ABSTRACT
Novarina follows Pascal’s thoughts in his use of numbered fragments which stand in the latently influential stream of the French essay: they engage in dialogue with Jules Lagneau, Simone Weil, and Claudel. In its artistic sense, Ocarina’s path from philology to philosophy leads from writing to the theater. Neither does Novarina believe in the illusion of supportable presence: “True presence attaches to nothing, the present is a gift, a present. Novarina’s texts, just like Pilinszky’s oratorio and stage works, are indubitably text-centric, but the former can also rely on daily theatrical practice. Pilinszky’s theatrical “pieces,” written in the 1970s, draw a great deal on his poetic technique: in truth, he worked out a theatrical poetics and not a theory of the theater. Just as with Pilinszky or Wilson, so in Novarina’s works, the actor does not express himself: he is a being divided in two, his own witness, observer of his own Passion—a person who steps outside personhood.
