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Sources of Pleasure in the Theatre of Hanoch Levin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2007

ZAHAVA CASPI
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Abstract

This article asks how it is that performances of the work of the most important playwright in Israel – Hanoch Levin – fill auditoria, despite the fact that these plays are considered to be unpleasant, irritating and even repulsive. I investigate the position of Levin's theatre with regard to audience response, and demonstrate how he arouses both conscious intellectual and emotional responses in his audience. The article seeks thereby to identify the sources of pleasure in Levin's theatre. It is apparent that Levin has no wish to send his audience home cleansed and contented. Neither is he interested in providing intellectual affirmation of the world's rationality, regularity and order. Rather than balance, harmony and external affirmation, Levin's plays offer a kind of pleasure bordering on what Roland Barthes calls jouissance, resulting in a new kind of catharsis in his audience.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , October 2007 , pp. 263 - 277
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2007

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References

NOTES

1 Hanoch Levin, The Rubber Barons, in The Labor of Life: Selected Plays by Hanoch Levin, trans. Barbara Harshav (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 1–50, here p. 50.

2 Hanoch Levin (1943–99) left a wide-ranging literary legacy: fifty-six plays, only some of which have been produced, mostly under his own direction; satirical cabarets; short stories; sketches; screenplays; a book of poetry; and a children's book. Levin is considered one of the greatest playwrights in Israel's history.

3 Jaques Derrida, On Grammatology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) pp. xiv, 19, 31.

4 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 168, 192.

5 The first to deal in depth with the effect of hesitation was Todorov, who saw in it the essence of the genre of the fantastic. According to Todorov, the ‘fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event’. The event which cannot be explained by the laws of reality creates a sensation of uncertainty and oscillation between acceptance and rejection. Hesitation is the effect of this sensation. See Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard, (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 25–7.

6 I cannot, in this framework, present all of the significances of the ‘double encoding’ mechanism, nor all of the variety of practices which Levin uses in operating this mechanism, including, among others, double encoding in a common object, intercalations of various sorts, mixing genres and hybrids. For a broader treatment of the subject see Zahava Caspi, Those Who Sit in the Dark – The Dramatic World of Hanoch Levin: Subject, Author, Audience (Jerusalem and Be'er Sheva: Keter and Heksherim Centre, 2005) pp. 158–69 (Hebrew).

7 Hanoch Levin, Mouth Wide Open, in The Whore from Ohio and Other Plays (Tel Aviv: Ha'kibutz Ha'meuhad, 1995) pp. 183–224 (Hebrew).

8 Nelson argues that in order to confirm separation of the spectator from the play, the theatrical event must be formally presented as a performance. Only thus will it secure the audience's conceptual frame which will allow them to recognize the performance as fiction. See Robert J. Nelson, Play within a Play: The Dramatist's Conception of His Art: Shakespeare to Anouilh (New York: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 1–10.

9 Richard Hornby, Drama, Metadrama and Perception (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1986), p. 32.

10 Patrice Pavis, ‘The Aesthetics of Theatrical Reception: Variations on a Few Relationships’, in Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), pp. 81–2.

11 Hanoch Levin, The Child Dreams: A Play in Four Parts, in The Labor of Life, Selected Plays, pp. 127–72.

12 Something happens in Roberto Benigni's film Life is Beautiful which is very reminiscent of this scene in the play, although in the film the illusion is maintained to the end, despite the father's death (he is killed offscreen and so out of the child's and the audience's view). Levin chooses to dispel the illusion – the father is murdered in full view of his son, and the child himself dies before the play's end.

13 Freddie Rokem, ‘Refractions of the Shoah on Israeli Stages’, in Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2000), pp. 27–98.

14 Yitzhak Laor, ‘The Comedy of Hanoch Levin: Fascism as a Mode of Existence’, doctoral dissertation (Tel Aviv, 1999) (Hebrew).

