THE MADMAN AND THE NUN
“He dissolved eighteen luminal tablets and two cybalgine tablets in a small pot. . . . Then we said good-bye. . . . Stas began to slit his wrist with a razor, but the blood somehow didn’t flow. He cut the varicose vein on his right leg, but there wasn’t any blood there either.
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Witkiewicz, like so many of his fictional protagonists, tried to maintain some dignity and sanity in a hopeless, unpredictable, and almost comically cruel world. In his work as in his death, he clarified the idea of the grotesque as the collision of tragedy and farce. Although he died in near obscurity—his highly disturbing and unconventional plays were dismissed as the ravings of a madman by the critics of his day—his name resurfaced in Poland after the October revolution of 1956, sparking a new avant-garde movement that drew the likes of Tadeusz Kantor and Jerzy Grotowski.
One of the few plays that enjoyed a modicum of success during Witkiewicz’s lifetime, The Madman and the Nun grew out of the many contradictory forces in his life and in the world around him. Although he was the son of one of the most prominent turn-of-the-century Polish intellectuals, Witkiewicz received no formal education. (“In our times,” his father wrote, “school is completely at odds with the physiological make-up of human beings.”) Left to his own devices, Witkiewicz became an accomplished landscape painter, following in his father’s footsteps, but he also created horrifying portraits of his friends, with titles like A Man With Dropsy Lies in Wait for His Wife’s Lover and The Prince of Darkness Tempts Saint Theresa With the Aid of a Waiter From Budapest. He traveled through Australia with the not-yet-famous anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, a childhood friend, at one point ending up tied to a stake over an open fire by natives hoping to rid him of ticks. He even served in the czar’s elite Pavlovsky Regiment, a unit that would ultimately fight alongside the Bolsheviks and would elect Witkiewicz as its political commissar.
More problematic is the fact that Trap Door focuses so heavily on Walpurg’s dilemma, reducing him to an individual, psychologically realistic character, that their production fails to achieve a higher, metaphorical significance. For one thing the romanticized tribulations of the insane artist have become somewhat hackneyed in the latter half of the 20th century. But also Witkiewicz’s outrageous drama, in which it seems almost commonplace for a nun to pull off her wimple and hump a madman, is concerned with more than the fate of an individual poet, or even the fate of society. Madman is written on a truly cosmic scale.
