THE SYMBOLIST LEGACY
Daniel Gerould
For us everything has become cramped, stifling, unbearable. We
are weary of conventional forms of society, conventional forms of
morality, the very means of perception, everything that comes from
outside. It is becoming clearer and clearer that if what we see is
all that there is in the world, then there is nothing worth living
for. We embrace all religions, all mystical doctrines rather than
exist in this reality.
Valerii Briusov, Preface to A. Miropolsky’s Stairs, 1903
The present-day return to the spiritual in art, characteristic of both the visual
and performing arts in the first decade of the twenty-first century is part
of a recurrent pattern, a periodic need to go back to eternal sources and
reestablish contact with the deepest well-springs of human creativity in the sacred,
however that may be defined. Prior to the present moment, the most significant
manifestation of this phenomenon in modern times was the prominence of place
given to the occult in the symbolist movement of fin-de-siècle Europe circa 1900.
It is this legacy that I wish to examine in order to locate the origins of our new
spirituality in the perennial rediscovery of older, hidden traditions. I intend to deal
only with the broad ideas, omitting the tangled anecdotal history of the sectarian
conflicts within and among the different groups of occultists.
Reacting hostilely to a smug materialistic world, celebrated as la belle époque, which
was obsessed by modernity and progress and prided itself on being technologically
advanced, the French symbolists, at the threshold of modernism, shunned the sur-
face here-and-now and sought reconnections with “lost” pasts rich in associations,
analogies, and resonances.
Whereas co-existing positivistic naturalism embraced the contemporary world in all
its specificity and unquestioningly accepted the premises of its reality, symbolism—as
the first manifestation of modernism that challenged modernity—can be called an
archaic avant-garde seeking legitimacy not in progress but in pre-history. Despite
its apparently anti-modern stance, symbolism was a pivotal moment in the evolu-
tion of modernism because it undermined the whole edifice of a logical, explicable
80 PAJ 91 (2009), pp. 80–90.
© 2009 Daniel Gerould
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world of matter through which it discerned the lineaments of a higher order of the
spirit. The seemingly solid façade of the nineteenth century was all illusion; reality
lay beyond and below. Recognizing the illusory nature of the material world, the
journey would be made back to the spirit.
Unlike subsequent bellicose and iconoclastic avant-gardes such as futurism or dada,
which declared war on all that had gone before, symbolism—more contemplative
and ecumenical—sought not a rejection of the past, but a reclamation of large bod-
ies of secret knowledge and reconciliation of older, forgotten wisdom with the latest
perceptions and insights. As the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann had recently made
expeditions to Asia Minor in search of Troy, so the symbolists undertook mental
journeys to unearth the deepest sources of divine wisdom in archaic Greek art and
culture. However, rather than confining themselves to the narrow rationalized neo-
classical version of the Greek heritage upon which the official culture of the French
state was founded, they found in the Dionysian mysteries analogues to Hindu,
Egyptian, and Biblical mythologies. They looked back to a primordial fountainhead
of transnational wisdom in the sacred books of the past at the same time that they
looked within to create a new system of personal belief. This theurgic idea was
predicated on the ancient wisdom of old cultures with a common source in sacred
rites of ancient and archaic Greece. The brilliant Russian director-playwright-theorist
Nikolai Evreinov did ethnographic research on the origins of tragedy in goat-songs,
traveling to sites in Asia Minor.
What is modern about the symbolist vision is not a mimetic representation of the
contemporary world, but its supersensible perceptions of a higher spiritual reality,
apprehension of underlying patterns beneath the surface. In the case of Vassily
Kandinsky (author of Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911, and the abstract drama
The Yellow Sound, 1909) and Piet Mondrian, this desire to portray spiritual realities
eventually led to abstraction, and, in the case of Alexander Scriabin, to multimedia
spectacle.
THE THEURGIC IDEA
The symbolists sought to reestablish continuities with both past and future through
a synthesis of world religions that were imbued with non-denominational mysti-
cism joining Eastern and Western traditions of belief. Pan was a reigning deity in
fin-de-siècle art and literature. Earth-, sky-, and ocean-centered, symbolism viewed
humankind as an element in a natural landscape, subject to the diurnal and seasonal
cycles; sun, moon, and planets provided perspective. Thus, on the one hand, the
symbolist vision was cosmic rather than social and collective. On the other hand,
it was deeply subjective, located in the inner recesses of the psyche. And the two—
macrocosm and microcosm—mirrored one another. The deep structure of the human
mind corresponds to the deep structure of the universe.
