Sublime Drama: British Theatre of the 1990s 9783110309935, 9783110301151

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Elżbieta Baraniecka Sublime Drama

CDE Studies

Edited by Martin Middeke

Volume 23

Elżbieta Baraniecka

Sublime Drama

British Theatre of the 1990s

ISBN 978-3-11-030115-1 e-ISBN 978-3-11-030993-5 ISSN 2194-9069 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2013 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

For my parents

Acknowledgements I would like to express my deep gratitude to the many individuals who gave their time, advice and valued support, whether intellectual, moral or financial, and without whom writing this book would have been a completely different experience. I particularly want to thank Martin Middeke for the excellent supervision of my work, for his assistance whenever I needed it, for a nudge when it was necessary, and also for giving me the possibility of financing the project by offering me the opportunity to work with his team at the University of Augsburg. In this context, I also want to acknowledge the kind support of all my colleagues at the university. In particularly, I would like to thank Christina Wald and Christoph Henke for the brainstorming sessions and feedback during our research workshops, and for the example that they have been for me of how to do this right. Special thanks should be given to the CDE Society not only for distinguishing my work with the CDE Award but first and foremost for giving me the wonderful opportunity to participate in the CDE conferences and the CDE PhD workshops all these years. I profited from them immensely. I would also like to express my gratitude to all my friends, particularly Katarzyna Węzowska, Agnieszka Laskowska, Danyela Demir, Linda Hess, Adina Sorian, Victoria Mears, and Matthew and Anne Gardner, for their continuing moral support. My most special thanks go to Matthew Fentem, who not only proofread every sentence of this book, but also accompanied me through every stage of this study, giving me his warm encouragement and strength, and showing great patience and incredible unflinching belief in me. Finally, I wish to thank my parents and my sisters, Beata Baraniecka-Geschinski and Agnieszka Baraniecka, along with their wonderful families, for constantly boosting me morally and giving their support in every possible way.

Contents Acknowledgements

VII

 . . .

1 Introduction 1 Thesis Overview of Chapters 12 Previous Research 18

 . .. .. .. . .. .. . .. .. . .. .. .. .. .. .. . .

29 Theory of the Sublime Longinus 32 “The echo of a great soul” 33 Sappho and the Threatened Subject 34 The Turn of the Sublime 36 Edmund Burke 38 38 Towards an Aesthetic of Shocks: Burke The Beautiful and the Sublime 41 Immanuel Kant 44 Characteristics of the Aesthetic Feeling 46 The Beautiful and the Sublime 47 Jean-François Lyotard 53 Lyotard and Kantian Reflective Aesthetic Judgement 53 54 Adjusting Kantian Sublime to the Postmodern Context Realism 56 The Inhuman 61 The Threat of Privation 64 The Ungraspable Presence 66 Summary 67 Theorizing the Sublime for Drama Analysis 71

 . .. .. .. .. . .. ..

77 Case Studies 77 Patrick Marber’s Closer The Beautiful, the Agreeable and the Sublime 78 Synopsis 81 Internal Analysis: Moments of (In)Hospitality 82 External Analysis: Moments of the (Un)Familiar 106 Anthony Neilson’s Normal 116 Synopsis 116 Bataille, Eros and Thanatos, and the Evil Inside 118

X

.. .. . .. .. .. .. . .. .. ..

Contents

Internal Analysis: Wehner’s Sublime Encounter with Eros and Thanatos 122 The External Level: Ecstasy of Minds 145 153 Mark Ravenhill’s Faust Is Dead Synopsis 154 Seduction in Realism and in Sublime 156 Internal Analysis: Consumerist Seduction of the Characters 160 195 External Analysis: Sublime Seduction of the Audience Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis 205 The Impossible Synopsis 207 213 Internal Analysis: Singing on the Boundary External Analysis: the Influence of the Parergonal Language on the Audience 246



Conclusion



Works Cited

251 261

1 Introduction 1.1 Thesis By referring to the British theatrical phenomenon of the 1990s in terms of the aesthetic of the sublime, the present study offers an alternative perspective and complementary approach to the concept of in-yer-face drama, a category that has largely come to be known in critical literature to describe young British playwrights of the last decade of the twentieth century and their shocking plays. Coined by Aleks Sierz in his influential book In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (2001), the term turned out to be very popular but also much contested by critics (see Harvie; D’Monte and Saunders; Wallace 2006: 20 – 22). Undeniably, an excellent and extremely vivid presentation of the theatrical moment and one of the seminal books on the theatre of that decade, to which my book is greatly indebted Sierz’s study and his label are nevertheless not without shortcomings. Taking the hint from Sierz’s own criticism of his book that the “relationship between stage and audience [in in-yer-face theatre] deserves more study” (Sierz 2008: 34– 5), my project focuses precisely on that particular task. It is the aim of this book to complement Sierz’s “memorable story” (Sierz 2008: 34) with a proposal of another, more systematic ‘story’, which concentrates on the interactive relation between the plays and the audiences’ responses in a more targeted way. In order to do so, the study will refer to the aesthetic category of the sublime, rather than to Sierz’s label of ‘in-yer-face’ theatre, as methodologically the former proves to be more fruitful and provides more precise tools for the analysis of the aesthetic response than does Sierz’s concept. Describing the theatrical phenomenon by looking at it thorough the lens of the sublime has many advantages, which will be first introduced here briefly, and then elaborated on individually in greater detail. Not only has the use of the aesthetic of the sublime the advantage of (a) a dynamic approach (drama-theoretical perspective) to the variety of theatrical work from the 1990s and, combined with Wolfgang Iser’s theory of aesthetic response, of providing a systematic and methodical analysis of the plays in comparison with what the somewhat vague term ‘in-yer-face’ offers, it also provides an analytical tool which is extremely appreciative of and enhancing the plurality of theatrical forms. Categories, as most frames, are necessarily and unavoidably delimiting and can often be reductive, as a quick survey of labels used to describe the theatre of the 1990s will easily demonstrate.¹ The term in-yer-face

 Sierz offers an overview of the labels with which his own label had to compete with at that

2

1 Introduction

drama, for example, though much less limiting than most of the labels circulating at that time, also has difficulties explaining the affiliation of some artists with it, such as Patrick Marber’s Closer or Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, simply because their way of shocking the audience is different from the typical bloody and explicit content. Sierz’s study puts too much focus on the particular attempt to shock through aggressive and explicit images rather than the targeted response that these images are supposed to elicit from the audience, which is a powerful experience of indeterminacy. And it is the latter that makes the category of the sublime open to a multitude of aesthetic forms, as indeterminacy can be evoked in many different ways. On the other hand, having its own basic structure of the negative (threat of privation) and positive moments (release of life-affirming energy), the category is not too vague and it does not operate along the principle of ‘anything goes’. Moreover, the aesthetic of the sublime also explains the appearance of what hereafter will be referred to as the sublime theatre in (b) the particular cultural-political context. This context is defined more generally as what Fredric Jameson famously referred to as postmodernism, which he considered to be the cultural logic of late capitalism, and more specifically with regard to Great Britain as coolness by Ken Urban in his “Towards a Theory of Cruel Britannia: Coolness, Cruelty, and the ‘Nineties” (2004). The sublime, as Jean François Lyotard argues (1984a), is a narrative which undermines any such dominant narratives, meta- or grand, in their claim to hold the authority to determine and dominate the shape of human existence according to their own interests. Considered from (1c) an epistemological perspective, the force of sublime resistance to any grand narratives or totalising systems comes from the particular nature of the sublime experience, during which the perceiver realises that reality and truth cannot ever be grasped in any total, absolute way, and that human perception of them is always subjective and therefore always incomplete. What is experienced in the sublime is the incommensurability of subject and object and therefore the impossibility of objective knowledge. This, in turn, undermines any claims of any systems to possess the best and absolute solutions, the truth, and, by extension, any claims to speak on behalf of the other. And this is where (2c) the ethical dimension of sublime drama manifests: it is the only “hospitable” (see Derrida 2000) narrative or form to present the other in its indeterminacy, or as Derrida would have us call it, its undecidability². By choosing

time, such as ‘Neo-Jacobean drama’, ‘New Brutalists’ or ‘Cool Drama’ and provides an interesting assessment of them (see Sierz 2008: 24).  Derrida discusses the difference between undecidability and indeterminacy for example in his “Afterward: Towards an Ethics of Discussion” (see Derrida 1988) and in his The Gift of Death. The difference between the two terms is that the undecidable signifies for Derrida the impossible

1.1 Thesis

3

this particular aesthetic form, sublime theatre acknowledges the existence of the other yet does so without determining it, without enclosing it within a fixed frame of a definition but allowing the other to be experienced as indeterminacy. (a) As evidenced by Sierz’s report about the difficulties while theorising the category of ‘in-yer-face theatre’ to fit the more than complex theatrical reality (see Sierz 2008: 29 – 30), framing such an aesthetic plethora of plays that were written during that period (Sierz 2010) is a rather daunting task. How can we account aesthetically for the blast of creative energy and the multifarious forms that the energy was turned into in a systematic way, yet without reducing these forms to mere categories or strategies such as ‘explicit images of violence’, ‘nudity on stage’ or ‘vulgar language’? How, in other words, can we avoid simply ticking off items on a list? Although disturbing images of extreme brutality and gore are the quality that many of the plays have in common, “[t]o talk about [the] plays as mere representations of violence renders them one-dimensional; they become about shock and shock alone”, as Ken Urban observantly points out (Urban 2004: 360 – 1). Unfortunately, but also inescapably, depictions of violence and sex are immediate eye-catchers, which can feed into the consumerism of pure sensationalism and which do not have to lead to any further and deeper experience of reality and self. Labels such as “New Brutalism”, “Sex and Sperm Generation” or “Cool Drama” seem to have stopped exactly at the sensationalist surface, precisely the stance which Urban argued against, as does the current study. There is definitely more at stake in the theatre in question than the mere administration of shock in the form of sensationalist content to the audience, as Urban and many after him for that matter have rightly recognised.³ Moreover, many plays such as Partick Marber’s Closer, Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, David Harrower’s Knives in Hens and Blackbird, or Caryl Churchill’s Far Away which undoubtedly have the comparative power to intensely disturb and also affect audiences at a very deep emotional and/or visceral rather than cerebral level, yet which, not resorting to such extreme images of violence as for example plays such as Sarah Kane’s Blasted, Philip Ridley’s The Pitchfork Disney and Mercury Fur, or Anthony Neilson’s Penetrator or The Censor, hardly comply

choice between two determinate options, whereas the latter is associated with a determinate choice of ‘nothingness’. In this study, however, the two words are used synonymously, to denote the oscillation between two possibilities, usually binary concepts.  The amount of academic writing on the drama of the 1990s is quite substantial; accordingly, the most important works will be briefly reviewed in the section reporting on the state of literary research.

4

1 Introduction

with the degree of brutality and gore required by labels merely focusing on violent or sexual content. In order to distinguish the plays from sensationalist and ‘cool’ associations, Urban proposes replacing the word ‘violence’ with the Artaudian term ‘cruelty’ (see Urban 2004: 361). In doing so, he seems to hit the nail on the head, as Artaud’s idea of the latter extended considerably beyond mere images of blood and bruises. Representing much more than gory content, Artaud’s concept signifies first and foremost a certain relentlessness in attitude, This cruelty is not sadistic or bloody, at least not exclusively so. I do not systematically cultivate horror. The word cruelty must be taken in its broadest sense, not in the physical, predatory sense usually ascribed to it. And in doing so, I demand the right to make a break with its usual verbal meaning, to break the bonds once and for all, to break asunder the yoke, finally to return to the etymological origins of language which always evoke a tangible idea through abstract concepts. One may perfectly well envisage pure cruelty without any carnal laceration. Indeed, philosophically speaking, what is cruelty? From a mental viewpoint, cruelty means strictness, diligence, unrelenting decisiveness, irreversible and absolute determinations. […] It is wrong to make cruelty mean merciless bloodshed, pointless and gratuitous pursuit of physical pain. (Artaud 2001a: 119)

As this quotation shows, Artaud’s idea of cruelty only marginally includes presentations of physical brutality. Indeed, what he is doing in this passage is an example of his concept of cruelty at work, by breaking with the usual connotations and meanings of the word in an attempt to return the language to its origins, so that we can experience life at its purest. In fact, in another letter to Jean Paulhan explaining the concept, Artaud describes cruelty as the insatiable desire for life, Cruelty is not an adjunct to my thoughts, it has always been there, but I had to become conscious of it. I use the word cruelty in the sense of hungering for life, cosmic strictness, relentless necessity, in the Gnostic sense of a living vortex engulfing darkness, in the sense of the inescapably necessary pain without which life could not continue. […] Theatre in the sense of constant creation, a wholly magic act, obeys the necessity. (Artaud 2001a: 119)

Cruelty as it is conceived by Artaud, that is less as a concrete theatrical strategy and more as the particular experience of “a living vortex engulfing darkness” and life in “constant creation”, is a crucial part of what this study defines as the aesthetic response of the sublime and consistently refers to in the analysis of the plays. The latter, however, is preferred to Artaudian cruelty, as, being theorised as an aesthetic category describing the dynamic of the relation between the subject and object, the sublime provides the possibility of a more methodical and systematic analysis of the experience during the process of its production,

1.1 Thesis

5

that is as the interaction between stage and audience. Also, the word cruelty underlines the moment of pain very strongly and under-represents the exhilarating moment of the actual experience of the life force that is also inherent in the experience. The sublime, in turn, actualises both sensations, the experience being defined as the paradoxical feeling of painful delight. Another advantage of the label of the sublime is that, focusing more on the response rather than attempting to define the scope of its possible catalysers once and for all, allows greater permissiveness in the category’s frames, keeping the category open and dynamic, yet without becoming too vague or turning into an aesthetic of ‘anything goes’. After all the response is ‘clearly’ determined, even though it is done mischievously so, as the experience of indeterminacy. Further, since the possibilities of evoking the latter seem inexhaustible, the aesthetic category of the sublime is subject to constant transformation and expansion. As a category, the sublime is therefore somewhat peculiar in that, unlike most categories, it both delimits its scope and field and unlimits them at the same time. It is a category which is open to constant transformation and change, and changes when its context changes. The critical potential of the sublime aesthetic lies in its force to make the perceiver become aware of his or her preconceptions by rendering them useless in the face of the overwhelming object produced in the perceiver’s mind during performance or reading, and lose these preconceptions by shocking him or her into a split-second of cognitive paralysis. The perceiver is forced then to approach the overwhelming aesthetic object, the sublime play, without a readymade concept for it, which in the case of theatrical critics and academics may be the familiar theatrical conventions and standards. It is experienced as a very daunting feeling since suddenly we find ourselves in unknown and often terrifying territory. Initial outrage seems to be a defence mechanism in such situations and a totally understandable reaction to sublime drama.⁴ However, if we are willing to leave our familiar frames behind and do without them for a moment, to trust the unknown and follow its lead, the terrifying experience may turn into a feeling of extreme exhilaration filling us with enormous energy and transforming our perception and thought. This transformation that happens during the play’s performance is also substantiated by Sierz, who observed that “[o]ne result of the new aesthetic was a change in critical criteria, in the way crit-

 Good examples of such reactions are, for instance, first reviews of Sarah Kane’s Blasted. Jane Edwardes from Time Out writes, for example, that the critics “couldn’t quite believe what they had witnessed” (Edwardes 38), Roger Foss from What’s On proposes that the play “ought to be retitled Nightmare on Sloane Square” (Foss 38) and Kate Kellaway from Observer remembers how the performance “made [her] feel sick, and giggly with shock” (Kellaway 40).

6

1 Introduction

ics value new work. The problem with judging nineties’ new writing in terms of naturalism or social realism is that this tries to impose the conventions of a previous era onto the present” (Sierz 2001: 243). During the experience of the sublime familiar categories of thought, which we use to perceive the world and reality around us, are called into question by being tested in the extreme circumstances that the aesthetic of the sublime produces. Creating these extreme conditions of liminal space, time, action, characters, and language, sublime plays place their audiences and often also their characters in what Victor Turner famously referred to as the transformational phase of liminality (see Turner 1977), where the familiar concepts can be contested and new room for new ideas created. Within the safe frames of theatre the most terrifying scenarios can be played out without any harm done; one of the typical features of the experience of the sublime is that though it makes us embark on very dangerous territories and push ourselves to extremes, it all happens in our imagination, our consciousness, and from a safe distance. Explaining her continuous and inexhaustible attempts to put her audiences through hell, growing more extreme with her each next play, Sarah Kane pointed out that “[i]t is important to commit to memory events which never happened – so that they never happen. I’d rather risk overdose in the theatre than in real life” (qtd. in Sierz 2001: 239). Kane broaches here another important facet of sublime drama, namely the introduction of the terrible other into our consciousness and lives, which usually is concerned with our mortality and the sense of selfpreservation. According to Edmund Burke, the eighteenth century philosopher, such quasi-death experiences reinvigorate us and heighten our desire for life (see Burke 122). Kane seems to thematise a similar intuition when she refers to the following story, I just met someone who has taken God knows how many overdoses and has attempted suicide in almost every imaginable way. She has a huge scar round here [points to her throat] and scars round here [points to her wrists]. But actually she’s more connected with herself than most people I know. I think in that moment when she slashes herself, when she takes an overdose suddenly she’s connected and then wants to live. And so she takes herself to hospital. Her life is an ongoing stream of suicide attempts which she then revokes. And yes, there’s something really awful about that but I can understand it very well. It makes sense to me. (Nils Tabert’s Interview, qtd in Saunders 2002: 114)⁵

It is this sensation of being connected, which the French writer and thinker Georges Bataille describes as the experience of continuity (see Eroticism),

 The interview was originally published as “Gespräch mit Sarah Kane” in Nils Tabert’s Playspotting: Die Londoner Theaterszene der 90er (see 10).

1.1 Thesis

7

along with the movement from death to life, or in other words this consubstantiality of Thanatos and Eros, that is at heart of the sublime theatre, and that will be discussed in all case studies presented in this book, though perhaps most dominantly in the chapters on Anthony Neilson’s Normal (3.2) and Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (3.4). It is also in this experience that the transformational potential and by extension political dimension of the sublime theatre lie. (b) Considering the political potential of the playwrights such as Kane, Ravenhill or Neilson, Urban admits that on the one hand the young artists had few qualms about profiting from their status as notorious but as such even cooler celebrities, or about being associated with Tony Blair’s marketing scheme of Cool Britannia, and yet, were “not the same as Men Behaving Badly ⁶ and the Spice Girls’ philosophy of Girl Power” (Urban 2004: 360). These connotations of the playwrights with the cool and the apparent lack of any explicit political agenda on their side made some critics assess their work as “hav[ing] almost nothing to say” (Ansorge 42; see also Gottlieb 1999; Nikcevic; or Müller). As Urban, however, rightly argues, the plays both participate in the cool but also engage with it in a very subversive way, “[t]hese cultural artefacts may be linked by a historical moment and the mindset of cool, but the work that they do in culture is crucially different” (Urban 2004; see also Kritzer). Though this affinity with the cool might seem like an ‘impure’ or even hypocritical form of political action (see Kershaw 55), such ‘impurity’ actually makes ‘perfect’ sense when considered within the philosophy behind the concept of the sublime. There is nothing ‘pure’ about the sublime, as the latter works within the gray zone between concepts and systems. The experience of the sublime usually sets out from familiar ground (here, values and ideas imposed by the dominating system of the cool and the whole commodity culture; aesthetically, from the conventional structures of drama and theatre), which is then undermined, all the received convictions about it called into question. As a judgement that only points to the deficiencies of a system, to the system’s limits, without however offering any alternatives or solutions, sublime subversion works from within this system. It does not constitute an attempt to replace it with a new one, but adds new elements into the ‘game’ and in doing so creates a greater plurality of voices, expands the system’s range and widens its political scope. This evident lack of a greater common goal and alternative may of course be considered to be the sublime’s, and, by extension, sublime drama’s, flaw. It may, however, also be considered its greatest strength in that by refraining from pointing to a concrete solution, which could be used as the replacement of the old sys-

 A British sitcom written by Simon Nye.

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1 Introduction

tem, sublime drama does not participate in the propagation of binary thinking and metaphysical distinctions of right and wrong. Such thinking, which is based on a belief in the existence of some one universal truth, against which such judgements of right and wrong can be measured and authoritatively made, is considered extremely dangerous by Jean François Lyotard, the key theorist of the sublime in this study. According to the philosopher, such determinant judgements of knowledge lead to totalitarian systems and all the typical terrors associated with them (see Lyotard 1984a). By creating a liminal space, where familiar concepts can be contested in extreme but safe circumstances, sublime drama points to the limits of familiar concepts, undermining their stability and blurring clear distinctions. This is usually concomitant with the experience of terror precipitated by the sudden privation of our familiar frames of reference. Yet, the painful experience of our old familiar world collapsing right before our very eyes, or rather ‘in our very mind’, may, and this is the goal of sublime drama, be turned into the sublime delight related to the experience of a new liberty of our thought gained in the experience of the somewhat frightening indeterminacy of concepts. The experience of this sublime indeterminacy, of the incommensurability of concepts with reality, automatically subverts any totalitarian claims to absolute and objective cognition and knowledge. As Urban observes, [i]t [the drama] gives no ideological certainty; it does not seek to be in complete opposition to or outside of commodity culture. […] But what [it] does is provide the possibility for ethical change in light of the suffering that the spectator has undergone; that is the immanent critique that it performs on the world of the cool. (Urban 2004: 370)

It is the audience’s painful experience of their familiar, suddenly perceived as too narrow-mindedly⁷ constructed, world collapsing that makes room for the arrival of the other. The sublime creates the space of “hospitality” (Derrida 2000) within our minds, where the other makes its presence felt, where it has room, but is never completely domesticated by our thought or rendered fully familiar. Un-

 Though this issue will be elaborated on in greater detail in the section on approach and methodology, perhaps it is necessary to mention at this point the particular way I apply the category of the audience. Naturally, I do not claim any supernatural ability to read other people’s minds and therefore do not make any comments on the reactions of real historical audiences. Each time the term audience is used in this study, it is applied in the sense of Wolfang Iser’s concept of the implied reader, which was adapted for the purpose of this work into the applied audience. In brief, Iser understands under the implied reader as a role that a reader needs to assume for the text to bring forth its effect, and which can be gleaned from the literary work. For a detailed discussion of the concept see chapter 2, section 2.6.

1.1 Thesis

9

like the aesthetic of the cool and the commodity culture, which has us perceive the other in terms of the agreeable, that is, as objects whose function is to satisfy our desires, the aesthetic of the sublime creates a space in which the other is experienced as always escaping our desire. Exchanging the judgement of the agreeable for the judgement of the sublime changes our sensibility towards the other, which though inspiring our desire can never be used to fully satisfy it. Picking up David Greig’s argument that for a play to be political it needs to “contain a suggestion that change is possible”, Sierz poses the following question, “[w]hile nineties drama often evidenced an acute moral disquiet with the world, did it deliver any metaphors of change?” (Sierz 2001: 240 – 1). Although most of the sublime plays do not seem to suggest any such possibility for their characters, that is, at the internal communication level, or, if there is a change in the predicament of a character it usually involves the character’s demise, sublime drama actively performs a change, transforming the audience’s consciousness. As Urban observes, commenting on Kane’s play Blasted, “change is possible, but not as the end point of some utopic political narrative. Rather, change occurs in those moments where comfortable designations break down (woman/man, victim/victimizer, native/foreigner, self/other) and everything must be rethought” (Urban 2001: 69). (c) The political potential of the sublime judgement is fuelled by the philosophical assumptions behind the concept, which can be further branched into two sub-fields, focusing more on (1c) its epistemological or (2c) its ethical implications. From the perspective of the former (1c), no complete cognition of the outside world is ever possible and is always tinged with subjectivity. Sublime drama makes its audiences painfully experience this failure of cognition repeatedly, by giving them the illusion of being able to understand and then flaunting the illusion by presenting them with some object that exceeds their imaginative powers. Sarah Kane’s Blasted is, again, a good example to demonstrate this technique. It opens with a well-known image from the so-called well-made plays, where all of the action takes place in one room, usually of middle-class origin. Representing a luxurious hotel room, the first impression that the play evokes in the audience’s mind is that of a rather familiar setting. This expectation is quickly shaken first by the emotional and sexual abuse that happens in the room, and later, even more radically, destroyed by blasting the naturalistic setting apart and plunging the play’s action and the audience into a nightmarish scenario. Breaking with the dramatic coherence of action and realistic presentation, the play frustrates the processes of cognition in the audience, who suddenly finds itself

10

1 Introduction

without any frame of reference to hold onto. Unsurprisingly, as Sierz documents, many complained that, “the world of the play is incoherent and its message is lost in unrealistic plotting” (Sierz 2001: 95).⁸ However, in line with the premises of sublime drama, Blasted is not an attempt at an intellectual discourse on the evils of war and violence and the pros and cons of taking possible action as is done, for example, in David Hare’s The Vertical Hour (2006), but rather a presentation of the ungraspability and unrepresentability of the reality of violence in its full complexity. Experience of such violence is beyond any spectator’s imagination or grasp (see Scarry). Apart from creating the experience of the impossibility of objective knowledge for the audience, sublime drama puts the unpresentatbility of objective knowledge itself into presentation, and thematises the problem of communication through language in general. Any statements about reality are revealed as mere narrative images, subjective constructions of it. Any attempts at communication, often simultaneously on both the internal and external levels of theatrical communication, are shown as unsuccessful. Asking the most essential questions about humanity and reality, such as what it means to be human, what life is all about, what is love, what is real or what is true, sublime drama provides very anti-essentialist answers to them, pointing to the indeterminacy of these values, or as Derrida prefers, their undecidability. And again, losing our grasp on reality is a rather frustrating and unsettling experience, which combined with the gruesome scenarios in which this loss happens, can be truly horrifying. Nevertheless, the overall experience of witnessing such terrifying scenes in a sublime play paradoxically results in the feeling of being energised and reinvigorated. This conflicting experience is explained slightly differently by different philosophers, but can generally be defined as the experience of an expansion of our consciousness in the moment of framing new concepts and creating a new language, this time, however, with a greater awareness that they are just as tentative and incomplete as the ‘old’ ones turned out to be. The experience of the undecidability of values is where (2c) the ethical implications of sublime drama stem from. Confronted with an extreme situation, the audience finds that the concepts it has had at its disposal so far are not com-

 Jane Edwardes, for example, insists that “[i]t would have helped to know how the characters were related to each other, where reality starts and fantasy begins, what war is being waged and why, and if we are really in Leeds” (Edwardes 38); Michael Billington argues that “[t]he reason the play falls apart is that there is no sense of external reality – who exactly is meant to be fighting whom out on the streets?” (Billington 1995: 39); and David Nathan states that “[i]t is a bad play because, for all the talk of a violent world, the world shown here is not recognisable, and for all the talk of Bosnia, it is not related to Bosnia in any specific way” (Nathan 39).

1.1 Thesis

11

mensurate with the overwhelming reality that is emerging before its eyes as the radically other. Kant refers to this moment as the failure of imagination and defines it as the negative moment of the experience of the sublime. In order to participate in and keep up with the play, the audience needs to take the risk and engage with the other without trying to, or in fact, being able to determine it completely, or appropriate it by framing it in some familiar shape. In other words, the audience needs to play by the rules of the other, and open itself to the unknown. As Jonathan Roffe points out, commenting on ethics in Derrida’s writing, “any ethical decision must involve in the final instance the abandonment of general rules and the affirmation of the singularity of the other about, or according to, which one is making a decision” (Roffe 44). By creating the opportunity for the audience to engage with the other in theatre, sublime drama gives the audience the chance to experience the other in safe circumstances and extend its hospitality towards it, welcoming it within its thought. The extension of hospitality brings about the extension of the audience’s imagination and transformation of its habitual gaze. Though the arrival of the other is initially accompanied with intense anxiety, a feeling of losing control, and requires what Derrida refers to as, drawing on Søren Kierkegaard, a leap of “faith” (Derrida 1995: 5), because “the involvement with the other […] is a venture into absolute risk, beyond knowledge and certainty” (Derrida 1995: 5), it is also extremely enriching for and broadening of the audience’s horizons of thought. The welcoming gesture of hospitality towards the other, inviting the other into our minds, can be compared to George Bataille’s experience of continuity with the other, which can only be permanently achieved in death (see Eroticism) – a state which Derrida would probably equate with absolute hospitality, and which he does not encourage us to attain. Neither does sublime drama. What the audience of sublime drama undergoes in the moment of the arrival of the other is a type of near-death experience, when the boundaries of the self become blurry and it is undecidable where the self ends and the other begins. The boundaries, however, never dissolve completely. This state of undecidability between the horizon of absolute hospitality towards the other and the horizon of domestication of the other as the same is not the goal in itself. Sublime drama is not an encouragement of inaction and indecision on the part of the audience. Rather, it is an opportunity for the audience to reassess their preconceived ideas about the world, and if necessary transform them accordingly. Carried out under very subjective circumstances of the leap of faith and not objective knowledge, this transformation is, however, felt as extremely individual and incomplete. In other words, the new concepts are always tinged with the indeterminacy and doubt experienced earlier, ready to be transformed further again and again.

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1 Introduction

Although all dimensions coexist and co-influence one another within the sublime plays, the analysis of the case studies will show that some plays are more oriented towards ethical issues, some towards the aesthetic and others towards the political use of the sublime.

1.2 Overview of Chapters Arranged into two main chapters, “Theory of the Sublime” and “Case Studies”, the main body of the book proceeds from the presentation of the category of the sublime in a theoretical outline to a demonstration of how the category applies in dramatic and theatrical practice, analysing the aesthetic of the sublime in four selected plays: Patrick Marber’s Closer (1997), Anthony Neilson’s Normal (1991), Mark Ravenhill’s Faust Is Dead (1997) and Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (2000). Chapter two is a conceptual presentation of the theory of the sublime in a chronological outline of a few selected philosophers, namely Longinus, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant and Jean François Lyotard; and of their ideas. Since the history of the term is so extensive, attempting to present it within the scope of the present study would be neither possible nor productive. The historical and conceptual development of the idea is therefore only sketchy and a ‘side effect’ rather than intention of the study. The other, more significant motivation behind selecting the four thinkers will be presented here briefly. Beginning from the sublime’s uncertain ‘origins’ in the famous work Peri Hupsous by a Greek writer named ‘Longinus’ or, alternatively, ‘Pseudo-Longinus’, the chapter starts off with this particular philosopher not only because traditionally he is considered to be the ‘father’ of the sublime, doubtful as this claim is, but first and foremost due to Longinus’ focus on the relation between artistic inspiration, creation and reception, which is also of essential interest for the present study. Of great significance here is especially how the artistic inspiration, the great passion, positive or negative, makes the artist torture words and mangle language, as what the artist experiences simply collapses the frame of conventional speech. This approach to language resurfaces in Artaud’s concept of creating a language beyond thought and gesture by means of cruelty, and Derrida’s theorising of the parergon. Together they will be of relevance in analysing the sublime aesthetic of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis and her creation of parergonal language. Another characteristic of the sublime that Longinus points out and which will be equally important in all case studies is the moment of the sublime turn. It is described by Longinus as the unexpected and paradoxical reversal of the situation from the sensation of near annihilation to what seems to be

1.2 Overview of Chapters

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its opposite, namely, the feeling of being energised, reinvigorated and even powerful, ready to create and live again. Longinus’ turn of the sublime is echoed in later theories of the aesthetic category as the experience of terror and the removal of this terror accompanied by the sensation of the sublime delight in Burke, the oscillation between the negative and positive moments in Kant, or the threat of privation and sensation of consciousness’ ecstatic renewal in Lyotard. The echoes are also further traced in case studies as the co-dependency of Eros and Thanatos, or creativity and destruction, life and death. Usually, the latter within the pair, conventionally negatively connoted, has the status of the unwanted other, which sublime drama thematises and, in so doing, attempts to inject the other back into culture and society, presenting what is generally pushed to the margins of the culture, or as Lyotard would later say, what is silenced by the dominant voices. Burke’s theory is interesting for several reasons. Not only does it massively shift the focus of the sublime from what his early eighteenth century predecessors defined as the experience of God’s greatness and infinity to the darker sensation of the prospect of one’s own mortality, but it also puts much greater emphasis on the experiential and shocking side of the feeling. Both modifications of the concept by Burke’s theory make it of particular interest for the study of the drama of the 1990s, which is, as Sierz rightly identified, first and foremost an experiential theatre. Coupled with Burke’s insights as regards the potential practical uses of the sublime, which, after the terror of life privation has been lifted, turns out to be the most powerful and most life-affirming sensation, his description of the experience touches upon important notions characteristic of the sublime theatre of the 1990s. With its electrifying and invigorating qualities, Burke considers the sublime to be the counter-force to the detrimental consequences of the over-indulgence in the joys of the beautiful, which he equates with pleasure and society. This vice, if taken too far, can lead to melancholy and suicidal thoughts. Similarly, sublime drama introduces the feelings and sensations that are marginalised by the dominant culture of consumerism and the cool, which that culture dismisses, labelling them as unsocial and destructive while presenting itself as life-enhancing. Showing, just as Burke did, that excessive consumption brings about the opposite effect, namely, a diminished experience of life and the feeling of ennui, sublime drama works as a homeopathic drug⁹ by injecting into the body of the so The description of theatre as “a sort of homeopathic action” comes from Joe Kelleher (50), where he, drawing on Plato, defines it further as “less likely to lead to a change in the political state of things than to a recognition of those feelings that need to be kept in check for the sake of the common political good” and in doing so supplying “a means of running off, as if through a

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ciety the things that it fears, though in safe doses ‘diluted’ by the protected theatrical context, so as to counteract them in real life. The use of Burkean sublime terror and shock to create a liminal space in the main character’s mind internally and audiences’ thought externally, and to lead them to the experience of the sublime and transformation, will be central in Anthony Neilson’s Normal. The Kantian theory of the sublime is deemed to be a ground-breaking step in the history of the concept, even though it was not so prominent for the philosopher himself, as he considered the aesthetic of the sublime to be a mere addition to his main interest, which was the aesthetic judgement of the beautiful. Continuing and systematising Burke’s separation of the beautiful from the sublime, Kant shifts the focus of the discourse from the senses to the mind, and meticulously describes the similarities and differences between the two feelings. Importantly, he classifies both the beautiful and sublime as judgements that are aesthetic and reflective, which puts them in the category of judgements that are described as subjective feelings, operating without pre-existing concepts and without forming any. The audience of sublime drama is also exposed to situations where they can only proceed further without preconceived ideas or dramatic criteria. Both the judgement of the sublime and of the beautiful are therefore significantly of no epistemological use – a notion which is picked up by Lyotard, and which makes the category viable in postmodern contexts. Typically, the audiences of sublime drama usually learn more about themselves, their own frame of mind, rather than about the aesthetic object that a given play evokes. As for the differences between the two judgements, the beautiful object seems as if it were created for the human apparatus of perception and the perceiving subject experiences no difficulties or pain on apprehending the object; quite the opposite, the subject feels in total harmony with it and enjoys its presence even though it cannot find any determinate rule under which to subsume the object. The sublime object, in turn, exceeds the subject’s capacity for apprehension and deeply frustrates the faculties of the human mind. The judgement of the sublime is therefore much more troubled than the judgement of the beautiful, as it consists of conflicting feelings, terror in the face of the overwhelming and ungraspable size of the apprehended object (mathematical sublime) and/ or by its power (dynamic sublime) and extreme delight. Kant explains the last feeling by the arrival of ideas of reason, such as the idea of absolute freedom or the idea of the infinite, which the overwhelming object supposedly evokes

drainage channel or short-circuit, any generative charge, any static electricity in the politics of performance that threatens the status quo” (Kelleher 50). David Ian Rabey also mentions this notion in the context of the British theatre of the 1990s (2010: 123).

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in our mind. The experience of the sublime demonstrates, in other words, that there is more to reality than our mind is capable of imagining or understanding and that there are limits to the latter. As Lyotard later shows in his postmodern interpretation of the category, this ‘more’ can only be sensed as pain or terror connected to the failure of our imagination and understanding to grasp the unknown. For Kant, this failure has, too, an upside as it allows him to turn around the unpleasant possibility opened by the sublime that the human mind is not capable of transcending the gap between subject and object by resorting to the faculty of reason. The latter providing its ideas of absolute freedom and infinity saves the human claim to superiority over nature and thus fills in the dangerous gap threatening the unity and coherence of Kant’s otherwise rational system. This gap, unsurprisingly, is not only left open in postmodern reinterpretations of the sublime but is also joyfully exposed. It is the experience of this discrepancy, of the incommensurability of the perceiving subject and the perceived object that opens the category of the sublime for the ethical thought of the other. It shows that the other can never be completely apprehended but has to remain indeterminate and unpresentable. If it is presented as determinate then, according to Lyotard, it means that a “wrong” has been done to the other. The presentation of such mechanisms of this ‘wrongdoing’ perpetrated on the other by consumerist discourse will be the main focus of chapter two, and of the analysis of the aesthetic of the sublime in Marber’s Closer. It is the experience of the sublime indeterminacy and unpresentability of the other, or as Derrida prefers to call it, the impossibility of deciding what the other is, in our minds that sublime drama exposes its audiences to so frequently. What Kant describes as the failure of human imagination and understanding becomes the success of thought in acknowledging its own inability to grasp the other in Lyotard, and opens thought to transformation. Similarly, for Derrida the sublime ecstasy does not, as Kant would have it, originate in the experience of the limitlessness of the human mind but quite the reverse; it is the sensation of the boundaries re-setting anew, in the moment of their transformation. The postmodern sublime is, therefore, a simultaneous experience of thought’s limits and of a new horizon, and the possibility of pushing the limits a bit further. Making virtue out of necessity, Lyotard interprets the frustrating experience of the limits of our system of thought as an indication that there are still realms, silent voices, that are not represented by the system. It is a sign that the system constantly needs to be revised, our thought transformed and new horizons discovered. Exploring these unknown realms is precisely the task that Lyotard defines for postmodern art and which sublime drama seems to pursue: to bear witness to the silent voices within the dominant culture, and present their unpresentabil-

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1 Introduction

ity by pointing to the incommensurability of the silent object and the subject’s dominant narrative and its familiar concepts. According to Lyotard, the only possible way of presenting the silent voice, or the other, is by showing this irresolvable conflict between the received concepts and their failure to grasp the other. This is the moment of thought’s paralysis, or what Derrida refers to as the “trial of undecidability” (Derrida 1988: 210). As Lyotard argues, the only answer that the sublime gives about the other is in the form of a question. The question is a sign that the other happens but it says very little about what the other actually is. The moment of our judgement about the other is always fraught with this sense of impossibility, or to use Derrida’s term again, undecidability. Further, Lyotard rejects any possibility of presentation of the other as graspable and refutes any system that purports to be able to do so, such as Habermas’ concept of reaching consensus through communication or the consumerist propagation of the human in the arts. The latter’s line of reasoning, according to Lyotard, is based on the equation of the apparent clarity of language with the human, and clarity sells better (a notion also propagated by Thatcher in the context of theatre). For Lyotard, these are mere attempts at domestication of the other, and its destruction. Four sub-chapters of analysis follow the theory chapter, each devoted to an individual case study. Though focusing on four texts may be considered to be a limitation, the decision was motivated by the main task of this work, namely to focus more decidedly on the relationship between the audience and the stage and on the analysis of the audience’s aesthetic response to sublime drama. In order to analyse the interaction within the two communication systems, internal and external, and how they influence each other it is necessary to look at the respective play’s reading, which I use very broadly and also understand performance as reading, as a process of continuous communicative exchange. This, in turn, can only be done by considering the plays in great detail and as a whole, examining the different aesthetic strategies within them, which make up their final aesthetics. The choice of the four particular plays was dictated by the endeavour to present a relatively wide range of strategies of sublime drama and to demonstrate the variety of ways that shock can be administered to the audience. In Closer, for instance, the negative moment of the sublime is delayed for a very long time, whereas in Normal, it is constructed almost from the beginning and is gradually built up throughout the play until it reaches its peak. Whereas part of Normal’s strategy of shocking the audience into the cognitive ‘paralysis’ lies in both the figural description and figural presentation of extremely brutal and gory images, 4.48 Psychosis refrains from presenting any bloody images entirely. Further, the plays were partially chosen so as to demonstrate that the cat-

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egory of the sublime applies not only to the key playwrights that Sierz discusses in his book, but also to a wider range of plays than the label of in-yer-face allows, as the latter seems problematic with regard to plays such as Closer ¹⁰ or, possibly, 4.48 Psychosis. Patrick Marber’s Closer, which is the case study of chapter 3.1, is analysed with reference not only to the sublime but also to two other judgements that Kant discusses in his Critique of Judgement, the beautiful and the agreeable. Demonstrating how different judgements made by the characters internally, and the audience/readers externally, affect their perception of and relation with the other characters, the chapter focuses on the ethical dimension of sublime drama. It shows how the other is often subsumed and domesticated by the consumerist and cool strategies of the agreeable, which are often presented under the label of the beautiful and which we often assume without thinking, and considers the possibilities of resistance to this process by applying the aesthetic of the sublime. With relationships as the central themes of the play, their analysis manifests the different consequences that the three judgements have on issues of love and intimacy. Is it possible to be intimate with the other without destroying its otherness by trying to get to know it better? After all, the idea of intimacy is usually defined as physical and emotional closeness and they are impossible without making ourselves knowable to each other. And yet, will this ‘making known’ to the other not diminish the attraction and end the possibility of love, as it is the otherness, the unknown, that is so exciting for us and makes us fall in love with the other in the first place? The answers to these and other questions posed by the play will be the main focus of the analysis of the sublime aesthetic in this chapter. Presenting Anthony Neilson’s Normal as the next case study, chapter 3.2 puts more emphasis on the epistemological implications of sublime drama. Confronting its main character and the audience with the type of the other that is conventionally defined as monstrous and inhuman, the play demonstrates the instability of the concept of the human, and of other concepts that are defined with reference to it, such as love and death. It does so by having the character internally and the audience externally experience the inhuman within themselves by transporting their minds into a liminal space, using the aesthetic of the sublime for this purpose.

 In order to deal with the problem, Sierz distinguishes between two sub-categories of in-yerface drama, a hot and a cool one. Closer is then classified as an instance of the latter. 4.48 Psychosis is not discussed by Sierz at all.

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1 Introduction

Mark Ravenhill’s Faust Is Dead, presented in chapter 3.3, remains within the epistemological dimension of sublime drama, as it focuses on the characters’ being seduced by ungraspable ideas such as the real and the true. It shows three characters embark on a Faustian journey in search for the real in a world which becomes more and more unreal, or, to use Baudrillard’s concept, hyperreal. Setting the action of the play within a reality dominated by consumerist semioticisation, the play also activates the political potential of the sublime aesthetic and examines its subversive effect of resisting such dominating narratives. It also demonstrates how the seduction with the prospect of the real, which is considered to be the basic and insatiable desire fuelling human creation and all endeavours, is manipulated by both the characters and the system of consumerism to fit their own purposes. The analysis shows how the audience also becomes part of this manipulation, only to be violently made aware of its influence on their perception by the arrival of the sublime real. Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis is the last case study of the book (3.4) and is formally the most experimental of the four. It would be convenient to say that this play’s speciality is its focus on the formal dimensions of sublime drama, as it pushes the limits of theatrical presentation much further in comparison to the other plays presented here. And indeed, a great part of its sublime effect on the audience is the result of this experimental approach to language. The latter only produces more and more instability of meaning, deepening the experience of the Derridean undecidability of a frame, instead of giving information and sending a clear message to the audience. True as such a statement might be, it would however also diminish the brilliance of the play, which by presenting the undecidability – the key feature of the sublime – automatically activates all remaining dimensions, the ethical, epistemological and political of sublime drama as well, producing, arguably, the most powerful effect of the four plays.

1.3 Previous Research Although the amount of critical accounts of the British drama of the 1990s has substantially grown since Sierz’s famous In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (2001), apart from his seminal work, which is however a very subjective and personal account of the theatrical phenomenon, and Urban’s very convincing attempt to define the aesthetic of the drama with regard to its effect on the audience, but which does not satisfactorily focus on the relationship between the audience and the stage, there have been hardly any other attempts at describing the theatrical phenomenon in a systematic way.

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An interesting work that does attempt to account for the relationship between the stage and the audience is Piet Defraeye’s essay, “In-Yer-Face Theatre? Reflections on Provocation and Provoked Audiences in Contemporary Theatre” (2004). Defraeye describes the typical features of theatrical provocation, systematically analysing its various effects, which very frequently also overlap with the effects of the sublime. The latter can therefore be further classified as a particular type of provocative aesthetic, leading to the ‘particular’ experience of indeterminacy. The common features that Defraeye lists include for example “the seditious disposition” (Defraeye 82) of theatrical provocation, which “challenges the most basic conventions of theatre as representation” (Defraeye 82). Remarkably, Defraeye further observes that this subversion cuts both ways, as in undermining the conventions of theatre it simultaneously also undermines its “own theatrical frame” (Defraeye 82). Just as the sublime, with its continuous movements between the feeling of paralysis and the feeling of being energised, loss of meaning and its formation, provocation, too, combines two paradoxical states, as it is about power and control but it is also on the verge of losing this power and control “as part of its challenge of its own theatrical framework” (Defraeye 82). Also, similarly to the approach used in this study, which is concerned with the emergence of an overwhelming object in the audience’s consciousness, he defines the audience’s perception of theatrical performance as reading, which he understands “in its broad phenomenological meaning” (Defraeye 85).¹¹ Unfortunately, Defraeye’s theory of theatrical provocation does not include any case studies but remains within the realm of general concepts and ideas. This definitely has both advantages and disadvantages. ‘Spacious’ as his theory is, it can be used with regard to various types of provocative theatre from different historical periods and shows their interconnectedness. Further, not referring to any concrete plays in particular, Defraeye avoids the problematic issue of theorising the category of the audience and their concrete reactions to concrete moments within a play. On this universal and abstract level, his theory remains convincing. Nevertheless, this general approach is not capable of presenting what is specific about the provocative behaviour of particular periods. The aesthetic of the sublime, having quite a few features of the provocative theatre as Defraeye has described it, can be considered as a sub-type, a particular instance of the provocative aesthetic, which operates with extreme experiences of Eros and Thanatos, which the consumerist culture of the cool attempts either to ignore or commodify

 Martin Middeke, too, speaks of phenomenological theatre with regard to Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, which I also consider to belong to the sublime drama, (see Middeke).

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1 Introduction

as something known and harmless, and leads to the sensation of indeterminacy and transformation of consciousness. The relation between Eros and Thanatos with regard to contemporary British theatre is discussed in depth by David Ian Rabey in his essay “Flirting with Disaster” in a study of two British playwrights, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane. The study was published in the collection of articles on Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance (2010), which was edited and introduced by Karoline Gritzner. Due to its main theme, the collection of articles is also of great significance for this study, particularly Gritzner’s introduction and Rabey’s article. Though using different theoretical approaches, the conclusions of both Gritzner and Rabey with regard to the interaction between Eros and Thanatos frequently coincide with the assumptions of this work as concerns the role of the sublime in the drama of the 1990s. For example, drawing on Freud’s theory of pleasure and reality principles, Gritzner speaks of the repressions in human life and sees them as the result of “capitalist discipline, control and manipulation of individual needs” (Gritzner 2010a: 3). Freud considers “emancipated sexuality (the liberation of Eros)” as a way out of it (Gritzner 2010a: 3). Referring further to Jean Baudrillard’s theory, Gritzner points out a subsequent development, namely that so-called ‘liberated’ sexuality has itself become a sign of reification and, like the other forces of production, economic growth and general rationalism, it appears […] as an inverted manifestation of the death drive. Our system ‘undertakes to abolish death and, for this very purpose, erects death above death and is haunted by it as its own end.’ (Gritzner 2010a: 3)

As a result of these cultural changes, human beings are detaching themselves from their “instinctual life” (Gritzner 2010a: 4) more and more. Theatre can offer a time and space where we can explore our deepest and most primal instincts, “relying on the powers of our imagination,” which is productive “in our conceptualisations of and aesthetic responses to the drives and compulsions of the human body and psyche” (Gritzner 2010a: 4). In doing so, theatre helps us reconnect with those drives. Rabey, in turn, points to the possibility of “encounter[ing] with the ‘other’” (Rabey 2010: 124), which “the more courageous forms of drama and theatre” (Rabey 2010: 126) offer, and he includes theatre that engages with Eros and Thanatos in this category. According to Rabey, “drama and theatre offer an imaginative, yet interpersonal, encounter with that which lies beyond the literally and immediately available” (Rabey 2010: 127). The experiences of Eros and Thanatos, taking the extreme forms of various transgressions, help facilitate the encounter with the other by “‘seeking out what is incoherent, inconsistent, contradictory,

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countersensical; […] endors[ing] what is unpredictable, unworkable, insurmountable, unfathomable’” (Rabey 2010: 126). Neither Gritzner nor Rabey, however, makes the connection between the theme of Eros and Thanatos and the aesthetic of the sublime in the drama of the 1990s, though Gritzner speaks of the sublime in her other essay, published in Theatre of Catastrophe (2006), with regard to Howard Barker’s drama. In this article, however, she is more preoccupied with the effect of the sublime within the internal communication system of Barker’s plays rather than with the production of the response in the audience. Most critics acknowledge that the explicit and extreme images of sex and violence are part of the drama’s strategies to shock the audience. They differ, however, in explaining the function of the shock effect. Those less favourable towards the drama of the 1990s see its use of shock tactics as mere sensationalism. Raimund Borgmeier, for example, discussing Sarah Kane’s Blasted agrees with the initial negative reviews that the play received after its premiere¹², which considered the presentation of unmotivated violence as the play’s greatest flaw rather than an effective strategy, as the present study does. He agrees with theatre critics such as Sarah Hemming or Michael Billington¹³ who did not see any justification for the “singular accumulation of horrible elements” in the play (Borgmeier 84). Questioning the use of seasons in Blasted as a failed “attempt to bring out a symbolic meaning of the play” (Borgmeier 83), Borgmeier argues against any “positive interpretations”¹⁴: Are we to get the impression that the action we see and the speeches we hear in Blasted have some archetypical significance, like the four seasons? Of course, human ingenuity and capacity to find interpretations is enormous, but the meaning of Blasted and its horrors is really far from conclusive. (Borgmeier 83)

What in the eyes of critics such as Borgmeier, who argue that without a political or social frame such violent images are simply senseless and unbearable, is the deficiency of the drama, has been considered to be its main strategy by others, who draw upon theories such as Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty (see Tönnies; Berns;

 Michael Billington in his review of 4.48 Psychosis remembers the critics’ reactions to Blasted as a “mixture of disbelief and outrage: the homburg-hatted man in front of me stomped out shouting ‘bring back the censor’” (2001).  After Kane’s death, Billington modified his critical opinion about Blasted, confessing that “[f]ive years ago I was rudely dismissive of Sarah Kane’s Blasted. Yet watching its revival last night I was overcome by its sombre power” (Billington 2001).  Borgmeier refers to Voigt-Virchow’s article, “Sarah Kane, a Late Modernist: Intertextuality and Montage in the Broken Images of Crave (1998)” (2001).

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Urban 2004; Saunders 2002), Barker’s Theatre of Catastrophe (see Barry; Urban 2001) or Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre (see Barnett; Lehmann 2007b) in assessing the aesthetic strategy of shock in the plays. Though differing in various aspects, all these theatrical concepts seem to consider the lack of motivation behind the disturbing images, that is, the lack of message as the message in itself. My approach to the drama through the prism of the sublime also positions itself among these studies, seeing the presentation of shocking contents that is unframed by any social or political context that could give it a meaning as the central strategy of the drama’s aesthetic. It is precisely the experience of the frame as collapsing and resetting itself again in the perceiver’s consciousness that is the core of the sublime feeling. The study’s approach differs from the other methods by putting much greater emphasis on the analysis of the relationship between the stage and the audience, describing the different stages in the process of perception and formation of the aesthetic response. Due to this particular focus, the use of shock tactics is also considered from this particular perspective of the audience’s response. Further, in referring to the aesthetic of the sublime the study chooses to also bring out more the energising and transformative quality of the experience and not to primarily concentrate on the disturbing qualities of the plays. In this respect, the sublime theatre is more reminiscent of Ralph Yarrow’s idea of a sacred theatre (see Yarrow) or Peter Brook’s concept of a holy theatre, which in shocking the audience fills it “at the same time […] with a powerful new charge” (Brook 53). Furthermore, most of the studies focus exclusively on one or two similar playwrights, or visibly similar plays, most frequently Sarah Kane’s work, and do not show how the theoretical models may or may not work with other playwrights. It is arguable, for instance, whether Lehmann’s concept of postdramatic theatre (see Lehmann 2007a) could be applied to plays such as Marber’s Closer or Neilson’s Normal or Penetrator just as successfully as it can be to Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (see Barnett; Lehmann 2007b). Such plays, namely, quite clearly still depend on storytelling and the use of actional speech onstage. Some critics, pinning the affiliation among the plays to the explicitly shocking images, draw a line between the shock effect produced by violent images in contrast to the shock effect produced by experimental forms. Merle Tönnies, for instance, argues that Kane departed from the strategies of the Theatre of Cruelty in her later plays, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis (Tönnies 67). Approaching Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis through the aesthetic of the sublime, in turn, permits a different understanding of Artaud’s concept of cruelty and makes it possible to see Kane’s last play as a radicalisation of her cruel strategies by pushing them to their extremes rather than as a departure from them. The judgement of the sublime does not, according to Kant, subsume the object of perception under a universal rule.

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Each object is perceived in its own right and as unique, inventing its own rules, which are impossible to grasp as a totality. Describing the drama of the 1990s with the category of the sublime does not limit the aesthetic scope of the plays to a concrete list of gory and deeply disturbing images on stage but is permissive of a much wider range of possible catalysts. This permissiveness of the category lies in the interactive quality of the sublime, as what is deemed to be overwhelming depends on the audience’s system of thought. Therefore, though overwhelming elements play an important role in catalysing the response, the latter ultimately depends on the perceiver. The sublime is the result of the dynamic interaction between the object and the subject, and cannot be considered without accounting for the latter’s frame of mind. The relationship between the sublime and literature is well established and reaches back to the ‘origins’ of the term in Longinus’ treatise Peri Hupsos, where it is described as the orator’s or the poet’s ability to overpower their listeners with language. The term was later taken up by the philosophical discourse of the eighteenth century to explain the world’s phenomena that could not be accounted for with science, that is, rationally. Since then, the philosophical discourse on the sublime has been growing and developing parallel to its literary counterpart, often crossing the boundaries between the two realms. The literary sublime then resurfaced again in Romanticism, where it made a particularly strong appearance in poetry and gothic novels. Trying to account for the great variety of the Romantic and gothic sublime in primary literature would require an entirely separate study, or possibly studies, to do it justice and is not the task or ambition of the present work. Moreover, since there are more than enough studies that focus exclusively on analysing the Romantic sublime¹⁵ or its gothic equivalent¹⁶, such work would mostly only be repetitive and therefore also rather redundant. Though much less researched in comparison, the poets and writers from the later periods, most notably modernism and postmodernism, have also been recurrently described with respect to the sublime (see Lyotard 1984a; Ramazani; Redfield; Segall; Slade). Not bound to a particular form, the sublime is rather the result and expression of the insatiable desire to exceed

 see, for example, Romantic Horizons: Aspects of the Sublime in English Poetry and Painting, 1770 – 1850 (1983) by James B. Twitchell; Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (1985) by Steven Knapp; Ferguson Frances, Solitude and the Sublime; Cian Duffy Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime; Angela Leighton Shelley and the Sublime (1984); the seminal work by Thomas Weiskel on The Romantic Sublime (1976); Stuart A. Ende’s Keats and the Sublime; or Neil Hertz’s The End of the Line (1985).  see, for example, Vijay Mishra’s The Gothic Sublime (1994); Andrew Smith’s The Gothic Radicalism (2000); or Ed Cameron’s The Psychopathology of the Gothic Romance.

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the existing limits and boundaries. The historical form of the sublime is then dependent on the historical boundaries that the sublime attempts to transcend. Its form and realisation will therefore differ in William Wordsworth, Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett or Sarah Kane. Nevertheless, some links and affinities can be discerned. Most significant for the present study is the undeniable link between sublime drama of the 1990s and the Romantic and gothic sublime literature. This link extends further to relate sublime drama with modernism and postmodernism.¹⁷ Regrettably, focusing the comparison of the three types of the sublime, Romantic, modern and postmodern, can only be briefly outlined here, as such a task exceeds the scope of the present study, which focuses on the analysis of the sublime in the genre of drama and theatre and within the historical frame of the last decade of the twentieth century. Briefly, the connection is expressed in the common interest of these literary works in the relation between the subject and the object, that is, between the inside of the human mind and the outside reality, and in the (im)possibility of transcending the distance between them. Furthermore, the interrelatedness is also discernible in the literatures’ use of the sublime as a mode of resistance to dominant and oppressive discourses and social forces, be it the supremacy of reason and common sense in the eighteenth century, the dominance of capitalism, industrialisation and urbanisation of the Victorian era, or the totalitarian ideologies and consumerism of late capitalism in the twentieth century. In other words, the emergence of the sublime mode can be seen as a resistance to any narratives that attempt to limit the concepts of the human, of human life and reality to a concrete image (see Lyotard 1984a). The sublime, as an aesthetic strategy and philosophical attitude, undermines these suffocating boundaries and imposed limitations. Thematically, this link is visible in the recurring interest of these literatures in what is considered to be the other, the marginalised element that a given culture attempts to keep at bay or even erase from the general consciousness altogether.¹⁸ The definition of the other differs depending on the cultural context and

 In a much broader context than that of the sublime, the interrelatedness between Romanticism, modernism and postmodernism has long been known and acknowledged by critics (see Garvin; Larrissy). In the context of the sublime, the connection has also been shown in philosophical discourse (see Slocombe).  There are many studies about the theatre of the 1990s which identify the various types of other that have been excluded by the culture of late capitalism. Just to mention a few examples, Annette Pankratz discusses the motif of death (see 2004a); Christina Wald thematises the inexplicable other of mental disorders, considering representations of trauma, hysteria and melancholy in the theatre (see Wald 2007); Monika Pietrzak-Franger thematises “the re-disco-

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what is therefore considered to be the other in Romanticism may no longer be so in sublime drama of the 1990s. In this respect, the work of the sublime is reminiscent of the work of deconstruction, detecting, uncovering and exposing the blind spots within a culture. Formally, the sublime, by putting the other – which often is associated with the ugly and the terrible (for example the Alps in Romanticism) – into presentation, usually offends the conventional tastes and norms of what is considered as a standard of beauty or ‘good’ forms in a given culture. In doing so, the sublime extends the scope of what is aesthetically acceptable in literature and the arts.¹⁹ Further, the overall assessment of the effect of the sublime depends on the approach to language and imagination in a given historical period and the belief in its imaginative and communicative powers, which are considered to be respectively incapable or capable of generating the link and bridging the gap between object and subject, or, semiotically, the belief in the bond between the signifier and the signified. Generally, the belief is considered to be strongest – although not without any doubts – in Romanticism, as the period is highly celebratory of the “‘awful Power’ of Imagination” (Shaw 101). This feeling turns into melancholy and nostalgia in modern literature, which, though it loses its belief in any possibility of bridging the gap, still uses language as if it were possible, and finally into an ecstatic game with language and representation in postmodernism (see Lyotard 1984a: 79 – 82). Working from the same assumption as modernism, postmodern literature celebrates the gap between signifier and signified instead. Regarding the particular genre, the amount of critical studies discussing the sublime in drama and theatre is surprisingly scarce in comparison to the discussions of the category in poetry²⁰, novels²¹ and the visual arts²². To put this remark

vering and experiencing of the male sensate corporeality” (Pietrzak-Franger 4) whose ‘deviant’ forms have often been excluded from cultural representation (see 4); and Amelia Hower Kritzer identifies the other as “the elements of society usually hidden from public view – unemployed young people, mental patients, drug addicts, homeless vagrants” (Kritzer 25). There are also numerous collections of articles which exclusively focus on the representation of the cultural and social margins in the drama of the 1990s (see, for example, Reitz 1995; or Schnierer 1997).  For a discussion of the introduction of the other into a culture by literature see Derek Attridge, Singularity of Literature (2004).  For examples of the studies of the sublime in poetry see footnote 21. Robert Baker’s analysis of poetry by William Wordsworth, Arthur Rimbaud, Emily Dickinson and Stéphane Mallarmé offers an interesting overview of the different modes of the sublime, which the author prefers to refer to as the extravagant so as to avoid its conventional associations with philosophers such as Kant (Baker). Anna-Lise François also analyses poems by William Wordsworth and Emily Dikkinson with regard to the sublime and adds the poetry by Thomas Hardy to the equation (see François). Catherine Maxwell in her The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne (2001) ex-

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in perspective, the recently published collection of articles edited by Harold Bloom, The Sublime (2010), includes twelve studies of the sublime in poetry, five essays on fiction and only one on drama.²³ The quantitative relation within Bloom’s collection is emblematic of the general proportions within literary research on the sublime. The existing works that do consider the sublime in drama are either dated and/or consider the category from Kant and Friedrich Schiller’s humanistic perspective, according to which the human mind by resorting to the idea of freedom is capable of transcending even the most terrifying phenomena or tragic forces. This humanistic viewpoint is represented in the discussion of the sublime in King Lear by Edward Dowden from 1881 included in Bloom’s collection, or in M. W. Gellrich’s article “On Greek Tragedy and the Kantian Sublime” (1993), where he uses Schiller’s model of the sublime tragedy based on Kant’s idea of the sublime in order to popularise the category that has “rarely been included in historical surveys of dramatic theory” (Gellrich 89). Referring to Schiller’s Das Pathetische (1793) and Über das Erhabene (1801), Gellrich presents Schiller’s image of the sublime dramatic hero, who, in line with the Kantian sub-

plores “the feminisation of the Victorian male poet” (Maxwell 1), focusing on figures, mythical or classical, and showing the poets’ encounter with the female sublime, defined by Maxwell as an aggressive female force. Such encounters “feminise the male in an act that simultaneously deprives and energises him” (Maxwell 1).  For Gothic novels see footnote 22. The Romantic sublime lives on apparently also in Victorian novels (!) by George Eliot, William Thackeray, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy (see Hanckock). Mary Ann Synder-Körber provides an analysis of the sublime from a feminist point of view in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (Synder-Körber Das weiblich Erhabene). Barbara Claire Freeman also thematises the feminine sublime, however, with regard to women’s American fiction (see Freeman). Unsurprisingly, Samuel Beckett’s novels have also been considered in connection with the sublime (see Myskja; Slade). In her study Sublime Desire, Amy J. Elias discusses the historical sublime, that is, the presentation of history as unrepresentable, comparing the historical romances of Walter Scott with what she refers to as metahistorical romances by authors such as J. M. Coetzee, Ishmael Reed, Leslie Marmon Silko, Julian Barnes, or Peter Ackroyd, to name but a few (see Elias).  For example, a very interesting study of the use of the sublime by modern art that attempts to come to terms with traumatic events is Gene Ray’s Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: from Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11 (2005). Another interesting example is the artistic and theoretical work by Barnett Newman (see Newman).  Among the essays about the sublime in poetry there are numerous studies: on Rainer Maria Rilke (Hopes), William Blake (Hobby), Gerard Manley Hopkins (Evans), John Keats (Albrecht), Coleridge (Evans), William Wordsworth (Wlecke), Robert Lowell (Hart), John Milton (Coleridge), Percy Bysshe Shelley (Hopes), Walt Whitman (Hopes) and William Butler Yeats (Ramazani). The collection also includes a few essays on the sublime in the fiction of: Kate Chopin (Freeman), Jane Austen (MacWilliams), Edgar Allan Poe (Hobby), Mary Shelley (Sherwin) and Herman Melville (Becker).

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lime, after the struggle with some overwhelming external forces is capable of resisting them with his or her force of mind, which evokes in the hero’s consciousness the absolute idea of freedom and allows him or her to rise above all obstacles (see also Wellek; Barone). Though historically interesting, such studies are of little use for the present study, as sublime drama of the 1990s seems to have little belief left in ideas such as absolute freedom, the moral superiority of human beings over nature, or the human subject as an autonomous agent with free will. Other studies, though using a more ‘updated’ theory of the sublime, discuss the concept primarily by focusing on its thematisation at the level of the internal communication system of the plays without considering its effect on the audience. In other words, they locate the sublime within the frame of the stage or text, only marginally relating it to or making it dependent on the audience’s response (see Johnson)²⁴. Karoline Gritzner’s previously mentioned essay on Howard Barker, similarly to the present study, defines the sublime as the experience of indeterminacy evoked by the encounter with Eros and Thanatos (see Gritzner 2006: 90). Gritzner discusses these encounters first and foremost with regard to the characters, arguing that “the sublime’s presence as an idea and feeling of boundless power (of the Other outside or within) becomes the source of the incomprehensible, terrifying yet fascinating jouissance (an enigmatic and ecstatic, heightened form of pleasure) for many of Barker’s tragic protagonists” (Gritzner 2006: 84). Usefully, Gritzner also describes the theatrical means of presenting the sublime onstage. The latter can be created for example by means of “poetic speech, which in its fragmented, fractured form points simultaneously to the construction and deconstruction of [the characters’] consciousness” (Gritzner 2006: 90). Other strategies evoking the effect of sublime indeterminacy onstage may be, according to Gritzner, “sounds and visual effects” (Gritzner 2006: 90) as they are, for example, used in Barker’s unperformed play Found in the Ground (2001):

 Of particular interest with regard to English drama are the chapters nine to eleven of this very extensive study on the use of hyperboles in Baroque literature, Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought. Christopher D. Johnson “traces how the hyperbolist in Baroque drama and philosophy often acts to deny the stringencies of circumstance, how he refuses to recognize faults, aporias, and limits, and yet sometimes how he is also able to express what is most transcendent, outrageous, or sublime in the human condition” (Johnson 280). Johnson’s focus is on the use of ordinary language in an extraordinary way (see Johnson 280). Though he does consider the audience’s response, his interest lies primarily in “what understanding, what bargain is made with the audience or reader so that hyperbole’s semantic or conceptual violence is accepted, excused, or simply ignored?” (Johnson 280).

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The play contains sounds of infinite distance; the imagery of burning books with its suggestion of burning bodies; the metaphors of mud and soul to suggest the dead and the frailty of human life. The sublime effect of these very particular and in a theatrical sense highly determinate performance images and movements nevertheless lies in the ensuing incommensurability between what is physically presented and what is imaginatively suggested. (Gritzner 2006: 91)

It is precisely what happens in this space between the materiality of the formless and boundless images and situations presented onstage or in a text and the audience and readers’ imagination that Gritzner regrettably does not pursue in her article, stopping instead at the edge of the stage, and which the present study undertakes to explore.

2 Theory of the Sublime Considering the strong popularity of the sublime in the twentieth century¹, it is rather unsurprising that the drama of the 1990s should also reflect this sudden interest in the feeling and its implications, theatre often being a type of seismograph for such manifestations of zeitgeist. What does this feeling consist of? How can it be represented formally? And what kind of perception of reality does it entail? According to Lyotard, the sublime is a subversive response to any totalitarian system which purports to be able to give a binding definition, or narrative, of human reality and provide humanity with a goal to pursue. Such systems, which Lyotard refers to as metanarratives (see Lyotard 1984b), operate along the principle of exclusion of everything and everyone which and who does not conform to their prescribed set of values or concepts. Only those who follow the universal rules of the dominant narrative are given the right to speak and, by extension, to exist. The particular, in turn, is marginalized and deprived of any voice. The sublime brings the marginalized back into the discourse. This tendency to give space to silent voices is very strongly represented in sublime drama, which identifies the realms and phenomena within the British society and culture that were excluded or pushed to the margins by Thatcher’s radical capitalism and which continued to be suppressed under Tony Blair’s government (see Urban 2004). The sublime is the discourse of the other. It represents what is unpresentable by the language and values of the dominant culture. Inventing its own language, the sublime gives voice to the other without depriving it of its alterity that is, without trying to adjust the other to the values and language of the dominant culture. Operating without pre-existing concepts and without forming any, the sublime seems to be the most suitable discourse of the other, because it can retain the singularity of the other without imposing dominance upon the existing discourses. The other is not adjusted to the dominant values; nor is it proposed as an opposing system of values which are to replace the existing, dominant sta-

 In the 1970s, the sublime experienced the latest revival in its long history of peaks and drops in popularity. It was first rediscovered in the United States, France and Italy, and two decades later also in Germany (see Heininger 275). In 1978 Jacques Derrida showed an extreme interest in the Kantian sublime, writing his La vériteé en peinture (The Truth in Painting 1987). In 1979 JeanFrançois Lyotard announced the sublime to be the new sensibility of postmodern art and introduced the term into postmodern European discourse (see Lyotard 1984a). Since that moment, as Christine Pries has observed, “ist der Begriff in aller Munde” (Pries 1989: 2). What followed was a veritable avalanche of writing on the sublime.

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tus quo. Similarly, refraining from offering any answers or solutions which could supplant the old order, sublime drama has been sometimes considered by critics as apolitical and/or amoral. Indeed, with no ideological agenda, sublime drama operates in a way that is quite different from what is conventionally associated with political drama. Introducing the other into the dominant discourse, sublime drama questions and undermines the latter’s claim to be the only authoritative voice. No priority is given to any of the parties. The different voices that the sublime brings together, adds new discourses to the existing ones. Not only is it thus a non-invasive way of introducing the other but also an opportunity for the existing discourses to open themselves to the unknown, sustain the potential for development and explore new horizons of thought and perception. In this context, the reappearance of the sublime in the drama of the late twentieth century can be considered to manifest two aspects of the reality of the time. On the one hand, more optimistically, it is the expression of the drive for greater openness towards the other and incessant transformation. On the other hand, the sublime is also symptomatic of the growing disillusionment, typical of the 1990s, with metanarratives such as world religions, communism or later also capitalism and with their attempts to impose their ideas of the truth about human reality.² The unsolvable conflict inherent to the feeling is the crucial aspect for Pries’ theory of the sublime as paradox (see Pries 1989: 6) and is also the typical feature of sublime drama. The sublime feeling is the result of the impossible attempt to represent an ungraspable content within a graspable form. “Das Paradox entsteht, weil mit dem Erhabenen in all seinen Ausprägungen etwas Unmögliches versucht wird, nämlich die Benennung von etwas Unnennbarem, kantisch gesprochen: die Darstellung von etwas Undarstellbaren” (Pries 1989: 6). This attempt includes probing the formal limits of representation, the effect of such endeavours often being a highly experimental form. Due to its unfamiliarity and otherness this form appears as repulsive and threatening to the subject and yet the latter simultaneously feels also attracted to it. What is also typical of paradox according to Pries, and therefore of the sublime in general and of sublime drama in particular, is that the contradictory ideas, concepts or feelings that the paradox brings together are not dissolved in a synthesis or reconciled. They re-

 The crisis of metanarratives can generally be tied in with re-emergences of the sublime. Indeed, in examining the history of the sublime, one notes that its popularity has tended to increase in times of rebellious turmoil and radical changes, be they political such as the French Revolution in 1789, cultural such as the industrial and urban growth of the late eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, which led to the crisis of Enlightenment, or aesthetic, such as the avant-garde movements in modernist art.

