Plotting Postmodern Being in Itziar Pascual'sPère Lachaise

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Notes

1. Itziar Pascual (b. 1967) belongs to Democratic Spain's first generation of playwrights. Other representative members of the group include Lluïsa Cunillé (n. 1961), José Ramón Fernández (n. 1962), Carmen Delgado Salas (n. 1962), Antonio Onettti (n. 1962), Margarita Sánchez Roldán (n. 1962), Antonio Álamo (n. 1964), Alfonso Plou (n. 1964), Maxi Rodríguez (n. 1965), Rodrigo García (n. 1964), Juan Mayorga (n. 1965), Yolanda Pallín (n. 1965), and Rafael González Gosálbez (n. 1966). Pascual, like others in her generation, most notably Fernández and Mayorga, began writing for the theatre as a student of the Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático and now teaches playwrighting at the same school. Consequently, she and her fellow authors are well aware of the most recent theories about theatre, which find their way into their works, whether consciously or not.

2. There are interesting comparisons to be made between Pascual's use of time and space in Père Lachaise and what Christian Charlet says about the Parisian landmark in his book Le Père‐Lachaise au coeur du Paris des vivants et des morts. Charlet describes Père Lachaise as “un lieu d'activité incessante.” He writes that “dès le matin, le cimetière s'anime telle une ruche bourdonnante …. Jusqu'au soir, cette activité ne connaît guère de répit et se combine avec l'arrivée des visiteurs, particulèrement nombreux dans l'après midi” (88). Taking into account what Charlet says about the afternoons in Père Lachaise, which is when the action in the play takes place, we may conclude that the afternoon is when the meeting of the living and the dead is most intense. Equally noteworthy is what Chalet says about the geographical location of Père Lachaise: “Il constitue … une voie de passage piétonniere importante entre le centre du XX^e arrondissement et la limite du XI^e” (89). Given Charlet's description of Père Lachaise as both a bordering and borderless place, Pascual no doubt took its physical features into account when choosing it as the setting for her play.

3. A summary of the significance of the work of the artists to whom Pascual makes reference will suffice to illustrate why they constitute an appropriately visual theoretical preface to the play. Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) was an abstract artist who was heavily influenced by Cubism. He relied on the contrast of color and light to create works characterized by the decomposition of form, the result of the amalgamation of objects whose distinguishing features remain intact but whose arrangement gives the impression of occupying more than one space simultaneously. Gino Severini (1883–1996) was one of the theoreticians of Futurism. Unlike his fellow Futurists, he was considered to be more neo‐impressionistic in his approach to his subject matter. The sense of dynamic movement in his paintings is achieved through a prismatic perspective, one that produces a fractured view. Christopher Wynne (1889–1946) also began his career as a Futurist and, although he creates more traditional works in his later years, he characteristically relies on fluid lines and shapes to create the sense of a spatial continuum. Jean‐Jacques Lebel (b. 1936) is a polyvalent artist whose experimentation with form and medium within a single work defies any association with the real world. Art, for Lebel, must give the impression of being an independent creative act. Delaunay and Lebel are Parisians. Severini is Italian and Wynne is British. Reference to these painters and the use of Père Lachaise are evidence of the increasingly more global approach that the playwrights of Pascual's generation adopt in their works.

4. In addition to ensuring that Père Lachaise resounds of postmodernity at a textual and contextual level, the absence of physical features in the description of the characters, the personification of time and place, the projection of suggestive paintings, and the detailed accuracy with which Pascual relies on the physical features and geographical lay‐out of Père Lachaise, which I shall come back to later, are conventions that guarantee that the play will also be postmodern in its staging. Pascual notes that the characters should be “interpretados únicamente por tres actores” and “se recomienda la supresión de toda escenografía corpórea, así como de cualquier elemento de atrezzo” (17). The absence of conventional scenery and place and the fact that three actors are to play six characters means the performance will be characterized by the same radical indeterminacy as its textual counterpart. Like all postmodern playwrights, Pascual essentially deconstructs objective representation. Aided by the projected images of the paintings and the reality of Père Lachaise's naturally labyrinthine composition, her hope is that her audience can conceptualize what is not explicitly provided for the performance. This expectation on the part of most postmodern playwrights has led Jeanette Malkin to remark that “all postmodern dramatists” are “rather audience‐dependent” (218).

