Notes
Translator's note: These notes have been edited and abbreviated with the author's permission.
INTRODUCTION )'
1. For a discussion of the necessity of transcending the "linguistic metaphor" !: in favor of a generalized semiotic approach, see Garroni's important study (1972). | The critique of the notion of /artistic language/ is developed further in Garroni jj
(1977)- '
2. This is a discipline that I consider eminendy theoretical, and I would like ■ to extricate it from the narrow domain of applied studies to which it has gen- [1 erally been confined. Obviously, I am not opposed to empirical applications, which j[ are the only way of trying out the validity of a theory, but 1 believe that at the ! •present state of research, theater semiotics still needs a carefully constructed method- I ological foundation, without which the textual analyses of specific perform- ; ances will yield very limited results. A small number of readings of individual
works have nevertheless emerged. See Corvin (1971); The Drama Review (1979); Pavis (1981c).
3. I must note an important divergence from my earlier work (De Mariiiis 1978/19799), a divergence that is more terminological than substantial. Though working within a methodological horizon very similar to the current one, I previously used the term /performance text/ in a purely descriptive sense, while referring to the performance as an ''empirical object" {1978: 69). I must point out that the term /text/ will generally be used in the course of this volume in both of its accepted meanings, i.e., to designate concrete discursive occurrences (aesthetic, pictorial, literary, scenographic, or performance texts) as well as the theoretical construct that permits the analysis of these occurrences in their semiotic functioning.
4. For a broader view, see my previous bibliographical publications: De Marinis and Magli (1975), De Marinis (1977a).
5. The terms /co-textual/ and /contextual/ originate in Textlinguistik (see Conte, ed., 1977).
6. Obviously, there are invariable co-textual levels and properties, such as the heterogeneity of expressive materials, codes, and the like (which function as constitutive elements of the model), and co-textual aspects which are proper and specific to each individual performance text. In reference to a given theatrical performance, : co-textual analysis operates both on the semantic level and on the level of expressive materials, above all through the identification (postulation) of the code rules that correlate them.
7. By /cultural synchrony/ I mean the "(dynamic) system of a given culture," conceived as the "sum total of all synchronous texts" (hence Kristeva's denomination of the /general text/). It should be clear that the synchronous texts of a given cultural systém are not only those that are strictly contemporary, nor all of the latter. On the other hand, all discursive occurrences (even those produced in different eras and/or originating in different cultural and geographical areas) that the culture in question validates as (its own) texts constitute the art of the cultural synchrony (see 2.4.2. and especially 5.4.)
8- The aspects inherent to the performance context will be treated in chapters 6 and 7.
9. For these reasons, the comprehension of the perforrnahce text will not be reduced to a matter of simple decoding, but will be conceived as a complex interpretive
190
Notes to pages 4-14
practice that brings into play all inferential modalities having to do with implied, unstated elements, "invented codes," uncoded determinants, and the like (see 3.5., 4.2., and especially chapter 7).
10. On the structure of semantic space and its relationship to textual production, see Eco (1975:178-82; 1979: 24; and especially 1981b, regarding the encyclopedia as a "regulating hypothesis" and the distinction between overall competence and local encyclopedias).
11. These are the traces that permit us to speak of /partially present performances/ at least in the case of works that are viewable and re-viewable directly and/or through audiovisual means. (See chapter 2.)
12. As we will see in chaper 6, in the case of theater we must make way for a broader and more complex understanding of communication than the conception that reduces it to a simple exchange of information. Appropriate consideration must be given to the characteristic of manipulative action which is carried out by the sender on the receiver.
13. On the "empty areas" (Leerstellen) and points of mdeterminacy in the literary text, see Iser (1972,1976), whose work I will discuss in relation to reception in chapter 7.
14.1 will gradually provide an analytic-descriptive redefinition of the concept of /genre/ throughout the course of this volume, and in an explicit and systematic way in chapter 7. For the concept of /frame/ see below, 4.6.2.
15. The distinction between theater semiotics and the textual analysis of performance should be clearly noted. Textual analysis is only one aspect of theater semiotics, even 0 it is the most important aspect. The metadiscipliaary function I am speaking of could then be assigned to theater semiotics understood in the broader sense, which would nevertheless be carried out on the bails of the theoretical framework provided by textual analysis.
16. A more recent frame of reference for my methodological approach can be found in the theory of a-centered structures and local models, which originated in the field of physics and mathematics and was subsequently adopted in the humanities and social sciences (see Petitot 1977, 1979).
17. For example, the coherence and completeness of a performance text are ultimately found in the "pragmatic" characteristics which the receiver {spectator, analyst) must decide to attribute to a given performance (see 2.3., below).
18.1 am convinced, however, that the validity of a theory can never be measured solely on the basis of practical applications and concrete proofs. There is never a completely satisfactory relation between a theory and its practical examples. See Rirffini (1978a: 22).
19. The fact does not seem to hinder semiotic studies in other aesthetic fields with as much internal heterogeneity as contemporary theater. This is certainly the case with literature, the visual arts, and music.
20. At this juncture I must again point out the importance of distmguishing between theatrical performance (a material object, an observable phenomenon) and the performance text, which is not a theoretical model of all performances, nor a model of everything in performances, but rather a model of the textual aspect of per-, fonnance, i.e., relating to the functioning of semiosis in theater. Furthermore, the flexibility of the model I am proposing allows it to take into account the typological diversifications (genres) that occur within the class (macro-genre) of theatrical performance.
21. On the relationship between these new scientific fields and experimental theater in America dining the 1960s and 1970s, see Schechner and Mintz (1973) and Stern (1973).
22. The current interest in the theoretical aspects of theater among contemporary theatrical practitioners is part of a long and important tradition. In the work of
Notes to pages 14r-20
191
many theoreticians of cinema and theater of the early twentieth century (from Ap-pia to Artaud, from Eisenstein to Brecht and Decroux), a great deal of emphasis is given to linguistic issues. Furthermore, many members of the Prague school, the founders of theater semiotics as a scientific discipline, also worked as directors and playwrights.
1. DRAMATIC TEXT AND MISE-EN-SCENE
1. The conflict between creators of the written text and theatrical practitioners is a long-standing one, even in semiotics. It can be found in the work of the Prague school where, for example, Jindrich Honzl takes the writers' side, and Jiry Vel-trusky the practitioner's side (see Matejka and Titunik, eds., 1976).
2. We must therefore shift away from the written text to-the performance as the object of study, rather than attempt to relate two entities which are incompatible, as we shall see in 1.5., because of the irreversibility of the process of transcoding leading from the written text to its staging.
3. I am referring to the fact that not all the theatrical performances have a preexisting written "text," regardless of how broadly one attempts to extend the application of that term. For the moment I will simply note my disagreement with the different attempts made by such scholars as Bettetini (1975: 86), Ruffini (1979: 13), and Ubersfeld (1981:13,18) to associate a written text with each and every theatrical event.
4. An example is found in Steen Jansen's initial attempt to apply Hjemslev's theory to dramatic analysis (see 1.2.).
5. Ruffini (1978b: 6-7) demonstrates that if one must refer to a constant or invariant, in many cases it is the performance itself that fulfills such a function. He mentions the "nineteenth-century productions in the tradition of the 'great actor,' characterized by a very low level of 'respect' for the text, in contrast with the importance attributed to the 'individuality' of the protagonist."
6.1 must note however that I have dealt here with only one aspect of Jansen's extensive theoretical work. Yet it is an important aspect, since it influenced his approach to the dramatic text as a whole. Aware of the problem, he later attempted to go beyond the conception of the dramatic text as a constant. This effort was, in my view, unsuccessful, since it involved only the nominal repudiation of the term (see 1978b: 33, for example). See also 1.6., below.
7. On the utility of film and television photography in the reconstruction of performance, see 2.4.
8. Nevertheless, more recently, Pagnini's position on the relation text/ performance has become more nuanced, and his attention to the theatrical event has increased (Pagnini 1978: 1980).
9. The protosemiotic studies by the Prague structuralists I already mentioned— Honzl, Bogatyrev, Burian, Veltrusky, and Mukarovsky—are obviously very important (see Matejka and Titunik, eds., 1976).
10. "The vast majority of the productions in the performing arts . . . have a subject that develops in time, hence a fable, an anecdote, an action composed of a sequence of interrelated values. This is what we call affabulation" (60).
11. For a more detailed discussion of the theoretical model of the relations between literature and performance proposed by Kowzan, see Ruffini (1978a). This is nevertheless an example of what I will later describe as dual-reversible models in 1.5.
: 12. For an example of the slippages from the analytic to the prescriptive-normative approach in the type of studies under discussion, see Serpieri, who writes that "the possibilities for mise-en-scene are certainly extremely varied, but the text does not allow violations at the 'discrete' level. Variations do occur in vast quantities in
-   J I*
KfW
192
Notes to pages 20-24
much of the directorial work of the past few years, particularly within the avant-garde. Restraints may be identified at least at the following points: the illegitimacy of falsifying the line of action by changing the order of the scenes or the acts; the illegitimacy of cutting mdiscriminately or drastically reducing the number of characters; the illegitimacy of mixing together disparate pieces of the text. . . ;the illegitimacy of overturning a pertinent sign-correlation in the text through ignorance of the code" (1977:99, emphasis added). Gulli Pugliatti's attempt to divide directorial efforts into good/legitimate and bad/iUegitimate "depending on the extent to which they can be called 'semioric' "(1978b: 17) is as erroneous as Serpieri's approach.
13. See Larthomas (1972), Bettetini (1975), and, in particular, Gulli Pugliatti. (1976: 70-71). For a systematic definition of theatrical performance as /performance text/, or as a (macro-) text composed of different partial texts (verbal, nonverbal, or mixed), see chapter 2 and following.
14. My postulation of a specific textual structure for each performance (chapter 3) takes into account the fact that, in performances, partial texts and codes are in most cases related to each other hierarchically, with subordinate and dominant positions varying according to each case, and which therefore do not always privilege the dramatic text a priori, as would follow from (a).
15. On the problem of the graphic description/transcription of the performance, see 24.3. The use of the terms language/metalanguage (and text/metatext) is intended in the strictly technical sense: by /metalanguage/1 mean "a system in which the content plane is in itself constituted by a system of signification" (Barthes 1964: 80); in other words, a language that "deals with" another language (see also Rey-Debove 1978). I am interested in demonstrating how, in performance, verbal language cannot function as metalanguage in relation to other, nonverbal languages in the mise-en-scene, and that the dramatic text cannot be considered a metatext with the performance as object-text.
16. See her definition of text T as a variable constant, and particularly the concept the pre-textual synthesis S "as a spectrum of performance options allowed by the organization of the linguistic material of the text. . . which are to be transmitted into R [theatrical realization] according to the direction offered by one of its interpretations" (13-14)-
17. Gulli Pugliatti's confusion is nominally resolved in 1978b (12), although not in its substantial consequences.
18. See Ruffini's definition of the script/dramatic text (1978a: 126), cited below in 1.6.
19.1 will discuss the concept of the dramatic text as a set of "orders" or "optional instructions for use," as well as the difference between a directive and a prescriptive text in i.8v below.
20. See note 12 above.
21.1 have taken the term "contextual" from Ruffini (1976a and 1976b). For a discussion of this issue, see 2.4.2.
22. Even contemporary theater offers examples of residue-texts, in the broad sense as well as the strict sense, where dramatic writing attempts to come closer to writing based on a staged performance, and to "incorporate" it in some way. We can distinguish at least two kinds of instances where this occurs which are quite distinct from each other in their processes and objectives: (a) situations where stage directions in the text are amplified either with a normative aim, as occurred in Pirandello's work, or with the aim of encouraging an independent literary fruition of the play, which happens in the case of more recent dramatic writing (see 1.6.); (b) situations where the written script based on an actual production reestablishes the dramatic text itself as only one of the many moments in the evolution of the theatrical work, a point of arrival, an intermediate stop, rather than a point of departure (as in Grotowski's Apocalypse cum figuris [1968] or Barba's Mm fars hus [1972], but
Notes to pages 24-28 193
also in the collective writing attempted by Scabia in Zip [1965] and in Scontri generali [1969]). In this second case, the dramatic text or script often does not exist in the concrete sense prior to the performance (see Ruffini 1979: 13).
23. According to Livio, "in order to dissipate possible misunderstandings, it should be clear that it is not from the script that the playwright's directorial ap- i| proach has to be deduced, but rather that the script and other similar 'proofs of evidence' provide a useful way of understanding the mise-en-scene of the author's time" (32).
24. This is obviously a difficulty which extends to a posteriori metatexts (/performance texts/ in the proper sense), and which has made these very difficult to produce. In the case of the dramatic text, the situation is complicated by the existence of literary conventions which have always made it impossible to resort to systems of complex notation (and to shift from verbal description to attempts at symbolic transcription). The dramatic text does not constitute a notational system (unlike, for example, the musical score), and this fact gives rise to the irreversibility of the dramatic text -* performance (performance text) sequence, as we shall see in the following section.
25.1 must repeatedly emphasize that, in my view, every individual performance of a play constitutes a unique, independent textual occurrence. As we shall see in chapter 2, this is related to the characteristics of uniqueness and unrepeatability which are mtrinsic to the theatrical phenomenon.
26. Maroth' maintains that the scemri are of greater documentary interest than full-length comedies of the same period, an assertion he attempts to prove by comparing a scenario by Flaminio Scala (U marito) with its corresponding comedy {llßnto marito), which was subsequently published in Venice in 1618. Nevertheless, he also cautions against overestimating the documentary authenticity of the scemri (214).
27. For the time being we can conceive of this performance metatext as a dramatic text which the analyst completes with a descriptive translation into linguistic code (or with symbolic transcription) of the paralinguistic and nonverbal components of a staging of that text. See 2.4.3. ^or further discussion of this issue. I
28. These characteristics are partly voluntary, partly involuntary. The involun-
tary traits are linked to the actor's voice and phonatory apparatus during the deliv- |{
ery of a given line. (For a discussion of so-called natural or unintentional signs in
theater, see De Marinis 1979a: 17.) ;lj
29. For the description of these properties, see Goodman (1968: 130-53). Accord- f, ing to Goodman, the functions of "scores" (i.e., the texts that constitute notational
systems) are as follow: "First, a score must define a work, marking off the performances that belong to the work from those that do not. . .. What is required is that j'i all and only performances that comply with the score be performances of the work" (128). Furthermore, "the score (as a class of copies or inscriptions that so define the work) must be uniquely determined, given a performance and the notational sys- j tern" (130). I must point out that, for Goodman, the term /compliance/ is,inter- ji: changeable with /denotation/, if its meaning is extended to encompass "a system : where scores are correlated with performances complying with them, or words 5 with their pronunciations, as well as a system where words are correlated with lj what they apply to or name" (143-44). Therefore, the expression/to comply with/is j interchangeable with /to be denoted by/, and /to have as compliant/ is interchangeable with /to denote/.
30. According to Goodman, "the text of a play is a composite of score and script" (210). "A script, unlike a sketch, is a character in a notational scheme and in a language but, unlike a score, is not in a notational system. The syntactic but not all the 1 semantic requirements are met. 'Script' here is thus not confined to cursive inscrip-
tions or to the work of playwrights and film writers. In general, the characters of natural languages and of most technical languages are scripts" (199).
194
Notes to pages 28-31
31. An exception could perhaps be found in basic stage directions of the type "Enter X" or "Exit Y," which are, however, few in number.
32. This is true for both the traditional dramatic text and for the technical "script," i.e., the text that is prepared by the director and his collaborators for a production, and which, in addition to the dramatic text which can be modified to a greater or lesser degree, includes detailed stage directions, with instructions for staging, delivery, movements, lights, costumes, and the like. Though they sometimes contain elements of symbolic notation, scripts are in fact written in a language that does not satisfy all the requirements of notationality: hence scripts do not constitute "scores." The case of stage directions for ballet is rather different, at least as far as Labanotation is concerned. Goodman defines Laban's method as "a discursive language comprising several notational subsystems" (216), which "provides for more or less specific scoring" and also offers "explicit license to describe in detail or leave open certain aspects of a movement" (215-16). Nevertheless, the "flexibility" of Laban's 'language," while not affecting "the score-to-performance steps . . . leaves the performance-to-score steps insufficiently determined" (216). Thus, while ballet notation must always succeed in "uniquely deterrnin[ing] the classes of performance belonging to -the work," it is often unable to fulfill the second function of the score, that is, to be "uniquely deterrnined, given a performance and the notational system" (129-30). In other words, even in the case of a quasi-score such as the ballet script, the reversibility of the process of performance transcoding is very problematic. The difference between the dramatic text and the technical script is quite another matter. This difference results from the fact that performances (or transcodings) of the dramatic text are constituted by different productions of the same play, while the transcodings of a technical script are provided by various individual performances of the same theatrical production. Hence the non-notationality of the dramatic text and that of the script involve different phenomena and produce different consequences. In fact, the difference between the dramatic text and the technical script can be compared to the difference between the text of a musical work and the interpretative score prepared by the conductor. Yet, while in the case of musical performance the notationality of the language in both texts allows the sequence "text -» score -> performance" to be reversed (at least theoretically), this is not possible in the case of the dramatic text and the technical script.
33. To speak of "fidelity" (or its absence) in the performance of a text makes sense only in a situation where the (notational) characteristics of the text allow this "fidelity" to be verified with objective criteria.