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main in a state of conflict, which pushes them to their limits. This is also where the sublime is constituted, at the borderline of contradictory concepts; at the tangent line of opposing ideas. Pries speaks of “[das]Verharren [des Erhabenen] auf einer Grenze” (Pries 1989: 6). Accordingly, sublime drama creates a situation where two opposites come into contact with one another and open themselves to the other. In the juxtaposition of the extremes, sublime drama makes its audiences experience the conceptual limits of the dominant system of thought. As Pries puts it, the sublime “bezeugt das Bewußtsein [der] Grenze” (Pries 1989: 12) and in so doing opens thought to transformation and change. The experience is disconcerting for the audiences. For suddenly, what had until now seemed to be a neatly and systematically arranged world of well-defined values and ideas starts to disintegrate. The experience of the sublime is therefore also connected with the experience of privation and terror. Having disturbed the existing order of things, the sublime does not replace it with a new determinate alternative, but instead generates chaos. The old image of reality is no longer viable and the new one is still nowhere to be seen. Lyotard refers to this as the threat of privation, the fear that nothing will follow. The momentary paralysis of thought is, however, released, which constitutes the pleasure of the sublime experience. What is sensed in this particular moment is referred to by Lyotard as the indeterminacy of thought, the other which can be interpreted in infinite ways (see Schrott 9) without being attached to any determinate meaning in particular. What is experienced in this moment of the sublime is, on the one hand, our own freedom of indeterminacy to perform ourselves and create our own presence in any way imaginable; and on the other hand, the same freedom to be and perform itself of the other. The latter characteristic makes the aesthetic of the sublime particularly suitable, that is, the least assimilating discourse of the other. The sublime can also be considered to be a response to the growing feeling of ennui and world-weariness related to the increasing anonymity and monotony of the modern, increasingly alienated life of the late twentieth century (see Crowther 125). Lyotard speaks of the time as “a period of slackening” (Lyotard 1984a: 71). Proposing the sublime as an infusion of new energy and vitality into the arts and, by extension, human lives, At the end of the twentieth century, a similar need to ‘shock ourselves’ back to life is particularly visible in the increased fascination with pain and extreme situations of which sublime drama seems to be a good example. In summary, the sublime as the expression of the postmodern zeitgeist represents the feelings of disillusionment with metanarratives on the one hand and, on the other, a greater openness towards the singular narratives of the other. The

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sublime constitutes an alternative response to the dominant discourse and its attendant norms and values, without attempting to replace them. Introducing the other into the dominant discourse, the sublime creates an unsolvable conflict which gives voice to many discourses without attaching moral values to any of them. During this sublime encounter, the discourses can open themselves to one another and expand their own conceptual limits in the process. Paradoxically, the experience is both paralysing and exhilarating. Facing the other can be an unsettling and even a terrifying event. Not only does such an encounter question and undermine the norms and values a given discourse represents, but it also changes the existing order irreversibly. If approached with the necessary openness, however, this experience may also turn out to be extremely rewarding, as it invigorates our thought and expands its conceptual scope, opening new horizons and possibilities. In the sublime, discourses are prevented from slipping into a state of torpor and stagnation. Instead, they are forced to recognise their own limits and open themselves to the other. Writing about the theory of the sublime necessarily involves a process of choice and selection of certain theorists, who are given priority over others. In my theoretical discussion of the sublime, I chose to focus on four representatives of the discourse on the sublime: Longinus, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant and Jean-François Lyotard. Although Lyotard’s theory of the sublime is most important for this book and is the fulcrum of the theory chapter, the three preceding thinkers (predominantly Burke and Kant) constitute the theoretical foundation for Lyotard and will therefore be considered in the chapter as well.

2.1 Longinus The origin of the sublime is just as ambiguous and elusive as the concept itself. Traditionally, it is considered to commence with the treatise Peri Hupsous, which is commonly translated in English as Of the Sublime, or, less commonly, Of the High (Deguy 5 – 7). The identity of the writer is also in doubt and it is only a matter of convention and common agreement that the writer is referred to as ‘Longinus’ or ‘Pseudo-Longinus’. As for the time when it was written, Richard Macksey summarises the dilemma in the following words, “there is no consensus for its date, which from the Renaissance until quite recently was commonly given as the third century C.E., although on the basis of internal evidence most scholars have today reached an uneasy agreement that it is a work of the first century” (Macksey 913 – 914). The work and its author seem to have escaped ultimate identification and determination just as their topic has done so for more than two thousand years.

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Peri Hupsous is a polemical response to another treatise on the sublime by Caecilius, whose work, according to Longinus, apparently “failed signally to grasp the essential points, and conveyed to its readers but little of […] practical help […]” (Longinus 41). Caecilius’ work, which unfortunately has not survived, exclusively concentrated, according to the author of Peri Hupsous, on “countless instances [of the sublime] as though our ignorance demanded it” without proposing “the methods by which we may attain our end” (Longinus 41). In an attempt to improve this flaw and “be of use to public men” (Longinus 41) Longinus sets off to write what, at first glance, may appear to be a manual of effective rhetoric for orators. Very quickly, however, the reader realizes that Longinus does not intend to produce a set of rules for a high style of speech. What he is more interested in are the sources of the sublime in language and its effect upon the hearers, which he describes as “transport” (Longinus 43), that is, a feeling of being carried away and completely overpowered by the speaker’s language. “The influences of the sublime”, Longinus argues, “bring power and irresistible might to bear, and reign supreme over every hearer. […] Sublimity flashing forth at the right moment scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt, and at once displays the power of the orator in all its plenitude” (Longinus 43).

2.1.1 “The echo of a great soul” Longinus describes the relation between nature and art, or, the event and its representation, by saying that “sublimity is the echo of a great soul” (Longinus 61). What this echo analogy shows, as Mary Ann Snyder-Körber astutely points out in Das weiblich Erhabene (2007), is that there is a modification between the original sound, which she identifies with the sublime passion and thoughts, and its repetition in the returning sound (their expression in language) (Snyder-Körber 68). Wenn ein Wort die Kehle verläßt und in den äußeren Raum tritt, entstehen Abweichungen in Länge und Lautstärke. So verwandelt sich auch der Pathos der großen Seele, wenn er zum sprachlichen Ausdruck wird, der wiederum von hörenden Ohren ebenso wie von einer visualisierenden Einbildungskraft vernommen wird und so einen weiteren medialen Wandel erfährt. (Snyder-Körber 68)

Similarly, just as sound is broken down in an echo, so does the inspired passion undergo modification through being broken down into fragments in the artistic creative process and later again in the reception. In the poetic discourse, the broken fragments take the form of discrepancies in imagery or transgression of literary conventions (Snyder-Körber 68 – 9). This description also applies for sublime drama such as Sarah Kane’s Crave (1998) or 4.48 Psychosis (2000), Martin

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Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (1997) or more recent plays such as Dennis Kelly’s Debris (2003) or Simon Stephens’ Pornography (2007). Attempting to transcend the limits of language in order to describe violent feelings or passions, the playwright or the characters of sublime drama just as Longinus’ poet “torture” the language and “stamp upon” it (Longinus 73 – 75). The impetus and concentration of the passion are so overwhelming and powerful that they threaten the poetic discourse, the dramatic text or theatrical performance with complete annihilation. And yet the result is paradoxically the strengthening and intensification of the artwork’s poetic force, which, for Longinus, means the reunification of the fragments into an organic unity. Longinus gives an example of this process by discussing a poem by Sappho which he considers to be sublime, because the poet “selects and binds the most striking and vehement circumstances of passion […] into a single whole” (Longinus 69 – 71), “one body” (Longinus 69). the sublime effect of the poem, is achieved by Sappho in her ode in that the author manages to bring together all the fragments and combine them into a single whole by the power of her artistic expression.

2.1.2 Sappho and the Threatened Subject Although Longinus does not cite the title of the poem anywhere, it is most commonly referred to in literature as Sappho 31, or by the first line, “Phainetai moi” – a poem that shares surprisingly many thematic and even some formal aspects with Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. The subject matter is a complex feeling of passionate love and anguish resulting from the inaccessibility of the object of desire. It is told from the point of view of the suffering lover, who describes her³ feelings on seeing the beloved person with someone else, a man. The poem can be divided into two parts, the first describing the dramatic situation and the other, the speaker’s reaction to it. The initial four lines picture the scene which the lyrical ‘I’ witnesses and which is the source of the speaker’s inner struggle of conflicting passions and distress. Depicted is a couple having light conversation, chatting and laughing. The man is sitting opposite the woman, the object of the speaker’s feelings, and responds to her laughter. Comparing the man to the gods, the lyrical ‘I’ considers his situation to be divine, blessed with the presence of the beloved one. Nothing seems to inhibit the flow of the couple’s conversation.

 Most interpretations assume that the lyrical ‘I’ of the poem is a woman considering Sappho’s presumable sexual orientation, although there have been also some critics who interpreted the speaker of the poem to be a man.

2.1 Longinus

Peer of Gods he seemeth to me, the blissful Man who sits and gazes at thee before him, Close beside thee sits, and in silence hears thee Silverly speaking, Laughing love’s low laughter. (Longinus )

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He appears to me like unto the gods, That man, who opposite to you Sits and to you speaking a sweet word, he replies, to your lovely laughter. (Harris )⁴

The atmosphere evoked in the first image of the poem is almost idyllic. This mood changes rather abruptly when the speaker’s gaze turns from the lovers’ scene to her own feelings. Oh this, this only Stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble! For should I but see thee a little moment, Straight is my voice hushed; (Longinus )

Truly that Flutters my heart in my breast. For when I look at you for a moment, I cannot speak (Harris )

The ardent desire which the lyrical ‘I’ experiences on seeing the woman, and the passionate love for her, turn into an agonizing pain when the speaker realizes that the object of her love is beyond her reach. Overwhelming, the contradictory passions the speaker is wrought with threaten her with a breakdown and even death. Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and through me ‘Neath the flesh impalpable fire runs tingling; Nothing see mine eyes, and a noise of roaring Waves in my ear sounds; Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes All my limbs, and paler than grass in autumn, Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter, Lost in the love-trance. (Longinus )

But my tongue is broken, right then Over my skin a light fire races I see nothing with my eyes, my ears Rumble And sweat pours over me as trembling Seizes me entire, greener than grass I am, just about to die I seem to me. (Harris )

The lyrical ‘I’ describes the violent bodily reactions which she experiences, beginning with the fluttering of her heart, the faltering of her language, fever, blindness, deafness, sweating, trembling and the final state of agony. Correspondingly, overpowered with her⁵ own anguish, the speaker of Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis experiences a similar collapse of body and mind. And yet the threatened subject in Sappho’s poem is not annihilated by the excruciating passion but, as

 This is a more literal translation of Sappho’s poem by William Harris, which is important especially due to the personal pronouns in the last two lines of the poem, which are missing in the artistic translation.  Just as in the case of Sappho’s poem, it is unclear whether the speaker(s) of Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis is a man or a woman, or more than one person. For a more detailed discussion, see chapter 3.4 of the present study.

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the commentator Philip Lewis observes, is “saved” in Longinus’ eyes by “the miracle of expressive writing” (Lewis 29) – a conclusion which, though modified by the postmodern context of the play, this study makes with regards to the question about the speaker’s suicide in 4.48 Psychosis. “Are you not amazed”, asks Longinus after quoting the poem, “how at one instant she summons, as though they were alien from herself and dispersed, soul, body, ears, tongue, eyes, colour?” (Longinus 71). The disjointed body of the speaker is unified by the creative force of the artist into the body of the poem and made one. This is articularly visible in the literal translation of the poem, in which the last two lines repeat the personal pronoun ‘I’ twice. Although the speaker describes her tongue as broken in the first line of the third stanza, the lines nevertheless continue and seem even more powerful in their poetic force than the first half of “Phainetai moi” – yet another similarity that the poem shares with the speaker of 4.48 Psychosis, who though committing herself to silence continues to speak her broken lines, which fragmented as they are, seem to be even more powerful as a result. This, according to Longinus, is the sublime effect of the poem, and also the sublime effect of the drama.

2.1.3 The Turn of the Sublime The unexpected “change of fortune”, the movement towards the threshold of death and the sudden return to life is, according to Neil Hertz, typical of Longinus’ approach to the sublime and is also one of the most crucial characteristics of sublime drama. Considering the poem by Sappho and other examples discussed by Longinus, Hertz observes an interesting regularity. From the position of a victim, the speaker suddenly attains the empowered position of the artist, “from Sappho-as-victimized-body to Sappho-as-poetic-force” (Hertz 1983: 585). This “sublime turn” is defined by Hertz as “the movement of disintegration and figurative reconstitution” (Hertz 1983: 591), “a transfer of power […] from the threatening forces to the poetic activity itself” (Hertz 1983: 584). Arguably, a similar turn can be identified in 4.48 Psychosis, in which the speaker thematises the threat and the act of her own demise and in doing so creates a work of art, through which she paradoxically ensures that her existence will continue in performance forever. In her discussion of Sappho’s poem, Snyder-Körber does not share Longinus’ opinion that it is from the unification of the discrepant parts into one organic body that the sublime effect and the poetic force of the poem originate. The same can be said about 4.48 Psychosis. Considering the poem from the feminist point of view, Snyder-Körber reads Sappho’s ode as a rejection of the persistent

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image of the female body as a beautiful object. Pointing out that Boileau, Longinus’ famous French translator from the seventeenth century, notices that the Greek word Longinus uses to describe the unity (“σύοδος”) can also mean shock and fright, Snyder-Körber allows for the possibility that “das ordende, alle Elemente vereinigende Prinzip des Gedichts ist […] ein anderes als das der organschen Einheit des lebendigen Körpers” (Snyder-Körber 76). She further points out that the way the body parts are presented by Sappho in her poem, namely without the “trunk”, a centre which could hold all the parts together, an image of an organic body cannot be reconstructed in the reader’s mind. Analogously, the speaker of 4.48 Psychosis also cannot find her essential self, experiencing it as a void and herself as “a fragmented puppet, a grotesque fool” (Kane 229). What arises out of Sappho’s description is an image of separate and only loosely connected body parts (Synder-Körber 80). The poem does not follow the classical patterns of harmony, regularity and clarity. It does not represent the ideal discourse as an organic body as Longinus insists. Instead of the ideal, beautiful female body, Sappho produces an image of a body in anguish, disjointed, disintegrating and unattractive if judged by classical standards of beauty. Through her own discourse, Sappho resists being forced by her interpreters and translators to fit into the tight parameters of the female ideal – a procedure which, as Snyder-Körber documents in her book, has been commonly practiced by literary critics in the past. Similarly, by presenting the audiences with the “bewildered fragments” (Kane 210) of her play, Kane also ensures the work’s resistance to any reductive interpretations. The poetic force of Sappho’s poem does not come from the assembly of the disjointed parts together into a harmonious picture of a beautiful body, but is rather the effect of its fragmentariness. The image of loosely connected parts resists determination as a clearly definable whole and indicates that there is something in the female body which cannot be grasped, bound and labelled as ‘the female body’. Resisting the idea of a determined female beauty and turning towards the ungraspable, the unpresentable other is what seems to constitute the sublime quality in Sappho’s poem – an idea which is also strongly represented in Patrick Marber’s Closer. As the first discussion of the sublime, Peri Hupsous thematises questions which will preoccupy artists and philosophers to come for centuries. What are the possible sources of the feeling? Can the sublime be created by language? If yes, what are the artistic strategies to produce this response in the receivers of the artwork? What does the feeling of the sublime actually entail? And what can be possibly gained from such an experience? Though written over two thousand years ago Longinus’ analysis of the sublime surprises with the viability of his observations in the context of contemporary literature and art. The ideas that creative energy is born out of fragments, that the passionate moment

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of presence escapes any presentation in language and requires radical transformation of the latter sound shockingly postmodern and tie in Longinus’ theory of the sublime with the more recent ideas on the subject matter. Although Longinus’ treatise was already known in the sixteenth century and was translated into Latin on numerous occasions, it was not given any priority and was considered on par with writings by other ancient authors such as Horace or Aristotle (see Cronk; Ley). It was not until Deaspréaux Boileau’s famous translation into French from 1674 (Traité du sublime, veilleux dans le discourse, Traduit du grec de Longin) that Peri Hupsous became one of the most discussed texts among scholars at the end of the seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries. In Britain, the most influential eighteenth-century study on the subject is Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757).

2.2 Edmund Burke 2.2.1 Towards an Aesthetic of Shocks: Burke There are several aspects which are considered to be Burke’s major input in the history of the sublime and which are of great relevance for sublime drama. They are: firstly, his empiricist approach to the issue and his focus on the experiential and the sensuous; secondly, the emphasis on terror and pain as the fundamental sources of the sublime and relating the sublime to self-preservation and life-affirming stimulation; and thirdly, the radical separation of the sublime and the beautiful. The following discussion of Burke’s theory will concentrate on the aspects of terror and pain in the experience of the sublime, which would later be picked up and developed by modern and postmodern thought and sublime drama into a new sensibility orientated towards shocks.⁶ Terror and pain, so Burke’s argument, if moderated by the safety of a distance, can be experienced by the perceiving subject as a life-enhancing and energising force which can stimulate our sensibility and wake us from the routine of life (Burke 122). In a post-industrial modern world, where life is easily reduced to a habit and is often characterized by existential emptiness, sublime terror and pain, as Paul Crowther observes, can be used to “rejuvenat[e] and heighte[n] our very sense of being

 For a comprehensive discussion of Burke’s theory see M. I. Peña Aguado’s Das Erhabenen als Rettungsbegriff der philosophischen Ästhetik (1992).

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alive” (Burke 193). The “rejuvenating” and energising sensation is one of the effects that sublime drama intends to produce. How does Burke account for this life-affirming quality of sublime terror and pain?

Terror and pain The sublime, and this is one of Burke’s original insights concerning the topic, is the direct result of our sensations and not our reflection upon them – a differentiation which is important in understanding the experiential aspect of sublime drama. As an empiricist who assumes that our knowledge of the world comes from our experience with the world and its objects through our senses, Burke sets off to examine the way the perceiving subject is affected by different objects and the implications of this encounter. He differentiates between two fundamental ‘passions’ which may be occasioned by our encounter with an object, pain and pleasure. He refers to them as “simple ideas, incapable of definition” and considers them to be both positive in nature and independent from each other (Burke 30). As María Isabel Peña Aguado notes in her analysis of Burke’s theory, pain and pleasure, being the two most basic and strongest passions, constitute the extreme poles in the wide range of other passions which are their modifications (see Peña Aguado 19). All of them, Burke argues, can be assigned to “two heads” (Burke 35), which are identified by Peña Aguado in Burke as two human drives (see Peña Aguado 19), “self-preservation and society” (Burke 35). Pleasure and the ideas associated with it, such as “life” and “health” (Burke 36), belong to the realm of society. Pain, danger, terror and other passions which are associated with our being-towards-death constitute the domain of self-preservation (see Burke 36). This domain is also the central concern of sublime drama, and will be manifested in the analysis of Anthony Neilson’s Normal. The opposition between self-preservation and society, pain and pleasure, translates further into Burke’s differentiation between the sublime and the beautiful. What is pain and terror’s role in the sublime? And how are they related to self-preservation? Locating the source of the sublime in anything that “is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates analogous to terror” (Burke 36), Burke identifies the experience of something terrible as the factor originating the idea of pain, which in turn produces the feeling of the sublime. A few lines later he adjusts this statement slightly, adding that the terrible object or situation cannot be a real threat to the perceiving subject and has to be moderated by a certain distance, “[w]hen danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be and they are delightful” (Burke

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36 – 7). Pain and danger have to remain within the realm of ideas, that is, of the potential, and not of the real, if the experience of the sublime is to arise. The sublime terror, in other words, has to be moderated by the mediation of the mind. Experienced from extremely close but still safe distance created by the theatrical frame, it is precisely the situation offered by sublime drama.

Self-preservation Such definitions of pain and terror and the particular way in which each of them contributes to the production of the sublime, raise some questions. Firstly, how is it possible that the sublime, which is considered by Burke to be “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (Burke 36) is produced in a process of moderation and diminution? And secondly, how can this feeling be delightful, if its sources are terror and pain? The answers to these questions are interdependent. Clearly, the idea that the intensity of the sublime should stem from moderation seems rather unconvincing. According to Crowther, therefore, what gives the force to the sublime is not the moderation of pain and terror. Nor is it pain and terror alone. What contributes to the overwhelming quality of the sublime is the association of the two passions with the sense of our mortality and the idea of death (Crowther 117) – an assumption corroborated by the use of pain and terror in sublime drama. Paradoxically, this association is also responsible for our enjoyment of the sublime. How can it be accounted for? Encountering something terrible, and Burke discusses in his Enquiry a wide catalogue of such objects and situations (such as obscurity, darkness, power, privation etc), the subject suddenly perceives “an unnatural tension and certain violent emotion of the nerves” (Burke 121). This experience is, according to Burke, a necessary exercise of the “finer parts” of our organism in order to avoid depression and the feeling of sluggishness in our life. Providence has so ordered it, that the state of rest and inaction […] should be productive of many inconveniencies; […] the nature of rest is to suffer all the parts of our bodies to fall into a relaxation, that not only disables the members from performing their functions, but takes away the vigorous tone of fibre which is requisite for carrying on the natural and necessary secretions. […] in this languid inactive state, the nerves are more liable to the most horrid convulsions, than when they are sufficiently braced and strengthened. Melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder, is the consequence of the gloomy view we take of things in this relaxed state of body. The best remedy for all these evils is exercise or labour. (Burke 122)

While labour is to exercise the muscles of the “coarser organs” (Burke 122) and keep them in shape, moderated pain or terror serve in the same way for the

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“finer organs” (Burke 123). Paradoxically, putting us face to face with the prospect of death, pain and terror rescue us from depressive and annihilating feelings and the monotony of our existence. The confrontation with a life-threatening experience, which however constitutes no real danger to us, reinvigorates us with these reviving jolts and gives us new strength and vitality. And this self-preserving quality is exactly, Burke argues, the source of the sublime delight and the reason for the intensity of the feeling, [i]f the pain and terror are so modified as not to be actually noxious; if the pain is not carried to violence, and the terror is not conversant about the present destruction of the person, as these emotions clear the parts, whether fine, or gross, of dangerous and troublesome incumbrance, they are capable of producing delight, not pleasure but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror; which as it belongs to self-preservation is one of the strongest of all the passions. (Burke 123)

It is the possibility to “rejuvenate our sensibility” in the experience of the sublime that, according to Crowther, has made Burke’s theory and his “existential sublime” so particularly attractive in certain periods of history which are characterized by a general feeling of ennui (Crowther 127). “It is no accident”, Crowther argues, “that the sublime is first excessively theorized in the eighteenth century” (Crowther 127). The life of aristocratic circles and the rising bourgeoisie with considerable leisure time at their disposal was, according to Crowther, susceptible to the feeling of world-weariness and therefore in desperate need of a stimulus which would counter their languor and wake them up from their lethargy (see Crowther 128). Similarly, modern and postmodern times are also considered by some thinkers to be in need of the sublime for analogous reasons, related to the consumerist culture of leisure and fun. With the increasing industrialisation and development of the consumer society, the sublime is, according to Lyotard, whose ideas will be discussed in greater detail later, the necessary new sensibility of postmodern art. Presenting its audiences with moderated terror in order to counteract the malignant influences of consumerist pleasure, sublime drama appears to answer Lyotard’s appeal.

2.2.2 The Beautiful and the Sublime The Burkean divorce of the sublime and the beautiful, a distinction which is later developed by Kant even further and which is also thematised by sublime drama, is based on the association of the former with pain and self-preservation and the latter with pleasure and society. The experience of the sublime ensures that we are not drawn into states of melancholy and despair by maintaining the tension

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of our “finer organs” and by doing so infuses our lives with vitality. The beautiful in turn, evoking love, which, together with sympathy, imitation and ambition, belongs to the passions associated with society, helps sustain social bonds and their development. Having attributed the sublime and the beautiful to pain and pleasure respectively, Burke goes on to define the different principles by which the two can be produced. Obscurity, power, privation, vastness, infinity, magnitude, difficulty and suddenness are examples of “passions” which, all being productive of terror, can therefore be the source of sublimity (see Burke 53 – 79). Considering the instance of obscurity, for example, Burke describes it, in line with his empiricist approach, as the failure of the senses, that is, a darkening of vision and the inability to see clearly, which evokes terror in the perceiving subject. Taken literally, this strategy is used, for example, in Neilson’s Normal to great dramatic effect, where for a few seconds both the main character and the audience find themselves in total darkness, at the mercy of a serial killer. As Burke further points out, “[e]very one will be sensible of this, who considers how greatly night adds to our dread, in all cases of danger, and how much the notions of ghost and goblins, of which none can form clear ideas, affect minds, which give credit to the popular tales concerning such sorts of being” (Burke 54). Obscured vision of objects and unclear ideas of them evoke the feeling of the terrible and by extension also of the sublime. The inability to see objects clearly induces our fear of them. Burke argues ‘our ignorance of things’ increases our dread of them whereas “[k]nowledge and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect [us] but little” (Burke 57). Relating ‘ignorance’ with terror and the sublime, Burke seems to suggest that the two be connected to our inability to comprehend. In other words, we often fear what we cannot grasp and do not understand. Therefore, ideas such as eternity, infinity or death, “of which we […] understand so little, […] are among the most affective we have” (Burke 57). Yet, these phenomena cannot be represented in any sensible form; they cannot be experienced by our senses. How then can the sensations of pain and terror be evoked in such cases? Although there are no sensible presentations of such phenomena as infinity or death, they can still be described by language. And continuing his discussion, Burke resorts to a literary representation of them. For this purpose he chooses a passage from Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton who, Burke believes, mastered “the secret of heightening or of setting terrible things […] in their strongest light by the force of a judicious obscurity” (Burke 55). The passage is a portrayal of death.

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The other shape If shape it might be called that shape had none Distinguishable, in member, joint, or limb; Or substance might be called that shadow seemed, For each seemed either; black he stood as night; Fierce as ten furies; terrible as hell; And shook a deadly dart. What seemed his head The likeness of a kingly crown had on. (Burke 55)

Burke’s discussion of this literary image produces some initial problems with understanding what exactly he considers to be the source of the sublime in this passage. Is it the fear of death, “the king of terror” (Burke 55) which is the source of the sublime? Or is it its description? Is sublimity an effect of language? Or is it a matter of sensations? Or is it perhaps both? This ambiguity and lack of clear distinctions concerning the relation between words and feelings are, according to Shaw, typical problems of Burke’s reflections and his use of literary examples in general (see Shaw 50). Although Burke never resolves the issue explicitly, Shaw suggests that the way Burke explains his literary examples of the different sources of the sublime proves that it is language which he considers to render the presented objects sublime (see Shaw 52) – a notion which sublime drama also thrives on. As for the qualities which Burke attributes to objects considered to evoke the beautiful, they are smallness, smoothness, sweetness, variation, delicacy and bright and clear colours. Burke also insists that, although it tends to be a common opinion, proportion, fitness and perfection are not the source of beauty, for the latter can be encountered in objects without these properties, such as flowers or animals. Considering a rose, for instance, “how does the slender stalk of [the flower] agree with the bulky head under which it bends? but the rose is a beautiful flower; and can we undertake to say that it does not owe a great deal of its beauty even to that disproportion?” (Burke 86). As far as the property of perfection is concerned, Burke argues his point in quite chauvinist way by maintaining that it cannot be the source of beauty since “this quality, where it is highest in the female sex, almost always carries with it an idea of weakness and imperfection” (Burke 100). And according to the thinker, women, “guided in this by nature” learn to be weak for this particular purpose, “they learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, to counterfeit weakness, and even sickness” (Burke 100). Another interesting implication of Burke’s separation of the beautiful from the sublime is their mutual ‘antagonism’. The sublime, producing tension in the perceiving subject, seems to counteract the effects of the beautiful, which are the “sinking, […] melting, […] languor […] nearer to a species of melancholy, than to jollity and mirth” (Burke 112). Moreover, as Shaw points out, “as the taste

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for the sublime becomes fashionable, its ability to provoke awe or fear is diminished: after a while every mountain, even a Mont Blanc, fades into indifference” (Shaw 59). The sublime, or rather the object catalysing the experience is always on the verge of lifting the veil of obscurity, becoming clear and sliding into the beautiful (see Nancy 33) – a notion which is the main concern of Patrick Marber’s Closer. The sublime can never become the known and the familiar. It has to remain foreign and unknown to the subject, as only then can it threaten and arrest the subject with its irreducible otherness. If a society or culture does not want to sink into a state of apathy and sluggishness it needs to make sure it exposes itself to the experience of this sublime otherness. Sublime drama offers safe circumstances for such exposure.

2.3 Immanuel Kant Kant discusses the sublime in his Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft 1790), which is the third book, following his two other works, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernünft 1781) and Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernünft 1788. Kant’s first two Critiques are concerned with two realms of human existence. The Critique of Pure Reason (1787) investigates the human cognition of nature (theoretical philosophy of nature), which is governed by the legislative principles of understanding. The Critique of Practical Reason (1788) examines the relation between nature, human freedom and morality (the practical philosophy of being free for the moral law), which is legislated by the principles of reason. The Critique of Judgement (1790) is meant to unite the two spheres of human reality, theoretical cognition of nature (understanding) and being free for the moral law (reason), by introducing a third, mediating element, the legislative principle of judgement. Before referring to the particular judgement of the sublime, I will first briefly discuss and explain the terminology of the Kantian system necessary to appreciate what this category entails and how it operates. Judgement is one of the four cognitive faculties of the human mind that Kant distinguishes: understanding, reason, sensibility being the other three. Apart from sensibility, all other faculties (understanding, reason and judgement) are legislative, that is, capable of providing a priori rules. According to Kant, our perception and knowledge of the world is only possible thanks to rules which do not arise from experience but are inherent in our mind, such as the a priori categories of time and space. Understanding, judgement and reason can provide such rules. Sensibility is not legislative and yet is indispensable for our theoretical cognition and perception of the world. It has several components: sensation, pure

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intuition, reproductive and productive imagination. Each component has a different function. For instance sensation presents us with colours, and pure intuition representations of forms. Sensibility is thus the cognitive faculty of ‘first contact’ with reality. It is responsible for the most immediate experience of the world and is concerned with particulars and not universals. When combined, for instance, with the faculty of understanding, sensibility participates in deriving knowledge about the natural world and reality. Unlike understanding, which is the faculty of theoretical cognition, or reason, which legislates human desire and free will, the faculty of judgement is concerned with human feelings, that is, our subjective sentiments, and is responsible for our decision-making processes. There are five types of judgement: determinate, indeterminate, teleological, of sensual interest, and aesthetic. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on discussing the last type, which is most significant for the analysis of the sublime, contrasting it with the other types where necessary. Aesthetic judgements concern new situations which do not match any concepts that the judging subject may have at his or her disposal. Importantly, the concept for the new situation is also never found or formulated. Aesthetic judgement proceeds without a concept and without forming one. This characteristic is referred to by Kant as aesthetic reflection and is of great relevance for sublime drama in its presentation of the other as indeterminate. Instead of a concept, aesthetic judgement produces a feeling of pleasure, displeasure, or, as it is in the sublime, of pleasure in displeasure, depending on whether the object seems to the subject to comply with the principle of purposiveness of nature or not. In other words, whether we find an object aesthetically pleasant or unpleasant depends on our perception and judgement of the object as either purposive or counter-purposive. What is exactly meant by the purposiveness of nature? Purposiveness (also translated as finality) is a Kantian neologism created to describe a particular way of judging an object of nature in terms of the object’s end. “Purposiveness is the object’s property of having or appearing to have a purpose” (Burnham 62). A purpose may also be compared to the ‘concept’ or ‘meaning’ of an object. Significantly though, this ‘concept’ differs from the concepts of understanding in that it is not constitutive of theoretical knowledge. A purpose of an object says nothing about the object in terms of its cognition. The object ‘only’ appears, or is judged, to be purposive. To briefly return to the task of bridging of the gap between the first two Critiques, how can the principle of purposiveness link theoretical cognition of nature (the domain of understanding) and the realm of human freedom (the domain of reason)? Kant’s answer is, by judging nature as purposeful, that is, commensurate with the purposes given by the cognitive faculties of the human mind:

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understanding, reason, imagination and judgement. If nature appears to be as if it were designed to be understood by the human cognitive faculties, Kant argues, the world of nature and the world of human cognitive powers can be converged. What remains therefore, is to prove that this is precisely the case. And this is what is at stake in Critique of Judgement and, by extension, the aesthetic judgements of the beautiful and the sublime. Whereas there seem to be no problems with demonstrating the purposiveness of nature in the judgement of the beautiful, the judgement of the sublime seems to pose a much greater challenge. Before addressing the problem of purposiveness in the beautiful and the sublime, I will first briefly consider other characteristics of aesthetic feelings, as they play an important role in the analysis of sublime drama, in this study most prominently in Patrick Marber’s Closer.

2.3.1 Characteristics of the Aesthetic Feeling Both being aesthetic judgements, the beautiful and the sublime operate without a prior concept and without forming one. They are based on feelings arising from our perception of a sensible presentation and do not contribute to our knowledge of things. They are not concerned with the question of what the perceived object really is but describe the object as it appears to the subject. Describing the beautiful as its primary example, Kant defines the four conditions of aesthetic judgement: quality, quantity, modality and relation (see Kant 26 – 52). Since for my analysis of the sublime drama only two conditions will be of relevance, namely quality and relation, I will limit my characterisation of the aesthetic feeling here accordingly. In line with the category of quality, the pleasure which the subject derives from the beautiful is disinterested. It does not arise from the subject’s interest in the beautiful object’s real existence but rather from the subjective perception (intuition) of the object’s pure presence, its appearance in the subject’s mind. The beautiful judgement cannot be dictated by the object’s existential value for the subject such as the possibility of satiating physical needs such as hunger or thirst. Nor can the judgement be made on the grounds of any ethical or intellectual interest. To use Kant’s own example, to argue that Versailles is not beautiful because it was built on slavery and human suffering is not an aesthetic judgement (see Kant 27). The beautiful is by definition contemplative and pure (disinterested). It is this principle of purity and disinterestedness which later came under severe criticism from postmodern thinkers such as Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy or Derrida, who found the requirement impossible to fulfil. Kant’s last condition of aesthetic judgement, the condition of relation, in turn, discusses the principle of purposiveness. The purposiveness which is felt

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in the aesthetic judgement is of a rather peculiar quality and is referred to by Kant as purposiveness without a purpose. Kant argues that although no external purpose of the object can be determined, the object still appears as if it were designed for some ‘hidden’ purpose. Kant speaks of an internal purpose of the object itself which is only perceived by the subject in the aesthetic judgement without being determined (see Kant 37). For instance in the aesthetic judgement of the beautiful, as Kant observes, “a flower is regarded as beautiful, because we meet with a certain finality in its perception, which, in our estimate of it, is not referred to any end whatever” (Kant 47). The purposiveness without a purpose can only be sensed in the object and not articulated. This particular feature explains why the aesthetic judgement is so attractive as a form of representation of the other in sublime drama. Refraining from specifying the purpose, or the meaning, of the perceived object, the judgement allows the object to remain indeterminate with regard to theoretical knowledge. Sublime drama marks the other’s presence by letting the audience’s sensibility feel it without, however, defining it with any determinate concepts or rules of understanding. What exactly is felt by the perceiver differs according to the type of the judgement.

2.3.2 The Beautiful and the Sublime In the judgement of the beautiful, as Kant argues, the subject feels some inexplicable unity and harmony with the object of nature although he or she cannot determine the object’s purpose. This harmony is, according to Kant, the result of “the concert in” the free play between the faculties of imagination (sensibility) and understanding (see Kant 42). Although no knowledge of the object or its purpose can be obtained in the judgement of the beautiful, the harmonious play between the faculties seems to indicate a certain purposiveness of the object which appears as if it were created for human cognition. As Jean-Luc Nancy later shows and Marber thematises in his play, this affinity of the beautiful with pleasure opens the judgement to its transformation into the agreeable. In the latter the object is considered in terms of its determinate purpose for the subject, which relates the agreeable with forces of consumerism and commodification. The relation between the faculties is more complex in the aesthetic judgement of the sublime, because here the imagination is no longer engaged in free play with understanding. The object of the sublime cannot be contemplated by the subject in harmony, but produces insurmountable problems for the two cognitive faculties, imagination and understanding, resulting in a momentary paralysis of the subject’s vital powers. The subject’s imagination, his or her ability to perceive the object through the senses, cannot supply any sensual presen-

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tation of the object and, therefore, no information can be provided to the faculty of understanding, whose operations seem to be thus completely blocked. The relation between the two is no longer harmonious, a situation Kant describes as being “deadly” serious (Kant 52). Though much less pleasant for the audience, these circumstances make the sublime resist its transformation into the agreeable. Operating according to the aesthetic of the sublime, the drama, too, refuses to participate in the consumerist production of the agreeable. Why are the two faculties, understanding and imagination, unable to operate in unity as they do in the judgement of the beautiful? And what are the implications of this conflict for the purposiveness of nature in the sublime? Whereas in the beautiful, the subject faces no problems with creating a mental image of the perceived object, in case of the sublime, supplying such presentation appears to be impossible. Similarly, the object of sublime drama seems to the audience’s imagination to be unpresentable. It exceeds the limits of the spectators’ imagination, which they experience as sensations of shock, complete bewilderment, deep unease or even utter outrage. The harmonious play between the imagination and understanding, typical of the beautiful, is out of the question in the sublime. The difference between the two judgements, therefore, as Kant explains, lies in the perceived object, or more precisely, in the way the subject perceives its form. For whereas in the beautiful the form of the object appears as if naturally designed to match the capacity of the imaginative and cognitive faculties of its perceiver – it is limited/finite and can therefore be represented in a sensual image without problems – in the case of the sublime, the object seems to “be devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes a representation of limitlessness” (Kant 52). Since there is no sensible representation of the limitless in nature, it consequently cannot be presented by the faculty of imagination, which is repelled by the formless object (see Kant 52). What does it mean in terms of the object’s purposiveness? In the beautiful, the object seems to be as if it were “preadapted to our power of judgement” (Kant 53). It evokes in the subject the feeling of pleasure due to the free and harmonious play between imagination and understanding during which the subject can sense a purpose behind the object of nature even though this purpose cannot be determined. In the sublime, in turn, the object “appear[s] […] to be illadapted to the faculty of presentation” (Kant 53). The latter cannot cope with the object or provide the necessary information to the faculty of understanding and, in the process, only inhibits its cognitive operations. The two faculties turn out to be completely inadequate in the face of the overwhelming object. Can the sublime still support Kant’s thesis of the purposiveness of nature? The compatibility of the subject’s cognitive faculties with the “ill-adapted” object of nature

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seems to be rather difficult to demonstrate. Kant solves the problem by locating the purposiveness in ‘the second moment’ of the sublime, when the initial paralysis of the subject turns into a sudden pleasure. The judgement of the sublime is divided by Kant into two phases, which however should not be considered as sequential but constantly alternating. The oscillating dynamic is one of the central features of sublime drama, which leads the audience to constantly move between the two extreme poles of Thanatos and Eros. The first moment is negative and is described by Kant as “the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces” (Kant 52) and “an outrage on the imagination” (Kant 53). On encountering what appears to the subject to be an object without form, the subject feels unable to grasp the object in any sensual mental presentation. The formless phenomenon seems to overwhelm and paralyse the subject’s senses and makes him or her realize the limits of their own ability to understand. The first moment of the sublime is the subject’s realization of the inner conflict between the cognitive faculties, imagination and understanding, and the object. Translated into the realm of sublime drama, what the audience experiences during this moment, the moment of Thanatos, is the incommensurability of their system of thought with what is presented to them onstage. At this point, the presented object seems to have no clear purpose or meaning to the audience. Paralysed and threatened by the overwhelming object, the spectators feel considerably diminished, or even momentarily annihilated. In the second, positive moment of the sublime, the situation changes radically with what Kant refers to as “mental movement” (Kant 54) which causes “a discharge all the more powerful” (Kant 52) of vital forces inhibited in the first moment of the sublime. This sensation is the moment of Eros in sublime drama, and is experienced as an instance of continuity with the other, even if only a fleeting one. In Kant’s theory, the overwhelming object stirs in the subject’s mind ideas of reason such as the idea of the limitless or the infinite. Although the object is not actually limitless, for, as Kant argues, the limitless cannot be presented sensually at all, it appears to the subject’s imagination as if it were so. In doing so, the overwhelming object evokes in the subject the ideas of reason. The sublime is not a property of the object but of the human mind, we express ourselves on the whole inaccurately if we term any object of nature sublime, although we may with perfect propriety call many such objects beautiful. For how can that which is apprehended as inherently contra-final [contra-purposive] be noted with an expression of approval? All that we can say is that the object lends itself to the presentation of a sublimity discoverable in the mind. For the sublime […] cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns ideas of reason, which, although no adequate presentation of them is possible, may be excited and called into the mind by that very inadequacy itself which does admit sensuous presentation. (Kant 53)

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The overwhelming object only serves as catalyst for the sublime feeling. To put it in the theatrical perspective, the sublime is the audience’s response to what it perceives as an overwhelming element in the performance. Kant further regards the catalyser from a twofold perspective, mathematically and dynamically. We can consequently speak of the mathematical or dynamical sublime. In the mathematical sublime, the catalysing object is analysed in terms of its size. “Sublime” according to Kant “is the name given to what is absolutely great” (Kant 54). It is a measure which is measureless, making any attempts at comparison impossible. The absolutely great cannot be found among the great objects of nature, which are always only comparatively great, and it can therefore only exist in the subject’s mind as an idea of reason. How can the finite excite the idea of the infinite? The answer lies in the difference between a determinate judgement and a reflective aesthetic judgement of the great object. Whereas in the former the object can be measured by application of numerical concepts, the latter operates by definition without a concept and therefore is only a subjective feeling, an attempt to grasp the totality of the object “in mere intuition (by the eye)” (Kant 56). In a determinate judgement of an object, which is constitutive of knowledge, the imagination provides the faculty of understanding with a presentation of the object. The latter is then recognized in a concept and thus cognized. The process of grasping an object by the faculty of imagination in a presentation is described by Kant as two cognitive operations, apprehension and comprehension (Kant 57). The size of the perceived object is first estimated by the faculty of presentation (the imagination) gradually, part by part. And as Kant observes, “this process presents no difficulty: for [it] can be carried on ad infinitum” (Kant 57). This is followed by comprehension, where all the parts are ‘counted up’ and a mental presentation (image) of the perceived object reproduced (synthesis). In a further step, the presentation is recognized in a concept by the faculty of understanding. The comprehension becomes problematic if the perceived object is so great that its parts can no longer be presented as a totality, as it is the case in the mathematical sublime. With the advance of apprehension comprehension becomes more difficult at every step and soon attains its maximum, and this is the aesthetically greatest fundamental measure for the estimation of magnitude. For if the apprehension has reached a point beyond which the representations of sensuous intuition in the case of the parts first apprehended begin to disappear from the imagination as this advances to the apprehension of yet others, as much, then, is lost at one end as is gained at the other, and for comprehension we get a maximum which the imagination cannot exceed. (Kant 57)

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Encountering an object which, due to its size, eludes the subject’s comprehension, the subject is faced with the limits of his or her own cognition. It is a moment when “imagination attains its maximum, and, in its fruitless efforts to extend this limit, recoils upon itself” (Kant 57). In sublime drama, what Kant refers to as the mathematical sublime may, for example, be produced by the form of a play which exceeds the audience’s grasp due to its heightened ambiguity and fragmentariness, as is the case in 4.48 Psychosis. The audience is presented with such an amount of various elements, be they incompatible points of view, disjointed speeches, words thrown out randomly, or extended moments of overwhelming silence, that it is impossible for them to add these elements up into a coherent whole. The catalyser can thus be described more generally as a chaotically and incoherently arranged materiality, both audible or/and inaudible. Forming a determinate judgement about the ultimate meaning of the play turns out to be effectively impossible and the audience has the feeling that some part of it ineluctably escapes it. For Kant, the moment of the imagination’s failure turns into the victory of reason. In failing to represent the magnitude, the imagination evokes the ideas of the infinite in the human mind, which although unpresentable can still be thought by reason. The unpresentability of the natural magnitude becomes the sign of the unpresentability of the idea of the infinite, which is thus presented, although negatively. In sublime drama, this moment is defined as the experience of the unpresentability of the other. The mathematical sublime is according to Kant the experience of reason’s supremacy over senses and manifests for him the human ‘calling’ as rational beings, who are capable of thinking beyond any sensible restrictions. The greatness of natural phenomena reminds human beings of this function. And although the objects are not compatible with the faculty of imagination, for which they appear to be “ill-adapted”, they certainly are compatible with the purpose of reason, as they seem to be designed for its ideas (Kant 62). Kant’s condition of purposiveness without purpose is thus fulfilled in the mathematical sublime. In the dynamical sublime, the natural object is analysed in terms of its power and might and not its size. The object has to be powerful enough so as to produce in the subject the feeling of an overwhelming fear. In sublime drama such fear is evoked in the audiences by confronting them with images and situations of extreme terror, such as it is done in Normal, for instance, by presenting the spectators with atrocious descriptions of brutality. The dynamical sublime is, however, closely related to and dependant on the mathematical sublime, as the power of the images lies also in the accumulation and intensity of the gory images. According to Kant, the terrible object can only be productive

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of the sublime, however, if “it has no dominion over us” (see Kant 62). The subject has to be at a safe distance⁷ from the mighty phenomenon, because one who is in a state of [real] fear cannot more play the part of a judge of the sublime of nature than one captivated by inclination and appetite can of the beautiful. He flees from the sight of an object filling him with dread; and it is impossible to take delight in terror that is seriously entertained. […] But, provided our own position is secure, [the terrible object’s] is all the more attractive for its fearfulness. (Kant 62)

Up to this point, Kant’s dynamical sublime may seem to follow Burke’s definition of the feeling linking it to self-preservation. Yet, for Kant, the sublime pleasure does not consist in the surge of rejuvenating and life-affirming feeling. For, although during the frightening encounter with nature the subject is faced with his or her vulnerability as a mortal being, at the same time the subject also realizes that he or she possesses power which is greater than anything else in nature. It is the power of reason to think beyond nature and the sensible confines of the subject’s own body and free him or her from the world of the senses. Sublime drama forms a type of compromise between Burke and Kant in this respect: it intends both the energising effect of the sublime as well as the broadening of the horizons of human consciousness. There is however a significant difference in interpreting the function of this broadening between Kant and sublime drama. For Kant, the experience of the dynamical sublime makes the subject realize his or her independence from natural conditions, “think beyond the bounds of the given” (Shaw 83), and discover that he or she is meant to be free, and therefore also, to be free to act morally. The overwhelming object seems to serve the purpose of evoking the idea of freedom in human mind and thus, the dynamical sublime complies with the Kantian condition of the purposiveness without purpose. In sublime drama, in turn, the experience of the expansion of the human consciousness is not a sign of the superiority of the human mind but a creation of hospitable space for the arrival of the other.

 According to Crowther the distance does not have to be physical but psychological; so the danger can be real but we can still consider it from a psychological distance by not giving in to fear for example. This adjustment seems to be compatible with the Kantian idea. What the distance produces in the subject is resistance to the threatening force. As Crowther observes, however, this distance may also be purely internal (Crowther 118).

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2.4 Jean-François Lyotard 2.4.1 Lyotard and Kantian Reflective Aesthetic Judgement Although Lyotard calls himself a Kantian, he also adds “but a Kantian of the Third Critique” (Lyotard 1991: 140 – 141). Rejecting Kant’s idea of merging epistemology, morality and aesthetics into one philosophical system, Lyotard focuses his attention on the last of these, the realm of aesthetic reflective judgement. As Serge Trottein points out, Kant’s theory of aesthetics may appeal to a postmodern thinker for various reasons, many of which overlap with the reasons why the aesthetic also appears attractive for the drama of the 1990s. Most importantly, “reflective judgement, as opposed to determinant judgement, does not start with concepts for which it tries to find intuitions, examples, or realizations; it does not impose itself on reality, as is the case with knowledge and morality” (Trottein 193). Instead, it begins with the particular and tries to discover a new rule or a new concept for it. The newly invented concept is applicable only to the particular situation, as if the particular situation were the rule for itself, and could not be reapplied in any other situation. The judging subject is therefore often described to be in a state of wonder, surprise or, as it is in the case of the sublime, even in a state of paralysis caused by the particularity and shocking novelty of the event that is being witnessed, and which the subject cannot explain with any concept at his or her disposal. This quality of aesthetic newness and unexpectedness led Raoul Schrott to refer to the sublime as an “Ästhetik des Ersten Mals” (Schrott 211), and the statement also seems true with regard to sublime drama, which also relies on novelty and experimentation. Reflective judgement, that is, judging without trying to subsume and appropriate the particular under the universal, as Trottein further points out, “displays an experimental character; it constantly has to invent new ways of understanding the events, of thinking the singular” (Trottein 193). This quality seems to go in line with the Lyotardian rejection of metanarratives, which are master narratives imposing their point of view and lifestyle, their rules and concepts on particular narratives and, in doing so, squash their individuality and uniqueness. Reflective judgement allows for a simultaneous coexistence of multifarious narratives and “implies resistance to any imperialism, to any attempt of domination by a singularity, be it of particular interests or of a universal concept of reason, since their predominance would immediately reduce a reflective judgement to a determinate or determinant one” (Trottein 193). Aesthetic judgement, and due to the potential of the beautiful for ‘corruption’ Lyotard favours here the judgement of the sublime, can therefore be a form

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of aesthetic resistance against all attempts at any kind of totalitarianism or domination.

2.4.2 Adjusting Kantian Sublime to the Postmodern Context In order to make Kantian sublime viable in the postmodern context, Lyotard divorces the aesthetic category from all its connotations with Kantian morality by firstly, emphasising the importance of the first moment of the sublime, secondly, reinterpreting the second moment as the experience of indeterminacy (the other), and thirdly, presenting the latter as unpresentable. According to Lyotard, the failure of the imagination to present, which is the first moment of the sublime, can paradoxically simultaneously be interpreted as a ‘success’. For this failure makes the subject realize the limits of his or her imaginative and cognitive powers and manifests the existence of the unpresentable, something which escapes determinacy, that is, escapes being grasped by the existing determinate concepts of understanding. As Pries points out, the sublime is “zugleich ein Scheitern und ein neuer Horizont” (Pries 1995: 193). Similarly, experiencing and showing that the unpresentable exists creates in the spectators of sublime drama the awareness that “there are things that are impossible to present in available language [discourses], voices that are silenced in cultures, ideas that cannot be formulated in rational communication” (Malpas 47). For Lyotard, the unpresentable is clearly the quality which is obliterated in metanarratives and needs to be exhibited and presented by postmodern art and literature, if the re-emergence of metanarratives is to be prevented. Sublime drama is an acknowledgment of and an answer to this need. Reinterpreting the failure of the imagination as its success, Lyotard feels it to be equally important as the success of reason and thus reinterprets the Kantian take on the sublime. Lyotard also redefines the second moment of the sublime during which, in Kantian theory, the subject feels the ideas of infinity and freedom, which is supposed to lead him or her to moral behaviour. Lyotard insists that the idea of freedom be defined as indeterminate, that is, not as an idea which determines our will according to some predesigned and universally binding rules and principles. According to Lyotard, freedom is only a regulative idea, which means it is reflective and operates without ready concepts (see Lyotard 1985: 84– 85). To make Kantian ideas of reason, the infinite and freedom, viable in the postmodern context, Lyotard defines them as devoid of any content and empties them of any determinate meaning. What the subject feels in the sublime, Lyotard concludes, is the indeterminacy of his or her own thought.

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Thought recognizes in [the idea of freedom or infinite] what it is in itself ‘before’ all determination. […] ‘before’ it was opposed by givens that had to be grasped by forms of sensibility, assembled in schemas, known by concepts, or estimated according to the good – ‘before’ all this, thinking is the power to think, […] irrelative, ‘raw,’ that comes from nothing other than itself, and is thus in this sense ‘inner.’ […] This is what the ‘voice of reason’ says in sublime feeling, and this is what is truly exalting. (Lyotard 1994: 122)

In the second moment of the sublime – and again the sensations described by Lyotard overlap with the experiences that the audience of sublime drama is exposed to − the subject experiences the power of thought itself, without the confines of pre-existing concepts; the subject experiences the unlimited possibilities of his or her own thoughts. The sublime experience seems to be the rediscovery of thought and the possibility of its endless transformation, of leaving the ‘old’ concepts behind, undermined, and inventing new ones, leading to a never-ending process of experimentation. Discovering his or her own indeterminacy, the subject finds the freedom to invent new concepts which will be the expression of the subject’s singularity. Also, the sudden awareness of the indeterminacy inside of the subject’s own thought, frightening as it may be, opens the subject, and by extension the audience, for the experience of a similar indeterminacy in the other ‘outside’. The experience of the sublime seems to make a demand of the subject/audience to welcome the unexpected, the unknown and the other (both in the subject and in the other) without attempting to make it familiar but by accepting it with its irreducible indeterminacy. This manner of welcome that is required of the subject is referred to by Jacques Derrida as “absolute hospitality […] graciously offered beyond debt and economy, offered to the other, a hospitality invented for the singularity of the new arrival, of the unexpected visitor” (Derrida 2000: 83). Sublime drama offers a space where the other can be encountered in its indeterminacy with hospitable openness. Presenting the other in its ungraspability, sublime drama is, in line with Lyotard’s theory of art, the only sensibility which can do justice to the other by making it palpable, yet without reducing it to the determinate, that is, familiar concepts. According to Lyotard, there are two things which are opposed to the indeterminacy and which sublime drama resists; they are realism and the human. He discusses realism in an essay from 1982, “An Answer to the Question: What is Postmodern”, and the human in his book The Inhuman (French edition 1988; English edition 1991). In both cases the aesthetic resistance takes the form of the aesthetic of the sublime.

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2.4.3 Realism Lyotard’s definition of realism includes his critical response to Jürgen Habermas’ essay “Modernity: an Unfinished Project” (in Passerin and Benhabib 1996) and his ideas with regard to the task of art and literature in the postindustrial reality. Lyotard seems to agree with Habermas that due to the increased industrialisation, technological development and their appropriation by the capitalist system (a new ideology?), human beings experience themselves as instruments of that system. No longer being capable of following all the developments in different branches of culture, be it science, new technologies or economics, human beings experience reality and life as fragmented and dispersed. This experience of chaos and fragmentation, the feelings of deep insecurity and being lost in the fast-changing reality are more than often thematised by sublime drama. Noticed by the critic Benedict Nightingale, the tendency towards the particular topic made him label the plays tellingly as “Theatre of Urban Ennui” (see Nightingale 20). The words of the playwright David Eldridge, too, describe similar sentiments of that period and the playwrights’ reaction to it, a generation had grown up in the UK fearing the five-minute warning, watching the Berlin Wall come down, that experimented with E and club culture, was finding a voice. This generation had had its youthful optimism pickled by the new horrors that visited their imaginations in the shape of atrocities in the Balkans and by a sense of outrage at the erosion of the UK’s notion of community and society by the mean-spirited Thatcher and Major malaise. We responded to that shifting culture with dismay and anger. (qtd in D’Monte and Saunders 5)

Both Lyotard and Habermas diagnose the situation as the process of dehumanization and seek a solution to it, arriving, however, at two different ‘cures’. Whereas Lyotard sees in the process of cultural fragmentation a chance to subvert and undermine totalitarian systems and ideologies (metanarratives), Habermas considers the fracturing of social life to be harmful and seeks ways to counter it. What he suggests is retaining the idea of human emancipation, that is, the idea that all branches of social life are to be united under the same goal, which is human freedom. This union can be accomplished by means of communicative consensus based on rational thinking. Art and literature, due to their communicative potential, can help facilitate this consensus by mediating between knowledge, morality and politics (Lyotard 1984a: 72).

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Needless to say, for Lyotard, both the idea of human emancipation⁸ and the idea of using art and literature in its service are utterly unacceptable. What Lyotard disapproves of with regard to this approach is its totalizing and manipulative potential, an attempt to unite all the different discourses in one rational organic whole under one goal, which for Lyotard is a mere illusion, and a dangerous one, too. If, to put it within the frame of this study’s main interest, drama is given the task of explaining reality in a clear, that is rationally communicative way, there is always a real danger that it will provide only a certain version of reality and impose it on its receivers, the audience, thus creating a determinate reality for them. And this is precisely what Lyotard refers to as realism in art and literature, “the art of making reality, of knowing reality and knowing how to make reality” (Lyotard 1997: 91). According to Lyotard, reality is an image of the world which is artificially constructed by the currently dominant common beliefs, values and ideals of a given culture. Realism, as Lyotard understands it, seems to be “the mainstream art of any culture” (Malpas 44). An example of such a production of reality by the dominant culture of consumerism and fun will be discussed in the analysis of Mark Ravenhill’s Faust is Dead. Realism, and by extension, drama provides the means of sustaining this particular “mainstream” image of reality and the “mainstream” values. It does so, in line with Lyotard’s argument, by “preserv[ing] various consciousnesses from doubt” (Lyotard 1984a: 74). He defines the objective of realist literature and art to be stabilization of the referent [objective reality?], arranging it according to a point of view which endows it with a recognizable meaning, reproduction of the syntax and vocabulary which enable the addressee to decipher images and sequences quickly, and so to arrive easily at the consciousness of his own identity as well as the approval which he thereby receives form others. (Lyotard 1984a: 74)

 Lyotard distinguishes between two forms of metanarrative which are typical of modernity, the speculative grand narrative, the aim of which is to increase knowledge (Truth), and the grand narrative of emancipation, which concentrates on liberating humanity from its suffering (Justice). Each of the narratives has its own rules and moves. Nevertheless, they also share many similarities. Both grand narratives focus on some future goal, which becomes their absolute priority and legitimizes their actions and decisions. All structures and realms of human life and reality, such as law, science, education and technology are subordinated to this ambition. Individual needs and desires, too, are sacrificed in the name of the higher cause. There is a greater good to be achieved and all the discourses of life must therefore be defined and evaluated accordingly. In its most extreme form, a grand narrative may take the shape of a totalitarian system such as national socialism with its goal to liberate humanity from its weaker elements and secure the rise of the “Übermensch”. In this grand narrative, players pay for “wrong” moves with their lives (see Lyotard 1984b).

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By providing the addressees (readers, audiences etc) with a coherent, rational and unambiguous image of reality (which is always the reality of the dominant culture), realist literature and art, Lyotard concludes, satisfy the basic human desires for unity, identity and security (Lyotard 1984a: 73). They produce the sense of the stability of the received beliefs and ideals of a particular culture. In doing so, Lyotard warns, realist literature and art may contribute to discrimination against the values and ideals of other cultures and the return of totalitarian systems. Realist presentation provides order and unity in that it adopts the communicative techniques of a given culture, codifies them into a norm to be followed, and, in the process, helps to legitimize that culture. Realism does not attempt to challenge the existing rules and beliefs but rather endeavours to reaffirm them. It allows society to relax and stop thinking by purporting to give it all the answers it needs. This state of social and cultural “slackening” (Lyotard 1984a: 71) is considered by Lyotard to be particularly detrimental, for it may open a gate for a return to the terror of totalitarian systems, of which “the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much as we can take” (Lyotard 1984a: 81). Sublime drama is a form of resistance to this type of realism. Also, Habermas’ suggestion of the possibility of rational communicative consensus is, according to Lyotard, against the idea of the unpresentable. Communicative consensus is based on the assumption that it is possible to find language which can mediate and link all existing discourses. Lyotard, however, argues, and sublime drama makes this palpable onstage, that human reality often involves situations, experiences and realms which cannot be presented in any form of rational communication, because there is no language which could communicate these instances of human reality. Suffering is, for example, one such realm of the unpresentable. Unsurprisingly, images of excruciating pain devoid of any political or social context that could help explain it and make it more acceptable for the audience are a frequently used strategy of sublime drama to confront its audiences with the unpresentable.⁹ Understanding cannot be reached in such circumstances. If it nevertheless is, a “wrong” must have happened, as Lyotard argues (Lyotard 2007: 13). If in a communicative situation one side cannot, for some reason, find a way to express their predicament, in other words, if this predicament cannot be presented in any communicative form of a rational narrative, consensus cannot be reached. If it nevertheless is, the unpresentable must  For a discussion of the inexpressibility of pain, see Elaine Scarry’s Body in Pain (1985); and for a discussion of representation of pain in Mark Ravenhill’s theatre, see Margret Fetzer’s “Painfully Shocking – Mark Ravenhill’s Theatre as Out-of-Body-Experience” where she refers to Scarry’s theory.

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have been subordinated to the dominative narrative of the other speaker. Thematising this situation precisely, Patrick Marber’s Closer abounds in examples of such “wrongful” subordination of the other, showing the fatal consequences of such action. The only way of presenting the unpresentable predicament, Lyotard asserts, is through the aesthetic of the sublime, which instead of solving the conflict by providing a communicative consensus presents the conflict itself. This conflict, which the audience of sublime drama experiences in a very powerful way, is referred to by Lyotard as a differend: As distinguished from a litigation, a differend [différend] would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of the rule of judgement applicable to both arguments. One side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legitimacy. However, applying a single rule of judgement to both in order to settle their differend as though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at least) one of them (and both of them if neither side admits this rule). (Lyotard 2007: xi)

A differend is an unsolvable conflict, because there is no language available which could represent all the sides of the conflict in an adequate, that is, in a just way. And yet ways have to be found to testify to these moments of indeterminate silence if we do not want to give in to the “terror” of totalitarianism. The unpresentable must be put into presentation. How can this be accomplished without ‘sacrificing’ its indeterminacy for the sake of being communicable? Since there is no communicatively successful solution to a differend, as Lyotard argues, the only solution is the unsuccessful one, that is, presentation of the failure of presentation by the aesthetic of the sublime. The presentation of this failure is also at the heart of sublime drama. Lyotard distinguishes between two forms of this aesthetic resistance to realism, (the sublime of) modernism and postmodernism. Both forms are in conflict with the mainstream realist values and realist aesthetic and try to undermine and subvert them. Although Lyotard distinguishes between the two forms, modernism and postmodernism, the latter essentially seems to be a more radical version of the former (Lyotard 1984a: 79). They both operate along the lines of the aesthetic of the sublime. The aesthetic results they achieve are however different. Lyotard refers to this differentiation as the difference “between regret and assay” (Lyotard 1984a: 80). Whereas the modernist sublime is permeated with nostalgia and melancholy due to the impossibility of presenting the unpresentable, the postmodern sublime considers this impossibility to be the success of art and literature and a cause for “jubilation”,

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The emphasis can be placed on the powerlessness of the faculty of presentation, on the nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject, on the obscure and futile will which inhabits him in spite of everything. [Or else] the emphasis can be placed […] on the power of the faculty to conceive, on its ‘inhumanity’ so to speak […] since it is not the business of our understanding whether or not human sensibility or imagination can match what it conceives. The emphasis can also be placed on the increase of being and the jubilation which result from the invention of new [aesthetic] rules […], be [they] pictorial, artistic, or any other. (Lyotard 1984a: 79 – 80)

Lyotard defines the aesthetic of the modernist sublime as a mode of mourning after the unpresentable. This modernist nostalgia is visible in attempts of modern literature and art to evoke the unpresentable by still using the conventions of a realist (in the Lyotardian sense of the word) aesthetic. The modernist sublime is melancholic and modernist literature is permeated with the feeling of loss. Language is no longer capable of presenting human reality. Nevertheless, this ‘crippled’ language is still used to put the unpresentable in presentation, but “only as the missing contents; […] the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure” (Lyotard 1984a: 81). This aesthetic mode of longing for the unattainable does not seem to represent what “the real sublime sentiment” (Lyotard 1984a: 81) is for Lyotard and is not radical enough in its questioning of existing rules. The postmodern aesthetic of the sublime, in turn, rejects the nostalgic sentiments and, as Lyotard argues, celebrates the fact that the unpresentable exists and is unpresentable, and puts this fact into presentation. The postmodern […] puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; [the postmodern] denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; [the postmodern is] that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. (Lyotard 1984a: 81)

Postmodernism is an aesthetic which, operating according to the ‘tenets’ of the sublime, that is, without concepts, liberates itself from received concepts, be they of art, literature or thought, and searches for new aesthetics solutions and paths. “The work [that the postmodern artist or writer] creates is not in principle governed by pre-established rules […] Such rules and categories are what the work […] is investigating. The artist and the writer therefore work without rules and in order to establish the rules for what will have been made” (Lyotard 1984a: 81). Exhibiting the strong tendency to experiment with both form and content, sublime drama mostly subscribes to Lyotard’s postmodern version of the sublime. It uses new strategies and methods, which decline to conform to the cur-

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rent aesthetic conventions of presentation (realism) and therefore are often regarded as shocking and iconoclastic. Applying the extreme aesthetic the drama does not intend to give pleasure to the audiences but attempts to evoke an even stronger emphasis on the existence of the unpresentable, “not as something missing from the content of a work but as a force that shatters traditional ways of narrating or representing” (Malpas 49). Once again, sublime drama exposes its audiences to the sensation of thought’s own indeterminacy, which opens thought to transformation and change. The drama, by applying the aesthetic of the sublime, creates the opportunity to experience this sublime indeterminacy, the unpresentable, and open its audiences’ consciousness to new options and avenues. The effects of sublime drama are shock, disorientation, an inability to grasp what is happening, and general confusion. If sublime drama is successful in its impact, it will leave its audiences not with answers but with shattered beliefs and new questions, such as those pointed out by Aleks Sierz: “what it means to be human, what is natural, or what is real” (Sierz 2001: 5).

2.4.4 The Inhuman The sublime indeterminacy in the context of art and literature is also discussed by Lyotard in his work The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1991) from 1988. In the introduction to this book, Lyotard observes that there is a demand on the part of the dominant capitalist culture that art and literature be human, that is, that they appeal to human values and human nature. “Be communicable, that is the prescription. Avant-garde is old hat, talk about humans in a human way, address yourself to human beings, if they enjoy receiving you then they will receive you” (Lyotard 1991: 2). In the eighties Margaret Thatcher’s government placed similar demands on British subsidized theatre, which by producing more experimental work posed too much of a risk to be supported by either state or “corporate money” (Gottlieb 2004: 422). Based on the premise that clarity sells better, subsidized theatre was deemed by Thatcher as counter-productive in her wider economic scheme of promoting consumer culture (see Peackock; Lacey). This requirement, which Lyotard sees as a demand for more realism, calls for drama that instead of asking ‘what is human?’ or ‘what is human nature?’ provides ready, easily marketable answers which ensure the stability of the dominant culture of capitalism and consumerism. As Simon Malpas points out, “in the contemporary marketplace the value of art is presented as its ability to appeal to a mass audience, and the best way to ensure success is to communicate quickly and pleasantly, and in an immediately accessible manner” (Malpas 90). Subversive questions such as ‘what is human?’, the suspicious “thinking which

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gnaws away at everything”, Lyotard argues, are therefore considered to be “dangerous and [are] shut away again pretty fast” (Lyotard 1991: 1). “Gnawing away” at received values and ideas by manifesting their indeterminacy and, by extension, the transformability and subjectivity of such values and ideas is exactly what Lyotard expects of postmodern art and literature, and what sublime drama does, undermining the dominant culture by undermining its narrative discourse and, in doing so offering space for new ones. Considering the call for more humanism in art and literature to be the call for a more realist aesthetic, Lyotard approaches the received idea of the human with typical postmodern suspicion by asking, “what if human beings, in humanism’s sense, were in the process of, constrained into, becoming inhuman (that’s the first part)? And (the second part), what if what is ‘proper’ to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman?” (Lyotard 1991: 2). What if, in other words, what is presented to us as the human is actually only a capitalist construct of it, the human determined in terms of efficiency, and therefore, in fact, the inhuman? As Malpas observes, “explained, the human ceases to have the capacity to be surprising or strange and is reduced to just another cog in the machine of capitalism” (Malpas 90). Lyotard describes this sort of humanity as “the inhumanity of the system which is currently being consolidated under the name of development” (Lyotard 1991: 2), which he refers to as the technological inhuman. There is, however, another type of the inhuman which Lyotard differentiates from the technological inhuman, and which is a recurrent topic in sublime drama, most notably in Neilson’s Normal. This other form, which Lyotard describes as “the anguish […], a familiar and unknown guest which is agitating [the mind], sending it delirious but also making it think” (Lyotard 1991: 2), is the sublime indeterminacy. For purposes of clarity, I will refer to the ‘other’ inhuman as the sublime inhuman, although Lyotard never does so. This irreducible indeterminacy is found by Lyotard in children before they are exposed to social structures and determined by them (see Lyotard 1991: 3), a notion which according to Rober Baker reverberates with Romantic visions of childhood “imagined as a presocial substrate, a prerational or prerationalized nature, whose unfathomable indetermination (a kind of primary otherness) would remain the basis and the promise of any later openness to an ‘outside’ systems of socialization” (Baker 76).¹⁰

 It would also be interesting to explore the connection between Kristeva’s idea of abjection (see Kristeva), Lyotard’s idea of indeterminacy and the aesthetic of the sublime as their presentation.

