PASTORAL MAGIC
EPIGRAPH: "We have a winding sheet in our mother’s womb which grows with us from our conception, and we come into the world wound up in that winding sheet, for we come to seek a grave.” – John Donne, Death’s Duel
EPIGRAPH: “Vesuvius clocks all black bells and lava, Niagara clocks that cataract their ticks, old time-weeping clocks with ebony beards, clocks with no hands for ever drumming out time without ever knowing what time it is.” – Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood
EPIGRAPH: “Power lies with whatever thing should be divine, with whatever law stands firm in time by nature ever-natural.” – Euripedes, The Bacchae
EPIGRAPH: “we wander a hall full of doors carrying a memory like a key,
we wander a hall full of mirrors thinking our body is a key…
meanwhile the bird goes nowhere, is nothing but
a paper dream of the exotic in a dream made of wood
while ouside the window
language grows fertile & there’s rain & there’s rain”
-- Spencer Short, “The Hotel Eden"
EPIGRAPH: “Lie back and the body will happen.
If you need to make it proper you must speak.”
-- Mary Szybist, “Again, The Body As Temple”
EPIGRAPH: “I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.” – Sylvia Plath, “Elm”
Theatre is magic.
It turns reality into pixiedust. Or blood. Disney understands this. Fairytales are bloody but Disney makes them pretty through a kind of Tinkerbell alchemy. This is perhaps a necessary re-imagining.
Coleridge took opium and had an interrupted dream. The dream took shape in the form of a sound. This sound has form. The form manifests itself in a pleasuredome which is like a landscape made out of damsel-shaped sentences. There is a synesthesia which is like a hieroglyph dressed up like an Abyssinian maid and set free to wander the icy landscape.
So : Artaud calls for “constant magic (8) which is Bataille forgetting the self while lying beside a woman which is Keats’ romantic adoration of a drawn body which is Coleridge’s synesthesia which is PASTORAL MAGIC.
Pastoral Magic is natural alchemy. It is the world which we inhabit but it is the world from the other side of a screen. The other side is where the magic happens. It is where the hieroglyphs and the totems are drawn.
Totem-ism is magic and pastoral. Most people can only receive an audiences’ benefit from Pastoral Magic because they are unwilling to engage in the necessary separation from a defined concept of “reality.” This separation is necessary for total participation. Total participation requires removal of the screen which requires a consciousness of it which is contrary to the concept of theatre which states that one should forget that one is at the theatre.
One should be aware that one is always already witnessing theatre because all people are always performing a version of themselves through language. This performance is imitative. It is imitative because there is at the base of it the idea of a person. Artaud’s theatre of immersion is a theatre in which the people are not people. All of the people in the Theatre of Cruelty are dolls because they are playing at being people.
Dolls do not have spirits but Bataille wants to privilege the spirit. Keats wants to “pipe to spirit deities” through the silent song of the hieroglyphic figures. Coleridge’s music is like a spirit. If there is a wounded body which is reality is the spirit a salve?
In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche posits that religion is a sickness which “heals” the “sickness” of society by eviscerating the body. Artaud’s plague-theatre does the same thing. So do Bataille’s penises. Is the spirit an immunization or a bloodletting?
Is pastorality the infection? An infection which makes zombies? Undead figures written on an urn destined to proclaim the dead beauty of the never/ever-natural world.
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'
What kind of reality-space do these figures inhabit? They are hieroglyphic bodies, performative language written on a vessel and based upon signifiers that are liberated because they are contained. They can never communicate through anything but gesture. Their story has already been written in their genesis which did not include the creation of a mouth through which to communicate words.
The urn, then, creates its own narrative as an object while simultaneously opening up its narrative because its mode of communication is visual.
Visual communication is a grand gesture. It is kissing the girl without a voice, kissing the dead girl, waking the sleeping girl. It is a gesture that is perhaps made with the mouth but it is not dependent upon it. It requires a body but the body need not be human. A body can be a screen. A body can be reality. Theatre can wound reality because it is an implement of the divine which desires to wound because “reality” disbelieves.
Theatre is the body of The Deities vs. the Mortal Body which is Reality.
Theatre is the implement of The Deities.
The Implement is designed to wound those things which are susceptible to it.
In Kubla Khan there is a dark chasm which is both savage and holy, which creates but which also destroys the surrounding landscape. It is an orifice, a mouth. It is unravaged but it ravages itself. A solar anus, of sorts. Perfect in its purity and subsequent putrefaction.
It putrefies because it is alive but it has been wounded by the dream. A dream intersects with reality. This causes a chasm. The chasm opens up and sends forth a wellspring which floods the sea. The sea is jerking off. The sea is drowning in itself. It creates and annihilates. There is a dramatic reciprocation.
