Dramatic Enunciation and Truthful Discourse in Juan Mayorga's Theatre

Abstract

This paper proposes an inquiry about the problem of dramatic enunciation, as it arises in contemporary theatre. With this objective, some works by Juan Mayorga are analyzed in reference to the problem of truthful discourse, from the moment in which the author proposes a poetics according to which theatre must always have a political meaning. Taking into account Michel Foucault's approaches in regard to the will of truth and the political function given to it, we first attend to the vision raised by this author of a pragmatics of discourse in which the meaning and value of statements are modified by the situation or status of the speaking subject, as exemplified by one of the playwright's early successes, Himmelweg. However, his subsequent trajectory looks at the possibility, suggested by Foucault in his last years, of a dramatic discourse in which it is the situation of the speaker that is affected by the statement and the act of enunciation that he carries out, giving rise to a dramatic game that Mayorga brings to the stage in works such as El cartógrafo or El Golem.