Oldal 144 [144]
ENIKŐ SEPSI
situation of the mother, who, after murdering the child, is banished from the
body ofthe theater work and assigned the state of mere witness to what is hap¬
pening on stage. Wilson seems to show the work to us through the eyes and
defective ears of a deaf-mute witnessing the events. Pilinszky’s text doubles
this role of witness by adding him as a spectator. The tempo of this theatrical
gesture, which has no external referee, is “lento,” not “ritardando.” It is Berg¬
son’s “durée” staged and inspired by Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts,
where composition carries the meaning, not the words."
In Wilson’s production, the scene evokes Daniel Stern’s research published
in The First Relationship: Mother and Infant,"’ which is mentioned in Wilson’s
notes in the early Robert Wilson Archives at Columbia University (box 181,
labeled “Deafman Glance project,” 1987. Notes for Overture to the Fourth Act
of Deafman Glance):
In 1967 I met Dr. Daniel Stern, head of the Department of Psychology at Columbia
University. He had made over 300 films of mothers and their babies in natural
situations where the baby was crying and the mother would pick up and comfort
the child. When these films were shown at normal speed, that was what we saw. But
when they were shown frame by frame — normal speed is 24 frames per second —
what one sees in 8 out of 10 cases is that the initial reaction of the mother in the
first 3 frames — 3/24ths of a second — is to lunge at the child and that the infant
is recoiling in terror. In the next 2 or 3 frames we see completely different pictures.
In the next 2 or 3 frames again the pictures are completely different, and so on.
So in one second of time we see that what is taking place between a mother and
child is extremely complex. When the mother is shown the film she is horrified and
responds, “But I love my child! I want to comfort the child.”
Although this scene is created from a different perspective and on the basis
of a different source from the scene captured by Pilinszky, the ritual form on
stage (the Murder) involves the spectator poet, and it gives the act multiple
meanings.
a liminary state referring to art and religion: “I had distinguished ‘liminal’ from ‘liminoid’
by associating the first with obligatory, tribal participation in ritual and the second as char¬
acterizing artistic or religious forms voluntarily produced, usually with recognition of indi¬
vidual authorship, and often subversive in intention toward the prevailing structures.” (Victor
Turner, From Ritual to Theatre. The Human Seriousness of Play, New York, Performing Arts
Journal Publications, 1982, 118.)
Gertrude Stein, Composition as explanation, in A Gertrude Stein Reader, Illinois, Northwest¬
ern University, 1993, 493.
17 Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1977.
s 142 +