Artaud: Rackscreams and Theater of Cruelty
Here are some questions you may want to ponder in your responses to Artaud:
1) What can the "confessional" framework do for our reading of Artaud? What does reading Artaud's late poems do to the confessional framework? To the model of poetry as "communication"?
2) What is the role of "lyric shame" - or just "shame" - in these poems? How does this affect operate in/through the poems?
3) Going back to our discussion of Lynn Hejinian's "Rejection of Closure": Are these poems/drama ideas for plays "dictatorial" or "democratic"? Are the plays Artaud calls for "contained" or "open"? What other frameworks might reading Artaud open up for us when it comes to discussing the power relationship between audience/performer, reader/writer?
3.5) If we go back to John Durham Peters, how might Artaud fit into or complicate the Socratic fear of "transgressive circulation"?
4) Write an imitation of the poems. Then describe what aesthetic devices you picked up on and how your version differs from his.
5) Write 3 hypothetical "theater of cruelty" productions (like the ones Artaud includes at the end of his manifesto) and then say why these would fulfill Artaud's demands of the "Theater of Cruelty".
6) AM wrote in a previous blog entry: "I'd like my poetry to be personal, but violenced/violencing, or quiet-and-charged." Does this apply to Artaud? Explore this idea.
7) The most obvious topic is of course "abjection": Kristeva was largely inspired by Artaud's work in coming up with her theorizations of the abject. So obviously, one can very easily give an abject/Kristevan reading of this text. But is there any way you feel Artaud is actually not a good fit for Kristeva's theories? ie Is there an argument against reading Artaud as "abject"?
8) We have talked a lot about the intersection of violence/aesthetics in this class. What might Artaud's plays/poems bring to this discussion?
Feel free to bring up other issues, especially if you draw on previous class discussions.
Good luck!
Johannes
A happy coincidence: I was in the middle of reading Watchfiends and Rack Screams, specifically “Artaud the Mômo,” when I finally had the chance to see Alex Garland’s Annihilation. The result was a one-two punch of “doubling.”
ReplyDeleteTo avoid outright spoilers for Annihilation, I’ll refer to Clayton Eshleman’s introduction to Artaud when he unpacks the “double” for us:
“The concept of the ‘double’ here is complex. It is not only life itself, but specifically the plague (to which Artaud compared his theater-to-be, sensing in both forces creative upheaval and renewal). Effective acting also involves the double: the actor is to become ‘an eternal ghost radiating affective powers.’ The double redoubles, so to speak, throughout Artaud’s life and work, and ultimately becomes a kind of surrogate for Artaud himself as ‘Artaud the Momo,’ the carnally-obsessed reviler homunculus who rises out of the ashes of electroshock at Rodez.” (9-10)
I don’t want to veer too far into “inside baseball” territory, but I focused on this quote because it applies to both Artaud (of course) and Annihilation. In Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty and the film’s Area X both, it’s up to doubling that brings about “creative upheaval and renewal” and, in the film’s climax, something quite like “an eternal ghost radiating affective powers.” In the same way that “the double redoubles,” there’s something infectious and metastasizing in Artaud and Annihilation, where surrogacy abounds and lines and identities get blurred.
Some standout excerpts that I consider illustrative of all this:
1. “The Return of Artaud, the Mômo”:
The anchored spirit,
screwed into me
by the psycho-
lubricious thrust
of the sky
is the one who thinks
every temptation,
every desire,
every inhibition. (93)
2. “The Human Face”:
The human face is an empty force, a field of death.
The old revolutionary demand for a form which has never corre-
sponded to its body, which left to be something other than the body.
……………………………………………………………..
The human face bears in fact a kind of perpetual death on its face
from which it’s up to the painter precisely to save it
in giving its own features back to it.
