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  • Cruelty and Desire in the Modern Theater: Antonin Artaud, Sarah Kane, and Samuel Beckett
  • Sung Hee Choi
Laurens de Vos. Cruelty and Desire in the Modern Theater: Antonin Artaud, Sarah Kane, and Samuel Beckett. Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011. Pp. 255. $75.00 (Hb).

Cruelty and desire are two lines that cut centrally through modern theatre. In this book, De Vos reveals how Artaud’s theatre of cruelty shares its metaphysical roots with the Lacanian concept of the real and traces the evolutionary trajectory that Artaud’s theatrical inheritance took in the works of Sarah Kane and Samuel Beckett. The first chapter, “The Inner World of Antonin Artaud,” is devoted to explication of Lacan’s threefold axis (the symbolic, the imaginary, the real) and its relation to Artaud’s basic concepts, such as cruelty, plague, and double. Artaud, who wanted to be a god in the genesis of new theatre, aspired to break the chains of the symbolic order and become a pre-human or even inhuman autonomous being by realizing and experiencing the real in the theatre.

The second chapter, “Madly in Love: Sarah Kane,” offers a thorough analysis of three of Kane’s plays: Phaedra’s Love, Cleansed, and 4.48 Psychosis, illustrating (1) how Artaud and Kane both rely on the power of uncompromising passion/love to get to the absolute truth, where the signifier and the signified, body and soul, are united; and (2) how Kane’s later works, as distinguished from her early plays (for example, Blasted), full of blood and goriness, are closer realizations of the spirit of the theatre of cruelty, which revolves around the protagonist’s unmediated jouissance and her or his unrelenting quest for the divine real.

In the last chapter, on Beckett, “Neither the Voice, Nor the Void,” De Vos maintains that, while Kane’s dramaturgy is a true successor of the theatre of cruelty in terms of its relation to language and to the ultimate goal of doing theatre, Beckett breaks radically with Artaud’s illusion of unity and accepts that repetition is the only choice left for us. Referring to Žižek, who emphasizes that the real is not some kind of pre-symbolic reality but “an excess” or “a lack” produced by the very process of symbolization, De Vos argues that “the relationship between the symbolic and the real is a dialectic one in which their mutual exclusion to coexist does not prevent them from being dependent on each other to exist at all” (207). So, the endless repetition of representation (which is destined to fail) is the only way to [End Page 569] hint at and evoke the real among us. As a result, in Beckett’s theatre, “the Real is tantalizingly close, but can never be grasped . . . It is always called back to the conventions of terms and representation” (200). The repetition compulsion that afflicts Beckett’s characters renders Beckett’s own playwriting a Sisyphean endeavour in which endless oscillation between separation from and reconciliation with the symbolic is read by De Vos as a Freudian fort/da movement. Beckett saw the imaginary aspect of Artaud’s (mis)recognition of the ego as a whole and wanted us to see that the real is only indirectly and negatively experienced, and is expressed on by its representation, its absence. To be is not to be.

Yet the book’s conclusion is not pessimistic. De Vos maintains that, like Echo, who is condemned to repeat the voice of the Other (the symbolic) but who still has a relative freedom to edit the message and vent her feelings for Narcissus, theatre can somehow manipulate what is prompted by the Other as it ventures into the space between the symbolic and the real. His conclusion explains the mystery of the anachronistic structure of this book, which ends with Beckett instead of Kane, who never gave up Artaud’s impossible dream, both on and off the stage. Contrary to Artaud’s and Kane’s obsession with the pre-symbolic past, Beckett’s endless fort/da movement between symbolic voice and void throws us into the future, keeping us in a constant state of becoming.

Gogo and...

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