De la trace au signe: la parole comme vestige dans Carthage, encore de Jean-Luc Lagarce
From Trace to Sign: Word as a Vestige in Carthage, encore by Jean-Luc Lagarce

Summary/Abstract: This article offers a descriptive analysis of Jean-Luc Lagarce’s play Carthage, encore (1977). In a world where speech appears to be an obstacle to communication, the four characters face an identity and relationship crisis at the same time. The study focuses in particular on the linguistic signs and traces that contribute to the construction of the characters’ identities. These discursive elements (silences, repetitions, reformulations) reflect the characters’ inability to relate to and understand each other. The analysis highlights how language, instead of ensuring cohesion at the plot level, becomes an obstacle to communication. Thus, as readers, we have explored in a semiological manner the crisis of language and its effects on the dramatic subject’s identity crisis. To achieve this, we propose breaking down the text into signs and reconstructing these traces in the reader’s mind, with the aim of understanding the mechanism through which Jean-Luc Lagarce’s character is internalized. The signs of the dramatic text (language, stage directions, dialogic structures, symbols, and silences) can only be apprehended through reading. In the process of understanding the text, reading involves the construction of an internal, imaginary, mental scene through which, via theatricality, the reader deciphers the text’s message. This does not, however, explain the text (Ryngaert 2005: 23), but offers the reader signs to follow in their understanding and shifting traces. The process is, therefore, internal in nature, and the reader’s task is ultimately to (re)construct the fabric and logic of the text based on the signs and traces they encounter during reading. A semiological approach to the fictional character – particularly their linguistic apparatus and their speech (internal or spoken) – is essential to this process.We will conclude by discussing the importance of the reader’s interpretation of dramatic signs and traces in the construction of the Lagarcean character’s identity in Carthage, encore.

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