The Thesis, Part Deux

I wrote a thesis as an undergraduate student. When I finished my thesis (which had a rather embarrassingly stupid title when I turned it in to my advisor; I have since changed "Are You There God? It's Me, England" to "Looking for England: National Identity in Post-World War II Britain"), I was certain that I was going to study 20th century British literature, with a focus on Irish expatriates. I was sure of this up until halfway through last semester, when I realized that I kind of only liked Samuel Beckett and sometimes W.B. Yeats, and I had no desire to read James Joyce... ever. And I loved my 19th century American class. And I wanted to publish my paper on Washington Irving and Kierkegaard and include it in my thesis. I wanted to read more about the theater and its development in the United States. (And I wanted an excuse to write about Artaud again, because really, not enough people read him. Go read The Theater and Its Double. Right now.)

So, here I am, back at the American Antiquarian Society, reading obscure novels about actresses. I'm going to read more into Kierkegaard, education and seduction, and look up a performance history of Rip Van Winkle, and doubtless give myself carpal tunnel syndrome as I prepare to write another thesis.

The strange thing is, I'm starting to like research again. I really enjoyed the hours I spent in the reading room at the Antiquarian Society this afternoon. I think part of it is handling old books. I love leafing through a book that went out of print a hundred years ago, that perhaps no one else has read since 1920. Those books have lives and histories of their own, and I can take these flights of fancy wondering where they had been and where they would go next, how it is that I stumble upon them. There's a wonderful piece in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, "The Mutability of Literature." Crayon picks up an old folio from the 17th century, and it begins speaking in an antiquated tongue. It had been on the shelf for over a hundred years, and couldn't believe that Shakespeare was more widely read than any other author of the time. I know that the books I'm reading might wonder at Hawthorne's popularity, Melville's ubiquity in American education, and, what interests me especially, the dissipation of theatrics and drama into every aspect of American culture except for the stage.

I'm almost done with being a student. I am still resolved to stop at my Masters degree and not get a PhD, but I'm now starting to appreciate the rare opportunity I have to conduct this kind of research, to read these obscure books, and to resurrect a few names that no one remembers any longer, but knowing myself that these names have something to say, that I should listen.

What I'm doing in Grad School

So I haven't written about a single thing I've read in grad school. I've read a lot of books (about one per week per class) since this semester started, but I want to throw back to last semester to what I think is one of my best pieces of writing to date. This is a shorter version of the 30-page final paper I wrote about Artaud and Beckett last semester.

Bad Romance: Love and Violence in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days

In his 1931 essay on Proust, Samuel Beckett describes habit as “the guarantee of a dull inviolability.” [1] Habit is a defense against the suffering of being, the experience of life as precarious, painful, fecund, and mysterious, and a guarantee of the mechanical repetition of existence. The life of habit is inscribed within conventional narratives, which impose an illusion of order over the chaos of living. Winnie, the “well-preserved” protagonist of Beckett’s 1961 play Happy Days, uses romantic narratives to anaesthetize herself to her bizarre condition of sinking into the earth, her increasing hysteria, her farce of a marriage and sexual frustration. Her act of self-preservation commits violence against the singularity of events. This hegemony of conventional narrative comprises the crucial problem of contemporary theater, according to avant-garde dramatist Antonin Artaud. In The Theater and its Double, Artaud claims that the domination of dialogue, realism, and psychology in contemporary theater has reinforced the tendency toward self-preservation and alienated theater from its purpose: to remind us that “[w]e are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads.”[2] Artuad promotes a theater of cruelty; this Artaudian cruelty is not necessarily physical violence, but overwhelming, superfluous intensity. Happy Days uses saturated, minimalist phenomena, fragmentation of narratives, and dehumanization to construct a dark mythos of dangerous but fragile cruelty and chaotic freedom.

