French Tragic Farce in an Age of Interpellation: Michel Azama's <i>Croisades</i> and Hervé Blutsch's <i>Anatole Felde</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since its heyday among playwrights like Beckett and Ionesco, the genre of “tragic farce” has continued to interest playwrights, both in France and around the world, as a means of dramatizing such existential concerns as the fragility of identity, the relativity of truth, the plurality of meaning, and the isolated condition of the individual in the modern, technocratic world. Contemporary French dramatists, Michel Azama and Hervé Blutsh, are two such playwrights. They represent voices from what Patrice Pavis has identified as a “new generation” of playwrights who, in recent decades, have moved French theatre beyond a strict adherence to any one particular ideological influence, including Existentialism and Absurdism, and who have instead moved it into a period of “interpellation.” Drawing on Althuser's psychoanalytic understanding of the term, which views “interpellation” as “the central operation by which ideology assigns to the individual human being an identity as a subject/object” (The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism 158–59), this article argues that, through their interpellation of ideology, this new generation of playwrights is forcing the contemporary French stage to look into the “Lacanian mirror” in a perpetual process of self-discovery and self-refinement. It argues that this “age of interpellation” reflects a larger trend in French literature in general, known as auto-fiction – a fiction whose creation is based on “facts” and that serves as a conduit into the subconscious. Ultimately, through a close reading of two contemporary tragic farces, Azama's Croisades and Blutsch's Anatole Felde, “interpellative theatre” is seen as being left to grapple with a whole host of simultaneous paradoxes as it attempts to “subject” itself in a contemporary context, caught between the polarities of ambiguity and polyvalence, absolutism and relativity, singularity and pluralism, globalization and cultural identity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".