Ambiguity avant toute chose: Humour and Re-writing in José Sanchis Sinisterra’s drama

Abstract

Starting from the ideas of border and ambiguity, fundamental in the dramatic aesthetics of José Sanchis Sinisterra (Valencia, 1940), this essay aims at analyzing how humour -based on Pirandello's "feeling of the opposite" and on the closeness of the comic and the tragic as a consequence- shows itself in five significant plays by the author. They are the following: Ñaque (1980), ¡Ay, Carmela! (1987), Atajo (in Terror y miseria en el primer franquismo, 2002), Mísiles melódicos (2004) and Vagas noticias de Klamm (2009). Sanchis's bitter smile or laugh applies to serious or even tragic topics (the actor's difficult life, The Spanish civil war, Franquism, the world's inequality, unemployment) in the above-mentioned works, which are borderline as far as their genre is concerned as well. In fact, most of them are playful hypertexts using forms typical of pastiche, parody and caricature, both on a thematic and (above all) stylistic level, with the purpose of expressing the blurred and ambivalent nature of human experience.