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The sublime inhuman has a potential to counter the technological inhuman of consumerism. The two types of the inhuman are in constant conflict with one another, trying to cancel each other out. Finding and exhibiting the indeterminacy in ourselves and in others may help resist the detrimental effects of industrial, technological and consumerist developments. What else remains as ‘politics’ except resistance to this [technological] inhuman? And what else is left to resist with but the debt which each soul has contracted with the miserable and admirable indetermination from which it was born and does not cease to be born? – which is to say, with the other inhuman? This debt to childhood is one which we never pay off. But it is enough not to forget it in order to resist it and perhaps not to be unjust. It is the task of writing, thinking, literature, arts, to venture to bear witness to it. (Lyotard 1991: 7)

Lyotard assigns literature and the arts the task of bearing “witness” (Lyotard 1991: 7) to the inhuman indeterminacy, to the unpresentable and the other, in the human and in human reality, and in doing so to counter the impact of the technological inhuman. Pointing to the impossibility of limiting the human to any rigid definition, constantly disrupting the idea of what is human, sublime drama, too, opens the human to transformation and the other. It becomes a mode of resistance to the technological inhuman (see also Rebellato 2008). How is drama supposed to “testify” to the sublime inhuman? What aesthetic shape does the resistance take? Clearly, there cannot be any manifesto with a set of rules and principles. For, the drama of the sublime indeterminacy operates without pre-determined rules or concepts. Each play creates rules and principles for itself in the moment of performing itself, constantly anew. The plays are themselves their own concepts. Discussing literary writing, Lyotard insists that “writing must perform on itself – in its detail, in the restlessness of words as they appear or fail to appear, in its receptivity to the contingency of the word – the very work of exploring its own weaknesses and energy […] One writes against language, but necessarily with it […] One violates it, seduces it, one introduces into it an idiom unknown to it” (Lyotard 1992: 89). To emphasise the performative moment of literary creativity and its singularity, Lyotard introduces the term “event” (Lyotard 1992: 91) and describes it ‘mysteriously’ as “the wonder that (something) is happening” (Lyotard 1992: 91). The term perfectly fits in with the theatrical ephemeral situation of performance. The event is a particular moment in time, an instant, as Lyotard describes it (Lyotard 1991: 78 – 88), during which the work of art simply is. It presents itself to its receiver, the audience, as an overwhelming, indeterminate presence, as “something happening”. Just as in the Kantian judgement of the sublime, the perceiving subject cannot find the purpose of the objects which he or she experiences

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and yet feels that it is there, although indeterminate and unpresentable; during the event, the receiver of the artwork, here sublime drama, cannot find any concept or meaning that would match and explain his or her experience of it. The event has such an arresting and mesmerizing influence on its audience that the latter’s ability to think (consciousness) is inhibited, suspended for this instant. The ‘paralysed’ audience can only remain with this unknowable presence, taking in its indeterminacy. Lyotard characterizes this situation as “an obligation within a face-to-face relationship” (Lyotard 1991: 81), during which the other in the work of art demands of the receiving subject to acknowledge its presence in its otherness (see Lyotard 1991: 81).

2.4.5 The Threat of Privation According to Lyotard the experience of the event of the sublime also evokes in the receiver the threat of privation. Approaching some overwhelming object, such as Barnett Newman’s vast canvas covered with the even layers of paint, Lyotard argues, the subject experiences a moment of anxiety. The presence of the colours, smoothly enveloping the canvas, does not seem to signify anything but itself. If the paintings tell a story it is indecipherable, completely hidden from the viewer. “There is almost nothing to ‘consume’”, as Lyotard observes (Lyotard 1991: 80). The subject suddenly feels threatened by the semantically indeterminate void of the painting. Similarly, on viewing sublime drama the audience experience an analogous fear related to the inability to make sense of what emerges in front of its very eyes. In Lyotard’s words, “one feels that it is possible that soon nothing more will take place” (Lyotard 1991: 84). The anxiety is, according to Lyotard, the result of a momentary “privation” which the audience experiences in the encounter with the indeterminate presence in a sublime drama. The term “privation” is borrowed from Edmund Burke, who, listing four kinds of it: vacuity, darkness, solitude and silence (see Burke 65), considers them to be possible sources of terror and therefore of the sublime. Lyotard identifies each type of privation with a particular kind of terror, “privation of light, terror of darkness; privation of others, terror of solitude; privation of language, terror of silence; privation of objects, terror of emptiness; privation of life, terror of death” (Lyotard 1991: 99). Tying in with Burke’s idea, Lyotard proposes his own definition of privation in the context of art and literature. This definition also plays an important role in sublime drama. Encountering a piece of art which does not seem to convey any clearly communicable meaning, the subject feels the threat that the meaning, which he or she is momentarily deprived of, will never appear and nothing more will happen. “A very big, very powerful ob-

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ject threatens to deprive the soul of any ‘it [language, light, life, others etc] happens’, strikes it with ‘astonishment’. The soul is thus dumb, immobilized, as good as dead” (Lyotard 1991: 100). The threat of privation in sublime drama is correspondingly related to the experience of Thanatos. The sublime delight, in Burke and Lyotard, results in the suspension of the privation and its threat, [w]hat is sublime is the feeling that something will happen, despite everything, within this threatening void, that something will take ‘place’ and will announce that everything is not over. That place is mere ‘here’, the most minimal occurrence. (Lyotard 1991: 84)

In sublime drama, this delight takes the form of energy release and is related to the experience of Eros. The meaning appears but only in the form of a sensation, of an indeterminacy, of ‘something happens’. And the best evidence that something happens is, according to Lyotard, the sensation of shock. Lyotard, however, also insists that this ‘shock’ of the sublime event has nothing to do with the shocks provided by the innovations of capitalism, which he refers to as “the petit frisson, the cheap thrill, the profitable pathos” (Lyotard 1991: 106). In this he agrees with Ken Urban, who discussing the connection of the British drama of the nineties with consumerism also insists that though the drama participates in the sensationalism of the cool, it uses it to an entirely different effect (see Urban 2004), namely the transformation of the consciousness. It is therefore important to differentiate between the desire to shock in order to make more profits and the desire to shock in order to transform established ways of thinking. Hidden in the cynicism of innovation is certainly the despair that nothing further will happen. But innovating means to behave as though lots of things happened, and to make them happen. Through innovation, the will affirms its hegemony over time. It thus conforms to the metaphysics of capital, which is a technology of time. The innovation ‘works’. The question mark of the Is it happening? stops. (Lyotard 1991: 107)

The difference between the shocking aesthetic of the sublime and the shocking aesthetic of capitalism is, therefore, the difference between the now and the new (see Lyotard 1991: 106). This difference lies in different conceptions of time. In the sublime the linear conception of time is broken. Only now, this instant, matters. It is a threatening moment for the subject, for suddenly the most common idea of the progression of time, the idea that ‘something will happen’ is undermined. This moment is the Kantian first moment of the sublime, during which the faculty of presentation is incapable of embracing the totality of ‘information’ and

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process it for the faculty of understanding. This is the negative moment of the sublime, when the subject is unable to present what he or she feels. And what the subject feels in this moment is an indeterminate presence. What the subject conceives of is what Lyotard refers to as the feeling “that there is… (quod)” (Lyotard 1991: 82). This sensation of indeterminate presence presents itself to the subject, but only as a feeling. Lyotard also compares it to a performative act of creation, the experience of Eros, a beginning (quod) of a new sensible world (quid), “like a flash of lightning in the darkness or a line on an empty surface” (Lyotard 1991: 82). The quid is the second moment of the Kantian sublime, when the unpresentable is presented. Although the quod results in the quid, they are not identical. The presentation of the quod is not possible. As Lyotard observes, “it is always too soon or too late to grasp presentation itself and present it. Such is the specific and paradoxical constitution of the event” (Lyotard 1991: 59).

2.4.6 The Ungraspable Presence The difference between the sensation “that there is… [quod]” and “what [quid] happens” (Lyotard 1991: 82) is temporal and qualitative. In temporal terms, the quod is always before the quid; “once it [quod] is there, it [quod] takes its place in the network of what has happened [quid]” (Lyotard 1991: 82). The unpresentable quod is presented as a new sensible world of quid. The temporal relation between the quod and quid is that of a peculiar paradoxical immediacy between (but not identity of) the two, “the flash [quod] is always there, and never there. The world never stops beginning. […] creation […] is what happens in the midst of the indeterminate” (Lyotard 1991: 82). Qualitatively, the difference is between the immateriality of the quod and materiality of the quid. The quod is immaterial, because indeterminacy (presence, the here and now) cannot be represented in any sensible form. Yet out of this indeterminacy something material is created, a new sensible world (quid). In the first moment of the sublime (quod) our consciousness (thought) is suspended. It cannot cope with the ‘now’ it faces. That something happens, the occurrence, means that the mind is disappropriated. The expression ‘it happens that…’ is the formula of non-mastery of the self over self. The event makes the self incapable of taking possession and control of what it is. It testifies that the self is essentially passible to a recurrent alterity. (Lyotard 1991: 59)

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The event, due to its irreducible indeterminacy (alterity, the other), can never be grasped in presentation by the consciousness (thought), which is “dismantled” and “deposed” in the sublime (Lyotard 1991: 90). Any presentation of an event is, therefore, its subsequent appropriation and modification through our consciousness (thought). Any presentation of an event always involves interpretation and change of that event after the event. Consciousness implies memory […]. By opposing discontinuity with synthesis, consciousness seems to be the very thing that throws down a challenge to alterity. In this conflict [between the same and the other; the determinate and indeterminate], what is at stake is to determine the limits within which consciousness is capable of embracing a diversity of moments (of ‘information’, as we say these days) and of actualizing them ‘each time’ they are needed. (Lyotard 1991: 60)

With the consciousness (thought) and the idea of the linear conception of time suspended, attaching determinate meaning to the event of the sublime is impossible. Such meaning is constituted in the process of linking occurrences in a (logical) relation to one another, that is, meaning is a matter of linear conception of time. Attaching a meaning to an event becomes possible only after the event, which is to say, when the presence is no longer there, post factum. And this meaning is only an interpretation of the event. Each attempt at an ‘actualization’ of the presence, at the retrieval of the event in its ‘original’ state is ‘only’ its translation, a repetition with a change. In sublime drama this impossibility of presenting an event is intensified and put into presentation itself. The sublime dramatic representation of the presence preserves and shows visible traces/ signs of this indeterminacy. And this is the second moment of the sublime, in which the unpresentable quod is presented as quid. The quid becomes the material sign of the quod, the sign of the quod’s resistance to being presented in a determinate form; the sign of a differend.

2.5 Summary The sublime is categorized by Kant as the reflective aesthetic judgement, a categorization which is later very significant for Lyotard in his reflections on the subject. What is defined by regarding the sublime as an aesthetic judgement is that it is an aesthetic feeling. As a feeling it is wholly subjective and does not attempt to make any objective statements about the truth or value of things. It does not therefore concern either epistemology or morality. Subjective as the judgement is, the sublime seems to be more concerned with the perceiving subject and its response than the object of the perception. Although the response

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and the object are interdependent and the former cannot arise without the latter, the main focus of the aesthetic of the sublime is the subject’s sensual reaction to the object, which in the sublime is a complex feeling of pleasure arising from displeasure. Another important characteristic of the sublime is that the feeling is reflective, which is to say, indeterminate. It cannot be subsumed under any pre-established (that is, determinate) concepts, and it does not form any new determinate concepts. What is felt in the sublime is the indeterminate (that is, void of any determinate semantic content) concept of freedom. For Lyotard, this freedom is thought’s sensation of its own indeterminacy. In the sublime, thought is suddenly freed from any existing concepts such as that of cause and effect. What the subject realizes in the sublime is the possibility of creating new concepts for thinking which will be subjective and indeterminate. Operating with indeterminate concepts, the sublime resists dominant narratives which claim to hold the truth about human reality. Although it is the particular response to the object by the subject that is the main focus of the aesthetic of the sublime, the object is not without significance. Quite the reverse, the object is in fact the only graspable, that is sensible, thing there is in the experience of the sublime. The sensation, the feeling itself is ungraspable. The only material moment of the experience of the sublime is, therefore, the object. And as the discussion of catalysing objects considered by Longinus, Burke, Kant and Lyotard shows, they usually, to put it bluntly, consist of strategies which arrange the familiar in an unfamiliar way and in doing so evoke in the audience the first moment of the sublime, which is recognisable by the sensations of shock and terror. These extreme sensations are necessary to throw the subject out of his or her conventional ways of thinking and perceiving. The catalyzing object has to be able to inhibit the thought processes of the subject, by pushing thought to its cognitive limits and suspending it for an instant. The relationship between the object and the subject is first and foremost a sensual attraction of sorts, since the operations of the mind seem to be paralyzed in that moment. The body of the object exerts power and control over the body of the subject. The latter can only sense an unknown presence without being able to grasp it by any available concept. The subject is so mesmerized by the power of the object that he or she cannot rationally analyze it, find words to describe it or speculate about its meaning. The subject, in other words, is incapable of regarding the object in terms of the known and the familiar. With the cognitive operations suspended, the subject can only feel the material presence of the object and become aware of its otherness in its irreducible indeterminacy. The indeterminacy of the object stirs up the indeterminacy inherent in the subject and opens the latter for change.

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This aesthetic effect, Lyotard argues, is accomplished by art and literature when they embark on new aesthetic paths of experimentation with new forms and concepts that question the known and the familiar. Experimentation is therefore also an important feature of sublime drama. Experimenting, art and literature almost automatically resist the existing aesthetic norms and rules of the currently dominant narrative in a given culture by “introducing into the cultural matrix a germ, a foreign body, that cannot be accounted for by its existing codes and practices” (Attridge 55 – 56). In doing so, sublime art and literature in general, and sublime drama in particular, create new space for the other and contribute to greater aesthetic plurality. However, there appear to be two basic ways of turning from the unknown into the known. The other may either be introduced into the same by domestication or foreignization¹¹. In the first case, “the other starts by being wholly different and is then stripped of its otherness so that it can be integrated or manipulated” (Attridge 30). The other is included or rather assimilated in the dominant narrative, to use Lyotardian terminology, by ceasing to be the other. This assimilating force of the domestic culture, eclipsing the other from its mainstream realist narrative, represents the desire of a given culture to maintain its identity, “its capacities and configurations, its value-systems and hierarchies of importance” (Attridge 30), in other words, to preserve its status as a metanarrative. In the foreignizing scenario, which is what sublime art strives for, “the otherness is registered in the adjustments I have to make in order to acknowledge it – adjustments that may never become wholly second nature to me” (Attridge 30). The other is welcomed by the dominant narrative as the other, that is, without trying to reduce its indeterminacy, but with what Derrida refers to as “hospitality” (Derrida 2000). In doing so, the sublime opens the dominant narrative to other narratives, weakening the status of the former in the process. The expressions ‘foreignization’ and ‘opening the narrative to’ may suggest that the other is something external to a closed, that is, whole and homogenous culture. Both Lyotard and Attridge reject this binary opposition of the outside

 The terms are also used in translation theory to describe two different approaches to the act of translation. The domestication method tries to adjust all the information and references to the foreign (‘source’) culture to the context of the ‘target’ culture, whereas the foreignization method translates the foreign text without trying to conceal the fact that it is ‘only’ a translation. For a detailed discussion of the two terms and the two approaches to translation see Laurence Venuti’s Translator’s Invisibility (1995), and The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (1998).

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and the inside.¹² Lyotard argues that the indeterminacy we experience in the object of the sublime makes us realize the indeterminacy as an intrinsic part of ourselves, the indeterminacy of our thinking. Similarly, Attridge points out that “the other […] does not come from outer space but arises from the possibilities and impossibilities inherent in the culture as embodied in a subject or a group of subjects. [The other is] not […] ‘ineffable’ or ‘inexpressible’ in the general sense, only what cannot be thought or said in a particular culture at a particular time” (Attridge 30). Sublime art uncovers these ‘unsaid’ moments, the ‘silent voices’ as already existing but being underrepresented in the dominant culture, and presents them while preserving and displaying their indeterminacy. Speaking of ‘silenced voices’, terror and paralysis of thought may give a negative tone to sublime drama. And yet it also participates in what Lyotard describes as a sensibility permeated by the feeling of jubilation (jouissance). The French word used by Lyotard to describe the feeling which the subject experiences in the sublime “means pleasure, but suggests also ecstasy and sexual orgasm. It immediately points to what is beyond the bounds of rational thought, excessive with regards to conscious control, and also suggests the possibility of transformation (through conception and birth)” (Malpas 94). The feeling of jubilation is related to the increased creativity, which is the result of the encounter of the subject with indeterminacy. Recognizing the indeterminacy of his or her own thought, the subject realizes all the new creative possibilities arising from this indeterminacy, of being free to create new worlds and discover new aesthetic realms. Sublime art may therefore be described as an ecstasy of imagination, which is experienced as “unbounded”, “thrusting aside its own barriers”, “unbridled”, “in the delirium of enthusiasm” and being “carried away” (Lyotard 1994: 151). Free from any conceptual bonds, the faculty of presentation attempts the impossible, to present the sublime presence in its indeterminacy, and necessarily fails. This failed presentation becomes, however, the sign that the unpresentable, the indeterminacy exists. The sublime succeeds in presenting the unpresentable by failing to present it, the paradox of this successful failure appearing to be its specific trademark.

 An interesting discussion of the binary opposition of the inside and outside in the context of the sublime is also provided by Jacques Derrida in his The Truth in Painting, where he deconstructs the artificial dichotomy of ergon and parergon. See also the analysis of 4.48 Psychosis in this study (chapter 3.4).

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2.6 Theorizing the Sublime for Drama Analysis The sublime is the result of the conflict or struggle between the perceiving subject and the catalysing object, as the object emerges, or in Lyotard’s words “happens”, in the perceiver’s consciousness in a way that does not seem to be compatible with the concepts at the subject’s disposal. The perceiving subject experiences this failure of its cognitive faculties as a moment of privation and terror. Showing the subject the limits of its consciousness, the situation, however, also sensitizes the subject to the realms of reality that are unrepresented in its thought, calling for its transformation and greater openness. In spite of the initial sense of inhibition or even paralysis of thought, the experience brings about an expansion of consciousness – a moment that Lyotard describes as “truly exulting” (Lyotard 1994: 122). In order to analyse the sublime conflict in drama, an approach is necessary that will take into consideration both sides of the equation: the perceivers (the readers or the audience) and the text (dramatic text or theatrical performance). Such an approach also needs to be able to portray the conflicted dynamics of the interaction and consider how the two sides affect each other in the formation of the response of the sublime in the particular context of drama and theatre. How to describe the audience’s consciousness? And how to account for the processes occurring there? Defining the process of literary interpretation as first and foremost an act of communication, a dynamic process of interaction, between the reader and the text, Wolfgang Iser’s theory of aesthetic response coupled with his theory of the implied reader seem to best suit the requirements of both the aesthetic category of the sublime and the theatrical context.¹³ Not only can his concept of the interaction between the reader and the text be translated into the basic situation of theatrical communication between the stage and the audience, but it also sees meaning (the aesthetic response) to be the product of the interaction between the two, which is precisely how the sublime is produced: at the intersection between the perceiver’s mind and the perceived object. The ‘collision’ of the two elements, of, to put it bluntly, the perceiver’s concepts and the object that the concepts fail to grasp, catalyses the response of the sublime and transformation of the perceiver’s thought. Sublime drama cannot be experienced as such without its perceiver, in whose consciousness it emerges as the particular aesthetic response of the sub-

 Though originally designated for novels, reader-response theories have been discussed by critics in the context of the requirements of theatre (see Bennett).

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lime. It is in the perceiver’s experience of it that the drama acquires the sublime quality. However, it is the drama’s particular make-up, which Iser defines as a certain organisation of signifiers within the text, that gives the perceiver instructions as to how to form the aesthetic response of the sublime. The signifiers, as Iser further points out, “do not serve to designate a signified object”, that is, the signifiers are not the sublime themselves, “but instead designate instructions for the production of the signified”, which is the aesthetic response (Iser 65). The perceiver needs to use his or her imagination to put the signifiers together and thus produce the aesthetic object (response) in his or her mind. It is in the perceiver’s mind that the synthesis of the signifiers takes place, or fails to do so. In sublime drama the organisation of the signifiers is such that it often ultimately precludes this synthesis into a clear and coherent signified and, in doing so, leads the perceiver to experience the limits of their own imagination and understanding, forcing them to struggle with those limits. The four case studies will show different examples of this subversive arrangement of signifiers, different strategies and techniques leading to the perceiver’s paralysis of thought and the sublime response. By implying that the reader’s task in production of the meaning is to follow the instructions in the text, Iser does not mean that the reader’s, or the audience’s, interpretative responses are totally restricted or controlled by the strategies of the text. Iser contends that the latter always leaves some room for the receiver, which he refers to as gaps of indeterminacy or blanks. The more blanks a text has, the greater the participation of the receiver’s own thoughts, experiences and values in constructing the aesthetic object (meaning), and the greater the potential of the text to activate a plurality of meanings. What is characteristic of sublime drama with respect to Iser’s notion of text’s indeterminacies is that initially they are often disguised as determinable objects as they appear to the audiences as familiar and recognisable situations and contexts; then, these apparently familiar contexts are suddenly revealed as unfamiliar and strange. In fact, they are rendered by the play’s strategies so unfamiliar and indeterminate that they seem to be on the verge of replacing what seem to be the more determinate parts of a play so far altogether. The determinate elements are revealed as indeterminate. The perceiver finds him- or herself in a limbo of the undecidable, balancing on the boundary between determinacy and indeterminacy. The aesthetic response that the perceiver eventually forms is palpably tinged with this experience of the indeterminacy of what earlier seemed determinate. The indeterminacy of sublime drama does not merely allow for the greater participation of its audiences’ consciousness in creation of the aesthetic object, but tries to achieve continuity with them, that is, to create a situation in which the perceivers can barely recognise where their own thought starts and where it

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ends. It is a moment of subject’s disappearance. Absolute continuity is, of course, impossible; only degrees can be attained. The greater the degree of continuity, the more powerful the experience of the sublime and the greater the potential of the transformation of the perceiver’s thought is. Though discussing the blanks Iser does not refer to the concept of the sublime but more generally to the literature of the twentieth century, which, according to him, is characterised by a greater degree of indeterminacy, his observation about it also fittingly describes the transformative power inherent in sublime drama. This potential does not lie in the meaning sealed within the text, but in the fact that that meaning brings out what had previously been sealed within us. When the subject is separated from himself, the resultant spontaneity is guided and shaped by the text in such a way that it is transformed into a new and real consciousness. Thus each text constitutes its own reader. (Iser 157)

Trying to fill in the blanks, the audience uses their own familiar concepts and experiences to make up for the missing links. If the play uses forms of presentations that are conventional the audiences fill in the gaps without even being aware of these actions as the processes of interpretation and understanding seem to happen seamlessly. Imposing their own concepts and meanings on the play, the audiences filter it through their system of thought and values, often without realising it. This situation, however, changes in sublime drama where sooner or later the tables are turned on the audience. Sublime drama allows for seamless filling in the gaps and for the illusion of familiar contexts so as to activate the particular familiar concepts in the audiences’ minds which sublime drama later wants to violently undermine. It does so in an extremely powerful way, leading to the sudden paralysis of the audiences’ consciousness, shortcircuiting it for an instant, by turning the familiar scenario into a terrifying and overwhelming situation in which the gaps are experienced as unbridgeable. The sublime indeterminacies cut both ways. Inviting the audiences to fill in the gaps with their own concepts, experiences and meanings, sublime drama allows the perceivers to work with its elements freely and opens itself to the audiences’ interpretation and possible appropriation. At the same time, however, sublime drama also ‘lures’ the perceivers in. The audiences start forming the aesthetic object in their minds, and let the elements of the play act on their consciousness without realising it. At some point in the play, however, the elements take on a monstrous shape and affect the audience’s consciousness violently, which optimally leads to its transformation in the process. Describing this moment in Iser’s theory, Stanley Fish explains the transformative potential in the following way,

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as the reader puts the work together, he is himself put together; as the text ‘begins to exist as a gestalt in the reader’s consciousness’ [p. 121], the gestalt that is the reader’s consciousness is in the process of being altered by the structure it is building; in response to the indeterminate set of directions, the reader is moved to assemble the virtual object in his own way, but as that object takes shape it begins to have a reciprocal effect on the way that the reader considers his own; the reader may be following his individual disposition in the act of construction, but that disposition is itself changed in an interaction with what it has constructed: ‘Hence, the constitution of meaning not only implies the creation of a totality emerging from interacting textual perspectives … but also, through formulating this totality, it enables us to formulate ourselves, and thus discover an inner world of which we had hitherto not been conscious’ [p.158]. (Fish 5 – 6)

The specificity of this process in sublime drama lies in the overwhelming nature of the aesthetic object that is formed in the perceiver’s consciousness in the interaction with the elements and strategies of a given play. Emerging in the audiences’ minds as some monstrous, formless and indeterminate entity, the object escapes their grasp and thwarts their processes of cognition and perception. This is the moment of Lyotard’s threat of privation, the short-circuiting of our consciousness, the fearful experience that meaning may never arrive and that our system of thought has failed us in supplanting the gaps in the text and assembling its elements to form a totality of meaning. The text of sublime drama acts on the audiences’ consciousness by saturating it with its sublime indeterminacy, as the latter struggles to patch up its gaps with what turns out to be useless, old and worn-out concepts. If the meaning finally arrives, it is always incomplete and unstable, as it is touched with the memory of the terrifying struggle, with Derrida’s “trial of undecidability” (Derrida 1988: 210). It will be the task of the analytical part of this study to investigate the process of the emergence of the overwhelming object in the audiences’ minds, the conditions of this emergence and the dramatic strategies leading the audiences’ consciousness to momentary paralysis and, later, transformation. The undeniable challenge of any attempt to analyse and describe the aesthetic response to any artwork in general, and drama in particular, is that it necessarily needs to speak for the perceiver: the absent and unpredictable elements in the communication that are the individual audiences and their subjective and idiosyncratic responses. Trying to account for what is referred to in response theories as the real reader and his or her history of responses in a reliable way would be extremely difficult and might even potentially be considered presumptuous. A subjective history of responses is precisely what Sierz’s book seems to aim at and succeeds in portraying in a rather convincing and believable way, with the author’s constant references to the real audiences’ reactions and the performances that he himself attended. Clearly, such an account is necessarily

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filtered through the eyes of its author and is extremely subjective – a fact Sierz willingly admits in the very first sentence of his book, informing the reader that his account is “a personal and polemical history” (Sierz 2001: xi). As long as he remains within the self-imposed frame of a personal report his descriptions are excellent, possibly the best of their kind, in conveying the atmosphere of that time, filtered through his eyes. The moment, however, Sierz starts to project his description of the real audiences’ response onto the more universal and more objective level of abstract audiences of the plays, and there are quite a few such moments in his book, his account becomes rather problematic. In an attempt to avoid this difficult and sticky situation, the present study will resort to Iser’s category of the implied reader, which, though not entirely unproblematic (see Fish 6 – 13; Bennett 36 – 71), nevertheless provides a more reliable tool for an analysis of aesthetic response, as it considers the receiver to be a construct, which has its “roots firmly planted in the structure of the text” (Iser 34), where it can also be anchored. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, each time the term ‘audience’ is applied in this study, it is used in the sense of Iser’s implied reader, which is adapted here to the dramatic context and translated into the implied audience, with dramatic text as a set of directions (organisation of various theatrical signs) for the audience to actualise and form into the aesthetic object. The dynamic relationship between the implied reader and the dramatic text, just as that of the implied audience and theatrical performance, is thus considered here on par with that of a performer and a script. Or, to phrase it from a reverse perspective, Iser’s definition of the relationship between the implied reader and the literary text is clearly suggestive of the interaction between the implied audience and the stage in the external communication system of theatre. In Iser’s definition of the concept, the implied reader “embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect – predispositions laid down, not by an empirical reality, but by the text itself. [H]e [the implied reader] is a construct and in no way to be identified with any real reader” (Iser 34). Similarly, the implied audience is a construct that is discernible in the dramatic text or performance in the form of a vantage point that needs to be taken by the audience if the play is to achieve its effect, which in the case of sublime drama is the effect of the sublime response. In other words, in order to be able to experience the sublime, the recipient needs to assume a certain role, a certain position implied to him or her by the play: the role of the implied audience (implied recipient) (see Iser 34). This might be for instance a set of certain conventional expectations that the play attempts to undermine or question. The concept of the implied audience “thus designates a network of response-inviting

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structures, which impel [the audience] to grasp the text [or the performance]” (Iser 34). The role of the implied reader in performing the meaning of the text is further defined by Iser by referring to its function in converging the various perspectives within a literary work, using a novel as an example: As a rule there are four main perspectives: those of the narrator, the characters, the plot, and the fictitious reader. Although these may differ in order of importance, none of them on its own is identical to the meaning of the text. What they do is provide guidelines originating from different starting points (narrator, characters, etc.), continually shading into each other and devised in such a way that they all converge on a general meeting place. We call the meeting place the meaning of the text, which can only be brought into focus if it is visualised from a standpoint. Thus, standpoint and convergence of textual perspectives are closely interrelated, although neither of them is actually represented in the text, let alone set out in words. Rather they emerge during the reading process, in the course of which the reader’s role is to occupy shifting vantage points that are geared to a prestructured activity and to fit the diverse perspectives into a gradually evolving pattern. (Iser 35)

Similarly, in order to be able to produce the response of the sublime (the sublime meaning), the audience needs to assume a certain role consisting of certain vantage points throughout the process of perception, which sublime drama steers them to take, to achieve a standpoint from which they can visualise the convergence of the various perspectives of a sublime play. This moment of convergence is experienced in sublime drama as the experience of the limits of concepts, the collapse of binary opposites and the impossibility of complete and objective meaning. The task of the analysis will be, in the first step, to describe the various perspectives presented in the case studies, which will be done at the level of the internal communication system of the plays. In the next step, the analysis will demonstrate the different vantage points that the audience needs to take, and the different strategies of the sublime plays that lead the audience to take the necessary positions, in order to find itself at the standpoint in the play where it can experience the convergence of all the perspectives in the sensation of the sublime. Describing this confluence of factors will be the task of the analysis at the level of the external communication system.

3 Case Studies 3.1 Patrick Marber’s Closer “It’s a lie” (Marber 216). This judgement concerns an exhibition of photographs and is made by Alice, one of the four characters in Patrick Marber’s play about relationships and love, Closer (1997). The exhibition is entitled “Strangers” and presents photographs of many anonymous people, “a bunch of sad strangers photographed beautifully” (Marber 216), Alice, described by the label as “Young Woman, London” (Marber 216), being one of them. Looking at her own image, she sees the representation as a reassuring lie. It has nothing to do with the world as she perceived it at the point when the picture was taken, with the sudden rush of deep despair, which she felt upon the realisation that she had been betrayed by her boyfriend. The representation perverted the moment into something beautiful, enjoyable, and consumable. Not only is it a lie, but it also makes the image of that evanescent, intimate moment consumable for others. What Alice seems to notice is the incommensurability of her experience of herself with others’ presentation, assessment and judgement of it as something beautiful, which seems unjust and hurtful to her. Alice’s anguish is exploited to make other people happier. It is the discrepancy between the feeling of the particular painful moment in the past and its representation, which does not convey the truth of that moment but seems miles away from it. Beautiful representation creates an illusory familiarity of form and evokes pleasure in the perceiver, who appears to have no difficulties in recognizing and understanding it. According to Kant, beauty is based on a certain seeming familiarity of form, which is not “disturbed or broken by any foreign sensation” (Kant 40). This apparent familiarity allows the faculties of imagination and understanding to cooperate in harmony, which the perceiver experiences as pleasure. The familiarity of the beautiful object derives from the illusion that its form seems to be in compliance with our concepts of understanding, which we use to grasp the world around us; the beautiful form appears to us as if it had been created for the purpose of our understanding. The perceiver can feel a unity with the beautiful object, which gives him or her pleasure. Contemplating the image of the heartbroken Alice, the visitors at the exhibition in Closer can feel such pleasure, precisely because the representation is beautiful in the Kantian sense of harmony. And yet Alice feels abused in the perceivers’ judgement of her picture as beautiful. Why Alice reacts so strongly to the situation is her feeling of being appropriated by the perceivers in their pleasure; that the perceivers use her image to their own advantage, in this case, to enjoy themselves, to feel something deep

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or to become more inspired. And although Kant insists that the pleasure deriving from the judgement of the beautiful should be disinterested, by which he means that we should have no interest in the existence of the beautiful object, and that personal interest in or desire for the object only contaminates the judgement of the beautiful, turning it into the agreeable, Jean-Luc Nancy argues that Kant’s ideal conditions for the judgement of the beautiful are utopian. In reality, which is much more blurry than what Kant requires of it, the disinterested judgement of the beautiful is in fact an unstable category always on the brink of “sliding into” something else (Nancy 33). “And this imminent sliding”, Nancy further points out, “is not accidental but belongs to the very structure of the beautiful” (Nancy 33). The category of the beautiful may therefore be considered only as an “intermediate, ungraspable formation, impossible to fix except as a limit, a border, a place of equivocation (but perhaps also of exchange)” (Nancy 33) which, depending on the circumstances, may either turn into the sublime or the agreeable. Presenting and analysing the use of the three types of judgment in Closer, this chapter will first explain the difference between the three feelings theoretically, drawing on Kant’s distinctions and Nancy’s criticism and re-definition of them. It will then proceed with an analysis of the various forms of judgements at the level of the internal communication system, where it will examine how the characters’ use of the different judgements in their perception of each other affect their relationships and their lives. In order to do so, the analysis will look into each character and each relationship separately. After an examination of how the various judgements change the characters’ perception of each other, the next major point will be an analysis of the relationship between the stage and audience, asking the same questions. The main focus of this section will be to examine the various strategies that the play uses to arrange its repertoire, its material, in order to steer the audience to form a particular judgement about the characters and the meaning of the play. It will show how the audience is first led astray to feel relatively comfortable within what seems to be an agreeable structure of the play only to have this rug of familiarity pulled from under its feet with one ‘sublime haul’. In doing so, the strategies first allow the audience to form the aesthetic object in their mind and then lead it to collapse by undermining its base.

3.1.1 The Beautiful, the Agreeable and the Sublime What distinguishes the beautiful from the agreeable, as Kant argues, is the lack or existence of personal interest for the object of perception in the respective

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judgements. The beautiful turns into the judgement of the agreeable when the beautiful object becomes of personal interest to the perceiver, and is experienced as “at once pleasure and appropriation” (Nancy 31). Although Kant insists that the judgement of beautiful is pure of any such interest, Nancy argues that “[i]t is always possible that some interest – empirical or not – has intruded itself [upon the judgement of the beautiful]” (Nancy 33). What opens the beautiful to this ‘contamination’ is the pleasure that the perceiver feels on seeing the object. Since the pleasure originates from the particular form of the beautiful, it is the latter which is responsible for this ‘perversion’ of the beautiful into the agreeable. Giving pleasure to the perceiver by presenting him or her with harmony, it makes the object vulnerable to the perceiver’s interest in it. We look at the picture of Alice. We feel the beauty of its form. Our imagination and understanding play in harmony, giving us the pleasure of experiencing ourselves in unity with the beautiful object. The pleasure that we feel in the beauty is, according to Nancy, “the enjoyment of the subject” which reveals or constitutes itself on this occasion precisely by “enjoying itself” (Nancy 32). It is this enjoyment that evokes our interest in the object, our desire for it, because it occasions our constituting, our experiencing of our self. According to Nancy, it is therefore hardly possible to separate the two feelings, the beautiful and the agreeable, from one another at all. Contaminated with our interest in the object, the beautiful instantly becomes the agreeable, and we start perceiving the object to be a sum of characteristics and ingredients, which we desire and do not perceive it in its entirety, in its ungraspable presence. In other words, the beautiful object stops being beautiful when we start attaching to it the concrete purpose (telos) of satisfying our needs. We see the object through the prism of the particular characteristics, its good forms, and its particular purpose. Our perception of the object is then filtered through our concept of it, which is dictated by our desires. In the end we cannot see the object as it is, but only as a set of attributes which are supposed to satisfy these needs. If the object fails to do so, we no longer have any interest in it and are ready to discard it. The original attraction to and fascination with the object disappear the moment we start appropriating it, forming it according to our concrete desires, and stop enjoying the object’s existence in its purposelessness and indeterminacy; its presence without giving the object any determinate meaning or trying to define it. What Alice argues about at the exhibition and is visibly hurt by is the feeling of being appropriated by the others’ ‘gaze’¹, first by Anna’s taking the picture of

 I draw here upon Michel Foucault’s ideas about the normalising and objectifying function of

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her, and then by the visitors at the exhibition. Her existence is stolen from her and given a beautiful form, and through this form, it is made agreeable and consumable. Commodified, her life and her appearance lose their indeterminacy and sublimity for us. What should remain ungraspable is grasped and presented in a pleasurable form. Alice’s image becomes an object with a determinable purpose, which can be used to satisfy the onlooker’s desires and can be marketed. Postcards with her image are sold all over the world, making the unrepeatable experience seem repeatable. Her beautiful form attracts the perceiver with a promise of pleasurable experience of his or her own self, but in the same gesture it also opens the form up to the agreeable; in doing so it renders the form vulnerable to appropriation, which considerably diminishes the potential for experiencing one’s own self, one’s own presence in the object, and along with it the attraction to the other. Fortunately for the other, however, according to Nancy “the same instability, the same constitutive lability that makes the beautiful slide into the agreeable can also carry it off into the sublime” (Nancy 33). What are the circumstances of this “sliding”? How can it be redirected towards the sublime? The answer lies, again, in the form of the object to be judged, which, unlike in the beautiful, in the sublime is defined by its paradoxical and unlimited contour (see Nancy 35) with its capacity to deeply disturb the perceiver. The movement from the beautiful, that is, from the limited and familiar form, towards the sublime is brought about by a conscious opening, that is, an “unlimiting” of this form (see Nancy 35) and freeing the perceived object for indeterminacy. It is the limiting form of Alice’s photograph that makes her beauty slide into the agreeable and not into the sublime. Had the photograph been made using the aesthetic of the sublime, Alice’s picture may have appeared ungraspable and more difficult to consume. The “sliding” of the beautiful either into the agreeable or the sublime seems to be at the heart of the play, both thematically and aesthetically. Its mechanism and its consequences are demonstrated in the play’s themes of love, intimacy and relationships. The drama shows how the characters are attracted to one another by the beauty of the other; how, because the otherness appears to them as the beautiful, that is, due to its limited familiar form, they almost immediately turn the beautiful indeterminacy of the other into the agreeable determinacy by creating a limiting image of the other, ‘fleshing it out’ with their own desires.

vision. For detailed discussion summarising Foucault’s thought on the subject matter see, for instance, Martin Jay, “In the Empire of the Gaze: Foucault and the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.”

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Gradually, the other is turned into a more and more determinate and familiar form, which destroys the otherness of the other and along with it its original appeal. The judgement of the beautiful slides into the judgement of the agreeable. The characters’ relationships, love and intimacy become familiar, lose their original magnetism and the potential of experiencing the self in the other. Aesthetically, the vicious circle is also reflected in the form of the play, which steers the audience into the experience of the same “sliding” (Nancy 33) effect that the characters experience in the play’s internal communication system. The apparent surface beauty and harmony of the play’s structure lures the members of the audience into making the judgement of the agreeable about its content and into appropriating the characters and their relationships according to their own needs and their preconceptions of love and intimacy. On the surface, the drama refers to familiar forms which have been conventionally associated with comedies about relationships in order to lull the audience into feelings of safety and comfort, only to shock them by breaking this illusion at the end of the play. The forms turn out to be a mere pretence, a simulation of familiarity. I will first present the effects of the sliding into the agreeable internally, for the characters, and then externally, for the audience. I will also examine whether the play shows any signs of breaking out of this vicious circle, that is, any signs of a sublime form which would resist becoming blurred with the agreeable but which would instead exhibit the ungraspable presence of the other.

3.1.2 Synopsis The story of the play is quickly told. Introducing four characters, two men, Dan and Larry, and two women, Alice and Anna, Closer shows how they meet and fall in and out of love with one another. Various configurations are played out: Alice and Dan, Dan and Anna, Anna and Larry, and Larry and Alice. The apparent ease of summarising the play is part of its misleading structure, setting a trap for the audience. Though the story can be told in two sentences, its implications are much more complex and its conclusions about the possibility of love and intimacy deeply unsettling. For Closer is first and foremost a story of striving for greater intimacy and the failures to actually do so. Focusing on the characters’ first encounters and the break-ups, the play presents the ‘extreme ends’ of the relationships and explores the crucial moments of the first attraction and its ‘death’.

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3.1.3 Internal Analysis: Moments of (In)Hospitality Encountering the other Dan and Alice meet in rather unusual circumstances. Alice, who has just arrived in London from New York City is the representation of the foreigner, the other, in the play, who, unfamiliar with the existing rules violently clashes with the new culture from the start. Not accustomed to traffic coming from the right she is hit by a car while crossing a street. Dan, who had already spotted her before the accident, accompanies her to a hospital. From the first moment, there is a strong mutual attraction between the two characters. What exactly this attraction is cannot be explained, although Dan and Alice try to give some concrete reasons for it the longer they are in each other’s presence. The beauty of their first encounter, the unrepeatable first experience of the indeterminate other lasts very briefly and is immediately broken down into the concrete attributes of the other person. Alice, for instance, associates Dan with the image of bread without crusts. “I looked in his briefcase and I found this … sandwich … and I thought ‘I will give all my love to this charming man who cuts off his crusts’” (Marber 267). In doing so, she makes the judgement of the agreeable about Dan right at the beginning of the play and their relationship. Searching through Dan’s briefcase, she creates an opinion about him by choosing to believe what she herself needs or wants to believe. The idea or the image of Dan cutting off his crusts must reflect Alice’s most intimate needs or longings, which she projects on Dan and therefore hopes to satisfy through the relationship with him. Defining those desires precisely is rather difficult and we may only make some speculations based on what we learn about Alice from the play, which is not much. Perhaps this is what her father used to do for her? There are many different theories about Alice’s past and identity, both of which remain indeterminate in the end. She tells Larry, for example, that her parents were killed in an accident. Whether this is true or not is never revealed. What is relatively certain is that Alice seems to suffer from the sense of being abandoned. She describes herself to Dan as a “waif” (Marber 191) and indeed does not seem to have any family. In the hospital she does not want to call anyone, saying that she does not know anyone (Marber 184– 5), and later Dan writes about her in his book that “[s]he has one address in her address book; ours … under ‘H’ for home” (Marber 198). The idea of Dan’s cutting off his bread crusts is an extremely warm image, associated with the security of home and loving parents. And this seems to be what Alice is in desperate need of. She therefore immediately ‘forms’ her idea of Dan according to this need and falls in love with this image, that is, with her illusion of Dan, an illusion of safety, since, as we

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learn at the end of the play, Dan lied to Alice about it. The bread simply “broke” in his hands on that day (Marber 292). Having investigated the sandwich, Alice proceeds with her scrutiny of Dan’s bag. She finds an apple and immediately bites into it. This may simply be Marber’s characterization technique, defining Alice as a person who does not seem to have a great respect for personal boundaries, which considering Alice’s efforts to keep the boundaries of her own privacy intact is somewhat ironical. Biting into the apple may, however, also be deemed to be a subtle implication foreshadowing the consequences of Alice’s filtered perception of Dan. An apple in female hands evokes the biblical associations of Adam and Eve, and of the Fall, which followed their consumption of the fruit. And it was with nothing less than the promise of knowledge that Satan tempted Eve into eating it. The price paid by the first humans for this knowledge was death. Remembering this moment four years later, Alice describes the apple as “green and […] horrible” (Marber 279). Her biting into the apple heralds the beginning of the relationship’s failure, its death and Alice’s death. Unlike Adam and Eve, who although they paid for their desire for knowledge with the loss of their immortality at least gained something in the process, the characters in Closer seem to leave their relationships empty-handed, having learned very little about love or intimacy with the other. Not only do they fail in their relationships, they do not learn anything about their partners in spite of their constant efforts to define the other, either. Attempting to grasp the other in a knowable concept hoping that they will become more intimate with the other in the process brings about the opposite result as it contributes to the failure of their relationships. Mistaking the concept for the other seems to be one of the most frequently commited ‘sins’ by the characters. Alice falls in love with the concept of Dan cutting off his crusts; Dan’s ex-girlfriend, Ruth, with the collection of poems written by a Spanish poet whom she later marries, and which is revealingly entitled “Solitude”; and Larry, possibly, with his Internet image of Anna. Unable to keep their image of the other open to constant change, to keep the frame of the picture unstable, they fall victim to their own mental creation, which they slowly become disillusioned with and tired of, like with a worn-out interpretation. Interestingly, creating images of others is the occupation of all characters apart from Alice, who earn their living by putting the other in literal or conceptual frames: Dan by writing, Larry by interpreting the symptoms on the skin and Anna by taking pictures. Not belonging to the group of the ‘predators’, Alice is the one who constitutes their ‘prey’, providing the content of their images.

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Framing the other solid Dan creates images by using words and other people’s lives. He is a writer but not a particularly successful one. At the time when he and Alice meet for the first time, Dan complains that he “ha[s] no voice” (Marber 187) and introduces himself as a “sort of journalist” (Marber 184), writing obituaries for a newspaper. Although this does not seem to be his dream career, this activity appears to be the defining feature of his character and of the quality of his writing in general: “parasitic” (Saunders 2008: 25) and deadly. Indeed, Dan’s attitude towards writing seems to be very egoistic and oriented towards himself and his own needs rather than the other, which three different occasions in the play where his writing is mentioned demonstrate, his work at the obituary page, his book about Alice and his online ‘conversation’ with Larry. All three situations show that Dan either does not want to give of himself in his writing or possibly has nothing to offer and therefore steals the lives of others. Centred on his own needs, he tends to consider the people that he writes about to be a sum of characteristics and features, which he describes. His writing, therefore, does not make the other come alive through his work but destroys it and his words are not “hospitable” (see Derrida 2000) towards the other.

Hospitality of frame Discussing the idea of hospitality, Derrida defines it as a particular type of writing: “an art and a poetics” (qtd in Naas 10) which welcomes the other by inventing each time a new language, “adjusted to the other” (qtd in Naas 10). The challenge of this poetics consists in creating a hospitable frame, namely a frame within which the other can be welcomed as the other, that is, as both particular and indeterminate. According to the law of hospitality, the other, or the “arrivant” as Derrida often refers to it (Derrida 1993: 33 – 35)², needs to be acknowledged in its partic-

 “I was recently taken by this word, arrivant, as if it’s uncanniness had just arrived to me in a language in which it has nonetheless sounded very familiar to me for a long time. The new arrivant, this word can, indeed, mean the neutrality of that which arrives, but also the singularity of who arrives, he or she who comes, coming to be where s/he was not expected, where one was awaiting him or her without waiting for him or her, without expecting it [s’y attendre], without knowing what or whom to expect, what or whom I am waiting for – and such is hospitality itself, hospitality toward the event. One does not expect the event of whatever, of whoever comes, arrives, and crosses the threshold – the immigrant, the emigrant, the guest, or the stranger. But if a new arrivant who arrives is new, one must expect – without waiting for him or her, without expecting it – that he does not simply cross a given threshold. Such an arrivant affects the very

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ularity. In order to do so, it seems unavoidable to ask some questions about the other’s identity and thus create a frame within which the other may appear to us as a particular presence. To welcome the particular other, we need to know at least a vague contour of its face³. Otherwise the encounter becomes too abstract, impersonal and anonymous. We need to ask the other what its name is. Hospitality is, therefore, conditioned by a question, the minimal demand being: “What is your name? tell me your name, what should I call you, I who am calling on you, I who want to call you by your name? What am I going to call you?” (Derrida 2000: 27). This question, like all other frames, may be either excluding or inviting, “depending on the inflection” (Naas 8). The frame is openend to hospitality when the other is welcomed unconditionally, that is, without expecting any definitive answer to the question. Hospitality can therefore be understood as “a negotiation between two seemingly contradictory imperatives, the imperative to unconditionally welcome the other before any knowledge, recognition, or conditions, indeed before any names or identities, and the imperative to effectively welcome someone in particular and not some indefinite anyone, someone with a name, an identity, and an origin” (Naas 9). Hospitability is a question, the materiality of which is the recognition of the presence of the other. This question is, however, simultaneously also an open question, which does not aim at receiving a determinate answer but always points beyond the answer, to its impossibility. The poetics of hospitality creates a space for the other where the other can be experienced, only felt in its particular materiality but never fully identified. The hospitable space renders this materiality indeterminable, enhancing the sublimity of the other.

Inhospitality of frame Instead of creating a hospitable space where the other could be experienced both in its particularity and in its irreducible otherness, Dan seems to impose his own image upon the ungraspable presence of the other, enclosing it within fixed conceptual frames and, in so doing, stifling the otherness through his rigid determination of it. It is, then, little surprise that he is continuously characterized in the play by associations with death. Alice, for instance, asks him whether he “gr[e]w up in a graveyard” and if he liked working in “the dying business” (Marber 184). And although the questions are posed in a humorous and flirtatious way rather

experience of the threshold, whose possibility he thus brings to light before one even knows whether there has been an invitation, a call, a nomination, or a promise” (Derrida 1993: 33).  For a detailed discussion of the concept of ‘face’ as the other see E. Lévinas’ Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (1969).

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than meant seriously, they also seem to demonstrate the nihilism and emotional vacuity underscoring Dan’s character, permeating his environment and also influencing those who are close to him. Death appears to be his inseparable attribute and, apart from his work at the obituaries page, is also evoked in the story of his mother’s passing away, his father’s funeral and, finally, in Alice’s deadly accident. All of these events might be construed simply as signs of the inevitability of death and unpredictability of human life, and yet all of them unmistakably revolve around Dan. Even though he cannot be rationally blamed for these deaths, it is difficult not to think that they are a subtle commentary on his attitude towards the other as expressed in his writing, which is evidently agreeable and not sublime. The encounter with Alice seems to bring Dan back to life. Until then, his existence appears to have had more of a vampiric quality, which the numerous lifein-death associations demonstrate. Dan literally lives off the dead, sucking out the little blood that is left in them, and this living seems to be a much-diminished form of existence as a quasi-writer. He uses the dead to ‘tide himself over’ until better ‘prey’ comes along. Alice’s appearance is like a delivery of fresh human blood, which Dan immediately starts pumping into his new project, using it to produce a ‘proper’ book. Before meeting Alice, Dan feeds his predatory writing with the already deceased; therefore his sentences cannot do so much harm to their lives anymore. In Alice’s case, the situation turns out to have more serious repercussions. Not only does it bring about the end of their relationship, but it also seems to contribute to Alice’s ultimate downfall. The objectifying attitude towards the deceased other is exposed in Dan’s manner of describing his work, which, amusing as it is, also reduces the dead to mere ‘jobs’. Dan

Dan

Well … we call it ‘the obits page’. There’s three of us; me, Harry and Graham. When I get to work, without fail, Graham will say, ‘Who’s on the slab?’ Meaning, did anyone important die overnight […] Well, if someone ‘important’ did die we go to the ‘deep freeze’ which is a computer containing all the obituaries and we’ll find the dead person’s life. (Marber 188)

The particular image of a life frozen and stored in a computer file quite clearly reveals Dan’s philosophy of writing. He seems to actually believe that something as ungraspable as human life can indeed be fixed and presented in an obituary. Michael Naas, reflecting on his own writing about Derrida after his death, insists that the writing reveals more about us, “what was closest to me” (Naas 7) and not to the dead. It is the writer’s own frame of mind that the writing shows us

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and not that of the deceased. The latter always exceeds our representation. As an example, Naas also refers to Maurice Blanchot’s memories about Georges Bataille and about the impossibility of grasping his life in words, How could one agree to speak of this friend? Neither in praise nor in the interest of some truth. The traits of his character, the forms of his existence, the episodes of his life, even in keeping with the search for which he felt himself responsible to the point of irresponsibility, belong to no one. There are no witnesses. (qtd in Naas 7)

Dan’s own description of his writing process shows his lack of concern for the dead. This uncaring response is perhaps best manifested in the jokes that Dan and his colleagues play at the expense of the dead, in order to distract themselves by inventing humorous euphemisms about them. Dan

Alice Dan

[…] At six, we stand round the computer and read the next day’s page, make final changes, put in a few euphemisms to amuse ourselves… Such as? ‘He was a convivial fellow’, meaning he was an alcoholic. ‘He valued his privacy’ – gay. ‘He enjoyed his privacy’ … raging queen. (Marber 188)

Clearly, the humour is also a way of avoiding the difficult subject of human mortality, and one’s own death. By joking about the topic, Dan and his colleagues use laughter to block the unknown from entering their consciousness by rendering it entertaining. They try to ‘laugh it away’. Harmless as the game may seem, it shows how the other is repressed from one’s experience, turned into the agreeable and used to satisfy one’s own needs or whims of the moment. That nothing seems to change in Dan’s behaviour upon meeting Alice is underlined by his creation of a euphemism to define her appearance even during their first encounter. And although the word he uses to describe her is very flattering (and it is Alice who asks him to do so), he places the word within the fixed frame of an obituary-like sentence, saying, “She was … disarming” (Marber 189). The use of past tense and a ready-made form defines Dan’s view of Alice, whom he will always seem to perceive through an image and not as an ungraspable presence. Looking at Alice’s photograph during Anna’s exhibition, Dan says, “You’re the belle of the bullshit. You look beautiful” (Marber 213). This ‘gaze’ oriented towards the image and not her real ungraspable self hurts Alice, who replies, “I’m here” (Marber 214). A similar situation is presented towards the end of the play, where Dan remembers seeing Alice for the first time. Again he is more focused on the past image than on the real Alice standing right in front of him.

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Dan

Alice Dan Alice Dan

I love your face … I saw this face … this … vision. And then you stepped into the road. It was the moment of my life. This is the moment of your life. You were perfect. I still am. I know. On the way to the hospital … when you were ‘lolling’ … I kissed your forehead. (Marber 282)

Although Dan says that he is aware of Alice’s presence, his short “I know” does not sound very convincing, especially since it is followed immediately by yet another reminiscence of a past image. Dan’s way of looking at Alice is inhospitable, with an answer already pre-formulated in his mind before even asking a question. Dan encloses Alice in a picture, by framing her in a story about her existence and about their relationship. He does it even during their first encounter, relating Alice’s accident in a very fairy-tale-like manner, and later again, by writing a book about her life. When he does it for the first time, he is actually encouraged to do so by Alice herself. They are both unaware of the possible consequences of this story-telling and to them it is simply a part of their flirtation. Alice, referring to his taking her to the hospital, calls Dan a “knight” and he replies by calling her a “damsel” (Marber 185). Evoking this very well-known scenario of a chivalrous knight saving an imprisoned lady, Alice and Dan place themselves within a concrete genre and therefore also within a concrete aesthetic form, which defines the role of the man as the active party and the woman as the one who waits and receives. The effect is then enhanced by the way Dan retells the story of Alice’s accident, imitating the language of the conventional fairy-tale romance: Dan

We stood at the lights, I looked into your eyes and then you… stepped into the road. (Marber 185)

There is safety in such stories because they are foreseeable and controllable. We know that they all have happy endings. Familiar stories create for us a sense of stability, based on the idea that essentially things always stay the same. Yet lulling ourselves into such a sense of security and freeing our consciousness from having to deal with everyday uncertainty can have serious consequences. We may become too attached to the story’s familiar scenario, which may be detrimental for our relationship with the other. Having the ideal picture in our mind, the reality will always look disappointing in comparison, because unlike a story real life is unpredictable, difficult to control and may take turns which we

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may not find convenient or compatible with our plans. At the time of their first encounter, Alice is unaware of the implications that such placing her within a story may have for her. She learns it the hard way when Dan writes a story of her life and imprisons her in the letters and complete sentences of his novel. In doing so, he nullifies the hospitality that he had extended towards Alice at their first encounter, brief as it was, gradually turning it into hostility (see Naas 9). Tellingly, it is around the time when Dan finishes his book about Alice that his attraction to her is shown to start fading away. Narrating Alice’s life seems to have robbed the character of all her mystery for Dan and made her all too familiar to him. In explaining Alice’s life away, Dan destroyed her charisma, rendering the mystery of her existence knowable and determinable. Ironically but also unsurprisingly, Dan’s book, as Alice bitterly observes, leaves out the truth about her (see Marber 218). Just like Anna’s photograph of Alice and Dan’s obituaries, the book is merely yet another “deep-frozen” image which has very little to do with reality, and which is created to fulfil someone’s purposes. When Anna asks Dan why he is wasting Alice’s time since he does not love her, his answer demonstrates his selfish attitude towards Alice. Dan Anna Beat. Dan

I’m not [wasting Alice’s time]. I’m grateful to her… she’s … completely lovable and completely unleaveable. And you don’t want someone else to get their dirty hands on her? Maybe. (Marber 199)

Dan replies to Anna’s accusation by immediately referring to the gain and profit that the encounter with Alice brought him. Christopher Innes describes the attitude as an expression of the Thatcher-induced “self-absorbed ‘Me’ [attitude] of the 1990s” (Innes 431). Dan sees the relationship with Alice primarily as the satisfaction of his needs. Thanks to her, Dan left the obituary page and at last became a writer. It was Alice’s life that provided him with a voice and subject matter, and he used it, without having any doubts or reservations about commodifying it. The novel was meant to be marketed and bring him fame and money. Dan’s version of Alice’s life is copied and sold, rendering graspable what cannot be grasped. In spite of all his endeavours, Dan never makes the fortune or fame that he hopes for. Although no reasons for the book’s failure are mentioned, it is possible that Dan’s writing is just as uncreative, unoriginal and deadly as he is. Instead of affirming and enhancing Alice’s originality and exceptionality, that is, her otherness, he destroys it. The book turns out to be yet another obituary

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that Dan wrote. Showing Dan’s subjective image of Alice, the book also represents his view of her, which appears to be controlling and determining. He chooses, for instance, not to include certain facts about Alice, because they do not seem to fit in with his fantasy of her, with what is closest to him. And so, he crosses out the sentence where it says that Alice “has only one address in her address book; [theirs] … under ‘H’ for home” (Marber 198). Finding it “too sentimental” (Marber 198), he chooses to include the spicier facts from her life, which Anna’s remark after reading the novel that Alice must have had “quite a life” (Marber 202) demonstrates. We may also discern from the surprised reaction of Anna – who first read the book and was then introduced to its main protagonist – upon seeing Alice for the first time, that Dan’s book did not manage to convey Alice’s beauty (see Marber 200). And since it did not seem to convey Alice’s sublimity either, it likely made her agreeable and consumable.

‘Living up’ to the image Alice seems to feel the consequences of this objectification and inhospitality. Immediately after Dan leaves her for Anna, she starts working at a lap dance club. Resigned to this fate of commodity, Alice gives in to “the society of spectacle”, where the image, the presentation is the only reality there is (see Debord). Symptomatic of this resignation is therefore also her use of her real name, Jane Jones, in this context. In keeping with the idea that the only reality is the reality of her image, the latter becomes her real identity. Her work as a striptease dancer may be considered as the expression of her growing cynicism and loss of faith in the possibility of a relationship which does not appropriate the other by reducing its indeterminacy to a concrete image. If such a relationship is impossible, if intimacy always means domestication of the other into the familiar, then at least it is better to be in command of the concrete image. Paradoxically, working as a striptease dancer gives Alice the illusion of exerting control over the image that is sold to others. The situation appears to guarantee emotional safety because no real contact is permitted and the encounter takes place according to a prescribed, totally pre-conditioned scenario, which makes the experience more predictable and lowers the risk of becoming involved and therefore hurt. Both sides are aware of their roles as the client and the service provider respectively. The latter provides the image which, from the premise, is created to fulfil the client’s needs. To someone who does not believe in the possibility of real intimacy, the situation may appear to be more honest than in a relationship, because both parties know the rules from the beginning and do not have to pretend either to themselves or to the other that they want to be with the other and secretly use them for their own purposes anyway.

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Larry, who meets Alice there, argues that she is mistaken to believe that, by choosing not to commit herself emotionally, she does not give anything to the men who come to the lap dance club, and tries to ‘enlighten’ her by pointing out to her, Larry

[…] you think you haven’t given us anything of yourselves. You think because you don’t love us or desire us or even like us you think you’ve won. […] But you do give us something of yourselves: you give us … imagery … and we do with it what we will. If you women could see one minute of our Home Movies – the shit that slops through our minds every day – you’d string us up by our balls, you really would. You don’t understand the territory. Because you are the territory. (Marber 251– 250)

What Larry does not seem to realize about himself is that in that very moment he, too, relates to an image of Alice which is more the expression of his needs of being the protector of weak women rather than the truth about her. Treating her as fragile and helpless, he proposes that he take her home with him and look after her (see Marber 248). Alice, however, is anything but fragile and rejects Larry’s offer. She seemed to be fully aware of male fantasies even before she came to London. Telling Dan about her career as a striptease dancer in New York at the beginning of the play, she appears to know very well that “[m]en want a girl who looks like a boy. They want to protect her but she must be a survivor. And she must come … like a train … but with … elegance” (Marber 192). Talking to Dan about it, Alice is aware of what may happen with an image of a woman in a man’s mind, but at that time she still seems to be hopeful that a different scenario is also possible. When Larry meets her in the lap dance club four years later, this hope seems to have been extinguished in her and Alice exhibits her body and offers it for sale herself. Instead of letting others profit from her appearance without receiving anything in return, she decides to take the initiative in her own hands and play by the rules of the capitalist market. Seen from Alice’s perspective, Thatcherism emerges as hardly hospitable towards the other. Dan’s perception of Alice is just as appropriating as that of her clients at the lap dance club, his view just as objectifying and commodifying when he uses Alice’s image to create his book. As Larry, for once, rightly points out to Dan, “[he] w[as] so busy with [his] grand artistic ‘feelings’ [he] couldn’t see what was in front of [him]. The girl is fragile and tender. She didn’t want to be put

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in a book, she wanted to be loved” (Marber 273). Unlike the men’s limiting gaze at the lap dance club, however, Dan’s appropriation of Alice’s image hurts her deeply. She wanted from Dan love and recognition of her existence in its indeterminacy, for what it was. Instead she was treated yet again as a service provider, equipping Dan with an image which he could use to his advantage.

Absolute indeterminacy Parasitic as he is, Dan is not the only one who is to blame for the failure of the relationship. Alice also plays a role in its downfall by making the unrealistic demand to be loved and seen exclusively in terms of her absolute presence in the here and now without a past or future which would determine her identity. When Dan keeps obsessing about learning the truth about her relationship with Larry even though it happened when Dan and Alice were not together she explains that since he cannot be with her without asking questions and she “[doesn’t] want to lie and can’t tell the truth” (Marber 284), she has no other choice but to leave him. In doing so, she sets conditions for a relationship which are too idealistic, absolute and therefore impossible to fulfil. For, becoming closer to one another necessitates giving to the other not only your presence but also your past and future, even though they may only be glimpses of what was and what may be. As Ulrike Biskup and Norbert Greiner point out, “Intimität setzt das voraus, was Alice verleugnet: eine stabile Identität, die sich dem anderen nicht verschließt und die sich nicht beliebig entwirft, sondern die sich im Gegenteil dem anderen ‚öffnet’” (Biskup and Greiner 50). If, therefore, Dan’s contribution to the failure of their relationship is his attempt to make Alice’s life as defined as possible, she also plays her part by doing everything she can to avoid being put in any fixed conceptual frames. Alice does not fulfil the conditions of hospitality, either, by making herself completely unknowable, for example by giving an untruthful answer to the question of her identity. Arriving in London, she immediately creates a new identity for herself. The information that she gives about her life in the States is rather scarce: she lived in New York and worked there as a stripper. Some of it also turns out to be rather unreliable and even a product of Alice’s own fabrication, such as her name. It is only towards the end of the play that the characters and the audience learn that her true name is Jane Jones. Alice is the name that she saw on a memorial plaque at the Postman’s Park in London. It belonged to a “daughter of a bricklayer’s labourer, who by intrepid conduct saved three children from a burning house in Union Street, Borough, at the cost of her own young life. April 24th 1885” (Marber 290).

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Alice’s constantly changing explanations of her scar, too, demonstrate her relentless endeavours to bar others from her past. She gives different versions of the story about her scar. For instance, she tells Larry at the beginning of the play that the scar is the consequence of a car accident, which happened “in the middle of nowhere” (Marber 190), while Alice was travelling with “a male” (Marber 190), from whom she later ran away. Later, at the exhibition she tells Larry that “a mafia hit man broke her leg” (Marber 219). When he does not believe her she offers yet another version of the story, more plausible though just as unverifiable, explaining that “[w]hen [she] was eight… some metal went into [her] leg when [her] parents’ car crashed… when they died. Happy now?” (Marber 219). Larry, who is a dermatologist, still does not seem to be satisfied with Alice’s story and puts forward another interpretation of the scar (and also of Alice’s identity): Larry

There’s a condition called ‘dermatitis artefacta’. It’s a mental disorder manifested in the skin. The patient manufactures his or her very own skin disease. They pour bleach on themselves, gouge their skin, inject themselves with their own piss, sometimes their own shit. They create their own disease with the same diabolical attention to detail as the artist or the lover. It looks ‘real’ but its source is the deluded self. […] I think Alice mutilated herself. It’s fairly common in children who lose their parents young. They blame themselves, they’re ‘disturbed’. (Marber 273)

Larry’s explanation of the scar may sound more convincing than Alice’s stories because it is supported by medical research. Nevertheless, it is also only a hypothesis about Alice’s personality, which may be merely just another story, just another attempt at defining her, another endeavour to grasp the ungraspable. Indeed, Larry’s explanation of Alice’s scar may be simply yet another effort to enclose her in an image of a woman which fulfils Larry’s masculine need to be the saviour and the protector. Seeing Alice as a traumatized and disturbed young woman gives Larry the opportunity to perceive himself as the strong and defending male. Yet again, Alice becomes a mere projection of male desires. Self-induced indeterminacy seems to be Alice’s most prominent characteristic feature. Of the four characters in Closer, Alice is the most difficult to grasp. Constantly changing her appearance, reinventing the story of her past, forbidding anyone to see her passport and discover her real name, the character attempts to make any definition of her impossible. What are the reasons for Alice’s relentless efforts to conceal herself from the others?

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Assuming that the story of Alice’s parents’ death is true, her evasive behaviour may be considered to be her reluctance to trust anyone completely for fear of abandonment. This explanation ties in with Larry’s hypothesis about Alice’s mental problems and Alice’s own description of herself as a waif. Children who feel abandoned by their parents either emotionally or physically are often known to blame themselves for the departure of their loved ones. Holding themselves responsible, they frequently face a twofold difficulty. On the one hand, they demand total acceptance of people whom they are close to and want to be loved unconditionally, simply for their existence. On the other hand, they may have enormous problems believing that they deserve such love and trusting the other person. With her insatiable desire to be loved for her presence, Alice appears to fit the pattern almost ideally. The constant mutations of her identity may therefore be explained further as an expression of her trauma and fear of being abandoned if her true identity is revealed. Another explanation also comes from the same assumption that Alice’s constant construction of new identities is based on a fear of being abandoned. This fear, however, does not originate from the traumatic experience of her parents’ death, which after all may simply be yet another product of Alice’s imagination. The abandonment that Alice tries to prevent happens as the result of the objectifying gaze of the other partner, who, unable to notice the sublimity of the other, perceives it from the start as agreeable and useful. Once the relationship reaches the stage of being only agreeable, its end is in sight. Alice’s attempts at rendering her existence ephemeral may be seen as trying to prevent such scenarios from happening. Struggling to preserve her own sublimity Alice tries to make the others acknowledge it in order to preserve their fascination and induce their love for her. Yet her attempts fail as her desire to remain absolutely unknowable seems to have quite the opposite effect and may even be seen as the reason preventing her relationships from developing towards deeper intimacy and love (see Biskup and Greiner).

Love: between agreeable and sublime Alice’s desire to keep her real identity absolutely indeterminate is therefore just as ineffective and just as inhospitable as Dan’s claim to know her absolutely. It is just as impossible to know the complete truth about the other as it is to be with somebody without asking any questions about them at all and without creating any image of them in our mind. The relationship between Dan and Alice fails because neither of them is willing to admit the impossibility of their demands. Dan is incapable of recognizing the irreducibility of Alice’s otherness and creating a more hospitable space for her. Alice, in turn, appears to be so terrified by the

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possibility of being imprisoned in a frozen image, used and discarded that she does not want to recognize the fact that intimacy requires taking the risk of opening yourself to the other. Rather than risk telling Dan about her relationship with Larry, she prefers to leave and thus becomes the victim of her own idealism. Also, the relationship between Dan and Alice fails because they both make the same mistake of attaching too much value to the idea of truth rather than honesty. The difference between the two concepts is that the former presupposes the existence of an objective reality, whereas the latter focuses more on intention and subjective feelings. Dan’s attempts to find out the truth about Alice’s life destroy her indeterminacy in his eyes, and consequently reduce Dan’s interest in her. Believing that the image which he presents in Alice’s biography is true and complete ends his fascination with her. Love, as the play’s presentation of the couple’s struggles demonstrates, cannot be based on sublimity only, because absolute sublimity precludes intimacy with the other. Neither can it be based solely on the agreeable, as the latter subjugates the other to the role of a consumable object. Prioritizing personal desires and needs in a relationship reduces love to a mere function. On the other hand, perceiving the partner without any personal interest in their attributes appears to be too idealistic to be possible. Desire for the other unavoidably seems to be ‘contaminated’ by interest and threatens the other with objectification. Does this mean that love necessarily destroys the other? If that be the case, however, would it mean that love is impossible? For, domestication of the other into the familiar tends to finish the attraction towards the other by rendering it mundane. Is there a way of preserving the otherness in a relationship, which would not preclude the possibility of getting closer to one another? In other words, are otherness and intimacy two irreconcilable ideas? The answer may be provided by Nancy’s interpretation of the sublime. According to his theory, the sublime is not a state that can be achieved once and for all but a continuous endeavour to reach out to the other without ever hoping to grasp it. Alice’s longing for absolute sublimity is a desire for a stability of absolute instability and is therefore doomed to fail from the outset. Sublimity can only be experienced in its dynamics of constant limiting and unlimiting movements (Nancy 38). In this respect, sublimity and love can be considered to be versions of hospitality, which is also characterised by the negotiation between the conditioned and unconditioned welcome. The experience of a limit, which in the context of relationships means the experience of the other within certain conceptual frames, also belongs to the experience of the sublime. This experience, however, renders the limits of the concept palpable and therefore also preserves the otherness in the concept. It shows the subjectivity and artificiality of the concept. Perhaps love of the other may only be defined as a constant endeavour, as a con-

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stant tension within our perception of the other, which on the one hand unavoidably tends to limit the other to a definable concept, and on the other hand attempts to undo the limiting drive, giving the other the freedom of indeterminacy. Unable to understand that love is a way toward and not arriving at a destination, an impossible attempt to transcend the distance between ‘you’ and ‘I’, the characters are disappointed with the relationship and quit. Shortly before leaving Dan, Alice bursts out, “Show me. Where is this love? I can’t see it, I can’t touch it, I can’t feel it” (Marber 285). Love, just as the sublime, is the journey and not the journey’s end and always remains ungraspable.

