From Mimesis to Kinesis

22/04/2015 From Mimesis to Kinesis: The Aristotelian Dramatic Matrix, Psychoanalysis, and Some Recent Alternati

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From Mimesis to Kinesis: TheAristotelian Dramatic Matrix,Psychoanalysis, and SomeRecent Alternati

by Ekbert Faas

Ekbert Faas, with doctoral degrees from Munich and Würzberg, teaches humanitiesand English at York University, Downsview, Ontario, Canada. The following articleappeared in Process Studies, pp.88, Vol. 13, Number 1, Spring, 1983. ProcessStudies is published quarterly by the Center for Process Studies, 1325 N. CollegeAve., Claremont, CA 91711. Used by permission. This material was prepared forReligion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

Freud’s mind was tragically oriented . . .there’s always at the end of the vision thatvacant spot where he knows he’s defeated,but he wants then to be defeated with dignity.Do you see? He can’t cure everybody. Hemay not even have an answer, but, by God,he’s going to try with great dignity and all theintelligence and feeling he’s got to arrive atsome wisdom. Arthur Miller 1

Of Whitehead’s more specific concepts, his "presentationalimmediacy," the "immediate perception of the contemporary externalworld,"2 has probably had the greatest single impact on recent poets.Such direct influence, however, by no means exhausts the relationshipbetween his philosophy and contemporary poetics. Though largelyunconnected with the evolution of recent art theories, Whiteheadprophetically anticipated some of their most radical concerns. Thefollowing excerpts from his 1933 Adventures of Ideas sum up some ofthese with amazing accuracy and comprehensiveness. The humanbody, Whitehead writes,

is an instrument for the production of art in the life of thehuman soul. It concentrates upon those elements in humanexperience selected for conscious perception intensities ofsubjective form derived from components dismissed intoshadow.... In this way the work of art is a message fromthe Unseen. It unlooses depths of feeling from behind thefrontier where precision of consciousness fails. Thestartingpoint for the highly developed human art is thusto be sought amid the cravings generated by the

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physiological functionings of the body. The origin of artlies in the craving for reenaction. . . . There is a biologicallaw which however must not be pressed too far that insome vague sense the embryo in the womb reproduces inits lifehistory features of ancestors in remote geologicepochs. Thus art has its origin in ceremonial evolutionsfrom which issue play, religious ritual, tribal ceremonial,dance, pictures on caves, poetic literature, prose, music.3

Had I been aware of it at the time, the statement might well haveinfluenced my previous attempt to describe the new understanding ofart "as a reenactment of nature in process, achieved by projectiveempathy and psychophysiological spontaneity, rather than as animitation of reality in stasis."4 To Whitehead as against Aristotle, thesubject matter of art is not the "kind of thing that might be,"5 butunmediated reality especially where it reaches into unconscious, precivilized experience. The creativity which gives it shape, takes itsimpetus not so much from rational activities allied to philosophicalspeculation, as from the rhythms of the body and the motions of oursoul. Language, even in the strictly literary arts, is no more than ameans to the end of suggesting facts ultimately inaccessible to words.Enshrined as it may become in print, the creative impulse first andforemost derives from the body. The traditional bias of Westernaesthetics towards discursive reason, in other words, has beenreversed.

According to Aristotle, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex owed part of itseminence as the greatest work of art to the fact that the play could begiven its full artistic impact by mere recital, that is to say by virtue ofits strictly linguistic potential. Just as this position marks ourtraditional understanding of art at its perhaps furthest extreme, so itsreversal, now widely practiced in today’s avantgarde theater, hashelped the new "body" poetics to its most radical and literalrealization. To Jerzy Grotowski, for instance, the primary medium forthe actor ought to be his body. "[E]verything must come from andthrough the body. First and foremost, there must be a physical reactionto everything that affects us. Before reacting with the voice, you mustfirst react with the body. If you think, you must think with the body."6Grotowski’s mentor, Artaud, had earlier demanded a similar primacyof the spectacle over the spoken word. In following "the veryautomatism of the liberated unconscious,"7 this theater of crueltyshould avoid the "cheap imitations of reality" of Aristotelianpersuasion. While emphasizing the psychotherapeutic bias of his ownefforts, Artaud at the same time inveighs against "a purely descriptiveand narrative theatre storytelling psychology" as well as psychologyin general. Just like the Aristotelian dramatic matrix, psychology, heseems to imply, ". . . works relentlessly to reduce the unknown to theknown, to the quotidian and the ordinary, [and] is the cause of thetheater’s abasement and its fearful loss of energy."

All this calls for an explanation which Artaud himself or his variousfollowers have so far denied us. What connections, if any, existbetween Aristotelian poetics and the contemporary psychological



theater as well as psychoanalysis itself? And to what degree can theefforts of an Artaud or Grotowski to evolve a new theater of the bodyrather than the spoken word be seen as an alternative to this traditionalnexus, an alternative with its roots in the same bodily character ofexperience emphasized so often, and so emphatically, by Whitehead?

