The isolate oddly awake when all the rest are (or seem) asleep. The vertigo of one who believes he has managed to contract (or deny) time. The gaze directed toward something immense in an airtight chamber, deep inside that reversed world which is the world of the underground. The joy of having played Daniel descending into the pit and returning without a wound from his dealings with the lions.
To counter the fear of the solitary waker which one will not be, one seeks various illusions. Isn’t it true that the illusion that, in its brief duration, has a chance of procuring the greatest contentment is the one through which one can amuse oneself for a moment by thinking, not only that one has symbolically passed to the other side or held at bay, if only just a little, the hostility of time, but that one has become that very same solitary being who remains in the light when all the others have been obliterated? I had, almost, the physical sensation of such a metamorphosis, one of the rare times I happened to appear on a stage; it goes without saying, however, that this transfiguration existed only for me and I am not in the least proposing that it was obvious enough to impress any one of the spectators who had gathered in the darkness of the hall.
A short time after the Liberation, a poetry matinee was presented at the Théâtre des Mathurins in memory of someone whose birth had branded him with ignominy, according to the views of certain people, and who had been one of the countless victims of a delirium bearing on the nature and destiny of a race: Max Jacob, whom the Nazis arrested as a Jew in his retreat at Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire and who died interned at Drancy. One of the theater’s directors—a great admirer as well as a great friend of Max, as were many of the writers and artists in the generation we all belonged to—asked me to introduce this matinee. Despite the repugnance I had always felt at the role of public speaker, I had no intention of refusing, because what was operating here, besides the very simple reasons having to do with my affection, was the fact that I considered it the most positive honor to pay the first public respects to the memory of such a poet, and that it also seemed to me an obligation I could not decently shirk, since it involved the person who had actually initiated me into the literary world.
What I had to do was deliver a short speech, typed text in hand, then do my share in the reading of poems and prose pieces that made up the major part of the program. I was moved—no need to stress that—and I was triply so, since in addition to what the situation contained that might give one a lump in the throat, there was also the fear that I would not be equal to my subject or would fall into what is so likely to be odious about the funeral oration as a genre, and, on top of that, the very egotistical terror of anyone stepping up onto a stage, a terror to which a novice like me laid himself open—one might well believe—more than another. The staging, as planned, was actually as reassuring as possible: I not only did not have to speak extempore or even from notes, but was quite simply supposed to read my few pages; as for Max’s works (of which the featured piece was a burlesque written in dialogue for several characters: Ne coupez pas Mademoiselle ou les Erreurs des P. T. T. [hold the line, Mademoiselle, or the telephone company’s mistakes]), they were to be read, too, not recited. I was therefore protected from the risk of getting tripped up in my speech and also from that of being stopped by a failure—always possible—of memory.
To hold sheets of paper in your two hands, when you speak in public, moreover, confers a certain bodily security in the sense that the paper to which, at least intermittently, you must turn your eyes is not merely a memory aid but a known object that you are touching and that gives you a certain poise while at the same time representing a screen that separates you from the people and, by occupying your gaze, prevents you from feeling you are face-to-face with them. To avoid that direct confrontation, I also had another barrier to rely on: the table behind which my companions and I were supposed to sit as we presented ourselves, rising only in turn when the moment came for each of us to take part, a protocol which, in short, required of the reader that he stand at various times (instead of sit) behind his wall but would not require him for an instant to be exposed on stage entirely unprotected. In the same way, the man who prepares to conjure up the demons must ask himself many questions about the efficacy of the talismans available to him and of the magic circle he will not fail to draw, a limit calculated to isolate him from the maleficent creatures from whom he has so much to fear if he does not succeed in subjugating them.
