There are keys that make a lock, did you know that? Let’s explain. Those of us who know J. Cortazar will not fail to consider that something intimate and prophetic connects this great Argentinian writer with the French playwright Ionesco. Let’s try and bring them close, forgetting for a moment that they were in different places, times and were threading different paths. They both create a painful caricature of reality; they christallise it in stereotypes that only a really critical conscience can manage to renounce. It’s too easy to smile at the image of the watch that runs after the wrist, that runs after the arm, that runs after their owner! Too easy to read the worry of ‘reason’ in the face of the population of a whole town transforming into rhinoceros as simple non-sense. We shouldn’t consider a single character, because he is simply a crutch for a deeper theme. If even this theme disappeared from the dialogues, then the sense of the play would vanish. It is YOUR thought that lives in those characters, for the time of a reading or of a staging, and that needs to understand. The language helped us evolve, until we transformed, but it can hide under the thick folds of the rhinoceros’ skin; the conscience forgets it is a distinct identity.
I appreciate, but at the same time grin, at the government’s attempt to reassure us: Italy is safe from Swine Flu! Be brave, my friends - known and still to know – we will not change into pigs; in spite of the fact that we more and more show their habit of feeding on pretty much anything, real and virtual, they offer us. Thus we forget we are still ourselves, surrounded by many landscapes, often disguised by a thousand masks that Lacan invites us to observe! Boundaries are, oh, so important, when we can move them, contract them and widen them, until we can exalt or reassure! How much ‘imprisonment’ in the freedom of speech and how much freedom in the imprisonment of our solitude! Exasperate and grotesque individuals in Rhinocéros, pityingly asking for some relief to the rigidity of conscience-less behaviour, in which language loses its original symbolic power of the unconscious (Lacan); until their very appearance is transformed, with their language and the underpinning power of the signifier (in Ionesco) and the of the stereotypy of the character (in Cortazar). Our eyes and our ears perceive wandering and empty symbols that lack the possessions that make them historical for the experience of the individual and of the group. There is where they can be kept and given new meaning, just like in the analytical experience, that is related to the underlying meaning of the metaphor, to the metonymy proper of the dream. One needs a new fusion that gives back the power of attributing meaning and this happens between the actor and the audience. A key is a cryptic condensation of what the author meant, it pushes against doors without locks, without entrance. Non-sense spreads, words become empty, yet there is one hope: “The text can still be written”, Barthes would say. Weakened, the pretentious structuralist thought must surrender. The itinerary must be remade inside the character represented, because the foolish delirium of ‘fama’ is so disarming, while ‘cronopio’ tidies up his own folly!
The noise of a key, something is turning, the key turns itself, unknown rooms.
The Key
Seems I've been waiting half a life/ For things to arriveThat won't come/ Seems I've been waiting all this time/ For the perfect rhyme/ Now it's done/ But I forgot what it was I'm looking for/ I found the Key but not the door/ Nothing more/ HeyeyeyIs there anybody home tonight?/ I can hear you on the other side/ But I can't get throughI say heyeyey/ There's no beginning, there's no end/ A vicious circle 'cause I cannot mend/ The love I feel for you.
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