I

For lack of examples listed by Artaud himself, two plays, Pirandello’sSix Characters in Search of an Author and Miller’s Death of aSalesman, may serve to illustrate that part of twentiethcentury theaterwith roots in the traditional nexus based on Aristotle andpsychoanalytic theory. At first sight the two plays seem to have littlein common except that their authors considered them as tragedies.Pirandello felt that he had dramatized "the inherent tragic conflictbetween life (which is always moving and changing) and form (whichfixes it, immutable)."8 Miller thought of his play as the tragedy of aman who "gave his life, or sold it, in order to justify the waste of it."9Yet even these concepts of tragedy are conspicuous for theirdifferences rather than their affinities. What relates the two plays and,in fact, makes them two of the most forceful manifestations of thetragic in our century, remained a secret even to their authors.

The genesis of Six Characters is well known from the playwright’s1930 preface to the play. The Father who, possessed with the demon ofexperiment, sends his own wife to live with another man and almostends up sleeping with his "StepDaughter" by the surrogate husband,had somehow taken hold of his imagination without revealing itsdeeper meaning in a significant form. For real poets, in Pirandello’sAristotelian conviction, "admit only figures, affairs, landscapes whichhave been soaked, so to speak, in a particular sense of life and acquirefrom it a universal value."10 Unable to discover it after much effort,Pirandello eventually found this deeper significance in the conflict"between lifeinmovement and form" which crystallized in two scenesof an "outrageous unalterable fixity." The characters search for anauthor, the whole impromptu stunt of staging their melodramaticentanglements before the surprised manager, is little else than thesearch for these two crucial moments. The first occurs when theFather, about to sleep with a prostitute, realizes that she is his StepDaughter; the second, a tragic result of the first, when the young Boyout of the substitute marriage shoots himself with a revolver. The StepDaughter, like the Father, is "dying to live" her scene in the belief thatit caused all her present misery. In turn, the Father calls it his "eternalmoment": "She (indicating the StepDaughter) is here to catch me, fixme, and hold me eternally in the stocks for that one fleeting andshameful moment of my life."

The eagerness with which Father and StepDaughter want to reenactthis traumatic encounter finds its repressive counterpart in the twentytwoyearold Son, who is made to relive the second scene. His father’sclaim to have fathomed "the meaning of it all" is a matter of merescorn and revulsion to him. Such things, in his opinion, "ought to haveremained hidden." But though he preaches repression, he is unable toescape the thrall of his two traumatic memories, one the suicide of the



Boy, the other the death by drowning of the fouryearold Child."There was no scene," he protests. "I went away, that’s all! I don’t carefor scenes!" His final reliving of the scene is all the more authentic forbeing so involuntarily spontaneous.

I ran over to her; I was jumping in to drag her out when Isaw something that froze my blood . . . the boy standingstock still, with eyes like a madman’s watching his littledrowned sister, in the fountain! (The StepDaughter bendsover the fountain to hide the child. She sobs.) Then . . . (Arevolver shot rings out behind the trees where the Boy ishidden.)

Pirandello, in fusing pretense and reality, has actual death and suicide"reenacted" on the stage here. This seems to imply that repressedtraumatic events become more powerful than reality itself once theyare released. The playwright himself, of course, who was barely awareof Freud at the time he wrote Six Characters, would hardly have talkedabout his play in these psychoanalytic terms. Instead of pointing outwhat from a postFreudian perspective appears as its case historylikeplot, Pirandello discusses the play in the traditional vocabulary ofAristotle, to whom the most important thing in a play was how theauthor had transformed the random events of life into "one action, acomplete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected thatthe transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin anddislocate the whole."11 In Pirandello’s view, the content of SixCharacters may well be chaotic, but his presentation of it was "thereverse of confused." After all, audiences around the world hadrecognized the clarity of the intrigue and the way in which the wholewas finally "quite simple, clear, and orderly."12

We find Miller making similar claims for Death of a Salesman. Theplaywright’s general sense of form, he confessed in an interview,"comes from a positive need to organize life. The very impulse towrite, I think, springs from an inner chaos crying for order, formeaning, and that meaning must be discovered … or the work liesdead as it is finished."13 This Aristotelian search for significant formcrystallized in a specific scene which, as in Pirandello’s SixCharacters, holds everything in its "outrageous unalterable fixity."There is similarity even of content. Just as Pirandello’s Father, makinglove to his StepDaughter prostitute, is discovered by the Mother, soMiller’s Willy Loman and his mistress are surprised by his son Biff ina Boston hotel room.

The two tragedies differ mainly in the way in which their "internallogic" (to use Miller’s phrase) is arranged around these focal scenes.Speaking in psychoanalytic terms, Pirandello’s protagonist plays therole of his own analyst in explaining and reenacting the cause of hismisery. "I’m crying aloud the reason of my sufferings,"14 he exclaims.His endless perorations on how a single encounter has crippled his lifeforever remind the manager of Pirandello, an author he heartilydetests. The Father, in other words, assumes the role of the playwrightin expounding what the author of, say, Aristotle’s model tragedy,Oedipus Rex, reveals in the gradual unfolding of his play. In a brilliant



detective storylike pursuit in which the investigator reveals his owncrime, Oedipus finds out about the cause of his misery, while theFather simply wants to demonstrate and, what is more, theorize aboutit. For man, he explains, "never reasons so much and becomes sointrospective as when he suffers; since he is anxious to get at the causeof his sufferings, to learn who has produced them, and whether it isjust or unjust that he should have to bear them."

