Of Theatre. 71

Home , Historical present, Nikolai Evreinov

“The Theatrical Pendulum:

Paths of Innovation in the Modernist Stage”

Andrés Pérez-Simón

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto © Copyright by Andrés Pérez-Simón, 2010

“The Theatrical Pendulum: Paths of Innovation in the Modernist Stage”

Andrés Pérez-Simón

Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Comparative Literature

University of Toronto

2010

Abstract

This dissertation examines the renovation of the modernist stage, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1930s, via a retrieval of three artistic forms that had marginal importance in the commercial theatre of the nineteenth century. These three paths are the commedia dell’arte, puppetry and marionettes, and, finally, what I denominate mysterium, following Elinor Fuch’s terminology in The Death of Character. This dissertation covers the temporal span of the first three decades of the twentieth century and, at the same time, analyzes modernist theatre in connection with the history of Western drama since the consolidation of the bourgeois institution of theatre around the late eighteenth century. The Theatrical Pendulum:

Paths of Innovation in the Modernist Staget studies the renovation of the bourgeois institution of theatre by means of the rediscovery of artistic forms previously relegated to a peripheral status in the capitalist system of artistic production and distribution. In their dramatic works, Nikolai

Evreinov, Josef and Karel Čapek, Massimo Bontempelli, and Federico García Lorca present fictional actors, playwrights and directors who resist the fact that their work be evaluated as just another commodity. These dramatists collaborate with the commercial stage of their time,

instead of adopting the radical stance that characterized avant-garde movements such as Italian futurism and Dadaism. Yet they also question the illusionist fourth wall separating stage and audience in order to denounce the subjection of the modernist artist to the expectations of bourgeois spectators. Jan Mukařovský’s concept of practical function in art is central to understanding the didactic nature of the dramatic texts studied in this dissertation. By claiming the importance of Mukařovský’s phenomenological structuralism, I propose a new reading of the theoretical legacy of the Prague School in conjunction with recent contributions in the field of theatre studies by Elinor Fuchs, Martin Puchner and other scholars whose work will be discussed here.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my doctoral committee. My supervisor, Veronika Ambros, generously shared her time with me during the last three years and proved to be not only a thorough scholar but a person entirely devoted to her doctoral students. And, in alphabetical order, I would like to thank Alan Ackerman, who provided me with feedback of extraordinary value for every chapter of this dissertation and always directed me to the current debates in theatre scholarship; Stephen Rupp, critical reader and mentor in his role of professor and Chair of Spanish and Portuguese, of great assistance in my search for my first academic position; and

Luca Somigli, the Italian comparatist who I knew would be part of my doctoral committee as soon as I took my first class with him in September 2005.

My work has benefited greatly from several graduate courses I attended at University of

Toronto from 2005 to 2007. In chronological order, I mention the following professors: Linda

Hutcheon, whose course on literary history I was lucky to attend just days after landing in

Toronto; Mario J. Valdés, who attracted my attention to phenomenological approaches to film and theatre; Luca Somigli, professor of Italian modernism and avant-garde, on two occasions; and Michael J. Sidnell, whose full-year course at the Drama Centre granted me the tools necessary to undertake a doctoral thesis on European modernist theatre. I also benefited from three graduate courses with my supervisor Veronika Ambros, who first introduced me to the dramatic works of Josef and Karel Čapek.

I would also like to thankRoland LeHuenen and Neil ten Kortenaar, respectively the past and the current directors of the Centre for Comparative Literature,for their support; the work of the graduate coordinators Barbara Havercroft and Jill Ross; and the generous assistance of

Aphrodite Gardner and Bao Nguyen. My thanks go also to my friend and colleague Adil

D’Sousa, who did the copyediting job and, most important, was always ready to sacrifice his time in order to help me meet the next deadline.

And Ruth Molina made everything happen.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Theoretical perspectives. 1.1. Limits and possibilities of theatre semiotics. 17 1.2. From the ‘meta’ prefix to a functional approach to art. 33

Chapter 2: The modernist commedia dell’arte. 2.1. The rebirth of commedia dell’arte in the modernist years. 49 2.2. Evreinov’s The Merry Death. Theory and praxis of theatricality. 61 2.3. Josef and Karel Čapek’s The Fateful Game of Love. Fictional audiences and the “impossibility” of theatre. 71

Chapter 3: The modernist puppet theatre. 3.1. Puppets, from symbolism to the modernist revival of the fairground booth. 90 3.2. Bontempelli’s Hedge to Northwest and the Italian tradition of the teatro grottesco. 106 3.3. Lorca’s theatre of the 1920s. How to do critical theatre with puppets. 119

Chapter 4: The modernist mysterium. 4.1. The modernist mysterium, between allegory and didacticism. 136 4.2. Lorca’s The Public. Between modernism and the tradition of the auto sacramental. 148 4.3. Karel Čapek’s The Mother. Allegories of war and nationhood. 172

Conclusion 189

Works Cited 198

SERVANT. Sir. DIRECTOR. What? SERVANT. There is the public. DIRECTOR. Show them in. (Federico García Lorca)

“If theater could be an initiatory participatory game, it could be at once entertaining and fateful” (Richard Schechner)

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Introduction

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This dissertation investigates the activation of audiences in modernist theatre from the early years of the twentieth century to the late 1930s. During this span of approximately three decades, Nikolai Evreinov, Josef and Karel Čapek, Massimo Bontempelli, and Federico García

Lorca contributed to the renewal of the European stage by reinterpreting certain traditions that had received scarce attention in the preceding decades of realist and naturalist theatre. Their collaboration with the commercial stage distinguishes them from the overt confrontation, made in the name of a radical “modern” rupture, which characterized avant-garde movements such as

Italian futurism and Dadaism.

This project focuses on three paths that had marginal relevance in the bourgeois stage of the nineteenth century, be it melodrama or realist theatre, and that did not receive the attention of high-brow dramatists until the emergence of symbolist theatre in the closing years of the century.

The first source is puppetry and marionettes, relegated in the nineteenth century to the realms of folk theatre and children’s entertainment; the second, commedia dell’arte, whose improvisatory nature had no place in a time when theatre was synonymous with scripted drama; and, finally, a third path developed into a form of didactic theatre that relied on the expository nature of the mystery play and, in broader terms, allegorical religious drama. I refer to this third form as the modernist mysterium following Elinor Fuchs’ terminology in The Death of Character (36-51).

By adapting these peripheral traditions to a historical context different from their original, the playwrights studied here performed a process of refunctioning. I derive this concept of refunctioning from the research of Jan Mukařovský mainly in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Mukařovský investigated how when a work is perceived against a new background (social, religious, philosophical) the recipient’s response can reverse those components that were thought to be carriers of aesthetic function in the first place. And, vice versa, aspects previously

considered non-aesthetic can be later evaluated as containing aesthetic value. The precedent of this idea of artistic refunctioning is to be found in the term aktualizace, originally coined in the field of linguistics by Bohuslav Havránek, one of the cofounders of the Prague Circle in 1926.

Mukařovský first applied this concept to the analysis of poetic language in the early 1930s, when he studied the historical emergence of poetic forms against the backdrop of both standard

(communicative) language and poetic language. From a wider perspective, used in connection to the history of artistic series, aktualizace can be translated as the process of making topical, or foregrounding, works, styles or authors of marginal importance in the canon of a certain era. The numerous folkloric elements of Lorca’s theatre of the 1920s, for instance, demand an aesthetic response that was not present in previous contexts of production and reception. Similarly, the presence of puppetry in Bontempelli’s Hedge to Northwest can also be described in terms of a change of function, for the puppets’ speeches are perceived against an ideological background that is significantly different to the folkloric context to which they had been previously associated.

Mukařovský conceives the work of art as an “autonomous sign”—one that is free of an immediate, practical correspondence with reality—without denying, at the same time, its intrinsic ability to set in motion extra-aesthetic values, assumptions, and beliefs. The variable nature of Mukařovský’s aesthetic function, which I will analyze more extensively in section 1.2, helps in understanding the particular relationship between the fictional components of theatre and the practical (read: didactic, political, revolutionary) condition of certain works under certain historical conditions. A good example is The Mother, written by Karel Čapek, in 1937, in solidarity with the Spanish anti-fascist troops, and a play that mobilized the patriotic sentiment of a Prague audience that could sense the closeness of the German invasion. If one compares

Mukařovský’s argumentation to the critical work of his contemporary Walter Benjamin, it is not surprising to see that both theorists strongly reject the separation made between autonomous/formalist authors, on one side, and, explicitly political authors, on the other. In his essay “The Author as Producer,” Benjamin emphasizes the need to break away from the bourgeois notion of the writer as a specialist who inhabits the ineffectual territory of art and remains ignorant of the interaction between his work and the general conditions of production.

This authorial awareness of the condition of producer, to paraphrase Benjamin’s essay title, is a recurring feature of the dramatic works of Evreinov, Bontempelli, Lorca, and Josef and Karel

Čapek.

Specifically, the corpus of dramatic texts selected in this dissertation covers the temporal span of the first three decades of the twentieth century. At the same time, this study analyzes modernist theatre in connection with the history of Western drama since the consolidation of the bourgeois institution of theatre around the late eighteenth century. This is to explain an artistic practice that foregrounds its artificial condition in order to question the notion of theatre as a mirror of life. I propose the image of a pendulum to recall the way in which theatrical art evolves in time, oscillating between overt manifestations of its self-referential potential and historical phases in which its artificiality is restricted in the name of naturalness of art. This idea of a theatrical pendulum explains how modernist theatre emerged as a reaction against the mimetic condition that had been present in the European stage since the late eighteenth century, when

Diderot developed a comprehensive theory of the illusionist fourth wall. Wagner took this paradigm to its extreme form with an architectural reform that separated stage from spectators, the members of the audience now sitting in dark light and unable to see each other—the stage as the only focal point.

The figure of Wagner is a precedent of central importance to this study because his art synthesized two principles that had been under discussion since the emergence of the bourgeois institution of theatre in the late eighteenth century. The first of these principles was Schiller’s idea of theatre as a moral institution, a theatre for the community in imitation of ancient Greek models; the second was the notion of the fourth wall mentioned above. While the modernists studied here generally fought the fourth wall with a wide repertoire of anti-illusionist strategies, they were still haunted by the image of a theatrical stage that can educate – and indoctrinate – the spectators. The uneasy balance between these two aspects characterizes modernist dramaturgies in contrast to the Wagnerian work of art, which merged them so brilliantly to the point that they were perceived as two manifestations of a single ruling principle.

Wagner, inspired by Schiller’s project of aesthetic and political education of the German

Volk, responded to the mercantile logic ruling artistic production and consumption in the second half of the nineteenth century. The ‘naturalness’ of the work of art was central to Wagner’s opposition to the forces of industrialism and commercialism. Speaking in structural terms, the great paradox behind Wagner’s magnificent project of collective/communitarian art was that, as

Matthew W. Smith notes, it “combined an unprecedented reliance upon stage technology with an unprecedented attempt to hide the means of its own production” (4). For example, contrary to sudden changes of scenery more typical of baroque dramaturgies (a precedent of modernist montage) Wagner would maintain the same set for the whole act. In the cases where he had to shift scenery, the change took place gradually—again, as if unfolding naturally—or it was hidden behind a cloudy atmosphere. Further, the orchestra remained out of view of the spectators, who only had visual access to the conductor. In Wagner’s own words,

Between [the spectator] and the picture to be looked at there is nothing plainly visible,

merely a floating atmosphere of distance, resulting from the architectural adjustment of

two proscenia; whereby the scene is removed as it were to the unapproachable world of

dreams, while the spectral music sounding from the “mystic gulf,” like vapors rising from

the holy womb of Gaia beneath Pythia’s tripod, inspires him with that clairvoyance in

which the scenic picture melts into the truest effigy of life itself. (Wagner qtd. in Smith

31-2)

The strict separation between stage and spectators from a spatial point of view, then, was precisely to produce the illusion of a spiritual unity encompassing the ‘natural’ stage and the observers. Wagner made the audience concentrate all the attention on the actors and machinery in front of the giant screen located behind the proscenium arch, without further distractions in the auditorium. Sitting in individual seats instead of seat boxes, with the lights darkened, the spectators were reduced into a passive body to be amazed by an intense stream of visual and acoustic stimuli.

Wagner’s idea of the total, organic work of art was the opposite version of the overtly artificial art that Viktor Shklovsky would describe in the 1910s, in the wake of the first experimentations of the Russian futurists. The idea of a non-organic work of art would soon displace Wagner’s organicist conception of art during the modernist years, even though the defendants of realist art continued advocating for the illusion of naturalness.1 Moreover, as film gained popularity in the first years of the twentieth century, theatre practitioners began to rethink

1 In the first half of the twentieth century, Lukács’s theory of realist art became the paradigm of this illusionist aesthetics, as he openly expressed his opposition to the baring of the artistic devices against the experimentations of the modernists and the representatives of the historical avant-garde. See Bürger 83-92.

the practice of writing and staging theatre vis-à-vis this new art. The growing importance of film was not, however, the only stimulus that accentuated the self-reflexiveness of a “theatricalized” theatre. It was the need to specify the distinctive conditions of theatre that lead Nikolai Evreinov to formulate the first definition of theatricality in his 1908 “Apology for Theatricality,” a theoretical effort later expanded upon by Shklovsky and other Russian formalists who developed the notions of “literariness” and “making the familiar strange” between 1914 and 1918.2

Evreinov was not an isolated case of a playwright/director being interested in (re)establishing the space of his art; issues such as the limitations of human acting, the constitutive presence of the audience, and the political implications of the stage became recurrent obsessions in the theoretical writings of these years.

The three thematic areas of my study (commedia dell’arte, puppetry, mysterium) work as points of intersection of varied political, cultural, and social traditions in the first decades of the twentieth century. Special attention is paid to theatrical manifestations previously condemned to the margins of modernism in view of their popular status in the nineteenth century (puppetry, for instance), or due to certain political connotations that could not fit the model of the ivory tower, as is the case for the political overtones of Lorca’s drama from his puppet plays to The Public and Play without a Title. My comparative approach to theatrical modernism enters into dialogue with important changes in the field of modernist scholarship that have taken place in the last fifteen years.

Until the mid-1990s, the central reference for modernist scholars was Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane’s Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930, a collection of essays first published in 1976. It was due to the enormous influence of this collection that a very

2 On the relationship between Evreinov’s theatricality and Shklovsky’s idea of art as deautomatization, see Jestrovic 143-4. 6

specific version of modernism, elaborated and perpetuated by Anglo-American academics, functioned as a scholarly synecdoche that neglected the possibility of other modernisms in

Europe (not to mention the artistic production of the English colonies, a theme not to be discussed here). Modernism, then, was supposed to have its peak in the legendary year of 1922 and ended around 1930, as if it were impermeable, or simply alien to, the enormous politicization of art life in the years immediately preceding the Second World War.

If Bradbury and McFarlane’s Modernism became the main reference for two decades, a more pluralistic vision of international modernism consolidated around the mid-1990s. Peter

Nicholls’ landmark study Modernisms (1995) and the establishing of the first convention of the

Modernist Studies Association in 1999, significantly entitled “The New Modernisms,” were instrumental in the expansion of the modernist canon. In the last fifteen years, numerous scholars have devoted their attention to modernist practices embedded in popular culture (literary journals, jazz music, etc.), as well as the role of (gender, race, class) agencies that were marginalized by traditional historical accounts. The question, at this point, is how to implement a comparative description of modernism today. To do so, this dissertation follows the path signaled by Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde (2004), edited by Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni. This volume represents a crucial shift in the Italian literary historiography as it translated native concepts (decadentismo, novecentismo, il grotesco) into the international language of modernism. In a way, Somigli and Moroni’s book constitutes an aggiornamento of Italian scholarship which had tended to work with local categories while remaining immune to the categories of international modernism. But, at the same time, Italian

Modernism operates in the inverse way, subjecting to a test previous assumptions on European modernism that were derived from specific instances of the Anglo-American canon.

Besides Italian Modernism, a second study of reference is the two-volume collection

Modernism (2007), edited by Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska3 under the sponsorship of the International Comparative Literature Association. By adopting a comparative approach to

European modernist theatre, I aim to demonstrate the existence of multiple impulses, not necessarily irreconcilable, in the regeneration of the European stage during the modernist years.

Common to all the dramatists studied in this dissertation is an interest in the renovation of the bourgeois institution of theatre by means of the rediscovery of artistic forms previously relegated to a peripheral status in the capitalist system of artistic production and distribution.

Despite the impossibility of arriving at an absolute distinction between modernism and the historical avant-garde (clear-cut definitions are only possible at the expense of flat reductionism), a central goal of this dissertation is to build up a textual corpus that would help us differentiate theatrical modernism from the manifestations of the historical avant-garde. In his

Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger explains that the social subsystem of art enters, in these years, a stage of “self-criticism.” He coins this term in reference to a global criticism that is now not questioning the foundations of a preceding artistic movement, but the idea of art as an institution in bourgeois society. As Bürger puts it, “The avant-garde turns against both the distribution apparatus on which the work of art depends, and the status of art in bourgeois society as defined by the concept of autonomy” (22). Bürger’s concept of “avant-garde” encompasses a series of artworks that have in common their rejection of autonomous art as a sphere separated from the rest of the social subsystems.

3 In the introduction to their collection of essays, Eysteinsson and Liska note how “In spite of a number of efforts to present modernism as an international phenomenon . . . the English concept of modernism has tended to be confined to the Anglo-American sphere . . . it is the English concept that has been the most formative, even beyond the linguistic borders of English, and its focus has frequently been on a select group of (“high modernist”) English, Irish, and American writers” (6). 8

There is little doubt that the classic notion of Anglo-American modernism falls outside

Bürger’s idea of avant-garde. T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, for instance, are very different to such classic exponents of the historical avant-garde as F. T. Marinetti, Marcel

Duchamp, and Tristan Tzara. What is particularly relevant to the present investigation, however, is the fact the dramatic works of Lorca and Čapek, for instance, do not totally fit under either rubric. How then to solve this historical and theoretical problem?

I now want to introduce into the discussion Günter Berghaus’ take on the theatre of the historical avant-garde. Instead of a two-tier model, Berghaus distinguishes three interpretations of the idea of artistic autonomy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The first version of artistic autonomy relies on a notion of art for art’s sake, which detaches itself from the utilitarian values of the bourgeois society. Aesthetics is therefore understood as a separate sphere from that of everyday praxis. The second idea of artistic autonomy is what Berghaus refers to as the specifically “Modernist,” embraced by those artists who “protect the independence of works of art from nonaesthetic functionality, concern themselves with the medium itself, and focus on its inherent aesthetic qualities” (Theatre 41). These self-reflexive works have a minor or null impact on the outside world, according to Berghaus. Finally, the third realization of the idea of artistic autonomy leads us to the radical stance represented by the avant-garde, epitomized by those artists who oppose the integration of art into the system of capitalist commodification.

While modernist artists, as Berghaus observes, “operated in close cooperation with the mediating agencies of museums, theatres, newspapers, and so on”, the avant-garde “refused to fulfill any subservient functions in bourgeois society” (Theatre 40). In the field of theatre, a group of playwrights (Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Wedekind) and directors (Fort, Lugné-Poë, Craig) reacted against stage realism, founding a self-sufficient stage that rejected the obligation of reproducing

an external reality. Berghaus defines these artists as the “founding fathers of the modern stage” but does not ascribe them to the avant-garde. He reserves this denomination for futurism, expressionism, Dadaism, and constructivism on these grounds:

The founding fathers of the modern stage pursued an artistic program that was certainly

modern, in some ways even ahead of their time, but they still treated theatre as a hand-

maiden of dramatic literature. They retained the concept of theatre as a fixed and

repeatable spectacle and never questioned the unspoken assumptions of what constitutes

a theatrical production. It fell to the historical avant-garde to challenge the criteria of

what constitutes a scenic work of art and to create performances that were not just

interpretations of dramatic texts, but autonomous, transient events that attained power

and impact from their temporal and physical immediacy. (Theatre 46)

Because Berghaus devotes his monograph to the different movements of the theatrical avant- garde, he makes no further reference to modernist playwrights and directors. It is easy to assume, however, that both these ‘founding fathers’ and continuators such as Bontempelli and Lorca should be considered representatives of modernist theatre—they all respect the link between dramatic literature and theatrical spectacle. Nonetheless, still agreeing with Berghaus’ description of the specific traits of the historical avant-garde, there are some questions that remain. How to denominate a theatre that relies on a dramatic text but, at the same time, redefines the relationship between stage and auditorium by foregrounding the ‘physical immediacy’ of the actors? How to catalogue a collection of plays that basically enacts a story, but also explore the critical role of capitalist authorities (theatre managers, audience) precisely in

the shaping of this fictional world? It is my conviction that while the works studied in this dissertation deserve to be considered modernist, they are also able to fulfill a performative function (“performative” in the sense of Austin’s speech act theory) that therefore makes them relevant to their historical and social context.

Another reason for the selection of this textual corpus is the fact that it is possible to develop certain conclusions out of it that help complement, and in some cases modify, theoretical assumptions on the modernist period that are mostly derived from the works of the two non- illusionist playwrights par excellence: Luigi Pirandello and Bertolt Brecht. The figure of Brecht is particularly relevant to my study, as his theatre makes constant use of mediating devices

(prologue and epilogues, choruses, songs, etc.) that can also be present in the dramatic works studied here. I argue that the presence of mediating (or “epic,” in Brecht’s terminology) elements does not automatically produce effects of critical distance, as is generally assumed by most critics interested in the German playwright.4 I claim that the identification between the cause (the epic device) and the effect (the audience’s distanced response) is far from being axiomatic. A play such as The Fateful Game of Love, by Josef and Karel Čapek, is a good instance of this phenomenon. The last words of the agonizing Gilles (“Turn out the lights; why are you putting lights above my head?”) highlight the physicality of the stage, but this self-referential speech does not diminish the emotional effect produced by the (staged?) death of this commedia character.

What follows is a brief summary of the four chapters of this study. Chapter 1 of this dissertation delineates the theoretical framework for the subsequent investigation. The chapter

4 A very important contribution in this respect is R. Darren Gobert’s recent essay “Cognitive Catharsis in The Caucasian Chalk Circle.” Gobert analyzes how Brecht’s early rejection of emotional empathy evolved into a hybrid approach to audience—conciliating rational and emotional response. See chapter 4 of this dissertation.

opens with a discussion of a recent article by Fernando de Toro, in which this former practitioner of theatre semiotics describes the end of the discipline as a symptom of an epistemological shift from structuralism to poststructuralism. De Toro’s essay continues the argumentation of Keir

Elam’s apologetic “‘Post’-script: Post-semiotics, Posthumous Semiotics, Closet Semiotics,” to the 2002 edition of The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. Contrary to de Toro, I argue that the semiotic project is not finished but only if by “semiotics” or “structuralism” we mean something other than the restricted corpus of texts that have grown out of Saussurean linguistics. I explain the differences between a struggling, dynamic conception of structure, and the ahistorical notion that was legitimized by the followers of Claude Lévi-Strauss. By reducing its scope to the search of universal grammars underlying abstract codes, the French structuralists ignored the social and artistic contexts surrounding the work of art. This was a fatal flaw that gave way to a body of theatre semiotics that was unable to analyze the presence of ideology in the contexts of production and receptions of theatrical works.

Section 1.2, “An excursus on the nature of the aesthetic function,” analyzes the popularity of the “meta” prefix since Abel’s classic Metatheatre (1963), and, from a wider perspective,

Roman Jakobson’s model of six linguistic functions. I argue that Mukařovský’s functional model, developed in close dialogue with the artistic manifestations of the interwar years, captures the interaction between art (theatre) and society more accurately than the “meta” scheme.

Chapter 2 investigates the way in which modernist dramatists reinterpreted commedia dell’arte in order to question the stability of dichotomies such as actor/character, physical/fictional stage and, finally, stage and audience. My reading of this modernist revival pays special attention to the way in which the commedia conventions serve the project of critical

revision of the commercial theatrical stage. Evreinov’s A Merry Death (1909) and Josef and

Karel Čapek’s The Fateful Game of Love (1911) are paradigmatic cases of dramatic works that reinterpret the commedia legacy in order to arrive at a new interaction between stage and auditorium. The figure of Pierrot, converted to a disoriented and melancholic character, speaks for the authors who want to redefine the institution of theatre in a time when their artworks are treated as just another commodity. In the modernist years, Pierrot recurrently appears as a tragicomic figure at the crossroads of an autonomous art (art for art’s sake) and a new theatrical praxis.

In A Merry Death, Evreinov reveals the subjection of commercial drama to bourgeois mores when the actor who impersonates Pierrot confesses that he has played the role of offended husband against his friend Harlequin only because it was the proper thing to do before an audience. Alternatively, the action in Josef and Karel Čapek’s The Fateful Game of Love takes place in a permanent “now,” a present tense to be actualized in every performance. The play consists of the staging of the conventional plot of love and jealousy by a commedia cast introduced by Prologue, a theatre-manager who is only worried about the economic success of the play. The actors, who play the roles of fictional actors and are presented as perfectly aware of the presence of the spectators, engage in discussions that range from the tastes of contemporary audiences to the impossibility of performing a (real) sexual scene in front of the spectators.

Chapter 3 analyzes one of the most important paths of renovation of the European stage around the turn of the twentieth century: the tradition of puppets and marionettes. Special attention is devoted to Bontempelli’s Hedge to Northwest and Lorca’s puppet plays and tragicomic farces. Both authors incorporate puppetry and marionettes in an attempt to criticize a theatrical institution dominated by bourgeois interests and values. Their works, written and

performed between 1919 and 1931, experiment with the popular tradition of puppets in a manner significantly different to the symbolists of the turn of the century. Both Lorca and Bontempelli confront the euphemisms and conventions of contemporary commercial theatre by incorporating didactic prologues into their plays and, in addition, by contrasting the naiveté of the artificial figures to the inauthentic condition of the bourgeois institution of matrimony. I will study

Bontempelli’s Hedge to Northwest and its use of the metaphor of the puppet in the context of the

Italian ‘theatre of the grotesque.’ This chapter also deals with the didactic prologues in Lorca’s puppet plays, as well as two farces he wrote in the late 1920s: The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden.

Chapter 4 investigates the emergence of the modernist mysterium, a term that, taken in a broad sense, encompasses the European tradition of liturgical drama. The didactic condition of this liturgical drama is now adapted to the politicized stage of the late 1920s and the 1930s. The six years between the first version The Public, in 1930, and his last (and unfinished) Play without a Title, of 1936, show the evolution of Lorca’s utopic dream of a non-realist theatre compatible with socialist politics. The Public, a drama midway between Calderón’s The Great Theatre of the

World and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, opens with a discussion between the Director and his actors about the way in which they should perform Romeo and Juliet. The

Director is criticized for submitting himself to the tastes of a bourgeois audience which expects the superficial theatre “in the open air.” He eventually decides that it is time to unveil the theatre

“beneath the sand,” which Lorca conceives of as collective ceremony encompassing both actors and audience. Lorca’s Play without a Title is, in the words of the Director, a “sermon” addressed to a bourgeois audience that believes the empty game of appearances of contemporary theatre

(again, theatre as life). This play contains Lorca’s more explicit defense of the popular front in

1936, only months before the outbreak of the Spanish War and his subsequent execution by

Francoist troops.

Karel Čapek wrote The Mother in 1937 as a wake-up call against a Nazi invasion of

Czechoslovakia, an event that would eventually take place two years later. Čapek conveys a patriotic message by presenting a mother named Dolores (an obvious reference to the Spanish

War) as a protagonist tormented by the phantasmagoric presence of her dead husband and sons, who have been killed for the causes of imperialism, nationalism and scientific progress. Čapek confines the figure of the Mother to a closed space and he never attempts to disrupt the stability of the fourth wall. Yet it can hardly be denied that the final word of the Mother (“Go!”), is a desperate call to arms against the approaching enemy, conceived to produce an enormous pragmatic effect in the spectators. The presence of martyrdom, typical of the modernist mysterium as Fuchs (and Benjamin, before) defines it, serves here to convey a patriotic call for unity against an external enemy.

In the main text of this dissertation, I provide quotations in the original language and in

English translation; the complete entries are listed in the bibliography section. When no English translation is referenced in the bibliography section, as is the case for excerpts from Lorca’s interviews, for example, the translation offered is entirely my own.

Chapter 1: Theoretical perspectives

1.1. Limits and possibilities of theatre semiotics.

In his introduction to “Theories of and Meditations of Acting,” the first section of his anthology Acting (Re)Considered (rev. ed., 2002), Phillip B. Zarrilli narrates his experience instructing an actor during the rehearsal of Euripides’ Hippolytus. Zarrilli wanted the actor playing Hippolytus to open the play on his knees, chopping wood with a hatchet “in a rhythmically measured but focused manner so that each blow would have a “heavy” quality, such that, once he began to deliver his opening speech, he should set the rhythm and tone of his speech to the chopping” (16). When the actor asked what his “motivation” for the act of chopping wood should be, Zarrilli replied that he was looking for something very different. In

Zarrilli’s words: “My intention was for the chopping to be placed before the audience along with the words of his speech. And for the audience to assemble meaning from the words and the relationship of the actor to his physical action” (17). Zarrilli expected “a specific energy, focus, psychophysical quality, and timing” (17) in the actor’s work, while leaving to the spectators the responsibility of assigning meaning to his actions. Combining his experience as theatre director with a vast knowledge of theories of acting, Zarrilli himself explains the critical importance of semiotics when it comes to understanding contemporary theatre:

Although the actor cannot act on the basis of understanding theatre as a semiotic system,

nevertheless, in an era which some define as post-modern, an actor will be ill-equipped

even for character acting unless he or she is able to understand not only the relation

between semiotics and acting but also what is required in productions where one plays

moments which are not motivated psychologically – moments in which an actor’s

action/gesture/posture might be said to “stand on their own”. (16)

Despite Zarrilli’s informed defense of semiotics, his stance does not represent a general trend in the field of theatre studies. As evidence, one need only mention Keir Elam’s well-known postscript to the 2002 edition of The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, a study first published in

1980. Much has been said on Elam’s apologetic “‘Post’-script: Post-semiotics, Posthumous

Semiotics, Closet Semiotics.” As is well known, Elam begins his postscript by comparing himself to Krapp, the character in Samuel Beckett’s play who cannot perceive continuity between himself and a voice—his voice—that he recorded years ago. In order to overcome

Krapp’s syndrome, Elam asks the reader to put The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama in historical perspective: “This volume . . . was written at the end of the 1970s, and looks back over a body of work produced under the influence of an intellectual movement – structuralism, together with its

‘successor’ semiotics – that has long since lost its cultural preeminence” (193). Writing the postscript twenty-two years after the original release of his book, Elam openly recognizes the insufficiency of a semiotic approach to theatre—yet he claims that some methodological tools can be still useful today.

In this first section, I review the basic tenets of Prague School structuralism in order to demonstrate how different they are from the principles of French structuralism, a tradition that develops originally from Lévi-Strauss’ anthropology. In the 1970s, theatre semiotics adopted the guiding principles of French structuralist theory in order to arrive at a scientific description of the codes operating in the theatrical work of art. The result was a theoretical corpus that systematically ignored the presence of the subject, and tended not to pay attention to social and

ideological elements in the work of art. The failure of this particular version of theatre semiotics should not imply the automatic rejection of other bodies of theories that situate semiotics at the core of their argumentation, as it is the case of the Prague Circle.

Elam’s postscript constitutes the starting point for a recent essay by Fernando de Toro, significantly titled “The End of Theatre Semiotics? A Symptom of an Epistemological Shift”

(2008). In this piece, de Toro describes Elam’s ‘post’-script as the logical result of “an epistemological crisis that not only the semiotic approach to the theatre faced during the late

1980s, but that was also confronted by the whole epistemological edifice of formalism towards the end of the 1970s” (“End” 110). De Toro seems to be in a good position to understand Elam’s

Krapp-like feelings, as he himself had adopted a very similar attitude in the preface of his

Theatre Semiotics. That volume, released in 1995, was the English translation of a study de Toro originally published in Spanish in 1987. In the English preface, de Toro stressed the temporal gap existing with respect to the date of publication of the original version. Moreover, he made it clear that the contents of the book came out of his research in Paris from 1982 to 1985:

today [1995] this book has to be read in the context of the stage development of the

discipline at the time (1982-1985). Very little has happened in the field since then, and

the discipline of Theatre Semiotics came and went with great speed. By the late 1980’s

the discipline had been exhausted and the best proof of this is that only three new books

and very few articles have been published since 1987. (Theatre 1-2)

De Toro then briefly notes that the exhaustion of the “whole semiotic and structuralist paradigm”

(2) was due to the emergence of post-structuralism and deconstruction, to conclude that “It

seemed after a while that producing diagrams and arrows had been unnecessarily obtrusive and did not get us anywhere” (2). Paraphrasing Elam, it could be said that by the time the English version of his book came out, de Toro already regarded theatre semiotics as a posthumous discipline.

More than one decade after Theatre Semiotics, and once liberated from the necessity of justifying the publication of this work in 1995, de Toro enjoys a privileged position when it comes to analyzing the historical trajectory of semiotics of theatre. His 2008 essay on this subject is a stimulating theoretical piece, as he proposes an account that combines both the historical and the theoretical dimensions. In the pages to follow, I will discuss de Toro’s “The End of Theatre

Semiotics?” with the intention of revisiting certain assumptions that he presents as demonstrated facts. In his essay, De Toro explains how theatre semiotics achieved epistemological legitimacy by the end of the 1960s, after importing most of its terminology from linguistics—following a move that first took place in the field of narratology. Theatre semiotics, therefore, developed out of a structuralist corpus exemplified by the works of A. J. Greimas, Claude Bremond and other

French scholars who relied on Claude Levi-Strauss’ anthropology and Saussure’s linguistics.

In dialogue with this intellectual climate, semiotic studies of theatre began to appear in the late 1960s and had achieved a prominent position by the mid-1970s. Elam’s The Semiotics of

Theatre and Drama constituted what was perhaps the most ambitious effort to synthesize the theoretical body developed to that date by scholars like André Helbo and Marco De Marinis.

Nonetheless, de Toro argues, these semioticians were oblivious to the fact that the basic principles of French structuralism had already been challenged by Jacques Derrida and the rest of the so-called post-structuralist thinkers. De Toro recalls as a central deficiency of theatre semiotics the adoption of an ahistorical, decontextualized approach to the work of art. In his

words, “because the theatre semiotics project was founded on a linguistic model, and on the developments of narrative semiotics that preceded the theatre project by at least two decades, the analysis of the theatre object was carried out independently of its cultural and social context”

(“End” 110). The attempt to study theatre without paying attention to the contexts of production and reception constituted a fatal flaw of this theoretical enterprise.

So far, I have presented a paraphrase de Toro’s historical account. It is time now to look more closely at his terminology, particularly the notion of “formalism” he uses in his essay. By formalism, de Toro refers to two different concepts: 1) the body of works written by the so- called Russian formalists in the 1920s; 2) a paradigm inaugurated by the aforementioned Russian scholars and which, in his view, subsumes both the Prague School and the French structuralisms; this paradigm collapses after the rise of post-structuralism in the 1970s. While the first meaning produces no confusion, the second one implies a common generalization that ends up distorting any effort to understand the evolution of theatre semiotics in the last decades. The ready-made identification of formalism and structuralism produces a simplified—or, better, simplistic— historical narrative that sustains itself in an illusory conceptual unity. This theoretical move implies a considerable spatio-temporal reduction, one achieved by applying the principle of pars pro toto: the Paris of the late 1960s standing in place of all the fortunes and failures of the idea of structure throughout the twentieth century. The artificial homogeneity conferred to the concept of formalism/structuralism contrasts, not surprisingly, with the ideological multiplicity of all the critical movements situated under the post-structuralist umbrella.

According to de Toro, the “formalist paradigm” exhausted itself in the 1970s, when it gave way to poststructuralism, “which provided the very epistemological and theoretical foundation to postmodernity” (“End” 121). De Toro argues that, while it took theatre researchers

a few more years to realize this shift, by the end of the 1980s most of them were aware of its inevitability—he recalls very few contributions after his 1987 book, as noted earlier.

Nonetheless, it is interesting to see how, despite his enthusiastic endorsement of poststructuralism, de Toro allows himself to fantasize on how different the evolution of formalism/structuralism would have been had certain events occurred. De Toro imagines three occurrences that, in his view, would have changed “the course of formalism” (“End” 117), meaning by ‘formalism’ the second, broader acceptation indicated above. Respecting his textual arrangement, I will render his argumentation in three separate blocks:

1) “Scholars from the West decided, particularly at the beginning of the 1960s, to center

exclusively on the most rigid aspects of formalism, ignoring what was actually happening

within formalism itself at the beginning of the twentieth century. For example, right from

the very beginning the Russian formalist paid attention to literary history, an area that

was going to be widely ignored by the formalism of the 1960s” (“End” 117).

2) “If the seminal work of Bakhtin and Voloshinov would have been known at the time it

was written, I believe that the Saussurean linguistics and the whole edifice that was

mounted from it would never have been developed in the same manner” (“End” 118).

3) “If the social aspects of the Prague School and their studies on reception theory would

have been better known, I again believe that it would have been difficult to have arrived

at a ‘sémiotique dure,’ or at the least there would have been other alternatives. However,

the questioning of the ‘hard’ formalism present during the first half of the twentieth

century was going to be squarely confronted by the post-structuralist” (“End” 118).

In the first quotation, the term “formalism” appears three times, accompanied by one mention of the “Russian formalist,” but it is difficult to ascertain what de Toro means at each separate occasion. In order to prove the originality of Russian formalism, he describes Tynjanov’s “On

Literary Evolution” as an essay that articulates “a revolutionary new way to approach the question of literary history” (“End” 117) but then, following a circular logic, he adds that the innovative features of Tynjanov’s approach “resided in a formal approach to literary history”

(“End” 117). It is my perception that the redundancy of this logic weakens, in a considerable manner, the argument it seems to support. If, conversely, de Toro had noticed that Tynjanov’s late writings anticipate the structuralist principles to be fully developed in Prague, the panorama would have been much clearer. This theoretical operation is only possible if a distinction between formalism and structuralism is made in the first place. Moreover, regarding the specific issue of literary history, it is necessary to remark that this was a topic widely discussed in the

1970s.5 The only reason why theatre semioticians ignored the diachronic dimension in their analysis was because they did not consider it useful for their own agenda.

