Finally to confront Artaud as an intellect rather than as an event, rather than as an explosion in one's own mind -------
Never before, when it is life itself that is in question, has there been so much talk of civilization and culture. And there is a curious parallel between this generalized collapse of life at the root of our present demoralization and our concern for a culture which has never been coincident with life, which in fact has been devised to tyrannize over life
. . . What is most important, it seems to me, is not so much to defend a culture whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract, from what is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical with that of hunger (7).
Let us regard "never kept a man from going hungry" as a rhetorical gesture, if an unfortunate one. The rest stands as a credo differing from most precisely in that it is sane: dreams and images matter from some relation to human need, or they do not matter to humans. While this may sound like tautology, those who spin around in debates over "art for art's sake" or art as sales manoevering routinely slight the obvious consequences. Artaud recognizes this as an error that one may as easily call social, psychological, or formal:
"If confusion is a sign of the times, I see at the root of this confusion a rupture between things and words, between things and the ideas and signs that are their representation" (7).
Or, later
". . . a cultivated 'civilized' man is regarded as a person instructed in systems, a person who thinks in forms, signs, representations--a monster whose faculty of deriving thoughts from acts, instead of identifying acts with thoughts, is developed to an absurdity" (8).
Leaving aside for the moment the implicit social concerns, this statement attacks the concepts of semiotic reference that grow out of de Saussure and Jakobson, insisting on what elsewhere has been regarded as the contamination of the semiotic system by the referent, by materiality of the text, but also by the biology of the interpreter, of the organism that reads the sign. Note, for instance, how the following relates to other theories:
"If our life lacks brimstone, i.e. a constant magic, it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in considerations of their imagined form instead of being impelled by their force" (8).
With Austin, Artaud situates meaning outside of the words or their enunciation, in the larger context. The perception Artaud describes here involves implied narrators and observers almost after the manner of Genette. He specifically mentions narrative later:
"It is because we have been accustomed for four hundred years, that is since the Renaissance, to a purely descriptive and narrative theater -- storytelling psychology; it is because every possible ingenuity has been exerted in bringing to life on the stage plausible but detached beings, with the spectacle on one side, the public on the other . . . " (76).
The parallel can hardly be seen as accidental. And one might follow this further afield. In the breakdown of the semiotic we have one vision of broad swath of Western aesthetics. The symbolic enters the semiotic, for example. But what's more interesting is that Artaud appears intent on a breakdown of the narrative perception itself.
He gets fairly specific. Take his idea of "The Theater and the Plague," topic of the performance-lecture that Nin describes somewhere in her Journals. In establishing a connection between theater and plague, Artaud tempts one to clinical diagnosis. I had to laugh when he followed it by a citing Augustine's City of God (26): where does one separate the pathological from the historical? But here at least he does seem to maintain a handle on at least his audience's probable disbelief:
"Whatever may be the errors of historians or physicians concerning the plague, I believe we can agree upon the idea of a malady that would be a kind of psychic entity and would not be carried by a virus" (18).
He goes on to write of a spreading not by contagion per se, but by revelation, a revelation involving the disintegration of social and, if one may follow his patterns of extension elsewhere, of psychological and intellectual forms.
This spreading he describes as theater.
To serve this end he proposes a primacy of what he calls mise en scene, which seems to be "everything specifically theatrical, i.e., everything that cannot be expressed in speech, in words, or, if you prefer, everything that is not contained in the dialogue . . . " (37). This extralinguistic "language" requires sensual beauty -- "This language created for the senses must from the outset be concerned with satisfying them" (38) -- and allusion or reference. That is, this "language" is not private or merely concerned with abreacting or catharsis of personal issues, but with something that happens between people, something which can be, if not understood exactly, responded to and integrated. He spends some time on the Balinese shadow theater as an example:
Here is a whole collection of ritual gestures to which we [westerners] do not have the key and which seem to obey extremely precise musical indications, with something more that does not generally belong to mkusic and seems intended to encircle thought, to hound it down and lead it into an inextricable and certain system . . . (57).
"What he sets in motion is the MANIFESTED . . . .
"All of which seems to be an exorcism to make our demons FLOW" (60).
..
A note --
The Balinese theater that Artaud talks about takes place under considerably different circumstances than do postindustrial performances. TThose conditions relate very specifically to the differences in presentations that Artaud writes of.