Arthur Miller’s relation to his protagonist, then, resembles not so muchPirandello’s towards the Father, as Sophocles’ towards Oedipus. Theplay’s internal logic gradually renders both audience and hero aware ofhis hidden guilt. In Oedipus Rex this takes the form of an investigationinto objective facts, while Death of a Salesman gives us apsychoanalytic variant of the same process. Willy Loman’s halfdemented forays into his past proceed with the randomunpredictability with which a neurotic patient might talk to his analyst.But the form of this involuntary confession, as manifest in the play’sstructure, finally amounts to a coherent case history of theprotagonist’s dilemma. Characteristically, the original version of theplay was entitled The Inside of His Head.15

Death of a Salesman, as Miller points out, is the tragedy of a man whounwittingly ruins his son, recognizes his guilt, and is forgiven by hisvictim.16 More than halfway through the play, Willy Loman, talking toBernard, his son’s former schoolmate, still wonders why Biff at ageseventeen suddenly turned from a high school football hero into ahopeless goodfornothing. Surely Buff’s failure in a math course isnot enough to explain this transformation. To both Bernard and Willyit is a total enigma:

WILLY: Why? Why! Bernard, that question has beentrailing me like a ghost for the last fifteen years. Heflunked the subject, and laid down and died like a hammerhit him!17

When Bernard suggests that it happened after Biff had gone to visit hisfather in Boston, Willy, wavering between halfrecognition andaggressiveness, reacts like Oedipus when Jocasta tells him thecircumstances of Laius’ murder at the crossroads.18 To the spectatorthere is little surprise in all this.

For throughout the first half of the play we have been made to watchWilly with the eyes of an analyst listening to his neurotic patient. Whatwe witness now is what Freud would have called a final outburst of"resistance due to repression."19 Very soon the protagonist’sembattled ego will yield its defenses to the forces of a repressedtraumatic experience as it invades him from the unconscious. WillyLoman, in Miller’s own words, is "the kind of man you see mutteringto himself on a subway . . . he can no longer restrain the power of hisexperience from disrupting the superficial sociality of hisbehaviour."20 And as we see his daydream phantasies enacted in frontof our eyes, one single event stands out with particular obsessiveness.At one point his wife Linda tells him he is "the handsomest man in the



world." This, in Willy’s guiltridden mind, evokes a scene with hisformer mistress calling him a "wonderful man" and thanking him forsome stockings he gave her. There is a second association when Willywakes up from this reverie, sees Linda mending her stockings andscreams: "Now throw them out!" All this, we are made to understand,is somehow connected with Biff’s failure in the math course. Forfollowing the hotel room scene there is another flashback, disrupted bythe mistress’ laughter and Willy’s "Shut up!" in which young Bernardwarns the Lomans that their son is about to flunk math. But at thispoint we still ask ourselves how the two incidents interconnect.

Willy’s overflowing unconscious, however, does not withhold theanswer for much longer. His conversation with the adult Bernard hasstirred up the crucial link in the chain of associations. Willy is at arestaurant with his two sons and their pickups. When Buff refuses totell him about his recent interview with his former boss, Oliver, hesuddenly, to the confusion of everybody, bursts out: "No, no! You hadto go and flunk math!" Now his wandering mind returns to the scene inwhich young Bernard reported Biff’s failure. But the scene hasundergone a significant change. Only Linda and young Bernard arepresent, while Biff has already left for Boston. Meanwhile in therestaurant, Biff asks himself why he ever went to see Oliver. InWilly’s mind this question is promptly answered by the laughter of hisformer mistress, which is enough to finally break down his remainingconscious defenses. Abandoned by his two sons, he relives thetraumatic scene, long repressed, which contains the solution to theriddle that has plagued him for so long. Biff, thinking that his fathermight intercede for him with his math teacher, found Willy in thecompany of a halfnaked woman.

II

As much as they point back to Aristotle’s Poetics and Sophocles’Oedipus Rex, the plot structures of both Death of a Salesman and SixCharacters in Search of an Author, then, show equal affinity withtwentiethcentury psychoanalysis. This is all the more striking as bothPirandello and Miller were practically ignorant of Freud’s teachingswhen they wrote their plays.21 It also suggests that both Freudianpsychoanalysis and contemporary psychological drama, each throughindependent channels, have common roots in the Aristotelian dramaticmatrix as largely derived from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. It remains tobe seen what connections there are between psychoanalysis proper andthis over twothousandyearold aesthetic tradition.