It is obvious that an earlier discovery of the Bakhtin Circle might have significantly changed the Saussurean-derived principles of French structuralism, as de Toro notes in his second statement. In any case, if it is accepted that theatre semiotics took shape in the 1970s, one has to consider that a good portion of the writings of the Bakhtin Circle was available by that time. Of paramount importance was the publication of V. N. Voloshinov’s Marxism and the

Philosophy of Language, in 1973, an English text accompanied by two superb essays by the

5 For an early systemic approach to literary history, see for instance, Claudio Guillén’s Literature as System (1971). 23

translators, Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Evidently, it would have been ideal to have had access to the works of the Bakhtin Circle at the time they were originally written, but this delay cannot explain the attitude of a group of researchers who felt safer operating on the stable ground of the Saussurean dichotomy signifier/signified. Finally, regarding the third of de Toro’s statements, I fully agree with his critique of a “hard semiotics” that plainly ignores the functioning of signs in the realm of social life.

An analysis of de Toro’s account reveals the problems of reducing the rise and fall of theatre semiotics to a simple matter of the structuralist/poststructuralist divide. Structuralism is still valid today but only if the idea of structure is presented as a methodological tool, not as synonymous with a grand narrative. Once structure is heuristically defined, it allows the researcher to accommodate the tensions inherent to the work of art, tensions that activate multiple realms of our everyday life—ethical, ideological, religious, etc. In accordance with this general purpose, I will devote the remainder of this section to review the main principles of the

Prague School structuralist project.

Against an essentialist, static description of the work of art, Prague School structuralist aesthetics took shape in the late 1920s under the principles of totality and struggle. The idea of totality, derived from Gestalt psychology, implies that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The part-whole relationship acquires full meaning in the context of the Prague School interdisciplinary mereology. Jakobson first uses the term “structuralism” in 1929, in an effort to apply to linguistics a basic trait of the new scientific episteme: “Any set of phenomena examined by contemporary science is treated not as a mechanical agglomeration but as a structural whole”

(“Retrospect” 712). Two years later, in an article on Charles Chaplin’s acting technique,

Mukařovský defines structure as “a system of components aesthetically deautomatized and

organized into a complex hierarchy, which is unified by the prevalence of one component over the others” (“Attempt” 171). It was in the course of an interview held in 1932 that, according to

Frantisek Galan, Mukařovský used the label “structuralism” to differentiate the Prague scholars from the Russian formalists.6 Most importantly, Mukařovský stresses the necessity of defining the idea of structure from a phenomenological perspective:

Structure, in other words, is a phenomenological and not an empirical reality; it is not the

work itself, but a set of functional relationships which are located in the consciousness of

a collective (generation, milieu, etc.) Several distinct structures with distinct dominants

and distinct hierarchies among their parts can gradually be realized, in different times or,

as the case may be, milieux, on the basis of the same work of art. Thus, the nature of

structure is not univocally given by the work. The structure becomes explicit, however,

once we perceive the work against the background of a vital tradition from which this

work diverges and which it reflects. If the background of the tradition shifts, the structure

changes too—the dominant is altered, etc. Owing to such a change the work assumes a

completely new appearance. (Mukařovský qtd. in Galan 35)

Mukařovský’s statement is of particular relevance to this dissertation. Chapter 3, for instance, analyzes the presence of folkloric figures and plots in the critical theatre of Bontempelli and

Lorca. The novelty of their dramatic works is not so much a matter of formal but of functional

6 This differentiation between Prague School structuralism and Russian formalism becomes even more explicit in 1934, when Mukařovský published “A Note on the Czech Translation of Sklovskij’s Theory of Prose.” In this review, Mukařovský, like the members of the Bakhtin Circle did in the late 1920s, criticizes Shklovsky’s immanent definition of literature. Mukařovský also defines structuralism in the following terms: “In arriving at structuralism, literary studies simply join the general tendency of contemporary scholarly thought. Throughout almost the entire realm of contemporary scholarship the discovery of the dynamic relations which pervade its material has proven to be an effective modus operandi – for example, in the disciplines of the arts and in general aesthetics, in psychology, sociology, linguistics, economics, and even in the natural sciences” (“Note” 141). 25

innovation, as the popular puppets and marionettes are brought to the stage to question, by contrast, the ideological assumptions that sustain bourgeois drama (from the conventionality of the love stories to the theatre manager’s perennial authority). This is precisely what Mukařovský means when he states, in the excerpt quoted above, that the artistic work is perceived “against the background of a vital tradition from which this work diverges and which it reflects.”

How does Mukařovský arrive at a phenomenological conception of structure in the early

1930s? One immediate precedent is the idea of the dominant, previously formulated by the

Russian formalists. It was their achievement to define the work of art as a constant struggle of dominating and dominated elements, expanding the seminal idea in Die Philosophie der Kunst, the work of the neo-Kantian philosopher Broder Christiansen translated into Russian in 1911.7

Boris Eikhenbaum and Roman Jakobson explore this concept in the early 1920s; and, as Jurij

Tynjanov puts it in 1923, “Dynamic form is not generated by means of combination or merger

(the often-used concept of “correspondence”), but by means of interaction, and, consequently, the pushing forward of one group of factors at the expense of another…. Art lives by means of this interaction and struggle” (Problem 33). One year before, in “The Ode as Oratorical Genre,”

Tynjanov had introduced the word ustanovka, a concept Jakobson originally coined in Russian in equivalence to Husserl’s Einstellung. This phenomenological concept, which can be translated as

“orientation”, “intention” or “set” toward something, points to the internal arrangement of elements in the work of art, as well as the external interaction of the artwork with non-artistic series. It is this second aspect that interested Tynjanov the most, to the extent that he arrived at a

7 Christiansen studies the way the work of art is perceived by the subject, and the presence of the “emotive factors” in this process: “It happens only rarely that the emotive factors of an aesthetic object participate equally in the effect of the whole. On the contrary, normally a single factor or a configuration of factors comes to the fore and assumes a leading role” (qtd. in Davydov 98). See Davydov’s article for a comprehensive account of Christiansen’s influence on the formalists, and the importance of this notion of dominant in the subsequent development of the idea of semantic gesture by the Prague School researchers, particularly Jan Mukařovský. 26

functional description of the work of art in “its interrelationship with the social conventions”

(“On Literary” 74). In his essay, Tynjanov refers specifically to the orientation of the literary genre of the ode in relation to literary/extra-literary speeches, but his approach8 can be perfectly applied to theatre, a collective practice in which artistic and social codes intersect.

A prominent feature of Mukařovský’s general theory is the distinction between the idea of structure and the material constitution of the work of art (“artifact”). The task of the critic is to analyze the concretization of the work of art at its phenomenological level, what he nominates the “aesthetic object,” with a term borrowed from Roman Ingarden. The structure, in consequence, is understood as an immaterial entity that is given to the perceiver as a changing aesthetic object, not as an ahistorical artifact. In his lecture “The Concept of the Whole in the

Theory of Art” (1945), Mukařovský explains the difference between Prague School structuralism and contemporary holistic approaches when it comes to conceptualizing the idea of wholeness:

Structuralism is, of course, akin to what is called “holistic thought”—they are, after all,

contemporaries—but it does not coincide with it. The basic notion of holistic thought is

the closed whole, whereas the basic notion of structuralist thought is that of the interplay

of forces, agreeing with and opposing one another, and restoring a disturbed equilibrium

by a constantly repeated synthesis. (79)

As Mukařovský explains, “wholeness does not appear to us as closure, or completeness . . . but rather as a certain correlation of components” (“Concept” 75). This statement is of particular

8 Tynjanov’s description of orientation shares significant traits with Benjamin’s work on allegory. In Tynjanov’s words: “If a work is torn from the context of a given literary system, and transposed into another, its coloring changes, it acquires other features, it enters another genre and loses its own genre, and in other words, its function becomes displaced” (“Ode” 566).

importance in view of Mukařovský’s rejection of the requirement of closure of the work of art, a theoretical principle (the open structure) that he incorporates into aesthetics as a result of his acquaintance with the artistic praxis of his time. The Czech scholar affirms that the semblance of organic totality, what Benjamin describes as the “false appearance of totality” (Origin 176), has ceased to be an obligatory condition in modern art. In Mukařovský’s words, “Today . . . when artificial torsos occur so frequently in sculpture, it can hardly be disputed that in perceiving the sculptural torsos of antiquity, we spontaneously comprehend the truncation as a component of their aesthetic effect” (“Intentionality” 93).

From the vantage point of the literary theories of the second half of the twentieth century,

Mukařovský’s interpretation of the idea of wholeness can be understood as an early manifestation of the systemic approaches that characterizes theoretical schools such as French structuralism and polysystem theory. From Mukařovský to Algirdas J. Greimas to Itamar Even-

Zohar, a common principle seems easily recognizable: the notion that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. But Mukařovský adds an important corollary to this statement: while the whole is always greater than its parts, its potential actualizations are also greater than any actual particular reading in a given time. The consequences of this principle are paramount as the work of art is now studied within an artistic and social praxis that is subject to change. It will fall to Felix Vodička, a member of the second generation of Prague scholars, to apply Mukařovský’s functional model to the practice of the specific in literary history. In a 1941 lecture to the Prague

Circle, Felix Vodička describes the task of the literary historian as the study of the successive concretizations9 of the same material artifact by distinct generations of readers—or spectators, in

9 In Das literarische Kunstwerk (1931), Roman Ingarden describes the literary work as a schematic formation to be filled in (“concretized”) by the perceiver. In his 1941 lecture “The Concretization of the Literary Work: Problems of Reception of Neruda’s Works,” Vodička adopts the term “concretization” but with a partially different meaning: “the reflection of a work in the consciousness of those for whom it is an esthetic object” (110) or, in other words, the 28

the case of theatre. In accordance with a phenomenological idea of structure, Vodička understands the work of art as the result of the different perceptions of the public against changing literary and social norms. In 1945, in one of his last contributions before his public conversion to Marxism, Mukařovský himself explains to what extent the work of art is connected to an artistic tradition in continuous evolution, as well as to its social milieu:

not only what actually is in the work—its immediate structure—but also what has been—

the preceding state of an artistic structure, the living tradition—are always present and

operative in it. They are in constantly renewed variances which again always seek

equilibrium. We can therefore say that even the structure of an individual work is an

event, a process, not a static, precisely defined whole. (“Concept” 77)

The dramatic works that integrate the corpus of this dissertation confirm Mukařovský’s description of the work of art as intersection of past and living traditions. The modernist retrieval of commedia dell’arte, puppetry, and the mysterium altered the artistic hierarchies that were assumed as natural in the opening decades of the twentieth century. In his puppet plays, for instance, Lorca demands a new response from an audience that now sees how the moral assumptions that were ‘respectable’ are now put into question. The Public, a play central to

“concrete appearance of a specific work which has become the object of esthetic perception” (110). The same work (artifact) can be concretized in different ways depending on the social and literary conventions of different periods. In accordance with Mukařovský’s definition of the work of art as sign, Vodička notes that, when a work is evaluated in two different periods, it is concretized as two different aesthetic objects. In a second lecture, “Response to Verbal Art” (1942), Vodička uses the term “actualization” as equivalent of concretization, a term that was part of Prague School research in the fields of linguistics and semiotics of art since the early 1930s. To reconstruct the literary norm of a given time, he explains, it is necessary to study the canonical works in that period, the prescriptive poetics that were enforced, and critical judgments on contemporary literature. The study of the artistic norms requires the inclusion of aspects as varied as the “ethical, social, religious, philosophical . . . the actualization of a work at any particular period materializes against the background of such habits and conventions, whether the evaluation be positive or negative” (“Response” 202).

Lorca’s project of theatrical and social reform, constitutes an extreme case of his desire to produce a direct effect on the audience: the reaction of the spectators to a subversive staging is, literally, the plot of the play. In The Public, Lorca reinterprets the Spanish tradition of the auto sacramental to arrive at a modern exercise of collective atonement, with the particularity that the organic nature of the auto has been substituted by the intersection of spatial and temporal planes without rational logic. In Mukařovský’s structural terminology, Lorca’s play emerges as a semantic whole that does not present itself as a closed entity, but as a whole containing

“constantly renewed variances.”

It is chiefly due to the influence of Husserl and Ingarden that Mukařovský becomes deeply interested in the intimate relationship between the material construction of the work of art

(artifact) and the perceiver’s actualization (aesthetic object). Phenomenology, therefore, plays a key role in the transition from late formalism to Prague School structuralism. If one compares the latter to Levi-Strauss’ own version of structuralism, from Structural Anthropology to The Savage

Mind, a key difference comes immediately to the fore: the simple fact that Levi-Strauss pays little attention to the subject’s interpretation. This is an aspect persistently ignored by de Toro and, in general, by those scholars who assume that the suppression of the subject is the common denominator of what they refer to as structuralism. In fact, the absence of hermeneutic elements in French structuralism was denounced in France when Levi-Strauss’ structuralism was still enjoying its critical apogee. I am referring to Paul Ricoeur’s critique of Levi-Strauss in a lecture originally delivered in 1963 and later published under the title of “Structure and Hermeneutics.”

Ricoeur, in his effort to integrate the exegetical technique of the hermeneutic tradition into the wider “epistemology of understanding” of post-Husserlian phenomenology, criticizes the fact that Levi-Strauss “establishes between the observer and the system a relationship which is itself

nonhistorical. Understanding is not seen here as the recovery of meaning…. The relation is objective, independent of the observer” (“Structure” 33-34). Moreover, Ricoeur rejects Levi-

Strauss’ idea of “savage thought” for considering it the product of “an unconscious system, which is constituted by differences and oppositions independently of the observer” (“Structure”

55). At the bottom line of Ricoeur’s argumentation is a disagreement with the radical separation between structuralism and history.

Unfortunately, Ricoeur’s early response to Levi-Strauss’ version of structuralism did not receive enough attention from the scholars who developed theatre semiotics in the 1970s without problematizing the presence of the subject perspective. The perpetuation of the formalist cliché in accounts such as de Toro’s is paradoxical, to say the least: “Formalism, particularly structuralism, could not answer fundamental issues that were emerging, such as questions related to subjectivity, the subject, ethnicity, identity displacements, issues of power and centrality”

(“The End” 121). This statement constitutes a typical example of how poststructuralist thinkers monopolize the return to subjectivity while, at the same time, condemning phenomenological structuralism to oblivion. For Mukařovský pays special attention to the role of the subject who perceives the correlation of structural forces that permeate the work of art, a subject that operates in an intersubjective space equipped with a set of social, ideological, and artistic values that relate the individual to the collective.

A review of Mukařovský’s structural theory demonstrates to what extent the principal tenets of Prague School structuralism remain, with a few exceptions, unknown to date. I have argued that the crisis of French structuralism does not justify the automatic dissolution of a broader, richer (and unexplored) structuralist theory; nor does it justify the gratuitous extension

of the prefix ‘post’ (in rigor, only applicable to post-French structuralism) to the structuralist theory practiced by Prague scholars.

To conclude, I will briefly review the recent contribution of Emil Volek, one of today’s most active promoters of the Prague School semiotic tradition. Of particular interest is his recent essay “Futures of the Past: Steps and Mis(sed)steps in Structuralism(s), Semiotics, and

Aesthetics from a Metacritical Perspective” (2009). This piece is the last installment of a critical project that began in the mid-1970s and first crystalized in his study Metaestructuralismo (1985).

Volek situates the aesthetic experience in the space of interplay between three elements: code

(langue), artifact (parole), and context (space of communication). Volek argues that the artifact—synonymous for the individual text, utterance, or artistic work—operates in the intersecting space between the abstract code and the space where the communication is

‘situated.’ As a result of this, the work of art cannot be described as a simple projection of the code, but rather as the result of a “multifaceted power struggle between the generative force of the code and the already ‘inhabited’ and resisting space of communicative context, characterized by the plurality of languages and of positions/orientations within certain specific physical, historical and social situation” (“Futures” 22, his italics).

These three spaces are, according to Volek’s description, “mutually irreducible, yet complementary” (“Futures” 21), and the logic of one cannot be simply transferred to the rest.

French structuralism and Chomskyan generative-transformational grammar, for example, operated exclusively at the level of the code, thus eliminating “the subject as possibly active agency” (“Futures” 22). This self-imposed limitation made possible the rapid growth of a theoretical corpus with a highly scientific appearance – at the cost of ignoring the fact that a work of art cannot be reduced to the status of a mere manifestation of a deep structure. As Volek

explains, French/transformational structuralism privileged the analysis of simple texts, mostly short stories and folktales, and it was only after the study of these ‘central’ texts that the conclusions were presented as universal. It was against this specific version of structuralism that the so-called poststructuralist thought emerged, but there is no reason to extend its pitfalls to the functional tradition of the Prague School, one deeply rooted in its historical present.

1.2. From the ‘meta’ prefix to a functional approach to art.

As explained in the introduction, a common denominator of the works that are integral to the textual corpus of this dissertation is the fact that they foreground the constructed nature of the theatrical stage or, more precisely, its condition of being-in-construction in front of an audience.

These works problematize the gap existing between stage and auditorium, art and life. In Lorca’s

The Public and Josef and Karel Čapek’s The Fateful Game of Love, for example, the separation between stage and audience is porous, unstable, and subject to constant revision. This situation contrasts with the basic tenets of illusionist theatre as they appear codified in a critical tradition that goes from Denis Diderot to Konstantin Stanislavsky. Diderot, one of the first theorizers of the illusionist fourth wall, conceives theatre as a succession of tableaux unified by the artist’s single point of view. This idea of dramatic tableau, as Roland Barthes observes in his essay

“Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,” implies the existence of “a pure cut-out segment with clearly defined edges, irreversible and incorruptible; everything that surrounds it is banished into nothingness, remains unnamed, while everything that it admits within its field is promoted into

essence, into light, into view” (70). The “irreversible and incorruptible” stage exerts a unifying control over the spectator’s gaze, thereby determining both the observer and the observed. In the twentieth century, Stanislavsky also endorses the existence of a fourth wall separating stage from viewers. In fact, he regards the presence of the spectators as an anomaly, for they are an obstacle to the actor’s natural retrieval of subconscious energy. The goal of his system of acting is, precisely, the correction of this anomalous situation. To “restore the natural laws, which have been dislocated by the circumstances of an actor’s having to work in public,” Stanislavsky explains, a system of acting “should return him to the creative state of a normal human being”

(Building 281). In stark contrast to this view, the playwrights studied in this dissertation problematize the existence of theatrical audiences as a constitutive characteristic of the theatrical event, not as a factor to correct or neutralize. And the appeal to the audience is usually made through the laying bare of the artistic devices, an operation that breaks the illusion of reality and demands a critical involvement from spectators who are not treated as simple voyeurs. As I will discuss in the chapters to follow, numerous mediating devices are present in a group of modernist plays that are characterized by an explicit didactic orientation.

At first sight, there are multiple aspects of the works studied here that make them qualify as metatheatrical. They engage in a critical relation with previous theatrical forms, as is the case of the actors who play the commedia dell’arte roles in Josef and Karel Čapek’s The Fateful

Game of Love; they can also reproduce (and distort) the plots of bourgeois drama, as

Bontempelli’s heroic puppets do in Hedge to Northwest; and, finally, they highlight the tension between stage and auditorium by presenting an inharmonious relationship between physical and imaginary stage, a characteristic of Lorca’s theatre from his farces to The Public. In sum, the dramatic works studied here respond to what one can expect from a theatre that comes preceded

by the prefix ‘meta’: self-reflectivity, critical relationship to previous models and, even though it is a very generic idea, complexity. The distinction between self-referential and mimetic dramaturgies is, in final instance, a question of theatrical levels rather than an absolute separation of two irreconcilable essences. In this respect, William Egginton observes how “there can be no theater that is not already a metatheater, in that in the instant a distinction is recognized between a real space and another, imaginary one that mirrors it, that very distinction becomes an element to be incorporated as another distinction in the imaginary space’s work of mimesis” (How 74). It is not by accident that scholars such as Elinor Fuchs, Martin Puchner, and Alan Ackerman, as well as Egginton himself, have advocated in recent years in favor of the adoption of the term

‘theatrical’ or ‘theatricalist’ in lieu of the most popular ‘metatheatrical.’ Be it through the mediating presence of asides, prologues and choruses, the incorporation of puppets commenting on the stage action, or the adoption of theatrical traditions that foreground the artificial nature of the stage (commedia dell’arte, Chinese and Japanese classic theatres), there is no need to present a play within a play in order to emphasize the artificiality of the theatrical stage.

To replace the concept of metatheatre, I propose a close study of the functional model of communication first developed by Karl Bühler in 1934, and later adapted by Jan Mukařovský.

An alternative vocabulary derived from Mukařovský’s functional approach will be also presented here, with special emphasis on the intersection of the practical and the aesthetic functions in the work of art. The idea of metatheatre or metaplay, one of the most influential concepts in theatre studies in the past fifty years, originally appears in Lionel Abel’s collection of essays Metatheatre, first published in 1963. Abel coins this term to define “a comparatively philosophic form of drama” (v) characterized by its self-conscious nature. In contrast to the catharsis-oriented Greek tragedy, Abel argues, the hero in the works of Shakespeare, Cervantes,

and Calderón remains “conscious of the part he himself plays in constructing the drama that unfolds around him” (167). The device of the play within a play, so important in the Baroque, is present in works such as Hamlet or Life is a Dream, yet Abel indicates that the concept of metatheatre goes beyond the use of this specific device:

the plays I am pointing at do have a common character: all of them are theatre pieces

about life seen as already theatricalized. By this I mean that the persons appearing on the

stage in these plays are there not simply because they were caught by the playwright in

dramatic postures as a camera might catch them, but because they themselves knew they

were dramatic before the playwright took note of them. What dramatized them

originally? Myth, legend, past literature, they themselves. . . . unlike figures in tragedy,

they are aware of their own theatricality. (134-135)

The notion of metatheatre is not exclusive to one artistic period. Abel applies it to the self- reflexive dramaturgies of such modern playwrights as Pirandello, Genet, and Brecht. At the core of Abel’s theoretical edifice stands his argumentation about the impossibility of tragedy in baroque and modern drama due to the “theatricalized,” self-referential condition of these two periods. One of the great advantages of the concept of metatheatre is the fact that, once it has been liberated from historical constraints, it becomes a valid analytic tool for the study of historical series. As Puchner puts it in his preface to Abel’s collection, “Nineteenth-century realism and naturalism thus are for modern drama what Greek tragedy is for baroque drama, namely, the “realist” precursor of the later self-absorbed metatheatre” (Introduction 14).

The origin of the idea of metatheatre can be traced back to the early 1960s, when the prefix “meta” enjoyed extraordinary prominence among art critics thanks to Clement

Greenberg’s theorizations on abstract painting.10 Abel was also responding to a parallel movement that took place in the area of literary theory in the wake of Jakobson’s famous study on the six functions of language. As it is well known, Jakobson presented his model of six functions of language at the 1958 Indiana Conference on Style. His paper “Linguistics and

Poetics” was published two years later in the proceedings Style in Language, edited by Thomas

A. Sebeok, and any further commentary about its influence on twentieth-century literary theory would be redundant here. In the pages to follow, I propose a historical reconstruction of

Jakobson’s model in order to demonstrate how his 1958 classification descends from the tradition of the Prague School (a research group he was cofounder of, in 1926), and to what extent it diverges from the Prague School project of interartistic semiotics. In particular, I argue that, by rendering Mukařovský’s original aesthetic function as poetic function, Jakobson closes the door to the inclusion of social and ideological phenomena in the realm of literary criticism.

Jakobson’s six elements of verbal communication are the following (I am reproducing here the graphic arrangement presented in “Linguistic and Poetics”):

10 See Puchner’s introduction to Abel’s Tragedy and Metatheatre 1-4. As Puchner observes, it is in the late fifties and early sixties “when the literature, painting, music, and theatre produced in the first half of the twentieth century are canonized, when prominent scholars engage the often hermetic, puzzling, and complex works of high modernism, introducing and explaining them to the academy and to the a wider public. The formulation they commonly use is that these difficult works do not seek to represent the world, but are rather “about” art itself…. There existed no art form in the twentieth century that did not acquire, sooner or later, the prefix meta” (Introduction 2-3). 37

CONTEXT

ADDRESSER MESSAGE ADDRESEE

CONTACT

CODE

And the functions corresponding to these six factors are:

REFERENTIAL

EMOTIVE POETIC CONATIVE

PHATIC

METALINGUAL

In strict terms, only two of Jakobson’s functions can be considered new contributions. More exactly, it is only the case of the metalingual function, for the concept of phatic function is derived from Bronislaw Malinowski’s anthropological research, as well as the transmission model of communication developed by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in the 1940s. In

“Linguistics and Poetics,” Jakobson defines the metalingual function as the one that predominates “Whenever the addresser and/or the addressee need to check up whether they use the same code” (69). Metalingual operations are present in our everyday exchanges, and their importance is particularly visible in the processes of language learning. My claim is that the metalingual function cannot be made equal to metatheatre due to the fact that there is no position of outsideness in theatre that can be compared to the abstract patterns of utterances such as “The word “apple” has five letters” or “Could you rephrase what you just said?”. Even in the case of

Brecht’s ‘epic’ devices, what occurs is a shift of attention to the theatrical conventions—a focus on the message itself, in linguistic terms—rather than a description of the code from an outside position.

If the metalingual function is not the linguistic equivalent of metatheatre (with all the connotations of self-awareness, self-reflexivity, etc., present in the latter), the most plausible solution seems the adoption of Jakobson’s poetic function. The substitution of the poetic for the metalingual function, however, does not produce a totally satisfactory solution either. In order to prove the insufficiency of Jakobson’s terminology, I propose a close reading of the definition of the poetic function in “Linguistics and Poetics”:

The set (Einstellung) toward the message as such, focus on the message for its own sake,

is the POETIC function of language . . . The poetic function is not the sole function of

verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal

activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent. This function, by promoting the

palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects. (69-70)

The concepts of Einstellung (set, orientation) and dominant are not foreign to the reader of this dissertation [see section 1.1]. As indicated earlier, Jakobson became familiar with them in the early 1920s, when he was one of the most active members of the so-called Russian formalist school. The idea of palpability can also be traced back to these years, since it is a translation of oščutimost’, a term Shklovsky coined to describe the consequences of deautomatizing effects.

The formalist origin of these three concepts demonstrates the existence of multiple theoretical layers in Jakobson’s famous model. In addition, his words on “the fundamental dichotomy of

signs and objects” are evidence for the legacy of the Prague School, an intellectual endeavor he joined in 1926 as one of the founding members of the Prague Circle. This dichotomy of signs and objects is central to my argumentation, as I will show later, but there are other aspects of the poetic function that deserve special attention now. I am referring to the very use of the adjective

“poetic,” a terminological decision that limits its range of application to the realm of verbal art.

Why does Jakobson restrict his analysis to linguistic materials? In 1958, when he delivers his paper at Indiana, Jakobson is especially interested in the development of a “poetry grammar.”

Having arrived in the United States in the early 1940s, he devoted himself exclusively to linguistic research for more than a decade—it is in this period that he writes his famous paper on aphasic disturbances. And, when he returns to literary studies in 1958, he is convinced of the existence of an empirical criterion that demonstrates the existence of the poetic function. It consists, as he puts it in “Linguistics and Poetics,” in the projection of “the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (71, his emphasis).

Leaving aside the phatic and metalingual functions, incorporated by Jakobson to his 1958 model of communication, the other four functions are known to Prague scholars as early as the mid-1930s. The key difference here is that, instead of poetic function, Mukařovský speaks of a multivalent aesthetic function. Jakobson himself adopts this terminology in his Prague years, as can be inferred from “The Dominant,” originally a lecture he delivers in 1935. To prove my statement, I will simply quote two brief excerpts from “The Dominant”:

In the referential function, the sign has a minimal internal connection with the designated

object, and therefore the sign in itself carries only a minimal importance. (44)

a poetic work cannot be defined as a work fulfilling neither an exclusively aesthetic

function nor an aesthetic function along with other functions; rather, a poetic work is

defined as a verbal message whose aesthetic function is its dominant. (43)

The first excerpt anticipates Jakobson’s theorization on the relation between sign and reality; in the second excerpt, one can see how Jakobson speaks of aesthetic function even when the work in question pertains to the realm of verbal art (“a poetic work is defined as a verbal message whose aesthetic function is its dominant”). It is evident how, in the context of the Prague School comparative semiotics of art, the aesthetic function appears as a more encompassing concept than Jakobson’s later poetic function. Therefore, if one proceeds in accordance with this wider approach and substitutes the aesthetic for the poetic function, the result is the following chart of artistic—not only linguistic—functions:

REFERENTIAL

EMOTIVE AESTHETIC CONATIVE

We thus arrive at a four-function model that can also be rendered in terms of 3 + 1: three communicative functions plus one aesthetic function. The main precedent for this hybrid scheme is Karl Bühler’s organon model of language, published by the German psychologist and linguist in 1934. In his Sprachtheorie, Bühler distinguishes three functions of language: Darstellung

(presentation), Ausdruck (expression), and Appell (appeal). These three functions correspond to the three elements of verbal communication and, in consequence, are always present in the communicational exchange. The functions do not exclude each other and, depending on the

predominant orientation of the speech, one can speak of an emphasis on the referred object

(presentation), the speaking subject (expression) or the utterance’s recipient (appeal). Bühler’s

Sprachtheorie takes everyday verbal communication as the basic, non-marked situation of analysis, a move that constitutes a radical departure from the practice of the philosophers of language, philologists and linguists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Bühler’s research is directly relevant to the evolution of Prague School semiotics because his organon model situates language in an intersubjective paradigm, therefore compensating for the limitations of Husserl’s phenomenology (Mukařovský’s most direct philosophical influence).

For, in contrast to Bühler’s model, Husserl confines language to the inner realm of expression.

Husserl distinguishes between two types of signs: expressions and indications. As Peter Steiner explains, indications, for Husserl, are merely contextual signs, while “the true realm of expressions is the solitary mental life, where words do not indicate because their meaning is directly “present” in the subject’s consciousness” (“In Defense” 416). Very different to Husserl’s description, Bühler shifts the attention to the use of verbal signs in a contextual social interaction, and signals the path for Mukařovský’s later incorporation of social aspects into a comprehensive semiotic theory. After reviewing the terminology in Bühler’s organon, the group of four artistic functions appears as follows:

PRESENTATIONAL

(Darstellung)

EMOTIVE / CONATIVE /

EXPRESSIVE AESTHETIC APPELLATIVE

In Mukařovský’s own account, “As a presentation (Darstellung) the linguistic sign functions vis-

à-vis the reality signified by it; as an expression it appears in relation to the speaking subject; as an appeal it is addressed to the perceiving subject” (“Poetic Designation” 67-8). The idea of presentational function, often translated (incorrectly) to English as “referential,” highlights the capacity of the sign to produce realities (world-creating signs). This creative facet is less explicit when the concept is translated as referential function, as Jakobson does in “Linguistics and

Poetics.” With respect to the expressive and appellative functions, terms equivalent to the emotive and conative functions in Jakobson’s model, the difference is not substantial.

Mukařovský expands upon Bühler’s Sprachtheorie by conceptualizing a fourth function, the aesthetic, which brings to the fore the structural components of the artistic work. This idea of an “orientation toward the expression itself,” an expression that Mukařovský uses in several of his essays of the 1930s, has been too often misunderstood as a simple translation of the old principle of art for the art’s sake. Yet what Mukařovský argues is precisely the opposite of this, for it is due to its aesthetic orientation that the work of art is able to weaken the transparent relation between signs and reality. The illusion of transparency that is inherent to realist- naturalist drama (theatre as slice of life) epitomizes the tendency toward informational redundancy or, to put it in linguistic terms, lexicalization. Contrary to this, the presence of non- mimetic codes in modernist theatre foregrounds the fact that the stage is not a passive copy of external reality, but a space that now questions ‘lexicalized’ identities and clears the ground for new social and ethical evaluations.

In sum, once that these terminological changes are implemented, the circle seems finally closed, and Jakobson’s model can be now traced back to the four-function model developed by

Bühler and Mukařovský. Yet there is still a question to be answered: What is the place of the

aesthetic function, and how does it interact with the other functions? And, more important, how does an analysis of the aesthetic function relate to the present dissertation? This topic will be discussed in the remainder of this section.

Mukařovský opens his long essay Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts

(1936) with the following statement: “Any object and any activity, whether natural or human, may become a carrier of the aesthetic function” (1). This is not a call for a return to panaestheticism but, very differently, an observation on the impossibility of tracing a clear distinction between the aesthetic and the extra-aesthetic. In his effort to apply Bühler’s communicational scheme to contemporary art, Mukařovský envisions a ubiquitous aesthetic function that cannot be confined to a single, delimited space. It is during the early 1940s, the years corresponding to his last phase of structuralist thought, that Mukařovský arrives at a terminology that finally suits his purposes. In “The Place of the Aesthetic Function among the

Other Functions” (1942), he reorganizes his typology of functions from the standpoint of the subject, defining function as “the mode of a subject’s self-realization vis-à-vis the external world” (40). By using “self-realization” instead of “effect,” Mukařovský prioritizes the perspective of the subject over the object achieved. At first glance, it seems a safe move to define the aesthetic function as the predominant one in artistic realms such as literature, sculpture, etc.

Nonetheless, Mukařovský denounces the limitations of this theoretical stance when it comes to explaining the presence of the aesthetic function in the society of his time:

as soon as we go beyond the realm of art, difficulties arise. On the one hand, we

continually find ourselves attempting to consider the aesthetic function as something

secondary which may exist but is not necessary; on the other hand, the aesthetic function

compels our attention outside of art so frequently, turns up in so many of the most varied

manifestations of life, and even appears as an essential component of habitation, dress,

social intercourse, and so forth, that we must think about its role in the overall

organization of the world. (“The Place” 31)

Writing in 1942, Mukařovský finds himself needing to explain the particular nature of the aesthetic function in an epoch when “life outside of art has become very strongly aestheticized”

(“The Place” 32), a statement very similar to Benjamin’s well-known words on the fascist aestheticization of politics. In fact, Mukařovský refers to the “aestheticization of physical culture” (32) as one example of the strong presence of the aesthetic function outside art.11 As two paradigmatic instances of the ideological implications of physical hygiene and aesthetic norm, I will simply mention here the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden, which in 1932 held the exhibition Healthy Woman, Healthy Nation [Gesunde Frau Gesundes Volk], and Hans Surén’s photographs of male and female nudes published in 1936 on the occasion of the Berlin Olympic

Games.12

In “The Place of the Aesthetic Function,” Mukařovský does not operate with Bühler’s triple scheme. Instead, he now distinguishes two main types of functions: the immediate and the

11 In “The Place of the Aesthetic Function,” Mukařovský poses the example of goldsmith’s and the baker’s craft to prove how the aesthetic function is present in elements with practical functions—for him, the color and the smell of the baker’s craft are also aesthetic elements. He concludes that there is “no sphere in which the aesthetic function is essentially absent; potentially it is always present; it can arise at any time” (35). Mukařovský criticizes architectural functionalism because Corbusier “proceeds from the premise that a building has a single, precisely delimited function given by the purpose for which it is built” (37), an unambiguous position that limits the buildings to a single function.

12 See Ann Thomas’ “The Body Politic: Reality and Utopia,” a contribution included in Jean Clair’s The 1930s: The Making of “The New Man”, the catalogue for a 2008 exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada. The interrelation between physical hygiene, ideology and aesthetics is also addressed by Philippe Comar in “Crystal and Mud: Academic Approaches to Figurative Representation of the Body,” also in this exhibition catalogue.

semiotic. The practical function pertains to the realm of the immediate, when the subject transforms reality in a direct manner with his own hands. An example of an immediate effect is the person who breaks branches off a tree to start a fire. In this case, Mukařovský notes, the material used to start this fire is a mere instrument to an immediate goal, a goal that is “as functionally unambiguous as possible appears most advantageous for the practical function”

(“The Place” 43). In contrast to this, the work of art presents a semiotic (mediated) relation to reality, which does not imply that the artwork cannot exert an impact on it. For, despite their antithetical conditions, the crisscrossing of the practical and the aesthetic functions is frequent both in art and in everyday life. In fact, Mukařovský notes, the art of theatre constitutes a paradigmatic case of the practical function appearing “frequently coupled with, indeed even blended with, the aesthetic” (“The Place” 47). In “Significance of Aesthetics,” a paper also written in 1942, Mukařovský reformulates the dichotomy practical/aesthetic function in terms that echo Shklovsky’s concept of ostranenie:

An absolute restriction to the practical attitude, of course, would unmistakably lead

eventually to total automatization, to a restriction of attention to already obtained and

exploited aspects. Only the aesthetic function can preserve for man vis-à-vis the universe

the position of a foreigner who keeps coming to unknown regions with fresh and keen

attention, who is constantly aware of himself because he is projecting himself into the

surrounding reality and is constantly aware of the surrounding reality because he

measures it with himself. (“Significance” 22)

Mukařovský’s theory of functions is not free from contradictions, especially when it comes to codifying a function, such as the aesthetic, which can only be defined in negative terms.13 The unresolved aspects of Mukařovský’s model have to be explained, at least in part, due to the hostile historical conditions of his late structuralist thought, which coincides with the German occupation of Prague. And Mukařovský would never resume his research on this issue after War

World II, as he had renounced structuralism in favor of Marxism in order to keep his professorship at the Charles University of Prague. Despite its unfinished condition,

Mukařovský’s functional division is of particular value when applied to modernism, a period characterized by the blending of the two functions studied by the Czech scholar. The next three chapters of this dissertation are concerned with the practical orientation of a heterogeneous corpus of modernist dramatic works, “practical” and “modernist” appearing now as two terms that are not mutually exclusive. In the case of Evreinov’s A Merry Death and Josef and Karel

Čapek’s The Fateful Game of Love, the two plays to be studied in depth in the chapter to follow, the apparently intransitive parody of the commedia plots serves as a vehicle for an explicit plan of theatrical reform.

13 As Michael Quinn notes, Mukařovský constructs the category of aesthetic function “negatively, that is to say, nowhere and everywhere” (“Negative” 51). Quinn criticizes the graphic arrangement proposed by Jakobson in 1958, and later by Steiner in his introduction to Mukařovský’s Structure, Sign, and Function, because in both cases the aesthetic functions stands in an equal relation with the rest of functions. In Quinn’s view, “Mukařovský’s free aesthetic function inherits, at the level of communication ethics, the political difficulties of access and exclusion that have troubled Schiller and other post-Kantian theorists. The difficulty of the logical status of free aesthetic functioning seems to me to be the reason why the borderless aesthetic is so resistant to graphic illustrations like Steiner’s and Jakobson’s” (“Negative” 54-5). 47

Chapter 2: The modernist commedia dell’arte

2.1. The rebirth of commedia dell’arte in the modernist years.

This introductory section revisits certain historical aspects of the commedia dell’arte which were appealing to the modernists who were attempting to redefine the institution of theatre at a time when their artworks were reduced to the status of commodity. The affinity between the commedia figures, Pierrot in particular, and the artist who is self-conscious of his profession can be traced back to the origins of the commedia around the mid-1500s. It was at this time that the commedia emerged as an acting trade, an activity different to the court spectacles performed by amateur actors. The personal implication of the actors in the construction of the commedia figures also reinforced this historical identification. It was because of these two factors that, when the modernists redefine their role as artists working in a capitalist environment, Pierrot recurrently appears as the dramatic figure that speaks for them in defense of a new theatrical praxis. My reading of the modernist revival of the commedia pays special attention to the way in which the commedia conventions serve the project of critical revision of the commercial theatrical stage. Nikolai Evreinov’s A Merry Death and Josef and Karel Čapek’s The Fateful

Game of Love are paradigmatic cases of dramatic works that reinterpret the commedia legacy in order to arrive at a new interaction between stage and auditorium. The conventional nature of the commedia stock characters is of particular interest when it comes to analyzing the

“retheatricalization” of the stage by those playwrights who dispense with the mimetic requirements of realist-naturalist dramaturgies.

