In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

AUTHENTICITY = ARTIFICIALITY (LIFE) 361
tions (Fellmann, 142f£.): "Spanish dances can be compared only to the
most elementary and eminent symbols of life, because they look simple,
like everything that is truly sublime" (Edschmid, 79). No other cultural
phenomenon is so closely and so frequently associated with the notion
of Life-and with the facticity of death-as bullfighting. Bullfighting
stages the oscillation between culture's triumph over nature and the
neverending threat that nature poses to culture. It is a ritual based on a
surface of colors and movements but also on the activation of deep, often
strangely existentialist meanings. D. H. Lawrence makes fun of this
proverbial association when he describes an American tourist watching
a bullfight in Mexico: "He was seeing LIFE, and what can an American
do more!" (Lawrence, 20).
Life exceeds the rationalities of all the different everyday worlds, and
therefore acquires a transcendental status. This is why, in asserting that
religion is superior to reason, Georges Bernanos can say: "Catholicism
is not simply a rule imposed from outside. It is the rule of life-it is life
itself" (Bernanos, 240). This is why Antonin Artaud, by claiming that
his form of theater is closer to Life than any other, merely reinforces the
old topos of art's divine vocation: "With this theater, we reestablish our
bond with life instead of separating ourselves from it" (Artaud, 18).
This, too, is why Silvio Astier, the young hero of Roberto Arlt's novel EI
juguete rabioso (The Furious Toy) lyrically praises Life after trying to set
fire to the bookstore where he is leading a most frustrating existence: "A
warmth as fresh as a little glass of wine made me feel friendly toward
the whole world during those watchful hours. I said ... Life, life, how
pretty you are, life ... Life, how pretty you are. Life ... how pretty ...
My God, how pretty you are" (Arlt, 68). And toward the end of PirandelIo's
Uno, nessuno, centomila (One, No One, One Hundred Thousand),
the hero finds that Life-the union with things and with naturehas
freed him from all the constraints imposed by human time, language,
and society: "I'm alive, and I don't conclude. Life doesn't conclude. And
life doesn't know about names. This tree, a trembling breath of new
leaves-I am this tree. Tree, cloud. Tomorrow, book or wind: the book
I'll read, the wind I'll drink" (Pirandello, 227).
If this monologue marks what one might call the environmentalist
level of the life mystique-the level that relates to the world as contextthe
protagonists in Rene Schickele's novel Maria Capponi repeatedly
come up against its existentialist version. They encounter life and love