Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 17 Number 1, April 2016

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Jean Bodin: Faust:Brevier, edition lulu, 2014, Rochester, NY, Taschenbuch, englisch,  43 Seiten,  $ 27.87 , ISBN 978-1-312-38177-3

Reviewed by

Odile Popescu

(Berlin)

More than ten years ago, a Berlin-based weekly magazine, (Das Blaettchen,10. Jahrgang, 2007, Heft 1) introduced, in a contribution by Ignaz Katz, for the first time the visual poetry of Jean Bodin. Fuer M. - Zwiebilder is he title of this collection, which the author appropriately found to be congenial to Annemarie Bostroem‘s Terzinen des Herzens, Ingmar Bergman‘s Sonntagskindern and to poetry such as ich an Dich by Dinah Nelken. At the same time, however, Katz emphasizes:

 

Bodin’s perspective on interpersonal relationships was comparable to that of Brecht: it places the observer into a position from which they can “critically neutralize” what is represented in the image. In this way, Bodin fetches the complexity of the situation (…) into the perception. The unexpressed turns into the fable.

 

Since then, Bodin has proved this ability successfully in further poetic and dramatic texts, especially in English: (Awakening (2009), The Hard Way Out (2010), Yerma (2011 ), Catharsis ( 2012), Consolations in Exile (2013 ). Reprints and reviews appeared in China, Greece, Cyprus, Israel, Austria, the UK and the USA. The current book reflects situations, events and the behaviour of characters from Faust I, as they were gathered during the rehearsals of the play in a production directed by Heinz-Uwe Haus with the Repertory Ensemble Players (REP) in Delaware, USA, in spring 2014. Poems, drawings and a prose essay on the “tragedy of love” seek to capture the “enormously different perspective on existence and its questions, which finds itself in all of our souls”—the very approach that Katz described so well in his review of Fuer M—and seek to integrate it into the process of directing the production.To “critically neutralize” represents, for both the director and the poet, above all else Goethe’s socially alternative position on the world.

 

In his review of the Delaware production (Das Blaettchen, 17. Jahrgang, Nr. 11, 2014 ) Charles Helmetag describes how the production benefits from this understanding of Goethe's position particularly for the production's contemporary interpretation of Gretchen, and how she mobilises, in Delaware, the audience’s “emotional memory”. Haus’s art of placing the actor’s imagination at the centre of the production always aims at the unconscious as well as the spectator’s ability to observe. Bodin radically grasps this motto of the production with his poetic, graphic and philosophical notes: “Gretchen has placed her life on love, against God and the world!”

 

The Faust-Brevier documents how the sensuality of the love scenes can be visualised and how poetic metaphors can be transferred to the stage, for example, when the lovers think of “Loreley”: “Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten” and they lose themselves in the summer house—a huge, white silk scarf—in waves and clouds…Some older German readers may remember Haus’s productions in Weimar at the end of the 1970s of Brecht’s Mother Courage, or of Shakespeare’s Pericles (for both productions the National Theatre Weimar published excellent documentary books, which are still available from antiquarian booksellers). In those productions, collaboration with sculptors Juan Leon, Guillermo Deisler and Glyn Hughes developed a comparable poetic-sensual mode of narration, especially in between the scenes, which brought out otherwise unuttered truths from the fable.

 

In the essay we read: “Gretchen is not the world, her love is the very break-out, Faust-like, from her world of narrow conventions, rigid dogmas and prissy morals. This attempt of sensuality at breaking out into freedom fails because of what makes this attempt great: because of the constraint forced on the lovers: in the most beautiful moments of their love, two separate individuals meet”. Bodin argues: “Faust has the choice to become unfaithful to himself or to Gretchen. The decision is tragic, and nobody can relieve him of his responsibility. Time will tell whether he is able to give her up”.

 

Gretchen’s great free decision is her devotion to Faust after the conversation about religion. She not only sleeps with a man before marriage, but with a man outside of all laws of the world, no longer calling for church and norms, law and security. Such clarity in the essay—which is mirrored in the stage direction and the choreography—encounters, in the poems, sketches and images, a dramaturgical fabulating, which grasps human contradictions on the levels of the subconscious and collage. With this, the Faust-Brevier finds, without doubt, its place in the dialectic tradition of Brechtian theatre work.