Here it is necessary to shift the question a little and bring in poetry, magic, and, more generally, everything else that causes theater to disengage itself from reality and—as we see it prominent on the parallelepiped of the stage under day or night illumination—present itself like a dream that unfolds before our eyes without our being inserted into it. And it is this guise of objectified dream that will perhaps allow us to rediscover here, too, waiting patiently for us, death.
A dream objectified, a dream that we look at, that touches us though we are not in it—What can this be, then, if not a set of actions that are proposed to us and that we consider with a passionate interest, as we would if, extracted from our lives but remaining lucid, we could be detached from our own history and see it played out before us, transformed by the perspective inherent in our new status? Or as though others, whose lives have already passed or who are simply withdrawn from time, were enacting for us, still completely in this world, a condensed version of what has happened to them, their gestures also coming to us modified by an effect of refraction, given the difference between the states in which, respectively, we find ourselves?
It therefore seems, when all is said and done, that death—even though it is assuredly the most theatrical of events—does not need to be shown on stage or put into words in a narrative in order to haunt theater: the mere presentation of individuals in makeup and costumes moving about in the falsified reality of a stage set and inserted into a time that is not ordinary time makes the stage—providing the truth is wrenched with enough clarity, there, as often as it should be—an antechamber to that other world that one cannot help constructing when one tries to imagine death. Death, to which we are brought close by everything to do with masquerade (old clothing within which one does not find a body but the emptiness of a ghost); everything—in the realm of luxuries—reminiscent of makeup, violet, black velvet masks with lace edges, frills and furbelows like mincing additions to a kind of nudity; all simpering and grimacing, stuccos, wainscotings, daubings, embellishments, and various sorts of added-on things by means of which man removes himself from the state of nature, disguises himself or masks the implements that are his witnesses, as though to deny himself as living and perishable creature or step out of himself, become acclimatized beyond the grave and in the end dupe it, this thing called death . . .
Funeral hangings. Screens of cloud or darkness. The drapery behind which Polonius is hidden. More than beautiful settings, which flatter the eyes or create too great an illusion, a certain poverty, a certain lack (through which one merely reaches a sort of grim allusion, very much within reality)—this is what is needed, in the last analysis, if death is to bear down with all its weight on a spectacle: a destitution that is only the residue of an effort toward festivity and perhaps evokes, by its derisiveness, the final destitution one will enter at the hour of death; a fair-booth shabbiness, creating, in contrast to the fairy play, which is fantasy by excess, a fantasy by default, which is necessarily endowed by its negative nature with a sinister coloration.
The Musée de Saint-Pierre de la Martinique, devoted to vulcanology and including, among other documents relating to the eruption of Mont Pelée, a poster of Les Cloches de Corneville [the bells of Corneville], which the municipal theater presented in May 1902, when the incandescent cloud of ash was about to destroy the town. The fake red nose I thought was being worn, in the avenue Mozart more than thirty years ago, by a man dressed (I believe) in a correct black suit and who, riding on a bicycle, had injured himself by colliding with the tramway in which I happened to be. The macabre jest of those musical comedy bells elevated to the dignity of a tocsin and of that bottle-nose of blood similar to the false nose of that sort of clown whose machinations are unclear, equivocal, like those one attributes to the “kings fool,” not knowing if he is a true madman or someone “making believe.” And the terrible—though infinitesimal in its actual dimensions—make-believe of those dolls which, in 1913, on the main promenade of the Ramsgate beach, mimed an execution by hanging (the two wings of the double doors of the prison opening wide to make way for the cortege, then the trapdoor vanishing under the feet of the condemned man, a rope around his neck over the piece of black cloth covering him), this, in return for a penny, in a hall filled with penny games, the sign Admission Free posted above its entrance.
At Saint-Pierre de la Martinique—where everything has grown up again, houses as well as vegetation, on top of the ashes and lava—one can see, near the museum, the ruins of the theater, a section of wall against which has been placed, since the catastrophe, a Roman-style bust forming the support for a sort of terrace reached by several steps. Terrace or, more correctly, patch of waste ground, a garden that has returned, almost, to a state of wilderness and which one would not even think of calling a “garden” if there weren’t a statue here as is customary in public gardens.