In the past fifteen years, Beckett scholarship has shifted from strictly philosophical readings toward a focus on the mythical, mystical, and anti-rational. Several recent studies view Beckett’s work as an inversion of the quest formula, undermining the heroic ego and dramatizing a psychological journey into darkness, quiescence, and the unconscious. Much of the critical body has traditionally emphasized the failures of language. But language is not merely a failure in Happy Days. Phyllis Carey observes that Winnie’s mechanical use of language normalizes and reduces to cliché “[w]hat once struck humans with awe, elicited primitive worship of the supernatural, and seemingly endowed words with magical, transforming power.”[3] Winnie destroys fear and wonder through her adherence to and elaboration of the static narrative formulas of romance and religion. Christianity fosters an illusion of a merciful God and an orderly universe, and the courtly love narrative forces sexuality into an orderly, controlled, and thus distorted form.

Marriage is a point of juncture for Winnie’s two narratives of romance and religion. The Catholic catechism justifies the sexual bond between husband and wife as an image of God’s love for humanity. This metaphor is fragmented and distorted in Happy Days. Sexuality has become perverse, not in the transgressive excess of Sodom and Gomorrah, which I argue is the prevailing biblical allusion in the play, but in the narrative of courtly love, which spiritualizes sexuality, negating the body through language rather than risking the body’s integrity through an excessive, theatrical act.

Much like Beckett’s increasing austerity in Happy Days, Artaud discards the conventions of plot, character, and dialogue in favor of creating a new mythology based on cruelty. Artaud writes that “all the great Myths are dark, so that one cannot imagine, save in an atmosphere of carnage, torture, and bloodshed, all the magnificent Fables which recount to the multitudes the first sexual division and the first carnage of essences that appeared in creation”[4]. Creation risks destruction, a danger that appears throughout Beckett’s work and provokes the characters’ anxiety, especially their fear of procreation, resulting in sterile, non-productive, and alienated sexuality. Winnie responds to this fear by sublimating sexuality into narrative.

Winnie’s sterile marriage to Willie is comprised of rituals in which love and sex are represented linguistically: she recites clichéd expressions of affection throughout, and in the final scene, her sentimental song replaces sexual union. The force she represses is dangerous and linked closely to her dark fantasies of apocalyptic destruction and the consuming, transgressive sexuality Artaud describes in The Theater and its Double. Artaud commends John Ford’s 1629 drama ‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore for its spectacle of Eros, which transgresses every principle of normative sexuality. The central love affair is extramarital, violent, and incestuous, between brother and sister. The main character displays his intense passion and refusal to abandon his beloved by tearing out her heart “as if to feast upon it in the middle of a banquet.”[5] Superfluous, transgressive sexuality is experienced as an essential force in the aftermath of Sodom and Gomorrah as well, and Lot’s daughters commit a theatrical act driven by metaphysical fear, a response to chaos with greater chaos like the shrieking victims of the plague. In contrast, Winnie and Willie’s marriage is a mechanical, habitual devotion that fails to consume them and bring them to the edge of complete decimation.

Traces of uninhibited passion persist, despite Winnie’s aestheticized narration. In the play’s final scene, Willie attempts to climb the mound in which Winnie is buried. Winnie reads this gesture as a recapitulation of his marriage proposal—he’s come begging for a kiss again—but she cannot dispel the “something else” he may be after, the gun. David Alpaugh suggests that Willie puts forth an “attempt at communication, sympathy, and love.”[6] Alpaugh reads the violent potential as Willie’s desire to end Winnie’s suffering, but I suggest that his intent to kill may be the unleashing of sexual energy as an uncontrollable force. Winnie and Willie do not need preservation, salvation, or the word of God. Only an Artaudian act of cruelty would allow them to feel again, live again, and be again—even if only for the spectacular moment of their deaths, in total rebellion against their plight. The possibility for such release is fleeting and quickly denied. Willie fails to reach her; his act is incomplete. Winnie responds with clichéd expressions in a “mondaine” tone and “her” song, “I Love You So,” a duet from The Merry Widow. Here, Winnie is at her most unoriginal and mechanical—her song is a music box tune—as opposed to Willie’s spectacular, desperate endeavor of superfluity and passion. Winnie ultimately preserves her cherished words from disintegration by destroying Willie’s theatrical gesture and inscribing it within her narrative. Order is restored. Another happy day will undoubtedly follow.

