Cruelty and Affirmation in the Postmodern Theater: Antonin Artaud and Hanoch Levin

Cruelty and Affirmation in the Postmodem Theater: Antonin Artaud and Hanoch Levin ERELLA BROWN The absence of a chapter on theater in several major books on postmodemism suggest that drama's place in the debate regarding the relations between modernism and postmodemism remains open.' This debate, which centers on the question of whether postmodemism represents a complete break with modernism, or is merely a radicalized form of modernist trends, has apparently been taciturn with respect to the theater. And in the relatively few instances where theater is discussed, the tendency is to reassess the canon of modernist drama in light of postmodem theory, rather than to focus on new postmodem dramatic works.' This situation implies that theater either has not produced · major contemporary playwrights to match the fertility and diversity of modernism (Stanislavsky, Strindberg, Pirandello, Brecht, Artaud, Genet, Beckett, lonesco, Diirrenmatt, and many more), or that we have failed to recognize within modernist theater the advent of postmodemism. The common aspect of these two possibilities points to what makes theater . a special case in relation to its own history. In Theater as Problem, Benjamin Bennett suggests that the lack of a coherent, continuous history of drama results from drama's anomalous position: it exists both within literature, as a literary genre, and outside literature, as a genre dependent for its fulfillment on theatrical performance. According to Bennett, this "openness of dramatic form to its own 'outside' " (p. 258), which resists the organic metaphor of literary form and the idea of uniformity of response, creates a paradox: "Drama cannot have a history, yet must have a history, and is therefore obliged to make - in the sense of to stage, to create in the theater - its OW" history" (pp. 256--57). The apparent discontinuity or pattern of radical breaks that characterizes modem theater is, then, the effect of this openness to an "outside." According to Bennett, dependence on the outside makes the modem theater susceptible to self-extinction, and in order to survive, theater "must unfailingly stay in touch with itself over time" (p. 256). Modern Drama, 35 (1992) 585 586 ERELLA BROWN This risk of a radical break which threatens self-extinction is especially the risk of the avant-garde. As Matei Calinescu observed in his seminal book Five Faces of Modernity, "Typically, the avant-garde, as the experimental cutting edge of modernity, has historically given itself a double task: to destroy and to invent" (p. 275). Noting the exhaustion, or in Calinescu's words, the "unavoidable sterility" of the negative moment in the modernist avant-garde. Calinescu cites Umberto Eco's anticipation of the second, the postrnodern, moment of avant-garde, which is the moment of affinnation beyond negation: "the moment comes when the avant-garde (the modem) can go no further. The postrnodern reply ... consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently" (p. 277). If the task of postmodernism, as many critics have observed, is to bring back representation, the task of theater is also to create for itself a unique and effective space apart from film, on the one hand, and literature, on the other. In view of this observation, perhaps the most fruitful approach to postmodern theater is to merge the two opposing extremes of the modem avant-garde, represented by Bertolt Brecht (who used filmic techniques) and by Antonin Artaud (whose main contribution was to re-mark the line that separates the theater from literature). One possibility for bringing them together is to locate Artaud within Brechtian theater, as does Stanton Garner in his excellent article "Post-Brechtian Anatomies: Weiss, Bond, and the Politics of Embodiment."3 Garner focuses on "the almost obsessive interest in the body as a political unit, its function within the play of political forces, and its role within the contest of subjectivity and subjection" (p. 146). Whereas Brecht "worked to politicize the Lebenswelt, or lived world, rendering its components externalized and subject to configuration and analysis" (p. 148), the post-Brechtians whom Garner discusses exploit the actor's body as "a principal site of theatrical and political intervention" (p. 146). By emphasizing "the...