Such links can be found even for more recent psychoanalytic methodswhich in their emphasis on physiological reenactment seem to offerradical alternatives to Freud’s rationalist methods. What, for instance,could be further removed from strictly discursive psychoanalysis thanprimal scream therapy? But rereading Arthur Janov one quicklyrealizes that screaming here is only a means to the end of uncoveringthe unbroken chain of neatly interconnected events or "scenes" oftenleading back to the "major scene" which caused the neurosis. To quotefrom Janov’s examples:



A patient who had no memory before the age often beganto relive experiences at the age of fourteen and worked herway down the age ladder until she relived a terrible eventthat caused the final split at the age often Some patientsare able to go directly to the major scene in which theyfelt the split; others take months to get there."22

A similar picture emerges from Bioenergetics. Its main exponent,Alexander Lowen, proposes to "help a person get back together withhis body and to help him enjoy to the fullest degree possible the life ofthe body."23 To this end, Lowen designed a number of ingeniousphysical exercises combined with primal therapy. But these aresubservient to a kind of torture chamber psychoanalysis in which thepatient reveals his past in the state of exhaustion or emotional turmoilinduced by screaming and physical exercise. In Lowen s own words:

One of the purposes of the analysis is to create that map inthe patient’s mind. It is a map of words, made up ofmemories, and is therefore the full history of the person’slife. When it all comes together like the pieces in a jigsawpuzzle, it finally makes sense and the person sees who heis and how he is in the world, as well as knows the why ofhis character.

Lowen’s and Janov’s direct indebtedness here is to Freud, whothroughout talks about his patients’ repressed experiences in terms ofhighly specific, dramatic, and traumatic "scenes." The analyst, likeTheseus in the labyrinth of the unconscious, has to "get hold of a pieceof the logical thread"24 that will lead him to a logically coherent casehistory. Not before all the pieces of the puzzle are assembled should hereveal the patient’s true life history to its protagonist who will then be"overborne by the force of logic."

It is only towards the end of the treatment that we havebefore us an intelligible, consistent, and unbroken casehistory. Whereas the practical aim of the treatment is toremove all possible symptoms and to replace them byconscious thoughts, we may regard it as a second andtheoretical aim to repair all the damages to the patient’smemory. These two aims are coincident. When one isreached, so is the other; and the same path leads to themboth.

Alternatively one might argue that Janov’s and Lowen’s indebtednessto Freud reaches far beyond the father of psychoanalysis; or, if viewedfrom a different angle, that Freud’s impact on his disciples andtwentiethcentury thought generally stems to a large extent from thefact that he translated into new, psychoanalytic terms what in its majorpremises forms part of an over twothousandyearold tradition ofWestern thought.

Freud was partly aware of these roots. Even before the birth ofpsychoanalysis proper, Aristotle’s concept of the purging of certaindetrimental emotions (fear and pity) reached by witnessing someone



else’s calamities provided Freud and Breuer with the label for theircathartic method. Here the psychical process which caused theneurosis "must be repeated as vividly as possible; it must be broughtback to its status nascendi and then given verbal utterance." Eventhough the patient, to describe him in Aristotelian terms, becomes hisown spectacle, the analogy holds. For most of the repressed materialhe is made to relive will strike him like an alien experience. Freudbefore long abandoned this more dramatic method for one in which thepatient rids himself of his neurosis by learning to see it as a part of hisintelligible case history. But even as late as 1924 he still admitted that"the cathartic method was the immediate precursor of psychoanalysis,and, in spite of every extension of experience and of everymodification of theory, is still contained within it as its nucleus."

Freud’s indebtedness to the traditional dramatic matrix is equallyapparent regarding the complex, which to him constitutes "the nucleusof all neuroses" as well as the beginning point of all "religion, morals,society and art."25 From its earliest mention in the letters to Fliess,26Freud named the complex after Oedipus Rex. The discovery, he wrotein The Interpretation of Dreams (1900),

is confirmed by a legend . . . whose profound anduniversal power to move can only be understood if thehypothesis I have put forward in regard to the psychologyof children has an equally universal validity. What I havein mind is the legend of King Oedipus and Sophocles’drama which bears his name.27

One question to be raised in this connection is if Freud, without hismodel, would have ever "discovered" the complex. Another concernsthe supposedly "universal validity" of the legend. Freud may questionthe interpretation of Oedipus King as a "tragedy of destiny" but onlyby reinterpreting the notion of destiny. Destiny to him is not one man’sspecific fate according to the will of the gods but "the fate of all of us."Oedipus’ "destiny moves us only because it might have been ours because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as uponhim. . . King Oedipus, who slew his father Laius and married hismother Jocasta, merely shows us the fulfillment of our own childhoodwishes." Yet recent investigations into the history of the story come tothe opposite conclusion. As Thalia P. Feldman points out, Oedipus, inthe extant literature up to Aeschylus, was not treated as an offenderwho needed punishment. "It is the Aeschylean Oedipus who firstblinds himself, an unprecedented individual action which signifies thatthe offender is loading himself with the enormous burden of shameand horror which he feels at his involvement, even though he andeveryone else knows that he is not guilty."28 This throws seriousdoubts on Freud’s claim that the killing of the primal father, theformation of the Oedipus complex, and the birth of tragedy allhappened at the dawn of history. What seems to be closer to the truthis that both tragedy and the Oedipus legend represent relatively recentphenomena in a specific culture which as such bequeathed itslimitations to Freud’s discoveries of neurosis and the discontents ofcivilization.