34. Here, too, the problem is not quantitative but qualitative. I can admit that in some cases the difference between the two metalinguistic entities would be very slight (e.g., in the case of a dramatic text with very precise, detailed stage directions, which are followed with the utmost "fidelity" in the theatrical production). But this difference cannot be measured or compared, given the complete irreversibility of the path leading from one to the other through the process of transcoding. The difference is at any rate qualitatively guaranteed by the difference in the respective objectives of the two entities.
35. These schemas are also inspired by Ruffini (1978a: 143). I must note however that in his very relevant description and critique of dual-reversible models, Ruffini incorrectly associates Koch (1969) with these models. In my view, Koch is committed to the idea of irreversibility (see 1969: 52-53 and passim). See also Noth (1972: 17-18).
36. As further evidence of their initial lack of literary autonomy, Shakespeare's plays are without explicit stage directions in the first posthumous, folio edition of 1623. According to Pagnini, the appearance of the earliest precious printed versions at the beginning of the 1600s demonstrated that quite soon these
Notes to pages 31-34
195
plays "aimed not only at becoming associated with theatrical events, but at finding a dignified place in the kingdom of literature ... on library shelves, next to established literary masterpieces" (Pagnini). In other cases, the scarcity or absence of explicit stage directions can be explained by the existence of rigid, long-established canons of performance which made stage directions superfluous. This was the case in classical Greek theater and in Italian theater of the Renaissance (Ottolenghi 1979: 21-22).
37. Much has been written on the prescriptive, totalitarian function of Pirandello's stage directions. The author's intention was to control with the utmost precision not only the concrete elements of performance, but also the intellectual and emotional reactions of the actors, reducing the director's intervention to a minimum. See Bartolucci's analysis (1973).
38. The dramatic text is not necessarily predestined for theatrical production. On the other hand, each and every type of text, whether literary or not, can be rendered in theatrical form, contrary to a long-standing stereotype. On this issue, I will cite my earlier assertion (De Marinis 1977a: 43): "Among literary texts, the distinction between dramatic and nondramatic texts has meaning only if one remains on the literary plane. From the theatrical point of view, it loses all theoretical relevance, as well as any practical importance: the fact that, so far, it is mainly 'dramatic texts' which are put on stage does not exclude the possibility that any literary text, dramatic or not (or even pictorial or musical), can be 'made theatrical,' 'made dramatic.' "
39. Jansen defines the dramatic situation, i.e., the basic unit of the dramatic text, as "a unit with a dramatic aspect that successfully combines a sequence of elements belonging to the spoken lines with- a group of elements belonging to the stage directions. Among the latter, there must be elements that belong to the subcategory of the characters, since there are also elements that belong to the lines, and at least one ultimately unspecified element belonging to the setting'' {1973: 264). When this statement is compared with the definition proposed by Jansen (1968: 77), the critic's attempt to overcome the rigidity of his earlier approach becomes obvious.
40. On what basis can it be said that the descriptive parts of a novel, for example, "cannot also be appropriately acted out in a performance," while the stage directions in a dramatic text can be readily followed? Is it really possible to distinguish stage directions as a separate group distinct from fictional descriptions? I believe that they are different only in their destination. Moreover, to maintain, as Jansen does, that opera and ballet contain "elements of music and dance that cannot be represented equally appropriately in a text" reveals the restrictive limits of his literary-linguistic conception of the text. This leads to his denying textual status to the musical score, the opera libretto, and choreographic notes.
41. RufHni is not alluding to the technical script in the proper sense, but uses the expression to designate the dramatic text in order to stress its theatrical destination and the importance of its stage directions (110).
42. In reformulating his provisional definition of the script, Ruifini draws an important distinction between explicit stage directions and extrapolated stage directions (111). This distinction solves the difficulty posed by texts which are usually considered dramatic but are without stage directions. Above all, however, it allows us to broaden the category of script, so as to include any type of text (novels, essays, or the like) that can be treated theatrically, i.e., furnished with extrapolated stage directions.
43. I use the term /pragmatics/ according to its current general meaning in textual linguistics, above and beyond the different nuances attributed to it by individual authors. See, in particular, Petofi (1974b: 205), who defines pragmatics as the study of the text from the point of view of /context/, in the threefold sense of
196
Notes to pages 34-39
"extralinguistic context of a natural language," "extralinguistic (communicative) context of a verbal expression," and "verbal context of a verbal expression" (I will call the latter the /co-text/; see 2.7.). Bar-Hillel's conception is even more appropriate to my own analysis, since it associates pragmatics with the study of "the essential dependency of communication on the speaker and on the listener, on the linguistic context and on the extralinguistic context in natural language," as well as on "the availability of deep knowledge, the ability of the users to acquire this deep knowledge and the good will of the.participants in the communicative act" (cited in Eco 1979: i4n.). To remain within a narrower definition, we must understand pragmatics as "the theory that specifies the conditions according to which texts ... are appropriate in relation to a given context" (Wolf, in Casetti, Lumbelli, and Wolf 1978: 22). I will deal with this aspect of theatrical pragmatics in chapters 6 and 7.
44. On the semantic-pragmatic aspects of textual and linguistic enunciation, see Benveniste (1970), Langages 13 and 17, Ducrot (1978), Recanati (1979), and Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1980).
45. See Rastier's insistence on the dialogical structure of dramatic text and, consequently, on its dual pattern of enunciation (author-characters) (1971). Some interesting points are also made in Thomas (1973), using the performative model by Wunderlich (1971).
46. For Benveniste, discourse and story are obviously two theoretical types of discourse which are often intertwined in the same text, although the fact that each one dominates alternately over the other can constitute the basis for a concrete taxonomy.
47. Segre's schemas are inspired by Pagnini (1978: iyiii.). In two subsequent articles Segre sHghtly alters his model of the narrative text (in the innermost rectangle, "1" replaces "I/You"), which, however, does not change its overall meaning (see Segre 1980, 1981).
48. For a definition of the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts see Searle (1969) and Ducrot (1977)- The two studies differ considerably with regard to the delimitation of the three kinds of speech act, their reciprocal relationships, and their degree of conventionality. See "Les actes de discours," in Communications 32 (1980), which includes articles by Ducrot, Anscombre, de Comulier, Nef, Recanati, Roulet, Zobet, Parret, and Vershueren; Versus 26/27 (I9^o); and Cahiers de linguistique franaise 2/3 (198X). Thus far, the most important attempt to elaborate a systematic theory of speech acts, especially illocu-tionary acts, has been carried out by Searle. Searle's many studies offer a particularly thoughtful analysis of the structure of illocutionary acts, the conditions that are necessary and sufficient for their success, their constitutive rules, and how they relate to propositional and enunciative acts as well as to perlocutionary acts. I will discuss Searle's taxonomy of illocutionary acts in chapter 6 (see Searle 1969, 1975a).
49. For a basic bibliography of the broad range of application of speech-act theory, see Sbisa, ed. (1978: 28, 296).
50. On the concept of a perlocutionary goal or objective, see Austin (1962), cited in note 63. We can suppose that, in discourse, the sequence of speech acts is structured according to a hierarchy of goals: see the psycholirtguistic work of Castelfranchi and Parisi (1980: 397ft.).
51. Van Dijk has pointed out that in many cases (such as conversations) the texf s only level of coherence is the level of the macro-act that can be assigned to it (1977a: 246). In the example^ of the telephone conversation just given, the initial greetings and salutations are related to the rest of the discourse pragmatically but not seman-tically, since they are necessary for the successful outcome of the act of requesting. Van Dijk suggests that we conceive of macro-speech acts as pragmatic macrostruc-
Notes to pages 39-45
197
tures corresponding on the illocutionary level to the semantic macrostructures of the text (241-42).
52. It should be noted that like micro-acts, macro-speech acts can also be indirect. See Nef's comment on the indirect macro-act (1980). Nef adopts the model elaborated by Wunderlich (1975) for the derivation of effective speech acts from manifest speech acts and extends its use to the text.
53. Calzolari and Gozzi offer some strniulating observations on the script as "instructions for staging" (1970: 90).
54. Nevertheless this does not satisfy the separation between the actor's "saying" and the director's "doing." The transposition of a text onto the stage implies much more than simply "saying." With regard to Uberfeld's schema, see the textual-linguistic concept of the "performative hyperstatement" (Conte, ed., 1977: 39), and Ross's symbolic formula of directive discourse (1968), which I will discuss below.
55. See Searle's list of the twelve dimensions of signification according to which illocutionary acts differ from each other (1975a: 344-50). While setting forth the constitutive rules of some type of speech acts in Searle (1969), the author had already distinguished between order (which implies that the speaker is in a position of authority in relation to the hearer), request, and advice. I must note however that Searle's idea of the dramatic text as a "set of instructions" harks back to a rather antiquated conception of the relationship between the text and the performance, according to which the mise-en-scene cannot (and must not) do anything other than carry out the instructions dictated by the writer. My effort consists^ therefore in finding a way of making use of Searle's interesting work within an irreversible model which allows the complete semiotic autonomy of performance.
56. It should be obvious by now that the theatrical spectators are not the receivers of the dramatic text, but of its theatrical transcoding. In keeping with Ross's terminology, I will continue to use the expressions speaker/hearer, which should be understood as synonymous with sender/receiver.
57. For Searle also this is the point that distinguishes illocutionary acts described as advice from those described as orders or requests: "Advising you is not trying to get you to do something in the sense that requesting is. Advising is more like telling you what is best for you" (1969: 67).
58. For the sake of simplicity, I will make yet another restriction, selecting the metteur-en-scene (director, stage manager, or the like) as the privileged addressee of the dramatic text.
59. Apart from the personal "authority" of the dramatist, we should remember that in Asian theatrical traditions up to the middle of the nineteenth century a set of solid, long-established theatrical conventions canonically prescribed elements of the mise-en-scene, allowing the writer to know with some certainty how his work would be represented on the stage.
60. In certain cases it would be appropriate to think in terms of sanctioned directives, using one of Ross's subclasses discarded earlier on: "A directive is sanctioned if it is obvious from the context of the directive (including what A might say) that A intends to and is able to respond to B's actions in such a way that (a) if B does not comply with the directive he will be punished by pain, losses, or frustration, or (b) if B does comply with the directive he will be rewarded, that is, conditions will be made more agreeable for him than they otherwise would have been" (Ross 39). This would describe (in the case of Pirandello's work, for example) the authoritarian position taken by the writer's heirs in granting production rights only to directors willing to follow the stage directions with complete obedience.
61. Here, as elsewhere, I am referring only to the perlocutionary goals of genre, proper to the dramatic text as such.
198
Notes to pages 45-48
62. 1 use the expression "at least to some degree/' since I do not believe that the dramatic text is inevitably intended for the stage. For the notion of perlocu-tionary effect, see Austin's reference to "certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons" in the passage cited earlier (1962: 101). Austin already grasped that the most complicated problem is that of cUstmguishing the illocutionary act and effect from the perlocutionary act and effect. Understanding this complexity, he wrote: "It is the distinction between illocutions and perlocutions which seems likeliest to give trouble" (110). For his part, he tried to keep "the true and proper production of real effects" (perlocutionary effects) for simple "conventional consequences" of an illocution (illocutionary effects: for example, the assumption of a task following a promise): "We have then to draw the line between an action we do (here an illocution) and its consequences" (111). It is useful to note Austin's distinction between perlocutionary object and perlocutionary sequel: "The perlocutionary act may be either the achievement of a perlocutionary object (convince, persuade) or the production of a perlocutionary sequel. Thus the act of warning may achieve its perlocutionary object of alerting and also have the perlocutionary sequel of alarming. . . ." (118). Thus, in the case of the present discussion, on the level of the directive macro-act we have the aim of convincing someone to stage a dramatic text as perlocutionary object, and the staging of the dramatic text as the perlocutionary sequel produced.
63. In this section, for the sake of simplicity, I discussed only the dramatic text properly speaking, as a directive issued by the author to the theatrical operators, and especially to the director. One could also attempt a more detailed examination of the standard situation in "director's theater," dividing it into two subsequent chains of communication: (1) communication from author to director, where the author writes the dramatic text "ordering" the director to stage it and to do so "in a certain way"; (2) communication from director to other theatrical operators (actors, technicians, and staff), where the director "treats" the dramatic text theatrically, transforming it into a script, and "orders" the actors and other operators to "perform" it according to his instructions. These scripts also offer an example of a macro-speech act of a directive sort, in which this directive aspect is even more marked than in the "untreated" dramatic text both on the level of macro- and micro-acts.
2. THE PERFORMANCE TEXT
1. According to Metz (1970), "manifestation-units," which used to be called messages, are almost always texts, resulting from the coexistence of various codes or subcodes (Eco 1975: 86), and hence composed of several "interwoven" messages. The multiplicity of codes proper to texts should not be conceived of exclusively on the horizontal axis (the text as the sum total of sequentially arranged messages organized by different codes), but above all on the vertical axis (the text as a group of messages, each of which is often interpretable on the basis of several codes). The very existence of linear and homogeneous 'languages" regulated by a single formal system has by now been definitively questioned (see 2.5.).
2. My defiriition is similar to Ruffini's (1978a: 221). In describing the performance text as a group of units 1 do not intend to designate a static group of paratactical elements, but a unified entity capable of dynamically integrating its own components (hence the emphasis on completeness and coherence), even if not always to the same degree or with the same force, I will return to this issue in the next chapter. I must note, however, that in the case of the performance text, even the constituent "parts" are texts, at a certain level. Hence while retaining the concept of the unity of the (macro) performance, I can also foresee the possibil-
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ity of independent analyses of the individual partial texts that constitute it (see 2.7.). The expression /performance text/ was introduced by Ruffini (1974a, 1976a, and 1976b), but the concept of performance as a complex semiotic text has existed for several years in the field of theater semiotics, under different appellations: see Koch (1969), Bettetini (1969 and 1977), Pavis (1976, 1980a), Gulli Pugliatti (1976), Ertel (1977), Pastorello (1979), Elam (1980), and Ubersfeld (1981). I prefer the term /performance text/ to other possibilities, because it is the only term that avoids the ambiguities or disadvantages of such expressions as /stage text/ or /theatrical text/. The first of these alternatives emphasizes the dichotomy between dramatic text/mise-en-scene which theater semiotics must overcome, selecting performance (or the theatrical transcoding of a dramatic text) as the only focus of inquiry. The other term has been applied too frequently to the written dramatic text, and is no longer genuinely available for other uses.
3. For a discussion of the difference between "theoretical model" and "observable phenomena," see Jansen (1973: 238), who also proposes the notion of "aspect." On the opposition between material object and object of thought, compare Prieto (1975:131-32) and my own comments in the introduction to this volume. My distinction between theatrical performance and the performance text is similar, but not identical, to the distinction made in textual linguistics between discourse as a concrete occurrence and text as a theoretical construct. My approach is quite different from the generative-transformational paradigm in which the distinction between discourse and text is usually couched, and on the basis of which the text becomes a kind of deep structure of discourse, constituting one of its possible manifestations (see for example Ballmer 1976:1; van Dijk 1979b: 512; for other definitions of the /text/ see Conte, ed., 1977). From now on, when speaking of/textual properties (and components) of performance/, I will always be referring to the properties (and components) of the material object /theatrical performance/ which are pertinent to the performance text as a theoretical object. These properties and components of the performance textcan be divided into two categories, located on two distinct levels of the text: (a) physical properties and components, predating the analysis and belonging to the level of concrete discursive manifestation, and (b) theoretical or systemic components, which are not immediately perceptible, and which the analysis must "construct" (codes, textual structures), I must also specify that the term /text/ will be used throughout this volume according to both of its currently accepted uses, i.e., to indicate a theoretical construct as well as a concrete discursive occurrence.
4. See below 3.5. for the distinction between "analysis," "criticism," and "reading."
5. See Moineri (1968). For an analysis of the similarities and differences between "ritual theater" and "athletic rituals," see Campeanu (1975: 99). Goffman makes claims similar to Campeanu's (1974: 136), comparing theatrical performance to athletic events in terms of frame analysis.
6. See for example Jansen (1973: 78), Gulli Pugliatti (1976, 1978a, and 1978b), and Serpieri (1977). The adjective /traditional/ is meant to allude to the normative aspirations of "fidelity" to the text, which continually appear in studies of this kind.
7. It is nevertheless very difficult to identify performances in which processes of semanticization and metaphorization are completely absent at the moment of reception. These depend on the conventions of the performance in question as well as on traits of receptive competence. In chapter 4,1 call representational conventions "(quasi-)general conventions," insofar as they are the basis of the vast category of theatrical events known as "representational theater."
8.1 am thinking of definitions such as the following: "theater is everything that is designated as theatrical in one way or another." Though more restrictive
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than these, definitions based on sociological criteria—like Metz's initial definition of cinema as "nothing more than the combination of messages which society calls 'cinematic'" (1971: ET 26)—are of the same type (compare Odin 1977: 25-26). Similarly, in the present case, we could say that "theater is the sum total of facts or phenomena which can be designated, thought of, or experienced as 'theatrical' by society as a whole, or by all individuals constituting society." By imposing an initial, if vague, restriction on the range of objects on which analysis can be carried out, a formulation of this type can nevertheless offer a useful point of departure for more descriptive definitions, as I already proposed in De Marinis 1978: 68.
9. In the very frequent case of a multiple sender (take, for example, the standard group of people who create a theatrical production: writer, director, actors, art designer, and other technicians), the copresence of some of these individuals is all that is necessary (usually the actors, or puppets with their hidden operators).
