Antonin Aalto was a 20th-century French poet, writer, actor, dramatist, thinker, and a famous psychopath in the West in the 20th century, an isolated addict, an expelled marginal person, a fierce rebel against authority, and a spiritual leader of modern and contemporary theater.
To this day, he is still a different kind of voice, his life and words are enigmatic: his rhetoric and eccentricities seem to show the world that he is a prophet of the crucifixion; he transforms his spiritual adventures into a magnificent, dark, chaotic, dazzling, seductive, but extremely puzzling labyrinth of words, spells, and pictures. For many readers, his dozens of volumes of manuscripts are an inaccessible, inaccessible labyrinth, with obscure, broken, esoteric, grotesque symbols at every fork in the road. Antonan Aalto, the first biography of Aalto in the Chinese language circle, which was just published this year, is not only a double retrospective, reconstructed and guided reading of Aalto's life and thought, but also the key and road map to lead readers into this labyrinth.
Antonin Aalto
Author:[American] David A. Shafer
Translator: Tang Jianqing
Edition: Nanjing University Press, Watchmen
June 2021
A picture scroll with the theme of the course of life
The book opens with a picture of France at the turn of the century, shrouded in social transformation, cultural upheaval, and war, leading to the birth and growth of Antonin Aalto. As a historian, when writing the trajectory of Aalto's life, he pays attention to the historical, social, and cultural environment in which he spends his various stages of life, and then relies on Aalto's friends, family, manuscripts, and correspondence to show the relationship between the torrent of the times, Aalto's personal encounters, and his ideological context in multiple dimensions. What lays out in front of the reader is not only a picture of Aalto's personal work, but also a picture of life with a deep history and the theme of Aalto's life course.
If in the past, people's understanding of Aalto's childhood and adolescence was mostly focused on keywords such as "Marseille", "bourgeoisie", "Mediterranean", "Greek", etc., then this time, Schaefer told us about Aalto's pursuit of mysterious spiritual experience, the source of Orientalism in his thought, the connection between the marriage relationship between the same family and the incest in his works, the suppression of him by the bourgeois values represented by his father and the resistance in his heart... Compared with other Aalto's research, Schever focuses more on exploring the roots and evolutionary paths of Aalto's thought.
In 1920, at the age of 24, Aalto came to Paris for medical treatment. Since then, his artistic creativity, his radical ideas have found an outlet, and he himself has entered a period of transformation. In Aalto, drama is no longer a bourgeois art category that brings leisure, entertainment, and aesthetics, but has the same status as culture and civilization; drama, with its unique attributes that can enter the spirit through matter, has become the most ideal means of revolution, and even the only means of reshaping mankind, society, civilization, and the universe. Through this most avant-garde and revolutionary art form, he tried to explore the path of the inner self, challenge the hegemony of Western culture, and set off a magnificent revolution.
The author cites a large number of historical facts, combing through the influence of dramatists on Aalto, explaining how he extracted from different artistic practices, felt the relationship between drama and society, the metaphysical experience in drama, and other theories of "cruel drama" that had a far-reaching impact on later generations. Although there have been many writings on this theory at home and abroad, the historical materials in the biography provide an intuitive annotation for the public to better understand the "cruel drama".
Sketch by Antonan Aalto, "Patient B", Dr. Dadel Clinic, 1919. Photo courtesy of the publisher.
Collision of thoughts with "organless bodies"
For Chinese readers, the more significant part of the biography is that the author examines in detail the transformation of Aalto's experiences and thoughts as he embarked on exotic travels and was trapped in a mental hospital. Compared with the first half of Aalto's active life in the Parisian cultural circle, the second half of his life, which traveled alone and lived in isolation and claustrophobic hospitals, is full of mysteries and rarely described in Chinese literature.
After failing his theatrical practice in Paris, Aalto went to Mexico and Ireland. These legendary pilgrimages prompted the primitivism, exoticism, and mystical experiences that had been implanted in his thoughts to grow like weeds, and he became more determined to compete with Western bourgeois culture, striving to call on Western culture to purify itself and return to its originality. His dependence on drugs and his unstable mental state pushed him into an infinite cycle of drug rehabilitation and spiritual treatment.