EPILOGUE:
As I attempt to come up with thoughtful sentences to write, I can’t help but wonder: why is Joyelle assigning us this text? After all, we are not theater majors: we’re MFA students. The very medium we practice is shown decided discourtesy by Artaud. He advocates reading a poem once and then trashing it. Well, I don’t know about anyone else in the class, but I don’t want my poems to wind up in the rubbish bin. I want them framed, admired, anthologized, and, obviously, misunderstood. But this kind of veneration points to Artaud’s idea of the “masterpiece,” which is much maligned by him. The indelible work of art is historical, distant: it takes place in the past. What Artaud seems to want is the immediacy of the now and the direct, transfixing quality of the up-to-date present. The great artwork, like Oedipus Rex, is a fixed form. There is nothing that can be done to it: it’s dead. The only way you can admire Sophocles is by eating and regurgitating what all the critics have said before. Well, I’m not so certain that I won’t my poems to be corpses. I don’t want them to be buried. I want them to be on fully display, like a beautiful Oscar de la Renta gown. Likewise, I want them to have mobility, to be able to be put audiences in a trance and attack them from all sides, leaving them in some magical, mystical state that is the utter antithesis of the humdrum personal problems of families, sexuality, employment, &c. But how can I achieve such an inhuman state? How can I apply Artaud’s theater of cruelty to my own poetry?
ReplyDeleteWell, Artaud has a lot of nice things to say about the Balinese theater. Most of his praise comes from their utilization of everything. The magic of the Balinese doesn’t derive from text, but from the folds of the gowns, the pouting lips, and rolling eyes. Artaud refers to all these non-textual, psychical attributes as “gestures.” These pantomimes liberate the theater from the text. Elsewhere, in his first manifesto, Artaud declares an end to the theater’s “subjugation to the text.” Once again, considering our medium, I don’t think we can ever get rid of text. I suppose we could start submitting blank poems, but I didn’t notice any pure white sheets when I browsed this week’s emails. So how we can apply the very psychical, concrete and material theory of gesture to the ineluctable opacity of language. I mean, writing the word “gown” is completely different from actually seeing a gown on stage. The gown on stage will have specific color and fit, while the mere word “gown” – i.e. if I were to read about a lady dressed in a gown in a book -- could be any size and any color. We need to figure out a way to move the nuanced detail of the stage to the poetic medium, because like Artaud’s theater, I want my poems to be a total spectacle.
Well, first off, I think it helps not to employ words like “truth” and “beauty.” I don’t mean to dismiss John Keats, but after reading his poem, I didn’t feel like I was in the middle of a revolution or caught up in a plague epidemic. Rather, I felt somewhat uninvolved. I believe my lack of rapture comes from Keats use of what have now become typical, abstract sentiments. I mean, we hear those words bantered about everyday. Someone says a girl looks “beautiful.” Another someone, a mother, asks if her son is telling the “truth” when he asserts that he didn’t toss her earring out the car window. But what is “truth”? What is “beauty?” I think these ideals suggest Artaud’s masterpieces. Their fixed: dead – not at all applicable to the present. If someone were to bring in a poem declaring that all you needed to know was truth and beauty, some kinder students might pander to it, but not me. I’d say: give me something else, something new, something you discovered.
This is what Arthur Rimbaud does. He takes beauty and breaks it apart. Yes, Artaud seems to have a problem with the 19th-cenutry French poet, and I don’t understand why. Rimbaud is doing exactly what Artaud advocates. He’s taking language and compelling it to “express what it doesn’t ordinarily express.” Rather than perfunctory praise for “beauty,” Rimbaud curses her because he finds her “embittered.” He is destabilizing the predetermined ethos that necessitates beauty be some typical pure, sweet, and clean goddess. By assigning “beauty” a definite attribute (bitterness), he is corresponding to Artaud’s idea of the gesture. In his note on the Marx brothers he points out all the chaos and upheavals that take place: a woman falls over, a man throws himself upon another woman. All this action arrests our attention because we want to know what happens next: what boundary will be transgressed, what hierarchy will be toppled. The idea of endless possibility seems to be the bulwark of Artaud’s theater and it was I find in Rimbaud (though he’s certainly not the only poet). Maybe this is how we can apply Artaud to our poems. We should always be pushing our language to its most extreme manifestation. We shouldn’t settle for basic templates like “beauty” or “truth” but transform “beauty” into an “ulcer on the anus” (Rimbaud’s “Venus Anadyomene”). We shouldn’t be afraid to explore language using the utmost ruthlessness and violence.
ReplyDeleteLastly, Carina mentioned Tinkerbell, and I have to expand upon Tinkerbell, because I think she’s very applicable to Artaud’s theater as well. In the movie, Tink never says a word. She is all gesture. We know she’s upset by the way she crosses her arms, pouts, and makes fussy little noises. This places Tink in the same company of the Balinese theater. She is employing all her attributes. Her skimpy green dress signifies all sorts of trouble and mischief. Tink tries to get the Lost Boys to murder Wendy -- a violent act that would certainly earn Artaud’s esteem. She knows limits, and she’s actually unrestrained, because Tink can fly.
