Intertextual loops in modern drama

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Author: Christine Olga Kiebuzinska

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Intertextual Loops in Modern Drama

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Christine Kiebuzinska

Madison • Teaneck Fairleigh Dickinson University Press London: Associated University Presses

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2001 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-8386-3895-3/01 $10.00 8¢ pp, pc.]

Associated University Presses 440 Forsgate Drive Cranbury, NJ 08512 Associated University Presses 16 Barter Street London WC1A 2AH, England Associated University Presses P.O. Box 338, Port Credit Mississauga, Ontario Canada L5G 4L8

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kiebuzinska, Christine Olga. Intertextual loops in modern drama / Christine Kiebuzinska. p. cm. Collection of essays, most of which are rev. versions of previously published material. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Intertextuality and palimpsestuous relations—Witkacy’s theory of pure form—Elfriede Jelinek’s Nora project—Jacques and his master : Kundera’s dialogue with Diderot—Christopher Hampton’s Tales from Hollywood—The scandal maker : Thomas Bernhard and the reception of Heldenplatz—Caryl Churchill’s Mad forest—Kafka betrayed—The narcissist and the mirror in Les liaisons dangereuses : Laclos, Hampton, and Mu¨ller. ISBN 0-8386-3895-3 (alk. paper) 1. European drama—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Intertextuality. I. Title. PN1861 .K467 2001 809.2⬘094⬘0904—dc21 00-050411 printed in the united states of america

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And what the heck is Peter Falk doing here? What’s anyone doing here? What are we doing here? And so on. But they are interpreters. That is, they each see everything differently. Later, they’re still quibbling, gazing miserably at the Ocean, oh not about terrorists or actors any more, not even about structures or significances or underlying themes, but about whether Emma Bovary has black or brown hair, is plump or slim, is over-dressed or elegant; about whether Dorothea Brooke is austere or frumpy, Casaubon decrepit or dignified, Felipe Segundo young and dark in embroidered collar or middle-aged and grey, all in black with a white ruff. C’mon Kelly, get real, what the hell does it matter?—It does matter, they’ve all been wrenched out of their contexts, so how do we recognize them except by dress and appearance, apart from their labels?—Right they’re castration fantasies, they wander our minds like stray phalluses—Jack you don’t have to be crude.—I didn’t say pricks, did I, phallus is a psychosymbolic term, surely you—Oh, shut your face.—But not my mind, honey, it really is all in our minds anyway.—Not all, the text always—But the reader forgets, my love, he is extraordinarily inattentive to such details, since he’s already constructed an image, not from descriptions, which he often skips, but from the way a character talks, feels, behaves. He may even identify and see himself, herself. But the Reader, the Implied Reader, the Ideal Reader? She bows her head mechanically but slightly as if impelled yet embarrassed. —Christine Brooke-Rose, Textermination

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Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The ‘‘Scene’’ of Intertextuality

9 11

Part I: Avant-Garde Subversions and Transgressions 1. Intertextuality and Palimpsestuous Relations 2. Witkacy’s Theory of Pure Form: Change, Dissolution, and Uncertainty 3. Elfriede Jelinek’s Nora Project: Or What Happens When Nora Meets the Capitalists Part II: Conversations, Misinterpretations, Contestations 4. Jacques and His Master: Kundera’s Dialogue with Diderot 5. Christopher Hampton’s Tales from Hollywood: Brecht and Horva`th as ‘‘Characters’’ Part III: Intertextual Politics and Scandals 6. The Scandal Maker: Thomas Bernhard and the Reception of Heldenplatz 7. Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest: Examining Postrevolutionary Disillusionment

21 47 87

123 163

199 231

Part IV: Copies, Forgeries, and Mockeries 8. Kafka Betrayed: Or Reflections on Kafkology 9. The Narcissist and the Mirror in Les Liaisons Dangereuses: Laclos, Hampton, and Mu¨ller

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Notes Bibliography Index

306 326 341

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Acknowledgments OVER THE COURSE OF PREPARING THIS MANUSCRIPT, I BENEFITED IMmensely from the NEH seminar on ’’Performance, Theory, Modern Drama and Postmodern Theatre’’ in 1991 directed by Herbert Blau, whose guidance ultimately shaped my earliest ideas on the subject of intertextuality and theatrical art. I also thank my own institution, Virginia Tech, for providing a number of research and travel grants that made it possible for me to complete this project. The generous Creative Match Grant for Study on Theatricality in 1989 allowed me to travel to theater festivals and to familiarize myself with new approaches in the theater. In particular, the Arts and Sciences Research Travel Grant in 1993 enabled me to conduct research in Vienna on Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek. At the same time, the opportunities to teach both undergraduate and graduate courses on theatrical art in the English Department gave me the opportunity to validate my interest in intertextuality. Previous versions of chapters 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 9 have appeared in the following journals (in order): ‘‘Witkacy’s Theory of Pure Form: Change, Dissolution, and Uncertainty,’’ South Atlantic Review 58, no. 4 (1993); ‘‘Elfriede Jelinek’s Nora Project: Or What Happens When Nora Meets the Capitalists,’’ Modern Drama 41, no. 1 (1998); ‘‘Jacques and His Master: Kundera’s Dialogue with Diderot,’’ Comparative Literature Studies 29, no. 1 (1992); ‘‘The Scandal Maker: Thomas Bernhard and the Reception of Heldenplatz,’’ Modern Drama 38, no. 3 (1995); ‘‘Kafka Betrayed: Or Reflections on Kafkology (A. Bennett and M. Kundera),’’Journal of the Kafka Society of America 19. no. 1/2 (1995); ‘‘The Narcissist and the Mirror in Les Liaisons Dangereuses: Laclos, Hampton, and Mu¨ller,’’ The Comparatist 17 (May 1993). A special debt is owed to my life’s companion, Wayne, whose skepticism about postmodernism is likely the reason I had to figure out how to present poststructuralist theory in lucid terms. At the same time, his continuing support by assuming many of the responsibilities of our shared life made it possible for me to complete the manuscript. Finally, to my children I owe the sense of connectedness and en9

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

gagement in my work. Without my son Andre and my daughter-inlaw Irene’s patient tutorials on the use of the computer, I probably would not have entered the technological age as readily as I did. Nor can I omit Aleksandr and Melassia from the list of indebtedness, for the two little scoundrels represent the future for their grandmother. I am grateful to my son Greg for his encouragement and faith in me. I also owe a special debt to my daughter Ksenya, who frequently tracked down sources for me at the Widener Library, and I am filled with gratitude to both Ksenya and her husband, Lowell, for the many times they have offered me hospitality in Cambridge, and to Lowell in particular for sharing invaluable insights and sources with me. Special thanks to Darlene Baker, who essentially saved portions of the manuscript when they had dramatically disappeared from my hard drive. Also appreciation to those colleagues and students who offered their technical skill, help, and encouragement during a time when I was faced with what seemed to be an insurmountable task.

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Introduction: The ‘‘Scene’’ of Intertextuality This ‘‘l’’ which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost —Roland Barthes, S12

THIS COLLECTION OF ESSAYS ON INTERTEXTUAL CIRCUITS AND LOOPS IN twentieth-century drama represents my continuing attraction as a comparatist to the infinite possibilities that create relationships between texts. But as Roland Barthes observes, this ‘‘I’’ that is making these connections already represents ‘‘a plurality of other texts,’’ some of which are connected to my training as a comparatist, others to the fact that I was born a comparatist. By that I mean that my childhood represents ‘‘a typical European education’’ of displacement, sudden collisions with other cultures, emigration, and perpetual triangulation. I was a child born during World War II, and my first memories are connected to travel away from the familiar to the unfamiliar and unrecognizable. As refugees from war-torn Western Ukraine, my family, amidst thousands of refugees fleeing for more or less the same reasons, traversed Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and ultimately arrived in November of 1944 in Berlin just in time for the most spectacular fireworks I’ve ever seen. I was but four years old and could not yet understand why I had been torn out of my familiar world, Zosia, my ‘‘nania,’’ my toys, and the children’s books my father read to me. Similarly, I wasn’t aware that I was living through what can be called a grand historical narrative, or that the flares that accompanied nightly bombings were in any way connected to the shrill whistle that the bombs themselves made. Consequently, any memory comes from representation and the close scrutiny of the few personal residues of my past. In a sense I learned about my past through the movies, the many recreations of World War II made in Hollywood. But since these were clearly made from one perspective, I had to fill in those parts that did not ‘‘show’’ my experience. In many ways, the past as reflected by this doubled memory is akin to Vladimir Nabokov’s observation in The 11

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Real Life of Sebastian Night that memory of the past is ‘‘no more than sundry bits of cinema-film cut away by scissors.’’1 Already on the journey itself to Berlin in the transport cars allotted to the refugees, I recognized that the other children didn’t use the same words I did, but because they were of Slavic origins, the words were not entirely unknown. And after all, we shared the same culture, one of being outside events, peripheral, displaced. However, as George Steiner, educated in three languages from early childhood, observes, No two languages, no two dialects or local idioms within a language, identify, designate their worlds in the same way. The memories stored, the empirical surroundings inventoried, the social relations which the language organizes and mirrors (kinship, for example), the colors distinguished in its vocabulary of perceptions, differ, often radically, from tongue to tongue.2

If, as Steiner observes, ‘‘our literatures are children of Babel,’’ then no two readers can share the same reading nor can they participate in the same exchange of memories, colors, and ultimately language itself, for the polyglot, however ‘‘sensitive to nuance and specificity, will never possess that somnambular at-homeness in a single tongue.’’3 Only the native speaker will have access to a language’s full range and depths, its Blut und Boden specificity. When reflecting back on my travels in a cross-weave of languages, I realize that though I have come close to the kind of understanding that a native speaker possesses, I still am always both outside and inside that language. I experienced this awareness in early childhood, for when we escaped from the bombing of Berlin in April 1945 to remote and rural Feldkirch in the Austrian Voralberg, we were the outsiders among those who had been rooted there for generations. It was not just a question of exclusion from language and tradition, but also the ruins of the castle on the hill, the Katzenturm, and the shopping arcades in an old town that dated back to the thirteenth century, all of which somehow did not belong to me. I was sent to an Austrian grammar school, without knowing a word of German or having any understanding of what it meant to be Austrian or, for that matter, Ukrainian. At the same time, neither the teachers nor the other pupils had ever met someone outside their culture; hence, I had to ‘‘translate’’ myself to those who had no concept of home as someplace else. Soon I became ‘‘fluent’’ in German, and that fluency allowed for learning but not quite for acquisition of a new culture. For example,

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the first grade teacher read us fairytales, which for the Austrian children were totally familiar since they already knew ‘‘what happens next’’ and recognized in the illustrations their own cultural roots, customs, dress, and social relationships. I, on the other hand, returned home to children’s books written in the Cyrillic alphabet and illustrated with images of a different folklore, embroidered blouses rather than dirndls and lederhosen, thatched roofs rather than gingerbread architecture, Baba Yaga instead of the Wolf. In time though, I learned German, and by the time we left for the United States in 1949, I had acquired the joy of being somewhat inside the language, of being able to express nuance and subjective responses. This would not last, for once again under the designation of ‘‘displaced person,’’ more commonly known as DP, I had to acquire yet another culture, but one less stable than the familiar Austrian one, for, as typical indigent immigrants to the United States, we moved into inner-city neighborhoods inhabited almost entirely by the representatives of the ‘‘otherness’’ of numerous immigrant cultures, class, racial differences, and so on. Since most of the new immigrants didn’t know English, many learned the language not from native speakers, but from those ‘‘others’’ that may have arrived earlier and liked to impress the newcomers with their seemingly total acculturation. Though we all had the misconception that what surrounded us was a so-called American culture, the irony is that we learned about Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse not from the dominant culture but from those who, like us, didn’t ‘‘know the language.’’ Strangely enough, neither Bugs Bunny nor Mickey Mouse as texts represented the same sense of exclusion as did the life of the charming and privileged Bobbsey Twins, characters in a series of books given to me by some well-meaning neighbor anxious to acculturate an immigrant child to appropriate models. I read about the Bobbsey Twins carefully, imagining that if I truly understood all their textual markers, I might finally belong to the same culture. Alas, the Bobbsey Twins not only belonged to a different culture, but also came from a privileged social and economic background, from which I was by way of displacement and immigrant status totally excluded. However, at age nine I had neither knowledge of economics nor of the theory of social stratification, and instead wondered why my parents, unlike those of the Bobbsey Twins, couldn’t take me to the seashore. But as I look back to living in the realm of constant desire, I did acquire a number of cultural educations almost simultaneously, one superimposed over the other like two transparencies conflated into one photograph.

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It is impossible to perceive the meaning of any one thing without knowing the pattern of the surrounding things. It took a number of years before I had acquired enough of the experience behind the ‘‘foreign’’ words in the texts that words stopped referring only to themselves and became more transparent, at least to a degree. As Milan Kundera observes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, ‘‘words misunderstood’’ have to do with difference in culture, ideology, and aesthetics, and as these words acquire weight, as they often do to native speakers, they become ‘‘principles.’’ That is why Kundera reminds his readers of the etymological comparison of words such as compassion, which ‘‘designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment’’ while words that designate ‘‘co-feeling’’ such as ‘‘soucit, spolczucie, Mitgefu¨hl, medkansla’’ signify ‘‘the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy.’’4 Kundera’s point in discussing ‘‘words misunderstood’’ has little to do with encouraging a polyglot proficiency but more with the constant differentiation and misreading in any one language. Consequently, he tries to implicate his readers in the generation and reception of meaning as ‘‘translators’’ who call attention to difference extending over a vast gamut of possibilities. This then is how I became a comparatist, a translator of culture of sorts, and why I became particularly interested in both theater and film, for there I was able to ‘‘see’’ the translations embodied. Steiner comments, ‘‘Conductors, directors in the theater, communicative readers of poetry, are our first-line respondents and interpreters.’’ So is a translator, particularly since a translator is always in search of total understanding, and that understanding leads to variations, for as Steiner observes, there have been a dozen Antigones in this century. Each reader translates in such a manner that each reading and re-reading ‘‘can modulate into a wealth of responsive genres of ‘answerings’.’’5 Though my father tries to remind me of my origins, and wellmeaning others noting my accent also ask about my origins, both my father’s demands and the curiosity of the others tend to relegate me back to a state of being which is less familiar to me than the chaotic simultaneity of triangulation from one culture to yet another to yet another. Eva Hoffman in her Lost in Translation, her meditations of life in another language, observes the impossibility of knowing one’s origins: ‘‘How will I ever pin down the reality of what happened to my parents? I come from the war; it is my true origin. But as with all our origins, I cannot grasp it. Perhaps we never know where we come from; in a way, we are all created ex nihilo.’’6 Like Nabokov’s Sebastian Knight, the born comparatist becomes a cos-

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mopolitan with memories made up of ambivalence and divided values. Julia Kristeva, no stranger to transcultural migration herself, observes that these questions regarding Blut und Boden are in themselves problematic, and in the ‘‘Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner’’ of her Strangers to Ourselves, she argues for cosmopolitanism: ‘‘And what about your origins? Tell us about them, it must be fascinating!’’ Blundering fools never fail to ask the question. Their surface kindness hides the sticky clumsiness that so exasperates the foreigner. The foreigner, precisely—like a philosopher at work—does not give the same weight to ‘‘origins’’ as common sense does. He fled from that origin— family, blood, soil—and, even though it keeps pestering, enriching, hindering him, or giving him pain, and often all of it at once, the foreigner is its courageous and melancholy betrayer. His origin certainly haunts him, for better and for worse, but it is indeed elsewhere that he has set his hopes, that his struggles take place, that his life holds together today. Elsewhere versus the origin, and even nowhere versus the roots.7

There is a certain poetics of life in another culture, for this poetics represents two conflicting impulses: the desire to find a stable site for individual identity and the desire to deterritorialize the self. Though I excelled in English in high school, my fascination was with Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Albert Camus, and Vladimir Nabokov—writers who seemed to lead me back to an abstract homeland. In thinking back why I preferred these rather than Charles Dickens, George Eliot, or even F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway, whom we studied in Honors English, it may have been because the writers with dual cultural identities used irony as an intentional transmission both of information and an evaluative attitude towards the world. But also the writers on my list of favorites all experienced life in another language, as if illustrating the fact that only the polyglot becomes an expert at decoding and then translating individual experience, connotations, paralinguistic sounds, gestures, and so on. Above all, the writers that I preferred tended to be introspective, self-informing, self-reflexive, auto-referential, and auto-representational. Surely the required writers we studied also used irony for calling attention to social injustice, and so on, but for me they lacked the type of irony that conveys an attitude and that undermines principles such as value, order, control, and, above all, identity. Identification with the ironical distance of my favorites somehow developed my sense of cultural negative capability, potentially the truest things about my identity, and one that ultimately led me to the study of comparative literature, for as Linda Hutcheon observes, ‘‘irony too

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is a sign of something else, something unsaid, and to read ironically is also to read with suspicion.’’8 Similarly, Hoffman, a fellow-immigrant, provides yet another comment on the recognition of ironical distance: ‘‘I step into a culture that splinters, fragments, and reforms itself as if it were a jigsaw puzzle dancing in a quantum space. . . . Perhaps a successful immigrant is an exaggerated version of the native. From now on, I’ll be made, like a mosaic, of fragments—and my consciousness of them. It is only in that observing consciousness that I remain, after all, an immigrant.’’9 However, I am equally aware that the drama of intercultural clash, without the irony of self-consciousness when repeated too often, becomes a cliche´ , easily assimilated into discourse of ‘‘otherness’’ or victimization.

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I Avant-Garde Subversions and Transgressions

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1 Intertextuality and Palimpsestuous Relations MY INTRODUCTION IS INTENDED TO ILLUSTRATE THAT THE ACTIVITY OF A reader is not one of being a consumer of texts, but rather one of learning and constructing a new set of relations. Intertextuality offers a new model for perceiving the borderline between art and culture; this model requires that one perceive a text from a position, observes, ‘‘within both art and culture and yet within neither, a model that is profoundly implicated in, yet still capable of criticizing that which it seeks to describe.’’1 The term intertextuality is of more recent coinage than other terms describing relationships between texts and was first introduced to critical discourse by Kristeva in the late 1960s, and, though often misunderstood, the term elucidates the transposition of one or more systems of signs into another text. As Kristeva explains, this ‘‘destructive-constructive’’ activity creates texts that are permutations of other texts, or an ‘‘intertextuality,’’ for ‘‘in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another.’’2 The concept is closely related to the generally accepted idea that a literary text is synchronically related to the network of already extant texts and must be situated primarily in relation to them. As an approach, intertextuality calls attention to the extent that any given text is created out of a corpus of texts that preceded its appearance. At the same time an intertextual approach creates a modification in the manner in which all the texts intersecting each other are read. Since antiquity, texts have been described not only with reference to their imitatio vitae but also in their relationship to each other. Aristotle in his Poetics had circumscribed the imitatio veterum that distinguishes generic modes such as the epic and tragedy. It is important to note that Jacques Derrida considers ‘‘theories’’ to be subject to the same process in discourse as other texts and observes that each ‘‘theoretical jetty’’ enters a priori, originally, into conflict and competition with other texts. Jetty for Derrida means ‘‘the force of that movement which is not yet subject, project, or object, not even rejec21

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tion.’’ Derrida explains that when individual theories confront each other, each theory ‘‘incorporates other identities—by contamination, parasitism, grafts, organ transplants, incorporation, etc.’’ Thus a theory, despite its original purity, becomes a theoretical jetty ‘‘inasmuch as it claims to comprehend itself by comprehending all the others—by extending beyond their borders, exceeding them, inscribing them within itself.’’3 Derrida’s observation explains that without writing volumes it is difficult to discuss intertextuality, and by way of that theory to explain what is meant by the extension of borders between texts. Ever since Aristotle’s Poetics, theories of representation were ‘‘structured, constructed, designed in order to explain for all the other jetties (past, contemporary, and yet to come)’’4 their position vis-a`-vis imitation of reality and also imitation of genre. Aristotle, for example, in his definition and analysis of tragedy, selected six constituent qualities of tragedy and discussed the ideal nature of each of the integral parts in a hierarchical manner as to their importance to the genre. Not only did Aristotle establish the ideal characteristics of the genre, but he also warned about transgressions against unity of action or plot arrangement. For example, Aristotle designated the plot constructed out of episodic elements as ‘‘the worst.’’ As we know from the history of drama, the so-called essential unities of the genre were defined even more rigidly with the rediscovery of Aristotle by Lodovico Castelvetro (1570) and Nicolas Boileau-Despreàux (1674), both of whom made the rules of tragedy even more prescriptive by introducing two more unities—time and place. It was by way of parodies and travesties of classical tragedies that Aristotle’s theoretical jetty was first subverted. However, as Gerard Genette observes, though parodies and travesties ‘‘appeared’’ to subvert the genre, usually that subversion consisted of diverting ‘‘the letter of the text to another purpose.’’ Consequently, though content itself was parodied, the tendency was to stick ‘‘to the letter as closely as possible’’5 in prolonging Aristotle’s theoretical jetty into the twentieth century. The dominance of Aristotelian theory in drama and theatrical practice was undermined by what Aristotle considered as ‘‘the worst’’ kind of plot, for the episodic plot has been the organizing principle of dramatic texts from William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Georg Bu¨chner to such examples from high modernism as Bertolt Brecht or Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz as well as to the texts, frequently designated as postmodern, of writers such as Milan Kundera, Elfriede Jelinek, Heiner Mu¨ ller, Christopher Hampton, Caryl Churchill, Alan Bennett, or Thomas Bernhard. Each deviation from Aristotle’s theoretical jetty called forth ‘‘the in-

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vention of transplants, relays, parasitisms, shifters,’’ which could be interpreted, as the case may be, ‘‘as contaminations, or as salutary provocations.’’6 Moreover, as a result of exporting discourses outside of their field, the new textual configurations proved to be as original as those that had been uncontaminated by such factors as ‘‘influence.’’ Despite the fact that Aristotle demanded strict adherence to his rules for tragedy, he was much more generous to the poets regarding their invention of plots, for he argued that one is a poet ‘‘by virtue of the imitative element in his work.’’ Though apparently Aristotle accepts influence as a given, the genealogy of the word influence as used in literary studies emerges in conjunction with late-eighteenth-century interest in defining originality and genius. More contemporary, ‘‘influence’’-inspired literary studies continue to be concerned with obvious relationships of dyads of transmission from author upon author, or tradition upon tradition. In particular, the study of influence became the main method employed by the newly emerging comparative literature studies in the late nineteenth century. The power of influence is such that it predetermines the perception of a ‘‘precursor’’ and thus an intentional connection to a kind of oedipal relationship to an idealized father/ author figure. More sophisticated explorations of so-called influence tended to include broader areas of study than the mere charting of originality, for they sought to include the notion of context or reception, the study of the development of genre forms and attention to changes in literary movements. Thus, at its best, the concept of influence was broadened to encompass the multifarious relations that exist among texts. At its worst, the study of influence opened up a space for critics to look for influences or precursors that tended to undermine the ‘‘genius’’ of authors or traditions according to the chronologically evaluative practices of literary history. Indeed, Harold Bloom in his The Anxiety of Influence refuses to idealize tradition and relegates such details as whether or not a poet actually read a specific work by the strong precursor to that ‘‘wearisome industry of source-hunting.’’ Criticism for Bloom represents ‘‘the art of knowing the hidden roads that go from poem to poem.’’7 Similarly, according to Michel Riffaterre’s definition of intertextual relations, ‘‘the poem is made up of texts, of fragments of text, integrated with or without conversion into a new system.’’8 Since ‘‘the anxiety of influence’’ continues to play its role as a theoretical jetty in contemporary criticism, it might be worthwhile to continue the problematic of that approach, particularly since it plays a significant role in understanding the particular practices of the dramatists I

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have chosen to illustrate intertextual relations. An added weight to the anxiety of influence emerges from the comparison between literatures of two countries, for repeatedly this approach culminates in an exaltation of one literary tradition over another, often in a form of cultural imperialism. Thus, the study of the hierarchy of literary history often coincided with other hegemonic practices. And despite the lessons that might have been learned from such politically motivated literary evaluations practiced by such literary ‘‘critics’’ as Hitler or Stalin, to mention only the two most prominent ‘‘cultural critics’’ of this century, the evaluative theory of influence studies continues to this day. The classification of certain texts under the rubric of Entartete Kunst in the Germany of the 1930s for their failure to represent Nazi ideals of cultural purity introduces the possibility that the influence of the authors was so powerful that their texts had to be symbolically burned to prevent further influence. Similarly, at the same time in 1932, Andrei Zhdanov called attention to yet another complication to the problem of the relationship of literature and the goals of society by means of the scientific approach of Socialist Realism. Consequently, not only the influence of the literature of the past was carefully analyzed but also all future texts were to be written according to the ideological criteria of ‘‘purposefulness’’ and ‘‘positive’’ heroes and ideals. Literary history was rewritten by such scholars as Georg Luka` cs who allowed only those authors, past and present, into the canon that adhered, at least to a degree, to the criteria of purposeful intent found in Socialist Realism. Thus, this ideological method turned influence studies on its head, for though, as in the past, the study of influence was based on hierarchy and priority, leading to such conclusions that the original was superior over the so-called copy, the scope of influence worked backwards and exerted power over the literary past. Perhaps no dramatist in our century has been so subjected to accusations of lack of originality and oversusceptibility to ‘‘influence’’ than Bertolt Brecht. Since Brecht appears as a major character in Hampton’s Tales from Hollywood, I find it justified to include him as an example in my discussion of theoretical jetties. As the irreverent rebel against the power of influence, it is no wonder that he recommended writers to Verwisch die Spuren, or ‘‘obliterate the traces.’’9 The topic of influence and Brecht presents one with the daunting task of examining the proliferation of studies alleging the primacy of Brecht’s precursors on the development of his Weltanschauung. Many critics writing on Brecht and the problem of influence persist in the notion that the original author, notwithstanding his quality

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or reputation, has proprietary rights over his work, and anyone who transgresses and borrows from the work either lacks originality or, even worse, is denounced as a plagiarist. The attacks on Brecht, which have continued through the decades to the present, use the romantic concept of creativity as something uniquely personal bestowed on the individual of rare sensibility, and the dilemma posed by these value judgments is that authors and texts are treated as products of something called the ‘‘literary imagination.’’ Any evidence to the contrary is taken as evidence of the lack of creativity, originality, and imaginative vision. From this perspective, the literary artifact is important not only in itself but also as an encapsulation of the creative energies of the unique creative spirit.10 However, as Manfred Pfister in his study of intertextuality points out, the more subversive elements that designate the intentional ‘‘borrowings’’ of writers from the entire expanse of texts is already present in such obvious foregrounding of literary ‘‘theft’’ as Robert Burton’s ‘‘Democritus to the Reader’’ from The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) aptly illustrates: No news here; that which I have stolen is from others, Dicitque mihi mea pagina, fur es. . . .] For my part I am one of the number, nos numerus sumus: I do not deny it, I have only this of Macrobius to say for myself. Omne meum, nihil meum, ’tis all mine, and not mine. As a good housewife out of divers fleeces weaves one piece of cloth, a bee gathers wax and honey out of many flowers, and makes a new bundle of all, Floriferis ut apes in slatibus omnia libant, I have laboriously collected this cento out of divers writers, and that sine injuria, I have wronged no authors, but given every man his own. . . . The matter is theirs most part, and yet mine, apparet unde sumptum sit (which Seneca approves), aliud tamen quam unde sumptum sit apparet; which nature doth with the aliment of our bodies incorporate, digest, assimilate, I do concoquere quod hausi, dispose of what I take. I make them pay tribute to set out this my Macaronicon, the method only is mine own; I must usurp that of Wecker e Ter, nihil dictum quod non dictum prius, methodus sola artificem ostendit.11

The copresence between two texts and a number of texts is usually foregrounded ‘‘by the traditional practice of quoting (with quotation marks, with or without specific references’’; however, as Genette comments, ‘‘in another less explicit form, it is the practice of plagiarism . . . which is an undeclared but still literal borrowing.’’12 Consequently, plagiarism, and the problem of tracing sources, clarifying influences, finding the origins of archetypes, pursuing allusions, and denoting imitations are questions that have always preoccupied

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literary scholars. Though the outrageous attitude expressed by Burton reflects a similar playfulness to that associated with intertextual appropriations by playwrights from Alfred Jarry to Tom Stoppard, intertextuality is also one of the terms that reflects poststructuralist preoccupations with the idea of the author, for the ‘‘death’’ of the author means the liberation of the texts from the authority of presence behind it, releasing texts from the constraints of a monologic reading, and thus making the text available for the production of polyglot, plural, contradictory, and indeterminate readings. The notion of intertextuality opens all cultural facts and artifacts to the internal exchanges between them, or it opens up words to make them yield the ‘‘infinite modalities’’ of language. The problem with studies arguing that so and so influenced Brecht and therefore plays a significant role in Brecht’s creativity is to deny that Brecht was as much a participant in the same cultural discourse as his contemporaries. Conversely, one could maintain that Brecht had a profound reciprocal influence on his contemporaries as well, an approach that would ultimately come full circle, privileging one influence over the other. One can easily determine just from the juxtaposition of theater directors Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator as potential influences on Brecht’s theory and practice that an inherent contradiction exists, particularly since Reinhardt’s theater demonstrates a substantially different method and intent from that of Piscator’s agit-prop theater. What emerges from Brecht’s engaged simultaneous involvement as a student director for both Reinhardt and Piscator is his dialogic attempt to think himself out from what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the monologism of conceptual glue, in this case the study of theatrical tradition and influence. Bakhtin’s dialogism may be helpful in liberating Brecht from the dominance of literary or theatrical tradition since, as Bakhtin explains, ‘‘the contexts of dialogue are without limit,’’ and even meanings emerging from dialogues of the past ‘‘will never be finally grasped once and for all, for they will always be renewed in later dialogue.’’13 ‘‘In the attempts to resolve the dilemma of the significance of influence both on Brecht or Brecht’s influence on others, perhaps one should turn to Brecht’s observations on historical processes, for in ‘‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’’ Brecht writes that the stage image should above all reveal contradictions between the different responses or interpretations of historical periods presented in that image. According to Brecht, the image that provides a historical definition ‘‘will retain something of the rough sketching’’ indicating ‘‘traces of other movements and features’’ in the completed picture. To bring out the simultaneity of the ‘‘traces of other

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movements,’’ Brecht suggests that one should imagine a man making a speech while standing in a valley, at times changing his views or uttering thoughts that contradict one another, ‘‘so that the accompanying echo forces them into confrontation.’’ Brecht’s decidedly Derridean observation may, as a result, be applied to the analysis of his own work, which echoes and shows traces of the influence of others as sketched on theater in general. These echoes reappear in his work as ‘‘traces of other movements and features’’ and provide his theater with its ‘‘fully worked figure’’ or character.14 In the light of contemporary poststructuralist critical theory regarding authorship and its proprietary adjunct, the literary work of art, the notions of both author and work have been found to be inadequate. Brecht himself serves as a precursor to the poststructuralist dismantling of authorship as spiritual property when he observes that originality is related to ‘‘worn out notions of what constitutes property.’’15 Each age has its own attitudes towards authorship, and from the contemporary perspective of poststructuralist criticism, authorship is viewed as an accessory to the readers’ rewriting of texts from their particular situated knowledge. Brecht obviously felt that the notion of the literary masterpiece as private property was outmoded since art essentially belongs to the field of collective reception. At the same time that Brecht was overturning the laws that constitute literary property, members of the Prague Linguistic Circle, in particular Jan Mukarˇovsky, were revolutionizing literary theory in the 1930s by calling attention to the fact that influence is not a hierarchical process that gradates several influences, allowing one to prevail over the other. Instead they posited that influence functions by ‘‘penetrating’’ and ‘‘colliding’’ with the tradition of local literature to whose conditions and needs it is subordinated. The local artistic and ideological tradition can thus ‘‘create dialectic tensions among the influences.’’16 Derrida’s observations about the use of ‘‘quotation marks’’ or what he playfully calls ‘‘inverted commas’’ are particularly pertinent to reconsidering Brecht’s disregard for ‘‘worn out notions of what constitutes literary property.’’ Quotation marks impose themselves in such a way on language, ‘‘that it is no longer possible to use seriously the words of tradition.’’17 Hence, whether Brecht acknowledges his sources or not, the obvious quotable quality of his texts suggests that for him literary texts belong to the same category as apples in a roadside garden. Genette observes that while intertextuality represents the practice of quoting with or without acknowledgment, nonetheless, ‘‘there is no such thing as an innocent

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transposition: i. e., one that does not in one way or another alter the meaning of its hypotext.’’18 Today, for example, we use Brecht’s terms such as epic or alienation or Gestus or even the term Brechtian, with or without quotation marks. Frequently, however, our use of these terms serves mostly our own need to put these terms into quotation marks, for these ‘‘inverted commas’’ signal our desire to participate in a privileged discourse; at the same time these marks, if we do not understand their usage, may effectively represent our exclusion from that particular discourse. The ‘‘mention’’ and ‘‘awareness’’ of that mentioning creates an uneasy and vigilant relationship, or as Derrida comments, ‘‘the only objective and objectifying relationship to discourse and to what this discourse says.’’ He continues: . . . the general irony which modifies to such a great extent discourses today . . . makes all the more rare, strange, unbearable too, those events of writing whose force nevertheless consists not in ‘‘using’’ language again, but in ‘‘using’’ language again by submitting it to the effects of deconstruction, that is without reconstituting what is being deconstituted and thus without giving up the quotation marks. . . . What is at stake, then is another writing of the quotation marks themselves, which, being doubly vigilant, being doubly in quotation marks and redoubling the quotation marks in an inventive way, destabilizes even the opposition between discourse with and discourse without quotation marks, mention and use, and the entire system of associated values. . . . So, of course, these events of writing which use quotation marks, which make use of them and exhaustively use them up in order to write something else, these kinds of forcing are taken for play. And the anxiety which they create—as they leave no criterion to distinguish between use and mention—explains the defensive discourse which consists in exposing this writing as gratuitous play (aestheticism) devoid of scientific or theoretical seriousness, as well as of political or ethical responsibility.19

Brecht understood that quotability was the hallmark of the ‘‘collision’’ of one text with another, and he foregrounded the ‘‘quoted, narrated, anticipated, reminded’’ through estrangement of the original.20 Consequently, in his theatrical practice, his stage decor no longer represents the world of the original but merely quotes it, or refers to it through a variety of Verfremdungseffekt[s]: the actor’s Gestus as a quotation of social attitude, the half-curtain which announces a new way of looking at representation, a stage decor that uses projections on a screen of either documentary material or of announcements of upcoming events in the play, and the use of choruses, songs, and frequently interrupted action. Brecht’s use of these ef-

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fects deflects the spectator’s expectations of traditional interpretations, which, if they were to be catered to, would produce a theater that would be ‘‘boring, a cliche´’’: [We] must drop our habit of taking the different structures of past periods, then stripping them of everything that makes them different; so that they all look more or less like our own, which then acquires from this process a certain air of having been there all along, in other words of permanence pure and simple. Instead we must leave them their distinguishing marks and keep their impermanence always before our eyes, so that our own period can be seen to be impermanent too.21

According to Mukarˇovsky, artists like Brecht ‘‘violate norms, however slightly, in order to provoke interest.’’22 The violation of norms on Brecht’s part is not a purely aesthetic endeavor, for in exposing naturalistic illusion, he also wants to problematize the illusion-making capacity of theater as well. In particular, Brecht wants to expose ‘‘the public side of role behavior behind which the technique of staging is hidden,’’23 and by exposing the theatrical mechanism he wants to expose the mechanism of social roles as well. The notion of displaying historical contradictions that is so central to Brecht’s own approach to both his drama and theatrical practice has become a major concern in rethinking, as Patrice Pavis explores, ‘‘the classical heritage of modern drama.’’ In attempts to evaluate the heritage or influence of past traditions one is confronted by defining notions that are both imprecise and archaic since each of these notions ‘‘recalls its opposite, or at least a corrective or a different point of view that relativizes its meaning.’’24 The evaluation of the role of historicity in Brecht’s texts depends on factors of reception. Frequently, this point of view denies Brecht, or any other reader such as Witkiewicz, Kundera, Churchill, or Hampton, the playful activity of interpreting a literary heritage according to her aesthetic and cultural values and in light of individual concerns. Since all literary works are ‘‘rewritten’’ by the societies that read them, as Terry Eagleton observes, ‘‘different historical periods have constructed a ‘different’ . . . Shakespeare for their own purposes’’ and have found different elements in his plays ‘‘to value or devalue.’’25 Barthes, who finds the literary work in its formalistic, almost sacred, concreteness inadequate in explaining what occurs when the reader approaches a text, suggests that the problem may lie in the idea that when reading is reduced to consumption the consequence is often ‘‘boredom’’: ‘‘to suffer from boredom means that one can-

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not produce the text, open it out, make it go.’’26 What is omitted from the devaluation of the role that reception plays in studies of influence is that a variety of different receptions or readings of literary texts is possible. These readings range from inspiration, the recognition of similar values, the questioning of systems of values and beliefs to reactions that evoke strong negative responses, provocation, and so on. To prevent the power of authors of the past on future texts, it may be useful to explore the matter of difference as an inherent trait of all texts, for as Bakhtin observes, ‘‘There is no first or last discourse, and dialogical context knows no limits (it disappears into an unlimited past and in our unlimited future).’’ Thus the text is never final, and potential readings are limitless: Even past meanings, that is those that have arisen in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (completed once and for all, finished), they will always change (renewing themselves) in the course of the dialogue’s subsequent development, and yet to come. At every moment of the dialogue, there are immense and unlimited masses of forgotten meanings, but, in some subsequent moments, as the dialogue moves forward, they will return to memory and live in renewed form (in a new context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will celebrate its rebirth: the problem of the great temporality.27

As Brecht, Witkiewicz, Kundera, Hampton, Mu¨ller, Churchill, and Jelinek well understand, the marked and unmarked quotation marks that proliferate in their texts, far from neutralizing these references to other text, rather convey an awareness of the copresence of the older texts. This awareness is already created in the very titles of Kundera’s Jacques and His Master or Jelinek’s Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte. Consequently, rather than neutralizing the sense of distance from their obvious references, both Kundera and Jelinek convey the sense of history or the historicizing of the distance between the writing of Denis Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist or Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The quotation marks that recall the general quotability of the apparent contents of Kundera’s or Jelinek’s representations of well-known texts are not mere formalist conventions ‘‘concerned with propriety’’ but serve as reminders of a general contamination of ‘‘irreducible parasitism’’ which affects any text that is transplanted from one culture to another. Having already announced their quotable quality from the very beginning, the intertextual elements foregrounded by obvious ‘‘quotation marks’’ by Kundera or Jelinek, for example, demand recognition. Without rec-

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ognition, they can only be ‘‘mis-known,’’ unrecognizable and misunderstood ‘‘monstrosities.’’28 Ingeborg Hoesterey, from whose article ‘‘The Intertextual Loop: Kafka, Robbe-Grillet, Kafka’’ I have ‘‘borrowed’’ part of the title for my collection of essays on modern dramatists, observes, ‘‘the intertextual makeup of the critic’s mind approaching a text’’ necessitates a certain lens adjustment, as for example, ‘‘when looking at RobbeGrillet while teaching (thus rereading) Kafka.’’ Examining a text or performance through an ‘‘intertextual lens may produce the same meandering, circular, looping dynamics as the artistic conceptualization and shares the latter’s insistent impulse to draw together distant elements, fragments of different discourses.’’ Intertextual loops inscribe themselves on the surface of the text in great concentric circles in which the other texts become visible. Intertextual perception not only negates the category of individual production but also that of individual reception, for reading intertextually often produces a ‘‘highly personal component’’ and raises the question of which work would do what to our reading of another contemporary or earlier work.29 Intertextuality is perhaps the term that is most frequently used to designate relationships between texts; however, Genette adds another term to the vocabulary of textual relations, that of literature as a palimpsest: [O]n the same parchment, one text can become superimposed upon another, which it does not quite conceal but allows to show through. It has been aptly said that pastiche and parody ‘‘designate literature as a palimpsest.’’ This must be understood to apply more generally to every hypertext as Borges made clear concerning the relation between texts and its foretexts. The hypertext invites us to engage in a relational reading, the flavor of which, however perverse, may well be condensed in an adjective coined by Phillippe Lejeune: a palimpsestuous reading. To put it differently, just for the fun of switching perversities, one who really loves texts must wish from time to time to love (at least) two together.30

In a palimpsestuous reading, the hypertext, or the original, always stands to gain by having its hypertextual status perceived. What to do with this perception is to a large extent the purpose of my examination of such hypertexts as Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist, Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Pillars of Society, and Ghosts, August Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata, and so on as these are reread and rewritten by Milan Kundera, Christopher Hampton, and Heiner Mu¨ller, Elfriede Jelinek, and Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz while they were reading something else, in other words,

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already betraying their original readings. It is interesting that ‘‘betrayal’’ is one of Kundera’s favorite words, for one can betray only the first time, and after that betrayal ‘‘means breaking ranks’’ and ‘‘going off into the unknown.’’31 Each ‘‘palimpsestuous reading,’’ each ‘‘betrayal,’’ each intertextual reading leads to a journey away from the original which has already been betrayed because the reader dared to love ‘‘at least’’ two or more texts together. From experience I recognize that intertextual theory requires a certain lens adjustment when writing about Jelinek’s Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte oder Stutzen der Gesellschaften while, for example, teaching Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in an undergraduate Introduction to Drama class. Though the students are unfamiliar with Jelinek’s text (it hasn’t been translated), the reading that we explore in class is already informed by Jelinek’s collision with two of Ibsen’s texts as well as her postfeminist argument with liberal feminism, for as Hoesterey comments, ‘‘the act of reflection focusing on the primary text produces an alienation to a past consciousness, an act of awareness which triggers the fusion of the two horizons earlier presumed to be different.’’ The interplay between tradition and the horizon of expectations on the part of the reader ‘‘creates a circular movement, a perpetuum mobile of interacting textual stimuli, proceeding along the structure of the intertextual loop, producing interpretive progress by regress and thereby demonstrating the reciprocal nature of all critical reading.’’32 The circling, meandering motion of intertextual reflection creates what Derrida calls a disruption in the linear process of literary history, a disruption that would ‘‘presumably have come about when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought, that is to say repeated, a repetition in all of the senses of this word’’: From then on it became necessary to think the law which governed the center in the constitution of structure and the process of signification prescribing its displacements and substitutions for the law of central presence—but a central presence which was never itself in its surrogate. The surrogate does not substitute itself for anything which has somehow pre-existed. From then on it was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a being-present, that the center had no natural locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse—when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present out-

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side a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum.33

Derrida’s suggestion that ‘‘surrogates,’’ or other readings, adaptations, translations, and so on do not substitute for ‘‘anything which has somehow preexisted,’’ and consequently everything becomes discourse, a continuous dialogism with that which has no central presence expect as ‘‘interplay of signification ad infinitum.’’ Frank Gehry’s description of his project for building, or rather rebuilding, a conventional house in Santa Monica by ‘‘wrapping’’ a new structure around it seems to echo similar concerns to Derrida’s awareness that the original signified is ‘‘never absolutely outside a system of differences’’: Anyway, I decided to get into a dialogue with the old house . . . where the interiors would join in a dialogue with the exteriors. Here I had it easy, because the old house was already a different aesthetic, and I could play off of it. But I wanted to explore the relationship between the two. I got fascinated with the idea that the old house should appear to remain totally intact from the outside, and that you could look as though it was now packaged in this new skin. The new skin and the windows in the new house would be of a totally different aesthetic than the windows in the old house. So they would constantly be in tension, or whatever, with each other.34

As this ‘‘intertextual’’ house became an art object, Gehry recounts that it was frequently photographed, and each photographer had ‘‘a different idea of how the place should look. So they started moving the furniture around.’’ However, as Fredric Jameson pointedly remarks on the Gehry experiment, ‘‘There can be no question of linking these worlds or spaces, or fusing them into some organic synthesis: at best the peculiar shape dramatizes the impossible task of such representation, all the while indicating its impossibility (and thereby perhaps at some curious second-degree level representing it all at once anyhow).’’35 The furniture-moving by the photographers/interpreters of Gehry’s house serves as an apt comparison to the infinite potential of intertextual relationships among texts, or to use Derrida’s terms, to create ‘‘resemblance with difference.’’ At the same time ‘‘furnituremoving’’ frees the material from reassuring finality by allowing it to enter into new, sometimes equally arbitrary combinations. The art of making new things out of old has the potential merit of ‘‘generating more complex and more savory objects than those that are made on purpose.’’36 A new function is superimposed upon and inter-

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woven with an older text, as for example in Witkiewicz’s rereading of Ibsen’s Ghosts and Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata in his play The Mother. The dissonance between these two concurrent elements from Ibsen and Strindberg in Witkiewicz’s play reveal that Witkiewicz is much less interested in the plot and themes of both playwrights than he is in transforming their formal properties into subject matter. Witkiewicz’s transformation of the two representative texts of theatrical naturalism and symbolism occurs in a similar manner to that what Pablo Picasso did with a bicycle’s saddle and handlebars or Marcel Duchamp with a urinal. As Wolfgang Iser explains, the doubling effect that emerges from the intertextual and extratextual frames of references of self-conscious rereadings of classics ‘‘creates an eventful disorder, in consequence of which both the structure and the semantics of these fields are subjected to certain deformations.’’37 Another factor involved in structuring the reader’s aesthetic experience is connected to the experiential horizon of the reader’s own present. Consequently, the reader surrounds herself with events of all kinds that require a highly attuned cultural antenna to select from the fluid of textual stimuli a textual reading. At times a certain ‘‘amalgamation’’ occurs as in Christine Brooke-Rose’s novel Amalgamemnon (1984) wherein the central character, a professor of literature, erases all boundaries by blurring the texts of Herodotus with the call-ins to a talk-radio program, blending contemporary history with ancient, Agamemnon with a pop singer. Her recipe for this intertextual stew is as follows: The best process will be described as take a dozen abstractions, mix with fresh modifiers finely ground, take an injunction, transgress it with a sharp knife and simmer it slowly in a westerly ghoul force four with three blind spots and a soupçon of fact. Let it cool and add to the mixture, season, fold it in the froth of ten well beaten tracts and cook for twenty years at romantic agony then allow to cool, serve with frosted doubt. Doubt of course will always be a luxury in a society run on certitudes, and next week I shall give you a recipe for the simmering of exquisite doubts.38

Intertextuality functions as a mechanism for challenging and subverting, in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s words the ‘‘grand narratives,’’ for the introduction of other texts serves the ultimate purpose of calling into question the privileged status of canonical literary texts by implicitly integrating all the texts into unstable relationships. What results is a sort of amalgamation that is in constant motion and, therefore, potentially capable of an infinite reinvention of meaning.

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Susan Suleiman explains, ‘‘The appropriation, misappropriation, montage, collage, hybridization and general mixing-up of visual and verbal texts and discourses, from all the periods of the past as well as from the multiple social and linguistic fields of the present is probably the most characteristic feature of what can be called the postmodern style.’’39 Walter Benjamin observes in his ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’’ that authenticity empties out as a notion as one approaches those mediums which are inherently multiple or intertextual; hence, what emerges is ‘‘a system of reproductions without an original.’’ Benjamin perceived that what the dadaists intended and achieved was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creation that they branded as ‘‘reproductions with the very means of productions.’’ The resulting loss of the aura of creativity was not so much related to a change in reproduction techniques but to a change in intent on the part of the makers of art. Benjamin’s observations have particular relevance for contemporary problems of authenticity. From Benjamin’s perspective, the overall character of art is thus no longer the result of technological innovation but mediated by the conscious acts of a generation of artists.40 Consequently, avant-garde playwrights like Witkiewicz and Jelinek not only raise questions about individual production but also that of the individual reception of art. Similarly, Barthes echoes Benjamin: Thus realism (badly named, at any rate badly interpreted) consists not in copying a famous reality as though suffering from a fearfulness which keeps it from being touched directly, is set farther away, postponed, or at least captured through the pictorial matrix in which it has been steeped before being put into words: code upon code, known as realism. This is why realism cannot be designated a ‘‘copier’’ but rather a ‘‘pasticheur’’ (through secondary mimesis, it copies what is already a copy).41

Barthes’s observations remind one that fictional creations are as real, as valid and as truthful as the so-called real objects, and the exposing of the codes upon codes in realism reveals that what had been formerly accepted as perfect mimesis is really just another set of conventions. It is significant that exposure of mimesis often takes the form of intentional parody which presupposes and confirms emancipation from the conventions that mimesis imposes. Like Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, parody works to distance and, at the same time, to involve both artists and spectators in a participatory hermeneutic activity. As a result of the destabilization of order, all texts react to one

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another, they cite one another, they parody one another, they attempt to compete with one another, and all these ‘‘playful’’ games contribute to the indefinite production of even more texts. Due to the paradoxical revisitation of the past, parody thus becomes a privileged mode of intertextual self-reflexivity. The various deletions and additions of selected fragments turn the text into a kind of junction where other texts, norms, and values meet and work upon each other, thus opening up a play-space between the text and its extratextual references. The effect of opening up a play-space is most immediate in the case of so-called classic works, which change constantly due to changes in reading. This is seen clearly when the repetition of a text like Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in a radically transformed intertextual field of poststructuralist readings by Jelinek in her version produces an entirely automatic effect of parody. It is significant that ruptures with most works of the past often take the form of intentional parody. In this case, the parodist gets beyond the dominant mode of thought and expression of the original not by explicitly denouncing it but by repeating it and reproducing it in a noncongruent context. Exaggerated repetition has the effect of rendering the original as absurd, and often this is achieved by revealing the arbitrariness of the ideology of the original. Since the parodist relies on rummaging in textual reserves of the past, the ensuing intertextual stew serves several meanings at once. Ultimately, an intertextual approach leads beyond the relationship between original and ‘‘copy’’ to an examination of how the two works interact with the audience. This suggests that the success of Witkiewicz or Jelinek’s ‘‘palimpsestuous’’ readings depend on the knowledge of the reader and spectator of previous sources. Since it is difficult for spectators to reread a performance text, they are faced with even more complexity since the mise-en-sce`ne in itself may create even more complex intertextual allusions to past theatrical traditions. The participation of readers/spectators, however, becomes even more complex when they have not actually read the original work but are only familiar with its retelling as a ‘‘movie.’’ Since the pleasure of a representation of a representation consists in comparing the copy with the original, the pleasure of a knowledgeable spectator in turn diminishes her involvement in the representation at the narrative level. On the other hand, the spectator who is unaware of the original text and has seen it as a ‘‘movie’’ may ultimately question what’s all the fuss in the slamming of a door in plays like Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Barthes speaks of intertextual codes as a ‘‘mirage of citations,’’42 suggesting that, faced with infinite intertextual codes,

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the grasping for significance is ‘‘likely to prove evasive and insubstantial’’ as soon as the spectator attempts to grasp them.43 The problem that occurs in considering the variety of intertextual spinoffs of particular texts that have acquired a particular value in our society as canonical classics is that educated people are at home with scholarly culture and know how to read a variety of texts. However, what they consider as a natural way of perceiving is but one among other possible ways. Perception that is acquired through education may ultimately be influenced by means of specific, conscious or unconscious, institutionalized or noninstitutionalized factors. In writing about the problem of perception Pierre Bourdieu aptly refers to the example from Martin Heidegger: ‘‘When for instance, a man wears a pair of spectacles which are so close to him physically that they are ‘sitting on his nose,’ they are environmentally more remote from him than the picture on the opposite wall. Their proximity is normally so weakly perceived as to go unnoticed.’’44 Taking Heidegger’s analysis metaphorically, it can be said the illusion of the ‘‘fresh eye’’ as a ‘‘naked’’ eye is an attribute of those who wear the spectacles of culture and who do not see that which enables them to see, any more than they see what they would not see if they were deprived of what enables them to see. Conversely, when faced with scholarly culture, the least sophisticated are somewhat like visitors to a foreign society to whose cultural rituals they do not hold the key. The disorientation and cultural blindness of the less-educated beholders serve as a reminder that perception of art requires a deciphering operation. Because they not only cannot decode and reduce art objects to an intelligible form and also since the information presented by the works exhibited exceeds the deciphering capabilities of the spectators, they in turn perceive them as devoid of signification, of structure and organization. Nor can they recognize the possibilities of variations and intertextual loops that hold a text together. Consequently, their reading of obvious intertextual collages like Jelinek’s Nora Project or Mu¨ller’s Quartet is not actively ironical, for irony is always a modality of perception, and in order for irony to be recognized, more than one ironist must be involved. For that reason irony and parody do not function inclusively, as for example in horror films, but rather exclusively. David Lodge in the introduction to the ten passages of parody and pastiche intertextually connected to other writers in his novel The British Museum Is Falling Down lists ‘‘(in alphabetical order, not the order of their appearance in the text) Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo, author of Hadrian VII), C. P. Snow,

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and Virginia Woolf.’’ ‘‘There are also allusions to other texts,’’ he explains, and to justify his stylistic borrowings he mentions that his parody is a way of coping with Bloom’s ‘‘anxiety of influence.’’45 As further support for his scholarly neurosis, he quotes a passage from Flann O’Brien: The modern novel should be largely a work of reference: most authors spend their time saying what has been said before—usually said much better. A wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the reader instantaneously with the nature of each character, would obviate tiresome explanations and would effectively preclude mountebanks, upstarts, thimbleriggers, and persons of inferior education from an understanding of contemporary literature. Conclusion of explanation. That is all my bum, said Brinsley.46

The playfulness of Lodge’s quotation by O’Brien also suggests the limits of parody, for the passage, already a parody of the theory of intertextuality, wipes out the possibility of even holding on to that ‘‘jetty’’ with the expression ‘‘that is all my bum.’’ So what then remains of intertextual theory and its relevance? Lodge, in defense of his parody/pastiche experiment, mentions that the context may be the element that connects the text to its readers/spectators. Thus, while the text itself may appear as a playful parody, only the newly created context represents the creative element of parody and pastiche. Ultimately, without the creation of contexts, all that texts based on intertextuality would represent is an elitist collage of elements that pronounce themselves to be ‘‘parody for parody’s sake.’’ For many critics and spectators of performances based in plays written by Witkiewicz, Jelinek, Kundera, Hampton, Mu¨ ller, Bernhard and Churchill, or Bennett their polyphonic intertextual quality tends to be confusing, and thus when they detect its connection to the pre-text, they often comment ‘‘not as good as Ibsen.’’ At the same time they find the breakdown of the fictive nature of monologic texts threatening because this breakdown necessarily raises possibilities about the ability of sustaining fiction in real life. Derrida observes that much of the problem of misunderstanding poststructuralist deconstruction has to do with overlooking the significance of context: One of the definitions of what is called deconstruction would be to take this limitless context into account, to pay the sharpest and broadest attention possible to context, and thus to the incessant movement of recontextualization. The phrase which for some has become sort of a slogan, in general so badly misunderstood of deconstruction, ‘‘there is

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nothing outside of text,’’ means nothing else—there is nothing outside of context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking.47

Genette describes parody as singing in another voice or in counterpoint, singing off key and thus deforming the melody, or singing in an inappropriate key and thereby mocking the original. The many textual materials upon which intertextually oriented artists such as Witkiewicz, Jelinek, Churchill, or Hampton obviously seem to rely on appear to function initially as violations of the materials. However, through the ironic lens of parody or pastiche, they at once exploit and subvert that which went before and even that which is concurrently taking place. At the same time, their use of materials encompasses everything that belongs to the wide range of culture. In fact, as in the case of Witkiewicz or Jelinek, everything takes place as if there were a set of processes, gestures, objects and genres from which the various forms of expression chose their own texts, each one attempting to create from this collection of possibilities, a specific system that differs in its media, objects, and processes from the system elaborated by the other texts. The many cases in which one text attempts to compete with another do not erase the distinctions, which separate them and paradoxically only serve to stress the differences. Moreover, as Hans Robert Jauss observes, ‘‘The reconstruction of the horizon of expectations, in the face of which a work was created and received in the past enables one on the other hand to pose questions that the text gave an answer to, and thereby to discover how the contemporary reader could have viewed and understood the work.’’48 While Jauss is particularly interested in the history of reception of texts, for Bourdieu a text is subject to what he designates ‘‘the field of cultural production,’’ whose dynamic is structured by the distribution of available positions, for example the art for art’s theatricality of Witkiewicz’s Pure Form, the ideological position of Brecht’s Epic Theatre, or the postmodern, intertextual hybrids of Jelinek or Hampton. The struggle between these positions is often expressed in the conflict between the orthodoxy of established traditions and the heretical challenge of new modes of cultural practice manifested in position-taking: Every position-taking is defined in relation to the space of possibles. . . . It follows from this, for example, that position-taking changes, even when the position remains identical, whenever there is a change in the universe of options that are simultaneously offered for producers and con-

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sumers to choose from. The meaning of a work (artistic, literary, philosophical, etc.) changes automatically with each change in the field within which it is situated for the spectator or reader.49

Bakhtin’s observations on the polyphonic voices in narrative are particularly relevant to the study of theatrical art since this approach allows for irony, defamiliarization effects, parody, or self-conscious repetition to emerge in the already seemingly polyphonic form of the dramatic text. Consequently, dialogism undermines and contests the text’s claims to canonical truth, and as a result the synchronic relationship among texts is revealed. Consciousness of other texts is not necessarily framed by authorial consciousness, for as Bakhtin notes, ‘‘it reveals itself from inside as standing outside and beside, and the author enters into dialogical relations with it.’’50 Ultimately, Bakhtin’s poetics opens up texts to the play of multiple and parodic and highly stylized discourses and comic inversions of the conventions of genre and the representations of realism. Since the majority of dramatic texts that I’ll be considering in this volume involve the relationship of older texts such as Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses or Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and their ‘‘rewritings’’ by Christopher Hampton and Heiner Mu¨ller or Elfriede Jelinek, it might be worthwhile to consider Derrida’s observations on the bricolage of cultural artifacts: If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concepts from the text of a heritage, which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoluer.51

Intertextuality then has a double focus, for it calls attention to the fact that a text is made of multiple writings, out of what Barthes describes as a ‘‘mirage of citations,’’ and that it also has already ‘‘borrowed’’ from a more or less random cultural field of other texts. The study of intertextuality, as Jonathan Culler cautions, ‘‘is thus not the investigation of sources and influences as traditionally conceived; it casts its net wider to include anonymous discursive practices, codes whose origins are lost, that make possible the signifying practices of later texts.’’52 Barthes’s explanation of reading as incorporating into itself a sense of de´ja` lu, or the sense that ‘‘there is no first reading, even if the text is concerned to give us that illusion . . . rereading is no longer consumption but play (that play which is the return of the different).’’ If we ‘‘immediately’’ reread the text ‘‘it is in order to obtain, . . . not the real text, but a plural text: the same and new.’’53 Expectations for a linear narrative and an orderly sequence of

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facts provide readers the illusions of necessity and order thereby sheltering the reader in the midst of chaos. Intertextuality on the other hand requires the reader not just to consume stories, but rather to learn and construct a new set of relations with each rereading. Nabokov’s Sebastian Knight illustrates that an intertextual reading depends on ‘‘hunting out the things which had once been fresh and bright but which were now worn to thread, dead things among living ones; dead things shamming life, painted and repainted continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of fraud.’’54 I find Bakhtin’s notions on dialogism and polyphony and Kristeva’s on intertextuality to be particularly relevant for the study of dramatic texts and their relationship to performance texts. Paradoxical in nature, the dramatic text first precedes a performance and later accompanies it. Since a theatrical presentation differs from the dramatic text in the reception of the text from readers to spectators, one cannot define that which occurs between a dramatic text and a theatrical performance as simply a translation but rather as a distinctly separate methodological activity in which verbal signs are communicated by means of signs from nonverbal systems. Simultaneously the spectator’s awareness is split between an awareness of text and awareness of other theatrical presentations of the text. Thus the genesis of the performance is itself intertextual, writes Keir Elam. ‘‘It cannot but bear the traces of other performances at every level, whether that of the written text (bearing generic, structural, and linguistic relations with other plays), the scenery (which will ‘‘quote’’ its pictorial or proxemic influences), the actor (whose performance refers back . . . to other displays), directorial style, and so on.’’55 The organizing principle for the study on intertextual loops in modern drama is based on the conversational or dialogic model. At times, as we can see the conversation is made up of contestations about genre, for many of the dramatists like Hampton, Mu¨ller, or Kundera have chosen to base their work on what can be considered polyphonic novels like Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses or Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist. Others have created intertextual play by disrupting the aesthetic qualities of original pre-texts to concentrate on avant-garde destruction and demolition. Others like Bernhard, Jelinek, and Churchill are more concerned with the way ideology functions as discourse. At the same time, in Hampton’s, Kundera’s, and Bennett’s plays, the spectator can find that the absorption of authors as cultural artifacts is yet another sign of intertextual parody. Nor

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can one discount the way media, particularly film, enters into the intertextual conversation. In order to create some semblance of ‘‘resemblance,’’ I have selected Witkiewicz and Jelinek as examples of avant-garde subversion. This does not mean that I consider Witkiewicz and Jelinek as similar, for though both dramatists overpopulate their plays with allusions not only to their pre-texts but also to contemporary ideology, aesthetics, social and political allusions, and so on, both Witkiewicz and Jelinek represent different avant-garde periods. Hence their juxtaposition may reveal that while both rely on parody, the conversation between them might ultimately be quarrelsome. Witkiewicz’s plays are fundamentally backshadowing a period that in light of the proliferation of his period’s ideologies has according to him all but vanished. For that reason, his plays are colored by nostalgia. Jelinek, on the other hand, undertakes her exploration of Ibsen’s text not for nostalgia’s sake but in order to reveal that all texts are appropriated for disparate ideological purposes. For example, Jelinek’s Was geschah reveals to what extent A Doll’s House has been appropriated in service to the ideology of both liberal feminism and capitalism. Yet both Witkiewicz and Jelinek use parody for the purpose of letting them address ideological discourse from within. Their reliance on parody at the same time gives them distance not to be totally swallowed up by the original texts. Both Witkiewicz and Jelinek explicitly point to the fact that they are referring to older texts; however, the spectator soon recognizes that that their ‘‘sameness’’ is more of a linguistic than a narrative one. The second juxtaposition includes Kundera’s Jacques and His Master and Hampton’s Tales from Hollywood, for ‘‘authors’’ as such appear within both plays. Kundera’s dialogue with Denis Diderot has much to do with the fact that Diderot wrote his novel Jacques the Fatalist in the period before the French Revolution, while Kundera wrote his play as a ‘‘variation’’ during the dominance of Socialist Realism and post-1968 political repression in Czechoslovakia. In Diderot the dialogue is an open-ended interaction through which his characters continually redefine and relocate themselves; however, in Kundera’s version, the very same characters are caught as if they were appearing simultaneously in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in the circular loop of absurdity. Dialogue in both Diderot and Kundera is meant to be a symbolic interaction among represented interlocutors. When a character/ actor never speaks for himself, who is then making the quotations? In this fashion, the subject of the utterance frames the utterance. Who is the subject of the paradox, and to what subject is it ad-

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dressed? In Diderot, the dialogue is an open-ended interaction through which interlocutors and their language continually redefine and locate themselves. Since Kundera’s text constantly loops back to Diderot, the paradoxical nature of dialogue in Kundera’s variation generates figures of imperfect synthesis, of unmediated contradiction. While Kundera’s intent in his play is to argue for Diderot’s Enlightenment values versus the restrictions imposed by the Soviet Union on any kind of open dialogue, Hampton in his play relies on a different kind of dialogue between authors. Hampton resurrects ¨ do¨n von Horva`th from his premature death in 1938 in order to O place him into a dialogue with Bertolt Brecht and a whole bevy of German exile writers residing in Hollywood, and the ensuing dialogue is meant to be a symbolic interaction among these represented interlocutors of various ideological and aesthetic notions. However, the nature of the dialogue generates figures of a cartoonlike quality and consequently raises questions about the nature of representation itself. The conversations between Bernhard and Austria in Heldenplatz and that of Churchill with post-Communist Romania in Mad Forest focus on cultural discourse, for both dramatists attempt to examine how culture is constructed. While Bernhard challenges Austrian society from within by questioning their denial of complicity with National Socialism, Churchill uses the lens of a foreign cultural anthropologist to show the limitations of understanding the postCommunist changes that have taken place in Romania. Both Bernhard and Churchill reappropriate realism in their own ways; however, while exploiting the power of familiar images, they also denaturalize them in order to make visible the concealed mechanisms of ideology and the power that it continues to wield. In addition, Bernhard engages in textual politics by dispersing the discourse in the play over a textual field that extends into the press. Churchill, on the other hand, expands her textual field by presenting from a variety of vantage points the material she and her student-collaborators acquired from interviews in Romania. Despite the difference in approaches as well as the political contexts of the societies they are representing, both Bernhard and Churchill expose and analyze the continuity of cultural grand rećits in contemporary Austria and Romania. The last two texts under consideration explore the question of how much familiarity might be too much of a good thing when certain texts or authors are appropriated by the rituals of fetishism in popular culture. There is no question that Franz Kafka has been ap-

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propriated not necessarily by those who read him but by those who seek a certain elitist status. In popular media, Kafka has become an almost cartoonlike figure. His texts, particularly The Trial, are frequently called upon to represent the mazes of totalitarianism, simultaneously the Holocaust, spirituality, sainthood, alienation, neurosis, and every weirdness one can imagine. The temptation to ‘‘rewrite’’ Kafka’s art to accommodate itself to every agenda harks back to the appropriation of Kafka’s texts by his friend Max Brod, who in editing them made sure that his image of Kafka the saint would be the permanent one. To accomplish his version of Kafka, he edited out of Kafka’s texts any images, particularly sexual ones, that would have undermined his vision. Thus Kafka as a cultural artifact has been reduced to an adjective, and ultimately to nothing but the letter ‘‘K.’’ Appropriately, the cartoon illustrations by Robert Crumb for David Zane Mairowitz’s Introducing Kafka reveal to what extent Kafka belongs to the realm that has been reduced ironically to the Kafkaesque. Both Milan Kundera and Alan Bennett address the abuses by Kafkologists and explore the extent to which Kafka has ended up as a poster image that may have exhausted its iconic potential by ending up as a Kafka T-shirt. Though perhaps not of the same cult status as Kafka’s image, Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses has in recent times been revisited by a number of popular interpretations and consequently has acquired the status of a fetishized object that is subject to constant rewriting. For example, Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses became an obsessive text for the French decadents such as Charles Baudelaire. More recently, Laclos’s epistolary novel has turned up in four film variations and two stage versions. The first was the modern-clothes film directed by Roger Vadim in 1959 with a jazz score by Thelonius Monk and with French film icons Jeanne Moreau and Ge´ rard Philipe. Vadim changes the context by presenting the supposed Merteuil and Valmont characters in an open marriage, and not until Valmont falls in love with a virginal ski bunny representing de Tourvel, played by Annette Vadim, who herself is but another variation of sex kitten Brigitte Bardot, that Moreau/Merteuil is provoked to revenge herself on her husband for having broken their pact of total honesty in their sexual maneuvers. In the 1980s, Laclos’s novel was interpreted no less than four times: by two playwrights, Christopher Hampton and Heiner Mu¨ller, and two film directors, Stephen Frears and Milos Forman. Thus for all these interpreters, Laclos’s morally open epistolary novel serves as the perfect mirror to explore the dangers of contemporary narcissism and the downfall of moral virtue. One should add to the list of variations Robert Wilson’s staging of

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Mu¨ ller’s Quartet, for Wilson’s interpretation focused more on the visual images of the Merteuil/Valmont dyad than on Mu¨ller’s text, which served as an ‘‘accompaniment’’ to Wilson’s choreography. Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the film version by Frears, Dangerous Liaisons (1989), for which Hampton wrote the screenplay, won a great deal of acclaim for its actors both on stage (Lindsay Duncan and Alan Rickman), in the Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by Howard Davies in 1986, and on screen in 1989 (Glenn Close, John Malkovich, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Uma Thurman). While these two variations by Hampton stayed as ‘‘true’’ as possible to the narrative of Laclos’s original, Forman’s Valmont in 1989, (with Colin Firth, Annette Bening, and Meg Tilly) attempts to retell the same tale with an innocent naughtiness and a happy conclusion. Unlike Hampton and Frears, Forman delights in the spectacle of the representation and places his characters into teeming crowds. As if Laclos’s text were not decadent enough for him, Forman at times indulges in sado-masochistic games, particularly in the scenes narrating the corruption of Cećile by Valmont. At the end of the millennium yet another version, Cruel Intentions (1999), directed by Roger Kumble, has surfaced. This one is set in Manhattan and focuses on the spoiled Upper East Side private-school youth. Sex, seduction, lies, and social manipulations seem peculiar coming from teenagers, and to exaggerate the effect Kumble has the actors emphasize certain phrases self-consciously in order to connect with Laclos’s Merteuil and Valmont. There’s also the possibility that Kumble may not have bothered with reading Laclos, for it appears he is instead more interested in creating ‘‘resemblance’’ with the ‘‘copies’’ of Laclos by Vadim, Frears, or Forman. Ultimately, Kumble’s version, much like the version by Vadim, without the eighteenth-century conventions to support the perverse manipulations of Laclos’s famous twosome, seems merely yet another palimpsestuous attempt to create a scandal where no scandal can play for longer than its allotted fifteen minutes of fame, or else until it recedes to totally deadening repetition. In the reception of the texts by Witkiewicz, Jelinek, Kundera, Hampton, Bernhard, Churchill, and Bennett, the spectator is projected into a limitless intertextual space and is afforded the possibility of creating other circuits and connections, a fact that broadens the principle of variable readings built into the individual text, a reminder of textual openness and a means of keeping the spectator’s role unstable. Ultimately, the borrowing and transforming of the material from a larger body of texts frees them from the semiotic order of structured and unified significance, a system of thought

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that previously held the power to check the unstructured and associative potential of intertextual reading. Consequently, contemporary drama calls attention to several processes of code changing which, as Umberto Eco observes, frequently produce ‘‘a new type of awareness about the world insofar as the aesthetic labor aims to be detected and scrutinized by the spectator, producing thereupon a diversity of communication acts which may or may not elicit ‘highly original responses.’ ’’56

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2 Witkacy’s Theory of Pure Form: Change, Dissolution, and Uncertainty THE PLAYS,

PAINTINGS, NOVELS, AND CRITICAL WRITINGS OF POLISH

dramatist and philosopher Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885– 1939), better known under his pen name Witkacy, an anagram he created to differentiate himself from his father the art critic Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1851–1915), show a strong affinity to the European avant-garde proliferating at the turn of the century as a consequence of the complicated responses to modernity. In particular, Witkacy represents the artist of the avant-garde who in ‘‘swerving from his time’’ remained relatively unknown, only to be rediscovered in the 1960s as a precursor of the theater of the absurd and Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty.1 Recent symposia and critical studies have served to reinforce the perception of Witkacy as a unique figure ‘‘of unusual dimensions and one of the most colorful figures in the European avant-garde’’ whose range of intellectual activities includes experiments as a novelist, aesthetician, theorist of the theater, philosopher, cultural critic, experimenter with drugs, painter, portraitist, and photographer.2 Intriguing biographical details such as Witkacy’s ‘‘modern’’ marriage with Jadwiga Unrig, his well-publicized erotic adventures, his experimentation with hallucinogens, his obsessive love affairs with Irena Skolska and Czeslawa Korzeniowska contributed to his legend. But it is Witkacy’s death that reflects the despair of his generation, for at the outbreak of World War II and the Nazi invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, Witkacy attempted to enlist in the war against Fascism, and, upon rejection from service, committed suicide on 18 September in the wooded village of Jezigory (now in Ukraine), on the very day that the Soviets attacked Poland’s eastern border. In 1985 the Polish government decided to bring back Witkacy’s corpse from Jezigory to his hometown of Zakopane to commemorate ‘‘the return of the author to his native land.’’ However, as if an ultimate Witkacian joke, the corpse was discovered to be a ‘‘false Witkacy.’’3 47

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As if scripted by Witkacy himself, the disappearance of his ‘‘mortalremains’’ reminds one of his many plays in which corpses disappear or reappear as if death had no meaning. Since Witkacy lived all of his life in Poland, his ideas on the mechanization of art, on violence and disruption, and on narcotics and madness, as found in the plays, novels, and manifestos he wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, placed him outside the sites of action in the arts. Alfred Jarry in his scandalous play Ubu Roi (1896) designates Poland as ‘‘nowhere,’’ a location not even appearing on a map.4 In Jarry’s play, Poland is a country that seems to be somewhat deranged, primitive, and strange, whose saving grace is that ‘‘if there were no Poland, there would be no Poles!’’5 Despite the fact that Witkacy lived in a country whose culture was considered to be peripheral to the main currents of European art and thought, the range of his exposure to literature, philosophy, and art ‘‘was neither provincial nor specifically Polish.’’ However, as Daniel Gerould observes, the historical and geographical space in which Witkacy lived out his life contributed to his feelings of extreme marginality, leaving him in an ‘‘existential limbo’’ that ‘‘sharpened his susceptibility to the absurd.’’6 Despite his isolation in Poland, Witkacy continued to participate in the intellectual life in Poland and Europe, for in addition to his plays, novels, and paintings, he wrote over fifty articles on philosophical subjects between 1931 and 1939, many in response to articles by Polish philosophers such as Roman Ingarden, Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, and Tadeusz Kotarbinski. On a more personal level, Witkacy’s intense correspondence with the German philosopher Hans Cornelius reveals his desperate need for affirmation as an artist and philosopher. At the same time that he himself is seeking recognition in Poland, Witkacy welcomes enthusiastically the creative talent of younger artists such as Bruno Schulz, and his ‘‘personal confession’’ upon reading Schulz’s Cinnamon Shops (1935) reveals his critical insights as well as his understanding of the human condition. It is important to consider that Witkacy’s creative life played itself out within a rapidly changing society in Poland itself, for Poland was granted statehood in 1918. To a great extent statehood contributed to excesses in nationalistic fervor, chauvinism, and the emergence of competing ideologies. Since Witkacy’s novels and plays, and indeed even his very persona, were considered to be too decadent for the fostering of a new national literature, his work was often ignored or castigated in the press. Similarly, during the first years of the Polish Communist state, the tenets of Socialist Realism imposed on Polish literature by the ever-watchful eye of Moscow made it impossible

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2: WITKACY’S THEORY OF PURE FORM

to promote Witkacy’s theory of Pure Form or any of his texts. Thus it was not until the more liberal period of the 1960s that his collected plays were published in Poland. At this point Witkacy’s theory and plays became the source of inspiration for today’s Polish playwrights Slawomir Mrozek and Tadeusz Ro´zewicz and the Polish theatrical innovators Tadeusz Kantor and Jo´sef Szajna. Translation in the 1960s of a number of Witkacy’s plays and essays on Pure Form into French, German, and English brought Witkacy’s ideas on theater to the attention of non-Polish theater scholars, many of whom saw his plays as paradigms of a theater against representation and as illustrations of the wildly interdisciplinary space of the classical avant-garde as it emerged from the clash between naturalism and the fin-de-sie` cle rebellions against verisimilitude in art and theater evident in the manifestos of symbolism, futurism and cubism, and surrealism. What contemporary theater scholars found startling about Witkacy is that he had found his own way to intertextuality along routes of his own devising. In particular, theater scholars saw Witkacy’s plays as examples of an innovative form that opened up new modes of perceiving, expressing, and acting. In addition, the sense of dread that informs his work in the face of the political catastrophes occurring in his part of the world became particularly relevant to the post–World War II artists and scholars. His work provides vertiginous glimpses of the collapse of all structures of understanding including language itself, for Witkacy’s novels, plays, and essays often flash intimations that the very self that pronounces his theories has no real existence. Indeed, even during his lifetime, Witkacy was criticized for falling back on formal aesthetics. Ironically, since the most recent political changes in Eastern Europe, Witkacy may yet acquire an afterlife as a realist, for Witkacy’s situation in the interwar period in Poland serves as a counterpart to the situation of artists and writers in Eastern Europe today in that he was faced with a political reality in which national and ideological elements were in constant flux. The appropriation of Witkacy’s Pure Form by the post–World War II generation of Polish theater artists is best represented by Tadeusz Kantor, who in naming his own company Theatre Cricot 2, connects his theater to the interwar avant-garde theater Cricot, where a number of Witkacy’s plays were presented. Kantor in particular borrows Witkacy’s intertextual approach by combining fragments from philosophy, anthropology, popular culture, his own self-dramatized life, and essentially all of literature. Ultimately, Kantor’s plays/constructions from The Dead Class (1975) to Today Is My Birthday (1991) are composed of ‘‘found objects’’ from a variety of texts such as Witka-

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cy’s plays, Bruno Schulz’s stories, Polish history and cultural myths, personal memories, and art constructions from Kantor’s other performances: As if stuck and patched together from various bits and pieces left over from childhood, from the fortunes experienced in their past lives, . . . from their dreams and passions, they keep disintegrating and transforming themselves in this theatrical movement and element, relentlessly making their way towards their final form, which cools off quickly and irrevocably, and which is to contain their whole happiness and their whole pain, THE WHOLE MEMORY OF THE DEAD CLASS.7

Kantor’s method of placing random elements from other writers like Witkacy into the actions and situations of what he calls his dramatic seances are often shockingly and scandalously out of place. He explains that his intent is to present ‘‘two alien systems, which would never explain or complement each other.’’8 As he cautions the spectators of The Dead Class, ‘‘It would be unjustified bibliophilic pedantry to attempt to find those missing fragments necessary for a complete ‘knowledge’ of the subject of the play.’’ For this reason, Kantor suggests, it is ‘‘inadvisable’’ to know the content of Witkacy’s Tumor Brainowicz (1921), from which he uses fragments as elements in his theatrical collage, for the use of Witkacy’s play is significant only to the degree that it represents an item from the storeroom of found objects that belong to Kantor’s ‘‘room of the imagination.’’9 Kantor’s theatrical seances reflect the irredeemable loss of a quintessential Polish childhood in a multicultural society where Jewish rabbis and Catholic priests dance together a nostalgic tango in The Dead Class. At the same time, his seánces reflect the wounds of post–World War II Poland—the almost total disappearance of its Jewish population, as well as the destruction of the Polish intelligentsia by the Nazis and the Communist regime that invaded Poland from both borders. Witkacy found himself at the end of World War I in a similar situation, for the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the disruption attendant upon the Russian Revolution pervaded all of Central Europe. Though one of the consequences was that Poland gained political independence, Poland’s statehood had the unfortunate consequence of simultaneously unleashing ideological and nationalistic conflicts and producing economic and cultural upheaval. At the same time, political change stimulated disruption in aesthetic theories as well, and manifestos on art proliferated to such an extent that the artist was pressed to join the ranks of various move-

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ments. As a consequence, Witkacy’s plays simultaneously reflect radical societal change and the problematic of proliferating aesthetic ideologies as they relate to the artist’s role in society. Similarly, the range of poststructuralist theories presents disturbing choices for artists and writers today. In addition, the unstable political systems and nationalistic conflicts in Eastern Europe situate present-day Eastern European intellectuals in a context already familiar from Witkacy’s grotesque representation of interwar society. More recent discussions reveal to what extent the features of the postmodern condition of indeterminacy and the free play of signifiers described by Jean-François Lyotard apply as well to Witkacy’s attempts to undermine the metanarratives of his time. The study of Witkacy’s development as a dramatist necessitates some attention to the relationship of literature to the other arts, particularly since the twentieth-century avant-garde movements are characterized by constant cross-fertilization among the arts from painting to sculpture to music resulting in a epistemological decentering of form. However, the rules to which aesthetes like Witkacy subject themselves tend to apply within very narrow boundaries. In fact, everything takes place as if there were a set of processes, gestures, objects, and genres from which the various forms of expression chose their own media, each one attempting to create from this collection of possibilities, a specific system that differed in its media, objects, and processes, from the system elaborated by the other arts. The many cases in which one art attempts to compete with another, poetry with music or sculpture, painting with poetry, do not erase the distinctions that separate them. The evolution of an artist such as Witkacy does not emerge exclusively from a dialectic of influences and ruptures as practiced by the avant-garde, for there are means other than influence through which the artist may be permeated, and context—both personal and historical—has some consequences that manifest themselves in Witkacy’s creative work. Ultimately, Witkacy’s texts serve as illustrations of the multiplex scripts that are produced by the interweaving of traces of other elements that characterize the development of the avant-garde since, as Jacques Derrida points out, ‘‘there are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces.’’10 One could also describe Witkacy’s entire creative output as autobiographical. Hence elements from his personal mythology appear on the same level as the appropriated elements from literature, philosophy, and art. Consequently, the dismantling and reassembling of appropriations, exhumations, and quotations by Witkacy produces the fractured universe of his plays.11 Born in the Russian sec-

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tor of partitioned Poland, Witkacy received a most liberal and eclectic education. His father educated Witkacy entirely at home, on the grounds that formal schooling produces mediocrity and conformity. He started to paint under his father’s tutelage, but by 1908 had turned from landscapes, the genre his father favored, to the grotesque drawings that his father found unsound because they were against nature.12 By the time he was five he was equally as absorbed in music as in art, and under the tutelage of his mother, a music teacher, he began composing and improvising. He also showed an interest in science and collected rocks and insects; later his interest in science was reflected in the many allusions in his dramaturgy to twentieth-century discoveries in physics. As an eight-year-old, he had already written a dozen or more plays showing the influence of William Shakespeare, Maurice Maeterlinck, Nicolai Gogol, and the Polish symbolists Stanislaw Wyspianski and Stanislaw Przybyszewski. He also studied higher mathematics and languages, and he read English, French, German, and Russian. His father envisioned that as a result of his educational experiment on his son, Witkacy would soar to the heights of Nietzschean sublimity. Various artists, musicians, and philosophers frequently gathered at the Witkiewicz retreat in Zakopane, and Witkacy developed close friendships with his ‘‘playmates,’’ the composer and pianist Arthur Rubinstein (1889–1982), the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), and the logician, aesthetician, and mathematician Leon Chwistek (1884–1944). Perhaps owing to his father’s demands for uniqueness, and, at the same time, to constant stimulation in different directions in reaction to the interests of his friends, Witkacy’s early years exhibit a lack of direction, a quality he was later to impose on the many exhausted artist prototypes in his novels and plays, for example, Leon Eely in The Mother (1924). Witkacy was not exclusively interested in art movements, for his reading in philosophy shows familiarity with the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Otto Weininger, Sigmund Freud, and Oswald Spengler. Witkacy’s interest in philosophy emerged quite early as is evident in the two philosophical treatises he wrote at seventeen, ‘‘On Dualism’’ and ‘‘Schopenhauer’s Philosophy and His Relation to His Predecessors.’’ ‘‘Schopenhauer is right,’’ he writes, ‘‘we look at the world from one viewpoint but ourselves from two.’’13 Schopenhauer’s brand of pessimistic determinism was clearly congenial to Witkacy’s own interpretation of the will as a blind metaphysical force devoid of any ultimate purpose. On the basis of his readings, Witkacy concluded that time, space, and causality are arrangements of our intellect which manifest

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themselves to us as a multiplicity of similar beings, constantly appearing and disappearing in endless succession. These philosophical concerns emerging from his reading of Schopenhauer will later become both thematically and stylistically integrated into his plays in attempts to project simultaneity by means of the negation of chronology, linear plot development, and the juxtaposition of new and unexpected elements that contradict the laws of logic. One could say that Witkacy’s philosophical explorations show the artist in opposition to the legitimization of theory, and thus his theory of Pure Form may be viewed as an attempt to undermine all existing ‘‘isms’’ including his own. In order to expose Witkacy to the best in art, his father sent him on a number of trips, the first in 1901 to St. Petersburg, where he visited the Hermitage, then in 1904 to Vienna, Munich, and Italy. In 1907 he attended a Gauguin exhibit in Vienna, and the following year, he saw a Fauve and early Cubist show in Paris, and once again a Cubist exhibit in Paris in 1911. But these experiences were not immediately reflected in his work since his grotesque drawings of that period with titles such as The Prince of Darkness Tempts Saint Theresa with the Aid of a Waiter from Budapest suggest a different sensibility. During this period he also wrote The 622 Downfalls of Bungo: or, The Demonic Woman (1910), a bildungsroman representing his initiation into sexuality based on his long, tortured affair with the red-headed actress Irena Skolska, who had gained her reputation as a temptress by playing demonic women in the modernist plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Przybyszewski. Much of Witkacy’s skepticism about the authenticity of creativity is reflected in this early novel as Bungo/Witkacy establishes his main theme: the poet’s insatiable quest for the unknown. Despite all the joys, all the knowledge brought within the grasp of humanity, Bungo regrets living in the organized world and at the same time sees little hope for finding an outlet. Neither science nor philosophy provides Bungo an understanding of the greater reality he is seeking. Art too serves only to represent a petite reálite´ exploitable. Only sensual fulfillment serves to provide an acute awareness of life, but total annihilation threatens in the form of the eroticized woman. Thus Witkacy’s plunge into ‘‘the metaphysical monstrosity of sexuality’’ with Skolska reveals Witkacy/Bungo as so ‘‘completely alienated from himself ’’ that ‘‘he began to fear that he might end, imperceptibly and without realizing it himself, in madness.’’14 One can detect a textual loop that may link Witkacy to the Viennese artist Gustav Klimt, for it is quite likely that Witkacy had an opportunity to see Klimt’s sensual decorations in both the Burgtheater,

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the Secession building, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Klimt’s paintings shocked the Viennese because of their erotic qualities and were perceived by them as a revolt against the ‘‘moral sense of sin that had plagued the righteous fathers.’’ ‘‘But in its place,’’ writes Carl Schorske, ‘‘arose a fear of sex that haunted many of the sensitive sons.’’ Thus the new freedom that liberated sexuality from the constraints of a moralistic culture ‘‘was turning into a nightmare of anxiety.’’ Images from Klimt’s paintings such as Watersnakes (1904–7) displaying his ‘‘lubricious playgirls of the deep’’ in their ‘‘half-somnolence of sexual satisfaction’’15 are intertextually connected to the very title of one of Witkacy’s plays, The Cuttlefish (1922), for in Witkacy’s lexicon, a cuttlefish is any soft insidious predator, a femme tentaculaire that attaches itself to its prey with its sucking tentacles. Witkacy, however, extends the term to apply to capitalism, demonic women, or bourgeois housewives with their demands for a comfortable life. It may be that Klimt’s many images of threatening women also serve as intertextual prefigurations of Witkacy’s sexually insatiable dominatrixes such as Bellatrix from Maciej Korbowa and Bellatrix (1918), Iza from Tumor Brainiowicz (1920), Hilda from The Beelzebub Sonata (1925) or Persy Bestialskaya from Insatiability (1930). Skolska, however, remains Witkacy’s personal prototype of the demonic women, for it was in their relationship that Witkacy discovered the demonic woman’s superiority in sexual games. In the end, the perversity of the demonic woman undermines the narcissistic fantasies of omnipotence in the many versions of the failed artist that pervade Witkacy’s plays and novels. The expedition Witkacy undertook to the South Seas and Australia with his friend Malinowski brought him out of a depression resulting from the suicide of his fianceé. Though the sensibility of the tropics was already familiar to Witkacy through Gauguin’s paintings, his letter to his father nevertheless suggests a tremendous impact of the expedition on his immediate perception: ‘‘I’m unable to describe the wonders I’m seeing here . . . the vegetation madder and madder, and the people more and more gaudily dressed (violet, yellow, and purple, sometimes emerald green), which along with the chocolate and bronze bodies and the strange plants in the background, creates a devilish effect.’’16 Not only did Witkacy’s encounter with the tropics provide a stimulus to his theory of Pure Form but it also gave him insights into culture itself. Influenced by his readings in Nietzsche, Witkacy felt that Western civilization was doomed because it had lost its primal connection to religion and myth, and worship of art, technology, and rationality proved to be a

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mere substitution for the more primal connections to the world of the spirit. From his journey with Malinowski, Witkacy saw what he considered to be the plague of civilization thrust upon the primitive paradise by Europeans. In his plays, the Europeans, unsated by their power and greed, succumb to the ‘‘tropical madness’’ of brutality and rapaciousness as a stimulus to their insatiable sexual desire. In his author’s note to one of his plays, Mr. Price or: Tropical Madness (1920), Witkacy explains that the disease ‘‘tropical madness’’ is an excuse by the colonial European sadists to justify the crimes they commit against the natives. Examples of the disease occur in the many predacious characters that populate Witkacy’s tropical madness plays, such as The Pragmatists (1919), Tumor Brainowicz (1920), Miss Tootli-Pootli (1920), The Independence of Triangles (1921), and Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf (1921). In Witkacy’s representations of tropical madness, the conventions of European civilization break apart and unleash all the aggression and violence they are supposed to restrain and conceal. At the same time, Witkacy’s understanding of the forces that invade the tropical paradise also link him to Nietzsche’s ideas on the emptiness of so-called civilization: We should reconsider cruelty and open our eyes. We should at long last learn impatience lest such immodest fat errors keep on strutting about virtuously and saucily, as have been fostered about tragedy, for example by philosophers both ancient and modern. Almost everything we call ‘‘higher culture’’ is based on the spiritualization of ‘‘cruelty,’’ on its becoming more profound: this is my proposition: That the ‘‘savage animal’’ has not really been mortified; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become—divine. What constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty; what seems agreeable in so-called tragic pity, and at the bottom of everything sublime, up to the highest and most delicate shudders of metaphysics, receives its sweetness solely from the admixture of cruelty.17