Carved from a blackish stone that is obviously a product of the volcano, the statue rests on a wooden pedestal as though it had been put up on a packing case in a completely temporary way, to get it out of reach of the proliferating vegetation. It represents a woman of African type lying flat on her front and leaning on her two arms, her face lifted toward the sky and her naked body half upright, in the pose of a drunken bacchante catching her breath after rolling around in shameful debauchery or in a harvest of grapes. The subject is Saint-Pierre being reborn from its ruins. But another interpretation—an unofficial one—seems more valid to me: according to an old woman I questioned when I walked into this garden the second time, the statue portrays a young girl who, struck by the incandescent cloud of ash, threw herself into a body of water and thus “died twice,” because for her the pure and simple burning was followed by a scalding—an explanation which I at first thought derived from mythology but which I afterwards learned was not so very fantastic since it was in this way, apparently, that many people of Saint-Pierre perished, seeking to take refuge in pools from the insane temperature of the ash cloud and not foreseeing how burning hot their contents would become. The old woman’s account was evidently quite far from agreeing either with the declared intention of the sculptor or with the definite eroticism with which the sculpture was marked; yet shouldn’t one view this as a supreme indication of the very equivocal nature of the expression of carnal pleasure and, more generally, ecstasy—which also partakes of death—so close to the expression of sorrow insofar, perhaps, as, being disturbed things themselves, they can only be presented with ambiguous features?
The humid heat of Saint-Pierre, where one feels as though each noon the earth opened and allowed the dead to walk through the streets, one in her flowered dressing gown, another in his large hat of basketwork. The statue, of an iron gray color rather like the gray of a stone for sharpening scythes; the daughter of fire and water whom I am tempted to compare to Empusa, to Norn, or, more simply, to the she-devil, a beautiful dark-skinned creature one encounters on roads at the hour of the strongest heat and who is the Creole form of the demon of midday, leading the imprudent follower astray or hurling him into the abyss after enticing him far away from the cultivated fields, behind her capricious faun’s steps.
At Luna Park—where I was taken shortly after the installation, in the vicinity of the Jardin d’Acclimatation (with its famous little tramway), of that specimen of variety show which is to the fun fair what the Cirque d’Hiver or Médrano, permanent circuses, are to their traveling colleagues—the barker of the Labyrinth shouted out, among other proclamations intended to rally his customers: “Come and see the devil jump into his silver bathtub!” This labyrinth, which I was not allowed to visit (and I preferred that, because what I was told about it scared me very much) had no relation except the name with the sort of Tower of Babel—specifically: the truncated cone girdled with a single spiral gallery, unless it was several circular galleries in tiers—which I had seen depicted in one of the squares of a Game of Goose in which other traditional obstacles were also represented, the inn, the well and (this
last being an obstacle without remission) death symbolized by a skull close to the very end of the long spiraling ribbon of a path.
I don’t know what form the path of the Luna Park labyrinth would have taken, reproduced on a map. I only know that this path—which I always, against all likelihood, imagined to be subterranean—was punctuated by surprises: in the darkness, or at least in the half darkness, sometimes it was the ground that disappeared from under your feet, sometimes an electric shock for your groping hands; people swore that at various hours of the day an employee of the establishment made the rounds and brought back into the light of day anyone who hadn’t managed to find his way out; people even said that the authorities had had to intervene and prohibit a certain trick in rather questionable taste: a mechanism devised to make one fall down, which, in the beginning, resulted in not a few broken legs. Perhaps all that was nothing but talk or the fruit of my brain, tormented by the idea of this “labyrinth.” Nevertheless, Luna Park, despite what might have been indisputably exciting about its open-air attractions, such as the water-chute* (with its great splash-landing) or the scenic-railway* (with descents that took one’s breath away), was a place as unreassuring in spots as one might expect, given its name, which evoked trips to the moon and stupendous adventures of the sort related in the novels of Jules Verne, the comic books of the cartoonist Robida, and the filmed fantasies of Georges Méliès.
