Cardullo Bert - Theories of The Avant-Garde Theatre - A Casebook From Kleist To Camus 2012
Cardullo Bert - Theories of The Avant-Garde Theatre - A Casebook From Kleist To Camus 2012
Cardullo Bert - Theories of The Avant-Garde Theatre - A Casebook From Kleist To Camus 2012
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Theories of the avant-garde theatre : a casebook from Kleist to Camus / edited by Bert Cardullo.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8108-8704-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-8705-3 (ebook) 1. Experimental
theater. 2. Avant-garde (Aesthetics) I. Cardullo, Bert.
PN2193.E86T56 2013
792.02'9—dc23
2012028479
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Preface v
Chronology of the European Avant-Garde, 1890–1950 vii
Introduction: Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical,
Intellectual, and Cultural Context 1
Bert Cardullo
1 On the Marionette Theatre (1810) 41
Heinrich von Kleist
2 The Tragic in Daily Life (1894) 49
Maurice Maeterlinck
3 On the Futility of the “Theatrical” in the Theatre (1896) 57
Alfred Jarry
4 Prefatory Note to A Dream Play (1901) 63
August Strindberg
5 The Stylized Theatre (excerpt, 1907) 65
Vsevolod Meyerhold
6 Realism and Convention on the Stage (1908) 69
Valery Briusov
7 The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909) 81
Filippo Tomasso Marinetti
8 Epilogue to the Actor (1913) 87
Paul Kornfeld
9 A Few Words about the Role of the Actor in the Theatre of Pure
Form (1919) 91
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz
iii
iv Contents
10 On Humor (1920) 97
Luigi Pirandello
11 Lecture on Dada (1922) 105
Tristan Tzara
12 Surrealism (1922) 111
André Breton
13 The Dehumanization of Art (1925) 129
José Ortega y Gasset
14 Postwar German Drama (1928) 135
Ernst Toller
15 New Stage Forms (1928) 139
Oskar Schlemmer
16 The Oberiu Theatre (1928) 143
Daniil Kharms
17 The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto (1932) 147
Antonin Artaud
18 The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) 155
Albert Camus
Epilogue: There Is No Avant-Garde Theatre (1962) 159
Eugène Ionesco
v
vi Preface
1890–1894
1890 Ellis Island opens, New York Harbor; William James Principles of
Psychology; Frazer The Golden Bough; van Gogh A Woman from
Arles; suicide of van Gogh; Hamsun Hunger; Wilde The Picture of
Dorian Gray; Freie Volksbühne established in Berlin; Maeterlinck
The Blind and The Intruder; Claudel Tête d’Or; Villiers de l’Isle
Adam Axel; Ibsen Hedda Gabler.
1891 First international copyright law; the Independent Theatre estab-
lished in London; Shaw The Quintessence of Ibsenism; Rimbaud dies;
Mahler Symphony No. 1; Pissarro Two Young Peasant Women; Monet
Grainstacks; Hardy Tess of the D’Urbervilles; Huysmans Là-Bas;
Wedekind Spring’s Awakening; London-Paris telephone service avail-
able.
vii
viii Chronology
1892 The word “homosexual” first appears in print; voting machines first
used in the United States; Tennyson dies; Cézanne Card Players;
Dvorak New World Symphony; Maeterlinck Pelléas and Mélisande;
Ibsen The Master Builder, Claudel The Tidings Brought to Mary;
Yeats The Countess Cathleen.
1893 Henry Ford builds the first automobile; Lugné-Poë’s Théâtre de
l’Oeuvre is founded; Turgenev, Tchaikovsky, Maupassant, and Taine
die; Cézanne Still Life with Curtain, Pitcher, and Bowl of Fruit; Pis-
sarro Place du Havre, Paris; Munch The Scream; Wilde Salomé;
Hauptmann The Assumption of Hannele; Hofmannsthal Death and the
Fool; Sternheim The Iron Cross; Wedekind Earth Spirit.
1894 Coca-Cola sold in bottles for the first time; Marconi builds the first
radio equipment; US Congress establishes the Bureau of Immigration;
Korea declares independence from China; Pater dies; Maeterlinck
Interior; Ibsen Little Eyolf; Shaw Arms and the Man; Yeats The Land
of Heart’s Desire; Debussy Afternoon of a Faun; Gauguin Breton
Village in the Snow; Henri Rousseau War, or the Ride of Discord.
1895–1900
1895 First showing of a motion picture in New York City using Thomas
Edison’s Kinetoscope and Joseph Armat’s Vitascope, and in Paris by
Louis and Auguste Lumière; Roentgen discovers X-rays; Engels dies;
Shaw Candida; Wells The Time Machine; Hardy Jude the Obscure;
Freud Studies in Hysteria; Degas Jockeys; Cuban War of Indepen-
dence begins.
1896 Millennial celebrations in Hungary of the Magyars’ settling in Cen-
tral Europe inspire an unparallelled cultural boom; Jarry Ubu Roi;
Chekhov The Seagull; Ibsen John Gabriel Borkman; Hauptmann The
Sunken Bell; Puccini La Bohème; Verlaine dies; first modern Olym-
pics, Athens; Henri Becquerel discovers radioactivity; periodical Die
Jugend founded in Germany.
1897 Vienna Secession group, led by Gustav Klimt, founded by Viennese
artists critical of “Das Künstlerhaus”—the official artists’ association;
creation of their own exhibition space, the Secession Building, archi-
tect Josef Maria Olbrich, and promotion of their design aesthetic with
exhibition posters and their own journal Ver Sacrum; J. J. Thompson
discovers the electron; gold fields discovered in the Klondike; Chek-
hov Uncle Vanya; Strindberg Inferno; Schnitzler La Ronde; Shaw The
Devil’s Disciple; Hofmannsthal The Little Theatre of the World; Mo-
net The Cliffs of Dieppe; Brahms dies.
Chronology ix
1900
Austria
France
Germany
Great Britain
Scandinavia
Strindberg Easter.
Spain
1901
France
Germany
Great Britain
Russia
Latvia
Italy
Verdi dies.
Chronology xi
1902
South African (“Boer”) War ends, with Boer acceptance of British sove-
reignty.
Coronation of King Edward VII.
Lenin and Trotsky meet for the first time, in London.
Alfonso XIII of Spain comes of age.
Austria
France
Germany
Great Britain
Scandinavia
Russia
1903
Edward VII’s state visit to Paris improves relations between France and
Britain; visit of French president Loubet to London follows.
Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst founds Women’s Social and Political Union, in
Manchester.
Austria
Russia
France
Germany
Great Britain
Erskine Childers’s thriller The Riddle of the Sands raises fears about
German invasion.
Synge In the Shadow of the Glen.
Scandinavia
1904
France
Paris and Rome, exhibition of Tony Garnier’s theoretical project for Cité
industrielle.
Matisse Luxe, calme et volupté.
Germany
Members of all parties in the German Reichstag protest the art chosen to
represent Germany at the World’s Fair in St. Louis, which represents
Emperor William II’s conservative tastes and rejection of the Seces-
sionists (whose work he considers to be “gutter art”).
Wedekind Die Büchse der Pandora [Pandora’s Box].
Freud The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
Great Britain
Spain
Lithuania
Revival of cultural life after the lifting of the prohibition on the Lithua-
nian press in 1904 and under the influence of the Russian revolution of
1905 as well as the Vilnius Seimas (parliament).
M. K. Čiurlionis, Lithuanian painter and composer, explores the analogies
between music and the visual arts; Čiurlionis draws on Lithuanian
folklore and Oriental mysticism and uses more abstract forms than
many of his Russian contemporaries.
xiv Chronology
Russia
1905
Belgium
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
1906
Austria
France
Death of Cézanne.
Germany
Italy
Scandinavia
Death of Ibsen.
Ukraine
1907
France
Germany
Scandinavia
Great Britain
Yeats Deidre.
Spain
Hungary
Works by Cézanne, Gauguin, and Matisse exhibited for the first time in
Budapest.
MIÉNK [Circle of Hungarian Impressionists and Naturalists] founded.
Latvia
Lithuania
Russia
Gorky Mother.
1908
Austria
France
Birth of Cubism: the term was first applied by Louis Vauxcelles to paint-
ings exhibited in Paris by Braque in 1908.
Great Britain
Hungary
Italy
Florence, La voce.
Venice, A lume spento, Ezra Pound’s first collection of poems, published.
Spain
Ukraine
Kiev, exhibition of the group Zveno [Link] with members Nicolai and
Vladimir Burliuk, Exter, Bohomazov, and Baranoff-Rossine.
1909
Louis Blériot flies across the English Channel from Sangatte to Dover.
Commercial manufacture of plastic begins.
Belgium
Austria
France
Germany
Berlin, Kurt Hiller and Jakob van Hoddis found Der Neue Club as a focus
for new writing and organize performances under the name Neopathe-
tisches Cabaret.
Kubin Die andere Seite.
Dresden, première of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s
Elektra.
Munich, Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Gabriele Münter, Marianne von Weref-
kin, and others found the Neue Künstlervereinigung, a group for
avant-garde artists, musicians, and dancers.
Great Britain
Italy
Scandinavia
Spain
Hungary
Lajos Kassák walks from Budapest to Paris, begins to write free verse.
MIÉNK breaks up after its second exhibition; the group Keresők [Seek-
ers] is formed with members Lajos Tihanyi, Róbert Berény, Béla
Czóbel, Dezső Czigány, Károly Kernstok, Ödön Márffy, Dezső
Orbán, and Bertalan Pór; their first exhibition denotes the first appear-
ance of a truly avant-garde movement in Hungary.
Poland
Romania
Ukraine
1910
Austria
France
Germany
Literary periodicals Der Sturm (ed. Herwarth Walden) and Die Aktion
(ed. Franz Pfemfert) founded in Berlin.
Neopathetisches Cabaret begins in Berlin.
Great Britain
Italy
Spain
Russia
St. Petersburg, first exhibition of the Union of Youth, one of the most
long-lived avant-garde societies; concurrent exhibition of the Triangle
group, organized by Nikolay Kulbin, contains sections of drawings by
Russian writers and a painting section.
Publication of Studiya impressionistov [The Studio of Impressionists],
edited by Kulbin.
Moscow, the first Jack of Diamonds exhibition is organized by Larionov.
Nathan Altman and Chagall travel to Paris, El Lissitzky to Darmstadt,
Italy, and France, Gabo to Munich.
Publication of A Trap for Judges, a collection of Futurist poetry, marks
the first collaboration of David and Nikolai Burliuk, Elena Guro, Ka-
menskii, and Khlebnikov, eventually known as the Gileia group.
Excerpts from the “Manifesto of Italian Futurist Painters” appear in Rus-
sia in Apollon.
Odessa, second Izdebsky Salon, including work by Kandinsky and the
Burliuks, and works of artists of the Russian and Western avant-garde;
the catalogue contains essays by Kandinsky and Schoenberg.
Hungary
Latvia
Ukraine
1911
France
First group showing of the Cubists at the Salon des Indépendants in “Salle
41.” It includes works by Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le
Fauconnier, Jean Metzinger, and Albert Gleizes, but Picasso and
Braque are not represented.
xxiv Chronology
Austria
Hofmannsthal Everyman.
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Hungary
Lithuania
Poland
Romania
Ukraine
1912
Austria
Belgium
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
Scandinavia
Spain
Russia
Georgia
Niko Pirosmani’s art discovered by the local artists Ilia and Kirill Zdane-
vich and the Russian painter Mikhail Le-Dantiu.
Hungary
Budapest, Lajos Kassák begins to publish free verse, novels, and short
stories. Third (and final) exhibition of Nyolcak group.
Romania
1913
Austria
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Russia
Hungary
Poland
Ukraine
Kiev, Oleksandr Murashko founds his own studio and infuses a Western
European and Modernist character into Ukrainian painting.
Futurist group Kvero [Quaero] is formed (Mykhail Semenko, Vasyl Se-
menko, and Pavlo Kovzhun).
Kharkiv, Budiak [Weed] group is formed by Bohomazov and Syniakova.
1914
Austria
Vienna, Hungarians Róbert Berény, Bertalan Pór, Lajos Tihanyi, and Vil-
mos Fémes Beck exhibit at the Galerie Brüko.
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Scandinavia
Russia
Hungary
Ukraine
1915
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Spain
Russia
Hungary
Romania
Ukraine
Skoptsy (near Kiev) and Verbivka (near Cherkasy), peasant craft cooper-
atives. Embroideries and kilims designed by the Suprematist artists
Kazimir Malevich, Alexandra Exter, Nina Henke-Meller, Liubov Po-
pova, Ivan Puni, Olga Rozanova, Nadezhda Udaltsova, and Yevgeniia
Prybylska.
1916
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Scandinavia
Swedish poet and novelist Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam awarded
Nobel Prize for literature.
Södergran Dikter [Poems].
xxxviii Chronology
Switzerland
Russia
Hungary
Latvia
Ukraine
Yugoslavia
1917
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
Scandinavia
Spain
Switzerland
Russia
Georgia
Hungary
Poland
Publication of the first issue of the avant-garde art journal Zdrój (Source),
founded by Jerzy Hulewicz (1917–1922), in Poznán.
Tytus Czyżewski, Leon Chwistek, and Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz form
Poland’s first avant-garde group Formiści [Formists] (called Polish
Expressionists until 1919) in Krakow; first exhibition of Polish Ex-
pressionists.
Ukraine
1918
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Spain
Switzerland
Russia
Belarus
Czechoslovakia
Georgia
Hungary
Latvia
Poland
Group of writers and artists affiliated with Zdrój found the group Bunt
[Revolt].
xlvi Chronology
Ukraine
Kiev, the art review Hermes published with a cover design by Exter.
Kiev, Neoprimitive artist Hanna Sobachko-Shostak exhibits her work.
Kharkiv, exhibition of the group League of Seven (Yermilov, Syniakova).
1919
Austria
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Scandinavia
Spain
Russia
Belarus
Czechoslovakia
Georgia
Kruchenykh joins forces with the Zdanevich brothers to form the Futurist
group Forty-One Degrees.
Chronology xlix
Hungary
Latvia
Lithuania
Poland
Warsaw, the first Futurist evening organized by Anatol Stern and Alek-
sander Wat.
Łódź, Group of Jewish artists Jankiel Adler, Marek Szwarc, Henryk Bar-
cinski, and others form the group Jung Idysz [Young Yiddish]
(–1923).
Łódź, publication of the first issue of the short-lived periodical Jung
Idysz, including the group’s manifesto.
Kraków, third exhibition of Formists (formerly Expressionists).
l Chronology
Ukraine
1920
Austria
Russia
Belgium
France
Milhaud and Cocteau’s Le Boeuf sur le toit staged at the Théâtre des
Champs Élysées, with sets by Raoul Dufy.
Death of Modigliani.
Tzara in Paris.
Ozenfant and Le Corbusier’s L’Esprit nouveau (–1925), a platform for
Purism.
Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella at the Opéra, with costumes by Picasso.
Georgian artist Lado Gudiashvili settles in Paris. He meets Picasso, Mod-
igliani, and Aragon.
Ezra Pound moves to Paris.
Germany
Italy
Scandinavia
Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
Russia
Belarus
Czechoslovakia
Georgia
Hungary
Latvia
Foundation of the Riga Artists Group, which has close links with Group
of Estonian Artists. The work of this group was promoted by Suta in
articles published in L’Esprit nouveau (numbers 10 and 25).
liv Chronology
Latvia
Latvian art enters its avant-garde maturity, drawing equally on the West
and Russia. Kazak’s Jūlijs Sproģis (1920) and Bathers (1920) show
Cubist-Futurist influences.
Lithuania
Poland
Ukraine
Yugoslavia
1921
The mutiny of the officers and uprising of the sailors at Kronstadt naval
base, Russia, in March forces the Bolshevik government to institute
the New Economic Policy (NEP), which restores a free market sys-
tem.
Adolf Hitler becomes leader of the National Sozialistishe Deutsche Ar-
beiter-Partei (NSDAP) in Germany.
Irish independence.
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) founded.
In March, Riga Peace Treaty between Poland and Soviet Russia. Consti-
tution of Poland.
Chronology lv
Nestor Makhno abandons the armed struggle in Ukraine and flees to Paris
in August.
Austria
Belarus
Belgium
France
Germany
Italy
Netherlands
Scandinavia
Russia
Czechoslovakia
Hungary
Latvia
Lithuania
Poland
Ukraine
Yugoslavia
Great Britain
1922
Austria
Karl Kraus’s “World War tragedy” Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit.
Journal Egység (Unity) appears in Vienna: Béla Uitz, Aladár Komját.
First issue of Sándor Barta’s left-wing Dada journal Akasztott ember
[Hanged Man]; he satirizes Kassák and MA for glorifying machines.
Uitz publishes album Analízis [Analysis] with twenty-three abstract
linocuts.
Béla Uitz breaks with the Activists.
Double issue of MA includes works by international Constructivists and
Dadaists.
Remaining original Activist members break with Kassák; Uitz’s journal
Egység is politically left of MA.
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
Russia
Scandinavia
Czechoslovakia
The Tvrdošíjní exhibition includes works by Otto Dix and Paul Klee, as
well as representatives of Dresden Art Nouveau; it subsequently visits
Košice and Brno.
Karel Teige and Jaroslav Seifert (who in 1984 will become the first Czech
to win the Nobel Prize for literature) make contacts with the French
avant-garde, including Amédée Ozenfant, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara,
and Le Corbusier.
The Yugoslav review Zenit features the work of Devětsil authors, and an
exhibition of Picasso’s work is arranged by Vincenc Kramář at the
Mánes Gallery in Prague.
Publication of the Revoluční sbornik Devětsil emphasizing the importance
of international avant-garde movements such as Constructivism, Pur-
ism, and Dadaism. Several members of the group, including Alois
Wachsman, Adolf Hoffmeister, František Muzika, and Bedřich Piskač
split off to form the new group Nová skupina and continue the tradi-
tion of magic realism.
Hungary
Latvia
Poland
Romania
Ukraine
Yugoslavia
Dada Tank and Dada Jazz are published by Dragan Aleksić (only one
issue of each published) in Zagreb.
Poljanski publishes the anti-Dadaist magazine Dada-Jok. The term Yugo-
Dada is coined by Aleksić.
In Belgrade, avant-garde magazines: Putevi [Paths] (1922–24), Hipnos
(1922–1923), Crno na belo [Black on White] (1924), Svedočanstva
[Testimonies] (1924–1925), 50 u Evropi [50 in Europe] (1928), Tra-
Chronology lxiii
1923
Austria
France
Tzara Le coeur à gaz (Théâtre Michel), with music by Satie and readings
by Iliazd, René Crevel, and Pierre de Massot, costumes designed by
Sonia Delaunay; Breton, Aragon, Éluard, and Péret storm the stage,
thus provoking a final break with Dada.
Ballets Russes production of Stravinsky’s Les Noces (designed by Gon-
charova).
Lajos Tihanyi settles in Paris.
Léonce Rosenberg’s Galerie de l’Effort Moderne organizes a De Stijl
exhibition.
Milhaud La Création du Monde (text by Cendrars, designs by Léger)
premièred at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.
L’Herbier L’Inhumaine (collaborators include Léger, Milhaud, and Mal-
let-Stevens).
Clair Paris qui dort.
Man Ray The Return to Reason.
lxiv Chronology
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Netherlands
Spain
Federico García Lorca stages his puppet play Títeres de cachiporra with
music by Falla.
Russia
Belarus
Czechoslovakia
Hungary
Lithuania
Latvia
Poland
Ukraine
Yugoslavia
1924
Austria
France
Germany
Italy
Netherlands
Dezső Korniss meets Vilmos Huszár and is exposed to the art of the De
Stijl group.
Spain
Joan Miró has his first exhibition at the gallery of Josep Dalmau.
Russia
Exter designs sets and costumes for the science-fiction film Aelita.
Czechoslovakia
Georgia
The Georgian Futurists publish three journals, all short-lived: H2SO4 (the
formula for sulphuric acid), Lit’erat’ura da skhva [Literature and the
Rest], and Memartskheneoba [Leftness].
Hungary
Latvia
Poland
Romania
Ukraine
Mykhail Semenko publishes his own Kobzar (collected works from 1910
to 1922).
Literary almanac Honh komunkul’ta [Gong of the Komunkul’t].
Yugoslavia
1925
Austria
Belgium
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Spain
Switzerland
Russia
Czechoslovakia
Teige, Seifert, and Honzl join a delegation of the Society for Economic
and Cultural Rapport with the New Russia to visit Moscow and Lenin-
grad.
Georgia
Hungary
Poland
Romania
Ukraine
1926
Austria
France
Germany
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe becomes director of the Berlin Werkbund.
Founding of the architects’ association Der Ring in Berlin; members in-
clude Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Klaus Mann’s Der fromme Tanz, one of the first German novels dealing
with the theme of homosexuality.
Major retrospective of the work of Lovis Corinth following his death the
previous year.
Kafka The Castle.
Barlach Boozer Boll.
Chronology lxxv
Italy
Spain
Russia
Czechoslovakia
Hungary
Poland
Blok splits up; the last issue of the magazine is devoted to the Internation-
al Exhibition of Architecture held in Warsaw.
Szymon Syrkus initiates a new association of architects and painters
called Praesens (1926–1939). The authors of program statements em-
phasize the links between new architecture and social demands.
Construction begins on a new building for the National Museum in War-
saw. The building, designed by Tadeusz Tołwiński, is modern and
functional.
Ukraine
Yugoslavia
1927
Trotsky expelled from the party in November. Bad harvest. Terror re-
sumes its full strength. NEP comes to an end.
Lindbergh makes first solo transatlantic flight.
France
Abel Gance’s film Napoléon shown at the Paris Opéra, with the use of
revolutionary projection techniques.
Germany
Great Britain
Ray (–1927), edited by Sidney Hunt. Two issues of Russian and European
sound and visual poetry, graphic design, and experiment.
Woolf To the Lighthouse.
Riding and Graves Survey of Modernist Poetry.
Italy
Spain
Russia
Czechoslovakia
Hungary
For lack of funds, the journal Új Föld (edited by Aladár Tamás) soon
ceases publication along with Dokumentum and Magyar Írás.
100%, legally published cultural journal of illegal communist party, edit-
ed by Aladár Tamás, with a Constructivist cover by Farkas Molnár.
Poland
Ukraine
1928
France
Ravel Bolero.
Breton Nadja.
Breton Le Surréalisme et la peinture.
Dulac La Coquille et le Clergyman (screenplay by Antonin Artaud).
Germany
Great Britain
Scandinavia
Spain
Russia
Czechoslovakia
Hungary
Romania
Ukraine
Malevich joins Tatlin, Palmov, and Meller as professor at the Kiev Art
Institute.
Malevich starts his Second Peasant cycle.
Fresco cycles by the Boichukist School in Odessa.
Dovzhenko’s epic film Zvenyhora [Zvenigora].
The unaffiliated journal Literaturnyi iarmarok [Literary Fair] is estab-
lished in Kharkiv under the editorship of Mykola Khvylovy; design by
Anatol Petrytsky.
1929
Belgium
France
Austria
Death of Hofmannsthal.
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Spain
Russia
Czechoslovakia
Teige takes part in the Neue Typographie exhibition in Berlin and interna-
tional exhibition of books and magazines in Dessau. He also publishes
the Mezinárodní soudobá architektura compendium to accompany the
Neues Bauen exhibition, complemented by a display of Czech archi-
tecture, held in Prague in May; and he attacks Le Corbusier in Stavba.
Jindřich Honzl leaves the Osvobozené divadlo, which becomes a revue
theatre presenting the duo Voskovec and Werich.
Teige is elected chairman of the newly formed Levá fronta [Left Front], a
group of artists and intellectuals that assumes some of Devětsil’s func-
tions.
Hungary
Police officers raid classes at the Academy of Fine Arts and expel stu-
dents of the New Progressive Group for “subversive” material (includ-
ing socio-photomontages).
New Progressives break with Kassák and Munka, but he continues to
publish their works.
Hungarian group of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Mod-
erne) formed, headed by Farkas Molnár.
Poland
Ukraine
At the Odessa Film Studio, Dovzhenko creates his film Arsenal, which
shows the Bolshevik uprising in Kiev in January 1918.
Yugoslavia
1930
Pluto discovered.
Austria
France
Germany
Russia
Czechoslovakia
Hungary
Latvia
Lithuania
Poland
Ukraine
Yugoslavia
1931
France
Germany
Great Britain
The Island, edited by Josef Bard (–1939): voice of “The Islanders” op-
posed to commercialized art; contributors include Henry Moore, Ger-
trude Hermes, C. R. W. Nevinson, Naomi Mitchison, and Mahatma
Gandhi.
The Four Gospels published with typeface and engravings by Eric Gill.
Woolf The Waves.
lxxxviii Chronology
Scandinavia
Spain
Czechoslovakia
Hungary
Poland
Ukraine
1932
Austria
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Czechoslovakia
Poland
Ukraine
Dovzhenko’s first Ukrainian sound film Ivan, about the building of the
Dnieper Dam.
Petrytsky paints Holod u Nimechchyni [Starvation in Germany].
The review Mystetstvo [Art] is published under the editorship of Pavlo
Kovzhun.
1933
France
Great Britain
Italy
Spain
Russia
Czechoslovakia
Ukraine
1934
Belgium
France
Great Britain
Italy
Spain
Russia
Czechoslovakia
Ukraine
1935
Belgium
France
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
Scandinavia
Switzerland
Czechoslovakia
Hungary
Yugoslavia
1936
Italy
Pirandello dies.
France
Germany
Great Britain
Spain
Czechoslovakia
The first and only issue of Surrealismus is published under the editorship
of Nezval.
Štyrský and Toyen take part in an international Surrealist exhibition in
London at the Burlington Arcade.
Jan Mukařovský contributes to the Surrealists’ volume Ani labut ani luna
[Neither Swan Nor Moon] commemorating the centenary of the death
of the Romantic poet and forerunner of Surrealism Karel Hynek
Mácha.
1937
France
Germany
Great Britain
Switzerland
Czechoslovakia
Hungary
Kassák has jubilee concert for his fiftieth birthday at the Music Academy.
Ukraine
1938–1950
1938 Germany annexes Austria and occupies the Sudetenland; House Un-
American Activities Committee formed.
1939 World War II begins as Germany invades Poland; New York
World’s Fair; Brecht Galileo; Eliot The Family Reunion; Joyce Finne-
gans Wake.
1940 Germany conquers most of Western Europe.
1941 Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and the United States enters the war;
Brecht The Good Woman of Sezuan and Mother Courage.
xcviii Chronology
Bert Cardullo
1
2 Introduction
(such as “Absurd” or “Protest”), but instead the astonishing variety and dar-
ing of the writers in all Western countries and theatrical movements who
since before the turn of the century have wrenched dramatic art out of every
one of its habits, including its more fundamental ones. Represented should be
such movements as French and Russian Symbolism, Italian Futurism, Ger-
man Expressionism, and Dada-Surrealism, as well as seminal figures like
Jarry, Strindberg, and Artaud along with such a Gesamtkünstler as Kandin-
sky.
