Maids Performing Madness

INFORMATION TO USERS
The negative microfilm o f this dissertation w as prepared and inspected by the

school granting the degree. W e are using this film w ithout further inspection or
change. I f there are any questions about the content, please w rite directly to the
school The quality o f this reproduction is heavily dependent upon the quality o f
the original material
The following explanation o f techniques is provided to help clarify notations which
may appear on this reproduction.
1 M anuscripts may not always be complete W hen it is not possible to obtain

missing pages, a note appears to indicate this.
2 W hen copyrighted materials are removed from the m anuscript, a note ap
pears to indicate this
3 Oversize materials (maps, drawings, and charts) are photographed by sec
tioning the original, beginning at the upper left hand com er and continu
ing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps
UMI
Dissertation
Information Service
A Bell & H ow ell Information Com pany

300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, M ichigan 48106
R ep ro d u ced with p erm ission o f the copyright ow ner. Further reproduction prohibited w ithout p erm ission.
Reproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
UMI N u m b e r :
9 829129
UMI Microform 9829129

Copyright 1998, by UMI Company. Ail rights reserved.
This microform edition is protected against unauthorized
copying under Title 17, United States Code.
UMI
300 North Zeeb Road

Ann Arbor, MI 48103
R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
R eaders Page. This page is not to be handwritten except for
A dissertation entitled
P E R F O R M IN G
TH E
M ADNESS:
R E P R E S E N T A T IO N OF INSANITY IN
19TH AND 20TH CENTURY THEATRE,
FROM JEAN-MARTIN CHARCOT TO MARGUERITE DURAS
subm itted to th e G raduate S ch o o l of the

University of W isconsin-M adison
in partial fulfillment of the requirem ents for the
d eg r ee of D octor of P hilosophy
(F re n c h )
by
R ead ers Page. This page is not to be hand written except for the signatures
H e n rik Borgstrom
Date of Final Oral Examination:

Month & Year D egree to be aw arded:
June 9
December
Approval Signatures f t Dissertation Readers:
199g
May
August
1998
Signature, Dean of Graduate School
R ep ro d u ced with p erm ission o f th e copyright ow ner. Further reproduction prohibited w ithout perm ission.
Reproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
PERFORMING MADNESS:
THE REPRESENTATION OF INSANITY IN 19 AND 20 CENTURY THEATRE,
FROM JEAN-MARTIN CHARCOT TO MARGUERITE DURAS
by
Henrik Borgstrom
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

o f the requirements for the degree o f
Doctor of Philosophy
(French)
at the
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
1998
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It is with the most heart-felt appreciation that I extend my gratitude to Judy

Miller, who has been my adviser, teacher, and close friend during my six years in
Madison. She has been and will always remain a true role-model for me, and now
that I embark on a career in academia, it is my sincere hope that one day I might be
able to offer a student the same kind o f inspiration and understanding that she has
offered me since my arrival at the University o f Wisconsin.
I am also grateful to the Department o f French and Italian, in particular to
Yvonne Ozzello, Laurey Martin-Berg, and Martine Debaisieux, who have always been
supportive o f my various projects in theatre, pedagogy, and scholarship. I feel
extremely fortunate to have studied in an environment that has allowed me to combine
the two most important interests in my life, theatre and French. I extend my thanks as
well to Brian Edmiston in the Department o f Theatre and Drama, who renewed my
appreciation for the theories o f Mikhail Bakhtin, and who introduced me to projects
in T.I.E. and D.I.E.
I wish to thank the readers o f my dissertation: Richard Goodkin,
Nicholas Rand, Elaine Marks, Bill Berg, and Mike Vanden Heuvel, whose insights
and comments have been vital to this project. I am also deeply indebted to those
friends and colleagues who stood by me through the ups and downs o f my writing
process, and who have allowed me to leave Madison with wonderful life-long
memories. I am especially grateful to Kirsten Pullen, whose love o f Beckett inspired
me to write my fourth chapter, and to Francine Conley, who taught me that a life in
theatre and a career in academia are not mutually exclusive.
Finally, I extend my most sincere gratitude to my parents, who graced me with
independence, perseverance, and the motivation to pursue excellence in all my
projects. They taught me to respect education, and they gave me the knowledge that
fulfillment in life is the result o f staying true to ones own choices and goals. Also, I
express my deepest thanks to my undergraduate professor Beatrice Guenther, who
inspired me to begin graduate work in French.
PREFACE
Great wits are sure to madness near allied.

John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel.
Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet.
Madness has been a recurrent theme in European drama for as long as theatre
has existed. From the reckless buffoons and zanni o f Medieval farce and the scenarios
o f the Commedia dell 'arte, to the clowns and tragic heroes o f Shakespeare, to the
tormented characters o f Racine and Corneille, madness in its many incarnations has
retained an important presence on the Western stage. It may be suggested that the
performance o f madness exists as a means to exorcise madness in society, to control it
by exercising it for the audience. Madness can be seen as a kind o f noise within a
community, and by performing it, a society can localize this noise and channel it so as
to retain its sense o f order and social stability.
Madness has also been considered a means to attain a higher understanding, a
kind o f sublime enlightenment in a world bound by rigid social structures and
behavioral codes. As the proverb tells us, every king has his fool, that figure who,
through his un-reason, seems able to see clearly, and to have access to those truths
that remain inaccessible to the rest o f society, like the four fools o f Victor Hugos
Cromwell (1827). The protagonist o f Rotrous Saint Genest (1645) experiences an
ecstatic madness as he sees God and converts to Christianity, and the tragic heroines
o f Romantic dramas, such as Beatrice o f Shelleys Cenci (1819), go mad in the face of
the unbearable moral depravity o f their society.
It would appear that madness has always been a social preoccupation.
Madness occupies a realm o f darkness and unknowingness. It fascinates because it
can never be fully understood. Madness eludes definition and resists most logical
systems which attempt to categorize it or to explain it. In Madness and Civilization
(1961), Michel Foucault traces societys dark fascination with madness. According to
his socio-historical model, madness has always held a distinct place within European
communities, whether in the itinerant ship o f fools floating from town to town in the
Middle Ages or behind the stone walls o f the hopitaux publics established in the
seventeenth century or in the psychiatric examinations at the nineteenth-century
clinical asylums. In life, as in theatre, Foucault seems to suggest, madness has long
been the focus o f societys scrutinizing curiosity.
What drew me into this general social fascination with madness was the
manner by which un-reason has been treated by certain experimental dramatists o f the
twentieth century. An aesthetic rupture appears to have occurred around the turn of
this century which transformed the way in which European writers chose to represent
madness on the stage. What had been considered an inaccessible realm o f darkness
was suddenly explored from within. For the first time, madness took center stage, and
dramatists began to construct theatrical texts which presented the mad mind as the
focal point o f reference. Audiences saw on the stage the world as it was experienced
by a madman. It was this apparent aesthetic rupture which led me to examine how
the trope o f madness differed between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Guided by the theoretical speculations o f Foucault, I focused my initial study
on the iconography o f madness which came out of the early psychiatric studies of the
nineteenth century. Jean-Martin Charcots work at the Salpetriere was particularly
fascinating in this regard because it seemed to support the wide-spread assumption
made popular by nineteenth-century phrenologists that mental afflictions could be
discerned through specific visual clues in a subjects physiognomy. Madness,
according to the more sensationalist demonstrations and publications o f the scientific
community, could be identified and classified according to gestures, posture and eyemovements. With the advent of photography, the scientific community was able to
reinforce a clear visual distinction between that which was considered sane and that
which was considered mad.
This same distinction seems to have been maintained in the performance o f
madness on the nineteenth-century stage. Just as the phrenologists and the clinicians
o f the Salpetriere produced extensive visual documentation o f mental afflictions in the
form o f photographs and sketches, the theatrical community o f the nineteenth century
began to codify acting styles and dramatic gestures in clearly illustrated acting guides.
With the availability o f clear documentation ffom both the medical publications and
the theatre journals o f the nineteenth century, I was able to formulate a relatively clear
image o f how madness was conceived as a visual representation of the Other.
The mad characters o f the nineteenth-century stage, such as the obsessive

Valter o f Ducanges Therese ou 1 orpheline de Geneve ( 1820), the tormented Blanche
in Henri Becques Les Corbeaux{ 1882), and certainly the multitude o f hysterical
women in Charcots scientific theatre, all exhibited definite physical traits which
clearly distinguished them as other. Their characteristic excesses in appearance,
gesture, and words intrigued and enthralled the audience, all the while reassuring the
spectators o f their own sanity, and therefore of their position of control, in a system
in which those who did not adhere to the given codes of logic could be identified,
localized, and segregated. It would appear that the social structures o f the nineteenth
century instigated a widespread desire to isolate, castigate and control madness in an
effort to reassure the public o f a sense o f order, reason, and morality.
In the experimental theatre o f the twentieth century, however, we see an
important break in the epistemological distinction between madness and reason. Three
o f the most influential French playwrights o f the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett,
Jean Genet, and Marguerite Duras create dramatic spaces which penetrate the very
core o f the mad mind. In their works for the stage, they explore madness from
within, offering to the spectators no normalized standard by which they can clearly
distinguish themselves from it. Madness becomes for these writers an acceptable
reality in itself. No longer exclusively marginalized as an evil which needs to be
segregated and eradicated in order for society to continue, madness is articulated as
the only way to represent the human condition adequately.
R ep ro d u ced with p erm ission o f the copyright ow ner. Further reproduction prohibited without p erm ission.
The specific works by Beckett, Genet, and Duras which I will examine in this
project appear to be linked by what I will refer to as an aesthetic o f madness. I define
this aesthetic as an epistemological and ontological realm which sets out to resist
conventional systems o f reasoning. Textually and visually, this is a space marked by
fragmentation and unstable signifiers. It is a space where distinctions between truth
and illusion are vague at best. It is a space where the characters production o f fantasy
becomes the reality o f the drama. I base my definition primarily on the theoretical
schizo-reality proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their 1972 work
Anti-Oedipe. In this representative space, all signs are schizophrenic, that is, they
are constantly in the process o f shifting, of becoming. As a result, human identities
can never exist as whole or unified entities; instead individuals are multiple
phenomena whose sense o f self is constantly being renegotiated and re-invented.
I conclude this preface with an assertion that the model o f schizophrenia and
the mad reality on which I base my analysis o f Beckett, Genet, and Duras is a
theoretical one. I have generalized schizophrenia as an aesthetic o f fluidity,
fragmentation, and disembodiment. I offer this aesthetic as a space of positive
creativity in the context o f literary texts. I am not a clinical psychologist and I do not
wish to presume that those persons who are afflicted with schizophrenic disorders
necessarily conform to my own theoretical speculations. I am also aware that there
exists a great variety in behavior and that there is within the medical community today
some debate whether or not schizophrenia is a viable diagnosis for certain cases of
mental illness which are generally termed schizophrenic.
R ep ro d u ced with p erm ission o f the copyright ow ner. Further reproduction prohibited without p erm ission .
CHAPTER I
A Pathological M useum :
The Construction and Performance of Madness
in 19,h Century Science
We can succinctly frame madness as it was constructed in society and on the

stage after the seventeenth century through the lens o f Michel Foucaults theory.
According to Foucault, with the establishment o f the first Hopital General in Paris in
1656, French society marked the birth o f a new constructed other which served to
replace the dwindling population o f lepers as a means o f defining antithetically a code
o f acceptable normalized existence in the dawning Age o f Reason.1 This decisive
segregation o f the population provided a new logic o f work, property, and morality.
Madness became an umbrella category by which an entire society, preoccupied with
locating and segregating all those who fell within the realm o f unreasonable
behavior, could define itself along the lines of civic morality.
From the seventeenth century onwards, the identification and the study of
madness became a social obsession. According to Foucault, the clinical data which
emerged from the scientific community became a type o f popular diversion in its own
right, and thereby contaminated the publics perception of how madness could be
localized and identified in society. In the nineteenth century, for example, hundreds
o f privileged Parisians flocked to La Salpetriere every Friday afternoon to hear the
lectures o f Jean-Martin Charcot, a specialist in the observation and treatment of
1 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York:
Vintage Books, 1988).
madness in women. Here we see what we might call a veritable theatre of madness,
where patients were often drugged, posed, and placed on display before an audience of
curious onlookers. By providing a definitive iconography o f madness, the scientific
community o f the nineteenth century influenced popular conceptions and artistic
representations o f insanity. In this chapter, I will concentrate on the constructedness
of a seemingly objective iconography of madness in the nineteenth-century scientific
field. I will examine how madness was created as a designation o f otherness, and
how the work o f such medical notables as Charcot maintained a clear segregation
between the space o f conventional or sound reasoning and that of insanity. I will also
analyze how the work o f the scientific community spilled over into the realm o f public
entertainment, and how the clinical categorization of the physical signs o f madness
informed popular conceptions o f the insane other.
Brouillets painting A Clinical Lesson at the Salpetriere (1887), which
currently hangs as part o f the French National Collection at the Neurologic Hospital in
Lyon, depicts Jean-Martin Charcot, a specialist in neurological disorders, examining a
female patient before a room full o f students, medical colleagues, and various non
medical dignitaries of Paris, including artists, writers, and journalists. The image
reveals a veritable theatre for the observation and the classification o f madness in the
nineteenth century.2 Charcot, lecturing, is clearly the focal center, and at his side,
unconscious, is his patient, the subject of the days lesson. Her bodice is completely
2 This painting has become, for me, an interesting metaphor for Charcots project at La Salpetriere.
What follows is my own interpretation regarding the manner by which the mad female was constructed
by the nineteenth-century scientific community. My analysis is based primarily on my readings of
unfastened, and she is being held upright from behind by a medical student. With her
shoulders and neck completely exposed, her position evokes the kind o f graceful
sensuality found in works by David and Delacroix. Her head hangs to one side, away
from Charcot, thus allowing her face to be the only one in the painting to directly
confront the spectator. Most notably, seated directly behind Charcot, is Paul Richer,
medical artist and physician, in the process o f documenting the details o f the
demonstration. Six years before Brouillets painting was completed, Richer had
published findings from his work at the Salpetriere in his famous visual table o f La
Grande attaque hysterique complete et reguliere, which classified four major periods
within an hysterical seizure, all with defined sub-categories which laid out pictorial
series o f the various poses that comprised a certain type o f attack. Precise
documentation in the form o f detailed drawings or photographs were, after all, one of
the most important elements in Charcots notoriety as the premier analyst o f madness
in Europe in the nineteenth century.
What is most interesting about Brouillets painting is the position o f the
patient as an object o f study, the subdued madwoman in the midst o f an hysterical
seizure, bared and displayed before a room o f curious bearded professionals. Her
name was Blanche Wittman. She was a long-term patient at the Salpetriere, and was
often pointed to as the classic prototype o f Charcots three stages o f hysteria:
lethargy, catalepsy, and somnambulism. Wittman, often referred to simply as Witt
or W . in the numerous medical journals which described her case, realized the
Foucault, as well as of feminisi works by H&ene Cixous and Catherine Clement, and Anti-Oedipe by
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
characteristic states o f the hysterical attack with marvelous precision.3 In the

portrait she has been hypnotized, and remains silent and unconscious as Charcot
explains to the onlookers the precise details of her condition.
Charcot usually dramatized his lectures by bringing in well-selected inmates
from the Salpetriere to demonstrate the conditions and characteristic stages o f various
neurological afflictions. Georges Guiilain, a devout student o f Charcot, and later one
o f the successors to his professorial chair, remarked that Charcot would do everything
possible to enhance his lectures by means o f visual and auditory effects. Charcot was
in fact one o f the first teachers to use projection equipment in his presentations, and he
usually surrounded him self with charts, drawings, graphic diagrams, as well as plastic
molds and casts o f patients exhibiting particular physical anomalies.^ Much like a
melodramatic actor, Charcot would himself mimic the physical stances and facial
contortions o f his patients, the deviation o f the face in a facial paralysis, the posture
o f a hand in a radial or cubital nerve paralyis, or the muscular rigidity o f a patient
suffering from Parkinsons disease.5 In his detailed account o f Charcots life and
work, Guiilain cites his colleague Pierre Janet, who comments on these clinical
dramatizations:
Everything in [Charcots] lectures was designed to attract attention
and to captivate the audience by means o f visual and auditory impressions.
The much-discussed dramatizations of his lectures on hysteria were not at all
confined to hysteria; these dramatizations were present to the same degree in
his lectures on multiple sclerosis or on tabes dorsalis. The patients who were
Frederick W. H. Meyers, cited in A.R.G. Owen, Hysteria, Hypnosis and Healing: The Work o f J-M
Charcot (London: Dennis Dobson, 1971) 186.
4 Georges Guiilain, J-M Charcot: His Life, His Work, ed. and trans. Pearce Bailey (New York: Paul B.
Hoeber, 1959) 55.
5 Guiilain 54.
selected and presented, whether individually or in group, whether similar or

dissimilar, the schematic figures on the blackboard, the graphic resumes, the
projections, the entire show had been designed and arranged for teaching
purposes.6
Each week, Charcot hand-chose a group o f patients who would serve to illustrate the
specific points o f his lecture. Guiilain recounts that the professor would move from
one patient to the next to demonstrate similar symptoms, responses, and physical
movements and postures among persons suffering from the same affliction. To this
end the patients, like the unconscious Blanche Wittman in Brouillets painting, were
often hypnotized so that they would reproduce the various symptoms o f their
condition at the desired moment. This can indeed be seen as a veritable theatre of
hysteria, complete with actors, stage-settings, and a meticulous director, not to
mention an audience of spectators.
In the two volume work on his achievements at the neurological clinic,
published shortly before his death, Charcot describes the elaborate screening process
by which specific patients were selected as models for his lectures. Before Charcots
arrival at the clinic, his interns divided a group o f patients who all demonstrated
symptoms o f a specific ailment into two groups: those who had previously
participated in one o f Charcots lessons, and those who were there for the first time.
These latter were then meticulously examined, and a small number o f them were
selected for Charcots personal examination. In this manner, even before the doctor
himself stepped into the clinic, his potential models had already passed through two
screenings, or auditions :
6 Guiilain 55.
les internes [...] dressent avec le plus de precision possible une premiere
liste de diagnostics. A son arrivee a lhospice, M. Charcot trouve cette
liste prete et il choisit tout de suite, parmi les cas juges a premiere vue les
plus interessants, un certain nombre de malades qui lui foumiront une partie
des elements de sa le9 on du jour. [...] Leur nombre etant considerable (il en
reste toujours au moins 60 ou 70, quelquefois 90 et plus), on con9 oit quil
n est possible de consacrer a chacun quun temps fort court.7
The process worked like a well-oiled machine, in Charcots own words, C 'est un
rouage presque indispensable du service.* Having thus selected the most
interesting cases among the narrowed-down list o f potential model patients, he had
them ushered into his theatre, where they would serve to demonstrate the key points of
his lecture.
Once in place, the patients were often hypnotized and asked to replicate
various physiognomic traits o f neurological ailments. Charcot induced a state o f
catalepsy by having the patient gaze at a bright light. Catalepsy became lethargy
when the doctor closed the patients eyes, or if he suddenly cut off the light source
with a screen. Somnambulism, or sommeil magnetique could be induced simply by
speaking in a peremptory tone to the lethargic subject (Owen, 185). In addition to
hypnotism through light, Charcot often used gongs, sound forks, or other percussive
instruments during his presentations to reproduce the various states o f the hysterical
seizure in his patients. In many of the engravings and photographs that were produced
to illustrate these demonstrations, the enormous sound fork retains a prominent
position in the background or in the hand o f one o f the experimenters. In a
particularly striking photograph by Paul Regnara, entitled catalepsie provoquee par
7 Jean-Martin Charcot, Clinique des maladies du systeme nerveux II (Paris: Bab, 1892) 431.
R ep ro d u ced with p erm ission o f th e copyright ow ner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
le bruit du d i a p a s o n a female patient is sitting hunched over to one side, her arms
pulled up to her face, her mouth contorted. Behind her, as large as the subject herself,
is the giant tuning fork used in the experiment. It looms up behind her like an
oversized prop in an absurdist play. From a twentieth-century perspective, these
theatrical elements seem somewhat out o f place in what would be considered clinical
scientific experiments, yet, as will be demonstrated throughout this chapter,
theatricality seemed to play an important role in a great number o f medical studies of
madness in the nineteenth century.
Regnard, the man responsible for this photograph, was a young physician of
the Salpetriere entourage. He contributed several photographic images to works such
as Les maladies epidemiques de I esprit (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1887), and the three
tomes o f the famous Iconographie Photographique de la Salpetriere (Paris: Delahaye
et Lecrosnier, 1876, 1878, 1880) images o f patients performing various characteristic
poses o f neurological afflictions under a state o f hypnosis. The photographs and
drawings show patients with their arms outstretched, their faces contorted, their
tongues extended, their eyes crossed; some patients are holding their hands to their
forehead or to their chin in theatrical stances o f despair or horror. In the background a
doctor or an intern is sounding a gong or drumming a pitchfork, or merely pointing
out particularly interesting anomalies in the patients posture9 - all this to demonstrate
the physical attributes o f mental illness, the goal o f which was primarily observation,
8 Charcot, Clinique 430.

9 Georges Did-Huberman, Invention de I 'hysterie (Paris: Macula, 1982) 207-8.
classification, and education, rather than treatment. In the first pages of his Legons
sur les maladies du systeme nerveux, Charcot writes,
Ce grand asile, personne de vous ne lignore sans doute, renferme une
population de plus de 5 000 personnes, parmi lesquelles figurent en grand
nombre, sous le titre d incurables, admises a vie, des sujets de tout age affectes
de maladies chroniques de tout genre, en particulier qui ont pour siege le
systeme nerveux [...] a notre disposition pour nos recherches pathologiques et
pour notre enseignement clinique [...] Nous sommes, en d autres termes, en
possession d une sorte de musee pathologique vivant, dont les ressources sont
considerables.10
In his own words, Charcot refers to his patients as life-time display-pieces in a living
museum. Their chronic neurological afflictions provided physicians and men of
science with an invaluable resource to observe the physiognomic manifestations of
incurable maladies among the safely interned mentally ill. The distinction between
the us and the them was maintained in much the same way that conventional
theatre separates the actors on stage from the spectators in the house.
Michel Foucault cites Charcot as largely responsible for constructing a social
truth regarding hysterical madness in the nineteenth century. With his weekly public
lectures and the volumes o f documentation, drawings and photographs which came
out o f his work at the Salpetriere, an enormous iconography o f the visible
characteristics o f madness was circulated among physicians and the literati o f the
time. In this manner, madness became a condition which could be clearly identified,
classified, and recorded. Foucault writes,
Let Charcots Salpetriere serve as an example in this regard: it was an
enormous apparatus for observation, with its examinations, interrogations, and
experiments, but it was also a machinery for incitement, with its public
10 Charcot, Leqons sur les maladies du systeme nerveux, qtd in Didi-Huberman: 275.
R ep ro d u ced with p erm ission o f the copyright ow ner. Further reproduction prohibited w ithout p erm ission .
presentations, its theater o f ritual crises, carefully staged with the help o f ether
or amyl nitrate, its interplay o f dialogues ,palpations, laying on o f hands,
postures which the doctors elicited or obliterated with a gesture or a word, its
hierarchy of personnel who kept watch, organized, provoked, monitored, and
reported, and who accumulated an immense pyramid o f observations and
dossiers. It is in the context o f this continuous incitement to discourse and to
truth that the real mechanisms of misunderstanding [meconnaissance]
operated.11
Charcot's work was based on visual clinical evidence: the observation and the
classification o f the physical traits o f an hysterical seizure. He was less interested in
the actual treatment of severe mental illness than in the documentation o f it. He was
not affiliated with psychological societies, and he did not attend regular meetings at
the Societe medico-psychologique in Paris. O f the ten percent o f the total patients in
his outpatient clinic that were deemed psychiatric, nearly one-third suffered from
progressive general paralysis, a condition which Charcot accepted as falling under his
neurological expertise.12 That is to say that Charcots interest lay first and foremost in
the external manifestations and in the visual signs o f neurological ailments, rather
than in the psychological treatment o f his patients afflictions. Male and female
hysterics were presented at the lectures and in the documentation for their particular
facial contortions and muscular contractions. As Janet reported, the subjects in his
lectures included patients with multiple sclerosis and with muscular and skeletal
irregularities.13
Nevertheless, although Charcot clearly viewed his achievements in the field of
neurology as separate and distinct from the emergent work o f the psychiatric doctors,
11 Michel Foucault, History o f Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) 56.
12 Foucault, Sexuality 209.
13 Guiilain 55.
or alienists, there is little doubt that the two domains were conflated, especially among
the non-medical population. The Salpetriere was one o f the most notorious insane
asylums in France, having housed hundreds o f female alienees since Louis XIV
opened its doors in 1656. Even after Charcots death, Auguste Cabene wrote in his
article about the Salpetriere for the Grande Encyclopedic, comme aux premiers temps
de sa creation, la Salpetriere contient actuellement un assez grand nombre de
folles. 14 Charcots analyses were a product o f nineteenth-century positivism, with
logical conclusions being drawn from empirical evidence. He represented a
movement among the young medical professionals and philosophers o f the time
toward the foundation o f a new psychology, a methodology based on objective
physiological data.15 His nomination as president of the new Societe Psychologique
Physiologique de Paris in 1885 sets him out as a champion for a medical science
which conjoined the psychological with the physiological.
Therefore, despite the theatrical nature o f the clinical presentations, Charcots
positivist approach to neurological afflictions more than likely translated, for the
general public, into a scientific, therefore reliable and objective, process of locating
and identifying the outward traits o f madness. The visual depiction o f madness
provided clinical iconography which informed the publics perceptions of insanity as
something which could be visually identifiable. This science o f classifying the
physiognomic traits in patients with mental ailments was not invented by Charcot. All
across Europe in the nineteenth century, physicians were developing various theories
14 La Grande Encyclopedic (Paris: Lamirault, 1886) 378.
11
to coordinate a persons psychological predisposition with physical features. The

fascination with the physical representation of insanity became a trans-national
preoccupation. At the end o f the eighteenth century, for example, Swiss theologian
Johann Kasper Lavater began to formulate the science of physiognomy, using a
persons facial features to distinguish character and mental capacity. His ideas were
later incorporated into the nascent science of phrenology, whereby a persons
character was linked, not only to his face, but also to the shape o f his head. In
Outlines o f Phrenology, published in Boston in 1838, George Combe included
drawings o f the four facial types distinguished by phrenology into basic humoral
categories: the lymphatic, the sanguine, the bilious, and the nervous. Each example
was clearly distinguishable from the others, and provided a scientific basis for reading
a persons personality simply by looking at his face. According to the early humoral
phrenologists, the shape o f a persons chin, the slant o f his forehead, the curve o f his
eyebrows, the arch o f his lips, and the angle o f his nose were all physical
manifestations o f an inner psychological disposition, such as melancholia, sloth,
courage, and irritability.16 The frontispiece to Combes A System o f Phrenology
(Boston, 1834) postulated thirty-five phrenological organs located on various
regions o f the skull. Such personality traits as combativeness, secretiveness, and
conscientiousness could be analyzed by studying the shape o f a subjects head.
Thirty years later, in S. R. Wells New System o f Phrenology (New York, 1866),
15 Christopher Goetz, Michel bonduelle, and Toby Gelfand, Charcot: Constructing Neurology (New
York: Oxford UP, 1995) 209.
16 Lynn Gamwell and Nancy Tomes, Madness in America (Binghamton: State U of New York, 1995)
71.
12
physician James Redfield published an elaborate physiognomic nomenclature, which

divided the face into nearly two-hundred tiny regions, each one specifically
designating one character trait, from benevolence (a minute rectangular area at the top
of the cranium) to envy (located in the center of the bottom lip), to submission (under
the chin).
Phrenological theories were most often called on to support a multitude o f
social and cultural biases, which postulated the intellectual and spiritual superiority of
white European men over any other group. It is commonly acknowledged that
physicians working under the burgeoning Nazi regime in the nineteen-thirties relied
on phrenology in their effort to prove the racial superiority o f the Germanic people;
yet such notions had already been common to scientific practice throughout the
nineteenth century in Europe and the United States.
In 1850, physician Robert Knox
calibrated the angle of the face and skull o f a black African male and a white
European male to prove that the Negro skull was more similar to that o f an ape than
that o f a Caucasian, thus giving support to the widely accepted cultural prejudice that
black persons were inherently less intelligent than white persons.17 Similarly, James
Redfield compared the shape o f the skull o f an Irishman to that o f a domesticated dog.
In his Comparative Physiognomy (New York, 1852), he presents a remarkable ink
drawing in which a bearded man, whose facial features and head presumably
demonstrate various characteristics o f the Irish people, bears a striking resemblance to
the sketched Irish terrier next to him. In reference to this analysis, Redfield wrote,
17 Profile of Negro, European, and Oran Outan, in Robert Knox, The Races o f Man (London, 1850)
reprinted in Gamwell: 70.
13
Among the Irish, the community takes to dirt-digging more naturally than to anything
else.
IS
As the subjects in these studies were groups who did not possess a voice
either in the professional or in the popular culture o f the nineteenth century, the
inherently racist, sexist, and classist theories o f phrenology went largely unchallenged.
The idea thzt one could read a persons intellectual capacity and emotional
character from simply looking at his or her physical traits was not exclusive to
scientific academe. At the height o f scientific positivism during the second half o f the
nineteenth century, the theories o f phrenology had seeped into popular consciousness
in France as well as in the United States and in England. Herbert Spencer, an
American philosopher and sociologist of the latter half o f the century, laid out the
theory o f social Darwinism, suggesting that human communities developed from
barbarism to civilization in the same way that human beings evolved from apes. He
posited that the evolution o f the nervous system in various human races necessarily
reflected their intellectual capacity and potential for complex thought. Following this
theory, a society which possessed a structured, organized civilization was the result of
a more highly developed consciousness.19
Spencers theories were highly influential among contemporary phrenologists,
who then applied the tenets o f social Darwinism to their own work. In 1841,
anthropologist F. Coombs published his findings regarding this new phrenological
Darwinism in the widely read Popular Phrenology. According to Coombs, the last
region o f the brain to develop was the seat o f the intellect, which served to inhibit and
18 James Redfield, Comparative Physiognomy (New York, 1852), reprinted in Gamweil: 70.
19 Gamweil 132.
14
control the more primitive functions o f the nervous system. This region was located
in the frontal lobes o f the cerebrum. Therefore, he concluded, the Anglo-Saxon race
was more capable o f intellectual reasoning than any other race, whose skulls
demonstrated a less prominent frontal cavity. To prove his point, he provided a
diagram which compared the profile portrait o f Milton, the poet, to the skull of a
savage Hottentot.
As both sketches are somewhat exaggerated, and as M iltons
head is portrayed with flesh and hair while the Hottentot skull is lying flush along a
plane surface so that the base o f the cranium is level with the lower jaw, it is not
surprising that the skull o f the savage African appears smaller and more severely
angled than that o f the European intellectual. And in case the reader still cannot
perceive the significance of this obvious difference, the caption reads, Skull o f a
savage Hottentot. Very small in the Intellect and Sentiments.20 In the same vein,
George Combes A System o f Phrenology (5th edition: Edinburgh, 1843) compared the
skull of Scottish poet Robert Bums with that of an unidentified North American
Indian. The drawing is meant to prove that Europeans have a higher capacity for
concentrativeness, or social attachment, than do Native Americans. For this reason,
American Indians, like many African tribes, are induced to wander and to migrate,
rather than to remain emotionally tied to any one place.21 Combes argument was
used to rationalize the forced relocation o f Native Americans during his century,
without risk o f any psychological distress on their part.
20 Portrait of Milton the Poet, and Skull of a Savage Hottentot, in F. Coombs, Popular Phrenology
(1841), reprinted in Gamweil: 132.
21 Gamweil 104.
15
Similarly, in an article published in the widely read Popular Science Monthly,

Ranson Dexter postulated that facial angle was a clear indication of mental capacity.
In the March issue o f 1874, Dexter wrote, The relative ascendancy o f the two factors,
physical and mental [...] shows very conclusively the gradual turning from the lowest
instincts o f the brute to the most complex mental powers o f man.'
The illustration
which accompanies the article shows the range o f overlapping facial angles, from a
Caucasian male to a fish. The diagram posits the lowest intellectual capacity with the
fish, then moves progressively inward as the intellect increases. The subjects are
identified respectively as a fish, a snake, a crocodile, a bird, a dog, a monkey, an idiot
(with an arrest o f brain development), a savage (Chief Black Hawk, a North
American Indian: same as Ethiopian), a half-civilized man (a Mongolian), and the
civilized white European (represented by the illustrious statesman, Daniel Webster).
At the same time that phrenology became important for classifying human
capacities, there was a rapidly emerging interest in the depiction of the physiognomic
traits o f mental afflictions through photography. Asylums all over Europe and the
United States began to compile catalogues o f photographs o f criminals and the insane
in an effort to identify common physical signs o f mental illness and physical
anomalies. The largest collections still extant are those from Bedlam Royal Hospital
in London, and the Hospital o f San Clemente in Venice, the register o f which contains
thousands o f portraits o f insane women.23 Often these catalogues were published as
interesting curiosities for the medical establishment as well as the general public. In
22 Ranson Dexter, The Facial Angle, Popular Science Monthly (March, 1874) 592.
22 Didi-Huberman 46.
16
the preface to the Revue photographique des Hopitaux de Paris, the authors A.
Montmeja and J. Rengade wrote,
La revue que nous avons lhonneur doffrir au public medical a pour objet de
publier les cas les plus interessants recueillis dans les hopitaux de Paris [...]
M. le Directeur de lAssistance publique a bien voulu placer sous son
patronage la nouvelle publication, et faire construire a lhopital un magnifique
atelier de photographie, qui est le rendez-vous de ce que la pathologie a de
plus interessant et de plus rare.24
As photography itself was a new science, it was considered by many an infallible and
objective means o f capturing and recording the visible traces o f mental illness in the
portraits o f interned patients. Beginning in 1851, Dr. Hugh W. Diamond, president of
the Royal Photographic Society o f London, as well as the director o f the Photographic
Journal, began to compile portraits o f interned women from Surrey County Asylum.
Commenting on a collection o f these portraits (On the Application o f photography to
the physiognomic and mental phenomena o f insanity, 1856), a contemporary
observer wrote,
Et quelles etudes, au point de vue de la physiognomie, dans ces collections oil
la nature du crime se trouverait inscrite a cote du visage du coupable! Comme
on pourrait lire lhistoire des passions humaines dans ce livre dont chaque
visage serait une page, et chaque trait une ligne eloquente! Quel traite de
philosophie! Quel poeme, que la lumiere seule pourrait ecrire! [...] J ai sous
les yeux une collection de quatorze portraits de femmes de differents ages.
Les unes sourient, d autres paraissent rever, toutes ont quelque chose d etrange
dans la physionomie: voila ce quon comprend au premier coup doeil [...]
Un mot suffit pour tout expliquer: ce sont des folles.25
One may wonder where this writer achieved such expertise in distinguishing that
element o f something strange in the faces o f these women that so poetically
24 Montmeja and Rengade, Revue photographique des Hopitaux de Paris I (1869) preface, reprinted in
Didi-Huberman: 276.
17
identified them as insane to him. As Foucault points out, the medical profession was
indeed creating a theatre o f madness for the literary public, where the reasonable
observers were given a kind o f how-to guide to identify the physical traits o f certain
mental conditions.
These portraits o f asylum patients were often reproduced as engravings in The
Medical Times, with interesting alterations by the artist to enhance the insane
cliches o f the subjects.26 For example, in the engraving taken from a photograph o f a
woman exhibiting symptoms o f Melancholy passing into Mania, the lines o f the
face are darkened, particularly around the eyes, thus giving the subject a more
identifiable look o f despair, or fear. The photographic background, revealing the
exterior o f the asylum walls, has vanished in the artists rendition, so the patient
appears to be gazing off into space rather than looking at a specific thing. Also, her
patterned dress has been altered to look more like an inmates uniform, and the
creases o f a garment draped over her knees are exaggerated, so that her hands seem to
be clutching the garment rather than to be simply resting in her lap. In the rendering
from another photograph o f a subject suffering from Religious Mania, the artist has
changed the perspective and heightened the symmetry of the pose, so that the subject
appears remarkably more saintly and distant than in the photograph. What is
important to note here is that despite the fact that the engravings exaggerated the
physiognomic traits o f their subjects, for the first time in history, the scientific
25 E. Lacan, Esquisses photographiques, a propos de I 'Exposition universelle et de la guerre d Orient

(Paris: Grassart, 1856) 39-40.
26 Images reproduced in Didi-Huberman: 42.
18
community could produce what it felt was objective recorded proof that it was indeed
possible to read a persons character simply by studying her face.
This technique o f cataloguing the faces o f the insane was used not only by
persons in the medical field, but also by the police, in an effort to classify the physical
traits o f deviancy. Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909) collected
hundreds of portraits and skulls o f criminals o f different nationalities, which he later
reproduced and published in his Atlas o f the Criminal (1878).27 Lombroso believed in
a type o f criminal anthropology which could reveal a consistency o f phrenological
traits among social deviants. Comparing a series o f photographic portraits could thus
produce theories regarding the identification o f a persons criminality simply by
looking at his or her face. This type o f photographic evidence, used by
criminologists and physicians alike, substantiated the widespread philosophy that
identity could be read in a portrait. The human face was reduced to a collection of
universal types, through which personality and disease could be identified, codified,
and registered.
Even classical portraits o f past artists and statesmen were not exempt from
phrenological analyses. After having visited painter Rembrandt Peales studio in
1839. Combe published a detailed diagnosis o f George Washington, based on a
painted portrait which he had seen there:
Washingtons head as here delineated, is obviously large; and the anterior lobe
o f the brain is large in all directions; the organ o f Benevolence is seen to rise,
but there the moral organs disappear under his hair. The temperament is
bilious-sanguine; the action o f the muscles o f the mouth strongly expresses
27 Cesare Lombroso, L 'homme criminel, criminel-ne, fou moral, epileptique, etude anthropologique et
medico-legale, 2 vols, trans. Regnier et Boumet (Paris: Alcan, 1887).
19
Secretiveness and Firmness, and the eyes bespeak these qualities combined
with Cautiousness. The general expression o f the countenance is that of
sagacity, prudence and determination.28
As might be expected, Combe noticed no signs of dementia or social deviancy in the
face of Americas first president.
Inspired by the positivist approach to phrenology, Duchenne de Boulogne
attempted to classify, through photographic portraiture, the particular muscular
configurations o f a multitude o f different emotions and afflictions in his Mecanisme
de la physionomie hum aim ou analyse electrophysiologique de I 'expression des
passions (Renouard: Paris, 1862). Meanwhile, in England, Sir Francis Galton was
producing composite character types by juxtaposing a series o f photographs o f persons
exhibiting similar traits. The frontispiece to his Inquiries into Human Faculties
(London, 1883) presents various specimens o f composite portraiture. Among the
assimilated facial types were sufferers o f tuberculosis and consumption, the latter
consisting o f a composite o f fifty-six different cases; also, faces o f criminality
(labeled, two o f the many criminal types) and health (represented by a composite
o f twenty-three portraits o f royal engineers).29 William Noyes (1857-1915), a
physician at the Bloomingdale Asylum in New York, used this same technique as a
diagnostic aid in identifying various mental disorders. Around 1890, he gave a
composite portrait o f the melancholy type to William James, who was then writing
and making drawings regarding his own bouts with depression.30
28 George Combe, Notes on the United States o f America during a Phrenological Visit (Edinburgh,
1841)339.
30 Gamweil 126.
The largest collection of photographic portraits of neurological afflictions

from the nineteenth century are the three tomes of the Iconographie photographique
de la Salpetriere, published successively in 1876, 1878, and 1879. Like the
photographic journals by the phrenologists, the volumes o f the Iconographie
photographique were purchased by wealthy Parisians who were fascinated by the
pathological curiosities found at their most famous insane asylum. Desire-Magloire
Boumeville was the chief editor o f all three volumes, contributing detailed
descriptions o f specific case histories from his work at the Salpetriere, and Paul
Regnard added his photographic expertise in the form of hundreds of artistically
composed photographs, vividly depicting the different stages o f hysteria and epilepsy
in Charcots young female patients. All conceivable poses and attitudes o f the
hysterical attack are clearly identified and laid out in these volumes. The Salpetriere
had a highly sophisticated photographic studio on its premises, with some of the most
advanced photographic instiuments of its day, not to mention all the props and
backdrops necessary for effective portraiture. The Service photographique, as the
studio was formally called, was equipped with two laboratories, various artificial light
diffusers as well as large windows for natural illumination, cameras with multiple
objectives for rapid series o f shots, developing chambers, and o f course a sizable
archive.31 The photographer had to be ready to be called in at any time to record on
film the immediate contractions and gestures of hysterical subjects, whose rapid
seizures would be over before any outside photographer would have time to arrive on
21
the scene and set up all the necessary instruments. As Boumeville wrote in the
preface to the first volume o f the Iconographie,
Bien des fois, dans le cours de nos etudes, nous avons regrette de ne pas avoir
a notre disposition les moyens de perpetuer par le dessin le souvenir des cas,
interessants a des titres divers, que nous avions loccasion dobserver.32
The job o f the photographer, Paul Regnard, then, was to perpetuate the images of the
Salpetriere patients for the future of the medical profession.
And so he did. The three volumes of photographs from the Salpetriere group
portraits o f patients exhibiting trademark characteristics o f la grande hysterie in both
men and women. The four main periods o f the hysterical seizure: epileptic fit,
clownism, emotional attitudes, and delirium, are all represented with clear, close-up
photographs and accompanying rubrics. In 1896, medical photographer Albert Londe
commented on the photographic service under Charcot, supporting the theories of
phrenology in localizing and identifying certain physical facial traits that might have
gone unnoticed until similar traits were identified in a series o f patients suffering from
the same affliction:
Letude des facies en pathologie nerveuse a ete faite d une fafon remarquable
par lEcole de la Salpetriere et sans trop savancer, on peut affirmer que la
Photographie n a pas ete d un mediocre secours dans la circonstance.
Certaines modifications de la face qui par elles-memes ne sauraient constituer
isolement un signe evident d une affection quelconque, prennent une
importance tres grande si on les retrouve toujours chez les malades similaires
[...] avec des photographies rapprochees les unes des autres, on pourra faire
des comparaisons sur de nombreux specimens et en deduire les modifications
typiques qui constituent tel ou tel facies.33
32 D-M. Boumeville and P. Regnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere (Paris: Delahaye

et Lecrosnier, 1876) preface.
33 A. Londe, La photographie modeme (Paris: Masson, 1896) 654, qtd in Didi-Huberman: 52.
22
Londe also remarked on the usefulness o f composite portraiture, as in the work of

Duchenne de Boulogne and Noyes, to isolate characteristics typical o f a certain
condition. Reducing an illness to definitive characteristic trademarks located in the
shape o f the eyes, the tension in the lips, the lines around the mouth and across the
forehead, among other phrenological regions, allowed doctors to create a system o f
signs that identified neurological afflictions according to a coded system o f traits and
attitudes. As we have seen, this system bore some resemblance to the methods o f
identification used by the police to codify criminals. As Georges Didi-Huberman
writes in Invention de I Hysterie:
Les medecins de la Salpetriere furent done comme des poiiciers
scientifiques, a la recherche d un critere de la difference, entendu comme
principium individuationis; un critere propre a fonder le signalement,
e est-a-dire une reconnaissance, une assignation d identite.34
In the photographic studios of the mental asylum as well as o f the prefecture de
police, and, as we shall see in the next chapter with nineteenth-century performance
theorists, scientific experts were in the process o f creating definitive images o f the
outward signs o f the unreasonable mind. Most importantly, they were able to do so
with a kind o f empirical, positivist confidence, and with a seemingly cool objectivity
which had been impossible with only the hand-drawn sketches o f previous years.
In the chapter o f Madness and Civilization entitled The New Division,
Michel Foucault delineates the historical movement to separate criminals from the
insane in the early nineteenth century. Foucault suggests that a new sensibility sprang
out o f the French Revolution which eventually caused the widespread establishment
u Didi-Huberman 58.
23
o f asylums throughout Europe, designed specifically for the internment and the
observation o f those considered mad. Up until this point, he remarks, madness had
been unquestionably linked with crime; therefore, the insane had been incarcerated in
the same facilities as convicted lawbreakers, all lumped together in the same category
o f social delinquents. Suddenly, this overarching category was called into question.
Foucault writes,
The undifferentiated unity o f unreason had been broken. Madness was
individualized [...] In this confinement drained of a part o f its content, these
two figures - madness, crime - subsist alone; by themselves, they symbolize
what may be necessary about it; they alone are what henceforth deserves to be
confined. Having taken its distance, having finally become an assignable form
in the confused world o f unreason, did not liberate madness; between madness
and confinement, a profound relation had been instituted, a link which was
almost one o f essence.35
Madness may thus have been separated from strict criminality, but it was not
completely evacuated from it. Not only did the asylum assure that madness
maintained a position distinct from the norms of logical reasoning, where it could be
localized and observed, but also by employing the same technique o f photography and
display as the popular publications that came out o f the prefecture de police, the
Salpetriere assured its audience of the same sensationalist presentation o f the faces of
madness as Lombroso in his Atlas de I homme criminel (1878) and Galton in his
Inquiries into the human faculties (1883). In this sense, photography ensured that
madness remained tainted with criminality, and could be observed from a safe
distance in order to identify its visible characteristics.
35 Foucault, Madness and Civilization 228.
R ep ro d u ced with p erm ission o f the copyright ow ner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
Boumeville and Regnard fill the pages of the Iconographie photographique

with an array o f art, technology, clinical, data, personal commentaries, and detailed
descriptions which posited hysteria as a real and documented disease. The favorable
reviews published in such respected medical journals as Archives de Neurologie,
Progres Medical and Revue scientifique revealed a reception to Charcots theories far
beyond that to any o f his earlier contributions to neurology. Up to this point hysteria
was not a disease respected by the scientific disciplines o f the nineteenth century.
There had been a gross lack o f anatomical data to legitimize it. However, by
offsetting this lack o f medical proof with a rich display o f clinical evidence, Charcot
was able, almost single-handedly, to bring hysteria to the forefront of the neurological
field:
Hysterias status as an objective disease was fortified by the Iconographie
photographique's presentation of an array o f clinical measures and laboratory
techniques that Charcot and Boumeville had used in earlier investigations of
organic disease. Tables, graphs, and other quantitative measures charted the
clinical course for the ailment and the effects of therapeutic interventions;
thermometry, recordings o f muscle contractions, respiration, pulse, chemical
analyses o f blood, secretions, and excreta were much in evidence.36
More than the graphs, tables, and all the other clinical data which proved the validity
o f hysteria, however, it was the series of individual case histories which captured the
attention and the imagination o f the Iconographie photographique's readers.
Although Blanche Wittman was the reigning star of the live demonstrations at
the Salpetriere, it was Augustine who quickly became the celebrity o f the
Iconographie photographique. In fact, it is Augustines poses which one can easily
recognize in Richers famous Tableau synoptique de la g rande attaque hysterique.
25
Georges Didi-Huberman suggests that it was in fact Augustines theatrical

predictability which allowed her to become the most favored subject for Charcots
photographic endeavor:
Ce qui fit d Augustine lune des grandes stars de 1Iconographie
photographique de la Salpetriere, ce fut avant tout lespece de deroulement
temporel, toujours tres bien delinee de repos et d entractes, de ses
attaques: lespece de decoupage dramaturgique, en actes, scenes et tableaux,
de ses symptdmes. Cette dite intermittence plastiquement reguliere.37
The images in the Iconographie follow a specific order, and each photographed pose
is accompanied by clear rubrics that explain the emotional state o f the subject at the
time. In fact, in many cases it was Augustine herself who added the corresponding
narration, as Didi-Huberman writes,
II y a done des passages sous silence, dans le commentaire alors meme
quAugustine, delivrant sa vision dans lapparaitre d une gesticulation, se
condamnait presque a une narration, un dire, tres legerement mediatises, de
son experience delirante.38
In a series dedicated to attitudes passionnelles, which illustrates certain dramatic
gestures caused by hallucinatory seizures, Augustine demonstrates various different
postures, labeled respectively enticement, supplication, eroticism, ecstacy,
and mockery. Though these photographs in all likelihood were not taken in one
sitting, Augustine wears the same white gown and sits in the same plush bed, so that a
distinct narrative can be formed when the images are placed in a given order. The
subjects gestures are extremely dramatic; each pose is different from the next, and
actually seems to lead into whatever posture is to follow. Even when she is affected
36 Goetz 184.
26
only by a hallucination o f sound, Augustine places her hands in such a manner as to

elucidate the posture.
What is most interesting about these scientific records o f the hysterical
subject in the midst o f a seizure is the fact that in most cases the seizures were
artificially induced by having the patient inhale significant quantities o f ether or amyl
nitrate. Under the influence o f these hallucinatory drugs, the patients were not
photographed during naturally occurring seizures, but rather, during induced or
performed simulacra o f seizures. Similar to Charcots personal approbation of
hypnosis as a means o f reproducing the stages o f an hysterical attack among the model
patients who participated in his weekly lectures, Desire-Magloire Boumeville
comments in the third volume o f the Iconographie photograpique:
les effets de Tether se prolongeraient un temps assez long apres T inhalation
[...] Lether produirait presque constamment dos reves agreables, voluptueux,
et mettrait la malade dans la situation ou elle se trouve durant une partie de la
phase gaie de la periode de delire des attaques. [...] Laction du nitrite d amyle
est moins agreable que celle de Tether. On voit que, aux sensations
voluptueuses, se melaient des reves penibles, dans lesquels la malade voyait
des yeux rouges, des dents bleues, du sang, etc.39
Albert Londe describes a similar experiment, this time with an entire group o f women:
Les hysteriques ont ete amenees devant Tappareil sous le pretexte de faire leur
portrait. A ce moment, un coup de gong a ete donne et elles sont toutes
tombees en catalepsie, ainsi que le montre le croquis fait d apres Tepreuve par
le Dr. Richer. Dans ce cas particulier on peut poser le temps voulu, car dans
Tetat de catalepsie le malade presente une immobilite presque complete.40
The theatrical nature o f these photographic sessions is striking. Not only were the
subjects specifically dressed and posed to evoke the various designated phases o f the
39 Boumeville and Regnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere III (Paris: Delahaye et

Lecrosnier, 1878) 189-190.
27
hysterical seizure, but they were also dmgged and hypnotized in order to reproduce
these same phases with expected regularity before the camera. Subsequently, the
photographs were classified, labeled, and reproduced as scientific, objective proof of
the systematic and universal nature of the hysterical attack.
Paul Richer was particularly proud o f experiments during which he could
induce his dazed patients to play an entire range of different roles, from dog to stageactress, simply by verbal suggestion.
In a series o f procedures which he documented
in his Etudes cliniques sur la grande hysterie (1881), Richer described how he would
suggest to his subject that she was in fact not made o f flesh and blood, but o f glass, or
wax, or rubber. Consequently, the patient would begin to take on the physical traits o f
these substances. If the subject was told that she was made of glass, Richer writes,
she moved about the room with extreme caution for fear of shattering. Pushing
further this line o f experimentation, Richer suggested to his patients that they were
animals or specific persons. He writes:
La malade peut etre egalement transformee en oiseau, en chien, etc. et on la
voit sexercer alors a reproduire les allures de ces animaux. [...] Des
experiences encore plus interessantes surtout au point de vue psychologique
consistent dans le changement de personnalite. Un sujet, sous [influence
d une suggestion verbale, peut se croire M. X ou Y. II perd alors la notion de
tout ce qui concourt a former sa propre personnalite, et cree a laide de ses
souvenirs la personnalite qui lui est imposee.41
Among the examples which Richer cites as most interesting or bien curieux" 42 are
the hysterical dramatizations o f a peasant-girl the patient walks as if she is wearing
40 A. Londe, La photographie medicale (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1893) 90.

