ARRABAL’S PANIC ALLOWANCES FOR THE ABSURD

Fernando Arrabal never embraced his identification as an absurdist; yet, elements of the absurd might be detected in much of his work. His early one-act The Tricycle (Los hombres del triciclo) is said to have come in second instead of winning first prize in a 1953 Barcelona playwriting contest because the judge thought it borrowed too heavily from Samuel Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot had its Paris premiere in January that year. Having never left Spain, Arrabal had not heard of Beckett or Godot, but the judgment might lurk behind his eventual impulse to define his own approach, which he called Panic Theatre. He was spurred to hitchhike to Paris to see some theater in 1954 and then to seek a grant to study theater in France. His stay in France, unexpectedly prolonged by confinement to a sanatorium for tuberculosis, would eventually lead to friendships with Beckett, Ionesco, and other avant-garde playwrights who had gravitated to Paris. With his 1958 marriage to Luce Moreau, Arrabal made his home there and became a bilingual writer.

    Beyond any commonality among avant-garde tendencies that sprang from creative minds of the 1950s, it was Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd that initially tied Arrabal’s work in the public perception to whatever was understood by the title of that 1961 book. Indeed, Arrabal’s name was one of nine that graced the cover of that original edition, which suggests that he had already earned enough renown to enhance sales. His name was not among the ten on the cover of the 1983 Pelican paperback third edition, in which Harold Pinter had moved up to the top tier with a full chapter on his work. By 2004, Arrabal had regained a place on the new paperback cover; his photograph ranked fifth in size, after Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, and Adamov, ahead of Pinter’s, although Esslin’s commentary on Arrabal’s work had not changed since the 1969 addition of a concluding paragraph and some superficial updating in 1983. One might speculate that the cover-design-as-marketing reflects Arrabal’s status as “the most produced author of the second half of the twentieth century,” while the minimally revised coverage in the text indicates Esslin’s well-considered reticence about recasting the later plays to fit a Theatre of the Absurd construct. Arrabal’s early plays have anchored his continuing inclusion in the book’s various editions, even as his work matured to stand for its own brand of avant-gardism. An Arrabal play needs no qualifier other than his name.

    Esslin took pains to point out that the dramatists whose work he subsumed under the “absurd” rubric did “not form part of any self-proclaimed or self-conscious school or movement,” but that certain characteristics could be identified among most of them: lack of meaning or purpose, abandonment of traditional conventions of plot and character, devaluation of language as communication, grotesque or dream qualities, use of stage images or objects to convey human isolation in an uncaring universe, avoidance of didactic messaging.⁶ Esslin’s grasp of the artistic intentions of the playwrights he labeled Absurd has been challenged, with notable corrected reading of his sources by Michael Y. Bennett.⁷ Because Esslin’s legacy lingers in the public mind, it is handy to use—with qualifications—his checklist of characteristics of the absurd. Esslin characterized Arrabal’s absurdism as derived “from the fact that his characters see the human situation with uncomprehending eyes of childlike simplicity,” as well as from his emphasis on the grotesque, and in his depiction of “a universe that is both squalid and devoid of meaning.”⁸ But already in the 1969 revision, Esslin qualified his assessment as he saw Arrabal’s plays of the 1960s becoming “too self-conscious.”⁹

    Arrabal’s theater, like Theatre of the Absurd, assimilates tendencies that reflect universal anxieties and conjure associations with Alfred Jarry’s ‘Pataphysics, Tristan Tzara’s Dada, Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, and the surrealism of André Breton, Salvador Dalí, and others. Indeed, Arrabal spent nearly three years among the surrealists who gathered daily around Breton. He often played chess with Tzara, the embodiment of the Dada movement.¹⁰ He acknowledges the continuing influence of the favorite authors of his adolescence: Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lewis Carroll. And Miguel de Cervantes. He maintains a spiritual sensibility even as he rejects the dogmatism of his rigid Catholic upbringing. As a passionate and knowledgeable chess player, he is able to project quasi-mathematical patterns into his writing. But he truly came into his own with the creation of Panic Theatre.

