The Water Hen by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz

First published:Kurka wodna, 1962 (English translation, 1968, in The Madman and the Nun, and Other Plays)

First produced: 1922, at the Słowacki Theater, Cracow, Poland

Type of plot: Absurdist

Time of work: Unspecified

Locale: Unspecified

Principal Characters:

• Albert Wałpor, a retired skipper of a merchant ship
• Edgar Wałpor, Albert’s good-looking, if inept, son
• Tadzio, a boy who is supposedly Edgar’s son
• Lady Alice, Duchess of Nevermore, a beautiful blonde woman who falls in love with Edgar
• Elizabeth Gutzie-Virgeling (the Water Hen), Edgar’s confidante, and later Tadzio’s beloved
• Richard de Korbowa-Korbowski (Tom Hoozey), sometimes called “the scoundrel,” he is devoted to Alice

The Play

The play begins with the Water Hen scolding Edgar Wałpor for not shooting her promptly. They have discussed the whole matter and decided on this course of action, but Edgar has trouble taking aim and firing. He dreads the consequences—no one to talk to—and believes that she is only using him to accomplish her purpose. She replies that he is being cowardly and that this is his opportunity to perform a unique deed. Finally convinced by her argument, Edgar does in fact shoot her dead.aw Ignacy Witkiewicz{/I}[Water Hen]}

Edgar is not sure he has achieved anything by this death. It is rather all of a piece with his feelings that his life has had no meaning and that he is without convictions—even though he is pressed by Tadzio to explain the significance of death. Edgar is not willing to acknowledge Tadzio as his son and suggests that he is not even sure of his own existence.

Edgar’s father, Albert, is not at all surprised to learn of the Water Hen’s death, and he does not believe that it makes much difference in the total scheme of things. Still, a killing is an impressive event, Albert admits, and he concedes that his son may yet make something important of his life. Edgar, meanwhile, falls under the spell of Lady Alice, the Duchess of Nevermore, whose husband, Edgar, has just died, and who is slavishly served by the scoundrel Korbowski (also her lover), who resembles Edgar Wałpor. The relationships between characters becomes even more complicated when Lady Alice reveals that her dead husband Edgar was an intimate of the Water Hen and was much affected by her letters to him. Except for Korbowski’s disturbing presence, Edgar feels (by the end of act 1) that he has created a family for himself by adopting Tadzio (perhaps the Water Hen’s son) and marrying Alice, his friend’s wife.

However, at the beginning of act 2, Tadzio confesses to Alice that he forgets why Edgar is his father. As usual in this play, no relationship, no idea, remains intact. Alice counsels Tadzio that it does not make much difference—that it does no good to question why things are as they are. There are no answers.

Korbowski spends much of act 2 berating Alice for her life with Edgar, who in Korbowski’s eyes is weak and a poor replacement for her dead husband. Alice does not care for these personal reflections, for she has her mind on a new business: the Theosophical Jam Company. Amassing capital is more important to her than probing human emotions. Why should Korbowski care about Edgar so long as no sex is involved, she asks him.

Then the Water Hen returns. Edgar is amazed but almost immediately accuses her of lying when she refuses to acknowledge Tadzio as her son. Still feeling like a nonentity, Edgar withdraws with the Water Hen just after Alice acknowledges that the Water Hen was the only woman her dead husband ever loved. Again Edgar Wałpor’s father is not surprised at this turn of events, and the Water Hen suspects that nothing has really changed as the result of her death. Still, Edgar insists that he has suffered, and to prove his point submits to the physical agony of a torture machine—as though it would somehow demonstrate the reality of his feelings.

Like Edgar, Alice feels she must also come to grips with the influence of the Water Hen on her life. Although she has admitted her dead husband’s love for the Water Hen, she now dismisses it as a figment of his imagination—a point the Water Hen seems to sanction when she admits that she lies about everything, and that, in fact, she does not exist. Thrown together by their desperate desire to believe in love and in the harmony of human relationships, Alice promises to love Edgar even as he ends act 2 dreading the meaninglessness of life—except for those who are the magnificent liars and can make something great out of it.

Act 3 takes place ten years later. Tadzio is twenty and much taken with the Water Hen, who is now beautiful and sensuous. Even Albert Wałpor is surprised when he comes upon Tadzio and the Water Hen enveloped in a violent embrace. Edgar and Tadzio quarrel over Tadzio’s declaration that he loves the Water Hen and wants to marry her. Edgar once again takes aim and shoots the Water Hen, even though she confesses she was only trying to make Edgar jealous. The Water Hen dead once again, Alice tries to take responsibility when the detectives arrive, but Edgar regards the death as the culminating event that ties him even more strongly to life—an outcome he thwarts by shooting himself. Outside, the shots and the commotion of a revolution can be heard. Inside, Albert Wałpor sits placidly playing cards, predicting that his card-playing colleagues will have no problem getting jobs in the new government. The play ends with one of the cardplayers indicating he will “pass.”

