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Performance and Madness: Modes of Correction and the Theatrical Ruse! CHRIS FLEMING Once the mimetic has sprung into being. a terrifically ambiguous power is established ; there is born the power to represent the world, yet that same power is a power to falsify. mask, and pose. The two powers are inseparable. -Michael Taussig (42-43) Christopher Durang's absurdist comedy Baby with the Bathwater dramatizes a number of episodes in which the audience is subjected to repeated displays of grossly dysfunctional parenting. In the first act of the play we witness proud new parents, Helen and John, attempting to make their new child act "normally " and be cheerful. In so doing, they resort to various methods of coaxing, coaching, and castigation: HELEN Smile, baby! DOTH (Angry.) SMILE! SMILE! SMILE! SMILE! HELEN (Pleased.) Oh, John, look, it's smiling. JOHN That's right, baby. HELEN Do you think it's just pretending to smile to humor us? JOHN I think it's too young to be that complicated. HELEN Yes, but why would it smile at us when we shouted at il? JOI·IN I don't know. Maybe it's insane. HELEN I wonder which it is. Insane, or humoring us? (23) The crux of Helen and John's dilemma is also the central focus of this paper and can be introduced by a number of related-questions: Does the child have a mental condition or is it just acting? Is this pathology or strategy? Is it mad or just playing with them? The aim of this essay is to trouble some of the presuppositions on which these questions are most likely predicated: it will seck to Modern Drama, 44:4 (2001) 383 CHRIS FLEMING problematize the stability of the opposition between "madness" and "acting" on which such decisions are repeatedly founded. A WAY IN: "SANITY AND THE RESTORATION OF BEHAVIOUR" Towards the end of Susan Sontag's novel The Bene/actor, the narrator reflects on his life and concludes that he could not have been mad, because his life has been a series of decisions that - despite their idiosyncrasies - cannot be mistaken for evidence of mental pathology. The issue of my sanity cannot be easily dismissed, but after long consideration of the matter, Ihold that Iwas not insane. Call it eccentricity if you like - but do not explain it away. The acts of the eccentric and the madman may well be the same. But the eccentric has made a choice, while the insane person has nOI[....] (272) Likewise, for Shoshana Felman, what characterizes madness is "not simply blindness, but a blindness blind to itseif[.. .J" ("Madness and Philosophy" 206; original emphasis). The will of Sontag's narrator proclaims to have not been blind to itself. A predominant conception of madness, exemplified by the reflections of Sontag's narrator, holds it in opposition to voluntarism: the mad person has lost the requisite distanciation in consciousness that allows him or her to be both subject and object to themselves. The mad have lost, in other words, the capacity to perform. By "performance," I simply mean what Richard Schechner refers to in his influential essay "Restoration of Behaviour": a cultural mode of corporeal and psychic action, founded on the central feature ofdistanciation. As soon as adisjunction is made or perceived between an "actor" and a"role," the mode of performance is invoked. Schechnerincludes a wide spectrum of cultural activities in this notion of perfonnance: shamanism, theatre, trance, exorcism, psychoanalysis . performance art, ritual. All of these activities share a relative awareness of distance between role and person: restored behaviour is the main characteristic of performance. The practitioners of all these arts, riles, and hcalings assume that some behaviours - organised sequences of events. scripted actions, known texts. scored movements - exist separate from the performers who "do" these behaviours. (35) Schechner suggests that it is precisely the separation of act and actor, via the mediation of tacit or explicit "scripting," that allows for the transmission of various forms of ritual, theatre, and gesture. The passing down of the texts introduces a split in consciousness that allows the performer to be separated from the performance. Taken in this sense, perfonnance has profound connections with agency, in...

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