    Panic Theatre or Le Panique, named for the Greek goat-god Pan, was the product of Arrabal’s discussions with the Chilean director Alexandro Jodorowsky and Polish-French artist Roland Topor. Beginning in 1960 the three friends met regularly at the most unlikely place for avant-gardists: the ornate Café de la Paix on the Place de l’Opéra in Paris. Their ideas about art coalesced as Panic, the name chosen in February 1962.¹¹ They conceived Panic not as a movement but as a mode of being that arises from memory and confusion, and often finds theatrical expression in games and ritual.

    Panic Theatre encompasses buffoonery, terror, the unexpected. It injects merriment into the grotesque, while the grotesque ventures intrepidly into potentially repellant—pornographic, scatological, blasphemous, violent—material. In Champagne pour tous!, Arrabal’s reconstructed conversations with Topor, his closest friend for forty years,¹² they periodically goad each other to define Panic, even twice referring to it as a movement.¹³ In the third edition of The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin quotes Arrabal on his idea of Panic Theatre:

     I dream of a theatre in which humour and poetry, panic and love would all be one. The theatrical ritual would then transform itself into an opera mundi like the fantasies of Don Quixote, the nightmares of Alice, the delirium of K., in fact the humanoid dreams which would haunt the nights of an IBM computer.¹⁴

Above or alongside the capacious umbrella of Theatre of the Absurd, there is space for Panic Theatre, and the plays Arrabal labeled “Panic” can be examined from both panic and absurd perspectives.

    What is probably most misunderstood about Arrabal’s work is that it is never his intention to shock audiences or readers with his violation of social proprieties. Arrabal has often reiterated this point to me in our conversations, as he intuits my squeamishness about aspects of his work. As early as 1972, Charles Marowitz reported from his interview with Arrabal: “He also insists that he never consciously sets out to provoke, [and he says] that ‘on the contrary, it’s me that’s very shocked at my plays’.”¹⁵ Unquestionably, some of his material is hard to take, even on the page; it is there because it arises from nightmarish aspects of his formation in childhood and it persists as liberating expression of the full range of what it is to be human with all the messiness that entails. The story of my first meeting with Arrabal in 1982 illustrates the effect of his challenging artistry. When I learned that Arrabal was to be the honored guest at a National Symposium on Spanish Theatre at the University Of Northern Iowa, I submitted a paper on Federico Garcia Lorca, which was accepted, although I was the lone theater scholar among Spanish language and literature specialists. Before I left for the conference, I assigned the graduate students in my Twentieth-Century Continental European Theatre class to read Arrabal’s First Communion (1962)¹⁶ for the following Monday. Scarcely had I returned to my office on Monday morning when a cluster of students arrived to check up on me. They had read the play and worried about me all weekend “up there with that monster.”

    In fact, the weekend had been a great enlightenment for me. Papers were given in several simultaneous sessions and Arrabal chose to attend mine (even though I gave it in English, which he professed not to understand), because he was drawn to both theater and Lorca. Afterward, I was thrilled that he spoke to me. I mentioned to him that I dreaded seeing his film Viva la muerte (Long Live Death, 1971) that evening because I can’t look at blood on the screen. He said he would not be offended if I wanted to have coffee with him instead of watching the movie. With his assurance that it was “just a tender love story,” I chose to attend the screening. Some scenes were nauseating to me. And yet! It was, in a strange way, a tender love story, an intensely human story drawn from his childhood memories, with emphasis on his father, a lieutenant in the Republican army who refused to swear allegiance to the Falangists in 1936, was arrested and condemned to death, attempted suicide, escaped from the hospital in January 1942 into deep snow, wearing only pajamas, and was never seen again. Arrabal retained only one memory of his father, Fernando Arrabal Ruiz, and it was more tactile than visual. A man’s hands gently patted sand over the legs of his little son, not yet four years old, on a sunlit beach in Melilla, Spanish Morocco, where the boy was born. In the late 1940s, Arrabal opened a box his mother had secreted and found family photographs from which his father’s face had been cut.¹⁷ Decades later, having searched relentlessly for any trace of his father, Arrabal learned from a prison document that his father’s suicide attempt on 27 July 1937 was occasioned by a devastating letter he had received that day, a letter in which his wife scathingly broke off all relations.¹⁸

    After that first meeting with Arrabal in Iowa, I read Baal Babylon (1959), the novel on which the film Viva la muerte was based, and I re-read with new understanding (and perhaps greater visceral tolerance) the play version, And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers (1969).¹⁹ When Arrabal met with the artistic staff of New Directions Theatre in Kansas City in 1986 as they prepared to stage that play, he stressed that they should not let the “provocative” aspects of the play distract from the essence: “I have not written a provocative play,” he told them.

