Gotroheen’s ‘Pragoitihasik’- A Dithyrambic Portrayal of Primal Instincts
by Sambit Basu
According to the old story, King Midas had long hunted wise Silenus, Dionysus’ companion, without catching him. When Silenus had finally fallen into his clutches, the king asked him what was the best and most desirable thing of all for mankind. The daemon stood silent, stiff and motionless, until at last, forced by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and spoke these words: ‘Miserable, ephemeral race, children of hazard and hardship, why do you force me to say what it would be much more fruitful for you not to hear? The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you – is to die soon.’
- Friedrich Nietzsche in ‘The Birth of Tragedy’
The Apolline is bound to exorcize the realm of art manifeste of the essentially Dionysiac in that the moment of birth of the illusory is already contained within the will to express. Therefore all representation is illusory in essence. With this caveat as a permanent backdrop it follows that all that passes in the name of Dionysiac art are actually illusions of the first order, all higher orders belonging to the formally Apolline; that is to say the Dionysiac project is dead in advance, its carnal outrage being the mirth of grave dancers. By saying this I am not demeaning the Dionysian tendencies that fuel and further creation but rather trying to emphasize that there is something essentially Apolline in expressive tendentiousness. The Dionysian drive rakes our existence forcing us to perform beauteous rites, primordial in essence, beastly in existence. The daemonic folk songs that Nietzsche mentions in ‘Birth of Tragedy’ is but an instance of these convulsive outcries, the almost and not quite art proper that abnegate and humble the Apolline only to rejuvenate, drawing from its (Dionysian) venomous potions- hence the Nietzschean phrasing ‘as medicines recall poison’. That is to say Dionysiac arts are the ones which acknowledge without pretence the inevitability of the Dionysiac conditions from their onset, never losing sight henceforth; henceforth there is no dearth of darkness on account of the auspicious duty to illumine with the necessary illusion. This ontological inevitability of originary darkness beyond and without language, gestates the nascent fumes that ultimately precipitates in myriad Dionysiac forms. The naïve artist vehemently denies the darkness with grand illusions crafted to pinnacles of perfection, tormented by the Dionysiac ceaselessly and unconsciously; the dark artist accentuates his music with stark orchestration and devious caprices to disrupt formal structuring and make way for the Dionysiac to burst forth and haunt the occasion with its (non)presence, persistent yet intangible. In extreme both are gullible to an unimodal pre-fixation of completion in itself, the basest of all illusions, intense enough to dazzle or doom one to ontological blindness.
‘Pragoitihasik’ (Prehistorik), a short story by Manik Bandyopadhyay is a masterpiece rife with Dionysiac revelations in its attempt to demonstrate the impossibility of making sense of primal darkness that man inherits, through a vivid account of bare life, a rudimentary existence akin to beasts that nevertheless refuse alternatives in any form. The story explicitly articulates an wisdom, profound and arcane; man is the beast of beasts:
“He won’t die. He cannot die. The conditions in which animals of the wild fail to survive, he being human will live for certain.”
No these lines don’t solicit for human intelligence, technology or societal skills but rather emphasize on his sheer grit, his extreme threshold of pain, his convulsive will to survive far past that of the savage beasts.
The storyline is as follows: Set in a rural area, the protagonist of the play Bhikhu is a notorious bandit. During a raid to a business house, his entire gang was captured. Bhikhu murdered the brother of the owner and made a narrow escape with a severe arm injury. He tried to takes refuge at his friend Pehlad Bagdi’s place who refuses to take the risk but built him a raised bamboo platform amidst the thick overgrowth of sinjuri trees in deep forest. Later Pehlad brings him back to his place. As he starts to recover the animal instincts in him start to take over. In the absence of his friend, Bhikhu tries to rape Pehlad's wife but fails. A furious Pehlad beats him out of the house. Bhikhu becomes a drifter and one day comes across Pachi, a voluptuous beggar with a nasty sore on her leg. Bhikhu takes a liking to Pachi but her man Bashir, another beggar, stands in his way. One night Bhikhu kills Bashir, and taking his savings sets off for the city along with Pachi.
A few weeks back I had the privilege of watching a stage adaptation of this story by the group called ‘Gotroheen’ (creedless). Since the story was one of my favorites, one of the pieces that inspired the tone of my own writings I was very enthusiastic about the play and was wondering in advance what theatrical treatment might convey the theme and feel in the realm of performative art, a medium with immense dionysiac potential. And I came out moved, a fierce agitation, intangible yet persistent in dearth of expression seemed to grip me on my way back home. The absurd didn’t hit me on the face all of a sudden on a street corner, it was already well in place, planted in course of the viewing experience. Let me make a few observations on the play, trying to understand its power to have this impact on me as a viewer and its overall efficiency in translating the thematic of the original story in terms of the language of theatre.