The outbreak of World War I during his travels with Malinowski thrust Witkacy into the midst of yet another reality when he interrupted his journey to enlist in the Imperial Pavlovsky Regiment in St. Petersburg. Self-created legend has it that at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution he was elected commissar by his troops. Later, the disparate realities of his journey to the tropics, his service in the Russian Imperial Army, and the Revolution of 1917 are projected in many of Witkacy’s plays onto the same plane, ‘‘tropical madness,’’ the degeneracy of the Russian aristocracy as it faces its demise, and

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horror at the emerging totalitarianism in the wake of the Russian Revolution. The characters who populate the thirty plays written in a great surge of creativity in the six years after Witkacy’s return to Zakopane in 1918 reflect a world of disquietude, disjunction, and distrust from which they seek to escape either through negation, evasion, or insanity. Nor does Witkacy see a phoenix rising from the ashes of the Old World. Instead, he shows in a number of his plays a newly entrenched regime that is far more oppressive than the one it overthrew. He provides despairing insights into the mechanization that the revolution engenders, since for Witkacy the Russian Revolution is a model that is symptomatic of forces and circumstances that lie beyond individual control. Consequently, his response to the revolution emerges in his tendency towards the grotesque, the metaphysically absurd, and the alogical in structure. ‘‘To destroy a class is to create a class,’’ reads the message from The Shoemakers (1934), one of Witkacy’s last plays. After three acts of revolution and counterrevolution, and endless social, political, and metaphysical battles, the revolution is taken over by technocratic pragmatists, who make farreaching economic decisions with ‘‘only as much compromise as is absolutely necessary’’ to consolidate power. The consequence is pure raging ‘‘BOREDOM,’’ as a sign appears repeatedly in the last act to be supplanted with ‘‘Boredom getting worse and worse.’’ In grotesquely prophetic lines, he ends the play with the stage directions, ‘‘all of a sudden, like lightning, the iron curtain falls down.’’18 Thus, Witkacy negates all hope for solutions, and even creative effort is useless in the face of the crushing order of banality. The reviews of Witkacy’s plays were full of outrage and disgust. The first of his plays to reach the stage Tumor Brainiowicz (1921) was presented for a total of two performances at the Slowacki Theater in Krakow. The production provoked violent critical attacks and embroiled Witkacy in scandal and controversy. The critics simultaneously attacked both his theory of Pure Form and the seemingly absurd content of the play. As a result of these attacks, Witkacy retreated into his public persona of the madman and drug addict. Much like Jarry in his antiestablishment street performances, Witkacy reveled in the license given to the artist to be a mad outsider, but at the same time he realized that his antics were tolerated only because the role of the artist was considered utterly insignificant, mere entertainment for the bourgeois establishment. In particular, Witkacy delighted in creating numerous versions of ‘‘auto-Witkacies’’ or self-portraits, mugging photographs, and alter egos and doubles such as Witkas, Witkrejus, St. Witkacy, Mahatma Witkac, and

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among others, the unsavory Onanislaw Spermacy Wyfiutkiewicz. Witkacy was quite aware that his performance of the artist provocateur endangered the artist’s authenticity. In addition, Witkacy’s extreme marginality in Polish society ‘‘heightened his consciousness of cultural dislocation and impending disaster, and sharpened his susceptibility to the absurd.’’19 What bliss to slug down, with a clean conscience, a glass of vodka on an empty stomach—with no regard for the health of either mind or body, convinced that psychophysical self-destruction is the highest goal of one’s existence. Only a creatively self-destructive artist, and no one else, can indulge in such a luxury. (Beware of using this as a bad example to follow or of trying to become an artist artificially so as to be able to ‘‘destroy oneself creatively’’—the punishment is nothing less than moral death.)20

Though artists as provocateurs were proliferating in the various futurist and dadaist cabarets and cafe´s, Witkacy himself was reluctant to join any movement that would circumscribe him. Thus Witkacy’s adoption of the variety of performative selves tends to be individualistic rather than movement-oriented and has more in common with the late-nineteenth-century decadents who transgressed against ‘‘good taste’’ than it does with the role of the artist as an agitator for social change. However, unlike in the theater, in order to incarnate the fiction of his own personality, Witkacy had to carry the entire play and mise-en-sce`ne with him. Thus Witkacy had to forge his own reality by creating new, endlessly proliferating forms and gestures that could serve him as masks. In Witkacy’s creativity, ‘‘performance aspects of life and art were accentuated; every moment became a staged scene, whether recorded by the camera or acted out in ‘reality.’ ’’21 There is much in Witkacy’s persona and his theater—characters with bizarre names who make mysterious and unexplained appearances and plots that appear to be ungoverned by any discernible logic and psychology—that may also be found in the work of his contemporaries as well as in his mentor Tadeusz Micinski’s work. In particular Micinski’s role as the self-appointed madman is one that Witkacy was also to play out in society. Micinski’s declaration, ‘‘In choosing my destiny I have chosen madness,’’ becomes the epigraph of Witkacy’s novel Insatiability (1930), and many of Witkacy’s characters choose madness and insane asylums as a way out of the sterility of ashen reality. However, as Witkacy’s play The Madman and the Nun (1923) illus-

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trates, madness no longer represents rebellion against society. Instead the insane asylum becomes a microcosm in which Witkacy can explore his most intimate fears, frustrations, and indignation at being treated like a madman by his contemporaries. Nor does Witkacy pay reverence to psychiatry despite his own psychoanalysis by a Freudian psychiatrist in 1912. In Madman his alter ego, the poet Walpurg, stabs Bidello, the psychiatrist sent to ferret out his hidden complex, with the pencil Bidello uses to take notes and then hangs himself in his cell. According to Witkacy, psychiatry as a system cannot penetrate ‘‘inner reality’’ or the ‘‘mystery of existence,’’ for even as Walpurg’s corpse lies in full view in his cell, a nattily dressed Walpurg saunters in hand-in-hand with the murdered Bidello as if nothing happened. In the face of these irrational events, the keepers of the insane asylum protest, ‘‘We’re the madmen now. They’ve locked us up for good. And this guy here, he’s still Iying there right in front of us, but that same Number 20 without the beard, he got up and went out there.’’22 Despite his relative isolation in Zakopane, Witkacy kept up with the proliferation of avant-garde experiments during this time. Like the cubo-futurists and dadaists he attempted to violate all principles of naturalistic representation, even if this destruction came about from the overburdening of formal elements. Guillaume Apollinaire, impresario of French modernism, points out that literary modernism was radically shaped by nonfigurative developments, and the result was a very different construction of modernity: ‘‘Verisimilitude no longer has any importance,’’ he writes, ‘‘for the artist sacrifices everything to the composition of his picture. The subject no longer counts, or if it counts, it counts for very little.’’23 The epoch in which Witkacy formulated his notions on Pure Form and Pure Form in the Theater mirrored the many theories of the period that reflected ruptures from established preconceptions, and the shocks created by nonrepresentational painting and collage, the ‘‘found object,’’ and twelve-tone music transformed the medium into the message. Activity in the arts was no longer concentrated only in Paris and tended to be dispersed to newly energized centers such as Berlin, Munich, Zu¨ rich, Vienna, and Moscow. A representative survey of the scandals in the activities of the avant-garde shows the constant circulation of attention-getting headlines. In Paris, Filippo Marinetti published the first Futurist Manifesto (1909) and Georges Braque’s cubist collage Still-Life with Violin and Palette (1910) created a scandal. In Moscow Vassili Kandinsky published About the Spiritual in Art (1911), and Kazimir Malevich issued the Suprematist Manifesto (1915). In Munich the Blaue Reiter artists issued a manifesto aban-

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doning representation in art (1912), and Marcel Duchamp abandoned painting for the readymade Bicycle Wheel (1913). Almost simultaneously the Dada movement emerged at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich (1916), and soon thereafter Andre´ Breton presented the Surrealist Manifesto (1924). It is surprising to what extent Witkacy was aware of the ‘‘happenings’’ occurring in the distant stages of the world, and this awareness is due to his edgy state of mind, his restless consciousness that reflects the changes that occur with such rapid speed that they engender disorientation or even amnesia. For Witkacy, the world that realists and naturalists claimed to be fully known and accurately depicted is revealed as a sham. Ultimately, the effect of experiencing fragmentation and dissolution is not only evident in Witkacy’s art but also in his very persona, as illustrated in a photograph from the period of World War I. The very handsome Witkacy, dressed in his officer’s uniform of the Pavlovsky Regiment, is caught in the refraction of a mirror so that five images of him are captured sitting at a table; there are also other, later pictures that show him as a buffoon, madman, drug addict, and the monster of his own paintings.24 What these photographic images suggest is that the ‘‘real’’ Witkacy cannot be recuperated from among the many masks he adopted to hide his presence. Though the varied images of Witkacy initially appear as playful masks screening reality, or as perverse images of a reality being masked, they end up bearing no relation to any reality whatever, for as Jean Baudrillard writes tellingly on today’s fascination with pure image, image becomes ‘‘its pure simulacrum forever radiant with [its] own fascination.’’25 Through the metaphor of the multiple reflections of his image in the mirror, Witkacy subverts the urge toward closure that dictates verisimilitude and authentic representation of self. Witkacy, the individual, ceases to be centered in an a priori ‘‘self ’’ but becomes instead a locus where various signifying systems intersect. The surreal images in Witkacy’s plays also defy verisimilitude and are difficult to circumscribe since they, much like the many reflections of Witkacy caught in the mirror, are open to endless dissemination. It is similarly difficult to locate definite influences on the development of Witkacy’s aesthetics. Some of the traces in Witkacy’s aesthetics are related to the various philosophical and scientific movements that disrupted the notion of a self firmly rooted in the Cartesian cogito. Among those who most directly influenced Witkacy’s theory of Pure Form were the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden (1893–1970), who attempted by means of phenomenology to describe perceived objects without making any claims about their

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existence or their relation to the time/space continuum, and Witkacy’s childhood friend Chwistek, who in The Plurality of Realities (1921) postulated four different kinds of reality. Chwistek’s attempt at a systematic relativizing of typologies in art describes the objective reality of natural elements, their formless substratum which exists only potentially, the subjective realm of impressions and appearances, and the reality of created images, which, in turn produce four different kinds of art.26 In addition, similar discoveries in physics, Max Planck’s quantum theory, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, and Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle undermined Euclidean notions of space. Thus, movement, activity, and change were to supplant static representations by focusing on the rapid locomotion of the new age of the automobile and airplane. ‘‘Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omni-present speed,’’ declared the Italian futurist poet Filippo Marinetti (1876–1944).27 Philosophers and artists were making the same discovery: that space is boundless and movement is the essence of all media. Consequently, the concepts of mutability and dynamism that are characteristic of Witkacy’s plays and his theory of Pure Form may also be seen in terms of Einsteinian physics, in indeterminacy and discontinuity, and in the infinite multiplication of possible ways of perceiving. From the perspective of an artist such as Witkacy, the world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events in which connections alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole. Ultimately, the effect of Ingarden’s explorations of the subjectivity of perception, Chwistek’s disparate realities, and the undermining of Euclidean notions of space is frequently palpable even in the very title of Witkacy’s plays, for example in Gyubul Wahazar: Or, Along the Cliffs of the Absurd (1921), which is given the additional subtitle ‘‘A Non-Euclidean Drama.’’ While Gyubul Wahazar, the main character, is ultimately a horrendously realistic representation of a Stalin-like tyrant, the first subtitle, ‘‘Along the Cliffs of the Absurd,’’ questions the potential realistic reading, as realism itself is hurled down the cliffs into the indeterminacy of the absurd, and the second subtitle, ‘‘A Non-Euclidean Drama,’’ in calling attention to relativity and uncertainty, totally dismembers the circumscribed space of naturalistic representation. ‘‘Real space has no structure’’28 asserts one of the characters in the play, and even the tyrant Wahazar loses his identity in the ‘‘mishmash of transformational possibilities, adjustments, and adaptations.’’29 In this manner, the polyphonic form of the title playfully announces that what is to follow is irreducible to rational analysis or

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univocal interpretation. Yevgeny Zamyatin, in his essay ‘‘On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and other Matters’’ (1923), voiced similar observations as Witkacy on the revolution that shattered the logic of millennia-old Euclidean realism: ‘‘Far closer to reality is projection along speeding, curved surfaces—as in the new mathematics and the new art. Realism that is not primitive, not realia but realiora, consists in displacement, distortion, curvature, non-objectivity.’’30 Witkacy’s plays such as Gyubul Wahazar illustrate effectively Zamyatin’s observation on what might be called a social version of Heisenberg’s scientific paradox. As a result, Witkacy’s plays often leave the spectator with nothing much more to go on than the confusion created as a consequence of the disruption of a world order. As the various links to literary movements indicate, Witkacy was not alone in exploring the changes in perception brought about by the discoveries in physics. Marinetti, whose ‘‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’’ (1909) proclaiming the aesthetics of the machine became a rallying cry for a revolution in the arts, demanded in his manifesto ‘‘The Variety Theater’’ (1913) that movement, activity, and simultaneity were to supplant the static theatrical representations of naturalism and symbolism.31 Marinetti’s manifesto established the general terms for the theory and practice of the entire avant-garde movement and became a rallying cry for artistic revolutions among artists of the younger generations. Though the ‘‘Futurist Manifesto’’ had a bombshell effect, it was based on traditional artistic rebellions of symbolism and cubism and anticipated the subversions of art by dadaism and surrealism. The manifesto demanded emancipation from the crushing weight of tradition, the so-called graveyard of culture, and exhorted the artist to reject prevalent middle-class values of good taste. Futurism urged the artist to abandon the life of passive contemplation and pressed him to take his place in the center of the universe’s ceaseless activity. The strength of Marinetti’s program lay in the freedom it gave the inventor—relief from the tyranny of the ideas of the ‘‘masterwork’’ and the freedom to be prodigal with ideas and energy, to move on constantly to the next thing.32 Not only did Futurism address itself to the physical realm but it also glorified intellectual exertion and agitation. Conflict, violence, misogyny, anarchism, and even war were viewed as positive examples of universal dynamism. At the same time, the strong language, harangues, changes of images, exaggerations, and insults gave Marinetti’s manifesto the sense of vitality related to the spirit of dynamism. Encounters with rival art movements became publicity events during which Marinetti incited

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the audience by hurling insults at them. Usually, the evening ended in a riot as spectators attempted to attack the futurists, and the rioting and brawling frequently spread out into the streets and bars. In Marinetti’s vision, the artist was an agitator who was not only to overthrow the cultural institutions of his society but who also agitated for political change. Thus, in his choice of a manifesto as the form calling for a revolution in the arts, Marinetti used the methodology of propaganda in order to politicize the arts. The spectacle of the Russian Revolution seemed to the futurists to be the culmination of their agitation for a total destruction of tradition and order and in itself a realization of their dreams. Marinetti’s glorification of agitation, conflict, violence, and anarchism had a profound effect on the development of Russian cubofuturism, which unleashed a new poetics of ‘‘the liberated word,’’33 or the word as an object with which you can do as you please and influenced the subsequent Russian cubo-futurist literary experimentation of poets like Vladimir Mayakovsky. However, in a broader sense, the futurist manifesto eventually came to stand for artistic liberty, represented in the title of the Russian cubo-futurist manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, which was signed by David Burliuk, Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh, and Mayakovsky in December 1912.34 Under the influence of the futurist manifestos, the dadaists continued the destruction of meaning even further by disconnecting words from their primary function and significance and, in creating a breach between the signifier and the signified, they promoted ‘‘the interweaving of contraries and of all contradictions, freaks and irrelevancies.’’35 Witkacy’s deconstruction in his plays of the inherited ‘‘cultural leftovers’’ of the recent storehouses of European modernism resembled Marinetti’s attack on the tyranny of ‘‘masterworks.’’ In his deconstruction of masterworks, Witkacy recombined their fragments into a collagelike assembly of intertextual elements. Allusions ranging from symbolism to surrealism pervade his plays, for among the elements of his ‘‘compositions’’ are disparate and often confusing references to such playwrights as Maeterlinck, Jarry, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Frank Wedekind, Ivan Goll, Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, and the Polish dramatists Wyspianski, Przybyszewski, and his friend Micinski. At the same time, references to art movements such as the symbolists, futurists, the Russian cubo-futurists, the expressionists, the dadaists, and the surrealists show to what extent Witkacy is concerned with situating his theory of Pure Form within the context of these movements. Witkacy’s antinaturalist aesthetics also display an affinity to the

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Russian symbolists, particularly to the aesthetics of Alexander Blok and Andrew Bely in whose poetics literary impressionism, hermeticism, the cultivation of the bizarre, decadence, decorative graciousness, exasperated romantic subjectivism, and the desire to renew versification and language are the dominant traits. The theatricality of the symbolists relies on circularity and endless repetition, the mindless ritual of society to reveal a Nietzschean sense of Eternal Recurrence that ultimately produces horror at the aimlessness of existence. Unity of personality and place disintegrate as the spectator discovers that characters and settings are merely mirror images. Symbolism’s pervasive influence can be detected in the plays of Blok and Bely and also the Polish symbolists Wyspianski, Przybyszewski, and Micinski who share with Maeterlinck and Strindberg a predilection for the unreal and the rejection of a world in which light and dark, the real and the unreal, the living and the dead are contradictory entities, for in their plays the distortion of time produces certain images in which the dead and the living are intermingled and exist on the same plane of reality. The dislocation of language from its usual function of communication to one of simultaneous, discrete, and interwoven monologues excludes particularities of character and individual psychology from their dramas. In particular, the symbolists attempted to bring back the theater to its origins in religious mysteries that would once again produce the experience of a ‘‘metaphysical shudder’’ of cathartic dread and horror in their spectators. The characters they invented to project the mysterious seem to be subordinated to language are there to restore to language its primordial magical powers of incantation. Frequently retardation and slow motion exaggerate the sense of ecstatic expectancy and hushed waiting of the dreamer who, as in Strindberg’s A Ghost Sonata (1907), awaits for ‘‘sleep, the liberator’’ as a release from ‘‘illusions, guilt, suffering, and death, the world of everlasting change, disappointments, and pain!’’36 Much of Witkacy’s theory of Pure Form is pervaded by the nostalgic elements of symbolism. In his theory Witkacy stresses that the theater must abandon the concerns of naturalism and what he calls psychological tricks and human-interest stories. ‘‘We’ve had psychology up to our ears,’’ Witkacy writes. ‘‘Instead the theater should usher us into a dimension of experience totally different from life into the sphere of metaphysical feelings where the mystery of existence can be apprehended emotionally.’’37 His most important question for the theater is to ask whether it is possible to recreate the same metaphysical feeling in the contemporary spectator as experienced when myths and beliefs coincided with religious impulses.

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Already in his coming-of-age novel, The 622 Downfalls of Bungo, Witkacy discloses an early version of Pure Form, which in his opinion, ‘‘must remain foreign to any connection with real life and flow solely from the laws governing the colors and lines themselves, whose combinations and constructions were to present a world absolutely self-contained, which would be . . . the reflection of the transcendental unity of being.’’38 This early attempt on Witkacy’s part to give theater back its transcendental or spiritual significance can be traced back to the Russian symbolists, particularly Bely, who writes: ‘‘Drama has arisen from mystery. Its fate is to return. When drama approaches mystery, returns to it inevitably, it will leave the stageboards and spread through life.’’39 Similarly Witkacy hoped to create ‘‘a pure theater devoid of lies, strange as a dream, in which, through arbitrary incidents totally unmotivated by life— incidents which are ridiculous, sublime, or monstrous—the soft, unchanging light of the Eternal Mystery of Existence descends upon us, radiating from Infinity.’’40 While one could say that in theory Witkacy shares the language of nostalgic desire for reclaiming the metaphysical element in art with the symbolists, he rejects the inner logic and synthetic order of much of symbolist art. At the same time, in his plays poetic language suffers a breakdown, for ultimately Witkacy rejects the lyrical excesses that dominate much of symbolist aesthetics. Consequently, Witkacy appears to function in several antagonistic rebellions against naturalism, for in his theory of Pure Form, much like the symbolists, he calls for a theater of colors, forms, and sounds that will create a formal order based on ‘‘inner necessity.’’ But in his attempt to create such a theater the many plays that savage Pure Form suggest a paradoxical desire for destruction of Pure Form. However, unlike the symbolists, Witkacy perceived that merveilleux and the myste´rieux, or the inconceivable, is found only in disorder, and he developed the techniques that might reveal the mystery of existence by means of the absurd and the grotesque. Witkacy speculates that if the absurd and the illogical are accepted as integral elements of theatrical imagery, they can also be accepted as the basis of the relationship between one image and the next. Consequently, Witkacy juxtaposes irreconcilable images, composed of contradictory characteristics as the basis of presenting the new reality. And to jar spectators out of their automatic interpretations of the world, Witkacy experiments with techniques such as violent explosions or irrational events that culminate in a coup de theáˆtre. The theory of Pure Form that Witkacy created shares with the other avant-garde movements proliferating at the turn of the cen-

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tury, ‘‘the expression of the modernist ideal of an autonomous art freed of referentiality.’’41 As Bernard Dukore aptly observes, Witkacy’s plays might also be described as ‘‘a cosmic amusement park, designed by Dalı´ and Magritte, where Strindberg sells peanuts and Sartre turns somersaults, and Dostoevsky and Nietzsche sling custard pies at each other.’’42 To some degree Witkacy’s theatricality mirrors the experience of a ‘‘reified world out of control,’’43 and in this respect approaches the postmodern condition, reflected in the arts, of the combination and recombination of signs from the junkyard of mass-produced culture. In his tactics of destruction of his own aesthetics, Witkacy has much in common with the attack on naturalism as represented by Jarry the enfant terrible of symbolism. Jarry’s Ubu Roi is pervaded with mordant satire, cruel ironies, invectives, puns, neologisms, and jokes that create a theater ‘‘accessible only to that person who feels himself sufficiently virile to create life.’’ In his assault on the theater, Jarry sought to break through the facades of the world of ‘‘appearances’’ to expose as Artaud describes, ‘‘eternal human imbecility, eternal lust, eternal gluttony, baseness of instinct . . . of people who have dined too well.’’44 Though simultaneously Witkacy shares the desires for a restoration of ritual and spiritual functions in drama with such symbolists as Maeterlinck, Blok, or Bely, he also seems to agree with many of the concerns of decadents such as Jarry, particularly with their apprehension that modernity is a kind of disease emerging from the general malady attributable to ‘‘Americanization’’ and industrialization. Anatole Baju writes in the symbolist journal Le Dećadent that ‘‘society is disintegrating under the corrosive action of a decaying civilization’’ brought about by ‘‘democratic pollution.’’45 Witkacy’s dramas and essays share with the historical avant-garde an invocation of crisis emerging from democratization and the philistinism of the bourgeois. The masses in his plays are described as venal materialists whose only salvation lies through the intervention of a select cadre of artists as carriers of aesthetic ideals and new social theories. The dominant tone that pervades Witkacy’s plays suggests a society in crisis that can only be saved from Armageddon by relying on the artist as savior of society. However, what is particularly relevant for the study of Witkacy’s reactions to social modernity is that his every reactive critique falls victim to constructing an opposing view, which it posts as an antithesis that locks it into a radical epistemological dependence on the very thing it criticizes. Ultimately, his representation of the artist reveals a weak, corruptible figure whose only originality lies in his commitment to the fashion of avant-gardism.

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Thus with a great sense of irony Witkacy criticizes his own avant-gardism as pure show and his Pure Form as intellectual affectation. For Witkacy, like many of the other prototypical avant-gardists like Jarry or Mayakovsky, his life commitment to aesthetic bohemians is not restricted to aesthetic production but entails a lifestyle replete with fashions and demeanors because aesthetic or political vanguardism represents full-time occupation. Witkacy as the prototypical vanguardist stages a typical conflict for his failed artists in his plays, a conflict which the dadaists, the futurists, and Witkacy himself acted out in public, in which one value-sphere (aesthetic or ideological) displaces a plurality of competing interests such as nationalism, capitalism, or communism. With great self-awareness, Witkacy heightens the elitist exclusivity of the prototypical avant-garde art for art’s sake figure, for most of the denigrated gray masses represented in his plays cannot comprehend the heights to which his artist figures aspire. Like Jarry, Witkacy always retained a large dose of the childlike in his dramaturgy, and like Jarry he carries over into his mature work the child’s delight in sudden surprises and spectacular effects, as well as naive enjoyment of killings, accidents, and disaster to present a series of ‘‘unpleasant’’ comedies, ‘‘so necessary in our times.’’ 46 One can detect Witkacy’s Ubuesque tendency towards the grotesque even in the nascent form of his early childhood plays. For example, Cockroaches (1893) portrays the reactions of the King, Priest, courtiers, and Pug Dog to the impending invasion of the castle by a swarm of gray cockroaches from ‘‘Ameri.’’ At the same time one can see to what extent Witkacy is already subverting the refinement and aesthetization of symbolism, for in this childhood play, the cockroaches, which serve as predecessors to the gray mobs gone mad in his later plays, are squashed in a general free-for-all slaughter as the Priest releases the Pug Dog to ‘‘Sic ’Em! Sic ’Em!’’47 The influence of Jarry’s King Ubu, with its lack of internal congruity, pragmatical motivations, and lifelike probability, is evident as well in the plays of Witkacy’s mature period. For example, in Gyubul Wahazar (1921), Witkacy creates Wahazar as a combination of Ubuesque madness and delusions of personal grandeur. It is bizarre how Witkacy’s Wahazar mouths the jargon of ‘‘scientific claptrap’’ which anticipates with dreadful accuracy Hitler’s vituperations on racial purity and the purposeful scientific Marxist jargon of Stalin. Witkacy’s plays, such as Gyubul Wahazar, reflect a curious mixture of farce, parody, and the grotesque that is also characteristic of Jarry. Both show the frightening and yet absurd consequences that follow when

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absolute power is dominated by absolute caprice. ‘‘I’m sacrificing myself for all of you,’’ proclaims Wahazar: I am alone, like God, I alone rule everything, and I’m responsible for everything, and answer only to myself alone. I can condemn myself to death, if I feel like it—if I become absolutely convinced that I’m wrong. I don’t have many ministers—therein lies my greatness. I am a lone solitary spirit—like the steam in the engine, like the electrical energy in the battery. But then I really do have a machine under me, and not some living pulpy mush. My officials are automata, like the ones you see in train stations. I put a penny in and out comes a chocolate, and not a peppermint. . . . Understand that? Huh?48

We can also see Witkacy’s Jarryesque impulse in his deconstruction of Wyspianski’s The Deliverance (1903), one of the cycles of plays in which Wyspianski creates a running dialogue with Polish drama’s theatrical past in his own version, The New Deliverance (1920). In his ironic reckoning of accounts with the Polish romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, Wyspianski brings back the hero Conrad from Mickiewicz’s Forefather’s Eve in order to confront him with the excess of words, bad habits, and deep sleep that have left Poland with nothing but empty heroic remnants from that promise of ‘‘deliverance.’’ Thus, Wyspianski’s Conrad must fight against his own romantic doubts that are his heritage from Mickiewicz. Witkacy reflects on Wyspianski’s theme of the failure to be great, but he consciously situates his play in the aftermath of a revolution that brings totalitarian terror and enforced conformity rather than freedom. Though Wyspianski’s play serves as the central intertextual loop for Witkacy, he also loops back to Beethoven’s Fidelio and Shakespeare’s Richard III. Relying on his technique of cubist collage, Witkacy combines fragments of these disparate works to interact with each other. As a character in Witkacy’s version, Richard III is confined against his will in the petty present, too small for his limitless ambition and thirst for absolute power. On the other hand, Witkacy’s protagonist, Florestan Snakesnout, by virtue of his last name signals a departure from the romantic hero of Beethoven’s opera. Instead, Snakesnout represents the present age of bourgeois salon liberalism, whose empty rhetoric masks self-seeking greed for comfort and prestige, for unlike Wyspianski’s Conrad, Snakesnout is complicit with the final totalitarian takeover. Ultimately, revolution is brought about in Witkacy’s The New Deliverance by the Unknown Someone and his mechanized henchmen, who seize power and take vengeance on their former masters. In this manner, Witkacy destroys

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not only the masterpieces of the past but also eliminates all hope, for instead of ‘‘deliverance’’ there is extermination. Thus Witkacy subverts Wyspianski’s belief in ‘‘an ideal theater of the future that would be native in inspiration and messianic in goals—a sanctuary for celebrating the heroic deeds and spirit of the nation.’’49 Since Wyspianski, similarly to Witkacy’s father, promoted a revival of Polish culture based on native folk arts and the spirit of the people, Witkacy’s rebellion against Wyspianski’s Deliverance can also be read as his revolt against the authority of his own father. Much like his contemporaries the German expressionists, whose clash with their fathers’ generation created sons as characters ready to kill their fathers, Witkacy’s talkative, rebellious artists and poets stand more or less openly for the author and his relationship to his authoritarian father. A fundamental difference, however, is evident between the ‘‘cry of the soul’’ of the Expressionist heroes and Witkacy’s weak and cynical antiheroes. Though the ‘‘l-dramas’’ of the expressionists in such plays as Walter Hasenclever’s The Son (1916) or Paul Kornfeld’s The Seduction (1917) proclaimed the New Man emerging from the slaughter of fathers, Witkacy’s Jarryesque impulse irreverently reverses the image of the New Man to show his sham ideals. Witkacy’s vision in his plays of a technocratic state, though similar to Georg Kaiser’s Gas (1918), a play set in a mythical world of enormously powerful technologists and managers, tends to subvert the central expressionists’ concerns of the New Man as savior. Kaiser’s exclamatory style illustrates the disjunction between him and Witkacy: ‘‘Tell me: where is Man?’’ writes Kaiser. ‘‘When will he appear—and call himself by his own name: Man? When will he overcome the curse— and achieve the new Creation, which he spoilt: Man?’’50 In Witkacy’s plays, however, the heightened emotional monologues of his artist/ poet characters turn into harangues that undermine the possibility of expressionist utopias or the dawning of a new age. The theater arts in particular attempted to bring together many of the disparate avant-garde practices in rebellion against naturalism. However, these rebellions against naturalism in themselves culminated in conflicting battles against each other. On the one hand, artists, poets, and dramatists more concerned with form were following Walter Pater’s observation that ‘‘all art aspires to the condition of music.’’ Thus, Witkacy’s inheritance from more formalist movements such as symbolism is linked to the attempts in all the arts for a language of sound and color that Kandinsky would define as ‘‘the purposeful touching of the human soul.’’51 Artists and dramatists explored the theoretical possibility of a true language or

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grammar of colors and as formal elements containing their own ‘‘inner necessity.’’ Maeterlinck was the first to explore the formal grammar of pure sound when he wrote, ‘‘we may also, perhaps unconsciously, hear this ‘pure’ sound at the same time as we perceive the real, or subsequently, the abstract object. In the latter case, however, this pure sound comes to the fore and exercises a direct influence on the soul.’’52 Similarly, the Polish symbolist Przybyszewski writes, ‘‘In a magic way a sound can evoke an entire life in endless perspective, a color can become a concerto, and a visual impression can arouse terrifying orgies in the depths of the soul.’’53 The various explorations on the part of all these movements had an incalculable effect on the arts, and since theater was the most public of all arts, many of the experiments focused on recreating the symbolic reality of theatrical space. The discussions on extending the limits of perceived reality also included attempts to stretch the limits of each art form. Frequently, the liberation from form led to the appropriation of the language of another form, as in Oskar Kokoschka’s attempt to transpose the dynamic rhythms of the curvilinear form of his paintings from canvas to stage in his play Murderer Hope of Womankind (1907), in Kandinsky’s ‘‘color opera’’ The Yellow Sound (1909) or, in music from the same period, Arnold Scho¨ nberg’s atonal system, through which he attempted to create ‘‘chord colors.’’54 At the same time, cubist collage defied verisimilitude and, in its refusal to represent, laid bare the process and material of art to call attention to itself as a representation of representation. And in theater, the Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) turned to cubism and constructivism as a means of destroying theatrical naturalism. In particular, Meyerhold’s theatrical productions exploited the cubic volume of the acting area, where actors practiced ‘‘biomechanics’’ on stage constructions created to foreground movement.55 An echo of these concerns can also be found in Artaud’s proposition that the program for his The´ aˆ tre Alfred Jarry (1926) was ‘‘to contribute by strictly theatrical means to the ruin of the theater as it exists today.’’ The destruction was essential in order ‘‘to return to the theatre that total liberty that exists in music, poetry, painting, and of which it has been curiously bereft.’’56 It is interesting that the theater was central to the attempts of the many artists in assimilating the qualities and values of other art forms, for as Michael Fried observes, ‘‘What lies between the arts is theater.’’57 Witkacy, like his contemporaries Kokoschka and Kandinsky, also sought to enlarge the possibilities of artistic composition. For Witkacy the theater became an experimental arena in which he could play with dynamism and simultaneity in order to win complete free-

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dom for static formal elements. In his Czysta Forma w teatrze [Pure Form in the theater] (1923), Witkacy maintains that the new drama will not imitate real life but the pure arts of painting and music. He believes that the dramatist, unhampered by such obsolete notions as psychologically believable characters and consistent plots, will be free to deform reality for purely formal ends and use all the elements of theater as the musician uses notes and the modern painter, colors and shapes. While the symbolists had discussed the isolation of the artistic language of color and form as independent of representational subject matter since the 1890s, Witkacy uses the categories of color and form to go beyond the spiritual or inner content foregrounded by the symbolists. Instead of using color as a reflection of everyday life or the subjective perception of life, Witkacy foregrounds color as a formal element within theatrical space. Witkacy’s conviction that color takes on meaning as color—not simply as something that enables us to recognize objects in the real world— closely resembles the explorations of the highly influential Russian suprematist artist and theorist Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935), who observed that ‘‘colour is a means of creating form and structure; it is not composition for composition’s own sake; it is something different—a language composed of special words. It is an aid with which one can talk about the universe or about the state of our inner animation, something one cannot express by means of words, sounds.’’58 Instead of using color as a reflection of everyday life or the subjective perception of life, Witkacy foregrounds color as a formal element within theatrical space. Likewise, Witkacy’s use of color in his paintings and stage images was meant to present autonomous images and, instead of representing the physical world, to create associations that would transport the spectator into an entirely new world, free and unpredictable. Witkacy insisted that the meaning of his plays or paintings lay not in the subject matter or discursive content but in their formal construction or ‘‘internal necessity.’’59 In writing on internal necessity, Witkacy appears to have been strongly influenced by Kandinsky’s essay ‘‘Content and Form’’ (1910), in which Kandinsky rejects the notion that form is the corresponding expression and materialization of content and insists that ‘‘form is the material expression of pure abstraction.’’ Kandinsky also writes that only ‘‘that work is beautiful whose form corresponds entirely to its inner content (which is, as it were, an unattainable ideal)’’ and lays down the foundation for the principle of ‘‘inner necessity’’ as ‘‘the one invariable law of art in its essence.’’60 For Witkacy, as for Kandinsky, ‘‘inner necessity’’ was a central concern, particularly as he attempted to pro-

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vide the theoretical transition of Pure Form from painting to drama. He asked, ‘‘If painting were no more than a set of ‘oriented tensions’ of line and color, and if modern painting tended toward pure expression and a refusal to represent anything, could not drama be conceived of as ‘pure action’?’’61 Since Witkacy believed that theatrical art should strive to achieve the abstraction of nonrepresentational painting and that it should create its effects by enigma and veiled suggestions rather than description or exposition, much of his work is far from easy to read, particularly since he dispenses with the conventional syntax of theatrical representations. This striving for abstraction is reflected in the model that Witkacy uses in his theoretical writings on Pure Form or Czysta Forma to illustrate what he means by ‘‘pure action.’’ Above all, the model illustrates the complexity and contradiction of Pure Form as representation, for in Witkacy’s intensification of images one notices both traces of avant-gardism and at the same time a certain ironic distance from his compulsion for innovation for its own sake. In addition, for the contemporary spectator, Witkacy’s model also relates to the essentially postmodern interest in performance rather than a plot-centered representation of an action: Three characters dressed in red come on stage and bow to no one in particular. One of them recites a poem (it should create a feeling of urgent necessity at this very moment.) A kindly old man enters leading a cat on a string. So far everything has taken place against a background of a black screen. The screen draws apart, and an Italian landscape becomes visible. Organ music is heard. The old man talks with the other characters, and what they say should be in keeping with what has gone before. A glass falls off the table. All of them fall on their knees and weep. The old man changes from a kindly old man into a ferocious ‘‘butcher’’ and murders a little girl who has just crawled in from the left. At this very moment a handsome young man runs in and thanks the old man for murdering the girl, at which point the characters in red sing and dance. Then the young man weeps over the body of the little girl and says some very amusing things, whereupon the old man becomes once again kindly and good-natured and laughs to himself in a corner, uttering sublime and limpid phrases. The choice of costumes is completely open: period or fantastic—there may be music during some parts of the performance. In other words, an insane asylum? Or rather a madman’s brain on the stage? Perhaps so, but we maintain that, if the play is seriously written and appropriately produced, this method can create works of previously unsuspected beauty, whether in drama, tragedy, farce, or the grotesque, all in a uniform style and unlike anything which has previously existed.62

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‘‘Poetry should be an uninterrupted sequence of new images,’’ announced Marinetti, and ‘‘the broader their affinities, the longer will images keep their power to amaze.’’63 In a similar manner, through the discontinuous affinities of actions in his model for Pure Form in the theater, Witkacy attempted to rouse the audience’s deadened nerves to the point of amazement. ‘‘Everything must be transformed in a way no one has ever seen before,’’ proclaims his prototype artist character in the Beelzebub Sonata (1925).64 Concerned with the increasing mechanization of life, Witkacy hoped that his theater would shock the spectator’s nervous system and act as a stimulating shower after long hours of stupefying work.65 Thus, while on the one hand Witkacy describes the structure of Pure Form in the theater in a highly formalistic manner as a pattern of simple and complex elements chosen consciously and purposefully, on the other hand he treats the effect of Pure Form on the spectator in metaphysical terms and places significant stress on expressive function. It is important to remember that Witkacy was a painter as well as a dramatist and that his first attempts to create an aesthetics of Pure Form were related to painting. In the painting Conversation of an Unknown Old Woman with the Demonic Orchestra Conductor, for example, Witkacy attempts to extend the limits of the picture frame by presenting an image of pure action through what Malevich designates as cubism’s central concerns of color, rhythm, and volume. While the title of his painting suggests a surreal event of sorts, the picture itself cannot be recuperated exclusively from the description of its content, for as Malevich elucidates, ‘‘in the plastic arts a painting has to be seen and heard, for we bring sound, colour and volume into the structure of objects and of nature.’’66 As Wojciech Sztaba writes, what matters is not the curious content that emerges from the painting, but the ‘‘theatricality’’ of the composition.67 Witkacy’s parodic titles of his paintings as well as his plays also suggest the crisis of references engendered by the collapse of the signature styles of naturalism. At the same time, Witkacy’s titles call attention to his remarkable anticipation of noniconic abstract art that emerged as a result of the collapse of all stable systems on the eve of World War I. Witkacy’s scenographic notion of pure action extends from his paintings to the groupings of characters on stage, ‘‘who should not be presented as a seemingly unintentional arrangement particular to the practices of naturalism, but rather as an arrangement related to set decoration, so that the image projects a painterly composition with a momentary suspension of movement and without any attempts by the actors to play mimetically.’’ In pursuit of techniques that would bring Pure Form to life, Witkacy urged the actor to em-

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ploy the technique of ‘‘dissonance’’ in which the actor made cheerful statements with an air of gloom and tragic ones with laughter.68 Ultimately, Witkacy’s model also serves as an appropriate illustration of Burliuk’s observation in ‘‘Cubism (Surface-Plane),’’ included in the manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, that the structure of nonrepresentational texts ‘‘reacts against conventional representational systems, enacting a critique of semantic valence.’’69 When considering Witkacy’s notion of Pure Form in the theater, attention to the purely ‘‘painterly composition’’ of actors, costumes, and set design may prove misleading, for Witkacy’s theater goes beyond cubism’s attention to rhythm, volume, and color to add the notion of movement in time. Though Witkacy pays considerable attention to the formal manifestations of color, shape, and tone in his Pure Form model, as he himself cautioned, the dominance of these elements might lead to ‘‘tableaux vivants and pantomimes.’’70 Witkacy’s world is a kinetic one. Tensions are constantly shifting, receding, and building up. In addition, new and unexpected elements are often juxtaposed in a single image in such a way as to go contrary to the dictates of logic and reason. Chance happenings inscribed one after another and sudden reversals in characterization are among the practices of astonishment illustrated in Witkacy’s model. Every time a narrative connection is established, he arbitrarily decides to disturb it by introducing the element of surprise—his special province—through techniques such as omitting foreshadowing and undermining causal or psychological connections. Witkacy’s attention to movement reveals Pure Form more as a Mo¨bius strip than as the stable enclosed space of the geometric forms of abstract paintings. Ultimately, for Witkacy, movement exhibits, as in the Mo¨bius strip, the eternal return to the beginning, for in his plays, while relative changes may occur within the plot, there is no movement out of the fixed loop of predetermined events. During the period in which ‘‘all clocks of all the arts were taken apart to the last spring, the last screw,’’71many artists found comfort in ideological commitment to a particular movement. Though his experience with war and revolution taught Witkacy that the individual’s basic freedom had been irreparably circumscribed, his plays and writings on Pure Form display passionate opposition to limitations, especially conventional or ideological ones. The characters that populate Witkacy’s plays reflect his distrust of ideology by seeking to escape through negation, evasion, or insanity the mechanization that any ideology engenders. In this respect Witkacy differs significantly from the perception of the Russian symbolists that the coming revolution represented ‘‘a purifying power of destructive

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cataclysm’’ from which a new period of renewal would follow.72 Instead, his plays reveal so strong a suspicion of political agendas masked as aesthetic movements that he ultimately deconstructs even his own manifestos. ‘‘We live in an age of manifestos,’’ writes Witkacy: Even before an artistic movement spontaneously comes into being, one can frequently observe its theory in a state of relative perfection. Theories are starting to create movements, and not vice versa. A greater and greater over-intellectualization of the creative process and the subjugation of the outbursts of genius to principles conceived a priori are the characteristic of our time.73

Similarly Jarry, whose Ubu Witkacy greatly admired, rebelled against the proliferation of theories by formulating his theory of ‘‘pataphysics,’’ which according to him, was ‘‘the science of imaginary solutions.’’74 Thus, pataphysics as the ‘‘science beyond metaphysics’’ shows the inadequacy and meaninglessness of the effort of the various movements to represent ‘‘inner reality.’’ In Jarry’s plays there is no internalizing, and the meaninglessness and chaos of reality are recognized in acts of instinctive savagery and destruction. Witkacy’s contemporary, the Austrian novelist Robert Musil, explores similar concerns in his The Man Without Qualities, and in a section entitled ‘‘Pseudoreality Prevails,’’ Musil’s paramount explication concerns the moral and intellectual condition of man, and Musil, like Witkacy, comes to a pessimistic conclusion: Men who once merely headed minor sects have become aged celebrities, and art dealers have become rich; new movements are constantly being started; everybody attends both the academic and the avant-garde shows, and even the avant-garde of the avant-garde; the family magazines have bobbed their hair; politicians like to sound off on the cultural arts, and even newspapers make literary history. So what has been lost?75

And like Witkacy, Musil despairs at the loss of a sense of history and nobility as sharp boundaries everywhere becomes blurred and everything is jumbled into a mishmash of cultural artifacts: There is just something missing in everything, though you can’t put your finger on it, as if there had been a change in the blood or in the air; a mysterious disease has eaten away the previous period’s seeds of genius, but everything sparkles with novelty, and finally one has no way of knowing whether the world has really grown worse, or oneself merely older.76

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When one examines the various theories promoted in the arts, one sees that frequently, as in the case of Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theater, the artist regards art as a privileged component in the process of social change. As Brecht states: ‘‘Reality, however complete, has to be altered by being turned into art, so that it can be seen to be alterable and treated as such.’’77 Though both Brecht and Witkacy perceive the world changing radically as a consequence of historical changes, Witkacy’s view, like Musil’s, remains distinctly anti-utopian. Instead of adopting an optimistic vision of the future, Witkacy apprehends the imminence of catastrophe; instead of preaching collectivism, he defends the individuality of the unique individual; and instead of promoting the myth of revolution, he formulates his peculiar kind of conservatism. The common feature of the artistic vanguard is to claim that their aesthetics may effect radical changes in perception and, as a result, in society as well; however, Witkacy, as a most playful and accomplished deconstructionist, refused to privilege his own theory. While on the one hand, Witkacy was formulating the ideal aesthetics of Pure Form, on the other hand he was subverting Pure Form in his plays and in the antiaesthetics of his S. I. Witkiewicz Portrait Painting Firm (1924). The mock-capitalist company’s motto insisted that ‘‘the customer must be satisfied.’’ The company ‘‘rules’’ included classifications of various portraits in the company’s production line: type A, ‘‘slick’’ portraits ‘with a certain loss of character in the interests of beautification’’; type B, portraits with ‘‘more emphasis on character and objectivity’’; ‘‘Type C, C Co., E, C H C Co E, etc, portraits to be executed with the aid of narcotics of a superior grade’’ so as to approach abstract composition, ‘‘or what is known as ‘Pure Form.’ ’’78 The type A and B portraits of ‘‘important’’ paying customers were signed as Witkiewicz. There was, however, no charge for the type C portraits that were of friends whom Witkacy painted while experimenting with combinations of alcohol and drugs, and these were always signed Witkacy. The type C portraits were also signed with a code such as those suggested in the above quotation, especially those portraits painted under the influence of what Witkacy called the ‘‘metaphysical’’ drugs—peyote and mescaline— which produced feelings of ‘‘the strangeness of existence,’’ as opposed to the ‘‘realistic’’ narcotics—cocaine, alcohol, and nicotine—which produced distortion.79 In his specialized and mechanical production of portraits of types A and B and in the classified experiments of type C, Witkacy was voicing impulses in many ways comparable to Duchamp’s ‘‘abandonment of art for a program of irony and destruction.’’80 Thus, Wit-

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kacy turned on the form he had made, and then on form itself. Both in painting and theater Witkacy attempted to break through the constraining barriers of genre and theory, including his own, and sought to expand the nature of his practice so that it violated established conventions of naturalistic painterly and theatrical representation. As a result, many of the characters that populate his plays frequently resemble the portraits he painted under the influence of ‘‘metaphysical’’ drugs. At the same time, many also reflect the bourgeois pretentiousness of his type A and B portraits of important ‘‘paying’’ customers. Bizarre and at the same time penetratingly real, the characters, conforming to Todorov’s description of the fantastic, exist in a sphere that is a ‘‘hesitation’’ between the real and unreal.81 The most typical of the myriad characters in Witkacy’s oeuvre are the artist in conflict with society, the artist-pretender, the demonic woman, the androgynous figure changing at will to a masculine or feminine persona, the mad tyrant, the mechanized desexualized servant, and the prototypical capitalist—all forming ‘‘a figurative museum of his gallery of portraits and of obsolete individualists.’’82 In particular, the failed artists, like Leon in The Mother, figure as central symbols of the inability to evoke the mystery of existence, or even illusion, in a world in which the pragmatics of capitalism have set the standards for art. Witkacy’s The Mother, subtitled ‘‘An Unsavory Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue,’’83 serves to illustrate effectively the intersection of various movements—from Naturalism to Pure Form. The subtitle effectively announces Witkacy’s intent to besiege Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, ‘‘A Domestic Tragedy in Three Acts,’’ by turning Ibsen’s domestic tragedy into an unsavory travesty. Though Ibsen’s Ghosts provides the themes of incest, dead fathers, and revelations of shameful truths, in The Mother, these revelations serve largely as traces that are transposed and condensed in such a way that they may not be instantly recognizable. As Gerould and C. S. Durer note in their introduction to the play, Witkacy lets loose the ‘‘whole world of hallucinations, schizophrenia, blindness, alcoholism, madness, and drug addiction—all elements that could appear in the naturalistic theater—in speeded-up and exaggerated form.’’84 While the struggle between mother and son in Ibsen’s Ghosts informs the conflict in Witkacy’s play, the vampire motif from August Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata provides thematic material rendered visually through Witkacy’s painterly composition in black and white, with characters white as cadavers. The main targets of Witkacy’s subversion of Ibsen’s and Strindberg’s plays, however, he finds in what he perceives as the artificiality of Ibsenesque verisimilitude and the

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emptiness of Strindberg’s expressionism. Though the first act and the beginning of the second at first appear almost as faithful parodies of both Ibsen and Strindberg, by the end of the second act, the lingering traces of Ibsenesque revelations of shameful truths and Strindbergian themes of forgiveness and repentance disintegrate as surrealist disorder permeates the play during the cocaine sniffing party that ravages the pretentious parlor and destroys all vestiges of the naturalistic time-space continuum and moral and psychological baggage as well. The references to Ibsen’s and Strindberg’s plays are not only oblique, however, for Witkacy playfully misquotes and misappropriates quotations from both Ghosts and The Ghost Sonata, and with a mischievous stroke he gives the mother the honor of being the arch defender of Ibsen’s dramas of tragic disclosures and Strindberg’s heightened dramas of spiritual anguish. Leon, however, rejects her histrionics: ‘‘But let’s not have any dramas a` la Ibsen, with all that tragedy business about the various professions and the shortcomings of each. I’d rather have a cold-soup tragedy or a juices-cooked-outof-it tragedy a` la Strindberg.’’ ‘‘Nothing’s sacred to you,’’ the mother protests. ‘‘You treat Ibsen and Strindberg the same way you treat me. Is there any greater work of genius in the whole world than Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata?’’ (129). Later, when Leon begins to echo his father’s voice, the mother melodramatically accuses Leon of acting like his father: ‘‘The two of you are completely alike in every way—just like in Ibsen’s Ghosts’’ (145). It will be seen that these ironic allusions to Ibsen are not treated in a manner consistent with the original works but ‘‘are deformed fragments of Ibsen transposed into a Witkacian dimension, like pieces of a naturalistic portrait—a nose, an eye, a cheek—included within a surrealistic painting’’;85 something similar could be said of the allusions to Strindberg. Since Witkacy’s approach is one of concentration and compression, The Mother can be viewed as a cubist collage, or as a representation of a representation composed out of elements from Ibsen and Strindberg. Using allusion as the key modus operandi, Witkacy, in his appropriation of Ibsen and Strindberg and his free play of selfconscious references to other texts in The Mother, also anticipates Kristeva’s observation on intertextuality that ‘‘any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.’’86 Similarly Witkacy asserts in The Only Way Out that ‘‘in art (and quite possibly in life too) everything depends exclusively on the connections.’’87 While Witkacy borrows the main characters and situations from Ibsen’s Ghosts, from the first scene it is evident that Ibsen’s world

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has become rather tawdry. Mrs. Alving’s genteel parlor has become dećlasse´, with ‘‘a cheap imitation leather sofa’’ and ‘‘a table covered with a decorated oilcloth’’ (121). Nor is Janina Eely the same image of high-minded self-sacrifice as Mrs. Alving. Her opening words— ‘‘the lowdown vampire’’—in reference to her son Leon, show us that her supposed self-sacrifice has consisted of nothing more than selfdeception and self-pity. Whereas in Ibsen’s play Mrs. Alving’s conflict is internalized and her disillusionment and suppressed sexuality emerge as subtext, in Witkacy’s play, the mother’s motivations are externalized, and she is given two different modes of expression that she switches on and off depending on the situation: ‘‘down-to-earth and direct’’ and ‘‘more refined and mannered’’ (119). In ascribing to the mother two distinct modes of expression, Witkacy calls attention to her ‘‘critical self-awareness and critical stage-awareness.’’88 By means of the mother’s dissection of her suffering, she is able to be directly involved in the action while simultaneously watching herself, as if from a distance, and judging her performance by analyzing her situation through Ibsen and Strindberg. The mother even describes her doubleness as seeing her ‘‘second, other self ’’ (140). She appears to be a bitter woman aware of two lives, one a selfdeluding unrealized life, and the other an equally self-deceptive real life consisting of her self-sacrifice as she knits incessantly in order to support and punish Leon, the product of ‘‘a dreadful misalliance’’ (123). ‘‘I have two lives,’’ she says ‘‘slowly, with venom,’’ ‘‘my other true existence which has died and this one floating by me like a nightmare’’ (121). Soon we see that her ‘‘true existence’’ is also a sham. ‘‘I used to paint,’’ she says bitterly; ‘‘I had great talent for music, I wrote stories that weren’t all bad. . . . I’m not saying this from any need to show off—there’s nobody here—I’m sure of that. Oh—this eternal loneliness’’ (121). In the meantime, the off-stage voice of her dead husband laughs. ‘‘Ha, ha, ha!’ and calls attention to her wallowing in her own self-sacrifice. The figurative ghost of the father in Ghosts becomes a real ghost whose voice is heard mocking the mother’s bourgeois concerns and commenting on his son’s struggle ‘‘from a vantage point outside space and time.’’89 Whereas in Ibsen’s play Mrs. Alving ultimately reaches the recognition that everything in her life has been a sham and that duty has been only a cover-up, the mother totally ignores the laughing voice of her betrayed dead husband. Instead of reaching self-awareness, the mother becomes a parody of a mother as she commands her servant Dorothy in her ‘‘more refined and mannered’’ tone to ‘‘please put the macaroni on in cold water, Italian style, the way my son likes it.

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It’s so nice to be a mother and be able to pamper your little boy’’ (122). While Leon bears a strong resemblance to Ibsen’s Osvald in his quest for ‘‘the joy of work,’’90 he is also imbued with a strong sense of the messianic and destructive idealism of Strindberg’s Student Arkenholz. Like Arkenholz, Leon is the eternal student searching for meaning. One by one he discards the various professions that might fulfill him. Above all, Leon refuses to become ‘‘a paint slinger, copying nature’’ (130), to make paintings similar to Osvald’s ‘‘full of light, of sunshine, of glowing happy faces.’’91 Rather, Witkacy selfdeprecatingly has Leon reject the possibility of becoming a ‘‘real’’ artist ‘‘who creates a sense of formal perfection through deformation of reality.’’ Instead, he chooses the profession of a dilettante social prophet because to be ‘‘a dilettante nowadays means more . . . than to be a specialist going around and around in a treadmill with blinders on your eyes’’ (130). He diagnoses the ills of society much as Witkacy himself did, calling attention to ‘‘universal grayness, mechanization, [and] a foul swamp of social perfection’’ (132) that have diminished the power of the individual. In Leon’s vision, special institutions will have to be created to disseminate knowledge about how to reverse the loss of ‘‘everything that is great, everything that has any connection with Infinity or the Mystery of Existence’’ (131). He envisions a society that will not be a ‘‘sickeningly democratic organization composed of the self-styled ‘intelligentsia,’ ’’ for that ‘‘sort of mealy-mouthed democracy is nothing but a big lie.’’ The society he foresees will instead ‘‘utilize social forces and create for once social, not individual, possibilities for the formation of a new humanity.’’ This euphoric vision of his role in the future ends in the exhausting realization that ‘‘we’re moving in the other direction, toward the production of healthy automatons, a hundred times more tragic in their automatism than the insects—because we had everything and lost it all’’ (133). Finally, as Gerould and Durer mention, Leon’s ‘‘utopian ideas for collective reformation of the human race are vaguer than his incisive negative analysis.’’92 At the same time, his idealism is undermined by his inability to commit himself to a course of action. Instead, he lives off his mother’s knitting, sucking her dry like a vampire. Leon can even justify the contradiction between his highest ideals of individualism and his own vampirism: ‘‘But in times like ours a dissociation has taken place between the principles for which a man stands and his actual moral value as an individual. Nowadays a prophet may be a perfect swine—that’s sad, but it’s a fact’’ (133). Thus Leon’s vision of society, though deeply felt, degenerates into

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‘‘bourgeois nihilism’’ that serves as a scandal-provoking feature in the program at the Cafe´ Illusion. The event becomes a parody of the provocations of the futurists and dadaists, with incensed spectators smashing the lights and breaking the seats. Calfskin, the impresario of the Cafe´ Illusion, demands damages and expresses disgust at the incoherence of Leon’s manifesto on art: But no one in the auditorium understood you: the biggest intellectuals in town were there—they all had complimentary tickets—they almost had to be dragged in. No one understood a single word: they thought you were talking double-talk. Now, of course, I’m not saying. . . . But everyone’s furious with you. They’re saying that you’re out to undermine all our ideals, with your morbid pessimism and complete intellectual anarchy—and even worse: your degenerate bourgeois nihilism. Others are saying it’s even worse than communism. (137)

It is interesting that Calfskin’s objections to Leon’s performance serve as parallels to the polemics in the press against Witkacy’s own theories and plays. One critic sarcastically remarked that seeing one of Witkacy’s plays was a grotesque experience, ‘‘as if one were to present the disjointed leg of one of Picasso’s paintings and order it to speak—a sin against nature.’’93 As in Leon’s debut performance at the Cafe´ Illusion, where his anti-illusion speech made ‘‘all hell break loose,’’ the reception of Witkacy’s plays showed that his nonEuclidean structure had the effect of arousing disorientation that frequently turned to anger. Calfskin’s comments thus provide ironic insights into Witkacy’s situation in interwar Poland as well. ‘‘You had two supporters there,’’ Calfskin says. ‘‘They got beaten to a pulp’’ (137). The Mother is like a seánce in which Witkacy summons characters from Ibsen’s and Strindberg’s plays; however, they materialize as shadows of characters, disconnected from their original function. For example, though Pastor Manders and Calfskin perform similar functions in Ghosts and The Mother as arbiters of moral and aesthetic values, in The Mother the uplifting, though hypocritical, moral preaching of Pastor Manders are debased into the pragmatic comments of Calfskin. Similarly, the servant-girl Regina (Osvald’s illegitimate half-sister) and her carpenter-father Engstrand are incarnated in The Mother as Sophia and her father, the ‘‘old buzzard’’ Apollinaire Stonybroke. Sophia is to keep Leon from committing suicide, thus fulfilling a function similar to Regina’s vis-a`-vis Osvald. It appears that Leon’s despair, like Osvald’s, arises from his knowledge that he is the offspring of a ‘‘misalliance’’: he has a criminal and a

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commoner for a father, and a Baroness von Oates, ‘‘spelled with an ‘e,’ and not just ordinary ‘oats’ ’’ for a mother (136).94 Leon’s despair is revealed to be as much of a sham as the mother’s pretenses to nobility, however. His ‘‘feelings’’ are a screen for his sentimental tragedizing about his inability to become a ‘‘factory worker or a post office employee’’ (128), and his intellectual despair becomes a cover-up for his sick, neurotic attachment to his mother. While Ibsen’s Ghosts is the dominant metatext in the first act of The Mother, Strindberg’s vampire motif sets the tone for the second act. Called a vampire by the mother in the opening lines of the play, Leon accepts this condition as he explains to Sophia their function in life: ‘‘We’re vampires! For the time being we’ll live off Mother. She’ll make ends meet with her knitting—it’s monstrous’’ (134). When Sophia recognizes the hypocritical nature of the mother’s sacrifices, she echoes Leon: ‘‘I’ve turned into a vampire. For the first time in my life I’ll be myself ’’ (135). However, a curious reversal in the second act reveals the mother as the main vampire, for Leon turns to military espionage and Sophia to prostitution in order to maintain the Mother’s status of her ‘‘Oates’’ lineage. The shabby living room of the first act has been left behind, and the action takes place in ‘‘a salon in a rather luxurious apartment’’ (139), evoking at the same time the sham elegance of the Colonel’s apartment in The Ghost Sonata, with its marble statue and mahogany furnishings. As in The Ghost Sonata, social status is found to be unstable, and as social pretenders invade the salon, Witkacy strips away their facades by means of scathing satire. But Ibsen’s Ghosts continues to add complexity to Witkacy’s textual construction when the mother, unaccustomed to a life without guilt-provoking self-sacrifice, turns increasingly to drink and secrets spill out of the closet as she acknowledges her role in pushing her husband into crime. ‘‘He stole and murdered for my sake, the poor thing,’’ she sobs, and ‘‘he made me so very happy.’’ Her self-examination, however, quickly peters out as she protests, ‘‘I only wanted to be a little better off ’’ (142). Similarly, the model of the simultaneous presence of dead and live characters in Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata takes on textual significance in The Mother when the father’s Voice, dissatisfied in serving as an Ibsenesque subtextual trace, begins to direct the action. Surreal forces are unleashed as a battle takes place in which Strindbergian vampires launch attacks on the middle-class parlor of Ibsen’s realm. The vampires are soon aided by the eccentric guests, who, like the guests at the ‘‘ghost supper’’ in Strindberg’s play, destroy all vestiges of pretense in the salon. The ‘bizarre gallery of Witkacian

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sensualists and swindlers’’95 bring cocaine with them, and soon ‘‘the whole universe seems strangely harmonious even though everything is really rotten’’ (149). At times, (for example, 140), the action appears to follow the model of Chwistek’s The Plurality of Realities, as cocaine makes it possible to see everything as beautiful and the guests as ‘‘wonderful memories of themselves’’ (149). Thus, when the mother dies from an overdose, Leon takes some more of ‘‘that wonderful stuff that lets us escape real-life dramas or else to postpone them indefinitely’’ (152). Nor does her death provide insights into the ‘‘Mystery of Existence.’’ Leon discovers that ‘‘she doesn’t know any more about what death really means than [the survivors] do about what life is.’’ And as Leon leads the party out of the pretentious salon, abandoning the mother’s corpse, the Voice applauds: ‘‘Bravo, Leon! For the first time I can see that you’re my son’’ (153). While the traces of Ibsen and Strindberg do provide The Mother with a certain element of coherent narrative structure, Witkacy’s mise-en-sce` ne ultimately attempts to overcome the handicap that separates drama from the purely visual arts—the necessity of experiencing the parts of the dramatic work successively. Though the action of the first act takes place in a conventional, drab, middle-class parlor and that of the second in an elegant salon, from the beginning Witkacy’s mise-en-sce` ne presents a world depicted only in blacks and whites, with characters ‘‘absolutely cadaverous white without the lightest trace of color’’ with ‘‘black lips and darkly flushed cheeks’’ (119). As a result, though a transition from the first to the second act may have occurred in terms of plot, the visual text of the mise-en-sce` ne instead presents indeterminacy as the condition of the characters throughout both acts, and the visual text, in its striving to be freed from the sensation of passing time, contradicts the text of the dramatic action. In a similar manner to the disjunction between Rene´ Magritte’s painting Pipe (1926) and the accompanying text ‘‘l am not a pipe,’’ we observe that in the relationship between Witkacy’s dramatic text of The Mother and the language of the mise-en-sce`ne there exists, as Michel Foucault explains with reference to Magritte and his work, ‘‘a whole series of intersections—or rather attacks launched by one against the other, arrows shot at the enemy target, enterprises of subversion and destruction, lance blows and wounds, a battle.’’96 As the third act opens in the form of an epilogue, the traces of Ibsen’s naturalistic and Strindberg’s expressionistic texts virtually disappear. We are in a room that is a black box, with no doors or windows. The floor is covered with a black carpet as well, and a black six-sided pedestal at center stage reveals the laid-out body of the

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mother. Every vestige of motivation, causality, and guilt seen in the bourgeois salon of the previous act has been abandoned, and Leon’s address to the audience suggests that the situation should be accepted ‘‘for what it is and nothing more’’: ‘‘Despite all its seeming complexity it’s something immediate, like the color red, for example, or the musical note A. Some people might consider it a hoax, a dream, a symbol, or God knows what. I leave them complete freedom of interpretation’’(153). Is this scene to be interpreted as Leon’s ‘‘terrible hangover,’’ or as an instance of his ‘‘unbearable feeling of alienation which they say is the special reaction to cocaine’’ (154)? Suddenly, the Voice interrupts and demands an end to Leon’s feeble attempts at making sense of the confused space-time continuum. And just as suddenly, when Leon claps his hands, a curtain at the back of the stage is drawn, revealing the entire cast of characters from the preceding acts. Spectators of Leon’s metaphysical confusion, the actors sit there on red chairs against the background of a black wall, and, as in the previous acts, these vampires are costumed and made up entirely in black and white. Only the Unknown Young Woman, vaguely resembling the mother in her gestures and expression, is dressed in ‘‘red, green, violet’’ (154). Thus, the mother exists as both the corpse and the Unknown Young Woman, and Leon exists as both the young man of thirty talking to his younger mother of twentythree and as himself in embryo in her rounded stomach. In addition, the disembodied Voice is present in the figure of the Unknown Young Man, who speaks in the same beautiful baritone. The two different dimensions of time and space exist simultaneously. As the action of the third act suddenly takes us to the frontiers of consciousness, the movement against time shows Witkacy’s playful interpretation of Einstein’s theory of the relativity. When Leon, in his self-indulgent ‘‘boo-hooing,’’ bemoans that the corpse of the mother won’t ever be able to forgive him, his mother to be, the Unknown Young Woman, forgives him everything a priori. Though the duality of existence had been explored as a potential condition in Leon’s monologues in the first and second acts, ‘‘doubleness’’ is now illustrated as ‘‘movement in depth, rather than progression in time.’’97 Time is no longer the time of real life, but of a hugely amplified present. Nor does Leon offer any explanations: ‘‘There are just some things I won’t go into, the spatial-temporal relationships in particular. I don’t know, for instance, how much time has elapsed since that other evening, and I don’t want to know’’ (154). One of the other characters, however, more accustomed to Ibsen’s style of denouement protests the illogical carryings on:

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Physical doubling plus displacement in time—no, that’s going too far. We’ve been raised on Einstein, but we can’t take a hoax like that seriously, even as an intellectual experiment. There are some intellectual experiments that shouldn’t be allowed: like those that contradict the fundamental laws of General Ontology. And then what’s the use of talking about reality, even if you accept the plurality of realities, as expounded by Leon Chwistek. Reality can’t be made logical without falsifying it. (155)

The series of surreal events illustrates the distance between Pure Form and the recognizable representations of Ibsen, or Strindberg. At one point, a huge shiny black pipe comes sliding down from the ceiling. The theater director Calfskin emerges out of a small door at the back of the pipe, followed by six workers dressed in black. The pipe disappears, disappointing everyone who had hoped that this might be a way out of the black box of the stage. The Unknown Young Woman demands that she wants ‘‘to live’’ and, grabbing hold of the corpse of the mother, yanks off the wooden head and scatters the straw and rags that the corpse has been stuffed with all over the stage. She pushes her way to the back of the stage, presses a button, and a door opens, revealing a mountain landscape in spring, flooded with sunshine. The sunny naturalistic landscape interjects hope as most of the characters, including the vampires—but with the exception of Leon, Calfskin, and the workers—leave, and the room gradually returns to blackness. The momentary glimpse of hope in the black box recalls Strindberg’s conclusion to The Ghost Sonata, for in that play, Arnold Bo¨cklin’s mystical painting Island of The Dead is revealed in order to guide the poor suffering soul from the ‘‘world of illusions, guilt, suffering, and death, the world of everlasting change, disappointments, and pain!’’ as ‘‘soft, quiet, pleasantly sad music can be heard from outside.’’98 It is significant that in this momentary intrusion of salvation into Pure Form the naturalistic landscape reveals an escape route only for the phantom figures, and not the hero, the workers, and the pragmatic Calfskin. Unlike Ibsen and Strindberg, Witkacy refuses to sustain the illusion of salvation, and Leon is bereft of even the illusion of loss. As he gathers up the scattered fragments of his mother, pressing them to his breast, Leon makes a soulful speech: ‘‘Aaah! Now I don’t have anything left any more. They’ve taken my pangs of conscience away from me! They’ve taken my anguish away! I have nothing, nothing, nothing! Only these tragic souvenirs. Aaah!’’ At this, the workers, ‘‘in the name of mealy-mouthed democracy’’ (161), throw themselves on Leon and, strangling him, drag his body in the direction

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of the trap door into which the pipe has disappeared. Then they stuff him into the trap, shouting, ‘‘Oh, that’s how, that’s how, oh that’s ho-o-w-w-w!’’ (162). No trace is left of Leon; the pipe descends from the ceiling, and the workers standing in line enter it once again. Instead of a Greek chorus, the workers clad in black serve as a commentary on the futility of striving for individualism in the pseudo-democracy of interwar Poland. As Gerould aptly states, the ‘‘deus ex machina now becomes literally a machine,’’ and the function of the machine, serviced by the automated workers, is to annihilate without a trace Leon’s suffering and striving. The other symbols of the past, including the rags and straw that represent his mother, have disappeared; ‘‘[A]ll that remains is for the hero himself to disappear.’’99 Thus, the empty space on stage at the end of the play calls attention to the triumph of mechanization. Quite appropriately, Jan Blonski calls Witkacy’s god from the machine ‘‘a deus ex populo,’’100 for in The Mother it is the six identical automatons lined up in a row who pass the final judgment on the nature of art and human suffering. The last image of the play is that of Calfskin, the director of the Cafe´ Illusion, wandering about the stage as the curtain comes down. It may be significant that the uncomprehending Calfskin is the last figure left on stage. Though his role suggests that naturalistic illusion may be more his forte, Calfskin enters the stage out of the tube together with the workers as part of a Pure Form happening. When his lines prove to consist of stale jokes, he gets a sock in the jaw and ends up muttering on the stage unintelligibly. There may be a commentary on theater in this: Calfskin cannot adapt to the new kind of spectacle in which neither reality nor the reproduction of reality ‘‘has the time to take on the appearance of reality.’’101 Yet, despite his incoherent muttering and his misunderstanding of Pure Form, Calfskin survives and may quite likely end up in Hollywood, continuing to pass pragmatic judgments on the relationship between art and profit. To assure his success, the deus ex populo is at his service ready to liquidate those who, like Witkacy, question the status quo. As we watch the epilogue in the third act, a play within a play, we see how Pure Form generates its own contradictions. ‘‘In fact,’’ comments the Unknown Young Woman, ‘‘the whole thing—whole thing—all of us y compris—has been brilliantly put on, although no one knows by whom. But it’s nothing more than the pure form of certain events, congealed in the infinity of Existence’’ (157). In Witkacy’s play, the prototype realistic characters of Ibsen’s Ghosts, the mother and son, appear to be dummies filled with sawdust. What seemed to be real—‘‘the wallowing in stale emotional entrails-twist-

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ing’’ (161)—is all false. Since the characters in Witkacy’s theatrical images in The Mother refer to situations found in imitations of reality projected by Ibsen or Strindberg, they become simulations of simulations, thereby raising questions about the nature of representation in general. Quite appropriately, Witkacy’s experiment in Pure Form illustrates Baudrillard’s observation that, ‘‘of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion.’’102 When most of the characters flee the constrictions of the black box through the escape hatch of the naturalistic landscape, Witkacy exposes the contradictions inherent in Pure Form. Having stripped away the representational ornamentation of naturalism, Witkacy reveals that Pure Form may lead not only to simplicity and to abstraction, but to emptiness as well. The emptiness is reinforced by the image of the empty space where Leon’s body should have been. One could say that Calfskin and the six automatons have not only destroyed Pure Form but also all vestiges of what was beautiful in the past as well, for Ibsen and Strindberg, just like the straw and rags remains of the mother, have been vacuumed up without a trace. Though written in 1924, The Mother is strongly prophetic in its anticipation of the purges of artists and the imposition of formulaic Socialist Realism in the 1930s in the Soviet Union, and at the same time of similar repression of ‘‘degenerate art’’ in Nazi Germany. What Witkacy accomplished in the process of deconstructing, deforming, and defamiliarizing the representation of reality through Pure Form was to reverse the expectations on the part of spectators to look to art as a site for reaffirming religious or officially sanctioned values. Instead, Witkacy’s The Mother confronts the spectator with an opaque reality that does not allow it to be understood from a predetermined horizon of expectations.

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3 Elfriede Jelinek’s Nora Project: Or What Happens When Nora Meets the Capitalists THE DISTINGUISHING FEATURE OF THE CREATIVE OUTPUT OF AUSTRIAN writer Elfriede Jelinek (born 1946) is her unmasking of the illusion that political fact can be separated from private life. In addition, Jelinek superimposes a strong materialist feminist reading on a range of contemporary issues in her works, including novels, texts for theater, radio plays, film scripts, criticism, and interviews. Jelinek’s play Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte oder Stu¨tzen der Gesellschaften, written in 1979 as a reflection upon the centennial of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, addresses her particular preoccupations: the mythicizing of canonical texts as a means of perpetuating ideology, the continuity of patriarchal structures in capitalist market economies, and the limitations of utopian individualism in feminist myths. Her awareness of the driving forces of late-twentieth-century consumer society has led Jelinek to recognize that any social and political critique of the readings of Ibsen’s classic necessitates a demystification of the modes of representation which are most successful in the dissemination and influence of ideologies. In her deconstruction of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Jelinek transposes the action of the play to reveal ‘‘what happened after Nora left her husband and met the pillars of societies.’’1 Though Jelinek’s works have been recognized in critical articles and anthologies and honored with literary prizes, among them the prestigious Heinrich Bo¨ll Prize in 1986 and most recently the highest award for drama in Germany, the Georg Bu¨chner Prize (1998), the reception of her work in Austria is generally received in ‘‘silently agreed-upon silence.’’2 More recent anthologies of criticism on Jelinek both in Austria and abroad attest to her position in Austrian literature, for her work is a frequent topic of special sessions at Germanistik conferences, and also of doctoral and master’s theses. Despite the fact that critics and academics are beginning to take her work seriously, she is frequently the target of polemical attacks in 87

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the Viennese press. In particular, the press appears to relish exploiting the more controversial aspects of both her personal life and public image. Jelinek contributes to the media’s fascination with her image by appearing in the latest couture fashions. Nor does she endear herself to the press with her frequent references to Parisianimported poststructuralist philosophy by means of which she criticizes today’s Austrian consumer society. At the same time, her status as Austria’s most significant playwright since the death of Thomas Bernhard calls attention to the fact that Austrians do not much like cultural figures that poke fun at their provincialism and inclinations towards fascism. In addition, the fact that her most recent plays have been directed by Claus Peymann, the leftist Burgtheater general director whom all Austrians love to hate, has cast her into the same camp as all other radical cultural elitists. Thus the combination that she is a highly fashionable woman who would never be caught wearing Austrian Trachten Mode, at the same time a materialist feminist, an ex-Communist Party member, and a member of the contemporary intellectual and artistic avant-garde complicates the reception of her work even further. Even her first intertextual project, the Nora Project (1977), a reconsideration of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, caused controversy since it was evident from the first that Jelinek was not creating a modern adaptation of Ibsen’s play, but that she was writing a text that attacked liberal feminism at a time when the word feminism as such was creating a great deal of anxiety within Austria’s conservative establishment. Since the play’s context represents a conflation of the Nazi period and Germany’s postwar economic boom, Jelinek was cast into the same ideological camp as that of the terrorist Baader Meinhof Group. Nor did it help the reception of her play that in her interviews she used strident rhetoric similar to that of Ulrike Meinhof. Controversies surrounding Jelinek started from the first production of her Was geschah, nach dem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte that originated as a radio play version of the Nora Project, and the completed version was produced in 1979 at the annual Styrian Autumn Festival in Graz. Austrian television’s Channel 2 originally wanted to transmit the production; however, the program was cancelled due to alleged ‘‘obscenities’’ in Jelinek’s provocative intertextual collage. The director, Kurt Josef Schildknecht, in turn exaggerated so-called pornographic elements to grotesque ends in his staging of Was geschah. As a result, the ensuing fuss over the production led to speculations in the press that a possible scandal might abort the premiere at the festival. The awaited scandal failed to materialize, and Jelinek’s play was received as the high point of the Austrian avant-

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3: ELFRIEDE JELINEK’S NORA PROJECT

garde festival. Ultimately, the success of Was geschah in Graz led to its appearance at prime time on Austrian Channel 1. Poor reviews were few, but those who denounced the play used a highly aggressive tone, calling Jelinek a ‘‘libber’’ and the production ‘‘a crude and amateurish show,’’ as well as an ‘‘unspeakably dumb attempt’’ at an Ibsen sequel. Such language set the tone for the subsequent reception of Jelinek’s work. These commentaries, wrote one defender ‘‘bear a most unpleasant likeness to the ‘artistic judgments’ that were made during the Nazi period to mobilize the socalled ‘healthy popular perceptions’ against modern art in order to dismiss it as degenerate art.’’3 The criticisms that most of Jelinek’s plays have encountered suggest a continuity of ‘‘the dilemmas that have plagued every successful avant-garde for the past century or more: the dilemma of political effectiveness versus stylistic indirection and innovation.’’4 Jelinek’s Nora Project came about as a response to a paper by Marlies Gerhard entitled ‘‘Where is Nora going? Or the Search for the Forgotten Woman,’’ presented at a woman’s conference in 1977. Gerhard represented Nora from the perspective of contemporary liberal feminist interpretations as a heroine of intuitive subjectivity who, by slamming the door to the doll’s house, triumphs against the paternalistic and phallocentric system. However, according to Jelinek, the slamming of the door does not solve Nora’s problems, for she continues to function within other less visible paternalistic systems than the doll’s house, systems in which the female heroine continues to function as a mere object in a system of exchange. Jelinek’s declaration that ‘‘plays by women should not deal with emotions,’’5 provides a means of interpreting her Was geschah, for the play serves as an example of her critique of the appropriation of Nora as an icon of the liberation of women. Many other writers, including the daughter of Karl Marx, had attempted to write sequels to Ibsen’s play, putting forward such views that Torvald would take to drink and Nora would write bad novels, or more melodramatic versions in which Nora’s children pay the price for living through the shame of Nora’s desertion.6 In Jelinek’s play, however, Nora’s quest for self-realization takes place within a context in which the highly individualized mechanism of patriarchal capitalism, so evident in Henrik Ibsen’s Pillars of Society, absorbs Nora’s striving for selfhood to its own purposes. Since the very title of Jelinek’s play refers to both Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and The Pillars of Society, it might be fruitful to examine how Ibsen’s texts function as pre-texts to Nora. A Doll’s House provides the entire ensemble of characters with the exception of Dr. Rank; from

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Pillars of Society Jelinek borrows the motive of land speculation. Konsul Bernick from Ibsen’s play serves as the source for Konsul Weygang’s characterization in Was geschah as a speculator, capitalist, and profiteer. At the same time, Jelinek playfully changes the ‘‘pillars of society’’ to ‘‘pillars of societies,’’ for the plural suggests a dispersal of power structures within multinational banks and corporations. Jelinek also substitutes the railroad project, so symbolic of nineteenth-century capitalist expansion, for Weygang, a modern highfinance manipulator of international corporations, and the other pillars of societies are interested in buying a profit-losing cotton mill for their much more deadly enterprise of building an atomic power plant on the site. However, they fear that when the media discovers that the female factory workers will be displaced not only from their jobs but also from the surrounding crumbling housing projects they may have to abandon their project. Consequently, in order to divert the attention of the media and their competition, they must first manipulate the potential sale in such a way that it appears that they are buying a ‘‘profit making’’ factory with the overt intent of converting it from cotton production to the production of synthetics. Jelinek’s reliance on the ethical dilemma rather than the actual characters or situations of Ibsen’s Pillars of Society inserts contemporary issues into her play by providing archetypal attributes that bring the continuities of the cultural past into play. The emerging capitalists of Ibsen’s Pillars of Society veil their machinations by justifying the morally undesirable railway project through their unscrupulous reliance on words such as ‘‘Providence.’’ However, Ibsen’s play reveals how they pragmatically cover up their individual profit-making aspirations by means of a public campaign that convinces the town that their supposed altruistically motivated plan will benefit the greater material prosperity of the entire community. In Jelinek’s play, the ‘‘pillars of societies’’ are even more insidious as they mock traditional morals and ethics by manipulating the media, by using behind-the-scenes diversions of funds from banks, by obtaining information through illegal means and threats of blackmail, and by eliminating potential competition through leakage to the press of set-up sex scandals and bank embezzlements. In contrast to Ibsen’s presentation of fully developed characters capable of introspection and awareness of moral laws, Jelinek presents her pillars of societies as totally lacking in emotion and capacity for introspection and reduces them to one-dimensional types whose only characteristics are their limitless lust and greed. Denied any possibility of psychological depth, Jelinek’s pillars of societies are empty characters and conse-

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quently their doubling and proliferation only brings out more strongly their carbon-copy likeness. In Jelinek’s play, the testing ground for Nora’s ‘‘redefinition’’ is the time space of the Germany of the 1920s, as it is undergoing economic collapse following the economic crash and hyperinflation, conditions which ultimately served to create a fertile ground for the rise of Hitler’s National Socialism. Simultaneously it is also the time space of the 1970s, a period that represents accelerated economic development in West Germany. Jelinek sets the play into these time spaces in order to demonstrate the ideological continuities between National Socialism and the contemporary German Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle, brought about through stock market manipulations, market deregulation and highly sophisticated takeover maneuvers, behind which the unseen power of the multinational corporations colludes to overcome political and legal constraints. She accomplishes this by revealing the mechanism of ‘‘what a capitalist knows and thinks, but doesn’t express publicly.’’7 Jelinek considers that the role of national and international capitalism under fascism is frequently not given serious attention or is covered up with references to ‘‘the insane Fu¨ hrer’’ or ‘‘the incited masses.’’ ‘‘This was the reason why I’ve written my Nora as a kind of Wirtschaftskrimi’’ [business crime novel].’’8 Jelinek’s conflation of Ibsen’s two plays into her Was geschah has much to do with the events occurring in Germany in the 1970s, for on the one hand, emerging liberal feminism in Germany attempted to create a space for women within the existing economic system, while on the other hand, the Red Army Faction, an outgrowth of the Baader-Meinhof group used terrorist attacks in their political struggle against what they feared was the return of Hitler-era fascism masking itself as capitalist expansion. This was also the era of student protests in Berlin and Paris against world imperialism, and many intellectuals like Jelinek were sympathetic with the so-called revolution against capitalist oppression in the Third World. Jelinek’s was not the only voice that expressed solidarity with the Left; for example, Germany in Autumn, a film made in 1977 as a collaboration of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Vo¨lker Schlondorff, Heinrich Bo¨ll, Edgar Reitz, and Alexander Kluge, represents a collective response by Germany’s leading directors and writers to the climate of political terrorism. Fassbinder’s film reflects Germany in the chaos resulting from the rampant terrorism by the Red Army Faction, political repression by the establishment, intergenerational conflict, and the shadow of the Nazi past consistently present in Germany’s identity. Ulrike Meinhof, one of the leaders of the Baader-Meinhof Group,

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became the spokesperson for her generation as she attempted to clarify the goal of the terrorist attacks on capitalist society: The struggle against imperialism . . . has as its goal to annihilate, to destroy, to smash the system of imperialist domination, on the political, economic, and military planes; to smash the cultural institutions by which imperialism gives a homogeneity to the dominant elites, and to smash the communications system which assures them their ideological ascendancy.9

Meinhof was found murdered in her prison cell on 5 September 1976 and became a martyr of the movement. Events thereupon followed with catastrophic speed, and on the anniversary of Meinhof ’s murder the following year the Red Army Faction took a step that shocked the German establishment by kidnapping Hans Martin Schleyer, the president of the Federal Association of German Industries and the president of the Federal Employers Association. The faction demanded the release of eleven political prisoners in exchange for Schleyer. As a consequence of this kidnapping, a state of emergency was declared and resulted in reprisals on the part of the police on left-wing students and intellectuals. In October of the same year, a Palestinian commando group hijacked a Lufthansa airliner and demanded the release of the eleven German political prisoners as well as prisoners of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. However, during the process of negotiations between the hijackers and the German secretary of state, three of the four Popular Front terrorists were killed, and on the same day three of the German Red Army Faction leaders held in German high-security prisons mysteriously died and were buried unceremoniously without attention from the press. Schleyer was executed in retaliation. The implications of these background events for Jelinek’s Was geschah are significant, for Konsul Weygang’s sophisticated image is closely related to that of the elegant Schleyer. Similarly, the financial project Weygang represents in the play is patterned on Schleyer’s reported plan for the international consolidation of banks and industries. It is also significant that Eva, the only figure not borrowed from Ibsen’s plays, resembles Ulrike Meinhof, both in the intensity of her rhetoric and her insights into the invisible power of the capitalists. Thus, to ensure that the spectators would recognize the relationship between Eva and Meinhof, Jelinek inserts fragments from Meinhof ’s writings into Eva’s part. At the same time that Jelinek is deconstructing capitalist ideology in her Was geschah, she is also attempting to subvert liberal femi-

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nism’s illusion of liberation. Since liberal feminism to a large extent promotes individual success within the system, Jelinek comes to the conclusion that in a society dominated by crude materialism and the predatory pursuit of success, personal self-realization is the ultimate fiction. In reimagining Nora as an innocent who wanders into the text of The Pillars of Society, Jelinek reveals that Nora’s conditioning as consumer of her own myth is perfected to the point where individual identity is indistinguishable from societal role. Thus any attempt on Nora’s part to change her life by slamming shut the door to the ‘‘doll’s house’’ is sabotaged from the outset because it is conceptualized from within the power framework Nora tries to escape, refracted in Jelinek’s version in the many ‘‘societies’’ she encounters as she proceeds from mill worker to a capitalist’s mistress and back to the entrapment of the ‘‘doll’s house.’’ As a Marxist feminist, Jelinek analyzes how everyone absorbs ideology, particularly Nora, who unconsciously continues to carry Torvald’s system of beliefs as baggage she inherited from Ibsen. Jelinek accomplishes her subversion of capitalist paternalism by means of selecting, transposing, and dispersing fragments of metaphors from canonical texts such as Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and mixing them up with contemporary cliche´s about individualism and self-realization from generic sources like Cosmopolitan. In this manner, Jelinek advances the notion that the culture industry is fundamentally a reactionary participant in perpetuating the structuring of social interaction that best guarantees the stability of the prevailing system of patriarchal capitalism. In her attempt to reveal how power relationships are frequently embedded within the reading of canonical texts and are appropriated to serve functions other than the original intent, Jelinek selfconsciously rewrites Ibsen’s already scripted texts in order to display how ideological myths are perpetuated from Ibsen’s time frame into the contemporary, with the two world views coexisting in the ‘‘repetition’’ of archetypes. Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is continually present in Was geschah, particularly in Jelinek’s deconstruction of its idealistic implications, the heroic strength of the heroine, and the utopian hopes for the equality of mind in the ‘‘partnership’’ of the married couple. However, in Jelinek’s version, the psychological depth of Ibsen’s characters has disappeared, and utopian dreams of gender equality are undermined by her ironic insertion of the cliche´s that continue to surround the reception of Ibsen’s play. Jelinek’s strategies of undermining the illusion perpetuated by discourse and ideology include a refusal to write using the conventions of Ibsen’s realism. As a subversive text, Was geschah does not provide a de-

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tached viewpoint, the illusion of seamless linearity, or narrative closure. Instead, Jelinek discloses that discourse is subject to contradictions, emerging not only from the multiple viewpoints that articulate issues of gender, but also with regard to issues of class and power. Jelinek’s presentation of the complex interaction of class and gender positions is typical of her method. As a result, conservative critics have christened Jelinek with variations on the designations ‘‘radical,’’ ‘‘communist,’’ and ‘‘libber.’’ In an interview with Anke Roeder, Jelinek protests, ‘‘I don’t want theater. I want an other theater.’’ Her goal is not to create the illusion that what you see on stage are autonomous subjects ‘‘inhabiting and owning their own space, their own time, their own action. They are not masters over their own fate; they have no unified wholes. They constitute themselves purely through speech, and they speak what they would not say otherwise.’’ In Jelinek’s plays, characters are highly artificial constructs and no longer mimetic signs of human individuals but discourse machines, relays for various ideological systems that intersect. What speaks on stage can no longer lay claim to an ‘‘I’’ or unified whole that could guarantee the truth of an utterance, but serves as switchboard for a multiplicity of discourses. Ideology pervades their discourse as their speech seeks a site of enunciation. Characters cannot rely on a stable identity or historic authenticity; all dialogue is quotation, undercutting the notion of a private subjectivity in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House bolstered by dialogue with psychological subtext. Likewise, Jelinek rejects the notion of authorship as the expression of original genius and stresses instead the ‘‘repetition of the always-familiar, the trivial, and the banal.’’10 Some feminist critics reproach Jelinek for the absence of female characters that represent ‘‘oppositional’’ or resistant subjects in her plays and novels. Instead, in Was geschah Jelinek calls attention to what extent the tendency on the part of many feminists to focus on emotions rather than reason tends to imprison women rather than empower them. In her analysis of how Nora’s discourse contrasts with that of the male characters, Jelinek satirizes the tendency in feminism towards lauding the psychology of the essential feminine. She demonstrates this tendency by showing the male characters in Was geschah reduce women to psychological characteristics based on various quotations from Sigmund Freud to Jacques Lacan. While women’s literature seeks a definition for the roles of women by placing women characters into subject positions, Jelinek engages spectators in a way that constantly calls attention to ideological discourse, even her own. Jelinek notes that, in general, women are not trusted to produce a literary work ‘‘which goes beyond im-

