French Studies, Volume 8, number 1, February 1972, p. 2-108

We always speak of theater while pretending to ignore that, like love, it has the "semblance / Of the beautiful Phoenix if it dies one evening / The morning sees its rebirth". Criticism multiplies obituary articles, soon followed by surveys on the renaissance of theater. But are we always talking about the same thing? It is not enough that an audience and actors be enclosed in a more or less closed place, in the common celebration of a cultural rite, for us to be able to speak of theater. Or rather, if we do so, for lack of finding a more adequate term, we still need to agree. We would like here, to situate Antonin Artaud's dramaturgical conceptions, to relate them to those of Rousseau and Jarry which constitute, it seems, the three essential moments of modern theatrical revolution. After them, the theatrical concept has radically changed. The bird no longer bears the same song, if it still keeps an identical skeleton. To the cult of the text for itself, of dramatic writing, succeeds, perhaps a new cult, the search for an exceptional temporality that is both fiction and reality, a privileged instant where existence ceases to oppose itself to essence to encompass it. Everything begins with a unanimous and global condemnation of "classical" theater, understood as a didactic or psychological ensemble, studying characters, elucidating an artificial situation chosen by a demiurge author whose word, the text, would be conceived as a sacred value, requiring a scrupulous repetition, a frozen enunciation like that of the Bible for the believer. We will not repeat, on this point, Rousseau's argumentation. For him, such a theater is only entertainment, diversion of attention. To the fundamental questions that the individual asks himself about his origins, the reason for his being in the world, his relations with society, a theater thus conceived responds with a vain and flattering game that Jarry reproves "recreation above all, lesson perhaps a little, because the memory of it lasts, but lesson of false sentimentality and false aesthetics (1)". The argument here targets an audience whose senses are quickly satisfied with a certain visual or verbal shimmer, a seductive as well as soporific purr. Artaud refuses a theater whose essential, even unique function is the reproduction of a discourse always similar to itself, where, of course, the spectator, always object, is never subject. Here bursts forth the most vivid denunciation of pseudo-theatrical language which, far from establishing communication, an immediate exchange between stage and auditorium, as it should in any articulated language, and even doubly articulated as human speech is, establishes at most, the semiologist has sufficiently demonstrated, a deferred stimulation (2). We therefore accuse the false communication within the theatrical space, where the author never addresses the spectator directly but uses an interpreter, a lying intermediary who refuses dialogue with anyone other than his partners and, through this fallacious intermediary, targets an abstract entity (the public) as if there were no individuals, beings of flesh and blood in the auditorium, in their irreducible unity! But, even more, we question the vain dramatic discourse which, by a traditional phenomenon in didactic matters, brings the incomprehensible back to the comprehensible, the extraordinary to the ordinary, reduces, that is to say diminishes, shrinks, lowers and renounces the metaphysical, universal, eschatological dimension, which should be its unique object. "And it seems to me that theater and ourselves must be done with psychology (3)." Jarry said no different when he accused the public of the Comédie française and Maurice Donnay of taking pleasure in the spectacle of characters who think like him, and whose everything he understands with this impression: am I witty to laugh at these witty words in the presence of natural subjects and peripeteias, that is to say daily customary to ordinary men (4)! Rousseau had already made a scandal on this subject by showing Racine and Molière constrained to sweeten their thought, to tickle sensitivity to please their audience, and in sum, to flatter morals while pretending to reform them. But it is Jarry who will deal a fatal blow to philosophical and moralizing theater by staging Ubu. In doing so, he went further than Rousseau could have asked: he showed clearly that language is reduced, in the policed societies we know, to demanding phynance: "Popular languages have become as perfectly useless to us as eloquence. Societies have taken their final form: nothing is changed there except with cannon and crowns; and as we have nothing to say to the people except give money, we say it with placards at street corners or soldiers in houses (5)." This is why we will never be done with Language. Perversion and destruction enterprises like Dada are more necessary than ever. "Breaking language to touch life is making or remaking theater (6)." We must attack conventions, make words burst to, beyond, find the first existence, springing from its freedom. Speech has been diverted by the oppressor, blown, as Derrida would say, that is to say palmed off. It belongs to theater to give back to all the use of speech, which is the use of freedom. However, articulated language — the spoken chain, as we say — is not enough for the expression of the individual. It is not the whole of our being. Added to this is gestural behavior and the cry. "How is it that in Theater, in theater at least as we know it in Europe, or better in the West, everything that is specifically theatrical, that is to say everything that does not obey