Outside of Winnie’s torrent of words, the divine operates as a capricious, inhuman force, and sexuality is something dark, threatening and intractable. Happy Days is cruel in its theatrical excess of saturated images and affects. In my full-length paper I discuss the dramatic techniques that engender cruelty, especially its dehumanizing irony and anti-sentimentalism, thus foregrounding turbulent, uncontrollable forces instead of characters’ psychology.
Winnie fantasizes about darkness and destruction, for the “happy day to come when flesh melts at so many degrees and the night of the moon has so many hundred hours,” [7] but then qualifies her wish for the purgation of a fiery death: “I do not mean necessarily burst into flames, no, just little by little be charred to a black cinder.”[8] She inscribes death into her stabilizing narrative, removing its finality and arbitrariness. Winnie muses, “There always remains something. (Pause.) Of everything.”[9] Her burned parasol will return the next day, her medicine bottle will become whole again, and Winnie herself will never melt, only fade into oblivion little by little, like those “unforgettable lines” she cannot remember. Rather than committing a theatrical act of total rebellion, which is ephemeral, unrepeatable, and singular, Winnie guards against the plague of the theater, theater as an overwhelming, disruptive force and harbinger of chaos, and the suffering of being. In the end, Winnie and Willie fall into silence; the effects of her linguistic violence are irreparable and the play ends with a cruel sense of the impossibility “to break through language in order to touch life”.[10]

Works Cited
Alpaugh, David J. “Negative Definition in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.” Twentieth Century Literature 11.4 (1966): 202-210.
Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and its Double. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958.
Beckett, Samuel. Happy Days. New York: Grove Press, 1961.
Carey, Phyllis. “The Ritual of Human Technē in Happy Days.” Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett. Ed. Katherine H. Burkman. London: Associated University Presses, 1987. 144-150.
Gontarski, S.E. Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript Study. Columbus: Publications Committee, Ohio State University Libraries, 1977.
[1] S.E. Gontarski. Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript Study, 17
[2] Antonin Artaud. The Theater and its Double, 79
[3] Phyllis Carey. “The Ritual of Human Techne in Happy Days,” 147
[4] Artaud 31
[5] Artaud 29
[6] Alpaugh 210
[7] Samuel Beckett. Happy Days, 18
[8] Beckett 38
[9] Beckett 52
[10]Artaud 13

Artaudian Cruelty (That's so metal)

As I've been working my way through The Theater and its Double, I've constantly been reminded of something that would, at first glance, have nothing to do with theater: metal music. Jarrod is much more of a fan of metal than I am, although I do like Between the Buried and Me and Bulb, but through the shows we've seen together and his frequent introduction of new bands and songs to me, I've come to understand this genre of music better. And I think it exhibits several connections with Artaud.

The Theater of Cruelty, Artaud's theory of theater in defiance of traditional western theater and literature, is an assult on the senses, a dramatic spectacle of metaphysical battles and an exploration of the dark power of freedom. Essential theater plays to all of the senses simultaneously, resulting in a frenzied, trance-like state in which the spectators are liberated and exposed to an intellectuality that goes beyond language and the traditional theater of psychology, which merely explores already-codified anxieties and conflicts. There is something anarchic in the midst of the strict, structured precision of this theater; although every movement must be carried out with almost mechanical accuracy, so that nothing is superfluous or void of meaning, the power of the gestures and sounds brings the audience to the edge of chaos.

Something very similar happens in metal concerts. A dream-like detachment from the body occurs as a response to the overwhelming physical force of the sounds and flashing lights in the darkness of a small room. Artaud's notion of "organized anarchy" is especially applicable to metal, because there is that duality of Apollonian order and Dionysian ecstasy. The music itself can be highly technical, even mathematical in its complex and tightly structured rhythms. Like the Theater of Cruelty, the sheer super-abundance of elements, all inextricably linked together, creates an impression of near-chaos, almost-anarchy. These elements-- guitar, drums, bass, vocals-- all crash against one another in a precise, calculated manner that nevertheless creates that other element of chaos.