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mediate daily concerns, i.e., which captures universal conceptions of society’s disposition. I mean the articulation of a philosophical overview that the male poets usually adapt from antiquity. In the same way, women are not trusted to produce the big form. Let’s take for example Nora as a topic—as long as a woman’s work does not surpass the realm of the private, it is accepted. This quickly ends when she begins to tackle the big questions.’’11 Jelinek is also at odds with feminism’s privileging of emotional experience over language and form. Since Jelinek began her own career from a more broadly political and also aesthetically avant-garde standpoint and only later turned to focus more acutely on a feminist perspective, Jelinek’s Was geschah can be viewed as a critique of the feminist aesthetics of psychoanalytically based ecriture feminine. In particular, Jelinek feels that the proliferation of women’s writing collectives of the 1970s, such as Liebe Kollegin, which focused on the naturalistic descriptions of the particularities of women’s lives, encouraged uncritical subjectivity. For example, Verena Stefan’s Haütungen, written in 1975, became a cult book of the feminist movement in West Germany; it thematizes a woman’s perspective on sexuality and focuses on bodily experiences such as menstruation, birth, and orgasm, or, as the title suggests, ‘‘writing through one’s skin.’’ Indeed, the West German women’s movement was strongly influenced by He´le`ne Cixous’s ‘‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’’ in which Cixous presents a feminine praxis based on describing the natural realm of woman as subject. Cixous urges women ‘‘to write the body’’: . . . Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.’’12 In reaction to the tendency of liberal feminism towards total subjectivity, Jelinek professes to find the ideal of women expressing themselves through a body language, or writing their bodies contrived. At the same time, she bristles when her own work is described under the label of Frauenliteratur, or woman’s writing. Jelinek argues that the rather euphoric celebration of what are theorized as women’s essential or ontological qualities heralds a return of what may be called biological determinism that ultimately perpetuates the tradition of bipolar thought. According to Jelinek, Stefan’s writing frequently oversteps the limits of sentimentalized, overwritten language, for Stefan’s ‘‘writing with the body’’ invents a whole spectrum of banal cliche´s that shift from regression to utopia, for instead of reason there is emotion, instead of a sharpsighted, detached focused scrutiny with ‘‘eyeglasses’’ one looks inside to find the mystery of one’s existence through the ‘‘speculum,’’ instead of

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‘‘revolution’’ there is ‘‘romanticism,’’ and instead of the image of an ‘‘amazon,’’ woman is perceived as an ‘‘anemone.’’ Jelinek feels that the movement represents a flight from society, a retreat to ‘‘mother nature’’ and the notion of an intuitive, immediate, and unmediated knowledge.13 From Was geschah to her most recent novels and plays, Jelinek has taken an outspoken position against what she perceives as a tendency in feminism to sentimental cliche´s. She argues that literature still has as its purpose ‘‘nothing more or less than taking a stance against capitalism—a system that despises human beings.’’ She also believes in the necessity for literature to open a space for thinking about different social arrangements. Jelinek acknowledges, however, ‘‘that social progressives are generally considered infantile illusionists who still believe in utopia, people who simply failed to go with the times.’’14 In her own work, she demonstrates that she sees no utopia in the future and refuses to support idealistic alternatives that frequently blend with the new fashionable right-wing trend for aestheticizing reality. Jelinek’s point of view resembles most closely that of Julia Kristeva, who cautions that if women have ‘‘a role to play in this on-going process, it is only in assuming a negative function: reject everything finite, definite, structures, loaded with meaning, in the existing state of society. Such an attitude places women on the side of the explosion of social codes: with revolutionary movements. But women tend to move immediately to the other side—the side of symbolic powers.’’15 As Jelinek’s Was geschah illustrates, the symmetrical division of male/female qualities excludes women from participation in the discourse on economics, history, and technology. Kristeva writes that ‘‘upheaval in language,’’ or rather without ‘‘a theory of this upheaval,’’ feminism tends to create an enclosed ideology parallel to the ideology of the dominant class. Since one of capitalism’s more advanced needs is to ‘‘rationalize’’ the perpetuation of its signifiers, liberal feminism unwittingly reinforces the patriarchal system.16 It is striking to what extent both Jelinek and Kristeva agree that ‘‘the remaining locus is the space of language’’ and, consequently, ‘‘modern theater no longer exists outside of the text.’’ This is not a ‘‘failure of representation,’’ Kristeva explains, ‘‘but a failure of demonstration, of the theater as de-monstration. . . . Faced with the technocratic explosion, this is a failure to constitute a communal discourse of play (interplay).’’17 The nature of theatrical representation consists of ‘‘ putting the text in quotes so that it thus becomes a reported discourse, a quotation from an out-dated code, feeble, just good enough to make some communal sign, but debased.’’ This

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according to Kristeva, ‘‘obliges playwrights or actors to play complacently with the verisimilitude of an antiquating society’s antiquating fantasies (a narcissistic and debilitating accommodation . . . thus keeping the audience’s lucidity removed from a criticizable discourse or ideology.’’18 Like Kristeva, Jelinek explains that, for her, theater is the site of the unauthentic, an empty space; consequently, she wants to expel so-called ‘‘Life’’ from the theater.19 Similarly, Kristeva observes, ‘‘We struggle against this ideology that produces only inversion,’’20 for Jelinek too has argued that the representational authenticity promoted by the feminist writing collectives is also related to the prevalent anti-intellectualism of mainstream feminism. Jelinek mocks the slippage of language into the ‘‘new inner directedness’’ and ‘‘the exaggerated subjectivity,’’ ‘‘the mythologizing of the woman’s ‘being,’ ’’ its totalizing qualities and utopian solutions. She protests that liberal feminism’s advocacy of individual subjectivity, self-exploration, and the consequent promotion of individual economic improvement has led to the exclusion of women from the ‘‘big questions.’’ She comments that at a feminist conference when she attempted to swerve the discussion from its almost ‘‘fascistic antiintellectualism,’’ a young woman asked her why she wrote about ‘‘working women’’ when she defined herself as an ‘‘intellectual.’’ ‘‘Yes,’’ Jelinek replied, ‘‘indeed, why?’’21 The intention of Jelinek’s distorted mimicry of Ibsen’s texts is to foreground and estrange aspects of both the original’s style and message while ensuring that the origins of the new imitation are still recognizable in the repetition of the already familiar. Her play’s unity is tied together imperceptibly through familiar theme words that are analyzed, studied, defined, redefined, and revealed to be empty. In foregrounding her explicit references to Ibsen’s two classics, Jelinek depends on the audience’s knowledge of both A Doll’s House and The Pillars of Society, as well as their familiarity with the ideological debates surrounding contemporary feminism and capitalist market economies. She also demands that they also recognize the residues of fascist myths in contemporary discourse. Despite the spectator’s recognition of the original quotations both from Ibsen and the front pages of contemporary newspapers, these quotations are frequently decontextualized, and the characters seem to quote from the accumulation of texts as second-rate performers rather than as characters. Ultimately, the assembly-line language that the characters have appropriated from Ibsen and the other texts saps them of their strength to think through and to articulate their situation. As a result, Jelinek’s characters appear to occupy a distinctly

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postmodern space, what Rosalind Krauss calls a ‘‘paraliterary space . . . of debate, quotation, partisanship, betrayal, reconciliation; but . . . not the space of unity, coherence, or resolution that we think of as constituting the work of art.’’22 Quotations from both of Ibsen’s texts are marked as if from a chambre d’ećhos, for even before the spectator views the play, the title alone signals that this is a sequel or ‘‘what happens next.’’ Similarly the first line sets up the identifying relationship to Ibsen’s text; ‘‘I’m Nora, the same as in the play by Ibsen’’ (7). However, Jelinek’s Nora only ‘‘remembers’’ that she was once the heroine of Ibsen’s most famous play and seems to have lost the emotional experience of having ‘‘been’’ Nora. Consequently, transposition suggests a form of ‘‘continuation’’; however, Jelinek’s references to Ibsen’s text prove to be evasive and insubstantial as soon as one attempts to grasp them ‘‘through’’ Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The intertextual relationship is thus based on the use of self-reflexive references as later we are reminded of the relationship to the original when Weygang identifies Nora as ‘‘the central character with the same name as in Ibsen’’ (20). Jelinek calls attention to the fact that her play is a parody of Ibsen, when for example Torvald condescendingly acknowledges to Krogstad that Frau Linde is now his housekeeper, ‘‘We all know from the theater, that you had once loved this woman, the one now in the kitchen’’ (47). The self-reflexive quotations function to alert the spectator to watch for the follies in the original. Throughout Ibsen’s play, we see Torvald carefully creating the terms and appropriate postures of his fictive world out of the moral maxims on debt, responsibility, the telling of lies, the aesthetic differences between knitting and embroidery, and even on eating macaroons. Nora, in turn, has become an accomplished actress in sustaining her fiction of youthfulness and irresponsibility by acting out the prettifying, self-deluding fiction of innocence for the eight years of their marriage. When the ‘‘wonderful’’ does not happen, Nora and Torvald’s fictions collapse and they are left, as in theater, only with the ‘‘appearance’’ of a marriage.23 Nora discards her theatrical dancing girl costume and assumes the adult costume essential to her new recreation of self as an uncompromising and strongminded heroine capable of taking on all society to test her new theatrical act. It is in this somewhat frayed adult ‘‘costume’’ from the last scene of A Doll’s House that Nora wanders into Jelinek’s script looking for a self-fulfilling job in a factory in order to test her quest for self-realization. While the focus in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House is on the life-lie under which his characters find cover, the central concern in Jelinek’s play

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is the ideological lie. In both plays Nora promotes the lie by which she is ultimately victimized because she does not understand its repercussions. Though in Ibsen’s play Nora discovers the crumbling of the lie under which she has been living, Jelinek illustrates that the ‘‘slamming’’ of the door to the doll’s house does not solve Nora’s inclination to submit to authority. Ultimately, in Jelinek’s version, Nora’s inability to understand the self-perpetuation of the dominant system makes her an unwitting collaborator of the pillars of societies. Jelinek explains that anyone who at this time believes that it is still possible to present characters that act as individuals is strongly mistaken: ‘‘Instead, one can only present characters as zombies, or as holders of constructed ideology or significance, but not as fully developed individuals with joy or sorrow and all that garbage; that is gone, once and for all times.’’24 She insists that the ‘‘absurdity of the so-called theatrical moment—that one watches ’something’ on stage—demands this exaggeration.’’25 She likens her method in theater to that of Pina Bausch, whose dance compositions rely on their precise relationship to language that she then deconstructs by means of dance movement. In a sense, much like Bausch, Jelinek ‘‘choreographs’’ her texts.26 She explains that theater places language on a pedestal and displays it; ‘‘language gets bigger, and one can write big language.’’27 Ultimately, the collage of quotations from Ibsen does not recreate the naturalism of the original, for the quotable lines when placed into the mouths of her exaggerated zombies resurface as purely automatic sound-bytes of discourse. The outside world which Nora apparently faces as she slams shut the door in Ibsen’s play is refracted in Jelinek’s version in the many ‘‘societies’’ Nora encounters as she proceeds from mill worker to capitalist’s mistress. In the process of surviving the harsh realities of the workplace, Nora loses her idealistic desire to become a thinking individual. She also loses the characteristics of innate innocence and generosity of spirit that made her such an appealing heroine, for as Christopher Innes points out with regard to Caryl Churchill’s Marlene in Top Girls, ‘‘the pursuit of capitalist rewards has meant rejecting maternal instinct, human feelings, and moral values.’’28 The theory of perception of art is founded on the experience of familiarity and immediate comprehension. However, as Allison Fiddler mentions, the success of Jelinek’s eclecticism and mixing up of codes depends on the intertext being recognized. ‘‘Parody is not just an internal relation between the work and its model, but is necessarily pragmatic, in that it assumes the audience will ‘get’ the reference, and appreciate the double coding.’’29 Ultimately, the problem of

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background and allusion in Jelinek is a complex one due to the author’s extended use of collage by means of which she scrambles canonical texts with elements from popular cultural texts. These are presented in a confusion of episodes and images so that Ibsen’s text is ultimately indistinguishable from the trivial literature with which it shares the same space. Though Jelinek develops the play constructed out of events and individuals from Ibsen’s classics, these fragments are written over by various other texts, so that, as in a palimpsest, only glimpses of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House become visible. Was geschah thus illustrates how ideological myths are perpetuated from Ibsen’s time frame into the contemporary, with the two worlds existing in the ‘‘repetition’’ of archetypes. Jelinek complicates the reception of Was geschah by not only ‘‘rewriting’’ Ibsen’s scripted texts but also by inserting ready-mades or quotations from Ibsen, Hitler, Mussolini, Frank Wedekind, women’s magazines, pulp fiction, market analysis, as well as quotations from her own interviews and critical articles in which she comments on the limitations of liberal feminism. Thus Was geschah illustrates not only the way scripted texts are absorbed into culture but also that they are received simultaneously with soap operas, situation comedies, game shows, music videos, and romantic pulp fiction. These elements coexist in a single textual space; however, the relation of these discourses with each other is often in conflict. At the same time, Jelinek’s ironic inclusion of elements from mass culture suggests a critique of commercial culture and its pervasive influence in contemporary society. As Susan Suleiman observes, ‘‘What reaches the public is always already ‘evacuated cultured good,’ deprived of force and integrity.’’30 It is important to remind oneself that Ibsen’s A Doll’s House entered popular discourse even in Ibsen’s own time and polarized the arguments of the feminists as well as their critics. Consequently, both Ibsen’s text and the arguments about whether Nora should have abandoned her children and home have become part of the problematic discussion that we’ve inherited through the ages. At the same time, popular film interpretations of A Doll’s House have produced generations that have not read the play but only viewed a ‘‘retelling’’ of the original. The film version of A Doll’s House that lies closest in time to Jelinek’s postmodern version is the one directed by Joseph Losey and starring Jane Fonda (1973). Since Fonda had already pronounced herself a feminist, this version comes close to what can be considered a liberal feminist production. What is particular about Losey’s version is that it breaks the claustrophobic quality of Ibsen’s original by collapsing the frame and allowing the camera

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to follow Nora on her Christmas shopping excursion, her meeting with friends in a brightly lit cafe´ for hot chocolate and macaroons, and on her lighthearted sledding excursion with her children. Hence, Nora’s dramatic slamming of the door to the doll’s house is no longer viewed as ‘‘frightening,’’ for the spectators have been reassured by Losey that outside the doll’s house lies a brightly lit world of cafe´s, shops, and sleighs. Since the pleasure of a representation of an original representation consists in comparing the copy with the original, the pleasure of a knowledgeable spectator in turn diminishes her involvement in the film at the narrative level. On the other hand, the spectator who is unaware of Ibsen’s original may ultimately question what’s all the fuss about Nora’s supposedly courageous departure, for after seeing Losey’s version, one has the sense that the first thing Nora will do is head for the cafe´ and order herself some hot chocolate and macaroons. Despite contemporary liberal feminist interpretations of Ibsen’s Nora as someone who exploded the myth of her husband’s symbolic power, Jelinek illustrates that Nora has been left unprepared to deal with the symbolic power structure of capitalism, and hence she moves without thought to side with the existing state of the social structure. One can trace Jelinek’s deconstructive method even in such an early play as Was geschah. As a result, Jelinek is less interested in a critique of Ibsen’s play than she is in the interpretations created by liberal feminists to justify personal liberation. As Suleiman explains, displacing the political effect from the work to its reading has the advantage of moving the debate from the question of what postmodernism is ‘‘to the question of what it does—in a particular place, for a particular public, at a particular time. This displacement does not, however, alter the basic questions about the politics of intertextuality or of irony or, more generally, about the relation between symbolic action and ‘real’ action in the world. It merely . . . displaces them from the work to its readings and readers.’’31 The transformation of Nora into the antiheroine of liberal feminism is effected by Jelinek’s focus on the surfaces of Ibsen’s character, for Jelinek’s Nora becomes a performing squirrel whose qualifications for the marketplace include the dancing of the tarantella as well as performing gymnastic exercises such as splits, backbends, and leaps to show her ‘‘flexibility.’’ In order to call attention to the way Ibsen’s original has been turned into appropriated and empty discourse, Jelinek exaggerates the already excessive elements in Ibsen’s play. For example, Torvald’s didactic tone, and various references to the flying and jumping animal world such as ‘‘my little lark’’ or ‘‘my squirrel’’ are self-consciously repeated. Similarly, the

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other characters from A Doll’s House are presented as one-track speech machines. For example, Annemarie quotes automatically her cloying sentimental platitudes on motherhood, Frau Linde enacts her one-track spiel on care and devotion, and Torvald flatly pronounces his robotic cliche´s on fiscal and moral responsibility. At the same time, allusions exist to Nora’s willful little-girl impudence and obstinacy as she threatens to stamp her ‘‘little foot’’ and thump her ‘‘little fist’’ if she doesn’t get her way (30). Perhaps Jelinek’s most subversive strategy is to demonstrate to the spectators how Nora’s repetition of Torvald’s aesthetic judgments on knitting to the wellmeaning Annemarie suggests Nora’s total complicity in Torvald’s power games: Nora. Does this knitting belong to you? Nora. So you knit, do you? Nora. You know, you should embroider instead. (34)

Jelinek takes familiar passages such as these, distorts them and pits them one against the other in order to show that these familiar discourses are the producers of myths of power relations as easily reproducible even by the powerless who sustain the myth of patriarchal dominance. From this perspective, actions are not so much ‘‘performed’’ as ‘‘announced’’ to reveal Nora’s appropriation of her familiar role of performing squirrel and chirping lark. Ultimately, these quotations reveal that the characters are merely acting out a previously scripted life text, for it is important to remember that for Jelinek her characters ‘‘exist only in language, and as long as they speak, they are present, when they don’t speak, they disappear.’’32 Her approach is closely related to the generally accepted idea that a literary text is synchronically related to the network of already extant texts and must be situated primarily in relation to them. Myth and repetition stand in a constellation with one another, the constellation of the coercive invariance of the natural context, from which there is no exit. Jelinek believes that society perpetuates its own mistakes, and the repetitions are required to call attention to the stereotypical situations that proliferate in social discourse. The novelty of the postmodern world is not that we live in a consumer society, but that society itself has become the consumed. For as Roland Barthes explains, Myth is a value, truth is no guarantee for it; nothing prevents it from being a perpetual alibi: it is enough that its signifier has two sides for it

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always to have an ‘‘elsewhere’’ at its disposal. This is because myth is speech stolen and restored. Only, speech which is restored is no longer quite that which was stolen; when it was brought back it was not put exactly in its place. It is this brief act of larceny, this moment taken for a surreptitious faking, which gives mythical speech its benumbed look.33

In Jelinek’s parody of Ibsen, Nora is continually exploited as a sexual object, changing hands several times during the course of the action. She collaborates in this process, for she uses her sexuality both subtly by making herself attractive to Weygang and overtly to wheedle information from Torvald. At the same time, Jelinek distorts the belief in the possibility of a ‘‘true’’ marriage between Nora and Torvald, for in her version Nora constantly confuses love with money and economics. Jelinek’s stage instructions suggest that this approach requires a reversal in the emotional tone which would normally be used for the latter and vice versa: ‘‘When one speaks of love, it should be presented completely in an objective manner, and when the conversation turns to economics the tone should be quite sentimental and sensual.’’34 Was geschah also presents the contradictions between bourgeois and working-class women’s emancipation, and for this purpose Jelinek introduces Eva and the other women workers in the mill factory as the only truly new characters. Eva in particular is based on Jelinek’s research on the condition of women workers of the 1920s, and she serves as Jelinek’s skeptical mouthpiece. Through Eva, Jelinek condemns Nora’s romantic notions of individualism, particularly when the price for Nora’s self-realization comes at the cost of the other working women’s continuous exploitation. Eva is the only one to understand that the sudden prettification of their working place with curtains, flower boxes, a library, and even a children’s cre`che does not represent improvement but is instead a ‘‘cheap’’ cover-up for the unemployment that threatens once the factory changes hands. From a perspective similar to Churchill’s analysis of liberal feminism in Top Girls, Jelinek links unrestrained self-fulfillment with the repression of others. Jelinek relies on a series of juxtaposed scenes that illustrate Nora’s engagement with the ‘‘pillars of societies’’ as a contrast to scenes in which the political consciousness of the cotton mill worker Eva is foregrounded. In a similar manner to Churchill’s presentation of the ruptures between Marlene’s Thatcherite competitiveness and Joyce’s working-class impoverishment, Jelinek reveals the ‘‘frightening’’ image of society. Innes’s observation about Top Girls, that Churchill’s materialist feminism ‘‘becomes a moral

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perspective instead of the subject,’’35 also serves to illustrate Jelinek’s intent in her Nora Project as she reveals that Nora’s highly individualized ethos is incapable of understanding the situation of the uneducated and underprivileged workers in the cotton mill. To undermine liberal feminism’s conviction that individual success represents in itself significant progress in overcoming the patriarchal system, Jelinek parodies the language of the contemporary women’s movement from the play’s first lines as Nora explains that she’s left the comforts of her middle class home so that she can develop herself from ‘‘object to subject’’ in the working place (8). However Nora’s ‘‘search for self ’’ (9) clashes with the personnel manager’s cynical observation that the task of employers and their representatives is to ‘‘promote and protect’’ the ‘‘full development’’ of the personality of their employees (7). While Nora’s middle-class assumption is that emancipation comes through self-realization in work, for the mill factory working women their ‘‘productive labor’’ represents the total annihilation of self. The scenes in the factory illustrate not only Nora’s naivete´ but also her insensitivity to the plight of the other women workers, and Jelinek alerts the spectators by calling attention to the subtle changes of vocabulary that separate the working women and Nora’s vocabulary of 1970s women’s liberation. Eva is the only voice that understands the gender specific separation of the demands of the working place and the myth of ‘‘womanhood,’’ and she denounces this myth as incipient fascism. Ultimately, to preserve the myths of ‘‘home’’ and ‘‘motherhood,’’ the women workers will have to trade ‘‘in their gold wedding rings for iron,’’ a reference to Mussolini’s appeal to patriotism on the part of women in the fight for fascism (11). Nora’s discourse abounds in familiar quotations from Freud, Hitler, and Mussolini on the woman’s role, and these are juxtaposed to equally recognizable phrases from 1970s feminist emancipation. In almost the same breath, Nora makes allusions to her movement away from being an object to becoming a subject as in the next breath she quotes from Hitler: Nora. The people, in its overwhelming majority, is ostensibly gifted with judgment to such a degree that it makes fewer decisions based on reason and more based on excessive reliance on its emotional reactions, says Adolf Hitler. (13)

Nora’s notion of feminist solidarity is thus juxtaposed to Hitler’s myth of the common subjectivity of the people. In defending her use of these ready-mades from liberal feminism and fascism, Jelinek ex-

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plains that ‘‘most things have been said so frequently that it’s unnecessary to create something new when it has already been said elsewhere much better. . . . When I write plays,’’ Jelinek continues, ‘‘I don’t strive to place characters acting out of their psychological motivations on the stage. I feel that at the present time this function belongs more to film. I tend to enlarge (or reduce) my characters into excessive, enormous, or grotesque figures; I make scarecrows out of them, for they have to stand out when placed on a pedestal of sorts.’’ Her main focus is not on the characters, which are, as Jelinek explains, mere self-conscious fictions, but on the nature of discourse as she probes language and its ability to reformulate, reiterate, and translate the already spoken.36 Through her use of multiple exaggerated and conflated perspectives, Jelinek provokes the spectator into rethinking what Linda Hutcheon defines as the ‘‘fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably political’’ aspects of even the most benign ideology. Jelinek’s use of this parahistorical space implies a certain postmodern attitude towards the past whereby ‘‘the past as referent is not bracketed or effaced . . . it is incorporated and modified, given new and different life and meaning. . . . [And] even the most self-conscious and parodic of contemporary works do not try to escape, but indeed foreground the historical, social, ideological contexts in which they have existed and continue to exist.’’37 When Nora tries to explain her abandonment of a husband, children, and the comforts of her middle-class home to Eva and the other working women, it becomes evident that Nora’s language, as the only medium of defining herself, is also what distances her from the other women, who cannot understand her pursuit of her selfdetermination as Lebensaufgabe [life’s destiny]. For Eva and the others, the dehumanizing dailiness of clock punching, piecework, and quality control has more to do with Leben aufgeben [to give up life]. Despite Eva’s cynical observations about the working women’s condition, Nora continues to indulge in babbling about the Verteilung [inner split] of her ‘‘complex’’ psyche, while Eva and the others fear Zerteilung [dismemberment] by the machine. Nora uses the discourse of the 1970s liberal feminism to convince Eva that marriage and children represent the ‘‘falsehood’’ that prevents women from exploring their innate destiny. However, Eva counters that for her and the other factory workers ‘‘the machine is the false part.’’ When Nora protests that she has ‘‘inner complexity’’ that allows her to justify her abandonment of her children, once again Eva punctures Nora’s naı¨vete´ by protesting that she too would love to be ‘‘complex,’’ as ‘‘complex’’ as the machine that she ser-

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vices (10). What Jelinek shows is that Nora fails to develop a critical distance on her marriage with Torvald and instead appropriates the language of the 1970s feminists on the woman’s role in marriage. In other words, one stereotype supplants another. For the working women, images of housewifery duties and motherhood are a beautiful dream that could remove them from the deadening day-in-day-out routine of their work in the factory. Despite the fact that their demoralized and exhausted husbands brutalize them at home, they continue to believe in the idealized image of husband, children, and home. However, as Jelinek alludes in Was geschah, even that man who has been totally impoverished and used up has someone beneath him who is even more exploited, namely his wife (54). The working women believe that home, whatever it may be, represents the true life while the ‘‘machine which they serve is the untrue’’ (9). As Jelinek illustrates, unfortunately for them the working women have absorbed the images of the ‘‘real’’ woman promoted by women’s journals. They define themselves by their husbands and children and look forward to the time when they can offer even more to their families, ‘‘when the beauty of a mother will radiate out and men and women will come together and say that they will never be willful or domineering again’’ (12). In the scenes with Eva and the women workers, Jelinek reveals to what extent Nora merely experiments with the rhetoric of liberal feminism in her movement into the milieu of the ‘‘pillars of societies.’’ The hypocrisy of Nora’s middle-class values surfaces when within moments she recognizes that Weygang is the best that she can attain. Almost instantaneously she adopts the exaggerated discourse of sentimental love from pulp fiction. As a result, when later in the play she is turned into an S&M dominatrix from pornography, she does not recognize her situation. Similarly she is reduced to the stereotypes of a femme fatale (32), femme fragile (33), Wedekind’s Lulu (40), or a flapper (57). Nor can she recognize misogynistic stereotypes when her new lover, Weygang, and his friends quote Freud or imitate Wittgenstein: ‘‘A woman is that what does not speak and about what one cannot speak.’’ ‘‘Precisely. This Freud says that first one has to experience what it means to be castrated, before one can begin to speak’’ (24). Indeed, Nora unfortunately illustrates this point of view when she speaks: ‘‘ My husband wanted me to be at home and closed up, since the wife should not look to the sides, but primarily into herself or her husband’’ (7). It is with extreme awareness of irony that Jelinek has Nora pronounce later in the play that she refuses to be ‘‘a sexual parasite’’ (52). In response to the contradictions of Nora’s and the working wom-

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en’s dreams and aspirations, Eva can only scream. But it is a scream of real solidarity to all women who have been exploited by false ideologies as she identifies with every woman who has ‘‘ever hung on a man’s neck in gratitude for a piece of chocolate’’ or has played the accomplice in the children’s game of ‘‘letting the robbers march through the golden bridge.’’ She lists the robbers representing multinational concerns that will ultimately ‘‘rob’’ the working women not only of their jobs but also their squalid living quarters: Deutsche Bank AG; Berliner Disconto Bank AG; Dresdner Bank AG; Bank of Trade and Industry AG; Landesbank Girocentrale; Vereinsbank; Berliner Commerzbank AG; Hardy-Sloman Bank GmbH; Bankhouse Marquand und Co., Max Merck Jr & Cie; Conti Bank AG; Simonbank Ag; H. J. Stein, Warburg, Brinkmann Wirtz & Co. (54)

By means of visual and linguistic juxtapositions, Jelinek illustrates that Nora’s expressive self-explorations and self-justifications that she left her husband because of the ‘‘abyss’’ between them are nothing more than middle-class self-indulgence in the face of the working women’s painful struggle with ‘‘self-alienation’’ and ‘‘selfestrangement’’ from love in marriage, the rearing of children, and comforts of home. Thus Jelinek’s critique of Nora’s middle-class assumptions that she speaks for the situation of all women relates pertinently to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s observation: The ideological importance ascribed to the sexual division of labor has made it particularly tempting for women to consider their special oppression as deriving from gender . . . and thus to deny the importance of class and racial divisions within the public sphere. The temptation has led many to assume, first, that all women have been more united by gender than divided by class or race, and, second, that white middle-class women could legitimately speak in the name of all women. This assumption has had deadly consequences for the development of feminist politics, for, by assuming the right of middle-class women to speak in the name of Woman, it has blinded mainstream feminism to some of its most important responsibilities and simultaneously has alienated many lowerclass and black women, who see their primary oppression as deriving from their class or race.38

Similarly to Genovese, Jelinek examines the contradictions between middle-class and working-class emancipation, for Nora’s character represents the idealism of the middle-class expectations of women’s liberation. For this reason, like Marlene in Churchill’s Top Girls, Nora becomes the handmaiden of the market economy. How-

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ever, the working-class women with their own illusions and middleclass expectations conform just as easily as Nora does to the norms and values promoted by the pillars of societies that encourage traditional values of women as childbearers consistent with the ideology of National Socialism. Only Eva, the only visible representative of a Marxist voice in the play, can clearly see the relationship between women’s liberation and economics. In Jelinek’s materialist-feminist Lehrstu¨ck, emancipation and economics are placed together so that the broad implication of Nora’s liberal feminist transformation can be interpreted as a critique of the more naı¨ve liberal feminism and its highly individualist approach to women’s emancipation. Jelinek’s materialist feminist position suggests that if Nora had teamed up with Eva, the outcome might have been different. Although the workers lose both their jobs and living quarters at the end of the play, and Eva makes no progress in her attempts to educate her coworkers, this brief glimpse of an alternative suggests, if not optimism, then at least the potential of a collective women’s liberation movement. Particularly in the sequences when Nora meets Weygang, Jelinek illustrates how easily Nora appropriates whatever ideology suits her. When we first see Nora at the beginning of the play, she is parroting the discourse of 1970s liberal feminism. Once she meets Weygang, however, she just as easily adopts the dominant ideology’s conclusions about the role of women. She even quotes Mussolini to justify her leaving the factory on Weygang’s arm: ‘‘When a woman works at a machine, she at that moment loses her femininity, emasculates her husband, and takes the bread from the mouth of the humiliated man’’ (53). Ultimately Jelinek’s allusions to the discourse of fascism expose the extent to which fascism is constructed out of media-promoted ideals of femininity. These ideals are denied to the working women who have no time for their home or their children since they, unfortunately, have to work. But they look forward to a time when ‘‘giving birth will become an act of creativity once again,’’ for only then will they be able to ‘‘sacrifice their wedding rings’’ (11). In the sequences between Nora and Weygang, Jelinek parodies the pattern of romance novels in which falling in love is made part of the process of social rise that ultimately culminates in marriage. But instead of ‘‘happiness,’’ Jelinek makes visible the calculations that are part of the process, the addition and subtraction of market value. With an amazing theatricality of language and its accompanying pathos, both Weygang and Nora exchange the most cloying cliche´s on love possible. It is an artificial language, composed entirely from the media-created idiom of love, but Jelinek displays it in such

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a manner that it becomes obvious to the spectators how closely the word combinations, repetitions, and word plays of Weygang’s ‘‘my Nora’’ reveal the similarity of sentimental possesive discourse on ‘‘love’’ to the proprietary usages of capitalists. Similar to the reversals that Jelinek presents in Nora’s life, the changes that have taken place in the Helmer home appear entirely in language. Frau Linde, who has left Krogstad, having had enough of his ‘‘excessive dependency,’’ has become, upon Nora’s desertion, Torvald’s housekeeper because she sees Torvald as ‘‘a man with a future,’’ who in her present situation is ‘‘the best she can achieve’’ (37). In his desire to rise in power, Torvald, on the other hand, wants to dump Linde since he’s seeking to make a better deal with a young daughter from the upper classes, and he offers her a substitute position, also unpaid, with Krogstad. Linde, without Nora’s seductive body and delicate beauty, can only defend herself with a whole arsenal of housewifery skills as she hovers over Torvald, stirring his tea and feeding him his favorite cake. She becomes a self-conscious parody of Nora to the extent that she quotes Nora’s speech from Ibsen as she greets the children coming back from the park: ‘‘How fresh and bright you look! My, what red cheeks you’ve got! Like apples’’ (38). However, Linde’s transformation into Nora becomes horrifyingly zombielike as she goes through all the automatic actions of an ‘‘ideal’’ mother and housewife as promoted by women’s journals. Linde in Ibsen serves as a contrast to Nora, a selfless woman for whom life has meaning only through responsibility and work. But in Jelinek’s version, Krogstad is not worth working for since he doesn’t have ‘‘the self-improvement ethos,’’ which Torvald obviously has. In defining herself as the ideal, mature partner to Torvald, Linde surrounds him with the cliche´s taken from popular magazines on the difference between men and women and what women must do in their ‘‘creative’’ approach to bring the right atmosphere into the home. Similarly, her role with the children Nora has abandoned is to supervise ‘‘their first steps in life.’’ Linde’s purpose in Jelinek’s text is to illustrate how the cliche´s of motherly instincts and skills as a housewife are quite contemporary in a time when family values are being promoted in women’s magazines with the same pathos as that used by Linde and also Annemarie. In Linde we can see all three middle-class womanly ideals: She is the substitute mother for the deeply disturbed children that were abandoned by their natural mother (35), and thus she throws herself on them and draws them to her breast (38). She takes over the role of the wife that for a certain time satisfies Torvald’s very particu-

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lar sexual needs. And she satisfies his need for an orderly home. She has the exaggerated qualities promoted by homemakers’ magazines: she is patient, for ‘‘she can wait when it’s necessary for years’’ (47), she gives her man and his power unstinting admiration (36), she is totally giving, ‘‘my sacrifices are without limit’’ (47), she provides comfort, and finds her fulfillment in service to her husband and children. She cooks nourishing, vitamin-filled meals beautifully served. She is the embodiment of the myth of fulfillment of the housewife: ‘‘Can you smell the home-baked teacake, dearest Torvald. I baked this only for you’’ (37). Jelinek also replicates the image from situation comedies of devoted wife as she flutters about providing commentaries on what she’s serving to a husband who merely wolfs down his food in silence. But for Torvald, Linde is only an unpaid housekeeper who caters to his desires and relieves him of responsibility. As the play pronounces, the relationship between men and women is controlled by the same laws as that between the working women and the factory managers. In relation to the meaning of production, reproduction, and procreation, Jelinek views the domestic sphere as being outside the arena where the real material power base lies, and the caricature of the traditional division of labor in the Helmer home replicates the oppressive exploitation of the women workers continuing their traditional work in the domestic sphere of manufacturing cloth in the workplace. Thus Ibsen’s idealized contrast of Krogstad and Linde to Nora and Torvald are totally deconstructed by Jelinek and exhibited as nothing but sham. Ultimately, both Linde and Annemarie are picturebook women, and even Nora’s quest for self-realization is shown as nothing but yet another variant of the same cliche´, one disguised in the new language of the liberal feminism of the 1970s. In Jelinek’s satire, numerous versions of the feminine are confronted and satirically distorted, for as she comments, ‘‘The image of the feminine is not defined by the woman, but by the man.’’ 39 For example, Jelinek seems to quote from The Ladies Home Journal on motherly instinct ideology when Annemarie reminds Nora ‘‘that when a mother thinks about her children, she instinctively does the right thing’’(42). It is obvious that for her purposes Jelinek uses Annemarie and Linde as the representative of the idealized mother and homemaker by given them lines from a variety of cliche´s: ‘‘carrying a sweet secret inside you’’ (29), ‘‘the nature of women’’ (29), ‘‘mother’s instincts’’ (42), ‘‘the making of a new life’’ (41), ‘‘the unseen threads that bind a mother to her children’’ (34), ‘‘a woman cannot be happy without her children’’ (33). Jelinek’s Nora too contributes

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to the accumulation of these cliche´s, for while on the one hand she’s fled from her role as a ‘‘milk cow’’(11), on the other hand she continues to promote the cliche´s of motherhood as well, for after several weeks of her trial excursion into ‘‘real life’’ she feels the loss of her children as a ‘‘thorn in her side’’ (15). These juxtapositions of sentimental ready-mades by Linde and Annemarie reveal that, like Nora, they shlepp around the echoes of discourse which they’ve appropriated quite literally from Family Circle. Fiddler provides an insight into Jelinek’s confrontation with the penetrating mechanism of the media’s pervasive invasion of the consciousness of consumers: It is not principally what is shown in the visual media or talked or sung about in its aural and written forms which interests Jelinek, but how their very medium can perpetuate the myths of beauty or love, establish gender differencing and the phallocentric structure of family life, and promote the myth of male superiority by encouraging our acceptance of these as natural and enduring truths. The notion of the culture industry as a reactionary ideological exercise in perpetuating the structuring of social interaction that best guarantees the stability of the prevailing system of patriarchal capitalism underpins her investigations.40

Torvald too has been transformed into a capitalist predator, a ‘‘lone wolf,’’ who, since Nora left him, tries ‘‘to dig into his innermost self in order to find out the truth.’’ His innermost self, however, sends him the message that ‘‘high finance’’ is the answer. The former perverse little fantasies with his ‘‘dancing girl’’ prove to be inadequate for the ‘‘lone wolf,’’ for now Torvald needs new games with a whip, and ‘‘Lindelein’’ is prepared to relieve him since as she explains, ‘‘Someone who is always the hunter in pursuit needs to become the pursued as well. That is the balance that nature requires’’ (37). Thus on the one hand you have in the scenes between Linde and Torvald the conciliatory language that women’s magazines promote to educate women in the handling of the other sex, and on the other hand you have the more kinky discourse of man as hunter and beast. In this manner, Jelinek shows the spectators the fine lines that separate the discourse of good housekeeping journals on pleasing men through their stomach and the advice on perfecting sexual techniques to please the same men reflected in journals like Cosmopolitan. As Jelinek illustrates, Linde seems to have become an avid reader of both the magazines that promote housewifery skills as well as those that give advice on the sexual pleasuring of the male animal. In particular, the characterization of Nora in her post-Ibsen inter-

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pretation represents Jelinek’s settling of accounts with liberal and radical feminism of the 1970s, for she focuses on the images that the Nora figure has assumed in popular culture. By deconstructing Nora’s idealism Jelinek exhibits the contradictions between Nora’s quest for self-realization and such helpless dependent femininity, as illustrated in her wiles when she meets Weygang, the pillar of capitalism: ‘‘I frighten more easily than you do, since feelings are more feminine’’ (20). Thus, Nora’s feminism, insofar as Nora understands it, is perverted into a deteriorated myth of the essential difference between the nature of a man and a woman. Ultimately the whole repertoire of Nora’s observations about the ‘‘essential feminine’’ (24) is drawn from social Darwinism (23) or biological determinism (23). The theories from the turn of the century as well as the feminist theories of the 1970s ultimately appear as unhistoricized and unpoliticized reified myths, subsumed equally to the purposes of the radical left as well as the reactionary right, to terrorists or fascists. Feminist discourse does not liberate Nora but instead makes her a collaborator in the perpetuation of misogynistic stereotypes. She uses Freud on ‘‘penis envy’’ to explain the inferior creative output of women (12) as readily as her references to ‘‘women’s solidarity,’’ which she interprets by the fact that ‘‘women by nature have stronger bonds to each other’’ (13). Solidarity is thus made into another myth, which collapses in her confrontation with the manager’s secretary, a scene that illustrates that class and status are in opposition to notions of solidarity: Nora. Are you not also a woman . . . ? Secretary. Of course isn’t that obvious? Nora. Why don’t you then look like a woman, I mean joyous? Why do you look so severe? Secretary. When one’s a private secretary to the manager one doesn’t need to keep a grin on one’s face all the time, particularly since one’s personal life circumstances aren’t necessarily wonderful. Nora. Don’t you feel some solidarity with me? Secretary. At the most we have in common similar pain in childbirth. . . . Although I suspect that I’ll feel these pains more strongly than you. (15)

Similarly, Jelinek’s painful juxtapositions of Nora’s liberal cliche´s to the working women’s reality are balanced with highly comical effects as Nora tries out her new rhetoric of liberal feminism as she moves into the milieu of the ‘‘pillars of societies.’’ Nora’s entry into that world has nothing to do with her integrity as a character but more to do with her ‘‘artistic’’ talents, which are her heritage from A Doll’s House. Indeed Nora’s middle-class ‘‘artsy’’ flair is soon put to

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good use by the personnel manager of the factory to provide ‘‘classy’’ entertainment in the form of two choral arrangements for mixed voices and a short but ‘‘cultured’’ tarantella dance interlude for distinguished visiting dignitaries, among whom is Weygang. Indeed it is obvious that Jelinek’s Nora has absorbed exceedingly well Torvald’s guidance of her ‘‘talent’’ to please him as the spectator in their private theater in A Doll’s House. She reminds herself, in Jelinek’s version, ‘‘to repeat the movements once more, as my husband taught me, sensually, but not too sensually’’ (18). Despite this she throws in acrobatic tricks and makes a backbend, thereby ‘‘deforming’’ her body. The manager of the factory takes up Torvald’s former paternalistic position and scolds Nora for dancing so ‘‘tempestuously,’’ for she might ‘‘hurt herself ’’ and hence not be able to fulfill her piecework quota. Weygang, however, is attracted by her grand leaps, twists, and backbends. For the manager, Nora’s movements appear ‘‘uneconomical’’ (18), but for Weygang, Nora’s body interprets the capitalistic rhetoric of ‘‘risk taking’’ capitalism, and her painful acrobatic exhibition serves as an ideal model of ‘‘flexibility’’ as she explains that ‘‘my husband wanted me sensual but not too sensual’’ (18). The repetition of direct quotations from Ibsen, such as ‘‘You have the tarantella in your blood; I notice that. And that makes you even more seductive’’ (19, 34, 46), discloses through changes in the context and tone the ideological progress of the play. Though the reference to the tarantella in Ibsen appears shortly before the threatening catastrophe, in Jelinek’s version, the quotation appears as Nora plunges into a new love. When Weygang adds, ‘‘You’re dancing as if your life were at stake . . . surely because it has to do with me?’’ Jelinek calls attention to the shift into the context of the marketplace (19). While Weygang’s first expression of the familiar line reflects his infatuation with Nora’s body (19), its second recurrence represents Weygang’s sweetening up of Nora in order to manipulate her to do his bidding and get information from Torvald about the Conti-Bank’s mortgages of the mill factory (34). Thus, the second time that Weygang utters the tarantella speech, he is fully aware that the qualities that seduced him can be put to good use in the process of conducting business. However, Nora too is not unaware of her participation in Weygang’s ‘‘speculation of gigantic proportions,’’ for as Nora reports to Annemarie, ‘‘He’ll make a big salary, and we’ll live quite differently from now on’’ (31). To set off Nora’s desirability on the market, Weygang exaggerates his total devotion for ‘‘my Nora my sunshine and my precious possession’’ (26). However, though he’s quite taken with his new posses-

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sion, he shows that he’s also interested in her exchange value before it turns into a loss: ‘‘What is significant about women is that they present easily damaged goods, quality before quantity’’ (26). The progress of the not-so-subtle buying and selling of Nora occurs when he tempts the Minister, who since Weygang owns her, would also like to possess her, for ‘‘she could be my sunshine as easily’’: Weygang. She not only has a face and body, but also a genteel education. Minister. You’re a good businessman, Fritz, one has to give you credit for that, you know how to sell. Weygang. Yes, I love her and am totally committed to her. Minister. I too could love her. (26)

Jelinek illustrates to what extent creating desire is an important facet of all market exchange, for the Minister is obviously excited by the description of Nora’s market qualities of incomparable skin, body, and charm. And Weygang entices him further by mentioning that her most significant asset is her childlike innocence, which borders on perversion, almost exactly like Wedekind’s Lulu, for like Lulu, Nora has no discernible moral standards. Since for Weygang, Nora’s sexuality is an abstract commodity, it can be traded in a similar manner as contracts for ‘‘futures’’ in the financial markets. Though Weygang puts the finishing touches to his deal with the Minister by proclaiming that he will live faithfully with Nora into old age ‘‘like Philemon and Baucis,’’ he soon qualifies this sentimental allusion by letting the Minister know that once his passion wanes, Nora will become available for the Minister’s pleasure: Weygang. In general, that’s been my experience, the greatest passion lasts only a short while. If you wait, until my desire has waned, you can take her. Minister. Done. Weygang. The loss of Nora will cut my heart to pieces. Minister. You shouldn’t give her away for nothing. The administrations of three countries are tearing themselves to pieces over the deal, and I have the key to it. Weygang. It’s a deal. Let’s say in three weeks. (27)

To make sure that the spectators recognize the similarities between the language of love and the language of the exchange of commodities, Jelinek distributes the most recognizable quotations from A Doll’s House to Nora and Weygang. In particular, Jelinek focuses on Torvald’s discourse on frugality and financial solidity. However, the quotation from Ibsen, ‘‘What’s the name of the bird that

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eats up money,’’ when it is placed into the context of a major speculation by Weygang no longer represents Torvald’s lecture on the bourgeois family ideal of fiscal responsibility. Instead, in the new context, the quotation functions as an expression of ‘‘exchange,’’ for Nora can’t just ‘‘eat up money’’ without paying for her keep. Weygang the capitalist can make out of money more money without producing anything. But Nora must literally give of herself; ‘‘otherwise buying and selling, trade and exchange come to a standstill’’ (30). In the interests of capitalism, Nora is completely dispossessed of her voice to make decisions about her body. Assuming her voice, Weygang speaks out both his and her part (32), and Nora remains standing benumbed (33). Weygang shows how well he knows Ibsen’s A Doll’s House by appealing to her to become his ‘‘partner’’ instead of his ‘‘little lark.’’ And Nora has nothing with which to resist him but her whole repertoire of arabesques, backbends, and splits. ‘‘Often,’’ Weygang explains, ‘‘cruelty is a sign of love’’ as he convinces her in her own voice to seduce Torvald, for the entire enterprise depends on her: ‘‘Your big bear would jump around and do all kinds of funny pranks,’’ he promises, disguised by her appropriated lines. He patiently explains that the situation at the factory resembles precisely that of Ibsen’s Pillars of Society since in order for the ‘‘railroad’’ to be built for ‘‘the good of mankind,’’ one must have information that will make it possible, for the construction of the ‘‘railroad’’ would make it feasible to build ‘‘new, bright, and friendly apartments for the workers,’’ which he will name the ‘‘Nora-Weygang Blocks.’’ ‘‘Oh beloved of course,’’ he concludes in her voice, ‘‘for now I belong to you entirely and truly’’ (29–33). Emptying words of meaning, as Weygang’s strategy illustrates, makes them useless for establishing a counterargument, for, as Kristeva observes, ‘‘in a culture where the speaking subjects are conceived of as masters of their speech, they have what is called a ‘phallic’ position.’’ Insofar as Jelinek introduces ruptures, blank spaces, and holes into language, ‘‘the fragmentation of language . . . calls into question the very posture of this mastery.’’41 When Weygang takes over her part, Nora is not only speechless but is also cast as a spectator of Weygang’s appropriation of her voice. She then must also accept the decisions made in her name, decisions that are resolved in his head, not in hers. Having herself contributed to this situation by differentiating herself from Weygang through her reliance on the rhetoric of biological determinism, Jelinek’s Nora illustrates that ‘‘La femme n’existe pas.’’

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Jelinek provides several perspectives from which to view Nora’s body, for Weygang sees it as both a source for the regeneration of new energy and simultaneously an expensive investment. Nora too views her body as objectified goods or capital: ‘‘I’ve always taken care of my body’’ (19). In fact, Nora’s body provides an access to further riches, and both Weygang and Nora acknowledge that a business transaction has taken place as Weygang watches her perform the tarantella: ‘‘Don’t I have the right to see my newest most expensive property,’’ and Nora replies, ‘‘but hopefully you also own many more expensive properties’’ (19). By showing the similarity of the language of market economies and love, the semantic romantic language of ‘‘you are precious to me’’ is thus subjected to examination. Thus love becomes a cover-up for the fact that the financially potent Weygang is going to help Nora in her climb up the social ladder. When Nora leaves the factory on Weygang’s arm, Eva observes that behind their manifested love lies the ‘‘shadow of speculation’’ (22). In this manner, Nora becomes property for the second time. To enhance her own investment in her body, Nora’s acrobatic exercises become a means of marking her market value as a woman. However, with increasing age and decreasing attractiveness, her exercises become less pliable, less graceful, and show her off to a disadvantage. Weygang cold-bloodedly evaluates his investment and its diminishing returns: her aging body with its drooping ass, flabby arms, and orange-like cellulose skin (55–56). In his scrutiny of Nora’s body, Weygang borrows the discourse of the cosmetics industry with its attention to skin texture and the flabbiness of thighs and upper arms. When Nora’s body is no longer of any use to Weygang, he accepts it as a market loss. In reflecting on the difference between capital and Nora’s body, Weygang comes to the conclusion that, unlike the spreading of a woman’s body, ‘‘capital never decreases in attractiveness when there’s more of it’’ (26), for ‘‘its greatest attraction is that quite simply there’s more’’ (28). Weygang fears that with menopause, the spread of Nora’s body is inevitable, since sexual organs will ‘‘strangle her living flesh.’’ For Weygang, Nora’s biological destiny is a repellant prospect, one he would prefer not to witness: ‘‘Personally I wouldn’t want to go through that’’ (55). To counteract the downward plunge of her market value, Nora resorts to painting her face and wearing immodest dress. Thus, Jelinek reveals the variables that determine a woman’s value as commodity, for Nora’s body is ultimately hired out by contract and serves as a means for profit. In its total subservience to capitalism, Nora’s body becomes not much more than a cadaver, and Jelinek exaggerates this aspect by presenting Nora’s body as a zom-

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bie that stands on the stage speaking an appropriated text. No trace of Ibsen’s Nora’s psychological being remains, and she simply functions to enact the ruins of Ibsen’s text. Even as a dominatrix, Nora’s role is only one in appearance for, as Jelinek explains, fashion subjugates women particularly insidiously by means of that role. The costume of a dominatrix is sadomasochistic, for the black leather and metal on naked flesh are imposed by the desire of men who must subjugate women even as they receive pleasure from the exchange. The reason, according to Jelinek, that the current fascination with the costume of the dominatrix has become so strong is that men must break the resistance of women with renewed brutality. The dominatrix in her thigh-high leather boots must ultimately be brought to her knees. And men who seek out a dominatrix are overwhelmingly those in power positions, for they seek chastisement in torture chambers as a means of arousing their renewed feelings of innocence in the marketplace. Despite Nora’s assumption of the role of the dominatrix, business as usual is transacted, and Nora is not among the competitors, as usual (48). It is Weygang’s power that ‘‘whips’’ Torvald into obedience; Nora is simply his whip. And even the words she uses to assault Torvald are not hers, for she is merely ‘‘reproducing’’ the already established relationship in A Doll’s House: When Torvald pleads with Nora after their S&M session not to ‘‘ruin’’ him by revealing his special ‘‘tastes’’ and appeals to her sentimentality for ‘‘her abandoned children’’ and their ‘‘former love,’’ Nora automatically appropriates his former words to chastise him: ‘‘Is that my squirrel that is chattering?’’ or ‘‘Is that my finch that is chirping?’’ (41–46). She pokes fun at his ideals of prudence and frugality and advises him to sell the factory to Weygang ‘‘so that he won’t have to borrow in the future’’ (46). Despite Nora’s illusions about the power of her love over Weygang, he is the embodiment of absolute power that determines her diminishing value by calling attention to her ‘‘sinking ass and hanging breasts.’’ When initially Weygang invests in Nora, he offers his financial acceptability, and Nora in exchange offers her body. When later Nora attempts to once more create an even exchange by expressing her interest in his financial deals by agreeing to play the S&M dominatrix to get information out of Torvald, she doesn’t understand that the exchange is uneven, and that Weygang looks on her body as a subject perceiving an object, or as an owner examining on his property. It is a relationship in which Weygang has complete control over his goods; he can throw them away, sell them, conduct

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transactions and exchange, or whatever he chooses: ‘‘That’s what one does with property, my little lark’’ (33). Jelinek also discloses that power has to do with competition, and those with limited power, such as the foreman in the factory who notices Nora’s class difference from the other working women, have little access to more valuable goods. In desiring middle-class Nora as a symbol that will aid him on his climb up the economic ladder, the foreman rejects working-class Eva, for he sees that at that moment [Nora] ‘‘is the best that he can attain,’’ and he attempts to convince Nora that for her he too ‘‘is at that moment the best that she can attain’’ (12). Though Eva ‘‘would crawl if necessary’’ for the foreman’s attentions, Nora, having left ‘‘a man socially more attractive’’ than the foreman, lectures her that ‘‘women need not demean themselves by throwing themselves at men’s feet.’’ Eva knows that for her and the other working women, there is no opportunity to express such pride; they, unlike Nora, ‘‘have to grab at what little life offers them’’ (12). As evaluated by the women workers, Nora’s rise to the ‘‘proud, serious man with a cashmere coat and chauffeured automobile’’ must somehow be related ‘‘to some particular value system or else we’ll never get anyone for ourselves’’ (23). Whatever Nora has is a market value, which, given the nature of the market, is unstable, for cellulose and dimpled flesh announce her fall from Weygang’s mistress to valueless flesh. Since Weygang no longer wants her, the Minister who desired her no longer desires to posses her, and he passes her on to Krogstad. Krogstad in turn recognizes her as used-up goods and rejects the Minister’s offer. In the end Nora is paid off by Weygang for her services with a small fabric store, ‘‘appropriate for a woman,’’ and she is for all time excluded from the competition of powerful market returns and relegated to small market competition that is subject to the rise and fall of more powerful markets (55–59). It becomes obvious in the course of the play that Nora, under the illusion that she is an equal partner in Weygang’s projects, has learned nothing about economics or class systems. When Weygang’s infatuation with her body cools, all Nora has to defend herself against patriarchal power is a random assortment of cliche´s on ‘‘true love,’’ the kind that is revealed in expressions such as ‘‘Your look pierces me like lightening’’ (19). Jelinek’s dialogue debases each sentimentalized emotional moment, moving by turns from playfulness to mockery, and on to total undermining of all myths of love. Freedom of choice is revealed as the struggle of both man and woman for the ‘‘best’’ they can acquire. The power of fate and longevity of love are revealed as capitalist pragmatism, and thus the

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myth of Philemon and Baucis is totally demolished. The myth of togetherness is revealed as a subject/object relationship, wherein it is the woman who loses herself in the subject, for Nora is handed over to the power and whims of other less powerful men. In addition, the eternity and absoluteness of love of a man for a woman is equated to Nora’s market value, for as that sinks, love disappears. Even when Weygang dumps her, Nora clings to the familiar cliche´s on enduring love, and Jelinek exaggerates the pathos of Nora’s situation by calling attention to the use of the word fate three times by Nora. In addition, she has Nora draw on a whole repertoire of cliche´s on ‘‘the true nature of womanly sacrifice’’ and ‘‘the male animal’s natural resistance to love,’’ for Nora proudly accepts the sentimental cliche´ that ‘‘since he shares everything with me, both joy and sorrows, in turn these come back to him in doubled love’’ (52). Upon her return to the now powerless Torvald, Nora continues to believe in the myth of eternal love for the ferner Geliebten [the far away loved one], for this love, ‘‘despite their separation by life, is eternal, everlasting’’ (61). Thus, the contrast between the language and the situation reveals that Nora has not learned anything from her experience. Using her skills as a composer of texts, Jelinek brings the spectators back to the doll house ‘‘idyll’’ and Nora’s new/old marriage with Torvald. Another reversal has occurred, for it is now Nora who works all day at the fabric store, while Torvald, having lost his job at the bank, does the accounts, and as he pores over the daily receipts, he lectures Nora that the first stage of capitalist enterprise necessitates above all ‘‘the accumulation of capital’’ (60). Thus, in the reenactment of the ‘‘idyll’’ from A Doll’s House, repetition reveals the fall of the Helmers from middle-class assumptions of gentility as Nora slops food on Torvald’s dish and screams both at him and the children. At the same time, all vestiges of middle-class manners and decorum have disappeared as Torvald commands Nora to ‘‘shut your mouth,’’ and Nora, in turn, screams at the returning children, ‘‘Shut your traps, you wretched brats. Can’t you hear that your father wants to listen to the business news?’’ (61.) The only trace of Nora’s quest for self-realization is her complaint that Torvald ‘‘left her sexually unsatisfied last night.’’ Torvald in turn contends that there’s nothing wrong with his performance, for he’s read that ‘‘only middle class women have orgasmic difficulties; the proletariat on the other hand copulate without any problems’’ (60). The evening news on the blaring radio reveals that the cotton mill and the adjoining housing projects have mysteriously gone up in flames during the previous night. It is further reported that the fate

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of the mill is presently unknown, though Konsul Weygang, as chairman of the corporation with controlling interest in the mill, has given assurances that a speedy reconstruction is being considered in order ‘‘not to endanger the situation of the workers’’ (62). As Torvald speculates that most likely it was ‘‘the Jews that had ignited the fire,’’ the news broadcast fades into a spirited march evoking the memory of early German fascism. Torvald’s expression of delight, ‘‘I love to hear this music,’’ ends the play. With the audible lingering strains of the ‘‘quoted’’ march, Jelinek illustrates how the mechanism of the historical process has been set into motion to reenact the past.

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II Conversations, Misinterpretations, Contestations

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4 Jacques and His Master: Kundera’s Dialogue with Diderot TWO HUNDRED YEARS AFTER DENIS DIDEROT WROTE HIS JACQUES THE Fatalist and His Master (1773), the laughter and skepticism of his novel resound in Milan Kundera’s Jacques and His Master (1970–71), a play written during the bleak period following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in1968. In returning to Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist, a novel presenting different voices and differing philosophical positions that are never resolved, Kundera reaffirms his ideas about the novel as an arena for presenting existential dilemmas of such oppositions as Soul/Body, Memory/Forgetting, Eros/Laughter, and Lightness/Weight. In his play Kundera adds to his preoccupations with paradoxes by introducing Diderot’s dyad of servant and master in order to examine the paradox of Servant/Master from a post-Enlightenment perspective. Jorge Luis Borges observed that ‘‘each writer creates his precursors.’’1 The self-consciousness of Kundera’s choice of Diderot as a precursor is not exclusively aesthetic since for Kundera the philosophes of the Enlightenment produced variations on themes such as reason, toleration, skepticism, individualism, civil liberty, and cosmopolitanism. These ‘‘decadent’’ values conflicted with the aims of Soviet Socialist Realism and its dogmatic tenets of Marxist scientific materialism. Socialist Realism was a ‘‘literary theory’’ that demanded faith in the utopian future that would arrive with the triumph of Marxism. This credo was ultimately imposed on all nations under Soviet ‘‘protection.’’ ‘‘What we read is a kind of memory,’’ Patrice Pavis comments. ‘‘This consists of making distorted elements reappear to our present life’’ in order to clarify the ‘‘correspondence between individual and social body.’’2 For Kundera, the Enlightenment corresponds to values in opposition to Socialist Realism. Consequently, unlike the critics of the Enlightenment, such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Kundera identifies the Enlightenment with all the moder123

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nity of Western civilization. In particular, he argues for Enlightenment values in the face of the Soviet-imposed literary values of Socialist Realism. On the other hand, Horkheimer and Adorno base their views of the Enlightenment on Hegel’s argument that the Enlightenment created totalities both in systems and in history, a process that depended on establishing absolutes.3 Though Horkheimer/Adorno and Kundera fundamentally agree on the dangers of totalitarian discourse, they disagree in their analysis of the roots of fascism and totalitarianism. While on the one hand, Adorno/Horkheimer view the Enlightenment as the source of the discourse that leads to notions of social progress that culminate in nationalism and fascism, on the other, Kundera finds in the abandonment of the skepticism of Enlightenment values the basis for totalitarian belief in the progress of the human spirit. While Kundera, like Diderot, views the paradox of the Master/Servant dyad from a playful perspective, Horkheimer and Adorno are convinced that Enlightenment values, despite dissolving ‘‘the injustice of the old inequality—unmediated lordship and mastery,’’ at the same time ‘‘perpetuates it in universal mediation, in the relation of any one existent to any other.’’4 Unlike Kundera’s belief that the Enlightenment promoted the emergence of doubt, Horkheimer and Adorno view the Enlightenment as representing a sympathy with the collective social impulses that culminate in the ‘‘unity of the manipulated collective of German fascism.’’ For Horkheimer and Adorno the ‘‘horde which so assuredly appears in the organization of the Hitler Youth’’ does not represent ‘‘a return to barbarism but the triumph of repressive equality, the disclosure through peers of the parity of the right of injustice.’’5 In light of Horkheimer and Adorno’s establishing a causal relationship between the Enlightenment and fascism, Kundera’s privileging of Enlightenment values has made the reception of his novels and critical texts problematic in those intellectual circles that view the Enlightenment as representing ‘‘the schema of calculability of the world.’’6 However, what appear to be conflicting values between Adorno and Kundera have to do with the fact that Adorno was writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. Adorno’s often quoted dictum, ‘‘After Auschwitz it is no longer possible to write poems,’’7 a dictum which he reiterates, ‘‘I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,’’8 seems to be reflected in Kundera’s observations about contemporary lyrical excesses that sentimentalize events by means of ‘‘archetypes, images, metaphors and vocabulary.’’9 Kundera consid-

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4: JACQUES AND HIS MASTER

ers it essential to deaestheticize those moments that easily slide into the ‘‘Grand March’’ of kitsch. Similarly, Adorno shares Kundera’s skepticism by calling attention to the possibility of aesthetic infatuation with images rather than what they represent: ‘‘Today, every phenomenon of culture, even if a model of integrity, is liable to be suffocated in the cultivation of kitsch.’’10 Kundera explains that at the time of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia his books were banned and could only be published in the West. At this time, a friend who was a theater director suggested that Kundera adapt Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot for the stage using the director’s name as a cover. However, Kundera found Dostoevsky’s hero, the gentle, saintly Prince Myshkin, overly sentimental, and his altruism too easily sliding into the language of didactic morality. In addition, behind Kundera’s rejection of The Idiot hovers his revulsion towards Dostoevsky’s private version of the myth that Russia was the bearer of a new Christ-like harmony that would redeem the brotherhood of Slavic nations from the errors of the Enlightenment. Similarly, Walter Benjamin had observed that Dostoevsky ‘‘conceives the world’s fate through the medium of his people’s destiny,’’ a point of view ‘‘typical of the great nationalists, according to whom humanity can develop only through the medium of a particular national culture.’’ Ultimately Kundera’s choice of Diderot over Dostoevsky represents his rebellion against submission to ‘‘the aura of the Russian spirit.’’11 The last century has been particularly pervaded with monologic harangues of ideology, and even literary theories tend to rely on approaches that would master the ontological borders of literary texts. For that reason Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic approach in his study of Rabelais may be relevant as a perspective from which to understand Kundera’s need to engage himself in Diderot’s novel of many voices. The dialogue between Diderot’s Jacques and his master reveals the opposition between official ideology and popular culture, and it can be said, according to Bakhtin’s observations on Rabelais, . . . that medieval man in a way led two lives: one official, monolithically serious and somber, beholden to strict hierarchical order; filled with fear, dogmatism, devotion and piety; the other, of carnival and the public space, free; full of ambivalent laughter, sacrileges, profanation of all things sacred, disparagement and unseemly behavior, familiar contact with everybody and everything.12

Bakhtin developed his theory of dialogism in his study of Rabelais, Menippean satire, and the carnival, and his attention to the poly-

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phonic cultural discourse within those texts served to undermine the monologic power inherent in literary tradition and the concept of the author. As Bakhtin explains, ‘‘The utterance is constructed between two socially organized persons, and should there not be present an actual interlocutor, one is presupposed in the personal of a normal representative, so to speak of the social group to which the speaker belongs.’’13 The extraliterary significance of Bakhtin’s subversive notion that an authoritarian and hierarchically structured society will naturally seek a monologic affirmation or fixed consensus by means of which to promote a centralized power structure is obvious, for when a literary critic makes so much of freedom, it cannot fail to be in part a comment on the Stalinist period during which he formulated his ideas on dialogism, the carnival and the grotesque, all of which have the effect of plunging monologic certainty into ambivalence and uncertainty. Dialogism, on the other hand, has the opposite effect of undermining monological discourse by relying on carnivalesque or Menippean discourses as well as the strategies of the polyphonic novel. Julia Kristeva observes that monological discourse smothers dialogism by ‘‘a prohibition, a censorship, such that this discourse refuses to turn back upon itself, to enter into dialogue with itself.’’ In dialogical discourse, however, ‘‘writing reads another writing, read itself and constructs itself through a process of destructive genesis.’’14 To call attention to his choice of the philosophes as his precursors, Kundera decided instead to write a variation in dramatic form on Jacques the Fatalist by Diderot, whose novel he describes ‘‘as a grand game, full of playfulness and lightness, a journey into an unbounded universe.’’15 His decision to write a play was an eccentric gesture as well, for he was writing for a theater that didn’t exist, or existed only in the small back rooms in Prague, ‘‘where two or three actors would create magic with almost no props or scenery. Out of a void they would bring forth life. But that Prague no longer exists. . . .’’16 Kundera also chose the dramatic form, the most public platform of all, as a means of defending the novel of ideas of his designated precursors—Miguel de Cervantes, Franç ois Rabelais, Diderot, and Laurence Sterne. Ultimately, Kundera’s embrace of Diderot’s playfulness over Dostoevsky’s ‘‘overblown gestures’’17 made it impossible to stage Jacques and His Master even under the cover of the pseudonym of Kundera’s friend, the director. Kundera’s main attraction to Diderot’s novel was the philosophical debate between Jacques and his master. The ongoing debate takes place during a journey the two undertake, a journey which does not appear to have a destination or sense of purpose. In fact,

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the journey serves as a framing device and a comic pretext to create ‘‘a box to hold an array of anecdotes, stories, reflections.’’18 In addition to the framing conversations between Jacques and his master, Diderot engages in a conversation with the reader on the paradoxical conflict between determinism and free will. The language of Diderot’s novel is not a consistent, unified field but a dialogue among mixed and opposing ideologies, voices of authority, genres, and social idioms. The narrator serves as merely a point of contact for a potential (and perhaps untrustworthy) interpretation of the dialogues between Jacques and his master. The intertextual possibilities of the novel thus function as a field of nonconclusive semantic interactions. However, the dialogic quality of Diderot’s novel continues in the dialogue between Kundera and Diderot. The fact that Kundera’s travelers, despite the traces of their eighteenth-century attitudes, appear more frayed, for they have been dispossessed of their status and privilege, suggests the loss of a potentially reaffirming conclusion about the continuities of social order in Kundera’s variation. In fact Kundera’s Jacques and his master have more in common with the travelers/refugees who continue to be a familiar sight in post–World War II Europe as they cross borders to what to them may represent if not freedom then at least a chance for survival. Though they may carry with them nostalgia for the orderly world that the prerevolutionary Enlightenment represented, they resemble more the master servant pair of Lucky and Pozzo from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Like Lucky and Pozzo, they too are bound to each other: Pozzo. Remark that I might just as well have been in his shoes and he in mine. If chance had not willed otherwise. To each one his due.19

Kundera is as concerned as Beckett with the paradox between chance and fate, for in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, his central character, Tomas, leaves Czechoslovakia during the 1968 invasion for the benign bourgeois political climate of Switzerland. Nevertheless, he enacts his personal deterministic Es muss sein fate to return to Prague in pursuit of his wife, Tereza, for his love of Tereza was born out of the six fortuities that signify their union. As Tomas crosses the border to Czechoslovakia, he is relieved of his passport and soon thereafter of his profession as surgeon. Paradoxically Tomas finds that his new job as a window washer provides the lightness of ‘‘what remains of life when a person rejects what he previously considered his mission.’’20 This narrow walk between what Es muss sein represents and its subversion is also evident in the universal

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script of e`crit la-haut that fixes Diderot’s Jacques to his relationship as servant to his master. Though Jacques constantly quotes the fatalistic projections of his former master, the Captain, his actions nevertheless undermine the strictures of the relationship between master and servant: But who, he used to ask, can ever boast of having enough experience? Has even he who flatters himself on being the most experienced of men never been fooled? And then, what man is there who is capable of correctly assessing the circumstances in which he finds himself ? The calculations which we make in our heads and the one recorded on the register up above are two very different calculations. Is it we who control Destiny or Destiny which controls us? How many wisely conceived projects have failed and will fail in the future! How many insane projects have succeeded and will succeed! That is what my Captain kept repeating to me after the capture of Berg-op-Zoom and Port-Mahon. And he added that prudence in no way assured us of success but consoled us and excused us in failure. And so on the eve of any action he would sleep as well in his tent as in barracks and he would go into battle as if to a ball.21

While Diderot’s Jacques derives his philosophy from his former master the Captain, the Captain in turn is a reader of Spinoza. However, as Martin Hall notes in the introduction to Jacques the Fatalist, ‘‘from Spinoza to ‘it’s written up above’ is not a route that is either obvious or direct.’’22 Despite his belief in ‘‘Destiny,’’ Diderot’s Jacques thinks and speaks as if chance and freedom guided him, and he finds freedom through his constant questions that undermine the reality of what has been written above, a freedom that resides only within the realm of his challenge to the imposed discourse created by the inevitability of Es muss sein or e`crit la-haute. Thus in practice Jacques rejects the determinism of destiny, and his actions show him capable of dealing with any difficulty and as the master of any situation. In contrast, the master argues for the philosophy of freedom before a skeptical Jacques, but he is incapable of making even the simplest decisions without the aid of his servant. Jacques thus projects the personification of a double truth. If there is no decisive proof that man is free, none is presented that man is not free. Consequently, Jacques theorizes on the assumption of necessity and determinism, but acts on the assumption of freedom. It is a formula that explains everything and nothing as Jacques proceeds from asserting his staunch belief in an unrelenting pseudo-Spinozan outlook of ‘‘the great scroll on which it is written’’ to becoming a skeptic who unconsciously revolts against the determinism of his inherited certitude from the Captain. Though by the nature of his

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status the master asserts that he is ruled by his free will and is not, as a result, subject to the demands of necessity, once he is abandoned by Jacques, he becomes an ‘‘automaton’’ who ‘‘carried straight on ahead, turning round from time to time, to see if Jacques was coming.’’ The master’s concept of freedom projects him into the universe of the absurd, and, left without a purpose, he ‘‘carries on existing simply because it is what he usually does’’ (Diderot 40). There is, however, a profound difference in the changes that Kundera makes to the system of beliefs of both Jacques and his master. For as Eva Le Grand observes, Diderot’s Jacques’ belief in determinism emerges a posteriori upon observing the futile love affairs and arguments for freedom made by his master. Kundera’s Jacques knows, as do all of Kundera’s characters, that they have been determined or programmed a priori.23 The skeptical Jacques in Kundera’s play, aware of having been scripted by Diderot’s script, protests that if he’s been determined then he is not responsible for his actions or impertinence to his master. Both the servant and the master project an awareness that there is no space for freedom of action since nothing is chance, and all is determined by the reality of knowing ‘‘where we’re going’’: But are we the masters of our action? As my captain use to say ‘‘The good and evil we encounter here below are written first on high.’’ Dear Master do you know any way of erasing what has been written? Can I cease to be? Can I be someone else? And if I am myself, can I do anything other than what I do?24

In Kundera’s variation on Diderot the sense of destiny acquires a different resonance, for the questions and points of reference that Kundera’s Jacques addresses differ substantially from Diderot’s Jacques. Kundera’s Jacques not only cites Diderot’s Captain who cites Spinoza, but also indirectly refers to the theater of the absurd and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in which Didi and Gogo enact the eternal return of waiting for Destiny/Godot to decide their fate from act to act. In addition, Kundera’s Jacques also carries about with him Diderot’s consciousness, and thus his presence on stage consists of the dust of the layers of historical references and their contradictory voices. Kundera responds to Diderot’s antirationalist position by creating his own context in which the inspiration and intuitive knowledge of Jacques assumes a mediating role in the conflict between the general and particular, between society and the individual. In Diderot, while Jacques by virtue of having a name and a designated relationship to his master is more fixed in the frame of

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the particular, Jacques’s master is the representative of the abstract, purely formal reality by way of his ambiguous title and his claim to domination. ‘‘Since when has a Jacques the right to tell his master whether he’s mistaken or not?’’ demands the master in Diderot. ‘‘A Jacques! A Jacques Monsieur is a man like any other,’’ protests the prerevolutionary Jacques: Master. Jacques you are wrong. A Jacques is not a man like any other. Jacques. He is sometimes better than another. Master. Jacques, you are forgetting yourself. Get on with the story of your loves and remember that you are only and will never be anything other than a Jacques. (Diderot 157)

Kundera alters the nature of Jacques’s relationship to his master by protesting not only that he’s not merely ‘‘a Jacques’’ but also the master’s ‘‘friend and companion.’’ The master, however, rejects the presumption of Kundera’s Jacques’s attempt to set up a relationship based on an equal exchange, and in a tantrum of rage calls on the authority given him by his title: Master. When I call you my friend, you’re my friend. When I call you ‘‘a Jacques,’’ you’re ‘‘a Jacques.’’ Because on high, and you know where that is, on high, as your captain used to say, on high it is written that I am your master. And I command you to retract your version of the story’s conclusion, which displeases not only me but also Madame de La Pommeraye. . . . Jacques. Do you really believe, Master, that Jacques would retract a story he told? Master. If his master so wills it, Jacques will retract his story! Jacques. That’ll be the day sir! (Kundera 66–67)

The word retract resounds with a double meaning, for retraction of one’s previously held opinion was formalized by the Soviet government in Czechoslovakia, and Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being is presented with an either-or choice of retracting his article on Oedipus’s guilt or losing his position as surgeon in the hospital.25 One must remember that Diderot is a prerevolutionary writer and Kundera is a writer reflecting on the post-Diderot changes brought about by the French and Russian Revolutions, by two world wars, the Holocaust, and the political repression of Stalin and Brezhnev. Thus Kundera’s Jacques has become craftier in his resistance, for he knows that despite the power of the master it is also written on high that he is indispensable to his master, and because of that awareness, he’ll exploit him ‘‘whenever the opportunity arises.’’ Nor would a

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switch in their positions alter their relationship, for according to Jacques the master would lose ‘‘appearance without gaining substance’’ and ‘‘power without gaining influence’’: Jacques. All that was set down the moment your master invented us. It was he who decided that you would have appearance and I would have substance. That you would give the orders and I choose among them. That you would have power and I influence. (Kundera 68)

Despite their awareness that both the servant and the master have to answer to two masters—Diderot and Kundera—the characters frequently resist being placed in Kundera’s time frame and long to return to the comfort of Diderot’s familiar frame, which despite Jacques’s fatalistic projections, nevertheless represents a more certain world, a world whose history has yet to be written. Particularly the master finds his status embarrassingly diminished in Kundera’s variation: ‘‘Why is it we have no horses,’’ he protests: Jacques. You forget that we’re on stage. You can’t have horses on stage! Master. You mean I have to walk because of a ridiculous play? The master who invented us meant us to have horses! Jacques. That’s a risk you take when you’re invented by too many masters. Master. You know, I’ve often wondered whether or not we’re good inventions. What do you think, Jacques? Are we well invented? Jacques. By whom, sir? The one on high? Master. It was written on high that someone here below would write our story, and I can’t help wondering whether he did a good job. Was he at least talented? Jacques. If he weren’t talented, he wouldn’t write. Master. What? Jacques. I said he wouldn’t write if he weren’t talented. Master. (Laughing heartily.) That shows you are nothing but a servant. Do you think everyone who writes has talent? What about the young poet who once came to call on the master of us both? (Kundera 37–38).

In Kundera’s variation, as in Diderot’s novel, not only are all anecdotes and remarks constantly reviewed, analyzed, and discussed, but the nature of literature as well becomes subject to the same analysis. Both Kundera and Diderot embrace the principle of diacritical differentiation that promises no absolute authority to any particular philosophical or aesthetic response or judgment. In the conceptual frame of both the novel’s and play’s dialogue between Jacques and his master, the paradoxical realm of the logically irreconcilable yet appealing positions of both travelers presents shifts between mutually exclusive dialogic positions, neither of which provides an en-

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tirely satisfactory answer to the question at hand, and yet at the same time neither of which can be disregarded completely. The use of dialogue by Diderot evokes a response in Kundera’s variation, wherein the characters of Jacques and his master respond to each other’s discourse as well as to the discourse of Jacques and his master as established by Diderot. Thus all utterances address themselves to everything that has previously been said about the same topic. This dialogic mode provides both the exploration and possible disclosure of the range of interpretations of reality. In a similar manner to the repetition of the theme of the relationship between Jacques and his master, and the playful recurrence of the dispute between the author and reader, Kundera also resumes the love stories as told in the discursive space of Diderot’s novel by Jacques and his master, by the innkeeper’s wife about Madame de La Pommeraye, and by Father Hudson and travelers they meet along the way, albeit in the more limited frame of the dramatic plot. The variations on the stories of seduction and cuckolding follow and intermingle like individual stretches of what Kundera designates as ‘‘a journey leading toward a theme, a thought, a single situation, the sense of which fades in the distance.’’26 The love stories serve as variations of love stories in general, as the narrator, reader, Jacques, and his master engage in the quest for significance or meaning that the stories are intended to provoke but ultimately refuse. Jacques’s love story sets into motion his master’s love story, and each as a variation on the theme of seduction and betrayal reveals the ultimate betrayal of the reader/spectator by leaving no clear sense of conclusion, resolution, or satisfaction. Diderot and Kundera not only abort the endings of the stories, but they also abandon the readers within a prolonged coitus interruptus that leaves them aroused but unsatisfied. In an interview with Philip Roth, Kundera comments that the erotic realm reveals the essence of all his characters, and since according to him sensuality represents ‘‘the deepest region of life,’’ the question concerning the absurdity of life ‘‘posed to sexuality is the deepest question.’’27 Sexuality also projects the illusion of human autonomy, and consequently its subversion by deferring sexual gratification reinforces the theme of betrayal. Diderot’s Jacques and his master argue continuously about the credibility of the stories, psychological determinants, morality of behavior, and appropriate judgments. But the discourse between Jacques and his master does not proceed logically to a conclusion of the supposed debate on values. Instead, the various narrators/listeners of the stories interrupt and interject their own interpretations

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about what they’ve just heard. The narrator of the novel in turn engages the reader in the endless debate, and voices interrupt other voices with dizzying variety and unpredictability. Accordingly, many of the stories never end; instead, they are interrupted once more, and frequently fade out never to be heard again. In addition, the narrator announces his unreliability by admitting that he is ‘‘not writing a novel’’ since he is ‘‘neglecting those things which a novelist would not fail to use.’’ Subversively he adds, ‘‘the person who takes what I write for the truth might perhaps be less wrong than the person who takes it for a fiction’’ (Diderot 30). At times the stories succumb to an excess of exaggerations that suggest reality must be otherwise. For example, in Jacques’s telling of the story of his love to his master, he recounts, ‘‘At that moment a surgeon arrived, and then a second surgeon and then a third. . . .’’ But the master, troubled by the excessive number of surgeons, no longer hopes that Jacques’s story of his love will ever get to the erotic moment that signifies the culmination of all love stories, ‘‘And there you were with as many surgeons as there are hats on Saint Roch’’ (Diderot 32). Nor can the narrator abandon this thread as he conjectures, What a scene anybody else would have made of these three surgeons, of their conversation on the fourth bottle, of the multitude of their marvelous cures, of the impatience of Jacques and the bad temper of their host, of what our country Aesculapiuses had to say as they clustered round Jacques’ knee. (Diderot 32)

Though the narrator insists that he will spare the reader ‘‘all of these things which you can find in novels, the comedies of antiquity and in society’’ (Diderot 32), Jacques does not show the same reserve towards his master: ‘‘He did not omit the smallest detail even though he risked sending him to sleep for a second time’’ (Diderot 33). Thus, in place of narrative closure, Diderot’s novel presents an irresistible pileup of interlocking yet contradictory notions. Indeed, even the narrator of the novel appears to be in a state of continuous self-contradiction, now asserting his free will to interrupt the narrative, now denying it. Paradoxically the narrator is both a promoter and betrayer of realism, and in the stories where he most eagerly argues for realism, he also undermines the putative realism of the stories by poking fun at its representation as he allows the fictional reader to question the function of realism in the novel: ‘‘Truth,’’ he addresses the narrator, ‘‘is often cold, ordinary, and dull. For example, your last description of Jacques’ bandaging is true, but what’s interesting about it? Nothing’’ (Diderot 49).