    I don’t like provocation. I detest it. I like love. That is what is important here. What is important is the mirror of this society in this jail. Obviously the play is strong, because the problem is very strong. The life in the prison is violent. It’s a true picture. I try to describe the reality up to the extreme, the horror.”²⁰

Opening myself to the tenderness, spirituality, and resilience within the extremes of obscenity, sordidness, and depravity definitely steeled me for later years when I assigned The Body-Builder’s Book of Love (1986)²¹ as Arrabal’s representative play in the twentieth-century theater course.

    One further autobiographical influence on Arrabal’s plays, one that pertains directly to And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers, should be noted before zeroing in on the potentially absurd elements in his canon. On 21 July 1967, during a visit to Spain, Arrabal was arrested in the night and taken to prison, without explanation or access to a lawyer. Held in the horrifying conditions at Carabanchel prison until 14 August, he felt close to the father he had scarcely known. His concern for other prisoners’ plights, their long years of imprisonment for vague offenses, would push him toward speaking out politically and allowing a new political dimension in his writing. While he awaited trial, the Spanish government was flooded with letters from major writers, including Samuel Beckett, Jean Anouilh, Eugène Ionesco, François Mauriac, Octavio Paz, Günter Grass, and Peter Weiss. The charge was “blasphemy and insulting the Spanish nation” for an inscription he had written at a book-signing.²² Given the international visibility of the situation, the court scrambled to reinterpret Arrabal’s handwriting so that la Patria referred not to Spain but to La Patra, the nickname of Arrabal’s cat Cleopatra.²³ He was acquitted.

    The possible claim to the aesthetic of the absurd in And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers (Et ils passèrent des menottes aux fleurs, 1969) is the focus on humankind’s helplessness in an uncaring universe. The grotesque aspects of the play are not the playful exaggerations of other absurdists but the reality of what happens to the psyche under the demeaning treatment Arrabal experienced and observed among prisoners without recourse in a penal system run by a monolithic state. The four prisoners in the play perform their dreams, nightmares, and memories. Seeking hope in the news that filtered in about man’s landing on the moon, Amiel poetically regards the Age of Aquarius as a new Eden and even imagines: “In the future you’ll be able to marry several people at a time—a woman, the moon, and two men. Or even homosexual marriages.”²⁴ His remembered love scenes with Lelia²⁵ offer rare respites from the scatology, blasphemy, cannibalism, violence, and depraved eroticism that dominate the play’s imagery as well as action. Autobiographical elements are most pronounced when prisoner Tosan is allowed a fleeting conversation through metal screens with his wife Falidia, echoing Luce Arrabal’s difficulties in getting through to Arrabal during his imprisonment.²⁶ This is juxtaposed with the first of two scenes between Katar and his wife Drima,²⁷ which closely correspond to accounts of how Arrabal’s mother behaved cruelly toward her husband after his arrest. The scene in which she defecates on him parallels a sequence in the movie Long Live Death.

