https://doi.org/10.66242/RVWH4226
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John Ireland. Theater, War, and Memory in Crisis: Vichy, Algeria, the Aftermath. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2025. 375 pp. $85.00. ISBN-978-0-472-05728-3.
Author’s Response by John Ireland, University of Illinois, Chicago
I must begin by expressing my thanks to Kathryn Kleppinger for all her work putting this H-France Forum together, along with my gratitude to Ifigenia Gonis, Susan McCready and Erin Twohig for three exceptionally generous and insightful readings of my book. As each reader followed different paths through my study, many new perspectives on what I’d written came into view, too many to give them all the attention that they deserve. I will be mulling them over for some time to come. My written response will focus instead on important questions raised or on connections between my work and comments rooted in each reader’s rich areas of research.
Ifigenia Gonis highlights different dimensions of memory in relation to theater and trauma, the “lingering collective amnesia around the dual traumas of Vichy and Algeria’s fight for independence” together with a need for “theatre, an otherwise rather marginalized form,” to address that loss of memory. She evokes the connection between theater, a performance art, to archaic oral culture and the marginalization of oral culture as a culture of literacy became dominant. Because Gonis covers so much ground in her opening two paragraphs, it might be useful for me to summarize and contextualize briefly the genesis of my project. I knew some of the theater I wanted to discuss in relation to war-related violence but for a long time I was unable to establish a wider framework for my discussion. Two historians finally helped me break the impasse. Henry Rousso’s landmark Le Syndrome de Vichy (1987)[1] and Benjamin Stora’s equally important contribution to the Algerian conflict, La Gangrène et l’oubli (1991)[2] both made the point that they could no longer separate the events of their periods of study from the traumatic memoryof those periods, still unresolved a generation later. In support of this shared thesis, both historians cited a host of memoirs, poems, novels and films attesting to the blocked and contested memory arising from this dark history. Neither historian listed a single play.[3]
And a huge problem of perspective came belatedly into view. Violent conflict has been endemic to our species since our ancestors first walked on this planet. But films have engaged with war trauma for just over a century. Books, for longer obviously, but not a lot longer, since societies with high literacy rates and access to books have proved rare until quite recently. How long has theater as a performance art, a ceremonial ritual, taken on war-related trauma? Alone among our literary genres (as it is still so often regarded, particularly in the classroom), theater as a performance art maintains an essential connection to archaic oral culture which regulated human communication for so many more millennia than either the classical or modern literacy cultures to which we devote almost all of our attention.
Over the last thirty years, so much scholarship has contributed to restoring a much more sophisticated understanding of oral culture and the function of ceremonial ritual in classical Greece, creating a very different view of the Athenian theater festival and its evolution.[4] My book builds on anthropological research undertaken in early twentieth-century France to better understand both humans’ propensity for war and the rituals conceived to regulate and mitigate its violence. That work sparked new investigations into classical tragedy and its origins. From Mauss and Durkheim to Bataille and Caillois, to later research by Hellenists and cultural critics Louis Gernet, Jean-Pierre Vernant and René Girard, I demonstrate how their different reflections on ritual and remembrance forged by archaic oral culture penetrated the performance field in France in the 1960s, shaping the creative thought of dramatists dealing with the traumatic memory of contemporary war.[5]
Gonis’s recent research, the relationship between performance art in post-war France and initiatives launched by the state to promote culture and remembrance, intersects with my work in interesting ways. Her work focuses on the politics of French theaters subsidized by the state, where a number of the important plays I analyze were staged. She identifies the first production in France of Genet’s Les Paravents in 1966 at the Théâtre de l’Odéon, which sparked riots inside the theater, demonstrations outside, and a polemical debate in the Assemblée nationale. Gonis is particularly attentive to the “potential tension” when “the fluidity of oral performance encounters and subverts an official government narrative.” One of the most fascinating examples of that confrontation that Gonis might have referenced is the women’s street theater collective, Kahina, created in 1975 by Salika Amara to combat the monopoly that partisans of “l’Algérie française” enjoyed in publishing houses and media outlets in the immediate aftermath of the war. Taking to the streets of Paris, Kahina’s only accessible public venue, the non-professional troupe presented the Algerian experience of the conflict through interactive spectacles that were also innovative contributions to oral history. Kahina created open-ended performance pieces allowing different actors to illuminate through personal testimony different facets or moments of Algeria’s struggle for independence. On occasion, the company also fashioned a multilingual Greek-style chorus capable of intervening in Arabic, Kabyle and French. Amara’s troupe also juxtaposed scenes recounting the arrest and torture of women resistance fighters by French soldiers with others that evoked the betrayal of Algerian women by the victorious FLN, before either narrative had any hope of being officially recognized.
