Gmail kac attac Sontag Saturn 70 kac attac Fri, Apr 5, 2024 at 7:21 AM To: Stefan Kac The movement to disestablish the "author" has been at work for over a hundred years. From the start, the impetus was--as it still is--apocalyptic: vivid with complaint and jubilation at the convulsive decay of old social orders, borne up by that worldwide sense of living through a revolutionary moment which continues to animate most moral and intellectual excellence. The attack on the "author" persists in full vigor, though the revolution ei- ther has not taken place or, wherever it did, has quickly stifled literary modernism. Gradually becoming, in those countries not recast by a revolution, the dominant tradi tion of high literary culture instead of its subversion, modernism continues to evolve codes for preserving the new moral energies while temporizing with them. That the historical imperative which appears to discredit the very / 13 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN practice of literature has lasted so long--a span covering numerous literary generations- -does not mean that it was incorrectly understood. Nor does it mean that the malaise of the "author" has now become outmoded or inappropri- ate, as is sometimes suggested. (People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.) But the longevity of modernism does show what happens when the prophe. sied resolution of drastic social and psychological anxiety is postponed--what unsuspected capacities for ingenuity and agony, and the domestication of agony, may flourish in the interim. In the established conception under chronic challenge, literature is fashioned out of a rational--that is, socially accepted-~-language into a variety of internally consistent types of discourse (e.g., poem, play, epic, treatise, essay, novel) in the form of individual "works" that are judged by such norms as veracity, emotional power, subtlety, and relevance. But more than a century of literary modernism has made clear the contingency of once stable genres and undermined the very notion of an autonomous work. The standards used to appraise literary works now seem by no means self-evident, and a good deal less than universal. They are a particular culture's confirmations of its notions of rationality: that is, of mind and of community. Being an "author" has been unmasked as a role that, whether conformist or not, remains inescapably respon- sible to a given social order. Certainly not all pre-modern authors flattered the societies in which they lived. One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith, as Juvenal in the Satires scored the follies of the Roman aristocracy, and Richardson in Clarissa denounced the bourgeois institu- 114. Approaching Artaud tion of property-marriage. But the range of alienation available to the pre-modern authors was still limited- whether they knew it or not- to castigating the values of one class or milieu on behalf of the values of another class or milieu. The modern authors are those who, seeking to escape this limitation, have joined in the grandiose task set forth by Nietzsche a century ago as the transvaluation of all values, and redefined by Antonin Artaud in the twentieth century as the "general devaluation of values." Quixotic as this task may be, it outlines the powerful strategy by which the modern authors declare themselves to be no longer responsible- -responsible in the sense that authors who celebrate their age and authors who criticize it are equally citizens in good standing of the society in which they func- tion. The modern authors can be recognized by their effort to disestablish themselves, by their will not to be morally useful to the community, by their inclination to present themselves not as social critics but as seers, spiritual adven- turers, and social pariahs. Inevitably, disestablishing the "author" brings about a redefinition of "writing." Once writing no longer defines itself as responsible, the seemingly common-sense distinc- tion between the work and the person who produced it, between public and private utterance, becomes void. All pre-modern literature evolves from the classical conception of writing as an impersonal, self-suffcient, freestanding achievement. Modern literature projects a quite different idea: the romantic conception of writing as a medium in which a singular personality heroically exposes itself. This ultimately private reference of publie, literary discourse does not require that the reader actually know a great deal about the author. Although ample biographical informa- / 15 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN tion is available about Baudelaire and next to nothing is known about the life of Lautréamont, The Flowers of Evil and Maldoror are equally dependent as literary works upon the idea of the author as a tormented self raping its own unique subjectivity. In the view initiated by the romantic sensibility, what is produced by the artist (or the philosopher) contains as a regulating internal structure an account of the labors of subjectivity. Work derives its credentials from its place in a singular lived experience; it assumes an inexhaustible per- sonal totality of which "the work" is a by-product, and inadequately expressive of that totality. Art becomes a statement of self-awareness an awareness that presup- poses a disharmony between the self of the artist and the community. Indeed, the artist's effort is measured by the size of its rupture with the collective voice (of "'reason"). The artist is a consciousness trying to be. "I am he who, in order to be, must whip his innateness, " writes Artaud modern literature's most didactic and most uncompromis- ing hero of self-exacerbation. In principle, the project cannot succeed. Consciousness as given can never wholly constitute itself in art but must strain to transform its own boundaries and to alter the boundaries of art. Thus, any single "work" has a dual status. It is both a unique and specific and already enacted literary gesture, and a meta-literary declaration (often strident, sometimes ironic) about the insufficiency of liter- ature with respect to an ideal condition of consciousness and art. Consciousness conceived of as a project creates a standard that inevitably condemns the "work" ' to be in- complete. On the model of the heroic consciousness that aims at nothing less than total self-appropriation, literature / 16 Approaching Artaud will aim at the "total book." Measured against the idea of the total book, all writing, in practice, consists of frag. ments. The standard of beginnings, middles, and ends no longer applies. Incompleteness becomes the reigning modality of art and thought, giving rise to anti-genres work that is deliberately fragmentary or self-canceling, thought that undoes itself. But the successful overthrow of old standards does not require denying the failure of such art. As Cocteau says, "the only work which succeeds is that which fails." The career of Antonin Artaud, one of the last great exemplars of the heroic period of literary modernism, starkly sums up these revaluations. Both in his work and in his life, Artaud failed. His work includes verse; prose poems; film scripts; writings on cinema, painting, and lit- erature; essays, diatribes, and polemics on the theater; several plays, and notes for many unrealized theater projects, among them an opera; a historical novel; a four. part dramatic monologue written for radio; essays on the peyote cult of the Tarahumara Indians; radiant appear- ances in two great films (Gance's Napoleon and Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc) and many minor ones; and hundreds of letters, his most accomplished "dramatic" form- all of which amount to a broken, self-multilated corpus, a vast collection of fragments. What he bequeathed was not achieved works of art but a singular presence, a poetics, an aesthetics of thought, a theology of culture, and a phenomenology of suffering. In Artaud, the artist as seer crystallizes, for the first time, into the figure of the artist as pure victim of his conscious- ness. What is prefigured in Baudelaire's prose poetry of /17 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN spleen and Rimbaud' record of a season in hell becomes Artaud's statement of his unremitting, agonizing awareness of the inadequacy of his own consciousness to itself-the torments of a sensibility that judges itself to be irreparably estranged from thought. Thinking and using language be- come a perpetual calvary. The metaphors that Artaud uses to describe his intel- lectual distress treat the mind either as a property to which one never holds clear title (or whose title one has lost) or as a physical substance that is intransigent, fugitive, un- stable, obscenely mutable. As early as 1921, at the age of twenty-five, he states his problem as that of never managing to possess his mind "in its entirety. » Throughout the nine- teen-twenties, he laments that his ideas "abandon" him, that he is unable to "discover" his ideas, that he cannot "attain" his mind, that he has "]ost" his understanding of words and "forgotten" the forms of thought. In more di- rect metaphors, he rages against the chronic erosion of his ideas, the way his thought crumbles beneath him or leaks away; he describes his mind as fissured, deteriorating, pet- rifying, liquefying, coagulating, empty, impenetrably dense: words rot. Artaud suffers not from doubt as to whether his "I thinks but from a conviction that he does not possess his own thought. He does not say that he is unable to think; he says that he does not "have" thought- which he takes to be much more than having correct ideas or judgments. "Having thought" means that process by which thought sustains itself, manifests itself to itself, and is answerable 'to all the circumstances of feeling and of life." It is in this sense of thought, which treats thought as both subject and object of itself, that Artaud claims not to "'have" it. Artaud shows how the Hegelian, dramatistic, self- / 18 Approaching Artaud regarding consciousness can reach the state of total alien- ation (instead of detached, comprehensive wisdom) because the mind remains an object. The language that Artaud uses is profoundly contradic- tory. His imagery is materialistic (making the mind into a thing or object), but his demand on the mind amounts to the purest philosophical idealism. He refuses to consider consciousness except as a process. Yet it is the process char- acter of consciousness--its unseizability and Aux--that he experiences as hell. "The real pain," says Artaud, "is to feel one's thought shift within oneself." The cogito, whose all too evident existence seems hardly in need of proof, goes in desperate, inconsolable search of an ars cogitandi Intelligence, Artaud observes with horror, is the purest contingency. At the antipodes of what Descartes and Val- éry relate in their great optimistic epics about the quest for clear and distinct ideas, a Divine Comedy of thought, Artaud reports the unending misery and bafflement of con- sciousness seeking itself: "this intellectual tragedy in which I am always vanquished, "° the Divine Tragedy of thought. He describes himself as "in constant pursuit of my intel- lectual being.? The consequence of Artaud's verdict upon himself--his conviction of his chronic alienation from his own con- sciousness- -is that his mental deficit becomes, directly or indirectly, the dominant, inexhaustible subject of his writ- ings. Some of Artaud's accounts of his Passion of thought are almost too painful to read. He elaborates little on his emotions panic, confusion, rage, dread. His gift was not for psychological understanding (which, not being good at it, he dismissed as trivial) but for a more original mode of description, a kind of physiological phenomenology of / 19 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN his unending desolation. Artaud's claim in The Nerve Meter that no one has ever so accurately charted his "inti- mate" self is not an exaggeration. Nowhere in the entire history of writing in the first person is there as tireless and detailed a record of the microstructure of mental pain. Artaud does not simply record his psychic anguish, how. ever. It constitutes his work, for while the act of writing- to give form to intelligence- -is an agony, that agony also supplies the energy for the act of writing. Although Artaud was fiercely disappointed when the relatively shapely poems he submitted to the Nouvelle Revue Française in 1923 were rejected by its editor, Jacques Rivière, as lack- ing in coherence and harmony, Rivière's strictures proved to be liberating. From then on, Artaud denied that he was simply creating more art, adding to the storehouse of 66|it- erature." The contempt for literature- -a theme of modern- ist literature first loudly sounded by Rimbaud--has a different inflection as Artaud expresses it in the era when the Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists had made it a com- monplace. Artaud's contempt for literature has less to do with a diffuse nihilism about culture than with a specific experience of suffering. For Artaud, the extreme mental -and also physical- pain that feeds (and authenticates) the act of writing is necessarily falsified when that energy is transformed into artistry: when it attains the benign status of a finished, literary product. The verbal humiliation of literature ("All writing is garbage, 2 Artaud declares in The Nerve Meter) safeguards the dangerous, quasi- magical status of writing as a vessel worthy of bearing the author's pain. Insulting art (like insulting the audience) is an attempt to head off the corruption of art, the banaliza- tion of suffering. / 20 Approaching Artaud The link between suffering and writing is one of Artaud's leading themes: one earns the right to speak through having suffered, but the necessity of using lan. guage is itself the central occasion for suffering. He de- scribes himself as ravaged by a "stupefying confusion" of his' "language in its relations with thought." Artaud's alien- ation from language presents the dark side of modern poetry's successful verbal alienations- -of its creative use of language's purely formal possibilities and of the ambiguity of words and the artificiality of fixed meanings. Artaud's problem is not what language is in itself but the relation language has to what he calls "the intellectual apprehen- sions of the flesh. " He can barely afford the traditional com- plaint of all the great mystics that words tend to petrify living thought and to turn the immediate, organic, sensory stuff of experience into something inert, merely verbal. Artaud's fight is only secondarily with the deadness of language; it is mainly with the refractoriness of his own inner life. Employed by a consciousness that defines itself as paroxysmic, words become knives. Artaud appears to have been afflicted with an extraordinary inner life, which the intricacy and clamorous pitch of his physical sensations and the convulsive intuitions of his nervous sys. tem seemed permanently at odds with his ability to give them verbal form. This clash between facility and impo- tence, between extravagant verbal gifts and a sense of intellectual paralysis, is the psychodramatic plot of every. thing Artaud wrote; and to keep that contest dramatically valid calls for the repeated exorcising of the respectability attached to writing. Thus, Artaud does not so much free writing as place it under permanent suspicion by treating it as the mirror of 121 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN consciousness- -so that the range of what can be written is made coextensive with consciousness itself, and the truth of any statement is made to depend on the vitality and wholeness of the consciousness in which it originates. Against all hierarchical, or Platonizing, theories of mind, which make one part of consciousness superior to another part, Artaud upholds the democracy of mental claims, the right of every level, tendency, and quality of the mind to be heard: "We can do anything in the mind, we can speak in any tone of voice, even one that is unsuitable." Artaud refuses to exclude any perception as too trivial or crude. Art should be able to report from anywhere, he thinks- although not for the reasons that justify Whitmanesque openness or Joycean license. For Artaud, to bar any of the possible transactions between different levels of the mind and the flesh amounts to a dispossession of thought, a loss of vitality in the purest sense. That narrow tonal range which makes up "'the so-called literary tone". ~-]iterature In its traditionally acceptable forms--becomes worse than a fraud and an instrument of intellectual repression. It is a sentence of mental death. Artaud's notion of truth stipu- lates an exact and delicate concordance between the mind's "animal" impulses and the highest operations of the intel- lect. It is this swift, wholly unified consciousness that Artaud invokes in the obsessive accounts of his own mental insufficiency and in his dismissal of "literature. The quality of one's consciousness is Artaud's final stan- dard. He unfailingly attaches his utopianism of conscious- ness to a psychological materialism: the absolute mind is also absolutely carnal. Thus, his intellectual distress is at the same time the most acute physical distress, and each statement he makes about his consciousness is also a state- 122 Approaching Artaud ment about his body. Indeed, what causes Artaud's in- curable pain of consciousness is precisely his refusal to consider the mind apart from the situation of the flesh. Far from being disembodied, his consciousness is one whose martyrdom results from its seamless relation to the body. In his struggle against all hierarchical or merely dualistic notions of consciousness, Artaud constantly treats his mind as if it were a kind of body--a body that he could not "possess, » because it was either too virginal or too de- filed, and also a mystical body by whose disorder he was "possessed." It would be a mistake, of course, to take Artaud's state- ment of mental impotence at face value. The intellectual incapacity he describes hardly indicates the limits of his work (Artaud displays no inferiority in his powers of rea- soning) but does explain his project: minutely to retrace the heavy, tangled fibers of his body-mind. The premise of Artaud's writing is his profound difficulty in matching "being" with hyperlucidity, flesh with words. Struggling to embody live thought, Artaud composed in feverish, ir- regular blocks; writing abruptly breaks off and then starts again. Any single "work" has a mixed form; for