Ludics in Surrealist Theatre and Beyond

Vassiliki Rapti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317103080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Taking as its point of departure the complex question about whether Surrealist theatre exists, this book re-examines the much misunderstood artistic medium of theatre within Surrealism, especially when compared to poetry and painting. This study reconsiders Surrealist theatre specifically from the perspective of ludics-a poetics of play and games-an ideal approach to the Surrealists, whose games blur the boundaries between the 'playful' and the 'serious.' Vassiliki Rapti's aims are threefold: first, to demystify André Breton's controversial attitude toward theatre; second, to do justice to Surrealist theatre, by highlighting the unique character that derives from its inherent element of play; and finally, to trace the impact of Surrealist theatre in areas far beyond its generally acknowledged influence on the Theatre of the Absurd-an impact being felt even on the contemporary world stage. Beginning with the Surrealists' 'one-into-another' game and its illustration of Breton's ludic dramatic theory, Rapti then examines the traces of this kind of game in the works of a wide variety of Surrealist and Post-Surrealist playwrights and stage directors, from several different countries, and from the 1920s to the present: Roger Vitrac, Antonin Artaud, Günter Berghaus, Nanos Valaoritis, Robert Wilson, and Megan Terry.

1
THE SURREALIST GAME “ONE INTO ANOTHER” IN NADJA AND LES DÉTRAQUÉES: RECONSTRUCTING ANDRÉ BRETON’S LUDIC DRAMATIC THEORY

Nous demeurons quelque temps silencieux, puis elle me tutoie brusquement: “Un jeu: dis quelque chose. Ferme les yeux et dis quelque chose. N’importe, un chiffre, un prénom. Comme ceci (elle ferme les yeux): Deux, deux quoi? Deux femmes. Comment sont ces femmes? En noir. Où se trouvent-elles? Dans un parc … Et puis, que font-elles? Allons, c’est si facile, pourquoi ne veux-tu pas jouer? Eh, bien, moi, c’est ainsi que je me parle quand je suis seule, que je me raconte toutes sortes d’histoires. Et pas seulement des vaines histoires: c’est même entièrement de cette façon que je vis.”* …

*Ne touche-t-on pas là au terme extrême de l’aspiration surréaliste, à sa plus forte idée-limite? (André Breton, Nadja in OC1 690).

[We remain silent for a while, then she suddenly addresses me using tu: “A game: say something. Close your eyes and say something. Anything, a number, a name. Like this (she closes her eyes): Two, two what? Two women. What do they look like? Wearing black. Where are they? In a park … And then, what are they doing? Try it, it’s so easy, why don’t you want to play? You know, that’s how I talk to myself when I’m alone, I tell myself all kinds of stories. And not only just silly stories: actually, I live this way altogether.”* …

*Does this not approach the extreme limit of the surrealist aspiration, its furthest determinant? (Howard 74).]¹

Introduction

The above quotation, depicting a young female protagonist named Nadja playing—and explaining—a spontaneous game with words, will be the focus of this chapter. The asterisked footnote that accompanies the passage raises it to a significant moment among the myriad snapshots that comprise André Breton’s Nadja. First published in 1928 and then again in the 1963 Gallimard edition, this sui generis text is like a ludic cryptogram, made up of images, anecdotes, photographs, and text, arranged in a kind of constellation that invites the reader to interpret along with its narrator/author the signs of the marvelous that intrude in his daily life. Likewise, this chapter undertakes a similar act of interpretation, in an effort to elucidate the above-mentioned footnote’s rather rhetorical question; the question endows Nadja’s confession about practicing and experiencing her game as a way of living with the aura of the extreme limit of the surrealist aspiration.²

In an attempt to grasp what is at stake in this footnote, it is necessary to make a detailed examination of the main parameters involved in the female protagonist’s game, and discuss some of the main surrealist tenets that this game apparently touches upon. By undertaking such an endeavor, it is my hope that the unexpected revelatory power of Nadja’s game for her interlocutor will be equally revelatory for our understanding of Breton’s enigmatic attitude toward the theatre. Such a detailed examination of Nadja’s game will not only shed light on the importance granted by the narrator/author to the play itself, but ultimately mark the starting point for a reconstruction of the implicit in this dramatic theory of the leader of Surrealism. In other words, I examine Nadja’s game of questions and answers closely in the hope of grasping Breton’s ludic dramatic theory, which is never explicitly stated yet fully informs his work.