I am very appreciative of Susan McCready’s detailed and painstaking reading of my study. She has many important insights, noting for example that instead of focusing on why theater is so neglected in discussions of Vichy France, the Algerian conflict and the enduring memory of both periods (my answer would have been speculative at best), I had preferred another line of inquiry which she formulates incisively: “What is lost to our understanding of these conflicts, their memory and post-memory, when we fail to take the theatrical genre into account?” That was indeed the question I wanted to explore. McCready provides an excellent summary of the various ways in which I sought to link very different treatments of war trauma by the dramatists in my study to the oral culture of pre-classical Greece and the increasingly complex ceremonial ritual of the Great Dionysia that gave birth to Greek tragedy.
Her close reading of chapter 3, which she correctly identifies, at least from my point of view, as “the most ambitious section of the book” is particularly welcome, as were a number of comments on chapter 2 where she highlights structural affinities connecting trial testimony and live theater (evident in both the Papon and the Eichmann trials). She notes the “convergence of memory and testimony, performance and ceremony” that has the capacity to galvanize court proceedings dealing with trauma and war-related violence. It needs to be stressed as well that live trial testimony also has its roots in archaic oral culture. McCready also notes the immense cultural influence of Aristotle’s adoption of textual culture on post-Renaissance Europe’s literary traditions—and a related prejudice that fueled Europe’s colonialist ventures: the assumption that oral culture equals primitive culture (a perspective naturally reinforced by colonial conquest), while textual culture equals sophisticated culture.
But McCready has one important reservation about my research. Why, she asks, explore in detail the anthropology of war in relation to religion and culture articulated in the early twentieth century from Mauss and Durkheim to Caillois and Bataille, while neglecting the innovations of theater during the same period, its increased investment in performance, the different movements connecting it to its ritual origins and to Greek tragedy? It’s an intriguing question, although it is formulated in very general terms whose ramifications McCready extends back through the nineteenth to the seventeenth century. I have two responses: it would indeed be interesting to trace the evolution of theater that sought to explore “the Dionysiac strain of tragedy identified by Nietzsche” in the early twentieth century. And there is no doubt that the First World War and the carnage of trench warfare caused massive trauma—and widespread reflection on trauma and the culture of war. But does it produce an analogous syndrome of memory? And how is it explored theatrically? Even as I pondered the question, no specific play came to mind. In short, I am really looking forward to discovering McCready’s important book! It was interesting to learn of Jean Norton Cru’s work on combatant memory, the site of most First World War trauma. But was that trauma specifically French? So much of the trauma related to trench warfare is prevalent among all the combatants, on both sides of the trenches. In stark contrast, the shared syndromes of memory arising from the Vichy years and the Algerian war are uniquely French (and in the latter case, Algerian). Trauma victims are overwhelmingly non-combatants, women as well as men, and, of course, children. Both periods are also associated with humiliating defeats, rooted in denial and shame, whereas the French claimed victory in 1918.[6]
One last speculative thought. I knew I wanted to begin my discussion of the dramatists I would feature with Sartre, whose theatrical mentor, Charles Dullin, produced some of the innovative theater referenced by McCready in the 1920s and 30s. Indeed, Dullin staged Sartre’s first official play, Les Mouches, in 1943 during the Occupation. Ironically, the innovations he brought to his stylized and abstract production were dismissed by reviewers as outdated “cubist bric-à-brac,”[7] and Dullin himself felt that his staging had failed Sartre’s play. Is it possible that the Occupation and overwhelming trauma associated with the Second World War progressively eclipsed World War I memory, foreclosing many aesthetic initiatives of the interwar years as well?
