mahr'svierteljahrsschriftfürästhetik
11
(2008), Nr.1/March
Rezension
Florence Dupont, Aristote ou le vampire du théâtre
occidental, Paris: Flammarion/Aubier 2007, 313 Seiten, € 22,–. 4990 Zeichen.
According
to section 7 of Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” the villain who poisoned
and withheld the monastery library’s pages of Aristotle’s lost second half of
the Poetics did so because he did not wish to make its message find the way to
the public. According to the monk convicted by Eco’s William of Baskerville,
Aristotle had also written a defense of laughter. And because laughter is a
property of common people as for instance peasants who give way to that
particular temptation of the devil Aristotle needs to be kept “pure” in the
shape of the Poetics as we know it. Some centuries or decades later – you
choose – that lack of a defense of laughter which is a fact in the Poetics as
we have it is turned against the whole text altogether.
It
is Florence Dupont who opens up an old account. As distinguished professor of
Latin language at the University of Paris-VII and specialist for antique
theatre with emphasis on orality her revaluation of antique culture with
respect to everyday and festive practices leads her to abandon master
narratives including that of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. With Aristotle – and
Hegel – , she holds (21), Nietzsche shares the opinion of a certain event of
origin of tragedy which basically neglects the complex changes of spoken and
written language, of the architectonic, artistic and musical institutions as
well as the social transformations that took place in ancient history.
For
Dupont the Poetics is a trap (12-14). Pointing at a still existent consensus
about the tradition of defending theatre in our (post-)cinematic days as she
takes pains to elucidate with the quarrel around the Festival of Avignon in
2005 – she speaks of a nouvelle querelle
des Bouffons – Dupont tries to
leave behind the old debate of those who intend to preserve theatre as text and
those who intend to found it on the body as shown up recently.
Going
back to the Greek-Latin environs – her books include Homère et Dallas:
introduction à une critique anthropologique, 1990; L’Invention de la
littérature,
Astonishingly
not mentioning the French classical theatre of 17th century – because of the
historical fact that the performances preceded the editions of texts – Dupont
identifies a mid-eighteenth century the first wave when Goldoni and others
displaced the harlequin and Diderot wrote a manifesto for a realist illusion. A
second wave during late nineteenth century is given when scenography replaced
the director and the space of stage became a fictional space for a hopefully ever
more competent audience deciphering instead of being drawn into the former real
space of actors. A third wave – for Dupont still important today – is detected
with Brecht’s rehabilitation of Aristotelian myth now reinforced by scenic
semiology.
Which
disaster? For Dupont who refers to an astonishing amount of recent French and
Anglo-Saxon research in the field it is still not easy to be a
non-Aristotelian. Hans-Thies Lehmann’s notion of post-dramatic theatre did not
change much, claims Dupont. Moreover, her scope directed at a résistance covers the whole of
theatre’s occidental history, for instance also a reading of Molière’s Bourgeois gentilhomme where, between
comedy and ballett, the figures obeyed a „raison musicale“ still different from
literary reason. It may be criticized that Dupont ignores to a large extent
those contemporaries who revalued the spectacle, like Artaud, Kantor or Fo. Her
answer is that those avantgardists still obeyed to a textocentrisme. Instead, for a retheatralization Dupont invokes the
cabaret, the operetta when play is still popular, in particular the boulevard
at which point she refers to the positive example of a movie (!), Marcel
Carné’s Les Enfants du paradis of 1945 (131). Still at stake remains to offer
“Some means for leaving contemporary Aristotelianism and not feeling bored in
the theatre” as the title of the concluding chapter has it.
Jean-Louis
Jeannelle (La faute á Aristote. Selon Florence Dupont, le philosophe grec, en
plaçant le texte avant le jeu, a tué
l’esprit du théâtre, in: Le Monde, Des Livres, October 19, 2007)
invokes that actor and philosopher Denis Guénoun’s claim that cinema has taken
over the imaginary and identification of the theatre (Le Théâtre est-il
nécessaire?, Circé 1997) is now surpassed by Dupont’s claim that the
catastrophy is not caused by cinema but by theatre’s early influential
theoretician Aristotle. Denis Guénoun (Pour le théâtre, merci Aristote, in: Le
Monde, Des Livres, October 26, 2007) replies that for Dupont –despite her
rebuttal of the subjection of scenic reality to interpretation by means of an
upheaval of the harlequin against professors – laughter comes academic. Also,
against the liquidatory rage against story, fable, drama and text, the play of
actors remains rooted in a language playing with words, ideas and emotions.
Guénoun defends Aristotelian theatre a an operation of research and aperture
transgressing the ritual of local identification. That does not seem
dialectical. But how and with which words will this be confronted. At which
stage? The debate will go on, in academic theatre of truth, to be sure.
Peter Mahr © 2008
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