And so I trusted in the idea that the table, on the one hand, and my sheets of paper, on the other, would intervene between the spectators and me and that this twofold defense, though not enough to do away with a fear that was more than simply a performer’s stage fright, would at least be a screen shielding from public view, to a certain extent, the all-too-obvious signs of it that my body might betray. I was fairly calm when, the curtain down, we took our places behind the table, but—since I was the one upon whom it devolved to stand up and speak first—I nevertheless dreaded the moment when, the three blows having been struck and the curtain raised, I would find myself, about to suffer the initial shock of it, in front of all those faces of people sitting watching me. What would I feel then? And would I be in a condition to read my text in any other way than in a neutral voice, without any inflection that could establish between those people and me a communication certainly made more difficult by the very appurtenances that reassured me: my sheets of paper like the pages of a balance sheet, the table like a desk around which company directors or politicians hold discussions?
In the hall, as I was aware, were a number of friends and relations scattered through an audience that had to be favorably disposed, on the whole, since it had come to join spiritually with us in remembering a great poet. Yet I cannot say that this was entirely satisfactory to me. If it is already annoying to appear less than brilliant before an audience of indifferent strangers, it is all the more unpleasant when they are people who know you, because then their disappointment risks being equal to the very confidence their friendship caused them to place in you; and clearly the ordeal is even worse if there are, among your examiners—as there were among mine—individuals who have a sort of family claim to the subject of which you are speaking and are in a position to reproach you with having committed a positive impropriety in handling it as you have. My fear, on this point, rose almost to the level of a moral scruple: Wasn’t I going to pay to a deceased friend a tribute so clumsy that those who had known him for longer and had fought alongside him for a revival of art and poetry would feel I was betraying him? No doubt every single spectator—if endowed with any perspicacity at all and intent upon observing how I bore myself—could see how much I, behind my table, resembled an accused in the dock at the moment when the curtain went up.
What (for more than five years now, since the thing took place) I keep experiencing, when I think of it, as the strangest sensation is that, once the critical moment came and the stage on which we had positioned ourselves was suddenly opened to the gaze of the public, I saw nothing in front of me but the footlights. Dazzled as I was by that row of electric lightbulbs whose luminosity rose toward us, all I had in front of me was a black hole, beyond the limit thus drawn as the strict separation of two worlds: a few square meters of floor, the base of what was our own space, well defined and illuminated; then the hall, so dark that it seemed not to exist. Incapable, during the first minutes, of distinguishing even the palest spot of a face, I spoke as though at the edge of a vast cave in which I saw nothing and in which I only knew there were those who were watching me. In this world where I was blind, in no way seeing, I knew I was entirely seen—alone in the light, alone perceptible and (contradictorily) delivered from the intrusion of gazes since, of all those eyes that had to be fixed on me, I myself saw nothing. Will I invite laughter if I say that during those few minutes, speaking for a dead poet and feeling invested with a little of the radiance of his fame (as I stood on that stage, like a statue on a pedestal displayed to everyone but closed in on itself by its absenc
e of sight), I almost thought I had taken a step beyond and—like the one who “victorious twice crossed the Acheron”—no longer had to fear the assault of death?
If I were imbued more than I am with the Christian ideas that were Max’s, I would not fail, today, to accuse myself of having sinned through heartlessness and pride. Instead of thinking of that friend, victim of the frightful persecution we all know about, I was thinking, from beginning to end of the performance, of the effect I was producing, prey first to a sort of drunkenness, in the face of that black gulf where I divined the breathing of the people listening to me—then to an anxiety that, in a cooler form, reproduced my original stage fright: as by degrees, my eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness of the hall and seeing into it more clearly, the charm broke, I studied the few faces I could discern, in order to read in them whether people were approving or disapproving of me; having finished the reading of a poem, I was—I confess—chagrined not to receive as much applause as I had hoped. In short, after those minutes of glorious euphoria, having descended from my plinth, I returned to this world and fretted over the very immediate judgment that, in a narrowly limited and not very important sphere, might be passed on me by a few samples of the creatures of this world. Although I had raised myself, through an unexpected play of the light and with a dead man for support, to an illusory immortality, my blind illumination had only to come to an end and the public appear to me in its living multiplicity for me to find myself instantly engaged once again in the most futile of egotistic preoccupations. Following the ecstasy, so deceptive and so quickly dissipated, was—stripped of all disguise—the very simple fear of not having made an impression, a fear that had tormented me from the beginning and had changed into a proud exaltation when I found myself in that sort of grandiose isolation where, at the edge of a mass of indistinct beings whom I sensed only by their confused rustling, I could almost believe there no longer existed anything but me. Thus, I did not recover my limits and did not return to real life until those watching me appeared before my eyes, as though, so long as I had been watched without being able to watch anyone myself, that lack of reciprocity had extracted me from the human world and as though, placed in a position such that I could think I was refracting toward invisible eyes (eyes that were not yet judging me) a light that I absorbed entirely, I felt I was suffused with the intangibility of an idol. A mirage soon dissipated, as is necessarily the case with a mirage and, all the more so, with a mirage that occurs in that most artificial of places, on a theater stage. But even though the theater may be only a laboratory of mirages, isn’t it precisely because of the fact that here, actors and spectators (the former in the glare of the electricity, the latter in the darkness of the photographer’s camera, in which they have allowed themselves to be locked up) make such imaginary voyages to the borders between life and death that the theater fascinates us?