10. On theatrical interaction as communication and on its essentially manipulative nature, see below in 6.
11. For the notion of performance as a "show" or "spectacle," see Kowzan. See also Molinari and Ottolenghi for an initial, very general definition of performance (spettacolo) as "everything that is observed by a spectator" (1979: 7). This definition is then narrowed down by the introduction of the concept of intentionality: "Some specification regarding the subjectivity of those who prepare a performance should be mentioned. In this case, a performance is everything that is staged with the intention of being observed, but also experienced" (emphasis added). In order to integrate this sender-biased definition with another definition from the receiver's perspective, I would suggest a rough sociological delimitation of the subject, with the claim that /performance/ is "everything within a given synchrony that is designated as performance by society as a whole, or by each individual in that society." See also note 8.
12. Not always, however, as is seen in the case of unique theatrical events, such as "happenings," street acts, or athletic events. Ultimately, a theatrical performance is always unique insofar as it is non-reproducible.
13. The parts that are reproducible in their entirety are obviously the scenery, lights, costumes, and the spoken lines (excluding their supersegmental aspects): components that remain unchanged from each mdividual performance to the next. Yet they are not completely unchanged if it is true that an alteration in the conditions of enunciation can cause noticeable changes in the "fixed" texts from one show to another. Take, for example, the necessity of adapting scenes to the dimensions of the stage, the placing of the lights, and so on. Eco makes a distinction between individual performances that can be completely duplicated (doubles) and performances that are unique in part (1975: 242ft.). For Eco, the .existence of "absolute doubles" is problematical and therefore we can speak only of "exact doubles": "there is obviously a precise threshold established by common sense and by our capacities for control: given that a certain number of traits have been preserved, a performance can be considered an exact double." The same printed word can often provide a case of exact doubles; its oral repetitions constitute examples of "partially unique performances." Painting presents a debatable, case. Having recognized that in painting and sculpture there are cases of such perfect duplication that the copy cannot be distinguished from the original, Eco negates the possibility of doubles in painting, if "to duplicate is not to represent or imitate (in the sense of 'creating an image of) but to reproduce the same conditions through the same procedures," painting can be replicated only with great difficulty, because the "dense" or "continuous" nature of its sign makes the exact identification of the productive rules of painting very difficult. Esr sentially adopting Goodman's distinction between allographic arts (with the capacity
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for notation) and autographic arts (without notation), Eco tends toward the claim that only works from the allographic category can be completely replicated. As.I will clarify later, I prefer to think that the technical reproducibility of a work (with the resulting possibility of creating exact doubles) is independent of whether this work can be rendered in notation or not. Conversely, Goodman claims that the allographic arts produce results that are much less similar to each other than the autographic arts.
14. In these cases, the difference between two stagings of the same production tends to be less marked, or almost nonexistent, though never completely nonexistent. As studies on this topic have confirmed, the possibilities for variation in an actor's or dancer's performance—even if very few and often imperceptible to the nonexpert—are never completely eluriinated. If the difference between one performance and another is irrelevant from the theoretical point of view, insofar as it does not affect the principle of the unrepeatability of performance, it can however acquire a certain importance on the practical level, in descriptions and analyses of the performance text. In fact, when the differences in question are minimal, the choice of a specific, individual performance may no longer be indispensable for the reconstruction and analysis of the performance (see notes 50 and 82 below). The category of the "textual structure of performance" which I will introduce in the next chapter will facilitate the distinction between structural variations (which bring about a change in the textual structure of performance) and material variations (with an invariable textual structure). See in particular note 3 in chapter 3.
15. On the dramatic text and script, see 1.5. On the description-transcription of the performance text, see 2.4.
16. Obviously, we must be careful not to confuse two separate types of events: different productions of the same dramatic text on the one hand, and the various individual performances of a specific stage production on-the other. On the consequences that the lack of notationality brings to bear on the dramatic text and the technical script, see also note 32, chapter 1.
17. On the "allographic" nature of literature and architecture, see Goodman, who asserts that "a literary script is both in a notation and is itself a work" (210).
18. It is hardly necessary to point out the noticeable differences between various renderings of the same musical score with regard to tempo, timbre, phrasing, and expression. It should be noted, however, that musical notation has a rich and complex history, in which very detailed, rigid scores have given way to "loosely woven" scores allowing greater space for the performer's initiative and for improvisation, often dispensing with notational systems in the strict sense. See Lombardi (1980,1981) for an account of musical writing in the twentieth century as well as the new "notational systems" that it has envisioned.
19. Of all theatrical genres, ballet comes closest to this possibility. As Goodman has observed, Labanotation satisfies the requirements for notation to a large extent. Clearly, however, a transcription need not be exhaustive in order to qualify as a score. For Goodman, "a score need not capture all the subtlety and complexity of a performance.... The function of a score is to specify the essential properties a performance must have to belong to the work" (212).
20. All of these are autographic arts, that is, having no notational system in the strict sense. Scripts for cinema and television are no exception, and could be compared to the case of the dramatic script, already fully discussed in chapter 1. As in the case of the dramatic text, the stage directions in the technical film script do not meet the requirements of notationality.
21. Even Goodman continually insists on the fact that if a work belongs to an allographic art capable of notationality, this does not guarantee complete duplicat-ability. "The performances of the most specific score are by no means exact duplicates of one another, but vary widely and in many ways. A moderately good copy
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and the original painting resemble each other more closely than do performances of a Bach suite by Piatigorsky and Casals" (196).
22. My understanding of /technical reproduction/ is rather different from Ben-jamin's homonymous concept. Unlike Benjamin, I do not intend it to refer to the possibility of photographic, audiovisual, or sound recording of a work of art, but to the capacity of certain types of work to be duplicated in a more or less precise way and in a greater or lesser quantity of copies.
23. On this issue, see below in 2.4. As the case of opera demonstrates, although ephemerality makes technical reproducibility impossible, it does not prevent repeatability.
24. Regarding the unrepeatability of performance, see Pavis's conception of theater as the result of a collision between structure (fiction, conventions, and so forth) and event {1980a). Amsterdamski's comments on repetition are valuable from the epistemological viewpoint: "Unlike unrepeatable events, the states of things that are capable of repetition are constructs of our intellect, which elaborates them thanks to its ability to create and to use abstract concepts. . . . The difference between what is repeatable and what is not thus depends essentially on the network of concepts one can use to articulate the real" (1981: 76-77).
25. The difficulty or impossibility of identifying a receiver (the actant-observer, for Greimas and Courtes [1979: ET 217]) completely distinct from the sender in phenomena such as folk festivals or ethnological rituals could create a problem for the inclusion of these events within any definition of theatrical performance. In these cases we could speak instead of phenomena of self-communication or self-performance. But even in circumstances of this kind, we can observe chains of communication and relationships of production and reception, although roles are not as fixed as in traditional performance, and senders can become receivers in the^ourse of the interaction, and vice versa. We must also take into account the presence of the external spectator whose gaze establishes a performance relationship even in the case of events that are created for "insiders," and are not originally intended to be communicated to others.
26. My definition reveals the similarity between theater and ordinary human interaction, but these are obviously far from identical categories. My aim is to distinguish the theatrical within performance (see note 11 above). I must emphasize that my definition is a scientific one and, as such, concerns what I would call the analyst's theoretical competence. As for the ordinary reception of performance, we must postulate a kind of competence containing, in addition to the two basic requirements, other kinds of knowledge (codes and conventions, intertextual frames, co-textual and contextual inferences), without which the spectator would not be in a position to recognize a given theatrical event as such, relating it to the appropriate class, nor to understand and interpret it (see chapter 7).
27. Both are well clarified by Wolf (9if£). We must also bear in mind that Goff-man's concepts have undergone significant modifications over the years. He is much more likely today to distinguish between theater and daily life than in previous years. See, for example, the close comparison made on the basis of frame analysis between theatrical performance and ordinary, face-to-face interaction in Goff-man 1974: 134-44. (F°r the concept of frame see 4.6.2., below.)
28. A fairly complex analysis on the similarities and differences between "behavior in real social life" and "theatrical performance" is attempted by Burns (1972), using the history of theater, microsociology, and ethnomethodology, in order to propose an interdisciplinary mquiry into the "phenomenon of theatricality as it is manifest in theater, and in social life" (6). See also 6.6., below.
29. One of the limits of Ruffini's rigorous and interesting approach lies in the close interdependence he establishes between dramatic text and performance text, defining one through the other, and vice versa.
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30. This is a question of the difference between persistent texts and ephemeral texts, or the difference between written texts and oral texts in the field of linguistics (Segre 1978: 133). I also disagree with one of the elements in Bouissac's synthetic definition of /text/ (126), i.e., the ordered character of the sum of the elements that constitute a text. I believe that this is a quality of some texts only (verbal texts, and the like), not the constitutive property of all. Given the spatiotemporal multidimen-sionality (see 2.5.) of the performance text, the textual units within it do not create an ordered whole.
31. For Kristeva's concept of the "(general) cultural text," see 2.7. and 5.1.
32. Eco states a similar position, subordinating delimitation of the text to the pragmatic operation of identifying the topic (1979: 90). See 2.3.2. for the conditions of coherence in the performance text. Lotman insists on the importance of the opening and closing demarcation of artistic texts (1970b: 140).
33. The normal criteria of demarcation (conversational pauses, empty spaces on the page, communicative behavior) do not apply in this case. Two statements uttered at a distance in time and/or in locations very far from each other can constitute a single text. Examples from literature include serialized novels, and "framed" narratives such as Arabian Nights and The Decameron.
34. Take, for example, the passion plays performed in Europe between the fifteenth and the sixteenth century, involving thousands of spoken lines, hundreds of "actors" and other participants, several days of performance in the town square and possibly in other locations. The passion play performed at Lucerne in 1583 was documented with maps showing the location of each of the stations in the Wein-markt during the two days of performance. See Nicoll 1966: figs. 58/59 and 62-63 and Konigson 1975: 118-24; ed-, 1980: 45-90. Konigson (1975) and Rey-Flaud (1973) provide a systematic discussion of theatrical space during the Middle Ages.
35.1 will limit myself to noting the problem of the exact beginning of the performance, and hence the exact beginning of the text. According to Guicharnaud (cited m Jansen 1973: 250): "Before the curtain rises, the spectator has the program in his hands. He learns the title, the genre to which the play belongs, the names of the characters, the setting. These details are already the work. The performance begins the moment I read infhe program 'Tartuffe, or the Impostor, a comedy in five acts by Moliere."' This raises a question regarding the relationship between the text proper and the materials that Casetti, Lumbelli and Wolf in their study of television (1978: 34) call paratexts: newspaper presentations and reviews, programs, and oral presentations. For these writers, the function of paratexts is to "predispose the audience ... to the genre." The function of theatrical paratexts is similar, and will be discussed in chapters 4 and 7. Nevertheless, I do not share the view that paratexts are part of the performance text. They simply enhance (or confound) its comprehension.
36. These indicators must be understood in chronological sequence. Optional indicators are noted in brackets.
37.1 must point out that performances by Robert Wilson, or other contemporary artists, are presented as though already in progress as the audience members begin to enter the auditorium (or other performance site). The stage is fully visible and the actors already present, either immobilized in a kind of tableau vivant, or intent on delivering a kind of prologue-overture.
38. Obviously these powers increase in types of theater "with no product," such as street acts and the like. In such circumstances, what can be used as a unit for textual analysis is not the performance, the product (which is often completely absent, or is present only to a minimal degree), but rather the production, the entire creative process developed from beginning to end of the "intervention." In other areas of experimentation, the center of attention has shifted from product in the narrow sense to productive process, focusing on the performance "outcome,"
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where translation rather than reduction occurs. Finally, current theatrical experimentation forces us to rethink the traditional concept of the relationship between theater and performance, according to which the following equation holds true: a theater is (only) the performances that it delivers.
39. For texts of this kind, see the anthology edited by Bortfantini, Grassi, and Gra-zia.
40. Segre (1978: 143) claims that in cases of avant-garde texts which violate all grammatical and logical rules, coherence is established only in relation to "motivational paraphrases which make explicit the theatrical premises of the text . . . through implicit performative hyperstatements such as This incoherent series of words (syntagms, etc.) is meant to represent (foreshadow, etc.) the incoherence of X.'" This perspective is compatible with my own pragmatic approach to the question of coherence.
41. On the relationship between the (pragmatic) macrotopic and (semantic) macrostructure, see Manetti and Violi (1979: 49). On the relationship between topic and isotope, see Eco (1979: 92). On the disagreements within textual linguistics on types and levels of textual coherence, see Conte, ed. (1977), Schmidt (1973: 258), and especially Manetti and Violi (see chapter 1).
42. I am referring both to ordinary reception and specialized analysis. See also 3-5-
43. For a definition of the textual structure of performance, see 3.1. below. For an explicit theorization of the fragmented quality of the components of "happenings" see Kirby's comment on "compartmental structures based on . . . the contiguity of completely autonomous, self-contained theatrical units" (1965: i6f£). Nôth introduces the notion of "irreconcilable segments" (1965: i6ff.). Koch attempts a classic fication of ''happenings" into seven types, in descending order ofTstructural organization (1971:330-65). I would like to point out that the compartmental structure of American ''happenings" of the 1950s and 1960s has been used more recently by Robert Wilson, who often conceives his performances as juxtapositions of very different components in time, if sequential, or in space, if simultaneous.
44. For some early analyses of the mechanisms of superficial cohesion in the performance text see Koch (1971) and Nôth (1972) on ''happenings/' Casetti also offers interesting comments on the types and levels of coherence in televised variety/ shows (Casetti, Lumbelli, and Wolf 1978:132-35).
45. The properties I am speaking of here are those that concern performance as a theoretical rather than material object, as is pertinent to a semiotic analysis of texts.
46. In the case of verbal language, sounds became scientifically "present" only with the birth of phonology at the turn of the century (see Jansen 1978b: 34). Following the development of the necessary theoretical and technical tools, it became possible to analyze sounds according to their pertinent and non-pertinent -traits, and to isolate the phoneme as the minimal unit of sound.
47. This is an absence that theater semiotics shares with the study of other, equally ephemeral "cultural objects," such as folklore and popular traditions.
48. Filmic enunciation, like theater, has an unalterable character that complicates analytic inspection, even if the film scholar now has the possibility of re-viewing films on moviola.
49. Despite the centrality of the issue of time in performance, or the time of performance, little attention has been paid to this in theater semiotics. Some interesting observations have been made by Bettetini while focusing on the issue of time in audiovisual texts, especially in films (1977: 8). Tordera has also dealt with this problem to some extent (1979).
50. From now on I will use /direct viewing/ to mean a repeated experience of the performance in question, including, in the best of circumstances, an "inside" knowledge of the various phases of its gestation. I would like to point out that by
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/theatrical performance/1 mean a single performance of a given production, studied irvits contextual and co-textual autonomy and specificity in relation to other performances. This distinction assumes a different kind of practical importance depending on whether we are dealing with "unique" theatrical events (an environmental act or a piece of performance art, for example) or events that are very loosely structured (such as experimental theater of the 1960s and 1980s), as opposed to highly standardized forms of theater (director's theater, academic ballet, and many of the performance traditions of Asia). In the second case, variations between one performance and another will be very minor, and might therefore be overlooked in the initial phase of research, i.e., in the reconstruction of the text, and especially in its analysis (as Bettetini proposed in 1977: see note 82 below). I must point out, however, that although there may be a lack of variation on the co-textual level, there is inevitably some degree of variation on the contextual level, due to different circumstances of reception. Hence an analytic approach that intends to take pragmatic, communicative aspects into consideration in order not to isolate the performance text from its concrete context must privilege a specific occurrence in its analysis, even in the case of highly structured performances which are therefore almost totally replicable.
51. By /direct/ documents I mean documentation on the performance in question. By /indirect/1 mean material in the "cultural context." Direct documents can in turn be subdivided into (a) internal elements, consisting of "traces," or "remains" of the performance (script, director's notes, accessories, recordings, etc.); (b) external documents, consisting of elements belonging to the "theoretical" or "planning" level of the event (statements, interviews, director's theoretical writings) or commentary and interpretations (newspaper articles, descriptions by the audience). This division is clearly too rigid, since intermediate shadings also exist. For example, the already mentioned "paratexts" include both "internal" elements (playbills, programs) and "external" documents, such as statements by the director or by critics. No document is neutral, and is therefore, to some extent, an interpretation. Indirect documents can be separated into (a) theatrical elements (internal or external documentation on other theatrical performances that can be related intertextually to the performance under analysis) and (b) extratheatrical elements, relative to other aesthetic or nonaesthetic texts from the same cultural synchrony which can help reduce the "absence" factor in the text under consideration.
52. The abundance of documentation referred to here is completely relative with respect to the complete absence of sources characterizing vast areas of performance in the West, even at the present time, e.g., the "unofficial" political theater of the twentieth century (agitprop, and the like) which was until recently almost completely ignored by historiographers, since it failed to fit into the usual classifications of theater. The same is true of the so-called minor genres, such as puppet theater, circus, mime, and vaudeville.
53. These examples have been randomly chosen. Many other examples of Roman festivals are provided in the CNRS volumes on Les fetes a la Renaissance, or various issues of Biblioteca teatrale (particularly 15/16). For examples of the Medici festivals^ see Zorzi's volume II teatro e la citta (1977), Mamone (1981), and Quaderni di teatro 7 (1980).
54. For a complete list of documents on this legendary production, see Marotti (1967: 177-79), who reminds us, however, that these writings ^'concern the interpretation of the tragedy proposed by Craig, as well as his relationship with Stanis-lavski, rather than the actual creation of the performance."
55. A sound or video recording, or a film, cannot be regarded as the text of a performance (i.e., as a performance text), but only as a (partial) "trace," inevitably marked by the subjectivity of the camera eye. See Savarese 1979: 49ff.
