Against Interpretation (24 page)

It is because this is not admitted, or generally understood, that one reads all too frequently the statement that while
Marat/Sade
is, theatrically, one of the most stunning things anyone has seen on the stage, it’s a “director’s play,” meaning a first-rate production of a second-rate play. A well-known English poet told me he detested the play for this reason: because although he thought it marvelous when he saw it, he
knew
that if it hadn’t had the benefit of Peter Brook’s production, he wouldn’t have liked it. It’s also reported that the play in Konrad Swinarski’s production last year in West Berlin made nowhere near the striking impression it does in the current production in London.

Granted,
Marat/Sade
is not the supreme masterpiece of contemporary dramatic literature, but it is scarcely a second-rate play. Considered as a text alone,
Marat/Sade
is both sound and exciting. It is not the play which is at fault, but a narrow vision of theater which insists on one image of the director—as servant to the writer, bringing out meanings already resident in the text.

After all, to the extent that it is true that Weiss’ text, in Adrian Mitchell’s graceful translation, is enhanced greatly by being joined with Peter Brook’s staging, what of it? Apart from a theater of dialogue (of language) in which the text is primary, there is also a theater of the senses. The first might be called “play,” the second “theater work.” In the case of a pure theater work, the writer who sets down words which are to be spoken by actors and staged by a director loses his primacy. In this case, the “author” or “creator” is, to quote Artaud, none other than “the person who controls the direct handling of the stage.” The director’s art is a material art—an art in which he deals with the bodies of actors, the props, the lights, the music. And what Brook has put together is particularly brilliant and inventive—the rhythm of the staging, the costumes, the ensemble mime scenes. In every detail of the production—one of the most remarkable elements of which is the clangorous tuneful music (by Richard Peaslee) featuring bells, cymbals, and the organ—there is an inexhaustible material inventiveness, a relentless address to the senses. Yet, something about Brook’s sheer virtuosity in stage effects offends. It seems, to most people, to overwhelm the text. But perhaps that’s just the point.

I’m not suggesting that
Marat/Sade
is simply theater of the senses. Weiss has supplied a complex and highly literate text which demands to be responded to. But
Marat/Sade
also demands to be taken on the sensory level as well, and only the sheerest prejudice about what theater must be (the prejudice, namely, that a work of theater is to be judged, in the last analysis, as a branch of literature) lies behind the demand that the written, and subsequently spoken, text of a theater work carry the whole play.

The connection between theater and psychology.
Another ready-made idea: drama consists of the revelation of character, built on the conflict of realistically credible motives. But the most interesting modern theater is a theater which goes beyond psychology.

Again, to cite Artaud: “We need true action, but without practical consequences. It is not on the social level that the action of theater unfolds. Still less on the ethical and psychological levels.… This obstinacy in making characters talk about feelings, passions, desires, and impulses of a strictly psychological order, in which a single word is to compensate for innumerable gestures, is the reason … the theater has lost its true raison
d’être.
”

It’s from this point of view, tendentiously formulated by Artaud, that one may properly approach the fact that Weiss has situated his argument in an insane asylum. The fact is that with the exception of the audience-figures on stage—M. Coulmier, who frequently interrupts the performance to remonstrate with Sade, and his wife and daughter, who have no lines—all the characters in the play are mad. But the setting of
Marat/Sade
does not amount to a statement that the world is insane. Nor is it an instance of a fashionable interest in the psychology of psychopathic behavior. On the contrary, the concern with insanity in art today usually reflects the desire to go beyond psychology. By representing characters with deranged behavior or deranged styles of speech, such dramatists as Pirandello, Genet, Beckett, and Ionesco make it unnecessasy for their characters to embody in their acts or voice in their speech sequential and credible accounts of their motives. Freed from the limitations of what Artaud calls “psychological and dialogue painting of the individual,” the dramatic representation is open to levels of experience which are more heroic, more rich in fantasy, more philosophical. The point applies, of course, not only to the drama. The choice of “insane” behavior as the subject-matter of art is, by now, the virtually classic strategy of modern artists who wish to transcend traditional “realism,” that is, psychology.