For the thousands and thousands of years in fact that the human
face has been speaking and breathing
one somehow still has the impression that it has not yet started to
say what it is and what it knows. (277)
Here, yes, is a shift in blame, a plea of “not guilty,” due to this “anchored spirit” which, as we come to realize for Artaud is a hollow presence: he disavows any talk of “spirit” and “soul” elsewhere in the collection. But in this moment, Artaud’s double acts the source of those “radiating affective powers” in order to generate and enact the site of the Theater of Cruelty and fill in the void of the “human face” and its “empty force.” And much like the mutations and hybridizations at work in Area X, Artaud’s Theater thus operates like a prism ever distorting and ever refracting light.
Same as Jake, I had a happy coincidence! With reading Artaud specifically, I've been perusing this Theater of Cruelty book at random the past month or so and I'd like to rope in some things he mentions in the preface and earlier/later chapters that I think will be pertinent to our discussion of confessionalism, language dissection/repurposing, and performativity.
ReplyDeleteIf you all will indulge me, I want to quote a few passages of his that serve a purely selfish reference to my current realms of questioning. First, in the preface of the book he positions theater directly in line with language and culture (enacting culture through language) and says that fixing theater in any single language (written words, music, lights, noises) "betokens its imminent ruin," and that "the choice of any one language betray[s] a taste for the special effects of that language; and the dessication of the language accompanies its limitation" (Artaud 12). This is a helpful mode of thinking about cross-pollination and collaboration as well, which I know several of us are interested in. For me, how he proposes breaking through language with theater (which weaves together so many different modes of language) is an ideal platform for the questions I have about the power of address but also it rubs interestingly against multilingual poetry. In the past, I've used foreign language to hide certain acts of ruin or tenderness because I could only approach them in a foreign space. I'm interested to hear how you all are vibing with his ideas of using performance in enact cruelty and maybe how that corresponds with multiple languages inhabiting poems?
Artaud had a fantastic fit against flat confessional poetics on page 79, and coincidentally in line with Hejinian's rejection of closure (recycling the same vocab) - "Enough of personal poems, benefitting those who create them much more than those who read them. Once and for all, enough of this closed, egoistic, and personal art."
His central purpose of theater being the creation of temptations and channeling them ("humor with its anarchy, poetry with its symbolism and its images" p. 90) is interesting in how he directs it to the sensible effect of material language. He treats these modes of language (gesture, voice, light, sound, etc.) in a very materialistic way, saying that there is a "uniquely material side of this language" acting upon sensibility in a way that makes this staging of temptations so physical instead of metaphysical in a way that a more confessional/emotive mode would. He takes theater beyond language even further when discussing mise en scène (p.41 and 93) and language specifically intended to be performed, which is something I'm working around (how to balance a poem in two forms, relaying effect both on and off the page via formatting/stage cues/character voices) and he differentiates between theater and play. Theater creates active and anarchic language through "encountering obstacles of both production and performance" (p. 41) so then how does one create a similar effect in written form? Is that possible? Desired effect being suspension of belief, confusion of which emotion to feel when (heightened by being apart of an audience i.e. mob mentality/peer pressure carrying suppositions), surrendering to authority but then forced to interact suddenly... But those are effects I'm striving for! Not necessarily what he's prescribing his theater.
On a whole different level is his discussion of the magical liberties of dreams only possibly recreated in reality through cruelty and terror because it opens the mind to possibilities and limitations in a similar way (p. 86). How does this jive with the dreamscape in poetry then? For example, how Berryman's Dream Songs keeps resurfacing in conversation, which brings it back to confessionalism as well.
pt. 1
ReplyDeletei am preoccupied, in my re-readings of this work, by apparitions of residue, of the void, of the self-split inherent in Artaud's en-handing//escharazage of the language (and thus most poignantly of his selves and thus thus thus of our selves).
