Language did not return into the field of thought until the end of the nineteenth century.
NERVOUS HERMENEUTICS AND THE THEATER OF CRUELTY
WORKING ALONG INDEPENDENT tracks and in different fields, Freud and Strindberg developed remarkably similar conceptions of the psyche during the fin de siècle, conceptions that crystallized in two works that appeared around 1900: The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1899) and A Dream Play (Ett drömspel, 1901). In each case, the turn to dream work arose in response to a failure of an attempt to unify fields of natural science and psychology. Freud and Strindberg’s intellectual journeys over the last decade of the nineteenth century reflected a much broader cultural turn to new, neurologically informed and inflected modes of interpretation. It was this return to interpretation—interpretation in a new form—that set the stage for Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty in the interwar period. It is with the Theater of Cruelty that this book closes, but in order to understand the ways in which that artistic vision transformed the nervous stage for the twentieth century, we must first return to the psychoanalyst and the dramatist who reopened the puzzle box of dreams.
The Return of Interpretation
The year of Miss Julie’s premiere was also the year of Freud’s first major case study. When Freud began the case of “Emmy von N” on May 1, 1889, he was a fairly typical Viennese nerve doctor, with therapeutic techniques drawn from a standard toolbox of massage and water therapy, dietary remedies, moral exhortation, and hypnotism. Especially hypnotism; the dominant aspect of Freud’s treatment of Emmy (as recorded in Studies in Hysteria [Studien über Hysterie, 1895]) was the use of hypnotic suggestion, time and time again, to help her recall traumatic memories and then systematically erase them from her mind, an approach largely adapted from the work of Pierre Janet.1
But Freud’s treatment did not, of course, remain on that plane. The case of Emmy von N provides glimpses of another method, one based not on hypnotic recall and induced amnesia but on talking and listening. While giving her a massage, Freud noticed that Emmy began to talk in a way “apparently unconstrained and guided by chance,” which led “in a quite unexpected way, to pathogenic reminiscences of which she unburden[ed] herself without being asked to” (56). On a subsequent occasion, Emmy’s desire to simply talk led to a conflict with Freud. In response to repeated questions from him about the origins of certain gastric pains, she finally replied “in a definitely grumbling tone that I was not to keep on asking her where this and that came from, but to let her tell me what she had to say” (63). While Freud at the time still regarded such moments “as a supplement to her hypnosis” (56), they marked the beginning of what was to become the talking-cure technique of free association. Freud ultimately learned from Emmy von N, as he told her daughter in 1918, that “[t]reatment by means of hypnosis is a senseless and worthless proceeding,” but one that compelled him “to create the more sensible psychoanalytic therapy” (quoted in Gay 71).
While hypnotism plays a central role, as we have seen, in Miss Julie, the play also gestures toward free-associative speech. Julie’s monologues, the first in which she recounts her recurring dream of wanting to fall from the top of a pillar (79) and the second in which she describes her upbringing (93–94), have a stream-of-consciousness character marked by long dashes. These dashes increasingly insert themselves into the speech of both the main characters as the play moves toward its conclusion, giving the impression that speech is becoming steadily more unwilled and impulsive.
I haven’t a thought I didn’t get from my father, not an emotion I didn’t get from my mother, and this last idea—that everyone’s equal—I got from him, my fiancé—which is why I called him a swine! How can it be my own fault, then? Shift all the blame on to Jesus, as Kristin did?—No, I’m too proud for that, and too intelligent—thanks to my father’s teachings—(108)
And so on. Strindberg defends this dialogic technique in his “Preface,” where he writes that he has “allowed my characters’ brains to work irregularly as they do in real life, where no subject is ever entirely exhausted before one mind discovers by chance in another mind a cog in which to engage” (63). Streams of consciousness become a principle of composition in subsequent essays such as “The New Arts! or The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation” (“Des arts nouveaux! ou Le hasard dans la production artistique,” 1894), in which he sketches his own impressions while strolling.
My thoughts were far away, but my eyes observed a strange, odd-looking object lying on the ground.
