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but plastic and physical. " Now theater is also metaphysical for Artaud, and
what he means by a theatrical metaphysic is another question. It's one that
his own productions never answered satisfactorily, and in his writings–
especially in
Le Theatre et son double-the
metaphysic of the concrete is of–
ten discussed vaguely, and at times it even seems
to
include notions from the
very systems of abstraction which Artaud is apparently rejecting. (I'm think–
ing especially of his attempt to convince his readers that the violent theatri–
cal gesture is also a "disinterested" gesture, as well as of his favorable view
of spectacles which produce sublimation.) But in the present discussion we
can limit ourselves to what I take
to
be Artaud's more authentic, and also
more complexly ambiguous, gesture of rejection. Jacques Derrida has said
that Artaud wants
to
abolish repetition. This is as fundamental a project in
Artaud as it is in Rimbaud. First of all, the subordination of theater to the
literary text makes of theater a mere repetition of literature. Secondly, the
supremacy of verbal language is also the supremacy of a code which depends
on repetition for its coherence.
(Any
code is of course unthinkable without
repetition. In a sense, Artaud's project is obviously absurd, but the devalu–
ation of verbal language has important consequences for the theater. Repeti–
tion can't be abolished, but the psychology supported by rational discourse
can be replaced by a purely scenic psychology already pointed to in the
Il–
luminations).
Finally, Artaud's rejection of psychological theater is the na–
tural corollary of his attack on logical discourse and on literary textuality .
Psychological theater dramatizes self-repetitions which provide the thematic
foundations for a coherently structured personality.
But Artaud's hostility to repetition makes him vulnerable to a type of
analysis which exposes the thematic continuities of his own life. Part of the
inescapable absurdity of the wish to abolish repetition is that the very per–
sistence of that wish, and its various modulations, subvert the content of
Artaud's project: he continuously repeats the project of abolishing repetitions.
And we can be more psychologically specific about this enterprise. The cen–
tral theme of Artaud's life, as Derrida has brilliantly shown, is a horror of all
derivation. The inferior status of theatrical performance in Europe is the re–
sult of theater being considered as merely derived from literature.
It
is never
entirely present to itself; it is always a reminder of its absent and more pres–
tigious source. But this view of the relation between performance and text
could be thought of as a sublimated version of Artaud's more visceral revolt
against his own derivation from his parents. To be born is to be derived; thus
Artaud's extraordinary insistence that his birth was a mistake. For example,
Artaud wrote to Henri Parisot on September 7, 1945:
