Cobac International Art Magazine/ World Theater

C.O.B.A.C. EVERLASTING

International Art Magazine

WORLD THEATER

Issue April

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#8 2011

THEATRICS OF

SEAM

The Beach beneath the Paving Stones Okhlopkov and the Nascence of the Postmodern

‘Meaning’in Beckett’sDrama

NEA ARTS number 4 2010

Fresno

Kankakee

Providence

In the Neighborhood arts & community

Houston

New Orleans

New York

A STAR ALLIANCE MEMBER

C.O.B.A.C. EVERLASTING

International Art Magazine

WORLD THEATER

Issue April

O

#8 2011

THEATRICS OF

SEAM

The Beach beneath the Paving Stones Okhlopkov and the Nascence of the Postmodern

‘Meaning’in Beckett’sDrama

c.o.b.a.c. international art magazine MARCH 2011 Director: Ali Saadat R&D: Mehdi Darafshi Cover:Driving Miss Daisy theater www.made-to-travel.com cobac.a.c@gmail.com cobac.blog.com facebook.com/COBACMAGAZINE Google group: cobac-internatioanl-art-magazine Publishing texts and photos of this magazine can not be reproduced without permission of the owners.

All Rights of photos used in the content of this magazine belongs to the owners.

Special Thanks to: Ebrahim Golabbakhsh, Revolution Art Magazine( Nelson Medina), Babak Ghanaat, Reza Bigdeli

Andreas kümmert

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The paris years

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Interview with German artist

Jacques copeau/ wikipdia source

19th and 20th Century Theater 19th and 20th century theater notes from Oney

revolution and the romantic theater

By Brian Johnston

Tricky Turnings of the Screw(ed)

by Brian W. Nowlin

The Beach beneath the Paving Stones: Lenora Champagne

16 28 40 54

Okhlopkov and the Nascence of the Postmodern

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THEATRICS OF SEAM

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James Harbeck

David Boje and Grace Ann Rosile

ANALYSIS OF SAMUEL BECKETT’S DRAMA Asist. univ. drd. Alexandra Munteanu

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Editorial

Theater as a subject, in general, is too big to be covered in only one sitting and even if we decide to only talk about one of the leading countries in this matter it is out of doubt that it would take several issues just to cover that. This issue is covering some general dimensions of theater, however it should be said that in future issues, it is planned to include discussions about series of subjects covering French theater and its path of evolution in three different time frames, which are intended to be continued in upcoming issues. By the help of the contributions of great Masters of the Literature’s history and theater, COBAC would be able to present one of the greatest piles of information of French theater’s history, containing special analytical details accessible to the readers. This issue is a beginning of a path of a study, which has always been a sensation to the fans of art. Analyzing French theater’s past, today and future is the upcoming plan for C.O.B.A.C. In this publication properties of French theater, the impact it experienced by the French revolution and its shortcoming in the 20th century was tried to be covered. We talked about jacques copeau and his work. French theater was influenced so deeply by copeau and his criticisms where albert camus calls him the turning-point of French theater’s history. This opinion extends to a level that camus divides French theater into two time periods, before and after copeau. Needless to mention that the impact camus and sartre left of French theater is undeniable. We also liked to take the chance to talk about beckett just because we personally like him; then we speak about him separately in an special issue.

Best wishes Ali Saadat cobac.a.c@gmail.com

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hen you started the music as a profession? Have you ever been studied or passed academic courses or education in this way?

I am on the road since 4 years now!

I never had lessons and I never studied playing the guitar and singing.

You play, write songs, compose music and so like these. Which one you are gifted or have more expert as your thought?

I think it´s both a gift but I'm more the singing and playing expert.

You said that in your works you have been affected Eric Clapton, Hendrix; my question is "aren't your works imitated their works ever?" what is the level of your inspiration from their works and you think how much your works have proximity to them as quality?

The Hendrix / Clapton influence refers to my work as a guitar player. I don´t try to imitate them! I never had a guitar teacher, so I learned from their records.

We decide to speak about your album here. Please tell me some brief information about it to let readers have feeling more similarity about it.

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Andreas kümmert singer / songwriter,soul,rock,blues,pop,folk musician from Germany! last year released his first record "smilin´ in circles" now you'll read a cd review an little interview about him!

He said that his debut cd was released in fall 2010! and he gave his best to make it very autenticly and unmasked.

Emotions are very important in his music... and played every single instrument on the record...

In germany the cd reviews were very good ;) He thinks for all the rest you have to here the record! some songs are on myspace www.myspace.com/andreaskuemmert

Why did you choose this genre of music? I mean the alternative music and folk.

Rock, folk, blues, soul and alternative music are the musical genres I grew up with.

Over a year from publishing "smilin´ in circles", Does It seems that you could attract your audiences? What is your

idea about it?

This question is very hard to answer.

In case of a musician I can´t tell because I use to slip in some kind of different dimension on stage.

The feedback of the audience makes me feel that my music works very well for them.

Andreas you are a European musician. Why did you publish it in English? Your country-Germany- has a historical experience in music and I think you had enough audiences in your region, hadn't you?

I don´t like music with German lyrics.

The other point is: the English language is international.

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It´s very unmasked and the songwriting grew from deep and honest emotions.

I played all of the instruments on the record by myself.

The sound is influenced by folk, rock, blues music... sometimes it sounds a little like alternative pop/rock music

Jacques Copeau U

pon his return to Paris, Copeau needed a period of rest and reflection, but certain pressing tasks demanded his time. He finished the adaptation of The Winter's Tale, which would be the first offering when the theater reopened in January 1920, and with Jouvet he oversaw the renovations to the stage and the lighting at the Vieux-Colombier. A unit set compatible with the dimensions of the stage area and the installation of an innovative lighting system controlled from backstage—baptized jouvets—were installed. More important in the eyes of Copeau, a school of dramatic arts remained essential if he was to realize the renewal of the theater that had been his dream for over a decade.

The theater opened its doors on February 9, 1920 with The Winter's

The Paris years 1920–1924

Tale on the renovated stage. The almost bare stage and the gray walls in the background puzzled critics and the public alike. The next offerings, Charles Vildrac's Le Paquebot Tenacity ("The Steamboat Tenacity") and Prosper Mérimée's Le Carosse du Saint-Sacrement elicited both critical and popular favor. The story of two young men, Ségard and Bastien, waiting for the S.S. Tenacity with its love interest—Ségard runs off with a barmaid, Thérèse, to live out his life in France and its sense of both adventure and loss: Bastien leaves for Canada—was more readily acceptable. By the end of the season, which ended with La Fontaine's La Coupe Enchantée ("The Enchanted Goblet"), a holdover from New York, the company had also performed George Duhamel's L'Oeuvre des athlètes ("The Athlete's Work""), Jules Romain's

Cromedeyre-le-Vieil, and Emile Mazoud's La Folle Journée ("What a Crazy Day"), works by contemporary writers newly initiated into the theater. After two years in New York, this was a company of proven theatrical skills in plays from various eras and of diverse styles. Too, the troupe showed that with its ensemble work and the simplicity of its presentations that allowed the text to be revealed in all its beauty, it had become the foremost theater in Paris.

By the end of February auditions were being held for the "Classes at the Vieux-Colombier", an undertaking Copeau asked Suzanne Bing to organize. Some of the students worked already for the Vieux-Colombier, others were students of actors at the Comédie-Française, but in all a rather mixed group with widely different backgrounds. The classes, which

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lacked sufficient space to expand its enrollment or its curriculum. Despite efforts on the part of Jouvet during the summer, no suitable space was found. The school started up in December, using space on the second floor of the building that housed the theater. Suzanne Bing was again in charge of the young people between the ages of fourteen and eighteen years old, and Copeau also offered a course of the "History of the Theater."

But this experiment was far from the elaborate program that Copeau had in mind.

The 1920-21 season at the Vieux-Colombier began with popular re-runs from previous season, opening with Vildrac's Le Paquebot Tenacity followed by Nuit des rois,

which Parisians had not seen since the end of the first season in 1914.

The highly demanding Vieux-Colombier audiences were happy to see fine performances of classics under the deft direction of Copeau. Critics, though, wondered when new plays would be on the bill. In January, Copeau staged Henri GhĂŠon's Le Pauvre sous l'escalier ("The Beggar under the Staircase"), the story based on the medieval tale of the life of Saint Alexis. La Mort de Sparte ("The Death of Sparta"), a play by Copeau's friend Jean Schlumberger dating from before the war, garnered neither critical nor popular praise.

The highlight of the 1921-1922 season was the opening the School of the Vieux-Colombier in a building on

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took place in a room in the courtyard behind the theater, were devoted to close readings of texts with emphasis not only on the meaning but the rhythms as well as physical exercises and improvisations. The sessions ended in June with a charade presented before Copeau and a few friends of the Vieux-Colombier which le patron found quite satisfying.

At the end of the shortened spring 1920 theater season, the Vieux-Colombier, although an aesthetic success, found itself in debt. The theater, now smaller because of the apron that extended from the stage, was barely economically viable. Copeau called upon the generosity of the Friends of the Vieux-Colombier who helped fill its coffers. The school, meanwhile,

Rue du Cherche-Midi, around the corner from the theater. Courses began in November under the directorship of Jules Romain, author and graduate of the École Normale Supérieure.

Among the teaching staff were Copeau himself who would teach a course on the theory of the theater and Greek tragedy, and Jouvet who taught a complementary course on the Greek theater from the point of view of its architecture. Bing taught the beginning course on reading and diction and along with Copeau a course on the formation of the dramatic instinct.

Marie-Hélène Copeau was in charge of a workshop on the use of different materials, on geometric design, on costume design and production. In all twelve professors dealt with a wide variety of courses covering both the history of the theater and its practice: rhythmic gymnastics, singing, voice training, mask and costume construction. The school provided three levels of offerings: Division A set aside for youngsters from twelve to eighteen who had had no formal education in the theater arts who were expected to stay in the school for three years; Division B for students eighteen years or older who during a threeyear matriculation would receive a technical education in the arts of the theater that would permit them to begin work in the professional theater; Division C was designated for those who had no intention of entering the theater as professionals but who wanted to take certain courses in order to broaden their knowledge of the theater. Course requirements, regulations concerning absences, scholarships and payment of tuition and fees were clearly set forth in the school's brochures. Copeau's dream finally found its realization.

The fame of the Vieux-Colombier seemed to reach its apogee in the 1922-23 season. The house was filled for every performance and visitors to Paris complained of the impossibility of getting tickets to any of its offerings. Copeau organized a

touring company to the provinces.

Invitations to play in other countries

of the Moscow Art Theatre, came to Paris in December 1922, he and his

in the off-season abounded. When Konstantin Stanislavski, the director

troupe were warmly received on the stage of the Vieux-Colombier. The

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felt throughout Europe and the United States. Despite the fame, conflict

arose. Jouvet, who understood the economics of the theater better than Copeau, knew that a larger theater and a more profitable pricing system were needed.

His proposal fell on deaf ears.

When he was asked to direct at the Théâtre des ChampsÉlysées, he chose his freedom. Even Romains decided that the Right Bank theaters were more hospitable to his work after Copeau rejected one of his plays. Despite the problems at the theater, the school continued to thrive.

Copeau allowed his young charges to appear in a production of Gide's Saül as the masked demons that taunt the king played by Copeau himself. The critical reaction was quite positive. The season ended, as the previous ones had, with the Vieux-Colombier in debt.

When the 1923-24 season opened, the Vieux-Colombier found itself in competition with former members of the company since Jouvet's and Dullin's theater drew from the same public as Copeau.

Its subscriber base reduced, the Vieux-Colombier no longer held the cherished spot in the heart of those theatergoers who sought quality in the theater. For Copeau, two events marked the highpoints of the season: the staging of his long awaited La Maison natale, a work that had its inception in various forms more than twenty years earlier, and the Noh play Kantan with the students of the school under the direction of Suzanne Bing.

Copeau's piece dealt with the theme of an autocratic father whose two sons, Maxime and Pierre, have already left the nest to find happiness elsewhere.

André, the youngest son, remains

at home, but is encouraged by his grandfather to search for his happiness. When the father dies, André is confronted with the choice of running the family's factory or self-fulfillment.

Maxime returns, seeks forgiveness, and André, with his grandfather's blessing, leaves the family home. The play, found to be lacking in dramatic action, was not greeted with great critical acclaim, much to Copeau's chagrin. Kantan, on the other hand, represented for Copeau the culmination of two and a half years hard work with his apprentice actors and the fulfillment of a dream of over a decade. The play never made it onto the boards of the Vieux-Colombier because Aman Maistre, one of the actors, sprained his knee, but Harley Granville Barker and Adolphe Appia saw it in rehearsals. Barker, after having seen the play, was effusive in his praise for the effects of the training the students received at the Vieux-Colombier: "If you were able to do that in three years, in ten years you could do anything at all." The play, performed with masked characters, allowed the young actors to show off to good effect their grace, athleticism and voice training.

At the end of the season, the troupe undertook a tour through eastern France, Belgium, and Switzerland.

Then, Copeau made the momentous decision to abandon entirely the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. Unable to make any concessions to the commercial aspects of the theater, tired of looking to his friends for support, he felt he had no alternatives. Despite the offer of help from Jouvet to make the Vieux-Colombier both an artistic and financial success, Copeau chose his independence. By mid-summer, the Vieux-Colombier was liquidated.

With some of his actors and young apprentices in tow, Copeau moved to the Burgundy countryside to begin a new project.

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influence of Copeau's principles to which he held without flinching was

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What is realism? nitially scandalous (like impressionism) taboo subjects and social criticism touch a nerve, lack of simple moral judgments Staging and writing style to convince the audience that the illusion of reality is occurring on stage Semblance of everyday life, no more prince or count so and so Calls for social/political/personal change change Initially refusing to make value judgments Complicated personalities molded by heredity and environment Some of the tenets of neoclassics, which we’ve been mocking

– no ghosts, no larger-than-life characters, ordinary speech, costume, settings, no verse, rejection of stock characters Henrik Ibsen is the first great realistic writer A doll’s House and Hedda for bad marriages, An Enemy of the People for political corruption, The Wild Duck for the need for imagination and illusion, Ghosts for moral criticism and hereditary syphillis Introduces discussion of series social/political/personal issues into the theatre Now rather confused with melodrama, realistic trappings without social comment, easy to root for (or against) characters.

What is naturalism?

A subdivision, an extreme form of realism Key figure – Emile Zola, advocated “scientific objectivity” Slice of life – connotes laboratory and dissection Rejection of the controlling hand of the artist means get rid of stage contrivance, make everything seemed lifted “as is” from everyday life Scientific method applied to art To describe without making value judgments Fascination with the poor – lots of squalor, For Esme!

1) Insistence on showing the stark side of life, 2) insistence on documentary style without editing Some key points

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Wants theatre to resume the centrality it had in ancient Greece in terms of religion, ecstacy Peoples’ important problems are buried in the subterranean reaches of their minds and cause internal divisions and divisions between people that lead to hatred, violence, and disaster Argues for a theatre that does not “numb us with ideas for the intellect but stirs us to feeling Theatre of Cruelty - sought a “new language of theatre” that treated the audience as a mental patient in need of healing.

To force the spectators to confront themselves and through the process cleanse themselves and find harmony To operate directly on the senses, bypassing the rational mind, to create a new language of the theatre Absurdists – theatre as an exploration of existentialism in performance style and language Brecht - theatre as extroverted attempt to influence and describe societal forces Artaud - theatre is an introverted examination of internal, subterranean forces19th and 20th Century Theatre Notes from Oney).

Note how in 19th and 20th centuries the world gets smaller and everyone sees what everyone else is doing. Lots of the reason why artistic style changes escalate so frantically 19th century developments – Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism Darwin contributes the notions that species and by extension societies can evolve and get better, that heredity, environment, and chance are as important as human will Psychiatry would have us believe that human motivation can be understood and interpreted Lots of advance in technology, too – stage machinery very sophisticated by mid-19th century and electric light comes in at the end of the 19th century.

h Century Theatre France 1880-1910 To present, not mundane, day-today activities, but the mystery of being and the cosmos, the infinite qualities of the human spirit An attempt to get free from the bondage of surfacy, sordid naturalism and move into the wonderland of the imagination.

A poetic theatre with symbolic images Create a dream world where major goal is to evoke atmosphere and mood, not tell a story Characters not as individuals but as figures representative of the human condition No realistic scenery Short lived, no great plays, but one more link in stage’s ability to express anything

freely Maurice Maeterlinck (18621949) a Belgy, worked chiefly in French theatre, writing symbolist poetry in the 1880s, interested in mysticism and the occult A kind of theatrical equivalent to Prelude to an Afternoon of a Faun!

Writes a tragedy, La Princesse Maleine, in 1889, that a critic says is more tragic than Macbeth, more meaningful than Hamlet (reminiscent of John Webster) ie undeserved praise!

Writes essays, too: Plays must penetrate beneath the surface of reality The concrete and definable is

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Reality, scientifically analyzed No poetic justice Heredity and environment (“I am waiting for the surroundings to determine the characters”) No more fakey plot turns No more rules and formulas, declamations, big words, grand sentiments Exact reproduction of life Realism is much more structure, highly wrought language, carefully plotted scenes and climaxes, symbolism Plays like Iceman Cometh are influenced by naturalism, Raisin in the Sun, too Rather more likely today as “naturalistic detail” How do you characterize symbolism as an artistic movement in the theatre?

unimportant compared with the inner life of human beings and the universe, which is a mystery Drama should deal with the ultimate reality of the soul rather than transparent physical reality Action should be supplanted by states of feeling; noted that much of life is uneventful anyway Sees theatrical expression in “an old man sitting in his armchair at night with a lamp beside him, giving unconscious ear to all the eternal laws that reign about his house, interpreting, without comprehending, the silence of doors and windows and the quivering voice of the light, submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his destiny.”

So there!

Conflict is unnecessary in drama and there is no need to show us the human will engaged in constant battle Even theatrical dialogue is false with its eloquence and additional significance You can see Beckett and Pinter behind this Static drama is both possible and desirable Of course, Maeterlinck departed from his own ideas from time to time, and came to believe that his theory of static drama “was a theory of his youth, worth what most literary theories are worth – that is, almost nothing.”

Gassner writes “it may be accurately said of Maeterlinck’s dramatic work in general that there is less in it than meets the eye” Wins Nobel Prize in 1911!

Gassner also says Synge was influenced by Maety Maeterlinck’s The Intruder A blind old man and his family sit around a table under a single light; a sick woman is in a room on the right, a baby who has yet to cry is in a room on the left. As the evening goes on the old man’s sense of foreboding increases; doors and windows open without people near them, a scythe is heard mowing outside – the blind grandfather seems to sense the presence of some other beings,

intelligences. At the end the woman dies and the baby cries; all rush into the sick room where there is a Nun administering sacraments, except for the grandfather who gropes blindly towards the mysteries of life.

What was theatrical expressionism?

Word first used in France to differentiate VanGogh and Gaughin from the impressionists (who were trying to capture objects in light at a given moment). Develops as a visual arts movement in Germany apx 1905 Expressionist painters interested in strong inner feelings and portraying life as modified and distorted by the painter’s vision of reality. Thus, in expressionism truth or beauty resides in the mind rather than (with impressionism) in the eye.

IE reality distorted to communicate inner feelings Also, a kind of sociophilosophic revolution. Opposed to realism and naturalism as glorifiers of science, which they associated with technology and industry and materialism Disliked realism’s emphasis on external appearance as using an aspect of reality to depict all of reality Believed fundamental truth is to be found within man, his spirit, his soul, his desires, and visions, and that external reality should be reshaped until it is brought into harmony with these inner attributes so that we can achieve our highest aspirations. Often socialist or pacifist Not a wholly unified movement any more than absurdism would be later Lots of young folks doing this.

A 1906 manifesto (from a group called Die Brücke – The Bridge) declares “We call upon all youth to unite. We who possess the future shall create for ourselves a physical and spiritual freedom opposed to the values of the comfortably established older generation.” Often divided into two branches: 1) mystic – those who sought to express a mystical grasp of the inner spirit, or 2) activists – those who sought

to transform society Can be seen as a variant of romanticism, especially when it depicts human beings struggling to free their spirit from the limitations of material existence. Often has a messianic tone as it seeks the “regeneration of man.” You hear them speak of transformation and of creating the “new man” again and again Also, often a negative view of current society and call for destruction of materialism and trappings of the old society. Seeking a world free from war, hypocrisy, hate where social justice and love reign and artists are free to express themselves About Expressionist plays (main points with important subheadings): 1) Message centered plays tend to be organized around a primary idea, theme, or motif rather than cause-and-effect plotting This series of related episodes is often called a station play, since it resembles the stations of the cross, which underlines the attempt to have Christ-like qualities in the protagonist 2) The central character, often a Christ-like person, is sacrificed to materialism, hypocrisy etc, “a vulnerable protagonist in a malevolent world” as Goldfarb tells us Since the protagonist is often the only character to appear throughout the play, he may serve as a unifying element second only to thought/idea Since the events of the play are often seen through the eyes of this character, those events are often depicted very subjectively; often distorted dreamlike.

3) Playwrights working to reduce each element to the bare essentials: plots can be demonstrations of an idea or argument.

Characters can be generic and often have no name – Man, Woman, Clerk, Mister Mister Dialogue is sometimes reduced to one or twoword sentences aka “telegraphic” style Gesture was succinct as well.

4) distortion evident in every element can be bizarre: corpses rise from graves, a man carries his own

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tarian, business, machine, military culture snuffs out hope!

Karel Capek’s R.U.R (1921) a late example from a Czech writer.

Depicts a wholly mechanized world in which men are served by Rossum’s Universal Robots. When the robots seize power, it appears that the world is doomed to total dehumanization, but unexpectedly the stirring love in two robots leads to an act of self-sacrifice and the hope of a new humanitarianism is reborn.

Few plays staged prior to end of WWI in 1917!

What the directors did: Distorted furniture and settings; huge chairs, prisoner in a bird cage, changed lighting and costumes to reflect emotions.

1) reduced scenery to essentials, a few set pieces. Drapes a cyc.

Have to be flexible for all these shifts in locale. Often strange angles.

2) light was very important; strong contrasts, shifts to match stream of consciousness; several scenes happening at once, tight spots, shafts of light, extreme angles, deep shadows, backlight, strange colors, whatever would help build the nightmare!

3) makeup and costume distorted as well to the point of caricature – bloated capitalists, bemedaled generals, diseased seekers after carnal pleasure, starving workers.

Expressionism comes along at the right time to help develop lighting design Short lived, finished by 1920 or so, but has affected us ever since – Eugene O’Neill, Three strands of modern theatre: Absurdist, Epic Theatre, and Theatre of Cruelty.

Theatre of the Absurd A movement that begins in Europe after WW II in response to the horrors of the war. What if the world isn’t rational? How do you account for Hiroshima, Dresden, Auschwitz? Kozinsky’s The Painted Bird. Grows out of skepticism about earlier modes of perception, belief in the inadequacy of scientific observation and realism to portray truth.

Definition: plays that convey our sense of alienation and loss of bearings in an illogical, unjust and ridiculous world.

I. Ancestors: 1. Alfred Jarry (1873-1907)someone who has influence more than success, a kind of patron saint for the absurdists.

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head in a sack Distortion especially evident in visual aspects. Walls lean inward to suggest oppression; trees become skeletons to predict death; color, shape, size of objects distorted to emphasize departure from reality Vivid light used to arouse mood or to isolate characters in a void 5) sharp contrasts throughout dialogue alternates between poetry and prose beautiful passages and obscenities telegraphic speeches and lengthy monologues realistic scenes may fade into a dream.

6) works permeated with a sense of dreamlike fantasy and magic; sometimes ecstatic; sometimes frightening 7) overall impression is of allegory clothed in nightmare or vision Influenced by doctrines of democratic love, free verse forms of Walt Whitman, writings of Freud and Jung on the unconscious, dramas by Buchner, Wedekind, and late Strindberg and others, Goethe (especially Faust II which dramatizes the search for spiritual fulfillment). Reinhardt is the first to direct Faust II in 1911, he does a bunch of the Strindbergs too; whole movement sometimes called Faustian Lots of plays where authori-

Writing plays during the 1890s.

Character based on Jarry’s least favorite teacher, a fellow that Jarry thought embodied all the basest human impulses. Ubu Roi - a comedy about a man who becomes King of Poland, kills and tortures everyone who opposes him, and is finally driven out but vows to continue his

torrid, temperate, and arctic zones at once. Opposite to you, at the back of the stage, you saw against the sky a small closed window and a fireplace through which trooped in and out these clamorous and sanguinary persons of the drama. On the left was painted a bed, and at the foot of the bed a bare tree, and snow falling. On

two men represented the opposing armies, but for the slaughters Jarry bought 40 life-sized wicker mannequins which were beheaded. To indicate that he was on horseback, Ubu wore around his neck a cut-out of a horses head.”

The actor playing Ubu didn’t know how to approach the role so the di-

exploits elsewhere. Captain McNure, merdre, the disembraining song.

Opening night in Paris: Jarry in grotesque makeup and baggy suit delivers a lecture before the performance.

“The scenery was painted to represent by a child’s convention, indoors and out of doors, and even the

the right were palm trees, about one of which coiled a boa constrictor.

A skeleton dangled from a gallows.

Changes of scene were announced by placard. A venerable gentleman in evening dress trotted across the stage on the points of his toes between every scene and hung the new placard on a nail. For battles,

rector told him to imitate Jarry’s delivery style - no inflection or nuance, equal stress on each syllable, stylized and jerky gestures. His costume was pear shaped.. After Merdre! there was a 15 minute uproar; people walked out; fist fights began.

Ubu got there attention again with an improvised dance, but the uproar be-

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Claus of the Atomic Age. After WW I (1918) more skeptical reactions to realism, attempts to create 20th century art: 2. Futurism - began in Italy 1909 popular through 1920s.

Originally an Italian movement Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) launches it in 1909

with a manifesto on the front page of a Parisian newspaper; also mails hundreds of copies to important people throughout Italy Like expressionists, futurists reject past and wish to transform humanity Expressionists associate past with soul-destroying materialism and industrialism Futurists, perhaps because they’re from industrially backward Italy, deplore veneration of the past as a barrier to progress In fact, they glorify the energy and speed of the machine age and seek to embody them in artistic forms In his poem “My Pegasus,” Marinetti celebrates the racing car above the winged horse of Pericles He also says that museums and libraries are cemetery-like and good for the old and dying “but we will have none of it, we, the young, the strong, and the living Futurists.”

He goes on “The oldest among us are thirty; we have, therefore, ten years at least to accomplish our task. When we are forty, let others, younger and more valiant, throw us into the waste basket like useless manuscripts.” They value energy and aggression: “We wish to glorify War – the only health giver of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful Ideas that kill, the contempt for women.” IE the ideal futurist man was an aggressive masculine fighter who forged ahead with this eye on the future, caring nothing for the past. First movement to seek direct confrontation with audiences From 1910 they’re giving performances during which they read manifestoes, give concerts, read poems, do plays, and exhibit works of visual art, sometimes simultaneously. Sometimes moving among spectators or using different parts of the room sequentially or simultaneously Their militancy makes them the epitome of the new and dangerous in outlook and art.

They especially outrage audiences with their demands that libraries and museums be destroyed as the

first step towards a dynamic future.

