From the Petit Odéon to Pas moi to Pas : Translation, Actor-Network Theory and the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault

LITTLE, James Joseph. From the Petit Odéon to Pas moi to Pas : Translation, Actor-Network Theory and the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault. In London Beckett Seminar. 2021.

Basic information

Original name

From the Petit Odéon to Pas moi to Pas : Translation, Actor-Network Theory and the Compagnie Renaud-Barrault

Authors

LITTLE, James Joseph

Edition

London Beckett Seminar, 2021

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Other information

Language

English

Type of outcome

Vyžádané přednášky

Field of Study

60206 Specific literatures

Country of publisher

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Confidentiality degree

není předmětem státního či obchodního tajemství

Organization unit

Faculty of Arts

Keywords in English

Samuel Beckett; Madeleine Renaud; Jean-Louis Barrault; actor–network theory; theatre; translation

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Abstract

V originále

Recent decades have seen an increasingly detailed historicisation of Beckett’s working process, with biography, letters and manuscript study providing an ever-more nuanced map of his work and working environments. This paper builds on such archival scholarship, drawing on manuscript research and Bruno Latour’s Actor–Network Theory (2005; 2013) to consider one particular network in the translation of Beckett’s late theatre. One of the mottos of Actor–Network Theory is that we should ‘follow the actors themselves’, by which is meant objects (human or nonhuman) that have agency within a given process (Latour 2005). This paper pays attention to actual actors in Beckett’s network, the Compagnie Renaud–Barrault, who played a key role in his development as a theatre practitioner. First, it tracks Beckett’s close creative relationship with the company’s founders Madeleine Renaud and Jean-Louis Barrault through an examination of the abandoned ‘Petit Odéon’ Fragments, which he tried to write for the couple’s theatre. The paper then considers how Renaud’s pressing anxiety regarding the translation of Not I played a significant role in Beckett’s work on the play’s French version. Finally, I chart Renaud’s role in the translation of Footfalls, the text of which Beckett significantly altered in advance of the French stage premiere. Following Helène Buzelin’s ‘process-oriented’ research of translation networks (2005, 215), the paper suggests that paying attention to the role of actors like the Compagnie Renaud–Barrault in Beckett’s creative process can help us construct a more dynamic model of authorship than that famously rejected by Roland Barthes in ‘The Death of the Author’: ‘To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing’ ([1967] 1977, 147). By contrast, studying a self-translating author as part of an Actor–Network can enrich our understanding of the creative process, opening up new interpretations of their texts.