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In Diderot’s novel, the stories on love and betrayal proliferate ceaselessly, but in Kundera’s variation, the repetition of the theme on the inevitability of betrayal is more confined. The stories are limited to the enactment of the master’s story of cuckolding by his friend Saint-Ouen and Jacques’s story about his betrayal of his best friend Bigre and the story of how he fell in love. These stories frame the story enacted by the innkeeper as the actress interpreting the story of the revenge by Madame de La Pommeraye upon her former lover, the Marquis: Master. You know what I wondered yesterday evening as I listened to the story of Madame de La Pommeraye? Whether it isn’t always one and the same story. After all, Madame de La Pommeraye is merely a replica of Saint-Ouen, while I am no more than a version of your poor friend Bigre, who himself is a counterpart of that dupe of a Marquis. And I see no difference whatever between Justine and Agathe, and Agathe is the double of the little whore the Marquis eventually married. (Kundera 82)

Maurice Blanchot writes that the ‘‘exigency of return could thus be said to be the exigency of a time without present . . . a future time, a past time, one in which radical disjunction . . . between one and the other, even were they the same, makes it impossible to identify other than as the difference borne by repetition.’’ When Jacques comforts the master, ‘‘Yes sir, it’s like a merry-go round,’’ and attempts to cheer up the master with yet another variation of the story of how he fell in love, the emptiness of the future is revealed in the ‘‘Eternal Recurrence of the Same.’’28 The master replies in a melancholy voice: ‘‘Yes, tell me, Jacques, my boy’’ (Kundera 82–83). However, in the retelling, the narrative is once more subverted by the other’s intruding discourse, and each story, through repetition, takes on the form of a journey that is thwarted by the fact that the tale is repeatedly and incongruously interrupted. Thus the emptiness of the past and death in the future are once more subverted. Though Kundera’s reenactments of Diderot’s stories in his variation appear to be parallel and complementary, ethically and aesthetically they present a different perspective, particularly evident in the innkeeper’s recounting of the tale of Madame de la Pommeraye. Both versions give us a portrait in being. As Kundera mentions, in Diderot’s versions the beauty of Madame de La Pommeraye is inseparable from the manner in which the innkeeper tells her story.29 Thus an ordinary, uneducated woman of the people relates a series of events that take place in a social setting beyond her ken, and each of the listeners and simultaneous commentators draws a different

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conclusion. As Madame de La Pommeraye revenges herself on her former lover, the Marquis de Arcis, in an intricate plot in which she stages his marriage to a former prostitute, the conclusion discloses that the greatness of the ego has to do with the fulfillment of its demands. Arcis, horrified by his humiliation, though still attracted to his young wife, throws her and her mother out into the street. In Diderot’s account of the tale, conventional morality both protects and limits the mediocre prostitute and her mother posing as virtuous women. They are seen at the same time as instinctually aggressive, destructive, and amoral. In Kundera’s variation, Jacques intervenes and alters the outcome of the enactment of the story as he declares Madame de La Pommeraye to be a wicked woman and defends the young wife by expressing his belief that a prostitute can change into a virtuous woman. His master sees Madame de La Pommeraye as not responsible for her evil and declares her to be ‘‘a mystery.’’ Both Jacques’s and his master’s points of view in Kundera’s version dispute Diderot’s defense of Madame de La Pommeraye, which justifies an ethics of instinct and individual will. While Diderot is tempted to prefer greatness in being to moral acquiescence, or surrender of the self, the final moral peripeteia in Kundera presents an alternative conclusion as Arcis forgives his wife and finds love, happiness, and moral renewal for both of them. Kundera has written frequently on the nature of the novel both in essays and in digressions within his novels. But, unlike Diderot, he has not written on the nature of the dramatic form with the exception of the one allusion that drama has not had its Sterne or Diderot.30 This allusion, however, does not refer to Diderot the playwright but to Diderot the novelist, for Diderot was not only the much admired writer of discursive philosophical novels but, paradoxically, he also promoted a new type of drama whose subject would be drawn from everyday, middle-class life to depict what Diderot termed ‘‘social conditions.’’ Ultimately, Diderot’s ideals on the social function of the theater were elevated by Soviet scholars as the first in which ‘‘the philosophy of acting was put on a solid scientific materialistic basis,’’31 a paradox that presents the great novelist and great theater critic pursuing different paths. The Diderot whose paradox of the actor as both actor and simultaneous beholder of social roles served as a model for Bertolt Brecht’s didactic Epic Theatre is not the same Diderot favored by Kundera. Ultimately, the eighteenth-century philosopher, novelist, and critic is himself a paradox since one and the same Diderot

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serves as a precursor for the Brechtian theory of the Lehrstu¨ck and simultaneously also as a forerunner of the existential dilemmas explored by the theater of the absurd and Kundera’s philosophical novels. But as Pavis observes, ‘‘Today nobody believes in the specificity of the dramatic text, or in the existence of rules and regulations governing dialogue, character, dramatic structure, etc.’’ Kundera’s approach to dramatic form is postmodern in the sense that he disregards the textual or staging traditions as they have been passed on from generations of theatrical heritage. Instead, he takes up Diderot’s novelistic text, ‘‘not so much as a basis for plot and character, but as a point of departure for a theatrical reading more or less dramatized by the improvisations of its various readers.’’32 Kundera has mentioned that he would give up the whole of Brecht’s work for one play by Eugene Ionesco.33 This seems to suggest that Brecht’s purposeful look towards a Marxist future did not satisfy Kundera’s vision of the future as much as did the image of Ionesco’s absurd rhetorician in The Chairs. Nor does Kundera share Brecht’s purpose in adapting a classic text as ‘‘construction material’’34 for the building of a Marxist future. Jan Kott has mentioned that in the Eastern Bloc countries, the theater of the absurd represented sociopolitical reality while Brecht’s plays were viewed as the theater of absurdity. When Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was presented in Warsaw in 1957, ‘‘everyone in the audience knew what Godot was: socialism,’’35 for Godot represented an arbitrary system which would or would not punish, provide food and shelter, or personal freedom for its citizens. His play, Kundera insists, is not a mere ‘‘dusting off ’’ of Diderot’s novel as an adaptation to a contemporary context but rather a variation, a departure that discloses ‘‘the infinity and variety concealed in all things.’’36 At the same time, he professes sorrow that the contemporary novel cannot retie the thread where it was cut. Nor can the novelist leap over the enormous experience of the nineteenth century, for if he wants to connect with the easygoing freedom of Rabelais or Sterne, he must reconcile it with the demands of his own time. Underneath Kundera’s variation lies the nostalgic desire to bring back the memory of a culture that he feels has disappeared, for he argues that since Czechoslovakia has been pushed out of Europe into the label ‘‘Eastern Europe,’’ the notion of culture based on difference or ‘‘the greatest variety within the smallest space’’ has in effect been erased and supplanted by the ideal of a pan-Slavic culture founded on the opposite principle of ‘‘the smallest variety within the greatest space.’’37 To counter Prince Myshkin’s appeal in

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The Idiot that Russian aristocrats should first become servants so as to become masters, Kundera returns to Diderot’s tale of the familiar relationship of the Goldonian servant who is cleverer than his master. Kundera comments that he was . . . delighted by its boldly heterogeneous richness, where ideas mingle with anecdote, where one story frames another; delighted by a freedom of composition that utterly ignores the rule about unity of action. I asked myself: Is this magnificent disorder the effect of admirable construction, subtly calculated, or is it due to the euphoria of pure improvisation? Without doubt, it is improvisation that prevails here; but the question I spontaneously asked showed me that a prodigious architectural potential exists within such intoxicated improvisation, the potential for a complex, rich structure that would also be as perfectly calculated, calibrated, and premeditated as even the most exuberant architectural fantasy of a cathedral was necessarily premeditated. Does such an architectural intention cause a novel to lose the charm of its liberty? Its quality of game? But just what is a game, actually? Every game is based on rules, and the stricter the rules, the more a game is a game. As opposed to a chess player, the artist invents his own rules for himself; so when he improvises without rules, he is no freer than when he invents his system of rules.38

To celebrate the playfulness of Diderot’s novel, in his variation in dramatic form Kundera renounces the Aristotelian unities of action, time, and place by dividing the action into twenty-two scenes within a three-act structure. However, as he acknowledges, the novel has more freedom than the dramatic form, and consequently the charm of the liberty of Diderot’s novel is circumscribed by stricter rules. In order to foreground the theatrical game, the gestures, manners, and costumes of the two protagonists create an awareness of their fictitious nature. The action takes place in the contemporary world of today’s theatricalized theater, but the narrative content recalls the eighteenth century. Jacques’s awareness of himself as a theatrical being makes him also realize that his conduct is a model for the spectators, and the spectator is placed into the position of self-conscious voyeur who is accused of ‘‘staring’’ at the actors (Kundera 17). But the master, supporting the notion of theater as illusion, advises Jacques to ‘‘pretend no one’s there,’’ and orders him not to pay attention to the audience. The master ultimately forgets that he stands on a Pirandellian or Beckettian stage, where characters can refuse to perform, and Jacques can refuse to obey him. Ultimately,

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the master’s statement, ‘‘I’m afraid that I know where we’re going’’ (Kundera 17) confirms the metaliterary message: characters are roles on a stage, performing today, tomorrow returning with the same words, the same gestures. In Diderot, the insistent presence of the reader, or the beholder in tableaux calls attention to the self-reflexivity of the medium. In his analysis of the paradox of the actor, actors both on and off stage become particularly interesting to Diderot since they walk the narrow line between conscious creation and absorption, forcing themselves and their audience to withdraw from the real world to the script of one. The theater represents an exercise of power, which, unlike in the novel, may result in short-circuiting the consciousness of both actors and spectators. Kundera attempts to form a visual equivalent for the paradox by creating a divided stage: a downstage area where all the action pertaining to the journey takes place, and a raised upstage area for the acting out of the stories. When Jacques, the master, or the innkeeper tell their stories, they mount the platform to participate as actors in the enactment of their tale. Frequently, they are challenged by their interlocutors, now turned spectators, to question the truth of what is happening on stage. Often, the actor as spectator insists on interrupting the enactment in order to revise the story and joins the other actors who enact his variation on betrayal on the ‘‘stage as stage.’’ For a few moments, then, there are no spectators, only actors who demand to be heard. The discontinuity of action as the narrators encroach on each other’s scenes results in a simultaneity and intermingling of dialogue, as for example, when Justine, Bigre, Saint-Ouen, Agathe as well as the master and Jacques concurrently enact the story of their betrayals: Justine. But I swear to you! I swear by my father and mother both! Young Bigre. I’ll never believe you! ( Justine burst into tears.) Master. (To Saint-Ouen.) The bitch! And you, Saint-Ouen, how could you . . . Saint-Ouen. Don’t torture me, my friend! Justine. I swear he never touched me! Young Bigre. Liar! Master. How could you? Young Bigre. With that swine! (Kundera 33–34)

By means of this strategy Kundera shows us that while Jacques is the betrayer of Bigre, the master is betrayed by Saint-Ouen. As Jac-

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ques attempts to warn the master that Saint-Ouen is a scoundrel, on the platform Saint-Ouen follows the conversation below with great interest: Master. He’s a scoundrel, all right, but for the moment he’s done no more than what you did to your friend Bigre. Jacques. Yet clearly only he is a scoundrel, not I. Master. (Struck by the veracity of Jacques’ remark.) Why that’s true. You both seduce your best friends’ woman, yet only he is a scoundrel, and not you. How do you explain that? Jacques. I don’t know, sir. But I have a feeling that in the depths of that riddle there hides a profound truth. (Kundera 73)

The constant reversals of the actor/spectator role, as in the case of Saint-Ouen watching the outcome of the conversation between Jacques and his master, recreates the relationship between the narrator and reader in Diderot’s novel by reinforcing thematically the basic conflict between a master/servant, narrator/ reader, and actor/spectator relationship. In addition, the numerous and at times confusing switches between the enactor and the enacted allows for the self-reflexivity of the novel to extend to the frame of the spectator in the audience: Jacques. (To the audience.) Wouldn’t you rather look somewhere else? All right then, what do you want to know? Where we’ve come from? (He stretches his right arm out behind him.) Back there. Where we’re going? (Philosophically.) Which of us knows where we’re going? (To the audience.) Do you know where you’re going? (Kundera 17)

Susan Sontag’s production in 1984 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge interpreted Kundera’s directions regarding the eighteenth-century setting ‘‘as we dream of it today’’ (Kundera 16) by devising a white Styrofoam version of Giambattista Piranesi’s engraving of a Roman ruin as an affirmation of the Derridean notion of traces and the sedimentation of historic eras. At the same time, the Piranesi-like representation of space provides the impression of stairways leading nowhere, doors opening on blank walls, and circuitous passages leading insidiously back to the point where one enters them, as the actors bump into each other while rounding the corner. The exaggerated eighteenth-century formalism of the actors’ gestures and stylized entrances and exits on the diagonal embellished the sense of circuitous space. And to foreground the question of authorship, Jacques carried around a bust of Diderot in his suitcase, which he took out and set on a pedestal in the many inter-

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ruptions in the journey. This trace or memory of Diderot serves as a reminder that Kundera’s Jacques is already ‘‘scripted’’ and thus subject to two masters in an intertextual conflict between Kundera and Diderot. In his response to Diderot as a presence in his text, Kundera resists developing his point of view and instead explores the theme of ‘‘memory and forgetting’’ since for him reading Diderot represents a kind of memory, a way of replaying the past rather than pretending to recreate it or absorb it. While the strategy of interruption of Kundera’s responses to Diderot closely follows Kundera’s own belief in the ‘‘art of the novel,’’ the question arises whether Kundera has succeeded in finding dramatic equivalencies to both his and Diderot’s narrative polyphony. The structure of his play seems much more confining in that the three acts, which although they are to be played without interruption, separate the discourse of the acts by presenting Madame de La Pommeraye’s story in the middle, foregrounding thereby, rather self-consciously, Kundera’s familiar theme of betrayal. The repetitions and interruptions suggest the confines of a commedia dell’arte scenario in which the actors enjoy a somewhat limited freedom to improvise within an established script, and consequently ‘‘thus it was written up above’’ becomes a literal and not only a figurative restriction. One must remember, however, that Kundera’s variation on Diderot’s novel in dramatic form represents his defense of the eighteenth-century spirit of the novel, and consequently Kundera’s ‘‘novelistic counterpoint as uniting philosophy’’39 in Jacques and His Master relies on a constant interweaving of that which is enacted and that which is commentary on the enactment. As in his novels where he intrudes frequently to address his readers directly, question his characters, and recite his own experiences, or account for his authorial proceedings, in the play he foregrounds the sense that all of the characters in Kundera’s novels are scripted to serve their master, the author. Kundera insists that characters in his novels are not created to imitate real people, but emerge from ‘‘a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.’’ The characters who populate Kundera’s novels are self-conscious fictions representing Kundera’s own ‘‘unrealized possibilities’’ in crossing a border he has circumvented to investigate human life ‘‘in the trap the world has become.’’40 In his novels, Kundera uses parody and irony, frequent philosophical digressions, and pseudo-historical documentation in order to respond critically to the nature of rhetoric, particularly political

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rhetoric, in his explorations of terms like kitsch or the grand march of history. He constructs novels whose unity is tied together imperceptibly through theme words which are ‘‘analyzed, studied, defined, redefined, and thus transformed into categories of existence.’’ The fragility of unity is maintained also through approaches to theme by means of digressions or ‘‘the abandoning of a story for a moment’’ in order to explore words like kitsch, laughter, memory, history, and border. 41 At the same time he is self-aware of the functioning of his own discursive strategies and constantly undermines them. Thus the reader, like the reader of Diderot’s Jacques, can recuperate both a potential sense of direction and its simultaneous subversion in a single work. The main focus in Kundera’s novels has to do with the nature of discourse as he probes language and its ability to reformulate, reiterate, and translate the already spoken. Much like Diderot’s exploration and undermining of the apparently solid conceptual and linguistic categories with which many of Diderot’s contemporaries attempted to encompass the world, Kundera, aware that reason and knowledge cannot be circumscribed, chooses to write in the form of variations on themes, dialogues with multiple voices, flights of imaginative speculations on the part of a self-aware narrator, speculations on the outcome of the narrative itself, digressions, and paradoxes. Thus his variation on Diderot is a continuing reflection on Diderot’s view that reality is a constantly changing continuum, and consequently language cannot truly represent reality, or at least the multiplicity of conceptions of reality. Since both digressions and variations on a theme suggest a departure, a movement away from the original theme, Kundera’s dialogue with Diderot may be read as a continuing digression on the digressions begun by Diderot. Diderot’s writing is marked by a constant and unsuccessful struggle to transcend the limits of both optimistic idealism and pessimistic materialism. Since nothing in Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist is built on certainty or necessity, everything that occurs can also be otherwise. The dialogic principle implies that history has a transcendent status that everything human is subject to dialogue. Diderot’s historical poetics and its objects are dialogically related, which means that they continue to criticize and redefine each other. Thus, in its very being Diderot’s novel projects a constant subversion of reality by invading it with questions and injecting into the most ordinary occurrences the poison of doubt, uncertainty, and possibility. Similarly, Kundera’s strategy of disruption and subversion in his digressions denies the possibility of a one-sided ideological position. For Kundera to treat ironically a form that is ironical in itself is to continue

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the tradition of Diderot’s paradox, for as Diderot’s Jacques suggests, it is paradoxical ‘‘that one’s words are hardly ever understood in the same way that they are spoken. Even worse than that is that one’s actions are hardly ever judged in the way they are performed.’’ And yet, a paradox can be the source of novelistic truth since ‘‘a paradox isn’t always a lie’’ (Diderot 64). At the time of writing his variation on Diderot’s novel, Kundera suggested that the ‘‘playfulness of the theatre as a game’’ appealed to him. Playfulness for Kundera has to do with a compulsive disregard for genre by breaking down unity through digressions. Much like Sterne, to whom he refers almost as frequently as to Diderot, Kundera finds Sterne’s observations to be the essence of his own approach: ‘‘Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;—they are the life, the soul of reading;—take them out of this book,—you might as well take the book along with them.’’ Sterne playfully continues that if an author ‘‘begins a digression,—from that moment . . . his whole work stands stuck still;—and if he goes on with his main work,—then there is an end of his digression.’’42 Not only digressions, but also variations on a theme are the essential characteristics of Kundera’s existential inquiries. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he writes that Beethoven discovered in his variations ‘‘another space and another direction’’ for the journey by way of theme ‘‘to the second infinity’’ since ‘‘with every variation Beethoven moves farther and farther from the original theme, which bears no more resemblance to the final variation than a flower to its image under the microscope.’’43 Based on these observations, Jacques and His Master can be read as a play in tribute to the novel, a defense of the freedom of the novel unrestricted by plot unity, purpose, and ultimate truth. In discussing Kundera’s variation, it is important to consider the questions of genre, which curiously slide into questions that relate to history and ideology. That Kundera considers that social ideology and changes in genre are closely related is evident from his essay ‘‘The Novel and Europe’’ in which he explores the movement of the novel from the ‘‘wide-open world’’ of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist to the evernarrowing landscape of the novel in the nineteenth century with its focus on causality, socioeconomic determinants, psychology, and notions of period and realism. This narrowing focus reduces questioning and ambiguity in favor of the pursuit of truth. What appeals to Kundera in Diderot’s novel is that Jacques and his master ‘‘exist in a time without beginning or end, for they have not yet been propelled along the rails of History towards significance and meaning.’’

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For Kundera, the relativity and ambiguity of beliefs as explored by Diderot are incompatible with a totalitarian universe, a difference not only with respect to questions of ideology but also an ontological difference since a world based on ‘‘a unique Truth denies freedom of play, ambiguity and doubt.’’44 Kundera’s preference for Diderot also gave him the opportunity to rebel against Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Dostoevsky-like analysis of the Renaissance as the starting point of the current crisis in the West. By openly rejecting Dostoevsky’s novel for the reason that it elevates sentiment and search for truth under ‘‘the rather hazy criterion of morality,’’ Kundera, in choosing the writers from the Renaissance and Enlightenment as his precursors, defends the novel of ‘‘reason and doubt,’’ ‘‘play,’’ and the ‘‘relativity of human affairs.’’45 He views the world of the novel as a world of relativity whose truth is concealed ‘‘as God was for Pascal.’’ If the novel has any message at all, this is it: ‘‘All truth is hidden and from that you can draw your conclusions. No one can hold a monopoly on truth, but you can take hold of other men’s truths and play with them in an endlessly comic teatrum mundi: This is the sole consolation for which you may hope.’’46 For Kundera the writers of the Enlightenment with their capricious attitude, use of irony, abandonment of linear narrative together with their detached observations, their cutting cynicism, and the elegance of their style provide a way out of the purposeful intent of the march towards truth. What delights Kundera about the eighteenth-century novelists is that they ‘‘talk about what fascinates them, and they stop when the fascination stops.’’47 Kundera’s play, which is closely entwined with Diderot’s novel in its proximity to Diderot, as well as its departure, allows for a dialogue between the two writers on questions of genre, history, and ideology. In his rereading of Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Kundera removes the ‘‘fatalistic’’ impulse from Diderot’s projection of the future, and instead he focuses his variation to argue for the continuity of the open novel. Having lived ‘‘through the death of the novel, a violent death inflicted by bans, censorship, and ideological pressures,’’ he considers ‘‘those glibly pious obituaries of the novel’’ as frivolous attempts on the part of the Western media to manufacture a crisis in belief, for the media as agents of the unification of world history ‘‘amplify and concentrate the process of reduction.’’48 According to Kundera, the novel’s essence relies on its complex relationship to other works, for each work is ‘‘an answer to preceding ones, each work contains all the anterior experience of the novel.’’ In tracing the history of the novel after Sterne’s Tristram

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Shandy and Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist, Kundera observes that the novel abandoned its potential for discursive polyphony and instead tied itself down to obligations of verisimilitude, realistic setting, and chronological order, abandoning ‘‘the space opened up by these two masterpieces.’’49 In his championing of the forerunners of the novel of questions, doubt, merriment, and humor, Kundera once and for all establishes his argument for a skeptical, subversive point of view of the comic. As he explains in Testaments Betrayed, for writers like Rabelais, the merry and comic were still one and the same; however, by the time of the eighteenth century, the humor in the novels of Sterne and Diderot reveals an affectionate, nostalgic recollection of Rabelaisian merriment that has been all but stilled in our own time. For Kundera, humor is ‘‘the divine flash that reveals the world in its moral ambiguity and man in his profound incompetence to judge others; humor: the intoxicating relativity of human things; the strange pleasure that come of the certainty that there is no certainty.’’50 With a heavy heart Kundera contemplates the contemporary tendency not only to succumb to the ideology of totalitarian kitsch but also more recently to the sanctimonious preaching of political correctness as he imagines the day when Rabelais’s ‘‘Panurge no longer makes people laugh.’’51 Kundera traces the fading of humor into the nineteenth century as humor abandons merriment, and the first traces of the notion of the absurd emerge in Gogol’s grotesque tales, for ‘‘the longer and more carefully we look at the melancholy stories, the sadder they become.’’ And as a reflection of the historical events in the European twentieth century, the merry epic of Rabelais is reinvented as the despairing comedy of Ionesco; thus, ‘‘the European history of laughter comes to an end.’’52 For Kundera, unlike for the realist writers of the nineteenth century, the novel does not reflect social reality but is merely a vehicle for producing philosophical questions. He criticizes the misdirection of the novels of the nineteenth-century realists and their reliance on the causal connections between social and historical background and the outcome of their representations. His critique of the nineteenth-century realists is not so much directed towards Gustave Flaubert, Henri Stendhal, or Leo Tolstoy but has more to do with the continuity of the realist model as it was forced upon literature in the Soviet countries by Andrei Zhdanov’s 1934 call to Socialist Realism and simultaneously the criminalizing of avant-garde decadent tendencies in literature in the late 1930s. As Abram Tertz in his subversive critique of Socialist Realism explains, Socialist Realism relies on lies, maneuvers, and the combination of the uncombinational: ‘‘the positive hero . . . and the

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psychological analysis of character; elevated style and declamation with prosaic descriptions of ordinary life; a high ideal with the truthful representation of life.’’ These tendencies result in ‘‘a loathsome literary salad,’’ composed of characters who ‘‘becoming suddenly aware of the time they are living in, scream at the reader in copybook slogans . . . ‘Long live world peace!’ or ‘Down with warmongers!’ ’’53 Similarly, in his critique of what he designates as the ‘‘Grand March,’’ Kundera writes: ‘‘In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.’’54 Not only is kitsch the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements, but political kitsch also reflects the kitsch that pervades private life: ‘‘People always see the political and the personal as different worlds, as if each had its own logic, its own rules. But the very horrors that take place on the big stage of politics resemble, strangely but insistently, the small horrors of our private life.’’55 Kundera’s critique of the kitsch of literary Stalinism also finds support in the analysis of French poststructuralists like Roland Barthes who describes socialist realist literature as always framing a precise historical process that functions much like ‘‘an algebraic sign representing a whole bracketed set of previous postulates’’: In the Stalinist world, in which definition, that is to say, the separation between Good and Evil, becomes the sole content of all language, there are no more words without values attached to them, so that finally the function of writing is to cut out one stage of a process: there is no more lapse of time between naming and judging, and the closed character of language is perfected, since in the last analysis it is a value which is given as explanation of another value. . . . We see that this is in fact a tautology, a device constantly used in Stalinist writing. For the latter no longer aims at founding a Marxist version of the facts, or rationale of actions, but at presenting reality in a prejudged form, thus imposing a reading which involves immediate condemnation. . . . The spreading influence of political and social facts into the literary field of consciousness has produced a new type of scriptor, halfway between the party member and the writer, derived from the former an ideal image of committed man, and from the latter the notion that a written work is an act.56

Similarly, Diderot also questions the possibility of writing the fiction as ‘‘truth’’ and stipulates that ‘‘if it is necessary to be truthful, then let it be like Molie`re, Regnard, Richardson, or Sedaine. Truth

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has its interesting sides which one brings out if one’s a genius. Yes when one is a genius, but what if one isn’t?—when one isn’t one shouldn’t write’’ (Diderot 49). Kundera takes up this conversation in his variation by retelling the story of a poet who presents bad poems to Diderot, and Kundera’s Diderot rejects Kundera’s presumption to rewrite his Jacques. Neither gods nor men nor sign posts forgive mediocrity in a poet. But the poet cannot help himself from writing poetry, for ‘‘it’s a compulsion! I have a tremendous compulsion to write bad verse.’’ ‘‘Let me warn you again of the consequences!’’ our master exclaimed, but the young poet replied, ‘‘You are the great Diderot, I am a bad poet. But we bad poets are the most numerous; we’ll always be in the majority! All of mankind consists of bad poets! And the public—its mind, its taste, and its sensibility—is nothing but a crowd of bad poets! Why do you think that bad poets defend other bad poets? The bad poets who make up mankind are crazy about bad verse! Indeed, it is just because I write bad verse that I shall one day be in the pantheons of great poets!’’ (Kundera 40).

Given Kundera’s general distrust of the novel of nineteenth-century realism, it is easy to understand that he would reject the ‘‘purposeful’’ point of view of Socialist Realism as it was imposed on the literature of the Soviet Bloc countries, and this opposition consequently led to the censorship and proscription of his work, his forced departure from Czechoslovakia in 1975, and in 1979, upon the publication in the West of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the revocation of his Czech citizenship. In reading about the events that marked Kundera’s life, such as the loss of his job as professor at the Institute for Advanced Cinematography Studies in Prague immediately after the publication of his first novel, The Joke, during the Prague Spring of 1968, the continuing censorship of his work, his subsequent expulsion and loss of citizenship, it would be easy in turn to interpret all of Kundera’s work as a ‘‘major indictment of Stalinism’’ and to read the tales that Jacques tells his master in his variation on Diderot as direct references to political repression and censorship. For example, in the face of the censorship of Kundera’s own work, the ‘‘gag’’ Jacques is made to wear in Kundera’s variation on Diderot’s novel and the figurative gag imposed by his master resonate with political significance. But to belabor this interpretation would be to play into what Kundera deplores as political ‘‘kitsch.’’ In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, his character Sabina protests against the sentimental interpretation of her paintings in the ‘‘free world’’ as representative examples of the ‘‘struggle for happiness and free-

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dom’’; she maintains that the enemy is ‘‘kitsch, not Communism!’’57 Intruding in his role as narrator, Kundera writes that ‘‘the Grand March to brotherhood, equality, justice and happiness,’’ emerges not from a rational philosophy ‘‘but from images, metaphors, and vocabulary’’: Since the days of the French Revolution, one half of Europe has been referred to as the left, the other half as the right. Yet to define one or the other by means of theoretical principles it professes is all but impossible. And no wonder: political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch.58

From Kundera’s definition of political kitsch it becomes clear that Dostoevsky’s messianic notion of universal reconciliation through love and suffering was hardly palatable to him. He recounts with some irony that the occupying Soviet troops were constantly puzzled that the Czechs whom they ‘‘loved’’ like brothers refused to reciprocate that love, and indeed the rejected Soviet troops had to use tanks as an expression of the ‘‘aggressive sentimentality’’ of ‘‘what it means to love.’’ ‘‘Man cannot do without feelings,’’ writes Kundera, ‘‘but the moment they are considered values in themselves, criteria of truth, justifications for kinds of behavior, they become frightening. The noblest of national sentiments stands ready to justify the greatest of horrors, and man, his breast swelling with lyric fervor, commits atrocities in the sacred name of love.’’59 At the same time, the writing of Kundera’s variation is also a tribute to the little countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland which tried in vain in to Westernize a socialism ‘‘that came in from the cold.’’ However, Kundera’s variation on Diderot should not be interpreted as his attempt to find equivalence between Czechoslovakia’s or Poland’s situations and the historical context that the power and influence of Diderot’s France represents: ‘‘People suppose that the little countries necessarily imitate the big ones, but that is an illusion. In fact they’re quite different. A little guy’s outlook is different from a big man’s. The Europe made up of little countries is another Europe ; it offers another perspective and its culture is often completely at odds with the Europe of big countries.’’60 Small nations do not make history since they are always ‘‘the object of history,’’ and history for the Czechs is something hostile, unjust, often stupid, and, as a result, the Czechs can’t take it seriously. ‘‘Hence’’ writes Kundera, ‘‘our special humour: a humour capable of seeing history as grotesque.’’61 While the countries that determine

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history participate in what Kundera describes as the Grand March with fists raised chanting the same syllables in unison, the Czech spirit of buffoonery in the face of the Soviet invasion in 1968 pervades not only Kundera’s novels but also the films of Milos Forman, Vera Chytilova, and Jirî Menzel, the plays of Vaclav Havel and Pavel Kohout, and the novels of Josef Skvorecky and Ivan Klima. What characterizes their work is their irreverent and skeptical attitude towards history, a skepticism that undermines the horror of ideology imposed by the Grand March of history upon their little country. Nor is Kundera’s critique entirely directed towards the crude imposition of Socialist Realism upon the spirit of doubt that pervaded the Prague Spring in 1968, for at the same time he views the 1968 revolutionary marches in Paris as ‘‘an explosion of revolutionary lyricism.’’ ‘‘That’s why the Parisian students looked towards Prague with mistrust (or rather with indifference), and the man in Prague could only smile at Parisian illusion which he thought discredited, comic or dangerous (There is a paradox worth meditating upon: the only successful—if ephemeral—implementation of socialism in freedom was not achieved in revolutionary enthusiasm but in skeptical lucidity).’’62 Though the Prague Spring culminated in an ‘‘explosion of postrevolutionary skepticism,’’ it also represented a long process ‘‘which deconstructed the regime’s dogma little by little, pitting intoxication, humanist sophism against inhuman sophistry, and which, by dint of laughing at the system, brought the system to be ashamed of itself.’’ While for the Czechs the Prague Spring represented a passionate defense of the European cultural tradition, ‘‘as much a defense of Christianity, as of modern art, both equally denied by the authorities,’’ in Paris the Left redefined its goal as ‘‘socialism in freedom.’’63 And while the disappearance of culture was perceived in Prague ‘‘as a catastrophe, a shock, a tragedy,’’ in Paris the loss of culture was seen ‘‘as something banal, insignificant, scarcely visible, a non-event.’’64 Ironically the Czechs’ defending their cultural links to the Enlightenment was the very opposite target of the spirit of revolution that pervaded Western Europe, for in its striving towards a purposeful, egalitarian society, Paris in May ’68 challenged the socalled called European culture and its traditional values. But Kundera does not agree with this point of view, for, as he comments, Western intellectuals, with their proverbial self-centeredness, often take an interest in events not in order to know them but so as to incorporate them into their own theoretical speculations, ‘‘as if they were adding another pebble to their personal mosaic’’:

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In Prague we used to say cynically that the ideal political regime was a decomposing dictatorship, where the machine of oppression functions more and more imperfectly, but its existence maintains the nation’s spirit in maximum creative tension. . . . When I look back I can see us permanently dissatisfied and in protest, but at the same time full of optimism. We were sure that the nation’s cultural traditions (its skepticism, its sense of reality, its deeply rooted incredulity) were stronger than the political system imported from abroad. . . . We were the optimists of skepticism: we believed in its subversive force and eventual victory.65

Ten years later in Paris he recalled that the sense of endings that had prompted him to create a stage version of Diderot’s novel encompassed a much greater magnitude of loss than the personal deprivation of his freedom to publish: ‘‘faced with the eternity of the Russian night, I had experienced in Prague the violent end of Western culture such as it was conceived at the dawn of the modern age, based on the individual and his reason, on pluralism of thought, and on tolerance. In a small Western country, I experienced the end of the West. That was the great farewell.’’66 At the same time, in his paradoxical position as a critic of both Soviet and Parisian rhetoric, Kundera also refuses the sentimentalized position of eternal dissident or e´ migre´ , a position taken by many ‘‘poets’’ who prefer to deal in ready-made political phrases and cliche´s and who have translated their cause into celebrity for themselves. Kundera’s recurring theme in his novels and essays on literature is the independence of art, not only from the encroachment of morality but also from politics, from history, from uncomprehending champions and critics. In his novel Life Is Elsewhere (1968), written at the same time as Jacques and His Master, Kundera insists on the freedom of the novel. ‘‘Man cannot jump out of his life,’’ he writes, ‘‘but perhaps a novel has more freedom.’’67 In an interview upon his arrival in Paris, Kundera expresses his dismay that his novels were being read as political documents, for the naive reader regards those days as ‘‘an era of political trials, persecutions, forbidden books, and legalized murder. But we who remember must bear witness: it was not only an epoch of terror, but also an epoch of lyricism, ruled hand in hand by the hangman and the poet.’’68 In Life is Elsewhere, Kundera tells the story of an extraordinarily gifted young poet, who, out of his very love for ‘‘poetic truth’’ becomes a stool pigeon and sends an innocent young man off to a Stalinist concentration camp: Understand, I am not against revolution, nor youth, nor motherhood, nor even poetry, but I have passionate longing to demystify myths. In

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mythic thought, poetry is an absolute value: I did not desert poetry, I betrayed it. For me lyric poetry is not only a literary genre, but a whole way of life, an attitude toward the world. I put away that attitude as one puts away religious faith. . . . The poet always identifies with his own feelings. An antipoetic posture means distrust of one’s own feelings and sensations, of other people’s feelings and sensations. An antipoetic posture grows out of the conviction that between what we think about ourselves and what we actually are there exists an infinite distance, just as there is an infinite distance between what we wish things were and what they are, or between what we think they are what they are. To apprehend this distance, this abyss, means to destroy the poetic illusion. This is also the essence of the art of irony. And irony is the perspective of the novel.69

Nor is he ready to assume the position that his literary work should function a priori as an indictment of the regime that has destroyed his opportunity for creativity. As a result of his critique of all political rhetoric, neither the Western intellectuals nor his fellow countrymen continued to lionize him. In the eyes of many, he was a deserter who had gotten out when the getting was good before the repression, before the jailings and protests. Worse, he had never used his international celebrity to further the anti-Communist cause. Given Kundera’s definition of kitsch as the need ‘‘to gaze into the mirror of the beautiful lie and to be moved to tears of gratification at one’s own reflection,’’70 one can see that he detests excessive lyricism and sentimentality that signifiers like ‘‘prison’’ evoke: ‘‘The wall behind which people were imprisoned was made of verse. There was dancing in front of it. No, not a danse macabre! A dance of innocence. Innocence with a bloody smile.’’71 It is no wonder then that the demystification of poetic lyricism on Kundera’s part has to do more with the demystification of a given attitude to life which goes far beyond the text into the realm of poetic kitsch as the poet steps ‘‘onto the stage of history not at just any random moment but at the exact moment when the light came upon it,’’ at the moment of The Planetary Historic News Event. When The Planetary Historic News Event is touched with the Sublime, at that moment the poet on the historical stage relives through nostalgia the sublime moment as ‘‘gunfire clatters in the background and the Archangel of Death hovers overhead.’’72 And at that moment what ‘‘has befallen him intensifies still more the inherent melancholy of his life, renders his destiny still sadder, and hence still grander and more beautiful.’’73 Perhaps what also attracts Kundera to Diderot is that reception of Diderot’s work even in his own time was equally as problematic and paradoxical as was Kundera’s under Communism. Critics in the

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West were inclined to see Kundera as an example of resistance to Communism, and in Communist Czechoslovakia they censored his work as decadent modernism. Even though Diderot’s Encyclopedie was acknowledged to represent intellectual progress made in every department of thought in the Age of the Enlightenment, the evercautious regime distrusted the tone of Diderot’s discourse and had the philosophe watched by the secret police. In 1748 the police raided Diderot’s house, seized his manuscripts and carried off the author to the prison of Vincennes, where he remained for three months. As Otis Fellows notes in his study of Diderot, not until the middle of the twentieth century did French literary scholars acknowledge that perhaps Diderot deserved a place of rare distinction among French writers and thinkers of his age. Prior to that, critics chided the philosophe for his ‘‘intellectual anarchy,’’ ‘‘lack of clarity,’’ ‘‘willful confusion,’’ and ‘‘distorted logic.’’74 Equally paradoxical is the fact that Diderot is ranked by Soviet scholars as one of the leading eighteenth-century French materialists who constituted a progressive force in that he helped to prepare the way for ‘‘a new stage of history.’’ This view of Diderot is often qualified by the explanation that despite dialectical elements in Diderot’s methodology, his views did not represent dialectical materialism, for while ‘‘the building blocks are present, the building is not.’’75 Consequently, Georg Lukacs cautiously places Diderot behind such precursors of Lenin as Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, since ‘‘the forward-driving element of thought’’ was not clearly manifest in Diderot.76 On the other hand, there is also the humanist Diderot, the philosophe of ethics and aesthetics, who is, as frequently as the Soviet appraisals name him a herald of communism, viewed in the West as a precursor of the spirit of democratic freedom emerging from the French Revolution. Literary history can be shaped in a variety of ways, depending upon the historian’s view of its meaning. He may perceive certain tendencies which characterize a whole epoch and summarize them by conferring distinctive names upon appropriate segments of history, the Age of the Enlightenment, and so on. For the Marxist historian, however, history is proceeding purposefully toward a predictable end. Soviet scholars accordingly reject the Age of Enlightenment as a meaningful historical category on the ground that it is based on an erroneous picture of history as a larger historical process that represents the emergence, the evolution, and predicted triumph of socialism. Perhaps the biggest ‘‘joke’’ concerning the reception of Diderot is that it cannot be maintained that both Soviet historicism and Western European humanism created a Diderot who did not exist.

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Diderot was in fact a philosophical materialist, ‘‘progressive for his time,’’ an atheist, a promoter of realism, and a critic of society in his fiction. Consequently, Jacques the Fatalist may be viewed through the sociopolitical lens of Socialist Realism as well as through a lens seeking reaffirmation of Western liberalism. While seemingly diverse points of view can be supported on both sides with innumerable quotations, Diderot’s opinions, since they are not dogmatically fixed, in the end betray both interpretations. From this double perspective, it was possible for French critics of the nineteenth century to isolate a Diderot who was a philosophical idealist, a romantic Diderot in whom the beauties of nature awakened deep religious feeling, as well as a materialist who views love as a purely animal and mechanical reflex. What emerges from these paradoxes is that Diderot was not himself a unified man but a veritable committee of mixed tendencies, a colloquium all to himself, in which Diderot’s different voices spoke up at different times. For Kundera, Diderot’s novel represents a world founded on the relativity and ambiguity of human affairs, both qualities incompatible with a totalitarian universe, for as he writes, this is a deeper incompatibility ‘‘than that which separates a dissident from an apparatchik, or a civil rights campaigner from a torturer, because it is not just a matter of politics or morality, but an ontological difference . . . for totalitarian truth excludes relativity, doubt, questioning; it can never accommodate what I would call the wisdom of the novel.’’77 Nor does Diderot’s novel rely on phony attempts to create the illusion of reality by amassing useless detail; instead the problematic relation of fiction and reality is the very theme of Jacques the Fatalist. While Diderot’s metaliterary novel is half a treatise on morals and half a parody of psychological and realistic narratives, Kundera’s variation is a metatheatrical commentary on the representation of Communist reality. For both Diderot and Kundera, the possibilities of literary art are too rich to be wasted on descriptions of concrete elements and sentimental emotions of everyday social and individual life. Viewed from the perspective that both the Marxist and humanist readings of Diderot could easily slide into self-serving ‘‘political kitsch,’’ Kundera’s choice of Diderot over Dostoevsky may be viewed as a joke that bumps up against a world that has lost its laughter. He writes that a world based on ‘‘a Unique Truth is molded from quite different substance from that of the relative and ambiguous world of the novel.’’78 For Kundera, Totalitarian Truth excludes relativity, doubt, and questioning. Kundera arrives at similar conclusions as did the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, a contemporary of

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Kundera’s, who in his essays ‘‘The Priest and the Jester,’’ ‘‘Determinism and Responsibility,’’ and ‘‘In Praise of Inconsistency’’ describes the polarities between the absolute and the relative as those representing ‘‘the priest and the jester.’’ Kolakowski condemns the realm of the priest as a world ‘‘that answers rather than questions,’’79 and similarly Kundera defends the novel’s uncertainty and sense of adventure as a reaction to a world that prefers ‘‘to judge rather than to understand, to answer than ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.’’80 It is not difficult to relate Diderot to the jokester or jester of Kundera’s and Kolakowski’s observations. Many apocryphal stories about Diderot thumping the thighs of Catherine the Great of Russia as he tried to convince her to join the side of progress have been related. But the jokester in the meantime subverts his belief in progress by working on Jacques the Fatalist during his long journey to Russia as a salesman for his encyclopedia. Diderot’s awareness of his own mischief invades the novel as the narrator, with a great deal of teasing, insists on telling the story in his way and refuses to pander to the reader’s desire for reassuring plots. The impatient reader, the master, wants to call the tune and demands to hear the story of how Jacques fell in love, but he is constantly reminded by the narrator, Jacques, that he possesses only the shadow of authority and may lose it at any time. The doublings of the narrator/reader and master/ servant relationship defeat linear expectations and project Diderot’s compulsive disregard for the laws of genre. In the discussion of the more obvious intertextual links between Kundera and Diderot, it is important to call attention to another, less visible companion, Jaroslav Hasˇek’s The Good Soldier Sˇvejk (1921) as he accompanies Kundera’s Jacques on his march through history from Diderot to the unknown space represented by the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Hasˇek, writes Kundera, sees the ‘‘train of History’’ as ‘‘impersonal, uncontrollable, incalculable, incomprehensible and inescapable.’’81 Similarly Hasˇek observes, ‘‘And somewhere from the dim ages of history the truth dawned upon Europe that the morrow would obliterate the plans of today.’’82 Sˇvejk’s pessimism about the future is covered up by his diagnosed patent idiocy, by means of which he subverts those in authority over him with his sunny idiot’s smile and thus denies them their cruelty and power over him: ‘‘In the old days it used to be worse; the accused had to walk on red-hot iron and drink molten lead, to prove if they were innocent or not. . . . Nowadays it’s fun being locked up. . . . There’s no quartering, no Spanish boots. We’ve got bunks, a table, a bench.

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. . . We’ve got our latrines right under our snouts. You can see progress in everything. . . .’’83 Like Kundera’s two companions, Hasˇek’s Sˇvejk is aware that the final destination will not provide a happy ending. In Hasˇek’s novel, the war is presented as unmotivated, for no one believes in the drivel of propaganda, not even those who manufacture it. And like Diderot’s narrative subversions in Jacques the Fatalist, Hasˇek undermines traditional, integrated, and linear plot. The novel opens with the news that the successor to the Habsburg throne has been murdered in Sarajevo: ‘‘So, they’ve killed our Ferdinand,’’ Mrs. Muller Sˇvejk’s landlady announces. ‘‘Which Ferdinand?’’ asks the surprised Sˇvejk as he rubs his rheumatic legs, ‘‘the apprentice hairdresser who once drank the hair oil by mistake or the one who picks up dog manure?’’84 Kundera observes that comedy in twentieth-century literature ‘‘doesn’t accompany the tragic: rather it destroys it in the egg and deprives the victims of the only consolation they could hope for—the consolation from the (real or supposed) grandeur of tragedy.’’85 Sˇvejk’s undermining of the historical destiny of Austria-Hungary is clear from the beginning of World War I as the completely healthy Sˇvejk has himself pushed right across Prague in a wheelchair to report to the draft board. He lifts his two borrowed crutches and shouts with warlike enthusiasm, ‘‘To Serbia! To Belgrade!’’86 Though all the citizens of Prague are greatly amused and laugh at him, the state cannot do anything against Sˇvejk, for, as Kundera observes, ‘‘he apes perfectly the gestures of the people in power around him; he repeats their slogans; he participates in their ceremonies. But since he doesn’t take them seriously at all, he turns them into an enormous joke.’’87 Sˇvejk does this by agreeing with anyone he is dealing with, particularly with superior officers. And even when he and the other malingerers have been subjected to a thorough and cruel stomach cleansing by enemas, Sˇvejk has a positive reply: ‘‘Try to think Austria rests on these enemas and victory is ours.’’88 But the irony underlying his remarks is always perceptible as he uses the subversive tactic of criticism by means of ingenuousness. ‘‘These reviews never come to any good,’’ he observes. ‘‘I remember once at a parade I had twenty buttons missing from my uniform, and they sent me into solitary confinement for a fortnight, where I lay trussed up like Lazarus. But in the army you must have discipline, otherwise why would anyone bother at all?’’89 Not only are his observations and explanations ironical, but so too are many of his actions. Sˇvejk constantly promotes patriotism, when it is clear that his actions

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only impede the achievement of his proclaimed patriotic objective. Kundera comments that during the Russian invasion, Sˇvejk’s ghost was just as alive in the streets of Prague as in Hasˇek’s novel: Sometime after the Russian invasion in 1968 I went to a big student meeting. The students were waiting for Husak who had been appointed by the Russians. He could not utter a single word, because everyone started shouting. ‘Long Live Husak! Long Live the Party!’ The shouting went on for five minutes, then ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, until, finally Husak, getting redder and redder, was forced to leave. Surely it was Sˇvejk’s genius which suggested this unforgettable tactic to the students.90

When Sˇ vejk, despite his rheumatism, has to report to his regiment, he subverts the entire universe of order and belief in progress in his ‘‘anabasis,’’ an anabasis that represents simultaneously a military advance and difficult and dangerous military retreat. At the same time he also knows that despite all his delaying tactics that he’s going ‘‘to Budeˇjovice all the same,’’91 and even when he makes the train stop, ‘‘Sˇvejk spoke continually of his honesty and how he had no interest in making the train late, because he was going to the front.’’92 While progressing with his regiment to the front lines, Sˇvejk is doing everything possible to prevent the arrival at the end of journey, for ‘‘it was definitely better to peel potatoes in the kitchen,’’ he observes, ‘‘shape dumplings and take the meat off the bone than to stand up to the hurricane of fire of the enemy and roar out: ‘Form two deep! Fix bayonets!’ when one’s trousers were full.’’93 But Sˇ vejk knows that ultimately all roads lead to Budeˇ jovice, and given the number of casualties in World War I, to a certain death. As Kundera writes in his defense of Sˇvejk’s supposed imbecility, ‘‘This is not ignorance or stupidity speaking, it is the refusal to concede History a value, to grant it seriousness.’’ Nor does he feel that Haˇsek’s novel is necessarily a condemnation of war; instead Hasˇek undermines the linear causal concepts of history as a forward moving process, ‘‘that is to say the concept which pretends to rationalize the irrational stupidity of war, pretending to give it sense,’’94 or as illustrated in Hasˇek’s novel which in its conclusion question the qualities of ‘‘patriotism, fidelity to duty, victory over oneself . . . especially today when our troops will in foreseeable time be crossing the frontier.’’95 Much like Diderot in his time and Kundera in ours, Hasˇek’s main character breaks down the linguistic taboos and with them the whole century-old scaffolding of ethical positivism, mythology, and

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social order, while at the same time assuming the seemingly innocent pose of a drunken tavern raconteur. Ultimately Sˇvejk at the novel’s end has managed to live and to survive in a meaningless world because he refuses to look for any meaning in it: ‘‘In Central European literature History appears as a process of gradual degradation of values; in Hasˇek’s Sˇvejk pretending to be an idiot becomes the last possible method for preserving one’s freedom.’’96 In this manner Sˇvejk can observe the performance of those in authority like the drunken chaplain in the prison ward as part of the system in which inner motives no longer mean much in an absurd world where outer forces are gaining more and more power over man: The chaplains’ performance was followed by all with close attention and unconcealed enjoyment. One man under the pulpit even bet that the monstrance would fall out of the chaplain’s hands. He wagered his whole portion of bread against two across the jaw and won his bet. What inspired the souls of everyone in the chapel at the sight of the chaplain’s ministration was not the mysticism of the faithful or the piety of true Catholics; it was the feeling we have in the theatre when we do not know what the play is about, when the plot develops and we breathlessly wait to see how it is going to end.97

Kundera also believes that Hasˇek’s great comic novel about war could not have been written in countries whose sense of history is one of progress, for as he explains, ‘‘Hegel and Marx conceive of history as being the embodiment of reason. The unserious, the absurd only have a place on the edge of history.’’ For the Czechs their experience of moving from under the protective cover of the AustroHungarian Empire to that of the Soviet Union has taught them ‘‘to stop worshipping the goddess of history and eulogizing her wisdom. Thus the Europe of little countries, insulated against the demagogy of hope, has had a more clear-sighted picture of the future than has the Europe of big countries, always so ready to become intoxicated with their glorious sense of historical destiny.’’98 Though Sˇvejk in his anabasis from Budeˇjovice knows that he’s temporarily walking away from his destiny, he protests: ‘‘But I’m going to Budeˇjovice all the same.’’ ‘‘This was more effective,’’ observes Hasˇek, ‘‘even than Galileo’s famous statement, ‘But it goes round all the same,’ because Galileo must have been furious when he said it.’’99 As Sˇvejk looks at the terrain of the battlefield, he sees history coming ‘‘round all the same’’: ‘‘The soil in which you’re buried after the battle wouldn’t care a hoot what kind of bread you were gorged with before you died. Mother Earth

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would decompose you and eat you up boots and all. In this world nothing is allowed to vanish completely. Out of you, my men, there’ll grow new corn for bread rations for new soldiers who like you perhaps won’t be satisfied, will start complaining, and then come against someone who’ll clap them into jail until kingdom come, because he’s got a right to do that. . . .’’ The young soldier gave a heartfelt sigh. He was sorry for his young life. Why was he born in such a stupid century to be butchered like an ox in a slaughterhouse? Why was all that necessary?100

Hasˇek sees the Galician front as destiny that will ultimately recycle everyone to fertilizer, and the comic focuses on the endless cycles of repetition. Unlike merriment in Rabelais or Diderot, the sense of comedy in Sˇvejk merges with the notion of the absurd. In contrast, Kundera finds no threat of impending destination and consequently no sense of urgency in Diderot’s novel. On the other hand, Kundera’s variation on Diderot’s novel discloses a melancholy conclusion that the journey may have to end as the master realizes there may not be enough time to listen to Jacques’s story of how he fell in love: ‘‘Something tells me, Jacques, that we haven’t much time’’ (Kundera 83). Once they arrive at their destination, the master kills his rival, Saint-Ouen, but it is Jacques who is caught by the villagers, imprisoned, and condemned to be hanged. Much like Lieutenant Luka´ˇs in Sˇvejk, who, though exasperated by Sˇvejk’s ‘‘imbecility,’’ cannot really function without him, the master in Kundera’s play, left without the hope of ever seeing Jacques, walks about the bare stage calling out unhappily, ‘‘Jacques! Jacques, my boy. . . . Ever since I lost you, the stage is as bare as the world and the world as bare as an empty stage’’ (Kundera 88). Once Jacques returns, the master acknowledges that what is wonderful about Jacques’s laughable love stories is that they are revocable while his own stupid intrigues are not. Now that they are left without a purpose or destination, Jacques imposes the burden of leadership on his master ‘‘because it’s written on high’’ that ‘‘you are my master and it’s your duty to lead.’’ Since the play was written in response to the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, one can see Kundera’s subversive image of the master who no longer remembers the purpose or direction of the journey. Thus the master shifts the burden onto Jacques; though the master gives out orders, it is Jacques’s duty to choose among them: Jacques. All right, then, I want you to lead me . . . forward. . . . Master. (Looking around, highly embarrassed.) Very well, but where is forward?

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Jacques. Let me tell you a great secret. One of mankind’s oldest tricks. Forward is anywhere. Master. (Turning his head round in a circle.) Anywhere? Jacques. (Making a large circle with one arm.) Anywhere you look, it’s all forward! Master. (Without enthusiasm.) Why, that’s splendid, Jacques! That’s splendid. (He turns around slowly in place.) Jacques. (Melancholy.) Yes sir. I find it quite wonderful myself. Master. (After a brief bit of stage business, sadly.) Well then, Jacques, forward! (They exit diagonally upstage . . .) (Kundera 89–90)

These words risk in ending in a double pessimism concerning the world and concerning the possibility of changing it as the ending of Kundera’s play returns us to the beginning of Diderot’s novel. Yet one must remember that the other companions to the melancholy undesignated ‘‘anywhere’’ destination are not only Hasek’s Svejk but also Beckett’s Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot, who in staying in place reveal the extent to which they are trapped in repetition. And much like in Beckett’s play, one senses that for Kundera’s Jacques and his master ‘‘life is elsewhere.’’ In Diderot’s novel, however, Kundera discovers the sense of adventure that resounds with the forward-going sense of a journey leading to discovery: ‘‘Diderot looked at the future,’’ writes Kundera, ‘‘as an infinite space to be filled with unlimited progress. We look to the future with fear and distrust. If Diderot can see my play from the other side of the tomb, he may not agree with me, but if he takes into account everything our century has seen, I don’t think my play would anger him. He would understand why we’ve lost faith in man.’’101 As a citizen preceding the French Revolution, Diderot could not have written such a fatalistic passage. But Kundera is writing after the Prague Spring, in the age of philosophical skepticism and political disappointment, and as a result, he does not see history as a spiral running toward the ultimate triumph of reason. Wars and revolutions may come and go, but changes remain insignificant. For Diderot history means hope, for Kundera a terrible nightmare of repetition. In Diderot’s novel, Jacques’s impertinence frequently undermines the master/servant relationship, particularly when Jacques plays such tricks on his master as consciously neglecting the strap of the stirrup. While the master sets off after Jacques, ‘‘swearing, cursing, foaming with rage,’’ Jacques runs in circles around the horse ‘‘bursting with laughter’’ and taunting his master: Jacques. Has it not been clearly demonstrated that most of the time we act without willing to? Come now, put your hand on your conscience and

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tell me, did you will any of the things you have said and done for the last hour? Were you not my marionette, and would you not have carried on being my puppet for a month if I’d wanted you to? Master. What, it was a game? Jacques. A game. Master. And you were waiting for the straps to come undone? Jacques. I had prepared them. (Diderot 249)

Despite the script of ecrit la-haut in Diderot’s novel, the critical moments when Jacques forgets his position as a servant and threateningly warns the master that he has it in his power to terminate their relationship break down the barriers between thought and action and almost allow for this intelligence to explode into a revolutionary moment. In Kundera’s variation, however, revolt is subverted through circularity, and a Beckettian sense that there is ‘‘nothing to be done’’ pervades since the truth of what has been written above cannot be altered: Jacques. Don’t worry, sir. I don’t like unnecessary truths. I know of nothing more stupid than the unnecessary truth. Master. For example? Jacques. For example, that we are mortal. Or that the world is rotten. As if we had to be told. You know the sort who steps on the stage like a hero and cries, ‘‘The world is rotten!’’ Well, the audience applauds, but Jacques isn’t interested, because Jacques knew it two hundred, four hundred, eight hundred years before him, and while he and his sort shout, ‘‘The world is rotten!’’ Jacques prefers to please his master. . . . Master. . . . his rotten master. . . . Jacques. . . . his rotten master, by inventing big-bottomed women of the kind he loves so well. . . . (Kundera 71–72)

In Diderot’s novel the grand rouleau of destiny encourages Jacques’s confidence that the master with his stupid belief in his freedom to impose his will on things—a belief that the novel has already belied—will be proved wrong. In Kundera’s variation, it is clear that both master and servant view themselves as part of a constricted script from which there is no escape. Perhaps the only realm of freedom exists in the realm of the theatrical space where identities are only roles, and one can change roles, a zone where meaning itself may be refused. Kundera points out that ‘‘real life is linked to a series of deceptions. It disappoints us with its futility. But when we consciously play games, as on stage, we already know that the game isn’t serious. Thus, the tragic futility of life becomes the joyful futility of play. In totalitarian regimes one quickly learns the importance of

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humor. You learn to trust or mistrust people because of the way they laugh. The modern world frightens me because it’s rapidly losing its sense of the playfulness of play.’’102 The somewhat fatalistic optimism of the ending of Diderot’s novel at least allows Jacques to finish the story of how he fell in love, to marry his love, and to occupy ‘‘himself in raising disciples of Zeno and Spinoza . . . cherished by his master and adored by his wife, for thus was it written up above.’’ Though this ‘‘happy ending’’ is subverted by Diderot by his observation that it may have been possible that the master fell in love with Jacques’s wife, and that like in the unhappy love story told by the master about his cuckolding, Jacques’s story may end in a similar repetition. However, Diderot reassures us that even if this were to pass, Jacques could comfort himself by relying on his Captain’s lesson: If it is written up above that you will be cuckolded, no matter what you do you will be. If, however, it is written up above that you will not be cuckolded, no matter what they do you won’t be. So sleep, my friend. And he slept. (Diderot 254)

In choosing Diderot’s paradoxical novel as a means of projecting the journey of Jacques and his master ‘‘across all the history of the West into the Prague of 1968,’’ Kundera rejects interpretations according to the Soviet aesthetics of Socialist Realism with its positive heroes and sense of revolutionary purpose that tended to interpret Jacques as the prerevolutionary embodiment of popular wisdom in the face of the demands imposed by the idle life of the ruling classes and instead connects his variation to the purposelessness of Diderot’s novel in which, as Kundera writes, the two travelers exist ‘‘in a time without beginning or end, in a space devoid of boundaries, in the middle of a Europe that will go on forever.’’ This is underlined in Kundera’s description of space in his variation on Diderot’s novel as ‘‘a stage without scenery’’ (Kundera 15), a setting which gives no clues to the length of their journey, their starting point, nor their destination. It is not only an excellent instrument for presenting ideas that are exposed in the course of the journey, but it also is the only form that shows a way of arriving at an indeterminate ending. Like Beckett in Godot, Kundera places his characters on an empty stage, moving them from place to place without their going anywhere, allowing them to talk, argue, and tell stories that are then enacted in place of the action of the play that is not really being enacted. For Kundera man proceeds through time as if in a fog— seemingly free, not entirely blind, yet unable to see more than a few

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yards ahead. But when man ‘‘looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. . . . From his present, which was their far away future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. . . . He sees their mistakes but not the fog.’’103 Ever since Jacques and his master have been traveling the centuries from Diderot to Kundera, their march represents a nostalgic journey on the part of Kundera back to Diderot. In particular Kundera’s master looks back with longing to the time in Diderot’s novel when masters could assert their rights and their aesthetic judgments and ride on horses while Jacques made his journey on foot. The frame of Kundera’s two travelers constantly shifts and refers to the frame of Diderot’s dyad of Jacques and his master. ‘‘It’s utter nonsense!’’ protests the master. ‘‘A Frenchman traveling through France on foot! Do you know who it is who dared rewrite our story?’’ Jacques. An imbecile sir. But now that our story is rewritten, we cannot make any changes in it. Master. Death to all who dare rewrite what has been written! Impale them and roast them over a slow fire! Castrate them and cut off their ears! My feet hurt. Jacques. Rewriters are never burnt sir. Everybody believes them. Master. You mean they’ll believe the one who rewrote our story? They won’t bother to read the original book to find out what we’re really like? (Kundera 69)

Jacques understands something that the master doesn’t—the infinity of possible variations to any story: ‘‘Everything that’s ever happened here below has been rewritten hundreds of times, and no one ever dreams of finding out what really happened,’’ explains Jacques (Kundera 69). History, then, from Jacques’s perspective consists of a multiplicity of variations ‘‘rewritten so often that people don’t know who they are anymore’’ (Kundera 69). Kundera, however, distinguishes between history as fiction and the tragedy of the historical event: Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. The history of the Czechs will not be repeated, nor will the history of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe is a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind’s fateful inexperience. History is as light as individual life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.104

In writing that his play expresses a ‘‘lost faith in man,’’ Kundera suggests that his play may be intended as part of the theater of the

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absurd. However, if we examine the divergence between Diderot the writer of Jacques the Fatalist and Diderot the critic preaching the beauties of social virtues, we find the critic and writer pursuing different paths. Ultimately Kundera’s strategies of laughter and playfulness in his novels and in the play Jacques and His Master attenuate, lighten, and subvert meaning and deprive the sense of tragedy its closure and finality. For it is laughter, as Mikhail Bakhtin writes, that reveals social consciousness, ‘‘for laughter opened men’s eyes on that which is new, on the future,’’ and laughter also displayed ‘‘the world anew in its gayest and most sober aspects.’’ Since laughter discloses and unveils the very essence of truth, in Diderot’s and Kundera’s embodiment of the servant and master, laughter becomes in Bakhtin’s words, ‘‘a free weapon to liberate’’ readers and spectators from ‘‘fear of the sacred, of prohibitions, of the past, of power.’’105

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5 Christopher Hampton’s Tales from Hollywood: Brecht and Horva`th as ‘‘Characters’’ CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON (1946–) PRESERVES PART OF THE ORIGINAL TITLE

¨ do¨n von Horva`th’s Tales from the Vienna Woods (1931) as he playof O fully transposes Horva`th from his premature death in Paris in 1938 to appear as a character in Hampton’s own play Tales from Hollywood (1982). Supposedly, while in Paris, Horva` th was making arrangements to emigrate to America. It is an irony of fate that would have amused him that finally, by way of Hampton, he arrived in Hollywood almost half a century later. Hampton’s justification for transposing Horva`th to Hollywood is based on the fact that brief notes for a novel, Adieu Europa, were found on Horva`th’s desk. Thus on the basis of the novel’s first few lines, ‘‘Ein Poet emigriert nach Amerika’’ [A poet emigrates to America],1 Horva`th lands in Hollywood. While Bertolt Brecht’s aesthetics have spawned an entire scholarly industry discussing the alienation effect, the didactic theater, and his anti-Aristotelian approach, Horva`th is not well know outside of Germany and Austria. Even there, Brecht casts an overwhelming shadow on all other playwrights of his generation. Following his death in 1938, Horva`th became essentially an unknown writer, and not until the 1960s were his plays revived in the repertory of German theaters. But even then, Horva`th did not by any means become a well-known name. Though the Horva` th Archive was established in Berlin in 1962, his collected works did not appear until 1970. In time, scholars like Traugott Krischke published biographical and critical material on Horva`th, stimulating thereby a number of dissertations on Horva`th’s plays and novels. During the late 1960s, productions of Horva` th’s plays began to appear on German stages, and for a while Horva`th even displaced Brecht from his canonical position as a German classic. A number of symposiums on Horva`th were held in the 1970s in Budapest, Rome, Graz, Berlin, and London and called attention to the significance of Horva` th’s contributions to the literature of the Weimar Republic. Hampton participated in the 163

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symposium held in London 9 December 1976, for the symposium was related to the premiere, directed by Maximillian Schell at the National Theatre, of Hampton’s translation of Horva`th’s Tales from the Vienna Woods. But as Wilhellm Emrich caustically observes, renewal of interest in Horva`th ultimately did not lead to a ‘‘Horva`th Boom.’’2 One of the reasons, explains Martin Esslin, why Horva` th is unknown in the world is that ‘‘his principle brilliance is a linguistic one: his plays use language to explore the use of language, and the ravages of its misuse.’’ Horva` th writes in the tradition of Sprachkritik—the critique of language—first explored by Karl Kraus and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was Kraus who first observed the relationship between the rise of the mass media and the devaluation of language, and suddenly, as Esslin comments, ‘‘there was a mass of people who could read but had no real education. And what was worse: newspapers were written by just such half-educated barely literate journalists.’’3 While for Hampton Hollywood serves as the dream factory for producing illusion, in Horva`th’s time, the paradise of paradises for promoting illusion was Vienna. Any obsolete Viennese operetta was dragged to the screen as long as it offered the public an opportunity of escaping their prosaic world to the days of the late Habsburg monarchy. The operetta films established that enchanted Vienna which was to haunt the screen from then on, and since many of the film directors in Hollywood came from European film studios, the operetta film continued as a model for romance. Its components were handsome archdukes, tender flirtations, baroque decors, people singing and drinking in suburban garden restaurants, and endless Johann Strauss waltzes, Franz Schubert songs, etc. In fact, Horva`th’s characters from Tales from the Vienna Woods often hum musical phrases from what they assume is the culture of the sublime. Music and literature, the highest values of Austrian and German Kultur, are traded by the characters as if they were commodities, for besides name dropping of authors, composers, and titles of their works, the characters have no other insights. Instead, they participate in a cultural ether that absorbs Puccini arias, Strauss waltzes, operettas, Dostoevsky, and supposedly philosophical discussions on cremation and eurythmics. Among the musical quotations that have in themselves become cultural cliche´s Horva`th inserts a Puccini aria from La Boheme, Goethe’s song ‘‘Seelige Sehnsucht,’’ accompanied on a lute in the brutal hands of Oskar the butcher, and a fragment of the title waltz played on the zither by the most hardened character of them all, Alfred’s grandmother.

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Ultimately, the proliferation of cultural quotations all end up in the same pot to be consumed but not digested. The resulting speech suggests a schizoid consciousness as the characters make a great effort to sound knowledgeable and cultured, but their effort remains unsuccessful because atavistic speech patterns repeatedly manifest themselves. However, the characters have to make do with what they have. Horva`th transforms the cadences and texture of a Viennese dialect into a sociolect in which traditional sayings, catchwords, and slogans from advertising cliches and tautologies abound. Readymade vacuous phrases or ‘‘canned thoughts’’ proliferate, and what matters is that the impoverishment of language and hence thought is demonstrated. Hampton mentioned during a panel discussion on the staging of his translation of Horva`th’s Tales from the Vienna Woods in the Actors Theatre of Louisville that Horva`th’s myopic characters are ‘‘people who talk to each other with great authority about subjects they know little about.’’4 Since in Hollywood being an intellectual, or educated, does not carry the same clout as it did for Horvath’s characters, the use of ‘‘cultured’’ language isn’t necessarily as relevant to the media-created language of Hollywood. However, the systematic attack against logical thought and rational argument, and their replacement by cliche´s, slogans, and platitudes is more virulent, for through appropriation even the language of the intellectuals is reduced to parody and quotations. Thus, Hampton’s introduction of Horva` th as the detached observer of the community of German exiles refers almost palpably to the impotence of his inarticulate characters in Tales from the Vienna Woods. Hampton, in the typical postmodernist playful rewriting of history, resurrects Horva`th from his premature death in a freak accident on the Champs-Elysees, for Horva`th was felled by a tree branch as he emerged from a matinee of Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The conflation of the two events, Disney’s film and a sudden wind storm, fill Horva`th’s death with the irony of the ridiculous. His death is particularly poignant, for Horva` th narrowly escaped from the Nazis when he was hounded out of Germany for his unrelenting criticism of their rhetoric and ideology. Even Horva`th’s real funeral could have been recreated into a macabre farce fit for Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). As Horva`th’s parents rushed to Paris to identify the body in the cellar of the hospital, the humdrum tune of an organ grinder came through the windows. To complete the already grotesque scene, a rather down and out man appeared suddenly in the cellars of the hospital. This deus ex machina figure announced that for a small sum he would like to

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conduct the funeral ceremony for the grand poe`te. And indeed the following day he appeared and conducted the ceremony with great dignity. It appears that the man had a criminal record, for when he was arrested eight days later for fraud, it was discovered that he had used part of the money from his stash to cover the funeral costs in order to ensure that the grand poe`te should be paid proper respect.5 Hampton pays his respects to Horva`th in a similar irreverent manner by resurrecting him to die in yet another variation of a Horva`thian death, this time one previously scripted in Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, at the bottom of a Hollywood producer’s swimming pool. Jules Aaron comments that Horva`th’s function in Hampton’s play is to become ‘‘the enigmatic eye of the literary storm around him. . . . ‘Ed’ to his American film acquaintances, Horva`th is a foreign ‘name writer’ with Hollywood potential, and a witness to the humiliation of his friends in the land of ‘treatments.’ ’’6 Hampton’s Horva` th is an American Horva` th, observes Gerhard Stadelmaier, who has survived his European ‘‘kitsch’’ death to emigrate to America where he appears as a ‘‘ghost of modernity,’’ a ‘‘brilliant vital being among out-and-out zombies (Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Brecht, Heinrich Mann, etc.), the only one among them who did not emigrate, did not flee the Nazis to a foreign land, nor endured isolation within a foreign language.’’7 Horva`th, however, feels himself genuinely at home in Hampton’s Hollywood, for Vienna, where Horva`th locates the action of his Tales from the Vienna Woods (1930), was ultimately merely a prologue to Hollywood. Hampton not only moves Horva`th to Hollywood but also assigns him the job of a screenplay writer. However, Hollywood being Hollywood, Horva`th is not hired to work on scripts according to his talent; instead he’s asked to do a ‘‘treatment’’ for a sequel ‘‘to a dull but surprisingly successful comedy about a chimpanzee called Bedtime for Bonzo’’ (1951).8 (The sequel, though not mentioned in Hampton’s play, presumably must be Bonzo Goes to College.) But the ‘‘treatment’’ he suggests is unacceptable to the Front Office, for he envisions that the hero ‘‘should fall in love with the chimpanzee’’ (94). The fact that the star of the first Bonzo, Ronald Reagan, had been just recently elected president in 1980 gives Hampton the opportunity to add a sly Horva`thian touch to his comments on American politics and culture. Familiarity with literary classics is evident in much of Hampton’s work, for he read German and French at Crew College Oxford from 1964 to 1968. Hampton’s previous plays, translations, and adaptations often feature liaisons with writers from the past, and Hampton’s particular interest in Horva` th began with his translations of

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Horva`th’s Tales from the Vienna Woods (1977), Don Juan Comes Back from the War (1978), and Faith, Hope, and Charity (1990). Hampton’s connection to other writers suggests that he prefers plays whose reception, like the reception of Horva`th’s plays, created scandals, controversies, and even interdictions, for his translations or adaptations of classics such as Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1970), A Doll’s House (1971) and Wild Duck (1979), Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (1970), Molie`re’s Don Juan (1972) and Tartuffe (1983), and adaptations for the stage of among others, Isaac Babel’s Marya (1967), George Feydeau’s and Maurice Desvallieres’ Signed and Sealed under the title Treats (1976), and George Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. (1982) attest to his interest in renewing the discussions that were originated by his literary precursors. Most recently, Hampton has translated Yasmina Reza’s international hit, Art (1997), a play presenting an argument on the aesthetics of modernism. Though Hampton wrote several topical plays such as The Philanthropist (1970) and Savages (1973), much of his work relates quite self-consciously to other authors and texts. For example, Hampton dramatized Choderlos de Laclos’s eighteenth-century epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses for the stage (1985) and later wrote the screenplay for the film version Dangerous Liaisons (1988), directed by Stephen Frears. Prior to that he had written the screenplay for Beyond the Limit (1983), based on Graham Greene’s The Honorary Counsel. As a result of his fame as a screenwriter for Dangerous Liaisons, other projects such as Carrington, on which he had been working for seventeen years, ‘‘all shuddered into life simultaneously.’’ Hampton also wrote the script for yet another version of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tale, Mary Reilly (1996), which was also directed by Frears. Most recently, he wrote the screenplay and directed Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1996). He has worked in other media as well, for in The Prague Trial 79 (1980) Hampton adapted a work by Ariane Mnouchkine and Patrice Cherau as a radio play for the BBC, and the following year he adapted Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man for BBC-TV. Nor has Hampton focused exclusively on adapting literary classics for the theater and film, for recently he has taken up the challenge of ‘‘rewriting’’ Billy Wilder’s film classic Sunset Boulevard (1950) into a smash London and Broadway musical hit with music composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber (1993). Writers as characters populate many of Hampton’s own plays, among them Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine in Total Eclipse (1968), made into a film in 1995 by Agnieszka Holland, and he takes up the challenge of creating a Bloomsbury milieu in his screenplay for Carrington (1995), which he also directed. Lytton Strachey and

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the artist Carrington are the main characters, but Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, and the rest of the Bloomsbury glitterati make appropriate appearances. But perhaps Tales from Hollywood is his most representative transtextual endeavor in that it sets his text into a relationship with a whole assemblage of other texts and literary theories. Hampton accomplishes this by placing into his play a whole coven of European intellectual e´migre´s in Hollywood, among them Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, and Lion Feuchtwanger, a historically accurate context, for indeed during the Hitler years many German wellknown and less-well-known e´ migre´ s and refugees settled in Los Angeles, hoping to make a living in the film industry as screen writers, editors, actors, and directors. As James K. Lyon mentions, by 1944 ‘‘there were fifty-nine refugee German screen writers in Hollywood, thirty-three directors, twenty-three producers, ten actors, and nineteen composers working for the film industry.’’9 Thus, Hampton’s Horva`th becomes ‘‘a beneficiary of this frenzied activity’’: And so it was that I found myself an employee of: (Projection: The Warner Brothers logo; music: signature tune from Looney Tunes.) Truth to tell, when it came time to devising something for all the new writers to do, the Brothers found themselves somewhat at a loss. So the corridors of the writers’ building were jammed with bewildered Germans asking each other how they ought to be treating their secretaries. (27)

Hampton complicates the problem of authorship, for in the introduction to his play he includes a bibliography of sources, as if to suggest that Tales from Hollywood represents an academic dissertation. Among the cited sources are Heinrich Mann’s autobiography, Ein Zeitalter Wird Besischtigt, and a thesis on Heinrich Mann by Robert Marshall Stanford, The Patriot in Exile; on Thomas Mann he lists Mann’s letters, diaries, and his account on the writing of The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus; on Brecht, the collection of plays and screenplays, his two-volume diary of the period, the Arbeitsjournal, Klaus Vo¨lker’s biography, Martin Esslin’s Brecht: A Choice of Evils, and James K. Lyon’s Bertolt Brecht in America. Even though many of these writers do not appear as characters in his play, Hampton also lists the memoirs of Alfred Do¨blin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Leonhard Frank, Hermann Kesten, Erika and Klaus Mann, Alfred Polgar, and Carl Zuckmayer. In addition, he mentions Nigel Hamilton’s The Brothers Mann and Salka Viertel’s autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers, and on Nelly Mann, Joachim Seppel’s novel Abschied von Europa. Nor was his research restricted to primary and secondary reading, for he lists three films in his ‘‘bibliography’’: Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (1943), for which Brecht wrote the screenplay,

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Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930), based on Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat (1905), and Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. At the same time, Hampton’s translations of several of Horva` th’s plays clearly prepared him for his work on Horva`th as a character; despite this, he cites Traugott Krischke’s ‘‘indispensable’’ biography of Horva`th and Horva`th’s novel, Kind seiner Zeit, as important background sources.10 In addition to his familiarity with Horva` th and Brecht and the contemporary critical attitude towards both, Hampton conducted extensive research on the German writers working for the film industry in Hollywood for his new project, for in Los Angeles he discovered primary sources dealing with the e´ migre´ s in the Special Collection at UCLA. Further discussions with Gerald Turbow, who teaches a course on the European refugees from Nazism at UCLA, convinced him that this was to be the subject matter of the commissioned play. Hampton also had a number of meetings with Marta Feuchtwanger, widow of Lion Feuchtwanger, ‘‘who was to become by far the single most important source of information for the play.’’11 A gathering held in Salka Viertel’s former house attended by some of the surviving e´migre´s gave Hampton the opportunity to soak up the atmosphere of ‘‘Old Hollywood.’’12 During the period covered by his play, Viertel presided with wit and charm over an Old-World literary salon whose guests included Wystan Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Charlie Chaplin, Otto Klemperer, and Charles Laughton, as well as the more recently arrived German e´migre´s. It was during one of the events at Viertel’s house that the European Film Fund was created to find jobs in the film industry for the German refugees. Despite the fact that the refugees were thus assured of a temporary livelihood, many like Heinrich Mann had difficulties in adjusting to the film industry’s formula scripts that catered to the American public’s taste for kitsch. The impetus for the play emerged from an invitation to Hampton in 1981 by the Mark Taper Forum Theater in Los Angeles to write a play on commission on a topic related to Los Angeles and the film industry. In fact it was suggested that Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard might be an appropriate starting point. However, Hampton, as his previous inclinations towards literary subjects suggest, decided instead to write a play on a subject dealing with the ‘‘European e´migre´s and refugees from Fascism.’’13 When Wilder, a refugee from Nazi Germany himself, heard that Hampton was more interested in writing on the German e´migre´s than on working on his ‘‘classic,’’ he wondered why anyone could write about ‘‘nebbishes’’ who couldn’t make it in Hollywood, ‘‘losers like Thomas Mann.’’ Despite his deci-

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sion to not rework Sunset Boulevard at this time, Hampton depends on the dark shadows and noir effects of Wilder’s film, suggesting that his Tales from Hollywood is simultaneously a tribute to its illustrious film antecedent. One should remember that Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard is already a parody of the glory days of Hollywood, and Wilder juxtaposes the fictional to the real in his creation of silent screen star Norma Desmond by casting Gloria Swanson to essentially embody her own career on the silver screen. To extend the collision of the mythical Hollywood with supposed reality, Wilder inserts into his film ‘‘real’’ characters such as director Cecil B. de Mille, columnist Hedda Hopper, and actors Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nillsen, and H. B. Warner, who appear as aged images of themselves. At the same time, Wilder’s own Horva`thian-like Viennese sense of irony and grotesque humor pervades Sunset Boulevard, particularly through the narrative tone of the film’s failed screen writer, Joe Gillis, acted with appropriate ironic detachment by William Holden. Much like Wilder’s commentary on Hollywood in Sunset Boulevard, one of Hampton’s strategies in the play is to present a self-reflexive look at the film industry from Horva`th’s perspective as he moves around the familiar landscape of studio back lots, Schwab’s drugstore, and the Sleeping Beauty Cocktail Bar on Sunset Boulevard (56). Comments on Hollywood as the embodiment of ‘‘the grotesque, the triumph of stupidity, the ugliness’’ (92) are quite obvious echoes of Wilder’s insider jokes in Sunset Boulevard. In a similar manner to Wilder’s juxtaposition of fictional and real characters in his film, Hampton’s historical German e´migre´s coexist with composite stereotypes reflecting either the industry or the ideology of that period. Among these are Charles Money and Art Nicely, both caricatures of Hollywood producers. But it is not Hampton’s only purpose to create a climate of nostalgia for Wilder’s Old Hollywood, for instead he uses his research to serve as a contextual focus that allows him to pit his worldly antihero Horva`th against the ideological and better-known Brecht. In establishing an appropriate Horva` thian background for his play, Hampton looks to Wilder’s film to provide the seedy, grotesque setting of decaying Hollywood. Wilder’s markers of the 1950s serve as appropriate traces for Hampton’s play, a period more familiar to Hampton through films such as Sunset Boulevard than from lived experience. In addition to Horva`th’s own voice based on his plays and scattered ironical autobiographical references, Hampton’s Horva`th acquires the veneer of the mordant, ironic mockery of Gillis from Wilder’s film, for like Gillis’s death in the swimming pool

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that serves as a frame for Wilder’s film, Horva` th appears on the scene framed by ‘‘a curious rippling submarine light’’ with ‘‘exophthalmia’’ as his most notable feature (11). Hampton has appropriated a Gillis-like death for his antihero, for the Horva` th who recounts the events of the past few months of his life in Hollywood is that of the corpse who at the end of the play is ‘‘dead at last’’ (95): I was aware of the great gash, which had opened above one temple. Then, all of a sudden through the blue green rectangle above, I had a distorted glimpse of the rolling lawns, the obedient trees, the imposing ivy-covered walls, Eden paid out of other men’s dreams. A great peace stole over me. By the time the chauffeur arrived, looking as if he’d escaped from that new Cocteau picture, I was lying, comfortable as could be, on the bottom. The sun blazed down on us and on this Biblical City. As for me, dear friends, as for me, I was dead at last. (95)

Hampton also borrows from Wilder the role of Betty the young screenplay writer who tries to save Gillis from his cynicism by creating a similar character in Helen Schwartz, the young idealistic Jewish screenplay writer. Like Betty in Wilder’s film, Helen recognizes Horva`th’s talent but is troubled by his lack of ideological commitment. However, unlike Wilder, Hampton adds a Brechtian touch by historicizing the political reference points of the play: the documented arguments among the exiles about the outcome of the war in Europe as well as the subversive influence of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s attempts to root out known Communists in the film industry. Since the Hollywood industry responded to the threats from Washington by blacklisting all suspects in the film industry, Helen becomes the voice of political protest as she ultimately decides to leave the movies to put her talents to use for the more socially relevant cause of working against political fascism in the United States. Though Hampton has obviously done his homework on Brecht and Horva`th, he unceremoniously disregards the fact that no references exist to a meeting between them despite the circumstances that both lived in Berlin at the same, both received the Kleist Prize for dramaturgy, knew the same people, and were praised by the same critics. However, as John Willet explains, more clearly than elsewhere the roots of a modern theater lie exposed in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic, for the great tensions and uncertainties of those years, the manic hopes, and sometimes suicidal despair appear not only in the extroverted passions of the drama of that time but much more directly in the biographies of the playwrights: ‘‘Here

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one learns of the price which the sensitive and creative individual had to pay for living in so intensely exciting a time. Not many of them were able to see it through—with all its accompanying features of exile, humiliation, possible arrest, political disillusionment— without losing the impetus which it had once given them.’’ 14 Though the realities of exile for Brecht and Horva`th were harsh indeed, Hampton’s staging of a fictional meeting between the two dramatists in Hollywood creates a certain amount of playful speculation about the nature of a conversation between them had they met in Berlin in the 1930s. In Hampton’s matter-of-fact appropriation of the many ‘‘authors’’ that proliferate in his Tales from Hollywood, Hampton suggests that he is familiar with the explorations of ‘‘what is an author’’ by poststructuralists like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. As Foucault explains, ‘‘The mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence.’’ The author’s name ‘‘performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse assuring a classificatory function’’ that characterizes the ‘‘marking off the edges of the text, revealing . . . its mode of being.’’ Since, for example, the name Brecht marks off a certain type of text, the author’s function is related to ‘‘the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain [Brechtian] discourses within a society.’’15 There is little question that Brecht’s influence as an author is to be seen everywhere on the contemporary stage in terms of stagecraft, acting, ideas about society, and attitudes concerning the reinterpretation of history. By the time of Hampton’s writing of Tales from Hollywood, Brecht had a place on the bookshelves of all those who considered themselves ‘‘liberal intellectuals.’’ Despite Hampton’s preference for Horva`th, he is not so much interested in attacking Brecht as he is in attacking the use of Brecht’s name as a representative cliche´ of nonconformist leftist ideology, for as Theodor Adorno comments, ‘‘Intellectuals themselves are already so heavily committed to what is endorsed in their isolated sphere, that they no longer desire anything that does not carry the highbrow tag.’’16 In Hampton’s play, Horva`th is the only character who is without a familiar ‘‘author’’ function; consequently, he is the only author who is truly ‘‘absent.’’ Thus his absence as a ‘‘name’’ opens up for the spectators the opportunity to ‘‘locate the space left empty’’ by his disappearance and ‘‘watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers.’’17 The underlying skepticism of a post-Brechtian generation of German playwrights, such as Peter Handke, Martin Sperr, Franz Xaver Kroetz, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Elfriede Jelinek, Thomas Bern-

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hard, and Peter Turrini, and British playwrights such as Hampton, Caryl Churchill, Joe Orton, and Harold Pinter, rendered the more optimistic aesthetic and political solutions of Brecht obsolete. In particular, Handke and Kreutz represent a generation of playwrights who declared a neoexistentialist revulsion against Brechtian politics of engagement and rational enlightenment. They also share what has been designated as Brecht allergy, Brecht antipathy, Brecht Mu¨digkeit, or Brecht fatigue. The post-Brechtians, while paying some tribute to the crafting of Brecht’s method, criticize him for falsifying the consciousness of his working-class characters since they see them incapable of achieving the necessary level of political insight to become agents of their fate rather than objects of power. Instead, this generation has taken up as its models Marieluise Fleisser and Horva`th, both of whom demonstrated the inability of their characters to make connections between their individual experience and their social reality and between their discourse and their actions. By focusing on Horva`th and Fleisser, they in time turned from Brecht’s dialectical analysis of economics to a close examination of the manipulative nature of the various institutions that determine consciousness of individual characters. Hampton is clearly influenced by the anti-Brecht rebellion initiated in Germany by Handke, who in his provocatively titled essay ‘‘Horva` th ist besser als Brecht’’ [Horva` th is better than Brecht], which appeared in Theater heute in 1968, criticizes Brecht’s theatrical approach as ‘‘Allzu vereinfacht und widerspruchlos’’ [too formulaic and oversimplified]. Handke was convinced that Brecht’s ’s theater was incapable of altering ideological perception: ‘‘The theater formalizes every movement, every insignificant detail, every word, every silence; it is no good at all when it comes to suggesting solutions.’’18 Ultimately Handke finds Brecht’s dramatic theory too limited, and he prefers the representation of reality as Horva`th saw it, ‘‘the world as it unfortunately is.’’19 Similarly, Kroetz criticizes Brecht’s approach to representing his characters as unrealistic, ‘‘The Brechtian proletarians always have a range of language at their disposal. . . . Since Brecht’s characters have such a competence and fluency in language, the way to a positive utopia or revolution is discernible. If the workers at Siemens had the linguistic competence of Brecht’s worker characters, they could have had a revolutionary situation.’’20 In contrast to Brecht’s worldview, in Horva`th’s plays no alternative awareness is heard, no utopian vision becomes discernible. Horva` th’s characters, in relying on the inauthenticity of kitsch, ultimately evade responsibility for their actions, for as Martin Swales concludes, ‘‘With Brecht one does have the sense of humanity out-

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raged by society: but with Horvath’s marionettes, one wonders if there is much humanity left to be outraged.’’21 Like Handke and Kroetz, Hampton views Brecht’s imprint on modern drama as problematic since for him Brecht represents the ‘‘last romantic’’ of the twentieth century. In his Tales from Hollywood Hampton attempts a deconstruction of both the thematic and formal constraints of the Brechtian tradition, for Hampton is suspicious of the notion that theater has an ideological function, and in characterizing Brecht in his own play he playfully presents a negative image of the playwright as ‘‘engaged writer.’’ As an alternative to Brecht, Hampton resurrects Horva` th, for Horva` th’s plays provide ‘‘no instructions’’ on how to interpret the outcome.22 The difference between the theatrical approaches of Brecht and Horva`th is essential in appreciating Hampton’s reason for casting Horva`th as a foil to Brecht. Horva`th relies principally on an emotional and seemingly intuitive internal protest against social injustice. One perceives in Horva`th’s plays that he’s more concerned with the disintegration of a moral and ethical point of view in his characters than he is with presenting alternative ideological paradigms as does Brecht, for Horva`th does not argue against politics ‘‘but against the mass of those who dabble in politics’’ and against ‘‘the dissolution which is above all visible in Germany, the use of political slogans.’’23 In Tales from the Vienna Woods Horva` th dismantles the mindless use of political platitudes that reveal tendencies to fascism, particularly reflected in the attitudes of those aspiring to a culturally sophisticated background. Thus in characterizing Horva`th as both a character and also the internal narrator of the action of his Tales from Hollywood, Hampton ultimately challenges the very premises of Brecht’s theater. Horva`th wrote Tales from the Vienna Woods during the interwar economic and political unrest taking place in Germany and Austria. The play ravages the myth of the Gemu¨tlichkeit and the charm of the fictional Vienna of operettas and songs. The sugar-coated quality of the waltzes played in the background serve as a contrast to the starkly real tale of human atrocity taking place at a time of unemployment and want, as Germany and Austria moved from one crisis to the next. Brecht too was influenced by the economical and political instability of the period; however, in Brecht’s plays the Verfremdungseffekt of song, gesture, and the unfamiliar historical or geographical context distanced his spectators and prevented them from succumbing to the emotional impact of the represented reality. By means of his Verfremdungseffekt, Brecht injected an alternative

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that provided his spectator yet another and, hopefully, a Marxist interpretation of the future. In contrast to Brecht, Horva`th illustrated to what extent ideological catch phrases produce a welter of hysterical cliche´s and rabid nationalistic platitudes, for he discerned that a media-influenced society was subject to domination by whatever ideology the media promoted. The effect of this connection was that at all levels language reduced to slogans produced emotional excitement rather than logical reasoning. Thus, instead of thinking for themselves, instead of acquiring the ability to express their thoughts and feelings, the characters in his Tales from the Vienna Woods merely parrot the cliche´s they appropriated from the ideological ravings of demagogues. As Swales suggests, Horva`th wrote Tales from the Vienna Woods as a parody of the so-called Besserungsstu¨ck, or play of moral didacticism. Ultimately, according to Swales, Horva`th’s ‘‘parodistic technique’’ was a reaction to ‘‘modes that ring hollow’’ and ‘‘conventions that belong to an age that is irrevocably past.’’24 What Hampton, Handke, and Kreutz find provocative about Horva`th is the presentation of his characters. Horva`th’s lower-middleclass characters in Tales from the Vienna Woods covered up their lack of education and sophistication with what Horva`th describes as the Bildungsjargon, an acquired discourse filled with a mix of foreign phrases, proverbs, cliche´s, quotations and misquotations from literature, and allusions to art and high society. Similarly, Adorno finds that Horva`th ’s characters, with their use of a high-tone discourse that often collided with quotables from the media, pulp fiction, and operettas, are particularly relevant to presenting an understanding of how today’s media-saturated society hides its own insecurities. To understand Horvath’s play, the spectators must surrender themselves to identification in order to sense the horror of what is cozy and jolly and thereby refuse it. As Adorno mentions, the residues of the discourse he designates as Blubo, short for Blut und Boden, or ‘‘blood and native soil,’’ so evident in the rhetoric of the Nazis, ‘‘have been pickled in brine, and stick to the tongue.’’25 Horva`th’s characters pay the price for their lack of self-awareness, for ultimately they merely act out the roles created by media-generated discourse. In this manner they merge into an undifferentiated mass of social compliance and mediocrity. They use cliche´s to flaunt an appropriate cultured tone, education, and supposed ideology; however, theirs is a language weighted down by its own inertia, a mere mechanism of convenience in the sense that it removes responsibility, commitment, meaning, and truth for the sake of saying

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the ‘‘right thing.’’ In the introduction to his Faith, Hope, and Charity, Horva`th defends his detached method: I haven’t improved on anything, but then I haven’t made facts any worse than they are, either. Emotional responses can be faked. Anyone can beg sympathy to win you over to their side. It’s easy to parody this glib sentiment. I avoid parody simply because it’s not an accurate mirror of emotions.26

Horva`th observed the speech and mores of the common people with a detachment that was a mixture of pity and contempt. Esslin comments that the contempt was directed at ‘‘the poverty of their means of expression, the stupidity of their lives,’’ but that Horva`th reserved ‘‘pity for the tragic situations into which that stupidity and inability to communicate inevitably plunges them.’’27 The pseudogenteel, romantic language, with its remnants of regional dialect, pseudoerudite cliche´s, quotations from Latin, and other grotesque incongruities of style that the characters rely on, reflects their own intellectual and spiritual impoverishment. To bring out the banality of his characters’ speech, Horva`th reveals that they think they are imitating the Hochdeutsch of the educated Viennese, while in reality they have absorbed the ready-made and very bad literary language of the popular press. Horva`th’s use of the Bildungsjargon comprises the falsely romantic cliche´s of lovemaking, the moronic generalizations about national characteristics, grandiloquent and misapplied quotations of classics, and the whole gamut of the junk language of the media of his time. Those who have a greater supply of ready-made aphorisms and cliche´s wield power over those still searching for a means of expression, as for example Marianne, who is manipulated by her father, her intended, Oskar the butcher, and Alfred, her lover. Frequently Horva`th’s characters run out of appropriate high-sounding expressions and lapse into silence. The silences that intersperse the exchange of platitudes are not pauses for the purpose of reflection, or even silences that reveal solitude, or an understanding, as expressed by another Viennese of Horva`th’s generation about ‘‘that which cannot be talked about,’’ but instead signal that the limits of their use of cultured language are ‘‘also the limits of their understanding of the world.’’28 The characters endlessly babble about communicating with one another as if illustrating Adorno’s observation, ‘‘Communication, the universal law of the cliche´ , proclaims that there is no communication anymore.’’29 Ultimately, the characters in Tales from the Vienna Woods suc-

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cumb to the rites of fascism as a consequence of their lack of selfawareness and their stupidity, for as Horva`th writes in the epigraph to the play, ‘‘Nothing gives as strong an impression of infinity as stupidity.’’30 Horva`th uses the stupidity of his characters to demonstrate how little autonomy and maturity his characters posses. In contrast to Brecht’s focus on ideological commitment, Horva` th is concerned with his characters’ lack of freedom. In Brecht’s plays the spectators are already prepared by the plot development to come to the appropriate conclusions that extend beyond the space of the play, while Horva`th’s plays remain puzzles that have to be decoded to arrive at an understanding of the extent to which the characters and hence the spectators are subject to the manipulation of political jargon. Though the political polarization taking place in Germany in the interwar period is reflected in Horva`th’s plays, he does not attempt, as Brecht did, to postulate political solutions, nor does he present utopian visions of change for the better. While Brecht’s political critique focuses on capitalism as the root of fascism, Horva`th goes further and deconstructs his characters’ use of political catchwords to show to what extent the formation of a consumer ideology is related to the mindless use of jargon and cliches. Horva` th frees himself from the need to moralize; hence his jokes, for they confront the spectators with the stupidity of jargon so unexpectedly that it loses its capacity to convince and confesses itself for what it is. Ultimately, Horva`th’s analysis of the relationship of political rhetoric and political reality leads to his skepticism about all political ideology, for he envisions potential totalitarianism in the jargon of Marxism as well. Hampton, like Handke and Kroetz, is attracted to Horva`th’s chaotic disorder and unstylized sentimentality in presenting the contradictions between the cultured language that his characters use and their cruelty, brutality, and mendacity as they are plunged into a period of unemployment, social instability, and emerging fascism. The fundamental difference between Brecht and Horva`th is crucial to Hampton, for in his Tales from Hollywood, he adds to Handke’s and Kreutz’s argument by challenging Brecht’s assumption that theater has the potential for altering perception, for he speculates that if this is so, this potential occurs in ‘‘indirect almost undefinable methods and means.’’31 Horva` th serves a triple function in Hampton’s play, for he is a character in his own right, the narrative voice describing both the dead-end situation of the German e´migre´s and the pretensions of the Hollywood film industry, and ultimately the mouthpiece for Hampton’s own theatrical approach. To demonstrate his displace-

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ment in both communities, he speaks a broken English when he’s talking to the natives and an idiomatic American English filled with slang expressions when he’s talking to the German intellectuals, who of course all also speak English, but a very artificial, ‘‘correct’’ version. Hampton’s Horva`th relies on the words and tone familiar to readers of the writer, for he quotes from Horva`th’s brief autobiographical statement describing himself as ‘‘a typical old AustrianHungarian mixture: Magyar, Croatian, German, Czech.’’ Since his father was a diplomat, Horva`th didn’t have a rooted existence but instead ‘‘loafed about partly in Venice and partly in the Balkans.’’ When he was ‘‘four feet tall’’ his family moved to Budapest, and he lived there ‘‘for half an inch.’’ His multicultural background would later give Horva`th the appropriate distance from which to judge the Nazi striving for German cultural hegemony, for he himself wrote his first German sentence ‘‘only at fourteen.’’ When he was in his teens he was put into the care of his uncle in Vienna in order to prepare for his high-school diploma, and it was there that Horva`th became a habitue´ of unfashionable and quite sleazy neighborhood cafes. He also was a regular visitor at the ‘‘midget cafe’’ near the Prater in Vienna, once commenting ‘‘that he could not imagine such a thing as a Nazi midget.’’32 All references to Horva`th’s life appear in the course of Hampton’s play and are used to create a difference between Horva`th’s quintessential outsider status and the culturally cohesive community of German intellectuals. At the same time, Horva`th represents the outcast from his culture, for when his Faith, Hope, and Charity was scheduled for performance at the Deutsches Theater in 1933, it was suddenly banned, and eventually Horva`th, as an alien, was officially deprived of the right to live and work in Germany. A sense of not belonging and simultaneously a desire to belong pervades the thoughts of many of Horva`th’s estranged characters, and consequently one feels pity for even the most depraved. In Horva`th’s case, the notion of exile is synonymous with the idea of dwelling among strangers and of being an e´migre´ in one’s own land. In presenting a strange combination of familiarity and at the same time exclusion, Horva` th underlined his own rootlessness, trying to subsume his private dislocation under the collective otherness of midgets, freaks, and sundry outsiders. Hollywood thus becomes the appropriate setting for stimulating Horva`th’s sense of the grotesque: It’s true to say that none of us was really happy. But as I expect you’ve noticed by now, I saw things differently from the others. You see, I had always loved what was strange and half-finished. I loved gullibility, cheap

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religions, mementos, plastic, superstitions, pornography with spelling mistakes, girls dressed as mermaids, streets without end, the ethics of fairgrounds, the bright smiles of the no-hopers, motiveless friendliness, the pleasure of nomad’s’-land. In short, after two years in Los Angeles, I knew I was home. (53–54).