At this time, Aalto's mind was stirred with many thoughts, ideas and consciousnesses, which confronted each other, collided or combined, and fissioned. The author keenly distills the term "body", especially the "organless body", from the obscure texts of Aalto's period. Aalto deeply felt the gap and contradiction between inner thought and external expression, the symbiosis and conflict between soul and body; he was strongly aware of the existence and chaos of the unconscious, and influenced the direction and presentation of consciousness. At this time, the human body, as the organic combination of spirit and flesh, becomes a channel, a means, and even an end to salvation, so the self-remodeling and the reconstruction of the body are equivalent to overturning all established rules and orders, truly defining their own existence, and opening up a new world.
Although Aalto has questioned the trustworthiness of language since his youth, he has repeatedly proposed to go beyond words and form another dynamic language symbol system that can express freely and express freely, and can also reach the depths of nerves and thoughts to broaden and deepen the dimension of expression. But the usual words and symbols, by virtue of their stable and universal nature—though rigid—have become tools for recording his inner passions and creativity, as well as channels for his ornate, ethereal thoughts, and for later generations to interpret his ideas.
Antonin Aalto, circa 1930. Photo courtesy of the publisher.
Use visual expression to resist the solidification of the meaning of words
Schever also specially selected many precious photographs and hand-drawn works by Aalto for the biography.
In his later years, Aalto painted a number of images while trapped in the Rodez Mental Hospital, including several sketches with a surrealist style, sketches modeling himself, and various spells. These mixed, fractured, abstract paintings are not insignificant, but an exploration of Aalto's expression of symbols, a transcendence of his literal symbols, and a metaphor for his inner strange imagination after he is detached from reality.
This is consistent with his early rebellion against the solidification of the meaning of the symbols of words, as well as his opposition to the dramatic language of dialogue, where material, visual, and intuitive expression can reach the instinctive, intuitive, thought, feeling, conscious, and subconscious worlds. The examination of this visual expression of the picture thus becomes an important part of the interpretation of Aalto's thought. For example, he sketched his own "cruel drama" in 1946, trying to clarify from a visual dimension that his drama is not bloodshed or brutal, but involves the existence and fate of unfree human beings floating in the universe.
Based on this, this biography has a unique academic value: it not only uses words to popularize to Chinese readers who Antonan Aalto is, interpret his famous ideas and remarks, and the value of his reflections on the entire society and culture; it also uses photographs, sketches, self-portraits and other images to figuratively tell the reader what made Aalto, showing his mental journey, his pain, his suffering, his uneasiness, his resistance, his shouts and his appeals.
Aalto used his life to write in extreme experiences, trying to write about the idea he wanted to find that crossed the gap between ancient and modern, class, East and West, and ethnic groups; he also tried every means to try to write his own alternative experiences in character, expressing the conflicts and oppressions he experienced from society, ideology and culture.
Throughout his life, he explored and expressed the infinite experience of consciousness, creating and repeatedly presenting his own suffering. All of his writings are derived from the extreme experiences of individuals, and these broken manuscripts—though full of contradictions and mysteries—speak of redemption, of the flesh and spirit of the individual, of Western culture, of all humanity. He is the contemporary Sisyphus, knowing that it is difficult to shake Western culture, but he will never give in, and still issues his cautionary predictions with a sharp voice and a profound posture. As Susan Sontag put it: "What he left behind was not a completed work of art, but a unique appearance, a poetics, an aesthetic of thought, cultural theology, and the phenomenology of the Passion." ”
Since the 1980s, Aalto's theatrical treatises have been scattered into China through English translations. To this day, our knowledge of him is more focused on his identity as a "dramatist." The American scholar David M. Will the publication of A. Shaffer's biography in China be like the American Life Theater Company's tour of France in the 1950s, allowing Aalto to truly rise to fame as a contemporary mythological and tragic hero? Undoubtedly, from the author's concise, clear and rational writing, from the historical and social dimensions that run through the book, Chinese readers can spell out clearer, more symbolic, wider, more extensive, and a picture of Aalto and his ideas, allowing us to examine his unique appearance in the 20th century. And this is the starting point for examination, self-examination and transcendence.
self-portrait. Maybe Aalto's last self-portrait. He indicated the date of December 1948. Photo courtesy of the publisher.
Author | Guo Sijia (Associate Professor, Department of French Language and Literature, Fudan University)
Edit | Qingqingzi Xiao Shuyan
Proofreading | Xue Jingning