One moment it was a cow; an instant later two peasants embracing; then a tree trunk, then … I delight in these rapidly changing impressions … then my will is engaged and I want to know what it is … I feel a curtain veiling my consciousness about to rise … but I don’t want it to … (105)
We saw in Chapter 5 how central hypnotism and suggestion were to Strindberg’s so-called Naturalistic period. But for Strindberg as for Freud, hypnotism gradually dropped away as a royal road to the inner psyche, to be replaced by the ebb and flow of (only apparently random) thoughts and impressions—a river that demands not surgical incision but attention, interpretation, and a certain form of letting-be.
The parallels between Strindberg and Freud only deepen with time. The two dreams of century’s end—The Interpretation of Dreams and A Dream Play—might initially appear to be sharply different works, one a scientific study of dream psychology, heavily documented with case histories and analyses of patients’ dreams, the other an occultish theater piece strongly informed by Buddhism, Gnosticism, and Schopenhauer. In order to locate their similarities, however, we must begin by recognizing that they were both written in the wake of debilitating intellectual failure.
While The Interpretation of Dreams is now often recalled as Freud’s masterpiece, often forgotten is the work that preceded it, the one he planned to make his magnum opus: his 1895 “Project for a Scientific Psychology.” The project was an attempt to wholly root psychology in the chemical thermodynamics of the brain, with the intention, as he states at the outset of the manuscript, “to furnish us with a psychology which shall be a natural science: its aim, that is, is to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determined states of specifiable material particles” (355). With this knowledge, Freud hoped that psychological conditions could some day be treated through unmediated action on the chemical processes of the body.
Freud was deeply invested in the project. In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess on April 27, 1895 he enthused that he was “caught up in the ‘Psychology for Neurologists’ [as he called it at the time], which regularly consumes me totally until, actually overworked, I must break off. I have never before experienced such a high degree of preoccupation” (Complete 127). Six months later he was sure his labors were paying off, when “everything seemed to fall into place, the cogs meshed, I had the impression that the thing now really was a machine that shortly would function on its own… . Naturally, I can scarcely manage to contain my delight” (146). A month after this false eureka moment, things looked quite different. Freud now wrote to Fliess that “I no longer understand the state of mind in which I hatched the ‘Psychology’; cannot conceive how I could have inflicted it on you… . [T]o me it appears to have been a kind of madness” (152), and soon thereafter abandoned the manuscript, never to return to it again. In its aftermath he turned his attentions to another and very different book, one that dispensed entirely with the neurophysiological apparatus: The Interpretation of Dreams. 2
Like Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Strindberg’s A Dream Play was written in the wake of a passionate, and increasingly desperate, attempt to unify chemistry and psyche. Strindberg wrote the play in the wake of his “Inferno Crisis” of 1894–1896, during which he had dived headlong into his fantasy of reconciling modern and ancient science in a quest that might be dubbed “neuro-alchemical.” Many of these researches were conducted at the Sorbonne (where he managed to obtain authorization to use certain laboratories) and many in his Parisian apartments, and Strindberg published his results in a series of (pseudo-)scientific writings: Antibarbarus, On the Action of Light in Photography, A Glance into Space, Sylva Sylvarum, Jardin des plantes, The Synthesis of Gold, and The Irradiation and Extension of the Soul. His memoir of the period, The Inferno (Inferno, 1897), contains still further records of his chemical and biological investigations during that time. Like Freud, Strindberg never fully abandoned this dream even if he came to see it as a Faustian catastrophe that very nearly ended him. And again, as with Freud, purely physiological explanations for the psyche never again shaped his work. While Miss Julie, like Freud’s “Emmy von N,” is a work that coupled physiological with psychological understandings of the mind—coupled, so to speak, Claude Bernard with Hippolyte Bernheim, neurobiology-and-environment with hypnotic suggestion—A Dream Play, like The Interpretation of Dreams, puts the physiological part of the equation behind it while inventing a radically new vocabulary for the psychological. At once informed by and untethered from the demands of physiological explanation, both Strindberg and Freud turned to that most elusive stuff of dreaming.
