The Incident at Antioch Read online

  MADAME PINTRE: Gates of irresolute thinking leading to the ineffectual moment! Factory! In terms of appearance or disappearance!34

  MOKHTAR: Hail, bright and early! Dark factory gates! Half-opening of consciousness lodged in between! Hail, place the worker passes through! Where you, who don’t name me, go is where my naming abides.

  PAULA: The needless survival of a foreign language.

  MOKHTAR: We few who are known to each other assign the order of the tasks. Brothers of June, March, and October,35 or of January in the Antipodes or of meridional August, when the waters recede and it’s hard to fathom so much dried-out seaweed, three or four people in the know about the new restore the factory to history, and its enduring memory, and the whole of the sea!

  PAULA: Prose from somewhere else in lieu of the poem from right here.

  MOKHTAR: Hail in the name of those who seek the name for your endurance.36

  (A crowd of workers starts streaming hurriedly out of the factory.)

  PAULA: Hail from one who declares the narrowness of her own existence.

  MADAME PINTRE: Hail, excess over nothing!

  PAULA: Pure void of the overflow of the world! You who when beginning your day know that it’s already over. The time for sleeping returns, and between two slumbers, you alone light the torch.

  Elsewhere, eyes are closed, every mouth has fallen silent. Or else discontent is rampant. No more thinkers37 or thinking. One lies on one’s stomach. The restless man sleeps. He attends to the absorption of the surplus. Or, threatened with losing it, he secretes around what he has the chalky shell of times of crisis.

  But three things about you are enviable: the physical workload, which keeps you from forgetting where the real occurs; the shop-floor rebellion, which deliberates about who maintains his self-respect above all else; and concrete language, which puts a quick stop to self-pity.

  MOKHTAR: The hustle and bustle of noon, the studious stupor of midnight. O factory masses released, you riddle of what will and won’t be. The desire to change …

  MADAME PINTRE: … a subject, who has come from so little that he doubts, but on his doubt itself he reflects, and with his doubt he contributes to …

  MOKHTAR: … what was previously expressed in the learned and invented resource of his native language.

  PAULA: Will you still dare to utter the word that became the flag of history waving over you? Every country tells the bitter tale of what happens after people thought the time of your reign had arrived through the triumph and glory of the soldiers of the workers’ revolution.

  Tell me, what connection is there between the pursuit of your true thought here, dictated by the only place that’s not yet superfluous, and these hordes of bloodsuckers casually selling off state assets?

  While I, a woman from a distant shore, am here among you seeking the language in which each word now has the stench of a dead State.

  If anyone from here is my friend, he’ll have to accept that I’m only an ambivalent friend. Because anyone who gets involved in politics no longer writes poetry, and if he has any time, he devotes it to getting ready for the evening meeting. Then when it’s held, he takes his turn speaking and is gratified if he hasn’t said a single thing that someone else couldn’t have said.

  MOKHTAR: Don’t look down on that concern with only saying something based on what someone else is thinking, you headstrong young woman.

  PAULA: I’m not looking down on anyone. I came over here reluctantly from the other side of a river. The city is breaking apart underfoot. There are only big buildings belching yellow sulfurous smoke now, and at night the lighting comes from the torches.

  I’ll speak only to you. I’ll tell you that the world is starting today, from scratch, and that all you have to do is go after the dispersion of being,38 the way the big white dog of verse does in the fog-shrouded grass.

  That’s how I’ll proceed now, until the sole heir appears among you owing to my doggedness.

  MADAME PINTRE: Get going, Paula! You’re not our enemy. The poem of the place is for a thousand voices.

  SCENE 4: In the place of choices.

  MOKHTAR, CAMILLE, MADAME PINTRE, and RENÉ are lined up on the side of the road as if they were watching people go by. VILLEMBRAY, standing right on the road, is flanked by THE MAURYS. PAULA is on the other side of the road, in a beet field.

  JEAN MAURY: Villembray, we’ve been unfair to you.

  VILLEMBRAY: Be my guest; out with it.

  PIERRE MAURY: Things are looking pretty bad.