I saw my project, its originality and certainly its complications, in terms of previously unmade connections. Erin Twohig sees it, I think more perceptively, in terms of gaps, as a work “uniquely interested in gaps” which she formulates as “a divide or empty space which demands to be filled, or which cannot be.” She then presents an excellent summary of the principal gaps my book set out to negotiate, and then looked more closely, as a Maghreb specialist, at a potential gap my book had intuited but that I felt ill equipped to fully explore. After all the turmoil Algeria has endured since beginning the fight for independence, was it possible to assess—and potentially extend—the theatrical and linguistic legacy of the foundational Algerian writer, Kateb Yacine, in Algeria today? Of all the dramatists in my study, Kateb’s creative range, as a result of two diametrically opposed poetic imperatives that began and ended his career, is unmatched. As a young man, Kateb, educated in French, as Twohig notes, left Algeria for France where an extraordinary novel, Nedjma, and two highly innovative plays, war tragedies, published in French and promoted by a major publishing house, Le Seuil, made him internationally famous. Passionately Algerian, and a militant supporter of Algeria’s fight for independence, Kateb returned to Algeria after many precarious years of exile in the early 1970s, breaking with the French language, and committed to a very different model of theatrical creation.
For a newly liberated Algeria seeking to establish nationhood in the years after 1962, with illiteracy rates affecting 85% of the population, the question of oral versus textual culture was in no way an academic preoccupation. It was an overwhelmingly complex existential problem, particularly since this vast territory is home to three primarily spoken languages (Berber/Kabyle/Amazigh) in multiple dialects. How could any of these groups, after 130 years of French colonial rule, begin to articulate a new collective, potentially national consciousness? Who would address whom, in what language?
Kateb’s late theater, as he immersed himself within an itinerant multi-lingual troupe that toured all over Algeria between 1972 and 1978, addressed that problem directly. Breaking with his past and the French language, Kateb committed to one guiding principle: theater would be l’affaire du peuple. His troupe would act as a catalyst for indigenous groups to engage in collective experiments of embodied creation in a multitude of spoken dialects. Drawing more from local oral story-telling traditions than Aristotelian theater, these encounters became a kind of laboratory, a collective forum for articulating what Réda Bensmaïa called “des agencements collectifs d’énonciation”—segments of a more collective speech act whose sense and nuances were revealed by being exposed, commented on and tested in the wider social sphere: “toute prise de parole, tout geste y prennent valeur collective.”[8] This process harbored for Kateb the revolutionary potential at the core of the creative initiative, its capacity to be an active relay in bringing about social change.
Twohig reminds us that in Algeria today, and across the Maghreb in general, the enduring reality of Arabic diglossia a generation after Kateb’s death means that the dialectal Algerian Arabic used in daily speech negotiates constantly with the Modern Standard Arabic commonly used for written expression, in accordance with Algerian state policy. I had ended my discussion of Kateb’s late theater by evoking my bewilderment at finding posthumous translations in French of some of this work. I could not begin to connect this strange textual residue (in the colonizer’s own language, no less) with the Algerian contexts in which the original creations had been realized. But Twohig saw paths I had not seen, establishing a connection between the quandaries of Arabic diglossia to one of the foundational moments in my book, when literary culture came to supplant oral practices in ancient Greece, to the point where “Aristotle’s authoritative Poetics appears to privilege the text over any theatrical performance.” Answering my frustration with posthumous French translations of Kateb’s late theater, Twohig concludes: if [Ireland’s] arguments hold true, if physical presence, and not merely written text, is crucial to theater’s cathartic and memorializing functions, “the truth of all the plays examined in this book [is] that we, as readers, are in the presence of ‘archival recuperation[s]’ that need to be understood as such. Much of the work, here, is in the gaps.” So true!