For Strindberg as for Freud, dreams are the stuff of untrammeled association, a space in which (as Strindberg puts it in the play’s “Preface”) “[t]ime and place do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality the imagination spins and weaves new patterns: a blend of memories, experiences, spontaneous ideas, absurdities, and improvisations” (176). In a manner further reminiscent of Freud’s account of dreams, the play combines an intensely visual quality with a strategy of condensation. The play’s welter of recurring images function as leitmotifs and hint at deeper symbolism: celestial constellations, blooming hollyhocks, a growing castle, a linden tree, a star-patterned coverlet, a door with a four-leafed clover opening in it, a great monkshood flower (the last of which, as Evert Sprinchorn points out, almost begs to be read as phallic [361]). These recurring images also aid the condensation of scenes and characters, as when a cupboard in one scene transforms into the four-leafed-clover door in a wall and then into a document cupboard and again into the clover door, this time leading to a vestry. The shifting set pieces seem at once teasingly profound (what does that clover door represent?) and fleetingly mutable (what once was a door is now a cupboard) in a way that recalls Freud’s account of both the deep meaning of dream images (their “latent content”) and their elusiveness (in order to escape internal censorship). This scenic condensation is redoubled, in the play, by a similar fluidity of characters, who (in the words of the play’s “Preface”) “split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, disperse, and converge” (176). As both Harry Carlson and Evert Sprinchorn have noted, the three principal male characters all seem to be aspects of a single person, and the Daughter of Indra is a shapeshifter who adopts multiple personae over the course of the drama (Carlson 137–190; Sprinchorn 367). Taken as a whole, A Dream Play may appear at first to be a mere hodgepodge of settings, characters, images, and words, but in fact it rests on an underlying allegorical structure whose allusive and elusive symbolism demands that audiences become active hermeneuts.3
Freud, too, turned to hermeneutics at the turn of the century. With its fundamental distinction between manifest and latent content and its attempt to develop a non-physiological account of psychic processes, Interpretation marks a decisive break with Freud’s “Project” of 1895. Paul Ricoeur rightly notes that the “Project” “represents what could be called a nonhermeneutic state of the system. Indeed, the notion of the ‘psychical apparatus’ that dominates this essay appears to have no correlation with a work of deciphering, … [but is rather] based on a principle borrowed from physics—the constancy principle—and tends to be a quantitative treatment of energy” (69). From the Interpretation on, by contrast, “Freudian theory may be looked upon as the gradual reduction of the notion of psychical apparatus—in the sense of ‘a machine which in a moment would run of itself’—to a topography in which space is no longer a place within the world but a scene of action where roles and masks enter into debate; this space will become a place of ciphering and deciphering” (Ricoeur 70). Most importantly, the Interpretation offers a vocabulary of dream interpretation (secondary elaboration, symbolism, condensation, displacement, regression to visual images, etc.) every bit as revolutionary as, and in some ways analogous to, Strindberg’s new theatrical language in Dream Play. As we have seen, the central role of free-associative speech, with the consequent demand for interpretation that such speech entails, is central to both innovations. And for Freud just as for Strindberg, the free-associative form of dreams offered not just a royal road to the psyche but also an analogue to life itself—a connection Freud was to further explore in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, 1901) and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten, 1905).
Interpretation of Dreams and A Dream Play, then, exemplify a recovery of the importance of interpretation at the end of a nervous century.4 In this respect, it is worth noting that 1900 also marks the publication of the essay that largely inaugurated this turn in twentieth-century philosophy, Wilhelm Dilthey’s “The Rise of Hermeneutics” (“Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik”). The essay’s significance lies above all in the fact that it attempted to ground hermeneutics in a broader understanding of existence and experience, a gesture Heidegger subsequently radicalized. In Interpretation and Dream Play, similarly, interpretation is not merely a function of textual analysis but is a fundamental and constitutive part of life and a route to greater freedom, an urgent existential task. For Strindberg in his post-Inferno period (after 1897), the ability to pierce the veil of illusion and thereby to loosen the shackles of the world is in large part an ability to read symbols correctly. For Freud, similarly, interpretation becomes a difficult but universal method by which the analyzed person gains a measure of freedom and self-knowledge through the recovery of repressed trauma.