In truth, it was neither the devil jumping into his silver bathtub (handsome Mephisto in red tights on the point of diving, at the risk of breaking his horns, into a receptacle with sparkling sides and not made of zinc or covered with white canvas as at the baths to which I was taken at that time, when we lived in an old apartment without conveniences), nor the prospect of being precipitated by some trapdoor into a windowless room in the depths of which, until I was delivered by the proper authority, I could meditate on the fate of those whom our Renaissance kings caused to be thrown into secret dungeons such as I had been shown at Blois during an Easter vacation spent visiting the chateaux of the Loire valley, it wasn’t the anticipation of seeing any of those fantastic apparitions or consequences of bad practical jokes that disturbed me when, at night, in bed and about to go to sleep, I saw parading through my head everything that the light and the games or other occupations of the day had allowed me to conjure up. Rather, what came back to me from my visit to Luna Park and plunged me into an agony was, for a certain time—a time which probably did not exceed a few days but which in retrospect I am inclined to turn into weeks or months—an actual memory, the memory of a sideshow that was neither diabolical nor in the least adventurous, a mere documentary, and on the order of a diorama, consequently very different from the labyrinth, and that remained a pure spectacle whose capacity to haunt had no other basis than this: smaller than natural size but, apparently, strictly accurate, it illustrated a public calamity that had occurred in the United States at a time that was probably recent but that had receded, for me, because of the particular perspective of the stage setting, into a legendary remoteness in which time could no longer be reckoned and in which the immemorial and the immediate, imperative presence of an event were in some sense welded together and merged.
A small town in the Allegheny Mountains, with scaled-down models of houses, among which—very likely—was a church topped with its steeple and furnished with a clock. Perhaps also a sort of town hall or other municipal building. An announcer gave the public the necessary explanations. The day has ended peacefully; night has now fallen completely and one hears (as it seems to me) something like the muffled fanfare of a torchlight procession followed, after a very short interval, by the ringing of a bell marking the hour or ordering a curfew; these noises, tiny and distant, on the scale of the village itself, where everything subsides little by little. What happens next? Nothing, I think, for a time. Only the speaker, with a quite professorial gravity, holds forth. Up there, in the Alleghany Mountains, there is a mass of water held back by a dam and, while the village calmly reposes, the dam breaks. Projections undulating over the stage where the group of artificial constructions stands show the water that gradually spreads and quickly turns into a gigantic flood in which everything is submerged. While the waters came, perhaps the alarm was heard? I don’t know what happens after and whether one sees—the sun having come up again—an immense expanse of slack water, without anything there, or almost nothing, reminiscent of the village, or whether—even later—the ruined houses are revealed, their roofs and walls caved in, reduced to the state of wreckage that, after having drifted for a long time, finally takes root once the waters recede. Of this spectacle, I can’t recapture any definite detail, and I can barely, if at all, regard as such the image of the invading flood, first oozing out quite high up and almost innocently in the mountain, then descending the length of the slopes or the cleft of a valley and overrunning everything little by little. I no longer recall anything with precision, except for the inexpressible anguish aroused by this catastrophe without collision or crash unfolding as though in slow motion and muted—the tone, finally, and the rhythm too, having been established once and for all by those brasses and that bronze bell, themselves half extinguished, announcing the imminent extinction of the fires and the peace of a sleep that nothing, at that moment, gave reason to think would not be of the most ordinary kind.
