FROM CATASTROPHE TO CATHARSIS: THE EXPLOSION OF THE PORT OF BEIRUT IN TWO TEXTS THAT HEALDE LA CATASTROPHE A LA CATHARSISL’EXPLOSION DU PORT DE BEYROUTH DANS DEUX TEXTES QUI PANSENT

Abstract: Catastrophe, a notion as old as man, is today considered obsolete in the scientific sphere, since it constitutes a blinding image which distracts the researcher from his object by its capacity to dazzle (Coanus, Duchêne, Martinais , 2004). This is how the notion of risk replaced that of disaster , since a risk can be calculated, prevented, avoided, reduced, etc. The disaster would thus become a “risk that has been realized”. The double explosion of the port of Beirut is therefore this disaster. In five seconds: two hundred dead, one hundred and fifty missing, six thousand wounded, nine thousand buildings damaged, two hundred thousand homes destroyed as well as hundreds of heritage and historic buildings and four hospitals, ten thousand businesses, workshops, stalls, shops, restaurants, cafes, pubs reduced to crumbs, dozens of art galleries, workshops of painters and sculptors, stylists, designers, architects swept away. In five seconds. (Majdalani, 2020, p. 120) Between risk and catastrophe, in the midst of traumatic tragedy, on the still smoking ruins, with rage, with force, with pain, the authors stand up, pen or guitar in hand, for a necessary catharsis. Indeed, the inevitability and uncontrolled nature of the situation is compensated by the capacity of men to react and to mobilize. (Clavandier, 2011) This is how we are going to look at two texts, born from the rubble of the port of Beirut, in an attempt to detect their cathartic essence. The first text is that of a Lebanese songwriter, Anthony Ojeil, who takes up the country’s hymn of Brel, under the title Vent d’espoir , a few days after the disaster, and the second, that of the playwright of Lebanese origin, WajdiMouawad, appeared in the newspaper Le Monde, 4 days after August 4. Résumé: La catastrophe, notion aussi vieille que l’homme, est aujourd’hui considérée comme obsolète dans la sphère scientifique, puisqu’elle constitue « une image aveuglante qui détourne le chercheur de son objet par sa capacité à éblouir » (Coanus, Duchêne, Martinais, 2004). C’est ainsi que la notion de « risque » a supplanté celle de « catastrophe », puisqu’un risque peut être calculé, prévenu, évité, diminué, etc. La catastrophe deviendrait ainsi un « risque qui a été réalisé ». La double explosion du port de Beyrouth du 4 août 2020 est donc cette catastrophe. « En cinq secondes : deux cents morts, cent cinquante disparus, six mille blessés, neuf mille bâtiments endommagés, deux cent mille habitations détruites ainsi que des centaines de bâtiments patrimoniaux et historiques et quatre hôpitaux, dix mille commerces, ateliers, échoppes, boutiques, restaurants, cafés, pubs réduits en miettes, des dizaines de galeries d’art, d’ateliers de peintres et de sculpteurs, de stylistes, de designers, d’architectes balayés. En cinq secondes. » (Majdalani, 2020, p. 120) Après le risque et la catastrophe, en pleine tragédie traumatique, sur les ruines encore fumantes, avec rage, avec force, avec douleur, les auteurs se lèvent, la plume ou la guitare à la main, pour une catharsis nécessaire. En effet, « [l]e caractère inéluctable et incontrôlé de la situation est compensé par la capacité des hommes à réagir et à se mobiliser. » (Clavandier, 2011) C’est ainsi que nous allons nous intéresser à deux textes, nés des décombres du port de Beyrouth, pour tenter d’en déceler l’essence cathartique. Le premier texte est celui d’un auteur compositeur libanais, Anthony Ojeil, qui reprend l’hymne au pays de Brel, sous le titre « Vent d’espoir », quelques jours après la catastrophe, et le deuxième, celui du dramaturge d’origine libanaise, Wajdi Mouawad, paru dans le journal Le Monde, 4 jours après le 4 août