Over the course of this book, we have found that it was in large part with the decay of the language of gesture as an accurate representation of mental states that modern European theater emerged, and further that that same emergence was connected to the rise of the language of nerves. The arc of the nineteenth century, in other words, traces a gradual transition from the dominance of a discourse of gestural representation to one of nervous sensation. This transition did not entail a radical break with the earlier discourse; rather, the discourse of sensation simply became increasingly widespread in relation to the discourse of representation, just as the neurological account of mental states became increasingly widespread in relation to the gestural account, until the earlier conception had largely faded from view. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, a further shift in emphasis took hold, from the discourse of nervous sensation to one of nervous hermeneutics—that is, to an understanding of interpretation as central to knowledge, but interpretation crucially informed by a neurological conception of the subject. The purpose of this mode of interpretation, a mode most clearly exemplified by psychoanalysis, was to read surface signs (principally gestures and words) to decode the language of underlying nervous conditions. This is not to say that the world changed in 1900; indeed, as Elaine Showalter has argued, psychotherapy and the ideas of Freud gained broad purchase outside of German-speaking countries only in the wake of World War I, principally in response to shell-shock-related disorders (Female 189–190). But what we witness around the turn of the century is a fruit that would ripen in the coming years.
This turn-of-the-century turn was also a return, for with the rise of a neurologically informed form of hermeneutics around 1900 the language of gesture actually regained something of its earlier significance. But if gesture returned, then it returned transformed. Largely gone were appeals to gesture as a “natural and universal” language that could be readily understood through spontaneous sympathy—gesture now demanded interpretation, and interpretation now demanded an understanding of neuropsychology. The post-Inferno Strindberg and the post-Project Freud exemplify the change. The stage language of Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata (Spöksonaten, 1907), for example, offers characters and settings that shift and blend in ways that recall both the “Preface” to Miss Julie and Théodule-Armand Ribot’s account of the aggregate nature of the self in Les maladies de la volonté (1883) and Les maladies de la personnalité (1885). The play confronts us with a mysterious landscape: a silent Milkmaid seen only by a young Student; a powerful old man named Hummel married to a Mummy who lives in a cupboard and acts like a parrot; a room filled with multicolored hyacinths that disappears and is replaced by a Böcklin painting. This is a playworld that nearly begs the audience to penetrate its shifting veils of manifest content. And this is a playworld, moreover, in which such interpretation is at least partially rewarded. Over the course of the play we uncover the secrets and lies of the spectral house at the heart of the drama, including the backstory that the ghostly Milkmaid is haunting Hummel for his murder of her many years in the past. The Milkmaid herself, whose wordlessness makes her a pantomime (she gesturally re-enacts, for instance, her own drowning), hearkens back to the lineage, discussed in the previous chapter, of the Speechless One Who Knows. We saw there that Miss Julie suggested such a figure in the form of the Count, but that this figure, crucially, does not know and conveys nothing and so offers no key to the locks of the play. But the Milkmaid restores the more familiar elements of the figure. Her mute entreaties, while difficult to read at first, ultimately yield insight and, if not redemption, then at least a solution to one of the play’s central riddles, the riddle of Hummel’s past. It is no mere coincidence that the Student’s conclusion, expressed to the dying Young Lady in the final scene, might have been borrowed from Freud: “Keeping silent for too long creates a pool of stagnant water, which rots” (285).
In its demand that we read gesture closely for clues of underlying psychic reality, Ghost Sonata parallels Freud’s psychoanalytic hermeneutics of gesture. We can find anticipations of this interpretive method as early as Freud’s contributions to Studies on Hysteria, where he comments that he “gradually came to be able to read from patients’ faces whether they might not be concealing an essential part of their confessions,” that the doctor should “make it quite a general rule all through the analysis to keep an eye on [the patient’s] facial expression as he lies quietly before us,” and that “the patient’s facial expression must decide whether we have really come to an end” of inquiry into a traumatic memory (79, 281, 294; see also 301; emphasis added). Freud pithily captures this emerging understanding when, toward the end of his Studies, he describes the hysteric’s physical symptoms as ways of the body “joining in the conversation” between doctor and patient (296).