instance, between an expository text and an oneiric description he frequently inserts a letter--a letter to an imaginary cor- respondent or a real letter that omits the name of the ad- dressee. Changing forms, he changes breath. Writing is conceived of as unleashing an unpredictable flow of sear- ing energy; knowledge must explode in the reader's nerves. The details of Artaud's stylistics follow directly from his notion of consciousness as a morass of difficulty and suffering. His determination to crack the carapace of literature" -at least, to violate the self-protective distance 123 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN between reader and text--is scarcely a new ambition in the history of literary modernism. But Artaud may have come closer than any other author to actually doing it--by the violent discontinuity of his discourse, by the extremity of his emotion, by the purity of his moral purpose, by the excruciating carnality of the account he gives of his mental life, by the genuineness and grandeur of the ordeal he en- dured in order to use language at all. The difficulties that Artaud laments persist because he is thinking about the unthinkable about how body is mind and how mind is also a body. This inexhaustible paradox is mirrored in Artaud's wish to produce art that is at the same time anti-art. The latter paradox, however, is more hypothetical than real. Ignoring Artaud's disclaimers, readers will inevitably assimilate his strategies of discourse to art whenever those strategies reach (as they often do) a certain triumphant pitch of incandescence. And three small books published between 1925 and 1920. -The Um- bilicus of Limbo, The Nerve Meter, and Art and Death- which may be read as prose poems, more splendid than anything that Artaud did formally as a poet, show him to be the greatest prose poet in the French language since the Rimbaud of riluminations and A Season in Hell. Yet it would be incorrect to separate what is most accomplished as literature from his other writings. Artaud's work denies that there is any difference be- tween art and thought, between poetry and truth. Despite the breaks in exposition and the varying of "forms" within each work, everything he wrote advances a line of argu. ment. Artaud is always didactic. He never ceased insulting, complaining, exhorting, denouncing even in the poetry /24 Approaching Artaud written after he emerged from the insane asylum in Rodez, in 1946, in which language becomes partly unintelligible; that is, an unmediated physical presence. All his writing is in the first person, and is a mode of address in the mixed voices of incantation and discursive explanation. His activ. ities are simultaneously art and reflections on art. In an early essay on painting, Artaud declares that works of art "are worth only as much as the conceptions on which they are founded, whose value is exactly what we are calling into question anew." Just as Artaud's work amounts to an ars poetica (of which his work is no more than a frag- mentary exposition), so he takes art-making to be a trope for the functioning of all consciousness- of life itself. This trope was the basis of Artaud's affiliation with the Surrealist movement, between 1924 and 1926. As Artaud understood Surrealism, it was a "revolution? applicable to "'all states of mind, to all types of human activity," its status as a tendency within the arts being secondary and merely strategic. He welcomed Surrealism- 'above all. a state of mind' -as both a critique of mind and a technique for improving the range and quality of the mind. Sensitive as he was in his own life to the repressive workings of the bourgeois idea of day-to-day reality ("We are born, we live, we die in an environment of lies, 39 he wrote in 1923). he was naturally drawn to Surrealism by its advocacy of a more subtle, imaginative, and rebellious consciousness. But he soon found the Surrealist formulas to be another kind of confinement. He got himself expelled when the majority of the Surrealist brotherhood were about to join the French Communist Party d step that Artaud de- nounced as a sellout. An actual social revolution changes nothing, he insists scornfully in the polemic he wrote / 25 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN against «the Surrealist bluff in 1927. The Surrealist ad. herence to the Third International, though it was to be only of short duration, was a plausible provocation for his quitting the movement, but his dissatisfaction went deeper than a disagreement about what kind of revolution is de. sirable and relevant. (The Surrealists were hardly more Communist than Artaud was. André Breton had not so much a politics as a set of extremely attractive moral sym- pathies, which in another period would have brought him to anarchism, and which, quite logically for his own pe- riod, led him in the nineteen-thirties to become a partisan and friend of Trotsky.) What really antagonized Artaud was a fundamental difference of temperament. It was on the basis of a misunderstanding that Artaud had fervently subscribed to the Surrealist challenge to the limits that "'reason?' sets upon consciousness, and to the Surrealists' faith in the access to a wider consciousness afforded by dreams, drugs, insolent art, and asocial be- havior. The Surrealist, he thought, was someone who "despairs of attaining his own mind." He meant himself, of course. Despair is entirely absent from the mainstream of Surrealist attitudes. The Surrealists heralded the benefits that would accrue from unlocking the gates of reason, and ignored the abominations. Artaud, as extravagantly heavy- hearted as the Surrealists were optimistic, could, at most, apprehensively concede legitimacy to the irrational. While the Surrealists proposed exquisite games with conscious- ness which no one could lose, Artaud was engaged in a mortal struggle to "restore" himself. Breton sanctioned the irrational as a useful route toward a new mental continent. For Artaud, bereft of the hope that he was traveling any. where, it was the terrain of his martyrdom. 126 Approaching Artaud By extending the frontiers of consciousness, the Sur- realists expected not only to refine the rule of reason but to enlarge the yield of physical pleasure. Artaud was incapa- ble of expecting any pleasure from the colonization of new realms of consciousness. In contrast to the Surrealists' euphoric affirmation of both physical passion and romantic love, Artaud regarded eroticism as something threatening, demonic. In Art and Death he describes 'this preoccupa- tion with sex which petrifies me and rips out my blood." Sexual organs multiply on a monstrous, Brobdingnagian scale and in menacingly hermaphrodite shapes in many of his writings; virginity is treated as a state of grace, and impotence or castration is presented--for example, in the imagery generated by the figure of Abelard in Art and Death- as more of a deliverance than a punishment. The Surrealists appeared to love life, Artaud notes haughtily. He felt "'contempt" for it. Explaining the program of the Surrealist Research Bureau in 1925, he had favorably de- scribed Surrealism as "a certain order of repulsions, 2° only to conclude the following year that these repulsions were quite shallow. As Marcel Duchamp said in a moving eulogy of his friend Breton in 1966, when Breton died, "'the great source of Surrealist inspiration is love: the exal- tation of elective love. " Surrealism is a spiritual politics of joy. Despite Artaud's passionate rejection of Surrealism, his taste was Surrealist- and remained so. His disdain for "realism? as a collection of bourgeois banalities is Sur- realist, and so are his enthusiasms for the art of the mad and the non-professional, for that which comes from the Orient, for whatever is extreme, fantastie, gothic. Artaud's contempt for the dramatic repertory of his time, for the 127 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN play devoted to exploring the psychology of individual characters -a contempt basic to the argument of the mani. festos in The Theater and Its Double, written between 1931 and 1936- starts from a position identical with the one from which Breton dismisses the novel in the first "Manifesto of Surrealism" (1924). But Artaud makes a wholly different use of the enthusiasms and the aesthetic prejudices he shares with Breton. The Surrealists are con- noisseurs of joy, freedom, pleasure. Artaud is a connoisseur of despair and moral struggle. While the Surrealists ex- plicitly refused to accord art an autonomous value, they perceived no conflict between moral longings and aesthetic ones, and in that sense Artaud is quite right in saying that their program is "aesthetic", -merely aesthetic, he means. Artaud does perceive such a conflict, and demands that art justify itself by the standards of moral seriousness. From Surrealism, Artaud derives the perspective that links his own perennial psychological crisis with what Breton calls (in the "Second Manifesto of Surrealism," of 1930) "a general crisis of consciousness". -a perspective that Artaud kept throughout his writings. But no sense of crisis in the Surrealist canon is as bleak as Artaud's. Set alongside Artaud's lacerated perceptions, both cosmic and intimately physiological, the Surrealist jeremiads seem tonic rather than alarming. (They are not in fact address- ing the same crises. Artaud undoubtedly knew more than Breton about suffering, as Breton knew more than Artaud about freedom.) A related legacy from Surrealism gave Artaud the possibility of continuing throughout his work to take it for granted that art has a "revolutionary mis- sion. But Artaud's idea of revolution diverges as far from that of the Surrealists as his devastated sensibility does from Breton's essentially wholesome one. / 28 Approaching Artaud Artaud also retained from the Surrealists the romantic imperative to close the gap between art (and thought) and life. He begins The Umbilicus of Limbo, written in 1925, by declaring himself unable to conceive of "work that is detached from life," of "detached creation." But Artaud insists, more aggressively than the Surrealists ever did, on that devaluation of the separate work of art which results from attaching art to life. Like the Surrealists, Artaud re- gards art as a function of consciousness, each work representing only a fraction of the whole of the artist's con- sciousness. But by identifying consciousness chiefly with its obscure, hidden, excruciating aspects he makes the dis- membering of the totality of consciousness into separate "'works" not merely an arbitrary procedure (which is what fascinated the Surrealists) but one that is self-defeating. Artaud's narrowing of the Surrealist view makes a work of art literally useless in itself; insofar as it is considered as a thing, it is dead. In The Nerve Meter, also from 1925, Artaud likens his works to lifeless "waste products, mere "scrapings of the soul." These dismembered bits of con- sciousness acquire value and vitality only as metaphors for works of art; that is, metaphors for consciousness. Disdaining any detached view of art, any version of that view which regards works of art as objects (to be contem- plated, to enchant the senses, to edify, to distract), Artaud assimilates all art to dramatic performance. In Artaud's poetics, art (and thought) is an action--and one that, to be authentic, must be brutal-and also an experience suf- fered, and charged with extreme emotions. Being both ac- tion and passion of this sort, iconoclastic as well as evangel- ical in its fervor, art seems to require a more daring scene, outside the museums and legitimate showplaces, and a new, ruder form of confrontation with its audience. The /29 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN rhetoric of inner movement which sustains Artaud's notion of art is impressive, but it does not change the way he actu. ally manages to reject the traditional role of the work of art as an object--by an analysis and an experience of the work of art which are an immense tautology. He sees art as an action, and therefore a passion, of the mind. The mind produces art. And the space in which art is consumed is also the mind--viewed as the organic totality of feeling, physical sensation, and the ability to attribute meaning. Artaud's poetics is a kind of ultimate, manic Hegelianism in which art is the compendium of consciousness, the re- flection by consciousness on itself, and the empty space in which consciousness takes its perilous leap of self-transcen dence. Closing the gap between art and life destroys art and, at the same time, universalizes it. In the manifesto that Ar. taud wrote for the Alfred Jarry Theater, which he founded in 1926, he welcomes "the disrepute into which all forms of art are successively falling." His delight may be a posture, but it would be inconsistent for him to regret that state of affairs. Once the leading criterion for an art becomes its merger with life (that is, everything, including other arts), the existence of separate art forms ceases to be defensible. Furthermore, Artaud assumes that one of the existing arts must soon recover from its failure of nerve and become he total art form, which will absorb all the others. Artaud's lifetime of work may be described as the sequence of his efforts to formulate and inhabit this master art, heroically following out his conviction that the art he sought could hardly be the one--involving language alone- -in which his genius was principally confined. / 30 Approaching Artaud The parameters of Artaud's work in all the arts are iden- tical with the different critical distances he maintains from the idea of an art that is language only-~-with the diverse forms of his lifelong "'revolt against poetry" (the title of a prose text he wrote in Rodez in 1944). Poetry was, chrono- logically, the first of the many arts he practiced. There are extant poems from as early as 1913, when he was seventeen and still a student in his native Marseilles; his first book, published in 1923, three years after he moved to Paris, was a collection of poems; and it was the unsuccessful submis-. sion of some new poems to the Nouvelle Revue Française that same year which gave rise to his celebrated correspon- dence with Rivière. But Artaud soon began slighting po- etry in favor of other arts. The dimensions of the poetry he was capable of writing in the twenties were too small for what Artaud intuited to be the scale of a master art. In the early poems, his breath is short; the compact lyric form he employs provides no outlet for his discursive and narrative imagination. Not until the great outburst of writing in the period between 1945 and 1948, in the last three years of his life, did Artaud, by then indifferent to the idea of poetry as a closed lyric statement, find a long-breathed voice that was adequate to the range of his imaginative needs- -a voice that was free of established forms and open-ended, like the poetry of Pound. Poetry as Artaud conceived it in the twenties had none of these possibilities or adequacies. It was small, and a total art had to be, to feel, large; it had to be a multi-voiced performance, not a singular lyrical ob- ject. All ventures inspired by the ideal of a total art form whether in music, painting, sculpture, architecture, or literature -manage in one way to another to theatricalize. 131 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN Though Artaud need not have been so literal, it makes sense that at an early age he moved into the explicitly dra. matic arts. Between 1922 and 1924, he acted in plays di. rected by Charles Dullin and the Pitoëffs and in 1924 he also began a career as a film actor. That is to say, by the mid-nineteen-twenties Artaud had two plausible candidates for the role of total art: cinema and theater. However, because it was not as an actor but as a director that he hoped to advance the candidacy of these arts, he soon had to renounce one of them cinema. Artaud was never given the means to direct a film of his own, and he saw his inten- tions betrayed in a film of 1928 that was made by another director from one of his screenplays, The Seashell and the Clergyman. His sense of defeat was reinforced in 1929 by the arrival of sound, a turning point in the history of film aesthetics which Artaud wrongly prophesied -as did most of the small number of moviegoers who had taken films seriously throughout the nineteen-twenties- -would termi- nate cinema's greatness as an art form. He continued act- ing in films until 1935, but with little hope of getting a chance to direct his own films and with no further reflec- tion upon the possibilities of cinema (which, regardless of Artaud's discouragement, remains the century's likeliest candidate for the title of master art). From late 1926 on, Artaud's search for a total art form centered upon the theater. Unlike poetry, an art made out of one material (words), theater uses a plurality of materi- als: words, light, music, bodies, furniture, clothes. Unlike cinema, an art using only a plurality of languages (images, words, music), theater is carnal, corporeal. Theater brings together the most diverse means--gesture and verbal lan- guage, static objects and movement in three-dimensional 132 Approaching Artaud space. But theater does not become a master art merely by the abundance of its means, however. The prevailing tyranny of some means over others has to be creatively subverted. As Wagner challenged the convention of al- ternating aria and recitative, which implies a hierarchical relation of speech, song, and orchestral music, Artaud de- nounced the practice of making every element of the stag. ing serve in some way the words that the actors speak to each other. Assailing as false the priorities of dialogue theater which have subordinated theater to "literature, 99 Artaud implicitly upgrades the means that characterize such other forms of dramatic performance as dance, ora- torio, circus, cabaret, church, gymnasium, hospital operat- ing room, courtroom. But annexing these resources from other arts and from quasi-theatrical forms will not make theater a total art form. A master art cannot be constructed by a series of additions; Artaud is not urging mainly that the theater add to its means. Instead, he seeks to purge the theater of what is extraneous or easy. In calling for a the- ater in which the verbally oriented actor of Europe would be retrained as an "athlete" of the heart, Artaud shows his inveterate taste for spiritual and physical effort--for art as an ordeal. Artaud's theater is a strenuous machine for transforming the mind's conceptions into entirely "'material" events, among