THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA DOI number 10.2478/tco-2020-0020 The Hybrid Theater of Robert Pinget Anca SIMILAR Abstract: The theatre of Robert Pinget was acclaimed at the Avignon Festival till the 1980s, until it became in spite of itself a representative of the theatrical avant-garde greeted by numerous critics and academic texts. It appears, however, that Pinget’s theatre was the victim of a real misinterpretation. Adventurous life, where romance and destiny mingle, lay the foundations of pingétienne irony, this search for personal tone subjects to uncertainties and other contradictions Robert Pinget's affiliation with Max Jacob's is an attempt to approach the avant-garde, but to turn away from it in a subtle way in the last moment. This waltz-hesitation of Pinget will be the basis of a tendency to put this work in the “new novel” or the theatrical avant-garde. The literature of Pinget can be considered as a form of the art of the escape the expression of an incessantly renewed amazement through an acousmatic voice. It is through the theory of the double and the quest for secrecy that we can now reposition Pinget's theater in the perspective of a classical theater on the very margins of the avant-garde and a striking example of an ontological incomprehension between adaptation and the message left by the author. Key words: Robert Pinget, Avignon, automatic writing, controlled contradiction, surveyed subconscious, acousmatic voice From a young Swiss novelist1 at the dawn of the 1950s, too quickly placed in the drawer of the New Roman in the 1960s, Pinget's work will then be embodied in the theater with increasing success between the 1970s and 1980s when he will be acclaimed at the Avignon Festival, meanwhile giving Lecturer PhD., Theater and Film Faculty, Babeș Bolyai University, Cluj Napoca 1 He becomes french citizen in 1966. 58 THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA rise to a considerable number of articles and academic theses. during his lifetime. Amongst his vast work we will particularly retain his radio plays and his plays, some of which are adaptations of his novels. Among these are La Manivelle (Pinget, 1970), The Hypothesis (Pinget, 1987), Autour de Mortin (Pinget, 1965), Abel and Bela (Pinget, 1987), which form the core of the Pingetian creation, a hybrid work between the novel and the theater, between life and the imaginary. Theater, memory and video Robert Pinget had read much of the academic work on his work: "Few of these theses were really wrong, he said, they taught me a lot about my work that I did not taught about when writing." 2 It is this "almost" that interests us today, as it appears that the Pingetian theater can go beyond the framework of the stage and escape from the labels too quickly attached to the work of the writer and man of the theatre. There is a video memory of the INA3 on Pinget where the latter appears from the end of the 1950s. These are the video archive documents where the author expresses himself from 1958 to 1965, then again from 1987 to his death in 1997, which allow to place the work of Pinget as he expresses himself directly on his work: 1958-Robert Pinget about Baga (programs / readings for all, INA) 1962-Robert Pinget about the Inquisitor, programs / readings for all, INA 1965-Robert Pinget presents his book Someone (programs / readings for all, INA 1987- Robert Pinget-Journal Antenna 2 1988-Robert Pinget and La “Manivelle “FR3 1993-Robert Pinget and writing The circle of Midnight, extensions 1993-Robert Pinget presents The Inquisitor (The circle of Midnight) 1997- Samuel Beckett by Robert Pinget (The Midnight Circle) 2 1993-Robert Pinget presented l’Inquisitoire, television show „ Cercle de Minuit” 3 Institut National de l’Audiovisuel - National Institute of Audiovisual 59 THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA These videos unequivocally show that Pinget's "tone" was already at work at the beginning of his career and that his public appearances also belong to a form of theatricality that has escaped commentators who do not have access to these digital archives. And this famous "tone", Pinget makes it the keystone of his work because "the search for the personal tone represents an enormous job"4 The adventurous life At Pinget, art and life are not separate. This quiet man with the gentleman-farmer lifestyle of Touraine, as it appears in the televised documentary of 1987, is still a "voluntary contradiction" typical of the creative art of Robert Pinget. We must therefore revisit the man under the prism of his adventurous life after the war, his travels in Spain under Franco, in North Africa and in Yugoslavia, where in the manner of the wicked characters of the "Salary of Fear" 5 oversees the construction of a railroad, as an Oudnarnik, that is to say, a "slugger", a shock worker, a foreign mercenary in the