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PARTISAN REVIEW
and the abstract." The physical elements of theater don't need the support
of a text in order to be read as meaningful signs. What we must learn to read
in the theater is not the "parent" text from which each production is de–
rived, but rather the irreducible and immediately perceived language of
movement, sounds, shapes, and colors.
The devaluation of the literary text is a subversion of character structures.
Psychology in the theater depends on the subordination of theater to litera–
ture or, more fundamentally, to verbal language. Linguistic structures inspire
and cooperate intimately with psychological strucrures. Perhaps the most
striking example in all literature of an attempt to bypass both types of struc–
ture can be found in Rimbaud. In his effort to reduce or simplify himself to
a series of discontinuous, fragmented scenes-scenes of the external world
which wholly objectify the desiring imagination-Rimbaud develops a sus–
picion of language itself. And this impatience with language is the sign of
Rimbaud's impatience with his own being. His radical negativity involves
a continuous self-repudiation; no present moment is to be responsible to
any past moment. Rimbaudian freedom implies a chimerical escape from any
self-repetitions at all. And if the self is to be entirely without depth or histor–
ical references, its mode of expression must be a succession of nonstructurable
visual "illuminations." Thus, unlike
Une Saison en Enfer,
in which language
tells a story, and unlike the
Derniers vers,
where complex musical structures
both conceal the poet's inner secrets and yet teasingly confirm their reality,
the
Illuminations
are Rimbaud's effort to make language transparent to
the hallucinated scene.
It
is as if he had realized that the particular attention
which poetic language usually requires of us inevitably becomes a lesson in
the strategies by which language constructs a coherent fiction. And coherent
fictions undermine the project of constant self-repudiation: they imply
duration, stability, and repetition. Therefore, in order to escape from the
temptation of structured coherence in the self, Rimbaud must also escape
from his interest in the principal instrument of all sense-making operations
-that is, his interest in language. The
Illuminations
are an attempt to de–
poeticize langUage, to deprive it of any poetic opacity and to reduce it to the
status of an uninteresting, barely noticeable prosaic vehicle which would
never infect the visions it carries with its own (undesirable) orders.
There is a striking parallelism between Artaud' s theatrical manifestos
and the program for poetry-and for being-implicit in Rimbaud's
Illumi–
nations.
Far from suggesting that the physical language of theater should
convey the same type of message as the literary text, Artaud emphasizes that
to end the supremacy of words is to bring about a radical change in the nature
of theatrical sense. To be done with literary masterpieces is to be done with
psychology in the theater. "The domain of the theater is not psychological,