15 Mordechai Gelman, ‘More Thoughts on Empathy’, Alpayim, 19 (2000), pp. 63–77, here p. 64 (Hebrew; my translation).

16 Henry Bergson, ‘Laughter’, in Wylie Sypher, ed. Comedy (New York: Doubleday, 1956), pp. 61–190, here pp. 63–4.

17 Gidon Efrat, Israeli Drama (Tel Aviv: Tzerikover, 1975) p. 254 (Hebrew; my translation). See also Joseph Milman, ‘I Wrote a Play that is Too Soft . . . Dammit: Metaphysical and Poetical Alienation in Hanoch Levin's Theatre of Protest’, Alei-Siach, 36 (1995), pp. 77–105, here p. 102 (Hebrew; my translation); and Eyal Dotan, ‘On the Understanding of Laughter in the Work of Hanoch Levin’, Alei-Siach, 43 (2000), pp. 25–44, here p. 39 (Hebrew).

18 In contrast with the past, current theories of empathy indicate that failure of empathy, if it exists ‘in the right measure’, actually has a positive and decisive role to play with regard to the object of the empathy. See Gelman, ‘More Thoughts on Empathy’, pp. 63–4. Gelman is referring here mostly to Donald Woods Winnicott and Heinz Kohut, who thought that empathic mishaps in the right measure have a crucial and positive role for the development of a normal personality. In this context Winnicott's ‘Good Enough’ mother, who is the truly good mother, is well known. I believe that one can apply similar ideas not only to those who succeed in obtaining the other's empathy, but also to those who feel empathy towards the other, in this case Levin's spectator.

19 Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Art of Failure: “The Stifled Laugh in Beckett's Theatre”’, in Harry R. Garvin, ed., Theories of Reading, Looking and Listening, (Special issue of Bucknell Review, 25, 1), (London and Toronto: Bucknell University Press, 1981), pp. 139–89.

20 Mouth Wide Open, pp. 218–19. All translations from this play are mine.

21 Ibid, pp. 217–18.

22 Ibid, p. 219. Emphasis mine.

23 Ibid. p. 223.

24 Hanoch Levin, The Crybabies, in The Labor of Life, Selected Plays, pp. 273–308.

25 For more on Levin's The Crybabies and its comparison to Aeschylus see Nurit Yarri, ‘What a Joker You Are, What Jokers We Are’, in Gad Kaynar and Haim Nagid, eds., The Theatre: An Israeli Quarterly of Contemporary Theatre, 1, 3 (2000), pp. 16–21; Caspi, Those Who Sit in the Dark, pp. 158–69.

26 The Crybabies, p. 159.

27 Nathan Spiegel, Aristotle's Poetics: Mimesis and Catharsis (Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 1971), p. 23 (Hebrew; translation mine).

28 The Crybabies, p. 159.

29 Spiegel, Aristotle's Poetics, pp. 98–9.

30 The term ‘neo-catharsis’ is Nelson and Miller's, and refers to the experience of the spectator in the theatre of the absurd. See W. J. Miller and B. E. Nelson, ‘Beckett's Style and the New Catharsis’, in idem, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Other Works (New York: Monarch Press, 1971), pp. 73–4. Emphasis in original text.

31 Barthes distinguishes between two kinds of enjoyment which texts of different kinds may render. He calls the traditional type of enjoyment ‘pleasure’. Texts which produce pleasure are satisfying and fulfilling and confer a sense of euphoria. See Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hills and Wang, 1975), p. 14.

32 Hanoch Levin, The Torments of Job, in The Labor of Life: Selected Plays, pp. 51–92. The play is based loosely on the biblical story.

33 Ibid, p. 89.

34 Ibid. p. 90.

35 Ibid. p. 89

36 Hanoch Levin, Hefetz: A Play in Two Acts, trans. Julian Meltzer (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press, 1971).

37 Execution, in The Torments of Job and Other Plays (Tel Aviv: Ha'kibbitz Ha'meuchad, 1988), pp. 7–52 (Hebrew).

38 The Torments of Job, p. 89.