Narrating the Past through Theatre

Four Crucial Texts

M. Bennett

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781137275417
• eBook ISBN: 9781137275424
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

This cutting-edge title explores how narrating the past both conflicts and creates an interesting relationship with drama's 'continuing present' that arcs towards an unpredictable future. Theatre both brings the past alive and also fixes it, but through the performance process, allowing the past to be molded for future (not-yet-existent) audiences.

1

Danton’s Memory*: Structural Impossibilities in Büchner’s Danton’s Death

Abstract: Chapter 1 examines how Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death invokes the workings of history and memory to create a narrative of suffocation, where the desires of narrating the past smash up against the “continuing present (that arcs toward an unpredictable future)” of drama. In effect, Danton’s Death is a lamentation on unrealized possibilities and lost opportunities, and the very contradictory nature of dramatizing the past reinforces these almost oxymoronic abstractions. The effectual and ineffectual functions of memory (and it will become the dream for Strindberg many years later) that collapse the past and hopes for the future into a precarious present are exposed only to be forgotten and taken to the grave with the death of Danton. For Büchner, in Danton’s Death, the failure to remember—that is, the failure of memory and the failure of history to remember—becomes the failure to seize an opportunity; or in another sense, past unrealized hopes for the future become the future’s desire for its present.

Bennett, Y. Michael. Narrating the Past through Theatre: Four Crucial Texts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137275424.

Nothing was fixed, nothing was settled, nothing was permanent; everything was, as they say in financial circles, to come due this month, or to come due next month. It was a time when kings lasted three months, books an hour, plays half an evening, and constitutions fifteen days. The scene shifted constantly, the nation lived in tents, and as we were part of the nation, we followed the trend.

—Abraham-Joseph Bénard Fleury ¹

I’ve heard of a sickness that makes one lose one’s memory. Death, they say, is like that. Then, I hope sometimes that death would be ever stronger and make one lose everything. If only that were so! Then I’d run like a Christian to save my enemy—that is, my memory. This place is supposed to be safe. Maybe for my memory, but not for me—the grave would be safer. At least it would make me forget. It would kill my memory here, but back there my memory lives on and kills me.

—Danton, in Danton’s Death ²

What Dubravka Knezevic has called “arguably the best historical play ever written,” Danton’s Death, by Georg Büchner, dramatizes the downfall and subsequent execution of Georges Danton during the French Revolution and Terror.³ Danton was the real-life head of the Committee of Public Safety, and when he later became the president of the Convention, Robespierre took over his old position as the head of the Committee of Public Safety. Once the power over executions was granted to the Committee of Public Safety, Robespierre had Danton executed, effectively eliminating all of his major political rivals. Written in 1835 by the twenty-one-year-old Georg Büchner, the composition of the play situates itself in a precarious position in history and also in the history of drama. Many scholars, now, view Büchner as the first modern dramatist. Though his worked remained largely unknown, and was not produced for quite some time after his death (therefore, his influence was very limited), with Danton’s Death, Büchner’s first play, the first “modern” play, was a historical drama. However specific the historicity of the play, in contrast to the clear framework and lines of conflict of melodrama, but more specifically, here, the anticipation of Romanticism by the Sturm und Drang writers, Büchner’s work signals the blurring of dramatic frame and conflict, creating liminal lines (something not really taken up again until Henrik Ibsen, a bit, but not really seen overtly until the work of August Strindberg and Oscar Wilde’s Salome). Thus, in a sense, it took a historical work to change the way drama narrativized. Writing in 1835, and very politically active himself, Büchner and his work sat in anticipation of the Industrial Revolution and Marx, and looked back upon the French Revolution.

