SOURCE: “Tadeusz Różewicz's The Card Index: A New Beginning for Polish Drama,” in Modern Drama, Vol. XXVII, No. 3, September, 1984, pp. 395–408.

The Card Index (Kartoteka) is the best known and most seminal of some fifteen full-length plays by Tadeusz Różewicz, foremost Polish poet and dramatist who has achieved an unimpeded style of his own.¹ Written in the late 1950s, when the arts in Eastern Europe were emerging from the dreary period of enforced socialist realism, The Card Index revolutionized Polish theatre by its radical concept of open dramaturgy, an approach which does not imitate or embellish life but creates a self-contained reality on stage. Using the formal principles of construction found in modern poetry, art, and music, Różewicz gives his play a fluid dramatic form, one that is more open and loose than forms developed by the conventional, mimetic dramaturgy of realistic psychology and storytelling. Yet The Card Index never becomes an abstract construction in pure theatricality. The fragmentary, seemingly incoherent form of the play serves to express severe dislocations in postwar Polish society, which witnessed the Communist takeover, the subsequent Stalinist reign of terror, a collapse of the Soviet-backed regime, and the short-lived liberalization of the late 1950s. The form of The Card Index also reflects Różewicz's view of malleable human nature in the world of instability and endless flux. No conventional realistic drama could capture those complex sociopolitical and moral issues as profoundly as The Card Index does by exclusively antimimetic means.

Historically, the nonrealistic idiom has been the dominant mode of expression for Polish dramatists such as Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, Stanisław Wyspiański, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (known as Witkacy), or Witold Gombrowicz. Różewicz imbues the antimimetic tradition of Polish drama with a new vitality by deconstructing its thematic and structural patterns, and refusing to maintain any consistent set of conventions.²The Card Index offers the audience no reality except the one that is being created at each moment by impersonation and enactment. In the theatricalized world of the play, Różewicz strives to reach beyond spoken language. Sounds, shapes, colors, and movements are the materials out of which a new dramaturgy should be created. His basic tools are thus images rather than words, and his primary medium is carefully orchestrated movement within a special, arbitrarily constructed space. Among his greatest gifts as a playwright is his ability to find precise visual effects which, superseding words, convey in purely theatrical terms the essence of an entire scene. Along with the work of Witkacy and Gombrowicz, Różewicz's concept of open dramaturgy has been a major influence on postwar Polish playwrights and theatre artists such as Helmut Kajzar, Jerzy Grzegorzewski, Kazimierz Braun, or Janusz Wiśniewski. Yet its most vivid parallel is Tadeusz Kantor's work. Różewicz, however, developed his daring dramatic style in The Card Index long before Kantor completed his most significant internationally acclaimed productions, Dead Class (1975) and Wielopole, Wielopole (1980).

Różewicz's assault on dramatic conventions was so radical that the first Polish production of The Card Index in March 1960 closed down after only nine performances.³ Despite an influx of West European avant-garde drama to Poland during the post-Stalinist Thaw, Polish critics and playgoers were not yet ready for the unique style and vision of The Card Index. Polish theatres all but ignored the play until 1971, when the literary monthly Odra published additional scenes from The Card Index, or approximately one-third of the original script.⁴ Known as the Unpublished Variations of the Text (Niepublikowane odmiany tekstu) or simply the Addenda (Dodatek), the scenes contain politically sensitive references to the Polish anti-Communist military underground during World War II, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, and the moral devastation of Polish society wrought by the War and the Stalinist era. The playwright feared that, despite the loosening of arts control in the late 1950s, the scenes would not pass censorship inspection. He thus chose self-censorship, excising and rewriting the scenes to save the script from the censor's ban. The eventual publication of the Addenda spurred a renewed interest in The Card Index, which received six different productions in 1971 alone. Since then, owing largely to theatre experimenters of the 1970s, The Card Index has become Różewicz's most frequently produced play, a classic of Polish drama, and an approved alternate on the official high-school reading list.

The deleted scenes have radically changed the critical understanding of The Card Index. They illumine the protagonist's past and clarify his motivation, but their explicitness pushes the play into the realm of conventional causal dramaturgy. As Różewicz honed and polished his concept of open dramaturgy, he replaced the more straightforward scenes with those in which a totally problematic sense of reality shatters any firm sense of story, and all connecting links must be provided by the audience itself. The forthright stage realism is used by Różewicz only when he seeks an ironic effect. Paradoxically, then, the censorship restrictions prompted Różewicz to search even further for a new dramatic idiom.

