hAARAT/SADE
217
is
not, ultimately, a moral issue, it is not an esthetic one either. It is an
ontological issue. While those who propose the esthetic version of "cruelty"
interest themselves in the richness of the surface of life, the proponents
of the ontological version of "cruelty" want their
art
to act out the
widest possible context for human action, at least a wider context than
that provided by realistic art-that wider context being what Sade calls
"nature" or what Artaud means when he says that "everything that acts
is
a cruelty." There is a m\?ral vision in art like
Marat/Sade,
though
clearly it cannot (and this has made its audience uncomfortable) be
summed up with the slogans of "humanism." But "humanism" is not
identical with morality. Precisely, art like
Marat/Sade
entails a rejection
of "humanism," of the task of moralizing the world and thereby refusing
to acknowledge the "crimes" of which Sade speaks.
I have repeatedly cited the writings of Artaud on the theater in
discussing
Marat/Sade.
But Artaud, unlike Brecht, the other towering
theoretician of twentieth-century theater, did not create a body of work
to illustrate his theory and sensibility.
Often, the 'Sensibility (the theory, at a certain level of discourse)
which governs certain works of
art
is formulated before there exist
substantial works to embody that sensibility. Or, the theory may apply
to
works other than those for which they are developed. Thus, right
now
in
France writers and critics such as Alain Robbe-Grillet
(Pour un
nouveau roman),
Roland Barthes
(Essais critiques),
and Michel Foucault
(essays in
Tel Quel
and elsewhere) have worked out an elegant and
persuasive anti-rhetorical esthetic for the novel. But the novels produced
by the
1touveau roman
writers and analyzed by them are in fact nowhere
near so important an illustration and exemplification of this sensibility
as
certain films, and, moreover, films by directors, Italian as well as
French, who have no connection with this school of new French writers,
such as Bresson, Antonioni, Godard, and Bertolucci
(Before the Revolu–
tion) .
Similarly, it seems doubtful that the only production which Artaud
ever 'Supervised, Shelley's
The Cenci,
came close to following the brilliant
recipes for the theater in his writings, any more than did his public
readings of Seneca's tragedies. We have up to now lacked a full-fledged
example of Artaud's category, "the theater of cruelty." The closest thing
to it are the theatrical events done in New York and elsewhere in the
last five years, largely by painters (such as Alan Kaprow, Claes Olden–
berg, Jim Dine, Bob Whitman, Red Grooms, Robert Watts) and without