5. The directions Michel gives Carlota confirm that Pascual relies on Père Lachaise's natural maze‐like features to reproduce an unstable reality on the stage in which to situate her characters. I can attest from personal experience that the directions Michel gives Carlota are accurate. Both sets of directions do lead to the main exit of the cemetery on the Boulevard Ménilmontant. But what at first appear to be clear and precise directions can potentially foil an individual's intention to find the exit. What is not obvious in the first set of instructions is that smaller parallel paths intersecting with other pathways run along the “Avenida Saint Morys” between the “Capilla” and the “Monumento a los Muertos,” which could easily thwart one's efforts to reach the “Avenida Principal.” The second set of directions is also potentially disorienting. The Avenue Circulaire, where the person following these directions would be, splits at both subdivision 32 and 16 to form a figure eight, another potential obstacle to one's efforts to reach the exit. Just as Pascual relies on Père Lachaise's unique feature as a naturally bordering and borderless place, she also relies on the cemetery's inherently convoluted and complex make‐up. Her calculated use of the Parisian landmark's physical characteristics for the purpose of theatrical representation gives added meaning to the postmodern notion of dramatizing “the ambiguity of art's interaction with life” (Corrigan 152). Evoking on the stage a convoluted world that is the mirror image of an equally convoluted concrete reality suggests that art and life are parallel concepts at best.

6. Isadora Duncan's (1878–1927) ashes are interred in the Columbarium in Père Lachaise. Given the geographical markers that Pascual provides, we can conclude that most of the action takes place in the area of the Columbarium, yet another example of the playwright's use of the exactness of the cemetery's physical layout to construct her text. Also worth noting is that Pascual uses the American dancer's real life experience to construct her character. It is a fact that Duncan's two children, Patrick and Deidre, died tragically as the result of a drowning accident. She herself died tragically when her veil became caught in the wheel of an automobile, an incident Secundino refers to in their encounter: “Pero el aire que te ahoga con el foulard es el mismo que les faltó a tus hijos” (63). The biographical accuracy regarding Isadora's character, like the layout of the cemetery, contributes to the seamless melding of the world of the audience and the created world of the stage in Pascual's' play.

7. There is no tomb in the Père Lachaise for Secundino Pérez. When Cundo initially asks Michel for directions to his grandfather's grave, he is clearly looking for a common grave, “the grave of Spanish soldiers …, the Spanish soldiers who arrived in France, crossed the border. My grandfather” (30), not a specific tomb. There is such a tomb that memorializes all Spaniards who died in the name of freedom located on the Avenue Circulaire just above Transversal N° 3. The following words are inscribed on the tomb: “A la Mémoire de Tous les Espagnols Morts pour la Liberté.” Since it lies along the path Michel instructed Cundo to follow, it is only logical that the encounter between Michel and Secundino (Cundo's double) should take place there.

8. Jacques Barozzi describes Père Lachaise as “one of the most beautiful open‐air museums in Paris” (12). It is fascinating to note the extent to which theories about museums coincide with theories about cemeteries. Museums, as Sharon Macdonald has demonstrated, are “key cultural loci of our times” because “through their displays … they raise questions about … identity …, and about permanence and transience” (2). They are the “embodiments”, as she puts it, “of temporal relations and social remembering” (9). Kevin Herthington shares in Macdonald's claim that museums are unstable spaces when he refers to them as a space characterized by “ambivalence” and “uncertainty.” He even describes a museum as a “contested space” from which “many actors” seek to project themselves and their ideas (162). In an increasingly globalized world in which the subject finds it ever more easy to cross borders of time and space, ever more easy to be here and there, metaphorically speaking, it appears that museums and cemeteries may be the inherently adequate spaces to contain such subjects.