Hampton also uses Horva`th’s cultural diversity and tolerance to show the limitations of the German writers’ exclusive concern for the fate of Germany. In inventing a life for Horva`th within the actual lives of the German e´migre´s in Hollywood between 1939 and 1950, Hampton takes Horva` th’s attitude towards politics as a departure point to present the impotence of the conflicting ideological positions in the society of German writers in Hollywood regarding the sociopolitical events of both World War II and the postwar investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Unlike the well-established ideologies held by the German e´migre´s, Hampton’s Horva`th is more concerned with the strange workings of chance: Why is it people are so afraid of the Nazis? Why aren’t they afraid of just walking down the street? I know of no political theory or philosophical system, which takes into account the workings of chance. I don’t just mean a few centimeters to left or right and it would have been me face down on the stone: I mean that chance, in its most brutal guise, was about to take charge of the lives of millions of Europeans. Not that people realized, of course—I have friends who took taxis to the internment camps. For me, the tree on the Champs Elysees was enough. . . . (13–14)

In his own life, Horva` th had discovered that his displacement freed him ‘‘from the constraints of sentimentality.’’33 Thus, unlike Brecht, who took pains to cast himself in the role of an involuntary exile, Horva`th finds freedom in his homelessness. Nor could Horva`th identify with the often-quoted sentence attributed to Thomas Mann, ‘‘Where I am is Germany.’’34 Though Brecht refused to assimilate, asserting that, ‘‘We didn’t have that in Augsburg,’’35 Hampton’s Horva`th with no ‘‘reputation to guard anymore’’ can wander freely about Hollywood observing its grotesques: ‘‘The kitsch! The de´sespoir! The pagodas! The chaˆteaux! The mauve haciendas! Donuts! Dentistry! Divorce!’’ (55): I’d stroll down the hill, buy a paper on the corner of Hollywood and Wilcox from a charming dwarf called Angelo, have breakfast in the local drugstore . . . then I’d wander past the Crossroads of the World to Sunset and Highland and take a bus to Universal City. I appreciated that even

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when you were down and out, the place names did their best to make you feel important. (56)

Hampton is as meticulous in setting the time frame for his play as he is in careful notation of his sources and establishing an appropriate mood. Since Horva`th died in Paris on 1 June 1938, Hampton’s transport of Horva`th to Hollywood places him as one of the early e´migre´s to arrive, though Thomas Mann was already in residence in Brentwood. Hampton locates the first meeting between the fictional Horva`th and Mann at the luxurious Beverly Hills Hotel’s bungalow, where Mann did indeed stay while awaiting the final preparations for his house.36 The second character Horva` th meets is Heinrich Mann, who arrives in Los Angeles with his wife, Nelly, in November 1940, having fled France by means of a strenuous hike through the Pyrenees to Lisbon, from where he embarked for America. Heinrich made his livelihood as a scriptwriter at Warner Brothers, where a one-year position had been arranged for him under the auspices of the European Relief Fund. All references to the real life of Hampton’s characters are authentic, though the reality of their lives proved to be much more grotesque than the snippets of information included by Hampton. For example, Nigel Hamilton’s biography The Brothers Mann focuses on the problematic personalities of not only the Mann brothers but also Heinrich’s scandalous wife, Nelly. The bad feelings between the Mann brothers stem back to the period after World War I when the more liberal Heinrich alluded in his letters to his brother’s naive political beliefs, and Thomas retaliated against this presumed attack by publishing Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1922). Nor did Thomas approve of Heinrich’s bohemian lifestyle, particularly his marriage with Nelly Kroger, a Hamburg barmaid, thirty years younger than Heinrich. As a result, the relationship between the two brothers, despite their ending up in Los Angeles an hour’s drive apart, continued to be chilly. Nelly’s affairs with other men, her drunkenness and insensitivity to etiquette were bound to outrage Thomas Mann’s elegant household; however, the differences between the two brothers were of much longer duration than just the period of Heinrich’s marriage to Nelly. The vitriolic nature of their exchanges had a great deal to do with their individual arrogance, which did not tolerate criticism, especially from a brother. Heinrich considered himself a ‘‘radical in spirit, in soul, and in form,’’37 nor was he above lording his radicalism over his brother’s more conservative position on war: ‘‘My brother enjoys it, as he does everything, aesthetically.’’38 Thomas re-

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sponded in a public letter defending ‘‘the bourgeois (in the best sense) strivings of his distinguished father, to accept the responsibilities of everyday living like any other man: a wife, children, and a house. . . .’’ Heinrich saw the latter as a disingenuous argument for Machtpolitik, and Thomas in turn replied, ‘‘Let the tragedy of our brotherhood take its course to the bitter end.’’39 Though they were later reconciled, their competition for political ‘‘rightness’’ continued to the end. Thomas ultimately helped support Heinrich when the latter lost his job at Warner Brothers, but he was by then an affluent, Nobel Prize endowed literary and political figure, and Heinrich’s only claim to fame in Hollywood was as the author of the novel on which Josef von Sternberg’s much admired The Blue Angel was based. Ultimately, it is ironic that the two brothers, who stood in such bitter opposition on their individual versions Germany’s destiny, were both exiled and dispossessed by the Nazis and reviled as betrayers. In Hampton’s play, Nelly Mann plays a central role, for she resembles to a large extent the lost female characters like Marianne in Horva`th’s Tales from the Vienna Woods. As Golo Mann recalls, Nelly drank secretly, slipping out into the bathroom or kitchen, but coyly refusing the drinks offered at parties. Once at a dinner party at Heinrich’s, Nelly opened the door completely naked and yowled, ‘‘Oh, I’ve got such an old husband!’’40 When Heinrich Mann declined Knopf ’s editorial suggestions to substantially cut the Englishlanguage edition of Professor Unrat, protesting that ‘‘he was writer enough to decide for himself what HE ought to write,’’41 no other publisher was ready to pay an advance for Heinrich’s work. Consequently, Nelly was forced to work as a nurse in the hospital to supplement the stipend Heinrich was allotted by his brother. She also began to buy cars on credit and resold them immediately for cash. While on probation for drunken driving, she was apprehended while driving under the influence. In the end, despairing over her imminent court trial, and convinced that she would be imprisoned, Nelly panicked and took an overdose of sleeping pills; it was her fifth attempt at suicide. This time she succeeded and died on the way to the hospital. These incidents are woven in by Hampton to give his play not only ‘‘authenticity’’ but also to provide a means for giving his alter ego Horva`th a way of establishing his character, for Hampton’s Horva` th clearly shows an affection for the self-destructive Nelly, a version of the many women in Horva`th’s plays that succumb to despair. Hampton makes use of much of the information in Hamilton’s account of the two brothers, particularly when he sets one of the scenes of the belated celebration of Heinrich’s seventieth birthday on 2 May 1941, which was held at Salka Viertel’s house. Thomas’s

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tribute to his brother as one who had ‘‘perceived and comprehended’’ the modern duties of the writer ‘‘earlier than us all’’ is referred to by Hampton, and the condition of the delayed, overwarmed dinner is quite accurately presented. Of course, at this point, as the representative voice of all Germans, Thomas could afford to be generous in spirit: You dear Heinrich, you perceived and comprehended this new condition of the spirit earlier than us all; you spoke the word ‘‘democracy’’ when all of us were helpless to know where to begin with it, and you proclaimed the totality of all that is human, including politics, in works which are both the highest art and prophecy in one. . . . If genius is the power of anticipation, the passionate portrayal of things to come, then your work carries the mark of genius and over and above its artistic ventures it is a moral phenomenon. . . . A whole generation ago, dear brother, you gave us the myth of Professor Unrat. Hitler is no professor—far from it. But Unrat [excrement] he is, nothing more, and will soon be but the rubbish of history. If you have, as I trust you have the organic patience to persevere, your old eyes will yet come to see what you described in your youth: the end of the tyrant.42

Hampton not only uses snippets from Thomas Mann’s speech, but he essentially patterns the scene on the situation described by Hamilton. Before the assembled guests could rise for the toast to Heinrich’s health, Heinrich also rose, also put on his glasses, and also brought forth a thick manuscript in which he paid his brother the highest praise for his continuous fight against fascism. To that he added a meticulous literary analysis of Thomas’s oeuvre and its relevance to the Third Reich. At the open door to the pantry, the guests were listening, crowding each other, and wiping their tears, and as one guest mentioned how touched he was by the wonderful homage the brothers had paid each other, Bruno Frank commented, ‘‘Yes, they write and read such ceremonial evaluations of each other, every ten years.’’43 In Hampton’s play this farcical scene serves to introduce the ‘‘unknown’’ Horva`th to the German e´migre´s: ‘‘Afterwards, somebody explained to me they’d been doing this kind of thing ever since they were fifty. And so, at even greater length, as the beef shriveled and blackened, Heinrich delivered his measured response’’ (34). That Bertolt Brecht’s appearance in the play is delayed is not due to purely dramatic reasons, for Brecht was indeed one of the last e´migre´s to arrive at the port of San Pedro on 21 July 1941. In a similar approach to using snippets of quotations from his research study on the Mann brothers in his play, Hampton relies on appropriate facts and quotations from Lyon and Esslin on Brecht. In particular,

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Hampton focuses on Brecht’s lack of commitment to ideology. For example, Lyon recounts that in 1941, just before he set sail for America from Vladivostok, Brecht bought Lenin’s writings in a German edition, but, as they arrived at San Pedro, Brecht threw these works into the harbor with the explanation, ‘‘I don’t want any trouble with the US authorities.’’ This anecdote is used by Hampton when Brecht asks Horva`th ‘‘Do you have any Lenin’’ to characterize Brecht’s pragmatic accommodation to his situation as an alien (43). The characterization of Brecht by Hampton contains elements of poetic truth, for in most respects, the revolutionary dramatist behaved like a law-abiding German burgher. He observed the curfew for enemy aliens, paid his income taxes, and registered annually with the Immigration and Naturalization Service.44 In presenting his version of Brecht, Hampton relies on the spectator’s previous knowledge of Brecht’s ideology, theatrical practice, as well as details of his womanizing, his ambivalence towards Marxism, and his contradictory attitudes towards capitalism. Brecht arrives in Hollywood by way of Finland and then Moscow, where he left his mistress, Margaret Steffin, to die alone, while he and his retinue consisting of his wife Helene Weigel and his two children traveled by way of the Trans-Siberian railroad to Vladivostok, and from there by boat to Los Angeles. Hampton undermines Brecht’s position in the play even further by applying Brecht’s antimoral from the Threepenny Opera that feeding one’s stomach comes before morality as Brecht comments that in Moscow he ‘‘couldn’t get enough sugar’’ (41). For Brecht everything can be explained by way of ideology, even the taste of apples: ‘‘Big and red and shiny and seductive and when you bite it tastes like an old sponge. Capitalist apples’’ (41). The meeting between Brecht and Horva`th is foreshadowed in the scene Horva`th has with Charles Money, a contract screenplay writer, about writing a script on Edward II to be based on the play Money assumes that Horva`th wrote. Told by Horva`th that the play was written by Brecht and Feuchtwanger based on an original by Christopher Marlowe, Money, nevertheless, gives Horva` th two weeks and two hundred dollars to write it, and Horva`th, with his vocabulary of ‘‘three thousand words of English’’ (19), proceeds much in the manner of Brecht’s adaptations of classics by writing a film script in which ‘‘almost all the words were Marlowe’s’’ (24). Money. And my people tell me you wrote a play about Edward the Second. Horva`th. Ah, I know what you mean. Eduard der Zweite. Yes. No. This play was from Bertolt Brecht und Lion Feuchtwanger. . . . Money. Either of them in town, you happen to know? (18)

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This early scene reveals that despite his own fame as a dramatist and media personality in Germany, Brecht is as unknown to Money as is Horva`th. Similarly, Heinrich Mann is only recognized as having written the ‘‘screenplay’’ to the legendary The Blue Angel, and Hampton quotes Mann’s cynical observation that his ‘‘entire American reputation stands on the legs of Marlene Dietrich’’ (29). And even the Nobel laureate Thomas Mann’s enjoyment of Wagner is interrupted by a ‘‘familiar, ear-splitting cry’’ as Tarzan intrudes on his ‘‘Parnassus’’ (15). This ridiculous meeting of the German intellectual elitist writer with a quintessential Hollywood popular star leads to Hampton’s conclusion by way of his narrator Horva`th: Well. Thomas Mann did know Johnny Weismuller. Schoenberg did play tennis with Harpo Marx. And I did meet Garbo. But I need hardly say the reality was very different. (16)

Ultimately, when Brecht arrives on the scene, unshaven, wearing his cap and especially designed ‘‘proletarian’’ jacket with no lapels, his cheap wire glasses, and chewing his cheap cigar, he is a caricature figure from the many photographs that have become icons of Brecht as committed writer. He even speaks in a ‘‘metallic slightly high-pitched voice’’ familiar to those who have heard him on record. Allusions to Brecht’s theatrical practices are also foregrounded as Hampton introduces Brecht by having him walk through the auditorium onto the stage, inspecting in the process both the spectators and Hampton’s sets, and ‘‘shaking his head in dismay’’ at the lack of Epic Theater’s ‘‘alienation effects.’’ Watching Brecht’s reaction to the dimly lit theater, Hampton’s Horva`th comments: Brecht always likes people to be aware that they were in a theatre. I said to him more than once, but Brecht what makes you think they’re anywhere else? But he had a way of not answering questions he didn’t approve. (40)

Brecht is depicted as being quite aware of what to do to succeed in the capitalist market economy, for even though he’s a newcomer he advises Horva`th that ‘‘it’s better to work as a freelancer and sell them stories’’ (42), and when Horva`th offers to see if there’s a job for him at his studio, Brecht declines, once again revealing his strong affinity to capitalistic self-sufficiency: ‘‘No. I’ll manage. I’ve always despised anyone whose brains can’t fill his belly’’ (42). Though for Brecht capitalistic America represents a dead end, a

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place where ‘‘every morning to earn my bread, I go to the market, where they buy lies,’’ 45 Hampton uses the scene between Brecht and Horva`th to reveal the ideological contradictions between Brecht’s quick sizing up of the moneymaking potential in Hollywood and his constant criticism that ‘‘everything here is sell, sell, sell’’ (42). Not only does Hampton call the spectator’s attention to the discrepancy between Brecht’s egalitarian Marxism and his personal accommodation to capitalism, but he pokes fun at Brecht’s theatrical practice, for when Horva`th comes to visit Brecht in his comfortable house in Santa Monica, Brecht has prepared the scene carefully with a sign, ‘‘Brecht’s garden’’ (47). Also the ethics of Brecht’s ‘‘scientific method’’ and his belief in collaboration are overturned as Brecht tries to entice Horva`th into a scheme to ‘‘bombard the studios with stories’’ since ‘‘it should be possible for you and me to put our heads together scientifically, and come up with something’’ (49). But Hampton, familiar from recent critical studies on how Brecht’s other collaborators, Elisabeth Hauptmann, Margaret Steffin, and Ruth Berlau, had fared when they claimed joint authorship with him, has Horva`th reject the offer. In addition, Horva`th closes the doors to any future attempts at collaboration by asking about Carole Neher, one of Brecht’s many mistresses who had played the role of Polly in Brecht’s huge theatrical success The Threepenny Opera and had also been the actress who portrayed Marianne in Horva`th’s Tales from the Vienna Woods. Brecht replies that Neher had been arrested ‘‘ostensibly for Trotskyite activities’’ and is presumed dead: ‘‘She was always naive. The innocent, you know, deserve everything they get’’ (50). In his study of Brecht and Stalinist terror, David Pike suggests that, given the totally ruthless purges of the Stalinist years, Brecht could not have been personally able to save Neher or other friends such as the Russian dramatist Sergei Tretyakov; however, he could have made his forum of appeals more public by means of petitions and public statements.46 Thus Hampton’s criticism of Brecht seems to support Pike’s observations regarding Brecht’s sins of omission. Hampton’s characterization of Brecht in the first act of his play alludes to the many negative versions of Brecht from a variety of sources. The second act, though it shows both playwrights agreeing on some points, reveals that they fundamentally disagree. This becomes apparent when Brecht comes searching for Horva`th in his hangout, the Sleeping Beauty Cocktail Bar, and even though he’s coming on a goodwill mission to help Heinrich Mann, who is ‘‘starving to death’’ while his brother ‘‘basks up there in the Palisades like some old lizard’’ (59), the difference between Horva`th’s basic humanism and Brecht’s dogmatic ideology becomes obvious. Brecht is

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more interested in the fact that Heinrich Mann ‘‘had been right all along’’ about the politics in Germany (60), while Horva`th is more moved by Heinrich Mann’s impotence in the face of a world which he no longer understands. Both Brecht and Horva`th in Hampton’s play look upon Heinrich Mann as their hero, albeit Brecht views him as a victim of his capitalistic brother, Thomas. In his journal Brecht observes that Heinrich ‘‘does not have the money to call a doctor, and his heart is finished. His brother, with a house he built for himself and four or five cars, literally lets him starve’’;47 Hampton echoes Brecht’s journal entries in the lines he writes for his character Brecht: What does he care? He basks there in the Palisades, like some old lizard, wallowing in money, with his secretary, his servants and his five cars and his brother’s down here, sweating and broke, with an insane wife and not even enough to get his shoes repaired. It’s like an image of everything that’s most depressing about our profession. Heinrich saw the way things were going before the last war, he understood about Fascism, while Hitler was still slapping paint on beer halls. Thomas thought that war was just what Dr Nietzsche ordered, he supported it, he thought democracy was some new-fangled French fad that wouldn’t last ten minutes in Germany. (59–60)

Hampton’s Horva` th, however, unlike the historical Brecht, doesn’t view Heinrich Mann as a victim of ideology or class but rather as a sad old man, one lacking an ironical perspective on his own situation. When Horva`th meets Heinrich Mann in ‘‘some Burbank toilet’’ while they are both employed as screenwriters for the Warner studio, Mann congratulates himself on his good fortune in view of the many who had perished: ‘‘How is it that we’ve managed to be so lucky?’’ (30–31). For Horva`th, Heinrich plays a different role than he does for Brecht, for Horva`th sees him pathetically struggling to maintain his dignity in Hollywood. At the same time, Horva`th views the situation of Heinrich’s wife, Nelly, who drowns her sorrows in wine, with a great deal of empathy. Indeed, Hampton’s Nelly resembles the many down-and-out heroines from Horva` th’s plays, and her suicide in the scene that is narrated by Hampton’s Horva`th has a similar quality to Horva`th’s hopeless tragedies, such as Faith, Hope, and Charity: He [Heinrich] bundled her into a taxi and got her to the nearest hospital. But they were very busy, as it was just before Christmas, and they didn’t like the look of this shabby foreigner. . . . So he took another taxi and set off for another hospital, where they were regretfully forced to

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take the same attitude. . . . He’d kept the taxi waiting this time, just in case, so they were able to set off without delay to hospital number three, where indeed they were more helpful and were able to tell him right away that Nelly had just died. (84)

Despite the fact that the German e´migre´s found themselves in a similar desperate situation in Hollywood, they continued to carry on the personal and ideological differences that had their beginnings in Germany. In particular, Hampton makes use of the intense contempt that Brecht and Thomas Mann felt for each other. The antagonism between the patrician Thomas Mann and the Marxist Brecht stretches back to Mann’s review of Brecht’s adaptation of Marlowe’s Edward II (1924), in which he calls Brecht a ‘‘strong but somewhat careless talent who has been pampered by the public in Germany.’’48 This was the beginning of the discordant note that marked their relationship for three decades. Brecht in turn began to polemicize against Mann, stating that Mann’s works were among the kind ‘‘he would pay to have suppressed.’’ He poked fun at Mann’s scholarly preparations for his Joseph trilogy by commenting, ‘‘I meet Thomas Mann at best by chance, and then 3000 years gaze down upon me,’’ or in Hampton’s more trenchant version, meeting Mann for Brecht was, ‘‘Like stubbing your toe on three thousand years of history’’ (43). Both writers reserved some of their choicest formulations of the other. Mann observed that Brecht was ‘‘very gifted, unfortunately,’’ while other allusions to Brecht included ‘‘monster’’ and ‘‘party-liner.’’ Brecht in turn selected epitaphs like ‘‘halfwit’’ or ‘‘reptile’’ or ‘‘that short story writer.’’49 At times, though Hampton puts Brecht’s critique of Thomas Mann into Horva`th’s mouth, for in the scene when Horva`th is ‘‘summoned’’ by Thomas Mann to the ‘‘Parnassus’’ of his privileged residence at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Hampton reduces Mann to the cliche´s of snobbery and hints of homosexuality familiar to those who have read Mann’s journals. For example, Mann characterizes Brecht’s adaptation of Marlowe’s Edward II as ‘‘relentlessly ugly’’ with ‘‘costumes made out of old sacks’’ and Edward’s boyfriend is acted by ‘‘the most unattractive lump in the company.’’ While the scene gives Hampton the opportunity to foreground Thomas Mann’s arrogance as he sighs over the fact that ‘‘fame carries heavy obligation’’ (22), in general the purpose of the scene is to allow Hampton’s hero Horva`th to indulge in witty observations on Mann’s ‘‘lulling sonorities’’ as he condescendingly compliments Horva`th on that ‘‘first charming little book of yours, you know the one I mean’’ (21). This oblique reference to Horva`th’s A Child of Our Time (1938),

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a novel that illustrates the vulnerability of the lower classes to Nazi ideology, is merely an opportunity for Mann to observe that his Joseph trilogy anticipates how ‘‘relevant the theme of an intellectual in exile would become’’ (23). The contrast Hampton presents between Horva` th’s concern for the victims of their own stupidity versus Mann’s elitist intellectualism suggests that Hampton, like many of his contemporaries in England and Germany, feels that those disempowered by ideology are the real victims of society. In Hampton’s play, Thomas Mann appears as a stereotype of himself, a simulacrum refracted by Mann’s own writing style, his diaries, the many biographies of various aspects of his life, and mountains of critical interpretations. One of the first scenes in the play shows the elegant Thomas Mann sitting in a wicker chair in front of his bungalow at the luxurious Beverly Hills Hotel reading, ‘‘while a little Wagner plays the prelude to Lohengrin’’; however, this stereotyped image of cultured tranquility is shattered by ‘‘a familiar ear-splitting cry,’’ as Tarzan, hanging from the end of a rope, crosses the stage in a great arc. Mann’s mild expression is touched with apprehension and annoyance as Tarzan stretches out his hand, ‘‘Me Johnny Weissmuller, you Thomas Mann’’ (14–15). This brief scene, rather than showing the satirically exaggerated gulf between the two worlds, that of popular culture and high culture, in its rather playful juxtaposition seems to underscore that both figures have become undifferentiated images. If there is any realism left in Hampton’s play, it is a realism that is meant to derive from the shock of grasping these images as simply representations of period, and not individualized characters in their own right. One of the pivotal scenes in the play after the arrival of Brecht is the scene in which the German e´migre´s meet to draft a statement of their position regarding the fate of Germany. Many of Hampton’s sources, including Esslin and Lyon, explain that for the exile colony, three topics of conversation dominated all others—the progress of the war in Europe; the state of the German people, including the question of their responsibility for Hitler and the war; and the political future of Germany. These topics drove former friends and old enemies into sharply divergent positions. Brecht squared off against Thomas Mann, the most prominent spokesman for German artists and intellectuals, whose word carried great authority with the U.S. government. Ultimately, despite their personal differences, the German colony, among them Brecht, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Feuchtwanger, Bruno Frank, Berthold Viertel, and their wives met at the Viertels’ house on 1 August 1943 to write a joint statement. While the wives, Katja Mann, Nelly Mann, Salka Viertel, and Helene

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Weigel, had coffee downstairs, the men worked in an upstairs bedroom. After four hours of discussion, they agreed on a brief statement, which Thomas Mann approvingly read before the assembled women. ‘‘At this moment, as the victory of the allied nations approaches, we, the undersigned writers, scientists, and artists of German origin, consider it our duty to make the following public declaration. We greet the proclamation of the German prisoners of war and e´migre´s in the Soviet Union that calls on the German people to force their oppressor into unconditional surrender.’’50 However, by the next morning Mann notified Feuchtwanger that he and Bruno Frank were withdrawing their signature, for they felt that it was important to avoid identification with any cause that the American government might deem pro-Communist. Brecht responded with anger, ‘‘The inflexible wretchedness of these ‘bearers of culture’ crippled even me for a moment. . . . Thomas Mann along with ninety one other intellectuals approved of the invasion of Belgium in 1914. Such people must be punished.’’ He even pondered how the German people could justify tolerating not only the atrocities of Hitler but also the novels of Thomas Mann, the latter ‘‘without twenty or thirty SS divisions over them.’’51 As Hampton’s scene shows quite clearly, each of the writers was in his own way very German and was emotionally and ideologically incapable of understanding the other. In Hampton’s play, Brecht feels strongly that even without Thomas Mann, they must continue to support the Soviet Union in its fight against fascism. Horva`th, however, refuses to sign, and he elucidates his desire to be on the sidelines to his mistress, Helen Schwarz, when she decides to join the Communist Party: Helen. I’m not interested in extremism. I’m interested in getting things done. Horva`th. All this is fine. I just don’t like to join. . . . I think a writer must always be outside. You tell better the truth from standing looking in the window than from sitting at the table. (67–68)

But Brecht confronts Horva`th the next day and in true Epic Theatre style unfurls ‘‘a large banner’’ announcing his position: ‘‘two fellow dramatists reach the parting of ways’’ (77), and ideological differences seep into a quarrel about the function of the theater: Brecht. It’s this disgusting passivity. You people don’t understand that in the theatre it’s not enough to interpret the world any more: you have to change it. Horva` th. I really think you underestimate people’s intelligence. They

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don’t want blueprints, they don’t want instructions. They’re being told what to do all day. They don’t want to come into a theatre and be told what to do all over again. They want to be told what they are. (80)

Thus Horva`th is promoted by Hampton as the truly relevant playwright for today, for this nonestablishment figure and quintessential outsider, frequenter of dim, seedy bars, accepts man’s various sins and aberrations, and he challenges Brecht’s steadfast belief in the Soviet Union and its practices: Horva`th. ‘‘I’ve always wondered, what happens to transvestites in the Soviet Union?’’ Brecht. I must say, this is shaping up to be one of the most eccentric defenses of capitalism I’ve ever encountered. You’re asking for a land fit for transvestites? (80–81)

The two dramatists finally part ways: Brecht to the hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he insists that, ‘‘no, no, no, no’’ he was ‘‘never’’ a member of the Communist Party (86), and Horva`th to lie at the bottom of a Hollywood swimming pool as ‘‘the sun blazed down on this Biblical city’’ (95). Other markers of period in Hampton’s play have to do with the activities in the late 1940s of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which methodically investigated the infiltration of known Communists into American institutions and the media. The trials in Washington ultimately serve to separate the German e´migre´ community for all time, as each returns to Germany to pursue his own ideological position. Brecht was summoned to appear before the committee on 30 October 1947, and on 31 October Brecht left the United States on an Air France flight from New York. Brecht’s legendary smoke screen before the committee finds itself into Hampton’s play as Horva`th summarizes the departure of all the characters. Thomas Mann, despite his antifascist activities, felt that Senator McCarthy’s investigations were too disturbing and were bound to also touch him, and he too, despite his recently acquired American citizenship, left the United States for Switzerland in 1950. Heinrich Mann’s fate is also accounted for. Though, as Hampton mentions in the play, Heinrich had been awarded the East German State Prize and appointed to serve as president of the East Berlin Academy of Arts, he died in Santa Monica in 1950, shortly before his planned return to Germany. At the same time that Hampton accounts for his ‘‘historical’’ characters, he also provides appropriate endings for his fictional ones among, them Helen Schwartz, the left-

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wing screenwriter. Helen, disillusioned by Hollywood’s blacklisting of all those under suspicion, leaves Hollywood. In the aftermath of the departure of all the other characters, Horva`th is left alone to continue his screenwriting career in Hollywood by working in 1951 on a sequel to Bedtime for Bonzo. But even in the fictional realm, Hampton cannot keep Horva`th thirty-eight forever, and he provides him an appropriate death, albeit anachronistically by killing him off in a Hollywood producer’s swimming pool. The success of Hampton’s intertextual approach depends on the recognition of the various references, for parody is successful only when audience ‘‘gets’’ the reference and hence can appreciate the double coding. Hampton’s play is a palimpsest of all the quotations and references from what is known about the Hollywood German e´migre´s, Thomas Mann’s speeches, the sad fate of Heinrich Mann and his wife, Nelly, Brecht’s writings on America and capitalism, and the stereotypes of Hollywood producers. Since Hampton’s characters echo each other and never leave ‘‘the supermarket’’ of language that has been reified by the process of accumulated layers of interpretation, they function as somewhat somnambulistic representatives of all the figures that have lost their reality in Hollywood’s recreations of reality. The frequently quoted words of the famous e´migre´s appear as sound bites, for the quotations signal the onset of reification for the generation represented by Hampton. Ultimately the obvious quotables have become products of literary exchange of the contemporary well-read intellectuals. Only Horva` th remains alive, possibly since he’s the only one who appears on the literary scene in the late 1960s as a ‘‘new’’ author for the second generation of dramatists like Handke, Kroetz, and Hampton. Ultimately, Hampton depends on Horva`th as a countervoice not only to Brecht but also to the dislocation and impotence of the conflicting political ideologies among the German writers, all of whom hate each other’s politics and envy each other’s fame, for it is well known that Thomas Mann despised Bertolt Brecht both for his Marxist politics as well as for his uncouth appearance, and Brecht didn’t much admire the elitist Mann. The ideological and personal quarrels between the Mann brothers, Heinrich and Thomas, required numerous lengthy published accusations and rebuttals on the part of each to make their individual position known. Since Horva`th, despite his fictional and ahistorical transposition to Hollywood, voices the only distinctly contemporary point of view, it is the other characters, like Brecht or Thomas Mann, who seem to be burdened by their participation in history. Fredric Jameson notes that ‘‘historical names reify characters to make it impossible for us to receive

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their representation without prior interception of already acquired knowledge.’’52 Hence Horva`th is the only character who is unconstrained by historical evidence, and can thus act as the disengaged observer of history. The function of the other ‘‘names’’ in the play is to lend the play ‘‘an extraordinary sense of de´ja` vu and peculiar familiarity,’’53 as allusions to real persons and events are thus reduced to banal and repetitive bits of information. For example, Hampton’s references to Brecht’s half-curtain, Brecht’s use of placards announcing the course of action, and the ‘‘harsh white light’’ that Brecht attempts to cast upon the events that are evolving within the German e´migre´ community have entered the scrap heap of literary heritage as icons that signal the automatic appropriation of Brechtian effects in theater, for as Manfred Wekwerth observes, ‘‘if there’s a Brecht-curtain, the production must be Brecht.’’54 Patrice Pavis explains that postmodernism in the theater is closely linked to a movement of ‘‘ideological retreat and depoliticization.’’ As a result, a new attitude much more ‘‘cynical and disenchanted’’ with ‘‘extreme distrust in the face of all inheritances, especially that of Marxism’’ (Pavis 18) emerged.55 Thus, Hampton’s playful activity of quoting snippets of allusions to literature and fragments of wellknown biographical information also reduces the potential for creating meaningful characters. Hampton’s postmodern playfulness has been criticized by more politically engaged playwrights such as George Tabori, who would have preferred a more ‘‘realistic’’ and dramatic rendering of what Tabori sees as ‘‘the climate of anxiety’’ created by the persecutions of Hollywood leftists by Joseph McCarthy.56 Scholars like Siegfried Mews have been concerned whether the portrait of the many German writers in Hampton’s play is accurately represented. They question whether, for example, the relationship between Thomas Mann and his brother, Heinrich, is just and hasten to cite sources that refute that Thomas Mann let his brother ‘‘starve’’ while he himself led a very elegant life in his villa in the Hollywood hills. Similarly, Brecht is also defended against the suggestion in the play of Brecht’s dogmatic loyalty to Marxism in the face of the ‘‘disappearance’’ of his many friends, like Carola Neher, in the Soviet Union.57 From this perspective, the connection between the pseudointellectual characters of Hampton’s play and the icons of twentieth-century arts seems tenuous. After all, Thomas, Mann, Heinrich Mann, and Bertolt Brecht represent creative originality and intellectual rigor at their highest, and their creative efforts were acknowledged through tributes from their peers, as well

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as distinguished by the most honored awards. However, since the texts of the great modernists have been designated as ‘‘classics’’ of the twentieth century, the writers in their roles as Hampton’s characters resort to self-quotation. Hampton’s playful appropriation of fragments from their texts, essays, notes and diaries suggests that these quotations have been absorbed into the general babble of contemporary intellectuals. The references in Tales from Hollywood to the lives of the German e´migre´s, the Hollywood film industry, and quotations from Horva`th fall all over themselves in an almost slapstick fashion so that multiple layers of textual references are heaped on top of one another as Hampton constructs his complex series of narrative frames. As in a palimpsest, every new textual reference that is introduced covers the previous one and is in turn covered by yet another one. Ultimately, even Hampton’s extensive research is not able to exhume anything like the real Hollywood or the real Brecht or Thomas or Heinrich Mann. The play is permeated by nostalgia for the decadence of Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, and, by extension, for Horva`th’s seedy Viennese cafes, for as Jean Baudrillard suggests, ‘‘When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.’’58 The problem of background and allusion in Hampton is a complex one due to author’s extended use of montage wherein the European exiles are presented in a confusion of episodes and images. Characters such as Thomas Mann or Brecht are juxtaposed with characters like Johnny Weissmuller, Greta Garbo, or Chico and Harpo Marx, with whom they share the same space. In addition, other famous exiles are referred to, among them Arnold Scho¨nberg, Marlene Dietrich, and Peter Lorre. And just as Greta Garbo has been reduced to her expression ‘‘I want to be alone,’’ Marlene Dietrich to her famous legs, and Johnny Weissmuller to his ‘‘Me Tarzan, you Jane,’’ the European intellectuals have been reduced to banal representatives of education and culture, for anyone who considers himself to be ‘‘educated’’ today knows that Brecht is responsible for the theory of the Epic Theater, and Thomas Mann has written such ‘‘profound’’ works as his Joseph in Egypt trilogy or Doctor Faustus. Consequently, as Adorno comments in The Jargon of Authenticity, ‘‘Expressions and situations, drawn from a no longer existent life, are forever being blown up as if they were empowered and guaranteed by some absolute which is kept silent out of reverence.’’59 Hampton’s awareness of how the media devaluates language reflects the similarity of his approach to Horva`th’s plays in which his characters babble the reified cliche´s of culture held in esteem in good old Vienna. Adorno explains that ‘‘the jargon of authenticity’’

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uses words selectively, and such terms as those associated with Thomas Mann or Brecht, such as ‘‘existential’’ or ‘‘epic,’’ are received by intellectuals as signals: The words become jargon only through the constellation they negate. The magic that the singular term has lost is procured for it by manipulations. Thus the terms become more important than what they represent. The jargon uses disorganization as its principle of organization. Yet history does intrude on every word and withholds each word from the recovery of some alleged original meaning. What is or is not intellectual jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation that places it transcendentally in opposition to its own meaning. It takes under its own control the preconceptual mimetic element of language for the sake of effect connotations.60

In his presentation of the German intellectuals suddenly thrust on the stage of Hollywood, Hampton appears to also agree with Adorno’s argument that even those intellectuals who have all the political arguments against bourgeois ideology at their fingertips, undergo a process of standardization which—despite crassly contrasting content—approximates them to the prevalent mentality to the extent that the substance of their view point becomes increasingly incidental, dependent merely on their preferences or the assessment of their own chances. What they subjectively fancy radical, belongs objectively so entirely to the compartment in the pattern reserved for their like, that radicalism is debased to abstract prestige, legitimization for those who know what an intellectual nowadays has to be for or against.61

The names of Brecht, Thomas Mann, and Heinrich Mann have all been used on various sides of an ideological debate; thus, in Hampton’s play, only Horva`th, undiscovered by the Anglo-American intellectual elite, has not been subjected to the commodification and standardization imposed on all the other intellectuals. Hampton’s Tales from Hollywood suggests that the author not only possesses a wide background in canonical texts but is also familiar with the poststructuralist concerns explored by Foucault and others on the function of an author’s name. Hampton’s attention to the meaning and value held in authorship in Tales from Hollywood has particular significance for the enunciation of Hampton’s poetics. Consequently, the characterizations of Brecht and Horva`th are especially relevant since they serve to foreground Hampton’s underlying exploration of the ultimate aim of theatrical representation as a choice, on the one hand, between a theater of engagement and

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detachment, and on the other, between ideological critique and compassionate insight. Hampton’s Tales from Hollywood also demonstrates that in writing about Brecht, the German exiles, and Hollywood it is impossible not to slide into cliche´ s and myths that surround each of these topics. Ultimately in Tales from Hollywood Hampton creates a palimpsest in which his research on the German exile community in Hollywood, his own translations of Horva` th’s plays, Handke’s essay on Horva`th, and Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard create layers of meaning emerging from his provocative intertextuality of the residues of what we know about the various subjects.

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III Intertextual Politics and Scandals

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6 The Scandal Maker: Thomas Bernhard and the Reception of Heldenplatz THE VIOLENT REACTIONS TO THOMAS BERNHARD’S (1931–89) HELDENPLATZ [Heroes Square]1 (1988), in the Austrian press even before its opening as the play selected to celebrate the one hundredth year anniversary of the Burgtheater on 14 October 1988 were influenced by a number of factors, for the reception of Heldenplatz proved to be simultaneously political, cultural, and historical. The response can be separated into several stages consisting of preevents and postproduction reactions. Among the most significant preevents that contributed to the reception of Heldenplatz were the election of Dr. Kurt Waldheim as Austria’s president, the erection of a Holocaust memorial in the inner city, the hiring of Claus Peymann as the Burgtheater’s general director, and the reception of Bernhard’s previous novels and plays in Austria. Though these ‘‘events’’ appear to be disconnected, they all ultimately contributed to the next stage of reaction in which the press played the main role in inciting Austrians to boycott the play. The premiere of Heldenplatz itself has consequences only to the extent that it generated the third stage of reception, the relapse into forgetfulness and silence on the part of those who had feverishly raged against the play. At the same time, this period was also characterized by the more serious discussions from critics addressing both the play itself and the preevent theatrics. In addition, the Burgtheater published a 297-page volume on the Heldenplatz scandal in 1989, which encompassed articles and reviews from the local and foreign press, letters to the editor, letters to the administration of the Burgtheater, and also to Peymann and Bernhard. The fourth stage is related to Bernhard’s death in February 1989, when it was revealed that his last will and testament continued his judgment of his countrymen by restricting their profit from the performance of his plays and the publication of his novels and plays in Austria for the next seventy years. Only those of Bernhard’s plays, 199

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among them Heldenplatz, currently under contract at the Burgtheater continued to be performed until the expiration of the contract. A number of years after the scandals surrounding the play occurred, the reception of Heldenplatz has entered its final, ‘‘educational’’ stage, for the Burgtheater generously allots seats for student groups. Since most of the young spectators are not aware of the historical implications and complications represented by Bernhard in his play, they do not recognize his irony and wit, and as a result merely ‘‘endure’’ the trial of the three-hour performance. The most obvious reaction to Bernhard’s vitriolic attack on Austria and its citizens had to do with the election of Waldheim in 1986 as president, for the disclosure that the former secretary general of the United Nations had been a member of the Nazi Party and that as an officer had played a role in ordering the execution of political prisoners in Yugoslavia was felt by many as yet another plot to bring undesired attention upon Austria and its past. Following the revelations about his past, Waldheim was disinvited by all prominent political leaders of the world, and only the Pope received him in the Vatican for a state visit. This insult to Austria made the extreme right that supported Waldheim particularly defensive, and Bernhard’s reminder from the stage of the collective Austrian culpability in the rites of fascism was precisely the right incendiary moment that set off a continuous barrage of protests and disclaimers. It is interesting that Bernhard’s tirade against Austria continues to be replayed in the most recent ‘‘tale from the Vienna Woods’’ when after the February 2000 election, Jo¨rg Haider’s Austrian Freedom Party became part of a government coalition, and recent history of the Waldheim affair was once again repeated: The European Union imposed sanctions against Austria; a number of countries withdrew their ambassadors; prominent celebrities and the diplomatic corps sent their ‘‘regrets’’ to the invitations to the elegant Vienna Opera Ball; cultural figures ranging from rock stars to famous divas cancelled their tours to Austria; the Austrian Tourist Board reported a crisis in the industry; on his visit to Montreal, Haider was refused entrance to their Holocaust Museum; and ultimately Haider resigned as leader of the Freedom Party. The mirror events of the Waldheim/Haider scandals suggest that Bernhard’s rage in calling attention to Austria’s not-so-innocent participation in the rites of fascism at Heldenplatz in 1938 was quite justified. The rage that Bernhard pours into his plays is not that of a progressive liberal arguing for a politics of change; instead, he is more interested in producing an effect on spectators by means of attaching an aura of decay and corruption to actual places. Heldenplatz is

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6: THE SCANDAL MAKER

steeped in public history and ritualizes history through the private memory of Jews returning to Vienna and encountering archetypal repetitions. The play concerns two Austrian Jewish professors, Josef Schuster and his brother, Robert, who had been hounded out of their positions at the University of Vienna following the triumphant entry of Adolf Hitler to Vienna in 1938. As refugees they sought safety in Oxford and Cambridge. When they are invited in the postwar 1950s to return to their former positions by the new ‘‘neutral’’ Austrian government, they find that the climate of anti-Semitism has not changed, and thirty years later Josef Schuster resolves to abandon Vienna and to return to Oxford. Ultimately, the quintessential Austrian Schuster realizes that Oxford provides no solutions. On the eve of his return to Oxford in 1988, he jumps to his death from the window of his apartment overlooking the Heldenplatz, the site of the mass greeting of the Austrians of their fellow Austrian—Adolf Hitler—with flowers and jubilation. Bernhard chooses the Heldenplatz for Josef Schuster’s suicide as a purely symbolic choice, for in reality there are no residential buildings on the Heldenplatz since the square is surrounded by government buildings on both sides of the Ringstrasse. Bernhard reveals how old rituals are perpetuated in the present, for the Schusters had discovered upon their return to Vienna that their memories of the original Geschrei, or screams from Heldenplatz had been transformed into a continuous Heldenplatzgeschrei, or Heldenplatz scream. Thus, through the intensification of his critique in Heldenplatz, Bernhard exposes the practices of exclusion that continue to be active in Austria’s culture revealed through their fascist discourse. What we see in Heldenplatz is not so much ‘‘enacted as reenacted,’’ particularly since circularity and repetition elicit a sense of ‘‘ahistorical stasis and return,’’ and, as a result, ‘‘the past and present cease to function as discrete entities.’’2 In 1987 Claus Peymann, the newly hired Burgtheater director from Germany, commissioned Bernhard’s Heldenplatz as the play to open the season commemorating the centennial of the Burgtheater. For the Austrians, the choice of Bernhard’s title signified that he and Peymann had another, more recent, fiftieth anniversary in mind. This reminder implicit in the title of the play left many Austrians both angry and uneasy, for they would have preferred instead to commemorate 4 November 1918, the seventieth anniversary of the fall of the Habsburgian empire, as the ‘‘true tragedy’’ of the Austrian people. The reminder by Bernhard and Peymann of the anniversary of the Anschluss of Austria with Nazi Germany filled Austrians with resentment and bitterness. Bernhard, taking his cue from the

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upheavals generated by the election of Waldheim, in Heldenplatz not only dismisses the postwar image of Austria as victim of Nazi Germany, but maintains that Austria’s retreat into nostalgia for its imperial past, implied in the celebrations of the Burgtheater’s onehundred-year history, represents yet another problem of Austria’s inability of Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung, or attempts to come to terms with the horrors of the past, a past that represents Austria’s not-solatent anti-Semitic and profascist sentiments. As Jeanette R. Malkin observes, ‘‘Bernhard’s plays may begin on the stage, but they always end in the audience.’’3 Ultimately, Bernhard’s ability to provoke his audience depends on the audience’s knowledge of the past, of how the past is represented in order to shock and provoke the spectators into questioning the representation. Heldenplatz is a historically specific play; at the same time it is also a ritualistic play enacting ‘‘doubleness’’ or a coexistence of multiple time schemes and modes of consciousness. Both off-stage and onstage are in continuous juxtaposition. These double codings, knowingly echoed in every word and gesture, both reflect and implicate the history and memory of its audience. The history is not portrayed but repeated, through archetypes that ‘‘restore’’ the past. Moreover, the apparent subject of the play, Nazism and its continuation in today’s Austria, is aimed at an audience, which is both subject and object of the play. Both time schemes, 1938 and 1988, coexist and are conflated. Through the use of theatrical self-reflexivity, Bernhard consciously turns the play into an ironic dialogue with, and at the same time a serious attack on, his audience. Nevertheless, Bernhard’s plays are not constructed in such a manner that acts on the spectators to provoke them to think by producing a kind of Brechtian detachment. Instead he inflames his spectators to respond to the raging monologues of his characters with a similar rage. Ultimately the violent reactions on the part of the spectators are an important part of the performance, and consequently when upon Bernhard’s death, Heldenplatz became just another play in the repertoire of the Burgtheater, the spectators who returned to the performances were disappointed at the lack of the ‘‘performance’’ within the theater. Heldenplatz can be viewed as Bernhard’s indictment of living in a land that elected Waldheim by a wide majority and in which Haider’s Freedom Party draws on the phantom of National Socialism with impunity, since Haider is quick to point out that he was born after the war and consequently bears no responsibility or guilt for the racial theories of official Austrian anti-Semitism of the Nazi period. In addition, Austria’s status as a ‘‘neutral’’ country is frequently used as a screen, for since the collapse of Nazi Austria in 1945 and

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the subsequent years of occupation, Austria was granted the status of the neutral and independent Second Republic by the occupying powers in 1955. Even before that time, the Moscow Declaration of 1943 had declared Austria as the first victim of Nazi Germany, and consequently postwar Austrians were freed from the burden of historical guilt, and quite complacently shifted their guilt for war crimes onto West Germany. Thus the Austrians could innocently go on to reclaim for themselves their own indigenous pre-Nazi history and identity by restoring the symbols of their national culture such as the Burgtheater and the State Opera. Consequently, renewal of Austrian identity became, above all, cultural, and they exploited Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert, Ludwig Beethoven, and especially Johann Strauss as agents of their contemporary foreign policy. As a result, the popular image of Austria as an apolitical nation of mountains, music festivals, art museums, and picturesque ski resorts has all but eclipsed its political history, that is until 1986, when the Waldheim affair punctured that image. Ultimately, Heldenplatz represents the collision of Bernhard’s viewpoint with the supporters of Waldheim’s and Haider’s neonativist nationalism, and in the play Bernhard demonstrates how the current rhetoric in Austria’s politically and fashionably correct Freedom Party continues to recycle the terms of fascism. As in many of his plays, Bernhard has created two temporal processes, conflated them and, having exposed them to the echoes of discourse in the public domain reveals through a coup de theáˆtre that the generation of ‘‘Haiders’’ is exactly the same as the one that greeted Hitler on the Heldenplatz. George Steiner comments that Austria’s ‘‘scarcely diminished pulse of anti-Semitism, and a singular brew of obscurantism, partly ecclesiastical, partly rural,’’ continue to characterize the climate of consciousness in the Austria of Waldheim and Haider.4 A champion of traditional family values, Haider feeds the public a steady diet of corruption scandals and serves up easy answers to difficult questions like joblessness and immigration. Haider also appeals to the prosperous Austrian young professionals who readily follow ‘‘a leader who is very charming, sporty, a good skier and mountain climber, who appears with a bare chest in publicity shots.’’5 The new nativist resurgence has much to do with Austria’s image of the winter sports paradise, for it is ironic that the welcome of Hitler in Austria by a hundred thousand people who greeted him on the Heldenplatz in Vienna in 1938 was replicated by about the same number of cheering spectators at Heldenplatz in 1982 welcoming home Karl Schranz, the famous Austrian skiing champion, after he had been excluded from the Olympic Games as an alleged pro-

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fessional. Elfriede Jelinek comments, ‘‘That’s Austria. Mass hysteria cannot distinguish between Hitler and a skiing champion. That’s— taking it from Marx—history repeated as farce.’’6 Politics in Austria are as theatricalized as Bernhard’s scenarios for the theater, and part of the staging of events in the reception of Heldenplatz had to do with the controversies surrounding the erection in 1987 of Mahnmal against War and Fascism, a monument designed by Alfred Hrdlicka to commemorate Austria’s Jewish victims. As Amos Elon explains, Mahnmal signifies ‘‘a monument that is at once a memorial and a warning, an admonishment, an exhortation.’’7 This event was yet another reminder that contributed to the uneasiness of Austrian conservatives, who felt themselves suddenly besieged on all sides, especially since the monument was erected on an empty lot behind the State Opera and the Albertine Museum and across from the Mozart Cafe´ in the inner historical center of Vienna. The conflicts over the monument lasted over ten years from its inception to its dedication. The Austrians felt that they had been reminded of their past quite enough, and initially they attempted to have the projected monument situated away from the inner city, either at the concentration camp site of Matthausen near Linz or in the Jewish section of Vienna’s Central Cemetery on the outskirts of town. There were also attempts to derail the project by proposing a search for a different sculptor since the Austrians were already familiar with Hrdlicka as a provocateur and hence feared that the monument would be another insult adding injury to their recent notoriety as neo-Nazis. Hrdlicka had previously antagonized the establishment by constructing a big wooden horse wearing a Nazi cap dubbed ‘‘Horse against Amnesia’’ that pursued President Waldheim doggedly to dedications of bridges, openings of roads, and even followed him to Rome when he went to visit the Pope, as well as to Salzburg for the opening ceremonies of the elegant music festival.8 Even today, the Viennese mutter as they pass Hrdliczka’s monument, for the monument is considered by some to be ‘‘unaesthetic’’ since it consists of a small, inconspicuous bronze figure, a bearded old Jew scrubbing the sidewalk with a toothbrush. He is surrounded by four huge, roughly hewn blocks of basalt from the site of Matthausen. One block represents Orpheus in the underworld, another is inscribed with quotations from the Austrian declaration of independence from the Third Reich, while the other two slabs, representing fascism, tower over the bronze figure. The extreme right militant Freedom Party fought against the monument itself and particularly its location since the empty site that was chosen in the inner city had been the site of an apartment building in which many Aus-

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trians perished during the bombardments of Vienna by the Americans in 1945. Thus the monument was also perceived as a desecration ‘‘disturbing the rest’’ of the Austrian victims. Though the unveiling was attended by thousands, it was boycotted by the leading members of the People’s Party and the Freedom Party, and Waldheim pleaded ‘‘another engagement.’’9 Bernhard’s insidious method in Heldenplatz replicates the tone of outrage of the many letters to the press protesting Hrdlicka’s monument as a similar tone resurfaces in the raging diatribes of his characters reminding the spectators of their part in the discourse on stage and in the press. His approach in Heldenplatz relates to Peter Handke’s highly controversial Publikumsbeschimpfung, 1966 [Offending the Public, 1969] which shocked the spectators by its refusal to provide them the pleasure of illusion that expectations of a ‘‘good plot’’ produce in the theater. In Handke and Bernhard’s plays, the spectators are not able to escape into their favorite role of ‘‘kibitzers,’’ but are instead, caught in ‘‘the crossfire’’ of the playwright’s words, as they become ‘‘the subject matter’’ of ‘‘the offense against the public.’’10 In Heldenplatz, the spectators are barred from the enjoyment of ‘‘kibitzing’’ on the supposed historical, philosophical, or psychological themes and the appropriate moral conclusions, for Bernhard, with monomaniacal exaggeration, instead confronts them with the signs that display their own tendencies for neofascism, corruption, and abuse of power. The conflated cyclical and narrative effects of progression and return illustrate the open-ended text of a continuous, though hidden, Nazi mentality and of the ‘‘memories assumed still active . . . in the audience.’’11 Public resistance to Bernhard’s writings becomes understandable when one examines the way Bernhard reaches his pessimistic, nihilistic conclusions. His frequent use of a narrow vision associated with psychologically unbalanced narrators, the introduction of grotesque elements and the use of a disturbing vocabulary and syntax may well create a feeling in readers and spectators of his unmitigated hatred towards Austria, for a striking feature is the way Bernhard uses individual characters’ fate to suggest the fate of Austria. The reason that Bernhard is so effective in antagonizing his audience is that the theatrical space of his plays is vividly portrayed as Austria, and, consequently, not only do his characters perpetuate the familiar outward behaviors of typical Austrians but also the inner topography of his proto-Austrian characters is equally effectively represented by means of Bernhard’s use of structural repetition. Thus, the image of Austria in plays like Heldenplatz is not only the product of juxtaposition but also of repetition. Bernhard succeeds in characterizing Austria

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as a doomed land by placing the ideal world outside Vienna and Austria, for it is only places like Madrid, Mallorca, and, above all, Rome that allow his severely disturbed characters to breathe. In Heldenplatz, Oxford and Cambridge are the ideal ‘‘spiritual’’ locations that hold out the possibilities of escape from the screams of the rabid crowds gathering at Heldenplatz. Bernhard’s method is to provoke the Austrians to remember that which they themselves would prefer to forget, for the very title of the play is so concretely a symbol of Hitler’s entrance into Austria that it is impossible for the Austrians not only to see themselves reflected as the screaming mob who greeted Hitler but also as the screaming mob that protested against Bernhard’s play. More than geography, institutions of justice and education, bureaucracy and decaying cities, more than pressures to conform, more than mistrust and dehumanization, the factor that leads to oppression and alienation in Austria, according to Bernhard, is the weight that history and tradition exert on the individual. The past stares down at Austrians at every turn, but they have become separated from it, and their environment is a forest of symbols they are no longer able to decipher. Bernhard reflects this in his use of language, which is anything but objective but, on the contrary, charged with elements of the grotesque. Bernhard’s insistence on using such terms as entsetzlich, ‘‘horrible,’’ ‘‘disgusting,’’ ‘‘shocking’’; jeder, ‘‘everyone,’’ ‘‘everybody’’; u¨ berall, ‘‘throughout’’ or ‘‘all over the place’’; ewig, ‘‘everlasting,’’ ‘‘eternal’’; verzweifelt, ‘‘desperate,’’ ‘‘despairing,’’ ‘‘hopeless’’; fu¨rchterlich, ‘‘frightful,’’ ‘‘horrible,’’ and the deliberate repetition of their loaded quality suggest a particular strategy that grows out of the text and is repeated by the spectators in describing the performance. In addition, Bernhard’s morbid insistence on themes of fear, mistrust, anxiety, obsessiveness, insanity, disease, death, and suicide when juxtaposed with wordplays, puns, exaggeration, and interjections of indiscriminate, hyperbolic terms result in an image of Austria and Vienna that is almost monomaniac in its exclusion of other more sentimental insights. Unlike the Brechtian method in theater, Bernhard’s image of Austria is not the product of juxtaposition, but of repetition, for the reiteration of the argument always returns to the same premise that Austria is indeed nazional-sozialistisch. Ultimately, Bernhard’s narrow vision makes his characters stereotypes, undifferentiated in their obsessive hatred of the Austrian Weltanschauung. ‘‘Bernhard,’’ comments John Updike, ‘‘with his tyrannical repetitiousness and unpredictably placed italic emphases—like the blows of an impulsive fist—was a maestro of the diatribe, its churn-

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ing, its hammering, its omnivorous momentum, music such that any note not of dispraise seems a discord and a momentary weakening of the artist’s strength.’’12 Due to Bernhard’s obsession with the Austrian psyche, the previous reception of his novels and plays cannot be ignored in the discussions of Heldenplatz, for Bernhard himself describes his role in Austrian society as ‘‘ein Geschichtenzersto¨rer, ich bin der typische Geschichtenzersto¨rer’’ [I am a history deconstructor, I am a typical history deconstructor].13 As a result, Bernhard was viewed in his native country with distaste, reflected in such invectives associated with his name as ‘‘Alpen-Beckett,’’ ‘‘Menschenfeind,’’ or misanthrope, Meister des Nichts, or the master of nothingness, and ‘‘Unterganghofer,’’ or the doom promoter, for even before the Heldenplatz scandal he had achieved notoriety when in 1968 in his in his acceptance speech of the Austrian State Prize for literature for 1967, reprinted in the Burgtheater’s program for Heldenplatz, he alienated his public by reminding them of their desperate condition, their apathy in the face of historical truth: ‘‘When we are on the trail for the truth, without knowing what that truth . . . may signify, it is death that we are tracking, it is our dissolution, and our end that we are pursuing.’’ Bernhard allows only one certainty: death. All other human concerns—art, religion, politics—are nothing but useless maneuvers undertaken for forgetting that we will all die.14 In his outrageous public appearances Bernhard exploited his prestige as an award-winning author to denounce the Austrian state, its artistic pretensions, and its politicians as he continued to make a public nuisance of himself in such ceremonies as the 1970 the German Academy of Language and Literature’s Georg Bu¨chner Prize and the 1971 Grillparzer Prize from the Viennese Academy of Sciences. He withdrew with considerable publicity from the Catholic Church in 1972 and in 1979 from the German Academy of Language and Literature. The grounds for his withdrawal are included in the letter to the Academy published in the Burgtheater’s program to Heldenplatz. Apparently, Bernhard had so ‘‘enraged’ the Minister of Culture awarding the prize by correcting him that he was not Dutch but Austrian that the minister was ready to attack Bernhard physically; instead the minister left the auditorium, making sure to slam the door. As a result, Bernhard’s recognizably confrontational ‘‘hate speech’’ extended insults to the entire membership of the Academy, describing them as a pretentious gathering of self-aggrandizing hypocrites. Ultimately, Bernhard’s pattern of creating ‘‘Bernhard-rage’’ was to follow in all of his public appearances. A connoisseur of spite,

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Bernhard relished hyperbole and confrontation, for even without discernible provocation he launched vitriolic assaults against public figures, heckling them in defamatory letters to newspapers. For example, one of the most infamous denunciations by the ‘‘scandal maker’’ named the regime of Chancellor Bruno Kreisky as a ‘‘puppet show,’’ and he described Kreisky as an obstinate ‘‘old idiot’’ who, having become chancellor, had become ‘‘quite unpredictable, a megalomaniac and a public menace.’’15 The personages Bernhard periodically insulted in both the press and his own texts are representative ‘‘names without content,’’ for in a sense Bernhard has ‘‘scripted’’ them to add to his collective pile of grotesques. Consequently his ‘‘names without content’’ intermingle with his fictional grotesques to the degree that one cannot distinguish between characters on stage and characters supposedly off stage. Political figures like Kreisky, Waldheim, and Haider weren’t Bernhard’s only target. He attacked Austrian cultural institutions with equal delight, and his hometown of Salzburg, site of the summer music festival, was a favorite focus of abuse. For Bernhard, the inanity of Austria was by far more loathsome than the ‘‘world-wide inanity that raged elsewhere. Steiner comments that Bernhard ‘‘lashes out at Austria’s unctuous burial of its thoroughly Nazi past; at the megalomaniac provinciality of Viennese culture; at the morass of superstition, intolerance, avarice in which the Austrian peasant or mountain-dweller conducts his affairs.’’16 According to Bernhard, the ‘‘quaint’’ residents of Salzburg misuse ‘‘so-called Great Art for vulgar ends of commerce,’’ and ‘‘the festivals are put on in order to cover up the mire of the city.’’ For Bernhard, Salzburg represents the ‘‘perverted Ungeist’’ of Austrian Catholicism and National Socialism. According to Bernhard, Salzburg hypocritically affects a pose of universality under the cover of the festival, and the medium of so-called international art becomes yet another means ‘‘of disguising the perversity of its perverted spirit, just like all the summers here are fakery, hypocrisy.’’17 The obsession of the Austrians with culture is disparaged in Bernhard’s novels and plays in which talk about music and literature and philosophers figure importantly as main themes. However, in Bernhard’s creative world, the musicians, philosophers, and writers turn out to be obsessive tyrants, constantly striving for perfection and hatefully destroying what does not meet their exacting taste. Ultimately, art, like life, is a burden borne unwillingly. For example, the dramatis personae of Die Macht der Gewohnheit, 1974 [Force of Habit, 1976], and Der Theatermacher, 1984 [Histrionics, 1990], are the members of a family circus and a family theater. In Force of Habit, a musical

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ringmaster, a clown, a bareback rider, a lion tamer, and a juggler have been rehearsing a musical phrase from Schubert’s Trout Quintet for twenty-two years in the hope of achieving a perfect performance. Caribaldi, the ill-tempered tyrant of this bizarre quintet of musicians, enforces a regimen of endless rehearsals on his untalented and unwilling musicians. What has kept the music alive all these years in Salzburg, Caribaldi asserts, is only ‘‘the force of habit’’ that provides all of them with a sense of necessity and order, for though Caribaldi hates The Trout, ‘‘The Trout must be played.’’ In Histrionics a bullying megalomaniac keeps his family imprisoned in the constant rehearsal of his play Wheel of History, an insane diatribe on the historic constellation of ‘‘Nero Metternich Hitler.’’ Art, according to Bernhard, ultimately fails to redeem the individual, the family, or the nation. In his novel Alte Meister, 1985 [Old Masters, 1989], Bernhard’s main character Reger spews tirades against the dim-witted Austrians who ‘‘go to Vienna as if to church’’18 to pay reverence to the ‘‘inflated world-rousing monstrosities. . . . Velasquez, Rembrandt, Giorgione, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Goethe, just as Pascal, Voltaire all of them such inflated monstrosities.’’ In particular, Reger rails against the current nostalgia for Habsburg culture, ‘‘pervaded by a petit-bourgeois sentimentality and a petit-bourgeois gaucherie that turns one’s stomach.’’19 Reger’s most venomous denunciations are for Martin Heidegger, who with his cult of folksy simplicity and ‘‘his homespun winter long-johns’’ philosophy reflects the current climate of thought pervading Austria: I have seen a series of photographs that a supremely talented woman photographer made of Heidegger who in all of them looks like a retired bloated staff officer, Reger said . . . in these photographs Heidegger is just climbing out of bed, or Heidegger is climbing into bed, or Heidegger is sleeping, or waking up, putting on his underpants, pulling on his socks, taking a nip of grapejuice, stepping out of his log cabin and looking into the horizon, whittling away at his stick, putting on his cap, taking off his cap, holding his cap in his hands, opening up his legs, raising his head, lowering his head, putting his right hand in his wife’s left hand while his wife is putting her left hand in his right hand, walking in front of his house, walking at the back of his house, walking toward his house, walking away from his house, reading, eating, spooning his soup, slicing off a piece of bread (baked by him), opening a book (written by him), closing a book (written by him), bending down, straightening up, and so on, Reger said. Enough to make you throw up.20

In 1984 when Holzfa¨llen 1984 [Woodcutters, 1987] was published, the novel was read by the Austrians as a direct provocation by Bern-

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hard against the Viennese and their obsession with music, literature and art. In the novel, a grouchy monomaniacal narrator, a recurring prototype like Caribaldi or Reger or Robert Schuster in Heldenplatz, one by one demolishes the pretensions of his hosts, his former artistic friends the Auersbergers, a failed composer who thinks himself to be Webern’s successor, and his pretentious wife, a culture vulture. The narrator names another guest, a would-be writer whom he detests—‘‘a derivative literary virgin’’—and pokes fun at her fixation on Virginia Woolf. The party is being held in honor of a ‘‘famous’’ Burgtheater actor currently playing Ekdal in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, and the hostess goes on and on about the social significance of having snared this important guest: She kept repeating the words a superb actor and a fascinating production of The Wild Duck in that voice of hers which even thirty years ago used to grate on me, though thirty years ago I had thought it an interesting voice, even if it did grate, whereas now I found it simply vulgar and repellent. The way she said altogether the most important actor and the greatest living actor I found quite unendurable. I never could stand her voice, but now that it was old and cracked and carried a permanent note of hysteria—now that it was strained and worn out, as they say of singers—I found it quite unsupportable.21

Bernhard thus reduces the most important guest, the Burgschauspieler, to his ambivalent role as an artistic public commodity, and the venerated Burgtheater, ‘‘the world’s first theatrical whorehouse’’ also comes under assault. The institutional and national authority surrounding the Burgtheater is revealed to consist of nothing but the inflated appeal of its actors, ‘‘seen as larger-than-life figures representing a national culture.’’22 In addition, Bernhard’s portrait of the Viennese as a philistine, social-climbing, and pretentious bourgeois society incensed many a cultural figure in Vienna, particularly when the composer Gerhard Lampersberg and his wife Maja ‘‘recognized’ themselves as the Auersbergers and filed a libel suit against Bernhard.23 In Bernhard’s early years as a writer, Gerhard and Maja Lampersberg had appropriated Bernhard for their salon of artists, and thus they felt doubly wounded by Bernhard’s ‘‘slander.’’ As part of the process of protecting Austrian cultural values, the Austrian police confiscated the book, ‘‘thereby making it a mail-order best-seller from West Germany.’’24 Bernhard’s obsessive and indiscriminate attacks on Austria have the tendency, as Steiner comments, to become ‘‘a monotone, a

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blunted saw buzzing and scraping interminably.’’ Despite the fact that the Austrian society that Bernhard indiscriminately chastises for its Nazism, its religious bigotry, and its provincialism ‘‘happens also to be the cradle and setting for much of what is most fertile, most significant in all of modernity’’25 seems to matter less to Bernhard than the fact that the culture that bred Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, Rilke, Kafka, Broch, Musil, and the Jugendstil movement in art and architecture also spawned Hitler, Waldheim, and Haider. Thus, despite Steiner’s appropriate critique of Bernhard’s monomaniacal and indiscriminate hatred of his country, Bernhard is less concerned with Austria’s magnificent cultural history than he is with the squandering by contemporary Austrians of that that rich inheritance by appropriating the list of names for their competitions in cultural status. Portrayed as the inflated devotees of music, literature, and particularly the Burgtheater, the assembled clique at the midnight supper in Woodcutters complacently legitimates its artistic and social status. Bernhard describes cultural life in Vienna as the ‘‘greatest culture mill’’ in the entire world, a mill into which everyone wants to leap in. The chief miller of this great mill according to Bernhard is the Chancellor, the much maligned Kreisky, whose task it is to throw all the opera singers, actors, and theater directors into the same grinding stone. However this process takes such a long time that when the cultural ‘‘flour’’ is finally milled, it is already somewhat ‘‘moldy and smelly.’’26 Despite the ranting and raving in the press against Bernhard, he is quite aware that the public discourse in the newspapers only seduces the ‘‘cultured’’ Viennese to run to the box office in droves. In his play Elizabeth II, written a year before Heldenplatz but not performed until after his death, the obsessive megalomaniac character Herrenstein rages against his own inability to stay away from ‘‘the permanent theater’’ of the Burgtheater’s scandals. And even a ‘‘new director,’’ who as a German always comes to Austria as ‘‘a fresh wind,’’ soon enough reveals the ‘‘gaping emptiness’’ that produces nothing but nausea. Having lived through god knows how many ‘‘directors,’’ Herrenstein realizes that despite their ‘‘newness’’ nothing has changed, for the Burgtheater continues to function as the perverse ‘‘Stu¨ ckevernichtngsmachine,’’ or drama demolition machine which transforms ‘‘new faces’’ very swiftly into ‘‘the old ones.’’27 Such comments by Bernhard on the theater as a space where nothing happens, ‘‘a place where the curtain goes up, there’s a dungheap on the stage, more and more flies show up, the curtain goes down,’’28 make the ‘‘cultured’’ Viennese quite nervous, for the Burg-

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theater is not only one of the most important theaters in Austria but it is a ‘‘national’’ theater, which like the Viennese opera and Volkstheater, is subsidized by the Austrian government. The Burgtheater more than any other institution represents the continuity of Austrian history, for in 1714 Maria Theresa founded a court theater next to the Hofburg, and her son Josef II decreed the theater as a national theater in 1776. It is in this theater that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro had its debut and the plays of the beloved Viennese Franz Grillparzer were first performed. When the last performance at the old Burgtheater was held in 1888 prior to the opening of the grand new Burgtheater on the Ring, the spectators leapt unto the stage to tear up floorboards and rip out pieces of the stage curtain, to be later venerated as cultural relics in their living rooms. Not only the building itself, but also the Burgtheater’s stars were worshipped to such a degree that flags flew at half-mast at their deaths. In this apotheosis of performing artists, the Viennese sublimated their decreasing political power with ‘‘an indescribable fanaticism for art.’’29 For the Austrians, Franz Joseph, the long-lived Kaiser of AustriaHungary, was at the same time the quintessential bourgeois citizen. His pretensions to grandeur culminated in the construction in the 1860s of the present Burgtheater, the opera, the university, and the museums in on the semicircular new grand boulevard called the Ring. The cultural institutions were juxtaposed to those devoted to government such as the Parliament, the Law Courts, and additional structures to extend the Hofburg. The Heldenplatz, between the new Hofburg and the Volksgarten, was envisioned as a grand paradeground linking the Hofburg with the ‘‘park for the people,’’ and the palaces of culture, museums, and government buildings provided the backdrop to a stage on which the pageant of Viennese life could unfold. The architects were creating something akin to a stage design, for they provided a setting appropriate for the Viennese bourgeoisie’s image of itself as carriers of culture. Franz Joseph’s Ringstrasse came to represent the theatricalized glory of the Habsburg empire, and since World War I, when the Austro-Hungarian empire had shrunk down sadly to the picturesque, but insignificantly small Austria, the Ring continues to embody former grandeur. Thus the reduction of the empire to the modest-sized Austrian Republic was not accompanied by a corresponding diminution of the Burgtheater’s prestige or its grand mission as the last remaining bastion of the past Glanz and Gloria of Habsburgica. And even Austrian radical reformers who were derided and criticized in their time, such as Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, Arthur

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Schnitzler, or Arnold Scho¨nberg have been absorbed into the nostalgic recreation of the putative atmosphere of Habsburgian diversity and liberalism. ‘‘All of them, loyalist, dissident and disaffected alike,’’ comments Andrew Wheatcroft, ‘‘grew up in an education system suffused with Habsburg values, under the benign eye of the Emperor—in the schoolroom, at the place of work, and in the newspapers. It was possible to react to Habsburgica, but it also permeated the air that they breathed, for preoccupation with image and effect provided an ideal growth medium for the luxuriant hothouse outgrowths of fin de sie` cle Vienna.’’30 This process was not intentional, but just an accidental byproduct passed on from generation to generation and feeding the hopes of a return to Habsburgian monarchy and the good old times. The Austrians feel such a proprietary anxiety about their cultural possession, that the piles of letters addressed to the editors of the many Austrian newspapers or sent directly to the administration of the Burgtheater during the Heldenplatz scandal spoke about the theater as ihre Burg, or ‘‘our theater.’’ Sigrid Loffler comments in his article on ‘‘the culture wars around the Burg’’ that the more insignificant the Austrians feel themselves to be the greater becomes the myth about the Burgtheater.31In defense of ‘‘their Burg,’’ the Austrian press constantly exhorted its readers that they must defend their cultural heritage. Since the Burgtheater represents the quintessential cultural aspirations of the Habsburgian past, contemporary Austrian culture is permeated with nostalgia, and Austrian theatrical giants such as Johann Nestroy, Ferdinand Raimund, and above all Franz Grillparzer are held in great esteem to such an extent that their most favorite plays have become enshrined as never-changing cultural artifacts in the repertoire of the Burgtheater. Every schoolchild knows speeches from Raimund’s Der Alpenko¨nig und der Menschenfeind, 1828 [The Alpine King and the Misanthrope], and Grillparzer’s Ko¨nig Ottokars Glu¨ck und Ende [King Ottocar, His Rise and His Fall]. So embedded are these plays in what Austrianness represents that any deviation from tradition is felt keenly by the preservers of Austrian culture. Ultimately, the Burgtheater’s most significant role in Viennese culture was it serving as a model of social decorum for a bourgeois audience with social aspirations. Thus, Bernhard’s pointed critique of Viennese theatricality as ‘‘THE PERFORMERS INSIDE THE PERFORMERS OF THE PERFORMERS’’ culminating in ‘‘THEATRICAL EXCESSES’’32 that erase the difference between comedy and tragedy were considered as yet one more assault not only on them but on their nostalgia for the former splendor of the empire.

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Since the Burgtheater is not only a Viennese institution but an Austrian one, the hiring of Peymann as the general director from Germany cannot be ignored in the discussion on the reception of Heldenplatz, for Peymann’s tenure at the Burgtheater was an established scandal among the guardians of Austrian culture from the very beginning. One must remember that many Austrians saw their country as having been as victimized by Hitler to the same degree as Poland and Czechoslovakia; thus yet another ‘‘invasion’’ by a German into their only remnant of power—the cultural scene in Vienna—was viewed as indeed an invasion, though this time by a socalled radical leftist. Consequently, the appointment in 1986 of the ‘‘foreign’’ Peymann to a contract for three years to what is considered the most prestigious and influential post in the performing arts in Austria set off heated discussions in the press about the nature and responsibility of the Burgtheater to foster ‘‘Austrian’’ culture. Peymann, who before assuming the post at the Burgtheater had been the artistic director in Stuttgart and Bochum, has a reputation as a linksradikaler Revolutiona¨r with open sympathies for the program of cultural wars associated with the left. Articles against the hiring of Peymann in the Austrian press stressed the fact that while director in Stuttgart in 1977 he had started a collection for the dental treatment of Gudrun Ensslin, a member of the Baader-Meinhof Bande, incarcerated in the Stammheim prison near Stuttgart. Nor was it forgotten that their most infamous writer—Bernhard—who was particularly known for being an anti-Austrian, Austrian, maintained a relationship with the German leftist Peymann that extended back to Peymann’s production of Bernhard’s first play Ein Fest fur Boris in 1970 [A Party for Boris, 1990] at the Salzburg Festspiele, and since that time, they had collaborated on staging most of Bernhard’s theatrical texts. Perhaps their most notorious collaboration before Heldenplatz was Vor dem Ruhestand in 1979 [Eve of Retirement 1982], first presented in Stuttgart a few months after the emergence of the divisive scandal in Baden Wu¨rttemberg involving its powerful conservative minister Hans Karl Filbinger. Filbinger, a potential candidate for president of the conservative CDU (Christian Democratic Party), had concealed his past as a ‘‘hanging judge’’ during the Second World War. At issue were the numerous death sentences he handed down as a zealous agent of Nazi justice. In a pattern repeated later in the Waldheim affair, Filbinger lied and protested his innocence, and when the truth became incontrovertible, tried to trivialize the importance of his actions, and finally resigned his post under pressure.33 Though Bernhard’s play is not directly based on the Filbinger case, the spec-

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tators found that the rise of the Nazi hanging judge in the play to a place of wealth, prestige, and public trust in a supposed democratic state a shocking reminder of the reality surrounding them daily in the press. As is typical of the reception of Peymann’s productions, Eve of Retirement was considered a ‘‘provocation,’’ particularly in the conservative political climate of Baden-Wu¨rttemberg, and the Stuttgart audience certainly understood ‘‘the implications of this ‘Comedy for the German Soul’ and reacted with boos.’’34 Peymann’s contract in Stuttgart was terminated in the ensuing Peymannschlacht, or Peymann slaughter, and the so-called Peymannschaft, or Peymann & Co, consisting of codirectors, staff, and a number of wellknown actors, moved to Bochum, turning the regional theater into one of the most notable antiestablishment theaters in the Federal Republic of Germany of the 1980s. Consequently, the collaboration of Bernhard with Peymann was already well known to the Austrians before Peymann assumed his post at the Burgtheater, and, of course, the Austrians were also quite familiar with Bernhard’s ‘‘locally’’ inscribed historicizing of their past in his many novels, plays, essays, interviews, letters to the editor, and autobiographical texts. The Austrians despised Bernhard quite intensely even without his collaboration with Peymann, for he had earned the reputation of being someone with a talent for stepping on sensitive toes and antagonizing the powers that be quite self-consciously. The controversies surrounding Bernhard illustrate to what extent he has been cast (or cast himself ) as an ‘‘irritant.’’ His criticism of Austria and his gloomy descriptions of the human condition have at times solicited violent reactions and have caused critics to condemn his writings as nihilistic and self-destructive. Not only do Bernhard’s texts use confusion, irritation, and disorder as thematic strategies but also the reception of these texts by readers and critics is permeated with these qualities. When Peymann was selected for the post of director of the State Theater, the Burgtheater’s famous acting ensemble, numbering approximately one hundred and forty tenured members, the largest, most secure, and privileged ensemble in modern theater history, agitated against his appointment. The ensemble had substantial freedom in the organization of rehearsal schedules, the assignment of dramaturgical personnel, and most importantly the choice and casting of shows for each season. Thus, when Peymann arrived with his own managerial staff and favorite performers from his ensemble from Bochum, the Burgtheater’s actors did everything possible to undermine his prestige, labeling him a semiterrorist promoting an engaged theater culture. Though the 1986–87 seasons were consid-

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ered to be ‘‘successful’’ with a repetition of several of Bernhard’s plays previously staged for the Salzburg festival, in March 1988, at the time of the anniversary of the annexation of Austria to Germany, Peymann staged Der 13. Ma¨rz 1938: Theaterszenen zum Anschluß, which for obvious reasons drew only nervous applause and mixed reviews from the Viennese.35 When one examines the heightened emotions of columnists and readers protesting against Hrdliczka’s monument, all of Bernhard’s plays and novels, and Peymann’s tenure in ‘‘their’’ Burgtheater, one could say that the Heldenplatz scandal was staged even before Peymann’s decision to commission Bernhard to write a new play for the Burgtheater’s commemorative celebrations. It was then hardly surprising that Peymann encountered problems during rehearsals of Heldenplatz, when six of the Burgtheater’s resident actors walked out of their parts under the pretext of moral indignation at having to act in a play so strongly execrating their country. Since rehearsals had to be extended due to new assigning of roles, the premiere of Heldenplatz had to be shifted to the later date of 4 November 1988; however, despite this delay, Peymann continued to bill the play as the official play for the Burgtheater’s centennial celebration. In addition, the problems that beset the production of Heldenplatz were fueled by the conservative and highly ructious Austrian scandal sheets.36 Initially, the outcry focused on the choice for the celebration of the Burgtheater’s centennial of the depressing Bernhard, ¨ bertreibungsku¨nstler, the exaggerationfrequently referred to as the U artist, as the playwright to open such a significant celebration. Letters poured in to the Burgtheater demanding a ‘‘traditional’’ Austrian play such as Grillparzer’s Ko¨nig Ottokars Glu¨ck und Ende with ¨ sterreichs,’’ or ode to Austria, ‘‘it is a good land . . . its famous ‘‘Lob O look all around you.’’ The letter quotes the ode in full with carefully underlined lines directed towards Peymann or Peymann/Bernhard. The lines describing the Austrian soul as ‘‘open and gay’’ with ‘‘a clear look’’ and ‘‘a steadfast disposition’’ were directed towards Peymann, while the lines, ‘‘God preserve the youthful spirit / and repair, what others have corrupted’’ were specifically called to Bernhard’s attention.37 The discussion of the Burgtheater’s repertoire soon abandoned the ‘‘reasonable suggestions’’ of cultural authorities and succumbed to outcries and shrieks of protest as passages from the unpublished script appeared in the Neue Kronen Zeitung and the Wochenpresse on 7 October. Since it had been agreed that Suhrkamp, the press publishing all of Bernhard’s work, was not to release Heldenplatz until the morning of the premiere, the illegally published excerpts were

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quoted out of context, and without any reference to plot or characters. The focus of the indignation concerned passages from the play that circumscribed Austria as ‘‘a stage on which everything had rotted, been annihilated, and had become totally demoralized,’’ by the ‘‘disgusting six and a half million supernumeraries of mentally deformed and raving mad Austrians.’’38 The excerpts also foregrounded the quotation that ‘‘present day Austria has more Nazis than in 1938’’ and that to survive in Austria ‘‘you have to be either Catholic or National Socialist’’ since no other point of view is to be tolerated (63–64). The president of Austria is named ‘‘a crafty-liar,’’ and the Bundeskanzler as ‘‘nothing but a tricky dealer in the sellout of his country’’ (102). Not to exclude any institution, the university faculty was described as reflecting ‘‘the unbelievable primitivism, and catastrophic ignorance’’ of the ‘‘provincial idiots, ninety percent of whom are Nazis from Tyrol, Salzburg, and Graz’’ (66). The tirade ends with the dark words that ‘‘in this most execrable of countries, the only choice is between black or red swine,’’ and their unbearable stench ‘‘spreads out from the Hofburg, the Opera, the Parliament, and football stadium over the entire damned and degenerate land’’ (164). Many ‘‘actors’’ felt empowered to defend Austria against Bernhard’s insults and immediately leapt upon the ‘‘public’’ stage. And even though on vacation in Majorca, on 10 October the retired Chancellor Bruno Kreisky was the first to telephone his indignation to the Neue Kronen Zeitung that this insult to Austria ‘‘should not be allowed to take place.’’ ‘‘I find it incomprehensible,’’ he protested, while indirectly insulting his successor Franz Vranitzky, ‘‘that no one in power has taken a position until now. Look, Thomas Bernhard can write what he wants. But one shouldn’t take this with noble disdain. Rudeness must be met with rudeness.’’39 Kreisky had been a target of Bernhard’s vitriolic remarks previously when he compared Kreisky’s regime to a Wurstelprater, or a comedy for marionettes, and this was Kreisky’s opportunity to get back at Bernhard. Once Kreisky responded, virtually every politician, as each one tried to outdo the other in the defense of Austria’s ‘‘honor,’’ took this opportunity to fuel the climate of anger and hate towards Bernhard and Peymann even further. Nor was anyone to be outdone in demands for ousting the ‘‘Peymann/Bernhard duo’’ from Austria. The following day, 11 October, President Waldheim responded. ‘‘I speak out when harm threatens the country,’’ he stated, calling Heldenplatz ‘‘an outrage against the Austrian people.’’ Feeling that some justification was necessary, he added that ‘‘it shouldn’t be taken for granted that only we are the Bo¨sen Buben and that it’s better else-

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where. Look only at some of our neighbors.’’ As a defender of Austrian honor, he could not keep silent in voicing his opinion that the Burgtheater was most certainly not the place for staging such insults.40 Egged on by the official voice of their president, letters poured in to the Viennese scandal sheets demanding the resignation of Peymann and the institutionalization of Bernhard in Steinhof, the local insane asylum. The outcry was so vehement that one observer characterized the protests as Peymannschlacht. At this point, not to be outdone by Waldheim, party leaders Alois Mock and Jo¨ rg Haider provoked further outbursts in their demand that such insults to Austria should not be financed by the taxes ‘‘of the hard-working Austrian folk.’’ However, their protests demanding that the Burgtheater’s repertoire reflect the taxpayers’ taste immediately called attention to the issue of censorship in a republic committed to ‘‘freedom of expression’’ in art on the part of a number of respondents. Thereupon, the minister of Education and Culture, Professor Hilde Hawlicek, decided to play a role despite the fact that she seemed undecided as to what her lines should be. While she protested that freedom of expression in art must be defended, she felt, however, that ‘‘had she been Bernhard she would not have written such a play,’’ nor ‘‘had she been the Burgtheater director would she have chosen it for the opening of the Burgtheater’s anniversary celebrations.’’41 This evasive defense of ‘‘freedom of expression’’ provided ammunition to Haider, who, strained to the ultimate by the audacity of the Bernhard/Peymann Nestbeschmu¨tzer, or ‘‘nest-soilers,’’ cited Karl Kraus’s attack on yellow journalism, ‘‘out, out of Vienna with these rotten scoundrels.’’42 When reminded in one editorial that Kraus’s words had to do with the casting out of the scandalmongering press, Haider ironically referred to Hawlicek’s defense of ‘‘artistic freedom of expression’’ as justification for his appropriation of Kraus’s stinging commentary against Peymann and Bernhard.43 In response to the questions raised by Hawlicek’s attempts to define artistic freedom, once again letters deluged the press, each trying to outdo the other in terms of erudition, liberalism, or aesthetic sensibility. Indeed, everyone automatically voiced the opinion that they supported freedom of expression in art, since ‘‘after all this was fundamental to the liberties established by the Austrian constitution’;’ however, they insisted that there ‘‘should be limits’’ as to what should be considered art. The ‘‘buts’’ and ‘‘howevers’’ continued using such evasions that of course Heldenplatz should be presented, but not in a theater supported by the taxes of its citizens. Others,

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relying on the quasi-intellectual authority of their titles as Herr Doktor or Herr Professor, insisted that, according to their informed opinions, Heldenplatz did not answer to any of the criteria established by Aristotle or Horace. The press, in turn, whipped up the public to express their ‘‘freedom of expression’’ by boycotting the play, and the most typical hate language appeared in the column ‘‘Staberl’’ in the Neue Kronen Zeitung inciting the readership not to swallow the ‘‘terror act of an immensely arrogant artist and the slick tricks of a clever businessman’’ referring to Bernhard and Peymann.44 Above all, most of the protests came to the same conclusion: that Bernhard’s ‘‘insults to Austria’’ could not be evaluated as ‘‘genuine expressions of artistic creativity.’’45 Nor did the diatribes restrict themselves exclusively to the press, since letters and threats against Bernhard and Peymann also poured into the Burgtheater. Some of the ‘‘warnings’’ were rather violent in nature, threatening ‘‘crippling,’’ ‘‘institutionalization,’’ or even ‘‘murder.’’ Both Peymann and Bernhard were subjected to personal insults as well. On his way to rehearsal one day, Peymann was attacked by an old-lady-dervish with an umbrella, and a defender of morality threatened Bernhard with a walking stick who shouted as he chased him—‘‘one ought to eliminate you.’’ A woman on crutches was about to attack him, Bernhard recounts in an interview, but decided that in lifting her crutches she might lose her balance, and thus she had to resort to shrill verbal abuse instead. In response to the raging theatrics in the press and by the performers in the political arena, Bernhard decided to make an entrance on the stage of the public theater as well, and in an ‘‘exclusive interview’’ in Basta insisted that as a result of the public histrionics, he had enough material to make the dialogue in his play even stronger and sharper. He agreed with the interviewer that his play was ‘‘horrible’’ but called attention to the fact that the theatrics being played out in the public theater were even more horrible. However, he noted ‘‘the one belongs to the sphere of art, the other to life.’’46 Soon, with some delight, the foreign press began to call the attention of its readers to the scandals in Vienna: ‘‘L’Autriche est un cloaque’’;47 ‘‘L’Autriche de Waldheim mise en pieces’’;48 Nieuw conflict bij Weens Burgtheater’’;49 and the German press referred to the defenders of Austrian values as the ‘‘Lederhosen-Derwische.’’50 The Austrian press soon responded with alarm that ‘‘Austria had presented itself to the entire world as a Bernhardesque Heldenplatz, a stage on which the grotesque comedy is being enacted.’’ To the world, the events taking place were a ‘‘farce, or an attack of raving

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madness’’ while to the Austrians they represented ‘‘disgrace’’ and ‘‘ridicule.’’51 An examination of the plot of Heldenplatz reveals to what extent Austria had become the stage and all Austrians the central characters in Bernhard’s exploration of the obsessive nature of discourse on both sides of the stage of the Burgtheater. The plot concerns the central character, Professor Josef Schuster, who has thrown himself out of the window of his Heldenplatz apartment on the day before his return to Oxford. Since his suicide occurs on the fiftieth anniversary of the suicide of his youngest brother, who hurls himself out of the window in 1938, the professor’s act suggests that the professor’s death is a consequence of an exaggerated sense of exactitude and repetition. Despite his absence on stage, the professor continues to be a presence, as the first act presents the housekeeper, Frau Zittel, and Herta, the maid, preparing dinner for the bereaved family. Frau Zittel in an endless monologue, supposedly for Herta’s benefit, ‘‘quotes’’ the professor’s opinions on everything from Sarasate, Glenn Gould, and Tolstoy, all of whom he venerated, to his opinions on the Viennese cultural institutions such as the Burgtheater and the theater at Josefstadt, both of which he despised and considered to be on the same level as the theatrics in church, for ‘‘anyone who had licked blood in the theater cannot live without theater’’ (25). The professor was equally obsessive about his clothes, for he abhorred silk shirts and had a fetish for English wool suits and English shoes, and though he bought numerous pairs of Italian shoes in Turin, he wore only English-made shoes. During the course of Frau Zittel’s ramblings, we find out that the professor was an egotist, a shoe fetishist, and a tyrant regarding the ironing and folding of his shirts to the degree that, despite numerous demonstrations of the correct folding of his shirts by the professor, Frau Zittel, who lived in sheer terror during the twenty years of service to the professor, could never master the precise order of the folds. The freeing of Frau Zittel and Herta from the professor’s obsessive exactitude and fear of drafts emerges subtly as Frau Zittel and Herta open windows to let the spring air in. Since the professor loathed irises, Frau Zittel rebels and puts a vase of irises on the table. Most significantly, Frau Zittel dares serve soup with caraway seeds, yet another ingredient that the professor found repugnant. Despite these signs of freedom, Frau Zittel continues to iron the professor’s shirts and Herta to shine his shoes fastidiously throughout the first act as if he were to appear through the door at any minute. Almost imperceptibly we find the professor’s opinions and preju-

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dices in Frau Zittel’s own voice as she combs Herta’s hair so that the maid will be presentable for the solemn occasion of the last dinner in the apartment. When she begins to quote the professor’s contempt for the stupidity of the folk from the provinces, she yanks and pulls Herta’s hair with the same vigor that the professor expressed regarding his hatred for anyone who disliked Sarasate or Glenn Gould. As Frau Zittel quotes the professor’s observation that Herta ‘‘sleeps the sleep of the stupid the professor had always said’’ (51), Bernhard conflates the professor’s harangue with Frau Zittel’s own prejudices against the upper-class Jewish professor and the ‘‘stupid’’ provincial Herta. While she appears to agree with the professor’s tastes, her own hatred of the lower classes and the upper classes collides with the professor’s own hatreds almost seamlessly as Frau Zittel appears to voice her opinion as an addendum to the professor’s: ‘‘I had better things to do than to hear Glenn Gould playing Sarasate on Saturday afternoons, especially since I loathe the sound of the piano’’ (32). The first act thus reveals that no significant ‘‘moral’’ questions are being raised that might require a response from the spectators, nor can the spectators find comfort in obvious themes that they can reflect upon. And the monologues in the form of speech harangues leave no space open for the possibility of selfreflection or self-awareness on the part of the characters and hence create a space for recognition and empathy for the spectators. What the spectators do discover is that the history of the Schuster family represents the history of the Austrian Jews in general. Professor Josef Schuster and his brother Professor Robert Schuster emigrated in 1938 to Oxford and Cambridge respectively, barely making it out of Austria alive after Hitler’s triumphant rally at the Heldenplatz. Following the war, upon the invitation by the Austrian government to resume their university posts, both brothers return to the Vienna of the 1950s only to discover that from their perspective, anti-Semitism and the Nazi mentality have remained virtually unchanged. Ultimately, Professor Josef ’s wife, Hedwig, despite many prolonged stays at Steinhof, the Viennese mental institution, has become so hypersensitive to the anti-Semitic atmosphere in Vienna that she begins to hear shouts of Sieg Heil from their Heldenplatz apartment. Though Professor Josef, according to Frau Zittel, makes his wife endure these horrors and refuses to move to another apartment, in the end, having been ‘‘hunted down by Hitler for the second time’’ (29), he decides that they’ll return to Oxford instead. Once the apartment has been sold to a ‘‘Persian rug dealer’’ (16), the piano crated up and sent to Oxford, and everything is packed into the boxes we see on stage, Josef commits suicide after realizing

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that the return to Oxford is nothing but an Alptraum, since alternative locations, even Oxford, have no chance as long as the modern psyche continues to be dominated by its darker historical obsessions. Following the funeral, his brother Robert explains the terrible event as the consequence of his brother’s inability to deal with ‘‘living in a nation of six and a half million retards’’ (89) ruled by a ‘‘caricature of a Nazi’’ (147). The second scene takes place in the Volksgarten next to the Heldenplatz with the Burgtheater visible in the foggy, cold March afternoon. The deceased professor’s two daughters and his brother, Professor Robert Schuster, are returning from the cemetery. One of the daughters mentions that Robert should protest the fact that a road is to be built through the beautiful grounds and orchards of his retreat in suburban Neuhaus. He insists that he has no intention of protesting since ‘‘all protests subvert themselves in the end’’; he only wants his peace, no more protests, against anything whatsoever (86). And yet, in recounting his interpretation of his brother’s suicide, he assumes his brother’s discourse of immense anger and negation to such a degree that it becomes impossible to distinguish between quotation and Robert’s individual speech. Similarly to Josef ’s monomaniac vision of decay and dissolution, a monomania that represents the last hold to which he clings before the final fall, it is evident from Robert’s ‘‘quoted’’ tirades that his situation is just as desperate, for according to him, even the music at the Musikverein has become ‘‘national-sozialistisch,’’ and one has shut out ‘‘the cries of the six and a half million abandoned, passive idiots who scream at the top of their lungs for a director, a director who when he comes will ultimately throw them into the abyss, from reaching one’s ears’’ (89). The third scene shows the family, including the widow and a few family friends, gathering amidst the trunks with labels ‘‘to Oxford’’ for the last meal in the apartment at Heldenplatz. The widow, Frau Professor Hedwig Schuster, obsessed by the cries in her head, falls into silence as the others debate the benefit of moving to Oxford versus staying in Vienna. The sounds of Sieg Heil become audible to the spectators as well and become louder and louder until they are virtually unbearable as Frau Schuster falls dead with her head in the plate, and the shouts from the Heldenplatz link the past and present in a continuous shrill scream. From the beginning of the play, Bernhard portrays suicide and death as the only way out of the catastrophe of living in Austria, for life in Austria produces illness of the soul for which there is no cure or way out. When, prior to the opening, the Burgtheater released a plot-syn-

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opsis that revealed that the insults to Austrian honor came out of the mouth of a Jewish professor, several reactions occurred. The immediate response on the extremist side was to blame Bernhard for using the ‘‘untouchable’’ figure of a Jew as a mouthpiece. Others questioned the need to characterize the Jewish professor so negatively both in his inclination for authoritarianism and the bitterness of his emotions. Some voiced the anxiety that ‘‘Bernhard by ascribing such disparaging language to a Jew may give the impression to bred-in-the-bone anti-Semites that this is the manner in which Jews think of us. This, in turn, will certainly feed outbreaks of hatred.’’52 Anti-Semitic diatribes appeared almost immediately in response, and in an editorial in Der Standard with the message ‘‘Storm the Heldenplatz,’’ Bernhard’s strategy is effectively illustrated as the writer falls into the trap of reinforcing Bernhard’s obsessive discourse in Heldenplatz: Bernhard uses a synthetic figure to present his insults. This figure, in order to suitably represent the anniversaries of the year, is a Jew. A Jew, analytical and intelligent (as naturally all Jews), occupies himself as a returning emigrant with the Austrian soul. His analysis (in contrast to an intelligent analysis) is a stupid one. The conclusion—a hysterical, stupefied, undifferentiated, neurotic scream.53

The discourse of seemingly more ‘‘tolerant’’ writers was a bit more circumspect than Peter Sichrovsky’s blatant anti-Semitism, for one ‘‘genteel’’ writer insisted that of course she had nothing against a Jewish theme in the repertory of the Burgtheater as such, but suggested instead that ‘‘a more pleasant play’’ such as Fiddler on the Roof should perhaps be presented. Yet others protested the debasement of the Austrian, highly cultured Jewish professor by making him appear to ‘‘howl like a German Alsatian hound.’’ Donald Daviau rightly maintains that ‘‘only in a society where prejudice exists could there be any objections’’ to this type of verbal affront: ‘‘Why should not a Jew be allowed to speak his mind like any other citizen?’’54 In addition, the Jewish community, a tiny minority in present-day Austria, having endured the campaign against the memorial to the Holocaust, Waldheim’s sordid campaign and subsequent election, and Haider’s party platform with its residues of anti-Jewish sentiment, did not greet Bernhard’s play with enthusiasm, and some objected to the non-Jew arrogating to himself the right to speak out against Austria in their supposed interest. Robert Schuster, who has withdrawn to his suburban villa in Neuhaus and, despite his awareness of the recent political climate, refuses to protest against the cur-

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rent Nazification of Austria, represents this point of view in the play. A professor emeritus, Dr. Walter B. Simon from the University of Vienna, reflects this view in his letter: As a returning Jewish emigrant and professor, I regret that I have no legal possibilities at my disposal to use against the theatrical piece Heldenplatz. I stand entirely for freedom of speech, for this right protects my freedom of speech to express my own views, but not to have them placed into someone else’s mouth. Professors after all can articulate their thoughts themselves.