Yet interiority was the point of departure and of return. Instead of dramatizing
faits divers, usually stories of crimes of passion, culled from newspapers, as was
the practice of Zola and his followers, the artist looks within for what is essential,
GEROULD / The Symbolist Legacy 81
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timeless, unchanging. Symbolists insisted on the primacy of spiritual realities, which
experienced subjectively lead to the release of the creative powers of the imagina-
tion. The private could become public and effect social change only following inner
transformation. The symbolist legacy includes a powerful belief in the transforma-
tive power of the theatre, not as social action, but spiritual immersion. The sacred
is a human reality revealed by the prophets rather than an otherworldly revelation
coming from a god outside humankind. The sole subject of art is “our veritable self,
our first-born self, immemorial, unlimited, universal, and probably immortal,” wrote
Maurice Maeterlinck in his 1902 work, The Buried Temple.
For fin-de-siècle symbolists, theosophy—divine wisdom—was the synthesis of science,
religion, and philosophy that served as the basis of their understanding of art. Not a
matter of faith, but an acquired knowledge of the magical psychic powers latent in
man, theosophy explored the theurgic idea of occult art, involving rites and incanta-
tions for controlling divine and beneficent spirits. In 1888 Helena Blavatsky’s Secret
Doctrine, a work of comparative esotericism, set out the basic tenets of theosophy, an
alternative to materialism, rationalism, and positivism designed to resolve tensions
between science and religion.
In 1901, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater’s Thought-Forms discussed the power
of thought to mold astral entities and expounded a theory of spiritual ideograms
that explained mystical power of forms, colors, sounds, and odors. First published
in 1889 and constantly republished, Edouard Schuré’s The Great Initiates set out
the central lines of an esoteric doctrine stretching from Rama and Krishna to Plato
and Jesus. Beneath the diversity of rites, myths, and religions, there is a common
doctrine of the mysteries. In the absence of any shared system of dogmatic belief,
the symbolists found in the syncretic union of ancient mysteries the stimulus needed
for creativity.
A NEW MYTHOLOGY
Reaching back to the Greeks, to early Christianity, to Gnosticism and the hereti-
cal sects and apochryphal texts, the Symbolists reinterpreted myths eclectically and
subjectively and created new mythologies that were intensely personal, subjective,
and mysterious. Two myths not the subjects of drama in classical times, Orpheus and
Narcissus, came to the fore as master myths of symbolism. Orpheus, the embodi-
ment of music and poetry, undergoes Dionysian sacrifice to achieve an Apollonian
triumph of his art. Mythologies were less valued for their narratives than for their
imagery and atmosphere as bearers of ideas and images. Alive and contemporary,
myth became an embodiment of wisdom and prophecy for the present age as bear-
ers of secret meaning.
Symbolist myths are the incarnation of human dreams and anxieties beyond time
and space. Symbolists are the first moderns to experience myth as multicultural
and transnational. Cut loose from neoclassical moorings, myths were set free to
voyage on the high seas; for the first time myths are set free as archetypal models.
82 PAJ 91
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The mythic heroes were creators and receivers of poetry and the arts. They were
voyagers, discoverers, and healers.
RETURN TO ANCIENT TRAGEDY ON SACRED SITES
The mandate calling for a return to the sources of ancient tragedy led fin-de-siècle
artists to envisage performances enacted on sacred sites. Following Nietzsche’s specu-
lations about the relations of audience to spectacle in The Birth of Tragedy, symbolist
theorists and practitioners tried to recreate the spiritual dimensions of ancient tragedy.
They designed, built, or imagined vast outdoor or intimate indoor theatres where
their dramas could be enacted before audiences of initiates.
It was at this time that modern ideas of active audiences and collective creation first
took shape. Symbolist theorists thought hard about how to achieve the participation
of spectators. Turning to ancient sources of art and spiritual culture, the poet and
playwright Vyacheslov Ivanov preached communality in the arts (sobornost’), hoping
to bring about a universal brotherhood of spectators, actors, dancers, and choruses
in a common ecstasy. “The crowd of spectators must fuse into a choral body, like
the mystical communities of ancient orgies and mysteries,” Ivanov maintained.