Anna’s strategies of indeterminacy Similarly to Alice, Anna is, too, afraid of being appropriated by the other, though she chooses a slightly different framing strategy to protect herself from appropriation and potential pain. Whereas Alice’s safeguard is her constantly shifting false identity, Anna tends to hide herself behind different objects or people to avoid being hurt. Alice protects herself by destabilising the frame and Anna does the same by stabilising it as much as possible. It is only fitting therefore that the first image of Anna that the audience sees in the play should be from behind the camera. She is taking a picture of Dan, to whom she feels strongly attracted but does not want to admit it either to herself or to him. Although she yearns for intimacy and love, her fear of emotional dependency prevents her from letting down her guard and opening herself up to the other. And there seems to be a very concrete reason for this fear. Although little is disclosed about it, Anna must have been deeply hurt in the past. She tells Larry that she had been hit before, presumably by her ex-husband, who left her for “someone younger” (Marber 202). Having had bad experiences with opening herself up to the other she now attempts to avoid making the same ‘mistake’ again by shutting herself off and keeping a safe distance. The story that she tells Dan of a “buried river” under the building where her studio is located (Marber 194) may be interpreted as an image of Anna’s and her buried desires, which she forbids herself to live out. She lives in denial of her deepest needs, which makes her character cold and ambiguous. Often when she is asked a question her answer is indecisive and hesitant. When Dan, for instance, asks her whether she is married she first says “yes”, then she corrects herself with “no” only to turn to her initial “yes” back again (Marber 198). Similarly, when later Larry and Anna break up and Larry reproaches her that she used to want to have children with him and now wants to have them with Dan, she replies “Yes – I don’t know – I’m sorry” (Marber 235).

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Anna’s reluctance to commit is perhaps best visible in her bouncing between Larry and Dan, using them against one another as a buffer between herself and the other. She evidently feels attracted to Dan and is possibly even in love with him, yet she decides to become involved with Larry. When she marries Larry, she starts an affair with Dan, possibly so as not to become too committed to Larry. Having Dan on the side while being married to Larry, Anna does not have to give herself or open herself entirely to either of them. She can balance somewhere in-between, not having to come too close to either of them or bet on one horse only. And although leaving Larry for Dan may seem to be a step out of her ‘emotional shelter’ towards a greater openness for and hospitality towards the other, she ultimately cannot handle it for long and moves back to her emotional safety again very quickly. After their break-up, Anna makes an appointment with Larry to ask him to sign the divorce papers and consents to his offer of having sex with him for the last time in exchange for his signature. Nevertheless, whether this is her real reason for meeting Larry and agreeing to this rather ‘extraordinary’ transaction becomes questionable when later Larry reveals to Dan that it was Anna who never signed the divorce papers in the end. Having sex with Larry may therefore have been yet simply another sign of Anna’s hesitancy and inability to commit fully. Her unwillingness to risk trusting the other and a strategy of keeping herself at an emotionally safe distance from Dan dooms the relationship to failure. After discovering that Anna slept with Larry, Dan is unable to forgive her and leaves. The form of the scene during which Anna tells Dan about her earlier rendezvous with Larry enhances the ambivalence of her character even more, underlining her bouncing to and fro between Larry and Dan in a very theatrical way. The scene conflates Anna’s narration of what happened at her meeting with Larry with retrospective flashbacks actually showing the encounter. Presenting the two temporal realities onstage simultaneously, the earlier one with Larry and the present one with Dan, literally places Anna between the two men, and at one point the three are even presented sitting together at the same table at the same time (see Marber 258 – 259). Her camera is another way of keeping distance and not involving herself in the reality around her. Instead of facing the other directly, Anna prefers pointing her lenses at it. In doing so, she puts the other within a frame, which not only creates a safety zone of glass between her and the other but also fixes the other, preventing it from making any unpredictable movements. Similarly to Alice’s stripping, photographing gives Anna the opportunity to control the image of the other. After all, she determines the frames within which the other appears. Safe and stable as the photograph of the other may be, it does not supplant the real encounter and cannot replace real contact with the other, not to mention

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intimacy. It is hardly surprising therefore that Anna is presented as the loneliest character in the play, who even spends her birthday in her own company (see Marber 213). Anna’s fear of the other and her unwillingness to welcome it unconditionally, that is, without any protection or frame is also manifested in her carrying guide-books with her. One of the functions of a guidebook is to prevent the tourist from getting lost in a foreign place. With a description it is easier to orientate yourself in a new environment and avoid sites which are uninteresting or dangerous. Evidently, Anna must feel like a constant foreigner, a chronic stranger in a foreign world since, as Larry points out to her she is almost addicted to her guide-books (see Marber 264). Giving the tourist as much information as possible about the given place that is being visited a guidebook offers the opportunity to learn about the place beforehand and creates some concrete expectations of it in the visitor. The experience of the real therefore always comes after the image of the place and is pre-determined by the description. Also, the information in a guidebook may give the impression that the place and the sights always stay the same. Assisting the visitor by offering orientation in a foreign space as they do, guidebooks may also hinder them from seeing it from a different perspective than the one given by the guidebook. It takes some effort and openness to notice things that are not shown or mentioned in a guidebook, that is, elements and details which point beyond and exceed the frame of the descriptions. Anna’s visits to the aquarium, too, expose her need for a frame to be put between her and the foreign or the other. She must come there quite often because Dan knows exactly where to send Larry to meet her. And indeed, when Larry turns up at the aquarium Anna is there, sitting alone on a bench fully equipped to observe the other in the form of fish, with her camera in one hand and her guidebook in the other. What these visits show is that apart from needing the frame, at the same time she feels attracted to the other and cannot resist seeing it. She fears it but she also misses its presence in her life, locating herself thus always in the in-between position of limbo, neither here nor there, choosing to observe the other from the safe distance behind the glass wall.

Exhibitions of the other The aquarium, just as Anna’s photo exhibition of strangers, is one out of many such displays of the other in Closer. The play seems to abound in places where the other is put on show: the Internet, the meat market, the lap dance club, the obituary page or even the hospital. What these places have in common is that they treat the other as, crudely speaking, ‘a piece of meat’ which is on sale. The body of the other is displayed as a product and presented at these ex-

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hibitions in an agreeable way, garnished so that it looks more attractive and appetising and can satisfy the customers’ needs better, bringing more profits. Set in the consumerist frames, the other loses its indeterminate status and the potential for real presence, and its body becomes an object with a particular purpose to fulfil and a particular meaning to convey. At the beginning of the play, Alice mentions to Dan that she went to the famous meat market in London “to see the meat being unloaded” (Marber 186). She simultaneously feels repulsed and attracted by the exhibition of meat, of dead animals. The conflicted feeling may be the result of Alice’s instinctive awareness that she, too, is part of the meat market, her body being objectified and sold in a strip club. This market, however, unlike the ‘real’ meat market, sugar-coats its product so that it loses its negative connotations. Alice’s choice to be a vegetarian may therefore be interpreted as a subconscious decision to reject the commodification of the other’s body, which reduces the latter to a saleable product. Unlike the other characters in the play, Alice does not consume the other’s body. Her later decision to go back to stripping may consequently be considered to manifest the depth of her despair and anguish after her break-up with Dan and can be equated with a death wish. By reducing herself to a piece of consumable meat on display, Alice voluntarily equates her body with a lifeless carcass that she saw at the meat market. When Alice agrees to her body being determined and used in this way, she chooses representation rather than presence, death over life. The aquarium also shares some common characteristics with the Internet, strip club and the meat market. In all these places the other is exhibited within a space which limits it to a concrete semantic function, to satisfy the human need for intimacy with the other in a safe way without taking any risks. Unpredictable and unfamiliar, the other may turn out to be a menace to our life, or our home. It may “question our right to what we call ‘our home,’ or […] try to evict us from that home and from everything we consider ‘our own’” (Naas 9). Encountering the other is always potentially threatening. The spaces portrayed in the play arrange this encounter in the safest possible way, presenting the other within a fixed frame. The fish in the aquarium are separated from the visitors by a glass wall. The chat participants on the “London Fuck” web page are safely hidden behind the screens of their computers, not having to disclose their true identity if they do not want to. The strip club guests are allowed to see human bodies from close up without having to commit or take responsibility for the other. Similarly the visitors at Anna’s photo exhibitions can contemplate the faces of strangers as long as they wish to without being forced to take action and do something about the strangers’ painful existence. Removed from its natural habitat, entrapped in a photograph, a glass box or a suite in a strip club, the other is

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accommodated to the needs and purposes of the spectators and made totally predictable and controllable. Not only is the other framed by the space into a frozen image, which limits its movements or determines them completely, but it is also deprived of the right to communicate freely. The particular arrangement of the spaces namely also sets the conditions of the interaction between the two parties. And it is always the party that pays that dictates the particular circumstances of the encounter. The animals cannot hide from the spectators’ gaze; the strangers at the photo exhibition cannot tell their stories; the women at the strip club can only engage in a particular type of cheap sex-talk conversation and the people in the sex chat rooms, although theoretically equal, are expected to talk about one subject only. The other is thus reduced to a particular concrete attribute, all its indeterminacy and uniqueness forgotten. Another apparent ‘advantage’ of these enclosed spaces is that the other contained within their frames is easily and quickly accessible. The visitors at the aquarium do not have to wait for days in order to sight a dolphin or a shark only to get a glimpse of them as a reward. They can contemplate the animals from an extremely close distance and at any time for as long as they want to. Similarly, it suffices to go around the corner to the nearest strip club to see naked human bodies exhibited for the customer’s “viewing pleasure” (Marber 250); or to switch on the computer and hundreds of chatters are waiting for an ‘encounter’ in the net, ready to engage in creating the illusion of intimacy. And illusion is indeed what they receive. Advantageous as they may seem from the perspective of the customers, these spaces offer only a substitute for real intimacy, for a real encounter with the other. The comparison of these places with the meat market demonstrates, also in the play of the words ‘meat’ / ‘meet’, that what can be encountered there are dead bodies, cadavers floating in space like Damien Hirst’s tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde, his probably most (in)famous sculpture: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) at the London exhibition, “Sensation”, organised by the Young British Artists in 1997. For, even though the fish, the women in the strip club and the people in the chat rooms are alive, in the particular space in which they are displayed their existence, their unique and unrepeatable way of being, is frozen into concrete images, which are repeatable and dead. It is the particular frame that the arrangement of the space provides for the exhibition of the other that makes the latter dead and consumable. If the other is to be represented in a just way, it needs to be displayed in a more hospitable frame, which makes it palpable but not determinate; a frame that does not reduce the other to a consumable image but points beyond the delineated contour, making the other appear in its indeterminacy.

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Sublime versus agreeable frames Nancy defines the operational framing modes of the two judgements by attributing the limiting movement to the agreeable and the unlimiting movement of the frame to the sublime (Nancy 35). The mode of presentation which turns the beautiful into the agreeable makes the frame invisible, trying to create and maintain the illusion that there is no frame and that the reality of the presentation is also the reality of the presented other. The fish in the aquarium are presented in a completely artificial environment and yet the visitors are led to believe that they are seeing the real thing; that the fish in the aquarium are no different from the fish in the sea or the ocean, trying to make the visitors forget that the fish are presented to them in a particular way. The other is completely contained in the presentation. Lyotard defines the mode of the presentation as realism and its processes as attempts to “stabilise the referent, to arrange it according to a point of view which endows it with a recognisable meaning, to reproduce the syntax and vocabulary which enable the addressee to decipher images and sequences quickly” in order to “preserve consciousness from doubt” (Lyotard 1984a: 74). The agreeable frame can therefore be described as a concealed tightening of the contour around the other, attempting to arrive at the clearest possible determination of it. The process of determination is a demonstration of power and dominance, too, since the other is adjusted and subordinated to the needs and desires of the party in power, the party that pays: the visitors of the aquarium, the customers of the strip club or the receivers of Anna’s photographs. Agreeable presentation seems to be the typical aesthetic of consumerism as it makes the object appear as if it existed solely in order to satisfy the customer’s desires and needs. A good example of how the agreeable presentation may eclipse the other is scene seven of act two, the stripping scene. The space of the strip club is arranged so that it creates an illusion of intimacy. Part of the space is divided into private rooms, where the client can meet with the stripper in seemingly more intimate circumstances. These rooms, of which there are six, are called Paradise Suites, which is supposed to point to the exquisite character of the intimate experience. However, the mere fact that there is more than one suite only cheapens and undermines the idea of the allegedly paradisiacal atmosphere of the situation. What should be a unique and exclusive encounter of intimacy between two human beings is reduced to a pre-programmed scene, which is performed according to more or less the same scenario in all six suites again and again, and is more reminiscent of a conveyor belt process than of an unrepeatable encounter. It quickly turns out that the behaviour of the visitors to the suites is governed by clearly fixed rules. No touching is allowed, no emotional attachment and the whole event is supervised by cameras and controlled almost com-

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pletely, leaving no room for unpredictable reactions or gestures. The whole situation is a mere imitation of an intimate encounter with the other. That the atmosphere of the Paradise Suite has very little to do with real intimacy between people becomes clear to Larry very quickly when he notices that the conversation with Alice is totally artificial and adjusted to the expectations of this place and its customers. The strippers are probably taught how to speak to the clients so that the latter feel comfortable and understood. They learn how to flirt with the guests, guess what the clients want to hear and say it even though they do not believe or feel it themselves. In doing so, they use the language, phrases and gestures of intimacy and devalue them in the process. Pretending to create the illusion of understanding, empathy and relationship, the conversation is merely yet another strategy to make the product being sold seem even more attractive and agreeable – something that Larry quickly realises and is naively offended by: Larry What d’you talk about? Alice This and that. Larry D’you tell the truth? Alice Yes and no. Larry Are you telling me the truth? Alice Yes. Larry And no? Alice I’m telling you the truth. Larry Why? Alice Because it’s what you want. Yes. It’s what I want. Larry He stares at her. Nice wig. Alice Thank you. Larry Does it turn you on? Alice Sometimes. Larry Liar. You’re telling me it turns you on because you think that’s what I want to hear. You think I’m turned on by it turning you on. (Marber 242)

Realizing the superficiality of the stripping club and his own inability to break through the invisible wall of the agreeable language, Larry loses his temper completely. He comes to the strip club in his despair after being left by Anna. Meeting Alice there so unexpectedly, he hopes that they can get closer and share their pain: Larry

I touched your face at Anna’s … opening. I know you’re in grief. I know you’re … ‘destroyed’. TALK TO ME.

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Alice Larry

I am. Talk to me in real life. I didn’t know you’d be here. I know who you are. I love your scar, I love everything about you that hurts. Silence. Larry slowly breaks down. She won’t even see me … You feel the same, I know you feel the same. (Marber 247)

Larry wants compassion from Alice, but she is determined to play by the rules of the consumer culture, her only reaction to Larry’s obvious pain being, “You can’t cry here” (Marber 247). The intimacy that is offered in the strip club is skin-deep, which, considering that Larry is a dermatologist, is also ironically fitting. Paradoxically, it is Larry’s own pre-constructed belief in capitalistic strategies and his own conviction about Alice’s identity that prevent him from recognising that Alice tells him the truth about her name. Assuming that everything that is said in the strip club is adjusted to the client’s needs, Larry automatically takes for granted that everything that Alice says must be a lie. Larry Alice Larry

[…] Why are you calling yourself Jane? Because it’s my name. But we both know it isn’t. You’re all protecting your identities. The girl in there who calls herself ‘Venus’. What’s her real name? (Marber 245)

Larry is, therefore, not only the victim of the agreeable scenery of the strip club but also of his own presumptions. Although he tries to undermine the consumerist frame imposed on his encounter with Alice by attempting to exact the truth from her at any price, he himself also uses this frame to look at Alice and in so doing allows his perception of her to be framed by consumerist concepts. Unable to recognise that she is telling him the truth, it is only his own prejudgement that hinders him from seeing the truth about her. Instead of approaching the other without any pre-conditions in mind, Larry’s query is far from Derrida’s idea of a hospitable question and is more reminiscent of an interrogation. Expecting a concrete answer, Larry’s questioning of Alice becomes more and more insistent and peaks in an aggressive outburst: Larry He gives Alice Larry He gives

I’d like you to tell me your name. Please. her £20. Thank you. My name is Jane. Your real name. her £20.

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Alice Larry He gives Alice […] Larry Alice Larry

Thank you. My real name is Jane. Careful. her £20. Thank you. It’s still Jane. I may be rich but I’m not stupid. What a shame, ‘Doc’, I love ‘em rich and stupid. DON’T FUCK AROUND WITH ME. (Marber 246)

Approaching Alice with a concrete image in mind, Larry does not want an answer but a confirmation of what he believes is the truth about Alice. He is not open to anything new and is unable to welcome the other in a hospitable way; as such, his question is oppressive and not liberating.

Alice’s death Alice’s (real) death may be considered to be an introduction of a moment of the sublime in the three other characters’ lives, introducing an element of resistance against the agreeable aesthetic of capitalism, which seems to have penetrated their existence and perception of the world so deeply. Do the characters experience the news about Alice’s death as a moment of sublime? If yes, how does it manifest itself in their lives? What the characters feel upon receiving the news of Alice’s death is, of course, impossible to precisely define, especially since the particular moment is not shown in the play, but only referred to by the characters later, when they meet up in the Postman’s Park for the last time. It is, therefore only possible to speculate about the impact of Alice’s death on them by analysing the longer lasting effects and the changes they have made in their lives, bearing in mind that after the sublime nothing can ever remain the same as before and taking this characteristic as a measure. Did Alice, just as the person from whom she borrowed her identity, save the three characters? Did she, by choosing the particular identity, also share that person’s fate? According to most critics, she did not manage to rescue any of the characters from their lonely lives, and reading into her character a heroine who sacrifices her life in order to save the others would be an over-simplification (see Saunders 2008: 23 and 63; Rabey 2003: 199). Pointing out that nothing really changes for the characters since none of them “seem[s] to derive [any] benefit[s] from her [Alice’s] death and at the end all ‘exit separately’” (Saunders 2008: 23 – 24) the critics argue that the characters seem to be even “less ‘closer’” than before (Rabey 2003: 199). Admittedly, there is still so much of their old egoistic selves in the characters when they all meet again in the last scene. Larry’s machismo appears back in place

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again when he instantly starts flirting with Anna and then tries to give her advice on how to live her life. Anna’s withdrawal to the country may be interpreted to be a further step in her sealing herself off from the others and her growing isolation. And Dan is back working at the obituary page. And yet something has changed for all of them irrevocably. Their encounter in the Postman’s Park shows a new type of connectedness between them, which none of them had experienced with the others before. They are now linked by Alice and all share the experience of her loss and her sudden death. In coming to the Postman’s Park they do not seem to have any other reason for being here but to acknowledge Alice’s past life and existence. In doing so, they create a space where the other, Alice, is remembered as she was, indeterminate, without any attempts to define her existence more closely or use it for private purposes. Ironically and paradoxically, for the first time the characters allow her to simply be indeterminate in their memories, without wanting anything from her sublime presence. Also, Larry decided to stop adjusting to what according to capitalistic values is considered to be a high-flying career and left private medicine. Coming back to the hospital, Larry chooses to work in a space which, as its name indicates, should at least theoretically be a more hospitable place, welcoming the wounded and the anguished strangers regardless of whether they are criminals or ‘good’ citizens. Giving up staring at the other through a glass wall, Anna gives a home to a stray dog and takes it to the country to “go for long walks” (Marber 288). And Dan breaks down crying when he realizes at work that there is no hospitable space at the obituary page for Alice, who, according to capitalistic norms, is valueless because she is hardly marketable. Dan

[…] I covered my face – why do we do that? A man from the Treasury had died. I spent all morning …writing his obituary. There’s no space. There’s not enough … space. (Marber 292)

We can easily stipulate that Dan will never be able to look at the obituary page in the same unaffected way again. Moreover, he also seems to have consciously realized the way people fall in love with their own images of the other and not the other itself. Mentioning his ex-girlfriend, Ruth, to Anna, he sadly comments, Dan

I bumped into Ruth. […] She married … a Spanish poet. He grimaces. She translated his work and fell in love with him.

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Fell in love with a collection of poems. They were called … ‘Solitude’. (Marber 292)

What Dan finally appears to have recognised is that the true other is sublime and constantly slips away from our grasp. As Lyotard points out, the only thing that can be said about the sublime is that it happens. The what, which follows the that, is only the latter’s trace, its mere representation. The that is always beyond our capabilities of comprehension and understanding (Lyotard 1991: 82). True as it is that the characters all go their separate ways in the end, they all seem to exhibit a greater sensitivity towards the other. And even though Alice’s presence may not have changed them in any radical way, I nevertheless argue that their encounter with her, the event of her death and the irreducible ambiguity of her presence left an indelible mark of the sublime on their lives. Undermining their familiar ways of thinking and of perceiving the other in terms of the agreeable, Alice’s sublime intervention irreversibly changed their perception and widened their horizons of thought, expanding their conceptual frames about love, relationships and the other if not radically then at least somewhat further.

3.1.4 External Analysis: Moments of the (Un)Familiar The beautiful and the agreeable Just as the characters are deceived by the beautiful appearance of the other into judging it as familiar and agreeable, so is the implied audience⁴ led by the play’s aesthetic strategies into the experience of the “sliding” effect from the beautiful to the agreeable that Nancy describes and of the consequences of such “sliding”. Presenting the story and the characters in a convention which at first glance seems to be extremely familiar, the form evokes determinate expectations in the audience and appears as if it had the purpose of fulfilling them. The beauty of the play’s structure is given a telos and in so doing made agreeable. This familiarity of form, its surface beauty, lulls the members of the audience into believing that what they see they know, can and do understand.. To use Kantian terminology, the form appears as if it had been created for the audience’s concepts of understanding. This reference to familiar concepts makes the members of the audience unaware of the overwhelming amount of the indeterminacies in

 For the concept of the implied audience as it is applied here see chapter 2.6 “Theorizing the Sublime for Drama Analysis”

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the play and of the process of filling them according to their familiar scenarios. and lets them believe that they learn the whole story. Assuming that the characters represent the audience’s familiar ideas about love, intimacy and relationships, the members of the audience impose upon the characters their own experiences and desires. The characters’ stories are no longer theirs but are appropriated and partly construed by the audience, revealing more about the latter than the former. It is the beautiful quality of the play’s form sliding into the agreeable which allows the members of the audience to mentally form the characters according to their own wants and needs, without even noticing the process.⁵ The audience lets itself be taken in and over by the consumerist aesthetic, mentally adjusting the content of the play to their own needs. On the surface the play seems to follow in the footsteps of the long-standing tradition of comedies about the confusions of love and relationships – a feature which has already been acknowledged by many critics, such as Christopher Innes who described the play’s content as “the standard comic material of love and infidelity [which] ruthlessly exposes a society where sex has become commodified and the feeling impossible” (Innes 431). With reference to the play’s form, Graham Saunders has pointed out that Closer “employs a dramatic structure based around the somewhat unfashionable term of the ‘well-made play’ […] often associated with a number of older playwrights including Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan” (Saunders 2008: 3). David Ian Rabey has noted that “Marber observes traditional, even classical realistic structure of dialogues moving the story onwards” (Rabey 2003: 199). Aleks Sierz , in turn, speaks of the play’s “formal balance” and “elegant structure” (Sierz 2001: 187) while Peter Buse praises it as “structurally immaculate” (Buse). Indeed, the play’s well-balanced, harmonious structure, dividing the presentation of the story into two acts of almost the same length, each consisting of six scenes, may evoke the impression of an orderly and familiar universe. Also, the symmetrical constellation of the characters, two women and two men, produces some expectations of the familiar scenarios of relationship mayhem and typical comic misunderstandings about who loves whom and who ends up marrying whom. The surface beauty of the play is a strategy which constantly seduces the members of the audience into the judgement of the agreeable; and which manipulates them into seeing the story and the characters as familiar and not strangers, and into recognizing in the situations presented their own personal experiences; in doing so, they are led to limit the story to a particular image that they

 Iser refers to the activity as filling in the indeterminacies in the aesthetic form of a literary work (see Iser 172– 175).

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need and exclude other possible scenarios and explanations. The agreeable constantly attempts to make the audience unaware of the indeterminacies in the play’s structure; by rendering the pores in the seemingly flawless structure of the play invisible.

The sublime disruptions of the agreeable determinacy This process, which the agreeable initiates, is constantly disrupted by the moments of sublime indeterminacy. Coming at the unprepared members of the audience without warning such moments shake them from what Lyotard would call their “state of slackening” (Lyotard 1984a: 71). Realizing that the determinate judgements which they have made about the characters and their relationships, love and intimacy, show in fact what is closer to themselves, their own experiences, desires and prejudices, rather than say anything concrete or true about the characters’ stories, the members of the audience recognise that these are in fact their ideas of love or intimacy that they simply add to the stories that the characters tell about one another. These sublime interruptions are introduced as experiences of indeterminacy. In such moments the characters, their relationships and their identities appear to the audience just as ungraspable as they were right at the beginning of the play. And the concepts of love and intimacy turn out to be ephemeral and impossible to define within any fixed conceptual frames but instead constantly exceeding and escaping the audience’s expectations about them. The force of the agreeable is therefore not the only aesthetic strand in the play but is counteracted by the force of the sublime so that the frame can never be made completely impermeable; what the audience experiences is the struggle or the negotiations between the two judgements; the opening and closing of the frame. The juxtaposition of the agreeable and the sublime makes for rather complex aesthetic dynamics in the play, which steer the audience into framing and unframing the characters and their stories. Although recognizing the uneasy relationship between the play’s beautiful form and its explosive content, the critics usually limit their observations on that matter to quoting Marber’s own comment about it that “[i]t was always a part of the conception of the play that I would write about big ugly emotions contained within some, hopefully beautiful structure. Which makes it crueller, I think” (see Raab 129, Saunders 2008: 52; emphasis mine). Few critics have actually attempted to explain the drama’s “cruelty” or elaborate on the underlying mechanics of the powerful effect that this paradoxical combination of a wellmade form with the rawness and emotional brutality of the play’s content has on the audience. Graham Saunders, though his analysis of this aspect is by no means the focus of his discussion of the play, seems to be a notable exception.

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Saunders rightly points out that the use of this well-structured, almost decorative form to present fairly volatile subject matter “made Closer something of a theatrical oddity among the rash of so-called ‘in-yer-face’ plays during the mid-/late 1990s, which were notable for the degree of explicitness through which they depicted violent and sexual acts” (Saunders 2008: 3). According to Saunders, it is precisely in the tension between the harmony of form and the chaos of not-always-so-beautiful feelings that the power and emotional impact of the play lie. Discussing the form of the play further, Saunders modifies his earlier remark slightly by rightly arguing later that [l]ike the shape of the question mark that constitutes Alice’s scar, Closer paradoxically defines itself by constantly eluding and contradicting easy definitions made for it belonging to a specific genre: so while it has a structure that is formalized and intricate, it never quite belongs to the form defined by the ‘well-made play’ due to its moments of brutal and explosive emotion; similarly, while it has been described as a comedy its overall themes are mostly bleak and pessimistic. (Saunders 2008: 29)

These moments of the play’s form “of brutal and explosive emotion” that Saunders talks about are moments of sublime eruptions, which run counter to the agreeable. Together the two strands make for the “constantly eluding and contradicting” quality of the play’s aesthetic. The dynamics of this aesthetic interaction between the audience and the play’s performance, or, more precisely, the way the audience’s response is steered by these dynamics, progresses in the following way. The audience is first attracted by the indefinite possibility inherent in the play at its beginning, when it is still completely indeterminate. Once the performance begins, the situation becomes more complex and the audience feels torn between two different forces, pulling it in two different directions, constantly alternating between greater determination and indeterminacy. Whereas the agreeable quality of the play attempts to seduce the audience into making determinate judgements about it and invites them to ‘consume’ it (by appropriating its content for the audience’s personal needs, that is, giving it a determinate purpose), the sublime moments thwart these endeavours, resisting the consumption and showing the audience the limits of its thinking by demonstrating how habitual, authoritative and inhospitable towards the other it is. The same dynamics of agreeable determinacy (imposing purpose on the beautiful, limiting it) and sublime indeterminacy (unlimiting the beautiful) are reflected in the play’s internal communication system, in the characters’ interactions, on whose ramifications Rabey comments wittily that “it is indefinite possibility, rather than definite qualities, which attracts, compulsively; that this attraction sparks the appetite for the sexually definite, compulsively; and that discovery of the definite ultimately separates people, compulsively” (Rabey 2003:

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201). The characters are fascinated by and attracted to indeterminate beauty. The more they learn about the indeterminate, the more agreeable and determinate it becomes in their eyes. The more determinate it is, the less attractive and less desirable it is to them. A similar process takes place in the external communication system, that is, between the stage and the members of the audience. At the outset, they are attracted to the play by its indeterminacy; their curiosity is stirred by their lack of knowledge as to what the play is all about. The opening scene presents the audience with an image that is determinate enough to let the imagination play, and still indeterminate enough to generate the audience’s interest and hold its attention. The first image that the audience sees is of Alice. Her appearance is intriguing and raises many questions. Who is she? Where does she come from? What has happened to her? How does she hurt herself? The character’s appeal to the audience lies in her indeterminacy, in her status of being a stranger. However, her determinate looks open her character up to objectification. Since she is hurt, young and beautiful the members of the audience extend their hospitality towards the stranger willingly and without fear but not entirely without prejudice. The hospitality is conditioned and the discrimination affirmative, that is, including and not excluding, and is based on the ‘Pretty Woman’ stereotype, implying a young, beautiful, sexy, vulnerable and poor woman who needs looking after and rescuing. With her black coat and a suitcase, Alice evokes the impression of a homeless soul in search of love and intimacy. These attributes that seem to define Alice steer the audience into creating a particular image of the character, activating a readymade concept in their minds provided by the abundance of similar images in the dominant pop culture cinematography, television and literature. In doing so, the original instant of the character’s indeterminacy is gradually replaced by a determinate image in the audience’s mind which is additionally very popular and successfully commodified in contemporary culture, perfectly playing into consumers’ needs. This atmosphere of familiarity is also further enhanced in the scene by Dan’s entrance and the presentation of the characters’ first encounter by referring to a very well-known romantic discourse of knightly chivalry where the brave and handsome young man rescues the beautiful but also young and innocent lady – a damsel in distress. This atmosphere of popular romance is further expanded by the characters’ flirtatious language. With their sharp and witty responses, the characters’ language draws the audience’s attention away from any potentially threatening or serious meanings behind the words and back to their skin-deep surface; to the entertaining style of the characters’ exchanges and the eloquence of their expressions. Again, it is the wrapping that counts mostly and not the content. The audience is being sucked in by this agreeable aesthetic and steered by the attractive

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and ‘cool’ appearance of the characters and their conversation to participate in the commodifying process. The agreeable form of their communication invites the audience to enjoy the characters’ flirtation without really acknowledging the trace of the characters’ ungraspable and fleeting presence in the language. The language seems to have a concrete purpose to fulfil: to give the members of the audience pleasure and not to bear witness to the other’s ephemeral existence, to the fact that with every second they are closer and closer to death. The agreeable surface of the language which invites the audience to ignore or conveniently overlook the menacing implications of the darker tones underlying the whole scene, is however regularly disturbed by the increasingly persistent references to death and human mortality in the course of the scene. The mention of what is one of the most ungraspable and terrifying human experiences introduces uneasiness into the play and with it the feeling of the sublime, which from now on runs parallel to and competes with the feeling of the agreeable. The idea of death is evoked in an overtly light, entertaining and playful way, Dan Beat. Alice Dan Alice Dan

I write obituaries Do you like it in the dying business? It’s a living. Did you grow up in a graveyard? Yeah. Suburbia. (Marber 184)

The agreeable strategy here is to impose an impermeable frame upon human experience, trying to exclude from it anything that could be construed as risky or potentially threatening. The brilliance of the language and the amusing effect of the characters’ conversation attenuate the bleakness and mute despair underlying the characters’ words and behaviour. Death is rendered invisible, harmless and unreal. That this strategy is widely used in capitalism is no novelty. It suffices to look at the contemporary consumerist culture, which lives in total denial of death and anything that has to do with human mortality. Beauty surgeries and anti-aging cosmetics, the obsession with one’s own body and fitness are part of the desire to forget about aging and death. Agreeable as the language in this scene is, there is also evidently something disturbing underneath the smooth surface of the playful sentences. The unsettling sensation makes the audience feel that something happens in the scene which is difficult to grasp, but the disquieting presence of which the audience can nevertheless sense in the death imagery. The technique employed here is reminiscent, to recall the image, of Damien Hirst’s sculpture, presenting a carcass of a tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde. The appearance of the shark is beautiful, but it represents death. The beauty of the shark’s appearance con-

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tributes to the spectators’ pleasure upon seeing it in its full magnificence, and by extension, to a heightened experience of themselves as being alive. The beautiful shape, however, veils the undeniable fact of the animal’s death, thus introducing the uncanny element into the ‘sculpture’. Each instant of life contains a promise of death. Presence is constantly on the brink of sliding into the past. As one of Samuel Backett’s characters puts it, we “give birth astride of a grave, a light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more” (Beckett 106). Another example of the play’s strategy of imposing the agreeable on the ungraspable is the scene in which Dan and Larry have a ‘conversation’ on the Internet. The scene shows the emotional emptiness saturating the characters’ lives, their life-in-death existence, and their inability to cope with it in a more successful way. On the surface, the image is entertaining: “two boys tossing in cyberspace” (Marber 212), one of whom thinks the other one is a woman, having Internet sex. Although the content of their conversation is very explicit and vulgar, the overall effect is also highly amusing. The use of the strategy which is very popular in comedies, where one character passes himself off as somebody else, inevitably results in a number of misunderstandings, which makes the whole situation even more comical. Yet, at some point the telephone rings at Larry’s office and the audience is woken up from the entertainment of the virtual reality to real life and its unpleasant problems. After hearing the details about the disease, Larry decides that it is an instance of atrophy, a diagnosis which may equally apply to the Internet sex-talk. The phone call is very short and yet it introduces the idea of sickness and death into the scene, exposing the emotional void of the two characters’ lives. What was initially entertaining, even though offensively so, now becomes a sign of despair on both ends of the cable. Both Dan and Larry are looking for something which would jolt them out of their life-in-death existence. They are both looking for love and intimacy but what they choose is the quick gratification of their desires. Revealingly, neither of the two is actually satisfied. Paradoxically, in trying to make death invisible, the agreeable spreads death and destruction even more by contributing to a growing sense of depression among society and to subsequently higher suicide rates. Edmund Burke explains this dependency between the beautiful (turning into the agreeable) and suicidal moods by referring to the destructive bodily effects that the ‘overdose’ of the agreeable may have on human beings. Providence has so ordered it, that a state of rest and inaction, however it may flatter our indolence, should be productive of many inconveniencies; […] for the nature of rest is to suffer all the parts of our bodies to fall into relaxation, that not only disables the members from performing their functions, but takes away the vigorous tone of fibre which is requisite

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for carrying on the natural and necessary secretions. At the same time, that in this languid inactive state, the nerves are more liable to the most horrid convulsions, than when they are sufficiently braced and strengthened. Melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder, is the consequence of the gloomy view we take of things in this relaxed state of body. (Burke 122)

That too much of the agreeable is detrimental to human beings even in theatre was more recently pointed out by the French drama theorist and practitioner, Antonin Artaud. According to Artaud, conventional theatre using conventional forms of communication, that is, theatre which is agreeable and which makes the audience relax and lean back, certain that their expectations will be satisfied yet again, leads mankind “towards an increasing atrophying of their instincts which account[s] to the death of their vitality and eventual extinction” (Esslin 80). Language in its conventionalized frozen form cannot express the ungraspable character of human experience and emotion. Therefore, “the use of such language desiccates experience and eventually makes people who rely on such modes of communication and thought lose their contact with life itself” (Esslin 70). In order to save the audience from “our [malaise] […] the boredom, inertia, and stupidity of everything” (Artaud 2001b: 388) and bring them back to life in its original raw force, that is, unframed and unlimited by any socially imposed conventions or standards, Artaud proposed a theatre which should “swoop down among a crowd of spectators with all the awesome horror of the plague, the Black Death of the Middle Ages, with its shattering impact” (Esslin 70). In order to have this overwhelming influence, theatre was supposed to be cruel, by which Artaud did not mean “the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail” (Artaud 2001b: 386). In a letter to Jean Paulhan, Artaud explained his particular use of the term “cruelty” by describing it as “the inescapably necessary pain without which life could not continue” (Artaud 2001a: 119). Artaudian cruelty was more about the emotional and visceral impact on the audience changing their conventional ways of perceiving and experiencing reality (Artaud 2001c: 112), employing very radical and even violent strategies to do so – a technique which is very similar if not the same to the techniques used by the sublime.

The retroactive transformations of the sublime The introduction of death and all violent emotions, feelings and images related to it can be considered to be the main strategy of the play, used to evoke the

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“cruel” counter-force to the agreeable, that is, the feeling of the sublime. This injection of the sublime takes place at different stages of the play with different intensity, the strongest being the final scene when the characters learn about Alice’s death and her false identity. For the greatest part of the play, before Alice’s death is revealed, the audience is still given the opportunity to perceive the play’s aesthetic as negotiation between the agreeable with its comforting feelings of safety and stability, and the interruptions of the sublime, which turn the feeling of comfort into discomfort. We find death skulking throughout the whole play disguised in different forms: beginning with direct references to death and mortality; the meat market with its carcass evoking sensation of the abject (see Kristeva); images of emotional inertia and cowardice, of life-indeath existence; the death of love and faithfulness; the agony of the final stages of doomed relationships; and destructive words and violating gazes objectifying the other, all of which make the beautiful idea of love less beautiful and more sublime. After the final scene, the comforts of the agreeable are no longer available. This violent interruption mars the surface of the beautiful form, which cannot be mended and which opens the play’s frame irrevocably, tearing back the play’s seamless surface, cutting through its agreeable material, reversing the limiting effects of the consumerist aesthetic and tipping the aesthetic scales in favour of the sublime once and for all. The sudden materialization of death becomes real and undeniable for the characters. The moment operates ‘retroactively’, making all the previous, less explicit references to death re-emerge in the audience’s memory of the play more prominently and distinctively against the background of the agreeable. With one blow everything that may have passed as entertaining and pleasurable so far gains a new semantic layer that undermines everything else. What might have been construed and dismissed as a mere figure of speech is now shown again, in a sharper and crueller light, presenting death as co-existent with and inseparable from life. If there are any traces of laughter at the comic effects in the play left, they are now checked and silenced. To demonstrate how this retroactive movement works using concrete examples from the play, Alice’s particular use of the formulation “the dying business” in the dialogue quoted earlier can no longer be so easily considered as coincidental or predominantly amusing, but takes on a very ominous tone undermining the lightness of the characters’ interaction in the scene. Similarly, her mention of the visit to the meat markets, her constant fabrications of people dying in accidents in her past can no longer be accepted as realistic depictions of setting and of Alice’s dramatic figure, but have to be seen as part of the strategy of the sublime, which is based on the assumption that the realistic presentation of reality or human beings is impossible. What is more, her black coat and the ruck-

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sack may now be seen as pointing to the transience of her nature, and Alice’s character emerges as an embodiment of death itself. All her past appearances gain a new, sublime quality, there to make the audience and the characters realise the detrimental effects of the agreeable. This effect is very well presented in the previously mentioned scene of Anna’s exhibition. Alice as the sublime force comes into the agreeable space that the exhibition creates and immediately undermines its authority, disclosing the strategy behind it. Also, when Alice comes into Dan’s life, he seems to be at the peak of his denial of death. The way in which he speaks about his work at the obituary column, about his deceased mother and, later, about the funeral for his father, demonstrates how detached he has become from life, of which death is, after all, an integral part. Alice’s presence in his life and her death bring him back to a deeper experience of life. For the audience, Alice’s character makes it impossible to frame the play and the characters into a coherent story. Her death and her revealed false identity make the members of the audience realise how much they have assumed a priori; and how many of the play’s indeterminacies they filled in without even realising it. Alice’s identity is perhaps the most prominent example of this procedure of determination and closure of the frame. If we follow the information exchange throughout the play concerning this question, we notice that the audience’s awareness is at best on par with that of the remaining characters, and at some points even inferior to theirs. It is Larry who first discovers that Alice was not her real name. The audience learns about it at the very end of the play, all their assumptions, concepts and theories about Alice’s character refuted. It is also the moment when more additional information is disclosed, such as Dan’s lie about cutting off the crusts and Larry’s hopping in the bathroom during the breaking-up scene. All these little revelations serve the purpose of making the audience realise that any knowledge that they may believe to have gained from the play so far is totally subjective and based on appearances rather than solid facts about the relationships’ developments. They show that the conceptual frame that the audience created about the play cannot be closed so easily. There will always remain something that exceeds this frame. Just as the characters do not succeed in getting closer to one another, the audience, too, is not any closer to the true stories behind the characters’ relationships and their failures. What both the characters and the audience experience is the sublime touch of the other in its indeterminacy.

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3.2 Anthony Neilson’s Normal “I believe that man (sic) is necessarily put up against himself and that he cannot recognise himself and love himself to the end unless he is condemned” (Bataille 1990: 39). Georges Bataille assumes in the quotation that only if we experience ourselves as condemned, that is, when we suddenly find ourselves on the other, which is often also deemed to be the immoral or evil, side, are we capable of recognising ourselves for who we really are.

3.2.1 Synopsis Justus Wehner from Anthony Neilson’s play Normal (1991) is a young and ambitious but also a very inexperienced lawyer with extremely high moral standards, who suddenly finds himself face to face with a serial killer. This encounter with the condemned changes him and brands his life forever. During what turns out to be a devastatingly traumatic encounter, Wehner realises that for all of his life he has been repressing an extremely important part of his human nature; that he has never really known himself or life before; that what he has been living up to now was a lie created for him by society and his parents. Indeed he had lived a story that was pre-formulated for him and he simply had to adapt his life accordingly. Interestingly, Wehner does not seem to arrive at this conclusion through intellectual reflexion but through a rationally ungraspable but sensually palpable experience of the other. The encounter with Peter Kurten is a rite of passage for the young Wehner, which allows him to share the serial killer’s experiences vicariously and experience himself as the condemned with all his high moral standards forsaken. This traumatises him deeply, pushing him into a liminal space between the conscious and subconscious realms of his mind, which the overwhelmingly extreme and confusing images of his tormented psyche shown in the play demonstrate, but it also leads him to a transformed insight into his human condition. The encounter is for Wehner what Victor Turner refers to as stage of liminality in a rite of passage (see Turner 1977), which creates a space and time where conventional norms and standards are pushed to their limits and put to the test. Taking on the liminal position of the shaman, the serial killer guides the young “neophyte” (Turner 1970: 96) through the liminal stage, steering and attending to his transition. Bataille, exploring a similar experience, refers to it as a moment of intensity during which the subject goes beyond the conventional limitations of his or her human nature, which are there to secure his or her own survival, in order to ex-

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perience life as more than only an act of self-preservation but instead as intensively as possible by risking a glimpse at the boundary between life and death. Clearly, such an exploration of the boundaries of human life necessarily entails the risk of self-destruction. Wehner survives the experience because he crosses the boundaries only emotionally, in his mind that is, keeping a safe physical distance between the overwhelmingly terrifying other (Kurten) and himself. He experiences Kurten, and by extension, the force of death, as the sublime. Formally, the audience is led to this culminant moment, which is also the peak of the experience of the sublime aesthetic of the play, in a different way than it is in Patrick Marber’s Closer. In the latter the sublime object, Alice, was presented as something beautiful and the audience was shocked to see that this perception of her very quickly slid into the judgement of the agreeable, ending up in objectification of the character, rendering graspable what is ungraspable. In other words, the other (Alice) was presented as the beautiful other and not the sublime other, which opened her to the judgement of the agreeable and perception of her as the familiar and no longer the indeterminate other. The audience was steered from its judgement of Alice as beautiful into perceiving her as agreeable only to realise Alice sublimity post factum, after the fatal consequences of its (mis)judgement. In Normal, the audience is steered to the response(s) of the sublime by steadily increasing the intensity of the performance’s appearance (a concept introduced by Fischer-Lichte 2004) using three main strategies: (1) the actor’s bodily presence, (2) ecstasy of things, and (3) intensity of atmosphere. The second category, ecstasy of things, is the main source of intensity of the performance’s appearance and, by extension, the main catalyst of the sublime, the object being Peter Kurten’s character, which gradually emerges as the most dominant ecstatic object in a three-phased process of its perception by the audience. In the first phase, Kurten is clearly presented as the absolutely other, that is, something overwhelming and ungraspable, but not sublime. Perceiving the other as somebody or something that is absolutely and completely different from us paradoxically makes the other determinant for us, as ‘the familiar unfamiliar’, the evil that is known. Categorised as such it can therefore be excluded from the realm of the acceptable and the good. The other can thus conveniently become a scapegoat for society’s imperfections and failures. This is where the audience is initially led in Normal, to think that it knows exactly what Kurten is, that is, the typical serial killer. The audience is meant to recognise Kurten as the absolutely other, who terrifying as he is, has nevertheless nothing to do with the audience. The latter can therefore feel safely separated from the condemned. The feeling of security and comfort is not granted the audience for long. The aesthetic strategies of the play quickly steer it into the second phase of the men-

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tal construction of Kurten’s character as the catalyst of the sublime. In this phase the audience finds itself siding more with Kurten than with Wehner. Kurten’s character is presented to be much more potent than Wehner’s and exerts an almost mesmeric and shamanistic influence over the audience. He overwhelms and imprisons the audience within his rhetoric power almost like Longinus’ orator, who “pulverizes all the facts like a thunderbolt, and exhibits the orator’s whole power at a single blow” (qtd in: Shaw 13). Along with his ecstatic appearance onstage, Kurten emerges as a monstrous object, making the audience lose its ability of cool rational judgement. Condemning Kurten as absolute evil is no longer possible as the audience feels more and more on the side of the killer. Although the feeling of the sublime is experienced by the audience with growing intensity punctuating all the phases, it finds its culminating moment in the audience’s experience of itself as condemned in the third phase, when it is forced to passively participate in the murder of Frau Kurten. Just as Wehner lives through this experience vicariously and experiences himself as the condemned and inhuman in the process, the audience too is exposed to a similar moment of intensity. This sublime moment is produced by the unexpected realisation that the audience finds itself suddenly and without any warning on the side of the other, that is, in the same category with the condemned, the serial killer, ‘the monster’, finding him no less human that the audience is. The safe boundary, which is based on the binary opposition of normal and abnormal, separating the audience, that is, the ‘normal’ and ‘decent’ citizens, from murderers, that is, the ‘abnormal’, the outcasts of society is no longer sustainable. This is an extremely terrifying and unsettling experience, the Lyotardian moment of privation when, overwhelmed completely by something we cannot grasp, we realise that everything we have believed so far does not apply any longer and we are faced with the unknown. In fact, we feel that we belong to the unknown and the terrible. The experience is truly frightening but also exhilarating, as it shows the audience the concept of humanity in a different light. The medium of theatre allows it to explore this side of human nature in a safe space employing the aesthetic of the sublime, which confronts the audience with its own limitations and lets it see beyond its familiar concept of itself. The sublime aesthetic exposes the audience to the overwhelming darkness in the other and makes the audience confront the darkness in itself in a safe and risk-free way.

3.2.2 Bataille, Eros and Thanatos, and the Evil Inside The experience of darkness is what Bataille defines as “the Evil”, that is, as everything that we condemn and banish from our lives because we feel that it may

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threaten our self-preservation, which according to the French sociologist is an extremely important element of human life.⁶ Bataille’s category of evil differs from its more common use in the meaning of an immoral act. Evil as Bataille understands it is not “the Evil which we do by abusing strength at the expense of the weak, but of the Evil which goes against our own interests and which is brought about by a passionate desire for liberty” (Bataille 1990: 5). At the core of his definition of evil is not the intention to harm the other but the crossing of the boundaries imposed upon us either by society or our own condition. It describes more a kind of pushing ourselves to our limits regardless of the consequences. Bataille’s evil means being driven by passion, a type of “divine intoxication” (Bataille 1990: 22), which makes us abandon all reason and rational thinking. Exercising this kind of evil goes against our personal interest since, involving “the tragic violation of law” (Bataille 1990: 21) and crossing the boundaries which demarcate the conditions of our safe existence, it may lead us to the total destruction of ourselves and/or others. As Bataille points out “death is the punishment […] for this mad dream” (Bataille 1990: 21). Nevertheless, in spite of the threat of our own demise, we are irrationally attracted to this kind of evil, even if our rational thinking attempts to block or ignore this impulse in us. “There is an instinctive tendency towards the divine intoxication which the rational world of calculation cannot bear” (Bataille 1990: 22). According to Bataille, the experience of evil, which is pure but destructive passion, can paradoxically be life intensifying. Bataille differentiates between two goals which humanity pursues, “one, the negative, is to preserve life (to avoid death), and the other, the positive, is to increase the intensity of life” (Bataille 1990: 23). The two goals may be related to what Sigmund Freud considered to be the two most basic drives of human life, and which he respectively referred to as the life-affirming drive, Eros, and the death-affirming drive, Thanatos (see Freud).⁷ Freud insists that these two instincts be of equal value and should be allowed in our life in the same degree. Unsurprisingly, however, people are more willing to admit only Eros in their life,  An interesting angle in the discussion of the place and function of evil in the British and Irish drama of the 1990s is offered by Peter Paul Schnierer in his article “Violent Redemptions: Negotiations of Evil in Contemporary British and Irish drama,” where he considers representations of evil with regard to the question of theodicy. Taking as his working definition of theodicy a formula proposed by Sarah K. Pinnock, who theorises the problem of evil as consisting of three parts: “(1) God is perfectly good, (2) God is omnipotent, and (3) evil exists” (qtd in Schnierer 2004: 471), Schnierer argues that “[w]ithout exception, British and Irish playwrights today initially take their cue from the third proposition only” (Schnierer 2004: 471).  Recently, Freud has been criticised for opening the dichotomy between the two forces, which in fact are two different aspects of one and the same force of life (see Carel).

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attempting to avoid Thanatos as much as possible, either not being aware that death and destruction are a crucial part of life as well; or rather, as Jonathan Dollimore shrewdly points out in his study on Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (2001), simply not wanting to think about it. “We recognise and register the sex/death connection, but in a way which precisely allows us not to ‘see’ it” (Dollimore xii). Bataille speaks of a similar tendency, pointing out that Just as certain insects, in given conditions, flock towards a ray of light, so we all flock to an area at the opposite end of the scale from death. The mainspring of human activity is generally the desire to reach the point farthest from the funereal domain, which is rotten, dirty and impure. We make every effort to efface the traces, signs and symbols of death. Then, if we can, we efface the traces and signs of these efforts. Our desire to elevate ourselves is one of a hundred symptoms of this force which guides us to the antipodes of death. The disgust the rich feel for the workers [etc…] depend on the fact that in their eyes the poor are closer to death than themselves. (Bataille 1990: 48)

Trying to avoid Thanatos has the opposite effect to the desired one of sustaining our life as long as possible. Both Freud and Bataille point out the detrimental consequences of repressing the drive which is such a fundamental part of our human nature. The prohibition or repression of Thanatos produces an excess of energy, which according to Bataille not only disturbs life but also makes us fail to recognise ourselves on the deepest level, as who we most fundamentally are (Itzkowitz 20), leading to the eruption of even greater destruction and violence. If Freud is right in claiming that Eros and Thanatos are the most basic and crucial drives of our human existence, denying either of them will necessarily result in a diminished quality of life and a false image of ourselves since “Bataille contends that both the left and the right poles of the duality are mainsprings of human self-recognition. With the right pole of effacement, we suppress the awareness of the left pole, of the presence of our own destructive desires” (Itzkowitz 23). Rejecting on the basis of moral grounds the existence of the death drive in our life, that is, our desire to destroy and ruin either ourselves or the other, we refuse to acknowledge a crucial part of our nature and therefore may be completely unprepared when Thanatos suddenly enters our lives without any possibility of our controlling it. Cultivating the image of ourselves as good without acknowledging the destructive forces in our life may paradoxically lead us to our demise (see Itzkowitz 24). The question that arises is whether we can live the drive of Thanatos without necessarily causing destruction and harm either to ourselves or others. In other words, is there a safe way of embracing the death drive in our lives? Bataille finds the solution to the problem in the ritual of sacrifice. Since, however, it is

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no longer practised in the Western world, there is a need for some activity which would replace the sacrificial ritual. The practice of sacrifice has today fallen into disuse and yet it has been, due to its universality, a human action more significant than any other. Independently of each other, different peoples invented different forms of sacrifice, with the goal of answering a need as inevitable as hunger. It is therefore not astonishing that the necessity of satisfying such a need, under the conditions of present-day life, leads an isolated man into disconnected and even stupid behaviour. (Bataille 1985: 73)

What is exactly the function of sacrifice? How does it satisfy the need that Bataille considers to be “as inevitable as hunger”? During the ritual of sacrifice a transformative violence is produced which, as Bataille claims, gives the spectators the opportunity to experience death firsthand and acquire “the power to look death in the face and to perceive in death the pathway into unknowable and incomprehensible continuity” (Bataille 2006: 24). The spectator is given the opportunity to confront Thanatos from a safe distance without risking his or her own destruction. These moments, Bataille continues, inform our life with intensity and “sacredness”, showing us something about the striving of our discontinuous nature towards the state of continuity. This sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature’s discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one. Only a spectacular killing, carried out as the solemn and collective nature of religion dictates, has the power to reveal what normally escapes notice. (Bataille 2006: 22)

The nature of human beings is discontinuous in the sense that our being is finite and has certain limitations, which, if exceeded, may result in our death. Human beings therefore attempt to respect these limitations and live within the boundaries of the possible and the known most of the time. Nevertheless, the idea of life as limited is sometimes hard to endure as we also feel a drive towards the state of continuity, that is, infinity and permanence. This drive is the force of Thanatos. The individual asserts the nature of his or her being by “going beyond these limitations which are necessary for his [or her] preservation” (Bataille 1990: 68). What Bataille suggests is that we introduce into our lives “the greatest number of elements which contradict it, but at the same time harms it as little as possible” (Bataille 1990: 69). Since the rituals of sacrifice are no longer in practise in Western societies, Bataille suggests the use of arts instead, which may also satisfy the need for violence in our lives, or as Bataille puts is, our need for “shades of death” (Bataille

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1990: 68). In fact Bataille argues that “if human life did not contain this violent instinct, we could dispense with the arts” entirely (Bataille 1990: 70). Whether indeed all arts, as Bataille seems to claim, can fulfil this function in human life is arguable. The arts which operate in the modus of the sublime, however, definitely can do so. After all, the experience of the sublime is very similar to finding yourself face to face with death, as the threat of privation, which Lyotard finds to be an indispensable element of the experience, consists in the feeling that nothing will ever happen again, that is, in the feeling that there is nothing more. Also common to the experience of both the sublime and continuity is the impossibility of language and thought. In the sublime the subject experiences itself as beyond all thought and its concepts. It is a sort of pre-conceptual phase, the ground zero of thought and language. Similarly, during the experience of continuity the subject suddenly ceases to exist and along with it, the ability to think or speak. The subject experiences itself in the pre-linguistic, pre-conceptual phase as an indeterminate being. Further, just as Bataille’s ritualistic and transformational violence leads the participants to the experience of themselves as condemned and, by extension, to a transformed understanding of their own humanity, similarly, Lyotard’s experience of the sublime inhuman (see Lyotard 1991) confronts the subject with the limits of his or her use of the concept of the human. And this is precisely the situation that Wehner faces in his task of defending Peter Kürten, the serial killer.

3.2.3 Internal Analysis: Wehner’s Sublime Encounter with Eros and Thanatos When Justus Wehner meets Peter Kurten, whose character is based on the infamous Vampire of Düsseldorf, who within a period of nine months (February to November 1929), murdered nine people and unsuccessfully attempted to kill many more (Berg)⁸, the former has just graduated from his studies and has all the makings of an excellent career as a lawyer. Kurten’s case was given to him as a reward for his outstanding performance as a law student. Considered to be an easy win, the high-profile case was supposed to boost his career as a de-

 Justus Wehner is also based on an actual person: Dr. Alex Wehner, who represented Kürten in court and whose closing defence is included in Karl Berg’s book, the psychologist that interviewed Kürten in prison. The murders presented in the play match the accounts of the real murders committed by Kürten. Also his personality as a cool, detached and self-controlled person fits in with Berg’s description of Kürten. It is also true that Kürten confessed to his wife, who turned him in so that she could get the reward offered for his head (see Berg).

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fence attorney. Wehner’s memories of himself from this time are filled with bitter self-irony: Wehner

What is most ironic is that I was given the case as a gift by my elders in the legal establishment. Still in my twenties, I was their most prided and precocious son and it’s true I knew everything of the law. […] So that was my gift: I was to be his defence lawyer. It was a prestigious case, and in those still liberal times it seemed that it might easily be won. After all, I did not have to prove him innocent, Just insane. And he was surely that. (Neilson 5 – 6)

Ambitious, young and idealistic, Justus considers himself to have extremely high moral standards, on which his telling name is also a hidden comment. He believes in society and its values and has a rather determinate idea of what humanity is all about. Judging by the way he addresses his parents Wehner probably comes from a rather well-off family and possibly conservative home. At the time of his first encounter with Kurten, Wehner does not realise how theoretical his ideals are and how unliveable. Never contested or tried against any real-life experiences, the beliefs and values cherished by Wehner lack any reference to reality. From the perspective of years later, Wehner describes himself as totally naïve, claiming that he “knew everything of the law. Less of life and less of love” (Neilson 5). His encounter with Kurten is an eye-opening experience for the inexperienced young man. Kurten shows him life and human nature from a perspective that Wehner never acknowledged before. Gradually, some instincts are revealed to him that he had never considered to be his own. His encounter with Kurten is a lesson in human nature, expanding Wehner’s quite limited view of humanity and himself, and transforming the young man forever. Wehner’s transformation is presented as taking place little by little, in stages, and predominantly in the character’s mind rather than in the outside reality. The whole encounter can be considered to be a mental rite of passage or a transition from one mental state to another, with Kurten as the shamanistic guide, who “mediates between the everyday world” of the believer and “another realm” that only he, the shaman, can enter, making the transition possible (Sorgenfrei 45). The Scottish cultural anthropologist Victor Turner (see Turner 1977) and the French ethnographer, Arnold van Gennep (Gennep 1977) define rites

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of passage as rituals that create an opportunity for the subject to experience him or herself in a liminal situation and re-assess the familiar values and ideals that they have believed in so far. Such transitional situations may “evoke a heightened reflexivity, and, therefore, a more informed or authenticated sense of self” (Matthews 177). Similarly, the threatening emergence of the serial killer in Wehner’s mind throws the young man into a state of mental liminality, pushing him to the edges of his consciousness and tapping into his most repressed subconscious urges. Terrifying and agonizing as the liminal experience is for Wehner, it is also relatively safe, as the encounter takes place mostly in Wehner’s mind, that is, in a space where Kurten cannot physically harm him. Kurten’s character functions thus as the shamanistic catalyst of the liminal space, and he does so by emerging in a sublime way. Kurten does appear to Wehner’s mind as something monstrous and overwhelming but no longer as simply yet another serial killer; Wehner does not see him as just another insane murderer, but as a sublime object, which can no longer be grasped in familiar concepts but materializes as something indeterminate, simultaneously terrifying and extremely appealing. Or more precisely, being a part of the liminal space, Kurten becomes the sublime shaman, who evokes in Wehner the ambivalent attitude of being betwixt and between. Wehner’s liminal confrontation with Kurten enables the young man to see himself, his value system and the idea of humanity in a completely new light. According to Turner the liminal state, which is a crucial stage in rites of passage, is a space where norms and values may be contested in a relatively safe environment. “[T]he initiands acquire a special kind of freedom, a ‘sacred power’” in the liminal space, as Turner points out (Turner 1982: 26). Defined as an exceptional state, “temporarily undefined, [and] beyond the normative social structure” (Turner 1982: 27), the liminal space offers a space where the subjects may test familiar beliefs and form new ones if necessary. During the experience of the sublime, the subject, too, is at a safe distance from the terrifying object and can feel its frightening power without actually risking his or her life. The liminal stage of Wehner’s rite of passage consists of four transformative phases, which are all punctuated by Wehner’s letters home, showing the gradual change in the young man’s behaviour and mind catalysed by the encounter with Kurten, the sublime object. Describing the space of liminality, Turner frequently refers to it as the space of betwixt and between, where the individuals “are neither-this-nor-that, here-nor-there, one-thing-not-the-other” (Turner 1977: 37). Wehner’s liminal state is, too, characterised by a comparable ambivalence, which gradually increases from phase to phase to climax in a moment of complete mental transformation into a killer. His rite of passage is a transition from an immature, naïve and very self-righteous young man of immaculate

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moral stands into a disillusioned but also more knowledgeable (in terms of human nature) adult, who is aware of his more primordial drives and who has experienced himself as condemned. In psychological terms, what happens during the state of liminality is an awakening of the drives of Eros and Thanatos and their passage from the subconscious to the conscious realm of Wehner’s mind. The experience of the sublime is therefore the experience of a new consciousness framing itself. The two drives are theatrically symbolised by Frau Kurten’s and Kurten’s characters respectively, and their appearance and behaviour onstage represents the interaction of Wehner’s ego with the two repressed forces in the liminal space of betwixt and between his conscious and subconscious mind.

Phase one: first lesson In the first phase, which comprises the scenes five to six, Wehner meets Kurten for the first time. When he later describes this event and his feelings concerning the case to his parents, he is still rather confident about his success and quite convinced of his righteousness at this stage, which both the style and the content of his first letter home demonstrate: Wehner

[…] Dear Mama Dear Papa As you must know, I have been appointed defence in the Ripper case and today I met Kurten face to face. […] I think we have an excellent case and I know already the angle I intend to use. Victory would be certain were it not for the rather worrisome change I detect in the air. (Neilson 10)

The style of the letter is very polite and respectful towards his parents and all the ideals and values they symbolise. Apart from his adjustment and subordination to the norms of society, which the correct sentences manifest, the letter also reveals Wehner’s infantile and unquestioning relation to his mother and his father. He uses the childish forms of address, gladly sees his parents’ beliefs about Kurten’s “insufferable upbringing” (Neilson 10) confirmed and clearly still needs their help in dealing with the case: “I’m counting on you and your colleagues in the Humanitarian League to put pressure on those that count. I know you plan to send a delegation, will you be part of it?” (Neilson 10). There seems to be no trace of disagreement with his parents’ values and opinions yet. To question any of them appears to have never crossed Wehner’s mind and is still incon-

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ceivable for him at this stage. Also, Wehner clearly wants his parents’ greater participation in his life. This need, which is never answered, will become more and more pressing in the course of the play and in more general terms may symbolise the indifference of society towards the hardships and suffering of the individual. And yet there is also another note detectable in the letter, which hints that the first encounter with the Ripper has already implanted the first seeds of doubt in Wehner’s mind and initiated the painful process of his passage into maturity and of the deconstruction of many of his illusions. In the post scriptum to the letter, Wehner asks his parents about a girl he once knew as a child: “Have you heard anything of Eva? She must be all grown up now. Ask her to write to me should you see her. For some reason, our summers together have returned to my mind” (Neilson 11). This question represents a marked change in the tone of the letter, though it is also still marginal at this stage. It is more intimate and spontaneous in comparison to the still predominant stiffness of the style in the main part of the letter. Wehner clearly does not realise what might have activated the memory of the girl in his mind. This memory, which will later turn into an unstoppable need and desire, is the product of Wehner’s earlier conversation with Kurten, which catalyses the period of liminality in Wehner’s mental life by activating in him long-repressed urges. Totally unaware of his own nature and its needs and drives, Wehner is still incapable of making this connection to Kurten. He does not even acknowledge the need for love in his life, which the surprised tone of his questions about Eva demonstrates. This naivety and total ignorance of these two fundamental human drives make Wehner extremely vulnerable and susceptible to Kurten’s sublime influence and his seduction. The scene of their first encounter demonstrates this very clearly. Wehner is totally naïve in his assumptions about Kurten’s character, which, judging by Wehner’s surprise at Kurten’s civil behaviour and appearance, the young man must have completely misapprehended. Expecting a monster, Wehner is totally taken aback by Kurten’s apparent ‘normality.’ As the stage directions tell us, “He is immaculately dressed, his cheeks just slightly rouged. He is a handsome man, in his late forties” (Neilson 6). Indeed, the Ripper could be just another ‘normal’ citizen. Kurten sustains and even intensifies this impression of ‘normality’ further with his rather sophisticated and polite language at the beginning of the conversation. He asks Wehner: “I wonder – perhaps you could tell me – is my hair unkempt?” (Neilson 7). This may simply be a part of Kurten’s “art of murder” strategy, which is later compared to and explained as the art of seduction (Neilson 29). Creating a sense of familiarity and security, the murderershaman lures the victim to approach closer. This is the first stage in the complex process of seduction, which establishes a feeling of trust by evoking feelings of

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normality and familiarity. This will put the victim off guard and make it easier to attack and gain power over him or her, which is necessary to effect the transformation. Kurten’s initial tactics seem to be a strategy of ‘soothe and shock’ during the first phase of Wehner’s transformation. He keeps confusing Wehner with his apparent normality, sophistication and civility only to suddenly change the tone completely and hit Wehner with a terrifying remark or a threatening question. In doing so, Kurten first lets Wehner think that he is in control of the situation and the interview. Feeling relatively comfortable and confident, Wehner is then totally unprepared for the sudden attacks, the impact of which is even more powerful and destructive because of that. Still considering himself to be completely separate from Kurten’s world, Wehner enters into a conversation with the serial killer without any misgivings or fears about the sustainability of his own world. He still seems to be quite confident about his mission and his own beliefs and announces them quite self-righteously to Kurten. He ‘graciously’ concedes, for example, that he finds the serial killer to be a human being, too, in spite of his inhuman deeds: “You’re still a human being, Mr Kurten. Whatever you’ve done” (Neilson 7). This remark seems to merely amuse Kurten, who recognises that the truth of this comment runs much deeper than Wehner seems to realise. It shows that Wehner and Kurten are not worlds apart, as it may seem at first glance. In fact they belong to one and the same species and have much more in common than Wehner is ready to admit. The game of cat and mouse, which Kurten plays with Wehner, is repeated a few times during the scene. In the first transformative phase, the movements of the sublime are still just mere tremors before the real quake, although their impact can already be felt, as they begin to undermine the stability of Wehner’s supposed terra firma. At the beginning Kurten’s attacks are still rather playful and merely probing, and only slightly throw Wehner off-balance. They gain in aggressiveness as the scene progresses to culminate at its end in quite a scare for Wehner. Having first established the atmosphere of familiarity by referring to things and behaviour familiar to Wehner, that is, by using very polite language, behaving in a ‘civilised’ way and pretending to be as cooperative in answering Wehner’s questions as possible, Kurten suddenly throws in a question which Wehner is evidently unprepared for. Such moments demonstrate rather clearly which of the two is really in control of the situation. Wehner only receives the answers to his questions because Kurten agrees to play along. The latter, in turn, never subordinates himself to Wehner but is in charge all the time, and can turn the tables on Wehner very quickly. When the latter tries to intimidate him by reminding him that “They’ll execute you, Mr Kurten. Doesn’t that frighten you?” (Neilson 8), Kurten throws him off track by replying coolly, “Why should I be

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afraid? I am what they fear” (Neilson 8). In order to cover for his confusion and win some time to regain his composure and control, Wehner consults his documents and changes the topic completely. The audience realises that the young man has lost this battle. Kurten plays along for some time, politely answering Wehner’s questions about his childhood, only to throw him off-balance again, for example, by exposing Wehner’s innocence in the context of sexual relationships, hitting him suddenly with the question, “Are you a virgin, Dr Wehner?” (Neilson 9). And when Wehner cannot find any appropriate response to this, Kurten pushes even further by asking, “Did your parents tell you what goes where? Did you all undress in separate rooms? Were you ashamed when you got hair on your balls? […] Were you afraid by the noises that came from their room? Did you ever see your mother’s cunt?” (Neilson 9). Finally, unable to bear it any longer, Wehner stops Kurten by shouting “That’s enough!!” (Neilson 9). Even though Wehner appears to have regained his voice the battle is already long lost. Kurten turns out to be stronger of the two. And even though for a brief moment Wehner seems to have regained his self-control in the end, by trying to find power and his old superiority in a moral feeling: compassion, pitying Kurten who evidently was never given the chance to learn what family love can be like, it is him and not Kurten whom the audience sees with his head down at the end of the scene. Kurten does not want Wehner’s pity, claiming that the dysfunctional circumstances that he was brought up in were “on the whole […] to [his] advantage”, as “[t]here [was] no place for innocence in this world” (Neilson 10). Although Wehner is not consciously aware of the implications of this first ‘lesson’, its message is certainly clearly felt by him and will bear fruit as the subsequent phases show. Wehner’s own upbringing did not prepare him for such a situation. Quite the opposite, it made him weak and inferior in the face of the overwhelming power that Kurten represents.