This second chapter is concerned with the role that the tradition of the commedia dell’arte plays in the development of a ‘theatricalized’ theatre during the modernist years. But, before proceeding to the analysis of this revisited commedia, it is necessary to emphasize that the

traditions of commedia and puppetry converge very frequently in those dramaturgies that are alternative to the realist-naturalist stream. As an example of the interrelation existing between the commedia and the puppets, I will briefly mention here the procedures of reversals of theatrical illusion that are present in Lorca’s The Billy-Club Puppets and Alexander Blok’s The

Fairground Booth. The plot of Lorca’s puppet play revolves around the classic conflict old/young present in numerous folkloric sources, and is also part of the comic tradition of the

Spanish interludes and the commedia dell’arte [see section 3.3]. The bully Don Cristóbal, who has married the innocent Rosita thanks to his monetary power, demands immediate sexual satisfaction from her, arguing that he has paid a good price for it. Yet he suddenly collapses from a heart attack—probably caused by his massive consumption of alcohol during the wedding— and falls over the footlights. At this point, the puppet farce seems to shift to a more serious tone—until the rest of the puppets discover that what they are facing is not the death of a real person. Cocoliche, one of Rosita’s comic lovers, eventually realizes that Don Cristóbal has simply burst: “he doesn’t have any blood!” . . . “Look! Look at what’s coming out of his belly button! Sawdust!” (Billy-Club 59; “¡no tiene sangre! . . . “¡Mira! ¡Mira lo que le sale por el ombliguillo” Los títeres 78).

A comparison of Lorca’s play with Blok’s The Fairground Booth shows interesting aspects in common, as both pieces share abrupt changes of mood that underscore the conventionality of the theatrical machinery. In The Fairground Booth, a dance ball scene evolves into a slapstick routine and one of the dancers uses a wooden sword to kill Pierrot, who then falls dead over the footlights. Very similarly to Don Cristóbal in Lorca’s puppet play, cranberry juice begins to spurt from Pierrot’s head but, suddenly, he returns to life in the best tradition of puppet theatre. With this very short plot outline, I only intend to show to what extent the commedia

dell’arte and the tradition of puppet theatre converge in the anti-illusionist dramaturgies of a varied group of modernist artists. The use of these figures is often accompanied by the exposure of spatial arrangement, such as when Meyerhold inserted a prompter-box in the main stage of

The Fairground Booth. He also presented the fictional figure of an Author who dialogues with his characters and interrupts the puppet play, which also occurs in Bontempelli’s Hedge to

Northwest [see section 3.2].

Meyerhold’s conception of the audience changed significantly from his production of

Blok’s The Fairground Booth (1906) to Verhaeren’s Dawn (1920). In the fervor of the Soviet revolution, Meyerhold was oblivious to Shklovsky’s observation about the impossibility of an absolute suppression of what Shklovsky refers to as the ‘psychological footlights.’ In 1920,

Shklovsky opens a theatre review comically titled “Papa—That’s an Alarm Clock” with a description of his first impression of Meyerhold’s production of Verhaeren’s Dawn: “The footlights had been removed. The stage was stripped bare . . . The theater was like a coat with the collar the ripped off. It was not cheerful and not bright” (“Papa” 39). In this short text, Shklovsky reflects on the multiple efforts to suppress the fourth wall in the theatre of the Soviet regime.

Meyerhold, in accordance with the artistic doctrine of the Communist Party, had organized a mass spectacle conceived to transform the spectators into active agents—a transformation that parallels the new role of the proletariat in the utopian socialist state.14 Meyerhold removed the footlights in order to unite actors, orchestra pit (populated by Proletkult members) and audience but, Shklovsky notes with irony, in this particular production the spectators seemed to go “on strike” (40) in view of their passive behavior. The rapid automatization of what was supposed to

14 In “On the Staging of Verhaeren’s The Dawn,” a short text published in 1920, Meyerhold and Bebutov declare that “each spectator represents, as it were, Soviet Russia in microcosm… Now we have to protect the interests not of the author but of the spectator” (Meyerhold 170-1).

be a communal and liberating exercise was evident as soon as Soviet theatre filled in, literally speaking, the orchestra pit (actors embedded in the auditorium, architectural reforms) only to end up reproducing the dogmas of the socialist state.

In “Regarding Psychological Footlights,” another short piece of the early Soviet period,

Shklovsky states that the core of theatrical art is not simply illusionism or anti-illusionism, but a constant tension between these two poles. An admirer of the futurist dramas of Khlebnikov and

Mayakovsky, Shklovsky argues that what foregrounds the materiality of the stage, its artificial condition, is the constant interplay between actuality and fiction. The main feature of non- mimetic aesthetics consists, therefore, in producing “a flickering illusion, that is, one that comes and goes” (“Regarding” 49). He maintains that theatre, understood as the representation of dramatic literature, cannot dispense with this requirement.

Shklovsky’s thoughts on theatricality and anti-illusionism, which he published in the

Russian press before temporarily leaving the country in 1922, can be read as the theoretical testament of the Russian theatrical avant-garde. At the same time, his description can be retrospectively applied to the European theatre that departs from naturalism at the turn of the nineteenth century, embracing first symbolism and later the rest of the –isms in the short span of two decades. On the one hand, Shklovsky makes the laying bare of the devices one of the main principles of his general artistic theory, and there is little doubt that the exposure of the theatrical machinery became in these years a frequent tool against the illusionist fourth wall. On the other hand, Shklovsky is perfectly aware of the futility of simply suppressing the physical boundaries between stage and auditorium. Interestingly enough, Meyerhold himself had formulated a very similar proposition to Shklovsky’s as early as 1911, in an article devoted to his experience at directing Blok’s play. After consolidating a theatrical style different to Stanislavsky and the

symbolists, Meyerhold proposed a return to a theatre of improvisation that should adopt the

“laws of the fairground booth” that were present in the Spanish and Italian Baroque:

The prologue and the ensuing parade, together with the direct address to the audience at

the final curtain, so loved both by the Italians and Spaniards in the seventeenth century

and by the French vaudevillistes, all force the spectator to recognize the actors’

performance as pure play-acting. And every time the actor leads the spectators too far

into the land of make-believe he immediately resorts to some unexpected sally or lengthy

address a parte to remind them that what is being performed is only a play. (Meyerhold

127, his italics)

Meyerhold’s conception corresponds with the genealogical description that I proposed in the introductory section: that the mediating devices typical of the Baroque reemerge in the late years of the nineteenth century from the low strata of popular entertainment. Or, to put it in

Meyerhold’s words: “Banished from the contemporary theatre, the principles of the fairground booth found a temporary refuge in the French cabarets, the German Überbrettl, the English music halls and the ubiquitous “varieties” (Meyerhold 136).

Naturalism, understood as the revolt against the melodrama and the ‘educative’ versions of the classics that populate the European stage in the second half of the nineteenth century, can be said to constitute the first historical reaction against the separation of art (theatre) and life in the capitalist era. In one sense, therefore, naturalism lays the ground for the reforms in early twentieth-century theatre. Yet the naturalist effort to produce a total renovation of the stage

evinces the same pitfalls it aims to expose: the naturalists15 take the part (melodrama) for the whole (the theatrical institution) believing that the rejection of the former will automatically open a new era. Zola, for example, affirms that “there is a ‘theatre language.’ It is the clichés, the resounding platitudes, the hollow words that roll about like empty barrels, all that intolerable rhetoric of our vaudevilles and dramas, which is beginning to make us smile” (52). Zola’s response to the melodramatic conventions of his contemporary theatre prefigures an extreme version of stage realism that sacrifices the artificiality of theatre for the sake of mimetic reproduction – one that brings to the stage, as in the 1879 production of his L’Assommoir,

“washerwomen washing real laundry with real soap in real hot water” (Braun 25). Zola’s criticism against the “intolerable rhetoric of our vaudevilles” also evidences a rejection of the popular theatrical and paratheatrical genres of his time in the name of theatre as a slice of life. It is in response to this dramaturgy that the modernists turn their attention to the commedia dell’arte in the early years of the twentieth century. From a wider perspective, the commedia also responds to the bourgeois drama that coalesces around the mid-eighteenth century.16 With the light-minded Columbine at the vertex of a triangle that includes the sentimental Pierrot and the trickster Harlequin, this scheme is significantly different from the pious relationship between

15 Duke Georg’s Meiningen Theatre constitutes the first modern theatre company in Europe, one that exercised an enduring influence on Ibsen, Antoine and Stanislavsky after touring European playhouses in the last third of the nineteenth century. Even though the repertoire of the Meiningen Company consisted mostly of historical plays, its emphasis on historical accuracy converted it to a central reference for the naturalists.

16 Between 1750 and 1770, the development of the German national stage is linked to the development of the bürgerliche Trauerspiel [domestic tragedy], a genre that legitimizes the values of the emerging bourgeois audience. A central aspect of the bürgerliche Trauerspiel consists in the substitution of empathy and self-identification for the admiration and fear of the classicist tragedy. To produce this effect of empathy, H. R. Jauss notes, Lessing interprets the Aristotelian notion of pity “as the emotion which is related to another ego, through intellectual empathy, in order that the spectator be conducted, by way of identification with fallible heroes of middling quality, to an understanding of human situations, and in order that he feel the need for moral decision” (290). This “transition from aesthetic to moral identification,” Jauss observes, produces a “turning point in the reception of Aristotle” (289), for now catharsis requires the empathic identification with the dramatic characters that are, not by accident, members of the middle classes.

father and daughter that was central to bourgeois drama. And the same can be said about the adultery scheme that was recurrent in realist and naturalist theatre of the late nineteenth-century, as the interaction of the three commedia characters question the social institution of marriage.

While the modernist revisions of the commedia frequently appear in the company of puppetry or puppet-like types of acting, there is a specific aspect that makes the commedia characters singular in this context of renovation. It is their ability, Pierrot’s in particular, to embody the paradoxical situation of a modern artist who cannot escape the laws of the market economy. Speaking in semiotic terms, it is possible to explain the modernist revival of the commedia by referring to the conventional nature of its stage figures, which foregrounds the distance between stage and external world. As Michael Quinn observes, the commedia dell’arte operates in a space of suspended reference, one that is “subject to political disruption by its relation to social practice” (“Comedy” 72) as it absorbs multiple historical and artistic discourses

– hence the necessity of investigating the historical fortunes of the commedia system of signs.

After its widespread presence in the Europe of the seventeenth century, the commedia system faced what can be termed as a referential crisis in the early years of the eighteenth century. This crisis took place when the conventional system of signs that forms the commedia collided with the mimetic foundations of an emerging realistic drama. The naturalization of the commedia characters in early eighteenth-century Venice, a transformation detailed by Quinn, epitomizes this process. Quinn explains how, in order to avoid a situation of referential uncertainty, Carlo

Goldoni performs different types of anchoring strategies, from writing roles based on the private lives of the actresses to relating the commedia characters to the popular figure of Abagigi – an old Armenian who walked the streets of Venice. Quinn notes how Goldoni’s “suturing techniques” make sense in a time when referential certainty was expected of the theatrical stage:

as the figures lost contact with mimetic reference, origins, and other types of contiguity,

they became proportionately more dependent upon intertextual significance and formal

aesthetics, became literally saturated with significance, and so became proportionately

more vulnerable, also, to the political appropriations that have determined their histories

(“Comedy” 73).

One example of ideological appropriation was Goldoni’s transformation of Pantalone into an ideal merchant who now stood for the bourgeois values of honesty and sincerity, a figure very different from the greedy type that Pantalone stood for in the Baroque period. The eighteenth century, therefore, witnessed the naturalization of the commedia characters, a shift to the disappearance of the commedia from the national theatres with which it was associated earlier.

The commedia would not emerge as high-brow entertainment until the modernist playwrights had incorporated it into their new ‘theatricalized’ theatre. But, what happened to the commedia given its decline from the closing years of the seventeenth century to its modernist revival about two centuries later? If Goldoni domesticated the arbitrariness of the commedia characters by imposing a realistic referential code on them, a similar situation took place in the France around the end of the seventeenth century. In 1697, Louis XIV closed the Theâtre-Italien and the troupe of Italian actors17 was banned for nineteen years; during the following decades, the commedia was relegated to paratheatrical spaces as the text-based drama monopolizes the national theatres.

Since 1759, the permanent theatre on the Boulevard du Temple combined rope-dancing with acrobats and harlequinades and, for one century, the Boulevard functioned as the most popular

17 The old actor Giaratone, one of the masters of the commedia, stays in France but retires from theatre, leaving as his artistic legacy what Robert Storey defines in Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask as “a disembodied mask, fully naturalized to the French language, culture, and taste” (34).

site for entertainment, parallel to the state-supported playhouses. When Napoleon reduced the number of official theatres to eight in 1807, the Boulevard became the place of convergence for all the paratheatrical genres that were not light comedy, melodrama, or opera.18 In view of these historical facts, it can be inferred that the commedia of the early nineteenth century was a spectacle with a huge popular reception but with no resonance in the official spheres (the polemic about Victor Hugo’s Hernani, for instance, took place in a very different intellectual climate).

While the gap between the commedia and the bourgeois theatre19 widened, the figure of

Pierrot became increasingly popular among the most prestigious French poets, who envisioned him as the perfect personification of the solitary artist. Pierrot was not seen as a comic simpleton anymore, but as a (post)romantic hero/poet who seemed vulnerable to the new realities of an art that was now fully integrated into the capitalist system of supply and demand. When, in 1847,

Gautier defines Pierrot as “the modern proletarian,” he is opening the path for a new interpretation of this conventional figure, bridging the gap between sign and reference by means of the transformation of Pierrot into a figure of political resistance. Gautier’s reading is not, in any event, an isolated case. The dispossessed Pierrot, previously confined to the unofficial space of the vaudeville,20 now seduces Charles Nodier, Théophile Gautier and Théodore de Banville, and the same can be said about his ascent in the esteem of some of the greatest artists of the

18 See Carlson’s “The Golden Age of Boulevard,” especially 28-31.

19 Hundreds of melodramas and vaudevilles are staged in Paris from the 1820s to the 1840s, and among all the actors that interpreted Pierrot (or his counterpart, the simpleton Gilles), the actor Baptiste Déburau excels as the master of this renewed dramatic figure.

20 In his monographs Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask and Pierrots on the Stage of Desire, Robert Storey analyzes in detail the importance of Baptiste Deburau when it came to popularize his new Pierrot among the French romantics in the 1830s and the 1840s.

second half of the century, from Charles Baudelaire and J.-K. Huysmans to Paul Verlaine and

Stéphane Mallarmé. As Robert Storey explains,

Gautier himself suggested the direction in which these sympathies were tending when he

wrote, in 1847, that Pierrot is “the ancient slave, the modern proletarian, the pariah, the

passive and disinherited being….” That the Romantics, suffering from a Byronic mal du

siécle, could see themselves as much disinherited as Pierrot or le peuple is not at all

surprising; and for Banville and Charles Baudelaire, the life of the saltimbanques—the

Gilles and Pierrots of the streets—soon became a symbol for that of the artist. Banville

chose not to inspect too narrowly the vulgar glamour of these scruffy showmen, but

Baudelaire saw clearly the squalid and ironic pathos of their lonely existence. (Pierrot

109-110)

As it is well known, a split between two different, but not mutually exclusive, ideas of modernity took place during the first half of the nineteenth century. The first notion of modernity contains the achievements of the bourgeois society: individual freedom, cult of reason, capitalist economy, and industrialization. The second modernity is an aesthetic one and, as Matei

Calinescu observes, this cultural modernity can only be defined in negative terms, as a joint group of forces with a common enemy: the utilitarian views of the bourgeoisie.21 In France,

Baudelaire coins the term “modernité” in “The Painter of Modern Life” (written 1859, published

1863); and Gautier reflects on the new condition of the artist for decades before making an explicit mention of modernity in an article published in 1867. In both cases, the condition of the artist is one associated with a fall from grace. The artist appears trapped in the contradiction

21 See in particular Calinescu 42-3. 58

existing between the dream of a retreat from the material world and the pragmatic need for a successful integration in the market system—“successful” meaning here an adequacy to the laws of supply and demand. While the notion of art for art’s sake was not new in the Paris of the

1830s (it can be traced back to Kant), the writings of Gautier and Baudelaire signal the crystallization of a conflict that will determine the modern experience of the artist who now works in a capitalist environment. In Calinescu’s words,

l’art pour l’art as it was conceived by Théophile Gautier and his followers was not so

much a full-fledged aesthetic theory as a rallying cry for artists who had become weary of

empty romantic humanitarianism and felt the need to express their hatred of bourgeois

mercantilism and vulgar utilitarianism…. In contrast to the views defended by Kant and

his disciples in Germany, the partisans of l’art pour l’art promote a primarily polemical

concept of beauty, derived not so much from an ideal of disinterestedness as from an

aggressive assertion of art’s total gratuitousness. This concept of beauty is perfectly

summed up by the famous formula—épater le bourgeois. Art for Art’s Sake is the first

product of aesthetic modernity’s rebellion against the modernity of the philistine. (45)

This “modernity of the philistine” has transformed the artists into paid wage-laborers, to reproduce here Marx’s famous definition of the intellectuals in his Communist Manifesto. The contradictions of the system arise in the critical reflection of Gautier, Baudelaire, and Flaubert, among others who attempt to redefine their role of producers without giving up the specificity of their profession—the artists have been stripped of their halo by the logic of commodification.

Baudelaire’s prose poem “Loss of a Halo” verbalizes this situation from an ironic stance that

prefigures the tensions later visible in the modernist years. Baudelaire’s narration of the encounter between an everyman and a cynical artist, a scene that Joyce will rewrite in Ulysses when Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus meet in a Dublin brothel, already evidences the self- conscious nature of modernist art. Marshall Berman notes that the space to which Baudelaire confines the modern artist “evokes vaudeville, slapstick, the metaphysical pratfalls of Chaplin and Keaton. It points forward to a century whose heroes will come dressed as anti-heroes, and whose most solemn moments of truth will be not only described but actually experienced as clown shows, music-hall or nightclub routines—shticks” (157).

Nonetheless, despite the enormous popularity of the commedia among those artists that are aware of their modern (no matter how evasive this concept is) condition, realist and naturalist playwrights show little interest in Pierrot and his fellow travelers. There is a significant gap, in consequence, between the novelists and poets who embrace the commedia in order to explain their new role of producers of artworks, on the one side, and the high-brow playwrights who build their dramatic pieces turning their backs on the commedia legacy—not to mention paratheatrical manifestations such as circus or vaudeville, on the other. This gap will only be bridged with the emergence of a group of modernist playwrights and directors who are conscious of the symbolic power behind Pierrot – a debased figure who now speaks on behalf of an artist who is conscious of his condition as producer, as Benjamin explains in an essay of the same title.

In the modernist years, therefore, Pierrot embodies the metaphor of the artist as a dispossessed clown; and, together with Harlequin and Columbine, he makes his entrance on the modernist stage as the representative of a new theatre of improvisation, a theatrical or ‘theatricalized’ spectacle that questions the assumptions of the theatre of the preceding decades.

A common aspect of the works of Evreinov and the Čapeks is the interplay between dramatic irony and empathic identification. Both in Evreinov’s The Merry Death and in Josef and Karel Čapek’s The Fateful Game of Love, the audience holds a position of superiority with respect to the fictional world presented on the stage, due to the fact that the conventional plot of the commedia prevails over the psychological interiority of the characters. Because the behavior of Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine is determined by the conventional rules of the commedia, any scene that imitates, adopts, or simply resembles the pathos of realist drama can be interpreted, in principle, in parodic terms. Nonetheless, the parodic condition of these dramatic works does not exclude the possibility of a tragic resolution, as I will show in the pages to follow.

2.2. Evreinov’s The Merry Death. Theory and praxis of theatricality.

Evreinov situated the theory and practice of his theatre in a post-naturalist context that also rejected most of the traits associated with symbolist aesthetics. While he was not the only playwright who combined creative and critical writing, his participation in the discussions that followed the first revolt against Stanislavsky’s theory of acting made him a unique figure of the modernist years. Pirandello, for instance, articulated his dramatic theory as early as 1908, in his essay “L’Umorismo,” showing his discomfort both with D’Annunzio’s mysticism and with the verismo, the Italian version of European naturalism. But it would not be until the late 1910s, after the contributions of the futurists and the proponents of the theatre of the grotesque, that

Pirandello took his theory to theatrical practice. When Evreinov began to write theatre, the situation in Russia was significantly different. Evreinov benefited from the path inaugurated by

Valery Bryusov and Vyacheslav Ivanov in the opening years of the century, and he also learned from Meyerhold’s innovations after his rupture with Stanislavsky’s Art Theatre. Meyerhold, in his turn, admired Bryusov’s article “Unnecessary Truth” (1902), a piece hailed as the manifesto of non-realistic theatre. And, in 1908, the anthology Theatre: A Book on the New Theatre [Teatr, kniga o novom teatre] appeared with contributions by Meyerhold, Bryusov and Sologub, among others.

A central concept in the Russian movement against dramatic realism was the idea of uslovnost, which can be translated as ‘stylization’ or, in the context of this feud, as ‘conventional theatricality.’ It was during these crucial years that Evreinov wrote The Merry Death [Veselaya

Smert’, 1908], also joining Meyerhold in the Russian revival of the commedia—besides Blok’s

The Fairground Booth, Meyerhold staged Schnitzler’s Pierrete’s Veil and Vladimir Solovev’s

Harlequin, the Marriage Broker. In addition to his playwriting, Evreinov developed a theory on theatre and theatricality that led to the publication of his treatises The Theatre as Such, Pro

Scena Sua, and The Theatre in Life.

Against the cluttered stage of naturalist theatre, and also against the primacy of the literary text in symbolist drama, Evreinov proposes a new theatre to be based on the central figure of the actor. To justify the primacy of the actor, he situates the notion of transformation

(first found in ritualistic forms) at the core of his theory. Transformation is a common instinct present in all human civilizations, Evreinov argues, an instinct that is linked to a need for survival. Moreover, by relating theatricality to this instinct of transformation, he allocates the art of theatre in a pre-aesthetic space. At this respect, Spencer Golub observes how “by naming

theatre a pre-aesthetic phenomenon, he [Evreinov] could free it from the slavery to aestheticism that interfered with the free expression of our will to transform” (55).

Golub’s words acquire meaning in the historical context that was described in the introduction to this chapter, for Evreinov aimed to retrace the limits of the theatre in an epoch when the concept of autonomy appeared inextricably linked to the notion of art for art’s sake.

This move was not an exception to a tendency particularly visible in the Russia of the 1910s, when theoreticians of art sought to define the specificity of their respective artistic realms. The

Russian futurist Velimir Khlebnikov wrote the manifesto “The Word as Such” in 1913, and one year later Shklovsky inaugurated his avant-garde criticism with “The Resurrection of the Word,” a text that shared with Khlebnikov’s manifesto a fascination for the materiality of the verbal sign.

Moreover, by the end of the 1910s, Jakobson had coined the term “literariness” to define the specific condition of the work of verbal art, and Eisenstein’s theory of filmic montage highlighted the particular characteristics of this novel art. In consonance with these critical enterprises, Evreinov reflected on the specificity of theatre in a period when autonomous art appeared disengaged from social praxis. His apology of theatricality, of a theatre as such, foregrounded the self-sufficient condition of the stage and freed it from the mimetic imperative; at the same time, his ‘theatricalized’ art emerged in direct dialogue with its contemporary socio- cultural space.

Invoking Mukařovský’s theorization on the practical and aesthetic functions [see 1.2], it is possible to affirm that Evreinov seeks a theatre that would produce a practical effect on the auditorium. Simply conceiving his theatrical reform as an ‘aestheticizing’ operation would miss the particular nature of the aesthetic function, as well as its complex interaction with the practical values that the work of art may contain. And, while it is possible to read Evreinov’s theory as an

effort to locate theatre outside the realm of the aesthetic, as Golub does, I prefer to interpret it in terms of a coupling of the practical and the aesthetic functions. By keeping these two together, it is possible to avoid the pitfalls of pan-aestheticism22 and, at the same time, to construct a theoretical frame that helps comprehend the modernist opposition to the fourth wall. For this illusionist device consolidates itself in the last decades of the nineteenth century as an invisible barrier that acts as guarantor of the autonomy of the artwork in the context of segregation described by Bürger in his Theory of the Avant-Garde.

Evreinov forces the audience to reconsider their role of onlookers by laying bare the illusionist devices that conceal the artificial condition of the theatrical stage. In A Merry Death

(1908), he questions the assumptions of realist theatre by situating the commedia figures of

Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine in the ambiguous space that exists between the actors and the dramatic characters they are expected to impersonate. The uncertainty of this modernist harlequinade is reinforced by the fact that, traditionally, commedia actors would have a relationship in real life,23 the type of pragmatic information that conditions the public’s response.

Evreinov exploits the ambiguity between actor and role from the opening of the play, when

Pierrot walks to the footlights and addresses the audience while Harlequin is asleep. Pierrot first sets the serious mood of the play (“This is no laughing matter – Harlequin is gravely ill!”) and then explains that Harlequin feels a delirious love for Columbine, a love that will not lead

22 Carnicke observes an indistinct definition of theatricality as an aesthetic and a pre-aesthetic in most of Evreinov’s essays after his Theatre as Such. See Carnicke 49-69. Because of this terminological confusion in Evreinov’s later thinking, I prefer to limit my analysis here to Evreinov’s theoretical contributions between 1908 and 1912, a period which is also unique in the history of the theory of drama in Russia due to the discussions on theatrical realism mentioned in the opening of this section.

23 The two lovers of the commedia used to be a married couple offstage, and the same situation would happen with fathers and daughters. A similar practice can also be found in the Spanish Baroque, when only actors with a decent public life could enact the religious autos sacramentales, for instance. The fact that Evreinov wrote the study The Spanish Actor of the XVI-XVII Centuries in 1909 leaves no doubt about his familiarity with this issue of a pragmatic nature. 64

anywhere because “Columbine is my wife, and that, naturally, settles it” (5). This mention of

Columbine as his wife seems to come from Pierrot the actor rather than Pierrot the dramatic character. And he explicitly presents himself as an actor when he shows his disdain for the tastes of popular audiences:

You can see it is now eight o’clock in the evening and he’s still sleeping. I can even say

more—I know, perhaps for certain, that Harlequin will soon die, but what decent actor

would tell his audience the end of the play before it begins! I’m not one to let the

management down, and I understand quite well that an audience comes to the theater not

because of some meaning or other or for the masterful dialogue, but simply to find out

how it all turns out in the end. (5)

A shift from actor to character takes place when Pierrot describes Harlequin as a great friend whom he envies “because as everyone knows, if I am Pierrot, it is only because I am a harlequin who has not succeeded like the madly popular Harlequin” (5). At this point, it is difficult to ascertain whether the one speaking to the audience is an actor or a character of the commedia.

The pendulum oscillates to the character’s side when he describes his role in the fictional world of the play as an inevitable fact that escapes his control: “If I didn’t behave like everybody else then I’d be the bold, merry Harlequin, for whom laws don’t exist, but!... I’m merely the stupid, cowardly Pierrot, whose character, incidentally, will become quite clear to you during the subsequent development of the play” (5-6). His words reveal Evreinov’s take on the interrelation of theatre and life, for the mediocrity to which Pierrot refers is due to his behaving “like

everybody else,” implying here that the keeping up of appearances in public life makes impossible the spontaneous vitality that has converted Harlequin into an admired figure.

Since Pierrot has already informed the audience of what will happen at the conclusion of the play (Harlequin will die at midnight, according to the prediction of a fortune-teller), the audience will contemplate the play from the same perspective of superiority that Pierrot enjoys over the rest of the dramatic characters. Besides foreseeing the events, Pierrot seems to have the ability to alter the course of events when he turns the clock back two hours in order to prolong the life of his friend. But when Harlequin wakes up, he does not show any symptom of fear of death, to his rival’s surprise. Harlequin then receives the visit of a Doctor who pretends to be in position to save his life, if only to get paid for what clearly is a useless service. Harlequin, noticing the Doctor’s pretense, refuses any help and announces that he is ready to enjoy his last hours of life. In the following scene, Pierrot helps Harlequin set the table for his last supper, believing that the medieval/symbolist figure of Death will be the third person sitting at the table.

Yet Pierrot ignores that Harlequin has actually invited Columbine and, when he realizes the identity of this guest, he adopts a serious attitude because of what he interprets as fatal treachery.

Harlequin, meanwhile, remains more interested in setting the place for Columbine and shows no interest in wasting the last hours of his life in a marital dispute. When Pierrot threatens to kill him, arguing that “the only thing for me to do is to avenge my honor” (12), the following exchange takes place between these two commedia figures:

HARLEQUIN. Come on! We’re wasting time. (Pierrot hesitates for another second, then

goes for the third place setting, but on the way back stumbles and drops the plate.)

Clumsy! Going around destroying the dishes!

PIERROT (with pathos). A fine one to talk! You destroyed my happiness.

HARLEQUIN (setting the third place). Skip the rhetoric, thank you! You lost interest in

Columbine a long time ago, and the only reason you’re acting jealous is because it’s the

conventional thing to do… But shh… (12)

In accusing Pierrot of “acting jealous,” Harlequin exposes the relation between the conventions of bourgeois drama and those of contemporary society, two codes of conduct that any

‘respectable’ spectator would take for granted. When Harlequin goes offstage to convince

Columbine to join the table, Pierrot sets the clock ahead two hours to take revenge with all the spectators as witnesses. What Pierrot ignores is the fact that Harlequin, making use of his traditional ability to play the commedia characters against each other, has made Columbine believe that her husband tolerates their love affair. What follows then is the reverse version of

Pierrot’s marital revenge. Columbine blames her husband for not defending her honor properly and transforms Pierrot’s tragic scene into a Punch and Judy show: “No excuses! And I, unhappy woman, married a scoundrel like you! Gave him the best years of my life! And he won’t even stand up for his wife’s honor! (Beats him.) Take that! And that! And that, you fathead!” (13).

If grotesque theatre arises from the combination of tragic and comic modes, then

Evreinov’s A Merry Death shares with Meyerhold’s productions the grotesque traits that will also be present in the puppet theatre of Lorca and Bontempelli a few years later. In A Merry

Death, the ingenious Harlequin has defeated Pierrot, here the epitome of the offended husband, by transforming his personal tragedy in a scene of slapstick comedy. After this humiliation,

Pierrot turns to the only agent with whom he can share his pain: the audience. From this point on, he will observe most of the dramatic action from outside, acting as a mediator between stage and

auditorium and refraining from joining the fictional world inhabited by Harlequin and

Columbine. When Columbine and Harlequin engage in a scene of exuberant love, Pierrot quietly stands outside as if occupying one of the seats of the spectators. Pierrot, who considers himself avenged after turning the clock ahead, remains impassive—he is not an active character, after all, just as he had announced in his opening speech. He tries to find comfort in the complicity of the spectators:

COLUMBINE (to Harlequin). Kiss me harder. Passionately. Make it hurt. Bite me. Don’t

hold back! (They kiss as she desires.)

. . .

COLUMBINE (to Harlequin). More! More! (To Pierrot.) Oh, you insensitive clod.

PIERROT (to Columbine). Go right ahead, help yourself! (To the audience.) My

conscience is clear, I stood up for my honor and there’s nothing for me to get excited

about.

COLUMBINE (to Harlequin). Kiss my eyes, my forehead, cheeks, chin, temples!

(Harlequin doesn’t have to be asked twice.)

PIERROT (to the audience). Ladies and gentlemen, you are my witnesses, I have been

avenged.

COLUMBINE. Kiss me on the back of my neck, where it makes me tremble. (Harlequin

is as kind as ever.)

PIERROT. It’s all the same to me. They can do anything they please. I have done my

duty as an outraged husband and I feel great. (14)

As noted earlier, Pierrot is an ambiguous figure oscillating between an actor playing in front of an audience (the actor who is friend of Harlequin and husband of Columbine) and the role of

Pierrot descendent of the commedia tradition. His last speech (“I have done my duty as an outraged husband and I feel great”) complicates even more the situation, for now the actor/character is playing the social role of offended husband in front of the audience. The intended seriousness of Pierrot’s attitude contrasts with the comic nature of the fictional world from which he is trying to distance himself. By stepping out of the main plot in order to obtain the approval of the spectators, Pierrot foregrounds the active role of the bourgeois audience when it comes to protecting the theatrical stage from behaviors that are considered illegitimate in the outside world (the stage appearing here as a mirror, at least in moral terms). He explains to the audience that “not to avenge is impossible: I am the deceived husband and had to avenge myself, because that’s the way decent people handle these things” (15), and it is obvious that by “decent people” he means the spectators who attend theatre evenings. Acting as a mediator between the fictional world of the stage and the actual world of the auditorium, Pierrot proceeds to observe

Harlequin’s agony from a vantage standpoint, without any sort of moral involvement. He even accompanies with the lute the last dance of Harlequin and Columbine—she is still unaware of

Harlequin’s imminent death—and shares with delight the first signs of weakness of his rival:

“Harlequin’s giving in! Harlequin’s getting weaker! Rejoice with me, poor husbands” (15),

Pierrot says to the audience.

When Evreinov conceives A Merry Death as a “harlequinade in one act,” he is adopting a dramatic genre that has historically relied on the parody of previous artistic forms. As Olle

Hildebrand notes, the harlequinade can be traced back to the seventeenth century when the

Italian troupes in Paris used the commedia dell’arte to parody the model of the French classicist

tragedy (“Theatrical” 244). In Evreinov’s case, the transparent mirror that should reflect the outside world is affected by the harlequinade’s own intertextual condition and the constant reference to the typical plots of bourgeois drama. Additionally, what relates his work to the group of modernists studied here is the fact that the audience is made direct responsible for what occurs on-stage. Pierrot, at the end of A Merry Death, cannot stand the agony of his friend

Harlequin and the genuine grief of Columbine (they now seem real actors, not commedia figures), and he eventually blames the spectators for his own behavior as offended husband:

“Nasty evil people! You’re the ones that dreamed up these stupid rules! It’s because of you I had to shorten the life of my best friend. (Turns his back on the audience)” (15-6).

Pierrot’s rejection of the spectators comes too late, however, for the medieval figure of

Death (clearly a parody of symbolism) now approaches the stage. The passing of Harlequin is preceded by a succession of melodramatic clichés: Death knocks on the door, stately approaches the wall clock to stop the time of Harlequin’s life, and finally holds an oil lamp until it becomes completely empty—an obvious sign of Harlequin’s time to depart. Harlequin, on the other hand, confronts Death24 with joy (“But why so tragic? Look around, madam! You’re in the house of

Harlequin, where they know how to laugh at the tragical, even at you,” 18) and asks Columbine for a final kiss. The stage then turns dark and, after a few seconds, a “beautiful, deathly pale moonlight” (18) illuminates a tableau vivant that shows Columbine mourning Harlequin at the foot of his deathbed.

With the death of Harlequin, the main plot of A Merry Death has come to its end. Pierrot reenters the stage and addresses the audience with an epilogue that apparently constitutes a

24 Harlequin to Death: “You want to stop the clock? There’s still time, madam. As far as I know, my time’s not up yet. Or do you expect a fight from me? No, no, I’m not one of those stupid, vulgar bourgeoisie. I know how to treat a charming lady” (18).

typical instance of captatio benevolentiae. And, as happened before, Pierrot addresses the audience after stepping out of his role in the fictional world of the play—the world that he shared with Harlequin and Columbine. This time, Pierrot communicates that he is obliged to recite what the author has written for him, even though he disagrees with the playwright’s final “mockery.”

He declaims Rabelais’ famous last words before his death (“lower the curtain, the farce is over”) and, when the curtain descends, Pierrot stays in front of it, facing the audience. With the play officially finished, Pierrot reminds the spectators of the absurdity of their applause, as the play cannot be taken seriously, “especially since Harlequin has no doubt already risen from his death bed and is now preening himself for the curtain call” (19). The strong dissonance between this quasi-farcical epilogue and the tableau portraying Harlequin’s death connects A Merry Death to other grotesque manifestations typical of modernist theatre.

2.3. Josef and Karel Čapek’s The Fateful Game of Love. Fictional audiences and the “impossibility” of theatre.

The Fateful Game of Love [Lásky hra osudná], a play written by Karel and Josef Čapek in 1910, remains an almost unknown title25 among English-speaking audiences. The play was first published in 1911 and premiered at the National Theatre in Prague in 1930, when Karel

Čapek was one of the foremost intellectual figures of interwar Czechoslovakia. He was also a playwright of enormous popularity in the Western world thanks to his play R.U.R. The main impetus for studying here The Fateful Game of Love is that it is a play that agglutinates many of the modernist features previously commented on here (dichotomy actor/character, presence of

25 I am in debt with Norma Comrada, translator of the unpublished English version of The Fateful Game of Love. 71

mediating figures, activation of the auditorium). At the same time, a look at this play will help reconsider certain theoretical assumptions on the relation between anti-illusionist devices and audience response in the first half of the twentieth century. As I will claim at the conclusion of this section, The Fateful Game of Love offers a model alternative to the Brechtian dramaturgy, a theoretical edifice on which theatre critics have traditionally relied when it comes to describe the interaction between stage and audience in anti-illusionist contexts.

The stage of The Fateful Game of Love is populated with a dozen characters who, in most of cases, bear a significant resemblance with the traditional figures of the commedia dell’arte.

Dottore, for example, is introduced as a comical figure, “like all moralists without authority” (i), in the tradition of Pantalone. The schemer Brighella descends from the Zani genealogy, and the decadent poet Gilles can easily be assimilated to Pierrot despite the fact that the Čapeks explicitly state that he is not identical to this commedia character. Scaramouche descends from

French adaptations of the Italian Harlequin. Regarding the female cast, the naïve Isabella follows the tradition of the easily influenced Columbine, while her aunt the procuress Zerbine is much more active than other female figures in the commedia. As for the rest of the characters, the aggressive and scarcely rational Trivalin is closer to the Punch puppet than to a figure of the commedia; and the character called Prologue remains an original creation of the Čapeks. Besides the presence of commedia or commedia-inspired characters, The Fateful Game of Love borrows from the commedia the sense of immediacy and improvisation that is not present in the text- based theatre of the previous decades. While the play is obviously conceived as the enactment of a dramatic text, its commedia affiliation produces a pragmatic effect on the audience.

