Style
Le Malentendu “is austere in its plot and characterization and claustrophobic in mood”.
Camus “deliberately contrived an effect of polished, articulate, non-colloquial discourse”, as in a classical tragedy. Through the necessity of writing while under occupation, “the play is cloaked in metaphor, trailing a train of symbols, with Camus styling the drama with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. In the Greek style, each character gives the argument for his or her actions, whether for good or ill. Thus Camus is able to air his thoughts on innocence, grief, guilt, betrayal, punishment, integrity, and silence, wrapping all these in what is essentially an existential debate. Although Camus' arguments come thick and fast, the play moves at a deliberate pace as it develops into more of a treatise than an organic drama".
“It is the most poetic of all the works Camus wrote for the stage, but one cannot claim that speech and situation always match perfectly”.
The characters “unwittingly express ambiguities that escape their awareness”, and indirectly express philosophical ideas. Le Malentendu is “so heavily laden with ambiguities and multiple levels of meaning that it borders on caricature, a fact that may explain its relative failure as a tragedy”.
Read more about this topic: The Misunderstanding
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together, they can’t be separated.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)
“I concluded that I was skilled, however poorly, at only one thing: marriage. And so I set about the business of selling myself and two children to some unsuspecting man who might think me a desirable second-hand mate, a man of good means and disposition willing to support another man’s children in some semblance of the style to which they were accustomed. My heart was not in the chase, but I was tired and there was no alternative. I could not afford freedom.”
—Barbara Howar (b. 1934)
“The difference between style and taste is never easy to define, but style tends to be centered on the social, and taste upon the individual. Style then works along axes of similarity to identify group membership, to relate to the social order; taste works within style to differentiate and construct the individual. Style speaks about social factors such as class, age, and other more flexible, less definable social formations; taste talks of the individual inflection of the social.”
—John Fiske (b. 1939)