Leo Bersani
ARTAUD, BIRTH, AND DEFECATION
Perhaps the most fundamental aspect of theatrical reform in the
twentieth century has been the devaluatiop. of the written theatrical text. And
of course the figure most intimately connected with this project is Antonin
Artaud. "We must be done with this superstition of texts and of
written
poetry," Artaud declared in 1933. What is "this superstition of texts?" The
text is the most respectable aspect of theatrical performance; it is , we might
say, the strictly mental component of theater. The literary text quaiifies the
physical confrontations of theater (confrontations among actors as well as the
spectator's erotic attachment to the actors); it is a reminder that physical
presence is not indispensable to the "essence" of theater. Significantly, Ar–
taud connects the tyranny of the text with the tyranny of the abstract. To re–
pudiate the domination of theater by literature is to reaffirm the physical
immediacy of the theater . And the primacy of the physical means that even
the language of the theater must be different from the language of literature.
Balinese theater was for Artaud the revelation of a theatrical language
in which words would be only one element, and not even the most impor–
tant.
In
the angular poses of the Balinese actors, in the strange rhythms of
their guttural sounds, in their grimaces and calculated muscular spasms, -
in the mysterious fusions of their voices with the sounds of musical instru–
ments, in the " dance" of the geometrical robes which transform the Balinese
players into "animated hieroglyphics," Artaud discovers "the meaning
of a new physical language with its basis in signs and no longer in words."
The physical elements of Western theater are intended to realize a literary
text; they serve that text; essentially, they illustrate and decorate it. The sec–
ondary importance of actual performance in Western theater reinforces our
sense of the inferiority of the concrete to the abstract: the former carries
meaning only to the extent that it reveals the latter. The abstraction is the
gold nugget to be removed from the impure ore of concrete reality. What
Artaud finds most astonishing in Balinese theater, on the other hand, "is
this revealing aspect of matter which seems
to
be suddenly dispersed into
signs in order to teach you the metaphysical identity of the concrete