  JEAN MAURY: Terrible, actually. I’ve come along with my colleague on the left, but I’m absolutely pessimistic. There’s a certain logic to the crisis.

  VILLEMBRAY: You’ll be bailed out by war one of these days.

  PIERRE MAURY: We’re sure you’ll agree that the vicious cycle has got to be broken. Economic stability has absolutely got to be restored, democracy respected, human rights upheld, investment increased, the currency rescued, immigration–whether controlled or uncontrolled, legal or illegal–strictly limited, and, of course, the cultural prestige of our country spread by every means possible.

  VILLEMBRAY: Brilliant! Your platform is brilliant! You have no need of me whatsoever.

  JEAN MAURY: We’ve got to make drastic cuts. The situation requires a surgeon, not just some quack or other. We should choose the man with the scalpel ourselves. You’re the one.

  VILLEMBRAY: Gentlemen, your initiative doesn’t call for any thanks from me, since, as you yourselves admit, it’s unavoidable. You’re only seeking me out so I can act as a shield for you.

  If it’s possible, with a few appropriate measures that your panic will allow me to take, to lend some momentary luster to your total collapse, I’m game. I’ll wield the knife where necessary.

  I have no intention of looking any further than the present moment, and you won’t entrust anything beyond it to me anyway.

  Naturally, I’ll crack down on you just like on everyone else. But you’re good at being patient and doing what you’re told.

  Yet look at that young woman (he points to PAULA). Turn and face her because my decision is in her hands.

  Paula, tell me, yes or no: Do you think I should accept their proposition that I head the government on these terms?

  If she says yes, I’ll go with you and prepare for my investiture. If she says no, I’ll turn down the chore of trying to pull a few sparks out of this dying fire just for show.

  JEAN MAURY: Thus does the State discover its essentially random nature.

  PIERRE MAURY: Speak, dear comrade. Women’s time has come.

  (Silence.)

  PAULA (to MOKHTAR, CAMILLE, RENÉ, and MADAME PINTRE): You decide! You decide!

  MOKHTAR: Look, listen, and think it over.

  PAULA: How strange the visible is! (Silence.) Why is this confusing spectacle being left to me? Give me the name for it.39 Don’t let me be overwhelmed by this huge mass of lights!

  CAMILLE: Let the guy come and do what he’s cut out for.

  PAULA: Did someone say my brother? O syllabary40 for the road ahead!

  MOKHTAR: Place of an absolutely indeterminate chance event.

  (Silence.)

  PAULA (falling to the ground, arms outstretched):41 Chance, illusion of meaning, whereby I know what it knows!42

  The pebbles in my mouth are turning into clear words.

  Oh, there I was, going dangerously along, in the grip

  Of a feverish exaltation in which the obstacle and the shrinking of desire both give way;43 now here I am in the tenderness of morning.

  See, the full extension of a body, like a lake bedazzled

  By the fir trees of heaven, and the imperceptible transparency into which I’m being dissolved!

  Where is the haven, goodness of evening, welcoming twilight?

  The light opens wide its splendor! The goldfish spurt out onto the filament of the waters!

  O obsolete road, rectitude suddenly shattered! I placed my own fall on the scales of jus
tice.

  I had, aflame with zeal, the sensible and the scattered.44

  Who is forcing me into submission then? Who is telling me about a strategist?45

  The image of the helmet and the owl,46 coming back to life as none other than the ethereal goddess! I bow down, and the light turns my body into a shield.

  The name for an overly long process.47

  I define, without emotion, the thought that founds you.

  It is I!48 (She stands up, her manner of speaking slightly different now.) Your Highnesses of politics, help me to my feet! The blow that must be dealt! The fortitude that must be had!

  For fear that I might falter, for fear that I might give in to the forgetting of what must be forgotten, hold me up, a woman broken in two, shattered by the light!

  Dictatorship! The inexistent’s capacity to be thought!49

  Why have I no brother or sisters or lovers any longer, except so that I might be a symbol for you? So that I might belong to you.

  O youth in rubble, in ruin! I used to encounter, yes, I had chance encounters to hold my own in life, and it devastates me

  That language and ever-perfectible naming are necessary now.50

  In the name of the flowers! In the name of the blazing furnace!