Sometimes they were welcomed; more often they were booed, pelted with fruit, or provoked physical violence; some evenings ended in riots.

Still they made themselves wellknown in France, England, Russia, and Germany through exhibitions writings, lectures, and demonstrations In their attempt to create art forms appropriate for a the machine age, they created: “picture poems,” aka concrete poetry, out of type of varying size arranged in configurations designed to arouse sensations of movement Kinetic sculptures with moving parts to introduce movement and energy into a static form Co-invent (along with the cubists) the collage form of assemble works from fragments from newspapers, scraps of cloth, etc, with the goal of “painting” with any material Claiming that modern utilitarian objects like wine racks and kitchen utensils are more beautiful than paintings or sculptures of the old masters; they entered these in exhibitions In music, they developed the bruitisme, translated as dynamic sound, based on the belief that since all movement produces sound, noise is a reflection of the “volcanic soul of life.” So, they orchestrate ordinary sounds and abstract noise to make music more suitable to modern life.

They had one “noise symphony” depicting the “awakening of the capital” through the sounds of pot covers, rattles, typewriters, and other similar “instruments.” One of these was called a “noise organ” and frequently used in their concerts Marinetti and others publish several manifestoes about theatre Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights (1911). The Variety Theatre (1913). The Futurist Synthetic Theatre (1915). The first denounces contemporary practice and calls for innovation. The second praises the music halls, nightclubs, and circus as superior to traditional theatre as a model for the future as long as it’s done by capturing the spirit of popu-

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gan again with each obscenity. The play was performed twice.

Jarry wrote 2 more Ubu plays and died relatively unknown in 1907.

After WW I people began to take an interest and his reputation grew.

Founding of the College of Pataphysics - the science of imaginary solutions. One critic calls Jarry the Santa

lar forms rather than merely imitating them. They loved the carefree, spontaneous atmosphere, the rapid succession of vaudeville attractions, interaction of audience and performers, mingling of elements from different media, and overall energy of the performance. The last essay condemns traditional drama for being lengthy, analytic, and static, and proposes a “synthetic” drama instead.

This must be brief “To compress into a few minutes, into a few words and gestures, innumerable situations, sensibilities, ideas, sensations, facts, and symbols. . . . Our acts can also be moments only a few seconds long.”

For their plays attempting to capture the dynamism of modern life they use the adjectives – alogical, unreal, and autonomous (conforming to its own laws only).

76 of these plays do get done in Italy in 1915-1916; they varied widely Distillations of Shakespeare plays into a few moments, to make fun of how traditional drama takes too much time on expositions and logical progression Usually they tried to capture the essence of some mood, situation, or sensation.

Francesco Canguillo’s Detonation (1915) – curtain opens on a deserted road at night; silence; a gunshot is heard and the curtain falls Same guy writes one called Lights (1919) where the stage is dark and actors planted in the audience start calling for lights in hopes of provoking the rest of the audience to join in Bruno Corra and Emilio Settimelli write Sempronio’s Lunch (1915) - Sempronio moves from age 5 to 90 as he eats under conditions that reflect the passage of time and life Same writers do one called Gray+Red+Violet+Orange (1915) where a character accuses a member of the audience of murder Giacomo Balla’s Disconcerted States of Mind (1916) – a white stage, 4 persons perform 4 disconnected scenes.

1) each one repeats a different

number 12 times.

2) each character repeats a different letter of the alphabet 12 times.

3) each performs a different action (raising his hat, reading his newspaper, blowing his nose, looking at his watch).

4) each tries to convey a different state (sadness, quickness, pleasure, denial).

Marinetti writes one called Feet (1915) where the curtain is raised just enough to reveal the actors’ feet and in 7 disconnected scenes accompanied by telegraphic dialogue they perform distillations of typical conditions such as anxiety, violence, work, and various kinds of love.

Same guy writes Simultaneity (1915) depicting two different places in which parallel actions proceed at the same time – one is life of a typical middle-class family, the other a coquette; his The communicating Vases (1916) does the same thing with three settings and actions.

Freaky yes, but lots of experiments with brevity, discontinuity, abstraction, alogicality, and simultaneity. Time is indefinite or telescoped; nonverbal sound and symbolic lighting are used; media are intermingled; puppets sometimes used. Clear-cut story, logical progression, psychological characterization are minimized or ignored.

Declines rapidly after 1930 but leaves legacy that will be picked up (but not acknowledged) in the 1950s 1) attempt to rescue theatrical art from a museumlike atmosphere.

2) direct confrontation and intermingling of performers and audiences.

3) exploitation of modern technology to create multimedia presentations.

4) use of simultaneous and multiple focus.

5) an antiliterary and alogical bias.

6) breaking down of barriers between arts.

3. Dada - Zurich, Switzerland

during WW I, 1916, a child’s first syllable Name chosen at random from a French dictionary, baby talk for anything to do with horses, but sometimes taken to be a child’s first word Participants disgusted by the Great War. Insanity seems to be the world’s true state. Artists must respond with calculated madness, chaos, imbalance, discord. Rejected the past. Simultaneous presentations of such works as: anti-artistic paintings, chance poems made from cut up words drawn from a hat, rubbish collages, sound poems, noise music, several people reciting poems at once. Exchanges of mutual insults between audience and performers.

1920 Tzara’s “Vaseline Symphonique” was pelted with eggs.

For one exposition they rented a glassed-in court which could only be reached through a public urinal.

Inside, a young girl, dressed for her first communion, recited obscene poems. One art work had a skull emerging from a pool of blood-red liquid with a hand sticking out of it. Another wood sculpture had a hatchet attached to it in case anyone wanted to attack it. The police closed the show.

In January 1920 at Lugne-Poe’s Theatre de l'Oeuvre there’s a program with the following works: Tzara’s The First Celestial Adventure of Mr Fire-Extinguisher Andre Breton’s If You Pease Frances Picabia’s “Cannibal Manifesto” Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes’s The Silent Canary (in which a man teaches his compositions to a canary who sings them “beautifully and silently”) The evening concluded in an exchange of mutual insults between audience and performers.

A sequel evening including Mr FE’s Second Celestial Adventure and Tzara’s Vaseline Symphonique (described by one critic as a “cacophony of inarticulate sounds”) provoked

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In the face of all this destruction, how can there be a God? Are there no absolute values? Have people given up their personal responsibilities to blindly follow the likes of Hitler? the Collaborators? Where do our standards come from?

1. Philosophical basis Existentialism - (in text) reaction against Neoclassic idea that absolute truth can be identified. Existence precedes essence; we create ourselves as we go along, we define ourselves by our choices. Shift of concern from defining species to just defining yourself.

Sartre (b. 1905 - 1980) - popu-

lar in 50s and 60s - trying to draw logical conclusions from a consistent atheism. An odd optimism. Rejects authority of state and human institutions. The universe has no intrinsic meaning. This realization provokes despair from which we can only rise through choice and action, by accepting our freedom. Since our choice is all we have, we must involve ourselves in social, moral, and political action.

Camus - 1913-1960 - the world has no rational explanation; we are all exiles, aliens, strangers. Absurdity results from a gap between an inborn human desire for clarity and

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the public to throw eggs at the performers.

1923 Tzara’s The Gas Heart in which actors impersonating various parts of the head – the neck, mouth, nose, ear, eyebrow – spoke disconnected dialogue in tones of polite conversations provokes a pitched battle between supporters and detractors of Dada The Dadaists were such individuals that they fell out among themselves; many had become surrealists by the mid-1920s. Tzara and Andre Breton fall out in1922, and Breton publishes the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924).

4. Surrealism - 1925-1940, mostly in France.

Grows out of dadaism, but tries to base work on specific principles, where dada rejected everything First to use the term, surrealism. Apollinaire (1917) in his play The Breasts of Tiresias - a vaudeville-like spoof about women’s emancipation. Set in Zanzibar. A woman finds her life too confining and releases her breasts which float away like balloons. She becomes Tiresias. Her husband sets about creating a family, learns some way to create children and engenders 40,000 offspring. As this goes on, the people of Zanzibar (one actor) don’t talk but play music on pots and pans.

Great theorist - Andre Breton an orderly in psychiatric wards during WW I with a strong interest in Freud’s theories of the subconscious.

Surrealism as an attempt to make the subconscious mind the source of the artist’s most significant perceptions. Tried to create art where truth emerges when the superego’s censorship and the ego’s logic are neutralized. Automatic writing.

More successful in painting. Often mingled familiar with strange Dali’s melting clocks. Detailed objects in a dream landscape.

Lots of dissension. Does not survive WW II. II. Absurdism

order and the irrationality of the world. Cannot capitulate to absurdity; since there are no absolutes we must create our own order out of the chaos. Dies in a car crash.

Both Camus and Sartre wrote plays but they used traditional play forms. Absurdists reject these.

Eugene Ionesco - human beings struggling to retain their humanity in an increasingly mechanistic world, Samuel Beckett - human beings in limbo estranged from each other playing with hollow phrases, Jean Genet - underworld characters as heroes who refuse to follow society’s meaningless rituals, Harold Pinter - human motive as mysterious often menacing. (All these except Pinter are French; France had the extra burden of dealing with the Vichy government which collaborated with the Nazi occupation).

2. Characteristics: 1) A similar point of view concerning the absurdity of the human

Sometimes seen as rituals for which the original purpose is obscure.

Sometimes use Serial Structure which book identifies as a series of individual events offered as a single presentation with or without some unifying principle.

3) Plot illogicality is mirrored in language. Rational language debased and replaced by clichés and irrelevant remarks. Plays may be long on talk but short on logical meaning.

Non sequitur - Latin for it does not follow.

4) Repetitious or meaningless activities are substituted for logical action Realistic motivation replaced with automatic or inappropriate behavior. Often characters have no past background whatsoever and are depicted in very general terms.

Text notes contrast between Godot and Oedipus in terms of lack of past information in the former and exhaustive detail in the latter. Sometimes characters merge into other

ominous or violent.

7) Despite rejection of ordinary logic, structure, and theatrical devices the plays are trying to make intellectual, conceptual statements about the human condition. Their subject is human entrapment in an illogical, hostile, impersonal, and indifferent existence.

Waiting for Godot - 2 acts with identical structures. 2 drifters meet in an unspecified place to wait for Godot. They’re visited by a master and a slave who converse with them and depart. A young boy arrives to tell them Godot will surely come tomorrow. In the meantime, they try various activities (from vaudeville routines to intellectual debates to consideration of suicide) to stave off despair. When the play ends, they’re still waiting. Human beings as derelicts adrift in an impersonal universe, passing the time in circular exchanges. The 2 characters who rush around fare no better than the

condition. Plays as dramatizations of inner sense of the absurdity and futility of existence.

2) Rejection of traditional plot structure. Most traditional plots based on logical cause and effect which assumes an orderly understandable universe. Linear exposition, complication, climax, denouement. Absurdist plots intentionally invalidate this perception; often the only logic to a situation is that there is no logic. Plots can be circular.

characters.

5) Time and place are generalized. Plays occur in some symbolic, metaphorical location or in a void.

Consideration of the whole stage picture is necessary to understanding the play - the tree in Godot. Time is as flexible as a dream.

6) Traditional distinctions of dramatic form disappear. Serious subject matter may be handled with irony and comedy. Traditional comic subjects may be treated as pathetic

two who remain stationary. No revelations, no answers - the play just explores their condition. At least Beckett puts a couple leaves on the tree for Act II. Bert Lahr was in the first major US production. Steve Martin and Robin Williams did it in the late 80s.

Bertolt Brecht Bertolt Brecht - German writer, director, theorist. Career from 1920s-1950s. Founded The Berliner Ensemble. Had served as an orderly

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mid-40s in US, returns to East Germany after WWII starts Berliner ensemble Comes to despise codification of his theories - a good point theorists don’t want to be pigeonholed by academics and students Still he’s known for: Epic theatre Reaction against Wagnerian theatre where all elements are fused to create hypnotic effect on audience through empathic response (Gesamtkunstwerk). Says that’s fundamen-

tally passive.

Calls it culinary theatre where the audience turns its minds off and gobbles. Wants an audience to watch critically, to be ready to take action when the play ends Aristotle divides poetry into lyric, dramatic, and epic. The theatre has it wrong by following the narrow dramatic format. The Epic is preferable - larger scope, more characters, more content, loved Shakespeare Wants us aware that we’re watching a reflection of reality on stage not reality itself – that the real problems lie outside the theatre Theatre should not treat contemporary subjects in a lifelike manner, but should make actions “strange,” the process of sufficiently distancing the spectator from the play that he can watch it critically. translation a problem.

Verfremsdungeffect/Alienation - call attention to the make-believe world of the theatre.

Manipulation of aesthetic distance - Involve the audience emotionally, then jar them out of their empathetic response to make them think critically.

Wrote plays that took a dialectic approach to an important main point or argument. Plays constructed to lead audience through process of exploration and thought and get you to leave the theatre thinking Historification - plays set in other places and times to emphasize the “pastness of events.” If spectators had lived there, they would have taken positive action.

Tons of devices for an antiillusionist theatre where spectators are reminded of the play. Wagner hides the mechanics of production – Brecht flaunts them.

Songs where the lyrics are about moral degradation and the music is lighthearted to force the audience to consider both elements separately movie screens captions - each scene reduced to a basic main point, that point projected as scene title

slides chorus off-stage narrators to bridge gaps between scenes actors stepping out of character. half curtain a vista scene changes, all lights clearly visible fragments of scenery as opposed to complete sets musicians onstage with actors actors encouraged to present rather than imitate characters (in rehearsals Brecht would ask actors to say “he said” before reciting lines in order to encourage them to comment on, rather than live their parts no clear cut heroes Theatre not a synthesis; each element should make its own comment; in fact Brecht called for a radical separation of elements A didactic attempt to fuse Marxist thought and theatrical art. Marxism hopeful belief that economic factors will eventually force the formation of better economic and government systems, that each old system, as it becomes decrepit, will generate and succumb to its successor until perfection is achieved.

The world is changeable and theatre can help. Often his plays have an unresolved conclusion and demand that the audience “find out the end yourselves.” “Change human nature or the world, which one?”

The Threepenny Opera, Galilleo, Mother Courage, Good Person of Szechuan. Sometimes his plays are so good they disregard his theories Brecht - theatre as extroverted attempt to influence and describe societal forces Artaud - theatre is an introverted examination of internal, subterranean forces, concerned for the threatened psyche.

Antonin Artaud – Theatre of Cruelty 2. Antoin Artaud (1895-1948) - an actor and theorist, roots with surrealists - expelled by Breton, bouts of mental illness (believed that “international dark forces” sought to destroy him); institutionalized most of the last decade of his life. Wrote

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in a military hospital in WW I. Collaborates with Kurt Weill who was part of a trend towards simplicity in music that reacted against the complexity of Wagner, Strauss, and Mahler.

Influenced by Stravinsky’s (and others’) attempts to return to more simple music.

1915 – Stravinsky wrote a piece called Renard, a chamber opera intended to be played “by clowns, dancers, or acrobats, preferably on a trestle stage with the orchestra place behind it.” A devaluation of the virtuoso orchestra. Interested in music as film scores, dances, settings for poems and other texts and as training for amateur performers.

Stravinsky appearing at annual German music festival in Baden-Baden to promote new music (Neue Musik) in the 20s; Brecht and Weill worked there as well.

Flees Germany 1933; nomadic existence all over Europe, spends

The Theatre and Its Double - manifesto of mid-1930s. Theorist no success as director, interest in primitive culture, finding myths that resonate now Fascinated with primitive ritual, eastern theatre. Wants theatre to resume the centrality it had in ancient Greece in terms of religion, ecstacy The great myths of the Greeks, Christians, etc have lost their power to affect us sufficiently; new myths must arise out of something like a plague that destroys repressive social forms.”

Order must collapse; anarchy must prevail for people to give vent to all their buried disordered impulses. This should happen not in the street but in the theatre! Theatre can free us from our ferocity!

Artaud sought a “new language of theatre” that treated the audience as a mental patient in need of healing. The world is sick, a madman in need of shock treatment.

The theatre should serve a nearpsychiatric function for the whole society (not just individuals) Sees the world as hungry, and, since culture never fed anyone, wants to forge a culture whose force supplies needs as elemental as hunger – shamanistic.

Peoples’ important problems are buried in the subterranean reaches of their minds and cause internal divisions and divisions between people that lead to hatred, violence, and disaster. Argues for a theatre that does not “numb us with ideas for the intellect but stirs us to feeling by stirring up pain” Advocates a Theatre of Cruelty to break down the audience’s defenses, to force the audience to confront itself.

Use of moral (not physical) cruelty of stage versions of great dark myths to transform and heal the audience at the subconscious level; the canon is dead, “a cruelty which acts as well upon the spectator and should not allow him to leave the theatre intact, but exhausted, involved, perhaps transformed.”

To achieve something like a religious experience in which a true communion--the elimination of all divisions--is reached.

To operate directly on the senses, bypassing the rational mind, to create a new language of the theatre; “carried along by the paroxysms of a violent physical action which no sensitivity can resist, the spectator finds his overall nervous system becoming sharpened and refined.”

Concrete suggestions: replace theatre with remodeled barns, factories, airplane hangars; put audience in swivel chairs and surround them with action on catwalks, along the walls; rejects scenery in favor of hieroglyphic actors, ritualistic costumes, puppets 30 feet tall, musical instruments as tall as a man, “objects of unheard of form and purpose.”

Wants lighting to have a “vibrating, shredded” effect; in notes on The Cenci, he suggests that a scene set in a torture chamber should “give off the noise of a factory at peak production.”

Preferred nonverbal sound – yelps, barks, to create harmonies and dissonances, a language addressed to the senses (he felt most of us were impervious to rational discourse but “few can resist physical surprise, the dynamism of cries and violent movements, visual explosions, etc” To force the spectators to confront themselves and

through the process cleanse themselves and find harmony Art as the salvation of humankind Marat/Sade – an attempt to apply Artaud’s theories by Peter Brook and the RSC. Actors portraying inmates in 1812 portraying historical figures from 1801 in a play within a play written by the Marquis de Sade to enact the narcoleptic Charlotte Cordet’s murder of Jean Paul Marat, who you’ll remember from David’s painting of him dead in his bath.

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Revolution and the

Romantic

I. Edmund Burke on the Histrionics of Revolution n 1789, Edmund Burke, an enthusiast of the theater of David Garrick and Mrs. Siddons, observed with revulsion a new form of drama entering the world: the French Revolution and all that it foreboded.

"What Spectators and what Actors" he wrote to Lord Charlemont. A century later (in 1889) the theater critics of London, led by Clement Scott, were to react with at least comparable horror to the appearance of A

I

Doll House and, later, Ghosts, plays that rudely awakened the British theater from its long slumber. The two events though distanced by time, are thematically connected. Edmund Burke reverted to the metaphor of theater to describe the revolution in Paris while Ibsen's critics described the impact of his new dramaturgy in terms of social revolution. ("If any repetition of this outrage be attempted, the authorities will doubtless wake from their lethargy.") What occurred between those two dates was the evolution of a whole new

supertextual structure of references that created the terms of Romantic and post Romantic drama and of its critical reception. By 'supertext' I mean a visual and verbal vocabulary and iconography by which ideas of reality are shaped, promulgated and sustained which then becomes a public domain of cultural discourse drawn upon, often unconsciously, by thinkers and artists.

For Burke, the French Revolution was an onslaught upon church, state, rank, property, law and order, in the name of a principle he repeatedly

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c Theater

by Brian Johnston

"Culture is to set man free and to help him to be equal to his concept." (Friedrich Schiller, On the Sublime: 1801)

the revolution, therefore, still is of interest to students of the modern theater. Much of the power of the Reflections comes from its (often florid) use of the rhetoric of the older literature and theater: a rhetoric that was to be displaced, in the intellectual world at least, by the rhetoric of Romanticism. In the imagery of Burke's attack on the revolution, and in that of Thomas Paine's reply, The Rights of Man (1791 one might see an 'Hegelian moment' of one theatrical vocabulary in intellectual decline and new one struggling to be born.

Unashamedly standing for the existing social order, its power-base and its privileges, the wealthy proprietor of Beaconsfield admonishes: The body of the people must not find the principles of natural subordination by art rooted out of their minds. They must respect that property of which they cannot partake.

They must labour to obtain what by labour can be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavor, they must be taught their consolation in the final proportions

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derided: "the rights of man." This latter was an "armed doctrine" against which censorship and repression at home and ruthless war abroad were fully justified. He published his most famous attack upon the revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 and it quickly was hailed as "the manifesto of the counter-revolution." Reflections, still a favored document of reaction, presents an example of all that the radical theater of Romanticism had to fight. Burke's frequent and vivid use of theatrical metaphors to berate

of eternal justice. Of this consolation, whoever deprives them, deadens industry, and strikes at the roots of all acquisition as of all conservation Burke opposes "natural subordination" to "art" and so claims that revolutionary ideas, which the Romantics were to insist were rooted in those principles of 'Nature' present in every individual , were an artificial intrusion into the natural order of hierarchical society. Any disagreement with this divinely sanctioned social dispensation will be countered by force. "We have prisons strong as the Bastille, for those who dare to libel the queens of France." With brutal honesty Burke reveals conventional society's twin pillars of indoctrination and force which the rhetoric of its complaisant theater softened and glamorized.

But, reactionary though he was, Burke possessed a vision of society that profoundly was to become part of Romantic lore: that a nation is extended back in time and that much of its essential 'identity' inheres in institutions and traditions drawing upon loyalties that transcend critical reason. Burke repeatedly appealed to his readers' consciousness of this network of allegiances and traditions which the 'Cartesian' logic of the philosophes failed to understand. He wished to preserve for all time the hierarchical social structure of his own age, stopping the clock of social progress at the hour of his writing.

Romanticism was forcefully to reject this static concept of history and society, but it, too, became more and more aware that the existing social structure and its historically evolved institutions could not just immediately be dismantled. Writing in 1795 and after the Revolution had run much of its violent course, Friedrich Schiller, the first major dramatist of the new 'radical' theater, warned against risking the very theoretical (even if morally necessary) idea of society. "The great consideration is, therefore, that physical society in

time may not cease for an instant while moral society is being formed in idea.... The living clockwork of the state must be repaired while it is in motion." Schiller was concerned not to endanger, (by theoretically erasing), that variegated human identity involved, however imperfectly, in existing social traditions and institutions: a concern reflected in his idea of the theater as well as in his political and aesthetic writings. An awareness of an ineradicable substratum to our conscious human identity, instinctual, irrational and often existing subconsciously, is an essential Romantic 'deepening' of Enlightenment rationalism. It is the keynote of its art and writing making the Romantic theater radically different from that which preceded it. Evolving from Schiller, through Kleist, to Ibsen and Strindberg, this invisible, but powerful 'underworld' to our conscious selves will, variously, provide a 'counterpoint' to the drama of rational consciousness.

Burke adulated the state in terms more extravagant than Hegel would utter: but Hegel, while remaining loyal to revolutionary and Romantic aspirations, was to incorporate much of Burke's concept into his own philosophy of the state. Hegel, however, saw states as evolving by acknowledging and overcoming, through dialectical conflict, their institutional contradictions and he commended both Goethe and Schiller for depicting in their historical dramas, such as Egmont and Don Carlos, just such actions at times of dialectical transition within states. In the history of the world, in Hegel's view, a succession of such conflicts, from ancient times to the present, constituted the evolution within the world of the concept (or consciousness) of freedom: a concept that found its extreme political expression in the French Revolution and its philosophical self-understanding in German Idealist philosophy. Consciousness of historical process, of human identity

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as the result of long cultural evolution, anticipated by Vico, came into its own in Germany at this time. It is no accident, then, that a dramatist within this culture, Schiller, was to inaugurate modern tragedy as a tragedy of historical consciousness, of individuals, such as the Marquis of Posa in Don Carlos, not only trapped in historically limiting circumstances, but lured, fatally, into the hubristic attempt to influence the historical process.

For Burke, a current generation is a temporary custodian, only, of a culture whose humanity extends back far into the past. "People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors," he observed. Against Rousseau's concept of the 'social contract' as the expression of the general will at any moment of deliberation, Burke asserted: As the ends of such partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world‌ The conflict between the 'dead' past and the 'living' present (with 'Nature' as the increasingly ambiguous arbiter between them) constitutes the major argument of Romanticism, creating a wholly new theatrical symbology. For various reasons, neither England nor France were intellectually to develop this argument to its fullest, so that its more consequential life within Romanticism will proceed in Germany and Scandinavia and will at the same time beget a much more radical idea of the place of the theater within a modern society. The quarrel between Burke and Paine presents this conflict between past and present in embryo, as it were, with all its po-

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tentialities unguessed at: but perhaps this allows us to see the conflict with greater clarity.

Even the histrionics of revolution in the actual world were offensive to conservative ideas of social propriety. Like a neoclassical critic confronted by 'Gothic" or St端rm und Drang drama, Burke finds the French revolution, in its crass indifference to historical tradition, breaking all the rules of dramatic decorum: The most wonderful things are brought about in many instances by means the most absurd and ridiculous; in the most ridiculous modes; and apparently, by the most contemptible instruments. Every thing seems out of nature in the strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled with all sorts of follies. In viewing this monstrous tragicomic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror.

Absurd and indecorous, the innovative revolutionary 'dramaturgy' is the indication of deplorable new melodramatic tastes in the public: Plots, massacres, assassinations, seem to some people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution.

A cheap, bloodless reformation, a guiltless liberty, appear flat and vapid to their taste. There must be a great change of scene; there must be a magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouse the imagination, grown torpid with the lazy enjoyment of sixty years security....

The French Assembly itself (of which Paine was to become an actual, and Schiller an honorary, member) has become a troupe of low comedians, acting before the people "the farce of deliberation with as little decency as liberty. They act like the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience." As an example of the true old dramaturgy with which

to reproach these deplorable new histrionics, Burke now wheels onto the stage his tragedy-queen in the famous set-piece on Marie Antoinette. Now, the point about this passage is that it is the debasement of a once-living theatrical rhetoric that did proceed from intense loyalty to traditional institutions: to the monarchy, the aristocracy, the Church and the forms and ceremonies that maintained these roles in power. The piece is too long to quote in full and a selection of phrases cannot do justice to the rhetoric of sentimentality that Burke sustains for two pages; but the following passage will provide an idea of Burke's procedure.

The queen is one of those "beings made for suffering" and "surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision": I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh! What a revolution! and what an heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall!.... little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. - But the age of chivalry is gone - That of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex...

The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprize is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice it-

self lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

Thomas Paine was quick to see the Shakespearean origins of this rhetoric: "Mr.Burke... may continue his parody to the end, and finish with exclaiming: "Othello's occupation's gone!" The extent to which Burke 'reads' the revolutionary events as theater is truly remarkable, as a sample of his phraseology (on one page alone) reveals: "When kings are hurled by the Supreme Director of this great drama...if such a spectacle were exhibited on the stage.. .with such a perverted mind I could never venture to shew my face at a tragedy...the tears which Garrick or that Siddons have exhorted from me... poets have to deal with audiences not yet graduated in the school of the rights of man... in the theater men follow their natural impulses..."

