"Deception of Woman (Maryla Grossmanowa and Self-portrait)"
by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1927,
pastel, 115.5 x 184 cm, National Museum, Warsaw
TADZIO: People are like insects, and Infinity surrounds them and Summons them in a mysterious voice.
-The Water Hen, Act I
Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, perhaps better known as Witkacy (the name he created to differentiate himself from his identically-named father, a well-known landscape painter), was born in Warsaw on February 24th, 1885, and committed suicide outside Zakopane on September 18th 1939, after Soviet forces invaded Poland and crushed his country’s hopes for independence.
Witkacy was a painter, a philosopher, a highly prolific and original playwright, a dramatic theorist, a photographer, a professional portraitist, and an experimenter of (and consequent expert on) a wide variety of drugs such as stimulants (cocaine, caffeine, and nicotine), psychotropics (absinthe, hashish, cannabis and peyote), and depressives (alcohol).
He developed the Theory of Pure Form in Art, which he manifested in his disturbingly beautiful paintings and beautifully disturbing plays, in which can be found elements of Expressionism, Romanticism, Surrealism, Absurdism, and Existentialism; the common denominator of these aspects being the individual’s lonely struggle for meaning, and a sporadic and fleeting mysticsm.
Witkacy, however, was a self-styled enemy of “isms”:
We live in an age of manifestoes: even before an artistic movement spontaneously comes into being, its theory is often already in a state of near perfection. Theories are starting to create movements, and not vice versa. Besides, in former times there weren’t “movements”, in our sense of the word, or different “isms”, there were only powerful personalities and the schools formed by their followers. A greater and greater intellectualization of the creative process, and subjugation of the creative process and subjugation of the outbursts of genius to principles conceived a priori is the characteristic trait of our times.[1]
Witkacy asserted that Art was sourced in religious mysteries, or, more specifically, “metaphysical feeling”:
The experience of the mystery of existence as unity in plurality, due to that impression of unity which, as in painting and music, is created by combinations of simple elements…[2]
He reasoned that as religious mysteries lost their significance to humanity, the importance of metaphysical feelings waned, and theatre gradually fell into a “pure reproduction of life”[3], (i.e., realism) intensified though it may be. This downward progression from a connection with the mysteries of existence to merely a somewhat more interesting representation of daily life is analogous to the “decay of metaphysical feelings themselves”[4]. In his “Theoretical Introduction to Tumor Brainowicz”[5], Witkacy also defines metaphysical feelings as a “unity of personality”, this then implies that the realistic form of theatre also waters down what was an individual’s mystical connection with God, and renders it into something pre-packaged for the masses, dissolving the unity of the personality, and fomenting and perpetuating a spiritual down-spiral into a loss of individuality, as well as the individual’s personal search for meaning, which is then rendered into so much uniform grey sludge hopelessly mired among the quagmire of the status quo.
Witkacy posits this question:
Is it possible, even only for a short period, for a form of the theatre to arise in which contemporary man, independent of dead myths and beliefs, could experience the metaphysical feelings which ancient man experienced through those myths and beliefs?[6]
His answer is that only “True Pure Art”,
…art whose substance is not the reproduction of the visible world or real feelings, but a purely formal unity which ties the given elements into a dissoluble whole….[7]
can possibly accomplish this task, only through Pure Form –that is, form revealing essence in its purest sense, utilizing all the elements of theatre, which contains its own logic intrinsic to the formal unity of the performance.
The characters should not be bound to a “real-life” through-line of psychology and action, but should express “fantastic psychology and action”, which acts as a pretext for a pure progression of events…characters who are completely implausible in “real-life” producing “events which by their bizarre interrelationships create a performance in time not limited by any logic except of the form itself of that performance”. The point is that everything must be perceived as necessary and inevitable within the structure of the form itself.[8]
The actors should not try to feel the emotions and experiences of the characters on stage, to imitate them, but
…should create the role…which entails the following…the actor must understand the whole of the play…the formal conception of the work…and its character, apart from all real-life probabilities…Next, he should build his role that…he can execute with mathematical precision whatever is required by the purely formal conception of the particular work in question…his work will be genuinely creative only when he considers himself an element in the given whole.[9]
To the director:
Setting the formal tone depends, of course, on the director…forget completely about life and pay no attention to any real-life consequences of what is happening onstage at any given moment as it relates to what is about to happen at the next moment…[10]
The spectator’s feeling after the performance should be that of having literally been transported into a world that has no direct bearing on “real-life”:
On leaving the theatre, the spectator ought to have the feeling that he has just awakened from some strange dream in which even the most ordinary things had a strange unfathomable charm, characteristic of dream reveries, and unlike anything else in the world.[11]
The Dream Reverie -or more precisely, the Dream- is that contact with the mystery of existence –the metaphysical feelings which are the mystical experience of communion with God. The characters in Witkacy’s plays who are privy to this experience –and there are several such- know it to be a terrifying, if revelatory experience. Alexander Walpurg, the titular madman of The Madman and the Nun, is a poet, locked up for having a “weak nervous system”, and for “Cocaine. The clock in my head. And that eternal question of whether I killed her or she killed me. Even in the fraction of a second I think two thoughts as different as God and Satan.” Walpurg is privy to the esoteric torments and ecstasies of metaphysical feelings:
WALPURG: There’s only one thing certain: today the greatest Art is found only in perversion and madness –I’m talking, of course, about Form. But for the True Creative Artists, not the jackals, the forms they create are intimately connected to their own lives.[12]
The protagonist of The Water Hen, Edgar Valpor, wants to be “Great” to satisfy his father, The Captain, who wants him to be an artist; and Edgar half-heartedly humours him, but lacks Greatness for it; the Water Hen wants Edgar to kill her –and he does, but immediately regrets it; and later, when the Hen returns from death, seemingly better than ever, again urging Edgar to kill her, and when he finally, definitively does kill her, and consequently decides to kill himself as well in despair, his father encourages him in his prospective suicide:
EDGAR: So, Father, you’re against me, too?