41 Paul Richer, Etudes cliniques sur la grande hyserie ou hystero-epilepsie (Paris: Delahaye et
Lecrosnier, 1881) 728.
42 Richer 728.
28
clogs and makes the gestures o f milking a cow--, o f an actress she smiles and
declares that her skirt is much too long--, and of a nun she falls to her knees and
makes the sign o f the cross. In all of these descriptions, the subject enacts
immediately recognizable cliches of the personality types suggested by the physician,
much like simple acting exercises, where participants are asked to improvise the
words and gestures of certain stereotypes. Richer writes:
Ce nest plus seulement a la fatjon de lhallucine qui assiste en spectateur a des
images se deroulant devant lui; cest comme un acteur qui, pris de folie,
simaginerait que le drame quil joue est une realite, non une fiction, et quil a
ete transforme, de corps et dame, dans le personnage quil est charge de
jouer.43
It seems quite telling that the writer chose a lexicon o f theatre terminology
(spectateur, acteur, drame, fiction, personnage, jouer) to describe a procedure by
which patients o f hysteria were induced Frst to reproduce the attack itself by means of
hypnosis or hallucinatory drugs, then to dramatize the effects o f the hallucination for
the benefit o f scientific records meant to illustrate their alleged madness. Richer was
thus aware of the performative elements that made up his experiments and, like
Charcot, he presented his experiments to his public as if the patient were an actor on
the stage. Like the live demonstrations at the Salpetriere, the photographs formed a
kind o f theatre o f madness, whereby hysterical curiosities were displayed as
commodities o f fascination and entertainment in the name o f clinical science.
In a collection o f photographs in the third volume o f the Iconographie
photographique, illustrating one such experiment completed by Paul Regnard, an
exquisitely dressed young woman demonstrates, under hypnosis, various sentimental
29
"positions, such as declamations of love, fear, and terror. These photographs are
truly works o f art, with expertly manipulated light-sources and camera perspectives.
Perfectly coiffed and attired, the woman represents the different emotions by the way
she extends her hands, focuses her gaze, and angles her head and body. A decade
later, medical photographer Albert Londe published a similar series of photographs in
the Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpetriere (1888-1918) under the rubric
Suggestions par les sens dans la periode cataleptique du grand hypnotisme. Once
again, the female subject, correctly centered and expertly lit, enacts a wide range of
emotional states before the camera. Each one is distinctive and easily deciphered
because o f the clicheed dramatic poses. Didi-Huberman writes:
C est avec cela que 1'Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere reussit a
nous laisser tous cois devant la beaute de certaines images, ou la lumiere aussi
semblait prendre part au role lui-meme, comme matiere intrinseque au drame
[...] Albert Londe [...] ecrasa systematiquement, lui, ses hysteriques, entre
lestrade (un socle plutot) et une lumiere ostentatoirement neutre, haineuse du
mystere, du grand mystere theatral de la catalepsie.44
These beautifully constructed portraits are indeed reminiscent o f sketches and
photographs o f nineteenth-century actresses posing in their roles as victims and
ingenues on the advertisements for the latest melodrama or pantomime on the popular
stage.
As had been done by the artists o f the Medical Times two decades earlier, Paul
Regnard and Paul Richer supplied the medical journals of Paris with detailed
drawings o f their photographs, making sure to enhance the theatricality o f each
portrait with a few well-chosen embellishments. In a particularly striking example,
43 Richer 729.
R ep ro d u ced with p erm ission o f th e copyright ow ner. Further reproduction prohibited w ithout p erm ission .
30
Paul Richer produced an engraving based on a photograph o f Augustine

demonstrating the paralytic phase o f an hysterical attack for his Etudes cliniques sur
la grande hysterie ou hystero-epilepsie (Paris, 1881). In the rendering, Richer took
some artistic license in order to transform his subject into a veritable cliche o f the
mad hysteric.45 Strong lines were added to her forehead, giving her eyes a strikingly
crazed look, the tension in her shoulders was intensified, and white foam was added to
her twisted mouth. Paradoxically, in addition to these added signs o f madness to the
engraving, Richer also heightened the femininity o f the image by making the bed
appear more plush, by showing Augustines hair spread out over the pillow, and by
pulling up the hospital gown well above her knees to expose two shapely, albeit
contorted legs which were completely hidden in the photograph. As a result, the
artistic rendering is at once horrible and scintillating, simultaneously a portrait o f a
raving lunatic and o f a sensuous young woman.
In light o f the not-so-understated eroticism in the photographs o f the hysterical
women o f the Salpetriere, it is interesting to examine some o f the commentaries that
accompany the images. In many o f the narratives in which Augustine explicates her
hysterical hallucinations, she presents visions o f herself vacillating toward and away
from sexual relations with an unnamed man. Sometimes her narration touches on the
quite explicit, one might even say pornographic. Further, in almost all the
photographs, her voluptuous hair cascades over her shoulders and back, and her body
45 The photograph by Regnard and the drawing by Richer are both reproduced in Didi-Huberman: 121.
31
is loosely covered by the drapes o f a white nightgown. After a particularly extensive

hallucinatory seizure on March 3, 1877, she wrote,
Je vois M ... sapprocher de moi, il se couche a mon cote, il m entrelatpait dans
ses bras, m embrassait, me chatouillait et me touchait [...] A mon tour, je
lembrassais aussi et le comblais de caresses en me serrant contre lui, alors je
fremissais, animee, heureuse, puis je me tortillais, en me tenant tout a fait
d une maniere inconvenante... Croyant toujours que M ... me caressait, me
touchait les seins, ensuite faisait la... Et moi, heureuse, je la faisais toujours
avec plaisir et ardeur.46
Narratives such as this one, coupled with strictly medical data, rendered the
Iconographie photographique a paradoxical mix o f objective science and seething
sexuality.
Augustines delirium-induced accounts were not the only ones to spice up the
volumes o f the Iconographie photographique. The young patient known as
Genevieve supplied the publication with long explicit quotations labeled as
expressions o f extreme lubricity.47 Having been bom and abandoned in Loudun, site
o f the great witch-hunts o f the seventeenth century, Genevieve became a perfect
model o f Charcots demoniaque. In the detailed case history recorded in the
Iconographie photographique, Boumeville compared her affliction to that o f the
demoniacal possession o f a convent o f Ursuline nuns in London. He also noted that
her cutting off part o f her breast recalled a similar incident o f self-mutilation among
members o f a Russian religious sect. In this manner, Genevieve stands out as more
46 Boumeville and Rdgnard Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere III (Paris: Delahaye et

Lecrosnier, 1879) 188-189.
47 Boumeville and Regnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere I (Paris: Delahaye et
Lecrosnier, 1876) 70-71.
32
than simply a clinical case; she becomes a kind of other-worldy being, possessed by a
dark spirituality. Christopher Goetz writes,
The melodramatic rendering of Genevieves history with its blend o f bizarre
clinical descriptions, its voyeurism, and its flair for the journalistic fa it divers
and the historical anecdote indicates that the Iconographie photographique
had on its agenda publicizing hysteria, beyond a strictly medical context. Each
attack, readers were told, had beneath the general pattern an originality o f its
own, and they were encouraged to go on to the case of Marc which would
be o f interest, we hope, even after Genevieve.48
This style o f presenting all the gruesome and sexual details o f one specific case, then
imploring the reader to turn the page for the next, equally if not even more interesting
case description, recalls the performative conventions of the Grand Guignol theatre,
where the master-of-ceremonies would appear between each act and entice the
audience to remain seated for the next gruesome scene, which would inevitably prove
to be even more enthralling than the last.
In fact, the explicitly sexual nature o f the photographs and of the narratives
that accompanied them served to reinforce the image of the madwoman as Other,
one might say even, the performance o f Other. Her poses and her words went
beyond the tenets o f the established moral codes, thus proving that she existed in a
space outside o f the norms o f logical behavior. Nevertheless, she only went so far in
her disruption o f these codes, for she was still captivating. Her portraits and her
narratives still enticed, rather than repulsed her audience; after all, both Augustine and
Genevieve continued to be observed by the most respected men o f science o f their
day, rather than incarcerated along with common street-walkers for moral indecency.
48 Goetz 186.
R ep ro d u ced with p erm ission o f the copyright ow ner. Further reproduction prohibited w ithout perm ission.
33
As can be seen from the foregoing examples, a significant portion o f the

Iconographie photographique was dedicated to photographs of a series of attractive
young women, lying back against a mountain o f pillows, their arms stretched toward
the camera in suggestive positions, all the while dramatizing, then narrating, a
fantasized sexual encounter. Keeping in mind that the readers of this medical
professional journal were primarily French male physicians and students o f medicine,
it is not surprising that their reception was so enthusiastic. However, members o f the
British medical field objected most strongly to the Iconographie photographique's
flirtation with the pornographic. The British Medical Journal, in its June 7 issue o f
1879, rigidly condemned the French for having gone too far:
We must say that we regret that a work o f such great scientific interest should
be to English readers rendered somewhat unsavoury reading by the
introduction o f long pages o f the obscene ravings of delirious hysterical girls,
and descriptions o f events in their sexual history.49
It seems that even contemporary readers o f the Iconographie photographique were
aware o f the sensationalistic tilt to this seemingly empirical medical publication, and
as with nineteenth-century burlesque shows and dance-hall performances, the arbiters
o f social morality criticized the sensual character o f the Salpetriere photographs. In
fact, the criticism which was aimed against Augustine, Genevieve, and Blanche
Wittman is not a far cry from that which condemned most nineteenth-century lowtheatre actresses to the position o f whore or moral degenerate. From a spectators
standpoint, the vedettes o f the Salpetriere fulfilled many of the same functions as the
female performers on the Parisian popular stage. Although male hysterics were also
49 Cited in Goetz 186.
34
represented, it was young women who dominated both the Iconographie

photographique and the live demonstrations. By pushing the envelope o f what was
considered acceptable female propriety in the nineteenth century, Augustine,
Genevieve, and Blanche Wittman, however genuine their afflictions were, played a
very specific role as seductresses and titillating objects of desirefor their male
spectators.
One may argue that the patients o f the Salpetriere, primarily the female
patients, who posed and reproduced the various cliches of hysteria in front o f the
camera as well as in front o f the live audiences at the Friday afternoon lectures, were
victimized by the medical professionals o f their day. Many may suggest that
Augustine, Genevieve, and Blanche Wittman were exploited, put on display in order
to titillate their public in the guise o f medical scholarship. I propose, rather, a certain
unspoken complicity between these women as performers and their medical agents.
Augustine, Genevieve, and Blanche were the stars o f the medical theatre at the
Salpetriere. They were specifically selected by Charcot and his colleagues precisely
because they were able to reproduce the faces o f madness with utmost precision and
regularity. Like well-rehearsed actors who reproduce meticulously every desired
gesture and every rehearsed glance night after night on the stage, these women
perfectly demonstrated the postures o f hysteria as they had been laid out by medical
professionals. Their performance o f madness was so successful because the positivist
attitude o f the medical profession o f the nineteenth century allowed their audiences to
accept the rigorous classifications o f madness without question.
35
Although Charcot published a great number o f articles on many psychological

afflictions other than hysteria, his popular fame was largely a result of his theatrical
demonstrations at the Salpetriere. Phrenology and social Darwinism provided him
with the necessary backdrop for the construction o f a seemingly objective, scientific
iconography o f madness. Whereas in the eighteenth century, the social elite of Paris
visited the Salpetriere on Sunday afternoons to get a glimpse of the lunatics and the
filles de mauvaise vie50 who were securely fettered at a safe distance; in the
nineteenth century, they congregated at Charcots lectures, or they perused the pages
o f the Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere. The result was the same: by
exposing themselves to cliched representations o f madness, reasonable persons
were able to reassure themselves o f their own position o f power in a world o f binary
logic. By watching the confined insane, those considered sane were convinced o f their
own sanity.
The pathological museum created by Charcot maintained a safe distance
between the performers o f madness and the spectators. With Augustine, Genevieve,
and Blanche on his stage, Charcot provided visual representations o f the Other, the
Mad, and thus valorized the established moral codes and ethics which governed
normal society o f his day.
Whether or not Charcots two massive projects on
hysteria, his live demonstrations at the Salpetriere clinic, and the three tomes of the
Iconographie photographique were accepted as unbiased scientific research or seen as
quasi-pomographic performances o f female sexuality, one cannot dismiss the
profound effects they had on the representation of madness in nineteenth-century
50 La Grande Encyclopedie (Paris: Lamirault, 1886) 378.
36
society. By creating and perpetuating a certain visual image of hysteria, biased or not,
Charcot, Boumeville, and Regnier were responsible for maintaining a classical
stereotype o f the mad person, which remains with us to this day.
As my examples have shown, it was not so much the treatment of madness
which concerned Charcot, but rather its observation and classification according to
specific visual clues. Although the experiments and the lectures at the Salpetriere
established a kind o f proximity between the inmate and the public, they never created
a dialogue between the two, as Foucault writes:
a psychology o f madness becomes possible, for under observation madness is
constantly required, at the surface o f itself, to deny its dissimulation. It is
judged only by its acts; it is not accused of intentions, nor are its secrets to be
fathomed. Madness is responsible only for that part of itself which is visible.
AU the rest is reduced to silence. Madness no longer exists except as seen.51
Even in those few instances when the patient was allowed to speak, in those explicit
commentaries added to enhance the photographed series in the Iconographie
photographique, it was only to support the unquestioned claims o f the physicians:
that the mad person did in fact exist in a personal reality far beyond the acceptable
norms o f reason and logic. Moreover, Charcot consistently dismissed the subjectpatients from his lectures before he would deliberate on the particulars o f their cases
in front o f his audience. This is to say that the mad person was little more than a
passive object o f an authoritative psychological discourse: the patient was expected to
perform the visual attributes o f madness as it had been classified and delineated by the
physicians. Foucault continues, if the medical personage could isolate madness it
was not because he knew it, but because he mastered it; and what for positivism
37
would be an image o f objectivity was only the other side o f this domination.52 In this
system, the mad person could never return the observation in any way, but, like an
actor on stage playing the villain, the fool, or the insane, remained forever marked as
an outsider to the world o f his audience. In the weekly lectures and in the series of
photographs in the Iconographiephotographique, the patients constant performance
o f madness, often under the influence of hypnosis or delirium-inducing drugs,
objectified her in the eyes o f the world, and, as Foucault suggests, placed her in the
position o f a perfect stranger, that is, as the man whose strangeness does not reveal
itself.53
With this in mind, we return again to Brouillets celebrated painting o f the
unconscious Blanche Wittman, hypnotized in order to perform the various stages of
Charcots schema o f madness. She is the only one whose face is turned away from the
master clinician. She remains indeed a stranger not only to Charcot and to the sea o f
medical dignitaries around her, but also to us, the spectators, who stand wondering
what may lie behind those closed and distant eyes.

38
CHAPTER II
M adness and M elodram a:

T he R epresentation of M adness on the 19th C entury Stage
In the opening phase o f this project, I examined the means by which an

important segment o f the scientific and medical community of the nineteenth century
engineered, through clinical drawings and photographs, a seemingly objective
iconography o f madness which was presented to the public as documented truth. It is
true that these documents and clinical demonstrations touched on the realm o f public
entertainment, marked, as they were, by what today may appear obvious elements of
theatricality. Nevertheless, these images o f madness were produced by the medical
community, and as such they attained a level o f scientific veracity that would be
impossible had these images been produced by popular culture alone. Naturally, there
already existed within popular society an iconography of madness in art, theatre, and
literature. What such publications as the Iconographie photographique de la
Salpetriere did, then, was to authenticate many o f those cliches which were already
predominant in popular culture in the nineteenth century.
In this chapter, I turn away from science to focus my attention on the arts,
particularly the dramatic arts, to examine images o f madness as they were presented
on the nineteenth-century French stage. Just as madness became a dominant theme
within the medical establishment in the nineteenth century, the madman or
madwoman played a central role in theatre throughout the 1800s. From the zany
rhythms o f bourgeois farce to the tragic reversals o f fortune of romantic drama,
39
madness became a central theme within popular entertainment. My project now is to

examine the visual code o f madness as it was portrayed in a theatre whichmuch like
the scientific establishment o f its daypromoted a binary system of accepted
reasonable behavior. I will look specifically at the introduction of madness to the
French stage among pre-Romantic Parisian theatre-goers at the end o f the eighteenth
century, as heralded by the sudden interest in the works o f Shakespeare. I will then
explore various acting guides and performance theories, in an effort to recreate the
physical portrait o f madness as it was represented by actors and dramatists of the
nineteenth century. As my study will reveal, the visual depiction o f madness was
classified and portrayed on the French stage in much the same way as it was defined
and portrayed in the scientific publications by the clinicians at the Salpetriere.
As my examination o f the scientific documents o f the nineteenth century has
shown, madness was not portrayed as comic or amusing. In almost all cases, the
medical establishment represented madness as a state o f un-reason and non
productivity within a society which prided itself on clear reasoning and material
production. For this reason, I have chosen not to dedicate this study to the
characterization o f the fo o l in nineteenth-century dram a- that character who inspires
laughter with bawdy retorts and slapstick stage-play, all the while muttering nuggets
o f profound clarity among the songs and jokes, like the four buffoons in Victor
Hugos Cromwell. Rather, my focus remains with the representation of the insane,
the mentally disturbed individuals in drama who inspire fear or pity more than
laughter. My examination will touch on those characters who were deemed non
40
productive or dangerous in a society which defined itself as reasonable. Neither is my
interest in the causes o f the affliction, but its visual portrayal, and the social
implications o f its physical representation on the stage.
Since the majority o f extant information regarding the visual representation of
madness in theatre must be gleaned from written descriptions and stage indications
rather than photographs or film, I would like to start my discussion with a visual
portrait. Sander Gilmans 1982 work, Seeing the Insane and his later work, Disease
and Representation (1988), trace the artistic representations o f madness from the
Middle Ages through the twentieth century. His studies suggest that the images of
madness in art identified the insane through the use o f recurrent icons, such as the
divided branch, disheveled clothing, and particular facial expressions, in order to
reinforce their position o f otherness in society. As I have shown in the first chapter,
this preoccupation with presenting the insane as a marginalized other appears to have
become increasingly prominent in the nineteenth century. Unlike the artists of
previous centuries, those o f the nineteenth century were concerned with a more
realistic portrait o f the insane, therefore the ancient symbolic icons in the
background gave way to specific, more representative treatments of the face and the
body o f the mad subject. The depictions of madness reinforced the notion that a
person could identify mental affliction simply by examining visual clues in gesture
and expression. Gilman writes,
The tradition of visually representing madness in the form of various icons,
whether physiognomy or body type, gesture, or dress, points toward the need
o f society to identify the mad absolutely. Society, which defines itself as sane,
must be able to localize and confine the mad, if only visually, in order to create
41
a separation between the sane and the insane. Thus the strength o f the visual
stereotype is in its immediacy. One does not even have to wait for the insane
to speak. The mad are instantly recognizable, and it is our need for
instantaneous awareness (which is often based on our construction o f images
o f madness rather than the illnesses themselves) which is the rationale for
the visual stereotype o f the insane.1
It is this notion o f representing the insane in order to reassure the viewer o f the
difference between his world and that o f the mad other which permeates the visual
iconography o f madness in the nineteenth century. By producing an image o f insanity
which is clearly an image o f difference, the artist reinforces the spectators position of
dominance in a society where a clear line exists between what is considered normal
and what is consider un-reasonable. Moreover, if that image is terrifying or revolting,
the spectator is reassured o f the absolute need not only to identify the insane, but also
to contain them. Therefore, by exaggerating the iconographic traits which will enable
the viewer to identify without question the insane subject, the artist is capable o f doing
what true-life observation cannot: present a clearly defined distinction between
madness and sanity, based solely on visual clues.
In order to launch my discussion o f the visual iconography o f madness which
was promoted by the artists o f the nineteenth century, I turn to a painting executed by
Francisco Goya in 1794 entitled Corral de locos (The Madhouse at Saragossa). My
analysis o f this work will directly inform my subsequent examination o f how similar
images o f madness were represented physically on the stage. Corral de locos was the
1 Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images o f Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca:
Cornell U Press, 1988) 49.
42
last o f a series o f paintings which Goya called Social Diversions, and it was
specifically created to be exhibited at the San Fernando Royal Academy for the Arts.
Goya him self appears to have been especially fascinated by this particular scene, as it
is the only one o f the fourteen paintings in the series which he describes in detail in
his letter to Bernardo de Iriarte, Vice-Protector o f the San Fernando Academy.
Presenting the collection as a series o f observations which generally do not have a
place in commissioned works, where caprice and imagination cannot allow
themselves to run free,2 he describes Corral de locos as a depiction o f the enclosed
grounds o f an asylum, where two inmates are wrestling, naked, as the guard beats
them with a bag. He adds parenthetically that this was indeed an actual scene which
he had him self seen in Saragossa.3
Corral de locos stands in direct contrast to the other paintings in the series, the
first eight o f which all represent various aspects o f popular bullfighting tournaments.
Although it is not the only work in the collection to depict an image which was
unusually violent for the neoclassical style o f the late eighteenth century, it is the only
one where the spectator is confronted directly by the gaze o f the painted characters.
The two naked wrestlers in the center o f the composition are perfectly framed by two
other men who remain in the foreground, on either side o f the scene. These two
2 Para ocupar la imaginaci." mortificada en la considerac." de mis males, y para serarcir en parte los
grandes dispenddios q.c me an ocasionado, me dedique a pintar un juego de quadros de gabinete, en q.c
he logrado hacer observacio.1a q.c regularmente no dan lugar las obras encargadas, y en que el capricho
y la invencion no tienen ensanches. Francisco Goya, letter to Iriarte, 4 January 1794. MS. Egerton
585, folio 74, British Museum, London. Reproduced and reprinted in Pierre Gassier, et al, Vie et
oeuvre de Francisco Goya (Fribourg, Suisse: Office du Livre, 1970) 382.
3 q.c reprs. un corral de locos, y dos q.c estan luchan do desnudos con el q.c los cuida cascandoles, y
otros con los sacos; (es asumto q.e he presenciado en Zaragoza).' Francisco Goya, letter to Iriarte, 7
January 1794. MS Egerton 585, folio 75. See preceding note.
43
figures appear completely separated from the confusion in the center o f the painting;
unlike the other men in the scene, they are not participating in the altercation, but in
fact have their backs turned to the spectacle, and stare directly out o f the painting.
Also, o f all the characters represented in the scene, only these two figures are
immediately recognizable as insane. Their bodies are closed: they both hold their
arms tight to the torso, and one sits clutching his knees, appearing to rock back and
forth. Their faces are strained and grotesque. However their individual expressions
seem to stand in straight opposition: one looks horrified, with wide eyes and an open
mouth; the other sneers mischievously. In both cases, the area around the eyes is
darkened, making the outward gaze all the more piercing. Both figures seem to
confront directly whoever is looking at the scene from the outside.4
If this painting is called Corral de locos, it is primarily due to the presence of
these two characters, without whom the scene would not necessarily be linked to the
inside o f a madhouse. If the artist had chosen to remove these two characters from the
scene, the painting could easily be that of two wrestlers in an arena, violent though it
may be. Certainly one may suggest that the central altercation in the scene is, in a
sense, mad, with the crowd shouting and gesturing, and the guard preparing to lash
the two wrestlers with his whip. However, the added presence o f the two gazing
figures serves immediately to identify the scene as an event exclusive to the enclosed
inner courtyard o f an insane asylum. The spectator is at once horrified at the brutality
o f the situation, and yet relieved at his distance from it. The two cliched madmen
4 Corral de locos currently hangs in the Meadows Museum in Dallas. My analysis is based on a
reproduction in Pierre Gassier: 111.
44
can reassure the spectator that what he or she is seeing is an aspect of their world,
not o f his own, and that the imposing stone wall which looms over the scene serves to
separate the us from the them.
Nevertheless, there is something disturbing about the way in which Goya
positions the outside observer vis-a-vis the painted scene. The painting offers no
intermediary barrier between the spectator and the figures who are depicted. The
observer is not peering in from a barred window or an iron gate; rather, the spectator
is situated within the walls of the asylum, where he is confronted directly by the
mocking gaze o f two o f the inmates. By this positioning, Goya seems to suggest that
acts o f madness are not always strictly confined to the enclosed world o f the asylum,
but rather, that even the most reasonable persons are apt to witness eruptions of
madness within the context o f their own world. Art historian Douglas Hilt writes, in
reference to this particular collection o f Goyas works:
All are insane, as is every crowd that gathers, whether to watch a procession
o f flagellants, a bullfight, or the inmates o f the madhouse; soon spectators
and victims are united in a collective delirium. The series of painiings Goya
termed popular diversions was his introspective foray into the world o f mass
hysteria, superstition, and ignorance.5
H ilts comment brings up the interesting paradox o f the crowd: first he suggests that
the distinction between madness and reason is blurred, as spectators and victims are
united in a collective delirium. Then he goes on to propose that Goya used his art
as a vehicle to explore the madness in his society, this world of mass hysteria,
superstition, and ignorance. This implies that there is indeed a clear distinction
5 Douglas Hilt, Ten Against Napoleon (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1975) 145.
45
between what is mad and what is not, but that this distinction can be easily lost.
The second part o f this citation recalls Goyas letter to Iriarte, when he wrote that
these paintings represented aspects o f the world which were rarely depicted in
commissioned art _y en que el capricho y la invencion no tienen ensanches .6
According to Goya in this letter, this particular series o f paintings examines aspects of
the human condition where caprice and imagination are, on the contrary, allowed to
run free. That is, unlike the works o f the neoclassical artists o f his day, these are
paintings which do not record images o f order and stability in a Cartesian world of
binary logic. They are, rather, images o f uncontrolled chaos within the context o f a
reasonable world.
What Hilt fails to do in his brief analysis is to define a reference point; in fact,
Hilt goes so far as to suppress it completely, by suggesting that the paintings resist a
binary distinction between madness and reason, that all are insane. Yet there is a
clearly defined reference point in Goyas works: himself, the reasonable observer.
The artist specifically wrote to Iriarte that the madhouse altercation represented in
Corral de locos was an actual event which he had him self seen.7 He also informed
Iriarte that all the paintings in the series were his own observations. There is in
Goyas own words therefore a clear distinction between observed and observer,
between spectacle and spectator.
The reasonable observer is witness to a series o f images in his society.
number o f these images display a level o f brutality that shocks and disturbs him.
6 See note 2.
7 See note 3.
46
These images do not correspond to the established codes o f logic and reason, and thus
they are not typically represented in the predominant artistic works of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Europe. These are images of madness. Goya recorded these
images in all their violence on the canvas. The brutality which he painted is not
subtle. It is immediate, harsh, and revolting. For whom did Goya record these mad
images ? These paintings were created specifically for the Royal Academy o f the
Arts, for Bernardo Iriarte, protector of the three Noble Arts.8 Goyas public was the
royal court o f Charles IV, the aristocrats, and the intellectuals o f tum-of-the-century
Spain-- that level o f society which set the standards o f reasonableness or
acceptableness.
Goyas paintings are gruesome, and because they are gruesome, the reasonable
observer reacts with aversion to the scene depicted before him. In this manner, he is
assured o f the binary opposition between what is reasonable, and therefore inherently
benign, and what is mad, and therefore inherently frightening. Contrary to Hilts
suggestion that Goyas works creates a fluid relationship between the mad and the
reasonable, where conventional logic and insanity exist together in a collective
delirium, Goyas Social Diversions actually reinforce the binary system for an
audience that defines itself along the lines o f established codes o f sanity. Hilt is
correct in stating that the artist presented images o f insanity, but he did so not to
illustrate that the world is entirely mad, but rather to demonstrate that madness
exists in a world o f reason.
8 "D.n Bernardo Yriarte, Vice prot/de la R.1Academia de las tres nobles Artes (from the inscription
accompanying Goyas portrait of Iriarte, 1797, qtd. in Gassier: 109.
Goyas art does not exalt madness, although the artist appears to have been
fascinated by it. Goya brings the spectator shockingly close to violent representations
o f insanity, and the observer becomes titillated by the disturbing nature o f the
depiction. He does not, however, offer madness as a feasible alternate reality. His
mad characters are frightening and dangerous, not sympathetic. There is in Goyas
work an image of madness which is horrifying; therefore, there is also an implied
system o f reason, which is sound. Where the neoclassicists represented in their art a
world o f idealized order, a world from which the mad Other was utterly evacuated,
Goya represented a world in which the mad Other held a threatening position.
Neoclassicists and Goyas means may have been antithetical, but the result was
similar. Like the neoclassicists, Goya created a lens through which the public could
reassure itself o f its position of dominance and of reason in a world defined by a
binary distinction between conventional logic and madness.
Goyas work represents a shift in aesthetics in the early nineteenth century.
The public was titillated by these images o f madness, perhaps because the tumbling
monarchy both in Spain and in France could no longer offer the vision o f perfect
stability as it had a generation earlier. With the horrors o f the French Revolution and
o f Napoleons conquest of Spain still fresh in the collective memory o f most
Europeans, Goyas Social Diversions circulated among the elite both in Spain and
in France. After having spent ten years at the San Fernando Academy, the entire
collection was acquired by the Chopinot family as a state-sanctioned gift from Manuel
48
Godoy, First Minister to Charles IV and self-proclaimed Prince o f Peace.9 It

remained in the Chopinot inventory for more than forty years before it regained
Spanish provenance in 1846 when it was purchased by the Count de Quinto in
Madrid. Less than two decades later, in 1862, the collection was sold in Paris at the
Hotel Drouot.10 During this series of transactions that moved the Social Diversions
across the Franco-Spanish border, the one painting, Corral de locos, seems to have
disappeared into singular private ownership at some point in the early nineteenth
century. According to Pierre Gassier, there is some doubt as to whether this particular
painting ever made it into the collection o f the Count de Quinto in 1846. In any case,
it had certainly left the collection by 1862, as it was not mentioned in the catalogue of
the sale at the Hotel Drouot. It appears, however, that Corral de locos did exist in a
private collection in France during this time, separate from the rest of the collection,
for it was sold individually in Paris in 1876.11 This activity surrounding the
acquisition and display o f this particular collection o f Goyas work, especially
regarding the singular interest in Corral de locos certainly implies a public fascination
with these images o f madness not only in Spain, but also in France.
Another artistic phenomenon which attests to this aesthetic shift in postNapoleonic France was the relatively sudden upsurge o f interest in the theatre of
Shakespeare. Parisians in the early nineteenth century flocked, for example, to
9 "Inventario. Pinturas elegidaspara el Principe de la Paz, entre las dejadas por la viuda Chopinot,''
qtd. in Pierre Gassier: 388.
101 acquired information regarding the provenance of Goyas work through a private interview with
Pamela Patton of the Meadows Museum in Dallas, Texas. Her references were the catalogue of the sale
of the collection of Count Quinto, Paris, Hotel Drouot, 1862 (no. 40); and Courtry, Ch., Catalogue of
"Vente E.GE", Paris, Hotel Drouot, April 20, 1876, p. 21.
49
visiting Shakespearean companies from London. Although Shakespeare was not a

complete stranger to the French o f the ancien regime, his work was considered too
brutal, violent, and irregular for the dominant aesthetic and behavioral model
generally adopted by French aesthetes o f the classical period. Voltaire himself, often
considered the champion o f Shakespeare on the continent, condemned the English
dramatist in his Lettres philosophiques for having, despite his natural genius, no
education, no taste, and no knowledge o f the great dramatic tradition. In 1746
appeared the first volumes o f Pierre-Antoine de La Places Theatre anglois, which in
its entirety treated and partially translated ten o f Shakespeares plays. Thirty years
later, the first full translations o f Shakespeare appeared in a twenty-volume work by
Pierre Le Tourneur.12 However, none o f these translations were complete, and all of
these works were composed specifically for a reading public. Although it may have
been acceptable, even laudable, to study Shakespeares texts and to discuss them
within literary circles, it was still inconceivable to perform Shakespeare on the stage.
Even Jean-Franfois Ducis, who first adapted Shakespeare specifically for the
French stage, greatly distorted the original texts to adhere to French sensibilities,
going so far as to keep the Danish prince alive at the end of Hamlet. Still, despite his
effort to tone down the explicit madness and violence o f Shakespeare, Duciss critics
condemned the displays o f un-reason in his adaptations.13 J. F. de Marmontel wrote
11 Gassier 161.
12 De Catuelan, Le Tourneur, and Fontaine-Malherbe, Shakespeare, traduit de I'anglois (Paris, 1776).
This work is discussed in detail in J. J. Jusserand, Shakespeare en France sous I'ancien regime (Paris:
Armand Colin et C'c, 1898) chapter IV.
13 Certainly there had always been a tradition of vulgar and violent theatre within popular culture in
France, such as in the fair-ground spectacles and street performances; however, Duciss work was
50
in 1773, in response to Duciss work, a gentle and polished nation [...] should
present only characters softened by good manners and vices palliated by
bienseances. 14 O f a version o f Richard III produced by De Rozoi in 1782, J. F. La
Harpe wrote, "[Richard III was performed] to the great scandal o f all decent people
who were revolted that so flat and barbarous a farce should be tolerated. 15 These
arbiters o f taste among the French literati spoke out vehemently against the
disorder, the convulsive outbursts, the monstrous irregularities, the madness
and the barbary o f Shakespeares themes.16 When in 1783 Ducis presented his most
daring adaptation to date, Le Roi Lear, which presented somber scenery and a
protagonist who was undeniably mad, La Harpe complained that the theatre, once
the property o f persons o f taste, had now been invaded by the unrefined rabble for
whom this pleasure had never been intended.17 These comments are indicative o f the
changes that were occurring in the artistic sensibilities at the dawn o f the French
Revolution. The codes o f representation which governed what was considered decent
and what was considered inappropriate for the legitimate stage were beginning to
change. Ducis was writing for an emergent aesthetic, where the physical
representation o f madness was creeping into the spotlight. C. M. Haines wrote in
1925,
produced for the elite, who, according to Duciss critics, should not tolerate such tastelessness and
such brutality in theatre, which was meant to ennoble the spectators rather than to shock them. Toward
the beginning o f the nineteenth century, however, this critical attitude changed.
14 J.F de Marmontel, Chefs-d'oeuvre dramatiques (Paris, 1773) cited and translated in C.M. Haines,
Shakespeare in France: Criticism from Voltaire to Victor Hugo (London: Oxford UP, 1925) 76.
15 J.F. La Harpe, Cours de litterature (Paris, 1799), cited and translated in Haines, Shakespeare in
France: Criticism from Voltaire to Victor Hugo (London: Oxford UP, 1925) 74.
16 F. Baldensperger, Etudes d histoire litteraire, deuxieme serie (Paris: Hachette, 1910) 178.
51
There is enough terror in Hamlet for the taste of most o f us; but Ducis, it
appears, was at heart a follower [...] o f the school of sombreness and horror
which perhaps explains why it was Lear and Macbeth, the two most horrifying
dramas o f Shakespeare, that he chose for his most daring innovations.18
Like Ducis, many other artists and writers no longer suppressed images o f madness
from their work, but began to explore madness with increasing attention to its
unbridled physical and visual expression.
To get a sense o f the significance o f this upsurge of interest in the images of
madness in Shakespeares work among the French, we can turn to H. A. Taines 1865
publication Histoire de la litterature anglaise.19 In direct contrast to the critics from
the neo-classical age, Taine, a romantic historian, suggests that it is in fact the
unchecked madness in Shakespeare that proves his genius. It is a genius which resists
conventional French modes o f reasoning and analysis. He characterized Shakespeare
as:
[t]he most creative that ever engaged in the exact copy o f the details o f actual
existence, in the dazzling caprice o f fancy, in the profound complications o f
super-human passions; a nature poetical, immoral, inspired, superior to reason
by the sudden revelations o f his seers-madness; so extreme in joy and pain, so
abrupt o f gait, so stormy and impetuous in his transports.20
Taine describes Shakespeare as a writer of excess, qualifying his texts as examples of

mingled contrasts, raving exaggerations, and furious accumulations o f sublimely
conflicting images. He uses terms such as super-abundant, and writes that
17 C.M. Haines, Shakespeare in France: Criticism from Voltaire to Victor Hugo (London: Oxford UP,
1925) 77.
18 Haines 79.
19 Hippolyte Taine, Histoire de la litterature anglaise (1865), trans. H. van Laun in 1871; reproduced
in Yale French Studies 33 (1964): 33-36.
Shakespeares work is the product o f a mind which produces too much and leaps too
far, yet for Taine, unlike La Harpe and Marmontel, this is an excess which titillates
and exhilarates by its violence, rather than revolts by its ugliness. According to
Taine, this is a style which remains foreign to most French dramatists, because it is a
style which resists classical systems o f reasoning: [Shakespeares metaphors] dim
with their brightness the pure light o f logic. He criticizes the neo-classical
philosophy represented in the theatre of Corneille and Racine for its obsession with
harmony and rationality which remains outside o f the realms o f time and space.
Making a direct reference to Jean Esquirol, celebrated in France for his work on the
insane in the first half o f the nineteenth century, Taine writes:
If Shakespeare had framed a psychology, he would have said, with Esquirol:
Man is a nervous machine, governed by a mood, disposed to hallucinations,
transported by unbridled passions, essentially unreasoning, a mixture of animal
and poet, having no rapture but mind, no sensibility but virtue, imagination for
prompter and guide, and led at random, by the most determinate and complex
circumstances, to pain, crime, madness, and death.21
Taines essay points to a fascination with images o f madness in nineteenth-century

France, and it is this fascination which laid the groundwork for much o f the artistic
production o f the time.
In the theatre, Shakespeare became a champion o f madness on the stage, and a
source o f inspiration for the French Romantics o f the nineteenth century. Many critics
agree that the introduction o f Shakespeare to French theatre was vital to the
development o f Romanticism, which rejected what was thought of as the cold
20 Taine 33.
21 Taine 36.
53
rationalism o f the neo-classics in favor o f passion, turbulence, and emotional excess.