Performances frequently took place in his fifth-floor St. Petersburg apartment, a
corner rotunda called The Tower, where the symbolist artists and philosophers met
regularly every Wednesday. Ivanov and his disciples sometimes arrayed themselves
in ancient garb and reenacted ancient ceremonies and rituals that were both Dio-
nysian and Christian. Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Blok, and Mikhail Kuzmin
directed performances of plays involving choral singing and group dancing. After
1919 Ivanov favored choric actions, popular festivals, and outdoor performances of
heroic legends.
Adopting Ivanov’s notion of a Theatre-Temple, the Polish poet and playwright
Tadeusz Miciński (a frequent visitor to the Tower), called for the creation of a
universal temple of beauty in the Tatras Mountains, which he associated with the
Himalayas and the origins of ancient Indian religions, “where in an amphitheatre of
the dead and living, carved in the mountains, under the azure sky and among the
deep forests, there will be revealed the mysteries of life on earth,” and where Sanskrit
dramas, such as Shakuntala could be performed. Pan-slavist, historiographer seeking
the roots of Western civilization in India, and translator of the great thirteenth-
century Persian mystic poem Jalal-Al-Din Maulavi, Miciński envisaged theatre, at
once primeval and social, that would unite East and West, reconcile Catholicism,
Orthodox faith, and Hinduism, and bring Poland and Russia together on the basis
of gnosticism and esoteric philosophy. In his 1905 essay “Theatre-Temple,” which
argues for a theatre that purifies the soul, Miciński writes, “If we look at the Persian
Ta’zia, which mourns the death of the prophet Ali, or at the medieval mystery plays
with Adam and Eve, Satan, the Apostles and Christ’s Passion—everywhere at the
sources of drama we find the sphinx of Religion.”
Place is invested with special import. A pioneering site-specific performance took
place in 1911 when Georgette Leblanc staged two performances of Maeterlinck’s
GEROULD / The Symbolist Legacy 83
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translation of Macbeth in his castle in Normandy at the fourteenth-century Abbey
of Saint-Wandrille bordered by a forest. For Maeterlinck, Macbeth was Shakespeare’s
most profound occult work. The audience of sixty spectators moved about the grounds
following the action from Macbeth’s arrival on horseback at the gates to the terrifying
events inside the castle. The poet-playwright-painter Stanisław Wyspiański projected
a stage “on the sacred national soil” by the Royal Castle of Wawel in Cracow over-
looking the Vistula and at the same time dreamed of an enormous theatre under the
open sky in the Tatra Mountains, with the lofty peaks serving as the wings and the
deep blue waters of a small lake suggesting the auditorium. Wyspiański conceived
of his Acropolis as being played within the Royal Castle Wawel in Cracow; all the
characters in the play are animated art works found in the castle (from the Bible or
Homer) who have stepped out of their tapestries or off their pedestals.
SYMBOLIST COLLABORATIONS AND MULTIPLE VOCATIONS
Taking the unity of the arts as one of their cardinal beliefs, the symbolists totally
rejected Dumas fils’s “well-made” conception of playwriting as special craft separate
from other intellectual and artistic endeavors and of the playwright as a technician
skilled at manipulating stage effects who need have no broader or deeper concerns. In
their view, theatre exits in relation to the other arts; at its highest points it represents
a synthesis of the arts. The symbolists sought to bring about such a fusion of the arts
by pursuing dual or multiple vocations and by collaborating with other artists.
The Lithuanian Mikalojus Ciurlionis, a musician who became a visionary painter,
was able to devise a new pictorial language to express a religion of the cosmos by
applying musical compositional forms and principles to painting. He developed his
own cosmology. He translated his musical creative impulses into colors and shapes
using the analogy of the seven colors of the solar spectrum and the seven tones of the
chromatic scale. Inspired by neo-Platonic aspiration toward a higher existence and
endowed with cosmic memory, he transcended his own time and place moving to
a universality of the spirit. His perspective was that of the mind contemplating the
whole universe. Moving toward the abstraction of spheres and circles, he composed
visual sonatas portraying fantastic “infinite” landscapes imbued with mysticism
in different movements about the sun, different planets, and signs of zodiac. The
natural is supernatural. Admired by Ivanov and the World of Art (Mir Iskusstvo)
circle, Ciurlionis declared, “I would like to create a symphony out of the sound of
the waves, the mysterious language of a hundred-year-old forest, the twinkling of
the stars, out of our songs and my boundless yearning.”