expression through speech, through words, or if you will everything that is not contained in dialogue [and dialogue itself considered in function of its possibilities of sonorization on stage, and the requirements of this sonorization] is left in the background (7)?" Theater will therefore be what gives the collectivity the practice of a unified language, going from cry to articulated message, including all gestures, addressing the senses as well as the mind. This is why a reading of Ubu Roi or The Cenci is impossible. To grasp their global meaning and effect, the texts would have to be annotated like a musical score, and we would have to have learned to perceive them as such. Who will know how to render the physical decomposition where the trap of Father Ubu and the wheel where, panting, Beatrice Cenci groans reduce us? Beyond all sensible appearances, it is appropriate to touch the spectator, to communicate with him through breath. The esoteric knowledge enthusiast that Jarry was would doubtless have understood and approved Artaud for having fought for "an affective athletics" founded on the Kabbalah: "to know the secret of the time of passions, of this kind of musical tempo that regulates their harmonic beating, here is an aspect of theater to which our modern psychological theater has certainly not thought for a long time (8)". But before reaching this physical education of the actor, we would have to have resolved the numerous dualities that theatrical representation poses. And first the two principles that have always opposed literary schools: illusion or reality? "Current theater represents life, seeks through more or less realistic sets and lighting to restore to us the ordinary truth of life, or else it cultivates illusion — and then it's worse than anything. Nothing less capable of deceiving us than the illusion of false accessories, cardboard and painted canvases that the modern stage presents to us (9)." Jarry, already convinced that trompe-l'œil no longer deceived anyone and that the simple representation of reality, in Antoine's manner, was only a superfluous mimesis for the mind, proposed the abolition of the set, which always imposes a vision, that of the author or the director, on the spectator. At most he would have accepted nature-set, which is neither duplicate nor projection of an individual subjectivity. But in a covered place, the absence of any set amounts to showing the wings, the maneuvers of the stagehands to bring a table or a door. The back of the set is still a set, which fixes the spectator's attention. That an actor play the role of a prison door, as was done for the representation of Ubu according to Gemier, this still amounts to distracting the public with a side of the drama. The "heraldic" set, made to harmonize the place with the action, is no more satisfactory. There would remain the naive set, "the set by one who does not know how to paint", approaching the most abstract set by retaining only the essential accidents of the represented place. This is the option chosen by Serusier, Bonnard, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec and Ranson for the sets of Ubu Roi, thus situating the play, according to Jarry's wish, both nowhere and in eternity. Through this representation, Jarry refused theater and its verisimilitude procedures, to reach the universal and the timeless. Not wanting to prefer "one world to another, theater to life or life to theater (10)", he endeavored to associate the spectator with a creative activity that was not diversion. Rousseau, in his effort to suppress the divinity of the author, proposed to the Genevan citizens to compose their dramas themselves, better still, he wanted to give the spectators as spectacle, to make them actors themselves, substituting civic festival for theater. But the example provided, which came back to the crowning of the rose maiden, if it allowed bringing together an entire collectivity in a common celebration, had nothing more to do with Art which is collective effort for surpassing, eternal combat against Death. Theater cannot be limited to a festival, to a game. This is what Jarry seems to answer to Rousseau. In taking up the expression "civic festival", he was already observing in distinguishing two categories of public: the great number who are content with spectacle plays, the minority for whom theater "is neither festival for its public, nor lesson, nor recreation, but action; the elite participates in the realization of the creation of one of its own, who sees living in oneself in this elite the being created by oneself, active pleasure which is God's only pleasure and of which the civic crowd has the caricature in the act of flesh (11)". This distinction may shock good minds who do not easily acquiesce to this "elitist" principle, moreover most often confusing the elite that forms itself through constant struggle with knowledge, and the aristocracy of money or culture that believes it holds everything by right of inheritance. Artaud, in this imaginary dialogue that we are trying to reconstruct, nuances Jarry's formulation: "far from accusing the crowd and the public we must accuse the formal screen that we interpose between us and the crowd, and this new form of idolatry, this idolatry of fixed masterpieces which is one of the aspects of bourgeois conformism (12)". Finally all three agree in wanting, more than the spectator's attention, his own collaboration. Through theater, each must give himself "the active pleasure of creating" (Jarry). But for this, we must unembalm some mummies, destitute certain statues. However, the paradox bursts forth more vividly: without author the crowd indulges in play and not in