    Granted, the Theatre of the Absurd is an elastic concept (as indicated by the range of writers included in Esslin’s Theatre of the Absurd), one can find ways to tie aspects of Arrabal’s hundred or so plays loosely to some of the concept’s characteristics. The early one-acts feature the most identifiably absurd elements and may be exemplified by Picnic on the Battlefield (Pique-nique en campagne), originally titled Los soldados(The Soldiers), which was published in 1952 and premiered in Paris in 1959. Absurdism’s sense of purposelessness underlies the detached attitude of the soldier Zapo as well as of his parents who arrive at his battle station with picnic baskets, and it is verbalized in the dialogue of the enemy soldier Zépo, who doesn’t know why he is their enemy.²⁸ The parents regard fighting a war as if it were a game: “Did you make a good score?”²⁹ Zapo and Zépo are dressed identically but in different colors, and they recall similar circumstances leading up to their becoming soldiers. Their interchangeability fits the Absurd’s abandonment of traditional concepts of character. While Arrabal has always valued words and has a poet’s sensibility in his use of language, the Absurd’s devaluation of language as communication might be exemplified in the repetition of dialogue sequences, as if the characters cannot remember having already spoken those words. For example, the father asks Zapo: “Which are you best at shooting, enemy horses or soldiers?” Zapo replies: “No, not horses, there aren’t any horses any more.” Later, the father and Zépo repeat the same words.³⁰ During one of the periodic bombing sequences with “deafening noise” and exploding shells, the parents merely open an umbrella and stand under it—a case of an object divorced from its usual purpose, like Lucky’s hat in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or the clock in Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. Two stretcher bearers come through, looking for corpses, concerned about their captain’s response if they return with no dead or wounded. As they leave, the father obligingly assures them, “Don’t worry! If we find a dead man we’ll keep him for you.”³¹ After the foursome chats about how they might stop the war by expressing their own lack of interest in it to those in charge, the mother puts a record on the portable record-player she brought. The parents and two soldiers get so caught up in dancing that they don’t hear the resumed battle sounds. All four are mowed down by machine-gun fire. The stretcher bearers return, presumably gratified to find corpses.

    The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria (L’Architecte et l’Empereur d’Assyrie, 1967) is often identified as Arrabal’s “finest” or best-known play; Peter Nourrish calls it “his key play.” Like many of Arrabal’s plays, it focuses on a couple who indulge in game-playing or rituals that push social norms to potentially audience-alienating extremes, even as the language itself soars poetically. As a total work of art, this full-length play appears to have little in common with plays categorized as Absurd. Yet, the circular construction—the play ends as it began, with the noise and flashing flames of an airplane crash and the one survivor, a man with a suitcase, seeking help from a savage—calls to mind the circularity of Ionesco’s Bald Soprano and The Lesson (1950) or Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952). The two title characters exist symbiotically like Vladimir and Estragon or even at first like the master-slave relationship of Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot. Given Arrabal’s allusions to Shakespeare (not to mention Greek classics), there may be some evocation of Prospero and Caliban in the sudden arrival of the “civilized” Emperor on an island inhabited only by a natural man whom he teaches to speak and serve him. Apparently in homage to Arthur Adamov’s Le Ping-pong (1955)—in which a flashy pinball machine controls the destiny of the two friends who obsessively play it³⁴—the Emperor has a story of playing a pinball machine to prove the existence of God if he could score 1,000. However, when he reached 999, a drunken person in the café knocked the machine and the game was over.³⁵

    Most of the action of The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria occurs two years after the crash, by which time the Architect has become not only fluent in speech but has learned the Emperor’s personal mythology as well as cultural allusions like Babylon, baptism, Bosch. The two have developed a repertoire of role-playing, which includes donning costumes: a woman’s skirt, soldiers’ camouflage, a chess bishop’s garb, a grass skirt, a black lace slip with black stockings and high heels, a nun’s habit, a judge’s robe, and apparel items of various witnesses. When they play war, they shelter from a hydrogen bomb under an umbrella, not unlike the parents in Picnic on the Battlefield. After the explosion, both Architect and Emperor imitate post-apocalyptic head-scratching apes.³⁶ Playing or becoming animals can be found in various Absurd plays such as Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1959) and his Jack, or the Submission (1950) in which the entire cast becomes cats meowing in the darkness of the final curtain. Ritual dressing or undressing on stage occurs frequently in Arrabal’s early works,³⁷ and it parallels Genet’s habit of using on-stage dressing to trigger role-playing, as in The Maids (1954) and The Balcony (1960). When the Emperor directs the Architect to ride him like a horse and whip him, one is reminded of the “General” and the Girl who plays his horse in The Balcony. Act 2 of The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria is a mock trial with the Architect as judge and the Emperor playing various witnesses, in turn. The courtroom sequences are punctuated by both the Emperor and the Architect reverting to their real identities to comment on the trial, not unlike the layering of identities in the trial sequence of Genet’s The Blacks (1958). Murder is not outside the purview of the Absurd, as exemplified in Ionesco’s The Lesson (1950) or Genet’s The Maids; Arrabal’s Emperor caps the mock trial by confessing that he murdered his mother, which he describes harrowingly. He dictates his own punishment: to be eaten by the Architect. In the course of the subsequent scene of cannibalism, the Architect gradually adopts the voice and manners of the Emperor while he also loses his mysterious power to command the natural world. One might argue that The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria prefigures postmodernism with its myriad embedded allusions and quotations: the opening line of Homer’s Iliad, the Bible, Shakespeare, Don Juan, the Story of O, Voltaire’s Candide, Sir Walter Scott, Thomas de Quincey, Saint Theresa of Avila, Lewis Carroll, Beaumarchais, and several Latin quotations. Or one attributes this proliferation to the all-encompassing nature of Pan.