A drama about roles, identities, and the loss of self, The Card Index is a powerful theatrical exploration of an inner psychological state. The organizing principle of the play is the protagonist's interminable journey through a strange, haunting landscape that becomes his state of consciousness. In a series of loosely connected, open-ended episodes with only slight dramatic action, Różewicz evokes the fragmented, self-contradictory nature of the human mind, and he embodies in the character of the Hero the plight of his generation. As the action unfolds, the Hero painstakingly pieces together the card index of his collective biography. An anonymous man “of indeterminate age, occupation, and appearance,” he assumes various identities, including those of a soldier in the anti-Communist military underground during the War, a writer, and an insignificant employee of a ridiculously absurd institution called “the national operetta.”⁵ He exists precisely in this multiplicity of personae, not as a distinct, individualized character of realistic drama. The playwright thus prevents spectators from holding any consistent attitude towards the Hero.

A weary man of the twentieth century and an antithesis of Mickiewicz's or Słowacki's Romantic heroes, Różewicz's protagonist has been scarred by the War and the postwar Stalinist era. He killed and compromised for such lofty abstractions as love of humanity, loyalty, and patriotic duty. In a bitter yet cathartic reckoning with the past and present, the Hero is stripped of lies, delusions, and obsessions, as he searches restlessly for a new beginning.

The action of the entire play occurs in the confined space of the Hero's windowless room, while he stays for the most part in bed. As so often happens in Różewicz's plays, the theatrical metaphor shifts from the actor to the stage as a whole. The setting in The Card Index is a direct expression of the protagonist's inner reality. In precise scenic images that supplant words, the setting stresses the absence of any avenue of escape and thus captures the Hero's sense of entrapment, while the bed, with its connotations of privacy, intimacy, and rest, suggests his vulnerability and passivity. The room thus has a double identity as a physical space and the Hero's state of mind.

Dispensing almost entirely with sequential plot, rational causation, and psychological verisimilitude, Różewicz gives The Card Index the fluid structure characteristic of dreams. Both naturalistic conventions and dream worlds are invoked, played off against each other, and dissolved. By creating this perpetual disequilibrium, Różewicz demonstrates the uselessness of insisting on any one level of reality. As the Hero remains in bed, rapidly shifting images float by, but each is bright and tangible while it lasts. In this half-waking dream, the Hero's bedroom is his parents' home, his office, a street, a coffee shop, and a Hungarian restaurant at the same time. The characters—real and imaginary, dead and living—appear and disappear by a process of free association, the result of analogical thinking rather than reasoning. The tone changes from facetious to solemn, from cynical to sublime, from ironic to affectionate. Despite their apparent offhand quality and spontaneity, the shifts in space, time, and tone are executed with seamless precision. The flow of images is tightly controlled by the structural principle of a polyphonic interplay of mounting tension and abrupt juxtaposition, as the seemingly unrelated episodes, including the Addenda, advance the play's circumstances rather than an identifiable storyline.

In an early manuscript version, The Card Index actually begins with one of the excised scenes, a nightmarish encounter between the Hero and the Hungarian waiter. Set in a Budapest restaurant shortly after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, it introduces political and moral concerns of the play.⁶ The Waiter, wary of foreigners in his invaded homeland, pressures the Hero into confessing his occupation. The Hero evades the question: “You see, I occasionally write” (p. 40). The Waiter then concludes contemptuously that the Hero must be a journalist. In Eastern Europe, journalism has become synonymous with propaganda and misinformation, and there is little pride in announcing that one works as a journalist. The Hero is thus forced to clarify that, although he sometimes does newspaper reporting, he is actually a poet. It does not come easily to him to call himself a poet, and he distances his awkward confession through a quick succession of histrionic effects. According to the stage directions, “The Hero shouts in despair. … The Hero laughs. … The Hero weeps” (p. 40).

Two young women come back from a swimming pool and use the restaurant as a sun deck. The image of the sunbathing women, a visual representation of carefree enjoyment of life,⁷ is counterpointed by the Hero's startling vision of gallows outside the restaurant. The gallows are an oblique reference to the death of the Hungarian opposition leaders who, in 1957, were charged with treason and hanged. The Waiter assures the Hero that he has merely seen a merry-go-round, and the Hero, drowsy after a heavy meal, meekly accepts his explanation.