Translations and adaptations of Shakespeares texts were penned by, among others,
Vigny, Dumas, Meurice, Richepin, and Deschamps. Berlioz and Saint-Saens
fashioned operas after Shakespearean themes, and Delacroix produced over two dozen
depictions o f Shakespearean characters between 1825 and 1852 alone. Literary
historian J. J. Jusserand wrote at the end o f the nineteenth century: Shakespeare has
been admitted into the Pantheon o f literary deities: painters, poets, and musicians all
agree.22 On the Parisian stage, Sarah Bernhardt charmed audiences with her
interpretations o f Shakespeares mad heroines Lady Macbeth and Ophelia, not to
mention her controversial role as the melancholic Hamlet.
The artists o f the nineteenth century not only appreciated the madness of
Shakespeares texts, that very element which was condemned only one generation
earlier, but they made an effort to explore this madness with singular attention, often
going so far as to heighten its visual sensation. The dramatic phenomenon which is of
particular interest with regards to the visual representation of madness is the
adaptation o f mad scenarios in pantomime. During the first decades o f the
nineteenth century, mute productions, created with little or no spoken dialogue at all,
were especially popular among the boulevard theatres in Paris and at the Theatre
Olympique. These adaptations were spectacular, designed to thrill and to horrify their
audience. Again, Shakespeare was a favorite inspiration here, although his texts were
considerably altered. Long monologues were suppressed in favor o f dramatic visual
22 J.J. Jusserand, Shakespeare en France sous I 'ancien regime (Paris: Armand Colin, 1898) 370.
54
effects, the level o f violence was elevated, and dramatists focused specific attention
on exaggerated gestures to enhance the individual crises o f certain characters and the
brutality o f certain conflicts.
In 1816, for example, Louis Henri produced a version o f Hamlet as a tragic
pantomime.23 By eliminating all dialogue in this, one o f the longest o f Shakespeares
texts, the dramatist was necessarily obliged to concentrate on the most visually
striking moments in the play. The performed madness o f Hamlet, as well as the
sudden breakdown o f Ophelia, were communicated solely by recognizable physical
gestures. Also, Hamlet s climactic sword-fight and the spooky apparitions of
Hamlets murdered father provided tantalizing fodder for the productions dramatic
visuals. The success o f this performance encouraged Henri to produce another
spectacular pantomime the following year, this time a four-act adaptation of
Macbeth.24 The supplementary subtitle added to this piece, les Sorcieres de la foret,2s
gives some indication as to the manner in which the occult and sensational effects
were used to enhance Shakespeares original text. In J.G.A. Cuvelier de Tries
partially scripted production o f Othello for the Cirque Olympique in 1818, the author
altered Desdemonas death by suffocation, and instead had her stabbed with a dagger.
The new scene ended with the heroine uttering a piercing scream from the wings.26
The tradition o f pantomime in the early nineteenth century is especially
interesting with regards to how madness was iconographed and visually represented
23 Christopher Smith, Shakespeare on French Stages in the Nineteenth Century, Shakespeare and the
Victorian Stage ed. Richard Foulkes (New York: Cambridge UP, 1986) 234.
24 Smith 234.
25 Baldensperger 194.
55
on the stage. Although full productions in pantomime began to be overshadowed by

the growing popularity o f melodrama and drame romantique by the 1830s and
1840s, the use o f pantomime within other dramatic genres continued well into the
twentieth century, where it reappeared in full force with the advent of cinema. It is
essential to note as well that, contrary to many notables o f the Comedie Franqjaise,
who continued to uphold the tenets o f the classical declamatory style and the
traditions o f performance used by pre-Revolutionary counterparts, the majority of
writers and actors o f the Boulevard obtained their training through pantomime.27
There exist very few detailed accounts o f pantomimic scenes from the first
half o f the nineteenth century, and even in the manuscripts that do survive, the
specifics o f the performances are distressingly sparse, hi most cases where scenes of
dialogue were interspersed with silent scenes, the stage directions simply indicated
pantomime between character X and character Y
7 8
70
or tableau.
The
conventions o f pantomime were used to establish the general mood o f a scene or the
particular mental state o f a specific character. This latter was usually of an extreme
nature, such as deep melancholia, despair, or rage. These silent images had to be
26 Smith 234.
27 Diderot, in his text De la poesie dramatique, condemned the purely textual side of classical
performance, and urged dramatists to explore an aesthetic o f muteness. He considered action and
gesture to be as effective as words on the stage, and in some cases, especially during climactic scenes,
even more important than spoken dialogue. In Eloge de Richardson, Diderot offered a version of the
final scenes of Le Fils naturel as a pantomime: he was astounded by its effectiveness to communicate
physically the mental states of the characters. Diderot suggested, then, a performative movement away
from the discours of neo-classical drama, to tableau, the visual representation of meaning. Nearly five
decades later, the drama bome out o f Republican France came to fulfill the aesthetic demands of
Diderot.
28 Pantomime entre Matilde et Ambrosio. Stage directions from Le Moine by Cammaille Saint-Aubin
(Paris: Barba, an VI) 1,5.
56
immediately recognizable to the audience, as there was no scripted dialogue to reveal

the characters motivations. In Cuveliers 1798 work C'est le diable, ou La
Bohemienne, an elaborate pantomime acted out behind the sleeping protagonist
Munster serves as a window into the thoughts o f this highly disturbed character.30
The dramatist used pantomime in this case to reveal the otherwise concealed workings
in the mind o f a madman agitated by a terrible dream. The spectators were
confronted by a deranged vision which definitively marks the tormented Munster as
mad. Similarly, in a 1798 adaptation of Le Moine by Cammaille Saint-Aubin,
Ambrosisos madness is confirmed through a series of pantomimes which show his
secret machinations with the devil.31 Both o f these examples illustrate the use o f
pantomime as an external device. They reveal to the audience scenes or thoughts that
it would not otherwise see, in the form of fully directed interactions between the mad
character and invisible spirits. These scenes were like peep-holes into a hidden inner
world, where a character was shown to be mad because he interacted with ghosts or
evil spirits. However, pantomimic techniques were also used by actors to
demonstrate, through specific gestures and expressions, the individual psychology o f
one character in his relations with the outside world. In order to perform madness
within a reasonable context, the actor made use o f a certain code o f physical
attitudes which would translate his mental state visually to the public, without the
presence o f invisible spirits and demons.
29 scene muette a effet, pantomime generate, coup de theatre oblige a la fin de chaque acte de
melodrame. " Arthur Poguin, Dictionnaire histoirique et pittoresque du theatre (Paris: Firmin-Didot,
1885)699.
30 Cuvelier, C'est le diable, ou La Bohemienne (Paris: Barba, an VI / 1798) I, 8.
57
Since the specific gestures and facial expressions were rarely defined with any
greater detail in the scripts themselves, the actors and the director would call on
established social stereotypes in order to communicate certain moods and situations
for their audience. Among the most noted French theoreticians to discuss the
significance o f a persons gestures and facial expressions in the nineteenth century
was Franfois Delsarte, whose research on the art o f oratory was posthumously
collected and transcribed by lAbbe Delaumosne in the early 1880s. Delsarte
meticulously classified hundreds o f human movements and attitudes according to their
intellectual, moral, and spiritual connotations. He felt that each mental or spiritual
function o f man corresponded to specific physical functions o f the body. Therefore,
by studying a persons physical expression, Delsarte could stipulate that persons
present mood, thoughts, and motivations. He based his theories on extensive
observations o f everyday interactions between persons in social situations as well as
on his studies in hospitals, prisons, and asylums.32 Much like his scientific
counterparts at the Salpetriere, he established a system o f physiognomic semiotics. A
series o f charts and tables illustrated a range o f codified expressions in the human
profile in its entirety, as well as in the lips, the eyes, the eyebrows, and the nose, in
particular. Similar diagrams demonstrated the semiotic significance o f the position o f
the fingers, the hands, the head, and the feet. In each range o f expression, perfect
harmony o f reason and sentiment was posited as the central normal icon. Each
31 Cammaille Saint-Aubin, Le Moine (Paris: Barba, an VI).

32 Genevieve Stebbins, Delsarte System o f Dramatic Expression (New York: Edgar Wemer, 1886) 5.
58
single position, and every possible combination o f movements, according to Delsarte,

expressed silently the mental state o f the subject, from inner conflict to ecstasy.
Delsartes theories gained tremendous respect among the literati o f nineteenthcentury Paris; he was a favorite at the court o f Louis Philippe and at the literary
salons o f Delphine Gay and Monseigneur Sibour because o f his talent for dramatic
reading. The celebrated French actress Rachel urgently solicited him to appear with
her at the Theatre fran9 ais.33 His works were translated into English, and his daughter
lectured on Delsartes system in the United States.
Delsartes codes o f silent expression were adapted specifically for the stage by
Genevieve Stebbins in her 1886 acting guide Delsarte System o f Dramatic
Expression. In this volume, there exist two methods by which a person may express a
state o f un-reason: madness, characterized by uncontrolled violence; and insanity,
characterized by an absence o f mental activity. According to Stebbins madness is
an upsurge o f uncontrolled fury, and is represented by lowering the eyebrows,
wrinkling the forehead, convulsively unclenching and reclenching the hands, dilating
the nostrils, and raising then lowering the head.34 Insanity, on the other hand, is
demonstrated by a loss o f appreciable focus and by an apparent sense of indifference,
or imbecility. The eyes are divergent, and the hands are relaxed, palms outward, with
the thumb retracted.35
Stebbins and Delsarte were not the only specialists in the physical performance
o f mental states, and they were by no means the only drama theoreticians who
33 LAbbe Delaumosne, Delsarte System o f Oratory (New York: Edgar Werner, 1893) xviii.
34 Stebbins 145, 152, 182.
59
localized madness according to a specific, and rather limited, code of gestural

representation. In fact, as early as 1753, acting specialists stipulated that madness
could be physically interpreted in one of two ways: fu ry , or mad rage; and
imbecility, or mental absence. The particular gestural definitions for each of these
moods are similar among many o f the acting theoreticians o f the last century. We can
therefore obtain a relatively feasible idea o f how these aspects o f madness were
represented visually on stage. Even acting guides published decades before Delsartes
birth presented specific codes for gestures and facial expressions similar to those
described in Delaumosnes Delsarte System o f Oratory and Stebbins Delsarte System
o f Dramatic Expression. This coincidence implies that the semiotic significance of
certain gestures and expressions was already inscribed within the system o f
performance values o f the nineteenth century, long before Delsarte codified them for
the general literary public. Performers already had at their disposal an established
code o f physical attitudes which would represent madness for their audience.
Simply by interpreting a series o f gestures and making certain faces, a nineteenthcentury actor was able to identify his character as mad or insane, in a silent
language comprehensible to his public. In almost all the descriptions which I
encountered, particular attention was given to the eyes and the hands, as if a disturbed
mental condition were located in isolated parts of the body, where it could be
expressed physically, according to a specific expressive code. This code delineated
35 Stebbins 95, 140.
60
the generally accepted and visually identifiable masks of madness on the nineteenthcentury stage.
What is o f particular interest is that nearly all the acting guides which I
examined attested that the emotions acted on the stage should faithfully represent
human nature, yet by twentieth-century standards, the gestures and facial
expressions delineated in these essays, which include eye-rolling and teeth-gnashing,
appear exaggerated and ridiculously overstated. However, by claiming the veracity o f
these actions as true to human behavior as Delsarte did also, in his persistent
digressive observations o f Parisians at the Tuileries36-- the acting theoreticians o f the
last century gave credence to the stereotypes which they described. There existed thus
a mutual reinforcement o f what was perceived to be the truth o f observation and the
behavioral modeling which went on through performance in the theatres. In this
manner the cliched images o f madness which were represented on the nineteenthcentury stage were reinforced as true and natural both for the performer and the
spectator.
In his Essay on the Art o f Acting, published in 1753, social philosopher Aaron
Hill discusses the performance o f madness as a slight modification of the performance
o f rage, that is, unbridled anger.37 Hill characterizes rage as an emotion which is
fierce and unrestrained. Therefore, he writes, the actor must express it
36 See Episodes I - VII in Delaumosnes Delsarte System o f Oratory.

37 Aaron Hill, Essay on the Art of Acting Works o f the late Aaron Hill, vol. IV (London, 1753) 368373. My analysis touches on acting guides written by English, German, and American performance
specialists, and the similarities regarding the physical representation of madness are striking, and imply
a transnational code of performance. This code is further reinforced by the stage directions in plays by
French writers of the nineteenth century.
61
impatiently, by a fiery propension in the eye, with a disturbd and threatning air, and
with a voice strong, swift, and often interrupted by high swells o f choking
indignation. He cites Shakespeare as the dramatist most able to draw a picture of
rage which is natural, complete, and clear. In order to interpret this emotion, he
suggests that the actor begin by bracing his sinews, and heightening the tension in all
the joints o f his body: the blood (as a consequence unavoidable) is sum m ond up,
that is, impelled into violent motion. Secondly, the actor must add fierceness to
his gaze, so that flames appear to escape from his eyes. He will complete this grimace
o f unrestrained ferocity by gritting his teeth, expanding his nostrils, furling his brow
all of which, he states, follow naturally. Finally, the actors breath must give way to
the tumultuous precipitation o f the spirits; they must necessarily become inflamed,
themselves, and will communicate their ardour to the voice and motion. Such is
Aaron Hills detailed interpretation o f the visual representation o f rage. He concludes
this chapter by proposing that the effect of madness be best articulated if the actor
modulates his demeanor during a performance by interspersing these unchecked
outbursts o f shrill and exclamatory loudness with moments o f heightened constraint
and almost whisperd composure, concealing a slow, smotherd inward rancour.
This way, he writes, the representation becomes movingly varied and natural.
Consequently, what Hill suggests for the most effective and also natural visual
representation o f madness is a performance which modulates between restraint and
un-control. According to Hill, unbridled madness becomes all the more shocking and
terrifying if it is represented as sudden and unpredictable, because it therefore betrays
62
a seething inner turmoil. Hills depiction of madness is the cliche o f the socially
dangerous lunatic, whose outbursts o f rage stand in direct opposition to cool measure,
logic, and reason.
In Henry Siddonss translation o f Engels Practical Illustration o f Rhetorical
Gesture and Action, which appeared in 1822, the author proposes a similar attitude of
unrestrained behavior, but as a representation o f extreme melancholia rather than pure
rage. Though the motivating emotion is different than that o f Hills essay, the visual
effect is equally explosive, and thus offers another visual image o f what can also be
considered the performance o f madness. Engel writes,
When the sufferance amounts to despair, then these irregular movements, the
effects o f interior anxiety, become violent. In this deplorable state the man
throws himself on the ground, rolls on the dust, rends his hair, and tears his
'IB
breast and forehead.
Engels suggests that excessive despair has the same effect on an individual as
unrestrained fury, stating that a melancholic is simply the victim o f his own wrathful
vengeance. He, therefore, like Hill, couples madness with violence. He also proposes
that it is the head, forehead, breast, cheeks, and sides o f a person which are most
affected by the passions as a result o f a melancholics fermentation o f the blood.39
Therefore it is these parts o f the body which are most significant in any depiction of
this emotional state. An artistic rendering o f King Lear on the brink o f madness,
labeled painful recollection,40 aptly conforms to the authors description of the
38 M. Engels, Practical Illustrations o f Rhetorical Gesture and Action, trans. Henry Siddons (London:
Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1822) 186.
39 Engels 188.
40 Engels, plate 11, Practical Illustrations 61.
63
physical performance o f dejection. The figure is disheveled and contorted. His head
is turned downward and to one side, showing the viewer his face in profile and
thereby exposing his right cheek. His right arm is bent backward, exposing his side.
His other hand, palm toward the viewer, is raised to the level of his chest. Engels also
writes that wringing ones hands is a natural expression o f excessive grief, as if the
subject were unable to restrain himself from acting out his inner fury.41 Once again,
this is a visual representation o f madness which connotes an inability to control the
inner surges o f ones emotions; it is a depiction o f madness where exaggerated
physical gestures imply a hidden tendency toward outbursts of frenzy and violence.
Similar accounts o f the portrayal o f mad rage are given in utmost detail in two
performance guides written in 1889 by acting specialist Webster Edgerly, writing
under the pseudonym Edmund Shaftesbury. Both o f these textbooks, Lessons in the
Art o f Facial Expression and Lessons in the Art o f Acting, are replete with step-bystep instructions for isolating various muscle groups in the body and the face in order
to effectuate specific psychological moods. They are also profusely illustrated with
diagrams and photographs that give close-up illustrations of how an actor should
contract not just his face generally, but individually his nose, his eyes, his mouth, and
his forehead. In Edgerlys description o f the facial expression for madness, the
word uncontrol appears to be the predominant term.42 He writes that the mouth
should connote a feeling o f horror: wide open, with the lips pointing downward, thus
41 Engels 187.
42 Edmund Shaftesbury, Lessons in the Art o f Facial Expression (Washington DC: Martyn College
Press, 1889) 152.
64
presenting disapproval added to astonishment.43 The nose, with nostrils expanded,

should convey excitement. Finally, the actor should knit his forehead to show
dislike, and he should raise both his brows and eyelids to their full extent in order to
imply uncontrol and wild excitement. Indeed, the two diagrams which represent
a disturbed condition,44 and dislike45 are both terrifying. The artist has isolated
the eyes, so there is nothing to give the illustrations a sense o f humanity or life. The
characters gaze is focused directly at the viewer, with extreme intensity, and there is
excessive shading around the eyes, thus making them look dark, almost cavernous.
In order to obtain a fuller image o f Edgerlys madman, we might turn to his
guide on bodily attitudes and gestures. Under the rubric frenzy, he writes, this
attitude is made by inclining the head backward; looking up; and clutching the hair
with both hands.46 This gesture recalls Engels previous description of extreme
dejection. Another, even more telling description o f Edgerlys vision of madness
comes not from his specific lessons on performed attitudes, but from a series o f
passages earlier in the text which he entitles dramatic experiences. These are
particular assignments for the reader that are meant to enhance his imagination and
thereby allow him to get in touch with the fullest force o f his emotions. In order to
truly experience fe a r, the author asks his reader to go to an abandoned building in the
middle o f the night. He should sit in a room which is cut off from all light, preferably
the cellar. Once the subject is alone in complete darkness, Edgerly writes:
43 Shaftesbury, Facial Expression 36.

65
Do not turn around, but imagine that directly behind you is an individual with
bloody eyes and ferocious face, who stands with uplifted arms holding an axe
over your head ready to strike. If you can do this and feel the flesh crawling,
and the roots o f your hair trying to stand on end, you may rest assured that you
have dramatic talent. People who are predisposed to insanity should not
undertake this.47
In another similar exercise the author suggests that the subject sit in a darkened room,
his back to a window where there is no outside light. He tells the reader,
turn the head away from the window, and think as keenly as possible that some
face, pale and wan, is looking through the glass at you, with horrid eyes, and
open mouth, the jaw being sunk upon the chest [...] Repeat this until a steady
feeling o f growing fear comes over you.48
In order for the actor to awaken within himself the feeling o f intense fear, he must
imagine himself alone with a madman. This madman is identified specifically by the
author as having bloody eyes and ferocious face, or horrid eyes and open mouth,
the likes of which he has described in his lessons and diagrams o f the portrait of
madness. This portrait is recurrent in the nineteenth century; and it is an image
which couples madness with terror, violence, and utter loss o f control. It is a position
which is diametrically opposed to sound reasoning and normal calm composure,
providence o f the sane majority, and it is an image which is often meant to inspire
fear and disgust.
Such is the description o f Cain in the third act o f Legouves M ort d'Abel,
which entered the repertory o f the Theatre Franfais in 1793. The act begins with Cain
asleep, deeply troubled by his brothers apparent favor with God. This dream is the
46 Edmund Shaftesbury, Lessons in the Art o f Acting (Washington DC: Martyn College Press, 1889)
XXXIII.
47 Shaftesbury, Acting 91.
66
turning point in Cains ability to reason clearly; it is here that he crosses the line
between sanity and madness. He awakes with a violent motion, and his wife
immediately recognizes the physical signs o f the change in her husbands state of
mind when she gazes into his face. Specifically coupling Cains visible rage with a
sense o f bewilderment, or loss, marked by the tension around his eyes, she utters,
legarement, la rage eclatent dans ses yeux!49 Cain loses all control first over his
emotions, then over his physical body. At the end o f the first scene, he shouts: que
ma raison se perd [...] la rage est seule dans mon ame. When he confronts his
brother in the following scene, Cain is no longer able to hold in his fury, and he
murders his brother in a sudden outburst o f violence: O transport! o courroux que je
retiens a peine! Ma main, pour le frapper, se leve malgre moi.50 It is as if the
madness in Cain has taken over his mind and his body, despite himself. All sanity
is evacuated, or transported from the character, leaving in its place a physical
manifestation o f pure madness, and Cain becomes utterly unable to stop his own act of
violence. Physically, this madness registered first in the characters eyes, then in his
hands. Furthermore, unlike in neoclassical drama o f pre-revolutionary France, the
audience witnesses not only the physical explosion o f madness in the character of
Cain, but also its violent result, as the fratricide takes place in full view o f the
spectators.
48 Shaftesbury, Acting 90.

49 Legouve, La Mort d'Abel (1793 version reprinted by Slatkine Reprints, Suite du repertoire du theatre
franqais vol. XII: Geneva, 1970) III, 1.
50 Legouve 111,3.
Similar outbursts o f mad furor were a common convention of melodrama,

which gained increasing popularity in France in the middle o f the nineteenth century.
Writers like Pixerecourt, Ducange, and Victor produced hundreds of plays for such
Boulevard havens as lAmbigu-Comique, la Gaite, and la Porte Saint-Martin. These
dramatists rarely strayed from one archetypal plot, which involved an innocent victim
tormented by the mad obsession of a sinister villain. Sentimental excess was always
in fashion on the melodramatic stage, and repeated eruptions o f emotional frenzy
underlined the psychological anguish of the characters. In Bouilles L 'Inconnu, ou
les mysteres, Charles is so tormented by a terrible secret from his past that he loses all
grasp o f his immediate reality, as his enemy Durivage notes, sa raison est totalement
alienee. 51 Suddenly recognizing his tormentors identity, Charless memory floods
back to him, and he is overcome by rage. As noted in the stage directions, this sudden
emotional upheaval is signaled to the audience by the expression in Charless eyes:
Ses regards, qui dans ce moment portent sur Durivage, prennent tout a coup une
expression de fureur. " 52 Such outpourings of emotional violence are not uncommon
in nineteenth-century melodramas. In similar fits o f rage, Valther stabs a woman
whom he mistakes for his future bride in Victors Therese ou I'orpheline de Geneve,53
and the aged Dufour banishes the child to whom he had moments before promised his
love and inheritance in Coelina ou I 'enfant du mystere by Gilbert de Pixerecourt.54
51 Bouille, Mathias, et Varez L Inconnu ou les mysteres ; 1822 version reprinted in Chefs-doeuvre du
repertoire des melodrames du theatre franqais (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970) III, 9.
52 Bouille 111,9.
53 reprinted by Slatkine, see note 51
54 Pixerecourt, Theatre choisi (Nancy, 1841).
68
This is a madness which blocks all reason. It bursts out with unprecedented fury,
and its results are disastrous.
Such images o f mad fury were brought to their fullest and most violent
extremes in the popular productions o f horror-theatre, the Grand Guignol, at the end
o f the nineteenth century. The conventional themes o f melodrama remained intact in
the scenarios o f Grand Guignol, under the pen o f Oscar Metenier, Max Maurey, and
Andre de Lorde, yet the level o f brutality which victims suffered at the hands o f their
mad tormentors was highly exaggerated. Where melodramas scoundrels were usually
foreign cads dressed in black overcoats, obsessed with the beauty o f an innocent
ingenue, the villains o f the Grand Guignol were often escaped lunatics, murderous
convicts, or mad scientists, and the blood always flowed generously as they pursued
their torturous schemes. In the horror classic Le Systeme du Docteur Goudron et du
Professeur Plume, adapted by de Lorde from the 1845 story of a similar title by Edgar
Allan Poe, two young journalists suffer the consequences o f an ill-advised visit to an
insane asylum. Unbeknownst to the two men, the inmates have revolted and killed the
institutions director. One o f them, Goudron, later identified as the most dangerous
lunatic in the institution,55 impersonates the asylums administrator and begins to
perform a gruesome lobotomy on one o f the journalists. Goudron represents the wellknown stereotype o f the raving lunatic. De Lordes stage directions indicate that he
gesticulates wildly, and that he is raving mad. When the guards eventually discover
him, he throws him self on the ground, screaming, and fights against the guards [...]
55 Andre de Lorde, The System o f Doctor Goudron and Professor Plume, trans. Mel Gordon, The
Grand Guignol, Theatre o f Fear and Terror (New York: Amok, 1988) 139.
69
he bites one on the hand.56 Following the tradition o f conventional melodrama, the
mad villain is exposed at the end by a reasonable authority, and order is once again
restored. According to Peter Brooks, whose work The Melodramatic Imagination has
become a landmark for students o f nineteenth-century drama, exaggerated outbursts of
mad fury were necessary to the melodramatic plot in order for the champions o f moral
reason to emerge ever stronger at the end of the play. Suggesting that melodrama
enjoyed success for the very fact that it reassured its public o f a sense o f social order
and moral justice, he writes:
These are all moments o f clarification, whose dramatic effect depends on the
acting-out o f moral identifications. Melodrama needs a repeated use o f
peripety and coups de theatre because it is here that characters are best in a
position to name the absolute moral attributes o f the universe.57
In the binary system o f reason versus madness, it is reason which triumphs before the
curtain drops.
There is a second recurrent image o f madness among the performance guides
which I have consulted, one which is not characterized by violence or fury, but rather,
by the total loss o f activity and attention. This portrait, usually referred to as
imbecility, posits the individual as aimless, disoriented, and unable to respond actively
to his immediate surroundings. Instead o f displaying unmitigated outbursts o f
extreme emotional force, the actor representing imbecility should avoid intense
physical responses:
One cannot avoid acknowledging a soft soul and an idle mind, unsusceptible
o f any attention, uninfluenced by any interest, which is never thoroughly
56 Gordon 138.
57 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995) 40.
70
awake, and does not even possess the feeble energy which is necessary to give
the tension requisite for the muscles and for the proper support of the members
of his body.58
Engel thus characterizes this attitude with a loosely open mouth, a sunken head, and
half-closed, aimless eyes.
Edgerly, in his guide Lessons in the Art o f Facial Expression, composes a
similar visual portrayal under the rubric insanity. Here, the mouth is slightly open, the
eyelids droop, and there is no muscular tension whatever in the eyebrows or the
forehead, thereby suggesting a feeling o f vacuous inattention. The eyes should be
diverging, demonstrating a lack o f focus, or mental absence.59 Nearly four decades
later, Florence Lutz replicates almost exactly this image in her acting guide The
Technique o f Pantomime. In order to perform this type o f madness with clear visual
gestures, she directs the actor to appear completely incapable of reasonable thought.
She writes,
Move eyes slowly in all directions without focus; no activity in eyelids; relax
lips; relax hands and fingers, palms front [...] Move head aimlessly; relax
chest, allowing legs and feet to adjust side by side and slightly apart, carrying
the weight over the arches o f both feet and turn toes in.60
Lutzs description adds physical motion in the head and feet to the coded facial
expression. Mental instability in this portrait is represented physically by an
instability both in the eyes and in the posture. The imbecile demonstrates, by
shifting his gaze as well as the weight on his feet, that he is incapable o f sound, stable
reasoning.
58 Engels 52.
71
This particular image o f madness can be found in Duciss adaptation o f King

Lear, which continued to be performed at the Comedie Fran<?aise through the middle
of the nineteenth century. Ducis added his own specific stage directions which were
not part o f the original English text. In the third act, Lear meanders through the storm,
visibly demonstrating his loss o f reason by constantly shifting his gaze: on le voit
[...] seul, egare, et promenant sa vue avec douleur et inquietude.61 Lear begins to
mutter a series o f nonsensical responses to persons who are not present on the stage,
then he suddenly shifts his mood, visibly demonstrating in his face and posture a
brusque change from sadness to joy. Ducis writes,
LEAR: avec un attendrissement douloureux,
J eus une fille, h elas!...
(Prenant tout a coup un visage riant, et comme se souvenant de tres-loin

et avec effort)
O u i ! oui, je m en souviens ! Elle etait jeune et belle.62
Finally, Lear stops reacting completely, falling into a kind o f daze, une espece
dinsensibilite. Duciss Lear exhibits all the trademark signs o f imbecility, unable to
focus his attention, or even his emotional state, with any reasonable certainty. His
constant shifts in gaze and expression signal the state o f mental divergence which he
is meant to portray.
Another character who displays a loss of reason characterized as a kind of
mental absence is Blanche from Henry Becques 1882 drama Les Corbeaux. As the
play opens, Blanche represents the conventional dramatic ingenue, whose life seems
60 Florence Lutz, The Technique o f Pantomime (Berkeley: Florence Lutz, 1927) 114, 126.
61 Ducis, Le Roi Lear (1783), reprinted in Suite du repertoire du theatre franqais, vol. XII (Geneva:
Slatkine, 1970) III, 5.
72
perfectly arranged for a young woman o f the Parisian upper-middle class. She then
suffers a series o f financial and psychological blows that cause her so much mental
anguish that, by the last act, she ceases to function as a reasonable human being.
Having lost her father, her lover, and her position among the Parisian upper crust, she
cuts herself off psychologically from her physical environment. Her sister Judith
describes her state in act IV: On croit a tout moment qu 'elle va vous reconnoitre,
mais elle ne voit personne, elle n 'entend plus rien. 63 In a silent scene near the end
o f the play, Becques stage indications correspond closely to the portrait of insanity
laid out in the guides I have examined on nineteenth-century pantomime. He writes,
Blanche est pale, sans force et sans regard, son attitude est celle d une folle au
repos. " 64 Like Duciss Lear, Blanche has become completely isolated ffom her
immediate surroundings. She cannot interact with the members of her family because
she has lost the ability to communicate according to the established code o f
reasonable interaction. She remains cut off from the world o f accepted logic; she is
visible, yet absent.
Although this visual representation o f imbecility is different ffom that o f rage,
both images characterize madness in terms o f physical and emotional excess: the first
by outbursts o f uncontrolled violence, the second by a total lack o f attention and
mental response. Moreover, all these performance theoreticians posited that an actor
had the ability to represent visually madness through a series o f prescribed physical
gestures. These writers, who all positioned themselves as astute observers o f human
62 Ducis III, 7.
63 Henry Becque, Les Corbeaux (Paris: Com^die fran^aise, 1984) IV, 3.
73
nature, offered a visual iconography of madness in the same manner that they offered
one for such general emotional states as disgust J o y , or pride. Their project suggests
that madness could be definitively identified and recognized by specific, universal
gestures and facial expressions.
The parallels with Charcot and the nineteenth-century phrenologists is striking.
They too suggested that insanity could be reduced to specific visual clues and
classified according to various well-defined gestures, facial contortions, and physical
poses, or attitudes. Like Hill, Engel, Edgerly and Lutz, the clinical physicians of the
Salpetriere offered a visual guide to these physical representations of insanity.
Furthermore, just as Charcot revealed by his tendency to hypnotize and pose such
willing subjects as Blanche Wittman and Augustine both in front of the camera and
before a live audience, the dramatic theoreticians o f the nineteenth century maintained
that madness, like any other dramatic sentiment, could indeed be performed.
Moreover, both insisted that this performance was a transparent re-presentation, and
not a construction, o f real life.
Among the plays written by French dramatists during the nineteenth century
there was never, until perhaps Alfred Jarrys Ubu series at the close o f the century, a
production which presented a situation where all the characters were mad. The
character who was designated as mad was set apart from the rest of the cast of
characters, thereby isolated from the established system o f sound reasoning.
Nineteenth-century theatre reinforced a binary system between reason and madness by
64 Becque IV, 5.
74
always portraying the mad character in opposition to a sane community.oS In addition

to underlining the otherness o f these characters, the dramatists o f the nineteenth
century tended to present their situation negatively. They depicted madness as a
marginalized evil, the enemy o f social harmony and positivist thinking, and by so
doing, they reassured their audience o f their position o f dominance in a world where
sound reasoning was the only acceptable norm. The bourgeois theatre-goer was
touched or frightened by the images o f madness presented to him on the stage, as his
own identity as sane, safe, and sound became all the more apparent. Drama critic
Saint-Marc Girardin wrote in 1843:
Lame se fait un plaisir de lagitation que lui donne le spectacle des passions
humaines, et un plaisir d autant plus doux quelle sait que ces passions ne sont
quune image et q u une illusion quelle croit sans dangers. Ces sentiments
impetueux qui poussent au crime les heros tragiques, ces amours qui font leur
joie et leur tourment, nous emeuvent et nous attendrissent sans nous inquieter.
Nous nous rassurons, sachant bien que nous ne sommes pas en jeu dans les
perils de ce genre.66
The mad character on the nineteenth-century stage could not function effectively and
could not communicate or interact with the community in any fruitful or beneficial
manner. A theatre which isolated its mad characters according to a binary system o f
identification as to what is mad and what is sane reflected a society which was
equally predisposed to alienate the mad other according to strictly defined rules of
normal behavior.
651 should point out here that in romantic theatre, which remained a marginalized, not a dominant,
artistic attraction in the nineteenth century, the mad character was often the only morally acceptable
one, driven insane by the depravity of his or her decadent environment.
66 Saint-Marc Girardin, Cours de litterature dramatique, tome I (Paris: Charpentier, 1843) 2.
75
What I have attempted to show in this examination o f madness on the

nineteenth-century stage is that madness was represented in reference to a clearly
defined code of reason. Madness was identified by specific visual clues that were
recognized both by the performers and by the spectators. A character exhibiting the
trademark signs o f madness, whether it take the form of rage or imbecility, was
marginalized in a community where only conventional systems o f logic and binary
reasoning were acceptable means for interpreting the human condition. According to
this system, a person is either mad, or he is sane, and if he is mad he is incapable of
productive interactions within a reasonable community.
This rigid distinction between madness and reason, with all its visual clues for
identifying and classifying the insane, began to disappear in the dramatic literature of
the twentieth century. In my next chapter, I will examine this shift in the aesthetic
representation o f madness on the stage, where the reference point for reasonable
behavior gave way to a conceptualization o f a dramatic space in which all the
elements are mad. The theatrical efforts o f writers such as Buchner, Strindberg and
Artaud no longer reassured their audiences o f their position o f dominance in a world
o f sound reasoning. Rather, this kind o f theatre questioned this world as it
undermined the notion o f a clear distinction between what is mad and what is sane.
lb
CHAPTER III
Changing Perspectives:
The Epistemological Shift in the Performance of Madness
among Dramatists of the Early Twentieth Century
In the first two chapters of this study, I proposed that certain medical and
theatrical professionals of the nineteenth century presented madness as a
psychological phenomenon conspicuously separate and distinct from conventional
systems of logic and reasoning. Indeed, by being outside, these presentations of
madness made conventional systems possible. The tendency in nineteenth-century
theatre to set madness apart from accepted social norms implied a social
preoccupation with isolating and separating madness according to a binary distinction
between what was considered sane, and therefore of productive social value, and what
was not. In this system, where madness was localized and isolated from the normal
social structures, mad characters were identified as purposeless, or even destructive
factors in an otherwise sane environment. They were seen as either blank mental
vegetables, like Blanche in Henri Becques Les Corbeaux, or fascinatingly perverse
subjects of scientific discourse, like the patient-subjects of Charcots extensive
investigations, or dangerous lunatics, as in the popular melodramas of Pixerecourt and
Ducange. Even in the more subtle psychological dramas of the nineteenth century,
such as Mussets Lorenzaccio, madness was inherently coupled with criminality or
socially un-productive behavior. Rarely, if ever, was madness seen as a potentially
77
positive space for creative production. Mad characters were outsiders on the
nineteenth-century stage, and their codes of reasoning worked against conventional
ideas of creativity and production. As a result, the spectators who saw the mad
character as other on the stage were reassured of their own position of authority and
of functional value within their world.
This reductive system of representation broke down in the early twentieth
century. Dramatists began to create a space in which there was no specific reference
point that would distinguish between madness and sanity. Madness was still
considered an enemy to conventional ways of being in the world. However, rather
than shutting out the mad elements from the representation by treating madness as a
closed door, artists and writers began to explore madness as a space for creative
freedom where they could undermine the established basis for deciding what is sane
or insane. The writers of the early expressionist and surrealist movements, for
example, questioned the notions that productivity and artistic value were linked with
reason and that madness existed only as a kind of empty or destructive non-reality.
For these authors, madness was not an obvious stereotype, nor could it be confined to
a marginalized other. Madness, in the works of these writers, had no distinct
boundaries; and for that very reason, it provided a certain freedom of expression
which traditional nineteenth-century dramatic codes of representation could not.
In this chapter, I will examine how certain playwrights and theoreticians of the
twentieth century, notably Artaud, Bakhtin, and Deleuze and Guattari, presented a
R ep ro d u ced with p erm ission o f th e copyright ow ner. Further reproduction prohibited without p erm ission .
78
new aesthetic of madness which disrupted the established binary code of reason/un
reason. Their project was not to reassure their audience of its position of dominance
in a world which it defined as sane. Instead, they called into question the reasoning
of their society, by privileging madness over conventional logic. For them, madness
was not a space of muteness or of otherness. Instead, madness provided a new set of
tools for artistic expression. By exploring a representational space wherein
conventional systems o f signs and referents break down, dramatists of the early
twentieth century and theoreticians who spanned the century opened up a creative
dialogue with their environment. Madness in the theatre became its own aesthetic, a
functional reality in its own right, with its own system of coordinates, and its own
potential for artistic creation.
Already in late nineteenth-century Germany, insanity took center stage among
the dramatists of the burgeoning expressionist movement. The 1879 publication of
Georg Buchners Woyzeck, first produced live in Munich in 1913, saw one of the most
disturbing treatments o f madness ever presented on the European stage. Unlike
Mussets mad Lorenzo, the title character of Buchners play is not a brilliant yet
tormented politico who plots out his crimes with a Machiavellian flair. Woyzeck acts
solely on instinct. Unable to cope with the pressures exerted on him by the archetypal
representatives of his social structure the Doctor, the Captain, and his amorous rival,
the Drum Major he murders his lover Marie. Biichner based this play on an actual
event which had taken place in Leipzig several decades earlier. In 1821, Johann
79
Christian Woyzeck, a former soldier and barber, killed his mistress for having been
unfaithful to him. During his trial, the defense pleaded insanity due to Woyzecks
claim that he persistently heard voices, and that he was subject to hallucinations.
Despite the evidence of the defendants madness, the plea was turned down and
Woyzeck was publicly executed in the market square of Lepizig in 1824.1
What makes this play remarkable, and poignantly different from previous
representations of madness in theatre as well as the clinical studies of Charcots
Iconogrciphie photographique de la Salpetriere, is that the representatives of reason
are portrayed so monstrously that the audience is led to sympathize with, rather than to
despise, the insane protagonist. Despite the viciousness of his crime and the obvious
indications of W oyzecks madness, the main character comes to embody the average
person, a modern Everyman, whose recourse to violence is spurred on by his own
ordinary insecurities in the face of ordinary pressures in a normal, albeit stylized,
social environment. At the end of the play Woyzeck does not delight in his crime; in
fact he remains quite tormented by the violence of his deed. Instead, it is the
representative pillars of society- - the Judge, the Court Clerk, the Policeman, the
Captain, and the Doctor- - who seem titillated by the crime: What a murder! A good,
genuine, beautiful murder! Beautiful a murder as you could hope for! Its been a long
time since we had one like this! 2 BUchners play indeed reverses the conventional
1 Douglas Jarman, Cambridge Opera Handbooks: Alban Berg, Wozzeck (New York: Cambridge U
Press, 1989) 8.
2 Georg Buchner, Dantons Tod and Woyzeck (Manchester: Manchester UP) 101. Translation mine.
80
distinction between madness and reason by portraying the insane protagonist as a type
of proletarian hero, and by depicting the arbiters of reason as villains. Since Biichner
places Woyzeck in all but four of the twenty-five scenes of the play, the audience is
invited to see the world through Woyzecks eyes, and this is a world where
conventional social codes of reason and morality fail to function. For Woyzeck, it is a
world gone mad, and he is the only one who, through his own madness, is able to see
clearly, as during his hallucination in the second scene: How bright it is! Its all
glowing over the town! A fires sailing around the sky and a noise coming down like
trumpets. Its coming closer! Lets get out of here!3 Buchner thus creates a
dramatic space where the points of reference do not conform to conventional systems
of logic, and where the audience is obliged to situate itself within Woyzecks
perceived reality, that is, a reality formed by madness.
Around this same time, Swedish playwright August Strindberg was publishing
his series of fantasy plays, To Damascus (1808), A Dream Play (1902), and The Ghost
Sonata (1907), which transcribe a concept of the world as a projection of the inner
workings of the human mind. Going a step further than Buchner, Strindberg does not
focus his plays on one mad character reacting to external stimuli from his
environment. Rather, he places the madness directly onstage by creating a dramatic
reality based on disjointed associations and fluid signifiers, a reality where buildings
grow out of the mud, where personalities float between death and life, and where the
1 Biichner 81.
81
plot" unfolds through a series of direct responses to the characters immediate desires
and fears. He thus eliminates the intermediary unstable protagonist completely,

thereby plunging the audience immediately into a realm of un-reason. In the preface
to A Dream Play, Strindberg writes.
Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time
and place do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality the imagination
spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free
fancies, incongruities and improvisations. The characters split, double,
multiply, evaporate, condense, disperse, assemble.4
What Strindberg set out to do in these works is to duplicate the structure of dreaming,
where the dream-state is not represented merely as fantasy, but as true perception.
Although the author does not explicitly use the term madness for describing
this state, the dramatic reality which he puts forth is in fact mad because it does not
correspond to conventional forms which identify a condition of sanity. And, far from
being a space of non-production, this mad space allows the author, as well as the
audience, to visualize the process of creating a myth, as Christopher Innes writes in
his commentary on A Dream Play:
The story o f a daughter of a god, whose descent to earth and involvement
in all possible variations of imperfect human love reveals the spiritual
meaning of existence, corresponds closely to Eliades definition of
myth as a primordial revelation [...] that gives meaning and value to life
by narrating how a reality came into existence.5
4 August Strindberg, A Dream Play, trans. Michael Meyer (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1973) preface.
5 Christopher Innes, Avant Garde Theatre 1392-1992 (New York: Routledge) 35.
82
Madness became thus an aesthetic tool through which avant-garde dramatists of the
beginning of the twentieth century were able to conceptualize a new reality onstage,
one which would allow the audience to visualize the human condition in a manner
which did not conform to established codes of binary logic.
The difficulty of such a pursuit becomes evident in the physical staging of a
dramatic reality which is not based on codes of conventional reality. The staging of
Strindbergs dream plays, for example, posed major problems because they required
technical resources that were not available, not even imaginable for most theatre
practitioners, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Strindberg himself was aware
of this problem, noting in a letter to his own Intimate Theatre in 1907, the whole
performance became a phenomenon of materialization instead of the intended
dematerialization.6 Dramatists were thus faced with the dilemma of how to represent
an alternate reality while still being bound to the material limitations of their physical
environment. Consequently, many writers began to experiment with new visual
media for representing their ideas, and the advent of film technology provided a whole
new territory of visual possibilities for resisting material reality.
One example of a such a new-media work which plunges the audience directly
into a reality of madness is Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayers 1919 silent film The
Cabinet o f Dr. Caligari, now considered one of the foremost representatives of
5 August Strindberg, Open Letters to the Intimate Theatre, Washington 1966, p. 294, qtd. in
Christopher Innes 36.
83
expressionist cinema.7 This production faithfully follows the conventions of

nineteenth-century melodrama, down to the top-hat and black cape that identify the
crazed villain as undeniably sinister. In this film, a fairground quack, Dr. Caligari,
executes a series of apparently unprovoked murders by using his hypnotic powers on a
substitute killer, a Frankensteinesque somnambulist, Cesare, whom he keeps in a
wooden box in his carnival trailer. In keeping with the spirit of theatrical melodrama,
the townspeople manage to save the beautiful ingenue from the clutches of Cesare
with only seconds to spare, as the romantic hero Francis discovers that Caligari is in
fact the director of a nearby insane asylum, driven to madness by his insatiable quest
for knowledge. The story ends with Caligari restrained in a strait-jacket and confined
to an isolated chamber. Francis concludes, from that day on, the madman has never
left his cell. That is to say, up until the final moments of the film, the conventional
social distinction between madness and reason seem comfortably intact: the insane
element is successfully contained and order is once again restored to the village.
In the concluding frame, however, the audience comes to realize that the entire
story of the film has been told by an insane narrator, a patient interned in an asylum
under the care of none other than the notorious Dr. Caligari himself, now deprived
of his signature top-hat and cloak. After the young patient has finished his tale, the
camera reveals the other characters of the story, Jane and Cesare, who are similarly
interned in the asylum. In this sudden reversal of the distinction between what has
7 The Cabinet o f Dr. Caligari, dir. Robert Wiene, perf. Werner Krauss, Conrad Weidt, Friedrich Feher,
84
been portrayed as sane and what has been portrayed as mad, Francis screams out,
You all think Im insane. It isnt true, its the director whos insane.8 In a final
ironic twist, Francis is subsequently led away and confined to the same isolated cell
where Caligari had been restrained at the end of the inner narrative. The entire story
of the film, in fact, has been a fantasy produced by a madman. This is represented
visually in the production by the highly stylized expressionist set; the story unfolds
before an exceptionally artificial-looking backdrop of crumbling archways, irregular
medieval facades, and Munch-like vistas, all of which give way to a much more subtle
and realistic setting in the concluding scenes. Even the psychedelic mural which
adorns the asylum cell during the inner narrative is only barely visible when the young
protagonist, now the mad subject of the outer narrative, is confined there at the end of
the film. As in Buchners Woyzeck, the focal space of The Cabinet o f Dr. Caligari is
a world seen through the eyes of a madman. In it, the representative reality is one of
madness, where the insane are the heroes, and where the representatives of
conventional social order are portrayed as the evil persecutors. This is a reversal in
the binary aesthetic of madness-reason, an aesthetic promoted by the scientific and
theatrical community for most of the nineteenth century. And while the difference
between sane and insane is maintained, it is troubled and disrupted, as it leads the
spectators to a place in which they realize that they cannot always see the distinction
between what is mad and what is not.
and Lil Dagover, Decla Film-Gesellschaft, 1919.
85
Although Mayer and Janowitz did not use any cinematographic tricks to
portray the altered reality projected by the mad mind, relying instead on stylized sets
and lighting effects which would have been available to any stage production, the
advent of cinema did provide artists with certain visual tools for representing
psychological turbulence inconceivable in stage productions. With the aid of multiple
exposures, clever editing, and distortive lenses, the cinematographer was able to
enter into the very mind of the madman, representing on film that which only the
character himself could see. In this way, the director could, for the first time in
performance history, physically create an alternate reality which would be impossible
to conceive in the actual world. In his 1916 film La Folie du Dr. Tube, French
cinematographer Abel Gance relied on the bizarre effects of fun-house mirrors to
depict the world seen through the eyes of its mad protagonist.9 In this story, the
obsessive central character has discovered a scientific method by which he is able to
diffract light rays. He subsequently passes from the real world into another reality,
where all images are grossly distorted, so much so in fact that it often becomes
extremely difficult for the audience to discern what is happening in a given scene. By
manipulating the visual effects, the cinematographer deliberately positions the
audience so that its gaze becomes the gaze of the madman, and for the duration of the
production, the spectators experience an alternate reality devoid of conventional
markers of social stability.
8 Ibid.
86
There appears, then, to have occurred in the avant-garde performances at the

turn of the century an epistemological shift in the representation of perceived reality,
and often these experimental artists turned to what I shall term an aesthetic of
madness in an effort to represent a generalized human condition in a manner
heretofore unexplored. According to this new aesthetic, the world does not function
along lines of linear logic. That which is conventionally assumed to be right,
proper and sane no longer holds authority. Rather, this is a world characterized
by disjunction, a world seen through the eyes of a madman.
In their 1972 work Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari propose a
model for representing the human condition based on principles that defy
conventional notions of production and creativity. Like a number of writers at the
beginning of the twentieth century, some of whom have been examined here, the
authors of Anti-Oedipus assert that established social codes inhibit individual freedom
because they have as their prime function to categorize, to inscribe, and to channel
human expression. On the contrary, in the aesthetic model proposed by Deleuze and
Guattari, which they call schizo-reality, the authors posit madness, specifically
schizophrenia, as the point of reference for their theory for reinventing the Self.
Within this schizo-reality, established binary systems of signs to referents cannot
function, because here, all signs are schizophrenic, that is, they are never
definitively fixed. Instead, all signs are in the process of becoming. The
9 See Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen (Berkeley: U of California Press) 20.
87
production and interpretation of signs is constant because the schizophrenic never

reaches, nor does he attempt to reach, a point at which he understands his environment
through a system of stable or defined entities. Deleuze and Guattari write,
Thus the schizophrenic, the possessor of the most touchingly
meager capital [...] inscribes on his own body the litany of disjunctions,
and creates for himself a world of parries where the most minute of
permutations is supposed to be a response to the new situation or a
reply to the indiscreet questioner. The disjunctive synthesis of recording
therefore comes to overlap the connective synthesis of production. The
process as process of production extends into the method as method of
inscription.10
Rather than characterizing madness as a condition of stagnancy or destructiveness,

Deleuze and Guattari couple madness with a state of hyper-productivity. In fact,
madness becomes for them a realm governed by creativity, because it is a space in
which the production and interpretation of signs is a constant process. Within this
schizo-reality, production of signs exists in synthesis with recording of signs;
therefore, meaning never implies a state of being, but always a state of becoming. The
proverbial schizo, whose entire reality is founded in a state of constant disjunction,
in such refusal of defined codes, is always in the process of reinventing the self.11
According the Deleuze and Guattari, the conventional systems of
representation and expression which govern a society are preoccupied with damming
10 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R.
Lane (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1983) 12.
11 For a more detailed discussion of schizophrenia as a theoretical model for understanding reality, see
chapter 4, Schizophrenic Realities: Disembodiment and Fragmentation of Identity in Beckett's Dis Joe
and Pas moi.
88
up, channeling, and regulating creativity.12 The only means that an individual may
have to access true personal freedom and creation, they state, is to let go of the
established social norms which distinguish between madness and reason. They use as
an image of this process of re-inventing human consciousness the mind of the
schizophrenic, or schizo, who defines himself according to his own set of fluid
associations. They write,
The schizo has his own system of co-ordinates for situating himself at
his disposal, because, first of all he has at his disposal his very own
recording code, which does not coincide with the social code, or coincides
with it only in order to parody it. The code of delirium or of desire proves
to have an extraordinary fluidity. It might be said that the schizophrenic
passes from one code to another, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes,
by quickly shifting from one to another.13
The schizophrenic mind, according to these authors, is free of social constructs

because it has accessed what Deleuze and Guattari call the realm of desiringproduction, where the production of fantasy becomes for the subject the only reality of
reference. Thus fantasy, that which would be seen as un-reasonable or un
productive in conventional social contexts, is for Deleuze and Guattari an acceptable,
if not even preferable reality in its own right. The schizo-reality which these writers
present is a space which allows for the fluent shift between conflicting codes. A space
of flux and of conflict, it resists any model of reasoning which sets out to codify or to
define. According to this model, creative freedom is linked to a space which
12 Deleuze and Guattari 33.

