American 'Unculture' in French Drama

Homo Americanus and the Post-1960 French Resistance

Les Essif

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137299031
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A book about the role America plays in the French imagination, as it translates to the French stage. Informed by a rich variety of Western cultural scholarship, Essif examines two dozen post-1960 works representing some of the most innovative dramaturgy of the last half century, including works by Gatti, Obaldia, Cixous, Koltes, and Vinaver.

Introduction: Part 1

The French and the Americans have been interacting since the seventeenth century. In the last half-century, with the advent of a new world order, a number of pundits have rather crudely come to distinguish the two national cultures in terms of political and cultural vitality: Americans act and the French react; Americans are a people of action while the French are a people of resistance. Until now, a vigorous – even aggressive – form of French resistance has seemed to escape our detection. It comes in a very lively genre of artistic representation. So I might begin this discussion with a dramatic warning: Self respecting Americans, beware! The French are taking over your bodies, your minds, your territorial space. They are fabricating American places and masquerading as American citizens on the stages of their theatres, imposing their interpretations of your world. They are writing plays about American people and American places, performing America their own way and as they see it. Since the 1960s, prominent French dramatists have written an extraordinary number of plays about the American West, about American war and violence, American business, and about America’s crusade to establish a new world order. Dramatists like René de Obaldia, Armand Gatti, André Benedetto, Fernando Arrabal, Pierre Halet, Hélène Cixous, Bernard-Marie Koltès, Michel Deutsch, Gérard Gelas, and Michel Vinaver have dramatized and Frenchified stories about the utopian wilderness of the western frontier and the larger-than-life eccentricities of its resident pioneers (like Calamity Jane and Geronimo); about World War Two and the atomic bomb, Vietnam, 9/11, ‘Megasheriff’ presidents, and Guantanamo prison; about the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti and the international response to its anti-communist, racist, and human rights implications; about French majorettes mindlessly marching in place to the tune of ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’; about an imagined sequel to Kafka’s Amerika – rendered in a radically Frenchified Kafkaesque style; about the quest of American conglomerates to conquer world markets and establish American-style capitalism as a global cosmology.

Readers of this book should also be aware of the specific nature of the post-1960 French perspective on, and manipulation and production of, ‘America and Americans.’ I want to be very clear that the French interest exceeds the cultural specificity of American society itself, in an attempt to explore and explain the materialization of a specific presentation of postmodern human culture: homo americanus.¹ This term, which I develop throughout this text, has more to do with fundamental cultural values than with nationality per se. Succinctly put, it represents an alternative to the West’s post-Enlightenment cultural evolution, an uncritical, mass-cultural, ‘uncultured’ alternative that goes against the grain of European ideological traditions. While the French critical gaze might reasonably begin with a certain geographical location and a certain citizenship in mind, it quickly shifts its insight to the more global evolution of human culture – and theatre plays a prominent critical-creative role in the hypothesizing of this phenomenon. The homo americanus spaces and characters of post-1960 French plays are not at all limited to what we conventionally conceive as American culture; they have, in fact, a deepening affinity with presentations of contemporary French culture, especially with respect to a number of themes treated in the following four chapters: capitalism-consumerism, spectacle-entertainment, and a de-emphasis on social community. At its most essential, the showcasing of American people and places in French plays offers a new model of French resistance, a resistance against the homo americanus trends in our globalizing world.

Yet the following questions still remain relevant: What could these French versions of American persons, places, and events tell us about American, French, or global cultures that homegrown versions could not? Why are they being written and performed? Readers who are more interested in the plays themselves than in the historical context and cultural underpinnings I am about to develop might want to move directly to the final section of this introduction and on to the chapters. Before I examine the plays, however, I feel it would be particularly enlightening to engage a rather lengthy and in-depth discussion of the critical-cultural object that the United States/homo americanus represents for the French, a discussion of the social, cultural, historical, and philosophical terrain which feeds the French theatrical fascination with and investigation of the United States.