    By 1976 Arrabal could already look back—in an essay published in Gambit—on his own continually developing artistry relative to:

     the ‘avant garde’ or ‘absurdist’ theatre … which was closer to reality than its predecessor, a reality which lit up the hidden side of our instincts and our compulsions (the hidden part of the iceberg), which had never been revealed before with so much precision.

This was followed, he notes, by “another form of expression, the image, the gesture, and in great part, the body.”³⁸ He cites as examples of the latter the Living Theatre, Grotowski, and his own plays, to which we might add the lingering influence—or rediscovery—of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Notably in this essay, Arrabal saw a return to the word, to a theater in which the imagination could again be combined with lyricism, with “the source of all creativity and of all energy: ‘In the beginning was the word’.”³⁹ Arrabal’s unabated relish for language embraces both Spanish and French. His informal writing sometimes conflates those languages in delightful word-play. He keeps multi-volume sets of dictionaries at hand and consults them frequently.⁴⁰ His zeal for words and his care with language is a crucial facet of his work that cannot be fully conveyed in translation. However, the luxury of a theater and audiences open to heightened language also seems to enfranchise a stronger narrative through-line in the plays. That tendency would become clearer in his plays of the 1980s.

    The Body-Builder’s Book of Love (Brevario de amor de un halterófilo, 1986)⁴¹ uses a structured plot, with pointers and plants, that proceeds almost in real time while it continues Arrabal’s favored pattern of bringing together two characters of opposing natures. Job is a compassionate middle-aged weight-lifter of powerful spiritual inclinations, who expresses his chaste love for the unseen Phyllis. He believes that she channels his breath and energy in his ritualistic heavenward thrust of the weights. However, police reports over a loudspeaker periodically warn of a young woman named Phyllis as the prime suspect in the deaths of several weight-lifters who were found dead, stabbed by a huge pair of scissors. Replacing Job’s usual assistant Hornstein (who is later found dead), Tao is a “nineteen-year-old masseur of androgynous beauty”⁴² who claims to be a eunuch. He is vulgar, carnal, psychologically and physically manipulative of Job. The two acting areas are an Edenic garden where Job takes his rest between bouts and the lighted platform reached by a ladder where Job goes for his allotted three tries to lift the weight. Phyllis, whose name means love, is clearly also an agent of death. The giant scissors fly into Job’s chest at his moment of triumph on the third try. Tao, now wearing a black dress and addressed as Phyllis, cradles the dying Job in her arms in a final tableau. Perhaps the production element that can best be linked to the Absurd in this play is the array of objects that appear in unexpected capacities. Twice, an arrow with an attached message flies in to stick in a tree. The covered corpse of Hornstein is mysteriously replaced by a slain lamb while the bloody scissors that killed Hornstein are found in a trash bin. A barber’s chair on wheels arrives to be used in place of the massage table. When Tao gets Job thoroughly confused, Job puts on a sheer cotton skirt and attempts a female impersonation. Tao drags in a cage on wheels and describes how Phyllis uses it to torture him. This triggers Job’s realization that he has lived in “a spiritual cage,”⁴³ yet he remains grateful to Phyllis for giving him rules to live by and accepts the death that will come at his moment of triumph. Although the play incorporates the religious symbols of the bloody lamb and the crown of thorns worn by Tao when he is pulled from the rose bush, and despite Job’s ritual praying to God before each lift, the overall treatment of religion in the play is one of ambiguity—not as nihilistic as allusions to religion in some plays of the Absurd.