Beyond accounting historically for this new drama, the lumping together
of such disparate yet fundamentally similar pioneers could suggest, I think,
intellectual and aesthetic contexts for theatre and drama even broader than
those that have already been proposed by critics and historians in explaining
the avant-garde revolution. What would become apparent in the assemblage
of these writers in a single volume is, for example, that the new movements
were fed as much by the other arts as they were provoked by conventional
drama itself. Poets, painters, musical composers, circus performers, archi-
tects, choreographers, photographers, cartoonists, sculptors—any but profes-
sional or commercial filmmakers—were the models and sources for the radi-
cal shift in the aesthetics of theatre and drama.
To speak only of the movies, their presence was continually felt through-
out the vigorous theatrical experimentation of the 1920s. On the one hand,
the theatre was seeking a new area of activity that the cinema—potentially,
the most literally representational or documentally “real” of the arts—could
not usurp; on the other hand, the theatre frequently tried to explore ways of
imitating and incorporating the fantastic or visionary capability of film form.
Throughout Europe, the dramatic avant-garde repeatedly expressed admira-
tion for film’s dreamlike fluidity, its power to convey interior states of mind,
as well as for its possibilities as a truly proletarian and anti-bourgeois art.
Particularly in France, the Surrealist theatrical experiments of such writers as
André Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, and Antonin Artaud
were perhaps better suited to the screen than to the stage, assaulting as they
did the theatre’s traditional objectivity or exteriority and its bondage to con-
tinuous time and space. And a number of Surrealists did indeed move from
the theatre to the cinema, most notably Jean Cocteau.
In Germany, film was one element among many of the influences that led
to the development of dramatic Expressionism (or vice versa), as German
cinema and theatre freely borrowed from each other during the twenties. The
debt to the stage, as well as to painting, of such pictures as The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari (1920) has often been noted, and, to cite only one example, the
characteristic roving spotlight of the Expressionist stage was an obvious
attempt to control audience attention in the manner of a movie director. The
attempts of the Bauhaus group to create a non-representational, manifestly
Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 3
eternal order but also a tendency to absorb the world’s chaos into the work of
art itself. (The first tendency holds true for most writers of Modernist fiction
and verse, as it does for Yeats the Symbolist playwright. The majority of
avant-garde dramatists, however, belong either in the second category—like
Luigi Pirandello, the Humorist of the Grotesque—or in both categories si-
multaneously, like the Pataphysician Alfred Jarry.)
Many would additionally identify in the avant-garde a thematic preoccu-
pation with the modern city and its technologies—with the exhilaration of
speed, energy, and rapid development, as in the case of the Italian Futurists—
as well as with the urban potential for physical, social, and emotional dislo-
cation. Renato Poggioli (1968) has described this avant-garde as a culture of
negation and its commitment to ceaseless, radical critique—not only of the
(bourgeois) art that went before it, but also, in many instances, of the socio-
political institutions and instruments of industrial-technological practice or
power—may indeed be seen as a prime instance of the Modernist emphasis
on the creation of the new.
In a rhetorical gesture utterly typical of the avant-garde, however, the
Surrealist poet-cum-playwright Robert Desnos lambasted the very notion of
the “avant-garde,” associated as it was for him with the Impressionists and
the Aestheticism of Cocteau. The dynamic of “negation,” then, is not re-
stricted to a criticism of mass culture by everything outside it but operates
within the field of avant-garde practice as well. Nothing is more characteris-
tic of the avant-garde than disputes within its ranks about which subgroup is
most deserving of the epithet. On the surface, the avant-garde as a whole may
seem united in terms of what it is against: accepted social institutions and
established artistic conventions, or the tastes and values of the “general pub-
lic” as that represents the existing order. Yet any positive program tends to be
claimed as exclusive property by isolated and even mutually antagonistic
groupings. So Modernist art appears fragmented and sectarian, defined as
much by manifestos as by creative work, and representing the amorphous
complexity of post-industrial society in a multiplicity of dynamic but un-
stable movements focused on philosophical abstractions. Hence the use of
“isms” to describe them: Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dadaism,
Surrealism, and the like.
All these modernist “isms” nevertheless react against the same common
enemy: the modern drama of Realism and Naturalism, that is, the social-
problem play as fathered by Henrik Ibsen, if not pioneered earlier by Frie-
drich Hebbel. Such Realistic and Naturalistic drama was based on the con-
ventional, long-lived triad of psychology or motivation, causality or connec-
tion, and morality or providential design, but these problem plays banished
theology as well as autocracy from their triadic paradigm of human action, in
this way deepening the dramatic role played by psychology, sociology, and
linearity or linkage. That is, in modern drama, the patriarchal relationship
Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 5
between God and the individual soul has been replaced by the adversarial
relationship between man and his own psychology, his will to comprehend
himself, even as the patriarchal relationship between ruler and subject has
been replaced by the adversarial relationship between man and society, in the
form of society’s drive to marginalize all those that it cannot or will not
homogenize. Thus the fundamental subject of almost all serious plays of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries—in other words, of almost all of modern
as well as Modernist drama—becomes the attempt to resurrect fundamental
ethical or philosophical certainties without resurrecting the fundamental spir-
itual certainty of a judgmental God or the fundamental political certainty of a
mindful monarch.
Modernist or avant-garde drama, however, took modern drama a step
farther, by demonstrating that a play’s movement could be governed by
something completely outside the triad that links motive to act, act to logical
sequence of events, and logical outcome to divine or regal judgment. In
Maurice Maeterlinck’s Symbolist play Pelléas and Mélisande (1892), for
instance, the characters are led to the slaughter like sheep but for reasons that
are never clear, either to them or to the audience. There is sequence but no
causality—that is, one event follows another but is not caused by it. Even an
otherwise representational work like Chekhov’s Ivanov (1887) can intimate
the avant-garde by breaking down the connection between the psychology of
its central character and the causal pattern of his drama. There is a causal
sequence leading to Ivanov’s marital infidelity and suicide, but there is no
sustained motive on his part—which is to say, one event is caused by an-
other, but irrespective of this otherwise intelligent man’s clear intent or wish.
For the avant-garde, beginning in the late nineteenth century with Jarry, if
not earlier with such German visionaries as Ludwig Tieck, Georg Büchner,
Christian Dietrich Grabbe, and Heinrich von Kleist, the nature of reality
itself becomes the prime subject of plays because of a loss of confidence in
the assumed model for dramatizing human behavior and thinking about hu-
man existence: in other words, the representation of the illusion of reality on
stage becomes the demonstration of the reality of the illusion-making capac-
ity, illusion-projecting essence, or illusion-dwelling tendency of the human
mind. Through the introduction of total subjectivity into drama—that mirror
of a supposedly external reality—the Symbolists in particular imagined a
new theatrical model, polyphonic in form and irreducible to rational analysis
or univocal interpretation, thereby opening the way for the subsequent avant-
garde movements that dominated the stage in the twentieth century.
The world, which the Realists and (to a lesser extent) the Naturalists had
claimed could be fully known and accurately depicted, was revealed by the
Symbolists to be pure illusion—a veil of fleeting appearances behind which
were hidden deeper truths. It was what lay buried within the psyche and
concealed behind the mirror that this radical new poetics of the drama pro-
6 Introduction
veal the depths and heights of the human soul. Kandinsky believed he could
synthesize music, dance, poetry, and painting into one monumental, self-
contained, and self-defined art form, or rather art-temple. Futurist synthetic
theatre, by contrast, rejected such an inward-looking art. For the Futurists,
literature, painting, sculpture, theatre, music, dance, morals, and politics
should all be inspired by the scientific and technological discoveries that had
changed man’s physical environment, and that should correspondingly
change human perceptions. Man should, in fact, become like a machine,
abandoning the weaknesses and sentimentalities of the past. Influenced as
they were by the superman of Nietzsche and of D’Annunzio, the Futurists
wrote of their own god-like being, who was aggressive, tireless, courageous,
inhuman, and mechanical. Early heroes of theirs, accordingly, were those
who had direct contact with machines: racecar drivers, pilots, journalists,
telegraph operators, and the like. Later heroes represented a fusion of man
and machine, assured of immortality because his, or its, parts were inter-
changeable.
The Futurists’ theories naturally centered on the industrial age, with its
machines and electricity, its urbanizations, and the revolution in the means of
transport and communication. Futurists welcomed the products of industrial
society with an all-embracing optimism, for they saw them as the means by
which man would dominate his environment and be able to extend his
knowledge infinitely. The speed and change of the industrial age were also
fundamental to the Futurists’ love of the modern and their rejection of the
static, lethargic past. The effects of the speed of transport and communication
on modern sensibility were such that man was now aware not just of his
immediate surroundings, but of the whole world as well. He was able to
overcome the limits of time and space, and to live through events both near
and far—in fact, to be everywhere at the same time. Simultaneità (simultan-
eity) was the word used by the Futurists to describe these extensions of
perception. In their works, different times, places, and sounds, both real and
imagined, are juxtaposed in an attempt to convey this new concept to the
public.
The Futurist embrace of simultaneity was accompanied by a desire for
synthesis. The Futurists held that the speed of modern life called for a corre-
sponding speed of communication in contemporary art, which was there-
fore—unlike the conventional or antiquated theatre—to convey the essence
of an emotion or a situation without resorting to lengthy explanation or
description. The sintesi teatrali (theatrical syntheses), then, were works of
extreme brevity and concentration, in which the traditional three-act play was
replaced by attimi (moments) intended to capture the essence and atmosphere
of an event or a feeling as it occurred. Movement, gesture, sound, and light
became as important as the written word, and in some cases came to replace
words altogether. This reduction to what the Futurists regarded as the essen-
Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 9
tial part of the action was intended to create an immediate and dynamic
contact with the public, so that the audience would respond intuitively to a
theatre that was now synthetic, hyper-technological, dynamic, simultaneous,
alogical, discontinuous, autonomous, anti-literary, and unreal.
F. T. Marinetti was determined from the outset to bring his movement to
the attention of the greatest possible number of people. In common with
many other innovators in the arts of the time, he believed that art and litera-
ture could have a determining influence on society, and he described Futur-
ism as the new formula of artistic action. The artist therefore became the
leader and promoter of new ideas, and the forger of links between art and
action, art and society. The desire for ceaseless activity, the advocacy of
bravery and heroism, and the insistence on aggression, accordingly, led the
Futurists to go beyond mere theorizing. They involved themselves in a great
deal of direct action, including their serate, or evenings, which usually con-
sisted of readings from Futurist works of literature and which often ended in
brawls. The serate doubtless gave the Futurists some general experience of
the theatre, whose importance for his movement Marinetti recognized, as he
did that of the spettacolo (performance) in particular.
Futurist performances became an ideal means of direct communication
with the public, the expectation being that audience members would react
directly and physically to what they saw and heard. Deliberate provocation of
the audience, partly for the sake of being aggressive, partly in order to break
down the barriers between audience and actors, became one of the most
important techniques of Futurist theatre and strongly influenced the staging
of its plays. The Futurists thus realized the polemical importance of certain
theatrical techniques early on, and in this sense Italian Futurist theatre repre-
sents nothing less than the birth of the twentieth-century avant-garde. In its
violent rhetoric and actions, in its blatant self-promotion and willful disre-
spect for the sacred cows of the (written) intellectual tradition, as well as in
its all-embracing (if prototypically Fascist) ideology, Futurism was the mod-
el or stereotype for all the “isms” to come.
Itself influenced by the Futurist synthetic theatre, Dada had been founded
in 1916 by a group of expatriate artists in Zürich, but as practitioners adopted
the banner in Berlin, Cologne, and New York, the movement became an
international one. Tristan Tzara, the Romanian poet who became the leader
of the movement, moved to Paris, the major center for Dada, as it was later
for Surrealism. “Dada” itself is a nonsense word, and as such is a clue to the
nature of the movement, which was anarchic, violently anti-traditional, and
vociferously anti-bourgeois—at least in its rhetoric. Many of the Dada artists
had been involved in the First World War, and the Dada movement has been
understood as a reaction of disgust toward a society that could sustain such a
10 Introduction
barbaric conflict. If the war was the end-product of a society supposedly built
on the principles of rationality espoused by Enlightenment philosophers, then
the means of protest against this society would have to be irrational.
As conscientious objectors in neutral Switzerland (the fount of the move-
ment), moreover, Dadaists were expected to desist from overt political
protest; Switzerland prohibited citizens or visitors from taking a strong vocal
stance on political occurrences beyond its borders, for fear that the country’s
neutrality might be compromised. The impulses of frustration and counterag-
gression felt by the Dadaists had to manifest themselves in some way, yet if
life had so little meaning for a world that was organizing and sanctioning its
own destruction, how could art matter? Hence the anti-sensical anarchy of
Dada art, whose pacifist authors wanted, not to escape from current events
through fantasy, but rather to reflect the chaos of their present so as to make
the public cry with laughter. Dada, in fact, struck out against all “isms”—
previous artistic movements that had, in effect, exhaustively and systemati-
cally emphasized the timeless and universal aspects of art without ever truly
living in their own particular moment.
This is the context in which Marcel Duchamp began to exhibit his “ready-
mades”—ordinary objects like bicycle wheels and the urinal he named
“Fountain,” signed “R. Mutt,” and presented as a sculpture. In doing so,
Duchamp offended against not only the assumption that art involves creative
effort but also the assumption that only certain things are appropriate subject
matter for art, which by definition would not include utterly utilitarian ob-
jects. Indeed, the Dadaists maintained that the artistic act, rather than the
product, was first and foremost Dada; the tangible yield developing from the
imaginative act (the painting, poem, sculpture, or dramatic text) was merely a
by-product of the real art. But best of all for the anti-materialist Dada artists,
the Dadaist use of language was not easily merchandized. In the performance
of a poem or a play, the Dadaists kept custody of their work, letting only the
experience of the language and its effects on the listener stand as proof of its
existence. Dadaists thereby succeeded not only in creating a presence in
society for the artist-as-performer (as opposed to the actor-as-character) but
also in keeping art out of the commodifying hands of bourgeois marketers,
principally because the art itself was a matter of hearsay to those not fortu-
nate enough to be present for the poetry reading or theatrical event. Dada
thus sought to radically short-circuit the means by which artistic objects
acquire financial, social, and spiritual value; in this manner, the movement
fulfilled one definition of the avant-garde, which is an attack on the founda-
tions of artistic institutions themselves.
And attack the avant-garde did, for the term “avant-garde” is, after all,
military in origin—however synonymous with “esoteric” or “incomprehen-
sible” it may now be—referring to the “advance party” that scouts the terrain
up ahead of the principal army. The expression was first used militarily
Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 11
around 1794, to designate the elite shock troops of the French army, whose
mission was to engage the enemy first so as to prepare the way for the main
body of soldiers to follow. The expression was first used metaphorically
beginning around 1830, by members of French revolutionary political move-
ments who spoke of themselves as being in the “vanguard.” Used as early as
1825, in fact, by the utopian socialist writer Olinde Rodrigues and later by
Charles Fourier’s disciple Gabriel Laverdant, the term “avant-garde” was
applied to the “men of vision” of the coming society—statesmen, philoso-
phers, scientists, and businessmen—whose actions would direct the future
development of humanity. It was only during the last quarter of the nine-
teenth century, however, that the metaphor was transferred wholesale from
politics to literary and artistic activities. Mainly attached to them ever since,
the aesthetic metaphor has been used to identify successive movements of
writers and artists who, within the larger cultural framework of Modernism,
generated a vital tradition of formal innovation or experimentation and socio-
political radicalism.
Mikhail Bakunin, for example, titled the short-lived anarchist journal he
published in Switzerland in 1878 L’Avant-Garde, and his aim in revolution-
izing aesthetics was to pave the way for social revolution. More than fifty
years earlier, however, Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon had proclaimed in
L’Artiste, le savant et l’industriel that
it is we artists who will serve as your avant-garde; the power of the arts is
indeed the most immediate and the most rapid. We have weapons of all
kinds. . . . We address ourselves to the imagination and to the feelings of man;
and we must always take the swiftest and the most decisive action. . . . There is
no more beautiful destiny for artists than to exert a powerful influence on
society—this is our true calling—and to thrust ourselves into the fray with all
our intellectual faculties, at the peak of their development. (210–211, 216; my
translation)
all the ordinary uses of language are too comprehensible, so these avant-
garde writers adopt various methods designed to break through language to a
mystery that is supposed to lie beyond it; or, in the interests of escaping from
mutability, they adopt imaginative ways of putting words together; yet, un-
like classical authors, avant-gardists ignore the purportedly changeless aspect
of human nature in their writing.
At one end of the scale are dramatists as different as Antonin Artaud and
Gertrude Stein, who dispense with their existing languages almost altogether
and replace them with collocations of more or less onomatopoeic sounds. (In
rejecting cogency of plot and idea in favor of the sensuality or pure form of
gesture and space as well as language, Stein was probably the first thorough-
going American avant-garde dramatist.) These sounds could be intended as a
return to the voice of man’s original pastoral or primitive nature, like the
barking of dogs and the mooing of cows, or perhaps they are supposed to
make us feel that all language is futile, since no language provides the key to
the meaning of the evolving universe. Then come those playwrights, like the
Dadaist Tzara, who treat words as objects, like the objects of the avant-garde
painter or sculptor, and try to dissociate them from the articulate meanings
they might have in a sentence.
As a performance phenomenon and as dramatic art, Dada disposed of
organic contexts by removing from language its readily recognizable charac-
ter of communication. The Dadaist poet hacked up words and rearranged
their syllables, exalting the outcome as new language whose meaning
camped sometimes in inflection, sometimes in the resemblance to other,
fixed or contextualized, words. Indeed, Dada poetry actively inconven-
ienced—or indeed eradicated—immediate comprehension by aggrandizing
language into art and then depriving that art of a clear and consistent aesthet-
ic. Like Dada poetry, the Dada stage was an experiment in language, med-
dling with the word in order to reduce viewers’ comprehension of theme,
setting, and metaphoric meaning. For the Dadaists believed that language art,
like other representational art forms, required revivification if it was to es-
cape from lifeless intellectualism. Language, for them, had lost its artistic
probity; in the form not only of overtly political propaganda but also of
truistic everyday speech, it was used merely as a tool to sustain ideological
power structures. When Tzara demanded a poetry intentionally divorced
from standard syntax and punctuation, he was not just exercising anarchism
against the tyranny of Realism and Naturalism in the arts; he was, in addi-
tion, rebelling against both communication and the possibility of communi-
cating Dada creativity (as well as desperation) to the rest of the world.
Of course, writers have always been aware of words as objects with a
shape, a rhythm, and a feel in the mouth, but traditional artists combined this
sense of words as tangible entities with the elaboration of more or less
coherent statements. Coherence had become such a despised characteristic
18 Introduction
by the early twentieth century, however, that many dramatists tried to elimi-
nate it, just as the so-called literary or narrative element had been removed
from much painting and sculpture. The play was meant to be a sheer juxtapo-
sition of words that did not allow the mind to pass through it in the usual way
and so slip back into the cycle of time. The normal comprehension of any
sentence is necessarily an act in time, so that if you could halt comprehen-
sion, the words would become or might appear to become ultimate fragments
of the universe, thus producing a semblance of eternity.
André Breton took a militant stand against all procedures that tended to
destroy just such an approximation of eternity—and with it the enigma of
existence—by submitting the unknown aspects of human words and actions
(paradoxically) to rational analysis. Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto
(1924 [Breton 1972]) therefore attacked the psychological novel directly and,
by implication, similar approaches to the drama. But Breton conceded that
dialogue as verbal communication was the most suitable channel for what he
called automatic writing. “It is to the dialogue that the forms of Surrealist
language are best adapted” (34), he declared. And in an effort “to restore
dialogue to its absolute truth” (35), Breton rejected the use of dialogue for
polite or superficial conversation. Rather, it was to be a confrontation of two
streams of spoken thought, neither particularly relevant to the other nor hav-
ing any inherent sequential order, but each provoking a spontaneous response
from its opposite number. As a psychic release in which the speakers dis-
pensed with decorum, such dialogue, when written down, was “automatic”
according to Breton in the sense that it was as free as possible from the
mental mechanism of criticism or self-censorship on the part of the author.
One of the first pieces of writing acknowledged as “Surrealist,” the play The
Magnetic Fields (1919), on which André Breton and Philippe Soupault col-
laborated, was just such a form of dialogue: a juxtaposition of two soliloquies
verbally bouncing off each other.
Finally, language might be used to create a puzzle, a conundrum, or a
game, as in the case of Jarry’s Caesar-Antichrist (1895). This is not quite the
same thing as a sheer object, for it allows a kind of circular movement of
comprehension within the terms of reference of the game itself. Here the
writer produces a construct according to his own arbitrary rules, or to rules
founded on the unexplained vagaries of his particular temperament, and we
are intended to enjoy it as a sort of metaphysical trompe-l’oeil. The game
presents the appearance of meaning, for the language of which it is composed
conveys sense up to a point, but it is really a self-sufficient linguistic laby-
rinth from which the mind is not intended to escape. Such a work offers no
exit to any reality other than its own and hence can be seen as something of
an anti-Realistic, quasi-Absurdist statement unto itself. Its over-deliberate
arrangement is, in the last resort, equivalent to the randomness of some other
avant-garde works.
Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 19
century with Jarry (if not earlier with the Germans Tieck, Büchner, Grabbe,
and Kleist), avant-garde dramatists also rejected traditional ways of regard-
ing and portraying reality; or, to put the matter another way, they lost confi-
dence in the customary (representational) model for dramatizing human be-
havior and thinking about human existence. These playwrights created a
daringly experimental drama that reflected their new ways of seeing people
and the world. And if the Great War exploded old conventions and precon-
ceptions for these artists, then the Russian Revolution of 1917 (preceded by
the dress rehearsal of 1905) showed them that the most sacred structures
were subject to violent change.
Indeed, the October Revolution and World War I go hand in hand, for the
former appeared to rescue the universal values of the French Revolution of
1789 from the ashes of Verdun in 1916. October 1917 restored faith in the
power of human agency (a power that would not be without its significance
for the drama) at a moment when the carnage on the Western Front seemed
to prove that human beings were the helpless playthings of historical forces.
For the entire European Left, the Russian Revolution symbolized the re-
sumption of history’s forward march—and so it was seen, through thick and
mostly thin, by many if not all leftists, until the Velvet Counterrevolution of
1989. Certainly neither international communism (with its rhetoric of the
enemy class) nor nationalist fascism (with its rhetoric of the enemy race)
would ever have become ruling creeds in the twentieth century had bourgeois
society not thrown itself into the abyss of 1914. It was World War I that
transformed both political “isms” into beliefs that spoke to the resentment,
exhaustion, and horror of the men who returned from the trenches.
Communism’s own accomplishment, and the source of its appeal, was to
formalize the terms of the bourgeoisie’s guilty conscience, its remorse at its
failure to practice what it preached: the idea of universality or action in the
public interest, as well as the equality of all citizens, ideals the bourgeoisie
claimed as its primary innovation and the foundation of democracy, but each
of which it constantly negated through the unequal distribution of property
and wealth perpetuated by the competition of its members. And communism
gave expression also to the aesthetic self-loathing of the bourgeoisie, their
secret belief that money twisted the soul and that they knew the price of
everything, yet the value of nothing. In this sense, the rise of communism
was inseparable from the rise of Romanticism, the artistic rejection of all that
was narrow, miserly, and vulgar about bourgeois capitalism.
In Russia, such rejection, and the revolution that went with it, became the
starting point for the new, theatrically and cinematically as well as politically
and economically, and it made the Soviet stage pre-eminent for experimenta-
tion during the dozen years after the fall of St. Petersburg and Lenin’s arrival
at Finland Station. Pilgrimages to Moscow to see the productions of Evgeny
Vakhtangov, Aleksandr Tairov, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Nikolai, Akimov,
Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 21
not the private domestic life of that period but rather its gross communal
instability: its shifting planes of reality, changing perspectives on society,
drastic transpositions of time and space, and multiple takes on personality.
Many of the new movements placed considerable emphasis upon multiple
images of personality, for example, through their exploration of the subcon-
scious—probably because Freud’s theories provided a semi-scientific expla-
nation for forces that the Symbolists had relegated to the realm of fate,
mysticism, or the supernatural. Through the subconscious, the subjective and
the objective worlds could be brought into a logical relationship onstage that
synthesized the views of both the Realist-Naturalists and the Symbolists.
And through the psychological probing of the Surrealists, the vast realms of
the mind offered material for new explorations in performance, apart from
any concern for objective representation. Freud’s theories were given new
dimensions, moreover, by the work of Carl Jung. Beginning with Psychology
of the Unconscious (1912; repr. 1971), he argued that Freud’s description of
the mind’s structure is incomplete; to its three divisions of id, ego, and
superego should be added a fourth, the “collective unconscious”—a division
outside the reach of psychoanalysis, for “by no analytical technique can it be
brought to conscious recollection, being neither repressed nor forgotten”
(319).
The collective unconscious, according to Jung, is “nothing more than a
potentiality . . . which from primordial times has been handed down to us in
the specific form of mnemonic images, or expressed in anatomical forma-
tions in the very structure of the brain” (319), incorporating “the psychic
residua of innumerable experiences of the same type” (320). In this manner,
Jung pushed the conception of the unconscious one step further and sug-
gested an explanation for psychological responses not accounted for by
Freud. He went on to declare that there are essentially two kinds of art: the
kind based on the personal unconscious and that based on the collective
unconscious. The first is limited by the author’s personal vision, but the
second is more significant because it captures (through archetype, myth, and
symbol) experiences embedded in the collective unconscious, which are the
ones best suited to compensate for what is missing from our lives in the
present. From the point of view of avant-garde dramatists, Jung, in so extend-
ing Freud’s conception of the unconscious, was implicitly arguing for a
reality that is far more complex than surface appearance would suggest.
New developments in physics were to prove as far-reaching as those in
psychology. Beginning in 1905, Albert Einstein began formulating his theory
of relativity, which constitutes the most revolutionary, precise statement of
those perceptions of time and space that greatly influenced not only twenti-
eth-century science but art and literature as well. This theory is revolutionary
precisely because, in formulating it, Einstein sought to incorporate both spa-
tial and temporal dimensions. Newtonian physics had depicted space as static
26 Introduction
and absolute by treating both time and point of view as fixed; starting with
Einstein space came to be seen, by contrast, as relative to a moving point of
reference. To the three spatial dimensions, he added the fourth dimension of
time, in the form of movement; and the faster the movement, the greater are
the changes in perceived dimensions of both time and space.
Even though Einstein saw mass, length, time, and simultaneity as relative,
he never doubted the orderliness of the universe, and he sought to harmonize
the variables through mathematical formulas. Less scientifically oriented
minds, however, were more attracted to the idea of relativity itself and ele-
vated it to a principle by which they could not only question the linear
progression of time or the related principle of inexorable, deterministic cau-
sality but also postulate the purely subjective nature of human perception.
For many, consequently, the possibility of firm or absolute truth had van-
ished forever, in the same way that it had disappeared around a century
before for the German Romantics in consequence of Kant’s notion that “pure
reason” cannot penetrate the essence of things, that the intellect cannot deter-
mine what is truth and what merely appears to be truth, that all perception is
finally subjective. (This idea was expressed in his Critique of Pure Reason
[1781] but later qualified—like Einstein’s theory of relativity—and recon-
ciled with a belief in God’s moral law in both his Critique of Practical
Reason [1788] and his Critique of Judgment [1790].)