which are the passions themselves. Against the centuries-old priority that the European theater has given to words as the means for conveying emotions and ideas, Artaud wants to show the organic basis of emotions and the physicality of ideas--in the bodies of the actors. Artaud's theater is a reaction against the state of underdevelopment in which the bodies (and the voices, apart from talking) of /33 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN Western actors have remained for generations, as have the arts of spectacle. To redress the imbalance that so favors verbal language, Artaud proposes to bring the training of actors close to the training of dancers, athletes, mimes, and singers, and "to base the theater on spectacle before every. thing else, as he says in his «Second Manifesto of the Theater of Cruelty, " published in 1933. He is not offering to replace the charms of language with spectacular sets, costumes, musie, lighting, and stage effects. Artaud's cri. terion of spectacle is sensory violence, not sensory en- chantment; beauty is a notion he never entertains. Far from considering the spectacular to be in itself desirable, Artaud would commit the stage to an extreme austerity-to the point of excluding anything that stands for something else. "Objects, accessories, sets on the stage must be appre- hended directly. .. not for what they represent but for what they are, » he writes in a manifesto of 1926. Later, in The Theater and Its Double, he suggests eliminating sets altogether. He calls for a "pure" theater, dominated by the "physics of the absolute gesture, which is itself idea." If Artaud's language sounds vaguely Platonic, it is with good reason, for, like Plato, Artaud approaches art from the moralist's point of view. He does not really like the theater--at least, the theater as it is conceived throughout the West, which he accuses of being insufficiently serious. His theater would have nothing to do with the aim of pro. viding "'pointless, artificial diversion," mere entertain- ment. The contrast at the heart of Artaud's polemics is not between a merely literary theater and a theater of strong sensations but between a hedonistic theater and a theater that is morally rigorous. What Artaud proposes is a theater that Savonarola or Cromwell might well have approved of. 134 Approaching Artaud Indeed, The Theater and Its Double may be read as an indignant attack on the theater, with an animus remi- niscent of the Letter to d'Alembert in which Rousseau, enraged by the character of Alceste in The Misanthrope by what he took to be Molière's sophisticated ridiculing of sincerity and moral purity as clumsy fanaticism- ended by arguing that it lay in the nature of theater to be morally superficial. Like Rousseau, Artaud revolted against the moral cheapness of most art. Like Plato, Artaud felt that art generally lies. Artaud will not banish artists from his Republic, but he will countenance art only insofar as it is a "true action." Art must be cognitive. "No image satisfies me unless it is at the same time knowledge," he writes. Art must have a beneficial spiritual effect on its audience- -an effect whose power depends, in Artaud's view, on a dis. avowal of all forms of mediation. It is the moralist in Artaud that makes him urge that the theater be pared down, be kept as free from mediating elements as possible--including the mediation of the writ- ten text. Plays tell lies. Even if a play doesn't tell a lie, by achieving the status of a "'masterpiece" it becomes a lie. Artaud announces in 1926 that he does not want to create a theater to present plays and so perpetuate or add to culture's list of consecrated masterpieces. He judges the heritage of written plays to be a useless obstacle and the playwright an unnecessary intermediary between the audi ence and the truth that can be presented, naked, on a stage. Here, though, Artaud's moralism takes a distinctly anti- Platonic turn: the naked truth is a truth that is wholly material. Artaud defines the theater as a place where the obscure facets of "the spirit" are revealed in "a real, ma- trial projection." 135 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN To incarnate thought, a strictly conceived theater must dispense with the mediation of an already written script, thereby ending the separation of author from actor. (This removes the most ancient objection to the actor's profes. sion-that it is a form of psychological debauchery, in which people say words that are not their own and pretend to feel emotions that are functionally insincere.) The sep- aration between actor and audience must be reduced (hut not ended), by violating the boundary between the stage area and the auditorium's fixed rows of seats. Artaud, with his hieratic sensibility, never envisages a form of theater in which the audience actively participates in the perfor- mance, but he wants to do away with the rules of theatrical decorum which permit the audience to dissociate itself from its own experience. Implicitly answering the moral- ist's charge that the theater distracts people from their authentic selfhood by leading them to concern themselves with imaginary problems, Artaud wants the theater to ad- dress itself neither to the spectators' minds nor to their senses but to their "total existence." Only the most pas- sionate of moralists would have wanted people to attend the theater as they visit the surgeon or the dentist. Though guaranteed not to be fatal (unlike the visit to the sur. geon), the operation upon the audience is "serious, 99 and the audience should not leave the theater "intact" morally or emotionally. In another medical image, Artaud com- pares the theater to the plague. To show the truth means to show archetypes rather than individual psychology; this makes the theater a place of risk, for the "archetypal real- ity ,?° is "dangerous. " Members of the audience are not sup- posed to identify themselves with what happens on the stage. For Artaud, the "true" theater is a dangerous, in. 136 Approaching Artaud timidating experience -one that excludes placid emotions, playfulness, reassuring intimacy. The value of emotional violence in art has long been a main tenet of the modernist sensibility. Before Artaud, however, cruelty was exercised mainly in a disinterested spirit, for its aesthetic efficacy. When Baudelaire placed "the shock experience" (to borrow Walter Benjamin's phrase) at the center of his verse and his prose poems, it was hardly to improve or edify his readers. But exactly this was the point of Artaud's devotion to the aesthetics of shock. Through the exclusiveness of his commitment to paroxysmic art, Artaud shows himself to be as much of a moralist about art as Plato--but a moralist whose hopes for art deny just those distinctions in which Plato's view is grounded. As Artaud opposes the separation between art and life, he opposes all theatrical forms that imply a differ- ence between reality and representation. He does not deny the existence of such a difference. But this difference can be vaulted, Artaud implies, if the spectacle is sufficiently- that is, excessively-~-violent. The "cruelty 99 of the work of art has not only a directly moral function but a cognitive one. According to Artaud's moralistic criterion for knowl- edge, an image is true insofar as it is violent. Plato's view depends on assuming the unbridgeable difference between life and art, reality and representation. In the famous imagery in Book VII of the Republic, Plato likens ignorance to living in an ingeniously lit cave, for whose inhabitants life is a spectacle--a spectacle that con- sists of only the shadows of real events. The cave is a the- ater. And truth (reality) lies outside it, in the sun. In the Platonic imagery of The Theater and Its Double, Artaud takes a more lenient view of shadows and spectacles. He / 37 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN assumes that there are true as well as false shadows (and spectacles), and that one can learn to distinguish between them. Far from identifying wisdom with an emergence from the cave to gaze at a high noon of reality, Artaud thinks that modern consciousness suffers from a lack of shadows. The remedy is to remain in the cave but devise better spectacles. The theater that Artaud proposes will serve consciousness by "'naming and directing shadows" and destroying "false shadows 99 to "prepare the way for a new generation of shadows, » around which will assemble "the true spectacle of life. 99 Not holding a hierarchical view of the mind, Artaud overrides the superficial distinction, cherished by the Sur- realists, between the rational and the irrational. Artaud does not speak for the familiar view that praises passion at the expense of reason, the flesh over the mind, the mind exalted by drugs over the prosaic mind, the life of the in- stincts over deadly cerebration. What he advocates is an alternative relation to the mind. This was the well-adver- tied attraction that non-Occidental cultures held for Artaud, but it was not what brought him to drugs. (It was to calm the migraines and other neurological pain he suf- fered from all his life, not to expand his consciousness, that Artaud used opiates, and got addicted.) For a brief time, Artaud took the Surrealist state of mind as a model for the unified, non-dualistic consciousness he sought. After rejecting Surrealism in 1926, he reproposed art- specifically, theater--as a more rigorous model. The function that Artaud gives the theater is to heal the split between language and flesh. It is the theme of his ideas for training actors: a training antithetical to the familiar one that teaches actors neither how to move nor what to do 138 Approaching Artaud with their voices apart from talk. (They can scream, growl, sing, chant.) It is also the subject of his ideal dramaturgy. Far from espousing a facile irrationalism that polarizes rea- son and feeling, Artaud imagines the theater as the place where the body would be reborn in thought and thought would be reborn in the body. He diagnoses his own disease as a split within his mind ("My conscious aggregate is broken," he writes) that internalizes the split between mind and body. Artaud's writings on the theater may be read as a psychological manual on the reunification of mind and body. Theater became his supreme metaphor for the self-correcting, spontaneous, carnal, intelligent life of the mind. Indeed, Artaud's imagery for the theater in The The- ater and Its Double, written in the nineteen-thirties, echoes images he uses in writings of the early and mid- nineteen-twenties- -such as The Nerve Meter, letters to René and Yvonne Allendy, and Fragments of a Diary from Hell-to describe his own mental pain. Artaud complains that his consciousness is without boundaries and fixed posi- tion; bereft of or in a continual struggle with language; fractured -indeed, plagued--by discontinuities; either without physical location or constantly shifting in location (and extension in time and space); sexually obsessed; in a state of violent infestation. Artaud's theater is character- ized by an absence of any fixed spatial positioning of the actors vis-à-vis each other and of the actors in relation to the audience; by a fuidity of motion and soul; by the mutilation of language and the transcendence of language in the actor's scream; by the carnality of the spectacle; by its obsessively violent tone. Artaud was, of course, not sim- ply reproducing his inner agony. Rather, he was giving a /39 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN systematized, positive version of it. Theater is a projected image (necessarily an ideal dramatization) of the danger. ouS, "inhuman" inner life that possessed him, that he struggled so heroically to transcend and to affirm. It is also a homeopathic technique for treating that mangled, pas. sionate inner life. Being a kind of emotional and moral surgery upon consciousness, it must of necessity, according to Artaud, be "'cruel."? When Hume expressly likens consciousness to a theater, the image is morally neutral and entirely ahistorical; he is not thinking of any particular kind of theater, Western or other, and would have considered irrelevant any reminder that theater evolves. For Artaud, the decisive part of the analogy is that theater--and consciousness can change. For not only does consciousness resemble a theater but, as Artaud constructs it, theater resembles consciousness, and therefore lends itself to being turned into a theater-labora- tory in which to conduct research in changing conscious- ness. Artaud's writings on the theater are transformations of his aspirations for his own mind. He wants theater (like the mind) to be released from confinement "in language and in forms. " A liberated theater liberates, he assumes. By giving vent to extreme passions and cultural nightmares, theater exorcises them. But Artaud's theater is by no means simply cathartic. At least in its intention (Artaud's practice in the nineteen-twenties and thirties is another matter), his theater has little in common with the anti-theater of play- ful, sadistic assault on the audience which was conceived by Marinetti and the Dada artists just before and after World War I. The aggressiveness that Artaud proposes is controlled and intricately orchestrated, for he assumes that / 40 Approaching Artaud sensory violence can be a form of embodied intelligence. By insisting on theater's cognitive function (drama, he writes in 1923, in an essay on Maeterlinck, is "the highest form of mental activity), he rules out randomness. (Even in his Surrealist days, he did not join in the practice of automatic writing.) Theater, he remarks occasionally, must be "scientific, 99 by which he means that it must not be random, not be merely expressive or spontaneous or per- sonal or entertaining, but must embrace a wholly serious, ultimately religious purpose. Artaud's insistence on the seriousness of the theatrical situation also marks his difference from the Surrealists, who thought of art and its therapeutic and "revolutionary mission with a good deal less than precision. The Sur. realists, whose moralizing impulses were considerably less intransigent than Artaud's, and who brought no sense of moral urgency at all to bear on art-making, were not moved to search out the limits of any single art form. They tended to be tourists, often of genius, in as many of the arts as possible, believing that the art impulse remains the same wherever it turns up. (Thus, Cocteau, who had the ideal Surrealist career, called everything he did "poetry. *) Ar. taud's greater daring and authority as an aesthetician re- sult partly from the fact that although he, too, practiced several arts, refusing, like the Surrealists, to be inhibited by the distribution of art into different media, he did not regard the various arts as equivalent forms of the same protean impulse. His own activities, however dispersed they may have been, always reflect Artaud's quest for a total art form, into which the others would merge -as art itself would merge into life. Paradoxically, it was this very denial of independence to /41 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN the different territories of art which brought Artaud to do what none of the Surrealists had even attempted: com. pletely rethink one art form. Upon that art, theater, he has had an impact so profound that the course of all recent serious theater in Western Europe and the Americas can be said to divide into two periods--before Artaud and after Artaud. No one who works in the theater now is un. touched by the impact of Artaud's specific ideas about the actor's body and voice, the use of music, the role of the written text, the interplay between the space occupied by the spectacle and the audience's space. Artaud changed the understanding of what was serious, what was worth doing. Brecht is the century's only other writer on the theater whose importance and profundity conceivably rival Ar. taud's. But Artaud did not succeed in affecting the con- science of the modern theater by himself being, as Brecht was, a great director. His influence derives no support from the evidence of his own productions. His practical work in the theater between 1926 and 1935 was apparently so unseductive that it has left virtually no trace, whereas the idea of theater on behalf of which he urged his produc- tions upon an unreceptive public has become ever more potent. From the mid-nineteen-twenties on, Artaud's work is animated by the idea of a radical change in culture. His imagery implies a medical rather than a historical view of culture: society is ailing. Like Nietzsche, Artaud conceived of himself as a physician to culture- as well as its most painfully ill patient. The theater he planned is a com- mando action against the established culture, an assault on the bourgeois public; it would both show people that they 142 Approaching Artaud are dead and wake them up from their stupor. The man who was to be devastated by repeated electric-shock treat- ments during the last three of nine consecutive years in mental hospitals proposed that theater administer to cul- ture a kind of shock therapy. Artaud, who often com- plained of feeling paralyzed, wanted theater to renew «the sense of life." Up to a point, Artaud's prescriptions resemble many programs of cultural renovation that have appeared peri- odically during the last two centuries of Western culture in the name of simplicity, élan vital, naturalness, freedom from artifice. His diagnosis that we live in an inorganic, "petrified culture". -whose lifelessness he associates with the dominance of the written word--was hardly a fresh idea when he stated it; yet, many decades later, it has not exhausted its authority. Artaud's argument in The The- ater and Its Double is closely related to that of the Nietzsche who in The Birth of Tragedy lamented the shriveling of the full-blooded archaic theater of Athens by Socratic philosophy--by the introduction of characters who reason. (Another parallel with Artaud: what made the young Nietzsche an ardent Wagnerian was Wagner's conception of opera as the Gesamtkunstwerk-the fullest statement, before Artaud, of the idea of total theater.) Just as Nietzsche harked back to the Dionysiac cere- monies that preceded the secularized, rationalized, verbal dramaturgy of Athens, Artaud found his models in non- Western religious or magical theater. Artaud does not pro- pose the Theater of Cruelty as a new idea within Western theater. It "'assumed . . . another form of civilization." He is referring not to any specific civilization, however, but to an idea of civilization that has numerous bases in history 143 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN a synthesis of elements from past societies and from non. Western and primitive societies of the present. The prefer. ence for "another form of civilization" is essentially eclec. tic. (That is to say, it is a myth generated by certain moral needs.) The inspiration for Artaud's ideas about theater came from Southeast Asia: from seeing the Cambodian theater in Marseilles in 1922 and the Balinese theater in Paris in 1931. But the stimulus could just as well have come from observing the theater of a Dahomey tribe or the shamanistic ceremonies of the Patagonian Indians. What counts is that the other culture be genuinely other; that is, non.Western and non-contemporary. At different times Artaud followed all three of the most frequently traveled imaginative routes from Western high culture to "another form of civilization. 