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It’s fruitful – and great fun – to read Marathe and Steeply as avatars of Jean-Paul Marat and the Marquis de Sade (cf. fn. 24, on JOI's film: The Film Adaptation of Peter Weiss’s ‘The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum at Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade'). For anyone similarly inclined, I recommend Peter Brook’s brilliant film adaptation of Weiss’s play. Some parallels:
Violence: Hearing the squeak – the sound of the guillotine. Marat was the French revolutionary whose moral and social idealism did not preclude his exhortations for extreme use of the guillotine against suspected counter-revolutionaries. De Sade was a proponent of a radical individualism unfettered by the limits of morality, religion or law. Not one to shrink from violence (his name became associated with the inflicting of cruelty), de Sade nevertheless abhorred what he saw as the impersonal, mechanical violence of The Terror. (My own warm fuzzies for Marathe were tempered by the description of Lucien Antitoi’s gruesome death by the AFR.)
Transgression/Masochism: De Sade believed that repression of freedom leads to violence, which only a transformation of the self at the deepest level can prevent. To achieve that transformation, one must open the cage within oneself. Some scary stuff is bound to fly out. de Sade as channeled by Weiss:
I don’t believe in idealists
who charge down blind alleys
I don’t believe in any of the sacrifices
that have been made for any cause
I believe only in myself . . .
When I lay in the Bastille
my ideas were already formed
I sweated them out
under the blows of my own whip
out of hatred for myself
and the limitations of my mind . . .
I dug the criminal out of myself
so I could understand him and so understand
the times we live in
cf. P. 420, IJ: “But Marathe knew also that something within the real M. Hugh Steeply did need the humiliations of his absurd field-personae, that the more grotesque or unconvincing he seemed likely to be as a disguised persona the more nourished and actualized his deep parts felt in the course of preparation for the humiliating attempt to portray; he (Steeply) used the mortification he felt as a huge woman or pale Negro or palsied twit of a degenerative musician as fuel for the assignments’ performance; Steeply welcomed the subsumption of his dignity and self in the very rôle that offended his dignity of self.”
The Tennis Court Oath: It’s deliciously congruous that during the French Revolution, Dr. Guillotin and others opposed to the crown met in a tennis court and signed the famous oath--never to disband until “the constitution of the realm and public regeneration are established and assured.”
Redemptive Power of Theater/Literature: DFW in the McCaffery interview: “I strongly suspect a big part of real art fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.”
Anthony Abbott in The Vital Lie: Reality and Illusion in Modern Drama: “It is the theatrical act itself that renews us, not the story that the theatrical event portrays. This is the basic point of the theories of Antonin Artaud upon which both Weiss and . . . Peter Brook have drawn so heavily. . . . shortly before his death, Artaud wrote the following poem:
And I shall henceforth devote myself
exclusively
to the theater
as I understand it
a theater of blood
a theater which at every performance will have
achieved some gain
bodily
to him who plays as well as to him who comes to see the playing.
moreover
one doesn’t play
one acts.
The theater is in reality the genesis of creation
It will be done.”
And so but on and on, annularly: insanity/sanity, privileged/poor, caged/free, audience/actor, the play within a play, movie within a movie . . .
The Impossibility of Resolution: Peter Brook’s addendum to Weiss’s play, in Brook’s film version, as spoken by de Sade:
Our play’s chief aim has been to take debate’s great propositions and their opposites;
See how they work and let them fight it out.
To point some light on our internal doubt.
I’ve twisted and turned them every way,
And can find no ending to our play.
Marat and I both advocated force
But in debate each took a different course.
Both wanted changes.
But his views and mine
on using power never could combine.
On the one side, he who thinks our lives
Can be improved by axes and knives;
Or he who’d submerge in the imagination,
Seeking a personal annihilation.
So for me the last word never can be spoken;
I’m left with a question that is always open.
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