privileged and authoritarian position as a super-productive man. We have here one of the first deliberate contradiction of the man of theater, which goes from the working foreman to the master of the new novel and the theater. The second voluntary contradiction is that of his homosexuality combined with a deep religious belief. This existential deviation is perhaps one of the characteristics of the adventurous life of its beginnings because for Pinget, it is not enough to write, it is necessary to have lived, even if it is necessary to engage in a life altogether, full of uncertainties, choosing the boldness of the adventurer who engages without thinking, without knowing what is beyond. Pinget is thus constantly confronted with the memory and the entropy of other worlds, which interpose themselves and blur the message like these hypotheses that arise at each junction of his life and his work. The 4 1993-Robert Pinget presents” l’Inquisitoire”,in “Cercle de Minuit” television show 5 Film by Henri Georges Clouzot (1953) 60 THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA individualism of the beginning of his life of adventure will lead him to a new contradiction, that of attempting the community experience in 1949 in a Kibbutz, the last frontier of the adventurer, and the last programmed failure which will be embodied dans « Graal Flibuste »6 (Pinget, 1956), parody of a travel narrative, which casts a cynical look at his past life without ever losing the work of the Oudarnik from his creative work:" But I must to go all the way . Precision and discipline.7 On the footsteps of Max Jacob The author's passion for the author Max Jacob, torn like him between homosexuality and conversion to Catholicism, remains a fundamental anchor in understanding Pinget, who discovers in this precursor of Dada and surrealism, a man who approaches the avant-garde, sometimes almost inventing it but who immediately turns away from it and rejects it, attracted by the muse of vagrancy as a man without ties. Thus, Robert Mégevant in his article “Robert Pinget, Max Jacob, the unclassifiable modernity “(About a conference of Robert Pinget on Max Jacob) very aptly says, the perfect contradiction of a writer who "always refused to build a book. But he took the trouble, the long sorrow, to check, to weigh every word after the labor of delivery. Let every word make the sound ... of the sacrifice probably. Is what he called supervised unconsciousness or the waking dream. This is the difference with the methods of the surrealist school, which did not want control. Max Jacob, he controls, chooses in what came out in spite of himself the keys that seem to him the most significant, those that best reflect the idea of his distress."8 However, is not the absence of books that characterizes Pinget, because his romanesque production is important between the years 1950-1960, but rather the choice to rewrite his novels in the second part of his life, in rewriting them in other more laconic forms, dialogues, monologues, researching 6 R. Pinget, Quelqu'un. s.l.:Ed de minuit., 1965, p. 144 7 Ibidem, p. 127 8M. Mégevand, Robert Pinget, Max Jacob, les inclassables de la modernité (conference of Robert Pinget on Max Jacob). Cahiers Max Jacob, October, No 11, 2012, pp. 9-15. 61 THEATRICAL COLLOQUIA ceaselessly, killing and resizing the original work by sword and scalpel . It is therefore the absence of the book that the Pingetian theatre founds because it drifts towards the dramatic art, disappears and is diluted in the autonomous interpretations and life of the author’s fictional doubles. Maurice Blanchot tells us that "To write relates to the absence of work, but invests in the work in the form of book [...] Or even: to write, it is the absence of work such as 'it occurs through the work and crossing it [...] The book: cunning through which writing goes to the absence of a book. »9.. This definition seems timely to define Pinget or the process of creation comes to supplant the work itself. In Advice to a Young Poet10, Max Jacob unveiled one of the keys to his work: "The characteristic of lyricism is unconsciousness, but a supervised unconsciousness.” 11 The filiation between Max Jacob's supervised unconsciousness and Pinget's voluntary contradiction is built on tone, one tone among the billions; the voice at the bottom of the water well, of what is said and what is lost; the impossible permanence of words and the flight of meaning in the oblivion of time. For Pinget time is a frame that repeats itself and is lost in time loops. It is sometimes a theater of the critical apparatus, notes of notes, theoretical and practical methods of writing, put in abyss of a theater of footings, returning, to other bottom of page, bibliography of the bibliography up to the concrete metaphor image of the water well, place and object of all the contradictions of the creative act.