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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 suspended almost-annihilation (Crisis of Verse). For Artaud, on the other hand, whose work exerted a decisive influence on the French theater of the 70s, emptiness 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 particular, 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 realizing 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 hieroglyphs strips things of their everyday meaning and clothes them with a different 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, Gallimard, 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 +
