LEO BERSANI
never stop feeling ourselves
in
our inner being,
in
the unformulated
mass of our life, in the substance of our reality, it means not feeling
any essential hole
in
ourselves, any vital absence , it means always feeling
our thought equal to our thought.
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Nevertheless, as far as the consequences for theatrical theory and practice
are concerned, this displacement of perfect presence is enormously impor–
tant. Since in the theater the dramatic text plays the part of the source from
which dramatic performance
is
derived, to abolish the "superstition of texts"
is the first requirement of the theater of cruelty. To .do away with psycho–
logical theater is just as necessary: the presence of the theater's multiple
physical realities has been violated by our habit of translating dramatic per–
formance into the psychology from which it presumably derives. Theatrical
shapes and movements have been the mere "dechet, " the " droppings" of
abstract psychological and moral truths .
To shift the emphasis in theater from the textual
to
the scenic implies a
redefinition of character and desire which would be as radical as that pro–
posed by the
Illuminations.
Although Artaud never discusses his ideas in
the terms I'm now using , his theatrical program is nonetheless an attack on
the very basis of psychological intelligibility in our culture . The notion of a
structured , unified character is inseparable from the phenomenon of deri–
vation and from a willingness to accept that phenomenon. In any coherent
psychological portrait, the unity of personality depends on interrelated traits
which are stabilized by their positions in a hierarchical structure. There are
dominant traits and there are subordinate traits; certain aspects of person–
ality are derived from other aspects; the seWs ' 'extensions" into various acti–
vities both diversify and repeat character. This unifying, hierarchical logic
of personality is easy enough to see in early psychologies of the humors or of
dominant faculties . It is also present, in more sophisticated form, in the
psychoanalytic classifications of character traits as derived from fixations on
different bodily pleasures; and the same unifying logic governs the judg–
mental discriminations about behavior in, for example, the Freudian use of
such labels as "symptoms" and "sublimations."
Now Artaud himself is not very instructive about the consequences of
a rejection of psychological drama. This is pardy because his theatrical prac–
tice (what there was of it) was less original than his speculations about theater,
and perhaps also because his own entrapment in the ideology of presence
would in any case have condemned him to a static, monumental type of
theatrical event . In his tortured struggle with the presence- absence duality ,
Artaud seems
to
have been incapable of imagining a theatrical scene which