This game, I argue, may be seen as a model-stage that shows Nadja playing/acting according to the rules that Breton lays out in his prolific writings. Nadja’s play reflects Breton’s major ideas about language and its surrealist use, along with its relation to the images and the position of the self before “surreality,” as he had expressed them in 1924 in the Manifesto of Surrealism, and in the “Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité” (“Introduction to the Paucity of Reality.”) Both texts, along with Nadja, are seminal to our attempt to reconstruct Breton’s implicit ludic dramatic theory. For Nadja’s game constitutes a rudimentary ludic/dramatic moment, in which notions such as play and game, dream, theatre and spectatorship, self-analysis and subjectivity are enigmatically interconnected. In this schema, concatenate circles encapsulate the fundamental surrealist modus vivendi, namely, that of the coincidentia oppositorum.

This chapter thus sets out to lay bare all the possible hidden layers of Nadja’s game that unfolded in a taxi, on the second day after her acquaintance with the narrator/author of Nadja (October 5, 1926). This game started as a spontaneous language game, and soon went on to take on the form of mimicry, and ultimately became an associative type of play that led the parties involved to a transformational experience. This seemingly “simple” moment invites a reading that brings forth all the main surrealist tenets as formulated by Breton himself in his major theoretical writings, besides Nadja, all of which have the potential to be applied to the stage as a playground that brings together two realms of reality. To better grasp all these layers, we must meticulously analyze the above excerpt and unfold its multifarious connections step by step. To this end, next to ludic theory in general, and some of the tools of psychoanalysis (including the well-known Lacanian notions of the imaginary and the mirror stage), a brief look at Breton’s position towards the theatre in relation to his major beliefs about the use of language and the image is necessary.

Revisiting André Breton’s scattered remarks on the theatre and the stage

It is noteworthy that even before launching himself as the author of the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, André Breton had already appeared in the public sphere as both a playwright and an actor. I refer to his Dadaist experiments S’il vous plaît (If You Please, 1920) and Vous m’oublierez (You Will Forget Me, 1920)—both included in the Gallimard edition of his famous Magnetic Fields—written in collaboration with Philippe Soupault by means of automatic writing. These were short skits in which he himself performed with his friends during the Dada evening at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre on March 27, 1920, and which, despite their humor, he soon discarded as being filled with “an infantile skepticism” (OC1 1176).³ S’il vous plaît, according to Breton, treats the theme of the seduction game in four forms in each one of its four acts: artistic, commercial, amorous, and theatrical (OC1 1175). You Will Forget Me, which deals with “the conflict of the ideas of conservation and reproduction” (ibid.) features characters-objects: specifically, an umbrella, a gown, and a sewing machine placed next to an unknown person. Breton’s Poisson soluble (Soluble Fish), published along with the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), is also the outcome of automatic writing. Soluble Fish contains one of the most revealing theatrical scenes. Two women and two men act as Lucie, Helen, Mark the poet, and Satan in a stage setup consisting of a giant gyroscope that revolves around its vertical axis, with one point resting on the edge of a glass. The character dialogues challenge logical coherence within a normal syntax. The value of these dialogues lies in the extraordinary poetic images they create, while Satan’s final words prefigure a new form of theatre: “Ladies and gentlemen, I am the author of the play that we have just had the honor of performing for you. The clockwork is of little importance, the symbols in this new form of theater being no more than a promise” (Manifestoes, Seaver and Lane 100; italics mine). His later work, Amour fou (Mad Love, 1937), as well as many of his poems, also abound in references to the stage and theatrical magic. In short, while Breton’s attitude toward the stage remains quite controversial, it is as if he played a game with constantly changing rules. At least, as Gloria Orenstein Feman states, “a superficial perusal of his works would indicate a negativism toward theatre—or at best an indifference to it as an art form. This attitude turned to outright hostility when it came to Breton’s clash with Artaud over the theatre in Alfred Jarry’s presentation of the Dream Play by Strindberg” (17–18), as we will see in more detail in the next chapter.⁴ However, incidents such as Breton’s clash with Artaud should not be taken to account definitively for Breton’s negativism towards theatre; for this negativism might simply be the result of his dissatisfaction with the practice of theatre up to his time: it was bound to the representational and illusionistic principle, which was incompatible with the absolute freedom that he sought everywhere. Besides, for him, any involvement with professional theatre meant inexcusable compromises, such as the one that forced the leaders of the Théâtre Alfred Jarry, Antonin Artaud and Roger Vitrac, to yield to “unworthy commercial instincts, to the extent of wanting to produce surrealist plays in the framework of the professional theatre” (Esslin, Antonin Artaud 331). Thus, one must truly scrutinize Breton’s prolific writings to come to a conclusion with regard to his debated anti-theatricality. For, as Orenstein Feman stresses,

