Intro & Preface & Contents
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From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...
Chapter 4 - The Castle of Murders
Antonin Artaud.
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It had been advertized as a “tête-à-tête with Antonin Artaud.” and the overflow audience packed into the small Paris theater on January 24, 1947, gaped in wonder. On stage was one of the most storied figures of the pre-war Parisian avant-garde. A decade before, the actor and artist had announced his plans to create a new kind of drama, a new type of theatrical performance -- a display of delirium designed to “stir up shadows” and to spark, as if by contagion, “a spasm in which life is continually lacerated,” convulsing the spectator “with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism pour out, on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior."
That night in 1947, something like Artaud's improbable plans for a “theater of cruelty” came strangely, disturbingly to life. Only a few months before, he had been a patient in a psychiatric hospital in Rodez; for most of the previous decade, he had been continuously confined in various mental institutions. He had not performed in public since 1935. Nobody knew what to expect.
The actor read poems. Even his closest friends could understand little of what Artaud was saying: hermetic, strange, his incantations boiled with visceral rage. “The anchored mind,” he declaimed, “screwed into me by the psycho-lubricious thrust of heaven is the one that thinks every temptation, every desire, every inhibition..."
p95
The man on stage would not let his audience ignore his pain, his suffering, his nine years of psychiatric confinement, the more than sixty convulsive shock treatments he had been forced to undergo.
"If there had been no doctors there would never have been any sick people,” he raved on. “Death too must live; and there's nothing like an insane asylum to tenderly incubate death.” “War will replace the father-mother.” “There rises again the old warrior of the insurgent cruelty, the unspeakable cruelty of living and having no being that can justify you."
Repeatedly, he fell silent. He seemed lost. Repeatedly, he started over.
And so it went for almost three hours, hands flying, words tumbling, silent pauses creating a mounting sense of apprehension.
Then, an accident; in a sweeping gesture, Artaud knocked over the papers he was reading. Stopping, he bent down to retrieve the manuscript. His glasses fell off. He dropped to his knees. Groping blindly, he searched for his poetry.
"We were all in extreme anguish,” one old friend later recalled. “He told us afterward that the void in the room made him afraid."
"Partial panic convulsed the audience,” another spectator remembered.
Sitting in the front row was André Gide, at seventy-eight the dean of French letters. From his seat, he tried to show Artaud where his manuscript had fallen.
It was no use. Slowly, unsteadily, the actor, as if suddenly a broken man, lifted himself up and sank back into his seat. “I put myself in your place,” he said, “and I can see that what I tell you isn't at all interesting. It's still theater. What can one do to be truly sincere?"
The show was over. With the help of a neighbor, Gide rose to his feet, walked on stage, embraced Artaud, and guided him to the wings. It was Artaud's last public appearance, fourteen months later, he was dead.
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The questions raised by Artaud's “tete-a-tete” are the questions at the heart of Foucault's first great book -- Folie et deraison ("Madness and Unreason,” re-titled in English as Madness and Civilization).
Was the great actor simply out of his mind? Or -- bizarre idea -- was he, as Foucault would imply, a modern prophet like Nietzsche's Zarathustra?
As André Gide later recalled, the audience leaving the theater that night “remained silent. What could they say? They had just seen an unhappy man, fearfully shaken by a god."
André Breton lamented the exploitation of a pathetically sick artist. Another writer deplored “the atrocious bad taste in the exhibition of such misery."
Gide, however, concluded that it was Artaud's finest hour: “Never before had be seemed so admirable to me."
He certainly seemed admirable to Michel Foucault. As he suggested in countless allusions and references throughout Madness and Civilization, Artaud was a figure of daimonic heroism, an artist who embodied a new way of knowing. He had conveyed his uncanny genius through the modern alchemy of poetry and drama, convulsively [ !! ] expressing his apparent madness in a singular work, precisely in Blanchot's strong sense -- and particularly on that night in 1947. Improvising a unified performance that breached the boundaries between acting and being, artifice and uncontrollable impulse, Artaud had put his mind to the test, unforgettably evoking for his audience, as Foucault later put it, “that space of physical suffering and terror which surrounds or rather coincides with the void."
This was in the local newspaper recently and I immediately thought of Artaud and Foucault. I'm going to quote it in full:
Mike Daisey is currently in the middle of a run at the California Shakespeare Theater in Orinda. He’s taking on four of Shakespeare’s tragedies on four consecutive nights; the second week of his run is Thursday through Sunday. Last week, I saw his “Hamlet.”
It was not his most finished work; a few of his threads kind of dangled off. But with Daisey, everything is a work in progress. He works from notes, not a script. He’s a wonderful talker; a wonderful shaper of thoughts. His “Hamlet” was about a whole bunch of things. The Chronicle’s Robert Hurwitt has a review of the show available online if you’re curious for more.
One of the things that his performance delved into was his bouts with depression and suicidal ideation. He tells of being (briefly) placed in a mental institution. And he points out that “To be or not to be” is a very straightforward speech about suicide.
And then he begins talking in the dark, about what the purpose of theater is, and about the allure of death. It was all mixed in. And as he talked, the stage lights got dimmer and dimmer. Eventually he was in complete darkness, his figure silhouetted by the oak and bay trees behind the Cal Shakes stage. And still he kept talking. He kept being a voice in the darkness, reaching out to us, encouraging us to become engaged in the theatrical process, to feel the darkness descending as the hero speaks frankly about suicide.
And right at the end of that, someone in the audience stood up and said, “You’re boring.” And, then, walking out, he yelled, “Hamlet is great, but you’re boring.” Then someone else in the audience yelled, “You had us in the palm of your hand, Mike.” Then the houselights came up, and Daisey laughed.
There’s not much to say about this event in terms of behavior. As Hurwitt tweeted, “Walking out of a show is yr right. Walking out and loudly voicing yr opinion is rude 2 everyone present. Also arrogant.” That pretty much says it. But what interested me more was this: It was a total freak-out. I suspect the heckler may have been a little disoriented by the whole process; Daisey is definitely not standard Cal Shakes fare. Perhaps he expected an academic disquisition on “Hamlet;” I dunno.
But when it got dark, he got panicky. He couldn’t watch anymore. He had some kind of powerful resentment — so powerful that he forgot basic theater manners — and he needed to express it.
We’ve all been to bad theater. We may have been bewildered by the laughter in the audience about something distinctly not funny. We may even have left at intermission, or just plain walked out. But we figure: Different strokes for different folks. Yelling is different; it indicates an intense level of engagement. In other words, the heckler was having a theatrical experience. It was a negative experience, but it was real. It demanded immediate attention. I’ve seen so many shows that were meant to be shocking, and they weren’t. Intercourse onstage, simulated or real? Seen it. Murder? Been there. Rape? Saw that too. Generally, I was not shocked. Attempts to provoke can seem pathetic.
But a demand for introspection in a darkened space? That was too much. Our heckler had to get the hell out of Dodge, and right now. And that’s genuine. When people rioted the premiere of “Le Sacre du Printemps,” they were engaged. The music mattered. A corruption of the form (as they would see it) mattered.
Daisey does intend to provoke. Even when it’s hard on him (he seemed a little shaken after the incident), he does that job. He made the theater come alive.
-Jon Carroll - "And so we heard a voice in the dark"
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