Freud’s third major debt to the traditional dramatic matrix is reflectedin his general preference, shared with Aristotle, for Oedipus Rex as aplay whose action "consists in nothing other than the process ofrevealing, with cunning delays and evermounting excitement . . . thatOedipus himself is the murderer of Laius."29 Sophocles’ tragedy, if itis not an actual precursor of the modern detective story, can certainlybe termed an early example of what Edgar Allan Poe called a "tale ofratiocination."30 Particularly ingenious here is the use of coincidencesuch as when Oedipus sends for the shepherd who saved his life atmount Cithaeron, who also happens to be the sole survivor of theking’s murder at the hands of his unknowing son; or when the news ofPolybus’ death is brought by a messenger who happens to be theshepherd who took young Oedipus from his Theban colleague andbrought him to Polybus, king of Corinth. For a moment Oedipusbelieves that he has escaped the prophecy that he will murder hisfather until the messenger tells him that he was not related to Polybus.This reversal is confirmed by the arriving Theban shepherd who isforced to testify to Oedipus’ identity with the killer of Laius. WhatFreud calls "the process of revealing, with cunning delays and evermounting excitement," is what Aristotle, with his customary precision,describes as an example of peripety and anagnorisis combined, afusion made even more powerful by the fact that both arise from a"probable or necessary sequence of events."31 Thus, the two devicesadd the final touch of perfection to a plot whose several incidents areso closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one ofthem will disjoin and dislocate the whole."

No wonder that Freud, in calling the action of Oedipus Rex a mereprocess of revealing, with cunning delays and evermountingexcitement," was reminded of similar revelations he was involved inalmost daily. The process, he writes, "can be likened to the work of apsychoanalysis,"32 which itself leads to the equivalent of Aristotle’splot, an "intelligible, consistent and unbroken case history." One mightadd that the analogy has a causal dimension in that the Aristoteliandramatic matrix played midwife at the very birth of psychoanalysis.

Both tragedy and psychoanalysis deal with and in a way try to resolvehuman suffering. Ironically, Aristotle here was far more optimisticthan Freud, who from the beginning purported to do no more than totransform "your hysterical misery into common unhappiness." For inthe Aristotelian hierarchy of entelechies, all of which are strivingtowards selfperception, poetry, as against historiography, imitatesthings not as they are but as they ought to be. Its statements thereforeare of the nature of universals rather than particulars. While "Naturealways strives after ‘the better,’" 33art anticipates that process ofteleological selfimprovement and seeks to fill tip "the deficiencies ofNature" here and now.34 But how then can tragedy, imitating the worstaspects of life ("EW]hat is done by violence is contrary to Nature),35be the greatest form of art as Aristotle asserts? The answer is containedin the catharsis concept, and, since the better kinds of catharsis arearoused by "the very structure and incidents of the play,"36 the answeris found in the coherence of the plot. To Aristotle, pity and fear are



irrational emotions, and their purgation, achieved by presenting theirrational in an ordered context, can only have the aim of making manmore rational.37 "Now, in men," Aristotle writes in Politics, "rationalprinciple and mind are the end towards which nature strives, so thatthe birth and moral discipline of the citizens ought to be ordered with aview to them. . . . And as the body is prior in order of generation to thesoul, so the irrational is prior to the rational."38

The catharsis concept, then, seems to cover the whole spectrum fromFreud’s "cathartic method" of acting out repressed experiences, topsychoanalysis proper purporting to cure the patient by making himunderstand these experiences as being part of his intelligible,consistent, and unbroken case history. The forces at work on theAristotelian spectator of tragedy are of a similar nature. Without somedisplay of violence or suffering, of course, no fear and pity can bearoused. But to Aristotle, this is not to be misunderstood in the senseof a theater of cruelty. Those, he writes, "who make use of theSpectacle to put before us that which is merely monstrous . . . arewholly out of touch with Tragedy."39 Similarly, the best way ofhandling the deed of horror is found in a play like Cresphontes whereMerope, "on the point of slaying her son, recognizes him in time."40More important than the actual presentation of violence and sufferingis the device of peripety in causing surprise while at the same timeletting us recognize what surprised us as an ordered sequence of causeand effect. For the arousal of pity and fear, like the emotions felt inreliving a repressed traumatic scene, will be purged by such hindsight.Aristotelian catharsis and Freudian therapy also share an almostexclusive reliance on discursive language. Just as Freud restrictsanalysis to the patient’s verbal articulation of his erratic life storytowards the logically consistent discourse of his case history, soAristotle, as already pointed out, prefers to have the cathartic impact oftragedy depend on the spoken word to the exclusion of a spectacle.