FATHER: Not against you, but with you against life. I’m waiting for you to become an artist. [13]
Plasmonick Blodestaug, the hero of The Anonymous Work (which is subtitled, Four Acts of a Rather Nasty Nightmare), is also an artist, also privy to the Theory of Pure Form; after the woman he loved and who had spurned him tells him:
ROSA: Plazy, I’m yours –only yours. I’ve woken up from a terrible nightmare. I don’t love him anymore.
PLASMONICK: It’s too late, Miss Rosa, it’s too late. I love Miss Claudestina de Montreuil. I’ve finally woken up from a nightmare, too –the nightmare of loving you. I’m starting to paint in a completely different way.
Later, when Plasmonick seems on the verge of suicide, and his father says:
BLODESTAUG: Plazy! Don’t kill yourself! Art!
PLASMONICK: Wouldn’t think of it, Father. Miss Rosa –your turn now. (Rushes at her and slits her throat with lightning speed. Rosa falls dead. Calmly.) My secret inner voice told me to. She already composed herself out, anyway…so it’s no loss to Art. In our times there are only two places for metaphysical individuals: prison or the insane asylum. [14]
The world is a nightmare and a dream. Both and neither. The Water Hen is shot and killed twice during the action of The Water Hen, the first time she urges Edgar Valpor to murder her– when he does, she doesn’t stay dead, and she returns, sexier and more beautiful than before. Her second death is fought against furiously, but is final.
The madman Walpurg hangs himself, only to walk in moments later to smilingly view his own corpse hanging from the window; Edgar Valpor shoots himself to become “Great”; The Engineer and the Fireman in The Crazy Locomotive urge their runaway train on, faster and faster –their philosophical discussion seemingly setting the pace of the engine, as they reveal themselves to be, respectively, Prince Trefaldi, King of murderers, and Travaillac, “sought in vain by the police, all over the world”. As the locomotive goes on, there is an increasing sense of imminent revelation reinforced by the feeling of imminent death.[15]
Death is around every corner, and in Witkacy’s plays, just as in life, when confronted with it we begin to reveal to ourselves and to others who we truly are. It is a mystery of existence that cannot be met en masse, but individually, and what awaits us within death, within our discovery of ourselves may well be, on the other hand, what the dead Pope Julius of The Cuttlefish, or the Hyrcanian Worldview seems to indicate:
ELLA: Oh my GOD, my GOD- I’ll die of fright. I’m afraid of you, Holy Father –save me. You’ve come from Heaven.
JULIUS II: (Speaking with cruelty) How do you know that Heaven isn’t a symbol for the most awful renunciation? Renouncing one’s personality. I’m a shadow just as she is. (He points to the statue.)[16]
At bottom, or above it all, or in the thick of it, we are alone, surrounded by strangers, stranger even to themselves, than we are to ourselves.
ROCKOFFER: I’m unknowable even to myself. Look at the paintings I’ve already done and you’ll see who I used to be. But if you look at what I’m going to do now, you’ll see what I want to be; the rest is a delusion.
-The Cuttlefish, or the Hyrcanian Worldview
PLASMONICK: Let’s talk some more. Then I’ll forget the frightful situation I’m in, if just for a minute. Physical pain and theoretical discussions are my only pleasures –then I don’t think about the realities of my life.
-The Anonymous Work
Witkacy wanted there to be a formal unity of an idea behind the theatre of Pure Form, a new dead myth or belief to send the spectator into a world which exists always at the edge of our senses, something definite and yet unknowable, and into which we tap, if only briefly, to keep us going through the everyday terrors of “real-life”, something like catharsis to let us know that there is something else beyond being alone.
TADZIO: Don’t cry, Papa, these are only little pictures God paints with his magic pastels.
-The Water Hen
[2] as above.
[3] as above.
[4] as above.
[5] “Theoretical introduction to Tumor Brainowicz”, (1920)
[6] See 1-4, above.
[7] As above.
[8] “On a New Kind of Play.”(1920).
[9] “A Few Words About the Role of the Actor in the Theatre of Pure Form” (1920)
[10] As above.
[11] See 8, above.
[12] The Madman and the Nun, (1923).
[13] As above.
[14] The Anonymous Work, Four Acts of a Rather Nasty Nightmare, (1921)
[15] The Crazy Locomotive, (1923)
[16] The Cuttlefish, or the Hyrcanian Worldview, (1921)
