Recently, I’ve been reading a quite a lot of stuff by two French thinkers: Antonin Artaud and Gilles Deleuze. Admittedly, reading the French can be a chore (if you’re not French) not only because I get the feeling that often their translators had one hell of a time trying to translate the ideas and concepts they were dealing with, but also because they tend, as a bunch, to have been uninhibited about the scope of what they wanted to deal with. There is a lot of digression, a lot of strangely angled approaches to a subject, and it seems that the French just have a much higher tolerance for arrogant and arty wank-speak. 20th century French thinkers – Sartre included, possibly excluding Camus – have always puzzled me. I can never quite decide whether I’m reading the writings of an extremely deep thinker or the diatribe of a second-rate side-show magician. Ultimately, I’ve come to the conclusion that they are all a little of both. But I also think it would be a mistake to discount their ideas just because they all, to one extent or another, have a clown side to them.
Artaud was intimately involved with the Surrealist movement. Dali is probably the most famous of the surrealists, but they included playwrights, film makers, photographers as well as artists. Artaud’s focus was theatre. He was an opium addict most of his life, suffered from awful bouts of depression, and was in and out of sanatoriums quite a lot. One of his most significant pieces of writing was Theatre and its Double (attached in pdf form)- a collection of his essays on theatre, its legacy, its failings and his concept of the Theatre of Cruelty (Manifesto attached but not actually as explanatory as some of the essays in his book), as a response to what he considered the ‘magical’ and unreal world of theatre.
Many of his ideas of what would be required to make theatre more relevant to everyday life and a more meaningful and intense experience for the audience would now be considered pretty tame and laughable, but I nevertheless find a lot of resonance with his central ideas, if not his proposed methods for achieving them. Essentially, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty isn’t about what you’d expect. It isn’t specifically about graphic violence or the portrayal of the hyperreal. He’s really talking about being cruel to the minds of his audience members. Of not allowing them to leave the theatre feeling cosy or happy or satisfied. He believed that learning new things had to be a painful experience. Artaud’s aim would be to force us out of the Plato’s Cave and into the blinding light of the real, using a whip. And that, if theatre was to be relevant and leave a lasting impact, it had to disturb the viewer. Essentially, he believed in shock tactics. The most obvious and superficial example of this would be his influence on early surrealist films such as Un Chien Andalou. But this is really a very broad and superficial reading of his ideas, to my mind. After watching the film, who remembers anything much other than the razor being drawn across the eye? It seems any deeper meaning to the film is blown away by that single repulsive image.
It’s easy to cause discomfort by shocking people with sensational images or ideas. The problem is… is the audience taking away anything more than the overtly shocking image burned into their mind? In an effort to prepare the ground for ideas in an audience, the trick is to shock them in a way that disturbs yet doesn’t leave them with some single iconic and highly memorable image that eclipses the deeper meaning.
In my wanderings and previous blog posts, I’ve often attempted to discuss how I define erotica as a genre, the ways in which it can be distinguished from written pornography, and where my writing fits into the scheme of things. And, I think I have some clues in reading Artaud’s work. I think my genre is ‘The Erotica of Cruelty“. I think what I am trying to achieve is something akin to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, but I do try to be mindful not to create shocking mental images so powerful that they overwrite the more quiet discourse going on beneath. I do write violence and hypersexual scenes, but I try, I think, to downplay them enough so that they get the readers attention – open them up – without shocking them to the point where the dilemma being presented is eclipsed. I don’t always do a good job of this, I know, but I think that’s what I’ve been trying to do. The cruelty lies in denying my readers a perfectly comfortable erotic experience. And I guess my aim is to draw you in, ask you to walk along the edge of the mouth of the Cave and engage you in a dialogue about what the greater ramifications are of a given fictional situation. Why do we choose to stay in a world of fantasy? What are the benefits of living outside of the cave, so to speak.
Another one of my recent ramblings has been in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, specifically in their philosophical idea called “The Body without Organs“. Again, we’re not talking specifically here about a real ‘body with no dick’ – although we could be. I’ll admit, this is much harder stuff to read than Artaud. Essentially (from Wikipedia):
For Deleuze and Guattari, every “actual” body has (or expresses) a set of traits, habits, movements, affects, etc. But every “actual” body also has a “virtual” dimension, a vast reservoir of potential traits, connections, affects, movements, etc. (a phase space). This collection of potentials is what Deleuze calls the BwO. To “make oneself a body without organs,” then, is to actively experiment with oneself to draw out and activate these virtual potentials. These potentials are mostly activated (or “actualized”) through conjunctions with other bodies (or BwOs) that Deleuze calls “becomings.”
Funnily enough, this also harkens back, I think, to Plato’s concept of Forms. Only, in a way, reversed. Plato asserted that everything that exists in the world – everything we can see and know and think – is actually an imperfect copy of a perfect Form that resides…well, he wasn’t very specific about that. But somewhere else. So, the coffee cup sitting on your table right now is just a slightly flawed copy or reflection of a perfect coffee cup that is on a perfect table in…heaven? Who knows.
The Body without Organs idea suggests that, for every person, state, thing, situation…there is the potential for an unlimited number of those things hovering in a virtual potential future. That the person we are, the situations we live, need to be actively questioned and prodded and experimented with in order to kick them into a state of being unstable. In that unstable state, and with the interaction of other ‘bodies without organs’ they can be actualized.
Perhaps I’m reading this and relating to it on a very superficial level, but I can see some relevance to this in the creation of fiction and in the interaction of characters. But not only there. I also see its relevance in experimental personas we all adopt when we cavort in social media environments. I might be, in reality a solid, grounded person. But it is only in the guise of Remittance Girl and when interaction with you (also dressed up for this wonderful masquerade ball) that interesting things really start to happen. Where the roles of writer and reader / producer and consumer / sender and receiver really get shaken up and become excitingly creative.
Similarly, in my fiction, even though I often write erotica involving clearly dominant and submissive characters, it is only when I force them to acknowledge both their interdependence and the debatability about who holds the power, do the stories become, in my view, truly interesting.