Bicycles and Balloons in Arrabal's Dramatic Structure

BICYCLES AND BALLOONS IN ARRABAL'S DRAMATIC STRUCTURE FERNANDO ARRABAL" IN DESCRIBING HIS more recent theater as a ceremonie ((panique" provides a valuable clue for understanding his earlier works. For this young Spanish playwright, who is better known in France than in his own country, theater is a rigorously ordered ceremony wherein it is indispensable that, beneath an apparent disorder , the presentation be a model of precision, in order that the chaotic confusion of life may be reflected with mathematical clarity.! Such concern for precision, though achieving its purest expression in the «Thedtre jJanique/' is manif~stly evident in a 1958 work, not included in the «panique" and largely ignored by critics, La Bicyclette du Condamne.2 In this one-act piece, the playwright achieves order within chaos by virtue of a circular structure which encompasses even the stage properties and goes far beyond the paradoxical juxtaposition of love-cruelty, goodness-evil, child-man usually mentioned as basic characteristics of Arrabal's work. The circle, per se" is the geometric form endowed with the greatest potentiality for confusion, since it lacks beginning, middle, and end. Thus, it has since antiquity been used to symbolize man's most complex philosophical concepts, such as those by which the sun and fortune become identified with a wheel and the moon with woman, the seasonal changes are ritually reenacted in circle dances, and life itself is conceptualized as an inexplicable cycle. Yet, despite this apparent confusion as to poin,t of origin and finality of the form itself, the very use of the circle to symbolize and therefore clarify the unknown implies its aptitude as an ordering form. As dramatic structure, the circle is eminently appropriate to contemporary theater, for it aptly parallels modern man's effort to extricate himself from the chaos left by the dissolution of traditional values -a chaos no less terrifying than that confronted by primitive man. The inevitable result of such circular structure, however, is to leave the spectator in a quandary as to those elements which are missing from the circle itself-beginning, middle, end. Therefore, the staged action seems to be devoid of reason for being, of action itself, and of resolution. Thus, in Arrabal's play of La Bicyclette du Condamne, the audience is h~rd put to know: Who is the condemned man? What 1 Theatre IV (Paris, 1967), p. 189. 2 Tlufatre II (Paris, 1961). 205 206 MODERN DRAMA September is his crime? Who has condemned him? What will be the ultimate result of his punishment? Even were the play's elements to be reduced to pure interaction, without recourse to dialogue (as is actually the case in many of this writer's later Upanique" works), a distinct circularity would be pervasive, not only as evidenced by the almost countless entrances and exits of personages, but also by all of the stage properties which have such an important function throughout Arrabal's work. Critics are quick to point out several curious juxtapositions which typify the work of this playwright, among them the childlike mentality of sexually mature individuals, the sadistic cruelty of morally innocent creatures, the castigating actions of the victim. More than merely paradoxical juxtapositions, however, these dichotomies constitute the by-products of a circular str.ucture whose significance lies in the playwright's announced intention to portray with clarity the chaos of man's existence. At times, this structure will define the confused configurations of organized justice and religion, at other times the violent bestiality of love, and at others the inane impersonality of war. Here, in La Bicyclette du Condamne, the structure conveys the inchoate identification between freedom and condemnation. It is by means of a systematic analysis of the circular structure in Arrabal's work that meaning will become clear in this and other pieces which at first glance may appear to be meaningless games. It is also by virtue of understanding this dramatic structure that the critic can avoid the contention that Arrabal is "more a visionary than a dramatist" who should move in the direction of "the creation of a series of evermoving tableaux," since the static quality does not suit his work.3 Neither tableaux nor the...