VIRTUAL THEATER: A STUDY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH LITERATUR

"Virtual Theater" is the study of a heterogeneous collection of unrepresentable plays produced primarily in the second half of the Nineteenth Century in France. Although the phenomenon of unrepresentable plays or "Closet Drama" is an age-old, cross cultural phenomenon, particularly rich in nineteenth-century literature, Virtual Theater marks a significant twist in that tradition. For Virtual Theater implies that subjectivity itself is a kind of drama whose representation in writing requires a new anti-generic form. By presenting the mind as a theater in which the conscious "I" of the writer is scattered among a series of imaginary theatrical positions, Virtual Theater points to a crisis in both subjectivity and representation in the late 19th Century. As I believe this crisis to be representative of a more general crisis in the humanist tradition of Western philosophy, I situate the origins of Virtual Theater in the upheaval of disciplines apparent in the early part of the century caused by the influence of German Romanticism's unique association of literature and philosophy (Chapter I). I then turn to close readings of the enigmatic "virtual plays": Hugo's Theatre en liberte (Chapter II), Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint Antoine (Chapter III), Mallarme's "Herodiade" and his "l'Apres-midi d'un faune" (Chapter IV).;"Virtual Theater," however, is not reducible to a genre. The term itself also connotes two assumptions underlying the production of virtual plays. First, the writing strategies of a virtual play anticipate modern psychoanalytic theory by borrowing structures which resemble those of the fantasm or unconscious fantasy. As such, each play offers new insights into the relevance of psychoanalytic theory to the study of literature. Second, Virtual Theater implies that writing may be reconceived as a potential performance infinitely variable with each reader's mental re-staging. By shifting attention away from a didactic act of communication onto compositional designs, the virtual plays appear to borrow writing strategies from other, traditionally "meaningless" performance arts including cinema, music and dance. In so doing, the authors of Virtual Theater suggest that between a subject (whether a reader or a writer) and language (whether lingusitic, visual or auditory) there will always be an imaginary space or virtual theater which creates a surplus of meaning and a supplementary text. It is the structure of the fantasm which allows me to articulate a metapsychology of the reader/spectator and ultimately a more general methodology applicable to the study of contemporary experiments in both literature and in other performance arts.