Antonin Artaud [The Theater and Its Double]
안토닌 악토 [연극 그리고 연극의 닮은꼴]

PREFACE : The Theater and Culture
서문 : 연극과 문화

Never before, when it is life that is in question, has there been so much talk of civilization and culture. And there is a curious parallel between demoralization and our concern for a culture which has never been coincident with life, which in fact has been devised to tyrannize over life.
중요한 것은 삶인데도 불구하고 삶에 대한 이야기보다는 문명이니 문화에 대한 이야기가 요즈음처럼 많은 적이 일찌기 없었다.  도덕적 타락(정신적 피폐)과 문화에 대한 관심은 묘하게도 서로 비례한다. 그런데  그 문화란 것이 실제로는 삶을 억압하기 위해 고안된 것이어서 삶과 일치되거나 부합되는 경우가 전혀 없이 항상 삶과 괴리된 것이었다.

    Before speaking further about culture, I must remark that the world is hungry and not concerned with culture, and that the attempt to orient toward culture thoughts turned only toward hunger is a purely artificial expedient.
   문화에 대해 더 이야기 하기 전에, 세상은 굶주리고 있고 사람들은 문화에는 관심이 없으며 사람들이 문화에 관심을 갖도록 만들려는 시도는 궁극적으로는 별 효과가 없는 순전히 인위적인 임시방편에 불과하다는 점을 지적해야겠다.

    What is most important, it seems to me, is not so much to defend a culture whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract, from what is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical with that of hunger.
   가장 중요한 일은, 인간을 굶주리지 않게 하는데 아무런 공헌도 하지 못하는 문화를 변호하는 일보다는, 굶주린 자들의 욕구 못지않게 강한 어떤 욕구를 지닌 아이디어를 우리가 소위 문화라고 부르는 것에서 추출해 내는 일이라고 생각한다.

     We need to live first of all; to believe in what makes us live and that something makes us live --- to believe that whatever is produced from the mysterious depths of ourselves need not forever haunt us as an exclusively digestive concern.
우리는 무엇보다도 우선 살아야한다. 그리고 우리를 살게 만드는 어떤 것이 있어서 그것이 우리를 살게 만든다는 것을 믿어야 한다 --  우리 자신의 내면 깊숙히 자리잡은 신비로운 어떤 곳에서 뭔가가 나오는데 그것이 무엇이든 우리는 그것을 오직 단순히 먹고 소화하는 문제로만 생각할 필요가 없다는 것을 믿어야 한다.

    I mean that if it is important for us to eat first of all, it is even more important for us not to waste in the sole concern for eating our simple power of being hungry.  
무엇보다도 먹는 일이 중요하다면, 먹는데에만 관심을 갖느라고 굶주림이라는 단순한 힘을 낭비하지 않도록 하는 일은 훨씬 더 중요하다는 뜻이다.

     If confusion is the sign of the times, I see at the root of this confusion a rupture between things and words, between things and the ideas and signs that are their representation.
혼란이 이 시대의 표시라면 이 혼란의 근원에 사물과 단어간의 부조화가 있으며 사물과  생각과 그리고 이를 나타내는 기호들간에도 단절과 파열이 있음을 나는 본다.

    Not, of course, for lack of philosophical systems; their number and contradictions

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characterize our old French and European culture : but where can it be shown that life, our life, has ever been affected by these systems? I will not say that philosophical systems must be applied directly and immediately : but of the following alternatives, one must be true:  철학적 체계들이 없어서 그런 것이 아님은 물론이다 ; 그들은 숫적으로도 많고 모순도 많다는 점은 우리 불란서와 유럽의 옛 문화가 지닌 특징이기도 하다: 삶이, 우리의 삶이, 이들 체계들의 영향을 받은 적이 있었다는 사실이 어디에 나타나는가? 철학적인 체계들이 직접적이고도 곧바로 적용되어야 한다는 말은 하지 않겠다 : 그러나 다음 대안들 중에서 하나는 진실이어야 한다.

    Either these systems are within us and permeate our being to the point of supporting life itself (and if this is the case, what use are books?), or they do not permeate us and therefore do not have the capacity to support life (and in this case what does their disappearance matter?).

    We must insist upon the idea of culture-in-action, of culture growing within us like a new organ, a sort of second breath; and on civilization as an applied culture controlling even our subtlest actions, a presence of mind; the distinction between culture and civilization is an artificial one, providing two words to signify an identical function.

    A civilized man judges and is judged according to his behavior, but even the term "civilized" leads to confusion: a cultivated "civilized" man is regarded as a person instructed in systems, a person who thinks in forms, signs, representations --- a monster whose faculty of deriving thoughts from acts, instead of identifying acts with thoughts, is developed to an absurdity.

