ON “DIALOG” – THE SPRING OF THE LIVING WORD
On the margins of the daily life, churning and irritating with the shop displays, the December issue of “Dialog” (12/2006) turned out to be a wonderful way of escaping the alcoholic gospel, or maybe it was just pure energy…It is also crucial, not a merely accidental remark, that I was more than pleased by reading a monthly devoted to modern drama, not to literature sensu stricto. To do justice to the December issue, I would have to describe each section, bow appropriately to everything and scribble a few letters about the emotions experienced. However, such things cannot be done. The delight and jouissance shall be dosed to the future fervent readers. An unnatural selection has to be made.
Daddyhood
-an interesting word, isn’t it? It seems that some time ago it entered on an incredible career. As a consequence, today it seems a completely hackneyed catchword that appears on the internet discussion lists run by resourceful daddies. All that has started probably on the day when in 2003 a guide by Daniel W. Driscoll Daddyhood. This changes everything was published. Over one third of the issue headed with a phrase Getting A Father Back, “Dialog”’s authors ponder upon what is hidden under such a familiarly and attractively sounding ‘daddyhood’. To whet our appetites, we are served a sad drama by Marek Pruchniewski and Marek Wortman, titled Nasz syn [Our Son], the text on “the drama of parenthood, the fall and breakdown of the family”, or to put it even shorter – on family traumas (a label used by Pruchniewski himself in the interview published in the issue). On the top of that, the text is precisely and neatly cut, moving, speaking in a simple language about matters referring to the experience from highest emotional registers. The focus is on the precision of verism, in black and white. But lets move on…
Next comes a sketch by Katarzyna Taras Tacierzyństwo [Daddyhood], which asks questions rather than gives easy answers. The author is looking, both intently and closely, on the father figure in the Polish movies of last few years, on the voice of the low budget production in the discussion on the condition of the modern man. So “fatherhood is, above all, chafing”, especially for the men in their thirties, especially for the fathers out of necessity. This is what Taras suggests. She does it after having drawn appropriate conclusion from the analyzed works of the tenth Muse that daddyhood is ‘more a matter of spirit and mind than of biology’. In other words, but more forcibly (using the words of my friend who dabbles with pen) – biological fatherhood is the mythologizing of some gentleman’s erection in an accidental lady and we should let nobody convince us it is something else. Well…
We will read also about a good father, but this time from the therapist point of view, in a published chapter of the book Poradnik dla zmartwionych rodziców [A Guide For Worried Parents] by Ewa Woydyłło. She, too, surprises us positively, by quoting interesting cultural texts and asking questions worth being asked. For example, what kind of father would Hamlet have made of himself if he had lived to marriage? Would his inclination to introspection in existential matters be transferred to family relationships? Woydyłło is not playing a fairy-god mother. I dare to doubt that Hamlet’s fatherhood could have been fortunate. Taking advantage of the occasion, I would like to put in my two pennyworth: Would I like to experience on my own skin a fatherhood by Gombrowicz or, lets say, by Giedroyc? Would I wish such fathers to anybody and if I did, would it be a friend or a foe? These are immodest questions.
For dessert or at the end of the topic, “Dialog” makes us familiar with the life and work of Eduardo Rovner, the Argentinian dramatist. His drama Distant Land of Mine was a (lucullan) reader’s feast, a summer breeze and a wonderful refreshment to me. Justyna Kozłowska summarises the drama in the following way: ‘Pain is felt by the Father – an artist lost in his wood from the painting who is under the spell of a town-Arcadia and wide trunk redwood, hidden in the poet’s dreams. All that he wants to resurrect through painting. And it is not important whether or not that land has really existed. It is the Chekhovian waiting for that land that is most important […].’ This waiting takes place with the assistance of the son, who furtively paints in, instead of the background, new details, which dumbfound the sensitivity of his father. The son patiently persuades him ‘You have lived, and live further with me. Let us be together, what else can we do?’. Reputedly, Rovner represents a theatre of soft absurdity, absurdity in a light version. In this absurd I discovered lasting charm, humour and optimism. Just like in this fragment on touch and, brusque in his manners, Freud, (traditionally) always between the two extremes of seduction and the death instinct. ‘Do you know what this guy needed?’ 25-year-old son is searched by his confabulant father. ‘The touch! Not that he would be listened to or read, he wanted to be touched! That was it! I would like to touch his beard, pat him on his belly, kiss him on a cheek […]. Imagine how from that moment on he would look in the photographs: smiling, tender… And psychoanalysts would have been different today. Now we have to stand this bunch of embittered men… and all this because of his face expression in the photos. Would you believe that? His smile could have changed the history…’ Let us then smile and, please, see for yourself what a treasure of good and well translated literature is hidden on as few as 21 pages.