The principles of the French revolution would be rejected by a decent audience "on the modern, as they once did on the ancient stage... no theatric audience in Athens would bear what has been borne.... In the theatre, the first intuitive glance, without any elaborate process of reasoning..." would serve to reject the 'cold' principles of the revolution. And Burke positively rejoices that British audiences have not been infected by the new intellect and its "process of reasoning": "We are not the converts of Rousseau; are not the disciples of Voltaire." Burke declares, sounding the familiar British note in intellectual matters. Burke's attitude represented what was to become, in the British theater, a political consensus amounting to self-censorship, abetted by the legal censorship of the Examiner of plays, and the patent (licensing) system. It not surprising, therefore, that serious drama - the drama of postrevolutionary consciousness - was to be absent from Britain for over a century after this was written, making the period, one of the most fertile

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he has taken of omitting some facts, distorting others, and making the whole machinery bend to produce a stage effect.

It is not just Edmund Burke's, but theatre's practice in itself, that Paine holds in disesteem. The Playwright, as it were by definition, cannot be a thinker: a doctrine also held by the heirs of Burke in the popular theater of the nineteenth century and of today. And yet Paine himself not only resorts to a rhetoric, but also employs metaphors that were to be taken up and developed by the new Romantic and radical theaters on the continent, especially in Germany and Scandinavia.

One of Paine's most vehement objections is against Burke's profound sense that the life of the present is governed by the past. Paine objects: Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the ages and generations that preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies... it is the living and not the dead, that are to be accommodated...I am contending for the rights of the living.. and Mr. Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living.

Paine shares the Rousseauist conviction that there is a natural humanity which historical cultures distort and to which we should revert. "...there have been upstart Governments, thrusting themselves between and presumptuously working to un-make man." The "natural subordination" that Burke appealed to, therefore, had in itself no authority for Paine who cited La Fayette's injunction, "Call to mind the sentiments which Nature has engraved in the heart of every citizen, and which take a new force when they are solemnly recognized by all: for a Nation to love liberty, it is sufficient that she knows it; and to be free, it is sufficient that she wills it." Nature and the general

will, in this Rousseauist tradition, are alone adequate guides to the creation of an ideal society. Such a conviction practically erases the past from significant political consciousness.

Paine seems to inhabit that innocent threshold to Romanticism when it still was possible, before the ghosts repossessed the modem mind, to proclaim, "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

It is an innocence that we might envy today. If, on the continent, the terms of the Burke-Paine dialogue were to undergo a tremendous deepening and extension, this extension was into sinister as well as exhilarating areas. Burke's sense of the 'irrational' continuity of a people's identity was to evolve into a 'cultural nationalism' of the right, in the lethal myths of 'blood, race, and soil' still plaguing our world, and in every way as disastrous as the abstract rationalist ideologies of the left that were to become its opponents on the cultural battlefield of Europe. It has been claimed that the second world war was fought between the left and right wings of Hegelian philosophy: which is to say that it was the quarrel between Burke and Paine taken to its limits.

Burke's belief in the binding power of tradition and Paine's rationalist rejection of it both were to develop into a far more profound dialectic in the hands of European dramatists and thinkers: in Schiller's, Kleist's and Hebbel's historical dramas, in Hegel's endeavor in the Phenomenology of Spirit and in The Philosophy of History, to recover the total past within the fabric of the present, in Ibsen's long struggle against the ghosts that haunt the life of the present, in Karl Marx's pronouncement in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, "The tradition of all the dead nations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. " This sense of the power of the past, for example, lies behind the action of Schiller's Don Carlos where the forces of renewal,

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in English literature, the most barren in serious dramatic output since the middle ages. As the reactionary theatrical consensus also sought the lucrative patronage of the great public ("giving the public what it wants") a native, serious modern drama could not emerge. For over a century both the popular and the fashionable theaters in London, while encouraging all the arts of the theater and of acting, fought against the evolution of a serious modern dramatic tradition.

From economic considerations, theater-managers feared alienating any section of the heterogeneous "great public" by the infiltration of alarming 'ideas' (let alone a sustained dramatic argument) into the theater. A serious modem drama in Britain could occur only if a dramatist emerged independent of the economic terms of fashionable London productions and intellectually capable of extending the limited terms of the Burke-Paine dialogue into the full Romantic-radical 'argument'. This inevitably meant it would have to be a dramatist from the continent who could be employed as a form of intellectual 'fifth column' against the establishment, and this goes a long way towards explaining the phenomenal success, among intellectuals in England, of Ibsen in the 1890's.

II. Thomas Paine on Burke's Histrionics Even though, in his rejoinder The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine derided Burke's "theatrical exaggerations for facts", his assessment of the value of the theater itself as an institution in an age of radicalism was as fatal as Burke's to the British theater's significant modern development. Both his non-conformist and his Rousseauist allegiances would encourage Paine to hold the theater in contempt. He writes of Burke's essay: I can not consider Mr. Burke's book in any other light than a dramatic performance; and he must, I think, have considered it in the same light himself, by the poetical liberties

of light and life and the future - Carlos, Elizabeth and Posa - are defeated by the forces of death and darkness, their symbolic opposites from the 'dead' past, of Alba, Philip and the blind Grand Inquisitor: a 'victory' for reaction that spells the spiritual death of Spain. Such a dialectical idea of reality, where, contrary to the Shakespearean vision, disorder is the healthy disquietude of the spirit, the condition of dynamic, evolving life, was to dictate the form, structure and content of Romantic and post-Romantic drama, leading to a new concept of tragedy. Instead of the 'closed' social, ethical and metaphysical structures with their punitive nemeses for the transgressor, within which Edmund Burke's vision was at home, Romanticism's tragic hero was the honorably restless transgressor whose rebellion called into question the entire structure of given reality and its sanctions. And not only was the structure of the present to be questioned and undermined: the past, too, could be seen as a subversive reservoir of values, tabooed by the present, whose resurrection could serve the cause of liberating our full humanity.

As incapable as Burke of developing this dialectic, Paine remains fixed to a facile rationalist rejection of the "musty records and mouldy parchments" of the past; as limiting, from its opposite perspective, as the massive complacency with which Burke defended the world-view that sustained his landed estate, Beaconsfield. Paine is scathing in his deflation of the outmoded theatrical rhetoric of Burke's traditional idea of society: When we see a man dramatically lamenting in a publication intended to be believed that, "The age of chivalry is gone! That The glory of Europe is extinguished for ever! That the unbought grace of life if any one knows what it is, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone!"

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form of revolutionary imagery. Following the 'close-up' image of the prisoner "sliding into death in the silence of the prison," there next is presented one of the most powerful counter-metaphors of the new dramaturgy, from Schiller to Eisenstein: the crowd storming the symbol of oppression. This already had become a central action of French radical melodrama, and had been imported onto the London stage in John Dent's The Bastille performed at the Royal Circus theater in 1789, before the reactionary authorities took alarm and banned all such 'Jacobinical' "repetitions of this outrage."

Jean Genet's ironic treatment of these contending symbologies in The Balcony (1956) contains, expands and sardonically concludes the whole Burke-Paine opposition: of the costumed symbols of endangered church, state, law and police, (the conventional roles of our socially sanctioned histrionics), rallying round the beleaguered and beautiful queen against the revolutionary crowd which storms the palace/ brothel. And this whole huge action is perhaps no more than a fantasy acted out by the brothel's patrons: a dream of the deluded historical/ political consciousness 'psychoanalyzed' by the most Romantic but disenchanted of twentieth-century dramatists.

Paine's isolated prisoner is linked to the tremendous scene which is communally heroic and seen not to "stand on itself" but shown to have "a close political connection" with the larger issue of the Revolution.

Action now embodies a radical idea by taking on symbolic figuration. Isolated situation and larger communal event can be connected in the way Eisenstein will juxtapose an isolated image, (e.g. the baby carriage tumbling down the Odessa steps), to the larger communal action heroically 'figured' in the Potemkin revolt. The parties are brought "man to man and contending for the issue" and there

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And all this because the Quixotic age of chivalry nonsense is gone, what opinion can we form of his judgment, or what regard can we pay to his facts?

Deriding Burke's histrionics, Paine writes: "His hero or his heroine must be a tragedy-victim expiring in show, and not the real prisoner of misery, sliding into death in the silence of a dungeon." Paine, here, 'releases' one of the powerful emblems of Romantic-revolutionary art and dramaturgy: one of the many images of spiritual and mental incarceration. The dungeon-rescue melodramas of revolutionary France, (or, e.g. Beethoven's Fidelio) were to make this emblem a common-place of Romanticism. As the metaphor of the prison expanded, so it came to comprise all forms of 'imprisoning' reality, (viz. Blake's "mind forg'd manacles") including the past of Europe, that confined the aspiring Romantic-radical spirit. And Paine seems to be smuggling in a new radical histrionics when calls to mind the figure of the people's uprising a radical image we can put beside Burke's reactionary set-piece on Marie Antoinette: The mind can hardly picture to itself a more tremendous scene than what the city of Paris exhibited at the time of the taking the Bastille, and for two days before and after, nor conceive the possibility of its quieting so soon. At a distance this transaction has appeared only as an act of heroism standing on itself, and the close political connection it had with the Revolution is lost in the brilliancy of the achievement. But we are to consider it as the strength of the parties brought man to man, and contending for the issue. The downfall of it included the idea of the downfall of despotism and this compounded image was become as figuratively united as Bunyan's Doubting Castle and Giant Despair.

Paine is trying to get his readers to 'see' in terms of a wholly new

is great suspense as to which of the contesting parties in this agon would gain the "prize." The scene also is symbolic, for it includes "the idea of the downfall of despotism" or "a compounded image... as figuratively united as Bunyan's Doubting Castle and Giant Despair."

Paine's reply to Burke, therefore, inverts the conservative's use of the metaphor of the theater. Burke had derided and deplored the new 'revolutionary drama' or drama of the revolution, by calling to mind the form and content of the older theater and the social hierarchy it sustained.

Paine in response invalidates, by deriding, the imagery of this older theater, (e.g. the tragedy-queen), and invokes images that were to be major weapons in the arsenal of the new revolutionary dramaturgy.

From the beginning, there had been a theatrical quality behind the manner in which the French National Assembly sought to define and appropriate the revolution as neoclassical drama: whereby the classical gestures of David's The Oath of the Horatii (1784) would be repeated in the sketches for the revolutionary The Oath of the Tennis Court (1791) And, as the riots attending conservative and radical productions on the Parisian stages demonstrate (including the struggle for the ideological control of the Comédie Française) the revolutionary battles often were to be fought within the theater buildings as well as on the streets. The revolution dramatized itself onstage as it proceeded.

III. Theater's New Radical Supertext If heroism was now an egalitarian and not an hierarchical undertaking, it could be represented either by a crowd, (e.g. Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, the plays of Hauptmann and Gorky, and Eisenstein's films) or, later, by 'ordinary' men and women within the drawing rooms of Europe. If modern culture involved a struggle between such individuals and their relation

to the past and present - which also metaphorically could be extended as a struggle between light and darkness, the living and the dead, nature and society, confinement and liberty, etc. - a whole new imagery gradually could be built up as a supertext for artists and writers to draw upon.

In the 'radical' theater this imagery would rival and transform that of conventional drama's imagery of the fearful disruption of hierarchical order with its attendant consequences of anarchy, madness, social destruction and natural disasters, where "chaos is come again" and where, as in Hamlet or Macbeth, restorative Order requires the destruction of the transgressive agents.

This transformation of rhetoric, imagery and metaphoric action, I believe, occurred between the time of Goethe and Schiller at the Romantic beginning of this modern tradition, and that of Ibsen and Strindberg near its Realist close. Realism itself, therefore, best is seen as an extension and subtilization of this Romantic supertext. Such a supertext could be extended and sustained, deepened and internalized, only for a limited period before it, too, would be exhausted or invalidated, and a new one would need to be found. This probably is what happens in earlier periods of the greatest extension of a dramatic supertext: e.g. the period between Aeschylus and Euripides or the period between Marlowe and John Ford. Such periods create what Roland Barthes has called "a second order semiotic system" or, in Erich Segal's term, a "megatext" of myth "whose sign-and-symbol systems are closely related with the central values of the culture, especially those values that express a supernatural validation, extension, or explanation of the cultural norms" But what might be new in Romantic-realist literature is the way in which this sign-and-symbol system created what Michel Foucault termed a 'counter-discourse' to the cultural

norms, not validating and explaining but challenging the conventional system. Foucault observes of this subversive 'counter-discourse': And yet throughout the nineteenth century, and right up to our own day - from Hölderlin to Mallarmé and on to Antonin Artaud - literature achieved autonomous existence and separated itself from all other language with a deep scission, only by forming a sort of 'counter-discourse' ... In the modern age literature is that which compensates for (and not that which confirms) the signifying function of language...

That is, the symbology of Romantic art sets itself up in opposition to traditional cultural norms: a feature of Romanticism and modernism with which we are familiar. This alternative system goes on the offensive, creating a militant and avant-garde art that opposes the presuppositions of the 'given' culture. As this avantgarde art (and thought) itself gains acceptance, it in turn becomes the traditional order that must be subverted, creating the endless dialectic of modern avant-gardism.

No doubt there was much that was subversive of traditional concepts in Greek and renaissance theater: Greek drama especially still can astonish us by its intellectual independence. But Romanticism, with the French Revolution as its central 'event', ("the master theme" of the age, as Shelley wrote to Byron) seems self-consciously to be setting up an alternative way of viewing human existence. As a "second order semiotic system", the Romantic supertext seems subversively to perform the function that Roland Barthes claimed for the ancient Greek theater: Associated with the "loosening" of work time, the theater installed another time, a time of myth and of consciousness, which could be experienced not as leisure but as another life. For this suspended time, by its very duration, became a saturated time."

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burg, in many aspects a 'corrective' to Romantic aspiration and subjectivity, at the same time is one of the most eloquent expressions of the Romantic temperament and its conflicts. It could have been written at no other time in European history.

And this Romantic dialectic was as apparent in political life, where the forces of reaction, avidly taking up Burke's Reflections as its manifesto, could form a 'Holy Alliance' against the 'pagan' forces of European revolution. Georg Brandes, in his Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature, portrayed all of significant modern European literature as nothing but variations upon the central ideological conflict of revolution versus reaction. This omnipresent kulturkampf provides a unity of metaphoric reference behind the diversity of such dramatists as Byron, Shelley, Schiller, Kleist, BĂźchner, Wagner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw and others.

By whatever different routes and approaches, they were led to the same arena of cultural conflict.

IV. Friedrich Schiller: The Concept of a Modern Theater The consciousness of this conflict gave dramatists not only a new idea of the function of the theater in society (explicitly avowed by Schiller and Wagner) but also of their theater's subject matter, with its attendant rhetoric, mythology and imagery. And, of course, the dramatists inhabited a period in which such a supertext was sustained and extended by other cultural forces: by historical, social and scientific developments; by philosophy, poetry, the visual arts, music and the novel.

Theater stood at the center - often a storm center - of this universe of discourse, reflecting its conflicts with particular vividness.

In the quarrel between Burke and Paine, therefore, we see the origins of a much wider and more involved dialectic. The function of theater which Burke espoused, of fortifying emotional support for the con-

ventional values under attack from critical reason, was to continue and to flourish up to the popular theater and entertainment of today. In England, the Examiner (Censor) of plays soon made sure that revolutionary or 'inflammatory' plays were denied the stage. Under the Bourbon government of France, the censorship that discouraged the emergence of a serious drama encouraged the well-made-play, with its insistence that trivial chance, not ideology or critical reason determined historical events. Self-censoring Hollywood and Broadway today as effectively banish any serious (truly critical) presentation of reality. This is popular and fashionable entertainment's primary political function. On the other (left) hand Paine, following Rousseau, seemed to see no worthwhile function for the theater at all in the new society that the revolution augured. Even where the left has accepted a cultural function for drama, as in many socialist countries, it often has severely limited the theater's freedom of expression: which is only another form of the anti-theatrical prejudice. But in Germany writers following Schiller, who acknowledged Rousseau as a mentor, set about recreating an alternative, and liberating, theater of which even Rousseau and Paine might have approved. And, until Ibsen, it is only these German dramatists who allow us to see the potential in Romanticism for a major modern dramatic art.

The radical redefinition of the function of art is set out in Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind. (1795) Sharing in the project of the French Revolution - the first revolution, according to Hegel, that had as its aim the re-creation of humanity - Schiller claims for art a central role in that process of re-creation. The aesthetic sense, or sense of beauty, proceeds from reason, yet, unlike analytical reason, does not sacrifice the sensuous. From his reason, aesthetic man understands the extent of his

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In classical drama, it would seem, this "time of myth and of consciousness" existed side-by-side with and complemented the 'work time' of quotidian existence. Even the tragic reality revealed as underlying everyday experience could be reconciled, though toughly, with that experience.

In Romanticism, on the other hand, this "saturated time" challenged and undermined, by revealing as deeply contradictory, the presuppositions (historical, ethical, philosophical) of our given world. The saturated time of Romantic myth hostilely opposed itself to the given world and evolved such militantly modern 'mythopoetic' forces and entities as Schiller's mytho-historic idealism, the idea of an "alienated" world; of subjective versus objective realities; the dialectic; the Weltgeist; the Zeitgeist; the struggle between past and present, darkness and light; the 'yearning' vertical natural scenography that Romantic drama shared with painting. Themes and concepts such as imprisonment and liberation; 'emperor and galilean'; the 'third empire of spirit' or Nietzsche's Ăœbermensch, Dionysos and the Crucified One, and so on, all ideologically extended the rhetorical vocabulary of Romantic and realist literature and art. Edmund Wilson noted how 19th century German literature "retained and developed to an amazing degree the genius for creating myths."

The Romantic imagination, born out of the consciousness of history, can challenge the Greek in the fertility of its myth-making, clarifying for the artist the nature of his/her quarrel with the age and the counter-forces that needed to be summoned for combat. The new element in Romantic drama as in Romantic philosophy is that of a multilayered ideological conflict. The artists may differ radically from, and even oppose, each other, but they will share a mutual awareness of the battle that is being fought or the malaise that needs to be cured. Kleist's The Prince Hom-

social and historical alienation. Man "comes to himself out of his sensuous slumber, recognizes himself as Man, looks around and finds himself - in the State. An unavoidable exigency had thrown him there before he could freely choose his station; need ordained it through mere natural laws before he could do so by the laws of reason."

Awakened by reason (e.g. Kantian philosophy) such an individual could not accept Burke's bland injunction to consider the consolations of eternal justice a sufficient compensation for the loss of earthly justice. But neither could such a citizen consider the whole existing fabric of traditional society as merely a handful of mouldy parchments shackling freedom of action within the present. Rational justice, such as Paine's, was too prone to offer a simplified account of our humanity, an abstract 'natural man' which idealistically ignores much of our human nature. "It will therefore always argue a still defective education if the moral character can assert itself only through the sacrifice of what is natural; and a political constitution will still be very imperfect if it is able to produce unity only by suppressing variety." In this manner, the disciple of Rousseau implicitly reproaches his master. Rousseau, like another enemy of the theater, Plato, had adulated Sparta. In his fine political essay, The Legislation of Lykurgus and Solon, Schiller held up Athens, with its social and intellectual freedoms, as representing a superior model of a human community. And Athens, above all, had emphasized the primacy of an aesthetic education in which the theater held the most honored place. It was this idea of the theater that the Romantic dramatists sought to recreate in modern terms, as a means for recreating, also, human society.

To vastly simplify Schiller's subtle and closely argued program in The Aesthetic Education, extending

over twenty seven 'letters', we find that art can perceive in the mode of 'beauty' and 'play' the nature of our true freedom, while retaining the full range of our sensuous nature and its conflicts. At the same time keeping its activity free of utilitarian ends, art is able, even in an unfree world, to maintain the idea of human freedom that must be attained in time. Art learns philosophy (Schiller was deep in the study of Kant while writing the Letters) and mediates between, on one side, the abstract ideas of truth and freedom which philosophy rigorously formulates and, on the other, the 'sensuous' world of men and women who can comprehend and enjoy the liberation offered by an aesthetic (pleasurable) expression of these ideas. Drama, above all, would be best placed for this function and Schiller consciously set about creating just such a new kind of drama, one which would lead audiences through palpable (sensuous) theatrical metaphors to a perception of the conflict or play of universal ideas (the ideological argument) that lay behind them. In such a concept of the new drama, the adequate modern playwright would necessarily, in Eric Bentley's formulation, be a thinker.

The Romantic artist's journey of self-exploration (the 'self' as a problematic potentiality, only: a call to 'self-determination') would simultaneously be an exploration of the 'world' which Romanticism saw as also awaiting its fulfillment. It was a conviction of Romanticism that the subjective conflict within the individual can find its extension in the objective worlds both of society and of 'nature', making modern drama, from Schiller to Strindberg at the same time deeply intensive and ambitiously extensive. It is for this reason, and not for any predilection for the 'picturesque', that symbolic scenes and landscapes are so important to Romantic and realist drama.

This extension of the individual's

inward drama into the cosmos is far more than the 'pathetic fallacy' that attributes to natural phenomena human emotions and volitions. In his essay On the Sublime Schiller argues that it is only from a contemplation of the sublime and terrifying aspects of Nature that an individual comes to suspect the 'demonic freedom' within him-or-herself: ...no sooner has free contemplation set him at a distance from the blind assault of natural forces - no sooner does he discover in the flood of appearances something abiding in his own being - then the savage bulk of nature about him begins to speak quite another language to his heart: and the relative grandeur outside him is the mirror in which he perceives the absolute grandeur within himself. Fearlessly and with a terrible delight he now approaches these ghastly visions of his imagination and deliberately deploys the whole force of this faculty in order to represent the sensuously infinite, so that even if it should fail in this attempt he will experience all the more vividly the superiority of his ideas over the highest of which sensuousness is capable. The sight of unlimited distances, and heights lost to view, the vaster ocean above him, pluck his spirit out of the narrow sphere of the actual and out of the oppressive bondage of physical life. A mightier measure of esteem is exemplified for him by the simple majesty of nature, and surrounded by her massive forms he can no longer tolerate pettiness in his mode of thought.

One thinks of the intense disorder of an Ellida Wangel set within the huge landscape, in The Lady from the Sea; the inner disorder finding its only adequate expression through the drama's extensions into sea depths and mountain heights. Romantic disorder is the necessary disquietude that impels consciousness through alienation towards more adequate concepts of liberation. This creative

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interplay between concept and metaphor, in which natural objects became the only adequate symbols, and to which each artist and thinker contributed, made Romantic drama's supertext one of the richest there has been. The dynamism of the Romantic supertext would encourage the development of a major dramatic tradition.

After Schiller, the concept of liberation was to undergo many modifications: but every avant-garde dramatist (or movement) has felt his or her idea of the theater to be a form of aesthetic liberation from forms of false consciousness: a form of secular salvation. For the disciples of Richard Wagner, devotional journeys to Bayreuth became the equivalent of medieval pilgrimages to a holy shrine, the aesthetically sanctified ground where only the work of the Master would be performed.

Bernard Shaw proclaimed that the modern theater had taken the place once held by the Church in society, and that the line of modern dramatists resembled the line of prophets of the new revelation. Shaw, pleading for an Ibsen theater that would perform only the Master's works "like Wagner's ring, in cycles..." added, "I think Ibsen has proved the right of the drama to take scriptural rank as one of the major prophets of the modern Bible." There has been no more ambitious idea of the theater since the drama of Athens. Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine would have been staggered by the claim.

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Tricky Turnings of the Screw(ed):

The Poetic, Ethical, and Mystery of Self-Reflexive

Erotic

Fakery and Illusion

Perhaps one of the first proto-potboiler textual moments in the Western tradition, a scene that overtly involves the narrative delights of mystification and detection, occurs in the midst of The Homeric Hymn to Hermes when an exasperated Apollo, searching for his stolen cattle, confronts a crime simultaneously carried out and covered up by a master trickster, a hermetic thief skilled in the art of directly committing indirections marked by a surfeit élan of self-conscious duplicity. Hermes not only spreads sand over the ashes of his cattle-killing sacrificial fire, but also, by ensuring that the cattle walk backwards whilst being led from their place of abduction to their doom, and by attaching twigs and leaves to his feet, creates a trail of deceptive signs that confounds even the divine reading skills of the master augur Apollo. As does any gifted mystery writer, Hermes crafts enigmatic tracks, signs pointing to a veiled meaning, that signify not only a particular crime but a particular style of subtlety and indirection, a delight for its own sake in the imaginative inventiveness of deception. By the end of the Hymn, Apollo’s firm sense of outraged bafflement (the straight-arrow Apollo is after all a god of rationalistic and traditionalist propriety and truth-telling) has, in and through the adventure of “reading” Hermes’s self-reflexively deceptive “texts,” softened into a humorous delight in and appreciation for Hermes’s inveterate thefts and fabrications.

by Brian W. Nowlin

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uch has been made of The Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Lewis Hyde, in his Trickster Makes This World, a book that wonderfully takes up trickster in both its content and its meandering manner of proceeding, offers a detailed reading of the Hymn as a way of demonstrating (with some help from the semiotic theorizing of Umberto Eco) that the process of signification, and with it of imaginative reflection, is possible only because signs, in order to function as semantic markers that can point to something, are inherently duplicitous. As Eco puts it: “[S]emiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used ‘to tell’ at all”. I shall not reduplicate here Hyde’s provocative reading of the Hymn and its semiotic implications, but I begin with Hermes and his Hymn as a way to invoke a mythological meta-narrative that concerns itself with the delights of detection, the joys of following alluring tracks into the realm of inventive deception-these joys and delights, and more specifically their overt figuration within several literary and cinematic narratives, will be the major concern of this essay. The Hymn, by making thematic the act of interpretation in a context of mystery and deception, reveals a truth about all mystery narratives: both the mystery writer’s and the villain’s delight in duplicity rub off on attentive readers.

Lured through page after page, we enjoy the adventure of being tricked because on some level such trickery reminds us that our firm convictions about the world (what exactly the golden cattle of Apollo signify, as it were) can be played with, for such convictions are themselves the result of inventive fabrications spun in those hermetic boundaries or thresholds

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novella could indeed itself be seen as a mystery text, for a whole host of reductive-minded critics have attempted to solve what really happens at the country house of Bly: What exactly did Miles say at school? Are the ghosts real? Is the narrator to be trusted? Despite ever-blossoming psycho-social and psycho-sexual readings (among others), however, James’s novella, which above all in its rhetorical and structural frame underscores the drama of uncertainty essential to writing and reading a mystery story, remains elusive, provoking but never satisfying the urge univocally to prove the precise nature of the events the story unfolds.

As Jonathan Levin points out, critics who attempt to solve the mystery of the novella in a reductive fashion fall into James’s trap, fixing in psychologisms the dynamic flow of relations that is the reality of the story. The ultimate mystery revealed through a sustained engagement with The Turn of the Screw is that the semantic center of the novella is, paradoxically, an “indeterminate suffusing fringe”. James himself acknowledges as much: “The study is of a conceived ‘tone,’ the tone of suspected and felt trouble, of an inordinate and incalculable sort-the tone of tragic, yet of exquisite, mystification” (James 1185). Suspected and incalculable mystification is the intuited secret of James’s ghost story, an incontrovertibly ambiguous mystery hiding within a facade of graspable, solvable reality. Again to quote from James’s commentary: “[The Turn of the Screw] is a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily caught (the ‘fun’ of the capture of the merely witless being ever but small), the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious” (1184-85).

