Witkiewicz, Artaud, and the Theatre of Cruelty

Abstract

Witkiewicz, Artaud, and the Theatre of Cruelty Adam Tarn Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, called Witkacy (1895-1939), was a Polish writer and philosopher of genius. Although he was relatively unknown and unacclaimed in his lifetime, today his work is exciting a wider interest because he is recognized as a precursor of the Theatre of Cruelty. His ideas and his techniques have much in common with the theories of his contemporary, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948). Re­ cently six of Witkacy’s plays have been published in English transla­ tion by the University of Washington Press in the United States; his own essay, “ On a New Type of Play,” is included in the volume, along with an introductory piece by Jan Kott which touches briefly upon the playwright’s life and thought. In this essay I shall discuss Wit­ kacy’s theory of drama, for without a knowledge of Witkacy’s artistic principles one cannot fully understand his work.l Before Witkacy turned to the theatre, he was a painter and a theoretician of the Polish school of abstract painting called “ Formism,” and his theories of theatre were formulated in accord with many of the principles of this school. However, this is not to say that scenery or scene design were, for Witkacy, the salvation of the theatre. He passionately opposed the predominance of any one element in the theatre — text, music, scenery, or the craft of acting. For Witkacy the theatre must unify all these diverse elements; like any true work of art, a theatre piece should be a “ unity within diversity,” and this prin­ ciple became the basic tenet of Witkacy’s aesthetics and philosophy. “ Unity within diversity” prescribes that each work of art should be structured according to its own logic and ruled by its own inherent laws — it should exhibit Pure Form. The actions, the characters and their psychology, the performances of the actors, the opinions of the protagonists, the plot situations — all these should be regarded as the formal elements of the theatre, just as the colors, the lines, and the composition of forms are the formal elements of painting. The theatre, or more specifically the drama — for we may now begin to speak of 162 Adam Tarn 163 dramatic literature — has its own rights of deformation or transforma­ tion. The drama may deform “ real-life” experience; the drama may freely transform the world, giving its heroes a fantastic psychology and leading them into actions which oppose the healthy common-sense of everyday life. But Witkacy did not advocate nonsense merely for its own sake; his theatre is far removed from the experiments in automatic writing and from the excesses of the Dadaists, although superficially his tech­ nique appears similar. What happens on the stage in Witkacy’s plays is often illogical, and the plays are often shockingly abstruse. In The Water Hen a woman is shot by her lover in the first act, seduces her son who is not her son in the second act, is killed in the third act, and would doubtless have been reincarnated several times if the play had more acts than three; in The Madman and the Nun, the hero walks nonchalantly with his lover, the nun, although he has just hanged himself and his body still hangs over the stage. But weirdness and absurdity are subordinated to an exact logic of form, the logic of the artistic “ coming into being.” Just as the colors and forms of a non­ objective painting acquire a meaning and pertinence within the closed, logical context of the work itself, so do the grotesqueries of Witkacy’s plays seem logical and necessary within their individual contexts. Today it may sound rather quaint to justify Witkacy’s work by comparing it with nonobjective painting, but we must remember that he wrote most of his plays and formulated his aesthetic theories during the nineteen-twenties, before the world had yet recognized the signifi­ cance of even Picasso’s work. The chief novelty of Witkacy’s theory for his own era was this translation of an advanced theory of abstract painting into a workable theory and practice for the stage. Witkacy realized fully the implications of this transformation of...