The Oklahoma Nature Theater Is Recruiting – Hélène Cixous, Volleys of Humanity, (excerpts).
‘Everyone is welcome’, ‘We seek to employ everyone and allocate them their rightful place’, proclaim all the posters for the Oklahoma Nature Theater. It is the largest theatre in the world. It is so vast that some of its employee-inhabitants have never had time to visit. Hundreds of men and women instantly disguised as gigantic angels and demons are being hired amidst a racket of trumpets and patriotheatrical fanfares. The largest angels and demons in the world.
There is virtually no audience. This is because nearly everyone who arrives in Oklahoma, synecdoche of America, becomes an actor, each person preferring to be seen rather than to look themselves, in this Amerika about which Kafka was the first and ultimate reporter. The majority of these people, yesterday’s exiles, are today dressed in costume, magnified and welcome. All that remains for them to do is to appear on stage, which extends more or less from one edge to the other. They do it so good-heartedly that whenever they are asked, ‘Where are you from originally?’ not one of them answers: from Russia, from Ireland, from Hungary, from . . .
Once suitably disguised beneath scales and feathers, they in effect become purged amnesiacs and are transformed into reborn Americans. Quite extraordinarily, the repertoire has not changed since 1912, date of the first Oklahoma Nature Theater production, dreamed up by Kafka, from his small room with a view over the river and the Verdict bridge (das Urteil), but how did Kafka know everything there was to know about America, never having been there? It was telepathic and prophetic genius. . . .
The most outstanding thing in this so called ‘American novel’ is that Kafka describes America, not only as the country cannot be, an unlimited labyrinthine actualisation of the promise, the promised land – something owed, just as would be, will be and will have been every promised land that has been terribly realised, but also as it continues to be and will persist in being. One hundred years ago Angels and Demons opened. Today, in Bushite times, the play has changed: If you are not one of our Angels you are one of those Demons. . . .
[T]he USA has the greatest altering power in the world. From one moment to the next, one ceases and one becomes. One can either become American, or one can become an ‘alien’. One can be welcomed with open arms like the long lost traveller or in a blink of an eye one can be stopped and thrown across the line, behind the invisible and mobile fence which distinguishes, disassociates, separates, unadmits and integrates one to the other. Having barely landed and approaching passport control I could be someone else. . . . [S]een by Americans with innocence I look as if I could have many possible origins and professions: . . . I myself start to doubt and am ready to acknowledge a string of nebulous guilts.
- 2002
‘Everyone is welcome’, ‘We seek to employ everyone and allocate them their rightful place’, proclaim all the posters for the Oklahoma Nature Theater. It is the largest theatre in the world. It is so vast that some of its employee-inhabitants have never had time to visit. Hundreds of men and women instantly disguised as gigantic angels and demons are being hired amidst a racket of trumpets and patriotheatrical fanfares. The largest angels and demons in the world.
There is virtually no audience. This is because nearly everyone who arrives in Oklahoma, synecdoche of America, becomes an actor, each person preferring to be seen rather than to look themselves, in this Amerika about which Kafka was the first and ultimate reporter. The majority of these people, yesterday’s exiles, are today dressed in costume, magnified and welcome. All that remains for them to do is to appear on stage, which extends more or less from one edge to the other. They do it so good-heartedly that whenever they are asked, ‘Where are you from originally?’ not one of them answers: from Russia, from Ireland, from Hungary, from . . .
Once suitably disguised beneath scales and feathers, they in effect become purged amnesiacs and are transformed into reborn Americans. Quite extraordinarily, the repertoire has not changed since 1912, date of the first Oklahoma Nature Theater production, dreamed up by Kafka, from his small room with a view over the river and the Verdict bridge (das Urteil), but how did Kafka know everything there was to know about America, never having been there? It was telepathic and prophetic genius. . . .
The most outstanding thing in this so called ‘American novel’ is that Kafka describes America, not only as the country cannot be, an unlimited labyrinthine actualisation of the promise, the promised land – something owed, just as would be, will be and will have been every promised land that has been terribly realised, but also as it continues to be and will persist in being. One hundred years ago Angels and Demons opened. Today, in Bushite times, the play has changed: If you are not one of our Angels you are one of those Demons. . . .
[T]he USA has the greatest altering power in the world. From one moment to the next, one ceases and one becomes. One can either become American, or one can become an ‘alien’. One can be welcomed with open arms like the long lost traveller or in a blink of an eye one can be stopped and thrown across the line, behind the invisible and mobile fence which distinguishes, disassociates, separates, unadmits and integrates one to the other. Having barely landed and approaching passport control I could be someone else. . . . [S]een by Americans with innocence I look as if I could have many possible origins and professions: . . . I myself start to doubt and am ready to acknowledge a string of nebulous guilts.
- 2002
