Scenes of Misrecognition (Koltès, Duras)

Abstract What is it about confession scenes that makes them such a productive heuristic device in late twentieth-century French theater, given that so many playwrights only tease audiences with the tantalizing prospect of confession’s truth-telling potential, all the better to quash it? Whether these disclosures are extracted under the glare of courtroom or police interrogations, or elicited in the more intimate settings of the bedroom or the analyst’s couch, modern theater’s interest in confessions appears to reside less in their probative value than in the questions they raise about the dramatic form and our investment in it. This article’s author proposes to pursue this inquiry through a discussion of two plays: Marguerite Duras’s oft-staged récit from 1982, La Maladie de la mort, and Bernard-Marie Koltès’s 1986 play Dans la solitude des champs de coton. What is most fascinating about these works is the curious way in which they appear to bear all the markings of confessions yet pointedly refuse to behave like them, thwarting the desire for revelation, catharsis, and closure at every turn. As performative utterances, these abortive confessions ultimately perform little apart from their own undoing. This failure is due in no small part to the persistence with which they direct one’s focus elsewhere: instead of the familiar spectacle of a character’s full and frank confession (assuming such a thing were even possible), the disquieting theater of Koltès and Duras demands instead that one attend to what one disavows.