Gestural interpretation achieves more mature form in Freud’s study of Dora, published in 1905 as Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse). Most famously, Freud describes Dora’s masturbatory habit of playing with a little drawstring purse she wore around her neck; unthinkingly and repeatedly, she opened it, inserted a finger, and closed it again. This instance provides Freud with his theory of “symptomatic actions,” unconscious and apparently trivial gestures that, on closer observation, “express unconscious ideas and impulses, and thus are valuable and instructive in that they allow the unconscious to find expression” (Case 65). In this respect, we should mitigate René Major’s influential argument that Freud’s break with Charcot lay chiefly in the shift of attention from hysteric’s gestures to their words (Major, “Revolution”). Gestures, especially unconscious ones, in fact continue to be vital to psychoanalysis, but are increasingly seen as linguistic rather than merely symptomatic. The irony here is that, however novel it was, Freud’s confidence in his ability to read the inner life of the mind through the language of gesture also harkens back to those Enlightenment-era writers we examined in Chapter 1, writers such as J. J. Engel, Lord Kames, and Joanna Baillie. “Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear will soon convince themselves that mortals cannot hide any secret,” Freud concludes. “If our lips are sealed we talk volubly with our fingertips; we betray ourselves through every pore. And so the task of uncovering ideas, however deeply hidden, is perfectly capable of resolution” (Case 66). Where the universal language of gesture once seemed to promise a royal road to the inner life, Strindberg and Freud suggested that this road might be uncovered once more—this time not through natural sympathy but learned interpretation.
In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous… . Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable.
SONTAG, Against Interpretation (8)
If the early twentieth century was marked by a return to interpretation, then it was also marked by something like its opposite: by the violent advancement of sensation in place of reflection, force in place of language, corporeal performance in place of communicative drama, ritual in place of hermeneutics: in short, by the Artaudian intervention into art and society. Sontag’s equation of art with nervousness, and the juxtaposition of art against interpretation, was one of a series of twentieth-century rebellions against the hermeneutic turn. Seven years after the publication of Against Interpretation, she published her first essay on Artaud, the high priest of “pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy” (Against 9).
One of the central ironies of Artaud is that he not only loathed the body but also yearned—yearned beyond all reason and possibility—for a theater of the fully communicable mind. In the program notes to his production of Strindberg’s Dream Play at the Jarry Theater in 1928, Artaud writes (in language oddly reminiscent of, say, Joanna Baillie) of the stage as a site for the revelation of mental states, stressing that he wants “to re-introduce into theater not a sense of life but certain truths situated deep down in the mind” (Collected 2.68). He hints there, too, at connections between reality and the dream, connections which, if properly understood, might lay bare the psyche. “There is a certain interplay of associations in the mind between a real and dream existence, certain relations between acts, and events expressible as actions, which makes up just the sort of theatrical reality the Jarry Theater has decided to revive” (2.68). Surprisingly, perhaps, the First Manifesto of the Theater of Cruelty includes a section entitled “THE INTERPRETATION” (“L’INTERPRÉTATION”), in which Artaud demands a “spectacle” that will be “calculated from one end to the other, like a code (un langage). Thus there will be no lost movements, all movements will obey a rhythm” (Theater 98; emphases in original). And it is indeed a total “langage” that the Theater of Cruelty aims to create: a language that corresponds in every particular with every motion of the mind, and that encompasses and includes every sound, sight, word and motion of the stage space. Language not short-circuited but perfected—language without mediation.
Just as Artaud felt an urgent need for this fully calculated code, so his horror lay in its failure, in the oppressive sense that mental states refuse complete representation and therefore render interpretation impossible. “What I lack is words that correspond to each minute of my state of mind,” he remarks in The Nerve Meter (Selected 84), and this lack is intolerable. From the notebooks: “In matters of feeling I can’t even find anything that would correspond to feelings./And I have nothing to say either” (Selected 195). Writing to George Soulié de Morant: “[i]t so happens that this slackening, this confusion, this fragility express themselves in an infinite number of ways and correspond to an infinite number of new impressions and sensations, the most characteristic of which is a kind of disappearance or disintegration or collapse of first assumptions” (293). Reflecting further on why he could not even utter the statement “it is cold,” he grasps for words.