56. For the distinction between these two terms see 2.4.3.
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Notes to pages 66-71
57. Two points must be made regarding the distinction between a given theatrical production and one of its individual performances in the case of performances from the past. On the one hand, as is obvious, the retrieval of a specific performance in the past creates serious and often insoluble difficulties. On the other hand, the question is paradoxically simplified since the practice of repeating a performance did not exist in many cases in the past. Before the institutionalization of theater and the birth of professional acting, performances were generally linked to precise festive or calendar events. Therefore, performances from preprofessional times are almost always clearly dated in the documents relating to them, and, furthermore, the scholarly reconstruction of such a performance involves the retrieval of a single event (such as the performance of La Calandria in Urbino on February 6, 1513, within the context of carnival celebrations).
58. Ruffini is clearly influenced by Peirce's theory of the interpretant and of unlimited semiosis, Wittgenstein's ideas on linguistics, and the concept of meaning as synonymy in Carnap and Quine.
59. A relationship is said to be equivalent when it is: (i) reflexive (a R a), (ii) symmetrical (a R b -> b R a), (iii) transitive (aRb&bRc->aRc) (Ruffini 7 n.).
60. In this section, the term /description/ is obviously used in the sense intended by Ruffini, meaning, in general, "semantic description," "content analysis." This is a rather different understanding than my own use of the term in the course of the volume, and especially in this chapter, where I intend it to mean a certain way of reconstructing a performance, i.e., using verbal language exclusively.
61. As I have already suggested, cultural synchronicity does not necessarily mean "strict chronological simultaneity." Ruffini has made some particularly mteresting observations on the opposition between the synchronous and the diachronic (17), tending toward a position pursued in linguistic theory with the goaLof overcoming the real antimony posited by Saussure between "synchronous facts" (static, systematic) and "diachronic facts" (dynamic, asystematic, heterogeneous, indefinable). See, for example, Ducrot and Todorov (1972: 154), and especially the post-Saus-surian work of Coseriu (1958:188-89), with its conception of language as energeia, a "system in movement," which includes change as one of its constitutive traits.
62. See below Ruffini's example of the octagonal temple in the Urbino production of La Calandria in 1513. Every descriptive analysis of a text will inevitably have a partial, provisional quality, as Rrffini points out in 1978a: 224.
63. See 4.1. for my definition of /code/ and /performance code/, from which the clearly relational, oppositional, non-substantive nature of/meaning/ will emerge.
64. The confusion between content and referent surfaces occasionally in Ruffini's work. He mentions the "exh-alinguistic reality of the content" (1976a: 3), and insists on the equivalence between denotative meaning and reality (25-26), claiming, for example, that "denotation means referent, or reality, above and beyond all the meticulous subtleties of terminology'' (1976b. 130).
65. Obviously, the problem of the referent and the extension of an expression deserves to be fully treated in its own theoretical field, namely in the area of a theory of truth values and a theory of reference (or mention).
66. Hence, a pertinent reading means pertinent from the perspective of textual analysis. Perhaps my divergence from Ruffini's position is more terminological than substantial. Fundamentally, the criterion of validity that Ruffini suggests substituting for truth allows us to distinguish between useful and nonuseful (or invalid) readings among the "infinite possible readings." The only real difference between this and my own criterion of pertinence is that perimence/non-pertinence is a binary opposition, while the criterion of validity offers a spectrum of different nuances.
67. This does not mean that the contextual approach is not useful, especially in the phases of analysis and interpretation, and especially if we broaden the ap-
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proach to include the communicative situation, i.e., the conditions of production and reception, including the "audience context" as well as the "cultural context."
68. As Goodman has observed (1968: 199 and passim), nothing prevents the development of a notational system that makes use of verbal language. Conversely, the nonverbal nature of a system does not necessarily implicate notationality. It follows that the distinction between description and transcription is not comparable to the distinctions between notational/non-notational, scientific/nonsdentific, and so on. On the other hand, it is possible to argue that giving up natural language for a symbolic system offers enormous advantages regarding "precision of reasoning and operational facility" (Greimas 1966: ET 16). Furthermore, in this case, the already established non-notationality of the stage directions in the dramatic text and script means that we must discover methods of transcription that are less imprecise in order to approximate the notational ideal defined by Goodman (see above 1.5.). The kind of graphic transcription I am speaking of here corresponds to codage (mise-en-code), which Kowzan juxtaposes with codification (1979: 6).
69. An early, interesting attempt at the notation of some of the acoustic and par-alinguistic parameters of the actor's vocal interpretation (accent, duration, frequency, pauses; laughter, weeping, sobbing, sighing, etc.) can be found in Louzoun (1975), who draws on the fundamental works of P. Osrwald.
70. See almost all the collected essays in S. Brecht (1974), but especially the long essay on Wilson's Deafman Glance (S. Brecht 1972), as the best example of his methpd of reconstructing the signifying elements in the vocal and gestural aspects of performance, from which his interpretation eventually emerges.
71. The separation into sequences was applied retrospectively by Ouaknine; these are examples of the "performance segments" which I will discuss in 2.6.
72. In reality the separation of sound track and image track is neither precise nor fixed. Sometimes information regarding the same track can be found in both columns, in other cases both columns merge into one.
73. Ouaknine makes clear that he chose "a frontal perspective with respect to the actors' entrance."
74. On account of its choice of material and approach, the description of Kasparina (a production at the Odin Theatret directed by E. Barba in 1967) by Ch. Aubert and J.-L. Bourbonnaud (vol. 1) offers the closest approximation to Ouaknine's work. Less thorough studies are found in the essays on The Serpent at the Open Theater (1968), and on Frankenstein (1965/67), Antigone (1967) and Paradise Now (1968) at the Living Theater (see Jacquot, ed., 1970). After the first volume of descriptions of contemporary performances, which were viewed "live" and experienced "from within," the CNRS scholars changed their strategy. In the second and third volume (Bablet, ed., 1970; Bablet and Jacquot, eds., 1972), the dominant tendency is to compare different stagings of the same text, performances that the scholars preparing the essays had never seen, or, much less, experienced from the moment of gestation. Among the most interesting of these essays are the studies by J. C. Francois and P. Ivernel on some productions of Brechf s plays (Mother Courage and Arturo Lfi) and essays by O. Asian on six performances of Genefs Les paravents and by B. Dort on the different written and staged versions of Brechf s Galileo that were supervised by the author. In all of these cases we are no longer dealing with descriptions of performances that were directly experienced by the writers, but with reconstructions of historical productions, carried out by collecting as much documentary material as possible. The main focus is on. the director's plan and on other materials offered by creative elements within the theatrical groups. This means that the scholars are often biased in favor of the subjective perspective of the creators of these performances, to the point of mistaking their declared intentions with actual results. The drawbacks of this approach are obvious to the Bablet and Jacquot team, and an attempt is made to counter them in the studies published hi volume 4
208
Notes to pages 73-77
(1975), edited by Bablet. The most important element in this endeavor is a group project undertaken on Victor Garcia's production of Genefs Les bonnes (1971). The results of the project are not entirely satisfactory because of methodological flaws. Nevertheless, two studies stand out: M. Louzoun's analysis of the paralinguistic text and M. Touzoul's essay on lighting. In the volumes /published between 1977 and 1979, the advantages and disadvantages remain the same. The approach tends to lapse into minute, lifeless descriptions, with few exceptions. In volume 5 (Bablet and Jacquot 1975) Louzoun's analysis of Becketf s Endgame stands out (though limited almost exclusively to the written text) in its skillful application of Steen Jansen's theoretical categories. In volume 6 (Jacquot 1978), Kowzan contributes a fine analysis of Tartuffe as staged by Roger Planchon in 1974. Pastorello contributes an interesting essay in volume 7 (Bablet 1979) on two important stagings of Brecht's Threepenny Opera. Volume 8 (edited by Konigson in 1980) represents a partial change of direction. Attention shifts to the past (from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century), privileging issues of theatrical production rather than individual stagings of plays (Konigston provides an essay on the theatrical use of the Weinmarkt square in Lucerne from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century).
75. Molinari (1977:175) points out that Brecht defined his theory of the theatrical "model" on the occasion of the Swiss staging of Sophocles' Antigone {Coira, February 15,1948). In fact, he gives a full description of the performance in the Antigone-Mod-ellbuch, published in Berlin in 1949. In the preface (now in Brecht 1975, 3: 237-44), Brecht articulates his idea of the model as "a clear, fully elaborated documentation of a single performance which is proposed as a rather binding model for subsequent performances, and which can thus be identified as a 'creative process' which would replace the sporadic, anarchical creative acts characteristic of air era in which only 'novelty' is appreciated" (Molinari, emphasis added). For a description of the function of "models" in the Berliner tradition, see Theaterarbeit (Berlin: Henshelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1961: 297-349).
76. The use of quotation marks with this expression is meant to suggest that the methods of transcription devised for theater up to this point are not notational in the strict sense, as is also true in other artistic fields.
77. A simplified, ad hoc version of Ivanov's system is used by Aubert and Bour-bonnaud (1970) to designate the position of the actors in Barba's Kasparina. In reality, this is a type of transcription used by chess players which Ivanov criticizes for its lack of precision, and also because "it offers only the endpoints of [an actor's] movement without transcribing it in its entirety" (90).
78. For applied analyses, see the eight-volume work published by the CNRS mentioned in note 74, particularly Louzoun (1975, 1978). For a discussion of the theoretical and technical problems of theatrical notation, see Pavis 1981a.
79. According to Kowzan, "Laban's system, known as stenochoreography, kinetog-raphy, or Labanotation, offers a code of notation which is now used by professional dancers and theorists of movement. Body postures are represented by combining different geometrical shapes ... along with lines and arrows, thus achieving a level of precision that manages to account for the position of each and every finger" (182-84). More recently, other forms of transcription have been developed in America, following the work of Efron (1941). See Ekman and Friesen (1969) and Birdwhistell (1970).
80. These were inspired by "the illusion that it was possible to communicate everything meaningful in the film through transcription" (Bettetini 1977: 18).
81. I have repeatedly referred to Goodman's criticisms of the attempts already made to achieve a system of total notation (Goodman 1968). See especially note 19 in this chapter.
82. He proposes two hypotheses "to be selected on the basis of the texf s characteristics": (1) transcription as a "model" of theatrical performance and (2) transcrip-
Notes to pages 77-80
209
tion "as description of the performance project" (19-20). It should be clear at this point that my preference lies with the second alternative, regardless of the type of performance in question (see also note 50 above).
83. For a critique of linguistic linearity based on Hjemslev's approach, see also Greimas and Courtás (1979).
84. It is not difficult to see that theater (in the broad sense discussed in 2.2. above) can use a theoretically unlimited number of expressive media. Consider, for example, a "happening" by Kaprow or Oldenburg, or a medieval miracle play. This calls into question the possibility (proposed by Metz for cinema [1973: 207]) of defining once and for all a "theatrical language" on the basis of "its specific expressive medium or . . . its specific way of combining different expressive media" (which, according to Metz, is possible in the case of cinematic language).
85. The acoustic element (music, sounds, cries, and the like) can never be completely excluded in theatrical performances, even in those of the nonverbal sort, such as mime, where the sounds are produced by the actor's efforts and movements in the performance space. Though often involuntary, these are certainly not without importance. We could say that the importance of these "marginal" noises increases in relation to the absence of words and music. Such sounds seem of negligible significance in traditional performances, but become much more meairmgful in the aesthetic and expressive economy of performances of a nonverbal type which are based mainly on the actor's physical movements, as is the case in performances by the Living Theater, the Odin Theatret, or in Grotowski's work.
,86. For a discussion of how all five channels of perception are activated during "happenings," see Koch (1971) and Noth (1972). See also Schechner's discussion of the importance which environmental theater attributes to the "private" senses (touch, taste, smell) usually censored in other artistic practices (1968: 43). I must note however that many different kinds of festivals—from folk traditions to the festivities of contemporary youth culture—engage the entire sensory apparatus of the spectator-performer. Moles has used the term "multiple arts" to describe all art forms in which several channels of perception are simultaneously activated in an aesthetic and perceptive synthesis (1958: 257).
87. In the language of textual semiotics these are called co-texts. See however Glich and Rabile's concept of the Teiltexte (1972).
88. Unlike Ruffini, I believe that a dynamic integration of the texts always takes place in the performance text, with a resulting transformation of the codes with respect to their extratheatrical usage (though this transformation can be rninimal), even in situations where the relationship between the partial texts (and the relationship between the codes) is one of juxtaposition and coexistence rather than an interrelated hierarchy.
89. On systems of punctuation and demarcation in performance (curtain, set changes, darkness, musical markers, written information, entrances and exits by performers, and so on), see De Marinis (1979a: 8-10).
90. On the arbitrariness of "cutting" and its relationship to "convenience," see Barthes on the literary text: "The tutor signifier will be cut up into a series of brief, contiguous fragments, which we shall call lexias, since they are units of reading. . . . The lexia will include sometimes a few words, sometimes several sentences; it will be a matter of convenience: it will suffice that the lexia be the best possible space in which we can observe meanings" (1970: ET 13).
91. De Marinis (4ff.) distinguishes between "identification of code units" and "ac-r tual découpage," asserting that (1) the number of minimal pertinent units depends on. the number of codes and (2) the identification of these units in the performance text can occur only following the recognition of its codes and subcodes (3) like the codes to which they belong, the minimal pertinent units of the performance text are not provided by the text but are tools of analysis and interpretation. For Metz,
210
Notes to pages 80-84
"there are as many types of minimal units as there are types of analysis" (1971: ET 194).
92. The performance macrotext is constituted by the total of all individual performances of the same performance. This group of performances can be of great interest to the analyst, particularly in the case of plays that are not too rigidly structured and whose individual performances display a fairly high number of co-textual and contextual variations,
93. See Petrofi (1974b), who nevertheless classifies as /externally co-textual/ inter-textual relationships which I do not include in the cultural context. I must note that according to the terminology of semiotic analysis, the simultaneous presence of several expressions in a text creates a /co-text/ rather than a /context/.
94. For Petrofi's various interpretations of the term /context/ see chapter 1 (note 43). Wolf's definition is more pertinent: "Let us assume that in pragmatic theory the context is defined above all (but not exclusively) in terms of the propositions and rules characterizing the internal structure of the elements participating in the interaction and structure of the communicative act" (Casetti, Lumbelli, and Wolf 1978: 24). This definition was formalized further by Ferrara (1977: 50). The notion of context (conceived of in an analogous manner) is central to van Dijk's theoretical position (1972b, 1977a, 1980).
95. These will be discussed in chapters 6 and 7.
96. Clearly, we must include in the "productive process," understood in the broad sense, all the different individual performances of the play (which the analyst has experienced directly or indirectly) which "provide the context" for the particular performance chosen as the object of study. r
97. On the concepts of "cultural synchronidty" and "synchronous text," see note 61 above, and especially 5.4. As for the difference between "cultural context" and the general text, I must emphasize that the cultural context of a given performance text is constituted only by the components of the general text that can be related to it.
98. In my view, however, this is not unlimited. See 3.4. on the limited (or at least finite) multiplicity of the textual structures that can be associated with the performance text. It is here that I disagree with Kristeva's concept of the "infinity'' of poetic language (1969).
9g. It should be noted that Kristeva elaborated her analysis on the texts of An-toine de La Sale, particularly Petit Jehan de Saintre, considered the first French novel in prose.
3. THE TEXTUAL STRUCTURE OF PERFORMANCE
1. The term /combination/ covers a range of relational possibilities from an integrated hierarchy to a simple juxtaposition.
2. The "systemic" is thus contrasted with the "textual," which "consists of an actual unwmding, a 'concrete' object, which predates the intervention of the analyst" (Metz 1971: ET 76). See note 3 in chapter 2 regarding the division of the components of the performance text into /material/ and /theoretical/ (or /systematic/). These are all the components of the theatrical performance chosen among many other possible components on the basis of their pertinence to the semiotic paradigm which transforms the performance itself into a performance text, or a theoretical object. Despite Metz's justification for choosing the word system over structure (1971: ET 89-90), Iprefer the expression /textual structure/ to /textual system/, given that the usual meaning of /system/ in semiotics is "a system of signs/' or "code'' ("s-code," according to Eco), Prior to the development of the semiotics of theater, Honzl insisted on the necessity of studying theatrical performance as a unified com-
Notes to pages 84-90
211
birtation of various elements of different origin, and used the expression "hierarchy of expressive media" (see Honzl 1943 in Metejka and Titunik, eds,, 1976).
3. The italicized parenthetical comment should serve to avoid misunderstandings and easy objections. I must emphasize that the textual structure that belongs specifically to a given performance can never be found unaltered in another performance, i.e., in a different work. The issue is slightly different when we are dealing with the various individual performances of the same theatrical production (and when I use the expression /theatrical performance/ in this volume I usually intend to designate an individual performance). In this case, we discover a range of differences depending on the type of performance in question. Sometimes the concrete variations are so minor that they do not involve structural variations in the use or organization of the codes (e.g., classical ballet, Noh theater, and so on), while in other cases the individual shows of the same production reveal such marked structural variations that they actually create different performances, and different performance texts (the most extreme examples are "happenings" and street theater). I must also point out that since the textual structure of performance is a pragmatic entity "constructed" by the receptive process, different readings or analyses can assign at least partially different textual structures to the same performance or (in the case just mentioned) to two almost identical performances of the same production. See also 3.4.
4. The dynamic deplacement operated by the textual structure accounts for the fact that the performance text is something more than simply the sum of its different parts (partial texts, partial segments, performance segments): a whole that is not entirely reducible to its separate components, although these components can be legitimately analyzed on their own.