A poignant reminder of the repressive politics in Eastern Europe, the scene carries an implied warning against complacency, opportunism, and self-seeking. The memory of his visit to Soviet-invaded Hungary will haunt the Hero throughout the play, along with his memories of the Holocaust and the Stalinist era. The fact that Różewicz makes the Hero a poet suggests the importance of artists' defiance against political oppression in Eastern Europe. In a brief moment, the Hero exposes lies and falsifications of the regime's propaganda and thus challenges the prevailing ideology. However, he soon sinks back into the stupor and self-imposed silence.

In the opening scene of the revised version of The Card Index, the Hero is in bed with his secretary, while the space around him seethes with simultaneous activity. Various people casually walk through his room, as if it were a street. Some of them “stop and read a newspaper. … Others listen for a moment to what is being said in the Hero's room. They sometimes add a few words and move on” (p. 5).

Among the Hero's visitors are characters from his past and present who have come to impart moral lessons. The Hero's parents reprimand him for his childhood transgressions. Olga, his war bride, bitterly reminds him that he had abandoned her. And three Elders in tattered clothes, an ironic replica of the Chorus in ancient Greek tragedy, recite Mickiewicz's lofty “Ode to Youth,” extolling the Romantic ideal of heroic self-sacrifice.⁸ But the Hero, oblivious to the surging, pulsating activity around him, wallows in bed holding up his hands and examining them closely. This suspended gesture, Różewicz's favorite technique, is reminiscent of Witkacy's “visual emphasis through pointed focus” which “directs the spectator's eye to a significant detail, character, or area of the stage and then holds his attention there for a prolonged moment, imprinting the scene on his consciousness.”⁹

The Hero's fragmented monologue, which weaves its way through the scene, is patterned after model sentences in phrase books for foreigners, as if the Hero were learning to use spoken language again:

This is my hand. I am moving my hand. … My fingers. … My live hand. … I am lying in bed. Chiefs of state and chiefs of staff have given me their permission to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. … A beautiful, clean, white ceiling. … The world didn't come to an end. We have survived. … I can lie in bed, clip my fingernails, listen to music.

(pp. 5, 9–10)

The Hero's lines are a salient extension of Różewicz's famous poem “The Survivor” (“Ocalony,” 1947), and the narrator's internal monologue in the short story “A New School of Philosophy” (“nowa szkoła filozoficzna,” 1956). Like the other War survivors in Różewicz's work, the Hero marvels at the very fact of being alive. He also awakens to the tremendous ethical implications of the Holocaust and the postwar imposition of the Communist rule which destroyed in Polish society “those organic bonds that survived, such as the family and the parish church.”¹⁰ For him, a witness of atrocity, a great simplification of everything has occurred. He uses the language in its most fundamental function and names simple objects and actions, thus groping for a firm sense of reality. He discovers that the experience of atrocity has revealed the fragility of an entire system of moral values, with its neat division into good and evil, beauty and ugliness, including as well the very notion of truth. The parents, Olga, and the Elders still cling to those values. But the Hero has emerged from his experience with few verities intact.

The scene, however, never falls into the trap of pervasive moralizing. Although Różewicz undoubtedly feels deep sympathy for his protagonist, he views the Hero at least as ironically as the Hero views himself. Normal audience sympathies and expectations are undermined by a sudden shift in tone from somber to grotesque. For instance, the playwright undercuts the seriousness of the Hero's monologue by interposing trivial details from his childhood and an irrelevant newspaper article.

Moreover, the Hero is both a victim and a victimizer, but his own malleability becomes evident only during his encounter with the Peasant in one of the excised scenes.¹¹ The episode reflects a tangled web of moral and political issues in wartime Poland, following the September 1939 invasion by both the Nazis and the Soviets. The vehemence of the Poles' struggle against the German occupation of their country was matched only by their hostility towards the Soviet-backed Communists, but the latter were by no means without supporters. The deleted scene focuses on this rift within Polish society. During the War, both the Hero and the Peasant fought in the same unit of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), an anti-Communist military underground. Presumably for his pro-Communist sympathies, the Peasant was dismissed from the unit, and the Hero was ordered to kill him. Now, in the theatricalized reality of The Card Index, the Peasant returns from the dead and jeers at the Hero for having been an object of manipulation in a political power struggle between the Communists and the underground.