Jaded, disillusioned, and fastidiousdoes this not describe the typical literary critic?

As the above remarks of James demonstrate, in the case of The Turn

of the Screw the true perpetrator of deceptions, of semantic crimes, as it were, is James himself, acting as a kind of authorial trickster who has the impertinence to locate the typical plot of the mystery story not within his novella but without, in the interpretive act of reading in which readers become detectives seeking to delve between the lines of a prose style that-and this is the deceptive mystery of the story-is always already taking place between the lines.

James’s story of mystification thus reveals only in a negative sense the delights of mystery narratives: the delight, really, is all James’s, for it is only marginally inscribed within his narrative itself. Despite all of the critical attention paid to it, therefore, and despite the fact that it is a better critic to its critics than vice versa, The Turn of the Screw does not, like the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, figuratively enact the narrative delights of mystification and detection. A further turn of The Turn of the Screw is needed, and this is especially so if the full poetic, ethical, and erotic components of narrative deception are to be evoked.

In what follows, then, I shall take up, guided by the example of the Hymn, aspects of one literary narrative and two cinematic narratives that themselves offer a better critical commentary on the delights and complexities of mystery stories than does most literary criticism. The three narratives discussed-Homer’s Odyssey, Orson Welles’s F for Fake, and Radley Metzger’s The Lickerish Quartet (alternately released as Erotic Illusion and Hide and Seek)-are not typical works of mystery or detective fiction per se, but rather what might be termed meta-mysteries, works that inscribe within their textures self-reflexive exercises in fakery and illusion, and thereby make thematic the dynamics and implications of narrative mystery. In essence, these three works come at mystery from the inside out, for the paradoxical at-

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where the culture’s dominant narratives are interwoven with our own.

Mystery narratives, in other words, are essentially provocative games of epistemological striptease, and in their inherently poetic, ethical, and erotic proddings, they inspire us to re-imagine the world.

The Hymn teaches another lesson: Hermes is ultimately granted a full place of honor with the rest of the Olympians not despite but because of his trickery. Unfortunately, the hermetic trickery of mystery narratives has not typically achieved the same recognition vis-à-vis the Olympus of institutionalized literary criticism, which throughout much of its history has relegated mystery and detective fiction to the realm of kitsch and popular entertainment. To be sure, there are important exceptions to the haughty dismissal of mystery narratives: Michael Holquist, for example, argues that “what the structural and philosophical presuppositions of myth and depth psychology were to Modernism (Mann, Joyce, Woolf, etc.), the detective story is to Post-Modernism (RobbeGrillet, Borges, Nabokov, etc.)… [and] if such is the case, we will have established a relationship between two levels of culture, kitsch and the avant-garde, often thought to be mutually exclusive”. Nevertheless, even when mystery narratives are taken seriously by literary critics, their delicate delights are all too often mangled by the heavy-handed theoretical machinations of criticism.

A prime example of a mystery story that remains infinitely more interesting than its criticism is also a rare case of the undeniable conjoining of the mystery genre, high art, and sustained critical attention: Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, a brief discussion of which will serve to highlight in an emblematic way literary criticism’s failure to do full justice to the allure of mystery. The story of the history of the various interpretations of James’s

tempt to detect or decode a known fake or a willed illusion is inseparable from the effort directly to apprehend the duplicitous, inventive energies that animate all mysteries and that both create and disrupt the boundary markers that constitute a culture’s particular sense of reality at any one time. The mystery of mystery-in other words, of the motivations for and the delight in the kind of duplicitous trickery that problematizes established notions of reality-is at issue in these works. In each case, the reader or viewer is put on the trail of that most self-conscious of criminals, that master of constructed lies and fraudulent fakery: the actor.

Whether it is the ever-turning, ever-

troping Odysseus in the poem that bears his name; or art forger Elmyr de Hory, biographical hoaxer Clifford Irving, and directorial trickster Orson Welles (and others) in F for Fake; or the mysterious young woman who spins-and/or is spun into-erotic illusions in The Lickerish Quartet, these characters and the works in which they trickily move illustrate that in the human realm to act is to some extent always to act: we are all fakers putting on a show, particularly when we are being most “authentic,” for the nature of human consciousness is such that action is largely always already imitation of action; human action is fundamentally imitative or poetic. As George Burns once put

it: “The most important thing about acting is honesty; if you can fake that you’ve got it made” (Davis xviii).

These works, by making thematic the tricks and games at the heart of mystery’s allure, illuminate the way that more typical, traditional mystery narratives challenge us to detect a mode of duplicitous acting-perpetrated by characters and authors alikethat, though it may be aberrantly criminal in the case of most mystery tales, has affinities with what we are doing in our actions (particularly our verbal actions) all the time: we improvise the truth because our minds are fundamentally trickster-based, immersed in a play of signs that can tell the truth only because they si-

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this journal, I just may be able to get away with such brazen boundary crossings (only a hermetic alchemy of the trickiest variety could facilitate the happy commingling of Homeric studies and Metzger’s artsy erotica).

Regardless, part of the method of my madness is to demonstrate that “mystery” as a locus of critical inquiry is far more fecund than typically realized. The topic of mystery not only raises fundamental semiotic questions about the meaning-making propensities of human consciousness and linguistic practice, but also calls into question all too-sharp distinctions between “high” and “low” forms of art. Indeed, as the following discussion of F for Fake in particular indicates, such critical distinctions can always be undone by mysterious tricksters who recognize that all art is born in a murky realm where the line between high and low, or real and fake, is hard to draw. All of the works treated in this essay delight in subverting the kind of distinctions that many critics, as assessors of artistic “value,” rely on for critical commerce.

A further admission: the three sections that follow are not meant to be argumentatively definitive. Rather, in their trickster-inspired improvisation and digression, they intend solely to evoke-not to prove-the poetic, ethical, and erotic components of self-reflexive narrative deception.

Much further work undoubtedly deserves to be done on this topic, but it is hoped that what follows will at least prod readers to return to-or to visit for the first time-the delights of the works discussed, perhaps seeing them with new eyes: the twinkling, winking eyes of trickster!

Narrative Deception is Poetic: Polytropic Odysseus Certainly one of the most charming scenes in all of Western literature occurs in Book XIII of Homer’s Odyssey when the mortal Odysseus and the goddess Athene share a moment of mutual deception and recogni-

tion that leads to a kind of tour de force celebration of the wily art of lying. Herself physically disguised in the form of a young shepherd, Athene provokes in Odysseus one of his typical verbal disguises: unknowingly deposited at long last in his native Ithaca, Odysseus claims to be a recently-arrived, booty-carrying Cretan fugitive who has killed a son of the king of Crete. In response to this characteristically Odyssean lie, Athene irrepressibly smiles, fondly reaches her hand out to Odysseus, and instantaneously likens her body to a woman “[l]ovely and tall and skilled in glorious tasks”. She then says, “Cunning would he be and deceitful, who could overreach you In various wiles, and even if a god should confront you.

Versatile-minded wretch, insatiate in wiles, you would not Cease from deceits though you are in your own land, Or from fraudulent stories that from the ground up are dear to you.”

In praising Odysseus’s versatileminded wiliness, Athene celebrates the homecoming of Ithaca’s long-lost leader, the precise kind of leader that, twenty-six hundred years or so after Homer, Oscar Wilde hoped would reappear in the late nineteenth century: That some change will take place before this century has drawn to its close we have no doubt whatsoever. Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based on memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar.

(Wilde, by the way, would certainly have been willing to transform himself, Athene-like, into either a young shepherd or a lovely and tall

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multaneously whisper the truth’s lie.

To recognize the inherent semiotic duplicity of human endeavors, and to “act” (in both senses of the term) accordingly, is, as these works will show, both an inherently ethical and a fundamentally erotic endeavor inseparable from the creative play of trickster, and trickster’s ways can never be fully circumscribed within or commodified by the semantic formulations of institutionalized values.

An admission: To group an ancient poetic text with two avantgarde films from the 1970’s is overtly to disregard critical conventions that would rigidly honor differences of culture, artistic medium, and genre, but since trickster rules

woman in order to return society to its lost leader-liar.) Whether cultured and fascinating liars are desirable political leaders (we have recently endured eight years of an administration of liars, though they have not at all been cultured and fascinating) remains an open question, but undeniably Odysseus possesses what Wilde calls the “wit to exaggerate” and the “genius to romance,” and it is just this ineradicable Odyssean wildness-the penchant for weaving facts and lies together into an indissoluble whole so as to convey an indirect meaning-that most delights Athene. As Lewis Hyde claims, “[Athene’s] smile is the facial gesture of those who knowingly occupy the space of trickster’s lies, for mind itself is amused by these reversals” .

Athene’s delight begs two questions in the context of this inquiry: What exactly characterizes Odysseus’s many verbal and physical disguiseshis lies-and what does this ancient portrait of “the space of trickster’s lies” have to do with mystery?

To a large extent, all of Odysseus’s tricky turns involve the most practical and pressing of motivations. In the above-mentioned example, the wily son of Laertes launches into a tall tale claiming that he, supposedly a Cretan fugitive, killed a son of the king of Crete because this son “‘wanted to deprive me of all my booty / From Troy, for which I had suffered pains in my heart, / Passing through the wars of men and the troublesome waves, / And because I was not graciously willing to serve his father / In the Trojans’ land, but led other men as companions’”. Such a web of confabulation exemplifies Odysseus’s lying tales at their most utilitarian: in directly telling the young shepherd that he killed Ortilochos because Ortilochos was after his loot, Odysseus indirectly warns the shepherd about just what kind of fate awaits “him” if he, too, should make an attempt to obtain some of Odysseus’s booty. Not be-

ing absolutely certain at this point if the shepherd is a friend or a foe, Odysseus proceeds, in the indirect manner that his lie facilitates, both to feel out the shepherd and thus test the shepherd’s potential either to help or to hurt him, and to warn the shepherd that he, Odysseus-disguised-as-a-Cretan, is a dangerous man. Whether confronted by the ravenous cyclops, the faithful swineherd, the unfaithful suitors, the alluring (and equally-wily) Penelope, the befuddled Laertes, or others, Odysseus relies on lies and disguises that provide a highly practical “cover” to allow the returning king to pursue various material, political, ethical, and sexual ends. At the same time, though-and this is the paradox of Odysseus that has alternately delighted and repulsed poets, dramatists, philosophers, novelists, and classicists down through the ages-Odysseus’s lies betray an irrepressible delight in the activity of verbal and physical deception that at times seems the height of impracticality. What Eva Brann calls Odysseus’s “sheer exuberant mendaciousness” frequently lands Odysseus in a world of trouble and gets his ever-dwindling crew killed.

Pursuing the practical game of deception with an often impractical zest that makes of lying a subtle form of art; simultaneously revealing and concealing his identity by crafting mysterious personas, the unmasking of which is identical to the homecoming that completes the epic-Odysseus is at once a master criminal in and a skilled teller of an alluring mystery tale! And yet, for readers of the poem, as for Athene, the mystery is transparent: we can appreciate-or not-Odysseus’s polytropism, but we are not taken in by it. Thus, when we as readers witness the various reactions to Odysseus’s intertwined mystifications and revelations, we experience the heart of mystery from inside the criminal’s or the writer’s perspective. The

scene with Athene overtly figures within the poem itself this privileged position readers enjoy from which to appreciate the aesthetics of narrative deception, and thus Athene’s delight is itself delightful because it mirrors our own. If The Turn of the Screw achieves a form of unsatisfied highbrow titillation because one can never beat James at his own game, the Odyssey allows readers to beat Odysseus at his, just like Athene.

Regardless, the precise nature of Athene’s delight (and ours) deserves further attention, for to engage the mystery of such delight is to delve into the inherent delight of mystery.

The delightfulness of Odysseus’s inventive deceptions has to do primarily with what might be termed the poetics of trickery. Seen through a broad symbolic perspective upon the poem’s overall action, Odysseus, in donning his various physical and verbal disguises, is continually imitating the very act of imitation, in other words, Odysseus’s actions are imitating the poetic act. Indeed, what Odysseus is most often doing in the Odyssey is using language to construct likenesses-the very activity of poetry understood in a broad sense. By so overtly figuring the figuring capacity of human beings, Odysseus reveals the fundamentally poetic nature of human action, something that can only be glimpsed when constructed likenesses are seen as likenesses, a mode of vision that requires suspending sharp distinctions between true and false, real and imagined. To appreciate with delight, rather than to misapprehend with befuddlement, Odysseus’s mysterious self-presentations requires just such a suspension.

The various lies employed by Odysseus in Ithaca are appropriately described as “Cretan” both because Odysseus falsely adopts a Cretan identity and because his lies contain facts about the true Odysseus that are precariously balanced between truth and falsehood-one recalls here

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said. And then he had this purpose in his heart, / Such a man was he for deliberation and fighting. / Speaking in a little voice, he addressed a speech to me: / ‘Silence now, lest someone else of the Achaians hear you.’ / And he held his head on his elbow and said his speech: / ‘Listen, friends, a godly dream came to me in my sleep. / We have come too far from the ships. Would there were someone / To go tell Agamemnon…

That he might urge on more of the men from beside the ships. / So he said. Then Thoas rose up… Hastily.

And he took his purple mantle off / And ran to the ships. In that man’s clothing I / Lay gladly.”

On the surface, Odysseus’s lie is a delightful tale that captures the true-to-life resourcefulness and trickery of Odysseus; additionally, though, Odysseus’s lie presents a poetic likeness of the precise kind of attentive, resourceful kindness and hospitality that Odysseus is hoping to provoke in Eumaeos. Eumaeos undoubtedly approves of the anecdotal tale offered by his bedraggled Cretan guest, and the particular nature of his approval warrants attention: “Old man, the story [ainos] is excellent that you have told.

And no profitless word did you speak improperly.

So you shall not want for clothes or for anything else, Of the things that befit a long suffering suppliant one meets.”

Strikingly, Eumaeos’s response to the story does not center upon its realistic evocation of the trickery of his beloved master, which seemingly would have convinced Eumaeos that the Cretan had truthfully encountered Odysseus; rather, Eumaeos’s response ostensibly ignores the specific content of the story altogether and instead directly praises the beggar’s manner of telling it-“no profitless word did you speak improperly.”

As Louise Pratt claims, “It is not entirely clear whether Eumaeos believes Odysseus’ story. His calling it

an ainos may indicate his awareness of it as a fiction with a concealed message; this is what the word ainos means elsewhere in archaic poetry”. In rewarding the Cretan beggar for a story well told-“‘So you shall not want for clothes or for anything else’”-Eumaeos may well also be responding to, and indeed imitating, the particular likeness that the tale has presented to his imagination. In marked contrast to the suitor Antinoos, who utterly fails to see in the beggar’s/Odysseus’s tale of a painful reversal of fortune a likeness to his own impending fate, Eumaeos possesses the kind of perspicacious double vision that can apprehend the events of a tale as simultaneously presenting an imitation of an action, a likeness best expressed indirectly.

In sum, in Odysseus’s poetic ainos and Eumaeos’s response to it, poetry and action merge. Both poetic “acts”-one spoken, one manifested in imitative human action-are in and of themselves pleasurable activities, and are also mediums through which to negotiate the most pressing and practical of concerns.

Odysseus’s lies ultimately reveal that human thought and action, based predominantly on narrative constructions in which sharp demarcations between truth and fiction prove impossible, are inherently poetic in the broad Aristotelian sense of poetry as imitation of action. Poetic imitation does not occur as a secondary embellishment upon an unchanging ground of truth or authenticity; rather, imitation exists all the way down, which is merely another way of saying what innumerable thinkers, from Nietzsche to Heidegger to Ricoeur, have long claimed: all human truths are relational, metaphorical. To engage human truth with eyes open to its metaphorical layers is to negotiate human thought and action in a poetic mode, a mode of play that avoids the high seriousness and the desperate insistence upon belief associated with literalistic modes of

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the Cretan Liar paradox in which Parmenides, a Cretan, affirms that all Cretans are liars. As Eva Brann puts it, what Odysseus says to his loyal swineherd Eumaeos, for example, is “both fact and deceit, factual deceit”, for though the people and places in Odysseus’s tales may be factual, and though the events of the tales may themselves reflect, often through a kind of Freudianesque displacement, the true events of Odysseus’s adventures, the tales themselves are patently false in a literal sense. The second tall tale that Odysseus, disguised as a lowly beggar and preparing to sleep outside in the cold, relates to his swineherd deserves special attention, since it is a selfreflexive story in which the very trickery involved in the telling of the tale is directly embodied in the content of the tale itself: if within the tale the figure of Odysseus tricks Thoas into leaving his mantle behind for the freezing Cretan, in telling the tale the freezing Odysseus, who in Eumaeos’s eyes is the same Cretan from within the story, in a sense “tricks” Eumaeos into giving him a mantle: “Would that I were in my prime and my strength were steadfast / As when we prepared and led our ambush up under Troy! / Odysseus led [Odysseus has the wonderful chutzpah to include himself as a character in his fictionalized story!], and Menalaos, son of Atreus. / I was third leader among them… [W]hen we arrived before the city and the sheer wall, / We lay around the town in the thick brushwood… And as the North Wind fell off, a bad night came, / A freezing one… Then the other men all had mantles and tunics… But I, when I went, left my mantle with my companions, / Foolishly, since I thought I would not freeze in any case… I shouted out then to Odysseus…

‘Zeus-born son of Laertes, Odysseus of many devices, / I shall not be long among the living, but the cold / Overcomes me. I have no mantle…’ So I

awareness that would demand that semiotic signs tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Eumaeos’s appreciative delight after listening to Odysseus’s ainos, and his resulting acting out of this delight, stem from the inherent joy of a mind becoming aware of its own motions: to recognize a likeness as a likeness is to discover that thinking is not so much a serious business as a form of play that by its very nature proceeds by indirections.

Athene’s smile is of the same nature as Eumaeos’s appreciation of a story well told, but the goddess’s reaction takes place essentially on a meta level: she does not so much glimpse a particular likeness in Odysseus’s story as in the habitual activity itself of inventively fashioning likenesses. Athene, that is, recognizes Odysseus, which is to say that she recognizes trickster, whose native land is a groundless ground of shifty deceptions that do not cease even when faced with the divine. Athene’s affectionate

response suggests that to use language to construct and understand likenesses, especially about the most important things-death, love, human community, relationship with the non-human-is really great fun, something that professional thinkers and scholars often fail to admit. At the same time, to link Athene’s sly smile to Eumaeos’s ethical kindness is to claim what moralists of all stripes consistently deny: recognizing the playful slipperiness of human truth does not lead to utter moral relativism and depravity. Quite the contrary, as the next section, especially, will show.

Narrative Deception is Ethical: Orson Welles’s F for Fake From Athene’s smile we move to the smile of delight that, in the early moments of Orson Welles’s masterpiece F for Fake, appears on the face of the little boy whom Welles, as narrator-editor-magician-charlatan, has solicited as a partner/spectator for a bit of old-fashioned sleight-of-hand: transforming a key-not symbolic of

anything, Welles insists-into a coin and back again. Taking Welles at his admittedly shifty word as to the anti-symbolism of the key, attentive viewers nevertheless cannot fail to intuit that this overall scene, like the encounter between Odysseus and Athene, is symbolic of the delights of self-consciously entering into the tricky realm where sharp lines between truth and fiction dissolve into fluid traces of that magical semiotic space-both true and false at oncewhence human meaning originates.

As Catherine Benamou, in a brilliant essay about F for Fake, writes: The “magic” of cinematic realism, like the magical act itself, requires the complicity of the viewer who, if only she or he will suspend her or his disbelief, will share in the pleasure of illusion: like the child in the train station in the opening sequence of F for Fake, who from the grin on his face may even have already seen the key trick Welles is about to perform (or at least knows that Welles is about to perform a

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commingling, on the small Spanish island of Ibiza, of two master fakers: the infamous art forger Elmyr de Hory, and his biographer Clifford Irving. Primarily utilizing documentary footage from a never-completed film about Elmyr by French filmmaker and art dealer Francois Reichenbach-who turned the project over to Welles, and who appears as himself in F for Fake-Welles crafts a portrait of Elmyr in Ibiza basking in the social frisson generated by the increased public knowledge of his exploits, and speaking openly about his career as an art forger who gleefully dupes the so-called experts and thereby exposes the fallibility-one might even say the “fakery”-of their expertise as arbiters of artistic authenticity and cultural/monetary value. In painting-and selling to art dealers and museums-fakes masquerading as genuine paintings by Modigliani, Picasso, Matisse, and others, the Hungarian de Hory, a shadowy figure and Holocaust survivor who turned to art forgery, we are led to believe, out of economic necessity, has become “the great faker of the twentieth century… a modern folk hero for the rest of us, who have a bit of larceny in ourselves but simply don’t have the courage or the opportunity to express it.” These words, spoken in F for Fake by Elmyr’s biographer Clifford Irving, a fixture in Elmyr’s Ibiza social scene and a frequent interview subject in Reichenbach’s footage, are deeply ironic, for present in the editorial interstices of F for Fake, if not in most of the actual documentary footage the film employs, is the knowledge that Clifford Irving, shortly after writing Elmyr’s biography (entitled Fake!), successfully duped the publishing world-for a time-into believing that he was meeting with the reclusive Howard Hughes and writing what would be an official Hughes “autobiography.”

In other words, the biographer of a known art forger had turned out to be perhaps the most successful liter-

ary con man of the twentieth century.

Irving’s status as a literary faker allows for a mise en abyme of fakery that Welles exploits as the guiding structural principle undergirding the overarching hall of mirrors that is F for Fake. At one point undoubtedly feigning (faking) physical and intellectual dizziness, Welles as narrator ponders: “If you can buy the notion that Cliff Irving turned to forgery before he turned to Elmyr, then I guess you can keep right on through the looking glass and believe that his book about Elmyr is a pack of lies… that Fake! is a fake, and Elmyr himself is a fake faker.”

If the intertwined mutual fakery of Elmyr and Irving serves as the ostensible subject of F for Fake, the exponential fakery of Orson Welles looms large both thematically and formally. Within the film Welles acknowledges and revisits the past trickery of his career, for example telling viewers that he got his start in the theatre in Dublin, Ireland after duping the powers that be at a famous theatre into believing that he was an accomplished Broadway performer. Further, F for Fake examines and visually recreates the mass hysteria generated by Welles’s infamous War of the Worlds broadcast (the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the radio). Above and beyond these-and other-overt references to his past work, however, F for Fake makes Welles’s trickery explicit in its insistent manner of raising the curtain on its own processes of composition. As indicated above, the piquant coincidence that the biographer of a faker is himself a faker is not necessarily present “in” most of the documentary footage used to tell the story of Elmyr and Clifford Irving.

In other words, in his own appearances in the film, Irving is not overtly presenting himself as the perpetrator of the Howard Hughes autobiography hoax. And yet he is, thanks to the magical trickery of Welles’s editing, which can lift the scenes of

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“trick” with that key) yet takes delight in seeing it done somewhat as anticipated.

F for Fake overtly invites viewers inside the “pleasure of illusion,” the allure of mystery-an invitation figured formally in the film’s frequent forays inside Welles’s editing room. Indeed, F for Fake-manically splicing together bits and pieces of documentary interviews of various personages and narrated sequences featuring Welles himself with footage of Welles editing all this material together-is a film predominantly about the activity of constructing a film. In this sense the film’s overt content, fakery-treated through a mosaic of interpenetrating angles-mirrors its form: the process of filmmaking itself is revealed as a form of fakery, a tricky improvisation, an inevitable imitation of the truth even in the case of a supposedly objective form like a documentary.

Since its initial release in 1973, F for Fake has resisted straightforward categorization, poised-or rather tottering-somewhere between documentary, fiction, and biopic. Is a movie that playfully disrupts easy distinctions between fact and fiction itself fact or fiction? Welles himself called it “a new kind of film” (Rosenbaum), and film critics have described it using various “metacritical” terms, most helpfully, perhaps, labeling it an “essay” or “essay film”: “The deliberate blurring of the boundary between actual and staged events is facilitated by Welles’s choice of the essay format, which, as Timothy Corrigan has pointed out, is itself located aesthetically ‘between the categories of public realism and formal expressivity, and so becomes a critical wedge within the very idea of filmic categorization’”.

Leaving aside for the moment debates concerning how precisely to come to terms with the film’s formal complexity, it can be claimed with certainty that F for Fake sets out to tell the tale of the remarkable

Irving being interviewed about Elmyr out of their original context and into a new story. An obvious example of this technique is the frequent rapid juxtaposing of segments of separate interviews of Irving and Elmyr respectively to facilitate the illusion that the two master fakers are actually speaking and responding to one another! By these and other meansand really, it must be seen to be believed-Irving is essentially faked by Welles into revealing his fakery, even though all he actually does in the film is talk about Elmyr’s fakery! By literally seeing Welles manipulate-cutting, splicing, rewinding-and indeed watch the very cinematic narrative they themselves are in the process of watching, viewers of F for Fake, like the little boy at the beginning of the film, and like Athene in the Odyssey, become self-aware of the inventive deceptions being perpetrated upon them. In sum, in F for Fake the camera and the editing boothand the portly trickster who controls them-are revealed to be the greatest fakers of all, and the self-reflexive game they play is possible precisely because of the willing, indeed the joyful complicity of the viewer.

Much more could be said about the overdetermined fakery of F for Fake. Of note especially is the trickery of Oja Kodar-Welles’s real-life mistress, whom the camera delights in cinematically fondling throughoutwhose sexy manipulations of both Picasso and viewers of the film further illuminate the dynamics of artistic and cinematic fakery. There is also the complex matter of how Welles both reveals and conceals himself throughout the film, a process not as straightforward as it may at first appear in the context of a film that encourages an awareness of its own trickery. As Jonathan Rosenbaum writes: “In some ways, the self-mocking braggadocio-such as ordering steak au poivre from the same waiter carrying off the remains of a gigantic lobster-becomes a kind

of mask, while [Welles’s] deepest emotions and intentions are hidden away in his own pockets, just as firmly as our own private investments remain in ours.” Regardless, for our purposes here it is most crucial to point out that, in playing with the topic of fakery, F for Fake seeks to investigate the particular allure of deception. What fascinates about hoaxers and forgers, those inventive criminals who, like Hermes in his Hymn, sign their works indirectly and thereby shatter the naïve belief in semiotic innocence? To be put on the trail of known fakes-Elmyr, Irving, Welles himself-is to search out the processes operative in the construction of narrative deceptions, in other words, of mysteries. Does the joy, the allure of this search purely have to do with awakening to the mind’s creative motions and thereby discovering one’s poetic moorings within a realm of semiotic trickery?

Welles’s film in fact suggests that we are fascinated by fakes not only because they prod us to epistemological discoveries that are inherently pleasurable, but also because the epistemological discoveries that fakers trick us into-waking up to our status as meaning creators and not merely passive recipients of meaning from above-carry with them an ethical dimension that actually helps us to lead our lives. Despite what the Bill Bennetts of the world may believe, there is such a thing as a trickster ethics, and it emerges quite provocatively in F for Fake, making this most playful of Welles’s films not a solipsistic exercise in jouissance but a fundamental affirmation of human nobility.