On the French stage
The following pages are equally good or maybe even better. I would like to draw your attention to, above all, the discussion on the French drama and theatre after Ionesco, which took place between excellent specialists (participants: Justyna Golińska, Barbara Grzegorzewska, Marek Rapacki, Jacek Sieradzki, Lech Sokół and Agata Zawrzykraj). And even though this respectable circle denies, a priori, theatre’s submission to postmodernism and even though they pretend not to have a slightest will to talk about the after-modernity, it discusses it intensely and speaks its, i.e. postmodernist, language. They unanimously classify Ionesco as a pre-deconstructionist and pre-postmodernist, unwinding the ready-made structures of the bourgeois drama, combining them in a different way or juggling them. The author of The Lesson – quoting after the Współczesna dramaturgia francuska [ a book on French Modern Drama] by Małgorzata Sugiera – ‘initiated a process of breaking down text structures and rigorous rules of drama 50 years ago, but he stopped half-way while his today’s followers move on, completely separating narration from the theatrical effect’. The only reservation I have is that in the country where the Vistula river flows there are scarcely any people who have ever heard of the direction into which the theatrical experiments go in the land of the Seine River. All the more, except “Dialog”, there is no one else who would publish the works of modern dramatists.
The respectable discussants complain a bit, giving in to various mimetic longings, that the absurdity used by today’s French authors is good for nothing, ‘it exists for its own sake, apart from the fragments of reality, shreds of conventions and already disrupted logics.’ However, they also remark that there is a change coming in the upon-Seine theatre: the break in the hegemony of the word, and, consequently, the conflict between the theatre of the word and the theatre of the body. Arguments, examples, doubts and other – find all this in the December issue.
Other delicacies will be there too. This is a completely personal story with a sentimental delight.
So somewhere at the end of September this year I happened to have heard that during the Days of Lithuania in Poland, in Teatr Mały in Warsaw, the National Dramatic Theatre from Kiev would give a guest performance of Thimotée de Fombelle ‘s The Lighthouse (Le phare), directed by Gintaras Varnas. However, the time was unfavourable and, despite my earnest wishes, I had to leave empty-handed since I was unable to go to the Teatr Mały. Later I forgot about it. You can easily imagine how big was my joy on “Dialog”’s publishing the monodrama of the young French author (in the translation of Agata Zawrzykraj). The text, exactly as I have expected, turned out to be enchanting and the chance to get acquainted with it had not been lost forever. There is no other place where you could find even the slightest trace in Polish of The Lighthouse, of its author too, maybe except for the short notes on Polish National Theatre website. So the poetic word of that French (a writer and director of his own dramas and a French teacher) seems to be worth something around a button. Thimotée de Fombelle takes us to the lighthouse located on an island inhabited by a taciturn father and his son. The father remains silent, so we have to listen to the son’s story and we have to believe it, even though the boy is not reliable and the world created in his head is indeed trompe-l’oeil… Thus he paints in the reality the things he misses most painfully: a brother, who, due to his uniqueness, is fascinating like the reflection of Narcissus. Then he is forced to resign himself to the fact that somebody (the father?) killed the brother in his head , that the brother was never there. It brings to my mind a quote from Baudillard’s Seduction ‘I’ll be your mirror’, I will be your illusion. For a long time I have not read such a disinterestedly moving prose: without a grain of talentless writing, without an inch of exaggeration. For a long time I have not allowed myself to be seduced by a true word and be dragged to someone’s side. Just like in this piece here being my good-bye to you: ‘I have the eyes that do not read. I know letters, I have learned them by myself, and I know A, B and all letters, but I have the eyes that won’t read. I loose letters in a word, words in a line, and lines on a page. When I finally find a word, I stop and get myself lost in the picture.’
This time, with an enormous pleasure and pre-holiday enthusiasm, I found myself completely delighted in “Dialog”. May it be more often.
Joanna Wojdowicz
Translated by Anna Skrajna
Discussed journals: Dialog