“In the absence of the other, consciousness and its object are but one. The other is no longer constituting the court of all reality, to discuss, invalidate or verify what I believe I see. Lacking in its structure, it allows consciousness to adhere or coincide with the objects in an eternal present.
Such is the distortion in perception due to the absence of an internalized other as structuring for life in the world that Gilles Deleuze describes in Logic of Sense, in the chapter “Michael Tournier and The World Without the Other.” And he adds: “The structure of the Other organizes the depth and the peacefulness. The disorders of this structure imply a madness of the bottom, of the depth, an aggressive return of the bottomless that cannot be conjured. Everything loses its meaning, everything becomes a simulacrum and vestige, even the objects of work, even the loved one, the world in itself and the self in the world” (…) “The other is the expression of a world possible and if it is not in the world of the perceptible, then the perceived and the unperceived, the known and the not known, confront each other absolutely without nuances. Everything is implacable, reality no longer folds in relation to one another, it rises threateningly. We then discover evils that are no longer of man.”
This is the world that I see rising between the texts of Saverio the Cruel, the work of Roberto Arlt.
A family group used to organizing macabre pranks, “cachadas”, on people outside their core, decides this time to deceive one of their food suppliers.
Manipulating him with the argument that his participation in an “operetta court” will be the cure for the mental illness of one of the women in the family, the worker agrees. He will act as a colonel in a farce.
Saverio embodies the dictator.
Cruelty in the group of hunters is a habit, custom, in the way they relate to the world, even between them. Within the core, manipulation and the tendency to exclusion are part of the relationship mode.
Roberto Arlt shows these miserable affections with humor. It is admirable how pathos in this plot is the sinisterness of the bottomless, the rise to the surface of the horror of manipulation. He makes the meaning twist, showing one side and the other of the plot at the same time.
Sometimes it seems to me that the author himself is playing a monumental joke on us with this work. Empathy towards the characters jumps from one to another, as if we could recognize ourselves at times in each one, once, a little.
The bottomless emerges as madness on the surface in the work Saverio the Cruel. Who is the crazy one? makes us wonder the author. Where does the farce begin and end and where does reality? Where is the limit between bodies when the state is one of manipulation, domination by the creation of a reality that replaces the real one?
This work by Roberto Arlt predates the fact that the cruelty of discrimination and explicit social exclusion were established in our social reality. But the author wrote it, not coincidentally, in the 1930s, the so-called infamous decade in Argentina was the context from which Saverio the Cruel emerged.
The Buenos Aires playwright observed how social ties were broken and solidarity between subjects of the same class was dissolved. He could see the cruelty in the looks emerging from the bottomless, from the depths of always lurking inhumanity. He could see the looks of those who perceive others as those… things, that insist on being real.
I think that Saverio the cruel resonates today, from the spectacularity of a farce that replaces reality by dint of obscenity and senselessness. The other, things, groups, institutions, the creative power of people are perceived as threatening, as well as history and social constructions.
“We are witnessing the decline of piety,” says Roberto Arlt. This happens in Saverio the Cruel.
*Director of Saverio the Cruel.
The play is presented every Saturday at 6:30 p.m. at the Teatro Payró (San Martín 766).