Artaud and His Doubles

Chapter 7 : Controlling Forces

chapter 7 : Controlling Forces Michel Foucault invokes Artaud in Madness and Civilization as a visionary artist whose “courage” in the face of his “ordeal,” as Foucault frames it, represents a personal and poetic protest against the absence of a coherent reality and the inability to create. Coming as it does near the end of his study of the institutionalization of the insane, Foucault’s passage on Artaud ’s words “hurled” against the “void”—“all that space of physical suffering and terror” (287)—also suggests a social and political protest against the way the insane have been restricted, pathologized, and institutionalized . But Artaud’s work is not just a protest; it is also a program. If Artaud’s “ordeal” expresses a horror of authority, it is not because he wants to eliminate power, but because he wants to wield it. As if in an attempt to counteract the chaos and powerlessness that Foucault describes, Artaud constructs his own kind of limiting structure—the Theater of Cruelty —that aims to shape and control. The Theater and Its Double proposes a theatrical experience in which the performance “imposes” (28) itself upon its spectators. The terms Artaud uses to describe the goals of the new theatrical event reinforce this in every essay. The Theater of Cruelty aims to “fascinate and ensnare,” “arrest ,” “benumb” (91), “hypnotize” (83), and “immerse” (125). It works toward a “genuine enslavement” (92), a “magnetism” (91). It is “hallucinatory ” (121), “spellbinding” (91); it will “impel” (31), “engulf” (96), “attack” (86), and “crush” (83). It seeks to know, as an acupuncturist, “at what points to puncture in order to regulate the subtlest functions” (TD, 80). It wants to “enchain” the spectator, and to do so, the production must know “where to take hold of him” (TD, 140). These terms and images are not synonyms, but they point toward the same fundamental conception of the performance as a one-directional event, a system of control and coercion . The Theater of Cruelty would be the realization of an apparatus that would make people experience the vision of the world its creator had. Enacted in the space of his imagination or on the stage, Artaud’s ideal the159 ater represents the convergence of the pathological and the political in a single vision of power. This is not the place to delve into Artaud’s madness or his personality —as porous as the boundaries become when speaking about him as a director—but to examine The Theater and Its Double’s ideas about the controlling figure of power. We do this first through a discussion of Artaud’s directing practice. Second, through crowd theory, we see the political implications of such a discourse that, in 1930s Western Europe, was promoting itself as “beyond” politics. Artaud employs the most autocratic language articulated by early directors and goes even further: his discourse finally moves outside of “art” altogether. As we have seen, the double of Artaud’s audience is the crowd. This chapter uncovers the double of his director: the demagogic crowd leader. While Artaud’s rhetoric unfolds within the context of a theatrical event, examining its underlying gesture brings us to an understanding of the impulse propelling that event. This chapter demonstrates how Artaud ’s staging goals for The Cenci and his description of the function of the director in The Theater and Its Double parallel a discourse on leaders and crowds with specific echoes in the interwar era. What Artaud calls for with the Theater of Cruelty is the re-creation of the dark maelstrom that the director sees as the truth of life, enacted on the bodies of others. The Theater of Cruelty is, at its heart, an exercise of power. Directing The Cenci Artaud’s writings, particularly those of the 1930s, are marked by their preoccupation with sanguinary figures of power.1 In 1931, Artaud adapted Matthew Lewis’s novel The Monk, the story of a depraved man of the cloth who satisfies his brutal desires on the bodies of others with literally satanic force.2 Heliogabalus, Artaud’s 1934 fantastic account of the ruthless Roman emperor, overflows with extravagant descriptions of sexual debauchery, political manipulation, and grisly murders. And in 1935, under the aegis of the Theater of Cruelty, Artaud produced his adaptation of The Cenci, in which he himself played the lead character of Count Cenci, a historical figure notorious for terrorizing his family, defying the pope, and considering himself above any law: “I believe myself to be and I am a...