In a preliminary note to the dramatic text, the authors set the time of the play in an indefinite “now,” while the space is located in “one of the best contemporary theatres” (i; “scéna

lepšího divadla” Lásky 3). The duplication of the space and time of a contemporary theatrical evening aims to bridge the gap between stage and auditorium, a reality effect that is reinforced by the difficulty of ascertaining the difference between the actors and the roles they are supposed to enact. Similarly to Evreinov, the brothers Čapek bring to the stage a group of actors that will play the roles of other actors, a movement that is accompanied by the presence of numerous mediating devices (“epic,” in Brecht’s terminology) devices. In the introductory scene of the play, a character named Prologue introduces the rest of the dramatis personae with the following speech:

Yes, my friends, they’re actors, and what we

are standing on are merely boards and not,

as you can see, the solid ground itself.

These trees, you know, are only daubs of paint;

These rosy cheeks are not a blush, but rouge;

[he touches Isabella’s face] and this is powder. Let

me say again,

they’re actors, and they won’t pretend that they

are – God knows what, a better breed perhaps

than mere artistes, as others may pretend,

proclaiming publicly: I’m Caesar; Brutus, I;

and I, Antonio; or, I am Julia. (Fateful 1)

Tož dovolte: Jsem Prolog

(uklání se)

a tito páni herci jsou. Já povídám,

že oni herci jsou, a na čem stojíme,

že jsou to prkna jen, jak račte nahlédnout,

a žádná živá zem; a tyto stromy zde,

to pouze malba jest, a toto rozkošné

(klepe na tvář Isabelly)

též není ruměnec: toť pouhé líčidlo,

a to zde pudr jest. – Já tedy pravím vám,

ti páni herci jsou a nechtějí vás klamat,

že jsou snad nevímco, tož něco lepšího

než pouzí artisté, jak jiní klamou vás,

když praví: Caesar jsem a já jsem Brutus, já,

já Antonius jsem a já jsem Julia. (Lásky 4-5)

Prologue announces that the actors on the stage will play “the fateful game of love” before the spectators, thus exploiting the ambiguity of Czech word hra, which designates both a game and a play or theatrical event. What will take place on stage, therefore, can be understood as the conscious enactment of a dramatic text but also as the spontaneous interplay of a group of actors whose lives depend, ultimately, on the will of their creator. At this point, the baroque metaphor of “all the world is a stage,” also frequent in marionette theatre, comes to the fore. In the particular case of The Fateful Game of Love, the authority to which all the players remain subject

is Prologue himself, who was previously described in the list of dramatis personae as “an ordinary theatre manager.” His rule over the players, a rule that is based on his economic power, becomes manifest when he introduces to the audience the actors/characters who are going to be part of the play/game. Gilles, for instance, protests against the positive depiction that Prologue makes of the schemer Brighella. Prologue describes Brighella as a “nice” character despite his evil intentions, arguing that the intrigue is always necessary for a good dramatic plot. On the other hand, Gilles declares that he would kill Brighella himself if he could or, more exactly, “if only I weren’t so passive, as Prologue says” (4; “Kdybych nebyl tak pasívní, jak říkal tady pan

Prolog” Lásky 7), which evidences to what extent his behavior is subject to the will of

Prologue/theatre manager.

What follows in this introductory scene is a discussion between Prologue and Gilles, the latter informing the audience of Brighella’s dubious activities—he writes pornography for profit and collaborates with the procuress Zerbine. Prologue then responds that it is indecorous to discuss these matters in front of the spectators, and criticizes Gilles for not reciting his complaints in verse, as a lyrical character is expected to do. The clash between Gilles and

Brighella in the opening scene of The Fateful Game of Love represents the conflict between the decadent artist and the new wave of commercialist authors. Brighella enjoys his status of professional writer immune from moral debates (literature as a trade devoid of any romantic connotation), and one can interpret the favorable attitude of Prologue-theatre manager towards him as evidence of Brighella’s superiority over the melancholic Gilles. Brighella mocks the figure of the romantic poet and, at the same time, exposes the lack of values behind contemporary practices in commercial theatre.

The figures in The Fateful Game of Love lack the stability and roundedness of the characters in realistic theatre, which means that their psychological traits remain subject to constant revision. The epitome of this situation is Isabella, the passive woman who is the object of desire of two male actors, Gilles and Trivalin. Prologue introduces her as a bad actress and later states that “if it’s a comic part she plays, or tragic. / The truth is, I don’t know; it varies with

/ the play and the circumstances” (3; “Vy ptáte se mne snad, / zda role komická, či tragická to je?

/ Já nevím, pánové. Vždy podle poměrů, / dle okolností hry” Lásky 6). This first scene concludes with a heated discussion among all the actors that eventually escalates into an argument over the virginity of Isabella, questioned by some of the members of the cast.

The next scene, which would be expected to unfold the plot, keeps delaying the dramatic action. This time it is Dottore, descendant of Pantalone, who addresses the spectators. He delivers an instructive speech that I will reproduce here in length:

DOTTORE. My esteemed audience! My lords, dear ladies, honorable clergymen, diligent

citizens! As the older member of our ensemble I welcome you in our midst and I would

like to ask you a question: Why have you come here? To be entertained? I am afraid

you will not be entertained here as well as if you stood before a monkey’s cage. Or have

you come here because of our art? If we do our best, you will begin to believe that we

are real people and you’ll forget that we are artists. Why then have you come here?

Why do we actually perform in front of you? I say, for the purpose of taking away with

you some degree of illumination, of moral purification, of that catharsis of which, as is

very well known to you, my dear ladies, speaks Aristotle. You will see here the august

and the base, the moral and the evil, the tragic and the ordinary in mutual struggle; you

will fear for the good, you will sympathize with the suffering, but you will be happy in

the end when you will see truth, honor and morality prevail, as is proper on stage as

well as in life. (Fateful 7)

DOTTORE. Velectěné obecenstvo! Urozené dámy, vysoká šlechto, důstojný klére, počestní a

pilní měšťané! Jakožto nejstarší z ansámblu vítám vás mezi námi, i dovoluji si předložiti

vám nejprve otázku: Proč jste sem přišli? Pro zábavu? Obávám se, že se zde nebudete baviti

tak dobře, jako kdybyste stáli před klecí opic. Nebo snad pro naše umění? Budeme-li hráti

nejlépe, vmyslíte se do toho, že jsme lidé, a zapomenete, že jsme umělci.

Tedy proč jste sem přišli? Proč vlastně před vámi hrajeme? Pravím, proto, abyste si odtud

odnesli poučení, mravní očistu, onu katharsis, o které, jak vám, ctěné dámy, známo, mluví

Aristoteles. Uzříte zde vznešené i nízké, mravné i špatné, tragické i všední ve vzájemném

zápasu; budete se báti o dobro, budete sympatizovati s utrpením, budete se však nakonec

radovati, až uzříte vítěziti pravdu, čest a morálku, jakož se sluší na scéně jako v životě.

Ještě jednou, buďte nám vítáni. (Lásky 9)

Dottore’s speech summarizes the main principles ruling the bourgeois institution of theatre.

Firstly, he presents theatre as a place for instruction rather than entertainment, an instructive effect that will be achieved thanks to the illusionist work of a group of actors who will be taken as real characters—if the performance is successful. In addition, he defines Aristotelian catharsis as the main goal of the theatrical event, more specifically an idea of catharsis that refers back to the genre of the domestic tragedy that Lessing develops around the mid-1700s. It was in this time that Lessing’s domestic tragedy substituted empathy and self-identification for admiration and horror (two typical elements of the French classicist tragedy), thus setting the patterns that would

characterize the realistic and naturalistic theatre of the nineteenth century and the early 1900s. In addition, due to the necessity to provide a safe depiction of middle-class characters for a middle- class audience, Dottore announces that the spectators will see in the end how “truth, honor and morality prevail, as is proper on stage as well as in life.” Yet the clownish Scaramouche, who is supposed to salute the spectators alongside Dottore in this scene, diverges from their rehearsed speech and instead brings more unpleasant realities to the public’s attention. Because “the time will pass well for you, as is proper on stage as well as in life” (7; “A naší snahou bude, aby vám u nás dobře ubíhal čas, jakož se sluší na scéně i v životě” Lásky 9), Scaramouche repeats with irony, the respected audience will remain oblivious to the infidelities of their wives and husbands, as well the disloyalty of their servants. It is only after Dottore’s reprimand that

Scaramouche rectifies his irreverent attitude: he praises the audience and bows to the auditorium before the two characters move upstage, a signal of the conclusion of this scene.

Scaramouche’s intervention reveals a critical usage of the metaphor of the theatrum mundi against bourgeois mores, for the everyday life of the revered spectators is presented as the keeping of an appearance of dignity—the result of acting in the public sphere. Theatre is therefore an illusion of reality, as is the (illusory) respectability of the middle-classes that have paid for their theatre tickets, Scaramouche seems to be saying. But, because of Dottore’s intervention, Scaramouche eventually promises not to remind the spectators of the unpleasant aspect of their lives. In 1910, when the Čapeks write The Fateful Game of Love, this critique of the theatrical institution relates to the rallying cry of épater le bourgeois that is so common to the use of commedia dell’arte figures since the mid-nineteenth century. The political situation was obviously different when the play premiered in Prague in 1930, after the collapse of the Austria-

Hungarian Empire, World War I, and the rise of totalitarianisms in Europe. What makes the play

relevant to both historical contexts is the fact that the Čapeks, as with the rest of the authors studied here, did not advocate for a frontal clash (as the Italian futurists and the Dadaists, for instance) but instead called for a reformation of theatre. And, because the political message does not bar the aesthetic content of The Fateful Game of Love, the play can be accommodated to different spaces of reception. The situation will be different in The Mother (1938), Karel Čapek’s last play, in which the political is clearly the dominant pattern [see section 4.3].

A dramatic work with striking similarities to The Fateful Game of Love is Lorca’s Play without a Title, a testimony of the political anxieties of the interwar period. In the manuscript dating from 1936, Lorca brings to the stage the contemporary conflict between socialism and fascism resorting to the anti-illusionist devices employed by the brothers Čapek. This time, a character named Author reminds his audience of the existence of darker realities26 that should be brought to the stage. A male spectator, actually an actor playing the part in the audience seats, stands up and proclaims that he has not paid for his seat “to receive moral lessons or to hear unpleasant things .... I’m getting out of here. I thought I was in a theater” (Play 54; “No he venido a recibir lecciones de moral ni a oír cosas desagradables…. Me voy. Yo creí que estaba en el teatro” Comedia 772). The Author then replies:

Inside here, there’s a terrible atmosphere of lies, and the characters in the plays don’t say

anything more than they’re able to say out loud in front of weak young ladies, but keep

26 “Author: Ha ha ha! Reality. Do you know what reality is? Listen to it. The wood for the coffins for all of us in this hall has already been cut. There are four coffins already waiting in the windows for four beings who are listening to me now, and perhaps there’s one—perhaps!—one that can be filled this very night, shortly after leaving this ever so lively place” (García Lorca Play 54). “¡Ja, ja, ja! La realidad. ¿Usted sabe cuál es la realidad? Óigala. La madera de los ataúdes de todos los que estamos en la sala está ya cortada. Hay cuatro ataúdes que esperan dentro de los vidrios a cuatro criaturas que ahora me oyen, y hay quizá uno, ¡quizá!, uno que se puede llenar esta madrugada misma a poco de salir de este vivísimo lugar” (Comedia 772).

silent about their true anguish. That’s why I don’t want actors, but men in the flesh and

women in the flesh, and anybody who doesn’t want to listen, let him plug his ears.

(García Lorca Play 54)

Ahí dentro hay un terrible aire de mentira, y los personajes de las comedias no dicen más

que lo que pueden decir en alta voz delante de señoritas débiles, pero se callan su

verdadera angustia. Por eso no quiero actores sino hombres de carne y mujeres de carne,

y el que no quiera oír que se tape los oídos. (Comedia 772)

Lorca, similarly to Karel and Josef Čapek, plays with the illusion of suppressing the characters in order to expose the interiority of the ‘naked’ actors onstage, convinced that the actors’ inner dramas are the same ones that the spectators hide from each other in public life. While Lorca could only finish the first act of Play without a Title, a play such as The Fateful Game of Love shows the extent to which the conflicting relationship between performing subject and dramatic character can be questioned.

Returning to Scaramouche’s defiance of the respectable audience: he takes this confrontation to a higher level when he tries to expel the spectators from the venue in Scene XI.

He transfers the dramatic action to the auditorium by announcing a fire in the theatre house and asking the audience to calmly evacuate the theatre. He then bows and leaves the stage “with dignity” (28; “Uklání se a s grandezzou odchází” Lásky 27), according to the authorial notes.

When Dottore wants to know the motive of his alarmist behavior, Scaramouche explains that it was all an invention to empty the theatre house for Gilles and Isabella: “I only want to step aside so that these two can be alone. That’s why I’ve been sending the audience away, because the

audience isn’t tactful enough to leave when they see two actors making love on the stage,” he says, muttering as he leaves the stage that the “Audience make things simply impossible for the theater” (29; “já chci jít jen stranou, aby ti dva zůstali sami. Proto jsem také posílal obecenstvo pryč, ale obecenstvo nemá tolik taktu, aby šlo na stranu, když vidí, že se herci na scéně milují”

Lásky 27). What Scaramouche is referring to is not the act of representing a sexual scene on the stage but, instead, the (im)possibility of an actual intercourse. The pendulum between fiction and actuality has swung now to the latter, as Scaramouche unveils the paradox of modern theatre: the path to authenticity will lead to the end of pretense but, at the same time, the truth condition of sexual or violent scenes will never be tolerated by the spectators.

Scaramouche’s speech produces the activation of the public in a paradoxical way, for now it is not only that the spectators exert influence on the fictional events, but also that their presence constitutes the main obstacle for a ‘real’ theatre, the one that Lorca sought in The

Public and The Dream of Life. This confirms Puchner’s thesis in Stage Fright about the constitutive importance of theatrical ‘suspicion’ in modernist drama and theatre. Scaramouche’s address also reveals the tension existing between the performance of a scripted text and what

Richard Schechner defines as ‘actuals’ – those processes taking place in the here and now of the performance and leading to irrevocable acts (Performance 26-65).

The direct address to the audience is not the only device that complicates the boundaries between stage and auditorium in The Fateful Game of Love. The dramatic dialogue is also of special importance when it comes to activate the auditorium. See for instance the verbal exchange between Gilles and the intriguer Brighella that takes places in Scene III. Brighella, the cynical writer who prides himself in making money with pornographic texts, plans to make a profit out of the love that both Gilles and Trivalin feel for the innocent Isabella. In order to

convince Trivalin to accept a money loan—to be returned later at a high rate of interest, of course—he explains to him how to use that money to buy presents for Zerbine, who is Isabella’s aunt. When Trivalin doubts his ability to repay the loan, Brighella reminds him of his excellent prospects: because heroic characters are very popular with audiences, Brighella explains, he will be soon working for a permanent theatre company. After his talk with Trivalin, Brighella also tries to get Gilles involved in the run for the girl’s affection, a dialogue that takes place in Scene

VII. When Gilles declares himself ready to fight for Isabella’s love, Brighella discourages him by arguing that he has no prospects in acting and life:

GILLES. But my acting prospects –

BRIGHELLA. Don’t deceive yourself, my dear Peppe: they are miserable. To tell you the

truth, the public is fed up with lyrical characters. The public demands pathos, action,

heroism and tragic figures on the stage.

GILLES. Don’t I suffer enough? Aren’t I tragic enough?

BRIGHELLA. But you don’t do anything, my dear Gilles. The public wants to see action,

a hero, a dynamic character. Deeds, Gilles, deeds are needed on the stage! Action!

GILLES. I would like to be a dancer…

BRIGHELLA. You should want only Isabella, Gilles! You must kidnap her during

tonight’s performance.

GILLES. Kidnap! (Fateful 19)

GILLES. Ale mé herecké vyhlídky –

BRIGHELLA. Neklamte se, milý Peppe, jsou prašpatné. Obecenstvo, abych řekl pravdu,

je nasyceno lyrických charakterů a žádá si na scéně patos, činorodost, heroismus,

tragické postavy.

GILLES. Což dosti netrpím? Což nejsem dosti tragický?

BRIGHELLA: Ale nejednáte, drahý Gillese; obecenstvo chce viděti jednání, hrdinu,

dynamickou povahu. Činu, Gillese, činu je zapotřebí na scéně.

GILLES. Já bych se chtěl státi tanečníkem.

BRIGHELLA. Vy máte chtít jen Isabellu, Gillese! Vy ji musíte unést během tohoto

představení.

GILLES. Unést! (Lásky 18-9)

At last, Brighella explains to Gilles the enormous benefits of kidnapping the girl: “this kidnapping will make you the center of attention, and you will advance to playing the hero, and that will enhance your financial status” (20; “tímto únosem na sebe obrátíte pozornost a avansujete na herce hrdinného, čímž se zlepší vaše hmotné postavení” Lásky 19). In this dialogue, without need of explicitly addressing the spectators, the inclusion of an imaginary audience in the fictional world of the play is what ultimately appeals to the public. The spectators become thematized (“the public is fed up with lyrical characters”; “The public wants to see action”) to the extent that their invisible presence conditions the characters’ behavior. Moreover,

Brighella’s plan to change the course of “tonight’s performance” reinforces the impression that the stage action is the result of improvisation rather than the enactment of a script. What is particular to the usage of these two typical anti-illusionist devices – the laying bare of the

dichotomy actor/character and the lack of psychological depth (characters that resemble commedia rather than rounded figures) – is the fact that they do not produce the effect of cognitive distance which is associated with Brecht’s dramaturgy. In other words, the dramatic irony that derives from this surplus of knowledge on the side of the audience is far from producing a detached response to the play/game of love created by the Čapek brothers.

The doubling of roles produces a situation in which the (fictional) actors are well aware of their acting duties. Scene IV, for instance, can be compared to the blank chapter in Sterne’s

Tristram Shandy: Brighella, standing alone on the stage, refuses to “act alone” because he has no need “to entertain anybody” (13; “Já tu nejsem proto, abych někoho bavil” Lásky 14). Only when

Gilles moves downstage is Brighella ready for the dialogue that signals the opening of scene V.

Another good example is the anti-climactic interruption of the encounter between Gilles, who has recited a long poem of desperate love, and Isabella. Brighella asks the girl to pardon the interruption because he needs to talk to Gilles in private: “Forgive me, Gilles, but this is not the time for lyrical outpourings” (18; “Promiňte, Gillese, ale nyní nezbývá času na lyrické výlevy”

Lásky 18), and immediately Isabella bows to the audience and goes with the rest of the immobile characters that are sitting upstage.

By making Isabella abandon the downstage in such an exaggerated way, the Čapek brothers parody the conventions that require the exit of a character while two other characters have a private discussion, in this case the schemer Brighella and his victim-to-be Gilles. The presence of immobile actors in a backstage gazebo is also a way to assimilate the human bodies to puppets that depend on their creator’s will. Constantly moving up and down the stage, every actor oscillates between active agent and some sort of statuesque person that remains outside the

play’s fictional world. To put it in Veltruský’s words, the commedia cast shifts between human being and object, as the inactivity of the actors in the gazebo depresses them to a zero level.27

To conclude this section and this chapter, I will consider here the presence of anti- illusionist devices in the most dramatic scene of The Fateful Game of Love – the death of Gilles.

Because of their rivalry for the love of Isabella, Trivalin challenges him to a gun duel28 and then easily kills him when Gilles forgets to turn around at the count of three. My interest in this final scene of the play is due to the fact that it produces an emphatic response that is absent in the anti- illusionist tradition that has been labeled, following Brecht’s dramaturgy, epic theatre. In principle, Gilles’ agony on the stage should be on the antipode of a tragic event: he is a flat character inspired by the figure of Pierrot; he is constantly mocked during the course of the play; and his love for Isabella, the indirect reason of his death, is of a ridiculous nature. Moreover, the actor is not living the part (Stanislavsky) because there exists a visible split between actor and character, instead of an identification of the former with the latter. Despite all these factors, one has to wonder whether the baring of the theatrical devices—the split actor/character, in this case—produces in the end an effect of critical distance. Applying a general rule, the answer should be affirmative. Manfred Pfister, in his analysis of Brecht’s use of epic devices such as prologues, asides and, in general, “the exposure of theatrical machinery to the audience,” concludes that

27 In “Man and Object,” Veltruský explains: “The action may fall to the “zero level,” the figure then becomes a part of the set. Such human parts of the set are for instance soldiers flanking the entrance to a house. They serve to point out that the house is a barrack…. Their reality is likewise depressed to the “zero level,” since their constituent signs are limited to the minimum…. It follows then that people in these roles can be replaced by lifeless dummies. Thus people as part of the set form the transition between the sphere of man and the sphere of the object” (86, his italics).

28 Zerbine, Isabella’s aunt, is worried that Gilles’ death would leave her without the money owed her by Gilles. Brighella consoles Zerbine with overt sarcasm by telling her that she can always sell Gilles’ posthumous manuscripts.

As far as the aesthetics of reception is concerned, these epic elements have an anti-

illusionist function which is intended to counter any identification or empathy on the part

of the audience with the figures and situations within the internal communication system,

thereby encouraging a posture of critical distance. (71)

Pfister then moves from the particular to the general and states that there exists “a particularly strong affinity between epic communication structures and comedy” (71), a position he reinforces by quoting Brecht’s famous statement that “whenever one comes across materialism, epic forms arise in the drama, and most markedly and frequently in comedy, whose ‘tone’ is always ‘lower’ and more materialistic” (qtd. in Pfister 71). One can conclude from this discussion that the mediating devices mastered by Brecht have two primary effects: comic response and critical distance, without the possibility of identification or empathy.

Nonetheless, the automatic equation between a device and a certain effect (critical response) has to be subjected to revision. In the death of Gilles in The Fateful Game of Love, for example, the tension between physical and theatrical reality is latent even in the last moments of his life, when he is still complaining about the stage illumination: “Turn out the lights; why are you putting lights above my head?” (44-45; “Zhasněte tady; proč mně dáváte světla nad hlavu?”

Lásky 40). Despite these self-referential words, the gravity of his death remains unaffected. And because there is no firm boundary between theatre and life, the mere fact of identifying who is dying (the actor? the character?) becomes highly problematic. Scaramouche tries to keep Gilles alive:

GILLES. My lords, my name is Gilles, called Grazioso,

And Peppe Napa, too –

How does it go?

SCARAMOUCHE. (quietly): –and I was born

one night when Moon, the paramour, crossed paths

with shining Venus. I am a silver lute,

le pale amant de la lune; I play in verse… (Fateful 46)

GILLES. Mé panstvo, já jsem Gilles, též Gracioso zván

a Peppe Nappa též – –

Jak je to dále?

SCARAMOUCHE. (tiše)

– – já v noci zrodil se,

když Měsíc bělostný byl právě v průchodu

se třpytnou Venuší. Jsem loutna stříbrná,

le pâle amant de la lune, a hraji veršíky – – (Lásky 46)

By reciting Gilles’ part, Scaramouche tries to keep him alive or, more correctly, the role that he enacted during the play. It can be concluded that the exposure of the conventional elements of theatrical art—stock characters from the commedia dell’arte—accentuates the artificial nature of

The Fateful Game of Love but, paradoxically, produces a notable illusion of reality that reinforces its tragic ending. The figure of the dispossessed Gilles/Pierrot embodies the contradictory situation of those modernist playwrights who try to reconcile the gap between

theatre and everyday life by drawing attention to the actor’s precarious situation as mediator between stage and auditorium. The play escapes a fixed generic definition (melodrama, comedy, tragedy) and uses the tradition of the commedia dell’arte to confront the principles of the

“proper” theatre, defended by Prologue/theatre-manager at the beginning of the play. Because they are aware of the critical relation between performer and character, the actors of The Fateful

Game of Love lay bare the audience’s active role in the course of the theatrical event.

Chapter 3: The modernist puppet theatre

3.1. Puppets, from symbolism to the modernist revival of the fairground booth.

In the nineteenth century, puppet theatre had been synonymous with low culture, a practice associated with such marginal spaces as the fairground and, often coupled with commedia dell’arte spectacles, the boulevard and the marketplace. By the turn of the century, however, the puppet is seen as the perfect metaphor for the whole paradigm of theatre itself, when a global reform of the bourgeois institution of theatre became the main concern of playwrights and directors alike. Puppets and marionettes are central to the critical discourse of symbolist drama, as dramatists and critics distrust the ability of the actors to enact fictional roles; the actors’ physicality is seen as an obstacle to the integrity of the work of art. The first part of this introductory section is concerned with the historical emergence of symbolist drama in

France at the close of the nineteenth century; the second part investigates the role of puppetry in

Meyerhold’s development of a non-illusionist theatre after his rupture with Stanislavsky’s

Moscow Art Theatre in 1903. In the time span that goes from Maeterlinck’s first symbolist productions to Meyerhold’s theory and practice of the “The Fairground Booth” (Meyerhold staged Blok’s play in 1906 and wrote an essay with the same title in 1912), a varied range of contributions revolved around the notion of the actor as puppet or marionette: Jarry’s Ubu Roi, originally conceived as a puppet play; Mallarmé’s penchant for puppetry and later closet drama; and Gordon Craig’s famous theorization of the über-marionette.

In his dialogued essay “On the Puppet Theatre” (1810), Heinrich von Kleist narrates his fictional encounter with Mr. C, an opera dancer who declares himself an admirer of the marionette theatre of a local marketplace. When von Kleist inquires about the reason for the superiority of marionettes over human performers, his interlocutor explains that their great virtue

consists in their lack of affectation—their members being “dead, pure pendulums, which follow the basic law of gravity – a marvelous quality, which we look for in vain in most of our dancers”

(213). At the bottom of von Kleist’s argumentation is the idea of an automaton (the marionette) that has not fallen from Grace. His praise of the marionette is an aesthetic tractate with a notable theological orientation, which inscribes itself in the tradition of Platonic and Hermetic dialogues.

Von Kleist’s essay would later inspire the writings on automatons by E. T. A. Hoffmann and

Giacomo Leopardi in the nineteenth century, and Rainer Maria Rilke and Bruno Schulz in the early twentieth century (V. Nelson 60-73). Nonetheless, despite the importance of a philosophical tradition that is fascinated by the human simulacrum, von Kleist’s essay did not have major influence on nineteenth-century dramatists and theatre directors. This was due to the fact that, for most of the century, marionettes and puppets remained confined to the realm of popular or ‘low’ art, a space alien to the bourgeois stage. It was only with the emergence of symbolist theatre in France, in the closing years of the century, and the publication Gordon

Craig’s essay on the über-marionette in 1907, that von Kleist’s original contribution finally found its adherents.

Around 1890, the French symbolists turned to the marionette and the puppet as the perfect instruments to achieve what Elinor Fuchs defines as the “de-individualization in favor of the Idea,” a radical reform against the notion of “character as represented by the living actor”

(Death 29). Because the actor’s body ceased to be seen as a positive (or, at least, neutral) signifier, the symbolist aversion to bodied spaces led to the massive presence of puppets in dramas that revisited the allegorical patterns of medieval mysteries. Two main principles operate at the core of the symbolist praxis. In the first place, the actor is seen as an obstacle against the spiritualized art that characterizes symbolist poetics. Maeterlinck’s programmatic text “Menus

Propos: Le Théâtre” (1890) is one of the earliest formulations of this principle. The Belgian playwright argues that the essence of the great dramatic characters is lost when they are impersonated on the stage, the individual act of reading being the only way towards understanding these characters’ inner truth. For Mallarmé, who also privileges evocation over showing, the dramatic work is insufficient, a mere “succession of exterior aspects of things, without any moment becoming real, and all things considered, without anything happening” (qtd. in Deak, Symbolist 23).

Mallarmé’s ideal Hamlet is a presence devoid of corporality, very much in the same fashion as that in which Maeterlinck conceives the dramatic character of Shakespeare’s play. As

Elinor Fuchs explains in The Death of Character, “Hamlet, one of Hegel’s chief examples of a tragedy of character, has here moved into a realm of abstraction that borders on allegory, with all characters functioning as symbols, aspects, or projections of an “imaginary and somewhat abstract” hero” (31). A second characteristic of symbolist drama is the dominance of narration over dramatic enactment. The narrator (a reciter, a chorus) enjoys a dominant position among all the performers on the stage, a strategy aimed at guaranteeing the integrity of the author’s artistic plan.

As early as 1890, Maurice Bouchor and Anatole France endorsed the hieratic expression of the puppets as the best remedy against the personalities of the actors. Their view was influenced by the contemporary Le Petit Théâtre du Marionnettes, which presented puppets of about thirty inches that were manipulated by a group of artists while another group of performers recited the text. In 1891, Paul Fort staged Pierre Quillard’s The Girl with Cut-off Hands [La Fille aux mains coupées], defined by Frantisek Deak as the “first distinctive symbolist mise-en-scène”

(Symbolist 144). In the play’s programme, Marcel Collière explained how, in order to arrive at a

lyrical drama, the original literary text was given priority over the spectacle: “The mise-en-scène of the poem is done in such a way as to give all the power to the lyric speech. Taking only the precious instrument of the human voice which resonates simultaneously in the soul of spectators, and neglecting the imperfect enticement of sets and other material devices of theater” (qtd. in

Deak, Symbolist 144). A narrator in a blue tunic read the prose stage directions, and the actors monotonously declaimed their parts in verse—instead of theatrical parts, it would be more correct to describe their speeches as recitation of poetry.29 An explicit critique of the actors’ physicality can also be found in Alfred Valette’s review of Maeterlinck’s Pelléas and Mélisande, performed in 1893 under the direction of Lugné-Poe. Vallette lamented that acting was not completely subordinated to the symbolist principles of abstraction and stylization, for he still felt that the actors were “too human, too concrete, too material” (qtd. in Deak, Symbolist 167).

The symbolist idea of the actor as a puppet/marionette became an integral part of the theoretical discourse of the directors who questioned mimetic aesthetics during the early years of the twentieth century. Edward Gordon Craig, one of the first directors to propose an explicit comparison between actors and marionettes, affirmed in 1907 that acting is not an art because actors cannot exercise a total control of their body. In accordance with the symbolist tradition, but also echoing von Kleist’s words, Craig declares that the actor’s work “is of an accidental nature. The actions of the actor’s body, the expression of his face, the sounds of his voice, all are at the mercy of the winds of his emotions” (On the Art 55-56). Craig’s formulation of the actor as über-marionette aimed to replace naturalistic acting and settings by an abstract presentation of shapes and colors in which the human body would appear as one of the constitutive elements of theatrical art, but not necessarily the dominant one. But Craig was not the only director who saw

29 As Deak observes, “The individual characters’ texts (the Girl, the Father, the Poet King, and the Servant) were in verse. These texts were like short poems/monologues that acquired the character of dialogue exclusively from the context created by the narrator” (Symbolist 143). 93

the living actor as an obstacle to his artistic practice. As Martin Puchner argues in Stage Fright, the modernist resistance to the actor’s presence, from Mallarmé to Oskar Schlemmer and the early Walter Benjamin, is not simply a matter of an anti-theatrical stance, a prejudice that can be ultimately traced back to Plato. What constitutes a uniquely modernist debate is, according to

Puchner, the awareness of

theater’s uneasy position between the performing and the mimetic arts. As a performing

art like music or ballet, the theatre depends on the artistry of live human performers on

stage. As a mimetic art like painting or cinema, however, it must utilize these human

performers as signifying material in the service of a mimetic project. (Stage 5)

An explanation to the phenomenon described by Puchner can be found in Otakar Zich’s

Aesthetics of Dramatic Art [Estetika dramatického umění], originally published in 1931, and a prelude to the semiotic project of the Prague School. As Zich observes, theatre cannot be defined as a reproductive art, and this is not only due to its collective nature. Musical art, for instance, is collective and at the same time operates as reproductive art. This is because the role of the musical performer is limited to introducing nuances to an artwork that is clearly defined from its inception: the composer hears the music in his mind, first, and then registers it in a score. This score secures the future reproducibility of the work without room for the performer’s modification, as the musical score establishes parameters such as timbre, intonation, and duration. In contrast to the reproducible musical score, a dramatic text will vary in performance by the mere presence of different actors, not to mention the role of stage directors and the overall importance of historic styles. The actors fulfill a creative task when they incorporate multiple

elements, such as voice delivery and facial features, which are both (at least partially) foreign to the authorial text. Because the human body cannot be automatically converted to a sign that is equal to the rest of the stage signs, there is no way to completely control the production and reception of the actor’s work. Gordon Craig epitomizes the obsession for directorial control that characterized the first decades of the twentieth century, the era of the great directors who aimed to transform theatre into a reproductive art as Zich described it: collaboration without modification.

Zich’s Aesthetics of Dramatic Art, a theoretical treaty almost unknown to international theatre researchers, contains the first conceptualization of the idea of stage figure [herecká postava, literally “figure of the actor”], a concept later expanded upon and revised by Veltruský.

As suggested in section 1.1, the mere adoption of a terminology derived from the tradition of

Saussurean linguistics is not sufficient to analyze certain phenomena in the field of theatre semiotics. In this case in particular, the duality signifier/signified cannot account for the constructive role of the audience in the perception of the gap existing between the actors and the dramatic characters they enact. In order to expand upon and rectify Saussure’s binary scheme,

Zich develops a three-part model by adding the intermediary concept of the stage figure. Zich explains that “the figure is what the actor makes, the character what the audience sees and hears,” which means that “the stage figure is a formation of the physiological kind, the dramatic character a formation of the psychological kind” (qtd. in Quinn Semiotic 77).30

30 Until very recently, Zich’s idea of stage figure had not caught the attention of theatre semioticians, with the aforementioned exception of Veltruský. This oblivion is not surprising if we consider that Zich’s trichotomy was not even popular among Prague scholars. In his retrospective essay “The Prague School Theory of Theatre,” published in the late 1970s, Veltruský observes that “Most of the theoreticians belonging to the Prague Linguistic Circle were reluctant to adopt this concept of the stage figure as distinct from both the actor and the character” (232). For a comprehensive account on this subject, see Quinn’s The Semiotic Stage.

Zich’s original concept of stage figure illuminates the modernist debate on the presence of human actors. Actors create their own figures with their body, postures, and movements, and also participate in the creation of the rest of the stage figures by collaborating in the stage action.

Besides the physical work of every actor, there are also external factors that condition the stage figure, such as the melodic qualities of the literary text—which affect the voice delivery—and the integration of the actors with the props, lights, and various objects of the stage. In addition to these factors, it is necessary to consider whether the actors are required to follow the rules of conventional systems (commedia dell’arte, Japanese Noh theatre) or participate in realist performances. In the commedia dell’arte tradition, for instance, the dramatis personae are grouped according to a hierarchy of functions, an arrangement that restrains the actors’ freedom when it comes to incorporating their physical traits to their stage figures.

Theatrical symbolism, and modernism in general, represented a reaction against the way that the stage figure was created in realist theatre. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the different aspects of the actor’s constitution were individualized on the basis that the stage figure should include “as many signs as possible irrespective of its action” (Veltruský,

“Contribution” 559). The particularization of the actor’s features ranged from factor such as voice delivery, eye movement and gestures to added elements such as make-up and costume.

Moreover, the actors considered celebrities of their time would impose their ‘personal’ features

(voice pitch, gestures, etc.) over the particularities of the dramatic character in question. It was because the spectators celebrated their acting as a natural exhibition of inherent traits that these theatrical stars tended to construct the same ‘personal’ stage figure no matter the dramatic characters they had to enact. The concept of stage figure helps understand the prevalence of narration/recitation over dramatic presentation in symbolist drama. Veltruský notes how, in

privileging lyric over dramatic texts, the symbolist playwrights “were aware of the fact that the productions of their texts would entail a drastic attenuation of the crucial position held, since the

Renaissance, by the dramatis persona conjured up by the actor” (“Semiotics” 89). The control of the actor’s body could never be complete, however, for the stage figure inevitably contains traces of the actor’s physicality even if that is not the intended purpose.31

In Russia, the symbolist theories of acting that came from France merged with a local movement that was already willing to question Stanislavsky’s realist school. The second part of this introductory section is concerned precisely with the role of puppetry in the Russian context, rejecting the basic assumptions of realistic dramaturgy. Of central importance is the figure of

Meyerhold, the catalyst of the transition from a realistic to a ‘stylized’ drama after his departure from the Moscow Art Theatre. I shall discuss how, in the wake of Maeterlinck’s static drama and

Gordon Craig’s theory of the über-marionette, the metaphor of the actor as puppet/marionette acquired a central position in the discourse of the Russian innovators during the years immediately preceding the Great War. One of the most important documents in this respect is the anthology of critical texts Theatre: A Book on the New Theatre, published in Russia in 1908. As noted in the previous chapter, this anthology contained contributions by a number of dramatists and directors who did not share the realist aesthetics of the Art Theatre. This volume included texts by Bryusov, who in 1902 had published “An Unnecessary Truth” in response to

Stanislavsky’s dramaturgy, Meyerhold, and recognized symbolist artists such as Blok, Bely, and

Sologub. The idea of the actor as marionette is particularly prominent in Sologub’s contribution,

31 A radical solution to this situation would be the total abandonment of the theatrical stage in favor of the closet drama, an artistic form exclusive to the domain of literature. Mallarmé constitutes the paradigm of this extreme movement against the theatrical institution as such, from the actors to the collective system of production (director, stage manager, etc.) and reception. The French author epitomizes an ‘anti-theatrical’ trend in the modernist years that saw theatre “as the Trojan horse of the extra-aesthetic intruding into the field of art, and for this reason there is a tradition within modernism that defines itself through an opposition to the theater” (Puchner Stage 103).

titled “The Theatre of One Will,” a piece clearly influenced by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. A reputed novelist and poet, Sologub had begun writing for the stage in 1906, after meeting

Meyerhold at Vera Komissarzhevskaya’s Theatre in Saint Petersburg. In “The Theatre of One

Will,” Sologub proposes the transformation of theatre into liturgy following the example of the ecstatic drama of the French symbolists. In order to achieve this transformation, he argues, it is necessary to go beyond the realistic idea of theatrical spectacle, which he defines as the product of enrolling “professional actors, the footlights and curtain, cunningly painted scenery seeking to give the illusion of reality, the clever contrivances of realistic theatre and the wise fabrications of conventionalized theatre” (Sologub 89). Of all these mentioned elements, the actor represents the main obstacle for his ideal of theatre of ecstasy, for the actor “draws the attention of the spectator too much upon himself and in so doing overshadows both the drama and the author. The more talented the actor, the more his tyranny is intolerable for the author and harmful for the tragedy”

(Sologub 89).