The histories of literature and drama provide many instances of storytellers of one country writing stories about another, using characters and spaces of another. The most notorious creations of the national or ethnic other occurred from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. The French staged the Spanish and the English, the Spanish and the English staged the French, and these Western cultures all wrote a lot of plays about the much more mysterious and exotic cultures of the East. For the most part, the latter were products of what Edward Said has identified as European Orientalism, a perspective which generally revisited and reevaluated the past and the non-West through an uncritical, ethnocentric, largely fantastical lens. For the past two centuries, Europeans have also produced novels and plays with stories about America and its past. But not until the second half of the twentieth century do the French begin to project their future in the West of the West, America, which they begin to see as an uncommon sort of cultural wellspring – one that works in reverse, as a foil.² Not until the second half of the century do French dramatists take an acute and almost obsessive creative interest in the otherness of America. I do not believe that the theatre of any other national culture has ever taken such an interest in the ‘foreignness’ or in the hegemonic otherness of another. The intensifying attempts of French theatre to adopt and explore the special traits of American space and the points of view and behavior of American individuals are no longer motivated purely either by the exotic foreignness of the United States or by some need to showcase by contrast the differences and the foreignness of their own culture. The new depth and breadth of French drama’s interest in the other side of the Atlantic owes in part to the fact that we have arrived at a point in history where the otherness of New World America is less distinct than ever from contemporary French culture, and the two formerly quite distinct national cultures are beginning to evolve along similar paths – a path that places homo gallicus on his guard.

Imaginations of America occupy a unique place in the French consciousness and they can yield cultural insight that homegrown perspectives do not. Since the 1960s and the US rise to global dominance, the topic of America has appeared in a wide range of French discourses, from popular and media culture, to theoretical writings within the social sciences, to fiction. A survey of dramatic texts published in France since the 1960s – those written by the most internationally prominent of French dramatists as well as by some less prominent, though nonetheless intellectually and artistically challenging ones – yields an extraordinary number of works that take the United States as a thematic axis, featuring American space and American characters. While post-1960 France has used the United States as a subject in other fictional and artistic genres such as prose, poetry, and painting, the French seem to take a special interest in theatrical renderings of the United States as a cultural object, that is, in the value of the contemporary United States as a visual, sonoral, and dynamic stage image. It truly surprises me that contemporary cultural studies and dramatic criticism have largely overlooked the subject of America as a cross-cultural theatrical image or discourse.³ This book helps fill this gap by using cultural and dramaturgical theories, criticism, and approaches to explore the French theatrical imagination as a creative form of border-crossing, as a comparative epistemology, as a cross-cultural theatrical way of knowing the world and divining the future.

American characters in French theatre from the eighteenth century through the first half of the twentieth century were largely stereotypically portrayed as rustic, eccentric, or materialistic ‘utilitarian workers’ in the midst of a ‘prosperous mediocrity’ (Maurice Baudin). As the French headed toward their social revolution of 1968, and French intellectuals were developing their cultural theories of the new hyperreal ‘Society of the Spectacle’ (Guy Debord), French theatre experienced a reawakening, owing not only to influences of postwar existentialism, postmodernism, and a passion for social progress, but also to revolutionary dramaturgical theories like those of Antonin Artaud (his metaphysical ‘theatre of cruelty’ which was rediscovered and reappraised beginning in the sixties and seventies) and the theatrically self-conscious, politically oriented theories and methods behind Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre. In his analysis of this ‘new theatre,’ Robert Abirached wrote of a ‘hypertheatrical’ revolution, one which involved ‘an inversion of the poles of reality and fiction,’ a ‘disguised space,’ and an overpowering of the action by ‘the dynamism of the images.’ What is more, this ‘return to the primordial origins of performance’ constitutes ‘a radical critique of bourgeois representation in relation to the primordial source of performance’ (417). For the French, the theatricality of the emerging American hyperreality was not only an intriguing critical object to explore but also a useful artistic strategy to undermine the hegemony of the bourgeois subcultures in Western societies. The dynamic hyperreal ‘image-culture’ of America is one that manufactures, markets, and embodies the potent images of Hollywood, new-age cowboys, Vietnam, virulent anti-Communism, religious evangelism, the bomb, money and capital, and it is one that revels in an unambiguous advertisement of itself, one that prefers viewing-enhanced or photoshopped high-definition versions of itself to experiencing life up-front and in the flesh, so to speak. America’s unique flair for self-simulation and self-stimulation has infected French culture and it has inspired French dramatists to explore the cultural anomalies of the United States through the hypertheatrical dimensions of the stage, to experiment with the hypertheatricality of the shifting relationships between the fiction of the stage and the illusionary, unreal quality of those European value systems which were seemingly compromised by the US model. The trope of America participates in the postwar non-realist revolution of French theatrical art.

