Jan Kott (and other sages of the Sixties)

By MICHAEL CAINES

Thinking about novels of ideas has led me back to influential books, and specifically the list published twenty years ago in the TLS; and this list in turn puts me in mind of one highly influential book (pictured above) dating from the early 1960s that didn't make the cut . . . .

Michael Bulley rightly pointed out last time around that you need proof of a book's effect to call it influential – of how many people Lucien Febvre's Struggle for History reached, for example, and its "particular consequences". Perhaps when we talk about influence, we're talking about a kind of excess – about Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom falling, some would say hazardously, into the hands of pundits and policy wonks as well as economists. The existence of new editions and translations is taken as proof of popularity. (Publishers' catalogues also hint at what counts as a lasting influence: see the "fortieth anniversary" edition of Capitalism and Freedom, the "fiftieth anniversary" Death and Life of Great American Cities, or the "Routledge Classic" edition of Purity and Danger.) And there's informed critical opinion, of course; in this week's TLS, Lawrence Douglas refers to the controversial first book on this 1960s list: "when we speak about Adolf Eichmann we inevitably also speak about Hannah Arendt".

Influence takes other courses, too. A week ago, I was at the Rose Theatre in Kingston for a conference that showed what curious courses it can take: "Jan Kott Our Contemporary", hosted by the Kingston Shakespeare Seminar, the Polish Cultural Institute and the Battersea Arts Centre.

The conference's title alludes to Kott's most famous work: Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Drawing on personal reflections and a sense of Shakespeare's affinity to Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, it was the outcome of Kott's many frustrating years of reviewing staid Shakespeare productions and trying to relate this supposedly universal plays to the world Kott knew, namely post-war Poland.

If Kott's book is filled with highly subjective, existentialist views, they were highly productive ones nonetheless, carried along with the 1960s Zeitgeist. Peter Brook famously wrote of Kott that he was the only Shakespeare scholar to assume that his readers "will at some point or other have been woken by the police in the middle of the night". Opposite a chapter on "The Kings" a reader could have found a photograph of Stalin's funeral; the coffin-bearers being would-be kings themselves, hoping to rise through the "Grand Mechanism" of history to claim the throne. Yet what was the point? With a Warsaw production of Richard III in mind, Kott could imagine a tyrant to be an absurdist clown: "Buffoonery is a philosophy, and the highest form of contempt: absolute contempt".

Although qualified in its praise, the TLS recognized the book's importance, devoting a page to the French edition published in 1962, two years before the English translation appeared (it has been translated into at least twenty languages): "he is sound in his analysis of what Shakespeare saw", the actor Robert Speaight wrote (anonymously), "but far more questionable in his assumption of what Shakespeare thought". Nonetheless,  Kott's influence on Brook, among others, is well-documented; it was with his ideas in mind that Brook staged his celebrated "endgame of the heath", as one critic called his RSC King Lear of 1962.

Yet here was also a case of perfect timing: Brook had long held similar convictions about the need to make such classic dramas speak to their moment. That Kott could write a whole chapter about Lear and not mention Cordelia once hardly mattered. He flatteringly invited his own contemporaries to see themselves in these great dramatic works, and to see the moral urgency of doing so: "One must find in [Richard III] the night of Nazi occupation, concentration camps, mass murders".

This linking of history to history plays partly explains why Ken Pickering, speaking at the Rose Theatre, could assert that there are simply pre-Kott and post-Kott ways of staging a classic, as the spirit of clunky antiquarianism gave way to modern dress, say, with visible references to present-day politics. (Although is this perhaps just a lesson that needs to be repeated from time to time? Think of the flap about "Hamlet in plus fours" and the modern Cymbeline staged by the Birmingham Rep in 1925; and the current fetish for candles, jigs and what-have-ye.) As became clear over the course of the morning's panels, Shakespeare Our Contemporary remains relevant to both theatre and the educational institutions that once came so grudgingly to the realization that theatre could be a worthwhile object of study. In Belgrade as in Stratford-upon-Avon, I learnt, students can appreciate the appearance of Rumour in Henry IV part two as a comment on our own age of misinformation moving at the speed of 4G, while Bucharest has seen Shakespeare "remixed" in the violent style of video game.

During the 1960s, some paid Kott the backhanded compliment of disagreeing furiously with him – whereas since then, many times over, his work has often been dismissed as outdated or irrelevant. At the Rose, Graham Holderness wisely pointed out that we shouldn't be so sure of history's straightforward shedding of the bad old ways, and of the irrelevance of Kott's readings; in the background, he had a slide in which the image of Dubrovnik as a hedonist's tourist destination which gave way to the same picturesque ramparts under siege, a Serbian-blasted city on fire. There was an anger to the discussion of Kott in relation to the violent struggles of today – which buffoon will step forward next, you might ask, as the Grand Mechanism turns?

Perhaps the ultimate compliment is to be able to say that his ideas have long been taken for granted. Re-reading Shakespeare Our Contemporary a few years ago, Michael Billington could describe himself as "stunned by how much of it has been absorbed into our theatrical culture": "I can't think of anyone today who influences production in quite the same way as Kott", even if the Polish scholar has been himself "largely forgotten". Major innovations do have a habit of outliving the innovators, you could say. Influence ebbs into the immeasurable.

 

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BOOKS OF THE 1960s

48. Hannah Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil
49. Daniel Bell: The End of Ideology
50. Isaiah Berlin: Four Essays on Liberty
51. Albert Camus: Notebooks 1935–1951 (Carnets)
52. Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht)
53. Robert Dahl: Who Governs?: Democracy and power in an American city
54. Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger
55. Erik Erikson: Gandhi’s Truth: On the origins of militant non-violence
56. Michel Foucault: Madness and Civilization: A history of insanity in the Age of Reason (Histoire de la folie a l’age classique)
57. Milton Friedman: Capitalism and Freedom
58. Alexander Gerschenkron: Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective
59. Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere) 
60. H. L. A. Hart: The Concept of Law
61. Friedrich von Hayek: The Constitution of Liberty (Die Verfassung der Freiheit)
62. Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities
63. Carl Gustav Jung: Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Erinnerungen, Traeume, Gedanken)
64. Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
65. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie: The Peasants of Languedoc (Les Paysans de Languedoc)
66. Claude Levi-Strauss: The Savage Mind (Le Pensée sauvage)
67. Konrad Lorenz: On Aggression (Das sogenannte Boese)
68. Thomas Schelling: The Strategy of Conflict
69. Fritz Stern: The Politics of Cultural Despair
70. E. P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class