ReplyDeleteWendy, contrariwise, probably would receive no praise from Artaud. She can’t fly, though she can talk. Pan even says, after spending some time in the company of Wendy, “Girls talk too much.” Here, Wendy becomes the play that’s subjugated to the text: relying only on words and leaving all her other faculties dormant. She is not the total spectacle. She is the dead, one-dimensional masterpiece. That’s why Tink wants to murder her. She knows what Wendy represents: the idea of motherhood, which is bound up in the real, preexisting, hierarchal, heterosexual society. Tink and Wendy are rivals. Tink is Artaud’s theater sprinkling her pixie dust on things to make them fly, to liberate them from the encumbrances of the human world. Meanwhile, Wendy is the human. She leaves magical Neverland to become a mother and continue the very un-hypnotic human race.
I'll be honest, I can't find my Artaud at the moment, so some of this comment is going to be remembered rather than with my book open in front of me. I'll be back once I find it, though.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, a little on Carina's ideas on Disney and such: What I find so interesting about the transformations that Disney takes on in comparison to the transformations that Seth is advocating for (violence, newness, something that evolves truth and beauty out of their staidness) is that they both endeavor to take on an emphasis on spectacle/singular focus on spectacle (probably true mostly for the Disney). The magical theater they take on constantly exists as a vehicle for change, transformation, but their ends so entirely opposite. The Disney movies, I think, move toward maybe more of a Keats-y idea of beauty and spectacle--despite the fact that the kiss literally animates the girls in these movies, their animations/transformations lead them all to the same end and to the same ideas of beauty and romantic truth each time. Conversely, we see Artaud praise the Balinese theatre for its physicality, for its vividness, which relies so much on an individual experience of it, that it seems to me that perception can’t be duplicated even if the theatre can.
Granted, I wasn’t a Disney kid and I’m pretty certain I saw my first Disney princess movie at some age like 20, so if there are differences that aren’t superficial between them to be found without the lens of cynical adult, they’re lost on me. My experience of them is basically the same girl each time, perhaps slightly differently colored so that we all might find one to relate to. And this is the magic that they rely on, what transforms them from tragedy to fairytale, but also what strips them of their animation/interest/Artaud/Seth ideal. Before these transformations, they have a hope for some kind of interesting tragedy that Artaud might go for: pricked by a spindle? That’s really weird. Shacking up with dwaves? Very weird. And fascinating in their repose. Etc. But this is stripped in favor of the romance spectacle, the beauty spectacle, etc. Stripped in favor of the kind of swirling magical gesture necessary for them to meet their predestined end. It seems the same for Keats’ Urn as well: the beauty here is timeless, something that after each generation is gone remains the same, remains reliable in its beauty.
I’m thinking about this in relationship to what I remember to be Artaud’s fear of repose, his need for the theatre to be different each time, for actors to perform even slightly differently instant to instant. The fear of repose seems to be the same as the anxiety that I think I have about the idea of imitation here. We are all imitating the idea of what it is to be x person, etc., and the idea of experiencing theatre through a newness in gesture seems antithetical to repose, though we also have this idea that imitation is constant (and imitation seems the same as repose to me), so what does this do to theatre? It makes it a place where imitating the imitating becomes some kind of “truth” through this slight change in gesture on behalf of the actor?
I really can’t say enough how much I appreciate all of Artaud’s conversations on the nature of gestures and the power of poetry/theatre/all art in the act of inversion; everything about this book has an eye towards chaos, towards disrupting the ‘repose’, and after a lot of thought I think I’ve settled onto thinking that this is a Good Thing. I was skeptical at the outset, honestly. Skepticism is my default approach towards just about everything, it tends to get me to the most interesting questions (i.e., a urinal in a gallery, skepticism gets you to the real fun of ‘Is this A-art?’, etc.). So, I was skeptical; after all maybe repose isn’t such a bad mode? If everything rests on agreeing with Kafka that good art takes an axe to the ice flow within us all, we should think about how necessary and productive that violence is. I felt in agreement when realizing that at the very least, this sort of violence / disruption / inversion will always bring one to a question or judgment, even if what in the end is more valued is a return to the familiar repose—at least one can say they considered something different. So, intrinsic value to this chaos—sure, I’m on board. Tear the form and it’s significations from each other? Absolutely, start packing in the gunpowder.
ReplyDeleteLike many I’m sure, I’ve often by blown away by a poem that seemed (not entirely unlike the Solar Anus) to create (perhaps better served to say ‘discovered’?) associations that I not only would have ever imagined but will then surely never forget. The anxiety of influence has a kind of generative pressure in this way in that when something like this comes out of the network of textual gestures on the page, it has all the more vitality to it, seems all the more rare and admirable. So all the repeated conversation in these ‘essays’ that encourage such things in theater are certainly equally admirable to my mind.
