False Theater and Dramatic Truth: Jules Renard and the Theater

A significant and neglected aspect of the aesthetic of Jules Renard (1864-1910) is his use of and ambivalent attitude toward the theater. He considered it the falsest of forms, yet continued to seek authenticity through it; rejecting the "theatrical," he used "dramatic" techniques in all his work. A close examination of three characteristic plays and of his views on the theater elucidates important elements of his art as a whole. Though this study reinforces the image, as revealed in Sartre's essay on Renard's Journal, of a problematic figure caught between polarities of truth and art, it also suggests a fundamental unity that Sartre's negative perspective does not encompass. Like the Journal, the theater illuminates an ambiguous aesthetic, in which drama is reduced to language, as language moves toward silence. Despite, and even because of, its "falseness," the theater as theory and practice reveals particularly well the dramatic tension in Renard's work, pointing dialectically beyond contradiction toward a more fruitful ambiguity, and becoming thereby a vital step in his quest for authentic art. (RSM)