Phase two: awakening The second phase is the longest one and extends over scenes seven to eighteen. The second letter home at the end of this section is much more pressing than the first and shows clear signs of Wehner’s impatience and frustration about the case and about the silence of his parents. The tone of the letter is much more honest and the style less forced. Almost immediately Wehner urges his parents to come and see him, prompting them, “Will you be coming to Dusseldorf? I need to talk to you” (Neilson 34). Wehner’s letter is an evident appeal for help. He feels lost and confesses that he is “floundering in this case […] not sleeping well, and as a result […] not thinking clearly” (Neilson 34). The letter

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is clearly saturated with anxiety, the source of which is still inexplicable to the young lawyer. Wehner senses that something has happened to him, although he still seems to be unable to truly identify either the transformation or its initiator. Mentally, he is still unaware of the impact that Kurten has on him but viscerally he feels his influence from the previous phase. When Wehner admits to his parents that he feels “as if [his] thoughts are not [his] own, [and] never were” (Neilson 34), it is more of an intuitive thought rather than a conscious insight into his own psyche. The intuition is, nevertheless, very accurate as it refers to the process of Kurten’s shamanistic manipulation of Wehner’s mind, which considerably accelerates in the second phase of Kurten’s ritualistic seduction. The stage marks a radical change in the pace and intensity of Wehner’s transformation. Having prepared the ground, Kurten decides to move on to a different approach: of ‘scare and spare’. He begins rather innocently, by asking Wehner questions which make the young man aware of his naivety about love. He then contrasts Wehner’s naïve image of love with his own terrifying experiences of it, simultaneously creating through his narration a frightening image of his childhood and of himself in the process. The monstrous image that emerges from Kurten’s memories is a preparation for an even more terrible moment when Wehner suddenly finds himself at the mercy of the killer, about whose horrid childhood experiences the young man has just learned. The momentary tension is then released as Wehner’s life is spared. The long and terrifying description of the serial killer’s traumatic childhood, which make Kurten emerge as the sublime object in the young lawyer’s mind, starts with Wehner’s question whether Kurten thought that his father loved his mother, whom he beat and abused so cruelly. Ceasing the opportunity, Kurten assumes the teacher’s role and first tries to lead Wehner to arrive at the answer himself by first asking him guiding questions in a very Socrates-like manner, and then exposing him to Kurten’s truth about love using the sublime so that Wehner can feel his way towards the answer himself. In so doing, Kurten initially makes Wehner aware of the young lawyer’s own concept of love and then puts him through an overwhelming and terrifying experience of the other concept of love, that is, Kurten’s own. Not only does he make Wehner question his familiar concepts but also to experience the other almost first-hand. The questioning also involves the humiliation of Wehner, which according to Victor Turner is a typical experience of the liminal stage (see Turner 1977: 37). And so, Kurten first asks Wehner about his definition of love. The lawyer’s reply is unsurprisingly very conventional, “Selflessness. Trust. Understanding. Affection. Happiness” (Neilson 11). Having established that Wehner has never experienced this feeling himself, Kurten pushes further, asking tauntingly, “And how have you arrived at this definition? From books, from art? From the diction-

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ary?” (Neilson 11). After Wehner admits that he knows love from the observation of his parents, Kurten continues with his lesson, ridiculing Wehner’s a priori assumption about his parents’ love by taunting him, “They must have? Because daddy must love mummy?” (Neilson 12). When Wehner attempts to defend his idea of love, arguing that “what your parents had doesn’t sound like love, it sounds more like brutality” (Neilson 12), Kurten simply retorts, “Brutality belongs to love” (Neilson 12). Though more and more shocked, the young lawyer still maintains his own views about love, which makes Kurten progress to the ‘scare’ part of his strategy. Instead of discussing the idea of love with Wehner any further, Kurten makes Wehner share his experiences of ‘love’ vicariously and sublimely. He overwhelms Wehner with terrible images from his childhood, which was filled with extreme poverty, atrocious cruelty and abuse, and of himself as a blood-thirsty monster, and puts the young man through a life and death experience. In doing so, Kurten makes Wehner feel the power of Thanatos, and how life-intensifying it can be. During Kurten’s terrifying account, Wehner remains silent for the most part, absorbing the monstrous images that the serial killer paints before his eyes. The memories are overwhelming. When Kurten tells Wehner about his first two victims, two boys, whom the eight-year-old Kurten drowned, the young man is “visibly shaken by this” (Neilson 13), especially since the victims were never associated with the serial killer before. What adds to the terrifying effect of the narration is the way Kurten recapitulates the events. Recollecting the situation, he compares his first murder to finding “a diamond washed up on the beach” and “cannot help but smile” at the memory (Neilson 13). Wehner is clearly disturbed by Kurten’s reactions and claims that now he is certain that Kurten must be insane. Morally outraged as the young man seems to be, he yet cannot help but continue to listen to the serial killer’s stories, repulsed and attracted by them at the same time. Indeed, Wehner’s reaction to another gory description of Kurten’s childhood experiences with a dog-catcher reveals that the lawyer is more on Kurten’s side than he wishes to admit. The dog-catcher lived in a room directly under Kurten’s family room, and his gloomy ‘business’ had a lasting effect on Kurten’s ‘career’ as a serial killer. The memory is truly horrifying: No one ever spoke of the sounds that came from that room But night after night I would lie awake, listening to those sorry whines and yelps And yearning to know what went on there. (Neilson 14)

One day, the young Kurten plucked up his courage and decided to look inside:

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It was a charnel house […] And through the black cloud of flies at the far end of the room and standing on newspaper was the catcher at his killing slab A small dog trembled upon it. (Neilson 14)

The catcher invited Kurten inside and took him on as his apprentice, and the boy would come over regularly to assist the catcher at his ‘work’. It was this experience that helped to develop his preference for murders, as Kurten remembers, It was during this time that I made an astonishing discovery; that the spilling of blood its coppery smell, its deep colour, caused a pleasing sensation in my crotch. I became quite addicted to that sensation. (Neilson 14– 15)

When Kurten wonders what “became of [his] dog-catcher friend”, Wehner’s suggestion is rather untypical of the well-behaved young man who cherishes high moral norms. He offers an explanation that “[p]erhaps a dog tore out [the dog-catcher’s] throat” (Neilson 15). Is this a first sign of Thanatos stirring in the young lawyer? The aggression and violence informing the remark certainly make the assumption plausible. Nevertheless, Wehner quickly falls back to his old self-righteous and ‘civilised’ self, by responding to Kurten’s offensive description of his sexual relationship with his mother and sister, showing his disgust and contempt for the serial killer, which makes the latter turn to even more drastic methods. Kurten resorts to terror. Calling Wehner a “little hypocrite” (Neilson 16), he imitates the noises that the animals made when he “was fucking dogs and sheep and pigs whilst sticking them with knives” (Neilson 16). He “squeal[s] like a pig at Wehner [who finally] bolts out of his seat terrified” (Neilson 16). Then suddenly the lights go out and Wehner finds himself in total darkness, alone with the serial killer. This is the climax of Kurten’s ‘scare and spare’ strategy and the culmination of the second phase in Wehner’s ‘education in human drives’. Exposed to a life-threatening experience when death in the form of Kurten is almost palpable, “only inches away”, Wehner is given a taste of real terror: Kurten

What a story to for your future children, Wehner. How they’ll thrill when you tell them: Trapped in the dark with the Dusseldorf Ripper. The lights snap back on. Kurten stands only inches away from Wehner. And you lived to tell the tale! They stare into each other’s eyes. (Neilson 17)

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The sudden release of tension and danger is the ‘spare’ part of Kurten’s strategy and corresponds to the sublime turn from the negative into the positive moment, during which the subject is flooded with a sudden rush of vital forces, the experience of Eros. From this moment on, a very clear difference is noticeable in Wehner’s behaviour, which is visible for instance in Wehner’s rehearsed opening speech, with its extremely passionate and very accusatory address. The positive moment of the sublime, which Burke defines as delight takes the form of an awakening of rage combined with anguish in Wehner. It is a moment of discovering a question, which in Wehner’s case is: “Do we bear monsters? Or do we create them?” (Neilson 19). Another symptom of the change is the growing connection between the two men. The experience, during which Kurten shows himself to Wehner as Thanatos, forcing the young man to face the possibility of his own demise, is unsurprisingly utterly terrifying for Wehner but paradoxically also seems to result in a greater understanding between the two, as from then on they start to bond and meld more visibly. With the conscious part of his mind switched off by the ‘scare’, that is, the negative moment of the sublime, it is impossible for Wehner to make any determinate judgements about Kurten any more. Therefore, when the ‘spare’ part, that is, the positive moment of the sublime follows, Kurten emerges for Wehner as pure energy. The experience of the sublime shows Wehner Thanatos as a life-intensifying force. Terrifying as Kurten is for him, the young man sees himself also growing closer to the killer as he feels the power of Thanatos that Kurten exudes rising in himself. Experiencing the condemned other in himself, Wehner opens his mind to Kurten, which the new understanding between the two men evinces. When for example, Kurten helps Wehner to get rid of a hiccup; they laugh together; Wehner promises Kurten, who worries that he will not have good shoes for his trial, that “we will find for you some good shoes” (Neilson 20), and in this moment “something passes between them” (Neilson 20). The gradually deepening communion of the two men is manifested even more clearly in the next scene where Wehner speaks in chorus with Kurten, telling the story of Christine Klein, a thirteen-year-old girl, who was murdered by Kurten in 1913. The specific narration technique during which Wehner and Kurten complete each other’s sentences shows the growing resemblance between the two characters. Considering the scene to be the product of Wehner’s mind, the communion may be seen as an interaction between two different parts of Wehner’s personality: his own old self, and the hidden drives represented by Kurten’s character. Alternately, it can also be considered in terms of a communication between Wehner’s id and ego. The young man feels this foreign presence, the voice of the other, in his mind but still does not know how to classify it, which he later

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expresses in his second letter home, confessing that his thoughts are not his own. Taking turns in recounting Christine’s murder, Kurten and Wehner seem in complete grammatical and semantic agreement. The specific form of finishing the sentences of the other often melds the two men into one subject:

Kurten Wehner Kurten Wehner Kurten Wehner Kurten Wehner Kurten

On the twenty-fifth of May 1913 someone had broken into their house by night intending only to rob them but instead I crept into their daughter’s bedroom where a black, black urge came upon me. I strangled her put my fingers up her and cut her throat. It happened silently. (Neilson 21– 22)

Although Wehner still speaks in the third person whenever he speaks about the murderer, his ‘someone’ seems to be on the verge of melding with his own ‘I’, which is also Kurten’s ‘I’. The other, which Wehner excludes from his own self, from his identity, finds its way back there through the narration, as the other informing the familiar. At this stage of Wehner’s transformation, the voice in his head, which is becoming more and more dominant, is still unacknowledged by Wehner. He seems to be verbally performing his new, Kurten-induced identity without even realising it. Not even when he catches himself at being more interested in the perpetrator than in the victim: Wehner

I said to them that people were bound to be more interested in Kurten because he had led such a unique life whereas his victims had only been unique in their manner of dying. (Neilson 24)

Although he almost immediately regrets making this remark by imposing control over himself again, “I wish I hadn’t said that” (Neilson 24), the ‘slip’ is significantly telling. Wehner, too, finds the serial killer more fascinating than the victims. Now that he has actually felt the powerful effect of the Thanatos drive himself, Kurten, representing this drive, has an irresistible appeal for the young man. It is the appeal of life at its most visceral and at its rawest, with all the intensity of its force. Wehner’s education in basic human instincts (and the transformation of his identity) continues as Kurten introduces his young disciple to his wife and the art of seduction, which he likens to the art of murder. In doing so, he shows Wehner

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that Thanatos and Eros are not two binary opposites, two counteracting forces of which one is good and the other evil, but that they in fact complete one another or are even parts of one and the same life force. Having exposed Wehner to the death drive, it is now time that Kurten introduces him to the sexual drive by making him acquainted with his wife. After experiencing the sublime effect of Thanatos, Wehner will now see that the same life force is at work in Eros. When Kurten mentions Frau Kurten, Wehner is completely taken aback by the idea that a serial killer can live in a ‘normal’ relationship with somebody else. And on his first encounter with Frau Kurten, he does not know how to behave and “feels very foolish, very awkward” (Neilson 27). Clearly, he has just as little idea about Eros as he had about Thanatos. Frau Kurten tells him about her husband’s “art of attracting women” (Neilson 28), which Wehner then recapitulates to the audience as if he were repeating a memorised lesson. His instructions are immediately re-enacted by Kurten and his wife in a slapstick silent movie style: Wehner First, visualise your goal! Kurten looks at Frau Kurten, then at the audience. He rubs his hands together greedily. He presents Frau Kurten with a flower, which she refuses. Kurten ponders another approach. Wehner Different people respond to different things. Kurten then presents her with a parcel. She refuses. Wehner Be persistent! (Neilson 29)

Wehner remembers that earlier Kurten compared the art of seduction to the art of murder and indeed the set of instructions is reminiscent of Kurten’s modus operandi, which he employed on Wehner before. For instance, the instruction that requires, “When you are close enough to take advantage, do not!” (Neilson 29), can be identified with the moment of darkness during which Kurten could have killed Wehner and yet he did not. And the numerous recommendations to be patient with the object of seduction/victim may be seen, for example, in Kurten’s attempts to manipulate and placate Wehner before hitting him with some shocking questions or information. The art of seduction ends with stabbing the victim with a pair of scissors and “slip[ping] the ring onto her finger” (Neilson 30), showing again that Eros and Thanatos are tightly intertwined. The scene thirteen, where Wehner meets Frau Kurten for the first time, is also the first one in which Wehner uses Kurten’s first name, indicating the further growth in intimacy between the two. The scene may be interpreted to be a ‘final exam’ for Wehner, who can be released to the outside world soon, as he is about to complete his preparation to live his life and his drives fully. Wehner is about to be born again as the title of the last scene before the second letter

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home, “Birth” may indicate. Though the scene describes the moment when Kurten decides to start murdering again, it may also be applied to the awakening of Wehner’s murderous desires and sexual needs, which the third phase of his transformation is indicative of. Wehner is re-born to life.

Phase three: incorporation The third phase is very short and closes the gap between the awakening of the drives in Wehner’s mind in the second phase to their implementation in a form of a ‘performed’ murder in phase four, adding the physical component to the equation. Having achieved the mental union with Wehner, Kurten appears here as a voice in Wehner’s head (see Neilson 34), tempting him and prompting him to take advantage of Frau Kurten. Kurten Wehner Kurten Wehner Kurten Wehner Kurten

She spoke very highly of you. Who did? My wife. I wouldn’t blame you at all. For what? Don’t you think she’s an attractive woman? […] Are you implying that I might… It’s only natural. You both have years of desire pent up inside you. What harm could there be in it? (Neilson 35)

In doing so, he seeds the ground for Wehner’s final action. The presentation of Kurten for the first time explicitly by the stage directions as “just a voice in [Wehner’s] head” (Neilson 34) indicates the even closer integration of Kurten’s ideas with Wehner’s thoughts. Or, psychologically, it may also be considered to be the strengthening of id against ego in Wehner’s self. Realising that the image of being a ‘good man’ is extremely important and deeply imbedded in Wehner’s identity, Kurten is very devious in his temptation strategy and appeals precisely to this sense of decency in the young man, persuading him that “[Frau Kurten] needs a man who can bring some decency into her life. Some purity. All the things that I [Kurten] could never give her” (Neilson 36). Kurten drapes Wehner’s sexual desire in the wrapping of decency and justifies the urge to him using Wehner’s familiar discourse. That this method is successful on Wehner is demonstrated in the next image, which takes us back from Wehner’s mind to Kurten’s prison cell. The latter is looking at a dying wasp and draws Wehner’s attention to it. As “Wehner joins him” (Neilson 36), they watch together the insect die with an identical curiosity. The apparently insignificant moment is loaded with implicit meanings, as the image of a dying wasp

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may be linked to Wehner’s previous deliberations about Frau Kurten and may signify his decision to go to her. The moment seals her fate. Subconsciously, Wehner has just made the decision to seduce Frau Kurten, which in Kurten’s vocabulary is equivalent to deciding to murder her. From now on, Wehner’s transformation into Kurten also becomes more pronounced in Wehner’s body and appears to be unstoppable. When Kurten describes his further criminal activity, this time Wehner chimes in with him not only verbally but also physically. It is not only his mind but now his body, too, which is being taken over by Kurten. First his foot starts tapping to the rhythm of Kurten’s narrative. And when Kurten “(grabs) Wehner’s shoulders, and they are rising up and dropping down alternately, Wehner allows him to do this. [And] [h]e cannot help but smile” (Neilson 38). At some point in the narration, the two men begin dancing together and their movements become more and more frantic. After a while the recounting is suddenly halted when Kurten “slaps Wehner on the face” (Neilson 39) as if he wanted to bring his hypnotised patient back out of a trance. Wehner is “stunned, horrified at the realisation of what he’s been doing” (Neilson 39). The young man’s reaction clearly demonstrates that the drives are taking control of his body and senses, becoming stronger and stronger. The sensual and bodily change of the third phase is visibly tangible in his third letter home, which seems to have been written in a state of utter distress and frenzy. The letter is comparatively long and almost entirely abandons the civil and polite tones of Wehner’s earlier writing. The young man is literally screaming at his parents. His form of expression is very chaotic and combines many different issues. Although at first glance it is Wehner’s need for justice and compassion for the killer’s victims that comes across most visibly through his letter, the writing also strongly reverberates with his recently awoken more basic and less cultivated desires. Very often it is not so easy to tell whether he is actually speaking about the victims or himself: Every one of those victims was someone’s daughter, someone’s lover, someone’s brother, son. Imagine their thoughts. Imagine the details of their thoughts. Imagine thinking about your child’s last moments on this earth, alone, afraid, the child that you made, the child that you saw smile for the first time, that you saw walk, that you heard talk. What noises did it make in that last moment? What look was in its eyes? Did it feel pain when the blade went in? Did it call out your name? (Neilson 40)

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Although Wehner may be referring here to Kurten’s victims and the anguish of their parents and closest family, which he may have experienced and witnessed when interrogating them about the case, the detailed questions and the imagery are also very voyeuristic and sensual. Indeed, they echo Kurten’s descriptions of the excitement that he experiences during the act of murder at the sight of “the spilling of blood / its coppery smell, its deep colour” (Neilson 15) and at the noise that pigs made when he “was fucking [them] whilst sticking them with knives” (Neilson 16). Compassion is mixed with the voyeuristic curiosity and excitement about the death and pain of the other. This complex and somewhat conflicted feeling belongs to the experience of the sublime, which these images may evoke in Wehner, raising him beyond the ideas of morality and immorality. Indeed, it is difficult to distinguish one from another, just as in the moment when Wehner and Kurten watch the wasp die and Wehner asks Kurten about his motivation, whether he does it more out of malice or sympathy. Kurten answers, “You know / I can’t tell any more” (Neilson 36). Even though we may want to pretend to be completely on the morally good side, claiming that it is pure compassion for the victims that we feel, it is still difficult or even hypocritical to repress and deny the more primordial urges of our nature, Eros and Thanatos, which are also involved in the experience. The letter further continues: Because maybe she walked out the door that night and out of your life and maybe you didn’t even say goodbye. And you sit there sorting through her things, the tatty toys she used to hug, her tiny shoes […] and you think maybe if I had done this or that then maybe she’d still be alive maybe she is still alive maybe there’s been some mistake and then it hits you again the deafening slam of the irreversible; she’s gone, she’s gone for ever She’s gone for ever. (Neilson 40)

It is impossible to decide whether Wehner is sympathetic with the victims, or whether he is sorry for himself, grieving the loss of the only woman he might have been in love with. This reference to his childhood love, which possibly was Wehner’s only love, has been consistent through all his earlier letters home. It is probably also no coincidence that her name is Eva, which is also the name of Kurten’s wife. The two women seem to meld in Wehner’s memory and become the expression of his repressed sexual drive, which he had never lived out so far. It is quite evident that Wehner blames his parents for this

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loss, which may also be equated with the partial loss of Wehner’s self, if we assume, after Freud, that the id is an important component of our identity. The resentment towards his parents that reverberates in the letter is an expression of Wehner’s disappointment with them and their indifferent silence. Describing the terrible pain of the bereaved parents of the victims and their attempts to come to terms with their loss, Wehner levels a hidden accusation at his own parents and their emotional disinterest towards their own son. He feels abandoned and deserted by them and by society as such, as Wehner’s parents may be also seen as the representation of the Freudian super-ego and thus of all authoritative bodies. Those who were supposed to be his teachers and his guardians, and in whose ‘teachings’ he used to believe almost religiously, failed him and left him disillusioned. The values and principles that they preached turned out to be invalid, insufficient and weak, leaving him helpless and unprepared for the reality of the outside world. Kurten’s way of life, in turn, paradoxically seemed to be more honest. Unlike Wehner’s parents and other ‘decent’ members of society, Kurten actually lived by the values and ideas that he believed in, even though he knew that he was risking his life in doing so. This ‘honesty’ validated his way of life for Wehner. Of course, this may sound as if the play were trying to justify or even glorify the serial killer’s action or his way of life. The actuality is far from it. We have to remember that this is not the real Kurten that is presented to us, but his ghostly shaman-like representation in Wehner’s mind, connecting Wehner back to his primordial nature and instincts, Eros and Thanatos, and in so doing, empowering him and giving Wehner a deeper insight into his human nature.

Phase four: execution The fourth stage shows Wehner living out the life force and its two different sides in an almost pure state: he seduces Frau Kurten (Eros) and then murders her (Thanatos). Of course, once again, it is important to remember that all this happens only in Wehner’s mind, which becomes the liminal space, beyond any social norms. It is an experience of being driven by both Eros and Thanatos in an extreme way, without being held back and supervised by the authoritative voice of the super-ego in any form, either his parents or society. Wehner’s uncontrollable and hysterical laughter and his more and more frenzied behaviour indicate a growing loss of control over himself, which becomes total in the silent scene where he murders Frau Kurten. Eros and Thanatos increasingly drive Wehner’s conduct, which is visualised, for example, in the sudden appearance of Kurten behind Wehner’s back, giving him advice how to seduce Frau Kurten (Neilson 43). No longer in charge of his actions Wehner

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seems like a puppet, steered and overwhelmed by a force that he has no power over. Kurten dominates Wehner’s mind, dictating his every move and pushing him further and further towards a total experience of Eros and Thanatos. Having integrated Kurten’s voice into his own, Wehner finally yields to this influence and the urges that it provokes in him. He “pulls [Frau Kurten] to him and kisses her. She resists only for a moment. His hand grasps at her breasts. They sink to the ground and the lights fade with them. In the darkness, we hear Kurten’s laughter” (Neilson 44). From now on, Frau Kurten’s voice also joins in the narration of Kurten’s crimes. The scene manifests the newly born unison of the three voices: Eros (Frau Kurten) and Thanatos (Kurten), making up the id, and Wehner’s voice, which makes up the ego. The degree of Wehner’s identification with Frau Kurten and Peter Kurten, or their integration into Wehner’s identity, is also shown in scene twenty-four, when Frau Kurten, who acted dead for the last scene, suddenly “looks at Wehner, and […] comes alive. She reaches out to touch him” (Neilson 47) and addresses him by her husband’s name, Peter. Although Wehner is “horrified” by her behaviour and “[having recoiled] from her touch […] staggers away” (Neilson 47), he cannot escape Frau Kurten. Describing the story of the crime that led to the serial killer’s arrest, Wehner sees himself identified with Kurten. It is as if he were telling somebody else’s story, simultaneously realising that this person is in fact himself. He sees Frau Kurten, who this time represents both Eros and Thanatos, approach him and he cannot do anything about it. In this moment, he recognises that he, too, is capable of things that he never thought himself capable of. Defenceless and paralysed he can only follow her lead, his newly reborn instincts. When Frau Kurten approaches him, he merely “squeezes shut his eyes” (Neilson 48) and lets himself be touched by her, even if it feels like “being touched by death itself” (Neilson 48). The touch of Eros is simultaneously the touch of Thanatos, the image clearly manifesting a strong relationship between love and death. Kurten helps Wehner understand this paradox even further. He convinces Wehner that now that he loves Frau Kurten, he has to murder her as well. Kurten Wehner Kurten

Do you love her? I suppose I must. Then you can’t stop there. You must see it through. (Neilson 49)

Wehner seems to be confused at first, not knowing how Kurten arrived at this disturbing conclusion and rationally still rejecting such a line of reasoning. Kurten explains that death and destruction are the states that all want and need,

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though not all recognise this fact.⁹ They are our deepest desire, the glimpse of which Georges Bataille believes can be experienced in eroticism. Bataille considers the sexual act to be an experience of ourselves as continuous, that is no longer as individual separate human beings but as belonging to the source of our existence, the place where we came from before we became separate and therefore discontinuous entities as human beings. The two states of existence that Bataille distinguishes between, discontinuous and continuous, constitute the core of human nature, of whom we essentially are. We are discontinuous in our autonomous bodies and lives but we are also driven by a longing for our lost sense of being one with the rest of the world: We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. We find the state of affairs that binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear. Along with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should last, there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking us with everything that is. (Bataille 2006: 15)

When we are alive, we are in a state of discontinuity, that is, separate in our bodies from other human beings, objects and the world in general. And we experience this incommensurability, this disconnectedness with the other on a daily basis, for example when we try to communicate with other people or attempt to grasp the world. According to Bataille, humans suffer from this discontinuity, constantly endeavouring to overcome it, by inventing new ways of communicating, which, however, are inevitably doomed to fail. The struggle is symptomatic of the desire to become continuous with the rest of the world, with the other. This can only be permanently achieved in death. There are, however, also ways of experiencing death and continuity while remaining discontinuous, that is, alive, which can “substitute for the individual isolated discontinuity a feeling of profound continuity” (Bataille 2006: 15). Bataille argues that “the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation” (Bataille 2006: 16) as it is “existence itself [that is] at stake in the transition from discontinuity to continuity” (Bataille 2006: 17) and this transition can only be brought about by an act of violence, “a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder” (Bataille 2006: 17). During the sexual act, and more pre-

 And although this may sound preposterous coming from a serial killer, this conflation of desire and death has been expressed by many since ancient times (see Dollimore), though admittedly in a less shocking way. John Keats, for instance, writing to Fanny Brawne on 25 June 1819 formulates this paradoxical desire using the following words, “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Lovliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute” (qtd in Dollimore xxii).

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cisely, at its climactic moment, the persons involved in it suddenly cease to exist, losing themselves in the other. This momentary death is an ecstatic experience of our continuity with the other, the latter being both the source of our existence, be it the primal energy of the universe or a supreme being, and also the other human being.¹⁰ It is “a fusion where both [partners] are mingled, attaining the same degree of dissolution. The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives” (Bataille 2006: 17). What happens in this moment is a temporary surrender of our subjectivity to the other. We sacrifice our autonomy in order to transcend the state of our discontinuity and feel ourselves continuous with the other. Violence in the form of self-sacrifice is thus an important facet of the sexual act if the latter is to be the experience of the communion with the other. Or as Kurten puts it, “brutality belongs to love” (Neilson 12). Bataille also names a further significant component of the sexual act, the anguish connected to the necessity of stripping naked: “Nakedness offers a contrast to self-possession, to discontinuous existence […]. It is a state of communication revealing a quest for a possible continuance of being beyond the confines of the self” (Bataille 2006: 17). In order to engage with the other, the subject has to strip naked not only of his or her clothes but also, emotionally, of all the possible barriers that the subject might have built around him- or herself for protective purposes. This can be a very disconcerting and even frightening experience as it leaves the subject vulnerable to the other, as “the self is dispossessed” (Bataille 2006: 18), that is, loses control over his or her life in the act. Yet, it is also an indispensable stage of the sexual act, without which the communion with the other would not be possible. There are many parallels between Bataille’s explication of the sexual act and the aesthetic of the sublime. The sublime may therefore be considered to be the aesthetic representation of the sexual act and the momentary experience of continuity as Bataille describes it. The stage of the anguish and the necessity of stripping naked corresponds to the negative moment of the sublime, when all the faculties of the mind are suspended and the subject’s consciousness of

 Interesting in this context of the human desire for continuity with the other is the explanation offered by Plato in his Symposium relating the myth about the division of the human in two halves by Zeus who found the human too powerful and wanted to weaken ‘it’: “Man’s original body having been thus cut in two, each half yearned for the half from which it had been severed. When they met they threw their arms round one another and embraced, in their longing to grow together again, and they perished of hunger and general neglect of their concerns, because they would not do anything apart” (qtd in Dollimore 12). Just as in Bataille’s theory, the continuity reclaimed in the sexual act is paid for with the lovers’ annihilation.

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him or herself is halted for a moment. This negative experience turns into a positive one when the subject experiences the other in him or herself, as indeterminacy. The subject becomes one with the other, even though he or she cannot grasp the other intellectually or permanently. To turn back to the play, what Kurten means by claiming that we all yearn for destruction may be interpreted as the human desire for continuity. This desire can be partially fulfilled during the sexual act. Wehner experiences Frau Kurten’s touch as the touch of death, because the experience of Eros involves also the experience of Thanatos. What is theatrically represented as ‘the touch’ may, consequently, be interpreted as an image symbolising the sexual act, during which Wehner experiences the annihilation of his own subjectivity. That Wehner and Frau Kurten had a sexual encounter with one another, at least in Wehner’s mind, is later confirmed by the latter in the conversation with Kurten in the following scene. The serial killer convinces Wehner that the logical consequence of his deed is murdering Frau Kurten, and hands him “a surreal and hideous-looking” hammer (Neilson 49). For, in order to understand the intricacies of love Wehner has to “go to it” (Neilson 50). He needs to experience death in its extremity and intensity, because he needs to feel it without intellectually analysing or understanding it. Only by pushing himself to his mental and emotional limits will he be able to lose himself in the experience and open himself to the new perception of love, life and death and modify his old ideas or even leave them behind entirely. This is precisely what happens in scene twenty-six, entitled “The art of murder”, which is probably the most terrifying scene of the play, during which Wehner murders Frau Kurten in a very relentless and brutal act of homicide. The whole scene is very long: in the first performance it lasted about six minutes, as Aleks Sierz recalls but it “felt much longer” (Sierz 2001: 70), and was hard to bear. Frau Kurten is continuously beaten, strangled, dragged onto the stage and her legs are broken. Finally, the murderous sequence is ended with Wehner’s final blows: “Wehner is like an animal, beating her head. He screams a terrible, triumphant scream. Frau Kurten dies. Wehner collapses over her body” (Neilson 52). His education in human drives is complete, which his last letter home lays bare. Before discussing Wehner’s last letter home, it is important to emphasise again that the whole scenario of the scene takes place only in Wehner’s mind and is a matter of a struggle among the different drives in Wehner’s consciousness. Even though the audience sees Frau Kurten die onstage, it does not mean that Wehner remembers the true occurrence here, which becomes even clearer in the next scene, where Frau Kurten ‘miraculously’ comes back to life. In all probability, Wehner did not become a murderer in real life. Although it might seem that the play condones violence in presenting the murder and death to be the

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high point of erotic excitement, it does, indeed, just the opposite. It affirms and protects life, though using the experience of violence to do so. In line with Bataille’s ideas about the necessity of violence in our lives, we seek continuity “but generally only if that continuity which the death of discontinuous beings can alone establish is not the victor in the long run. What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain” (Bataille 2006: 19). Indeed, committing a murder would constitute an “aberration exceed[ing] that limit” (Bataille 2006: 19). The experience of our drive towards death and destruction is insofar important as it can show us “which way these stirrings would take us” (Bataille 2006: 19) should we listen to them. “They are simply a sign to remind us constantly that death, the rupture of the discontinuous individualities to which we cleave in terror, stands there before us more real than life itself” (Bataille 2006: 19). The act of murder, which Wehner commits in his mind, is there to show him not only that death is real and we are all capable of bringing it upon other human beings and ourselves but also how powerful and energizing death drive can be. It is this visceral knowledge that Wehner gains from the experience, the acceptance of Thanatos in himself, that perhaps saves him from participating in the atrocities of the Second World War. Wehner’s last letter home shows the transformation that he went through. Its style is no longer frantic or anxious, but predominantly saturated with feelings of resignation, sadness and resentment. It is also very short, merely a few lines in which Wehner informs his parents that he will no longer need them as he has just learned “that the appeal has failed” (Neilson 54). Although the sad tone of the letter may be ascribed to the disappointment with the case’s outcome, the sorrow seems to run deeper. It is a farewell letter of a broken man, who though gained some knowledge about human nature, also lost his innocence and idealism with all its carelessness and certainties. Saying goodbye to his parents and everything he has believed so far, Wehner seems to be mourning this irrevocable loss. Even though, as he describes it, “he has a new father now” (Neilson 54), he still grieves the loss of his earlier innocent self. Even though he learned so much about human nature, the experience was extremely traumatic and left him with a feeling of emptiness. Opening him to a new perception of what is human, the sublime encounter with Kurten/Thanatos and Frau Kurten/Eros also left his world destabilised and shaky, removing the stable ground from under Wehner’s feet. This melancholic feeling tainted with bitterness is also expressed by Wehner in one of his last conversations with Kurten, shortly before the latter’s execution. During the last meeting, the serial killer tells Wehner about his only regret, which is “that [he] will not live to hear the children sing about [him] in the play-

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grounds as they sing about Jack in London” (Neilson 55). Though Wehner’s seemingly confident reply that “It will never happen” (Neilson 55) may give the impression that, as Kurten remarks, the young lawyer “regained that old certainty of [his]” (Neilson 55) again, Wehner is in fact far from it and sadly admits that Kurten “did too good a job for that” (Neilson 55). The final dialogue between the two shows that the young man has lost his earlier unflinching attitude. Before answering Kurten’s question as to whether there are people who love each other “without fear, without pain” Wehner replies “yes”, but only after a pause. When Kurten asks him “But is that the truth? How do you know?”, Wehner’s answer is anything but confident, “(sighs) I don’t, Peter. I don’t. But that’s my truth. For now” (Neilson 55). Although Wehner is clearly traumatized by Kurten’s influence in his life and considers himself to be branded by the experience, it can be argued that, in a sense, he owes Kurten his life. The latter is the transformative violence that Bataille speaks of when referring to sacrificial violence, which can save the subject from destructive violence in real life. The traumatic encounter with Kurten arguably saved Wehner from greater violence. Showing him the human capacity for brutality and revealing his own murderous instincts to him, the situation made Wehner experience himself as weak and vulnerable. It demonstrated to him that no-one is free from the drive to destruction and how dangerous it is to believe the opposite, as his words in the final scene of the play manifest: Wehner

In the years that followed Peter’s execution I and a great many ‘normal’ men were to do things we had never thought ourselves capable of. I was lucky. Before my hands got too bloody, I fled from my homeland, found a woman I love dearly and had two beautiful children by her. The law is no longer my concern. (Neilson 58)

Arguably, the shattering of his faith in so called “‘normal’ men” allowed Wehner to escape the violence of war “before [his] hands got too bloody”. No longer so easily convinced by authoritarian views, he did not give in to the totalitarian ideology, was able to recognise the situation for what it was and escape it in time. Undeniably Wehner lost a great deal due to the encounter with Kurten: the stability and security of his life and beliefs. Broken down and traumatised as the experience seems to have left him, it also gave him a much deeper insight into

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the human nature, which cannot be judged along clear lines of right and wrong. The sublime experience of himself as murderer, as condemned, allowed Wehner to broaden his perception of himself as human.

3.2.4 The External Level: Ecstasy of Minds In order to explain how the sublime response is evoked in the audience, I will refer to Erika Fischer-Lichte’s concept of the intensity of the performance’s appearance (Intensität der Erscheinung, see Fischer-Lichte 288), which manifests the way the sublime is catalysed in Normal: by manipulating the different levels of intensity onstage. According to Fischer-Lichte, there are three basic strategies that generate the intensity of performance: (1) the actor’s presence; (2) the ecstasy of things; and (3) the intensity of the atmosphere. The audience’s sublime aesthetic response during the performance of Normal is produced by the last two strategies in particular, although the first one can, too, substantially contribute to the overall aesthetic of intensity and, in doing so, to the formation of the catalyst of the sublime response in the audience.

The actor’s presence What Fischer-Lichte means by the actor’s presence is “die leibliche Erscheinung des Akteurs, die den Raum besetzt und die Zuschauer zwingt, ihre Aufmerksamkeit auf ihn zu fokussieren” (Fischer-Lichte 289). This intense bodily appearance of the actor activates in the audience (and in him or herself, too) free energy, which circulates in the theatrical space and can be palpably felt by all the participants as the intensity of the actor’s presence (see Fischer-Lichte 289). Clearly, the more intense the actor’s bodily presence onstage, the more sublime Kurten’s appearance will be. If the actor manages to show himself in the dichotomy between the role of Kurten and the actor’s real physical self, he may intensify the effect of the sublime that Kurten’s character has on the audience. By mesmerising the audience through his own physicality, the actor may ensnare the audience’s senses and make the audience struggle between their determinate moral judgement of the character and their attraction to the actor, that is, between their indeterminate judgement of the sublime. A similar ambivalence or opacity is at work at the internal level of the play, in Wehner’s changing perception of Kurten. For the young lawyer Kurten, too, appears simultaneously as a serial killer and the mesmeric other, the force of life, which Wehner feels the urge to tap into and become continuous with. The intense presence of the actor thus puts another

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layer on the already ambivalent effect of Kurten’s character for the audience externally.

The ecstasy of things Though the actor’s intense presence onstage may contribute substantially to the performance’s intensity of appearance, it is Ficher-Lichte’s second category, the ecstasy of things, that is most prevalent in generating the sublime aesthetic response in Normal. Fischer-Lichte defines ecstatic things as objects which are not self-contained, closed objects in themselves but “treten vielmehr aus sich heraus, zeigen sich, erscheinen in besonders intensiver Weise als gegenwärtig, so daß sie sich der Aufmerksamkeit des Zuschauers aufdrängen” (Fischer-Lichte 289). The aesthetic of the sublime, too, employs ecstatic objects in its first, negative moment, in which they catalyse the feeling of terror or privation in the audience. When the object, which in everyday life seems determinate and familiar to us, suddenly appears in a completely new light and frees itself from its teleological and determinate concept; as a result, the perceiving subject is deprived of his or her conventional image of the reality. It is the familiar made to appear unfamiliar, which threatens our habitual ‘gaze’ and the status quo. Kurten is construed by the play’s text to emerge as such an ecstatic object, which then catalyses the experience of the sublime for the audience. Just as internally Kurten and his stories serve as the catalyst of the sublime for Wehner, Wehner’s reminiscing narrative catalyses the experience of the sublime both internally for himself as a repetition of the trauma and externally for the audience, by making the sublime construct in Wehner’s mind that Kurten is re-emerge for the audience in a three-phased sequence in its full intensity, i. e., as an ecstatic object. The three stages construing Kurten’s sublime emergence in the audience’s mind begin as (1) the experience of Kurten as the ‘familiar unfamiliar’ during which the audience can still relatively easily detach itself from Kurten’s world and exclude him from the concept of the human, morally condemning his way of life. In the next stage the audience is led to (2) the experience of Kurten as both familiar and terrifyingly other. This is the sublime state of indeterminacy: suspending the category of moral condemnation; the state of betwixt and between the conscious and the subconscious. Finally, in the last phase, the audience is steered to (3) the recognition of Kurten as part of itself and to experiencing itself as condemned. In the first, rather short and predominantly conscious phase, the audience is steered to making a choice between two apparently totally opposite worlds and value systems: Wehner’s and Kurten’s. In this phase, still not knowing much about either of the characters, the audience tends to sympathise with Wehner,

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who is the more familiar of the two, and see itself as belonging to his category of the human rather than to that of Kurten, whom they only know from Wehner’s narrative, which dominates the beginning of the play and describes the serial killer to the audience. In this phase it is still easy for the audience to condemn Kurten. Parallel to Wehner’s narrative voice, in the first tableau of the play Kurten is also represented in the pantomimic image of the killer standing “in an unnaturally stiff pose, (with) his back to the audience” (Neilson 3). Not having a concrete face yet, Kurten is presented to the audience as the absolutely other, which is not yet sublime. His absolute indeterminacy makes him, paradoxically, determinate for the members of the audience, who at this stage can still consciously (=conceptually) detach itself from Kurten and exclude him from their own concept of the human and the familiar. Kurten is deemed at this stage as the ‘familiar unfamiliar’: the killer. It is only when the clear separation of the familiar from the unfamiliar is no longer possible that the other appears as the sublime. This first image of Kurten’s is still too far away from the audience to be experienced as the sublime other. From this moment on, Kurten’s presence will only intensify until it reaches the edges of the audience’s consciousness. At this point, however, the other’s appearance is still not strong or powerful enough to become a real threat or/and appeal to the members of the audience, as it has not yet reached the sublime realm of betwixt and between the subconscious and the conscious. The audience sees Kurten from a distance that is still too great to experience him as the sublime; so it simply experiences him as an absolutely foreign body, not belonging to and unwanted in the audience’s familiar reality. The image of Kurten’s back turned towards the audience may symbolise the apparently clear cut dividing him from Wehner’s and the audience’s consciousness. He is presented as a faceless silhouette. This facelessness makes it easier for the audience to detach itself from Kurten and exclude him and everything that he stands for from its lives. The moment he turns his face towards Wehner and the audience, however, the situation changes radically. Kurten enters the space of betwixt and between the subconscious and conscious, the sublime phase, and the struggle begins, as it is no longer so easy to dismiss Kurten as the absolute other. It is the moment when the other and the familiar find themselves in dangerously close proximity to the apparently unfamiliar. In this sublime phase, betwixt and between the conscious and the subconscious, the audience is confronted with Kurten as the other that repulses and attracts them simultaneously. The serial killer is presented as a sublime/ecstatic object, which terrifying as he is exerts such power over the subject that the latter cannot look away or detach him or herself from him by making moral judgements. By presenting Kurten with his back towards

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the audience, the first phase made it possible for the audience to condemn Kurten as a merciless and inhuman criminal. Such a judgement becomes increasingly problematic in the sublime phase, when the members of the audience find themselves face to face with Kurten, who is no longer a universal but a particular other; an other in which they can recognise some familiar though still indeterminate contours; with a face which is no longer a blank space but which the longer they look into the more it resembles their own. This apparent familiarity, combined with the power that Kurten’s character exudes, makes the members of the audience waver in their moral condemnation of the serial killer. Even though his deeds may scare and repulse them, they find themselves unable to turn against Kurten, to condemn his acts as immoral and side with Wehner. The former appears as a much more attractive character than the young lawyer, who is weak, immature and extremely naïve. Faced with the serial killer, with somebody whom common sense tells the audience to shun, the audience is nevertheless mesmerised by his sublime emergence. It finds itself under the power of the sublime object that Kurten represents through his intense and ecstatic appearance, and experiences a terrifying attraction and delight in the both horrific and ecstatic images that he generates. The pleasure is terrifying because, considered in rational and moral terms, the images are atrocious and inhuman. Where exactly does this power of Kurten’s character come from that makes him so irresistible to the audience? What makes the spectators respond to Kurten in such a powerful way is that they recognise and experience in him what Wehner experiences during his transformation, too; that is, Bataille’s unstoppable human desire for continuity, which, for the most part, the members of the audience do not allow themselves to live out consciously and they do so for good reasons. In doing so, they repress an aspect of themselves which is nonetheless a crucial part of human life. It is, therefore, the terrifying recognition of Kurten’s inhumanity within their own humanity that makes his presence so indelible in their minds. Only in theatre can the audience let itself experience the terrifying force of Thanatos, because it offers only a simulation of the real thing, which is powerful enough to make the audience feel its impact (the threat of privation) but is artificially constructed and therefore risk-free. Kurten emerges as a sublime representation of Thanatos, giving the members of the audience the opportunity to face it along with their innermost fears in safe circumstances. They agree to expose themselves to such terrible intensity because they live through the intense images of Kurten’s murderous deeds only vicariously. And in the end, the experience turns out to be extremely energizing and life-intensifying.

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The pleasures of the sublime originate from displeasures and consist in the complex and paradoxical feeling of a threat and the removal of that threat, in increasing the intensity of the terrible presence and decreasing it. Exposed to the play’s overwhelming descriptions of unimaginable cruelty the audience is paralysed for a moment, unable to take in the extreme aesthetic object, that is, Kurten and his stories, only to return back to its consciousness (and language) in the next second, which is now energised and experienced more powerfully. And this is precisely where, according to Derrida (see Derrida 1987; Cheetham) and Lyotard (see Lyotard 1994), the pleasure and the power of the sublime feeling lies: in our heightened awareness of our consciousness of ourselves, which we experience upon restoring the limits of our thinking; of our mind re-framing or ‘restarting’ itself. Similarly, Lyotard points out that “what ‘the voice of reason’ says in the sublime feeling” is “that ‘there is thought’” and “this is what is truly exalting” (Lyotard 1994: 122). Bataille, too, sees the experience of our continuity (death) as being ecstatic but it is not the experience of death as such that is important for Bataille but the life-intensifying effect of the brief contact with it. Therefore, it is not about the removal of the frames that hold our life together in its discontinuity but about the experience of the frames themselves, of the limits of our life, which intensifies our consciousness of it. In Normal the audience is not steered towards the moral assessment of Kurten’s deeds but towards the experience of life at its rawest and purest through the ritualistically transformative violence of the images and their intensity of appearance onstage. There seem to be quite a few moments in the sublime phase of the play when the audience can experience Kurten’s character as an ecstatic object and feel their consciousness restart and create itself anew. These moments overlap with Wehner’s short moments of paralysis and shock during his first three phases in his experience of liminality. They culminate in the murder scene, where the audience is made complicit in the killing of Frau Kurten and in so doing put into the category of the condemned with Kurten and Wehner. Just like Wehner, the audience is caught up in the sublime power of Kurten’s character and finds itself unable either to condemn or to approve of his way of life. The audience struggles between what is morally right and what seems irrational and immoral if considered in real terms, but life-affirming if ritualised and aestheticised in a theatrical performance. It is a struggle then between experiencing the force of the image and drawing energy from it on the one hand, and analysing it according to principles of moral and social law on the other. In the aesthetic of the sublime, it is the former that takes priority over the latter. The sublime phase is thus characterised by the impossibility of making a determinate judgement about Kurten’s behaviour. The audience alternates between being fascinated by and attracted to the serial killer’s intense appearance and

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repulsed and terrified by the depravity of his deeds. Such is the mesmerising power of Kurten’s character, however, that even the most atrocious descriptions of his murders cannot stop the audience from being enticed by him. The sublime phase is the space where the audience comes closer to Kurten’s world and distances itself from Wehner’s value system subconsciously, that is without making a conscious decision about it, but by being viscerally attracted to the life-force that Kurten represents by integrating Eros and Thanatos in himself and which the audience can sense but not rationalise or name. It is in these moments of being torn between the visceral attraction, which makes the audience suspend its consciousness (its conscious use of the concepts of understanding to judge Kurten) for a split-second, and the moments when this consciousness is created anew that the sublime feeling is experienced: in the birth of new ways of thinking and perceiving. The new perception of life is negotiated gradually, in a sequence of moments of betwixt and between, which the sublime phase consists of, and which both Wehner and the audience have to go through. These moments gradually transform their consciousness towards a greater experience of life in an enhanced form, intensified by the experiences of Eros and Thanatos. The sublime phase ends with the members of the audience’s experience of themselves as condemned and sudden realisation that what they have been considering as other so far has been a repressed part of themselves all the while, which has now been only activated by the encounter with Kurten and has shifted from the subconscious to the conscious part of their mind. This is the next transitional moment: from the sublime space back to the conscious space. The new consciousness is expanded to recognise the inhuman in the human. The audience is pushed to this realisation throughout the play but the climactic moment that steers the audience to this awareness even more intensely is the murder of Frau Kurten. During this scene, the audience is involuntarily made to participate also bodily in the act, as the character in an attempt to escape its murderous persecutor suddenly “invade(s) the audience space” (Neilson 52) and seeks shelter among its members. With the fourth wall torn down, the audience is confronted with the possibility of acting itself. Will it decide to reject the conventions of theatre and try to help Frau Kurten hide? Will the audience be bold enough to undermine the frame imposed upon it culturally? The situation is quite frightening. Not only does it question the conventional opposition of actor and spectator, character and audience, but it also makes the audience pay for their inaction. Allowing Wehner to “catch her and drag her kicking and screaming back to the stage” (Neilson 52), the audience tacitly sentences her to a horrible death. Till now, the audience’s silent approval of the immoral acts and images onstage has remained within the frame of the audience’s mind. The violation of the physical distance between stage and the auditorium makes the members of the audi-

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ence become accomplices also at the bodily level and by extension, experience itself just as condemned as Wehner does, too.

The intensity of atmosphere Contributing to the overall intensity of the play’s atmosphere and, consequently, to the generation of the audience’s response to Kurten as the sublime object is the particular aesthetic form of partly narrated and partly performed memory, constantly keeping the audience’s attention on edge. This aesthetic form creates the sublime space and time for the audience by exposing them to overwhelming content in a very unstable and often surreal form of a traumatic “memory of a memory” (Neilson 3). The mixture of the increasingly frantic language of Wehner’s letters home; the constant shift between different fictional levels of the story; switching from Wehner’s overarching voice of narration to Wehner’s voice as part of the reminiscence, from facts to events distorted by the traumatic memory; makes it impossible for the audience to relax and let itself be entertained but holds its attention throughout the whole performance of the play very intensely. Confronted by the juxtaposition of rationally explicable and irrational images, the play’s form opens up the sublime space, where the audience is steered to vicariously experience the collapse of conventional binary oppositions such as reality and dream; life and death; love and brutality; the familiar and the unfamiliar; subject and object. The terrifying quality of the stories described to the audience is increased by the unreliable narration which, due to its unpredictable turns from the (internally) real to the fictional, and from realistic images back to the surreal and dreamlike scenarios, takes away any possibility of finding stable ground, a fixed frame, from which the audience could rationally analyse the dramatic situation and find comfort in the stability of determinate concepts. A good example of how the real intermingles with the surreal, conscious memory of the real event with its reverberations in the subconscious mind, is the first and probably the most dominant image overarching and looming over the whole play: the tableau vivant of Kurten and the swan in the amusement arcade. The whole play emerges from this initial tableau, showing Kurten as part of the puppet performance activated by the insertion of a coin. This image taps into Wehner’s subconscious and catalyses the traumatic memory in him, impelling him to tell the story of his encounter with the serial killer. The individual elements of the tableau vivant recur throughout the whole play, contributing to the dreamlike atmosphere of the performance. The audience sees and hears Wehner describe the moment when he activated the mechanism of what first looked like “a sweet-dispenser of some kind”

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(Neilson 3) and then turned out to be a puppet show portraying Peter Kurten. Parallel to Wehner’s voice the audience is shown what seem to be life-size representations of the real puppet show retrieved from and distorted by Wehner’s subconscious mind, which the sudden snapping on and off of the lights upon the tableau manifests. Kurten appears in the scenario as a human puppet, a character that is evidently a living human being and yet whose whole behaviour and posture are more reminiscent of a marionette. The real Peter Kurten is merged in Wehner’s mind with his puppet representation from the amusement arcade, making it also impossible for the audience to differentiate between and separate one from the other. The initial tableau is extended over the rest of the play by means of the “Refrain” scenes (II, IV and XXIV), infusing the aesthetic form with the echoes from Wehner’s mind and increasing the intensity of the performance’s dreamlike atmosphere. The first two scenes are extremely short glimpses of the initial tableau, showing “Kurten in silhouette. He is looking up at the swan. We hear the voice of Kurten’s wife, and as we do the swan sinks slowly back down behind the stage” (Neilson 4). The insertion of such peculiar refrains among Wehner’s comparatively rational narration of the traumatic event and among what seem to be realistic representations of Kurten’s interrogations, undermines the appearance of a coherent and logical story-telling. The consistent recapitulation and representation of events is disturbed and melded with irrational images and subconsciously coded messages from Wehner’s mind, which makes what initially seemed to be a realistic and graspable representation of events much less so. The audience has to grapple with the different modes of representation, which switch without much warning. The last “Refrain” scene also includes Wehner’s voice cutting into Frau Kurten’s recurring initial appeal: Frau Kurten

Peter? Peter, what is it that’s happened? Peter, what have you done this time? The police were looking for you Is it serious? What is it that’s happened, Peter? Peter, what have you done? (Neilson 4)

The inclusion of Wehner’s narrative voice in the realm of the subconscious manifests the growing impossibility of differentiation between the real and surreal, between the narration of the event and the traumatic dream: Frau Kurten Peter? Wehner, horrified, recoils from her touch and staggers away.

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Back in May of 1929, a young girl, Maria Budlick, approached a man in the street and asked him if he knew the whereabouts of a hostel. He offered to show her the way. She went with him. Peter, what is it that’s happened? When he led her into a park, she became scared. (Neilson 47)

The unexpected twists and turns of the narrative, assisted by numerous subconscious images presented non-verbally make the threatening character of Kurten, and by extension, the emergence of Thanatos, even more intense for the audience. They open up ‘gaps’, or, as Iser calls them, indeterminacies (see Iser 59 – 60), in the representation of the story, through which Kurten as the harbinger of death may touch the members of the audience. Since the latter are forced to fill in the holes (indeterminacies) by resorting to their own experiences of death, they are also forced to interact with Kurten’s terrible reality. An image of Kurten’s reality informs the reality of our minds and the other way round. The holes, or indeterminacies in the form framing the play, allow for the interaction between the stage and the audience (internal and external systems), which means, by extension, that the audience can experience Kurten similarly to how Wehner does, as an artificial construct which suddenly emerges in his mind in very intense and ecstatic forms of Eros and Thanatos and taps into the urges from its subconscious realm. It is a moment of the consciousness being reborn again.

3.3 Mark Ravenhill’s Faust Is Dead Loosely based on the Faust legend,¹¹ Mark Ravenhill’s Faust is Dead (1997) is first and foremost a play about seduction and desire. According to the legend, Faust is driven to sign a pact with the devil by his insatiable thirst for knowledge, the most sublime desire to know the world intimately in its absolute totality. This desire can also be defined as the desire for a total, that is, real continuity of the subject and object. In Faust, the desire takes the form of a very concrete question. To quote from perhaps the most famous interpretation of the Faust legend, Goethe’s Faust (1808/1864), it is the question of “was die Welt im innersten zusammenhält” (Goethe 28). Concerned with the knowledge of the world’s essence, the desire can only be fulfilled in achieving the absolute correspondence or iden-

 For an analysis which focuses more on the examination of the legend’s influences on Faust is Dead, see Hadley.

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tity between the presentation of the world and its cognition by the subject. It is precisely this promise of the experience of the world in its essence that Mephistopheles uses as temptation to seduce Faust and manipulate him into giving up his soul and life to him. The devil promises to show him the real world. Ravenhill’s Faust is Dead is a presentation of what happens to this one of the perhaps most sublime of human quests for the real in postmodernism, which Fredric Jameson famously described as the culture of late capitalism (see Jameson). The following chapter will consider the fundamental elements of the search for the real, such as the nature of the human desire for it, the experience of being seduced by the promise of the real, and last but not least the concept of the real itself, and the transformation of these components within the system of the cultural logic of late capitalism. The chapter will further show the consumerist reduction of the sublime quality of the real to a determinate consumable object and the elevation of the real to its sublime status of indeterminacy by the play’s aesthetic.

3.3.1 Synopsis The play portrays three main characters, Alain, Pete and Donny, their interactions with one another and the impact of consumerist simulation of the real, which drawing on Baudrillard’s theory may be described as a consumerist type of seduction, on their experience of the real. In their rather desperate attempts to find the object of their desire, the real, which is supposed to make their lives meaningful and authentic, and by whose lack they are so clearly though probably rather unconsciously driven, the characters embark on a journey, a quest for the real, and, surprisingly, end up in finding it. The success however turns out to be a failure as grasping the real in its totality leads to a catastrophe and one of the characters’ death. Alain is a French academic and his character has been recognised by critics as a hybrid of Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard (see Sierz 2001: 135) Jacques Lacan, and Francis Fukuyama (Hadley 262). Since the play uses Baudrillard’s stories of seduction having Alain’s character repeat them almost verbatim, it is the thinker’s aspects within the character and Baudrillard’s theory of seduction with the real that the analysis will home in on. Initially, Alain seems to be the one who plays the role of Faust, as he decides to leave the academic life, seduced by the prospect of “liv[ing] a little” (Ravenhill 2001: 99) for a change. Later, however, typically of the play’s constant change of roles of the seducer and the seduced, Alain turns into Mephistopheles trying to tempt Pete and Donny into participating in his seduction games. He then takes on the Faust’ role again, being

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seduced by the Internet. At first glance, Alain is also the character who appears to be least dominated by the consumerist seduction (simulation) and who seeks to teach Pete about the sublimity of the real through his strategies of seduction games. As it turns out in the course of the play, however, Alain applies the theory of the seduction in just the same way as Pete uses the screen of the computer or his camera in order to avoid direct confrontation with the surrounding reality by enclosing it within a fixed frame of theoretical concepts. Pete, in turn, is a typical child of the cyber age. His connection to the media and consumerism is not only visible in his verbal and non-verbal behaviour, but is also underlined by his family background: Pete’s father is a very successful software developer, whose name Bill unavoidably evokes associations with Bill Gates. As Wallace accurately describes the character, “Pete […] is a citizen of the present. He is the realisation of [Zygmunt] Bauman’s figure of the tourist – someone who travels light, whose interests wander, who controls uncertainty by controlling the spaces in which he travels, and consumes the world around him in manageable portions” (Wallace 2006: 108). Pete and Alain set off on a journey to run away from Bill, which may also be seen as their desire and an attempt to escape from the monopoly systems of consumerism and simulations that Pete’s father represents and away from the consumerist real in search of the sublime real. They hide in a desert, which considering one of Alain’s template, Baudrillard, immediately also brings to mind the associations with the desert of the real (Baudrillard 1994: 1), symbolising the sublime indeterminacy of the real, but is also based on Foucault’s journey to “Death Valley with a student [where] they took LSD and had sex” (Ravenhill qtd in Sierz 2001: 135). Indeed, this is what happens during their time there, which may further be seen as part of Alain’s strategies of ‘seduction’ to educate Pete about the sublimity of the real. Unlike Peter Kürten’s initiation strategies in Neilson’s Normal, Alain’s ‘teaching methods’ turn out to be rather unsuccessful on Pete. Even though the characters end up having sex this does not result in any real experience for Pete, as the latter feels nothing. There is no sensation of subjects merging with the objects, no trace of Bataille’s sublime continuity with the world. As for Alain, his sexual desire, or better said his consumerist need for sexual fulfilment, is satisfied in the act and ended. What is also terminated is Alain’s initial interest in and need for Pete and Alain’s seduction of him. This situation shows that even though Alain continuously quotes Baudrillard’s seduction stories he does not seem to have any idea what they mean or what they say about the real, namely that it always has to remain in the realm of the ungraspable/imaginary and the sublime. Otherwise the desire for the real leads to death,

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as the latter, being the total continuity, total fusion of the subject with the object, is the only possible experience of the real. The desire for the real according to Baudrillad, who heavily draws upon Jacque Lacan’s concept of the Real as ungraspable in any presentation other than as a void (objet petit a), is necessary to maintain the dynamics of the system and life, to keep it open to transformation. It is important, however, that the fulfilment of this desire be kept at bay, with the object of the desire forever remaining sublime, that is, always beyond our grasp. Only the sublime presentation of the real can fulfil this function. Once the real is grasped and the desire is satisfied, the system comes to an end. Alain either does not understand the implications inherent in Baudrillard’s theory of seduction, or he simply does not care about the fatal consequences of attaining the real and allows the deadly move from the metaphorical to the real, letting the seduction stories play out and thus allowing Donny to experience the fatal reduction of the distance between the representation and the real. This irresponsible approach to seduction games is not repeated at the external level of the play, since externally everybody survives the performance. The real is offered to the audience as a sublime presentation, and the distance between the presentation and the real is sustained. That Alain does not understand the fatal consequences of grasping the real is shown when the real arrives as the teenage-boy Donny, whom Pete and Alain invited over, cuts his jugular and bleeds to death. Alain clearly does not recognize the danger of the situation in time to prevent it. Later, it is Pete who seems to be more aware of the reality of the situation and responds to it first and not Alain – clearly, Ravenhill’s harsh representation of what he refers to as the postmodern irresponsibility. The thinker prefers to remain in his ‘bubble’ made of his theoretical ideas, safely separated from the real of Donny’s death. Disillusioned and disgusted with Alain and his ideas, Pete decides to go back to his father, choosing the consumerist real over Alain’s concept of seduction. Before he does that, however, he takes his revenge on Alain for putting him through all this and for Donny’s death. Ironically, in order to do so, he uses Alain’s strategy of seduction against him in an equally cruel way. In doing so, Pete reverses the roles, becomes the seducer, and seduces Alain with his own methods, turning them on against themselves and showing their limits: he destroys Alain’s power and responds in kind.

3.3.2 Seduction in Realism and in Sublime Reflecting on Baudrillard’s concept of seduction, Rex Butler defines it as the modality that makes presentation possible (Butler 72). Seduction is the distance be-

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tween the copy and original, the opening between presentation and the real, between the object and the subject. Seduction is therefore the space that both connects the presentation to the real and at the same time also separates them from one another. This movement of offering and withdrawal of the real from presentation is described by another commentator of Baudrillard’s theory, Mike Gane, as “self-annulment, or the gift and its cancellation” (Gane 1991: 42). In other words, presentations of objects are produced as the result of seduction by the desire for the real. Each work of art or literature, indeed all creative work, can be considered to be the result of the artist’s desire for and his or her seduction with the real, which seems to be offering itself to the artist and yet escapes him or her the moment the latter attempts to put it in presentation. Depending on the visibility of seduction in the work, that is, depending on the degree of visibility of the distance between representation and the real, different presentation modes can be distinguished. To name two extreme poles on the scale, there are presentations which try to make the distance disappear and give the illusion of being able to offer the real in the presentation, and presentations which emphasise the unbridgeable distance between itself and the real, by drawing attention to the distance itself and the absence of the real in presentation. The former are analogous to what Lyotard refers to as realism and constitute the representative mode of metanarratives, whereas the latter operate according to what Lyotard defines as the sublime aesthetic, which puts into presentation the unpresentability of the real. Equating realism with the terror of totalitarianism and death, Lyotard leaves little doubt as to which of the two extreme poles is worth pursuing. The desire for the real is visible in all characters in Faust is Dead, as each of them is driven by it, even though each of them looks for its fulfilment in different objects. Alain wants “to live a little” and imagines his object of the real to be the sexual encounter with Pete. Pete dreams about becoming rich so that he can “buy so many totally real experiences” (Ravenhill 2001: 112) which he further defines as “keeping peace in Bosnia […] tak[ing] Saddam Hussein for a pizza […] shoot[ing] pool with the Pope and hav[ing] Boris Yeltsin show [him] his collection of baseball stickers” (Ravenhill 2001: 112). Donny, in turn, longs to “make it real. Totally real” (Ravenhill 2001: 134) and looks for the fulfilment of his desire in death. Although all of them have different ideas as to how to satisfy their desires, all of them seem to believe in the possibility of positive satisfaction of the desire for the real, in the possibility of grasping the real. This belief, as I will show later in the chapter, is the result of being manipulated by the consumerist rhetoric and consumerist strategies of simulation. Operating by making the distance between the representation and the real invisible, the strategies of simulation modify the indeterminate desire for the sublime real into a determinate need

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for the consumerist version of it, the agreeable real, and in doing so, slowly but surely lead the characters to a disaster. Although Baudrillard does not agree with Lyotard in many points, in this particular instance, when it comes to presentation of the real, both thinkers seem to be on the same page. Baudrillard, too, pleads for greater visibility of seduction, of the space of betwixt and between presentation and the real, and, by extension, for exhibiting the ungraspability of the real and considers any claims of grasping the real as both illusory and detrimental. In fact, Baudrillard appears to go even further than Lyotard, arguing that there is no such thing as the real at all but only the human desire for it, which consumerism tempers with and remodels to its own advantage. The real, which is a rather complex and much disputed notion in Baudrillard and which will be elaborated on in greater detail later in the chapter, belongs according to Baudrillard into the realm of pataphysics (see Gane 2000: 10): the realm of imaginary solutions. Consequently, the consumerist claims of being able to grasp and provide the real to the consumers, or in other words, the consumerist promises of satisfying the consumers’ desire for the real, are for Baudrillard, just as for Lyotard, an expression of totalitarian attempts to control the reality by manipulation with human desire and proposing some illusory formula to satisfy it. It is important to emphasise at this stage that even though Baudrillard does not seem to believe in the existence of the real, he still considers the desire for it to be an extremely important drive in human life. In this, he draws on Lacan’s theory of human desire for the real. The latter considers the desire to be the essence of human being and defines it further as emptiness, a void that nothing can ever fulfil. To revisit the issue of realism and the sublime from this psychological perspective, in the former the void is considered as a flaw which needs to be removed or concealed, whereas in the aesthetic of the sublime the missing content is explicitly thematised and put on the display. The infinite ‘lack’ that is at the heart of the human being prompts human beings to creativity and love and infuses human life with primal energy as long as it remains unfulfilled. Finding the object which removes the void would end the desire and along with it the human life. Once the desire is gone something essential about the human being is gone, too. To sum up and sort out the terminology used throughout the chapter, seduction is the distance between the real and its presentation. The aesthetic of a presentation depends on the presentation’s approach to seduction, the two extreme poles being the aesthetic of realism, which attempts to render the distance of seduction invisible, and the aesthetic of the sublime, which puts the distance in presentation. In realism, seduction is aesthetically reduced to minimum, by equating the real with the presentation. In other words, it is the presentation

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that determines, and by extension controls, the concept of the real. Only then can the claim of providing the object of the real be sustained. This mechanism is referred to Baudrillard as simulation: a situation when the real no longer precedes the image but the image creates the real, or rather it creates the universal rule as to what is considered to be real in a given system at a given time. Simulation, of which Baurillard distinguishes several phases and all of which will be defined later in the chapter, is according to Baudrillard the central strategy of the system of consumerism, as it gives a determinate form to the object of the real, so that it can later be produced and marketed. The determinate real is further referred to in the chapter as the consumerist real. In sublime, seduction (the distance between representation and the real) is extended to maximum. It is achieved by pushing representation to its limits and exposing the absence of the real within the representation. The real is shown as the missing content, as indeterminacy. Any attempt at grasping it in a fixed form of an object are either doomed to failure or lead to Lyotardian terror of totalitarianism and death. Although Baudrillard does not mention the connection to the sublime explicitly, his seduction stories appear to operate within its aesthetic. Exposing the terror of any attempts at grasping the real in a fixed frame, they point to the necessity of seduction and indeterminacy of the real. The following analysis is divided into two parts considering the notion of seduction at the internal (3.3.3) and external (3.3.4) levels of the play respectively. Internal analysis homes in on seduction within the system of consumerism and is further subdivided into two subsections, simulations and seductions. Although this subdivision may at first seem confusing as it appears to indicate that there are two different, and even opposite phenomena, namely that the section on simulations presents the strategies of consumerism whereas the section on seductions manifests strategies defying the consumerist system. This is not the case. For, what at the internal level of the play is presented as seductions turn out to be concealed simulations when considered more closely. They turn out to be consumerist seductions, offering consumerist real; trying to control the real etc. Though initially possibly confusing the subdivision is still sensible because simulations describe the processes at the more general, wider scope of the system of consumerism; whereas (consumerist) seductions show the same mechanism incorporated by the characters and used in their relationship with others. The part on simulations shows how consumerism develops certain attitudes towards reality. The part on seductions, in turn, shows the workings of the consumerist attitudes in the characters’ behaviour. As a whole, part 3.3.3 of the chapter describes the consumerist aesthetic of realism, the consumerist real, and the consumerist seduction.

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The final part of the chapter (3.3.4) considers the generation of the aesthetic response of the audience by the play’s strategies. Only the external communication level does justice to the sublime aesthetic employed in Baudrillard’s seduction stories, as it is only the audience that can experience the stories’ presentation of the real as sublime.

3.3.3 Internal Analysis: Consumerist Seduction of the Characters Simulations The dramatic space in which the characters live and interact is presented as simulated, consumerist reality, that is a reality saturated and preceded by omnipresent screens, mass media and fast developing technology. Indeed, the infiltration by the mass media and their, mostly televisual, models is so extreme in the play that the space in which the two characters travel is more reminiscent of a reality-show – with its fast-changing scenes, interrupted with interviews and comments, where the reality is completely determined by and tailored to the form of the show. It is as if some invisible force dictated the characters’ activities, their verbal and non-verbal behaviour, adjusting it to certain pre-established patterns and pre-programmed movements. The hold of the mass media on the characters along with the omnipresence of the simulated and consumable real and its predominance over the sublime indeterminate real, is made clear from the play’s beginning, where Alain’s character appears onstage for the first time. He appears in the consumerist reality at its most typical: reality-show. Emphasising the effect of mediatised reality even further, the first production of the play directed by Nick Philippou in 1997 used video projections for this scene. Alain has been invited to a TV show of a famous American moderator, David Letterman to talk about his recent book, The Death of Man, the title of which immediately reveals Alain’s link to postmodern philosophy. This philosophy being mentioned in the particular context of a TV show locates postmodernism within the close vicinity with processes of mediatisation, consumerism and capitalism, a notion also famously represented by Jameson in his influential “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984)”. Alain’s first appearance in the play is on TV, “entering the society of spectacle as an image, a transient, exotic celebrity” (Wallace 2006: 107), which creates the situation typical of Baudrillard’s simulation where reality is adjusted to a model and/or preceded by its mediatised version. Alain’s reality as a person, his verbal and non-verbal behaviour, his feelings and opinions, are all determined by the purpose of the show. The scene manifests quite clearly how this process of adjustment to a model works.