F for Fake fairly obviously celebrates a kind of folk ethics that undermines the official moralitiesultimately bowing down before the altars of commerce-present in capitalism’s dominant narratives. Hence Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving, in the context of the film, can undeniably be seen as trickster heroes

exposing the capitalistic commodification of art that takes place in the “art market” with the active collusion of the so-called experts who serve the function of guarantors of cultural capital. The experts, used (though paid for it) by the institutions that profit from the buying and selling of “art,” are precisely, because of the illusive objectivity by which they judge authenticity, what allow fakers to profit by means of inventive, albeit criminal, forgeries. As Welles says in the film: “We hanky-panky men have always been with you. What is new: the ‘experts.’ Experts are the new oracles: they speak to us with the absolute authority of the computer, and we bow down before them.”

And then, slyly: “They are God’s own gift to the faker.” Confounding the experts requires not buying into the absolutism of their evaluations, their reliance upon a strict dichotomy between “good” and “bad” or real and fake art. Thus, Clifford Irving speaks in the film as a paradigmatic anti-expert trickster when he claims that “the important distinction to make when you’re talking about the genuine quality of a painting is not so much whether it’s a real painting or a fake; it’s whether it’s a good fake or a bad fake.”

Beyond this obvious ethical concern to foreground the frequently manipulative business of art, however, F for Fake, particularly through its formal complexity and the resulting active complicity of the viewer, fosters an ethics of what might be termed sophisticated tricksterism.

The exponential fakery of the film provokes viewers to be on the lookout for narrative deception everywhere they look, even-and perhaps most especially-where they may least expect it, for example in the discourses of those, such as film directors, who pose as authoritative purveyors of meaning. To be an ethical trickster is to be able to out fake the fakers, a crucial skill when confronted with fakers-media conglomerates, cultural

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individual human artist and that thus remains fundamentally anonymous.

Perhaps, F for Fake subtly suggests, the nobility of the artistic impulse is most authentically present in the tricky lies of the fakers rather than in the official truths of the institutions that, for the sake of their profits, deny altogether the trickiness of art.

Regardless, in a world without divine consolation, where the one certain fate for every artist and his or her work is eventual oblivion, the enigmatic master trickster Orson Welles affirms above all else the strangely impersonal process, always exceeding our attempts intellectually to define or materially to commodify it, of artistic creation: Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for

or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash: the triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes.

A fact of life... we're going to die.

“Be of good heart,” cry the dead artists out of the living past. “Our songs will all be silenced-but what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.”

Narrative Deception is Erotic: Radley Metzger’s The Lickerish Quartet.

At last we come to Radley Metzger, the great Euro-inflected American director of erotic films who, despite generally being underappreciated, is starting to get his critical due. For a moment, thoughand this is not really a digression, for our hermetic steps are only seemingly backwards-let us move

in demonstrating again and again-can never be univocally “signed” by any

a few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must fall in war

from one island realm to another, from Ibiza to a fantasy island where

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institutions, presidents-who have real, dangerous power at their disposal. F for Fake, as one continuous exercise in out faking the fakers, is thus a virtual manifesto of trickster ethics. Crucially, though, the film demonstrates that a sophisticated tricksterism that promotes an inveterate skepticism of all truth claims does not inexorably plunge into nihilism and despair, for at the heart of F for Fake is a spirited affirmation of the nobility of the human struggle for meaning and of the transpersonal artistic impulse by which this struggle takes place. The very center of this affirmative dimension of the film is certainly the justly famous Chartres scene, in which Welles eloquently celebrates the redeeming power of art, a power that-as trickster delights

dwell the Phaeacians, whose king says about them: “‘Feasting is dear to us always, the lyre, and dances, / Changes of clothes and hot baths, and the bed’”. These Phaeacians are indeed the perfect ancient analogue to the jet-setting sophisticates, leisurely exploring the lush intellectual and emotional complexities of stylish sensuality, who typically inhabit Metzger’s late-Sixties, earlySeventies billowy cinematic terrain.

Amongst them, in the Homeric telling, sits Odysseus, trickily maneuvering his way between Calypso’s island and the general direction of Penelope, and the Phaeacians treat him to what is most likely the first instance of sophisticated erotica in the Western tradition: the blind singer/ poet Demodocos’s song about the adulterous affair between Ares and Aphrodite. In addition to being a tale of and about erotic titillation-this aspect of the story is undeniable, as attested to by innumerable moralistic and feminist readings through the years construing it as, respectively, a bit of ancient immorality (or morality by negative example) or a distasteful example of patriarchal prurience-Demodocos’s song is also a story about detection, detailing the seamier side of Holmes and Watson, as it were (elementary pornography, my dear Watson). As the story goes, the infallible eye of Helios shines down upon the illicit carnal couplings of the luscious Aphrodite and the martial Ares, and soon Helios informs the cuckolded cripple Hephaistos about his wife’s infidelities. Hephaistos retreats to his workshop and devises a subtle bronze trap intended to catch Ares and Aphrodite red handed: “‘He spread bonds all around the bedposts in a circle / And he spread many out from the rafters up above, / Subtle as a spider web, that no one would ever see’”-the ancient equivalent of hiding in the closet with a video camera. Pretending to be off on a journey to Lemnos, Hephaistos then leaves his wife alone at

home, knowing that inevitably Ares will soon take advantage of his absence. Ares does, and in the middle of the goddess of love (quite literally), soon finds himself trapped with her in Hephaistos’s crafty bonds.

A triumphant but clearly livid Hephaistos then summons all the gods to come see what the “‘bitch-faced maiden’” and the “‘destructive Ares’” were up to. The gods arrive-minus the goddesses, who stay at home out of shame (further evidence, it is claimed, of the perspective of purely patriarchal desire behind this tale)and irresistibly burst into laughter in response to the lurid scene. Amidst the hilarity, which only increases Hephaistos’s rage, Apollo asks his brother Hermes if he would like to be caught in such strong bonds and sleep with “‘golden Aphrodite.’” “‘Far-darting Lord Apollo,’” Hermes responds, “‘I wish that might come about! / Three times as many endless bonds might hold me fast / And all you gods and all the goddesses might look at me, / But I should be sleeping alongside golden Aphrodite’”. When Hermes speaks what many a god was no doubt thinking but would never admit-trickster is known to do this-the gods’ laughter exponentially increases.

The tale goes on, and there is certainly more to it than I have indicated here, but our hermetic digression reveals-especially when the oftenignored narrative frame of Demodocos’s song is kept in mind (Odysseus and his Phaeacian companions sit listening to it, “delighted”)-that eroticism and detection, sex and mystery, are often embedded (pun intended), and this will be a major theme in our examination of Metzger’s The Lickerish Quartet (1970). Further, Hermes’s wonderful willingness to enter imaginatively into the scene before him is a reminder of the aesthetic delights of eroticism (a major formal and thematic component of Metzger’s work). That academic discourse does not often concern itself

with these delights is something that Zach Campbell attests to in his review of The Lickerish Quartet: Sexually explicit cinema has existed practically as long as any other form of cinema. Culturally, we've done a decent job commending “art” that borrows from “pornography”consider the work of Catherine Breillat or Bernardo Bertolucci or Pier Paolo Pasolini. But what about pornography that grasps for art? Radley Metzger, director of such erotic milestones as Therese and Isabelle, The Lickerish Quartet, and Score, exemplifies this oversight perfectly.

Ah, the sui generis delights of a Radley Metzger film! If F for Fake is difficult for critics to locate in any particular genre, Metzger’s entire oeuvre stubbornly resists straightforward categorization. A lesbian coming-ofage story that unfolds with a brooding, Proustian charm (Therese and Isabelle); preternaturally hip Europsych stylings framing an adaptation of a Dumas novel; a meta-exploration of the thrills of viewing artsy erotic films, set in the Balsorano Castle in Italy (The Lickerish Quartet); a campy, idyllic, and still progressive fable of sexual awakening (Score); the wit and panache of a chic merging of pornography and Pygmalion (The Opening of Misty Beethoven)how precisely locate within any critical fiction of genre these works by a man whom Richard Corliss famously referred to in the early ‘70’s as the Aristocrat of the Erotic? Metzger’s films, filmed with luxurious care (often with the help of master cinematographer Hans Jura and art director Enrico Sabbatini) and scored by the likes of the Italian maestros Piccioni and Cipriani, aim at what has been aptly called an “art-porn hybrid aesthetic” that mediates between the high culture status of the foreign art film and the rough-hewn, low-cult material of the sexploitation feature.

Metzger’s work can be seen in terms of its attempt to dissociate from its sexploitation neighbours through a

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tery are effectively turned inside out and thereby made explicit (here, “explicit” in a double sense). Unlike detectives in or readers of a typical mystery story, the three members of The Lickerish Quartet’s stylishly cosmopolitan family-a husband and wife and their (or rather her) son-all know what they are looking for-a revelatory encounter with the scintillating femme fatale they have stumbled upon at the carnival, who may or may not be the same woman featured in the stag film they had been watching just previously-and yet, for a variety of interpenetrating psychological reasons, they have great difficulty in finding it. In the end, their mutual attempts in effect to merge fantasy and reality-and is not an attempted merge between the fantasy and reality of “whodunit” precisely what propels readers through the pages of a traditional mystery story?-only momentarily succeed, but each family member (and, I cannot resist adding, the member of each family member) is left with a newfound awareness that the forever incomplete nature of one’s erotic and epistemological conquests-the fleeting moments of feeling that one has deliciously stepped fully into realityis cause not for despair, but for celebration: to discover that one must forever re-discover what seems most succulently real in life is simply to reawaken to the wonder that one is still, profoundly and mysteriously, alive. As the wife (Erika Remerg), late in the film, puts it: “People don’t stay the same from one minute to the next. Things change. That’s the only thing you can count on.” She says this with a sense not of despair, but of wisdom, as if vivaciously aware that the unavoidability of change is the very wellspring of desire, physical and otherwise.

The Lickerish Quartet, certainly the only erotic film ever to begin with a Pirandello quote as epigraph, expertly negotiates, through a meta-exploration of the adventure of

watching erotic films, the complex intermingling in lived life of what can only be abstractly differentiated as “illusion” and “reality.” From the outset of the film, when the three family members watch a grainy, black-and-white movie featuring couplings at once sleazy and enticing, viewers become aware that what each character sees-on and off the screen-is conditioned by psychological “screens” of fantasy that ceaselessly reflect images of the real.

As the film-and the film within the film-progresses, the movie projector, essentially a fourth member of the family, becomes in its increasing unreliability an emblem of the subjective factor at work in the various characters’ individualized interpretations of what they are seeing.

Eventually, the sexualized body of the mysterious woman from the carnival, which both does and does not seem to be that of the main starlet in the film-within-the-film, becomes the locus in relation to which each character attempts to experience as incontrovertibly real his or her individual fantasy of reality.

If the literally and metaphorically interpenetrating fantasies at play in the film are markedly Freudian-a primal scene (established via at times near-subliminal flashbacks) and its resulting Oedipal drama undergird the psychological libido of the family-their expression is Jungian in its imagistic creativity and visionary flavor: the husband’s frequent daydream of a wartime rendezvous between a virile soldier and a vulnerable prostitute, the mother’s verbal confabulations of owned and disowned guilt and innocence, and the son’s spiritual visions of the incorruptibility (despite the most graphically rendered of travails) of Saint Margaret. The perennially sexy dialectic of innocence and depravity is the pivot upon which the characters’ fantasies turn, and differing momentary resolutions of this dialectic structure the respective scenes of sexual fulfillment between the mysterious woman and

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process of cultural distinction, mapping the move from underground to aboveground along an axis of sexual, and cinephile, taste. Shot in Europe with European actors on lavish and “cultured” locations, Metzger’s cinema… attempted to school its public in the erotic pedagogy of continental life. (Gorfinkel) Or, as Richard Corliss, essentially saying the same thing sans the academic jargon, writes: Metzger’s movies were classier [than sexploitation fare], more literate, better-made, and blessed with women who looked as if they could communicate desire without carrying disease. Although there was less explicit sex per frame in his films than in those of his competitors, they usually had an erotic atmosphere that made a single raised eyebrow more highly charged than an entire William Mishkin gang bang.

Certainly for those of us raised in an era when erotic cinema connotes unimaginative sleaze, discovering Metzger's films is nothing short of a revelation, a passport to a more “innocent” time when an intelligent exploration of cinematic eros could be embraced with uninhibited aesthetic satisfaction.

“I wasn’t hiding,” the mysterious blond-and brunette-woman (played

by Silvana Venturelli) at the evershifting center of The Lickerish Quartet’s playfully phantasmagoric high modernism tells the man, the husband (Frank Wolff). “Maybe not,” he responds, “but I was looking.” And later, upon meeting atop the ramparts of the family’s castle the man’s young-adult stepson (Paolo Turco), the woman coyly asks, “Did you come up here because you thought I wouldn’t find you, huh?” The boy: “Because I knew you would.” As these two fragments of dialogue reveal, The Lickerish Quartet, like the other “meta-mysteries” examined here, presents a case of a self-reflexive game of deception, a self-aware dance of epistemological hide-andseek, in which the delights of mys-

each member of the family. In a scene that cannot fail to resonate with those of us surrounded by too many books and ideas, the husband and the enigmatic woman etymologically seduce (you must see it to believe it!) one another in the library/study, their passion rising precisely to the extent that it can transcend the tendency toward verbal, intellectual representation that is so overtly present in the locale. After ecstatically “overwhelming” a youthful body that is simultaneously innocent and corrupt, the man regains his physical and emotional virility. The son and the mysterious woman couple outside in an Edenlike atmosphere of pastoral innocence and natural beauty that no doubt mirrors the son’s belief in the innocence of Saint Margaret, herself a visionary substitute for his mother. Nevertheless, the spirited depravity of the young couple’s actions functions to displace a too-sharp dichotomy between innocence and experience, the precise strictly-held dichotomy responsible for both the son’s resentment toward his stepfather and his escapist visionary flights. Since the scene overtly frames the sun as lighting the young couple’s lovemaking in the same manner as the light of the projector animates the interpretation-riddled movie screen-additionally, the crickets’ hum imitates the hum of the projector-it suggests that the son himself glimpses, as if watching himself in a film, the significance of his newfound innocent depravity and depraved innocence. The mother, finally, seduces and is seduced by the woman in a scene of tender, transformative bondage whereby she is simultaneously punished and forgiven for her repressed licentious past. After these scenes of exquisite, albeit ultimately elusive (and perhaps illusive), fulfillment, the mysterious woman disappears, perhaps back onto the movie screen whence she seemed to comeindeed, a movie screen into which everyone in The Lickerish Quartet is fated to disappear.

Lest the above analyses seem to construe the erotic scenes in The Lickerish Quartet as formulaically transpar-

ent in their symbolic resonance, as if the film’s eroticism functioned merely as a thinly-veiled exemplum of pop psychology, it must be affirmed that the moments of erotic apotheosis in the film are actually overdetermined with significance in a manner that resists definitive interpretations even as it irresistibly invites them. Nevertheless, there is undeniably an organic unity present in each erotic scene that sets it apart from the others and gives it a particular aesthetic, atmospheric “feel.”

Metzger himself, when discussing the use-or lack thereof-of cuts in filming and editing a scene, acknowledges the differing aesthetic principles operating in different scenes: “[I]n The Lickerish Quartet, when the boy and girl are on the grass: we were trying to get a pristine, Garden-of-Eden atmosphere, and a cut would have been jarring. But in the library scene… you have a lot of cuts. It was an older man with a young girl, and the cutting helped suggest the effort and the spirit in the spine of the scene. I try not to work from a chart; the scene itself will tell you what kind of treatment you should give it”.

Regardless of the particular interpretations they invite, then, Metzger’s stylized erotic scenes-“it is style itself that is being eroticized”-above all prompt viewers to recognize that eroticism is inherently aesthetic, mediated by intertwined mental and imaginative deceptions and recognitions, shot through with interpretive gestures that are in some mysterious sense inseparable from physical passion. In the self-reflexive realm of Pirandellian porn that is The Lickerish Quartet, sex is epistemological and epistemology is sexy, for Metzger’s film reveals that if negotiating the riddled interaction of fiction and reality is poetic and ethical, it is also erotic. The deceptions self-consciously enjoyed by a consciousness embracing its inseparability from the truthful fictions of trickster are erotic in as much as they inflame the mind with a desire to transcend its habitual stances and certainties. By in effect figuring such a dynamic of Platonic eros in the flesh, Metzger reverses the

direction of Platonism as it is usually conceived: physical passion is not sublimated into transcendent fulfillment, but just the reverse. The Lickerish Quartet thus demonstrates that actual sex-dirty and complicated as it is, and yet fraught with innocence-is the embodiment of a psychic, subjective factor that we take for granted only because sex, like the young bombshell in the film, so completely intermixes fantasy and reality.

As Gorfinkel writes: These works move against the realist ontological function attributed to pornography as the limit of the representable… Metzger’s images arrest the motion towards representational truthfulness of the sexed body in favour of presenting sex as aesthetically mediated or dematerializing. Many examples of this tendency can be seen in the texts, in which the mise-en-scene serves to make manifest a psychic function or process of desire, arousal and pleasure.

Such a mode of aesthetic eroticism, inseparable from a self-aware engagement with the delights of deception, is present in the experience of reading even the most typical of mystery yarns: one enjoys the epistemological chase, especially when it moves into tricky nooks and crannies that turn out differently than one expected, and looks forward to the revelatory climax, but one knows all the while that the end of the book will not fully sate desire but only momentarily deflect it from its hunger for another book. Inevitably, further mysteries beckon.

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Alfred Jarry 1873 –1907 French writer

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The Beach b

the Paving Stone I

n the slogan, "the beach beneath the paving stones" from the Days of May, students and militants expressed the spirit of freedom and autonomy that they were proposing and actively living out. The beach corresponds to the notions of festivity, freedom, spontaneity, selfdetermination and creativity that lie beneath the paving stones of postindustrial society, which is bureaucratic, repressive, and manipulative, maintains order through violence, encourages non-participation and passivity, and has a tremendous capacity for absorbing protest.

The events of the Barricades, where a festive spirit reigned and collective decision making and animated discussions took place; the formation of action committees which solved problems as groups and aided striking workers and their families; the instances of anonymous collective creation of wall posters at the Ecole des Beaux Arts-these provided the crucible of action where

themes and structures of the May Movement could be tested. There was a briefly-lived utopia, which took the form of an "anti-society" or "counterculture" opposed to existing social relations and proposing new ones.

This activity influenced and has been carried on in practice by a number of French theatre groups, usually organized on collective lines, long after the temporary utopia was squelched and replaced by "normalization's of the situation.

May, 1968 was a radicalizing experience for many theatre artists. Reacting with the May militants against a society where culture is an item for consumption, politicized theatre people rejected the structures, premises and conventions of bourgeois theatre such as a psychological approach to characterization and the performer/ spectator relationship expressed in the traditional theatre building. Committing themselves to political engagement and to the critical function of art, they sought alternative means of working and forms of organizing

and expressing themselves.

Following the example of May, emphasis was placed on the individual actor's creativity and on collectivity as a method of creation and organizational structure. The May militants' attack on institutionalized culture prompted serious efforts to reach a new, popular audience that was not being addressed by the TNP or the decentralized theatres, these having become the ground for serious middle class drama. A renewal of interest in the forms and techniques of popular theatre with its clear, direct and entertaining language for expressing the people's point of view emerged. Popular forms, improvisations and experiments with space also helped to establish new relations between spectators and performers-relations that encouraged the spectator's creativity and participation, rather than his passivity. Most important, as an attempt to promote change and raise consciousness on the most immediate level, productions were developed

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es

around problems in daily life.

May made the questions cleartheatre artists responded in a variety of ways. But before examining how the concerns raised in May entered the work of specific theatre artists, it is necessary to establish something of the theory and history of the May Movement.

Student protest, frequently focused on the issues of university reform and American aggression in the Vietnam War, was an international phenomenon by 1968. That year agitation in the form of student strikes, demonstrations, and manifestations were prominent in Germany, Italy, Japan, Czechoslovakia and the United States as well as in France.

Finding that it was not unusual for protest to be met with violent repression, students began to see the links between their own experience with the "system" and national independence struggles in Cuba, Vietnam, and other "underdeveloped" nations.

The May Movement was largely the struggle by these young people for

characterized by play and the realization of desire. In their 1966 pamphlet they predicted that ". . . revolutions will be festivals or they will not be, for the life they herald will itself be created in festivity." Like Lefebvre, they considered the re-integration of festival into daily life to be "the final cause of the revolutionary plan." The spirit of festival was actively sought by the May militants. Jean Louis Barrault describes the situation at the Odeon Theatre during its occupation by the militants (May 15th): "The square outside had become a regular fairground: a man with a Monkey, A man with a bear, guitarists, Rubbernecks and more or less camouflaged ambulances. Slogans all over the walls. "At the Sorbonne, (occupied May 13) a piano was dragged out into the courtyard. On the barricades a feeling of festivity and unity prevailed, especially on May 10th.

The building of the barricades on May 10th-llth was a way for the students and militants to establish not only a defense, but also a space for their festive anti-society where freedom and direct democracy could be practiced. In Cohn-Bendit's words, "the barricades were no longer simply a means of self-defense; they became a symbol of individual liberty."

A collective voicing of everything by everybody began as action committees were formed to solve concrete problems. Suddenly and spontaneously, groups of individuals improvised solutions to immediate problems, expressed themselves, and rediscovered latent desires. One of the major lessons of May was that collective action could present a challenge to the domination and manipulation of the centralized, bureaucratic and authoritarian system. Operating basically without leaders as a protest against hierarchical systems or organizations, the action committees on the barricades discovered the possibility of self-affirmation through collective consciousness and involvement in a common action.

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beneath May 1968 and French Theater LENORA CHAMPAGNE

their own liberation from domination by an increasingly technocratic culture.

Alfred Willener has suggested that the May Movement "can be characterized by a juncture between Marxism and anarchism, on the one hand, and between politics and culture, on the other." Politically, the militants' action eventually led to a situation where ten million striking workers threatened France's economy and even the stability of the de Gaulle government. However, the aspect of the explosion which most concerns us here is its attack on mass culture and everyday life in post-industrial society, which is characterized by repression and manipulation of desires and consequent alienation of the individual. The revolt was made in the name of personal and collective creativity, against the programmed society.

A much publicized prelude to the May events was a 1966 scandal at the University of Strasbourg, where a controversial pamphlet with a devastating attack on established society and culture was illegally published and distributed at university expense. The pamphlet, entitled, "The wretched state of the student, considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and particularly intellectual aspects, and some ways of remedying it," Was collaboration between students at the University and a group called the Situationist International.

While not as catalytic with regard to the May events as was the March 22nd Movement that began at Nanterre, the situationists expressed ideas that was influential in May. This group, which included radical artists and writers, Was enormously influenced by the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre and his critique of everyday life. they realized the degree to which alienation and fragmentation pervade the everyday, and consequently proposed "a permanent revolution in daily life" which would be

This festive, actively creative, participatory character of the early Days of May can be contrasted with what the situationists considered to be the "spectacle" quality of society which encourages the attitude of the passive spectator rather than that of active participant. This notion of spectacle "is not a collection of images, but a social relation between people, mediated through images." In other words, a condition that fosters alienation. The replacement of real relations with images relates to the phenomena of absorbtion.

In advanced capitalism, any action of contestation or revolt is coopted by the prevailing value system or ideology. Any radical gesture of protest can be ideologized or co-opted and become merchandise. Likewise, the function of artistic activity becomes that of creating products for cultural consumption. Because it reflects and therefore justifies the existing value system rather than critically examining social relations, culture takes on an absorbtionist function and becomes "the concrete inversion of life." As Henri Lefebvre stated it, Culture . . . is a state ideology. Unity of culture can only be found at the highest level, that of cultural institutions, whence "mass culture" and consumption are supplied with "best quality products" and works that are said to be "unadulturated."

Rebellion against the role of institutionalized culture in justifying the status quo prompted the occupation of the Odeon theatre as a symbol of state-supported bourgeois culture as well as the wall inscription, "Art is dead. Let us create our daily lives."

This emphasis on creation in daily life indicates that the "division between those who create culture, in the artistic sense, and those who consume it" is rejected. This "brings the political and the cultural more closely together, the latter approximating more and more to culture in the sense of 'daily life."' Realizing

that it would take a severe shock to awaken people's creativity, to arouse them from their usual role of passive spectator to that of active participant in the decision-making process of determining their own lives, the situationists and the March 22nd Movement militants advocated violence.

Because violence is the negation of order and therefore cannot be absorbed by it, it could provide the liberating shock that would unblock the habit of passivity.

When the building of the barricades was met with the violent repression of the French police on the night of May 10 to 11th, a large part of the French population was aroused from passivity and quickly mobilized into demonstrations of solidarity with the students. On May 13th, the general strike was called. After weeks of violence, negotiations, demonstrations, and some occupation of factories, agreements were reached with the workers and the student uprising was suppressed. Basically, the crisis was over by the end of June. But the questions that had been raised remained. Allowing that there was a drop in spirits among politically progressive artists during the repressive measures taken by the de Gaulle government following the restoration of "order," it is understandable that it was a year or so before productions fully assimilating and addressing themselves to the questions raised by the May events were performed.

Many theatre groups organized on collective lines and addressing political issues began working throughout Europe during this period; however, only the effects of May on the work of a single troupe, the Theatre du Soleil, and the playwright/ animator Armand Gatti, whose radical idea of a "spectacle without spectators" utilizes the material of daily life and the potential creativity of the spectator to an unprecedented degree, will be considered.

Le Theatre du Soleil May, 1968 had immediate and

far-reaching effects for the Theatre du Soleil. Among them were: increased collectivization and an emphasis on the individual actor's creativity. This led to the development of several collectively created productions derived from improvisations without using a pre-established text. Popular theatre skills and improvisation techniques were extensively developed. Spectators were included in the creative process.

Finally, in their most recent production, the Theatre du Soleil focused on themes from everyday life. A new stage in the troupe's politicization, both in terms of the dynamics and consciousness of the group and in the content and form of the performance, was marked by its acclaimed production, 1789.

The Theatre du Soleil was organized as a collective prior to 1968.

Founded at the initiative of Ariane Mnouchkine with a core group of ten members in 1964, the group has become a worker's cooperative composed of about forty performers, designers and technicians with equal salaries and voting rights.

Prior to the May disturbances, this collective organization of the group had not evolved to the point of utilizing collectivity as a creative method.

Previous productions (which included Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen in 1967 and a highly original treatment of A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1968) had always been based on a response to or interpretation of a written text.

In the June crackdown following the May disturbances, the Theatre du Soleil, which had halted public performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream as an expression of solidarity with the Movement, was expelled from the small Paris theatre where it had been appearing. Fortunately, a provincial town council provided them with an abandoned salt factory to work in during the summer. Here the troupe continued the experiments with the improvisation techniques,

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action committees in May had done with their manifestos and tracts.

1789 The Theatre du Soleil's next spectacle, 1789, "The Revolution Must Continue to the Perfection of Happiness" (1970-1971), was the realization of what the troupe had been preparing for with The Clowns-it was a true collective creation and an attempt to deal artistically with May 1968. Mnouchkine explained that the collective work had not been without its difficulties: In the beginning, the troupe did behave like authors: each person thought what he invented belonged to him. With 1789, however, we began to lose our sense of property, even regarding what we invent.