The letter then continues to quote from the published excerpts in the press to express that ‘‘some Austrians (though of course not all!) are indeed ‘feeble-minded,’ otherwise a play such as Heldenplatz would, if at all, appear on one of the ‘small theater’ stages and definitely not on the stage of the Burgtheater.’’55 Others saw the play as nothing but a general provocation by the Jews themselves and concluded that Heldenplatz and the about-toopen Martin Scorcese film The Last Temptation of Christ were all part of the same plot to undermine Austrian-Christian values.56 Ironically, some Austrians used as examples of their tolerance and lack of anti-Semitism such formulations as ‘‘the worst is that Hitler had killed all the best Jews and only the worst have returned.’’57 When the press reached the ‘‘Nazi-hunter’’ Simon Wiesenthal for comments, his reply fed the anti–Bernhard/Peymann tirades even more since according to Wiesenthal ‘‘every generalization, every accusation playing up collective guilt contradicts Jewish ethics and is to be abandoned for fear of throwing together the bad with the good.’’58 A few more perceptive critics from the German press, among them Benjamin Heinrichs, observed that one can only exaggerate that which actually exists: Bernhard’s bold and also diabolical construction refuses to show the Austrian Jews in a role, which would force tears to the eyes of even the most hard-boiled anti-Semites. Nor does he show them as decent, cultivated, victims of barbarism but instead characterizes them as Austrians, as that which they themselves despise, but continue to be to the end of their days. Through this alienation effect of presenting the professor’s narrow-mindedness, his authoritarianism, and his biases against the middle-class, peasants, and the proletariat, Bernhard denies the public the ‘‘good Jew’’ as an object of identification. Nor does he cater to the pseudo-liberalism and supposed open-mindedness of the more humanistically inclined sector of the public by allowing them to wallow in benign philo-Semitism.59

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As the premiere approached, Der Standard called for a storming of the Burgtheater, and reminded its readers that due to public outcry and the storming of the stage in Frankfurt at the premiere of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Die Stadt, der Mu¨ll, und der Tod, the play had to be withdrawn. The article ends with the closing remarks that ‘‘it is wonderful that in a democracy everything is possible’’; however, the writer conveniently forgot that the ‘‘storming’’ of Fassbinder’s play in Frankfurt had to do with the audience’s outrage against the play’s anti-Semitic content. And on the day of the premiere, the front page of the Neue Kronen Zeitung presented an incendiary photograph of the Burgtheater in flames with the caption ‘‘nothing is too hot for us.’’60 The foreign press picked up this provocation, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine noted that this incitement appeared on the anniversary of the Austrian Kristallnacht when rampaging crowds burned down Jewish synagogues.61 The press, having fired up its readership since the early days of October, awaited a massive demonstration and turned out in full force many hours before the beginning of the premiere on 4 November. And since counterdemonstrations by the defenders of Bernhard and Peymann, particularly from the Austrian Federation of Writers, were also announced, a clash between the two camps was anticipated. However, despite all the attempts in the scandal sheets to sabotage the premiere, the mass demonstration proved to be a disappointment as small groups of skinheads, Christian defenders of morality, and so on, milled before the entrance holding placards with such expressive displays as ‘‘Pfui,’’ ‘‘Nestbeschmutzer,’’ and ‘‘Raus mit Peymann.’’ At the same time, the most important actors in the performance—Waldheim, Vranitzky, Haider, and Hawlicek— pleaded other engagements. The only theatrical event worth playing up was the dumping of a wagonload of horse manure in front of the Burgtheater. Thus, a line in Bernhard’s text that ‘‘this small town is a huge manure pile’’ (164) once more showed the liminal border between the theater on the stage and the theater playing itself out at the entrance to the theater. At the same time, the spectators were greeted with a nontraditional theater program which departed from the Burgtheater’s usually well-documented programs that normally include the script, background essays, and production notes. Instead, the program consisted of photographs taken in Vienna by Oliver Hermann on grey, bleak days from 11 to 13 March 1988, representing the Viennese in various situations: protests against subsidies to foreigners, the Austrian police formations in front of the Hofburg, the Viennese walking in the Volksgarten with their dogs, the ubiquitous, well-fed

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older generation in their Trachten coats and hats sitting on benches in the Volksgarten, or similarly in the coffeehouses devouring their whipped cream and pastries. These photographs were often taken with a wide-angle lens to distort the faces and expressions even further. The ‘‘photograph album’’ of Vienna also included photographs of either suggestive commercial or political posters, or photographs of Vienna’s baroque splendor taken from strange angles. Interspersed with these were photographs of barred gateways, iron fences, barbed wire, and doors with ‘‘no entry’’ signs. The epigraph for this collection of photographs comes from Bernhard’s epigraph to the play itself: It may be that once or twice during the year one can feel at home in Vienna when one walks on the Kohlmarkt or on the Graben then onto the Singerstrasse in the spring air. (7)

Having been so insulted even before the performance, those protestors who had bought tickets attempted to undermine the performance with loud booing, whistling, stamping, shouts of ‘‘boring,’’ ‘‘banal,’’ ‘‘stupid,’’ outcries of ‘‘God preserve Austria,’’ and the unfurling of a huge banner—‘‘Raus mit Peymann’’—from the third balcony. ‘‘Blasphemy,’’ cried out one protestor, and since the play, as a commentator observed, didn’t attack God as such, but the Nazis, the outcry reaffirmed the text that Austria was ‘‘nothing but a nest for Nazis.’’62 Despite the outcries, or indeed perhaps due to them, the ovation, as Peymann and Bernhard appeared on the stage at the conclusion of the performance, continued for forty-five minutes. Following the premiere, the press, perhaps somewhat chagrined at the failure of the boycott, no longer used the strategy of attacking Bernhard and Peymann for insulting Austria’s honor but rather of discrediting the play and production as ‘‘boring, ‘‘cynical,’’ and ‘‘stupid.’’ These examples of the responses generated by Bernhard’s discourse in Heldenplatz illustrate the particular dynamics and potential for conflict evoked by Bernhard’s excessive language. The arguments for or against Bernhard frequently have little to do with what he actually said, for as he himself has observed, reality is almost entirely circumscribed by discourse, not as individual creation, but as part of the general field of discourse itself. Consequently, the reception of Heldenplatz does not represent a unique reaction to the play but continues the discourse set into motion by the conflation of all of Bernhard’s texts, as the obsessive monologue, the single droning voice is endlessly reformulated, corrected, and filtered through a

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hundred different registers. What emerges is language spinning on itself in a perpetually arrested inconclusiveness. There is no respite from despair in Bernhard’s plays, and Heldenplatz, as does Eve of Retirement, Force of Habit, and Histrionics, shows characters as roles that are reified and detached from human intentionality and expressivity to be transformed into an inevitable destiny for their bearers. Racism is shown to be institutionalized, reified, and accepted as inevitable, and anti-Semitism is not the result of sociohistorical development, but, as quite simply, the natural state of affairs. The merging of the stage and reality from the months of diatribes in the press and in the arena of politics appeared in Bernhard’s Heldenplatz as a refraction of the degenerate language used so automatically in the press, and which by virtue of its ready-made, dead cliche´s denied all the actors, those on stage and off, any possibility of individualism and expression. What also emerged was the realization that the actors on stage and off, as well as the spectators as actors, had carefully studied their entrances. Theater thus became not only a metaphor for human experience but also denied possibility of representation as both the actors on stage and off merged in the continuous utterances. Bernhard’s theater became an arena for obsessiveness and obscenity to be played out as the ‘‘performers inside the performers,’’ and ‘‘performers inside the performers of the performers’’ foregrounded the artificiality and excesses of this extended theatrical space. And in the case of Heldenplatz, the theatrical space had been extended to include all of Austria as tirades similar to those ‘‘quoted’’ in the play pervaded the land. One German critic observed that Bernhard’s technique depended on reversal: That there are more Nazis in Vienna now as in 1938 is not true; nor is it true that the universities are filled with idiots. That Vienna is in a total stupefied state of abjection is also not true. Bernhard has the effect of an old Austrian mortar. He doesn’t strike the target, but the effect of demoralization is enormous. Everything that isn’t true, becomes true.63

Heldenplatz and Bernhard’s last novel, Ausloschung: Ein Zerfall, 1986 [Extinction, 1995] represent his most bitter critiques of Austria. In Extinction, Bernhard’s use of the epigraph from Montaigne, ‘‘I feel death ever pinching me by the throat, or pulling me by the back,’’ is repeated in the main’s character’s observation, ‘‘We populate a wound.’’ The narrator’s name, Franz-Josef Murnau, marks him as heir to old imperial Austria’s fate: decline, failure, and obliteration. A rootless intellectual living in a self-imposed exile in Rome, Murnau’s mission is to teach Gambetti, his student, the mysteries of

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German literature, particularly Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess. The obsession with Kafka becomes a veritable trial, when upon the grotesque death of his parents, he inherits the family estate, Wolfsegg, like Austria once grand and mighty, now shabby and in disrepair, its legacy squandered by degenerate heirs. Despite the protests of his sisters, who still wear the Trachten dirndls of their youth, Murnau leaves the estate of his fascist parents to the Jewish community in Vienna, headed by his former school friend, now Rabbi Eisenberg. Like so many of Bernhard’s protagonists, he then commits suicide. Extinction represents Bernhard’s most bitter assault on Austrian repression, self-satisfaction, and complacency, and he diagnoses the perpetuation of National Socialism as the particular form of modern Austrian degeneration and disease. However, both in Heldenplatz and Extinction, Bernhard does not succumb to the facile temptation of moralizing politics, since for him both the politics of the right and left represent inclinations to authoritarianism. Bernhard doubts all forms of authority, including putatively utopian ones that he views as yet another danger of seeking illusions. While in many of Bernhard’s novels protagonists divest themselves destructively and irresponsibly of their inheritance, Josef Schuster’s leap from his apartment window in Heldenplatz and Murnau’s suicide at the conclusion of Extinction can appear to be consciously connected to the fate of another Austrian, the essayist Jean Ame´ry, born Hans Maier, whose Jewish father, an Austrian patriot, died fighting for Franz Joseph. Reared as an Austrian by his mother, Ame´ry did not think of his Jewishness until the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 transformed him into an alien in his own homeland. Surviving Auschwitz, Ame´ ry attempted to forge a new identity for himself by creating Ame´ry as an anagram out of Maier, and without surrendering to the sentimentalities of the Holocaust industry that was just beginning to flourish, in his essays he expressed his resentment and hatred of what the Austrians had done to him. Though he changed his name and country, he continued to write in the language of his oppressors, and in 1978 Ame´ry returned to Salzburg with the express purpose of hanging himself. It is Ame´ry’s voice that accompanies the resignation to their fates of both Josef Schuster and Franz Joseph Murnau: Just to think of Austria, a country that’s disfigured, degenerate, and done for, is enough to make you vomit, to say nothing of the utterly degenerate state, whose vulgarity and baseness are unparalleled not only in Europe but in the rest of the world—a state that has for decades been run by unprincipled, degenerate, brainless governments. First by the vul-

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gar, vicious National Socialist regime, then by the no less vulgar, vicious and criminal pseudosocialism that succeeded it, I had told Gambetti on the Pincio, as I now recalled, standing by the open grave. The destruction and annihilation of our country has been encompassed by National Socialism and pseudosocialism, aided and abetted by Austrian Catholicism, which has always cast its blight upon Austria. . . . Every morning when we wake up we ought to be utterly ashamed of today’s Austria. Time and again I tell myself that we love Austria but hate the Austrian state. . . . To be an Austrian today is a death sentence, and all Austrians are subject to this death sentence, I had said, as I now recalled, standing by the open grave. Everything Austrian is characterless, I said. Whenever one comes back to Austria, one feels dirty, I thought standing by the open grave. The men wearing the insignia of Blood Order, the SS officers supporting themselves on their crutches and their sticks, the National Socialist heroes, did not spare me a glance, as they say.64

The theater of Austria as the last stage on which Bernhard was to play out his role of provocateur continued beyond the grave, for Bernhard, already deathly ill during the histrionics surrounding Heldenplatz, died three months after the opening on 12 February 1989. The liminal quality between fiction and reality becomes evident, for Bernhard had previously noted that he would die at age fifty-five; his obsessive exactitude is suggested by the proximity of his birthday to his death and the fact that this was the fortieth anniversary of the death of his beloved grandfather. An injection by his half-brother, Dr. Peter Fabjan, a physician, allowed him to die by way of an assisted suicide. In Heldenplatz Frau Zittel mentions that Jews are buried in plain rough coffins, and Bernhard desired to be buried in a similar manner, his body wrapped in unbleached linen. Nor did he allow his countrymen to bury him with the pomp that the death of Austria’s most famous writer would have inspired. Instead, much like the silence surrounding Samuel Beckett’s death and funeral, Bernhard’s death was not announced to the press until after his quiet funeral at the cemetery in Do¨blinger, his character Josef Schuster’s burial place as well. Bernhard’s will ‘‘explicitly’’ stresses that he wants nothing to do with the Austrian state and ‘‘rejects every attempt by the state to associate itself with his person and his work for all time.’’ Bernhard’s histrionic public persona is ultimately most evident in his will, for its terms illustrate his determination to conceal his private self from public view. He forbids the scrutiny and publication of his private papers, correspondence, and even unpublished manuscripts, which include a partially completed novel, Neufundland, and two plays. He went so far as to add to his will a special codicil to publicize his con-

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tempt for his compatriots. It prohibits any republication, performance, or recitation of his already published works in Austria for seventy years, the duration of his copyright. Only those plays currently under contract at the Burgtheater, including Heldenplatz, can be performed for the duration of that contract. Thus even in death Bernhard’s monomaniacal pursuit of his favorite theme suggests a man who yearns for public attention, even notoriety and, as he most likely expected, the actors who had participated with such agitation during the Heldenplatz affair now felt that they could afford to be forgiving. Indeed, shortly after the announcement of Bernhard’s death, President Waldheim excused Bernhard’s misanthropic nature as a consequence of ‘‘his deeply troubled youth.’’ Bernhard had always seen the world as a theatrical comedy, for he was fundamentally afraid of so-called tragedies, which according to him often yield to an excess of sentimentality. Bernhard’s final lesson is not to the theater itself but to the world as theater: No tragedy, not even the most terrible, can justify us in falsifying our thoughts, falsifying the world, falsifying everything—in siding with hypocrisy, in other words. I have often observed that people who throughout their lives have been judged distasteful are spoken of after their death as though they had never been repulsive and distasteful. This has always struck me as tasteless and embarrassing. When someone dies, his death does not make him a different person, a better character: it does not make him a genius if he was an idiot, or a saint if he was a monster. It is in the nature of things that we have to endure such a calamity and suffer all its attendant horrors, in the certain knowledge that the true image of the dead has not changed. . . .65

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7 Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest: Examining Postrevolutionary Disillusionment CARYL CHURCHILL’S MAD FOREST, SUBTITLED A PLAY FROM ROMANIA, WAS produced in 1990 and, like many of her other plays, started as a workshop project at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Churchill, the director of the play, Mark Wing-Davey, and a group of ten graduate students went to Bucharest to get the background on recent political changes in Romania. Much of the work on the project was done collaboratively with the students at the Romanian Caragiale Institute of Theatre and Cinema. The spontaneous events of the Romanian revolution were at this time still unexplored, and hence, in relation to the other East European countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, where the process of the overthrow of Communist regimes was both documented and analyzed since the inception of the Solidarity movement in Poland, Romania’s political and economic situation remained a dense, impenetrable forest. The title of her play hints at Churchill’s own confusion about Romania’s political situation, for as she explains in the introductory notes to Mad Forest, ‘‘on the plain where Bucharest now stands there used to be a large forest . . . that could only be crossed on foot and was impenetrable for the foreigner who did not know the paths.’’ She informs us that the irritated horsemen who became lost in the forest named the forest Teleorman, or ‘‘mad forest.’’1 The title thus alludes to the difficulty of finding access to the ‘‘paths’’ of the subject by the foreign playwright and workshop group, and relates to the tentative, inconclusive shape the play assumes by ‘‘going around the subject’’ instead of penetrating through the mazes of history and ideology in Romania. Nonetheless, Mad Forest illustrates that despite Churchill’s disingenuous protests of being lost in the mazes of Romania’s history, she and her workshop conducted extensive research, not only on the present reality in Romania, but also on the more distant past. Ultimately, Churchill’s analysis in the play pres231

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ents a sophisticated intertextual assemblage of continuities and discontinuities in the history of Romania. Though Churchill’s Mad Forest reveals her understanding of the political events in Romania, she does not presume to write yet another analysis of Romania’s political corruption. Instead she sets out to write a play that presents the confusion, repetition, and inevitability of being lost among the ‘‘isms’’ and their variations that proliferated due to the collapse of an established order. Wing-Davey, the director, echoes Churchill’s point of view that the play ‘‘isn’t a documentary,’’ nor are the actors ‘‘trying to be foreigners.’’ ‘‘Much of the play is about being a Westerner in a foreign place,’’ he explains, ‘‘and the phrase-book sentences that open each of the scenes are there as reminders that this is simply a partial view; it’s not the truth.’’2 Each scene of the play’s twenty-four scenes is announced by one of the company reading from a phrase-book as if ‘‘for English tourists’’ first in Romanian, then in English, and once again in Romanian. For example, the first scene opens with the sentence: ‘‘Lucia are patru oua. Lucia has four eggs’’ (13). This lesson in Romanian serves both as an indicator that eggs are central to the scene and also points to our limited ‘‘vocabulary’’ in understanding the luxury of these eggs in a country overwhelmed with economic deprivations. Similarly in the following scene the question ‘‘Who has a match?’’ announces not only the power failure but also the failure of ‘‘illumination’’ on the part of those participating in the scene. Even though as the play proceeds the sentences that announce each scene become more complex, we as foreigners learning Romanian from the tourist phrase-book neither know the situation to which we can apply the phrase, ‘‘Ciinelui ii e foame. The dog is hungry’’ (44), nor do we know the rules of grammar in order to construct our own sentences from the very limited vocabulary at our disposal. To illustrate the impossibility of constructing meaning out of these elementary situations, the last scene is spoken entirely in Romanian as the guests at Florina’s wedding assault each other with randomly numbered phrases: 1. ‘‘This country needs a strong man.’’ 8. ‘‘We have to put the past behind us.’’ 14. ‘‘You’re not going to marry a Hungarian.’’ 9. ‘‘l don’t care what they’re called it’s the same people.’’ 14. ‘‘But what does it mean? Whose side were they on.’’ Not only are the sentences overlapping, but by group 14 everyone is talking at once, leaving in the end only the vampire’s words to be heard alone: ‘‘You begin to want blood. Your limbs ache, your head burns, you have to keep moving faster and faster’’ (85–87). Churchill’s self-reflexive use of dialogue of overlapping speeches

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7: CARYL CHURCHILL’S MAD FOREST

fractures the language of individual subjects. These near-cacophonic vocalizations undermine the possibility of arriving at a single conclusion. Thus, Churchill demonstrates that the speed and violence of the events prevents any satisfactory resolution. A characteristic of Churchill’s plays is that representation of events is valid only when it opens up a space for reflection on the difficulty or impossibility of representation, and hence interpretation. In addition, the events are not recounted as an unbroken narrative line, but as a collage of related fragments. Churchill differs in both treatment and method from other British playwrights who also address the consequences of the collapse of the Communist order. Both Howard Brenton in his Moscow Gold (1990) and David Edgar in The Shape of the Table (1990) rely on Brechtian paradigms of power structures. Similarly, British novelist Julian Barnes in Porcupine (1992) begins with a familiar scenario of a deposed Communist Party leader on trial for the old ideology. Brenton, Edgar, and Barnes create postmodernist pastiches of Socialist Realism’s ‘‘purposeful’’ writing, and their texts playfully imitate the grand narratives of the trials of the Communist national hero as he attempts to defend himself against the new ‘‘democratic’’ order. Though Churchill, like the others, relies on Brecht’s political aesthetics as a working philosophy for her workshop method, she has abandoned Brecht’s particular brand of Hegelian Marxism as ‘‘just a slogan for linear historical progressivists.’’3 In this manner Churchill rejects on the one hand the master narratives of Socialist Realism and on the other Brechtian epic construction. If social change is the key to understanding Brechtian Epic Theatre, Churchill’s Mad Forest marks a break with the metanarrative of progress, and instead displays ‘‘a universal, diffuse cynicism.’’4 Churchill also avoids the traps of pastiche that effects either a Social Realist format or that invokes nostalgic references to Vsevolod Meyerhold’s constructivist spectacles or to Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre theory. 5 Instead, Mad Forest functions more like a Marcel Duchamp readymade constructed out of recontextualized elements from what is already there in the complexities of the historical mosaic of Romania’s past. As in her other plays, the self-reflexive devices in Mad Forest point to a double strain in Churchill’s work: On the one hand, she shows a commitment to the apparatus of representation using actors as obvious temporary speakers representing characters. The doubling and tripling of actors in various roles in a number of her plays comments about unchanging human oppression and pain. She uses this device when she explores the conflict between feminist ideology and

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individual success that underwrites bourgeois feminism in Top Girls, the cyclical exploitation of workers in Fen, and the long-running hegemony of paranoia and doublethink upon the individual psyche in Mad Forest. On the other hand, particularly in Mad Forest, Churchill pays consistent though less obvious attention to the powers of theatrical illusion, to modalities of representation that subvert what we normally call the content. In her ‘‘snapshot’’ tourist approach in Mad Forest, Churchill avoids linear narrative, and through the discontinuous portrayal of the disintegrating effects of external disturbances, she also rejects a Hegelian dialectical view of history in favor of a feminist ethnography. In refusing to bend to frameworks of the imposed authority of ideologies, Churchill opens up a ‘‘space’’ for post-Communist discourse. Not only does Churchill’s approach historicize the events by juxtaposing shameful events from Romanian history with those of the more recent uprisings and reversals, but she also provides a onepage ‘‘diary of events’’ in the published version of her play. The diary extends from December 1989 to October 1990 and focuses on the front-page news in Romania: the demonstrations on 16–17 December in Timosoara in support of the Hungarian priest Laszlo Tokes and the subsequent shooting of the demonstrators; the 21 December shouting down of Nicolae Ceausescu’s speech in Bucharest and the ensuing shooting of the demonstrators, among them students; the 22 December reversals when the army changed over to the side of the demonstrators; the occupation of the TV station by the resistance; the escape of the Ceausescus; the formation of the National Salvation Front; the 25 December capture, trial, and execution by a military tribunal of both Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. However, next in sequence in mid-January another event is inserted—‘‘a phone call from the director Mark Wing-Davey to writer Caryl Churchill.’’ The juxtaposition of these two disparate ‘‘events’’ suggests that they are somehow organically connected (5). The diary thus appears to demonstrate, as Donna Soto-Morettini mentions, ‘‘a synchronicity of events—revolution and play about revolution happening all at once.’’6 The subtitle of Mad Forest—A Play from Romania—suggests a problem of perspective since according to the diary, Churchill’s experience in Romania consisted only of a brief visit by ‘‘director and writer’’ to Romania during 3–7 March, a trip made presumably to set the groundwork for the subsequent trip by Churchill, the director, the students and the stage crew from 31 March to 7 April to meet with Romanian students from the Caragiale Institute. With the Romanian students acting as interpreters, Churchill and the gradu-

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ate students conducted quasi-ethnographic fieldwork consisting of interviews and conversations with ‘‘ordinary’’ people in the street. In a subversive manner, Churchill raises questions about the legitimacy of the undertaking to represent complicated social and political change based on such limited exposure that she provides as evidence of her play from Romania. Consequently, Churchill leaves the judgment of the accuracy of her interpretation open to the interpretation of spectators and readers of her play. The diary continues to present the two simultaneous developments in May on the same level of significance: Anti-National Salvation Front demonstrators occupy the center of Bucharest in early May; the reversals of the 20 May election results indicate large majorities for lliescu and the Front; and 21 May rehearsals begin for Mad Forest. The organic synchronicity of changes in Romania and the process of the play are brought to an ironic juxtaposition when on 13 June the miners enter Bucharest to crush anti-Front demonstrations, and Mad Forest opens at the Central School Theatre in London. The diary ends with a focus on the events surrounding the production of the play, for on 17 September Churchill’s play is performed at the National Theatre in Bucharest and opens at the Royal Court Theatre in London for a brief period from 12 to 27 October. Even in the ‘‘diary of events’’ the facts of history and chronology turn out to be contested representations. Despite, however, the ‘‘naı¨ve’’ presumption on Churchill’s part to write a play from Romania, she avoids constructing meaning from her ethnographic excursion into post-Ceausescu Romania by presenting documentary material, eyewitness accounts, and her own structuring imagination to dramatize not the experience itself but the texture of that experience. Though initially from reading Churchill’s diary one could criticize her presumption to write a play on such limited exposure to the events themselves, the play’s distancing effects provide the spectator the opposite text—that of finding a path through the ‘‘mad forest’’ of Romanian politics to reach an understanding of the process. Not only was it difficult for foreigners to understand the changes taking place from moment to moment but it was also as difficult for Romanians to determine the nature of political mutations in their country from the countless postmortems discussing whether the rapid sequence of political reversals in December 1989 represented liberation, revolution, uprising, coup d’e´tat, end of the evil empire, or simply ‘‘a change.’’ Churchill’s play mirrors the confusion of the characters as they ask themselves whether ‘‘the old regime is really dead’’7 or whether it has merely changed into ‘‘new clothes.’’ In a

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scene describing the confusion resulting from the shooting of the protesters and the subsequent invisible shifts in power, one of the patients brought in to the hospital voices the paranoia that all the characters in Churchill’s play feel as a result of not knowing from day to day what really happened: Did we have a revolution or putsch? Who was shooting on the 21st? And who was shooting on the 22nd? Was the army shooting on the 21st or did some not shoot or were the Securiate disguised in army uniforms? . . . Most important of all were the terrorists and the army really fighting or were they only pretending to fight? And for whose benefit? And by whose orders? Where did the flags come from? Who put loudhailers in the square? How could they publish a newspaper so soon? Why did no one turn off the power at the TV? Who got Ceausescu to call everyone together? And is he really dead? How many people died at Timosoara? And where are the bodies? Who mutilated the bodies? And were they mutilated after they’d been killed specially to provoke the revolution? By whom? For whose benefit? Or was there a drug in the food at Timosoara to make the people more aggressive? Who poisoned the water in Bucharest? (50)

In addition to her focus on contemporary events in Romania, Churchill adds layers of historical traces from Romania’s past. She rearranges and combines recent events from the Romanian history with those that had been left out, put aside, overlooked, and forgotten. Istvan Rev observes that ‘‘forgetting is constitutive, an essential element of ‘remembering otherwise,’ of rewriting history, of reconstituting identity. By ‘remembering otherwise,’ the historian constructs an alternative version that liberates one (a person, a group, a nation) from one’s past. Forgetting thus has a liberating effect. But what is left out naturally has not been lost forever.‘‘8 Since forgetting represents not only a possible loss but a conscious act directed against the existing recollections of Romania’s World War II period, Churchill inserts back into the text of Mad Forest traces from the past that had been covered up for the sake of forgetting. Despite Churchill’s apparent sophistication in her approach to Romanian history, she plays at being a naive tourist to whom everything seems grotesque and bizarre. For example she playfully inserts surreal elements into the performance: a vampire, a dog, a rat, a dead grandmother, and a flying angel. The vampire, a familiar figure recognized by everyone, has mutated from his noble romantic past as the mythical Count Dracula from Transylvania into a much more common bloodsucker. In general, Churchill’s reliance on mythical archetypes serves to reveal that the specters from the past

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are not that different from the living ghouls of today. To show how ‘‘real’’ these apparitions are, Churchill does not resort to special effects, for she mentions in the production notes, ‘‘The Vampire was not dressed as a vampire’’ and ‘‘We didn’t use a prop rat’’ (9). Thus, the vampire is just an ordinary Romanian, who having smelled the blood of the revolution from his not so distant past, reappears on the scene of collective vampirism during the December 1989 events quite ‘‘undead,’’ though unrecognized by anyone but a starving dog: Vampire. Nobody knew who was doing the killing, I could come up behind a man in a crowd. Dog. Good times. Vampire. There’s been a lot of good times over the years. Dog. Not for me. (44–45)

The vampire’s reference to ‘‘a lot of good times over the years’’ allows Churchill to allude to the World War II and Romania’s alliance with Nazi Germany. Churchill illustrates that the past inevitably bubbles up, for one of the consequences of the signing of a pact between lon Antonescu and Adolf Hitler in 1940 was that Romania unleashed its already strong anti-Semitic movement. As was typical of native fascist movements in other cultures, Romanian culture also posited a pristine ethnic ego, an ego upon which Romania’s capacity for survival depended and which had to be nourished and protected from external corruption by others including Jews, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Carpatho-Russians, and gypsies. Ultimately, the emerging fascist regime of the late 1930s constructed its ideology from these romantic notions of nation to create a more categorical, rigid, xenophobic, and intolerant state ideology. In particular, the extreme right-wing student movement, calling itself the Legion of the Archangel Michael, served as a catalyst for Romanian anti-Semitism and later transmuted itself into a SA-type paramilitary terror gang calling itself the Iron Guard. The outcome of the Iron Guard’s superefficient hunting down of Jews was that the Jewish population in Romania, which in 1939 numbered eight hundred thousand, the third largest concentration in Europe, was reduced by two thirds by 1944.9 The Romanian playwright Eugene lonesco recounts how in the early years of the Iron Guards, a teacher in his Iyceé asked with his usual ‘‘kind smile’’ whether all the Jews in Bessarabia had been killed: ‘‘It’s not too soon’’: And he was happy. I don’t know what makes me angrier: their stupidity or their bestiality. On the street, the owner of a creamery says: ‘‘All this

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is on account of the Jews.’’ Then spitting off to one side, he adds with the appearance of having thought profoundly: ‘‘It’s because of them that our children are dying.’’10

In a similar method to lonesco’s exploration of the epidemic of conformity that he diagnosed as ‘‘rhinoceritis’’ in his play Rhinoceros (1959), Churchill illustrates by means of the illogic of her characters’ discourse the continuities of fascist ideology. She accomplishes this by projecting Romania’s shameful history into the present in a scene in the first act in which an ‘‘angel’’ appears out of the past to comfort a priest. The priest confesses to the angel that he is ashamed that the Church has not taken a stand against the repression by the Romanian Securiate and has instead collaborated with Ceausescu in denouncing parishioners: Priest. Everyone will think we’re cowards. Angel. No no no. Flying about in the blue. Priest. Yes. Yes. Pause. You’ve never been political? Angel. Very little. The Iron Guard used to be rather charming and called themselves the League of the Archangel Michael and carried my picture about. They had lovely processions. So I dabbled. Priest. But they were fascists. Angel. They were mystical. Priest. The Iron Guard threw Jews out of windows in ’37, my father remembers it. He shouted and they beat him up. Angel. Politics, you see. Their politics weren’t very pleasant. I try to keep clear of the political side. You should do the same. (22)

The priest’s conversation with the angel reveals that no comfort can be found even in the higher spheres, for the angel suggests that the only recourse is to ‘‘sink down and down inside oneself,’’ where one can fly about in the blue, for ‘‘that is what the church can give people, they can fly about inside that blue’’ (21). When Flavia Antonescu, who is a schoolteacher, has doubts about her lectures on Ceausescu, she can only sink down inside herself and talk to the ghost of her grandmother, despite that in her husband Mihai’s presence she is steadfastly preparing her lesson plan for her elementary school class. Intimacy in relationships is undermined by fear of being overheard. Only in exchanges between the real and otherworldly characters are questions of authenticity raised, for as Flavia’s exchange with the ghost of her grandmother suggests, it isn’t simply thought and identity that are suppressed as an outcome of ‘‘sinking down inside oneself ’’:

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Grandmother. You’re pretending this isn’t your life. You think it’s going to happen some other time. When you’re dead you’ll realize you were alive now. When I was your age the war was starting. I welcomed the Nazis because I thought they’d protect us from the Russians and I welcomed the Communists because they’d protect us from the Germans. I had no principles. My husband was killed. But at least I know that was what happened to me. There were things I did. I did them. Or sometimes I did nothing. It was me doing nothing. Flavia. But nobody’s living. You can’t blame me. Grandmother. You’d better start. Flavia. No, Granny, it would hurt. Grandmother. Well. [Silence.] (26)

Inauthenticity in meaning, language, and identity leads for a search for absolutes: freedom, equality, God. Even the confused priest imagines a certain safety in confiding to an angel floating in ‘‘the blue sky’’ since ‘‘no one’s ever known an Angel to work for the Securiate. . . .’’ (21). But Ceausescu’s brand of wholesale repression leaves only a space for empty rhetoric; it is Big Brother oratory simultaneously infected with the bombast of the old regime: Angel. When people come into the church they are free. Even if they know there are Securiate in church with them. . . . Even if you say Ceausescu, Ceausescu, because the Romanian church is a church of freedom. Not outer freedom of course but inner freedom. Priest. I don’t trust you any more. Angel. That’s a pity. Who else can you trust? (21–22)

Since the young characters in Churchill’s play grew up entirely under Ceausescu’s mythmaking institutional structures, they have no sense of past history. In fact, Churchill’s characters appear to suffer from collective amnesia regarding the truth of the past, or as Rev comments, ‘‘How much worse if this amnesia is replaced by false memories, a nonself.’’11 False memories may lead to the writing of history as a triumphant one, or as a story of resistance leading to liberation, or as a memory lapse erasing Romania’s role in World War II and forty-odd years of Communism. Consequently, in the rewriting of history, blame can be placed on various causalities such as the nomenklatura, informers, Soviet domination, minority populations such as the Hungarians and the gypsies, the plots of bordering nations such as Hungary, and, ultimately, the CIA. As a result, the real events in Romanian history such as the Holocaust are still forbidden topics, and revisionist historians are hard at

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work rewriting history, depicting a new version of Antonescu as a national hero. Consequently, Romanian fascism has not yet been brought before the judgment of history or nation. Similarly, although the Ceausescus are gone, their dirty secrets are scarcely known to the Romanian people, and journalists who once praised Ceausescu, then denounced him, now clamor for an ethnically pure Romania.12 Churchill’s approach in Mad Forest mirrors the micropolitics of everyday life and the continuities of racism, nationalism, and hatred of ethnic minorities as they are perpetuated within the tightly confining ideologies and limited economic and social structures in which the characters are immersed. This is particularly true of characters such as Bogdan Vladu and his son Gabriel, members of the working class and supporters of the Blut und Boden platform of the Peasants Party. They are against lliescu’s National Salvation Front, for they foresee that despite the Front’s democratic platform, the situation of the oppressed workers most likely will not change. To illustrate Bogdan’s and Gabriel’s alienation from the changes that are being promoted by the former Communist Party members, Churchill gradually reveals Bogdan and Gabriel’s paranoia as well as their nostalgia toward old-style fascist authoritarianism by focusing on the constant slippage in logic in their discourse. One of Churchill’s methods is to focus on repetitions such as, ‘‘This country needs a strong man’’ (77, 85), that are uttered by Bogdan in two quite different contexts. The other is to exhibit the lack of logical links in the platform the characters support as they argue for privatization on the one hand and support of the Peasants Party based entirely on nostalgia, ethnic solidarity, and fascist paranoia on the other. Umberto Eco observes that one of the characteristics of Ur-Fascism is the ‘‘privilege to be born in the same country. Since the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies, the root of Ur-Fascist psychology is an obsession with a plot, preferably an international one. The followers must feel besieged.’’13 Churchill effectively reveals to what extent Bogdan and Gabriel have appropriated the discourse of Ur-Fascism, and their support of the Peasants Party is simply a variation on the same paranoia as that promoted by Antonescu in the pre–World War II period. Only the scapegoats have changed, for now the Hungarians, instead of the Jews, have become the target of xenophobia in Romania. Private schools, private hospitals. I’ve seen what happens to old people. I want to buy my father a decent death. I support the Peasants Party be-

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cause my father’s a peasant. I’m not ashamed of that. They should have their land because their feet are in the earth and they know things nobody else knows. Birds, frogs, cows, god, the direction of the wind. CIA, KGB, we’re all in the hands of foreign agents. That’s one point where I’m right behind Ceausescu. If they want to live in Romania they can speak Romanian. (81–83)

Despite Churchill’s obvious interest in the effect of politics on the individual, her approach is characterized by a marked absence of any direct portrayal of political events. As Tony Mitchell mentions, ‘‘By concentrating exclusively on subjects who are not directly connected to the Ceausescu regime, Churchill is still able to portray a representative cross-section of society, which is linked by what she has described as ‘a whole spectrum of paranoia at one end, stretching through to a very reasonable suspicion at the other.’ ’’14 Instead, Churchill focuses on the predicaments and power relations that affect the everyday life of ordinary families, and political figures are banished to the background to serve as indicators of how the broader political scenario connects to everyday life, how the power of unseen systems controls human thought and behavior, and how the symbols of suppression regulate, govern, and ultimately eliminate resistance. In Mad Forest Churchill uses a number of a distancing techniques to question society’s assumption of viewing certain relationships as ‘‘natural.’’ Among these devices is a self-reflexive presentational technique of doubling or tripling up actors in a number of roles as eleven actors play thirty-seven roles with an age range of eight to over seventy and encompassing ‘‘unreal’’ characters such as an angel, a vampire, a dog, and a ghost. Churchill’s demystification of theater as a site for representing ‘‘truth’’ calls attention to the very structure of the theatrical sign as something strangely duplicitous, since while the sign asserts an identity it at the same time manifests a division. Churchill also recognizes that the insidious use of representation is part of the staging of a dictator’s power, evident in the simulation of power Ceausescu attempted in his ultimately uncompleted presidential palace. Elin Diamond explains that the theater is ‘‘governed by the logos of the playwright’s text,’’ and actors represent fictional entities of that text ‘‘to produce a unique temporal and spatial framework or dramatic ‘world.’ ’’ However, according to Diamond, Churchill’s texts ‘‘have become increasingly attentive to the ideological nature of the seeable’’ in order to illustrate that ‘‘seeing’’ is never a neutral act. What Churchill wishes us to see is not an alternative world con-

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stituted by alternative stereotypes. That would be to replicate the procedures, if not the precise substance, of a world she wishes us to see as transparent. Her aim is to explore the insidious power of images that are not only forced upon the characters, but also, at times, embraced by them. Her political imagination maintains a supply of images to be opposed to each other, but her theatrical imagination is committed more to exploring than to recommending alternatives.15 The play is constructed in three acts. Against a many-layered background, Churchill etches the relationships of two families, one initially accommodating to the Ceausescu regime, the other divided in its attitude. The first act, entitled ‘‘Lucia’s Wedding,’’ concerns the lives of the Vladu and Antonescu families and portrays fictional events leading up to the wedding of Lucia Vladu to an American. The many scenes leading up to this ‘‘happy’’ event suggest that Lucia’s marriage to the American Wayne is an escape from the limited economic possibilities in Romania. This act takes place before the overthrow of Ceausescu and reflects the atmosphere of isolation, mistrust, and deep divisions both within and between the families. While these symptoms in capitalist societies tend to be ‘‘private’’ concerns, Churchill connects these scenes to the practices of Ceausescu’s special brand of wholesale repression that operated effectively in both private and public spheres. This climate is evident in the opening scene when the entire company recites with ‘‘smiling’’ faces a poem in Romanian in praise of Elena Ceausescu while ‘‘stirring’’ Romanian music is played in the background (13). The plot of the two weddings that dominates the structure of the play is purely external and essentially meaningless. In contrast, a plurality of reflexive pictures of basic situations call the spectator’s attention to what is already the same in each of the snapshot scenes. The snapshots in the first part include not only close-ups of ‘‘familiar’’ scenes such as family together at home in the evening, but also the trials of everyday life, visits to the doctor, talking to the Securiate, standing in line to buy meat, a classroom scene, two men sitting in the sun, waiting for the trolley. The first act ultimately concludes with the group portrait at Lucia’s wedding. The first act is followed by ‘‘December,’’ which consists of speakers representing different roles in society: students, a bulldozer driver, a doctor, a member of the Securiate, a housepainter, a painter, a translator, and others. Though the speakers of these roles are represented by the same actors that played some of the characters in the first act, Churchill allows the spectators to reach their own conclusions about the continuity of roles from one act to the other. In fact, even in the first act

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the actor playing the priest in one scene also plays the Securiate man in another and ultimately the vampire in yet another scene as well. That he ‘‘speaks’’ the role of a soldier in the ‘‘December’’ sequence suggests that roles as such are impermanent and can be ‘‘acted’’ by anyone. In a society undergoing rapid political changes, ultimately it seems not to matter what ideological position a role conveys since temporary roles can become permanent roles. However, as is evident from the third act, ‘‘Florina’s Wedding,’’ roles that seemed to have been life-roles due to the status they were accorded in society, such as a Securiate officer, an architect for Ceausescu’s palace, or a teacher of an elementary school, suddenly collapse and leave the ‘‘actors’’ without lines. In the confusion of the ‘‘December’’ events and their aftermath, these actors in particular must find another life-script. However, despite their willingness to adjust to the new freedom that abandonment of a constricted role had imposed on them, the characters find that they cannot forsake the old familiar lines that they had learned so well during the Ceausescu years. The fact that the play returns to the beginning in enacting yet another ‘‘wedding’’ suggests that while there has been change, the continuities of ideological rituals continue. Thus, despite the fact that weddings suggest beginnings, in Churchill’s Mad Forest, Florina’s wedding represents a return to old rituals of hate rather than love. By calling attention to the way politics affects private life, Churchill’s play illustrates effectively the particularities of Romanian politics. What distinguished Romanian Communism from the international model promoted by the Soviet Union was that Romania’s historical predisposition to nationalism had been central to Romanian culture and politics long before the emergence of the Romanian Communist Party. From the nineteenth century, the Romanian elite relied upon an image of themselves that was ‘‘historically’’ rooted in the past, and their quest for origins was strongly linked to the pursuit of the ‘‘truth’’ about the their nation. They rediscovered and mythicized their Dacian roots, for these roots made the Romanians appear to be the direct inheritors of the culture of the Roman Empire, and thus this ‘‘national essence’’ ennobled their past and made them culturally superior to their more ‘‘primitive’’ Slavic and Hungarian neighbors. The Romanians’ assertion of their national essence also played a role in the retributions they enacted periodically during the Ceausescu years against the Hungarians that culminated in the events in Timosoara in early December 1989. As is evident in Churchill’s play, the hatred for Hun-

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garians living within Romania’s borders creates a climate of xenophobia and resentment. When Ceausescu broke away from the brotherhood of nations under the Soviet Union, he relied on the idea of the national myth to consolidate his power. Ceausescu was assisted in his ascent to power by anti-Communist nations, who in the game of political dominoes played during the Cold War promoted Ceausescu as a rebel against Communism. As Norman Manea ironically observes, ‘‘the best-loved son of his people’’ was received by all the heads of state of both East and West,16 thereby reaffirming for the Romanians the myth of their small country’s significance in world events on both sides of the Cold War front. To consolidate his status, Ceausescu attempted to overwhelm both his people and visiting outsiders with the power of his state. He planned for the construction of a palace that would once and for all demonstrate that he was the equal of presidents of bigger countries. The palace, which was to have the latest technology as well as the most luxurious of decorations, would show the world that he was a cosmopolitan who kept abreast of the latest ideas in science, art, architecture, and fashion. Above all, he wanted to show the world that Romania was not ‘‘deformed by provincialism,’’ for as Plesu observes, those belonging to small cultures always behave ‘‘demonstratively,’’ for they must show that they are the equals of ‘‘those belonging to big cultures.’’17 The focus on the nation was reproduced by Ceausescu not only because the Romanian Communist Party saw the ‘‘nation’’ as a useful instrument but also because discourse on the nation was how various power groups drew their own boundaries and sought their advantages. His regime became visibly antidemocratic, indifferent to the suffering, the cold, the lack of food, the fear of police, the perpetual uncertainties, or the threatened destruction of whole villages in the name of massive projects of expansion and glorification. The national myth was enhanced by the Romanian Communist Party’s mode of control, which emphasized minimal remunerative incentives and a combination of symbolic and ideological controls that increasingly gave national values a major place. Since, as Eco explains, Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism as perceived by the leader, citizens do not act; instead, ‘‘they are called upon to play the role of the People by the Leader. . . . Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction’’ representing ‘‘the Voice of the People.’’18 To make sure that the people enacted their role effectively, institutionalized paranoia became the means of control at every level of private life: ‘‘in labor legislation that tied every wage earner to his place of employment, to force obedience and facilitate surveillance; in family

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legislation that made divorce difficult to obtain, banned abortion, and discriminated against unmarried couples; in school legislation aimed at the politicization and militarization of children.’’19 The total effect of constructing the idea of nation by Ceausescu was that national discourse with hegemonic force subdued the Marxist one. The idea of nation achieved its triumph at the initiative of the Party leadership, and much of the activity of constructing the discourse of the nation served to centralize all aspects of culture within the political apparatus. The result was an increased concentration of national values and symbols, their very concentration generated by the workings of the political order. In a word, the monolithic Party-State produced a monolithic Nation: ‘‘The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Truth has already been spelt out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.’’20 After the fall of Ceausescu, the so-called National Salvation Front assumed control. The Front promoted a spirit of national reconciliation evident initially in the gesture of including opposition leaders and even a few Hungarians in the governing council. This reconciliation was unfortunately short-lived. A climate of intolerance was resuscitated as some of those opposing the ‘‘liberal ideals’’ of the Front founded new publications from which they propagated indigenism, anti-Semitism, and ad hominem attacks on opposition groups that were even worse than before. As a result, various political parties declared themselves, some of which had even harsher platforms than that of the National Salvation Front, as for example the National Peasants Party declared a pronounced Blut und Boden kind of nativism. It was then no surprise that within six months of Ceausescu’s overthrow articles appeared that reflected nostalgia for Ceausescu and even his Securiate. Nostalgia pandered to the sense of dislocation felt by many Romanians following the fall of their leader, for as Eco observes, ‘‘even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives.’’21 In Mad Forest Churchill playfully calls attention to the continuity of words like ‘‘human face,’’ ‘‘truth,’’ and ‘‘realistic basis’’ from one act to the other. These words signal to what extent these terms from Socialist Realism have entered into the discourse of ordinary life. Churchill’s characters submit to the paranoia of Ceausescu’s regime, and later, after its collapse, the automatic usage of such terms from his regime such as ‘‘realistic basis’’ becomes a means of reveal-

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ing that though on the surface the regime had changed, the same thought patterns are simply continuing in another guise. The play also deals with the sense of betrayal felt by the young people in her play who view the lliescu regime as a duplication of the political structure of the Ceausescu regime. Mitchell observes that this led ‘‘to suspicions that the revolution was a coup engineered by lliescu, a scenario which some of Churchill’s characters give voice to, but which the play holds from enforcing.‘‘22 The first scene of the first act begins with Bogdan Vladu, an electrician, and his wife, Irina, a tram driver, who appear to be arguing, but the spectators cannot hear them because Bogdan has turned up the blaring music on the radio. The rest of the scene is played in silence as their daughters, Lucia and Florina, enter displaying rare commodities: four eggs and American cigarettes. We gather from Bogdan’s reactions that these gifts are due to the special privileges of Lucia’s American boyfriend, Wayne. The scene is filled with the tension of words that are left unspoken as they sit smoking in silence as the scene ends. Violence is present but left unvoiced; Bogdan initially rejects Lucia’s offer of an American cigarette and demonstratively puffs away his Romanian brand. When he picks up the American cigarette, Lucia and Florina respond in laughter; he then picks up one of the precious eggs and ‘‘breaks it on the floor’’ (14). This short scene establishes the family’s predicament: their dependence on the radio as a screen for private life, conflict over Lucia’s imminent marriage to Wayne, and the effect that this marriage will have on Florina’s anticipated marriage to Radu Antonescu, the son of a politically correct family of professionals. At the same time, the scene calls attention to the fact that even Bogdan’s staunch antiforeign ideology cannot withstand the temptation of American cigarettes, a symbol of luxury. When Florina scrapes up ‘‘what she can’’ of the broken egg into a cup (14), the harshness of the Romanian economic deprivation is revealed, for Mitchell mentions that eggs were rationed to families at a maximum of twenty per month, and at one of the first mass protests in Bucharest, egg cartons were thrown symbolically at Ceausescu’s palace (504). Hence Bogdan’s gesture can be read as a significant one. Katherine Verdery observes that while not ‘‘all human speech is fraught with contention, not every word uttered is political; in Romania the politicization of culture made contention pervasive. This affected how culture was produced and how its texts should be read.’’23 The next scene reveals how political correctness infiltrates even the family level. In the scene entitled ‘‘Who has a match?’’ Mihai, Flavia, and Radu Antonescu work in silence until the lights

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go out. The fact that Churchill names this family ‘‘Antonescu’’ is in itself significant for it calls attention to the inclinations towards fascist authoritarianism among Ceausescu’s intellectual elite. Only fourteen lines are spoken in this scene, but they reveal much about the family: Mihai is an architect who quietly acquiesces to Ceausescu’s (referred to as ‘‘He’’ in the text) ‘‘very interesting recommendations’’ to Mihai’s design on what we can assume is the construction of the palace; Flavia, who is preparing her next day’s lesson on the biography and the ‘‘great personality’’ of Comrade Ceausescu, responds to Mihai in a ‘‘correct’’ if unenthusiastic manner: ‘‘That sounds good.’’ Presumably the Antonescus’ intentional ellipses are intended for eavesdropping devices, for only when the lights go out do they speak of more personal matters and voice their opinions. And even then their expression is appallingly ‘‘economical’’ as Mihai and Flavia ‘‘forbid’’ Radu to even think of marrying Florina Vladu: Radu. It’s not her fault if her sister— Mihai. The whole family. No. Out of the question.

Once the lights come on, they all start reading since presumably the surveillance devices have been activated once again. The spectators have to decode from this brief interchange what the reasons might be for a marriage between the two families being so categorically ‘‘out of the question.’’ One can interpret that they fear that Lucia’s marriage to an American will bring the suspicion of the Securiate not only on the whole family of the Vladus but also on those who may be only indirectly connected with them. Despite the danger of being ‘‘overheard,’’ Radu rebels against Mihai’s absolutism as he obviously challenges not only Mihai but also the listening devices: ‘‘So is that the third time He’s made you change it?’’ Mihai doesn’t reply (14–15). These two scenes prepare the audience to perceive the play’s subsequent scenes in the light of culturally conditioned ideology; however, the ideology emerges theatrically and not doctrinally. Ideology circulates through the text and can be deciphered by a spectator from the simple ‘‘snapshots’’ of family and friends. Churchill’s reliance on combinations of close-ups and wide-angle snapshots, a microscopic or telescopic view, and a reducing or diminishing view through a reversed scope offer the spectator a number of perspectives. The wide-angle shot is often accompanied by an alienation technique that could be called ‘‘ethonologizing.’’ Actions and characters are employed as part of an exercise demonstrating compli-

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cated social processes. The ‘‘realistic snapshots’’ of life in Romania are interspersed with surreal moments such as the priest’s conversation with an angel/legionnaire, the dog’s chat with the vampire, and Flavia’s conversation with her dead grandmother. Ultimately, the realistic scenes reveal what is being covered up, while the surreal moments disclose what is the reality behind the reality that is being presented. The scene of Bogdan and the man from Securiate demonstrates the punishment workers receive for crimes against the nation, for Bogdan is being held accountable for the fact that Lucia, who since she was trained as a primary schoolteacher ‘‘has wasted resources that could have benefited a young woman with a sense of duty.’’ As a result, Bogdan loses his position as a foreman, and Irina has been transferred to a depot in another part of the city ‘‘which doubles the time she has to travel to work.’’ Bogdan is, however, encouraged to take advantage of the economic decline of his family to make reports to the Securiate, for as ‘‘a patriot you may not have noticed how anyone out of favor attracts the friendship of irresponsible bitter people who feel slighted’’ (19): Securiate. Do you love your country? Bogdan nods. Pause. Securiate. You love your country, how do you show it? Bogdan is about to speak. He stops. He is about to speak. (17)

The conclusions emerging from scenes such as these inspire questions on whether public and private have meaning in deeply paranoid societies, whether ‘‘we can consider the kind of communication we witness here in both government offices and homes to be inauthentic.’’24 For as the scene illustrates, Bogdan communicates through silence while the Securiate officer communicates through veiled threats, ‘‘ ‘I’m sure you are eager to show that your family are patriots.’ Silence. Bogdan looks away’’ (18). Despite the various techniques of intimidation that are obvious in the interchange between Bogdan and the Securiate officer, the dictatorship of Ceausescu revealed ‘‘surprising interstices in which rules were suspended.’’ Though the apparent arbitrariness in enforcing the rules might suggest a weakening of power, in reality ‘‘it consolidates it, adding a confusing coefficient of unpredictability.’’ As a result, no one could determine the patterns of arbitrariness, for it ‘‘was sometimes a staged arbitrariness, an arbitrary disguise for occult maneuvers, but at other times it was pure arbitrariness.’’ The

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result of the inconsistency of rules and regulations was a breakdown in direct communication. Instead people resorted to ‘‘meta-dialogues’’ with a ‘‘correct’’ conversation covering up the ‘‘real, unspoken business.’’25 For example Lucia’s visit to the doctor is subversively entitled ‘‘Are you listening?’’: [While they talk the Doctor writes on a piece of paper, pushes it over to Lucia, who writes a reply, and he writes again] . . . Doctor. There is no abortion in Romania. I am shocked that you even think of it. I am appalled that you dare suggest I might commit this crime. Lucia. Yes, I’m sorry. [Lucia gives the doctor an envelope thick with money and some more money.] Doctor. Can you get married? Lucia. Yes . . . [The Doctor writes again, Lucia nods] Doctor. I can do nothing for you. Goodbye. [Lucia smiles. She makes her face serious again.] (19).

Manea observes that caution toward ideologies and suspicion toward politics do not, however, necessarily lead to moral stability. The noncommittal stance doesn’t only have positive effects. Among its frequent consequences are . . . compromise and complicity. The deformation of principle to the point of caricature can discredit faith in principles as such.26

The scenes muffled in silence and scenes with elliptical dialogue leave us with snapshots and not portraits, absence rather than presence: ‘‘They sit smoking in silence’’ (13); ‘‘They sit in candlelight in silence’’(14); ‘‘They stand a long time in silence’’ (17); and so on. In the scene entitled ‘‘What’s the time’’ not even one word is spoken: ‘‘Lucia and lanos standing in silence with their arms round each other. She looks at her watch, he puts his hand over it. They go on standing’’ (17). In Mad Forest silence discloses that which cannot be uttered: the fear, paranoia, secret life, and schizophrenia of everyday life. The culminating scene of Lucia’s wedding presents a muted celebration. Not only events such as Lucia’s abortion, which the spectators can assume must have been the outcome of her love affair with lanos, cast a pall on Lucia’s ‘‘love’’ marriage to the (unseen) American, Wayne, but also a series of tensions, conflicts, and undercurrents reflect the furtive, submerged way of life of the Romanian citizens under the Ceausescu regime. Manea describes the atmosphere of the Ceausescu era as an ‘‘insidious, dilated presence of the monster

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called the Power: in one’s home, in one’s thoughts, in the conjugal bed.’’27 At the same time the impoverishment of life, the separation of intellectuals from workers, the state’s celebrations of power, stupidity, and perversion lead to macabre collective pathologies. Fear, apathy, and depersonalization also lead to the creation of scapegoats or ‘‘rhinocerization’’: The unlit streets of Bucharest, the unheated apartments, the interminable lines for basic foodstuffs, the ubiquity of the police and its collaborators, the diversionary attacks on national minorities, the increasing brutality in human relationships, the monstrous pressure exerted by the bureaucracy in every sphere of material and spiritual life. Life as a series of postponements, a tumorlike growth of mistrust and fear, an all-encompassing schizophrenia. A step-by-step reduction of private life, and finally its abolition, as time itself becomes subject to ever-increasing taxation and eventually total expropriation by the state: the hours sacrificed to standing in line, to ritual political meetings and to rallies, on top of the hours at work and the hours of helpless exposure to the inferno of public transportation on the way to and from work, meetings, and shopping; and when you were finally home in your birdcage you found yourself lost, mute, staring into an emptiness that could be defined as infinite despair.28

Though Radu Antonescu is established as a dissenter from his parents’ politically correct persuasions when in a brief scene he shocks a meat queue by whispering ‘‘Down with Ceausescu’’ (17), this first direct act of resistance in the play is ‘‘disguised by Radu’s refusal to acknowledge it.’’29 Only when talking to imaginary others or when drunk can the character voice doubt or dissent. But the dissent is always muted, for even when Radu, Gabriel, and lanos sit down with a bottle of wine, there is no conversation; only their ‘‘jokes’’ reveal the unspoken: Gabriel. A man wants a car and he saves up his money and at last he’s able to buy a Trabant. He’s very proud of it. And he’s driving along in his little Trabant and he stops at the traffic lights and bang, a car crashes into the back of it. So he leaps out very angry, and it’s a black car with a short numberplate, but he’s so angry he doesn’t care and he starts banging on the bonnet. Then a big dumper truck stops behind the black car and the driver gets out and he takes a crowbar and he starts smashing the back of the black car. And the Securiate man gets out of his battered black car and he says to the truck driver, ‘‘What’s going on? I can understand him being upset because I hit his car, but what’s the matter with you?’’ And the driver says, ‘‘Sorry, I thought it had started.’’ (20–21)

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Despite the liberating moment veiled within the joke, the first act of the play presents the characters ‘‘imprisoned within tightly confining ideologies and economic and social structures.’’30 However, the second act, entitled ‘‘December,’’ opens up the realm of possibilities. This act has the characteristics of a docudrama and consists of a collection of accounts, observations, and questions by various people designated only by their profession as student, housepainter, doctor, flowerseller, translator, bulldozer driver, and others who witnessed the events in Bucharest between 21 and 25 December. The ‘‘speakers’’ also present various levels of English usage, demonstrating their inability to describe these events for foreign spectators. These reports, spoken ‘‘as if the others are not there and each is the only one telling what happened’’ (29), point to the limits of class solidarity across class lines as dramatic tension is established between the language of solidarity and the enactment of oppression, continually highlighting the discrepancy between utopian democratic hopes and the real politics of authority. There are utopian moments, however, when this tension evaporates and speech and act coincide, albeit fleetingly, to enable the individuals to see themselves as agents of their own liberation. As Mitchell mentions, the discontinuous, interweaving fragments ‘‘create a rhythm which builds gradually from fear and anticipation to celebration and joy, and to fear and bewilderment after the Securiate’s ‘terror shooting’ begins.’’31 Though Oana-Maria Hock recounts that this was the first time in forty years that Romanians looked each other in the eyes,32 Churchill’s play suggests otherwise, for instead the spoken accounts give the impression of avoidance, confusion, impotence, caution, sporadic joy, withdrawal, and ultimately depression: Doctor. On my way home in the afternoon there was a woman crying because she lost her handbag, the other women comfort her saying, ‘‘It could be worse, people were crushed and lost their shoes, don’t cry for such a small thing.’’ (31) Girl student. I’d planned to go to see a film with a friend but in the afternoon my father said I must ring up and pretend to be ill, then my friend rang and said that she was ill. I wanted to go out and my father said I couldn’t go alone. I thought of an excuse—we had to have some bread, so we went out together. There were a lot of people moving from Union Place towards University Place. . . . A man came up and asked what was happening but my father pulled me away because he realized the man was a provoker who starts arguments and then reports the people who get involved. My father insisted we go home, I said he was a coward and began to cry. He said if he was single he would behave differently. (32)

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Flowerseller. I go to the market to get food and many people are going to the centre. I watch them go by. I am sorry I get married so young. (36) Soldier. They say us it is not Hungarians. It is terroristi. We guard the airport. We shoot anything, we shoots our friend I want to stay alive. (39) Student 2. People were shouting. ‘‘Come with us,’’ but I thought, ‘‘It’s a romantic action, it’s useless to go and fight and die.’’ I thought I was a coward to be scared. But I thought, ‘‘I will die like a fool protecting someone I don’t know. How can I stop bullets with my bare hands? It’s the job of the army, I can do nothing, I will just die.’’ So I went home. (40) Painter. My girlfriend and I were at the TV station. I didn’t know who we were fighting with or how bad it was. I was just acting to save our lives. It is terrible to hate and not to be able to do something real. (40) Student 2. The train didn’t go that day so I stayed at home. I thought, ‘‘This is not my town. I will go to my own town and act there.’’ (42) Painter. Painting doesn’t mean just describing, it’s a state of spirit. I didn’t want to paint for a long time then. (43)

Churchill presents December 1989 in Bucharest as a potentially liberating moment. But as we can determine from the ‘‘speakers,’’ in the context of the political events, the received, lived, remembered past seemed just not to make sense anymore. As Mitchell mentions, in the postproduction discussions of Mad Forest in Bucharest, Churchill invoked the Painter’s self-reflexive closure to act 2 ‘‘in reply to an audience member who expressed shame that there was no Romanian play about the events.’’33 In the face of this dead end, the past appears to lose its meaning both for the believers and for the skeptics. The third act, entitled ‘‘Florina’s Wedding,’’ suggests a happier outcome than the muted wedding scene of Lucia’s wedding, for the wedding takes place in the time of ‘‘liberation’’ and ‘‘freedom.’’ But the first scene, which contains a vampire and a hungry dog, foreshadows that the upsurge of joy might be arrested and destroyed: Vampire. I came here for the revolution, I could smell it a long way off. Dog. I’ve tasted a man’s blood. It was thick on the road. I gobbled it up quick, then somebody kicked me.

In ‘‘Florina’s Wedding,’’ Churchill focuses once more on the vicissitudes of family life, this time in the aftermath of the tremendous political upheaval, demonstrations, and consolidation of power by lliescu and the National Salvation Front. These scenes are juxtaposed next to parodic, surrealistic, and supernatural scenes, a highly expressionistic reenactment of the death of Ceausescu, and an en-

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actment of one of the character’s dream about a cornered Elena Ceausescu trying to bribe soldiers. As Mitchell mentions, ‘‘these scenes serve to disrupt and undermine logical paradigms, and establish shifts from objective to subjective viewpoints.’’34 Churchill’s tight focus on ‘‘the micropolitics of the everyday’’35 contributes to a deeper understanding ‘‘of the damages, the compromises to the human spirit.’’36 As the characters from the two families move out to more public spaces, the silences of the first part have been overtaken with questions. Each character struggles to ground the confusion in some kind of understanding, and we witness the emergence of suppressed hostility, accusations, and recriminations. As a result, the characters become increasingly isolated, and even the ghost of her grandmother fails to appear to Flavia to guide her through the unknown straits of what freedom represents. The characters review the blur of events and attempt to piece together as best they can the history of the period. Though everyone voices suspicion that the events were just another theatrical exhibition, Lucia, returning from America, reassures them about the ‘‘reality’’ of what happened: ‘‘No, it was real. . . . I saw it on television’’ (53). Jean Baudrillard in his Simulations explains that in the ‘‘impossibility of isolating the process of simulation must be seen the whole thrust of an order that can only see and understand in terms of some reality.’’ As a result, in states of uncertainty everyone relies on what is taken to be real: But this becomes more and more difficult, for it is practically impossible to isolate the process of simulation, through the force of inertia of the real which surrounds us, the inverse is also true (and this very reversibility forms part of the apparatus of simulation and of power’s impotency): namely, it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real.37

Since the characters are unable to verify the reality of the events, suspicion filters down to the most intimate level and begins to surround all familial relationships: Radu. Do you remember once I came home from school and asked if you loved Elena Ceausescu? Flavia. I don’t remember, no. When was that? Radu. And you said yes. I was seven. Flavia. No I don’t remember. [Pause.] But you can see why somebody would say what they had to say to protect you. Radu. I’ve always remembered that. Flavia. I don’t remember.

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Radu. No, you wouldn’t. [Pause.] Flavia. Why are you saying this, Radu? Are you making it up? You’re manipulating me to make me feel bad. I told you the truth about plenty of things. Radu. I don’t remember. (66–67)

The family members of this politically correct family find that their daily communication has been hopelessly damaged by their belief in the authenticity of official communication. The question that now emerges is how to determine what is correct in the post-Ceausescu era: Mihai. Radu, I don’t know what to do with you. Nothing is on a realistic basis. Radu. Please don’t say that. Mihai. What’s the matter now? Radu. Don’t say ‘‘realistic basis.’’ Flavia. It’s true, Mihai, you do talk in terrible jargon from before, it’s no longer correct. (66)

The suspicion generated by the general disillusion and confusion about the fate of the revolution does not only surface between generations but also between classes, nationalities, and minorities. For that reason, Radu and Florina’s now suddenly politically correct marriage is already doomed. And so is Lucia’s potential marriage to the Hungarian lanos: Radu. Iliescu’s going to get in because the workers and peasants are stupid. [Pause.] Not stupid but they don’t think. They don’t have the information. [Pause.] I don’t mean your family in particular. Florina. You’re a snob like your father. You’d have joined the party. Radu. Wouldn’t you? [Silence.] (60)

Consequently, the seeming reconciliation of the Antonescus and the Vladus in an early scene in ‘‘Florina’s Wedding’’ when Mihai and Flavia visit Gabriel in the hospital is seen as being merely politically expedient. The Vladus, now that the elite has been temporarily disempowered and put under suspicion, perceive that the future marriage of Radu with Florina might put them into a better light with

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the new regime, for Gabriel is a new hero, having been wounded in the rebellion against Ceausescu. Mihai. We’re so glad the young people no longer have a misunderstanding. We have to put the past behind us and go forwards on a new basis. Bogdan. Yes, nobody can be blamed for what happened in the past. (49)

A visit of the young people to Florina’s grandparents in the country shows that old traditions conceal old hatreds as well, as Radu’s paranoid discourse targeting peasants, the Front, gypsies, or Hungarians conflates with the plot-obsessed accounts of the past by the grandparents: Grandfather. He was killed while he was putting up the posters. Radu. You see? They’re murderers. It’s the same Lucia. For which party, grandpa? Radu. Tactic of intimidation. Ianos. Who killed him? Grandfather. Posters for the Peasants Party. Florina. Is that who you support? Radu. The Front claims the country supports them but it’s because of intimidation. Ianos. So did they find out who killed him? Grandmother. Yes, it was gypsies killed him. Radu. Gypsies? They were probably paid by the Florina. How did they know it was them? Radu. Front. Ianos. They hardly need paying to murder somebody. Radu. Or it could have been Front supporters Lucia. Or Securiate. Radu. and they put the blame on the gypsies. (61–62)

The young people in the play are trapped by old suspicions, class hatreds, old prejudice against the gypsies as much as their grandparents and parents. Radu and Florina’s imminent marriage is plagued by class prejudice, and Lucia and lanos’s love for each other cannot overcome ethnic hatreds, for in addition to the problem that lanos is Hungarian, his parents have adopted an autistic gypsy child, Toma: Lucia. Shall I stay here and marry you? [Silence.] This is the last of the chocolate. [As she gets it out, Toma pounces on it and runs a little way off, stuffing it all into his mouth.] You horrible child. I hate you. Ianos. Don’t shout at him. How can he help it? You’re so stupid. Lucia. Don’t shout at me.

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[Toma whimpers. He starts to shake his head obsessively.] Ianos Would your family let you marry a Hungarian? (59–60)

When the young people bring Gabriel Antonescu, who had been wounded in the protests against Ceausescu, home from the hospital, their energetic acting out of the trial separates them along ideological lines as well, for Radu plays Ceausescu and Florina Elena: Radu. You can’t shoot me. I’m the one who gives the orders to shoot. Florina. We don’t recognize being shot. All. Gypsy. Murderer. Illiterate. We’ve all fucked your wife. We’re fucking her now. Let her have it. [They all shoot Elena (Florina), who falls dead at once. Gabriel, who is particularly vicious throughout this, shoots with his crutch. All make gun noises, then cheer. Ceausescu (Radu) runs back and forth. They shout again.] (70)

All cheer and embrace each other, but as lanos hugs Lucia, Gabriel suddenly hits out at lanos with his crutch: Gabriel. Get your filthy Hungarian hands off her. Ianos. What? Gabriel. Just joking. (71)

From these scattered scenes, the spectators can determine that the early scenes of dissidence against Ceausescu—Radu standing in a food line, or the three friends, Radu, Gabriel, and lanos exchanging subversive jokes while drinking in a bar—seemed to have covered up old ethnic and class hatreds. It is no wonder that Florina mentions, ‘‘Sometimes I miss him.’’ (61). Ceausescu provided a united front of fear and hatred, and now the society has fragmented into hate groups in more insidious ways. Radu, who seems to despise Mihai’s loyalty to the old regime and Mihai’s easy redefinition of himself as a liberal democrat in support of the Front, uses language as dogmatic as that of Mihai, and much like his father he is turning into an authoritarian, rigid revisionist. What Churchill reveals is that even the idealistic Radu, so ready with his subversive whisper, ‘‘Down with Ceausescu’’ cannot withstand the ‘‘rhinoceritis’’ of nationalism and fascism described effectively by lonesco: I was chatting with S. We were talking quietly. Then we discussed politics. He is anti-Nazi of course, and anti-lron Guard. Nonetheless he says: ‘‘The

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Iron Guards are not right. They are not right on all points. However you must admit—and you know I’m not an anti-Semite—you must admit that the Jews too . . .’’ etc. ‘‘You know that I am against the Iron Guards. However, they call for moral and spiritual values which . . .’’38

As the old paranoia begins to overtake the Antonescu and Vladu families, Radu and Florina’s wedding celebration ends in a drunken brawl. The guests’ collective representativeness justifies their presence at the party, but their individual presence serves only to raise questions about what they collectively represent. Their sporadic interaction displays not so much the convergence but rather the divergence of this group. Julia Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves explains that the cult of origins is a hate reaction: ‘‘Hatred of those others who do not share my origins and who affront me personally, economically, and culturally.’’ Within the politics of hate, ‘‘a defensive hatred,’’ easily backslides to ‘‘a persecuting hatred. And wounded souls may be seen to turn around and fight their neighbors who are just as hurt as they are—perhaps by the same totalitarian tyrant—but who can easily be taken for the weak link in that chain of hatred, for the scapegoat of one’s depression.’’39 Irina. I don’t like seeing you with lanos. Lucia. He’s Gabriel’s friend. Irina. I was once in a shop in Transylvania and they wouldn’t serve me because I couldn’t speak Hungarian. In my own country. Lucia. Yes, but Irina. And what if the doctor only spoke Hungarian and someone wanted a doctor? (79) Bogdan. Leave my son alone. Hungarian bastard. And don’t come near my daughter. Ianos. I’m already fucking your daughter, you stupid peasant. (84)

For as Soto-Morettini observes, ‘‘we end in circularity, for weddings happy or unhappy will go on. And Angels and Vampires, legendary figures, dance amidst the chaos,’’40 having survived not only World War II, the years of Soviet domination, and the long Ceausescu years and come full circle to yet another period of ethnic hatred and suspicion. People will go on living disappointed in their past, probably largely disappointed in the present, and uncertain about their future. They will look for someone to blame for their failures and insecurities. The movements and ideologies most likely to benefit from this mood are more likely to be movements inspired by xenophobic nationalism and intolerance. The easiest thing is a to

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blame stranger. The past is the essential element. If there is no suitable past, it can be invented. In Mad Forest what appear to be ideological certainties provide only starting points for thought, not conclusions. Refusing to be bound by the strictures of Socialist Realism or the urgencies of contemporary social problems, Churchill looks to larger contexts that reveal analogies and insights that consciousness does not determine but is determined by social existence. Individual freedom is severely limited by material forces, defined as the production and reproduction of social life. These forces generate a superstructure of ideas, or ideology, which in turn serves to perpetuate them. The pain and suffering of the characters in Mad Forest are thus not be understood as personal fates, but as subject to ideology. Although Churchill seems to explore a world through the single ideological perspective, she is careful to allow that world to reveal its own limitations. She cleverly dramatizes the ways in which the pursuit of a single kind of individualism converts into another kind of social conformity. Churchill describes her method of portrayal as a process of abstracting from seemingly individual stories a causative, societal mechanism. Churchill demands of the audience a sophisticated form of participation. In Mad Forest many characters come and go, not always performed by the same performer. Her major instrument is not the ideal character, the revolutionary relationship, or the prophetic message but the regenerating image that confers new structural significance on issues, events, and circumstances that are otherwise quite familiar. In such contexts it is possible to see Churchill struggling beyond stereotypes to highlight the very movements which brought those stereotypes to prominence. Resolutions to the large social problems Churchill explores are not hers to provide, and the conflicts she dramatizes between social and individual constraint and social and individual success are conflicts of complex moral choice, not those of programmatic political rhetoric.

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4 Copies, Forgeries, and Mockeries

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8 Kafka Betrayed: Or Reflections on Kafkology I HAVE NEVER STUDIED KAFKA, AND TO BORROW JOSEF SKVOERCKY’S ENcounter with Kafka, ‘‘I only read some of his books.’’1 The little I know of Kafka’s work is about as original as the insights into Kafka’s Oedipus complex by Sidney, the insurance man from Alan Bennett’s play Kafka’s Dick. Aware of my limitations as a Kafkologist, I began carrying home bundles of books from the library, and soon my study began to resemble Sordini’s workroom with ‘‘every wall . . . covered with pillars of documents tied together, piled on top of one another.’’ Since there was no end to these bundles arriving from the interlibrary loan office, and ‘‘as bundles of papers are continually being taken away and brought in, and all in great haste’’ the piles of books were always falling on the floor, and the ‘‘perpetual crashes, following fast on one another,’’2 came to distinguish my experience of immersion into Kafka scholarship. As my self-serving example illustrates, Kafka is often appropriated to make individual experience seem more exaggerated and complex. While this response on the part of a subjective reader may be relatively innocuous, critics who position Kafka into various ideological and cultural camps are fingered by Milan Kundera as Kafkologists. Kafkology is defined as tautological ‘‘discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka’’ with the sole purpose of producing and sustaining ‘‘its own image of Kafka, to the point where the author whom readers know by the name Kafka is no longer Kafka but the Kafkologized Kafka.’’3 The intent of this exploration is to examine the process by which Kafka became Kafkologized both in literary criticism and popular culture, film, and drama. The intertextual loop that places Kafka and the Kafkaesque in a dialogic relationship also reveals how texts enter ‘‘the discursive space of culture’’4 and are thereby transformed. According to Kundera and Bennett, it is Kafkology that plays the role of transmitter of Kafka into the intertextual loop of the Kafkaesque. As Bennett observes, the Kafkologized Kafka has been garrisoned by armies of critics, for if ‘‘there is a Fortress Freud so is there a Fortress Kafka, Kafka 261

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his own castle.’’5 Kafka’s castle has been constructed out of ideological stones, and his texts have been held hostage within these walls. Both Kundera and Bennett trace the laying of the first stones of ‘‘Fortress Kafka’’ to Max Brod. According to Kundera, the roots of Kafkology emerged from under ‘‘the castrating shadow’’ of Saint Garta, the roman a` clef published in 1926 by Brod shortly after Kafka’s death. ‘‘Savor the title,’’ Kundera instructs us, ‘‘Zauberreich der Liebe [The Enchanted Kingdom of Love],’’ a novel that would have been forgotten were it not for Garta, a fictional portrait of Brod’s close friend Kafka, in the novel described by Brod as a ‘‘saint of our time.’’ ‘‘What a marvelous paradox,’’ Kundera observes, ‘‘the whole image of Kafka and the whole posthumous fate of his work were first conceived and laid out in this simpleminded novel, this garbage, this cartoon-novel concoction, which, aesthetically, stands at exactly the opposite pole from Kafka’s art.’’6 Even Kafka’s very portrait has been appropriated in the service of the image of the suffering artist, who because of his neurosis and anorexia was unable to find meaning in relationships. The extent to which this image precedes Kafka is all-pervasive, and the Japanese have even adopted Kafka as an adjective; thus a picture of Kafka is very Kafka. Kafka has been forever imprisoned by the image of the black and white poster with his photograph in the foreground and Prague in the fog in the background, the fog concealing the labyrinthine space of what is considered to be the Kafkaesque. One of my students compiled a dictionary of words misunderstood a` la Kundera as a basis for our study of Kafka’s The Trial in which he defined the Kafkaesque as ‘‘the image of an immense, three-dimensional labyrinth with constantly changing paths, wherein a pasty-skinned, nervous little bank clerk in a gray suit opens his mouth with an unuttered scream.’’ Thus the evocation of the Kafkaesque has become a cliche´ categorizing anything that is remotely offensive to our sensibilities, and often this term can be overheard in coffeehouses, particularly in conversations about the scary outside world. David Zane Mairowitz adds that in Prague ‘‘you can buy a Kafka TEE-SHIRT on every streetcorner in the tourist quarter, or his image on porcelain plates or artisinal wood carvings. You can take a ‘Kafka’ tour (‘Have lunch with Kafka’—no joke) and visit all the Prague landmarks where his ghost walks. Soon like Mozart in Salzburg, you’ll be able to eat his face on chocolate.’’7 ‘‘Before even becoming the ADJECTIVE,’’ writes Mairowitz, Kafka was an assimilated Jew from Prague:8 The ADJECTIVE has come to stand for many things, not all of them having to do with Franz Kafka. He is often thought of as spooky. Or as a

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writer of mysteries, or a kind of pre-Orwellian visionary mapping out the boundaries between bureaucracy and dictatorship. . . . There is now a literary science called ‘‘Kafkology,’’ and professors who vaunt themselves as ‘‘Kafkologists.’’ The literature ABOUT Kafka alone runs into thousands of volumes. A lot of it tells about his search for God and meaning in an Absurd universe, or the search for individuality in the Age of Bureaucracy. One American psychologist, ascribing every conceivable sexual fantasy to Kafka, including the wish to be sodomized by his father, interprets the Door of the Law in THE TRIAL as the unattainable entry to Mother Kafka’s vaginal canal.9

Consequently, Kafka as a cultural icon has become lost in the representation of K/KAFKA, for as Jean Baudriallard comments, ‘‘we are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts. . . . Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all models around the merest fact—the models come first, and their orbital circulation constitutes the genuine magnetic field of events.’’10 Thus Kafka’s name has been absorbed as a bankable tourist attraction by the kitsch of representation. As Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari observe in their study of Kafka, the letter K ‘‘no longer designates a narrator or a character but an assemblage that becomes all the more machinelike, an agent that becomes all the more collective because an individual is locked into it in his or her solitude.’’11 Long after the roman a´ clef, Brod went on to write a biography of Kafka in 1937 in which Kafka’s books were examined ‘‘almost exclusively in the microcontext of biography.’’12 Brod’s biography initiated an industry in which Kafka’s texts became allegories of Kafka’s religious, philosophical, existentialist, or Marxist views. In turn, biography was frequently reduced to hagiography, both religious and secular, and declarations such as ‘‘Kafka a martyr to his solitude’’ or ‘‘Kafka lived and suffered for us’’ become ‘‘mythomaniacal assertions’’ in the service of the ‘‘sainthood’’ of Kafka. To illustrate the collapse of critical priorities in Brod’s lyrical speculations about Kafka’s private life, Kundera cites that in a randomly chosen essay the letters are quoted fifty-four times, the diary forty-five, the stories twenty, The Trial five, The Castle four, and Amerika not once.13 Maurice Blanchot agrees with Kundera’s view of Kafka as a victim of inordinate interest particularly since his works ‘‘came into our possession not by life, but by the death of the author.’’ And even Blanchot’s voice resembles Kundera’s remonstrations: ‘‘One would like to recommend to writers: leave nothing behind, destroy everything you wish to see disappear; do not be weak, have confidence in no one, for you will necessarily be betrayed one day.’’14 Since one

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focus of Kafkology is ‘‘biographical archeology,’’ that work is already doomed, for as W. G. Kudzus comments, ‘‘certainly there is no current method for finding a dead man, let alone for actually interacting with his aliveness.’’15 The selfless ardor of Kafkologists stems in part from the fact that the more a work comments on itself, the more it calls for commentary. ‘‘Who will not remember adding something to the reading of The Castle,’’ asks Blanchot, ‘‘and feeling guilty for having done so?’’ What an abundance of explications and a frenzy of interpretation; what exegetical fury, be it theological, philosophical, sociological, political, or autobiographical; how many forms of analysis, allegorical, symbolic, structural, and even (anything can happen) literal! And so many keys: each employable only by the one who forged it, each opening one door only to close others. Where does this delirium come from? Why is reading never satisfied with what it reads, incessantly substituting for it another text, which in turn provokes another.16

Bennett in his play Kafka’s Dick not only addresses Brod’s culpability but also illustrates the ideological appropriation of Kafka as ‘‘prophet’’ of the coming of the Nazis. At the same time, he reveals to what extent the appropriation of Kafka’s name is a consequence of commercial interests as well. The first scene, whose ‘‘date is immaterial, though it is around 1919,’’ shows the ‘‘dying’’ Kafka and Brod, ‘‘his friend’’ in a parody of the conversation about the ‘‘burning’’ of Kafka’s books as Bennett piles on all the cliches that adhere to what has been designated as the Kafkaesque: Brod: Can I just let you in on my thinking? We’re in 1920 now, right? You’re going to die soon . . . give a year, say 1924 at the outside. Well, less than ten years later we get the Nazis, right? And, as prefigured in some of your as yet unrecognizable masterpieces (which I’m going to burn, I know, I know), the Nazis seize power and put into operation the full apparatus of totalitarian bureaucracy. Kafka. Max, I saw it coming. Brod. You did. Kafka. Would that history had proved me wrong, Max. Brod. Would that it had. Only, tragically it didn’t. Because in 1933 the Nazis are scheduled to stage their infamous Burning of the Books . . . Brod. I can see it now: a shot of flames licking round a book jacket, the name Kafka prominently placed. Kafka. Dreadful. Brod. Sure, but burn one and you sell ten thousand. Believe me, if the Nazis hadn’t thought of it the publishers would. Kafka. Max, I’m not sure. Do I want to survive?

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Brod. Of course you do. I’m a successful novelist, so I’m headed that way myself. I know you’ve got talent. You haven’t made it big yet, in fact you haven’t made it at all, but once you’re dead I’ve a hunch your fame is going to snowball. Who knows, you could end up as famous as me. Whereas, you burn everything, you’ve squandered your life.17

Bennett’s opening scene also illustrates Alan Udoff ’s observation that the majority of Kafka’s writings stand under the two fold homonymy of Kafka’s signature: 1) the Kafka of Brod’s citation, who authorizes the existing texts, confers canonicity on them, and installs them in their future existence as literature; and 2) Kafka’s own citation of his name, or more precisely, the limits that he sets to Brod’s citation, by which Kafka intends the utter destruction of the contested writings.

