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PARTISAN REVIEW
ences for certain sexual actlvltles, for certain styles in other people, for
particular rhythms of behavior, for particular systems of thought) . Repeated
and sublimated, desire thus creates personality.
Theater can offer us the extraordinary luxury of briefly destroying this
entire process. We can now see that the violence of the theater which Artaud
proposes to us is not only a question of patricide (or matricide) and deicide.
The theatrical scene that is not subordinated to a literary text can also brush
aside the hard-earned knowledge of the world as more than a performing
space for my own identity. Theater reobjectifies desire, and when its scenes
coincide with those of the spectator's own desiring imagination, it is as
if,
for a moment, he had recovered the happy illusion that his desires literally
possess the world. Furthermore, in an essentially nonverbal theater no longer
retelling stories already told in literature, we may also enjoy a loss of the
continuities which our verbal fictions have discovered in (or imposed on) our
desires. Psychological continuity thrives on the frustration of desire; desire,
duplicated and sublimated in ideals and mental faculties, organizes a self.
The victims of this process are the fragmentary, the accidental, the periph–
eral, the discontinuous. The scenic finality of theater allows for the reinstate–
ment of a heterogeneous multiplicity of desire. A mass of memories and
fantasies no longer have to be sacrificed to the structural harmony of charac–
ter. Theater is the privileged esthetic space for structurally unassimilable
desires.
But the indulgence of those desires obviously entails certain brutalities.
To reemphasize the fragmentary and the discontinuous is to fracture , to
wound the self. We undermine a psychological unity which we no longer
think of as an inescapable psychic fate but which has performed the far from
negligible service of providing us with an identity in the world. Representa–
tions of discontinuous impulses express partial selves; the person is dismem–
bered by the very fertility of its resources. And in our exuberant fusion with
those scenes which offer themselves, literally, as the theater of our desires,
we may also become more readily disposed to violate
any
otherness in the
external world. Consciousness liberated from the restrictive continuities of
character may also be consciousness abandoned to the brutal
if
illusory
omnipotence of masturbatory fantasies. The deconstruction of character in
contemporary theatrical experiments is a complex adventure. Desiring
impulses no longer contained by conscience or by a sense of responsibility
toward one's own coherence are perhaps even more ferocious than the
vengeful desires sanctioned by conscience. Some of these experiments (I'm
thinking especially of Robert Wilson, Joe Chaikin, Peter Brook, and Charles
Ludlam) have in fact found strategies to tame a desiring imagination which