11 Deleuze and Guattari 15.
89
privileges disjunction as opposed to suppressing it. Deleuze and Guattari thereby

locate creation specifically within a context of madness.
This is a madness which
can be defined by its very resistance to definition, and where fantasy is not relegated
to a space of non-reality, but enters into conventional reality and thereby transforms it
into a new reality of its own. It is a space where the established social and moral
codes are scrambled, where traditional distinctions between reason and insanity are
blurred, thereby allowing for the perpetual dialogue among multiple perspectives.
In their illustration of the creative potential o f this schizo-reality, Deleuze and
Guattari often cite the works of surrealist poet and dramatist Antonin Artaud, who,
probably more than any other twentieth-century artist, has been marked in literary
history as a writer of madness. An actor and a dramatist between the wars, Artaud,
until his death in 1947, spent most of his life in and out of mental institutions, where
he underwent any number of experimental treatments, ranging from mind-altering
drugs to early electric shock therapy. His erratic behavior in life led to frequent arrests
and repeated internments in asylums both in France and abroad. The most noted of
his run-ins with the law was in 1937, after a particularly tumultuous voyage to Ireland,
when he was expelled by the local authorities and sent back to France in a straitjacket. He then spent the longest period of time in his life, nine consecutive years,
interned as certifiably insane, isolated even from his own family, who spent nearly
three months trying to locate him .14
14 See Alain and Odette Virmaux, Antonin Artaud, qui etes-vous? (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1986).
90
It is not surprising, then, that madness became a recurrent theme in the works
of Artaud, whose biting criticism of what he saw as arbitrary codes of morality and
social authority is predominant in both his essays and personal letters. Nearly all his
scripts and dramatic scenarios for both stage and screen are mental dramas. His 1934
piece, La Conquete du Mexique, for example, stages the Mexican revolt against
Cortez as a violent psychological battle within Montezumas mind.15 He also
projected himself completely into the role of mad Count Cenci in his own adaptation
of Les Cenci in 1935, believing that there should be a perfect integration between the
psychology of the actor and that of the character he is embodying.16 In fact, in a letter
to Abel Gance in 1927, he proposes that he would be the only actor capable of playing
the role of Usher in Jean Epsteins then upcoming screen adaptation of Edgar Allan
Poes The Fall o f the House o f Usher, stating,
Si je n ai pas ce personnage dans la peau personne au monde ne I'a.
Je le realise physiquement et psychiquement [...] je lincamerai du
dedans. Ma vie est celle d Usher et de sa sinistre masure. J ai la
pestilence dans lame de mes nerfs et j en souffre. II y a une qualite
de la souffrance nerveuse que le plus grand acteur du monde ne peut
17
vivre au cinema sil ne la un jour realisee. Et je lai realisee.
Madness is thus an integral part of Artauds work. He was fascinated not only by the
nature of his own madness, as is evidenced in his volumes of poetry and personal
writings, but also by the representation of madness in the works of others. His
15 Antonin Artaud, La Conquete du Mexique in Oeuvres completes, tome V (Paris: Gailimard, 1979)
18-24.
16 Antonin Artaud, Les Cenci in Oeuvres completes, tome IV (Paris: Gailimard: 1978) 147-210. See
also Christopher Innes 69.
91
numerous projects and proposals for the stage include Biichners Woyzeck (1932),
Strindbergs A Dream Play (1928) and Ghost Sonata (1931), and surrealist writer
Roger Vitracs Coup de Trafalgar (1930), Les Mysteres d'Amour (1927), and Victor,
ou les Enfants au pouvoir (1929), just to mention a few. He was equally drawn to
cinema, having played roles in three films directed by Abel Gance (Napoleon, 1927;
Mater dolorosa, 1932; Lucrece Borgia, 1935), and proposed a series of his own
screen scenarios, the most noted of which is La Coquille et le Clergyman (1927).
Artaud was a member o f the original group of surrealists, although his place of
honor among the founding fathers of surrealism was quickly and adamantly revoked
in 1926. The repercussions of this rupture, which was a result primarily c f Artauds
refusal to join the Communist cause, were later published in the second Manifeste du
surrealisme.18
Interestingly enough, Artauds response to his sudden exclusion from
the surrealist group actually appears to place him closer to the original surrealist ideal
than were those of Bretons school who had rejected him. In a letter published in Les
Cahiers du sud in February 1927, only two months after his break with the surrealists,
he declared that any artist who ties himself to a political cause inevitably loses sight of
his creative freedom . The Communist revolution, he contended, entailed nothing
more than the transfer of ideology from one restrictive moral and social code to
another. He writes,
17 Antonin Artaud, Lettre a Abel Gance, le 27 novembre 1927 in Oeuvres completes, tome III (Paris:
Gailimard, 1978) 129.
18 Andrd Breton, Manifestes du surrealisme (Paris: Gailimard, 1990) 79.
92
II y a pour moi plusieurs manieres d entendre la Revolution, et parmi

ces manieres, la Communiste me semble de beaucoup la pire, la plus
reduite. Une revolution de paresseux. II ne mimporte pas du tout [...]
que le pouvoir passe des mains de la bourgeoisie dans celles du proletariat.
Pour moi la Revolution nest pas la. Elle nest pas dans une simple
transmission des pouvoirs.19
The revolution which Artaud seeks to accomplish in his writings is not one of political
ideology, but rather, one which will effect a profound spiritual transformation
within the human condition. It is, for Artaud, within the domain of the arts,
specifically the dramatic arts, that this fundamental re-awakening of the human race
can take place. Informed by the anti-establishment aesthetic put in place by the
surrealist group, he therefore set out to create a mad theatre, which renounces
textual logic in favor of a frantic array of sounds and images meant to communicate
directly with the publics inner senses and intuitions. For Artaud, as for Deleuze and
Guattari, true creation can only be born out of disjunction, in a space which defies
authoritative discourses of classification, distinction, and logic. His Theatre of
Cruelty offers a new way to conceptualize the human condition through a plunge into
the irrational. 20
19 Antonin Artaud, Manifeste pour un theatre avorte in Oeuvres completes, tome II (Paris:
Gailimard, 1980) 24.
20 I must point out here that Artauds practice did not necessarily mirror his theory. The few theatrical
productions which he actually did manage to stage were, by his own admission, not accurate
representations of his hypothetical Theatre of Cruelty. For example his own mise en seine of Les Cenci
in 1935 fulfilled many of the expectations of traditional representational theatre which Artaud himself
condemned in his essays and letters. Also, the ideal performance space which he laid out in Le Thiatre
et son double was never constructed in his lifetime. Despite these failures on the stage. Artauds
extensive writings and performance theory offer fascinating insights into a changing aesthetic evoking
an epistemological distinction between madness and sanity.
93
In his short dramatic piece Le jet de sang, written in 1925 and later published
as part of a collection of surrealist poems entitled L'Ombilic des limbes, Artaud

dramatizes what can be seen as a headlong jump into madness.21 Although this text
precedes Anti-Oedipe by nearly five decades, Le jet de sang stages many of the
fundamental notions of schizo-reality and desiring-production which Deleuze and
Guattari would propose half a century later. The play begins with a grotesque
affirmation of the conventional social order, with an archetypal young couple
repeatedly declaring their love for each other, and thereby asserting that the world is
perfectly harmonious. Nous nous aimons, " the young woman proclaims, to which
her lover responds, A/i que le monde est bien etabli (77). Embodying the
conventional ideals of romantic love, the young couple confirms that the world is
beautiful because they are in love. Furthermore, in a short exchange where the young
man turns away from the girl as if to see whether or not she will follow him, he
establishes his position o f dominance by testing his partners fidelity:
LE JEUNE HOMME, la quittant brusquement.
Je taime.
Un silence
LA JEUNE FILLE, me me jeu, elle se met en face de lui.
Voila.
LE JEUNE HOMME, sur un ton exalte, suraigu.
Je taime, je suis grand, je suis clair, je suis plein
je suis dense. (76-77)
21 Antonin Artaud, L'Ombilic des Limbes (Paris: Gailimard, 1968).
94
In this introductory micro-drama, the two characters confirm their position as heroes
of romantic love in a world where all seems to be as it should be," and where loving
confers on the man an existential plenitude that makes everything right in the world.
Just moments later, however, the two lovers are separated during a spectacular,
other-worldly storm, which irrevocably plunges the dramatic space into a realm of
unrestrained madness. Human limbs fall from the sky, followed by broken fragments
of classical architecture, then scorpions, a frog, and a beetle. The conventional
markers o f sanity in Western society- - a sound body and a structured society- -have
been shattered and replaced by images that inspire fear and aversion. An insidious
and potentially dangerous madness has taken over the dramatic space- -dangerous,
because it can overturn confidence in notions of order and logic. From this moment,
the performance takes on a dream-like quality, with stage- lirections so fantastical,
such as the wounded hand of God spraying the stage and its characters with blood,
that, as with Strindbergs dream-plays, it is nearly impossible to imagine a functional
mise en scene.22 Looking up at the sky in horror, the young man screams out, Le d e l
est devenu fo u (77), no doubt articulating an imagined spectators reaction at the
sudden chaotic shift in the performance. If Deleuze and Guattaris schizo-reality is
characterized by fluid signifiers and fragmentary associations, Le je t de sang visually
manifests this reality with dramatic force.
22 In fact nearly forty years passed before Le jet de sang was actually produced onstage for the first
time, by Jean-Marie Patte in 1962; see Alain and Odette Virmaux, Antonin Artaud (Paris: La
Manufacture, 1986) 227.
95
As the play progresses, Artaud systematically undermines each one of the

institutional columns that support Western society, beginning with the fundamental
markers of the Oedipal social system: the archetypal Father and Mother. These are
represented as gross allegorical caricaturesLe Chevalier, in his enormously
oversized armor, distorts the traditional image of a medieval knight as representative
of order, protection, and patriarchal law. Similarly, La Nourrice, groaning under the
weight of her grotesquely inflated breasts, becomes a monstrous imitation of the
nurturing mother-figure. Like warped reflections in a fun-house mirror, Le Chevalier
and La Nourrice appear onstage just after the young lovers have vanished into the
wings, as if to present a mad duplicate of the space of harmonious social stability
depicted in the opening frame. In a rapid succession of bizarre scene-fragments,
Artaud criticizes the social institutions of his day. Like the stereotypical bon
bourgeois who devours the profits from his various business ventures, Le Chevalier
stuffs his mouth with slices of cheese which he peels from between his papers.
Equally startling allegories depict other "pillars of society: a priest, a sacristan, a
cobbler, a judge, a fruit-merchant, and a prostitute. The young man recognizes the
arbitrary nature of these categories when he utters in the midst of the chaos around
him:
Jai vu, j ai su, j ai compris. Ici la place publique, le pretre, le savetier,
les quatre saisons, le seuil de leglise, la lanteme du bordel, les balances
de la justice. Je n :en puis plus! (79)
96
From the church to the brothel, institutions which are the keystones to conventional
social structure are rendered ineffectual in this mad reality. The young man who
finds himself sucked into this world of un-reason finds no solace in those figures who
would otherwise represent the arbiters of order. To borrow from a psychoanalytic
model, one might say that the society of Le jet de sang is a society which has been
castrated. The phallic order, and thus patriarchal control, has been undermined. This
is an idea which is probably best illustrated by the Prostitutes defiantly biting the
accusatory finger of God which descends from the sky in the final moments of the
play. Free of the traditional constraints that define a society as reasonable, the
young man and the prostitute run off together, comme des trepanes (83). By
entering into a realm of madness, the young man finds, perhaps, a form of liberation.
For Artaud, as for Strindberg, it is not a question of reproducing legends on the
stage, but of actually creating them in the presence of, and with the involvement of,
the entire audience. True communication is impossible in traditional Western theatre,
Artaud writes in Le Theatre et la cruaute, because the space of the spectators is
separated, closed off, from that of the performers. In such a system, the audience
cannot take part in the creative act. They are obliged to sit back and to accept the pre
rehearsed performance as it is presented to them. They are not invited to break down
the established codes of representation and of interpretation. If one considers
Artauds criticism of the conventional theatre of his day in light of the theories of
Deleuze and Guattari, one can see how Artauds theatrical project was one which
97
attempted to scramble the codes of established systems of representation. His

vision for a new genre of theatre mirrors the anti-Oedipal schizo-reality in that it
envisions a performance where signs are never fixed, and where the entire dramatic
experience, like a sacred ritual, emphasizes the process of becoming, of transforming
all participants, actors and spectators alike, on a fundamental psychological level.
Artaud saw the traditional theatre of his day as an attempt to illustrate and to
imitate defined social life. We have seen how the various acting guides of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did just that: they codified human emotional
states, including the identified faces of madness, according to standardized facial
and gestural expressions. This was meant to illustrate physically for the seasoned
spectator the spectrum of human sentiments portrayed in the dramatic performance.
The public could then identify non-verbalized emotional movements as definitive
illustrations of mental states which existed in their everyday real lives. By seeing a
comforting, codified reality onstage, the audience, in turn, was reassured that the
social hierarchy was in place and unquestionable. The goal of a conventional
performance was not to question the audiences adherence to one material reality, but
rather to reinforce it by illustrating it through "realistic means. Artauds Theatre
Alfred Jarry, on the contrary, did not seek to illustrate life, but rather to continue, even
recreate it:
98
Le Theatre Alfred Jarry ne triche pas avec la vie, ne la singe pas,

ne lillustre pas, il vise a la continuer, a etre une sorte d operation
magique sujette a toutes les evolutions.21
Again, Artauds concept of theatre was one which could never be finalized. His
words: continuation, operation, evolution stand in direct contrast to what he saw as
the flaws of traditional western theatre: stagnation, isolation, and illustration, with no
hope of creatively transforming its participants.
Artaud makes this clear in his essay
La mise en scene et la metaphysique, in which he states that the public has lost
touch with true theatre because for centuries dramatists limited performance to mere
illustrations of that which was expected through daily, ordinary thought processes and
established codes of representation. He therefore felt a need to create a theatre which
would address itself directly to the human subconscious, in an effort to break down
the codes of normalcy which prevented individuals from accessing their spirituality.24
In what has become his most famous work, Le Theatre et son double, Artaud
describes the physical means by which his revolutionary theatre attempts to place the
audience at the center of an alternate reality, a kind of projection of the inner
turbulence of the human mind. He writes,
[L]e theatre doit poursuivre, par tous les moyens, une remise en cause
non seulement de tous les aspects du monde objectif et descriptif exteme,
mais du monde interne, cest-a-dire de lhomme, consider^
metaphysiquement. Ce nest quainsi, croyons-nous, quon pourra encore
reparler au theatre des droits de 1imagination.25
23 Antonin Artaud, Theatre Alfred Jarry: Saison 1928 in Oeuvres completes tome II (Paris: Gailimard,
1980)27.
99
Artaud criticizes the conventional theatre of his day, where strict codes of
representation serve to separate the spectators from the performance. Instead of living
the theatrical event, the public observes it from a safe distance, literally and
figuratively. In order to implicate the public more intimately into the performance,
Artaud rejects the conventional separation between the stage and the house.
Eliminating any notion of superfluous ornamentation, Artaud visualizes a
performance space dedicated solely to the function of the spectacle, where thrusts and
galleries allow the actors full access to every part of the room, and where the audience
sits, center, in moveable seats. The spectators are thus literally surrounded by a
performance which is not confined to one designated section of the room, but which is
staged in, around, above, and behind the seating area. With sudden and abrupt spatial
changes throughout the performance, and with lights intermittently flashing across the
room at both the actors and the spectators, the audience never has the comfort of
simply sitting back and distancing itself from the spectacle. As Artaud writes,
Laction denouera sa ronde, etendra sa trajectoire d dtage en etage, d un
point a un point, des paroxysmes naitront tout a coup, sallumeront comme
des incendies en des endroits differents; et le caractere dillusion vraie du
spectacle, pas plus que lemprise directe et immediate de faction sur le
spectateur, ne seront un vain mot. [...] et a plusieurs actions simultanees,
a plusieurs phases d une action identique ou les personnages accroches
fu n a f autre comme des essaims supporteront tous les assauts des situations,
et les assauts exterieurs des elements et de la tempete, correspondront des
moyens physiques d eclairage, de tonnerre ou de vent, dont le spectateur
subira le contre-coup.26
24 Antonin Artaud, Le Theatre et son double (Paris, Gailimard, 1964) 70.
25 Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres completes tome IV (Paris: Gailimard, 1978) 89.
26 Artaud, Oeuvres completes tome IV 93.
1(K)
In this manner, Artaud seeks to create a method of performance which is as unique,

unpredictable, and unrepeatable as the events of life. He consistently refers to his
vision of theatre as process, as act. Artaud conceives of theatre, like life, as a
constant, ever-changing event. His vision of the theatrical experience is one which
was never finalized: the Theatre Alfred Jarry was created specifically to be always
subject to the fluctuations of circumstance and of chance.
This idea is further reinforced by his ideas regarding the articulation of
language during a performance. Rather than focusing exclusively on a given text,
Artaud emphasizes the importance of gesture and vocal tone. Since conventional
character dialogues imply a fixed text, where the performance holds secondary
position to the plot and development of a written script, Artaud suppresses the use of
->7
spoken language in favor of what he terms iexpression dans I'espace.'
By
deforming speech, elongating certain vowels, changing the conventional structure of

rhythm and accent, Artaud privileges sound effects over sense. As a result, the
incantatory style of the spoken lines, which is then coupled with unusual lighting
effects and special musical instruments specifically invented for a particular
performance, create a dramatic experience where, as Artaud would have it, reason
fails. For Artaud, it is not a question of producing a finished text, which relies on the
logical progression of plot and characterization, but rather of articulating a
27 Artaud, Oeuvres completes tome IV 86.
101
performance where the process is more important than the product. By plunging his
audience into the realm of the irrational, Artaud wished the spectators to access all the
hallucinations and disjunctions of an alternate reality, to inhabit the fluid associations
of a disturbing dream.
Deleuze and Guattari heralded Artaud as their anti-Oedipai hero because his
theories for reinventing theatre were based on such an aesthetic. Artaud contrasted his
artistic vision with what he referred to as traditional Western theatre, based on
realistic representational and moral codes. His own project set out to create a
theatrical experience not based on such authoritative distinctions. The notion that
creativity is born out of disjunction resonates well with the writings of Russian
theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, whose depiction of the human condition as a dialogic event
also refutes systems of linear logic. Through the lens of Bakhtins theories of
dialogism, it is possible to focus on Artauds key concepts of continuation, operation,
and evolution, and to show how one might consider his notion of physical as well as
spiritual space of performance as inherently dialogic.
For Bakhtin, creativity cannot be located in any system which is defined along
lines of binary logic. For creativity to exist, there must be change, and if an event is
treated synchronically, there is no principle of change whatsoever. Likewise, if an
event is treated diachronically, as in conventional systems of dialectical materialism
and structuralism, any element of change is merely a product of alternatives that have
102
been specifically defined, then synthesized.28 It follows from this that Bakhtins
vision of creativity is tied to a transformative, perpetual dialogue which can occur
only when conventional systems of binary logic break down. Bakhtins notion of
transformation through dialogue resists the rigidity of traditional systematic
philosophies.
Any system which lays out a strictly defined number of meanings, certainly
one which presents each meaning as a separate and individually coherent unit, cannot
produce a dialogue in the Bakhtinian sense. Also, most diachronic systems are
designed to generate a conclusion of some sort, a logical and unified truth which
emerges from the meeting of two opposing forces. Denying the validity of any
aesthetic system which attempts to present a unified truth, Bakhtin wrote, From the
point of view of truth, there are no individual consciousnesses.29 Bakhtin rejected all
notions of conclusion, unity, and closure. He focused on each event for its particular
possibilities, or as Morson and Emerson suggest in their treatment of Bakhtin, for its
particular eventness, meaning its openness to multiple unforeseen possibilities.30
Bakhtin sees a notion of being which allows every moment of existence to be rich in
potential, a kind of perpetual open present.
This idea of unfinalizability lies at the center of Bakhtins theory. Bakhtin
insisted on a positive interpretation of the term. In Problems o f Dostoevski's Poetics,
28 See Morson and Emerson, Creation o f a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990) 39.
29 Bakhtin, Problems o f Dostoevskys Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984) 81.
3(1 Morson and Emerson 236.
103
he wrote emphatically, nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the
ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is
open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future.11
Bakhtins conception of the world and of the human condition was not one of order or
systematic logic, but rather one of infinite yet creative and productive chaos.
According to conventional arguments, however, events make sense only if they are
governed by certain laws and logical formulas, especially by a system of cause and
effect. In such a system, Bakhtin argued, creativity is only a form of discovery, not a
means of truly producing anything new or unexpected, and life is reduced to mere
mathematics. True creativity is never a product of discovery for Bakhtin, but of
spontaneous invention. In other words, Bakhtin proposed an aesthetic which places
process above product.
According to Bakhtin, the human struggle toward consciousness is founded on
the opposition between the notion of a world where all things produce simultaneous
multiple meanings and established systems of privileged discourse which allow for no
dialogic interaction between the source of an utterance and its recipient. This is what
Bakhtin referred to as authoritative discourse. It is imposed onto the subject from
without; it remains distanced, and it permits no play with its framing context.12
Authoritative discourse can take the form of sacred writings, political dogma,
11 Bakhtin, Problems o f Dostoevski's Poetics 166.

12 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1981) 424.
104
propaganda, or more surreptitiously, of established social norms or unquestioned

modes of representation within a community.
Artauds call for a type of creative performance which is always spontaneous
and ever self-transforming resonates with Bakhtins theories regarding a life which is
always unfinalizable, a life full of, as Morson and Emerson suggest in their extensive
work on Bakhtin, eventness, or event-potential,33 For Bakhtin, the only way for
creativity to be genuine is for it to exist as immanent, in constant ongoing processes.
He pushed this idea further by insisting that an individual is capable of authoring his
self if he is open to experience his being as a constantly fluctuating event. This
notion of authoring ones self implies a creative existence which will constantly
question, resist, and undermine the dominant authoritative discourse o f ones
environment. This existence can never be wholly known, as it is perpetually in
dialogue, always shifting and unfolding: it is constantly in process, as Michael
Holquist suggests in his reading of Bakhtin:
The situatedness of the self is a multiple phenomenon: it has been given
the task of not being merely given. It must stand out in existence because
it is dominated by a drive to meaning, where meaning is understood as
something still in the process of creation, something still bending toward
the future as opposed to that which is already completed.34
This notion of life as a perpetually creative and dialogic process, whereby an

individual will constantly re-invent the self by opening up to multiple perspectives lies
13 See Morson and Emerson, Creation o f a Prosaics 40.

34 Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (New York: Routledge, 1991) 23.
105
at the heart not only of Bakhtins theory of eventness but also of Artauds project for
his Theatre of Cruelty.

In Problems o f Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin examines the elements of
literary works which he considers to be of an essentially dialogic nature. Focusing in
particular on the creative process of Dostoevski, Bakhtin affirms the independence,
internal freedom, unfmalizability and indeterminancy of dialogic characters vis-a-vis
their author. The dialogic work, according to Bakhtin, is continually in process, and
the individual characters are not completed like statues hewn in the past and
displayed as finished commodities for an audience of onlookers. Dialogic characters,
rather, exist in what Bakhtin refers to as the real present of an ongoing creative
process. He writes:
This is no stenographers report of a finished dialogue, from which
the author has already withdrawn, and over which he is now located
as if in some higher decision-making position: that would have turned
an authentic and unfinished dialogue into an objectivized and finalized
image o f a dialogue, of the sort usual for every monologic novel.35
What makes a work dialogic, then, is its refusal to arrive at a point of closure. The
dialogic author never allows a work to be truly completed. It exists in continuation.
Artaud made a similar assertion in speaking about his Theatre Alfred Jarry.
He claimed that the dramatic text presented at his theatre was always subject to
spontaneous revisions and chance re-interpretations, so that any spectator who
attended a series of performances of the same piece would never see the same play
106
twice. He wrote, une mise en scene, une piece seront toujours sujettes a caution, a
revision, de telle sorte que des spectateurs venant d plusieurs soirs d'intervalle
n aient jam ais le me me spectacle devant les yeux. '16 By taking this position, Artaud
refused to grant to the logos of a dramatic text its conventional position as truthholder. The text was not to be treated as a finished piece intended to be rehearsed
until it could be considered perfect. Artaud insisted that each performance remain
open to chance and to change. In this manner, the theatre which he envisioned was
one based on continuation and on perpetual dialogue between the performers, the
author, and the spectators.
According to Bakhtin, there can be no change on any level within an
individuals perception of a given code unless there is dialogue. What Artaud does in
his writings about le Theatre Alfred Jarry is to stress the communicative nature of the
dramatic experience. By stating that his goal was to produce a theatre which would
never repeat the same spectacle at any two performances, he underlines the dialogic
nature of his project. He calls for his audience to resist accepting the social codes
which are reinforced on stage by traditional Western dramatists, and to open
themselves up to dialogue with the performance, and thereby to be transformed by it
on a fundamental level.
In his essay En Finir avec les chefs-doeuvre, Artaud asserts that the masses
have no interest in the great works of dramatic literature on the stage for the very fact
35 Bakhtin, Problems o f Dostoevsky's Poetics 63.
107
that the masterpieces are literary, and therefore represent a logos of established
truth.
The classical works, he writes, are based on stagnant forms that no longer
respond to the needs of their public. He writes,

nous pourrions tout de meme voir que cest notre veneration devant
ce qui a ete deja fait, si beau et si valable que ce soit, qui nous petrifie,
qui nous stablilise et nous empeche de prendre contact avec la force
qui est dessous [...] la force vitale . 37
Any work which is displayed as a finished product, Artaud theorizes, offers no room
for participation in any kind of metaphysically transformative sense, and thus allows
only for the further "spiritual petrification of its audience and performers.
The question that arises from this examination of Artauds theatre as a theatre
of process is, what is the goal of a performance which refuses to be finalized ? What
did Artaud seek to accomplish with an experimental genre of performance which had
as its primary intention to continue, not to illustrate ? In other words, what is the
desired effect of a theatre which is created to be dialogic ? In his essay, Toward a
philosophy of the act, which appeared in the 1984-85 issue of the yearbook of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences, Bakhtin suggests that the goal of a dialogic text or
experience is to promote creative understanding. By underlining the importance of a
perpetually open-ended approach to life experiences, he proposes, an individual
consciousness allows him- or herself to enter into another. Bakhtin refers to this
16 Artaud, Theatre Alfred Jarry: saison 1928 26

17 Artaud, Le Theatre et son double 121.
process as live entering or living into another consciousness.
\U
108
The consequence
of this live entering into another consciousness is to transform the individual

consciousnesses of all participants in the process. The dialogic interaction between
various perspectives creates a kind of architectonics of consciousness which is not
reducible to any one individual. He writes,
I actively enter as a living being into an individuality [...] Its not the
subject who unexpectedly takes possession of a passive me, but I who
actively enter into him. [This] is my act, and only in it can there be
productiveness and innovation .39
What Bakhtin describes here is a fundamental transformation within the

consciousness of all participants of the dialogue, during which each individual is
invited to actively enter into the consciousness of another individual, experience
another perspective, and allow him or herself to be changed by it. It is a
transformative process, or operation, through which the consciousnesses of the
participants are altered on a fundamental level.
The Artaudian theatrical experience can be understood as a moment of critical
dialogue which forces humankind to experience itself through others. Through his
theatre, Artaud argues, individuals are obliged to confront the various codes and social
definitions which restrict their creative freedom. By effectively entering into an active
dialogue with the authoritative codes which, according to Artaud, have infected and
18 M.M. Bakhtin, Toward a philosophy of the act in Filosofiia i sotsiologiia nauki I tekhniki.
(Moscow: Nauka, 1986) 93, qtd. in Morson and Emerson 54.
59 qtd. in Morson 54.
109
petrified their souls, the participants of the Artaudian spectacle are thus invited to
experience another reality, one of personal creative freedom. According to Artauds
argument, they are transformed because, unlike conventional European theatre which
re-presents established monologic social codes, the Theatre of Cruelty asks them to
enter into a dialogue with their surroundings and with the human condition. Artauds
hope was that such a theatre would eventually reawaken the human race by
reinventing the way which individuals define themselves and each other. In this
sense, Artaud wished, through his revolutionary theatre, to reinvent human
consciousness along the lines of creative dialogism, whereby individuals would see
each moment of life as full of what Bakhtin calls event-potential, and whereby the
human experience would be one of perpetual active interaction between and among
individual consciousnesses.
Artauds project for reinventing theatre by plunging the performance into the
realm of alternate reality came up against certain practical difficulties. The lack of
financial support for his productions was only one of many limitations which made
the realization of Artauds work nearly, if not completely, impossible. His stagings of
Vitracs Les Mysteres de I'Amour, Claudels Partage de Midi, and Strindbergs
Dream Play saw only a single dress rehearsal before their openings. Vitracs Victor,
ou les Enfants au pouvoir did not even complete an entire run-through before its first
I 10
performance in 1927.40 Furthermore, all of Artauds productions took place in

Italianate theatre spaces, and the plans which Artaud conceived regarding a physical
performance space for his Theatre of Cruelty were never fulfilled during his
lifetime. These were certainly not ideal conditions for creating the spiritual revolution
which Artaud had imagined as the only vital role for modern theatre. Nevertheless,
one cannot dismiss Artauds theoretical and dramatic work as utter failures. The
dramatist himself considered his stagings at the short-lived Theatre Alfred Jarry to be
successful, if for nothing else than for making audiences aware of the concepts of his
proposed theatre of cruelty. And, as regards the conceptualization of an alternate
reality in performance, one critic wrote that complex lighting, individual and massmovement, sound, music revealed to the spectator that space and time form an
affective reality [beyond] verbal material. 41 On some level, then, Artaud did achieve
his goal, that is, to effect an intense emotional response from his audience which,
through a heightened awareness of inner potential, would lead to the rejection of
rationalistic and materialistic society .42 Despite the general skepticism which Artaud
may have encountered with respect to his theatrical projects at the time, he stands out
as one of the foremost drama theoreticians of this century. The concepts that make up
Artauds project for reconceptualizing theatre are still considered among the most
creative impetuses of modem theatre. His notions of extending the publics
40 Antonin Artaud, Le Thdatre Alfred Jarry in Oeuvres completes, tome II (Paris: Gailimard, 1980)
34.
41 Jouv, Nouvelle Revue Frangaise (1 June 1935): 914-15, qtd in Christopher Innes 88.
42 Innes 88.
111
imagination by presenting alternate visions of the world and of the human condition,
through hallucinatory distortions of scale and perspective, can be found in the work of
subsequent dramatists ranging from Jean Genet to Robert Wilson. Also, his
techniques of extending the language of the stage by adding emphasis to symbolic
gestures, vocal tonality, and patterned movement have been developed by renowned
international practitioners, such as Richard Schechner and Peter Brook. Finally, his
concept of ritualizing drama through the creation of a dramatic reality distinct from
conventional logic has become an ideal for a great number of writers, primarily of
European drama, to this day .43
The writings of Antonin Artaud foreground the radical shift in the European
conception and aesthetic of madness at the beginning of the twentieth century. Along
with other dramatic writers, such as Buchner and Strindberg, and cinematographers
such as Abel Gance and Mayer and Janowitz, Artaud sought to create a representative
space which placed the spectator in the midst of a realm of un-reason, a space of
desiring-production, to use Deleuze and Guattaris term, in which fantasy becomes
the reality of reference. Artauds project for a theatre of cruelty is one which resists
established systems of reasoning, a space where notions of absolute categories
disappear. This is a space of madness where conventional codes of logic become
scrambled, and where the subject is invited to enter into an open and un-finalizeable
dialogue with the world.
43 For a more detailed discussion of Artauds influences in contemporary drama, see Christopher Innes,
I 12
This aesthetic of madness is the framework on which I will base my analysis

of three dramatists of the second half of the twentieth century: Jean Genet, Samuel
Beckett, and Marguerite Duras. All three of these writers privilege madness as a kind
of open reality which offers new possibilities for representing the human condition.
They do not place madness onstage in order to reassure their audience of its secure
place within the closed and codified systems of their societies, but rather to question
these systems by presenting madness as the only reality of reference. Through their
staged works, the public is invited to dialogue with the unstable representational codes
played out in their texts. In this way, spectators participate not only in the creation of
the drama enacted before them by the fragmentary characters who face them from the
stage, but also in a vital re-invention of their own identity and of the codified society
in which they exist. Indeed, if the spectators refuse to enter into such a dialogue, the
play passes them by entirely.
Avant Garde Theatre 1892-1992, chapter 5.
113
CHAPTER IV
Schizophrenic Realities:
Disembodiment and Fragmentation of Identity
in Becketts Dis Joe and Pas moi
It can be said, particularly in the light of several of his one-act plays, that
Samuel Beckett was a writer of madness. In a significant portion of his dramatic
work, among which Dis Joe (1965) and Pas moi (1973) are prime examples, he
presents fictional representations of a reality which cannot be defined according to
logic or traditional codes of representation. Becketts characters and dramatic
situations are often characterized by an overwhelming sense of disintegration, in
which the concept of a unified identity is undermined by individuals characters
psychological battles against the disembodied fragments of their own selves. The
ontological insecurities and epistemological confusion inherent to Becketts texts
resonate quite strongly with the descriptions by such noted psychiatrists as R.D. Laing
and Harold Searles of the schizophrenic condition. By adopting the model of the
schizophrenic reality, one can examine the dramatic works of Beckett, where
linguistic, existential, and representational distortions create a space of madness in
which personal identities are perpetually in flux, and an integrated notion of the self
breaks down utterly.
Within the discipline of psychiatry, persons whose behavior and thought
processes conform to the established codes of reason and morality of their society are
1 14
said to be ontologically secure.' These persons have a strong sense of their presence
in their environment. They see themselves as real, alive, whole, end temporally
continuous beings. Having a definite sense of integral selfhood and personal identity,
they are able to interact with others as equally real, alive, whole, and continuous
beings. This is not to say that such persons are totally self-confident, with no anxieties
or insecurities in their daily interactions with their environment. Even the most
rational people suffer moments when they feel overwhelmed by their environment, or
drastically unsure of their own viability in their relations with other people.
However, for the ontologically secure, these anxieties and insecurities do not
undermine the basic underlying understanding that they are substantial autonomous
beings, spatially co-existing with their physical body, and differentiated from the rest
of the world as separate individuals. The ontologically secure person takes it for
granted that s/he was born as a biologically viable entity, who experiences his/her
surroundings as a whole and unified person.
An individual who is afflicted with schizophrenia is not ontologically secure,
so that in the ordinary circumstances of living, such a person tends to feel more unreal
than real. According to R.D. Laing, schizophrenics do not have a sense of their own
fundamental wholeness, and they lack the understanding of themselves as
temporally continuous beings. For these people, there is no existential experience of
personal consistency or cohesiveness. Often, these individuals feel themselves
1 R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (New York: Random House Pantheon Books, 1969) 40.
115
divorced from their physical body, and they cannot differentiate themselves from their
environment or from other persons. Schizophrenia is characterized by a total
breakdown of existential and temporal unity. The schizophrenic individual cannot
distinguish between memories and present perceptions. Hallucinations and past
experiences flood the individuals psyche with immediate vividness, just as present
stimuli may appear as distant memories. Often the schizophrenic cannot differentiate
between emotional and somatic sensations, so that various psychic reactions may
appear to the individual as perceived variations in the size, color, or shape of physical
body parts. Harold Searles, an expert in the analysis and treatment of schizophrenia,
wrote in 1959,
In the conduct of his daily life and in his communicating with other
persons [the schizophrenic] is unable [...] to distinguish between the
symbolic and the concrete. If his therapist uses symbolic language, he
may experience this in literal terms; and on the other hand the affairs of
daily life (eating, dressing, sleeping, and so on) which we think of as literal
and concrete, he may react to as possessing a unique symbolic significance
which completely obscures their practical importance in life as a human
being.
The way in which the schizophrenic individual perceives reality is thus radically
different from the way in which ontologically secure persons perceive it. A
schizophrenic sensibility finds no established benchmarks on which to base a stable or
consistent identity, and the common stimuli of everyday interactions take on an acute
immediacy. The only way in which schizophrenics can gain any sense of individual
2 Harold F. Searles, Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects (New York:
I 16
validity vis-a-vis their environment is by constantly shifting gears, by changing the

fundamental makeup of their personality to correspond to the perceived variations in
external stimuli. In a theoretical sense, then, schizophrenics do not define themselves
according to an established representative code, but exist in constant flux, perpetually
interacting with the tiniest perceived shifts in their environment.
In his 1969 work The Divided Self, Laing presents his understanding of
schizophrenic patients tendency to perpetually reinvent themselves in an effort to
negotiate the reality of their surroundings. Unlike ontologically secure persons, who
can accept their own position in a given situation and seek potential gratification from
their relationship to others, schizophrenic individuals are unable to take their or
others identities for granted. Because their identity is directly linked to an
environment which they conceive of as being ever-shifting and perpetually fluid, they
must constantly recreate new systems of coordinates by which they define themselves.
It is as if they lived in a kind of stream-of-consciousness reality, their entire
existence an attempt to preserve, rather than to gratify their sense of self. According
to Laing, persons suffering from schizophrenia live in constant fear of losing
themselves because their environment can offer no reliable points of reference.
writes,
If the individual cannot take the realness, aliveness, autonomy, and identity
of himself and others for granted, then he has to become absorbed in
contriving ways of trying to be real, of keeping himself or others alive,
International Universities Press, 1965) 305.
He
117
of preserving his identity, in efforts, as he will often put it, to prevent

himself losing his self . 1
It is interesting to note Laings specific use of the word contriving, as he thereby

asserts the active and conscious effort of schizophrenics to create and recreate
constantly their reality. Schizophrenics must reinvent their reality at every moment in
order to feel alive. Their sense of individual identity is thereby never given, or fixed
in any kind of logical or normalizing code. In fact, the entire concept of a definitive
code or system of self-identification becomes lost on schizophrenics, because for
them, the environment and the presence of others is a constant threat, and they must
perpetually redefine themselves in order to maintain any sense of personal integrity at
all.
Laing differentiates between two types of existential phenomena within an
individuals perceptual link between the mind and the body. Ontologically secure
persons, whom Laing describes as individuals who experience themselves as
embodied, have the ability to experience their body as a base from which they can be
a human being with other human beings .4 They have a sense of themselves as being
biologically alive and real, and they are aware of themselves as subject to physical
dangers that may threaten their body. They separate themselves from others through
the knowledge that they cannot experience other peoples emotions and afflictions as
anything but products o f their own limited sense of empathy.
3 Laing 44.
1 18
At the other end of the spectrum, according to Laing, are those who have the
sense that they have never quite become incarnate and can only speak of themselves
as unembodied. This apparent divorce of the self from the body is a common trait of
schizophrenia, and impedes the individual from communicating with other persons as
a defined physical being. These unembodied schizophrenics have the sensation of
being spectators of themselves, and they often begin to dialogue with their physical
self as a separate entity. Regarding this split between a schizophrenics mind and
body, Laing writes,
The unembodied self, as onlooker of all the body does, engages in nothing
directly. Its functions come to be observation, control, and criticism
vis-a-vis what the body is experiencing and doing, and those operations
which are usually spoken of as purely mental. 5
As a result, schizophrenics become hyper-conscious of their environment and of their

own emotional reactions to external stimuli. They constantly attempt to reposition
their own imago, or personality, in their relations with other people, all the while
developing an interactive relationship with their disembodied self which can become
extremely complex. Such a fragmented sense of self leads to an equally fragmented
experience of reality, where nothing appears unified or systematic, and where
everyday happenings threaten the individual with an overwhelming sense of nonbeing.
4 Laing 68.
5 Laing 71.
I 19
Such a sense of unembodied existence in a reality marked by fragmentation

and hyper-fluidity is exhibited in many of the dramatic works of Samuel Beckett.
Visually, Beckett often reduces the spatial tableau to a bare minimum, like the sterile
landscape of En Attendant Godot (1952), or the desert dunes of Oh les beaux jours
(1963), or the spartan rooms of La Demiere Bande (1959) and Trio dufantom e
(1975), and often the characters are physically restrainedcrouching in garbage cans,
slumped in wheel chairs, like the major players of Fin de Partie (1957), or peering out
from giant funeral ums like the three characters of Comedie (1963), or slowly dying in
a rocking-chair like the old woman o f Berceuse (1981). Isolated and often unable to
move beyond the closed space in which they find themselves, the characters are
confronted by their own inability to communicate successfully with the outside world,
and to understand the absurd situations which they are forced to confront. Although
Beckett himself does not posit his characters as mad, the dramatic world which he
creates in his texts can be understood as mad, because reality, for Beckett, is a kind of
madness. Entrenched in a world marked by instability and disparity, his characters
often display an overwhelming sense of loss of self in the way in which they dialogue
either with other characters or with the various fragmented incarnations of their own
self. In many ways these plays mirror what Laing and Searles describe as the
schizophrenic sensibility, where the individual is unable to function as a unified
ontologically secure being.
120
What is of greatest interest to my examination of Beckett are the short pieces
that further heighten the characters personal isolation and ontological insecurities by
focusing exclusively on a solitary protagonist in the midst of a psychological battle
with fragments of his or her own consciousness. By giving voice to the protagonists
thoughts, Beckett plunges the audience directly into a dramatic space which allows the
spectator to see and hear the otherwise invisible turbulence of a mind gone mad. Two
texts, Dis Joe (1965) and Pas moi (1973), are particularly noteworthy because they
permit the spectator to visualize the inner workings of the main characters disturbed
mind. In both works, the protagonist exhibits ontological, epistemological and
communicative components of a schizophrenic sensibility. Because interaction with
other characters is reduced to a bare minimum at best, the spectator becomes privy to
a fragmented and obsessive dialogue which the characters appear to have with
disembodied slivers of their own consciousness. Consequently, the entire dramatic
space becomes what I will call a space of madness, as there exist no clearly defined
points of reference which would allow the character a reliable or stable sense of
individual identity. As these frantic monologues unfold, the characters are constantly
obliged to renegotiate their ontological position as they face their increasingly
apparent inability to overcome an overwhelming sense of loss of self. Since Beckett
does not put in place a reliable marker of identity for the fictional characters on the
stage, the audience is similarly obliged to renegotiate constantly its position in the face
of the fragmented reality presented to it. In this manner, the spectator becomes
121
implicated in an intimate rapport with what I will call a schizophrenic experience,