For us it is better to work communally. A real collective work is based on the richest possibility for everybody to create.

The troupe decided to base its first collective work on the French revolution because it wanted to address a popular subject known commonly to all French people and to comment on a particular set of social relations and dynamics. In 1789 the story of a people's revolution that is co-opted by the powerful forces of bourgeois capitalism is told. There can be no doubt that the vision of the historical events of the French revolution is presented by the Theatre du Soleil was colored by the May 1968 upheaval.

To prepare for the creation of 1789 troupe members did extensive research into documents and history of the period for several weeks.

When improvisations began, groups of four or five performers would improvise around a theme or situation from the revolution (such as the fall of the Bastille) suggested by Mnouchkine or another member of the company. Each group submitted their own version of the same event or theme. Certain improvisations were retained, elaborated and made more precise. A variety or episodic structure was derived for the

production from the juxtaposition of the different acting styles and views of the revolution expressed in these early improvisations.

Very early two decisions were made about the spectacle: to organize the space as a fairground, so that people would be free to move about and to use the devices of popular theatre to tell the people's version of the Revolution. Both of these decisions were a reaction to May and against the bourgeois theatre: its performer/spectator relationship, the organization of the theatre building with the stage/audience separation, its psychologism. They were a reference back to May in other ways, too-the festive atmosphere of the production was reminiscent of the barricades in May and of the situationists' observations on the festival quality of popular revolutions.

Also, the passivity of the spectator was challenged by involving him physically in the action. The space for 1789 was arranged so that spectators could either stand in a central area or remain detached from the action by sitting in bleachers erected at one end of the vast rectangular space where the spectacle was performed, the Cartoucherie of Vincennes, an abandoned munitions warehouse on the outskirts of Paris.

Five platform stages, some of them joined by ramps, were set up in the space so that simultaneous Actions separated in space could be performed. This organization of the space made the spectacle dynamic. If a spectator chose to stand in the central area, rather than to sit on the bleachers, he was free to move around to watch the actions that took place on the different platforms, and in fact had to move to make room for the actors who pushed their way through the crowds to get from one stage to another. However, this involved only a change in the spatial relationship of the performer and the spectator, which while significant, was not a real change in the role of

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popular forms, and vocal and physical exercises it had used in preparing The Kitchen and A Midsummer Night's Dream. This summer spent together allowed the troupe to think about and assess the meaning of May for them, and resulted in a more intensive collectivization. The Theatre du Soleil "slowly (became) conscious of what politics is-politics is life. If a group of human beings starts to change its way of working and living together, this becomes politics.

One evening the troupe performed an impromptu piece for the local townspeople using the popular style and improvisation techniques they had been exploring. The success of this experiment convinced the troupe to abandon the a priori written text and to develop their own show based completely on improvisations.

The product of this work was The Clowns (1969). This was an important transition piece for the Theatre du Soleil, because it emphasized the creativity of the individual actors and changed the role of the director into that of "first spectator." In this production the group was searching for a "clear, direct, and luminous form" and Mnouchkine's function became largely one of watching the improvisations and making comments or suggestions as to clarity and directness. The improvisations were elaborated by the performer from there.

This resulted in a give and take or dialog process between the performers and the director and constituted a preliminary attempt at collective problem-solving that corresponded to the discoveries of the May Movement militants, who learned that solutions can be found by everyone discussing, discovering, contributing and acting together. In The Clowns each member explored his own creativity, leading to a new democracy in theatre, where actors could become "authors as well as interpreters." The troupe was now ready to practice collective authorship, as the

the spectator. The physical passivity of the spectator was challenged, but his potential creativity was not. The troupe decided to use popular forms in the show because they wanted to avoid showing history as a psychological conflict between great men or reducing it to an anecdotal level.

Instead, the popular forms were much more suited to expressing the

demonstrated a series of waves of popular, festive energy and enthusiasm being repressed by successive returns to order, as had happened not only in 1789, but more recently in May 1968. As Michael Kustow observed, a leitmotif of 1789 was that festivity is dangerous for authority, and must be contained. from a popular celebration in which 1789's

the irony implicit in their presentation of their vision of the revolution: May 1968, like 1789, has been absorbed and co-opted by the society it opposed. After all, 1789, provocative as it was, was performed for the amusement of an audience with a large bourgeois contingent.

1793 The Theatre du Soleil's next

energy and presenting the forces of the revolution. For instance, after the fall of the Bastille, the revolution became a festival as circus and variety acts broke out on all Five platforms.

Among the resources of popular theatre used in the spectacle were puppets, both hand-held and life size, mime, juggling, acrobatics, commedia Del 'arte, tableau vivants, and the aforementioned variety structure.

The structure and content of 1789

public participates, the people's revolution becomes a spectacle for the bourgeoisie. In the framework of a festival, the decline and overthrow of the aristocracy and the church by the people and the subsequent rise of the bourgeois order that replaces it are shown. The fact that 1789 ends with a mock performance of the revolution for the amusement of a group of gaudy nouveau riches indicates that the Theatre du Soleil is conscious of

spectacle was 1793, The Revolutionary City Is of This World (19721973). This show was a reflection on the sans culottes "who from 1793 to the end of 1793 led an experience of direct democracy and elaborated a program which survived their defeat."

The method of creation for 1793 was similar to that of 1789-the company gathered and considered historical material, then began impro-

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racy in May 1968. The Theatre du Soleil thinks that If such an experience could be possible during more than one year, it is viable and can be led back; the river has returned underground, but it will resurface one day.

May 1968 proved that the river that went underground after 1793 could, indeed, resurface again-but

struggles of people and the contradictions in a revolutionary period than 1789 had. Thoughts about May 1968 were still informing the group's work. Franqoise Kourilsky observed, "It is . . . the idea of projecting the experience of direct democracy...that governs and controls the spectacle."

Surely the sectionnaires in their "assemblees de quartier" can be compared to the action committees, who also experienced direct democ-

it was called a beach. And though it is beneath the paving stones once again, it can possibly still be uncovered.

L'Age d'Or, Premiere Ebauche (The Golden Age, First Draft) L'Age d'Or opened in March 1975 after 18 months of preparation.

Deciding that it wants to be a theatre "directly engaged in the social reality, a theatre which is. . .an encouragement to change the conditions in

which we live," the troupe decided to give up history for contemporary daily reality. Themes such as television, drugs, abortion, overcrowding in housing for immigrant workers, racism, etc. were dealt with in the spectacle.

Since The Clowns the Theatre du Soleil had become increasingly interested inpopular forms in their search for a specifically theatrical language which is clear, efficacious, and immediately readable to everyone. For L'Age d'Or, the performance style became very precise and physical, using the mask and the body as the major means of expression. The development of the show involved the transformation of traditional popular forms such as commedia Del 'arte, Chinese theatre and clowns into contemporary types, recalling Jacques Copeau's call for "a new improvised comedy with types and themes from our times." Whether the types were to be defended (the Arab worker) or attacked (the cop), the idea was to make the contradictions, passions, ideas, and desires of the character visible through the body. The rigor involved in this method resulted in a spectacle that was both theatrically and politically powerful-both entertaining and significant. Two things make L'Age d'Or a departure or more radical step for the Theatre du Soleil: its presentation of a work in progress (the "first draft" in the title), which implies an emphasis on the process of creation rather than the finished product, and the tapping of the creativity of a select group of spectators by inviting them to view the improvisations and make suggestions for their improvement. In the process of developing L'Age d'Or, the actors brought their improvisations to immigrant workers, miners, people in rural villages, and high school students and asked them for comments, suggestions and criticism. These people who were consulted during and contributed to the creation of L'Age d'Or are credited

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visations. However, 1793 was much more discursive or anecdotal than 1789. Each actor worked first to develop a character, who would tell his own story. The character had a place in the larger context of a "role," such as "the French women." The different roles expressed the political forces of the revolutionary period.

1793 focused more on the daily

in the program as co-authors of the piece, along with the actual performers. Finally, L'Age d'Or centered on the adventures of a young Arab immigrant worker, Abdullah, who encounters enormous obstacles in France.

The structure of the spectacle was a series of separate episodes joined by the narration of an Arab woman who led the spectators from one playing area to another. (The performance area was divided into four roughly equal valleys, sloping up to a central plateau.) What was shown was a stylized observation on the social and political problems faced in everyday living: the theatrical form transformed to make it contemporary and effective?

L'Age d'Or reflected tensions in society and increased demands since 1968 for theatre to be politically committed and engaged. Armand Gatti A still more radical approach to the May militants' demand for "a culture in action sprung from life" has been taken by Armand Gatti, a playwright. In 1969 the French government forbade the performance of his play "The Passion of General Franco," already in rehearsal at the TNP. After this, he turned to a kind of para-theatrical activity which involved making experiments in "collective writing" with people from outside the theatre. As an author, Gatti was deeply affected by the questions posed in May. In an interview with Denis Bablet, Gatti admits that May was determining for me and notably in my situation as dramatic author.

The months of May had become a necessity for me. . .If May had not come ...it was not possible to go farther. That does not mean that May is resolved: the problem remains of the situation of the dramatist with the system today. At a colloquium held in 1974 on the subject of collective creation Gatti expressed a point of view very close to the more radical cultural intentions of the May Movement. Reminding one of the situationists' notion of the passive

spectator, Gatti says, The public is a shameful notion. It is the voyeur, the consumer . . . I am for a spectacle without spectators... where each person participates in the creation; where each learns from the other. But the voyeur, I don't want.

Gatti was positing a distinction between his own work and that of such "orthodox" collective groups as the Theatre du Soleil. Whereas the Theatre du Soleil is a collective in terms of being a specific unit composed of members and posing questions of the internal problems of collective creation (question of relations within the group, essentially), Gatti's notion of collectivity is where everyone actively creates-the Spectator as well as the theatre artist. expounding on this distinction, Gatti points out that Two types of collective creation exist: one commercial, which is made with actors, and another, which is made outside of the theatre with participants unfamiliar with the theatre . . . the latter aspect of collective writing. .is more interesting to me.

Gatti has made two shows using this method of collective writing.

In June 1972 Gatti and students of the Institut des Arts et de Diffusion de Bruxelles presented La Colonne Durutti, a piece developed from improvisations by apprentice actors.

The spectacle was performed in a factory. The walls were covered with posters made during rehearsals which recounted problems they had had in conceiving characters, the results of their discussions-the entire progress of the work was documented, thereby relating the time of the creation of the piece to the time of its performance. The relationship between the performer and the character he played was developed from and based on a political relation.

After this experience, the group of students and Gatti decided "to go to the country, to the Brabant Wallon, for a change of air, to see another social class and discover their

problems." Thus began Gatti's major experiment in collective writing to date -a project involving some 3,000 people in a rural region of Belgium.

Gatti arrived in the area with a group of students. They began to video-tape the villagers' activities, playing them back for the townspeople in the evenings. The idea was to get people to talk about their daily lives, about their reality and their dreams.

After some time, first the old people and then the children began speaking with Gatti and the theatre students.

After several months in the area villages, about 45 committees of peasants of various ages were formed to write and rehearse various sketches on the theme of the journey of an old peasant named Adelin. A kind of modern Noah, Adelin wants to escape from the problems of pollution and highway construction and return to a more natural life.

After nearly a year of preparation, the spectacle was performed in 1974. The performance lasted 28 hours and was nearly a "spectacle without spectators" since almost everyone in the area had participated in its preparation in some way, down to the local women who volunteered to bake tarts for feeding everyone after a commercial organization withdrew its promise to provide provisions. The performance covered 25 miles and took the form of a popular procession using huge puppets and some 125 vehicles. Various sketches, all part of the collective writing and depicting the inhabitants' different ways of seeing and reacting to the peasant's journey took place simultaneously. Gatti and his students and designers also expressed their reactions to the theme and to the people themselves. "Each participant, be the actor, musician, or designer, was able to transform himself entirely in contact with the experience, all lived the same adventure."

Summation The desire to address problems of everyday life, a major aim and

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revolution, but it must offer material for reflection, discussion, and must develop contradictions.

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concern of the May Movement, has entered theatre practice. In Gatti's work and in the Theatre du Soleil's "first draft" of L'Age d'Or we see this and also the emphasis on the process of creation rather than on the final product. The Theatre du Soleil and Gatti, as well as most troupes who work collectively, have questioned the composition and the role of the public and have tried to establish a new, more "active" kind of relationship with spectators. There is an insistence on the actor's creativity and on the viability of collective creation, where relations are not the vertical ones of author, director, actors, and technicians as in commercial theatre, but the horizontal relations of equal members of a cooperative who frequently share and exchange different roles. The questions posed in May continue to inform the work of these theatre artists, though frustration and absorbtion are having their effect and are hampering the artists' attempts to intervene directly in people's daily lives. The May Movement provided a shock that aroused the French population out of its lethargy and made a new political art both possible and necessary. If there is a renewal of class consciousness in social life, which is what the events of May, 1968 provided, then it is possible to make art utilizing and addressing that consciousness. However, cultural agitation alone cannot continue to maintain that consciousness. Protest is too easily absorbed by the system.

The Beach is receding as May 1968 quickly becomes another chapter in the French revolutionary history.

Still, there are many who, like the Theatre du Soleil and Armand Gatti, still see the possibilities for theatre as a militant activity. As Gatti put it, May made the contradictions much more clear. We perceived that basically we looked to justify our role, to find ourselves useful to the society, in this system, rather than to have a real action. In saying this, I do not pretend that the theatre can make the

www.flickr.com/photos/chrisdorneyphotography

by Chris Dormey Urban Night Shot

OkhlopkovandtheNascen of the

Postmode James Harbeck published in Theatre InSight 7:1 (Spring 1996)

F

rom 1930 to 1937, Nikolai Pavlovich Okhlopkov was the artistic director of the Realistic Theatre in Moscow. His work there during that time made the theatre’s name something of an oxymoron, for in the half-dozen productions for which he was responsible there he discarded the proscenium and many of the conventions of “re-

alistic” staging in favor of a style which was cinematic in its treatment of action (with cuts back and forth between different scenes and with music used as in movies) and what is today often called “environmental” in its use of the theatre space.

It was a remarkable and somewhat seminal period of experimentation; it was also, in the sphere of Soviet theatre, a brief and isolated one. Other

directors maintained the proscenium style of staging; even Meyerhold did not genuinely discard it. And, after the Realistic Theatre was taken away from Okhlopkov in 1937, he was also forced to retreat to the proscenium, although he did what he could when he could still to extend the stage into the auditorium or to put some of the audience on the stage.

For the purposes of this paper,

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atre.” These principles describe well the nature of his Realistic Theatre work; in summary, they are as follows: 1) to discard the box stage and use any part of the auditorium which served the purpose; 2) to allow the stage to surround the audience as well as the audience the stage; 3) to use “montage action” similar to that of cinematic technique (“the action may be transferred from one of our stage sets to another frequently situated some distance from the first,

not only at the end of one episode and the beginning of another, according to the author’s instructions, but at any time within the episode”); 4) to use music as an aid to setting the mood and pulse of the play; 5) through close actor-audience proximity, to necessitate unusual exactness in the actor’s technique; 6) to use a genuine language of the theatre rather than a “naïve photographic naturalism.” Okhlopkov concluded: “Thus we assert the realism of the theatre through theatrical means, appealing to the imagination of the spectator and at the same time providing it with a powerful stimulus.

Thus the audience co-operates with the actors in every performance, so that the actors applaud the audience as well as the audience the actors” (van Gyseghem 1943, 193-195).

These principles and their realization, taken individually, are neither entirely original nor even entirely new. “Theatricality” has (as the very existence of the term shows) been more the norm than the exception throughout much of theatrical history.

But a return to “theatricality” after the dominance of “naturalistic” staging is not a return to the old manner of seeing the drama any more than egress from a tunnel into the open air means that one is in the same valley as one was in before entering the tunnel. The resurgence of such theatricality is a post-Enlightenment moment, not an atavistic irruption of a pre-Enlightenment aesthetic.

Even in the post-Enlightenment sphere, however, Okhlopkov’s style was not without precedent. In fact, it was a logical development in its time and place. Adolphe Appia and Jacques Copeau had ripped out their proscenium arches, although the stage and the audience remained in opposition. The Futurists and Dadaists had played games with language and expression, as well as involving the audience in some of their pieces (some examples are to be found

in Aronson 1981, 34-36). Max Reinhardt also aimed at involving the audience more closely, although his staging largely preserved the actoraudience distinction, and Erwin Piscator was trying surrounding the audience by 1926. The “Constructivist” experimentation with staging was in full swing by the early 1930s in the Soviet Union, and in fact was soon to hit a roadblock called “socialist realism”. Experiments in non-”realistic” staging, making use of metaphor, synecdoche and other fancies, were also carried out in the early 1930s at the Liberated Theatre of Prague and elsewhere by Jiri Frejka, Jindrich Honzl, Emil Burian, and others; none of the Czechs, however, rearranged the actor-audience relationship as radically as they rearranged the stage space. Likewise, Okhlopkov’s mentor, Vsevolod Meyerhold, had introduced many of the “theatrical” means of which Okhlopkov subsequently availed himself, and had experimented with audience contact as early as his 1921 production of Mystery-Bouffe. It was for Meyerhold that El Lissitzky produced the oftenreproduced (in books) but never realized surround staging design for Tretyakov’s I Want a Child. Notwithstanding this, however, Meyerhold never truly did away with the proscenium, and Okhlopkov harshly criticized him for it: “Meyerhold actually cut the continually developing line of revolutionary theatre architecture.

He threatened to do away with the stage; he even removed the curtains forever from his stage; but his constructivism not only retained the stage, but the elaboration of the stage as an element that Constructivism required. Meyerhold sanctioned the existence of the stage” (Strasberg and Kingsley 1973, 122).

Meanwhile, in Poland, Zygmunt Tonecki summed up Reinhardt, Piscator, Meyerhold, Kiesler, Gropius, et alia, in his 1929 article “The Theatre of the Future,” which called for annular staging (see Aronson 1981, 239-

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nce

Okhlopkov’s Realistic Theatre work is interesting in that we may discern in it early stirrings of the postmodern. Not of postmodernism; not that he expressed a postmodern philosophical perspective; but that his intentional aesthetics and their realization in the productions in question were nascently postmodern, and that the experience of viewing them was also conducive to the development of a postmodern ethos. This is primarily due to their exposure of the communicative act and their catalyzation of awareness of distance, difference, between sender and receiver and between the world of the audience and the world of the performance. From this comes the undermining of metanarratives, which is the basis of the postmodern. This ethos being inherently inimical to a consolidated ideocracy, it is no wonder that Okhlopkov was forced into more traditional manners of staging after the 1930s.

And yet Okhlopkov was an ardent supporter of the socialist ideal. His work is thus also interesting for how we may see, in hindsight, the extent to which his style could actually serve to work against his espoused ideology.

In his book Theatre in Soviet Russia, André van Gyseghem gives six principles quoted from Okhlopkov as “the basic principles of his the

241). His design was not realized, but Andrzej Pronaszko and Szymon Syrkus produced scattered stagings in the later 1930s under Tonecki’s influence. Okhlopkov’s particular distinction is as the first director to stage according to all of his espoused principles—and to such a degree (Arnold Aronson (1981, 117) calls Okhlopkov’s first productions “the first truly environmental theatre productions of the twentieth century”)—and as effectively the only one to do so in Soviet Russia. It is my intention to present him not as an entirely unique case but as an exemplary one.

What Okhlopkov’s style was in actual practice varied a bit. In all cases the details were shaped by the smallness of the Realistic Theatre, which was the smallest professional space in Moscow, seating only 325 people.

This enforced a certain closeness. In the first production, The Start (1932), the proscenium arch was still intact.

Some of the audience was seated up on what had been the stage, and the performance space was a ramp that rose up on both sides and looped overhead, as well as a small space between the two parts of the audience. Often action took place simultaneously in different places or in rapid alternation. For The Mother (1932), listed as directed by Pavel Tsetnerovich but largely guided by Okhlopkov’s hand, the entire space was gutted and reconfigured. There was a small round platform in the middle, with four sections of audience surrounding and facing it; the audience were in turn surrounded by a raised platform, with metal grillework in front of it, which was connected by four aisles to the center stage. The staging was rather spare.. In contrast with this was the heavily detailed hillside which was built for The Iron Flood (1934); the audience butted right up against it—it jutted out like a W—and the entire auditorium was overarched by a blue cyclorama, so that the theatre became something of a genuine “environment”.. The actors were

busying themselves in character with things such as laundry and cooking as the audience came in, and they occasionally addressed patrons directly as the audience was being seated. Spare staging and highly “theatrical” techniques were returned to in Aristocrats (1935), which had two bare platforms joined at the corner in the middle of the auditorium, surrounded by the audience; montage action was again used, and scene changes and setting effects were accomplished by rather ostensive variants on the kabuki kurogo. The final two productions, Othello (1936) and Colas Breugnon (1937), had stages at one end and one or two sides of the house as well as pieces in the middle (a gondola, a landscaped island). Colas Breugnon “opened with a feast in which actors shared food and drink with the audience who sat on planks and barrels” (McLain 1982, 173), and the entire theatre was made to look like a forest glade.

What, exactly, is it about this staging that conduces to a nascent postmodern? Perhaps this would best be broached by laying out what, exactly, I mean by postmodern. The classic statement is Jean-François Lyotard’s: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives” (1987, 74). This is to say, the idea that there is one overall truth-system which can describe and subsume all narratives, all different perspectives and truth-systems, as was put forth in the evolutionary ethos of modernism (and many times before it), is called into question. This proceeds from an awareness of human existence—expressed in human interaction—as duelling truth-systems, singularities competing through language games. Lyotard espouses “the principle that any consensus on the rules defining a game and the ‘moves’ playable within it must be local, in other words, agreed on by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation. The orientation then favors a multiplicity of finite meta-arguments, by which I mean argumentation that

concerns metaprescriptives and is and actors close together and virtually sharing space, whether in large numbers or small. limited in space and time” (89). The first awareness of this comes through the understanding of the fundamental distance involved in the act of communication, the impossibility of an exact match of meanings between sender and receiver. A result of this awareness is an overt focus on the signs which are used in communication, which leads to a rampant fragmentative quotationalism: this is postmodernism. But that is a product, not an antecedent, of the postmodern condition.

The nascence of the postmodern must be understood in the context of its historical moment, as the next logical step after the Enlightenment apotheosis of the metanarrative of “scientific” empiricism. The same influences—for example, Okhlopkov’s aesthetics—in other times would lend to other effects. It is, of course, well understood that the tenure of extreme resemblance to constitutive reality in theatrical signs was rather brief, and that “heightening” has for most of history been the accepted norm.

But in a world where metanarratives are stable, a heightening represents greater ideality, or at the very least a plausible imitation or simple degradation, and is accepted as a natural offshoot of the constitutive system.

The scientific, empiricist focus of the Enlightenment changed the focus to the imminent, to the physical world as the ultimate truth, to the empirically verifiable and scientifically accurate as the necessary standard for truth-value judgments. In order for the signs to remain transparent, they had to resemble the consitutive with great exactitude; otherwise, they reeked of artifice, of unreality, perhaps even of an outdated transcendental ideology.

But the next step on this road is to find that even the understandings which attach to these empirical realities are uncertain, and that nothing is sure but the signs themselves. All that is

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sider this impression of a moment in The Mother: Nilovna, a small woman played by the actress Mel’nikova, descended [the] steps into the auditorium and, having descended, immediately turned to one of the spectators with some words (and this address was perceived as something natural, for Mel’nikova said it in a very ordinary voice), just as, for example, they turn to you in a tram with a request for you to pass a coin for them and you do it without thinking. And in that moment the entire auditorium felt in that spectator’s position which arose

as if there were a super-contact between both sides. (Iu. Iuzovskii, “Teatr Okhlopkova,” using examples from such as Sterne and Tolstoy. But even allowing that 19th century fiction used ostranenie, the act of identification of it as a process lends a reflexive clarity which has a particularly strong catalytic effect on the development of a post-modern weltanschauung. Meyerhold drew some influence from the Formalists, and so they would also have had an at least indirect influence on Okhlopkov.

Zachem liudi khodiat v teatre: stat’i, ocherki, fel’etony raznykh let

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necessary for this is to render the act of signification opaque and to expose as not inevitable the ideology which drives the ideals. This step is (was) unavoidable, and Okhlopkov was neither the first nor the last to catalyze it. (The thoroughness with which he deviated from the standard transparency of the sign was, of course, more salient.) Post-Enlightenment, “theatricality” can become an underlining of the material sign as the only constant, and thus an index of the disintegration of monadic meaning. Ultimately, in fact, the simple materiality of the sign is all that can be relied on, and it becomes an end in itself; consider Baudrillard (1987, 29): “For us the medium, the image medium, has imposed itself between the real and the imaginary, upsetting the balance between the two, with a kind of fatality which has its own logic.”

Okhlopkov’s staging first of all conduced to the postmodern in its bringing the audience and performers together in the same space. In doing this, it underlined the crucial distance which is involved in the act of communication, manifest through a difference between the spectator and the action which cannot be reconciled; it catalyzed an awareness of a plurality of realities, of the stage world—a subjunctive one contained within the act of an utterance—and the constitutive world existing in parallel, never reaching perfect communication.

It may seem an odd thing to assert that staging which brings the audience into closer contact with the actors would serve to accentuate their distance from the performance.

For one thing, the very phenomenon of closeness will lend to greater emotional impact in the spectator’s automatic cognition; for another, the closeness enables greater perception of detail. If any sort of direct contact—verbal or physical—is effected, it should engender in the audience a feeling of direct involvement. And that such staging is emotionally effective and absorbing is well-attested; con-

(Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1964): 65-66; quoted in Southard 1980, 69.)

But this aesthetic effect does not ultimately equate with greater faith in signification; nor, for that matter, does it necessarily lead to more active involvement on the part of the audience. The question of frame is of paramount importance here. Erving Goffman explains the crucial understanding which pertains to the theatrical frame: “The central understanding is that the audience has neither the right nor the obligation to participate directly in the dramatic action occurring on the stage, although it may express appreciation throughout in a manner that can be treated as not occurring by the beings which the stage performers present onstage” (1974, 125). They may seem for a thrill of a moment to be in the same world, but the awareness quickly follows—and is underlined by being remembered— that they are not.

Consider this reaction to theatrical proximity expressed by Frances Mackenzie (quoted in Marshall 1975, 224): Watching a good and lively Twelfth Night production, I felt rather as if I were at a party where the hosts were in fancy dress but not the guests. Viola, in an aside, came right up to me and spoke with her face close to mine, but with her eyes looking just over my shoulder at someone in the row behind. I was rather embarrassed and felt I ought to make a polite and sympathetic reply, but was handicapped by my lack of fluency in Shakespearian blank verse. I wanted to recoil in my seat and pretend not to be there, but then, of course, I should have been failing in ‘audience participation’.

The problem is clear: the proximity engenders in the cognitive processes automatic reactions developed for things which usually occur at such a range, but these reactions are immediately wrestled down by the awareness that the phenomenon perceived is within a different frame, one

that by definition cannot interact with one’s own. What if Mackenzie had responded in blank verse? Needless to say, it would have constituted an embarrassing disruption, a solecism in the communicational grammar of the moment. And when in The Mother the actress playing the Mother had a spectator hold her bread for a moment while she prepared a table, the transgression of the usual boundaries which that represented may have been striking (and perhaps somewhat subversive), but the spectator could not have engaged in any behavior which might have affected the action of the play. There may have been “a feeling that the spectators could become participants at any moment” (McLain 1982, 117), but the fact is that they didn’t and, really, they couldn’t.

