RICHARD GILMAN
419
siveness never fuse, never offer direct perspectives on one another.
Nothing is done as a
consequence
of something having been said,
or the other way round.
The clue to this strange new relationship of speech and act lies
in Kroetz' s remark about the most important"action" of his charac–
ters being their silence. For these silences, the gaps within or the
truncations of their speech, make for an almost unbearable tension
on the stage, a pressure of the unsaid-of the unable to be said-that
weighs upon every movement or gesture, and all potential ones, and
infuses them with a quality of extreme nakedness, radical isolation .
Bereft of the "cultural" covering in which dramatic actions are ordi–
narily sheathed, the matrix of articulated ideas , attitudes , percep–
tions, comment and so on, these physical events take place, so to
speak, inexplicably, like eruptions from the darkness , pure , horrifying
acts of discrete and seemingly motiveless violence .
The most extreme of them, the murders, rapes , assaults' that flll
his plays , come at a point when the felt inadequacy of the characters'
language , the frustration they cannot name (and still worse , cannot
even imagine with a name, since that would be to possess some part
of the language whose lack is their very condition) bring his characters
to pass over the boundaries of the "civilized."
It
is as though the
tension created by their inarticulateness, the profound occlusion of
consciousness in them, can only give way
to
the " reliefs" of brutal
motions,
to
a catharsis in which nothing is purged but something
infinitely painful is , at least, attested
to .
This deeply subtle relationship of speech and gesture in Kroetz's
plays, this atmosphere made up so largely of the implicit and un–
announced, make their strange power and
effectiven~ss
unusually
difficult to convey through brief quotation or the description of single
actions. Still, a scene such as the following one from
Farmyard
offers
us a narrow way into the depleted, stricken world his imagination
has come upon. A middle-aged farmhand has taken the young,
retarded daughter of his employer to a country fair. They take a ride
on the "ghost-train" and when they emerge from the tunnel the
girl is evidently in distress:
Sepp: What's the matter?
Beppi:
(Walks
stiffly.)