The symbolists saw theatre as a collaboration among artists, and, in keeping with
their belief in the unity of the arts, sought out like-minded artists in other media.
No era was richer in collaborative alliances that established outstanding partnerships.
Poets worked with dancers, as in the case of William Butler Yeats and Michio Ito,
a modern dancer who knew almost nothing about Noh, had had eclectic training,
and was open to experiment (making him a perfect collaborator for Yeats). It was
Yeats who brought the knowledge of Noh, which he had acquired from Ezra Pound.
84 PAJ 91
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Ito came to study and appreciate Noh, and eventually brought the new form he had
created with Yeats back to Japan in a Japanese translation of The Hawk’s Well.
For Yeats, the function of art was to invoke spiritual realities. A séance enthusiast,
Yeats considered spiritualism a modern religion and visited many mediums in the
hope of contacting the dead, who he felt were always near. Believing in the power
of mediumship (with its stars, special effects, farewell performances) to make superb
theatre, Yeats collected information received from the dead. He invoked the doctrine
of a world-soul or Anima Mundi, from which creativity derived. This world-soul,
joined to the Great Memory, explains the symbolist exaltation of playwright as a
creator attuned to the collective unconscious.
The interdisciplinary collaboration between the Belgian painter Jean Delville and
the Russian musician Alexander Scriabin was another milestone in the symbolist
attempt to forge a new language drawing upon the various arts.
SCRIABIN’S MYSTERIUM
Beginning in 1902 Scriabin conceived of a ritual with antiphonal dialogue of nar-
rator and chorus that would enact a terrestrial and cosmic transformation, uniting
feminine and masculine principles and transcending the “I” and “Non-I.” Specta-
tors would be votaries performing dances and assisting in the Dionysian rituals that
would lead to the final cosmic apocalypse: a world conflagration of matter, time,
and space. A multimedia of sound, sight, smell, feel, dance, and décor, Scriabin’s
eschatological mysterium is a great cataclysmic work ushering in the end of the
world, synthesizing all the arts, and moving beyond the limits of the separate arts
and of art in general.
For Scriabin, who rejected the concept of masquerade, the theatre was essentially
antireligious, and therefore sinful, because it substitutes for the truth a masque of
multiple reincarnations and supports the illusion of life. The role of the mysterium
was to overthrow theatre and restore the integrity of self-unity. Scriabin rejected
the decadent theatrical life of Paris, the cult of theatre in Moscow, and Meyerhold’s
theatre of Masks, lamenting that “Our entire society is being converted into a
theatrical production. It tries to achieve a semblance of life in its artificiality. Our
own lives begin to acquire a theatrical character because of inner division and outer
dispersion. We become stage actors performing for ourselves, possessed by a passion
for self-analysis.” In Moscow Scriabin frequented Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre, where
he particularly liked Kalidasa’s Sanskrit drama, Shakuntala (1914), performed musi-
cally and rhythmically as an opera-ballet full of pantomime and processions. With
Alice Koonen, Tairov’s wife and lead actress, Scriabin created gestural pieces set to
music, which she danced.
On an extended visit to Brussels in 1908 Scriabin became involved with a circle of
friends drawn together by their shared interest in theosophy. With Delville, a sym-
bolist painter and author of a treatise, “The Mission of Art,” the Russian composer
GEROULD / The Symbolist Legacy 85
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dreamed of creating an all-encompassing work of art combining colors, shapes, and
sounds.
For his projected mysterium Scriabin worked on creating a new language that was
derived from Sanskrit roots, but included cries, interjections, exclamations, and sounds
of breath being inhaled and exhaled to suggest the breathing of the cosmos. The
Russian composer would have endorsed Tadeusz Miciński’s declararation that “The
Church, the sole true Church, is the Cosmos.” Scriabin practiced light-color-sound
synesthesia. For a public showing of Delville’s monumental painting, Prometheus,
there were light projections corresponding to notes played by Scriabin.
For his symphonic Prometheus, Poem of Fire (1909–10), Scriabin called for a keyboard
of lights, or color organ, which could project colors on a screen or in the audience.