FROM DAMAGE TO WORDS : THE DIARY OF A CONFINED PERSON

From March 16 to April 20, 2020, therefore from the 1st to the 35th day of confinement due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in France, Wajdi Mouawad writes his logbook every day, during this crossing of the desert, alone which more is “A word from a confined human to a confined human,” he says in his introduction. Faced with one of the greatest social challenges that our current world has had to face in its almost entirety, each confined human has experienced a fight and has had no choice but to fight it. We will consider that of the Lebanese-born playwright, Wajdi Mouawad, who took up his pen, a somewhat trivial posture in front of his camera, and spoke to the world – and to himself – for about fifteen minutes, all daily, at 11 a.m., Paris time. Through these words, both oral and written, read and listened to, psychoanalytical and saving, the magic is done, once again. And the “power of a word” becomes that of a remedy, a catharsis, a god. This is how we will consider the words as the supreme weapon of resistance, of human resilience: words by proxy, demiurge words, words that are kept

Le monologue racinien ou l’impossible dialogue

Dans la majorité des pièces raciniennes, nous retrouvons des scènes dans lesquelles un personnage, seul sur scène, parle ou se parle. Il serait intéressant de voir dans quelle mesure on peut parler seul, sachant que la parole sert, par définition, à communiquer. Ne pouvant sans doute se résoudre à parler pour rien, le personnage se prend à imaginer des destinataires possibles – réels ou imaginaires – mais invariablement absents. Le schéma de la communication est alors dévié de ses caractéristiques initiales et nous assistons à un véritable jeu des pronoms personnels qui s’efforcent de désigner les divers pôles de la communication, se démêlant entre un « je » Ôcaméléon et un « tu » volatile.In the majority of Racine’s plays, we find monologues, scenes where a character stands alone and talks to himself. It would be interesting to see to what extent we can talk alone, knowing that by definition, talking is meant for communicating. The character, probably unable to accept the fact of talking alone, imagines real or imaginary addresses. The communication scheme is thus deviated from its initial characteristics and we notice a real play of personal pronouns designating various communication poles, swinging between a chameleon "I" and a volatile "you"

Lost faces in Wajdi Mouawad’s Visage retrouvé

Wajdi Mouawad’s works focus mainly on the characters’ identity quest. The writing’s hardness shows the cruelty of war, which is a leitmotiv in Mouawad’s works, due to the Lebanese civil war that the author has knew in his childhood. In his first novel, Visage retrouvé, published in 2002, Mouawad exorcises the memory of the past by his telling of Wahab’s story. This teenager found out, at his 14th birthday, that he couldn’t recognize his mother’s face anymore. This terrible loss will lead him to a dreamlike quest of the true face of his mother, which symbolizes the land of origins, the childhood and the lost tenderness. We have chosen to analyze this quest, in the light of the obsessive recurrence of images and words

Le monologue racinien ou l’impossible dialogue

In the majority of Racine’s plays, we find monologues, scenes where a character stands alone and talks to himself. It would be interesting to see to what extent we can talk alone, knowing that by definition, talking is meant for communicating. The character, probably unable to accept the fact of talking alone, imagines real or imaginary addresses. The communication scheme is thus deviated from its initial characteristics and we notice a real play of personal pronouns designating various communication poles, swinging between a chameleon "I" and a volatile "you"

« MAIS POURQUOI DONC WILLY PROTAGORAS S’EST-IL ENFERME DANS LES TOILETTES ?OU COMMENT RECREER LA REALITE AU THEATRE DE WAJDI MOUAWAD »

When he wrote his very first play, Willy Protagoras enfermé dans les toilettes, Wajdi Mouawad was only 23 years old. In this tragedy, he talks about freedom’s right, and wonders about the limits that society builds around that liberty. In this play, the nicest apartment of the building is divided between two families that have complicated relations between love and hate. One day, Nelly decides to leave this masquerade, while her brother, Protagoras, locks himself into the toilets and forbids anyone to enter. He refuses to listen to his parents, to negotiate with the squatters or to deal with the neighbors. He refuses to compromise or to abdicate his freedom. But this revolt is but the echo of the socio-political Lebanese reality where Mouawad was born. And since this first play, the playwright hasn’t stopped questioning this intricate reality. We will try to prove that the protagonist’s confinement is the reflection of the constraint state of a whole country, or a whole generation, in a changing spatiotemporal frame

