The Plague and its Powers in Artaudian Theatre

The Plague and its ·Powers in Artaudian Theatre JANE GOODALL Artaud's essay "The Theatre and the Plague" begins with an account of a dream-vision experienced by Saint-Remys, Viceroy.of Sardinia, in 1720: ... he saw himself plague-ridden and he saw the plague ravage his miniature state. Beneath the scourge, the frameworks of society dissolve. Order collapses. He is audience to (it assiste a) every moral deviation, to every psychological debacle; he hears in himself the munnuring of his internal fluids, disrupted, in complete derangement, becoming heavy and gradually turning to carbon in a vertiginous shrinkage of matter. I In "assisting" at this apocalyptic spectacle, the dreamer is essentially in the position of any audience member in the Theatre of Cruelty. He knows the dangers to which he is witness cannot kill him, but he realises too "that the will operates in them to the point of absurdity, to the point of the negation of possibility, to the point of a kind of transmutation of the lie from which you can remake the truth" (T.D., p. 15), and this realisation teaches him to act in defiance of destiny and tum the fatal course of events which was set according to his premonition. His Story illustrates that the powers of the plague are powers of revelation, of alchemical transformation, leading through the nigredo of dissolution towards a new genesis. Artaud describes how volcanic eruptions on the surface of the flesh violate the inside/outside borders which preserve corporeal integrity, as social, psychological and ethical structures implode. "Civilised man" disintegrates in an elemental forcefield that seems to be reversing the process of creation and the more determined his strategies of self preservation , the more directly they contribute to the process of his destruction. It is as though the logic of causality in which he invests all hope of survival is itself subservient to some more deeply laid design requiring his unwitting co- 530 JANE GOODALL operation for its fulfilment. So Artaud tells another story, of how Boccaccio and his debauched companions remain unheeding and unscathed in the open countryside whilst ... in a castle nearby, transformed into a fortified citadel with a cordon of armed men to prevent entry, the plague transforms the entire garrison and its occupants into corpses and spares the men at arms who alone have been exposed to contagion. (T.D., p. 22) Edgar Allan Poe, an acknowledged mentor to the Theatre of Cruelty enterprise, gives amesmeric rendition of the story of the garrisoned company in "The Masque of the Red Death." The victims of the red death are possessed by a force which manifests itself in a horrific transgression of the inside/outside borders in every sphere - social, biological, territorial, existential: No pestilence had ever been so fatal or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal - the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow men.2 Prince Prospero, "happy ... dauntless ... sagacious," remains unaided by the occult counsel of the dream vision and thus unable to read the semiotics of the red death, believing that he can evade it by the very strategies of liminality against which its influence is pervasively manifested. He retreats into a fortified castle with a thousand of his retinue, who -are instructed to solder the bolts on the iron gates so as "to leave means neither of ingress nor of egress to the sudden impulses of frenzy from within." After some months, he proposes to celebrate their privileged sanctuary with a masked ball. Prospero has a fetichistic sense of order and ritual which borders on the pathological, and the appearance of the personified Red Death as the inconceivable climax of his obsessively prescribed ceremony is like the parousia of a formless double which has been coming inexorably to meet, possess and devour him in a flamboyant display of the powers of horror. In Artaudian metaphor, the power base of horror is always...