In the encounter with the Uncle, which follows the opening scene of the revised version, the focus shifts from the Hero's persona as a Home resistance fighter to that of a political opportunist. Both evasive and adaptable, he has eventually accepted the Communist rule in Poland. In a postwar about-face, he sacrificed his political beliefs and moral sensibilities for earthly gratifications and the crassest pragmatism. However, in the censored version of the scene, the only direct reference to the Hero's support for the Communists is found in the cryptic line: “I applauded. I shouted cheers” (p. 13). In its original version, which was removed by Różewicz, the scene is a scathing indictment of postwar Polish history. It features two additional characters, the Young Man, who was tortured by the Polish Communist police during the Stalinist rule of terror, and an old Hungarian Miner, who exposes the Hero's hypocrisy and malleability.

In the Miner's account, the Hero's artistic career was launched by his service to the government propaganda machine and his adherence to Andrei Zhdanov's doctrine of socialist realism. In keeping with the socialist-realist mode of exaggerating and extolling the accomplishments of the Communists, the Hero produced propagandistic falsifications of reality. Moreover, he justified the “glitter and shine” of his writing with more clichés and stereotypes: “I was motivated by the love for the common man, by the desire to uplift him. … to make him better” (pp. 50, 47). When the post-Stalinist Thaw came, the Hero again moved with the tide, denouncing his earlier stance and seeking to please the new regime.

The later, revised version of the scene with the Uncle abandons the realistic motivation and storytelling. Well aware of conventions and techniques used by playwrights to create a logically believable world on stage, Różewicz exposes these theatrical forms as fraud. His method is first to consider possibilities offered by scenic realism, and then to undermine the credibility of such old-fashioned dramaturgy. During the meeting with the Uncle, the Hero perceives the inadequacy of the role or mask forced upon him by others. In several short speeches, he suddenly reveals his hidden inner nature, his wished-for identity, and the secret desire to realize a new life. The scenic indications call for Stanislavskian psychological acting in addition to naturalistic costumes and properties. Różewicz then punctures this illusion of reality by using spoken lines as ritualistic incantations or self-enclosed language games rather than an expression of thoughts and emotions. When the Uncle suggests that the Hero go back with him to the idyllic home of his childhood where life is less complicated, the Hero bluntly refuses:

I can't, Uncle. … I open my mouth, and I want to swallow whole cities, people, buildings, paintings, bosoms, TV sets, motorbikes, stars, belly dancers, socks, watches, titles, medals, pears, pills, papers, bananas, masterpieces. …

(pp. 14–15)

The Hero's all-embracing craving for the visible world may be understood literally as a grotesque expression of consumer societies' preoccupation with material goods. Such materialism erupted especially in Eastern Europe, where the lifting of the Iron Curtain during the late 1950s followed a shift in Communist Party policies from strictly enforced ideology to a degree of pragmatism and flexibility. But similar lists of disconnected nouns occur throughout the play in a variety of contexts. Thus, through giving names to human beings and objects, the characters seek to regain a sense of control over outside reality that has been shattered by their experience of atrocity. Moreover, in their search for equilibrium amid chaos and the complete fluidity of all values, the characters find refuge in the world of objects. As Czesław Miłosz has observed in his essay on postwar Polish poetry: “Human affairs are uncertain and unspeakably painful, but objects represent a stable reality, do not alter with reflexes of fear, love, or hate, and always ‘behave’ logically.”¹² The lists of nouns are also the play's special language, truncated and seemingly nonsensical, but by no means illogical. Grammar, or in Ludwig Wittgenstein's terminology, “the totality of rules which state in which connections words have meaning and propositions make sense,”¹³ has been reduced in Różewicz's language games to a rule of ever shifting assemblages of dislocated fragments. Since the manner of representation of reality determines how reality is represented,¹⁴ these assemblages mirror the characters' fragmented world and their experience of disintegration.