The Plot in fact should be so framed that, even withoutseeing the things take place, he who simply hears theaccount of them shall be filled with horror and pity at theincidents; which is just the effect that the mere recital ofthe story in Oedipus would have on one.41

III

Whoever remembers the Happenings of the sixties and seventies willknow that Artaud by no means offered the most radical reactionagainst this position. While Michael Kirby hailed The Theatre ofCruelty as "almost a text for Happenings,"42 Artaud himself was farfrom advocating a total abolition of language in the theater. But he wasequally removed from Freud’s or Aristotle’s belief that language canresolve the contingency of experience in its discursive order. On thecontrary, language has been ossified by such assumptions, and, beforeit can be used in the theater, has to be cleansed of its abstractencrustations. For hidden underneath is its old dynamic potentialwhich, as Artaud concluded before Charles Olson,43 can be reclaimedfrom the respiratory sources of language:



let words be joined again to the physical motions that gavethem birth, and let the discursive, logical aspect of speechdisappear beneath its affective, physical side, i.e., letwords be heard in their sonority rather than be exclusivelytaken for what they mean grammatically.44

Artaud had his own ideas about how the theater of cruelty wouldbenefit the spectators. This is achieved neither by letting them see therandomness of events in their deeper causal coherence nor by makingthem understand life as a logically consistent case history. No amountof explaining or understanding will do away with the basic cruelty oflife – "that life is always someone’s death." Man, rather than deludinghimself that suffering might be eliminated, should simply learn toconfront it. The new theater, then, "far from copying life, puts itselfwhenever possible in communication with pure forces." It shouldimmerse the spectator in the irrational rather than strive to purge it outof him. The actor is to provide him with a model in this pursuit. ToArtaud, "every emotion has organic bases," so that the soul, forinstance, is no more than a "skein of vibrations." Yin and Yang,Chinese acupuncture, and the Cabala are invoked in discussingpossible new acting techniques that will provide an alternative to theAristotelian mimetic theater and its twentiethcentury variant, storytelling psychology." As an "athlete of the heart," the actor shouldexplore the different modes of respiration in his acting. Thus joining"the passions by means of their forces, instead of regarding them aspure abstractions," will confer a "mastery upon the actor which makeshim equal to a true healer."

Artaud’s alternative to the psychological theater was to a large extentinspired by nonWestern sources. A Balinese dance group which hesaw at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris brought his rather diffuseideas about "The Theater and the Plague" or "The Alchemical Theater"to a concrete focus. It also led him to define his goals in analogy to"the Oriental theater of metaphysical tendency" as opposed to "theOccidental theater of psychological tendency." These Balineseproductions, he wrote, "take shape at the very heart of matter, life,reality. There is in them something of the ceremonial quality of areligious rite, in the sense that they extirpate from the mind of the onlooker all idea of pretense, of cheap imitation of reality." Some whatlater, Hindu cosmology helped him redefine his concept of cruelty asthe central law of the universe. Unlike the JudeoChristian God,Brahma suffers his own creation "with a suffering that yields joyousharmonics perhaps, but which at the ultimate extremity of the curvecan only be expressed by a terrible crushing and grinding."

The passage serves to remind us that Artaud was not the first either tooppose the Aristotelian dramatic matrix or to derive his alternativesfrom nonWestern sources. It also brings to mind the onesideddistortions which have characterized this now nearly twohundredyearold tradition right from the days of Schopenhauer’s pessimistictranscription of Eastern thought. For Eastern philosophy, if consideredin its own right, is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, but rather whatwe might call fatalistic. In depicting the supreme divinity as a monsterof destruction, the Bhagavad Gita, for instance, clearly admits to the



natural cruelty of life. At the same time it exhorts us to act even if suchaction may involve someone else’s suffering or death. Neitherteleological laws inherent in life nor rational orders that man mightimpose upon it will eliminate this dilemma. All man can do in trying toface it, is develop the appropriate kind of selfdetachment throughmeditation. Analogously, Sanskrit drama has little concern withimplicit teleological schemes, coherent plots showing things as theyought to be, or the purging of fear and pity with the aim of producingmore rational citizens. Bharata’s Natyasastra, the Sanskrit equivalentof Aristotle’s Poetics, defines drama, not as the "imitation of . . . oneaction, a complete whole"45 but as the "representation of conditionsand situations"46 aiming to induce a state of appreciative serenityanalogous to the lifeaffirming selfdetachment reached throughmeditation.

Arthur Schopenhauer, the first philosopheraesthetician to make suchideas his own, misinterpreted the Eastern acceptance of suffering as adenunciation of life and the attempt to come to terms with it asresignation. Lacking all sense of the psychophysiological core ofEastern mysticism, he consistently advocated a repression("Unterdrückung") and negation of all life impulses. Hence tragedy tohim is simply a powerful artistic medium to the same end. Inportraying the "horrific side of life" ("die schreckliche Seite desLebens")47 and showing how all the misery of life results from theblind workings of the Will which is everything, tragedy merelyinduces a state of quietism in the spectator:

The power of transport peculiar to tragedy may be seen toarise from our sudden recognition that life fails to provideany true satisfactions and hence does not deserve ourloyalty. Tragedy guides us to the final goal, which isresignation.