    If our life lacks brimstone, i.e., a constant magic, it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form instead of being impelled by their force.

    And this faculty is an exclusively human one. I would even say that it is this infection of the human which contaminates ideas that should have remained divine; for far from believing that man invented the supernatural and the divine, I think it is man's age-old intervention which has ultimately corrupted the divine within him.

    All our ideas about life must be revised in a period when nothing any longer adheres to life;  우리는 지금 어떠한 것도 삶과 연관이 안되는 시대에 살고 있으므로 삶에 대한 우리의 생각들을 바꾸지 않으면 안된다. it is this painful cleavage which is responsible for the

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revenge of things; the poetry which is no longer within us and which we no longer succeed in finding in things suddenly appears on their wrong side: consider the unprecedented number of crimes whose perverse gratuitousness is explained only by our powerlessness to take complete possession of life.

    If the theater has been created as an outlet for our repressions, the agonized poetry expressed in its bizarre corruptions of the facts of life demnonstrates that life's intensity is still intact and asks only to be better directed.

    But no matter how loudly we clamor for magic in our lives, we are really afraid of pursuing an existence entirely under its influence and sign.

    Hence our confirmed lack of culture is astonished by certain grandiose anomalies; for example, on an island without any contact with modern civilization, the mere passage of a ship carrying only healthy passengers may provoke the sudden outbreak of diseases unknown on that island but a specialty of nations like our own : singles, influenza, grippe, rheumatism, sinusitis, polyneuritis, etc.

    Similarly, if we think Negroes smell bad, we are ignorant of the fact that anywhere but in Europe it is we whites who "smell bad." And I would even say that we give off an odor as white as the gathering of pus in an infected wound. 마찬가지로 만일 우리가 니그로들에게서는 심한 냄새가 난다고 생각한다면, 유럽을 제외한 다른 모든 곳에서는 심한 냄새가 나는 것은 바로 우리 백인들이라는 사실에 대해 우리가 무지한 것이다.

     As iron can be heated until it turns white, so it can be said that everything excessive is white; for Asiatics white has to become the mark of extreme decomposition.

어떠한 것도 삶과 밀착되지 못하고 모두가 겉도는 시대에 우리가 살고 있다면 삶에 대해 우리가 지닌 모든 생각들을 바꿔야 할 것이다. 쇠에 열을 계속 가하면 그 쇠는 흰색으로 변하듯이 지나친 것은 모두 희다고 말할 수가 있다; 아시아인들은 흰색이란 원래의 색이 매우 심하게 변질되면 (색이 모두 바래어 없어지면) 나타나는 것이라고 생각한다.

    This said, we can begin to form an idea of culture, an idea which is first of all a protest.이 정도로 이야기를 했으니 이제 우리는 문화에 대한 생각을 다시 만들어 가야 한다. 문화에 대한 생각이란 우선 저항이다.

    A protest against the senseless constraint imposed upon the idea of culture 이 저항은 문화라는 개념에 부여되는 의미없고 황당한 제약과 구속에 대한 저항이다. by reducing it to a sort of inconceivable Pantheon, producing an idolatry no different from the image-worship of those religion which relegate their gods to Pantheons.

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    A protest against the  idea of culture as distinct from life --- as if there were culture on one side and life on the other, as if true culture were not a refined means of understanding and exercising life. 이 저항은 문화란 삶과 구별되는 별개의 것이라는 생각에 대한 저항이다. 한쪽에는 문화가 다른 한쪽에는 삶이 있고 이 둘은 서로 아무런 관련이 없는 별개의 것인양 생각하는 일반적인 추세에 대한 저항이다.

    The library at Alexandria can be burnt down. There are forces above and beyond papyrus: we may temporarily be deprived of our ability to discover these forces, but their energy will not be suppressed. 알렉산드리아의 도서관은 불에 타 없어질 수 있다. 그래도 종이 위와 종이 너머에는 힘이 있다: 우리는 일시적으로는 이같은 힘을 발견하는 우리의 능력을 빼앗길 수도 있다, 그러나 그 힘이 발산하는 에너지는 억누를 수 없다. It is good that our excessive facilities are no longer available, that forms fall into oblivion; a culture without space or time, restrained only by the capacity of our own nerves, will reappear with all the more energy. It is right that from time to time cataclysms occur which compel us to return to nature, it.e., to rediscover life. The old totemism of animals, stones, objects capable of discharging thunderbolts, costumes impregnated with bestial essences --- everything, in short, that might determine, disclose, and direct the secret forces of the universe --- is for us a dead thing, from which we derive nothing but static and aesthetic profit, the profit of an audience, not of an actor.