Likewise, in The Iron Flood, the hillside environment was striking, novel, more like being there than a box set would ever be, but no fool would ever have taken it as real presence; indeed, the proximity served again to underline the illusion, as Okhlopkov himself later admitted.

“We wanted to turn set pieces into genuine hills—even mountains. But after all—the spectator sat right beside these prop roads, paths, hills and mountains. He had only to reach out his hand and run it along those ‘wrinkles’ on the road to see that it was not life but only make-believe. Even without putting out his hand it would have been easy to see this at a glance: there was no need to create this illusion, even to try to ‘fool’ the spectator” (N. P. Okhlopkov, “Ob uslovnosti: II,” Teatr 12 (1959): 70-71; quoted in McLain 1982, 129). (For that matter, even had the play been performed on a genuine hillside, it would nonetheless have involved the distance of a frame.) Michael McLain analyzes one of the laudatory reactions to the play: Although Neznyj avers that the spectator lost his awareness of being in a theater, he contradicts this with his comments about applause and ‘the vivid theatrical spectacle.’ This would

seem to indicate that something approaching a dual reality was created for the audience: they were simultaneously caught up in the ‘reality’ of onstage events to a remarkable degree, but with the applause and other signs of their appreciation they reacted in a way which still reinforced the awareness of the theater as convention and art. (118) This “dual reality” was of course the automatic cognitive processing of phenomena followed immediately by the less habituated awareness of frame difference. The awareness of the communicative act enforces a frame separation, a different reality which will show its difference more as the parallax increases with reduced distance. Traditional staging which maintains a separation between actors and audience never brings the action so close that ramifications and frame-appropriateness have immediate importance. They are brought to the fore by bringing the actors closer to the audience. There is perceptual proximity, which has impact, but the longer-term and more subtle, secondary-level effect is distance, an awareness of separate realities.

The second aspect of Okhlopkov’s

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they would run off taking the phone with them. Or when a table was required two of these men would enter with a piece of green baize which, squatting on the floor, they would hold taut between them to suggest the table top. The rest of the play, the dialogue, the costumes, were realistic, and the combination of these conventions with the realism I found disturbing. (1938, 171) Other productions also confronted the spectator with the form as much as with the contents (which earned them the criticism of “formalism”— which, as McLain puts it, “essentially meant that the production was fresh and entertaining and could so be accused of allowing these qualities to obscure the ideological content” (103); the label had gained, in its use as an epithet, a definition considerably looser than that intended for it by its original users). Jay Leyda wrote of The Start: “By means of new demands and shocks, by levels, by light, by sound (speech, music, noise), by the balanced use of every space and object, by terrific control of actors, by playing at all levels of intensity, by being surrounded (literally) by the play—an exciting evening” (quoted in McLain 1982, 101). In Othello, elements of Shakespearean, Chinese and Classical Greek staging were combined; for instance, a chorus was added to sing during the strongest moments of the play (see Southard 1980, 107). In Colas Breugnon, “Okhlopkov used soft, delicate plays of light, orchestrated by a musical background, that followed the change of musical rhythm and mood that mirrored the changes within the play” (Southard 1980, 110). Even the realistic detail of The Iron Flood was made as an intrusion into the usual audience space, a deliberate attempt to shock (see McLain 1982, 120).

The intellectual stimulation of such theatrical innovations would no doubt be exciting and involving for many audience members. Their role in the performance, as interpreters,

was unquestionably foregrounded.

This is as Okhlopkov wanted: “Thus we assert the realism of the theatre through theatrical means, appealing to the imagination of the spectator and at the same time providing it with a powerful stimulus. Thus the audience co-operates with the actors in every performance, so that the actors applaud the audience as well as the audience the actors” (van Gyseghem 1943, 195). In a worker’s paradise, all will cooperate in harmony. But the very awareness of the cooperation involved in the communication, the understanding that the receiver makes a contribution to the meaning and that it therefore is not indisputable and transparent, is the seed of the postmodern plant.

In transparency of signification Herbert Blau discerns solipsism, hegemony, a view through a lens which does not reveal that it is a lens. “This is the space without boundaries in which ideology seems to merge with the structure of the unconscious, from whose (unimagineable) coign of vantage there is no frontier to cross because there is no geography, nor existence but its own” (1992, 431).

Ideology—which is really to say metanarrative, or a brand thereof—is key here. Consider what Fredric Jameson (1993) cites as “the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as ‘the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence’” (89). “The Althusserian formula, in other words, designates a gap, a rift, between existential experience and scientific knowledge: ideology has then the function of somehow inventing a way of articulating these two distinct dimensions with each other” (91). It allows the illusion of transparency in communication. “What we call ideology,” Paul de Man explains, “is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism” (1986, 11). That which turns the focus to the linguistic function, to the necessary assump-

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Realistic Theatre staging that was incipiently postmodern was its style, its “language”: its use of music and montage and, in some of the productions, overtly “theatrical” usages. The audience, having been made aware of the difference, that is to say distance, between communicative parties and between the realities involved, were also made aware of the difference, that is to say lack of similarity, between the two worlds, and their attention was focused onto the signs themselves, the vehicles of signification. This could act against the seeming transparency of the signs, adding a degree of opacity.

Examples are readily forthcoming. The most overtly “theatrical” of the Realistic Theatre productions was Aristocrats. The stage platforms were bare, with a few painted screens as decor. “The actual props required in the business,” Norris Houghton recalls, were brought on in the full light by blue-masked and dominoed attendants who in function suggested the Chinese property man. They would run on in full stage light carrying a telephone, for example, and would hold it while a character made his call; when the business was completed

tions underlying meaning, will not rid us of ideology—which could hardly be possible unless it were to turn us into vegetables—but it will force an acknowledgement of it and a consequent understanding that metanarratives are not rock solid and indisputable.

In an ideocracy such as Soviet Russia, this could naturally be a problem. The postmodern is, from the beginning and by definition, inimical to ideocracy of any type. We will recall that incredulity towards metanarratives leads to “the principle that any consensus on the rules defining a game and the ‘moves’ playable within it must be local, in other words, agreed on by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation. The orientation then favors a multiplicity of finite meta-arguments, by which I mean argumentation that concerns metaprescriptives and is limited in space and time” (Lyotard 1987, 89).

What this means is that, with Lyotard and Deleuze, one will “seem to favour the supervention of a micropolitics which will attend to the local and the specific without recourse to some grand programme or macropolitical theory such as Marxism, or psychoanalysis, or evolutionary progress” (Docherty 1993, 4). Ideology and metanarratives can only be applied pragmatically, not dogmatically and universally, for their universality has been denied.

Ideocracy is thus especially vulnerable to the deconstructions of postmodernism because it relies on the stability of a single meaning-system, a single metanarrative.8 Ernesto Laclau analyzes one of the aspects of Marxism which are vulnerable in this respect.

Consider, for example, the category of ‘class’ within Marxism. Central to the series of recent exchanges are the following questions: Is it classes or social movements that constitute the fundamental agents of change in advanced industrial societies? Or, is the working class in the process of disappearing? But these questions are

quite secondary because, whatever answers they elicit, they presuppose what is fundamental: the obviousness and transparency of the category ‘class’. . . . It is precisely the limitation of responses that keeps alive the sense of a question. (1993, 331) And the postmodern, for its part, dissolves the limitation of responses and renders categories opaque.

But the effects also come in ways even more directly pertinent to the case of Stalinist Russia. The Soviet Union of the 1930s was only questionably Marxist, but it Other systems, such as late capitalism (see Jameson), are based on fluid media of symbolic exchange and are thus wellsuited to the postmodern. was very much subject to a view of humanity striving for a single apotheosis, one grand ultimate state of being, and it was stridently apparent to all and sundry even in that time and place that anything which might question the values driving this quest could weaken it. A single quest seemed to call for a single artistic style, one that would directly aid that quest, one which would keep people’s minds focused on the one thing. This was “Socialist Realism.” Party spokesman Andrei Zhdanov formulated it as follows: Socialist realism, being the basic method of Soviet literature and criticism, requires from the artists truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, truth and historical completeness of artistic representation must be combined with the task of ideological transformation and education of the working man in the spirit of socialism. (Southard 1980, 83) The very details of its prescriptions in themselves tend to prohibit much of Okhlopkov’s innovation. But the Realistic Theatre’s work also represented more: first, the simple fact of its presence as an exception was an enforcement of pluralism, an infraction. Beyond that, its ostension of forms was viewed as a distrac-

tion from the importance of the message. This is noteworthy: the forms, whether or not in the grand scheme of things they were actually new, were obtrusive in that time and place for being different. More than this, even, and perhaps only inchoately sensed by most of Okhlopkov’s critics (or, for that matter, his supporters), was the crisis of faith in metanarrative which the Realistic Theatre staging served to catalyze. Even if one could remain true to one ideology, one would always be aware of others as viable options; ideocracy, especially of the Soviet sort, requires an unswerving belief in only one. The very concept of ideology, in fact, was a weapon, a club with which to beat down the fractious.

Within the sphere of a metanarrative which claims exclusive patent on the

truth, other ideologies are falsehoods, obscurers of transparent meaning.

The necessary response to those who make signification opaque is to say that it is because they have gone over to falsehood, and that were they to

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had been sown for the dissolution of the Realistic Theater were being nurtured by reviews like Beskin’s. It was not a time to be charged with such sins. (McLain 1982, 119) After The Iron Flood, one of the major critics, Boris Al’pers, wrote, “The innovation of this theater is confined to stunts and technological ‘bright ideas’ which are very poor and limited in scope. This theater wants to amaze the audience with its unusual stage carried into the auditorium and the loud gaudiness of its productions.

At the root of this theater’s recent work lies a coarse naturalism coupled with a weakening of the ideological content” (Boris Al’pers, “Zeleznyj potok u Oxlopkova: 11 Marta 1934 g.,” in Teatral’nye ocerki: 2 :Teatral’nye prem’ery I diskussii (Moscow: Iskusst-

that with the production Oxlopkov had proved himself ‘a formalist, a rationalist, an anarchist building a bridge in the air with no foundation in lives, psycho-social content.’ . . . Within each new production the seeds which

vo, 1977): 246-248; quoted in McLain 1982, 128). Aristocrats was likewise criticized, but the play’s contents—a glorification of the Baltic-White Sea Canal project—gave sufficient license for endorsement and success.

In 1936, however, a series of three articles under Stalin’s signature appeared in Pravda condemning formalism. In response to these, five self-criticism meetings were organized for the theatre artists of Moscow. Okhlopkov, who was more interested in surviving than in making a strident point, responded to official criticisms of his work with appropriate abjection. “[N]ot having overcome the petty-bourgeois ideology in myself, the philistine ideology of the futurists . . . I could not communicate to the spectator the true sense of these productions” (N. P. Okhlopkov, “Protiv formalizma i naturalizma: Diskussiia u teatralnykh rabotnikov: Vyustuplenie oshibki moei raboty,” Teatr I dramaturgiia 4 (1936): 196-7; quoted in Southard 1980, 102). One would do well, however, to consider that he also at the same time apologized in advance for the errors in his production of Othello which was to open soon after. But Okhlopkov, we should be sure to remember, was himself an ardent supporter of socialism. He had no wish to deconstruct the metanarrative to which he subscribed; the plays which he produced, at the Realistic Theatre as later, were in text very solid Soviet stuff (or—as with Othello—at least not anti-Soviet).

His aim was to bring the audience and the actors closer together, as we note, “so that the actors applaud the audience as well as the audience the actors.” Indeed, Norris Houghton noted that “in the Realistic Theatre spectators and actors look much the same . . . : there will be Red Army uniforms on the stage and in the house; there will be shawl-shrouded women and rough-bloused men in both places” (Houghton 1938, 170).

But, inevitably, in the joy in the use of the theatrical means, in the bringing into proximity of audience and actors, and in the very innovation which this style represented, Okhlopkov’s own ideology—along with any and all— was subtly being undermined. His karma, one might say, was running

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return to truth all would be clear. The “formalism” of the Realistic Theatre was, not surprisingly, seen as a sort of falsehood.

From The Start, Okhlopkov’s staging drew fire. His first production at the Realistic Theatre was condemned for formalism, for distracting from the message with its obtrusive stylistic innovations. Not that it was universally condemned: there were, as always, those who took more liberal stances, but they were not the voices of the powers-that-were. And again with The Mother, [t]he progressive critics recognized [it] for the socially viable, ideologically sound and artistically effective production that it was. But the conservative view was still stridently negative. The critic E. Beskin wrote

over his dogma. The positivist ethos was already well-formed, and the next step after questioning metaphysics would naturally be an uncertainty regarding the ultimately unverifiable act of understanding; given the right nudge, the result could not but be a weakening of the absolute faith in transparency of signification, and thus in metanarratives.

The result also could not but be a weakening of the faith of the Soviet government in Okhlopkov’s viability as an artistic director. Othello and Colas Breugnon did not fare well, and in 1937 the Realistic Theatre company was merged with Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre and moved into their space, one which did not allow for much manipulation. In the long run, Okhlopkov was able to save himself through his work in film, becoming something of an icon of the Soviet worker through his performances in Lenin in October, Lenin in 1918 and Alexander Nevsky.

He was ultimately given another theatre, but one which, having historical significance, could not be gutted and reconfigured. He continued to innovate as he could, but the potentially postmodern effects of his work had been somewhat weakened.

The question may arise as to whether Okhlopkov’s work was in fact modernist: it was labelled “formalist”, after all, which could tend to imply a modernist slant, and its focus on finding the most effective means of theatrical communication may seem to smack of the modernist emphasis on materials. It is the question of difference (as in Derrida) which makes it clear that it was not. Whether strict modernism in theatre is possible at any rate is subject to question; Nick Kaye (1994) asserts that it is not, and quotes one of the priests of modernism in art, Michael Fried: “Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre” (28; emphasis in original).

The basis of modernism is the idea of the self-sufficient apotheosis of the materiality of a given artistic form, the cleansing of the media of any scintilla

of signification, signification being a thing which automatically brings in and relies on things external to the material of the work. “In striving toward ‘essence’ the modernist work seeks to realize qualities and values which are legitimate in their own terms, and

of signification was underlined.

Okhlopkov’s significance in theatrical history is not, and most likely will never be, remembered primarily for the contribution of his style to the emergence of the postmodern. This is perhaps at least in part because the

so to transcend the play of difference Derrida reveals in an appeal to the ‘transcendental signified’ and so the presence of meaning” (17; emphasis in original). The idealization of a closure of reference, a self-sufficiency of meaning, trades on the assumption that what it idealizes is even possible.

A postmodern sensibility finds that it is not, that there can be no closure of meaning, for there is always a difference between what refers and what is referred to—in fact, anything which relates to nothing external to itself is incapable of conveying meaning (for example, “A is not B and B is not A” means nothing without further explanation)—and a difference between understander and understood. That the medium has interposed itself between the real and the imaginary does not mean that the sign becomes self-sufficient; it must always at least seem to refer to something beyond itself. In terms of Okhlopkov’s work, it should by now be clear that the very idea of closure was undermined, and the act

postmodern itself has acquired This is not to say that the Formalists were modernists, but simply that much that was modernist was tarred with the brush of “formalism”. a certain invisibility—it is, after all, and in spite of itself, a metanarrative too. Even if the standard staging style remains non-“environmental”, the plurality of possible theatrical forms and arrangements is largely taken for granted nowadays (at least in the circles of those who are likely ever to hear of Okhlopkov), which means that the postmodern project has been quite successful. Nevertheless—or perhaps even because of these facts—it bears reminding that the qualities for which Okhlopkov is remembered were in fact both products and causes of the nascence of the postmodern, whatever else they may also have been, and their relation to the dominant politico-cultural sphere of their time and place is a valuable illustration of the inseparability of the political and the aesthetic.

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Eugène Ionesco

1909-1994 Romanian-French writer

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THEATRICS OF SEAM David Boje and Grace Ann Rosile The article will be published in Journal of Organizational Change Management’s Special Issue on SEAM in late 2002 guest edited by Henri Savall

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Abstract

he purpose of this article is to explore the similarities and differences in the SEAM method and postmodern approaches to theatre. Neither metaphorical nor managerialist, SEAM’s perspective allows that the organization is theatre. Our contribution is to introduce the terms ‘metascript’ and ‘metatheatre’ to describe how SEAM’s approach accommodates the multiple perspectives and simultaneous multiple stages populated by the “spect-actors” (Boal, 1979) of the Tamara-esque postmodern organization.

“Organization is theatre,” says Henri Savall, the founder and director of the Socio-Economic Approach to Management (SEAM), during a personal interview conducted in July 2001 in Lyon. One year later, the present authors (Boje and Rosile) are again in Lyon, at the ISEOR campus. We are in an ISEOR seminar room on a Saturday morning with 18 SEAM doctoral students and five of Saval’s key faculty at the Institute. We have just spent 90 minutes offering our interpretation of the relationship of SEAM and theatrics. We explain that we theorize organizations narratively; and for us, theatrics provides a contextual frame for our narrative approach to organizational change that we call restorying (Rosile, 1998a, b, c; White & Epston, 1990). The storied organization is Tamara-esque theatre, with simultaneous multiple stages (Boje, 1995). SEAM does not ignore, gloss over, or totalize this variety. Instead, SEAM incorporates what we call “metascript” and “metatheatre.”

Since the purpose of this article is to explore the theatrical aspects of the SEAM methodology, we begin by offering a bit of the theatrics of our own research of this topic, by taking you, the reader, back to that seminar room that sunny Saturday morning in Lyon. The present authors had concluded their talks, frequently drawing on Saval’s English-speaking faculty for translations. As we conclude our comments on theatrics, we are surprised to discover that Savall has unobtrusively begun a flip-chart drawing to address the issues being discussed. Ever the showman, in his

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quiet style Savall dramatically reveals that he is still Comedien Français as in his youth, but for a different audience in academia these days. As he paints a drawing to deconstruct our presentation with his theatrical intervention, he evokes a bit of silent theatre. In his trademark bowtie, he resembles Charlie Chaplin for a moment.

His performance is ironic and humorous. The silent theatre is a pregnant pause in the dialog and rhythm of the event.

Then Savall begins: “There are people who are the stars of organizational theatre. There is an off stage and an on stage, and those who work to perfect what takes place on the stage. There is a director, and there are people who think they can be better directors. There are people on the sidelines who want to replace the stars, who think they can do a better job. With so many directors and also spectators seeking to displace actors and become the new stars, the metascript becomes increasingly chaotic.” We are theatre therapists to organizations. SEAM methodology scribes the fragments of the metascript and presents a deconstruction of the script variations and incongruities in the “Mirror Effect” intervention (see intro article by Boje & Rosile in this issue). Then after the variations (of the metascript) are presented to organizational members, the rescripting intervention is jointly produced.

How do we view SEAM in the context of organizational theatrics? In organization studies, theatre is either a metaphor or an actuality. In a previous issue of the Journal of Organizational Change Management (JOCM), Oswick, Keenoy, and Grant (2001) and Kärreman (2001) conclude that followers of Goffman (1974) take a metaphoric approach (e.g., Harvey, 2001; Overington and Mangham, 1987; Rosen, 1985; Clark & Mangham, 2001; Meisiek, 2002) while followers of Burke (1937, 1945, 1972) take a more literal approach, theatre is not a metaphor.

We believe that Saval’s quote, with which we began this paper, reflects the more Burkean perspective inherent in SEAM. Before proceeding with this analysis, however, we will address another use of theatre in organizations. This third perspective is helpful because it demonstrates something which SEAM is not.

To the above metaphoric/actual dualism, we add a third alternative trend: theatre as an organizational change tool. In our symposium for the 2001 Academy of Management (Boje, 2001c), panelist Georg Schreyogg (2001) presented theatre as a change technology (See also Schreyogg & Noss, 2000). In Germany, France, and even in the U.S., firms hire consultants who employ professional actors and playwrights to enact theatre as a technology of change. In this approach, the professional actors recreate conflict situations and craft object lessons to address problems identified by senior executives. The consultants may interview organizational members for dialogue, and may incorporate ongoing organizational issues in the plots. These theatrical productions may be employed to suggest alternative perspectives on problems, or to model problem resolutions or specific behavioral responses desired by management. Performances typically would be discussed and processed by managers and employees, sometimes using focus groups, following these theatric events. We view this as a managerial use (Alvesson and Willmott, 1996) of theatric technology, employing theatre professionals to aid the expert consultant and top management in their strategies to control organizations.

Of the three approaches described above (metaphoric, actual, and managerialist), we suggest that Henri Savall’s Burkean perspective offers a less metaphorical, less managerialist, and, we contend, a more postmodern approach to diagnosing and intervening in the organization which is theatre. Saner (1999, 2000) pursues theatre as a postmodern intervention which is off-Broadway or even off-off-Broadway when compared to more traditional relationships between consultants and clients. By off-Broadway, Saner means consulting is a form of postmodern theatrical intervention. We turn now to a more detailed exploration of the ‘postmodern theatrics’ (Rosile, Best & Boje, 2001) of SEAM.

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SEAM IS THEATRIC METHOD

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EAM assumes organization is theatre. It does not approach theatre as a metaphor. Rather, the purpose of the diagnosis stage of this intervention is to research the “metascript” of the organization, and to use qualitative narrative research methods (Boje, 2001a) to reproduce samples of the organistic metascript in the “Mirror Effect” (The Mirror Effect is discussed by us in intro article to this issue). In theatrical terms, SEAM’s Mirror Effect explores the many different scripts which populate an organization simultaneously, that collectively constitute its metascript.

What is Metascript? SEAM juxtaposes the senior executive’s script against many alternatives, more marginalized scripts, so that the metascript is a multiplicity of contending and fragmented scripts. Executives are directors who line up characters (human and non-human alike), in an antenarrative (Boje, 2001a). An antenarrative is a pre-narrative bet that a story can be told that will enroll stakeholders in ways that transform the world of action. Corporate directors, managers and other script-creators mobilize plot-scenarios in the course of which theatre emerges on multiple, real corporate stages (as in Tamara, Boje, 1995). Indeed many directors offer characters roles, themes, dialog, and ways of playing (paraphrase of Latour, 1996).

SEAM consultants meticulously record comments of executives and non-executives in individual and group interviews that we (the authors) believe constitute fragments of the metascript. Scribing and translating the metascript is the starting point for SEAM. And a co-reading of the collected fragments of metascript is the point of the Mirror Effect event. These comments comprise what we view as a script. For example, in a SEAM diagnosis in an alarm company consultants collected quotes from 480 people. We consider that this data comprises a “metascript.” Data (or

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“script lines”) were also collected using field observations of company meetings and work process behaviors. To coordinate the multi-consultant interviewing and observations, field interviews were entered into a computer database over a period of six months. This yielded 2,500 pages of what we would consider to be mostly metascript.

SEAM assumes that over time the organization’s script becomes overlayered and fragmented with the many scriptwriters and script editors in organizations.

Further, as in TAMARA (Boje, 1995, TAMARA Journal, 2001) the organization is assumed to be a multiplicity of stages on which different plays are acted out by organizational members (actors) simultaneously. Since organizational theatre is multiple and simultaneous, actors in one part of the organization do not see the performance of other groups of players first-hand. Rather, they hear stories of performances at meetings, and experience various other presentations and stagings of events they did not attend. The actors of the organization therefore pursue stories of theatric performances from room to room, office to office, branch to headquarters, in a TAMARA-esque networking.

As in TAMARA, SEAM’s postmodern perspective of organizations recognizes the modernist false dualism in the distinction between actor and audience (see also Boal’s 1979 concept of “spect-actor”). Actors may choose not to behave (to become part of the audience of spectators), or to behave differently (to improvise), to slant their interpretation and even resist the script. SEAM’s extensive interview process collects the lines of dialog, which reveals the hidden conflicts, taboo topics, and dysfunctional dynamics in mostly unwritten (and often conflicting) scripts. In these ways SEAM acknowledges that the organization is not only metatheatre, the organization is also metascript.

As the firm enacts and networks a TAMARA-esque simultaneous and fragmented multiplicity of theatre, the metascript becomes less and less coherent (perhaps it never was so). Piecemeal revisions may result in a metascript that “de-energizes” organization stakeholders (Cristallini, 2002). In postmodern terms (see M. & M. Peron in this issue of JOCM) the metascript may contain a dialectic of scripts that are in opposition, yet do not totalize. As Treppo and De Geuser (in this issue) point out, we manage and work in under-organized worlds of contradiction and heterogeneity.

In our terms, the metascript never ceases to emerge, adapt, and dissolve; it does this without the interference of a cadre of directors and script revisionists.

By definition, metascript cannot stand still. We can hypothesize that it is more homogeneous in more bureaucratic organizations, with fewer authorized directors and editors and more structured and formalized rehearsals. However, even in bureaucracy there is TAMARA-esque simultaneous performance, within the divisions of labor and divisions of hierarchy. Further, as in less bureaucratic organizations, even bureaucratic metatheatre has a “drift effect.” Any originary script (and we doubt there was) drifts in its editions, revisions, and fragments, to become a monstrous collage that while continually con-scripting in a panoptic embrace, does not necessarily meet needs of actors or spect-actors.

If we return to Savall’s theatric performance at ISEOR, his intervention was to write the word “aesthetics” onto a chart he sketched on a flip chart; he also sketched his “SEAM Field of Theatre.”

According to Savall (2002), SEAM incorporates a range of considerations, from emotional to financial. SEAM avoids the traditional separations of categories like aesthetic, physiological, psychological, sociological, and economic. Action in the organizational theatre incorporates all these in its inquiry and analysis.

Next, we propose seven elements of metatheatre, which we refer to as the “Septet” (Septet means seven items).

SEAM’s Relations to Septet, the Poetic Elements of Metatheatre In our Septet,

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we propose a postmodern reinvention of Aristotle’s (350 BCE) dramatic elements (of Poetics). Aristotle’s Poetic elements are also the root of the Boal (1979) theatric method, Theatre of the Oppressed. Boal builds upon Freire’s (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1969), and reinterprets Aristotle’s Poetics to fashion a postmodern Poetics of theatre. Boal’s methodology is widely used around the world. This approach, and its application to organizations, was the focus of an Organization Development and Change division of the Academy of Management’s conference symposium (Boje, Rosile, and Malbogat, Toronto, 2000). In that event, Malbogat, director of Toronto’s Theatre for Social Change, put on masks and portrayed characters that consultants and academics would likely encounter (for example, the sloth, the aggressor, the sniveler, the conniver, and the crazy-maker). The purpose was to demonstrate how the various masked characters typically engaged in oppressing others.

How does SEAM relate to Boal’s methodology? During the diagnosis phase, SEAM consultants spend 2-6 months scribing the metascript in extensive organizational interviews. As do most researchers, they aggregate data and show trends.

However, they also highlight diverging comments explicitly, thereby revealing potential oppressions, and metascript incongruities. They do this with SEAM’s mirror effect (see Boje and Rosile’s Introduction in this issue of JOCM), which explicitly presents diverging and converging clusters of actual utterances of organizational actors. This focus on divergences in comments (script fragments) prevents the glossing over of differences, and the forcing of a falsely uniform theatrical-picture of the organization. We view the SEAM mirror event as a metascript process which allows SEAM to do what Boal does-- to reveal oppression, conflict, and power.

