"Panic Theatre": Arrabal's Mythic Baroque

"PANIC THEATRE": ARRABAL'S MYTHIC BAROQUE Kenneth S. White Fernando Arrabal pointedly restated and justified his predilection for baroque writing in 1969, meanwhile denouncing the undue bareness of "objectai" literature: "Profusion and austerity combine, are married admirably in the baroque, that is why I prefer it to so-called 'objectai' literature, which . . . appears to me a dangerous temptation toward outmoded impoverishment in objectivity."1 An irreducible core of Arrabal's plays and a root of their "austerity" is the theme of reality's totalitarian repressiveness versus theatricalized dreams of Youth in Eden. This deeply imbedded tension can be traced to the author's precocious terrors and sense of alienation formed in Franco's Spain. Born in Melilla, in former Spanish Morocco, in 1932, Arrabal moved to the mainland of Spain as a young boy. With one of his first plays (composed in Spanish) Arrabal won a scholarship enabling him to go to Paris in 1955. Since then, he has refused to go back to Spain, except for one injudicious trip in 1967, which led to two months in a Spanish prison. Written or adapted in French since 1955, Arrabal's plays have been performed widely in Germany, England, Poland, Italy, Scandinavia, South America, Australia, the United States, and elsewhere. They have been translated into more than twenty languages.2 Integrated profusion, says Arrabal, is his instinctive theatrical mode of combining phantasmagoric perceptions in new forms of drama comparable to an opera mundi: I dream of a theatre where humor and poetry, panic and love would all be one. The theatrical rite would then be changed into an opera mundi like Don Quixote's fantasms, Alice in Wonderland's nightmares, K.'s delirium , if not the humanoid reveries which haunt the nights of an IBM machine.8 Peering unwarily into Arrabal's all-seeing kaleidoscope involves risks. It may, in fact, deform our optical accuracy if we purport to examine his drama sua generis. Does this potpourri of fashionable ingredients produce a tasty, albeit intricate, savor? If not, what "profusion" has Arrabal really concocted? In what ways have they coalesced, creating a new species of contemporary baroque drama? Arrabal has insisted that baroque deformation is indispensable in his esthetics: "I refuse to imagine reality without the phantasms, the monstrosities, 1Arrabal, in an interview with Alain Schifres, Entretiens avec Arrabal (Paris: Belfond, 1969), p. 62. WéaÜtés, no. 252 (janvier 1967), p. 55. "Arrabal, dust jacket, Théâtre panique (Paris: Bourgois, 1967). Arrabal's Mythic Baroque99 the distortions of the baroque."* Once more, a critical hurdle appears, inescapable . Though Arrabal may seem at first to proliferate wild fantasies, monstrous characters, and outlandishness in his plays, are the metaphorical impetus and coherence of a present-day baroque actually centered in deformity , grotesquerie, and analogies linking the human and the monstrous? Or does this new baroque necessarily have foundations which support more extension, more subtle shapes? Like many experimental, radically upsetting dramatists, Arrabal has engendered for the stage an unmistakably egocentric and inimitable world. At times it seems almost hermetic. Little by little, he has nourished it and enlarged it. Considering his plays as a corpus, one can classify the Arrabaldian universeby extracting eleven primary features: 1.A half-dreamed, half-mythical realm of youthful reverie, sometimes childish; a sort of playful quasi-paradise where children's naughty games turn into handcuffed and chained torture, even to unrepentant murder. 2.Unexplained co-existence of nostalgic, simple-minded childlikeness with adult ambiguities. (A mother-fixated hero, with tendencies to misogyny , is prototypical of this double nature. ) 3.Obsessive tension of victims confronting torturers, dramatized mythically . 4.Rapprochement of mirth and fright; similarly, grotesque to-and-fro swings of opposite emotions. 5.Role-multiplying or androgynous characters. 6.The police-state metaphor: inquisition, torture, despair, violent death, betrayal of one family member by another. 7.Inverted Christianity, mystic emblems, blasphemy, erotic sensationalism , bizarre ceremonies and rituals, alliance of wild eroticism and death; simultaneity of devout and sacrilegious motifs. 8.Fundamental counterpoint of illusions within illusions. 9.An impetuous, sometimes patchy style; an uneven, coursing, or savage dramatic rhythm dependent on extravagant shock effects. 10.Outlandish visual imagery: dwarfs, giants, hunchbacks, huge balloons, a robot...