Kant’s notion—which for Kleist shattered his Enlightenment belief in the
power of reason to comprehend the universe and to perfect life on earth—lay
at the heart of German Romanticism. Henceforth, the outer world was aban-
doned in favor of the inner, reality was created by the imagination, higher
consciousness was gained through the unconscious, and the generally valid
was reached by the way of the most individual. But whereas Romantics like
Tieck and Grabbe escaped from objective reality into a world of fairy-tale
fantasy, literary satire, or nationalistic folklore, Kleist incorporated the recal-
citrance of that reality into such dramas as Penthesilea (1808) and Prince
Friedrich of Homburg (1811) and in this sense showed some affinity for the
classicism of Goethe and Schiller (themselves erstwhile Stürmer-und-
Dränger), which attempted to reconcile spirit and matter by harmonizing the
inner and outer worlds.
As a result of Einstein’s work, however, the changed conceptions of time
and space were soon visibly evident on the surface of artistic forms (in
addition to being spiritually manifest at their core)—particularly in their
organizational patterns. Space in painting, for example, had since the Renais-
sance been conceived as fixed, and objects had been shown from a single
point of view at a specific instant in time. In fact, the entire logic of perspec-
tive painting was based on this convention, which was grounded in Newton-
ian physics. The first major break with tradition came in the late nineteenth
century when Paul Cézanne began to include in one painting objects that
Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 27
could be seen only from different “eye-points.” But it was Cubism (usually
said to have begun in 1907 and to have reached its height just prior to World
War I) that first systematically introduced into a single painting several
points of view, no one of which had more authority than the others. The
Cubist painters, among whom Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were the
leading figures, sought not only to break down objects semi-geometrically
into cubes, spheres, cylinders, and cones, but also to provide several views of
the same object simultaneously. Cubism thus represented an attempt to deal
analytically with space and to incorporate the dimension of time into paint-
ing.
Similar attempts were made in drama, where time had traditionally been
treated as linear (and events occur in proper succession from beginning to
middle to end) rather than as simultaneous or relative. Just as fixed space had
governed most painting, the orderly or sequential passing of time had gov-
erned drama, with most plays being unified through a cause-and-effect ar-
rangement of incidents that mimicked Newton’s own theory of causality
(according to which every thing or occurrence in the universe has its cause or
origin). Less often, overriding thought, theme, or thesis had been used to
unify otherwise seemingly random, disjointed incidents (as in Aristophanes’
comedies and the medieval mystery plays). And it is a variation on the latter
method that nearly all non-realistic dramatists have adopted, for most have
organized their works around some central idea or motif, although the specif-
ic form of organization—musical, say, as in the cases of Strindberg’s afore-
mentioned Ghost Sonata, Mayakovsky’s “bouffe” (comic opera) of a mys-
tery play, or, even later, Sam Shepard’s Suicide in B-Flat (1976)—depends
in large part upon the assumptions the playwright has made about reality.
Before the modern period most dramatists had assumed, of course, that
ours is a logical universe presided over by a just God; behind any apparent
chaos, therefore, lay ultimate harmony and justice. But as I have tried to
make clear, avant-garde drama was directly affected by the new god of
science—by new scientific discoveries and the advanced technologies of the
machine age, in their constructive as well as destructive capacities. For this
reason, the plays of the Expressionists, Futurists, and Surrealists have an
essentially new tempo or rhythm that mirrors the fast pace of industrial life,
the thrilling speed of the airplane, the automobile, and the motorcycle, and
the quick cuts of edited film. Such drama overwhelms the spectator with its
abrupt images and movement more in keeping with the sports arena and the
movie screen than with the predictable pace and sanctimonious solemnity of
the bourgeois, boulevard, or Broadway theatre or even the Symbolist temple
of art (where earthly discontinuity, illogicality, and obscurity could still be
absorbed, reconciled, or overruled in a transcendent, ideal realm). Further-
more, avant-garde drama playfully calls attention to itself as drama, to its
own artifice and spectacle (as Realist or Naturalist plays never would), and
28 Introduction
exuberantly combines esoteric art with popular culture—with the circus, the
cabaret, even the jazz of the twentieth century—in a way not seen since the
two apogees of Western theatre: those of ancient Greece and Elizabethan
England.
All the playfulness and exuberance ended, however, with the rise of fas-
cism and the arrival of World War II, as an entire generation of artists was
geographically displaced, politically silenced, morally co-opted, or simply
executed (like the sometime Surrealist Federico García Lorca). State repres-
sion of the avant-garde was most obvious, of course, under the totalitarian
regimes of the Soviet Union and Germany, where avant-garde practice was
denigrated, respectively, as “formalist” and “degenerate.” In both cases,
avant-gardism was stamped out because it conflicted with, or merely failed to
serve, official government policy. The dramatic decline of the European
avant-garde in the 1930s is thus connected with a paradoxical feature of the
avant-garde ethos: avant-garde artistic practice can flourish only under liber-
al political regimes, which are willing to tolerate vigorous expressions of
dissent against the state and society. In this respect the avant-garde bites the
hand that feeds it, or conversely, in Poggioli’s words, it pays “involuntary
homage” to the bourgeois liberal democracies it attacks (106).
World War II was thus a turning point not only in the individual lives of
so many artists and intellectuals but also in the history of the avant-garde as a
whole. Avant-garde drama written after World War II, like the drama pro-
duced between the two world wars, was to be affected by new scientific
discoveries and the advanced technologies of the machine age, but in this
case they were those that made possible the splitting of the atom and the
demented, conveyor-belt efficiency of gas chambers—which is to say, tech-
nologies whose immediate effect was overwhelmingly negative, indeed, in-
comprehensibly catastrophic. The horrors of World War II, especially the
systematic displacement and extermination of vast numbers of people, creat-
ed a crisis of conscience among many of the world’s artists and intellectuals.
Traditional values and morals seemed incapable of coping with such dilem-
mas as America’s dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan or such monstros-
ities as the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis against European Jewry (not
to mention the Soviet Union’s GULAG stretching from the Urals to the
Pacific). Conventional values and morals, as a result, no longer seemed to
rest on any solid foundation.
As the full implications of a Godless universe (one promulgated, if not
introduced, by late-nineteenth-century thinkers) at last became fully evident,
the search for absolute values or essential truths gave way to a fundamental
questioning about man’s existence and place in the universe. As Martin
Esslin put it, “The decline of religious faith was masked until the end of the
Second World War by the substitute religions of faith in progress, national-
ism, and various totalitarian fallacies. All this was shattered by the war. By
Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 29
1942, Albert Camus was calmly putting the question why, since life had lost
all meaning, man should not seek escape in suicide” (1961; rept. 1969, 5).
Camus, of course, was an exponent of existentialism, perhaps the most com-
pelling force in postwar thought. (Although it can be found as far back as the
ancient Greeks, existentialism remained a relatively minor strain in philoso-
phy until the mid-nineteenth century, beginning with Kierkegaard.)
While an essentialist philosopher might inquire into what it means to be
human—what the essential human traits are—the existentialist begins by
asking, “What does it mean ‘to be’ or ‘to exist’?” Existentialists like Camus
argued that human beings are, individually, responsible for making them-
selves what they are and that, without making a free and conscious choice
before taking action, one cannot truly be said “to exist” as a human being.
This philosophical movement thus sought to free the individual from external
authority as well as from the authority or weight of the past and to force him
to discover within himself the grounds for choosing and doing. (Hence the
difference between traditional, expository characters who are victims of the
past and unconventional, existentialist characters who live in—and act out
of—the eternal present.) Understandably, existentialism struck a responsive
chord during and after World War II, for the world had seemingly gone mad
as personal choice was abdicated in favor of blind adherence to national
leaders and policies, even when such obedience entailed condoning almost
unbelievable cruelties or crimes against humanity.
Existentialism also struck a responsive chord in the theatre. Albert Camus
and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote such plays as Caligula (1945) and The Flies
(1943) to dramatize the tenets of their philosophy. These plays, along with
others by Giraudoux, Anouilh, and Salacrou, create what could be called a
form of aesthetic dissonance, however, for they posit, in Esslin’s words, the
ultimate “senselessness of life [and] the inevitable devaluation of ideals,
purity, and purpose” (6). Yet the plays themselves are logical constructs that
depend for their effect on ratiocinative devices, discursive thought, and con-
sistent or coherent character. In this sense, existentialist playwrights have
something in common with dramatists who went before them—Goethe,
Schiller, and especially Kleist, a harbinger of the avant-garde. These Ger-
mans had attempted to harmonize Romanticism—and its focus on the turbu-
lent, internal life—with Neoclassicism, which emphasized the controlled,
external world. Camus, Sartre, and company tried to express irrational con-
tent—that is, the theme of the irrationality of the human condition—in ra-
tional form. (Sartre and Camus were followed, in the late 1990s, by Tom
Stoppard and Michael Frayn, whose Arcadia and Copenhagen, paradoxical-
ly, explore in conventional dramatic form the way in which Werner Heisen-
berg’s uncertainty principle exploded the traditional concept of causality,
thus opening the door to “chaos theory.”)
30 Introduction
The difference between such drama and earlier non-realistic plays, from
Symbolism onward, is precisely that perception or vision, rather than its
techniques. Although the Absurdists were especially attuned to as well as
inclined to imitate the work of Jarry, Artaud, Pirandello, the Futurists, the
Dadaists, and perhaps above all the Surrealists, their subject becomes hu-
mans’ entrapment in an irrational, hostile, impersonal, and indifferent uni-
verse, an existence in which the search for truth is an exercise in futility.
(This attitude, incidentally, does not seep into American drama, with Jack
Gelber’s The Connection [1959] and Edward Albee’s The American Dream
[1961], until our post-war euphoria wears off, the Korean War erupts in the
midst of the Cold War, and the Vietnam debacle looms on the horizon. The
American avant-garde, however, is rooted more in performance than in text,
in a radical performance technique that dismantles and then either discards or
refashions the overwhelmingly “well-made” drama of the American stage, as
the work of the Wooster Group, the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, the
Bread-and-Puppet Theatre, Mabou Mines, and Ping Chong will attest.)
The Theatre of the Absurd, that is, gives up the search for a dramatic
model through which to discover fundamental ethical or philosophical cer-
tainties about life and the world—something even the Surrealists attempted
in their probing of the unconscious. To paraphrase Malraux (1960), if the
mission of the nineteenth century was to get rid of the gods, the mission of
the twentieth century was to replace them with something—until we get to
the Absurdists, who replace “something” with nothing or nothingness. The
only certainty about human reality, in Ionesco’s words, is that, “devoid of
purpose . . . cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental
roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless” (quoted
in Esslin, 5). And this “certainty,” as I have already indicated, is reflected by
the viciously cyclical nature of Absurdist dramatic form.
Since the inception of the Absurd, avant-garde drama certainly has not
ceased to be written. One need only witness from the 1970s, for example, the
Austrian Peter Handke’s Ride Across Lake Constance (1971), which demol-
ishes even the remnants of mimesis through a relentless scrutiny of the semi-
otics of language and experience that allows for no progression of events, no
resolution, no characterization, and hence no correspondence between behav-
ior and language; the Frenchman Michel Vinaver’s Overboard (1973),
whose many discontinuous and seemingly unrelated scenes ultimately sug-
gest that everything from the corporate world to the world of myth intercon-
nects; the American Robert Wilson’s three-hour speechless epic Deafman
Glance (1971), which created a combination Theatre of Silence-and-Images
not unlike that of silent experimental film; and the work of another
American, Charles Ludlam, whose savagely nihilistic Ridiculous Theatre
parodied familiar genres and the absurdities of life as well as art, in plays like
Bluebeard (1970) and Camille (1971). What has happened, however, is that
32 Introduction
since the late 1960s or so, we have entered the era of Postmodernism (a term
first used in architecture), in which two events occurred to stop the “ad-
vance” of the avant-garde.
The first was the embrace by Postmodern dramatists of a stylistic plural-
ism, an eclectic and often self-reflexive mixing of different styles from dif-
ferent time periods. Under Modernism, the argument goes, a variety of styles
had flourished, but within any one (such as Expressionism or Surrealism) the
artist sought unity by adhering consistently to the set of conventions associat-
ed with that mode. The problem with this definition of Modernism, at least as
it is extended to the history of drama, is that the mixing of radically different
styles—and the playwrights’ propensity to call attention to the process of
artistic creation—was already evident in the work of avant-gardists from the
1920s, not to mention earlier, in the experimental plays of Strindberg. A
more sophisticated version of the Postmodern argument claims that it is not
the mere presence of eclecticism and self-referentiality that distinguishes
Postmodernism, but rather their different cultural positioning and use within
a Postmodern context. Within an avant-garde ethos the self-conscious mixing
of styles constituted a typical attempt to occupy the position of “most ad-
vanced and subversive trend,” whereas self-reflexive pluralism in Postmod-
ern culture marks an exhaustion of the subversive energies and ambitions
once associated with the avant-garde.
Over the past century, artists, chastened by what they saw happening in
the world, have ceased believing in the efficacy of revolutionary art to
change the world; yet they still mouth slogans about transforming the order
of society and go through the motions of producing art designed to do just
that. And the ideologies and techniques of earlier avant-gardes are still con-
veniently lying around, ready to be picked through, recycled, and called to
reserve duty, though the heirs no longer see themselves as belonging to a
single movement at all. (The quintessential example, in form as well as
content, of the resulting drama is Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: Millen-
nium Approaches [1992].)
What began before World War I, then, as a burgeoning involvement by
artists in the future of their societies—if only as outcasts who believed (like
Artaud) that some day they would be regarded as prophets—had subsided by
the decade of the 1970s into an acknowledgment that progressive artistic
programs would never be adopted and experienced by the vast majority of
any country’s citizens. To paraphrase Fredric Jameson (1991), all that is left
is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of
the styles in the imaginary museum of the past. Or, as Ihab Hassan (1971;
repr. 1982) put it, only indeterminacies—“discontinuity, heterodoxy, plural-
ism, randomness, pervasion”—and deformations—“disintegration, decon-
Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 33
fact, the play exists at all before it is staged. In Blooded Thought, Herbert
Blau (1982) conceded that “so far as performance goes, the Text remains our
best evidence after the fact, like the quartos and folios of the Elizabethan
stage.” But what, he asks, is “the nature of the Text before the fact?” “The
idea of performance,” he suggests, “has become the mediating, often subver-
sive third term in the on-again off-again marriage of drama and theatre” (37).
And performance groups such as Mabou Mines and Grand Union, for their
part, have become concerned less with what they are saying—with content—
than with form and formal experiment: with the means of communicating,
the places where theatrical events take place, the persons employed as per-
formers, and the relationship of performers, and performance, to the audi-
ence.
Something similar can be said about the formalists who practice “experi-
mental” or “alternative” playwriting in America and who trace their lineage
back to Gertrude Stein. Even in those plays of theirs that seem, on the
surface, to obey established or conventional dramatic norms (those of farce,
say, in Charles Ludlam’s Reverse Psychology [1980]), these writers encour-
age us to step back and linger over the elements of performance longer than
we’re used to doing, seeing how those elements contain clues to the largest
meanings of the drama. The design of space, the passage of time, the rhythms
of speech and movement: these “invisibles” of theatre, once meant to disap-
pear when stories or characters are compelling enough, instead emerge from
the background to tell their own stories.
The very setting of the “other” American drama seems to take on a life of
its own. Landscape becomes an extension of its inhabitants, reflecting anxie-
ties or ambitions only partly expressed in words. “The rooms besiege me,”
says Jean Peters in Adrienne Kennedy’s A Movie Star Has to Star in Black
and White (1976), and as she struggles against them, she reveals a hypersen-
sitivity shared by many other characters in these plays. Jeep fears the walls
closing in on him in Shepard’s Action (1975). Marion’s spirit suffocates in
her husband’s townhouse in Maria Irene Fornés’s Abingdon Square (1987).
The different kinds of compartments in Jeffery M. Jones’s Night Coil (two
adjacent chambers), Len Jenkin’s 1988 work American Notes (a motel room
and lobby, a forest hideaway), and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Imperceptible Mut-
abilities in the Third Kingdom (the hull of a slave ship, measured obsessively
throughout the play) all serve as psychological pressure-cookers for their
occupants. The more they know about space, the less they feel able to control
it.
Outside, the landscape is just as restless, forcing characters to acknowl-
edge emotions they would prefer to avoid. In Lee Breuer’s B. Beaver Anima-
tion (1974), a flood reduces the stage to a pile of planks, all that remains of
B. Beaver’s dam. Nature won’t stay outdoors in Tina Howe’s One Shoe Off
(1993), where roots break through the floorboards, branches wind themselves
36 Introduction
around the beams, and ivy crawls up the furniture. And consider how many
writers—Ronald Tavel (Boy on a Straight-Back Chair, 1969), Murray Med-
nick (Switchback, 1994), David Greenspan (Son of an Engineer, 1994), John
Steppling (Standard of the Breed, 1988)—come immediately to set their
plays in vast wastelands. A catastrophe seems imminent or perhaps has just
occurred. Either way, one senses that the space has won only a temporary
reprieve from change—whether it comes in the form of urban warfare in Eric
Overmyer’s Native Speech (1985), nuclear holocaust in Constance Cong-
don’s No Mercy (1986), or the death of a moon in Mac Wellman’s The
Hyacinth Macaw (1994). In each of these plays, an enormous sky stretches
above measureless darkness. Characters use up all their emotional resources
just keeping their small pools of light from dwindling away. All of them
could be asking the question Rhoda asks in Richard Foreman’s Rhoda in
Potatoland (1975): “How can I relate to this place?”
As we map this new theatrical territory, we will also have to acknowledge
the effect of time, another element of performance we can no longer take for
granted. When narrative is observed, its passage can be excruciating: in
Action, one intensely felt minute gives way to another, just as unremitting, as
if the present tense dilated to ensure that the subtlest gradations of experience
are dramatized. Equally disorienting are those plays where the past won’t
remain in the background and the future won’t wait its turn. The former
aren’t mere memory plays: Oyamo (in 1981’s The Resurrection of Lady
Lester), Congdon, and Kennedy each create a remembered world that is
capable of sucking characters irretrievably into its vortex. And the latter
aren’t standard-issue fantasias: For John Guare (Muzeeka, 1968), Arnold
Weinstein (Red Eye of Love, 1961), Naomi Iizuka (Tattoo Girl, 1994), and
Richard Caliban (Rodents and Radios, 1990), the speculative selves available
in dream or fantasy slip the leash for the characters who summoned them,
wreaking havoc on the best-laid plans for narrative. In fact, it is the rare
character in these plays who doesn’t exist in all three tenses at once. Time
becomes an almost tangible element of the environment—groped through,
wallowed in, pushed back—capable, like a tornado, of dispersing a character
among numerous contexts; ready, like a flood, to overwhelm him all at once
with worlds ordinarily visited one at a time. This ordeal is rarely as moving
as in Suzan-Lori Parks’s theatre, where time is space for different versions of
the same character (African, and later American) on opposite sides of a
single ocean.
Self-division is epidemic in all this theatre: it is as if stage-time acts as an
acid on its inhabitants, breaking apart images valid only for the moment they
are perceived, revealing the composition of personalities beneath the surface
of ordinary behavior, and sometimes allowing us to see a self and its ramifi-
cations (the kind of person a character denies, fears, or hopes to become) at
the same time. The spectacle is unsettling: the person on stage, fickle about
Avant-Garde Drama and Theatre in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context 37
his form, can’t be trusted, nor can he trust himself. Shepard’s Shooter, in
Action, identifies a condition known to many characters when he describes
seeing a collection of limbs that, despite his best efforts, he can’t claim:
“When I look at my hand, I get terrified. The sight of my feet in the bathtub.
The skin covering me. That’s all that’s covering me.” He is “afraid to sleep
for fear his body might do something without him knowing.”
Standard psychological language is useless when it comes to describing
such characters. They’re not just “alienated,” for instance, when the floor
barely supports them, the walls close in, and their entire world sheds a skin
just when it starts to seem familiar. (“I got no references for this,” says Jeep.
“Suddenly it’s shifted.”) “Ambivalence” doesn’t begin to suggest their radi-
cal fracturing of will. (Kennedy’s Clara sits in the margins watching movie
stars “star in her life” and speak her thoughts.) “Nostalgic” or “idealistic”
temperaments aren’t to be found here; only characters so unmoored to a
context that, like Fornés’s Marion, they feel as if they’re “drowning in
vagueness” and “have no character.” Nor are they simply “insecure” or “con-
fused,” but rather suffer such an extreme form of self-consciousness that the
self dissolves under the laser-like scrutiny of consciousness. (Foreman’s
Rhoda can’t reconcile her body with her “body of knowledge.”) Indeed,
when we look at that place onstage where a character is supposed to be—a
figure bearing the burden of biography on the road to realized choices—
instead we see phantoms and mannequins and the debris of their struggle to
become complete. There are figures like Dinah in One Shoe Off—donning
and doffing costumes from famous plays, unable to find one that suits her
self-image—and the heroine of Craig Lucas’s Reckless (1983), frequently
changing her name and so, she hopes, her destiny. There are the malcontents
in Muzeeka, Red Eye of Love, Jack Richardson’s Gallows Humor (1961), and
Rodents and Radios, casting aside jobs and family roles in their quest for
their essential identities. There are the characters in Ed Bullins’s theatre—
say, The Man Who Dug Fish (1967)—refusing to accept racial roles without
irony. And finally there are the collages and force fields that stand in for
character in the works of Kennedy, Breuer, and Foreman—what could be
called ephemeral constellations of thought, vision, and action.
One senses that these playwrights are never sure of their characters, who
seem in the shifting landscape of a play to be more than merely the sum of
their actions and utterances. Yet for all their determination to penetrate their
mysterious surroundings and redeem the promise of the promised land, these
characters never feel they arrive. Up to the last moment, their skepticism
battles their faith: Individuals who began by scorning received definitions of
their lives are careful not to settle for their own. They think there is always
another corner of the setting to discover, another variation of their identity to
try. Potential lives and future destinations remain more seductive than cur-
rent experiences. Are such characters destined for days of self-contradic-
38 Introduction
Ann Magnuson, Martha Clarke, Stuart Sherman, Chris Burden, Linda Mon-
tano, Laurie Anderson, Jack Smith, Holly Hughes, Vito Acconci, Winston
Tong, Meredith Monk, Spalding Gray, Rachel Rosenthal, Tim Miller, John
Fleck, John Leguizamo, John Kelly, Joan Jonas, Gilbert and George, Debo-
rah Hay, Bill Irwin, Bob Berky, David Shiner, the Kipper Kids, Michael
Moschen, Avner (“the Eccentric”) Eisenberg, and the Flying Karamazov
Brothers. Anything can be called “art,” in other words, as long as it is conse-
crated in performance—often of the narcissistic self.
Yet even “performance art,” especially in its original incarnation as Ka-
prow’s “happening,” harks back to ideas first introduced by the Futurists,
Dadaists, and Surrealists. Impatient with established art forms, they turned
first to the permissive, open-ended, hard-to-define medium of performance,
with its endless variables and unabashed borrowings from literature, poetry,
music, dance, drama, architecture, cinema, sculpture, and painting. Alfred
Jarry’s investiture of a new personality, or performative self, for himself;
Oskar Kokoschka’s manufacture of and formal marriage to a life-sized doll;
the proto-Expressionist Frank Wedekind’s enthusiastic participation in circus
life, together with his practice of nudism, eurythmics, “free love,” even on-
stage masturbation and urination; the Bateau-Lavoir’s celebrated banquet in
honor of le douanier Rousseau; the Dadaists’ first program, which ended in
riot at the Cabaret Voltaire in February 1916; Eisenstein’s production of
Tretyakov’s Gas Masks (1923–1924) in the Moscow Gas Factory—all these
by turns playful and impassioned, casual and programmed, serious and child-
like events could be called, by today’s definition, “performance art.”
But avant-gardists tellingly termed them fumisteries (figuratively, practi-
cal jokes or mystifications), and the aesthetic motif that they embodied fu-
misme. Which is to say that these events were simultaneously the smoke-
screens and cannon shots through which the avant-garde initiated its frontal
assault on the art of previous centuries. Fumisteries were never intended to
be, as is “performance art,” the thing in itself. They were the products of
artists who, when their creative rhythms were most accelerated, when their
most pugnacious breakthroughs in aesthetic method and concept were occur-
ring, equated their roles as much with carnival barker, circus clown, music-
hall magician, or religious charlatan as with those of sage and prophet. To
put it another way, they had some perspective on what they were doing, or
enough self-doubt not to take themselves too seriously, which is one of the
reasons we can take them so seriously today. In word as well as deed, avant-
gardists embodied the relativity, subjectivism, or tumult of their age—not the
fragmentation, flattening, and solipsism of the one to follow.
40 Introduction
WORKS CITED
Apollinaire, Guillaume. Preface to The Breasts of Tiresias: A Surrealist Drama. Trans. Louis
Simpson. In Modern French Theatre: The Avant-Garde, Dada, and Surrealism; An Antholo-
gy of Plays, ed. Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth, 56–62. New York: Dutton,
1964.
Blau, Herbert. Blooded Thought: Occasions of Theatre. New York: Performing Arts Journal
Publications, 1982.
Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972.
Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. 1961. Rev. ed. Garden City, NY: Anchor/Double-
day, 1969.
Hassan, Ihab. “Postface 1982: Toward a Conception of Postmodernism.” In Ihab Hassan, The
Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, 259–271. Madison: Univer-
sity of Wisconsin Press, 1982.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1991.
Jung, C. G. “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry” (1922). In The Portable
Jung, ed. Joseph Campbell; trans. R. F. C. Hull, 301–322. New York: Viking, 1971.
Kornfeld, Paul. “Epilogue to the Actor.” Trans. Joseph Bernstein. In Anthology of German
Expressionist Drama: A Prelude to the Absurd, ed. Walter H. Sokel, 6–8. Garden City, NY:
Anchor/Doubleday, 1963.
Malraux, André. The Metamorphosis of the Gods. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Doubleday,
1960.
———. The Temptation of the West. Trans. Robert Hollander. 1961. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991.
Masson, André. La mémoire du monde. Geneva: Albert Skira, 1974.
Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1968.
Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de. Oeuvres (facsimile reprint of the 1868–1878 Paris edition). Vol.
5. Geneva: Slatkine, 1977.
Schechner, Richard. Environmental Theatre. New York: Hawthorn, 1973.
Chapter One
41
42 On the Marionette Theatre
***
During the winter of 1801, which I spent in M—, I happened one evening, in
the public gardens, to meet Mr. C—, who had recently been engaged as the
principal dancer at the opera in that town and was enjoying extraordinary
popular success.
Heinrich von Kleist 43
I told him that I had been astonished to see him several times at a marion-
ette theatre, which had been hammered together in the marketplace and was
providing entertainment for the crowds by means of little dramatic bur-
lesques interspersed with song and dance.
He assured me that the pantomime of these puppets afforded him much
pleasure, and let it be known in no uncertain terms that a dancer who wanted
to perfect his art could learn a few things from them.
Since this remark, from the way he expressed it, seemed to me to be more
than a mere sudden whim, I sat down with him in order to question him more
closely about the grounds he might have for such a strange claim.