    Une pucelle pour un gorille (A Damsel for a Gorilla, 1986)⁴⁴ is based on the true story of Aurora Rodriguez and her prodigious daughter Hildegart (1914–1933), who was conceived by an unknown father to fulfill her mother’s goal of creating the perfect intellectual woman. Under her mother’s relentless tutelage, the real Hildegart did become internationally renowned in her teens, having learned to read at age two, earned a law degree at sixteen, and published books on sexual education for women, even corresponding with Havelock Ellis and Margaret Sanger, among others. She was nineteen when her mother fatally shot her as she slept. Arrabal sets the story against periodic eruptions of animalistic carnival grotesqueries. Indeed, Aurora opens the play by addressing a bull and a mule that represent her parents (she later cuts off their heads)—to announce her intention of having a child without benefit of marriage. The gorilla of the title may represent male sexuality or perhaps even Professor H. G. Wells, whose invitation for Hildegart to visit him in London precipitates the stalemate with her mother. During their final argument, the stage directions call for horrible gigantic birds to fly over the heads of the audience; some have almost human faces, two of which resemble the bull and mule.⁴⁵

    Arrabal’s Aurora becomes rhapsodic several times as she envisions the daughter she will raise. “I will make her into a genius who one day will be the leader of free women.”⁴⁶ “Thanks to my daughter, the world will come to order and finally make sense.”⁴⁷

     Little by little, … I will infuse my daughter with all the wisdom of that past paradise when our ancestors communicated among themselves in the language of the birds. … she will create the rarified and spiritual flame of the most radiant light and thus bring an end to the chaos of today’s civilizations that have barely emerged from barbarity.”⁴⁸

    “With perfect precision my daughter will find the way and the truth within the torturous labyrinth that hems us in.”⁴⁹ Arrabal’s Hildegart devotes herself to alchemy, which serves as an analogy for the purity—free from worldly distractions—of the alchemist. The scenes featuring a “false Hildegart” or a “false Aurora” project them as the media creations that they become in the public mind. Hildegart is, of course, her mother’s creation—until she declares her independence from Aurora, as Aurora had once done to her parents. Additional original touches include Aurora’s friendship with Lénica, a gay man who becomes her lifelong friend. Aurora meets him in an early scene when she is so desperate to find a male stranger to inseminate her that she wanders the streets wearing a barrel large enough for two. Lénica is ultimately shot as a “faggot” during a macabre carnival dance.⁵⁰ Despite the play’s grotesque and fantastical elements, this is clearly a long way from Theatre of the Absurd. Indeed, when an interviewer in 2016 solicited responses to various words, Arrabal’s reply to Theatre of the Absurd was “alien to my purpose” (“étranger à mon propos” and “ajeno a mi propósito”) and he added a comment to the effect that nothing remains after a bout of drunkenness but the words on the bottle’s label.⁵¹

    In recent years, Arrabal’s exploration of the couple in his plays has moved from symbiotic relationships that might be interpreted as opposing instincts within a single persona⁵² to juxtapositions of historical figures who may or may not have ever met: Claudel y Kafka (2002), Dalí versus Picasso (2013), Sarah y Victor (2018); the latter, of course, refers to Sarah Bernhardt and Victor Hugo. In addition, he juxtaposes Shakespeare and Cervantes in a play in which they are not characters; in El extravagante triunfo de Miguel de Cerbantes [sic] y William Shakespeare (2016), the characters are the five Norwegian jurors for the Nobel Peace Prize. These plays are not yet available in English translation.

    Arrabal turned ninety on 11 August 2022. The congratulations that came in from around the world hailed him as a trailblazer. While his plays continue garnering most of the attention, he has also published, as best I can count, sixteen novels, fourteen nonfiction books plus seven book-length epistles (most famously Carta al General Franco, 1972), six collections of poetry, five opera libretti, five books on chess in addition to thirty years of weekly chess columns in L’Express. He has directed seven full-length films and is a prolific painter, in addition to the remarkable large-scale surrealist portraits of himself that he commissioned. He has received dozens of prestigious international awards, including France’s highest: Chevalier of the Legion of Honor (2005). Perhaps the distinction he has enjoyed the most is his 1990 election as Transcendent Satrape of the Collège de ’Pataphysique.⁵³ One might say that Arrabal maintains an ironic relationship to other avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. In Arrabales, a 120-page publication of his texts and drawings along with photographs of himself in twelve different cities, he posed in front of crude murals and graffiti. In one of the Madrid photographs, he stands next to graffiti that reads “La vida nos es Dada” (“Our life is Dada”), while he wears a shirt with a photograph of himself and the words “Arrabal íntimo pánico.” Yes, Pan encompasses it all. Arrabal signed one of his recent email messages relating to his 90th birthday: “… en nombre de Pan de la científica confusión y de todo lo demás, arrabalaicamente, fa.”