[a] careful exploration of Breton’s writings reveals that there is an intimate linkage in his mind between surrealism and theatrical form. This subterranean analogy, which likens the dream or the inner life of the psyche to the theater, is a recurrent underlying motif, suggesting the interpretation that theater could one day become the medium par excellence for surrealist expression, for it is one art form in which imagination can become reality and where I can become an other (18).

Along the same lines, I believe that Breton envisioned an idealized version of theatre, which prevented him from giving it its full potential and resulted in a constant deferral of its materialization to the future. Keeping this idealized version at the back of his thoughts, he held that new form of theatre perpetually unrealized or, to quote his own words, he kept it as “a promise of the future.” Hence his infamous claim in Nadja, for instance, that the only play written for the stage worthy of recollection was Pierre Palau’s Les Détraquées, performed by Le Théâtre des Deux Masques in February 1921. A claim that denies an entire theatrical tradition in this way is clearly anti-theatrical, particularly given the fact that the quality of Palau’s play has been questioned, as we will discuss in detail shortly. Unsurprisingly, this challenging statement has prompted several different interpretations among scholars of surrealist theatre.

Henri Béhar, first of all, the scholar who has most devoted his life to the study of surrealist theatre, wrote a provocative article, entitled “The Passionate Attraction: André Breton and the Theatre.” He owes the title of his article to the following note, written by Breton in Nadja, with regard to the actress Blanche Derval, who played one of the two female protagonists in Palau’s Les Détraquées and whom he greatly admired:

Qu’ai-je voulu dire? Que j’aurais dû l’approcher, à tout prix tenter de me dévoiler la femme réelle qu’elle était. Pour cela, il m’eût fallu surmonter certaine prévention contre les comédiennes, qu’entretenait le souvenir de Vigny, de Nerval. Je m’accuse là d’avoir failli à l’attraction passionnelle (OC1 673).

[What did I want to say? That I should have approached her, that at every price I should have attempted to reveal the real woman she was; to do this, I ought to have overcome certain reservations against actresses who maintained the spirit of Vigny, of Nerval. Here I reproach myself for having failed to yield to this passionate attraction.]

In the expression “passionate attraction,” used by Breton about the actress Blanche Derval, Henri Béhar saw Breton’s attitude toward the theatre:⁵

I very willingly see it as the ambivalent sign of his attitude toward theatre. On the one hand, he expects from it a revelation, or at least a great find …

… But, on the other hand, there is the irrevocable condemnation found in “Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité” of the two masks …. The theatrical game is impossible from both sides (“Passionate Attraction” 18).

What Béhar had traced as an obstacle in “Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité” was Breton’s overall reaction against the imitative principle of the theatre. More precisely, this was the moment when Breton imagined donning a suit of armor, in order to discover some of the consciousness of a fourteenth-century man. In his failure to do so, he exclaims:

Ô théâtre éternel, tu exiges que non seulement pour jouer le rôle d’un autre, mais encore pour dicter ce rôle, nous nous masquions à sa ressemblance, que la glace devant laquelle nous posons nous renvoie de nous une image étrangère. L’imagination a tous les pouvoirs, sauf celui de nous identifier en dépit de notre apparence à un personnage autre que nousmême (OC2 266).

[Oh eternal theatre, you require, not only in order to play the role of another, but even in order to suggest this role, that we disguise ourselves with its likeness, that the mirror before which we pose returns us to a foreign image of ourselves. The imagination has every power except that of identifying ourselves, despite our appearance, to a character other than ourselves (Muller and Richardson 317).]

