Michel de Ghelderode, the Wooster Group, and postmodernist revisions of La tentation de saint Antoine

Abstract

La tentation de saint Antoine initially recalls Hieronymus Bosch’s famous Renaissance painting or Flaubert’s onieric work‐in‐progress. A closer look at more recent adaptations of the story of Saint Anthony the Great, however, reveals that such transformations of the myth addressed shifting aesthetics in the twentieth century by combining genres and texts, designed to cast what Foucault considered Flaubert’s most modernist ideas in an entirely postmodern light. This paper examines two of these adaptations: first, Michel de Ghelderode’s multiple versions of the tale set in Flanders, published separately from 1919 to 1932, but not performed until 1957 as a radio play and marionette show; and, second, the Wooster Group’s provocative stage adaptation, which transplanted the hermit Anthony to an excess‐filled New York of the eighties in Frank Dell’s The Temptation of Saint Antony.What Flaubert created as a self‐reflexive commentary on the dangers of books, twentieth‐century adaptors turned into a postmodern statement about other contemporary media forms, including stage, radio, cinema, and television. More importantly, by strategically appropriating not only Flaubert’s subject matter, but also his composition technique and passages from his texts, these artists draw attention to the perils of a culture‐saturated twentieth century in which art had become adaptation.