: Balinese audiences know the stories of the plays before they arrive at the theater. The point of performance is seldom to "tell the story" exactly, but to display a rendition. We experience something like this with a version of a popular song. The interest may come with variations from melody, inflection, or other aspects. These sing against the anticipated form much as variations on an iambic pentameter sing against the anticipated iamb.
Now,
Artaud would reduce the role of words and the specificity of time and place instituted by those words. There's a lot to be said for this. One thinks of the abnegation of a certain referentiality in Mallarme's late work, for instance. Both work for a universality, a generality, and at once a specificity. For the audience's troubles are not that Oedipus does or does not fuck his mother or that Hamlet is to be or to not be, but some abstract or universal pertinent to that and related to their own mothers, their own beings.
However, there remains some necessity for designation of elements, of time and place in some sense, albeit relative. Ancient playwrights had some advantage in this because characters and stories were known by all. Children would have known the stories of Achilles as oral legend, much as our children know of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. Were Artaud's production in the Theater of Cruelty to work, it should therefore summon some similar incident. Notably he chose the Conquest of Mexico, a natural event for its visual wildness and violence, which might be susceptible to presentation as gesture.
'T'd seem, then, that this cruelty requires synthesis, that rigor cannot be absolute, or need not be. Nowadays an MTV video by personae who seem to want little more than fast women and pretty cars employ principles that sound radical in Artaud. But A's case isn't made so easily. A's careful to point out that linguistic language is to be decentered, not eliminated, and that it should function much like it does in a dream. But I would suggest that the "meaningfulness" or, in Artaud's words, "the psychology" inherent in referential language operates as a factor, not as an addend or accretion. I mean that it is an inseparable aspect of all that it touches, but an entirety of no thing. What we think of as a constative statement is a statement whose gestures indicate that one can take it as true in a certain way that may be traditional in one culture or another. This may function, in some ways, like the noun-verb head of a Chomskyan sentence -- as the entity that other elements modify and by which other elements might be interpreted. Perhaps it may not. But it seems central to human thought that there should be something like a thing or an action that does. Or perhaps a scene. Now, in theater, of course, these things might be established without being named: they can be embodied by actors or the mise en scene.
Now, for writers, an interesting aspect of all this nonverbality is that readers derive visual and aural pictures while reading, and these must play with the continuing text in somewhat similar ways. Jackendoff points out that visual signals are integrated before sentences are completed; by observation, they are included in the syntactic assembly of meaning. This would have to be true to accomodate anything like Austin's speech-acts in any form.
A conclusion? I don't know. But it appears that the various aspects that we think of as context may be combined in various ways and have almost any relation to the language applied to them. In such a case, it need not be the language that fixes feeling in the ways A objects to. Written word has a fixity, yes, but not through being language. Statement has fixity, yes, but that may be undercut by everything in context that may suggest that we not believe the statement.
Altogether, then, language and even written language could have most any place in this. The issue Artaud is really after here seems related to the matter of address. The audience must embody the feelings, the insights, the ideas of the performance -- embody them, live them, whatever: this as A said to Nin. I quote it from memory: "I want to give them the plague so they will ____, and awaken" -- not coincidentally, the lines quoted by Arthur Janov in his second book, The Anatomy of Mental Illness. Artaud searches for feeling in something like Janov's sense, though he doesn't seem to have altogether found it. But I don't want to be reductive in this way. Artaud clearly considers this a social act, which Janov does not, or not in the same sense. (Janov's Primals are intensely internal. They're often triggered by external events, but they're a matter of a person and his or her past, not an interaction with persons present. Artaud presumes something in which persons not only trigger other persons, but in which intellectual insight remains a large part. Also, he imagines this as something that would dissolve or decompose social repressions.
It's hard to work out just how much of Artaud amounts to metaphor, how much is delusion, and how much is literal statement so enormous that one does not immediately grasp it. [I can't get any further now.]
...
In The Theater and Its Double Artaud accomplished his most sustained comprehensible project. One may wish to judge or to experience Artaud in other metiers, but there is some use to grasping him theoretically. For all his enveighing against words and literature, for all his famous psychosis, most all of his writing adopts at least the form and gesture of constative declaration. And The Theater and Its Double is by itself a coherent statement of the position that occupied him from his "Letters to Riviere" to the last days at Rodez.
No comments:
Post a Comment