Monthly Archives: September 2010

Jan Kott

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While for some critics of theatre Eric Bentley, Robert Brustein, Martin Esslin and Michael Billington remain the high-water marks of the trade, for me it’s been Jan Kott (1914-2001), the Polish critic and theoretician who is probably best known for his Shakespeare Our Contemporary; his essay therein on King Lear provided Peter Brook with the concept for his groundbreaking 1962 production of the play with Paul Scofield. Kott’s marriage of the consciousness of the theatre to his own remains, for me, a far more supple and imaginative, as well as compassionate, critical perspective than any of the writers I mention above; we have had very few similar critics in the English-language tradition, unfortunately; one might do well to put The Playwright as Thinker and The Theatre of Revolt into storage for a few years and instead leaf through Kott’s collections The Theatre of Essence or Theatre Notebook 1947-1967, discovering a sensitive means of allowing a broad erudition and wit to inform personal and aesthetic experience, and vice versa.

In October 2008 I wrote about one of his late collections of essays, The Memory of the Body; this short notice is reproduced below.

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The Memory of the Body: Essays on Theater and Death. Jan Kott. Translated from the Polish by Jadwiga Kosicka, Lillian Vallee and others. 153 pages. Northwestern University Press, 1992.

Since my return to New York from Montauk it’s been a slow few weeks, theatrically speaking; the invitations to openings are few (though the invitations I’ve received have been gracious and flattering). So most evenings are spent reading. And, to a large part, reading about theatre: plays and essays, mostly, including quite a lot of Greek plays, mostly in preparation for seeing them — Iphigenia in Aulis last week, this week Philoktetes. As I sit in my apartment or on the subway reading through these scripts, I feel that I’m still participating in the theatre; I take the theatre with me on my commute or in my evenings. This integrates drama into my days and nights, when I’m away from auditoria. I’m also writing a lot about the theatre.

The experience of theatre and its threads through everyday life were a part of Polish critic Jan Kott’s project as well. Especially in his later essays, for instance those in his 1992 collection The Memory of the Body, there is little or no differentiation between body, quotidia and theatre, drama. The same characteristics affect his earlier criticism (the insights contained in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, The Eating of the Gods and The Gender of Rosalind could not have emerged without Kott’s experiences in first Nazified then Stalinist Poland), but as he aged and his body began to fail him, his essays became more intimate. The theatre is a bodied art, and we all have bodies. Kott examined his more intensely than most theatre writers, the way it moved through the streets of Poland, Vienna and Korea.

Kott may be best remembered now for his influence on Peter Brook, Peter Hall and other directors, but it seems to be Kott that will last. For all that Brook is a fine director, there’s also something of the charlatan about him, and there’s something very cold about his books The Empty Space and The Open Door; his facile division of the art into Deadly Theatre, Holy Theatre, etc. seems simplistic when one recognises the broad multidimensionality, the personal risk and vision, of Kott’s writing; a lot of Peter Brook’s theory reads like a self-help book, as elegant and high-falutin as it most undoubtedly is. Hall is firmly of the institutional theatre now — no more empty spaces for him without an elegant foyer and stars on the stage. Not that there isn’t a place for this too, and not that Hall isn’t a brilliantly talented director himself. But his diaries and his writing about Shakespeare are no match for Kott’s incisive, idiosyncratic and (yes) lyrical dramatic consciousness.

“There are experiences one undergoes but does not talk about,” Kott writes at the beginning of his essay on his own struggles with heart disease, “The Memory of the Body.” “The experiencing of extreme situations should be remembered.” Kott is primarily a critic, an abstractionist, though, and his training is in talking about things one does not — or, perhaps, can not — talk about. “An orgasm given by a body is inarticulate speech, a cry, quickened pulse, trembling, sweat. Right now I am trying to change this into discourse, but I know that there is an entire dimension that is inexpressible,” he continues in the same essay. The struggle for both critic and dramatist is to not describe but to suggest the inexpressible, that bodied rhythm that is available to the theatrical experience in a way that is not suggestible in any other art form.