This book examines both how and why prominent post-1960 French playwrights represent or misrepresent ‘America,’ ‘Americans,’ and more abstractly, the concept of ‘Americanness’ – or, more precisely, homo americanus – especially in terms of what the French perceive to be the extraordinarily uncritical collective consciousness of Americans and the alternative cultural ‘reality’ it has engendered for the United States and the world. Since Tocqueville pondered this anti-intellectual legacy in the nineteenth century, in today’s context of the United States’ global hegemony in an increasingly globalized world, the French conceptualization of it has transformed into what Jean Baudrillard has termed American ‘unculture’ (America 8). Baudrillard and others believe this unculture results from an undialectical approach to history and the present, one which tends to dismiss or oversimplify the contradiction, conflict, and nuance underlying all forms of sociocultural practice. Unculture is reflected in those American values and practices that the French find fascinating as well as culturally and historically regressive, and consequently and paradoxically problematic: individualism, hyper-patriotism, provincialism-puritanism, religious fundamentalism, materialism-commercialism, a pioneer-cowboy-lawman mentality, militarism, gangsterism, violence, a cultural obsession with spectacle and entertainment (Hollywood), and with all this, a refusal of social community. It might go without saying that the French find at least some of these values and practices sufficiently fascinating to either adopt, mimic, or artistically reproduce them in their literature, cinema, and drama.

I am aware that some readers might tend to view my topic as yet another stodgy attack on the proverbial bugbear of American anti-intellectualism. Yet every day America’s cultural behavior grows more blatantly illogical, contradictory, even ridiculous, and for reasons that are beyond our immediate reach – reasons which this study will help to flesh out – foreigners are in a better position than Americans to perceive the contradictions and to create fictionalized insight into the absurdity of it all. This book builds on the premise that since the 1960s, French intellectuals – including prominent dramatists – have come to understand the undialectical ‘hubris’ of US culture in less contentious and more positive, dialectical ways: as a culmination of postindustrial, postmodern Western white civilization; as a powerful index of a global cultural evolution; and consequently, as a conceivable future ‘uncultured’ state of their own increasingly globalized national culture. Due largely to the United States’ increased hegemony over Western culture since the sixties, the French have become increasingly ‘Americanized’ in all sorts of ways, but most of which are an effect of capitalism-consumerism and the hyperreality in which it thrives. Since many French have begun to think and act like Americans, all the more reason to dramatically expose and explore homo americanus culture on the stage. Theatre represents a privileged fictional space for the French to translate their self-interested, cross-cultural interpretations of American ‘unculture’ into new forms of non-realism. By merging contemporary cultural theories with French theatrical theory and dramaturgical practice I will show, in part, that the French scrutinize the United States as a complex cultural model, one catalyzed and characterized by the postmodern turn toward an alternative, ‘hyper’ reality. Prominent post-1960 French drama has moved through styles, genres, and movements that include existentialism, nouveau théâtre (theatre of the absurd), the Brechtian inspired, politically committed methods of agit-prop, and the more postmodern theatre of the everyday, all of which, in their own special ways, have used theatre to explore the United States and the United States to explore the art of theatre.