Notes

1.

Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Anchor Books, 1961; revised 1969).

2.

Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, Third Edition (New York: Pelican Books, 1983).

3.

Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, Third Edition, With a New Foreword by Martin Esslin (New York: Vintage Books, 2004).

4.

Ángel Alonso, “Un sombrerazo de admiración sin disimulo ni tapujos para un genio,” Arrabal 80, ed. Raúl Herrero (Zaragoza: Libros del Innombrable 2012), 17. Original text: “…Arrabal, el más universal de los dramaturgos españoles, con una obra traducida a un centenar de idiomas y el autor más representado en la segunda mitad del siglo XX….”

5.

Esslin (1961: xviii, 1969: 4).

6.

Esslin (1961: xvii–xxi, 1969: 6–7).

7.

Michael Y. Bennett, Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2–14. Michael Y. Bennett, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 128–32.

8.

Esslin (1961: 186, 188–89, 189, 1969: 217, 219–20, 220–21).

9.

Esslin (1969: 222).

10.

Arrabal, Champagne pour tous! (Paris: Stock, 2022), 195–200, 213–14.

11.

Arrabal, Le Panique (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1973), 9–10.

12.

Fernando Arrabal, “El placer doloroso de llorar,” Arrabal 80, 500.

13.

Arrabal, Champagne, 15, 32, 48, 91, 127ff, 149–53, 175–76.

14.

Esslin (2004: 292). Original text is in Le Panique, 98.

15.

Charles Marowitz, “Arrabal’s Theater of Panic,” The New York Times (3 December 1972), SM 40.

16.

Fernando Arrabal, First Communion, trans. Michael Benedikt, in Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth, Modern Spanish Theatre (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1969), 309–17. The original is La Communion solennelle (1969).

17.

Fernando Arrabal, Porté disparu (Paris: Plon, 2000), 12. Arrabal claims here that he was fifteen when he looked in the box, but most secondary sources and chronologies say he was seventeen.

18.

Fernando Arrabal, “Dos notas finales a Baal Babilonia,” Arrabal 80 (2012), 14–15.

19.

However, when Arrabal spoke to my class in 1986 and I interpreted his French for the students, he chided me for using a euphemism to avoid verbalizing one of the ribald things he said.

20.

Felicia Londré, “The Beast in Arrabal,” American Theatre, vol. 3, no. 11 (February 1987), 26.

21.

Fernando Arrabal, The Body-Builder’s Book of Love (New Brunswick, NJ: Estreno Plays, Contemporary Spanish Plays 15, 1992).

22.

Thomas John Donahue, The Theater of Fernando Arrabal: A Garden of Earthly Delights (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 93. He wrote: “Me cago en Dios, en la patria y en todo lo demás” (“I shit on God, on the fatherland, and on everything else”).

23.

Marowitz, “Arrabal’s Theater of Panic,” SM 40; Peter L. Podol, Fernando Arrabal (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1978), 20–21. See also: Bettina L. Knapp and Kelly Morris, “L’affaire Arrabal Español,” The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 13, no. 1 (Autumn 1968), 87–88. The text of Samuel Beckett’s letter, “Carta a la justicia madrileña,” is included in Arrabal 80, 27–28. For his wife Luce’s perspective on the ordeal, see Viveca Tallgren, “Cómo es la vida de la mujer de Arrabal?” in Arrabal 80, 292–93.

24.

Fernando Arrabal, And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers, trans. Charles Marowitz (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 15.

25.

Arrabal, Handcuffs, 21–22, 72–74.

26.

Arrabal, Handcuffs, 48–50.

27.

Arrabal, Handcuffs, 46–48, 62–63.

28.

Fernando Arrabal, Picnic on the Battlefield, trans. Barbara Wright, in Guernica and Other Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 121–22.

29.

Arrabal, Picnic, 114, 117.

30.

Arrabal, Picnic, 114, 118.

