Benjamin Fondane, for a New Drama Poetics

It is perhaps exaggerated the hypothesis that Fondane's poetics is systemically articulated. A number of dominant features, however, impress a dynamic unity on Fondane's vision of the theater, even on the performative dimension of culture, as is evident in the False Treatise of Aesthetics, written in the Parisian years. Touched by the influence of the French intellectual and artistic environment, following the meeting with Artaud and Shestov (which accentuated the "existential" predisposition of Fondane's thinking), these constants can be traced back to his first press articles and to his plays, contaminated by readings of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Shestov, Gide. The influence of these mentors is felt in how Fondane reads and rewrites in his plays the classic stories of Oedipus, Philoctetes, the wandering Jew. The biographies of the masters, that of Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, are mutually placed by Fondane in a dramatic logic. (They are the protagonists of existential "dramas" and, like any "tragic" hero, they are waiting for the end that absolves them of the burden of an "unhappy conscience"). The figure of the hero in Fondane's plays borrows and dramatically transposes this "existential" odyssey which is a pattern of Fondane's work (poetry, dramaturgy, essay) and his biography. Already from the articles of the Romanian period, beyond the empirical commentary of text or performance, there emerges Fondane's preoccupation with the rules and structure of ever changing drama mechanisms, from the Greek tragedy to the realistic and symbolist drama. Such reflections will later find an organic continuation in those observations from the False Treatise convergent with an important direction from the theory and practice of the performing arts of the twentieth century and beyond: a creative direction prefigured by Antonin Artaud, who is trying to revitalize western performance by its "re-dramatization" (not so much by emphasizing the effect of real, credible imitation, but by emphasizing the artifact nature of the performance, as an alternative to the real).