Patrick Moreau is a professor of literature in Montreal, editor-in-chief of the journal Argument and essayist. He notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and The prose of Alain Grandbois, or reading and rereading The Travels of Marco Polo (Note bene, 2019).
As we know, the concept of blackface refers to a form of theater that was popular in the United States between about 1830 and the beginning of the 20th centurye century, in which a white actor dressed up in black to caricature an African-American character. That this kind of stage practice was racist is hardly in doubt, these characters always being presented as naive, stupid, etc. This accusation of practicing blackface however, becomes a little mad when she aims at the masks of ancient tradition with which the faces of the actresses who embody the Danaides in the tragedy of Aeschylus are covered. The Suppliants directed by Philippe Brunet (it was at the Sorbonne in 2019), or whether it is launched, as recently in Pointe-Claire and Beaconsfield, against a puppet.
The character of Blackbeard, created by the storyteller of Martinican origin Franck Sylvestre, is thus criticized for presenting caricatural features – which is undeniable – and therefore for offering a poor representation of blacks. But those who criticize the artist seem to forget that Blackbeard… is a puppet. Aren’t puppets always stereotyped and caricatural? It is such a law.
No more than the style specific to the puppet theater, these accusations do not take into account the play Blackbeard’s Incredible Secret as a whole, of its aesthetics, of its meaning. Franck Sylvestre defends himself against these accusations of presenting a racist caricature to a childish public by explaining that his detractors do not take into consideration the role of his character who, despite his appearance, is the one who, throughout the intrigues, proves to be the smartest and thus manages to solve all the problems. How could it be otherwise, since these people who are agitated on social networks to ban his show have never seen it?
Their anger and their will to censor were only fueled by the few images broadcast to promote the show. These apprentice censors therefore focus on a single element, the appearance of the puppet, the mask of the Danaides, without taking the slightest account of the rest. In their eyes, the meaning of the piece does not matter; in other words, that we can grasp, in Blackbeard’s incredible secret, an anti-racist message, or that the tragedy of Supplicants be driven by a humanist ideal. We remain glued to these two details that we desperately want to make meaningful, meaningful, outside of their context, outside of any context.
Representation crisis
I cannot help drawing a parallel between these two accusations of practicing blackface and that launched against Verushka Lieutenant-Duval, who was accused of having uttered a racist insult because she had pronounced the two syllables of a word, in a sentence and in a context where the word in question did not absolutely obviously had no racist meaning. Among other things, because all these accusations are indicative of what could be called a crisis of representation.
In both cases, in fact, the spoken word as well as the appearance of the mask or the puppet are confused with things, whereas they are signs. The appearance of a character, the sound reality of a word say nothing by themselves, in themselves. As a sign, they refer to something other than themselves, to a meaning that can only be revealed in a given context. A black caricature can be, in the first degree, the support of a racist discourse, just as, taken in the second degree, the element of an anti-racist discourse (think, for example, of a famous sketch by Yvon Deschamps) .
Now, one would say that it is difficult today to distinguish between the sign itself such as it is materially realized (the signifier, to use Saussurian terminology) and its meaning (the signified), that one puts oneself to consider it as if it were in itself a thing, had a meaning by itself, outside of any context. At that point, the intention of the one who handles the signs (that is to say the meaning he puts into them) no longer has any importance. She is completely out of the game. And suddenly, notorious anti-racists such as Verushka Lieutenant-Duval or Philippe Brunet, a black like Franck Sylvestre can be accused of being racist.
To refuse in this way to measure the gap which necessarily subsists between the sign and the reality it designates, between the representation and what is represented, in other words to make the sign a thing, an object, dehumanizes the speakers of any language, who are denied the freedom to say what they want to say; but this refusal also prevents meaning. The signified in fact unfolds only in this gap which slips between the words (or the signs) and the things of the world which they designate more or less imperfectly.
Wanting, under these conditions, to make the sign and its object coincide is an old but dangerous dream of humanity; it is Cratylus’ dream; it is that of all those utopian inventors of perfect languages, who dream of a pre-Babelian, divine idiom, in which words would be things.
It is perhaps above all a nightmare, that of a language-world, a language-truth, which would henceforth make any quest for meaning useless and would abolish the very human imperfection which makes us what we are.