If someone asked me why I could not say it, I would answer that my inner feeling on this slight and neutral point did not correspond to the three simple little words I would have to pronounce. And this lack of correspondence, therefore, between a physiological sensation and its emotional response in the first place and next its intellectual response—insofar as it is possible to summarize and synthesize in general terms this series of swift, almost instantaneous operations which give rise to the truism it is cold—this lack of correspondence, since it does not select its subjects or spare me in any way, culminates, as it spreads, in the colossal troubles which correspond perfectly, alas, to the loss of personality. (295)
The need for interpretation is now urgently felt and urgently felt to be impossible. Not even the simplest of declarations is sayable without introspection so relentless and exacting that it must break down before it has even begun—which is to say that it is with Artaud that the nervous hermeneutics of Strindberg and Freud becomes pathological, the demand for interpretation so involuted, convoluted, and untenable as to evacuate personality.
Where internal sensation can no longer be felt or even spoken (all correspondences severed between sensation and emotion, emotion and intellect), the only cure would seem to be that of an influx of sensation from without, sensation so overwhelming as to blast away even the possibility of interpretation. Thus Artaud calls for a “solidified, materialized language by means of which theater is able to differentiate itself from speech” (Theater 38). With language reconsidered as concrete stimulation of the “skein of vibrations” that constitutes the soul (Theater 135), the dream of total langage is realized in the collapse of the gap between signifier and referent and thus the annihilation of interpretation. By this means, gesture regains something like the universal accessibility attributed to it by eighteenth-century theorists and subsequently recovered by Freud—though it regains that universality not through interpretation (whether natural or learned) but through pre-discursive force: “if the gesture is made under the necessary conditions and with the necessary force, this reverberation invites the organism, and through it the whole individual personality, to assume attitudes that correspond to the gesture that has been made” (Selected 257). Once correspondence is rendered as sympathetic vibration, inner life becomes communicable at the price of meaning. As Artaud puts it in the program notes to his production of Strindberg’s A Dream Play: “[t]he magnetic vibration of the universality of life and the mind are presented to us and impress themselves on us” (Collected 2.68).
Given the significance of Shelley’s overlooked drama The Cenci for the history we have been tracing in this book—the ways in which this play, as we saw in Chapter 1, stages the breakdown of both gestural and verbal signification and points toward a neurological dramaturgy—it is hardly surprising that Artaud should have turned to this obscure work for his first and only attempt at realizing his Theater of Cruelty onstage. Artaud insisted that his Les Cenci, staged at the Théâtre des Folies-Wagram in Paris on May 7, 1935, was not to be understood as a mere translation and adaptation of Shelley’s work (or even of Stendhal’s 1837 novella, which also inspired it) but as an original creation in its own right, a claim that is only partly borne out by the text. Unsurprisingly with Artaud, it is only when we move beyond the dramatic text that we find the true motor of the work.
Les Cenci is best understood, like Büchner’s Woyzeck, as an experiment in primary media—above all, in acoustics. Working together with the conductor Roger Désormière, Artaud designed a soundscape of auditory effects billed as music. The soundscape featured musical instruments (including viola, flute, percussions, and an early theremin-like electrical device called an ondes Martenot) combined with prerecorded sound effects: footsteps and whispers, wind and thunder, metronomes running at clashing speeds, cathedral bells. The result was a concatenation of “musical” and “non-musical,” “live” and “programmed” effects in which traditionally opposing categories were difficult if not impossible to separate from one another. In his study of the production, Adrian Curtin has noted that, given Artaud’s dramaturgy, “[a]bstract, acousmatic sounds made physical sense in that their vibrations were likely felt as well as heard (as a result of the loudspeaker placement) even if their semantic sense was unclear or non-existent: an attempt by Artaud to realize his desire to plunge the public into a ‘bath of fire,’ making the spectator ‘participate with his soul and his nerves’ ” (251–252).