These late essays of Kott’s are largely about sex and death, but about other everyday matters as well. In the first third of the book, Kott is on more familiar territory. There’s a lovely, comic essay about the uselessness of dramaturgs (Kott was one himself for many years, so he knows whereof he speaks), and fine essays about Gombrowicz and Bruno Schulz (introducing the idea of “lyrical friendships,” which I find quite delightful and, more to the point, accurate), Kantor, Mrozek and Grotowski; his description of Tadeusz Kantor’s I Shall Never Return at La MaMa E.T.C. in June 1988 would be a textbook example of how to write about avant-garde theatre were it not for Kott’s inimitable personal insight, not to mention a length that would test the patience of mainstream editors everywhere.

But this is a death-haunted book (Kott himself died in December 2001). The final essay is a lengthy disquisition on the Gilgamesh myth and its evocation of mortality, much on Kott’s mind then, given his medical history. But his deepest insights are saved for his descriptions of pain and the heart, the nexus between sex and death. This is never far from eros, and Kott draws this final parallel:

We use two words in reference to the erotic: sex and love. Throughout the entire Greek and Roman tradition, the word eros or amor is used and each of these contains both concepts. What is essential is that need, desire, is given free from the outside, it is inborn, a consequence. It is, simultaneously, the need to join bodies and to join souls. I once introduced the concept of soul-bodies or body-souls which desperately seek one another. Which is to say that what is encoded in the body — need and longing — is also the soul. Soul-bodies in Eros are inseparable.

In the experience of death, in the actual experience of dying, you know that you die as a soul-body. I have no doubt about this. When the heart hurts and it hurts very intensely, then the soul-body or body-soul hurts. Maybe that is why the heart is a sign of love. And death — you die alone in the world. You are in love with someone, and lose the very boundaries of your flesh. But you die in something that is not only you, because you die with everything all around. The soul and body are inextricably bound to one another.

“The soul flew from the body,” goes a Polish folk song. In my dying the body falls away from the soul. Only the heart, in a great spasm of pain, clings to the soul to the very end.

If one were a gossip one might ask for more: descriptions of the experience from which these insights were painfully extracted. But these are precisely the experiences one “does not talk about”; the insights should be enough for us, and if they’re not, that just says more about our own small-minded tendency to gossip and moral judgment than about Kott’s expressions. And over the past several years in the New York theatrical critical sphere, the insights are lacking, theatre writers and critics seem to have become bored with theatre itself. In the print press, critics approach new plays as they would approach new cars, quick five-star ratings and descriptions of new features; in the blogosphere, fragmentation and lack of attention has led to a plethora of plugs, of quick hits here and there, of dull academic theorising, of political jeremiads. The uplift of shambling, careerist mediocrity is everywhere, in both arenas. (I’m almost tempted to say that there is too much room devoted to theatre in the daily press, if that’s all there’s going to be.) There is theatre, and there is life, but their essential codependence — a codependence as intimate and catastrophic as the codependence of sex and death — is ignored.

There are a lot of walks in Kott’s more autobiographical essays: walks with friends, through old neighborhoods. Bearing Kott’s thoughts within my own on my walks through the streets of New York, even as I lack the resources or the status to see all of the theatre I might like to see (and as indigent dramatists do, I borrowed this book from the public library too), he accompanies me and teaches me to see, as he does, the theatre in the everyday, the everyday in theatre, not unlike composers like John Cage. It is in my broadest public statements, in my most intimate personal experience. In “The Memory of the Body,” Kott demonstrates that this insight can continue to life’s end — which, for dramatist and audience both, is theatre’s end as well.

Upcoming: What She Knew

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The production team for the upcoming theatre minima premiere of What She Knew is coming together nicely: we’re delighted to have Oana Botez-Ban, Travis Just and Nick Fracaro on board for the 1 December 2010 premiere at manhattan theatre source. We’ve also just cleared rights for the fine Joel-Peter Witkin image at right, Oedipus and Jocasta, for use in our publicity for the play; the theatre minima Web site has been duly updated.

