Artaud's Revision of Shelley's The Cenci: The Text and its Double

Abstract

Artaud's Revision of Shelley's The Cenci: The Text and its Double Jane Goodall The plague takes images that are dormant, a latent disorder, and suddenly extends them into the most extreme gestures; the theater also takes gestures and pushes them as far as they will go: like the plague it reforges the chain between what is and what is not, between the virtuality of the possible and what already exists in materialized nature. (Antonin Artaud's The Theater and its Double, p. 27) This image represents the theater as a bridge from the virtual to the actual, a convergence of physical and metaphysical operations. Artaud's metaphors betray an obsessional concern with this physical/metaphysical interface, a concern which drives him in quest of an "alchemical theater," capable of resolving "every conflict produced by the antagonism of matter and mind." His own endeavors to bring about such a resolution through practical work in the theater present a special problem where critical assessment is concerned. At one extreme, critics like Jacques Derrida and Susan Sontag, whose interest in Artaud is exclusively conceptual, are intrigued by the paradoxical phenomenon of "an art without works." Sontag gives a disparaging summary of his Theater of Cruelty enterprise and his production of The Cenci in particular, asserting that his incompetence as a practitioner is "a constituent part of the authority of his ideas"; and she summarizes his achievement as "a singular presence, a poetics, an aesthetics of thought, a theology of culture and a phenomenology of suffering."1 Derrida, having acknowledged that an art without works defies exegesis and leaves the critic without resource, contemplates the aporia of a "metaphysics of flesh" which can produce works only as a form of excretion: JANE GOODALL is lecturer in Drama at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. Her work has been published in Modem Drama and Themes in Drama; she is currently working on a book on the Theater of Cruelty. 115 116Comparative Drama Like excrement, like the turd, which is, as is well known, a metaphor for the penis, the work should stand upright. But the work, as excrement, is but matter without life, without force or form. It always falls and collapses as soon as it is outside me.2 Such an approach to the relationship between work and creator as one of somatic contiguity excludes the possibility of bridging the gulf between physical and metaphysical awareness through the expression of creative impulse in palpable form. But Artaud envisages "matter as revelation," "culture-in-action" (as he declares in his Preface), which is not a material product but a materialization.! In describing the manifestations of creative impulse, Artaud chooses metaphors of eruption, explosion and ejaculation, of transformation, dissolution and apotheosis. The artist is represented as a medium, the center of a psychic force-field. His relationship to the tangible effects of this forcefield —described in metaphors of earthquake, whirlwind, lightning , tidal wave—is never métonymie Alchemy works outside the terms of physical cause and effect. If a concentration on Artaud's metaphysics has tended to lead to the dismissal of his theatrical enterprises as aberration, the reverse has also been the case. Christopher Innes finds Artaud's theoretical writings "positively Delphic in their poetic obscurity" and suggests that this has been "largely responsible for the way his stage work has been ignored or disparaged."4 Innes' decision to regard The Cenci as a work in its own right rather than an attempt to realize the principles of the alchemical theater leaves him unembarrassed by the ontological paradox which Derrida and Sontag find in Artaud's very attempt to give tangible form to his ideas. Innes makes a revealing study of the dramaturgical qualities of the script, which he sees as a framework for mathematically calculated sound and movement patterns, a performance text as distinct from a dramatic text. His preference for a critical vocabulary borrowed from technical subjects (geometry and kinetics especially) is symptomatic of his reaction against what he sees as a misleading emphasis on the abstruse and the abstract in preceding studies of Artaud's work. Certainly he is effective in countering the dismissive appraisals of The Cenci...