It is important to note that Sologub is not prescribing here the substitution of the puppet for the actor (Maeterlinck), nor the adoption of closet drama (Mallarmé). However, he insists on the necessity that the performing subject, precisely because of his corporality, be reduced to the status of “speaking marionette” because it is the only way to guarantee the rule of a single will, what he denominates “the will of the poet” (Sologub 91). The metaphor of the world as stage operates behind the dream of reducing human actors to marionettes:

And, ordinarily, we do not know that there is no such thing as our original will, that our

every movement and our every word has been dictated and even foretold a long time ago

once and for all in the demonic creative plan of universal play so that there exists for us

neither choice nor freedom, there is not even a place for the actor’s agreeable ad libbing,

since it was already included in the text of the universal mystery by some unknown

censor; and this world, with which we grow familiar, is nothing other than a stage setting,

marvelous in appearance, but behind it there is backstage disorder and filth. We play, as

best we can, the role dictated to us, actors and at the same time spectators, by turns

applauding one another or hissing one another, sacrificed and at the same time

sacrificing. (Sologub 92)

In terms similar to those employed by Maeterlinck and Gordon Craig, Sologub contemplates the actors’ physicality as a threatening element that must remain under control in order to protect the authorial will. But, in Sologub’s particular case, how does he apply his ideas to the stage? His ideal of theatrical performance consists of a reader (“the black man”) that sits near the stage and calmly proceeds to read the elements of the dramatic text, first the title, then the list of characters and the author’s prologue, and finally all the stage directions as the action advances. In the end,

Sologub postulates, theatre “must free itself from the actor’s acting . . . there must be no acting on the stage. Only an even transmission of the text, word by word” (94). Because Sologub is closely attached to the symbolist reverence for the dramatic text, he can only conceive of the theatrical performance as the (exact, immutable) enactment of a previously determined literary text. He privileges the dramatic text to the extent that he denies any artistic capacity to both the actors and the stage director, seen by him as intruders who disrupt the poet’s supreme power.

Despite numerous mentions of Christian liturgy and the de-individualized Greek tragedy,

Sologub’s “The Theatre of One Will” is, in the end, a simple continuation of the static theatre envisioned by the French symbolists.32

In contrast to Sologub, Meyerhold initially recruited French symbolist drama to combat

Stanislavsky’s realism only to arrive later at his own version of puppet theatre. In his symbolist years, from 1903 to approximately 1907, Meyerhold regarded Maeterlinck’s symbolist drama as one of his main sources of inspiration. As Deak notes, in these years “Meyerhold came to the realization that the new theatre he was seeking would not come about by reforming the existing theatre, as Stanislavsky believed, but by a radical break with it” (“Meyerhold’s” 42), and French symbolism offered him a coherent set of dramaturgical principles that made possible a break with realistic aesthetics. This early symbolist influence, however, was only one of the various strains that would characterize Meyerhold’s own technique of acting in the years to come. In order to explain the importance of Meyerhold’s reform, I shall incorporate into my analysis the idea of stage figure, a semiotic concept described elsewhere in this introduction as one of the most suggestive contributions made by the Prague scholars.

The staging of Maeterlinck’s Sister Beatrice, in 1906, is a good example of how the individual stage figure of realistic theatre becomes attenuated when it is integrated into a wider set of stage figures. For this particular production, Meyerhold blurred the distinctive physical traits of the female cast, with the exception of the main protagonist, Sister Beatrice, played by

Vera Komissarzhevskaya. Some of the elements that integrated the Nuns into a single, undifferentiated stage figure were the following: the hieratic gestures and movements that followed a unifying rhythmic pattern, modeled on the paintings of the primitive Pre-Raphaelite

32 Christopher Innes criticizes symbolist drama for embracing “traditional legend and artificial medievalism, while the religious aspect of their work remained within the socially accepted limits of catholicism” (22). The same argument can be applied to Sologub’s proposal.

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style; a cold delivery free from all tremolo, with extended pauses, resulting in the antithesis of naturalistic speech; and, finally, the similarity of the costumes and the set (grey-blue colors in both cases) that reinforced the depersonalization of the bodies on the stage. A long blue robe covered the body of the actresses, with the exceptions of their palms, and a blue bonnet also completely covered their heads, with no hair visible. In the third and final act, the agony of Sister

Beatrice was presented in imitation of medieval paintings of Christ’s descent from the cross.

According to Deak’s historical reconstruction of the performance, “all the nuns gesticulate in unison and the main gesture is the open palm (facing forward), imitating religious painting and used throughout the production by the chorus of Nuns” (“Meyerhold’s” 45). The influence of medieval aesthetic patterns was central to the creation of the stage figures in Meyerhold’s adaptation, since a typical feature of European liturgical theatre is the attenuation of the distinctive traits of the performing subjects.33

Alongside Sister Beatrice, Meyerhold staged Maeterlinck’s The Death of Tintagiles,

Pelléas and Mélisande and The Miracle of Saint Anthony, as well as a symbolist adaptation of

Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in the 1906-07 season of Vera Komissarzhevskaya’s theatre. In view of these titles, there is little doubt about the influence of symbolist aesthetics on Meyerhold’s non- naturalistic theatre. However, concurrently with these symbolist productions, Meyerhold was able to forge his own dramaturgical model, one significantly different to the solemnity of French and Russian drama. The production of Blok’s The Fairground Booth [Balaganchik], which premiered on December 30, 1906, constituted a turning point of Meyerhold’s theatrical career,

33 As Veltruský points out, in the liturgical theatre of medieval Europe “the internal polarity of the figure is weak because they (as distinct from the characters) are little differentiated, often near interchangeable. The distinctness and the unity of each figure is sacrificed to its smooth insertion in the whole set of figures. Characteristically, the performers often act in unison, as a sort of chorus, and the figures can even merge, intermittently, with the church choir” (“Contribution” 555-6).

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for Blok’s text offered him the possibility of merging the symbolist tradition with the popular strains of puppetry and commedia dell’arte. In The Fairground Booth, the movements of the actors imitated the restricted repertoire of movements of puppet theatre, thus foregrounding the artificial connection between actor and character instead of presenting it as a natural fact.

Meyerhold placed a little booth on center stage with hybrid figures (halfway between actors and puppets) attached to wires that were visible to the audience. Outside the booth, on the main stage, an actor impersonated the Author who controls, or better attempts to control, his fictional creations, a scheme also adopted later by Bontempelli and Lorca [see sections 3.2 and 3.3]. The

Author, however, does not enjoy the absolute power he believes he has, as someone hidden in the wings pushes and pulls him on and off stage by his coat tails.

With the interplay of fictional levels, Meyerhold foregrounds the self-referential condition of the theatrical event in contrast to the idea of theatre as a mirror that faithfully reflects an external reality. Besides the puppet-like movements of the actors, and their dependence upon a higher authority that manipulates their strings, another characteristic that reinforces the artificiality of the play is the hybrid materiality of some of the figures. As

Meyerhold himself explained, the symbolist ‘Mystics’ who sit behind a table in the first scene of the play are, in actuality, a hybrid of actors and cardboard figures:

Behind the table sit the ‘Mystics’, the top halves of their bodies visible to the audience.

Frightened by some rejoinder they duck their heads, and suddenly all that remains at the

table is a row of torsos minus heads and hands. It transpires that the figures are cut out of

cardboard with frock-coats, shirt-fronts, collars and cuffs drawn on with soot and chalk.

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The actors’ hands are thrust through openings in the cardboard torsos and their heads

simply rest on the cardboard collars. (Meyerhold 141)

The Mystics are not the only figures made (partially) of cardboard. Columbine, for whom the cuckold Pierrot suffers, appears to the spectators as a shallow and elusive character. At the end of the play, she is converted into a cardboard figure, meaning that the metaphor of her shallowness has been subject to a literal interpretation, what Bogatyrev refers to the “realization of the metaphor” (“Czech” 106). The realization of the metaphor, a typical folkloric device, is therefore recruited for anti-illusionist purposes. While the presence of theatre within theatre is not a novelty at all, the accumulation of apparently incompatible styles (realism, symbolism, puppetry, commedia) ends up producing a disharmonic modernist version34 of the ancient metaphor of theatrum mundi.

The distance between symbolist drama and Meyerhold’s new idea of puppet theatre is evident in his humorous treatment of classic symbolist motifs. At the end of The Fairground

Booth, Harlequin pronounces a grave speech before escaping through a window (a typically symbolist sign of the secluded life of the artist) only to find himself clumsily falling through a paper hole. Moreover, the constant confusion between the earthly Columbine and the solemn figure of Lady Beautiful/Death constitutes another example of parodic distance from symbolist drama. This parody of symbolist motifs, present in Blok’s play and highlighted in Meyerhold’s

34 J. Douglas Clayton argues that the title of Meyerhold’s production can be related to the idea of épater le bourgeois, for the term balaganchik “is used figuratively in Russian, rather as the English “farce,” but more pejoratively, to mean vulgar theatre or even a scandal of any kind in which conventional decorum is flouted” (54). In view of Clayton’s contribution, it is possible to define Meyerhold’s production as one of the earliest examples of anti-bourgeois puppetry in the twentieth century. But, rather than conveying an explicitly political message, Meyerhold defies the expectations of the audience by disrupting the mimetic illusion and questioning the stability of the theatrical frame. 103

production, were also present in Schnitzler’s pantomime The Veil of Pierrete when it was translated and adapted by Meyerhold, with the title of Columbine’s Scarf, in 1910.

Meyerhold’s new theatrical praxis had its theoretical counterpart in his theorizations of a new theatre that would be different from both Stanislavsky’s school and the symbolist orthodoxy. Meyerhold’s most extensive reflection on this matter appears in the essay “The

Fairground Booth” (1912). In sharp contrast to Sologub’s proposal, Meyerhold explains that the reading-room of a library, and not a playhouse, “is the only proper place for such gravity and immobility” (Meyerhold 124). In disagreement with the omnipresence of the authorial text,

Meyerhold calls for a return to an actor-creator, almost a pantomime, as “a good antidote against excessive misuse of words” (Meyerhold 124). This essay also contains a long reflection on the incorporation of puppetry to the modernist stage, for Meyerhold distinguishes between two possible applications of puppet theatre: the first type is imitative, and the objective of the puppets is to reproduce as closely as possible the gestures and appearance of human beings; the second type, on the contrary, presents the movements of the puppets as something overtly artificial.

Only this second version, according to Meyerhold, represents the theatrical(ist) path to be explored once the mimetic imperative has been put into question.

Meyerhold’s description of the puppet is in consonance with the general idea of uslovnyi theatre (which can be translated as stylized, non-realistic, non-representational) that Meyerhold had been endorsing since late 1906. The artificial nature of the puppets is precisely what reinforces the imaginary implication of an audience that is now required to see something that is not a passive copy of reality35. For, as Meyerhold argues, “The puppet did not want to become an

35 In 1906, Meyerhold compared the naturalist school of acting, from the Meiningen Players to the Moscow Art Theatre, to photography, an activity that he did not considered an art at that time: “The naturalistic theatre has created actors most adept in the art of ‘reincarnation’, which requires a knowledge of make-up and the ability to adapt the tongue to various accents and dialects, the voice being employed as a means of sound-reproduction; but in 104

exact replica of man, because the world of the puppet is a wonderland of make-believe, and the man which it impersonates is a make-believe man” (Meyerhold 129).

Sections 3.2 and 3.3 analyze dramatic works of Bontempelli and Lorca, two authors who incorporate puppetry and marionettes in an attempt to criticize the contemporary situation of theatre, an institution dominated by bourgeois interests and values. Without being ascribed to the radical revolt of the avant-garde, as Berghaus defines it, the fact that these plays contain multiple elements of criticism against the bourgeois institution of theatre approximates them to the confrontational stance that characterizes the historical avant-garde. The plays to be studied here, written and performed between 1919 and 1933, incorporate the popular tradition of puppets in a manner significantly different to that of the symbolists at the turn of the nineteenth century. In

Bontempelli’s Hedge to Northwest, as well as in Lorca’s puppet plays and dramas, one can perceive the central role of dramatic action as being different to the static condition that characterizes Maeterlinck and Craig. They also show a firm opposition to the moral conventions of the bourgeois audience, whereas symbolist drama evaded immediate social resonance by presenting a religious aesthetics that, in some cases, was but a continuation of the principle of art for art’s sake. Moreover, in contrast to the solemn tone of the stylized tragedy of the symbolists,

Lorca and Bontempelli stage grotesque stories that revolve around the irreducible tension of violence and naïve love. Finally, their creations depend on the active role of an audience that, in certain cases, receives didactic speeches from the characters on the stage.

this plasticity plays no part. The actor is expected to lose his self-consciousness rather than develop a sense of aestheticism which might balk at the representation of externally ugly, misshapen phenomena. The actor develops the photographer’s ability to observe the trifles of everyday life” (Meyerhold 24-5, his emphasis).

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3.2. Bontempelli’s Hedge to Northwest and the Italian tradition of the teatro grottesco.

In the opening of his essay “Il grottesco in Italia,” Gigi Livio recalls the magnificent funeral of Alberto Giovannini, one of the most popular comic playwrights of his time, which had taken place in Milano in 1915. Livio notes that only a few months after the funeral, Giovannini was already considered a second-rate artist, and, in the course of the decade following his death, became completely ignored by public and critics alike. The reason for Giovannini’s rapid oblivion was the success of Luigi Chiarelli’s play, The Mask and the Face [La maschera e il volto], after its premiere in Rome in May 1916. The popularity of Chiarelli’s play initiated the so-called teatro del grottesco, a generic label that would be associated with the works of authors such as Rosso di San Secondo, as well as certain characteristics of the dramas written by

Pirandello and Bontempelli since the late 1910s. While Giovannini’s theatre was based on caricature, Livio argues, Chiarelli and San Secondo adopted a parodic stance towards everyday life that referred to a need for ideological reform (“Il grottesco” 110-1). It is not surprising, therefore, that the trivial humor of the ‘comic master’ Giovannini was considered irrelevant in the uncertain years that followed World War I. With the marionette as central metaphor, the

Italian grotesque brought to the fore the mechanical nature of human relations in bourgeois society. As Livio himself states in the introduction to his classic anthology Teatro grottesco del novecento, the confusion of the comic and the serious was intended to produce a “strangement effect” (vii, “un effetto straniante”) in the audience.

After the premiere of his play in Rome, Chiarelli subtitled The Mask and the Face as “a grotesque in three acts” (“grottesco in tre atti”), instead of the more neutral denomination of commedia. In his 1920 article “La giovine scuola,” the playwright Marco Praga implied that

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Chiarelli had arrived at the term grottesco almost by accident, as his original idea36 for The Mask and the Face was a serious, even tragic, drama. No matter the historical accuracy of Praga’s statement, the fact was that the term grottesco eventually became a generic tag for a theatre that displayed a critical attitude towards formulaic theatre of easy consumption by bourgeois audiences. As the historical counterpart of the futurist performances, the theatre of the grotesque adopted a more moderate stance toward social and theatrical conventions, for dramatists preferred parody to direct confrontation. Moreover, another characteristic that differentiated it from futurism was the absence of artistic manifestos.

One of the few permanent features of the movement, already visible in Chiarelli’s The

Mask and the Face, is the presence of the conventional plot of bourgeois drama as an intertext immediately noticeable to the spectators. An important precedent of this formula is Evreinov’s A

Merry Death, a work analyzed in section 2.2 of this dissertation. In this play, the cuckold Pierrot facilitates the death of his friend Harlequin, the lover of his wife Columbine, even though Pierrot never finds the strength to end his friend’s life. In the end, Pierrot tries to comfort himself by seeking the complicity of the respectable spectators who are expected to act similarly should a case of infidelity occur in their homes. In Chiarelli’s The Mask and the Face the role of the avenger corresponds this time to Count Paolo Grazia, who publicly defends the use of violence against unfaithful wives, more to preserve one’s reputation than because of a true belief in this solution. Paolo finds himself caught in his own rhetoric of honor, however, after his wife Savina is found committing adultery. They agree on a plan beneficial to both: she leaves for London and

36 It has been traditionally assumed that it was Virgilio Talli, director of the second production of The Mask and the Face, who was the first to interpret the play comically. But according to Livio, the first person in adumbrating the grotesque nature of the play was Praga himself, after reading it in 1915, even though he did not reveal this information in his 1920 article (“Il grottesco” 116). Praga’s plots were variations of the bourgeois triangle husband- wife-lover, which could explain why he did not want to acknowledge his role in discovering a new artistic trend (the grotesque) that parodied these formulaic plots.

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he pretends to have drowned her in Lake Como. When a female body appears in the lake, Paolo identifies it as his wife’s, but the lie becomes public when Savina eventually returns from

London. In the end, the couple reconciles and flees the scene in order to avoid possible charges of imprisonment against Paolo. From this succinct plot it is easy to infer the tragicomic nature of

Chiarelli’s play, a work that touches on social issues (marital codes of honor) but with a farcical approach that is absent in naturalistic theatre. In Chiarelli’s The Mask and the Face there is no indication of actors doing puppet-like movements, nor there is any explicit presence of puppets or marionettes. Nonetheless, the metaphor of the human being as puppet applies perfectly to the play, since the main characters in this grotesque drama appear as flat figures that can only react to a plan that has been previously set up. The puppeteer, in this case, is not a demiurgic figure but the faceless agency of social conventions.

My reading of Bontempelli’s Hedge to Northwest [Siepe a nordovest], a play written in

1919 and first staged in 1923, takes into account the Italian tradition of grotesque theatre and, at the same time, situates it in the wider context of the European stage. In a well-known statement,

Meyerhold defined the grotesque as a mode that “does not recognize the purely debased or the purely exalted. The grotesque mixes opposites, consciously creating harsh incongruity and relying solely on its own originality” (Meyerhold 138). Meyerhold mentioned the drawings of

Goya and the tales of Edgar Allan Poe and E. T. A. Hoffmann as predecessors to his distorted aesthetics. After the Great War, similar attempts would be found in the works of the German expressionists and the Spanish novelist and dramatist Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, who coined the idea of esperpento as a tragicomic mode also inspired by Goya. Bontempelli’s Hedge to

Northwest is without doubt part of this contemporary European trend and at the same time incorporates a critical approach that, in a way, anticipates the political condition of the theatre of

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the late 1920s. In this 1919 play, Bontempelli highlights the contrast between humans and artificial beings in order to expose the inauthentic condition of bourgeois society. He conveys his criticism against bourgeois mores by parodying the formulaic plots that had monopolized commercial theatre since the late nineteenth-century.

In order to better contextualize Bontempelli’s Hedge to Northwest, I will first analyze two pre-futurist plays by Marinetti, Le Roi Bombance (1905) and Poupées electriques (1909), both of them written first in French and later translated into Italian. These two works were central in the transition from French sources (symbolist drama, Jarry’s King Ubu) that were familiar to Marinetti, to the eventual consolidation of a domestic tradition of grotesque drama in

Italy. Marinetti published Le Roi Bombance in Paris in 1905, and saw it staged in the same city in 1909 only a few weeks after the publication of the Futurist Manifesto in the daily Le Figaro.

The French affiliation of Le Roi Bombance was evident in the title’s intertextual reference to

Ubu Roi, a convergence reinforced by the fact that Marinetti’s play was directed by Lugné-

Poe—director of the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre at the time of Jarry’s premiere.

Le Roi Bombance, read in conjunction with its Italian version Re Baldoria (1910), emerges as a work at the crossroads of the tradition of symbolist drama (pre- and post-Jarry) and the immediate context of Italian and European politics. In this play, Marinetti reduces the revolutionary discourse of contemporary socialism to a matter of intestinal appetites. The absurd suicide of the royal cook, who kills himself over a fish not delivered on time, provokes the collapse of a kingdom that had kept the populace satiated thanks to the cook’s secret sauce. The revolt of the hungry masses eventually develops into a grotesque orgy of food and wine that is followed by the takeover of the royal palace. The situation is restored by the Nietzschean figures of Santa Putredine and her son, the sleepy vampire Ptiokarum. At the conclusion of the play,

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Santa Putredine emphatically calls for “Creation! Destruction! Regeneration!” (247)37 while

Ptiokarum describes the popular revolt as just another chapter in an eternal circle of devastation that is powered by the blind instinct of self-destruction. In view of the depiction of the masses as blind hordes incapable of reasoning, one can read this ‘satiric tragedy,’ as Marinetti denominated it, as an overt attack against contemporary socialism. The fact that Marinetti presented the Italian version to two socialist leaders and one union activist, ironically lauded as the “great cooks of universal happiness” (3, “grandi cuochi della felicità universale”), can only confirm this interpretation. The medievalism and religiosity that had characterized symbolist drama are now metamorphosed in an overt satire of equalitarian politics.

The grotesque condition of Le Roi Bombance comes to the fore at the beginning of Act

III, subtitled “The Orgy.” After the death by inanition of the king and his royal cohort at the conclusion of the second act, three royal cooks have proceeded to calm the hungry masses by feeding them the corpses. For the Paris premiere in 1909, Marinetti prescribed the use of life-size puppets in representation for the satiated populace, and then made the actors playing King

Baldoria and his troupe escape through the mouths of the puppets. The reconciliation of

Marinetti’s “colossal puppets”38 with human performers was the most difficult task for Lugné-

Poë, the director of the French premiere.

If Le Roi Bombance continued Jarry’s distorted aesthetics, Marinetti’s Poupées electriques (1909) consolidate the path for a parallel line of evolution, one that would eventually come together in the concept of the theatre of the grotesque. This time, Marinetti adopts the love

37 I am translating from Re Baldoria, the Italian version of Marinetti’s play, first published in 1910.

38 Recalling his experience at directing Marinetti’s play, Lugné-Poë defines the artificial figures as “colossal puppets” and explains how the actors were “not used to interpreting such a concept and do not find it easy to adapt to a new formula” (qtd. in Berghaus Italian 37).

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triangle typical of bourgeois drama as the point of departure for a play that seems conventional throughout its first act, but that ends with the melodramatic death of Juliette. She has committed suicide over Paul, a man who courts Mary Wilson, the wife of the respectable inventor John

Wilson. It is in the second act of this three-act play that the puppets make their appearance, thanks to the genius of the inventor. John has created two electrical puppets, Monsieur Prudent and La Mère Prunelle, because he prefers the company of artificial beings to his human counterparts, but also with the intention to spice up his marriage by making love to his wife in the room where the puppets are. Nonetheless, in view of his wife’s scarce attraction to the artificial couple he has created, the inventor decides to get rid of the puppets at the end of the second act. The limited role of Monsieur Prudent and La Mère Prunelle in Marinetti’s drama has often been regarded as a symptom of his immaturity as a playwright in 1909. Harold B. Segel, for instance, observes the fact that the puppets only appear in the second act and do not fulfill a major duty besides helping to characterize, by passive contrast, John Wilson’s misanthropy and sexual fantasies (Segel 261-2). On the other hand, and still considering the limited role of the artificially created married couple, it is possible to read Poupées electriques as the first attempt at ironic appropriation of the formulaic love triangle that is the object of bourgeois consumption.

In view of the denouement of the play (the husband, suspicious of a love affair, threatens his wife with a gun, she takes it and commits suicide), one can rightly assume that the transgressor John Wilson is finally incapable of violating the social conventions from which he thought he was escaping when he created two potential voyeurs for his fantasies of furtive sex. In the end, Mary Wilson’s self-inflicted death is not a significant deviation from previous melodramatic formulas, but it is possible to interpret the love intrigue as a farcical comedy to be performed by actors who resemble puppets hanging from the strings of social mores.

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As can be inferred from a brief analysis of Marinetti’s Poupées electriques, the metaphor of the bourgeois individual as puppet is central to the first manifestations39 of the Italian theatre of the grotesque. The mechanistic metaphor is also central to another play traditionally considered part of the movement of the grottesco, Rosso di San Secondo’s Puppets, What

Passion! [Marionette, che passione!], of 1918. It is important to note the fact that, while di San

Secondo rejects psychological realism, he still aims to elicit a pitiful response from the audience.

In a preliminary “Note for the Actors,” he instructs the actors to perform a play “of desperate silences” (“di pause disperate”) that should not be interpreted comically, but with a “feeling of tragic humorism” (“un sentimento di tragico umorismo”). Moreover, he compares the protagonists to marionettes attached to the strings of their passions, characters that are still human and, “as such, profoundly pitiful!” (“profondamente pietosi!”) (di San Secondo 73).

Besides the grotesque strain that can be traced back to Marinetti’s dramas, a second influence on the teatro grottesco that unfolds in the late 1910s is the Futurist fascination for mechanical beings. Since the manifesto of The Variety Theatre (1913), the futurists incorporated the anti-mimetic principles of contemporary pictorial art (cubism, for example) and developed comprehensive theories of declamation, dance, and music. This was also visible in the Manifesto of Futurist Scenography (1915), by painter and designer Enrico Prampolini, who advocated the use of electric neon tubes and painted gas instead of actors. Other examples of futurist manifestos that confronted the tradition of naturalistic acting were the Dynamic and Synoptic

Recitation (1916), the Manifesto of Futurist Dance (1917), and the Manifesto of Mechanical Art

(1922). Common to all of them was the apology for the transitory nature of the theatrical

39 As Luca Somigli argues, Poupées électriques can be read as a precursor of the teatro grottesco in view of Marinetti’s “double use, literal and metaphoric, of the puppet, and the openly parodic appropriation and overturning of the conventions of bourgeois drama” (“Modernism” 317). 112

spectacle, which replaced text-based drama, and the assimilation of the human body with the geometrical shapes of puppets and marionettes.

Bontempelli’s Hedge to Northwest proposes an explicit comparison between human beings and artificial figures. Bontempelli divides the stage of Hedge to Northwest into three interrelated spaces that are inhabited by puppets, marionettes, and humans, respectively. In the first dramatic space, standing in the left corner near the proscenium, there is a small theatre box with its own curtain. Before the main action begins, this curtain rises and shows a couple of puppets: Colombina and Napoleone. The second and third dramatic spaces are inscribed in the main stage, behind the main curtain. At the right side of the stage, three actors enact the typical love intrigue of a bourgeois drama: a triangle formed by Laura, her husband Mario, and her lover

Carletto. Finally, at the back center of the stage, a group of marionettes, half the size of the actors, gather around a little hill. The dialogue between the puppets Colombina and Napoleone functions as a didactic commentary on the primary plot of Hedge to Northwest. These puppets intervene on three occasions (in the prologue and the two intermissions) providing a frame for the dramatic action and, at the same time, performing the role of naive raissoneurs— commentators that guide the audience throughout the play.

In Hedge to Northwest, human beings and marionettes inhabit separate spaces unaware of each other’s existence, even though they may accidentally collide during some moments of the play. The contrast between these two dramatic worlds is especially visible if one compares the passivity of the actors to the dynamism of the marionettes. It can be argued that Bontempelli stresses the immobility of the Laura-Mario-Carletto trio by emptying the relation between dramatic dialogue and dramatic action. Their dialogue describes past actions and narrates events that have occurred off the stage, as opposed to the dialogue that reproduces interpersonal

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relations and helps unfolds the plot events in the “here” and “now” of the spectators. The weak dramatic action enters into a relation with the moral paralysis of these ‘respectable’ figures;

Laura and Mario seem trapped in their marriage, a fact that they keep referring to throughout the play as if time had stopped. Not surprisingly, the movement of the actors is kept to a minimum, as Laura adopts a passive role by lying on a hammock and waiting for Carletto to seduce her with romantic clichés—the courtship taking place in the brief absences of her husband, obviously. Only at the end of Hedge to Northwest does Laura make a decision, somehow abandoning the passive attitude that has characterized her. Her master plan, probably not as brave as she would like to believe it is, consists of bringing to the country a big umbrella that will help to conceal her illegitimate encounters.

In stark contrast with the human trio, the center-left side of the stage is occupied by a group of marionettes that are half the size of the actors and pulled by visible strings. These marionettes form a nation of sacrificed workers who strive for territorial conquests under the guidance of their political and military leaders, the King and the Hero. These two heroic characters are accompanied by the figure of the Princess (reminiscent of D’Annunzio’s decadent heroines) and two ministers with diverging views on how to proceed with the territorial expansion. At the last level of individualization are the collective characters of the workers and the commoners [popolo]. The marionettes appear as depository of those attributes that are absent in the formulaic bourgeois drama: risk, honor, passion and, above all, a belief in the reform of society. However, it is important to bear in mind that the epic condition of these artificial beings appears often counterbalanced by the author’s ironic stance. In the aftermath of World War I,

Bontempelli is well aware of the impossibility of returning to a society sustained by the fairness of the King and the nobleness of the Hero, characters more proper of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s

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nostalgic epic. Writing in 1919, when the crisis of the Italian parliament is about to culminate in

Mussolini’s arrival to power, Bontempelli cannot hide his distrust of democracy. In the first act of the play, the dialogue between the King and his ministers evidences the differences between the theory and praxis of governance. The monarch discusses with his First Minister the measures to take against the wind alert that threatens their nation:

FIRST MINISTER. Yes, our majesty. We have studied the case.

KING. And what is your decision?

FIRST MINISTER. Naming a commission with representatives from all the political

parties.

KING. This system has the advantage of having been adored, in many occasions, by the

most educated and civilized nations. Yet I am afraid there is an inconvenience.

FIRST MINISTER. Which one?

KING. That it will take several winters until the commission decides what to do and, in

the meanwhile, our citizens and buildings will suffer the brutal winds—which do not

respect commissions. (Siepe 17, my translation)

PRIMO MINISTRO. Sì, Maestà; lo abbiamo studiato.

RE. E quale è questo modo?

PRIMO MINISTRO. Nominare una Commissione, avendo cura che vi siano rappresentati

tutti i partiti politici.

RE. Il sistema ha il vantaggio d’essere stato adottato molte volte dalle nazioni più colte

ed evolute. Ma temo che abbia per contro un inconveniente.

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PRIMO MINISTRO. Quale?!

RE. Che passeranno parecchi inverni prima che la commissione abbia deliberato il da

farsi, e intanto i cittadini e le costruzioni stesse soffriranno del vento brutale, che non

rispetta le commissioni. (Siepe 17)

In view of the King’s response, his Second Minister proposes a way to act at the royal discretion without violating the sacrosanct Constitution: if the construction of the hedge is announced as a transitory measure, there is no need to vote and the commission will be postponed sine die.

Without further consultation, the King then endorses his minister’s proposal in order to proceed to the immediate construction of the barrier against the northwestern winds. This scene of decision-making shows how, despite the apparent contrast between the noble values of the marionettes and the moral paralysis of the bourgeois triangle, Bontempelli also associates the former with an inauthentic existence—at least when it comes to their political leaders.

In the tradition of puppets for children, Bontempelli inserts a story of love between the noble characters of the Hero and the Princess, with the peculiarity that the obstacle to the Hero’s amorous conquest is not her father nor a rival warrior, but the religious devotion of the Princess.

The Hero, hailed by the King as the successor to his throne, is surprised by the Princess’ renunciation of possessions, not to mention her wish to become a nun. It is through the conflict between the Hero’s pragmatism and the Princess’ spirituality that Bontempelli introduces the metaphor of the theatrum mundi in the fictional space inhabited by the marionettes:

HERO. Think of your father, and your kingdom: they want to give you a husband; they

expect a crown prince, and a sovereign for future times.

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PRINCESS. I can’t think. I just feel, irresistibly. I just feel myself moving towards God,

irresistibly. It is as if a divine string were taking me, guiding my steps. (Siepe 24)

EROE. E pensate a vostro padre, e al vostro Regno: essi vogliono darvi uno sposo;

aspettano da voi un erede, e un sovrano per i tempi venturi.

PRINCIPESSA. Io non so pensare. Sento così, irresistibilmente. Mi sento muovere verso

Dio, irresistibilmente. Mi sembra che un filo divino mi porti, e guidi i miei passi.

(Siepe 24)

The Hero rejects the existence of a superior being, and tries to convince the Princess by proclaiming that “We are not miserable instruments in the hands of a laborer: we are divine sparks, we are the masters of our will and our thought” (“Noi non siamo miseri strumenti in mano di un operaio: siamo faville divine, siamo padroni e signori del nostro volere e della nostra riflessione”, 24). His words constitute a typical example of romantic irony, since any spectator will clearly see the strings governing the movements of the marionette that believes himself to be rebelling against his puppet master. The metaphor of the marionette, implicit in the Hero’s speech, will reappear more explicitly in the following scene of Hedge to Northwest, this time in a dialogue between Laura and her seducer Carletto. In fact, an attentive reading of the man’s words will find traces of the previous dialogue between the marionettes, yet with a different meaning. When Laura explains how difficult it is to resist her attraction to Carletto, he responds:

“The Gods will determine our acts, Laura. Stop thinking. Let yourself go. We are not Gods, but poor things: we are but marionettes pulled by a string, Laura” (“Soltanto gli Dei sanno dirigere i propri atti, Laura. Non pensare. Abbandònati. Noi non siamo dèi, siamo povere cose: non siamo

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che marionette tirate da un filo, Laura”, 27). If, in the world of the marionettes, the problem of the Princess consisted in her inability to reason (“I can’t think. I just feel,” she insists) and her incapacity to understand the validity of a pragmatic marriage, now it is the absence of reflection that Carletto demands from his female counterpart. And, differently from the Hero’s claim for the independence and free will that characterize humans, Carletto invokes a higher authority to define himself as a marionette with no individual freedom.

The two plots converge at the end of Hedge to Northwest when Laura gets to install a big umbrella that occupies more than half of the stage, bordering the little hill that was supposed to be conquered by the marionettes. The Hero, who was promised the Princess’ hand if he could erect a hedge against the winds, seems perplexed at the sudden appearance of this protective barrier. He eventually decides to return to the quarters pretending that the wall was the fruit of a divine intervention, and decides to marry the Princess afterwards. But the fictional illusion collapses abruptly when a gipsy woman enters the stage and grabs the marionettes, a fact that corroborates the words of the puppets/commentators about the blindness of the human trio. What follows is the irruption of an actor playing the role of marionette master, who abandons the strings and steps onto the stage to save the wooden figures—now lying in a lifeless state. The marionette master eventually talks to the gipsy woman and convinces her to become his disciple, as she possesses a special sense of the marionettes that is not frequently seen in humans.

The abrupt ending of Hedge to Northwest may seem redundant due to Bontempelli’s decision to make explicit the negative traits of the bourgeois characters—mostly, their oblivion to the noble values of the marionettes. The gipsy woman and the marionette master, on the other hand, appear as mediators between the artificial creatures and the humans, a conciliatory movement by Bontempelli who recruits these folkloric figures in his effort to renovate the

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practice of contemporary commercial theatre. I will devote the next section of this chapter to the farces that Federico García Lorca composes in the 1920s with an intention very similar to

Bontempelli’s: the purging of formulaic clichés by means of a new interpretation of folklore and children’s puppetry, thus forging a dramaturgy that shares significant traits with the Italian theatre of the grotesque.

3.3. Lorca’s theatre of the 1920s. How to do critical theatre with puppets.

The third and last section of this chapter is concerned with Lorca’s puppet plays and tragicomic farces, a group of dramatic works that he wrote in the 1920s. Special attention will be paid to the prologues of his puppet plays The Billy-Club Puppets [Los títeres de Cachiporra], and In the Frame of Don Cristóbal [El retablillo de don Cristóbal]. In these (apparently) naive works, Lorca openly questions the authority of theatre impresarios by presenting a conflict between the human figure of the Director and the puppets that rebel against him. In addition,

Lorca’s two tragicomic farces, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife [La zapatera prodigiosa] and

The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden [Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín], will be studied as grotesque variations of a typical plot in the Spanish comic tradition: the unhappiness of a young woman married to an older man. Similarly to Bontempelli, Lorca proposes a reform of the bourgeois institution of theatre by incorporating puppetry and folklore into his dramas. By combining puppet plays with farces that reduce the actors to a puppet-like condition, Lorca adapts previous versions of the modernist puppet (Maeterlinck’s stylized

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figures, Jarry’s human Punch) to the critical context of the interwar years. Central to Lorca’s enterprise is the desire to bridge the gap between stage and auditorium – what Benjamin defines as the “filling in of the orchestra pit” (154) in his essay “What is Epic Theatre?”.

Two paths are discernable in the critical project that Lorca articulated around the mid-

1920s. The first one consists of a new interpretation of a Spanish classic corpus, comprising short comic genres (Cervantes’ interludes as his main model), popular ballads, traditional music, and ambulant puppet shows. The second presents a farcical treatment of human passions that approximates the dramatic characters to comic puppets, yet with the particularity that their apparently comic nature is counterbalanced by a disturbing presence of eroticism and violence. It is through these puppet, or puppet-like farces, that Lorca first confronts his condition of being a producer of theatrical commodities for a theatre industry that functions according to the laws of supply and demand. As he declared in a 1934 interview, “theatre is not in decay. What is absurd and decadent is its organization. The fact that somebody, simply for having a few millions, becomes a censor . . . is intolerable and shameful. It is a tyranny . . . that only leads to disaster”

(“el teatro no decae. Lo absurdo y decadente es su organización. Eso de que un señor, por el mero hecho de disponer de unos millones, se erija en censor de obras y definidor del teatro, es intolerable y vergonzoso. Es una tiranía que . . . sólo conduce al desastre”; “Los artistas” 544). In the 1930s, Lorca insistently advocated for the creation of theatre clubs as the best way to develop an alternative stage, and he also envisioned a global theatrical reform via the representation of baroque plays before popular audiences [see section 4.2].

Lorca’s hostility toward bourgeois rule is already visible in the prologues of two puppet plays that he writes in 1923 and 1925, respectively: The Billy-Club Puppets and In the Frame of

Don Cristóbal. As is well known, a central trait of folk theatre is the absence of a fourth wall

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separating stage from audience,40 a situation that Lorca takes as the point of departure for a new type of interaction between stage and spectators. The Billy-Club Puppets, subtitled “a guignolesque farce in six scenes and an announcement,” [farsa guiñolesca en seis cuadros y una advertencia] has the external appearance of a children’s show41 but already includes explicit elements of social criticism. Anticipating the plot of his farces, The Billy-Club Puppets revolves around the popular antihero Don Cristóbal (Cristobita in the popular denomination), a rich man who uses his money to marry the young Rosita despite her being in love with the comic puppet

Cocoliche. Cristobita, a Punch characterized by the billy club he always holds in his hand, eventually cannot stand Rosita’s affair with Cocoliche and dies of a comic heart attack. Of special interest to Lorca’s global project is the role of a secondary character called Mosquito, “a mysterious personage, part ghost, part leprechaun, part insect” (Billy-Club 23; “un personaje misterioso, mitad duende, mitad martinico, mitad insecto” (Los títeres 40), who delivers a programmatic speech on occasion during the play’s prologue. Mosquito’s words reveal the reason for Lorca’s defense of a theatre of popular roots:

MOSQUITO. My company and I have just come from the theatre of the bourgeoisie, the

theatre of the counts and the marquises, a gold and crystal theatre where the men go to

fall sleep and the women to fall asleep too. My company and I were prisoners there!

