Culture Shock/Fintan O'Toole:Marcel Marceau, whose father died in Auschwitz, was one of several post-war artists whose silence spoke volumes about the world's loss of innocence
At Auschwitz, the unspeakable became literal. When he visited Auschwitz last year, Pope Benedict said: "In a place like this, words fail. In the end there can only be a dread silence - a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God." He was expressing a notion that occurred to at least some of those who themselves descended into the hell of the Holocaust. Primo Levi recorded the reaction of himself and his fellow inmates on arriving at the camp and seeing the prisoners: "We looked at each other without a word." When they were dressed in their uniforms and joined the damned, "then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man".
As Ludwig Wittgenstein had written in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a book that gained currency after the Holocaust, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent". Theodor Adorno famously expressed the dilemma of art after the Holocaust when he wrote that "It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz". He didn't mean, as is often suggested, that the only option was to shut up. He was instead drawing attention to the fact that culture - language, art, intellectual life, religion - had failed and that we could not simply go on as if the Holocaust were a mere blip on the screen of enlightened progress. Words had failed us, and they could no longer be used as if their meaning was still adequate.
The dilemma was especially acute for theatre. Drama assumes that human beings have the freedom to act, to choose one course over another. The concentration camps had obliterated that assumption by perfecting, in Levi's phrase, "the demolition of man". Language - the expression of individuality - had been hollowed out.
It is not accidental that three of the figures who responded most directly to this dilemma had been touched by the Holocaust. Samuel Beckett, who reshaped theatrical language as a noise made within a great void of silence, had seen his friends hauled off to the death camps. Harold Pinter, who stitched silence - the famous Pinteresque pause - into the fabric of language, grew up as a Jew amid the anti-fascist struggles of the East End of London. And then there was Marcel Marceau, to whom, until his death this week, Oliver Goldsmith's line from The Good-Natured Man, "silence is become his mother tongue", could be applied. His father died in Auschwitz in 1944.
Marceau's genius was to make silence audible and absence visible. Just as he made us "see" what was not there - walls, stairs, tables, chairs, people, masks - he made us "hear" the silence that surrounds words. Like his contemporaries in the early 1950s - John Cage in music, who created a piece from four and a half minutes of silence, and Robert Rauschenberg in painting, who created a series of white canvases - he was exploring the meaning of apparent absence. But, like them, he was far from making some kind of nihilistic gesture. Cage's silence drew attention to the wealth of sounds we ignore all the time. Rauschenberg's "blank" canvases caught the subtlest reflections of light. And Marceau's wordlessness was less a celebration of silence than a defiance of the unspeakable. He gave us the paradox that even where there is nothing, there is a great deal. It was not accidental that Marceau, like Beckett, reached back beyond the Holocaust to the era of silent film. Some of the inspiration that Beckett derived from Buster Keaton and Marceau from Charles Chaplin was technical. The masters of the silent movie had used a body language more eloquent than words. But some of it was, in the broadest sense, philosophical. Keaton and Chaplin had given us human beings surviving in a hostile universe of random catastrophes and uncontrollable technologies and, by making us laugh, had asserted our capacity not to be defeated by it. Even within a more sombre post-Holocaust aesthetic, Marceau found a way of enacting a similar struggle between the human body and an implacable world, and forcing a similarly rueful laugh.
But he also moved decisively beyond the innocence of Chaplin's tramp. His two great showpieces, David and Goliath and The Mask-Maker - both seared on the memories of anyone who saw him at the height of his powers in the mid-1970s - played on the inextricable nature of good and evil, hero and villain, comedy and tragedy. The astonishing technical prowess of his dizzying shifts between David and Goliath enacted the notion that the two were, after all, contained in the same body. And in the terrifying Mask-Maker, he switched with a similarly vertiginous speed between laughter and weeping as he applied the masks of comedy and tragedy to his face, until the comic mask got stuck and he was forced to go on laughing while it strangled him to death.
There was no purer playing-out of Adorno's demand for an art that recognised the death of culture at Auschwitz. The very symbols of classical culture - the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy - were turned into death-traps. His body shaking with laughter and his face contorted in horror, he embodied the paradox of trying to make art in the shadow of barbarism. He gave us an unforgettable image of culture's loss of innocence. Yet in doing so, he gave us a great example of the power of imagination to defy death and the power of silence to attain expression.