Semantics & semiotics are tangoing til their heels bleed and the blood gets all over the floor and you can't tell whose blood is whose. Maybe this isn't Artaud's primary directive, but it's certainly a side-effect of the path he's chosen (which is a-between-path cutting through vegetation with all the stems leaking out their latexy protective juices). This semantic/semiotic strain-struggle actively Resonates across & into & through the invocation of those mentioned entities (not quite artifacts as in meadowslasher, etc), and play becomes at play. Wherein, for example, at one point void = "never fulfilled organic possibility" wherein organic = not "integral life of the human body" wherein the body is the ultimate site of this semantic/semiotic problematic. The spiral is real.
pt. 2
Deletephysical residues, pillage of thought, dishrag of dead jism
our eyes are extricated from our sockets to behold (and ingurgitate through the capital eyes) the internals of corruption Artaud actively Mines Up. The absolute state of corruption (lit: cor='altogether' rumpere-'break'), the state of inhabiting-via-embodiment the verbed altogether-break, in which its opposite (the pervasive other which shapes différance and through negation its meaning) is not just present-absent, but absent-absent.
What becomes, then, of the dynamics the reader is otherwise so accustomed to sussing out? This, too, extends to this work's selfhood. The aforementioned 'entities' become cessing, bubbling sites of this activated altogether-break, and conflate into eachother; instigate and implicate each other. The différance thus dismissed, the selves become the void and become the jism and become the daughters, along with the reader.
I want to map the void, which also appears in the guise of orifice, udders, etc etc.
Delete(also tracking tongue and phallus which equal each other)
Importantly (maybe?), it's for sure (in part) an inherited void. I mentioned this in class once (as far as French lit. goes)...the void is un-freaking-avoidable up in the canon.
"[opium is] the most fearsome invention of the void which has ever impregnated human sensibilities [...] I can do nothing without this culture of the void inside me" (4-5)
"When I eat, the gluttonous void of the bottom of the throat, of the greedy orifice, summons the alimentary bolus[...]" (243)
"[human life...] by its voltaic displacements/ all the errant availabilities/ of the infinity of the void,/ of the increasingly incommensurable/ holes of void/ of a never fulfilled organic possibility" (312)
"the human body has been made to eat,/ has been made to drink,/ in order to avoid/ making it dance. // [...] in order to avoid/ grinding down/ and executing occult life." (313)
"With what will I fill nothingness?" (262)
"and to put in its place, who?/ The one whom being and nothingness/ made,/ as one gives to make peepee." (223)
"[Antonin Artaud] was really that man who, at the bottom of nothingness, was sleeping" (265)
"[SATAN] who with her slobbering udders/ has never concealed anything from us/ except Nothingness" (311)
"For if there is nothing,/there is nothing/ except this excremental idea" (311)
And I'm wondering if Artaud writes pain into the antidote for void, as in the bone-pain poem series...too facile, but throwing it into this. i don't know how much weight i should give to his Life Events. That incessant Confessional question feels like a limitation in a way; of course it's impossible to all-the-way divorce generator from generated, but that's my extremist impulse. the word confessional really pisses me off.
I’m circling around seizing as a state in between alienating and self-seeing (esp. on pg 137) … or alienating and being/bearing. This seizing magnifies toward the bardo, as resonating on pg 171 in literal nothingness.
ReplyDeleteI’m carrying with: Kim’s “foreign language to hide certain acts of ruin or tenderness” and Trish’s “apparitions of residue, of the void, of the self-split” / “a-between-path.”
Of course, in the realm of the popular, George Saunders’ “Lincoln in the Bardo” resonates. I didn’t love the book, but I loved the way its many voices could float together in “a-between-path” always moving, always hovering. The form of the novel prioritizing voice. Voice-as-movement.
Jean quoted Rilke in a writing early on in the semester: “Every angel is terrifying.” Artaud writes: “the terrifying suspension / of a breath of alienation” (pg 103). (From CocoRosie: a reduction of Artaud’s ferocity: I wonder what this would sound like without a human voice, how the sounds and silences would assemble for terror / the terrible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRQZMreM5Qs) … “And it was always drainage for angels,” … (pg 139)).
But I’d like to emphasize the following*, carrying now an echo from “Subsisters” -- "exultant foreign arrangement of folds, folds are falten, me falta [...] this word, which means miss, in the language of this island [...] en-wringed."
