Darkness as National Drama

/, Literature, Blesok no. 57/Darkness as National Drama

Darkness as National Drama

In order to check/make pragmatic his intent as author to “play” with the darkness of his people, Čašule opts for a specific genre – what is known as the drama of ideas (Engl. comedy of ideas), a dramaturgical matrix that is simply ideal for the research (experimentation) he decided to embark on. The drama of ideas (ideological drama) is quite a rigid type of drama form that the French existentialists (Camus/Sartre) took almost to a paroxysm, but some other lucid authors (“of the format” of George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Jean Giradoux…) quite joyfully practiced with some apparently “more benign” goals: to “fight” with the society they lived in, to laugh cynically at their time and their tribe, to warn of the dangers of the moral and ethical erosion they witnessed, to put the “mirror pf the theatre” before what was called reality. The drama of ideas does not deal with theatralisation of events, nor retell the “stories” of certain characters, but uses the functional drama form as a model to debate (discuss, dramatise…) efficiently and effectively the status of some great/serious/respective postulates or concepts (ideas-as-such) it considers important for the community. Dramas of ideas are always also dramas with a thesis. Their tension, and also their relevance, should be assessed/derived precisely from their stressed/intentional engagement.
Writing Darkness, Čašule precisely expresses as a priority his engagement as author: existentialist (Sartre-like) by his own determination, realistic (Krleza-like) in the poetics he develops, left-oriented and radical in the goals he persues. These goals are not only aesthetic. On the contrary, they are preferentially ethical.
Those who read Darkness today should not look for, let alone triumphantly “discover”, sad Macedonian history. On the contrary, from the flawlessly developed texture of this drama that theater experts long ago defined as the texture of a “well-made play”/piece bien faite (Петковска, 1980/1996), they may – first at the level of dramaturgical craft! – recognize its pregnant and extremely intriguing/polysemic inter-textual relations with some of the most relevant dramas of the 20th century. More precisely: with the European tradition of modern/modernistic drama in general.
A small, marginalized and “stray” literature, that starts to build its own affirmation only after the foundation of a national state, after barely fifteen years from the codification of its literary language (meaning: at the end of modern culture!) manages – thus – to create a drama of the calibre of Darkness: a drama that corresponds with the best of European modernism as completely equal.

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Nevertheless, the true relevance of this dramа – even its upturned role in the history of contemporary Macedonian dramatics – is undoubtedly contained in its authentic original modernistic mission. Of course, this is a mission that derives from the author’s engagement, existentialist (Sartre-like), belligerent, but at the same time idealistically hopeless. Literary!
Writing Darkness, this defeatist, in every sense claustrophobic drama5F, Čašule sincerely believes that he is doing it because he has to. At the time of Darkness he is still convinced that literature (especially drama) must function as the conscience of its own epoch, in order to maintain the moral vertical that the faltering times constantly undermine, threatening to bring it down. Precisely because of this great and responsible task, literature (especially drama) must open, even impose, great topics – those which significantly affect the very being of the nation.
In the case of this most famous and most frequently staged play of his, Čašule debates – efficiently and effectively dramatizes! – the still open (and painful!) issue of Macedonian national identity: decisively (not at all gently) researches the character of the “contemplative community” (Anderson, 1983) that we name as a nation, its status, emotional and mental capacity, its ability to transform from ethnos into demos, in a modern state association. Like every other engaged author, Čašule simultaneously researches the modalities/aspects of the patriotism that such a (modern) state should be able to develop, the capacity of that same state to enable, but also continuously to confirm not only the national (collective) freedom, but also stimulate individual freedoms of every type, including the freedom of artistic creation.
Why, how and when does Čašule do all this?
Written over a long period and in several versions, the play Darkness was finished in the middle of the year 1960. An interesting fact is that the first piece of the text was published in the Ilinden Festival triple issue of Nova Makedonija (31.07-1/2.08.1960). The integral text was subsequently printed in three issues of the magazine Razgledi, and the premiere took place by the end of the next January, 1961. The author – born in 1921, meaning the same year when the historic event, the assassination of Gjorče Petrov took place, but also the imaginary action of his play6F – ends maybe his most important play at the precise age of forty, at the threshold of his own intimate maturity and his maturity as an author, announcing himself as a writer with nerve (not only as a writer with passion and a gift).
“A writer with nerve is recognized both by the culture of his books’ titles, and also by the culture of giving names to the heroes of his texts” (Kovač, 2006:363). Almost immediately after its literary and theatrical promotion, the onomastics of Darkness entered in a grand manner into Macedonian modernistic discourse, but also into a cultural imaginative spectrum, growing to be a powerful symbolic topos, and gradually also a stereotype. The title of one of the important texts that thematically treats the works of Čašule, written six years later, confirms this explicitly. Namely, it is: Long Years of Darkness, by Mateja Matevski, and it is dated 1967 (Матевски: 1967).

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5. The drama Darkness is literally located in the “wasteland framed within four walls”, as its introductory didactics says (Čašule, 1980:247); undoubtedly it is a metaphor (of Macedonia) such that a more devastating would be difficult to find!
6. The author’s note, written at the beginning of the text, reads: The characters and events in this drama are fictitious. Any similarity with existing persons is accidental and unintentional. The Author. (Čašule, 1980:243).

2018-08-21T17:23:05+00:00 December 15th, 2007|Categories: Essays, Literature, Blesok no. 57|0 Comments