There is a mysterious identity
of essence between the principle of the theater and that of alchemy.
For like alchemy, the theater, considered from the point of view of
its deepest principle, is developed from a certain number of fundamentals
which are the same for all the arts and which aim on the spiritual
and imaginary level at an efficacity analogous to the process which
in the physical world actually turns all matter into gold. But there
is a still deeper resemblance between the theater and alchemy, one
which leads much further metaphysically. It is that alchemy and the
theater are so to speak virtual arts, and do not carry their end-or
their reality within themselves.
Where alchemy, through
its symbols, is the spiritual Double of an operation which functions
only on the level of real matter, the theater must also be considered
as the Double, not of this direct, everyday reality of which it is
gradually being reduced to a mere inert replica -as empty as it is
sugarcoated -but of another archetypal and dangerous reality, a reality
of which the Principles, like dolphins, once they have shown their
heads, hurry to dive back into the obscurity of the deep.
For this reality is not human but inhuman,
and man with his customs and his character counts for very little
in it. Perhaps even man's head would not be left to him if he were
to confide himself to this reality-and even so it would have to be
an absolutely stripped, malleable, and organic head, in which just
enough formal matter would remain so that the principles might exert
their effects within it in a completely physical way.
Before going further, let us consider
the curious predilection for the theatrical vocabulary of all books
dealing with alchemical subjects, as if their authors had sensed from
the beginning all that was representative, i.e., theatrical,
in the whole series of symbols by means of which the Great
Work is to be realized spiritually, while waiting for it to be realized
actually and materially, as well as in the digressions and errors
of the ill-informed mind among these operations, in the almost "dialectical"
sequence of all the aberrations, phantasms, mirages, and hallucinations
which those who attempt to perform these operations by purely
human means cannot fail to encounter.
All true alchemists know
that the alchemical symbol is a mirage as the theater is a mirage.
And this perpetual allusion to the materials and the principle of
the theater found in almost all alchemical books should be understood
as the expression of an identity (of which alchemists are extremely
aware) existing between the world in which the characters, objects,
images, and in a general way all that constitutes the virtual
reality of the theater develops, and the purely fictitious and
illusory world in which the symbols of alchemy are evolved.
These symbols, which indicate what might
be called philosophical states of matter, already start the mind on
its way toward that fiery purification, that unification and that
emaciation (in a horribly simplified and pure sense) of the natural
molecules; on its way toward that operation which permits, by sheer
force of destructive analysis, the reconception and re-constitution
of solids according that equilibrium of spiritual descent by which
they ultimately become gold again. It is not sufficiently understood
how much the material symbolism used to designate this mysterious
operation corresponds to a parallel symbolism in the mind, a deployment
of ideas and appearances by which all that is theatrical in the theater
is designated and can be distinguished philosophically.
Let me explain. Perhaps it has already
been understood that the genre of theater to which I refer has nothing
to do with the kind of realistic, social theater which changes with
each historical period and in which the ideas that animated the theater
at its origin can no longer be discerned except as caricatures of
gestures, unrecognizable because their intention has changed so greatly.
Like words themselves, the ideas of the archetypal, primitive theater
have in time ceased to generate an image, and instead of being a means
of expansion are only an impasse, a mausoleum of the mind.
Perhaps before proceeding further I shall
be asked to define what I mean by the archetypal, primitive theater.
And we shall thereby approach the very heart of the matter.
If in fact we raise the question of the
origins and raison d'etre (or primordial necessity) of the
theater, we find, metaphysically, the materialization or rather the
exteriorization of a kind of essential drama which would contain,
in a manner at once manifold and unique, the essential principles
of all drama, already disposed and divided, not
so much as to lose their character as principles, but enough to comprise,
in a substantial and active fashion (i.e., resonantly), an infinite
perspective of conflicts. To analyze such a drama philosophically
is impossible; only poetically and by seizing upon what is communicative
and magnetic in the principles of all the arts can we, by shapes,
sounds, music, and volumes, evoke, passing by way of all natural resemblances
of images and affinities to each other not the primordial directions
of the mind, which our excessive logical intellectualism would reduce
to merely useless schemata, but states of an acuteness so intense
and so absolute that we sense, beyond the tremors of all music and
form, the underlying menace of a chaos as decisive as it is dangerous.
And this essential drama, we come to
realize, exists, and in the image of something subtler than Creation
itself, something which must be represented as the result of one Will
alone -and without conflict.
We must believe that the essential drama,
the one at the root of all the Great Mysteries, is associated with
the second phase of Creation, that of difficulty and of the Double,
that of matter and the materialization of the idea.
It seems indeed that where
simplicity and order reign, there can be no theater nor drama, and
the true theater, like poetry as well, though by other means, is born
out of a kind of organized anarchy after philosophical battles which
are the passionate aspect of these primitive unifications.
Now these conflicts which the Cosmos
in turmoil offers us in a philosophically distorted and impure manner,
alchemy offers us in all their rigorous intellectuality, since it
permits us to attain once more to the sublime, but with drama,
after a meticulous and unremitting pulverization of every insufficiently
fine, insufficiently matured form, since it follows from the very
principle of alchemy not to let the spirit take its leap until it
has passed through all the filters and foundations of existing matter,
and to redouble this labor at the incandescent edges of the future.
For it might be said that in order to merit material gold, the mind
must first prove that it was capable of the other kind, that it would
have earned it, would have attained to it, only by assenting to it,
by seeing it as a secondary symbol of the fall it must experience
in order to rediscover in solid and opaque form the expression of
light itself, of rarity, and of irreducibility.
The theatrical operation of making gold,
by the immensity of the conflicts it provokes, by the prodigious number
of forces it throws one against the other and rouses, by this appeal
to a sort of essential redistillation brimming with consequences and
surcharged with spirituality, ultimately evokes in the spirit an absolute
and abstract purity, beyond which there can be nothing, and which
can be conceived as a unique sound, defining note, caught on the wing,
the organic part of an indescribable vibration.
The Orphic Mysteries which subjugated
Plato must have possessed on the moral and psychological level something
of this definitive and transcendent aspect of the alchemical theater,
with elements of an extraordinary psychological density, and conversely
must have evoked the symbols of alchemy, which provide the spiritual
means of decanting and transfusing matter, must have evoked the passionate
and decisive transfusion of matter by mind.
We are told that the Mysteries
of Eleusis confined themselves to the mise en scene of a
certain number of moral truths. I believe instead that they must have
consisted of projections and precipitations of conflicts, indescribable
battles of principles joined from that dizzying and slippery perspective
in which every truth is lost in the realization of the inextricable
and unique fusion of the abstract and the concrete, and I think that
by the music of instruments, the combinations of colors and shapes,
of which we have lost every notion, they must have brought to a climax
that nostalgia for pure beauty of which Plato, at least once in this
world, must have found the complete, sonorous, streaming naked realization:
to resolve by conjunctions unimaginably strange to our waking minds,
to resolve or even annihilate every conflict produced by the antagonism
of matter and mind, idea and form, concrete and abstract, and to dissolve
all appearances into one unique expression which must have been the
equivalent of spiritualized gold.
Excerpt from:
The Theater and its Double
By Antonin Artaud
Translated from the French by Mary Caroline Richards
Grove Press New York
ISBN 0-8021-5030-6
