Unlike psychological theatre, which clearly expresses through language and situations, the characters’ superior truths, the 50s theatre changes the language and the situations from means of revealing the insight life of things into autonomous, independent objects. The exposed objects produce the life of characters.
The avant-garde theatre, as essence of world and of playing, doesn’t reflect external realities, yet it unmasks and obliterates the psychology, replacing it with “an architecture of void and words”. The image-objects become the centre and the engine of the dramatic action. The symbols fail to express anything; they just produce. The psychological situations are replaced by language situations.
The conflict in this paradigm is determined by the relationship between the desintegration and the salvation of the word and the individual. The avantgarde, seen as a phenomenon which unstructures reality and proves the fake, unreal nature of things, is a denying spirit.
Considering this aspects, I find it interesting to analyze how an avantgardiste playwright and screenwriter uses the concepts of dezintegration and salvation in his literary work. The process is quite difficult as Arrabal is one of the founder of the movement called the Theatre of Panic, a radical form of absurd theatre, whose emotions felt by its audience are organic and visceral in origin (panick itself is considered clinically a sudden, intense, undetermined, organic fear) : disgust, grotesque, abominable. « I have no theory on theatre. My writing is an adventure, not an outcome of an experience. »(F.Arrabal) The panick ceremony offers both to the hungry-for-participation audience and to the dramatic author absolute freedom, the latter , exhibiting his obsessions and altering the integrity of the former.
Arrabal’s texts lack of salvation functions. The audience and the character’s world are just shattered through shock and violence. There is no hope for either of them.
Working hypothesis: From a psychoanalytical perspective, while the dramatic content of Arrabal’s texts expresses denial and world’s obliteration, the form of the text, the linguistic dimension and the dramatic discourse express revival and salvation.
Methodology
To this purpose,I have taken into consideration two plays: The Labyrinth and The Architect and the Emperor of Asia; and two film,s J’irai comme un cheval fou and Viva la muerte!
1.Arrabal’s world suggests a turning point, moving attention from epistemology to ontology. His characters are incapable of knowing, the truth hides itself from them. Indirectly, the public/the reader starts asking questions as :
What is the world ?
How many types of worlds are there and what happends when two of them become oppositee in nature ?
How is this world structured ?
To answer these questions, I have used a lacanian interpretation of his texts, making a connection between psychoanalysis and structural linguistics, considering the former as a form of healing through words. The lacanian unconscious is labyrinth- like structured, ignores logic, the time dimension and expresses itself by metaphors.
Arrabal’s labyrinth is made of blankets hanged on crossed ropes, lying on an indefinite territory; it is a trap-park where once one is lost, can’t ever escape. This strange place was unintentionally created by Justin, the landlord of the park and nearby mansion, who has washed all the dirty blankets from the house, but was late to gather them back. Now, the blankets have become an organic being, trapping the strangers within it.
Under the perceived chaos there is a superior order, one which is known only by the creator of the labyrinth, the only one who knows his way about it. The theatre of Panic itself is the ceremony of rigorous order, expressed in the mathematical precision of director’s perspective. The more fascinating is the performance, the more detailed the mise en scene is.
Arrabal’s Labyrinth is human unconscious.
Lacan’s unconscious is language-like structured.” One doesn’t analyze the dream, but the language of the dream.” This language is not linear, it can become a circular chain of significants. According to Saussure theory, this language structure has a negative relationship between signs. There are no significants in lacanian psychoanalysis, as the significant doesn’t’ mean anything. And the chain that it forms is unstable and has no certain meaning either.
This ambiguity of language reflects upon the ambiguity of characters. Micaela, Justin’s daughter ( the savior principle in a traditional labyrinth) is masculine and hypocrite. The characters in “The Architect” are ambivalent to. They are playing theatre on a beach after they shipwrecked, presenting scenes of their life journey: mother and child, lover and lover, doctor and patient, victim and aggressor, comedian and spectator.