Take the scene to which many people particularly objected, in which Sade persuades Charlotte Corday to whip him (Peter Brook has her do it with her hair)—while he, meanwhile, continues to recite, in agonized tones, some point about the Revolution, and the nature of human nature. The purpose of this scene is surely not to inform the audience that, as one critic put it, Sade is “sick, sick, sick”; nor is it fair to reproach Weiss’ Sade, as the same critic does, with “using the theater less to advance an argument than to excite himself.” (Anyway, why not both?) By combining rational or near-rational argument with irrational behavior, Weiss is not inviting the audience to make a judgment on Sade’s character, mental competence, or state of mind. Rather, he is shifting to a kind of theater focused not on characters, but on intense trans-personal emotions borne by characters. He is providing a kind of vicarious emotional experience (in this case, frankly erotic) from which the theater has shied away too long.

Language is used in
Marat/Sade
primarily as a form of incantation, instead of being limited to the revelation of character and the exchange of ideas. This use of language as incantation is the point of another scene which many who saw the play have found objectionable, upsetting, and gratuitous—the bravura soliloquy of Sade, in which he illustrates the cruelty in the heart of man by relating in excruciating detail the public execution by slow dismemberment of Damiens, the would-be assassin of Louis XV.

The connection between theater and ideas.
Another ready-made idea: a work of art is to be understood as being “about” or representing or arguing for an “idea.” That being so, an implicit standard for a work of art is the value of the ideas it contains, and whether these are clearly and consistently expressed.

It is only to be expected that
Marat/Sade
would be subjected to these standards. Weiss’ play, theatrical to its core, is also full of intelligence. It contains discussions of the deepest issues of contemporary morality and history and feeling that put to shame the banalities peddled by such would-be diagnosticians of these issues as Arthur Miller (see his current
After the Fall
and
Incident at Vichy
), Friedrich Duerrenmatt (
The Visit, The Physicists
), and Max Frisch (
The Firebugs, Andorra
). Yet, there is no doubt that
Marat/Sade
is intellectually puzzling. Argument is offered, only (seemingly) to be undermined by the context of the play—the insane asylum, and the avowed theatricality of the proceedings. People do seem to represent positions in Weiss’ play. Roughly, Sade represents the claim of the permanence of human nature, in all its vileness, against Marat’s revolutionary fervor and his belief that man can be changed by history. Sade thinks that “the world is made of bodies,” Marat that it is made of forces. Secondary characters, too, have their moments of passionate advocacy: Duperret hails the eventual dawn of freedom, the priest Jacques Roux denounces Napoleon. But Sade and “Marat” are both madmen, each in a different style; “Charlotte Corday” is a sleepwalker, “Duperret” has satyriasis; “Roux” is hysterically violent. Doesn’t this undercut their arguments? And, apart from the question of the context of insanity in which the ideas are presented, there is the device of the play-within-a-play. At one level, the running debate between Sade and Marat, in which the moral and social idealism attributed to Marat is countered by Sade’s trans-moral advocacy of the claims of individual passion, seems a debate between equals. But, on another level, since the fiction of Weiss’ play is that it is Sade’s script which Marat is reciting, presumably Sade carries the argument. One critic goes so far as to say that because Marat has to double as a puppet in Sade’s psychodrama, and as Sade’s opponent in an evenly matched ideological contest, the debate between them is stillborn. And, lastly, some critics have attacked the play on the grounds of its lack of historical fidelity to the actual views of Marat, Sade, Duperret, and Roux.

These are some of the difficulties which have led people to charge
Marat/Sade
with being obscure or intellectually shallow. But most of these difficulties, and the objections made to them, are misunderstandings—misunderstandings of the connection between the drama and didacticism. Weiss’ play cannot be treated like an argument of Arthur Miller, or even of Brecht. We have to do here with a kind of theater as different from these as Antonioni and Godard are from Eisenstein. Weiss’ play contains an argument, or rather it employs the material of intellectual debate and historical reevaluation (the nature of human nature, the betrayal of the Revolution, etc.). But Weiss’ play is only secondarily an argument. There is another use of ideas to be reckoned with in art: ideas as sensory stimulants. Antonioni has said of his films that he wants them to dispense with “the superannuated casuistry of positives and negatives.” The same impulse discloses itself in a complex way in
Marat/Sade.
Such a position does not mean that these artists wish to dispense with ideas. What it does mean is that ideas, including moral ideas, are proffered in a new style. Ideas may function as décor, props, sensuous material.