Schopenhauer’s words from The World as Will and Idea are quoted inNietzsche’s 1886 "Critical Glance Backward" in The Birth of Tragedy(1872),48 which inverts the Schopenhauerian position by way ofanticipating the more recent theater of cruelty. Reacting against allprevious teleological and rationalist makebelieve, Nietzsche, like histeacher, sees tragedy as dealing with the "natural cruelty of things"("naturliche Grausamkeit der Dinge");49 and he makes light of criticswho "never tire of telling us about the hero’s struggle with destiny,about the triumph of the moral order, and about the purging of theemotions."50 Facing "the Heraclitean double motion" of Apolloniancreativity and Dionysiac destructiveness, the tragedian focuses on "theeternal wound of being" and shows how, again and again in life, theApollonian illusion or "veil of Maya" is torn apart until nothingremains but "shreds floating before the vision of mystical Oneness."But as "an augury of eventual reintegration," the Dionysiac spirit"which playfully shatters and rebuilds the teeming world ofindividuals" induces the very opposite of Schopenhauerian resignationin the spectator:

Tragedy cries, "We believe that life is eternal!". . . It



makes us realize that everything that is generated must beprepared to face its painful dissolution. . . . Pity and terrornotwithstanding, we realize our great good fortune inhaving life not as individuals, but as part of the lifeforce with whose procreative lust we have become one.

In advocating this untragic celebration of life despite the "horror ofindividual existence," Nietzsche anticipates Artaud to the very point ofsounding imposingly messianic while failing to investigate thepractical possibilities of the new theater. There is little even in Lethéâtre et son double that enables us to imagine how, as the potentialaudience of such spectacles, we will be made to join in such amor fatirejoicing. All it amounts to, as Jerzy Grotowski concludes, is "a veryfertile aesthetic proposition. It is not a technique." Artaud, likeNietzsche before him, evolved a theoretical alternative to theAristotelian dramatic matrix and its psychoanalytic derivations. Butneither explored the ways in which their theory could be turned intopractice, a task more recently tackled by Brook, Grotowski, and others.

The primary aim of Grotowski’s poor theater, for instance, is "a kindof social psychotherapy"51 in which the spectator comes to share theactor’s psychophysiological selfpenetration towards an "innerharmony and peace of mind." This is achieved neither by anAristotelian portrayal of characters for the sake of their actions nor apsychoanalytic dissecting of emotions for the sake of establishingtragic case histories. Acting to Grotowski is the very Opposite ofimitating an action or emotion. "An actor should not use his organismto illustrate a ‘movement of the soul,’ he should accomplish thismovement with his organism." Instead of enacting the words codifiedin a literary text he ought to use his body in order to find a language ofsigns. Words to Grotowski "are always pretexts" and more often thannot disguise the impulse that tries to reveal itself in them. To makewords the guidelines for acting is as illadvised, therefore, as tosuggest boredom, for example, by letting the actor act in a "bored"manner. For a bored man, as he desperately and unsuccessfully tries tofind something that will end his boredom, is far more active thanusual. Before all else, the theater’s medium is the body of the actor."Before reacting with the voice, you must first react with the body. Ifyou think, you must first think with your body."

In this regard, Grotowski’s poor theater differs not only from itsAristotelian and Freudian counterparts but also from such neoFreudian advocates of a process psychotherapy as Janov or Lowen.Prima facie, Towards a Poor Theater, with its handbook like lists ofphysical exercises and its psychoanalytic vocabulary, sometimessounds conspicuously like Lowen’s Bioenergetics. Living, Grotowskiwrites,

is not being contracted, nor is it being relaxed: it is aprocess. But if the actor is always too contracted, thecause blocking the natural respiratory process almostalways of a psychical or psychological nature must bediscovered. We must determine which is his natural typeof respiration. I observe the actor, while suggesting



exercises that compel him into total psychophysicalmobilization.

But to Grotowski, the process of "total psychophysical mobilization,"including primal scream techniques, no longer serves as a meanstowards the end of establishing consistent case histories within theoverall framework of a psychoanalytically discursive logic. Its truercounterparts perhaps are Poetics like the Sanskrit Natyasastra or theJapanese Kwadensho. Such treatises at least show that the training ofactors in a manner resembling a process psychotherapy devoid ofrationalist systematization is more than a recent fad of the West. It hasbeen common practice in India and Japan for many centuries.

Notes

I Richard A. Evans, Psychology and Arthur Miller (New York: F. P.Dutton, 1969), p. 79.

2A. N. Whitehead, Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect (New York:Capricorn Books, 1959), p. 21. Concerning the influence of theconcept on contemporary poets see F. Faas, Towards a New AmericanPoetics: Essays & Interviews (Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, GarySnyder, Robert Creeley. Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg) (Santa Barbara:Black Sparrow Press 1979), pp. 47, 65, and passim. See also CharlesAltieri, "From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground ofPostmodern American Poetics," Boundary 2 1 (197273), 60541, pp.623ff.

3(New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 27071.

4New American Poetics, p. 32.

5Aristotle, Poetics 1451 b 5. This and all following quotations fromAristotle’s Poetics are from Ingram Bywater’s translation, Aristotle.Rhetoric and Poetics. Introduction by F. Solmsen (New York:Random House, 1954).

6Towards a Poor Theater (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), p.204.