31.

Arrabal, Picnic, 121.

32.

Podol, Fernando Arrabal, 73. Deborah B. Gaensbauer, The French Theater of the Absurd (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1991), 99.

33.

Peter Nourrish, New Tragedy and Comedy in France 1945–70 (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1988), 130.

34.

Arthur Adamov, Two Plays: Professor Taranne and Ping Pong, trans. Derek Prouse (London: John Calder, 1962).

35.

Arrabal, The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria, trans. Everard d’Harnoncourt and Adele Shank (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 42–45.

36.

Arrabal, Architect, 30.

37.

A good example is First Communion (La communion solonnelle, 1969) in which the Little Girl begins the play wearing only panties and gradually dons the white dress and veil. Conversely, the Necrophiliac ritually undresses himself before throwing himself onto the dead woman in the casket.

38.

Fernando Arrabal, “The New ‘New’ Theatre,” ed. John Calder. Gambit: International Theatre Review 30 (London: John Calder, 1977), 24. Translator not named.

39.

Arrabal, Gambit, 26.

40.

On a 1985 visit to his apartment, when I mentioned having presented a paper on the rise and fall of neo-Baroque spectacle in French theater, Arrabal thrilled at the word “baroque” and eagerly showed me its etymology in various sources.

41.

Fernando Arrabal, The Body-Builder’s Book of Love, trans. Lorenzo Mans (New Brunswick, NJ: Estreno Plays, 1999).

42.

Arrabal, Body-Builder’s, xii.

43.

Arrabal, Body-Builder’s, 42.

44.

Arrabal, Une pucelle pour un gorille, in Théâtre XVII (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1987), 27–82. The play premiered as The Red Madonna or A Damsel for a Gorilla, trans. Lynne Alvarez, at New York’s INTAR Theatre in November 1986; Alvarez’s English translation has not been published. Arrabal also wrote a novel on the subject, titled La Vierge rouge (Paris: Éditions Acropole, 1986) and a second play, The Red Madonna, that more closely parallels the novel, in Théâtre XVII, 83–163.

45.

Arrabal, Pucelle, 67.

46.

Arrabal, Pucelle, 39. “…je ferai d’elle un génie qui un jour sera le leader des femmes libres.”

47.

Arrabal, Pucelle, 41. “Grâce à ma fille le monde connaîtra l’ordre et aura enfin un sens.”

48.

Arrabal, Pucelle, 45. “Peu à peu, … j’insufflerai à ma fille toute la sagesse de cette époque paradisiaque où nos ancêtres communiquaient entre eux grâce au langage des oiseaux. … elle créera le feu rarifié et spiritualisé qui est la lumière la plus radieuse: ainsi elle répudiera le chaos des civilisations d’aujourd’hui que émergent à peine de la barbarie.”

49.

Arrabal, Pucelle, 55. “Avec quelle exactitude ma fille trouvera la voie et la vérité au milieu du tortueux labyrinthe qui nous entoure.”

50.

Arrabal, Pucelle, 82. The dancing dwarves seize Lénica, push him against a wall and hang a sign on him: Faggot. And they shoot him. The French word is Tapette.

51.

Diego Moldes, “Respuestas sublimes: un entretien avec Fernando Arrabal,” La Règle du jeu (10 September 2016).

52.

Podol, Fernando Arrabal, 76, cites an interview in which Arrabal suggested that the Architect might be merely a product of the Emperor’s imagination—or the Architect might be imagining a non-existent Emperor!

53.

’Pataphysics was the brainchild of Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), author of Ubu roi (1896). The group was founded in 1948 in the memory of Jarry. See Arrabal’s interview by Gérard de Cortanze, “La ’Pataphysique: histoire d’une société très secrète,” Magazine Littéraire 388 (June 2000). When Arrabal visited my graduate theater history class in 1986 (see note 19), the question that most pleased him was from student David Luby, who asked how one might become a ’pataphysician.

54.

Fernando Arrabal, Arrabales, ed. Alicia Aza, Ánfora Nova 87–88 (2011), 94.

55.

Email to Felicia Londré and others with subject line “… tweet, instagram, tik tok, presse internationale,” 7 August 2022. “In the name of Pan of scientific confusion and all else, Arrabalically, fa.”