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Articles

Volume 33, Number 1 (2012)

Lunettes Noires et autres Éecrans Identitaires dans L’œuvre de Michel Tremblay

Soumise
mai 17, 2013
Publié-e
2012-01-01

Résumé

This article examines the functions performed by the sun glasses worn by Marcel, a major character in both the theatre and fiction of Michel Tremblay. This character appears in En pièces détachées and Marcel poursuivi par les chiens, two plays which invoke, between the audience and the stage, the mediation of female characters. The gaze of these first two female spectators on the stage makes the identity of the principle character waver before the eyes of the audience while preventing their direct access. The character’s glasses are far more than a simple stage prop: they can be seen as a device of multiple screens which, interposed between Marcel and reality, translate a behavioural dysfunctionality. The character’s identity challenges are especially associated with a familial blindness manifesting itself in the maternal screens and by the sight of a transgressively traumatising scene, relating to the impossible sight of the foundational familial incest. Although these two events (incest and murder) may not be connected in the plot, they do both relate to a forbidden vision: that of his own flesh as object of desire and that of the annihilation of the subject (Mercedes) by another (Maurice).