5 . By /extra-theatrical/ use of the codes I mean their usage in other aesthetic texts as well as in everyday life. <
6. What I have summarized here is the most dominant vein of the accumulative-synthetic tendency. For the sake of a more comprehensive view, I must add that within the history of twentieth-century discourse on theater there is also a contrasting tendency toward reducing theater to a single expressive medium, generally identified with the actor's total style of delivery (see the later work of Appia, De-croux, Grotowski).
7. This explains the autonomy of classical comedy in the context of the festival. "As one of the main elements converging in the festival, it is ready to detach itself from the festival, to live on its own" (Cruciani 1980: 35).
8. See also Romei (1980) on the mutual independence of the scenographic text and the dramatic text in sixteenth-century comedy. Ruffini observes a similar relationship between the paralinguistic code and the gestural code (131).
9. As I noted in the previous chapter, even in cases of genre we must not completely exclude the possibility of identifying levels of deep coherence (of a thematic or motivational type, for example). Here much depends on the interpretive choices of the receiver.
10. For a definition of ostension as a privileged mode of sign production in theater, see De Marinis (1979a: 11-16).
11.1 will return to the idea of the impossibility of "literary citation" in theater in the discussion of theatrical intertextuality in 5.4.
12. This distinction is important. I am not thinking of physically identical performance texts (this is a remote possibility, and not a very interesting one) but the possibility of identical code combinations underlying the partial texts of different performances.
13. It is clear from the examples given that in this case (as in my discussion of the "uniqueness" of the textual structure of performance" in 3.1.), I am interested in the structural similarities that can be in different works, and not in the structural
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Notes to pages 90-95
similarities found in separate performances of the same theatrical production. In this second case, systematic analogies are guaranteed by the fact that the textual structure can be partially replicated.
14. Unless indicated to the contrary, the term /structure/ refers to the textual structure of performance, which, as we have seen, is really a macrostructure. The most famous discussion of /multiple reading/ can be found in Barthes (1970).
15. An analogous distinction can be seen in Eco (1979: 59). Referring to the literary text, Eco distinguishes between "the liberal use of a text when approached as an imaginative stimulus, and the interpretation of an open text" (1979: 59). See also Bet-tetini (1975:149-50) and Corti (1976: 62ff.) for a conception of the text as a "filter" of (pertinent) readings, and consequently as a restraint on their proliferation. Other oppositional pairs equivalent to pertment/non-pertinent readings and interpretation/use are proposed by Eco (1981c: 893ff.).
16. In this case however it would be very problematic to use the idiolect as proof of the limited number of the textual stmctures of performance, and hence of the interpretations of the performance text.
17. Meaning toward general and particular conventions. And this is not rigorously the case, either, since even particular conventions can be constituted on the basis of aesthetic deviations from other particular conventions, as well as from general conventions (see 4.6.4.).
18. See chapter 7 for the concept of the implied or Model Spectator. As Coppiet-ers and Tindemans have pointed out, however (1977: 35), the task of the analyst is above all to understand the comprehension of the ordinary empirical receiver of the performance.
19. Apart from concerning different classes of spectators (the ordinary audience on the one hand and the specialist on the other), reading and analysis thus constitute two subsequent moments in the same hypothetical interpretive approach. For the difference between "analyzing" and "reading" a (verbal) text, see also Verdaas-donk and Rees (1977).
20. I use the theoretical/nontheoretical opposition in the sense intended by It-konen, cited by Ramat (1979: 274). This distinguishes "between the nontheoretical rules known by the native speaker and the theoretical rules constructed by the linguist." As Ramat notes, Chomsky's equation between the grammar of the linguist and the innate competence of the native speaker has by now been widely called into question, and Chomsky himself appears to have gone beyond it in his distinction between to cognize and to know.
21. See Barthes's famous distinction between "science," "criticism," and "reading" (1966).
22. As is well known, Barthes identifies the essential difference between science and criticism in the different attitudes toward the meanings of a given work (48ff.). If science "deals with meanings," "criticism produces them," thus occupying an intermediate position between science and reading.
23. This moment of selection and evaluation is explained with different modalities and aims according to the adopted paradigm (whether philological, sociological, psychoanalytical, stylistic, or historicist). For an exhaustive list of the "procedural systems" most frequently used by contemporary criticism, see Pagnini (8off.). Argan emphasizes that value judgment is a distinctive trait of critical reading (1976, 1980). The distinction between criticism and science has recently been the subject of a careful inquiry by Nanni (1980), whose conclusions are not too far from my own views. Among the attempts to redefine the epistemological status of criticism in a broader sense, Menna's perspective (1980) is particularly interesting in its effort to embrace the theoretical aspect, along with the historical and evaluative aspect, within the critical approach.
24. From now on I will speak of the textual structure of performance in the sin-
Notes to pages 95-99
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gular, meaning, if not explicitly stating, that there is one textual structure for every (pertinent) interpretation.
25.1 must note that even the reading of a performance (which I shall call ordinary interpretation, to maintain an analogy) contains evaluative aspects (regarding the pragmatic appropriateness of the performance text, for example) which influence comprehension of the event in question (Pascadi 1974).
26. In my own view, contemporary theatrical criticism is completely devoid of examples of excellence (in Italy as well as abroad, with a few rare exceptions). Locked into the defense of their own power positions, theater critics (and even academic critics of theater) seem uninterested in discussing their role and methods, or in estabUshing more rigorous standards (see Quaderni di teatro 5 and De Marinis 1980b).
4. PERFORMANCE CODES AND THEATRICAL CONVENTIONS
1. See Prieto (1966: 56), Eco (1975: 56), and, especially, Eco (1976: 32-33). More recently (1981a), Eco has given greater focus to the logical nature of the correlative relationship of "standing for" which enables the code to institute the sign function. This has allowed him to clarify the fact that this relationship is based on a mechanism of inference, not one of equivalency. In proposing an inferential model of the sign, Eco simply clarifies a conception that was already present in his earlier theo-rization of codes and sign production (on which I constantly draw for my own construction of the performance-text model and its various levels). Similarly, the notions of code and sign function as I use them in this study are informed by the conviction that the sign is never (merely) "resemblance," identification, and equation between expression and content" (Eco 1981a: 663).
2. See 4.4. for an explanation regarding my use of italics here and in the previous, italicized passage.
3. For an analysis of the dramatic structures and performance conventions of Noh theater see Marotti (1974) and Ortolani (1973a, 1973b). For a discussion of the hand gestures of Kathakali theater see Ikegami (1971). See Pasqualino (1978: 101-105) on the rigorously coded gestures of Sicilian puppet theater.
4.1 do not share the apprehensions expressed by Volli regarding the appropriateness and usefulness of postulating such codes (1979: 15). His objections result from of an unduly narrow conception of the /code/, and a crudely referentialistic notion of /content'.
5. Molinari's views on the problem of theatrical codes are very close to my own, though his terminology is somewhat different (1979: 59-60), since he proposes substituting the term /paradigm/ for /code/.
6. Regarding the notion of aberrant decoding see Eco (1968, and especially 1975): "The message as source constitutes a sort of network of constraints which allow certain optional results. Some of these can be considered as fertile inferences which enrich the original messages, others are mere 'aberrations.' But the term 'aberration' must be understood only as a betrayal of the sender's intentions: insofar as a network of messages acquires a sort of autonomous textual status, it is doubtful whether, from the point of view of the text itself (as related to the contradictory format of semantic space), such a 'betrayal' would be viewed negatively^ (1975: 198). See also Eco (1979: 177)- More-recent research on textual semiotics has fully demonstrated that the concept of "aberrant decoding" must be radically reviewed within a more adequate framework of a pragmatics of communication (see Wolf in Casetti, Lumbelli, and Wolf 1978: 21, 37, 43, on televisual reception, for example).
7. "In order to be decoded at reception every theatrical message requires a large number of codes, which means, paradoxically, that theater can be received and un-
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Notes to pages 99-101
derstood by individuals who do not possess all the codes" (Ubersfeld 1977: 30-31). This will be further clarified in chapter 6. The concept of theatrical competence (see 4.6.)—which can be divided into general competence and particular competence—is of great importance in this regard. In order to account for the differences that intervene in the comprehension of the performance text at reception, it would be useful to refer to Labov's distinction between individual competence and community competence (see below 7.4.). I must add that, at least from dadaism onward, Western theater often deliberately plays on effects of strangeness, mystery, exoticism, or surprise resulting from the audience's non-awareness of certain codes. In addition to the more prevalent situation where the sender's competence is "greater" than the receiver's, there is also the possibility that the receiver possesses the greater competence, enabling him to engage in forms of textual cooperation that are un-predicted by the empirical author, even if virtually contained in the text. In theater, this would occur in the case of educated fruition of popular or "folk" performances.
8. It should be noted that usually in the case of a multiple sender, as is almost always the case in theater, mtenh^ns/presupposirions/kinds of competence are not identical for all the partial senders (writer, director, actors, and so on).
9. For a theoretical statement of the problems of theatrical reception, see chapter 7. There has been little specific or systematic semiotic work on staging. An initial attempt is made by Bettetini (1975) while working on a common definition of "mise-en-scene" in cinema and theater. See also Molinari and Ortolenghi's "genetic consideration" of performance. A semiotics of theatrical production seems less difficult to accomplish in the case of highly structured and coded genres, such as ballet and the circus.
10. In various disciplinary fields increasing importance is now attributed to inference in discourse comprehension. See, for example, the "comprehension model" in the psycholrnguistic work of Castelfranchi and Parisi (1981: 43), according to which the task of actualizing the definitive cognitive content of discourse is entrusted to two kinds of inference founded on extralinguistic awareness: (1) discourse inferences and (2) encyclopedic inferences. It should be noted however that according to Peirce's cognitive semiotics, every mental process, every "mental act" (including sensations, perceptions, and emotions), has an inferential character (233 1931/58: 5, 266-68).
11. According to Eco, to carry out the analysis of the components that make up the "expanded sememe" constituted by the text, it is necessary to integrate the linguistic code with an autonomous set of "textual rules": rules of co-reference, contextual and circumstantial selections, rules of stylistic, rhetorical, and ideological over-coding, common and intertextual frames, operators such as the topic, and so on. See Eco 1976 and 1979.
12. See Kowzan (1975), and also Ruffini (1974a, 1974b, 1978a), whose terminology (/code line/) betrays the tendency to perceive every textual "level" as homogeneous and linear, or as having a single code. Bouissac also relates every expressive component of a circus act to a code.
13. "Elements of the expressive system [in the code] need not necessarily belong to a single system" (Eco 1976: 34).
14. Ruffini is of a different opinion: "What constitutes the sufficient condition for the two codes to be regarded as different? The reply is: a difference in the means of expression" (1978a: 43). Ver6n, by contrast, agrees with Metz (1973: 82).
15. This approach allows Metz to make a definite step forward in dealing with the vexed question of the specific, which now becomes a graduated concept rather than a binary one. In fact, he speaks of the possibility of "multiple specificity," meaning that a code can be called "specific" to a given language (or type of text) without being the only one to possess it (1971: ET 224). We thus find ways and degrees to which codes are specific according to the number of "languages" (or types of text)
Notes to pages 101-105
215
which manifest them. As noted, the category of the specific will be used in this sense in the present volume.
16.1 must point out that in juxtaposing the systemic-functional viewpoint with that of the expressive media, I mean to designate the former as the "standpoint of the code/' that is, a consideration of the rules according to which the code correlates pertinent elements of the expressive plane to pertinent elements of the content. As we have seen in 3.1., it is on the systematic plane that the theoretical entities of the performance text "constituted" by analysis are located: first, the codes and the textual structure which organizes them. Obviously, in speaking of the /standpoint of the expressive materials/1 do not intend to refer to the performance as a concrete object, but, as is always the case in this study, to the performance text as a theoretical object, considered from the standpoint of the various expressive media that characterize it.
17. These are: words, tone, music, gesture, movement, makeup, hair style, costume, accessories, scenery, Ughting, music, and noise.
18.1 use quotation marks with the term /sign/ to register my disagreement with those who continue to base a semiotics of theater on a typology of theatrical signs, as though the performance text derived from a combination of fixed minimal units. On the contrary, I maintain that the multiple units pertinent to the performance text can vary depending on the type and level of analysis, and can display different syntagmatic forms and dimensions depending on code and class. (See note 60 below, and note 91 in chapter 2). For this reason I prefer the term /sign function/ or /productive mode/ to /sign/, /expression/, or /textual unit/. See De Marinis (1979a: 10-20) for an early attempt to define the modes of sign production in theater, on the basis of the general typology proposed by Eco (1975).
19. It should be remembered that Jansen's argument is leveled mainly against Ruffini's mmtilinear conception of theatrical communication (see Ruffini 1974a and 1974b).
20. Note that we are dealing with a graduated concept of specificity rather than a binary one.
21. For Metz these are "codes with universal manifestation ... [in which] no particular characteristic would be required on the part of the 'manifestant' of the sig-nifier" (Metz: ET 222-23).
22. Regarding the codes of iconic naming and recognition, see especially Metz (1975). There is no mention of a scenographic code, since stage scenery actually constitutes a complex text produced by a set of performance codes (perceptive, proxemic, iconographic, etc.) on the basis of relative theatrical conventions. As for specificity, this is proper only to the expressive medium and not to the codes which organize it.
23. The case of genuinely natural theatrical codes is different. These involve the transcultural biological rules (or laws) which recent research has identified in the theatrical techniques of the body (see Padier 1980). E. Barba has identified three biological rules that govern the use of the body in non-everyday situations: (1) change in balance, (2) contradiction between the direction of movements and the direction of impulses, (3) "coherent noncoherence" (see Ruffini, ed., 1981: 19-20, 29-30; Barba 1981: 69ft.).
24. This is true only within a given theatrical culture or civilization. For those outside this environment, the implicit and explicit cultural codes of a given theatrical civilization all become conventions which must become the object of a conscious learning process. This is what happens, for example, in the case of a European spectator watching Balinese dance or Noh theater.
25. See 2.6. and 3.2. on the fact that the partial texts and relative codes always undergo some degree of modification in the course of their use in the performance text, if only as a consequence of the co-textual relations and the relationships be-
216
Notes to pages 105-108
tween the codes (see Metz's notion of deplacement, which I have reformulated in terms of the "dynamic quality" of the textual structure of performance). I am in complete agreement with Ruffini when he states that on occasion certain partial texts (with their relative codes) seem to predate the performance as such. I do not agree however with the claim that this condition of autonomous preexistence necessarily implies that the text in question remains unchanged when it becomes part of the performance. See Guarino's brief but pertinent remarks on this issue (1979). I will return to a discussion of the impossibility of "literal" citation in theater in 5.4.
26. This parenthetical comment serves to underline that I am speaking of an ideal situation (in the narrow sense according to which Chomsky's generative model is ideal), a situation not usually found in reality, either through the "fault" of the sender (director, actors) or through the "fault" of the receiver (the audience), or both (see 6.2. and 7.4.).
27. For an attempt to classify theatrical conventions on the basis of Lewis's theory, see Burns (1972), who Distinguishes between (a) rhetorical conventions, regarding the actor/audience relationship, and (b) authenticating conventions, internal to the performance and concerning the relationship between the characters.
28. Obviously, one must imagine a miiiimal degree of acceptance below which one can no longer speak of a convention.
29. This is also always the case with athletic events, where "the normative conventions are perfectly arbitrary, extremely rigorous, and, obviously, explicit" (Campeanu 1975: 99).
30. According to Pavis, the "conventions are rather like "'forgotten' rules, internalized by the operators, and decipherable by the spectator only through the~pro-cess of interpretation" (93).
31. The opposition between theoretical and nontheoretical is meant to designate the opposite poles of a gradual continuum along which the concrete competencies of the senders and receivers can be located. On the sender's side, for example, we can trace different degrees of awareness in relation to theatrical conventions, according to genres and historical eras. A similarly graduated quality of awareness and explicitness is found on the level of reception, forming a continuum that includes the "naive" as well as the informed spectator, the critic as well as the analyst.
32. The distinction between theoretical and nontheoretical, like that between active and passive, holds true for conventions as well as performance codes in the strict sense. See 7.4.
33. See Eco for the distinction between code and s-code (1976: i9ff.).
34. Though constituting s-codes, artistic institutions (which include theatrical conventions) often function as systems of correlation, and hence as codes in the full sense, to such an extent that they can be used for the purpose of lying, as Eco has shown in his discussion of the improper use or deliberate transgression of the literary rules of genre (30-32).
35. These terms are used according to the meanings intended by Metz (1971). Hence /general/ means "proper to all the occurrences of a given language," /particular/ and /distinctive/ mean "proper only to some, or only to one language, respectively."
36. We must be careful not to confuse the (general) performance code, which provides the representational sign functions according to which the stage equals the world (or the place where the event is set), with the general convention within which and on the basis of which that code is instituted, through a change in the extra-theat-ncal codes. The same distinction must be made in the case of "particular" and "distinctive" conventions. As we will see in 4.7.1., general and particular conventions produce, respectively, general and particular codes, and distinctive conventions institute distinctive codes. There is not a reciprocal two-way relationship between
t'|* Notes to pages 108-112 217
these, however, since a convention can reflect several performance codes at the same time.
37. These examples are obviously drawn from traditions of "popular" theater, such as nmeteenth-century Grand Guignol, the tradition of Neapolitan sceneggiate, puppet theater, or nineteenth-century opera. But even classical theater has occasionally featured the foolish character type who mistakes fictional representations for reality (see Pridamant in Corneille's L'illusion comique or Sly in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew).