You can’t imagine how unhappy we were. (Billy-Club 23)

40 The spectators of folkloric spectacles, who are often familiar with the plot that is being staged, freely interact with the actors or puppets in different ways—interrupting the stage action, joining the songs, etc. See Veltruský’s essay “Structure in Folk Theater,” on Peter Bogatyrev’s book on Czech and Slovak folk theatre. The essay was originally written in 1940 to be discussed among the Prague School members, but it was banned from publication by the Nazi censorship in Prague. Veltruský eventually published the essay in English in 1987.

41 Lorca presented The Billy-Club Puppets to his sister Isabel and friends on the occasion of the celebration of the Wise Men [los Reyes magos] in 1923. This celebration took place in the feast of the Epiphany (January 6) when the children traditionally receive their Christmas gifts in Spain.

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MOSQUITO. Yo y mi compañía venimos del teatro de los burgueses, del teatro de los

condeses y de los marqueses, un teatro de oro y cristales, donde los hombres van a

dormirse y las señoras… a dormirse también. Yo y mi compañía estábamos

encerrados. No os podéis imaginar qué pena teníamos. (Los títeres 40)

In 1925, two years after The Billy-Club Puppets, Lorca presented a more explicit critique of theatre as commodity in a second dramatic piece that also has the folkloric figure of Cristóbal as a main protagonist. I am referring to In the Frame of Don Cristóbal, a play that depicts the conflict between a Director (played by an actor) and the characters (all of them puppets) that he fights to dominate. The Director first delivers the prologue and then proceeds to supervise the puppets’ acting. He controls when they enter and leave the stage, and he even censors speeches that may be considered offensive to a ‘respectable’ audience. The greatest clash takes place between the Director and a puppet, the Poet, who continually steps out of the scripted plot in order to present a more lyrical version of the ugly Don Cristóbal. But the Director, who watches the Poet’s words, constantly reminds the puppet of his authority; and, rather than engaging in a discussion in aesthetic or moral terms, the Director simply invokes his financial authority. The

Director is not ashamed to acknowledge the fact that, had he had the Poet’s imagination, he would have fired the Poet already:

POET. If the director of the play is willing, Cristóbal will see water nymph, and Rosita

will be able to fill his hair with icicles in the third act when snow begins to fall on all

the innocents. But the owner of this theatre has all the players shut up in a tiny iron

cage, so only ladies with silk bosoms and ridiculous noses may see them, and only

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gentlemen with beards who go to their clubs saying: Ca-ram-ba! Really, Cristóbal is

not like this at all, nor is Rosita.

DIRECTOR. Who’s prattling there?

POET. I was just saying they are getting married42.

DIRECTOR. Be kind enough not to stick your nose into it. If I had imagination, I’d have

thrown you into the gutter long ago. (In the Frame 27-8)

POETA. Si el Director de escena quisiera, don Cristóbal vería las ninfas del agua y doña

Rosita podría llenar de escarcha su cabello en el acto tercero donde cae la nieve sobre

los inocentes. Pero el dueño del teatro tiene a los personajes metidos en una cajita de

hierro para que los vean solamente las señoras con pecho de seda y nariz tonta y los

caballeros con barbas que van al club y dicen: Ca-ram-ba. Porque don Cristóbal no es

así, ni doña Rosita…

DIRECTOR. ¿Quién habla ahí de ese modo?

POETA. Digo que ya se están casando.

DIRECTOR. Haga el favor de no meter la pata. Si yo tuviera imaginación ya le habría

puesto de patitas en la calle. (Retablillo 408)

There is little doubt that this confrontation between the (human) Director and the (puppet) Poet symbolizes the weak position of the creator in an industry dominated by economic interests.43

42 I have partially modified Honig’s translation of In The Frame of Don Cristóbal. He incorrectly translates “ya se están casando” as “they are resting,” instead of “they are getting married.”

43 It is necessary to insist upon the fact that Lorca never lost sight of the commercial stage, which is the reason why he combined premieres in commercial theatres with chamber versions in experimental venues until his death in 1936. Different from reformers such as Antoine Artaud, who only became influential decades after his death, Lorca’s dramaturgy was directly relevant to the theatrical praxis of his time. 123

The same conflict reappears in the two tragicomic pieces that Lorca sees performed by actors,

The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplín. This time, however, the main source of tension is located in the stage-audience axis, for now Lorca makes the spectators responsible for the paralysis of the contemporary theatrical industry. The prologue of The

Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife constitutes a direct appeal to the audience. On the occasion of the play’s premiere in Madrid in 1930, Lorca wrote a programmatic prologue to be delivered by the figure of the Author, played by Lorca himself on the opening night. In this prologue, the

(fictional? actual?) Author insists on his position of superiority over the spectators, reversing the lack of independence that was characteristic of the authors portrayed in Lorca’s puppets plays.

These are the Author’s initial words:

AUTHOR. Worthy spectators… (Pause.) No, not ‘worthy spectators’; merely

‘spectators’. And not because the author doesn’t consider the public worthy – quite the

contrary. It’s only that behind that word ‘worthy’ there seems to be a slight tremor of

fear and a sort of plea that the audience should be generous with the mimicking of the

actors and the workmanship of the playwright’s genius. The poet does not ask

benevolence, but attention, since long ago he leapt that barbed fence of fear that

authors have of the theatre. (Shoemaker’s 63)

EL AUTOR. Respetable público… (Pausa.) No, respetable público no, público

solamente, y no es que el autor no considere al público respetable, todo lo contrario,

sino que detrás de esta palabra hay como un delicado temblor de miedo y una especie

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de súplica para que el auditorio sea generoso con la mímica de los actores y el artificio

del ingenio. El poeta no pide benevolencia, sino atención, una vez que ha saltado hace

mucho tiempo la barra espinosa de miedo que los autores tienen a la sala. (La zapatera

196)

Delivering the prologue with the curtain still down, the Author orders the Shoemaker’s Wife to be silent (“Shut up!”) and to remain offstage until the play begins (“I want to enter!,” she insists).

The Author’s inharmonious relationship with both the external (audience) and the internal

(dramatis personae) levels of the play will later be reproduced in a different but related space: the hostile environment that threatens the Wife, a threat that develops into an imminent violent ending. The tension increases when the Husband leaves home after continuous marital disputes, and she begins to receive sexual innuendos from the men who frequent her house, now converted into a tavern for her economic survival. The townspeople around the house fulfill the function of a chorus that reacts against what it is considered to be an inappropriate behavior from the woman. They first do it with ironic ballads—the use of offstage songs here anticipates The

House of Bernarda Alba—and, as the action advances, their presence threatens to become a riot.

The relationship between stage and auditorium is replicated here through the scheme of theatre within theatre, as the Shoemaker’s Wife becomes the object of the gaze of the anonymous villagers who monitor her through the windows of her house.

One aspect that has traditionally puzzled the critics is the generic indeterminacy of The

Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife. At first sight, the comic nature of the play seems certain given its typical carnivalesque plot—the young woman unhappily married to an old man. Nonetheless, the generic denomination of the play, “violent farce in two acts” (“farsa violenta en dos actos”),

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forces the interpreter to reconsider its initially unquestioned comicality. In this ‘violent farce’ the behavior of the Shoemaker’s Wife lacks realistic verisimilitude, as it ranges from childish joy to unrestrained violence without further psychological justification. Moreover, the fact that her speeches contain multiple echoes from ballads and popular songs only serves to attenuate the audience’s empathic response to this highly theatricalized character. Lorca rejects the idea of a well-rounded dramatic character, and embraces the tradition of grotesque, puppet-like human figures inaugurated by Jarry’s King Ubu.

The tension between the Wife and the neighbors/spectators becomes unbearable as the second and last act of the play unfolds. Her conversation with the Mayor clearly reflects this situation. The Mayor, who previously tried to teach the Shoemaker how to tame the young woman (“I’ve killed my four wives,” he proudly said), now intends to take advantage of the man’s absence and seduce his Wife. When she rejects the proposition of this violent old man— very plausibly the human counterpart of Punch and Don Cristóbal— the Mayor threatens to put her in jail, a response that shows the extent to which the woman is condemned to suffer the punishment of the community. Luckily for her, the discussion is interrupted by a trumpet call,

“florid and most comical” (Shoemaker’s 91; “un toque de trompeta floreado y comiquísimo”, La zapatera 223) that announces the arrival of an unexpected show: a puppet master has come to town and is said to be heading for the young woman’s house.

The Shoemaker’s itinerant puppet show can be interpreted as the passage to an alternate reality, one that better suits the woman’s idealist dreams. Nonetheless, beyond the appearance of an escapist entertainment, the puppet show is actually a trick that the old husband deploys in order to rewrite the story of his marriage—he puts the blame on her. He does it before the internal audience of the townspeople and, at the same time, the external audience of Lorca’s

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play. The puppeteer is, in truth, the husband in disguise, and Lorca’s stage directions stipulate that everybody will recognize his real identity except his young wife, who will be therefore condemned to a state of ignorance during the whole puppet show. The inauthentic condition of the spectacle is evident when the husband opens the function with the mandatory “worthy spectators” (“respetable público”), precisely the words that the Author had associated with servility in the play’s prologue.

When the resentful husband, probably unaware of the credibility of his own artifice, depicts an imagined knife fight between two men who rival for the woman’s love, he is somehow approving her punishment. The confusion of fictional levels reaches a point whereby a boy, acting in his capacity of messenger, interrupts the show to announce a tragic incident that has occurred in the outside world. He talks to the Shoemaker’s Wife with the naïve vocabulary typical of a play that Lorca denominated as a “violent farce”: “Two or three young men have wounded each other with knives and they’re blaming you for it. Wounds that bleed a lot”

(Shoemaker’s 102; “Se han hecho heridas con las navajas dos o tres mozos y te echan a ti la culpa. Heridas que echan mucha sangre”, La zapatera 233). The townspeople surround the house and the Husband reveals his real identity in an attempt to restore order, yet nobody (not even his wife) has any respect for him now. It is at this point that the action in The Shoemaker’s

Prodigious Wife gets interrupted, but one can assume that a violent ending is going to take place, even though the woman still defies the crowd with the last words of the play: “come ahead, come ahead if you want to. There are two of us now to defend my house. Two! Two! My husband and

I. (To her husband.) Oh, this scoundrel, oh, this villain!” (Shoemaker’s 107; “venid, venid ahora, si queréis. Ya somos dos a defender mi casa, ¡dos! ¡dos! Yo y mi marido. (Dirigiéndose al marido.) ¡Con este pillo, con este granuja!”, La zapatera 237). The tension dramatically

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increases as the outside chants become more and more perceptible, following Lorca’s last stage direction: “The noise of the couplets fills the stage. A bell begins to ring distantly and furiously”

(Shoemaker’s 107; “El ruido de las coplas llena la escena. Una campana rompe a tocar lejana y furiosamente”, La zapatera 237).

The premiere of The Love of Don Perlimplín was originally scheduled for 1928 in the theatre club El Caracol, founded by Cipriano Rivas-Cheriff, an admirer of Gordon Craig and one of the few innovative theatre impresarios in the Spain of that time. Lorca conceived it as a chamber version for the club subscribers, but it was censored by the military regime of Primo de

Rivera due to the motif of cuckoldry in the scene of Don Perlimplín’s wedding night. The three existing copies of the play were confiscated and later deposited in the Registry of Pornography.

In 1933, during the liberal regime of the Spanish Republic (1931-36), Lorca finally saw Don

Perlimplín staged in the experimental theatre club Anfístora as part of a two-play program that also included a new stage version of The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife. At first sight, the rhymed title Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, and the ridiculous name of the protagonist Perlimplín, prefigure a horizon of comic expectations. However, its condition of

“erotic lace-paper valentine” (“aleluya erotica”), as Lorca subtitles it, brings to the fore its erotic undertones. This time, Don Perlimplín is not a human version of Don Cristóbal but a naïve middle-aged man who cannot experience sexual desire. When his old servant Marcolfa arranges the matrimony with the young Belisa, he remains ignorant of any sexual implication of his marriage. This can be inferred from his reaction to Belisa’s chants from her balcony, “almost naked” (Love 114; “casi desnuda”, Amor 243), according to Lorca’s stage directions in the conclusion of the first scene of the play:

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BELISA: Ah love, ah love.

Tight in my warm thighs imprisoned,

There swims like a fish the sun.

MARCOLFA: Beautiful maiden.

PERLIMPLÍN: Like sugar . . . white inside. Will she be capable of strangling me?

MARCOLFA: Woman is weak if frightened in time.

BELISA: Ah love, ah love.

Morning cock, the night is going!

Don’t let it vanish, no!

PERLIMPLÍN: What does she mean, Marcolfa? What does she mean?

(MARCOLFA laughs.)

What is happening to me? What is it?

(The piano goes on playing. Past the balcony flies a band of black paper birds.) (Love

115)

VOZ DE BELISA. ¡Amor! ¡Amor!

Entre mis muslos cerrados

nada como un pez el sol.

MARCOLFA. ¡Hermosa doncella!

PERLIMPLÍN. ¡Como de azúcar!... blanca por dentro. ¿Será capaz de estrangularme?

MARCOLFA. La mujer es débil si se la asusta a tiempo.

VOZ DE BELISA. ¡Amor!

¡Gallo que se va la noche!

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Que no se vaya, no.

PERLIMPLÍN. ¿Qué dice, Marcolfa? ¿Qué dice? (Marcolfa ríe.) ¿Y qué es esto que me

pasa?... ¿Qué es esto?

(Sigue sonando el piano. Por el balcón pasa una bandada de pájaros de papel negro.)

(Amor 245-6)

While the band of black paper birds accentuates the non-illusionist nature of this infantile tale of love, it is equally true that the presence of an actress “almost naked” on the stage obliges one to reconsider the apparently naïve nature of The Love of Don Perlimplín. By creating the figure of

Belisa as a symbol of radiant sexuality, Lorca foregrounds the active role of the audience when it comes to legitimizing certain moral behaviors on the stage. In The Love of Don Perlimplín,

Lorca uses a different device than he had used in his previous authorial prologues, for now he addresses the audience indirectly, by means of a dialogue between two fictional commentators of the main dramatic action. This dialogue occurs in the scene of the wedding night or, more accurately, “bedtime” (“hora de dormer”), for this is the term Belisa uses in order to convince her husband to come to bed. After the couple turns off the light, two sprites enter from opposite sides of the stage and cover it with a grey curtain.

At first sight, these two supernatural figures (to be played by two children, according to

Lorca’s notes) seem to endorse the dramatic convention stipulating that sexual scenes be concealed from the public’s view. The two sprites exchange casual greetings, as if making a routine task, and then sit on the prompter-box to chatter about the newlyweds. The alteration of the poetic decorum is evident in their verbal exchange: on the one hand, the colloquial language of these commentators purges the marital scene of any erotic resonance, situating it on a farcical

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plane; on the other hand, the presence of surrealist speeches illuminates a more disturbing side of

Belisa. The First Sprite, for instance, claims to have known Belisa since her childhood years, and recalls how “her room exhaled such intense perfume that I once fell asleep and awoke between her cat’s claws” (Love 119; “Su habitación exhalaba un perfume tan intenso, que una vez me quedé dormido y me desperté entre las garras de sus gatos”, Amor 250). The sprites eventually reveal that their curtain is not aimed at censoring a scene of marital sex, but to conceal the improper behavior of the young wife, who cheats on Don Perlimplín while he sleeps. And, because this is not publicly accepted, the Second Sprite states that this is the reason “why our efficient and most sociable screen should not be opened yet” (Love 119; “Que no se descorra nuestra eficaz y socialísima cortina”, Amor 250).

When the First Sprite declares that “it is not fair to place before the eyes of the audience the misfortune of a good man” (Love 120; “no es justo poner ante las miradas del público el infortunio de un hombre bueno”, Amor 251), he is referring to Belisa’s imminent adultery. The seriousness of their dialogue gives way to carnivalesque inversion when the Sprites open curtain to show Don Perlimplín lying on the bed “with two enormous gilded horns” (Love 120; “unos grandes cuernos de ciervo en la cabeza”, Amor 251); there are also five ladders and five hats in the bedroom of the newlyweds, comic symbols that stand for “the five races of the earth”, in the words of the servant Marcolfa. Don Perlimplín, in light of Belisa’s flagrant infidelity, appears as just another reincarnation of the cuckold in the folkloric tradition of the old husband who cannot satisfy his young wife. Lorca, however, modifies the emphasis on lower appetites that is so typical of carnivalesque worlds and now converts Don Perlimplín into a representative of precisely the opposite view: the comic puppet now dreams with a resurrection of his body in quasi-religious terms.

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It is in view of his inability to arise sexual desire in his wife that Don Perlimplín makes up a plan to seduce her. He invents a parallel persona that writes her the letters that none of her multiple suitors dare to write. As she confesses to her husband, “these letters from him . . . They speak about me . . . about my body . . .” (Love 125; “pero estas cartas de él… Hablan de mí… de mi cuerpo”, Amor 256). Don Perlimplín, apparently accepting his role of cuckold, helps her to set up a night-time encounter with the mysterious man in his own garden—the one to which the play’s title refers. But, when she expects to meet the young man, Don Perlimplín arrives, announcing his intention to kill the mysterious lover:

DON PERLIMPLÍN. Then, dead, you will be able to caress him in your bed – so

handsome and well groomed – without the fear that he should cease to love you. He

will love you with the infinite love of the dead, and I will be free of this dark little

nightmare of your magnificent body. (Embracing her.) Your body . . . that I will never

decipher!. (Love 130)

DON PERLIMPLÍN. Ya muerto, lo podrás acariciar siempre en tu cama tan lindo y

peripuesto sin que tengas el temor de que deje de amarte. Él te querrá con el amor

infinito de los difuntos y yo quedaré libre de esta oscura pesadilla de tu cuerpo

grandioso. (Abrazándola.) Tu cuerpo… que nunca podría descifrar… (Amor 262)

Don Perlimplín runs offstage and Belisa stands alone, disconcerted, until she sees a man wrapped in large red cape that she takes as her platonic lover without realizing that he is none other than her husband in disguise. Her husband, with a dagger stuck in his chest, has committed suicide

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aware of his condition of “manikin without strength” (Love 131; “monigote sin fuerzas”, Amor

263), giving himself in sacrifice in order to redeem Belisa [on the metaphor of sacrifice in

Lorca’s drama, see 4.2]. Violent and spiritual at the same time, the main character in The Love of

Don Perlimplín is a figure subject to an unfulfilled desire that drives him to death—this desire can be defined as his particular puppet master. Don Perlimplín, rather than a simple comic puppet perceived by the audience from a perspective of superiority, appears as a collage of dramatic types that, in the end, is not irreconcilable with an empathetic response. Initially the old cuckold married to a young woman, he also represents the proud husband who commits a murder to save his honor, and the young and handsome man (at least, in Belisa’s imagination) that sacrifices his life for love.

This third chapter has been concerned with the way in which narration, an important element of the art of puppetry and marionettes, makes its entrance onto the modernist stage through the hand of the French symbolists, who mainly attempt to control the independence of the actors. The symbolist orthodoxy reduced the human performer to a hieratic figure of stylized gestures, while a mediating agent (a chorus, a reader) guaranteed the ‘integrity’ of the dramatic text. A different use of narrating techniques was characteristic of a second strain of modernist puppetry, one visible in Meyerhold’s turn to the art of the fairground booth, as well as in the progressive development of the Italian tradition of grotesque drama. Bontempelli’s Hedge to

Northwest is a perfect example of this inclusion of puppetry, accompanied by narrating agents, in a critical theatre that demands a reform of the theatrical circuit both in the spheres of production and reception. Besides the increasing presence of prologues, epilogues and different stage narrators, this theatre frequently parodies motifs and situations typical of bourgeois drama,

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producing an effect of estrangement as a result of the interaction of human performers and artificial beings on the stage.

Finally, Lorca’s theatre of the 1920s expands upon this critical interpretation of puppetry and folkloric art that is central to Bontempelli’s drama. The reformist attitude of the Spanish playwright appears explicit in the prologues that denounce the dominance of economic interests in the theatrical industry. Moreover, in his two tragicomic plays to be performed by actors, The

Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplín, Lorca duplicates the relationship between stage and auditorium by subjecting the stage events to the gaze of an additional viewer.

This agent can be a collective entity included in the fictional world of the play (the neighbors who spy on the Shoemaker’s Wife), or two individuals external to the events depicted (the sprites who comment upon Don Perlimplín’s humiliation on his wedding night). The symbolist use of narration as a way to control theatrical mimesis develops into a more varied use of diegetic devices in the modernist dramaturgies of subsequent decades. I have paid special attention to the disruptive presence of narration in Lorca’s theatre of the 1920s, as it reveals the irresoluble conflict between literal and metaphoric, visible and absent spaces. Puppets that rebel against their Director, a Shoemaker who falls in his own trap after telling the false story of his Wife, and an old husband who sublimates his wife’s body by projecting an idealized version of himself, are three examples of this strategy of questioning. The relevance of narration in The Public, Lorca’s most ambitious drama, is even greater, as now the subversive staging of Romeo and Juliet is only accessible through the verbal reports of those who have witnessed it. This play will be examined in the following chapter of this dissertation.

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Chapter 4: The modernist mysterium

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4.1. The modernist mysterium, between allegory and didacticism.

The preceding chapters were devoted to two traditions that were subject to a process of refunctioning in the early decades of the twentieth century. Even though they were both highly popular amongst nineteenth-century audiences, puppetry and commedia dell’arte were not integrated into the commercial system of theatrical production and reception, and remained mostly confined to the realms of folkloric art and paratheatrical entertainment. Alongside puppetry and commedia, there is a third modernist form that can be dubbed, following Elinor

Fuch’s terminology in Death of Character, as the modernist mysterium. In this chapter, I appropriate the term mysterium to denote a modernist theatrical practice with a strong didactic orientation that adapts the expository nature of the original medieval genre to the historical reality of the interwar period. This term encompasses dramatic works that redefine the relationship between stage and audience in the interwar years, particularly from around the mid-

1920s. What takes place is a phenomenon broader than the revival of medievalism that had characterized symbolist dramas in the late years of the nineteenth century. The modernist mysterium investigates the conflict between the individual and the community, privileging the interior perspective of the dramatic character(s) instead of presenting the fictional world as if it were the reflection of an empirical reality. This practical (also read: political, didactic) strain of modernist theatre adopts structural and symbolic patterns typical of the mystery play and religious drama – from allegorical depiction to images of martyrdom – which are interpreted in reference to political or societal issues.

Lorca’s The Public (1930-36) and Čapek’s The Mother (1937) evidence the fragile equilibrium between aesthetics and politics in the years leading to the Spanish Civil War (1936-

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39) and the subsequent Nazi expansion in Europe. Lorca and Čapek propose artistic solutions that seem diametrically opposed, but that share significant traits in their attempt to make modernism and didacticism compatible. Both dramatists redefine the stage as a liminal space existing between the suspension of disbelief typical of the theatrical event and the efficacy that is intrinsic to ritual. Their experimentation with forms reminiscent of liturgical drama (mystery play, mourning play, auto sacramental) reconfigure the role of the theatrical institution in fostering a new relation between individual and community. A crucial aspect in the theatre of

Lorca and Čapek is how, in their effort to produce a practical effect on the audience, they turn to diegesis in order to create imaginary spaces in the minds of the spectators. They use the theatrical stage, then, to direct the spectators’ attention to the reality that is outside the theatre walls. I will elaborate on these aspects in sections 4.2 and 4.3 of this chapter.

How does the modernist mysterium, from a historical and structural point of view, relate to modernist dramaturgies in the first years of the twentieth century? In the opening years of the twentieth century, two main tendencies arose against the naturalist drama of the living room: one was subjective drama (the theatre of the ‘I’); the other, political theatre. I am borrowing these terms from Raymond Williams, who, in The Politics of Modernism, describes them as the “two opposite directions” (86, his italics) in modernist theatre after the great reformers of naturalism—

Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg. After the private space of the living room, Williams asserts,

Either the drama could become fully public again, reversing the bourgeois evacuation of

the sites of social power which had been a consequence of its rejection of the monopoly

of rank…. Or the drama could explore subjectivity more intensively, drawing back from

conscious representation and reproduction of public life in favour of the dramatization,

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by any available means, of what was taken to be an inner consciousness or indeed an

unconscious. (86)

Under the apparently unitary label of the rejection of naturalism, Williams concludes, there were

“very different and ultimately transformed positions which were waiting at the end of each of these directions” (86). These two tendencies originally overlapped in pre-War German drama

(Wedekind, Kaiser, and early Brecht) but separated in the early 1920s as Erwin Piscator and

Ernst Toller developed a theatre for the working class clearly influenced by the Soviet model. A similar process of differentiation took place in the rest of Europe as the idea of committed art— here, synonymous with leftist art—gave way to the increasing presence of dramatic productions that were, more often than not, carriers of transparent ideological messages.

In addition, and with variable degrees of proximity to this explicitly political drama, the historical avant-garde operated in all its aesthetic-ideological complexity, continuing the movements of the Great War (futurism, Dadaism), or producing direct responses to the crisis of the self that followed the conflict (surrealism). The 1920s have been traditionally considered the golden age of the theatrical avant-garde by accounts that have emphasized the performativity and the transitory condition of the scandalous spectacles of, for example, the surrealists. At the opposite end of the spectrum, modernist theatre seems to be in retreat, or to simply disappear, from the critical picture of these years. Yet what is unique to the modernist mysterium is its capacity to participate in the political theatre of the late 1920s and 1930s while, at the same time, maintaining the subjectivist orientation that had characterized earlier experiments with religious dramatic forms since end-of-the-century symbolism. Lorca’s The Public and Čapek’s The

Mother, the two plays to be studied in this chapter, are two notable examples of the modernist

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revival just mentioned. The motif of martyrdom is of central importance to these two works both at the semantic and the pragmatic levels, as it produces a persuasive effect on audience.

The first scholar to note the affinity between martyrdom imagery and modernist theatre was Walter Benjamin, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Benjamin defines martyrdom as one of the elements that differentiates the baroque mourning play from the Greek tragedy, and argues that the Trauerspiel, as a form of martyr-drama, is still alive in the twentieth century. In his words, “if one only learns to recognize its characteristics in many different styles of drama from Calderón to Strindberg it must become clear that this form, a form of the mystery play, still has a future” (Origin 113). More recently, Elinor Fuchs has also interpreted Strindberg’s drama, particularly his late pilgrimage plays, in relation to the tradition of the mystery play. Fuchs proposes the term mysterium to distinguish it not only from the medieval mystery but also from the symbolist mystery play, for it goes beyond the limits of the symbolist genre to encompass a wider group of works that extends from Maeterlinck and Mallarmé to Georg Kaiser’s Morn to

Midnight and Brecht’s The Baden Play for Learning and, finally, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Fuchs explains how the mysterium “evolved in part as a revival of allegorical methods, however dislocated by a self-conscious, modernist irony, and also continued to bear the stamp of fin-de- siècle symbolist occult aesthetics” (Death 37).

Fuchs’s mysterium operates, in consequence, as a distinctive model that maintains an ambivalent relation to medieval drama by adopting its allegorical mode while, at the same time, dislocating its ontological stability. The figure of the Stranger, a modernist equivalent of the

Everyman in Strindberg’s To Damascus, epitomizes this phenomenon. The Stranger is a universalized character descending from allegorical drama, but he is also a figure with a

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biographical past44 as was typical of Strindberg’s naturalist phase. The merging of these two characterizing patterns, the generic and the individualizing, is a clear indicator of the hybrid nature of this modernist reading of the mystery play. As Fuchs notes, the mysterium is not simply an esoteric return to medievalism in direct opposition to the social concerns of naturalist drama, since “theater writers such as Toller (in Transfiguration), Mayakovsky (in Mystery Bouffe), and even Brecht were also drawn to the mysterium form, as implausible as the project of dressing

Marxist doctrine in Christian eschatology might seem at first glance” (Death 44). It is precisely the political orientation of these (pseudo)religious revivals that will be object of analysis in this chapter. The uneasy relation between allegory and didacticism is visible in the writings of Brecht and Benjamin since around the mid-1920s, when the existence of the orchestra pit between stage and audience became one of their main concerns. However, before discussing their thoughts on the role of the artist as producer of cultural commodities, I will briefly discuss the context of the emergence of theatre as a secular ritual by the turn of the century in the wake of Wagner’s dramaturgical model. The discussion about the nature and function of the orchestra pit exposes the significant differences existing in the aesthetic thoughts of Wagner, on the one side, and

Benjamin and Brecht, on the other.

From a formal point of view, Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk can be described as a synthesis of different artistic disciplines ranging from drama and music to dance, painting and sculpture.

This definition of the total work of art is, however, too narrow because it ignores the ideology behind Wagner’s project of a communitarian art that could escape the logic of commodification, as defined by Marx and Engels. The Bayreuth Festspielhaus, under the patronage of Ludwig II of

Bavaria, was a logical consequence of Wagner’s resistance to the dictates of the ‘public,’ the

44 The need to unveil the painful past of the Director is, interestingly enough, the starting point of Lorca’s The Public. In this play, as Strindberg in his trilogy To Damascus, Lorca integrates a dream atmosphere with allegorical patterns of cyclical time. 140

critical mass integrated by middle-class theatergoers that enjoyed a work of art that has been fully integrated in the capitalist system of supply and demand. Against the logic of commercialism, Wagner’s total work of art presents itself as a self-sufficient organism still possessing a religious-like aura. Wagner’s appeal to the eternal essences of the German Volk was congruous with a renewed interest in the ritual aspects of ancient Greek theatre and culture. This historical connection was soon to be noticed by Nietzsche, who celebrated Wagner’s art to the point that he described the Greek tragedy, in retrospective fashion, as a “music drama” of the

Wagnerian type in 1870 (Henrichs 452). Two years later, in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche declared that the Dionysian spirit that gave birth to ancient tragedy was only alive in Germany, in music (Bach, Beethoven and, finally, Wagner) as well as in Schopenhauer’s philosophy.

Wagner’s dramaturgy is relevant to the present discussion because it gives special prominence to images of human sacrifice that are interpreted as foundational myths of a community, in his case, the German Volk. The motif of the redeeming sacrifice, for example, is behind the ritual deaths of the protagonists of Tristan and Isolde; and Christian imagery abounds in his last work, Parsifal, from the Holy Grail to the figure of the Redeemer, among other

Biblical motifs. It was due to the enormous popularity of Wagner’s operas that the theme of sacrifice occupied a prominent place in the theatre of the early years of the twentieth century, particularly in Germany. In Berlin, Max Reinhardt’s theatre represented numerous plays that revolved around the motif of sacrifice. He produced Oscar Wilde’s Salome, Franz Wedekind’s

Earth Spirit and Spring’s Awakening, as well as the classic tragedies Electra and Oedipus and the Sphinx. Naturally, this artistic revival did not occur in a historical void. The advance of rationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had progressively reduced the central role of religion and ritual as homogenizing forces in Western Europe, particularly in urban areas. At

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the end of the nineteenth century, however, a varied number of secular rituals appeared in the wake of the demise of the Church as a unitary power. This occurred in the context of a crisis of rational language (Nietzsche) and of the idea of a cohesive human psyche associated with a stable notion of individual identity (Freud).

The closing years of the nineteenth century witnessed a renewed interest in sacrificial rituals in the fields of anthropology and sociology. Theories of sacrificial ritual were developed by the Victorian religious scholars William Robertson Smith (Lectures on the Religion of the

Semites, 1889) and James George Frazer (The Golden Bough, first version 1890). These theories would later be adapted and expanded by Emile Durkheim (The Elementary Forms of Religious

Life, 1912) and Arnold van Gennep (The Rites of Passage, 1909). From a sociological perspective, Durkheim investigated the relationship between individual and community at a time when industrialization and the demise of religion as a force of cohesion was causing the dissolution of the bonds between individuals in Western societies. Durkheim’s sociological reading of ancient rituals45 looked at how the shared consumption of the flesh and blood of the sacrificial animal establishes a social and political community, a community that lasts beyond the literal temporal duration of the ritual by situating itself in a mythical time. The Cambridge scholars emphasized the need to understand drama, especially tragedy, in light of ancient rituals to be studied by anthropologists.

In the first years of the century, Wagner’s illusionist stage design was progressively questioned by new directors who disagreed with the notion of a single perspectival view. As early as 1901, for example, Reinhardt proposed a theatre that would adopt the shape of the Greek

45 Fischer-Lichte explains how, for Durkheim, “modern society only filled a form already moulded by primitive religion. This inversion now made it feasible to explain sacrificial ritual and totemism in terms of the problems arising in modern societies from the disintegration brought about by the division of labour” (Theatre 35).

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amphitheatre. With the precedent of Reinhardt, and notably influenced by Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Georg Fuchs proclaimed that actors and spectators should form one indivisible unity.

As Fuchs explains in Revolution in the Theatre, the construction of Munich’s Art Theatre in

1908 was literally an attempt to “rebuild the stage from the ground up.” What he seeks is not another reform of the stage but a total reformulation of the theatre, for he affirms that “the entire problem of design as it touches the drama and the spectators should be considered, both on the stage and in the auditorium” (79).

What was at stake in these early years of the twentieth century is, in Fischer-Lichte’s view, a new relation between theatre and society, one based on the “conviction that the shift of the dominant from internal to external communication could win back the basic social and cultural functions of theatre – something that the bourgeois theatre had lost” (Show 43). From a historical viewpoint, therefore, the modernist rediscovery of religious models constitutes just one artistic manifestation of a much broader movement with considerable sociopolitical implications.

But what is characteristic of theatrical modernism is its self-conscious approach to ancient ritual, one that aims to explain the specificity of the modernist dramaturgy vis-à-vis other art forms such as dramatic literature and film. This chapter studies this second, more specific relationship between theatrical modernism and religious or ritual forms, and how this rediscovery affected the middle-class institution of theatre.

In the 1920s, the ideal of a total dissolution of the barrier between stage and audience was progressively substituted by a critical approach to the fourth wall, as dramatists and directors reflected on the ideological implications of this physical separation. In this respect, the theory and practice of Brecht’s theatre represents the most coherent attempt to reevaluate the distance separating stage from audience. Brecht’s dramaturgy matures in a context of increasing

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politicization of the stage, usually from left-wings activists who, like Piscator, were inspired by the activities of the Russian artists in the early Soviet years. The exposure of the artistic machinery was then considered an act of rebellion against what Brecht referred to as the distribution apparatus, which is also the object of criticism of Lorca’s puppet plays [see section

3.3]. The Wagnerian mystic gulf, the great symbol of the separation between stage and audience, was perceived with mistrust by those artists and thinkers who saw in filling the orchestra pit, as

Benjamin would put it, the most urgent task of contemporary theatre. Walter Gropius, for example, collaborated with Piscator on the design of an enormous arena stage with an approximate capacity of two thousand spectators, a space that would dispense with the division stage/auditorium. This project of a monumental political forum was never realized due to the lack of patronage, but it is indicative of Piscator’s attraction to unitary spaces. Brecht, continuing but also reforming Piscator’s orthodoxy, preferred to foreground the division between stage and audience instead of merging both realms with architectural reforms.

In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin approaches the Brechtian idea of dialectic dramaturgy by opposing Nietzsche’s theory on the function of the chorus in Greek tragedy. As noted earlier, Wagner’s total work of art and Nietzsche’s theory on the Dionysian origins of theatre had a significant impact on playwrights and directors at the turn of the century.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had situated the origins of Greek tragedy in Dionysus, the god who experiences the suffering of individuation. The celebration of the sacrificial ritual of

Dionysus, Nietzsche affirmed, pursues the reconciliation of the individual with the community.

Nonetheless, Benjamin, contrary to Nietzsche, rejects the idea of a total dissolution of the boundaries between chorus and spectators in Greek tragedy. In his study on the Trauerspiel,

Benjamin laments the “abyss of aestheticism” [Abgrund des Ästhetizismus] to which Nietzsche

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confines the agonistic interplay of Apollonian and Dionysian forces, leaving no space for the possibility of a moral evaluation in theatre: “Nietzsche’s renunciation of any understanding of the tragic myth in historical-philosophical terms,” writes Benjamin, “is a high price to pay for his emancipation from the stereotype of a morality in which the tragic occurrence was usually clothed” (Origin 102). Moreover, Benjamin disagrees with the idea of the chorus and audience being dissolved into a sublime chorus of dancing, as Nietzsche describes it. If the tragic chorus exercises a mediating function, Benjamin argues, then the chorus cannot be the product of the visions of the spectators. Benjamin also explains how, in the tradition of the German mourning drama—still alive in modernist drama, according to him—the main function of the chorus is to frame the dramatic action (Origin 121-22). Via this baroque detour, Benjamin indirectly anticipates Brecht’s later use of choruses, songs, and film projections, devices that are all part of a dramaturgy that incorporates its own critical commentary.

Benjamin denies the existence of an indivisible unity between the chorus and the spectators of Greek tragedy, a fact corroborated, in his view, by the simple presence of the orchestra (Origin 104). The same theme of discussion will reappear in one of his last pieces, the essay “What Is Epic Theater?” written in 1939. This time, Benjamin explains, the final goal of the Brechtian theatre as precisely “the filling in of the orchestra pit,” in a time when “this abyss, of all elements of the theater the one that bears the most indelible traces of its ritual origin, has steadily decreased in significance” (154). The orchestra pit has definitively lost the remnants of its ritual origin, and is now problematized in political, social, or even scientific terms. When

Benjamin writes about Brecht’s attempt to fill in the ‘abyss’ between stage and public, he recurrently uses the term ‘didactic’ to refer to what I have been defining, following Mukařovský,

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as a practical effect—one that affects directly the social praxis.46 Around 1929, Brecht developed the form of theatre that he would later call the Lehrstück, which can be translated as ‘teaching play,’ ‘learning play’ and, more broadly, ‘didactic play.’ The Lehrstück as a theatrical genre invokes a critical response from spectators who are then required to observe, critically, the scenes that are presented before them. Brecht’s epic drama intends to transform the spectator into a critical observer with the capacity to think and act. In Brecht’s theatre, each scene stands for itself, without necessary relation to the others, in frontal opposition to the intoxicating effect of naturalness that was characteristic of Wagnerian art.

The principal characteristic of the epic theatre, Brecht writes, “is perhaps that it appeals less to the feelings than to the spectator’s reason. Instead of sharing an experience the spectator must come to grips with things” (“Epic” 23). Brecht states, however, that “it would be quite wrong to try and deny emotion to this kind of theatre. It would be much the same thing as trying to deny emotion to modern science” (“Epic” 23). This last statement, dating back from Brecht’s

“The Epic Theatre and its Difficulties” (1927), is important in order to reconsider critical stereotypes about Brecht’s position on emotion in theatre. In this respect, R. Darren Gobert has recently explained how Brecht’s rejection of emotion (his famous scheme of oppositions) is a gesture of denial of the behaviorist approaches to the audience in both American comedies and

Soviet films of the 1920s (Gobert 14). In this multi-cited table from 1930, Brecht confronts dramatic and epic theatres and assigns them the goals of “feeling” [Gefühl] and “reason” [Ratio].