which is in these two plays the only reality which Beckett posits for his audience.
The goal of this examination is not to psychoanalyze the fictional characters of
Becketts dramatic works as if they were real people on the couch of a psychiatrists
office. Samuel Beckett does not follow the conventions of realism in his work for the
theatre, and he does not present his characters as accurate or realistic recreations of
specific individuals in the normal situations of everyday life. What Beckett does do,
however, is to establish a dramatic space, wherein emblematic characters confront
certain existential insecurities in an ontologically unstable environment. My
examination, then, will focus on those textual markers in the dramatic language of
Becketts works which indicate the overarching elements of a schizophrenic
sensibility, and the purpose of my analysis is to consider the effects that Becketts
plunge into insanity may have for an audience which still sees itself as conventionally
rational.
The short television drama Dis Joe,6 translated from the English Eh Joe shortly
after its production on the BBC in 1966, is a prime example of the type of
psychological fragmentation inherent to many of Becketts characters. The twentyminute film begins with an unidentified man sitting on a bed, seen from behind. In
complete silence, he meticulously inspects and locks the only three open spaces in his
barren room: a cupboard, a window, and a door. After he has returned to the bed, the
122
camera moves in to about one meter from his face, but stops short as a disembodied
female voice suddenly breaks the silence and begins to speak: Joe... Joe(6 8 ). The
voice continues throughout the piece, pausing only for a few seconds at nine specified
moments, during which the camera moves increasingly closer to Joes face, so that in
the final segment only a fragment of the characters face, from his brow to his lower
lip, is visible.
The presentation of the protagonist as mad, that is, fragmented, unstable, and
unembodied, is straightforward in this piece; in brief, this is the story of a lecherous
man who is haunted by guilt for his past betrayals. This guilt takes the form of the
relentlessly sarcastic voice of a former lover which he cannot control; yet the voice
seems to emanate from his own mind. Although many critics have dismissed this
particular piece as melodramatic and obvious, it offers keen insight into a process of
self-disintegration remarkably similar to the descriptions of the schizophrenic
sensibility laid out in the psychiatric case studies of Laing and Searles. The silent
protagonist of Dis Joe, who sits motionless on the edge of his bed for the entire
duration of the monologue, is in the midst of an intense psychological battle between
conflicting fragments of his self, a battle which gives no sign of reconciliation.
In the third segment of the monologue, the voice mockingly highlights Joes
apparent sense o f solitude and isolation, his feeling that there is no one to love or to
pity him, and that he is forced to listen to his own thoughts:
6 Samuel Beckett, Film, He Joe in drei Sprachen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968). All citations are
123
Un vivant quelque part pour taimer aujourdhui?... Un vivant quelque

part pour te plaindre?... Dis Joe... Cette pisseuse qui vient le samedi,
c est payant, non?... Tant la saillie... a ne doit pas te ruiner... Attention
de ne pas te trouver a court... Jamais pense a $a?... Dis Joe... Si tu etais a
court de nous... Plus ame morte qui vive a eteindre... Plus qua croupir sur
ton lit dans ta vieille douillette puante a tecouter toi-meme. (69)
This passage reveals the crux of the conflictive nature of Joes psyche. His
consciousness is split into various inner voices, living dead souls, that torment him
in his solitude. Here the voice lumps these voices together with the personal pronoun
nous, thereby establishing a contrary binary relationship between toi (Joe) and nous
(the inner voices). The text thus presents a psychological conflict between the
character we see on the screen and the inner voices of his mind. Joe is alone on one
side of the battle, facing a dis-unified barrage of antagonistic voices from the other.
The voice specifically identifies two of these other voices as belonging to Joes father
and mother, voices which he has apparently succeeded in snuffing out: Dm serre-kiki
mental comme tu disais... Une de tes plus heureuses formules... Sans quoi il serait
encore a t'agonir'\69). However, since the current female voice remains, the text
seems to indicate that with each voice which Joe manages to silence, there are other
voices which crop up in its place. Despite the fact that Joe has come up with a certain
formula for suppressing the voices in an effort to regain a position of control and a
sense of mental peace, his efforts appear ineffectual. The current voice chides Joe for
from this edition: page numbers are indicated in parentheses.
124
his persistence in attempting to overcome the voices that taunt him, implying that he
will have nothing to live for once he is alone listening only to himself.
The paradox of this statement is evident, because what does the spectator see
already, if not the solitary Joe, alone in his grimy robe, listening to himself I
According to the speaking voice, the voices take hold behind his eyes, where they
continue to torment him for years. They exist within his own mind, and yet they
appear to attain such a level of individual autonomy that Joe loses his sense of self
integrity, so much so that he tries desperately to kill each one. In this respect, the
various voices, o f which we only hear one in the course of the play, emerge as
separate individual characters that antagonize the silent Joe for an extended period of
time until he finally succeeds in snuffing them out. As is evidenced by the dominance
o f the speaking voice in the text, however, Joe remains for some time in a subordinate
position to an autonomous voice that dominates him. Furthermore, these voices are
those of the dead, and certainly, any attempt to kill that which is already dead, tuer
tes morts Jans ta tete'X69), would be a futile or at least a paradoxical mission.
The power of the voice to exist as a separate and autonomous character is
evident from the very opening of the play. First, the voice is that of a woman, clear,
precise, and strictly regulated: vo/jc, de femme, basse, nette, lointaine, peu de
couleur, debit un peu plus lent que le debit normal et strictement maintenu'\6S). As
soon as the voice calls his name, Joe opens his eyes, and begins to listen. Throughout
the rest of the monologue, Joes expression is that of pleine ecoute'X 6 8 ). The fact
that this is not a mans voice, and the fact that it remains distant and that Joe is
straining himself to listen to it, clearly indicate its position of otherness with respect to
the aging male character we see on the screen. Moreover, the voice remains
antagonistic, constantly taunting him for decisions he made in the past. This is a
strong voice belonging to a woman who was able to survive Joes betrayal and move
on with her life, finding someone else, more attractive, more loyal, and more sane
than Joe:
Oui, on ten a donne... De cette saloperie... Dieu sait pourquoi...
Meme m oi... Mais moi j ai trouve mieux... Tu las su j espere...
Superieur sous tous les rapports... Plus tendre... Plus fort... Plus fin...
Plus beau... Moins sale... Loyal... Fiddle... Sain desprit... Oui,
moi je m en suis sortie...(71)
By painting a picture of her new lover as more tender, stronger, finer, and more
attractive than Joe, the voice antithetically characterizes Joe as cold-hearted, weak,
crude, ugly, and dirty. She goes on to describe her new lover as loyal and sane,
thereby qualifying Joe as disloyal, unfaithful, and, finally, as insane.
What is more, this voice is capable of recounting the details of an incident of
which Joe has no first-hand knowledge, the suicide of another woman whom the voice
characterizes simply as la verte. The ninth segment of the monologue begins with a
string of questions that imply Joes ignorance of the event:
Jamais su ce qui sest passe?... Elle n a rien dit?...L annonce sans plus...
Innocente envolee avant lheure... Vierge-saints-priez-ame-repos...
Tu veux que je te raconte? ...(71)
126
The voice then begins a relentless foray into the precise details of the young womans
death. It touches not only the inner reaches of Joes tormented mind, but also that of
the young woman who was brought to despair after Joe had promised to commit
himself to her, a ticket for the next mornings flight already stashed in his pocket. The
voice elaborates her narrative by drawing distinct parallels between the young victim,
conquered by Joe, and herself, who was able to survive Joes betrayal. She describes
how Joe had helped the young woman into her coat, just as he had done with the
voice, repeatedly mouthing his promise of love, bonheur demain." Finally, she
recounts how the young woman, after several failed attempts at suicide, eventually
collapsed unconscious on the shore, waiting for the tide to come in to drown her.
As the voice begins to fade out in the last segment of the monologue, she
persists in evoking and re-evoking this final image of the womans death:
Voila 1histoire... Tu laseu e... Le plus clair... Maintenant imagine...
Imagine... Le visage dans les pierres... Les levres sur une pierre...
Une pierre... Joe a bord... La greve dans lom bre... Joe Jo e...
Aucun son... Pour les pierres... Les pierres... Dis-le, Joe, personne ne
tecoute... Dis Joe, ?a desserre les levres... Les levres... Imagine les
m ains... Imagine... Le solitaire... Contre une pierre... Une pierre...
Imagine les yeux... Les yeux...{l'i)
Like the extreme visual close-up of Joes face during this final section of the text, the
voice creates a figurative close-up of the young woman who drowned herself. In
these final moments of the film, Beckett conflates at least three distinct and individual
characters: the voice, the young woman, and Joe himself. As we have seen, the coat
and the repeated promise of bonheur demain already establish a link between the
127
current voice and the young victim. Also, the story which the voice is telling is not
her own. She essentially adopts the voice of la verte, exposing the most intimate
details of a suicide that was in fact witnessed by no one. In this manner, the voice is
simultaneously two characters, both women who have been rejected by Joe. Now the
sarcastic tone of the current voice taunts Joe in order to avenge, through his own sense
of guilt, two separate yet distinctly similar incidents of his treachery.
The female voice of Dis Joe is a voice o f strength and of chiding sarcasm, yet
we cannot forget that, by its own admission, this voice belongs to Joe himself.
Nobody was there to record the last moments o f the young womans suicide, so we
must assume that the narrative is in fact a product of Joes own imagination, springing
from his own feelings of remorse and loneliness, as Rosette Lamont suggests in her
article entitled Lending an Ear to the Anima:
The voice he hears is an echo of his own probing of his past. Memory
stirs imagination, which, although dead, continues to imagine, the ironic,
shrewish tone of a self-assured woman suggests one who knows Joe as
well as he knows himself [...] it is possible, even likely, that this story issues
from the protagonists vivid sense of remorse, a reliving of events reported
to him but obviously unwitnessed by any living being . 7
Since the suicide happened without witnesses, the details of the event necessarily
spring forth from the speakers own imagination. The voice effectively re-creates the
state of mind of la verte, and embraces la verte's inner thoughts as if the two of them
were conflated into one and the same person. This is a dead voice from his past,
128
creeping forth from behind his eyes to taunt him in the solitary moments before he
goes to sleep. At the same time, we know from the stage indications prior to the
monologue that the voice seems to possess a definite autonomous presence for Joe:
II se leve, va a la fenetre, louvre, regarde dehors, ferme la fenetre, tire le
rideau, simmobilise, pose tendue. [II] va de la fenetre a la porte, louvre,
regarde dehors, ferme la porte a clef, met la clef dans sa poche, tire la
tenture devant la porte, simmobilise, pose tendue. [II] va de la porte au
placard, louvre, regarde dedans, ferme le placard a clef, met la clef dans sa
poche, simmobilise, pose tendue. [U] va du placard au lit, se met a quatre
pattes, regarde sous le lit, se releve, sassied sur le lit a la meme place
quau debut, commence a se detendre. (67)
From this initial stage direction, it appears that Joe is not in control of those voices in
his head. He feels threatened by them, as if they had a concrete presence, and not
until he has made absolutely sure that there is no other person lurking outside the
window or under his bed can he begin to relax. His moment of respite is fleeting,
however, and quickly we realize that he can never isolate himself from these voices
that speak to him from inside his own mind. The paradox in this text, then, is that
although Joe appears troubled by the voices, they are in fact products of his own
mental creation. It is Joe himself who recreates the final moments of the unwitnessed
suicide, through the voice of another abandoned lover, in order to torment himself.
He is at the same time the subject-creator and the object-victim of his own internal
dialogue. Joe has simultaneously lost his voice and taken possession of it by
mediating it through the disembodied fragment of his own memory. Indeed this
7 Rosette Lamont, Becketts Eh Joe: Lending an Ear to the Anima, Women in Beckett, ed. Linda
129
recalls the nature of the schizophrenic ontology described by Laing and Searles,
whereby the subject suffers from the sense that his own voice has been stolen, and
that he must constantly renegotiate his own positioning with other voices that are
trapped within his own psyche.
The schizophrenic nature of the voice become particularly apparent in the final
moments of the text. As the voice begins to fade, she mockingly urges Joe to utter his
name himself: Dis 'Joe '," and to "imagine," as if she were relinquishing her own
power of speech and the re-creation of the story to the silent Joe. She ostensibly asks
Joe to continue the story himself. What is so remarkable about this apparently
simple phrase, "Dis Jo e, is that it further highlights the schizophrenic sensibility of
the male protagonist. He is already, in a sense, subject to his own dialogue, listening
to voices that emerge from his own mind. Yet throughout the text, these voices are
that of other individuals. Unlike the solitary characters of La Demiere Bande and
Berceuse, who listen and respond to their own voices, albeit somewhat altered as they
emerge from invisible incarnations of their younger selves, Joe creates in his own
mind voices of different people from his past. His conversation, however one-sided
it actually is, is more immediate than that of Krapp, since he is simultaneously
creating and, through the anguished expression on his face, reacting to a dialogue that
is not mediated by a tape-player. The dialogue is also more polyphonic than that of
the dying woman in Berceuse since Joes voices reflect the disembodied presence of
Ben-Zvi (Chicago: U of Illinois Press, 1990) 230.
130
other people. Not once during the film does the audience hear Joes own voice.
When the female voice urges Joe to himself say Joe, that is, to address himself by
his own name, it brings the play back to the opening moments of the text, when the
voice breaks the silence by uttering Joe. In other words, Joe has already in his mind
addressed himself by his own name, as if he were simultaneously two different
people. If one adds to this the suggestion that the voice itself is at once two women,
Joe becomes three distinct characters at the same time. The French title Dis Joe
thereby brings to the forefront an aspect of Joes schizophrenia which is not apparent
in the English title Eh Joe. The French word "dis" is not only a conversational marker
to get a persons attention, roughly equivalent to the English eh, but it is also an
imperative command, requesting the male protagonist to address himself by name, and
thus to begin a multiple-person dialogue with himself. What the French title does
specifically that the English title does not is to reinforce the idea that the voice is not a
completely separate entity, but in fact a product of Joes own creation.
As the camera moves ever closer toward Joe, its movement sporadically
interrupted by the haunting voice-over, the spectators come closer and closer to that
spot behind Joes eyes where the voices live. I use the verb live, because for Joe, it
seems, these voices do not exist simply as personal ruminations into his own past.
Rather, they exist as autonomous and powerful entities, capable not only of severely
antagonizing Joe, but also of creating visual images of events which he has not seen.
As C.G. Jung stated in a lecture attended by Beckett in 1935, the schizophrenic
131
condition is marked by various inner personalities who emancipate themselves from

conscious control to such an extent that they become visible and audible. They appear
as visions, they speak in the voices of definite people . 8 For the audience of Dis Joe,
who is permitted to hear the disembodied female voice which essentially exists only
within Joes own mind, it would be nearly impossible not to treat the voice as a
distinct character. In this sense, the voice stands out as both real and unreal. It is
both an autonomous force and a creation of Joes mind. The dramatic space created
by Beckett in this piece is not one of wholeness, or unity. Instead, it is a space of
fragmentation and disintegration, marked by a sense of disembodiment and self-loss
characteristic of the schizophrenic reality.
Dis Joe is not the only dramatic text by Beckett which examines the
psychological turmoil of an ontologically unstable subject, whereby the protagonist
appears splintered into multiple fragments of his self which seem to be not only
autonomous entities, but also in conflict with each other. Several years after Dis Joe,
Samuel Beckett began work on another short dramatic piece, Pas moi,9 which was
First produced on the Paris stage in April, 1975. This piece, which Beckett translated
into French after the successful production of the English version Not I in London in
the spring o f 1972, offers another example of how the author creates a space marked
8 C.G. Jung, T h e Tavistock Lectures Lecture III, The Symbolic Life, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977) 72. Regarding Beckett's familiarity with Jung's theories and his
attendance at the 1935 lecture, see Enoch Brater, T he / in Becketts Not /, Twentieth Century
Literature 20 (1974): 189-200.
9 Samuel Beckett, Oh les beaux jours, suivi de Pas moi (Paris: Minuit, 1974). All citations are from
this edition: page numbers are indicated in parentheses.
132
by the schizophrenic reality. Although there are many similarities between the
dramatic situations of Dis Joe and Pas moi, in the latter, the sense of existential
fragmentation and a disintegrated self are brought to an extreme, presented in a much
more abstract and non-representational manner than in Dis Joe. In Pas moi Beckett
not only reduces the scenic space to a black void, but also eliminates all conventional
visual markers of the main character Bouche by allowing the audience to see only her
disembodied mouth. Whereas the relatively cohesive text and the visual close-up of
Joes face in Dis Joe serve to localize and to link the madness to a specific individual,
the textual and performative elements of Pas moi offer the spectator few such
benchmarks. Visually and textually, Beckett has minimized in this text the
contextual frames and the points of reference which would allow the audience to
position themselves in any definitive manner with respect to the characer(s) on the
stage.
On the stage, Bouche is completely disembodied from her corporal self.
Physically she is marked almost exclusively by absence. In essence she is little more
than an animated orifice spewing out broken fragments of incomplete thoughts and
arbitrarily linked memories of disparate events. Halfway through the play, she
comments on this schizophrenic separation between her self, characterized exclusively
by her speech, and her physical body:
imaginez!... tout le corps comme en alle... rien que
la face... bouche... levres... joues... machoire...
pas une--... quoi?... langue?... oui... bouche... levres...
joues... machoire... langue...(89)
133
The stage tableau offers almost nothing to the spectators which may reassure them of
any physical integrity to Bouches identity. With the actors face blackened, and her
body raised to a level about three meters above the stage, with only a dim light
focused from below on her mouth, Bouche appears, from the audiences perspective,
as a tiny hole on one side of the stage. There are no gestures to accompany the
speech, no eye movements, no turns of the head or body, which otherwise would
allow the spectator to link the spoken text to a whole, unified, and living being.
Like the preponderant blanks in Bouches speech, the physical absence of the
actor obliges the spectator to fill in the gaps. In this sense, by forcing the observers to
personally create their own visual representation of Bouches physical identity,
Beckett positions the audience in an extremely intimate relationship with the character
and with the text. The spectators must, in a sense, conflate their own imagination
with Bouche in an effort to create an integrated physical being that will correspond to
their projected reactions to the story. However, this intimacy is simultaneously
undermined by the very fact that the physical distance between the actor and the
audience in the performance space reduces the visual presence of Bouche to an almost
imperceptible spot of light on the stage.
Throughout Bouches narrative, there is a second character, Auditeur, who
looms on a raised platform, his back to the house, between the speaker and the
audience. Auditeur therefore stands as a constant mediator between Bouche and the
spectator. Four times Auditeur appears to interrupt Bouches flood of speech by
134
mysteriously raising his hand, dans un mouvement fa it de blame et de pitie

impuissante"(95). Because Auditeur is turned away from the audience, the spectators
are further distanced from the speaker. They are positioned as third-person observers
of a scene between two unknown and unidentified characters. Like voyeurs or
eavesdroppers at a confessional booth, the spectators in the darkened house become
silent observers of a private dialogue between two persons whom they can never
firmly identify. In this manner the audience is at once invited toward and distanced
from Bouche. On one hand they are invited to complete the visual image of the
character, thereby assuming a body where there is none; and on the other hand they
are highly removed from Bouche, both by her physical distance from them, and by the
interceding presence of Auditeur.
The title of the play is a further indication of the sense of disassociation
inscribed in this text. The clearly obsessive protagonist Bouche recites her entire
monologue in the third person, referring to herself as a simple nameless elle.
Although the spectator will assume that the story which Bouche is telling is her own,
she never once specifically acknowledges herself as its subject. By completely
suppressing the first-person pronoun, she recounts the story as a third-person narrator,
as if to meticulously dispel any suspicion that elle" is in fact she, the speaker. This is
true even when she is describing the details of the subjects own solitude and the inner
workings of her mind, the intimate tone of which refute the possibility that Bouche did
not have the experience first-hand. It is as if Bouche is at once within her own mind
135
and body, and a spectator of herself, like an omniscient narrator who can retell with
utmost detail the intimate reactions of an isolated character in a story.
This textual fluctuation between distance and intimacy is constant throughout
the piece. Often the fragmentary sentences suppress the nominative subject
completely, thereby distancing the speaker even further from the already third-person
narrative, as in the opening moments of the monologue:
un jour quelle trainait dans une prairie... cherchant vaguement des
coucous... pour en faire une couronne... quelques pas puis halte...
les yeux dans le vide... puis allez encore quelques... halte et le vide
a nouveau. (82)
Yet, despite the apparent distance which the narrator maintains to the story, the
monologue retains the intimate tone of a personal experience. There are thus two
opposing registers at work in this text, one which corresponds to a personal
confessional narrative, and one which relates a removed account from a third-person
perspective. There is therefore no stable point of reference either for the main
character or for the spectator. Bouche perpetually shifts between the two lexicons of
intimacy and distance.
The story begins quite melodramatically with the pathetic story of a child
growing up without love. The opening lines read like a lamentation from a
nineteenth-century Romantic drama:
done point d am our... au moins 5 a... tel quil sabat dhabitude...
au foyer conjugal... sur lenfant sans defense... non... point
136
d am our... ni celui-la ni un autre... aucune sorte... ni alors ni

apres... histoire banale done...(82)
During these initial moments of the play, there is nothing which would indicate an
ontological distance between the speaker and the subject of the narrative. The
opening lines thereby establish a first-hand link between the speaker and the text.
Consequently, the spectators will project their reactions to the story onto the speaker,
and thus place themselves in a second-person relationship to Bouche. During the first
few seconds of the performance, therefore, Beckett sets up an intimate relationship
between the speaker, the spectator/observer, and the narrative.
However, only seconds later, the speaker suddenly incorporates the third
person pronoun elle into the monologue as well as the direct object pronoun la, just as
she begins to recount the details of a seemi tgly supernatural experience which
occurred one day at the beginning of April:
la voila dans le... le noir... et sinon exactem ent... privee de sentiment...
non... car elle entend toujours le bourdon... soi-disant... dans 1oreille. (83)
By refusing the first-person pronoun, Bouche suddenly asserts her distance from the
narrative, and the audience is obliged to reposition itself, along with the speaker, to
the perspective o f third-party observers. The spectators can no longer link their
emotional reactions to the story directly to the speaker, but rather must react to a
distant, nameless elle, subject of the narrative. The relationship between character,
observer, and text becomes suddenly distant and fragmented. As we shall see, this
137
flux between intimacy and distance between Bouche, the audience, and the story is
never stabilized during the performance. Throughout the course of Pas moi, the
spectators are obliged to reposition themselves constantly in the face of the
disintegrating identity of Bouche.
From the outset, the text betrays an extremely tenuous sense of identity on the
part o f the speaker. The first few lines of the monologue describe the initial moments
of Bouches life, a kind of primary infant memory. However, any sense of the
speakers personal attachment to the experience is absent from the text. The tone
remains rather ambivalent and the speaker appears to emphasize her sense of
detachment from the situation she is describing. In just the first seven lines of the
text, almost all words reference a lexicon of loss, or nothingness: petit bout de rien,
loin de tout, au troudit, n 'importe, fantomes, pas trace, file, ni vu ni connu. There
is no feeling that Bouche has the notion that she came into the world as a whole or
unified being. Rather she sees herself as a kind of lifeless object, a little scrap of
female nothing, coming into a world characterized as little more than a dark hole:
monde... mis au m onde... cc m onde... petit bout de rien...

avant lheure... loin de--... quoi?... femelle?... oui... petit bout
de femelle... au monde... avant lheure... loin de tout... au troudit...
dit n importe...(82)
Bom premature, or avant Vheure, it is as if she entered life as a thing not yet
finished, not yet complete, and she felt herself loin de tout," removed from any sense
of wholeness or alive-ness. She does not even possess a firm identification with her
138
own gender, as is indicated by the very first line of the monologue, where "mis au
monde indicates a masculine subject pronoun.
Not until the narrative appears to be interrupted by an invisible second party
through the implied question of the subjects identity does Bouche acknowledge,
albeit quite indifferently, that this is in fact the story of a woman, that is, a small scrap
of female: "petit bout de fem elle. Within the first few seconds of the production,
then, Bouches speech is marked by absence. Her initial introduction of herself and of
her position in the world is characterized almost exclusively by an overarching feeling
of loss of self in the hole of existence. This is a hole, "trou / troudit where even
words seem to disappear. In these opening moments of the play Bouche describes her
initiation into a world that is little more than a void which deprives her of any secure
sense of identity as well as of the power of verbal communication.
In his 1974 essay, The / in Becketts Not /, Enoch Brater, reading
psychoanalytically, suggests that what we are observing in Bouches flood of
fragmentary speech, marked by absence and a tenuous grasp on the self, can be seen as
a Jungian process of individuation. Brater points out that Beckett was keenly
interested in Jungs theories, and the pervasive sense of identity confusion in Pas rnoi,
Brater argues, can be traced to Jungs theory concerning the individuals confrontation
with her own shadow, that part of Bouches persona that makes up all her
uncontrolled desires and emotions.10 The above citation from the opening of the play,
10 Enoch Brater, The / in Becketts Not I," Twentieth Century Literature 20 (1974): 189-200.
139
as well as several subsequent moments when Bouches speech is suddenly interrupted
by the interrogative markers quoi? and qui?, indicate that Bouche is not a unified
entity operating autonomously, but that there is at least one other voice, which
remains inaudible to the spectators, continuously prompting, even correcting Bouche's
account:
bientot soixante... un jour quelle quoi?... soixante-dix?...
mere de Dieu!... bientot soixante-dix...(82)
The fact that the speaker suddenly stops short in the middle of a sentence transforms
the monologue into a dialogue, as if a second character, who has been silently
listening to Bouche from the beginning yet remains both unseen and unheard by the
audience, now interrupts Bouche to correct certain facts in the narrative. You are
soon seventy, the speaker seems to say in the above citation, not sixty. As this
invisible speaker seems to exist only in Bouches own mind, the dialogue becomes
reminiscent of a staged telephone conversation, where the visible character is obliged
to repeat what her interlocutor is saying, quoi?... soixante-dix?" for the benefit of the
audience which hears only one side of the dialogue. An even more dramatic
interruption occurs a few lines later:
le corps si engourdi... a ne pas savoir comment il se tient...
imaginez!... comment il se tient!... si debout... ou assis...
mais le cerveau--... quoi?... a genoux?... oui... si debout...
ou assis... ou h genoux... mais le cerveau--... quoi?... couchd?...
oui... si debout... ou assis... ou a genoux... ou couche...(83)
140
Here, the invisible second character appears to cut off the flow of Bouches narrative
by adding two rather insignificant details to the account, d genoux," and couche.
These interruptions in the already fragmentary flow of the monologue suggest that
Bouche is repeatedly confronted by an inner voice which she cannot control. This
voice, like a hyper-active super-ego, is constantly monitoring Bouches narrative and
obliging the speaker to pause and to auto-correct any apparent discrepancies in the
story. According to Brater, this process mirrors Jungs notion of self-realization,
when the individual is forced to come to terms with various inner personalities before
attaining a sense of wholeness or selfhood.
The point of Braters argument is that Bouche is on the verge of reaching this
final step of self-realization and must now confront and combat various incarnations
of her self. As she does this, she experiences an overwhelming sense of disintegration
and fragmentation. He writes, Mouth is an image not of wholeness, of a
reconciliation of opposites, but of fragmentation and destruction. 11 Bouche has no
control over her own voice. She cannot even acknowledge that the story she is telling
is her own, and the persistent interruptions by the voice of her superego repeatedly
serve to undermine the reliability of the account as truth. The idea that Bouche is not
entirely in control of her own narrative becomes all the more clear at the moment
when Bouche describes the sensation of when she first begins to speak. She is
" Brater 196.
141
overwhelmed by her own outburst of speech, and she feels powerless to stop the
outpouring of words from her mouth:
lav o ilaq u i ne peut arreter... imaginez!... ne peut arreter le flo t...e t le
cerveau plus quune priere... la quelque part une priere... a la bouche
pour quelle arrete... un instant de repit... rien quun instant... et pas de
reponse... comme si elle nentendait pas... la bouche... ou ne pouvait pas...
pas une seconde... comme folle... la bouche devenue folle... tout ga
ensem ble... la lutte pour saisir... attraper le fil...(89)
In this passage, Bouche describes how her own mouth seems to take on a life of its
own; as she says, her mouth has gone mad. It is as if Bouche and her mouth became
two distinct and separate beings. Bouche cannot stop the mouth, her mouth, from
suddenly bursting out into uncontrolled speech. Bouche relates how she pleads with
the mouth to stop speaking, but the mouth refuses to stop, as if it were spitefully not
listening to Bouches wishes. Like the disembodied voices in Dis Joe, the mouth
becomes an individual character not only separate from, but also antagonistic to, the
protagonist Bouche, who, like Joe, appears powerless to stop the words from coming.
The sense of identity fragmentation apparent in this short passage is quite
remarkable. First, the speaker completely omits any personal pronoun which
specifically refers to herself. The only pronoun which does so is the direct object
pronoun in la voila," which reduces the subject of the account to the position of a
passive observer. This implies a distinct separation between the speaker and the
subject of the story. The active subject pronoun elle," capable, according to the text,
of listening (entendre) and of becoming (devenir), refers not to the subject herself, but
142
to her mouth, la bouche, which appears to have disembodied itself completely from
the subject, controlling by its own accord every sound which she utters. The power of
this disembodied mouth-gone-mad is so strong in fact, that the subject cannot even
understand the steady stream of words which it is producing, a verbal output which is
later characterized as a series of voyelles tout de travers'\93). What ensues is an
internal psychological battle, une lutte pour saisir, between the subject and la bouche,
a battle not only to comprehend, but also to grasp, to take hold of, and to bring the
madness under control.
In order to better understand the schizophrenic battle which is presented in
this text, one might localize each of the different voices which appear to exist
simultaneously in and around the narrative. The attempt to identify these apparently
individual voices in Pas moi is somewhat more difficult than in Dis Joe simply
because the voice that seems to emanate from Joes mind is clearly marked as other.
It is the voice of another female actor, and Joe himself remains silent throughout the
play. On the contrary, in Pas moi, the only voice that the spectators presume to hear is
that of Bouche. However, since the speaker refuses to incorporate the first-person
pronoun into the narrative, the subject of the story, e//e is, in a sense, a distinct
character, separate from Bouche. The first character distinction in the play can thus be
drawn between the speaker Bouche and the main character of the story "elle."
The second character distinction is established within the story itself. As is
evidenced by the citation I quoted earlier, the subject of the story elle" appears to be
143
a separate character from la bouche," the mouth-gone-mad, with whom "elle"

pleads but whom she cannot prevent from speaking. A third character distinction
relates to the unheard voice which I discussed earlier, this monitor which repeatedly
interrupts the narrative in order to rectify the details of the story. The text therefore
presents four separate and distinct personalities: "elle" and "la bouche," who exist
within the story; and Bouche and the unheard monitor, which exist outside of the
story.
Because of the nature of third-person narrative, we must assume that the
various incidents described in the account- -on the meadow, in the supermarket, in the
street- have occurred in the past. According to the text, the confrontation between
elle and la bouche takes place two or three times a year, which suggests that during
the dramatic time o f the performance, the speaker is recounting elle's sensation of past
events. However, the verbs used are predominantly in the active present or in the
present participle, which indicates a present urgency in the narrative. According to the
story, and as most critical readers of Pas moi have come to accept, the subject of the
story elle is in fact mute, and when she does speak, it is la bouche which does so as a
separate entity which elle is unable to control. If this is the case, the words that the
audience hears during a performance of Pas moi are in fact an example of one of the
incidents which is described in the story itself, that is, a moment when la bouche has
begun spewing out a chain of words in the face of elle's reluctance or inability to
speak herself. When one connects the inner narrative with the outer elements of the
144
performance, then, one can link Bouche (the disembodied mouth which the audience
sees onstage) wih la kouche in the narrative. One might subsequently link elle, who
remains voiceless within the narrative, to that unheard, unseen character with whom
Bouche is interacting. This unheard, unseen character, then, can be understood to be
everything but the mouth, all the rest of that physical body which has been blacked out
for the audience.
We know from the narrative that elle possesses a physical body. She goes out
into the street, she walks in the meadow collecting flowers, she makes purchases at
the local supermarket. Yet, metaphorically, from the perspective of the outside world,
her mouth is nothing, in a sense blacked-out because she does not have the ability to
speak. When, however, the mouth-gone-mad takes over and begins to vomit out
fragments o f disconnected speech, elle feels utterly helpless. During those isolated
incidents when the mouth takes over, the metaphoric representation turns inside out,
and it is as if elle became blacked-out, and only la bouche existed, as Bouche
describes, tout le corps comme en alle... rien que la [...] bouche...(89) It is this
image which the audience witnesses in a performance of Pas moi. Elle has been
completely overshadowed by la bouche.
Certain discrepancies immediately come to mind, however, when the inner
narrative and the visuals o f the performance come together. First, if elle is linked to
the unseen, unheard body of Bouche, one must assume that elle is in fact the voice
of the interrupting monitor, in a sense, the mind or the superego behind Bouche.
145
However, the monitor, unlike elle within the narrative, does appear to possess a
certain amount o f control over the story. The monitor has the power to stop Bouche,
and to correct Bouche, a power which elle apparently does not have over la bouche.
Secondly, despite the apparent link between Bouche and la bouche of the narrative,
the story still remains in the third person, and its central character is elle, not la
bouche. Finally, if one were to assume that what the audience is witnessing is a
moment when la bouche has completely overshadowed elle, there would be, following
the blacked-out metaphor, no visible sign at all of the body of elle.
Yet in a performance of Pas moi, there is a physical body on the stage, the
silent but clearly present body of Auditeur. Like elle of the narrative, Auditeur does
not have the power of speech. Whereas Bouche is all mouth, no body, Auditeur is all
body, no mouth. In this respect, Auditeur comes to represent the body of elle which
seems to become blacked out when la bouche begins to speak. Furthermore,
Auditeurs four isolated gestures come at exactly those moments in the text when the
unheard monitor appears to interrupt Bouches narrative. One might note here as well
that according to the technical definition of the word, Auditeur is not only one who
listens, but also, as in the English Auditor, one who verifies, or monitors accounts
for their accuracy. It is possible to conclude from this that Auditeur is in fact the
physical body of elle, and holds a certain amount of control over Bouche, the
disembodied la bouche, as a monitor of the narrative. That is to say that the
apparently individual personalities on the stage and in the scrip t- Bouche, Auditeur,
146
elle, la bouche, and the voice of the monitor are not, as the narrative seems at first
to suggest, independent. They are, rather, inter-dependent.
The fact is that although the text presents several distinct personalities, they
are not isolated from one another. We have seen how in Dis Joe, although the voice
appears to be an independent force, it is actually a creation of Joes mind. Without
Joe, the voice would not exist. Similarly in Pas moi, no matter how independently
strong the mouth appears to be, it cannot exist without the body; la bouche cannot
exist without elle. This idea lies at the heart of the schizophrenic sensibility outlined
by Laing and Searles. The schizophrenic feels unembodied, fragmented into distinct
individual personalities or voices, yet the schizophrenic is nonetheless one physical
being, and all those identity fragments coexist within one consciousness. In Pas moi
Bouche, the monitor, Auditeur, la bouche, and elle are all fragments of the same
person, yet each retains a distinct separate identity in a kind of co-dependent
relationship, where no one fragment attains full autonomy.
Bouche cannot be seen and cannot see herself as a whole or unified being.
This idea underlines the fundamentally schizophrenic nature of the dramatic space
which Beckett has created in Pas moi. Enoch Brater is correct in his assertion that this
text presents a destructive crisis of identity; however, I propose that the situation of
Bouche is not simply a confrontation between the self and its Jungian shadow on the
path toward self-realization, but rather an endless dialogue between several distinct
147
fragments of one consciousness which is no closer to integration at the end of the play
than it was at the beginning.
James Acheson brings up this point in his 1981 essay Madness and
Mysticism in Becketts Not /. He expands on Braters argument, noting that
Becketts text seems to suggest, not so much a process of individuation, but rather, a
process of becoming schizophrenic. In his essay On the Nature of the Psyche Jung
asserts that an individuals move toward self-realization is often accompanied by
visions of focused luminosities in monadic form, such as a single star, the sun, the
moon, or an eye. Such visions indicate to the psychologist that the individual is
beginning to attain a unified conceptualization of the self as a single and whole
entity.12 It is true that the subject of the narrative in Pas moi does describe a vision of
the moon, which would support Braters argument that elle is eventually going to
reach a sense of individual unity:
et un rayon va et vient... va et vient... tel un rayon de lune...
a cache-cache dans les nuages.. .(83)
However, as Acheson points out, this description is far from that of a focused or
monadic light. It comes and goes sporadically, intermittently hiding and appearing
from between the clouds.13 If one is to adopt Jungs theories of self-realization, as
Brater does, the fragmentary images described in Bouches narrative are more
12 C.G. Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche, The Structure and Dynamics o f the Psyche, trans. R. F. C.
Hull (London: Routledgeand Kegan Paul, 1960) 199.
13 James Acheson, Madness and Mysticism in Becketts Not /, AUMLA May 1981: 93.
148
indicative of disintegration than of unification. Bouche is not an integrated, whole

being, but rather, an amalgam of several distinct inner personalities, speaking in the
voices of definite characters. Becketts text offers no fixed point of reference which
will establish a unified or reliable identity for the interlocutor on the stage. As a
result, the spectators are obliged to renegotiate their own position along with the
fluctuating identity dynamics presented by the text.
The perpetual shifts in identity and in positioning in Pas moi are remarkably
similar to the type of role variations common among schizophrenics in their
interactions with other persons. In describing his relationship with schizophrenic
patients, Searles observes that the positions of patient and therapist are constantly in
flux. The ego-boundaries of both persons progressively weaken to the point of utter
confusion, so that not only does the schizophrenic patient shift between contradictory
positions of intimacy and distance, the therapist likewise begins a process of
repeatedly re-inventing himself, moving from mother, to child, to lover, to enemy,
all within a single session. Searles notes that this phenomenon is particular to
interactions with schizophrenic individuals due to their sense of disembodiment and to
their fragmented relationship with language. He writes,
in this situation o f clouded communication, projection and introjection
on the part of each participant is facilitated to an extent which is seldom
if ever seen in an analysts work with a neurotic patient, for in the latter
instance the frequent and clear verbalizations, from each participant, tend
149
to keep relatively clearly in view the ego-boundaries between the two

participants. Thus there develops a generous reality basis for the symbiotic
transference which the schizophrenic patient tends powerfully, in any case,
to form with his therapist.14
Searles contends that unlike interactions with those persons who, despite even the
most acute neuroses, are able to communicate with other persons as whole, or unified,
beings, schizophrenics, who have no sense of a unified self, will consistently
reposition themselves. Consequently, the other normal participants in the
interaction will feel their own sense of a unified self compromised, and will also begin
a process of repositioning. Searles describes several moments when he has found
himself experiencing two quite different, and subjectively unrelated, feeling attitudes
toward the patient simultaneously. 15 The schizophrenics sense of a fragmented
reality is so overpowering that the therapist often becomes enmeshed in the patients
own feeling of self-loss and dedifferentiation. Such is the dramatic space in Pas moi,
where the spectators are confronted with the disembodied and fragmentary reality of
Bouche, and consequently cannot identify their own position according to any
normative logical codes. Even as they attempt to reposition themselves, they will find
that the contradictory identities which are thrown their way do not allow them any
fixed or reliable position with regards either to the text or to the character.
The spectators position is much more reliable in Dis Joe than it is in Pas moi.
First of all, Dis Joe is a film, therefore the observers gaze is controlled exclusively by
14 Searles 531.
150
the camera, which will show the audience only what the director wishes it to see.
Secondly, because of the physical presence of Joe, the spectators are not obliged to fill
in the gaps to the same extent as they are with Bouche, who is physically as well as
textually fragmented for the entire duration of Pas moi. Also, the text of Dis Joe is
much more syntactically cohesive than that of Pas moi, and the identity of the female
voice that torments Joe is more easily defined than any of the various personalities
that together make up Bouche. Nonetheless the aesthetic of madness is integral to the
production o f Dis Joe, just as it is to Pas moi. In neither of these two texts does
Beckett posit any point o f reference for a normal reality. The reality which we see
in both cases is a mad reality, a space inherent to the schizophrenic sensibility.
Traditional European theatre defines itself according to the accepted codes of
logical normalcy established by a society which collectively defines itself as sane.
This means that in most cases, the dramatic situations center around characters that
can be identified as ontologically secure, that is to say, characters who interact with
their environment and with other characters as whole, unified, and separate beings.
Joe and Bouche are not ontologically secure characters. As we have seen, Joe is not
simply Joe, but a collection of inner voices that he simultaneously creates and
combats within his own mind. Bouche is an even more dramatic example of the
disintegrated self, acting at once as author, narrator, subject, and monitor of the story
o f her life. Neither one o f these characters is complete, or to use Bakhtins term,
15 Searles 532.
R eprod u ced with p erm ission o f th e copyright ow ner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.
151
finalized. They are constantly in process, never quite reaching that point of selfrealization so integral to an individuals negotiation of a unified identity.
Both Joe and Bouche waver on the edge between two realms, where the
conventional boundaries between the real and the unreal are fluid, allowing the
one to seep into the other. It would be useful, then, to understand this mad existence,
not as the convergence of two separate ontological realms, but rather as an individual
realm of its own. Since Beckett offers no definitive markers that would allow the
spectators to comprehend with absolute certainty that now the character is
communicating with the real, now with an illusion, the entire dramatic space
becomes a perpetual dialogue between these two ontological systems. In this sense
then, Beckett presents madness as a viable existential space in its own right, a space
where the established code of differentiation between truth and illusion cannot
function because, for these characters, truth and illusion are indistinguishable.
Illusion for both Joe and Bouche, is the reality; in fact it is the only manner in which
they understand the human condition at all. In Becketts interpretation of human
existence, then, madness is a reality, and in many ways, the only feasible trope for our
understanding of ourselves.
By allowing, I may even suggest by obliging, the spectators to enter into the
schizophrenic sensibility, Samuel Beckett permits the ontologically secure person to
experience a different reality, a reality where human identity is not given or fixed,
where it is not so easy to distinguish between the many different layers of persona
152
which constitute the self. Beckett shows us that we are, in fact, enmeshed in madness;
madness exists as an integral part of our reality, no matter how much we would like to
characterize it as secure or definitively logical.
R.D. Laings series of case studies is
remarkable in this sense. In many instances schizophrenia afflicts persons quite

suddenly, and Laing often describes how a young person, who has functioned as a
perfectly reasonable and self-assured individual, wakes up one morning suddenly
incapable of a unified conceptualization of the self. One might note as well that
schizophrenia is characteristically identified as an Occidental notion; all one needs to
do is examine certain Eastern religions, where the separation of mind from body, and
a complex dialogue between various forces within the self are considered a source of
epiphany rather than a mark of mental weakness. Beckett, as a writer of madness,
allows us to experience a reality based on perpetual re-presentation, where the self is
never a finalized product, but always in the process of dialogue with itself and with
the forces that surround it.
153
CHAPTER V
Deception and Delusion:

Blurring the Distinction between Truth and Illusion
in the Dramatic Works of Jean Genet
The notion of representing madness on the stage as an ontological space where

fiction and reality are interchangeable, that is, a dramatic space where madness is
the reality, is problematic. Theatre is by its very nature a genre understood as being
defined by illusion. Conventional dramatists of realist theatre go to great lengths in
order to create dramatic illusions which will pass for reality, and critics are often
quick to point out any discrepancies in the performance that make such an illusion
un-convincing. The fact is that in all such representations there exists a pact of
confidence between the performers and the spectators that ensures the audiences
position of dominance. Despite its illusions, theatre in general does not deliberately
deceive or threaten its public. No matter how convincing the performed reality
onstage, the spectators are always aware that they are spectators of fiction. It would
be absurd to think, for example, that members of the audience at a performance of
Macbeth would storm the stage in order to prevent Duncans murder. Spectators will
always retain a certain distance from the events depicted before them, because they are
aware of the illusion, and they are therefore, as arbiters of the established codes of
representation, in a position of control.
154
There is, in fact, something inherently reassuring about a theatrical

performance that relies on realistically developed characters in accurate
representational settings. Even though the fictional characters that are represented
onstage appear lifelike and real, the audience remains in the comfortable position of
spectators at a fictional, performed event. The public can be amazed and impressed
by the meticulous detail o f costumes, props, character interpretations, and set design
that successfully create the illusion of reality, yet at the same time it will not confuse
this illusion with reality. Such is the paradox of conventional representational theatre:
the more convincing the illusion, the more comfortable the distance between the
spectators and the events happening on the stage. The spectators take pleasure in
being reassured that they are not implicated in the fiction that is being recreated before
them.
This representational paradigm essentially breaks down, however, the moment
that the fiction and the reality become so enmeshed that it becomes difficult, if
not impossible, to distinguish one from the other, that is, when the realistic begins
to seem real. The comfortable distance of the spectator can only be assured as long
as the theatrical illusion remains outside the frames of the audiences immediate
reality, for example, if the stage represents a nineteenth-century parlor, or a back-alley
in Manhattan, or a physicians laboratory. If the stage, on the other hand, represents
itself, a contemporary performance space, and if the actors represent contemporary
actors, the distance between reality and illusion suddenly collapses. Faced with a
155
performance where the conventional rules of theatrical illusion are no longer intact,
the audience is placed in a position where they must continually negotiate between
fiction and reality. In such a situation, the audience will find it considerably more
difficult to exercise its logical tendency to distinguish between truth and performance
because the performance invades the spectators immediate reality and thereby
implicates them directly into the reality of the play. The performance thus becomes
threatening, because, unlike the actors, the spectators cannot predict the course of the
performance. As a result, the actors appear to seize the position of control, and the
spectators are less able to effectively distance themselves and their own reality from
the theatrical illusion.
Jean Genet has long been hailed as the champion of this type of theatre o f
deception. In particular, his 1958 work Les Negres1pushes the limits of the
spectators perception, leading them down a series of false paths, where they are
obliged repeatedly to re-evaluate their trust in the performance. What is so
disconcerting about Les Negres is that Genet repeatedly undermines the structural
elements of the spectators willing suspension of disbelief. Whereas conventional
Western drama relies on a distinct separation between reality and fiction, where the
audience remains at a safe distance from the events enacted before them, the textual
and performative elements of Les Negres continually blur the lines between fiction
and actuality. The spectators are constantly placed in a position where they are
1Jean Genet, Les Negres (Paris: L'Arbalete, 1963).
156
obliged to question the integrity of the performance which they are witnessing. As a
result, rather than providing the public with the comforting reassurance that they are
merely observers of a fictional performance, a production of Les Negres breaks down
the security which is ensured by the spectators willing suspension of disbelief. The
pact of confidence between performers and audience, which is such an essential
aspect of conventional theatre, begins to break down. The play becomes threatening,
and the actors shift from being simply players on a stage to potentially dangerous
adversaries.
In this manner, Genet creates in his dramatic work a theatre of madness where
it becomes difficult to distinguish between truth and illusion. Rather than
instituting a comforting distance between the spectators and the fiction, the
performance invades the audiences immediate reality and implicates them in a
threatening game of role-playing and theatrical trickery - - threatening because the text
repeatedly undermines the spectators ability to identify, and thereby distance
themselves from, the deceptions. Genets madness is similar to, but not the same as
that established by Beckett in his works. Both dramatists create in their theatrical
texts a dramatic reality which blurs the line between that which is and that which
seems. However, with Beckett, the madness resides within the characters themselves.
The protagonists of Dis Joe and Pas moi are solitary individuals, and, although the
audience is invited to step into the schizophrenic reality of their troubled minds, the
two characters are not overtly aware that they are being watched. Joe and Bouche are
157
mad; they exist within the realm of madness, they do not perform it. Genet, on the
other hand, centers his madness in the dynamic between the performers and the
audience. The characters of Les Negres are aware of the spectators in the house, and
they deliberately conspire, through various theatrical ruses, to undermine the
audiences understanding of reality.
Before delving directly into the structural intricacies of Les Negres, it may be
helpful to examine the fiction-reality paradigm which Genet sets up in Les Bonnes,2
which was produced nearly a decade before Les Negres opened on the Paris stage in
1959. Although Les Bonnes does not specifically treat actors or the crafts of the
theatre overtly, as does Les Negres, it establishes a similar system of performative
layers, or mise-en-abyme, which deliberately blurs any clear distinctions between
truth and fiction for the spectators. From the opening of this play, the audience is
led to believe in an illusion within an illusion, a trademark convention of Genets
theatre and one which ultimately obliges the spectators to question constantly their
usual assumptions regarding the dichotomy between that which seems and that
which is.
In Genets opening comments, Comment jouer les Bonnes, the author gives
particular attention to the surreptitious nature of the performance, whereby he places
the actors in an antagonistic, rather than an allied position vis-a-vis the audience. The
very first word of his suggested mise en scene, is, in fact, f u r t i f \ l ), and he goes on
158
to describe how the spectators should never quite know what to expect from the game
which is being played out before them: // faut a la fois y croire et refuser d y croire,
mais afin qu 'on y puisse croire il faut que les actrices ne jouent pas selon un mode
realiste"{9). In other words, he insists that even the passages which he describes as
sincere are not to be performed realistically, so that the public is tempted to
question even those moments in the play which are not openly performative. Even
the realism within this play, then, is meant to appear illusive. Genets emphasis on
the non-realistic manner in which the actors are to portray their roles stands in direct
contrast to his insistence that the set be created according to the strictest rules or
realism: the bed and the profusion of flowers in the room, he writes, must be real
(11). The audience is thus confronted by a paradoxical juxtaposition between the
hyper-realism of the setting and the exaggerated theatricality of the actors
interpretation, which Genet describes as un peu titubant'f 11). Somewhat
vacillating is a term which can be applied to the underlying motivation behind the
entire play as the spectators, faced with a performance that undermines their basic
understanding of the logical distinction between reality and illusion, are repeatedly
obliged to shift their position.
During the initial moments of the first scene between characters Claire and
Solange, there is no reason why an audience seeing this play for the first time should
not accept the womens performed identities as the dramatic reality. Although
2 The version cited in this chapter is: Jean Genet, Les Bonnes (Paris: LArbalete, 1976). Page numbers
159
Claire-Madames tone and gestures are particularly melodramatic, or as Genet

suggests, d'un tragique exa sp ere\ 15), the conventions of theatre as a genre dictate
that the observers should understand the initial illusion presented to them as the
fundamental truth of the drama. If the characters later disguise themselves or
misrepresent their identity, the audience assumes the knowledge of their original
imagos, and any identity-deception which later ensues is actually a deviance from
their real identity established in the opening scenes of the performance. Genet,
however, reverses this notion by having the two characters disguised at the very
beginning of the production, thereby tricking the audience into accepting a
misrepresentation of the characters identities as dramatic truth. For several
minutes during the opening of Les Bonnes, the spectators follow the rising hostility
between two actors, one of whom they have accepted in the role of an insubordinate
servant, as she eventually dominates and begins to strangle the other, whom they have
accepted in the role of the ruthlessly caustic mistress. No doubt the audience
experiences a certain level of frustration the moment that the kitchen alarm suddenly
interrupts this climactic moment, and reveals to the spectators that the Fiction which
they have been guided to accept as the base reality of the drama is nothing more
than a deliberately deceptive ruse. From this moment on, the spectators will retain at
least a hint of skepticism concerning the character identities that are presented to them
are indicated in parentheses.
160
as the play moves on. Genet thereby instructs the audience to question that which
appears to be reality in the scenes which follow.