The play begins with sharp metallic clamours in a pitch dark auditorium. The black background, the stage partly lit and partly obscured with numerous dangling ropes created a jagged and distorted viewing space, charging the setting with a sense of violence and violation, dismal yet vigorous. The action begins with the chaotic dance of forms not quite human, disparate fragments wreathing and wriggling in agony, craving for life and light. The choreographed movements are but mere flickers in spacial variation that says more than words can, about the puniness and absurdity of the (non)human condition in a world bereft of any scope for grace or redemption. The somber beats of ‘dhamsa’, an indigenous percussive instrument, syncopating at times, accentuated the grave realization of non-becoming. A heavy bass sound that throbs the heart, conglomerated the viewers into an organic whole, effectively absorbing them within the performative complex. The recitation of poems by Manik Bandhyopadyay, Birendra Chattopadhyay, Jibanananda Das and Shovon Bhattacharya commented copiously on the unbridgeable rifts that hinder communication in all forms between forms of existence. The performance itself will not have the least effect on the lives of others, that of the bare beings who tread the fringes of society often stepping out to a no man’s territory. The story itself constantly harps on this failure of knowing, this unattainability of fellow beings and the permanent non-availability of their life and world to the so called civilized who are so superficially connected by an illusory mesh of commonality that the slightest clash of interest is enough to rip it apart. But then art achieves what the literary is incapable of accomplishing with all its systemic and logical rigor. The original story invokes a mood, carefully crafted through a certain mode of descriptive narration that touches the nerve ends of the wound suddenly in the naked, sending a shiver down the spine of the reader, bringing him alarmingly close to the experiential domain, so far impervious to articulative exploration; the artist with his heightened sensibility abolish distances between domains that are mutually disjoint. Yet the conscious one acknowledges the fact that its not so much of a matter of limitation of linguistic expressivity but has more to do with irreconcilable separation of experiential modes as a basic human condition. The opening act/ scene evokes this feel in effect with the promise of a physical spectacle that would simultaneously acknowledge this debacle of unattainability. Bodies creep and climb the ropes, coalesce to the point of indistinction as syncopated beats underline the erratic twists. In a world driven by primal instinct and brute life force, the extreme crudity of misery pushes existence to the preverbal where bodies speak for bodies themselves, Babylon obscured by the laughter of Dionysus. Their primal wails ferments to almost weary chants by a reccurance ad infinitum that digs up a black hole where light and time have been abolished forever. The protagonist creeps up to the stage on his all four, clinging to a pair of ropes that extends the stage beyond the fore stalls. The stage is further spaced out when characters exchange dialogue, enter and exit the main stage from spaces amidst the stall. The initial stage décor is constrained to a bare minimal: a dial without hands invoking the notion of absence of a secular notion of time and a giant inverted branch that divides into an intensive network of branchlets resembling an antler, the deciduous horn of a stag that may well symbolize impermanence, decay and death. The inevitable darkness and the irreversibility further echoes in the lines of poems that has been recited by personae onstage whose diegetic identity is rather ambiguous. I reckon them to be a dramatic device to put into effect the excesses that cannot be accommodated within the framework of a monotonic/lithic dialogue based linear narrative. The three ladies in black immediately come to mind when I think of such extradiagetic presence on stage. They are a band of paranoiac wretch and orator of wisdom, an unlikely aggregate vigorously fecund, and their facial expressions’ teeming ominous unspeakable paranoia contrapuntal to what they speak creates an eerie uncanny feel; a feel sure to have haunted the discerning reader of the short story ‘Pragoitihasik’. Here lies the success of this supremely artistic venture, in conveying the affect of the original story but in terms and language of another medium, in this case that of theater’s. The dialogues are curt and replete with jargon of the marginals and almost no attempt has been made towards a narrative continuity; a stylistic treatment freely borrowing from various artistic schools, from surrealism to the Brechtean epic has been employed at random in a vigorously bleak exposition of ritual madness and nonreason. Accordingly animalistic instincts that thrive like a deathless hermaphrodite under the shallow surfaces of civilization has been emphasized through and through, through a recurrent deployment of physically rigorous choreography and sexually charged scenes that depict brutal violence simultaneously culminating in an orgy that syncs with the death cry. The extremely efficient lighting breaks the space into an asymmetric contiguity and accentuates the actions only too well. The germ of the Dionisiac latent within the story assumes a daemonic proportion, swelling up to shroud the world portrayed, thereby presiding over its fate in a ritualistic celebration and bereavement of the essential human condition, the wild exhilaration in suffering and the unfathomable human terrain, permanently black. Nietzsche surely would have liked this play! To end on a Nietzschean note:
In the Dionysiac dithyramb, man’s symbolic faculties are roused to their supreme intensity: a feeling never before experiencedis struggling for expression- the destruction of the veil of Maya, oneness as the source of form, of nature itself. The essence of nature was now to find symbolic expression. A new world of symbols was required, the whole of the symbolism of the body, not only the symbolism of the mouth, the eye, the word, but the rhythmic motion of all the limbs of the body in the complete gesture of the dance. Then all the other symbolic forces, the forces of music – rhythm, dynamics and harmony – would suddenly find impetuous expression. In order to grasp this total liberation of all symbolic forces, man must already have reached that peak of self negation that seeks symbolic expression in those powers: the dithyrambic votary of Dionysus is thus understood only by his fellows!
- Friedrich Nietzsche in ‘The Birth of Tragedy’
