Arthur Adamov and Invaded Man

ARTHUR ADAMOV AND INVADED MAN ARTHUR ADAMOV'S CRITICS are in general agreement that his early plays (those included in Theatre, Vols. 1 and 2)1 are in many ways the direct result of his effort at what Leonard C. Pronko calls "an exorcism of private terrors:'2 In his self-revelatory work, L'Aveu, a portion of which is translated into English, Adamov admits that by expressing his neurosis he exorcises himself.s As a result of L'Aveu the dimensions and motifs of Adamov's "disease" are well known and we see these contents gaining expression in his plays. Martin Esslin in his book, The Theatre of the Abs'u.rd,· has given a lengthy review of L'Aveu together with helpful insights as to some of the relationships between Adamov's neurosis and his activity as a playwright . I do not propose to recapitulate this review. Rather, I want to point up what are for me some interesting expressions of Adamov's neurosis and insight which I find in his second play, L']nvasion. Immediately following the Second World War Adamov became editor of the short-lived literary magazine, L'Heure Nouvelle. In the first issue he included an article, entitled "Une Fin et un Commencement," in which he said: From whatever point.he starts, whatever path he follows, mod~ em man comes to the same conclusion: behind its visible appearances , life hides a meaning that is eternally inaccessible to penetration by the spirit that seeks for its discovery, caught in the dilemma of being aware that it is impossible to find it, and yet also impossible to renounce the hopeless quest.1I In Adamov's view the impossibility of either fulfilment or abandonment of this quest describes the tragic situation of man. This conceptualization of modem man's plight had been given concrete expression in the earlier L'Aveu in reference to himself. There we find: 1 Arthur Adamov, Theatre (Paris, 1953), Vol. 1; Arthur Adamov, Thet1tre (Paris, 1955), Vol. 2. Z Leonard C. Pronko, Avant-Garde: The Experimental Theatre in France (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962), p. 131. S Arthur Adamov, "The Endless Humiliation," Evergreen Review, Vol. 2, No.8, Spring 1959 (Translated by Richard Howard), p. 64. 4,·Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Garden City, N. Y., 1961), pp. 47ff. II Quoted in Esslin, op. cit. 399 400 MODERN DRAMA February Hence it is only too obvious that the sickness binding me is governed by guilt, the consciousness of a fault, and that this fault is related to the mystery of sex.... There is no escape; I must expiate a fault which seems to have fallen on my very flesh. But the flesh is only a link in the endless chain of realities symbolizing each other. We must discover what is hidden behind the last of such symbols. The overwhelming evidence must become apparent to all eyes: This fault is not ultimately my fault, it transcends me, greater than even the sickness within me. I want to make this truth contagious, virulent: every private fault, every individual guilt, whether the guilty person IS conscious of it or not, tran- . scends the individual to identify itself with the fault of all men everywhere and forever-the great original prevarication which is named Separation. (In the word fault there is on the one hand the sense of failure and on the other the sense of falling. Fault is thus absence and fall, which are precisely the terrible aspects of Separation.)6 Thus we see that even in 1939 (the date of this portion of L'Aveu) Adamov was not only aware of his own deep alienation but was able to place his personal experience into a universalistic framework in which all men are guilty and hence separated. The problem is: separated from what? To this question which he addressed to himself, Adamov wrote: I do not know. All I know is that I am suffering, and that if I am suffering it is because at the source of myself there is mutiIiation , separation. I do not know what name to give! what I am separated from, but I am separated from it. Once it...