One might perhaps compare the Weiss play with the long prose narratives of Genet. Genet is not really arguing that “cruelty is good” or “cruelty is holy” (a moral statement, albeit the opposite of traditional morality), but rather shifting the argument to another plane, from the moral to the aesthetic. But this is not quite the case with
Marat/Sade.
While the “cruelty” in
Marat/Sade
is not, ultimately, a moral issue, it is not an aesthetic one either. It is an ontological issue. While those who propose the aesthetic version of “cruelty” interest themselves in the richness of the surface of life, the proponents of the ontological version of “cruelty” want their art to act out the widest possible context for human action, at least a wider context than that provided by realistic art. That wider context is what Sade calls “nature” and what Artaud means when he says that “everything that acts is a cruelty.” There is a moral vision in art like
Marat/Sade,
though clearly it cannot (and this has made its audience uncomfortable) be summed up with the slogans of “humanism.” But “humanism” is not identical with morality. Precisely, art like
Marat/Sade
entails a rejection of “humanism,” of the task of moralizing the world and thereby refusing to acknowledge the “crimes” of which Sade speaks.

*   *   *

I have repeatedly cited the writings of Artaud on the theater in discussing
Marat/Sade.
But Artaud—unlike Brecht, the other great theoretician of 20th century theater—did not create a body of work to illustrate his theory and sensibility.

Often, the sensibility (the theory, at a certain level of discourse) which governs certain works of art is formulated before there exist substantial works to embody that sensibility. Or, the theory may apply to works other than those for which they are developed. Thus, right now in France writers and critics such as Alain Robbe-Grillet
(Pour un Nouveau Roman),
Roland Barthes (
Essais Critiques
), and Michel Foucault (essays in
Tel Quel
and elsewhere) have worked out an elegant and persuasive anti-rhetorical aesthetic for the novel. But the novels produced by the
nouveau roman
writers and analyzed by them are in fact not as important or satisfying an illustration of this sensibility as certain films, and, moreover, films by directors, Italian as well as French, who have no connection with this school of new French writers, such as Bresson, Melville, Antonioni, Godard, and Bertolucci (
Before the Revolution
).

Similarly, it seems doubtful that the only stage production which Artaud personally supervised, of Shelley’s
The Cenci,
or the 1948 radio broadcast
Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de Dieu,
came close to following the brilliant recipes for the theater in his writings, any more than did his public readings of Seneca’s tragedies. We have up to now lacked a full-fledged example of Artaud’s category, “the theater of cruelty.” The closest thing to it are the theatrical events done in New York and elsewhere in the last five years, largely by painters (such as Alan Kaprow, Claes Oldenberg, Jim Dine, Bob Whitman, Red Grooms, Robert Watts) and without text or at least intelligible speech, called Happenings. Another example of work in a quasi-Artaudian spirit: the brilliant staging by Lawrence Kornfield and Al Carmines of Gertrude Stein’s prose poem “What Happened,” at the Judson Memorial Church last year. Another example: the final production of The Living Theater in New York, Kenneth H. Brown’s
The Brig,
directed by Judith Malina.

All the works I have mentioned so far suffer, though, apart from all questions of individual execution, from smallness of scope and conception—as well as a narrowness of sensory means. Hence, the great interest of
Marat/Sade,
for it, more than any modern theater work I know of, comes near the scope, as well as the intent, of Artaud’s theater. (I must reluctantly except, because I have never seen it, what sounds like the most interesting and ambitious theater group in the world today—the Theater Laboratory of Jerzy Grotowski in Opole, Poland. For an account of this work, which is an ambitious extension of Artaudian principles, see the
Tulane Drama Review,
Spring 1965.)