self-surpassing; before an author, it stands at intellectual attention. Between these two extremes, we must find a work that will be pretext, raw material for a collective creation. But, here again, the author cannot make a definitive work, for then he would risk imposing the cult of the masterpiece. "A spectacle that repeats itself every evening, following always the same rites, always identical to themselves, can no longer include our adherence (13)." We must return to the origins of theater, find the deep meaning, the principle of creation: "And from the synthesis of the complex is remade the first simplicity, uniprimacy that contains everything, like the unsexed being engendering all numbers, portraying of each object instead of life the being or synonyms: the principle of synthesis, the idea of God" (Jarry, on Filiger). As God, according to the Bible, created the universe by seven words, man, to equal himself to the divine principle, must in turn emit the creative breath. Thus is condemned, in advance, any enterprise of the theater-event type that would limit itself to miming reality without creating a new one. More generally it is the repetitive character of the theatrical act that is denied and the author finds himself constrained to create a new work each evening. Mimesis is not sister of Calliope. But since an alchemical or kabbalistic theater is still far from our possibilities, despite the milestones laid by Artaud in The Theater and its Double, we must well find a propaedeutic to this future theater and, at least, rid the stage of its cumbersome rags. Just as the set must abstract itself so as not to impose a univocal vision, the actors, their costumes and accessories will have to situate themselves in an in-between world, a point of convergence between realism and illusion. We must indeed find a compromise that allows the actor, a being of flesh as real as can be, to incarnate a character, illusory double, without however being able to mark the stages of the doubling. We must cease opposing the real place where the interpreters evolve and the fictitious one of the action. Jarry glimpses a solution in proposing to his actors to adopt the mask of the character they represent (and no longer only a comic or tragic mask, as in Greek theater). Thus the puppet, animated from within and not manipulated from the heights of the flies by strings, will be a sufficient abstraction for the public concerned with pursuing creation. All the more so as the games of artificial light provided by the projectors will allow not to fix the vision on a single plane. In addition, the actors, adopting, by such accent, the voice of the role, will complete their character. They will also have to seek a gestural behavior tending to the universal: "Example of universal gesture: the puppet testifies its stupor by a recoil with violence and shock of the skull against the wing (14)." This explains why Jarry condemns the written work for a determined actor: the latter disappeared, the play is no longer playable and cannot inscribe itself in eternity. Artaud, one of the founders of the Alfred-Jarry Theater, will take up these proposals in the brochure The Alfred-Jarry Theater and Public Hostility (itself written by Roger Vitrac): "The characters will be systematically pushed to the type. We will give a new idea of the theatrical character (15)." This formulation will be explained regarding the staging of Strindberg's Dream: "The Jarry Theater would like to reintroduce to theater the sense, not of life, but of a certain truth situated at the deepest of the spirit. Between real life and dream life there exists a certain play of mental combinations, relationships of gestures, events translatable into acts and which constitutes very exactly this theatrical reality that the Alfred-Jarry Theater has set itself to resuscitate (16)." Artaud will see a striking illustration of this in Balinese theater. We conceive, from then on, that certain traditional antinomies are surpassed. That of the author and his characters first of all. Rousseau already denounced this multiplication of the author creating a world with a hundred diverse characters and asking the spectator to identify with them. He was taken up on this point by André Breton: "Imagination has all powers, except that of identifying us despite our appearance to a character other than ourselves (17)." Certainly, it is not a question of playing at creator for pleasure. The author must be guided toward theater by an absolute necessity: "I think there is no kind of reason to write a work in dramatic form, unless one has had the vision of a character that it is more convenient to let loose on a stage than to analyze in a book" (Jarry). Even in this case, the character no longer belongs to the author, no more than to the director or the interpreter. We must melt these old distinctions, surpass them by the advent of the theater-man that Artaud calls for with all his wishes and realizes in his existence. We could not indeed ask for the virile creation of the spectator while forbidding all the animators of the spectacle the same function. In other words, vital activity must be the fruit of the whole theatrical collectivity. An ideal difficult to realize as long as some want to arrogate a preeminence. This is far from being resolved since, even if we arrived at a conjunction of the author, the director, the interpreter and the spectator, we would still need the whole public to be united in the same operation. Now theater, and this is the most serious criticism that Rousseau makes of it, instead of uniting us separates us in the dark auditorium: "We think we are assembling at the spectacle, and it is there that each one