He again reaches into the sack and, standing, lets a handful of sand fall into the water.
Now we hear the isolated chords again.
The ward reaches into the sack and, standing, lets a hand
The ward reaches into the sack and, standing, lets a hand
ful of sand fall into the water.
ful of sand fall into the water.
The curtain closes.
Translated by Michael Roloff
Quodlibet
More than any of Handke’s plays to date, Quodlibet (written in 1969, between Kaspar and The Ride Across Lake Constance) requires fairly extensive adaptation to an American linguistic, cultural, and historical environment. Why this is necessary is made apparent by the play itself. What finally surprised me, though, was the comparative ease with which indigenously German allusions — allusions to the various manifestations, public and private, of fascism — can be replaced by American equivalents. In further adaptations, which a cast may want to make, it would be worthwhile to consult the invectives at the end of Handke’s Offending the Audience (Publikumsbeschimpfung) simply to see how “not to overdo it.” This translation is meant as a basic model for American productions.
M.R.
The curtain rises. On the bare stage, one by one, talking quietly to each other, appear the figures of the “world theater”: a general in uniform, a bishop in his vestments, a dean in his gown; a Maltese knight in the coat of his order; a member of a German student corps with his little cap and sash; a Chicago gangster with his fedora and pin-striped double-breasted suit, a politician with two heavily armed CIA bodyguards; a dance-contest couple — he in a dark suit and white turtleneck sweater, she in a short, pert dress; a grande dame in a long evening gown, carrying a fan; another female figure in a pants suit, a poodle on the leash.
These figures come on stage in no particular order, separately or in pairs, arm in arm or not. Chatting, they slowly walk about the stage, step here and there, laugh softly at some remark or other, walk on again, not that one hears them walking of course. Each chats with the others at some point; every so often one of them stands apart alone as though struck suddenly by some thought before starting a new conversation; only the bodyguards take no part in the conversations; they nod to each other occasionally, that’s all; otherwise they keep peering away from the figures on stage into the surrounding area, once up into the rigging loft, then — this without bending down — into the prompter’s box, then into the vault of the theater as though up into the fifth tier of an opera house — at any event, never at the audience itself: the audience does not exist for the figures on the stage. One notices that all the figures briefly come to a complete stop, but the next moment one or two are walking again. At moments the general conversation almost lapses into complete silence; there are also moments during which only the rustling of garments on the floor is audible, whereafter the conversation resumes more vociferously and insistently than before.
The figures walk about making almost no sound, lost in themselves, stand still, are still, chat: that’s actually all there is to it. It’s entirely up to the actors what they want to say. They can talk about what they’ve just read in the papers, what they’ve experienced that day, what they want to experience, about what just occurred to them, or about something that gives the impression of having just occurred to them … a few times one thinks one hears them speaking a foreign language, probably French: C’est très simple, Monsieur. — Ah merci … oh! ma coiffure! … Ah! Ce vent! … Cette pluie! … Or something of that kind, invariably uttered by the women. The audience of course strains to listen, but only occasionally gets a few words, or snatches of sentences.
Among the words and sentences that the audience does understand — besides the irrelevant and meaningless ones like “Do you understand?” “Not that I know,” “Why not?” “As I said,” “And you?”—are some which the audience merely thinks it understands. These are words and expressions which in the theater act like bugle calls: political expressions, expressions relating to sex, the anal sphere, violence. Of course the audience does not really hear the actual expressions but only similar ones; the latter are the signal for the former; the audience is bound to hear the right ones. For example, instead of napalm they mention no palms onstage; instead of Hiroshima they speak of a hero sandwich; instead of cunnilingus of cunning fingers; instead of psychopath of bicycle path; instead of leathernecks of leather next; instead of Auschwitz of house wits; instead of dirty niggers of dirty knickers... Or the actors use double-edged words in sentences with invariably harmless connotations, but in such quick succession that one listens to the ambiguous words instead of the sentences, for example: thigh, pick, member, spread, panties, tear, pant, cancer, victim, fag, rag, paralysis, stroke, frag … Many sentences, which appear to be quite harmless, are also uttered in quick succession; however, they contain words which, when they appear in clusters, begin to give the illusion of an allusion: A sentence with the words tiger cage (“I didn’t want to put my tiger in the cage but the cops insisted.”) is followed by a sentence containing the word gook (“I wasn’t completely satisfied until I had wiped the gook off the wall.”), which is followed by a sentence with the word waste (“Sad to say, but we had to waste a lot of … time”), which is followed by a sentence containing the words anti-personnel weapon (“Anti-Americanism is a weapon I personally refuse to use.”), which is followed by a sentence with the word infrastructure (“The infrastructure of the organization, if I may say so, consists of living bodies, all you have to do is count them”), which of course also contains the words body count in slightly different form, and which is followed by a sentence containing a distorted form of the words Tonkin Gulf & Saigon (“Tom’s kinfolk made a resolution not to take the Gulf Line steamer to Saigon.”) and finally a sentence containing the proper name My Lai, also in distorted form because of the proximity of the event (“As the old bastard of an Irishman used to say to me about Dora: ‘She was me last lay before me prostate operation, and she was me very best lay.’”).
The hit turns out to be a two-run hit, the beating is a beating around the bush, the bomb turns out to be what a bomb this play was, the smashed brain on the stone turns into mashed potatoes alone, where someone spread blood it turns out that the old beer-belly actually sweated Bud; when shot is mentioned it only refers to a shot of whiskey; and what shot through his head were only thoughts; “Shot through the head!”—“Shot through the head?”—“Yes, thoughts shot through my head.” Syphilis is Sisyphus & the clap is a thunderclap & a dildo becomes dill does it too.