He asked me if I had not, in fact, found some of the dance movements of
the puppets, particularly of the smaller ones, very graceful.
I could not deny this fact. A group of four peasants, dancing a roundel in
rapid tempo, could not have been painted more prettily by David Teniers the
Younger [1610–1690].
I inquired about the mechanism of these figures and how it was possible,
without having a myriad of strings on one’s fingers, to control their individu-
al limbs and extremities as the rhythm of their movements in the dance
required.
He answered that I should not think of each individual limb as being
placed and pulled by the manipulator during the various moments of the
dance.
Each movement, he said, had its center of gravity. It suffices to control
this in the innermost part of the figure; the limbs, which are nothing but
pendulums, follow mechanically on their own, without any help whatsoever.
He added that this movement is very simple: whenever the center of
gravity is moved in a straight line, the limbs describe curves; and often,
when shaken in a merely random way, the whole figure comes to a kind of
rhythmical movement which is similar to dance.
This observation seemed to me at first to shed some light on the pleasure
he had claimed to find in the marionette theatre. I was still a long way from
suspecting the conclusions that he would later draw.
I asked him if he believed that the manipulator who controlled these
puppets must himself be a dancer or at least have some conception of the
beautiful in relation to dance.
He replied that even if a task is easy from a mechanical point of view, it
does not necessarily follow that it can be performed entirely without sensitiv-
ity.
The line that the center of gravity has to describe is indeed very simple
and, so he believed, in most cases straight. In situations where it is curved,
the law of its curvature seems to be of the first or at most of the second order,
44 On the Marionette Theatre
and even in the latter case only elliptical, a form of movement most natural
for the extremities of the human body (because of the joints), which would
demand no great artistic skill on the part of the manipulator.
From another perspective, however, this line is something very mysteri-
ous. For it is nothing less than the path of the dancer’s soul, and he doubted
that it could be found unless the manipulator were to transpose himself into
the marionette’s center of gravity—in other words, were to dance.
I replied that the business of a puppeteer had been presented to me as
something fairly uninspired, rather like the turning of a crank on a barrel
organ.
“Not at all,” he answered. “In fact the relation of the movements of his
fingers to the movement of the attached puppets is something quite artful,
rather like the relation of numbers to their logarithms or the asymptote to the
hyperbola.”
Meanwhile, he believed that even the last bit of vitality or spirit could be
removed from the marionettes, their dance could be transferred wholly into
the realm of mechanical forces, and that it could be produced, just as I had
imagined, by means of a crank.
I expressed my amazement at seeing him dignify with such attention this
variety of fine art intended for the masses. Not only did he consider it capable
of a higher development, he himself seemed to be preoccupied with such a
thing.
He smiled and said he was confident in claiming that if a craftsman were
to construct a marionette according to his specifications, he could use it to
present a dance that neither he nor any other skillful dancer of his time,
Gaetan Vestris [1729–1808] himself included, would be capable of match-
ing.
“Have you,” he asked, when I silently cast my eyes at the ground, “have
you heard of those mechanical legs that English craftsmen manufacture for
unfortunate souls who have lost their limbs?”
I said no, I had never come across such things.
“I am sorry to hear that,” he replied, “for when I tell you that these
unfortunate individuals dance with them, I am almost afraid that you will not
believe me. What do I mean, ‘dance’? The range of their movements is
indeed limited, but those they do have at their command are executed with a
serenity, ease, and grace that must astonish every thinking soul.”
Jokingly, I responded that he had now found his man. For the craftsman
who was capable of constructing such a remarkable limb would doubtless be
able to put together an entire marionette according to his specifications.
“What,” I asked, as he in his turn, slightly embarrassed, looked down at
the ground, “what, then, are the specifications that you would expect his skill
to meet?”
Heinrich von Kleist 45
It would seem, he retorted, as he took a pinch of snuff, that I had not read
the third chapter of the Book of Genesis very carefully; and if a person is
unfamiliar with this first stage of all human development, one can hardly
speak with him about the later stages, let alone the final one.
I said that I knew very well what disorders consciousness produces in the
natural grace of human beings. A young man of my acquaintance had lost his
innocence right before my eyes, as it were, through a mere observation, and
afterward he was unable ever to find paradise again, in spite of every con-
ceivable effort. But what conclusions, I added, can you draw from this?
He asked me what incident I had in mind.
“About three years ago,” I related, “I was bathing with a young man
whose development at the time was suffused with a wonderful grace. He
would have been just approaching the age of sixteen, and only the first traces
of vanity were beginning to appear—a result of the favor he enjoyed with
women. It happened that shortly before this, in Paris, we had seen the statue
of the youth removing a thorn from his foot; copies of the statue are well
known and can be found in most German collections. Just as my friend was
putting his foot on a stool in order to dry it, a momentary glance in a large
mirror reminded him of the statue; he smiled and told me the discovery he
had made. In actual fact I had seen the same thing in exactly the same instant,
but, whether it was to test the sureness of the grace he possessed or to counter
his vanity in a salutary way, I laughed and replied that he must be seeing
things! He reddened and raised his foot a second time in order to show me;
however, as one might easily have guessed, the attempt failed. Flustered, he
raised his foot a third and fourth time; he must have raised it about ten times:
in vain! He was incapable of producing the same movement again—what am
I saying? The movements he did make had such a comical aspect that I had
trouble holding back my laughter.
“From that day—from that moment, as it were—an inconceivable change
came over the young man. He began to spend entire days in front of the
mirror; and bit by bit his charm deserted him. An invisible and incomprehen-
sible power, like an iron net, seemed to spread over the free play of his
gestures, and, after a year had gone by, there was no longer any trace of the
loveliness which had once delighted those who surrounded him. There is
someone still living today who was witness to this strange and unfortunate
occurrence and can confirm it, word for word, just as I have related it.”
“At this point,” said Mr. C— amicably, “I must tell you another story;
you will easily see how it fits in here.
“On a journey to Russia, I was visiting the estate of Mr. von G—, a
Livonian nobleman, whose sons were at that time very involved in fencing.
The eldest in particular, just home from the university, was playing the
virtuoso, and he offered me a rapier one morning when I was in his room. We
fenced, but it happened that I was better than he was. He became flustered,
Heinrich von Kleist 47
partly because of his own passion, and almost every thrust I made found its
mark, until finally his rapier went flying into the corner. Picking it up, he
said, half jokingly, half irritably, that he had met his match, but sooner or
later we all encounter our master, and now he wished to lead me to mine. The
brothers burst out laughing and shouted, ‘Let’s go! Down to the stall!’ Tak-
ing me by the hand, they led me to a bear that their father, Mr. von G—, was
having raised on the estate.
“Astonished, I went up to the bear who was standing on his hind legs,
with his back against a post to which he was chained and his right paw poised
to strike. He looked me straight in the eye: this was his fencing posture. I
thought I must be dreaming to find myself facing such an opponent, but Mr.
von G— said, ‘Go ahead, attack! See if you can hit him!’ When I had
recovered somewhat from my astonishment, I lunged at him with my rapier;
the bear made a very quick movement with his paw and parried my thrust. I
tried misleading him with feints; the bear did not move. I lunged at him again
with concentrated skill, and I definitely would not have failed to hit a human
breast, but the bear made a very quick movement with his paw and parried
the thrust. I was now almost in the situation of the young Mr. von G—. The
bear’s soberness robbed me of my composure, thrusts alternated with feints, I
was dripping with sweat: in vain! It was not only that the bear, like the
premier fencer in the world, parried all my thrusts, but he did not react at all
to feints (no fencer in the world copies him in this). His paw poised to strike,
he stood with his eyes fixed on mine as though he could read my soul therein;
and when my thrusts were not in earnest, he did not move.
“Do you believe this story?”
“Absolutely!” I cried, applauding enthusiastically. “I’d believe it of any
stranger, it is so plausible; how much more, then, of you!”
“Now, my excellent friend,” said Mr. C—, “you have everything you
need to understand me. We see that in the organic world, as reflection grows
darker and weaker, grace emerges more radiant and powerful. But just as two
lines intersecting on one side of a point, after their passage through infinity,
suddenly reappear on the other side, or just as the image in a concave mirror,
after moving out into the infinite, suddenly becomes visible again, so too
grace returns, when knowledge has, as it were, gone through an infinity; thus,
grace appears most purely in that human form which has either no conscious-
ness at all or an infinite one—that is, in a puppet or in a god.”
“Therefore,” I said, somewhat abstracted, “we would have to eat once
more of the tree of knowledge in order to fall back into the state of inno-
cence?”
“Yes, indeed,” he answered. “That is the final chapter in the history of the
world.”
Chapter Two
***
There is a tragic element in daily life that is far more real, far deeper, and far
more consistent with our true self than the tragedy of great adventures. This
is easy to feel but hard to show because the essential tragic element is not
merely material or psychological. It is not a matter of the unflinching strug-
gle of one person against another, the struggle of one desire against another,
nor the eternal conflict of passion and duty. It is more a matter of revealing
what is so astonishing about the mere act of living. It is more a matter of
revealing the existence of the soul itself, in the midst of an immensity that is
never at rest. It is more a matter of allowing to be heard, above the ordinary
dialogue of reason and the feelings, the more solemn and uninterrupted di-
alogue of man and his destiny. It is more a matter of making us follow the
uncertain and painful steps of someone approaching or retreating from his
own truth, his beauty, or his God. And it is a matter of showing us and
making us hear a thousand similar things which the tragic poets have given
us brief glimpses of in passing. But here is the essential point: could not that
which they have given us brief glimpses of in passing be shown before
anything else? That which we hear underlying King Lear, Macbeth, and
Hamlet for instance, the mysterious chant of the infinite, the ominous silence
of souls or of the gods, the rumble of eternity on the horizon, the destiny or
fatality one senses inwardly without being able to say by what signs one
perceives it—could one not by I know not what interchange of roles bring
them closer to us while putting the actors at a greater distance? Is it then too
bold to maintain that the authentic tragic element of life, normal, deep-rooted
and universal tragedy, only begins at the moment when so-called adventures,
sorrows, and dangers are over? Is not the arm of happiness longer than that of
sorrow, and do not some of its forces come closer to the soul? Must we really
shriek like the Atrides before an eternal god will reveal himself in our life,
and will he never sit down with us in the calm light of our lamp? Is not
tranquillity, watched over by the stars, a terrible thing when you consider it;
and does our sense of life grow in tumult or in silence? Is it not when we are
told at the end of a story, “They were happy,” that a great unease should
come upon us? What is going on while they are happy? Does not happiness
or a simple moment of rest reveal more of what is serious and changeless
than does the whirlwind of passion? Is it not then that the progression of time
and other more secret progressions at last become visible and the hours go
Maurice Maeterlinck 51
rushing forward? Does not all this touch deeper chords than the dagger-thrust
of ordinary drama? Is it not just when a man thinks he is secure from death
threatening from without that the strange and silent tragedy of being and of
the immensities does indeed throw open the doors of his drama? While I am
fleeing before a naked sword, does my existence reach its most interesting
point? Is it always at its most sublime in a kiss? Are there not other moments
when one hears more lasting and purer voices? Does your soul only burst
into flower during stormy nights? This seems to have been the general opin-
ion until now. Almost all our tragic authors only see the life of violence, the
life of the past; and one may say that all our theatre is out of date and that the
art of drama is as many years behind the times as is sculpture. It is a different
story with, for instance, good painting and good music, which have managed
to tease out and reproduce the most hidden but none the less serious and
astonishing features of the life of today. They have noted that what life has
lost by way of surface decoration it has gained in depth, in intimate meaning
and spiritual weight. . . .
But our tragic authors, just like the mediocre artists who have not gone
beyond history painting, make the violence of the story they are telling carry
all the interest of their plays. And they set about entertaining us with the
same kind of deeds that delighted barbarians who were used to crimes, mur-
ders, and treasons. But we spend most of our lives far away from blood,
shouting, and swords, and the tears of mankind have become silent, invisible,
and almost spiritual . . .
When I go to the theatre I feel as if I were back for a few hours among my
ancestors whose idea of life as something simple, arid, and brutal I have all
but forgotten and which I can no longer share. There I see a betrayed husband
kill his wife; a woman poison her lover, a son avenge his father, a father
butcher his children, children cause the death of their father, murdered kings,
ravished virgins, citizens in jail, and all the traditional sublime, but alas! so
superficial and so crude—blood, unfelt tears, and death. What do these crea-
tures, who have but one fixed idea and no time to live because they must put
to death a rival or a mistress, mean to me?
I had come in the hope of seeing something of life connected to its
sources and its mysteries by links which my daily routine gives me neither
the opportunity nor the power to observe. I had come in the hope of glimps-
ing for a moment the beauty, the grandeur, and the gravity of my humble
everyday existence. I was hoping that I should be shown I know not what
presence, what power or what god living with me in my room. I was expect-
ing I know not what meaningful moments which I experience unperceived
amid my most wretched hours; and all too often I was to discover a man who
told me at length why he was feeling jealous, why he was administering
poison, or why he was committing suicide.
52 The Tragic in Daily Life
observe him at rest. We are dealing not with an exceptional violent moment
in life but with life itself. There are thousands and thousands of laws mightier
and more venerable than the laws of passion; but these slow-moving, dis-
creet, and silent laws, like all things endowed with irresistible strength, are
not seen and heard except in the twilight and the serenity of the quiet mo-
ments of life.
When Ulysses and Neoptolemus come to Philoctetes to ask him for the
arms of Hercules, their action in itself is as simple and as ordinary as that of a
man of our time who enters a house to visit an invalid, of a traveller who
knocks at the door of an inn, or of a mother by the fireside who waits for her
child to come home. Sophocles swiftly sketches in the character of his hero.
But can we not say that the main interest of the tragedy does not lie in the
struggle we see there between cunning and loyalty, between love of one’s
homeland, rancor, and stubborn pride? There is something else; it is man’s
higher existence that is shown to us. The poet adds to ordinary life something
that is the secret of poets, and all of a sudden it is revealed in its astonishing
grandeur, its subordination to unknown powers, its unending affinities, and
its awesome misery. A chemist lets fall but a few mysterious drops into a
vessel that seems to contain nothing but clear water: and all at once a whole
world of crystals will rise up to the rim and reveal to us what was latent in the
vessel where our flawed vision had not perceived anything. Similarly in
Philoctetes, the sketchy characterization of the three main actors would seem
to be merely the sides of the vessel containing the clear water which is
ordinary life, into which the poet lets fall the revealing drops of his genius . . .
So it is not in the actions but in the words that the beauty and the great-
ness of beautiful and great tragedies lie. Are they found only in the words
which accompany and explain the actions? No, something is needed other
than the outwardly necessary dialogue. It is the words which at first seem
redundant that matter in a play. It is in them that its soul lies. Side by side
with the necessary dialogue there is almost always a dialogue that seems
superfluous. Examine it carefully and you will see that this is the only one to
which the soul will listen profoundly because it is only here that it is being
addressed. You will also become aware that the quality and the scope of this
dialogue determine the quality and the ineffable range of the play. It is a fact
that in the ordinary drama the indispensable dialogue does not reflect reality
at all; and what constitutes the mysterious beauty of the most beautiful trage-
dies are those very words which are spoken beside what seems to be the strict
truth. It is found in the words that conform to a truth deeper and incompar-
ably closer to the invisible soul which breathes through the poem. One may
even affirm that the poem comes closer to beauty and a higher truth to the
extent that it does away with the words which explain the action and substi-
tutes for them words which explain, not what is called a “state of the soul”
but I know not what intangible and unceasing striving of souls towards their
54 The Tragic in Daily Life
beauty and towards their truth. To that extent also it comes closer to the true
life. It is a common experience in daily life that one has to resolve a very
serious situation by means of words. Just think about it. At these moments, or
indeed ordinarily, is what you say or what is said to you always that which
matters most? Are not other powers, other words that one cannot hear
brought into play that determine the event? What I say often counts for little;
but my presence, the attitude of my soul, my future and my past, that which
will be born in me, that which has died in me, a secret thought, the friendly
stars, my destiny, the thousands and thousands of mysteries that surround me
and envelop you, that is what speaks to you at that tragic moment and that is
what responds to me. All this underlies each of my words and each of yours,
and it is chiefly this we see, and it is chiefly this we hear in spite of ourselves.
If you have come, you “the outraged husband,” the “deceived lover,” the
“abandoned wife” intending to kill me, your arm will not be stayed by my
most eloquent pleas. But it may be that you will then encounter one of those
unexpected forces and that my soul, knowing that they are watching over me,
may speak a secret word which will disarm you. These are the spheres where
adventures are resolved, this is the dialogue the echo of which should be
heard. And it is this echo that one hears—exceedingly attenuated and vari-
able, it is true—in some of the great plays I have just spoken of. But could we
not try to draw closer to these spheres where everything happens “in reality”?
It seems to me that the attempt is being made. Some time ago, dealing
with Ibsen’s play where this “second-degree” dialogue is heard at its most
tragic, dealing with The Master Builder I endeavored, unskillfully enough, to
prise open its secrets. These are still gropings very much like the same blind
man’s hand on the same wall striving towards the same light. “What is it,” I
said, “that in The Master Builder the author has added to life in order to make
it appear so strange, so profound, and so disquieting beneath its trivial sur-
face? It is not easy to make out, and the old master has kept more than one
secret from us. It would even seem that what he wanted to say was but little
compared to what he had to say. He has set free certain powers of the soul
which had never been free before, and he may have been possessed by them.
“‘Do you see, Hilde,’ exclaims Solness, ‘do you see! There is sorcery in you
just as there is in me. It is this sorcery that causes the outside powers to act.
And we have to yield to it. Whether we like it or not, we have to.’”
There is sorcery in them as there is in all of us. Hilde and Solness are, I
believe, the first dramatic characters who feel for an instant that they are
living in the atmosphere of the soul, and this essential life they have discov-
ered within themselves, beyond their everyday life, terrifies them. Hilde and
Solness are two souls who have caught a glimpse of their situation in the true
life. There is more than one way of getting to know a person. Let me take, for
instance, two or three people whom I see almost every day. Probably for a
long time I shall distinguish them only by their gestures, their outer or inner
Maurice Maeterlinck 55
habits, their manner of feeling, acting, and thinking. But there comes a mys-
terious moment in any friendship of some duration in which we become
aware, so to speak, of our friend’s exact relationship to the unknown that
surrounds him and the attitude destiny has assumed towards him. It is from
this moment onwards that he truly belongs to us. . . .
I believe that Hilde and Solness are in this state and perceive each other in
this fashion. Their conversation is unlike anything we have ever heard before
because the poet has endeavored to blend inner and outer dialogue in one
expression. There reign in this somnabulistic drama I know not what novel
powers. All that is said in it at once conceals and uncovers the sources of an
unknown life. And if we are bewildered at times, we must not lose sight of
the fact that our soul often appears to our poor eyes a most demented force,
and that there are in mankind many more fruitful, more profound, and more
interesting regions than those of reason or intelligence. . . .
Chapter Three
57
58 On the Futility of the “Theatrical” in the Theatre
the actual production, but its potential for depersonalization is one of several
sources of the twentieth-century theatre’s return to the mask. Both the play
and its theatrical realization were to have a long-term influence on many
non-rationalist forms of theatre, especially in France (but elsewhere too)—an
influence clearly traceable in the work of Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Ionesco.
***
I think the question of whether the theatre should adapt itself to the masses,
or the masses to the theatre, has been settled once and for all. The masses
only understood, or pretended to understand, the tragedies and comedies of
ancient Greece because their stories were known to everybody and were
explained over and over again in every play anyway and, as often as not, set
out by a character in the prologue. Just as nowadays they go to see the plays
of Molière and Racine at the Comédie-Française because they are always
being played. Besides, it’s a fact that most of them are over their heads. The
theatre not yet having gained the freedom forcibly to chuck out anyone who
doesn’t understand, or to clear the auditorium at each interval before the
shouting and smashing begin, we can be satisfied with the established truth
that if people do fight in the theatre it will be over a work of popularization,
one that is not in the least original and is therefore more readily accessible
than the original; an original work will, at least on the first night, be greeted
by a public that remains bemused and consequently dumb.
And the first-night public consists of the people who want to understand.
If we want to lower ourselves to the level of the public, there are two
things we can do for them and which are being done for them: the first is to
give them characters who think as they do (a Siamese or Chinese ambassa-
dor, seeing Molière’s The Miser, bet that the miser would be outwitted and
his money-box stolen), and whom they understand perfectly, thinking: “I
must be witty to laugh at all this wit”—which never fails to happen to the
audiences of Mr. Maurice Donnay [1859–1945]—and thinking that they are
doing their bit in creating the play, which cuts out the effort of anticipating
what is going to happen; and in the second place, to give them a common-
place sort of plot—everyday events that happen anytime to just anybody,
because the fact is that Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci
are rather outsized figures whose diameter is somewhat hard to measure up
to, because genius, intelligence, and even talent are larger than life, and so
beyond most people.
If in the whole universe there are five hundred people who, compared
with infinite mediocrity, have a touch of Shakespeare and Leonardo in them,
is it not right and proper to grant these five hundred healthy minds the same
Alfred Jarry 59
By slowly nodding up and down and lateral movements of his head the
actor displaces the shadows over the whole surface of his mask. And experi-
ence has shown that the six main positions (and the same number in profile,
though these are less clear) suffice for every expression. We shall not cite
any examples, as they vary according to the nature of the mask and because
everyone who has managed to watch a puppet show will have been able to
observe this for himself.
They are simple expressions and therefore universal. Present-day mime
has made the great mistake of ending up with a conventional, tiresome, and
incomprehensible mimed language. An example of this convention is the
hand describing a vertical ellipse round the face and a kiss being implanted
on this hand to suggest a beautiful woman and love. An example of a univer-
sal gesture is the marionette displaying its bewilderment by starting back
violently and banging its head against a flat.
Behind all these accidentals there remains the essential expression, and
the finest thing in many scenes is the impassibility of the mask, whether it
utters words grave or merry. This can only be compared with the solid
structure of the skeleton, deep down under its surrounding animal flesh, the
tragicomical qualities of which have always been acknowledged.
It goes without saying that the actor must have a special voice, which is
the voice appropriate to the part, as if the cavity forming the mouth of the
mask were incapable of uttering anything other than what the mask would
say, if the muscles of its lips could move. And it is better for them not to
move, and that the whole play should be spoken in a monotone.
And we have also said that the actor must take on the body appropriate to
the part . . .
Chapter Four
***
63
64 Prefatory Note to A Dream Play
events as a background, the imagination spins out its threads of thoughts and
weaves them into new patterns—a mixture of memories, experiences, spon-
taneous ideas, impossibilities, and improbabilities.
The characters split, double, multiply, dissolve, condense, float apart,
coalesce. But one mind stands over and above them all, the mind of the
dreamer; and for him there are no secrets, no inconsistencies, no scruples, no
laws. He does not condemn, does not acquit; he only narrates the story. And
since the dream is more often painful than cheerful, a tone of melancholy and
of sympathy with all living creatures runs through the pitching and swaying
narrative. Sleep, which should free the dreamer, often plagues and tortures
him instead. But when the pain is most excruciating, the moment of waking
comes and reconciles the dreamer with reality, which, however agonizing it
may be, is a joy and a pleasure at that moment compared to the painful
dream.
Chapter Five
65
66 The Stylized Theatre
attacked in Pravda, and a year later the Meyerhold Theatre was shut down.
In 1939 he was arrested and his wife, Zinaida Raikh, murdered; Meyerhold
himself was shot a year or so later.
***
The stage has become estranged from its communal-religious origins; it has
alienated the spectator by its objectivity. The stage is no longer infectious, it
no longer has the power of transfiguration.
But thanks to such dramatists as Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, and Wag-
ner, the theatre is moving back towards its dynamic origins. We are rediscov-
ering the precepts of antiquity. Just as the sacred ritual of Greek tragedy was
a form of Dionysian catharsis , so today we demand of the artist that he heal
and purify us.
In the New Drama external action, the revelation of character, is becom-
ing incidental. We are striving to penetrate behind the mask, beyond the
action into the character as perceived by the mind; we want to penetrate to
the inner mask.
The New Drama rejects the external in favor of the internal, not in order
to penetrate man’s soul and thus renounce this earth and ascend to the heav-
ens (théâtre ésotérique), but to intoxicate the spectator with the Dionysian
cup of eternal sacrifice.
If the New Theatre is once again dynamic, then let it be totally dynamic.
If the theatre is finally to rediscover its dynamic essence, it must cease to be
“theatre” in the sense of mere “spectacle.” We intend the audience not mere-
ly to observe, but to participate in a corporate creative act. . . .
The stylized theatre liberates the actor from all scenery, creating a three-
dimensional area in which he can employ natural, sculptural plasticity. . . .
By freeing the actor from the haphazard conglomeration of irrelevant stage
properties, and by reducing technical devices to the minimum, the stylized
theatre restores prominence to the creative powers of the actor. Concentrat-
ing on the restoration of tragedy and comedy (as manifestations of Fate and
Satire), the stylized theatre avoids the “mood” of Chekhovian theatre, which
transforms acting into the passive experiencing of emotions and reduces the
actor’s creative intensity.
Having removed the footlights, the stylized theatre aims to place the stage
on a level with the auditorium. By giving diction and movement a rhythmical
basis, it hopes to bring about the revival of the dance. In such a theatre,
dialogue can easily merge into melodic declamation and melodic silence.
The task of the director in the stylized theatre is to direct the actor rather
than control him (unlike the Meiningen director). He serves purely as a
bridge, linking the soul of the author with the soul of the actor. Having
Vsevolod Meyerhold 67
assimilated the author’s creation, the actor is left alone, face to face with the
spectator, and from the friction between these two unadulterated elements,
the actor’s creativity and the spectator’s imagination, a clear flame is kindled.
Chapter Six
69
70 Realism and Convention on the Stage
another one that merges itself with thought. The key to resolving this contra-
diction is the living actor, around whom should be objects that are actual but
not obtrusive, illusionistic, or unharmonious.
Many of his fellow symbolists fled Russia after the Russian Revolution of
1917, but Briusov remained until his death in 1924. His attempt to write
plays that embraced the Bolshevik Revolution failed, however, and he never
recaptured the success and influence of his symbolist period.
***
The production style at modern theatres can be divided into two kinds: realis-
tic and conventionalized.
Historically, stage convention preceded stage realism. The ancient theatre
knew only conventionalized staging, being reconciled to kothurnoi, masks,
megaphones, and scenery that almost never changed. Conventionalized were
the stage productions of the medieval theatre and the theatre of the ages of
Shakespeare and Corneille. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, when real-
ism triumphed even in literature and the graphic arts, theatre directors re-
mained faithful to convention, which had degenerated into a pernicious tradi-
tion: in depicting a room or a forest, in turns of speech, in gestures, in
makeup. Only in the last twenty-five years have attempts been made to turn
the stage into a kind of mirror which would reflect reality. The Meiningen
theatre in Germany, Antoine’s theatre in France, the Moscow Art Theatre
here in Russia, all attempted to free the stage from all these conventions.
