Mallarméan Antecedents of the Avant-Garde Theater

, MALLARMEANANTECEDENTS OF THE AVANT-GARDE THEATER ANY THEATRICAL OR OTHERWISE ARTISTIC ACI1VITY that forcefully reminds man of the void that fringes society may be termed avantgarde . In this sense, Pascal, the dramatist, would have been the avant-garde leader of his time. It is precisely this preoccupation with the stripping away of social layers that has provided the substance of crisis in the theater for the last eighty years. To this extent one may differentiate between avant-garde and mere. innovation. Under the latter heading one may place such departures from classicism as ula comedie larmoyante," "Ie drame bourgeois," Hernani, the melodrama of the Revolution, the social drama of the mid 1800'S, etc., but the disillusionment with not only theatrical form but with its emotional and sociological content as well dates from Symbolism. Until the 1880'S, the French theater was quite satisfied to deal with social themes. The playwright styles himself as both a deplorer and healer of social ills. The only evolution in the theater to which one may point during these long decades was the increase in the degree of dramatic intensity that playwrights such as Becque and Augier brought to these problems. Even Mallarme evinces admiration for Becque's La Parisienne. But the exaggerated social consciousness of the thesis play tended to seal off the theater from its poetic sources. The dramatic presentation of injustices and abuses, though capable of moving the spectator, did so by making a concerted and rational appeal to the intellect. An important part of the dramatic experience was the spectator's "engagement" to tacitly condemn the wrongs he saw perpetrated on the stage against the victims of social vices. Briefly, the French theater just prior to the advent of Symbolism had become cloyingly didactic, calling for greater intellectual than emotional involvement_ The Symbolists rejected didacticism as well as the facile emotionalism generated by the problems which it studied. . Needless to say, the symbolist poet, unlike Zola or Bourget, had no utilitarian goals. Some years before, Baudelaire and Nerval had restored literature to Pascal's great void. Society comes to be looked upon as just so much diurnal cacophony, out of tune with the inner music of the "abyss." To the contemporary theater Antoine imported fresh dramatic soil from Russia, Scandinavia, and Germany with 12 1963 ANTECEDENTS OF mE AVANT-GARDE THEATER 13 which to revitalize domestic products. However, the benefit to French playwrights was limited to learning how to write more effectively about social problems. It seems logical to assume that the theatrical avant-garde was born not from the Theatre Antoine but from the "abyss." The first im~ portant task of the avant-garde was to find an effective way of piercing the opaque wall of conventionalism which obstructed the poet's perception of transcendent symbols. The playwright must learn to interpret dramatically his inward, oneiric domain. Methods of giving dramatic expression to the inner void developed through long, difficult years of experimentation and are, indeed, still perhaps only in the preliminary stages. It is our contention that, as yet, sufficient due. has not been given Mallarme for his role in not only detecting wherein the contemporary theater did not correspond to the needs and manifestations of a reality that was becoming more relativistic with every new scientific discovery, but also for that of suggesting an esthetic framework within which the theater of the·future could be set. Though, doubtlessly, Artaud has provided the definitive "art poetique" for the moderns, one canriot discount Mallarme as a distant prophet of the new theater. A choreography of L'Apres-midi d'un Faune and Herodias was the nearest Mallarme ever approached to the formal stage. However, during a certain period of his life he attended the theater quite frequently and it is thanks to this interest as a spectator that we owe his Crayonne au Theatre.1 His observations are couched in the usual elliptical and opaque style, but by persevering one finds substance that provides a dearer insight as to the goals and procedure of the modern stage. Mallarme begins his remarks by deploring a theater that endeavors to fill up a magnificent void "avec de mediocres representations."1 The...