Like Seth, though, my aforementioned skepticism wasn’t ever satisfied by Artaud’s attack on the masterpieces. This ‘debate’ seems all over the place nearly anywhere one looks and as usual I’m left feeling that there not only should be more of a middle ground but that it’s what feels like the best attitude to hold. It feels like poor creative ‘work’ to either dismiss the masterpieces solely for being perceived as being masterpieces or to blindly worship them. Whatever strangely anonymous yet all-encompassing democratic process produces them aside, artwork is artwork, and both arguments feel like flimsy justifications to not have to deal with those works.
Artaud’s dismissal of works that simply ‘don’t speak’ to whatever current times one happens to live in feels to me to be packed full of a lot of assumption. It’s dismissing whatever sublime power those works may hold to others, which to me is at least as bad, arguably worse than praising a work based on its elected status. He seems to rely a lot on talking about centering works on themes ‘for our current, present epoch’ yet do any of the ‘approved’ themes listed in his second manifesto seem like they are unique to any single stretch of time? Of course not. I simply don’t follow whatever logic he leans on here. I felt like he was arguing his point much better when relying on notions of things produced in the current vernacular, though as I’ve discussed already I find that a problematic idea as well; for instance, a flashmob-play breaking into a scene from Hamlet in a NYC street corner certainly seems like it would disrupt the ‘repose’ of the morning commute.
ReplyDeleteWhat really worries me is Artaud’s obsession with the public and the ‘needs of the time’; this feels like a philosophy to me that comes into existence instantly standing on a very slippery slope towards worshipping the lowest common denominator of public popularity. Should all theater strive towards the popularity of a Michael Bay movie? the Twilight novels? What I’ve just said is open to criticism of elitism but again what I really feel I would champion would be not just an embracing of some kind of grey area between these idealistic tics but a dismissal of the conversation altogether; the world needs both ends and everything in between, and obsessing over which to strive for feels like its missing the point.
When I first read the title of this book, theater and its double, I immediately was reminded of two things: first, Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and simulation and second, Charlie Kaufman's New York Synecdoche. Needless to say, this book turned out to be something very different from what I expected. However, the early expectation I unconsciously formed by this connections prompted me to keep thinking about certain topics: artifice vs. nature(whatever that means) and representational art vs. well, everything else.
ReplyDeleteArtaud approaches the issue of artifice in different terms and different attitude. In the preface “The Theater and Culture”, Artaud writes that “Culture is devised to tyrannize over life” (7) and that Civilization is “an applied culture controlling even our subtlest action, a presence of mind” which produces the civilized man to be “identifying acts with thoughts” instead of “deriving thoughts from acts” like “a monster” does(8). By setting up the civilized and the monster oppositional, it first seemed the artifice (which I related to civilization and culture) and nature seem to be exclusive. Also, Artaud seemed to be resenting the prescriptive nature of Culture and Civilization and identify that characters of culture and civilization to what he calls “Occidental” theater where “theater lives under the exclusive dictatorship of speech”(40). Relating my reading of the preface to his analogy of Plague and feelings that penetrate actors in theater where there is no material destruction, benefit or relation to his real condition, and to the analogy of a victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames, I expected his idea of true theater to be with least amount of control or more “natural” than artificial”. However, Artaud asserts that Oriental theater, especially Balinese theater, is superior to “Occidental” theater because it utilizes everything on the stage instead of letting spoken language dominate the theater, and does so in precise manner that is mechanical, turning face in to masks, an artifice.
This was an intriguing point, for the kind of communication he advocates, the “signal” from the burning victim, the “gesture” seem to not only be indeterminate in its semantic meaning-- the true nature of poetry and language that people often neglect in daily life for convenience—but also in its origin/source of agency. Indeterminate artifice – especially when it takes material form like stage and actors—can sound like an oxymoron; material artifice has to be created through the authorial intention, under precise control that derives from interior aesthetics, no? Also, in order to communicate through such speech-less materials instead of speech-language, it seems that the clarity of authorial intention should be readily supplied to the viewers to prevent confusion and multiple meanings material forms can represent. It is important to point out, as we talked about in the discussion, that the line that divides passive or active role in the kind of theater Artaud is describing can be blurry. The trance, terror eliminates the line between conscious acting and hallucination, auditorium and stage, and perhaps, actors and audiences for magic identification occurs—“it is we who are speaking”, the burning on the victim is creating a signal through the body and/or the spectators is creating the signal through the eyes.
ReplyDeleteThis lead me to question of how artist should position oneself in the process of creation under this idea of art, and, well, what one can do. Artaud writes, “unconscious furnishes images at random” (81) ; then, what does precision even mean? How do we create an art that “directly affects brain” like the painting of Lot and his daughters by Lucas Van Leyden or Marx Brothers’ work (35)? I assume it can only be done through the constant making of works that will eventually develop the intuition of nightmare-imagination and hallucinations and detach oneself from the aesthetic that you somehow believe to be interiorized in you. As you can tell, the answer to this question still isn’t appearing clear to me, as Artaud intended not to be I believe.
