Luminous Writing, Embodiment, and Modern Drama: Mme Blavatsky and Bertolt Brecht

Luminous Writing, Embodiment, and Modern Drama: Mme Blavatsky and Bertolt Brecht SUE-ELLEN CASE In the fall of 1875, Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, accessed the Astral Light for her writing. Mme Blavatsky was beginning the first volume of her erudite and complex work on the occult sciences entitled Isis Unveiled. Writing in Ithaca, New York, at the home of Hiram Corson, a professor of English at Cornell University, Mme Blavatsky produced twentyfive pages a day. Professor Corson reported that she was quoting long verbatim paragraphs from dozens of books of which I am perfectly certain there were no copies at that time in America, translating easily from several languages [...J. She herself told me that she wrote them downas they appeared in hereyes on another plane of objective existence, that she clearly saw the page of the book, and the quotation she needed [...J. (qtd. in Cranston 154) The Astral Light provided a luminous text base for Mme Blavatsky roughly a century before the digital script of the Internet began to appear to many others . Although Mme Blavatsky put the astral script to the use of print, she perceived it as a source of knowledge, accurate and sustained by physical and psychic properties "beyond" those practiced within print culture. Moreover, this fund of knowledge, like the World Wide Web of electronic technology, could be accessed from anywhere, including Ithaca, to be written into rigorous and scholarly accounts, without the warranty that print culture, or actual books, were constituted as bestowing. Even a professor of English at Cornell could be convinced of an astral accuracy that did not reside in a local print library. It could be said that Mme Blavatsky revealed a worldwide web of information outside of modem modes of production and access,l Mme Blavatsky's perception of the astral source did not appear to her as part of a "new" or "modem" regime, as the digital script announces itself to be; instead, her access to the luminous source renewed encounters with the Modern Drama, 43 (Winter 2000) 567 568 SUE-ELLEN CASE ancient and eternal. The "modem," in Mme Blavatsky's day, and perhaps lingering on in ours, had to do with Western incursions into the Asian subcontinent through partnerships among Christian missionaries and colonial agents. Mme Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society, against the tide of this "modem ," pursued an access to the indigenous ancient scripts, and, for that pursuit, were honored by many, including the fourteenth Dalai Lama, for reviving access to texts that Christianity sought to overwrite (Cranston 85). Mme Blavatsky revealed how ancient texts and practices, deemed superstitious and detrimental to the processes of modernization, could be perceived as accurate and useful. The ancient figures of mantras and hieroglyphs were set against the emerging, arcane symbols of physics. Of course, Mme Blavatsky was also a part of her times in staking these claims in the ancient. Other Russian artists and cultural thinkers were embracing exotic images of ancient worlds and earlier so-called primitive societies, such as Goncharov3. In fact, there was even a movement called "the Wanderers," whose members, like Mme Blavatsky, sought ancient truths through nomadic practices. Yet, in so doing, this Russian movement was pulling away from Western European modernist tendencies, resisting the rise of science and the "modem." As Alexandre Benois put it, For us the world - despite triumphant Americanism, railroads, telegraphs, telephones , allihis modern brutality and vulgarity, all this despicable transformation of the earth - for us the world still contains great charm and promise. (qtd. in Bowlt 60) The image and influence of Mme Blavatsky, from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth, helps to organize the tension between a sense of the modern and an impulse toward the ancient that has accompanied the development of "new" technologies and imperialist dreams. This tension around the technological claim of the "new" and the indigenous association with the "ancient" has generated conflicting social,epistemological, and performative claims that continue to proceed into the twenty-first century. By setting the familiar figures of Mme Blavatsky and Bertolt Brecht against one another, we can character-ize this tension, animating the competing practices of scripting, embodiment, and performance as they partner...