Page 90 [90]
ENIKŐ SEPSI
In its artistic sense, Valére Novarinas path from philology to philosophy leads
from writing to the theater. The recollecting nature of language prepares him
to find his way back from the page and the reader’s imaginary (mental) theater
to the original font — nothingness [“néant,” “rien”], emptiness (the French
word vide is an anagram of Dieu, God), which for Mallarmé meant nothing
more than virtual completeness in its own motionlessness, in the word’s sus¬
pended almost-annihilation (Crisis of Verse). For Artaud, on the other hand,
whose work exerted a decisive influence on the French theater of the 70s, emp¬
tiness embodied the possibility of a merciless encounter with reality’s verso, its
shadow.’ For him, the Western use of language and the theater’s logocentrism
was an obstacle; Eastern performance represented its polar opposite, with
its gestural systems embodying more ancient circumstances and myths.* For
this reason, oriental theater is much more metaphysical, while the occidental
tends more to psychologize.* In Artaud’s teleological vision, the theater’s par¬
ticular, universally encoded “diction” must be as hieroglyph-like, precise, and
immediately legible as in a dream.° His spiritual heirs (Robert Wilson, Jerzy
Grotowski, Valére Novarina, et al.) set out on separately branching paths in re¬
alizing this vision. In his early performances, Wilson either excluded language
entirely (Deafman Glance) or displayed it as a sound effect, equal in rank to
the visual spectacle, a musical motif exterior to the body’s periphery (Letter to
Queen Victoria, Stalin, Freud, Einstein on the Beach). Grotowski’s actor allows
impulses to pass through himself that originate in the body’s organic nature
and are not worked out in advance but come to the surface during the course
of rehearsals. In this sense, in his inaugural address on taking the Chair in
Anthropology of Theater in the Collége de France in 1997, he distinguishes
between theater that requires learned artistic craft and is thus artificial —
“art”, “artificiel” — and the organic theater. This organic theatrical via negativa
strives to attain the state in which the actor is a vehiculum (the expression
Peter Brook used in reference to Grotowski’s theater), an empty vessel ready
to accept and carry something.
According to Artaud, the phonemic diction of his holy theater of hiero¬
glyphs strips things of their everyday meaning and clothes them with a differ¬
ent one. And this is nothing other than the working of metaphor, the process
1 Previously, in the 1960s, French theater had defined itself as Brechtian.
2 Antonin Artaud: Le théatre et les Dieux [The Theater and the Gods], in Oeuvres complètes,
VIII, Paris, Gallimard, 1971, 196; see also Maurice Blanchot: Artaud, in Le livre à venir, Paris,
Gallimard, 1959, 50-58; Blanchot: La cruelle raison poétique, in L'entretien infini, Paris, Gal¬
limard, 1969, 432-438.
3 Artaud: Théâtre oriental et théâtre occidental, in Le théâtre et son double, Paris, Gallimard,
Folio/Essais, 1964, 105-113.
* Ibid., 112.
5 Artaud: Le theätre de la cruauté, Paris, Gallimard, Folio/Essais, 1964, 145.
6 Artaud: Le théâtre et la poésie, in Œuvres complètes, V, Paris, Gallimard, 1971, 15.
. 88 +