Socialist Allegory of the Absurd: An Examination of Four East European Plays

Abstract

Socialist Allegory of the Absurd: An Examination of Four East European Plays Mardi Valgemae “There exist no words in any human language which can comfort guinea pigs who do not know the cause of their death.” This thought, expressed by a survivor of the atomic explosion at Hiroshima,! helps us grasp the magnitude of the problem facing the contemporary writer. Put in very simple terms, the problem involves the creation of an artistic language or structure that could describe the physical as well as the metaphysical anguish of man in post-atomic society. Complicated enough under ordi­ nary circumstances, artistic communication becomes even more complex when subjected to ideological censorship. No wonder then that some critics consider the drama to be the most dynamic art form of socialist Eastern Europe. For art, as Lévi-Strauss has pointed out, has retained the archetypal element of “savage thought.”2 And the ruthless visual metaphors of contemporary absurdist drama have created an allegorical structure that ex­ presses the agony of human guinea pigs better than could be achieved by ordinary verbal language. Artaud was of course not the only one who articulated such an aesthetic, but his words have become classic: “In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.”3 The language of absurd visual images seems ideally suited for the construction of socialist allegories— and we shall examine four such plays in this paper— for, as Martin Esslin has observed,4 absurd images enable East European playwrights to communi­ cate their views on man and the totalitarian state without arous­ ing the wrath of the censor. The political thaw in the Soviet bloc began in Poland in the 44 Mardi Valgemae 45 mid-fifties, and it is to Poland that one must turn for the earliest — and the most widespread— flowering of East European drama that transcends the limitations of socialist realism. Though the impact of Beckett, Ionesco, and Jarry on the Polish theatre was electrifying, it must not be forgotten that Poland boasts its own tradition of absurdist plays in the works of Stanislaw Wyspianski, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (alias Witkacy), and Witold Gombrowicz . Among the more recent dramatists who write in the new mode are Tadeusz Rózewicz and Slawomir Mrozek (b. 1930). The latter’s Tango, though much more “realistic” and rational than the dramas of Witkacy, Gombrowicz, or Rózewicz, is the most widely known post-war Polish play in the idiom of the absurd. “Do you still remember how . . . in protest against tradition,” says Eleanor to her husband Stomil in Tango, “I gave myself to you with Mummy and Daddy looking on? In the first row of the orchestra at the opening night of Tannhäuser.”5 The couple in Mrozek’s play have rebelled against Victorian social and moral conventions. Later we learn that Eleanor sleeps with a disreputa­ ble house guest, while Stomil, calmly accepting the ménage à trois, walks around with his pajamas unbuttoned. Mrozek’s stage directions for Act I create a picture of chaotic freedom, suggest­ ing a triumphant overthrow of the conventions of a time when it took great courage to dance the tango. Eleanor’s and Stomil’s son Arthur, however, endeavors to reinstate the old social and moral codes by ending what his granduncle calls fifty years of “jokes” (p. 70). Though Mrozek has not specified tìbie time of the action of his play, it is clearly contemporary with the date of the initial production of the work in 1965. This places the beginning of “the joke” chronologically in the immediate vicini­ ty of the Russian Revolution, and as Arthur’s rebellion takes on added dimensions, Tango shifts from the realm of social comedy to that of political allegory. Approached from this point of view, Arthur’s elders may be said to have overthrown a tradi­ tional political system in order to establish a revolutionary re­ gime, the excesses of which more than equal the breach of social decorum committed by Eleanor and Stomil at the performance of Tannhduser. Jan Kott has found in Mrozek’s play overtones of the politi­ cal struggle in Hamlet...