This outright rejection of emotion, however, would progressively evolve towards a hybrid

46 On Benjamin’s evolution from the Trauerspiel to his late writings on Brecht’s theatre, Michael J. Sidnell affirms: “Formerly, Benjamin had posited an artistic embodiment poised between Nietzschean aestheticism and discursive moralizing; now he was so extremely anti-Nietzschean as to endorse a Socratic relation of hero and audience” (“Aesthetic” 26). 146

approach to audience response until its final codification in his “Short Organum for the Theatre,” in 1953.

It is against the background of Benjamin and Brecht that the didactic orientation of the late theatre of Lorca and Čapek can be better understood. Several concepts developed by Prague scholars, such as the duality of object and subject on the stage (Veltruský), the polyfunctional nature of the theatrical sign (Honzl), and the tension between physical and imaginary space

(Brušák), will also be incorporated into the discussion. The following sections of this chapter are devoted to the analysis of Lorca’s The Public, and his unfinished Play without a Title, and Karel

Čapek’s The Mother. Through the study of these specific works, I propose a study of didactic theatre that complements the basic tenets of Brecht’s dramaturgy. A reading of these plays in light of the tradition of the modernist mysterium situates The Public and The Mother in the immediate ideological quarrels of the 1930s.

Lorca and Čapek, who both reject manifestos and any type of absolute theoretical statements about their theatre, seek an equilibrium between the allegorical nature of the mysterium and the need to produce an immediate impact on an audience in order to show that the theatrical practice is disconnected from their socio-political reality. This uneasy balance is patent in Lorca’s drama, in the transition from The Public to Play without a Title, as his use of the

Spanish tradition of the auto sacramental varies from the representation of an interior anxiety of sexual nature (The Public) to an explicit apology for socialist politics (Play without a Title). In the case of Čapek’s The Mother, a play written in 1937 to mobilize the Prague audience against a hypothetical (eventually, real) German invasion, its persuasive power arises from the merging of subjectivist patterns (the Mother’s externalized interior monologue) with plot conventions that

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have been interpreted as typical of melodrama (the sacrifice of her youngest child for the sake of the nation).

4.2. Lorca’s The Public. Between modernism and the tradition of the auto sacramental.

In his recent essay “Theatrical Modernism: A Problematic,” Graham Ley proposes a “set of observations” (539) that aim to correct what he sees as an endemic problem in modernism studies, namely the insufficient attention “to the conceptual problems of the modern or of modernism in dramaturgy” (539). In his fifth observation, Ley refers to the enormous weight of the Spanish baroque tradition in Lorca’s theatre, an aspect traditionally ignored by international scholars. The problem, Ley explains, is “whether Lorca’s acknowledged pre-eminence in modern

Spanish drama(turgy) owes anything (of significance) to modernism” (541). Or, in other words, whether the internationalization of Lorca’s work comes at the risk of the occultation of what could be his main source of inspiration, the Spanish Baroque, even more important than the contemporary movements of surrealism and expressionism. With a short but highly accurate comment, Ley calls attention to the necessity of confronting what is without doubt a struggle between two traditions (Spanish and European) and periods (Baroque and modernism). It is with this goal in mind that this dissertation conceives of modernism as a confluence of artistic/temporal paths rather than a self-contained movement clearly delimited in time. In consonance with Ley’s statement, the two previous chapters have demonstrated to what extent new readings of past traditions (puppetry and commedia dell’arte) innovated the European stage during the period commonly known as modernism.

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From 1929 to his death in 1936, Lorca repeatedly described The Public as the most ambitious of his dramas. The Public is a palimpsest that absorbs constructive patterns typical of medieval and baroque dramaturgies such as temporal circularity, non-realistic transition between scenes (montage), and simultaneous presence of several spaces in the main stage. At the same time, The Public contains intertextual references to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well as Romeo and Juliet, the latter a play that the Director, a character in the play, performs with tragic consequences in a never visible space. The initial scene, where the Director is approached by Three Men who demand a true theatre even if it scandalizes the bourgeois audience, also mirrors the opening scene in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author.

The idea of an artistic and social transformation through theatre haunted Lorca during his stay in New York in 1929. He wrote to his family: “It is time to think about the theatre of the future. Everything that exists in Spain is dead. Either the theatre’s source changes or it disappears. There is no other solution” (“Hay que pensar en el teatro del porvenir. Todo lo que existe ahora en España está muerto. O se cambia el teatro de raíz o se acaba para siempre. No hay otra solución”, Epistolario 657). At that time, Lorca already had The Public in mind, a play he wrote during his four-month stay in La Habana on his way back to Spain. In the years to follow, Lorca repeatedly described The Public as the central piece of his project for a regenerated theatrical stage. He insisted on emphasizing the importance of The Public and his projected

‘impossible plays’ over his commercially successful dramas, Yerma and Blood Wedding (The

House of Bernarda Alba was not premiered until 1946, in Buenos Aires). Two of these impossible dramas were As Five Years Pass (a play whose rehearsal he directed with the Theatre

Club Anfistora, scheduled to premiere in late 1936), as well as his incomplete drama Play without a Title. Interviewed in April, 1936, two months prior to the outbreak of the Spanish War

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and his subsequent assassination, he explained: “It is in these impossible plays where my true purpose is. But, in order to prove my personality and obtain the audience’s respect, I have premiered other plays” (“En estas comedias imposibles está mi verdadero propósito. Pero para demostrar una personalidad y tener derecho al respeto he dado otras cosas”, “Conversaciones”

631).

In parallel to his publicly acclaimed dramas in Spain and Argentina, Lorca insistently advocated for the creation of theatre clubs as the best way to develop an alternative stage, convinced that the “theatre’s authority” would only be restored if this new theatre was imposed on the spectators. Besides commercial venues and innovative clubs, Lorca envisaged a third space for his theatrical reform, this time via the representation of classical Spanish plays before popular audiences. This project materialized in the ambulant theatre company La barraca, a university company that toured rural Spain between 1932 and 1934. La barraca addressed the two audiences praised by Lorca: one, the cultivated university students and the intellectuals he had known in the Residencia de Estudiantes of Madrid, most of them of leftist orientation; the other, a rural population that was theatrically uneducated but who, nevertheless, vibrated with the representation of the classics. As he declared in 1934, in the middle of the two extremes existed the “only public that is not favorable to us . . . the cold and materialist bourgeoisie” (“Hay un solo público que hemos podido comprobar que no nos es adicto . . . la burguesía, frívola y materializada”, “Teatro” 495).

Why read Lorca’s The Public as a modernist revision of the European tradition of religious theatre? In his years with La barraca, Lorca defined himself as a “Calderonista” on repeated occasions, and staged two of Calderón’s autos sacramentales, Life is A Dream [La vida es sueño], a different version to his world-famous play, and The Great Theatre of the World [El

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gran teatro del mundo]. The autos sacramentales were street plays performed in Spain on the occasion of the festivities of the Corpus Christi, generously sponsored by the city councils from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. Of central relevance was their didactic orientation, as the primary purpose of the autos was “to teach and to re-express dramatically (by moving the emotions and the intellect of the audience through the eye and the ear) the redemptive power of Christ, present in the Eucharist” (Thacker 162). The autos operated “in a highly contentious and mediated space, one in which the relatively open and homogeneous space of the public plaza and the professional status of the actors function in direct opposition to the conditions of efficacy of medieval rituals of presence” (B. Nelson 112). This hybrid nature, halfway between ritual and theatre, was unique to the Spanish context in contrast to other Corpus

Christi plays in Europe.

The Christological symbolism in The Public is not an isolated case in Lorca’s theatre. His play The Love of Don Perlimplín makes an intertextual reference to Christ’s sacrifice for humanity, central dogma of the Eucharist and therefore the auto sacramental. The tragicomic

Don Perlimplín, half man and half puppet, embraces sacrifice as the way to save Belisa’s soul

[see section 3.3]. Biblical references permeate the play: in the Second Scene, for instance,

Perlimplín’s words to his servant Marcolfa are reminiscent of Christ’s words in the Last Supper.

“Just as Christ’s Last Supper took place before His crucifixion and is connected to it,” writes

José Ignacio Badenes, “so we find that in this play, Perlimplín’s “last supper” precedes, and at the same time foreshadows, the final scene when the protagonist immolates himself for his beloved” (691). Perlimplín performs a sacrificial ritual: first in figurative terms, when he arrives a virgin to his wedding night; and later in literal terms, when he kills himself for the wife that cannot love him. Reproducing here the terms coined by Ricardo Doménech, it can be said that

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Perlimplín, in his transition from farcical to tragic character, evolves from offer (the matrimony arranged with Belisa’s mother) to offering (Perlimplín presents himself to his wife).47 As a result of his sacrifice, Perlimplín redeems the same woman that committed adultery on their wedding night. Marcolfa announces to Belisa that she is now “another woman. You are dressed in the most glorious blood of my master” (Love 132; “Belisa, ya eres otra mujer… Estás vestida por la sangre gloriosísima de mi señor”, Amor 263). It is in light of the convergence of anti-illusionist puppetry and religious symbolism that Allen Josephs defines The Love of Don Perlimplín as an

“irreverent, sacrilegious and grotesque morality play” (qtd. in Badenes 693).

The Public follows a circular logic, as the play opens and finishes with the exact same words. When the Servant informs the Director of the arrival of an unknown audience, the

Director responds “Que pase”. These words have been traditionally translated into English as

“Show them in,” but the Spanish verb “pasar” can also be rendered as “traverse” or “getting through,” an interpretation that emphasizes the act of transgressing boundaries. It is not by accident that the Director is sitting in his room, one of the private spaces typically associated with the bourgeois drama that Lorca wants to transforms in the eyes of the audience. Those who wait to be ushered in are not persons, but Four White Horses that are symbols of the Director’s repressed thoughts. It goes without saying that the difficulty of having four horses dancing and speaking on the stage qualified The Public as an ‘impossible play,’ at least under realist criteria.

The Horses engage in a verbal dispute with the Director where eschatological concepts abound

(mention is made of “toilet,” “sweat,” “rotten apples,”), a duel of carnivalesque inspiration that anticipates the crude imagery of the play. The Director resists the temptations embodied by the

47 In Spanish, the terms proposed by Doménech are, respectively, oferta and ofrenda. See Doménech 250.

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horses and finally expels them, letting them know that his theatre “will always be in the open air.” (“al aire libre”).

After the Horses are gone, the Servant informs the Director of a new arrival of the public.

“Show them in,” repeats the Director, as if starting a new theatrical function—this time, he has changed his blond wig for a black one. The Director receives the visit of three men in tailcoats that are simply identified as Man 1, Man 2 and Man 3. They are wearing dark beards, an overtly theatrical accessory, as is the Director’s wig. The Men salute him with irony (“Mr. Director of the Open Air Theater?”, Public 5; “¿El señor Director del teatro al aire libre?”, El público 283), and say they have come to congratulate him on his recent staging of Romeo and Juliet. What follows is a series of accusations against a theatre that they see as a false enterprise that does not dare to reveal the inner “truth of the tombs” (“la verdad de las sepulturas”). Man 2 provokes the

Director: “How did Romeo urinate, Mr. Director? Isn’t it nice seeing Romeo urinate?” (Public 5;

“¿Cómo orinaba Romeo, señor Director? ¿Es que no es bonito ver orinar a Romeo?”, El público

284); and then, in a cryptic manner, he inquires: “What was happening, Mr. Director… when it wasn’t happening? And the tomb? Why, at the end, didn’t you go down the steps into the tomb?

You could’ve seen angel carrying off Romeo’s sex while leaving another, his own, the one belonging to him” (Public 5; “¿Qué pasaba, señor Director, cuando no pasaba? ¿Y el sepulcro?

¿Por qué, en el final, no bajó usted las escaleras del sepulcro? Pudo usted haber visto un ángel que se llevaba el sexo de Romeo, mientras dejaba el otro, el suyo, el que le correspondía”, El público 284). Man 1 becomes the most ardent defendant of a new form of theatre, and announces that he is ready “to shoot myself in order to inaugurate the true theater, the theater beneath the sand” (Public 5; Tendré que darme un tiro para inaugurar el verdadero teatro, el teatro bajo la arena”, El público 284).

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The elusive referentiality of this dialogue makes difficult its translation to semantically stable terms. While one can infer the existence of a production of Romeo and Juliet in the past, the mention of the (uncertain) sexuality of an unidentified angel is rather vague. Further, the

Three Men locate the source of this theatre-to-be-resurrected in a mysterious tomb that would bring together eros and tanatos, the two forces that, once unchained, should make possible the foundation of the theatre beneath the sand. Because a plot paraphrase can only partially explain this verbal exchange, I propose here an intertextual reading of this first encounter between the

Director and the Three Men. The influence of surrealist drama, in particular of Cocteau’s

Orpheus, has been traditionally noted by scholars studying the presence of horses and homosexual undertones of Lorca’s play. From the point of view of theatrical praxis, however, the most significant intertextual reference is Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, a play admired by Lorca.

As is well known, six characters whose story cannot be written meet a stage director and his troupe while they rehearse an actual play written by Pirandello himself, titled Il gioco delle parti. The characters complain about the fact that they are reduced to fixed meanings that the audience can easily derive from their actions and gestures. They also criticize the actors for merely reproducing stereotyped roles instead of exploring the true selves of the characters who they are supposed to enact. The Manager has modified the recognition scene between the Father and his Step-Daughter in Il gioco delle parti, cutting the man’s sexual innuendos in the brothel where they meet. When the Step-Daughter demands that the scene remain intact (“But it's the truth!”), the Manager sardonically responds to her: “Great! Just what we want, to make a riot in the theatre! . . . What does that [the truth] matter? Acting is our business here. Truth up to a certain point, but no further” (Six 257; “Bello! Benissimo! Per far saltare così tutto il teatro? . . .

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Ma che verità, mi faccia il piacere! Qua siamo a teatro! La verità, fino a un certo punto!” Sei

162).

In Pirandello’s play, the Manager’s position represents a conservative stance when it comes to relating the business of theatre to the expectations of contemporary audiences. He subscribes to a radical differentiation between the drama that is ready to be consumed by a certain public and the possibility of a moral or social debate. In Lorca’s The Public, Man 1 even threatens to shoot himself if that is necessary to unveil the theatre beneath the sand, as quoted in the excerpt above. The Three Men finally convince the Director, and ask him to represent the most radical drama possible: “Do you think there could be any newer play than us with our beards . . . and you?” (Public 6; “¿Le parece a usted obra más nueva que nosotros con nuestras barbas… y usted?”, El público 285).

No matter how detailed, a Pirandellian reading illuminates only one side of Lorca’s drama, for The Public is a palimpsest that operates, simultaneously, on a synchronic and a diachronic axis. What would happen if we go deeper in our inquiry of the religious theatrical sources of the play? I have already mentioned the importance of the auto sacramental, a hybrid genre, liturgical and theatrical at the same time, of the Spanish Baroque. In addition, there is a second form of interest besides the tradition of Corpus Christi plays. I am referring to the liturgical drama that can be traced back to the first theatrical manifestations associated with the

Easter cycles in the tenth century. This liturgical drama was very close to ritual, for the Easter play originated as a dramatic trope interpolated into the Easter Mass. The Visitatio sepulchri trope emerged as a dialogue between the three Maries and the angel who announces to them the resurrection of Christ after his crucifixion. This trope was also known as the Quem quaeritis, the

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angel’s first words to the three Maries (“Whom do you seek in the Sepulchre?”). The following table proposes a comparison between this Easter trope and the opening scene in Lorca’s play:

Visitatio sepulchri The Public

- The three Maries visit an angel. - The three Men visit the Director.

- The three Maries are given permission - The three Men are given permission to

to speak (“Whom do you seek in the enter the room (“Let them in”).

Sepulchre?”).

- The angel has no sex. - The angel as an ambiguous sexual

figure.

- The three Maries are told that a - The Men demand a resurrected theatre.

resurrection has occurred. The They want the Director to descend to

sepulchre is empty. the sepulchre.

- Christ has sacrificed himself to redeem - Man 1 offers himself in sacrifice for the

humanity. theatre beneath the sand.

Without necessarily claiming that Lorca conceived The Public as a conscious reenactment of this old liturgical drama, a textual comparison provides sufficient evidence of how The Public returns to the ritual roots of Western drama. In fact, in 1923, Lorca staged the oldest liturgical play in the

Spanish language, the Mystery Play of the Three Wise Kings [Auto de los reyes magos], at his family home in Granada. To stage this liturgical drama from the late twelfth century, Lorca made

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use of cardboard figures and accompanied the dramatic action with live piano music by Manuel de Falla. In this theatre evening, Lorca also staged his first version of The Billy-Club Puppets.

Let’s return to the troubled dialogue between the Director and the Men who have come to challenge his commercial theatre. When they accuse him, the Director first responds by invoking the respect for the morals of his spectators, but then he reveals what is in reality his deepest fear: the sadomasochist punishment of the “mask”. Differing from objects such as wigs and beards, the mask is actualized here exclusively by the characters’ dialogue, and it is precisely its immaterial condition that makes it a carrier of multiple (and sometimes conflicting) meanings.

The mask is an imaginary and, at the same time, fearful agent whose presence oppresses the

Director:

DIRECTOR (reacting). But I can’t. Everything would come crashing down. It would be

like leaving my children blind and then . . . what would I do with the audience? What

would I do with the audience if I removed the handrails from the bridge? The mask

would come and devour me. I once saw a man devoured by the mask. The strongest

youths in the city rammed large balls of thrown-away newspapers up his rear with

bloodied pickaxes; and once in America there was a boy whom the mask hung by his

own intestines. (Public 5-6)

DIRECTOR. (Reaccionando.) Pero no puedo. Se hundiría todo. Sería dejar ciegos a mis

hijos y luego, ¿qué hago con el público? ¿Qué hago con el público si quito las

barandas al puente? Vendría la máscara a devorarme. Yo vi una vez a un hombre

devorado por la máscara. Los jóvenes más fuertes de la ciudad, con picas

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ensangrentadas, le hundían por el trasero grandes bolas de periódicos abandonados, y

en América hubo una vez un muchacho a quien la máscara ahorcó colgado de sus

propios intestinos. (El público 284-5)

The mask, in The Public, functions as an ambivalent sign. In one sense, the mask constitutes a classic symbol of pretense and artificiality, and in certain passages of the text it is posited that its removal will reveal the Director’s emotional authenticity. But, if the act of removing the mask equates an act of sincerity, this exposure is not free of pain and contradiction as long as it reveals the fractures of the own self. The mask, finally, also functions as symbol of a collective violence against the individual, as can be inferred from the Director’s words. It is necessary to emphasize this dual nature of the Lorquian mask in order to avoid a simplistic interpretation of its role in

The Public. In Lorca’s agonistic drama the removal of the mask is not strictly synonymous with the discovery of the inner self, but rather a symbol that causes a tension that cannot be fully resolved. The polyfunctionality of the mask is a perfect example of what Honzl defines as the

“changeability of the theatrical sign” (“Dynamics” 86-7), for there is a constant interplay of signifier and signified. The mask can be conveyed through different signifiers (a material object, a verbal construct); at the same time, different meanings are assigned to the same signifier (the mask can be synonymous with liberation, but also with oppression).

One of Veltruský’s earliest writings, his essay “Man and Object in Theatre” (1940), is of particular value when it comes to describing the relation between the mask and the characters in

Lorca’s drama. Instead of a sharp distinction between subject (actor) and object (props),

Veltruský conceives of this separation in terms of a continuum that varies depending on their implication on the dramatic action. He writes that “a lifeless object may be perceived as the

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performing subject, and a live human being may be perceived as an element completely without will” (“Man” 84). The extreme case of transition from actor to object takes places when the action is reduced to the “zero” level and the actor simply becomes a part of the set—now replaceable by a lifeless figure. Inversely, an object can become a subject when it is the central part of an action and stands on its own afterwards, such as Veltruský’s example of a bloody dagger standing on its own after the murderer has fled the stage. How does the tension between subject and object manifest itself in The Public? I have already referred to the mask, frequently a symbol of superficiality but also the active agent that threatens the Director, thus impeding him from unveiling the theatre beneath the sand. Still in the first scene of the play, a folding screen is another example of the aforementioned tension between subject and object. This folding screen acquires special importance when it comes to scrutinizing the interior of the Director and of two of the Men who have come to face him. Man 1, who has revealed his real name, Gonzalo, is not afraid to acknowledge a past love affair with the Director. In view of the Director’s refusal to admit his homosexual past, Man 1/Gonzalo uses the folding screen in order to subject the

Director to a physical and emotional transformation. This transformation parallels the inversion of the theatre of the open air to the theatre beneath the sand:

MAN 1. But I’ve got to take you to the stage, whether you want to or not. You’ve made

me suffer too much. Quick! The screen! The screen!

(Man 3 brings out a folding screen and places it in the middle of the stage.)

DIRECTOR (weeping.) The audience is going to see me. My theater will come crashing

down . . . I’ve done the best dramas of the season, but now . . . ! (Public 6-7)

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HOMBRE 1. Pero te he de llevar al escenario, quieras o no quieras. Me has hecho sufrir

demasiado. ¡Pronto! ¡El biombo! ¡El biombo! (El Hombre 3 saca un biombo y lo

coloca en medio de la escena.)

DIRECTOR. (Llorando.) Me ha de ver el público. Se hundirá mi teatro. Yo había hecho

las dramas mejores de la temporada, ¡pero ahora!... (El público 286)

The Director passes through the folding screen and what appears on the side is “a boy dressed in white satin with a white ruff. He should be played by an actress. She is carrying a little black guitar” (Public 7; “un Muchacho vestido de raso blanco con una gola blanca al cuello. Debe ser una actriz. Lleva una pequeña guitarrita negra”, El público 286). The transformation of the

Director reminds the reader of Lorca’s famous drawings of Harlequins, melancholic figures usually devoid of visible sexual attributes. Man 1/Gonzalo also forces Man 2 and Man 3 to pass through the folding screen, as he believes they are also hiding their homosexual desires. Man 2 is then transformed into a feminine figure, and Man 3 now appears as a sadomasochist man with a whip and leather wristbands. The folding screen, in sum, reveals the characters’ hidden interiority.

The continual metamorphoses of these men lead to a painful exercise of self-discovery that ends up determining the tragic destiny of the two main characters, Director and Man 1. In

Scene II, titled “Roman Ruin,” these characters mutate into two surrealist figures (Character in

Bells and Character in Vine Leaves) that enact a violent dance replete with scatological metaphors. The verbal exchange between them (acting as protagonist-antagonist, as in Greek tragedy) evolves into a physical struggle that combines homosexual drive and death instinct. As

Antonio Monegal has observed, transvestism in The Public consists in an exercise of undressing

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rather than dressing/accumulating new clothes. The feminine or ambiguous figures that appear from behind the folding screen, therefore, should not be “perceived as a disguise but as an uncovering of the true identity that was hidden under the masculine clothes” (Monegal 207). In the case of the Director, he is transformed into a white harlequin—a traditionally ambiguous sign—but is now performed by an actress, according to Lorca’s stage direction. The Director and

Man 1/Gonzalo mutate into the two surrealist figures, Character in Bells and Character in Vine

Leaves in Scene II of the play, as noted earlier. In Scene III, the split between subject and object is complicated as the Director and Men 2 and 3 remove new clothes. The human figures go offstage and, in their stead, the clothes stands on their own in what is an extreme instance of an object functioning as a dramatic subject. The harlequin white dress, a ballerina’s tutu, and a pajama with poppies perform actions and deliver speeches in Scene III independently of the actors’ bodies (the actors leave the stage). This occurs in conjunction with the horses that enter the stage in search of the actress who is going to play the sepulcher scene of Romeo and Juliet.

The multiple transformations that take place in the first three acts of The Public acquire a new semantic dimension when interpreted in light of Scene IV. The reason why I emphasize the importance of Scene IV is because its imagery condenses the theory and praxis of Lorca’s theatrical reform as expressed from the late 1920s to his death in 1936. In his rendition of

Christ’s sacrifice, Lorca interprets the tradition of the auto sacramental in light of contemporary dramaturgies (expressionism, surrealism), and stresses the participatory nature of the theatrical event by connecting it to religious ritual. This scene presents what is the most powerful transformation of the play when it comes to foregrounding archetypical associations. I am referring to the mutation of Man 1/Gonzalo into the Red Nude crowned with blue thorns, his crucifixion placed in the center of the stage on a vertical bed that faces the audience. Or, instead

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of a crucifixion, it is more correct to describe it as the staging of a crucifixion, for Lorca subjects this sacred image to a theatrical(ist) lens that foregrounds the artificial nature of what is being shown. Lorca conceives the martyrdom of the Red Nude as a “primitive painting” to be situated at the centre of the stage, adopting the pre-Raphaelite style that was also shown in Meyerhold’s first postsymbolist productions [see section 3.1]. The façade of a university building stands to the right side of the stage. The visible theatrical space appears, therefore, divided into two parts.

There is also a third space that exists in the background, with arches and stairs leading to an absent theatre where the subversive representation of Romeo and Juliet has taken place.48 In the opening dialogue of this Scene IV, a Male Nurse informs the Red Nude that the spectators in this absent space are demanding the death of the Director. What follows is a surrealist enactment of the passion of Christ that contains multiple Biblical allusions:

NUDE. I wish to die. How many glasses of blood have you taken out of me?

MALE NURSE. Fifty. Now I’ll give you the gall and then, at eight, I’ll come back with

the scalpel to deepen the wound in your side.

NUDE. That’s the one that has more vitamins.

MALE NURSE. Yes.

. . .

NUDE. How long before we reach Jerusalem?

MALE NURSE. Three stations, if there’s enough coal left.

NUDE. Father, take away this cup of bitterness from me.

48 Javier Huerta Calvo notes how this triple (and simultaneous) division of the dramatic space imitates the spatial arrangement of medieval paintings (“retablos”). See Huerta Calvo 47. 162

MALE NURSE. Shut up. This is already the third thermometer you’ve broken. (Public

33)

DESNUDO. Yo deseo morir. ¿Cuántos vasos de sangre me habéis sacado?

ENFERMERO. Cincuenta. Ahora te daré la hiel, y luego, a las ocho, vendré con el bisturí

para ahondarte la herida del costado.

DESNUDO. Es la que tiene más vitaminas.

ENFERMERO. Sí.

…

DESNUDO. ¿Cuánto falta para Jerusalén?

ENFERMERO. Tres estaciones, si queda bastante carbón.

DESNUDO. Padre mío, aparta de mí este cáliz de amargura.

ENFERMERO. Cállate. Ya es éste el tercer termómetro que rompes. (El público 311)

Lorca’s technique of montage produces the overlapping of characters and dramatic spaces. A group of five students with “black student gowns and red academic sashes” (33; “mantos negros y becas rojas”, El público 312) enter stage right and engage in a discussion about the (never seen by the spectators) scandal of Romeo and Juliet. The crucifixion of the Red Nude continues at the center of the stage, and a round of applauses is heard from the contiguous (but invisible) third space. These three spaces merge when the two actors playing Thieves go down the stairs, and a group of ladies in evening dress enter the stage coming from the imaginary playhouse. Ladies 1,

2, 3 and 4 narrate the violent reaction of the spectators, who are said to have undressed the actor who played Romeo. A character named Boy 1, a modern version of the classic figure of the

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messenger, arrives at the stage to narrate the action that is taking placing in the imaginary space of the subversive theatre never to be seen. Boy 1 reports that “the revolution’s reaching the cathedral” (35; “En este momento llega la revolución a la cathedral”, El público 313) and then exits the stage with the group of ladies. What follows is a dialogue between the Students that

Lorca uses to convey his thesis for a new theatre. The Students discuss what happened when the

Director dared to unveil the theatre beneath the sand. According to their reports, the audience reacted against the staging of the sepulcher scene of Romeo and Juliet when they realized that it was a young man, and not a woman, who was playing the part of Juliet. Student 4 recalls how

“The rioting started when they saw that Romeo and Juliet really loved each other . . . the revolution broke out when they found the true Juliet underneath the seats and covered with cotton balls so she wouldn’t scream” (35). The discussion continues:

STUDENT 1. There’s everyone’s big mistake and for that reason the theater’s in the

throes of death. The audience shouldn’t try to penetrate the silk and cardboard that the

poet erects in his bedroom. Romeo could be a bird and Juliet could be a stone. Romeo

could be a grain of salt and Juliet could be a map. What difference does it make to the

audience?

. . .

STUDENT 2. It’s a question of forms, of masks. A cat could be a frog and the winter

moon could very well be a bundle of firewood covered with terrified maggots. The

audience is to fall asleep upon the words and they must not see through the column to

the sheep bleating and the clouds traveling across the sky.

. . .

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STUDENT 2. In final analysis, do Romeo and Juliet necessarily have to be a man and a

woman for the tomb scene to come off in a heart-rending and lifelike way?

STUDENT 1. It isn’t necessary, and that was what the stage director brilliantly intended

to demonstrate.

STUDENT 4 (irritated.) It’s not necessary? Then let the machines stop… and then go

throw grains of wheat upon a field of steel. (Public 35-36)

ESTUDIANTE 1. Aquí está la gran equivocación de todos y por eso el teatro agoniza. El

público no debe atravesar las sedas y los cartones que el poeta levanta en su

dormitorio. Romeo puede ser un ave y Julieta puede ser una piedra. Romeo puede ser

un grano de sal y Julieta puede ser un mapa. ¿Qué le importa esto al público?

ESTUDIANTE 2. Es cuestión de forma, de máscara. Un gato puede ser una rana, y la

luna de invierno puede ser muy bien un haz de leña cubierto de gusanos ateridos. El

público se ha de dormir en la palabra y no ha de ver a través de la columna las ovejas

que balan y las nueves que van por el cielo.

ESTUDIANTE 2. En último caso, ¿es que Romeo y Julieta tienen que ser necesariamente

un hombre y una mujer para que la escena del sepulcro se produzca de manera viva y

desgarradora?

ESTUDIANTE 1. No es necesario, y esto era lo que se propuso demostrar con genio el

Director de escena.

ESTUDIANTE 4. (Irritado.) ¿Que no es necesario? Entonces que se paren las máquinas

y arrojad los granos de trigo sobre un campo de acero. (El público 314)

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This discussion illustrates two conflicting opinions on the relation between actor and dramatic character. If everything becomes transformed on the stage, Student 2 argues, then there is no point in fighting over the materials that are used (“Romeo could be a grain of salt and Juliet could be a map”). Contrary to this view, Student 4 sees the young man’s body as a disturbing presence that needs to be controlled. Nonetheless, even though he approves of the censorship of

Romeo and Juliet, he still condemns the “detestable” reaction of the audience. Student 1 uses the same adjective but this time with a different idea of theatre in mind: “Detestable. A spectator should never be part of the drama. When people go to the aquarium they don’t murder the sea snakes or the water rats or the fish covered with leprosy, rather they run their eyes over the glass and learn” (Public 38; “Detestable. Un espectador no debe formar nunca parte del drama.

Cuando la gente va al aquárium no asesina a las serpientes de mar ni a las ratas del agua, ni a los peces cubiertos de lepra, sino que resbala sobre los cristales sus ojos y aprende”, El público 317).

Through the constant reversal of meanings, Lorca presents his idea of a didactic theatre, one that has to be imposed on an audience which should come to the playhouse to learn from the

Director, not to impose his ‘respectable’ morals on him.

Scene V, the final scene of The Public, functions as a sort of epilogue after the rebellion of the spectators has buried the theatre beneath the sand. The space is the Director’s room, the same space where the play had begun, and this time the Director discusses his project of a new theatre with a character called the Prestidigitator. In this closing scene, the Director refuses to accept what the Prestidigitator has to offer: illusionist tricks that resemble theatre, but that are not the theatre beneath the sand that he intends to reveal. To justify the randomness of sexual desire, the Prestidigitator argues, there is no better way than to make use of supernatural elements such as Diana’s flower in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He explains to the Director:

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“If love is pure chance and Titania, Queen of the Fairies, fell in love with an ass, then, by the same reasoning, there wouldn’t be anything extraordinary about Gonzalo drinking in the “music hall” with a boy dressed in white sitting on his lap” (Public 43-4; “Si el amor es pura casualidad y Titania, reina de los silfos, se enamora de un asno, nada de particular tendría que, por el mismo procedimiento, Gonzalo bebiera en el music-hall con un muchacho vestido de blanco sentado en las rodillas”, El público 323). These tricks, however, do not convince the Director of the new theatre:

PRESTIDIGITATOR. Without any effort I can turn a bottle of ink into a severed hand

full of ancient rings.

DIRECTOR (irritated.) But that’s deception! That’s theater! If I spent three days battling

the roots and the pounding waves, it was to destroy theater.

PRESTIDIGITATOR. That I knew.

DIRECTOR. And to demonstrate that if Romeo and Juliet are in mortal agony and die in

order to come back to life smiling when the curtain falls, then my characters, on the

other hand, burn the curtain and truly die in the presence of the spectators. (Public 44-

PRESTIDIGITADOR. Yo convierto sin ningún esfuerzo un frasco de tinta en una mano

cortada llena de anillos antiguos.

DIRECTOR. (Irritado.) Pero eso es mentira, ¡eso es teatro! Si yo pasé tres días luchando

con las raíces y los golpes de agua fue para destruir el teatro.

PRESTIDIGITADOR. Lo sabía.

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DIRECTOR. Y demostrar que si Romeo y Julieta agonizan y mueren para despertar

sonriendo cuando cae el telón, mis personajes, en cambio, queman la cortina y mueren

de verdad en presencia de los espectadores. (El público 322-3)

A real drama has occurred on the stage, the Director claims, but this necessary revolt was aborted by an audience that could not accept it. The Director emphasizes the actuality of the events when he tells the Prestidigitator: “Here you are, standing in a theater where authentic dramas have been performed and where a real combat has raged, one that’s cost the lives of all the players” (46;

“Aquí está usted pisando un teatro donde se han dado dramas auténticos y donde se ha sostenido un verdadero combate que ha costado la vida a todos los intérpretes”, El público 325). This dialogue summarizes the great paradox behind Lorca’s The Public: the representation of a dramatic fiction is undermined by constant references to a painful drama that is actually happening behind the fictional screen. This dual condition of The Public is reminiscent of the hybrid nature of the autos sacramentales, which exist halfway between didactic/expository theatre and a ritual of collective atonement.

In an interview given during a trip to Argentina, in 1933, Lorca mentioned the manuscript of The Public and explained that “I don’t intend to stage the play in Buenos Aires, nor in any other place, for I believe there is not a company willing to perform it nor a public that could tolerate it without indignation” (“no pretendo estrenarla en Buenos Aires, ni en ninguna otra parte, pues creo que no hay compañía que se anime a llevarla a escena ni público que la tolere sin indignarse”, “Llegó” 444). When the journalist asked him about the reason of this impossibility,

Lorca described The Public as “the mirror of the audience…. And because everyone’s drama can be really painful, and generally it is far from honorable, spectators would immediately jump out

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of their seats, full of indignation, and they would prevent the performance from continuing” (“es el espejo del público…. Y como el drama de cada uno a veces es muy punzante y generalmente nada honroso, pues los espectadores en seguida se levantarían indignados e impedirían que continuara la representación”, “Llegó” 444). In The Public, the revolt of the spectators is only actualized through diegetic means, as the space of the sepulcher is never to be seen. In Lorca’s

Play without a Title, however, the violence is taken to the spectator’s seats. Lorca composed the first act of this unfinished play in 1935-36, months before from the outbreak of the Spanish Civil

War. In 1934, a socialist upheaval in the northern region of Asturias had occasioned a major threat against the center-right government of Spain at the time. The clash between the leftist militias and the Spanish army constituted the first episode of the war that would finally explode two years later on July 18, 1936. As happened in The Public, what emerges here is an apology of an artistic form that should go beyond a theatre that is synonymous with keeping up “a terrible atmosphere of lies,” an untrue environment that is alive with the complicity of the director and his actors. Furthermore, as in The Public, the Director wants not actors who impersonate roles,

“but men in the flesh and women in the flesh” (Play 54; “yo no quiero actores sino hombres de carne y mujeres de carne”, Comedia 772) who should present their interiority to the spectators.

The early death of Lorca prevented him from developing a dramaturgy that he considered to be at a nascent stage, but it can be inferred from his public speeches that he was somehow foreseeing Grotowski’s theories on the actor’s body. Lorca’s Play without a Title expands upon the idea of exposing the actor’s vulnerability in front of the audience, an idea of central importance in The Public. In Play without a Title, the blood splatters the stage when a spectator steps onto the stage and shoots a factory worker who had dared to deny the existence of God.

This explicit confrontation between authoritarian conservatism and leftist politics constitutes the

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most extreme instance of politicization in Lorca’s theatre. In order to arrive at a true theatre,

Lorca seems to be saying here that it is necessary to tear down its walls. This time, in contrast to

The Public, Lorca’s explicit political position makes the play a much less ambiguous text—and, one could also say, a much more monologic discourse. Lorca’s desperate attempt to reconcile his inner anxieties with the cause of the proletariat ends up producing a dialectical exercise of difficult, or even impossible, resolution, as several critics have noted before. In fact, the

Director’s speech is not a prologue but a “sermon,” in his own words.

Well aware of Pirandellian dramaturgy, Lorca now situates part of the action in the auditorium, dividing the playhouse into levels that correspond to very clear hierarchies. Two

‘respectable’ couples, sitting in the orchestra seats, constantly interrupt the Director’s speech

(“I’ve got a right to. I’ve paid for my seat!”, Play 53; “Tengo derecho. ¡He pagado mi butaca!”,

Comedia 771). Above them, a Young Man in tails stands in the parterre box and engages in discussion with the Director about the limits and possibilities of a revolution of the theatre. The intellectual formation of this Young Man makes him a similar figure to the group of students in

Scene IV of The Public. Finally, a Factory Worker stands in the front row of the top gallery, obviously one of the cheapest seats in the house. This Worker makes a call to join the socialist revolution (“Comrades!”) that it is said to be approaching the theatre walls. The gap to be bridged now, in sum, is not the one separating stage and audience, but the playhouse from the political clashes of the mid-1930s.

Besides noises and changes in illumination, diegesis is the main source of information of the confrontation happening outside the theatre. The immaterial nature of verbal reports49 makes them a very flexible tool to spread the dramatic tension throughout the whole auditorium. In

49 On the concept of imaginary space and the way it activates the spectators’ participation, see Karel Brušák’s “Imaginary Action Space in Drama,” in particular 155. 170

addition, the unifying presence of the dramatic action both on the stage and in the different sections of the theatre reinforces the split between what occurs within the walls (theatre as pretense) and the violent conflict that is supposed to take place, simultaneously, outside the theatre building. Echoing Lorca’s praise of popular audiences with La barraca and the contemporary discourse of socialism, the Director calls to open the doors of the theatre to the revolutionary soldiers: “The theater belongs to everyone! This is the school of the people!”, Play

61; “¡El teatro es de todos! ¡Ésta es la escuela del pueblo!”, Comedia 779).