In this chapter, I examine how Georg Büchner, in Danton’s Death, narrative of suffocation through the invokcation of history and memory.⁴ The desires to narrate finds itself confronting the “continuing present” of drama. Danton’s Death creates a synchronic and diachronic tense of always.⁵ Lamenting the unrealized possibilities and the lost opportunities, Büchner discusses the effectual and ineffectual functions of memory. Memories, Büchner suggests, collapse the past and the hopes for the future into a precarious present. However, memories are also exposed only to be forgotten and taken to Danton’s grave. The failure to remember in this play is equivalent to the failure to seize an opportunity.. Initially, Danton’s memory and remembrance of history allows him to seize all opportunities. Later, however, Danton still remembers, and his memories are killing him, not because he cannot act on them but because he can no longer convey (or translate, rather) those same messages as effectively as another: Robespierre. Danton and Robespierre remember history very differently. What happens to Danton, in effect, is that, for a short time, Robespierre’s translation of history is more favorable to others than Danton’s translation of the same events. Danton becomes one of the first theorists of the linguistic turn. Danton realizes that the mistakes of the past cannot save the present, for we only know the past, and therefore the structure of the present, by way of a faulty translation. Action that is taken is based on misinterpretation and, therefore, nothing happens and nothing ever changes. In creating a historical drama that is structurally plagued by impossibility, Büchner sets up a cruel joke of contradictions and “empty noise,” and created the ominous path where nobody can escape the terrors of a bad translation:

Actually, the whole affair makes me laugh. There’s a feeling of permanence in me which says that tomorrow will be the same as today, and the day after and all the days to come will be alike. It’s all a lot of empty noise. They want to scare me. They won’t dare.⁶

The fact that Büchner chose drama as the genre of the story is quite telling, as well.⁷ Only a few months after the composition of Danton’s Death, Büchner dabbled in prose fiction, writing the prose fragment, Lenz. His choice of genre, drama, reinforces the plague of memory. Intended to come to life and have a physical and material reality of its own on stage, the realities of the stage dictate that memories necessarily die, and that the actors suffer to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, so that every performance is (essentially) the same as the previous one. Danton is sentenced to eternal death by guillotine, and the knowledge gained by the actors must necessarily be forgotten once the play begins again the next night:

If there is a hero in this prose drama of the prosaic relations in the fourth year of the French Revolution, then it is the guillotine made sacred by the Jacobins. The guillotine functions simultaneously as metaphor and metonymy. It is a metaphor because in the moment of decapitation the sovereignty of the people is shown in action. It is metonymy because this moment cannot be maintained but constantly demands new moments, new beheadings.⁸

This embodied confusion of tropes plays into a genre that only reifies the ideas that Büchner explores and gives them a similar physical reality. In a play where history hinges on the constant juxtaposition of metonymy and metaphor, humans cannot neatly embody both the trope of metaphor and the trope of metonymy in the body of the actor. The character, then, becomes structurally and logically impossible and is in dire need of a topological translation.

The card game

The insufferable repetition of death and despair thematically opens the play with a game of cards. Flirting with a woman at the card table, by “plott[ing] an affair with the queen,” Hérault, a deputy of the National Convention, turns the physical action of a card game into a sexual advance: “The kings and queens fall on top of each other so indecently and the jacks pop up right after.”⁹ The stacking of the cards, however, not only mirror the physical nature of procreation and birth but also ominously point out the continual “fall” of kings and queens: the indecent, possibly early or treacherous fall of the kings and queens are followed by the rise of more than one jack, vying for power and the throne. This drama, played out with the flick of the cards, only lasts until the cards are reshuffled, and then the same drama can be played over again. The fall of kings and queens is left, somewhat, to chance. However, “it costs money.”¹⁰ And to get into this drama, to participate in this rise and fall requires a price: some win and some lose. But there is always a winner, and always a loser. And the cards do not care that previous winners come out losers in the end. The cards have no memory.

Each card player, however, is very aware of the object of the game and remembers each win and loss. As Robespierre says about plotting the fall of Danton, a rival “jack,” who in Robespierre’s eyes is waiting to pop up and become the “king”: “The sin is in our thoughts. Whether thought becomes action, whether the body carries it out—that is pure chance.”¹¹ But to Danton, there is even less agency than that, and there is very little that we can do about it: “Time loses us,” Danton says. We are merely direct objects. We cannot act, but are acted upon, and therefore, n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Modern Drama and the Translation of History’s Narratives
• 1  Danton’s Memory: Structural Impossibilities in Büchner’s Danton’s Death
• 2  Salome’s Tale—Iokanaan’s Telling— Wilde’s Retelling: Historical Relativity and (Un)specificity in Wilde’s Salome
• 3  Galileo’s Narrative: Translating History’s “Conditions” in Brecht’s Life of Galileo
• Conclusion: For All Seasons—The Particulars and the Universals of Man in Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons
• Bibliography
• Index