The “color music” was to be determined by the notes. Delville did the cover design
for the score, but Scriabin’s project was not realized until 1967 at a performance by
the Rochester Philharmonic at which Alex Ushakoff (a film producer and designer of
space simulation systems for astronauts) scattered colors throughout the auditorium.
Prometheus’s fires, colors, and lights are meta-symbols of man’s highest thoughts.
FUTURE UTOPIAS: SYMBOLIST SCIENCE FICTION
Looking beyond and through the here and now, the temporal and immediate, sym-
bolists take a long view of the present from a dual perspective of past and future.
Considering revolution as an act of the spirit and social change achievable through
transformation of the individual, they are drawn to apocalypse, metamorphoses of
humanity, and visions of utopia and dystopia. Symbolists were among the pioneers
in the creation of modern science fiction: Villiers in The Future Eve (1886), Jarry in
Doctor Faustrol (1911), Briusov in his play The Earth (1904) and novella Republic
of the Southern Cross, Sologub in his epic trilogy The Created Legend (1905–1913),
which Meyerhold planned to film, and Miciński in his Nietota: Secret Book of the
Tatras Mountains (1910) and Father Faust (1913). These works, informed by demi-
urgic consciousness, draw heavily on the Faust myth in their portrayal of imaginary
societies in conflict making use of weird inventions to forge mystical weapons. Their
work reflects the resurgence of the supernatural in high art. Inspired by Platonic
idealism, they experimented with horror literature, the grotesque, and the fantastic,
including the mass culture motif of puppet-soul in robots, androids, and cyborgs.
Maurice Maeterlinck initially conceived his essay, “The Tragical in Daily Life,” as “A
Theatre of the Android,” since he wished to eliminate the human actor and replace
living human beings onstage by simulacra.
Curious about all aspects of art and culture and ambivalent, a symbolist like Villiers
de l’Isle-Adam did not reject modern science and technology, but incorporated them
within a larger vision and higher wisdom capable of effecting a unifying reconcili-
ation of spirituality and science. He tests the facile belief in progress characteristic
of late nineteenth-century positivism. In his Cruel Tales, Villiers shows that the
new technologies of advertising and mass marketing when applied to the arts will
create a virtual world of fraud and sham, peopled by simulacra. But Villiers writes
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as a visionary thinker—in the company of mystics like Swedenborg, Blake, and
Goethe—who are able to think in a spiritual arena where the religious and the
scientific imagination can meet. In The Future Eve, Edison, who as the wizard of
Menlo Park is a modern mythic hero of electricity, gradually assumes the linea-
ments of Prometheus, the bearer of light to humankind. Villiers is able to reveal old
mythologies as antecedents of new. The symbolists saw science not as superseding
previous knowledge, but as part of an ongoing human quest for wisdom, a link in
the chain of secret knowledge.
THE FADING OF SYMBOLISM
Although it enjoyed an enduring afterlife in poetry in a number of countries, the
fortunes of symbolism on stage fell to a low point in the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s
when a socially engaged, politicized theatre dominated by ideology gained ascen-
dancy as a result of changed social circumstances. The First World War, the Russian
Revolution, the Great Depression, the rise of totalitarian dictatorships throughout
Europe, Fascism and Communism, World War II, and the Holocaust made the idea
of a “theatre of the soul” seem an elitist aberration and its obsession with death and
the other world decadent and unseemly. Social activists self-righteously condemned
the symbolists as reactionary (although they had in fact been predominantly socialist
and anarchist in political leaning). At the time of the First World War, under the
influence of anthroposophy, Andrei Bely left Russia to become Rudolph Steiner’s
disciple in Dornach, Valerii Briusov and Alexander Blok tried to embrace Bolshe-
vism and come to terms with the new regime, while Sologub, who stuck to his
anti-authoritarian symbolist beliefs in unfettered human creativity was branded a
formalist out of touch with Soviet reality and denied permission to emigrate.
For the next several post-1914 generations a “theatre of the soul” under the banner
of transcendent spirituality could not help but appear a narcissistic and self-indulgent
escape into vague private mythologies and somnambulistic introspection. The revival
of ancient mystery cults with obscure rituals seemed a flagrant evasion of responsibil-
ity and a refusal to confront real issues in the real world.
REINSTATEMENT OF SYMBOLISM
Symbolism was rediscovered and popularized in the 1970s, in large part because of
major revisionism in the art-historical appraisal of the fin-de-siècle painters such as
Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Ferdinand Khnopff, and Jean Delville, who had
always been regarded as of questionable taste and artistry when compared to the
impressionists: Renoir, Monet, Manet, and Lautrec, whose work set the standards
for modernism in art.
