Henri Gouhier's definition “Représenter c’est rendre présent par des présences” (to represent is to make something present through presences) is totally inadequate to Tadeusz Kantor's Theater of Death, the essence of which—as described in detail elsewhere—is precisely the “impossibility of making present” both the dead “literary pre-existence” of the spectacle (drama, fable, characters) and the subjective memory of what-was.

Neither does the semiologists’ definition “theater is the spatialization of literature” fit the assumptions of Kantor, who used linguistic citations from Witkiewicz's Tumor Brainowicz, visual references to Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke and the prose of Schulz in The Dead Class to create possibilities (even for an instant) of the ostentatiously “substitute” existence of the dead pupils in moments when the class came to life and the photograph of memory dissolved. This is one of the principles of the Theater of Death: literary roles and motifs make impossible the rebirth (in reconstructed reminiscences of long-dead characters and incidents), or rather such reconstruction is lost in the trap of “impersonation.” Inaugurated with the 1956 Cuttlefish, the years-long “playing (with) Witkacy” in the Cricot 2 theater, extending through The Dead Class of 1975, was based on the assumption that the plays—even the most avant-garde ones that nevertheless had long been fulfilled in the imagination of their author, constituted “the DEAD world of the DEAD.” For Kantor, the fundamental contradiction of the theater is found in the stage—play relationship, and even the momentary unity of literature and theater is impossible. On the one side of this eternal conflict there is, thus, the fiction of the play, its fable, and the “reality of fictional drama,” associated with the condition of death. The reality of the theater, entangled in the conflict with theatrical illusion, remains on the other side. The stage is the place where this transformation of the eternal condition of death into the condition of momentary, ostensible, simulated life plays out.

It is not, after all, literature that undergoes “spatialization” here, but rather the photographic plates of memory of Kantor himself as he creates the Theater of Death by conjuring up the metaphysics of photography. The black-and-white image of the small group of pupils sitting at their desks constantly returns in performances of The Dead Class and freezes into immobility.