Resumen de Pour une étude esthétique des ‘lazzi’ dans “Arlequin poli par l’amour” (1720) de Marivaux
Part of a reflection on the action in Marivaux’s theater, this article proposes an aesthetic analysis of the lazzo, represented massively in his first comedy for the Italian Theater. These digressive ‘little things’, aiming at the laughter, ‘verses inside the prose of narrative’, constitute a répertoire, building an original discourse on the ground of existing ‘fragments’. The playwright uses them as a modern, taking advantage of inferred tensions: logic of the detail versus that of the scene, graphic versus psychology. Other notions (‘tableau’, metaphor, variation, conversation) intersect the lazzo through contradicting or enriching it: Marivaux combines these other esthetic stakes with it. Finally, against the idea of a decline from 1720s, its practice is extended in La Surprise de l’amour (1723) and later; the intelligence of the playwright lies in deploying these ‘pearls’ every time differently, making their outlines flicker.