Revisionism with respect to symbolist theatre was slower in coming, no doubt because
the terrain was virtually unknown to the general public and the material was far less
accessible. My PAJ anthology of 1985, Doubles, Demons, and Dreamers—reprinted
as Symbolist Drama, a simpler, but less evocative title—was an attempt to make
available the amazing range of fin-de-siècle playwriting in the symbolist mode. The
GEROULD / The Symbolist Legacy 87
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collection includes fourteen plays from Sweden, France, Spain, Ireland, Germany,
the United States, India, Poland, and Russia and represents a rich variety of forms
and styles drawing upon myth, legend, and folklore, Biblical moralities, medieval
dance of death, Poesque nightmare visions, and psychic monodramas.
Already by the 1960s the impact of Artaud (an avowed admirer of Maeterlinck)
and the vogue of the absurd had helped prepare the ground for the rediscovery of
symbolist theatre. Beckett and Ionesco were not only inheritors of the dramatic
techniques and devices of The Intruder and The Blind, but also of the grotesque
vision animating Maeterlinck’s work. Starting with Villiers and continuing with
Maeterlinck, symbolists always had a profound awareness of the fraudulence and
absurdity of so-called “real life.”
Transmission of symbolist concepts of a mythopoetic theatre took place in the
second half of the twentieth century through the work of playwrights such as T.S.
Eliot and directors and creators like Grotowski and Kantor. The revival of poetic
drama caused a reawakening of interest in mythopoesis. A proponent of symbolist
poetry, T.S. Eliot returned to myth in his plays The Family Reunion (Orestes) and
The Cocktail Party (Alcestis) and showed how this could be done within the confines
of literary drama and drawing room settings.
Two major forces for a return to the spiritual in modern theatre are Tadeusz Kantor
and Jerzy Grotowski, Polish artists whose idiosyncratic journeys back to their pasts
have become paradigms for the future. Whereas Kantor pointed to his artistic pre-
decessors and made contact with his family and local ancestors, Grotowski wished to
find a common ground with distant progenitors, stretching back to Greeks, to early
Christianity, to Gnosticism, and ultimately to archaic societies and their practices.
KANTOR
A prime lesson that Kantor learned from the symbolists was the importance of
“placing theatre within the realm of the totality of art.” Although Kantor displayed
verve and acumen in connecting his theatre to almost all the major avant-garde
movements and artists of the early twentieth century, it is significant that his first
work for the theatre was by Maeterlinck. Kantor started his theatrical career with
a production of The Death of Tintagiles, a drama rendering palpable the invisible
presence of death.
Kantor shared the symbolist obsession with first and last things, for entrances and
exits, for genesis and eschatology. He regarded the stage as a vestibule between the
worlds of the living and the dead where the departed could reappear not as ghosts,
but as living beings. He created new myths out of old and old out of new. The
returning soldier on his spiritual journey in The Return of Odysseus of Wyspiański
haunted his work. A “painter of the soul,” Kantor is a bridge from one age to another,
from the fin-de-siècle circa 1900 to the turn-of-the-century circa 2000. His theatre
is built on establishing contact with the other world and bringing the dead on stage
as living presences.
88 PAJ 91
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Kantor, as master of ceremonies at a dramatic séance, creates a theatre of death
where the stage is the antechamber between this world and the world beyond,
allowing the dead to enter our lives, not as ghosts or unreal figures, but as tangible
beings. Only the past exists, and it is irretrievable, but scraps and fragments of a
lost past can momentarily be summoned forth by what Kantor calls “negatives of
memory.” The artist’s discovery that life is best expressed by its absence, by vacancy,
by sham, came about accidentally, as have all his most important “finds.” While
vacationing on the Baltic in 1972, Kantor chanced upon an empty one-room village
school house. Flattening his nose against the dirty pane of one of the windows, he
peered into the past. Memory activated, time set spiraling backward, the theatre of
death was born in that illusory return to the lost homeland of childhood. Looking
through the window frame at the non-existent world of the past, the artist saw
himself as a six-year-old sitting on the bench. Only in memory can we detect the
faded lines of our genealogy and save our most personal histories from forgetting
and annihilation. Bits of old roles, scraps of past events are momentarily called up
from non-existence before falling back again into nothingness. On wooden benches,
which he made himself, Kantor placed on stage thirteen old men and women, with
their own childhood, in the form of manikins, attached to their sides and backs as
emblems of mortality.