MEMORY FOR OBLIVION IN WAJDI MOUAWAD’S PLAY MÈRE

“Keeping the memory of past events would contribute to a better knowledge of hazards and to the prediction of future events. » (Reghezza-Zitt, Benitez & Devès, 2020, p. 1) Remembering is undoubtedly the best of mentors. But forgetting would also be a precious ally in the perpetual and daily struggle that is life. Indeed, “it is essential that the brain forgets the unimportant details to focus on what really matters, in our daily decision-making.” (Richards & Frankland, 2017, p. 1083) What if we remembered to better accept the tragedy? What if writing helped us to understand it better? What if the words saved us from death? In his play Mother, the third installment in the Domestics cycle, an essentially autobiographical work, Wajdi Mouawad, Lebanese-Canadian playwright and director, looks back on his family\u27s exile in the middle of the Lebanese civil war in 1978. Through this work, where the writer plays his own role, the memory of the past is very present, a memory of the still bleeding wound. Mouawad remembers to exorcise the demons that keep haunting him. In what way is writing (and representing) the memory of the tragedy a work of memory necessary to forget to let oneself die? We will first consider the mechanisms of memory and forgetting, before turning, in a second part, to the role of theater in the process of remembering, catharsis and overcoming

Linguistique et rhétorique du monologue dans le théâtre racinien

Nous avons abordé la forme langagière particulière qu est le monologue pour nous intéresser, plus particulièrement, à la place qu occupe cette forme dans le théâtre racinien. Défini intuitivement comme un discours que se tient un personnage à lui-même, le monologue devient, au fil de l analyse, un puits inépuisable de richesses langagières, pragmatiques et rhétoriques. Or, le meilleur moyen d analyser une forme langagière est de s intéresser à la langue qui en constitue la trame ainsi qu aux composantes qui en font une forme de discours. Nous avons tenté, dans une première partie, de définir le monologue, en partant des définitions lexicologiques et étymologiques pour aboutir à une caractérisation dramaturgique de cette forme particulière du discours théâtral ; le deuxième chapitre a été exclusivement consacré aux monologues raciniens abordés sous divers aspects, alors que dans le troisième, nous avons établi une comparaison entre les monologues raciniens et cornéliens. Nous nous sommes ensuite intéressés, dans une deuxième partie, aux seuls monologues de Racine à travers une analyse linguistique pointue des trente monologues que contiennent ses pièces, dévoilant un à un les mécanismes de la métrique, de la syntaxe et du lexique qui les régissent, et explorant les spécificités de la communication dans cette forme de discours si particulière. La troisième partie, quant à elle, a été consacrée à l'analyse rhétorique et conversationnelle du monologue, abordé selon les concepts de la pragmatique et de la rhétorique classique.We have approached the particular form of language which is the monologue, to concentrate our interest on the place occupied by this form in Racine s plays. As the analysis progressed, the monologue, that was intuitively defined as a speech held by a character to itself, became an inexhaustible mine of linguistic, pragmatic and rhetorical richness. However, the best way to analyze a linguistic form is to focus on the language that constitutes its framework, as well as on the components that turn it into a form of speech. We have tried, in the first part, to define the monologue starting from the lexicological and etymological definitions and ending up with a dramaturgical characterization of this particular form of theatrical speech; the second chapter has been exclusively dedicated to various aspects of the Racine s monologues. In the third chapter, we have established a comparison between our corpus and the Cornelian monologues. Then, in the second part, we have only been interested in the Racine s monologues, throughout a narrow linguistic analysis of the thirty monologs contained in his plays, revealing one by one, each of the ruling metric, syntactic and lexical mechanisms, and exploring the specificities of the communication in this so particular form of speech. The third part has been dedicated to the analysis of Racine's monologues using the concepts of rhetoric and pragmatic.PARIS3-BU (751052102) / SudocSudocFranceF