Dramatic Devices

The character of the Water Hen is itself a dramatic device. It is Witkiewicz’s parody of Henrik Ibsen’s great realistic and symbolic play Vildanden (pb. 1884; The Wild Duck, 1891). In Ibsen’s play, the wild duck, which is shot, is a symbol of human emotions, which are also destroyed. By changing the symbol to a water hen, Witkiewicz not only indulges his sense of humor—reducing the pretensions of art to a rather prosaic symbol—but also calls attention to the tricks of art, to the way art embellishes life and makes it seem more significant than it actually is. Witkiewicz is not so much against this symbol-making as he is dedicated to showing it for what it is—not a reflection of life’s meaning but a substitute for the absence of meaning. Thus in act 3 of The Water Hen, the Water Hen is transformed from a pretty but not sensuous woman into an irresistible sexual object. Art has, in other words, triumphed over the reality of what the Water Hen was in the first two acts. This is laughable, even absurd, but such is the power of art.

Since the human personality is not solid or individual, Witkiewicz delights in giving different characters the same name or giving a single character several names. Thus, both of Alice’s husbands are named Edgar, and Richard de Korbowa-Korbowski is referred to as the scoundrel and Tom Hoozey. He also resembles Edgar Wałpor, even though he is his romantic, demoniac opposite. The Water Hen is also identified as Elizabeth Gutzie-Virgeling. In Polish, her name, Elzbieta Flake-Prawacka, is a combination of the words flaki (tripe) and prawiczka (virgin), a fittingly humorous name for a woman who is a bizarre combination of the down-to-earth (the guts of things) and the unbesmirched ideal.

In general, Witkiewicz’s dramatic devices are designed to undermine the logical, rational, and linear development of traditional realistic plays. When the Water Hen appears at the beginning of act 3 after a ten-year absence, Tadzio’s servant, Jan, announces, “Sir, the lady who was here ten years ago wishes to speak to you.” The figure of the Lamplighter, who accuses Edgar Wałpor of playing dumb, of refusing to recognize his own function as a dramatic device, is also the playwright’s way of calling attention to theatricality. The theater shines a light on life—as does the Lamplighter in act 1, when his lantern makes a pattern of “eight concentric beams of intense green light.” Art, Witkiewicz implies, is a self-defining, circular way of giving life a form.

Critical Context

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz was a philosopher, painter, novelist, and aesthetician as well as a playwright. In one of his most important essays, he elaborated the concept of “pure form,” a term that is referred to in The Water Hen, generally acknowledged as one of his greatest plays. Witkiewicz believes that plays should be as visual as paintings, that they should not be narratives but pictures, images of existence such as the one the Lamplighter creates with his lantern. Existence cannot be grasped rationally or logically; it can only be represented as form, which can be pure in the sense that it does not argue a message—that is, it does not come to some conclusion about the nature of things. The theater, in other words, is not a comment on life; the theater is, rather, its own world and constitutes its own shape. The Water Hen, for example, can come back to life because the return, the repetition of things, is essential to the form of the play. Thus the theater creates its own sense of order and its own rules.

Witkiewicz grew up in a world shaped by war and revolution. His own father, a distinguished artist, argued for precisely the kind of realism that his son rejected. Like one of his own characters, Witkiewicz even invented a name for himself, Witkacy, and lived a rather eccentric existence which demonstrated that he would not be bound by the strictures of his society. He was skeptical of humankind’s ability to order the world, and put all of his energies into the creation of art. He is one of the most important playwrights of the twentieth century, anticipating the absurdist drama of Samuel Beckett and others while expressing a peculiarly Polish sense of the futility of history. He committed suicide in 1939 shortly after German and Russian armies invaded Poland.

Sources for Further Study

Gerould, Daniel C. Witkacy: Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz as an Imaginative Writer. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981.

Gerould, Daniel C, ed. and trans. The Witkiewicz Reader. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992.

Gerould, Daniel C., and C. S. Durer. Introduction to The Madman and the Nun, and Other Plays. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968.

Miłosz, Czesław. “The Pill of Murti-Bing.” In The Captive Mind, translated by Jane Zielonko. 1953. Rev. ed. New York: Octagon Books, 1981.

Miłosz, Czesław. “S. I. Witkiewicz, a Polish Writer for Today.” Tri-Quarterly 9 (Spring, 1967): 143-154.

Puzyna, Kostanty. “The Prism of the Absurd.” Polish Perspectives 7 (June, 1963): 34-44.

Tarn, Adam. “Plays.” Polish Perspectives 8 (October, 1965): 8.

Toeplitz, Krzysztof. “Avant-Garde with Tradition.” Poland 4 (April, 1965): 28-31.