isolates himself; it is there that we go to forget our friends, our neighbors, our relatives, to interest ourselves in fables, to weep for the misfortunes of the dead, or laugh at the expense of the living (18)." Even if we envisage a theater other than the one Rousseau thinks of, it is necessary to find common ground for the whole assembled audience. New paradox: the more communication is established between the author, his interpreters and the spectator, the more it dissolves between the spectators themselves. Let us note moreover that all the modifications of the scenic space conceived since Rousseau will change nothing to this axiom. Plunging the public into darkness, transporting it into a natural setting or into a factory hall, putting it at the center of the spectacle, all this will perhaps improve communication, economize losses in transmission, but will always come back to juxtaposing a set of individuals, not to melting them in a collective activity. Even Artaud who makes his spectator the center of all vibrations, spiritual and physical, does not derogate from this. The more we want a collective art, the more it interiorizes itself, except to transform the auditorium into a molecular whirlwind, totally incoherent or, worse, a definitively apathetic ensemble. How to realize a theater that acts, this is precisely what remains to be defined. Let us say it clearly, the civic festival that assumes certain functions of theater is not an art. Certain privileged moments, as in May 1968, may have changed, partially, our life, they are not this effort of surpassing and imagination that we ask of theater. The latter will have to transform the world, change life and at the same time change ourselves. There is no example where these three fundamental ambitions have been achieved. So, while waiting for this decisive moment, we must be content to see in theater a revealing element of ourselves, even if it means rejecting the revolution into a future time. Before reaching a radical transformation of society, "theater is made to empty abscesses collectively" (Artaud). Jarry had understood this by creating his horrifying puppet, our "ignoble double", all charged with our ambitions, our base instincts, our terrors; Artaud too whose theater of cruelty was to materialize our dreams and our anguishes. Thus conceived, theater is indeed a magical operation: to reach the Great Work, we must attain purity. The world can only regenerate through pure beings, having chased the demon that is in them, or more exactly having known how to exorcise it, dominate it and direct it. To this testifies the suffering of Antonin Artaud. Theater will therefore be what succeeds in resolving the contradictions previously noted. Like Jarry, Artaud wants to surpass the couples of opposition: theater or life, illusion or reality, wakefulness or dream, spectator or actor, etc. In sum, he seeks nothing else, and in terms close to Tradition, than this supreme point so magnificently designated by Breton: "Everything leads us to believe that there exists a certain point of the spirit from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low cease to be perceived contradictorily." To parody the latter, speaking of surrealism, we can say that it is in vain that we would seek to Artaud's activity another motive than the hope of determination of this point. We are then astonished that the paths of these two great navigators of the contemporary spirit have diverged so much. Perhaps they should have interchanged, in their vocabulary, the words "theater" and "life". Are they not synonyms? But above all, it was necessary to put on stage this devastating hurricane that is Ubu, it was necessary to declare oneself adversary of theater, as Antonin Artaud did: And now, I will say a thing that will perhaps astonish many people. I am the enemy of theater. I have always been. As much as I love theater, as much I am, for that reason, its enemy (19). Only then will the Phoenix be reborn.

HENRI BÉHAR

1. "Twelve Arguments on Theater", All Ubu, Paris, Librairie générale française, "Le livre de poche", 1962, p. 148.
2. Cf. Georges Mounin, "Theatrical Communication", in Introduction to Semiology, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1970. Agreeing with him to say that "the circuit that goes from stage to auditorium is essentially a circuit (very complex) of the stimulus response type" (p. 92); we will insist, for our part, on the fact that the public's reaction is delayed in a set of ritualized gestures (applause, bravos) or even deferred (criticism, conversation, epistolary exchange about the spectacle or even fictitious dialogue with an absent author). Unexpected prolongations of the representation, which bring us back to communication through this long detour that is life!
3. Artaud, Complete Works, Paris, Gallimard, 1964, t. IV, p. 92.
4. All Ubu, p. 140.
5. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Languages, chap. xx.
6. Artaud, Complete Works, t. IV, p. 18.
7. Artaud, Complete Works, t. IV, p. 45.
8. Artaud, Complete Works, t. IV, p. 157.
9. Artaud, Complete Works, t. II, p. 79.
10. Jacques Robichez, "Jarry or Absolute Novelty", Popular Theater, n° 20, September 1, 1956.
11. All Ubu, p. 148.
12. Artaud, Complete Works, t. IV, p. 91.
13. Artaud, Complete Works, t. II, p. 15.
14. All Ubu, p. 143.
15. Artaud, Complete Works, t. II, p. 46
16. Artaud, Complete Works, t. II, p. 79.
17. André Breton, Point du jour, Paris, Gallimard, "Ideas", 1970, p. 8.
18. Letter to d'Alembert, Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, p. 66.
19. Artaud, December 1946, cited by J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, Paris, Le Seuil, 1967, p. 366.