38. For the notion of frame, or "scenario," see 4.6.2. On encyclopedic competence as the historical competence of the speaker, see Eco (1975: 143). On intertex-tual competence see Kristeva (1969, 1970) and Eco (1979: 81).
39. For a discussion of these distinctions see below 7.4.
40. I am referring to the (graduated) notion of /specificity/ developed by Metz: "What is specific does not exist elsewhere, and in its own sphere of existence it is perceived as definitive, not interchangeable and not accidental" (1969: 394-95). See also note 15 above.
41. I deliberately use the expression /representation/ instead of /theatrical performance/, since there are theatrical events which are completely or partially devoid of fictional representation, and hence outside these "general" conventions.
42. AH of these languages use and re-elaborate these conventions according to the characteristics of their own expressive media and on the basis of the specificity of their own communicative situations. See the attempts at a semiotic approach to cinema and theater in Bettetini (1975) and cinema, theater, and painting in Barrhes (1973b). For semiotically oriented analyses of the concept of representation, see Ou-dart (1971), Marin (1971), Kaisergrubers and Lempert (1972), and AUegri (1978).
43. For a discussion o the concept of imitation in the Natya-Sastra, see Ghosh (1967). On the principle of monomane (mimesis) in the Zeami treatises on Noh theater, see Ortolani (1973a, 1973b) and Marotti (1974). As I have already stated in 2.2., it is difficult to make an absolute distinction between representational theatrical events and nonrepresentational theatrical events, and to make a rigid determination that a performance is (completely) within or (completely) outside the "general" conventions in question. If an event can be located more 01 less explicitly outside the general conventions, this does not mean that it is completely devoid of fictional and symbolic conventions which refer to something else (through denotation and/or connotation). Conversely, it is also true that some presentational, self-referential elements can always be found in representational theater. We might consider the idea of /theatrical representation/ as one of G. Lakoff's "fuzzy concepts," "a nu-anced group,"' "whose boundaries are vague and open to a certain gradation" (Eco 1975: 1441L).
44. In effect, particular conventions are common to groups of performance texts that can be considered as a single (macro-)performance text. See 2.7. and 7.5.
45. The conventions of the dramatic text can also be divided into general, particular, and distinctive conventions. Gulli Pugliatti's study attempts a classification that is quite similar to this (432).
46. There are cases however in which the presence of particular conventions do not imply any foresight The rituals of sport fall into this class, as Campeanu observes (1975: 99).
47. Regarding these links, see Duvignaud's observations on the stalling devices used in medieval religious theater in order to postpone and complicate an ending that was already fully known and expected (1965: 298-304).
48. Cited in Lavagetto (1979:41). The bibliography of semiotic studies on opera is not very vast. See Osolobe (1974) for a study of the various forms of musical theater from the perspective of a theorist of communication, as well as the work of Scotto di Carlo (1973) on the kinesics of opera singers.
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Notes to pages 112-118
49. This idea can be compared to Jauss's concept of a "horizon of expectation," to be discussed in chapter 7.
50. Eco uses the metaphor of the "inferential walk" to refer to the "free, relaxed gesture with which the reader liberates himself from the tyranny—and fascination—of the text in order to find possible outcomes for it in the repertory of the already said" (1979: 118). See also note 53.
51.1 am referring here to the extension of the category of/genre/ in a descriptive rather than prescriptive direction which I will call for in chapter 7. Genre will thus correspond to /textual class/ or /type/. For the moment, however, I will continue to refer to genre in its narrower, generally institutionalized meaning (see 4.6.4. and 4.7.1.).
52. When I mention the identification of a genre, I obviously mean to refer to both /theatrical performance/ as a macro-genre, and the (sub)genre made up of a given theatrical type (opera, puppet shows, ballet, etc.).
53. Eco (1979: 79H.) uses /sceneggiatura/ (scenario) as a translation for /frame/, which is a concept borrowed by textual semiotics from research on artificial intelligence (Minsky 1974, etc.). As used in work on artificial intelligence, this term has also many points in common with the category of "frames" elaborated by Bateson and taken up by Goffman (1974), and which "refers to a system of premises or instructions necessary to decipher, to give meaning to a stream of events" (Wolf 1979: 34). The concept of intertextual frames or scenarios also originates with Eco, who distinguishes these from the /common frame/. While the common frame concerns real-life situations, the intertextual frame refers to a textual world, where the phenomenon of intertextuality allows us to recognize stereotypical structures, reci3r-rent and predictable motifs, and invariable patterns.
54. On the logical theory of possible worlds as applied to textual semiotics, see Ego (1979: 82); Varna, ed. (1977); Versus 10-20 (1978); and Silvestrird, ed. (1979).
55. Obviously, there is no contradiction between the definition of "distinctive conventions" and my comments above (3.1.) on the multiple character of codes. In fact, a code is always specific to its initial situation at the moment that it is institutionalized; once this has occurred and once it has become socially accepted, it becomes available for multiple manifestations, and is therefore multiple..
56. Apart from being strongly coded, popular theater is often governed by conventions of a non-mimetic sort. Yet it addresses an audience (its traditional, audience, rather than tourists) endowed with a high level of competence in the genre. I must note that these conventions, though antinaturalistic, often maintain a relationship of close continuity with conventions that rule many other aspects of cultural behavior and the daily life of the community (see Various Authors 1978a).
57. In chapter 7 I will broaden the category of /genre/ to include every possible class of performance text delimitable within the performance text macro-genre, and hence also mduding the class constituted by the works of an individual artist (director, actor, etc.). This is not to deny that, according to the perspective adopted in the present chapter, it is useful to make a distinction between the identity and function of artists' conventions and those of the other particular conventions (genre, historical period, etc.).
58. We should remember that the degree of the dynamic integration of the codes into the textual structure of performance also has an important effect on the extent to which the performance code deviates from its nontheatrical usage.
59. See note 25 above, and 3.2.
60. By /segmental/1 mean the code units that mark a precise "gap" in the surface of the performance text, thus occupying a "continuous'' segment of the performance "syntagm" (a movement or a line, an object, costume, or musical passage). By /supersegmental/1 mean the units which, though found in the performance text, do not occupy a position that can be separated from the rest of the performance
Notes to pages 118-122
219
without causing a spatiotemporal interruption (see De Marinis 1979a: 6-7). On the cinematic equivalent, see Metz (1971: ET 179, 202-203).
61. We could therefore state that in the case of the Verfremdung convention the textual support of the relative unit is constituted by the entire performance. This is usually what happens in the case of general conventions. Usually, however, theatrical conventions have exponential units with more limited "syntagmatic frames of reference/' but always involve several performance codes and partial texts discontinuously: take for example, the conventions of the "aside" (De Marinis ibid.-. 7).
62.1 must note, however, that the explicit theorization of the alienation effect occurred several years after this essay, and has its terminus post quern in Brecht's visit to Moscow in 1935.
63. Urmson (1972: 338-39) suggests that we conceive of the shift made by the theatrical spectator from lexical meaning (which is basic and general) to textual meaning (which is particular) as an example of "counterfactual interpretation." I will return to this issue in chapter 6 in relation to theatrical fiction. Eco (1981b) has taken up the distinction between lexical or conventional meaning and textual or institutional meaning in his formulation of a theory based on an encyclopedic semantics which attempts to bridge the gap between the two types of meaning (i.e., between "what an expression conventionally 'says' and what someone 'means to say,' or intends, in using this expression"), and which also aims at providing a semantic representation of the second type of meaning.
64. In cases such as these, we could think in terms of sign-functions, in the sense attributed by Barthes (1964) and Eco (1973b). See Pilbrow's important study on the semantic and syntactical conventions of theatrical lighting (1970).
65. While he insists on the privileged relationship between the aesthetic text and the mode of sign production in invention, Eco points.out that his conception has nothing to do with idealistic theories of total creativity. "Invention is not synonymous with 'aesthetic creativity' even if the text is teeming with inventive initiatives. Invention is simply the category that defines a process of sign-institution, independently of its aesthetic outcome" (ibid. 32on.).
5. PERFORMANCE TEXT, CULTURAL CONTEXT, AND INTERTEXTUAL PRACTICES
1. I call these codes /extratextual/ to stress the fact that they are external to the performance text.
2. Clearly, terms such as /determination/, /motivation/, /origin/, and the like do not refer to a direct, unidirectional dependency of a genetic type, as Kristeva seems to postulate between geno-texi and pheno-text (1969:228-31). I would instead agree with Ruffini's statement that "The cultural text does not 'generate' the individual texts of which it is made up, but simply 'includes' them: therefore the relationship c-T/i-T is not of a structure/superstructure type, although the cultural text constitutes the link that enables a single i-text to be related to the economic structure which indirectly 'produces' it" (Ruffini 1976a: 18). More recently an interesting semiotic systemiza-tion of the relationships between structure and superstructure is provided in Bon-fantini (1979). i
3. In this scheme I will also include general conventions, which, unlike the other two types of conventions, are directly related to a given synchrony, because I believe that the traditional canons of Western theatrical performance can undergo significant modifications and alterations as the result of variations in theatrical and literary/dramaturgical conventions in a given period. The history of theater proves this. Consider, for example, the differences in the actor/character relationship, or in the stage/world relationship in different theatrical traditions (classical Greek, medi-
220
Notes to pages 122-128
eval, Elizabethan, seventeenth-century French theater, Renaissance theater, nineteenth-century naturalistic theater, and twentieth-century avant-garde theater).
4. For fifteenth-century treatises, see Delia pittura (1435) by Leon Battista Alberti, Piero della Francesca's De prospectiva pingendi (c. 1482), and De divina proportione (1496) by Luca Pacioli.
5. The bibliography on the origins and development of Renaissance perspective is obviously very vast. Some of the classical works which are pertinent to the kind of approach I have chosen are: Panofsky (1924/25), White (1949)/ Francastel (1951, 1965,1967), and Schefer (1969). I will return to the issue of Renaissance perspective in my discussion of Francastel.
6. It would be interesting to broaden the discussion of the Handbook to other manuals and treatises which were published in Italy during the same period, and which share the same theoretical and practical aims: A. Morrocchesi's "Lessons in Theatrical Art and Delivery" (1832), S. Torelli's "General Analysis of Mime" (1842), and C. Blasis's "Studies on the Arts of Imitation" (1844).
7. The analogy between a painting and a stage set was the subject of an important debate in the eighteenth century. Consider the example of Diderot's Entretiens sur lefils nature! (1757), which is meticulously discussed in Szondi (1968). For a conception of theater as a code-level in pictorial representation, see Schefer (1969).
8. "By 'secondary modeling systems' are meant semiotic systems on the basis of which models of the world and of parts of the world can be built. These systems are secondary in relation to the primary natural language above which they are located, directly (in the supralinguistic system of Hterature), or as forms that are parallel to it (music or painting)" (Ivanov, Lotmaxi, et al. 1973: 63). p
9. See the most recent of Lotman's studies (1977b) on the poetics of everyday behavior in Russian culture in the eighteenth-century, and especially Lotman (1979), where the role of theater is identified in its "function as an intermediate code, or a translator-code," between life and pamting.
10. In the Theses of 1973, Lotman observes that the tendency of culture toward unity is counterbalanced by an opposing tendency toward variety. In this capacity to describe and regulate itself, culture manifests a metalinguistic aspect, which Grande has quite correctly emphasized in his introduction to the Italian edition of the Theses (1980:14).
11. In order to conform with the terminology I have used so far (aesthetic idiolect, aesthetic text, etc.), I prefer the term /aesthetic code/ to Lotman's /artistic code/.
12. On art as a "secondary modelng system," see the theses presented by Lot-man in 1967, as well as the 1973 collective Theses. Regarding the dual process on the basis of which art produces "models" of the "unique original" that constitutes life, and, at the same time, functions as the original on which we often model our everyday behavior, see also Osolsobe (1974: 570-71).
13. An example of a "contemporary" object can be found in the nuptial carriage in the 'Triumph of Federico da Montefeltro" by Piero della Francesca, a pamting which Francastel claims was inspired by the prince's wedding at Urbino in 1460, or more generally by the wedding ceremonies fashionable among the aristocracy of the period. Similarly, the rock featured in the two famous paintings of Saint George and the dragon by Paolo Uccello is related to the cardboard rock-grottoes used in Renaissance festivals (1953: 218). The "cloud" which was used in Florentine religious plays is found in various fifteenth-century pamtings, such as Masolino's "Assumption," Mantegna's "Adoration of the Magi," and Ghirlandaio's "Virgin with the Mantle" (1953: 220-22; 1967: 65-70).
24. See the examples in note 13. For Francastel, even Paolo Uccello's "Miracle of the Host" (1968) constitutes a "scene-by-scene reflection of a Parisian mystery play."
15. According to Francastel (1953: 229) this famous cycle does not simply repre-
Notes to pages 128-130
221
sent Saint Peter's dream, but offers "the representation of something that was seen on stage," i.e., a religious play performed in Florence during that period.
16. For a discussion of the development of Francastel's thoughts on the relationship between painting and theater in works written later than those discussed here, see Muraro (1976).
17. According to Zorzi (1977: 92), "Pellegrino da Udine proposed a stage set painted in perspective for the performance of Ariosto's Cassaria in Ferrara in 1508, thus applying the term 'perspective' to stage scenery for the first time." However, Zorzi also notes some interpretive difficulties regarding the document in question (cited in Cruciani 1976: 66n.).
18. According to Zorzi, insofar as stage scenery is concerned, the fundamental shift of the times lies in "the move from city to theater" (90). The protagonists of this moment of suture between the development of perspective in painting and urban stage scenery are, in Zorzi's estimation, Genga and Peruzzi, as well as the San-gallos. Cruciani agrees with this assessment, adding the names of Bramante and Raphael (61). Nevertheless, the important issue here is not to provide a historical reconstruction of perspective in stage scenery, but to focus on the network of issues connected with it. We thus return to the question of the contiguity between city and theater, and the different ways in which theater represents itself in relation to the city (see Cruciani 62). Only within this context can we can fully grasp the significance of the constant collaboration of architects, painters, and scenographers in these ceremonial and theatrical events. And we can thus perhaps identify one of the main reasons for the delay between the introduction of perspective in painting and the first use of perspective in stage scenery in the last thirty-five years of the sixteenth century. According to Philippot (cited in Cruciani 64-65), a level of ideological homogeneity had to develop between painting and theater in order for the practice of perspective to spill over from one field to the other. On theatrical spaces and on perspective in Renaissance stage scenery, see Nicoll (1927), Jacquot, ed. (1964), Povoledo (1964,1969), and Cruciani (1972) in addition to the studies already mentioned.
19. For a discussion of performance in Florence in the fifteenth century, see the important studies by D'Ancona and deU'Apollonio, and also Molinari (1961), Zorzi (1977), and Cruciani (1974-75).
20. Gombrich (1945, and in 1972a: 55-56) has questioned the actual consistency of the relationships between Botticelli's "Primavera" (4978 c.) and "La giostra," hypothesized by Warburg in 1893, and especially the relationship between these two works and the legendary Simonetta. See note 23 for Gombrich's interpretation of. the pamting.
21. According to Francastel, "The performance of the joust is the crowning element in the procession of the carriages through the city, but it is in itself a complete episode, linked to, though not part of, the less-aristocratic ritual of the procession preceding it" (1952a: 24711.), Another famous fifteenth-century joust was held in honor of Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence on February 7,1469, and was celebrated in the poetry of Luigi Pulci.
22. See Argan (1968: 238) who defines Florentine neo-Platonism as a philosophy of crisis, "a crisis not only in the great values of early humanism, but also a crisis in the lofty political and cultural aspirations of Florence." On the influence of neo-Platonism on Botticelli's mythological symbolism, see Gombrich. On the neo-Platonic Academy, see Chastel (1975).
23. This interpretation (disputed by Francastel) is prompted by a letter written by Ficino, which Gombrich believes to be linked to the inspiration of the "Primavera," where Botticelli supposedly defines Venus in neo-Platonic terms as Hutnanitas (58-66). According to Gombrich, in accepting Ficino's invitation to visualize this conception, Botticelli made use of the ekphrasis of Venus in Apuleius's Golden Ass,
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Notes to pages 130-140
which appears in the context of a pantomime of the Judgment of Paris (77-81). In this first attempt at approaching a mythological subject, the painter treats it in terms of religious art, where, according to Gombrich, the "pagan" aspect of Apuleius's description is completely transformed (93-94).
24. In Poliziano's description of the Kingdom of Venus, we can irnmediately identify the theme of Botticelli's "Primavera" ("Stanze" I, 71-72).
25. In another article (1952b), Francastel links Botticelli's painting to Lorenzo's "Comento sopra alcuni de' suoi concetti" ("Commentary on a Few of His Concepts")~a work of uncertain chronology, however—maintaining that "the meaning of the 'Primavera' is inseparable from a knowledge of the poetic works of Lorenzo the Magnificent himself" (273). In this study, Francastel highlights the propaganda value of the famous painting, its function as a "symbolic justification of the prince's intentions." "The procession of the May festival in Florence, the mythological realm of Venus, paradise of the new Flora: Botticelli's ingenious work is therefore also a representation of good government" (286).
26. See also Poetique 27 (1926) (particularly L. Dallenbach and J. Lenny) on inter-textuality. See Literature (1981), Todorov (1981), and Culler for more-recent studies on this concept.
