Storytelling in the theater of Marguerite Duras and Marie Redonnet: A poetics of relating

This dissertation focuses on the role of "relating" in selected plays by Marguerite Duras and Marie Redonnet. My study shows that both authors paint a world wherein characters inherit property that is in ruins or destroyed. Consequently the stories and memories of the characters' "ancestors" are all that remain. It follows that the children, or the youngest voices in the plays, become family storytellers. As they speak of a time they are too young to recall and describe people and places they have never seen, they reveal that their inheritance is comprised of stories. Their accounts of the past are neither linear, nor told from a single point of view. In fact, their stories, built from a rhythmic accumulation of tellings, give life to a polyphony of voices.; My close readings of Duras's L'Eden Cinema (1977) and Savannah Bay (1982, 1983) and Redonnet's Mobie-Diq (1988) and Seaside (1992) illustrate that like all histories, family narratives are shifting and elusive links to the past. Instead of establishing "roots," the clusters of narratives in the plays under consideration expose a vast network of relationships. Edouard Glissant's conception of a poetics of relating (une poetigue de la relation) provides a framework and a means of expanding my study of storytelling in the theater of Duras and Redonnet. In his work, relating (la relation) refers to cross-cultural and interpersonal relations as well as to what is narrated. Glissant's writings on identity and relating, the creation of lost or forgotten histories, and textual diversity are particularly relevant to my project. In their plays, Duras and Redonnet establish an endless series of connections between individuals and the objects and elements in their surroundings. Both authors treat the past as a limitless text from which they mine lost or unrecorded histories. As they do so, they construct a theater that is markedly heterogeneous. Duras and Redonnet explore the intermingling of languages, genres, and oral and written traditions. Their stories and their mode of storytelling celebrate the emergence of a poetics of relating in the French theater.