  Speak to me, and I’ll answer you.

  I exist! I exist in the splitting of the law.51 (Silence. From the other side of the road, MOKHTAR, CAMILLE, MADAME PINTRE, and RENÉ all stare at PAULA.) Speak, delegation of the Two.

  RENÉ: We’re reflecting, as we look you all over.

  PAULA: I’m taking place out of place.

  CAMILLE: We’re looking at you without any enthusiasm.

  PAULA: You were holding a fake chip of language under the lamp. I’m worth more than that old metal. I’ve just been freshly minted.

  MOKHTAR: Why shouldn’t we accept the strange evidence?

  MADAME PINTRE: Here you are! A young woman experiencing the joy of the new.

  CAMILLE: Counting the leaves, cataloguing the red ash trees!

  MOKHTAR: Like one fallen spread-eagled under the light, but it’s not God speaking to her. For it’s giving up those trappings that’s knocking her down and making her spring back up to achieve the precision of an axiom.52

  RENÉ: Let’s not want anything but her. When it’s cold and gray out and the field’s been plowed, a knock comes at the door, you open it, and all of time presents itself for the startling discussion.

  MOKHTAR: She’s divided enough to be ready to change the law of the One.

  PAULA: Give me the red scarf that that young girl is wearing. I threw my own colors into the harbor.

  (CAMILLE crosses over and wraps the red scarf around PAULA’S neck. During what follows, MOKHTAR, RENÉ, and MADAME PINTRE will cross the road and stand next to PAULA, with their backs to the audience.)

  CAMILLE: Hail in the insularity of the revolution.

  MOKHTAR: “The gap between the ‘I am’ of the individual and the hold on him of an inner constraint appears only with the emergence of our collective self-creation.53

  RENÉ: The antagonism between individuals forced into competition with each other ultimately names the accidental character of what engenders them. We are freer under the dominance of capital, because our conditions of life are accidental to us.54

  MADAME PINTRE: But we are naturally less free, since we are wholly controlled by an impersonal force.55

  CAMILLE: The contradiction between our inner subjective selves and what is forced upon us by labor, against the backdrop of a sacrifice made right from the start, becomes evident to us once we become conscious.56

  MOKHTAR: In order to come into being as subjects, we must therefore abolish the very conditions of our own existence.57

  MADAME PINTRE: Which is to say, what all society has been based on up to the present.58

  CAMILLE: Hence we are directly opposed to the form in which the virtual subjects of society have until now given themselves collective expression.59

  RENÉ: That is, the State. In order to become the subjects that we are, it is incumbent upon us to put an end to the State. From now on, to exist comes down to the still negligible effort to bring about that end.”60

  (PAULA is almost completely hidden behind the OTHER FOUR.)

  CAMILLE: We designate you the indiscernible one.

  PAULA: Now I’m both invisible and essential to you.

  MADAME PINTRE: Hand me the scarf. (PAULA and the OTHER FOUR wrap the red scarf around themselves like a thread connecting them.) The incorporation of some-one into the preamble to the text.61

  PAULA: Mokhtar and Madame Pintre, hello. Camille and René, hello to you, too.

  MOKHTAR: The tent in the desert, when the fox follows the trail of the seventeenth name of water into the hollow. Rising above everyone, its seventeenth name enters the vocabulary of their worn-out language.

  MADAME PINTRE: After the woman of the ages comes the woman of the hour, who, in addition to the idea, propagates conviction and authority.

  PAULA: Louise Michel,62 Hypatia, Elisabeth Dmitrieff, Joan of Arc, Virginia, and Catherine.63

  Sappho, Marie Curie, Camille Claudel, and Sophie Germain.

  Emmy Nœther, Vera Zassulitch, Louise Labé; Emily Dickinson and the Brontë sisters, Bettina von Arnim, Djuna Barnes.

  Madame de La Fayette and Madame du Châtelet, Victoria, Elizabeth, and Catherine the Second as well.

  Saint Theresa of Ávila, Zenobia, Alexandra Kollontaï, and Theodora of Byzantium.

  Jane Austen, Anna Seghers, Gertrude Stein, and Zivia Lubetkin. Lady Murasaki.

