From: ma-AT-panix.com
Subject: Re: Foreman
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2000 08:44:56 -0500 (EST)


Michal wrote:

> I am not sure
> about your comparison, dearest m. I pledge my ignorance--not of Foreman or
> Witkacy--but of a method of comparison.  If you may, please explain what you
> mean. If I were to say anything about Foreman ala Pologne it would have to
> be apropos Gombrowicz and not Witkacy. 

I wouldn't say that my comparison has a "method" to it; it is just that Foreman
feels to me very much the way Witkacy feels to me.  Here are some points of
similarity.  In both Witkacy and Foreman, the "locus" of the play (by this 
I mean not the overt location of the action or the overt plotline, but the
"place" in and around which are concentrated the real intensities of the play)
is an intense spiritual and emotional experimentation on the part of the
characters.  The subject of the play is this experimentation.  The characters
devise for themselves certain situations to put themselves into, and there
they stay, like Prometheus bound to the rock; all the action is signalled
_inner_ action.  There are marked differences: in Witkacy, the characters 
tend to be tortured by unquenchable ambition, will, a need to drive themselves
to some point of ultimate and perhaps unbearable intensity; in Foreman, they
appear, in comparison, almost will-less, almost passive, much more fragilely 
drawn.  But this is a difference in tenor rather than substance, if these terms
make any sense.

Another similarity is in the way elemants of the play -- actions, gestures,
words -- function within it.  Now here I feel I have a serious dearth of
linguistic tools to express what I want to say, but I'll try.  If you take 
a so-called "realistic" play, one might say that the elements which constitute 
it -- the actions, gestures, words -- are made to function in such a manner 
as to suggest a bunch of "real" characters acting in a "real" world.  Much of
this has to do with certain models of continuity which are assumed to be
characteristic of the behavior of "real people" in "real life".  Like in
film-editing for continuity, the idea is to create a feeling of "reality"
by not trespassing on any of the standard cognitive comforts that we take 
for granted in normal interactions with people and the world.

In both Foreman and Witkacy, however, the elements function in precisely 
the opposite way; they are assembled so as to create a series of cognitive 
and affective clashes, to unhinge normal expectations and create a space
of a different affective awareness and intensity.  In a sense one might say
that just as the play is "about" the affective experimentation of the
characters, so, too, does it want to be a laboratory of affective 
experimentation for the audience.  It "portrays" its subject matter in a way
similar to how a Kandinsky painting "portrays" its subject matter -- by 
a kind of emotive tracing via juxtapositions and relations of abstract 
elements.  "Abstract" is, I think, a key word here.  Or, as Witkacy put it, 
"pure form".  Pure form employed to create intensive affective assemblages.

Now it is your turn, Michale, to elaborate on your comparison with Gombrowicz.


-m


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