In the meantime, this is a good time to contribute to the upcoming production — your donation, from $5.00 to $5,000.00, will be very much appreciated. Your tax-deductible gift can be delivered through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, here. In the meantime, you can keep up-to-date on production details by joining theatre minima’s mailing list. You’ll be hearing from me soon on other details of the premiere, which will be performed by the fine Gabriele Schafer.

Image: Oedipus and Jocasta, Joel-Peter Witkin. Courtesy Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago / Bruce Silverstein Gallery, NY

William Gaddis

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William Gaddis. Photo: Marion Ettlinger

One of the pleasures of The Paris Review‘s new online archive of their author interviews is the availability of Zoltán Abádi-Negi’s 1987 talk with American novelist William Gaddis (1922-1998).

It would be nice to say that Gaddis’ first novel, The Recognitions (1955), “burst onto the scene,” but its appearance was greeted with a polite silence in most corners. The novel is among those monumental works of American modernism, like Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, Mark Rothko’s paintings and Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories, that beggar easy description: nearly 1,000 pages in its hardcover edition and not much less in the paperback, The Recognitions, along with Gaddis’ next book J R (1975), are essential to an understanding of the United States in the postwar period. More than this, though, as Sven Birkets wrote in his New York Times Book Review notice of Agapē Agape, Gaddis’ novels constitute in all their brilliance “the idea of the sacred rootedness of true art.”

And Gaddis was, quite explicitly, a modernist writer. “Speaking of influences, I think mine are more likely to be found going from Eliot back rather than forward to my contemporaries,” Gaddis told Abádi-Negi shortly after the publication of Carpenter’s Gothic (1985); in the interview Gaddis demonstrates little enthusiasm for either postmodern fiction or criticism. In form, style and content, Gaddis’ five novels are largely composed of Americans talking: J R is set out almost entirely in dialogue, and A Frolic of His Own (1994) incorporates most of Gaddis’ only (unproduced) play, Once at Antietam.

Gaddis is, on the surface, a satirist, but like Horace, Swift and Kraus he is far more than that. All of his novels painfully and often hilariously tear the scabs from the American experience, the Puritan ethic and Western capitalism, but underlying all of it is a firm faith in the redemptive qualities of aesthetic creation, always under siege from the administered society from which it rather wondrously and paradoxically emerges. He begins broadly — the locales of The Recognitions circle the globe — but as time goes on his focus becomes narrower. J R is set largely in Long Island and New York City; Carpenter’s Gothic in an isolated New England house (constantly barraged from within by television stories and telephone messages from far-off African lands); A Frolic of His Own, his satire of the legal system (and therefore the administered American culture), in a home on Eastern Long Island; and finally, in his brilliant short novel explicitly influenced by Thomas Bernhard, Agapē Agape (published posthumously in 2002), in the room and the mind of a dying man (also suggesting that other master of the rooms and minds of dying men, Samuel Beckett).

There is a development in Gaddis’ work from the monumental to the concise, stripping down to the core the essence of Gaddis’ satiric vision: that of opportunities lost, of humanity unable to achieve its hopes, in either art or life. As he writes in the very last pages of Agapē Agape:

Age withering arrogant youth and worse, the works of arrogant youth and the book I wrote then, my first book, it’s become my enemy, o Dio, odium, the rage and energy and boundless excitement the only reality where the work that’s become my enemy got done and the only refuge from the hallucination that’s everything out there is the greater one that transforms you good God, Pozdnyshev [a character in Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata], those words that Levochka gave you to transform the whole thing when “music carries you off into another state of being that’s not your own, of feeling things you don’t really feel, of understanding things you don’t really understand, of being able to do things you aren’t really able to do” yes, that transforms that transfigures you yourself into the self who can do more! That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that’s become my enemy because that’s what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.

And if there are echoes here for those who watched yesterday’s post on Krapp’s Last Tape, I don’t believe they are unearned.