An execution by slip knot, reproduced at Ramsgate in the glass box of a penny machine not larger than a dollhouse. The engulfment of a town, shown at Luna Park on the scale of a theater stage very much smaller in its dimensions than an ordinary stage. Although what is involved, here, is still a spectacle, one could not, in the case of either of these reconstructions, speak of dramatic art. No actors, no dialogue; with no setting other than a documentary one, drama in a naked state, displayed with the poorest means, the most literally reduced. Whence, perhaps, in addition to the explicit horror of the content of each of the two tableaux, that other, more insidious horror: the impression of a destiny, of a scenario staged since time out of mind and whose dry unfolding takes place mechanically, without any of the blunders—or the beauties—that human operation could introduce into it, and this within a format such that, for lack of any common measure between the thing seen and the spectator, the latter may imagine that a supernatural pedagogue is causing him to follow a lesson in pictures, from very high up and very far away.
A real hanging would have, without any doubt, horrified me even more and I would have been prey to an absolutely panic-stricken terror if I had found myself in the situation of perishing by submersion. But would either one of these conjunctures have made me experience the sort of uneasiness that, when I conjure it today, changes into such a particular anguish? Having no distance from it, and unable even to look at it, wouldn’t I simply have been horror-struck, crushed, by the intolerable violence of the event? What can the value be, in such conditions, of the experiences I am talking about if it is obvious that in order to speak of them, and even to remember them with enough lucidity, they must have been sufficiently harmless in the first place so that, living through them, I did not lose all lucidity? No doubt I am, therefore, condemned to labor away at trifles since everything of a more imposing form would, for that very reason, escape my gaze and remain confounded with the enormous, opaque mass that I must confess I will never never be capable of penetrating.
The idea of a mesh of circumstances from which one cannot escape, of a disaster preparing in the wings while one is soundly sleeping: particles of truth relating to death, which at first sight I believe I can extract from the two descriptions I have just given. One must, however, refrain from forcing events, and not take for original givens the reflections they suggest as soon as one bends over them to examine them closely. For if the distance that exists between an experience and the memory one has of it is increased not only by the distance separating such a memory from its being put down on paper but also (another type of deviation) by the separation between the memory thus described and the same memory when re
flection is applied to it, once these distances have been telescoped there is no way of restoring the situation: the memory is altered forever and no furious line deleting the passage in which one has gone astray can repair the damage thus done. No other way out, then—ceasing to slave away over minute corrections which cause no storm to rise from the streaked sky of the page but my own irritation, redoubled at each stroke of the pen—no other way out than to push my reflection further, to the point where, having at last run up against something solid (something that is no longer an idea but a compact body), I will at least have the certainty that I have not allowed what was my own possession to be diluted in abstractions.
An apparatus set in motion by the insertion of a coin; a diorama subjected to various changes, without perceptible outside intervention. In my memory, therefore, two mechanisms exist side by side, theatrical illustrations of death but both divested of human protagonists and the second, even, bringing into confrontation only some water and some houses, in the absence of any character. Two pieces of machinery, systems endowed, apparently, with a sort of personal life and consequently belonging to the disquieting world of automatons, that world which extends from the locomotive one sometimes hears whistling in the night and emitting loud sighs when it arrives in the stations, or the motorcycle (which I used to call a “pétrolette” [moped]) whose noise is the most obvious confirmation of the correctness of the term moteur à explosion [internal combustion engine; lit., explosion engine], to the diver with his spherical metal head, passing by way of the ventriloquist, a living phonograph inhabited by innumerable human voices, and the somnambulist, an automaton of flesh and blood, very closely related to the cadaver, in which, until the moment it achieves the final immobility of the skeleton, certain internal movements and unconscious transformations occur. Effects—these, too—of machinery, the relaxation that causes the dead person to “void,” the swelling of the abdomen, the intestinal gurgling, not to mention the beard and the nails that continue to grow for a certain time, are signs of that species of miserable survival by which the dead person, before being promoted to a specter who haunts, is himself haunted. If cadaverous cold and rigidity are merely deceptive appearances disguising as mannequin or statue the creature now caught up in a series of unnameable tribulations, the horror that this creature arouses must come from his ambiguous position, the quality he shares with bat, batrachian, land crab, or any other animal that one can describe as from a border region, just as the automaton, in his own way, is a hybrid of living creature and machine.
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