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Page 109
to ask, "How does a character who acts as an element of a mise-en-scène speak?" Do his words have a univocal meaning? Do they mean one thing only and nothing else?
In 1938 Bogatyrev, in a fundamental paper on signs in theater, pointed out that signs in theater are not signs of an object but signs of a sign of an object. He meant that, beyond their immediate denotation, all the objects, behaviors, and words used in theater have an additional connotative power. For instance, Bogatyrev suggested that an actor playing a starving man can cat some bread as breadthe actor connoting the idea of starvation but the bread eaten by him being denotatively bread. But under other circumstances, the fact of eating bread could mean that this starving man eats only a poor food, and therefore the piece of bread stands not only for the class of all possible pieces of bread but also for the idea of poverty.
However, our drunken man does something more than standing for drunkenness. In doing so, he is certainly realizing a figure of speech, a metonymy, since he stands for the cause of his physical devastation. He also realizes an antonomasia, since he, individually taken, stands for his whole categoryhe is the drunken man par excellence. But (according to the example of Peirce) he is also realizing an irony by antonymy. He, the drunk, the victim of alcoholism, stands ironically for his contrary; he celebrates the advantages of temperance. He implicitly says I am so, but I should not be like this, and you should not become like me. Or, at another level, Do you see how beautiful I am? Do you realize what a kind of glorious sample of humanity I am representing here? But in order to get the irony, we need the right framing: in this case, the standards of the Salvation Army surrounding him.
Since we have approached the rhetorical level, we are obliged to face the philosophical one. Our drunken man is no longer a bare presence. He is not even a mere figure of speech. He has become an ideological abstraction: temperance vs. intemperance, virtue vs. vice. Who has said that to drink is bad? Who has said that the spectacle of intoxication has to be interpreted as an ironic warning and not as an invitation to the most orgiastic freedom? Obviously, the social context. The fact that the drunk has been exposed under the standards of the Salvation Army obliges the audience to associate his presence with a whole system of values.
What would have happened had the drunk been exposed under the standard of a revolutionary movement? Would he still have signified "vice" or, rather, "the responsibility of the system," ''the results of a bad administration," "the whole starving world"? Once we have ac-

 
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