27.1 have examined some instances of this type in 3.3. while discussing performance texts with textual structures in common. At this juncture, however, I am interested in observing and analyzing a phenomenon, rather than in expressing a value judgment. Self-quotation is also an example of how particular conventions are generated from conventions that are specific to a given performance. From the standpoint of the modes of sign production it corresponds to a catachresis of "inventions" into "over-coded stylizations" (see Eco 1975: 303; and on theater, see De Marinis 1979a: 16-19). See the concept of the autotext, or self-text, proposed by Dallenbach, whose use of the term is nevertheless restricted to the relationship of the text to itself, of which mise-en-abime is the most typical example.
6. TOWARD A PRAGMATICS OF THEATRICAL COMMUNICATION
1. The double arrow indicates immediate feedback, made possible in theater by the physical copresence of sender and receiver, an element that is absent in mass media. As Moles has pointed out (1967), the cultural circuits of mass media produce only phenomena of medium-range or long-range retroaction. Such is the case with newspapers, cinema, and television. The theatrical relationship can however be conceived of as an uninterrupted sequence of interchanges. The two-directional arrows within the rectangles refer to secondary communicative systems, "internal" to the principal elements of theatrical interaction. I will return to this in note 17 in the context of the distinction between onstage communication and communicaion with the offstage area. For a discussion of illoeutionary and perlocutionary acts and effects, see 6.5.
2. "I propose, as a working hypothesis, that we assume that an 'artistic' phenomenon comes into being whenever someone ('the artist') chooses ... an instrument destined to carry out a detennined operation, with the deliberate intention of indicating by this choice, of communicating by this means, the particular concept of the operation resulting from his relationship to the chosen instrument" (Prieto 1971:119-20).
3. According to Mounin, if communication occurs in theater, it is a one-way occurrence since "the audience can never answer the actors back," or at least they cannot do it "through the means of theater." Buyssens is of the same opinion (1967).
4. For two particularly critical analyses of the premises and blind alleys of "communication semiology/' see Genot (1973) and Nattiez (1973).
Notes to pages 140-142
223
5. A notifying signal "consists in the production of a signal mmcating to the receiver that the sender intends to send him a message" (Prieto). Segre, however, has a narrower understanding of communication, and one that implies reversibility (i979a: 47-48).
6. It is obvious that in the very fact of going to the theater, the spectator already knows that there is a sender ready to send him messages, and this is the basis of the "contract" undertaken at the box office. In this sense, I would agree with Elam's statement that "it is the spectator who initiates the theatrical communication process through a series of actions at once practical and symbolic, of which the first is the simple act of buying a ticket. . . . The economic basis of the transaction has the symbolic value of a 'commission.'. . . The audience's relative passivity as 'receiver' is in fact an active choice which imposes certain obligations on the elected 'senders.' ... If the delegated initiative appears to be abused, the audience is entitled to withdraw from the contract" (1980: 95-96). Elam's comments lose their relevance, however, in the case of performances that are not based on an economic contract (free theater, celebrations, religious rituals).
7. In other cases, the codes are less easily identified or seem completely absent: consider, for example, the often imperceptible psychomotor reactions of the audience (coughing, smoking, whispering, fidgeting) to which one can easily assign rather precise meanings ("attention," "discomfort" "excitement," "boredom"). On the cultural conventions that govern the "responses" of the theater audience, determining denotative and connotative meanings, see Tordera (1979). The audience's responses also contain rather precise rules of genre which determine their appropriateness: "what is accepted as a 'good audience' in the case of tragedy, i.e., quiet attention, is considered anathema to farcical comedy" (Elam 96).
8. This occurs not only in dramatic theater, but also, and especially, in sports and folk genres. The signal constituted by the "departure of the audience from the performance location" also has meaning for the receivers in this communicative universe. It can be interpreted as a failure to meet the contract stipulated by the spectator in buying the ticket and entering the area, and consequently as an interruption of communication.
9. I am obviously referring to theatrical conventions on the one hand and performance codes on the other, understood as the result of the more or less specialized use of cultural codes which are not necessarily specific in the dramatic text (see above 4.6.). For a. distinction analogous to awareness/use (active/passive competence), see Trabant's distinction between understanding an actionJperforming an action (1976: 77ff.).
10.1 will offer a sociological explanation in addition to the semiotic one. Given its collective destination, theater (more than other artistic practices) has traditionally tended to base itself on a "shared knowledge," making ample use of the elements of Lotman's "common memory" (see Lotman 1980: 21). Hence the "conformist" quality of its relationship to genre (see 4.6.2.).
11. With the exception of the Model Spectator(s) inscribed in the text. The fact that the sender codes do not totally coincide with the receiver codes is the normal condition of every communicative situation. See the notion of "aberrant decoding" mentioned in chapter 4. As I have already repeatedly asserted, the abductive process of rmder-coding has a deterrrúning role in the interpretation of the performance text.
12. On this issue, see Ruffini's concept of communication based on a graduated rather than a binary scale, which situates a "communicative performance" (in which the "production factor" is greater than the "expense factor") and a "signifying performance" (in which the contrary is observed) at opposite poles of a continuum.
■13. In theater, we witness the apparently paradoxical fact that while this multi-
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Notes to pages 142-143
coded quality makes comprehension more difficult, increasing the possibility of the receiver's code failing to match the sender's code and hence the likelihood of aberrant decoding, the same quality nevertheless guarantees (partial) communication, since it facilitates at least a minimal level of comprehension. Furthermore, we must remember that the codes and conventions, though fulfilling a primary function, are not the only mechanisms of textual signification used by the performance text. Comprehension of the performance text cannot therefore be conceived of in terms of a simple decoding. As I have repeatedly stated, and will analyze more closely in the next chapter, it must be conceived as a complex interpretive process which brings into play co-textual, contextual, and encyclopedic inferences, where pragmatic factors, relative to the communicative situation, genre, and reciprocal presuppositions of sender and receiver also clearly play an important role. Still, as Eco has pointed out, the existence of at least a minimal degree of knowledge of the codes remains indispensable to the creation of comprehension, and hence of communication (1979).
14. For example, the audience's comprehension increases noticeably in the case of so-called traditional performances, or performances based on strong (highly socialized) conventions, and hence, for this reason, well integrated into the general text.
15. See Goffman's critique of the dyadic sender/receiver model of communication and his proposal to change these two poles into sharper analytical categories (1970).
16. Perhaps we should draw a greater distinction between the communicative relationship among the characters and the communicative relationship among the actors. Often these categories do not coincide. This can be noted in the anecdotes recounted in Diderot's Paradoxe sur le comedien (110-15), illustrating the way in which actors of the period used to pursue their own erotic intrigues on stage, by inserting pointed comments in a loud whisper in the midst of passionate speeches from the dramatic text.
17. Even communication with the area beyond the stage can also be divided into two kinds: (a) communication between character and spectator and (b) communication between actor and spectator. Fictional theater usually privileges (a), whereas nonrepresentational theater privileges (b). Clearly, the two principal levels of theatrical communication (onstage and beyond the stage) are not the only ones that exist in theater. Other chains of communication can be discerned at both poles of the interaction (see figure 3): (a) the sender group: playwright-director, director-actors, director-other operators, actor-actors (not to be confused with the onstage actor-actor relationship which is included in the onstage level [see note 16]); (b) receiver group: spectator-spectator, spectator-self (self-communication). See Eco (1973a: 53ff.), Bettetini (1^75:127), Pavis (1980a: 80-81), and Ubersfeld (1981:1973a: 309-11). Regarding the spectator-spectator relationship, Elam distinguishes three main effects: stimulation (laughter in one part of the auditorium provokes a similar reaction elsewhere); confirmation (spectators find their own responses reinforced by others); and integration (the single audience member is encouraged to surrender his individual function in favor of the larger unit of which he is part) (1980: 96). As for the sender group, Ottolenghi comments on the playwright—> director—» actors relationship as follows: "This is only one of many possible models, although the most obvious and the most historically consolidated (one can create a performance starting with an actor, a piece of music, a setting: one could hypothesize an infinite number of different relationships)" (1979: 34). A case in point can be observed in the productive process of Barba's Odet Theatret, where improvisations are encouraged and the final performance is a collective product. Here "the director becomes a receiver in relation to the actor, and the relationship between author-text and actor often occurs without the mediation of the director" (Ottolenghi).
18. "The threshold between sign phenomenon and stimulus thus lies in the prin-
Notes to pages 143-146
225
ciple of reversibility . . a code exists if the sequence of mediations functions as such and if a forced circuit is not created between stimulus and response" (Eco 1976: 23-24).
19. "A flash of light during the staging of a play, an unbearable noise during a musical performance, some form of subliminal excitement, all these phenomena, which are classified as stimuli, can be recognized by the sender as stimulators of a given effect: the sender possesses a semiotic awareness of this, because, for him, a given stimulus can only lead to a given effect. . . . However, the effect cannot be totally predicted, especially when produced within a context of extreme complexity" (Eco 24). There are many examples of this in theater, such as the "physical" involvement incited by experimental theater in the 1960s in an effort to overcome the fossilization of traditional theatrical roles. This involvement ranged from virtual "aggression" (in the Living Theater) to an intense demand for participation. The use of sound in more-recent experimental theater is particularly important in this regard, serving to test the limits of the audience's acoustic endurance and resistance (Wilson's Edison, for example, or several of Foreman's productions, such as Madness and Tranquillity [1979]).
20. See Poetics 1449b, 23-27. As Brecht points out (1975: II, 127), in order for this "purification" to take place, we must presuppose "a particular psychic process: the spectator's becoming one with the characters imitated by the actors." On the difficult issue of resolving the complex textual and interpretive problems raised by this famous comment in Aristotle, see Lucas, ed. (1968). Some commentators have understood catharsis as an aesthetic and psychological process of "tragic sublimation," or as a "rational-intellectual clarification of the feelings of pity, terror, and the like" (Delia Volpe 1954: 36), while others have interpreted it as an act of liberation and the complete transcendence of all emotions (those provoked by the play, as well as other possible emotions). Tatarkiewicz (1970: 179-80) upholds this second interpretation, while Gallabotti (1974:137-38) supports the first.
21. "The word (logos) is a powerful sovereign, since with its very slight and completely invisible body it leads to the accomplishment of divine works. In fact, it has the power to end fear (phobon pausai), remove pain (hypen aphelein),. produce joy (charan energasasthai), intensify compassion (eleon epauxesai)" (Enkomion Helenes 8; 1949: 99). It-is significant that the two feelings which Aristotle later singled out in his theory of tragic catharsis are already mentioned here. For Gorgias, poetry produces and intensifies the psychagogic and sentimental effects of the word (9-10). And hedeia vosos is produced on the visual level by the "capacity to mold statues of men, and to form monuments of the gods" (18). Gorgias applied the theory of art as illusion and deception mainly to tragedy, comedy, and oratory.
22. Book 10 of Plato's Republic provides many arguments that were later used to fuel moralistic and religious opposition to theater down through the centuries (the early Church Fathers, the Counter Reformation, Bossuet, the Jansenists, and Rousseau). Platonic influence can also be traced in more-recent writers who were radically hostile to the ideology and praxis of theatrical performance, such as Appia, Artaud (see Sontag 1973), and Grotowski. Yet the conception of theater as an instrument of emotional manipulation and seduction does not belong solely to theater's detractors: this can also be found in most of Western tfdnking on theater, especially since the "reinvention" of theater in the Renaissance (see d'Aubignac, the Riccobonis, R. de Sainte-Albine, and Dorat, for example, as well as the more strictly philosophical approach of Lessing, Rousseau, and Diderot).
23. Zeami offers a compendium of his theory of the nine theatrical styles in a short tract entitled Kyui-shidai, "The Stairs with Nine Steps" (IT 225-32). Sieffert has pointed out (i960: 5off.) that the concepts of "flower" and "yugen" (an almost untranslatable term, sometimes rendered as "subtie spell," sometimes as "profound elegance"), as well as the concepts of "interesting'' and "unusual," constitute the key principles of classical Noh aesthetics (see Zeami 127). All of these principles
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Notes to pages 146-147
concern the element "that holds the spectator under a spell" (74), and they constitute the prerogatives that a performance must possess in order to excite uncontrollable emotions in the spectator (163), thus creating a bond between actor and audience. Zeami theorizes this relationship in Book 5 of the Fushi kaden, and identifies it as the indispensable foundation for his own dramatic conception (Sieffert 33, 51, passim).
24. These are the basic moods of Prince Rama, legendary hero of the Ramayana (Marotti, ed., 1979: 81) Other sources mention Nine Lasting Psychic States, adding to those already mentioned the bhava of Peace (Soma), which correspond to the Placid and Familiar Sentiments or Flavors (see Daumal 1935: 124; Das Gupta 1962: 1253; Marotti).
25. Apart from the issue of the exact number of rasa and bhava, the relevant pages in the Natya-Sastra are particularly controversial and difficult to understand, especially with regard to the identity of the two concepts, their function and reciprocal relationships. I have provided in the text the explanation by Ghosh (1967), one of the most recent editors of the ancient treatises. Daumal's interpretation of the theory of the rasa (1937,1938) is also quite subtle and compelling. For Daumal, the rasa constitutes the "essence of poetry." The bhava, on the other hand, is the manifestation of the rasa. In the epic poem, rasa and manifestation influence each other mutually. But their relationship is hierarchical: "As the tree comes from a seed, a flower from the tree, and a fruit also from the tree, Flavors [rasas] are also the root from which the Manifestations spring" (Daumal 1938: 168).
26. The participation of the audience is thus seen as an aesthetic experience, based on a type of surrender to the performance which is neither absolute nor unconscious of the distance between the self and the performance. See Daumal (1938:165, 166) and Sarachchandra (1971:198).
27. According to Ghosh: 'Tt is probably on a consideration like this that Aristotle spoke of catharsis in connection with witnessing a drama of tragic contents which are not dissimilar to the Pathetic, the Odious, and the Terrible Sentiments" (xxxvii-xxxviii). It is quite possible that there were instances of actual contact and exchange between classical Greek theater and the theater of ancient India, though the issue is a complex and controversial one, given the uncertain chronology of the Natya-Sas-tra.
28. Although the Natya-Sastra does not exclude the possibility of "realistic" art for a popular audience, Ghosh points out that "from the very elaborate treatment of various conventions regarding the use of dance, songs, gestures, and speeches by different characters, it is obvious that the tradition of ancient Indian theater recognized very early the simple truth that the real art to deserve the name is bound to allow to itself a certain degree of artificiality which receives its recognition through many conventions" (Ghosh xxx). On the major differences between Aristotelian mimesis and the "conventions" defined by the ancient tract, see Marotti (1974:12-13): "while the relationship between an object and its mimetic representation in 'Western naturalistic realism' seems to conform to a kind of identity, a mimesis is found adequate to the degree that it reproduces the characteristics of the object," whereas the Natya-Sastra and, to an even greater extent, the Zeami treatises on Noh theater conceive of "the relationship between the object and its representation under the wider species of correspondence, which could include identity as a particular case." Another more fundamental difference between the conception of theater in East and West is the importance attributed to staging and its various components in Asian traditions, in contrast with the emphasis given to the literary dimension in the European tradition with its Aristotelian devaluation of the aspect of spectacle (see Ghosh xxvii-xxviii). According to the Natya-Sastra, the rasa—or sentiments— are evoked in the spectator by experiencing the theatrical spectacle (abhinaya) of the corresponding Psychological States, or, more precisely, their Determinants (virb-
Notes to pages 147-150
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hava, "causes of the bhava") on the one hand, and their Consequents (anubhava, "sequel to the bhava") on the other (meaning their external effects—laughter, tears, and other reactions) (Ghosh xxxviii). The abhinaya is the ensemble of expressive and mterpretive actions in theatrical performance. These can be grouped into four main categories: (i) bodily movements and gestures; (2) expressions of psychological states; (3) costumes, sets, etc.; (4) words and music. Each has a different importance, depending on which of the four styles the play belongs to (i.e., the Verbal, the Grand, the Energetic, or the Graceful) (see Ghosh xxviii).
29. In his discussion of Piscator's "pedagogy by suggestion" and "historical emotionalism," Castri analyzes the theatrical devices which the playwright used with the aim of provoking audience involvement in order to make a political point. Brechf s return to the canons of Aristotelian drama with the great plays of his maturity is well known. Even theoretically he was not of the opinion that his theater, which was based on rationalistic principles, should be deprived of emotion, or "entertainment," it was simply a question of discovering which emotions, wlmt kind of diversion, and for what ends (Brecht 1975:1,129). Brecht's epic theater was intended to reconcile "study" and "diversion," "awareness" and "pleasure," two goals that had developed in opposite directions within the Aristotelian theatrical tradition (see 1975:1, 148). To do this, he found it necessary to free theatrical pleasure from identification, and to find another basis which would allow the use of theater for the purpose of teaching and raising consciousness. This new principle of "aesthetic enjoyment" was identified in the "alienation effect," the fulcrum of non-Aristotelian dramatic theory.
30. My own project of a semiotics of theatrical seduction is situated at the opposite pole from the idealistic-tautological approach of Baudrillard (1981) and his followers, who conceive of seduction as an intuitive category, an absolute, ineffable entity, situated "elsewhere" with respect to the discourse that describes it (see also Various Authors 1981).
31. According to Pessoa de Barros: "The semiotic approach to the modality of doing or theory of performance should be developed through two differed components: a theory of manipulation and a theory of action" (1977: 2).
32. For Greimas, the modalities in which "doing" modalizes "doing" are "facti-twes/' and are distinct from the "veridictive" modalities" in which "being" modalizes "being" (Greimas 1976; Greimas and Courtes 1979).
33. "Situated syntagmatically between the sender's wanting and the receiver-subject's actual realization of the narrative program (proposed by the manipulator), manipulation plays upon persuasion and thus articulates the persuasive doing of the sender and the interpretive doing of the receiver" (Greimas and Courtes ET 184).