Their productions might be considered the last word in theatrical realism;
their failures ought to be acknowledged as fatal for all theories. (This is no
place to revive the old argument about “realism” in art, in general. The
question may claim to have been resolved, until the defenders of realism find
new arguments. Only those who refuse to hear and understand can still aver
that art should “reproduce” or “reflect” reality. It has long been proven that
art, in the first place, has never performed that function; in the second, cannot
perform it; in the third, were it to perform such a function, it would create
something wholly unsuitable.)
The ideal of the realistic theatre is to make everything on stage as it is “in
life.” The realistic theatre contrived to put an entire apartment on stage, in
lieu of the traditional three-walled “box-set” with white draperies: the specta-
tor faced a room with a ceiling, a hanging lamp, furniture arranged just as it
ordinarily is in private homes: through the window a town or garden was
visible, other rooms could be seen through the open door. In place of trees
painted on the wing-and-border pieces, quaintly intertwining their branches
up to the sky, the realistic theatre plants a sort of real garden or forest on
stage, with paths, grass, asymmetrically staggered tree-trunks. If rain is to fall
during the play, the spectators in such theatres hear the sound of water; if the
Valery Briusov 71
play takes place in winter, bits of white paper are sprinkled behind the win-
dows or between the trees; if there is wind, the window curtains billow; if
there is supposed to be a street on stage, the noise of a crowd and carriages or
even the whirring and bells of an electric trolley reach our ears. The actors in
such theatres wear costumes that correspond exactly to the epoch or social
stratum depicted; their vocal intonations, accents, and gestures copy exactly
what they have seen and heard in life; in delivering dialogue, crossing the
stage, positioning themselves in groups, they pay no attention to the audi-
ence, but pretend that they are living, not acting, etc., etc.
Nevertheless, it should be noted that, despite all these innovations, even
in the realistic theatre a great deal fails to appear to be “life as it is.” While it
pays heed to details, it leaves untouched the basic scenic conventions. The
stages of realistic theatres are lit, as before, by footlights and spotlights from
below, above, and the side, whereas, in reality, light either falls from the
sky—from the sun or moon—or filters in through a window or issues from a
lamp or candle. Not one theatre has yet dared to portray night by plunging the
stage into total, real darkness. In just the same way, all theatres continue to
make sure that everything spoken on stage can be heard in the auditorium,
even though it be spoken in a whisper. Even when a large number of people
is on stage, invariably only one actor does the talking, and when a new group
of performers starts to speak, the preceding group never fails to fall silent and
only pretends, by frantic gesticulation, to be carrying on its conversation.
Thus, at every step individual realistic details in the production are revealed
to be out of keeping with others: when, for instance, rain is depicted, they
forget to devise runnels of rainwater and leave the actors in dry clothing; in
portraying a sunset, they let the shadows of things and persons fall to the side
opposite the footlights, right in the path of the sun, etc.
Of course, an ingenious and highly intelligent director may perhaps suc-
ceed in avoiding all these pitfalls and eliminating all these imperfections (for
instance, by taking advantage of the phonograph and the cinematograph,
which are, as yet, barely used in the theatre). But, even so, no director will be
able to “deceive” the spectator or make him believe that what he sees is life
and not a “show.” By all sorts of trifling signs, by the brightness of colors or
the movement of shadows, our eyes almost always and unmistakably distin-
guish the make-believe from the real. Unlike the stupid birds of Zeuxis [ca.
420–390 B.C.], we never take painted fruit to be the real thing; we never
walk up to a landscape painted on a wall with the idea that it is an open
window where we can inhale fresh air; we never nod to a marble bust of an
acquaintance. When an avalanche composed of cotton wool buries two luna-
tics at the end of a performance, we see perfectly well that they are not the
actors who just now were playing their roles for us, but dummies stuffed with
straw. And none of the spectators sitting in the pit and the balconies, having
72 Realism and Convention on the Stage
paid from two to six rubles for his seat, believes that Hamlet, prince of
Denmark, is actually standing before him and later lies dead as the curtain
falls.
The most realistic productions remain in essence conventionalized. In
Shakespeare’s day they would put up a sign with the inscription “A Wood.”
Not so long ago we were content with a painted backdrop of a wood and
wing-and-border pieces representing implausible trees. Nowadays they begin
by constructing a forest out of artful plastic trees with three-dimensional
trunks, hinged branches, and fake foliage. Possibly the next step will be to
confront the spectators with living trees, whose roots are concealed beneath
the stage floor. However, even this will remain only a conventional symbol
for a forest to the spectator; he will never believe that, behind the curtain
during the intermission, pines, oak, and birches actually sprang up—and he
will merely assume a forest in the shape of what he sees, as the Elizabethan
spectator assumed it when he read the inscription “A Wood.” In the ancient
theatre, when the actor portrayed a man come from foreign parts, he entered
from the left. On the modern stage the actor is left in a little vestibule, where,
in sight of the spectator, he removes his overcoat and puts down his umbrel-
la, to show that he has entered from the street. But who among the spectators
forgets that the actor has entered from the wings? How is the convention of
removing an overcoat, donned in the dressing room a minute before going on
stage, subtler than the convention that an actor, entering at left, has come
from foreign parts?
Moreover, all the technical improvements of the realistic theatre not only
fail to enhance stage illusion, but vitiate it. A beautiful stage-set rivets the
attention as an independent work of art, and distracts it from the course of
action. Period and true-to-life objects, flaunted by the directors, arouse inter-
est as museum curios and fill the mind with notions irrelevant to the drama.
By giving free play to machinery, such as the sound of rain, the chirp of
crickets, or curtains billowing in the wind, one arouses curiosity and compels
the whole audience to wonder and ponder: where is the gramophone or the
wind machine located, behind which curtain are they jerking wires? Little by
little the spectators grow accustomed to these improvements in stage realism,
which have now ceased to be novelties, but this is not the result of spectators
starting to accept cotton wool as snow and a length of cord as wind, but of all
these contrivances having passed into the roster of ordinary stage conven-
tions. In the world, emotion and nature are the active elements; in the theatre
they are replaced by the artistic creativity of the performers and the craft of
the machinist. The more we conceal this distinction between life and stage,
the more palpable it will come to be.
Valery Briusov 73
II
The shortcomings of the realistic theatre of late, when realism was put in
effect on the stage in a logical fashion, were so striking and pronounced that
they prompted a reaction. The blatantly antirealistic movement, which, at the
end of the last century, regenerated all forms of art, finally invaded the
theatre. Attempts were made to transmute the very principles of stage pro-
duction and, to replace realistic theatres, theatres arose that called themselves
“conventionalized.” The Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in Paris, Max Reinhardt’s thea-
tre in Berlin, V. F. Komissarzhevskaya’s theatre in Petersburg with produc-
tions by V. E. Meyerhold, the Moscow Art Theatre in its latest productions,
one after another made conscious efforts to return to conventionality on
stage. Their productions are only the first steps on the path of exploration,
but they mark out the road on which stage art is stumbling.
Conventionalized theatres, starting from the accurate premise that total
illusion on stage is unattainable, eschewed the hope of deceiving the specta-
tor and mimicking life and nature. These theatres exchanged the realistic
depiction of place of action for pictorial allusion. Instead of a box-set of a
room, for instance, they put only a window; instead of a forest, a few trees;
instead of a tower, a piece of cardboard with a crudely marked pattern of
stones. The stage is furnished with only those objects absolutely necessary
during the course of action: a bench, a bed, the bank of a stream, with the
walls of the room or the outskirts of a park or the back of a street left entirely
empty. In the new theatre, the acting corresponds to the décor. Instead of
reproducing those vocal intonations and gestures observed in life, they “por-
tray” only various psychic upheavals and various behavioral actions: for
instance, weeping is an inclination of the head, running is a slow floating
movement, a kiss is a bringing together of lips that do not touch one another.
The directors of these theatres take special care to see that everything con-
summated on stage be beautiful, regardless of the subject of the drama per-
formed. All of the actors’ rhythmical movements and their groupings are
subordinated to the general concept, the general tempo chosen, to harmonize
with the style of the décor, etc.
However, it must be noted that these would-be conventionalized produc-
tions in fact seem, for the most part, semirealistic. The directors of conven-
tionalized theatres, thinking to free themselves from unnecessarily realistic
detail, present, rather than all of the ambience, only a few of its components,
but often those few are presented with complete realism. The former theatre
depicted a whole room, the new one depicts one wall; the former theatre
depicted a forest, with sunlight streaming between the tree-trunks and bird-
song, the new one, in its stead, puts three saplings on the forestage. This
semirealism rivets the spectator’s attention with heavier shackles than the old
74 Realism and Convention on the Stage
stage realism did. Seeing only part of a room in front of him, one wall
without a ceiling, one window beside a bed, the spectator sees only that wall,
only that window beside a bed, and it is much harder for him to imagine the
room than if it were either depicted in entirety or not depicted at all. The
Elizabethan spectator, reading “A Wood,” could conjure up a dense, impene-
trable grove, wherein the action takes place; the spectator at a “conventional-
ized” theatre, with three trees set before him on stage, sees only these three
trees and nothing more.
In just the same way the actors’ conventionalized acting in fact seems, for
the most part, inconsistently performed. The actors at “conventionalized”
theatres perform ordinary dialogue wholly naturalistically and switch to con-
ventionalized acting only in the most dramatic passages. In dialogue during
the scenes their voices correspond accurately to what we hear in life; con-
versely, in screams and exclamations, they do not imitate an actual scream
but “depict” it. Walking across the stage, sitting on a bench, closing their
eyes, raising an arm, the actors of the “conventionalized” theatre move like
living people; at a moment of emphasis or intense dramatic action, they
suddenly lose this ability—of being living creatures—and turn into manne-
quins. In conventionalized productions these shifts from realism to styliza-
tion in the acting checker all the actions, shatter all the effects, transform the
show into an excruciating alternation of clashing colors and dissonances.
Of course, one can combat semirealism and inconsistent acting style;
conventionality might be more logically injected into all set-pieces and all
details of the acting. Aware that the depiction of objects cannot, in any case,
give an illusion of the originals, some “conventionalized” theatres have al-
ready begun deliberately to distance the scenery and set-pieces from the
forms of reality. Not walls or trees or clouds are portrayed on stage, but a
suggestion of walls, trees, clouds—stylized reality; the furniture put on stage,
the props put into the actors’ hands are intentionally unlike the originals,
obviously only depictions, only symbols, and not the things themselves. The
actors at such theatres, in all the scenes, significant and insignificant, strive to
deport themselves like mannequins. Recollecting that, in the emotional pas-
sages, they nonetheless will fail to deceive the spectators or compel them to
believe that they [the actors] are suffering, enjoying bliss, or dying in actual
fact, for the sake of a total effect, they pretend that they are not walking, not
looking, and not talking, but depicting walking, looking, talking. . . . In these
theatres everything must be conventionalized from start to finish, and as in
the old theatres they constantly strove to convince the spectators that they
were watching reality, so here they constantly strive to remind them that this
is only representational. . . . Nevertheless, not one theatre has yet succeeded
in implementing such a plan in full measure. At every point, realism kept
breaking through the conventionality all the same: the sky, for instance, was
conventionalized, with its stripes, but the crags were realistic; the walls were
Valery Briusov 75
III
and dressed in real costumes—like all those artifacts to which we deny the
name of art? Is it not misconceived on our part to ascribe stage performances
to the realm of art?
These charges would be valid if the theatre did, in fact, lay claim to
concentrating on several different aspects of outward appearance at the same
time. Then it would only be a blend of the various genres of art and would
lose the right to an individual place in their ranks. But, not being a synthesis
of the arts as some theoreticians claim, the theatre is nevertheless a true art,
because the essential token of artistic creativity is characteristic of its very
authenticity. The essence of theatre, as of any art, was beautifully defined,
once and for all, by Aristotle two thousand years ago, in his treatise on
poetics. “Tragedy,” said Aristotle, “is the imitation of a single, important,
self-contained action”—and these words, with striking precision, distinguish
the art of the theatre from other types of art. As shapes are to sculpture and
line and color to painting, so action, direct action appertains to drama and the
stage. The dramatist wants the actor, by his playing, to incarnate the action as
it develops before the spectator’s eyes, much as the sculptor wants to show
the spectator the inert shapes of a body in marble or bronze.
The dramatic works of all ages and countries confirm Aristotle’s defini-
tion. Leaving aside the Greek tragic poets, whose works served him as points
of departure for his theory, all later masters of drama incarnated in their
works primarily action: Kalidasa, Shakespeare, Calderón, Corneille, Ibsen,
Wedekind. (The theory of drama as “action” [“in the process of being accom-
plished” and not “having been accomplished”], propounded by Aristotle, is
worked out in greater detail by the German critics, beginning with Lessing.)
What is Othello, for example? He is not a statuesque image, immediately
taken in by the sight, like Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix [1872]; he
is no outpouring of emotion like Shelley’s poetry, he is the image of a man in
action. We learn of Othello not from his outward guise, not even from his
speeches, but precisely from his behavior on stage. Even those dramas which
could seem to contradict Aristotle’s definition essentially affirm it. Such are
the early plays of Maurice Maeterlinck, who wrote a great deal against the
theatre of action, and in defense of static theatre. The immobility and inactiv-
ity of those dramas are notorious. Although all the characters, throughout the
course of all the plays, remain in almost one and the same posture, the
possibility of action keeps growing in their souls, to burst forth in the last
scene as the catastrophe.
In order to show the spectators action protracted over time, an “actor” is
indispensable. Therefore, the incarnation of drama on stage can appertain
only to a performer, a living creature capable of action, or else to an ingeni-
ous mechanism which depicts action. In the latter case the theatre, as an
individual art form, disappears and becomes only a second-rate auxiliary for
the dramatist, just as typography is for the poet. In the former case, the sole
78 Realism and Convention on the Stage
all the contrivances of scene designers; it was mistaken only in thinking that
the imagination had to be assisted by all sorts of inappropriate hints.
Portières, parti-colored rugs covering the stage floor, benches covered by
cloth or fur, rows of columns, massive pediments, steps ascending aloft, and
so on—these are the possible accessories of dramatic performance. None of
these objects can have a direct relation to the drama performed; they can be
associated with it only by a unified style, and their selection must depend on
the discretion and taste of the director.
The ancient Greeks, possessed of a subtle dramatic flair, had their actors
play against the background of an actual building. In Shakespeare’s time
actors played against a background of tapestries and draperies which did not
pretend to the spectators to be anything else. Neither the spectators of the
ancient theatre nor those of Shakespeare’s theatre found it difficult to use
their faculty of imagination in picturing Scythia, the brink of earth, where
Prometheus was fettered to his rock, and the clouds where the action of
Aristophanes’ Birds takes place, and all those courts, hovels, seacoasts,
woods, and mountains that alternate with such cinematic rapidity in Shake-
speare’s tragedies. The attempts made by some German and Russian theatres
to play Shakespeare and the ancient drama on dual-level stages and similar
experiments of the French open-air theatres with unit sets have shown that
even for the modern spectator such exertion of the imagination is not at all
difficult. After the manifest failures of all the “realistic” and “quasi-conven-
tionalized” productions, it is definitely time to turn to the techniques of the
ancient and Shakespearean theatres. Only then shall we be returning the art
of the stage to its rightful owner—the artistic creativity of the performers.
Chapter Seven
Translated by R. W. Flint.
Original publication, in English: From Documents of Twentieth-Century Art:
Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (New York: Viking, 1973),
19–24.
81
82 The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism
siast, it is hard to argue any inherent connection between Futurism and Fas-
cism, since the Russian Futurists embraced the Russian Revolution with
equal fervor.
***
We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps
with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like
them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled
our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of
logic and blackening many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling.
An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at
that hour, alone, awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward
sentries against an army of hostile stars glaring down at us from their celes-
tial encampments. Alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships,
alone with the black specters who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives
launched down their crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling like
wounded birds along the city walls.
Suddenly we jumped, hearing the mighty noise of the huge double-decker
trams that rumbled by outside, ablaze with colored lights, like villages on
holiday suddenly struck and uprooted by the flooding Po River and dragged
over falls and through gorges to the sea.
Then the silence deepened. But, as we listened to the old canal muttering
its feeble prayers and the creaking bones of sickly palaces above their damp
green beards, under the windows we suddenly heard the famished roar of
automobiles.
“Let’s go!” I said. “Friends, away! Let’s go! Mythology and the Mystic
Ideal are defeated at last. We’re about to see the Centaur’s birth and, soon
after, the first flight of Angels! . . . We must shake the gates of life, test the
bolts and hinges. Let’s go! Look there, on the earth, the very first dawn!
There’s nothing to match the splendor of the sun’s red sword, slashing for the
first time through our millennial gloom!”
We went up to the three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their
torrid breasts. I stretched out on my car like a corpse on its bier, but revived
at once under the steering wheel, a guillotine blade that threatened my stom-
ach.
The raging broom of madness swept us out of ourselves and drove us
through streets as rough and deep as the beds of torrents. Here and there, sick
lamplight through window glass taught us to distrust the deceitful mathemat-
ics of our perishing eyes.
I cried, “The scent, the scent alone is enough for our beasts.”
And like young lions we ran after Death, its dark pelt blotched with pale
crosses as it escaped down the vast violet living and throbbing sky.
Filippo Tomasso Marinetti 83
But we had no ideal Mistress raising her divine form to the clouds, nor
any cruel Queen to whom to offer our bodies, twisted like Byzantine rings!
There was nothing to make us wish for death, unless the wish to be free at
last from the weight of our courage!
And on we raced, hurling watchdogs against doorsteps, curling them
under our burning tires like collars under a flatiron. Death, domesticated, met
me at every turn, gracefully holding out a paw, or once in a while hunkering
down, making velvety caressing eyes at me from every puddle.
“Let’s break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like
pride-ripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind! Let’s give
ourselves utterly to the Unknown, not in desperation but only to replenish the
deep wells of the Absurd!!”
The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I spun my car around
with the frenzy of a dog trying to bite its tail, and there, suddenly, were two
cyclists coming toward me, shaking their fists, wobbling like two equally
convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments. Their stupid dilemma
was blocking my way—damn! Ouch! . . . I stopped short and to my disgust
rolled over into a ditch with my wheels in the air. . . .
Oh! Maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain! I
gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I remembered the blessed black
breast of my Sudanese nurse. . . . When I came up—torn, filthy, and stink-
ing—from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously
pass through my heart!
A crowd of fishermen with handlines and gouty naturalists were already
swarming around the prodigy. With patient, loving care those people rigged a
tall derrick and iron grapnels to fish out my car, like a big beached shark. Up
it came from the ditch, slowly, leaving in the bottom like scales its heavy
framework of good sense and its soft upholstery of comfort.
They thought it was dead, my beautiful shark, but a caress from me was
enough to revive it; and there it was, alive again, running on its powerful
fins!
And so, faces smeared with good factory muck—plastered with metallic
waste, with senseless sweat, with celestial soot—we, bruised, our arms in
slings, but unafraid, declared our high intentions to all the living of the earth:
MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM
1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearless-
ness.
2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
84 The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism
It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting,
incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism because
we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeolo-
Filippo Tomasso Marinetti 85
gists, ciceroni, and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in
secondhand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that
cover her like so many graveyards.
Museums: cemeteries! . . . Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of
so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories
where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd
abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously macerating each other with
color-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls!
That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the
graveyard on All Souls’ Day—that I grant. That once a year one should leave
a floral tribute beneath the Gioconda portrait, I grant you that. . . . But I don’t
admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should
be given a daily conducted tour through the museums. Why poison our-
selves? Why rot?
And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions
of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to
express his dream completely?
. . . Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our sensibility into a
funerary urn instead of hurling it far off, in violent spasms of action and
creation.
Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile
worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken,
beaten down?
In truth I tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies
(cemeteries of empty exertion, calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of
aborted beginnings!) is, for artists, as damaging as the prolonged supervision
by parents of certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious
wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may be a solace
for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner. . . . But we want no part
of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!
So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they
are! Here they are! . . . Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the
canals to flood the museums! . . . Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old
canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded! . . . Take
up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers, and wreck, wreck the venerable
cities, pitilessly!
The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our
work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably
throw us into the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to hap-
pen!
86 The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism
They will come against us our successors; they will come from far away,
from every quarter, dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flex-
ing the hooked claws of predators, sniffing doglike at the academy doors the
strong odor of our decaying minds, which already will have been promised to
the literary catacombs.
But we won’t be there. . . . At last they’ll find us—one winter’s night—in
open country, beneath a sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. They’ll see
us crouched beside our trembling airplanes in the act of warming our hands
at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take
fire from the flight of our images.
They’ll storm around us, panting with scorn and anguish, and all of them,
exasperated by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us, driven by hatred: the
more implacable it is, the more their hearts will be drunk with love and
admiration for us.
Injustice, strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes.
Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.
The oldest of us is thirty: even so we have already scattered treasures, a
thousand treasures of force, love, courage, astuteness, and raw willpower;
have thrown them impatiently away, with fury, carelessly, unhesitatingly,
breathless and unresting. . . . Look at us! We are still untired! Our hearts
know no weariness because they are fed with fire, hatred, and speed! . . .
Does that amaze you? It should, because you can never remember having
lived! Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl our defiance at
the stars!
You have objections?—Enough! Enough! We know them . . . we’ve
understood! . . . Our fine deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the revival
and extension of our ancestors—perhaps! . . . If only it were so!—But who
cares? We don’t want to understand!
. . . Woe to anyone who says those infamous words to us again!
Lift up your heads!
Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl defiance to the
stars!
Chapter Eight
The Offended One 1924), and Kilian, oder Die gelbe Rose (Kilian, or The
Yellow Rose, 1926). One of his last plays, ud Süß (Suss, the Jew), was staged
in 1930 and portrayed the controversial eighteenth-century Jewish financier
Joseph Süß Oppenheimer.
Hitler’s seizing of power in 1933 forced Kornfeld back to Prague. In
1941, he was taken into custody there by the Nazis and sent to Ghetto
Litzmannstadt in Łódź, Poland, where he died at the age of fifty-two.
***
I do not know whether this play [Die Verführung] will ever be presented on a
stage. It has been written for the theatre. If it is never produced, I am pre-
pared to accept any reason except one: namely, that its style is not good
theatre. If someone were to say that it was not worthwhile offering it to the
theatre-going public, I would neither agree nor disagree. But I would vigor-
ously protest if someone asserted that it was indeed worthwhile—but not
suited to the theatre.
This assumes that the director and actors will not stage it in a way that
runs counter to its spirit. But as the art of acting has developed over the past
few decades, this danger does lie in a definite direction. And judging from
the form and spirit of most of the “modern” plays presented in these last
decades, the contemporary playwright (who is also “modern”) faces a double
danger. Therefore I feel it necessary to address the following words to the
actor. Perhaps there are here and there actors who, as they read this tragedy,
will retrospectively correct the images inspired in them, or even form images
out of what had previously remained mere words.
Let not the actor in this play behave as though the thoughts and words he
has to express have only arisen in him at the very moment in which he recites
them. If he has to die on the stage, let him not pay a visit to the hospital
beforehand in order to learn how to die; or go into a bar to see how people act
when they are drunk. Let him dare to stretch his arms out wide and with a
sense of soaring speak as he has never spoken in life; let him not be an
imitator or seek his models in a world alien to the actor. In short, let him not
be ashamed of the fact that he is acting. Let him not deny the theatre or try to
feign reality. On the one hand, he can never fully succeed in the attempt; on
the other hand, such a counterfeit presentation of reality can only be given in
the theatre if the dramatic art has fallen to such a low estate as to be a more or
less successful imitation of physical reality and everyday life—whether
steeped in emotions, moral precepts, or aphorisms.
If the actor builds his characters from his experience of the emotion or
fate he has to portray and with gestures adequate to this experience, and not
from his recollections of the human beings he has seen filled with these
emotions or victimized by such-and-such a fate; in fact, if he completely
Paul Kornfeld 89
banishes these recollections from his memory, he will see that his expression
of a feeling which is not genuine and which has really been artificially
stimulated is purer, clearer, and stronger than that of any person whose
feeling is prompted by a genuine stimulus. For the expression of a human
being is never crystal-clear because he himself is never crystal-clear. He is
never only one feeling—and if he were only one, this one would always
appear in a different light. If he thinks he has immersed himself in but a
single experience, there are nevertheless innumerable psychic facts existing
within him that falsify many aspects of his behavior. The shadow of his
present environment as well as the shadow of his past falls across him. Many
people are comedians to themselves; yet the actor, who merely performs, is
truer in his expression than many of those who are victims of an actual fate.
Concern for many things prevents the real-life person from externalizing
himself completely: the memory of many things is rooted in him and the rays
of a thousand events crisscross within him. So at any given moment he can
only be a changing complex of behavior. But the actor is free of all that: he is
no complex, he is always only one. He is not falsified by anything—hence
only he can be crystal-clear and rectilinear. And since he is only this one
embodiment, he can embody it completely and magnificently. By shaping the
character he portrays, the actor will find his way unerringly to its essence.
Let him therefore pick out the essential attributes of reality and be nothing
but a representative of thought, feeling, or fate!
The melody of a great gesture says more than the highest consummation
of what is called naturalness.
Let him think of the opera, in which the dying singer still gives forth a
high C and with the sweetness of his melody tells more about death than if he
were to crawl and writhe. For it is more important to know that death is
anguish than that it is horrible.
Chapter Nine
the stimulus of an image. The overall form of the work is the responsibility of
the director, but the duty of the actor is “to keep himself firmly under con-
trol,” to “forget completely about life,” and to devote himself entirely to
building up the total theatrical experience.
Largely ignored during his lifetime, Witkiewicz achieved his real influ-
ence only posthumously, after the political changes in 1956 in Poland, when
his plays—among them The Water Hen (1921), The Cuttlefish (1922), and
The Madman and the Nun (1923)—came to loom large in the national reper-
toire and to attract attention abroad.
***
In Warsaw recently there has been a revival of the art of the actor, initiated
by Mieczyslaw Limanowski [1876–1948], a geologist well known through-
out the whole of Europe. We are obliged to debate the matter with him—we
being (in the pluralis doppelgängerus) a painter virtually unknown even in
Poland. This seems farcical, but that’s the way it is—there’s no help for it.
The theatre really must be in bad shape if people from such diverse special-
ties have something to say on this subject.
The theories according to which this “renaissance” is taking place are
closely related to the principles set forth in Fyodor Kommissarzhevsky’s
book The Art of the Actor and the Theatre of Stanislavsky. Following these
views, the actor is supposed to “experience” totally the inner life of his role;
his words and gestures are supposed to result naturally from his feelings, just
as would happen in real life to people under the influence of strong emotions.
All this they call pieriezhivaniya (experiences), plus voploshcheniya (em-
bodiment).
A second principle of the Stanislavsky school (in our view a correct one,
as opposed to the first, which we must categorize as totally false) has as its
aim the creation of an absolutely unified company in which no star tenor can
hog the front of the stage and push the other actors into the role of accompa-
nists, turning the play into a solo display piece for a particular actor or actress
and destroying it as a work of art. It goes without saying that in the staging of
the sort of Pure Form play which we have previously attempted to describe,
this second principle is altogether indispensable. Despite the dominance or
subordination of certain moments and individuals on the stage, it is impos-
sible to think of any purely formal whole where unity in plurality in and of
itself is not the most important goal. But, in our opinion, all kinds of “experi-
ences” are totally irrelevant.