* “And let flatness light up in volume,
for the flat has no volume,
and it is the volume which is the flat;
the volume eats the flat,
which turns on all sides because of that.” (pg 143)
Kim closes her note on foreign language with an assertion that “I could only approach [acts of ruin or tenderness] in a foreign space.” The “could only” is crucial, just as Artaud’s summons (via “And let”) indicates an impossibility for ___ (thoughts?) without transformation / ingesting-to-embody. To be “en-wringed,” emphasis on the “en.”
All of this is part of my circling around alienating and being / bearing as a liminal state. “Volume” and “flat” could very well be “alien” and “being,” or vice versa, or ___? Within this liminal state, I’m especially drawn to the dynamism between seizing and seizure, another “between-path.”
quick correction on the song :: I mean to wonder about the absence of voice AND guitar
DeleteIn Fragmentations, the theme of life and death is mediated through the relationship between the speaker and his six daughters (which were elder women in his family imagined as daughters). In the beginning of the poem, “Out of the cunt without the mother I will make an obscure, total, obtuse and absolute soul.” “The cunt without the mother”, a body part detached and excluding the humanity, is the speaker’s instrument to create a self-contradictory soul.
ReplyDeleteOn page 73, in the section from “I saw Yvonne’s bloated sac …. rancid belches of the soul with kicks and slaps”, the soul described in bodily terms. The soul is scarred (blistered), and sexually transgressive (sodomized). When Yvonne’s swelling heart was punctured (pus from the bloated sac flowed out, and the self-abjection started), the body is not etherealized (Ophelia crawl not on the Milky Way), but subjects itself to filth, and the rancid belch of the soul (the soul repelled the self/dirt to the exterior. The grotesque body and what the body exudes are sacred and disturbing at the same time. “I saw it burst from her skull like Anie of the ‘Holy’ Throat, and I saw the intestinal crown of thorns of her blood flowing from her on nonmenstrual days.”. The phrase “the intestinal crown of thorns” compared the diseased body to Jesus’ body that endures pain in order to sacrifice for humanity, and elevates the broken and contaminated body.
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ReplyDeleteA hypothetical production for a Theater of Cruelty:
ReplyDeleteA forceful, verbatim delivered of a public address by Donald Trump calling for a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, recited in unison along with a recording of the same by a chorus of performers enclosing the audience in a tight circle à la Artaud’s schematic of the stage. All of these performers should be white and costumed in digital camouflage. At times, actors will flub a word or hesitate, shriek, and bite down on a blood capsule in their mouth or detonate one planted on their body. Stepping back from the circle, a facet of a wall (or a heavy curtain, or a blind) will drop down from the ceiling between the performer and the audience. Like this, the performers will eventually all drop out of the speech and a faceted wall will enclose the audience. At this point, the recording of the speech should loop a particular line, and with each repetition of that line, slow each repetition so that the pitch drops and the recording becomes massively distorted. Option to further amplify and warp the line past the point of recognizability by introducing abrasive feedback and noise; option to progressively dim the lights to pitch black. At the close of the performance, the wall should lift; in the place where each performer stood, a cinderblock.
Artaud drives the theater of cruelty at every turn toward dissolving the mesh of artifice that sociologically or ontologically separates theater as such from the performative experience of lived reality. A certain kind of violence, or cruelty, for Artaud, is the substrate common to both that he mobilizes as the catalyst for this process, through which the theater surpasses the representative mimicry of mannered theater and attains the force of the mass spectacle—only pushed to this extent can the theater revivify life through a mechanic of “thorough involvement”—a “total creation”. Interestingly, I see his writings in “Fragmentations” and “Artaud le Mômo” as at once complementary and ancillary to the immanent totality toward Artaud seemingly drove the production of his entire life—on one hand, how could the poems be anything but tracings and ashes of the metabolic fire? But then, through devices like incursions of glossolalic sound, repetitious deformations and agglomerations of profanities, Artaud shows us how this approach to theater might translate to an approach to “lyric”, insofar as these densities and relentlesslessnesses seem aimed a similar immanence. If shame is working through these poems, it is not as an interlocutor or an isolated affect so much as an amniotic fluid—or rather, a seminal one. Artaud le momo is obscene, excessive, and yet rigorously fixated and insistent on the depradation beyond depradation, on the immanence that is absolutely not a transcendence of origin and body.