In his analysis of Les Bonnes in Saint Genet: comedien et martyr Jean-Paul
Sartre treats specifically this question of appearance versus being in this play, which
he describes as le plus extraordinaire exemple de ces tourniquets d'etre et
d'apparence, d imaginaire et de realite."7, Sartre asserts that it is this text more than
any other by Genet which exemplifies all the artificiality, the falseness, and the
trickery which make up what he calls the lies of the theatre.4 It is interesting that
Sartre should choose the word mensonge to describe Genets dramatic work, as he
thereby highlights an antagonistic relationship between the audience and the
performance, and therefore reinforces the notion that Genet breaks the code of
confidence between spectators and actors. Sartre begins his essay by pointing out
Genets initial suggestion that the two maids be played by male adolescents. One can
assume that Genet did not intend that such a performance in drag should be so
convincing that the audience would not see through the deception, but rather that he
wished the spectators, not immediately perhaps, but through occasional glimpses of a
muscular arm or a brutal gesture, to realize ultimately that the two women onstage
are in fact young men. On a primary level of the performance, then, Genet toys with
the publics conceptions of reality, as Sartre writes, De cette pate feminine, Genet
3 Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: comedien et martyr in Oeuvres completes de Jean Genet, I (Paris:
Gallimard, 1952)675.
4 Sartre 675.
161
veutfaire une apparence et le resultat d une comedie. Ce n 'est pas Solange qui doit
etre une illusion de theatre, c'est la femme Solange.5 This is a play about illusions,
one may even say delusions, as the characters and the audience along with them,
become caught up in a cyclical ritual of lies and disguises. Yet each time the delusion
begins to overtake the reality, the moment the performance becomes the only
representative reality, Genet inserts a visible sign, such as the kitchen alarm, that
will jolt the spectators into realizing that they are always only on the edge between
"truth and fiction, so that their perception of that which is presented to them on the
stage will continue to vacillate from one to the other.
Aside from the transvestitism of the actors, an innovation which Genet
relinquished in Jouvets 1947 production, there are a number of signs throughout the
text which signal to the spectators the deceptive nature of the illusion being played out
before them. Throughout the entire first scene, for example, as the false Madame is
exchanging bitter words with the false Claire, the real Claires uniform is draped
over one of the bedroom chairs. Since Genet makes specific mention of this detail in
the opening stage directions, he clearly intended that the audience should notice it.
However, as I proposed earlier, the audience has no definitive reason, until the alarm
clock sounds, for not accepting the false Madame as the real one. The apparently
superfluous uniform in the comer seems to be an illogical peculiarity that can only
5 Sartre 676.
162
serve to perplex the audience. Another source of confusion is the following puzzling
exchange between the mistress and her maid:

SOLANGE, elle cherche dans I armoire, ecartant quelques robes.
La robe rouge. Madame mettra la robe rouge.

CLAIRE: J ai dit la blanche, a paillettes.
s o l a n g e , dure. Madame portera ce soir la robe rouge de velours ecarlate.
CLAIRE, naivement. Ah? Pourquoi?
SOLANGE, froidement. U mest impossible d oublier la poitrine de
Madame sous le drape de velours. Quand Madame soupire
et parle a Monsieur de mon devouement! Une toilette noire
servirait mieux votre veuvage. (19)
Any spectator in the house would certainly find it bizarre that a maid should so
forcefully contradict her employers choice of attire. As any spectator already familiar
with this text will understand, Genets suggestion that Claire respond to Solanges
request naively indicates that, in that instant, Claire is speaking as Claire, not as
Madame, whose tone of voice has been consistently harsh and cold. That is, Claire
wishes to know why her sister prefers the red velvet to the white sequins for that
evenings ritual. For the unwitting audience however, the suddenly innocent tone of
Madames question will register rather as an illogical shift in the master-servant
dichotomy, thereby further destabilizing the reality of the performance.
Just moments later, Claire addresses Solange by her real name: Parfait.
Menace-moi. Insulte ta maitresse. Solange, tu veux parler, n 'est-ce pas, des
malheurs de Monsieur. Sotte. Ce n 'est pas le moment de le rappeler, mais de cette
indication je vais tirer un parti magnifique'\20). Again, this line, where Claire gives
specific instructions regarding the order of events for the game she is playing with
163
Solange, jumps out as a signal to the spectators that they should not necessarily trust
the images which are presented to them. Similar moments that serve as ruptures in the
reality of the maids performance are Claires contradictory comment at the
beginning of the play, "surtout ne te presse pas, nous avons le temps [... ] Prepare:,
nut robe. Vite le temps presse'X 16), and later, Claires indication that her dress is too
large, Si la robe est trop longue, fa is un ourlet avec des epingles de nourrice'X25).
For those persons who have Genets text in front of them, where the false Madame"
and the false Claire are clearly identified by their real names, and for those persons
watching a performance of Les Bonnes who are already familiar with the piece, these
moments of rupture in the maids ritual may stand out as obvious indications of the
reality within the fiction. However, for those spectators who are seeing a
production of this play for the first time, it is not until Claire assumes her maids
costume that they can identify the characters in their real roles, and even so, this
reality is never assured. I venture to say that theatrical convention is so strong that
even a non-naive spectator would participate in the confusion and be taken in by the
deception.
One reason that it is so difficult for the spectator to discern the reality from
the illusion, despite the intermittent signs which I have mentioned above, is that the
characters, in essence, become that which they appear. The moment that Claire dons
Madames dress, she becomes Madame within the context of the maids ritual.
Conversely, when Claire reassumes her uniform, she becomes a maid, suddenly on an
164
equal footing with her sister Solange. The fact that the two maids bear identical
costumes, however, further confuses the identity paradigm. When both maids appear
onstage in their uniforms, the spectator is faced with the task of distinguishing
between the two characters. Genet deliberately makes this task a difficult one by
repeatedly blurring the lines between Claires and Solanges individual personas.
Throughout the play, the two maids identities are embedded into each other to
such an extent that Claire and Solange are often indistinguishable. It is important to
point out, for example, that Solange does not don Claires uniform when she is
portraying Claire in the ritual. Their costumes, and therefore their imagos, are
identical. Also, the audiences initial introduction to Solange was as Claire, so that
in any subsequent scenes, where Solange has undergone no costume change that
would definitively identify her as other than Claire, the spectators will continue to
confuse one maid with the other. Claire herself brings this up when she says,
Madame a soigne Claire ou Solange, car Madame nous confondait toujours"(Sl).
The Claire-Solange identity confusion is further reinforced by Madames own
grammatical slips, often intermingling the singular and plural form of the secondperson pronoun. At one moment she orders Solange, Une voiture. Solange, vite,
vite, une voiture. Mais depechez-toC\%2). Also, when she gives her red velvet dress
to Claire, she says, Tiens! Je vous la donne. Je t'en fa is cadeau, C la ire '\ll).
Individually, Claire and Solange are simultaneously tu and vous. In the eyes of
Madame, and most likely as well of many of the spectators, the two maids, who as
165
sisters are physically similar, independent of their identical costumes, are

interchangeable. When Solange eventually gains the courage to follow through with
the ritual murder, she exclaims, Maintenant nous sommes mademoiselle Solange
Lemercier. La femme Lemercier. La Lemercier. La fameuse criminelle"( 109), and
Claire solemnly responds, Solange, tu me garderas en toi"( 110). Even after Claire is
dead, she will remain a vital part of her sisters identity. Solange is thus both Solange
and Claire, just as Claire is simultaneously Claire and Solange. The two
characters become enmeshed as one being, at once criminal and victim, fragmented
reflections of one within the other.
In his 1968 work The Vision o f Jean Genet, Richard N. Coe, one of the
foremost scholars of Genet, bases his argument on the idea that appearance and
reflection play a fundamental role in Genets work, stating that the characters that
make up Genets oeuvre exist in an inseparable relationship with their own reflection.6
In this sense, they do not emerge as single, unified individuals, but rather, as we have
seen with Becketts characters, as multiple identity-fragments which together make up
the whole being. Pushing this idea further, Coe suggests that in many instances in
Genets work, appearance becomes somehow more real than reality. He writes, the
mask is more real than the face; to pretend to act or to act as a pretense, is more
essential than sincerity in a word, all reality is theatre.7 Genet seems to suggest in
6 Richard N. Coe, The Vision o f Jean Genet: A Study o f his Poems, Plays, and Novels (New York:
Grove Press, 1968).
7 Coe 19.
166
his work for the stage that what one may accept as ones reality in life cannot
necessarily be trusted as truth, because we are constantly surrounded by illusion.
Genets theatre can thus be understood as a theatre of madness, where the only
representative reality is one based on delusions and misrepresentation.
In Les Bonnes, for example, Madames gowns and make-up, that is, the mask
of Madame, are a vital part of the maids ritual. Claire and Solange take turns
dressing themselves up in Madames clothing, thereby assuming her appearance in
order to create a new reality for themselves. By choosing Madames most extravagant
gowns and jewels, they become, in effect, the archetype Madame, an elaborate
effigy against whom they can build up and project all the pent-up anger and violence
which they are obliged to repress in their daily interactions with their employer. Coe
writes, In gesture, the world of mysticism and ritual merges with the world of
existentialism and dialectic, continuity with discontinuity, and the individual with the
archetype.8 Through performance, then, the ritual simulacrum becomes the maids
immediate reality. Without embodying the physical appearance of Madame, the
maids cannot real-ize, or fulfill, their illusion, and this illusion this performed ritual
of violence is the only reality in which Claire and Solange are able to bring their
game successfully to its murderous conclusion: Madame refuses to drink the poisoned
tea, but Madame does not.9
8 Coe 43.
9 For a further discussion of the appearance-being paradigm in Genets work, see H.E. Stewart. You
are what you Wear," Francofonia 10 (Spring, 1986): 31-40.
167
This insistence on the physical presence of Madame within the ritual

becomes particularly important at the end of the play, when Claire once again
costumes herself as Madame in order to bring the ritual to its final climax. Since
this final performance is meant to be a continuation of the ritual which the maids
have begun in the opening scene, it would be logical, it seems, for Claire to choose the
red velvet gown which she has worn earlier. However, she does not, but costumes
herself instead in the white sequins. The reason behind this switch may be the fact
that Madame, during her interruption of the maids game, has given the red velvet
gown to Claire:
MADAME: C est fini. (Elle caresse la robe de velours rouge.) Ma belle
Fascination. La plus belle. Pauvre belle. C est Lanvin qui favait

dessinee pour moi. Specialement. Tiens! Je vous la donne. Je fe n
fais cadeau, Claire. (77)
The red velvet dress can only serve as a successful tool for the ritual transformation of
Claire into Madame as long as it actually belongs to Madame. In fact, as the dress
was individually created for Madame by the designer himself "specialement, it would
be an ideal effigy of Madame, since no one else has a gown like it. However, since, at
the end of the play, this dress is no longer Madames but Claires, Claire must choose
a different costume in order to create the ritual Madame. When Madame laments
168
her rupture with Monsieur with the words, C'est fini, she inadvertently points out
that the red velvet gown as well is finished as a ritual costum e.10
Through appearance, the archetype Madame effectively replaces the real
Madame with a feasible ceremonial copy in the maids game. The copy is in fact
more reliable than the original simply because it is the maids creation and will
therefore play along with the rules of the ritual. Yet Madame is not the only
archetype necessary for the ritual to succeed, for Madame cannot function without
the equally requisite archetype maid. Since the ritual is an invention created by
Claire and Solange, the archetype of the ceremonial maid works on a somewhat
different level from the Madame archetype. Since the ritual becomes a space
wherein Claire and Solange can express their hidden hatred for their mistress; it is, as
Coe suggests, a space which is more real for the maids than the day-to-day reality
wherein they are obliged to play the roles of devoted servants. Only in Madame's
absence, or when Madame is replaced by the ritual Madame are the two maids free
to act openly on their real hatred. Once the archetype Madame has been
constructed, the performed ritual invades and occupies the maids daily reality, and
only through this ritual are they able to successfully purge their violence.
111The red velvet gown can. however, become a feasible tool for performing Claire in the ritual, since
the dress now belongs to Claire. I point out Solanges extended monologue at the end of the play, when
she, as Claire is about to murder Madame. She evokes the following metaphor, Je porte la toilette
rouge des criminelles (106). Although there are no stage directions that indicate that she is in fact
wearing the red gown, she could, following the conventions of the maids ritual construction of
Madame, effectively become Claire by wearing the costume which now belongs to Claire. In such
a mise-en-scine the identity dynamics would be even further embroiled, as both maids would then be
wearing costumes originally designed for Madame in their ritual murder of Madame."
169
I have thus shown that, for the ritual to function, it must rely on elements from
the maids day-to-day existence. This is true not only for the physical appearance of
the ritual Madame, but also for the ritual hatred which leads up to the violence at
the end of the play. Genets text shows us that the hatred exhibited between Claire
and Madame is directly linked to a real hatred not only between the maids and
Madame, but also between Claire and Solange. Halfway through the performance,
Solange tells her sister, ye sais que je te degoute. Je te repugne. Et je le sais puisque
tu me degoutes(5&). Claire responds with the equally spiteful comment, y 'en ai
cissez de ce miroir effrayant qui me renvoie mon image comme une mauvaise odeur.
Tu es ma mauvaise odeur"(58). Claire and Solange are mirror images of each other;
and, as I have already mentioned, they are in many ways interchangeable. However, it
is a mirror image based on repugnance and hatred, not only of each other, but of
themselves. When Claire exclaims that Solange represents her own bad smell, she
is exposing a deep hatred of herself, a hatred which Claire is able to express fully
during the ritual, when she, in the guise of Madame antagonizes Solange, in the
guise of Claire. This brings us to the rhetorical question on which Sartre bases his
essay: who is it that Claire is insulting during the ritual? When Claire as Madame
tells Solange as Claire, Tenez vos mains loin des miennes, votre contact est
immonde"(25), she is, in a convoluted play of identity dynamics, expressing her own
repugnance of herself and of her own domestic position. Sartre writes,
nous sommes etourdis par un tel tourbillon d apparences que nous
ne savons pas si cest Claire qui gifle Madame, Claire qui gifle Claire,
170
Solange qui gifle Claire ou Solange qui gifle Solange (Car Solange se
hait en Claire comme Claire en Solange).11
The identity confusion which Sartre describes remains vibrant throughout the final
killing-scene between Claire and Solange. When the spectators finally leave the
theatre, they are yet haunted by the unresolved identity paradigm of the ritual murder
which has become a real murder. Did Solange kill Claire, or did Claire kill herself,
or following the play of identity reflections between the two sisters, did Claire kill
Solange, or did Solange kill a mirror image of herself? These questions do not have
definitive answers, because Genet does not, in this play, create characters who
conform to a code o f representation based in conventional logic. His characters are
simultaneously Self and Other, existing as multiple fragments within a reality outside
the established codes of normalcy. They exist within a realm of delusional madness,
where reality and illusion come together on an equal footing within a performed ritual
based on hatred and murder.
Such a ritual of hatred, murder, and ceremonial effigies underscores the textual
and performative structures of Genets later play Les Negres, a piece which explores
notions of performance and illusion in a world divided along racial lines. Genets
response to an actors request to construct a play intended for Black actors, Mais
qu 'est-ce que c'est done un noir? Et d'abord, c est de quelle couleur?( 15), already
indicates the authors preoccupation with appearance versus reality. In this simple
11 Sartre 688.
171
rhetorical question. Genet points out the arbitrariness of defining racial identity
through color. The truth of an individuals identity, he seems to suggest, cannot be
reduced to a persons outside appearance, because, as we have seen in Les Bonnes,
that which seems is rarely what is. Genet pushes the limits of the "truth versus fiction
paradigm in Les Negres. Relying on many of the same dramatic techniques that he
incorporated into Les Bonnes, Genet creates in Les Negres a text so replete with
performative levels that an exhaustive analysis of this work is far beyond the scope of
a single chapter. I will therefore limit my examination to those elements of the text
and of the performance which portray what I have called Genets theatre of madness,
the creation of a dramatic space in which reality and illusion do not exist as separate
realms, but are so intertwined that the spectator, like the archetypal madman in the
asylum, loses his power to distinguish between truth and fiction. Rather than being
reassured of a position of dominance within a world defined along conventional
systems of logic, the spectators of Genets Les Negres are confronted by a
performance which both confuses their intellect and threatens their very sense of
identity.
The textual and visual elements which make up Les Negres are much more
reminiscent of the conventions of improvisational theatre than scripted drama.
Unlike the settings for Le Balcon and Les Bonnes, for example, where the author calls
for realistic stage accessories, the performance space of Les Negres is little more than
a multi-leveled playing area, with raised platforms and black drapes. The absence of a
172
representational backdrop or scenery heightens the effect of a performance built on

creating theatrical illusions, where the actors must create their settings through the
power of suggestion, rather than through ready-made sets and realistic props.
Improvisational theatre is by its unstable, non-fixed nature a more "threatening
dramatic genre than scripted theatre, as the performers do not know in advance the
outcome of the scenes which they are asked to play, and the audience cannot find the
comfort which is provided by established plot-lines with a beginning, middle, and end.
Consequently, the structure of an improvisational performance is cacophonous,
characterized by repeated interruptions in the story-line, sudden changes in the theme
and tone of the scenes, and often an arbitrary and brusque ending to provide closure to
what would otherwise be an unending self-propelled performance. All these structural
elements are fundamental to the text of Les Negres, indicating that Genet wished to
inoculate this piece with the sense of unpredictability and danger inherent to
improvisational theatre.12
A particularly striking example of this improvisational tone embedded in the
plays text emerges during the retelling and re-enactment of the murder of the white
woman, which is ostensibly the most crucial moment of the performance and the
central ritual which would appear to give the play its structure. In his initial account
of the crime, the character Village describes the woman as a drunk beggar who was so
12 The version of Les Negres cited in this paper is: Jean Genet, Les Negres (Paris: LArbalete, 1963).
Page numbers are indicated in parentheses.
173
inebriated that she barely opened her eyes before Village and his accomplice
overcame and strangled her:
Monsieur Herode Aventure et moi, juste apres le diner, nous sommes
passes sur les quais. II faisait assez doux. Un peu avant lentree du port,
il y avait une vieille clochexde accroupie ou allongee sur un tas de
guenilles [...] Je lai etranglee avec mes deux mains pendant que monsieur
Herode Aventure emprisonnait les siennes. Elle sest un peu raidie...
enfin elle a eu ce quils appellent un spasme, et cest tout. Un peu degoute
a cause de la gueule de la vieille, d une odeur de vin et durine, a cause de la
crasse, monsieur Herode Aventure a failli degueuler. (34)
Just moments later, however, when Village continues his narration, the story changes,
and the odor which so disgusted Aventure in the original version is transferred to the
odor of the Blacks, which repelled the white woman, and thus motivated the Blacks to
kill her: Je vous dirai seulement que cette fem m e etait blanche et qu 'elle prenait
pretexte de not re odeur pour me fuir. Me fuir, car elle n 'osait me chasser{31).
Again and again the story is interrupted, with the character Neige insinuating that
Village was actually in love with the white woman, a story-line which seems to be
taken up a short time later between Village and the character Vertu, with Vertu
performing the role of the murdered woman. Through this process of interruptions
and revisions, the facts surrounding the ritual murder, which appears to be the central
focus o f the play, come across as structurally confusing, fragmented, and unreliable.
The confusion around the murder and around the identity of the victim grows
all the more poignant as the actors begin to set the stage for the long-awaited ritual
ceremony of the murder. When Village places the character playing the white woman
behind the counter of the bar, Neige interrupts him, insisting that he had originally set
her behind her sewing machine. However, nowhere in the text previously has Village
even mentioned a sewing-machine. There seems to be no other motivation to insert
such an arbitrary interruption in Villages account of the murder, than simply to
perplex the audience, who are then left asking themselves whether or not Village had
in fact described the white woman at her sewing machine. The recreation of the ritual
story proceeds thus, constantly interrupted by various voices both from the Court, a
group of black actors wearing white masks emblematic of various figures of authority
in the colonial system, and from the other characters, here most closely identified as
actors in the ritual, who wish to clarify or to transform the account.
As Village continues to weave the story of the murdered white woman, key
elements of the narrative change or drop out completely, as if it were spontaneously
being created and recreated on the spot, like an improvisational acting exercise subject
to all the whims and outbursts of its participants. The resulting effect is that the
audience is left utterly confused. Was Village alone, or did he have an accomplice?
Was the murdered woman a bar-maid or a drunkard? Was Village in love with her or
did he not know her at all? The continually morphing narrative frustrates the
spectators on two levels, the first stemming from the inconsistencies and ruptures
which actually exist in Genets text, and the second arising from their own self-doubt
as to whether or not they may have missed something in previous dialogues. One
thing which is certain about Genets text is that it is structured in such a way as to
make it nearly impossible to follow the story logically. Deprived of the comforting
175
possibility of discerning the text from the subtext, the truth from the fiction, the
spectators are left in a position where they are no longer reassured by the performance,
but befuddled by it, and at the base of this confusion lies the disconcerting palimpsest
between theatricality and reality, which creates among the spectators a nagging
sensation that they are somehow the butt of the characters, perhaps even the actors
joke.
From the very opening of Les Negres, the performers go to extreme measures
to heighten the theatricality of their appearance and gestures, thereby undermining the
believable dramatic illusion of their performance. By insisting in initial stage
directions that the curtains be pulled, not raised, Genet highlights the familiar tone of
the performance. Draw-pull curtains are generally the domain of very small, even
amateur theatres, where the dramatic illusion is based much more on the craft of the
actors than on immense realistic sets and accessories. By stipulating a pulled curtain,
therefore, Genet creates a space, from the very first seconds of the performance,
reminiscent o f a small, informal theatre, where the actors will appear more like people
from the community. This sense becomes increasingly evident during the opening
moments of the performance, when Archibald, taking on the guise of master-ofceremonies of an amateur theatre troupe, introduces each actor by name directly to the
audience. It thus becomes all the more difficult for the spectators to distinguish
between the actors, or actor-characters, and the actors themselves. Furthermore, the
lighting is harsh and glaringly artificial: "la lumiere est une lumiere de neon, tres
176
violente"(\9) which does little to mask the reality of the actors as people playing
roles. Dressed in gaudy evening clothes the actors suggest a false, or performed
gentility, Le fracet cravate blanche des messieursest accompagne de chaitssures
jaunes. Les toilettes des dames robes du soir tres pailleteesevoquent de fausses
elegances, le plus grand mauvais gout"{20). In this theatrical splendor, the actorcharacters perform a highly ritualized European dance, the minuet. All these visual
elements underline the obviously theatrical nature of the spectacle about to be
presented.
This glaringly apparent theatricality is further reinforced by the texts structure
of a play within a play. The Court- - consisting of archetypal figures representing the
Queen, the Judge, the Governor, the Missionary, and the Valet- - appears on its
platform, equally artificial-looking, in its grotesque white masks and emblematic
costumes. A mirror of the audience, the colonial grandees close the dramatic space by
creating an effect reminiscent of a theatre-in-the-round, with the actor-characters
surrounded on two sides by spectators- - the audience in the house and the actorspectators on the stage, for whom the ritual is to be performed. The Court thereby
serves to focus the spectoral gaze on the players who will perform a simulacrum of
murder for the Courts pleasure, as well as for the pleasure of the audience in the
house. Genets opening stage directions specifically direct Archibald to announce his
introductory speech tantot au public, tantot a la C our'\23). As the troupe of actors
darken their faces with soot mixed with saliva, thus further drawing attention to the
177
artificiality of the performance, Archibald announces the roles that everyone,

including the audience, has been assigned: Nous nous embellissons pour vous plaire.
Vous etes blancs. Et spectateurs. Ce soir nous jouerons pour vous"(24). In this
introductory line, Archibald clearly distinguishes between the performers and the
spectators, between fiction and reality. What could be more reassuring to a white
audience watching black performers/characters than such a firm affirmation of these
conventional representational distances? The pact of confidence between the
audience and the performers seems fully intact, although as the play begins to take
shape, the spectators soon realize that the actors benevolent pact with the audience is
but a tenuous one.
The threatening aspect of the performance begins to take hold as the
performers draw undue attention to the artificial conventions of theatre, thereby
assuming a certain ironic distance between the actors and the performance. Later in
his introductory speech, Archibald announces directly to the audience,
Ce soir nous jouerons pour vous. Mais, afin que dans vos fauteuils
vous demeuriez a vote aise en face du drame qui dej se deroule ici,
afin que vous soyez assures quun tel drame ne risque pas de penetrer
dans vos vies precieuses, nous aurons encore la politesse, apprise parmi
vous, de rendre la communication impossible. La distance qui nous separe,
originelle, nous 1augmenterons par nos fastes, nos manieres, notre
insolence car nous sommes aussi des comediens. (26)
In this speech, Archibald states something which should go unstated in a performance

that wishes to reassure the spectators of a comfortable distance from the dramatic
illusion. The sarcastic tone of this monologue, which throws anti-Black racist notions
178
back at the white audience, introduces an underlying feeling of hatred against the
spectators which immediately destabilizes the pact of confidence between the
audience and the performers. Though stating the contrary, Archibald insinuates that
the performance will in fact penetrate the precious lives of the spectators." Such
glimpses of apparently real emotions within the context of a performed fiction seem
to pose an authentic threat in the midst of the otherwise comforting artificiality.
Despite its theatrical elements, a performance of Les Negres undermines the
conventions of dramatic illusion on two fundamental levels: the stage represents a
contemporary stage, and the actors represent contemporary actors. With these
representational attitudes in place, the conventional code of illusion can never be fully
realized, because the audience will always see the performers first and foremost as
actors, and they will see the performance as just that, a fictional performance, or as
Archibald repeatedly calls it, a ritual ceremony. As the play progresses, Genets text
points out again and again, through apparent interruptions in the performance and
through seemingly spontaneous unscripted outbursts from the actors, that the players
are in fact real persons with their own agendas and motivations. Such dips into
reality are present throughout the production, for example, the moment when Neige
refuses to acknowledge the audience as Archibald makes his initial introduction of his
troupe:
Madame Augusta Neige (Elle reste droit)... eh bien... eh bien, madame
(En colere et tonnant) saluez! (Elle reste droite)... Je vous le demande,
saluez, madame! (Extremement doux, presque peine) Je vous le demande,
saluez, madame, c est un jeu. (24)
179
The audience would probably assume that Archibald, having already established
himself as an actor playing a role, is speaking to Neige actor-to-actor as opposed to
reciting the lines of the established scripted ritual which they are about to enact.
This is not to say, of course, that the audience is completely fooled into
thinking that these apparently spontaneous interruptions are not part of Genets text,
and that the actors whom they are observing are making up resistant dialogue as they
go along. These ruptures do, however, introduce a certain improvisational tone into
the performance which tends to confuse and disturb the audience because they
indicate the simultaneous presence of several different performative layers in the play.
On the one hand, the actors are engaged in what I will refer to as the primary, or
innermost, performative frame, the ritual simulacrum of the murder. The
aforementioned exchange between Archibald and Neige introduces a second
performative frame. Neiges disrespect is scripted, yet it does not belong to the
register of the ritual performance, but rather to a second register, wherein the
characters reveal their own reluctance or willingness to participate in the ritual. This
second frame is less theatrical than the first, and thus appears to the audience as more
spontaneous, or realistic. Despite its improvisational tone, however, the second
frame is still part of Genets text, and in neither one of these two performative layers
does the audience actually see the real personality of the actor. What the spectator
180
can conclude then, is that in a performance of Les Negres, the actors are playing
actors playing actors.
As the play progresses, however, the audience soon comes to realize that
Genets text does not rely simply on the simultaneous performance of two frames, but
of several. Neiges initial rupture introduces a performative layer which is obvious,
yet subsequent ruptures follow, which introduce additional performative layers to the
second frame, thereby establishing a third, then a fourth frame to the performance.
With each succeeding layer, the performers appear to become less and less
performative, thus more and more real. Consequently, as the spectators become
aware of each performative layer, the actors seem to come ever closer to the
spectators own reality; and, the closer that the actors come to the spectators reality,
the more menacing their presence seems to be. This play indeed creates a space of
madness, where the performance invades the audiences own reality and thereby
undermines the spectators conventional notions of what is truth and what is illusion.
In order to maximize the effect of the actors stepping threateningly close to the
audiences reality. Genet heightens the theatricality of the innermost frames of the
performance, so that each successive frame appears increasingly realistic. I will
now attempt to localize each of the various performative frames in Les Negres in
order to examine how Genet establishes in this play an intricate system of illusions
which sets out to disturb the spectators own understanding of reality. For claritys
181
sake, I will begin my analysis with an examination of the primary frame, that of the
ritual murder, which then sets the stage for the more subtle secondary frames.
As Derek Connon wrote in his 1996 article entitled, Genets Les Negres and
the art of upsetting the audience, this is not a play written fo r Blacks, but rather, it is
a play written against Whites.13 This is true on a very obvious level, as the primary
frame of performance is a ritual which simulates the murder of a white woman
enacted by black actors. Genet intended for this play to be produced for an audience
of white theatre-goers, who would enter the house only to see themselves parodied
onstage by the caricatures of colonial domination represented by the Court. Genet
insisted that the masks donned by the members of the Court must not cover the actors
faces completely, but leave enough visible evidence for the audience to be aware that
the actors behind the disguises are black: Chaque acteur en sera un Noir masque
dont le masque est un visage de Blanc pose de telle fagon qu 'on voie une large bande
noire autour, et meme les cheveux crepus"{20). The audience in the auditorium will
thus realize that they are in fact being ridiculed as objects of black knowingness, and
that the actors who are meant to portray the white spectators are actually collaborating
with the black actors who are performing the ritual sacrifice. As the Governor tells
the Queen at the beginning of the performance, nous savons que nous sommes venus
assister a nos propres funerailles"{21). This comment highlights the audiences
implication in the performance. The spectators know that the actor playing the
182
Governor is black, and yet the object of the ritual performance is the murder of a
white. By stating that the white Court is about to be sacrificed by the black actors- and, in fact, at the end of the play, the members of the Court are systematically
assassinated by the "actors- - Genet implies that the white audience in the house,
which is mirrored on the stage by the Court, is equally in danger, equally the object of
the ritual sacrifice.
A similar projection of danger to the audience occurs later in the text, when
the Queen sees herself assaulted by the black performers:
Je suis la Reine Occidentale a la paleur de lis! Resultat precieux de
tant de siecles travailles pour un pareil miracle! Immaculee douce a
1oeil et a 1arne [...] Soit que je sois en bonne sante, eclatante et rose,
soit quune langueur me mine, je suis blanche. Si la mort me fixe, c est
dans la couleur de victoire. O nobles paleurs, colorez mes tempes, mes
doigts, mon ventre! (53)
Having succumbed to what appears to be a hypnotic trance initiated by Vertu, who
ironically takes on the voice of the white dominator, praising the beauty and virtue of
the color white, the Queen eventually manages to break free of the spell, and wakes up
with a start, shouting Assez! Etfaites-les taire, ils ont vole ma voix! Au secours..."
(55), and later, Je me croyais abandonnee! C est q u ils m eferaient du mal! (56).
This figurative rape o f the white Queen, where the blacks assault her and steal her
voice is also a direct affront to the white spectators. They are, in a sense, rendered
powerless in the face of an unpredictable performance by black actors who are playing
11 Derek F. Connon, Confused? You will be: Genets Les Nigres and the Art of Upsetting the
Audience, French Studies L:4 (1996): 425.
183
out racial stereotypes before their eyes. The audience has become implicated in a
dangerous game drawn along racial lines.
This game reaches a definite urgency the moment that the actors bring an
audience member up onstage in order to hold the knitting of the sacrificial victim of
the performed ritual. If the audience is indeed made up primarily of whites, as Genet
specifically suggests in his opening comments, this would mean that the singled-out
spectator brought into the performance would be the only white person on a stage
where a group of black actors are simulating the apparently unmotivated murder of a
white woman. The victim in the ritual is thus doubled, with the white spectator
marked by a prop which belongs specifically to the woman about to be murcered, and
simultaneously mirrored by the character Diouf wearing a grotesque mask in the
likeness o f a white. Only moments earlier, Diouf accepted his role, stating solemnly,
je descendrcii dans la mort que vous me preparez'\62). I should add here as well that
of all the actors who could have portrayed the sacrificial victim, the character Felicite
chose the one player who had suggested reconciliation with the Whites, though his
proposed entente met only with derision from the other Blacks. In other words, during
the moments which lead up to the ritual sacrifice, there are two representative
Whites on the stage: the spectator from the audience, and Diouf, the peace
maker, obliged to wear the ridiculous mask of the enemy. This scene recalls
Genets initial stage directions, where the author wishes to single out a sole white
spectator in a house of black theatre-goers by dressing him in ceremonial garb and
184
seating him in a place of honor in the center of the first row, bathed in a single
spotlight for the duration of the performance. In both cases, the single white
spectator is directly implicated in a game which reduces the clear distinctions between
what is real and what is performed. Once again, the conventional codes of
representation and distance between fiction and reality are overturned, and the pact of
confidence between audience and performer is destabilized.
As we have seen, Genet does not create in Les Negres a dramatic space devoid
of the conventions o f theatrical illusion. When the entire Court is publicly
assassinated at the end of the production, there is no doubt that it is only a
melodramatic conclusion to a highly theatrical performance. Nevertheless, it is
precisely these overly performed moments in the play which lay the groundwork for
a performance that, in the end, remains sublimely threatening, because, as I have
shown in Les Bonnes, Genet infuses the general theatricality of this text with sudden
moments of non-theatrical realism. By heightening the obviously performative
aspects of the production, Genet is equally able to heighten the reality of the non
ritualized moments in the play, specifically those moments concerning the
interrogation and execution of an unseen figure offstage.
To decipher the multiple interplaying layers which make up Les Negres can be
quite an overwhelming project, as George Macdonald wrote in his 1962 commentary
on the work, A true paraphrasing of the entire work becomes not the labor of a
lifetime, but of an eternity. Its levels are continually being shuffled, its juxtapositions
become identities, its opposing forces fight on either side. 14 First, there is the
problematic positioning of the Court, who seem to be simultaneously part of the
ritual, and observers of it. They are at once a reflection of the audience and an insult
to it. Then there is the ritual itself, so highly theatricalized that it soon becomes
evident that it is simply a ruse meant to distract the attention of the spectators from
another, more real ritual taking place elsewhere. This becomes clear very early
during the performance, when Archibald turns to the one actor who, by his disheveled,
more natural costume is singled-out from the beginning as someone who is not
participating in the ritual onstage:
(// se toum e vers Ville de Saint-Nazaire) Et vous, monsieur,
vous etes de trop. Tout, etant secret, il faut foutre le camp. Allez, mais
allez done les prevenir. Dites-leur bien que nous avons commence. Quils
fassent leur travail comme nous allons faire le notre. Tout se passera comme
a laccoutumee. Je lespere. (29)
ARCHIBALD:
The very deliberate use of the word secret will draw the attention of the spectators,
who will no doubt begin to ask themselves the nature of this mysterious exchange.
There is also an immediate introduction to another unseen group of people offstage
who, in some kind of mysterious collaboration with the actors onstage, must perform
their work as the actors entertain the audience with their dramatics. The spectators
become aware that they are somehow being tricked.
14 George B. Macdonald, 'T he Blacks and Ritual Theatre, Humanities (Spring, 1962): 32-44.
186
The sensation that the audience is only a pawn in the more serious game which
is being played out in the wings grows more tangible when Ville de Saint-Nazaire
returns to the stage and has an extended dialogue with the other actors:
ARCHIBALD:
s'approchcint de Ville de Saint-Nazaire: Eh b ie n ? Est-ce
q u il y a d e ja q u e lq u e c h o s e ?
II e s t a rriv e . On l a a m e n e , m e n o tte s a u x m a in s .
Tous les Negres se groupent autour de Ville de Saint-Nazaire
NEIGE: Quallez-vous faire?
VILLE DE SAINT-NAZAIRE: il se baisse et ramasse le revolver pose sur
la boite de cireur : Avant tout, linterroger...
ARCHIBALD: I interrompant: Ne dites que ce quil faut dire, on nous epie.
Tous levent la tete et regardent la Cour.
LE JUGE, criant: Parce que vous etes deguises en chien savants, vous
croyez savoir parler, et deja vous inventez des enigmes.
v i l l a g e : au Juge: Un jo u r...
ARCHIBALD: I interrompant: Laisse. Dans la colere tu vas te trahir et
nous trahir. (a Ville de Saint-N azaire): A-t-il dit quelque chose
qui le justifie? Rien?
v i l l e d e s a i n t - n / z a i r e : Rien. Je m en vais?
ARCHIBALD: Quand le tribunal sera en place, reviens nous prevenir. (40)
v i l l e DE SAINT-NAZAIRE:
Ville de Saint -Nazaire is apparently serving as a link between what is happening

onstage and what is happening in the wings, between the us of Archibald and the
troupe of actors and the them of the offstage interrogators. As the play proceeds,
further references are made which intentionally draw the spectators attention toward
the events which they cannot see, events which are necessarily of a violent nature,
involving a revolver and a hand-cuffed hostage. After Ville de Saint-Nazaires rushed
exit, the Valet questions one of the actors, "Auriez-vous la bonte de me renseigner?
Car enfin j ai choisi d'etre comprehensif Ou est alle le Negre avec son colt, tout a
l heure?"(A3). Here the Valet poses the question which most of the members of the
187
audience already have on their lips. He mirrors the certain confusion among the
spectators. His question is, however, ignored, and the audience remains
unenlightened. It is only as the offstage violence grows more imminent that the public
gleans a firmer understanding of what is about to take place behind the drawn
curtains: Ville de Saint-Nazaire returns onstage to report, // se defend comme il pent.
Mais on est sur qu il sera execute (84). Once again reflecting the misgivings of the
audience, the Judge, from the Court, declares that he fears that another crime is being
executed elsewhere (88). Therefore, throughout the course of the production, as they
sit watching the exceedingly ritualized performance onstage, the spectators are
haunted, not only by the violent nature of the onstage simulacrum itself, but also by
the notion that something real is taking place out of their sight, something vaguely
threatening, and something in which they are somehow personally implicated.
What is so intriguing about Genets text, however, is that the threat of this
offstage plot suddenly dissipates toward the end of the production. As the primary
onstage frame reaches its climax, the frame of the offstage interrogation becomes
increasingly theatrical, and therefore increasingly obvious. As Derek Connon points
out, Genet is rather heavy-handed in his presentation of these unseen events which are
supposed to be such a secret from the audience. The spectators are bound to hang
onto every word that Ville de Saint-Nazaire utters, simply because he has been so
clearly marked from the beginning as an outsider, someone whose performance
belongs in a different reality. The actors flirtation with the offstage violence is
188
confusing to be sure, but as the play wears on, it becomes less threatening. The
audience eventually comes to realize the circumstances of the events occurring in the
wings: a group of black radicals are judging, perhaps torturing, a black traitor.
Archibald spells it out for the public in his comment to Ville de Saint-Nazaire: "il
s 'agit de juger, proboblement, de condamner, et d'executer un Negre. C'est grave. II
ne s'agit plus de jouer'X84). It seems somewhat illogical that, in a play which on its
most obvious performative level is so adamantly threatening to a white audience,
Genet includes a clandestine plot, that of Blacks killing another Black, which is so
inherently un-threatening to a white public. Furthermore, despite the apparent efforts
to keep this offstage plot so disconcertingly secret, the author chooses to make it
conspicuously obvious rather than to create a more believable reality by simply
hinting at it with subtle innuendoes.
The eventual execution of the offstage black traitor is just as theatrical, and
therefore un-real as the onstage ritual murder:
Soudain, dans la coulisse, on entend une, puis plusieurs explosions
de petards, et, sur le velours noir des decors, les reflets d unfeu
d'artifice. (109)
The theatrical gimmick of explosions and colored lights will certainly dissipate any
suspicions that the audience may have had as to the reality of the offstage sub-plot.
The fact that the ultimate violence, which has been so meticulously built up from the
beginning of the performance, ends in a flourish of fe u d'artifice implies that the
offstage action is just as artificial as the ritual performed onstage. In fact, despite its
189
melodramatic tone, the ritual murder of the white woman implicates the white
audience to a stronger degree than the supposed secret second frame because the
victim is white, not black. This, as Connon points out in his article, is highly
problematic, as the audience soon comes to realize that the execution of the black
traitor offstage is simply another performed ritual. If this is indeed the case, one can
therefore assume that the purpose of this secondary ritual is the same as that of the
primary ritual, namely to divert the attention of the spectators from another, more
serious, event taking place elsewhere.
In the extended exchange which I quoted earlier between Ville de SaintNazaire and the other actors, Archibald indicates that the ritual which they are
enacting on the stage is a means to divert the Court from Ville de Saint-Nazaires
actions offstage left: Ne dites que ce qu 'il fa u t dire, on nous epie. (Tous levent la
tete et regardent la Cour)(40). The stage directions specifically designate the Court,
not the spectators in the house, as the subject pronoun for on nous epie." This implies
that the circumstances around the offstage interrogation of the black traitor is actually
part of the performed ritual onstage, where the Court, not the audience, is the primary
target. However, when Ville de Saint-Nazaire returns to announce the pending
offstage execution, he speaks o f a spectacle which is being performed for the
audience, not the Court: "si la comedie peut etre menee devant eux (il montre le
public), nous ne devons plus jouer quand nous sommes entre nous"(&4). More
suspiciously yet, he later comments, Mais alors, cette comedie que nous jouons, pour
190
vous, ce n etait qu'un divertissement?"(&4) to which Archibald responds with an

abrupt, Tais-toi. Ville de Saint-Nazaires use of the word nous appears out of
place since he has been explicitly excluded from the spectacle which is performed
onstage. The fact that he includes himself in the comedie therefore implies that his
role as the offstage liaison is actually part of the onstage ritual. We must remember as
well that Ville de Saint-Nazaire was specifically introduced by name directly to the
audience in Archibalds introductory speech. He was thus introduced as an actor"
among the other "actors. If he were not meant to be simply another role in the
performed ritual, should he not have been chased offstage before Archibald presented
the actors to the public? We can push this point further by taking a closer look at the
comments made by the Valet and the Judge regarding Ville de Saint-Nazaires
offstage role. It is true that their statements reflect the growing suspicions of the
audience about the unseen events offstage. However, by so doing they also
deliberately focus the audiences attention on these events. Genet makes is quite clear
from the beginning that the spectators should be aware that the Court is played by
black actors, and therefore, by individuals potentially collaborating with the actors
onstage. It follows that the Court is in fact an integral part of the secondary plot, and
the function of their role is to further draw the attention of the audience to, not away
from, the secret plot led by Ville de Saint-Nazaire.
This apparent collaboration between the Court and the "actors raises some
fundamental questions regarding the purpose of the ritual performance(s). One may
191
assume that there exists a third plot, also unseen by the spectators, from which the
audiences attention must be drawn. The play may thus be broken down into a series
of interlocking layers: the primary frame (the ritual murder) is performed in order to
draw the attention of the Court away from the secondary frame (the interrogation and
execution of a black traitor); this secondary frame, however, is performed by all the
actors, including the Court, in order to draw the attention of the audience away from a
mysterious third plot.15 In order to explore this possibility, it becomes necessary to
take a closer look at the stage directions, and to separate the offstage action into stage
left and stage right.
The first time that Ville de Saint-Nazaire is asked to leave the stage, he begins
to walk offstage right. Village immediately intervenes, saying, Pas par Id,
malheureux. On vous avail dit de ne plus venir, vous gachez tout"(29). This motion
is repeated almost exactly the second time that Ville de Saint-Nazaire attempts to exit
stage right: Pas par Id, malheureux. (Ville de Saint-Nazaire sort a gauche)(4 1).
This is extremely mysterious. Who is the referent to the pronoun on, who has asked
that Ville de Saint-Nazaire not return? Certainly it is not the black radicals of the
secret plot in which Ville de Saint-Nazaire is playing such a key role, as he comes
back onstage again and again to report on the progress of the interrogation. The
audience must assume then that the clandestine plot (frame two) is taking place
15 Connon 430.
192
offstage left. At the same time, however, something else, something more serious and
unexplained, seems to be happening offstage right.
At one of the most theatrical moments in the play, when the character Bobo
gives birth to a series of puppets in the likeness of the Court, just moments before the
ritual killing of the Court reaches its climax, Neige remains petrified, gazing off into
the stage-right wings: " toujours immobilisee dans une pose de sortie, comme si elle
allait penetrer dans la coulisse de droite"{ll). Some minutes later, the entire Court
steps off their platform and disappears stage right, where they proceed to make
deliberate shuffling and stomping noises behind the curtain: On entend un bruit de
pas dans la coulisse"(92). It is possible that this particular noise, the only non
artificial sound-effect which emanates from offstage, is meant to mask a similar, but
real, noise from the wings. Furthermore, when the Court is so melodramatically
assassinated at the center of the stage, the revolver which Village uses does not fire,
thereby implying that it is in fact only a prop gun. Archibald steps on a childrens toygun cartridge to imitate the sound of the fatal shot, (115) and the Missionary and the
Valet fall onto the heap o f corpses with no gun-shot at all. However, when it is the
Judges turn to die, Genet gives the following puzzling stage direction: "On entend
une detonation'\ 117), a sound which is repeated when the Queen is killed. According
to these stage directions, the audience hears two distinctly realistic gun-shots, which
are not characterized by the theatrical cover-up of a toy-cartridge or fireworks. Since
the secret assassination of Ville de Saint-Nazaires traitor has already taken place
193
offstage left, one is left wondering about the nature of these two gun-shots at the end
of the ritual performance.