7 For this and the following quotations from Artaud see The Theaterand its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958), pp. 54, 60, 76, 77.

8Naked Masks. Five Plays, ed. Eric Bentley (New York: E. P. Dutton,1952), p.367.

9Death of a Salesman. Test and Criticism. ed. C. Weales (New York:Viking Press, 1967), p. 150.

10 For this and the following quotations from Pirandello see NakedMasks, pp. 36465, 371, 367, 223, 258, 260, 239, 274, 276.

11 Poetics, 1451 a 3234.



12 Naked Masks. p. 374.

13 For this and the following quotations from A. Miller see Death, ed.C. Weales, pp. 185, 171, 149.

14 For this and the following quotation from Pirandello see NakedMasks, p. 267.

15 See Death, ed. G. Weales, p. 155.

16 See ibid., p. 167.

17 Ibid., p. 93.

18 Compare Death, ed. G. Weales, p. 94, with Oedipus Rex, line 711ff.

19 An Outline of PsychoAnalysis translated by James Strachey (NewYork: Norton, 1969), p. 36.

20 For this and the following quotations from A. Miller see Death, ed.C. Weales, pp. 158, 37, 38, 39, 40, 109.

21A. Miller maintains that he "was little better than ignorant ofFreud’s teachings when [he] wrote Death of a Salesman," Death, ed.C, Weales, p.161.

22 The Primal Scream (New York: Dell, 1974), p. 97.

23 For this and the following quotation from A. Lowen seeBioenergetics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 43, 327.

24 For this and the following quotations from Freud see Pelican FreudLibrary, 15 vols., ed. A. Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,1973ff.), III, 380, 387; VIII, 47; III, 57, 44.

25Totem and Taboo, pp. 15657.

26 See The Origins of PsychoAnalysis. Letters to Wilhelm Fliess,Drafts and Notes: 18871902, ed. Marie Bonaparte, etc. (New York:Basic Books, 1954), p.223.

27 For this and the following quotation from Freud see Pelican FreudLibrary, ed. A. Richards, IV, 36263, 364. For a detailed analysis ofFreud’s Oedipus interpretation in Die Traumdeutung see CynthiaChase, "Oedipal Textuality: Reading Freud’s Reading of Oedipus,"Diacritics 9 (1979), 5468. The author, however, seems to me to deriveerroneous conclusions from misinterpreting Oedipus’ selfblinding asan act of repression (see p. 57).

28 "Taboo in the Oedipus Theme," Oedipus Tyrannus, translated andedited by L. Berkowitz and T. F. Brunner (New York: Norton, 1970),pp. 5969, 63.

29 Pelican Freud Library, ed. A. Richards, IV, 363.

30 The New Columbia Encyclopedia, ed. W. H. Harris and J. S. Levey



(New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), p. 752.

31 Poetics, 1451 a 3334.

32 For this and the following quotations from Freud see Pelican FreudLibrary, ed. A. Richards, IV, 363; III, 387; III, 393.

33On Generation and Corruption, 3.36 b 27, The Basic Works ofAristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 527.

34Politics, 1337 a 41, Basic Works, p. 1305.

35 Generation of Animals, 788 b 2829, The Works of Aristotle.Translated into English under the Editorship of J. A. Smith and W. D.Ross (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1970), V.

36 Poetics, 1453 b 910.

37 Cf. Leon Golden, "The Clarification Theory of Katharsis," Hermes104 (1976), pp.43752, especially p.445, which of all catharsisinterpretations lam aware of comes closest to the one presented here.

38 Politics, 1334 b 1421, Basic Works, p. 1300.

39 Poetics, 1453 b 910.

40 Ibid., 1454 a 67. Concerning the contradiction between thisstatement and 1453 a 1315, see J. Moles, "Notes on Aristotle, Poetics13 and 14," Classical Quarterly N.S. XXIX, 1 (1979), pp. 7794, 82ff.

41 Poetics, 1453 b 37.

42 Happenings. An Illustrated Anthology, written and edited by M.Kirby (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), p. 34.

43 See E. Faas, New American Poetics, p. 45ff.

44 For this and the following quotations from Artaud see Theater,pp.119,102,82,140, 135, 133, 135, 72, 60,103.

45 Aristotle, Poetics, 1451 a 3233.

46 See P. Lal, Great Sanskrit Plays in Modern Translation (NewYork: New Directions, n.d.), p. XVII. See also E. Faas, "Faust andSacontalá," Comparative Literature 31, 4 (Fall 1979), pp. 36791,373.

47 For this and the following quotations from Schopenhauer seeWerke. Zürcher Ausgabe, ed. Arthur Hübscher, 10 vols. (Zürich:Diogenes Verlag, 1977), II, 472; 1, 31819.

48 The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, translated byFrancis Golffing (Garden City, N.Y.; Doubleday, 1956), p.12.

49Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1972), pt. 3, vol. 1, 115.



50 For this and the following quotations from Nietzsche see Birth, pp.133, 120, 108, 23, 67,143, 102.

51For this and the following quotations from Grotowski see PoorTheatre, pp.206, 46, 45, 123, 235, 236, 204, 208.

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