In reoriginating Kafka’s name by means of claiming to save Kafka from KAFKA, or Kafka against his negative self, Brod ‘‘thus claims to speak authoritatively on the very alternation of desire central to the Kafkan complex.’’18 While Bennett’s play reveals Kafka’s enlistment by Brod into the ranks of an underground resistance to the Nazis, since World War II the reception of Kafka has been complicated and conditioned by the Cold War and has resulted in the garrisoning of Kafka into two ideological castles. In the West, the word Kafkaesque became synonymous with the annihilation of liberal individualism by the impersonal, all-penetrating mazes of totalitarian power, and The Trial in particular became an ‘‘illustration’’ of the horrors of totalitarian regimes. Communist critics, on the other hand, judged his fiction as prefascist documents showing the consequences that emerge from ‘‘blind obedience and sacrifice of intellect.’’19 The slippage of Kafka into the word derived from his name, Kafkaesque, suggests the extent to which the word has entered the language to denote ‘‘an allpervasive, menacing incomensurability between the experience and the reality of social relations.’’20 Jean-Paul Sartre’s address to the Moscow Congress on Peace and Disarmament in July 1962 was the first forum that opened the discussion for the need ‘‘for disarmament in the cultural sphere.’’ The reception of Kafka was identified by Sartre as the primal sin of the consequences of using ‘‘culture as a weapon,’’ for in the West he was ‘‘distorted and misconstrued’’ and in the East ‘‘passed over in silence.’’ For both Western and Soviet critics Kafka became exclusively the writer ‘‘who derided and exposed bureaucrats,’’ and both sides used that central truth for creating their own versions of

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Kafka.21 Fearing that a subversive connection could be made that bureaucracy was an ‘‘inevitable sin of socialism,’’ the Czechoslovak Union of Writers approached Kafka as ‘‘a decadent antirationalist, as a divisive force out of place in a society intent on building socialism.’’22 Consequently, Kafka’s texts were considered as potential explosives that might detonate in the hands of socialist readers. While the international symposium at Liblice Castle on 27–28 May 1968 led to Kafka’s ‘‘rehabilitation’’ in the Soviet Bloc countries, and his works were finally published and acknowledged to be of artistic merit, they were at the same time condemned ideologically.23 Thus in the service of the two dissenting ideologies Kafka the author was split asunder from what he had written. But even in his own time Kafka, in a letter to Felice Bauer, observed the makings of Kafkology as each critic attempted to imprison him in an ‘‘ethnic’’ fortress: And incidentally, won’t you tell me who I really am; in the last Neue Rundschau, The Metamorphosis is mentioned and rejected on sensible ground, and then the writer says: ‘‘There is something fundamentally German about K’s narrative art.’’ In Max’s article, on the other hand: ‘‘K’s stories are among the most typically Jewish documents of our time.’’ A difficult case. Am I a circus rider on two horses? Alas, I am no rider. I lie prostrate on the ground.24

Kafka’s insight into his disappearance by means of interpretation represents the tendency in the broad social dimension that produces what has been designated as the Kafkaesque. Among the characteristics assigned to the Kafkaesque are shifts towards a progressive concentration of power, the bureaucratization of social activity that turns all institutions into boundless labyrinths, and the depersonalization of the individual. Ultimately, The Trial has become the symbolic text of the oppression of the individual on both sides of the Cold War. Thus on one side the Kafkaesque has come to correspond to the definition of oppressive totalitarianism and on the other as a description of the anti-individualistic preoccupation of capitalist market economies with money, property, and social status. An example of a Marxist interpretation of Kafka is visible in the attempt by Peter Weiss to exorcise the spirit of Kafka from his consciousness, for Weiss sees Kafka as the star witness of futility, the representative of what Weiss calls ‘‘the twisted guilt-laden doomed and damned bourgeoisie.’’25 In a self-pitying chapter in his autobiography, Weiss feels himself to be as victimized as Joseph K., and he accuses himself for blindly accepting the verdict that has sentenced him to exile. Not until he ‘‘exorcised’’ Kafka from his consciousness was he able to develop as an artist:

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Kafka was always in front of that wall which finally destroyed him; he was constantly running up against this wall which was, after all, no broader than himself. This wall was composed of the traditional laws and I needed to move only one step to the side in order to stand in front of an open space. But to be capable of this simple step I had to first abandon the chimera under which I was struggling. . . . The world where I stood alone with Kafka received its death blow. It was still near, it still existed, but it was a sepulchral vault in which I ran my head against a wall. Kafka had never dared to revise the verdict of the judges; he had exalted their superior force and constantly abased himself before it. Whenever Kafka was on the verge of seeing through it he sank to his knees and apologized.26

In his second variation on The Trial, Weiss places Kafka on ‘‘trial’’ for presenting Joseph K. in service of the dehumanizing, capitalist system that covers up its program under such labels as social responsibility, humanism, belief in progress, and support of the peace process.27 Thus, in Weiss’s interpretation, K. is condemned for not recognizing the nature of the class struggle by those oppressed by the system he continues to serve while under the illusion that he is doing something positive in writing his ‘‘idealistic’’ monthly reports, in which he champions ‘‘a different kind of order, a greater order, a universal order’’ that will overcome pervading poverty, misery, and fear.28 Despite his disgust with his immediate supervisors, K. hopes that he can change the system from within. In Weiss’s characterization, K. is a reactionary, who by the time that he begins to recognize how he has been absorbed into the multinational capitalist system finds that it is too late. Since K. can’t commit himself to join the ‘‘revolutionaries,’’ Leni and Titorelli, he is wounded in the crossfire between the two forces. Willem and Franz in the leather uniforms of the ‘‘regime of lies’’29 come upon K., and, as Franz kicks K.’s body aside, Willem comments, ‘‘Wie ein Hund.’’30 The last image of the play presents Leni kneeling over the dead K. as she raises her fists and lets out a horrible scream. Weiss insists that the purpose of his ‘‘new process or trial’’ is to show a way out of Kafka’s serpentine twists of hidden power. Though he uses Kafka’s title, some of the events, backgrounds, and names of characters, these are used only as ‘‘quotations,’’ or as what Weiss designates as ‘‘homages’’ towards Kafka to whom his play is dedicated.31 Despite his mark of obeisance towards Kafka, Weiss calls on his intertextual ‘‘other,’’ Bertolt Brecht, whose portrait hangs on stage alongside that of Kafka in Titorelli’s picture gallery, as his alternative voice. In his interview with Anita Brundahl, Weiss explains that he agrees with Brecht, who called the ineffectual intellectual as

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a ‘‘tui,’’ one who has solutions for all problems, but despite his intellect, cannot act. The alternative to neurotic individualism is represented in Weiss’s play by a Greek chorus composed of workers, who are the only ones capable of bringing about social change. Not only does Brecht present the ideological counterargument to Kafka’s in Weiss’s play but also Brecht’s theatrical aesthetics of Verfremdung is called upon to elicit ‘‘not emotion’’ but reflection on the part of both the actor and spectator, for according to Weiss, it is preferable to play emotional content ‘‘demagogically’’ rather than with ‘‘pity and fear.’’32 The portrait Weiss paints of Kafka is similar to that of Georg Luka`cs, who in his argument for ‘‘positive heroes’’ dismissed Kafka’s heroes as embodiments of a decadent type: ‘‘the isolated, melancholy bachelor who is cut off from nature and prone to highly aestheticized, subjective visions of reality.’’33 While Weiss’s and Luka`cs’s evaluations of Kafka represent the limits of ideological interpretations, more recent shifts in cultural studies on Kafka’s interest in clothes, body culture, exercise, sun-bathing, and health reform contextualize Kafka in ‘‘an aestheticized relation to the urban world,’’ for clothes in particular insert ‘‘the individual into a social context of set values, beliefs, activities.’’34 Mark M. Anderson notes that Kafka’s rejection of naturalism had to do with ‘‘his conviction that the substance of modern urban life has migrated to the surface of things.’’35 Thus yet another image of Kafka as the narcissistic aesthete has been added to Kafka the prophet and Kafka the lonely artist. Ultimately, the difference between Luka`cs’s designation of Kafka as a decadent and Anderson’s interpretation of an aestheticized Kafka reveals a shift in evaluating decadence as a negative by Lukaćs to the appreciation of decadence as a new aesthetics by Anderson. Though the ideological battles between the critics of the two Cold War fortresses illustrate the problem of the Kafkologized Kafka in easily understood binary terms, the more aesthetic interpretations, particularly the appropriations of Kafka by the film industry and popular culture prove to be more subtle, and hence more treacherous. Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962) with its sudden shifts in perspective, bands of shadows and violent stripes of light, strange architectural spaces, and temporal distortions serves as an appropriate example of an aestheticized interpretation of Kafka that veils the more hidden project of an ideological interpretation. For example, Welles’s image of the hundreds of automaton typists in the huge space of the old Gare d’Orsay is framed aesthetically in such a way that the spectator is convinced that this image represents Kafka’s critique of the mechanization of the individual, despite the fact that

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this image of mechanization belongs more to Karel Capek’s vision than to Kafka’s. Similarly the image of blindfolded justice surrounded by masses of victims with numbers on their arms stands out as a post-Holocaust indictment of ‘‘the trial.’’ Lawrence Langer ironically comments on Kafka’s ‘‘fearful premonition of the Holocaust’’: ‘‘Someone must have been spreading rumors about Franz Kafka, for without having done anything wrong, he was proclaimed one fine morning the prophet of the Holocaust.’’36 Holocaust analogies infiltrate the critical imagination of many Kafka scholars, particularly that of George Steiner, who asserts about The Trial that it ‘‘exhibits the classic model of a terror state’’: ‘‘It prefigures the furtive sadism, the hysteria which totalitarianism insinuates into private and sexual life, the faceless boredom of the killers. Since Kafka wrote, the night knock has come on innumerable doors, and the name of those dragged off to die ‘like a dog’ is legion.’’37 A closer reading of Kafka shows that both Steiner and Welles use Kafka for their own agendas, for as Kundera insists, Kafkology never focuses on the work itself but on its exegesis. Nor does Kafkology ‘‘look to Kafka’s novels for the real world transformed by an immense imagination; rather, it decodes religious messages, it deciphers philosophical parables.’’38 As K. ‘‘howls hysterically’’39 against the absurdity of existence, Welles rebels against Kafka’s ‘‘pessimism’’ by interpreting Joseph K. as a mid-twentieth-century existentialist declaring his freedom as he rejects the abject submission of ‘‘dying like a dog.’’ Thus, Joseph K., much like Albert Camus’s Sisyphus, the hero of the absurd, finally ‘‘knows himself to be the master of his days,40 for when ‘‘agents’’ in trench coats throw a hand grenade into the pit in which Joseph K. is being held, he picks up the grenade and throws it back at them. Though he dies, the explosion mushrooms into an atomic cloud, and the spectators are left with the message that only the force of an atomic bomb can quell Joseph K.’s final insurrection against authority. As with Sisyphus, one must imagine Joseph K. ‘‘happy in that moment.’’41 The extent to which Kafka has entered a magnetic field of simulation, a field which according to Baudrillard requires proving ‘‘the real by the imaginary,’’42 is evident in the recent representations of the Kafkaesque, and one only has to note the actors who represent not K. the character but Kafka ‘‘as the real thing’’: Anthony Perkins in Welles’s The Trial (1962); Jeremy Irons in Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka (1991); Kyle MacLachlan in David Jones’s The Trial (1992); Woody Allen as Kleinman, the Kafka manque´ figure in his film Shadows and Fog (1992); and Daniel Day Lewis in Alan Bennett’s The In-

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surance Man, directed by Richard Eyre for BBC, Channel 2 (1986). Other recent representations include a ‘‘film within a film’’ by Beda Docampo Feijoo’s The Loves of Kafka (1991), with Jorge Marrale as Kafka in a drama about a screenwriter who travels from Argentina to Czechoslovakia to find a producer for a film about Kafka. More recently a short fantasy by Peter Capaldi, Franz Kafka: It’s A Wonderful Life (1995), with Richard E. Grant as Kafka, described in the reviews as more Capra than Kafka, presents Kafka’s seeming inability to complete the first sentence of his Metamorphosis. At the same time one can add to these representations of the Kafkaesque the Brothers Quay’s puppet animations, in particular Nocturna Artificiala (1979), in which a Kafka-like puppet with hollow eyes and dark eyebrows watches the strange city at night from the solitude of his room. If Alfred Hitchcock’s observation that ‘‘casting is character’’ is true, then the actors representing K./Kafka already bring to their performances from other films established personae of the neurotic, the paranoid, the psychotic, the obsessive, the intellectual, and the insomniac, and in this manner their previous embodiments ‘‘precede’’ Kafka. One only has to note that Perkins was the psychotic of Psycho; Irons is the very embodiment of neurosis in films from Reversal of Fortune to Damage; MacLachlan’s image is wedded to his phenomenal career as the obsessive FBI Agent Cooper from David Lynch’s cultist television series Twin Peaks; Daniel Day Lewis is well known for his performances as the alienated outsider in such films as My Beautiful Laundrette and the womanizing intellectual Tomas from The Unbearable Lightness of Being; and Woody Allen represents the quintessential New York Jewish neurotic artist. The compendium of quotations from the Kafkaesque in the films based on Kafka as text serves to illustrate the extent to which Kafka has been gulped down by the popular imagination. In Shadows and Fog, a film that might be described as Bertolt Brecht and Federico Fellini meet in Zentropa/Prague of the Astoria Studio’s imagination, the Kafkaesque and Allenesque collide in a whole range of selfconscious quotations: ‘‘At heart I’m a clerk,’’ ‘‘You filthy vermin,’’ ‘‘A family is death to the artist,’’ ‘‘I don’t know my function,’’ ‘‘I was unsure,’’ and ‘‘No one’s told me what to do.’’ Not only has Kafka been appropriated but also the cultural colonization of Prague as a symbol of the Kafkaesque has been taken over by the film industry’s desire for authenticity. In fact, with the exception of Jones’s The Trial, film representations of the Kafkaesque are flagrantly dependent on the cliche´s of early film noir, retaining thus the empty frame of the pathological nightmare of the genre. Both Allen’s and Soderbergh’s films open with a shot of a man running down narrow, shad-

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owy, cobblestone streets, pursued by other men in long overcoats and wide-brimmed hats. And Bennett’s opening shot in The Insurance Man refers to the genre as well, for it is night in a ‘‘foreign city’’ and a body is hanging from a lamppost while in the distance one can hear the sound of gunfire and bombs falling. With baroque Prague backdrops and expressionistic images, the films intentionally quote from old German expressionist films like Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919) or F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), and in fact Soderbergh, in a playful tribute to the period, names the evil doctor in his Kafka ‘‘Murnau.’’ While Allen’s film is a self-conscious farce on the themes of Lars von Trier’s Zentropa (1991), Soderbergh’s Kafka is a postmodern collage that erases the essential difference between Kafka and K.; they are both simultaneously Kafka/K. caught in The Trial and attempting to reach The Castle. Kafka is investigating the mysterious death of a friend and discovers that the dead man left behind some serious political enemies. At the same time, Kafka stumbles on a conspiracy linking officials at the insurance company with a body-snatching enterprise operating out of Hradcany Castle, the seat of the Czech government. But as Werckmeister observes, in Soderbergh’s film, ‘‘social conflict transpires only in the actions and gestures of bureaucrats, terrorists, killers, and police officers, but what it is about remains unclear.’’43 In literary criticism, Kafka’s solitude opens him up to endless interpretation of everything going on in history, but in Soderbergh’s posthistorical interpretation, the cliche´s associated with the holloweyed hunger-artist are playful signifiers presented as self-conscious traces from Kafka’s texts: ‘‘You’re a lone wolf—you keep too much to yourself ’’; ‘‘I write by myself for myself ’’; ‘‘The terrible toil of the insurance office’’; ‘‘You need to put some color in your cheeks’’; ‘‘Please burn everything that I’ve written; a true friend would.’’ Other references relate flippantly to his works: ‘‘The Penal Colony— it’s so new!’’ ‘‘The Castle can look quite majestic from here!’’ At the same time Soderbergh combines the mood of film noir’s shadowy streets filled with impending dread with that of the disorienting confusion of international political and criminal plots of films like Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), and even the theme music, played on a cimbalom, suggests the famous zither music of the earlier film. Soderbergh, however, disrupts this noir vision of Prague by inserting a color sequence borrowed from science fiction. Kafka/K. penetrates ‘‘the castle,’’ represented as a maze of interconnected corridors, and destroys the medical records division. He returns to the black and white representation and capitulates by confirming the

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‘‘suicide verdict’’ of the political martyr Gabriela Rossman. ‘‘You are very helpful, Kafka,’’ the police inspector commends him, and Kafka retreats to completing his ‘‘letter to his father.’’ Thus, despite the acrobatic ‘‘Kafka OO7’’ liquidation of Dr. Murnau, the film ends with ‘‘the betrayal of resistance, cooperation with the authorities, reconciliation with the tyrannical father.’’44 Though all of the representations of Kafka may be easily relegated to the Kafkaesque, Jones’s The Trial, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, is an exception. This may have to do with Pinter’s basic respect for Kafka, for if Walter Benjamin represents the critic who approaches Kafka with a great deal of tact, taking ‘‘all conceivable precautions against the interpretation of his writings,’’ then Pinter approaches the writing of his screenplay by finding his way in Kafka’s text, as Benjamin cautions, ‘‘circumspectly, cautiously, and warily.’’45 Pinter’s own attitude towards interpretation suggests a similar circumspection, and his advice for those seeking to find meaning in his own elusive plays is that ‘‘the more acute the experience the less articulate its expression.’’ He writes that the desire for verification on the part of readers is understandable ‘‘but cannot always be satisfied. There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. The thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’’46 Jones’s version of The Trial does not strive for Kafkaesque effects; it is filmed in Prague and set in the period that Kafka wrote the novel. Rather than the depopulated versions of the renderings of the Kafkaesque, Jones’s early twentieth-century Prague is presented as teeming with merchants, hawkers, and people going about their business. In Kafka the institution is a mechanism that obeys its own laws; no one knows who programmed those laws or when. But no one said that this mechanism had to play itself out in dark shadows, and it is a shock to see the sunlit morning on which Joseph K. is arrested. Thus the lively throngs and sunlit buildings in Jones’s film bracket what Skvorecky describes as the kafkarna of Joseph K.’s daily encounters with bureaucratic Besserwissers.47 The fact that these events in Jones’s film take place in the representation not of a dream but a ‘‘real’’ world is what brings out the essence of the quality Kundera calls Kafkan. ‘‘This term,’’ he writes, ‘‘determined solely by the novelist’s images, stands as the only common denominator in situations (literary or real) that no other word allows us to grasp and to which neither political nor social nor psychological theory gives us any key.’’48 The absorption of Kafka’s very name by popular culture has at the same time repositioned him within that twilight zone that exists be-

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tween popular entertainment and ‘‘serious’’ art. As Bennett comments, in ‘‘de-nominating himself Kafka was to make his name and his letter memorable,’’ for in diminishing it he augmented it. Having now reduced the name to K., ‘‘he docks it, curtails it, leaves its end behind much as lizards do when something gets hold of their tail.’’49 The absolute reduction of the name to the logic of mass production is evident in the packaging of Kafka for the Broadway stage. Steven Berkoff ’s dance drama Metamorphosis (1989), with Mikhail Baryshnikov as Gregor Samsa, and Marthe Clarke’s dance drama interpretation of The Hunger Artist (1987) illustrate the extent to which Kafka’s name has become a mere garnish that will assure these intrepid explicators of texts a place in the contemporary avant-garde. In both productions, movement, textual readings, scenic imagery, and musical accompaniments converge into one seemingly contradictory vision of Kafka. In Clarke’s interpretation, lyrical dance passages and dramatic extracts both from the story and Kafka’s letters to Felice Bauer are composed to create an impression of Kafka’s emotional starvation, his incompatibility with Felice, and his ‘‘hunger for relationships.’’ Earth mounds on the dance floor, cabbages, a nineteenth-century rocking horse, bentwood chairs, a portrait of Kafka purposefully hung askew serve as ‘‘contrapuntal’’ effects that appropriate Kafka as ‘‘one’’ of the stage effects. Berkoff, in his staging of the story about the insect that Kafka himself insisted could not be represented, acts somewhat like Kafka’s publisher, who thought that a cover illustration for the story was essential. Fortunately there is no insect costume; instead Baryshnikov as Gregor Samsa appears in a three-piece, pin-striped suit, the contemporary equivalent of a costume for bureaucratic insects. The set is composed essentially of black metal bars with a cage for Gregor’s room on which Baryshnikov ‘‘performs’’ the giant insect. Though Metamorphosis strives for the effects of high art in the form of a ‘‘spoken’’ ballet, the reviews suggest a ‘‘failed’’ musical. The adapter’s solution is to distribute the narrative fragments among the characters, and thus the characters step in and out of their roles, and in the same tone of voice describe their actions from without. Their speech and actions are robotic, and only Gregor is individualized through Baryshnikov’s performance. That Baryshnikov is the STAR of the performance is without question, for the program announces Baryshnikov’s name in letters that are immense in comparison to Kafka’s, with ‘‘Franz’’ amputated altogether, and thus Kafka is literally swallowed up by the ‘‘name’’ that for the moment can sell more tickets. Contemporary critical theory shares with Kundera the contempt

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for the reader’s constant desire for verification and explication. Jacques Derrida cautions that ‘‘reading a text might indeed reveal that it is untouchable, properly intangible precisely because it can be read, and for the same reason unreadable to the extent to which the presence within it of a clear and graspable sense remains as hidden as its origin. Unreadability thus no longer opposes itself to readability.’’50 Similarly Michel Foucault describes the desire to interpret as ‘‘a way of reacting to enunciative poverty, and to compensate for it by a multiplication of meaning: a way of speaking on the basis of that poverty, and yet despite it. But to analyze a discursive formation is to seek the law of that poverty, it is to weigh it up and to determine its specific form.’’51 The theme of betrayal in Testaments Betrayed, ‘‘An Essay in Nine Parts’’ is not a new venture for Kundera, for ‘‘betrayal’’ is central to Kundera’s novels, and there is hardly a character in his novels who doesn’t betray someone or something. Sabina from The Unbearable Lightness of Being immediately comes to mind, for not only does her very name refer to the nineteenth-century Czech poet Karel Sabina, who betrayed the cause of the Czech nationalism. Sabina represents the quintessential betrayal of country and ideology, but also she is the voice that associates sentimental cover-ups of human existence as kitsch, defined by Kundera as the privileging of feeling in order to cover up the truth. For as Kundera observes, ‘‘When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.’’ In a catalogue to an exhibit of Sabina’s paintings she discovers that her biography ‘‘read like the life of a saint or martyr: she had suffered, struggled against injustice, been forced to abandon her bleeding homeland, yet was carrying on the struggle.’’52 Sabina’s fate is the very same fate that Kafka has endured as Saint Garta in Brod’s novel. However, there is a profound difference between the betrayals that Kundera explores in his novel, for they represent the existential predicaments of the modern world in which we can only improvise our lives, while the ‘‘testaments betrayed’’ have to do with the insensitivity of readers who want to promote their own sensitivity. One only has to read a short passage from Brod’s biography of Kafka to become aware that his main concern is not to describe Kafka’s works but to show off his own lyrical linguistic sweeps: There you have fire, the completely restless fire and blood of a tense childhood, full of forebodings; but the walls of fire obey the baton of an invisible conductor; they are not ragged sheets of flame but a palace, whose every stone is a roaring blaze. Perfection—and just for that reason

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outre´ and not extravagant. . . . If the angels made jokes in heaven it would have to be in Franz Kafka’s language. This language is fire, but it leaves no soot behind. It has the sublimity of endless space, and at the same time it palpitates with every palpitation of things created.53

This passage was chosen randomly, for in reading Brod’s hagiography one is struck by the many passages which are in essence tributes to himself, to his sensitivity in recognizing Kafka’s greatness. Note also Kundera’s reminder: ‘‘No one is more insensitive than sentimental folk. Remember: ‘Heartlessness masked by a style overflowing with feeling.’ ’’54 In Testaments Betrayed the theme of the betrayal of Kafka’s legacy is only one of many variations on betrayals; other themes include the betrayals of composers Igor Stravinsky and Leon Jana´ cek by the naive critics who ‘‘feel’’ that their music reflects a romantic sensibility. We can see how Kundera’s thematic explorations of Stravinsky and Janaćek ultimately lead back to Kafka when he quotes Stravinsky that music is ‘‘powerless to express anything at all: a feeling, an attitude, a psychological state.’’55 He insists that understanding comes from paying attention to the structure of their music, and that the only way to understand Kafka’s novels is to read them within the context of the history of the art of the novel. ‘‘Rather than search the character K. for a portrait of the author and K.’s words for a mysterious coded message, to pay careful attention to the behavior of the characters, their remarks, their thoughts. . . .’’56 Betrayal by mistranslation is yet another variation that allows Kundera to take one sentence from Kafka’s The Castle in the many mutations that reveal the desire of ‘‘bad poets’’ to add to Kafka’s simplicity by eliminating his transgressions against good style. These thematic variations allow Kundera to lay out his great theme: the independence of art, not only from the encroachments of morality but also from politics, from history, from uncomprehending champions of their art as well as uncomprehending critics—not to mention, uncomprehending translators. The collection of essays is not, however, a mere catalogue of Kundera’s pet peeves, for Kundera avoids the very didacticism that he sees rooted in nineteenth-century realism, which according to him leads to the ‘‘grand march’’ of Socialist Realism, by using the polyphonic form he so admires in Jacques Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist. Kundera is not a system maker; instead he gathers bits and pieces of Kafka, Janaćek, Rushdie, Stravinsky, Hemingway, Ce´ line, and others and brings them together thematically in order to reveal what he calls ‘‘the spirit of the trial’’ to induce ‘‘guilt,’’ which pervades much of contemporary literary criticism.

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Kundera also suggests that contemporary psychological, sexual, and gender interpretations share the same spirit as good-old Socialist Realism for putting the artist on trial, not so much for social omissions but for betraying his own ‘‘transgressive’’ self. As an example, Kundera uses the sentence in the third chapter of The Castle in which Kafka describes the coition of K. and Frieda to reveal the substantial differences in the ‘‘translation’’ of the sentence when authority over the text becomes the central purpose. Using translations by Alexandre Vialette, Claude David, and Bernard Lortholary, Kundera illustrates the dissatisfaction on the part of the translators with Kafka’s repetition of Fremde twice and its derivative Fremdheit once by ignoring the repetition and adding their own words: ‘‘where one must suffocate from exile’’ or ‘‘abroad, in a country where.’’ ‘‘The metaphor,’’ writes Kundera, ‘‘loses the element of abstraction it has in Kafka, and its ‘touristic’ quality is heightened rather than suppressed.’’57 While the choices by Vialette, David, and Lortholary appear to be purely aesthetic choices, they also suggest dissatisfaction with Kafka’s interplay of multifaceted meanings in the repetition of Fremde and instead attempt to unravel meaning and significance from the simple sentence. On the other hand, Fremde is interpreted by Anderson as evidence of ‘‘precisely these ‘disgusting’ heterosexual relations that Kafka repeatedly characterized as a violation of his identity, as a journey away from the strange or eigentu¨mliche [belonging exclusive to; peculiar; characteristic; original; specific; queer] self that marked him as a writer.’’ Whatever he may have thought of ‘‘male culture,’’ Kafka was never able to conceive of heterosexual Verkher [traffic; sexual intercourse] as anything but a betrayal of his eigentu¨mliche self, as a journey into die Fremde.58

In arguing ‘‘against interpretation’’ Kundera focuses on the ‘‘betrayed’’ writers and composers in his Testaments Betrayed as variations on his grand theme of the independence of art. He revisits old territory since for him variations ‘‘constitute a journey, but not through the external world.’’ He writes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, ‘‘You recall Pascal’s penseé about how man lives between the abyss of the infinitely large and the infinitely small. The journey of the variation form leads to the second infinity, the infinity of internal variety concealed in all things.’’59 Thus we find in Kundera’s novel Immortality Hemingway complaining to Goethe, much as Kundera himself castigates Brod: I must have told people a thousand times to leave my life alone. But the more I pleaded the worse it got. . . . When I won the Nobel Prize I re-

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fused to go to Stockholm. Believe me, I didn’t give a damn about immortality, and now I’ll tell you something else; when I realized one day that it was holding me in its clutches, it terrified me more than death itself. A man can take his own life. But he cannot take his own immortality. As soon as immortality has you aboard, you can’t get off. . . .60

Kundera’s Goethe recognizes the paradoxical nature of the death of the author: ‘‘Man doesn’t know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn’t know how to be dead.’’61 Kafka of course has his own problems with immortality, for when Brod published Kafka’s diaries, Kundera comments, ‘‘he censored them somewhat’’ by deleting not only the allusions to whores but anything else touching on sex. Since that time, Kundera writes, ‘‘Kafkology has always expressed doubts about its subject’s virility’’ and ‘‘delights in discussing the martyrdom of his impotence.’’ Kafka has thus become ‘‘the patron saint of the neurotic, the depressive, the anorexic, the feeble; the patron saint of the twisted, the prećeiuses ridicules, and the hysterical.’’62 The metaphoric search for Kafka’s penis is played up in Bennett’s witty comedy Kafka’s Dick, performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1986. In taking on the owner of the best-known initial in literature as the protagonist of his farce, Bennett is also commenting on the nature of Kafkology: The theory these days (or one of them) is that the reader brings as much to the book as the author. So how much more do readers bring who have never managed to get through the book at all? It follows that the books one remembers best are the books one has never read. To be remembered but not read has been the fate of The Trial despite it being the most readable of Kafka’s books.63

The main character in Bennett’s play, Sydney, a minor executive in an insurance firm in Leeds, is precisely the kind of reader who knows all about Kafka but has never read his books. Though Sydney has accumulated a myriad of biographical facts on everyone from Ludwig Wittgenstein to F. Scott Fitzgerald, his particular specialization is Kafka, and as we find him relaxing in the living room, he is examining a book by two psychologists at the University of North Carolina, ‘‘who having analyzed everything Kafka ever wrote, deduce that one of his problems, of which there were many, was a small penis’’ (13). Linda, his wife, asks innocently, ‘‘No pictures?’’ This desire to see ‘‘nude photographs’’ (13) of the famous author reveals the extent to which that desire is titillated by publishers who while showing no ‘‘picture’’ nevertheless produce an endless flow of

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letters, biographies, and critical interpretations on Kafka, for as Sydney informs an incontinent Max Brod who appears on their doorstep looking for a bathroom: ‘‘I believe the Library of Congress catalogue lists some fifteen thousand’’ (41). Bennett’s play ‘‘around’’ Kafka shows that he shares Kundera’s aversion to kitsch and hagiography, and to a large extent his play addresses Kundera’s contempt for academic sleuths. ‘‘I assure you that rifling through someone’s intimate correspondence,’’ writes Kundera, ‘‘interrogating his former mistresses, talking doctors into betraying professional confidences, that’s rotten. Authors of biographies are riffraff, and I would never sit at the same table with them.’’ This protest unfortunately has no effect, for the ‘‘spectacle of public executions’’ of authors is the prime entertainment of the day.64 In Bennett’s play, Sydney, whose only qualification for doing research seems to be a distressing fondness for psychobabble, is busy digging around in Kafkology for his ‘‘case study’’ on Kafka’s Oedipus complex, which he hopes to publish in The Journal of Insurance Studies. As he works on his project, Sydney comes to resent Kafka, for as Bennett comments, ‘‘biographers are only fans after all, and fans have been known to shoot their idols.’’65 The desire to ‘‘shoot’’ the author is reflected by an irate reader in Kundera’s Immortality as well: It was necessary to say out loud at last that reading about Hemingway is a thousand times more amusing and instructive than reading Hemingway. It was necessary to show that Hemingway’s work is but a coded form of Hemingway’s life and this life was just as poor and meaningless as all our lives. It was necessary to cut Mahler’s symphony into little pieces and use it as background music for toilet-paper ads. It was necessary at last to end the terror of the immortals. To overthrow the arrogant power of the Ninth Symphonies and the Fausts.66

Sydney, like Kundera’s reader, shares that compulsion to defame the immortals. He does this by concentrating on nothing but the facts: ‘‘I’m an insurance man, I prefer facts. Biography. I’d rather read about writers than read what they write’’ (13). His storehouse of facts includes such recently acquired trivia ‘‘that Hitler went to the same school as Wittgenstein’’ (11), a connection he considers quite provocative, ‘‘for one of the functions of literary criticism is to point up unexpected connections’’ (15). Linda, a former nurse, does not share her husband’s literary interests. But she has picked up one or two tidbits from him; she knows that Auden wore no underpants, that Mr. Right for E. M. Forster was an Egyptian tram-

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driver, and that Kafka’s father ‘‘used to rummage in his ears with a toothpick then use it to pick his teeth’’ (13). Some day, she says, she’ll read and ‘‘learn the things in between’’ (14). Sydney explains that biographical facts are more important than the ‘‘things in between.’’ ‘‘This is England. In England facts like these pass for culture. Gossip is the acceptable face of intellect’’ (81). As he explains to Linda the ‘‘essential’’ Kafka, we find that Sydney’s interest in Kafka is entirely self-serving, for in finding parallels with Kafka’s life, he ennobles himself: He was never short of symptoms. You could at least have nursed him. You wouldn’t like his stories. Not what you’d call ‘‘true to life.’’ A man turns into a cockroach. An ape lectures. Mice talk. He’d like me. We’ve got so much in common. He was in insurance. I’m in insurance. He had TB. I had TB. He didn’t like his name. I don’t like my name. I’m sure the only reason I drifted into insurance was because I was called Sydney. (14)

A deft parodist, Bennett is the inventor of the most intricate play within a play on the modern English stage. He complicates the structure of Kafka’s Dick by using a number of framing devices while at the same time creating a simultaneity that allows for the contemporary period to gradually catch up with the time frame of the first, the years 1900–1926. The play is framed by a brief biographical interlude dramatizing Brod’s promise to burn Kafka’s work and the consequences of the broken promise when Kafka is forced to enter the playroom of the immortals where Wittgenstein dances with Betty Hutton and Dostoevsky chats with Noel Coward (82). As Kafka enters the hall of immortality, the gatekeeper Brod/St. Peter points out God, who is at the same time the POLICEMAN and Hermann K., and the play ends with Kafka’s realization that ‘‘heaven is going to be hell’’ (85). The two different time periods are united not only by the apparitions of Kafka, Brod, and Hermann K. in the contemporary period but also by the theme of the fathers: Sydney is threatening to put his rather sweet father into a nursing home, but the father is thwarting this by memorizing the necessary facts that determine identity. ‘‘Somebody’s been telling lies about me’’ (39) he tells Brod, whom he suspects as being one of the ‘‘they’’ who are coming to take him away. When Hermann K., who is at the same time the POLICEMAN, appears, Sydney’s father recognizes him: ‘‘This is him. He’s got authority written all over him’’ (47). Hermann K. in turn demands that his son ‘‘sink to his knees in abject remorse’’ (52). At this point Bennett produces the repertoire of cliche´s on Kafka’s emaciation and

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Kafka’s inadequacies and puts them into Hermann K.’s mouth: ‘‘Still as thin as a tram ticket. Did he eat?’’ (52). But of course Kafka’s hidden penis is really the source of the Oedipal struggle: ‘‘There is one fact about my son and his . . . old man that has never got into print. . . . The long and the short of the matter is . . .’’ (61). If fathers in Kafka, as Stanley Corngold observes, ‘‘exist as the fiction of an exculpative authority empowered by errant sons born to be ruined by their hope of real fathers,’’67 then Bennett provides the mirror image of contemporary society’s exculpative authority of weak sons over decrepit, feeble fathers. By the time we meet Brod on Sydney and Linda’s doorstep carrying a turtle who later emerges from his shell as Kafka, Bennett has already developed his theme of betrayals. The culprit in Bennett, as the first scene already established, is Brod, but his second appearance confirms first impressions; Sydney quickly reassures Brod that though he’s read half a dozen biographies of Kafka, he always returns to Brod’s. ‘‘Of course you do,’’ replies Brod. ‘‘I knew Kafka. They didn’t’’ (18). For Brod ‘‘knowing’’ Kafka is tantamount to being Kafka, for as he says of Kafka’s novels, ‘‘I practically wrote them’’ (51). But Kafka’s sudden transformation from the turtle forces Brod to become more circumspect. Kafka is not aware of his fame, for he still thinks Brod burned all his manuscripts. In Brod’s words: ‘‘He knows he’s Kafka. He doesn’t know he’s Kafka.’’ The consequent game Sydney is forced to play is ‘‘I don’t know him, I’ve never heard of him’’ as he rushes to his bookshelf to hide all his books on Kafka. As the piles of books come tumbling down, Bennett reveals that they consist entirely of the Kafkological canon: The Loneliness of Kafka, Kafka: The Debate Continues, and The Agony of Kafka, and so on. When Kafka discovers Brod’s betrayal, Sydney reassures Kafka that the proliferation of studies interpreting his life are the basis for his current fame as an icon of resistance to ‘‘fascism, communism, the totalitarian state’’ (72): Your reputation today, at least among those who know your name but haven’t read you (which is the measure of literary reputation after all) . . . stands high as a man who protested (though don’t ask in what respect precisely), a man who shook his fist (helplessly, no doubt) against authority, officialdom, the law. You were, if not an enemy of the state, a friend of the enemies of the state. (73)

Kafka protests that he would like to find a community of outcasts who would read him ‘‘furtively, with discretion and behind locked

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doors.’’ The ideal readers, according to Bennett’s Kafka, would be those who read him but don’t name him, know him but do not speak of him, study him but do not teach him. ‘‘That would be my ideal state’’ (73). In this debate between the two insurance men, the essence of Bennett’s critique of Kafkology surfaces, but his critique is based on the deconstruction of such cliche´s that Sydney has appropriated: ‘‘You see, try as we will, we can never quite touch Kafka. He always eludes us. We never do know him’’ (79). All these cliche´s are built on the myth of the artist’s life, ‘‘how one struggled for years against poverty and indifference only to die and find himself famous. Another is a prodigy finding his way to the public’s heart to be celebrated while still young, but paying the price by dying and being forgotten. Or just dying’’ (81). But these myths have to conform to what we have convinced ourselves an artist’s life should be, and Kafka’s life has turned into the stuff that created St. Kafka written by Brod and a farce in which Kafka is reduced to his penis by Bennett. ‘‘The process goes on,’’ Sydney comments, ‘‘articles, books . . . every day is—’’ as Kafka interrupts ‘‘—a day of judgment. I know’’ (73).

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9 The Narcissist and the Mirror in Les Liaisons Dangereuses: Laclos, Hampton, and Mu¨ller THE RECENT THEATRICAL READINGS BY CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON AND Heiner Mu¨ ller of Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782) explore zones of indeterminacy in Laclos’s epistolary novel, and the phenomenon of rereading grants the classical text, as Patrice Pavis notes, ‘‘a perennial life by founding this life, not on permanent and unchanging significance, but on change and adaptation.’’1 In their reading of Laclos, both Hampton and Mu¨ller illustrate Julia Kristeva’s observation that the intersection of textual surfaces in any given literary work can never be circumscribed but is instead open to endless dissemination since ‘‘any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.’’2 From a slightly different perspective, Milan Kundera observes that variations on a theme represent a challenge to undertake a journey that leads to ‘‘the infinity of internal variety concealed in all things.’’ Kundera suggests that the limitless variations on variations represent a movement in which the final variation may bear no more resemblance to the original theme ‘‘than a flower to its image under the microscope.’’3 The intersection of the utterances from Laclos’s novel in Hampton’s and Mu¨ller’s plays illustrates the ambivalent relationship between writing and reading since the writer is the same as the one who reads. As Kristeva points out, ‘‘since his interlocutor is a text’’ the writer himself ‘‘is no more than a text rereading itself as it rewrites itself.’’4 Similarly, Roland Barthes advances a theory of intertextuality that depends entirely on the reader as the organizing center of interpretation, ‘‘as the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed.’’5 To the study of the intertextual field between readers and writers, Hans Robert Jauss adds a historical dimension by focusing on the ways different readers’ horizons diverge from one another over time since ‘‘the succession of works is mediated not only through the producing subject but also through the consuming 282

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9: THE NARCISSIST AND THE MIRROR

subject.’’6 Michel Foucault’s conception of intertextuality contributes a political component by focusing on the ways that the social realm saturates the literary object, and he insists that we analyze the role of power in the production of textuality and of textuality in the production of power. In particular, Foucault’s observations on the manifestations of ‘‘differences’’ in class and gender have specific resonance when related to Laclos’s novel and Hampton and Mu¨ller’s variations. What is important for the discussion of Laclos, Hampton, and Mu¨ller is the awareness of the way intertextual networks shape not only our understanding of language but also our existence as social and political subjects. This is especially significant when the readings of Laclos by Hampton and Mu¨ller represent divergences in the readings themselves, not only evident as changes from one genre to another but also as introductions ‘‘to the very roots of thought, of notions of chance, discontinuity and materiality.’’7 The main concern of this discussion is to explore Hampton’s and Mu¨ller’s readings of Laclos’s provocative social portrait of eighteenthcentury society as illustrations of the multiplex scripts that are produced as a consequence of the interweaving of traces of other elements of the chain or system since, as Jacques Derrida points out, ‘‘there are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces’’8 (26). The problems Hampton and Mu¨ller face in creating variations on Laclos’s epistolary novel have to do with the characteristics of the genre itself. Indeterminacy is particular to the epistolary novel in that two realities exist simultaneously, the reality of the letters themselves, and the reality that is being veiled in the dark spaces between the letters. Most significant for the transposition of the novel into dramatic form is that epistolary fiction is based on the aspect of absence, and the letter serves as a sign of absence; by contrast, in performance, the presence of the body of the actor is essential for representation to occur. Absence imposes hermeneutic instability, while presence reaffirms it. Another consideration related to absence is the aspect of time, which in the epistolary novel dissolves into absence, while in theatrical reality, time projects itself as continuous presence. Not only the spirit of absence dominates Laclos’s novel, but other features of the genre, the juxtapositioning and interfacing of the letters, the reflexivity of discourse, the intertextuality of intersecting discourses from Rousseau and Samuel Richardson, and particularly the readerly nature of the activity presented in an epistolary novel pose problems for translating Les Liaisons Dangereuses into the language of the mise-en-sce`ne. One must also remember that letters are private, whereas events represented in the theater are social and

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public, and hence the threat of making public by publishing the private is a strong subtext in Laclos’s novel. However, one characteristic of epistolarity that lends itself quite readily for articulation into performance is the foregrounded nature of theatricality that is characteristic of writing letters, and since letters are written to produce certain effects on the recipient, only ingenuous types, like Cećile de Volanges, the convent-bred adolescent of the novel, think they write to express themselves. Theatricality is part of the assumed poses of sincerity, love, or loyalty projected in the letters; hence, transposition of these qualities into theatrical gestures represents similar poses assumed by the characters in the novel. In the epistolary form utilized by Laclos, the act of seeking meaning is repeatedly exposed as a problem-filled, even hazardous occupation. The conflict of the many discourses of the multiplecorrespondent text is due to the problem that at no point can a single discourse be traced, but, instead, the novel projects a cluster of disparate discourses, a contradictory, multivocal system. In what looks to be the preface to the novel, the barely visible frame of the author is presented within the frame of a publisher who questions the ‘‘verisimilitude’’ of the collected letters, and an editor who insists that his only task has been the selection of letters ‘‘of a whole section of society.’’ However, since these letters reflect sentiments that are either ‘‘pretended or dissembled,’’ they continually ‘‘frustrate the one desire he [the editor] wishes to satisfy.’’9 In addition, the frames one character builds around another or about him/herself are all occasions for ironic disjunction due to the absence of a unifying narrative consciousness that would contain the consciousness of all characters. Not only does the lack of a central narrative authority undermine the fulfillment of fiction, but also the irony that the speakers of the novel are hidden or entirely dissolved behind their perfected disguise, or their armor of reason, subverts credibility. Another problem that Hampton and Mu¨ller encounter has to do with the nature of communication represented by the letters, particularly those between the main characters, Mme. de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, since though their letters symbolize communication, they do not necessarily embody it. Les Liaisons Dangereuses is then paradoxically a novel of the failure of messages to get across; for, in the course of reading, it becomes evident that the two main characters struggle over control and mastery of the others and each other. This struggle sets two forces into opposition, the system of lucid intention and reason as exemplified by the ‘‘plans’’ and ‘‘grand designs’’ of Merteuil and Valmont against the systemless

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realm of sentiment generated by the reactions of Mme. de Tourvel, Cećile de Volanges, the Chevalier Danceny, Mme. de Rosemonde, and Mme. de Volanges. The single-minded campaign of the two schemers is undermined by the very structure of the novel, the juxtaposing of contradictory narratives that make us doubt the reality or exact tenor of a particular event. In his analysis of the novel, Georges Poulet observes that while on the surface Les Liaisons Dangereuses seems to be a novel about the premeditated conquest of a victim by a seducer, surreptitiously another novel is introduced, the ‘‘unexpected, unforeseeable, the novel of the unpremeditated conquest of the seducer by the victim.’’10 The interpenetration of the novel of reason and control with the novel of sentiment and emotion manifests itself in Laclos’s text primarily as a conflict of process, on one hand, the process of the art of creating the self in order to determine the meaning of the text and the meaning of one’s relationship to the more general text of the culture of worldliness, and on the other, the process of surrendering the self to the general text of culture so that, in essence, the text creates the self. Ironically, Valmont and Merteuil initially suggest that they are engaging in a process of undermining cultural authority by mastering its conceptions of truth, its patterns of ordering reality, and its rules regarding social interaction. This process of mastery yields that Valmont and Merteuil become extensions of the system itself. The novel is about the process of systematization and reduction of others to the language of classification, and in so doing robbing them of their freedom. The system demands voluntary, artistic self-creation and self-representation, leaving the main characters entirely dissolved behind their perfected disguise or mask. Since Laclos’s epistolary form creates meaning not only through the content of the letters, where the bare frame of plot is discernible, but also through juxtapositioning, interfacing, and intertextual allusion, the transposition of the novel into dramatic form is a hazardous undertaking, for as noted by Frances King, ‘‘an exact dramatic transcription of Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 Les Liaisons Dangereuses would consist merely of a man and a woman alternately reading the letters that make up the novel.’’11 However, both Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1985) and Mu¨ller’s Quartet (1982) provide transformations of Laclos’s novel through the powerful lens of modern sensibility which reflect their particular vision of contemporary society. Hampton’s variation, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, uses a theatricalized vision of the eighteenth century as period to imbue the plot with the style and spirit of the novel. Hampton focuses on the many refer-

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ences in Laclos’s novel to the salon as theater, as well as to the many self-reflexive allusions by Valmont and Merteuil to themselves as actors, as the central perspective of characterization. For within the frame of Laclos’s images of the salon as the stage for enacting the ‘‘projects,’’ ‘‘plans,’’ and ‘‘grand designs,’’ the appropriate mask, posture, or gesture is vital, and all the talents of that society of worldliness are directed to defining, preserving, and furthering the agreed-upon image and style. The subtle change, however, of moving the action of Laclos’s novel slightly forward into the mid-1790s to suggest a society on the brink of the French Revolution does seem to hint at Hampton’s desire for historicized retribution. In addition, the mise-en-sce`ne of the New York production had a distinct autumnal mood, and the sudden gusts of wind and swirling leaves conveyed a sadness, a sense of a tragic autumn, of fin de sie`cle. Similar to the world in Laclos’s novel, Hampton’s society views itself as ‘‘le grand theáˆtre.’’ Though society is viewed as ‘‘le monde,’’ Valmont and Merteuil are more concerned with the images that society favors than with society itself. Since the main interest of both characters is in the system that valorizes their place in the salon, their very existence depends on the exclusion and isolation of those who might challenge their position in the salon.12 The high intelligence of both Valmont and Merteuil is dissipated exclusively for erotic encounters whereby they measure each other’s strength. Indeed their machinations are disproportionate to the intended effect, for Merteuil sets the action going by commanding Valmont to seduce and corrupt Cećile in revenge on a former lover who dared to leave her to propose marriage to the virgin Cećile. The horrible irony is, as Charles Baudelaire observes, that all their scheming is directed towards winning ‘‘a quite frivolous prize.’’13 Laclos’s epistolarity is exchanged by Hampton for a foregrounded theatricality; however, contemporary erotic games and sexual obsessions—so aptly coined by Christopher Lasch as ‘‘the culture of narcissism’’—emerge as thematic concerns that link Hampton’s play to general poststructuralist criticism of the society of the spectacle. This is by no means unique to Hampton’s vision, for Laclos clearly perceived Merteuil and Valmont as self-created images caught in the mirrors of the salon. It is no wonder that theater and fiction appear as frequent allusions in Laclos’s novel. Valmont identifies himself as being ‘‘not unlike the hero in the last act of a drama’’ (Laclos 58) and uses the perspective of his professional skill as an actor to criticize the performance of others. For example, in admonishing Danceny for not playing his part of the lover effectively since ‘‘lovers’ complaints are not entertaining outside the opera’’ (Laclos

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129), Valmont projects the conviction that it is the mask or role of the lover that is more significant than the emotions behind the mask. One’s skill in acting is central to the mastery necessary to project one’s will in the society that judges only the effects of performance. Merteuil is the ultimate theatrical invention, for she not only views herself as a supreme actress but also as the impresario of her own life. In letter 81 to Valmont she reveals the secrets of her acting skills, for even as an apprentice actress, the young Merteuil made ‘‘a study of facial expression and of character as it is displayed in physical features. Through this I acquired the searching glance which experience has taught me not to trust entirely, but which, on the whole, has seldom deceived me’’ (Laclos 182). Not only the study of others but also the composure of her own features became the focus of her acting career as she ‘‘created’’ herself by practicing ‘‘looking serene, even cheerful’’ when annoyed, suffered ‘‘pain voluntarily so as to achieve a spontaneous expression of pleasure, and laboured with the same care, and even more difficulty, to repress symptoms of unexpected joy’’ (Laclos 182). The transposed theatricality from Laclos’s novel emerges in Hampton’s play in intimate teˆte-a`-teˆte scenes, which are then juxtaposed to the enacted effects of their private designs upon the other characters, particularly Tourvel and Ce´ cile. This juxtaposition of scenes, as does the interfacing of the letters, works quite effectively in bringing out Valmont and Merteuil’s fascination with their roles. However, in watching their victims, they also watch the effect on the other, and since their projects have no meaning without the presence and admiration of others, both Merteuil and Valmont need each other to valorize their conquests. They are constantly aware of their performance and unable to express emotion without calculating its effects on others as if they doubted the authenticity of any gesture or expression without the security of a mirror that reflects a similar image. Consequently, they frequently act out scenes for each other. In Hampton’s play, Merteuil is the internal director as well; this role is evident from one of the first scenes in the play when she bids Valmont to hide behind a screen while she stages her concern to Mme. de Volanges that Cećile is receiving letters from her young admirer, Danceny. Since she wants Cećile to be susceptible to Valmont’s seduction, Merteuil thereby eliminates the possibility for Danceny to intrude on her plans. In playing out Merteuil’s script, Mme. de Volanges whisks Ce´ cile off to the chateau of Valmont’s aunt, Madame de Rosemonde, thus unwittingly opening Cećile to

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Valmont’s erotic ruses. On Merteuil’s part, it is a ploy of merciless intelligence to betray the girl who has been confiding in her because, without losing Ce´ cile’s trust, the little tableau cements the mother’s confidence and provides a means to get Cećile to the country where Valmont may seduce her. Not only does Hampton exploit the appropriately theatrical device of eavesdropping, but also the scene provides a precise equivalent for what Merteuil and Valmont so often do in their letters as they show off to each other their skills at maneuvers. However, the very rapid development of the plot from this one scene deprives Hampton’s play of the duration of time in the novel since in the novel, before any event is enacted, all possibilities are examined and reexamined to prevent any traces of intent on the part of the schemers. From the beginning of the play it is Merteuil who sets various actions into motion, while Valmont is projected as a rather vain but unwitting victim of Merteuil’s ruthless games. Thus, in Hampton’s version, Valmont emerges as the prototype narcissist described by Lasch, who ‘‘notwithstanding the occasional illusions of omnipotence depends on others to validate his self-esteem.’’ 14 Valmont’s narcissistic strutting about also demands constant victims, preferably those who are hard to get, like Tourvel, in order to feed the image in the mirror. In Laclos’s novel the need for public verification is presented in a more balanced manner; Merteuil, though more limited in playing before a large audience, chooses Valmont as ‘‘the other’’ to applaud her exploits. In choosing Valmont as her ideal spectator, Merteuil makes sure that the message of her performing skills will not be lost on Valmont. Such is the function in Laclos’s novel of Merteuil’s episode with Pre´van, the predatory Don Juan whom she ensnares and ostensibly ruins merely because he boasted that he would have her. In recounting in great detail her total victory over Pre´van, a victory that banishes Pre´van from the salons of society, Merteuil wants to show Valmont her great success in contrast to what she considers as Valmont’s failure with Tourvel. This episode also serves as a not-toosubtle hint of what may be in store for Valmont if he as much as considers threatening her image by making public what she has exposed in her letters. Due to her success in destroying Pre´van, Merteuil’s confidence in the inviolability of her reputation is entirely impermeable to doubt, and that is the reason she continues to scoff at Valmont’s lack of success in his campaign to win Tourvel. The omission of the Pre´van episode by Hampton can of course be justified in terms of the expediency of restricting the action to the main characters; however, its omission deprives Merteuil’s character

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in Hampton’s play of her susceptibility to the same acclaim that Valmont receives more publicly. Indeed for Valmont the theater of his victory requires public applause: ‘‘Spectators? Oh, wait and see,’’ he writes Merteuil. ‘‘I shall not want those either. If they are not here to watch me at work, I shall show them my task complete: they will then have only to admire and applaud’’ (Laclos 230). The public domain of Valmont’s campaigns against his victims has the function in Laclos of showing how limited the sphere of action was for women of Merteuil’s intelligence. For while Valmont prides himself over the number of public victories which added to his reputation of purity of method and absoluteness in self-control, Merteuil has to take secret pleasure in the refinement of her acting, the secrecy of her movements, and the inviolability of her reputation. While Valmont’s campaign of seducing Tourvel will in his eyes establish him publicly as a hero within the salon, Merteuil’s victories are entirely private and consist of her operating within the salon by accepting its code and values while in the meantime reversing the rules of the game in her favor. Since Hampton’s play focuses on the events rather than the dynamics of the relationship between Merteuil and Valmont, much of the irony intended by Laclos to suggest the double bind of Merteuil’s position is consequently lost, and, instead, sympathy for her position is greatly reduced in presenting her more as a ruthless, scheming woman than as a woman trapped within the system that the culture of worldliness applauds. The scene during which Valmont hides behind the screen in order that Merteuil may show off her skills at manipulation and dissimulation illustrates quite effectively to what extent Merteuil is trapped by the necessity of projecting control. Just a few moments before the enacted scene, she reveals to Valmont that her invention of self wasn’t a question of choice since she was a woman: ‘‘Women are obliged to be far more skilful than men.’’ However, for a woman, ingenuity consists of the appearance of losing since, ‘‘we can’t even get rid of you when we want to: we’re compelled to unstitch, painstakingly, what you would just cut through.’’15 The transposition of the infamous letter 81 creates a great deal of sympathy for Merteuil, particularly when considered within the context of contemporary feminist issues. Today’s society, however, values spontaneity more than strength of intellect, and consequently Merteuil’s assertion that she ‘‘always knew I was born to dominate your sex and avenge my own’’ by becoming a ‘‘virtuoso of deceit’’ undermines the validity of her efforts to perfect her techniques (Hampton 33). She admits quite readily that she wanted Valmont even ‘‘before we’d met’’ and that it was the only one of her desires that ever got the better of her.

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She views their relationship as ‘‘single combat,’’ paying Valmont the ultimate compliment of being her equal in the battle between the sexes. Not only does Merteuil reveal her vulnerability to Valmont, but she also lets him in on the secrets of her success: ‘‘Only flirt with those you intend to refuse: then you acquire a reputation for invincibility, whilst slipping safely away with the lover of your choice. . . . Never write letters. Get them to write letters. Always be sure they think they’re the only one. Win or die’’ (Hampton 34). In response, Valmont compliments her as being ‘‘a genuinely wicked woman,’’ adding, ‘‘I can’t resist you’’ (Hampton 40). While on the surface Valmont’s appraisal of Merteuil may not differ substantially from the characterization by Laclos, in the novel it is not Merteuil’s wickedness, but rather her wit and intelligence that make her such an astounding accomplice to Valmont. Merteuil is indeed a woman capable of the sort of energy that Stendhal describes as essential for ‘‘de grands desseins.’’16 However, in Hampton’s play, when she taunts Valmont that before he can be rewarded he must show her evidence of his triumph over Tourvel ‘‘in writing,’’ she appears as a woman who has no other dimension than that of the cold cruelty she considers so ennobling. The scene also shows, perhaps prematurely, to what extent she intends to include Valmont in her designs for power. As she commands him, ‘‘And now you must leave me,’’ Valmont gives her ‘‘his most charming smile’’; this, however, leaves her visibly unmoved as she insists ‘‘because I’m hungry.’’ Valmont. Yes, I’ve quite an appetite myself. Merteuil. Then go home and eat. [Silence. Then he crosses to her and lingeringly kisses her hand.] In writing. (Hampton 41)

Despite the more one-sided nature of characterization in Hampton’s play, Andre´ Malraux’s observation that the game of erotic power between Merteuil and Valmont sets vanity against vanity, vanity counter to desire, and desire in opposition to vanity is frequently illustrated within the dynamics of the play.17 Strangely enough, despite their will, intelligence, and energy not one of the characters achieves the object of his/her desire, or if they do, they find it wanting. Valmont, for example, wants to sleep with Merteuil, but she, at least outwardly, does not want to sleep with him. He wants also to sleep with Tourvel, but she simply doesn’t want to at all. Even when he does sleep with Tourvel, the pleasure is fleeting since it is tested against the erotic power Merteuil holds over him. When he does sleep with Cećile, he is merely fulfilling Merteuil’s desire, and Cećile, though she loses her virginity to Valmont, would prefer to sleep

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with Danceny, her heart’s desire. Merteuil, who continues to desire Valmont, sacrifices that desire in order to show him the triumph of her will. She in turn sleeps with Danceny not because she desires him, but because this step is necessary in order to humiliate Valmont. Thus the narcissistic and aggressive impulses of the pair towards each other, and towards Tourvel, Cećile, and Danceny, result in a ronde of aggressiveness, revenge, and emptiness. All of the characters live in the realm of desire; however, the most poignant desire in Hampton’s version is expressed by Valmont as a desire for passion: ‘‘I want passion. . . . Not the kind we’re used to, which is as cold as it’s superficial; I don’t get much pleasure out of that any more.’’ Due to the systematization of all emotional life to the rules of the game of worldliness, Valmont’s desire is set in opposition to his desire to control Tourvel so that she, despite her belief in virtue and the sanctity of marriage, will ‘‘still not be able to stop herself.’’ Consequently, Valmont’s desire to fill his emptiness with real emotion has to be defended as merely ‘‘the excitement of watching her betray everything that’s most important to her’’ (Hampton 15). Thus, despite Valmont’s desire for passion, and Merteuil’s even more horrible cruelty, the game of erotic power entails regarding the other as purely an erotic object and thereby reducing their individualism to the most mechanical and dehumanized level. The erotic games played by Merteuil and Valmont necessitate a most lucid consciousness, as well as a denial of pleasure, for as Georges Bataille writes in his study of ‘‘erotism,’’ all great libertines are ‘‘great only because they have destroyed in themselves their capacity for pleasure.’’ Instead, they exploit their cold cruelty, for cruelty is nothing, writes Bataille, ‘‘but a denial of oneself carried so far that it becomes a destructive explosion.’’18 The self-conscious, self-effacing cruelty practiced by Merteuil might be read as the frustration of an intelligent, liberated woman who has had ‘‘to invent’’ herself, or create her mask, for no other reason than that society doesn’t allow her the same privileges to satisfy her drive for pleasure. She finds out through bitter experience that while pleasure is the single reason for uniting the sexes, it does not suffice to create a liaison between them (Hampton 80). For that reason, Merteuil has manipulated her erotic experiences to avoid the possibility of love and hence loss of power, since men, she says, ‘‘hold every ace in the pack’’ by ruining women ‘‘whenever the fancy takes you’’ (Hampton 32). Women, on the other hand, ‘‘either have to devise some way of making you want to leave us, so you’ll feel too guilty to harm us; or find a reliable means of blackmail’’ (Hampton 33).

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In contrast, Valmont’s cruelty is practiced in a more public domain, for Valmont is willing to take on any woman whose ruin will enhance his reputation. While Hampton’s play effectively foregrounds the witty dialogue, one-liner snubs, and sardonic humor of the two darlings of society much in the manner of a Restoration comedy, this attention to surfaces tends to be reductive, particularly when terrible events are happening such as the seduction/rape of Cećile. In the novel, Valmont’s very words strike horror as he describes to Merteuil the event of Cećile’s defloration, ‘‘conquered by force of authority,’’ with ‘‘one hand. . . . needed for power, the other for love’’ (Laclos 222–23), as do Merteuil’s in her reply to Valmont criticizing Cećile for her lack of self-awareness and dooming her to nothing better than ‘‘a machine for giving pleasure’’ (Laclos 254). Whereas in Laclos these remarks plunge the reader into the very essence of Enlightenment cynicism, Hampton’s staging of the scene projects more Cećile’s stupid naivete´ in contrast to Valmont’s worldliness. Ultimately Laclos’s novel calls attention to Cećile’s limited education in preparing her for the world, a limitation that results in the effortless corruption of Cećile by Merteuil and Valmont, a social criticism that is not as easily discernible in Hampton’s adaptation. Even as Merteuil reveals her rules of the game to him, as she does when she includes Valmont in her scheme to cuckold her former lover Gercourt, Merteuil must also play the game with the most lucid consciousness. She controls the game by taking advantage of Valmont’s narcissism that demands constant reaffirmation from his admiring mirror by denying him applause. The crucial scene that determines the ultimate parting of the ways of the two schemers has to do with Valmont’s obsessive pursuit of Tourvel, for in her downfall, Tourvel will establish Valmont as the master in the game of seduction: Valmont. Every step she tries to take away from the inevitable conclusion brings her a little closer to it. Hopes and fears, passion and suspense: even if you were in the theatre, what more could you ask? Merteuil. An audience? Valmont. But you’re my audience. And when Gercourt is married and Madame de Tourvel eventually collapses, we shall tell everyone, shall we not? And the story will spread much faster than the plot of the latest play and I’ve no doubt it will be much better received. (Hampton 59–60)

Merteuil’s abandonment of her role as Valmont’s audience ironically also has to do with her loss of control over her emotions. What undermines the relationship of common interests is the intensity of

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emotion that Tourvel invokes in Valmont, for once she surrenders her virtue, she behaves, as Valmont reports to Merteuil, ‘‘with perfect candour. Total mutual delirium: which for the first time ever with me outlasted the pleasure itself ’’ (Hampton 79). Valmont’s enthusiastic report forces Merteuil to use her power as arbitrator of what is reasonable in the realm of worldliness to undermine Valmont’s confidence in the power of love. Instead of praising his triumph, she reminds him that giving himself over to his project so completely is ‘‘not the way of the world.’’ Consequently, the intensity of Valmont’s feelings for Tourvel are set in opposition to Merteuil’s taunts and derision that ‘‘once upon a time you were a man to be reckoned with’’ (Hampton 73). Merteuil’s taunts make Valmont anxious that his alliance with Tourvel may indeed have undermined his image, and to reclaim his status in Merteuil’s eyes, Valmont follows Merteuil’s ready-made script of cruelty: ‘‘Listen. Listen to me,’’ he tells Tourvel. ‘‘You’ve given me great pleasure. But I just can’t bring myself to regret leaving you. It’s the way of the world. Quite beyond my control’’ (Hampton 93). The emphasis on theatricality in the sequences of staged scenes played out for the benefit of others—Merteuil’s theatrical manipulations of Mme. de Volanges and Cećile, Valmont’s staging of assistance to a poor peasant for Tourvel’s benefit, and ultimately Merteuil’s script for Valmont’s betrayal of Tourvel—suggest a lack of freedom. Perhaps the most devastating scene that illustrates the total narcissistic imprisonment in images is the scene in which Valmont is writing a letter to Tourvel on the courtesan E´milie’s back since in that scene he is playing to three spectators, Tourvel in the letter, E´milie in announcing that he is writing a love letter to a prude while making love to her, and ultimately his ideal spectator, Merteuil, to whom he recounts the events in yet another scene. Merteuil and Valmont, however, believe they have succeeded in turning the others into mere actors following a script they have written and directed. The irony is that they do not recognize that they are frozen and fixed within their roles, and even when Valmont has the opportunity to break out of his role during the brief glimpses of an emotional life he encounters with Tourvel, his vanity as an actor demands the applause he has become accustomed to. The most insidious aspect of Valmont’s adherence to the absolute script of narcissism is the illusion that his intimate meetings with Merteuil seemingly give him the opportunity to unmask and be sincere; however, Merteuil only uses the pretense of discarding her mask as a means of unmasking Valmont and exposing his helpless face. Valmont realizes that what he thought was his drama has actually

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been Merteuil’s, and when he returns to claim his prize of a night with her, he boasts that the destruction of Tourvel ‘‘may well turn out to be my most famous exploit.’’ But Merteuil undermines his self-congratulatory crowing by claiming, ‘‘I’m inclined to see this as one of my greatest triumphs.’’ Valmont. There’s nothing a woman enjoys so much as a victory over another woman. Merteuil. Except, you see Valmont, my victory wasn’t over her. Valmont. Of course it was, what do you mean? Merteuil. It was over you. [Long silence] That’s what’s so amusing. That’s what’s so genuinely delicious. (Hampton 95)

In Laclos’s novel, from then on, everything that happens seems part of an unstoppable chain. As war is declared, the two actors can no longer follow a script. Cećile’s young lover, Danceny, now Merteuil’s current lover, discovers through her that Valmont has corrupted Cećile and challenges him to duel. Before dying, Valmont gives Danceny his correspondence with Merteuil, and Danceny decides to make public Merteuil’s infamous letter describing her system and her destruction of Pre´van. Valmont dies, as does Tourvel, driven mad by his rejection. Cećile enters the convent, and young Danceny, disillusioned with the way of the world, enters the celibate order of the Knights of Malta. However, it is Merteuil who suffers the most ravaging fall. Seeking to reaffirm her inviolable reputation at the theater, she discovers that the world of the salon is fickle, and despite her acting skills, as she enters her box, at first murmurs are heard, then she is publicly insulted by other women, who rise ‘‘as of one accord, leaving her sitting alone,’’ and ‘‘this very marked display of indignation was applauded by all the men, and the hubbub increased to the extent, it is said, of hooting ‘‘ (Laclos 389). Ultimately, Pre´van is reinstated in society, and Merteuil, her face ruined by smallpox, leaves the country. In Hampton’s version of the battle between Merteuil and Valmont, Tourvel emerges as the most diminished character. In Laclos’s novel, she is indeed the sincere believer, a virtuous woman who is convinced by Valmont’s striving for redemption. She ultimately gives herself to him not for her own pleasure but to save him. With this act, she accepts the responsibility for her own downfall from virtue, and that is the reason when Valmont so brutally announces his boredom, defending himself, ‘‘It was not my fault’’ (Laclos 335), Tourvel is plunged into a nightmare vision in which a wrathful God, a wronged husband, betrayed friendships, and the

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monster Valmont are hopelessly intermeshed. Her descent into delirium is particularly horrifying because we already know that her suffering serves no purpose, for Valmont has in no way been redeemed by her love. Instead, he barters her downfall for a one-nightstand with Merteuil. Ultimately, Laclos reveals the tragedy that emerges from the contrast of romanticism combined with extreme Christian piety when it is subject to assault by the most cynical male libertinism of Valmont. In Hampton’s adaptation, however, the horror of Tourvel’s downfall is mitigated by the suggestion that she may have died willingly, knowing that Valmont really loved her after all. This in turn implies that Tourvel was not mistaken in her love for Valmont since, at least in the end, he proves worthy of her. Due to his redemption by the love of Tourvel, Valmont is elevated to heroic stature, and through his deathbed message to the dying Tourvel affirms that transfiguration through love is ultimately possible. Thus, despite the speech at the beginning of the play by Merteuil which presents her struggle to master her world through an act of voluntary, artistic self-creation and self-representation, a speech which in our time should have evoked both admiration and understanding, Valmont emerges as Merteuil’s moral superior and the sentimental favorite because he is at least capable of love. His death in the duel with Danceny is presented implicitly as a suicide, and his final message to Tourvel, ‘‘tell her her love was the only real happiness I’ve ever known’’ (Hampton 100), denies Merteuil the triumph of victory as she interjects sharply ‘‘that’s enough!’’ when she hears a report of the recent events. As everyone startles at the tone of this involuntary remark, Merteuil ‘‘hastens to paper over the crack’’ by saying in a controlled manner, ‘‘I think we should respect the sensibilities of our friend’’ (Hampton 102). Divested of her connection to the initial feminist perception projected in her speech on the nature of society and the role of women, Merteuil is deprived of the sympathy engendered by that position and emerges in Hampton’s final evaluation as little more than a calculating monster. As Stephanie Barbe Hammer notes, ‘‘no longer a victim of gender, she is in the final scene the most repellent of the play’s corrupt pre-Revolutionary aristocrats.’’19 It appears as if Hampton gives Valmont the benefit of sympathy, even though, or perhaps because, he is subject to Merteuil’s dominant manipulating intelligence. Her lucid intelligence is ultimately seen as more reprehensible than the vanity of a 1780s playboy, and Hampton’s adaptation betrays ‘‘a familiar longing for a clear-cut moral universe where love (affirmed at no matter what cost) is always good and where democratic revolution (no matter how bloody) automatically rights all wrongs.’’20

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In Hampton’s play, Merteuil escapes with her reputation unscathed, and the last scene shows her playing cards on New Year’s Eve with the women she has manipulated and derided—Mme. de Volanges and Mme. de Rosemonde. It is a scene filled with uneasiness as they recount the recent events of the deaths of Tourvel, and Ce´ cile’s and Danceny’s withdrawal from life. Merteuil agrees that ‘‘this has been a terrible few weeks’’ and then continues: But the time passes so quickly. A new year tomorrow and more than halfway through the eighties already. I used to be afraid of growing old, but now I trust in God and accept. I dare say we would not be wrong to look forward to whatever the nineties may bring. Meanwhile, I suggest our best course is to continue with the game. (Hampton 103)

Responding to Merteuil’s calming words, her companions resume playing. However, in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s staging, the play ends with flashes of light on the back wall, the suggestion of distant booms, and ‘‘the unmistakable silhouette of the guillotine’’ (Hampton 103). The merging of Merteuil with the virtuous characters in the last scene suggests to what extent all members of that society comply with the destructive games of the salon. Since the rules of the game are so coercive and human relations are systematized with such vigorous logic and lucidity, even the most virtuous characters participate in supporting the vestiges of the system. Consequently, the play’s most subversive character, Merteuil, who in the beginning of the play criticized the system of sexual injustice with such vigor, is now reduced to the circle of impotent women. Ironically, Merteuil’s feminism now appears ‘‘to be yet another example of an arch hypocrite’s dramatic posturing.’’21 Merteuil’s revolutionary fervor has thereby been subverted by Hampton into the posturing of a stereotypical member of the decadent ruling class, and in the suggested shadow of the guillotine we can anticipate the retribution upon Merteuil. In calling attention to both the French Revolution and our own fin de sie` cle, Hampton suggests the double possibility of historical retribution upon a society that makes all its investments in the surface reflections of a mirror. In Heiner Mu¨ ller’s Quartet another literary companion, besides Laclos, figures significantly in his intertextual variation: Heinrich von Kleist’s play (1777–1811) Penthesileia (1808). In Kleist’s Penthesileia, both Achilles and Penthesileia fight each other to the limits of body and flesh as desire leads them to the brink of the abyss of death. Unlike Hampton’s version of Laclos’s novel, Mu¨ller’s Quartet presents Merteuil as a woman warrior, a Penthesileia, who is ready

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to fight until she loses strength but not desire, for when Achilles betrays Penthesileia for a moment by being distracted with other concerns, upon his return, she turns into pure fury. She finishes Achilles by savagely sinking her teeth into his beautiful breast, turning his splendor into a mutilated body. Achilles, however, as Valmont in Mu¨ller’s Quartet, dies submitting to her love. Penthesilea hurls herself upon Achilles, literally devouring his body with her teeth and kisses. She then goes into her own breast with her dagger, ‘‘I descend into my breast,’’ she says and follows him to death. ‘‘There. There. There. And once more.’’ And the battle is finished: Penthesileia. For now I will descend into myself, as into a mine, to dig a killing feeling out as cold as iron ore. This ore, I will refine it, in the burning fire of my misery, into hard steel; then the hot corrosive poison of remorse, steep it through and through; to hope’s eternal anvil next I’ll carry it, to hone and point it dagger sharp; and to this dagger now I offer up my breast: Like So! And so! And once again!—And now all’s well.22

Unlike Hampton’s attention to portraying the main incidents that come to light from the letters of Laclos’s novel, Heiner Mu¨ ller’s Quartet makes no attempt to represent the surfaces of the novel. Instead, Mu¨ller presents the subtext of ‘‘erotism’’ emerging from the dark spaces between the letters and uses the compact imagery of Merteuil and Valmont’s role playing to provide a shift of the manipulator’s identity to the perspective of the manipulated. Despite the symmetry of the title, suggesting a four-person salon comedy of manners, Mu¨ ller’s play presents an Achilles-Penthesileia endgame between man-woman, woman-man. Much like the characters’ reversals in Kleist’s Penthesileia, Mu¨ller’s Merteuil and Valmont spar with each other in their own person, and then, without transition, or change of costuming, Merteuil addresses Valmont as if she were Valmont seducing Tourvel, shifting Valmont into the role of ‘‘the other,’’ the object of seduction. This role-playing mirrors Valmont’s assumption of Tourvel’s perspective in Laclos since, in order to seduce Tourvel, Valmont must both read her and write her. As the controlling consciousness of Mu¨ller’s play, Merteuil assumes the role of her niece Cećile, ready to be ravished by Valmont. Merteuil’s and Valmont’s shifts into the roles of their victims complete the symmetry of a quartet; however, it is Merteuil and Valmont who provide the major themes that are then played through the others. In restricting Laclos’s range of characters to Valmont and Merteuil, Mu¨ ller ex-

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plodes the concept of character. The two players multiply as they assume different roles because, much as in the novel, in order to manipulate the emotions of others they have assumed the consciousness of the other so effectively that the mask has become frozen to their face. Mu¨ller’s ‘‘TIMESPACE’’ in Quartet places the action in a drawing room before the French Revolution and an air raid shelter after World War III. Thus, Mu¨ller’s deconstruction of Laclos’s novel projects the battle of the genders simultaneously into the decadence of the late-eighteenth-century salon, where the Enlightenment values of reason were projected as games of worldliness, power, and privilege, and into the hopelessness of the twenty-first-century space totally annihilated by nuclear devastation. Mu¨ller expands the range of the text by placing the action into a landscape devoid of color and light, and in his retracing of Laclos’s classic, frames the violence and dislocation within an underground where the two last members of the human race continue their horrible game. What emerges from the merging of the Age of the Enlightenment with postnuclear annihilation is the suggestion that the end of civilization may be a consequence of the tradition set forth in the Age of Reason, observations that link Mu¨ller’s vision with that of the Frankfurt School critics, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Ju¨rgen Habermas. Writing in the shadow of Hitler’s Holocaust and Stalin’s Gulag, they argued that the logic that hides behind Enlightenment rationality is a logic of domination and oppression. From this perspective, all the Enlightenment imagery about civilization, reason, universal rights, and morality was for naught. The twentieth century—with its death camps and death squads, its threat of nuclear annihilation—has shattered the optimism of the Enlightenment belief in the idea of progress. Mu¨ller shares in the denial of the Enlightenment project; he focuses, as Carl Weber comments, ‘‘a pitiless and deep-cutting stare at all our assumptions about the individual and the society in which he lives, at the forces that mold human society, and the history that propelled mankind towards its present, perhaps doomed, state.’’ Thinking radically, investigating the social and historical trends of our world to their final, if lethal, consequences are the tasks that Mu¨ ller sets for himself, believing that ‘‘our race will destroy itself and, maybe, the planet it inhabits if it continues to pursue its present political and social course.’’23 Mu¨ller does not, however, attempt to analyze the causes or to resolve the problems he encounters. Instead, he strengthens the problems and the conflicts insisting that ‘‘I believe in conflict. I don’t believe in anything else. What I try to do in my writings is to

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strengthen the sense of conflicts, to strengthen confrontations and contradictions. There is no other way.’’ Nor does Mu¨ller believe in aligning politics and art ‘‘on parallel tracks,’’ for as he insists, ‘‘if you translate an idea into an image, either the image will become askew or the idea will be exploded. I prefer the explosion.’’24 At the same time, Mu¨ller rejects attempts made by interpreters of his plays to put ‘‘on their wetsuits and dive down, looking for the iceberg or building their own’’ since ‘‘what’s underneath is nobody’s business.’’ For Mu¨ller, theater has a reality of its own and ‘‘doesn’t portray, mirror, or copy the reality of the audience.’’ According to Mu¨ller, ‘‘Naturalism nearly killed the theatre with its strategy of doubling reality.’’25 This attitude towards the theater places Mu¨ller’s Quartet at a disjunction from Hampton’s careful adherence to the representation of Laclos’s narrative. Mu¨ller’s strategies in Quartet for disrupting the spectator’s identification with characters by reducing the subtext and its concomitant aspects, the setting up of cause and effect through the development of a character’s psychological traits— are evident in his lack of characterization of the doubled up character reversals occurring among the quartet of characters. These reversals suggest that the characters are merely masks or roles that embody the corrupted values of Merteuil and Valmont, who, as embodiments of Enlightenment beliefs, are convinced that it is possible to dominate nature. Similarly, the setting in Quartet prevents identification with period since Mu¨ ller ‘‘outlines brutal new history lessons’’ traversing the twenty-first century as he excavates among the debris for traces of the corrupt remnants of the eighteenth-century salon. He uses Laclos’s text like ‘‘a found object from an archeological dig.’’26 He reshapes and recasts Laclos’s text to serve as a residue of a past historical period that has little meaning within the context of the end of human history, the end of a species, and the total destruction of a landscape. To bring out the sense of period as a remote artifact more strongly, in his production of the play, Robert Wilson used the private theater of the baroque Ludwigsburg castle of the Wu¨rttemberg royalty for one of the stagings of Quartet. This setting, which so appropriately matches the functionless quality of the life of the two aristocrats, was set into opposition to the clearly theatricalized postmodern scavenger hunt of displaced objects of the mise-en-sceńe. The hunt for the ‘‘most concealed objects’’ of Laclos’s text surfaces in Mu¨ller’s dramatization as the unspeakable rot, ‘‘green and bloated with poison.’’27 Language is stripped naked, for ‘‘nakedness,’’ as writes Bataille, ‘‘offers a contrast to self-possession, to discontinuous existence. . . . It is a state of communication revealing a

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quest for a possible continuance of being beyond the confines of the self. Bodies open out to a state of continuity through secret channels that give us a feeling of obscenity.’’28 Mu¨ ller’s interpretation of Laclos approaches Bataille’s observation that ‘‘through the activity of organs in a flow of coalescence and renewal, like the ebb and flow of waves surging into one another, the self is dispossessed’’ (Mu¨ller 18). Stripping the other naked in the lust of the hunt, if not a simulacrum of the act of killing, places the other into an equivalent of being deprived of gravity. ‘‘What is game to me,’’ asks Valmont in the course of the hunt for Tourvel’s virtue, ‘‘without the lust of the chase? Without the seat of fear, the choked breath, the turning upward of the white in the eye? What’s left is digestion’’ (Mu¨ller 109). In the game of the hunt, the difference between the hunter and the prey is lost for ‘‘the prey has its power over the hunter’’ (Mu¨ ller 114). Though Tourvel is seen as the victim, and Valmont as the sacrificer, both, during the consummation of the rite of sacrifice, lose themselves ‘‘in the terrors of the opera’’ (Mu¨ller 114). Merteuil and Valmont simultaneously want to dominate the other and to lose themselves in the other. This contradiction ultimately reduces the characters’ identification with gender roles. Consequently, when Merteuil switches into the perspective of Valmont, she not only wants to dominate the other woman, Tourvel, through him, but also to eliminate her own gender. Merteuil’s seduction of Valmont/Tourvel also violates the expectations that seduction is part of a masculine mystique. This seduction by Merteuil/Valmont culminates in Valmont/Tourvel tearing open his shirt and submitting to Merteuil’s desire, ‘‘Here it is. I am a woman Valmont. Can you look at a woman and not be a man?’’ Merteuil switches back to her own role and rejects Valmont/Tourvel, thereby achieving a simultaneous rejection of him as a man, and as a woman. As they pause to examine what has happened, Valmont suggests that he ‘‘could get used to being a woman’’; Merteuil, however, responds, ‘‘I wish I could’’ (Mu¨ller 114). Merteuil’s attempt to transcend her condition purely through will shows that the Enlightenment project is doomed from the start and instead plunges both characters into destruction and abjection. Abjection, as Kristeva notes, emerges out of ‘‘one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible.’’29 Abjection in Mu¨ller’s Quartet projects ‘‘a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it.’’30 For that reason, Merteuil’s comment, ‘‘I wish I could,’’ does not represent an ironic view of the condition

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of women but reflects her state of abjection, the symptoms of which are the body as ‘‘a non-assimilable alien, a monster, a tumor, a cancer that the listening devices of the unconscious do not hear, for its strayed subject is huddled outside the paths of desire.’’31 Despite the suppression of desire, the game must continue, and Valmont introduces another possibility as he assumes his own role seducing Cećile; Merteuil plays the innocent niece. Merteuil/Cećile is demeaned to groveling on the ground before Valmont begging to be taken, thanking Valmont for revealing that God dwells in ‘‘the twitching of . . . thighs, the trembling of . . . knees’’ (Mu¨ller 116). As Valmont proclaims his victory, ‘‘Love is as strong as death,’’ Merteuil acknowledges, ‘‘the annihilation of the niece’’ (Mu¨ller 116). Thus both of them have one victory: Merteuil over Valmont/Tourvel and Valmont over Merteuil/Cećile. The question is raised by Merteuil whether at this point they should perhaps ‘‘devour each other . . . so this affair can come to an end before you become thoroughly tasteless’’ (Mu¨ller 116). However, devouring has little to do with the appetite after the hunt but represents disgust with ‘‘mirrors oozing blood’’ and ‘‘the night of the bodies’’ (Mu¨ ller 110). This disgust leads to desire for the most abject aspects of the body, ‘‘dirt,’’ ‘‘excrement,’’ ‘‘spit,’’ ‘‘urine’’ (Mu¨ller 117), since, as Kristeva explains, ‘‘these body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands’’32 on the road to death. The next game is to be to the death. As the final act in their game of annihilation, Merteuil proposes that Tourvel ‘‘die of her futile fall from grace,’’ and she designates this last episode as ‘‘SACRIFICING THE QUEEN’’ (Mu¨ller 112). Valmont steps into the role of his victim Tourvel once more, ‘‘I have told you that I shall kill myself if you don’t resist this time the evil that is reaching out from inside you’’ (Mu¨ller 117). In the final scene, Merteuil/Valmont offers Tourvel/ Valmont a last glass of wine, intending to watch the death scene ‘‘with the aid of my lorgnette so I’ll be able to watch better the performance-your last one, Queen—with fear and pity. I have had mirrors set up so you can die in the plural.’’ Tourvel/Valmont responds to Merteuil that ‘‘Since you are a man, your breast is empty, and only nothingness growing inside you’’ (Mu¨ller 117). ‘‘It is good to be a woman, Valmont, and not a conqueror,’’ he says before he resumes his own role: You don’t have to tell me, Marchioness, that the wine was poisoned. I wish I could watch you die as I watch myself. This can masturbate even with the maggots. I hope my performance didn’t bore you. That indeed would be unpardonable. (Mu¨ller 118)

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Merteuil now must play out the game by herself: ‘‘Death of a whore. We are alone now cancer my lover’’ (Mu¨ller 118). The two characters have gone beyond the border of their condition as living beings; as corpses, ‘‘the most sickening of wastes,’’ they are the utmost of abjection since a corpse ‘‘is death infecting life.’’33 While outside the bunker, civilization has destroyed itself, inside the bunker/salon the last two vestiges of the rot of civilization have destroyed each other. Both in their own person, and in the role reversals, the two play out their sex-specific roles, a game that serves more as a way of passing time while waiting for the end of history than as a game of pleasure. Devices such as exchanged gender roles and the actors’ comments on how well they have played out ‘‘the other’’ show that even the self-consciousness of the ‘‘other’’ as both subject and object of the erotic game does not mitigate the spirit of violence, thereby reinforcing Marquis de Sade’s observation that violence is ‘‘as stubbornly there . . . as death.’’34 The act of violence that deprives the sexual object of particularity is characteristic of the libertines in Mu¨ller’s text who violate others in order to see which stages the object of their desire will go through before he/she submits. Their pleasure doesn’t consist in the satisfaction of sexual desire but in the performance of the ritual of cruelty and violence. While in Laclos’s novel, Merteuil and Valmont derive pleasure from their erotic conquests as reflections of their skills in worldliness, and in Hampton’s variation from the narcissistic measurement of their performance and technique, in Mu¨ller’s version, the only pleasure left is masturbation. In the play’s opening scene, Merteuil addresses the nonpresent Valmont: ‘‘Do not rush Valmont. That is good. Yes yes yes yes. That was well acted, wasn’t it?’’ (Mu¨ller 107). Upon Valmont’s entrance, she tells him that she almost regrets his punctuality since ‘‘it’s cutting short a bliss I’d loved to share with you, wouldn’t it be based on its indivisibility alone’’ (Mu¨ller 107). Pleasure in Mu¨ller’s text doesn’t consist so much in the satisfaction of sexual desire as in the performance of the residues of a past pleasure ‘‘to feel something that in my memory seems to be a sensation of bliss’’ (Mu¨ller 107). Their memories, though, are ossified artifacts from their museum of pleasure: We would have full houses, wouldn’t we, Valmont, with the statues of our putrefied desires. Those dead dreams classified according to the alphabet or lined up in chronological order, free of the accidents of the flesh, not exposed anymore to the horrors of change. Our memory needs those crutches: one doesn’t remember the various bends of cocks, not to mention faces: a haze. (Mu¨ller 118)

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Sex is merely a preparation for death, a way of killing the void of time since ‘‘there is no man whose member won’t stiffen at the thought of his dear flesh departing’’ (Mu¨ller 110). In their abject condition, the soul becomes nothing but ‘‘a muscle or mucous membrane’’ (Mu¨ller 110). No feelings are left for others; nor can they participate in the theater of history as the cataclysm of the revolution approaches. ‘‘Let the rabble fornicate between the door and threshold, their time is expensive, it’s costing us money,’’ says Valmont, ‘‘our noble vocation is to kill time . . . there is too much of it’’ (Mu¨ ller 109). ‘‘HOW TO GET RID OF THIS MOST WICKED BODY’’ (Mu¨ller 117) cannot be realized since even eternity is envisioned ‘‘as an eternal erection’’ (Mu¨ller 109) where ‘‘this can masturbate even with the maggots’’ (Mu¨ller 118). Besides reducing sex to a mechanical masturbatory process, Mu¨ller also chooses cancer as an appropriate metaphor for projecting the ‘‘ruthless, secret invasion’’ of Merteuil as the last woman on earth, whose womb is filled with a cancerous tumor. While in Laclos’s novel, Merteuil is disfigured by smallpox, an appropriate metaphor since ‘‘the destruction of a disguise, the ruin of an appearance is the final moral judgment of a society,’’35 cancer invariably expresses the character of not just a shameful disease but a lethal one. As Susan Sontag observes, ‘‘cancer is described in images that sum up the negative behavior of twentieth-century, homo-economicus: abnormal growth and repression of energy.’’36 What also emerges from Mu¨ller’s Quartet is that all roles have become deadly. While Merteuil and Valmont use linguistic conventions specific to the sex war, these relationships from a culturally specific past have lost substance, particularly since the future as a concept of history has been eliminated. To play out traditional male/female roles in the face of total annihilation projects the peak of irony. Gender roles are still foregrounded; however, the roles no longer reflect biologic difference. The roles are simply empty masks and postures from the past reflected into history in the future. Sexuality, as the most abject form of difference, in the face of total destruction, comes close to indifference. He´le`ne Cixous’s analysis of gender offers, inadvertently, a comment on the wilderness of roledoubling in Mu¨ller’s text: ‘‘men and women are caught up in a network of millennial cultural determinations of a complexity that is practically unanalyzable: we can no more talk about ‘woman’ than about ‘man’ without getting caught up in an ideological theatre where the multiplication of representations, images, reflections, myths, identifications constantly transforms, deforms, alters each person’s imaginary order and, in advance, renders all conceptualiza-

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tion null and void.’’37 What is inscribed in Mu¨ller’s Quartet as it divides itself, breaks up into little bits, and regroups itself is the mingling of roles into a ‘‘precession of simulacra’’ since in the doubling and redoubling of man/woman/woman/man it is frequently difficult, or at times impossible, to determine who is speaking. Mu¨ller states that ‘‘the form develops out of the mask.’’ When the process of masking or transformation has become so much a matter of surface, language can no longer function as an effective means of unmasking. We can no longer speak of psychologically identifiable characters, since the mask has increasingly become a ‘‘privileged metaphor for possible faces and roles which have replaced the individual face, that phantasmagoria of bourgeois society.’’38 Similar to the function of masks in Jean Genet’s plays, Mu¨ller’s masks in Quartet can be considered as an experiment with both representation and self-reflexivity. Representation, or the wearing of masks, involves expressing the truth of collective sexual or political fantasies related to subconscious dreams and suppressed desires. In contrast, the selfreflexivity that emerges from the conscious foregrounding of role doubling serves as a reminder of theatricality. In a theater that denies recognizable structure, what Mu¨ller calls ‘‘theater as condition’’ is replaced by ‘‘theater as process,’’ and the spectator’s gaze unmasks and displaces the mask of denial. When one examines Hampton and Mu¨ller’s variations on Laclos’s pessimistic reading of the Enlightenment, their interpretations suggest differences that are ultimately ideological. Hampton creates a blend of romanticism out of the complex realities of sexual desire and the politics of the salon in order to express his deeply felt nostalgia for a world of absolute values. Love is reaffirmed no matter at what cost, and social change potentially rights all wrongs. The image of the creative destruction, or force of the French Revolution, is set in opposition to the horrors of domination through the power of reason as represented by Merteuil’s ruthless systematization of others. Through his characterization of Valmont, Hampton strives to find a means of representing the eternal truth of the validity in love. To realize this theme, Hampton relies on the construction of a strong causality in plot development, characterization, and setting, and, in that sense adheres closely to the surfaces of Laclos’s novel. At the same time, Hampton depends strongly on a metanarrative that projects a belief in progress and the absolute validity of ‘‘a fervently conservative moralism’’39 that is strangely complicit with the values of the sophisticated West End or Broadway theater audiences. Mu¨ller’s Quartet, on the other hand, signals the death of metanarratives by foregrounding fragmentation, indeterminacy, and distrust

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of all universal or totalizing discourses. The absence of verifiable speakers, the polymorphous/androgynous nature of the quartet of characters, as well as the antinaturalistic dispersal of action suggest that Mu¨ller’s theater denies recognizable meaning, forcing readers and spectators to make an investment in the text, entering a zone filled with questions rather than answers, a zone of indeterminacy characteristic to the spaces between the letters in Laclos’s original text.

