LEO BERSANI
449
of concreteness
to
the theater (and to all human experience), for "God's
history
is ...
the history of the Work as excrement."
Artaud, like Rimbaud, forces us to
see
the unavoidable connection
between the deconstruction of charac'ter and violence. Theater is intrinsically
cruel-although for reasons which have little to do with the vague notions
of "necessity," "difficulty," and "appetite for life" with which Artaud
watered down his intuitions about theatrical cruelty. The particular power
of theater lies in its immediately scenic nature. While Rirnbaud had always
to struggle against the conceptualizing tendencies of language, a theatrical
performance can return us at once to visual modes of self-definition. Theater
is the ideal space in which a regression from the structured sublimations of
character can be enacted. No human performance eliminates psychology;
but theatrical performance can return us to a psychology of the concrete.
In what sense is this return violent or cruel?
First of all, theater allows us momentarily to forget the distinction
between the self and the world-a distinction based on the infant's painful
recognition that the scenes of his desiring imagination are internal scenes.
Desire is mental, and therefore abstract, and our capacity for abstraction
depends on our having been forced to discriminate between sensory experi–
ence and the fantasies of desire.
We
can
see
the complicity of language with
this learning process. The most elementary verbal grammar helps us to
systematize these discriminations (I'm thinking, for example, of the dis–
tinctions among pronouns, as well as of the implicit opposition between
concrete and abstract in the difference between the present tense and past
and future tenses), and we of course
use
words to represent-to present once
again-realities no longer or not
yet
present. Thus a nonverbal coincidence
of the self with the world is replaced by verbal descriptions both of what we
perceive and what we
feel,
by the transposition of pictorial desire into narra–
tive fictions. Our fictions express, elaborate, and disguise our desires; they
sublimate desire. They may also be meant to seduce reality into conforming
to desire. Our very willingness to admit the fictive status of our stories about
the world suggests a wish to strike a bargain with the world. More secretly,
we hope that fiction will have an energy sufficient to transform the world
and thus return us to that harmony between desire and reality which would
make fictional narratives obsolescent. Finally, we reflect on the nature of
our fictive scenes and stories, and finding patterns, analogies, themes-in
short, repetitions-in the history of our imagination, we are naturally led
to view that history as the display of a coherent character, Desire, blocked
in its naIve confusions with the world, repeats itself at different levels of
mental activity. A single desire runs through various preferences (prefer-