In these words Breton explicitly confronts the notion of theatre as mimesis, highlighting its permanent artificiality: an artificiality which is manifest in the persistent discrepancy between the self and its impersonations on stage. Employing the familiar mirror metaphor—a favorite among the Surrealists—he faults theatre for a lack of genuineness and, thus, of truthfulness and effectiveness. Breton could not, of course, anticipate the path-breaking theories about the formation of the self that Jacques Lacan (despite Breton’s impact on him), would later develop.

Surrealism’s influence on Lacan is well documented; as Stamos Metzidakis states, Lacan, who was to provide structuralism with a radically new language and a rewriting of the sign, “was largely inspired by the automatic writing to which André Breton held all his life” (“Breton’s Structuralism” 38). Also, the same scholar continues, Breton was interested in “the [same] eternal quest for, and renewal of, desire as Lacan”; indeed, there are striking similarities between Lacan and early Surrealism with regard to the “probing of the id” and the “stretching of the limits of the ego” (ibid. 39). Yet, in his seminal study, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the ‘I’ as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949), which, interestingly, refers to Breton’s “Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité,”⁶ and which informs my own project, Lacan maintains his distance from Breton. He argues for the child’s “méconnaissance” (miscognition, misconstruction of the self) in front of the mirror—in the sense of a false image of wholeness—as a prerequisite for knowledge. This, I believe, could amply apply to surrealist theatre, for it is a theatre of imagos that seeks to transform both its actors and spectators through identification. In Lacanian terms, identification is “the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image—whose predestination to this phase-effect is sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of the ancient term imago” (Sheridan 2).

Being unaware of the seminal role that the notion of “méconnaissance” plays for the infant in front of the mirror, and of the possible application of this concept to the theatre in general, Breton continued his attack against theatre. In his view, theatre unacceptably calls for such a misconstruction of the actor’s self, since the actor has to assume the role of the “other.” Thus, Breton closes his “Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité” with a more categorical declaration-confession against disguise: “Je n’aime pas qu’on tergiverse ni qu’on se cache” (OC2 266) [I don’t like either procrastinating or hiding]. Breton’s denial of mimesis, which is a prerequisite for the stage, poses a great impediment in our effort to reconstruct Breton’s dramatic theory, as Béhar also acknowledges. However, as this chapter will demonstrate, this obstacle is not insurmountable. Rather, it may be seen as a necessary precondition for establishing a more solid basis for our endeavor. The denial of representation, as exemplified in the actor’s false identification with the image of the “other,” may not necessarily mean negation of the theatre; rather, it may mean the beginning of a transformation, a new conception of this medium, one that refers to a would-be-non-mimetic theatre. After all, we must keep in mind that Breton embraced the image of the “demain joueur,”⁷ in the sense of “the player of tomorrow.” In this case, emphasis is placed on the future as capable of playing with its past, allowing for reconsideration and constant reevaluation. One has only to recall the following words from the Second Manifesto of Surrealism (1930):

Il est normal que le surréalisme se manifeste au milieu et peut-être au prix d’une suite ininterrompue de défaillences, de zigzags et de défections qui exigent à tout instant la remise en question de ses données originelles, c’est-à-dire le rappel au ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Does surrealist theatre exist?
• 1 THE SURREALIST GAME “ONE INTO ANOTHER” IN NADJA AND LES DÉTRAQUÉES: RECONSTRUCTING ANDRÉ BRETON’S LUDIC DRAMATIC THEORY
• 2 STAGING “MAD LOVE” IN THE THÉÂTRE ALFRED JARRY: BRETON’S LUDIC DRAMATIC THEORY IN PRACTICE
• 3 STAGING CHILD’S PLAY IN ROGER VITRAC’S VICTOR OR CHILDREN IN POWER: BETWEEN PAIDIA AND LUDUS
• 4 PLAYING WITH LANGUAGE: ANTONIN ARTAUD’S PAIDIA AND ROBERT WILSON’S LUDUS
• 5 LUDICS IN MEGAN TERRY’S “THEATRE OF TRANSFORMATIONS”
• Conclusion
• Works cited
• Index