The secret of erotic tragedy remains a secret even in the telling, for its import lies in experience, not explication. This secret divides the communal theatrical audience into its individual atoms: the secret is borne individually by each, not by the community; the erotic tragedy elicits its truth in consciousness. Paradoxically it does so through the eradication of identity, the lovers, the subject and object of desire, become mirrors of each other — but even this is not enough: they trade identity in the “Tristan you / I Isolde / no longer Tristan” of Tristan, the “You Isolde / Tristan I / no longer Isolde” of Isolde in the second act of Wagner’s great opera (this perhaps the proper liebestod of the work, for it obliterates the individual in erotic union and ecstasy). When it reaches to its darkest depths of desire and impulse, this exchange has profound significance for the liberation of pleasure which always touches on pain. In this exchange, the male becomes female, the female male; each possesses a phallus, each a vagina; the dominator and the dominated exchange individual sensation in that the lover is at once outside and within his or her lover’s body and experiences both ecstasy and the abjection of domination. (In the theatre this must be accomplished through poetry, metaphor, and costume: nothing else for it.) Socially this turns the concept of aggression and passivity against itself, estranging them from their social contexts and locating them in the private desirous body.
To be sure, the concept of the individual as developing freely in solidarity with others can become a reality only in a socialist society. But the fascist period and monopoly capitalism have decisively changed the political value of these concepts. The “flight into inwardness” and the insistence on a private sphere may well serve as bulwarks against a society which administers all dimensions of human existence. Inwardness and subjectivity may well become the inner and outer space for the subversion of experience, for the emergence of another universe. Today, the rejection of the individual as a “bourgeois” concept recalls and presages fascist undertakings. … If the subversion of experience proper to art and the rebellion contained in this subversion cannot be translated into political praxis, and if the radical potential of art lies precisely in this non-identity, then the question arises: how can this potential find valid representation in a work of art and how can it become a factor in the transformation of consciousness?[1]
As with all secrets, this secret cannot be described until it is experienced. But its experience is so dependent on the giving-up of the self to the other, to the risk of the loss of that individual agency, to allow oneself to enter the experience and the body of another and to remain open to another possessing one’s own body. The play, the drama, cannot possibly express this within the limitations of the form. But it suggests, through language, costume, light, movement, in that order. It elicits the secret but cannot do anything with it: what does the individual do with it once admitted to consciousness?
Footnotes
- Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1978, pp. 38-39. [↩]
Can the drama really only suggest? This may be true with the theatrical form as limited as we have now (mostly, anyway), but is this form not bound by the social conventions of permanent self-control as life goal? In an ‘art of theatre’ as proposed by Howard Barker, an all-encompassing theatre in which one – similar to the ecstasy of sexual union – consciously allows control to be taken from oneself, is it not possible to evoke the secret? Surely, it may then not achieve the same clarity and intensity; the experience however, is given nonetheless.
Similarly, I would question the order that puts language first: caught up in socially prescribed semiotic networks, is the basis of the theatrical experience not situated in the performers’ bodies rather than language? For this we share, audience and performers alike, and cannot move away from. The human body is – both in theatre and erotic sexuality – the stage and the channel by which individual identity is reaffirmed through eradication. The proposal stands thus: a theatre in which performers and spectators alike are willingly giving their entire being elicits the secret of tragedy. The means by which these are achieved are (in this order) the body (in costume), movement, sound (including language, though semiotics muddles the purity of experience) and light. Whilst light comes last in this list, it is nonetheless the binding agent of the body and movement, wherefore it should probably be considered separately, at least if we are talking about an order…
What does the individual do with it? It depends whether, once admitted to consciousness, it accepts or denies it. Acceptance may depend on the individuals willingness to have the foundations of an overbearing, prescriptive society of measurable desires and expected self-control (for desires are unquantifiable and – worse, some may say – often unreasonable. They may not enter a public sphere that is based on the assumption of ‘common sense’.) shaken or shattered. How does one move outside when inextricably bound up on the inside? Can the two be brought together? If so, how does this reflect back upon the secret of erotic tragedy? Is there a possibility that its importance lies in an _unconscious_ need for that experience which may not be expressed otherwise in everyday life?
Lara,
Theatrical form is also bound by its necessary adherence to the principles of space, time and causality that govern the phenomenal world. To say that it suggests another realm of bodied experience isn’t to deny the power of suggestibility, only to delineate the limits not only of theatrical form but that phenomenal world itself in the realm of the “real” world. Theatre’s power may serve to confront that world, but remains of necessity within it.
I did not mean to create a strict hierarchy of theatrical elements in my list: through any given production one element may predominate over another from time to time throughout its duration. But its use of (and I would suggest predominance of) spoken language sets theatre/drama apart from other performance disciplines such as music and dance. Quite right about light there, by the way.
Your final sentence also rings quite true, and the nature of erotic tragedy’s importance may indeed be to bring what is repressed, unconscious, before the spectator: to make it conscious, even when it cannot be expressed otherwise. I do believe that this also transcends Freud’s similar therapeutic project, for erotic tragedy proposes no “cure” except that of individual imagination.
Dear George,
Thank you for the quick reply. I am currently reading through the rest of your ‘proposal’ and will get back to you as soon as I feel I have put the elicited thoughts into order.
I could agree that the spoken word’s dominance is central to drama, though I feel to extend it to ‘theatre’ is too far. But then again, each of us is applying their own definitions to these words (which points to my caveat about semiotic tangles, though upon reflection, I should probably have written semantic…).
Lara,
You will find more than enough tangled semiotic (and semantic) Gordian knots to wear out more than a few pairs of scissors …
George