2 First came what was known just after World War I, in the writings of Hesse, René Daumal, and the Surrealists, as the Turn to the East. Second came the interest in a suppressed part of the Western past--heterodox spiritual or outright magical traditions. Third came the discovery of the life of so-called primitive peoples. What unites the East, the ancient an- tinomian and occult traditions in the West, and the exotic communitarianism of pre-literate tribes is that they are elsewhere, not only in space but in time. All three embody the values of the past. Though the Tarahumara Indians in Mexico still exist, their survival in 1936, when Artaud vis- ited them, was already anachronistic; the values that the Tarahumara represent belong as much to the past as do those of the ancient Near Eastern mystery religions that Artaud studied while writing his historical novel Helio- gabalus, in 1933. The three versions of "another form of civilization" bear witness to the same search for a society / 44 Approaching Artaud integrated around overtly religious themes, and flight from the secular. What interests Artaud is the Orient of Buddhism (see his "Letter to the Buddhist Schools," writ- ten in 1925) and of Yoga; it would never be the Orient of Mao Tse-tung, however much Artaud talked up revolu- tion. (The Long March was taking place at the very time that Artaud was struggling to mount the productions of his Theater of Cruelty in Paris.) This nostalgia for a past often so eclectic as to be quite unlocatable historically is a facet of the modernist sensi- bility which has seemed increasingly suspect in recent decades. It is an ultimate refinement of the colonialist out- look: an imaginative exploitation of non-white cultures, whose moral life it drastically oversimplifies, whose wis- dom it plunders and parodies. To that criticism there is no convincing reply. But to the criticism that the quest for "another form of civilization" refuses to submit to the dis- illusionment of accurate historical knowledge, one can make an answer. It never sought such knowledge. The other civilizations are being used as models and are avail- able as stimulants to the imagination precisely because they are not accessible. They are both models and mys- teries. Nor can this quest be dismissed as fraudulent on the ground that it is insensitive to the political forces that cause human suffering. It consciously opposes such sensi- tivity. This nostalgia forms part of a view that is deliber- ately not political-~-however frequently it brandishes the word "revolution." One result of the aspiration to a total art which follows from denying the gap between art and life has been to encourage the notion of art as an instrument of revolution. The other result has been the identification of both art and {45 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN life with disinterested, pure playfulness. For every Vertoy or Breton, there is a Cage or a Duchamp or a Rauschen. berg. Although Artaud is close to Vertov and Breton in that he considers his activities to be part of a larger revolution, as a self-proclaimed revolutionary in the arts he actually stands between two camps--not interested in satisfying either the political or the ludic impulse. Dismayed when Breton attempted to link the Surrealist program with Marx. ism, Artaud broke with the Surrealists for what he con- sidered to be their betrayal, into the hands of politics, of an essentially "spiritual" revolution. He was anti-bourgeois almost by reflex (like nearly all artists in the modernist tradition), but the prospect of transferring power from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat never tempted him. From his avowedly "'absolute" viewpoint, a change in social structure would not change anything. The revolution to which Artaud subscribes has nothing to do with politics but is conceived explicitly as an effort to redirect culture. Not only does Artaud share the widespread (and mistaken) belief in the possibility of a cultural revolution unconnected with polit- ical change but he implies that the only genuine cultural revolution is one having nothing to do with politics. Artaud's call to cultural revolution suggests a program of heroic regression similar to that formulated by every great anti-political moralist of our time. The banner of cultural revolution is hardly a monopoly of the Marxist or Maoist left. On the contrary, it appeals particularly to apolitical thinkers and artists (like Nietzsche, Spengler, Pirandello, Marinetti, D. H. Lawrence, Pound) who more commonly become right-wing enthusiasts. On the political left, there are few advocates of cultural revolution. (Tat- lin, Gramsci, and Godard are among those who come to 1 46 Approaching Artaud mind.) A radicalism that is purely "cultural" is either il- lusory or, finally, conservative in its implications. Artaud's plans for subverting and revitalizing culture, his longing for a new type of human personality illustrate the limits of all thinking about revolution which is anti-political. Cultural revolution that refuses to be political has no- where to go but toward a theology of culture--and a soteriologv. "I aspire to another life," Artaud declares in 1927. All Artaud's work is about salvation, theater being the means of saving souls which he meditated upon most deeply. Spiritual transformation is a goal on whose behalf theater has often been enlisted in this century, at least since Isadora Duncan. In the most recent and solemn ex- ample, the Laboratory Theater of Jerzy Grotowski, the whole activity of building a company and rehearsing and putting on plays serves the spiritual reeducation of the actors; the presence of an audience is required only to wit- ness the feats of self-transcendence that the actors perform. In Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, it is the audience that will be twice-born-an untested claim, since Artaud never made his theater work (as Grotowski did throughout the nineteen- sixties in Poland). As a goal, it seems a good deal less feasible than the discipline for which Grotowski aims. Sensi- tive as Artaud is to the emotional and physical armoring of the conventionally trained actor, he never examines closely how the radical retraining he proposes will affect the actor as a human being. His thought is all for the audience. As might have been expected, the audience proved to be a disappointment. Artaud's productions in the two theaters he founded, the Alfred Jarry Theater and the Theater of Cruelty, created little involvement. Yet, although entirely dissatisfied with the quality of his public, Artaud com- 147 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN plained much more about the token support he got from the serious Paris theater establishment (he had a long, desperate correspondence with Louis Jouvet), about the difficulty of getting his projects produced at all, about the paltriness of their success when they were put on. Artaud was understandably embittered because, despite a number of titled patrons, and friends who were eminent writers, painters, editors, directors all of whom he constantly badgered for moral support and money--his work, when it was actually produced, enjoyed only a small portion of the acclaim conventionally reserved for properly sponsored, difficult events attended by the regulars of high-culture consumption. Artaud's most ambitious, fully articulated production of the Theater of Cruelty, his own The Cenci, lasted for seventeen days in the spring of 1935. But had it run for a year he would probably have been equally con- vinced that he had failed. In modern culture, powerful machinery has been set up whereby dissident work, after gaining an initial semi-offi- cial status as "avant-garde," is gradually absorbed and ren- dered acceptable. But Artaud's practical activities in the theater barely qualified for this kind of cooptation. The Cenci is not a very good play, even by the standards of convulsive dramaturgy which Artaud sponsored, and the interest of his production of The Cenci, by all accounts, lay in ideas it suggested but did not actually embody. What Artaud did on the stage as a director and as a leading actor in his productions was too idiosyncratic, narrow, and hys- terical to persuade. He has exerted influence through his ideas about the theater, a constituent part of the authority of these ideas being precisely his inability to put them into practice. / 48 Approaching Artaud Fortified by its insatiable appetite for novel commodi. ties, the educated public of great cities has become habitu- ated to the modernist agony and well skilled in outwitting it: any negative can eventually be turned into a positive. Thus Artaud, who urged that the repertory of master. pieces be thrown on the junk pile, has been extremely in- fuential as the creator of an alternative repertory, an adversary tradition of plays. Artaud's stern cry "No more masterpieces!" has been heard as the more conciliatory "No more of those masterpieces!" But this positive recasting of his attack on the traditional repertory has not taken place without help from Artaud's practice (as distinct from his rhetoric). Despite his repeated insistence that the theater should dispense with plays, his own work in the theater was far from playless. He named his first company after the author of King Ubu. Apart from his own projects--The Conquest of Mexico and The Capture of Jerusalem (un- produced) and The Cenci-there were a number of then unfashionable or obscure masterpieces that Artaud wanted to revive. He did get to stage the two great "dream plays" by Calderón and Strindberg (Life Is a Dream and A Dream Play), and over the years he hoped also to direct productions of Euripides (The Bacchae), Seneca (Thyes- tes), Arden of Feversham, Shakespeare (Macbeth, Richard I, Titus Andronieus), Tourneur (The Revenger's Trag. edy), Webster (The White Devil, The Duchess of Malf), Sade (an adaptation of Eugénie de Franval), Büchner (Woyzeck), and Hölderlin (The Death of Empedocles). 'This selection of plays delineates a now familiar sensibility. Along with the Dadaists, Artaud formulated the taste that was eventually to become standard serious taste Of- Broadway, Of-Of-Broadway, in university theaters. In 149 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN terms of the past, it meant dethroning Sophocles and Corneille and Racine in favor of Euripides and the dark Elizabethans; the only dead French writer on Artaud's list is Sade. In the last fifteen years, that taste has been repre. sented in the Happenings and the Theater of the Ridicu. lous; the plays of Genet, Jean Vauthier, Arrabal, Carmelo Bene, and Sam Shepard; and such celebrated productions as the Living Theater's Frankenstein, Eduardo Manet's The Nuns (directed by Roger Blin), Michael McClure's The Beard, Robert Wilson's Deafman Glance, and Heath. cote Williams's ac/de. Whatever Artaud did to subvert the theater, and to segregate his own work from other, merely aesthetic currents in the interests of establishing its spiritual hegemony, could still be assimilated as a new theatrical tradition, and mostly has been. If Artaud's project does not actually transcend art, it presupposes a goal that art can sustain only temporarily. Each use of art in a secular society for the purposes of spiritual transformation, insofar as it is made public, is in- evitably robbed of its true adversary power. Stated in di- rectly, or even indirectly, religious language, the project is notably vulnerable. But atheist projects for spiritual trans- formation, such as the political art of Brecht, have proved to be equally cooptable. Only a few situations in modern secular society seem sufficiently extreme and uncommuni- cative to have a chance of evading cooptation. Madness is one. Suffering that surpasses the imaginable (like the Holo. caust) is another. A third is, of course, silence. One way to stop this inexorable process of ingestion is to break off communication (even anti-communication). An exhaus- tion of the impulse to use art as a medium of spiritual transformation is almost inevitable- -as in the temptation felt by every modern author when confronted with the in- 150 ENDER PRE STEN ON SATURN perms of the past, it meant dethroning Sophocles and Cameille and Racine in favor of Euripides and the dark Elisaberhans3 the only dead French writer on Artaud', lint is Sade In the last fireen years, that taste has been reppe. sented in the Happenings and the Theater of the Ridien lous; the plays of Genet, Jean Vauthier, Arrabal, Carmelo Bene, and Sam Shepard; and such celebrated productions as the Living Theater's Framenstein, Eduardo Maner'. The Nans (directed by Roger Blin), Michael MeClure') The Beard, Robert Wilson's Deafman Glonce, and Heath. cote Williams's ac/de. Whatever Artaud did to subvert the theater, and to segregate his own work from other, merely aesthetic currents in the interests of establishing its spiritual hegemony, could still be assimilated as a new theatrical tradition, and mostly has been. If Artaud's project does not actually transcend art, it presupposes a goal that art can sustain only temporarily, Each use of art in a secular society for the purposes of spiritual transformation, insofar as it is made publie, is in- evitably robbed of its true adversary power, Stated in di- rectly, or even indirectly, religious language, the project is notably vulnerable. But atheist projects for spiritual trans- formation, such as the political art of Brecht, have proved to be equally cooptable. Only a few situations in modern secular society seem sufficiently extreme and uncommuni. cative to have a chance of evading cooptation. Madness is one. Suffering that surpasses the imaginable (like the Holo- caust) is another. A third is, of course, silence. One way to stop this inexorable process of ingestion is to break off communication (even anti-communication). An exhaua. tion of the impulse to use art as a medium of apiritual transformation is almost inevitable--as in the temptation felt by every modern author when confronted with the in. /50 Approaching Artaud difference or mediocrity of the public, on the one hand, or the ease of success, on the other, to stop writing altogether. Thus, it was not just for lack of money or support within the profession that, after putting on The Cenci, in 1935, Artaud abandoned the theater. The project of creating in a secular culture an institution that can manifest a dark, hidden reality is a contradiction in terms. Artaud was never able to found his Bayreuth- -though he would have liked to-for his ideas are the kind that cannot be institu- tionalized. The year after the failure of The Cenci, Artaud em- barked on a trip to Mexico to witness that demonic reality in a still existing "primitive" culture. Unsuccessful at em- bodying this reality in a spectacle to impose on others, he became a spectator of it himself. From 1935 onward, Ar- taud lost touch with the promise of an ideal art form. His writings, always didactic, now took on a prophetic tone and referred frequently to esoteric magical systems, like the Cabala and tarot. Apparently, Artaud came to believe that he could exercise directly, in his own person, the emotional power (and achieve the spiritual efficacy) he had wanted for the theater. In the middle of 1937, he traveled to the Aran Islands, with an obscure plan for exploring or con- firming his magic powers. The wall between art and life was still down. But instead of everything being assimilated into art, the movement swung the other way; and Artaud moved without mediation into his life -a dangerous, careering object, the vessel of a raging hunger for total transformation which could never find its appropriate nourishment. Nietzsche coolly assumed an atheist theology of the spirit, a negative theology, a mysticism without God. Ar. 151 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN taud wandered in the labyrinth of a specific type of reli. pious sensibility, the Gnostic one. (Central to Mithraism, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, and Tantric Buddhism, but pushed to the heretical margins of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the perennial Gnostic thematics appear in the different religions in different terminologies but with cer. tin common lines.) The leading energies of Gnosticism come from metaphysical anxiety and acute psychological distress- the sense of being abandoned, of being an alien, of being possessed by demonic powers which prey on the human spirit in a cosmos vacated by the divine. The cos- mos is itself a battlefield, and each human life exhibits the conflict between the repressive, persecuting forces from without and the feverish, afflicted individual spirit seeking redemption. The demonic forces of the cosmos exist as physical matter. They also exist as "law," taboos, prohibi- tions. Thus, in the Gnostic metaphors the spirit is aban- doned, fallen, trapped in a body, and the individual is repressed, trapped by being in "the world". -what we would call "society." (It is a mark of all Gnostic thinking to polarize inner space, the psyche, and a vague outer space, "the world" or "society, 99 which is identified with repression--making little or no acknowledgment of the importance of the mediating levels of the various social spheres and institutions.) The self, or spirit, discovers it- self in the break with "the world." The only freedom pos- sible is an inhuman, desperate freedom. To be saved, the spirit must be taken out of its body, out of its personality, out of "the world.» And freedom requires an arduous preparation. Whoever seeks it must both accept extreme humiliation and exhibit the greatest spiritual pride. In one version, freedom entails total asceticism. In another ver. 