In Play without a Title, Lorca dreams with the utopic idea of tearing down the theatre walls as a desperate attempt to relate his theatrical art to the praxis of his time. He lays bare the theatrical devices and ends up producing a strong pragmatic effect on the audience (and readers) rather than a distancing effect. In The Public and Play without a Title, two of his ‘impossible’ plays, Lorca proposes his project of theatrical reform by linking it first to the unveiling of the tragic nature of love, and later to the urgent necessity of bringing ‘moral truth’ to the stage. His unfinished didactic theatre significantly draws from the Spanish tradition of the auto sacramental, while also incorporating elements from surrealism and expressionism. The explicit political orientation of Play without a Title is due to the historical urgency of Lorca’s late playwriting, and a similar statement can be made about Karel Čapek’s The Mother, the object of analysis of the next section of this chapter.

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4.3. Karel Čapek’s The Mother. Allegories of war and nationhood.

Karel Čapek is, at first sight, an author with interests that are radically different from

Lorca’s. The Spanish author wrote mainly poetry and drama, while Čapek transgressed all boundaries in terms of genre, for he was a renowned author of genres as diverse as science fiction novels, fairy tales and illustrated narratives, not to mention hundreds of journalistic articles and travelogues such his Letters from England, Spain, and Italy. Recipient of a Ph.D. in

Philosophy, earned with a thesis on American Pragmatism, he forged a close relationship with philosopher T. G. Masaryk, elected President of the Czechoslovak Republic from 1918 to 1935, and authored his Conversations with T. G. Masaryk [Hovory s T. G. Masarykem]. As a great admirer of English culture, Čapek was a liberal who refused to endorse socialism in a time when most Prague artists were attracted, in one way or the other, to revolutionary politics. Čapek’s refusal of any version of totalitarianism becomes more intriguing in light of his last play, The

Mother [Matka], written in 1937 and staged in Prague in February, 1938, months before his death. Čapek wrote this play in solidarity with the Spanish anti-fascist troops, and also to mobilize the patriotic sentiment of a Prague audience that could sense the closeness of a German invasion. By referring to The Mother as an example of “modernism taken to practice,” I intend to analyze the extent to which this play appeals to its audience in the historical context of the late

1930s.

Čapek’s early dramatic production ranges from The Fateful Game of Love (1911) to The

Insect Play [1922, Ze života hmyzu], both cases in collaboration with his brother Josef, as well as the enormously popular drama R.U.R. (1921). The Insect Play is particularly relevant to the present study because it presents itself as a modern dialogue with the tradition of the mystery

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play. The allegorical nature of the play was severely criticized by reviewers outside

Czechoslovakia. To respond to this international criticism, the Čapek brothers wrote an alternative ending to be included in a second edition of the play, which also incorporated a new preface from the authors. In this preface, the brothers rejected the labeling of the play as a cynical and pessimistic exercise, as critics in Germany, England and America had suggested. The authors explained that the play “may be ugly, but it is not pessimistic,” and went on to say that

[We] did not intend to write a drama, but a mystery in a quite antiquated and naïve sense.

Just as in the medieval mystery play there appeared personifications of Avarice, Egotism,

or Virtue, so certain moral concepts are here personified as insects . . . We did not write

about people or about the vermin of the field; we wrote about certain vices. And, God

knows, it is not dirty pessimism to find that vice is something wretched and lousy. Of

course it is not elevating or original, either, but that was really not our end. (qtd. in

Harkins 82-3)

On a superficial level, the presence of ants, butterflies, and beetles that behave like people (they fall in love, accumulate wealth, and kill each other) qualifies The Insect Play as a typical example of the animal fable. Yet the presence of an anonymous Wanderer complicates the definition of this work as a simple fable. In the introductory scene, which is actually like a prologue, the Wanderer acknowledges his state of total disorientation. “Where am I?”, he asks himself, before Act I begins. He then trips and falls from the stage wings, and shouts at the audience “Go on, laugh! Funny, isn’t it?” (Insect 95), a comical address that ignores the illusionist fourth wall. The address to the spectators is not exclusive to this play, for it constitutes

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a dominant feature of The Fateful Game of Love [see section 2.3]. The Wanderer then explains:

“See how I fell? Straight as an arrow! Like a hero! I was… representing the Fall of Man!” (Insect

95). The apparent nonsense is thus rapidly neutralized by the Wanderer’s invocation of an allegorical reading: what has happened on the stage has to be interpreted in reference to a transcendental message, the Fall of Man. This Wanderer continues the tradition of the hero in Jan

Comenius’ Labyrinth of the World, a work well-known to the Čapek brothers. Because the baroque man is a “semiotic animal,” to reproduce here Fernando R. de la Flor’s expression (390), the Wanderer is involved in a constant process of deciphering divine signs. In 1922, this dramatic character was confined to a world of appearances, of literal meanings, a world that did not refer to a transcendental reality whatsoever. From a general point of view, one can affirm that the interaction of two planes (historico-realistic and symbolic-allegorical) characterizes Karel

Čapek’s creations in the years following the First World War. In his Apocryphal Tales, for instance, “distinctive interpretations of biblical and historical (or pseudo-historical) stories became surprisingly analogues for modern-day problems or for the way people behave” (Klíma

136).

In 1937, Čapek returned to playwriting after a decade-long hiatus. He wrote The White

Plague [Bílá nemoc], a play that continued the fantastic or allegorical line of previous dramatic works but that was now relevant to its immediate political context. This time, Čapek did not resort to animals or robots in order to reflect on the problems of modern society. Instead, he developed a fantastic plot that allows him to call attention, if only indirectly, to the magnitude of

Hitler’s threat over Czechoslovakia. In The White Plague, an infectious disease spreads in an undetermined country ruled by a field marshal who is acclaimed by the masses. This totalitarian leader plans to invade a neighboring country. Doctor Galen, the epitome of the lonely hero,

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eventually finds the cure for the disease but he refuses to make it widely available until the dictator renounces war. When the Marshal becomes infected, he agrees to stop the war machinery, but the doctor is accidentally killed by the mob when he tries to access the dictator’s building. On the reception of The White Plague, Ivan Klíma notes how Čapek’s play was immediately understood as a defense of the nation against the German threat:

According to contemporary accounts, a half-hour of applause followed the Prague

premiere – something uncommon in the history of Czech theater. That people understood

the play as a depiction of the approaching political conflict is witnessed also by the fact

that the most frequent criticism Čapek received, supposedly even from the republic’s new

president Edvard Beneš, was that the play was too pessimistic. (214)

The White Plague premiered simultaneously in Prague and Brno on January 1 and was rapidly followed by performances in Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Sweden, and Norway. In 1938, The White

Plague was staged in London, and a single actor played the parts of Marshal and Doctor in successive scenes—the play was rewritten for this purpose. This decision infuriated Čapek, and not only for artistic reasons. In his view, the English adaptors had situated the tyrant and the doctor on the same ethical level without favoring either of them, probably to prevent more criticism from expansionist Germany (Bradbrook 69-70). By that time, the Swedish academy had decided not to award Čapek the Nobel Prize due to his active opposition to Hitler.

If The White Plague operates in a dual code (fascism and communism as historical counterparts of the contagious disease), Čapek’s last play, The Mother, presents a more transparent connection to its historical reality. And, unlike his previous dramatic works, which

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mainly consisted of a succession of scenes, The Mother adopts the triple unity of action, space, and time. The time of the play is strictly contemporary (this can be inferred from the characters’ dialogue, on which I will comment later) but the space is far from being a mere reproduction of a typical living room in late 1930’s Czechoslovakia. The single space of the play is the dead father’s room, which is replete with souvenirs from colonial campaigns such as rifles, masks, and lancets. The bizarre appearance of a room that looks “more like a family museum than a living room” (Mother 338; “vypadá to spíš jak rodinné muzeum než jako obývaný pokoj”, Matka 20), according to Čapek’s stage direction, produces an effect of strangeness on the perceiver. The foreignness of the theatrical set was highlighted in the premiere of the play in the Prague

National Theatre, in February 1938.

Similar to Brecht’s The Mother, itself an adaptation of Gorki’s novel, Čapek conceives the maternal figure as a synthesis of the individual and the political. In Čapek’s play, the Mother, archetype of life, has suffered the loss of her husband and her older son in an indeterminate colonial territory. These two deaths occurred no more than fifteen or twenty years prior (her youngest son, Tony, is a teenager now). Her husband was a soldier who died following the absurd commands of his superior, even though he was aware of the danger these orders entailed.

Her son Andrew died of malaria, also in a colonial territory, after volunteering to host the virus that was under clinical research. When the Mother appears before the spectators, she refers to these two past deaths as something that, despite their alleged heroism, she does not want to witness again. These two family members visit her in Act I and, as Čapek explains in a short introduction to the play, the dead are not to be perceived as ghosts, but real persons visible both to the Mother and to the spectators. According to the author, “They are as they were when they were alive, for they live still in the imagination of the mother; they are dead only in that she

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cannot touch them—and in that they make a little less noise than do we, the living” (Mother 338;

“Jsou takoví, jako když žili, neboť žijí dál v představách své matky; jsou mrtvi jen tím, že už je ona nemůže vzít do rukou – a že nadělají o něco míň hluku než my živí”, Matka 16). It is because of this feature that Čapek’s play has been compared to Thornton Wilder’s Own Town and, more generally, has been related to expressionist practices of the German and Czech theatre of the preceding decade.50

The centrality of the theme of sacrifice is evident right from the beginning of the play, as can be inferred from the dialogue between the Mother and her sons. Their speeches contain multiple references to a past time that pertains to a different sensibility, one that I will denominate here as a pre-War World I perception of the sacrifice. The death of the father as a brave soldier in the colonies is justified here in terms of honor. A belief in the individual sacrifice is still perceived at this point as a positive, and necessary, duty. This perception changes radically after the experience of the Great War. As Fischer-Lichte notes, there is not “the slightest probability that a sacrifice could bring about a utopian community” after the War, yet the nations that have witnessed the massive slaughter try to believe in the sacrifice “for the sake of a holy cause; that the dead should be commemorated as heroes and not be forgotten as part of an anonymous crowd” (Theatre 89). It is this sense of commemoration that stands behind the

Mother’s initial references to the dead husband. Her feelings about the death of her older son, a doctor who also died in colonial territory, are still a hybrid of resignation and acceptation. These two deaths haunt the present life of the Mother and, at the same time, enter in conflict with the values embodied by the four surviving sons.

50 According to Bradbook, “Čapek had discussed the use of dead dramatis personae with Frantisek Langer as early as the late twenties” (71).

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In the “now” of the theatrical representation, the Mother disapproves of any risky enterprise, no matter how important the contributions of her four sons could be for society.

Writing in 1937, Čapek creates a female character that cannot come to grips with the massive slaughter of War World I, a woman unwilling to sacrifice her sons in the name of a collective cause—be it science (Richard), nation (Kornel), or revolution (Peter). As in Sophocles’

Antigone, Čapek’s Mother represents the inevitable clash between the family and the state law: she invokes primal love, and the blood ties that join her to her family, over any collective enterprise that requires the sacrifice of her sons. Čapek’s play thus emerges as a modernist tragedy in the sense that it presents the conflict of two visions that are ethically justified, yet limited because they can integrate the other’s position. The conflict, as of 1937, is that her defense of family as core of civilization cannot be extended to the whole of the nation. But, at the same time, the total suppression of individualism in the name of collectivism would result in a totalitarian society ruled by a single person who claims to embody his subjects. One should not forget that, in Sophocles’ tragedy, Creon is not a tyrant, but somebody who wants the state laws to be respected; his clash with Antigone cannot be rendered in terms of good versus evil, but as the confrontation of two ethical decisions that are fundamentally right in their partial scope.

As an artwork written in extremis, The Mother presents an uneasy balance between fictional and political content. The didactic orientation of Čapek’s play is not, at any rate, an exception in his late aesthetics, for it is present in most of his writings throughout the 1930s. One only has to turn to, for instance, his collection of miscellaneous essays Marsyas or On the

Margin of Literature [Marsyas čili na okraj literatury] and On Ordinary Matters or Zóon

Politikon [O věcech obecných čili Zóon politikon] published in the early 1930s. The first book contains pieces on folkloric and popular literature such as fairy tales and detective stories, but

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also tackles the contemporary importance of newspapers and tries to define the future of proletarian literature (popular genres read by this class, not socialist realism). Zóon Politikon is a more personal account of Čapek’s philosophical and political ideas, as can be rapidly inferred from essay titles such as “On Politics,” “On Relativism,” “On the Tyranny of Machines,” “The

Spirit of Democracy” and “Why I am not a Communist.” In several of the book’s essays, Čapek criticizes the partisan use of nationalism, and accepts a sense of patriotism only if it serves to promote a liberal and rational order, as Masaryk and the intellectuals around him tried to do in the interwar years. The flip side of the coin, socialism, also produces Čapek’s disaffection. “I cannot be a communist”, he declares, “because its moral is not one of help. Because it preaches about the abolition of the present social order rather than putting an end to social evils like poverty.” And he continues his reasoning with a defense of emotion over politics that anticipates the Mother’s stance in his 1937 play:

the language of communism is hard; it does not speak about the value of emotion,

willingness, help and human solidarity; it says proudly that it is not sentimental . . . but

without sentimental grounds you would not offer a glass of water to your neighbor;

intellect alone would not make you help a man who had slipped. (Čapek qtd. in

Bradbrook 165)

Čapek makes his political views very explicit here. But, how does his political stance relate to a play such as The Mother? Can one conclude that The Mother is simply the representation of a political debate, with the only difference being that this time it is clothed in fictional action? An answer to this question can be provided with the help of Mukařovský’s “Intentionality and

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Unintentionality in Art” (1943), an essay that can be considered a contemporary of Čapek’s play, and a theoretical piece that stems from the dialectical contradictions of European art in the interwar years. I am particularly interested in Mukařovský’s concept of practical function in art, reviewed in more detail in section 1.2 of this dissertation. When the practical function predominates over the aesthetic, Mukařovský’s explains, intentionality (the semantic forces inside the artwork) “expresses itself primarily as a tendency toward a specific aim”

(“Intentionality” 93). According to this logic, the elements constituting the work of art are primarily arranged in view of the completion of the goal, and only judged according to this criterion (the activity is only considered to be adequate when it fulfills the pre-established goal).

In the cases when the practical orientation is only secondary, the artwork is “not oriented toward any specific external goal but are themselves the goal” (“Intentionality” 94). This does not mean that the work constitutes a self-enclosed entity alien to social practice, but that it has to be interpreted (mediated) by a collective. There is always a need for mediation, Mukařovský observes, precisely because the work of art does not exist in a transparent and unequivocal relation to the different aspects of reality (social, political, religious).

It has been frequently observed that the characters in Čapek’s play stand as representatives of different ideas rather than individualized entities, which would constitute a considerable flaw according to realist criteria—the classic accusation of ‘flat’ characters. This affirmation needs to be revised, however, in light of the expressionist affiliation of The Mother.

In addition, the allegorical foundation of previous dramas, particularly the modern ‘mystery’ The

Insect Play, confirms the structural role of allegorical depictions in Čapek’s theatre.

Furthermore, the practical orientation of The Mother is also due to the educative character of

Prague National theatre, where the play was premiered in 1938, a national theatre created in the

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nineteenth century in imitation of the new educative theatre envisioned first by Schiller in

Germany.

The interaction between the Mother and her family represents the political antagonisms haunting Czechoslovakia, and Europe, in the late 1930s. There is a conflict, at first sight, between individualism and collectivism. At the same time, the spectators contemplate a political clash that takes place, in very explicit terms, between the twin brothers. While Kornel is conservative and nationalist, Peter advocates for the use of revolutionary violence. The chess game that the twins play in Act I synthesizes their irreconcilable views and, at the same time, situates their clash in an abstract plane that makes it applicable to any other country in Europe: it’s a fight between Blacks and Whites. Instead of taking the side of one of the twins, Čapek portrays them as victims of totalitarian ideologies that justify the use of violence against their own population. Take, for instance, the contrast between Kornel’s words (“Put things where they were before”; “Dát věci tam, kde byly”) and Peter’s (“Put things where they ought to be”; “Dát věci tam, kde mají být”): order, tradition, nation, on one side; revolution and utopia, on the other.

And, in sharp contrast to both of them, the Mother refuses to engage in a political discussion, insisting that things must be “where they are at home” (Mother 347; “Dát věci tam, kde jim je dobře”, Matka 29).

One aspect of special relevance is the fact that, similar to Lorca’s The Public, there is no rupture of the fourth wall. Appeals to the audience are done indirectly, through the characters’ verbal exchanges. What begins as a portrayal of an ideological conflict finally evolves into a confirmation of the exceptionality of the times shared by the Mother and the spectators. When the Father converses with the twins Peter and Kornel (they have become ghosts too, for they have been killed in the civil conflict), the old man shows his discomfort towards the current

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events. “Soldiers on both sides? … Soldiers against soldiers?” (Mother 370; “Na obou stranách vojáci? … Naši proti našim?”, Matka 56), the Father asks with incredulity. Kornel, who has died for the nationalist cause, observes his Father’s reaction with ironic amusement. In Kornel’s account, “A major in the cavalry, and here his own son wants to revolutionize the world. A ready-made family tragedy” (Mother 341; “Major od jízdy, a tadyhle syn mu chce převracet svět.

Hotová rodinná tragédie”, Matka 24-5). Peter, the revolutionary twin, also reminds his Father that they are living in “a different era now,” and insists that there is “A fight between the old world and the new…. Let the old world perish!” (Mother 345; “Boj starého a nového světa … Ať zhyne starý podlý svět!”, Matka 26).

The conflicting views that have arisen during the play become solidified in Act III, as though there is no possibility of agreement (Čapek’s pragmatism appears here in its extreme version). As the act opens, the Mother appears, locking up the weapons that were hanging on the wall in a last effort to protect her youngest son Tony. Yet, there is an agent that will make her change her pacifist conviction: the radio announcer that brings the war news into her home. The external, imaginary action space invades the stage now, observable in the three following addresses by a female radio announcer:

Our enemies have taken advantage of a time when our country was mortally weakened by

a disastrous civil war, and they have invaded our territory under the pretext of restoring

order. (Mother 379)

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We cry out to the whole world: hear us, this is an outrage, it is an unspeakable crime! . . .

Our country, our exhausted, hapless country, is being butchered like an animal! (Mother

380)

Attention! Attention! We call all men to arms. We call all men. What happens to us no

longer matters. We are no longer fighting for ourselves, but for the land of our fathers and

our children. In the name of the dead and of those to come, we call the whole nation to

arms! (Mother 396)

Nepřítel využil chvíle, kdy se náš národ sám smrtelně oslabil nešťastnou občanskou

válkou, a přepadl naše území pod záminkou, že přichází obnovit pořádek. (Matka 67)

Náš národ, náš nešťastný a vysílený národ je dobíjen jako zvíře! (Matka 68)

Slyšte, slyšte, slyšte! Voláme všechny muže do zbraně. Voláme všechny muže. Na nás už

nezáleží. Už nebojujeme za sebe, ale za zem svých otců a dětí. Ve jménu mrtvých i

budoucích voláme do zbraně celý národ! (Matka 87-8)

Also in this final act, Čapek reveals the immediate historical reference of his play: the Spanish

Civil War that had erupted in July 18, 1936. The Mother is now called Dolores51 by her family and the radio announcer situates the killings of civilians in the village of Villamedia, an

51 Harkins states that Čapek’s mother “has no name” (151), and maintains that there is no evidence to support the thesis that the play refers to the contemporary Spanish conflict. Yet there is textual evidence to prove the referential link to the Spanish war, as one of the sons says: “You’re right, Dolores, it is a matter for men” (389).

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imaginary equivalent of the city of Lérida52. The strangeness of the play’s fictional world, which had made reference to unknown colonies and to very general examples of scientific progress (the two dead sons: the doctor and the aviator), is now neutralized by virtue of the specific spatio- temporal reference that is the Spanish War. In addition, the persuasive nature of Čapek’s drama is conveyed by means of the tension existing between visible and imaginary spaces, in a similar manner to Lorca’s The Public and Play without a Title. In The Mother, a significant part of the dramatic action has been removed from the stage and remains therefore inaccessible to the eyes of the spectators, who only learn about it from the characters’ verbal reports. The polarity between the presented and the imaginary (verbally suggested) reality reaches its climax in the third and last act, when the radio speeches represent the intrusion of the laws of the external

(factual) world into the internal (fictional) space inhabited by the Mother. She reluctantly listens to the radio news until she hears about the killing of women and children – this moment constituting the subjection of her familial space to the national sacrifice that will be needed in the real world of the spectators. The play concludes when the Mother finally embraces patriotic values and she decides to send her only living son off to war. The children’s life, which was precisely her great argument against war, is now the justification for armed action:

MALE ANNOUNCER: Another bomb fell on the hospital, killing sixty patients. The city

of Villamedia is in flames.

TONY: Mom, I beg you—

52 Regarding the aerial bombing of a school in Lérida, Spain, see Čapek’s words in his article “Lérida,” in Lidové noviny, 5 November 1937: “We do not blame the aircrew for this crime. The responsibility lies higher up. With those who command. With those who lead. With those who finance the massacres of these shameful years” (qtd. in Klíma 209). See also the conclusion of a poem published in Lidové noviny in August 1936. The twentieth century means, for Čapek, “Great new records, great inventions. Wretchedness. / Dictators. War. A ruined town in Spain” (qtd. in Klíma 209). 184

FEMALE ANNOUNCER: Hear us! Hear us! We call to the whole world! We call on all

people everywhere! Enemy aircraft this morning attacked the village of Borgo and

bombed the elementary school. Those children who escaped were machine-gunned.

Eighty children were wounded. Nineteen children were killed by gunfire. Thirty-five

children caught in the explosion were . . . dismembered.

MOTHER: What are you saying? Children? Why would anyone kill children?

TONY (looking at the map): Where is it. . . where is it. . .

MOTHER (standing as if turned to stone): Children! Little, runny-nosed children!

(Silence. She works the rifle free from the wall and places it in TONY’s hands with a

powerful gesture): Go!

CURTAIN

(Mother 398)

MUŽSKÝ HLAS V AMPLIÓNU: Letecká puma zasáhla nemocnici, kde zahynulo

šedesát nemocných. Město Villamedia hoří.

TONI: Maminko, prosím tě –

ŽENSKÝ HLAS V AMPLIÓNU: Slyšte, slyšte, slyšte! Voláme k ampliónu celý svět!

Voláme lidi! Nepřátelská letadla napadla dnes ráno vesnici Borgo a svrhla pumy na

obecnou školu. Do prchajících dětí střílela ze strojních pušek. Osmdesát dětí bylo

raněno. Devatenáct dětí postříleno. Třicet pět dětí bylo výbuchem… roztrháno.

MATKA: Co říkáš? Děti? Copak někdo zabíjí děti?

TONI (hledá na mapě): Kde to je… kde to je…

MATKA (stojí jako zkamenělá): Děti! Malé, usmrkané děti!

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(Ticho.)

MATKA (strhne ze stěny pušku a podává ji oběma rukama Tonimu. S velkým gestem):

Jdi!

Opona

(Matka 90).

The Mother is now willing to accept the sacrifice of her last son in the name of an unnamed nation, soon to be invaded by a foreign power. William E. Harkins, as other critics before, has referred to this ending as a “melodramatic climax . . . justified by the imminence of war” (153).

In his memoirs, Ferdinand Peroutka, a close friend of Čapek, refers to The Mother in overtly negative terms. “Čapek changed from a playwright and novelist into a propagandist” (qtd. in

Klíma 226), writes Peroutka in the aftermath of World War II, comparing Čapek’s last play to the “agitprop” of the Soviet regime. Finally, Ivan Klíma justifies Čapek’s work on the basis that

“There are exceptional periods in history where a drama of precisely this type can speak to people with startling urgency” (227). However, Klíma recognizes, Čapek intended “to connect what cannot be connected” (226) by simultaneously defending pacifism and an armed defense of his homeland.53 This lack of consensus over the aesthetic value of The Mother evidences the difficulty of coming to grips with the didactic shift of Čapek’s theatre of the late 1930s, a political orientation that responds to the urgency of his time.

There is little doubt about the didactic orientation of the stage dialogue in The Mother, conceived to make transparent the ideas which the dramatis personae stand for. The appellative

53 In a similar fashion, Bradbrook justifies the didacticism of Čapek’s late essays as a necessary means to a national revival: “If these essays on contemporary problems sound somewhat didactic, it is so for the best patriotic reasons” (163). 186

nature (to use here Bühler’s concept of appellative function) of Čapek’s drama is particularly evident in the final act, when the Mother responds to the radio’s call for arms by accepting the sacrifice of her youngest son. The radio constitutes the only Brechtian device designed to establish an open channel communication with the audience, while the rest of the constructive elements of the play function in accordance with the basic premises of the illusionist fourth wall.

The usage of this unidirectional media of mass communication approximates Čapek’s last play to

Lorca’s openly political Play without a Title, a “sermon,” as the character of the Director defined it. The mediating function of the radio also relates Čapek’s The Mother to The Lindbergh Flight, one of the most famous of Brecht’s ‘teaching plays,’ and in both cases it can be affirmed that a case of real dialogism between stage and auditorium is never achieved. Smith has recently criticized that the empowerment of the audience in The Lindbergh Flight is more illusory than real despite Brecht’s claim54 that the radio would transform the audience into an active communicative producer, a statement that could also be perfectly applied to Čapek’s last play.

While the political component is taken for granted by any scholar interested in Brecht’s work, I have demonstrated the necessity of theorizing the didactic orientation behind the allegorical patterns of Čapek and Lorca’s last dramatic works, since they constitute immediate responses to the political events of their time. The will to transform theatre into a practical exercise explains the didactic orientation of modernist theatre of the late 1930s and, from a wider historical perspective, closes the circle that had begun with the first disruptions of the illusionist wall at the turn of the nineteenth century.

54 Smith explains that “Brecht’s attempt to rehabilitate radio as a participatory mass medium is curiously unsuccessful. The role of the audience-participants in The Lindbergh Flight, as well as in its subsequent variations, is in fact limited to the role of scripted chorus. “We have lifted ourselves up” (“Wir haben uns erhoben”) sings the audience at the end of the work, but it is by no means clear that it is the chorus that pilots this airplane, even in the variation where Lindbergh is played by the audience. Theirs is not in fact the job of “communication,” nor of “resistance,” nor even of “production,” insofar as these terms imply any real agency on the part of the communicative producer” (88).

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Conclusion

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Mukařovský’s lecture “On the Current State of the Theory of Theater,” read in one of

Prague experimental theatre clubs in 1941, opens with a concise statement that summarizes in two lines the problematic elaborated in this dissertation: “One of the important problems which the contemporary theater has been trying to solve in various ways is how to establish active contact between the spectator and the stage” (201). Mukařovský explains how this interaction between stage and audience was fostered by means of different strategies such as the transfer

(partially or in its entirety) of the dramatic action to the auditorium, or the presentation of dramatic characters who break the illusion by commenting on the events enacted on the stage.

Beyond the greater or lesser impact of literal attempts to eliminate the gap between stage and audience—the removal of the footlights, for example, or different architectural reforms—

Mukařovský argues that the idea of stage and auditorium forming an organic whole has become the default option for the theatre of his time. Writing in the city of Prague, invaded by the Nazis as Čapek had feared in The Mother, and with increasing difficulty in disseminating his research due to German censorship, Mukařovský’s 1941 lecture is still a valuable document that helps us understand the evolution of the modernist stage in the first half of the last century.

This study has adapted Mukařovský’s phenomenological structuralism, particularly his notion of the practical function in art, to the study of modernist theatre in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Besides the work of other members affiliated to the Prague School project, such as were the cases of Veltruský and Honzl, I have also incorporated the recent contributions of theatre scholars who have analyzed the diverse implications of the modernist critique to the middle-class commercial stage. Fuchs’s The Death of Character, Puchner’s Stage

Fright, and Jestrovic’s Theatre of Estrangement are examples of recent contributions reassessing

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the aesthetic and ideological aspects of theatrical modernism, influencing the critical horizon in which this dissertation inscribes itself.

In lieu of a conclusion, I now propose five brief statements on the methodology and goals of this doctoral dissertation.

1. A comparative approach to modernist theatre.

This dissertation has consisted of a joint study of selected dramatic works by five

European authors (Evreinov, the Čapek brothers, Bontempelli, and Lorca) in relation to modernist dramatists and directors from the French symbolists to Meyerhold and Brecht. Their relations have not been conceptualized in terms of contacts, influences, or debts, as older models of comparativism would have recommended. While there is no reason to deny cases of empirical contact among authors, this has not been the main concern of this study. Instead, my main goal was to arrive at a plural map of dramatic trends converging in three traditions (commedia dell’arte, puppetry, mysterium) that function as thematic nodes across national borders. These three nodes simultaneously operate on a diachronic and a synchronic axis. They function diachronically, for they rediscover traditions dating back from the early modern period, and even the Middle Ages in the case of the mysterium (the allegorical patterns are visible, for example, in the theatre of the Čapek brothers since their early The Insect Play, a work they define as a modern mystery play). At the same time, these thematic nodes also operate in a synchronic manner, in direct interaction with the cultural and social conditions of the early decades of the twentieth century. It is only through this dual approach that one can fully account for the semantic and intertextual complexity of a plays such as Lorca’s The Public, which reads the

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tradition of religious drama (medieval mysteries, baroque auto sacramental) alongside

Pirandello’s contemporary drama and the aesthetics of surrealism and expressionism.

2. A specific theory of theatrical modernism.

By selecting works pertaining to Spain, Italy, Czechoslovakia and Russia, studied in a wider context that also makes reference to the French and German stage, I have aimed to contribute to the current expansion of the field of international theatrical modernism. This was in order to develop a critical corpus that is not a simple transposition of conceptual categories originally induced from the narrative and poetry of the so-called ‘high modernists.’ If common sense recommends the existence of a set of general concepts accessible to all the scholars in the modernist field, it is also true that only a theoretical ‘decolonization’ of theatre studies will make possible the advancement in scholarship of theatrical modernism. Graham Ley’s argument in his essay in the ICLA series volume Modernism is crucial at this respect. Ley regards the absence of

Meyerhold in Nicholls’ acclaimed study Modernisms as an example of the scarce attention that stage reformers have traditionally received by international modernist scholars. In Nicholl’s study, Ley notes, theatre “occupies a thoroughly subsidiary role” (536) as if dramatists and directors were able to make sporadic contributions to international modernism without any of the theoretical rigor characterizing innovations in poetry, the novel, and painting. Because Nicholls implies that “theatre and dramaturgy are marginal to modernism,” Ley writes, “this leaves us with one of two possible conclusions: either modernism in the theatre must be assessed in a radically different manner, or we must acknowledge that the critical theory of modernism does not provide us with a sufficient account of radical initiative and innovation in the theatre and

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dramaturgy of the modern period” (536). To implement the second of these proposals, I have studied the way in which a group of modernist dramatists reformed the theatrical apparatus while always collaborating with the commercial stage of their time, a collaborative stance that differentiates them from the representatives of the historical avant-garde.

3. New possibilities of theatre semiotics.

This dissertation has proposed a new reading of the semiotic tradition of the Prague

Circle in combination with contemporary scholarship on modernist theatre. As with the Russian formalists earlier, the Prague scholars were well acquainted with the contemporary trends in

European art (in the case of Honzl, he was a renowned film and theatre director). Theirs was an approach radically different from the monumentalist/historicist idea of academia that was in vogue during the first half of the twentieth century. As a result of this, the Prague School theory of theatre evolved in close contact with the innovations in the modernist stage, a unique feature that differentiates this theoretical corpus from the much more abstract and linguistically oriented version of theatre semiotics that was popular from the 1970s to the 1990s.

In chapter three, for example, I brought into discussion Veltruský’s concept of stage figure (originally coined by Zich in the late 1920s) in order to provide a semiotic explanation of the modernist distrust for the physicality of the actors. Veltruský replaces Saussure’s dichotomy signifier/signified by a triple model that now presents the stage figure as an intermediary phase between the actor’s body and the character as it is finally recreated in the minds of the spectators.

This semiotic formulation provides a plausible explanation for historical phenomena such as the symbolist opposition to the actor’s physical traits, later continued by Gordon Craig’s utopic

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vision of a total control over the performing subject. According to the Prague School terminology, these controlling maneuvers are attempts to eliminate any divergence between the stage figure (what the actors constructs with his body) and the fictional character to be perceived by the audience, a character that dramatists and directors do not want to see ‘contaminated’ by the actor’s particularizing features. Section 4.2, devoted to Lorca’s ‘impossible drama,’ has discussed the close relationship between ideology and theatrical conventions when it comes to the audience’s perception of the non-neutral actor’s body -- what Veltruský refers to as the

“overwhelming reality” (“Dramatic” 115) of the human body on the stage.

4. Modernist theatre as critical practice.

The main reason behind this joint study of artworks from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds has been to demonstrate to what extent a critical attitude towards the commercial circuit of production and reception is a constant preoccupation in modernist theatre. This view of modernist theatre is adapted from Bürger’s conceptualization of the historical avant-garde as a phase of “self-criticism” of the social subsystem of art, when the artists position themselves against the distribution apparatus rather than against the artistic language of previous artistic schools. I have given particular emphasis to how modernist dramas denounce the submissive role of the artist to the dictates of middle-class audiences in a time of cultural commodification—the artist frequently represented by fictional authors and actors. In Josef and Karel Čapek’s The

Fateful Game of Love, for example, a theatre impresario requires a troupe of commedia dell’arte actors to perform a melodramatic plot of love and treachery in which money justifies any kind of behavior. And, at the conclusion of Evreinov’s A Merry Death when the curtain is lowered, the

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cuckold Pierrot remains on the stage to blame the social conventions of the respectable audience on his avenging his friend Harlequin, who reportedly had an affair with Pierrot’s wife

Columbine. Even in the case of a text-based analysis such as the present study, I find it necessary to consider the authorial dramatic script in relation to the different elements that integrate the theatrical circuit (impresarios, directors, stage-audience relationship, and so on). While drama can be perfectly read as literature, it is also the script for a performance that participates in a circuit of production and reception.

5. The temporal limits of theatrical modernism.

Theatrical modernism characterizes itself by a definition of the stage in autonomous terms vis-à-vis other arts in order, precisely, to better problematize the relationship between stage and auditorium—and, in the end, stage and society. Due to spatial and temporal constraints,

I have limited my research to dramatic works pertaining to the first three decades of the twentieth century. Because didacticism shifts to a dominant position in the highly politicized theatre of the late 1930s, Čapek’s The Mother (written 1937, staged 1938) seems a reasonable point of conclusion for a dissertation that has investigated the permeability of the theatrical stage to ideas of artistic and social reform. The temporal limitation of my study, however, does not imply that theatrical modernism dies automatically at the end of the 1930s. Brecht’s own work extends beyond the temporal limits of this dissertation, which demonstrates the impossibility of a radical shift between modernist and postmodernist theatre (if postmodernism is not but an expansion of modernism, a different topic not to be discussed here).

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Moreover, recent contributions in the field of theatre studies have tended to avoid a sharp divide between pre and post-war theatre. In Stage Fright, for example, Puchner relates the use of diegetic devices in Brecht and Beckett to the modernist closet drama strategies of Mallarmé,

Joyce, and Stein. From the dramaturgical point of view, Ley, in “Theatrical Modernism,” has recently argued in favor of the inclusion of Grotowski among the great modernist reformers due to the comprehensive nature of his theory of human performance, comparable to the likes of

Meyerhold and Brecht.

The fifth and last statement above implies the need for further research on the relationship between stage and audience in twentieth-century theatre. If one compares the evolution of European theatre and drama from the 1960s to today, there appear distinctive traits that were not present in the theatre of the first decades of the twentieth century. Probably the most significant difference is the enormous influence of what Hans-Thies Lehmann defines as

‘postdramatic theatre,’ the result of a mutual estrangement of theatre and drama, the fading away of “the trinity of drama, imitation and action” (Lehmann 37). In the postdramatic theatre of The

Living Theatre and Performance Group, for example, the stage functioned as “a beginning and a point of departure, not a site of transcription/copying” (Lehmann 32). The relationship between the performing subject and the audience becomes the dominant element in the performance art paradigm, one where the stage ceases to exist as the necessary space for the (re)enactment of a fiction whose reproducibility is guaranteed by its verbal codification in form of dramatic text.

A central feature of the modernist works studied in this dissertation is their emphasis on the artificiality of the artistic stage, in contrast to previous notions of theatre as a natural

195

phenomenon that remains impermeable to historical or ideological agencies. This critical strain of modernist theatre acquires sense in a context of self-awareness of the economically determined role of the artists (the actor, the author, the director) in a time when their work is valued just as any other commodity. After 1945, however, the idea of a revolt against middle- class audiences ceases to operate at the core of dramaturgies well aware of the modernist aesthetic innovations, Beckett being one clear example of this.

Furthermore, when the relationship between the (holy) actor and audience is the central object of study in the second half of the century, as is the case of Grotowski’s Laboratory

Theatre, the theatrical event is conceived in terms of a communion between actors and spectators, a shared exercise of self-interrogation, rather than a confrontation between them.

Among the modernist dramatists studied in this dissertation, Lorca appears as the most significant precedent of this approach to the figure of the actor. In The Public, Lorca envisages

Grotowski’s theory of human performance when he claims that the renovation of the relationship with the audience can only be achieved by first laying bare the actor’s inner self. For a central concern in Lorca’s unfinished theatre is the transformation of theatre into a space that, through the presentation of the taboos ignored in our everyday life, eventually leads the spectators to an individual exercise of self-exploration. Lorca, as Grotowski and Schechner later, converts the passive spectators into witnesses of ethical debates brought to the stage, thus abandoning their safe condition of voyeurs who are untouched by the real dramas that are now happening on the stage, to paraphrase the Director’s words in the last Scene of The Public.

This dissertation concludes with a mention of Lorca’s The Public because it is a work that constitutes a unique synthesis of the two main approaches to the relationship between stage and audience in the last century. The Public combines both the confrontational stance that

196

characterizes the critical version of modernist theatre studied here and the idea of a new spectatorship as it has been defined since the 1960s by Grotowski and various practitioners of performance art. By studying the importance of peripheral artistic forms in the modernist renovation of the European stage, I have completed the first stage of a more extensive project that would connect modernist theatre with the evolution of the postdramatic stage during the final decades of the twentieth century.

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