Although the metascript is not a written text, yet it has, we hypothesize, a “Septet” of theatric elements, which are character, plot, theme, dialog, rhythm, and spectacle – and these affect individual and organizational performance (Boje, 2003).

A brief explanation of these elements follows.

CHARACTER: Characters are recruited, seduced, coerced into new roles and relationships. There are starring roles, understudies, and supporting roles.

SEAM involves both horizontal and vertical actors in the organization (the “horivert” concept) as well as customers.

PLOTS: There is never one script, always a multiplicity of scripts. There is never one plot, there is a network of plots (and emplotments). Emplotment is Ricoeur’s (1984) term for “grasping together” characters, themes, events, dialog, etc. into a hermeneutic spiral of three mimetic moments (see Boje, 2001a chapter on plots).

Plots are discarded, invented, and disseminated for a new inter-plot-ment in unwritten intertextualities. The collective metascript itself is a system of inter-scripts (i.e. script lines in one script reference lines in another; scripts do not have to be written). Plots, for example, are organizational plans seeking real-izability and realization, but they can also de-realize when characters stop engaging in them. Plots have champions (starring characters) supporting characters, antagonistic characters, and non-included characters yet to be seduced or conscripted. The metascript is a system of communication, coordination, and control (SEAM’s 3C’s) among the various characters.

In SEAM, plots may be viewed as part of narrative organizational strategies (Barry & Elmes, 1997). To plot a revision to a metascript is to attempt to real-ize a transformation in all the 7 Septetic elements of theatre. SEAM carefully constructs its changes as experiments. With thorough documentation of the subtleties of hidden costs and the loss of potential performance, SEAM clients gain a more accurate sense of how a strategic change (plot change) is affecting organizational performance. SEAM experts have demonstrated that their comprehensive form of cost analysis could have revealed the hidden costs of many reengineering efforts which ultimately failed (Savall and Bonnet, NEED DATE AND REFERENCE).

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THEMES: Never singular as in Aristotle’s view, but “mega” as in Freire’s (1970) radical variation of action research. Freire’s “theme analysis” is jointly co-enacted by the researchers and the Brazilian peasants in his project narrative. Themes emerge in discussions by the peasants with researchers. In some cases, themes are presented theatrically, as with Boal’s approach to theatre.

SEAM assumes a multiplicity of themes. In SEAM’s mirror phase, intervenerresearchers reveal the actual utterances of organizational actors, so they can negotiate with organization members to co-produce the diverging and converging categories of comments. This highlights the multiplicity of perspectives and themes simultaneously present in the organization theatre.

DIALOGS: Not one dialog, but contending dialogs exist, which do not conquer each other and do not present a totalization. Themes and plots are expressed in dialog, and dialog can be more or less scripted. For, example a McDonald’s restaurant has highly scripted dialog for not only its employees, but also for managers and customers (Boje, 2002).

SEAM intervener-researchers are trained to record verbatim comments of organizational members. These comments are not forced into totalizing categories, but rather, are mirrored in their complex and contradictory natures, as described above under THEMES. RHYTHMS: There is not one rhythm as with Aristotle’s Poetics (350 BCE), but a pan-opoly of rhythms. What are organizational rhythms, planning rhythms, and controlling rhythms? Rhythms are recurring patterns in fields of action and discourse. Rhythms in organizations are part of the self-organizing system of complexity and chaos effects; scripting attempts to channel rhythm.

SEAM follows a « chrono-biological » rhythm, which is, according to Saval, « the change music, the harmony of change for the actors, and the…biological rhythm » (Saval interview, 2001).

SPECTACLES: For Aristotle (350 BCE), spectacle was the least important of the six poetic elements of theatre. For us, spectacle is the most important. Spectacles multiply, in that they accumulate as theatric expressions of corporate image and consumer advertising. We prefer Debord’s (1967) conceptualization of spectacle to Aristotle’s (although Aristotle is not totally abandoned by us--we retain the cathartic effect). Corporate spectacle is designed to instruct the mass of consumers in scripts of happiness through consumption (Boje, 2002; 2001b, d) in what Firat and Dholakia (1998) term “theatres of consumption.” For Nietzsche (1974/1887), spectacle is the theatre of addiction; spectators are unaware they have become actors in spectacles scripted by a collective of power brokers. Foucault (1979) in his chapter on the carceral, notes something Nietzsche has missed, that the powerful are as conscripted by spectacle as the minions. It is important to remember that while the metascript is a carceral, it is not a dialectic. We do not transform corporate spectacles into some theatrical space we could call non-spectacle. Rather, the spectacles are rescripted into just another spectacle to be incorporated into the metascript. There is not vacation from corporate spectacle, just substitution of one more consumer spectacle for another.

SEAM recognizes that the essential component of spectacle is power. SEAM’s Saval is neither a Marxist nor is he a “critical postmodernist.” The SEAM approach is spectacle, is more Goffmanesque, with its front stage official corporate spectacle and the backstage intrigue of scripts that want to be realized, but are not yet. « Managers will have the formal power intact; but what SEAM demonstrates, is that they don’t have actual power. But all the actors in the organization have hidden power. So it is important to acknowledge the existence of conflicts within the organization …To overcome and transcend this conflict…it is necessary to (establish) a leadership/management which negotiates with each, each and all the persons who are the actors within the organization….It is impossible to get lasting financial per-

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formance…without management based on negotiation… » (Saval interview, 2001).

FRAMES: Burke’s (1972: 23) unfinished project was to extend his “Pentad” (his interpretations of Aristotle’s 6 poetic elements) by adding one more, called “frames.” Burke’s pentad corresponds to Aristotle’s poetic elements as follows (Burke, 1945: 231): plot = act; character = agent; spectacle = scene; theme = purpose; dialog = agency; and also rhythm = agency. What are frames? They are competing points of view, and contradictory ideologies (Burke, 1937). In organizations, the official ideological frame conflicts with unofficial aspirants (new frames).

For example, the marginalized ideologies of workers, unions, or environmentalists juxtapose the official ideology of the firm and its corporate executives (Boje, 1995).

To transform the organization’s metascript is to intervene in the network of frames and make one frame more pronounced, and/or introduce some new frame.

SEAM embraces frames, which other perspectives may view as contradictory or irrelevant. Further, these frames are interpreted with economic cost data. However, the organizational members, not by the SEAM experts, supply this data. “… we bring them these new tools, and they calculate hidden costs, not us, we don’t do it by ourselves” (Saval interview, 2001).

All seven theatric elements (the Septet, above) are constituents of the metascripting dynamics of managing organizational change, in what we have been developing as the metatheatrics of organizations. We have suggested how each of these septetic theatre elements relates to SEAM methodology. We conclude by summarizing 5 ways that the metatheatric elements of SEAM shape SEAM’S organizational change approach. First, SEAM is metatheatric: it assumes a multiplicity of each Septet-element (e.g. not one but many plots), and not one but many theatres of organization. Second, in assuming organization is theatre instead of organization as theatre, the SEAM approach is more compatible with the Burke and Boal approaches and our Septet interpretations of Aristotle, rather than the Goffman metaphoric sociology. This leads to the third point, that SEAM is not only theatrical but also postmodern. Oppressions (expressed as loss of potential) and conflicts are not glossed or finessed, they are uncovered, highlighted and negotiated. Fourth, SEAM has made a conscious choice to challenge Fayol’s management approach as incomplete. While organic, Fayol’s approach is, for Saval, more sociological than economic. Saval’s “theatre de SEAM” extends the socio-economic by supplementary inclusion of the psychoanalytic and of the aesthetic. SEAM’s expanded frame includes human, technical, social, and economic costs, including also the hidden and potential costs. Finally, SEAM accommodates a view of organizations as theatric spectacle. Aristotle thought spectacle was only something bad poets did when they wrote bad theatre. In contemporary postmodern theatres of capitalism (Boje 2002) the septet elements have become fused into one element, the spectacle. Corporations produce and distribute spectacles (not products) for mass consumption.

In sum, SEAM intervenes into what we call the “theatres of capitalism” (Boje, 2002). SEAM is neither metaphoric theatre, nor a performance staged by professional actors reciting lines scribed by consultant’s visions of senior managers’ frames of managerialist ideologies. SEAM is not application of theatric terminology to corporate behavior. Rather, SEAM fights fire with fire. SEAM meticulously collects (what we assume to be) metascript from alternative viewpoints (i.e. executive, workers, technicians, and customers) in order to confront the organization with the “Mirror Effect.” This can be a day-long event, and is devoted to reading to the corporation its own metascript and deconstructing dysfunctions in metatheatre.

Changes to the metascript are proposed as SEAM « experiments, » suggesting an off-Broadway (Saner, 2000) phase of the organization theatre. Add to this the surprise of daring to calculate the hidden costs of the metatheatric dysfunctions, and we see in SEAM a way to cast the spotlight backstage, and ultimately, to relate theatre to economic performance.

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Swan Lake & the Ballets Russes

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A wittgensteinian analysis of Samuel beckett’s Drama Asist. univ. drd. ALEXANDRA MUNTEANU Universitatea "1 Decembrie 1918", Alba Iulia

The aim of this paper is to offer an analysis of Samuel Beckett’s drama from the perspective of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. As an alternative to the various symbolic, or thematic, interpretations of Beckett’s plays, an approach is suggested that is based on his characters’ use of language.

The analytical frame applied is therefore heavily inspired not only by Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language in general but in particular his notion of ‘language game’. The data for this analysis will be provided by two of Samuel Beckett’s plays, ‘Waiting for Godot’ and ‘Endgame’, respectively.

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“

HAMM: We’re not beginning to … to … mean something?

CLOV: Mean something?

You and I mean something! Brief laugh. Ah, that’s a good one.”

(Endgame) “The early success of Waiting for Godot was based on a fundamental misunderstanding, critics and public alike insisted on interpreting in allegorical or symbolic terms a play which was striving all the time to avoid definition.” This is Samuel Beckett’s own critique of those who tried by any means to find a particular message in his play.

Since its first production in 1953, Waiting for Godot, Beckett’s first play to be published and staged, has probably generated more critical controversy than any other contemporary play. It has been produced in thousands of theatres in all parts of the world, in any number of interpretations and settings, it has been “dissected, argued over, reviled, hailed as opening a new era in Western drama – it has been subject to every possible fate except that of being ignored”.

Waiting for Godot is a two-act play based on a striking economy of theatrical means. On an almost empty scene representing a country road with only a bare tree, two eldery men, Estragon (Gogo) and Vladimir (Didi) are waiting for someone by the name Godot (who will never show up). The purpose for their appointment is not revealed. (In fact, there is little information concerning the social status of the characters or their past -except that they’ve known each other for more than fifty years). Two other

characters, a local landowner Pozzo and his slave Lucky, join them for a while then leave again. The second act echoes (with small changes) the first: it has been said about Waiting for Godot that it is a play in which “Nothing happens, twice”.

Some of Beckett’s critics in their search for meaning in Waiting for Godot have offered various symbolic interpretations. Due to its title and the frequent references to the Bible, most of these tend to be religious.

G.S. Fraser, for instance, found Christian symbolism in the play. According to him, the tramps and their misery symbolize the fallen state of man, the tree on stage stands both for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and for the cross, the boy is an angel send by God, and Godot, of course, is the anthropomorphic image of God. Beckett himself disagreed with interpretations of this kind: ‘When will they stop making me mean more than I say?’ It seems that religious interpretations are quite common for the plays of the so-called Theatre of the ‘Absurd’. For example, Terence Rattigan’s reports from a conversation with Harold Pinter: “When I saw The Caretaker I told Pinter that I knew what it mean. ‘It’s about the God of the Old Testament, the God of the New, and Humanity, isn’t it?’

Pinter said blankly, ‘No, Terry, it’s about a caretaker and two brothers.’”

The opposite kind of interpretation found with Waiting for Godot focuses on lack of meaning and possibilities in the world of Vladimir and Estragon. Eugene Goodheart, for example, writes that in Beckett, “the condition of nonbeing and meaningless is universal and insurmountable” and the games the characters play represent a “kind of playing to fill the

void of self”.

In the face of these interpretations, one might ask: how could Beckett’s dramatic world be approached without either adding “extra” meanings to it or regard it as meaningless? How could the ‘meaning’ of Godot be discussed without making such final statements?

A more appropriate approach, perhaps, would be to start from Beckett’s use of language in Waiting for Godot. While waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon pass the time discussing different topics (from The Bible to wearing boots), telling stories, singing, arguing, i.e. by using language in various ways. These activities constitute their very existence and form their social bond.

It is the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who was the first to use the concept of ‘language game’ to bring into prominence the fact that “the speaking of a language is part of an activity, a form of life (Lebensform).”

As Wittgenstein sees it, an essential property of language is its embeddedness in structured activities that constitute a ‘form of life’. Almost all activities that human beings engage in are ones that are intrinsically connected with, or somehow grounded in, our use of language. Learning our language, or coming to participate in our form of life, is essentially connected with acquiring mastery of countless kinds of language games. Wittgenstein gives the following list of some of the characteristic language-games that constitute our form of life: Giving orders, and obeying them –Describing the appearance of an object … …Reporting an event – Speculating about an event – … Making up a story …

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‘Meaning’in Beckett’s Drama

Play-acting – Singing catches – Play-acting – Guessing riddles – Making a joke … …Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.

In Wittgenstein’s view, a word is analogous to a chess piece, and utterances can be thought of as moves within the language games that make up the human social bond.

There are at least two reasons why a language-game approach would be preferable in interpreting Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame. First, it would not force upon the plays a certain thematic reading: religious, philosophical, political, etc.; second, neither would it commit the other fallacy- interpreting the world inhabited by the characters as meaningless- since it starts from the premise that the characters primarily use language and hence participate in a form of social interaction (a form of life) which can never be meaningless. This kind of analysis, however, does not claim to exhaust the ‘meaning’ of Beckett’s plays – let alone for the reason that by being dramatic works their full potential can only be achieved, i.e. are only realized, in their actual performance.

It only attempts to explain some aspects of the way language is used by the characters and the implications these might have for establishing the meaning of these plays as wholes.

Language-games in Waiting for Godot and Endgame “ESTRAGON: Lets’ go.

VLADIMIR: We can’t.

ESTRAGON: Why not?

VLADIMIR: We are waiting for Godot.”

(Waiting for Godot) The main game in WFG is the titular ‘game of waiting’: the two men are waiting for the mysterious Godot to come. Whoever Godot might be he seems to be tremendously important to both Vladimir and Estragon since they invest so much hope in his arrival. While waiting for

him they play some other smaller “games”: they tell stories, Vladimir sings a song, they play-act, give orders (which are obeyed or not), ask questions, curse one another, pray almost all the language games listed

by Wittgenstein can be identified in Waiting for Godot- but all these small games are played within the limits of the metagame of waiting.

As Jeffrey Nealon notices in an postmodernist analysis of Godot, in order to suggest these limits Beckett employs a ‘spatial metaphor’: “Vladimir and Estragon cannot go anywhere (disrupt the limits of their gambling) because they have inscribed themselves within the limits of one static, universal metagame, to which they constantly return when their smaller games have run their course. They play comfortably within these limits, but never attempt to transgress or disrupt them.’

Indeed, when their small games break down or are played out, they constantly refer to their metagame: POZZO: …Adieu.

Long silence.

VLADIMIR: That passed time.

ESTRAGON: It would have passed it in any case.

VLADIMIR: Yes, but not so rapidly.

Pause.

ESTRAGON: What do we do now?

VLADIMIR: I don’t know.

ESTRAGON: Let’s go.

VLADIMIR: We can’t.

ESTRAGON: Why not?

VLADIMIR: We’re waiting for Godot.

A similar metagame is central to Beckett’s Endgame. The play presents a decadent world, ruined and “grey”, populated by figures “human but barely human.” Hamm, once powerful, now old and blind, his friend-servant Clov and his parents, Nell and Nagg who are “bottled” in two bins which they cannot leave.

Throughout the play they are running out of bicycles wheels, coffins, rugs, and in the end, Hamm’s painkiller.

Clearly (as the title also suggests) they play some last game: of the

world, of their existence?

The play has often been interpreted as a metaphor from chess, as ‘endgame’ is the third and final part in a game of chess and Beckett himself insisted on this analogy. The chess-player is involved in a game, the rules of which are not his making, and which he operates from outside. Essential to this analysis is that the players (Hamm and Clov) are not allowed to change these rules, as they are, in Wittgenstein’s terms, “instruments of the game itself”. The idea of restricted moves is further emphasised - very much as in Waiting for Godot - by a spatial metaphor: the characters cannot leave the house (”outside of here it’s death”p.5). Therefore, the need to continue playing (according to the established rules) is even more acute here than in Godot: CLOV: (imploringly). Let’s stop playing!

HAMM: Never!

In an interpretation of Endgame, B.S. Hammond has written the following: “We might formulate the deeper preoccupation of Endgame, tentatively, as follows: in a world no longer rendered purposeful by Christian conceptions of eschatology, time is experienced not as a linear development towards a goal, but as a yawning vacuum, a black hole without structure.” Therefore, structure has to be imposed from outside through routine, for Beckett’s characters, through playing of games. It is essential for the characters to keep playing, as the games constitute their very existence (Ironically, Beckett leaves no alternative to them, this also demonstrating the self-reflexive nature of Endgame: Clov and Hamm are just characters/ actors in a play and they ‘exist’ as long as they ‘play’). As Hammond further notices “…the dramatic tension of the play derives from Clov’s regularly threatening to stop playing - to upset the board. His attempts throw Hamm back on his resources

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game is that it might transgress and disrupt the old limits within which they play their metagame, their grand ‘endgame’.

As a consequence, Hamm tries to maintain the balance by devising new moves for the game. Thus, his ‘story’ is a key element in his attempt. Clov cannot leave because it would deprive Hamm of his audience and thus his game of ‘story-telling’ wouldn’t make any sense. The possessive “my story” creates certain vagueness in Hamm’s utterance: the term can describe Hamm’s entire life story or the story (i.e. his fiction) he keeps telling to the small audience consisting of his parents and Clov. This is an instance of what Ruth Kempson calls the “indeterminacy of meaning”: when “the meaning itself of an item seems indeterminate”. Being a rather cruel story (Hamm tells how he, or a fictional version of himself, once refused bread and corn to a starving man and his child) Hamm prefers to maintain this vagueness about it.

Clov re-defines Hamm’s ‘story’: “The one you’ve been telling yourself all your… day.” which instead of clarifying its meaning increases its vagueness even more. The definition Clov provides for Hamm’s story contains another indeterminate element, “your days”. In its turn, “your days” can mean “your life”, but also “the present”, “the past”, even “the future”, or any unspecified span of time. Clov doesn’t choose to use the more precise term ‘life’ because, as B.S Hammond points out, “…Hamm and Clov do not possess anything as meaningful as a ‘life’. They possess only ‘days’ – empty, undifferentiated sheets of time.”

Further on, “my story” is substituted by Hamm himself with “my chronicle”. In Kempson’s terms, ‘referential vagueness’ is created two different terms being applied to the same referent. Hamm’s second choice can be explained not only by the fact that “chronicle” is somehow superior to “story”: “the Greek word

confers a superior status on Hamm’s pursuit”, but also because a chronicle, unlike a story, does not necessarily have an end and is the record of passing time: “Hamm is issuing a timely warning to Clov that conversations like the one they are having, that they have had so many times in the past, will recur in the future.”

In other words, their languagegames will continue, the essential condition being to keep them going, and only the two of them are able to make that happen. In fact, Hamm is the one of the two who does his best to maintain their conversation, by giving positive connotation to his own words, by keeping terms vague that might refer to unpleasant realities, or by urging Clov to do his part in the game (“Ask me where I’ve got to”, “Keep going, can’t you, keep going”), while Clov threatens to stop playing (“I’ll leave you”) or is deliberately misreading Hamm’s utterances in order to mock his efforts and upset the game. Hamm, for example, uses a stereotyped expression (“But nevertheless, better than nothing”), which implies that he hasn’t done that bad, after all. But Clov ignores the implications of Hamm’s utterance, and gives his words a purely literal reading: logically, can that expression be meaningful? Speech Act Theory treats this as instance of nonsecuring of the ‘uptake’: “the failure to recognize the illocutionary force intended”. Clov attributes Hamm’s utterance (which is clearly a cliché) the illocutionary force of what Searle (1979) terms ‘representatives’: “illocutionary acts which commit the speaker to the truth of the proposition asserted”.

In Waiting for Godot, it is Estragon who generally monitors the conversation, gives turns to it, sustain it as long as he wishes and terminates it when he finds that it is not heading towards any worthwhile resolution (e.g. “In the meantime let us converse calmly”, “That’s the idea, let’s contradict each other”,

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in inventing new games and devising new moves.” In the following passage, for example, Clov has again threatened separation (an action that is not going to happen). In answer to Clov’s challenge, Hamm introduces the set-topic of his story: CLOV: I’ll leave you.

HAMM: No! CLOV: What is there to keep me here?

HAMM: The dialogue. (Pause.)

I’ve got on with my story. (Pause.)

I’ve got on with it well. (Pause. Irritably.) Ask me where I’ve got to.

CLOV: Oh, by the way, your story?

HAMM: (surprised). What story?

CLOV: The one you’ve been telling yourself all your …days.

HAMM: Ah, you mean my chronicle?

CLOV: That’s the one.

Pause.

HAMM: (modestly). Oh not very far, not very far. (He sighs.) There are days like that, one isn’t inspired.

(Pause.) No forcing, no forcing, it’s fatal.

(Pause.) I’ve got with it a little all the same. (Pause.) Technique, you know. (Pause. Irritably.) I say I’ve got on with it all the same.

CLOV: (admiringly). Well I never! In spite of everything you were able to go on with it!

HAMM: (modestly). Oh not very far, you know, not very far, but nevertheless, better than nothing.

CLOV: Better than nothing! Is it possible?

Clov fails to give Hamm the credit his topic merits. Being a rulegoverned activity, the game of conversation cannot be played unless its rules are followed. In Wittgenstein’s words certain rules (those that are instruments) of the game “cannot be changed without changing the game”. Hamm is entitled to be irritated with Clov, because ”he is trying to cheat by refusing to ask all the old questions”; he’s trying to change the rules of the game they have played comfortably for some time. The danger of changing the rules of the

“That’s the idea, let’s abuse each other”, “Now let’s make up”, “Let’s pass on now to something else, do you mind”). In the following example, he doesn’t feel like going along with Vladimir’s game, so he’s trying to ‘undermine’ the latter’s discourse: VLADIMIR: Did you read the Bible?

ESTRAGON: The Bible…(He reflects.) I must have had a look at it.

VLADIMIR: Do you remember the Gospels?

ESTRAGON: I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were.

Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That’s where we’ll go, I used to say, that’s were we’ll go for our honeymoon.

We’ll swim. We’ll be happy.

VLADIMIR: You should have been a poet.

ESTRAGON: I was. (Gesture towards his rags.) Isn’t that obvious?

Silence.

VLADIMIR: Where was I… How’s your foot?

ESTRAGON: Swelling visibly.

VLADIMIR: Ah yes, the two thieves. Do you remember the story?

ESTRAGON: No. VLADIMIR: Shall I tell it to you?

ESTRAGON: No. VLADIMIR: It’ll pass time.

(Pause.) Two thieves, crucified at the same time as our Saviour. OneESTRAGON: Our what?

VLADIMIR: Our Saviour. Two thieves. One is supposed to have been saved and the other … (he searches for the contrary of saved) …damned.

ESTRAGON: Saved from what?

VLADIMIR: Hell.

ESTRAGON: I’m going.

He does not move.

VLADIMIR: And yet … (pause) how is it – this is not boring you I hope – how is it that of the four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved. (Pause.) Como, Gogo, return the ball, can’t you once in away?

ESTRAGON: (with exaggerated enthusiasm.) I find this really most extraordinary interesting.

These utterances can also be examined in the light of the Gricean framework of ‘conversational implicature’.

Grice adopts the term “implicature” to refer to the various kinds of calculations by which we make sense of what we hear. His theory “provides some explicit account of how it is possible to mean (in some general sense) more than what is actually said.”

Estragon’s answer to Vladimir’s second question- a yes/no question (“Do you remember the Gospels?”) is not simply affirmative or negative as Grice’s maxim of quantity requires (“make your as informative as is required for the current purpose of the exchange”). He also indicates his casual interest in Vladimir’s topic (the Bible) by flouting both the maxim of manner (Be perspicuous, and spe-

cifically: i) avoid obscurity; ii) avoid ambiguity; iii) be brief; iv) be orderly) and the maxim of relevance (“Be rel-

evant”). Thus, instead of answering Vladimir question he starts talking about the colourful “maps of the Holy

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plicature he establishes, the way he makes sense of Vladimir’s utterance is clearly not what the latter intends.

What Estragon aims at is, of course, subverting Vladimir’s discourse.

Being a very good conversationalist and determined to continue his argument, Vladimir is not discouraged

by Estragon’s subversive moves.

He makes use of rhetorical questions to provide continuity to his story (“Where was I?”) and keenly tries to attract E’s attention by showing interest in his heath (“How’s your foot?”).

But he’s not really interested in it; he shows his indifference to Estragon’s injured foot, and does so by unceremoniously flouting the maxim of ‘relevance’ (“Ah, yes, the two thieves.”).

Vladimir’s persistence in his story in spite of Estragon’s emphatic reluctance to cooperate with him in conversation is not triggered by any serious intention to drive home some point. Vladimir does everything only to “pass time”, he know perfectly well that in order to

play the ‘metagame’ of waiting they have to spend their time by playing other small games.

Further, when Vladimir wants to make some sense of the story of the two thieves in rational terms, Estragon shows annoyance by employing a subtle strategy of what Erving Goffman calls ‘reruns’. But as Beckett’s criticism has noticed by his “our what”, “saved from what”, he is not actually asking for ‘reruns’: “They can hardly be seen as demands for clarification, for they do not seem to have been prompted by his not having heard. Rather, they indicate lack of enthusiasm to participate in the conversation.” Vladimir, however, treats Estragon’s responses as genuine reruns and observes the maxims of ‘relevance’, ‘quantity’ and ‘manner’ in providing proper answers. But Estragon doesn’t want to pursue the story, so he opts out of the conversation abruptly (“I’m going”). However, “He doesn’t move” as Beckett’s stage directions indicate. Engaged in the game of waiting for Godot, Estragon knows as well as Vladimir that they “can’t leave”. Moreover, Vladimir is there to remind him (as Hamm does with Clov) that they have to go on playing: “Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can’t you, once in a while?”

As this paper has tried to demonstrate, the language game played by the main characters are essential to both Waiting for Godot and Endgame. This is because Beckett’s drama relies so much on language: in his plays “language is intrinsic to the human situation and not a removable element.”23 Didi and Gogo, Hamm and Clov exist as long as they use language, i.e. are engaged in language-games. It is from this perspective that their actions can be seen as purposeful, and that they can be said to “mean something.”

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Land” and what they suggest to him.

He is, in fact, deliberately misinterpreting Vladimir’s question: the im-

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Alain Robbe-Grillet

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1922 –2008 French writer and filmmaker

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