152 Approaching Artaud sion, it entails libertinism--practicing the art of transgres. sion. To be free of "the world," one must break the moral (or social) law. To transcend the body, one must pass through a period of physical debauchery and verbal blas- phemy, on the principle that only when morality has been deliberately flouted is the individual capable of a radical transformation: entering into a state of grace that leaves all moral categories behind. In both versions of the exemplary Gnostic drama, someone who is saved is beyond good and evil. Founded on an exacerbation of dualisms (body-mind, matter-spirit, evil-good, dark-light), Gnosticism promises the abolition of all dualisms. Artaud's thought reproduces most of the Gnostic themes. For example, his attack on Surrealism in the po- lemic written in 1927 is couched in a language of cosmic drama, in which he refers to the necessity of a "displace- ment of the spiritual center of the world" and to the origin of all matter in "a spiritual deviation." Throughout his writings, Artaud speaks of being persecuted, invaded, and defiled by alien powers; his work focuses on the vicissitudes of the spirit as it constantly discovers its lack of liberty in its very condition of being "matter." Artaud is obsessed with physical matter. From The Nerve Meter and Art and Death, written in the nineteen-twenties, to Here Lies and the radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God, written in 1947-48, Artaud's prose and poetry depict a world clogged with matter (shit, blood, sperm), a defiled world. The demonic powers that rule the world are in- carnated in matter, and matter is "dark." Essential to the theater that Artaud conceives--a theater devoted to myth and magic- is his belief that all the great myths are "dark" and that all magie is black magic. Even when life is en- / 53 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN crusted by petrified, degenerate, merely verbal language, Artaud insists, the reality lies just underneath- Or some- where else. Art can tap these powers, for they seethe in every psyche. It was in search of these dark powers that Artaud went to Mexico in 1936 to witness the Tarahumara peyote rites. The individual's salvation requires making contact with the malevolent powers, submitting to them, and suffering at their hands in order to triumph over them. What Artaud admires in the Balinese theater, he writes in 1931, is that it has nothing to do with "'entertainment" but, rather, has "something of the ceremonial quality of a religious rite." Artaud is one of many directors in this cen- tury who have sought to re-create theater as ritual, to give theatrical performances the solemnity of religious transac- tions, but usually one finds only the vaguest, most promis- cuous idea of religion and rite, which imputes to a Catholic mass and a Hopi rain dance the same artistic value. Ar- taud's vision, while perhaps not any more feasible in mod- ern secular society than the others, is at least more specific as to the kind of rite involved. The theater Artaud wants to create enacts a secularized Gnostic rite. It is not an expia- tion. It is not a sacrifice, or, if it is, the sacrifices are all metaphors. It is a rite of transformation--the communal performance of a violent act of spiritual alchemy. Artaud summons the theater to renounce "'psychological man, with his well-dissected character and feelings, and social man, submissive to laws and misshapen by religions and 99 precepts, and to address itself only "to total man" -a thoroughly Gnostic notion. Whatever Artaud's wishes for "culture," his thinking ul- timately shuts out all but the private self. Like the Gnos- tics, he is a radical individualist. From his earliest writings, 154 Approaching Artaud his concern is with a metamorphosis of the inner" state of the soul. (The self is, by definition, an "inner self.") Mundane relations, he assumes, do not touch the kernel of the individual; the search for redemption undercuts all so. cial solutions. The one instrument of redemption of a possibly social character which Artaud considers is art. The reason he is not interested in a humanistic theater, a theater about in- dividuals, is that he believes that such a theater can never effect any radical transformation. To be spiritually liberat- ing, Artaud thinks, theater has to express impulses that are larger than life. But this only shows that Artaud's idea of freedom is itself a Gnostic one. Theater serves an tin- human" individuality, an "'inhuman" freedom, as Artaud calls it in The Theater and Its Double--the very opposite of the liberal, sociable idea of freedom. (That Artaud found Breton's thinking shallow--that is, optimistic, aesthetic- -follows from the fact that Breton did not have a Gnostic style or sensibility. Breton was attracted by the hope of reconciling the demands of individual free- dom with the need to expand and balance the personality through generous, corporate emotions; the anarchist view, formulated in this century with the greatest subtlety and authority by Breton and Paul Goodman, is a form of con- servative, humanistic thinking- -doggedly sensitive to everything repressive and mean while remaining loyal to the limits that protect human growth and pleasure. The mark of Gnostie thinking is that it is enraged by all limits, even those that save.) "All true freedom is dark," Artaud says in The Theater and Its Double, "and is infallibly identified with sexual freedom, which is also dark, al- though we do not know precisely why." 155 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN Both the obstacle to and the locus of freedom, for Artaud lie in the body. His attitude covers the familiar Gnos. tie thematic range: the affirmation of the body, the revul. sion from the body, the wish to transcend the body, the quest for the redeemed body. "Nothing touches me, noth. ing interests me, » he writes, "'except what addresses itself directly to my flesh." But the body is always a problem. Artaud never defines the body in terms of its capacity for sensuous pleasure but always in terms of its electric capac- ity for intelligence and for pain. As Artaud laments, in Art and Death, that his mind is ignorant of his body, that he lacks ideas that conform to his "condition as a physical an. imal,»? so he complains that his body is ignorant of his mind. In Artaud's imagery of distress, body and spirit pre- vent each other from being intelligent. He speaks of the "'intellectual cries" that come from his flesh; source of the only knowledge he trusts. Body has a mind. "There is a mind in the flesh," he writes, "a mind quick as lightning. 99 It is what Artaud expects intellectually from the body that leads to his recoil from the body. the ignorant body. Indeed, each attitude implies the other. Many of the poems express a profound revulsion from the body, and accumu- late loathsome evocations of sex. "'A true man has no sex," Artaud writes in a text published in December 1947. He ignores this hideousness, this stupefying sin." Art and Death is perhaps the most sex-obsessed of all his works, but Artaud demonized sexuality in everything he wrote. The most common presence is a monstrous, obscene body "this unusable body made out of meat and crazy sperm, 93 he calls it in Here Lies. Against this fallen body, defiled by matter, he sets the fantasied attainment of a pure body- divested of organs and vertiginous lusts. Even while insist- 156 Approaching Artaud ing that he is nothing but his body, Artaud expresses a fervent longing to transcend it altogether, to abandon his sexuality. In other imagery, the body must be made intel- ligent, respiritualized. Recoiling from the defiled body, he appeals to the redeemed body in which thought and flesh will be unified: "It is through the skin that metaphysics will be made to renter our minds"; only the flesh can supply "a definitive understanding of Life." The Gnostic task of the theater that Artaud imagines is nothing less than to create this redeemed body--a mythic project that he explains by referring to that last great Gnostic system atics, Renaissance alchemy. As the alchemists, obsessed with the problem of matter in classically Gnostic terms, sought methods of changing one kind of matter into an- other (higher, spiritualized) kind of matter, so Artaud sought to create an alchemical arena that operates on the flesh as much as on the spirit. Theater is the exercise of a "terrible and dangerous act, 3 he says in "Theater and Sci- ence"- -"THE REAL ORGANIC AND PHYSICAL TRANSFORMA- TION OF THE HUMAN BODY.? Artaud's principal metaphors are classically Gnostic. Body is mind turned into "matter. As the body weighs down and deforms the soul, so does language, for language is thought turned into "'matter. » The problem of language, as Artaud poses it to himself, is identical with the problem of matter. The disgust for the body and the revulsion against words are two forms of the same feeling. In the equivalences established by Artaud's imagery, sexuality is the corrupt, fallen activity of the body, and literature" is the corrupt, fallen activity of words. Although Artaud never entirely stopped hoping to use activities in the arts as a means of spiritual liberation, art was always suspect 157 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN like the body. And Artaud's hope for art is also Gnostie, like his hope for the body. The vision of a total art has the same form as the vision of the redemption of the body. ("The body is the body/it is alone/it has no need of organs, » Artaud writes in one of his last poems.) Art will be redemptive when, like the redeemed body, it transcends itself- when it has no organs (genres), no different parts, In the redeemed art that Artaud imagines, there are no separate works of art--only a total art environment, which is magical, paroxysmic, purgative, and, finally, opaque. Gnosticism, a sensibility organized around the idea of knowing (gnosis) rather than around faith, sharply dis- tinguishes between exoteric and esoteric knowledge. The adept must pass through various levels of instruction to be worthy of being initiated into the true doctrine. Knowl. edge, which is identified with the capacity for self-trans. formation, is reserved for the few. It is natural that Artaud, with his Gnostic sensibility, should have been attracted to numerous secret doctrines, as both an alternative to and a model for art. During the nineteen-thirties, Artaud, an amateur polymath of great energy, read more and more about esoteric systems--alchemy, tarot, the Cabala, astrol- ogy, Rosicrucianism. What these doctrines have in common is that they are all relatively late, decadent transfor- mations of the Gnostic thematics. From Renaissance alchemy Artaud drew a model for his theater: like the symbols of alchemy, theater describes "philosophical states of matter? ' and attempts to transform them. Tarot, to give another example, supplied the basis of The New Revela- tons of Being, written in 1937, just before his seven-week trip to Ireland; it was the last work he wrote before the mental breakdown that resulted in his confinement when 158 Approaching Artaud he was returned to France. But none of these already formulated, schematic, historically fossilized secret doc- trines could contain the convulsions of the living Gnostic imagination in Artaud's head. Only the exhausting is truly interesting. Artaud's basic ideas are crudè; what gives them their power is the intri- cacy and eloquence of his self-analysis, unequaled in the history of the Gnostic imagination. And, for the first time, the Gnostic themes can be seen in evolution. Artaud's work is particularly precious as the first complete docu- mentation of someone living through the trajectory of Gnostic thought. The result, of course, is a terrible smash. The last refuge (historically, psychologically) of Gnos tic thought is in the constructions of schizophrenia. With Artaud's return from Ireland to France began nine years of imprisonment in mental hospitals. Evidence, mainly from letters he wrote to his two principal psychiatrists at Rodez, Dr. Gaston Ferdière and Dr. Jacques Latrémolière, shows how literally his thought followed the Gnostic formulas. In the ecstatic fantasies of this period, the world is a mael- strom of magical substances and forces; his consciousness becomes a theater of screaming struggle between angels and demons, virgins and whores. His horror of the body now unmodulated, Artaud explicitly identifies salvation with virginity, sin with sex. As Artaud's elaborate religious speculations during the Rodez period may be read as metaphors for paranoia, so paranoia may be read as a metaphor for an exacerbated religious sensibility of the Gnostic type. The literature of the crazy in this century is a rich religious literature--perhaps the last original zone of genuine Gnostic speculation. When Artaud was let out of the asylum, in 1946, he still 159 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN considered himself the victim of a conspiracy of demonic powers, the object of an extravagant act of persecution by "society." Although the wave of schizophrenia had receded to the point of no longer swamping him, his basic meta. phors were still intact. In the two years of life that remained to him, Artaud forced them to their logical conclusion. In 1944, still in Rodez, Artaud had recapitulated his Gnostic complaint against language in a short text, "Revolt Against Poetry." Returning to Paris in 1946, he longed to work again in the theater, to recover the vocabulary of gesture and spectacle; but in the short time left to him he had to resign himself to speaking with language only. Ar- taud's writings of this last period-_virtually unclassifiable as to genre: there are "letters" that are "'poems" that are "'essays" that are "dramatic monologues 39 give the im- pression of a man attempting to step out of his own skin. Passages of clear, if hectic, argument alternate with pas- sages in which words are treated primarily as material (sound) : they have a magical value. (Attention to the sound and shape of words, as distinct from their meaning, is an element of the Cabalistic teaching of the Zohar, which Artaud had studied in the nineteen-thirties.) Artaud's commitment to the magical value of words explains his refusal of metaphor as the principal mode of conveying meaning in his late poems. He demands that language di- rectly express the physical human being. The person of the poet appears in a state beyond nakedness: flayed. As Artaud reaches toward the unspeakable, his imagina- tion coarsens. Yet his last works, in their mounting obses- sion with the body and their ever more explicit loathing of sex, still stand in a direct line with the early writings, in which there is, parallel to the mentalization of the body, a 160 Approaching Artaud corresponding sexualization of consciousness. What Ar. taud wrote between 1946 and 1948 only extends metaphors he used throughout the nineteen-twenties- of mind as a body that never allows itself to be "'possessed, 99 and of the body as a kind of demonic, writhing, brilliant mind. In Artaud's fierce battle to transcend the body, everything is eventually turned into the body. In his fierce battle to transcend language, everything is eventually turned into language. Artaud, describing the life of the Tarahumara Indians, translates nature itself into a language. In the last writings, the obscene identity of the flesh and the word reaches an extremity of loathing- -notably in the play commissioned by French radio, To Have Done with the Judgment of God, which was then banned on the eve of its projected broadcast in February 1948. (Artaud was still revising it a month later, when he died.) Talking, talking, talking, Artaud expresses the most ardent revulsion against talk- and the body. The Gnostic passage through the stages of transcendence implies a move from the conventionally intelligible to what is conventionally unintelligible. Gnostic thinking characteristically reaches for an ecstatic speech that dis- penses with distinguishable words. (It was the adoption by the Christian church in Corinth of a Gnostic form of preaching "speaking in tongues". -that provoked Paul's remonstrations in the First Epistle to the Corinthians.) The language Artaud used at the end of his life, in passages in Artaud le Momo, Here Lies, and To Have Done with the Judgment of God, verges on an incandescent declama- tory speech beyond sense. "All true language is incompre- hensible, ," Artaud says in Here Lies. He is not seeking a universal language, as Joyce did. Joyce's view of language 161 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN was historical, ironic, whereas Artaud's view is medical tragic. The unintelligible in Finnegans Wake not only is decipherable, with effort, but is meant to be deciphered The unintelligible parts of Artaud's late writings are sup. posed to remain obscure--to be directly apprehended as sound. The Gnostic project is a search for wisdom, but a wis. dom that cancels itself out in unintelligibility, loquacity, and silence. As Artaud's life suggests, all schemes for end. ing dualism, for a unified consciousness at the Gnostic level of intensity, are eventually bound to fail-that is, their practitioners collapse into what society calls madness or into silence or suicide. (Another example: the vision of a totally unified consciousness expressed in the gnomic messages Nietzsche sent to friends in the weeks before his complete mental collapse in Turin in 1889.) The project transcends the limits of the mind. Thus, while Artaud still desperately reaffirms his effort to unify his flesh and his mind, the terms of his thinking imply the annihilation of consciousness. In the writings of this last period, the cries from his fractured consciousness and his martyred body reach a pitch of inhuman intensity and rage. Artaud offers the greatest quantity of suffering in the history of literature. So drastic and pitiable are the nu- merous descriptions he gives of his pain that readers, overwhelmed, may be tempted to distance themselves by re. membering that Artaud was crazy. In whatever sense he ended up being mad, Artaud had been mad all his life. He had a history of internment in mental hospitals from mid-adolescence on--well before he arrived in Paris from Marseilles, in 1920, at the age of 162 Approaching Artaud twenty-four, to begin his career in the arts; his lifelong addiction to opiates, which may have aggravated his mental disorder, had probably begun before this date. Lacking the saving knowledge that allows most people to be conscious with relatively little pain- the knowledge of what