Reviews of the premiere give some sense of the impact of this auditory assault. One of the most positive, written by Raymonde Latour for Paris-Midi under the heading “Before All of Paris, The Theater of Cruelty Was Born Last Evening,” celebrated the way that Artaud’s own performance as Cenci “hit[] us in the face with the most searing words and passionate phrases, like slaps or battle cries” (Blin 128). Most reviewers describe a similar experience in less enthusiastic terms. Gérard d’Houville (pseudonym of Marie de Heredia), writing for Le Petit Parisien, complained that “[o]ur ears tortured by deafening music produced by loudspeakers … we were in a state of alert as if we were hearing the wail of sirens during an evening of ‘air raids’ ” (Blin 136). And Colette, who was present as a reviewer for Le Journal, concluded that “the music … stays within the confines of a shriek and a railroad disaster, [while] the costumes, the décor, the acting and mime of the actors stem from the same aesthetic” (Blin 134).
As Colette’s presence indicates, Artaud’s sensory assault may have been disturbing to some but was hardly beyond the pale of cosmopolitan fashion by the 1930s. Indeed, similar experiments at least as radical as Les Cenci had been performed over the course of the previous two decades in the Dadaist cafes of Zurich and Berlin and the Futurist cabarets of Rome, to say nothing of the incommensurably more hypnotic and pitiless spectacle of the Nazi rallies at Nuremberg, with their massed-loudspeaker-and-searchlight aesthetics of acoustic and optical overload. Moreover, Artaud’s attention to primary sense stimuli is an inheritor of a genealogy of theaters of sensation dating back at least to Woyzeck. As we have seen throughout this book, artists and scientists throughout the nineteenth century had struggled mightily to capture this new and radically decentered subject, this network of energies, vibrations, and affects. Could such a subject be comprehended and represented, ordered and classified? Could it be made to speak the languages of tragedy, melodrama, or opera? Could neuroscientific patients be transformed into a theatrical troupe? Could the theater itself be reinvented as a laboratory of the human being? Artists from Percy Shelley and Georg Büchner through Émile Zola and August Strindberg answered these questions in dialogue with neurology—and one of the more persistent answers, the theater of sensation, minimized linguistic communication in favor of direct neural effects. In this light, Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty constitutes less a radical break with certain previous theatrical practices than their expansion to the point of impossibility.
The idea that Artaud should be understood in continuum with such developments, and more particularly as an absurd extension of nineteenth-century theaters of sensation, conflicts with much received opinion. In the writings of philosophers and artists as diverse as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Julian Beck, Judith Malina, Susan Sontag, Charles Marowitz, Ariane Mnouchkine, Patti Smith, Joseph Chaikin, Jacques Derrida, Sylvère Lotringer, and Peter Brook, Artaud’s work signals far less a continuation of than a sharp break with past practices of performance and thought. It is time now to call that account into question, however productive it may have been.5 Similarly, the period around the 1910s has often, and with good reason, been seen as one of profound rupture with the previous century. It hardly needs to be said that there arose, between the premiere of A Dream Play in Stockholm in 1907 and Artaud’s restaging of it in Paris in 1928, a welter of new shock effects, chief among them the rapid technological development and mass proliferation of cinema and the shell-shock horrors of trench warfare. Both Walter Benjamin and Peter Bürger have famously connected the shock tactics of various interwar avant-garde movements (Futurism, Surrealism, Vorticism, etc.) with these destabilizing developments, developments that might seem to suggest that theaters of sensation after, say, 1915 were of a fundamentally different order from those before it (Benjamin 237–238; Bürger 108). But, as we have seen in previous chapters, the destabilization of modern shock effects was already a consistent feature of nineteenth-century consciousness, and the ratcheting quality of these effects—in which yesterday’s inconceivable overstimulation becomes today’s workaday reality—had been in place for at least a century by the time D. W. Griffith began experimenting with film or tanks rolled along the Somme. This is not to say that, in the matter of shock, there was not a difference in degree that helped to produce the avant-garde movements of the teens and twenties, but rather that this difference has often been overstated in order to demarcate the post-World War I period from that of the earlier (and, in light of the overwhelming experience of the War, easily forgotten) traumas and transformations that helped to create the neural subject over the course of the nineteenth century. In this light, Artaud may have been more indebted to the nineteenth century that we have previously acknowledged.