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Notes Introduction 1. Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1959), 18. 2. George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 97. 3. Ibid., 100–102. 4. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 20. 5. Steiner, Errata, 24–25. 6. Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 23. 7. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 29. 8. Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (New York: Routledge, 1994), 125. 9. Hoffman, Lost, 164.

Chapter 1. Intertextuality and Palimpsestuous Relationships 1. Linda Hutcheon, A Politics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 225. 2. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 36. 3. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms,’’ trans. Anne Tomiche, in States of ‘‘Theory’’: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. David Carroll (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 65. 4. Ibid. 5. Gerald Genette, Palimpsests, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 78. 6. Derrida, ‘‘Some Statements,’’ 70. 7. Harold Bloom, Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 31, 96. 8. Michel Rifatterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 164. 9. Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke in 20 Banden, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), 157.

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10. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 19. 11. Robert Burton, ‘‘Democtritus to the Reader,’’ from The Anatomy of Melancholy, qt. in Manfred Pfister, Intertextualita¨t: Formen, Funktionene, anglistische Fallstudien, ed. Ulrich Broich and Manfred Pfister (Tu¨ bingen: Max Niemayer Verlag, 1985), vii. 12. Genette, 1–2. 13. Mikhail Bakhtin, qt. by Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 349–50, from E`stetika, 373. 14. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 191. 15. Brecht, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 15, 202. 16. Jan Mukarˇovsky, Structure, Sign, and Function, trans. John Burbank and Peter Steiner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), xxi. 17. Derrida, ‘‘Some Statements,’’ 74. 18. Genette, 294. 19. Derrida, ‘‘Some Statements,’’ 75–76. 20. Brecht, qt. in Peter Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, ed. and trans. Michael Hays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 72. 21. Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, I90. 22. Jan Mukarˇovsky, Aesthetic Function, Norm, and Value as Social Facts, trans. Mark E. Suino (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1979), 99. 23. Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 138. 24. Patrice Pavis, ‘‘The Classical Heritage of Modern Drama: The Case of Postmodern Theater,’’ trans. Loren Kruger, Modern Drama 29, no. 1 (1986): 1. 25. Eagleton, 12. 26. Roland Barthes, ‘‘From Work to Text,’’ trans. Josue V. Harari, in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 80. 27. Bakhtin, qt. in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 110. 28. Derrida, ‘‘Some Statements,’’ 78–80. 29. Ingeborg Hoesterey, ‘‘The Intertextual Loop: Kafka, Robbe-Grillet, Kafka,’’ in Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings, ed. Alan Udoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 71. 30. Genette, 398–99. 31. Kundera, Unbearable, 91. 32. Hoesterey, 72. 33. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,’’ in The Structuralist Controversy: A Discourse on the Human Sciences, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 241. 34. Frank Gehry, qt. in Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Spatial Equivalents: Postmodern Architecture and the World System,’’ in States of ‘‘Theory’’: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. David Carroll (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 127–28. 35. Jameson, ‘‘Spatial Equivalents,’’ 145. 36. Ibid. 37. Wolfgang Iser, ‘‘The Aesthetic and the Imaginary’’ in States of ‘‘Theory’’: History, Art, and Critical Discourse, ed. David Carroll (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 215.

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38. Christine Brooke-Rose, Amalgamemnon (Manchester: Carcanet, 1984), 43. 39. Susan Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender Politics and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 191. 40. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. H. Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1973), 237–38. 41. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 55. 42. Ibid., 16. 43. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 102. 44. Martin Heidegger, qt. in Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 2. 45. David Lodge, introduction to The British Museum Is Falling Down (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), xvii. 46. Ibid. , xvi. 47. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc / Jacques Derrida (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 20. 48. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 26. 49. Bourdieu, Field, 30. 50. Bakhtin, qt. in Todorov, 105. 51. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Structure, Sign, and Play,’’ 248. 52. Culler, Pursuit, 103. 53. Barthes, S/Z, 16. 54. Vladimir Nabokov. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1959), 91. 55. Keir Elam, Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980), 93. 56. Umberto Eco, Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 161.

Chapter 2. Witkacy’s Theory of Pure Form 1. Jan Kott, ‘‘foreword’’ to Madman and the Nun, by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. ed. and trans. Daniel C. Gerould and C. S. Durer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), vii. 2. Daniel Gerould, ed., The Witkiewicz Reader (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992), xi. 3. Ibid., 26. 4. Jarry’s observation on Poland is quite accurate, for Poland had been partitioned among the three neighboring powers—Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and Russia—between 1772 and 1795. Thus at the time of Witkacy’s birth, Poland ‘‘did not exist,’’ and only after the post–World War I redefinition of borders by the League of Nations in 1919 did Poland became autonomous. 5. Alfred Jarry, King Ubu, in Modern French Theatre, ed. and trans. Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1964), 54. 6. Gerould, ed., The Witkiewicz Reader, 5. 7. Tadeusz Kantor, The Dead Class, Program from Theatre Cricot 2 Performance at LaMaMa Theatre Club, New York, June 1991.

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8. Tadeusz Kantor, Today Is My Birthday, Program from Theatre Cricot 2 Performance at LaMaMa Theatre Club, New York, June l991. 9. Kantor, The Dead Class. 10. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 26. 11. Gerould, ed. The Witkiewicz Reader, 10. 12. Daniel Gerould, Witkacy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), 8. 13. Gerould, Witkiewicz Reader, 49. 14. Ibid., 63. 15. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-sie`cle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1979), 224–25. 16. Witkiewicz, qt. in Tropical Madness: Four Plays, ed. and trans. Daniel Gerould (New York: Winter House, 1972), 245–46. 17. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), 158–59. 18. Witkiewicz, The Shoemakers, in The Madman and the Nun and Other Plays, ed. and trans. Daniel C. Gerould and C. S. Durer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), 288. 19. Gerould, Witkiewicz Reader, 5. 20. Witkiewicz, Witkiewicz Reader, 290. 21. Gerould, Witkiewicz Reader, 2. 22. Witkiewicz, The Madman and the Nun and Other Plays, 129. 23. Guillaume Appolinaire, qt. in Peter Nicholls, Modernisms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 13–14. 24. Photographs of Witkacy in Tropical Madness, 236–59. 25. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations. trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1883), 11. 26. Daniel Gerould and C. S. Durer, introduction to The Madman and the Nun, xxiii–liii. 27. Filippo Marinetti, ‘‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,’’ in Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, 1972), 41. 28. Witkiewicz, Gyubul Wahazar: Or, Along the Cliffs of the Absurd—A Non-Euclidean Drama in Four Acts, in Tropical Madness, 142. 29. Ibid. , 161. 30. Yevgeny Zamyatin, ‘‘On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters,’’ in A Soviet Heretic, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 112. 31. Filippo Marinetti, ‘‘The Variety Theater,’’ in Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1972), 116–22. 32. Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzola, Futurism (London: Oxford University Press, 1978), 108. 33. Filippo Marinetti, ‘‘Destruction of Syntax—Imagination without Strings— Words-In-Freedom,’’ in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (New York: Viking, 1973), 98. 34. John E. Bowlt, ed. and trans., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde. rev. ed. (New York: Thames, 1988), 69. 35. Tristan Tzara, ‘‘Dada Manifesto,’’ trans. Barbara Wright, in Dada Performance, ed. Mel Gordon (New York: PAJ Publications, 1987), 51. 36. August Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata, in A Dream Play and Four Chamber Plays, trans. Walter Johnson (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973), 228. 37. Witkiewicz, Madman, 57–58.

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38. Witkiewicz, qt. in Witkiewicz Reader, 63. 39. Bely, qt. in Konstantin Rudnitsky, Meyerhold: The Director, trans. George Petrov (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1981), 84. 40. Witkiewicz, qt. in Daniel Gerould, ed., Twentieth-Century Polish Avant-Garde Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 31–32. 41. Gerould, Witkiewicz Reader, 3. 42. Bernard Dukore, ‘‘Who is Witkacy? Witkiewicz East and West,’’ Theatre Quarterly 18 (1975): 62. 43. Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 57. 44. Alfred Jarry, qt. in Eric Sellin, The Dramatic Concepts of Antonin Artaud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 64. 45. Anatole Baju, qt. in Nicholls, 47. 46. Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Czysta Forma w teatrze, 1923 [Pure Form in the theater] (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1977), 111. This and subsequent translations from Polish to English are mine. 47. Gerould, Witkiewicz Reader, 36. 48. Witkiewicz, Gyubul Wahazar, 110. 49. Witkiewicz, qt. in Gerould, Twentieth, 19. 50. Georg Kaiser, qt. in John Willett, Expressionism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 123. 51. Vasillii Kandinsky, ‘‘Content and Form,’’ in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, ed. John Bowlt (New York: Thames, 1988), 19. 52. Maurice Maeterlinck, qt. in Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to Readymades, trans. Dana Poland and Thierry de Duve (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 121. 53. Stanislaw Przybyszewski, qt. in Gerould, Witkacy, 18. 54. H. H. Stuckenschmidt, Schoenberg: His Life World and Work, trans. Humphrey Searle (London: Calder, 1977), 117. 55. Christine Kiebuzinska, Revolutionaries in the Theater: Meyerhold, Brecht, and Witkiewicz (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1988), 39–74. 56. Antonin Artaud, qt. in Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth, ed. and trans., Modern French Theatre: The Avant-Garde, Dada, and Surrealism (New York: Dutton, 1964), xxvii. 57. Michael Fried, ‘‘Art and Objecthood,’’ in Minimal Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968), 142. 58. Kazimir Malevich, qt. in Rainer Crone and David Moos, Kazimir Malevich: The Climax of Disclosure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 199), 25. 59. Witkiewicz, ‘‘On a New Type of Play,’’ in Madman, 296. 60. Kandinsky in ‘‘Content and Form,’’ Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, 20–21. 61. Witkiewicz, Czysta Forma, 7. 62. Ibid., 77–78. 63. Marinetti, ‘‘Destruction of Syntax,’’ 100. 64. Witkiewicz, Beelzebub Sonata: Plays, Essays, and Documents, ed. and trans. Daniel Gerould and Jadwiga Kosicka (New York: PAJ Publications, 1980), 34. 65. Witkiewicz, Czysta Forma, 78–79. 66. Malevich, qt. in Patricia Railing, From Science to Systems of Art (Sussex: Artists Bookworks, 1989), 64. 67. Wojciech Sztaba, Gra ze sztuka o two´rczosci Stanislawa Ignacego Witkiewicza [Play with art: the creativity of Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz], (Krakow: Wydawnictwo Literacy, 1982), 126.

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68. Witkiewicz, Czysta Forma, 146. 69. Burliuk, qt. in Crone and Moos, 96. 70. Witkiewicz, Czysta Forma, 169. 71. Jan Kott, ‘‘Witkiewicz, or the Dialectic of Anachronism,’’ in The Theater of Essence (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1984), 68. 72. Gerould, Witkacy, 26. 73. Witkiewicz, Czysta Forma, 55. 74. Alfred Jarry, qt. in George Wellwarth, Modern Drama and the Death of God (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 49. 75. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 55–56. 76. Ibid., 56. 77. Brecht on Theatre, 219. 78. Witkiewicz, ‘‘Rules of the S. I. Witkiewicz Portrait Painting Firm,’’ in Beelzebub Sonata, 173. 79. Daniel Gerould and Jadwiga Kosicka, Introduction to ‘‘Rules of the S. I. Witkiewicz Portrait Painting Firm,’’ in Beelzebub Sonata, 172. 80. Ibid. 81. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 25. 82. Gerould, Witkacy, 341. 83. Witkiewicz, The Mother: An Unsavory Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue, in Madman, 117–62. All subsequent references to The Mother will appear within the text. 84. Daniel Gerould and C. S. Durer, introduction to The Mother, in Madman, 114. 85. Ibid., 113. 86. Kristeva, Desire, 66. 87. Witkiewicz Reader, 290. 88. Gerould, Witkacy, 248. 89. Gerould and Durer, introduction to The Mother, in Madman, 114. 90. Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts in Six Plays, trans. Eva Le Gallienne (New York: Random House, 1951), 136. 91. Ibid. 92. Gerould and Durer, introduction to The Mother, in Madman, 112. 93. Janusz Degler, Witkacy w teatrze miedzywojennym [Witkacy in the interwar theater], (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1973), 18. 94. Gerould and Durer have brilliantly resolved the translation of Witkacy’s bizarre names without eliminating the satiric qualities implicit in the original. In translating the mother’s name as ‘‘Baroness von und zu Oates,’’ spelled with an e from Baroness Obrock, they have translated quite literally from the Polish while at the same time retaining the ironical reference to pretentiousness, since obrok in Polish literally means fodder; the addition of c, changing it to Obrock, germanizes the name, thereby giving it in the Polish context the same pretentiousness as the intentional addition of e often projects when used to make common names sound more posh and British. The other names, such as Lucian Beer, play with the similar juxtaposition in Polish of the rather affected first name next to an inordinately common one. The satire implied in the translation of the names of Modesta-Bladdery and Mordello-Benz is true to the original, and the ‘‘tre´s phooey’’ of Count Tre´fouille is as in the original. However the translation of Sofia and Apollinaire Plejtus as ‘‘Stonybroke,’’ while rendering accurately the situation of the characters (Plejtus is Witkacy’s creation out of Pleite machen—‘to go bankrupt’), does not reveal the classcharacter of the name, since Plejtus, though not a real name, has a decidedly ‘‘ple-

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beian’’ sound that would offend any Baroness von und zu Oates. Similarly, the translation of ‘‘Calfskin,’’ though literal, also fails to render the strong ironic significance inherent in the Polish; for to call someone a ‘‘calf ’’ in Polish is to insult them with almost the same contempt for stupidity and blockheadedness as to call someone an ‘‘ass’’ in English. 95. Gerould and Durer, introduction to The Mother, in Madman, 114. 96. Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, ed. and trans. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 26. 97. Gerould and Durer, introduction to The Mother, in Madman, 115. 98. August Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata in A Dream Play and Four Chamber Plays. trans. Walter Johnson (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973): 191–231, 228. 99. Gerould, Witkacy, 252. 100. Jan Blonski, qt. in Gerould, Witkacy, 252. 101. Baudrillard, 152. 102. Ibid., 38.

Chapter 3. Elfriede Jelinek’s Nora Project 1. Elfriede Jelinek, Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte, in Theaterstu¨ cke (Cologne: Prometh Verlag, 1984). Quotations from German texts are given in translation. This and all subsequent translations from the German are mine. References to Was geschah will subsequently appear in the text. 2. Gitta Honneger, ‘‘This German Language . . . An Interview with Elfriede Jelinek,’’ Theater 25. no.1 (1994): 14. 3. Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, ‘‘In the Eyes of the Press: Provocation— Production—Prominence: A Critical Documentation of Elfriede Jelinek’s Reception,’’ in Elfriede Jelinek: Framed by Language, ed. Jorun B. Johns and Katherine Arens (Riverside, Calif.: Ariadne Press, 199), 289–90. 4. Susan Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender Politics and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 190. ¨ ber Elfriede 5. Elfriede Jelinek, qt. in Brigitta Landes, ‘‘Kunst Aus Kakanien. U Jelinek,’’ Theater heute 27, no.1 (1986): 7. 6. Though I have not been able to find any references to Jelinek’s having read Eleanor Marx Aveling and Israel Zangwill’s ‘‘A Doll’s House Repaired,’’ which was published in a socialist monthly in London 1891, Bernard F. Dukore’s article ‘‘Karl Marx’s Youngest Daughter and A Doll’s House,’’ Theatre Journal 42, no. 3 (1990): 308–21 shows that similarly to Jelinek’s strategy of exchanging Nora’s and Torvald’s lines, Marx Aveling and Zangwill mockingly repaired Ibsen’s play by giving ‘‘lines of one speaker to the other.’’ 7. Elfriede Jelinek, ‘‘Ich schlage sozusagen mit der Axt drein,’’ Theaterzeitschrift 7 (1984): 15. 8. Jelinek, qt. in Riki Winter, ‘‘Gespra¨ch mit Elfriede Jelinek,’’ in Dossier u¨ber Elfriede Jelinek, ed. Kurt Bartsch and Gu¨nther A. Ho¨fler (Graz: Droschl, 1992), 15. 9. http://burn.ucsd.edu/archives/ats-I/1995. 10. Jelinek, qt. in Anke Roeder, ‘‘Ich will kein Theater Ich will ein anderes Theater. Gespra¨ch mit Elfriede Jelinek,’’ in Herausforderungen an das Theater (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 151. 11. Eva Brenner, interview with Elfriede Jelinek, February 1993, ‘‘Where Are the Big Topics, Where is the Big Form?’’ in Elfriede Jelinek: Framed by Language, 20.

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12. He´le`ne Cixous, ‘‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’’ trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 250. 13. Jacqueline Vansant, ‘‘Mit dieser Irrationalita¨t kann ich nichts anfangen,’’ interview with Elfriede Jelinek, in Deutsche Bu¨cher 15, no. 1(1985): 9. 14. Jelinek, qt. in Brenner, 33. 15. Julia Kristeva, ‘‘Oscillation du ‘pouvoir’ au refus’’ [Oscillation between power and denial], an interview by Xaviere Gauthier from Tel quel (summer 1974), in New French Feminisms, trans. Marilyn A. August, 166. 16. Ibid., 167. 17. Julia Kristeva, ‘‘Modern Theater Does Not Take (A) Place,’’ trans. Alice Jardine and Thomas Gore, Sub-Stance 18/19 (1977): 131. 18. Ibid., 132–33. 19. Jelinek, qt. in Roeder, 153. 20. Julia Kristeva, ‘‘La femme, ce n’est jamais ç a’’ [Woman can never be defined], trans. Marilyn A. August, in New French Feminisms, 140. 21. Jelinek, ‘‘Ich schlage sozusagen mit der Axt drein,’’ 15. 22. Rosalind Krauss, ‘‘Poststructuralism and the ‘Paraliterary,’ ’’ October 13 (1980): 37. 23. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House in Six Plays, trans. Eva le Gallienne (New York: Random House, 1951), 79. 24. Yvonne Spielmann, ‘‘Ein unerho¨rtes Sprachlabor: Feministische Aspekte im Werk von Elfriede Jelinek,’’ in Dossier u¨ber Elfriede Jelinek, 41. 25. Jelinek, qt. in Marlies Janz, Elfriede Jelinek (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler Verlag, 1995), 31. 26. Jelinek, qt. in Landes, 7. 27. Jelinek, qt. in Honneger, 22. 28. Christopher Innes, ‘‘Caryl Churchill: Theatre as a Model for Change,’’ in Modern British Drama 1890–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 466. 29. Allison Fiddler, ‘‘There Goes That Word Again, or Elfriede Jelinek and Postmodernism,’’ in Elfriede Jelinek: Framed by Language, 138. 30. Suleiman, Subversive, 199. 31. Ibid., 193. 32. Elfriede Jelinek, ‘‘Wir leben auf einem Berg von Leichen und Schmerz,’’ interview by Peter von Becker, Theater heute 33, no. 9 (1992): 4. 33. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 125. 34. Jelinek, qt. in Allyson Fiddler, Rewriting Reality: An Introduction to Elfriede Jelinek (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 80. 35. Innes, 467. 36. Jelinek, ‘‘Ich schlage,’’ 15. 37. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 24–25. 38. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Feminism without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 21. 39. Jelinek, qt. in Gabriele Presber, Frauenleben, Frauenpolitik: Ru¨ckschla¨ge und Utopien (Tu¨bingen: Konkursbuchverlag Gehrke, 1992), 16. 40. Fiddler, Rewriting Reality, 36. 41. Kristeva, ‘‘Oscillation,’’ 165.

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Chapter 4. Jacques and His Master 1. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, trans. James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 201. 2. Patrice Pavis, ‘‘The Classical Heritage of Modern Drama: The Case of Postmodern Theatre,’’ trans. Loren Kruger, Modern Drama 29, no. 1 (1986): 6. 3. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York, Continuum, 1991), 24. 4. Ibid., 12. 5. Ibid., 13. 6. Ibid., 7. 7. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘‘After Auschwitz,’’ in Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 362. 8. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘‘Commitment,’’ in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 312. 9. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 257. 10. Adorno, ‘‘Commitment,’’ 318. 11. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 78. 12. Mikhail Bakhtin, qt. in Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 78. 13. Ibid., 43. 14. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 77. 15. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 15. 16. Kundera, qt. in Arthur Holmberg, ‘‘Interview with Milan Kundera,’’ Performing Arts Journal 25 (1985): 26–27. 17. Milan Kundera, ‘‘Introduction to a Variation,’’ in Jacques and His Master, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 1. 18. Kundera, Art, 82. 19. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 21. 20. Kundera, Unbearable, 196. 21. Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and his Master, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 29. Further references to Diderot’s Jacques will appear in the text. 22. Martin Hall, introduction to Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and his Master, 17. 23. Eva LeGrand, ‘‘Milan Kundera Auteur de Jacques le Fataliste . . . ,’’ Stanford French Studies 8 (1989): 349–62. 24. Milan Kundera, Jacques and His Master, 18–19. Further references to Kundera’s Jacques will appear in the text. 25. Kundera, Unbearable, 185. 26. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 165. 27. Milan Kundera , qt. in ‘‘Afterword: Interview with Philip Roth,’’ in Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 236–37. 28. Maurice Blanchot, The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 294–95.

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29. Kundera, ‘‘Introduction to a Variation,’’ in Jacques, 9. 30. Ibid., 10. 31. Arnold Muller, Diderot and Soviet Criticism, 1917–1960: Diderot Studies, vol. 15 (Geneva: Libraire Droz S. A., 197), 334. 32. Pavis, 9–10. 33. Kundera, qt. in Antonin Liehm, ‘‘Milan Kundera: Czech Writer,’’ Czech Literature since 1956: A Symposium, ed. William E. Harkins and Paul I. Trensky (New York: Bohemica, 1980), 47. 34. Pavis, 10. 35. Jan Kott, The Theatre of Essence (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1984), 209. 36. Kundera, Book of Laughter, 165. 37. Milan Kundera, ‘‘The Tragedy of Central Europe,’’ New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984, 33. 38. Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 19. 39. Kundera, Art, 80. 40. Kundera, Unbearable, 221. 41. Kundera, Art, 84. 42. Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (New York: New American Library, 1960), 63. 43. Kundera, Book of Laughter, 164–65. 44. Milan Kundera, ‘‘The Novel and Europe’’ New York Review of Books, 19 July 1984, 17. 45. Kundera, ‘‘Introduction to a Variation,’’ 3. 46. Kundera, qt. in Liehm, 48. 47. Kundera, ‘‘The Novel and Europe,’’ 16. 49. Ibid., 18. 50. Kundera, Testaments, 32–33. 51. Ibid., 33. 52. Kundera, Art, 36. 53. Abram Tertz, The Trial Begins, trans. Max Hayward in On Socialist Realism, trans. George Dennis (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), 214–15. 54. Kundera, Unbearable, 254. 55. Kundera, qt. in Ian McEwan, ‘‘An Interview with Milan Kundera,’’ Granta, no. 11 (spring 1984): 33. 56. Roland Barthes, ‘‘Writing Degree Zero,’’ trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 41–42. 57. Kundera, Unbearable, 254. 58. Ibid., 261. 59. Kundera, ‘‘Introduction to a Variation,’’ 2–3. 60. Milan Kundera, ‘‘Prague: A Disappearing Poem,’’ trans. Edmund White, Granta, no. 17 (autumn 1985): 87. 61. Kundera, qt. in Ian McEwan, 27. 62. Milan Kundera, ‘‘Paris or Prague?’’ trans. Edmund White, Granta, no. 17 (autumn 1985): 15. 63. Ibid., 13–15. 64. Ibid., 16. 65. Ibid., 13–14. 66. Kundera, ‘‘Introduction to a Variation,’’ 11. 67. Milan Kundera, Life Is Elsewhere, trans. Peter Kussi (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 270.

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68. Kundera, qt. in Ian McEwan, 24. 69. Kundera, qt. in Liehm, 44–45. 70. Kundera, Art, 135. 71. Kundera, Life, 270. 72. Milan Kundera, Slowness, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 61–62. 73. Ibid., 67. 74. Otis Fellows, Diderot (Boston: Twayne, 1989), 3–4. 75. Muller, Diderot and Soviet Criticism, 23–36. 76. Georg Lukacs, Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 103–6. 77. Kundera, ‘‘The Novel and Europe,’’ 17. 78. Ibid. 79. Leszek Kolakowski, Toward a Marxist Humanism, trans. Jane Peel (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 216. 80. Kundera, ‘‘Afterword: Interview with Philip Roth,’’ 237. 81. Kundera, Art, 11. 82. Jaroslav Hasˇek, The Good Soldier Sˇvejk, trans. Cecil Parrott (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 43. 83. Ibid., 21. 84. Ibid., 3–4. 85. Milan Kundera, ‘‘Somewhere Behind,’’ trans. David Bellows, Granta, no. 11 (spring 1984): 82. 86. Hasˇek, 59. 87. Kundera, ‘‘Prague: A Disappearing Poem,’’ 92. 88. Hasˇek, 69. 89. Ibid. 90. Kundera, ‘‘Prague: A Disappearing Poem,’’ 93. 91. Hasˇek, 252. 92. Ibid., 225. 93. Ibid., 308. 94. Milan Kundera, ‘‘The Czech Wager,’’ New York Review of Books, 22 January 1981, 21. 95. Hasˇek, 752. 96. Milan Kundera, ‘‘A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out,’’ trans. Edmund White, Granta, no. 11 (spring 1984): 109. 97. Hasˇek, 89. 98. Kundera, ‘‘The Czech Wager,’’ 21. 99. Hasˇek, 253. 100. Ibid., 664. 101. Kundera, qt. in Holmberg, 27. 102. Ibid., 25. 103. Kundera, ‘‘The Novel and Europe,’’ 17. 104. Kundera, Unbearable, 223. 105. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Islowsky (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1968), 93–94.

Chapter 5. Christopher Hampton’s Tales from Hollywood 1. Christopher Hampton, introduction to Tales from Hollywood (London: Faber & Faber, 1983), 6.

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2. Ian Huisch, Horva`th: A Study (London: Heinemann, 1980), 139–47. ¨ do¨n von Horva`th (New York: PAJ 3. Martin Esslin, introduction to Four Plays by O Publications, 1986), 9. 4. Christopher Hampton, Colloquium on ‘‘Brecht and Horva´th: Epic Theatre and New Objectivity,’’ Actors Theatre of Louisville, 18 October 1992. 5. Josef Strelka, Brecht. Horva´th. Du¨rrenmatt (Vienna: Forum, 1962), 78–79. 6. Jules Aaron, ‘‘Exiles in Paradise: Christopher Hampton’s Tales from Hollywood, ’’ Theater 13, no. 3 (summer/fall 1982), 70. ¨ do¨ n von Horva` th aus dem Wienerwald,’’ Theater 7. Gerhart Stadelmaier, ‘‘O heute 24, no. 5 (1983): 25. This and subsequent translations from the German are mine. 8. Christopher Hampton, Tales from Hollywood (London: Faber & Faber, 1983), 93. Further references to Tales will appear in the text. 9. James K. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 46. 10. Hampton, introduction to Tales. 7–10. 11. Ibid., 10. 12. Ibid., 7–8. 13. Ibid., 7. 14. John Willet, Theatre of the Weimar Republic (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 211–12. 15. Michel Foucault, ‘‘What Is an Author?’’ Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 102–8. 16. Theodor W. Adorno, Minimalia Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1978), 207. 17. Foucault, ‘‘What Is an Author?’’ 105. 18. Peter Handke, ‘‘Horva`th ist besser als Brecht,’’ Theater heute 9, no. 3 (1968): 28. ¨ do¨ n von Horva`ths 19. Horva` th, qt. in Traugott Krischke, ed., Materialen zu O Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald (Frankfurt: Suhrkampf, 1972), 7. 20. Franz Xaver Kroetz, Weitere Aussichten . . . : Ein Lesebuch, ed. Wolfgang Schuch, Thomas Thieringer, and Jochen Ziller (Ko¨ln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1976), 525. ¨ do¨ n von Horva` th (1905–1938) 21. Martin Swales, introduction to Symposium: O 9 December 1976, (London: Austrian Institute, 1977), 1–2. 22. Hampton, qt. in Gerd Ja¨ ger, ‘‘Die Impotenz der Intellektuellen. Ein Gespra¨ch mit Christopher Hampton,’’ Theater heute 24, no. 5 (1983): 28–29. 23. Horva`th, qt. in Huisch, Horva`th: A Study, 7. 24. Swales, introduction to Symposium, 1. 25. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Sherry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 334. ¨ do¨n von Horva`th, 94. 26. Horva`th, Author’s note, to Four Plays by O 27. Esslin, introduction to Four Plays, 9. 28. Winfried Nolting, Der Totale Jargon (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1976), 35. 29. Adorno, Notes, 334. ¨ do¨ n Horva` th, Tales from the Vienna Woods, trans. Christopher Hampton 30. O (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), 7. 31. Hampton, qt. in Ja¨ger, 28. 32. Horva`th, qt. in Huisch, 1–5. 33. Horva` th, qt. in Franz Kadronska, ‘‘Sozialkritik und Transparenz faschistischer Ideologeme in Horva`ths Jugend ohne Gott, ed. Traugott Krischke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 69.

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34. Thomas Mann, qt. in Lyon, 252. 35. Brecht, qt. in Lyon, 252. 36. Donald Prater, Thomas Mann: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 311–27. 37. Nigel Hamilton, The Brothers Mann: The Lives of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1871–1950 and 1875–1955 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 127. 38. Heinrich Mann, qt. in Hamilton, 160. 39. Hamilton, 183–85. 40. Nelly Mann, qt. in Hamilton, 328. 41. Heinrich Mann, qt. in Hamilton, 321. 42. Thomas Mann, qt. in Hamilton, 317. 43. Bruno Frank, qt. in Hamilton, 317–18. 44. Lyon, 314. 45. Martin Esslin, Brecht: The Man and His Work (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960), 69. 46. David Pike, ‘‘Brecht and Stalin’s Russia: The Victim as Apologist (1931– 1945),’’ in Beyond Brecht: The Brecht Yearbook II, ed. John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, and John Willett, (1982): 178–82. 47. Brecht, qt. in Lyon, 265. 48. Thomas Mann, qt. in Lyon, 296. 49. Brecht, qt. in Lyon, 264–65. 50. Thomas Mann, qt. in Lyon, 261. 51. Brecht, qt. in Lyon, 261–62. 52. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 24. 53. Ibid. 54. Manfred Wekwerth, ‘‘Brecht Today,’’ TDR 12, no. 6 (1963): 119. 55. Patrice Pavis, ‘‘The Classical Heritage of Modern Drama: The Case of Postmodern Theater,’’ Modern Drama 29, no. 1 (1986): 18. 56. George Tabori, ‘‘Tatt des Urschreis des Urkichern’’ Theater heute 24, no. 5 (1983): 30. 57. Siegfried Mews, ‘‘Exiles on Stage,’’ in Christopher Hampton, ed. Robert Gross (New York: Garland, 1990), 95–104. 58. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman ( New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 12. 59. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 197), 11. 60. Ibid., 7–8. 61. Adorno, Minimalia Moralia, 206–7.

Chapter 6. The Scandal Maker 1. Quotations from the German texts are given in translations. This and all subsequent translations, except when noted, are mine. 2. Jeanette R. Malkin, ‘‘Pulling the Pants off History: Politics and Postmodernism in Thomas Bernhard’s Eve of Retirement,’’ Theatre Journal 47, no. 1 (1995), 108–9. 3. Ibid., 109. 4. George, Steiner, ‘‘Black Danube,’’ The New Yorker, 21 July 1986, 92. 5. Elfriede Jelinek in Eva Brenner, Interview with Elfriede Jelinek, February 1993, ‘‘Where Are the Big Topics, Where is the Big Form?’’ in Elfriede Jelinek: Framed

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by Language, ed. Jorun B. Johns and Katherine Arens (Riverside, Calif.: Ariadne Press, 1994), 31. 6. Ibid., 23–24. 7. Amos Elon, ‘‘Report from Vienna,’’ The New Yorker, 13 May 1997, 96. 8. Ibid., 96–98. 9. Ibid. 10. Peter Handke, Offending the Public, in Kaspar and Other Plays, trans. Michael Roloff (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1969), 9. 11. Malkin, 119. 12. John Updike, ‘‘Studies in Post-Hitlerian Self-Condemnation in Austria and Germany,’’ The New Yorker , 9 October 1989, 132. 13. Thomas Bernhard, ‘‘Der Italiener,’’ in Insel-Almanach auf das Jahr 1965 (Frankfurt: Insel, 1964), 85. 14. Thomas Bernhard, ‘‘Dankrede fur den Forderungspreis fur Literature 1967,’’ Burgheater Programmbuch No. 36 (Vienna: Burgtheater, 1988), 52. 15. Thomas Bernhard, qt. in Kurt Hofmann, ed., Aus Gespra¨chen mit Thomas Bernhard (Vienna: Lo¨cker, 1988), 78–79. 16. Steiner, 93. 17. Bernhard, qt. in Kurt Hofmann, ed., Aus Gespra¨chen mit Thomas Bernhard (Vienna: Lo¨cker, 1988), 78–79. 18. Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters, trans. Ewald Osers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 5. 19. Ibid., 34–35. 20. Ibid., 44–45. 21. Thomas Bernhard, Woodcutters, trans. David McLintock (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 12. 22. Matthias Konzett, ‘‘Publikumsbeschipfung: Thomas Bernhard’s Provocations of the Austrian Public Sphere,’’ The German Quarterly 68, no. 3, 269. 23. Hans Ho¨ller, Thomas Bernhard (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1993), 148. 24. Robert Croft, ‘‘The Comedian of Horror,’’ The New York Review, 27 September 1990, 47. 25. Steiner, 93. 26. Bernhard, qt. in Krista Fleischman, ed., Thomas Bernhard: Eine Erinnerung, Interviews zur Person (Vienna: 1992), 171–72. 27. Thomas Bernhard, Elizabeth II (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 29–30. 28. Bernhard, qt. in Hofmann, 78–79. 29. William M. Johnston, Vienna. Vienna: The Golden Age 1815–1914 (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1981), 124. 30. Andrew Wheatcroft, The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire (New York: Viking, 1995), 290. 31. Sigrid Lo¨ ffler, ‘‘Farce. Tobsuchtsanfall. Weltblamage,’’ Profil, 17 October 1988, 17. 32. Thomas Bernhard, ‘‘Is It a Comedy? Is It a Tragedy?’’ in The President and Eve of Retirement, trans. Gitta Honegger (New York: Performing Arts Journal, 1982), 211. 33. Malkin, 107–8. 34. Ibid., 108. 35. Laurence Romero and Christiane Zehl Romero, ‘‘Tiger at the Gate: Claus Peymann in the Vienna’s Burgtheater, Modern Austrian Literature 25, no. 1 (1992): 93–98. 36. The Burgtheater published a 297-page volume on the Heldenplatz scandal consisting of clippings from the local and foreign press, letters to the editor, and

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letters to the administration of the Burgtheater, and also to Peymann and Bernhard. See Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation (Vienna: Burgtheater, 1989). 37. Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 28. 38. Thomas Bernhard, Heldenplatz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 89. Further references to Heldenplatz will appear in the text. 39. Bruno Kreisky, qt. in Dieter Kinderman, ‘‘Das darf man sich night gefallen lassen!’’ Neue Kronen Zeitung, 10 October 1988. Reprinted in Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 35. 40. Kurt Waldheim, qt. in Kotanko Kittner,‘‘Waldheim: In der Burg kein Platz fu¨r Heldenplatz, ’’ Kurier, 11 October 1988. Reprinted in Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 35. 41. ‘‘Hawlicek hat neuen Burg-Chef parat ‘Schließe Ru¨ cktritt Peymanns nich aus,’’ Die Presse, 11 October 1988. Reprinted in Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 36. 42. Jo¨rg Haider, qt. in Kinderman, ‘‘Hinaus aus Wien mit dem Schuft,’’ Neue Kronen Zeitung, 12 October 1988. Reprinted in Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 44. 43. Hans Werner Scheidl, ‘‘Heldenplatz und die Folgen,’’ Die Presse, 12 October 1988. Reprinted in Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 46. 44. ‘‘Staberl,’’ Neue Kronen Zeitung, 20 October 1988. Reprinted in Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 118. 45. Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 152. 46. Conny Bischofberger and Heinz Sichrovsky, interview with Bernhard, ‘‘Bernhard bricht sein Schweigen.’’ Reprinted in Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 158–59. 47. ‘‘L’Autriche est un cloaque,’’ Liberation, 12 October 1988. Reprinted in Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 52. 48. ‘‘L’Autriche de Waldheim mise en pieces;’’ Liberation, 12 October 1988. Reprinted in Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 53. 49. ‘‘Nieuw conflict bij Weens Burgtheater,’’ Algemeen Dagblad. Reprinted in Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 53. 50. Andreas Razumovsky, ‘‘Ausla¨ ndische Infektion,’’ Frankfurter Allgemeine, 15 October 1988. Reprinted in Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 85. 51. Sigrid Lo¨ ffler, ‘‘Farce. Tobsuchtsanfall. Weltblamage,’’Profil, 17 October 1988, 110–14. 52. Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 104. 53. Peter Sichrovsky, ‘‘Stu¨rmt den Heldenplatz,’’ Der Standard, 4 November 1988. Reprinted in Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 187. 54. Donald G. Daviau, ‘‘Thomas Bernhard’s Heldenplatz,’’ Montashefte 81, no.1 (1991): 32. 55. Jens Dittmars, ed., Sehr gescherte Reaktion: Lesebriefen-Schlachten um Thomas Bernhard (Vienna: Osterreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1994), 206–7. 56. Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 101–4. 57. Bernd C. Sucher, ‘‘Notwendige Wahrheit, gefa¨ hrliche Provokation,’’ Su¨ddeutsche Zeitung 7 November 1988. Reprinted in Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 235. 58. Simon Wiesenthal, qt. in Kinderman, ‘‘Das darf man sich night gefallen lassen!’’ Neue Kronen Zeitung, 10 October 1988. Reprinted in Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 35. 59. Benjamin Heinrichs, ‘‘Heldenplatz,’’ Die Zeit, 21 October 1988. Reprinted in Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 134. 60. See photograph and heading in the Neue Kronen Zeitung, 4 November 1988. Reprinted in Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 182. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 226.

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63. Gu¨ nther Nenning, ‘‘Peymann’s Wiener Weltheater,’’ Die Zeit, 4 November 1988. Reprinted in Heldenplatz: Eine Dokumentation, 192. 64. Thomas Bernhard, Extinction, trans. David McLintock (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 324–25. 65. Ibid., 53–54.

Chapter 7. Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest 1. Caryl Churchill, Mad Forest (London: Nick Hern Books, 1990), 7. Further references to Mad Forest will appear in the text. 2. Mark Wing-Davey, qt. in Marc Robinson, ‘‘Bracing Grace: Wing-Davey’s ‘Front Foot’ Approach to Mad Forest,’’ Village Voice, 24 December 1991, 127. 3. Donna Soto-Morettini, ‘‘Revolution and the Fatally Clever Smile: Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 8 no. 1 (1994): 114. 4. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (London: Verso, 1988), 3. 5. Tony Mitchell, ‘‘Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest Polyphonic Representations of Southeastern Europe,’’ Modem Drama 36, no. 4(1993): 500. 6. Soto-Morettini, 106. 7. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘‘Jolts,’’ Representations 49: Special Issue: Identifying Histories: Eastern Europe before and after 1989, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Istvan Rev, and Randolph Starn (winter 1995): 1. 8. Istvan Rev, ‘‘Identifying History,’’ Representations 49: Special Issue: Identifying Histories: Eastern Europe before and after 1989, 9. 9. I. C. Butnaru, The Silent Holocaust: Romania and Its Jews, (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992), xv. 10. Eugene Ionesco, Present Past: Past Present (New York: Grove Press, 1971), 121. 11. Rev, 8–9. 12. Matias Carp, Holocaust in Romania, (Budapest: Primor Publishing Co., 1994), 85–86. 13. Umberto Eco, ‘‘Ur-Fascism,’’ New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995, 13. 14. Mitchell, 503. 15. Elin Diamond, ‘‘(In) Visible Bodies in Churchill’s Theatre,’’ Theatre Journal 40, no. 2 (1988): 190–91. 16. Norman Manea, On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist (New York: Grove Press, 1992), 50. 17. Plesu, 67. 18. Eco, 13. 19. Manea, 51. 20. Eco, 13. 21. Ibid., 12. 22. Mitchell, 500. 23. Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 12–13. 24. Soto-Morettinni, 107. 25. Plesu, 64–66. 26. Manea, 17–18. 27. Ibid., 6. 28. Ibid., 5–6. 29. Mitchell, 505.

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30. Geraldine Cousin, Churchill the Playwright (London: Methuen, 1989), 20–21. 31. Mitchell, 502. 32. Oana-Maria Hock, ‘‘At Home, in the World, in the Theatre: The Mysterious Geography of University Square, Bucharest’’ Performing Arts Journal 8, no. 2(1991): 79. 33. Mitchell, 502. 34. Ibid., 506. 35. Soto-Morettinni, 106. 36. Robinson, ‘‘Bracing Grace: Wing-Davey’s ‘Front Foot’ Approach to Mad Forest,’’ 127. 37. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 40–41. 38. Ionesco, 79. 39. Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 2–3. 40. Soto-Morettinni, 117.

Chapter 8. Kafka Betrayed 1. Josef Skvorecky, Talkin’ Moscow Blues, ed. Sam Solecki (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys Publishers,1988), 155. 2. Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1974), 86. 3. Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Harper Collins,1995), 42. 4. Ingeborg Hoesterey, ‘‘The Intertextual Loop: Kafka, Robbe-Grillet, Kafka,’’ Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings, ed. Alan Udoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 58–75. 5. Alan Bennet, Two Kafka Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 198), ix. 6. Kundera, Testaments, 38. 7. David Zane Mairowitz and David Crumb, Introducing Kafka (New York: Rotem Books, 1993), 165. 8. Ibid., 6. 9. Ibid., 156–57. 10. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext (e), 1983), 31–32. 11. Gilles Deleuze and Fe´ lix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 18. 12. Kundera, Testaments, 42. 13. Ibid., 43–44. 14. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 139. 15. W. G. Kudzus, ‘‘Kafka’s Cage and Circus,’’ Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings ed. Alan Udoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 158. 16. Blanchot, 391. 17. Alan Bennett, Kafka’s Dick (New York: Samuel French, 1986), 8. Further references to Kafka’s Dick will appear within the text. 18. Alan Udoff, ‘‘Before the Question of the Laws: Kafkan Reflections,’’ in Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance, 179.

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19. O. K. Werckmeister, ‘‘Kafka 007.’’ Critical Inquiry 21 (winter 1995), 489. 20. Ibid., 470. 21. Sartre, qt. in A. J. Liehm, ‘‘Kafka and the Communist Critics,’’ Partisan Review 13, no. 3 (1975), 407. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 415. 24. Kafka, qt. in Marthe Robert, As Lonely as Franz Kafka, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 23. 25. Peter Weiss, Leavetaking and Vanishing-Point, trans. Christopher Levenson (London: Calder and Boyars, 1966), 108. 26. Ibid. 27. Peter Weiss and Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, ‘‘Einige Rollen,’’ trans. Jo¨ rg Scherzer (into German from Swedish), Der neue Prozeß (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 122–23. The translation from German from Weiss’s Der neue Prozeß is mine. 28. Weiss, Der neue Prozess, 21. 29. Weiss and Palmstierna-Weiss, 127–28. 30. Weiss, Der neue Prozess, 105–6. 31. Ibid., 127. 32. Weiss, qt. in Anita Brundahl, ‘‘3 Weiss: Ein Gespra¨ch zwischen Peter Weiss, Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss und Anita Brundahl,’’ trans. Jo¨rg Scherzer ( into German from Swedish) Der neue Prozeß (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 121. 33. Georg Lukacs, qt. in Mark M. Anderson, Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Sie`cle, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 11. 34. Anderson, Kafka’s Clothes, 32. 35. Ibid., 29. 36. Lawrence L. Langer, Admitting the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 109. 37. George Steiner, qt. in Langer, 121. 38. Kundera, Testaments, 44. 39. Ibid., 45. 40. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Random, 1955), 91. 41. Ibid. 42. Baudrillard, 36. 43. Werckmeister, 478. 44. Ibid., 489. 45. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Franz Kafka,’’ in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt, trans. H. Zohn. (New York: Schocken, 1973), 124. 46. Harold Pinter, qt. in Martin Esllin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 3rd ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1980), 243. 47. Skvorecky, 170. 48. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 10. 49. Bennet, Two Kafka Plays, xii. 50. Jacques Derrida in ‘‘Devant La Loi,’’ trans. Avital Ronell, in Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings, 137. 51. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, Harper & Row, 1972), 120. 52. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 250–54.

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53. Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, 2d ed. (New York: Schocken, 1960), 132. 54. Kundera, Testaments, 98. 55. Igor Stravinsky, qt. in Kundera, Testaments, 64. 56. Kundera, Testaments, 208. 57. Ibid., 105. 58. Mark M. Anderson, ‘‘Kafka, Homosexuality, and the Aesthetics of ‘Male Culture,’ ’’ Gender and Politics in Austrian Fiction, ed. Ritchie Robertson and Edward Timms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,1996), 96–97. 59. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 164. 60. Milan Kundera, Immortality, trans. Peter Kussi (New York: Grove, Weidenfeld, 1991), 82. 61. Ibid., 215. 62. Kundera, Testaments, 45. 63. Bennet, Two Kafka Plays, xvi. 64. Kundera, Immortality, 336. 65. Bennet, Two Kafka Plays, xxiv. 66. Kundera, Immortality, 336. 67. Stanley Corngold, ‘‘Kafka’s Other Metamorphosis,’’ Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings, 48.

Chapter 9. The Narcissist and the Mirror in Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1. Patrice Pavis, ‘‘The Classical Heritage of Modern Drama: The Case of Postmodern Theater,’’ trans. Loren Kruger, Modern Drama 29, no.1 (1986), 7. 2. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 66. 3. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 164–65. 4. Kristeva, Desire, 86–87. 5. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 148. 6. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 15. 7. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 231. 8. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 26. 9. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, trans. P.W.K. Stone (New York: Penguin Books, 1961), 17–21. Further references to Laclos’s novel will appear within the text. 10. Georges Poulet, Interior Distance, trans. Elliot Coleman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), 56. 11. Frances King, qt. in Stephanie Barbe Hammer, ‘‘Romanticism and Reaction: Hampton’s Transformation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses,’’ in Christopher Hampton: A Casebook, ed. Robert Gross (New York: Garland, 1990), 109.

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12. Peter Brooks, The Novel of Worldliness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 43. 13. Charles Baudelaire, qt. in Ronald C. Rosbottom, Choderlos de Laclos (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 142. 14. Christopher Lasch, Culture of Narcissism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 10. 15. Christopher Hampton, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), 32. Further references to Hampton’s play will appear within the text. 16. Stendhal, qt. in Andre´ Malraux, Le Triangle Noir (Paris, 1970), 48. 17. Malraux, 29. 18. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 173. 19. Hammer, 125. 20. Ibid., 127. 21. Ibid., 126. 22. Heinrich von Kleist, Penthesilea: Five Plays, trans. Martin Greenberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 268. 23. Carl Weber, introduction to Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, by Heiner Mu¨ller, ed. and trans. Carl Weber (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984), 14–15. 24. Heiner Mu¨ller qt. in Weber, 18. 25. Ibid., 19. 26. Bonnie Marranca, ‘‘Despoiled Shores: Heiner Mu¨ller’s Natural History Lessons,’’ Performing Arts Journal, no. 2 (1988): 17–18. 27. Heiner Mu¨ller, Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, 118. Further references to Mu¨ller’s play will appear within the text. 28. Bataille, 17. 29. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1. 30. Ibid., 4. 31. Ibid., 11. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 4–5. 34. Marquis de Sade, qt. in Bataille, 187. 35. Brooks, 212. 36. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Vintage, 1979), 62–63. 37. He´le`ne Cixous, ‘‘Sorties,’’ in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 198), 96. 38. Mu¨ller, qt. in Pavis, 9. 39. Hammer, 128.

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Tisdall, Caroline, and Angelo Bozzola. Futurism. London: Oxford University Press, 1978. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. ———. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. Trans. Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. The Trial. Dir. David Jones. Screenplay by Harold Pinter. With Kyle MacLachlan, Anthony Hopkins, Alfred Molina, Jason Robards, Juliet Stephenson, and Polly Walker. 1992. The Trial. Dir. Orson Welles. With Anthony Perkins, Elsa Martinelli, Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Akim Tamiroff, and Orson Welles. Paris Europe/Ficit/Hisa, 1962. Tzara, Tristan. ‘‘Dada Manifesto.’’ Trans. Barbara Wright. In Dada Performance. Ed. Mel Gordon, 45–51. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1987. Udoff, Alan. ‘‘Before the Question of the Laws: Kafkan Reflections.’’ Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings. Ed. Alan Udoff, 178–213. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Updike, John. ‘‘Studies in Post-Hitlerian Self-Condemnation in Austria and Germany.’’ The New Yorker, 9 October 1989: 132–36. Valmont. Dir. Milos Forman. With Colin Firth, Annette Bening, Meg Tilly. Orion, 1989. Vansant, Jacqueline. ‘‘Mit dieser Irrationalita¨t kann ich nichts anfangen.’’ Interview with Elfriede Jelinek. Deutsche Bu¨cher 15, no. 1(1985): 1–9. Verdery, Katherine. National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Weber, Carl. Introduction to Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, by Heiner Mu¨ller. Ed. and trans. Carl Weber. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984. Weiss, Peter. Leavetaking and Vanishing-Point. Trans. Christopher Levenson. London: Calder and Boyars, 1966. ———. Der neue Prozeß. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984. ———, and Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss. ‘‘Einige Rollen.’’ Trans. Jorg Scherzer (into German from Swedish). In Der neue Prozeß, 122–31. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984. Wekwerth, Manfred. ‘‘Brecht Today.’’ TDR 12, no. 6 (1963): 118–24 Wellwarth, George. Modern Drama and the Death of God. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. Werckmeister, O. K. ‘‘Kafka 007.’’ Critical Inquiry 21(winter 1995): 468–95. Wheatcroft, Andrew. The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire. New York: Viking, 1995. Willett, John. Expressionism. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. ———. Theatre of the Weimar Republic. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988. Winter, Riki. ‘‘Gespra¨ch mit Elfriede Jelinek.’’ Dossier u¨ber Elfriede Jelinek. Ed. Kurt Bartsch and Gu¨nther A. Ho¨fler, 9–19. Graz: Droschl, 1992. Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy. Beelzebub Sonata: Plays, Essays, and Documents. Ed. and trans. Daniel Gerould and Jadwiga Kosicka. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1980. ———. Czysta Forma w teatrze [Pure Form in the theater] 1923.

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Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1977. ———. Gyubul Wahazar: Or, Along the Cliffs of the Absurd—A Non-Euclidean Drama in Four Acts. In Tropical Madness, 99–171. ———. The Madman and the Nun and Other Plays. Ed. and trans. Daniel C. Gerould and C. S. Durer. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968. ———. The Mother: An Unsavory Play in Two Acts and an Epilogue. In Madman, 117–62. ———. ‘‘On a New Type of Play.’’ In Madman, 291–97. ———. ‘‘Rules of the S. I. Witkiewicz Portrait Painting Firm.’’ In Beelzebub Sonata, 173–76. ———. Tropical Madness. Trans. Daniel and Eleanor Gerould. New York: Winter House, 1972. ———. The Witkiewicz Reader. Ed. Daniel Gerould. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. ‘‘On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters.’’ In A Soviet Heretic. Trans. Mirra Ginsburg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Zentropa. Dir. Lars von Trier. With Jean-Marc Barr, Barbara Sukowa, Lawrence Hartman, and Eddie Constantine. Zentropa, 1991.

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Index Aaron, Jules, 166 About the Spiritual in Art (Kandinsky), 58 Abschied von Europa (Seppel), 168 Adorno, Theodor, 123–25, 172, 175, 176, 193, 194, 298; The Jargon of Authenticity, 193 Allen, Woody, 269–71; Shadows and Fog, 269, 270 Alpelko¨nig und der Menschenfeind, Der [The Alpine King and the Misanthrope] (Raimund), 213 Alte Meister [Old Masters] (Bernhard), 209 Amalgamemnon (Brooke-Rose), 34 Amerika (Kafka), 263 Ame´ry, Jean, 228. See also Maier, Hans Anatomy of Melancholy, The (Burton), 25 Anderson, Mark, M., 268 Anxiety of Influence, The (Bloom), 23 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 58 Arbeitsjournal (Brecht), 167 Aristotle, 21–23, 219; Poetics, 21, 22 Art (Reza), 167 Artaud, Antonin, 47, 65, 69 Auden, Wystan, 169, 278 Ausloschung: ein Zerfall [Extinction] (Bernhard), 227, 228 Baader Meinhof Group, 88, 91 Babel, Isaac, 167; Marya, 167 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 209 Baju, Anatole, 65 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 26, 30, 40, 125, 126, 161 Bardot, Brigitte, 44 Barnes, Julian, 233; Porcupine, 233 Barthes, Roland, 11, 29, 35, 36, 40, 102, 145, 172, 282 Baryshnikov, Mikhail, 273 Bataille, Georges, 291, 299, 300 Baudelaire, Charles, 44, 286

Baudrillard, Jean, 59, 86, 193, 253, 263, 269; Simulations, 253 Bauer, Felice, 266, 273 Bausch, Pina, 99 Beckett, Samuel, 42, 127, 129, 136, 158, 160, 229; Waiting for Godot, 42, 127, 129, 136, 158, 160 Bedtime for Bonzo, 166, 191 Beelzebub Sonata, The (Witkiewicz), 54, 72 Beethoven, Ludwig, 67, 142, 203; Fidelio, 67 Bely, Andrei, 62–64 Bening, Annette, 45 Benjamin, Walter, 35, 125, 224, 272 Bennett, Alan, 22, 38, 41, 44, 45, 261, 262, 264, 265, 269, 271, 273, 277–81; The Insurance Man, 269, 271; Kafka’s Dick, 261, 264, 277, 279 Berkoff, Steven, 273; Metamorphosis (dance drama), 273 Berlau, Ruth, 185 Bernhard, Thomas, 22, 38, 41, 43, 45, 88, 172, 199–11, 213–30; Elizabeth II, 211; Eve of Retirement (Vor dem Ruhestand), 214, 227; Extinction (Auslochung: ein Zerfall), 227, 228; Force of Habit (Die Macht der Gewo¨hnheit), 208, 227; Heldenplatz, 43, 199–207, 210, 211, 214, 216–20, 223, 224, 226–30; Histrionics (Der Theatermacher), 208, 227; Old Masters (Alte Meister), 209; A Party for Boris (Ein Fest fu¨r Boris), 214; Woodcutters (Holzfa¨llen), 209, 211 Bertolt Brecht in America (Lyon), 168 Beyle, Henri, 144, 290. See also Stendhal Beyond the Limit (Hampton), 167 Blanchot, Maurice, 134, 263, 264 Blaue Reiter, 58 Blok, Alexander, 62, 63, 65 Blonski, Jan, 85 Bloom, Harold, 23, 38; The Anxiety of Influence, 23

341

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INDEX

Blue Angel, The (Sternberg), 168, 181, 184 Bo¨cklin, Arnold, 84; Island of The Dead, 84 Boileau-Despreàux, Nicolas, 22 Bo¨ll, Heinrich, 91; Germany in Autumn, 91 Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The (Kundera), 142, 146, 276 Borges, Jorge Luis, 31, 123 Bourdieu, Pierre, 37, 39 Bradburry, Malcolm, 167; The History Man, 167 Braque, George, 58; Still-Life with Violin and Palette, 58 Brecht: A Choice of Evils (Esslin), 168 Brecht, Bertolt, 22, 24–30, 35, 39, 43, 75, 135, 136, 166, 168–75, 177, 179, 182–95, 233, 267, 268, 270; Arbeitsjournal, 167; Epic Theatre, 39, 75, 135, 193, 233; ‘‘A Short Organum for the Theatre,’’ 26; Threepenny Opera, 183, 185; Verfremdungseffekt, 28, 35, 174 Brenton, Howard, 233; Moscow Gold, 233 Breton, Andre´, 59; Surrealist Manifesto, 59 Brezhnev, Leonid Ilych, 130 British Museum is Falling Down, The (Lodge), 37 Broch, Hermann, 211 Brod, Max, 262–65, 274–78, 281; Zauberreich der Liebe [The Enchanted Kingdom of Love], 262 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 34; Amalgamemnon, 34 Brothers Mann, The (Hamilton), 168, 180 Brothers Quay, 270; Nocturna Artificiala, 270 Brundahl, Anita, 267 Bu¨chner, Georg, 22 Burgtheater, 53, 88, 199–03, 207, 210– 16, 218–20, 222–25, 230 Burliuk, David, 62, 73 Burton, Robert, 25, 26; The Anatomy of Melancholy, 25

Capra, Frank, 270 Carrington (Hampton), 167 Castelvetro, Lodovico, 22 Castle, The (Kafka), 263, 264, 271, 275, 276 Ceausescu, Elena, 234, 242, 253 Ceausescu, Nicolae, 234, 238–50, 252, 254–57 Ceci n’est pas un pipe [This is not a Pipe] (Magritte), 82 Ce´line, Louis-Ferdinand, 275 Cervantes, Miguel de, 126, 142; Don Quixote, 142 Chairs, The (Ionesco), 136 Chaplin, Charlie, 169 Chekhov, Anton, 167; Uncle Vanya, 167 Cherau, Patrice, 167 Child of Our Time, A (Horva`th), 187 Churchill, Caryl, 22, 29, 30, 38, 39, 41, 43, 45, 99, 103, 107, 173, 231–43, 245–47, 251–53, 256, 258; Mad Forest; A Play from Romania, 43, 231–36, 240, 241, 243, 245, 249, 252, 258; Top Girls, 99, 103, 107, 234 Chwistek, Leon, 52, 60, 82; The Plurality of Realities, 60, 82 Chytilova, Vera, 148 Cinnamon Shops (Schulz), 48 Cixous, He´le`ne, 95, 303; ‘‘The Laugh of the Medusa,’’ 95 Clarke, Marthe, 273 Close, Glenn, 45 Cockroaches, The (Witkiewicz), 66 Conrad, Joseph, 167; The Secret Agent, 167 Conversation of an Unknown Old Woman with the Demonic Orchestra Conductor (Witkiewicz), 72 Cornelius, Hans, 48 Corngold, Stanley, 280 Cruel Intentions (Kumble), 45 Crumb, Robert, 43 Culler, Jonathan, 40 Cuttlefish, The (Witkiewicz), 54 Czysta Forma w teatrze (Witkiewicz), 70

Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, The (Wiene), 271 Camus, Albert, 269 Capaldi, Peter, 270; Franz Kafka: It’s A Wonderful Life, 270

Dada, 59 Dalı´, Salvador, 65 Dangerous Liaisons (Hampton), 167 Dangerous Liaisons (Frears), 45, 167 Daviau, Donald, 223

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INDEX

David, Claude, 276 Davies, Howard, 45 Dead Class, The (Kantor), 49, 50 Deleuze, Gilles, 263 Deliverance, The (Wyspianski), 67, 68 DeMille, Cecil B., 170 Derrida, Jacques, 21, 22, 27, 28, 32, 33, 38, 40, 51, 274, 283 Desvalliere, Maurice, 167; Signed and Sealed, 167 Diamond, Elin, 241 Diderot, Denis, 30, 31, 41, 42, 123, 126– 47, 149–53, 155, 157–61, 275; Encyclopedia, 153; Jacques the Fatalist, 30, 31, 41, 42, 123, 126, 128, 141–44, 152–54, 161, 275 Dietrich, Marlene, 184, 193 Disney, Walt, 165; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 165 Do¨blin, Alfred, 168 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen), 30, 31, 32, 36, 40, 42, 87, 88, 89, 93, 94, 97, 98, 100, 102, 112–15, 117, 119, 167 Don Juan (Molie`re), 167 Don Juan Comes Back from the War (Horva`th), 167 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 142 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 125, 126, 147, 152, 164; The Idiot, 125, 137 Duchamp, Marcel, 34, 59, 75, 233 Dukore, Bernard, 65 Duncan, Lindsay, 45 Durer, C. S., 76, 79 Eagleton, Terry, 29 Eco, Umberto, 46, 240, 244, 245 Edgar, David, 233; The Shape of the Table, 233 Edward II (Marlowe), 186 Ein Fest fu¨r Boris [A Party for Boris] (Bernhard), 214 Einstein, Albert, 60, 83 Ein Zeitalter Wird Besischtigt (Heinrich Mann), 168 Elam, Keir, 41 Elon, Amos, 204 Emrich, Wilhellm, 164 Esslin, Martin, 164, 168, 176, 182, 188; Brecht: A Choice of Evils, 168 Eyre, Richard, 270

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Fabjan, Peter, 229 Faith, Hope and Charity (Horva`th), 167, 176, 178, 186 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 91, 172, 225; Germany in Autumn, 91; Die Stadt der Mu¨ll, und der Tod, 225 Feijoo, Beda Docampo, 270; The Loves of Kafka, 270 Fellini, Federico, 270 Fellows, Otis, 151 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 166, 188, 189 Feuchtwanger, Marta, 169 Feydeau, George, 167; Signed and Sealed, 167 Fiddler, Allison, 99 Fiddler on the Roof, 223 Fidelio (Beethoven), 67 Filbinger, Hans Karl, 214 Firth, Colin, 45 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 277 Flaubert, Gustave, 144 Fleisser, Marieluise, 173 Fonda, Jane, 100 Forefather’s Eve (Mickiewicz), 67 Forman, Milos, 44, 45, 148; Valmont, 45 Forster, E. M., 278 Foucault, Michel, 82, 172, 194, 274, 283 Fox-Genovese, Elisabeth, 107 Frank, Bruno, 188, 189 Frank, Leonhard, 168 Franz Kafka: It’s A Wonderful Life (Capaldi), 270 Frears, Stephen, 44, 45, 167; Dangerous Liaisons, 45, 167 Freud, Sigmund, 52, 94, 106, 112, 211, 212 Fried, Michael, 69 Futurist Manifesto (Marinetti), 58 Garbo, Greta, 193 Gas (Kaiser), 68 Gauguin, Paul, 53, 54 Gehry, Frank, 33 Genet, Jean, 304 Genette, Gerard, 22, 25, 27, 31, 39 Germany in Autumn (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Vo¨lker Schlondorff, Heinrich Bo¨ll, Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge), 91 Gerould, Daniel, 48, 76, 79, 85

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INDEX

Ghost Sonata, The (Strindberg), 31, 34, 77, 81, 84 Ghosts (Ibsen), 31, 34, 76, 77, 80, 81, 85 Giorgione, 209 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 22, 164, 209 Gogol, Nicolai, 52 Goll, Ivan, 62 Good Soldier Sˇvejk, The (Hasˇek), 153 Gould, Glenn, 220, 221 Grant, Richard, E., 270 Greene, Graham, 167; The Honorary Counsel, 167 Grillparzer, Franz, 212, 213, 216; Ko¨nig Ottokars Glu¨ck und Ende [King Ottocar, His Rise and His Fall], 213, 216 Guattari, Fe´lix, 263 Gyubul Wahazar (Witkiewicz), 60, 66 Habermas, Ju¨rgen, 298 Haider, Jo¨rg, 200, 202, 208, 211, 218, 223, 225; Austrian Freedom Party, 200, 202, 204, 205 Hall, Martin, 128 Hamilton, Nigel, 168, 180–82; The Brothers Mann, 168, 180 Hammer, Stephanie Barbe, 295 Hampton, Christopher, 22, 24, 29, 30, 31, 38, 39–45, 163–68, 170–75, 177– 95, 282–97, 299, 302, 304; Beyond the Limit, 167; Carrington, 167; Dangerous Liaisons, 167; Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 45, 167, 285; Mary Reilly, 167; The Philanthropist, 167; The Prague Trial ’79, 167; Savages, 167; The Secret Agent, 167; Tales from Hollywood, 24, 42, 163, 168, 170, 172, 174, 177, 193, 194, 195; Treats, 167 Handel, Georg Friedrich, 209 Handke, Peter, 172–75, 177, 191, 195, 205; Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Public), 205 Hangmen Also Die (Lang), 168 Hasˇek, Jaroslav, 153–57; The Good Soldier Sˇvejk, 153 Hasenclever, Walter, 68; The Son, 68 Hauptmann, Elisabeth, 185 Haütungen (Stefan), 95 Havel, Vaclav, 148 Hawlicek, Hilde, 218, 225 Hedda Gabler (Ibsen), 167

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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, 156 Heidegger, Martin, 37, 209 Heinrichs, Benjamin, 224 Heisenberg, Werner, 61 Heldenplatz (Bernhard), 43, 199–207, 210, 211, 214, 216–20, 223, 224, 226–30 Hemingway, Ernest, 275 Hermann, Oliver, 225 Herodotus, 34 History Man, The (Bradbury), 167 Hitchcock, Alfred, 270; Psycho, 270 Hitler, Adolf, 211, 278 Hock, Oana-Maria, 251 Hoesterey, Ingeborg, 31, 32; ‘‘The Intertextual Loop: Kafka, Robbe-Grillet, Kafka,’’ 31 Hoffman, Eva, 14, 16; Lost in Translation, 14 Holden, William, 170 Holland, Agnieszka, 167; Total Eclipse, 167 Holzfa¨llen [Woodcutters] (Bernhard), 209, 211 Honorary Counsel, The (Greene), 167 Hopper, Hedda, 170 Horace, 219 Horkheimer, Max, 123, 124, 298 ¨ do¨n von, 43, 163–95; A Child Horva`th, O of Our Time (Kind seiner Zeit), 169, 187; Don Juan Comes Back from the War, 167; Faith, Hope and Charity, 167, 176, 178, 186; Tales from the Vienna Woods, 163– 67, 174–76, 181, 185 House Un-American Activities Committee, 190 Hrdlicka, Alfred, 204, 216; Mahnmal against War and Fascism, 216 Hunger Artist, The (Kafka), 273 Hutcheon, Linda, 15, 105 Ibsen, Henrik, 30–32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 53, 62, 76–79, 81–94, 97–101, 103, 109–11, 113–15, 117, 167, 210; A Doll’s House, 30–32, 36, 40, 42, 87–89, 93, 94, 97, 98, 100, 102, 112–15, 117, 119, 167; Ghosts, 31, 34, 76, 77, 80, 81, 85; Hedda Gabler, 167; Pillars of Society, 31, 89, 93, 97, 115; Wild Duck, 167, 210 Idiot, The (Dostoevsky), 125, 137 Immortality (Kundera), 276

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Independence of Triangles, The (Witkiewicz), 55 Ingarden, Roman, 48, 59, 60 Innes, Christopher, 99, 103 Insatiability (Witkiewicz), 54, 57 Insurance Man, The (Bennett), 269, 271 Introducing Kafka (Mairowitz), 44 Ionesco, Eugene, 136, 144, 237, 238; The Chairs, 136; Rhinoceros, 238 Irons, Jeremy, 269, 270; Damage, 270; Reversal of Fortune, 270 Iser, Wolfgang, 34 Isherwood, Christopher, 169 Island of The Dead (Bo¨cklin), 84 Jacques and His Master (Kundera), 30, 42, 123, 126, 140, 142, 149, 161 Jacques the Fatalist (Diderot), 30, 31, 41, 42, 123, 126, 128, 141–44, 152–54, 161, 275 James, William, 52 Jameson, Fredric, 33, 191 Janaćk, Leon, 275 Jargon of Authenticity, The (Adorno), 193 Jarry, Alfred, 48, 65, 66, 74; Ubu Roi, 48, 65, 66, 74 Jauss, Hans Robert, 39, 282 Jelinek, Elfriede, 22, 30–32, 35–42, 45, 87–120, 174, 204; Nora Project, 37, 87, 88, 89, 95, 104 Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte, 30, 32, 42, 87–96, 100, 101, 103, 106 Joke, The (Kundera), 146 Jones, David, 269, 270, 272; The Trial, 269, 270, 272 Joseph, Franz, 212, 228 Joseph in Egypt (Mann, Thomas), 187, 188, 193 Jugendstil, 211 Kafka (Soderbergh), 269, 271 Kafka, Franz, 31, 43, 44, 211, 228, 261–81; Amerika, 263; The Castle, 263, 264, 271, 275, 276; The Hunger Artist, 273; Metamorphosis, 271, 273; The Penal Colony, 271; Der Prozess, 228; The Trial, 44, 262, 263, 265–67, 269, 271 Kafka’s Dick (Bennett), 261, 264, 277, 279 Kaiser, Georg, 68; Gas, 68

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Kandinsky, Vassili, 58, 69, 70; About the Spiritual in Art, 58; The Yellow Sound, 69 Kantor, Tadeusz, 49, 50; The Dead Class, 49, 50; Today is My Birthday, 49; Theatre Cricot, 49 Keaton, Buster, 170 Kesten, Hermann, 168 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 62 Kind seiner Zeit [A Child of Our Time](Horva`th), 169, 187 The Kindness of Strangers (Viertel), 188 King, Frances, 285 Kleist, Heinrich von, 296, 297; Penthesileia, 296, 297 Klemperer, Otto, 169 Klima, Ivan, 148 Klimt, Gustav, 53, 54, 212; Watersnakes, 54 Kluge, Alexander, 91; Germany in Autumn, 91 Kohout, Pavel, 148 Kokoschka, Oskar, 69; Murder Hope of Womankind, 69 Kolakowski, Leszek, 152, 153 Ko¨nig Ottokars Glu¨ck und Ende [King Ottocar, His Rise and His Fall] (Grillparzer), 213, 216 Kornfeld, Paul, 68; The Seduction, 68 Korzeniowska, Czeslawa, 47 Kotarbinski, Tadeusz, 48 Kraus, Karl, 164, 218 Krauss, Rosalind, 98 Kreisky, Bruno, 208, 217 Krischke, Traugott, 163, 169 Kristeva, Julia, 15, 21, 41, 96, 97, 115, 126, 257, 282, 300, 301; Strangers to Ourselves, 15, 257 Kroetz, Franz Xaver, 172–74, 191 Kruchenykh, Aleksei, 62 Kudzus, W. G., 264 Kumble, Roger, 45; Cruel Intentions, 45 Kundera, Milan, 14, 22, 29, 30–32, 38, 41–45, 123, 124, 126, 127, 129, 130– 32, 134–61, 261–63, 272–78, 282; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 142, 146, 276; Immortality, 276; Jacques and His Master, 30, 42, 123, 126, 140, 142, 149, 161; The Joke, 146; ; Life is Elsewhere, 149; Testaments Betrayed, 144, 274–76; The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 14, 127, 130, 146, 270, 274

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INDEX

La Boheme (Puccini), 164 Lacan, Jacques, 94 Laclos, Choderlos de, 31, 40, 41, 44, 45, 167, 282–90, 292, 294–300, 303–5; Les Liaisons Dangereuse, 31, 40, 41, 44, 167, 282–85 Lampersberg, Gerhard and Maja, 210 Lang, Fritz, 168; Hangmen Also Die, 168 Langer, Lawrence, 269 Lasch, Christopher, 286 Last Temptation of Christ, The (Scorcese), 224 Laughton, Charles, 169 LeGrand, Eva, 129 Lejeune, Phillippe, 31 Lewis, Daniel Day, 269, 270; My Beautiful Laundrette, 270; The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 270 Liaisons Dangereuses, Les (Hampton), 45, 167, 285 Liaisons Dangereuse, Les (Laclos), 31, 40, 41, 44, 167, 282–85 Life is Elsewhere (Kundera), 149 Lodge, David, 37, 38; The British Museum is Falling Down, 37 Loffler, Sigrid, 213 Lorre, Peter, 193 Lortholary, Bernard, 276 Losey, Joseph, 100, 101 Lost in Translation (Hoffman), 14 Loves of Kafka, The (Feijoo), 270 Luka`cs, Georg, 24, 268 Lulu (Wedekind), 106, 114 Lynch, David, 270; Twin Peaks, 270 Lyon, James K., 167, 168, 182, 183, 188; Bertolt Brecht in America, 168 Lyotard, Jean-François, 34, 51 Macht der Gewo¨hnheit, Die [Force of Habit] (Bernhard), 208, 227 Maciej Korbowa and Bellatrix (Witkeiwicz), 54 MacLachlan, Kyle, 269, 270 Mad Forest; A Play from Romania (Churchill), 43, 231–36, 240, 241, 243, 245, 249, 252, 258 Madman and the Nun, The (Witkiewicz), 57, 58 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 52, 62, 63, 65, 69 Magritte, Rene´, 65, 82; Ceci n’est pas un pipe (This is Not a Pipe), 82

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Mahler, Gustav, 211 Mahnmal against War and Fascism (Hrdliczka), 216 Maier, Hans, 228. See also Ame´ry, Jean Mairowitz, David Zane, 44, 262; Introducing Kafka, 44 Malevich, Kazimir, 58, 70, 72; Suprematist Manefesto, 58 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 52, 54, 55 Malkin, Jeanette, R., 202 Malkovich, John, 45 Malraux, Andre´, 290 Man Without Qualities, The (Musil), 74 Manea, Norman, 244, 249 Mann, Erika, 168 Mann, Golo, 181 Mann, Heinrich, 166, 168, 169, 180–82, 184–86, 188, 190–94; Ein Zeitalter Wird Besischtigt, 168; Professor Unrat, 169, 181 Mann, Katja, 188 Mann, Klaus, 168 Mann, Nelly, 168, 180, 181, 188 Mann, Thomas, 166, 168, 169, 179, 180– 82, 184, 186–94; Joseph in Egypt, 187, 188, 193; Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 180; The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, 168, 193 Marinetti, Flippo, 58, 60–62; ‘‘First Futurist Manifesto,’’ 61; ‘‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,’’ 61; Futurist Manifesto, 58; ‘‘Variety Theater,’’ 61 Marlowe, Christopher, 183, 186; Edward II, 187 Marrale, Jorge, 270 Marriage of Figaro (Mozart), 212 Marx, Chico, 193 Marx, Harpo, 193 Marx, Karl, 156, 204 Mary Reilly (Hampton), 167 Marya (Babel), 167 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 62, 66 McCarthy, Joseph, 190; House UnAmerican Activities Committee, 190 Meinhof, Ulrike, 88, 91, 92 Menzel, Jiri, 148 Metamorphosis (dance drama) (Berkoff ), 273 Metamorphosis (Kafka), 271, 273 Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf (Witkiewicz), 55

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Mews, Siegfried, 192 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 69 Micinski, Tadeusz, 57, 62, 63 Mickiewicz, Adam, 67; Forefather’s Eve, 67 Miss Tootli Pootli (Witkiewicz), 55 Mr. Price or: Tropical Madness (Witkiewicz), 55 Mitchell, Tony, 241, 246, 251–53 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 167 Mock, Alois, 218 Molie`re, 145, 167; Don Juan, 167; Tartuffe, 167 Monk, Thelonius, 44 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 227 Moreau, Jeanne, 44 Moscow Gold, (Brenton) 233 Mother, The (Witkiewicz), 34, 52, 76, 77, 80–82, 85, 86 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 203, 209, 212, 262; Marriage of Figaro, 212 Mrozek, Slawomir, 49 Mukarovsky, Jan, 27, 29 Mu¨ller, Heiner, 22, 30, 31, 36, 38, 40, 44, 45, 282–85, 296–305; Quartet, 37, 45, 285, 296–300, 303, 304 Murder Hope of Womankind (Kokoschka), 69 Murnau, F. W., 271; Nosferatu, 271 Musil, Robert, 74, 75, 211; The Man Without Qualities, 74 Mussolini, Benito, 108 Nabokov, Vladimir, 11, 14, 41; The Real Life of Sebastian Night, 11–12 Neher, Carola, 192 Nestroy, Johann, 213 New Deliverance, The (Witkiewicz), 67 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 52, 54, 55, 65 Nillson, Anna Q., 170 Nocturna Artificiala (Brothers Quay), 270 Nosferatu (Murnau), 271

Perkins, Anthony, 269 Peymann, Claus, 88, 199, 201, 214–19, 224–26; Der 13 Ma¨rz 1938: Theaterszenen zum Anschluß, 216 Pfeiffer, Michelle, 45 Pfister, Manfred, 25 Philanthropist, The (Hampton), 167 Philipe, Ge´rard, 44 Picasso, Pablo, 34, 80 Pike, David, 185 Pillars of Society (Ibsen), 31, 89, 93, 97, 115 Pinter, Harold, 173, 272 Pipe (Magritte), 82 Piranesi, Giambattista, 139 Piscator, Erwin, 26 Planck, Max, 60 Plesu, Andrei, 244 Plurality of Realities, The (Chwistek), 60, 82 Poetics (Aristotle), 21, 22 Polgar, Alfred, 168 Porcupine (Barnes), 233 Portage to San Cristobal of A. H., The (Steiner), 167 Poulet, Georges, 285 Pragmatists, The (Witkiewicz), 55 Prague Linguistic Circle, 27 Prague Trial ’79, The (Hampton), 167 ‘‘Prince of Darkness Tempts Saint Theresa with the Aid of a Waiter from Budapest, The’’ (Witkiewicz), 53 Professor Unrat (Mann, Heinrich), 169, 181 Prozess, Der (Kafka), 228 Przybyszewski, Stanislaw, 52, 53, 62, 63, 69 Psycho (Hitchcock), 270 Publikumsbeschimpfung [Offending the Public], 205 Puccini, Giacomo, 164; La Boheme, 164

Only Way Out, The (Witkiewicz), 77 Orton, Joe, 173

Quartet (Mu¨ller), 37, 45, 285, 296–300, 303, 304

Pascal, Blaise, 209 Pater, Walter, 68 Patriot in Exile, The (Stanford), 168 Pavis, Patrice, 29, 123, 136, 192, 282 Penal Colony, The (Kafka), 271 Penthesileia (Kleist), 296, 297

Rabelais, François, 123, 126, 136, 144, 157 Raimund, Ferdinand, 213; Der Alpenko¨nig und der Menschenfeind [The Alpine King and the Misanthrope], 213 Reagan, Ronald, 166

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348

INDEX

Real Life of Sebastian Night, The (Nabokov), 11–12 Reed, Carol, 271; The Third Man, 271 Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (Mann, Thomas), 180 Regnard, Jean-François, 145 Reinhardt, Max, 26 Reitz, Edgar, 91; Germany in Autumn, 91 Rembrandt van Rijin, 209 Rev, Istvan, 236, 239 Reza, Yasmina, 167; Art, 167 Rhinoceros (Ionesco), 238 Richardson, Samuel, 145, 283 Rickman, Alan, 45 Riffaterre, Michel, 23 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 211 Rimbaud, Arthur, 167 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 31 Roeder, Anke, 94 Roth, Philip, 132 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 283 Royal Shakespeare Company, 45, 296 Ro´zewicz, Tadeusz, 49 Rubinstein, Arthur, 52 Rushdie, Salman, 275 Sabina, Karel, 274 Sade, Marquis de, 302 Sarasate, Pablo de, 220, 221 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 65, 265 Savages (Hampton), 167 Schell, Maximillian, 164 Schildknecht, Kurt Josef, 88 Schleyer, Hans Martin, 92 Schlondorff, Vo¨lker, 91; Germany in Autumn, 91 Schnitzler, Arthur, 213 Scho¨nberg, Arnold, 69, 193, 213 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 52, 53 Schorske, Carl, 54 Schranz, Karl, 203 Schubert, Franz, 164, 203, 209; Trout Quintet, 209 Schulz, Bruno, 48, 50; Cinnamon Shops, 48 Scorcese, Martin, 224; The Last Temptation of Christ, 224 Secret Agent, The (Conrad), 167 Secret Agent, The (Hampton), 167 Sedaine, Michel, 145 Seduction, The (Kornfeld), 68

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Seppel, Joachim, 168; Abschied von Europa, 168 Shadows and Fog (Allen), 269 Shakespeare, William, 22, 29, 52 Shape of the Table, The (Edgar), 233 Shoemakers, The (Witkiewicz), 56 Sichrovsky, Peter, 223 Signed and Sealed (Desvallieres and Feydeau), 167 Simon, Walter B., 224 Simulations (Baudrillard), 253 Sinyavski, Andrei, 144, See also Tertz, Abram 622 Downfalls of Bungo: or, The Demonic Woman, The (Witkiewicz), 53, 64 Skolska, Irena, 47, 53, 54 Skvorecky, Josef, 148, 261, 272 Slap in the Face of Public Taste, A (Burliuk, Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky), 62, 73 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney), 165 Soderbergh, Steven, 269, 270, 271; Kafka, 269, 271 Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr, 143 Son, The (Hasenclever), 68 Sontag, Susan, 139, 303 Soto-Morettini, Donna, 234, 257 Spengler, Oswald, 52 Sperr, Martin, 172 Spinoza, Baruch, 128, 160 Stadelmaier, Gerhard, 166 Stadt der Mu¨ll, und der Tod, Die (Fassbinder), 225 Stalin, Josef, 130 Stanford, Robert Marshall, 168; The Patriot in Exile, 168 Stefan, Verena, 95; Haütungen, 95 Steffin, Margaret, 183, 185 Steiner, George, 12, 14, 167, 203, 210, 269; The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H., 167 Stendhal, 144, 290, See also, Beyle, Henri Sternberg, Josef von, 168, 181; The Blue Angel, 168, 181 Sterne, Laurence, 126, 136, 142–44; Tristram Shandy, 142, 143 Still-Life with Violin and Palette (Braque), 58 Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, The (Mann, Thomas), 168, 193

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349

INDEX

Strachey, Lytton, 167 Strangers to Ourselves (Kristeva), 15, 257 Strauss, Johann, 164 Stravinsky, Igor, 275 Strindberg, August, 31, 34, 53, 62, 63, 65, 76–79, 81, 82, 84, 86; The Ghost Sonata, 31, 34, 77, 81, 84 Suleiman, Susan, 35, 101 Sunset Boulevard (Wilder), 165–67, 169, 170, 193, 195 Suprematist Manifesto (Malevich), 58 Surrealist Manifesto (Breton), 59 Swales, Martin, 173, 175 Szajna, Jo´sef, 49 Sztaba, Wojciech, 72 Tabori, George, 192 Tales from Hollywood (Hampton), 24, 42, 163, 168, 170, 172,174, 177, 193–95 Tales from the Vienna Woods (Horva`th), 163–67, 174–76, 181, 185 Tartuffe (Molie`re), 167 Tatarkiewicz, Wladyslaw, 48 Tertz, Abram, 144. See also Sinyavski, Andrei Testaments Betrayed, ‘‘An Essay in Nine Parts’’ (Kundera), 144, 274–76 Theatermacher, Der [Histrionics] (Bernhard), 208, 227 Theatre Cricot 2, 49 Third Man, The (Reed), 271 13 Ma¨rz 1938: Theaterszenen zum Anschluß, Der (Peymann), 216 Threepenny Opera (Brecht), 183, 185 Thurman, Uma, 45 Tilly, Meg, 45 Today is My Birthday (Kantor), 49 Tokes, Laszlo, 234 Tolstoy, Leo, 144, 220 Top Girls (Churchill), 99, 103,107, 234 Total Eclipse (Hampton), 167 Total Eclipse (Holland), 167 Treats (Hampton), 167 Trial, The ( Jones), 269, 270, 272 Trial, The (Kafka), 44, 262, 263, 265–67, 269, 271 Trial, The (Welles), 268, 269 Trier, Lars von, 271; Zentropa, 271 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 142, 143 Trout Quintet (Schubert), 209

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Tumor Brainowicz (Witkiewicz), 50, 54–56 Turbow, Gerald, 169 Turrini, Peter, 173 Twin Peaks (Lynch), 270 Ubu Roi (Jarry), 48, 65, 66, 74 Udoff, Alan, 265 Unbearable Lightness of Being, The (Kundera), 14,127,130,146, 270, 274 Uncle Vanya (Chekhov), 167 Unrig, Jadwiga, 47 Updike, John, 206 Vadim, Annette, 44 Vadim, Roger, 44 Valmont (Forman), 45 Velasquez, Diego, 209 Verdery, Katherine, 246 Verfremdungseffekt (Brecht), 28, 35, 174 Verlaine, Paul, 167 Vialette, Alexandre, 276 Viertel, Berthold, 188 Viertel, Salka, 168, 169, 181, 188; The Kindness of Strangers, 188 Vo¨lker, Klaus, 168 Voltaire, François Arouet, 209 Vor dem Ruhestand [Eve of Retirement] (Bernhard), 214, 227 Vranitzky, Franz, 217, 225 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 42, 127, 129, 136, 158, 160 Waldheim, Kurt, 199, 202–5, 211, 214, 218, 219, 223, 225, 230 Warner, H. B., 170 Warner Brothers, 180, 181 Was geschah (Jelinek), 30, 32, 42, 87–96, 100, 101, 103, 106 Watersnakes (Klimt), 54 Webber, Andrew Lloyd, 167 Weber, Carl, 298 Wedekind, Frank, 62, 106, 114; Lulu, 106, 114 Weigel, Helene, 183 Weininger, Otto, 52 Weiss, Peter, 266–68 Weissmuller, Johnny, 188, 193 Wekwerth, Manfred, 192 Welles, Orson, 268, 269; The Trial, 268, 269

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350

INDEX

Werckmeister, Otto Karl, 271 Wheatcroft, Andrew, 213 Wiene, Robert, 271; The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, 271 Wiesenthal, Simon, 224 Wild Duck (Ibsen), 167, 210 Wilder, Billy, 165–67, 169, 170, 171, 193, 195; Sunset Boulevard, 165–67, 169, 170, 193, 195 Willet, John, 171 Wilson, Robert, 44, 45, 299 Wing-Davey, Mark, 232, 234 Witkacy, 47–86. See also Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Stanislaw, 47 Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy, 22, 29, 30, 31, 34–39, 42, 45, 47, 52, 75; and Pure Form, 39, 47, 49, 53, 54, 58, 59, 62– 64, 66, 71, 72, 75, 76, 84–86; The Prince of Darkness Tempts Saint Theresa with the Aid of a Waiter from Budapest’’ (drawing), 53; Conversation of an Unknown Old Woman with the Demonic Orchestra Conductor (painting), 72; S. I. Witkiewicz Portrait Painting Firm, 75. Works: The Beelzebub Sonata, 54, 72; The Cockroaches, 66; The Cuttlefish, 54; Czysta Forma w teatrze, 70; Gyubul Wahazar, 60, 66; The Independence of Trian-

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gles, 55; Insatiability, 54, 57; Maciej Korbowa and Bellatrix, 54; The Madman and the Nun, 57, 58; Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf, 55; Miss Tootli Pootli, 55; Mr. Price or: Tropical Madness, 55; The Mother, 34, 52, 76, 77, 80–82, 85, 86; The New Deliverance, 67; The Only Way Out, 77; ‘‘On Dualism,’’ 52; The Pragmatists, 55; ‘‘Schopenhauer’s Philosophy and His Relation to His Predecessors,’’ 52; The Shoemakers, 56; The 622 Downfalls of Bungo: or, The Demonic Woman, 53, 64; Tumor Brainowicz, 50, 54, 55, 56 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 106, 164, 277, 278 Woolf, Virginia, 210 Wyspianski, Stanislaw, 52, 62, 63, 67, 68; The Deliverance, 67, 68 The Yellow Sound (Kandinsky), 69 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 61; ‘‘On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and other Matters Euclidean,’’ 61 Zauberreich der Liebe [The Enchanted Kingdom of Love] (Brod), 262 Zentropa (Trier), 271 Zhdanov, Andrei, 24, 144 Zuckmayer, Carl, 168

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