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Al-Ahram Weekly 23 - 29 March 2000 Issue No. 474 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 23 - 29 March 2000 Issue No. 474
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Enchanting abandon
By Nehad Selaiha
Of the many kinds of authors, the most irritating is the gifted author-critic. As a professional critic, I know of nothing more frustrating, indeed devastating, than to have my job done for me and to have it done in such a brilliant manner that makes me green with envy and forces me to begrudgingly admit that I could never surpass it. The Czech writer Milan Kundera is one of the top of this category of authors. His Introduction to a Variation, printed in the 1985 Harper and Row English edition of Jacques et son Maitre (written in Prague in 1971 and published in French 10 years later), is a masterpiece of creative critical writing. It begins in the intimate tone of a personal recollection, taking for a starting point the deep financial straits the author found himself in after the Russian occupation and subsequent banning of his books. Despite his need, he turns down an offer to do a stage adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, not as an anti-Russian reflex, but because "Dostoevsky's universe of overblown gestures, murky depths and aggressive sentimentality" repels him. By comparison, Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste (1773) seems a "feast of intelligence, humour, and fantasy" and he suddenly feels "an inexplicable pang of nostalgia" for the universe it depicts, and an instinctive need to breathe deeply of its post-Renaissance spirit.
Trying to understand his sudden aversion to Dostoevsky at the time, Kundera recalls an encounter with some Russian infantrymen in the countryside on the third day of the occupation. They stopped his car, searched it, then the officer who had ordered the search asked him without the slightest hint of malice or irony how he felt and added candidly: "You must realise we love the Czechs. We love you." The horror of this grotesque, irrational declaration of love in the midst of a ravaged countryside overrun by thousands of tanks, leads to profound insights into the danger of elevating feelings to the rank of values, criteria of truth and justifications for kinds of behaviour. Indeed, as he puts it, "the noblest of national (and, I would add, religious) sentiments stand ready to justify the greatest of horrors, and man, his breast swelling with lyric fervor, commits atrocities in the sacred name of love." In other words, "When feelings supplant rational thought, they become the basis for an absence of understanding, for intolerance; they become, as Carl Jung has put it, 'the superstructure of brutality'."
Tracing the genesis and malignant growth of this lethal "superstructure" in Western civilisation (to which it is by no means confined), Kundera arrives at the Renaissance and celebrates its "spirit of reason and doubt, of play and the relativity of human affairs." It is the spirit which informs Jacques le Fataliste, as he sees it, and puts it in the company of and on a par with such novels of true grandeur as Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Ulysses or indeed Sterne's Tristram Shandy -- Diderot's great model. The rest of the Introduction is taken up with astute reflections on the novel as an art form and its unexplored possibilities, on the differences between Tristram Shandy and Jacques le Fataliste, on the difference between making adaptations of existing texts and creating new variations on them (Diderot's novel is classed as a variation on Tristram Shandy and Kundera's play as a variation on his variation), and, finally, on the structure, or "architecture" as he calls it, of the play.
Throughout one is constantly and vividly reminded of the great Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly his two seminal books on the novel, The Dialogic Imagination and Rabelais and His World. Indeed, at certain points, Kundera seems to be echoing Bakhtin's definition of the novel as a force, "novelness", rather than a genre, and of its language as heteroglossia, or infinitely fragmented languages in battle with each other. Adopting as artistic criteria Bakhtin's concepts of the polyphonic novel (of the novel as the "maximally complete register of all social voices of the era"), of the dialogic principle which undermines the hegemony of any one single discourse, relativising and de-privileging it, making it aware of competing definitions of the same thing, and of the carnivalesque, or carnival laughter, as a liberating energy and a force which serves to subvert ossified hierarchies and stale judgements, Kundera rates Diderot's novel over its English model. Whereas "Tristram Shandy is the monologue of a single narrator... Diderot uses five narrators who interrupt one another to tell the novel's stories" (which all consist in dialogue) in the form of dialogue, so that the novel as a whole "is nothing but a big, noisy conversation." Besides, while "Sterne's book is a compromise between the spirit of freethinking and the spirit of sentimentality, a nostalgic memory of Rabelaisian revelry in the antechamber of Victorian modesty", as Kundera puts it, "Diderot's novel is an explosion of impertinent freedom without self-censorship, of eroticism without sentimental alibis."
Commenting on Bakhtin's concept of "carnival laughter", a critic once said: "You could read all of Bakhtin as an extended, dialogic footnote to Heraclitus and to his various reincarnations: Menippus, Cervantes, Sterne, Gogol, Diderot and, especially, Rabelais." And in constructing his "variation-homage" to Diderot in Jacques and His Master, Kundera was inspired by those "reincarnations" and contributing, perhaps consciously, his own extended, dialogic (and elegiac) footnote at a time when the spirit they celebrated in their works was crushed by Russian tanks, when the carnival turned bitter and masters and servants of the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza type gave way to Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky on the empty stage of the world in Waiting for Godot.
Kundera's technical description of his play cannot be bettered: "On the fragile base of the journey of Jacques and his master rest three love stories: of the master, of Jacques and of Madame de La Pommeraye. While the first two are loosely connected with the outcome of the journey, the third, which takes up the entire second act, is from the technical standpoint purely and simply an episode (unintegrated as it is into the main action); it is an obvious infringement on the laws of dramatic structure. But that was where I made my wager," he says. To unite the stories into a coherent whole while renouncing strict unity of action, he used the technique of polyphony, whereby the stories are intermingled rather than told consecutively, and the technique of variation which makes each of the three stories a variation on the others. "And so," he concludes, "this play which is a variation on Diderot is simultaneously an homage to the technique of variation, as was, seven years later, my novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting."
