision of consciousness on her women characters, who, by interacting with ‘the multitudes’ (le peuple, la foule, les nombres) open the possibility that human connectedness can make consciousness multiple and thereby transcends the dichotomies of self and other.
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References
Notes
1. Chedid, Andrée, Théâtre I: Bérénice d'Egypte, Les Nombres, Le Montreur (Paris: Flammarion, 1981), p. 240.Google Scholar ‘One—or many—voices.’
2. Ibid., p. 241. ‘Tonight, tonight, tonight, my friends, the grand showman will unveil for us the unity and plurality of things.’
3. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 41–2.Google Scholar
4. Cixous, Hélène and Clément, Catherine, La Jeune Née (Paris: Union Générate d'Editions, 1975), p. 150.Google Scholar ‘Starting from the relationship of the two sexes to the Oedipus complex, the boy and the girl are steered toward a division of social roles such that women ‘inevitably’ have lesser productivity because they ‘sublimate’ less than men and that symbolic activity— hence the production of culture—is the work of men.’ Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman (trans. Wing, Betsy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 82.Google Scholar
5. See, for instance, Buber's, MartinI and Thou, translated by Smith, Ronald Gregor (Edinburgh: Clark, 1937).Google Scholar
6. ‘Ogundipe-Leslie, Molara, ‘Women in Africa and Her Diaspora: From Marginality to Empowerment’ in Davies, Carole Boyce and Ogundipe-Leslie, Molara, eds., International Dimensions of Black Women's Writing (New York: New York University Press, 1995), p. 15.Google Scholar
7. Beaulieu, Jean-Philippe and Tomek, Suzanne, ‘Réécriture et évolution romanesque dans les dernières Œuvres d'Andrée Chedid’, New Zealand Journal of French Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1993, p. 30.Google Scholar ‘In Chedid's work, several very complex phenomena are masked by the appearance of a surface level simplicity, which gives the texts a more postmodern coloration than it had at first seemed.’
8. Miller, Judith G., Introduction to Hélène Cixous, The Name of Oedipus. Song of the Forbidden Body, in Plays by French and Francophone Women: A Critical Anthology, edited by Makward, Christiane P. and Miller, Judith G. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 249.Google Scholar
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 250.
11. Cixous, Hélène, Le Nom d'Œdipe: Chant du corps interdit (Paris: des femmes, 1978), p. 84.Google Scholar ‘[Death] has stretched out over me to sleep and my body has turned to sand for you. How could my body cease feeling death with yours lying upon me?’ The Name of Oedipus: Song of the Forbidden Body, translated by Judith G. Miller in Plays by French and Francophone Women, p. 324.
12. Cixous, , La Jeune Née, p. 143.Google Scholar ‘ways of relating that are completely different from the tradition ordained by the masculine economy … a kind of desire that wouldn't be in collusion with the old order of death.’ The Newly Born Woman, p. 78.
13. Cixous, , Le Nom d'Œdipe, p. 86.Google Scholar ‘It is you my night surging over me as surely as I am the silent sea whose flesh has just opened so that you may fill it. And we are entering each other My mother, My child. My flesh is restful here. I shall cease to suffer. I have forgotten everything. I no longer know who is dying.’ The Name of Oedipus, p. 326.
14. Cixous, , La Jeune Née, p. 143Google Scholar: ‘a desire that would invent Love’; ‘grateful acknowledgement of the intense and passionate work of knowing’. The Newly Born Woman, p. 78.
15. Chedid, , Théâtre I, p. 121.Google Scholar ‘It seems to me that the bits of our common face would rise more freely from a rough, bare universe that remembers nothing.’
16. Judith G. Miller, Introduction to The Goddess Lar or Centuries of Women in Plays by French and Francophone Women, p. 167.
17. Merope Pavlides, ‘Restructuring the Traditional: Myth in Selected Works of Cixous, Chedid, Wittig and Yourcenar’, dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1986, p. 179: ‘Whereas the work of Cixous and Wittig seems founded on the need for the creation of a specifically female mythology, that of Chedid appears as an attempt to re-examine Woman's role as it relates to all of humanity.’
18. Miller, Judith G., ‘Andrée Chedid: Faire parler la bonté au théâtre’, conference paper given at York University, Canada, 05 1995, p. 2.Google Scholar ‘Wouldn't it be better to remain alert to the cry of the world, to live fully and without veils in the presence of the other, and to accept life's at times painful stirrings?’
19. Ibid., p. 4. ‘She always employs a spatial imagination that abolishes boundaries.’
20. Ibid., p. 5. ‘We see on stage these two worlds together, in the same moment as participants in the same universe. The fiction of different worlds is rendered more evident even as the interdependence of people is reinforced.’
21. Chedid, , Théâtre I, p. 40.Google Scholar ‘Homme-tronc’ translates as quadriplegic, while ‘grondement de la foule’ means ‘angry growling of the crowd’.
22. Ibid., pp. 26–7. ‘Un jet de lumière’ is a ray of light, while ‘comme dans une trappe’ means as if into a trap door.
23. Ibid., p. 29. ‘Who can hear you?’
24. Ibid., p. 76. ‘We are listening to you.’
25. Ibid., p. 149. ‘In the background, during the whole scene, we hear the bustling crowd, which communicates its vibrations to the stage.’
26. Ibid., p. 17. ‘He has no arms and no legs, but when he speaks, it's as if this land comes to me. I can no longer ignore his voice.’
27. Ibid., p. 158. ‘I cannot abandon them.’
28. Ibid., p. 167. ‘I will raise myself like a mother among you! We will go down to Kédès!… We will fight by the torrent of Kison! I will turn each man into a hero!’
29. Ibid., pp. 121–2. ‘ambiguous, torn between contrary voices. [She is] permeable and penetrated. [She] listens to an interior universe, but is also tributary, in solidarity with others. At once guide and instrument.’
30. Pavlides, , ‘Restructuring the Traditional’, p. 252.Google Scholar
31. Chedid, , Théâtre I, p. 17.Google Scholar ‘How one breathes outside, Dion. I hate these walls which isolate me. I suffocate under these ornate ceilings. All this marble oppresses me. All this gold paralyses me. I am separated from the heavens and the earth.’
32. Ibid., p. 59. ‘I want to know their lives, share if only for an instant their daily worries. In the shelter of these walls, in this offensive grandeur, I knew nothing.’
33. Ibid., p. 49. ‘We are nothing without them.’
34. Miller, , ‘Andrée Chedid: Faire parler la bonté au théâtre’, p. 4.Google Scholar ‘Assuming that goodness is a process, mobile and changing, Chedid offers us a theatre in movement.’
35. Ibid., p. 6. ‘reveals itself as a communal world, a world where the ‘me’ never exists without a ‘you’, or a whole series of ‘you's united.’
36. Ibid., p. 14.
37. Ibid., ‘a lucid connection between the human being and the world’.
38. Ibid., p. 4. ‘On stage, she constructs a thickness more than a hierarchy, which works to include in its texture the audience itself.’