Toward a Concrete Drama. Isou and Successors Research Perspectives

Abstract

The aim of this text is to show the formal, structural and ideological similarities between the strategy of letristic poets (above all Isidore Isou) and a particular group of 20th century Polish dramas. In the poems of the letrists (which ultimately functioned as paratheatrical scripts), the word functioned as a visual and sound object, torn from traditional semantics, being a free record of the physical work of voice and body; thus denying the traditional alphabet and system of language (in this case – the end of the representation of the impossibility of textualisation of the apocalyptic experience). On the basis of the analyses of these practices, the author introduces the concept of “concrete drama”, which – like the poems of the Letrists – is at the same time a visual object, a score of rhythmical musical composition, a literary work and a record, and proposes a group of texts that can be included in this genre category. The analysis shows an unintended and independent similarity between two avant-garde aesthetic currents, developing in the 20th century in France in Poland.