The growing-up and the rebuilding of the individual in this context is seen as a method of reducing the instability of the chain of meaning, by finding the centre of the labyrinth. In the centre of Arrabal’s labyrinth ( the sacred place where one can meet the monster, the inner Ego) there is a toilet, a dark, dirty, small room where Etienne and Bruno are handcuffed to each other. As in Kafka’s trial, Arrabal places his characters in an absurd, irrational, uncontrollable world. Etienne doesn’t know why he has been imprisoned or why he is there. He is just leaving his guilt. And once he has escaped, he finds himself trapped in a more perverted prison.
2. To grow up, the individual must surpass three stages.
1. The stage of need which is the Reality dimension, a psychological space seen as a symbol of completeness, a maternal space lacking of language. To become a civilized adult requires losing this unity with the Mother. The language appears as an outcome of absence. The words are necessary when the objects one wants aren’t there. Bruno, the second prisoner, is overwhelmed by an undying need:”I am thirsty”.
The second stage, of demand, represents the Imaginary dimension. The request can’t be satisfied with objects. This can only be done by having another person to acknowledge it. The individual asks the Other to complete him, to fulfill his being. The Emperor devours the Architect affectionately, taking his place. This is the stage of earning an identity (the mirror stage). Bruno, Etienne’s Alter-Ego dies but haunts him still, facing him endlessly as a mirror reflection, every time he wants to get away.
The third stage, the one of the wish, symbolizes the Language dimension, the order and adulthood. Justin, the creator of the labyrinth is the only member of this paternal space, structured according to two principles: of the Other- the unreachable centre of the labyrinth- and of the Absence. To enter this order one must submit to Justin’s rules, to language rules. Etienne rebels against Justin’s authority, he accepts to go to trial, hoping for salvation, and he is condemned to death.
3.The cinema imagery is bizarre and focuses on a similar simbology. In Viva la muerte, the director presents the growth and the spiritual evolution of the young Fando. Obliged by his mother, church, school and friends to deny his communiste father, he escapes in an imaginary word of oedipian fantasies : his mother defecating on her husband’s head or masturbating on the remainings of a fresh buthcered ox.
In J’irai comme un cheval fou, after the brutal death of his mother, Aden runs away to the desert where he becomes friend with a dwarf, Marvel, a magician who can levitate or change the night into day. The boy discoveres a free life, unconditioned by cultural, social restraints. His returning to civilisation proves to be a failure, he too escaping eventually in a world of incestual fantasies : him giving birth to a human skull or having sex with Malvolio, who violently devours him.
The sexual act and the act of devouring are both originated in the frustration one feels after he is separated of his mother (Freud) or in his desire to dominate and posses the Other, to confirm his own identity. (Lacan) (Etienne devours himself, becoming the Monster from the Labyrinth, the Emperor devours the Architect, Micaela sexually aggresses Bruno, sticking needles into his sex.)
4.The desintegration of the world at a content level (symbol, semantic coherence) is balanced by a reintegration /salvation at a fomal level. The absence of a global meaning is balanced by the presence of local meanings. The act i of writing itself maintains the fiction dimension alive. The salvation of the individual is possible by the use of language. The text is the author’s final truth. Denying the created reality, he paradoxically confirms its existence.
The text is structured as an hyper absence, as a sumum of elements zoomed in by a descriptive present succession ,which doesn’t give the public any clues about the temporal coordinates of the action: Etienne and Bruno, the emperor and the Architect have always been in that situation. The present time of the verbs give the impression of meaningless waiting, of void and eternal absence.
Conclusion
Arrabal’s work is more than a complexity of signs which have taken the form of an avantgardistic performance. Even though violence, shock , sexual brutality and absurd, grotesque deaths are essential to the concept of the Theatre of Panic, the obliteration of the world and of the individual are compensated by the revival of the language. The language has become the new world, born out of nightmare, penetrating the public’s perception, directly and intense, as an exposing therapy.