The self is the defining notion of post-industrial society : the watershed of modern art, literature and psychology since Picasso, Joyce and Freud, the modus operandi of contemporary society and the yardstick of its tangential pop cultures. T. S. Eliot was one of the first to actively engage a multiple and fractured self in modern poetry, beginning with “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1911/17) and its inward-directed invitation to explore painful zones of feeling and emotion, while taking care, paradoxically, to eliminate these from his poetry. This he did through what he termed the “objective correlative”, or “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” The technique was demonstrated to disturbing effect in “Prufrock”’s etherized patient and insistent coffee spoons, filling in for numbness and frustration, but opened a new poetic field whereby the self could just infuse the objective world of the poem, and in so doing, allow the artist to access a state of necessary impersonality.
These concerns lie at the core of “I Went to the House But Did Not Enter” , an intriguing hybrid piece by German director/composer Heiner Goebbels. Constructed on four thematically intersecting texts spanning the last century, the show, a “staged concert” in the now signature style of its creator (after “Eraritjaritjaka”, 2004), explores the convergent concerns of its authors to challenge the tyranny of personality and the validity of language’s attempt to master human experience. Sung a cappella with virtuoso gravity and control by the Cambridge-based Hilliard Ensemble (2 tenors, 1 countertenor, 1 baritone), these texts offer immediate applications of Eliot’s literary theories. The series of three tableaux begins with “Prufrock”, here a study in grey where the bank clerk’s objectified insignificance in the eyes of his society is forcefully rendered by the Hilliards’ efficient packing and unpacking of a drawing room’s various objects in black and white. It continues to Maurice Blanchot’s short novel “La folie du jour”, first written in 1948, as a response to the losses and terrors of war (during which Blanchot narrowly escaped execution) and a testament to the writer’s ability to live tranquilly with constant suffering (the “madness of the day”) by removing himself from experience itself. This middle section is spoken primarily by the Hilliard Ensemble and comes the closest to resembling theater, but reintroduces the objective correlative in the looming form of an architecturally British looking house facade, with illuminated interiors of four rooms. It segues next to Franz Kafka’s very brief and characteristically humorous meditation on the individual’s isolation in society, “An Excursion into the Mountains” (1912), before finishing, where it must, with Samuel Beckett and his late monologue “Worstward Ho” (1983).
Goebbels has said his interest in “staged concerts” stems from a search for “alternatives to concepts of presence and intensity, the individual and absence” and the desire to explore these with “cinematic reality” in a way that avoids emotional subjectivity. In other words, using a kind of objective correlative to arrive at an intensity of feeling in the absence of an authorial self. In Goebbel’s visual language, this can translate into settings which appear to be of no relation to the words being spoken, such as in the “Worstward Ho” tableau, placed in a plush red upholstered hotel room interior. But Goebbels reserves an ingenious surprise in the form of a “slide show” whose frozen glimpses of human life fade into footage of a running river. The still-life of “Prufrock’s” arrested anxiety becomes an affirmation of life, in Beckett’s enigmatically hopeful mantra: ”Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”.
“I Went To The House But Did Not Enter”, in English with French subtitles, Sept. 23-27, 8:30 pm, Théâtre de la Ville, 2 place du Châtelet, 4e, Mº Châtelet, 15€/26€, tel: 01.42.74.22.77.
Photo Credit: www.heinergoebbels.com