A final illusion is played at end of the performance, when the entire cast has
left the stage. Genet indicates in his final directions that the curtain at the back of the
stage is to be raised slightly, to reveal all the actors, unmasked, surrounding a second
catafalque which has remained hidden back-stage. By this point it has already been
revealed to the audience that the original onstage coffin was nothing more than a prop
created by suspending a white sheet across two chairs, the two missing chairs
belonging to the Valet and the Missionary. As Derek Connon indicates in his article,
the fact that these two chairs are discovered at the end of the play means that all the
chairs are accounted for. In turn, this suggests that the second catafalque is not an
artificial prop, but an actual coffin:
in order to construct their fake catafalque the blacks have been forced to
steal two o f the chairs belonging to the Court, but since only two chairs
were missing, and these are now accounted for, what could a second fake
catafalque be make from? The obvious conclusion is that the second
catafalque cannot be fake and so must be real.16
Connons statement can be expanded to include the audiences final perception of the
entire performance. By exposing the fact that the spectators have been fooled into
believing that the visible coffin a metaphor for the sacrificial death was real,
when in fact it was only a theatrical trick, a diversion from the real coffin, Genet also
indicates that the entire performance, including the deliberately not-so-secret plot
194
taking shape offstage left, was also a theatrical trick, meant to divert the spectators
attention from the more genuinely guarded violence behind stage right, a violence
which does remain secret, and therefore menacingly realistic.
The audience of Les Negres is thus deceived on at least three levels; first,
through their unwitting participation in the staged ritual onstage, secondly by their
peaked interest regarding the execution offstage left, which turns out to be nothing
more than another ruse, and finally by the nagging and unfulfilled suspicions
concerning the mysterious action offstage right. The performance is maddening, as
the spectators leave the theatre with a series of unresolved questions, and the haunting
sensation that they have been duped by a ritual motivated by racial hatred stemming
from French-African colonialism. It is indeed, as George B. Macdonald puts it, the
project o f a lifetime to attempt to sift out the various deceptions which make up Les
Negres. Like opening the door to the mind of a schizophrenic, it becomes nearly
impossible to distinguish truth from fiction, for Genet creates in this piece a
textual and performative structure so enmeshed that any logical attempt to ascertain a
reasonable system of coordinates within this sea of mixed signals becomes an
exercise in futility.
What we see in Genets work for the stage, then, is an obsessive preoccupation
with the idea that what you see is not necessarily what you get. Much like in the
dramatic space of Samuel Beckett, Genets characters exist in a realm where the
16 Connon 436.
195
distinction between reality and fiction is not a given. What separates the maids and
the black performers in Genets pieces from Becketts Joe and Bouche, however, is
that the former maintain a certain awareness of the deception which the latter do not.
Claire and Archibald wittingly create their space of madness, whereas Joe and Bouche
simply exist in it. There is a fundamental deliberate antagonism between the
performers and the audience in Genets dramatic work which is not inherent to
Becketts texts. Becketts audiences are confused, to be sure, constantly pushed and
pulled by his characters inability to negotiate a definitive position between truth
and illusion. They are not, however, directly threatened by a performance which
insistently invades the spectators own space of reality, as they are with Les Negres.
By pushing the extremes of the appearcince-versus-being paradigm Les Negres
obliges the audience not only to question their own established code of differentiation
between reality and illusion, but more importantly, between sanity and madness. As
this play effectively taints the audiences reality with the instability of illusions, it
infuses the spectators world with the threat of madness.
196
CHAPTER VI
Madness as Infection:
the Contamination of Reason by Un-reason in
India Song by Marguerite Duras
We have seen how two writers of the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett and
Jean Genet, have in their dramatic works represented the human condition through an
aesthetic of madness. In Dis Joe and Pas moi Beckett invites the audience to
penetrate the personal schizophrenic reality of the protagonist. This is a madness
experienced from within the mind of the character on stage. Jean Genet, on the other
hand, creates a barrage of performative layers in his plays. This is a theatrical space of
madness, where the spectators lose the comforting ability to distinguish between truth
and illusion. Their methods are different, yet both writers choose to represent human
existence through the lens of a mad reality.
The concept of a mad reality is highly disturbing since madness seems to
escape any fixed definition. Foucault pointed this out in Madness and Civilization,
arguing that, for all the clinical advances since the classical era that have attempted to
identify, contain, and to neutralize madness in European society, it still remains a
pervasive threat to the basic system of social norms. In her 1971 work Le Psychiatre,
son Fou et la Psychanalyse, psychoanalyst Maud Mannoni goes further, speaking of
the necessary madness which should in fact touch everyone:
Depuis des siecles, medecins et philosophes se sont penches sur le
probleme de la folie sans reussir a savoir exactement ce que c est.
197
On a suppose quaucun homme n y echappait, on a parle d une folie

necessaire, voire de la necessite pour chacun d avoir la folie de tout
le monde . 1
As we have seen in the works of Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet, and as we shall see
with Marguerite Duras, this idea of an invasion of madness" from which no one can
escape constitutes an essential feature in the works of some of the most respected
French writers of this century. In the Fictional worlds of these authors, madness is
indeed, as Mannoni proposes, an inherent aspect of everyones reality.
Madness is a predominant element in the writings of Marguerite Duras, her
prose fiction as well as her works for the theatre. The list of mad characters in
Durass work is an extensive one, hence an exhaustive analysis of madness in her
oeuvre might constitute an entire dissertation. From the aging woman obsessed with
holding back the sea in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (1950) and Eden Cinema
(1977), to the apparently manically depressed protagonist of Le Ravissement de Lol V.
Stein (1964), whose ghost continues to haunt Durass later texts, an aesthetic of un
reason takes center stage in the world of Durass fiction. Almost all of Durass
protagonists, usually but not exclusively female, seem tainted by madness. After the
death o f her German lover, the French woman of Hiroshima, mon amour (1960)
lapses into a state of mental delirium; flashbacks of this state continue to plague her
years later. The Vice-consul of Lahore, of Le Vice-Consul (1965) and India Song
1 Maud Mannoni, Le Psychiatre, son Fou et la Psychanalyse (Paris: Points, 1971) 37, qtd in Raynalie
Udris, Welcome Unreason (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993) 3.
198
(1972), suffers a sudden nervous breakdown and begins to shoot the lepers in the
gardens of Shalimar. His uncontrolled outbursts of desire for the wife of the French
Ambassador in Calcutta mark him in both these works as an outsider, im fou, and a
threat to the diplomatic circles in India. In a similar plunge into desire and madness,
the brother and sister of Agatha (1981) display an un-reasonable preoccupation with
their childhood, marked by hints of incest and a fixation on their dead mother.
Despite the variety of ways in which we can classify the mad state, almost
all the characters in Durass fiction do seem to have one thing in common: they are in
some way isolated from their society, existing in a kind of personal reality, and
embracing a linguistic register which underlines their rupture from established
systems of interaction and communication with the outside world. The Durasian
subject is fraught with uncertainty about his or her place in society, and Durass texts
explore the interface where mental illness threatens to invade and to take hold of the
fundamental code of coordinates by which individuals define themselves and their
environment.
In her 1987 work Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Julia Kristeva
dedicates an entire chapter to the writings of Marguerite Duras, texts which Kristeva
describe as written on the brink of illness , 2 and which bring us to the verge of
madness . 3 For Kristeva, madness, represented as so compelling in Durass texts, is
intimately linked with a severe state of mental depression, which is marked foremost
2 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Me'ancholia (New York: Columbia UP, 1980) 228.
by the subjects inability to communicate effectively with his or her surroundings.

Melancholia, Kristeva asserts, is the threshold to madness. As the subject enters a
severe state of depression, he or she suffers an utter breakdown of the lines of
communication, and is no longer able or willing to conform to the established codes
of expression. The system of signs and referents which makes up conventional
linguistic registers is no longer adequate, and the subject suffers what Kristeva terms
as the death of speech, or a denial of the signifier4:
Melancholia then ends up in asymbolia, in loss of meaning: if
I am no longer capable of translating or metaphorizing, I become
silent and I die .5
Kristeva is not necessarily speaking of a physical death here, although suicide is often
regarded by severely depressed subjects as the only possible result of their perceived
loss of symbolic meaning. The other result, the one which Kristeva examines in Black
Sun, is rather a spiritual death, the death of conventional reasonthe passageinto
madness. The subjects paralysis before established systems of logic and
communication, this silence in the face of interpersonal communication, is often the
last shield against the subjects total loss of reason .6
According to Kristeva, a persons secure sense of self resides in an ability to
decipher language and signs according to conventional systems of reason. The mad
individual exists in exile from established codes of representation in a realm totally
3 Kristeva 227.
4 Kristeva 37.
2(H)
devoid of reference. For these individuals, objects and signifiers are no longer
identified with stability, and therefore assume a state of symbolic flux. This idea is
reminiscent of the schizo-reality posited by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus,
where the mad subject exists in a reality where meaning cannot be fixed according to
conventional systems of logic.
For Kristeva, it is this type of symbolic flux, this breakdown of conventional
codes of communication, which lies at the heart of Durass writing, which she
describes as a writing that privileges madness over conventional reality:
A complicity with illness emanates from Duras texts, a complicity
that is somber and at the same time light because absentminded. It leads
us to X-ray our madness, the dangerous rims where identities of meaning,
personality, and life collapse [...] With Duras what we have is madness in
full daylight.7
What Kristeva underscores in this passage is that madness is bom out of contradiction.
This is a world where established definitions o f being fall apart, giving way to a
different reality bearing its own language of signs and referents. It is a space built
up with scattered and fluid signs, where conventional meanings collapse to the realm
o f the un-nameable, a space which, in her own words, remains inaccessible 8 to
those persons who function successfully within established codes of reason.
5 Kristeva 42.
6 Kristeva 42.
7 Kristeva 228
8 Kristeva 52.
201
Two phrases stand out in particular in Kristevas analysis of Durass writing:

passion for death , 9 and shattering of psychic identity , 10 both of which characterize
the type of depressive madness so prevalent in Durass work. Death and pain, both
physical, as evidenced by the mutilated bodies of the victims of the atomic bomb in
Hiroshima, mon amour, and psychological, as in Le Ravissement de Lot V. Stein, are
the cornerstone to many of Durass texts. In all these cases, however, death and pain
are closely connected with sexual desire and an almost overpowering sensuality, as in
the disturbing juxtaposition of the two lovers naked bodies with the devastation of
Hiroshimas victims in Hiroshima, mon amour. The Durasian coupling of eroticism
with madness leads to a sense of warped meaning within her texts, where the
characters must isolate themselves from the established social order to fulfill their
deadly passion. In so doing, they create their own private reality with its own
system of coordinates, as Kristeva observes:
public life becomes seriously severed from reality whereas private life,
on the other hand, is emphasized to the point of filling the whole of the
real and invalidating any other concern. The new world [...] is unreal.
We are living the reality of a new suffering world . 11
This new world, inhabited by characters in exile from the world of conventional
reason and established social systems, is characterized equally by desire and by death.
This is reminiscent of what Deleuze and Guattari term as the realm of "desiringproduction, a space in which the fantasies produced by desire invade and eventually
9 Kristeva 221.
10 Kristeva 222.
202
take over the space which is conventionally accepted as normal. It is indeed a world
of un-reason whose denizens are articulated as doubles, one to another, as in mirrors
that reduplicate and magnify their madness to the point of violence and delirium.1:
Of all the dramatic texts by Marguerite Duras, none present madness on so
many simultaneous and intertwining levels as does her 1972 work India Song, written
at the bequest of Peter Hall, director of the London National Theatre, and
subsequently turned into a film, directed by Duras herself, in 1975.13 Like most of her
works for the stage, India Song is highly poetic, using language in a fragmentary and
elliptical style to create visual images rather than to propel the plot. It is also the most
stylized of all her plays, as none of the characters ever speak on stage. Instead, the
story is told exclusively by a series of off-stage voices, which seem to be narrating the
events many years after they have taken place. It is the story of Anne-Marie Stretter,
wife of the French ambassador in Calcutta, and of the two days leading up to her
suicide at the mouth of the river Ganges. Madness is pervasive in India Song, with
three characters- the Vice-consul, the Spanish wife of an embassy secretary, and the
beggar-woman from Savannakhet- specifically described as fou, and two other
charactersAnne-Marie Stretter and the spectral Lola Valerie Steindescribed as
suffering from an incurable state of melancholy.
" Kristeva 235.

12 Kristeva 257.
13 Marguerite Duras, India Song (Paris: Gallimard, 1973). This will be the text of reference in my
analysis, and all citations from India Song are taken from this edition. Page numbers are marked in
parentheses.
203
What I hope to show in my examination of this piece is that madness in India

Song exists as a sort of contaminant from the outside, which successfully infiltrates
and takes hold of the white colonial community in Calcutta. I will explore how the
three main representatives of this madness, the Vice-consul, the beggar-woman, and
Anne-Marie Stretter, act as catalysts in the dramatic transformation of a space of
reason into a space of madness, a madness which continues to contaminate other
peripheral characters, through desire and obsession, years after Anne-Marie Stretters
death. Finally I will examine how this process into madness reflects Deleuze and
Guattaris anti-Oedipal realm of desire-production, and thereby offers the audience
a new way of conceptualizing the human condition through an aesthetic of un-reason.
At its outset, one can divide the fictional world of India Song into two realms:
that of the dominant white colonial power, represented by the European diplomatic
circles in Calcutta, and that o f the ever-threatening outside world of the silent
native population. In performance, these two realms are physically divided into
inside and outside. The French embassy, which is the site of the first two acts of
the play, is closed off from the natives, in a sense protected from them, by guards
and an iron gate. As representatives of the empirical presence in India, the diplomatic
functionaries, whom the narrative voices characterize collectively as I'Inde blanche,"
exist as arbiters of the colonial social order and of a western system of reason. Above
all, they live exclusively behind the closed doors of the embassy enclaves. They exist
in the world of the inside, as one guest comments during the second act of the
204
performance about the women of White India, Elies vivent a I'abri du soleil.
Volets clos... des recluses"(12). In many ways the Europeans see themselves as
lost," exiles in a foreign place, therefore they feel obliged to construct definitive
barriers to protect themselves from an outer other world that is regarded as different
and menacing. By keeping the Other at a distance, they attempt to negate the threat of
what is felt as a danger. The secret for survival among the diplomats in India,
according to another guest, are the cercles fe rm e s'\6 1). Not even their conversation
strays from the closed circles of embassy life, as is clearly evidenced by the fragments
of conversation during the second act: Vous avez remarque, one guests asks
another, Les Blancs ici neparlent que d'eux-memes. Le reste..."{90). Like the
island in the mouth of the Ganges that houses the embassy residence, the White
India of India Song isolates itself from the indigenous population. This outside
force, this unspecified Le reste... of the above citation, nevertheless poses a certain,
if ambiguous, threat to the integrity of the white Europeans, as it presses against the
walls of the colonial structure.
The world of the outside, this foreboding presence beyond the embassy
gates, is repeatedly characterized through lexicons of illness, chaos, and madness.
One of the guests at the reception expresses his pleasure at catching a glimpse of
Anne-Marie Stretters legs when she plays tennis with her daughters: c'est beau des
jam bes de femme, ici... plantees dans cette horreur"{13). Her white European legs on
the tennis court yet another symbol of the W est- stand in direct contrast to the rest
205
of the country, which is characterized sweepingly as a horror. For the white

Europeans, India represents a place of instability and of disorder, standing in direct
opposition to the social codes which govern the West. The Ambassador tells an
unspecified party guest during the second act, Les lois qui regissent une societe
normale n 'ont pas cours ic i'\6 1). India is for these people not normal," that is, it
stands against the imported systems of order which the Europeans are attempting to
maintain. Moreover, it threatens to infiltrate and to contaminate these very systems.
By stating that normal laws, meaning those which govern European societies,
cannot function in India, the Ambassador points out how the established order of the
West becomes corrupted here.
There is thus a definite link between the realms of the inside and the
outside in this text, where the latter threatens disorder, even death for the former, as
one o f the reception guests points out, les suicides d'Europeens augmentent avec les
famines"{%0). Duras herself, in her resume at the end of the play, expresses this
distinction between the two worlds, simultaneously separate yet intertwined, that
make up her fictional India:
Lhistoire est une histoire d amour immobilisee dans la culminance de
la passion. Autour d elle une autre histoire, celle de lhorreur famine
et lepre melees dans lhumidite pestilentielle de la mousson immobilisee
elle aussi dans un paroxysme quotidien. (148)
In the above citation, Duras draws a line between the two dramatic spaces at
play in the text. The internal story is characterized by love and passion, whereas the
external story, one which not only touches on, but actually surrounds the former, is
206
depicted through horror, famine, leprosy, pestilence and storm. The two stories
nevertheless mirror each other, both reaching their highest degree of intensity in what
Duras terms paradoxically as an everyday paroxysm. Reflected in the comment
about how the suicides among the Europeans increase with the famine, the outer
realm beyond the embassy walls appears to impose a mortal threat for the inner
enclaves of White India. As the Europeans associate this "outer reality of India
with deprivation, poverty, destruction, death, illness, and madness, they also perceive
it as a distorted and dangerous reflection of their own world. They therefore suffer
from an acute anxiety stemming from the apparent danger of a distanced Other, the
resonances from which are felt within their own world. For them, the outside world
of India presages the contamination and death of the European system.
In light of this, it is interesting to note that during the course of the play, the
characters speak at length o f the pending arrival of the monsoon. In fact, the embassy
reception of the second act is the last one which can be held before the storms hit in
full. There exists therefore, in the approaching shadow of the Indian rains, a sense of
urgency among the Europeans, as one woman tells another at the beginning of act two:
Jamais de soleil. Pendant six mois... Vous verrez On ne dort plus... On attend les
o ra g es...'\59). A weather phenomenon specifically connected to the East, the
monsoon can be seen as a metaphor for this ominous force from the outside which
threatens to disrupt the order of the Europeans. Even the pianos, epitome of Western
culture, and which are heard throughout India Song playing music imported from
207
Europe, go out of tune once the rains begin (83). Once again, one can see how the
realm of the outside is characterized by discord and instability, and how it threatens to
introduce chaos into the closed circles of white India.
This outside realm is also tainted with disease, specifically leprosy, which is,
in turn, coupled with madness. During the reception, the wife of the Secretary of the
Spanish embassy recounts to the Vice-consul the story of a woman who became
insane, convinced that she had contracted the disease:
...la femme d un secretaire, chez nous, elle devenait folie,
elle croyait quelle lavait attrapee... impossible de lui
enlever cette idee de la tete... il a fallu la renvoyer a Madrid. (87)
Leprosy is thus specifically linked to madness. It is also linked to the outside realm of
a menacing India, symbol of disease and death. One guest groups the entire Indian
population with lepers, seeing illness everywhere, and comments, Les lepreux, on les
distingue mal du re ste...'\63). Again, the speaker makes the same distinction I
pointed out earlier between the closed circles of White India and the rest. This
rest is an immense collective noun which serves to separate the us of the
Europeans from the them, which represents not only the Indian people, but also the
threat of illness and of madness.
The image of infectious madness which threatens to invade the embassy
enclaves is represented metaphorically in the play by the pending arrival of the
monsoon. The storms pose a certain danger to the order of the white structures in
India because they bring with them disease, as one woman warns another during the
208
reception, La meilleure hygiene pendant la mousson(13). It is as if the white

Europeans must scrub themselves clean lest they be contaminated by the very air
brought in by the infectious rains. During the opening dialogue between the two
female voices, one questions the other about the strange odor which has seeped into
the embassy salon. Voice 2 answers emphatically, L a
l e p r e ( sic)
(19). Similarly in
the fourth act, voice 1 says, L'air sent la vase. Et la lepre. Et le feu"{ 112), thereby
drawing a parallel between the mud left by the monsoon rains, leprosy, and the fires of
the crematoriums where the victims of famine and disease are systematically burned
each night. The outside world has thus already begun to infiltrate the inner sanctum of
the embassy circles, bringing with it a morbid smell of madness and illness.
In addition to the monsoon, several other performative elements in the play
indicate that the outside world has already begun to invade the inner realms of white
India. First, there is the invisible presence o f the indigenous servants who
repeatedly pass silently through the rooms throughout the performance. Although
they have no scripted dialogue in the text, Duras specifically mentions them several
times in the stage directions: Domestiques qui passent, regulierement'Xl \ ). None of
the other characters appear to pay any particular notice to the servants, yet their
presence is a conspicuous reminder that the indigenous population, the rest, has
indeed infiltrated the inner spaces of the embassy enclaves. Another sign of the Indian
presence within the embassy walls is the series of shouts of the Indian fishermen and
merchants which filter in through the windows. In the stage directions, Duras refers to
209
these sounds collectively as the noise of Calcutta: le bruit de Calcutta: rumeur

forte, majeure. Autour: rumeurs diverses: cris reguliers des marchands. Cfiiens.
Appels lointains"(21). Like the smell of death from the crematoriums, the noise of the
Indian population wafts in through the windows like an invisible sign of the outside
world. Finally, there is the ever-present voice of the beggar-woman from
Savannakhet, whose puzzling song is a recurrent motif throughout the performance.
All these performative elements remind the spectator that, despite the stone walls and
iron gates, the Europeans cannot close out completely the invasive power of outer
India.
Between these two realms of the threatening outside India and the protective
inside embassy, there is the park, which acts as an intermediary buffer. In
performance, this becomes a liminal space just outside the windows of the interior
performance space, and as the interior scene changes from the embassy salon to the
Prince o f Wales to the Ambassadors residence, the exterior space transforms from a
park, to a hotel garden, to the sea. However, the primary stage setting is not actually
meant to change significantly as the performance progresses, as the stage directions
indicate at the beginning o f the fourth act: C est toujours le meme lieu. 11 devient un
salon du Prince of WaJes(123). Consequently, upstage windows, whether they be in
the embassy, the island hotel, or the residence on the ocean, always open out to that
buffer space just outside the private interior room. This is a transitional zone
between the closed circles of White India, represented by the salons, and the
210
ominous outside, represented by the monsoon, the crematoriums, and the ocean, all
of which lie just beyond the buffer space. This near-exterior zone exists, therefore,
between the realms of madness and reason, and it is in this space that the two
characters who are most definitively established as "mad in the text are most
prom inent- the Vice-consul and the beggar-woman from Savannakhet. Both of these
characters move into this liminal space from the "outside. For a greater part of the
performance, they linger in this transitional space, as if unable to penetrate into the
innermost sanctum of the embassy. In fact, the single time that the Vice-consul does
actually enter the inner room of the reception, he commits an act of un-reason and is
promptly escorted back outside. It is also through this transitional space that AnneMarie Stretter must pass in the final moments of the play, as she gives in to madness
and walks into the sea.
Rejected by her mother because she was discovered to be pregnant, the beggarwoman from Savannakhet, we are told by the off-stage voices, spent ten years walking
from her home in Laos to Calcutta. Here she appears to follow the Whites, in
particular Anne-Marie Stretter, who is haunted by her presence wherever she goes.
"Elle est tout a fa it folie, the Young Attache remarks during the second act (89).
Later in the play, specifically linking madness to the breakdown of language, as
Kristeva does in Black Sun, an un-named friend of the Stretters describes the beggarwomans inability to communicate through any established system of expression. In
the fourth act, he tells Georges Crawn:
211
Ce qui reste d elle a Calcutta? Tres peu de chose... Ce chant de

Savannakhet, ce rire... la langue natale il est vrai, intacte, mais
sans emploi aucun. La folie etait deja la quand elle est arrivee...
trop avancee deja... (135)
This citation is of particular interest, because the final enigmatic assertion that
madness was already there when she arrived [in Calcutta] can be read to go beyond
the description of just the beggar-woman herself. The speaker seems to suggest that a
condition of madness was already present in Calcutta before the beggar-womans
arrival, and that the beggar-woman is just another visible sign of a pervading state of
un-reason which is lying latent in White India. Again, this remark highlights the
notion that an outer madness has already begun to seep into the closed circles of the
embassy society long before the plays action begins.
Even when she is physically absent from the stage, the beggar-woman makes
her presence known through her mysterious chant, the song of Savannakhet, which
next to the repeated strains of India Song is the most frequently heard tune in the
play. During the reception, the beggar-woman suddenly appears in the embassy park,
where she gazes at the guests from among the garden foliage: "La mendiante apparait
dans le pare. Elle se cache derriere un b u isso n '\ll). In this, the beggar-woman
seems somewhat unearthly, or un-graspable. Logically, a woman of her social
standing would not be permitted to enter the embassy park through a gate which is
strictly guarded. And, although she herself is not a leper, the beggar-woman is
intrinsically associated with leprosy because of her social standing, and because of her
212
proximity to the leper colonies along the Ganges, where she sleeps. She moves in,
like the odor of leprosy and the sound of the monsoon rains, as a delegate of the
outside world who has managed to penetrate the inner sanctuary of the European
milieu.
In the second act, Durass stage directions describe her as a oiseau de nuit"
( 8 8 ), who peers out among the plants in the garden and gazes at Anne-Marie Stretter.
No student o f Duras would fail to note the striking similarity of this moment with the
traumatic incident which launched the madness of Lola Valerie Stein, the protagonist
of Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein when the girl watched her fiance fall in love with
Anne Marie Stretter during a ball in S. Tahla. This moment is recounted by Voice 1
in the opening moments of India Song: "Derriere les plantes vertes du bar, elle les
regarde [... ] Elle n 'a jam ais gueri, la jeune fille de S. Tahla"(36-37). This comment
refers to Lols breakdown and extended depression after she realized that Michael
Richardson had fallen in love with another woman. It is this pervasive melancholia in
Lol which becomes an object of obsession for the narrator of Le Ravissement de Lol
V. Stein, and thus the central theme of the novel. When the beggar-woman peers out
at Anne-Marie Stretter and Michael Richardson from among the leaves, she mirrors
Lol in the ballroom in S. Tahla at the moment that Lol passes from the realm of reason
into the realm of madness. Although the audience of India Song know only fragments
of the beggar-womans history, the connection between her and Lol. V. Stein further
reinforces her position as a symbol of madness. Her penetrating gaze, just like Lols,
213
is another indication of how this madness moves to contaminate the social order of the
other characters. When Voice 2 later says that Lola wanted to follow the lovers of the
Ganges, to watch them (38), she could just as easily be speaking about the beggarwoman, who follows Anne-Marie Stretter and Michael Richardson to the Prince o f
Wales hotel and to the Ambassadors residence on the island, where she remains, as
always, outside, watching. She is thereby a constant reminder of the un-nameabie
madness which lies just outside the doors of the inner spaces of reason. And, like Lol,
she remains untouched in her madness, like in a state of grace, more innocent than the
insiders.
This comment by Voice 2 about the desire to watch, to observe, can equally
apply to the Vice-consul, who, like the beggar-woman from Savannakhet, pursues
Anne-Marie Stretter wherever he goes. In fact the text elicits many parallels between
the Vice-consul and the beggar-woman. Like her, the Vice-consul is persistently
associated with leprosy, and thereby with madness. From the beginning of the play,
the Vice-consul is shunned by the diplomatic circles in Calcutta, because of an
incident at his previous post in Lahore, where he randomly shot at the lepers in the
gardens outside his residence. Les nerfs qui ont lache"{64), one party guest tells
another during the reception. The Vice-consul refuses to let go of this crime, uttering
to Anne-Marie Stretter in act two, Les autres me separent de Lahore. Je ne m 'en
separe pas. C est moi Lahore"{91). By identifying himself with Lahore, he explicitly
associates himself with disease and madness. Not drunk while he fired on the lepers,
214
one must assume that he was mad (90). This double connection between the Viceconsul and leprosy, and thereby madness, is further underlined in the conversation he
has while dancing with the wife of the secretary of the Spanish embassy; he exclaims,
je n 'ai pas peur de la lepre"{%l). This comment is later recalled during a
conversation between two other women:
II lui a dit quil souhaitait attraper la lepre.
- Un fou... (93)
His loss of reason becomes all the more poignant when he suddenly breaks into
instantaneous laughter in the middle of Act Two, as one woman comments to another,
Comme s il etait fou de bonheur tout d un coup"(69, emphasis mine). Throughout the
play, the Vice-consul comes off as unbalanced and unpredictable; in this sense one
may say he is a source of discord in the world of reason maintained by the inner
circles of White India. The Vice-consuls madness reaches its climax at the end of
Act Two, as the diplomatic reception draws to a close. He is seen wandering through
the embassy park, screaming out the name of Anne-Marie Stretter, the woman he
loves. His shouts further reinforce his connection to the beggar-woman of
Savannakhet, whose mysterious chant is heard continuously throughout the
performance.
Where the Vice-consuls madness differs most significantly from that of the
beggar-woman, however, is that, whereas she goes relatively un-noticed by most of
the embassy society, his presence inspires visible fear and disgust. Immediately after
215
the Vice-consul enters the stage in the second act, for example, one of the guests
criticizes her hostess for having invited such a social outcast to the reception: "Elle
aurait pu nous eviter cette presence genante(62). Moments later, the Ambassador is
overheard telling the Young Attache, "Les gens s ecartent de lui, je sais... ilfait
peur..."{ 6 6 ). Indeed, people avoid the Vice-consul as if he were diseased, as if his
presence alone threatened to contaminate them. When he eventually enters the
reception, Duras writes in the stage indications, "deux ou trois couples cirrivent dans
le pare, comme s ils fuyaient I homme de Lahore'\%5). Here again, the Vice-consuls
identity as the man of Lahore underlines his position as an outsider, a man more
readily associated with the outside India than with Europe. When the wife of the
Secretary of the Spanish embassy leaves him during their dance, one of the guests
supposes that he must have frightened her in some way (8 8 ), and as he moves in to
speak with Anne-Marie Stretter, the entire reception becomes tainted with a "legere
peur"{ 89).
Despite his European origins, the Vice-consul is not part of the inner circles of
White India. In fact, his public breakdown at the end of Act Two occurs after
Anne-Marie Stretter refuses his request to remain after the reception with her cercle
intime. Once again, the Vice-consul is relegated to the realm of the outside, never
able to fully assimilate into the protected interior ruled over by Anne-Marie Stretter.
As he is told by an unidentified guest at the end of the reception, "le personnage que
vous etes ne nous interesse que lorsque vous etes absent"(102). The arbiters of polite
216
society, represented by the guests at the embassy reception, therefore draw a clear
distinction between their position and his. The Vice-consul, identified with all the
horror which is the outside realm of India, with its disease and madness, remains
always on the margins of the European social order. His demand to become
integrated into the most intimate clique of the embassy world is a disruption of the
social system, where madness must be kept at a distance. Anne-Marie Stretter cannot
accept his request to remain with her group of intimes after the reception, because it
would signify her willing acceptance of an outer contaminant within her closed inner
circle.
In her work Welcome Unreason, Raynelle Udris specifically analyzes the
interplay between inner and outer realms in the Durasian text:
the Vice-consul, in spite o f his more positive and assertive mode of
existence, finally repeats or duplicates the fate of the beggar-woman.
At the end of the Embassy reception the Vice-consuls situation is
indeed [...] assimilated to the beggar-womans physical predicament.
The Vice-consul joins the same geographical place of exclusion, the
place of madness and contagion, outside the safety of the gates [...]
suggesting the assimilation of the Vice-consul to leprosy and to the
threat of unreason which the latter symbolises . 14
The Vice-consul represents the instability and the danger associated with the
threatening outer realm. Unlike the beggar-woman, he is all the more threatening for
white society because he himself is a European who has been effectively contaminated
14 Udris 118. Although Raynalle Udris is writing about Duras's novel Le Vice-consul, and not India
Song, the two works have many of the same narrative strains in common, and certainly, the positioning
of the Vice-consul within an outer realm of madness is equally pertinent to both texts.
217
by the illness associated with outer India. He therefore manifests what is most
disturbing for the Europeans about their place in this foreign world, that is, the all too
visible possibility that they themselves are in danger of becoming mad. He therefore
represents an obtrusive and uncomfortable reminder of the potential infection of the
inner world of Reason by the outer world of madness.
Having thus examined the binary universe at play in India Song, with the
interior social system o f the Europeans on one side, and the looming madness of
outer India on the other, I will now explore how this outer world does successfully
contaminate the inner realm through the budding madness of the plays protagonist
Anne-Marie Stretter. Anne-Marie Stretters existence, in fact, puts the binary itself
into question. As I will show, Anne-Marie Stretter begins in the world of reason; in
man}- ways she is the proverbial queen bee of the European system. Although she
can be seen as being already tormented at the beginning of India Song, she remains
safe because she observes the social conventions. Gradually however, due to the
persistent interference of the beggar-woman of Savannakhet and the Vice-consul,
whose shadows loom in the margins of White India, she becomes, in a sense,
infected with their madness, and passes over completely into the world of the
unstable outside. By so doing, she heralds the overarching transformation of the
space of reason into a space of madness.
Several comments during the performance indicate Anne-Marie Stretters
position as firmly embedded within the order of the European milieu. Her story
218
effectively begins inside established social circles. During her childhood, she excelled
in classical music, as one guest tells another at the reception, Elle etait un espoir de
la musique europeenne" (82). Described as beyond reproach, she is admired by the
European diplomats for her charity work and for her unfailing sense of duty as the
wife of an ambassador: "Irreprochable. Passez derriere les cuisines, vous verrez des
grands recipients d'eau fraiche pour les mendiants. C'est elle qui... Irreprochable...(70). Although she is not faithful to her husband, she is discreet, and
the Ambassador accepts her infidelities as a normal function of their marriage.
Visibly, Anne-Marie Stretter fulfills her role as hostess and ambassadrice with the
utmost subtlety, and her days are spent in much the same manner as those of any other
European woman in Calcutta: games of tennis, excursions with her daughters, visits
to the embassy offices, and diplomatic receptions. She even discouraged her husband
from pursuing his interest in poetry, thereby reinforcing his position within the
structured bureaucracy (62). As the play progresses, however, the audience becomes
increasingly aware of a transformation in Anne-Marie Stretter. This femme
irreprochable shows signs of becoming gradually corrupted by madness.
To say that Anne-Marie Stretter suddenly goes mad in the course of this play
would no doubt be hasty and simplistic. Unlike the distressed Blanche of Henri
Becques Les Corbeaux, Durass character does not begin the play in a state of
perfect reason, then suffer a clearly defined trauma which sends her off suddenly
into a state of un-reason. She may be embedded within the conventions of society at
219
the opening of India Song, however, there are several references in this text which
indicate that, despite her function as a leader of the social circles of White India,
Anne-Marie Stretter betrays a latent madness which eventually comes to a head at the
end of the text, when she walks into the Ganges.
In many ways, Anne-Marie Stretter fulfills Kristevas description of the severe
melancholic, suffering from what the author describes as the Durasian malady of
grief . 15 At one point during the reception, one of the guests describes her as a
prisoner of misery(7 1). She has been seen weeping by herself in the park, and one
of the embassy guests recounts how she sometimes locks herself away, literally
closing herself off from the other Europeans: On dit que parfois elle traverse des
crises... graves(8 1). In the opening scene, the stage directions describe the
protagonist as statufiee dans ses larmes," and mouillee de I eau de larmes"(35).16
The two off-stage voices comment on Anne-Marie Stretters unexplained depression,
calling her Une lepre, du coeur'\34). Indeed, from the initial moments of the play,
Anne-Marie Stretter is linked, albeit indirectly, to disease and unreasonableness.
Like that menacing outside world which is characterized simultaneously
through a lexicon of monsoons, of leprosy, and of the starving masses outside the
embassy gates, the basic identity of Anne-Marie Stretter is never definitively fixed.
Like the schizo of Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus, the protagonist of India
15 Kristeva 220.
16 It is interesting to note that the only other character in India Song who explicitly shows signs of grief
is the Vice-consul, who, as we have seen, is specifically designated as mad in the text.
220
Song exists as a kind of fluid image, always just out of reach of the other characters
understanding. Although, unlike the beggar-woman and the Vice-consul, Anne-Marie
Stretter is able to function within the established system, she appears to have her own
system of coordinates for situating herself which does not coincide completely with
the established social codes. Always enigmatic, she becomes the source of obsession
for the Europeans, who gradually construct a larger-than-life myth of this woman who
remains always for them un-graspable.
The best description of Anne-Marie Stretters condition lies probably in the
characters own words, when she tells the Young Attache who has just asked her to
dance, je ne suis tenue a rien(86). She exists as a kind of floating signifier,
unattached and unascribed. This is certainly true of her relationships with other
people. Her first husband brought her from her native Italy to Indochina; she then left
her husband to marry Stretter, and together, they traveled throughout Asia before
settling in Calcutta. She seems incapable of giving herself completely to one man,
however, and despite her marriage to the Ambassador, she maintains several lovers, as
one woman tells another during the reception, On dit que ses amants sont anglais,
etrangers au milieu des ambassades(18). She is thus drawn to men from the
outside, strangers who, like her, have difficulty acclimating, and therefore remain
somewhat isolated. During the course of the play, Anne-Marie Stretter moves
physically from one man to another, coupled at one moment with Michael Richardson,
at another, the Vice-consul, at another the Young Attache. Voice 2 tells Voice 1 in
221
the first act, Elle est a qui veut d elle"(46). This statement becomes clearly
contradictory, however, as the play moves on, and the audience witnesses the intense
outbursts of the Vice-consul who suffers for the very fact that she does not belong"
to him. In fact it is as if nobody can quite get a grasp on Anne-Marie Stretter.
Even during those few moments in the performance when the spectators
actually hear Anne-Marie Stretter speak, her own motivations emerge as shifting and
unstable:
s: Ce nest ni penible ni agreable de vivre aux Indes.
Ni facile ni difficile. Ce nest rien... vous voyez... rien...
J. a t t a c h e : (temps) Vous voulez dire que c est impossible?
a .-M. S: C est-a-dire... (Legerete adorable de la voix) ... Peut-etre...
oui... (Sourire dans la voix) Mais a ce point, vous voyez, cest
sans doute une simplification... (82)
a .- m .
Her speech patterns recall those described by Julia Kristeva in her analysis of the
melancholics breakdown in communication, where the depressed person falls into a
pattern of expression marked by scattered signs, checked sequences, conveying the
collapse of meaning into the un-nameable . 17 Through her persistent use of
fragmentary and contradictory speech, Anne-Marie Stretter eludes definition and
classification. It is this type of rupture in the conventional system of signs and
referents that Kristeva asserts is the last human shield against an individual's complete
passage into madness. Anne-Marie Stretter becomes, in this sense, un-definable.
Though the text seems to be an attempt to reconstruct the events which led up to her
17 Kristeva 52.
222
suicide, none of the voices in the play ever seem to gain a firm understanding of their
focal character. In this manner, Anne-Marie Stretter always remains on the outskirts
of their codes, moving ever closer to the always present yet elusive outer realm, and to
madness.
The inconsistencies which make up Anne-Marie Stretters identity permeate
even her name and nationality. She is at once Anne-Marie Stretter, wife of the French
Ambassador in Calcutta, and Anna Maria Guardi, the child musician from Venice.
Her mother was Italian, and her father was French, though she herself is often
mistaken for English. Je vous ai crue anglaise la premiere fois," the Young Attache
tells her in the middle of the second act; she responds, " f a arrive quelquefois"(&3).
Just moments later, an unidentified party guest comments on the Italian inflections"
in Anne-Marie Stretters voice, a trait which another guest remarks may be the cause
of her enigmatic distance: c 'est peut-etre qa qui prive de... de la presence... cette
origine etrangere?{84). She is thus marked from the start as being a foreigner and,
despite her central role within the embassy circles, somewhat of an outsider, an
intriguing mystery, as one man comments to another during the reception, Comme
elle intrigue cette fem m e"(81). After her death, she is buried in the English cemetery
in Calcutta, and even there her identity remains vague, her original name erased :
voix 1: Anne-Marie Stretter ecrit sur la tombe?
voix 2: Anna Maria Guardi. Efface. (44)
223
Anne-Marie Stretters identity is a blur at best. Her name, her nationality, her
relationships are all tainted with a sense of instability, and she remains always just out
of reach from those who attempt to understand her. She exists, in a sense, through a
mode of absence.
It is this absence which systematically links Anne-Marie Stretter to the two
most obvious symbols of the outer realm of madness in the play, the beggar-woman
from Savannakhet and the Vice-consul of Lahore. All three characters share a kind of
nomadic existence, and cannot be fixed in any one location. Like the beggar-woman,
Anne-Marie Stretters seventeen-year voyage around Asia began in Laos. Leaving her
husband in Savannakhet, she traveled with Stretter through the Far-Eastern capitals,
including the Vice-consuls Lahore, as Voice 2 recalls in the first act:
On la trouve a Pekin.
Et puis a Mandalay.
A Bangkok.
On la trouve a Bangkok.
A Rangoon. A Sydney.
On la trouve a Lahore.
Dix-sept ans.
On la trouve a Calcutta. (43-44)
During the embassy reception, the disgraced Vice-consul awaits his next assignment,
not knowing whether or not he will be permitted to remain in Calcutta. One of the
guests comments in Act Two: /7s I enverront ailleurs(10), and the Vice-consul
himself later tells the Young Attache, Qu 'on m 'envoie ou on voudra(16). The only
thing which actually remains fixed for these characters is the fact that the three of
224
them appear spatially linked. They form a kind of inseparable triangle, always in
close physical proximity to each other even as they are, in a sense, floating in a no
mans land, belonging to no one.
The three of them are equally tainted with the specter of disease and death.
Throughout the play, the Vice-consul is described as morbidly pale and gaunt. One of
the guests at the reception comments, Quelle maigreur... et ce visage... comme
greffe... quelle pcileur'X65). Moments later, another guest makes a similar
observation Le visage est comme morf'(12), and later another voice remarks, "La
voix... ecoutez la voix... blanche"(73).
In much the same way, Anne-Marie Stretter
is referred to in the first act simply as "la blanche or as "la morte du Gange'X32),
and in the third act, the two female voices appear to confuse the protagonist with the
beggar-woman in a mysterious textual interplay of sleep and leprosy:
voix 2: Elle dort?
voix 1: Laquelle?
voix 2: La Blanche.
voix 1: Non. Elle se repose [...]
voix 1: Est-elle lepreuse?
voix 2: Laquelle?
voix 1: La mendiante.
voix 2: Elle dort dans la l&pre et chaque m atin... non...
(115-117)
Similarly, during the final moments of the play, as Anne-Marie Stretter approaches
her death, the Vice-consul, the man who brought death to Lahore(90), is described
as a deathly ghost: "Dehors I'ombre blanche de Lahore devore du regard"( 142). By
the end of the play, Anne-Marie Stretter is on the verge of being devoured by
225
madness. As the Vice-consul foreshadowed during the embassy reception when he