Another article I thought of while reading this book was “Artifice and Absorption” by Charles Bernstein. In today’s world, it became natural for artists to imagine the analysis and reception, consciously or subconsciously and the trained readers as well. Artaud seems to reject the art that is analyzable, it has to be unanalyzable with the language of logical discursion. It, to me, seems safe to say that he is advocating absorptive work instead of anti-absorptive, self-aware, self-psychoanalyzing works. My question regarding this is that how the collective hallucination is achievable when many (Western?) viewers are so accustomed to the convention of self-aware/anti-absorptive reading of art works and resist absorption. To the ones accustomed to this convention, wouldn’t hallucination seems isolating instead of involving? (I’m speaking out of my experience of terror and confusion I felt when I first attended the church service where people speak in tongue, cry, and faint; it just was jarring, terrifying and isolating experience. I could not bring myself to be part of it) This question I also don’t expect to be answered.
ReplyDeleteI’d like to start my post by applauding Carina’s video/visual representation of Artaud, especially in representing this idea about cruelty: “… the Theater of Cruelty will turn upon the preoccupations of the great mass of men, preoccupations much more pressing and disquieting than those of any individual whatsoever.” (p. 87) I personally can find nothing more “disquieting” that the Jersey Shore and The Situation. But seriously I found the use of video, poetry and visuals an interesting representation that seems to go to the heart of what Artaud wants for the theater, using all the theatrical tools available to push the boundaries of the expected.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first began The Theater and Its Double, Artaud gave me a firmly nihilistic feel in his aspirations for the future of theater, but as I continued on I thought that he doesn’t want to destroy all the boundaries. He just wants to destroy anything that doesn’t meet his boundaries and ideas of what theater should be. In the first manifesto on cruelty he outlines really specific behaviors and characteristics of theater. It seems the metaphysical theater exists in his romantic idealization of the Balinese and the destruction of his cultural model. His idealization of the Balinese left me skeptical. I couldn’t get past the idea that his reaction to the theater was the reaction of an outsider and the actual meaning communicated was most likely just as culturally confined. But I tried to work past that thought and embrace the spirit of Artaud.
The idea I was able to embrace most fully was the theater beyond the words, beyond language. As someone who enjoys watching TV on mute, this idea is extremely intriguing. Words are often distracting, extraneous or meaningless.
Goffman is one of my favorite sociologists, and I’ve mentioned him before. He created what is known as the Dramaturgical Approach to sociology and it analyzes human interaction in theatrical terms. Artaud’s ideas about non-verbal communication and use of physical space are things that Goffman built his theory on and used in his research.
Depending on the study, approximately 90% of communication comes from non-verbal cues. To think that words occupy only 10% might be distressing to a writer. But for me poetically it also illustrates that the layout of a page is communication. Artaud’s ideas made me think of the boundaries of poetry and how poetry has been affected by his thoughts. Is the non-verbal component of poetry just the page? Should poetry push away from the meaning of words and only concentrate to the sound of the words off one another? Should poetry destroy the page and relocate to the Jersey Shore?
In reading The Theater and Its Double, I couldn’t help but think of Ryan Trecartin.While acknowledging that Artaud differentiates between theater and cinema and warns against comparisons in image because of the limitation of film Trecartin seems pertinent to me because of his use of gesture, magic, conflict, in my brain (99). (In an interview with Vice, Trecartin describes the context for/creation of his work: “We’re creating and participating in a new natural that we know nothing about yet—It’s like discovering fire and aliens at the same time-and not knowing it- I like living and creating in a time of overwhelming transition…”—This seems relevant to our discussion of pastoral magic in that media might work here as a kind of landscape—or the other way around?).
ReplyDeleteAnd while Artaud discusses the enveloping of the spectator in the spectacle of the theater, I do feel as though I become enveloped in Trecartin’s videos (I-Be-Area, for example), as though I am “sharing in a delirium,” which produces/stirs up a sense of “dark power” or crisis—a projected “powerful anxiety” (32, 144). I suspect infection—a (secret?) interior communication enacted—but without turning toward psychoanalysis (here I’m thinking, too, about Ji yoon’s point about hallucinations and nightmare-imaginations—and Keats: whereas Keats’s sense of Art in “Grecian Urn” impels questions or projections but maybe resists the psychological because of its fixedness as an artifact—whose ecstasy is never fully realized, Trecartin’s Art seems to involve or hover near the synesthesic realm of Coleridge’s piece—enthralling, violent—“beware! beware!” Trecartin occupies, too, I think an interesting position as director/creator of spectacle).