In the genre which we are proposing (and even for performances of the
old masters of dramatic literature), the actor should be, in all he says and
does, a part of the whole, without feeling any necessity to “create” the role in
a realistic sense; that is to say, he need not enter into the real-life feelings of
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz 93
the hero and imitate onstage such a person’s supposed gestures and tone of
voice at various important moments in his life. Instead, the actor should truly
create the role, which, in our interpretation, entails the following. First, the
actor must understand the whole of the play, with particular reference to all
the lines spoken by all the characters who appear in the work, as well as their
gestures and also the different settings as they unfold during the course of the
action; or, in other words, he must first understand the formal conception of
the work (as distinct from its real-life mood) and its character, apart from all
real-life probabilities. Next, he should build his role in such a way that—
quite independently of his own frame of mind, his own inner experiences and
state of nerves—he can execute with mathematical precision whatever is
required by the purely formal conception of the particular work in question.
This may mean that he is to say a given speech with special stress on certain
words, at one moment emphasizing their logical content, at another their
sound value, or to offer the spectator a new image which contrasts with the
real, fluctuating picture of the given situation. His work will be genuinely
creative only when he considers himself an element in the given whole.
Once he is onstage, the actor does nothing but give a performance, which
of course may be increasingly perfected throughout the rehearsals and the
actual production itself, but he will continue to do nothing but give a perfor-
mance, comparable to other performances, such as the actual painting of a
picture which has already been composed, or the writing down of a sympho-
ny and its performance by an orchestra. However, the relationship between
conception and execution is different for each of the arts; their moments of
invention and technical realization are differently coordinated. In painting
and poetry, the most—relatively speaking—happens while the work is actu-
ally in progress; less takes place during the physical writing of music, al-
though even here various changes and improvements of initially foggy con-
ceptions are also possible. In the theatre there should be a minimum of this,
unless of course the theatre is to be nothing more than a servile copy of
reality. If that is the case, then “experiences” can be immensely useful, al-
though if we imagine a successful play in which a certain character commits
two murders and is condemned to death, we may well ask what kind of a
superman or superwoman would be able to experience all that, say three
hundred times, without becoming seriously disturbed or, quite simply, going
insane.
In our opinion, for the actor who does not have to imitate a character, but
who can create his role according to his own creative intuition, the psycholo-
gy of the hero as well as the lines which he has to speak should be only
subsidiary means. Once he appears onstage, the actor must be like a painter
who has so thoroughly thought out all the details of his painting and has such
a sure hand that the execution of the picture requires nothing from him but
the mechanical application of several coats of paint. It goes without saying
94 A Few Words about the Role of the Actor in the Theatre of Pure Form
that such a procedure is almost impossible in painting; in the art of the actor,
however, the creative process should ideally proceed in that fashion, and it is
in fact quite within the realm of possibility. Naturally, unavoidable small
variations are of no concern.
The actor should keep himself firmly under control the way a musical
virtuoso does. The only difference is that the actor has much greater scope
for his creativity, but always within the limits of the given work’s remaining
true to itself—which is the director’s responsibility. Every play, like every
poem, contains only a certain limited number of interpretations, beyond
which it stops being the work created by the author. However, we have no
objective measure for this limit. In our opinion, Shakespeare staged with
Stanislavsky’s realism stops being Shakespeare, Beethoven played sentimen-
tally stops being Beethoven, but unfortunately we have no objective criterion
for any of this. There will always be the possibility of more or less emphasis
on real-life content, and every work of art, even the purest, faces inevitable
defilement—in the performance and the hearing or viewing in music and
theatre, and in the very visibility of the world of objects in painting.
Of course, it all depends on whether the author has stressed the formal
content or the real-life content. Any play in Pure Form can be staged realisti-
cally, but a purely formal whole cannot be made out of every realistic work,
even if the director were to stand on his head. But whereas in painting and
sculpture there are only the works and those who view them, music and
theatre are further handicapped in that they must depend on the performance,
and in the case of theatre the complications arising from this reach quite
colossal proportions.
Setting the formal tone depends, of course, on the director. Grasping the
purely formal content of the work and creating a unified structural whole are
incredibly difficult tasks. But as a general guideline we could formulate the
following purely negative principle: Forget completely about life and pay no
attention to any real-life consequences of what is happening onstage at any
given moment as it relates to what is about to happen at the next moment. It
goes without saying—at the next moment onstage. Naturally we’re not talk-
ing about real-life consequences beyond the stage, such as the possibility of
an empty cash drawer, or the director, actors, and author being beaten up by
the crowd, or other similar happenings which, in our opinion, the manage-
ment of an experimental theatre should, at the present time, accept as the
facts of life.
We should point out that in this kind of play the manner of speaking the
lines, or the delivery, ought not to be uniformly a matter of the emotions.
From time to time this sort of emotional emphasis might serve as a purely
formal effect (for example, saying something sad in a joyful fashion or the
reverse, which incidentally happens even in life when one gets upset over
something totally insignificant or treats indifferently a real atrocity); howev-
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz 95
er, compared to the roar of animal passions heard on the stage nowadays,
compared to this hyperintensification of life, the delivery of the lines in the
theatre of Pure Form must be very restrained, and all the same principles
formulated when discussing the declamation of poetry must be applied to this
question. Each play should have its own “tone,” its upper and lower limits to
be respected in accordance with the author’s intentions, which must be felt or
understood by the director. We do not maintain that volleys of shots, roars,
and groans are inadmissible on the stage, but only that everything must be
interpreted and incorporated within the limits set by the tone of the whole,
rather than be the expression of purely real-life associations. Whereas au-
thors can afford to let themselves be carried away, the challenge of creative
work on the stage depends on its rigorous limits.
If actors could only give up their ingrained bad habit of displaying emo-
tions, the whole creative process of acting would consist solely in maintain-
ing the agreed-upon tonality. On the one hand, this seems to be something so
trifling that it is not worth talking about; on the other hand, it is infernally
difficult—so much so as to be virtually impossible. However, we maintain
that as soon as the tone is properly understood as a part of the formal concep-
tion, the details of the execution should fall into place of their own accord. Of
course, actors would have to give up their long-standing practice of trying to
send audiences into convulsive emotional twitchings, spasms, and fits—and
that is one of the principal difficulties in the proper staging of a play in this
new mode. The actor’s need to direct the audience’s attention to himself and
to feel the satisfaction of being able to hit them in their innermost recesses
and guts would have to become transformed into a genuine desire actually to
create a whole in dimensions totally different from real-life ones, even
though each actor’s contribution would be only partial. To accomplish this,
the actor would have to forgo his desire to impersonate, to pretend to be
somebody real about whom someone else was tactless enough to write—
which is what “experiencing” à la Mieczslaw Limanowski (1876–1948) ulti-
mately amounts to. Despite all the lack of expertise in theatre of which we
can be accused, we hold that the gist of what we have said is correct—from
the formal point of view of course—and that the whole thing which we have
outlined is completely feasible.
Let’s assume that people at the first performance actually roar with laugh-
ter because they expect the play to make the kind of sense which they have
always been accustomed to look for in the theatre and which au fond already
bores them to death. Quite possibly, sophisticated connoisseurs and profes-
sional theatregoers will make faces in disgust and use abusive language. But
we are of the opinion that after a certain purely superficial getting used to the
outer trappings of the thing, it should be possible to take far greater pleasure
in performances of this kind than in French farces which already make peo-
96 A Few Words about the Role of the Actor in the Theatre of Pure Form
ple sick to their stomachs, or than in dramas with so much “truth” in them
that they outdo life itself in truthfulness, sublimities hobbling on crutches, or
various other tidbits under the rubric “renaissance.”
Now we have absolutely no desire to depreciate the great masterpieces of
past ages. But isn’t it time to stop repeating what was created a long time ago
in its most perfect form? What we propose is twofold: to cultivate the clas-
sics with a proper feeling for their essence—but only those works of out-
standing value which have stood the test of time—and to launch out on the
(at least seemingly) boundless sea of experiment. In painting nothing more
remained to be created in the realm of subject matter, from the point of view
of life undeformed, except for inane naturalism, which amounted to beating
one’s head against a brick wall—in other words, against the unachievable
perfection of nature. Likewise in poetry, sense—worked over for the mil-
lionth time—became an obstacle to new formal combinations. In theatre the
situation is exactly the same now. Don’t anyone tell me that this will produce
private gibberish unintelligible to others, an individual language which only
its creator will understand, or actions characteristic of people suffering from
schizophrenia. All these accusations may be true if we look at art from the
point of view of life. In our understanding of the term, form is something
higher than subject matter and real-life sense, which are only means in the
purely personal process of creation.
There is need to unbind hands and feet, ungag mouths, and shake all the
old bad habits out of our heads. Let’s assume that nothing comes of it and
that it all sinks down again into the same boredom and grayness typical of the
creative work going on around us now and reverts to that endless rehashing
of the same old thing to the point of nausea. Let’s assume that it’s the
figment of the imagination of a sick brain—the brain of an individual who
does not understand that the theatre can never be anything but what it has
always been up to now. Still, isn’t it worth trying?
The force with which we resist the temptation to try anything new and
unknown is truly diabolical. Or has the temptation really grown too weak?
That would prove that the mechanization of life has really gone so far that the
theatre as a social institution par excellence can no longer resist the petrifica-
tion of everything into a uniform, gray, undifferentiated pulp that is only
superficially heterogeneous.
Chapter Ten
On Humor (1920)
Luigi Pirandello
97
98 On Humor
Pirandello’s most respected plays from this time, Right You Are (If You
Think You Are!) (1917), Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), and
Enrico IV (1922), thus all investigate the relativity of identity, truth, and
madness. Six Characters, part of his “theatre-in-the-theatre” (or metatheatri-
cal) trilogy, which includes Each in His Own Way (1924) and Tonight We
Improvise (1930), used the theatrical process to explore both the difference
and the similarity between fiction and reality, as well as to investigate the
nature of character. Pirandello’s idea that the masks we wear in life cover an
essential void influenced the Absurdists—in particular Samuel Beckett.
***
Comedy and its opposite lie in the same disposition of feeling, and they are
inside the process which results from it. In its abnormality, this disposition is
bitterly comical, the condition of a man who is always out of tune; of a man
who is at the same time violin and bass; of a man for whom no thought can
come to mind unless suddenly another one, its opposite and contrary, inter-
venes; of a man for whom any one reason for saying yes is at once joined by
two or three others compelling him to say no, so that yes and no keep him
suspended and perplexed for all his life; of a man who cannot let himself go
in a feeling without suddenly realizing something inside which disturbs him,
disarranges him, makes him angry. . . .
It is a special psychic phenomenon, and it is absolutely arbitrary to attrib-
ute to it any determining cause. It may be the result of a bitter experience
with life and man—an experience that doesn’t allow one the naïve feeling of
putting on wings and flying like a lark chirping in the sunshine: it pulls at the
tail when one is ready to fly. On the other hand, it leads to the thought that
man’s sadness is often caused by life’s sadness, by evils so numerous that not
everyone knows how to take them. It leads to the reflection that life, though it
has not ordained a clear end for human reason, does not require me to wander
in the dark, a reflection that is peculiar and illusive for each man, large or
small. It is not important, though, since it is not, nor may it be, the real end
that all eagerly try to find and which nobody finds—maybe because it does
not exist. The important thing is to give importance to something, vain as it
might be. It will be valued as much as something serious, and in the end
neither will give satisfaction, because it is true that the ardent thirst for
knowledge will always last, the faculty of wishing will never be extin-
guished—though it cannot be said that man’s happiness consists in his
progress.
All the soul’s fictions and the creations of feeling are subjects for humor;
we will see reflection becoming a little devil which disassembles the ma-
chine of each image, of each fantasy created by feeling; it will take it apart to
see how it is made; it will unwind its spring, and the whole machine will
Luigi Pirandello 99
break convulsively. Perhaps humor will do this with the sympathetic indul-
gence about which those who see only a kind of good humor speak. But it
ought not to be trusted. . . .
Every feeling, thought, and idea which arises in the humorist splits itself
into contraries. Each yes splits itself into a no, which assumes at the end the
same value as the yes. Sometimes the humorist may pretend to take only one
side; meanwhile, inside, the other feeling speaks out to him, and appears
although he doesn’t have the courage to reveal it. It speaks to him and starts
by advancing now a faint excuse, an alternative, which cools off the warmth
of the first feeling, and then a wise reflection which takes away seriousness
and leads to laughter. . . .
Let us start, then, from the construction that illusion offers each of us: the
image that everyone has of himself through the work of our illusions. Do we
see ourselves in our true reality, as we really are, and not as what we would
like to be? Through a spontaneous interior artifice, the result of hidden ten-
dencies or unconscious imitations, don’t we believe ourselves to be, in good
faith, different from what in substance we are? And we think, work, live
according to this factitious but at the same time sincere interpretation of
ourselves.
Now, yes, reflection can reveal to the comic and the satirical as well as
the humorous writer this concept of illusions. The comedian only laughs at it,
being pleased to blow away this metaphor of himself created by a spontane-
ous illusion. The satirical writer will be upset by it. But not the humorist:
through the ridiculous side of this perception he will see the serious and
grievous side of it. He will analyze the illusion, but not with the intention of
laughing at it. Instead of feeling disdain he will, rather, in his laughter, feel
commiseration.
The comic and satirical writers know, through reflection, how much nour-
ishment the spider of experience takes from social life to form the web of
morality in any person. And they know how often what is called the moral
sense remains trapped in this web. In the long run, what are arrangements of
so-called social convenience? Calculated considerations, in which morality is
almost always sacrificed. The humorist goes deeper, and he laughs without
disdain on finding out how, with naïveté, with the best good faith, through
the spontaneous work of fiction, we are led to interpret as real feeling, as real
moral sense in itself, what is nothing but a feeling of convenience, that is, of
mental calculation. He goes even further, and discovers that even the need to
appear worse than what one really is may become conventional, if one is
associated with a social group whose characteristic ideas and feelings are
inferior to what one might desire for oneself. . . .
Simplicity of soul contradicts the historical concept of the human soul. Its
life is a changing equilibrium, a continuous awakening and slumbering of
feelings, tendencies, and ideas. It is an incessant fluctuation between contra-
100 On Humor
dictory terms, an oscillation between opposite poles: hope and fear, truth and
falsehood, beauty and ugliness, right and wrong, and so on. If suddenly in the
dark image of the future a brilliant plan of action is drawn, or vaguely a
flower of pleasure shines, soon there also appears, as a result of experience,
the thought of the past, often dark and sad; or the feeling of the agitated
present intervenes to bridle the happy fancy. This conflict of memories,
hopes, prophecies, presentiments, perceptions, and ideals can be represented
as a conflict of souls among themselves; all are fighting for the definite and
full power of personality.
Let’s look at an executive, who believes in himself and is a gentleman.
The moral is predominant in him. But one day the instinctive soul, which is
like a wild beast hidden deep in everybody, gives a kick to his moral soul and
the gentleman steals. Now that poor man is the first one who after a while is
shocked, cries, and desperately asks himself, “How, how could I have done
this?”
But—yes, sir—he has stolen. What about another man? A well-to-do
man, indeed a rich man, he has killed. The moral ideal constituted in his
personality a soul which was in conflict with his instinctive soul; it consti-
tuted an acquired soul that fought with his hereditary soul, which, left free to
itself for awhile, succeeded in committing a crime.
Life is a continuous flow which we continually try to stop, to fix in
established and determinate forms outside and inside of ourselves because
we are already fixed forms, forms that move among other immovable ones,
which follow the flow of life until the point when they become rigid and their
movement, slowed, stops. The forms in which we try to stop and fix this
continuous flow are the concepts, the ideals, within which we want to keep
coherent all the fictions we create, the condition and the status in which we
try to establish ourselves. But inside ourselves, in what we call our soul,
which is the life in us, the flow continues indistinctly, under the wire, past the
limits that we set when we formed consciousness and built a personality.
During certain stormy moments, inundated by the flow, all our fictitious
forms collapse ignominiously. Even what doesn’t flow under the wire and
beyond the limits—what is revealed distinctly in us carefully channeled by
our feelings, in the duties which we have imposed upon ourselves, in the
habits that we have formed—in certain moments of flood overflows and
topples everything.
There are some restless spirits, almost in a continuous state of confusion,
who do not freeze into this or that personality. But even for the quiet ones,
those who find rest in one form or other, fusion is always possible. The flow
of life is in everybody.
Therefore, it can be, sometimes, a torture for everyone that, in contrast to
the soul that moves and changes, our body should be fixed forever in un-
changing features. Why are we made exactly so? We sometimes ask the
Luigi Pirandello 101
mirror, “Why this face, this body?” We lift a hand; in the unconscious, the
act remains suspended. It seems strange that we have done it. We see our-
selves alive. In that suspended gesture we look like a statue—like that statue
of an ancient orator, for example, whom we see in a niche, climbing the stairs
of the Quirinal in Rome. He has a scroll in one hand and the other hand lifted
in a severe gesture. How sad and surprised that ancient orator seems to be
that he has remained there, through so many centuries, suspended in that
gesture, while so many persons have climbed, are climbing, and will climb
those stairs!
During certain moments of interior silence, during which our soul sheds
all habitual functions, and our eyes become sharper and more penetrating, we
see ourselves in life and we see life as an arid barrenness. Disconcerted, we
feel as if taken by a strange impression, as if, in a flash, a different reality
from the one we usually perceive were revealed to us, a living reality beyond
human vision, beyond the forms of human vision. Very clearly, then, the
facts of daily existence, almost suspended in the vacuum of our interior
silence, appear to us meaningless and without scope. That different reality
appears horrible to us in its stern and mysterious crudeness because all our
fictitious relationships, both of feelings and images, have split and disinte-
grated in it. The interior vacuum expands, surpasses the limits of our body,
becomes a vacuum around ourselves, a strange vacuum like a stop of time
and life, as our interior silence plunges itself into the abyss of mystery. With
a supreme effort we try, then, to recapture the normal sense of things, to tie
ourselves again to the usual relationships, to reassemble ideas, to feel alive in
the usual way. But we cannot trust this normal consciousness, these rear-
ranged ideas, anymore because we know now that they are deceptions which
man needs to save himself from death or insanity. It was an instant, but its
impressions will last for a long time, with a dizziness in contrast to the
stability, quite specious, of things, ambitions, and miserable appearances.
Life, which goes on as usual among these appearances, seems as if it isn’t
real anymore. It seems a mechanical phantasmagoria. How can one give
importance to it? How can one respect it?
Today we exist, tomorrow we will not. Which face have they given us to
represent part of a living person? An ugly nose? How painful to walk around
with an ugly nose for the rest of our life! It is good for us that after a while
we don’t pay any more attention to it. Then we don’t know why other people
laugh when they look at us. They are so silly! Let us console ourselves by
looking at somebody else’s lips, one who doesn’t even realize it and doesn’t
have the courage to laugh at us. Masks, masks. They disappear in a breath,
giving way to others. A poor lame man, who is he? Running toward death on
crutches. Here life steps on somebody’s foot, there it blinds somebody’s
eye—wooden leg, glass eye, and it goes on. Each one fixes his mask up as he
can, the exterior mask.
102 On Humor
Because inside there is another one, often contradicting the one outside.
Nothing is true! True is: the sea, the mountain, a rock, a blade of grass. But
man: always wearing a mask, unwillingly, without knowing it, without want-
ing it, always masked with that thing which he, in good faith, believes to be
handsome, good, gracious, generous, unhappy, and so on.
This is funny, if we stop to think of it. Yes, because a dog, after the first
ardor of life is gone, eats and sleeps; he lives as he can, as he ought to. He
shuts his eyes, with patience, and lets time go by, cold if it is cold, warm if it
is warm.
If they kick him he takes it because it means that he deserved it. But what
about man? Even when he is old he always has that fever; he is delirious and
doesn’t realize it. He cannot help posing, even in front of himself, in any
way, and he imagines so many things which he needs to believe are true,
which he needs to take seriously. . . .
The discovery of the telescope gave the finishing stroke. This is another
infernal machine, comparable to the one which nature wanted to give us. But
we invented this one. Instead of being less than nature, with the eye looking
from the bottom, out of the smaller lens, and seeing what nature mercifully
wanted us to see small, what does our soul do? It jumps to look from the top,
so that the telescope becomes a terrible instrument, which destroys earth,
man, and all our glory and greatness.
Luckily, we have humorous reflection, from which stems the feeling of
incongruity, which in this case says, “But is man really as small as an in-
verted telescope wants us to see him?” If he can understand and realize his
infinite smallness, it means that he also understands and realizes the infinite
greatness of the universe. How can we say, then, that man is small? But it is
also true that if he feels himself big and a humorist happens to know it, he
can have happen to him what happened to Gulliver, the giant in Lilliput who
became a toy in the hands of the Giants of Brobdingnag. . . .
From what we have said up to this point about the special activity of
reflection in the humorist, the intimate process of humorous art clearly and
necessarily develops.
Art, like all ideal or illusory constructions, has the tendency to fix life. It
stops it at one moment or in various moments—a statue in a gesture, a
landscape in a momentary unchangeable aspect. But what about the perpetual
mobility of our successive aspects? What about the continuous fusion in
which souls find themselves?
Art in general abstracts and concentrates; that is, it catches and represents
only the essential and characteristic ideality of men and things. Now, it
appears to the humorist that all this oversimplifies nature, attempting to make
life too reasonable, or at least too coherent. It seems to him that art in general
does not take into consideration what it ought to, art doesn’t consider causes,
the real causes which often move this poor human life to strange, absolutely
Luigi Pirandello 103
unpredictable actions. For a humorist, causes in real life are never as logical
and ordered as in our common works of art, in which all is, in effect, com-
bined and organized to exist within the scope that the writer has in mind.
Order? Coherence? What if we have within ourselves four souls fighting
among themselves: the instinctive soul, the moral soul, the affective soul, and
the social soul? Our consciousness adapts itself according to whichever dom-
inates, and we hold as valid and sincere a false interpretation of our real
interior being, which we ignore because it never makes itself manifest as a
whole, but now in one way, now in another, according to the circumstances
of life.
Yes, an epic or dramatic poet may represent a hero in whom opposite and
unacceptable elements are shown fighting; but he will create a character out
of these elements and make him coherent in his actions. Well, the humorist
will do exactly the reverse: he will take the character apart. While the poet is
careful to make him coherent in each action, the humorist is amused by
representing him in his incongruities.
A humorist does recognize heroes; even better, he lets others represent
them. He, for his own sake, knows what legend is and how it is formed; he
knows what history is and how it is formed. They are all compositions more
or less ideal; perhaps they are the more ideal if they show a greater pretense
of reality. He amuses himself by taking them apart, and one cannot say that
this is a pleasant amusement.
He sees the world, if not entirely naked, let’s say in only its shirtsleeves.
He sees a king in his shirtsleeves, a king who makes a beautiful impression in
the majesty of his throne, with his royal staff and crown, his purple robe and
ermine. Don’t lay people with too much pomp on their deathbeds, in their
funeral chambers, because he is capable of profaning even this composition,
this scene. He is capable of catching, amid the sadness of the spectators, in
that cold and rigid corpse, with his decorations and good suit on, a certain
lugubrious grumble of the stomach, an exclamation (since these things are
best expressed in Latin), “Digestio post mortem. . . .”
And what about the unseen part of life? The abyss which exists in our
soul? Don’t we often feel a spark inside ourselves, strange thoughts like
flashes of folly, illogical thoughts we dare not confide even to ourselves,
arising from a soul different from the one we recognize in ourselves? For
these, we have in humor research into the most intimate and minute particu-
lars—which might look vulgar or trivial if compared with the ideal syntheses
of most art—and work based on contrasts and contradictions in opposition to
the coherence sought by the others. We have that disorganized, untied, and
capricious element, all the digressions which are seen in a humorous work in
opposition to the orderly plan, the composition, of most works of art.
104 On Humor
They are the result of reflection, which dissects—“If Cleopatra’s nose had
been longer, who knows what course the world would have had?” This if,
this little element that can be pinned down, inserted like a wedge in all facts,
can produce many different disaggregations; it can cause many disarrange-
ments at the hand of a humorist who, like Laurence Sterne for example, sees
the whole world regulated by infinite smallnesses.
Let’s conclude: humor is the feeling of polarity aroused by that special
activity of reflection which doesn’t hide itself, which doesn’t become, as
ordinarily in art, a form of feeling, but its contrary, following the feelings
step by step, however, as the shadow follows the body. A common artist pays
attention only to the body. A humorist pays attention to the body and its
shadow, sometimes more to the shadow than the body. He sees all the tricks
of the shadow; it now assumes length or width, as if to mimic the body,
which, meanwhile, doesn’t pay any attention to it.
Chapter Eleven
***
105
106 Lecture on Dada
I don’t have to tell you that for the general public and for you, the refined
public, a Dadaist is the equivalent of a leper. But that is only a manner of
speaking. When these same people get close to us, they treat us with that
remnant of elegance that comes from their old habit of belief in progress. At
ten yards distance, hatred begins again. If you ask me why, I won’t be able to
tell you.
Another characteristic of Dada is the continuous breaking off of our
friends. They are always breaking off and resigning. The first to tender his
resignation from the Dada movement was myself. Everybody knows that
Dada is nothing. I broke away from Dada and from myself as soon as I
understood the implications of nothing.
If I continue to do something, it is because it amuses me, or rather be-
cause I have a need for activity which I use up and satisfy wherever I can.
Basically, the true Dadas have always been separate from Dada. Those who
acted as if Dada were important enough to resign from with a big noise have
been motivated by a desire for personal publicity, proving that counterfeiters
have always wriggled like unclean worms in and out of the purest and most
radiant religions.
I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don’t
expect to hear any explanations about Dada. You explain to me why you
exist. You haven’t the faintest idea. You will say: I exist to make my children
happy. But in your hearts you know that isn’t so. You will say: I exist to
guard my country against barbarian invasions. That’s a fine reason. You will
say: I exist because God wills. That’s a fairy tale for children. You will never
be able to tell me why you exist but you will always be ready to maintain a
serious attitude about life. You will never understand that life is a pun, for
you will never be alone enough to reject hatred, judgments, all these things
that require such an effort, in favor of a calm and level state of mind that
makes everything equal and without importance.
Dada is not at all modern. It is more in the nature of a return to an almost
Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada covers things with an artificial gen-
tleness, a snow of butterflies released from the head of a prestidigitator. Dada
is immobility and does not comprehend the passions. You will call this a
paradox, since Dada is manifested only in violent acts. Yes, the reactions of
individuals contaminated by destruction are rather violent, but when these
reactions are exhausted, annihilated by the Satanic insistence of a continuous
and progressive “What for?” what remains, what dominates is indifference.
But with the same note of conviction I might maintain the contrary.