For Kantor the stage is a “poor room of the imagination,” a place of community
between the living and the dead—out of time and out of space—where a profane
sacrum is celebrated each evening. “But isn’t profanation the best way and perhaps
the only way of keeping a ritual alive?” Kantor asks. “I maintain,” Kantor asserts,
“that the theatre is a fording place on a river, a plane across which dead characters
from the other shore, from the other world, cross into our world, now, into our life.
And what happens then? I can give you the answer: the Dybbuk, the spirit of the
dead, who enters into the body of another person and speaks through him.”
GROTOWSKI
From his youth profoundly interested in esoteric spiritual literature and magic,
Grotowski—adopting the religious formulation of his model, Juliusz Osterwa, the
creator of the Polish ensemble Reduta—considered theatre to be a holy communion.
Throughout his career Grotowski was engaged in a visionary quest for spiritual puri-
fication. Personal transformation was the goal of the theatrical event. The actor seeks
spiritual liberation through exacting discipline in the holy act of psycho-physical
performance before the spectator. He referred to the theatre in religious terms as a
place where sacrifice leads to redemption and sanctity. Theatre, he argued, should
return to the forms of ritual from which it arose. Then the actor becomes a celebrant
in a secular mystery, acting for a community of spectators who take part in the ritual
and join in the collective creation.
Grotowski approaches sacred theatre through myth and archetype in a profane
ritual, a modern and ironic confrontation with mythopoesis that must be tested
through blasphemy and sacrilege; in an age of disbelief only infernal mockery can
rekindle sparks of feeling for the divine. In Apocalypsis cum figuris, which combines
GEROULD / The Symbolist Legacy 89
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passages from the Bible, liturgical chants, and texts by Dostoevsky, T.S. Eliot, and
Simone Weil, the Christian myth of salvation achieved through Christ’s sacrifice is
put to the test of blasphemy and profanation, and the myth of the hero’s spiritual
transformation is radically restructured.
In his paratheatrical work between 1969 and 1975, Grotowski did away with the
theatre building, the actor, and the spectator in favor of the direct participation of
one human being with other human beings in outdoor settings, such as forests and
mountains, as part of events sometimes lasting days or even weeks, or, contrarily, in
confined rooms for short periods, in order to reach the spiritual essence common to
all men. Bringing together people of different nationalities, ages, professions, races,
who met in different countries and settings, Grotowski strove to break down the
barriers that prevent humankind from reaching what lies hidden in the soul.
Both the theatrical and the paratheatrical explorations conducted by Grotowski have
been dedicated to the revelation of a secular mystery (the only kind possible in an
age of disbelief ), a ceremony capable of making actor and spectator one, a communal
and collective creation that will transform its participants and reorder their lives.
In the words of Ludwik Flaszen, Grotowski’s longtime associate and literary advisor,
“Grotowski’s performances wish to revive the utopia of those elementary experiences,
supplied by the collective ritual, in whose ecstatic elation a community, as it were,
dreamed a dream about its own essence, its place in total reality, not particularized
into separate spheres, where Beauty was not different from Truth, emotions from
intellect, spirit from body, joy from suffering; where man felt an affinity with the
Totality of Being.”
CONCLUSION
What the symbolists bequeathed to present-day theatre is a belief in the power of
the creative imagination to transform first the individual, then society. They believed
in the wholeness of experience, in the links between the exterior and interior, the
microcosm and macrocosm, and in humankind’s relation to the earth, thus antici-
pating present-day ecological concerns. Rejecting the official doctrines and dogmas
of institutional religions and politics, the symbolists saw social change as effected
through transformations of consciousness. The symbolist prepared the ground and
cleared the field, making it possible for twenty-first-century playwrights to range
freely back and forth in time from ancient myths to science fiction projections into
future times.
DANIEL GEROULD is Lucille Lortel Distinguished Professor of Theatre
and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, City University of New
York. He has translated and written about Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. He
edited the twelve-volume Harwood/Routledge Polish and East European
Theatre Archive and is the editor of Slavic and East European Theatre.
90 PAJ 91
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