DeleteA lot of ground covered here, so I'll try to keep this short.
ReplyDelete"Evil spirits are not mental states but beings who never wanted
to en-dure themselves" (70)
The hyphen in 'en-dure' is everything to me right now.
In one reading, these spirits refuse to be with themselves in time, and in another reading: refuse to be with themselves in persistence itself, in surviving, particularly as it relates to the body, 'in' death.
Another reading: evil spirits are not mental states, but want to speak outside of time.
Maybe this is a kind of "occult life", the kind that Artaud's poems, or even poetry itself, allows for itself, and yet one which, or so Artaud believes, we cannot prevent from being 'fornicated' by the human body.
(pg 313)
& it's true.
The human body is all the time trying to fornicate poetry.
& maybe this is how our bodies might avoid "grinding down and executing" a poem's occult life.
Like Artaud Le Momo, I think my body can also be an "oafish illiterate", and "understands that he is head and arms, legs to get the trunk moving...that there is nothing else apart from...this totem of eyelids ears, and a nose drilled by twenty fingers" [71-72]
I'm reminded here of another nasal passage from Le Momo:
"...a body, which in order to be needed to wallow in vice,
with its penis for cramming its nose."
There's something desperate about this penis cramming.
Desperate and incestuous.
The meeting between this penis-totem & nose-totem fractures the poem's body. Its sense of body.
There's also something pornographic, and possibly triggering about imagining a tear in something as tender as a nose-hole.
But this is a poetry that seems to present, and move through impossible holes.
Maybe the mechanism of this happening has to do with Ann-Maylin's "'a-between-path' always moving, always hovering." Thanks for that formulation. I'm also interested in the poem's "Voice-as-movement", through "the infinitely small...into the angle of its sempiternal strangulation" (68)
Here, poem sucks itself into death asymptotally. Hovering. Never arriving.
Like a "perforated tongue of the sex organ forever denied by the heart."
Not so difficult to imagine an organ made to be broken. To my mind:
something hymic, but already a detachable penis waves its giddy head.
Where in the occult life of a poem does this 'perforated sex organ' wallow?
Outside of time?
I'm immediately thinking of the film Johannes shared, "Seashell & the Clergymen".
In the beginning, when the clergyman is repeatedly filling and tossing his vials of black-chemical-whatever from the seashell's single dimple, these creepy lieutenant specters slip into his room and lay themselves on the ceiling arches like freaky vamp nematodes or something.
Like you, I am hurt when the specters steal the clergyman's seashell-spoon, after which he holds himself and shivers as if in withdrawal.
The little (suddenly miniature) lieutenants carry his shell, slowly twirling. The epaulets slowly twirling.
As if moving any faster would wake them from their dream, and from their tremendous oafish sabers.
Maybe this work (or is it domestic?) space becomes another kind of void the film-body endures.
(thanks for these thoughts Trish)
Maybe that loss is a kind of occult life. And maybe this fracturing between the little soldier-vamps and the clergyman mirrors another in Le Momo, wherein "the well driller who was defacated into the batismal garbage cans of holy water basins,/
[realizes] that he was me." [135]
To clarify something: I'm interested in how the narrative and spatial disruption is initiated by the miniature soldier specters, and how they might relate to the electroshock-invoked "dead people" whom the speaker in Artaud Le Momo "wouldn't have chosen to see" (177). How their interruption momentarily rescues AND haunts this man-who-breaks-the-glass-syrup-vial-endlessly-on-the-floor-like-prayer.
DeleteNote: seeing that "a-between-path" came up in Trish's comment as well as AM's. Appreciating both (& the rest).