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Alain, his book and his concepts are instantly appropriated by and tailored to the purpose and the simulational reality of the screen, which is, unsurprisingly, show and entertainment. The show’s host does not seem to be interested in exploring Alain’s intellectual ideas about conditio humana in a postmodern and posthuman world, but is more excited by the “neat” (Ravenhill 2001: 97) title of the book, its ‘hip’ image, or as Baudrillard would put it, its structural value as a sign and not the book’s ‘real’ content: David Letterman Neat title. What exactly does it mean? Alain Well, it’s a complex thing to explain in a few minutes. David Letterman Because I have to tell you right now I feel pretty much alive. Laughter. (Ravenhill 2001: 97– 98)

Although he does seem to be asking Alain about the meaning of the book’s title, he is not ‘really’ concerned with receiving a ‘real’ answer, that is, an answer which is not pre-designed. The model of the show precludes any possibility of any such response whose meaning would not be predetermined in advance, precisely by the structural value of the sign that the entertaining show is. Letterman does not even seem to have heard, or have needed to hear Alain’s reply, as his own ‘response’, seeking to adjust the content to the form of an amusing show, manifests. Indeed, it does not matter what Alain says. In fact he could have said anything: the moment he stepped into this consumerist space, his words became signifiers whose semantic value is determined in exchange with other signifiers of the show: fun, amusement, excitement, being cool and sexy, being a celebrity such as Madonna, who is another guest at the show, and Letterman himself. Alain and his irreducible and ungraspable presence as a person is totally overpowered and dominated by the form of the media. To use Baudrillard’s formulation, Alain’s presence is reduced to his words, which in turn are “transformed into models, neutralized into signs, they are eviscerated of their meaning” (Baudrillard 1986: 132). Any attempts at communicating with Letterman fail ‘spectacularly’, too, as Alain’s words are immediately emptied of their possible signifieds and detached from their referent (the real book) by the host and exchanged for a much more amusing meaning, adjusted to the light and agreeable tone of TV entertainment: David Letterman Alain David Letterman Alain David Letterman

And it seems to me that you seem pretty much alive as well. Yes, but I’m talking about man as an idea. Uh uh / uh huh, yeah yeah. As an idea, as a construct. Madonna, have you read the book?

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Madonna David Letterman

Not yet, David. But you’re going to right? (Ravenhill 2001: 98)

It is the form of the show as a signifier that determines its signified and not the referent in the entertainment business. It is the form, a model which precedes and shapes everything that happens later during the show, imposing certain patterns of meaning and behaviour on the participants that matters. And “this form”, according to Baudrillard, “regardless of the context, is what inexorably connects them [the media] with the system of power” (Baudrillard 1986: 131). Precluding any possibility of ‘real’ communication, that is, a communication which is open to an indeterminate and unknown response, the media participate in consumerist strategy of social control: “power belongs to the one who can give and cannot be repaid. To give, and to do it in such a way that one is unable to repay, is to disrupt the exchange to your profit and to institute a monopoly” (Baudrillard 1986: 129). Whether Madonna has read Alain’s book or not is just as insignificant as the book’s contents, because the response to questions about it was already inscribed in advance in the model of the show. It is only the book’s structural value as a sign, that is, its semiotic value, that matters, as well as its flexibility and adaptability to the needs of the entertainment business, which is itself linked to consumerism. In the play consumption is presented as what, according to Baudrillard, is “an activity consisting of the systematic manipulation of signs” (Baudrillard 2005: 218). Alain and his book are treated as empty signifiers which can be manipulated so that they fit in with the needs of consumerism. The meaning of Alain’s book is produced in exchange with other signs, such as ‘entertaining show’, ‘celebrity’, or ‘fun’ rather than in exchange with its referent (the actual book). William Pawlett describes the process of semioticisation of reality in the following way: The meaning of the term ‘Gucci’ is determined by relations among other signifiers such as ‘Prada’, ‘Timberland’, ‘Marks and Spencer’ and the like. Any ‘referent’, such as a sweatshop factory in the Third World, is bypassed by the play of signifiers ‘sexy’, ‘chic’, ‘rugged’, ‘good value’ etc. These constructions are models without direct or stable reference. (Pawlett 76)

Similarly, Madonna’s value also lies in her semiotic value, the connotations of which can be altered according to what the system of consumerism deems to be currently fashionable.

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Baudrillard 1: The semiotic reality The emptying of the signifiers of fixed signifieds by detaching them from their referents and the subsequent manipulation of signs for the purpose of consumerism is referred to by Baudrillard as the operation of the semiotic (see Baudrillard 2007), as “semioticisation” of reality (Merrin 17), which he sees as part of a long process extending over the history of human scientific and technological progress. Baudrillard distinguishes four stages of this gradual imposition of the semiotic upon reality, which he refers to as the “four successive phases of the image” (Baudrillard 1994: 6): it it it it

is the reflection of the profound reality; masks and denatures a profound reality; masks the absence of a profound reality; has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

As Slocombe points out, “these four stages mark the demise of the Real and the rise of the simulation in a rough chronological order” (Slocombe 69). What these four stages also show are the endeavours prompted by the human desire for grasping the real in a representational form in order to be able to categorise it and understand it better. Unfortunately, these endeavours have proved to have quite an opposite effect. The more we try to describe the real, the more it becomes a mere description of it and the more the real seems to escape us. All the time sustaining the illusion of nearing closer to attaining the real, the attempts have only managed to increase the gap between the subject and the object, and obfuscate this fact. As a result, the real has been replaced by the image of the real, removing the subject from its desire for the real and from the possibility of real experience further and further. According to Slocombe, Baudrillard’s three first phases of the image, show the gradually increasing disinterest in experiencing the real and growing interest in measuring, representing and discussing different concepts of the real, comparing the images merely against each other and not against the real. The third stage, which “reveals an increasing interest in comparison between formulations of the Real, rather than in the Real itself” (Slocombe 70), paves the way for the fourth stage by emptying the signifier of the real of its referent altogether. No longer caring about the Real, scientist and artists debated endlessly about what was real, not realising that the Real no longer existed anywhere but in their formulations of it. Debates about what was real were so intense that nobody realised that the image had replaced the Real; the sign replaced the referent as the producer of meaning. (Slocombe 70 – 71)

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In the fourth phase of the image the real, or rather its sign, is determined by other signs, which, no longer rooted in any fixed referent, are open to any signified. Precisely this situation is exploited by consumerism, which fills the signifiers with the connotations suited to its current needs by placing the signifiers in the neighbourhood with other signifiers which lend the former their meaning. This state of things where the signs (simulacrum) are “never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference” (Baudrillard 1994: 6) leads Slocombe to consider postmodernism as being “not about emancipation but about control” (Slocombe 71). At first glance, Faust is Dead seems to subscribe to the opinion, by pointing to the connection between postmodernism and consumerism and its destructive influence on human relationships and generally human life – a reading which also seems to be very popular among the critics and reviewers writing about Faust is Dead. Bree Hadley, for instance, describes the play as “the critique of postmodern culture’s fascination with consumerism and violence, and its denial of a fundamental reality beyond the constructed world” (Hadley 271). Dan Rebellato, in turn, warns the reader not to be “dazzled” (Rebellato 2001: xiv) by the numerous references to postmodern thought in Ravenhill’s work, which is rather sceptical of “postmodernism, with its refusal to accept that reality is something we share” and equates it with “Thatcherite philosophy par excellence” (Rebellato 2001: xv-xvi). Considered as supportive of the processes of simulation, postmodernism can indeed be deemed as pertaining to the totalitarian tendencies within consumerism opening the path for manipulations with the concept of the real, which can then be used to exercise control over consumers. There is however another strand within postmodernism, which is aware of the connection between postmodernism and capitalism and which opposes the consumerist imposition of models on individuals. Lyotard comments on the process of the appropriation of the empty signifier by consumerism, and just as Baudrillard¹² sees it as possibly another totalitarian ideology, which however conceals itself behind the image of openness and promotion of liberty and choice. Consumerism exploits the postmodern thought and the indeterminacy of the signifier. Apart from pointing it out, Lyotard also proposes a strategy to upset this totalitarian system, by exposing its mechanism with the operations of the sublime art and sublime real just as Baudrillard seems to propose to do the same with his seduction games. The latter also thrives on the loosened bond between the signifier and the signi-

 see Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media”, where he describes the media and consumerism as “decentralized totalitarianism” (138).

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fied. Unlike consumerism, however, the sublime does not temper with the signified, trying to adjust its content to any goals or principles, but demonstrates its indeterminacy and non-finality. The sublime exposes the incommensurability of the sign and the real. Lyotard points to the dangers of attempting to grasp the real once and for all, warning that such endeavours are bound to end up in totalitarianism (see Lyotard 1984a). Baudrillard’s concepts of symbolic exchange and seduction fulfil the same function within the system of simulation. As for the accusation of Baudrillard concerning his dismissal of the existence of the reality which would not be a product of semiotic construction, the analysis will show that the thinker had a good reason for such a dismissal, and the play proves his point precisely, manifesting that the only reality, the real which exists outside language is death, which is, however, also only a blank, a void, the unknown and can only be experienced but never comprehended.

Baudrillard 2: The symbolic reality To return to Baudrillard’s theory, he distinguishes between two basic modes of relations and communication, which he seems to juxtapose with one another, and which he refers to as realities and considers to be the only realities there are: the reality of the symbolic exchange, which is a concept in Baudrillard’s theory closely related to seduction, and the reality of the semiotic exchange which was discussed earlier. For Baudrillard, reality is always the social reality created by language as a system of signs. He does not seem to believe in any reality which would exist outside of the system of signification (language). Reality is always an artificial construct for Baudrillard and the reality of symbolic order is the one that he prefers as the type of exchange which paradoxically, just as seduction, “puts an end to the real, […] resolves the real, and at the same time, puts an end to the opposition between the real and the imaginary” (Baudrillard 2007: 133). The symbolic cancels the idea of the real as a disjunction of terms, such as “soul and body, man and nature, the real and the non-real, birth and death. In the symbolic operation, the two terms lose their reality” (Baudrillard 2007: 133). What Baudrillard seems to expect of the symbolic exchange (and, in his later work, of seduction) appears to be what Lyotard expects of the sublime, namely, “a shattering of belief and […] discovery of the ‘lack of reality’ of reality, together with the invention of other realities” (Lyotard 1984a: 77).

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Baudrillard 3: The real For clarity’s sake, it is perhaps helpful to linger a while on Baudrillard’s somewhat confusing use of the terms of reality and the real. In his discussion of the symbolic order, the thinker clearly draws upon Lacan’s concepts of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Baudrillard seems to be rather sceptical about the existence of Lacanian Real as independent from the Imaginary. His critics (see Butler 2) often find it important to emphasise that Baudrillard’s theory of the real is highly unsentimental in the sense that Baudrillard does not believe in the existence of the real apart from the Imaginary (see Baudrillard 2007: 133). According to Baudrillard, there is nothing outside of the system of signification and so the real is also internal to it and not some external entity that exists beyond it. As such the real is, according to Baudrillard, always merely an effect of the real, which is created by the system as its own double, in the process of creating binary oppositions. The effect of the real is only ever […] the structural effect of the disjunction between two terms […]. The reality of nature, its ‘objectivity’ and its ‘materiality’, derives solely from the separation of man and nature, of a body and a non-body […]. Even the reality of the body, its material status, derives from the disjunction of a spiritual principle, from discriminating a soul from a body. (Baudrillard 2007: 133)

The reality, the ‘real’ identity of one term is generated in juxtaposition to another term, in relation to an image. The process is reminiscent of Lacan’s order of the Imaginary, during which stage, the child creates its own identity as a whole when it sees itself in a mirror. The child’s identity is based on the imaginary concept of itself. Evidently drawing on Lacan here, Baudrillard insists that “the reality principle is never anything other than the imaginary of the other term” (Baudrillard 2007: 133). And the other is excluded and repressed from the identity of the term’s reality. To use one of Baudrillard’s own examples, the male identity is created by exclusion of everything that is associated with the female. In the sexual bipartition masculine/feminine, an arbitrary and structural distinction on which the sexual reality (and repression) principle is based, ‘woman’ thus defined is only ever man’s imaginary. Each term of the disjunction excludes the other, which eventually becomes its imaginary. (Baudrillard 2007: 133)

Unlike Lacan, who differentiates between the social reality (the realm of the Symbolic) and the Real, Baudrillard uses the two terms, the real and reality, interchangeably, which potentially may be confusing. The Symbolic order is the only reality and real that there seems to be for Baudrillard.

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Nevertheless, as Butler convincingly points out, there is also another type of the real in Baudrillard’s theory, which can be found at the limit of the system and which is suspiciously reminiscent of the Lancanian Real: There is always a kind of internal limit […] which means that, if the system is able to expand forever and nothing is outside of it, it is also never entirely closed, something is always left out of it. And it is this internal limit, this difference that makes resemblance possible, that Baudrillard calls the real. There are thus two different senses in which the real is used in Baudrillard’s work: there is the real which is brought about by the system and that real which is the absolute limit to the system [the sublime real]. Baudrillard’s work, therefore, is not simply to be understood as the celebration of simulation, the end of the real, as so many of his commentators would have it. Rather, his problem is how to think the real when all is simulation, how to use the real against the attempts by various systems of rationality to account for it. (Butler 17)

For Butler, Baudrillard emerges as a “defender of the real” (Butler 17) which constitutes the resistant force to totalitarian systems by pointing to their limits and their attempts to grasp the real in a determinate form/concept. This other real at the limit of the system is the sublime real, the real that is always missing and is therefore reminiscent of the Lancanian absence (see Butler 22), a hole in the system, pointing to the beyond and driving the system on to the new and the unknown.

Pete and the consumerist real Apart from one moment, to which I will come back later in the chapter, in the entire play, this type of the sublime real (representation of the real as its lack) seems to be absent from the characters’ experience. The reality that the characters produce or, better said, reproduce is a “neo-reality of the model” (Baudrillard 1998: 126); the semiotic reality, the consumerist real. The talk-show reality is imposed upon Alain’s unique being, which is reduced to a sign and exchanged against other signs, its semantic value being determined by the other sings belonging to the ‘sign pool’ of the talk show. The characters’ ‘real’ “is only a semiotic ‘reality effect’: the world as it is filtered and processed through the linguistic and imagic sign” (Merrin 31).¹³ Instead of experiencing the real as ungraspable and sublime the characters imitate the sign and mistake it for the real. The “experiential reality has become a modelled, precessionary, semiotic production” (Merrin 32).

 Baudrillard draws upon Roland Barthes’ concept of the reality effect (see Barthes).

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The mistaking of the consumerist real for the sublime real as well as being driven by the desire for the latter without understanding the drive is best visible in Pete’s character. His constant references to the real manifest the deep longing in the character for an experience of the real which would end this longing once and for all, and which, according to Lacan, can only be granted in death. It is highly improbable that Pete is aware of this side to the real. He is, after all, a child of consumerism and his desire for the real is translated into consumerist determinate needs such as signing a contract or taking Saddam Hussein for a pizza. Pete is a true believer in the consumerist real and unaware that the only access that we have to the real, that is to such an experience of it that is totally and absolutely unmediated by any system of signification, is in death and the only safe way of experiencing the energising force of the real is as the sublime. Instead of accepting the insatiable desire as part of his essence as a human being and choosing the safer sublime real in order to reconnect with the energy of the real, Pete seems to ‘buy into’ the consumerist promise with his heart and soul, believing that the real can actually be grasped in an object. His use of vocabulary points to Pete’s rather devoted subscription to the consumerist real. Though the real is imagined here as an intense experience of some total existence, Pete’s words, however, reduce the described ‘real’, the allegedly authentic feeling, to a marketable image and give it a purpose and a meaning in the consumerist order, contributing to “commodification of emotion” (Wallace 2006: 108). Describing his friend, Steve, to Alain, Pete uses the following expressions to convey Steve’s art and Steve himself: “Great words. Words, yeah, but also something about the Steve … like he really totally means it, you know? Which is like totally marketable. And I am telling you that Stevie and the band are like totally the thing” (Ravenhill 2001: 100). The accumulation of the words such as ‘totally’, ‘really’, ‘mean it’, ‘the thing’ is supposed to convey the intensive appearance of Steve, its ‘realness’ and the ‘realness’ of Steve’s words, but the expressions only screen Steve’s allegedly unique way of being and communicating off and achieve quite the opposite effect. Instead of producing the effect of the real for the listener, the description of Steve is merely mildly amusing, and the words are reminiscent of MTV teenage language, which can be used to describe anyone and anything. Also, the particular combination of the theoretically ‘profound’ concepts of ‘totality’, ‘reality’ and ‘significance’ with the ‘low’ context of their use, with connotations of ‘fun’ and ‘entertaining’, make the utterance turn on itself and fall from the sublime heights and flatten on the bathetic lows: what was meant to be the sublime real is ironically revealed as merely the consumerist appropriated version of it. The use of irony as a strategy of revelation is part of the play’s criticism of capitalism, and also typical feature of Ravenhill’s aesthetics in general.

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This example shows the mechanism that is present in the contemporary culture of consumerism and simulation which often attempts to appropriate the concept of the real, and by extension also its connotations with nature, freedom, origin, authenticity and truth, which are just as elusive as the real, to enhance the marketability and attractiveness of its product and legitimize its use value by referring to human ‘natural’ and therefore ‘real’ needs. Although advertisements and commercials are usually more successful than Pete in producing a reality effect through its simulation, the basic mechanism behind the simulation of the real is the same. This strategy seems to be very successful since, after all, it taps into what seems to be the strongest human desire ever: the desire for a real experience. We all yearn for real events to happen, which intensify our experience of our lives and ourselves. The human primordial desire for the real and its inherent life energy is thus ‘hijacked’ by consumerism and turned into a need for the consumerist real. As needs unlike desire can be fulfilled, for example, the need to eat can be fulfilled by provision of food, the consumerist needs, which the consumerist semiotic strategies equate with the desire for the real can be satisfied with the consumerist real. The irony of this situation is that in appropriating the idea of the real, capitalism and consumerism manipulate it into something that the real is not, namely into an object, which is determinate, material and more controllable by making it often more attractive and intensive than the real itself, and in doing so corrupting the idea of real. It removes human beings from the experience of the primal energy of the real. Instead of enhancing life as consumerism promises the system brings about its closure, its death. The real becomes yet another sign which can be used according to the needs of the market in order to increase the appeal of a product and fill it with any meaning that is currently needed. The intensive ‘real’ experiences sell better. As Umberto Eco points out in his Travels in Hyperreality (1986), in order for the “‘total fake’ […] to be enjoyed it must seem totally real” (Eco 43). Baudrillard describes the mechanism of appropriating the idea of reality and nature by consumerism in his The System of Objects (1968/1995), where he, using as an example the contemporary use of glass in architecture, explains how the signifier glass, which, though “fragile, breakable and show[ing] up smudges” (Butler 31), can be made more appealing by manipulating its signified through emphasising its connotations with signs of “clarity, neutrality and impartiality” (Butler 31) and hiding the other, less attractive features of the material. Due to its transparent appearance, in the rhetoric of consumerism glass becomes the expression of human freedom, openness and at the same time functionality and comfort. Yet, Baudrillard points out that there is a certain paradox at work here, showing that glass is both “proximity and distance, intimacy and the refusal of intimacy, communication and non-communication […] transparency with-

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out transition: we see, but cannot touch” (Baudrillard 2005: 42). Unsurprisingly, however, only the currently popular features are emphasised by the rhetoric of consumerism. The product pretends to be what it is not; it promises what it cannot fulfil: an interior space constructed with glass is supposed to be the manifestation of liberation. Yet, as Butler argues, “that immediate openness to the outside and the scrutiny of others is the very opposite of freedom, is ultimately to do away with the interiority and free will which make individual choice possible” (Butler 32). The consumerist real promises an illusory ‘perfect’ solution. In his “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism” (1984), Lyotard, too, discusses the similar phenomenon of the appropriation and manipulation of the sign of the real by capitalism, which adjusts the signified of the real to its own purposes. For Lyotard this is manifested in the kitsch of “eclecticism” and “anything goes” (Lyotard 1984a: 76). He extends the discussion to the realm of art: It is easy to find public for eclectic works. By becoming kitsch, art panders to the confusion which reigns in the ‘taste of the patrons. Artists, gallery owners, critics, and public wallow together in the ‘anything goes,’ and the epoch is one of slackening. But this realism of the ‘anything goes’ is in fact that of money; in the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield. Such realism accommodates all tendencies, just as capital accommodates all ‘needs,’ providing that the tendencies and needs have purchasing power. (Lyotard 1984a: 76)

The signifiers ‘real’ and ‘reality’ are “accommodated” by the forces of capitalism to connote various products positively in order to make them more marketable and profitable and to justify the consumers’ need for them as real and natural. (For example, the free cinema magazine from Cinemaxx advertised the film Live Free or Die Hard (2007) with a spectacular shot where Bruce Willis catapults his car into a helicopter. The comment under the picture said that the film included “scenes of extreme realism”). The reality of capitalism is the reality of the consumerist real.

Framing the real The consequences of this preference for the consumerist real, for determinate and controllable sign over the indeterminate sign of the sublime real, is that the latter can no longer be experienced as sublime indeterminacy, undefined by any model. Indeed, the sublime real appears to a chronic consumer of the consumerist real as Pete as unbearable and terrifying. The character often chooses the consumerist familiar frame over the sublime terrifying frame in order to ‘tame’ and ‘domesticate’ the experience of the real. The former renders the real

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in familiar concepts whereas the latter only suggests the existence of the real as beyond signification, and points to its ungraspability. The sublime frame allows the real to remain indeterminate. The preference of a simulated consumerist real over the sublime real is manifested throughout the whole play. Pete often resorts to the simulated reality, that is the ready-made model of the real, over its sublime experience. The latter seems to be too scary for him, partly because it is so foreign and unknown to him, as he is the product of the consumerist culture of simulation, the repeatability and reproducibility of which guarantees that everything happens according to a certain pre-determined scenario. As Johan Callens points out, “Pete frequently needs to order and distance experience, mediate it at all cost, knowing perhaps too well the price of any close encounters with reality” (Callens 170). To give an example, before taking drugs in order to “have an experience”, Pete explains to Alain that just by themselves, on their own, okay, experiences don’t have a shape. They don’t have a shape and they don’t have a rhythm. And without shape, without rhythm, the experience can be too much. It can be too painful. So we shape the experience. Like this. Pete arranges the pills in a circle around them. (Ravenhill 2001: 116)

Even though Alain seems to try to persuade Pete that “[they] don’t have to decide the shape. [They] don’t have to know in advance” (Ravenhill 2001: 116) and that it is better to “allow the shape to emerge” freely, he, too, resorts to a fixed narrative frame of his theoretical ideas in order to shield himself from the sublime reality of blood, pain and death when it becomes too much for him, first after he is attacked by Pete’s father’s men, and later also after Donny’s death: Donny is writhing. They try unsuccessfully to staunch the blood. Donny dies. Everyone very still. Long long pause. Alain moves away from the body. Alain Of course, as we look back it will become easier to name the exact date. Or we may never be able to say exactly. Perhaps we will never agree a fixed point. A moment. There will be different theories. / But in principle we will agree. (Ravenhill 2001: 132)

Just as Alain puts his theory between himself and the experience of sublime reality, Pete uses his camcorder for the same purpose, simultaneously contributing

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“to the overall simulation [and] depersonalisation” (Callens 170) in the play. When Alain and Pete travel to the desert to hide from Pete’s father and his retribution, the sublime reality of the place is, again, too much for Pete. Alain Pete

This is a very beautiful place. I guess it’s okay. I kind of prefer it on the TV. I prefer it with a frame around it, you know? […] Like you know, it stretches out, there it goes, on and on – you get the point from the TV – but when you actually see it, you know … it’s a little scary. (Ravenhill 2001: 113)

So in order to control the experience of the sublime reality Pete “takes out the camcorder, [and] looks through it” (Ravenhill 2001: 113) immediately finding it consoling: I kind of feel okay now. This always works for me. Some guys it’s Prozac but with me … (Ravenhill 2001: 113)

Similarly, when he invites Alain, whom he barely knows, to stay over night he separates himself from him with his camera and Alain separates himself from ‘too much unknown’ by, typically, resorting to a fixed ready-made narrative. Alain

(in French) Because in America, and only in America, am I truly at home. For me, and for so many children of this twentieth century, it is only in America that we really believe that we are alive, that we are living within in our own century. Pete Look. Hold it right there. He fetches his camcorder. (Ravenhill 2001: 101)

All this happens under the label of having fun and experiencing something real, the two being part of what Baudrillard refers to as the “fun morality”, according to which the consumer is obliged to be active and to try everything, “since you never know whether a particular encounter, a particular experience (Christmas in the Canaries, eel in whisky, the Prado, LSD, Japanese-style love-making) will not elicit some ‘sensation’” (Baudrillard 1998: 80). This principle of fun as duty is perhaps even more conspicuous in the following scene.

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Having fun? Alain wants to have sex with Pete, who seems to be rather reluctant and even frightened by the prospect. In order to calm himself down, as Alain “starts to feel Pete’s genitals” (Ravenhill 2001: 113), Pete repeats the ready-made statements of political correctness in a prayer-like tone, which Ravenhill also describes as “talismans” intended to make sure “that everything will be ok” (Ravenhill qtd in Billingham, 132), and finally finds the courage to assume his consumerist duty to try everything out and be open to new experiences, falling in line with the ‘credo of the fun system’: Pete

I don’t have a prejudice here. You filthy little weenie-feeling heap of shit. I believe in Affirmative Action. I believe in the multiplicity of sexualities within our society. (Ravenhill 2001: 113)

The system of fun is according to Baudrillard a new religion supplanting the puritan ethics of work and ‘no fun at all’: Conversely, but in the same way, consumerist man (l’homme-consommateur) regards enjoyment as an obligation; he sees himself as an enjoyment and satisfaction business. He sees it as his duty to be happy, loving, adulating/adulated, charming/charmed, participative, euphoric and dynamic. This is the principle of maximizing existence by multiplying contacts and relationships, by intense use of signs and objects, by systematic exploitation of all the potentialities of enjoyment. (Baudrillard 1998: 80)

Later as apparently the buzz words of the fun system are not enough to calm Pete down and help him through the experience of sex with Alain any more, he reaches again to a more potent ‘weapon’, his camcorder, and pretends that all this is happening on TV, looking at the whole ‘event’ through his camcorder, and reporting it in a “TV commentary voice” (Ravenhill 2001: 114). The voice over description is held in the typical tone of TV gibberish: “Lost under the stars, surrounded by the splendour of nature and the mysterious awesomeness of Death Valley, the kid is initiated into the strange world of the homosexual” (Ravenhill 2001: 114). The insertion of the word “awesomness”, typical of teenager speech, among the bombastic language, emphasises the ridiculous character of the awkward scene even more. Pete’s strategy of putting the experience within the frame of a simulation is so successful that when he comes he does not “feel a thing” (Ravenhill 2001: 115), which for Pete, who is a true follower of the fun morality, is of course “amazing” and “so cool” (Ravenhill 2001: 115). This seems to be the play’s comment on the effect of the consumerist real, which instead of inten-

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sifying our sense of being and sublime reality removes us from the real and, by extension, from the most basal source of life’s energy.

Non-participatory participation Pete chooses the simulated real over the sublime real not only because it gives him the comfort of a fixed frame, which gives shape to experiences, but also because the activity of framing the experience feels like an event itself which supplants the real with a more controllable version of it. Using his camera allows him to insert himself into an experience of exciting reality but also to keep a safe distance from it. Susan Sontag, referring to the process of taking pictures, provides an interesting insight into the psychological implications of this activity, and which can also be extended to semiotic operations of simulation and simulacra, “[p]hotography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation” (Sontag 10). Taking pictures is therefore a strategy for experiencing something and, if the exciting reality becomes too much, for removing yourself from it by conveniently hiding behind the camera. As Sontag further points out, “picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights – to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on. […] Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention” (Sontag 11). Being preoccupied by the activity of making a video, releases Pete from taking responsibility for what is happening around him, from participating in the experience with Alain and from giving himself up in the process.

Seductions Even though Ravenhill speaks about Baudrillard in a very dismissive tone, describing his theory as “smart intellectual game”, and referring to Baudrillard’s philosophy as “nihilistic” and “an easy option” (qtd in Sierz 2001: 135), paradoxically the play seems to follow Baudrillard in his criticism of the consumerist reality for the most part, clearly representing his evaluation of the mechanisms of consumption. Still, it is difficult not to notice the accusatory tone in Ravenhill’s play, which shows the concept of seduction as dangerous, absurd and cruel. Taking the aesthetic of the idea literally and putting it to test against real-life situations in the play’s fictional world, the seduction is shown as leading to dismemberment, death and sacrifice. Indeed Ravenhill himself dismissed of Baudrillard’s stories of seduction as “being quite chic, having these dangerous thoughts about violence and sexuality, but […] lack[ing] any responsibility” (qtd in Sierz 2001: 135).

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In spite of Ravenhill’s open criticism, the idea that Baudrillard’s seduction stories are a serious encouragement to look for the real in death or self-maiming behaviour is highly improbable if not outright inconceivable. The only way to read Baudrillard’s seduction stories is as fiction, which is another simulation but which is revealed as such and addressed against itself. It is a scenario of a simulation turning on against its own logic, taking this logic to extremes. The stories can therefore only operate within the external communication system of the play, that is only as sublime representations, which show the monstrosity of the real but only as an extreme but safe simulation. Manifesting that language does not equate to the real, that it is symbolic and seductive, and if taken literally, ‘for real’, may turn out to be dangerous and even lead to totalitarian systems, is the function of Baudrillard’s idea of seduction and, intentionally or unintentionally, also the effect of Ravenhill’s play. For after all, his plays, too, abound in gory images and scenarios very much similar to Baudrillard’s stories of seduction. Death, cruelty, dismemberment and violence are used in Baudrillard only as part of seduction games, that is, sublime representations, pointing to the unattainability of the real. The problem of the internal use of the seduction by the characters is that they put its scenarios on par with the real, mistake representations for the real, and perform them in an attempt to grasp the real and die or let others die in the process. Callens describes the situation very accurately as “a move from metaphor to metonymy, from the symbolic to the real” (Callens 172). This move seems to be exactly what Baudrillard’s allegories, or, as Callens refers to them, “koans” (Callens 172) may be seen as implicitly warning against: the high price paid for grasping the real, for trying to bridge the insurmountable gap, the seductive distance of desire, between the language and the real that it describes. In the following I therefore suggest a different reading from the common interpretations of the play’s use of Baudrillard’s idea of seduction and contend that just as it is possible to see Ravenhill as an enfant terrible of British theatre of the nineties and his early plays as “romanticising violence and cruelty without recognizing the real-life suffering going on all around it” (Hadley 271), it is also possible to consider Baudrillard’s idea of seduction within the same frame of criticism, “provoking hostile remarks [such as] ‘I hope he finds his real beneath the wheels of a truck’” (Butterfield 66). However, both judgements seem to fall short of both Ravenhill’s and Baudrillard’s work. Butterfiled’s observation about Baudrillard’s theory that “one cannot feel that those who encounter Baudrillard by insisting on the continuing existence of real bodies and real suffering are either missing the point or falling for it [and that] [s]uch responses seem too simplistic given the sophistication of Baudrillard’s work” (Butterfield 66) also applies to Ravenhill’s drama and his use of violence and cruelty. Neither operates literally;

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instead both only operate within the frame of a particular representative mode: the aesthetic of the sublime. The aesthetic of Baudrillard’s narratives about the seduction games shows what happens if the system of signification is taken as a one-to-one equivalent of the real, when the limit of representation is ‘mastered’ and filled in with a concrete content and made into a transparent vehicle of meaning; when the distance between the real and its representation is cancelled. This is what the consumerist real promises: cancellation of the bar between the signifier and the signified. The consumerist tactics of passing representations off for the real may perhaps be described in relation to Lacan’s Imaginary stage, during which a stable identity is created by identification of the subject with an image. This moment gives the subject the sense of its own subjectivity as autonomous and complete. There is, however, a downside to this operation of imaginary identity formation as the subject undergoes the unavoidable processes of alienation from its self. The consumerist system pushes the sense of alienation from the pre-linguistic self (the real), which Sean Homer explains as “the process through which the subject first identifies with the signifier and is thereafter determined by the signifier” (Homer 71) further and further. The effects of this development are pointed out by Ravenhill’s presentation of the Internet self-cutters community. Pete and Donny are so detached from their sense of self, from their feelings and sensations, that they resort to rather drastic measures to re-connect with them again and indulge in ‘self-injury’. That too much pleasure may be detrimental was observed by Edmund Burke as early as the eighteenth century, who saw that objects and activities which are traditionally considered to extend our sense of life and subjectivity, if ‘overdosed’ could affect us in quite the opposite way, and could even lead us to suicide. As a possible counter-measure, Burke proposed the sublime as a safe strategy of supplanting our existence with the less popular feeling of terror (see Burke 122). Considered from this perspective, Ravenhill’s and other in-yer-face playwrights’ violent representations onstage do not serve as a condonation and certainly not as an encouragement to self-injury, meaningless relationships, cheap sex or suicide just as little as Burke’s sublime does not suggest that people should expose themselves to real life-threatening experiences. They are rather expressions of the characters’ violent reactions to a system enclosing in on them with its consumerist real, determining their needs and reducing them to mere consumers.

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Baudrillard’s use of death, violence and cruelty within his concept of seduction operates in an aesthetically analogous way to the sublime violence¹⁴ within in-yer-face theatre in general and Faust is Dead in particular, using violence and cruelty to point, rather specifically, to the limits of the consumerist system of simulation. Seduction stories reveal the missing real from the system by precisely demonstrating what happens when the space of the missing object is filled with a concrete and absolute answer: the system’s closure. Seduction stories do not destroy the system in a great revolutionary gesture and supplant it with a new one. Working from within the system, the only purpose of seduction is to point out the system’s moments of failure and draw attention to its limits. As Butler puts it, “the difference between seduction and simulation is that the latter always tries to master its limit, by naming the other. In seduction, there is a simultaneous attempt to take into account the other and the fact that it cannot be taken into account” (Butler 97). If seduction therefore presents the real as a desire for something that does not exist, it is not in order to dismiss the possibility of experiencing something deeply altogether and encourage a culture of fake experiences and simulated existence but to manifest the potentially even lethal consequences of trying to grasp the real. By resisting closure seduction resists the idea of death as closure, and welcomes the idea of death as an opening to the unknown and unpredictable. Sublime death is presented in Baudrillard’s stories of seduction as the drive force, as the manifestation of the unfulfilled desire, which prompts us to search for the unknown, knowing full well that this unknown has to remain indeterminate. The dangers of ‘going for the real’, of falling for the illusion that the real can be grasped, are clearly visible in Ravenhill’s play. Before moving on to the analysis of the seductive operations in the play in detail, I would like to quote Nick Philippou, the director of Faust is Dead first production, whose comment on the influence of Nikolaus Lenau, a German romantic poet, and his poem, Faust (1836), on Ravenhill’s play exposes this dangerous illusion rather accurately: Lenau says at one point … I paraphrase, but something like I wish I could understand what it would feel like to have a knife go in my heart, and of course that experience is mirrored in the play, where kids really want to have that ‘true’ experience of cutting … In a sense the supposition from Lenau, who killed himself, was that the closer you are to death, the closer you are to the only real authentic act any human being can actually experience. Death being the only unmediated, unfiltered experience we could ever have… It goes back to

 Baudrillard often describes the operations of the seduction by referring to the sublime without however elaborating on the comparison in detail (see Baudrillard 1990b). For discussion of the sublime in Baudrillard, see Will Slocombe.

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something Edward Bond said, that you prove the world real by dying in it. (Phillippou qtd. in Hadley 266)

That the experience of death or of pain as death’s substitute are the only real experiences available in the culture of mediatised, semioticised reality is a common conclusion not only within Ravenhill’s ouvre, for whose performance a knife tellingly seems to be a rather indispensable prop¹⁵, but also within sublime drama in general, where images of extreme violence are in common use. Suffice it to mention scenes such as the death of the main character from Sarah Kane’s play, Phaedra’s Love (1996), Hippolytus, who after filling his life with different types of simulacra, fast-food and other products of consumer culture, finally finds the key to the experience of his embodied self in self-sacrifice, his last words being “If there could have been more moments like this” (Kane, Phaedra’s Love 103). It does not mean that these plays encourage the audience to engage in similar activities. They only point to a certain limit within the consumerist system, which tries to exclude death from human experience altogether (see Pankratz 2004a: 17) and paradoxically generates the culture of death and self-cutters. According to Baudrillard’s logic of the relations between simulation and seduction, the self-scarring is not a counter-measure to oppose consumerism, but it is a kind of exaggeration of it, a monstrous version of it (see also Butler 91), generated by the system which encourages existence through images and excludes any possibility of experience of pain or death. What is also visible in these examples and which is also part of Baudrillard’s concept of seduction is the confluence of death, desire (also sexual desire) and the real: a knife is a weapon but also a phallic symbol and Hippolytus’ desire to die is evoked by Phaedra’s love and death. As this sublime confluence of Eros and Thanatos was the central subject matter in the previous chapter on Anthony Neilson’s Normal it will not be discussed in greater detail here.

Seduction There are four intertwined attempts at seduction in the play. Only one of them is, in my opinion, effective in terms of unmasking the strategies of the consumerist real by presenting the real as terrible and sublime. (1) At the beginning Pete mistakes Alain for a record producer and tries to seduce him so that Pete’s friend,  For instance, in Shopping and Fucking (1996), the young male prostitute Gary is penetrated with a knife, in The Cut (2006) citizens in some imaginary, possibly totalitarian state are administered ‘the cut’ by Paul, a state official; and his satire play, Product (2005) begins with the line “So there’s a knife” (Ravenhill 2008: 155).

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Stevie, can sign a contract. This seduction does not even attempt to unmask the system of simulation, but simply repeats its consumerist logic. (2) This situation is further used as a starting point for seduction by Alain who turns the tables on Pete and tries to entice him in turn. In doing so, Alain changes his status as the object of seduction and becomes the seducing subject. In order to seduce Pete into performing certain actions, the thinker resorts to Baudrillardian examples of seduction games from his Seduction (1979/1990), Cool Memories 1980 – 1985 (1987/1990) and Fatal Strategies (1983/1990). Although initially he may appear to be a teacher of Baudrillardian seduction, it soon transpires that Alain abuses the seductions narratives to manipulate Pete, and that his own behaviour also merely reproduces the patterns of simulation. His seduction of Pete, as it turns out, is supposed to satisfy Alain’s sexual needs and not offer the opportunity of experiencing the real for both of them. The real that is experienced by the characters in the process is only the consumerist real and not the sublime. (3) After this failure, Alain moves on to his next object, Donny, relatively fast and discards Pete in a process of waning of desire typical of consumerist fashion. This new scenario of seduction, however, brings along an unexpected and potentially fatal turn for Alain. The new object of seduction, Donny, raises the stakes and turns the tables on Alain by taking his own life. In spite of what appears to be as Donny’s unassailable challenge, the seduction fails initially, since Alain, prepared for such a scenario, recorded everything on tape. By posting Donny’s death in the Internet, Alain reclaims his status as the subject and reduces Donny to an object again. (4) Yet, the seduction fails only initially. As Pete is touched by the whole experience so deeply he decides to finish Donny’s work for him and gives Alain Donny’s eyes as a gift. In so doing, he completes the process of seduction successfully, unmasking the dream of grasping the real and surviving it as a dangerous illusion. In order to understand why the first three attempts at seduction are interpreted as failures and only the fourth one is considered to be effective, and also in order to appreciate the dynamics of the relations among the seducers and the seduced better, subjects and objects of seduction, I will first consider Baudrillard’s theory of seduction and interpret the examples of it which are paraphrased in the play by Alain.

Baudrillard 4: theory of seduction and seduction stories Seduction stories are extreme versions of simulation. It is the logic of simulation (and consumerist system) pushed to its extremes. Unlike simulation, which purports to be able to fill in the content missing from a system by convincing us that the real exists and is attainable in a particular object or sign, the mechanisms of

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seduction expose these attempts as a mere illusion of the real, pointing to the incompleteness of the system and to its limit. In fact, Butler argues that seduction is the system’s limit (see Butler 25) and seduction stories are demonstration of this limit. The latter point to the difference, the missing content (the real), which makes the system of simulation incomplete. Ironically, it is also the difference which makes the system continue and expand. Butler explains this paradoxical relation in the following way: “if simulation goes too far in attempting to overcome the distance between copy and original, seduction is both that distance which allows their resemblance and that distance which arises when their resemblance is too close” (Butler, 119). Seduction both subverts the system of simulation and is also the reason for its development. In order to explain the operations of seduction within the system of signification and representation, Butler refers to Baudrillard’s discussion of a collection as an example of a system of objects (Butler 76 – 81). This example seems to be particularly fitting with regard to the play since all its characters seem to be either collectors or pieces in a collection, too. The characters constantly switch from their status as subjects (collectors) into the status of objects. Collection accumulates certain objects in a successive way according to a subjective principle, which only exists in the mind of the collector. In fact, because it is the collector’s subjective conceptual requirements that the objects need to fulfil Baudrillard argues that “beyond all else [the collector] is collecting himself” (Baudrillard 1990b: 122) and includes the latter also within the frame of the collection but only as the object missing from it, as the last object in the set (see Baudrillard 2005: 97). Collecting is, therefore, for Baudrillard a search for subjectivity. The collection can only be complete if the collector decides that it is so, and it is incomplete as long as the collector believes that there is yet another object that is missing from the collection. In other words, it is this subjectively defined missing object that keeps the collector alive and infuses the collection with energy and dynamism. It is the missing object, which is also the collection’s limit and the collector’s fascination, which makes the collection and the collector’s subjectivity sublime (see Baudrillard 2005: 94) allowing for the collection to go on ad infinitum. As long as the object remains sublime, that is, unattainable in the collector’s mind, the collection will remain incomplete and the objects within it in an exchange with one another, each successive piece attempting to fill in the space of the missing object and trying to respond to the sublime void within the collection. The operations of seduction, the seductive distance, within the system of the collected objects, that is the operations of the sublime real against which the objects are compared to one another, guarantees that the collection’s and the collector’s desire go on: it guarantees life. The moment when the collector decides

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that he or she has found the missing last object, which fills the sublime void, marks the end of both the collection and collector, as the latter’s subjectivity resides in the missing object and if the latter is found than it takes the collector’s ‘slot’ within the collection. Finding the last piece amounts to the collector’s destruction. And yet, providing the last piece is, ironically, what consumerist real promises. Baudrillard explains how the matter of life and death and the intricate workings of seduction are inherent to the act of collecting, making it “at the same time possible and impossible” (Butler 119), in the following way: The (final) object attains exceptional value only by virtue of its absence. This is not simply a matter of covetousness. One cannot but wonder whether collections are in fact meant to be completed, whether lack does not play an essential part here – a positive one, moreover, as the means whereby the subject reapprehends his own objectivity. If so, the presence of the final object of the collection would basically signify the death of the subject, whereas its absence would be what enables him merely to rehearse his death (and to exorcize it) by having an object represent it. (Baudrillard 2005: 99)

The experience of one’s own death through a substitute and of one’s own subjectivity or consciousness being created on the boundary between life and death is also intrinsic to the aesthetic of the sublime, which, too, enables us to “rehearse” our own death in its representation in the other. With its moments of sublime exchange, during which the negative moment of the void (threat of privation) continuously alternates with the positive moment of the exhilarating feeling that something (subjectivity, consciousness) does happen even though it can never be grasped by any object and thus makes the space for the arrival of the new object, the sublime exchange is analogous but extremer version of the exchange that happens in seduction, at least for as long as the last object, the real is not grasped. In simulation, the consumerist system promises to provide the last object, and in order to do that it manipulates the subjective principle of collection, the desire for the real in the collector, and determines it according to the alleged ‘last object’ (consumerist real). As for the play, it provides two instances of a collection. It presents Alain as a collector of Pete and Donny, and Pete and Donny as collectors of scars. Whether Alain is a deliberate collector or not is difficult to prove as he himself never comments on his status. However, when Pete angrily points it out to him, “You want Donny for your collection, right?” (Ravenhill 2001: 124), having noticed that Alain’s interest in him has begun to fade away, Alain does not protest against Pete’s accusation. Pete bases his allegation on the apparent similarity between Alain’s fascination with Donny and the French academic’s narratives, which for Pete belong to the same collection: “The Japanese cannibal? The woman who cut out her eyes? The dufus with the perforated

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pecs?” (Ravenhill 2001: 124). The first two examples that Pete lists refer to the stories recounted by Alain earlier in the play, which are based on Baudrillard’s seduction scenarios. In order to assess whether Pete is right in his observation, that is whether Alain is a collector and whether the relation between Alain and Donny indeed follows the logic of the seduction scenario, it is necessary to understand what the role of the seduction narratives is and how they operate within Baudrillard’s theory and the play.

Alain’s/Baudrillard’s stories of seduction What seems to be at stake in Baudrillard’s concept of seduction is pushing the system of signification with its consumerist realism to its limits and undermining its tendencies towards wholeness. In order to demonstrate what happens when this status of wholeness is achieved, Baudrillard uses fictional scenarios to show it. According to Baudrillard, this operation of unmasking the lack of the real from the system is life-saving since “meaning is mortal” (Baudrillard 1994: 164). Meaning, which corresponds to the real when considered in terms of absolute clarity, is mortal, just as the supplanting of the last piece in the collection is mortal. Therefore, it is important to undermine this clarity of meaning in representation and this is the role of seduction within seduction stories: exposing the limits of the system and thereby subverting it. To use Baudrillard’s explanation of the process, “any classification, any modality of meaning can […] be destroyed simply by logically being elevated to the nth power – pushed to its limit, it is as if all truth swallowed its own criteria of truth […] and lost all its meaning” (Baudrillard 1994: 108). The elevation of the system of signification to the nth power and manifesting the possible consequences of mastering the limit of the system by filling it with an absolute end, with the final piece in the collection, is precisely what seems to lie at the heart of Baudrillard’s examples of seduction games and what makes them so terrible and shocking. Horrocks and Jevtic in their book, Baudrillard for Beginners (1996), which Ravenhill read as a preparation for writing the play (see Sierz 2001: 135), describe this communicative situation presented in Baudrillard’s stories of seduction as a process of “challenge, one-upmanship and death” (Horrocks and Jevtic 94). The stories of seduction usually follow the same scenario, in which the object of seduction turns the seducer’s words against him or her by translating metaphor into metonymy. By attempting the impossible cancellation of the distance between the representation and the real, the move from metaphor to metonymy has fatal effects for the seducer, for as Baudrillard points out, “this liquidation of metaphor, this precipitation of the sign into brute, senseless matter, is a thing of murderous efficacy” (Bau-

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drillard 1990a: 121). Repudiating the seducer’s metaphorical use of language, the object “becomes the fatal object which drags the subject [the first seducer] down to annihilation” (Baudrillard 1990a: 121). In doing so, the object reverses the situation, taking on the role of the seducer, of the active party, and seduces the original seducer, turning his or her meaning against him or her. Reversibility and reciprocity are thus central in seduction scenarios. It is the consumerist real that brings about the consumerist system’s own demise. The reversing transformation of the linguistic representation of meaning into the real is referred to by Baudrillard as “cruel realist short circuit” (Baudrillard 1990a: 121), which marks the arrival of the real and with it the end of the desire. The first seduction story recounted by Alain concerns the cannibalistic consumption of a woman, and is taken from Baudrillard’s Cool Memories (see section on 1983, 151): In 1981 in Tokyo, a Dutch woman was on business. On business in Tokyo and she met a man, a Japanese man. Through her business. They became friendly, their friendship grew until eventually she ate dinner with him. […] They are eating and she reveals, she tells him that she is a poet. She writes poetry. Love poetry. She has a poem about him and would he like to hear the poem? Well, alright. So he’s eating and she starts to read the poem and he pulls out a gun and he shoots her. He shoots her dead. And then he eats her. Cuts her up and puts her in his bowl and he eats her and as he’s eating her, all the time he’s declaring his love for her. His undying love. Who was cruel? The man or the woman? (Ravenhill 2001: 108)

Interestingly, the Japanese man described in the story is identified in Baudrillard as Issei Sagawa, the famous Japanese cannibal and a student at Sorbonne Academy in Paris, who in 1981 invited his fellow student to his room under the pretext of discussing literature, shot her in the neck and then ate her over several days. The inclusion of the story by Ravenhill only underscores the play’s criticism of consumerism, as Issei Sagawa became a celebrity in Japan, asked to give interviews and even to write restaurant reviews. In one of the interviews he explained that he wanted to eat the woman because he desired her beauty being an unattractive man himself. As most Baudrillardian examples of seduction, this one, too, shows a game of appearances pushed too far, which prompts the fatal move from metaphor to metonymy that Callens pointed out (Callens 172), turning the Symbolic into the

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Real and in doing so undermining the process of producing meaning, reversing the roles of the seducer and the seduced and delivering the final, fatal blow of and to the consumerist real. Commenting on the story, Baudrillard remarks that “the effacement of metaphor” is the “characteristic of the object and its cruelty” (Baudrillard 2003: 151). In spite of the appearances it is the woman, the object of the man’s desire, that is cruel because she seduces the man to consider the words in their “literal tenor” (Baudrillard 2003: 151) and brings about the end of his desire. Baudrillard sees in the seduction “a certain amount of reciprocal sacrifice. […] Something has to die but I don’t see it as having to remove someone – perhaps desire or love must die” (qtd in Gane 1991: 62). The story may be interpreted in the following way. On hearing one of the woman’s love poems, the man is so deeply seduced by the effect of the language, which re-creates for him the real feeling, that he mistakes the appearance of meaning for the real thing, the signifier for the signified, the seduction of meaning for its production, presumably believing it to be the expression of the woman’s love for him. In his mind the distance between the representation of love and the love itself cease to exist. He lets himself be tempted by his desire for the real and by the promise of its satisfaction contained within the language. He goes for the real, kills the woman and consumes her. It is difficult not to think of Bataille’s idea of continuity with the other at this point, which as Bataille also points out ends up in the death, the annihilation, of the subject. To answer Alain’s question about who is the cruel party of the two, in spite of the appearances it is the woman and her poetry that is considered to be cruel because she seduced the man with her language to believe that the real may be grasped and made him go for this ‘final piece in the collection’ and, in so doing, ended the desire and love. It is the man who is the victim and who ends up according to Baudrillard as “only a subject stripped naked, an orphan of desire, dreaming of a lost mastery – neither a subject nor truly an object of desire, but only the mythical instrument of a cruel liberty” (Baudrillard 1990a: 123). The act of chopping the woman’s body apart can also be seen as analogous to an act of literary analysis, with its operations of breaking down the poem into meaningful, ‘consumable’ parts, the sum of which can never equal the whole. What the story of seduction manifests is that the whole can never be grasped possessed and consumed as such. This is also what the sublime experience manifests: it is an experience of the imagination and reason in their unsuccessful attempts to break down the monstrous and ungraspable object into parts and put them back together in a meaningful whole. What both the seduction and the sublime point to is precisely the failure of any attempts to do this, to grasp the real, and the fatal consequences of such attempts. What is at a stake in both the sub-

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lime and the seduction is the revelation of the insurmountable distance between the real and its representation, the incommensurability of the two, which if bridged, leads up to death. The other story of seduction describes two lovers, a man and a woman. The woman asks the man which part of her he finds most attractive. He replies that it is her eyes that he most desires in her. The next day he receives a parcel containing her eyes. This time the question is, “who was the seducer and who was the seduced” (Ravenhill 2001: 105). Baudrillard’s answer seems to be that it was the woman again, because she seduces the man into attempting to grasp his desire of her through language. He falls for her trap and tries to give his desire a definite name: the eyes. This part of her cannot, of course, supplant her whole existence (pars pro toto). The woman reverses the meaning of the man’s words. She pushes language to its representational limits, by taking the statement at its face value, and putting an end to the man’s desire once and for all.¹⁶ The reversibility of the seduction games is strongly reminiscent of Longinus’ turn of the sublime in Sappho’s “Phainetai moi” (see sub-chapters 2.1.2 and 2.1.3 of this book). Just as in Baudrillard’s seduction story, the female lyrical ‘I’, too, uses her objectified and fragmented body to flip the situation to her advantage and draw power from it.

Pete’s seduction of Alain Against this theoretical backdrop, Pete’s seduction of Alain turns out to be yet another simulation, and the experience of the real that Pete has in mind and offers Alain in exchange is only the consumerist real. Pete meets the French thinker in a bar and taking him for a producer, he invites Alain to come home with him, hoping that he will profit from this encounter in a very material way: I kind of know one of the guys, sorta know him a little, you know? And he said that you’re a producer, that you’re seeking to sign Stevie and the band. To a major label. (Ravenhill 2001: 99)

 In Baudrillard’s version of the story the woman sends the man only one eye (see Baudrillard 1990a: 120), which Baudrillard comments upon in the following way, pointing to [t]he beauty and violence of this defiance against the platitude of the seducer. But also the diabolism of this woman, who takes revenge against the very wish to be seduced: trap for trap, eye for eye. Never did punishment take so awful a form as in this unscrupulous offering. She loses an eye, but he loses face – how will he be able from now on to “cast an eye” on a single woman without being afraid of getting one in return? For really nothing is worse than to utter a wish and to have it literally fulfilled; nothing is worse than to be rewarded on the exact level of one’s demand. He is caught in the trap by the object that surrenders to him as a literal object. 1990a: 120 – 121)

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Interestingly, Alain never corrects Pete’s mistake and just plays along. He does that perhaps because he is already thinking about seducing Pete to have sex with him and as long as Pete believes that Alain is the producer his chances that this might actually happen are quite good since Pete is more than ready to sell himself out for the deal: See, one of the guys figured that you were old and uncool enough – no offence intended – old and uncool enough to be A and R and Stevie sort of sent out word that if anyone was like prepared to… please you then Stevie could be very greatful to that person. So if you wanna… (Ravenhill 2001: 100)

It is rather clear from this passage that Pete is not really attracted to Alain, or interested in experiencing the real with him, and is only willing to have sex with Alain as a form of transaction – a motif which recurs in Ravenhill’s early work quite often. Sex with Alain is supposed to bring Pete closer to Stevie, who in turn, judging by the way Pete describes him (see Ravenhill 2001: 100) is the epitome of the real for him. This real, however, is not the sublime type but clearly of the consumerist order as Pete also characterises Stevie as “totally marketable” (Ravenhill 2001: 100). Pete’s seduction of Alain is in fact a type of simulation, that is a transparent seduction with the distance between the real and representation hidden, the real controlled by the signifier, and with no real response or presence possible. A simulation in disguise, this seduction does not mean to reveal the mechanism of the consumerist system by pushing it to its extremes but seduces the consumer to certain behaviour luring him or her with the consumerist real and is clearly visible in the manner of Pete’s conduct as the seducer. First of all, Pete manipulates Alain’s desire without being interested in Alain. Yet, he pretends that this is great fun that they are having. Pete also talks almost without a break and creates a space where reciprocity is precluded. You wanna stay over? Stay over if you want. Yeah. This a box. Or a hole. Both a box and a hole. This is good. To talk to you like this is good. It’s interesting. For me. Because you are different… He kisses Alain. Different can be sexy. Sometimes. (Ravenhill 2001: 100)

Once Alain starts talking, Pete immediately reaches out for his camcorder. He does that to screen himself from the potentially unwanted response form Alain and to control the situation and its outcome better. His agenda is, after

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all, to get the contract out of this situation regardless of Alain’s, and even his own feelings. In fact, since Pete is not attracted to Alain, it is conceivable that he had to put his feelings aside in order to secure the deal: he had to detach himself from himself and the response of his body. His strategy is therefore very calculated: he tempers with Alain’s desire, promises him the real, but only so that he may profit from it. As soon as Pete realizes that this will not be possible since Alain is not a producer, the deal is off and Alain is asked to leave.

Alain’s seduction of Pete This is the moment when Alain reverses and takes over the situation, becoming the subject of the consumerist seduction himself now and rendering Pete to its object. In order to catch Pete’s interest, Alain resorts to Baudrillard’s seduction story about the woman who gauges out her eyes. The story presents a scenario of a real that is ‘realised’, grasped, given and therefore fatal. It shows the real as shocking and terrifying. And even though at first glance it may seem as if Alain endeavours to have Pete experience the sublimity of the real through the story, the way Alain uses the narrative is, however, a proof to the contrary. Alain reduces the narrative to a mere consumerist sign, which, added to the context of the situation, is supposed to make Alain’s own appearance more attractive for Pete. The seduction story is used by Alain, who is now in control of the situation, to shape and remodel the reality to serve his own purpose, which is to tempt Pete into giving him what Alain came to Pete’s place originally for: sex. The story does reverse the initial situation and the power relation between the seducer (Pete) and seduced (Alain) and it would be also plausible to consider it to be an example of Baudrillardian seduction, at least initially. On gaining control, however, Alain puts the situation back on the consumerist track, as he does not intend to unmask the mechanism of simulation underlying the consumerist system for Pete but use Pete as the object which will help him satisfy his own need. Moreover, Alain has a rather particular scenario in mind as to what should happen and how it should happen. Once Pete takes the bait, Alain is anything but seductive in his behaviour towards the young man and makes his wish known to Pete very explicitly: Alain Pete Alain Pete […]

I want to fuck you. Yeah? I need to fuck you. Or you fuck me. Maybe. Okay. I don’t have a problem with that.

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Alain Pete Alain

If I stay with you, I fuck you. We drive somewhere. We drive to the desert and I fuck you. Sure, sure, I understand. If that’s the deal … That’s the deal. (Ravenhill 2001: 111– 112)

That Alain does not care about Pete but only about getting what he wants becomes even clearer in scene ten when he does not really listen to what Pete says and just starts having sex with him. The only thing that Alain seems to pay attention to is his own need. And at one point he even encourages Pete to look through the camera so that it calms him down by giving him the illusion that he can control what is happening to him. Alain Pete

Alain

Keep it all within the frame. You’re right. You’re right. I can do that. It’s on TV, okay? It’s something on TV. (Ravenhill 2001: 114)

Alain uses the logic and effects of simulation to his own advantage very much in the same way as the system of consumerism used the title of his book earlier on to the same effect. By providing Pete with the familiar frame of the TV, he manages to placate him and sell him what he, Alain, has to offer. He simulates a reality for Pete which is familiar to him and which pacifies him enough so that it not only makes him subordinate to Alain’s wishes but also creates the illusion of being in control. He simulates for Pete the consumerist reality of the screen. Alain is just as successful in detaching Pete from what is happening to him as David Letterman is in detaching Alain’s book from the form of its title. The oral sex that Alain is performing on Pete becomes for him an image just as any other image in the constant circulation and exchange of simulacra, so that when he comes “[he does not] feel a thing” (Ravenhill 2001: 115). Unsurprisingly, the consumerist real that Alain seduced Pete with at the beginning does not have the powerful effect of the sublime real and therefore turns out to be disappointing for Pete. Soon enough he finds himself bored with the thinker. Pete

[…] I don’t want to be with you. You see? You understand? Okay, we had an experience. Fine. That’s cool. Thank you. There, see. I’m grateful. We shared an experience. I did a lot of new stuff. I was scared but we got through it … when

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we were there … great. But that’s over … I’m bored. (Ravenhill 2001: 118)

Instead of being energising and life intensifying, the experience turns out to evoke the feelings of apathy and indifference in Pete – a typical effect of the consumerist real. Pete’s interest in Alain is briefly excited again when he sees him in the Letterman’s show. It is the first time that he hears more about Alain’s ideas and wants to learn more about them, Pete

You’re so metaphorical. What does that mean? On the TV show. What does that mean – the End of History? Please. I want to learn. I want to be with you and I want you to teach me. (Ravenhill 2001: 120)

It seems that it is the metaphorical and enigmatic language that Alain uses to talk about his ideas and which Pete does not understand that manages to excite Pete’s imagination and desire for real and makes him return to Alain. It was also the language of the seduction story that impressed Pete and made him change his mind about Alain in the first place so that he let Alain stay, even though Pete could not comprehend the meaning of the story either. It is, therefore, the unknown, the undecidability in the language, the entity the desire of which is brought up by the sign and which yet escapes the sign, the truly sublime real that generates Pete’s desire and excites him to action and search for answers. It is the sublime real that gives new dynamic to Pete’s life and reorients it, even if only for a short time, away from consumerism, and not the consumerist real that was offered to him by Alain and which only led him to stagnation. Explaining the similar principle at work in Baudrillard’s language of seduction, Mike Gane turns to Julia Kristeva’s concepts of transfinite and translinguistic phenomena (see Gane 1991: 41– 42), which she refers to attempting to explain the aesthetic quality of ambiguity in a novel: Transfinite is the analogue of the difference between the logical and the poetic, the quantitative and the infinite. The transfinite is […] that which broadens out from the sentence itself, into the poetic. (Gane 1991: 41)

It is the transfinite quality of the language of seduction, “that which broadens out from the sentence itself”, which is so appealing to Pete and which renders the stories of seduction so ambivalent in their meaning. The ambivalence, Gane further points out still drawing on Kristeva’s theory, is the result of the con-

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fluence of “what might be called the semiotic operation which occurs in a finite field, and the symbolic operation which opens onto unlimited or potentially interminable or transfinite polylogue” (Gane 1991: 42). A true seduction therefore always consists of “the meeting of the semiological and the symbolic” (Gane 1991: 42) and of the resulting ambivalence, which invite new meanings, broadening the horizon of thought and the system of signification ad infinitum and generating the insatiable desire for the sublime real. It is, therefore, little surprising that Alain’s crude statement, “I want to fuck you” does not manage to appeal to Pete’s imagination with the same mesmeric power as his, or rather Baudrillard’s, language of seduction does. There is, indeed, very little ambiguity in the sentence as to what Alain’s expectations of his relation with Pete are. There is, therefore, also very little space for development of desire, or, to use Derrida’s concept, there is little hospitality (Derrida 2000) in the sentence, since everything has already been said and decided in advance.

Alain’s seduction of Donny Another situation which also speaks for classification of Alain’s character as consumerist collector searching for the consumerist real and applying the strategies of simulation in order to do so, is Alain’s seduction of Donny. Typically of a consumerist collector, that is typically of the subject of seduction which sees the other as finite objects that can be grasped and discarded if no longer needed, Alain’s desire for Pete fizzles out as soon as another potential object of seduction, Donny, appears on the horizon, or more precisely, on the computer screen. Donny is a young man whose greatest pride are his scars – the effect of his selfcutting, which he displays on Pete’s webpage intended for that purpose. Pete set up the page after his interest in Alain and his desire for the sublime real was rekindled by Alain’s telling him about the importance of cruelty and sacrifice: Alain

[…] how will we live in this new age of chaos? Not as we lived in the old age. Not with the old language. Not by being more kind, more … enlightened. We must be cruel, we must follow our desires and be cruel to others, yes, but also we must be cruel to ourselves. We must embrace suffering, we must embrace cruelty. (Ravenhill 2001: 121)

Under Alain’s influence, that is under the influence of consumerist real disguised as the sublime real, Pete starts injuring himself and founds an Internet community of self-cutters, with Donny as one of its members. Even though Alain teaches Pete about the importance of violence, cruelty and sacrifice, it soon becomes

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rather clear that his big words are empty and he does not live according to what he purports are his own principles. Moreover, he exposes Pete to ideas which, if taken out of the context, become very dangerous and even potentially lethal. Pete still does not understand the relation between the semiotic, the symbolic and the real. Consequently, he also cannot understand that the ideas of cruelty and suffering, which Alain so carelessly implants in Pete’s mind, are meant to be realised metaphorically, at least according to Baudrillard’s strategy of violent theory. For Baudrillard violence and cruelty are strategies within his theory, which he uses to “seek insight through escalation (SED 5)” (Merrin 61). By giving thought an extreme form (see Merrin 62) Baudrillard makes it reach the point of its own collapse and reversal (see Merrin 62). In developing his ideas about cruelty, violence and sacrifice, Baudrillard also draws on theoreticians such as Artaud or Bataille, who believed that the experience of violence by human beings was an essential part of human life. However, they also believed that in order for the cruelty to be life affirming and community forming it also had to be experienced as a part of a ritual. The experience of cruelty had to be symbolic, and should never cross the line dividing the symbolic from the real. Paradoxically, Alain’s teaching achieves precisely what Baudrillard’s theory was supposed to prevent: crossing the boundary over to the real. Donny’s seduction reveals yet again that Alain uses Baudrillard’s ideas as consumerist signifiers to enhance his own appeal so that he can better manipulate the object of his desire. Although he speaks about the significance of being cruel to oneself, he is not ready to expose and make a sacrifice out of himself. As soon as Donny arrives at their hotel-room door Alain immediately screens himself off from the potential risk of the other. Taking himself outside the situation of seduction, he hides behind camcorder for this purpose and creating the situation of simulation. In so doing, he detaches himself from the event and exempts himself from the challenge of response and reciprocation. Also, with the camcorder in his hand, Alain becomes the one in control of the situation. He instantly assumes the role of a director, dictating Pete and Donny what to do and say. The situation, however, gets out of his control, even if it is only for a short time. When one of the objects of Alain’s seduction turns the tables on him, it pushes the situation to extremes, reversing the roles between them. During the cutting competition that Pete and Donny have under the encouragement of Alain, Donny cuts his jugular and bleeds to death. In doing so, he short-circuits the consumerist production of the simulated real by providing the sublime and uncontrollable real. Donny forces the system of simulation, which Alain’s recording of the scene symbolises, to a halt. This is manifested in Alain’s instant putting of his camcorder aside, his terror at the sight of Donny’s blood and the preg-

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nant silence that follows, in which the real is given time and space to make itself known as sublime: Donny cuts his jugular. Collapses. Pete Oh shit, man. Shit. Alain puts the camcorder down quickly and he and Pete rush to Donny. Alain Stop the blood. Stop the blood. Donny is writhing. They try unsuccessfully to staunch the blood. Donny dies. Everyone very still. Long long pause. (Ravenhill 2001: 131– 132)

Symbolically, Donny’s cut may be seen as slicing the totalising system of consumerism open. Instigated by Alain’s desire for mastering the limit of the system the situation paradoxically and tragically only proves that the limit cannot be mastered. Every attempt to do so will end with totalitarianism and death. Donny does, in other words, what Alain lectures but fails to do himself: he lives the real and pays the terrible price to do that. Taking Alain’s words literally, Donny exposes the pretence of the consumerist real, the limits of the system and reveals the ‘terrible’ face of the real just as the women in Baudrillard’s stories of seduction do. By providing Alain with the ultimate real object, Donny ends the seduction game and Alain’s collection and his desire along with it. He pays a huge price for it. For unlike in Baudrillard’s seduction stories, Donny dies ‘for real’ at the internal level of the play. Donny’s death caught Alain unaware. It broke through all Alain’s ‘screens’, which he used to filter the reality around him. Not only did it force him to put the camera down, but it also halted his thought processes and made him connect to the reality in a more direct, less mediated and experiential way through the feelings of shock, terror and panic. The moment of Donny’s control over the situation does not last long, though, and Alain snaps out from his momentary ‘paralysis’ quite quickly, resorting to his academic jargon again: Alain moves away from the body. Alain Of course, as we look back it will become easier to name the exact date. Or we may never be able to say exactly. Perhaps we will never agree a fixed point. A moment. There will be different theories. / But in principle we will agree. (Ravenhill 2001: 132)

Later the recording of Donny’s death is also posted on the Internet, shown on TV and appropriated by the consumerist system in every possible way. The subver-

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sive moment that Donny’s death was is engulfed and immediately absorbed by the system and rendered harmless again. The sublime real is reduced to the consumerist real. Chorus

[…] He made every TV show, every talk show. Ricki and Oprah both got the same show: ‘Death on the Net’. And Stevie, he already has a song about it. Which he has performed unplugged and is now showing three times an hour on MTV. (Ravenhill 2001: 134– 135)

Even though it may seem as if Donny’s death did not bring about any lasting change in the system, Alain being one of its hidden representatives, there is someone else whom Donny’s act did touch very deeply. Unlike Alain, Pete does not go back to ‘normal’ after overcoming the initial shock caused by Donny’s death. Neither does he try to shield himself from the terrible reality by using his camcorder as he did back in the dessert but responds to it as best as he can. There is a definite change in Pete’s behaviour, which also manifests itself in his transformed attitude towards Alain and his theories. Pete

No. Stop. Stop now. Why do you have to? Oh yeah … blah blah blah. (Ravenhill 2001: 132)

Donny’s death undermined Alain’s authority for Pete, who now blames the thinker for escalating the situation and not stepping in when the situation became critical: Pete

[…] Donny is dead. Donny is here and Donny is dead. Did you think this was gonna happen? Did you know? You had any idea, it was your duty to jump in there, to intervene. Why didn’t you intervene? (Ravenhill 2001: 133)

What the tragic incident showed Pete is the true face of the real. It was Donny who made him realise the fatal consequences of grasping the real and not Alain. Unlike the thinker, Donny was willing to give himself in the experience, to sacrifice his life. In doing so, he not only halted the system of simulation and exposed Alain as its charlatan but also managed to perform a transformation of Pete and create a feeling of solidarity and community between the two

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young men. For, having disposed of Donny’s body, Pete decides to take revenge on Alain and complete Donny’s work, the force of which initially was undermined by its subsequent mediatisation. In the last scene Pete visits Alain in the hospital and tells him about his decision to join his father, Bill. Expressing his deep disappointment with the theoretician, Pete explains his feelings to Alain in the following way, Pete

[…] see, I don’t believe you. Sure, I get your point. See, I can do the whole Death of Man speech thing, you know? But where’d it get us? It got us Donny. And I don’t want that any more. (Ravenhill 2001: 139)

Though at first glance it may seem that it is the consumerist system’s victory, with the latter winning Pete back, since he decides to return to his father. Nonetheless, there is a crucial change in Pete’s behaviour now. Choosing his father over Alain is Pete’s conscious decision. Pete is aware of the mechanism of consumerist system and the strategies of simulation now. He knows its limits. He decides to go back not because he suddenly believes in the system again but he realizes that the system is the only thing there is. Outside of it there is only death. What may therefore look like the system’s victory in the beginning turns out to be its subversion in the end. Pete will live with his father even though he disagrees with him: Pete

[…] I hate my dad. But you offer despair, you know that? And it may be true, but it doesn’t get us anywhere. (Ravenhill 2001: 140)

Pete admits that Baudrillard’s theory may be true; that there may be no other real than death. Equipped with this new consciousness, he may safely start travelling through the world of simulacra and simulation again, because this time he will not mistake them for the real. Donny’s seduction was successful on Pete: not only did it show him the terrible but true face of the real but it also saved him from Alain’s concealed consumerist real. Donny’s death gave Pete a deeper insight into the nature of the real and allowed him to take control over the situation again, turning from being the object of Alain’s seduction into its subject, even though a broken and incomplete one. Donny’s death also had another impact on Pete: it created a bond, a community, between the two young men. Even though Donny’s death was immediately appropriated by the media its seed was planted in Pete, who driven by

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the energy released in this destructive act carried it to its end. In order to make sure that Donny’s subversive death, that is the death of the object of collection, achieves its aim of destroying its collector, Pete presents the latter with a gift: he gives Alain a shoebox with Donny’s eyes. He gives him the real. It is Pete and Donny’s sublime seduction of Alain with their cruel response to Alain’s consumerist seduction. After Alain opens the shoebox, Donny’s ghost enters, telling Alain that he would soon die and go to hell and promises never to leave his side (see Ravenhill 2001: 140). This is the threat of the real to the system: haunting the system with the prospect of a sudden power reversal.