The scene between the Hero and the Uncle remains suspended and unresolved as it quickly dissolves into another episode in which Różewicz continues to play with naturalistic conventions. The Hero is back in bed when two strangers, the Guy in a Hat and the Guy in a Bicycle Cap, enter and proceed to measure him and his room. In the process, they remove from the Hero's clenched fist crumpled drafts of his curriculum vitae. Thus Różewicz rips apart conventions of naturalistic dramaturgy. In a superb display of visual irony, he shows that one can describe the dimensions of a set or even the protagonist, but this kind of information lacks any insight into the character's past or inner world. Hence, a realistic playwright must often resort to such conventional devices as an unexpected discovery of vital information in a letter or a diary. The original version of the scene is shorter and more straightforward. Dressed in long overcoats with heavily padded shoulders, the two strangers appear as omnipresent bureaucrats of the oppressive late 1940s and early 1950s, when one's right to privacy was considered a capitalist whim. In an interview, Różewicz explained that both strangers work for the Polish Communist secret police (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa).¹⁵ Consequently, the Hero's evasiveness may be explained by his fear of being followed. The excised scene thus seeks to make a blunt political statement, but becomes a piece of antigovernment propaganda lacking the depth and richness of the revised version.

In an abrupt transition from the realistic to the bizarre and the unexpected, the Hero trades a pair of socks for Bobik, “an elegant, middle-aged man, perfectly groomed and sleekly pomaded [ulizany],” who walks on all fours (p. 16). Różewicz thus catches the audience unawares with an extravagant theatrical surprise reminiscent of devices used in Witkacy's, as well as Gombrowicz's, plays and novels. He strives for a daring dramatic effect, infused with humor and irony, which will provoke, attack, and arrest the attention of the spectators. This theatricalization of movement points to the limitless possibilities of nonrealistic theatre and thus serves as Różewicz's shock tactics to wreak havoc on conventions of the theatre of illusion.

More than simple mockery of the audience, Bobik's movement on all fours is in fact a visual extension of the Polish epithet ulizany with its connotations of self-effacement and servility. In that respect, the Hero identifies with Bobik. He all but forces him to drink the water in which the Uncle, “an honest and simple man,” had soaked his feet: “It's a medicine for people like you. For people like myself” (p. 17). The water thus serves as a metaphor of expiation and catharsis. Yet a moral regeneration does not occur. Neither Bobik nor the Hero drinks the water. Instead, the Hero orders coffee from the Waitress, who appears from nowhere and even offers to take off her clothes, while the Elders recite a list of disconnected nouns. The Hero and Bobik sip the coffee, examining their hands. Bobik, a born opportunist, has survived the War with only a few ink stains on his hands. But the Hero's hands are still stained with “enemies' blood” (p. 18). His explanation has a bitterly ironic undertone, for among the “enemies” whom the Hero killed during the War was the Polish Peasant.

Left alone on stage, the Hero contemplates suicide as the only way to escape the nightmare of the past and the compromises of the present. The motif of escape is underscored visually, as the Hero, with a rope around his neck, locks himself up inside a closet. When he emerges moments later, he sits down on the bed and eats a sandwich. The attempted self-destruction is thus counterpointed by a trivial but life-affirming action of eating.

The present soon merges with the past as the Hero is visited by the Childhood Friend, who had drowned three years before the War, and the middle-aged Fat Woman, who was once an object of the Hero's adolescent sexual fantasies. An unfocused, offhand conversation between the Hero and his Friend about such topics as masturbation and defection to the West suddenly culminates in the Hero's rigorously unsentimental account of World War II:

Do you remember the wire factory? That's where the first bombs were dropped on Friday morning, 1 September 1939. I was on my way to get a paper. A kid was yelling that the War started. Another one kicked him in the behind: “Shut up, you asshole”—but in an hour the city was bombed. It went on like that for several years. There was the occupation. In May '45 the War ended. Apparently thirty-three million people were killed.

(pp. 37–38)

This impassive, antiheroic description, placed in the intentionally disrespectful context of the earlier conversation, would not have passed the censor's inspection and has been relegated by Różewicz to the Addenda.

When the Fat Woman appears on stage, the Hero hardly notices her, engrossed in reading aloud old letters. Indeed, the language of The Card Index relies on a consistent mixing of the most varied materials, including also newspaper clippings, nursery rhymes, poems by Polish classics and Różewicz himself, and nominal declensions. This method of building a drama out of details taken from his reading and his own works is characteristic of Różewicz's dramaturgy and has its parallels in modern art, music, and poetry. The playwright combines these materials in striking new arrangements, often pushing them toward parody and self-parody, and producing an added dramatic tension between abstract and concrete. This grotesque juxtaposition has a deflating effect which renders the characters' rhetoric obsolescent and hollow.

The scene with the Fat Woman is interrupted by a five-to-ten-minute intermission. Following this brief suspension of the dramatic action, the events immediately preceding it—the eating of a sandwich, the Fat Woman's entrance, the reading of the letters—are repeated exactly as they had occurred. The audience is thus reminded that it merely watches a theatrical reality which may be arbitrarily manipulated.

