Emanuel Morgan's Journal

From Sontag's Against Interpretation

Marat / Sade / Artaud

Susan Sontag

"Theatricality and Insanity - the two most potent subjects of the contemporary theater are brilliantly fused in Peter Weiss' play, The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. [*] The subject is a dramatic performance staged before the audience's eyes; the scene is a madhouse. The historical facts behind the play are that in the insane asylum just outside Paris where Sade was confined by order of Napoleon for the last eleven years of his life (1803-14), it was the enlightened policy of the director, M. Coulmier, to allow Charenton's inmates to stage theatrical productions of the own devising which were open to the Parisian public. In these circumstances Sade is known to have ostensibly re-created such a performance. The year is 1808 and the stage is the stark tiled bathhouse of the asylum.

"Theatricality permeates Weiss' cunning play in a peculiarly modern sense: most of Marat / Sade consists of a play-within-a-play. ... In Brook's production, insanity proves the most authoritative and sensuous kind of theatricality. ... It is through its depiction of theatricality and insanity that Weiss' play is also a play of ideas. The heart of the play is a running debate between Sade, in his chair, and Marat, in his bath, on the meaning of the French Revolution, that is, on the psychological and political premises of modern history, but seen through a very modern sensibility. ... But Marat / Sade does not lend itself to being formulated as a particular theory about modern experience.

"Such a theater, whose fundamental action is the irrevocable careening toward extreme states of feeling, can end in only two ways. It can turn in on itself and become formal, and end in strict da capo fashion, with its own opening lines.

Or it can turn outward, breaking the "frame," and assault the audience. Ionesco has admitted that he originally envisaged his first play, The Bald Soprano, ending with a massacre of the audience; in another version of the same play (which now ends da capo), the author was to leap on the stage, and shout imprecations at the audience till they fled the theater. Brook, or Weiss, or both, have devised for the end of Marat / Sade an equivalent of the same hostile gesture toward the audience. The inmates, that is, the "cast" of Sade's play, have gone berserk and assaulted the Coulmiers; but this riot - that is, the play - is broken off by the entry of the stage manager of the Aldwych Theater, in modern skirt, sweater, and gym shoes. She blows a whistle; the actors abruptly stop, turn, and face the audience; but when the audience applauds, the company responds with a slow ominous handclap, drowning out the "free" applause and leaving everyone pretty uncomfortable.

"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.

"It's from this point of view, tendentiously formulated by Artaud, that one may properly approach the fact that Weiss 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 are mad. ... 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.

"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. ... That the ideas taken up in Marat / Sade are not resolved, in an intellectual sense, is far less important than the extent to which they do work together in the sensory arena."

Sontag, Susan. "Marat / Sade / Artaud", Against Interpretation. Dell Publishing, New York, 1966, p. 168-178.

[*] Actual title: The Persecution and Assasination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of Monsieur de Sade.

Current Mood: Criminally Insane

Marat / Sade / Artaud

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