3.3.4 External Analysis: Sublime Seduction of the Audience As far as the play’s external impact is concerned, the audience is also a subject to a type of seduction, during which the audience is offered the opportunity to rethink its concept of the real and its relation to representation. The external seduction of the audience proceeds in three aesthetic phases of the play, which steer the audience’s perception processes by changing the dynamics of the dramatic situation and creating stark aesthetic contrasts among them. The phases can be distinguished by the following characteristics: 1) flatness; 2) illusory depth; and 3) transformation. These phases are analogous to the movements conducive to the experience of the sublime and respectively correspond to 1) the threat of privation; 2) the experience of the sublime delight; and 3) the experience of indeterminacy of thought and its transformation. The description of the three phases will present the play’s aesthetic strategies leading the audience first to the experience of the real as sublime and then the realisation that any representation of the real is merely an illusion of it, which at its best points to the unattainability of the real, its indeterminacy.

Flatness The quality of flatness is gradually created and intensified by accumulation of similar images of simulation and consumerist real up to the point of Donny’s death, which brings by contrast a momentary relief for the audience. That the first phase of flatness, or what Fredric Jameson referred to as depthlessness, stretches over fourteen out of nineteen scenes of the play does not seem to be a coincidence. It is the play’s strategy aiming to evoke in the audience the experience of the threat of privation, the feeling that nothing real will ever happen and we will be absorbed by this superficiality and insignificance completely. Extending this quality of flatness over such a long time escalates the feeling of

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threat and terror in the audience, and intensifies in it a strong desire for something real to happen, the longing for the real to cut its way through the surface of the seemingly endless simulation. What may seem amusing about the scenes initially eventually becomes unbearably stifling. The depthlessness along with its qualities such as waning of affect and emotional vacuity finally become so intolerable and overwhelming that when the moment of Donny’s death arrives it releases all the frustration of waiting accumulated in the audience so far with a surge of vital energy and sublime ecstasy. It feels real, at least for a moment. Fredric Jameson speaks of depthlessness, as the “supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms” and characterises it as “a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense” (Jameson 196). It needs to be reminded, though, that Jameson’s definition of postmodernism, unlike Lyotard’s concept of it, strongly roots the latter in “the logic of capitalism” and therefore also in the logic of simulation and consumerist real. Discussing Jameson’s concept of depthlessness, Adam Roberts describes it as “a certain emptying out of significance” (Roberts 126), emptying representational space of its depth and explains this development by referring to the processes of simulation, as the latter radically contributes to problematisation of the concept of the real, and by extension, the conventional opposition of surface and depth. These phenomena leading to the problematisation of the concept of the real are clearly visible in the first long part of the play, where any trace or any potential of depth is overmatched and subsequently immediately neutralised by the ‘flattening’ force of consumerist simulation, by its strategy of homogenisation of signs’ values, and its slogan of ‘anything goes’. For, homogenisation of signs reduces difference to minimum. The situation where differences between pairs such as “essence and appearance”, “latent and manifest”, “authenticity and inauthenticiy” and “signifier and signified” (Jameson 198) are not merely deconstructed, with their boundaries shown as ambivalent. They are completely erased so that every sign can be exchanged against any other sign regardless of its deep structure (signified) leading not to the freedom of choice and more enhanced sense of life, which the much hyped slogan of ‘anything goes’ seems to be promising, but to indifference and inertia, emptying of intellectual and emotional content. That this first and longest part of the play does not simply consists of ‘pure’ flatness but also has some faint hints, the however understated suggestions, that there might be something real, something deeper underneath, is a strategy that intensifies the desire for the real in the audience, and manipulate it into believing that there is depth and real there. It only needs to push through the surface. Without these subtle implications, the flatness would not be experienced by the audience as so painfully stifling, and the real as pulsating underneath it. To par-

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aphrase Baudrillard’s words (see Simulacra and Simulation 164), this is precisely where the seduction with the real begins: in the wakening of the desire by making a subtle hint that there might be something real, something more behind the words, a deeper meaning, and immediately frustrating the desire and cancelling this hint by engulfing it with flatness. The very beginning of the play provides a good example of the tactics of suggesting the real and cancelling it. The scene consists of a chorus, which in the first performance of the play in 1997 was performed by students from Marymount College, telling a story of a young boy who is anxious about the state of the world. He tells his mother about this existential fear and she tries to placate him: Chorus

See, a few years ago I couldn’t sleep. I’d go to bed and then I got thinking about all this stuff in the world – about the riots and the fighting and all the angry people and all – and I just couldn’t sleep. And sometimes I’d cry – partly because I really wanted to sleep and I was mad that I couldn’t sleep but partly because of all those bad things going on. And my mom would come into my room and be just like totally freaked that I was crying night after night. ‘What’s wrong, poops? You have to tell me what’s wrong. Is it the teachers at the school? Is one of the teachers at the school doing bad things to you?’ Until eventually I’m like: ‘No, Mom, it’s not the teachers at the school. I’m crying for the world, because the world is such a bad place.’ And Momma is like: ‘I know, poops. It’s bad now but it’s getting better. It’s gonna get a whole lot better. We’re going to live in a better world.’ (Ravenhill 2001: 97)

Although the meaning of the anxious boy’s words suggest some deeper problem the aesthetic surface of the words and expressions such as “just like totally freaked”, “poops” or “I’m like”, along with the manner of their articulation, that is performed by a group of young people imitating the Greek chorus, ridicule the meaning and flatten the depth of the statement, reducing it to a laughing matter and baring the audience from any possibility of any engagement with its deeper meaning. The surface of the language draws the audience’s attention to itself and away from any potential deep meaning behind it. The materiality of the language predominates over its meaning and adjusts it to one model, that of fun and entertainment. The accumulation of the language of fun and entertainment over so many scenes, however, pushes the model to its extremes and creates an overwhelming object of the sublime in the audience’s mind. Fun and en-

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tertainment take on a terrible edge and loose their initial amusing effect. They become monstrous. Another formal feature which makes it difficult for the audience to get involved with the boy’s complaint in-depth and which adds to the quality of flatness is the fast pace with which the scene is followed by the next one. The rapidity of this exchange is indeed typical of the whole play’s rhythm and is reminiscent of the televisual aesthetic, where one image is instantly replaced by a new one, one piece of information is superseded by another one, so that the viewers’ attention can be held at the maximum level at all times. The aim of the play’s use of this aesthetic strategy is not only an oversaturation of the audience with images and consequential indifference and insensitivity towards the content of the images but also lulling the audience into a false sense of security evoked by the televisual familiarity. The televisual overexposure is known to be coupled with the feeling of being exempted from possibility and responsibility of immediate and direct response. If an opportunity of response is given to the viewers, it is monitored and controlled by being confined to a few options that the viewers can choose from. Their reaction is thus already pre-designed and simulated. Similarly, the members of the audience are encouraged by the familiar aesthetic to lean back, let themselves be entertained and watch passively. Also, the theatrical form of chorus, which is conventionally associated with the lofty and sublime style of ancient tragedy, combined with the low register of the boy’s language evokes an atmosphere of comedy rather than tragic despair. Instead of creating a community with the audience by drawing it into the depth of the protagonist’s terrible predicament and inducing the audience’s compassion for the tragic hero, as is often the function of the chorus’ direct address in drama (see Pickering 73 – 77), the chorus in Faust is Dead seems to achieve quite the opposite effect. If anything, the speaker represented by the chorus is even more isolated from the audience, who due to the amusing register of the language can easily ignore the appeal in the young boy’s voice. In line with Henri Bergson’s concept of laughter (see Bergson 8)¹⁷, the audience distances it-

 “Als eine nicht minder merkwürdige Eigenschaft des Komischen möchte ich zweitens die Gefühllosigkeit betonen, die gewöhnlich dem Lachen zur Seite geht. Das Komische scheint seine durchschlagende Wirkung nur äußern zu können, wenn es eine völlig unbewegte, ausgeglichene Seelenoberfläche vorfindet. Seelische Kälte ist sein wahres Element. Das Lachen hat keinen größeren Feind als jede Art von Erregung. Ich will nicht sagen, wir könnten über einen Menschen, der uns etwa Mitleid oder gar Liebe einflößt, nicht trotzdem lachen: allein dann muß man für einen Augenblick diese Liebe vergessen, dieses Mitleid unterdrücken. […] Kurz, das Komische setzt, soll es voll wirken, etwas wie eine zeitweilige Anästhesie des Herzens voraus, es wendet sich an den reinen Intellekt” (Bergson 8 – 9).

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self from the play’s serious content, and is able to laugh at the character’s predicament. The tactics of subtly hinting at a possibility of the real, of some potential depth, and instantly revoking it by reducing the delicate suggestion to a mere surface of entertainment and consumerist real is applied throughout the first fourteen scenes. The examples of this technique are countless. For instance, in scene two, the idea of death is rendered as amusing and meaningless, by being put next to signifiers such as Madonna, sex, chat show and laughter. The deeper implications of Pete’s readiness to prostitute himself in exchange for a deal in scene three is glossed over by the hilarious effect that his verbal behaviour has on the audience, when he tries to convince Alain of Stevie’s talent by singing one of his songs “with great words” (Ravenhill 2001: 100): Got a Killer Killer Killer Killer Killer Killer

killer in my VCR in my ROM on the cable news in the floss I use in the floss in the floss in the floss. (Ravenhill 2001: 100)

What could potentially be even conceived to be a sexual abuse of Pete by Alain in scene ten is rendered harmless and amusing by Pete’s own voiceover commentary throughout the sexual act: Alain continues to suck Pete off for some time in silence. Pete There goes a racoon … hoppity hopping through that piece of tumbleweed. […] Hoppity hop. Hey, little fella, how you doing? And if that little fella, could speak, he would tell us: ‘I’m doing just fine. I’m living life out here at one with Mother Nature.’ Don’t you just wish you could do the same? (Ravenhill 2001: 114– 115)

Each scene adds to the growing formidable quality of flatness by emptying its signifiers from any potential signifieds and adjusting the former to the consumerist real. In doing so, they form the overwhelming object in the audience’s consciousness, catalysing the play’s first phase of the sublime: the threat of privation, which in Faust is Dead is the privation of significance, depth and the real. The more intensive the experience of the flatness is in the audience, the greater is the contrast and therefore the greater the effect of the next phase,

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which is the releasing of the vital energies and the experience of the sublime delight.

Illusory depth The experience of flatness of the first part of the play along with the subtle hints at the possibility of the real and their immediate removals evoke in the audience the threat of privation, the feeling of the lack of the real and therefore the even greater desire for it. As Margret Fetzer points out in her essay, “Painfully Shocking – Mark Ravenhill’s Theatre as Out-of-Body-Experience”, “with the boom of ‘simulacra and simulation’ which can no longer be traced back to any reality comes nostalgia, the ‘escalation of the true, of lived experience’” (Fetzer 166). The overwhelming accumulation of the depthless images of simulation and simulacra over so many scenes frustrates the desire for a real experience in the audience. When the moment of Donny’s death arrives, it is therefore experienced as a relief and a rescue from the monotony and emotional emptiness of the earlier phase. As the most intensive and most shocking moment in the play, it offers the illusion to the audience that finally something real, something authentic, deep and meaningful happened. At last, the audience is given the opportunity to feel powerfully and profoundly. In spite of the monstrosity of Donny’s act, the audience experiences the moment as extremely energising and satisfying in its visceral appeal. The feeling is that of the sublime delight: a confluence of terror at the sight of death and concentrated pleasure taken from being released from the depthlessness and emotional vacuity of the play’s earlier stage. Nevertheless, it is difficult to ignore that Donny’s death is a theatrical death and as such is therefore by definition not real but simulated. Or, as Margret Fetzer argues, “the characters are framed by the stage: they do not happen to us, but in a virtual reality that has been constructed for our view” (Fetzer 171). Annette Pankratz also reminds that although “bodies on stage will always be bodies” they “are always already framed as part of a theatrical code” (Pankratz 2004b: 75). Is the simulation of Donny’s death, therefore, any different from the simulation of the first phase of the play? What does it imply for the experience of the real by the audience? How real is the real that the audience seems to feel? Are all these feelings just an illusion? Referring to the two aesthetic categories of the agreeable and the sublime may help answer the first question. By considering the difference between the simulation of the first phase of the play and the second stage in terms of aesthetic effect, the former as agreeable and the latter as sublime, it is possible to understand that although they both operate as simulation they do so with different

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methods and achieve different results when it comes to their effect on the audience. The first phase produces the consumerist real, which has many corresponding features with the agreeable. Firstly, it is determined by a need. A need, unlike desire, is more concrete and can be satisfied more easily. It is created and defined by the system of consumerism so that it can later be satisfied by it in a self-perpetuating scenario. The need and the satisfaction of the need are both products of the same system. Secondly, the consumerist real is framed by a model, which precedes and creates it. This makes the consumerist real predictable, controllable, graspable and safe. Only when the frame of the model is pushed to its limit, as it is done in the play by excessive accumulation of consumerist real, does the latter become terrifying in its nauseating effect that it produces in the audience. In other words, the consumerist real is experienced as agreeable for the audience as long as it comes in moderate amounts. When it is offered to the audience in a concentrated form as it is done in the first phase of the play, it becomes unbearable and unsettling. The sublime real, in turn, which is evoked in the moment of Donny’s death by the sudden release from the nauseating consumerist real, is also a type of simulation but this time the audience is not given any opportunity of shielding itself from the violence of the act, as it was offered earlier in the play by means of the consumerist aesthetic. Donny’s death is followed by a very long pause and stillness (see Ravenhill 2001: 132) – the only instant in the play which is marked this way. The audience is given time for the silence and motionlessness of this moment to take over and sink in. The sudden halt in the action, or rather in the fast paced precession of the images, stands in a strong contrast with the rest of the play’s rhythm, punching a hole in the flatness of the play’s rapidly exchanging surfaces, and also punching the audience in the ‘gut’, to use James Macdonald’s description of the similar effect that Kane’s Blasted has on the audience (see Hill-Gibbins). Whereas the first phase of the play creates the effect of the consumerist real which prevents the audience from any empathy for the characters and enables the audience to gloss over any deeper meaning in the stories without having to respond to them, the stage of the illusory depth evokes the sublime real, which affects the audience differently, making it impossible for the audience to ignore Donny’s predicament so easily, at least for as long as the silence after his death lasts. The first phase removes the audience from the possibility of any reaction to the injustice and abuse shown onstage, by reducing its bodily response to one concrete type of feeling: consumerist pleasure evoked by the consumerist real. The second phase reconnects the audience to what happens onstage by tying its members to the protagonist’s pain: Donny’s death becomes the audience’s experience of shock.

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Although Donny’s death is only simulated for the audience, it is simulated in the aesthetic of the sublime and affects the audience in a different way than the consumerist simulation. Shown as an empty signifier, an indeterminacy, Donny’s death is not given a consumerist value, at least not immediately, by being put on par with signifiers which would make it agreeable rather than terrible for the audience. Unlike the signifier ‘death’ in the title of Alain’s book, the signifier ‘Donny’s death’ is exchanged against silence and not against agreeable signifiers such as Madonna or laughter, which though meaningless are yet determined by their goal to satisfy the consumer’s need for pleasure. Silence defines Donny’s death as indeterminate. The indeterminacy of this atrocious image cannot be forgotten so easily as it does impress itself upon the audience’s bodies, by inducing in them a bodily response of shock. As Margret Fetzer rightly points out, “the pain experienced by the characters onstage resurfaces as the shock experienced by members of the audience” (Fetzer 172). The sensation of shock upon Donny’s slashing his jugular, which is not immediately alleviated by agreeable signifiers but enhanced and prolonged by the indeterminate signifier of silence, makes it difficult for the audience to distance itself from Donny’s situation by rationalising and relativising his pain with other signifiers. It becomes real for the audience in their experience of shock. To answer the remaining questions concerning the ‘realness’ of the simulated real onstage, the audience’ experience of it is as real as it can be. Though the character’s death is not real, the audience’s response to it is. The real that the audience experiences is real but it does not necessarily mean that it is true. It is real even though Donny’s death is not, at least not externally. The real is sublime. What this theatrical creation of the illusion of depth manifests is the ungraspability of the real and the ambiguity of the experience and of the concept of it. It shows that experiencing the real says nothing about the reality of the object or the situation that the experience is catalysed in us. There is no truth about the object in our experience of it as real. The real of the other is always unshareable and therefore only an illusion, it is always imaginary for the witness.

Transformation The last part of the play demonstrates what happens after experiencing the sublime. Is it indeed a life-transforming experience as philosophers of the sublime often insist? Does the experience of the sublime real broaden the audience’s horizon of thought? The final phase of the play seems to offer the opportunity for the members of the audience to reflect upon this question and the effect of the real upon them, though it is formulated without referring to the idea of the sub-

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lime explicitly. The possibility of the reflection is inspired by Donny’s words, addressing the audience from beyond the grave: Chorus

Looking back, now I’m an adult, I think I used to cry at night not because the world was such a bad place. Well, okay, not just because the world is such a bad place. But also because I wanted the world to come to an end. Like Armageddon or Hellfier or Total Meltdown or some such catastrophe. And I cried because I felt so guilty because it was gonna happen any day and it would be all my fault for wanting it so much. But the world hasn’t ended. It’s going on and on. And I keep on looking for signs that it’s getting better like Momma told me. But I can’t see them. So it hasn’t ended and it’s not getting better. It’s just going on, on and on and on. And I wonder if I should feel something about that. But – you want the truth? – I don’t feel a thing. See, I’m the kind of person who can stand in the middle of an earthquake and I’m just like ‘whoa, neat earthquake’. And I wonder what made me that way. (Ravenhill 2001: 137)

It is possible to wonder whether there is a grain of truth in Donny’s expression of his deep disappointment with the state of the world, which remains unmoved and unchanged regardless of the horrendous things that happen in it on daily basis. What the character seems to be asking the members of the audience implicitly is to reflect upon their own response to his death and how fast they were able to move on, focus on the familiar discourse and forget about the terrible event. His response seems to point to a general indifference in the society to external stimuli, or more precisely, the consumerist ability to reduce the scope of reaction to any stimuli to one determinate sensation, that of the agreeable. Sanctioned by the consumerist principle of fun, all experiences are rendered harmless by being made familiar and entertaining. This allows the consumer to avoid such uncomfortable issues as pain or death. However, this disavowal not only results in a diminished experience of being alive but may also paradoxically eventually lead to pain and death, as Edmund Burke famously argues. At first glance, the final phase seems to furnish the audience with the possibility of such a reduction, as the consumerist real appears to cancel the experience of the sublime real yet again. When Alain ends the moment of silence by resuming his monologising narratives and the pace of the play takes up on its earlier dynamic once more, the audience is offered again something new but at the same time also something familiar to consume. The action follows now the recognizable scenario of a crime thriller, as the characters try to dispose

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with Donny’s body, argue about what to do next, Alain tries to steal Pete’s valuable disc and Pete shoots him for that. The renewed attempts at reduction of Donny’s anguish to the agreeable fail this time in my opinion. For, by now the audience has experienced the contrast between the threat of privation by being subject to the sensation of the overwhelming depthlessness of the consumerist real and the powerful sensation of experiencing the sublime real in Donny’s death. This aesthetic journey makes it very difficult to simply go back to enjoying the consumerist real again. Therefore, although the drama seems to gain on pace as the images start to flow again and the moment of the real is obfuscated by them and new action, there is no returning to the previous status quo after the sublime real. Donny’s death hangs over the remaining scenes rather persistently, making it impossible for the audience to give in to the consumerist attempts at rendering Donny’s death entertaining. The silly language of the chorus does not draw the audience’s attention away from the terror of Donny’s death (see Ravenhill 2001: 134– 135) any longer but enhances the atrocity of the situation and its seriousness even more, pointing the finger at itself in a self-referential gesture. It is the system of consumerism and all who propagate it that are responsible for Donny’s demise. It is the system, which created Donny, led him to his death and now tries to use this death to promote itself even further. In this vein, the last words of the chorus in scene sixteen pondering that since the death inspired so many celebrities who created shows and songs about it, then “maybe Donny wasn’t so pathetic after all and he knew what was happening in his life and figured out a way to make something good come from it” (Ravenhill 2001: 135), are charged with self-irony. Donny’s death does not stop the system of consumerism from producing the consumerist real, which goes “on and on and on” (Ravenhill 2001: 137). And in fact things seem to have changed from bad to worse after his demise. Both Donny from beyond the grave and Pete by choosing to go back to his father, Bill, show great doubt in the possibility of transformation and disappointment with the real. Even though the reality of the third phase is still that of the consumerist system, the characters’ consciousness of the system and the real is transformed. And so is the audience’s perception. The last image of Donny’s ghost without his eyes may therefore be emblematic for the final part of the play: the haunting remainder of the terrible real, which points to the limits of the consumerist system.

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3.4 Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis The last case study in this work and also, tragically considering her premature death, the last play by Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis (2000), is perhaps the most ambiguous dramatic piece of those analysed in this book.¹⁸ Despite, or possibly precisely because of its thematic and aesthetic ambiguity, the play is rather frequently analysed by critics, as its uncertainty seems to invite the readers in, opening an astounding interpretative range, or, to refer to Derrida’s concept, interpretative “hospitality” (see Derrida 2000), which the varied readings¹⁹ and stage realisations of the play manifest. Just to mention the differences in the number of cast: the first production of 4.48 Psychosis in June 2000 at the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, directed by James Macdonald, used three actors to represent the voices in the play, and the Polish director, Grzegorz Jarzyna, worked with five actors during his 2002 production, whereas Sebastian Schug put only one actress on the stage in his 2005 Heidelberg production. As the number and variety of the performance stagings illustrate, the impossibility of grasping the meaning of the play in one coherent interpretation turns out to be extremely productive in enhancing the creativity of both the critics and artists of various kinds: directors, performers, musicians, dancers, and stage designers. Considering the wide interpretative scope offered by the play, it would be naïve to purport to have found the only right approach to it. However, choosing the particular lens of the aesthetic of the sublime has the advantage of allowing various interpretations and readings to co-exist without insisting on the ‘correctness’ of any of them. The sublime quality of the play’s aesthetic lies in its undecidability, which, in turn, invites the semantic and formal plurality into its midst. Opting to take the five dashes — — — — — (Kane 205)

separating the sections of 4.48 Psychosis as the central motif of this undecidability from the play’s many disjointed lines, the play’s “bewildered fragments”

 If there is anything central about the play, it is its quality of ambiguity, uncertainty or, to use Derrida’s term, undecidability (see Derrida 1988). This quality has already been commented on by many critics (see, for example, Fordyce; De Vos 2010; Pankratz 2010), who however have applied different approaches than the one used in the following analysis.  see the collection of essays on Kane’s work, Kane in Context, edited by Laurens De Vos, and Graham Saudners.

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(Kane 210), in which the speaker describes her²⁰ predicament as “sing[ing] without hope on the boundary” (Kane 214), the analysis takes as its central perspective the various frames and margins in the play, discussed at the level of both form and content: theatrical conventions, existential limits, and conceptual boundaries. In that the analysis follows the parergonal approach of Jacques Derrida in his The Truth in Painting (1978/1987), which he applies in his reading of various philosophers of art, Kant and his Critique of Judgement (1790/2005) being one of them. The parergonal approach focuses on the frame, the parergon of a work, of an ergon, and examines the latter only in relation to this liminal space and not, as is conventionally done, focusing on the latter. The truth about art, the identity and essence of artwork, does not lie in an isolated and self-determining ergon but in its frame. It is the parergon that delineates and, in doing so, defines the identity of the ergon, guaranteeing its totality. What Derrida proposes is instead of trying to ignore the frame and concentrate on the ergon “on the contrary [to] engag[e] in it [the parergon] and going all round it […]” (Derrida 1987: 32). As Derrida also observes, drawing on Kant’s distinction of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ frames, not all frames are the same (see Derrida 1987: 64). This chapter puts forward the thesis that the frames in the play are of a very specific aesthetic: they are sublime. Accordingly, the further contention of the analysis is that the play’s main strategy and technique of evoking the sublime consists in drawing attention to and extremely exposing these sublime frames, which are experienced as forming and collapsing (framing and unframing), the effects of which are visible both in the internal and external communication systems of the play, blurring the distinction between them.²¹ The framing and unframing mechanisms will be discussed and further analysed in the chapter at the internal level of the play by the persona describing her experience of the framing/unframing movement as her borderline existence with her voice breaking down, her balancing between life and death, continuity and

 Although, as Ken Urban points out (2001: 44), conventionally there have been three actors performing the play to mark the three distinct voices in the play, the following analysis chooses to refer to the speaker of the play as singular and female in full awareness of the subjectivity of this interpretative decision and having no objective evidence to support this choice. The decision is mostly dictated by practical reasons of stylistic simplicity and partly to indicate the role of the reader’s/critic’s subjective identification with the voice.  It is perhaps interesting to notice that 4.48 Psychosis is not the only play where Kane seems to be preoccupied with collapsing frames. Indeed, the playwright seems to have been interested in breaking down boundaries from the very beginning of her career, beginning with her first play, Blasted (1995), where she planted a bomb in the middle of the dramatic action and in so doing effectively obliterated the boundary between naturalistic and absurd aesthetics.

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discontinuity, materiality and immateriality, and her experience of Eros and Thanatos or her split self. The external level of communication, where, prompted by the play’s steering techniques, the audience finds itself oscillating between moments of framing and form, and moments of unframing and experiences of formlessness will be the subject matter of the later sections of the chapter.

3.4.1 The Impossible Synopsis Any attempt at grasping the play’s identity in a coherent and determinate image, that is, any endeavour to define the play’s central meaning, its main storyline, key themes or to arrange all elements to add up into a clear semantic unity is subject to the play’s sublime dynamics of parergonal resistance and is doomed to failure. The synopsis, being such an attempt, is necessarily marked by the defying force of the sublime parergon. Instead of providing a neat summary of the play the synopsis manifests its irreducible undecidability. The parergonal dynamic of framing and unframing at work in 4.48 Psychosis compels its audience to search for the meaning but at the same time makes it impossible for its members to agree on a coherent synopsis of the play. It forces the spectators and critics to consider many interpretative options, removing the security of clarity and coherence or the possibility of an objective judgement as if it were “pull[ing] the rug out from under our feet” (Pankratz 2010: 149). With the same gesture, however, the dynamic also creates space and makes room for the plurality of meanings. Reading Derrida’s The Truth in Painting (1978/87), Ulrike Dünkelsbühler interprets the Derridean parergon as an answer provoking questions which can only be answered with new questions (see Dünkelsbühler 69). The sublime parergon seems to be defining, that is, framing in the contours of a subject matter. It does so, however, in a very vague way, leaving the identity of the ergon undecidable and thus provokes new questions by giving parergonal answers. The parergonal quality of the play removes the possibility of fixed meaning from the audience’s control and grasp and the performance emerges in the spectators’ minds as both forming and then suddenly formless, very much in the Kantian sense of the emergence of the formless object catalysing the sublime. In this experience, the audience is constantly reminded that coherence comes with a price, and that any coherent image of reality is in fact highly construed, incomplete and always already framed. Commenting on Kant’s similar attempt to introduce a logical frame onto the process of aesthetic judgement, Derrida describes it as a “violence of framing” (Derrida 1987: 69), and further observes that “the delimitation has enormous

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consequences, but a certain internal coherence can be saved at this cost” (Derrida 1987: 69). Derrida refers to this process as “external” (Derrida 1987: 69) framing, as the decisions come from the perceiver, and in Derrida’s particular example, from Kant. However, this framing movement activates another “gesture of framing”, and this is where the sublime comes in, “which, by introducing the bord, does violence to the inside of the system and twists its proper articulations out of shape” (Derrida 1987: 69). What follows is the experience of formlessness, also directly thematised in one of the lines from 4.48 Psychosis, “How can I return to form / now my formal thought has gone” (Kane 213). This sublime formlessness seems to be part of Kane’s strategy of marrying form with content, the two co-constituting and co-representing each other (see Stephenson and Langridge 130). To return to the question of synopsis, ‘clearly framed’, the play may be considered to be a thematisation of a depressive female character, who cannot find her own identity, is deeply disappointed with love and life, and struggles with the decision to commit suicide. As Annette Pankratz demonstrates, “it is possible to isolate recurring themes: the search for an ‘Other’ [self, lover, God etc], the contemplation of suicide, a reckoning with God and the commentaries on the futile procedures of therapy” (Pankratz 2010: 158 – 159). This necessarily somewhat vague recapitulation of the main themes, which is also the most common summary among critics and reviewers, and which the majority of them is ready to agree on, is only possible if any elements that could complicate this description – and there are quite a few of them in the play – are excluded and ignored. Most critics are fully aware of the unavoidable reduction and acknowledge the ungraspability of the play. Once more elements are taken into consideration, the interpretations and readings immediately start to drift apart, depending on the selected parts included within the interpretative frame. The play’s content cannot be grasped and breaks out of its frame. The latter takes its place as the sublime ergon, even if it lasts only an instant. A good example of the parergonal multiplication of answers is the issue of indeterminacy of the character(s) and his, her or their gender(s). After a short acknowledgement that there is no possibility of knowing for sure, frequently critics decide to read the play as an expression of different voices within a female persona, occasionally in a dialogue with a therapist or her more rational self. This reading is likely coloured by looking at the play through the prism of the author’s sex and biography.²² Plausible as this assumption may be, there is no clear indi-

 some even go as far as to equate the persona with the author herself; see for example the review by Michael Billington, “How do you judge a 75-minute suicide note?” Guardian 30 June

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cation that the character is a woman. In fact, the play goes to considerable extents to make sure that the speaker’s gender and also the number of the speakers or voices, as many critics more and more frequently opt to refer to them, in the play remain as indeterminate as possible. There are a few instances when the speaker refers to herself and in doing so identifies her gender as a ‘she’. For instance, the persona describes an incident of being “restrained by three male nurses twice her size” (Kane 223; emphasis mine). This ‘identification’ is, however, marked with great uncertainty and cannot be trusted for many reasons. Firstly, it is impossible to tell how many speakers there really are, as there is no list of dramatis personae and the characters are marked with a dash. Even if one of the speakers is indeed a woman, it is still impossible to decide whether the remaining voices are also female or not. Moreover, since all utterances are marked by a dash it is further undecidable which voice belongs to which character. Even if there is a female character, there is no way of telling when exactly this character speaks. Secondly, even if there were clear evidence as to the number of characters and it were possible to determine who is speaking when, the voice, assuming that there is indeed only one, seems to be experiencing an identity crisis and refers to him- or herself as the “hermaphrodite” (Kane 205). The speaker does not know or cannot decide his or her own gender either, and any statement made by the speaker as to his or her gender is unreliable and may thus be revised by him or her at any time. Any decision to determine the gender of the persona is a framing gesture and subject to a loss of totality of meaning, which is palpably experienced in the moment of framing. This simple example of the undecidability²³ (framing and unframing) of the character’s gender and of the number of characters shows the sublime principle of the parergon at work. It shows how the play’s parergonal answer leads to multiplication of questions and an even greater indeterminacy of the initial answer; how instead of helping to define the character more clearly, it splits the dramatic category into many unknowns, and reveals an emptiness in its middle.²⁴ Indeed,

(2000): 5. Graham Saunders, commenting on the possibility of a biographical reading of Kane’s last play, points out that, “[i]n some respects this was the obvious critical path to take, and indeed, when faced with the difficult task of reviewing the play, what most critics chose to do. By following the line of least resistance and seeing the play ‘as a declaration of suicide’, and a ‘75minute suicide note’, critics were to some extent on safe ground.” However, he also further concedes that, “[i]t is also undeniable that this last work was also the most clearly biographical and personally driven.” (Saunders 2002: 110).  Though for Derrida undecidability and indeterminacy are not exchangeable terms, the analysis uses them synonymously, to denote what Derrida means by undecidability.  A very interesting discussion of the play’s missing middle and its “chiasmatic structure” is provided by Ehren Fordyce (see Fordyce).

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many critics have even argued that pushing the category of character to its generic limits puts 4.48 Psychosis outside the frame of the dramatic genre. The playwright Phyllis Nagy, for example, insisted that for that reason 4.48 Psychosis can no longer be considered a drama, claiming that “[w]hen you abandon character, you abandon drama” (Saunders 2002: 159). Some critics, therefore, classified the play as an instance of Hans-Thiess Lehmann’s postdramatic theatre (see Lehmann 2007b; Barnett). The vanishing of character that Nagy speaks about is part of the play’s generic undecidability and parergonal strategy, which finds its expression at the thematic level as the performance of an appearing and disappearing subject. Instead of providing a clear and coherent interpretation, any attempt at setting a frame only produces more questions, each complicating the other even further and opening (unframing) the play to an even greater ambiguity and uncertainty of meaning. Having been invited to fill in the moments of indeterminacy with its personal experiences, feelings and thoughts, the audience is also invited to participate in the play’s annihilating movements. As Edward Bond describes, the audience is “force[d] […] in a sense to live with [its] own annihilation – by having to live with hers [Kane’s]. The sacrificed victim always returns to haunt the sacrificers” (Bond qtd in Saunders 2010: 74). Although Bond biographically refers to the author’s death, this remark can also be applied with regard to the play’s vanishing character. The latter can also be considered as “the sacrificed victim” that comes back to haunt the audience’s experience with its void. The audience is thus subjected to double movements within the play, which constantly phase into one another, such as creation and obliteration, presence and absence or framing and unframing. This conflicted feeling of the almost simultaneous experience of life and death, or creation and destruction of meaning, that is visibly at work in the play’s character makes up the core of the experience of the sublime and will be discussed in greater detail in later sections of the analysis. Another example of a parergonal structure leading to new complications rather than clarity and coherence, and revealing an even greater indeterminacy of the possible answer, is the issue of the play’s ending. After a sequence of a few increasingly scarce and thinning lines on the progressively emptier pages, pleading, among other things, for the audience to “watch me vanish” (Kane 224), the voice suddenly announces, “please open the curtains” (Kane 245). The last pronouncement turns out to lead to frequent consternation and disagreement among critics. Considering the constant references to suicide throughout the play, it is perhaps unsurprising that some critics are willing to assume that

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the play ends with the persona’s death (see De Vos 2006; De Vos 2010;).²⁵ Undeniably, the voice, which seems to be the only indication of the speaker’s still being alive, gradually seems to be dissolving towards the end of the play. Nevertheless, there is no clear evidence of the speaker’s death, as other critics accurately also acknowledge (see Saunders 2002; Pankratz 2010), only of her liminal existence. By simply assuming that the play ends with the persona’s death, the play is given a closure, an idea which runs counter not only to the last words, but to the whole parergonal strategy of the play, as the last words, “please open the curtains” (Kane 245), decidedly also indicate a new beginning and suggest both the framing and unframing gesture rather than pointing to a complete full-stop. That is not to say, however, that the play definitely and with all certainty does not end in the speaker’s death. It just as well may do so. What is important, however, is that this concept of death contain the idea of life energy; that the concept of death be understood in the logic of the parergon, collapsing the clear-cut distinction between life and death. Whether it will be referred to as the former or the latter is of lesser importance. What this new beginning may mean or what actions it may involve needs to be left to speculation. Suicide, death, may but does not necessarily have to be one of them. Even if we insist that it be referred to as death, then it is certainly not to be conceptualised as closure but as another opening. The image is that of death infused with life-affirming energy. It was this moment of energy release that was so brilliantly captured by James Macdonald’s first production of 4.48 Psychosis in the gesture of opening the windows facing on the busy street of Sloane Square at the Royal Court Theatre in London (see also Saunders 2002: 125). Rather than, as Laurens De Vos suggests in his otherwise very convincing interpretation of the play, symbolising the persona’s reconciliation to “the world’s imperfection” and “liberation from their psychosis” (De Vos 2010: 134), opening the windows was a gesture pointing to the possibility of transformation of the audience and, by extension, of the world through the energy generated by the performance of the play.²⁶ For De Vos, who considers Macdonald’s stage interpretation to support the “optimistic outcome” of acceptance of the conventional perception of reality, such a reading

 see footnote 30 in this chapter.  As naïve as it may perhaps sound, this might have actually been Sarah Kane’s romantic goal behind the play, as she revealed in “a four-page essay about the future of British theatre” to Dominic Dromgoole, who was at the Bush Theatre at that time, that she deeply believed in the connection between what happened on the stage and the future of the world (see Dromgoole 161).

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is too positive to fit in with “the play’s mood […] that is utterly bleak” (De Vos 2010: 134). Though I agree with De Vos that interpreting the last image of the play as liberation from psychosis is rather implausible, and with his interpretation of the last words as “opening up the curtain to the Real” (De Vos 2010: 134), be it psychosis or death, I insist that the image be read aesthetically rather than psychoanalytically, and therefore as neither pessimistic nor optimistic, but as catalysing the experience of the sublime, that is, the experience of the ergon turning into the parergon, its boundaries breaking down and the energy bound in them released only to be rebound into new ergons. Admittedly, the play’s ending does not encourage the audience “to return to the safety of the symbolic world” (De Vos 2010: 135). It does not, however, invite the audience to choose its opposite either, but rather to experience the fragile boundary, the space between the Real and the Symbolic, to stay within the Lacanian terminology used by De Vos, without demonising either of them. Inviting the audience to experience the two realms aesthetically and at their tangent point of the void, the play energises its spectators with its ending rather than instructs to resign themselves either to the former or to the latter. The final words in the play may further be considered to be the speaker’s metatheatrical gesture encouraging the performance to continue in yet another play, pleading for yet another chance to perform, speak, live and thus continue his or her parergonal existence. It may be interpreted as an appeal for yet another chance both internally for the persona and externally for the audience to experience death as the necessary condition of life understood as constant transformation and change. What supports this reading is that these words are not, in fact, the last line of the play as most critics assume. They are followed by another line, the recurring five dashes, pointing to the continuance of the parergonal movement. The parergonal mechanism frustrating the task of grasping the play in a synopsis results also from the vast amount of elements which need to be kept out of and excluded from the description in order to provide a relatively clear and coherent recapitulation of the play, such as the spatial arrangement of words on the page, or missing punctuation. Indeed, the amount and quality of these elements are so overwhelming that any statement purporting to say something determinate and coherent about the play appears to almost border on the ridiculous and cannot avoid being overly reductive, such as the dismissive comments of the reviewers labelling the play as “a suicide note” (Saunders 2002: 110). It is difficult not to feel that such a reading of the play, rational and founded in sound evidence as it may appear to be – as most of the typical symptoms of a psychotic disorder such as delusions, hallucinations, disorganised speech and behaviour

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to name but few, can easily be identified in the text – somehow, nevertheless, seems to miss the mark. The only thing, therefore, that such a synopsis demonstrates is that it cannot demonstrate anything; it presents that it cannot present anything. The truth is unavailable. Instead of a synopsis describing the main storyline as the speaker’s suffering from a mental disorder, her gradual disintegration and coming to the decision to commit suicide, it is more rewarding to analyse the psychotic state as an aesthetic manifestation of the parergonal experience, which saturates all of the speaker’s experiences and thoughts. Seen from this perspective of limen, the play is best described as a presentation of the speaker’s experience of balancing between opposite ideas such as love and hate, life and death, absence and presence, sanity and insanity. Being in this liminal space, the speaker experiences the ideas in the moment of their momentary convergence and dissolution into one another, in the borderline zone where such apparently conflicting concepts lose their determinacy and identity and blur into one another, being voided of their conventional meanings.

3.4.2 Internal Analysis: Singing on the Boundary The boundary on which the speaker of the play ‘sings’ is the parergonal space from which the persona considers the truth about fundamental concepts and their relations to one another, such as life and death, body and mind, sanity and insanity, or presence and absence, experiencing how the conceptual boundaries of such ideas seem to be breaking down, and how the concepts blur into each other, the boundaries separating them slowly dissolving into greater and greater indeterminacy, along with the speaker’s consciousness. The description of this activity as singing only seems to emphasise the blurry effect even further, as words are often ‘deformed’ in singing, with its materiality emphasised. Puzzlingly and somewhat ironically, since everything else in the play seems to blur into one another, this parergonal place is a temporally clearly identified instance in the play. Delineated as a particular moment in time, beginning at 4.48 in the morning and stretching “for one hour and twelve minutes [when] I am in my right mind” (Kane 229), it is significantly the only occasion when “the truth” is revealed to the speaker (see Kane 205). Truth, to briefly take the interpretation outside the internal level of the play, was considered by Sarah Kane to be one of her utmost priorities as a playwright. As Claire Wallace observes, Kane’s theatre was supposed to put the audience in “direct physical contact with thought and feeling” and, by extension, with “truth” by means of visceral strategies (see Wallace 2010: 88). Considering the postmodern distrust to-

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wards such absolute concepts, it is even more intriguing to see what exactly is uncovered about this truth to the speaker. The truth is described by the persona as “a truth that no one ever utters” (Kane 205). In other words, the truth cannot be contained within any presentation, linguistic or other, and is thus unframable and formless. Not even the speaker herself can express it, as she proclaims, “I had a night in which everything was revealed to me. / How can I speak again?” (Kane 205). This inevitably places a hurdle that is difficult to overcome in the way of any critic and thwarts any attempts at discovering the truth from the start. The question, then, which immediately suggests itself is why attempt the impossible at all? The indeterminacy of the truth is itself the answer. The truth can never be uttered by language because, seen from the radical perspective, any linguistic expression is already a modification and thus a lie. Therefore, to repeat the line again, “no one ever [really] utters” it. Having realised this, the speaker feels unable to speak again, for saying anything now would always diminish the experienced truth, or even feel like lying to yourself and to others. Words and language frame reality for us, unavoidably selecting some of its elements and ignoring the others. Any discourse that purports to be able to provide a representation of truth is dismissed by the speaker as “vile delusions of happiness” (Kane 229). It is the impossibility of answering the question about the truth that is the answer to the question – a parergonal answer to a parergonal question. What follows is a tracing of the points in the play where this parergonal answer is formulated, the particular moment, at 4.48, and of the utterances which may enhance the description of this moment. The analysis will examine the experience of truth more closely and attempt to present it, knowing full well that it is impossible and yet trying to do so anyway, in spite of the odds: to speak about the unspeakable and, just as the speaker does, fail just as inevitably. It is therefore a description of this failure rather than a description of the truth that the analysis intends to present. The failure manifests itself in the experience of indeterminacy, the breaking down of language, the impossibility of grasping meaning and the framing and unframing of thought.

The parergonal mind The parergonal nature of the moment at 4.48 where the limits become dangerously palpable stretching from twelve to five o’clock to six o’clock in the morning is formally underlined by evoking associative images generating the atmosphere of betwixt and between, reminiscent of Victor Turner’s state of liminality (see Turner 1977). During this parergonal time it is neither day nor night, neither dark nor light, “neither here nor there” (Pankratz 2010: 149) but somewhere at

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the edges of the speaker’s consciousness and mind. The description of the persona’s parergonal mind reveals further details about this crucial moment: a consolidated consciousness resid[ing] in a darkened banqueting hall near the ceiling of a mind […] (Kane 205)

The image described here is of a mind compared to “a darkened banqueting hall”. Neither entirely dark nor bright, vision is impaired in the mind. The dimmed light allows only cautious, groping movements and limited visualisation. Forms and shapes of objects can be barely discerned or determined. In this half-light, the consciousness is said to reside “near the ceiling”, that is, at the very border of the mind. The consciousness’ condition is depicted as consolidated and may indicate its solid, stony and impermeable quality. The description then continues: […] whose floor shifts as ten thousand cockroaches when a shaft of light enters as all thoughts unite in an instant of accord […] (Kane 205)

Unlike the consciousness, the mind is portrayed as a rather unstable and unpleasant place, its floor constantly threatened with collapse, with breakdown. Combined with the conditions of impaired visibility and ten thousand cockroaches, this place is also not a particularly inviting one. The factor inducing the shifting of the mind’s ‘floor’ and with it probably also a feeling of falling down, is described as “a shaft of [entering] light” and is simultaneous, if not identical, with the instant of uniting thoughts, when thinking is suddenly sharpened. The comparison of thoughts with light is not a very surprising but a rather conventional one. It may immediately evoke associations with enlightenment or illumination and further also with reason and rationality. The brightness of united thoughts seems to be juxtaposed to the darkened state of the mind, which the consciousness inhabits. The latter is thus associated with darkness in the play. Although rational, clear thoughts are usually considered to introduce stability, certainty and order, in the case of this mind the effect appears to be the opposite. Instead of stabilising the image the shaft of light makes the base of the mind scatter and vanish, revealing a gaping hole in its make-up, and causing the whole construction to shudder. The shaft of light reveals how unstable the foundation of the mind is and uncovers an opening to the unknown in it, a certain bottomlessness, which is responsible for the feeling of falling, collapsing and breaking down. Is it an instance of thoughts undermining their own source? Unlike the rickety and shaky floor that is erased with the shaft of light, the condition of the consciousness was described as con-

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solidated, that is, solid. What happens to the consciousness in the moment when the clear thoughts enter the mind? The text does not seem to provide answers to these questions. Instead, the interpretation becomes more and more speculative and starts to be reminiscent of walking on thin ice rather than on solid semantic ground. The description poses yet another riddle, “the cockroaches comprise a truth which no one ever utters” (Kane 205). Trying to keep all the scraps of meaning from fleeing away, that is to say, trying to keep them within the frames imposed on this passage by the analysis and out of which the signification of this passage appears to constantly be trickling away, the portrayed dynamic can be recapitulated as follows. The floor of the mind, its foundation and simultaneously its border, is compared to cockroaches that scatter away when a clear thought enters. The cockroaches are also said to be made of, or consist of a truth. In other words, there is a truth in the cockroaches fleeing from light and clear thoughts. Does this mean that the truth disappears with the arrival of clear thoughts? Does it also mean that clear thoughts have nothing in common with this truth? This is where the first ‘formless’ passage stops, followed by an empty space on the page. One sentence and a question follow. I had a night in which everything was revealed to me. How can I speak again? (Kane 205)

After the previous struggle for meaning, the short passage perplexes the reader with its sudden clarity and form, as if it were the shaft of light that the previous text described. Although at first glance the two sentences seem to be ‘speaking’ in a clear voice, closer scrutiny reveals that the meaning is just as ungraspable and indeterminable as in the previous passage. Only revealed to the speaker, what happened during this night remains veiled for the reader. Again, being the result of guesswork rather than of any tangible and sound evidence from the text, we may hypothesise that the revealed truth obstructs or hinders the speaker’s capability of expression. After this moment of revelation, the person finds “hermself” (Kane 205) unable to speak again … and speaks about this inability. The voice disqualifies its native language while using it at the same time. What was revealed to the persona that made her question and doubt the possibility of communication so radically? The question is followed by an empty space, which stubbornly still refuses to provide any answers. The subsequent text fragment is the other of the two formless passages enclosing the two apparently clear middle sentences. The overwhelming pace of the piece and its register are reminiscent of the first passage of this section. Again no semantic assistance is provided in the form of punctuation. The text describes a

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situation in which a person, who thinks she is alone in a room, suddenly “finds the room in reality teeming” (Kane 205). No information, however, is given as to who or what was also populating the space. The persona is referred to as a hermaphrodite, that is, someone who is neither exclusively male nor female. This uncertainty is further magnified by the portrayal of the persona as broken, which may imply the hermaphrodite’s state of fragmentation, being split into at least two parts. Despite calling the reality a nightmare, the hermaphrodite “begs never to wake from [it]” (Kane 205). The text stops and questions explode. Who is the hermaphrodite? Is she the silent person from the first section? Or is s/ he the ‘I’ from the previous passage? Is the room that the hermaphrodite finds the banqueting hall from the first passage? What is the reality that is being referred to? Is it reality or is it a nightmare? Or is it both? Why would anyone want to linger in a nightmare? What or who are the other inhabitants of this room? Are they connected to the cockroaches from the other passage? One question seems to perpetuate the next, with their number growing ad infinitum. The interpretation of the passage oscillates between meaning, which emerges quite suddenly with every new word, and its disappearance happening just as quickly upon the realisation of the discourse’s semantic impermeability. This disturbing quality of the text is difficult to pin down. The syntax and the conjunctions both seem to adhere to the rules of grammar. Also, the words considered individually appear to be meaningful, and yet the passage as a whole presents an interpretational challenge, if not an impossibility. Seducing the reader with a promise, a shadow of meaning, the text bars the access to its semantic content as soon as the reader attempts to grasp it. The experience of the text is informed with the feeling of insecurity, constant doubt and interpretative failure. Although occasionally some partial signification comes into view, grasping the passage in its entirety is completely unattainable.

Parergonal insanity The first mention of the time 4.48 appears as early as in the title of the play. Although the title is usually considered to be outside of the play, being the advance information only available to the audience or the readers and not to the characters, it is in fact another instance of the play’s parergonal structures, belonging, as Derrida would likely agree, neither to the inside nor to the outside of the play (see Derrida 1987: 32). Reaching over to what is conventionally considered to be part of the external communication system for a moment, the section includes the title as part of its internal communication system. Indeed, the lines in the play most often do not resemble the conventional utterances of characters, and frequently, dehumanised as they become in the process of ‘voiding’, they

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turn into simple material lines, printed markings on the page. From this perspective, the title does not differ substantially from the rest of the lines and can be considered as simply yet another line of the play, which is the first mention of the parergonal time at 4.48. Describing it as the moment of psychosis, the title defines the moment as an experience of what medicine describes as mental instability and the inability to connect with reality. At first, this association only seems to be substantiated by the voice’s further accounts of the moment, as the time of desperation and as the moment when the speaker wants to commit suicide: “At 4.48 / when desperation visits / I shall hang myself / to the sound of my lover’s breathing” (Kane 207). From the audience’s implied rational perspective, it would only be too easy to imagine that a person suffering from a psychotic break would experience this moment as an instance of utter despair and decide to take their life. Also, it would come as a relief to have this ready-made label, to be able to apply it to these moments of insanity in the play and to safely classify them as something marginal that the socalled sane do not have to understand or concern themselves with. The dangerous chaos of the play, of which the earlier description of the instability of mind and consciousness is a good example, could thus be contained within a secure frame, keeping the sane from the insane. Pigeonholing it as an instance of insane speech would also dismiss any possibility of the statement’s containing any truth, as the latter is traditionally associated with clarity, coherence, sanity and rationality, and further relieve the audience from having to search for the truth. A closer inspection of the speaker’s further statements about what happens at 4.48, however, complicates the situation by enhancing the characterisation of the time with references which seem to run counter to the original classification of the moment as a psychotic break, bafflingly insisting that it is the moment “when sanity visits” (Kane 229), the only time when the speaker is in his or her “right mind” (Kane 229), when the speaker feels whole and not “a fragmented puppet” (Kane 229), and further also as the “happy hour / when clarity visits” (Kane 242). The easy option of dismissing the statements as the insane ravings of a ‘lunatic’ or, if we are in a more gracious state of mind, as a register of a depressive person’s excruciating pain, thus becomes much harder to sustain, at least not without some shadows of doubt, and a more thorough inspection of the statements seems necessary. The contradictory utterances reveal that the speaker’s understanding of the term ‘psychosis’ rather radically differs from the more traditional and conventional, that is, medical definition of it. Indeed, the persona’s characterization of the state may even be seen as exactly the opposite of the customary idea of psychosis. For the speaker considers the moments of psychosis to be the only

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time when he or she paradoxically feels sane and “in touch with my essential self” (Kane 229), even though this is also experienced painfully as state of desperation. This description is also strongly reminiscent of Kane’s rather unusual description of depression as “quite a healthy state of being” (Saunders 2009: 87), her explanation being typically bleak and yet also characteristically sharp, unflinching and observant that all it [depression] reflects is a completely realistic perception of what’s going on. I think to a certain degree you have to deaden your ability to feel and perceive. In order to function you have to cut out at least one part of your mind; otherwise you’d be chronically sane in a society which is chronically insane. I mean look at Artaud. That’s your choice go mad and die or function but be insane. (Saunders 2009: 87– 88)

Indeed, using very similar arguments to those of Kane’s, in an attempt to function ‘normally’ in a conventionally sane world, the voice resignedly consents to being medicated: Okay, let’s do it, let’s do the drugs, let’s do the chemical lobotomy, let’s shut down the higher functions of my brain and perhaps I’ll be a bit more fucking capable of living. Let’s do it. (Kane 221)

The process of medication is considered by the speaker to be an act of extreme violence, a “therapeutic torture” (Pankratz 2010: 158) done to the patient’s mind by “scorching” (Kane 233) madness from it, and in doing so “bisecting” the soul (see Kane 233), the latter verb suggesting that the soul is split in two in the therapeutic process. During medical treatment and therapy, according to the speaker, the patient’s whole existence is wrapped in a “web of reason / spun by a doctor to augment the sane” (Kane 233). The rather unflattering image presenting the doctor as a spider underlines the blurring of conceptual values typical of the speaker’s parergonal state of mind and disrupting opposite pairs: the concepts of sanity and life become more reminiscent of slow death at the hands of the ‘doctor-predator’ waiting for the injected venom to work on the prey so as to suck out all the vital juices from them. The image also suggests that the medically sane feed on those who are considered to be insane according to rational science. The therapeutic process, as the speaker argues, is supposed to confirm sane people’s identity as superior and strengthen their claim on determining reality and life in line with their principles. The insane are used as sacrificial victims, as the abject, who are both expelled from the healthy body of the society of the sane and their energy absorbed to feed it.

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The section is followed by a self-help list²⁷, which may possibly be seen as an exemplary product “spun by the web of reason”. It extends over three pages; here only a brief sample: to achieve goals and ambitions to overcome obstacles and attain a high standard to increase self-regard by the successful exercise of talent to overcome opposition to have control and influence over others to defend myself to defend my psychological space to vindicate the ego to receive attention (Kane 233 – 234)

What makes this list even more uncomfortable for the reader/audience is that he or she will probably recognise themselves in one or two items in the list. Significantly, after subjecting herself to the “scorching” therapy, “caught in the web of reason”, the persona misses the only revelatory moment in her existence: At 4.48 I shall sleep. (Kane 233)

This moment is strongly reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg’s lines from his famous poem “Howl” (1955), where, as Lillian Feder observes, “madness is […] a reduction to silence: the rebels are given ‘the concrete void of insulin metrasol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,’ and they rest ‘briefly in catatonia’” (Feder 265), which in 4.48 Psychosis takes the form of sleep. The mad outcasts, the mad prophets of uncomfortable truth are thus silenced, having been exposed to the therapy of the sane. Considering Kane’s plays, beginning from Blasted, through Phaedra’s Love, Cleansed, Crave and up to 4.48 Psychosis, it seems that she believed it to be the task of her theatre to introduce the abject back into the body of the sane by means of the audience’s exposure to the uncomfortable experience of psychosis, the unsettling radicalism of madness, without providing any frames to hold

 The list of suggestions is taken from Edwin S. Schreidman’s The Suicide Mind, which Kane supposedly was reading while writing the play (Saunders 2002: 178).

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on to or to separate them from the distress, regardless how uncomfortable it would make its members. To give some examples, in Blasted (1995) the familiar scenario of an expensive hotel room is blown apart by a bomb. The play and its audience are plunged into a nightmarish reality face to face with a soldier, extremely brutal and insane from the atrocities of war. In Phaedra’s Love (1996), the titular heroine decides to commit suicide, mad with love for her stepson Hippolytus, who shockingly interprets this gesture as the greatest gift he has ever been offered. In her interview with Stephenson and Langridge, Kane spoke of her personal agenda for theatre, declaring that her “responsibility as a writer is to the truth, however unpleasant that truth may be” (Stephenson and Langridge 134). It appears that for the speaker just as for Kane, depression, madness and truth share a very close affinity. “Depression is anger” (Kane 212) and not an illness, or so the speaker insists in one of her ‘therapy sessions’ with the rational voice. Anger is the consequence of the realistic, that is, true and real perception of reality, which, in turn, can only be experienced as such in a state of psychosis, according to the line of (un)reasoning represented by both Kane and the speaker. In view of this what may seem to be a somewhat peculiar logic, it is unsurprising that the persona describes her predicament as “deadlocked” (Kane 209), painfully wedged between two irreconcilable options that seem equally unbearable. She can either subject herself to medication, giving up parts of her thoughts in order to live ‘normally’ even though it would be a lie, or she can refuse therapy, which would enable her to experience the truth but she would also have to agree to suffer from psychosis. Whenever she chooses the latter, insanity over sanity, the speaker finds herself in a liminal space of psychosis, between life and death, where she constantly oscillates between the two extreme options, such as “I do not want to die […] I do not want to live” (Kane 207) or, put more abstractly, between “a black and white […] of yes or no yes or no yes or no yes / or no yes or no yes or no” (Kane 240). As the play progresses, the difference between life, understood as a radicalised idea of a lie and as the impossibility to find the self, and death, understood as the termination of the self, becomes less and less clear to the speaker. At one point she bitterly observes, “I have been dead for a long time” (Kane 214), thus equating life with death. Dissolving into the latter, into nothingness, therefore, appears to be the only logical thing to do, or as the persona concludes, going “Back to my roots” (Kane 214). The speaker does not appear to be willing to give up her heightened sensitivity in exchange for ‘normal functioning’ in the world of the sane, which she derisively refers to as “drowning in a sea of logic”, “this monstrous state of palsy” (Kane 223), or “this dreary and repugnant / tale of a sense interned in an alien carcass and / lumpen by the malignant spi-

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rit of the moral majority” (Kane 214). Nothingness becomes more and more appealing to the speaker and takes on the meaning traditionally associated with being alive, as presence, that is, a heightened experience of one’s own being as a real unity. Dissolving into nothingness thus also seems to be the answer to the problem of the speaker’s split subjectivity and the impossibility of finding herself. It is only during the parergonal time that the speaker discovers her true identity and is in touch with her essential self. What does this essence consist of? And how can dissolving into nothingness help gain this experience permanently? What is the connection between the truth, nothingness, light and, last but not least, the concept of a unified self? It appears to be necessary to examine the speaker’s statements and her attitude towards nothingness more closely in order to find the possible answers to these questions.

Nothingness: Content During one of the revelatory 4.48 periods the speaker proclaims, “[n]othing matters more” (Kane 229). The assertion of nothingness’ significance is preceded by the line, “[r]emember the light and believe the light” (Kane 229), which seems to point to a certain link between nothingness and light. A similar formulation appears for the second time at this point, the previous instance being at the play’s beginning, Remember the light and believe the light An instant of clarity before eternal night don’t let me forget _ _ _ _ _ (Kane 206)

The lines reverberate with Christian associations and have also been discussed by critics as such.²⁸ The passage has been recognised to be a reference to a corresponding section from C.S. Lewis’ The Silver Chair, a book belonging to The Chronicles of Narnia series. Analogous words are directed to Jill, a young protagonist, who finds herself in the fantasy world of Narnia and meets Aslan, a lion who in Lewis’ imagery represents Christ. Narnia is in great danger and only Jill’s

 The reference was made by Daniel Evans in a conversation with Graham Saunders (Saunders 2002: 168 – 179); and was further elaborated on by Christina Quay (2007).

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intervention can save it. The girl has to follow Aslan’s advice, which is precisely to “remember the signs and believe the signs”, even if the “air will thicken” and clear thinking will become difficult (Lewis 27). The girl enters a world where keeping a clear mind gradually becomes impossible and the distinction between truth and lie becomes more and more problematic. The difficulty in distinguishing the real world from the dream is further portrayed by Lewis in the story of a prince who finds himself unable to identify his real self: Every night there comes an hour when my mind is changed, and, after my mind, my body. For first I become furious and wild and would rush upon my dearest friends to kill them, if I were not bound. And soon after that, I turn into the likeness of a great serpent, hungry, fierce, and deadly. […] So they tell me, and they certainly speak truth […] I myself know nothing of it, for when my hour is past I awake forgetful of all that vile fit and in my proper shape and sound mind – saving that I am somewhat wearied. (Lewis 156 – 7)

Completely unaware of his condition during the blackouts, the prince has to trust the judgement of the others and believe that they are telling him the truth. Similarly, the speaker from 4.48 Psychosis also mentions a presence of some other “they” who allegedly know her name (Kane 206). What does it mean to know someone’s name? A name is considered to convey information about the person’s or thing’s identity. To know a person’s name is to know their identity. The process of naming is attaching a label to meaning, an arbitrary process of prescribing the signifier to its signified. It is also a moment of exerting power and control over the signified, just as portrayed in Lewis’ story about the prince who, given a false identity by his oppressors, was to be used in usurping Narnia for their own dark purposes. The concept of a name and identity is thus a very slippery, unreliable and even a dangerous one. With Jill’s assistance, the hour of the prince’s apparent unconsciousness is revealed to be the only time when the prince is truly himself and is finally recognised by him as such, “Now you can save me; when this hour has passed, I shall be witless again” (Lewis 165). The situation of the 4.48 Psychosis persona echoes the prince’s, yet the former’s fate turns out to be much darker. For, in the speaker’s reality there is no one, no Aslan, who could save her. Even though the lion’s words are repeated in the play, they are also modified, “signs” being replaced by “light”. Saturated with Christian symbolism as it is, light in 4.48 Psychosis seems to underlie a more ambivalent or even outright sinister undertone than that of the traditional connotations of light with knowledge, hope, or

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truth.²⁹ Rather than illuminate the truth about the voice’s identity, the shaft of light entering the mind, to return to the earlier image of the consciousness and mind, makes any possibility of truth flee and disappear. Instead of elucidation, there is uncertainty and confusion. And although the speaker wants to remember the light and speaks of an instant of clarity, nothing seems to be revealed or clarified. And yet, perhaps it is? Perhaps it is precisely this ‘nothing’ that is revealed in this moment of clarity? Maybe it is this ‘nothing’ which also reverberates in the question, “How can I speak again?” (Kane 205), implying that there is, precisely, nothing, no meaning, which would be there, immanent and stable, waiting for the language to express and represent it? Or for anyone to find and articulate it? If that be the case, the last words of this section, “don’t let me forget” may be read, ‘don’t let me forget that there is nothing’. The speaker of 4.48 Psychosis, similarly to Lewis’ prince, is subject to signification by others who try to impose frames of an identity on her. In those rare moments of clarity, the speaker realises the truth about her own condition, namely that it is not there to be represented. There is simply nothing to represent. At the centre of the speaker’s identity and self there is nothing. To return to the persona’s statement that “[n]othing matters more” (Kane 229), it needs to be read against the background of the speaker’s experience of the entering shaft of light as the truth illuminating the speaker’s predicament to her and showing that at the centre of her thought and consciousness, at the core of her self, there is, in fact, nothing. That is why nothing matters more as regards the essence of the self. That is also why the speaker decides to commit suicide: not in order to die and cease to exist but in order to exist more fully, to become continuous, to use Georges Bataille’s concept (see Bataille Eroticism), with her true, essential self. It is only in view of such an understanding of nothingness that the following statements begin to make sense: I have resigned myself to death this year Some will call this self-indulgence (they are lucky not to know its truth) (Kane 208)

Choosing death is seen by the speaker as an act of indulging the self, by finally satisfying its desire to fully become what it is: nothingness.

 This ambivalent use of light by Kane (also in her other plays) is also commented upon by Quay (2007).

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The word ‘nothing’ appears many times in the play. It continually permeates its space, as it were, in both form and content. To use another example of this gradual saturation, at some point the speaker proclaims that Nothing can extinguish my anger. And nothing can restore my faith. This is not a world in which I wish to live. (Kane 210)

The first meaning that imposes itself is the more straightforward one, namely, that the speaker feels compelled to death by her deep disappointment with the state of the world, which is expressed in her anger, and by the loss of hope that change is possible. This perhaps more obvious reading is not the only possible one, though. Considering the sentences in a more ‘affirmative’ light, they can be interpreted as positive statements, believing that the oppressive feeling of anger that the persona has can, in fact, be terminated, and faith can be restored by melding with nothingness. Interestingly, these two readings do not have to necessarily exclude one another, provided that the word ‘nothing’ is considered from the parergonal perspective, which puts the meaning of the word in constant semantic oscillation, depending on the frame that we want to apply. Other significant passages also mentioning the concept of nothingness are the lines towards the end of the play, assuring that Nothing’s forever (but Nothing) (Kane 231)

and the only thing that’s permanent is destruction we are all going to disappear trying to leave a mark more permanent than myself (Kane 241)

It is perhaps useful and rewarding to read these sentences along with yet another passage, which appears earlier in the play, Everything passes Everything perishes Everything palls (Kane 218)

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Both quotations describe the great significance that the speaker attaches to the state of absolute permanence, or continuity. It is the impossibility of attaining the latter in life, which Bataille also describes as the state of discontinuity, that makes the speaker consider the possibility of death, having “become so depressed by the fact of my mortality that I have decided to commit suicide” (Kane 207). It is important, however, to see the latter choice as an affirmative gesture, for dissolving into nothingness is accompanied by a release of energy, which is necessary to create new life. In this respect it is interesting to have a closer look at the line about the desire to “leave a mark more permanent than myself” (Kane 241). Before discussing the speaker’s desire to dissolve into nothingness as a lifeaffirming gesture, however, the analysis will first turn to the formal representation of the relation between the speaker and nothingness.

Nothingness: Form Digressing slightly from the analysis of the internal communication system I will turn to the formal representation of nothingness in the play and show the relation between nothingness and the “mark more permanent” (Kane 241). This dependency is formally and symbolically represented as the relation and dynamics between the white page (nothingness) and the printed marks (speaker’s voice), that is, letters, words and sentences, but also, less conspicuously, punctuation marks and dashes. The description commences from the examination of the materiality of the broken line as an example of a printed mark, which seems to divide the play’s text in sections and thus separate them from one another. Although constituting an inseparable element from each section, the broken line has usually merely been briefly mentioned by critics as an unconventional dividing method, “evoking discontinuity of one sort or another” (Blattès and Koszul 104). Repeated twenty-three times throughout the play, it is a line which separates the various discourses accumulated in it, a line which divides and connects, closing and opening, making and unmaking itself. It is a disappearing line. Or is it an appearing emptiness? Is there a hierarchy between the line and the white space which breaks it? Or is it the line which breaks the white space of the page? As suddenly as the line starts to run across part of the page, it stops just as abruptly after a few marks. As if dissolving into the white page, the broken line draws attention to the latter, exposing spatial relations between the visible parts and the ‘normally’ invisible ones. The white page, whose conventional task is to merely provide support for letters, words, to be their parergon, is suddenly given a voice – an inexpressible one. It transgresses its traditional function as the invisible support for words, and by extension, for meaning and exposes the materiality

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of the printed marks. In doing so, it unmasks the letters and words as nothing else but parerga themselves and the meaning as ephemeral.

Breakdown The white page becomes visible and almost tangible. Indeed, it is difficult to ignore its whiteness and its abyssal, voiding quality. Together with the arrangement of the pictorial text (letters, words etc), the page’s materiality is reminiscent of an artistic plastic installation such as Cristina Iglesias’ Pavilion Suspended in a Room 1 (2005). This artwork, which is part of the permanent exhibition at the Tate Modern, consists of twenty-six rectangular panels which are suspended from the ceiling. Made of braided bronze wires, the solid panels nonetheless seem to soar in space with an amazing lightness. The panels’ fabric with interwoven letters, words and text passages, seems like the architecture of a literary text whose meaning can hardly be discerned. Some of the panels overlap, some hang horizontally and some vertically. Together they seem to create a room with enough space for a few viewers to enter, look around and, perhaps, find their word on the panel and their own meaning. The twenty-four sections of 4.48 Psychosis constitute a similar architecture with words, letters, phrases and other print marks soaring and floating in the emptiness of the page. Their constellations and alignment often seem accidental rather than intentional. The sentences and phrases seem to be in motion, in flux, always ready to be rearranged and modified. The overall image is one of chaos and suspension in a vast, infinite white space – an abyss, which threatening to overwhelm and annihilate the text and its apparent meaning completely, at the same time creates infinite interpretative room for the recipients of the play. A great tension is built up, for the text seems to fight back by endeavouring to establish and sustain its own semantic identity against the emptiness of the page. The latter appears to expose the text’s own materiality by pressing in on the printed marks, fragmenting them, cutting the sentences and dislocating them into a more and more meaningless jumble, such as the following passage, dislike dislocate disembody deconstruct I don’t imagine (clearly) that a single soul could would

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should or will and if they did I don’t think (clearly) that another soul a soul like mine could would should or will irrespective (Kane 222)

In this fight between the pictorial representations and the emptiness surrounding and saturating them, no side seems to win the upper hand. No matter how ‘thin’ or ‘thick’ the text becomes, the whiteness of the page always finds its way between and betwixt the words, letters or even between complete closed sentences which have a beginning marked by a capital letter and an end signalled by correct punctuation. Nevertheless, the printed marks always seem to survive this effacing gesture on the part of the page. The exposure of the space between letters and words shows the arbitrariness of their spatial and temporal arrangement, exposes their materiality, and in doing so also the arbitrariness of their meaning. Sometimes the distance is broader and sometimes narrower, but the gap can never be filled completely. Only by ignoring the empty space, that is, by ignoring the parergon, can meaning be voiced. The white page and the words as material marks have to be made invisible if we want to obtain some knowledge of the play. The materiality of the parergon has to disappear. Yet the strategy at work in 4.48 Psychosis is different. The void between letters, words and sentences seems to grow gradually, unmaking the meaning of the text yet without making it disappear completely. The effacing, “corrosive” (Kane 219) gesture of the page never really exceeds the limit but makes the text balance between materiality and immateriality; existence and non-existence creating an inner tension which threatens to, but never really does explode. Struggling for its semantic identity, the voice raises its desperate cry to be saved from annihilation,

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Find me Free me from this corrosive doubt futile despair (Kane 219)

where “corrosive doubt” can be read as the saturation of the text with the emptiness of the page, gnawing away, voiding the words of their textual semantic identity. The passage continues: I can fill my space fill my time but nothing can fill this void in my heart The vital need for which I would die Breakdown _ _ _ _ _ (Kane 219)

Continuing the interpretation of this passage as the text’s self-referential description, the lines speak of a lack, a void in the heart, the middle of the text’s identity as ergon and of the desire to fill this lack, even if it will claim the text’s ‘life’, that is, its meaning. Its referential ability forsaken, the text becomes mere materiality, and thus it becomes the parergon again. The ergon’s death is the birth of the parergon, ready to disappear again and give its energy to a new ergon. The bounding and releasing of the energy is the moment of the line’s breakdown. The breaking down movement of the line dividing the play’s sections, the parergonal movement, seems to thus constitute the rhythm of the whole play. Interestingly, the Oxford English Dictionary gives a variety of (at times it would seem contradictory) meanings for the word “breakdown”. It can signify “collapse”, “failure” and an explanatory “analysis”. The Oxford English Dictionary’s entry reads, 1. trans. [ < II.] To break (anything) so that its parts fall to the ground; to demolish, destroy, level with the ground. Also of things fig. […] 2. [ < 7.] To break into small pieces; to crush; to decompose. […] 4. intr. (for refl.) To fall broken or in ruins; to collapse, give way, fail utterly, prove of no avail; to give way, as the back sinews of a horse’s leg (whence the technical use in 1831, 1864). Also of an engine, a machine, vehicle, or the like: to cease to function, esp. through the fracture or dislocation of a part. […]

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7. To analyse or classify (figures, statistics, etc.). orig. U.S. (Oxford English Dictionary Online; emphasis mine)

The word is also used in biochemistry to describe processes such as catabolism, during which complex structures collapse with a simultaneous release of energy. The energy released in the process of breaking down phosphates into adenosine provides energy for muscle action and other processes. The ‘failure’, the collapse of structures is necessary to sustain life and even to produce life. A breakdown is a sudden and complete failure. Also, the word relates collapse and madness with an act of explanatory analysis. Breaking down (an attempt at explanatory analysis) textual materiality may thus result in releasing the energy of the text, its ‘life’ as it were, but at the expense of plunging the text into ‘madness’ and the collapse of the text’s structures. The energy produced in this process will inform ‘new life’, taking the form of new representations and new meanings ad infinitum. The text’s struggle to maintain semantic stability, that is, against its absorption by the materiality of the page turns out to be counterproductive in finding the text’s own self-presence in the semantic identity. The latter is not to be found in the material representation. It is revealed or released at the breaking point of the line, in a performative act of the text, which is unique and singular. This act is also a suicidal one, for the semantic identity can never be repeated in any new representation (new rewriting, reading or performance) of the text. In this sense, the suicide is the only possibility for the identity of the text to perform itself. The constant suicidal references may paradoxically imply the text’s desire to live or rather be born and reborn eternally in the form of infinite meanings. The tension in the text results precisely from this parergonal movement which oscillates between the ‘life’ (immateriality) and ‘death’ (materiality) of the text’s ‘I’.

