Oldal 143 [143]
OCR
ON BEARING WITNESS TO A POETIC RITUAL gloved hand over the boy’s mouth, producing silence. Sheryl takes back her hand, when a deaf-mute characteristic howl breaks out again from the boy, a sound such as never has heard any kind of sound. Sheryl claps his mouth up for the second time until the child’s body calms under her hand, and now they can stand facing each other soundlessly. Sheryl turns and steps backwards to the middle of the brick wall. The little boy rhythmically in her tracks. Sheryl stops, and the child too behind her. Sheryl turns and starts walking straight at the stone wall. Up runs the brick wall, and the house lights go out. On a snow-white piano a black girl plays Chopin. The moon-lit park full of unrecognizable invited guests. Sheryl and the boy in her tracks, as I’ve earlier described, enter the garden and disappear from our view.!* According to the Hungarian artist Janos Gat (Sheryl Sutton’s future husband), Janos Pilinszky met Sutton after a Paris performance of Deafman Glance in Paul Wiener’s apartment. Wiener was a Hungarian psychiatrist and Pilinszky’s host,'* and his oral testimony also reveals that Sheryl Sutton spoke a little French, as did Pilinszky, though he spoke no English. Thus, most of the dialogues written in Conversations with Sheryl Sutton are imaginary, as the subtitle “novel of a dialogue” suggests (i.e., it is a work of fiction). The above “Murder scene” enters Pilinszky’s personal mythology as the image of “The Murder” in general, witnessed in a concrete form by the poet during the Shoah: in the autumn of 1944, he was stationed as a soldier in Harbach and Ravensbriick, where he saw the horrors of the labor and concentration camps firsthand. In his first published poems and in his prose, Pilinszky explores the interrelating states of mind of the victim and the murderer in abstract images. As he bore witness to the Shoah, he also becomes a spectator of this “Murder Scene” on the stage in 1971. He was moved by Sheryl Sutton’s portrayal of the murderer, and the performance — which lacked emotion and offered little in the way of catharsis — was also artistically provocative for him. In this context, Pilinszky is the spectator and the witness to the rite, and we are involved in his experience through his text. The theater anthropologist Victor Turner’s term “liminoid state”! offers a concise description of the Janos Pilinszky: Conversations with Sheryl Sutton. The Novel of a Dialogue, Manchester/ Budapest, Carcanet - Corvina, 1992, 49-50. Janos Gat also performed a solo at the Nancy Festival in 1971 about one year and one day in the life of a person. He showed me the photos of this performance in his gallery on Madison Avenue in New York. After Wilson left Paris, a theatrical group called Laila was founded there, and Sheryl Sutton, Janos Gat, and Paul Wiener became members of this group. Wiener also wrote an article on his and Gat’s experiences with Laïla: De la régression contrôlée à la transcendance, Art et Théâtre, June 1990, 34-35. Victor Turner further develops van Gennep’s scheme (Arnold van Gennep: The Rites of Passage, Routledge Library Editions Anthropology and Ethnography (Paperback Reprint ed.), Hove, East Sussex, UK, Psychology Press, 1977 [1960]) by revealing the attributes of the three phases (preliminal, liminal or threshold and postliminal) and their main features. In his by now classic work From Ritual to Theatre, Turner uses the word “liminoid” to describe * 141 +
