Fernando Arrabal: The Games are Dangerous

There are players who do not take anything seriously. And there are men who openly challenge tribunals and prison. However, on very few occasions do players appear who not only do not take anything seriously but also challenge tribunals and prison. Even when he challenges Franco or Castro, Arrabal is not antiestablishment or a militant preacher. He is a man who plays. He conceives art as a game, and the world is turned into a game the very moment he touches it. However, this century is a field of forbidden games, a trap set for players. The first thing by him I read was Y pusieron esposas a las flores, a piece inspired on Franco's prisons. It was in Prague where at that time other prison masters reigned. I said to myself: One day, our horrors will be forgotten. However, this piece by Arrabal, this dirty masterpiece, this orchid of perverted imagination, this extraordinary rotten flower of evil will last. No doubt, I am mistaken. It is not this piece, this suffocating homage to de Sade that will remain, but the images of Epinal of the new rewriting of history, imposing their edifying vision of past decades, because from the womb of this serious and stupid century only an even more serious seriousness and a more stupid stupidity can be born.

"The world has become mortally and absurdly serious", said Gombrowicz to his critics, who then applauded him and turned him into a deadly serious writer. Oh Arrabal, what's the name of the star guiding your steps? Marx, anti-Marx, Tocqueville, Sartre, Mandela, Bush? For you, nothing is more venerable than this honourable Mafia of History. Your star bears the name of Cervantes. The day you admitted that, solemnly raising your arms towards the sky, the public around you (Marxists or anti-Marxists?), who thought they were listening to a completely charming incongruent, burst into laughter. (You know it only too well: it is only possible to make them laugh at those moments when you are being most serious). With the luminous clarity of absurdity, soon after that you expressed the same admission in La hija de King Kong, the last of your books I read. It is a play-novel, where each one of the games-football, rugby, chess- is a prison of rules, as beautiful as an exquisitely finished form.

Contrary to the chess player, the artist makes up the rules of the game himself and for himself, simultaneously the architect of the prison and the prisoner itself. La hija de King Kong has fifty chapters (never exceeding three pages) and each one of them has: 1) a fragment of the story of the protagonist; 2) his homage to Cervantes (never exceeding one paragraph); 3) one or two proverbs (similar to those enounced by Sancho); and 4) a sibylline sentence to finish. The games are dangerous: there is prose and mechanisms of writing so wisely, austerely and desperately playful that they suffocate one to death from boredom. Oh Arrabal! How did you manage, with such a monastically severe set of rules and so systematically applied, to carry on being so shamelessly amusing? How did you manage to move me with an unreal and impossible character to the extent of making me read the totally absurd adventures in one go, unable to put it down? After her education in a religious boarding school, the heroine becomes a prostitute, succeeds in finishing off two pimps, and gets away by fleeing to America. The old head of a bunch of gangsters is after her trying to kill her, but ends up falling not for her body nor for her soul, but for her love for Cervantes, of whom she never stops thinking about throughout all her adventures.

Cervantes is the god of this novel. In the last chapter, the leader of the gangsters rides a donkey, the Cervantes-loving prostitute, a horse, and they run away together, under the stars on the American prairies, into the distance. Oh Cervantes, our father! Praised be your name! Stay with us, for in this deadly serious and unloving land we have been left alone and only have you!

Milan Kundera