told her, Vous etes en moi. Je vous emmenerai en tnoi [...] Nous sommes les memes"
(97-98), Anne-Marie Stretter, at the end of the play, is about to pass from the
"reasonable world of the inner circles of "White India to the outer world of madness
and death, to that realm inhabited by the Vice-consul, the beggar-woman, and the
looming vague threat of disease and chaos which is India. It is in fact the Viceconsul who remains silently watching at the close of the final act, as Anne-Marie
Stretter strips off her clothing before leaving the interior space of the Ambassadors
residence, to step fully into the realm of the outside.
India Song is not a play about Anne-Marie Stretters madness post facto. The
performance comes to a close the moment she passes from the interior realm of the
established social order to the outer realm of un-reason. The play ends with AnneMarie Stretter just on the edge of madness, just before she allows herself to enter fully
the world of the Vice-consul and the beggar-woman. It is more appropriate, then, to
say that Durass text deals rather with Anne-Marie Stretters course of becoming mad,
or better, of allowing herself to inhabit fully the process toward un-reason during
those final two days of her life when she gives in to the latent madness within herself.
It is important to note that Anne-Marie Stretters act of suicide is only treated
peripherally in the text/performance. The audience never sees the act itself, only her
motion toward it, and although the off-stage voices repeatedly refer to their focal
character as "la morte du Gange, Anne-Marie Stretter is in fact very much alive
226
throughout the course of the performance. She is thus never definitively finished" in
the play, never fully understood, never totally mad, never quite dead.
Reflecting back to Mikhail Bakhtins theories on the dialogic imagination, one
can see India Song as a polyphonic, or dialogic text, and its protagonist as the
unfmalizeable hero. Like Bakhtins model for the dialogic human condition, Durass
text insists on the conjunction between being and event, that is, the notion that
human consciousness is always in the process of becoming', it is never a finalized
product. As I have shown, Anne-Marie Stretter can never be wholly known because
she is perpetually un-finished, so to speak. Her identity is constantly in flux, always
shifting and unfolding, and therefore always just beyond other persons attempts to
classify or to define her according to any established codes of representation. She
moves ever closer to the realm of madness, yet she is never definitively mad, in the
way in which the Vice-consul and the beggar-woman are mad. Moreover, since the
text itself deals not with the defined act, but with the process of becoming that is,
Anne-Marie Stretters being is the event of the play- - India Song remains in
process.
Duras underlines this process o f madness in her text through the cryptic
dialogue of the four off-stage voices which dominate the play. India Song is not
performed in so-called real time. It is a story reconstructed through fragments of
memories and subjective ruminations by off-stage voices which are removed from the
227
main characters both by time and distance. In the final summary of the play, Duras
writes,
Lhistoire de cet amour, les voix lont sue, ou lue, il y a longtemps.
Certaines sen souviennent mieux que d autres. Mais aucune ne sen
souvient tout a fait et aucune, non plus, ne la tout a fait oubliee. (147)
The voices are guided by their own intense obsession, their unreasonable desire for a
woman who is long since dead. The voices are indeed mad, as Duras writes in her
opening remarks, les voix de ces femmes sont atteintes de folie'X 11). It is these
voices that are responsible for setting the play in motion, and it is these voices who, in
a sense, keep Anne-Marie Stretter alive long after her death. At the beginning of each
act they identify the setting and the characters, and they describe and comment upon
the underlying motivations which propel the various situations which are enacted on
stage. In this manner, the voices act as stand-ins for the author, appearing to create
the story of India Song while the audience is watching. Since the spectators never
actually see any of the characters speaking on stage, they are guided through the story
solely through the third-person narratives of the disembodied voices, who, although
distanced from the focal characters, remain beset with these characters lives and
emotions. India Song can thus be read not only as a play about the ascertained
madness of the Vice-consul and the beggar-woman from Savannakhet, and the gradual
passage into madness by Anne-Marie Stretter, but also, as a work about the remnant
madness of four off-stage voices, atteintes de folie," and their fixation on a world
now lost. In this sense, the madness which contaminates Anne-Marie Stretter in the
228
course of the performance continues to contaminate her world many years after the
time-frame of the play. The off-stage voices contaminate also the readers and
spectators ability to comprehend Anne-Marie Stretter.
One of the most remarkable aspects of this text, as with most of Durass texts
which deal with madness, is that Anne-Marie Stretter, much like Lol V. Stein and
Suzannes mother, despite their passage into un-reason, retain an inherent sensuality
that fascinates, rather than repulses, the audience. This is partly due to the fact that
India Song, as I have mentioned, focuses on the process of becoming mad rather than
the post-facto assertion of madness. Anne-Marie Stretter remains seductive because
she is mysterious and un-graspable. Also, physically, the character is highly
sensuous. On stage she stretches out her body on the sofa and underneath the fan, and
in the final moments o f the play, she undresses entirely. Although, as we have seen,
she is contaminated by madness, she is also an unwitting contaminant, becoming the
source of obsession for the off-stage voices, and consequently for the spectators in the
house. Her process into madness is thus inherently linked to the desire which she
inspires among the other characters and among the spectators. It is a process which
retains an overarching sense of sublime sensuality.
In this sense, Anne-Marie Stretter can be seen as what Deleuze and Guattari
term a desiring-machine. In their work Anti-Oedipus, the authors posit that within
the realm of desiring-production there is no distinction between the social
production of reality and the personal production of desire and fantasy. Unlike the
229
traditional psychoanalytical model which asserts that desire functions to produce

fantasies that serve as imaginary doubles of reality, the model of desiringproduction proposes that desire produces its own reality independent of what is
conventionally conceived as the given, or established reality. The story of India
Song is conceived out of a desire for Anne-Marie Stretter, a desire manifested in the
characters within the play as well as a desire which is played out between the off-stage
voices who are recounting the story. The stage directions indicate at the beginning of
Act One: "La Voix I se brule a I'histoire d Anne-Marie Stretter. Et la voix 2 se bride
a sa passion pour la voix / (11). Out of this burning passion the voices, which
assume an authorial position vis-a-vis the visible characters, create the reality of
Anne-Marie Stretter. It is as if Duras seems to highlight, through the presence of the
off-stage voices, a process of artistic creation born out of desire. The focus of this
process is Anne-Marie Stretter, whose passage into madness becomes emblematic of a
new reality. She represents the process of desiring-production in that she gives
herself over completely to the world of unreason, allowing the outer madness to
penetrate her completely. At the end of the play, she becomes fused with the beggarwoman and with the Vice-consul, and through the loss of her rational ego, she comes
to represent pure desire.18 She passes into the schizophrenic state, into a reality
beyond what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the false consciousness of established
18 For a more detailed analysis of this process of desire in the prose works of Duras, see Raynalle Udris:
149.
230
codes. By the end of the play she has shed her public imago and passed completely
into the realm of desire.
What the spectator encounters in a performance of India Song is the
confrontation of two different social structures, the inner circles of the embassy
enclaves and the outer India. These are reminiscent of the two conditions of the
social machine which are outlined by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: the
segregative and the nomadic. In Deleuze and Guattaris depiction of the modern
social state, these two realms are each defined according to a separate and distinct
position of desire, where the segregative, or capitalist, realm functions according to
the Oedipal structure. The White society of India Song, with Anne-Marie Stretter at
its center, corresponds to this segregative group, a closed world of established reason.
The outer realm, represented by the native Indians, the monsoon, leprosy, as well as
the itinerant mad characters of the Vice-consul and the beggar-woman from
Savannakhet, can be seen as corresponding to the nomadic group, which does not
structure itself according to established systems. During the course of India Song, the
inner segregative socius is gradually contaminated and taken over by the outer
nomadic group, a process represented by the passage into madness of the white
societys icon, Anne-Marie Stretter. What this process into madness represents, then,
is the coming-together of two realms, a multi-level dialogue between opposing forces.
This is a new space of creative understanding, a space where eventually reason is
defeated, pushed out, formulating in its place a space of un-reason, where the system
231
of coordinates which conventionally define an individual gives way to a reality

characterized by an aesthetic of fluidity. It is this realm of madness that becomes for
the characters, as well as for the author- - whose presence is reflected through the off
stage voices- - a space of independent creation.
232
CONCLUSION
In the opening phase of this project, I explored the manner by which the
scientific community of the nineteenth century established an iconography of madness
which reinforced certain cultural stereotypes already inscribed within the collective
social unconscious. By identifying and codifying specific body contortions, gestures
and facial expressions as indications of an unreasonable mind, European
phrenologists and the clinicians of the Salpetriere standardized madness according to a
strict code of visual signs. These signs promoted a binary system for understanding
the human condition, where the distinction between reason and madness was clearly
articulated through specific visual clues. I do not mean to imply that all the work that
came out of the burgeoning psychiatric community of the nineteenth century was
invalid or detrimental to the understanding of the human psyche. The major advances
in psychotherapy which occurred in the first half of the twentieth century, and which
laid the groundwork for the psychoanalytic research which is still in practice to this
day would have been impossible were it not for the scientific research conducted by
the neurologists and psychiatrists of the nineteenth century. Sigmund Freud was, after
all, himself a student of Charcot and the Salpetriere school.
The focus of my examination, however, remains with the more sensational
side of the psychiatric studies of the nineteenth century, those scientific publications
and clinical demonstrations which entered into the realm of public entertainment. The
tomes of the Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere (1875-1880),

Lombrosos studies of the faces of criminality (1878), and the series of
phrenological studies which were published in the American journal Popular Science
Monthly in the second half of the nineteenth century did not cater exclusively to a
public of scientific or medical scholars. These publications, much like Charcot's
Friday-afternoon lectures at the clinical theatre of the Salpetriere, had a wide audience
which was fascinated and titillated by the visual curiosities which distinguished
reasonable society from the mad Other. Charcot himself referred to the Salpetriere as
his own pathological museum, 1 an immense resource for the observation and
classification of the physical manifestations of madness in society.
It would be difficult to deny the conspicuous theatricality which accompanied
these demonstrations. The subject-patients, usually though not exclusively young
women, passed through a series of rigorous screenings before they were selected to
provide a visual portrayal of the mental afflictions which were the subject of a given
lecture. Under the influence of ether and hypnosis, their hair loose and their bodices
unfastened, they would perform various poses of hysterical madness before an
audience of primarily male spectators. Behind the subject, the stage was set with a
collection of enormous graphs, charts, photographs, and wax moldings. This was
indeed a theatre of madness, complete with its own vedette Blanche Wittman, who
1Nous sommes [...] en possession dune sorte de musee pathologique vivant, dont les ressources sont
considerables." Jean-Martin Charcot, "Lemons sur les maladies du systeme nerveux," Oeuvres
completes III (Paris: Lecrosnier & Babe, 1886) 3. See also Georges Didi-Huberman. Invention de
I'Hysterie (Paris: Macula, 1982).
like Augustine and Genevieve, most favored models of the Iconographie

photographique de la Salpetriere, performed designated cliches of madness with
utmost precision and regularity.
What is most interesting about the Salpetriere studies is that the drawings and
photographs of the Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere reproduce many of
the same visual stereotypes of madness which adorn the pages of nineteenth-century
acting guides. The photographed poses of Augustine which make up the series
"Attitudes passionnelles in the second volume of the Iconographie could easily
stand side by side with publicity photographs of Sarah Bernhardts Lady Macbeth or
Marella Sembrichs Lucia de Lammermoor. Also, many of Richers often
exaggerated clinical drawings represent visual signs of madness remarkably similar to
the performers faces of madness described in Henry Siddons Practical
Illustrations o f Rhetorical Gesture and Action (1822) and Edmund Shaftesburys
Lessons in the Art o f Facial Expression (1889). It is noteworthy to add here as well
that in 1887, Charcot and Richer published a work entitled Les Demoniaques dans
I art, where the authors localize and classify distinct poses of madness in paintings by,
among others, Andrea del Sarto, Raphael, and Rubens. It is impossible to ascertain
whether the stereotyped images of madness in art and performance were influenced by
scientific observations, or whether clinical studies drew from those images which
were already inscribed within the arts. What one can gather from a study of both the
more sensationalist clinical studies of insanity and the various performance guides of
235
the nineteenth century is that there existed in pre-World War I Europe a prescribed
logos of madness, an authoritative discourse, to use Bakhtins term, which established
a clear distinction between what was considered reasonable, and therefore of social
productive value, and what was considered mad.
The authoritative discourse produced both by the inmate performers at the
Salpetrieres clinical theatre and by the dramatic actors on the Parisian stages
presented a conceptualization of madness which was defined along a strictly
organized code o f physical representation. This was a code which refused any
dialogic interchange between the representatives of sane society and the
marginalized mad subjects. The spectators at both of these theatres regarded
themselves as sane, and therefore in a position of dominance in their society. The
rational audience was able to recognize and identify the mad figures on the stage
because of the clearly defined referents which were enacted by the performers: rolling
eyes, frantic gestures, dropped jaw, and so on. These signs, because they were so
codified and marked as mad, afforded the spectators the luxury and reassurance of
setting themselves in opposition to the mad characters before them. According to this
code of representation, the spectators could identify the stereotyped mad-person as an
individual who has lost his reason and is therefore unable to function productively
within the parameters of a logical and reasonable society.
Furthermore, both in the demonstrations at the Salpetriere and on the dramatic
stage, the mad subject was set in opposition to arbiters of conventional reason. The
236
silent and passive Blanche Wittman provided a stark contrast to Charcot who
described her hysterical affliction to the curious onlookers in his clinical amphitheatre;
the similarly silent and passive Blanche Vigneron stands in opposition to her rational
sisters who discuss her passage into madness in the final act of Henry Becques Les
Corbeaux (1882). In both cases the madness is described from the outside by a
representative of reason. The mad subject remains impenetrable, distant, as if sealed
off in her own reality which remains inaccessible to the reasonable spectator. Thus
set apart from conventional social codes, the mad subject was identified either as a
non-productive curiosity, as in the above examples, or as a source of threat, as in the
popular melodramas of Pixerecourt and Ducange. Madness was rarely depicted as a
potentially positive space for creative production. With the mad subject relegated to a
position outside established ideas of creativity and production, reasonable observers
could be reassured of their own position of authority and of functional value in their
society.
The birth of the avant-garde at the turn of the century, however, heralded a
dramatic epistemological shift in the representation and performance of madness.
Dramatists and cinematographers of the early twentieth century began to experiment
with new techniques for representing the human condition, and often the dramatic
reality which they chose to represent was one rooted not in conventional systems of
reasoning, but rather in madness. Since madness had been so clearly separated from
accepted ideas of being in the world, it provided experimental artists with an open
237
door to new and unusual ways of conceptualizing reality. Madness became, in a

sense, a vehicle for resisting the established logos. Artists and writers began to
explore madness as a space for creative freedom through which they could
communicate a new aesthetic for representing the human condition. This was an
aesthetic of madness whereby the personal reality of the mad subject was no longer
seen as a closed, inaccessible system, viewed from the outside and in opposition to a
point of reference based in conventional codes of social behavior. Instead, the
spectators were invited to experience the mad reality from within, to see the world
through the eyes of a mad-man. On the stage, playwrights such as Georg Buchner and
August Strindberg created a dramatic reality which privileged instability over order,
hallucination and fantasy over rational logic. On the screen, directors such as Abel
Gance and Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer explored unusual camera techniques to
create a visual representation of the world which had been inconceivable in
conventional representational art. In their works, where the perspective was often
based within the mind of a mad subject, any clear point of reference which could mark
the distinct boundaries between reason and insanity disappeared. The audience could
no longer situate itself within the comforting position of dominance in opposition to a
mad Other, because in these works, madness was the only reality of reference.
One of the most remarkable examples of this aesthetic of madness which
was adopted by the avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century can be found in
the writings o f Antonin Artaud, French dramatist and performance theoretician
238
between the wars. Having spent most of his life within the walls of various insane
asylums in France, Artaud inscribed a kind of mad sensibility into both his essays
and his works for the stage. Nearly all his scripts and dramatic scenarios are mental
dramas, and almost all his writing voices a harsh criticism of what he saw as the
arbitrary codes of morality and social authority which govern Western society. Artaud
believed that through theatre, a society is able to reinvent itself, and that through
performance, actors as well as spectators can tap into the innermost reaches of their
subconscious in order to access a new way of being in the world.
Both in his theoretical writings which make up Le Theatre et son double
(1938) and in his theatrical practice on the stage, Artaud sought to place the spectators
at the center of an alternate reality where they would be invited to participate, along
with the performers, in a kind of spiritual transformation. It was the process of the
performance, not the product which held the most meaning for Artaud. Unlike
conventional nineteenth-century theatre, the Artaudian spectacle refused all notions of
fixity, attempting constantly to undermine traditional distinctions between what is
considered rational and what is considered insane. He conceived of theatre, like life,
as a perpetual, ever-changing event. Much like Bakhtins idea of a dialogic reality,
Artauds writing envisioned a theatrical event which would always be subject to
simultaneous conflicting forces, thereby creating a performance which can never be
wholly known, as it is always shifting and unfolding. This Theatre of Cruelty, as he
called it, was an effort to create an unpredictable, un-finalizable, transformative
239
operation, having as its ultimate goal the creation of a new reality beyond established
codes of morality and reason.

Conceiving of a new reality as a plunge into the irrational lies at the heart of
the theoretical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in particular in their
1972 work Anti-Oedipe. These writers also propose an aesthetic of madness, a
conceptualization of the human condition which they refer to as the schizo-reality.
According to this theoretical system, schizophrenia becomes the mode through
which an individual might re-invent himself. As with Bakhtins dialogism and with
Artauds Theatre of Cruelty, the sdiizc-reality denies all established systems of signs
to referents, creating instead a world in which all signs are always in the process of
becoming. For these theoreticians, then, madness is not a space which is inaccessible
or non-productive. They conceive of madness, rather, as an aesthetic realm which is
governed by creativity, where the production and interpretation of signs is a constant
process, and where the production of fantasy becomes a reality in its own right.
Because this is a space of constant disjunction, the mad subject- - Deleuze and
Guattaris proverbial schizo- -is always in the process of re-creating himself and his
environment.
The concept of rooting a theatrical production within the realm of madness
rather than in the world of conventional reason has resonance in the works of three of
the foremost experimental French dramatists of the twentieth century: Samuel
Beckett, Jean Genet, and Marguerite Duras. Although their individual projects are
240
quite different, each of these writers situates his or her texts within what can be
understood as an aesthetic of madness. Within the dramatic realities which they
create, they privilege madness as a kind of open space which offers new possibilities
for representing the human condition. They do not place mad characters on stage to
serve as the marginalized Other, against which the audience may reassure itself of its
own position of dominance and reason. Rather, they undermine the codified systems
of their societies by creating a dramatic space where madness is the only reality of
reference. The spectators are invited to enter into a transformative dialogue with the
text/performance as they experience a new reality, marked by unstable signs,
fragmentary characters, and fluid identity dynamics.
The short dramatic texts by Samuel Beckett, in particular Dis Joe (1965) and
Pas moi (1973), can both be characterized by an overwhelming sense of
disintegration. In both of these plays, the protagonists are in the midst of a profound
psychological battle between splintered fragments of their own selves. Both Joe and
Bouche are ontologically insecure; that is, they do not appear to conceive of
themselves as whole or unified beings, but rather as a collection of several different
identities. These identities reveal themselves through antagonistic voices that seem to
emanate from within the characters own minds. Both Joe and Bouche exist in a
liminal realm between the real and the unreal, where there are no distinctions between
truth and illusion, where body and mind do not exist as one unit, but as individual
entities. By stepping into the immediate reality of these characters, the audience is
241
invited to experience the human condition as a perpetual dialogue between conflicting

voices that together make up the protagonists schizophrenic sensibility.
Jean Genet also sets up a kind of schizophrenic reality in the performance of
his dramatic texts. Unlike Beckett, however, Genet does not localize the madness
within the mind of one character, where one individuals fantasies become the reality
of the production. Instead, Genet stages what can be understood as a collective
performative madness. In both Les Bonnes (1947) and Les Negres (1958), the
performers deliberately scramble the codes, to use the expression which Deleuze and
Guattari employ to describe their theoretical schizo-reality. They pull the audience
into a game of deception and ruse, where the distinction between actuality and theatre
becomes all but impossible to discern. Particularly in Les Negres, the characters play
out a series of performative layers, frames of representation that, as they are
successively uncovered, appear increasingly realistic and increasingly threatening to
the spectators. As the play progresses, the performers seem to edge ever closer to the
immediate reality of the audience in the house. The dramatic aesthetic articulated in
Genets texts is mad in that it is a space in which illusion is the reality. The effect
of the structure of Genets plays is in this sense opposite to that of Becketts texts:
whereas Becketts audience steps into the mad reality of the fictional protagonist,
Genets audience sees their reality invaded by performers who deliberately confuse the
lines between truth and illusion. With Beckett, it is the characters who cannot
distinguish between the real and the un-real; with Genet, it is the audience who
242
finds itself unable to make such a distinction. Genet displaces that which seems from
that which is, and thereby obliges the spectators to question their assumptions
regarding the difference between reality and illusion. As a result, the audience of
Genets plays see their world invaded by the threat of a mad reality.
This notion of madness as an invasive force which threatens to destabilize the
order of established codes of reason is what underscores the textual and dramatic
structure of Marguerite Durass enigmatic play India Song (1972). Unlike both
Beckett and Genet, Duras introduces into her text characters who are specifically
designated as mad by the structured societies in which they exist. She thereby
constructs on stage two different realms, the segregative inner world of the
established social codes and a nomadic outer world of madness. In India Song the
spectators follow the gradual passage into madness of the embassy circles central
figure, Anne-Marie Stretter. Through this progression into madness, the social
structures which govern the established colonial society in India appear to become
contaminated by the invasive threat of disease and death which forever looms just
beyond the embassy gates. As Anne-Marie Stretter moves in the final scene from the
inner realm to the outer realm, she steps into a liminal reality where reason and un
reason come together. This is a space of creative dialogue between conflicting forces,
where the system of coordinates for defining an individuals identity gives way to an
aesthetic of symbolic fluidity. It is in this alternate reality that the characters are able
243
to re-invent themselves outside the norms and expectations of conventional social

structures.
After having examined the works of these three dramatists through the lens of
a mad sensibility, one is still faced with certain overarching questions: how might
one define madness, and how does madness function as a distinct reality in its
own right, as a space of creative freedom? We have seen in the works of Beckett,
Genet and Duras three very different treatments of what I have generally termed an
aesthetic o f madness. Although this term might appear somewhat arbitrary at first, it
does serve to link together the desire among many experimental writers of the
twentieth century to explore alternative ways of representing the human condition.
From the absurdists and the early surrealists of the beginning of this century to the
novelists of the so-called nouveau roman, madness has been a recurrent trope for
visualizing the world. These writers choose to enter into the mad sensibility, to
explore the human experience through an alternate reality where conventional markers
distinguishing truth from illusion are rendered ineffective in negotiating a persons
sense o f being in the world. It appears that madness offers a sense of creative freedom
because it resists systems of logic. Madness can provide an escape from absolute
definitions and from established social codes of morality and authority for the very
fact that for centuries, madness has been localized outside all such codes. Since
madness has been excluded from the established logos, writers who choose to explore
it from the inside, that is, to create a vision of the world seen through the eyes of a
244
madman, may access an alternative mode of expressing reality, one which might offer
new possibilities for individuals to re-invent themselves.
Madness is not a concept which is easily defined. According to the Oxford
Reference Dictionary, madness is defined by its antithesis: not sane, or having a
disorderly mind.2 Simply stating that madness is not reason would be grossly
insufficient in a study which attempts to analyze madness as a space for creative
production. I have based my concept of an aesthetic o f madness on the theoretical
frameworks posited by Bakhtins The Dialogic Imagination (1975) and by Deleuze
and Guattaris Anti-Oedipe (1972). Both of these texts propose a philosophy for
understanding the human condition based on perpetual transformation. For these
writers, true creative production cannot occur in a social system where signs remain
rela ively static and where artistic expression is expected to conform to specific codes
o f representation. This goes beyond a simple criticism of realism in that their notions
of dialogism and schizo-reality question the fundamental codes which form the basis
for understanding reality itself.
For Bakhtin, as for Deleuze and Guattari, it is the process not the product
which holds significance, because product entails fixity, whereas process is always
un-finalized. Bakhtins dialogic principle is a way of understanding the self as a
constant and multiple phenomenon which is never merely given. It is motivated by a
constant drive to meaning, where meaning is conceived as still in the process of
2 The Oxford Reference Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) 497.
245
creation, something which is constantly bending toward the future rather than
something which has been already completed or understood. In this model, as
opposed to the Hegelian idea that the self strives toward a single point of
enlightenment in the future, there is no single meaning. The world, according to
Bakhtin, is like a whirlwind of conflicting meanings so vast that no single term for
unifying its diverse energies is possible. In such a world of constant activity,
existence, for Bakhtin, is an event in itself, a constant ongoing process of becoming/
In this model, then, the self and an individuals being in the world can never be wholly
known because they are constantly evolving, constantly in process.
The schizo-reaUty proposed by Deleuze and Guattari entails a similar
conceptualization of the world. By setting their vision of reality within a
schizophrenic sensibility, they propose a model for understanding the self as a
multiple and ever-changing phenomenon. The anti-Oedipal hero does not experience
the world through any fixed or given systems. His sense of self is a constant re
negotiation of contesting identities. In this perception of reality, all given codes are
scrambled, so that conventional relationships between signs and referents break down.
Meaning thus becomes a highly fluid concept, as it can never be fully grasped or
defined. Therefore the proverbial schizo can never understand himself or his
environment as anything but a continuously fluctuating event. This is a model for
1 See Michael Holquist. Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (New York: Routledge, 1991).
246
experiencing reality as a creative process, a state of desiring-production that resists all

systems of definition and completion.
Experimental writers of the twentieth century sought to escape traditional
systems of expression where given codes of representation served to confirm the
established norms of society. The avant-garde was borne out of a desire to reject
conventional realism, but in order to reject realism, one must conceive of new
alternatives for representing reality. In todays post-modern world it can be difficult
to grasp the fundamentally revolutionary impact of non-representational theatre. It is
important to note that there was no true avant-garde before the very end of the
nineteenth century. Even the more fantastical productions of the nineteenth century
did not attempt to question the basic human understanding of reality, and all
explorations o f madness- - that is, a reality beyond any notion of conventional systems
of logicwere conducted from an outside perspective of reason. Throughout the
nineteenth century, madness remained inaccessible.
Perhaps it is this notion that madness was considered un-knowable that
attracted experimental dramatic writers to it. Madness is a realm of broken signs,
where language becomes fragmented, where identities constantly transform, and
where the distinction between truth and illusion fades away. In the nineteenth
century, madness in theatre was presented as a space of non-sense and of non
production. Those dramatic writers in the twentieth century who chose to explore an
aesthetic o f madness, however, found that the world of un-reason could provide new
247
meaning for the human condition, and new ways of conceptualizing reality. These
writers could resist and undermine established codes of representation by exploring
the world from the perspective of un-reason.
Another way of understanding the works of Beckett, Genet, and Duras would
be to read their plays not necessarily as explorations of madness, but simply as
expressions of alternate modes of representing reality. All three writers do place
madness on the stage. According to most conventional systems of understanding
social behavior, Joe, Claire, and Anne-Marie Stretter would most probably be
considered "mad. Yet the three authors who created these characters are generally
accepted as sane, even brilliant, by their audiences. In a sense, then, these three
writers still remain outside o f madness, and they cannot know the mad reality any
more assuredly than can the spectators at a production of Dis Joe, Les Bonnes, or
India Song. They do, however, create a dramatic space which does not conform to
conventional notions of being. They explore both textual and performative elements
which articulate alternative models for conceiving reality. Perhaps they get at where
we, as humans, have "stretched in our own understanding of the limits and
limitlessness of reality.
The texts o f Beckett, Genet and Duras resist traditional literary notions of
unity and closure. They break down the idea that an individual exists as an integrated
and unified being with a completed identity that can be fully understood. Their works
are multi-leveled, schizophrenic, in structure, thus undermining the position of the
248
spectator- - or even the author- - as a dominant force in relation to the performance-
event. They problematize the concept of an individual identity by placing on the stage
characters and situations that are constantly elusive and un-finalized, always in
process. By asserting the openness and instability of the human condition, by
privileging madness over reason, Beckett, Genet and Duras explore in their works a
creative reality where disjointed fragments of language, identities, and representative
codes come together in a mutually transformative dialogue. They create a space of
positive un-reason which offers new possibilities for understanding the self and the
world through a model of perpetual re-invention and re-.:-ation. The spectators of
these productions are invited to step into a new reality, to enter into a creative
dialogue with a mad sensibility and thereby to be transformed by it.
249
ADDITIONAL WORKS CONSULTED
On madness and psychiatry

Charcot, Jean-Martin. Lemons du mardi a la Salpetriere. Paris: Bureaux du progres
medical, 1889.
Charcot, Jean-Martin and Paul Richer. Les Demoniaques dans I'art. (reprint)
Amsterdam: B.M. Israel, 1972.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. London: Hogarth, 1957.
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. " On Creativity and the Unconscious. New York:
Harper and Roe, 1958.
Hunter, Dianne. Representing mad Contradictoriness in Dr. Charcots Hysteria
Shows. Madness in Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
Jung, C.G. The Integration o f the Personality. London: Routledge, 1940.
On theatre and performance theory

Archer, William. Masks or Faces: A Study in the Psychology o f Acting. London:
Longmans, Green, and Co, 1888.
Attali, Jacques. Bruits. Paris: PU de France, 1977
Bernhardt, Sarah. The Art o f the Theatre. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1927.
Birringer, Johannes. Theatre, Theory, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1991.
250
Brecht, Bertold. Brecht on Theatre, ed. and translated by John Willet. New York:
Hill and Wang, 1964.
Duval, Georges. Frederick Lemaitre et son temps. Paris: Tresse, 1876.
Freytag, Gustav. Technique o f the Drama. Chicago: S.C. Griggs, 1895.
Gold, Arthur and Robert Fitzdale. The Divine Sarah. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1991.
Gondal, I.L. Parlons ainsi de la voix et du geste. Paris: J. de Gigord, 1912.
Knapp, Bettina L. Theatre and Alchemy. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1980.
Hubert, Marie-Claude. Le theatre. Paris: Armand Colin, 1988.
Hugounet, Paul. Mimes et Pierrots. Paris: Fischbacher, 1889.
Knapp, Bettina. Theatre and Alchemy. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1980.
Knight, Wilson. Symbol o f Man. New York: Regency Press, 1979.
Malekin, Peter. The Perilous Edge: Strindberg, Madness, and Other Worlds.
Staging the Impossible. Ed. Patrick Murphy. Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 1992.
Mole. Memoires. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968.
Pardoe, T. Earl. Pantomimes fo r Stage and Study. New York: D. Appleton, 1931.
Przybos, Julia. L'Entreprise melodramatique. Paris: Jose Corti, 1987.
Redmond, James, ed. Themes in Drama: Madness in Drama. New York:
Cambridge U Press, 1991.
251
Roach, J. and Reinelt, J. Critical Theory and Performance. Ann Arbor: U of

Michigan Press, 1992.
Salmon, Eric. Bernhardt and the Theatre o f her Time. Westport, Connecticut:
Greenwood, 1984.
Shevtsova, Maria. The Consumption of Empty Signs. M odem Drama 30:1
(March, 1987): 35-45.
Souriau, Maurice. De la convention dans la tragedie classique et dans le drame
romantique. Paris: Hachette, 1885.
Styan, J.L. The Drama: Reason in Madness. Theatre Journal 32 (1980): 371-85.
Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre. New York: PAJ, 1992.
Artaud
Artaud, Antonin. L'Arve et Vaume. Paris: LArbalete, 1989.
Artaud, Antonin. "Autour du theatre et son double et des Cenci. " Oeuvres completes.
Paris: Gallimard, 1979.
Artaud, Antonin. "Deux projets de mise en scene." Oeuvres completes. Paris:
Gallimard, 1980.
Artaud, Antonin. Les Tarahumaras. Paris: Gallimard, 1971.
Artaud, Antonin. "Le Theatre de seraphin." Oeuvres completes. Paris: Gallimard,
1978.
252
Derrida, Jacques. "Le Theatre de la cruaute et la cloture de la representation."

L'Ecriture et la difference. Paris: Seuil, 1967.
Goodall, Jane. Artaud and the Gnostic Drama. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.
Hocke, Thomas. Artaud und Weiss. Las Vegas: Lang, 1978.
Plunka, Gene. Antonin Artaud and the Modern Theater. Rutherford: Fairleigh
Dickinson UP, 1994.
Sontag, Susan. Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings. Berkeley: U of California Press,
1976.
Thiher, Allen. Jacques Derridas Reading of Artaud. The French Review.
1984 Mar., 57:4, 503-508.
Bakhtin
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: U of Texas Press,
1986.
Hirshkop, Ken and David Sheperd, ed. Bakhtin and Cultural Theory. New York:
Manchester UP, 1989.
Mandelker, Amy ed. Bakhtin in Contexts. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1995.
Beckett
Acheson, James. Samuel Becketts Artistic Theory and Practice. New York:
St. Martins Press, 1997.
Beckett, Samuel. Catastrophe et autres dramaticules. Paris: Minuit, 1986.

Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber, 1986.
Beckett, Samuel. La Derniere hande. Paris: Minuit, 1959.
Beckett, Samuel. En Attendant Godot. Ed. Germaine Bree and Eric Schenfeld.
New York: Macmillan, 1963.
Beckett, Samuel. Fin de partie. Paris: Minuit, 1957.
Ben-Zvi, Linda. Not /: Through a Tube Starkly. Women in Beckett, ed. Linda
Ben-Zvi. Chicago: U of Illinois Press, 1992. 243-248.
Blackman, Maurice. Acting without words: Artaud and Beckett and Theatrical
Language. AUMLA (May, 1981): 68-76.
Diamond, Elin. Speaking Parisian: Beckett and French Feminism. Women
in Beckett, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi. Chicago: U oflllinois Press, 1992. 208-216.
Gidal, Peter. Understanding Beckett: A Study o f Monologue and Gesture in
the works o f Samuel Beckett. New York: St. M artins Press, 1986.
Henning, Sylvie Debevec. Becketts Critical Complicity. Lexington: UP of
Kentucky, 1988.
Kroll, Jeri. I create, therefore I am. AUMLA (May, 1981): 36-53.
Levy, Shimon. Samuel Becketts Self-Referential Drama. New York:
St. M artins Press, 1990.
Martin, Mary Kay. Space Invasions: voice-over in works by Samuel Beckett

and Marguerite Duras. Themes in Drama: the Theatrical Space, ed. James
Redmond. New York: Cambridge UP, 1987. 239-245.
Oppenheim, Lois. Female Subjectivity in Not I and Rockahy." Women in Beckett.
ed. Linda Ben-Zvi. Chicago: U of Illinois Press, 1992. 217-227.
Pilling, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. New York: Cambridge
UP, 1994.
Sherzer, Dina. Portrait of a Woman: The Experience of Marginality in Not /.
Women in Beckett, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi. Chicago: U of Illinois Press,
1992. 201-207.
Watts, Eileen. Becketts Unnamables: Schizophrenia, Rationalism, and the Novel.
American Imago 45,1 (Spring, 1988): 85-106.
Zeifman, Hersh. Being and Non-Being: Samuel Becketts Not
Modern Drama
19 (March 1976).
Genet
Day, Gary. Artaud and Genets The M aids: Like Father, Like Son?
Twentieth-Century European Drama, ed. Brian Docherty. New York:
St. Martins Press, 1994.
Kennedy, Brian Gordon. The Unknown Role of Madame in Genets Les Bonnes."
Romance Notes 36:3 (Spring, 1996): 243-252.
Genet, Jean. Le Balcon. Paris: LArbalete, 1962.

Genet, Jean. Elle. Paris: LArbalete, 1989.
Genet, Jean. Les Paravents. Paris: LArbalete, 1961.
Plunka, Gene A. Jean Genets Mentor: Jean Cocteau. New England Theatre
Journal 4 (1993): 49-63.
Rosen, Carol. The Structure of Illusion in Genets The Balcony. Modern Drama
35:4 (December, 1992): 513-519.
Shevtsova, Maria. The Consumption of Empty Signs. M odem Drama 30:1
(March, 1987): 35-45.
Straus, Todd. Being-as-Actor in Ionesco and Genet: a Psycho-Theatrical Reading.
French Forum 10:1 (January, 1985): 97-108.
Stewart, Harry E. Jean Genets Mirror Images in Le Balcon." Modern Drama 12:2
(September, 1969): 197-203.
White, Edmund. Genet: a Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Duras
Ames, Sanford S. Mint Madness: Surfeit and Purge in the Novels of Duras.
Sub-Stance 20(1978): 37-41.
Diamond, Elin. Refusing the romanticism of Identity: Narrative Interventions in
Churchill, Benmussa, Duras. Theatre Journal 37:3 (October, 1985): 273286.
256
Duras, Marguerite. Agatha. Paris: Minuit, 1981.

Duras, Marguerite. Eden cinema. Paris: Actes Sud, 1988.
Duras, Marguerite. Hiroshima mon Amour. Paris: Gallimard, 1960.
Duras, Marguerite. Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.
Duras, Marguerite. Le Vice-consul. Paris: Gallimard, 1965.
Limam-Tnani, Najet. Roman et cinema chez Marguerite Duras. Tunis: Editions
de la Mediterranee, 1996.
Ricouart, Janine. Ecriture Feminine et violence: une etude de Marguerite Duras.
Birmingham, Alabama: Summa Publications, 1991.
Thiher, Allen. Lacan, Madness, and W omens Fiction in France. in Liminal
Postmodernisms: the Postmodern, the (Post-)Colonial, and the
(Post-)Feminist. Theo Dhaen and Hans Bertens, ed. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994.
223-254.
Related Plays
Chefs d oeuvre du repertoire des melodrames du theatre franqais. Tomes I-XX.
Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970.
Fugard, Athol. The Road to Mecca. New York: Theatre Communications, 1985.
Hugo, Victor. Cromwell. Paris: Nelson, 1900.
Hugo, Victor. Le Livre de Lucrece Borgia. Paris: Actes Sud, 1985.
Moliere. Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Boston: DC Heath and Co, 1947.
257
Musset, Alfred de. Lorenzaccio. Paris: Larousse, 1971.

Pixerecourt, Guilbert de. Coelina ou I enfant du mystere. New York: Clearwater
Pub. Co., 1975.
Racine, Jean. Andromaque. Paris: Larousse, 1990.
Racine, Jean. Phedre. Poemes, Pieces, Prose. Ed. Peter Schofer, Donald Rice,
William Berg. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. New York: Methuen, 1985.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy o f Hamlet, Prince o f Denmark. New York:
Washington Square Press, 1959.
Strindberg, August. Plays. New York: Random House Vintage Books, 1976.
Vitrac, Roger. Theatre I, II, III. Paris: Gallimard, 1946.
Weiss, Peter. The Persecution and Assassination o f Jean-Paul Marat. New York:
Pocket Books, 1966.
Zola, Emile. Therese Raquin. Paris: J. Tallandier, 1974.
Miscellaneous texts
Hofmann, Wemer. Goya: Das Zeitalter der Revolutionen. Munich: Prestel, 1980.
Kant, Immanuel. Theoretical Philosophy. New York: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Maids Performing Madness

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Maids Performing Madness

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Maids Performing Madness

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

INFORMATION TO USERS

The negative microfilm o f this dissertation w as prepared and inspected by the

1 M anuscripts may not always be complete W hen it is not possible to obtain

A Bell & H ow ell Information Com pany

UMI Microform 9829129

300 North Zeeb Road

R eaders Page. This page is not to be handwritten except for

19TH AND 20TH CENTURY THEATRE,

FROM JEAN-MARTIN CHARCOT TO MARGUERITE DURAS

subm itted to th e G raduate S ch o o l of the

Date of Final Oral Examination:

Approval Signatures f t Dissertation Readers:

Signature, Dean of Graduate School

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment

It is with the most heart-felt appreciation that I extend my gratitude to Judy

Great wits are sure to madness near allied.

The mad characters o f the nineteenth-century stage, such as the obsessive

We can succinctly frame madness as it was constructed in society and on the

characteristic states o f the hysterical attack with marvelous precision.3 In the

selected and presented, whether individually or in group, whether similar or

8 Charcot, Clinique 430.

14 La Grande Encyclopedic (Paris: Lamirault, 1886) 378.

to coordinate a persons psychological predisposition with physical features. The

physician James Redfield published an elaborate physiognomic nomenclature, which

In 1850, physician Robert Knox

As both sketches are somewhat exaggerated, and as M iltons

Similarly, in an article published in the widely read Popular Science Monthly,

25 E. Lacan, Esquisses photographiques, a propos de I 'Exposition universelle et de la guerre d Orient

The largest collection of photographic portraits of neurological afflictions

32 D-M. Boumeville and P. Regnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere (Paris: Delahaye

Londe also remarked on the usefulness o f composite portraiture, as in the work of

35 Foucault, Madness and Civilization 228.

Boumeville and Regnard fill the pages of the Iconographie photographique

Georges Didi-Huberman suggests that it was in fact Augustines theatrical

only by a hallucination o f sound, Augustine places her hands in such a manner as to

39 Boumeville and Regnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere III (Paris: Delahaye et

In a series o f procedures which he documented

40 A. Londe, La photographie medicale (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1893) 90.

Paul Richer produced an engraving based on a photograph o f Augustine

is loosely covered by the drapes o f a white nightgown. After a particularly extensive

46 Boumeville and Rdgnard Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere III (Paris: Delahaye et

As can be seen from the foregoing examples, a significant portion o f the

49 Cited in Goetz 186.

represented, it was young women who dominated both the Iconographie

Although Charcot published a great number o f articles on many psychological

Whether or not Charcots two massive projects on

50 La Grande Encyclopedie (Paris: Lamirault, 1886) 378.

51 Foucault, Madness and Civilization 250.

M adness and M elodram a:

In the opening phase o f this project, I examined the means by which an

madness became a central theme within popular entertainment. My project now is to

5 Douglas Hilt, Ten Against Napoleon (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1975) 145.

Godoy, First Minister to Charles IV and self-proclaimed Prince o f Peace.9 It

visiting Shakespearean companies from London. Although Shakespeare was not a

Taine describes Shakespeare as a writer of excess, qualifying his texts as examples of

Taines essay points to a fascination with images o f madness in nineteenth-century

rationalism o f the neo-classics in favor o f passion, turbulence, and emotional excess.

on the stage. Although full productions in pantomime began to be overshadowed by

immediately recognizable to the audience, as there was no scripted dialogue to reveal