SOURCE: Longino, Michèle. “Bajazet à la lettre.” L'Esprit Créateur 38, no. 2 (summer 1998): 49-59.

In the following essay, Longino considers the theme of communication in Bajazet.

What happens to Bajazet when the play is taken literally?¹ Reading literally brings together two discourses, one of history, and the other of literature. The one privileges fact, the other fiction. When considering them together, distinctions between the two discourses tend to blur, since behind them both looms a greater force: the condition of all discourse, that is, communication.² My modest ambition is to offer a suggestive reading of some key points concerning this major condition, represented in both the news of the day (the literal) and the play (the fiction) that mirrored and assigned structure to that news.

From first preface to final act, the play relays the problem of communication like a mirror game into regressive infinity, deferring and ultimately defying...