In the play, the technique of polyphony is obvious in the constant intrusion of one story on another, the interruption of one narrative line to accommodate another then picking it up again, and, especially, in the device of conducting two separate dialogues, belonging to two different stories, simultaneously, as in Scene 5 of Act One. And though the technique of variation is equally obvious, Kundera is careful to draw attention to it explicitly in the dialogue. In the first act, Jacques twice repeats: "Our adventures, Master, seem strangely similar," and in Act Three the Master says: "You know what I wondered yesterday evening as I listened to the story of Madame de La Pommeraye? Whether it isn't always one and the same story. After all, Madame de La Pommeraye is merely a replica of Saint-Ouen [the friend who gulled him, sneaked into the bed of his beloved Agathe, fathered her bastard son and forced him by a ruse to provide for him], while I am no more than a version of your poor friend Bigre [whom Jacques gulled, sleeping with his beloved, Justine, and giving her a child whom Bigre believes to be his own], who himself is but a counterpart of that dupe of a Marquis [the Marquis Des Arcis whom Madame de La Pommeraye tricks into marrying a whore out of revenge]. And I see no difference whatever between Justine and Agathe, and Agathe is the double of the little whore the Marquis eventually married."
Like the technique of variation, which also features as a theme in the play's structure of meaning, the question of rewriting or adapting old texts crops up in the dialogue as a theme in the Master's open references to Diderot who first conceived them as characters, equipped with horses for their journey, and to Kundera who rewrote them (albeit in a variation) in a stage play where they cannot have horses. Kundera gets a curse for his pains when the Master cries out: "Death to all who dare rewrite what has been written!... Castrate them and cut off their ears!" But then even the grand author of the book of life himself, of "what is written on high", as Jacques puts it, does not escape criticism and shafts of irreverent humour. When the Master kills his treacherous friend in a duel and Jacques is arrested in his place, Jacques cries out: "The stupidities written on high! Oh, Master, he who wrote our story on high must have been a very bad poet, the worst of bad poets, the king, the emperor of bad poets!" And when he is fortuitously saved by the sudden, deus-ex-machina-like arrival of Bigre, the friend he duped, he is overcome with laughter and exclaims: "Here I was, telling off a bad poet for being such a bad poet, and what does he do but quickly send me you to correct his bad poem. And I tell you, Bigre, even the worst of poets couldn't have come up with a more cheerful ending for his bad poem!" Indeed, the whole of history, as Jacques, the earthy philosopher, remarks at another point, is made up of bad poems, rewritten over and over so that no one knows anymore who they are or what the original poem was like.
This delightfully cheeky, refreshingly irreverent, robustly erotic, and daringly skeptical text (which is also warm-hearted, genially tolerant of human folly and sadly cognizant of the shortness of life, its underlying loneliness, many thwarted dreams and unfulfilled longings) could not have been performed in Egypt anywhere else but at Al-Hanager. Only a person of Huda Wasfi's integrity, faith and courage could have risked it, or fought as hard to defend it against the hysterical swords of the censors. It was given in a smooth, accurate and eminently actable colloquial Arabic translation by Mohamed Metwalli, sensitively and lovingly directed and designed by the prize-son of Al-Hanager and Wasfi's special protégé, the surprisingly gifted Mohamed Abul Su'ood (with his closest artistic associate Ihab Abdul Latif as executive director), and superbly acted with zestful panache and subtle finesse by the members of his Shrapnel Troupe. The talented, technically versatile and highly disciplined cast included: the dark and puckish, lithe and blithe Mohamed Farouk as Jacques; the innocent-looking, gracefully tall and willowy Hani El-Mettinawi as his Master; the smouldering, demonic, and wonderful parodist Hamada Shousha as Saint-Ouen and also, in drag, as the old prostitute in the story of Madame de La Pommeraye, the sweet Rihab Ali as both the daughter of the old prostitute and Justine with whom Jack loses his virginity; the elegant and impressive Yasmin El-Naggar as Agathe and the innkeeper who enacts the part of Madame de La Pommeraye while she tells her story, constantly slipping in and out of the part; the handsome Mohamed Nassar as le Marquis Des Arcis; the deliciously marionette-like Mohamed Abu Youssef as Agathe's father and Old Bigre; Ibrahim Ghareeb, who made the naive and credulous Young Bigre seem endearingly like a figure fresh out of a comic strip; and Ahmad Gameh who adequately doubled as the officer who arrests the Master then Jacques, and the waiter at the inn.
Abul Su'ood humbly and lovingly surrendered himself to the text, putting aside his passion for exuberant visual and sound effects, and strictly obeying the author's stage directions. He presented a stage without scenery, as Diderot had done in his novel, and Kundera instructed in his play. The costumes and minimal props were neutralized and did not indicate any particular period or specific place -- only vaguely, somewhere in France, sometime in the past. Even Kundera's division of the bare stage into two main areas, a downstage one for the action taking place in the present and a raised upstage one, in the form of a large platform, for the episodes from the past, with a staircase in the far background leading to an attic, was obeyed. In the area of acting, however, Abul Su'ood allowed himself some freedom, occasionally going against Kundera's injunction to avoid exaggeration, and injecting into the performance controlled doses of parody and caricature. One consequence was that the huge female posteriors the Master obsessively imagines and talks about kept perceptibly growing until they became grotesquely overblown, gaining metaphysical dimensions. This did not harm the play and actually helped to draw the audience into its world and bring it closer to theirs. In any case, this deeply provocative and highly enjoyable production was the best reception Kundera could have had in Egypt.