I admit that my friends do not approve this point of view. But the Nothing
can be uttered only as the reflection of an individual. And that is why it will
be valid for everyone, since everyone is important only for the individual
Tristan Tzara 107
But because everything that issues freely from ourselves, without the inter-
vention of speculative ideas, represents us. We must intensify this quantity of
life that readily spends itself in every quarter. Art is not the most precious
manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal value that people
like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting. Dada knows the correct
measure that should be given to art: with subtle, perfidious methods, Dada
introduces it into daily life. And vice versa. In art, Dada reduces everything
to an initial simplicity, growing always more relative. It mingles its caprices
with the chaotic wind of creation and the barbaric dances of savage tribes. It
wants logic reduced to a personal minimum, while literature in its view
should be primarily intended for the individual who makes it. Words have a
weight of their own and lend themselves to abstract construction. The absurd
has no terrors for me, for from a more exalted point of view everything in life
seems absurd to me. Only the elasticity of our conventions creates a bond
between disparate acts. The Beautiful and the True in art do not exist; what
interests me is the intensity of a personality transposed directly, clearly into
the work: the man and his vitality; the angle from which he regards the
elements and in what manner he knows how to gather sensation, emotion,
into a lacework of words and sentiments.
Dada tries to find out what words mean before using them, from the point
of view not of grammar but of representation. Objects and colors pass
through the same filter. It is not the new technique that interests us, but the
spirit. Why do you want us to be preoccupied with a pictorial, moral, poetic,
literary, political, or social renewal? We are well aware that these renewals
of means are merely the successive cloaks of the various epochs of history,
uninteresting questions of fashion and façade. We are well aware that people
in the costumes of the Renaissance were pretty much the same as the people
of today, and that [the ancient Chinese philosopher] Chouang-Dsi was just as
Dada as we are. You are mistaken if you take Dada for a modern school, or
even for a reaction against the schools of today. Several of my statements
have struck you as old and natural: what better proof that you were Dadaists
without knowing it, perhaps even before the birth of Dada.
You will often hear that Dada is a state of mind. You may be gay, sad,
afflicted, joyous, melancholy, or Dada. Without being literary, you can be
romantic, you can be dreamy, weary, eccentric, a businessman, skinny, trans-
figured, vain, amiable, or Dada. This will happen later on in the course of
history when Dada has become a precise, habitual word, when popular repe-
tition has given it the character of a word organic with its necessary content.
Today no one thinks of the literature of the Romantic school in representing a
lake, a landscape, a character. Slowly but surely, a Dada character is forming.
Dada is here, there, and a little everywhere, such as it is, with its faults,
with its personal differences and distinctions which it accepts and views with
indifference.
Tristan Tzara 109
We are often told that we are incoherent, but into this word people try to
put an insult that it is rather hard for me to fathom. Everything is incoherent.
The gentleman who decides to take a bath but goes to the movies instead.
The one who wants to be quiet but says things that haven’t even entered his
head. Another who has a precise idea on some subject but succeeds only in
expressing the opposite in words which for him are a poor translation. There
is no logic. Only relative necessities discovered a posteriori, valid not in any
exact sense but only as explanations.
The acts of life have no beginning or end. Everything happens in a com-
pletely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is called
Dada.
Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic
strikes me as a boring kind of game. The convention of the spoken language
is ample and adequate for us, but for our solitude, for our intimate games and
our literature we no longer need it.
The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of an art, but of a
disgust. Disgust with the magnificence of philosophers who for 3000 years
have been explaining everything to us (what for?); disgust with the preten-
sions of these artists-God’s-representatives-on-earth; disgust with passion
and with real pathological wickedness where it was not worth the bother;
disgust with a false form of domination and restriction en masse, which
accentuates rather than appeases man’s instinct of domination; disgust with
all the catalogued categories, with the false prophets who are nothing but a
front for the interests of money, pride, disease; disgust with the lieutenants of
a mercantile art made to order according to a few infantile laws; disgust with
the divorce of good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly (for why is it more
estimable to be red rather than green, to the left rather than the right, to be
large or small?). Disgust finally with the Jesuitical dialectic that can explain
everything and fill people’s minds with oblique and obtuse ideas without any
physiological basis or ethnic roots, all this by means of blinding artifice and
ignoble charlatan’s promises.
As Dada marches it continuously destroys, not in extension but in itself.
From all these disgusts, may I add, it draws no conclusion, no pride, no
benefit. It has even stopped combating anything, in the realization that it’s no
use, that all this doesn’t matter. What interests a Dadaist is his own mode of
life. But here we approach the great secret.
Dada is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to races
and events. Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing; it is the
point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the
castles of human philosophies, but very simply at street corners, like dogs
and grasshoppers.
Like everything in life, Dada is useless.
Dada is without pretension, as life should be.
110 Lecture on Dada
Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a
virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces
that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.
Chapter Twelve
Surrealism (1922)
André Breton
111
112 Surrealism
mitting the unknown elements in man’s words and actions to a rational under-
standing of them. (from The Reader’s Encyclopedia of World Drama, ed. John
Gassner & Edward Quinn [New York: Crowell, 1969], 821.)
The most essential characteristics of surrealism itself, in any form of the arts,
are the cult of the dream, the representation of the absurd, the erotic, and the
element of chance, and the expression of the psychic experience of man
through a form of writing that is “automatic” in the sense that it is uninhibit-
ed, freely associative, and as free as possible from the mental mechanism of
criticism and censure.
Breton later became committed to a political role for surrealism, expelling
Antonin Artaud from the movement, for example, for his apostate view of
revolution as no more than a change in the internal conditions of the soul. In
response, Artaud in 1927 characterized Breton’s revolution, preoccupied as it
now was with the necessity of production and the conditions of the workers,
as a “revolution for castrates.” The roots of man’s problems lay far deeper
than in social organization, Artaud argued, and the only revolution worthy of
support would have to free the internal man—as surrealism, in the way it was
originally conceived by Breton, had intended to do.
***
walking, but cloven, at half his height, by a window perpendicular to the axis
of his body. Definitely, there was the form, re-erected against space, of a man
leaning out of a window. By the window following the man’s locomotion, I
understood that I was dealing with an image of great rarity. Instantly the idea
came to me to use it as material for poetic construction. I had no sooner
invested it with that quality, than it had given place to a succession of all but
intermittent sentences which left me no less astonished, but in a state, I
would say, of extreme detachment.
“Preoccupied as I still was at that time with Freud, and familiar with his
methods of investigation, which I had practiced occasionally upon the sick
during the War, I resolved to obtain from myself what one seeks to obtain
from patients, namely a monologue poured out as rapidly as possible, over
which the subject’s critical faculty has no control—the subject himself
throwing reticence to the winds—and which as much as possible represents
spoken thought. It seemed and still seems to me that the speed of thought is
no greater than that of words, and hence does not exceed the flow of either
tongue or pen. It was in such circumstances that, together with Philippe
Soupault, whom I had told about my first ideas on the subject, I began to
cover sheets of paper with writing, feeling a praiseworthy contempt for what-
ever the literary result might be. Ease of achievement brought about the rest.
By the end of the first day of the experiment we were able to read to one
another about fifty pages obtained in this manner and to compare the results
we had achieved. The likeness was on the whole striking. There were similar
faults of construction, the same hesitant manner, and also, in both cases, an
illusion of extraordinary verve, much emotion, a considerable assortment of
images of a quality such as we should never have been able to obtain in the
normal way of writing, a very special sense of the picturesque, and, here and
there, a few pieces of out and out buffoonery. The only differences which our
two texts presented appeared to me to be due essentially to our respective
temperaments, Soupault’s being less static than mine, and, if he will allow
me to make this slight criticism, to his having scattered about at the top of
certain pages—doubtlessly in a spirit of mystification—various words under
the guise of titles. I must give him credit, on the other hand, for having
always forcibly opposed the least correction of any passage that did not seem
to me to be quite the thing. In that he was most certainly right.
“It is of course difficult in these cases to appreciate at their just value the
various elements in the result obtained; one may even say that it is entirely
impossible to appreciate them at a first reading. To you who may be writing
them, these elements are, in appearance, as strange as to anyone else, and you
are yourself naturally distrustful of them. Poetically speaking, they are distin-
guished chiefly by a very high degree of immediate absurdity, the peculiar
quality of that absurdity being, on close examination, their yielding to what-
114 Surrealism
has become too lucid. After the word whose origin seems suspect you should
place a letter, any letter, ‘l’ for example, always the letter ‘l,’ and restore the
arbitrary flux by making that letter the initial of the word to follow.”
I shall pass over the more or less correlated considerations which the
Manifesto discussed in their bearing on the possibilities of plastic expression
in surrealism. These considerations did not assume with me a relatively
dogmatic turn until later (Surrealism and Painting, 1928).
I believe that the real interest of that book—there was no lack of people
who were good enough to concede interest, for which no particular credit is
due to me because I have no more than given expression to sentiments shared
with friends, present and former—rests only subordinately on the formula
given above. It is rather confirmatory of a turn of thought which, for good or
ill, is peculiarly distinctive of our time. The defense originally attempted of
that turn of thought still seems valid to me in what follows:
“We still live under the reign of logic, but the methods of logic are
applied nowadays only to the resolution of problems of secondary interest.
The absolute rationalism which is still the fashion does not permit considera-
tion of any facts but those strictly relevant to our experience. Logical ends,
on the other hand, escape us. Needless to say that even experience has had
limits assigned to it. It revolves in a cage from which it becomes more and
more difficult to release it. Even experience is dependent on immediate util-
ity, and common sense is its keeper. Under color of civilization, under pre-
text of progress, all that rightly or wrongly may be regarded as fantasy or
superstition has been banished from the mind, all uncustomary searching
after truth has been proscribed. It is only by what must seem sheer luck that
there has recently been brought to light an aspect of mental life—to my belief
by far the most important—with which it was supposed that we no longer
had any concern. All credit for these discoveries must go to Freud. Based on
these discoveries a current of opinion is forming that will enable the explorer
of the human mind to continue his investigations, justified as he will be in
taking into account more than mere summary realities. The imagination is
perhaps on the point of reclaiming its rights. If the depths of our minds
harbor strange forces capable of increasing those on the surface, or of suc-
cessfully contending with them, then it is all in our interest to canalize them,
to canalize them first in order to submit them later, if necessary, to the
control of the reason. The analysts themselves have nothing to lose by such a
proceeding. But it should be observed that there are no means designed a
priori for the bringing about of such an enterprise, that until the coining of
the new order it might just as well be considered the affair of poets and
scientists, and that its success will not depend on the more or less capricious
means that will be employed. . . .
André Breton 117
trovertibly mark the decisive stages of surrealist exploration during this first
phase. After that, up till the taking into account of the social aspect of the
problem round about 1925 (though not formally sanctioned until 1930), sur-
realism began to find itself a prey to characteristic wranglings. These wran-
glings account very clearly for the expulsion-orders and tickets-of-leave
which, as we went along, we had to deal out to certain of our companions of
the first and second hour. Some people have quite gratuitously concluded
from this that we are apt to overestimate personal questions. During the last
ten years, surrealism has almost unceasingly been obliged to defend itself
against deviations to the right and to the left. On the one hand we have had to
struggle against the will of those who would maintain surrealism on a purely
speculative level and treasonably transfer it on to an artistic and literary plane
(Artaud, Desnos, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Vitrac) at the cost of all the hope for
subversion we have placed in it; on the other, against the will of those who
would place it on a purely practical basis, available at any moment to be
sacrificed to an ill-conceived political militancy (Naville, Aragon)—at the
cost, this time, of what constitutes the originality and reality of its research, at
the cost of the autonomous risk that it has to run. Agitated though it was, the
epoch that separates the two Manifestos was nonetheless a rich one, since it
saw the publication of so many works in which the vital principles of surreal-
ism were amply accounted for. It suffices to recall particularly Le Paysan de
Paris and Traité du Style by Aragon, L’Esprit contre la Raison and Etes-vous
Fous by René Crevel, Deuil pour Deuil by Desnos, Capitale de la Douleur
and L’Amour la Poésie by Éluard, La Femme 100 Têtes by Ernst, La Révolu-
tion et les Intellectuels by Naville, Le Grand Jeu by Péret, and my own
Nadja. The poetic activity of Tzara, although claiming until 1930 no connec-
tion with surrealism, is in perfect accord with ours.
We were forced to agree with Pierre Naville when he wrote:
“Surrealism is at the crossroads of several thought-movements. We as-
sume that it affirms the possibility of a certain steady downward readjust-
ment of the mind’s rational (and not simply conscious) activity towards more
absolutely coherent thought, irrespective of whatever direction that thought
may take; that is to say, that it proposes or would at least like to propose a
new solution of all problems, but chiefly moral. It is, indeed, in that sense
that it is epoch-making. That is why one may express the essential character-
istic of surrealism by saying that it seeks to calculate the quotient of the
unconscious by the conscious.”
It should be pointed out that in a number of declarations in La Révolution
et les Intellectuels. Que peuvent faire les surréalistes? (1926), this same
author demonstrated the utter vanity of intellectual bickerings in the face of
the human exploitation which results from the wage-earning system. These
declarations gave rise amongst us to considerable anxiety and, attempting for
the first time to justify surrealism’s social implications, I desired to put an
120 Surrealism
end to it in Légitime Defense. This pamphlet set out to demonstrate that there
is no fundamental antinomy in the basis of surrealist thought. In reality, we
are faced with two problems, one of which is the problem raised, at the
beginning of the twentieth century, by the discovery of the relations between
the conscious and the unconscious. That was how the problem chose to
present itself to us. We were the first to apply to its resolution a particular
method, which we have not ceased to consider both the most suitable and the
most likely to be brought to perfection; there is no reason why we should
renounce it. The other problem we are faced with is that of the social action
we should pursue. We consider that this action has its own method in dialec-
tical materialism, and we can all the less afford to ignore this action since, I
repeat, we hold the liberation of man to be the sine qua non condition of the
liberation of the mind, and we can expect this liberation of man to result only
from the proletarian revolution. These two problems are essentially distinct
and we deplore their becoming confused by not remaining so. There is good
reason, then, to take up a stand against all attempts to weld them together
and, more especially, against the urge to abandon all such research as ours in
order to devote ourselves to the poetry and art of propaganda. Surrealism,
which has been the object of brutal and repeated summonses in this respect,
now feels the need of making some kind of counter-attack. Let me recall the
fact that its very definition holds that it must escape, in its written manifesta-
tions, or any others, from all control exercised by the reason. Apart from the
puerility of wishing to bring a supposedly Marxist control to bear on the
immediate aspect of such manifestations, this control cannot be envisaged in
principle . And how ill-boding does this distrust seem, coming as it does
from men who declare themselves Marxists, that is to say possessed not only
of a strict line in revolutionary matters, but also of a marvelously open mind
and an insatiable curiosity!
This brings us to the eve of the Second Manifesto. These objections had to
be put to an end, and for that purpose it was indispensable that we should
proceed to liquidate certain individualist elements amongst us, more or less
openly hostile to one another, whose intentions did not, in the final analysis,
appear as irreproachable, nor their motives as disinterested, as might have
been desired. An important part of the work was devoted to a statement of the
reasons which moved surrealism to dispense for the future with certain col-
laborators. It was attempted, on the same occasion, to complete the specific
method of creation proposed six years earlier, and thoroughly to tidy up
surrealist ideas.
“Whatever may have been the controversial issues raised by former or
present followers of surrealism, all will admit that the drift of surrealism has
always and chiefly been towards a general and emphatic crisis in conscious-
ness and that it is only when this is in being or is shown to be impossible that
the success or historic eclipse of the movement will be decided.
André Breton 121
the most immediate conscious domain. I really cannot see, pace a few mud-
dle-headed revolutionaries, why we should abstain from taking up the prob-
lems of love, of dreaming, of madness, of art and of religion, so long as we
consider these problems from the same angle as they, and we too, consider
Revolution. And I have no hesitation in saying that nothing systematic had
been done in this direction before surrealism, and for us also at the point
where we found it, ‘the dialectical method in its Hegelian form could not be
put into application.’ For us also it was imperative to have done with ideal-
ism proper, and our coining of the word ‘surrealism’ is enough to show that
this was so, as it is to show the need for us—to use Engels’ example—of
going beyond the childish development: ‘The rose is a rose. The rose is not a
rose. And yet the rose is a rose.’ Nevertheless—if I may say so parenthetical-
ly—we had to set ‘the rose’ in a profitable movement of less innocuous
contradictions, a movement in which the rose is successively the rose out of
the garden, the rose which holds a singular place in a dream, the rose which it
is impossible to extract from ‘the optical bouquet,’ the rose which may
change its properties completely by passing into automatic writing, the rose
which retains only what the painter has allowed it to retain of a rose in a
surrealist painting, and finally the rose, quite different from itself, which goes
back into the garden. That is a long way from any idealist standpoint, and we
should not disclaim an idealist view if we were not continuing to suffer the
attacks of an elementary materialism. These attacks emanate from those who,
out of low conservatism, oppose the investigation of the relation of thought
to matter, and those who, through ill-digested revolutionary sectarianism,
and while ignoring the whole of what is being asked of them, confuse this
materialism with the materialism which Engels distinguished as essentially
different from it and defined as being primarily an intuition of the world
which had to put itself to the test and be realized. ‘In the course of the
development of philosophy, idealism became untenable and was contradicted
by modern materialism. The latter is the negation of negation and is not
simply the old materialism restored: to the enduring foundations of this old
materialism it adds the whole of what has been thought in philosophy and
natural science throughout an evolution of two thousand years, and adds too
the product of this long history itself.’ It is also essential to the proper appre-
ciation of our starting-point to understand that we regard philosophy as out-
classed. In this we are, I believe, at one with all those for whom reality has
more than a theoretical importance, for whom it is a question of life and
death to appeal passionately, as Ludwig Feuerbach insisted, to this reality:
we so appeal by committing ourselves entirely, without reservation, to the
principle of historical materialism; he so appealed by casting in the face of
the astounded intellectual world the idea that ‘man is what he eats’ and that
André Breton 123
second, and in this will be surprised, the germs of incidents? When shall we
have this other novel, in which the verisimilitude of the scenery will for the
first time fail to hide from us the strange symbolical life which even the most
definite and most common objects lead in dreams; again, the novel in which
the construction will be quite simple, but in which, however, an elopement
will be described with the words for fatigue, a storm described with precision
but gaily, etc.? Whoever believes with us that it is time to have done with the
provoking insanities of ‘realism’ will have no difficulty in adding to these
proposals for himself.”
Chapter Thirteen
***
All modern art is unpopular, and it is so not accidentally and by chance, but
essentially and by fate.
It might be said that every newcomer among styles passes through a stage
of quarantine. The battle of Hernani comes to mind, and all the other skir-
mishes connected with the advent of Romanticism. However, the unpopular-
ity of present-day art is of a different kind. A distinction must be made
129
130 The Dehumanization of Art
between what is not popular and what is unpopular. A new style takes some
time in winning popularity: it is not popular, but it is not unpopular either.
The break-through of Romanticism, although a frequently cited example, is,
as a sociological phenomenon, exactly the opposite of the present situation of
art. Romanticism was very quick in winning “the people” to whom the old
classical art had never appealed. The enemy with whom Romanticism had to
fight it out was precisely a select minority irretrievably sold to the classical
forms of the “ancien régime” in poetry. The works of the romanticists were
the first, after the invention of printing, to enjoy large editions. Romanticism
was the prototype of a popular style. First born of democracy, it was coddled
by the masses.
Modern art, on the other hand, will always have the masses against it. It is
essentially unpopular; moreover, it is antipopular. Any of its works automati-
cally produces a curious effect on the general public. It divides the public
into two groups: one very small, formed by those who are favorably inclined
towards it; another very large—the hostile majority. (Let us ignore that am-
biguous fauna—the snobs.) Thus the work of art acts like a social agent
which segregates from the shapeless mass of the many two different castes of
men.
Which is the differentiating principle that creates these two antagonistic
groups? Every work of art arouses differences of opinion. Some like it, some
don’t; some like it more, some like it less. Such disagreements have no
organic character; they are not a matter of principles. A person’s chance
disposition determines on which side he will fall. But in the case of the new
art the split occurs in a deeper layer than that on which differences of person-
al taste reside. It is not that the majority does not like the art of the young and
the minority likes it, but that the majority, the masses, do not understand it.
The old bigwigs who were present at the performance of Hernani understood
Victor Hugo’s play very well; precisely because they understood it they
disliked it. Faithfully adhering to definite aesthetic norms, they were dis-
gusted at the new artistic values which this piece of art proposed to them.
“From a sociological point of view” the characteristic feature of the new
art is, in my judgment, that it divides the public into the two classes of those
who understand it and those who do not. This implies that one group possess-
es an organ of comprehension denied to the other—that they are two differ-
ent varieties of the human species. The new art obviously addresses itself not
to everybody, as did Romanticism, but to a specially gifted minority. Hence
the indignation it arouses in the masses. When a man dislikes a work of art,
but understands it, he feels superior to it; and there is no reason for indigna-
tion. But when his dislike is due to his failure to understand, he feels vaguely
humiliated and this rankling sense of inferiority must be counterbalanced by
indignant self-assertion. Through its mere presence, the art of the young
compels the average citizen to realize that he is just this—the average citizen,
José Ortega y Gasset 131
a creature incapable of receiving the sacrament of art, blind and deaf to pure
beauty. But such a thing cannot be done after a hundred years of adulation of
the masses and apotheosis of the people. Accustomed to ruling supreme, the
masses feel that the new art, which is the art of a privileged aristocracy of
finer senses, endangers their rights as men. Whenever the new Muses present
themselves, the masses bristle.
For a century and a half the masses have claimed to be the whole of
society. Stravinsky’s music or Pirandello’s drama has the sociological effect
of compelling the people to recognize itself for what it is: a component
among others of the social structure, inert matter of the historical process, a
secondary factor in the cosmos of spiritual life. On the other hand, the new
art also helps the elite to recognize themselves and one another in the drab
mass of society and to learn their mission, which consists in being few and
holding their own against the many.
A time must come in which society, from politics to art, reorganizes itself
into two orders or ranks: the illustrious and the vulgar. That chaotic, shape-
less, and undifferentiated state without discipline and social structure in
which Europe has lived these hundred and fifty years cannot go on. Behind
all contemporary life lurks the provoking and profound injustice of the as-
sumption that men are actually equal. Each move among men so obviously
reveals the opposite that each move results in a painful clash.
If this subject were broached in politics the passions aroused would run
too high to make oneself understood. Fortunately the aforementioned unity
of spirit within a historical epoch allows us to point out serenely and with
perfect clarity in the germinating art of our time the same symptoms and
signals of a moral revision that in politics present themselves obscured by
low passions. . . .
One point must be clarified before we go on. What is it the majority of
people call aesthetic pleasure? What happens in their minds when they “like”
a work of art; for instance, a theatrical performance? The answer is easy. A
man likes a play when he has become interested in the human destinies
presented to him, when the love and hatred, the joys and sorrows of the
personages so move his heart that he participates in it all as though it were
happening in real life. And he calls a work “good” if it succeeds in creating
the illusion necessary to make the imaginary personages appear like living
persons. In poetry he seeks the passion and pain of the man behind the poet.
Paintings attract him if he finds on them figures of men or women whom it
would be interesting to meet. A landscape is pronounced “pretty” if the
country it represents deserves for its loveliness or its grandeur to be visited
on a trip.
It thus appears that to the majority of people aesthetic pleasure means a
state of mind which is essentially undistinguishable from their ordinary be-
havior. It differs merely in accidental qualities, being perhaps less utilitarian,
132 The Dehumanization of Art
more intense, and free from painful consequences. But the object towards
which their attention and, consequently, all their other mental activities are
directed is the same as in daily life: people and passions. By art they under-
stand a means through which they are brought into contact with interesting
human affairs. Artistic forms proper—figments, fantasy—are tolerated only
if they do not interfere with the perception of human forms and fates. As
soon as purely aesthetic elements predominate and the story of John and
Mary grows elusive, most people feel out of their depth and are at a loss what
to make of the scene, the book, or the painting. As they have never practiced
any other attitude but the practical one in which a man’s feelings are aroused
and he is emotionally involved, a work that does not invite sentimental
intervention leaves them without a cue.
Now, this is a point which has to be made perfectly clear. Not only is
grieving and rejoicing at such human destinies as a work of art presents or
narrates a very different thing from true artistic pleasure, but preoccupation
with the human content of the work is in principle incompatible with aesthet-
ic enjoyment proper. . . .
During the nineteenth century, artists proceeded in all too impure a fash-
ion. They reduced the strictly aesthetic elements to a minimum and let the
work consist almost entirely in a fiction of human realities. In this sense all
normal art of the last century must be called realistic. Beethoven and Wagner
were realistic, and so was Chateaubriand as well as Zola. Seen from the
vantage point of our day Romanticism and Naturalism draw closer together
and reveal their common realistic root.
Works of this kind are only partially works of art, or artistic objects. Their
enjoyment does not depend upon our power to focus on transparencies and
images, a power characteristic of the artistic sensibility; all they require is
human sensibility and willingness to sympathize with our neighbor’s joys
and worries. No wonder that nineteenth-century art has been so popular; it is
made for the masses inasmuch as it is not art but an extract from life. Let us
remember that in epochs with two different types of art, one for minorities
and one for the majority, the latter has always been realistic. (For instance, in
the Middle Ages. In accordance with the division of society into the two
strata of noblemen and commoners, there existed an aristocratic art which
was “conventional” and “idealistic,” and a popular art which was realistic
and satirical.)
I will not now discuss whether pure art is possible. Perhaps it is not; but
as the reasons that make me inclined to think so are somewhat long and
difficult the subject had better be dropped. Besides, it is not of major impor-
tance for the matter at hand. Even though pure art may be impossible there
doubtless can prevail a tendency toward a purification of art. Such a tendency
would effect a progressive elimination of the human, all too human, elements
predominant in romantic and naturalistic production. And in this process a
José Ortega y Gasset 133
point can be reached in which the human content has grown so thin that it is
negligible. We then have an art which can be comprehended only by people
possessed of the peculiar gift of artistic sensibility—an art for artists and not
for the masses, for “quality” and not for hoi polloi.
That is why modern art divides the public into two classes, those who
understand it and those who do not understand it—that is to say, those who
are artists and those who are not. The new art is an artistic art.
I do not propose to extol the new way in art or to condemn the old. My
purpose is to characterize them as the zoologist characterizes two contrasting
species. The new art is a world-wide fact. For about twenty years now the
most alert young people of two successive generations—in Berlin, Paris,
London, New York, Rome, Madrid—have found themselves faced with the
undeniable fact that they have no use for traditional art; moreover, that they
detest it. With these young people one can do one of two things: shoot them,
or try to understand them. As soon as one decides in favor of the latter it
appears that they are endowed with a perfectly clear, coherent, and rational
sense of art. Far from being a whim, their way of feeling represents the
inevitable and fruitful result of all previous artistic achievement. Whimsical.
arbitrary, and consequently unprofitable it would be to set oneself against the
new style and obstinately remain shut off in old forms that are exhausted and
the worse for wear. In art, as in morals, what ought to be done does not
depend on our personal judgment; we have to accept the imperative imposed
by the time. Obedience to the order of the day is the most hopeful choice
open to the individual. Even so he may achieve nothing; but he is much more
likely to fail if he insists on composing another Wagnerian opera, another
naturalistic novel.