Trecartin’s work—like Artaud’s theater—“differentiates itself from speech by using a language addressed primarily to the senses rather than to the mind”—aiming for something “beyond the reach of spoken language” (37-38). In something like Trecartin’s I-Be-Area, language is important (and scripted!)—but words are given, (I think) as Artaud suggests of words in the theater, “approximately the same importance they have in dreams” (94). In this episode/segment, for instance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8fij0LIWgY&feature=related, language isn’t privileged over gesture, color, lights, sounds, repetitions—and their overlapping (here we get the sense of dissonance from/in gesture and intonation, etc.) (125). In discussing the fact that his characters tend to speak in nonsequitors (a kind of imaginative/dream reality?), Trecartin states,
"With media, I’m often much more interested in how it’s translated by people sharing that media, rather than the media itself. I feel like that’s where it exists, between the piece and the sharing of it. So I’ll be inspired by drunk people in a bar talking about a show that they just saw or something. It’s about collecting all these moments of sharing things and having them be in the culture mud, rather than a one-to-one ratio or pointing to different influences. It’s more letting things digest and then feeling the rawness of the vibe rather than a particular articulation of it, then sculpting that out in list form, and starting to write dialogue in a way where the whole room is condensed."
Trecartin is concerned, perhaps, with creating a similar mode of spatiality and immediacy to the one Artaud advocates with the theater (even if we return to something like I-Be-Area multiple times without it changing, there is so much going on that the emotional effects might change (the spectacle is necessarily violent).
I think that Artaud calls for a synesthesia too – especially in his writings on the Balinese theatre. There is such a sense of vigor in his descriptions of how music and movement (of the body) become one gesture and cannot be separated – or how the costume is inseparable from the body (59). I like the idea of synesthetic things – and by things I’m also thinking perhaps along the lines of the way that conscious/subconscious/life/reality/present/past, etc. all blur together in a constant synesthetic experience. Though I do understand Artaud to be speaking directly to the qualities of theatre – I want to expand this idea as it relates to life/writing. Also along those lines – I feel that the only “real” memoir is one that is written with a disregard for chronological time because that is the way that the brain works, ie stream of consciousness as it relates to synesthetic time. If any of that makes sense?
ReplyDeleteI do like the melting of images, and time (compression and expansion) that happens in Coleridge and Keats – and though I do feel that these performances and pieces are (to a certain extent) locked in time – I think that their continual study releases them into new realms of performance in which the poem itself is not taught – perse – but more so reimaged – reperformed – redesigned into a new piece based on the juxtaposition of the current time frame – who is reading it, etc. and this seems so obvious to me but I’ll say it – I’m thinking along the lines of – each person that reads those poems out loud is performing the poem – however the reception will always be different - the audience will always change – there will never the same perceptual experience by the reader or the audience. In these ways I do think that poetry/writing and theatre can go together though it that Artaud is against writing because of its ties to time.
I feel like the magic that is being called for is kind of explosion – as JM mentioned – a body dancing on a pyre. Is it the body dancing? The heat of the fire making the body move? Something more primal than that – such as nerve endings reacting? Etc. I think that the visual of the body is the magic in the sense that there is a constancy of energy and a projection (of energy, physical sparks, etc.) of horror and fascination. I feel like the energy that is happening at the moment is a large part of the inhabitance of magic and that it is the inhabitance of magic – the existence of it – that is what makes for the constancy of it.
I think that the hieroglyphics are immediate in that they will always refuse to communicate something universal but also in that they convey an immediate energy to the person(s) that are interacting with them. There is magic in the gestural energy and the gesture that made it in the first place. I think that it’s also metaphorical for the kind of gesture in Balinese theatre that Artaud – perhaps – was not aware of as – I believe someone said in class – he didn’t understand the Balinese theatre – ie didn’t study the Balinese culture. That being said – I always think that the gesture is mysterious. There is not an answer to the puzzle and there is no way out of the labyrinth. There is a circularity cannot be escaped because the answer itself is the circularity (intellectual paths and signs p. 63 – I wrote: circularity). This is quite tangential right now – but I’ll try to organize my thoughts more and come back…
Sorry this is a bit late; I always have more to say than I expect.
ReplyDeleteI feel like my thoughts on The Theatre and Its Double revolved nicely around (and somewhere in between) Seth’s and Ryan’s thoughts, that is, both skepticism and approval, so that’s where I’ll start.
I have to admit right off the bat that I was one of those people who took drama classes and acted in high school musicals and yet still somehow hated all the theatre kids around me. I’m sorry everyone. Even though I enjoy acting and taking part in the “spectacle,” I’ve never had the sort of wild enthusiasm or fierce devotion or even intense respect (necessary lust/motivation to breathe?) for the theatre that Artaud has. It can certainly be a magical experience but there’s “magical experience” and then there is the sort of all-encompassing, soul-shaking, permanent influence theatre that Artaud believes, and I’ve just never had that experience. Maybe I’ve never seen good enough productions. I have, however, as Ryan points out, had that sort of moving, eye-opening, “blown away” feeling reading certain poems.