In his manifesto on the Theater of Cruelty, Artaud is adamant about the elimination of the stage. Rather than perpetuating this notion of art as separate from life, that the life on the stage must be hermetically isolated from the life outside the theater, Artaud posits that the spectators should be enveloped by theatrical action. The fourth wall is nonexistent in Artaud's theater, and the only "sets" consist of the very costumes and props carried or worn by the actors. Most of the metal shows I've been to are in small venues, so the barriers between individuals in the crowd, and between audience and performer are often transgressed. The concert is not contained only to the stage, but infiltrates the entire building; the performance extends everywhere and the crowd is unknowingly transformed into performers themselves, responding to the music and creating a sort of communal dance which is impossible to fully escape. Musicians occasionally jump from the stage into the audience, or pull audience members onto the stage.

At first, I was frustrated because I could barely understand the lyrics of metal songs, but after reading Artaud, it's more apparent to me that the voice is used more as an instrument to contribute to an overall thematic effect than as a clear transmitter of words. Artaud's ideal theater liberates the mise en scene (everything apart from the written text, which Artaud claims is everything that is essentially theatrical: props, costumes, gestures, sound effects, lighting, etc.) from the hegemony of the text. Speech is not eliminated in Artaudian theater, but it does not serve its usual function of describing emotional states and psychological or social conflicts. Artaud explains that "it is not a question of suppressing the spoken language, but of giving words approximately the importance they have in dreams" (94). Words spoken in dreams may be completely incomprehensible upon waking, but within the context of the dream, this distorted language is efficacious. The same is true of the growling vocal technique often used in metal, which distorts the words. The intonation becomes more expressive than the words themselves; a primal scream or guttural roar contributes far more to the mood of the song and the performance than an abstracted description of anger, aggression, or ecstasy.

That intonation, in metal and in Artaud's notion of pure theater, expresses something dark, cruel, and dangerous; the two art forms are connected thematically as well. Artaudian theater must furnish "the spectator with with the precipitates for dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, poure out, on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior" (Artaud 92). Metal music often picks up these themes as well, especially in several sub-genres like death metal and black metal. The imagery, band names and song titles (such as Cannibal Corpse or "Hammer-Smashed Face"), and lyrics often center around the very themes that Artaud attributes to pure theater: humanity's taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, a sense of danger. The most important theme for theater is that "we are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads" (Artaud 79). This is the type of cruelty, danger, and metaphysical that Artaud promotes; the only way to recover life's value is to be made aware of how precarious our situation is, how little humanity counts in a vast, inhuman universe. Metal music is not perhaps always so eloquently existential in its lyrics, but this sense of dangerous forces is most certainly present. Taken in isolation, the lyrics are sometimes flat-out absurd; take, for example, Cannibal Corpse's "Shatter Their Bones": "Putrid foul zombies make their ghastly approach / A dreadful horrid feeling sets in / Scrambling for weapons, an attempt to defend / Against a gruesome horde of the undead." The zombies in this song are, perhaps, a return of the repressed, an indication of western society's alienation from death and the inherant horror the living have of the dead.

To me, these essential themes are most evident, not in the words (which I cannot immediately comprehend), but in the mood created by all of the elements of the performance. This sense of fear and danger cannot be fully captured in a recording; one needs to feel the bass and the drums reverberating through one's body and experience the indescribable sort of anxiety and euphoria that this sensation induces. Likewise for the Theater of Cruelty; a script can tell virtually nothing about the true theater, because theater does not lie in the words, anymore than the full experience of music resides in the score. It's in the mise en scene that theater exists, in the present creation of gestures that can never be repeated in precisely the same way, the aggregation of all the sensory elements so interconnected that one experiences them all simultaneously and throughout the entire body as a snake is lulled by the vibrations of a charmer's horn.

Both Artaudian theater and metal music are efficacious only to the degree that they can enact on the audience's senses. They appeal directly to the senses, but there is obviously something of intellectual value in both; the cultural tendency to avoid the topics that these two art forms discusss indicates their importance, their necessity to give expression to these forces that surround us and, perhaps even more frightening, within us.

The World's a Stage

I've written a lot about love in these posts on Swann's Way, but a larger, recurring theme for In Search of Lost Time is the interaction between art and reality. This is, of course, manifest in Swann's Way as well, and not only in Swann's comparison of Odette to a Boticelli painting.