In art repetition is nothing. Each historical style can engender a certain
number of different forms within a generic type. But there always comes a
day when the magnificent mine has been exhausted. Such, for instance, has
been the fate of the romantico-naturalistic novel and theatre. It is a naïve
error to believe that the present infecundity of these two genres is due to lack
of talent. What happens is that the possible combinations within these literary
forms are exhausted. It must be deemed fortunate that this situation coincides
with the emergence of a new artistic sensibility capable of detecting other
untouched veins.
When we analyze the new style we find that it contains certain closely
connected tendencies. It tends (1) to dehumanize art, (2) to avoid living
forms, (3) to see to it that the work of art is nothing but a work of art, (4) to
consider art as play and nothing else, (5) to be essentially ironical, (6) to
beware of sham and hence to aspire to scrupulous realization, (7) to regard
art as a thing of no transcending consequence. . . .
134 The Dehumanization of Art
But whatever their shortcomings, the young artists have to be granted one
point: there is no turning back. All the doubts cast upon the inspiration of
these pioneers may be justified, and yet they provide no sufficient reason for
condemning them. The objections would have to be supplemented by some-
thing positive: a suggestion of another way for art different from dehuman-
ization and yet not coincident with the beaten and worn-out paths.
It is easy to protest that it is always possible to produce art within the
bounds of a given tradition. But this comforting phrase is of no use to the
artist who, pen or chisel in hand, sits waiting for a concrete inspiration.
Chapter Fourteen
***
135
136 Postwar German Drama
I have been asked by the editor of The Nation to write a few words on
postwar German drama. We are in the habit of using the term “postwar
drama” without stopping to ask ourselves if there really is such a type,
distinct in presentation, treatment, kind, and form from that of the pre-war
period.
Did the war really cause this decisive change in German drama? Not at
all. It is strikingly confirmed today, after ten years, that the present tenden-
cies in the drama began their development years before the war, and that
since then they have simply been in more rapid eruption.
The younger dramatists felt that an unbridgeable gulf divided them from
the older generation. The struggle between the generations, the father-and-
son problem, the fight between compromise and directness, between bour-
geois and anti-bourgeois, had stirred young intellects before the war and
made a reality of what they had prophetically seen coming. To be sure, the
war destroyed many moral and social, many spiritual and artistic values. But
the foundations of these values had become rotten. In place of the idea, there
had come to the fore a realpolitik which was leading to the abrogation of all
reality. Freedom had become hypocrisy—freedom for the few, spiritual and
economic bondage for the many. In the first dramas of Sorge, Hasenclever,
and Werfel this hatred toward our elders was already smoldering. And these
were the same elders who did nothing to prevent the war but, tricking it out
in romanticism, pitilessly and unfeelingly sent battalion after battalion of
young German manhood out to die.
During the war very little got to the public through the strict censorship.
But after the collapse, every day brought new works from the newly liberated
minds. The form which this art took was called expressionism. It was just as
much reaction as it was synthetic and creative action. It turned against that
tendency in art which was satisfied merely to set down impressions, one after
the other, without troubling to question their essential nature, justification, or
the idea involved. The expressionists were not satisfied simply to photo-
graph. They knew that environment permeates the artist and is reflected in
his psychic mirror in such a way as utterly to transfigure this environment.
Expressionism wanted to influence environment, to change it in giving it a
brighter, more righteous appearance—to make it impossible, for example, for
a catastrophe like the war ever to threaten mankind again. Reality was to be
comprehended anew in the light of the ideal, was to be born again.
All activity resolves itself into outer and inner activity, both of equal
importance and strength as motivating forces. In style expressionism was
pregnant, almost telegraphic, always shunning the peripheral, and always
probing to the center of things. In expressionistic drama man is no accidental
private person. He is a type posited for many, and ignoring the limits of
superficial characterization. Man was skinned in the expectation that some-
Ernst Toller 137
where under his skin was his soul. The dramatic exponents of expressionism
were Sorge, Göring, Barlach, and Toller. Of their works may be mentioned
Sorge’s The Beggar, Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight, Hasenclever’s The
Son, Unruh’s A Family, The Poor Cousin by Barlach, and Toller’s Transfig-
uration and Masses and Man.
During the epoch of expressionism a significant development took place.
A new character appeared on the stage—proletarian man. Of course, there
had already been plays whose action took place in a proletarian milieu. But
something fundamental divided expressionistic proletarian drama from such
a play as Hauptman’s The Weavers or Büchner’s Woyzeck. In the old dramas
the proletarian was a dull creature who rebelled against his fate with strong
but rash impulse. The artist who pictured him wanted to awaken sympathy.
In the new drama, the proletarian is active, conscious, rebelling against his
fate, and struggling for a new reality. He is driven on by feeling, by knowl-
edge, and by the idea of a brighter future.
It is useless to talk of the fiasco of expressionism, or to ask whether
expressionism produced works which will still be remembered in fifty years.
Expressionism wanted to be a product of the time and to react to it. And that
much it certainly succeeded in doing. Never since Schiller’s The Robbers
[1782], since [his] Intrigue and Love [1784], has the theatre been so much a
rostrum for current happenings or so much upset by the strife and counter-
strife of public opinion: passionate partisanship on one side, and violent one-
sided reproaches on the other.
Let us examine for a moment the reproach of “tendency” leveled against
expressionism. When a piece of writing portrays spiritual behavior, feelings,
reactions to the phenomena of life and knowledge, it does not seem tenden-
tial to the bourgeois, because these things have become traditional and be-
cause they express his conception of the world, his philosophy, his naked
economic interest. He overlooks the fact that such writing also has a tenden-
cy, namely his own.
But when new observations are made in a drama, in opposition to those
ideas to which the bourgeois has been accustomed, he calls such a work
tendential. The atmosphere in any work of art, in so far as it transects a given
social milieu, always has a definite impress that one is safe in calling parti-
san. There is, however, one type of partisanship that the artist must avoid,
namely that partisanship of the black-and-white kind which depicts all per-
sons on one side as devils of the blackest sort, and all those on the other as
angels.
But since the spirit, the idea, did not succeed in changing the character of
the times; since the old reality with the old abominations, with the old greed,
the old rapacious striving, the old danger zones, simply reappeared; since the
peace which all were yearning for turned out to be a grin behind which the
next war is looming; since the spiritual had again become a veneer and a
138 Postwar German Drama
mockery, younger dramatists appeared who thought that as the ideal was
lacking there was no reason for it, especially in art. They set out to portray
life and nothing but life. But the decisive thing in life for them was the
uninhibited accord or antagonism of the sexual impulse. The chaotic, the
sexual, became the focus of the new drama which tended to the epic in form.
Side by side with this the struggle between the generations played a definite
role. Speech became naturalistic again, but it was distinguished from the old
naturalism by a dynamic impetus that gave it a distinctive rhythm. As drama-
tists of this type one may mention Brecht, Bronnen, and Zuckmayer.
The later German dramatists were unquestionably influenced by America,
but the German brand of Americanism did not represent the great minds of
America. What was taken over was the tempo, the banal optimism, the super-
ficiality, in short that new matter-of-factness which has very little meaning
and no connection whatever with the major arts.
German drama exists, as does all German art, between two worlds. The
bourgeois world is spiritually and ethically convulsed, and the world of the
workers is visible as yet only among small or petty groups.
Chapter Fifteen
saw the tension between man the living organism and the nonliving environ-
ment on the stage as the critical opposition of the art. But man himself,
Schlemmer noted, is both spiritual and mechanical. . . . [In this he] recalls the
interest of Craig, Kleist, and Briusov in the marionette. . . . [Hence Schlem-
mer’s ] ideal stage figure would be both formal and spiritual, both man and
marionette (actually something rather close to Craig’s Über-Marionette).
(353)
139
140 New Stage Forms
In 1929, following political criticism of his work, Schlemmer left the Bau-
haus to work at the Breslau Academy. In 1930, the Nazis destroyed a series
of mural paintings he had done at Weimar; they shut down the Breslau
Academy two years later, and then did the same to an exhibition of Schlem-
mer’s work in Stuttgart. In 1937, Schlemmer figured in the Nazi exhibition
of “Degenerate Art” in Munich. The last ten years of his life were spent in
Germany, albeit in a state of “inner emigration.”
***
A: Can you tell me what the lines on the stage mean? [Photos show four
strings rising from the stage corners and crossing diagonally at a single point,
center stage, and apparently some eight feet in the air.]
B: They are the axes of the stage, then the diagonals, and inside the resulting
square, a circle is drawn. Apart from the center-point marked by the lines on
the floor, the central point of the space has also been fixed by stretching
light-colored strings from the corners of the stage—a surprising effect that
somehow brings the space to life.
A: But what for? Are the actors so stupid they need such aids to orient
themselves?
B: No. But because the geometry and stereometry of the stage space are in
this way “revealed,” and the notion of the dimensions awakened, the space
acquires a specific character it did not have before. Its accordance with laws
becomes perceptible, the actor, performer, or dancer is “bewitched” by this
spatial system that otherwise he would be unaware of, and he moves within it
differently than he would in the indeterminate fluidity of space.
A: But doesn’t such an exaggerated principle kill off what is best in a dancer:
the unconscious, the self-surrender, the exaltation? Doesn’t it rob him of his
soul? After all, the dancer isn’t a gym teacher or a traffic warden. It is just
this quality of soul and ecstasy we demand of the artist.
B: Certainly, and I would be the last to want to see that stifled. Let me remind
you of Goethe’s phrase “freedom within law,” and remind you further that in
all art, and particularly in the highest art, there reigns an operation of laws
that we experience as form and style. Let me remind you of the music of J. S.
Bach, which is a wondrous work of adherence to contrapuntal laws, and
equally of course a wonder of sensibility. Or to take an example from the
pictorial arts: the book of proportions of Albrecht Dürer, that exceptional
work on measure, of the human form in particular, where the secrets of
Oskar Schlemmer 141
number are sought with a fanatical zeal. Law and number have hindered
neither of these two great artists from revealing a spiritual content; indeed,
they attained this only through consummated form. To return to our stage:
why should measure and law be banned here, where they advance upon us in
the proportions of the space, the proportions of man, and in every form, just
as they do in color, in light, and in the passage of time, etc.?
Chapter Sixteen
Ever since the Revolution, Russia’s avant-garde artists had attempted to de-
fend the possibility of a formalist, nonrealistic art that would nevertheless
remain concerned with life in general and the new social order in particular.
Against this, the proletarian writers and critics insisted upon a realistic ap-
proach and a message clear even to the most uneducated audiences. By 1930,
when the Oberiu disbanded, the battle was essentially over and the triumph of
the latter view of theatre complete. (361)
Daniil Kharms himself was arrested in 1931 and exiled, then jailed again in
1941; he is believed to have died of starvation in a Ukrainian prison on
February 2, 1942.
***
Suppose two people walk out on the stage, say nothing, but tell each other
something by signs. While they are doing that, they are solemnly puffing out
their cheeks. The spectators laugh. Is this theatre? Yes, it is. You may say it
is balagan [knock-about puppet show; booth show at a fair]. But balagan is
theatre.
Or suppose a canvas is let down on the stage. On the canvas is a picture of
a village. The stage is dark. Then it begins to get lighter. A man dressed as a
shepherd walks onstage and plays on a pipe. Is that theatre? Yes.
A chair appears on the stage; on the chair is a samovar. The samovar
boils. Instead of steam, naked arms rise up from under the lid.
All these—the man and his movements on the stage, the boiling samovar,
the village painted on the canvas, the light getting dimmer and getting bright-
er—all these are separate elements of theatre.
Until now, all these elements have been subordinated to the dramatic
plot—to the play. A play has been a story, told through characters, about
some kind of event. On the stage, all have worked to explain the meaning and
course of that event more clearly, more intelligibly, and to relate it more
closely to life.
That is not at all what the theatre is. If an actor who represents a minister
begins to move around on the stage on all fours and howls like a wolf, or an
actor who represents a Russian peasant suddenly delivers a long speech in
Latin—that will be theatre, that will interest the spectator, even if it takes
Daniil Kharms 145
place without any relation to a dramatic plot. Such an action will be a separ-
ate item; a series of such items organized by the director will make up a
theatrical performance, which will have its plot line and its scenic meaning.
This will be a plot that only the theatre can give. The plots of theatrical
performances are theatrical, just as the plots of musical works are musical.
All represent one thing—a world of appearances—but depending on the
material, they render it differently, after their own fashion.
When you come to us, forget everything that you have been accustomed
to seeing in all theatres. Maybe a great deal will seem ridiculous. We take a
dramatic plot. We develop it slowly at first; then suddenly it is interrupted by
seemingly extraneous and clearly ridiculous elements. You are surprised.
You want to find that customary logical sequence of connections which, it
seems to you, you see in life. But it is not there. Why not? Because an object
and a phenomenon transported from life to the stage lose their lifelike se-
quence of connections and acquire another—a theatrical one. We are not
going to explain it. In order to understand the sequence of connections of any
theatrical performance one must see it. We can only say that our task is to
render the world of concrete objects on the stage in their interrelationships
and collisions. We worked to solve this task in our production of Elizabeth
Bam.
Elizabeth Bam was written on commission for the theatrical section of
Oberiu by one of the members, Daniil Kharms. The dramatic plot of the play
is shattered by many seemingly extraneous subjects that detach the object as
a separate whole, existing outside its connection with others. Therefore the
dramatic plot does not arise before the spectator as a clear plot image; it
glimmers, so to speak, behind the back of the action. The dramatic plot is
replaced by a scenic plot that arises spontaneously from all the elements of
our spectacle. The center of our attention is on it. But at the same time,
separate elements of the spectacle are equally valuable and important to us.
They live their separate lives without subordinating themselves to the ticking
of the theatrical metronome. Here a corner of a gold frame sticks out—it
lives as an object of art; there a fragment of a poem is recited—it is autono-
mous in its significance, and at the same time, independent of its will, it
advances the scenic plot of the play. The scenery, the movement of an actor,
a bottle thrown down, the train of a costume—they are actors, just like those
who shake their heads and speak various words and phrases.
Chapter Seventeen
147
148 The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto
***
We cannot go on prostituting the idea of the theatre, whose only value lies in
its excruciating, magical connection with reality and danger.
Stated this way, the question of the theatre must arouse general attention,
since theatre, because of its physical aspect and because it requires expres-
sion in space (the only real expression, in fact), allows the magical means of
art and speech to be practiced organically and as a whole, like renewed
exorcisms. From all this it follows that we shall not restore to the theatre its
specific powers of action until we have restored its language.
That is to say: instead of relying on texts that are regarded as definitive
and as sacred, we must first of all put an end to the subjugation of the theatre
to the text and rediscover the notion of a kind of unique language halfway
between gesture and thought. . . .
The question for the theatre, then, is to create a metaphysics of speech,
gesture, and expression in order to rescue it from its psychological and hu-
man stagnation. But all this can be of use only if there is behind such an
effort a real metaphysical temptation, an appeal to certain unusual ideas
which by their very nature cannot be limited or even formally defined. These
ideas, which have to do with Creation, with Becoming, with Chaos, and are
all of a cosmic order, provide an elementary notion of a realm from which the
theatre has become totally estranged. These ideas can create a kind of pas-
sionate equation between Man, Society, Nature, and Objects.
Antonin Artaud 149
TECHNIQUE
THEMES
it is in the utilization and handling of this language that the old duality
between author and director will disappear, to be replaced by a kind of
unique Creator who will bear the double responsibility for the spectacle and
the plot.
THE LANGUAGE OF THE STAGE. It is not a question of eliminating
spoken language but of giving words something of the importance they have
in dreams.
Also, one must find new methods of transcribing this language, which
might be related to the methods of musical notation or might make use of
some sort of code.
As for ordinary objects, or even the human body, elevated to the dignity
of signs, it is obvious that one can derive inspiration from hieroglyphic
characters, not only in order to transcribe these signs in a legible way that
enables one to reproduce them at will, but also in order to compose on the
stage symbols that are precise and immediately legible.
This code language and this musical notation will also be invaluable as a
means of transcribing voices.
Since it is fundamental to this language to make a specialized use of
intonations, these intonations must constitute a kind of harmonic balance, a
kind of secondary distortion of speech that must be reproducible at will.
Similarly, the ten thousand and one facial expressions captured in the
form of masks will be labeled and catalogued so that they can participate
directly and symbolically in this concrete language of the stage; and this
independently of their particular psychological utilization.
Furthermore, these symbolic gestures, these masks, these attitudes, these
individual or group movements whose innumerable meanings constitute an
important part of the concrete language of the theatre—evocative gestures,
emotive or arbitrary attitudes, the frenzied pounding out of rhythms and
sounds—will be reinforced and multiplied by a kind of reflection of gestures
and attitudes that consist of the mass of all the impulsive gestures, all the
failed attitudes, all the slips of the mind and the tongue that reveal what
might be called the impotences of speech, and in which there is a prodigious
wealth of expressions, to which we shall not fail to have recourse on occa-
sion.
There is, besides, a concrete idea of music in which sounds make en-
trances like characters, in which harmonies are cut in two and are lost in the
precise entrances of words.
From one means of expression to another, correspondences and levels are
created; and even the lighting can have a specific intellectual meaning.
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS. They will be used for their qualities as
objects and as part of the set.
152 The Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto
Also, the need to act directly and profoundly upon the sensibility through
the sense organs invites research, from the point of view of sound, into
qualities and vibrations of sound to which we are absolutely unaccustomed,
qualities that contemporary musical instruments do not possess and which
compel us to revive ancient and forgotten instruments or to create new ones.
They also compel research, beyond the domain of music, into instruments
and devices which, because they are made from special combinations or new
alloys of metals, can achieve a new diapason of the octave and produce
intolerable or ear-shattering sounds or noises.
LIGHTS—LIGHTING. The lighting equipment currently in use in thea-
tres is no longer adequate. In view of the peculiar action of light on the mind,
the effects of luminous vibrations must be investigated, along with new ways
of diffusing light in waves, or sheets, or in fusillades of fiery arrows. The
color range of the equipment currently in use must be completely revised. In
order to produce particular tonal qualities, one must reintroduce into lighting
an element of thinness, density, opacity with a view to producing heat, cold,
anger, fear, etc.
COSTUMES. As for costumes, and without suggesting that there can be
any such thing as a standard theatrical costume that is the same for all plays,
we shall as far as possible avoid modern dress—not because of any fetishistic
and superstitious taste for the old, but because it seems perfectly obvious that
certain age-old costumes intended for ritual use, although they were once of
their time, retain a beauty and appearance that are revelatory by virtue of
their closeness to the traditions that gave them birth.
THE STAGE—THE AUDITORIUM. We are eliminating the stage and
the auditorium and replacing them with a kind of single site, without partition
or barrier of any kind, which will itself become the theatre of the action. A
direct communication will be re-established between the spectator and the
spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, because the spectator, by
being placed in the middle of the action, is enveloped by it and caught in its
cross-fire. This envelopment is the result of the very shape of the room.
For this reason we shall abandon existing theatre buildings and use some
kind of hangar or barn, which we shall have reconstructed according to
techniques that have resulted in the architecture of certain churches or certain
sacred buildings, and certain Tibetan temples.
In the interior of this construction, special proportions of height and depth
will prevail. The room will be enclosed by four walls without any kind of
ornament, and the audience will be seated in the middle of the room, below,
on movable chairs to allow them to follow the spectacle that will go on all
around them. In effect, the absence of a stage in the ordinary sense of the
word will allow the action to spread out to the four corners of the room.
Special areas will be set aside, for the actors and the action, at the four
cardinal points of the room. The scenes will be played in front of white-
Antonin Artaud 153
The essay “Le Mythe de Sisyphe” (“The Myth of Sisyphus,” 1942) expounds
Camus’s notion of the absurd. . . . Meursault, the central character of
L’Étranger (The Stranger, 1942), exemplifies much of this essay: man as the
nauseated victim of the absurd orthodoxy of habit, later—when the young
killer faces execution—to be tempted by despair, hope, and salvation. Dr.
Rieux of La Peste (The Plague, 1947), who tirelessly attends the plague-
stricken citizens of Oran, enacts the revolt against a world of the absurd and of
injustice, and confirms Camus’s words: “We refuse to despair of mankind.
Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve
them.” (“Albert Camus: Biography,” Nobelprize.org. 17 Sep 2012: http://
www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1957/camus.html)
155
156 The Myth of Sisyphus
Other well-known fiction works by Camus are La Chute (The Fall, 1956) and
L’Exil et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom, 1957). As noted in the intro-
duction to this volume, his austere search for moral order in an absurd uni-
verse found its aesthetic correlative, paradoxically, in the classicism of his
art, for Camus’s plays and fiction “depend for their effect on ratiocinative
devices, discursive thought, and consistent or coherent character.”
***
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of
a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had
thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than
futile and hopeless labor.
If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of
mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice
the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ
as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To
begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole
their secrets. Aegina, the daughter of Aesopus, was carried off by Jupiter.
The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus.
He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that
Aesopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunder-
bolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the
underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto
could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the
god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.
It is said also that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his
wife’s love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the
public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by
an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission
to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the
face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no
longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger,
warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the
gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was
necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and,
snatching him from his joys, led him forcibly back to the underworld, where
his rock was ready for him.
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much
through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred
of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which
the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price
that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about
Albert Camus 157
Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe
life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body
straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it and push it up a slope a hundred
times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone,
the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh
start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted
hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time
without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone
rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to
push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that
toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down
with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never
know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his
suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when
he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is
superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would
his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?
The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this
fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it
becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebel-
lious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks
of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the
same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by
scorn.
***
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in
joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his
rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling
too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it
happens that melancholy rises in man’s heart: this is the rock’s victory, this is
the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights
of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus,
Oedipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he
knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he
realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl.
Then a tremendous remark rings out: “Despite so many ordeals, my ad-
vanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well.”
Sophocles’ Oedipus, like Dostoyevsky’s Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the
absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.
158 The Myth of Sisyphus
One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manu-
al of happiness. “What! by such narrow ways—?” There is but one world,
however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are
inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs
from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd
springs from happiness. “I conclude that all is well,” says Oedipus, and that
remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches
that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who
had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It
makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His
rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his tor-
ment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence,
the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret
calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price
of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the
night. The absurd man says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing. If
there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is but one
which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows
himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man
glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that
slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which be-
comes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon
sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is
human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is
still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s
burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods
and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth
without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that
stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a
world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Epilogue: There Is No Avant-Garde
Theatre (1962)
Eugène Ionesco
159
160 Epilogue: There Is No Avant-Garde Theatre
***
It is indeed in the union between the historical and the unhistorical, the
topical and the untopical (that is to say the permanent) that we can seek this
changeless basic material which we can also succeed in finding, instinctively,
in ourselves: without it, any work of art is valueless; it keeps everything
alive. So finally I maintain quite fearlessly that the true avant-garde or revo-
lutionary art is that which, boldly setting its face against its own times, looks
as if it is untopical. By casting off all claim to topicality, it reveals its links
with this universal basic material we have already spoken of, and being
universal it may be considered classical; but it should be understood that this
classicism must be rediscovered by passing through and going beyond the
new elements that should permeate this kind of art. Any attempt to return to
some sort of “historical” classicism by turning one’s back on what is new
would only encourage the development of an outdated and academic style.
For example: Endgame by Beckett, a so-called avant-garde play, is far closer
to the lamentations of Job, the tragedies of Sophocles or Shakespeare, than to
the tawdry drama known as committed or boulevard theatre. Topical drama
does not last (by definition) and it does not last for the good reason that
people are not truly or profoundly interested in it.
It is also worth noting that social changes are not always related to artistic
revolution. Or rather: when the mystique of a revolution becomes a regime, it
returns to artistic forms (and so to a mentality) that are outmoded, with the
result that the new realism is bound up with the mental clichés we call
bourgeois and reactionary. Conventionalism repeats itself and the bewhis-
kered academic portraits of the new reaction are—stylistically—no different
from the academic portraits, with or without whiskers, of the bourgeois peri-
od which did not understand Cézanne. So we can say, somewhat paradoxical-
ly perhaps, that it is the “historical” which is moribund, and the non-histori-
cal which remains alive.
Chekhov in his drama shows us dying men in a particular dying society:
the destruction, as time runs out and gnaws away, of the men of a certain
period; Proust too had done this in his novels—and so had Gustave Flaubert
in L’Education sentimentale, although he showed as a background to his
characters not a declining but a rising society. So it is not the collapse or the
break-up or the erosion of a social system which is the principal theme, the
truth of these works, but man eroded by time, his destruction seen at a certain
historical moment but true for all history; we are all murdered by time.
I mistrust pacifist plays, which seem to be showing us that it is war that
destroys mankind and that we only die in wartime. This is more or less what
one young critic seemed to be saying, obstinately dogmatic, when comment-
ing on [Brecht’s] Mother Courage. More of us die in wartime: topical truth.
We die: permanent truth, not topical yet always topical, it concerns every-
Eugène Ionesco 163
body, and so it also concerns people not involved in war. Beckett’s Endgame
is more true, more universal, than Schéhadé’s Histoire de Vasco (which in no
way prevents this play from having high poetic qualities).
Since at first sight “what concerns us all fundamentally” is curiously less
accessible than what concerns only some people or what concerns us less, it
is obvious that avant-garde plays, whose aim (I apologize for being so insis-
tent) is to rediscover and make known a forgotten truth—and to reintegrate it,
in an untopical way, into what is topical—it is obvious that when these works
appear they cannot help being misunderstood by the majority of people. So
they are not “popular.” This in no way invalidates them. The plainest realities
are discovered by the poet in silence and solitude. The philosopher too, in the
silence of his library, discovers truths difficult to communicate: how long did
it take for Karl Marx himself to be understood, and even now can everyone
understand him? He is not “popular.” How many people have succeeded in
assimilating Einstein? The fact that only a few people are capable of a clear
understanding of the theories of modern physicists does not make me doubt
their validity; and this truth that they have discovered is neither invention nor
subjective vision, but objective reality, outside time, eternal, and the scientif-
ic mind has only just touched the fringe of it. Where we are concerned with
an unchanging truth, all we ever do is approach, move away, and then draw
closer again.
There also exists—as we are meant to be talking about the theatre—a
dramatic idiom, a theatrical method of approach, a trail to blaze, if we are to
reach a reality that has objective existence; and this trail to blaze (or path to
find again) cannot be other than one belonging to the theatre, which will lead
to a reality that can only be revealed theatrically. It is what we might agree to
call laboratory research.
There is no reason why there should not be drama for the people (I am not
quite sure who the people are, unless it is the majority, the non-specialists),
boulevard theatre, a theatre of propaganda and instruction, composed in some
conventional idiom: this is popularized theatre. We must not for this reason
prevent the other kind of theatre from continuing its work: a drama of re-
search, laboratory drama, the avant-garde. If it is not taken up by a large
public, this in no way means that it is not of vital importance to our minds, as
necessary as artistic, literary, or scientific research. We do not always know
what use it is—but as it fulfills a mental requirement, it is clearly quite
indispensable. If such drama has an audience of fifty people every evening
(and it can have that number), the need for it is proved. This kind of theatre is
in danger. Politics, apathy, malice, and jealousy are, unfortunately, a danger-
ous threat on every side to such writers as Beckett, Vauthier, Schéhadé,
Weingarten, and others, as well as to their supporters.
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176 Select Bibliography
177
178 Index
185