Ivan Goll - Preface to Methusalem or The Eternal Bourgeois (1922)
Ella & Susn (2009)
Aristophanes, Plautus, Molière, had an easy time of it; they got their best effects by the simplest means in the world: beatings. We have lost this sort of naïveté.
Even in army barracks physical punishment is frowned upon: this was not the case in the times of Aristophanes and Molière. And besides, modern man is now-a-days much more liable to have a gun than a stick. But a gunshot is not so funny as a simple beating.
So the modern satirist must look for new stimuli. These he has found in Surrealism and Alogic. Surrealism is the most forceful negation of realism. Surface reality is stripped away to reveal the Truth of Being. 'Masks': crude, grotesque, like the emotions they express. No more 'heroes', just people, no more characters, just naked instincts. Quite naked. To know an insect you must dissect it. The dramatist is research-scientist, politician and legislator; as surrealist he reports on these things from a distant realm of truth. These things he learns by listening at the impenetrable walls of the world.
Alogic is today the most intellectual form of humour, and therefore the best weapon against the empty clichés which dominate all our lives. Almost invariably the average man opens his mouth only to set his tongue, not his brain, in motion. What is the point of talking so much and taking it all so seriously?
Plot of the drama? Events are so powerful in themselves that they contain their own intrinsic drive. A man is run over: an experience hurled hard and irrevocable into the stream of life. Why is only the death of man called tragic? A conversation five sentences long with an unknown woman can well become far more tragic for you in eternity. Drama should be without beginning or end, like everything else here on earth. But sometime it has an end - why? No, life goes on, everyone knows that. The drama stops because you have tired, grown old in a single hour, and because truth, the most potent poison for the human heart, may only be swallowed in very small doses.
(back to Manifesto page)
Even in army barracks physical punishment is frowned upon: this was not the case in the times of Aristophanes and Molière. And besides, modern man is now-a-days much more liable to have a gun than a stick. But a gunshot is not so funny as a simple beating.
So the modern satirist must look for new stimuli. These he has found in Surrealism and Alogic. Surrealism is the most forceful negation of realism. Surface reality is stripped away to reveal the Truth of Being. 'Masks': crude, grotesque, like the emotions they express. No more 'heroes', just people, no more characters, just naked instincts. Quite naked. To know an insect you must dissect it. The dramatist is research-scientist, politician and legislator; as surrealist he reports on these things from a distant realm of truth. These things he learns by listening at the impenetrable walls of the world.
Alogic is today the most intellectual form of humour, and therefore the best weapon against the empty clichés which dominate all our lives. Almost invariably the average man opens his mouth only to set his tongue, not his brain, in motion. What is the point of talking so much and taking it all so seriously?
Plot of the drama? Events are so powerful in themselves that they contain their own intrinsic drive. A man is run over: an experience hurled hard and irrevocable into the stream of life. Why is only the death of man called tragic? A conversation five sentences long with an unknown woman can well become far more tragic for you in eternity. Drama should be without beginning or end, like everything else here on earth. But sometime it has an end - why? No, life goes on, everyone knows that. The drama stops because you have tired, grown old in a single hour, and because truth, the most potent poison for the human heart, may only be swallowed in very small doses.
(back to Manifesto page)