The Hero is back in bed, reading aloud a newspaper article, when the Elders return. Outraged by his violations of the dramaturgy of intrigue and fast-paced action, they admonish the Hero:

Do something, get going, think.
There he lies while time flies. …
He's finally asleep, the gods will rage!
There can be no bread without flour.
There must be action on stage.
Something should be happening at this hour!
If you don't move, the theatre is defunct.

(p. 23)

The Hero gets rid of the Elders in a grand spectacle of stabbing and decapitating. Sensational, spectacular scenes are part of the dramatic heritage, which Różewicz pushes to absurd extremes. In the theatricalized world of The Card Index, the deaths of the Elders are just another stage convention, and the Elders are soon resurrected.

Instead of the fast-moving action that the Elders demanded, the Hero plunges into a wordy and pathetic monologue. The audience, that has just seen theatrical conventions punctured and ridiculed, is caught short in shocked amazement as the established premises of the play are suddenly disavowed. The spectators are thus forced to pay close attention to the Hero's existential questioning of his condition. The Hero admits that his ideals have been merely delusions, and his inability to escape his obsessions isolates him even further from other people. In a flashback, he relives an execution he had witnessed or survived, and he wonders how it was possible for the Holocaust to occur at all.

The unwary spectator is first carried along by the intense interplay of human emotions. But it soon becomes evident that the Hero's attitudes are presented not as the playwright's own opinions, but in a dramatized and theatricalized manner, and they are treated with characteristic ambivalence and irony. A foil to the Hero is the Young German Woman, on a tour of Poland, who mistakes his room for a coffee shop. She sits down at a table, checks her makeup, orders coffee and pastry, and initiates a superficial conversation. Her casual presence provides a striking contrast to the Hero's emotional outburst and the blatant realism of the conclusion of the scene. A loudspeaker blasts screams and curses in German, as the Hero apparently has another flashback. The recorded sound creates a vision of helpless people brutally rounded up for an execution or a deportation to a death camp. This straightforward psychological realism is so manipulative that it might provoke laughter in the audience, if it were not for the Young Woman. A detached observer, she “does not seem to hear the screaming, and she looks at the Hero in astonishment” (p. 26). The Young Woman then tiptoes out of the room, leaving a red apple on the table. The result is a sense of distance that allows for a powerful effect without sentimentality. The image of the apple, symbolic of a simple affirmation of life, and a moment of silence following the Woman's exit, supplant the obviousness of the spoken lines and the sound effects, and they thus express more poignantly all that a Polish poet returned from the hell of the Holocaust cannot say to his audience.

Różewicz's technique is to alternate static and dynamic elements, exaggerate extremes of tempo, and play off long monologues against pictorial effects and theatrical surprises. In a moment of radical discontinuity, the focus shifts to the Elders, who assume the role of the protagonist and thus expose the fragility of traditional dramatic categories. Reciting Różewicz's poem “Persuasion” (“Perswazja,” 1959), they reprimand the Hero as if he were a child at fault. When the Teacher comes in, the Elders send the Hero to bed and thus temporarily remove him from the stage action.

Reminiscent of both Gombrowicz's novel Ferdydurke and Różewicz's short story “An Interrupted Examination” (“Przerwany egzamin,” 1958), the episode with the Teacher renders concrete and theatrical a popular Polish saying: “Life is a never ending examination.” The Teacher has come to examine the Hero. Yet the First Elder takes the examination in his place, and the Teacher does not even notice the difference. Addressed by the Teacher as a “young man” (pp. 28, 29), the Elder recites lengthy quotations from history textbooks and lonely-hearts columns, in addition to stereotypical blurbs about the significance of Chopin's music in the life of Polish society. Following this irrelevant exchange of useless information, the roles are switched again, and the Hero examines the Teacher. Pointing to his hand, the apple, or a button, he asks the Teacher: “What's that?” (p. 29). He thus continues the ritual of naming objects and reconstituting the very fabric of reality. The Elders soon join the Hero and recite entire lists of nouns.

