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| Marathe and Steeply as Marat/Sade http://infinitesummer.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=470 |
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| Author: | CarolynM [ Sun Aug 30, 2009 11:19 am ] |
| Post subject: | Marathe and Steeply as Marat/Sade |
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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| Author: | bluestocking [ Mon Aug 31, 2009 9:53 am ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Marathe and Steeply as Marat/Sade |
This analysis is made of awesome. Thanks. |
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| Author: | OneBigParty [ Mon Aug 31, 2009 10:25 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Marathe and Steeply as Marat/Sade |
| Author: | CarolynM [ Tue Sep 01, 2009 7:17 am ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Marathe and Steeply as Marat/Sade |
Well, I think DFW in IJ succeeds in both comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable (keeping in mind that individual readers may Come In to IJ simultaneously disturbed and comfortable), by writing "about what it is to be a fucking human being." (McCaffery interview again). DFW grabs us by the throat, makes us witness graphically violent scenes of heartbreaking cruelty, whether to oneself (Joelle having Too Much Fun) or others (Lucien Antitoi, Lenz's cats and dogs, the Hawaiin-shirted French Canadians). And he "locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness" (ibid.) -- Don Gately's possible path to redemption, Mario's sweet innocence, the mundane, earnest struggles of E.T.A. students and Ennet House residents and satellite characters to get by in and make sense of the world. The daily struggle to communicate, to touch others. What makes DFW succeed -- for me -- at revealing beauty in the darkness of life is that in the first gorgeously written, sensitive first 100 pages he convinced me to trust him to lead me to the precipice of loneliness and entrapment and death, and over the next 600 + pages he has not betrayed that trust. What's human and magical and still alive is his stunning writing and complexly human characters and this big, heavy book that we carry on the subway (like the E.T.A. students, I'm sure the arm that suspends IJ while I read is now larger than the one that holds the pole) or read in bed, and the rippling waves of communication as we virtually share it. |
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| Author: | mjdemo [ Tue Sep 01, 2009 9:55 am ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Marathe and Steeply as Marat/Sade - Structural integration! |
Another big shout out to CarolynM for brining the Marat / de Sade angle into the light. Someone else on the forums mentioned how Marat / Steeply can be seen as Rosencrantz and Guilderstern analogues, and I think this works when IJ is analyzed against Hamlet's structure (a 5 act tragedy with similar characters and plot). We also have the fractal (Sierpinski triangle) structure, with images repeating at different scales, such as the annulus, deformation, addiction, inability to communicate, and incestuous abuse, among others. There is also the Greek tragedy angle, with Medusa (Joelle / the Entertainment) as the monster, Orin as Oedipus Rex, Don Gately as Hercules, and possibly others - (see my thread "The Labors of Don Gately"). But the Marat / de Sade angle represents yet another face of the cube: the moral-political discussion of the power of the culture and/or state versus the freedom of the individual. Marathe and Steeply each present their versions of the proper balance of individual freedom vs. control, reflecting the same discussions that have been going on since the founding of the U.S. and the French Revolution. We know that individuals make bad choices sometimes - is it better to coerce them into making better choices, or for the individual to be subsumed into a larger cause, as Marathe has been? And yet we see a corrupt government abusing it's power in the name of safety and defense - The Gentle / Tine administration is a marvelously prescient satire, written before Bush the younger ever became a national figure. The solution of AA is presented as an interesting balance between these tensions, but as we see in the case of Randy Lenz, it's as imperfect as any other. The amazing thing is how succesful the book is when it actually has at least 4 independent structures. Many fiction authors can barely pull off one. |
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| Author: | repat [ Tue Sep 01, 2009 7:53 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: Marathe and Steeply as Marat/Sade |
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