34. According to Greimas and Courtes, in addition to a semantic competence, the "subject's competence" includes a modal competence "which can be described as a hierarchical organization of modalities" and which constitutes the goal of the manipulative operation (ET 45).
35. Even if not expressed in the same terms, the idea that communication and language can be conceived of as actions aimed intentionally at influencing the receiver, modifying his "inner state," and/or urging him to adopt specific forms of behavior is an idea that has long been widespread in various disciplines related to linguistics and semiotics (communication semiology, the philosophy of language, pragmatic linguistics, psychoIinguisti.es, and pragmatic textual semiotics). For an informed introduction to pragmatic linguistics, see Schlieben Lange (1975).
36. The idea was already expressed by Austin (1962:104) who mentioned "parasitic . . . 'nonserious,' 'not full normal' linguistic uses," in reference to literature, theater, and the like. See Gale (1971) on the pseudo-speech acts producedhy actors during a performance.
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Notes to pages 150-153
37. Searle's examples are what Ekman and Friesen refer to as "mtrinsically coded acts," which I prefer to call "fictional samples" (De Marinis 1979a: 14-15).
38. Like the assumption that "no textual trace, beyond the author's intention, can identify the fictional nature of a text" (Editorial, Versus 19/20: 3).
39. As we saw in 1.8., Searle distinguishes correctly between written text and represented text, claiming that only in the case of the represented text can we properly speak of "pretended" speech acts: "The text of the play will consist of some pseudo-assertions.. . . the playwright's performance in writing the text of the play is rather like writing a recipe for pretense than engaging in a form of pretense itself" (1975c: 328). Urmson holds a similar position (1972), although he is more insistent than Searle on the pragmatic aspects of theatrical fiction.
40. When I use the term /speech acts/ in the context of the performance text, I am clearly not referring solely to actions conveyed by verbal language but also those produced by nonverbal or mixed means. Nevertheless, I prefer this expression over other possible expressions (such as /communicative acts/ or /sign acts/) in order to conform with widespread usage and to make explicit the theoretical point of reference of the present discussion. A future theory of theater as action needs a broader theoretical framework which is less linguistically focused than what we had currently at our disposal in the philosophy of speech acts. Trabanf s effort (1976) is interesting in this regard, though still too linguistically bound, in its redefinition of the sign as an "indicative action" (or "semiotic action") and the quest to formulate semiotics in terms of a theory of human acts (78ft., 124).
41. Let us for the moment pass over the already mentioned possibility of communication between actors in theatrical performance, as distinct from communication between the characters (onstage communication in the proper sense), with the accompanying production of real internal perlocutions and illocutions. Obviously, if we take a look at theatrical phenomena which are outside representational conventions, this possibility becomes commonplace: take for example the orders given and received hierarchically in a military parade, or the directives and advice exchanged by football players during a game, or the performative statements which take place among the "actors" hva ceremony or festival: investitures, coronations, weddings, etc.
42. Cases of this type are obviously numerous in Asian performance traditions which are based to a lesser extent than Western theater on representational illusion. According to Marotti (1974: 8), "In Japanese Kabuki and in Indonesian Wayang wong the actor speaks to his audience, and not to his partner."
43. My use of the term /indirect/ at this juncture is not the usual use of this term in the literature of speech acts where the expression /speech act/ designates an illo-cutionary act which is carried out indirectly through the execution of another act (see Searle 1975b): an order carried out through a question, for example.
44. The conception of the text or discourse as a hierarchy of aims according to which the sequences of constituent utterances are structured currently prevails in various research fields from textual pragmatics to textual linguistics. See van Dijk (1977a) and Parisi (1980).
45. For definitions of directive and commissive illocutionary acts, see Searle (1975a: 355-56), whose taxonomy I have used in this typological sketch. In the performance text we find serious illocutions of all kinds. In an agitprop performance, or example, we will find representatives and expressives; and at a political rally, declaratives. In analyzing each concrete case, we must identify the prevalent and/or principal illocutionary acts in a position to constitute the macro-act of the entire performance text, and to which all the other acts are subordinated.
46. The widespread use of behabatives in popular theater (and in commercial literature) results from the author's intention to mark the discourse in a highly emotional way with the aim of inducing an immediate, noncritical response in the audience through emotional identification.
Notes to pages 153-160
229
47. A qualifying characteristic of declarations is that "the successful performance of one its members brings about the correlation between the prepositional content and reality; and the successful performance guarantees that the propositional content corresponds to the world. If I successfully perform the act of appointing you chairman, then you are chairman; if I successfully perform the act of nominating you as candidate, then you are a candidate" (358). According to Searle, in order to properly execute the declaration, "there must exist an extralinguistic institution and the speaker and hearer must occupy special places within this institution" (359).
48. Among the few exceptions, I must note Cohen's study (1937b) on the visual arts, particularly on Duchamp's paintings.
49. Obviously, many of these phenomena are not "theatrical" in Ubersfeld's opinion. But this is not enough to explain the divergence at issue here. In fact, even in theatrical performance in the strict sense, representational elements exist alongside presentational elements. Sometimes however the self-referential elements seem so dominant that they push the performance text beyond the canons of theatrical fiction, as we have seen in the case of avant-garde performances, as well as ballet and circus (see 2.2. and 4.6.1.).
50. For Goffman's description of the relationship between theater and daily life, and his "theatrical metaphor," see 2.2.2. above. The ethnomethodological and mi-crosociological studies do not constitute the only perspective responsible for bringing about the radical reformulation of the classical distinctions in question. Scholars of mass communication, for example, have also pointed out that electronic developments have greatly altered the collective imaginary and that "the changes in mass-consumer production destroy the classical categories of performance, eradicating the distinction between fiction and reality, simulation and event" (Abbruzz-ese 1980: 8).
7. THE SPECTATOR'S TASK
1. See Campeanu (1975), which I have cited frequently in this volume, Coppi-eters and Tindemans (1977), Elam (1980), and, especially, the volume by Pavis (1980b), which offers the first systematic introduction to the semiotics of theatrical reception, even if the author concentrates more on the literary-dramatic aspect than 'on^ertontfaneeT^ —™-«™—■-......—.....      , -
2. See also Taviani's comments on the absence of the spectator in eighteenth-century writing on theater: "The spectator is absent from prescriptive manuals as well as scientific and philosophic works on delivery and actors.. . . The spectator is envisioned no differently from the reader of a book: a book exists independently of its reader, can be read and reread; one can reconsider one's impressions, confront them; in fact, one can arrive at a supposedly objective standpoint in which there is a clear distinction between the object under inquiry and the subject performing the mquiry. The concrete persistence of the book in spite of the flux of different readings gives rise to the awareness—or the illusion—that a work exists independently of its effect on a user" (1981: 102-103). This is not to deny the fact that Western thinking on theater has often articulated empirical hypotheses of the theatrical spectator, along with normative, dogmatic hypotheses. See, for example, the comments on this question in Aristotle's Poetics and The Moral Characters of Theophras-tos.
" 3. Clearly, audiences of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were greatly influenced by many other works, especially novels, which affected their participation at theatrical events (see Capatti 1975: 40-41).
4. In 1964 Maurice Descotes observed that "the spectator scarcely exists in the history of theater" (1964: 2), a situation which has not altered greatly since that time. Although Descotes's work seems rather outdated today, it is still the most important volume on theatrical reception written by a historian. In recent years.
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some historiographical efforts worthy of mention are Brauneck (1974), the already mentioned work by Capatti (1975), and a few of the essays published in Jacquot, ed (1968).
5. Freud's influential essay "Psychopathic Characters • on the Stage" (1905) attempts to explain the pleasure that audiences feel in the theater while watching painful or even tragic scenes: "Being present as an interested spectator at a spectacle or play does for adults what play does for children, whose hesitant hopes of being able to do what grown-up people do are in that way gratified. The spectator is a person who experiences too little, who feels that he is a 'poor wretch' to whom 'nothing of importance can happen/ who has long been obliged to damp down, or rather displace, his ambition to stand in his own person at the hub of world affairs; he longs to feel, and to act, and to arrange things according to his desires—in short, to be a hero. And the playwright and actor enable him to do this by allowing him to identify himself with a hero. They spare him something, too. For the spectator knows quite well that actual heroic conduct such as this would be impossible to him without pains and sufferings and acute fears, which would almost cancel out the enjoyment. He knows, moreover, that he has only one life and that he might perhaps perish even in a single such struggle against adversity. Accordingly, his enjoyment is based on an illusion; that is to say, his suffering is mitigated by the certainty that, firstly, it is someone other than himself who is acting and suffering on the stage, and, secondly, that after all it is only a game, which can threaten no damage to his personal security" (305-306). Mannoni's important psychoanalytical critique of theater (1957) is based on Freud's essay, and arrives at conclusions that are more complex, though not always compatible. According to Mannoni (1957), in the theater "everything seems predisposed to produce illusion, but on someone else, as if we were in complicity with the actors. This someone else is a part of our ego, a residue of the 'child' we once were, still beckoning us back" (74). Freud calls the "someone else" the dream-ego. Mannoni explains that at this moment the subject must take refuge in denial (Freud's Verneinung): "Arriving at the most extreme consequences, we must admit that in the adult the effects of the mask and of the theater are made possible in part due to the presence of processes similar to those of negation (Verneinung); that is, that it must not be true, that we must know that it is not true in order for the unconscious images to be really free. In this way, the theater carries out a symbolic function. It is like the great'negation,^hich^ows"the^eturn"=to*™' what was repressed under a denied form" (76). Mannoni's conclusions develop and sharpen Freud's observations: "The site of the imaginary is the ego, not the ego of Freud's early writings where the subject was expected to adjust to reality, but rather the narcissistic ego, which is the site of reflexes and identifications." Mannoni concludes that theater did not come into existence in order to offer a better, richer life to the subject "to compensate for a narrow, limited one, but in order to produce events of a completely different kind, which come about only in the imaginary part of the ego. And for this to happen, it is not necessary for the subject to confuse illusion with reality; in fact, this confusion must not occur" (81-85). On the issue of emotional identification, see Gombrich's essay on "The Mask and the Face" (1972b) which discusses psycho-aesthetic studies on the theory of empathy (Einfuh-lung) by Upps, Lee, Berenson, Wolfflin, and Worringer. See also Jauss's distinctions between different kinds of aesthetic identification: associative, admiring, sympathetic, cathartic, and ironic (1982).
6. The interpretation of the data gathered through interviews and questionnaires brought Holm to-reverse the commonplace assumption that the level of the subjecf s reception (or comprehension) of a performance rises according to social class and frequency in attending the theater. In this case, however, there seems to be an inverse relationship between habitual attendance at the theater and originality and intelligence of reception. When faced with such an unusual show as Ferai,
Notes to pages 161-165
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the reception of knowledgeable theatergoers follows an ur^teresting pattern, one that is conditioned by stereotypes of traditional theater. On the other hand, spectators without much familiarity with theater responded with the most interesting reactions, probably because they were able to watch the performance from a more naive and unprejudiced position. Thus two different conceptions of theater emerge: the image of theater as harmless entertainment, and a contrasting image of theater as an event that deeply influences the individual, an experience to which one cannot react with indifference, and which can also lead to unpleasant feelings and situations. Hence the intention expressed by many of the unsophisticated audience members never to repeat the experience.
7. The typology of theatrical readings proposed in the last chapter of Demarcy's book is also of great interest (1973: 327ff-)- On the one hand, the author identifies a horizontal reading (the receptive attitude of the traditional spectator, characterized by passivity, attention focused almost exclusively on the fabula and its resolution, identification with the hero, and finally, as a consequence, an "extreme visual poverty," i.e., the incapacity to "see," to grasp the information autonomously conveyed by the various signifying systems of the performance while also functioning to support the narrative structure). On the other hand, Demarcy proposes a transversal reading which consists of a critical, objective attitude toward the theatrical event and the characters in a type of reception that is more attentive to the signifying systems used by the staging than by the "story" being told. In this second type of reading, which is obviously the type favored by the author, we can observe the influence of Brechf s Verfremdung and Eisenstein's idea of a "vertical reading" of film. For a rigidly phenomenological application of the psychosociology of reception in theater, see Steinbeck (197011.).
8. In the following pages I will deal briefly with literary reception. Reception studies in other artistic fields can be found in the following: Lumbelli (1974), Metz (1976), Monaco (1977), and Casetti (1978) on cinema; Casetti, Lumbelli, and Wolf (1978) on television; Mura (1979) on the visual arts; and Tessarolo (1979) and Ser-ravezza (1980) on music.
9. See, for example, the bibliographical references in note 35, chapter 6.
10. For bibliographical information on aesthetic reception, see Grimm (1977), and Poetique 39 (1979), which has become an important reference point, offering trans-"lationsoffaussrlserj-StempelrStiefle,"and"Wafhirig.' To'complefelhe picture, I must mention the volumes edited by Warning (1975) and Weber (1978). See also Poetics Today 4, no.i (1980): "Narratology II: The Fictional Text and the Reader."
11. For a more synthetic definition of the "horizon of expectation" see Jauss, cited in Warning, ed. (1975: 130).
12. I must nevertheless point out that Jauss's aesthetics of reception does not completely coincide with the concept of ecart as found in the writings of formalist and postformalist theorists. For Jauss, "novelty" is not merely an aesthetic category but is also a historical one.
,, 13. The idea of an "implied reader," understood as an image which the text itself "constructs" of its own receiver, has been current for some time in theories of literature which are based on structuralism or semiotics. Other works which are independent of the research by the Konstanz group are: Barthes (1966), Hirsch (1967), Lotman (1970a), Riffaterre (1971), Corti (1976), and especially Eco (1979).
14. Van Dijk's hypotheses on textual macrostructures are close to my own comments in 3.1. on the textual structure of performance (which is, however, a macro-structure of codes), and in 2.3.2. on the levels of coherence in the performance text.
15. See van Dijk (1977b, 1979a), van Dijk and Kintsch (1978), W. Kintsch and E. H. Kintsch (1978). Van Dijk is also editor of the special issue of Poetics dedicated to "story comprehension" (9:1-3,1980).
16. The psycholinguistic studies by Castelfranchi and Parisi (1980) are conducted
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Notes to pages 165-168
along the same lines as the research by van Dijk and Kintsch. In recent years th authors have progressed from a study of the statement (sentence) to the study c discourse. See note 10 in chapter 4 for information on their "model of understand ing and remembering sentences."
17. Some theorists propose an ideal reader above and beyond the impliei reader. According to Segers, the "ideal" reader is a hypothetical constructio: created by the theorist in the process of interpretation, or a construction createi by the writer while setting up the plot (1978:50). Coste describes the implied reade as "virtual," and defines the "ideal" reader as the reader "attributed or authorizei by an author or an interpreter: "I will call the first the ideal authorial reader and the secon. the ideal critical reader" (1980: 357). Pagnini proposes a different triad: he use the term "ideal" to designate the implied or model reader, and also identifies potential reader as "a different reader (i.e., from the reader implied in the text), of different culture, belonging to a different social class" (this reader can becom the new ideal addressee of the work). Finally, he identifies a universal reader justified by the "ambition long demonstrated by writers to survive their own-er. and to gain a kind of immortality by virtue of the future readability of their owi works" (1980: 57-58). Other variations in these typologies can be found i Riffaterre's archilecteur (1971), understood as a kind of "sum of all readings," Wolff intentional reader (1971), Fish's informed reader, and Culler's competent reade (1975). These concepts are discussed critically in Coste and in Iser (1976: Er 30-38).
18. Culler's observation is symptomatic in- this regard: "The question is not wha actual readers happen to do but what an ideal reader must know implicitly in orde to read and interpret works in ways which we consider acceptable, in accordano with the institution of literature" (1975: 123-24). Culler subsequently returned t< this type of problem, especially in the chapter "Semiotics as a Theory of Reading' in his 1981 volume.
19. See 6.5. on the performance text as a macro-speech act (or a macro-sign act) Some mention of an implied or ideal spectator can be found in Pagnini (1978: 17I8 and Pavis (1980a: 82). Clearly, like the receiver, the sender must be considered as ; textual strategy of enunciation inscribed in the text (the Model Author, in Eco' term) as well as an empirical entity, a real author. In the case of theater, there an obviously multiple .model authors. We -must-keep m mind, the ^distinction-betweei the intentions of the empirical sender (meaning X, the author of the text Y) anc enunciative intentions as textualized strategies (what Y means as a text). These twi strategies are theoretically distinct and do not always coincide in practice. This fac gives rise to such notions as the concept of unconscious meaning (widely utilized ii ethnographic studies), making way for a whole series of "deep" interpretations whether psychoanalytical, sociological, or the like. I must point out that my allu sions to the sender's desires or intentions, to the spectator's adjustment to thesi intentions, and to the success of speech acts always refer to the textual strategy o strategies inscribed in the performance text, unless the contrary is indicated. Fi nally, in the case of the performance of a dramatic text (a case which, as we hav« seen, is not coextensive with the class of performance texts), I must emphasize thi distinction—mentioned in Pavis 1981b—between the Model Reader/Spectator in scribed in the dramatic text and the Model Spectator suggested by the staging of th» same text. These are textual strategies that do not often coincide with each other and can deviate in a radical way.
20. I must note that all performances are "open" in a certain sense, sine their multi-coded makeup allows communication to take place on different level of code-awareness, and hence on different levels of comprehension. When distinguish here between "closed" and "open" performances, I am aUuding t< the type of interpretive cooperation "prescribed" and foreseen for the spectato