Charlotte Delbo's Theatre of Elimination

• In Event: New Approaches to Holocaust Literature

Abstract

Although she had already written extensively about her Holocaust experience through poetry and prose, Charolotte Delbo’s 1966, QUI RAPPORTERA CES PAROLES? (WHO WILL CARRY THE WORD 1982), was her first published Holocaust drama. Its technical and dramatic success owes much to her pre-War work assisting Louis Jouvet, one of the most well-known impresarios at the time, and among the most influential figures in 20th century French theatre. First performed in 1974, the play provides a powerful example of a landscape overrun with images of bodily waste and human remains – consequences emerging from sites of violence, putrefaction, and death. The imagery of decomposition is transgressive by its very nature, displaying the unabridged realities of the Holocaust within an ‘aesthetics of atrocity.’ By translating such images into a literary drama about Holocaust memory, Delbo exposes both the condition of camp life and its effect on the prisoners.
The drama is fashioned around the need for eroding bodies to continue to bear witness in a universe which is itself in a state of disintegration. The playwright’s predominant focus on bodily deterioration over other problems reveals a world in which there is an inability to even minimally care for the body. As in the concentration camp, physical deterioration occurs as the result of a number of forces acting on the body: the lack of basic food, hydration and general nutrition; actions performed against the body, such as sleeplessness and torture; the inability to wash or cleanse one’s body, and the related inability to regulate bodily waste production. Reading Delbo’s lines against themselves, the images of excrement and other forms of human waste that occur with such regularity in the play, become the link between the literal and the symbolic. Since the fundamentally symbolic nature of the consciousness of the self makes us unable to live with our own excrement, Delbo “embodies” those images in her powerful lines. While the language of the play (re)creates a world populated with dying and emaciated women, the play itself unfolds as the disintegration of that very world, even as the women seek one voice to “carry the word.”

Author

• Holli Gwen Levitsky, Loyola Marymount University