The One True Dave

(I wrote this in the mid-2000s but still holds up!)

            These words, arranged for the first time in exactly this order convey a meaning heretofore unknown, both signal a coming into being and also imply the absence of the infinite variations of words and possible meanings that could have appeared here in their place. The moment of creation, the words connote a living present message and following that: re-reading, saving, posting, having others read these words; they are now the remnants, the dead husk, the re-presentation of a once living spark of communication. The impulse is gone leaving an impression. Derrida says “repetition summarizes negativity, gathers and maintains the past present as truth, as ideality” (246). In this way we can better understand Artaud’s statement, quoted by Derrida, that “written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed” (247).  

            ‘Pataphysics is the pseudo-science – the science of exceptions – created by Alfred Jarry. ‘Pataphysics encompasses metaphysics the way metaphysics encompasses physics. Jarry saw science reducing reality and experience to a series of laws. With each law, there are invariably exceptions and Jarry, reversed the logic of the science-drunk world around him to envision reality as exceptional and laws as the coincidences and inconsistencies. This is hinted at in his famous Ubu plays but pivotal to his novels like Supermale and The Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, ‘Pataphysician. Jarry was a tremendous influence on the young Antonin Artaud, especially during his experiments with surrealism, exemplified by the fact he and his good friend (at the time) Andre Breton called their first independent surrealist theatre, The Theatre of Alfred Jarry. Half a century after Artaud’s death, another ‘Pataphysician by the name of Jean Baudrillard lamented of the absence of the real and how a city like Los Angeles creates fantasy factories (theme parks, Disneyland, Los Vegas) outside its borders to enforce the reality of its own hyperreal delirium. 

Derrida’s close reading of Artaud’s writings, especially The Theatre and Its Double, is written with a similar logic (and style of rhetorical attack) that would match well with both a speech by Jarry’s Dr. Faustroll and within Baudrillard’s texts like Simulacra and Simulation and The Illusion of the End. Derrida uses the Hegelian dialectic to illustrate/penetrate Artaud’s difficult text and act as both foil and tool to excavate the gem of Artaud’s vision. The fact the gem is not explicitly held up for all to see is intentional leaving the reader the task of the final step to achieve an original spark of insight. To explicitly state the meaning of Artaud’s text would remove any further need of it. It would be a disservice to Artaud’s antithetical thesis. The chapter starts with an attack against the traditional theatre and its impotent devotion to the playwright as God. Derrida says, “He lets representation represent him through representatives, director or actors, enslaved interpreters who represent characters who, primarily through what they say, more or less directly represent the thought of the ‘creator’” (235). Derrida continues by discussing the role of the director as merely “an artisan, an adapter, a kind of translator” that “does nothing but illustrate a discourse” (236). My understanding of Derrida’s intent is that the director is like so many school children given the task to colour maps. They may use the colours they choose but the maps are all photocopied and impossible to change. In the Baudrillardian version, the original map has been lost long ago and the photocopies are copies of copies. In fact, the children aren’t even capable of questioning whether the countries they are colouring even exist. The parallel to the fanatic/frenetic unquestioning academic worship of Shakespeare is staggering. Derrida continues by listing what Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty is not. It is not non-sacred theatre, it is not a theatre of words or beholden to words, it is not abstract theatre for it, too, becomes a system of representative and repeatable signs, it is not Brecht’s Epic theatre that is mired in the same discursive machine while exposing the cogs, it is not non-political theatre and it is not interpretive theatre. What it is, however, is “pure presence as pure difference” (245). It does more than involve the spectators, they are the “entertainment to themselves” (245). Derrida explains that “all words, once spoken, are dead and function only at the moment when they are uttered” (247) and that “a sign which does not repeat itself, which is not already divided by repetition in its ‘first-time,’ is not a sign” (246). Artaud seeks a theatre of primacy: a pre-codification, pre-rational, pre-socialized, pre-decoded connection with and by the spectator. A visceral response. Instinct. In the Hegelian sense, if traditional theatre is the thesis, Artaud’s theatre is the antithesis. Both cannot exist within the same space without annihilation. Matter and anti-matter. Particle physicists use enormous cyclotrons to smash atoms together at incredible speeds for momentary glimpses of these highly elusive specks of anti-matter. They envision these tiny particles contain enough energy to bend time and space – if only to isolate them, if only briefly, from their mate (as it is theorized happens in black-holes). So too, Artaud had the vision to conceive of his “pure” theatre, the anti-thesis of the dead representational traditional theatre. He wished to vivisect the antithesis apart from its thesis in a Hegelian nightmare-scenario and affect his audience/participant directly through a pure experience – to rip a hole through representational space-time through pure presence in all its spiritual transcendent ‘pataphysical glory.