    Yet totemism is an actor, for it moves, and has been created in behalf of actors; all true culture relies upon the barbaric and primitive means of totemism whose savage, i.e., entirely spontaneous, life I wish to worship.

    What has lost us culture is our Occidental idea of art and the profits we seek to derive from it. Art and culture cannot be considered together, contrary to the treatment universally accorded them!

    True culture operates by exaltation and force, while the European ideal of art attempts to cast the mind into an attitude distinct from force but addicted to exaltation. It is a lazy, unserviceable notion which engenders an imminent death. If the Serpent Quetzalcoatl's multiple twists and turns are harmonious, it is because they express the equilibrium and fluctuations of a sleeping force; the intensity of the

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forms is there only to seduce and direct a force which, in music, would produce an insupportable range of sound.

    The gods that sleep in museums : the god of fire with his incense burner that resembles an Inquisition tripod; Tlaloc, one of the manifold Gods of the Waters, on his wall of green granite; the Mother Goddess of Waters, the Mother Goddess of Flowers; the immutable expression, echoing from beneath many layers of water, of the Goddess robed in green jade; the enraptured, blissful expression, features crackling with incense, where atoms of sunlight circle -- the countenance of the Mother Goddess of Flowers; this world of obligatory servitude in which a stone comes alive when it has been properly carved, the world of organically civilized men whose vital organs too awaken from their slumber, this human world enters into us, participating in the dance of the gods without turning round or looking back, on pain of becoming, like ourselves, crumbled pillars of salt.

    In Mexico, since we are talking about Mexico, there is no art: things are made for use. And the world is in perpetual exaltation.

    To our disinterested and inert idea of art an authentic culture opposes a violently egoistic and magical, i.e., interested idea. For the Mexicans seek contact with the Manas, forces latent in every form, unreleased by contemplation of the forms for themselves, but springing to life by magic identification with these forms. And the old Totems are there to hasten the communication.     

    How hard it is, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.

    This is how our strange idea of disinterested action originated, though it is action nonetheless, and all the more violent for skirting the temptation of repose.

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    Every real effigy has a shadow which is its double; and art must falter and fail from the moment the sculptor believes he has liberated the kind of shadow whose very existence will destroy his repose.

    Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations. From the beginning, one might say its shadow did not tolerate limitations.

    Our petrified idea of the theater is connected with our petrified idea of a culture without shadows, where, no matter which way it turns, our mind (esprit) encounters only emptiness, though space is full.

    But the true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way. The actor does not make the same gestures twice, but he makes gestures, he moves; and although he brutalizes forms, nevertheless behind them and through their destruction he rejoins that which outlives forms and produces their continuation.

    And the fixation of the theater in one language --- written words, music, lights, noises --- betokens its imminent ruin, the choice of any one language betraying a taste for the special effects of that language; and the dessication of the language accompanies its limitation.

    For the theater as for culture, it remains a question of naming and directing shadows: and the theater, not confined to a fixed language and form, not only destroys false shadows but prepares the way for a new generation of shadows, around which assembles the true spectacle of life.

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    To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theater; the essential thing is not to believe that this act must remain sacred, i.e., set apart --- the essential thing is to believe that not just anyone can create it, and that there must be a preparation.

    이것은 인간과 그 인간의 능력에 흔히 부여되는 제약과 제한을 거부하고 우리가 현실이라고 부르는 미개척지를 무한히 확대해나가야 한다는 뜻이다. This leads to the rejection of the usual limitations of man and man's powers, and infinitely extends the frontiers of what is called reality.

    우리는 연극에 의해 새롭게 다듬어진 삶에 대한 우리의 감각을 믿어야 한다. 삶에 대한 우리의 새로운 감각은 우리로 하여금 두려움없이 자신을 아직은 존재하지 않는 어떤 것의 주인이 되게 하고 그 존재하지 않는 것을 존재하게 만든다. 우리는 우리가 단순히 남의 생각과 말을 녹음기처럼 따라하는 유기체로 머물러있는데 만족하지 않고 나서서 노력한다면 태여나지도 않은 모든 것에 생명을 불어넣어 살아나게 할 수 있다. We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being. And everything that has not been born can still be brought to life if we are not satisfied to remain mere recording organisms.

    또한 우리가 삶이라는 단어를 언급할 때, 이 단어는 우리가 표피적으로 아는 삶을 의미하는 것이 아니라 형체도 없고 연약하고 변화무쌍한 삶의 핵심을 의미한다는 점을 이해해야 한다. 우리  시대에 정말로 저주받아 마땅할 일은 화형을 당하면서 불길속에서 신호를 보내는 희생제물이 되는 대신에 형식을 갖고 예술적 장난을 하며 시간을 낭비하는 일이다. Furthermore, when we speak the word "life," it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach. And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.