Logically, as I was reading The Theatre and Its Double, I developed a sort of dual eye (a fitting metaphor, I think): I was reading the text both as a work of art/metaphysics/personal truth, and reading it as a rather proscriptive announcement of Artaud’s passion and plan for the/his theatre. The bottom line I ended up at was much like Ryan’s, Seth’s, and Trish’s thoughts: that is, Artaud’s passion for the theatre obviously limits his desire to work with or consider works of other mediums, to the point where he makes—what I feel are—some flimsy and bizarrely hypocritical dismissals of the “masterpieces” and of written poetry in general. Like Trish, I didn’t buy into his idealization of the Balinese theatre, and although it may definitely be exquisite and full of the sort of vital motion, the explosion, the frantic plague throes that he feels necessary for good, true living theatre, I think it is all too easy for someone enamored to analyze and ascribe theory and concept to the systems of others. As he says himself, “so much the worse if my enthusiasm carries me away” (142). So, the further I read, the more grains of salt I started taking with it. For me, The Theatre and Its Double is much like the opinion of an enthusiastic talk show host whom I find physically compelling but whose opinions I just never agree with.
For me, at least, it was an argument foremost, and because I stand outside of the theatre (of the idealization, love of, and passion for the theatre), I felt the argument was a fairly shallow one. Yes the theatre can do some truly amazing things which other forms of art typically cannot do—audience involvement being at the top of that list—but Artaud’s inconsistent view, which crops up especially in comparison to written texts, that theatre is the highest of the art forms, the sole art form for immersion and for speaking both to what Carina’s points out as pastoral magic (ancient myths, universal impulses/concerns of man) and what Ryan notes about speaking to our times (the best of the best) just doesn’t sit well with me. Like Ryan, I also want middle ground, and like Seth, I also don’t like the idea of a world where our poetry is read once and then fed through a paper shredder.
ReplyDeleteHaving come across this particular issue before, it’s always seemed like a great failing to me when artists from other mediums fail to recognize the unique traits and inherent value of art forms different from their own. If Artaud’s vision had been achieved and written poetry became a “throw away” excursion, where would we be? Certainly there would be a great deal lost; not only in the canon of poetry which Artaud disdains but in our very ability to express ourselves freely, in a lasting manner, to record and build the Myth basis which Artaud wants all of his plays to use but not be used by. I think everyone in our class would probably say that there is some degree of compulsion in what they do, something natural and pastoral and ancient-magical about translating thoughts on to paper, about the written word, the text. I don’t think I can buy into his world of the theatre at the cost of my own preferred method of expression, immersion, explosion.
I suppose what troubled me most about Artaud’s argument—what kept me most skeptical—was not that actually his dismissal of the masterpieces or of written poetry. Rather, what bothered me the most was the contradictions which seem—to me at least—blatantly obvious. The biggest one is this: Artaud does seem to want that pastoral magic, the return to the great Myths, the “forces of struggle” (85) that make up all the greatest notions of humanity as a whole (Chaos, Becoming, war etc.) Although he does not go so far as to make a definitive list of acceptable myths, we get examples from South American history, from the Greeks, and from Oriental legends. I believe that what he wants—contrary to Seth’s ultimate conclusion—are Keat’s desperate and ultimately abstract Truth and Beauty; he certainly is pushing for something beyond the individual, the “everyday love” and “personal ambition” (85) that plague the modern theatre, the preoccupations of modern interest. He does not seem to care so much about the concrete details, the “real objects” which we can supposedly see in our minds. He wants greater themes, dreams, symbols, the perhaps unintelligible-on-a-primary-level world of the Balinese spectacle.
ReplyDeleteYet he also disdains the masterpieces, and as Ryan points out, seems to have some preoccupation with theatre which “speaks” to our times; he wants the oldest of our beliefs, the primordial Myths, the universal human concerns, but he wants them in the language of our times. Essentially, he wants the masterpieces he disdains, but he wants them in geometric outfits and full of wild symbolic violent gestures—which, he notes, are mechanical and ingrained because they have been part of the Balinese theatre for centuries. Um… what? Like Ji yoon notes somewhere in her comments, this feels like a conundrum to me: surely in the textual masterpieces there are these universal elements, these great Myths he loves, but because they are not full of dramatic motion and sound which was carefully scripted out and planned and played over the course of years (making it the antithesis of natural), they are static and cannot touch us?
It doesn’t help, of course, that he makes a list of pieces everyone will perform, which include: Shakespeare’s lesser known works (because those aren’t masterpieces, so they’re acceptable?) adapted to suit a modern audience, extracts from the Zohar, you know, that masterpiece of Hebrew literature, a piece from the Bible but with a lot of emotion, something taken from the writing of the Marquis de Sade… So basically, we should get all of our new, good theatre pieces from literary masterpieces. Which are “not good for us” (74) and which are “worth reading once, and then should be destroyed” (78). That’s all well and good for the moment, I suppose; we can modernize all the great Myth texts and famous personages and crimes and histories we have, and then we can… well, run out of things to modernize and have nothing on which to base future theatre pieces because we would have given up trying to write textual masterpieces. His suggested practice simply does not add up with his aesthetic of simply working the ancient concerns/Myths into modern voice. His examples are all filtered first through written word or history, through facts recorded first on paper.
