Pekić’s Theater of Commentaries
See diary entry December 15, 1983
Every writer keeps notes. Grocery lists disguised as outlines, phone numbers that later look like titles, arrows pointing to nowhere. Most of these are forgotten detritus. But in the case of Borislav Pekić—Serbia’s novelist, playwright, political exile, and reluctant prophet—his editorial notes for a set of plays read less like marginalia and more like dispatches from a one-man war room. Here is a dramatist redrafting not only his commentaries but history itself, turning each play into a philosophical skirmish with God, Marx, Orwell, and occasionally the graffiti inside a Belgrade phone booth.
In these notes, comedy is not comedy. It is weapon, disguise, Trojan horse. “Political comedy,” “linguistic comedy,” “comedy of conscience”—Pekić doesn’t describe his works in the language of the theater season but in the taxonomy of pathology. The stage is where society reveals its tumors most clearly, provided you can still laugh at them. Laughter, in Pekić’s world, is not levity; it’s survival.
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Grosz’s acid caricatures of Weimar-era politicians and generals—bloated, smug, half-mad—embody the grotesque comedy of power that Pekić dissects. Grosz, like Pekić, uses satire to expose corruption, ideology, and doublethink. “Generals continue their games even after death,” Pekić wrote. Grosz’s grotesque caricatures of Weimar politicians echo his sense that history is not solemn archive but absurd parade—leaders playing with fire as if it were theater props. |
Consider The 186th Step. Ostensibly a play about a journalist hounding an old man to death in order to prove how many steps led up the Mauthausen quarry. The real subject, as Pekić’s commentary makes clear, is the moral calculus of “ends and means.” If truth is higher than life, then why not torture or kill in its service? But if life is higher than truth, then what is truth worth? A tidy philosophical conundrum, except in Pekić’s hands it comes with chickens and eggs: “The Big Hen and the Small Eggs,” he suggests, as a possible title. The horror of ideology, dressed up as poultry humor.
Or take his notes on How a Gentleman Was Tempered, which he wants retitled On Some Questions of Newspeak. The examples he lists could have been lifted from this morning’s headlines: missiles called “peacekeepers,” the “reprogramming” of debts, “elegant solutions” to problems better left unsolved. Orwell’s dystopia wasn’t a warning, Pekić implies—it was already in syndication, replaying daily, dubbed into the official language of every state. His comedy is grotesque precisely because reality had beaten him to the punchline.
Even the mottos he attaches to each play reveal his sense of theater as an existential experiment. Ecclesiastes rubs shoulders with Borges; Marx’s German Ideology is invoked in the same breath as Yesenin’s poetry. At one point, Pekić even borrows from bathroom graffiti: “Killing out of compassion is like screwing out of chastity.” These mottos aren’t ornamental. They are provocations—intellectual grenades lobbed into the reader’s lap before the play even begins.
What makes these notes irresistible is their tone: half philosophical disputation, half deadpan stand-up. Stalin, he writes, lived such a solitary life that he developed a “consciousness of absolute threat.” The Great Terror, therefore, becomes not historical tragedy but an illustration of one man’s paranoia. Elsewhere, he observes: “A man becomes honest only when bankrupt, a thief only when caught.” These are the sort of aphorisms one imagines being scribbled on cocktail napkins, except Pekić intends them as stage directions for civilization.
And then there is the recurring question: What does it mean to forget? Converts, he suggests, are defined by their process of forgetting. Generals, by their delusion that war can be replayed like a board game. Dissidents, by their inability to adapt to the “Hegelian charms of slavery.” Each group, each play, is an allegory of memory under siege. Comedy, again, is the camouflage.
Or take his notes on How a Gentleman Was Tempered, which he wants retitled On Some Questions of Newspeak. The examples he lists could have been lifted from this morning’s headlines: missiles called “peacekeepers,” the “reprogramming” of debts, “elegant solutions” to problems better left unsolved. Orwell’s dystopia wasn’t a warning, Pekić implies—it was already in syndication, replaying daily, dubbed into the official language of every state. His comedy is grotesque precisely because reality had beaten him to the punchline.
Even the mottos he attaches to each play reveal his sense of theater as an existential experiment. Ecclesiastes rubs shoulders with Borges; Marx’s German Ideology is invoked in the same breath as Yesenin’s poetry. At one point, Pekić even borrows from bathroom graffiti: “Killing out of compassion is like screwing out of chastity.” These mottos aren’t ornamental. They are provocations—intellectual grenades lobbed into the reader’s lap before the play even begins.
What makes these notes irresistible is their tone: half philosophical disputation, half deadpan stand-up. Stalin, he writes, lived such a solitary life that he developed a “consciousness of absolute threat.” The Great Terror, therefore, becomes not historical tragedy but an illustration of one man’s paranoia. Elsewhere, he observes: “A man becomes honest only when bankrupt, a thief only when caught.” These are the sort of aphorisms one imagines being scribbled on cocktail napkins, except Pekić intends them as stage directions for civilization.
And then there is the recurring question: What does it mean to forget? Converts, he suggests, are defined by their process of forgetting. Generals, by their delusion that war can be replayed like a board game. Dissidents, by their inability to adapt to the “Hegelian charms of slavery.” Each group, each play, is an allegory of memory under siege. Comedy, again, is the camouflage.
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Where Grosz ridicules and Magritte destabilizes, Bacon brings the existential scream. His figures, warped and isolated, capture Pekić’s sense that beneath comedy lurks terror—the guillotine of life, the loneliness of power, the paranoia of Stalin. Bacon’s visual violence pairs with Pekić’s insistence that means corrupt ends, and ends corrupt means. “No consciousness can withstand the pressure of compulsion… it becomes the craving for power.” Bacon’s distorted figure captures the terror beneath Pekić’s laughter: comedy as camouflage for the scream of the twentieth century. |
What these editorial notes reveal is not just a playwright tinkering with drafts, but an intellectual turning theater into tribunal. His stage directions are ethical summonses. His comedies are philosophies in costume. His mottos, lifted from scripture or science, are invitations to witness the absurdity of power and the frailty of truth.
Reading them today, forty years on, one is struck less by their historical context than by their eerie prescience. The euphemisms, the doublethink, the substitution of “peace” for war and “truth” for power—these remain the lingua franca of our own age. Pekić’s notes, unfinished and provisional as they are, remind us that the theater is never just theater. It is rehearsal for survival in a world where reality itself is always up for revision.
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