What was radical in Artaud, then, was not his advocacy of a theater of sensation but rather his extraordinary extension of the concept, an extension almost to absurdity. The repeated insistence that all thought and feeling must be communicable and yet that words are fundamentally inadequate to this task leads inexorably to the conclusion that language must be concretized—must become pure corporeal sensation—and that this force of sensation must be as all-inclusive as thought itself is to the thinker. This is the hypnotic stagecraft of Miss Julie taken to its maximum conceivable degree. “I propose to treat the spectators like the snakecharmer’s subjects and conduct them by means of their organisms to an apprehension of the subtlest notions,” Artaud writes in “No More Masterpieces,” and further proposes to “resort to mass spectacle,” “a spectacle where these means of direct action are used in their totality; a spectacle unafraid of going as far as necessary in the exploration of our nervous sensibility” (Theater 81, 85, 87).
In a passage discussed in this book’s Introduction, Foucault noted that, in the late eighteenth century, “life becomes one object of knowledge among others, and is answerable, in this respect, to all criticism in general; but is also resists this critical jurisdiction, which it takes over on its own account and begins to bear, in its own name, on all possible knowledge” (Order 162). Over the course of this book, we have seen that one of the names for that “life” was nerves. Nerves became one of the central signifiers for the vital energies that at once comprised a person and exhibited her for comprehension and management; that at once eluded all categorization and invited it; that at once demanded the objective observer while finding no place for him. The peculiar paradoxes of this nervous discourse pointed toward two antithetical paths: toward ever more exacting observation and interpretation of the neural subject on the one hand, and toward ever more total immersion in the sensorium on the other. In other words: either the deepening of nervous hermeneutics or the intensification of nervous sensation.
1 Janet’s influence on Freud did not disappear after the latter’s turn away from hypnotism; indeed, Janet’s study of the “rapport” between hypnotist and subject subsequently inspired Freud’s theory of transference.
2 This is not to say that the dream of grand synthesis ever wholly vanished for Freud, any more than Strindberg ever completely abandoned his alchemical fantasies. Peter Gay notes that “the Project, or rather its invisible ghost, haunts the whole series of Freud’s theoretical writings to the very end” (87). The attempt to provide a physiological account of psychological operations persists for example, in Chapter 7, Part B of The Interpretation of Dreams and is central to Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). It is also the case, as Frank J. Sulloway has demonstrated in Freud: Biologist of the Mind (1992), that biological accounts of mental operations continued to inform Freud’s work throughout his career, even if they came to be overshadowed, after the Interpretation, by psychological vocabularies of his own coinage. As for Strindberg, he carried with him to his grave a lump of metal he claimed was gold he had produced in an alchemical crucible in Paris.
3 For Harry Carlson, the whole work is an interweaving of “four dreamers experiencing three sets of reciprocal dreams,” symbolizing the idea that (in Schopenhauer’s words) “in the great dream of life there exists a reciprocal relationship: each not only appears in the other’s dream precisely as there required, but also experiences the other in a similar way in his own dream” (144, 140). The play is shot through with teasing intertextualities, and the work’s repeated claim that the world is Maya—illusion, hence dream—further provokes us to penetrate the veil. Active interpretation is called upon by the play not only because dreams require it, but also, and far more importantly, because dreams are a key to life itself. Indeed, as the Daughter and Poet agree, they are life itself (“the world, life and human beings are only an illusion, a phantom, a dream image” [261]), and Strindberg is never more Romantic than when he echoes this theme from Calderon’s Life is a Dream and Shakespeare’s Tempest.
4 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s brief account of this return to hermeneutics around the turn of the century is incisive (see, e.g., 10–11, 42–44).
5 Kimberley Jannarone’s Artaud and His Doubles is an important step in the direction of a necessary reevaluation of Artaud’s influence. Jannarone suggests not only that Artaud’s contributions were less original than generally understood but moreover more troubling, in that they were heavily indebted to strains of fascist aesthetics.