Homo americanus as global and cultural other

To better understand the cross-cultural inspirations and motivations behind and within French dramatists’ use of American space and characters we must first take a close look at America’s exceptionalism, its cultural otherness. Pulling back to a more comprehensive, global point of view, the United States has always been remarkably different from the rest of the globe, even with all its social conformity, or perhaps especially with its conformity and growing uniformity. Pondering ‘America’ from a foreign, non-American perspective can lead us to new understandings of the differences of the outsiders-looking-in as well as the insiders-looking-out.⁴ In view of the US global hegemony, one that at least since World War Two involves a massive distribution of mediatized imagery, conceptions of ‘America’ occupy a unique place in the consciousness of individuals from Canada to Cameroon, especially with respect to the world’s globalizing trend. Many foreigners today are not very clear on where their culture ends and where the otherness of ‘America’ begins. There is little doubt that ‘America’ shapes the way non-Americans live, the way they think, and the ways in which they desire and project their futures; consequently, it has a profound effect on the form and the content of at least some of their literature and their art.

By ‘America’ I mean the ‘pure’ imperial fiction of the cultural imagery as well as the less fantastical sociocultural, political, and economic realities of the United States, realities which are often but not always responsible for the fiction. ‘America’ is an attitude that, even while it is scorned, is being increasingly adopted by foreigners (even those who feel colonized by its culture and victimized by the American empire’s policies of economic apartheid), and this is no less true for the Europeans than it is for the Africans and the Asians. No doubt on some level America becomes more of a formulation than a received truth – both at home and abroad. In Heidi Fehrenbach’s and Uta G. Poiger’s words, ‘There is no monolithic “American culture” but only perhaps an endless stream of image-ideals: culturally and subjectively processed varieties of American culture that serve specific yet endlessly evolving functions for consumer populations’ (xxix; my emphasis). External (foreign, French) imaginations of America transcend mere nationality: America becomes a symbol of what anyone might imagine it to be, and perceived American traits, such as individualism and national self-indulgence, become the subject and the consequence of social, cultural, and artistic negotiation. Many French perceptions of the United States are something of a refashioned version of the Western world’s historical attitude toward the East, the ‘Orientalism’ that Edward Saïd refers to as a ‘man-made’ discourse, a ‘created consistency,’ a ‘constellation of ideas,’ ‘a kind of ideal and unchanging abstraction’ (Orientalism 3–8). In short, projecting their own concerns about the past, present, and especially the future onto America, the French and other Europeans have constructed an essentialized form of an American identity, one that stands in contrast to their own. But, unlike ‘Orientalism,’ in the case of what I will call ‘Americanism,’ the cultural hegemony is not in the eye of the beholder, and ‘Americanism’ is not an entirely unreflective perception, whether we tie it to a national character or a geographical region, or employ it to evoke a mindset and a lifestyle.

The more powerful America has become and the more it has expanded its global reach, the more non-Americans have tended to judge it not only as a national culture but also as a barometer for postmodern civilizing trends, behavior, and evolution, and consequently, the more non-American writers use it as a critical tool or as an ideologem, which Patrice Pavis defines as ‘an ideological message,’ ‘a textual and ideological unit which functions inside a social, ideological, and discursive formation’ (Analyse des spectacles 49, 243).⁵ Despite their pride and their national self assurance, however, Americans have become increasingly vexed by the foreign gaze. On a mission to ‘rediscover the real America’ (Reconstructing 250), as opposed to some ‘symbolic’ one, James Ceaser has claimed that ‘In considering the symbolic America, a window is opened on modern thought itself’ (4). But he is troubled that ‘American discourse’ has taken a mostly negative path. He deplores the fact that almost all those who have pondered America have read it in a negative light, and he especially blames the ‘literary c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• A Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Part 1
• Introduction: Part 2
• 1 - The Hyperreality of the Western Frontier
• 2 - Homo Americanus War and Violence
• 3 - The Totalitarian Non-Tragedy of Americano-Global Business
• 4 - The (Supra-)Global Spectacle of American (Non-)Community
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index