The action now accelerates, leading up to a rapid and surprising epilogue. Różewicz's method of dramatic construction depends, for its forward thrust, on rhythmic augmentation of elements and accelerating velocity. He manages a steady increment in tempo and in richness of orchestral voicing with musical nuance and almost mathematical precision. Fast movements and a breakneck tempo are achieved by lack of explanation, rapidity and brevity of dialogue, and flamboyant verve. The Secretary, who had imperceptibly got out of bed, returns with a file of documents to be signed by the Hero. The Elders gape at her buttocks in tight-fitting clothes, and they recite excerpts from two frivolous poems, both entitled “To a Maiden,” by Jan Kochanowski, Poland's greatest Renaissance poet and one of Różewicz's masters. The Teacher asks the Hero for some money. As in the opening scene, various people walk through the Hero's room. A young couple stops and kisses passionately. The Hero's parents come back to explain to their adolescent son mysteries of procreation. And the Hero speaks, in verse and in prose, of his childhood fantasies of heroism and self-sacrifice. He then plunges into a sequence of short, staccato sentences reflecting the fragmentation of the self. Like the narrator of Różewicz's short story “Attempted Reconstruction” (“Próba rekonstrukcji,” 1959), he records his journey through the inner landscape of the mind: “I traveled a long way before I reached myself. … faces, trees, clouds, the dead. … All this is merely flowing through me” (p. 34). The rhythmic progressions of the scene, seemingly random and discontinuous, remove the fixed points necessary for viewing what takes place on stage from a single perspective. In so disconcerting the audience, the playwright draws attention away from the illusion to form—away from any single illusion of a character's reality to the shifting forms of illusion which the character may assume.

In the final scene, the Hero is alone with the Journalist, who has come to interview him. Like the interview scenes in the dramatist's later plays On All Fours (Na czworakach, 1971) and The Hunger Artist Departs (Odejście Głodomora, 1976), the scene reveals Różewicz's increasing mastery of dramatic effect, and his skill in playing with the techniques and conventions of traditional theatre and leading his audience wherever he wishes.

The interview promises to provide insights into the Hero's psychology and past history, but the audience's predictable expectations are quickly thwarted. The Journalist demands answers to such questions as: “What is your goal in life?” or “What do you intend to do to prevent a nuclear war?” (pp. 35–36). The Hero, speaking from the Polish experience of atrocity and disintegration, recognizes the uselessness of abstract concepts, neat categorizations, and impressive slogans. He finds it impossible to identify with any system of ideology or tradition which previously might have offered support. Therefore, when the Journalist complains: “You didn't tell me much,” the Hero replies: “You've come too late” (p. 37). The Hero's answer also indicates to the audience that the stage action is over. His closing line thus punctures any remaining theatrical illusion of plot and character, and underscores the staginess of the playwright's own creation. Fragmented and open-ended, The Card Index has no final conclusion. The stage “lights do not go out even when the tale is ended” (p. 5). The action is merely suspended until the next performance.

Conventional drama generally illumines the world by simulating real situations and people within a clearly defined time span, but for Różewicz this mimetic aspect of drama is of secondary importance. His interest is in the possibilities of the dramatic medium, rather than in its conventional objects or themes, and he strives to present his vision in other, nonmimetic ways. The strength of The Card Index lies in the dramatist's brilliant use of simultaneity, discontinuity, juxtaposition, and shifting planes of a reality which exists in a constant state of destruction and reconstruction. In this richly textured and ingeniously patterned play, Różewicz has developed a systematic, nonrealistic dramatic technique which enables him to present a large and complex world in a highly subjective yet coherent and formally satisfying fashion.

Stripped of the narrative and psychological interconnections, Różewicz's theatre is overwhelmingly pictorial rather than exclusively literary. He uses theatrical images with great force and precision, but the visual element is never at rest as a fixed and detachable background. A seemingly disjointed and incomplete work, The Card Index is a scenario waiting to be expanded and honed by an imaginative acting company. Like other plays by Różewicz, it offers theatre companies rich material for their collective creations, but it depends on non-Stanislavskian acting for its effect. Consequently, Różewicz's dramas were not fully integrated into the Polish theatre until the early 1970s, when a new, antipsychological approach to acting was developed at Jerzy Grotowski's world-famous Teatr Laboratorium in Wrocław. The Laboratorium never produced a Różewicz play, but its innovative body and voice training provided Polish actors and directors in other Polish companies with creative tools to execute nonrealistic compositions such as The Card Index for the stage. It is no coincidence that during the 1971/1972 season, after years of indifference from theatre artists, Różewicz became the third most frequently produced playwright in Poland.¹⁶ Both a direct influence and a pervasive presence, Różewicz's drama now serves in Poland as a model for the unlimited possibilities of an antimimetic and nonliterary theatre liberated from psychologically conceived characters and realistic storytelling.