The satirist’s vision is hung between the tragic and the ecstatic; it’s to Gaddis’ great talent that we can owe its brilliant containment in comic form (the events of A Frolic of His Own, for example, begin when the main character, novelist and Gaddis-double Oscar Crease, manages to run himself over with his own car); and though these last words are the cry of a dying man, Gaddis was a great one for first sentences, too:

Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at the critical moment it presumes itself as reality. (The Recognitions)

– Money … ? in a voice that rustled. (J R)

Justice? — You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. (A Frolic of His Own)

Gaddis’ work has been eclipsed by that of many of his contemporaries — among those living, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth; among those dead, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer — but it is heartening to see that, in 2010, his satiric vision hasn’t been entirely fulfilled, despite the notorious “Mr. Difficult” essay by Oprah’s Book Club favorite Jonathan Franzen, which in all its condescending and moronic glory appeared in a 2002 issue of The New Yorker. All of Gaddis’ novels, as well as his book of essays The Rush for Second Place (2002), remain in print (all are available from the Superfluities Redux Amazon bookstore here, where you can also find the 2007 collection of essays on his novels, Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System). Though one shudders to think what Gaddis would think of the Internet after the cacophony of J R, the Internet has been kind to him. There is an excellent Web site devoted to his novels here; it includes the full text of Stephen Moore’s groundbreaking 1989 full-length study of the novelist. There is another excellent collection of Gaddis pages at The Modern Word‘s “Scriptorium” here. I was fortunate enough to take a class with William Gaddis at Bard College on “The Literature of Failure” in 1979, which I wrote about several years ago here (my contribution begins about halfway down the page); and, finally, there is this YouTube clip from a 1986 interview with Malcolm Bradbury that captures quite well the spirit of the man:

Books received

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Sealed with a kiss: Melanie Jessop in Howard Barker's Victory (Photo: Stephen Vaughan)

Two new publications arrived recently that may be of some interest to Superfluities Redux readers.

Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance, edited by Karoline Gritzner and just out from the University of Hertfordshire Press, is a collection of essays that addresses just what the title describes. Dr. Gritzner has gathered a community of critics, academics and artists who trace these drives and compulsions through theatre and drama from Attic tragedy (David Rudkin) through the 21st century (Howard Barker); other contributions address the drama and prose of Georg Büchner, the opera of Verdi and Wagner, the thin line between drama and philosophy, performance artists like Ron Athey and musical performers like Nick Cave; contributors also include Dic Edwards, Michael Mangan, David Ian Rabey and Graham Saunders. My own contribution considers Eros, sex and death in the context of fin-de-siecle Vienna and the Weimar republic through the work of Musil, Brecht and the Neue Sachlichkeit painters.

There is no end of sex in theatre, but precious little eroticism. Gritzner writes in the introduction to the book:

The art of theatre in general, but Shakespeare’s theatre above all, places all its bets on the power of the imagination: without it, nothing is possible; with it, everything is. Eroticism, too, is triggered and sustained by the imagination. Qualitatively different from the sexual act which aims for reproduction, eroticism is “sexuality transfigured by human imagination” — the erotic is a poetic elaboration and, hence, an end in itself. … For Heiner Müller, too, “the essential thing about the theatre is transformation, and the last transformation is death, dying. … And what’s specific to the theatre is not the presence of the living actor or the living spectator, but rather the presence of the person who has the potential to die.” …

Our encounter with eroticism and death in theatre and performance is real and imaginary at the same time. The transient movement of bodies in the space and time of the here and now can be seductive and yield a visceral affect; but our encounter with the unknown and invisible will ultimately depend on the work of our imagination, which alone has the power to turn the theatre into a space of desire.

There is a full table of contents and other excerpts from the introduction at the University of Hertfordshire Press Web site here. I’m delighted to be a part of this wonderful community, and to have my words appear in such a necessary book; you can order it through the Superfluities Redux Amazon bookstore here. It will be, in the words of Amazon, “shipping soon.”

A word also for Coarctate: Antigone’s Return and Selected Poems, by Mark Daniel Cohen and just out from my comrades at EyeCorner Press. Mark’s work, in the words of the publisher, “offers a fresh and intelligent look at Sophocles, re-writing Antigone almost as a Beckettian version of Tristan and Isolde. The modern-day domestic drama is continued in the second part of the volume, in which selected poems aptly combine the trivial and the sublime, the mark and measure of every great classic.” Coarctate is also available from the Superfluities Redux Amazon bookstore here.