Then venturing further into what for me were uncharted waters, Twohig suggests that certain of my theoretical apparatuses might help illuminate facets of Algerian linguistic diversity that focus on continuities between oral and written forms today. Noting, for example, the importance of courtroom testimony and religious ritual as live cultural forms which, like performance art, bring history and memory into the immediate present and provide a forum for grief and remembrance for the dead, Twohig raises questions with compelling cultural and poetic ramifications: “How do the linguistic exigencies of formal settings, the way they depart from uses of the ‘mother tongue’ affect the cathartic potential of giving or hearing testimony? Do the myriad linguistic and historical pathways which connect (and distinguish)” so many forms and registers of Arabic language usage “allow theater in dialect to create different filiations with mourning practices?” I am so happy to have made any contribution to those fascinating questions, while gaining important insights into Algerian language practices in today’s Algeria.
In their final remarks, both Gonis and Twohig evoke the role of pedagogy connected with so much of this theater, intertwined with both history and memory in a way that links it powerfully to the concept of postmemory which also haunts my study. Postmemory, it seems to me, houses an implicit appeal for pedagogy as a path to understanding. That insight is central, I think, to Alexandra Badea’s work, as Gonis suggests, and to Baptiste Amann, Compagnie Nova, and other dramatists working today who are preoccupied by the questions and problems posed to French identity by conflicted Algerian postmemory sixty years after the Evian Accords.[9] Their plays and performance art are motivated by the conviction that the silences of painful history can only be resolved by spoken words pronounced in the public sphere, addressed to an actively listening audience. In a constantly evolving “seeing place” (theatron), their creative work seeks a new catharsis of the mind, a prise de conscience, an insight, as a result of something learned. But this theater also consciously reconnects across millennia with oral traditions that understood the emotional force of spoken narratives communicating trauma, and with the foundational role of empathy in the audience receiving that narrative. When that connection is made, a specially charged kind of communication linking performance art to ceremonial oral culture takes place. In a specific place, at a unique and ephemeral moment in time, the theatrical act creates an event.
John Ireland
University of Illinois, Chicago
jireland@uic.edu
Notes
[1] Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy: De 1944 à nos jours (Paris: Le Seuil, 1987).
[2] Benjamin Stora, La Gangrène et l’oubli: La mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1991).
[3] In 2009, another important publication, Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), added a new term: “multidirectional” memory (prompted in part by the revelations of the momentous Maurice Papon trial), and provided a new analysis of more recent literature and film to its updated inquiry into history and (post)memory. Once again, theater did not enter the discussion.
[4] From an extensive bibliography on this question, I recommend two books as a good place to start: The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, ed. P.E. Easterling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and The Origins of Theater in Ancient Greece and Beyond, ed. Eric Csapo and Margaret C. Miller (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
[5] See: Marcel Mauss, Œuvres (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1968); Emile Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2014); Georges Bataille, La Part maudite (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1949); Roger Caillois, L’homme et le sacré (Paris: Gallimard, 1950); Louis Gernet, Anthropologie de la Grèce antique (Paris: Editions Maspero, 1968); Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe et société en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Editions Maspero, 1974); René Girard, La Violence et le sacré (Paris: Grasset, 1972).
[6] Benjamin Stora notes that de Gaulle, anxious to veil the discredited Occupation years by attaching them to a longer period of “accredited” history, often inserted France’s experience of 1940 to 1944 into what he referred to as the “thirty-year war” (1914-1944), a wider framework from which more commemorative capital could be gleaned. See La Gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris : La Découverte, 1991), 221-22.
[7] See Jean-Paul Sartre, Théâtre complet (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2005), 1270.
[8] See Réda Bensmaïa, « La littérature algérienne face à la langue : le théâtre de Kateb Yacine », Hommage à Kateb Yacine, ed. Nabil Boudreau (Paris : L’Harmattan, 2006), 49-50.
[9] See Alexandra Badea, Quais de Seine (Paris: Editions de L’Arche, 2019); Baptiste Amman’s … Et tout sera pardonné? was published as a “tapuscrit,” no.142, in the Théâtre Ouvert collection in 2019. Compagnie Nova’s acclaimed performance piece: Et le Cœur fume encore remains unpublished.
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H-France Forum
Volume 21 (2026), Issue 5, #4
https://doi.org/10.66242/RVWH4226