Oscillating between Eros and Thanatos³⁰: parergonal presence To return to the analysis of the internal communication system, even though the speaker seems to have made up her mind about committing suicide, and threatens that “[a]fter 4.48 [she] shall not speak again” (Kane 213), each time the one hour and twelve minutes pass, the words, the printed marks, the sound, and the voice continue and so does the performance, accumulating more and more en For the motif of Eros and Thanatos in the wider context of theatre and performance see Karoline Gritzner ed., Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance; and in the context of more recent drama, see the article by David Ian Rabey “Flirting with disaster” (2010: 123 – 143), where he also briefly discusses Kane’s work (2010: 132– 134).

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ergy. The drive towards suicidal destruction (Thanatos) is thus countered, or better said, parergonally alternated – since this dynamic is repeated again and again throughout the play – with the drive to create, love and, by extension, to live (Eros). In spite of her fear of her life’s discontinuity, which paradoxically propels the speaker to the decision to discontinue that life by choosing the state of continuity in death and infinite silence, time and again the persona decides to continue to speak. If the decision to die is to be taken seriously, how can this contradictory behaviour be accounted for? Perhaps a closer look at the speaker’s own description of what happens immediately after the parergonal period will provide some useful information in this respect: And I go out at six in the morning and start my search for you. If I’ve dreamt a message of a street or a pub or a station I go there. And I wait for you. (Kane 214)

The parergonal moment is the time when the speaker finds herself in an extremely close vicinity to nothingness and death. She virtually experiences the nothingness entering her like a “shaft of light” (Kane 205), though ‘only’ parergonally, that is, never completely. This is also when she decides to commit herself to death. In spite of her claims, however, she does not take her life, but as soon as the parergonal period is over she speaks about embarking on a journey to search for a ‘you’. It is as if the experience of the void (Thanatos) inspired in the speaker the desire for an object which would fill in this void, knowing full well that finding such an object is impossible, and motivated them to search for love and to continue speaking (Eros). This movement between death and life seems to be repeated many times within the play. Indeed, it is the main underlying principle behind the play’s dynamics. The speaker is constantly moving between the desire to fill in the void within herself and the experience of the void as impossible to fill. As long as the desire keeps outbalancing the appeal of the void with the possibility of a material self or ‘you’, the speaker continues to consciously deceive herself with the illusion and carries on her borderline, parergonal existence. Gradually, however, this illusion becomes more and more difficult to sustain, and the painfully stark truth (see Kane 239) that the only possibility to find the self is in becoming one with the void is hard for the speaker to ignore. To revisit the question about the identity of the ‘you’, who or what is hidden behind this personal pronoun is never revealed in the play, and, as is often the case with 4.48 Psychosis, there are at least several interpretational possibilities

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that the readers or spectators can choose from.³¹ The ‘you’ may refer to the loved one, a concrete person that is gone from the speaker’s life. The enunciation towards the end of the play, “in death you hold me”³² (Kane 244), may be then interpreted as the only possible scenario of real reunion, the only possibility to experience continuity with the lover, namely in the dissolution of the boundaries of her self into nothingness. The personal pronoun may also be taken to designate love in general, for, assuming that it is still the same person that is being spoken about here, a later passage of the same section describes the ‘you’ as a female whom the persona, however, has never encountered, and who therefore may be just a general idea of love in the speaker’s mind: What does she look like? And how will I know her when I see her? She’ll die, she’ll die, she’ll only fucking die.³³ (Kane 215)

The conflation of love and death, to continue with the interpretation of the line “in death you hold me”, seems to result in the creation of continuity between the speaker and the other or love, the image being of a triple embrace of Eros (you, love), Thanatos (death) and the ‘me’. This continuity is only possible at the tangent point where Eros and Thanatos meet and the boundaries between distinct individuals, or ideas, break down. It is difficult not to think about other characters from Kane’s earlier plays, who often seem to be subjected to parergonal oscillations not unlike this one. In Cleansed, for instance, as Pankratz points out, “the sexualised relationship between Grace and her dead brother creates a mind-space in which the borders between life and death and / or between inside and outside, psyche and body disintegrate” (Pankratz 2010: 155). In Phaedra’s Love, Hippolytus, who at the beginning of the play seems to lead a death-in-life existence, lingering in a type of limbo space where time appears to have stopped and no change is possible, snaps out of this pathetic state thanks to Phaedra’s death out of her love for

 Considered as ‘the lost object’, the mysterious personal pronouns (you, she) invited also, unsurprisingly, psychoanalytical interpretations (see Tycer).  The words come from Schreidman’s The Suicidal Mind (1996).  There is a scene in The Hours (2002), a film based on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and scripted by David Hare, where Woolf is shown in the process of creating her character while writing the novel. And the author is walking and thinking aloud, saying, “she’ll die, she’s going to die. That’s what’s going to happen. She’ll kill herself”. Knowing that Woolf also considered taking her own life at that time, too, it is possible to hear a double meaning in the character’s statements, not unlike the voice in 4.48 Psychosis.

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him. This extreme conflation of Eros and Thanatos in Phaedra’s suicidal act releases transformative energy, which changes Hippolytus, who wakes up from his slumberous existence and becomes active, only to die at the end of the play himself. Hippolytus experiences the moment of his death as the instant of his most intense presence. To return to 4.48 Psychosis and the issue of the mysterious missing persona, one section later the speaker laments again, […] the loss of her I’ve never touched love keeps me a slave in a cage of tears I gnaw my tongue with which to her I can never speak I miss a woman who was never born I kiss a woman across the years that say we shall never meet (Kane 218)

It is also possible to connect “the loss of her” as the persona’s reference to her missing self in another passage, revealing that “[i]t is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind” (Kane 245). To sum up, the parergonal experience of death or destruction seems to paradoxically magnify in the speaker the desire for love and life, and makes the voice speak and create, and decide to continue her ‘borderline song’ in spite of the sense of its futility. It is the experience of the loss of ‘you’, love or herself and the impossibility of filling this void after the loss that paradoxically motivate the speaker to the sublime and melancholy search for the lost object. The latter can, however, never be found, which, in turn, is the renewed source of the speaker’s continuous pain and experience of Thanatos. Pain, as the persona tells her therapist during one of their sessions, intensifies then the speaker’s experience of being alive. When the therapist asks, “Why did you cut your arm?”, the speaker replies, “Because it feels fucking great. Because it feels fucking / amazing” (Kane 217). An extreme experience of Thanatos turns into an extreme experience of and desire for Eros. If, as Freud argues, the conflation of the two drives is the source of vital energy necessary to sustain life and to create, then the experience of these two forces or desires at the point of their convergence, at their limits is bound to result in an even greater release of this energy: parergonal presence, that is, in an energised instant of being, shortly before its disappearance in a representation. This is the energy which the voice uses to create her sublime goatsong, in a type of Dionysian frenzy.

Ergon and parergon To draw together all the theoretical threads from what has been said so far and consider for a moment the question of the sublime in the context of the Derri-

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dean concepts of ergon and parergon, the dynamics of the oscillation can be related to the interdependency between Eros and Thanatos. Whereas the former manifests in the play as the speaker’s search for her identity in her sudden bouts of creativity, Thanatos appears in the persona’s returns to her destructive tendencies and suicidal thoughts. To tie it in with the relation between ergon and parergon, the speaker’s search for her identity is carried out through her creation of the ergon. This search, and by extension, the production of the ergon, is paradoxically propelled by the persona’s experience of the incommensurability of the ergon with the desired object, and so the ergon’s inability to be the speaker’s identity. The search for and creation of new erga is, in other words, the result of the experience of a lack in the ergon. This ‘discovery’ can only be made by becoming aware of the parergon, whose central function is conventionally to mask the lack within the ergon. The continuous blurring of ergon into parergon and the other way round constitutes the core of the aesthetic of the sublime. To recapitulate Derrida’s theory of parergon and elaborate on it more extensively, Derrida discusses it in his The Truth in Painting (1978/87), drawing on Kant’s examples of frames in his Critique of Judgement (1790/2005). Kant gives three examples of pererga: “the frames of pictures, or the drapery on statues, or the colonnades of palaces” (Kant 40). Although Kant considers parerga to be mere additions to paintings, not really belonging to the latter’s inside, arguing that they are “what is only an adjunct and not an intrinsic constituent in the complete representation of the object” (Kant 40), Derrida nevertheless insists that it is in fact extremely problematic to distinguish where one starts and the other ends, what is inside and what is already outside the ergon. Using Kant’s own examples, Derrida illustrates the impossibility of the task of separating the ergon from its parergon, pointing to the numerous problems in Kant’s definition: One wonders […] where to have clothing commence. Where does a parergon begin and end. Would any garment be a parergon. G-strings and the like. What to do with absolutely transparent veils. […] For example, Cranch’s Lucretia holds only a light band of transparent veil in front of her sex: where is the parergon? Should one regard as a parergon the dagger which is not part of her naked and natural body and whose point she holds turned towards herself, touching her skin […]? […] The question of the representative and objectivising essence, of its outside and of its inside, of the criteria engaged in this delimitation, of the value of naturalness which is presupposed in it, and, secondarily or primarily, of the place of the human body or of its privilege in this whole problematic. (Derrida 1987: 57)

Having demonstrated the difficulty of detaching the parergon from its ergon in Kant’s examples, Derrida moves on to consider other objects in the function of parerga as the outside of the ergon,

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not every milieu, even if it is contiguous with the work, constitutes a parergon in the Kantian sense. The natural site chosen for the erection of a temple is obviously not a parergon. Nor is an artificial site: neither the crossroads, nor the church, nor the museum, nor the other works around one or other. But the garment or the column is. Why? It is not because they are detached but on the contrary because they are more difficult to detach and above all because without them, without their quasi-detachment, the lack on the inside of the work would appear […]. What constitutes them as parerga is not simply their exteriority as a surplus, it is the internal structural link which rivets them to the lack in the interior of the ergon. And this lack would be constitutive of the very unity of the ergon. Without this lack, the ergon would have no need of a parergon. The ergon’s lack is the lack of a parergon, […]. (Derrida 1987: 59 – 60)

It is not its exteriority that constitutes the parergon as Kant argues, but its ties with the interiority of the ergon, or to be more precise, the ties with the lack within the ergon. Consequently, Derrida further insists that there can be no ergon without parergon. Even though conventionally the parergon’s link with the ergon has been deemed insignificant and “incidental” by art theories (see Marriner 352), Derrida shows that the ergon’s autonomy and existence is founded precisely on the element that is supposed to be only additional to and not part of the ergon, namely on its frame. It is “only as (from) parergon” that “energeia […] becomes ergon” (Derrida 1987: 80). The ergon’s identity as an autonomous and self-contained totality is thus illusory, as it simply cannot be sustained without a frame, which serves as a prosthesis to fill in for the lack in the ergon. The parergon’s role is therefore anything but supplemental. Quite the opposite, the parergon turns out to be of supreme importance not only in creating the ergon by separating it from the outside and delimiting its scope, but also in supplanting the missing content from the ergon. To demonstrate how this parergonal supplanting of the ergonal lack works, Derrida uses Kant’s presentation of religion as a rationally sustainable system as an example of the ergon. Derrida argues that religion can only sustain this claim by using parerga such as grace, mystery and miracles to fill in its deficiencies, which then can be conveniently dismissed as insignificant and only additional to the identity of the main object: The parergon inscribes something which comes as an extra, exterior to the proper field (here that of pure reason and of Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone) but whose transcendent exteriority comes to play, abut onto, brush against, rub, press against the limit itself and intervene in the inside only to the extent that the inside is lacking. It is lacking in something and it is lacking from itself. Because reason is ‘conscious of its impotence to satisfy its moral need,’ it has recourse to the parergon, to grace, to mystery, to miracles. It needs a supplementary work. This additive, to be sure, is threatening. (Derrida 1987: 56)

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The threatening potential of the parergon becomes significant in the aesthetic of the sublime, which uncovers the irrational moments within the rational system and puts them into presentation. This is Kane’s strategy of presenting the abject and anything that is marginalised by dominant systems. Derrida also draws closer attention to a double role of the parergon. Depending on the perceiver’s perspective, the parergon may be taken as either separating the ergon (framing, discontinuity of matter) from the outside, the context, or connecting it with the latter (unframing, continuity of matter). As Derrida points out, “the parergonal frame stands out against two grounds, but with respect to each of these two grounds, it merges into the other” (Derrida 1987: 61). In fact, both these processes of framing and unframing happen simultaneously and can be experienced as such if a parergonal perspective is taken. Parergon, as Derrida points out, has a “thickness” (Derrida 1987: 60) and a double edge, it touches both the ergon and the ergon’s context, and is itself a type of liminal space mediating between the other two dimensions. As Wolfreys observes, “all borders are double in that, neither simply an outside nor an inside edge, they touch on both inside and outside, thereby doubling – and dividing themselves by the mark that takes place” (Wolfreys 89). Unlike in the conventional aesthetic where “the parergon is a form which has as its traditional determination not that it stands out but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy” (Derrida 1987: 61), in the aesthetic of the sublime the parergon is exhibited, put in presentation, with all its moments of appearance and disappearance. It becomes the ergon itself. A sublime frame, therefore, is a border, a line, demarcation, boundary, limit, that is palpably recognisable as such, and which, as Wolfreys observes, “includes but exceeds the idea of the actual frame” (Wolfreys 89). The sublime parergon “is not fixed but rather that which unfixes any stability in its articulation, every time it takes place” (Wolfreys 88). It unframes as it frames. Instead of clarifying the concept of life, the sublime frame only makes it more problematic. It seems to delineate the possible scope of an answer in its framing gesture, but opens the scope up in its next unframing move. Supplanting the lack, the void, the emptiness in the ergon, the sublime parergon exposes rather than fills in this lack, this emptiness, in presentation as it frames the identity of the ergon. It shows that the ergon can only constitute itself in relation to the void. The latter is the condition of the ergon’s existence, just as Thanatos conditions the emergence of Eros. Since all life is directed towards death, Eros constitutes Thanatos, too. The experience of this circular³⁴ process

 In this respect I disagree with De Vos, who in his essay comparing Beckett with Kane argues

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evokes the feeling of the sublime: it is both terrifying, as it removes the stable ground from under our feet, and at the same it is also truly exhilarating, as it releases new energy and opens up new horizons for thought and creation. To return to the play and the speaker’s experience of the oscillation between Eros and Thanatos, speech and silence, or life and death, their dynamic of alternation is similar to that of the circular blurring of ergon and parergon. The moment at 4.48 seems to be the threshold space, where the speaker experiences the parergon’s framing and unframing movements in their greatest extremity. She experiences the possibility and consequences of frameless being in Thanatos and of the framed, or as the speaker puts it ‘caged’ (see Kane 213) existence in Eros both simultaneously in this moment, at their conceptual limits, trying to make up her mind to either live within frames or live without them. Being unable to decide for either of the two options since each seems unbearable, she chooses the third option and continues to live parergonally, constantly subject to the framing and unframing, and continues this liminal existence, which the last five dashes at the end of the play may imply. Considering the identity of the speaker, the selfhood, to be an example of an ergon, her experience of it from the parergonal perspective reveals a void, a lack within the ergon. Parergonal life, that is, an existence which accepts a certain degree of nothingness (Thanatos) chipping away at its frames, is the only possible way to be that is bearable for the speaker. The decision to continue to live parergonally and switch between death and life, silence and speech is also motivated by another factor. The unframing drive of the parergon (Thanatos) consists in breaking down the boundaries of the speaker’s selfhood, and this process involves a simultaneous release of energy. Apart from experiencing the dissolving of the frames holding the self together, which is most visible in the disintegration of the speaker’s language, the speaker also experiences an energy rush accompanying this collapse. She experiences the emergence of Eros from Thanatos, and she uses the newly acquired energy, which she turns into the instant desire to create, to speak, to sing her parergonal song and look for her love. The moment of speech is the moment of binding the energy in a frame, which disappears along with the desire to create, as Derrida points out, in the moment of its deployment, giving rise to the work, or meaning. Destroying energy and satisfying the creative desire are thus part of the creative

that “[w]hile Beckett’s semi-monologues reveal a continuous repetition, Kane’s are seen to be much more linear. […] While Beckett concludes that one can do nothing but start all over again, over and over again, without ever reaching a satisfactory end, Kane jumps off this carrousel of repetitive starts” (De Vos 2006: 123 – 124). Whereas this might be true of Kane’s other plays, this does not seem to apply to 4.48 Psychosis.

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process. In the case of the aesthetic of the sublime, however, this desire is kept ‘alive’ continuously, since the frame disappears only for a moment as it is also in a continuous process of ‘unframing’, collapsing the ergon, and because of the unframing dynamics the ultimate form/meaning of the ergon can never be decided completely.

Parergonal madness and the creative process The speaker’s continuance of her parergonal existence and speech in spite of her threats to remain silent can be explained as a result of the parergonal oscillation between Eros and Thanatos, and the energy gained in this process. Subjecting herself to this liminal experience can further be seen as a particular artistic strategy, wherein the artist withdraws from life and already existing, familiar language to experience the void and emptiness within herself and the collapse of the familiar phrases only to emerge to live transformed again and find new forms of expression and new experiences of the self. This method, as Feder points out, “is the most personal yet the most characteristic motif of modern literature” (Feder 265). Since the persona also frequently refers to her writing activities (see Kane 213), it is possible to assume that she is, in fact, an artist herself, who uses her madness, in the sense of the collapse of boundaries of self and language, to enhance her creative powers and expand her own artistic horizons and those of the receivers of her work. In that she is also strongly reminiscent of Sappho’s speaker from her “Phainetai moi” (see 2.1.2 and 2.1.3). That the experience of madness as dissolution and loss of self may be particularly effective in this respect has been known and applied by artists literally for ages, and the motif of a mad poet who sees the truth is well established and documented in literature.³⁵ Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis seems to inscribe itself in this literary tradition. It is perhaps useful to mention two names here, as both appear to be particularly fitting in the context of 4.48 Psychosis, namely Friedrich Nietzsche and Antonin Artaud. Both Artaud and Nietzsche thematised the idea and use of madness in theatrical situations, and both looked for artistic and creative inspiration in the force of destruction and frenzy leading to ecstatic creation, which are, however, experienced in a relatively controlled way. In Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872/1995) the destructive force is symbolised in the figure of the Greek god Dionysus, associated with a “flood of passion to which the Apollonian principle of individuation might give form” (Kauf-

 see for example also Corrine Saunders’ Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture (2005).

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mann 245). Tragedy arises out of the struggle between the two, Dionysus and Apollo. Even though he seems to favour the destructive force, Nietzsche acknowledges the necessity of “Apollonian illusion, through whose influence we are to be delivered from the Dionysian obtrusion and excess” (Nietzsche 80). The destructive force of madness needs to be held within a safe frame in order to produce the energising effects. Similarly, the sublime can only be appreciated if the terror accompanying the threat of privation is lifted and the energy discharged. It can only be felt as sublime delight if the terrifying nothingness is contained within a frame again. The Dionysian is nevertheless necessary to breathe life into the Apollonian and inspire the latter to exceed its own frames and transform. The two are thus most effective if they cooperate (see Nietzsche 81). To translate it into the register of parergonal dynamics, it is possible to see Dionysus as the unframing force resulting in the experience of formlessness and continuity, and Apollo as the framing force holding the potentially terrifying experience within safe limits, and preventing it from ending in “barbaric […] ‘cruelty’” (Feder 208). This is also the dynamic and function of the sublime.

Parergonal language³⁶ The speaker’s experience of the unutterable truth during the parergonal time results in the sense of the impossibility of speaking and paradoxically simultaneously in a heightened desire (Eros) bordering on existential urgency to do so nevertheless. To revisit the relevant quotation again, the speaker laments, “I had a night in which everything was revealed to me. / How can I speak again?” (Kane 205) and continues speaking.³⁷ The language she uses, however, is no longer the familiar rational language of the ‘conventionally sane’, but an idiom plunged into madness and subjected to Artaudian cruelty (De Vos 2010: 128, 133). It is a parergonal language, which bears a great resemblance to Artaudian language

 This section of the chapter follows the line of reasoning of an excellent essay by Laurent De Vos, “Sarah Kane and Antonin Artaud: cruelty towards the subjectile”, and is deeply indebted to its insights. The concept of parergonal language is very similar to the Artaudian subjectile, even though the latter was mainly used by Artaud in reference to painting. Both terms, parergon and subjectile, were also of great interest to Derrida, who commented on them, adding the third, similar concept of the trait to the equation.  Even though different in its aesthetics, which are much less bleak than Kane’s, Beckett’s characters are often confronted with a similar dilemma of not being able to stop, which Alain Badiou discusses in his book, Beckett: Das Begehren ist nicht tot zu kriegen (2006). There are many more parallels between Kane and Beckett’s work (for more detailed commentary see Barry; or Saunder “Beckettian world”).

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“beyond gesture and thought”, which he also referred to as subjectile (see Derrida and Thévenin, 1998), though in a non-theatrical context. Having experienced the collapse of thought, language, its concepts and their incommensurability with the truth³⁸, the speaker finds herself in a position from which it is impossible to return to the familiar form of language from before the parergonal time, and asks, “How can I return to form / now my formal thought has gone?” (Kane 213). The contrast between the two types of, or, better said, approaches to language is a matter of hierarchy or, rather, degree of visibility of the ergon and parergon. Whereas the rational, ‘ergonal’ approach is more focused on communicating the meaning and the message and thus putting the ergon in central focus, the irrational, ‘parergonal’ language hovers between making sense and unmaking it simultaneously, balancing the relation between ergon and parergon. The difference is best demonstrated in a closer analysis of the following two sections of the play.

Ergon > parergon The very first section of the play is related to several other sections, which are all characterised by an apparent semantic transparency of the audible voice’s ergonal language. A rational voice breaks the silence, which the text represents as italicized words of stage directions put in brackets, ending with a full stop, (A very long silence.) (Kane 205)

by contradicting some other, invisible and inaudible speaker. A very confident and authoritative voice assures the silent person that he or she has friends. The sentences produced by the audible voice consistently use correct grammar and punctuation mark, and their content seems to be conveyed in a rather clear and straightforward way. The content of the first sentence is repeated and slightly modified in subsequent sentences. The same vocabulary is used, which consists solely of a few simple words and phrases such as “you have friends”, “what do you offer your friends to make them so supportive” or simply “what do you offer” (Kane 205). The clarity of the sentences makes it possible to repeat them with what would appear to be precisely the same semantic content:

 Drawing on Lacan’s theory of the Real, De Vos defines the truth that the speaker of 4.48 Psychosis talks about as the Lacanian Real, which basically runs parallel to my interpretation of the truth as Bataille’s continuity with nothingness.

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You have a lot of friends. What do you offer your friends to make them so supportive? (A long silence.) What do you offer your friends to make them so supportive? (Kane 205)

The first question is followed by precisely the same question again and then echoed for the second time in the final, shortened version, “What do you offer?” (Kane 205). The clear repetitive structure of these sentences seems to reinforce the audible voice’s authority. By repeating the phrases again and again, the voice creates an impression of omniscience, along with its own rational metanarrative of transparent forms and pure intelligibility. This approach to language draws upon the belief that meaning, and therefore also human identity, can be adequately and precisely represented by words. The success of this approach depends on its ability to render the empty space between the word’s letters invisible, thus obfuscating the arbitrary relation between word and meaning. This approach hides the parergonality of language and the page. Yet, even in this seemingly clear and relatively coherent ‘dialogue’, the force of the parergon, or, as Artaud would call it, the subjectile, makes itself felt, albeit still subtly, still subdued by the ergon’s dominance, at this point. The perfect form of the sentences is disturbed by moments of silence, which are however still marked each time, using structures of the audibly dominant voice, each completed with a full stop. The silent voice is represented in the language of the authoritative speaker, articulated and therefore no longer silent. Instead of becoming what it ‘really’ is, the silence is ‘finished’ in its representation and with it the dominant and normative narrative’s claim to transparency. The silence is also separated from the audible voice with brackets. Framed and excluded, its beginning and end precisely marked, it is as if the silence were held imprisoned, caged by the structures of the dominant narrative. In spite of these attempts to contain its silence, the surface of the page connects the audible voice and the ‘audible’ silent voice with a silence of its own, impermeable white substance saturating and linking the two, and making their purportedly semantically transparent structure shudder within itself.³⁹ It is the parergonal unframing of the void and the subjectile’s silence.  Ariel Watson, commenting on the silence’s subversive potential in this passage, observes, “[s]ilence is a means of resisting the theatricality of the therapeutic encounter. It is a refusal to act within the script of expectation and diagnosis, an assertion of the individuality of each case, each patient, each subjectivity” (Watson 194).

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The silence cannot be fully expressed or represented by imposing frames onto it in the form of brackets, words and punctuation. Represented, it will always only be a trace (symbol) of silence. The supposedly certain knowledge expressed by the authoritative voice about the condition of the silent voice is also undermined. With the materiality of the page introducing doubt into what would seem to be a rational discourse and a relatively clear dialogue, the possibility of finding and expressing ‘the essential truth’ about the subject of this dialogue is radically negated. Exposed as a mere illusion of meaning and, in fact, as simple materiality, the text is simultaneously opened to various interpretations and representations, none of which can be verified and considered to be the only true and correct one. Instead of providing answers, the questions are multiplied. What is the difference between a “very long silence”, “long silence” and simply “silence”? Does the silence represent another person? If so, is it one person or many? Do the silent and the audible voice belong to the same person? With its empty spaces exposed, the text increasingly resembles the broken line separating the sections of the play and slips into the next one.

Ergon ≈ parergon If the text of the previous section was aiming at its semantic transparency and trying to hide the missing content by concealing the necessity of the parergon, the text from the second section, whose content has already been discussed earlier in the chapter in the context of the image of mind and consciousness (see Kane 205) and now will be looked at from the perspective of the techne, seems to attempt the opposite and ostensibly makes the meaning undecidable. Or rather, the familiar shape of words and phrases seduces with the possibility of meaning and their framing gesture. This possibility is, however, cancelled in almost the same moment by drawing attention to the materiality of the language consisting in the parergon’s unframing motion. Language loses its referentiality, its ability to make sense and be an ergon. Instead, the ergon merges with its parergon and together they become one, continuous in its materiality with the materiality of the page, even if it is only for a brief moment. How is this heightened materiality of language, and of the page, for that matter, produced? According to Artaud, there is only one strategy: cruelty. Commenting on the nature of the Artaudian subjectile, De Vos observes, “In order to actually botch the subjectile, to make it suffer instead of just using it as a passive support, one must be cruel.” (De Vos 2010: 128). For that purpose, “language as a means of communication” needs to be “amputated” (De Vos 2010: 130), the white page cut, fragmented, broken down and deformed, so that the words “bleed”

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into the white page and become continuous with it, as in the following passage towards the end of the play, watch me vanish watch me vanish watch me watch me watch (Kane 244)

To return to the beginning of the play again, the second section extends over two pages. In the first part, the reader is confronted with three text passages. Two of them have a form of what in the Kantian idiom of the sublime is referred to as the without-form: an object exceeding the capacity of understanding and imagination to grasp it in one intuition. The passages enclose the third passage, consisting of two sentences, placed in-between and separated on each side by an empty space. The enclosing passages are more reminiscent of scraps of text than a ‘proper’ discourse and give the impression of chaotic continuity on the page. No beginning or end can be discerned, since no punctuation is provided. Words simply start suddenly on the page without any warning in the form of capitalization. They continue for a certain time and then disappear again, also without any warning (without a full stop). Reminiscent of the “— — — — —”, the materiality of the first passage is much denser than that of the dialogue from the previous section. Overcrowded, the words seem to follow one another hastily and without any structure. The only element relating the words to each other is the space between them which, unbounded by any punctuation, makes the relation between the words rather uncertain. The white substance of the page presses the words together into an overwhelming totality whose meaning is impossible to grasp in an instant. The reader is paralysed by the accumulation of words and sounds whose meaning seems to slide off the surface of the page. Although the signification of the separate words can be found in any dictionary, their meaning as a whole is inaccessible and the process of interpretation is necessarily suspended (paralysed thought). A representation can only be provided in a struggle with the text, by violently imposing on it subjective frames, and will be tangibly incomplete. By imposing frames onto the materiality of the text and making assumptions such as deciding

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arbitrarily where to stop and make a mental comma or full stop, a subjective interpretation of the text and meaning can be arrived at. Yet such a representation is always tinged with the loss of meaning, since the process of comprehending involves making semantic sacrifices by including and excluding contents according to the representational frame. The overwhelming aesthetic of the text forces an awareness of this process in the interpreter and makes them reflect upon this activity, realising how subjective and indeed almost impossible this process of signification is. The play uses many different strategies of ‘materialising’ the language and page as parergon turning into ergon. Another example of such a strategy is a passage from the third section. At first glance this passage could be mistaken for the ergonal language, as it surprises the reader with another turn to transparency and simplicity of the text’s initial lines. About three-quarters of the section consists in phrases which due to their structure may pass for complete sentences, each with a subject and a predicate. Each line commences with an ‘I’ which seems to give information about itself, which is however very negative. Although the meaning appears to be conveyed in a clear and straightforward way, a certain artificiality about the discourse can be noticed. This repetition of the same structure again and again is reminiscent of the process of learning how to write or of rote lessons in a foreign language class when the same sentence structure and the same terms are repeated ad nauseam so that the student can learn them by heart and then apply them without thinking. Starting with the personal pronoun ‘I’, the sentences may also be read as an attempt at a self-definition by self-description. Each line would be an effort to determine the ‘I’ again and again, and to magnify its existence by constantly repeating the pronoun. I am sad I feel that the future is hopeless and that things cannot improve I am bored and dissatisfied with everything I am a complete failure as a person I am guilty, I am being punished I would like to kill myself I used to be able to cry but now I am beyond tears I have lost interest in other people I can’t make decisions I can’t eat I can’t sleep [next page]

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I can’t think I cannot overcome my loneliness, my fear, my disgust I am fat I cannot write I cannot love (Kane 206 – 7)

In spite of these efforts, the image arising from these sentences is self-destructive rather than self-affirming. Instead of asserting the self, the “I” is negated with every sentence. Moreover, although the structure of the sentences appears to be complete, a closer inspection shows that they all are missing punctuation at the end and thus remain open. The materiality of this passage presents an image of lines consisting of words which suddenly break down and vanish, merging with the emptiness of the page: the recurrent motif of parergonal movement typical of the play. The relatively large space between the lines emphasises this effect even more, so that the text is reminiscent of Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures, with their stretched-out limbs and thin postures. Shadows of human beings, the edges of their form gnawed away, the figures seem to be dissolving in space, as if they were constantly about to disappear. Similarly, the passage of this section appears to be gradually effaced by the page’s void saturating the words and letters with its parergonal force and turning the ergon into parergon. Considered vertically, as a row of graphic signs, the ‘Is’ tend to appear and disappear on the page like the broken line, the parergon, which divides the play into sections, thus perpetuating its fragmentation. The horizontal lines of words also seem to participate in this parergonal movement of making and unmaking itself on the page. Although the row of sentences is disrupted at some point, the text continues to be tinged with this oscillating, ephemeral motion.

3.4.3 External Analysis: the Influence of the Parergonal Language on the Audience Finally, turning to the question of the sublime response of the audience, the chapter puts forward the thesis that the main strategy the play uses to produce it lies predominantly in the parergonal position that the audience is steered to take. The spectators are not only witnesses to the speaker’s experience of the boundary but are also subject to its sublime effect on their own thought. The audience, too, experiences the void in its thought and the simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating force of being saturated with indeterminacy, which introduces both insecurity and liberation into the perceivers’ reality.

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The parergonal position along with the experience of the parergonal motions of framing and unframing, accompanied by its effect of blurring ergon into parergon and parergon into ergon are created in stages that translate into the typical phases of the aesthetic of the sublime: 1) the stage of apparent familiarity (invisible frame); 2) sudden disruption of the familiarity accompanied by the feeling of terror connected to the threat of privation (shocking material appearance of the frame); and 3) discharge of vital energies combined with the transformation of thought, perception and experience (palpable disappearance of the frame).

The familiarity of the ergonal language The first section of the play evokes an atmosphere of relative familiarity in spite of the somewhat disturbing subject matter and the rather unsettling silent voice. Though the audience is thrown into the play’s first section without a ‘proper’ beginning such as an introduction or dramatic exposition, it does not happen without any ‘warning’ or without any frame of reference for the audience to hold on to, as the title of the play signals and, in doing so, circumscribes the possible subject matter to psychosis, a mental disorder. Also, those among the audience who are familiar with Kane’s earlier work and her own mental problems may even assume that the play is autobiographical to a certain extent. The missing exposition to the play is not really missed that much, nor is its absence particularly shocking or disturbing for contemporary audiences or readers. With an idea of psychosis in their minds, the readers will most probably interpret the first scene as a therapy session with possibly two characters involved: a therapist and a patient, even though there are no concrete or clear indications that there are only two distinct voices involved. How familiar or iconoclastic the first image of the play is in performance naturally depends on the stage realisation of the first scene, which may range from the more conventional interpretation involving two actors, to one actor talking to her- or himself, to using many different voices and creating the atmosphere of schizophrenia from the start. Regardless of the technique, the first section does not seem to be constructed to undermine or disturb the readers’ or spectators’ idea of mental disorder at this stage. On the contrary, the clear and easily understandable questions add up rather nicely to form the typical image of a patient-and-therapist situation, or, in the case of many voices, into an inner dialogue between rational and irrational voices. In fact, the clarity and the effortlessness with which the sentences can be grasped by the audience are almost suspiciously so. The ergonal quality of the language produces an atmosphere of certainty and the apparent comfort of being able to make determinate judgements about the dramatic situation. The latter does not even seem to be particularly disrupted by the silence of the ‘pa-

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tient’; after all this, too, could plausibly be common behaviour for a psychotic person. The language in this section comes into focus in its quality as an ergon whose parerga, i. e., the page, words, printed marks, sounds and bodies onstage, easily go unnoticed, not really drawing attention to themselves at this point. They effectively remain invisible, all attention directed to the meaning apparently contained in the sentences. Since the utterances seduce us with their seeming clarity and coherence, it is easy to dismiss the silence of the other voice as the symptom of his or her damaged psyche. This section is an example of what Derrida described as the invisibility of the parergon, which having given its energy to the ergon vanishes, its work never being noticed. This is also the experience that the audience is exposed to at the beginning of the play, still unaware of its own cognitive processes involved in the reception of this section at this stage.

Materialisation of the parergonal language The comfort of cognition, or as Lyotard refers to it, “the solace of good forms” (Lyotard 1984a: 81), however, soon comes to an end with the arrival of the next section and the ensuing chaos of expression, which shatters the neat composition of the earlier scene. The members of the audience suddenly find themselves confronted by an onslaught of words, hurled at them as bundles that are impossible to separate into units of graspable meaning during the performance. Interpreting the utterances would only seem possible with the help of careful reading and analysis carried out in several stages, dissecting the blocks of words into manageable pieces and placing a subjective frame on the reality of each utterance. Such an interpretation is, however, necessarily partial. As a whole, the statement of this expression escapes the grasp of the perceivers and overwhelms the mind with its complexity. Words are being spoken and individual expressions would seem to have discernible meanings, and yet they do not provide us with a recognisable meaning of the passage as a whole. Language is reduced to nothing more than sounds and printed marks on a page. The change from the ergonal language of the previous section to the parergonal language of its successor is akin to turning a kaleidoscope. The spectators’ eyes are presented with familiar linguistic elements, which however due to their changed position suddenly lose their traditional signifying roles and become foreign bodies, presenting uncanny but always fragmentary traces of resemblance to familiar language. Words become materiality, a phenomenon which Anna Opel discusses in the context of Cleansed and refers to as “Sprachkörper”, drawing on Manfred Pfister’s concept, yet radicalising it substantially. According to Opel, Pfister, commenting on the materiality of language in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus,

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“untersucht nicht das Sprachmaterial, sondern er beschreibt die physischen Bilder, derer Coriolan sich bedient, um seine Abscheu vor den Plebejern auszudrücken” (Opel 15). In Kane’s plays the materiality of language is much more radical. After all, her greatest goal was to make form and content one and 4.48 Psychosis can be considered to be the most extreme instance of this endeavour. Just as it is with Artaud’s subjectile, the parergonal language of 4.48 Psychosis is much more than only a matter of images of violence and cruelty. The parergonal language literally becomes ‘matter’ itself as it becomes the site of repeated violence at various communication levels: of the author, the speaker and the audience. In the process, it emerges as material corporeality, and because of that, also as vulnerable to the perceiver’s cruelty in the form of interpretative framing. The audience’s experience of the ‘mattering’ of parergonal language can be a terrifying moment, a glimpse of the void accompanied by the Lyotardian threat of privation: the fear that nothing will ever happen again, together with the creeping anxiety that, to use the speaker’s words, “[n]othing matters more” (Kane 229; emphasis mine). It is the experience of words devoid of meaning and meaning as illusive, temporary and unstable. Lyotard describes the moment as the zero point of thought (see Lyotard 1994: 122) and Artaud refers to a similar phenomenon as “a void in thought” (Artaud qtd in Haney 68): a moment when the familiar boundaries between concepts and ideas start collapsing, and nothing is certain anymore. Carl Lavery, discussing the concept of the sacred⁴⁰ in theatre, describes a very similar feeling to that of the threat of privation, the void, in the following way, I was overcome […] with a sense of vertigo. I couldn’t settle. I was restless, nothing was stable. […] The world seemed strange. Suddenly, there was a void, a hole which didn’t make sense. There was […] a kind of drifting, and a body in space, and a sense of distance. (qtd in Yarrow, 21) For me, the sacred is […] a form of liminal experience, an empty fullness, a full emptiness. […] I’m taken outside of time, outside of myself, outside of consciousness. But I’m still aware of my own separateness, or at least something in me is. This is not indifference and this is often accompanied by anxiety. Fear? Perhaps. But not fear of something – this is not to do with objects. Rather, it is fear in general: nebulous fear, pure fear. Death on the horizon. And yet in this dislocation, or rather because of this dislocation, I get a sense of my world, and of my place in it. The sudden vertiginous rush that I’m here and that this is this. (qtd in Yarrow, 20)

 The sacred theatre is a concept also founded on Artaud’s idea of a void in thought.

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It is to the latter sensation of “vertiginous rush that I’m here and that this is this” that I want to turn presently, as it corresponds to the last stage of the sublime: the terrible delight.

The terrible delight and transformation Lavery describes the feeling resulting from the experience of the void in thought as dizziness and loss of balance tied in with the heightened sense of our own self-presence, even though the sensation is gone as soon as we become conscious of it. It is the experience of the newly born consciousness which Derrida considers to be sublime, and which he explains by connecting it to the experience of the setting frame, along with the sensations of the release and bounding of energy accompanying the appearance and disappearance of the frame. The sublime energy is released on crossing from the previous unframed stage of void to the stage of a new frame of our transformed mind and thought. Even though the process is described here as a passage from stage one to stage two it is important to bear in mind that it happens almost simultaneously and is experienced as a sort of pulsation or vibration within language and the receiver’s thought, phasing from materiality into immateriality. The audience feels its thought saturated with the void when the play turns into parergon and becomes ungraspable in its monstrous materiality. Its indeterminacy, the vast emptiness of the white pages and of the printed marks devoid of meaning, however, also invites the audience to fill in the space with their own thoughts, experiences and become co-creators of the performance and the aesthetic object. The play’s voiding space thus cuts both ways: hospitably opening up gaps of indeterminacy, the empty space making room for the members of the audience to enter it, bringing their own experiences, concepts, ideas and values into play. It then permeates the ideas with its annihilating force and leads the members of the audience to the experience of privation and to the collapse of the boundaries of their familiar concepts. During the process of breaking down the frames of the familiar concepts, vital energy is released and so the voiding paradoxically also has a catalysing effect on the audience. It energises its members to creative transformation and renewal of their consciousness. The variety of stage interpretations of the play is the best evidence of this hospitality and the resulting creativity. The terrible delight comes from the process of framing and not, as has often been argued in the discourse on the sublime, from the sense of unboundedness and limitlessness of the human mind. It is the feeling that, to revisit Lyotard’s formulation, something does happen in spite of the void and nothingness, or better said, because of it. For it is the experience of the void in our thoughts that

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energises and inspires the desire in us to attempt to fill it in, and thus, by extension to creative activities, even though we are fully aware of the futility of such endeavours. The experience of the sublime, however, shows that it is not the arrival at the destination, the satiation of the desire, but the sense of being driven by the insatiable desire for the object that remains forever beyond our reach that is the foundation of the heightened sense of our ephemeral presence and the motive force behind all creativity and life.

4 Conclusion There have been a number of attempts to describe the theatrical phenomenon of the 1990s, which was characterised by the presentation of violent and sexually explicit images onstage in a very provocative way. Some labels, such as “Blood and Sperm Generation”, “New Jacobeans”, “the Naughties”, “New Brutalist”, “Cool Theatre” or “Theatre of the Urban Ennui” quickly came and went. Other concepts, such as “Theatre of Cruelty” or “Theatre of Catastrophe”, were more convincingly theoretically grounded, and have been more successful in describing the drama; consequently, they have also been applied by critics more readily. What has turned out to be by far the most popular label, however, is Sierz’ “in-yer-face theatre”. Yet in spite of the many advantages and undeniably rewarding insights offered by some of the concepts, none of them seem to offer a satisfactory model for analysing the relationship between the stage and the audience, which is so central in appreciating the drama of the 1990s. Proposed by the study and presented in four plays of major playwrights of the time, the category of sublime drama provides a theoretical model that is not only suitable for the analysis of the relationship between the stage and the audience, but which can also account for the provocative and shocking quality of the plays without subsuming their formal composition under any restrictive aesthetic rules or categorising them according to a determinate content, theme or motif. Moreover, highly suspicious of any ideology-oriented systems, be they based on religious, political, economic, scientific, psychological or aesthetic premises, the category of sublime drama also responds to the zeitgeist of the particular cultural and socio-political period. On the one hand, sublime drama matches the spirit of liberation from the totalitarianism of communistic regimes and carries the energy released in the collapse of borders, be they more concrete like the Berlin Wall or the less tangible but just as ‘real’ boundaries and borders in people’s minds. On the other hand, disappointed with the insufficient changes in its own ‘backyard’, sublime drama shows this frustration onstage and offers a mode of resistance to what seems to be the new totalitarian system of ‘cool’ consumerism. Focused on the aesthetic relation between the stage and the audience, sublime drama describes it as a dynamic process of communicative interaction between the two realms, leading to the formation of the particular response of the sublime in the spectators’ consciousness. In line with the principles of the aesthetic category of the sublime, each experience of it is unrepeatable and cannot be subsumed under any fixed, pre-existing rules. Indeed, it is the quality of incommensurability to preconceived ideas and concepts that is one of the central features and simultaneously also conditions of the sublime feeling. The latter is

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only evoked as a result of confrontation with an object that does not fit in with the perceiver’s dominant system of values and beliefs. If the subject can grasp the perceived object, the latter loses its capacity to shock. It loses its otherness. The response of the sublime is, therefore, strongly dependent on the perceiver’s frame of mind, and is therefore highly subjective. Consequently, the analyses of the case studies presented in this work do not refer to real audiences to describe the sublime effect of the discussed plays but consider the perception process at a more abstract level. Drawing on Wolfgang Iser’s concept of the implied reader and adapting it to the theatrical context as the implied audience, the study accounts for the implied frame of mind that is necessary for the sublime response by examining the implied system of norms and values of the plays, or, to use Iser’s term, the text’s repertoire. The activation of a play’s repertoire in the audience’s consciousness is the first phase in the production of the sublime response. What this repertoire is and how it is activated differs from play to play. Unsurprisingly, however, sublime drama most frequently thematises the mentality of the consumerist culture as the dominant and familiar system of norms and values, as the two case studies Closer and Faust is Dead exemplarily manifest. Whereas in Closer the repertoire concerns the consumerist aesthetic of the agreeable and its influence on the perception of the other and human relationships of love and intimacy, Faust is Dead presents how the consumerist strategy of simulation affects our understanding and perception of reality and the real. Both Normal and 4.48 Psychosis, in turn, seem to drift away from the repertoire of consumerism. Instead, they focus on the humanistic and essentialist concepts of what is normal and what is human. Though each play uses its own strategies to arrange its repertoire, the process steers the audience to take certain roles and points of view in the course of the play’s performance or reading, leading it to the production of the response of the sublime. Generally, this arrangement precipitates the three-staged process of interaction between the stage and the audience: 1) the stage of familiarity, in which the play’s repertoire (dominant norms and values, and familiar modes of perception) is activated in the audience’s consciousness; 2) the stage of terror: the cruel confrontation of the repertoire with the unfamiliar reality of the other, which evokes the threat of privation in the audience; and 3) the stage of transformation of the audience’s consciousness towards greater indeterminacy. In order to produce the atmosphere of familiarity, Closer uses the particular form of the beautiful, which, according to Kant, is based on harmony and simplicity. Though the way the characters treat each other is anything but beautiful, it is nevertheless presented by means of extremely symmetrical structures reminiscent of a well-made play, such as the perfectly proportioned character con-

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stellation of two men and two women who keep falling in and out of love with one another, the linear presentation of the relationships’ beginnings, middles and endings, or the witty and amusing dialogues, which take the audience’s attention away from their much less amusing meaning and help to gloss over the less beautiful moments of the play. The apparent beauty of the play’s harmonious form steers the audience to activate the particular expectations of the familiar scenarios typical of romantic comedies and the characteristic obstacles that their characters need to face before finally getting together. Influenced by their own expectations, the audience filters the characters through familiar romantic images – an activity which is encouraged by the play’s strategies in order to give the audience the illusion of understanding the play’s reality and the couple’s problems, only to take away this certainty in the play’s final scene, which initiates the second phase in the experience of the sublime. The phase is catalysed by the unexpected news about one of the play’s characters, Alice. The audience learns not only about the character’s sudden death in a car accident but also about her ‘real’ identity, which, as it now turns out, it never knew. This correlation of the three aspects – Thanatos, the real, and ungraspable identity – is the typical high point in the experience of the sublime and one of the most central and recognisable characteristics of sublime drama. Infusing the aesthetic object that the audience has formed in their minds about Alice and the play’s story so far with great uncertainty and indeterminacy, the revelation questions the system of values and norms that the audience has applied to produce that object. The audience experiences the incommensurability of its apparatus of perception and signification to the reality of Alice’s unattainable existence, which, it appears, has always been beyond the audience’s grasp. The second phase of the sublime is thus closely followed by the third and last stage: the transformation of the audience’s consciousness towards greater hospitality to the indeterminacy of the other. The play’s strategies allow the members of the audience to fall back on the familiar repertoire of the consumerist cool by framing the darker and more brutal overtones within the play in the agreeable aesthetic. In doing so, the audience can distance themselves from the connotations with death and abjection subtly lingering in the play’s language and images by focusing on the entertaining, glossy, and more agreeable quality of the dialogue and blocking the other out of its consciousness. Providing this agreeable frame, the play gives the audience a way out. It does so, however, only to a certain point. The information about Alice’s death and her identity seriously shakes the foundations of the agreeable frame, retroactively activating the abject elements, which the audience was capable of glossing over earlier in the play, by now giving them more prominence over the agreeable ones within the audience’s consciousness. With very little

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left to hold on to, the members of the audience experience the indeterminacy of the other within their own thoughts. Whereas Closer’s strategy of evoking the response of the sublime is to disguise the sublime other in an agreeable ‘wrapping’ and only reveal its indeterminacy towards the end of the play, Normal applies the opposite strategy to achieve the similar effect of rendering the other familiar and harmless. Initially introduced as the absolute other, the familiar unfamiliar, the inhuman monster who brutally murdered many people, enjoying himself immensely in the process, the serial killer Peter Kurten is presented in total opposition to the dominant and conventional image of what is defined as human and normal, that is, civil and moral, behaviour. This dominant image is based on the belief that condemns violence, trying to exclude any traces of it from so-called human reality. This concept also seems to be the main repertoire of the play, which is activated in the first phase of familiarity and later questioned during the process of forming the response of the sublime. The members of the audience are first invited to sympathise with and see themselves as being on the same side as the character who represents the play’s repertoire, the young lawyer Justus Wehner, rather than that of the terrifying murderer. In doing so, the audience positions itself together with the just and righteous and in opposition to the condemned. The initial distance, based on the clear separation of the human from the inhuman, between the audience and Peter Kurten is slowly but surely blurred and obliterated in the course of the play, as the audience finds itself more and more attracted to the monstrous but powerful and ecstatic killer rather than to the weak, infantile and hypocritical lawyer. Kurten emerges in the audience’s consciousness as an ecstatic object, whose presence and appearance is so potent and mesmerising that the audience finds itself in his power and incapable of condemning either him or his actions. Feeling simultaneously repulsed by and attracted to Kurten and the aesthetic presentation of his heinous crimes, paralysed by the terror of Thanatos and energised by its turning into the ecstasy of Eros, the audience suddenly recognises that its sensations are not so dissimilar to the murderer’s descriptions of his feelings while committing the murders. What has initially been classified by the members of the audience as the absolute other is revealed to them now as an inherent part of their own nature, and the distinction between the human and inhuman becomes increasingly blurry. The clear-cut definition of the human is thus experienced as highly problematic and takes on a more indeterminate quality. Presenting Kurten initially as the absolute other, the audience is steered by the play’s strategies to consider the serial killer as the familiar unfamiliar, the evil that is conventionally and commonly recognised as such. Having at its disposal a ready concept for grasping the absolute other, the audience can easily

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detach itself from it. The play’s strategies, however, arranging the repertoire so that the dominant values appear to be unattractive and weak and the condemned emerges as the ecstatic and eroticised object in the audience’s consciousness, lead the latter to experience the other as part of its thought. The sensation and, by extension, the response of the sublime are built up in stages, gradually increasing the intensity of Kurten’s appearance as an ecstatic object in the audience’s mind and accumulating the energy only to release it during the murder scene of Frau Kurten. This moment abruptly ends the audience’s state of being paralysed by the mesmerising images. As the realisation of its taciturn acceptance of the violence presented dawns on the audience, the latter recognises that the conceptual frame that it used at the beginning of the play to define and produce Kurten’s image in its mind is neither sufficient nor applicable and that the line separating the human from the inhuman is questionable at best. The repertoire activated in Faust is Dead is a return to consumerist culture and its aesthetic of the agreeable, which the play presents as the operation of simulation on human reality, the perception of and desire for the real. Similarly to Closer’s presentation of how the agreeable frame manipulates the desire for the indeterminate other human being, turning it into the determinate need for consumption and appropriation, Faust is Dead, too, exposes corresponding mechanisms of consumerist simulation, but with regard to the human desire for the ungraspable sublime real, which is turned into a satisfiable need for a determinate product (the consumerist real). The play evokes the repertoire of the consumerist simulation by presenting the story, its action and its characters in a familiar televisual aesthetic, which reduces every statement, action or event to the signifier of the agreeable. When placed within the frame of consumerist simulation, each signifier can be exchanged against any other signifier, regardless of the meaning. Just as the agreeable in Closer, the familiar aesthetic frame of simulation renders the potentially more serious situations in Faust is Dead harmless, barring the audience from any ‘real’ interaction with them. Unlike in Closer, however, where the agreeable is rationed to the audience in easily ‘digestible’ and therefore deceitfully unnoticeable portions, Faust is Dead’s strategy is to overwhelm and exhaust the audience with the aesthetic of consumerist simulation. The growing accumulation of the consumerist real, which is presented to the audience in a rapid succession of images, with scenes and situations quickly changing, emerges in the audience’s consciousness as an aesthetic object saturating and overwhelming that consciousness with its extreme flatness and evoking in the audience the threat of privation: the fear that nothing meaningful will ever happen again. What may even be experienced as entertaining and amusing at the beginning of the play becomes unbearably

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stifling and possibly even nauseating after several scenes. The oversaturation with the images of the consumerist real creates in the audience the craving for something meaningful to happen, the desire for something real to cut through the empty phrases and flat surfaces. Pushing the image of consumerist simulation to the limits, the play’s strategy is to make the audience experience its simulational mechanism in its extreme form, blown out of its everyday proportion, so as to better show its detrimental effects on the human experience and perception of the real, by actually having the audience experience these effects on their own bodies. The omnipresence of the consumerist, simulated real produces frustration with its depthlessness and evokes a desire for true experiences and authentic feelings, which is presented at the internal level of the play in the characters’ infliction of pain on themselves. Externally, the effects of the overwhelming presence of consumerist simulation are felt by the audience in the intensification of its desire to experience something real. Optimally, the intensity of the desire in the audience coincides with the moment of the apparent arrival of the real in the play: the death of a character. Donny’s cutting his jugular vein and bleeding to death brings the rapid succession of images to a sudden halt. The audience is given time for the image and the signification of the moment, that is the silence, to sink in. Unlike the earlier situations in the play, this event is not exchanged against new images, which would enable the audience to forget about this unpleasant instance and move on to the next scene. The only thing that follows Donny’s death is a long pause. Further, as terrible as the character’s death is, the audience experiences it first and foremost as extremely energising and viscerally satisfying though inexplicably so: the sensation of the sublime real. The audience is finally liberated from the oppressive aesthetic flatness and can experience something powerfully and profoundly. Freed from the unbearable vacuity and depthlessness of the earlier scenes, the audience seems to finally be given the opportunity to experience something real. The momentary depth that the spectators feel is, however, only illusory, as what they experience is clearly not Donny’s pain or death. The latter is, after all, only a simulation itself. In the last phase of the sublime, the members of the audience thus realise that the real that they seem to experience is just as illusory as the consumerist real. The experience of the sublime is the experience of the lack of reality and the real. What the members of the audience thus become aware of is that there is a significant difference between the two kinds of the real, the consumerist and sublime. Both are simulations. Yet the consumerist variant attempts to satisfy the consumer by manipulating his or her desire for the ungraspable real into a concrete need for a determinate object (consumerist real). The sublime simula-

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tion of the real, in turn, provides an image of the latter, which, powerful, energising and inspiring as it is, only shows the perceiver that the real is not graspable in any material form and the desire for it must always remain unsatisfied. Since this desire is, however, the driving force sustaining every life-form, fulfilling it would mean its end and the termination of life, as the mechanism behind the consumerist simulation of the graspable real manifests. Similarly to Normal, the last case study, 4.48 Psychosis, starts off by establishing the repertoire of the familiar unfamiliar. Evoking the easily recognisable language of a therapy session, the play’s strategy is to trigger conventional associations and connotations. Two discourses are juxtaposed in the first stage of familiarity: the dominant voice of rationality and the marginalised and silent voice of irrationality. Represented by the language of the dominant voice, the silent voice of the other is given a name, judged by the norms of the rational voice’s narrative as mentally ill and rendered as the familiar unfamiliar. Though the members of the audience perceive the silent voice as the other, they also experience it as controllable and harmless, as they are equipped with a ready concept to grasp and explain it. Framed within a familiar discourse, the other has no power over the audience. The situation changes dramatically in the stage of terror, when the familiar language shows itself to the audience in a more uncanny light. Still being able to recognise individual words and some traces of meaning, the audience is led to experience its own failure to grasp the meaning of the statement as a coherent whole. The previous atmosphere of certainty and comfort of knowing and understanding is followed by the experience of the limits of the audience’s ability to comprehend. The stage of terror is thus triggered by the presentation of language as parergonal, in its overwhelming materiality, that is, as printed words, letters and marks on a page, which are now hurled at the paralysed audience with no immediately discernible logic to them. Indeed, no different from the white page that envelops and supports it, devoid of any meaning, the language becomes pure materiality, inanimate matter, which voids the familiar system of thought and signification initially evoked in the audience’s consciousness with its annihilating force. What was previously experienced as relatively clear and reliable meaning is exposed as illusive, ephemeral and totally dependent on the context. The materiality and meaninglessness of language is experienced as the Lyotardian threat of privation: the terrible feeling that no meaning will ever arrive and our existence and life will forever remain senseless and absurd. The words, language and meaning, however, do continue to arrive, as the threat of privation is suddenly lifted, accompanied by the experience of a great energy release. The new meaning and the process of its creation are, however, transformed, as they are now saturated with the memory of the void and

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therefore marked with a trace of its indeterminacy. What the audience experiences in the last stage of the sublime is thus the ecstasy of its consciousness ‘resetting’ itself, re-emerging from the void. With the experience of this transformation comes the realisation that it is in the void that the life-creating energy originates. Though different in their very unique and individual aesthetics, the four case studies are nonetheless connected by the same endeavour to evoke the response of the sublime in their audiences. Differing in the respective strategies that they apply in their arrangement of their repertoire in order to lead the audience to this response, the plays simultaneously manifest some parallels, which are also discernible in other plays from this period and connect them all in the aesthetic category of sublime drama, the repercussions of which can still be felt long after the 1990s. All the plays operate along the lines of the three-part process of response production, steering the audience from the stage of familiarity, through the stage of terror and threat of privation, to the final stage of transformation. Admittedly and unavoidably, each play uses different strategies to lead the audience through the consecutive stages. Some plays, such as Closer, extend the familiar stage throughout the whole story, introducing stages two and three abruptly; others introduce it in stages, or alternate the experience of the familiar with the unfamiliar, such as 4.48 Psychosis with its passages of ergonal language alternating with the fragments of parergonal language. Other plays, such as Faust is Dead and Normal, extend the second stage more than the others. Furthermore, different plays use different means to catalyse the stage of terror. Some, such as Normal, resort to unbearable images of extreme violence and explicit sexual content. Others, such as 4.48 Psychosis, instead do violence to language and meaning. Though the strategies and their realisation may and do differ from play to play, the general principle behind them is to produce an object in the audience’s consciousness for which the latter cannot find an existing concept, idea or form and consequently cannot grasp. Logically, the nature of the object depends on the dominant system of concepts, as the overwhelming object necessarily needs to symbolise that which is unrepresented, or suppressed, within the system: the marginal, the silent, the abject or the other. Experiencing the object and not being able to fall back on familiar values or ideas, the audience becomes painfully aware of the limits of the dominant system of thought. As for the final stage of the sublime, though again differing with regard to its positioning within the plays and its mode of ‘dawning’ on the audience, the experience of the indeterminacy of thought combined with its transformation are experienced as a powerful release of energy. Here, the transformation is bound to the particular experience of the collapse and new formation of concep-

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tual frames: the exulting sensation of thought being reborn. The feeling is a conflicted one, and is often evoked in plays as the simultaneous experience of Eros and Thanatos, as it involves both the painful moment of destruction and failure, and the energising and ecstatic moment of thought opening itself to the indeterminacy of the other. Though the moment of sublime drama seems to be over and British contemporary drama appears to have moved on, as many critics confirm¹, the traces and echoes of the sublime eruption can still be felt². As Sierz argues, [t]he repercussions of the success of […] in-yer-face new writers is clear. Although this particular new wave crested in about 1999, at least a decade ago, we still live in its backflow. The result is that the British new writing scene in the new millennium is radically different from what it had been in, say, 1990, or a couple of years earlier. (Sierz 2010)

This influence is especially visible in the drive towards innovation and in the heightened sensibility for and hospitality to the other and the unknown. To give just one example of this aesthetic openness, we need only consider the enormous support for and welcoming attitude towards the so-called New Writing. To cite Sierz’s once more, Today, New Writing is everywhere. Everywhere, you can watch plays that are examples of New Writing; everywhere, you can meet new writers; everywhere there are New Writing fes-

 In a debate organised on 28 May 2004, recorded at the theatreVOICE and hosted by Aleks Sierz, the playwrights Simon Stephens, Richard Bean and Mark Ravenhill acknowledge this need for the theatre to move on. Sierz, too, agrees that after a while, “there was a time in the 1990s that if you didn’t see an anal rape on stage, you asked for your money back.” And Stephens speaks of the new generation of playwrights to distinguish themselves from their in-yer-face predecessors, saying, “it’s fascinating now giving copies of Blasted to a group of young writers in The Young Writers Programme, and they find it completely alien and completely tedious and completely disinteresting” (see Bean, Ravenhill, Stephens and Sierz). Sierz claims that the time of in-yer-face theatre is now over, “[t]he 1990s are gradually receding into history” (Sierz 2008: 34). He seems to agree with Dominic Dromgool, who identifies a change on British stages after 9/ 11: “Certainly, in the early years of the new millennium, new writing for British theatre has become more plentiful, more varied and more overtly political than ever. Although some playwrights, such as Philip Ridley, debbie tucker green and Dennis Kelly, use some of the techniques of in-yer-face theatre, the general scene has moved on” (Sierz 2008: 34). For an overview of British theatre in the first decade of the twenty-first century, see, for example, David Lane’s Contemporary British Drama (2010) or Sierz’s Rewriting the Nation: British Theatre Today.  David Lane in his recent survey of Contemporary British Drama (2010) sees “the ‘moment’ of In-Yer-Face theatre” as “a vibrant but short period of theatre history with energy and optimism” (Lane 26) and sees the legacy of this drama in “the desire for innovation, [and] a recognition that drama cannot stand still” (Lane 53).

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tivals. There’s even a New Writing scene. In fact, there is an absolute deluge of the new. Everyone, from playwrights to artistic directors, wants to be part of the moment. As Harriet Devine, in her celebration of fifty years of the Royal Court, writes: ‘Today almost every theatre in Britain, from the National Theatre to many tiny fringe venues, offers openings to new playwrights.’ Similarly, in 2007, one provocative blogger wrote, ‘From the Royal Court in London to the Traverse in Edinburgh, via Liverpool’s LLT and companies like Paines Plough, it often feels like Britain is positively drowning in new writing. To the casual observer, there’s a glut of theatres and programmes that specialise in new writing, especially by young people.’ (Sierz 2010)

That this continuing effort at greater hospitality towards the unfamiliar, be it the aesthetic, ethical or political other, is no longer experienced as so shocking and outrageous as it was in the 1990s can only be considered as a tribute to the power of sublime drama and the result of the sublime experience of thought’s indeterminacy.

5 Works Cited Primary sources Beckett, Samuel 1987: Waiting for Godot. Stuttgart: Reclam. Churchill, Caryl 2008: Plays Four: Hotel, This Is a Chair, Blue Heart, Far Away, A Number, A Dream Play, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? London: Nick Hern Books. Crimp, Martin 2005: Plays 2: No One Sees the Video, The Misanthrope, Attempts on Her Life, The Country. London: Faber and Faber. 197 – 284. Hare, David 2008: The Vertical Hour. London: Faber and Faber. Harrower, David 1995: Knives in Hens. London: Methuen Drama. — 2006: Blackbird. London: Faber and Faber. Kane, Sarah 2001: Complete Plays: Blasted, Phaedra’s Love, Cleansed, Crave, 4.48 Psychosis. London: Methuen. 204 – 245. Kelly, Dennis 2009: Plays One: Debris, Osama the Hero, After the End, Love and Money. London: Oberon Books. 7 – 46. Marber, Patrick 2004: Plays One: After Miss Julie, Closer, Dealer’s Choice. London: Methuen Drama. 177 – 298. Neilson, Anthony 1998: Plays One: Normal, Penetrator, Year of the Family, Night Before Christmas, Censor. London: Methuen Drama. 1 – 58. Ravenhill, Mark 2001: Plays One: Shopping and Fucking, Faust, Handbag, Some Explicit Polaroids. London: Methuen Drama. 93 – 140. — 2008: Plays Two: Mother Clap’s Molly House, Product, The Cut, Citizenship, Pool (No Water). London: Methuen Drama. Ridley, Philip 2002: Plays One: Ptichfork Disney, Fastest Clock in the Universe, Ghost from a Perfect Place. London: Methuen Drama. — 2009: Plays Two: Vincent River, Mercury Fur, Leaves of Grass, Piranha Heights. London: Methuen Drama. Stephens, Simon 2008: Pornography. London: Methuen Drama.

Secondary sources Ansorge, Peter 1999: “Really a Golden Age?” State of Play. Ed. David Edgar. London: Faber and Faber. 37 – 47. Artaud, Antonin 2001a: “Letters on Cruelty.” Artaud on Theatre. Eds. Claude Schumacher and Brian Singleton. London: Methuen Drama. 112 – 120. — 2001b: “No More Masterpieces.” Theatre of the Avant-Garde 1890 – 1950: A Critical Anthology. Eds. Bert Cardullo and Robert Knopf. New Haven: Yale University Press. 382 – 388. — 2001c: “Theatre of Cruelty – First Manifesto.” Artaud on Theatre. Eds. Claude Schumacher and Brian Singleton. London: Methuen Drama. 112 – 118. Attridge, Derek 2004: The Singularity of Literature. London et al.: Routledge.

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Badiou, Alain 2006: Beckett: Das Begehren ist nicht tot zu kriegen. Trans. Heinz Jatho. Zürich: Diaphanes. Baker, Robert 2005: The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Modern Philosophy. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Barnett, David 2008: “When is a Play not a Drama? Two Examples of Postdramatic Theatre Texts.” New Theatre Quarterly 24: 14 – 23. Barone, Paul 2004: Schiller und die Tradition des Erhabenen. Berlin: Schmidt. Barry, Elizabeth 2007: “Beckett, Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Catastrophe.” Beckett’s Literary Legacies. Eds. Matthew Feldman and Mark Nixon. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 169 – 187. Barthes, Roland 1986: “The Reality Effect.” The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 141 – 148. Bataille, Georges 1985: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 – 1939. Ed. and trans. Alan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. — 1990: Literature and Evil. Trans. Alastair Hamilton. London: Marion Boyars. — 2006: Eroticism. Trans. Mary Dalwood. London: Marion Boyars. Baudrillard, Jean 1986: “Requiem for the Media.” Video Culture: A Critical Investigation. Ed. John G. Hanhardt. Layton, Utah: Gibbs M. Smith, Inc Peregrine Smith Books in association with Visual Studies Workshop Press. 124 – 146. — 1990a: Fatal Strategies. Trans. Philip Beitchman and W. G. J. Nesluchowski. New York: Semiotext(e)/Pluto. — 1990b: Seduction. Trans. Brian Singer. New York: St. Martin’s Press. — 1994: Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor MI: The University of Michigan Press. — 1998: The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Trans. Christ Turner. London: Sage. — 2003: Cool Memories 1980 – 1985. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso. — 2005: The System of Objects. Trans. James Benedict. London: Verso. — 2007: Symbolic Exchange and Death. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage. Bean, Richard, Mark Ravenhill, Simon Stephens and Aleks Sierz 2004: “Transcript 1: New Writing.” The Theatrevoice Debate. 24 March 2011 . Bennett, Susan 1990: Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception. London: Routledge. Berg, Karl 2004: Der Sadist: gerichtsärztliches und kriminalpsychologisches zu den Taten des Düsseldorfer Mörders Peter Kürten. München: belleville. Bergson, Henri 1948: Das Lachen. Trans. Julius Frankenberger and Walter Fränzel. Meisenheim: Westkulturverlag Anton Hain. Berns, Ute 2003: “History and Violence in British Epic Theatre: From Bond and Churchill to Kane and Ravenhill.” New Beginning in Twentieth-Century Theatre and Drama. Eds. Christiane Schlote and Peter Zenzinger. CDE Studies 10. Trier: WVT. 49 – 72. Billingham, Peter 2007: “Interview with Mark Ravenhill.” At the Sharp End: Uncovering the Work of Five Contemporary Dramatists. London: Methuen Drama. 125 – 133. Billington, Michael 1995: Rev. of Blasted, dir. James MacDonald. Guardian. Republished in Theatre Record 1 – 28 Jan 1995: 39. — 2000: “How do you judge a 75-minute suicide note?” Rev. of 4.48 Psychosis, dir. James Macdonald. Guardian. 24 March 2011 .

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