Le Pays lointain des fantômes de Jean Luc Lagarce
Jean Luc Lagarce's Remote Country of Ghosts

Summary/Abstract: The ghost is a dramatic, poetic and linguistic model for the plays of the French playwright and director Jean-Luc Lagarce. The ghost as a model makes it possible to question identity beliefs and the relationships established in time and history. Because within its dramatic and literary universe the past, as a temporal plane and as an existential experience, has a privileged status. The ghostly dramatic character of Lagarce thus functions as a temporal counter-model which contributes to a psychologization of temporality within the framework of this dramatic and literary universe. As the ghostly paradigm is that of repetition in Lagarce’s theater, ghosts of all types return to the places of their past survive oblivion. The ghost therefore helps the author to rethink the temporality of the present. It becomes a very redefinition of the contemporary, the model of which is based on temporal non-coincidence which operates through a phase shift and an anachronism. Lagarce is thus able to give birth to a unique dramatic character: a true contemporary who establishes himself on stage thanks to the involvement of a ghost. This ghost establishes an exact equivalence between the actual, the untimely and the chimerical in the context of dramaturgy. Every Lagarce’s dramatic character turning into a "paper being" deprived of any psychology, he presents himself at the same time as being a puppet of language like a ghost of a contemporary human being.

• Details
• Contents