Also, converting the Myths and the famous stories into our modern concerns and language has absolutely nothing to do with costuming, as modern costumes should “be avoided as much as possible” (96). The Theatre and Its Double is starting to sound more like a case for Artaud’s personal fetishes than a directed call to action for a decaying art form.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, like Ryan, I can’t lose my skepticism when it comes to his dismissal of the masterpieces, of the past, and of written word. Artaud’s new spectacles need the past desperately, and not just the deep, deep past of the pastoral magic, the primordial concerns of war, creation, chaos. His theatre, by his own examples, needs the very masterpieces he disdains, because they provide the individual human framework his grander vision lacks. They give him not only actions but history, but roles to fill and actors to move 360 degrees around his wild audience chamber. His argument for the great magics, the all-encompassing and not-personal, the un-self-centered crumbles when it becomes obvious that our best ways of relating to these concepts is through the written word. In order to make his new theatre manifest, he first finds it necessary to write down not one but two manifestos.
I’d also like to point out that all of this doesn’t mean that I did not massively, massively enjoy this book. I’ve already gone on too long, but I hope at some point someone takes the time to comment on this book as a written work of art itself, because the translation is noteworthy and the lyrical nature of the text itself would be something to look at. And, like Ryan and Seth both point out, the most compelling and most discussed point here—the need for wild gesture, constant motion, permanent pushing of boundaries, explosion, chaos—is a lesson that, as poets wishing not to create disdainful, static works, we should all dwell on.
“if, since the world began, we had heard all beautiful women call to us in trumpet blasts and greet us like bellowing elephants…a portion of our inner vision of the world would have been radically transformed thereby.” –Artaud
ReplyDeleteIn this quote an understanding of the sign and signified are dependent on temporality. It would be possible to convince an infant (if the whole world was in on the ruse) that beautiful women make elephant sounds. That then would make the lived experiences of the child a living theater, where we know seemingly normal behaviors are performed. If the child entered a space where the ruse was not upheld, they would then enter a performative space that would upend their conception of beauty and horror: the real world would become a theatre to them, with all of the distorting and transformative aspects of the theatre intact.
The types of reversals advocated in this quote used in the context of a theatre performance would diverge from “the virtuality of the possible and what already exists in materialized nature.” I was talking in class about how with his emphasis on the plague, Artaud calls for a move away from life, or the ways in which industrialized society has separated mankind from the spectre of death which is so palpable during plagues, wartime, etc. The reversals of basic facts of life then, might be one way a theatrical text/performance creates a plague of its own, a sort of mystery force emanating from an unknown place.
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Artaud’s disavowal of masterpieces, the classics, seems as much related to a disconnect with the audience caused specifically by time elapsed (later generations misconstruing work due to lack of context) as much as it is related to social class. Masterpieces are “reserved for a self-styled elite and not understood by the general public.” Masterpieces reinforce social hierarchies then, because access to classics was limited.
With all that said I do think it’s foolhardy to dismiss all literature that preceded this text, but as a dramatic text it of course needs this grand statement to maintain its focus.
This idea of desert, judged and meted out by the intelligent nature (of lightening, for example)—determines who gets the plague, not the sacrificed guarding soldiers outside, but the garrisoned royals inside. Is the plague a blessing or no? Did that privileged group incite the receipt of that sickness according to that same porous causal loop Artaud cites in the lunatic whose inflamed wit likely instigates his bubos?
ReplyDeleteIs there a conditional governing moral center within art/theater, or is it haphazard and nihilistic? Pppl as vessels, inert things passively awaiting catalysts? or gesticulating causal agents?
Artaud seems, at various times, to endorse Keats’ ideal of a sublimity in the immutable—or, at least, a kind of permanent suspension, an interminable interim—privileging, over that of the literal murderer’s, the actor’s fury, which “remains enclosed within a perfect circle,” unexhausted (25). And, that the revolt inspired by the theater is only fully effectual if it remains un-acted upon, in a literal sense (28). Then again, Artaud, in his discussion of the masterpiece painting, finds, while in possession of an Intelligence, a lack due to anachronism.
If all freedom is dark, then why not flout all the constraints that would hinder a course of action that is socially/morally/legally base? Why must one exist in a state of only partial, or affected, consciousness, as a prerequisite to engaging in that darkness? If one cannot enter into such acts in the full light of rational consciousness, then one can never really ever Know with any Certainty that s/he is Living according to Artaud’s ideal (what is this?)(theater? freedom through theater? the maker or the receiver of its liberations? and how can we attain, or know that we have attained, those freedoms if they are forged, at once, by deliberation and Master, and, by recession into dreamy virtuality?)