From invention to convention: a critical view of the evolution of the aside in French neoclassical drama

Style, Fall, 2001 by Jure Gantar

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The first documented definition of the aside as a dramatic technique, and not just as an occasional stage direction, is usually credited to the French scholar Henri-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardiere, who in his 1640 book La Poetique, written at the express request of cardinal Richelieu, uses this term to describe the fifth type of "Sentimens forcez" 'unnatural sentiments' (254). La Mesnardiere employs the neologism l'a-parte when he discusses a dramaturgical error, quite common in young playwrights, that originates in modern Spanish and Italian drama. He defines it in a following manner:

Je nomme ainsi ces beaux discours qu'un Personnage fait a part en la presence d'un autre sur l'un des coins du Theatre, tandis que le dernier Acteur est contraint pour aider au jeu, d'estre sans yeux & sans oreilles; puis qu'a ne point farder les choses, s'il n'est & sourd & aveugle, il faut qu'il scache malgre lui ce que l'autre fait a sa veue, & qu'il veut pourtant lui cacher. (267)

I name thus those beautiful speeches which one Character makes aside in the presence of another in one of the corners of the Theatre, whilst the latter Actor is obliged to pretend in this act to be without eyes & without ears; then, not to conceal it at all, unless he is both deaf & blind, he must, in spite of his knowledge, ignore that which the other does in his view & which he wants, however, to hide from him.

Despite La Mesnardiere's somewhat negative take on l'a-parte, his observations were soon adopted by other French critics and the term aside, beginning with the abbe d'Aubignac's 1657 definition of the a parte as a type of implicit narration (qtd. in Arnaud 250), becomes an indispensable part of theatrical vocabulary.

Etymologically, the noun l'aparte originates in the Latin expression a parte sua (on his/her side) and in the 1580s was adopted as an Italian adverb a parte, but even in the latter case the word is not used as a theatrical term until the early nineteenth century (see Imbs 201). Beside this word, a number of other terms are commonly used in French neoclassical drama to indicate this kind of delivery. Stage directions such as bas or a lui-meme (to himself) are often used concurrently with a part, while speaking past other characters on the stage may also be denoted with the use of strategically placed dashes, with italics, or by putting the aside-lines in parentheses.

The basic definition of the aside is relatively simple and has been rarely contested. David Bain, in his exhaustive study Actors and Audience. A Study of Asides and Related Conventions in Greek Drama, defines the aside as "any utterance by either speaker not intended to be heard by the other and not in fact heard or properly heard by him" (17). In his analysis of Elizabethan stage conventions, Alan C. Dessen points out that in the seventeenth century the word had three possible meanings, but eventually focuses on the last option, according to which delivering one's lines aside means "to direct a speech so as (somehow) to maintain the fiction that it cannot be heard by other onstage figures" (53). Also interesting are Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni's description of the aside as "un trope communicationel" 'a communicational trope' (239) and Nathalie Fournier's elaborate definition of l'aparte as a

procede dramatique, discours secret (monologue ou dialogue), derobe par convention aux autres personnages en scene et a ses consequences, liees a un trait essentiel, la convention du secret, qui implique la presence sur scene des allocutes exclus de l' aparte et oblige a envisager les incidences sur l'aparte du decoupage scenique et du lieu scenique. ("L'aparte" 47)

dramatic proceeding, secret discourse (in monologue or dialogue), concealed by convention from the other characters on the stage and from its consequences, dependent on an essential feature, the convention of secrecy, which implies the presence on the stage of speakers excluded from the aside and demands that one consider the effect on the aside of theatrical editing and theatrical location.

For our purpose, the term aside will be provisionally defined as any commentary on the staged action, inscribed within the main text of the play, that occurs on the intersection between the dramatic and the theatrical. In this sense, the aside is a dramaturgical footnote, appearing on the margin just below the imaginary line at the bottom of the metaphorical page that divides the audience from the actors. Or, to complicate even further, the aside could be described as a metatextual elaboration on the discursive integrity of the communicational transactions of a play. Yet even at the very peak of French neoclassicism, in the relatively short period between Corneille and Racine, there exists a substantial difference in the way asides can affect our reading of a performance. Though the structural attributes of the aside appear to have remained more or less stable since this dramatic technique was first used in antiquity, the aside as a theatrical strategy is so dependent on the Bakhtinian dialogue between the dr amatic and the performance text that its function in communication with the audience has in the past radically changed. Indeed, I will argue that this transformation originates in the increasing awareness by the seventeenth-century spectators of the conventional nature of the aside and their ensuing realization of the limitations of the aside as a means of theatrical representation. Using examples from plays by Corneille, Moliere, and Racine, I will attempt to demonstrate critically how the evolution of the aside from a mechanism of dramatic economy into an essentially comic device parallels the introduction of the proscenium arch in French neoclassical theatres.