위비의 시학-가능성의 연극 문법,새로운 감각으로 현실 읽기

Abstract

Aristotle defined theatre as the ‘representation of man in action’ in Poetics B.C. 350. According to him, theatre the art of representation was possible under the assumption that human actions represented on stage must be understandable, and therefore meaningful to spectators. Here, to apprehend the meaning of a human action meant to understand the motive of the action. The belief in understandable motive of human action became the primary of theatre until the mid of 19th century when Western world witnessed the breakdown of the status quo. With the advent of scientific or ‘modern’ thoughts of Comte, Darwin, Freud and Nietzsche, the authority of Christianity and other established traditions came to be questioned. The traditions included the belief in motive of human action. In the field of theatre, the question about understandable motive of human action was directly related to a question about the possibility of what Aristotle called theatre and its purpose. Accordingly, theatre at crisis was faced with a dilemma: whether to continue its humiliating dead life by representing meaningless human action, or compromising with modernity, or to die a heroic death by quitting the meaningless work. It is worth noticing that what Aristotle meant by theatre was none other than tragedy. That is, the impossibility of theatre meant the death of tragedy. This point is significant because it gives a ray of hope on the possibility of theatre, as being comedy. Related to this, the writing and production of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (1896) was an epoch-making event in theatre history. Mirroring the said dilemma, this play resolutely attempted to explore a possibility of theatre in modern era. Departing from the dead tradition of tragedy, it experimented the possibility in the form of comedy. Accordingly, Jarry's Ubu Roi charts the process within which a king-clown protagonist Ubu steals, dissects, and parodies Aristotle's poetics of tragedy and finally weaves it into his own poetics of comedy, which is defined as a theatre of presentation, clown, crude language, no ending, and conflict. The modern sensibility of this play is materialized into the excretion of an abusive word “shitte!” that Ubu shouts toward the audience, the anachronistic zealots of the dead tradition. Likewise, Jarry ‘presents’ his reading of reality though the mouth of this anti-hero as well as his poetics.