Rivière calls "the blessed opacity of experience" and "the inno- cence of facts" -Artaud at no time in his life wholly got out from under the lash of madness. But simply to judge Artaud mad--reinstating the reductive psychiatric wisdom -means to reject Artaud's argument. Psychiatry draws a clear line between art (a "normal'* psychological phenomenon, manifesting objective aesthetic limits) and symptomatology: the very boundary that Ar. taud contests. Writing to Rivière in 1923, Artaud insists on raising the question of the autonomy of his art- of whether, despite his avowed mental deterioration, despite that' 'fundamental flaw" in his own psyche which sets him apart from other people, his poems do nevertheless exist as poems, not just as psychological documents. Rivière replies by expressing confidence that Artaud, despite his mental distress, will one day become a good poet. Artaud answers impatiently, changing his ground: he wants to close the gap between life and art implicit in his original question and in Rivière's well-intentioned but obtuse encourage- ment. He decides to defend his poems as they are--for the merit they possess just because they don't quite make it as art. The task of the reader of Artaud is not to react with the distance of Rivière- -as if madness and sanity could com- municate with each other only on sanity's own ground, in the language of reason. The values of sanity are not eternal or "'natural." any more than there is a self-evident, 163 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN common-sense meaning to the condition of being insane. The perception that some people are crazy is part of the history of thought, and madness requires a historical def- mition. Madness means not making sense- -means saying what doesn't have to be taken seriously. But this depends entirely on how a given culture defines sense and serious. ness; the definitions have varied widely through history. What is called insane denotes that which in the determina. tion of a particular society must not be thought. Madness is a concept that fixes limits; the frontiers of madness define what is "other. "° A mad person is someone whose voice so- ciety doesn't want to listen to, whose behavior is intoler. able, who ought to be suppressed. Different societies use different definitions of what constitutes madness (that is, of what does not make sense). But no definition is less provincial than any other. Part of the outrage over the cur. rent practice in the Soviet Union of locking up political dissenters in insane asylums is misplaced, in that it holds not only that doing so is wicked (which is true) but that doing so is a fraudulent use of the concept of mental ill- ness; it is assumed that there is a universal, correct, scientific standard of sanity (the one enforced in the mental- health policies of, say, the United States, England, and Sweden, rather than the one enforced in those of a country like Morocco). This is simply not true. In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary-are, in the largest sense, political. Artaud was extremely sensitive to the repressive func. tion of the concept of madness. He saw the insane as the heroes and martyrs of thought, stranded at the vantage point of extreme social (rather than merely psychological) alienation, volunteering for madness-as those who, 64 Approaching Artaud through a superior conception of honor, prefer to go mad rather than forfeit a certain lucidity, an extreme passion- ateness in presenting their convictions. In a letter to Jac- queline Breton from the hospital in Ville-Evrard in April 1939, after a year and a half of what was to be nine years of confinement, he wrote, "I am a fanatic, I am not a mad man. » But any fanaticism that is not a group fanaticism is precisely what society understands as madness. Madness is the logical conclusion of the commitment to individuality when that commitment is pushed far enough. As Artaud puts it in the "Letter to the Medical Directors of Lunatic Asylums" in 1925, "all individual acts are anti- social." It is an unpalatable truth, perhaps quite irrecon- cilable with the humanist ideology of capitalist democracy or of social democracy or of liberal socialism--but Artaud is right. Whenever behavior becomes sufficiently individ- ual, it will become objectively anti-social and will seem, to other people, mad. All human societies agree on this point. They differ only on how the standard of madness is ap- plied, and on who are protected or partly exempted (for reasons of economic, social, sexual, or cultural privilege) from the penalty of imprisonment meted out to those whose basic anti-social act consists in not making sense. The insane person has a dual identity in Artaud's works: the ultimate victim, and the bearer of a subversive wisdom. In his preface, written in 1946, to the proposed Gallimard collected edition of his writings, he describes himself as one of the mentally underprivileged, grouping lunatics with aphasiacs and illiterates. Elsewhere in the writings of his last two years, he repeatedly situates himself in the com- pany of the mentally hyper-endowed who have gone mad -Hölderlin, Nerval, Nietzsche, and van Gogh. Insofar as 165 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN the genius is simply an extension, and intensification, of the individual, Artaud suggests the existence of a natural affinity between genius and madness in a far more precise sense than the romantics did. But while denouncing the society that imprisons the mad, and affirming madness as the outward sign of a profound spiritual exile, he never suggests that there is anything liberating in losing one's mind. Some of his writings, particularly the early Surrealist texts, take a more positive attitude toward madness. In "General Security; The Liquidation of Opium," for in- stance, he seems to be defending the practice of a deliber- ate derangement of the mind and senses (as Rimbaud once defined the poet's vocation). But he never stops saying. -in the letters to Rivière, to Dr. Allendy, and to George Soulié de Morant in the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties, in the letters written between 1943 and 1945 from Rodez, and in the essay on van Gogh written in 1947, some months after his release from Rodez- -that madness is confining, destroying. Mad people may know the truth--so much truth that society takes its revenge on these unhappy seers by outlawing them. But being mad is also unending pain, a state to be transcended--and it is that pain which Artaud renders, imposing it on his readers. To read Artaud through is nothing less than an ordeal. Understandably, readers seek to protect themselves with reductions and applications of his work. It demands a spe- cial stamina, a special sensitivity, and a special tact to read Artaud properly. It is not a question of giving one's assent to Artaud--this would be shallow--or even of neutrally "'understanding" him and his relevance. What is there to assent to? How could anyone assent to Artaud's ideas un. / 66 Approaching Artaud less one was already in the demonic state of siege that he was in? Those ideas were emitted under the intolerable pressure of his own situation. Not only is Artaud's position not tenable; it is not a "'position" at all. Artaud's thought is organically part of his singular, haunted, impotent, savagely intelligent consciousness. Ar- taud is one of the great, daring mapmakers of conscious- ness in extremis. To read him properly does not require believing that the only truth that art can supply is one that is singular and is authenticated by extreme suffering. Of art that describes other states of consciousness- -less idio- syncratic, less exalted, perhaps no less profound--it is cor- rect to ask that it yield general truths. But the exceptional cases at the limit of "writing" -Sade is one, Artaud is another--demand a different approach. What Artaud has left behind is work that cancels itself, thought that outbids thought, recommendations that cannot be enacted. Where does that leave the reader? Still with a body of work, even though the character of Artaud's writings forbids their being treated simply as "literature. » Still with a body of thought, even though Artaud's thought forbids assent--as his aggressively self-immolating personality forbids identi- fication. Artaud shocks, and, unlike the Surrealists, he re- mains shocking. (Far from being subversive, the spirit of the Surrealists is ultimately constructive and falls well within the humanist tradition, and their stagy violations of bourgeois proprieties were not dangerous, truly asocial acts. Compare the behavior of Artaud, who really was im- possible socially.) To detach his thought as a portable in- tellectual commodity is just what that thought explicitly prohibits. It is an event, rather than an object. Forbidden assent or identification or appropriation or / 67 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN imitation, the reader can only fall back on the category of inspiration. "'INSPIRATION CERTAINLY EXISTS, as Artaud affirms in capital letters in The Nerve Meter. One can be inspired by Artaud. One can be scorched, changed by Ar. taud. But there is no way of applying Artaud. Even in the domain of the theater, where Artaud's pres. ence can be decanted into a program and a theory, the work of those directors who have most benefited from his ideas shows there is no way to use Artaud that stays true to him. Not even Artaud himself found the way; by all ac. counts, his own stage productions were far from being up to the level of his ideas. And for the many people not con- nected with the theater--mainly the anarchist-minded, for whom Artaud has been especially important--the experi- ence of his work remains profoundly private. Artaud is someone who has made a spiritual trip for us-a shaman. It would be presumptuous to reduce the geography of Ar- taud's trip to what can be colonized. Its authority lies in the parts that yield nothing for the reader except intense discomfort of the imagination. Artaud's work becomes usable according to our needs, but the work vanishes behind our use of it. When we tire of using Artaud, we can return to his writings. "'Inspira- tion in stages," he says. "One mustn't let in too much liter- ature." All art that expresses a radical discontent and aims at shattering complacencies of feeling risks being disarmed, neutralized, drained of its power to disturb--by being ad- mired, by being (or seeming to be) too well understood. by becoming relevant. Most of the once exotic themes of Artaud's work have within the last decade become loudly topical: the wisdom (or lack of it) to be found in drugs, 1 68 Approaching Artaud Oriental religions, magic, the life of North American Indi- ans, body language, the insanity trip; the revolt against literature, 99 and the belligerent prestige of non-verbal arts; the appreciation of schizophrenia; the use of art as violence against the audience; the necessity for obscenity. Artaud in the nineteen-twenties had just about every taste (except enthusiasms for comic books, science fiction, and Marxism) that was to become prominent in the American counterculture of the nineteen-sixties, and what he was reading in that decade the Tibetan Book of the Dead, books on mysticism, psychiatry, anthropology, tarot, as- trology, Yoga, acupuncture is like a prophetic anthology of the literature that has recently surfaced as popular read- ing among the advanced young. But the current relevance of Artaud may be as misleading as the obseurity in which his work lay until now. Unknown outside a small circle of admirers ten years ago, Artaud is a classic today. He is an example of a willed classic- an author whom the culture attempts to assimilate but who remains profoundly indigestible. One use of liter- ary respectability in our time- and an important part of the complex career of literary modernism-is to make ac- ceptable an outrageous, essentially forbidding author, who becomes a classic on the basis of the many interesting things to be said about the work that scarcely convey (per- haps even conceal) the real nature of the work itself, which may be, among other things, extremely boring or morally monstrous or terribly painful to read. Certain authors be- come literary or intellectual classics because they are not read, being in some intrinsic way unreadable. Sade, Ar- taud, and Wilhelm Reich belong in this company: authors who were jailed or locked up in insane asylums because /69 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN they were screaming, because they were out of control; immoderate, obsessed, strident authors who repeat them. selves endlessly, who are rewarding to quote and read bits of, but who overpower and exhaust if read in large quanti. ties. Like Sade and Reich, Artaud is relevant and under. standable, a cultural monument, as long as one mainly refers to his ideas without reading much of his work. For anyone who reads Artaud through, he remains fiercely out of reach, an unassimilable voice and presence. (1973) 170 Conversation opened. 1 read message. Skip to content Using Gmail with screen readers sontag saturn 4 of 10 Sontag Saturn 122 kac attac Fri, Apr 5, 8:57 PM to Stefan UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN 1927), The Fate of the House of Habsburg (Das Schicksal derer von Habsburg, 1929), The White Hell of Pitz Palü (Die weisse Hölle von Piz Palü, 1929) -all silents- followed by Avalanche (Stürme über dem Montblanc, 1930), White Frenzy (Der weisse Rausch, 1931), and S.O.S. Iceberg (S.O.S. Eisberg, 1932-1933). All but one were directed by Arnold Fanck, auteur of hugely success- ful Alpine epics since 1919, who made only two more films, both flops, after Riefenstahl left him to strike out on her own as a director in 1932. (The film not directed by Fanck is The Fate of the House of Habsburg, a royalist weepie made in Austria in which Riefenstahl played Marie Vet- sera, Crown Prince Rudolf's companion at Mayerling. No print seems to have survived.) Fanck's pop-Wagnerian vehicles for Riefenstahl were not just "tensely romantic." No doubt thought of as apolitical when they were made, these films now seem in retrospect, as Siegfried Kracauer has pointed out, to be an anthology of proto-Nazi sentiments. Mountain climbing in Fanck's films was a visually irresistible metaphor for unlim- ited aspiration toward the high mystic goal, both beautiful and terrifying, which was later to become concrete in Führer-worship. The character that Riefenstahl generally played was that of a wild girl who dares to scale the peak that others, the "valley pigs, 3' shrink from. In her first role, in the silent The Holy Mountain (1926), that of a young dancer named Diotima, she is wooed by an ardent climber who converts her to the healthy ecstasies of Alpinism. This character underwent a steady aggrandizement. In her first sound film, Avalanche (1930), Riefenstahl is a mountain- possessed girl in love with a young meteorologist, whom she rescues when a storm strands him in his observatory on Mont Blanc. 176 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN Nuba society are wrestling matches and funerals: vivid encounters of beautiful male bodies and death. The Nuba, as Riefenstahl interprets them, are a tribe of aesthetes. Like the henna-daubed Masai and the so-called Mudmen of New Guinea, the Nuba paint themselves for all impor. tant social and religious occasions, smearing on a white- gray ash which unmistakably suggests death. Riefenstahl claims to have arrived "just in time," for in the few years since these photographs were taken the glorious Nuba have been corrupted by money, jobs, clothes. (And, probably, by war--which Riefenstahl never mentions, since what she cares about is myth not history. The civil war that has been tearing up that part of the Sudan for a dozen years must have scattered new technology and a lot of detritus.) Although the Nuba are black, not Aryan, Riefenstahl's portrait of them evokes some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental, the joyful and the critical. A principal accusation against the Jews within Nazi Germany was that they were urban, intellectual, bearers of a destructive corrupting "'critical spirit." The book bonfire of May 1933 was launched with Goebbels's cry: "The age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the Ger- man revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit." And when Goebbels officially forbade art criticism in November 1936, it was for having "typically Jewish traits of character": putting the head over the heart, the individual over the community, intellect over feeling. In the transformed thematics of latter-day fascism, the Jews no longer play the role of defiler. It is "civiliza- tion" itself. 188 Fascinating Fascism What is distinctive about the fascist version of the old idea of the Noble Savage is its contempt for all that is re- flective, critical, and pluralistic. In Riefenstahl's casebook of primitive virtue, it is hardly--as in Lévi-Strauss-the intricacy and subtlety of primitive myth, social organiza- tion, or thinking that is being extolled. Riefenstahl strongly recalls fascist rhetoric when she celebrates the ways the Nuba are exalted and unified by the physical or- deals of their wrestling matches, in which the "heaving and straining" Nuba men, "huge muscles bulging, " throw one another to the ground- -fighting not for material prizes but "for the renewal of the sacred vitality of the tribe." Wrestling and the rituals that go with it, in Riefenstahl's account, bind the Nuba together. Wrestling is the expression of all that distinguishes the Nuba way of life. ... Wrestling generates the most pas- sionate loyalty and emotional participation in the team's supporters, who are, in fact, the entire " non- playing? population of the village. . . . Its impor- tance as the expression of the total outlook of the Mesakin and Korongo cannot be exaggerated; it is the expression in the visible and social world of the invisible world of the mind and of the spirit. In celebrating a society where the exhibition of physical skill and courage and the victory of the stronger man over the weaker are, as she sees it, the unifying symbols of the communal culture- -where success in fighting is the "'main aspiration of a man's life". -Riefenstahl seems hardly to have modified the ideas of her Nazi films. And her portrait of the Nuba goes further than her films in evoking one as- 89 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN polity. The masses are made to take form, be design. Hence mass athletic demonstrations, a choreographed display of bodies, are a valued activity in all totalitarian countries; and the art of the gymnast, so popular now in Eastern Eu. rope, also evokes recurrent features of fascist aesthetics; the holding in or confining of force; military precision. In both fascist and communist politics, the will is staged publicly, in the drama of the leader and the chorus. What is interesting about the relation between politics and art under National Socialism is not that art was subordinated to political needs, for this is true of dictatorships both of the right and of the left, but that politics appropriated the rhetoric of art--art in its late romantic phase. (Politics is "the highest and most comprehensive art there is, 2° Goeb- • bels said in 1933, "and we who shape modern German pol- icy feel ourselves to be artists . . . the task of art and the artist [being] to form, to give shape, to remove the dis- eased and create freedom for the healthy.") What is in- teresting about art under National Socialism are those features which make it a special variant of totalitarian art. The official art of countries like the Soviet Union and China aims to expound and reinforce a utopian morality. Fascist art displays a utopian aesthetics- -that of physical perfection. Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoni- ously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy. Rietenstahl's promo- tion of the beautiful and the healthy, it must be said, is much more sophisticated than this; and never witless, as it is in other Nazi visual art. She appreciates a range of bodily 192 Fascinating Fascism types--in matters of beauty she is not racist--and in Olympia she does show some effort and strain, with its at- tendant imperfections, as well as stylized, seemingly et- tortless exertions (such as diving, in the most admired sequence of the film). In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art, Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a "spiritual" force, for the benefit of the community. The erotic (that is, women) is always present as a temptation, with the most admirable response being a heroic repression of the sexual impulse. Thus Riefenstahl explains why Nuba marriages, in contrast to their splendid funerals, involve no cere- monies or feasts. A Nuba man's greatest desire is not union with a woman but to be a good wrestler, thereby affirming the principle of abstemiousness. The Nuba dance ceremonies are not sensual occasions but rather "festivals of chastity". of containment of the life force. Fascist aesthetics is based on the containment of vital forces; movements are confined, held tight, held in. Nazi art is reactionary, defiantly outside the century' mainstream of achievement in the arts. But just for this reason it has been gaining a place in contemporary taste. The left-wing organizers of a current exhibition of Nazi painting and sculpture (the first since the war) in Frank- 93 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN furt have found, to their dismay, the attendance excessively large and hardly as serious-minded as they had hoped. Even when faked by didactic admonitions from Brecht and by concentration-camp photographs, what Nazi art reminds these crowds of is- -other art of the 1930s, notably Art Deco. (Art Nouveau could never be a fascist style; it is, rather, the prototype of that art which fascism defines as decadent; the fascist style at its best is Art Deco, with its sharp lines and blunt massing of material, its petrified eroticism.) The same aesthetic responsible for the bronze colossi of Arno Breker- -Hitler's (and, briefly, Cocteau's) favorite sculptor-_and of Josef Thorak also produced the muscle-bound Atlas in front of Manhattan's Rockefeller Center and the faintly lewd monument to the fallen doughboys of World War I in Philadelphia's Thirtieth Street railroad station. To an unsophisticated public in Germany, the appeal of Nazi art may have been that it was simple, figurative, emotional; not intellectual; a relief from the demanding complexities of modernist art. To a more sophisticated public, the appeal is partly to that avidity which is now bent on retrieving all the styles of the past, especially the most pilloried. But a revival of Nazi art, following the revivals of Art Nouveau, Pre-Raphaelite painting, and Art Deco, is most unlikely. The painting and sculpture are not just sententious; they are astonishingly meager as art. But precisely these qualities invite people to look at Nazi art with knowing and sniggering detachment, as a form of Pop Art. Riefenstahl's work is free of the amateurism and naiveté one finds in other art produced in the Nazi era, but it still promotes many of the same values. And the same very 194 Fascinating Fascism modern sensibility can appreciate her as well. The ironies of pop sophistication make for a way of looking at Riefenstahl's work in which not only its formal beauty but its political fervor are viewed as a form of aesthetic excess. And alongside this detached appreciation of Riefenstahl is a response, whether conscious or unconscious, to the subject itself, which gives her work its power. Triumph of the Will and Olympia are undoubtedly superb films (they may be the two greatest documentaries ever made), but they are not really important in the history of cinema as an art form. Nobody making films today alludes to Riefenstahl, while many filmmakers (including myself) regard Dziga Vertov as an inexhaustible provoca- tion and source of ideas about film language. Yet it is arguable that Vertov-the most important figure in docu- mentary films--never made a film as purely effective and thrilling as Triumph of the Will or Olympia. (Of course, Vertov never had the means at his disposal that Riefen- stahl had. The Soviet government's budget for propaganda films in the 1920s and early 1930s was less than lavish.) In dealing with propagandistic art on the left and on the right, a double standard prevails. Few people would admit that the manipulation of emotion in Vertov's later films and in Riefenstahl's provides similar kinds of exhilaration. When explaining why they are moved, most people are sentimental in the case of Vertov and dishonest in the case of Riefenstahl. Thus Vertov's work evokes a good deal of moral sympathy on the part of his cinéphile audiences all over the world; people consent to be moved. With Riefen- stahl's work, the trick is to filter out the noxious political ideology of her films, leaving only their aesthetic" merits. Praise of Vertov's films always presupposes the knowledge 195 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN that he was an attractive person and an intelligent and original artist-thinker, eventually crushed by the dictator. ship which he served. And most of the contemporary audience for Vertov (as for Eisenstein and Pudovkin) assumes that the film propagandists in the early years of the Soviet Union were illustrating a noble ideal, however much it was betrayed in practice. But praise of Riefenstahl has no such recourse, since nobody, not even her rehabilitators, has managed to make Riefenstahl seem even likable; and she is no thinker at all. More important, it is generally thought that National Socialism stands only for brutishness and terror. But this is not true. National Socialism--more broadly, fascism-also stands for an ideal or rather ideals that are persistent today under the other banners: the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudia- tion of the intellect; the family of man (under the parent- hood of leaders). These ideals are vivid and moving to many people, and it is dishonest as well as tautological to say that one is affected by Triumph of the Will and Olympia only because they were made by a filmmaker of genius. Riefenstahl's films are still effective because, among other reasons, their longings are still felt, because their content is a romantic ideal to which many continue to be attached and which is expressed in such diverse modes of cultural dis- sidence and propaganda for new forms of community as the youth/rock culture, primal therapy, anti-psychiatry, Third World camp-following, and belief in the occult. The exaltation of community does not preclude the search for absolute leadership; on the contrary, it may inevitably lead to it. (Not surprisingly, a fair number of the young people 196 Fascinating Fascism now prostrating themselves before gurus and submitting to the most grotesquely autocratic discipline are former anti authoritarians and anti-elitists of the 1960s.) Riefenstahl's current deNazification and vindication as indomitable priestess of the beautiful--as a filmmaker and, now, as a photographer--do not augur well for the keen- ness of current abilities to detect the fascist longings in our midst. Riefenstahl is hardly the usual sort of aesthete or anthropological romantic. The force of her work being precisely in the continuity of its political and aesthetic ideas, what is interesting is that this was once seen so much more clearly than it seems to be now, when people claim to be drawn to Riefenstahl's images for their beauty of com- position. Without a historical perspective, such connois- seurship prepares the way for a curiously absentminded acceptance of propaganda for all sorts of destructive feel- ings- -feelings whose implications people are refusing to take seriously. Somewhere, of course, everyone knows that more than beauty is at stake in art like Riefenstahl's. And so people hedge their bets--admiring this kind of art, for its undoubted beauty, and patronizing it, for its sanctimo- nious promotion of the beautiful. Backing up the solemn choosy formalist appreciations lies a larger reserve of ap- preciation, the sensibility of camp, which is unfettered by the scruples of high seriousness: and the modern sensibility relies on continuing trade-offs between the formalist ap- proach and camp taste. Art which evokes the themes of fascist aesthetic is popu- lar now, and for most people it is probably no more than a variant of camp. Fascism may be merely fashionable, and perhaps fashion with its irrepressible promiscuity of taste will save us. But the judgments of taste themselves seem / 97 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN less innocent. Art that seemed eminently worth defending ten years ago, as a minority or adversary taste, no longer seems defensible today, because the ethical and cultural is. sues it raises have become serious, even dangerous, in a way they were not then. The hard truth is that what may be ac- ceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocuous ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed. II Second Exhibit. Here is a book to be purchased at airport magazine stands and in "adult" bookstores, a rela- tively cheap paperback, not an expensive coffee-table item appealing to art lovers and the bien-pensant like The Last of the Nuba. Yet both books share a certain community of moral origin, a root preoccupation: the same preoccupa- tion at different stages of evolution--the ideas that animate The Last of the Nuba being less out of the moral closet than the cruder, more efficient idea that lies behind SS Regalia. Though SS Regalia is a respectable British-made compilation (with a three-page historical preface and notes in the back), one knows that its appeal is not scholarly but sexual. The cover already makes that clear. Across the large black swastika of an SS armband is a diagonal yellow stripe which reads "Over 100 Brilliant Four-Color Photo. graphs Only $2.95," exactly as a sticker with the price on it used to be affixed--part tease, part deference to censorship on the cover of pornographic magazines, over the model's genitalia. 198 Under the Sign of Saturn He thought of himself as a melancholic, disdaining modern psychological labels and invoking the traditional astrologi. cal one: "I came into the world under the sign of Saturn- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays...." His major projects, the book published in 1928 on the German baroque drama (the Trauerspiel; literally, sorrow-play) and his never completed Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, cannot be fully understood unless one grasps how much they rely on a theory of melancholy. Benjamin projected himself, his temperament, into all his major subjects, and his temperament determined what he chose to write about. It was what he saw in subjects, such as the seventeenth-century baroque plays (which dramatize different facets of "Saturnine acedia") and the writers about whose work he wrote most brilliantly- -Baudelaire, Proust, Kafka, Karl Kraus. He even found the Saturnine element in Goethe. For, despite the polemic in his great (still untranslated) essay on Goethe's Elective Afinities against interpreting a writer's work by his life, he did make selective use of the life in his deepest meditations on texts: information that disclosed the melancholic, the solitary. (Thus, he describes Proust's "loneliness which pulls the world down into its vortex"; explains how Kafka, like Klee, was "'essentially solitary ,": cites Robert Walser's "horror of success in life.") One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But one can use the work to interpret the life. Two short books of reminiscences of his Berlin child- hood and student years, written in the early 1930s and unpublished in his lifetime, contain Benjamin's most ex- plicit self-portrait. To the nascent melancholic, in school and on walks with his mother, "solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man." Benjamin does not mean solitude /111 Under the Sign of Saturn serious man could also flatter people he probably did not think his equals, that he could let himself be "baited" (his own word) and condescended to by Brecht on his visits to Denmark. This prince of the intellectual life could also be a courtier. Benjamin analyzed both roles in The Origin of German Trauerspiel by the theory of melancholy. One characteris- tic of the Saturnine temperament is slowness: "The tyrant falls on account of the sluggishness of his emotions. 99 6 An- other trait of the predominance of Saturn, says Benjamin, is faithlessness. This is represented by the character of the courtier in baroque drama, whose mind is "Auctuation itself." The manipulativeness of the courtier is partly a "]ack of character"; partly it "reflects an inconsolable, despondent surrender to an impenetrable conjunction of baleful constellations [that] seem to have taken on a mas- sive, almost thing-like cast." Only someone identifying with this sense of historical catastrophe, this degree of despondency, would have explained why the courtier is not to be despised. His faithlessness to his fellow men, Ben- jamin says, corresponds to the "deeper, more contempla- tive faith" he keeps with material emblems. What Benjamin describes could be understood as simple pathology: the tendency of the melancholic temperament to project its. inner torpor outward, as the immutability of misfortune, which is experienced as "'massive, almost thing- like." But his argument is more daring: he perceives that the deep transactions between the melancholic and the world always take place with things (rather than with peo- ple); and that these are genuine transactions, which reveal meaning. Precisely because the melancholy character is haunted by death, it is melancholics who best know how to / 119 L,4i UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN read the world. Or, rather, it is the world which yields itself to the melancholie's scrutiny, as it does to no one else's. The more lifeless things are, the more potent and ingenious can be the mind which contemplates them. If this melancholy temperament is faithless to people, it has good reason to be faithful to things. Fidelity lies in accumulating things- -which appear, mostly, in the form of fragments or ruins. ("'It is common practice in baroque literature to pile up fragments incessantly, Benjamin writes.) Both the baroque and Surrealism, sensibilities with which Benjamin felt a strong affinity, see reality as things. Benjamin describes the baroque as a world of things (em- blems, ruins) and spatialized ideas ("Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things The genius of Surrealism was to generalize with ebullient candor the baroque cult of ruins; to perceive that the nihilistic energies of the modern era make everything a ruin or fragment-and therefore collectible. A world whose past has become (by definition) obsolete, and whose present churns out instant antiques, invites custodians, de- coders, and collectors. As one kind of collector himself, Benjamin remained faithful to things- -as things. According to Scholem, build- ing his library, which included many first editions and rare books, was "his most enduring personal passion." Inert in the face of thing-like disaster, the melancholy temperament is galvanized by the passions aroused by privileged objects. Benjamin's books were not only for use, professional tools; they were contemplative objects, stimuli for reverie. His library evokes "'memories of the cities in which I found so many things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris . . . memories of the rooms where / 120 Under the Sign of Saturn these books had been housed. ." Bookhunting, like the sexual hunt, adds to the geography of pleasure another reason for strolling about in the world. In collecting, Ben- jamin experienced what in himself was clever, successful, shrewd, unabashedly passionate. "Collectors are people with a tactical instinct" -like courtiers. Apart from first editions and baroque emblem books, Benjamin specialized in children's books and books writ- ten by the mad. "The great works which meant so much to him; "' reports Scholem, "were placed in bizarre patterns next to the most out-of-the-way writings and oddities." The odd arrangement of the library is like the strategy of Benjamin's work, in which a Surrealist-inspired eye for the reasures of meaning in the ephemeral, discredited, and neglected worked in tandem with his loyalty to the tradi- tional canon of learned taste. He liked finding things where nobody was looking. He drew from the obscure, disdained German baroque drama elements of the modern (that is to say, his own) sensibil. ity: the taste for allegory, Surrealist shock effects, discon- tinuous utterance, the sense of historical catastrophe. "These stones were the bread of my imagination, he wrote about Marseilles-the most recalcitrant of cities to that imagination, even when helped by a dose of hashish. Many expected references are absent in Benjamin's work -he didn't like to read what everybody was reading. He preferred the doctrine of the four temperaments as a psy- chological theory to Freud. He preferred being a com- munist, or trying to be one, without reading Marx. This man who read virtually everything, and had spent fifteen years sympathizing with revolutionary communism, had barely looked into Marx until the late 1930s. (He was / 121 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN reading The Eighteenth Brumaire on his visit to Brecht in Denmark in the summer of 1938.) His sense of strategy was one of his points of identifica. tion with Kafka, a kindred would-be tactician, who "'took precautions against the interpretation of his writing. The whole point of the Kafka stories, Benjamin argues, is that they have no definite, symbolic meaning. And he was fag. cinated by the very different, un-Jewish sense of ruse practiced by Brecht, the anti-Kafka of his imagination. (Predictably, Brecht disliked Benjamin's great essay on Kafka intensely.) Brecht, with the little wooden donkey near his desk from whose neck hung the sign "I, too, must understand it," represented for Benjamin, an admirer of esoteric religious texts, the possibly more potent ruse of re- ducing complexity, of making everything clear. Benjamin's "masochistic" (the word is Siegfried Kracauer's) relation to Brecht, which most of his friends deplored, shows the extent to which he was fascinated by this possibility. Benjamin's propensity is to go against the usual inter- pretation. "All the decisive blows are struck left-handed." as he says in One-Way Street. Precisely because he saw that "all human knowledge takes the form of interpretation," he understood the importance of being against interpreta- tion wherever it is obvious. His most common strategy is to drain symbolism out of some things, like the Kafka stories or Goethe's Elective Affinities (texts where everybody agrees it is there), and pour it into others, where nobody suspects its existence (such as the German baroque plays, which he reads as allegories of historical pessimism). "Each book is a tactic, "° he wrote. In a letter to a friend, he claimed for his writings, only partly facetiously, forty-nine levels of meaning. For moderns as much as for cabalists, /122 sontag saturn Conversation opened. 