  Jiang Qing with Rosa Luxembourg.

  This marks the end of all the exhausting efforts to bring you to light. The declaration of the end of exceptional circumstances.64 Let the document be delivered with my signature in successive orthodoxies.

  For I am in the hands of time.

  MADAME PINTRE: Nothing’s been said when speech, like the air borne aloft in the currents of the morning mists, still lacks its emission and timbre.

  Woman! Athena’s life journey, the law outraged by your renunciation, must be done all over again.65 O glaciation of a brief eagle’s wings! The cruel idol here has been destroyed.66 Here the unknowable achieves the definitive form of its State dissolution.

  (THE FOUR OF THEM silently gather together, closing around PAULA.)

  VILLEMBRAY (taking a few steps toward PAULA): Paula, let me say goodbye to you at the conclusion of this primitive ritual, because I’m leaving now. Goodbye.

  JEAN MAURY: Villembray, won’t we have an answer from you?

  VILLEMBRAY: You have it.

  PIERRE MAURY: Will you appear before the Chamber?

  VILLEMBRAY: No.

  JEAN MAURY: The left, I can assure you, agrees with us about handing all necessary powers over to you.

  VILLEMBRAY: The eclipse of every subject.67

  PIERRE MAURY: So be it.

  VILLEMBRAY: The eclipse of every subject.

  PIERRE MAURY: On account of this young woman, swept up into a fanatical sect right before your eyes?

  VILLEMBRAY: The eclipse of every subject.

  JEAN MAURY: Are you going to weigh the fate of the Nation against this ranting and raving?

  VILLEMBRAY: It is done.

  Welcome me into the ordinary, once proud nation now so reduced to a little patch of earth that the young have no alternative but to fall into the clutches of shady prophets.

  It was all in vain that I joined in the clamor of public opinion. The words I wanted to muffle speak louder now than all my expert claptrap.

  Capital and borders, televised verdicts, luxurious summit meetings, what a disaster!

  O rotting boat that no waves can keep afloat, I’ll observe you.

  O stupid devastation, from the depths of anonymity I’ll coolly assist you.

  (EXIT VILLEMBRAY.)

  PIERRE MAURY: This, I believe, is the end of the road. I’m going home. Back to work early, tomorrow.

  JEAN MAURY: A da
y under the threat of being just like every other. Let’s go.

  (EXEUNT THE MAURYS.)

  MOKHTAR (to PAULA): Come on, you!

  ACT II

  The Incident at Antioch

  SCENE 1: In the place of the war reserves.

  A scruffy-looking VILLEMBRAY, a straw hat on his head, is fishing in the harbor.

  VILLEMBRAY: I’m dunking this line in the foulness of the water.

  Hey, little fishy fattened on dead sailors! Hook your gills on my safety pin! I’ll fry you up in machine oil.

  Are the bells still ringing for mass at the headquarters church? I’d like to have a bell as an accompaniment because I’m practicing nothingness here.

  Before the city’s wiped out by the disaster, I’m putting together a case for silence. I’ll defend uselessness. No.

  The useless needn’t be valued over the useful. Mellow as can be, I’ll look at the water and my float.

  (He’s silent for a moment. ENTER PAULA.)

  PAULA: Villembray! Claude Villembray! (She tosses some little pebbles at him.)

  VILLEMBRAY: Who are you?

  PAULA: Paula. I’m Paula. It’s me. Don’t you recognize your baby sister?

  VILLEMBRAY: What are you doing here, O obsolete creature?

  PAULA: And what are you doing at the end of that fishing pole, you fisher of whales?

  VILLEMBRAY: I’m like one of the Danaides,1 except it’s the water that’s piercing my hook, with a hole that hideous finned creatures are swimming through.

  PAULA: Claude Villembray, I have lots to tell you. The people are taking shape once again. Claude! What they want and don’t want can now be expressed in words.

  The high command is working at strengthening the bonds of trust. The children have made a game out of knowing what’s what.

  So drop your fishing gear and come along.

  You made up my mind for me and I can return the favor.

  I left the man I was with.

  VILLEMBRAY: You did?