Characters often do and say things for the sake of aesthetic effect-- not necessarily out of a genuinely held belief or feeling. Odette's friends the Verdurins epitomize pantomimed emotions, in their case for entertainment. For example, Madame Verdurin puts on a show of intense physical reaction to music (swooning, short of breath, painful headaches), although she knows virtually nothing about music and Swann claims that she has poor taste. She intends to entertain, to amuse, and, most of all, to create her own eccentric and distinct character, as the epicenter of such amusements. Her husband devises a way to create the impression of laughter without actually laughing, for the same purpose of creating his own character. Whenever a guest makes a witty reparte, Mr. Verdurin pretends to choke on his cigar with suppressed laughter. He is not actually laughing or choking, but he began this performance in emulation of his wife's show of suppressed laughter, to "one-up" her. These two pantomimes in particular recall Lacanian psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek's analysis of things "deprived of their malignant property" and other objects devoid of their essential substance: decaffeinated coffee, nonalcoholic beer, fat-free ice cream, virtual sexuality without human contact or intimacy. Zizek's point is that these are all elements of a virtual reality, a sort of aestheticized and ironically detached existence. And to draw a connection to Baudrillard, this is simulacra, in which the essence-free copy becomes more real than the original. In the case of Mr. Verdurin, his feigned laughter more effectively communicates his amusement and geniality than real, genuine laughter would. Art supplants reality, fiction is truer than truth.

Throughout Swann's Way, characters deliberately disguise their feelings, often by putting on these exaggerated "dumb shows." Ironically, such overacting stems from a desire to show emotion with a subtle, artistic flair. Again, Zizek provides some insight; virtual reality permits everything, but everything is deprived of its dangerous element that constitutes its essence. Emotional intensity, in Swann's Way, is permitted but only when presented as an ironically detached pantomime of emotion. The result is a circle of intimate friends, whose interactions are wholly devoid of honesty. Everyone at the Verdurins' parties is required to wear a particular mask, and if a guest departs from the strict script which Madame Verdurin imposes on her parties, that guest is promptly declared a "bore," mocked, and never invited back. She prides herself that everyone at her gatherings is natural and open, but the underlying truth is that such openness can only occur within the rigid boundaries of her aesthetics. Swann's frankness is rejected and he loses favor with "the faithful" (the regular dinner guests) for not surrendering completely to Madame Verdurin's demands, for not complying with her script. The real honesty and frankness of Swann are aesthetically repugnant, in comparison to the affected, stylized interactions among the Verdurins and their guests. In "Combray," Swann does adopt an air of detachment and refrains from stating any opinion without the shield of irony, but this is a rather different aesthetic than the overwrought pantomimes in vogue at the Verdurins.

This preference for stylized frankness (honesty without honesty) extends beyond the Verdurins and their faithful. Francoise, the maid to the narrator's Aunt Leonie, feels compassion for those most remote from her, such as the hypothetical sufferer of labor pains in a medical encyclopedia, but she becomes cold when faced with the reality, such as the kitchen maid who was acutely suffering those labor pains. Similarly, the narrator himself says that "none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a real person arouse in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys and misfortunes" (Proust, 116). In other words, emotion can only be experienced indirectly, detached from the physical reality and immediacy of the individual or the circumstances and supplanted by an aestheticized portrait formed in the imagination.

Throughout Swann's Way, and I expect this to be true of In Search of Lost Time as a whole, there is tension between reality and art, the world of physical experience and that of creative imagination. The two must interact; no one can live entirely in fantasy or in unreflective experience. But the two are also antagonistic, and more often than not in Proust, imagination, ideals, and narratives overpower experienced reality. At the end of "Swann in Love," Swann laments that he has "wasted his life" on Odette, on the images he had formed of his mistress and the aesthetic experience of living solely for love, wallowing voluptuously in the realm of untempered emotions. I'm not sure how the narrator will handle this, since he seems more able to synthesize reality and fantasy in a way that illuminates both, but Swann does serve as a parallel for the narrator's experiences. Disillusionment is certainly on the near horizon.