|
|
|
|
|
|
l'énonciation and the sujet de l'énoncé. Who is speaking, qui parle? That intoxicated individual? The class he is representing? The Salvation Army? |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Luis Prieto has pointed out that in theater (as well as in cinema) words are not transparent expressions referring to their content (and through it to things). They are expressions referring to other expressions, namely, to a class of expressions. They are phonic objects taken as objects and ostended as such. The statement I love liquor does not mean that the subject of the utterance loves liquorit means that there is somewhere somebody who loves liquor and who says that. In theater and cinema, verbal performances refer back to verbal performances about which the mise-en-scène is speaking. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In a certain sense every dramatic performance (be it on the stage or on the screen) is composed by two speech acts. The first is performed by the actor who is making a performative statementI am acting. By this implicit statement the actor tells the truth since he announces that from that moment on he will lie. The second is represented by a pseudo statement where the subject of the statement is already the character, not the actor. Logically speaking, those statements are referentially opaque. When I say Paul has said that Mary will come, I am responsible for the truth of the proposition Paul has said p, not with the truth of p. The same happens in a dramatic performance: because of the first performative act, everything following it becomes referentially opaque. Through the decision of the performer (I am another man) we enter the possible world of performance, a world of lies in which we are entitled to celebrate the suspension of disbelief. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
There is a difference between a narrative text and a theatrical performance. In a narrative, the author is supposed to tell the truth when he is speaking as subject of the acts of utterance, and his discourse is recognized as referentially opaque only when he speaks about what Julien Sorel or David Copperfield have said. But what about a literary text in which Thomas Mann says I and the I is not Thomas Mann but Serenus Zeitblom telling what Adrian Leverkuhn has said? At this moment, narrative becomes very similar to theater. The author implicitly begins his discourse by saying performatively I am Serenus. (As in the case of the drunk, it is not necessary that he assume all the properties of Serenus. It is enough that he reproduce certain pertinent features, namely, certain stylistic devices able to connote him as a typical German humanist, a cultivated and old-fashioned middle bourgeois.) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Once this is saidonce the methodological standpoint that both fiction and living reportage are instances of mise-en-scèneit remains |
|
|
|
|
|