1 read message. Skip to content Using Gmail with screen readers sontag saturn 2 of 10 Sontag Saturn 196 kac attac Mon, Apr 8, 9:33 PM (13 days ago) to Stefan UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN from Germany is not only daunting because of the ex. tremity of its achievement, but discomfiting, like an un. wanted baby in the era of zero population growth. The modernism that reckoned achievement by the Romantics grandiose aims for art (as wisdom/ as salvation/ as cultural subversion or revolution) has been overtaken by an im. pudent version of itself which has enabled modernist tastes to be diffused on an undreamed-of scale. Stripped of its heroie stature, of its claims as an adversary sensibility, modernism has proved acutely compatible with the ethos of an advanced consumer society. Art is now the name of a huge variety of satisfactions of the unlimited prolifera. tion, and devaluation, of satisfaction itself. Where so many blandishments flourish, bringing off a masterpiece seems a retrograde feat, a naïve form of accomplishment. Always implausible (as implausible as justified megalomania), the Great Work is now truly odd. It proposes satisfactions that are immense, solemn, and restricting. It insists that art must be true, not just interesting; a necessity, not just an experiment. It dwarfs other work, challenges the facile eclecticism of contemporary taste. It throws the admirer into a state of crisis. Syberberg assumes importance both for his art (the art of the twentieth century: film) and for his subject (the subject of the twentieth century: Hitler). The assump- tions are familiar, crude, plausible. But they hardly pre- pare us for the scale and virtuosity with which he conjures up the ultimate subjects: hell, paradise lost, the apoca- lypse, the last days of mankind. Leavening romantic grandi. osity with modernist ironies, Syberberg offers a spectacle about spectacle: evoking "the big show " called history in a 1138 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN the two ruminating voices which suffuse Syberberg's film constantly express pain, grief, dismay. Rather than devise a spectacle in the past tense, either hy attempting to simulate "unrepeatable reality" (Syber. berg's phrase) or by showing it in photographic document, he proposes a spectacle in the present tense -"adventures in the head." Of course, for such a devoutly anti-realist aesthetician historical reality is, by definition, unrepeat- able. Reality can only be grasped indirectly- seen reflected in a mirror, staged in the theater of the mind. Syberberg's synoptic drama is radically subjective, without being solip- sistic. It is a ghostly film--haunted by his great cinematic models (Méliès, Eisenstein) and anti-models (Riefenstahl, Hollywood); by German Romanticism; and, above all, by the music of Wagner and the case of Wagner. A post- humous film, in the era of cinema's unprecedented me- diocrity- -full of cinéphile myths, about cinema as the ideal space of the imagination and cinema history as an exemplary history of the twentieth century (the mar- tyrdom of Eisenstein by Stalin, the excommunication of von Stroheim by Hollywood); and of cinéphile hyper- boles: he designates Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will as Hitler's "only lasting monument, apart from the newsreels of his war." One of the film's conceits is that Hitler, who never visited the front and watched the war every night through newsreels, was a kind of moviemaker. Germany, a Film by Hitler. Syberberg has cast his film as a phantasmagoria: the meditative-sensuous form favored by Wagner which dis- tends time and results in works that the unpassionate find overlong. Its length is suitably exhaustive- seven hours; /140 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN Art and Crisis, Hans Sedlmayr, with whom he studied art history at the University of Munich in the fifties.) The film is a work of mourning for the modern and what precedes it. and opposes it. If Hitler is also a "utopian," as Syberberg calls him, then Syberberg is condemned to be a post- utopian, a utopian who acknowledges that utopian feelings have been hopelessly defiled. Syberberg does not believe in a "new human being" -that perennial theme of cultural revolution on both the left and the right. For all his attrac. tion to the credo of romantic genius, what he really believes in is Goethe and a thorough Gymnasium education. Of course, one can find the usual contradictions in Syber- berg's film-the poetry of utopia, the futility of utopia; rationalism and magic. And that only confirms what kind of film Hitler, a Film from Germany really is. Science fic- tion is precisely the genre which dramatizes the mix of nos. talgia for utopia with dystopian fantasies and dread; the dual conviction that the world is ending and that it is on the verge of a new beginning. Syberberg's film about his- tory is also a moral and cultural science fiction. Starship Goethe-Haus. Syberberg manages to perpetuate in a melancholy, at- tenuated form something of Wagner's notions of art as therapy, as redemption, and as catharsis. He calls cinema "the most beautiful compensation" for the ravages of modern history, a kind of "redemption" to "'our senses op- pressed by progress." That art does in sorts redeem re- ality, by being better than reality--that is the ultimate Symbolist belief. Syberberg makes of cinema the last, most inclusive, most ghostly paradise. It is a view that reminds one of Godard. Syberberg's cinéphilia is another part of the immense pathos of his film; perhaps its only involun. /162 Remembering Barthes personal; the last article he published was about keeping a journal. All his work is an immensely complex enterprise of self-description. Nothing escaped the attention of this devout, ingenious student of himself: the food, colors, odors he fancied; how he read. Studious readers, he once observed in a lecture in Paris, fall into two groups: those who underline their books and those who don't. He said that he belonged to the second group: he never made a mark in the book about which he planned to write but transcribed key excerpts onto cards. I have forgotten the theory he then confected about this preference, so I shall improvise my own. I con- nect his aversion to marking up books with the fact that he drew, and that this drawing, which he pursued seriously, was a kind of writing. The visual art that attracted him came from language, was indeed a variant of writing; he wrote essays on Erté's alphabet formed with human figures, on the calligraphic painting of Réquichot, of Twombly. His preference recalls that dead metaphor, a "body? of work- one does not usually write on a body one loves. His temperamental dislike for the moralistic became more overt in recent years. After several decades' worth of dutiful adherence to right-minded (that is, left-wing) stands, the aesthete came out of the closet in 1974 when with some close friends and literary allies, Maoists of the moment, he went to China; in the scant three pages he Wrote on his return, he said that he had been unimpressed by the moralizing and bored by the asexuality and the cul. tural uniformity. Barthes's work, along with that of Wilde and Valéry, gives being an aesthete a good name. Much of his recent writing is a celebration of the intelligence of the senses, and of the texts of sensation. Defending the 1173 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN senses, he never betrayed the mind. Barthes did not enter. tain any Romantic clichés about the opposition between sensual and mental alertness. The work is about sadness overcome or denied. He had decided that everything could be treated as a system-a discourse, a set of classifications. Since everything was a system, everything could be overcome. But eventually he wearied of systems. His mind was too nimble, too ambi. tious, too drawn to risk. He seemed more anxious and vul- nerable in recent years, as he became more productive than ever. He had always, as he observed about himself, "worked successively under the aegis of a great system (Marx, Sartre, Brecht, semiology, the Text). Today it seems to him that he writes more openly, more unprotect- edly. ..." He purged himself of the masters and master- ideas from which he drew sustenance ("In order to speak one must seek support from other texts," he explained), only to stand in the shadow of himself. He became his own Great Writer. He was in assiduous attendance at the ses- sions of a seven-day conference devoted to his work in 1977 commenting, mildly interjecting, enjoying himself. He published a review of his speculative book on himself (Barthes on Barthes on Barthes). He became the shep- herd of the flock of himself. Vague torments, a feeling of insecurity, were ac- knowledged-with the consoling implication that he was on the edge of & great adventure. When he was in New York a year and a half ago he avowed in public, with al- most tremulous bravery, his intention to write a novel. Not the novel one might expect from the critic who made Robbe-Grillet seem for a while a central figure in con- temporary letters; from the writer whose most wonderful /174 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN Canetti recalls a time when, never without scruples, he "even invented elaborate excuses and rationales for hav. ing books." The more immature the avidity, the more rad. ical the fantasies of throwing off the burden of books and learning. Auto-da-Fé, which ends with the bookman im- molating himself with his books, is the earliest and crudest of these fantasies. Canetti's later writings project more wist- ful, prudent fantasies of disburdenment. A note from 1951: "His dream: to know everything he knows and yet not know it.? Published in 1935 to praise from Broch, Thomas Mann, and others, Auto-da-Fé was Canetti's first book (if one does not count a play he wrote in 1932) and only novel, the product of an enduring taste for hyperbole and a fascina- tion with the grotesque that became in later works more static, considerably less apocalyptic. Earwitness (1974) is like an abstract distillation of the novel-cycle about luna- tics Canetti conceived when he was in his twenties. This short book consists of rapid sketches of fifty forms of mono- mania, of "characters' " such as the Corpse-Skulker, the Fun Runner, the Narrow-Smeller, the Misspeaker, the Woe Ad- ministrator; fifty characters and no plot. The ungainly names suggest an inordinate degree of self-consciousness about literary invention--for Canetti is a writer who end- lessly questions, from the vantage of the moralist, the very possibility of making art. "If one knows a lot of people, 99 he had noted years earlier, "it seems almost blasphemous to invent more.?? A year after the publication of Auto-da-Fé, in his hom- age to Broch, Canetti cites Broch's stern formula: "Litera- ture is always an impatience on the part of knowledge." 1188 Mind as Passion those which he developed to oppose her, also generously counted as her gifts: obstinacy, intellectual independence, rapidity of thought. He also speculates that the liveliness of Ladino, which he'd spoken as a child, helped him to think fast. (For the precocious, thinking is a kind of speed.) Canetti gives a complex account of that extraordinary pro- cess which learning is for an intellectually precocious child -fuller and more instructive than the accounts in, say, Mill's Autobiography or Sartre's The Words. For Canetti's capacities as an admirer reflect tireless skills as a learner; the first cannot be deep without the second. As an exceptional learner, Canetti has an irrepressible loyalty to teachers, to what they do well even (or especially when) they do it in- advertently. The teacher at his boarding school to whom he now "bows" won his fealty by being brutal during a class visit to a slaughterhouse. Forced by him to confront a par- ticularly gruesome sight, Canetti learned that the murder of animals was something "I wasn't meant to get over." His mother, even when she was brutal, was always feeding his flagrant alertness with her words. Canetti says proudly, 66T find mute knowledge dangerous." Canetti claims to be a "hear-er?' rather than a "'see-er." In Auto-da-Fé, Kien practices being blind, for he has dis- covered that "blindness is a weapon against time and space; our being is one vast blindness." Particularly in his work since Crowds and Power-such as the didactically titled The Voices of Marrakesh, Earwitness, The Tongue Set Free -Canetti stresses the moralist's organ, the ear, and slights the eye (continuing to ring changes on the theme of blind- ness). Hearing, speaking, and breathing are praised when- ever something important is at stake, if only in the form of / 195 Mind as Passion those which he developed to oppose her, also generously counted as her gifts: obstinacy, intellectual independence, rapidity of thought. He also speculates that the liveliness of Ladino, which he'd spoken as a child, helped him to think fast. (For the precocious, thinking is a kind of speed.) Canetti gives a complex account of that extraordinary pro- cess which learning is for an intellectually precocious child -fuller and more instructive than the accounts in, say, Mill's Autobiography or Sartre's The Words. For Canetti's capacities as an admirer reflect tireless skills as a learner; the first cannot be deep without the second. As an exceptional learner, Canetti has an irrepressible loyalty to teachers, to what they do well even (or especially when) they do it in- advertently. The teacher at his boarding school to whom he now "bows" won his fealty by being brutal during a class visit to a slaughterhouse. Forced by him to confront a par- ticularly gruesome sight, Canetti learned that the murder of animals was something "I wasn't meant to get over." His mother, even when she was brutal, was always feeding his flagrant alertness with her words. Canetti says proudly, "I find mute knowledge dangerous." Canetti claims to be a "hear-er » rather than a "see-er." In Auto-da-Fé, Kien practices being blind, for he has dis- covered that "blindness is a weapon against time and space; our being is one vast blindness. ." Particularly in his work since Crowds and Power-such as the didactically titled The Voices of Marrakesh, Earwitness, The Tongue Set Free -Canetti stresses the moralist's organ, the ear, and slights the eye (continuing to ring changes on the theme of blind- ness). Hearing, speaking, and breathing are praised when- ever something important is at stake, if only in the form of /195 UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN ear, mouth (or tongue), and throat metaphors. When Ca. netti observes that "the loudest passage in Kafka's work tells of this guilt with respect to the animals, » the adjective is itself a form of insistence. What is heard is voices--to which the ear is a witness. (Canetti does not talk about music, nor indeed about any art that is non-verbal.) The ear is the attentive sense, humbler, more passive, more immediate, less discriminat- ing than the eye. Canetti's disavowal of the eye is an aspect of his remoteness from the aesthete's sensibility, which typi- call affirms the pleasures and the wisdom of the visual; that is, of surfaces. To give sovereignty to the ear is an obtrusive, consciously archaizing theme in Canetti s later work. Implicitly he is restating the archaic gap between Hebrew as opposed to Greek culture, ear culture as op- posed to eye culture, and the moral versus the aesthetic. Canetti equates knowing with hearing, and hearing with hearing everything and still being able to respond. The exotic impressions garnered during his stay in Marrakesh are unified by the quality of attentiveness to "voices 99 that Canetti tries to summon in himself. Attentiveness is the formal subject of the book. Encountering poverty, misery, and deformity, Canetti undertakes to hear, that is, really to pay attention to words, cries, and inarticulate sounds the edge of the living. 99 His essay on Kraus portrays some- one whom Canetti considers ideal both as hearer and as voice. Canetti says that Kraus was haunted by voices; that his ear was constantly open; that "the real Karl Kraus was the speaker." Describing a writer as a voice has become such a cliché that it is possible to miss the force-and the characteristic literalness- of what Canetti means. The voice for Canetti stands for irrefutable presence. To treat some. 1 196 sontag saturn