The theater: that place of feigned death, of death à la Charles the Fifth, and that classroom where, without chalk or blackboard, a number of lessons about this subject will have been taught to me.
When I was still a child, what I anticipated the most in an opera or play was the death of the hero (or heroes): of Romeo and Juliet, of Cyrano. To know how to die was the criterion of the great actor. Today, I am quite prepared to believe that for him this is the “hour of truth”: something reminiscent, allowing for the differences, of the estocada for the bullfighter. No way of getting out of it: if the actor does not know how to die the play loses its dignity just as the corrida is no more than a grotesque butchery if, in order to bring it to an end, too many cautious or ill-timed blows of the sword are needed. In both cases—the badly acted death or the unsuccessful killing—it seems that one has been cheated out of the most important part and it hardly matters then whether the rest was brilliant: all that stage business, those inflections, those passes of the cape or other motions that had filled one with enthusiasm fall back into the nullity of profane things; like a Mass in which the fact that the transubstantiation has not taken place becomes glaringly noticeable to the congregation. That few contemporary actors can confront the great Elizabethan slaughters without looking ridiculous may be the most obvious mark of the decadence of the theater: it no longer answers its primary purpose—to throw a bridge from our world to the other world—when the art of dying is lost.
Of course I am simplifying here (an inclination into which it is easy to let oneself slip). Many genres of theater exist that are not dramas; and there are even tragedies without death, such as Bérénice, in which nothing happens except a moral laceration. Can one say, for all that, that the pinnacles are not reached in it? I don’t think one can seriously maintain this, but it is not carrying things to extremes to affirm that death is never altogether absent when true theater is involved, whatever the appearances may be.
It is all too easy to show that a broadly comical play in which one sees men and women reduced to the state of mere puppets (whether their identity becomes uncertain because of misunderstandings, or their caricature appearance turns them into ambiguous characters, half masqueraders and half demons, like homosexuals leading their sabbaths dressed in evening gowns, or whether they become the unfortunate playthings of the intermeshing machinery of chance or of another character’s malice), a vaudeville or a farce, even a revue of naked women (with stupid gestures, plastery makeup, and tawdry finery) or simply a spectacle whose banality and poverty appear degrading—it is all too easy to show that, being in some way the negatives of tragedy—ludicrous equivalents of what is, on a serious level, the implementation of a destiny operating on human beings with moral depredation or ravages profound enough to signify a moral death—they contain that death which I consider essential to theater. One can also say that death is no stranger to classical plays constructed according to the rule of the three unities, whatever may be their subject, since their action, governed by the rhythm of the sun, develops as the day progresses and finishes in the night, like a human life shown foreshortened. Most difficult will be to include, for instance, the comedy of manners in this system, or any sort of modern comedy, unless one excludes them without qualms and denies them, on principle, the attribute of “true theater.” I would be tempted to solve the problem this way if there were not also the comedies of Shakespeare, among other examples of plays that ignore the three unities and are not light comedies or farces but could nevertheless not, without crude philistinism, be ignored.
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