Notes

1. It is generally assumed that The Card Index is Różewicz's first play, written at the time when he had already established himself as a leading Polish poet. However, prior to The Card Index, Różewicz had completed the little-known Exposure (Ujawnienie, 1950), but its anti-Communist stance has prevented the play from publication or production. Moreover, Różewicz had been working on another play, eventually entitled Dead and Buried (Do piachu. …), as early as 1948, shortly after his famous collection of verse, Anxiety (Niepokój, 1947), won him recognition as a major new talent. Dead and Buried, however, was not completed until 1972.

2. Both in Poland and abroad, The Card Index has frequently been perceived as a play indebted to the theatre of the absurd, mainly the work of Samuel Beckett (see especially Jan Kott, Theatre Notebook, 1947–1967 [Garden City, N.Y., 1968], pp. 131–134). Although both playwrights share some structural and philosophical concerns, The Card Index is an attempt to go beyond Beckett's dramaturgy and to create a new art of drama. Różewicz thus explains his attitude towards Beckett's theatre: “It was for me both a revelation and a challenge. I wrote my plays in opposition to Beckett's. His dramatic work was my point of departure, not a point of arrival. I worked against Beckett's nihilism. I sought to overcome Beckett's dramaturgy by creating a theatre after Beckett. All means were fine to accomplish this goal. I took my lessons from Jarry, who had a tremendous influence on the entire Polish theatre of the twentieth century. I also took lessons from the Polish classics: Mickiewicz, Fredro, Wyspiański, and Zapolska; from the Polish expressionists such as Miciński and Przybyszewski; and from Witkacy and Gombrowicz” (personal interview in Wrocław, 4 August 1983. See also Irena Sadowska-Guillon, “Tadeusz Różewicz: le théâtre de la mythologie [interview].” Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle, 61 [April 1983], 161–165).

3. For information about the production at Warsaw's Dramatyczny Theatre, see Marta Fik, Trzydzieści pięć sezonów (Warszawa, 1981), pp. 123–124; and Marta Piwińska, “Różewicz a Teatr Dramatyczny,” Współczesność, 5 (May 16–31, 1960), 9.

4. Tadeusz Różewicz, “Kartoteka: Fragmenty nie publikowane,” Odra, 11 (November 1971), 67–75.

5. Tadeusz Różewicz, Kartoteka (Warszawa, 1981), p. 41. Further reference to the play is to this edition, with page numbers given in the text in parentheses; the translation is mine. For the English translation of the censored version of the play, see Tadeusz Różewicz, The Card Index and Other Plays, trans. Adam Czerniawski (New York, 1969). In addition, the Polish director Kazimierz Braun directed a production in English at the University of Connecticut in Storrs in March 1980, using the omitted scenes which were translated into English by Jarek Strzemień.

6. The scene is also a grotesque allusion to Witkacy's charcoal composition titled “The Prince of Darkness Tempts Saint Theresa with the Aid of a Waiter from Budapest” (c. 1913).

7. Różewicz later developed this image into an entire scene in his play The Old Woman Broods (Stara kobieta wysiaduje, 1968).

8. This association of the Chorus with the Polish Romantic tradition was emphasized by Tadeusz Minc in his two, widely acclaimed productions of The Card Index: in 1973 at the Mały Theatre in Warsaw and in 1977 at the Kameralny Theatre in Wrocław. In both productions, the Chorus represented a group of young Polish revolutionaries, participants in the unsuccessful national uprisings of 1830 and 1863. The Chorus thus personified the national and Romantic mythology on which the Hero and his generation were raised.

9. Daniel Gerould, Witkacy: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz as an Imaginative Writer (Seattle and London, 1981), p. 56.

10. Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge and London, 1983), p. 89.

11. In the scene with the Peasant, Różewicz reworks the central motif of Dead and Buried, a play he had begun before The Card Index.

12. Miłosz, p. 89.

13. Gerd Brand, The Essential Wittgenstein, trans. Robert E. Innis (New York, 1979), p. 137.

14. Ibid., p. 34.

15. Personal interview in Wroclaw, 4 August 1983.

16. Kazimierz Andrzej Wysiński, ed., Almanach sceny polskiej 1971/1972 (Warszawa, 1973), p. 195.