Cruelty and Desire in the Modern Theater: Antonin Artaud, Sarah Kane, and Samuel Beckett by Laurens De Vos (review)

Laurens DeVos engages in a formidable task in this study: proving that not only are Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty concepts more easily seen in theater production than most critics claim, but they can also be explicitly found in the works of two more generally well-regarded playwrights—Sarah Kane and Samuel Beckett. To do so, he continually displays how all three artists "launch an attack on the subjectile of language" (171) in both their theories (for Artaud) and their scripted works by highlighting how language can actually work against understanding. De Vos argues three major claims in this book. First, he seeks to prove that these three "share a common worldview that is structurally embedded in their work and that is reflected in their ideas of what literature should convey and on what language can and cannot do" (26). Second, he claims that proving Kane's influence by both Artaud and Beckett helps "determine more easily the degree of Beckett's Artaudian sensibility" (26). Finally, he argues that Artaud's Theater of Cruelty ideas, which focus on moving away from a dependence on the written word, are "not altogether anathema to the literary genre of tragedy" (26). This approach results in a study that combines theater and literary theories with linguistics and psychoanalysis in a way that makes these varied disciplines accessible without reducing them to overly simplistic generalizations.

De Vos begins by examining Artaud's writings through the lens of psychoanalysis to determine how the artist's hostility to the written word mirrors critical thinking and attempts to place these critical discourses in the theatrical realm. Artaud's hostility toward Western theater, De Vos argues, stems from the fact that it has rejected those characteristics that make it inherently unique as an artistic medium. "Not only has the theater abandoned the staging of pure life forces," De Vos writes, "it has taken the novel as its model in that it felt obliged to stage a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Only what could be narrated was appropriate for the theater" (29). In a move that separates this book from many others that have examined Artaud's work, De Vos then places Artaud's concerns about theater in comparison to several psychoanalytical views of thinking in such a way that the reader may easily understand the concepts and connections that De Vos makes to psychoanalysis and literary theory without needing a comprehensive knowledge of either field.

Lacan's psychoanalytical views of development (and its relationships among the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real) become a major argument for Artaud's attempt to return theater from its current literary constraints to the pre-Oedipal stage of development that would allow the artist to circumvent the necessity of the written word as meaning-maker and image-creator. From the very beginning, society's emphasis on the word creates a worldview that Artaud can no longer shape as his own. "To begin with, he is given a name, and thus categorized and labeled from his first moments. The name Antonin Artaud defines him, and raises expectations he must live up to" (39). No matter what we do with our lives, our very name and genealogy place certain restrictions or freedoms on us, for example the benefits or stigmas that would come from being a member of a wealthy family or having the surname Hitler. De Vos then focuses on Artaud's nontheatrical works to demonstrate how this struggle against the dictatorship of language enveloped all aspects of Artaud's life and how they relate to the playwright's views on family, God, defecation, sexuality, bodily organs, and repetition. Freud and Derrida appear sporadically in these views, but De Vos makes it apparent that he considers Artaud as a (perhaps) unwilling advocate of Lacan's views. De Vos further argues that the Theater of Cruelty can...