Catastrophic Sexualities in Howard Barker's Theatre of Transgression

Karoline Gritzner

Abstract The recent work of contemporary English dramatist and poet Howard Barker offers startling speculations on the theme of erotic sexuality and its interrelationship with death. This paper discusses Barker's "theatre of catastrophe" with reference to theories of eroticism (Bataille), seduction (Baudrillard), and aesthetics (Adorno). In Barker's sexually charged reading of Shakespeare's Hamlet in Gertrude the Cry; his erotic version of the Grimm brothers' fairytale Snow White in Knowledge and A Girl; and in his play for three actors and a corpse, Dead Hands, erotic desire and the sexual encounter are theatrically articulated as the subversive and destructive effects of consciousness. Key Words: theatre, drama, Howard Barker, eroticism, death, sexuality, aesthetics.

Moments of profound sexual passion cause us - the couple who love - to implore a death, if only from the anxiety that nothing will ever again surpass the unearthly quality of this ecstasy. Is it not too perfect to be followed, except by its repetition? The dread of its failing to reappear ... the yearning for its reappearance ... perhaps the solitary reason for perpetuating ourselves? I

In Howard Barker's plays sexual desire necessarily complicates life; it signifies a tragic encounter with the Other and catapults individuals into an awareness of their own limitations and possibilities. Barker calls his distinctive dramatic project a "theatre of catastrophe" in which characters embark upon ecstatic explorations of unlived life, involving the experience of pain and violation but also a recognition of beauty. In his most recent non-dramatic text Death, The One, and The Art of Theatre - a provocative collection of poetic meditations on the "art of theatre," love and death - Barker contemplates the aesthetic and spiritual quality of tragedy, which considers eroticism and death as its main subjects. Written in a fragmentary, aphoristic style (which is formally as well as thematically reminiscent of Theodor W. Adorno's Minima Moralia), Death, The One, and The Art of Theatre embraces theatre as a form of art in which the socially and morally impossible becomes possible - theatre is articulated as a space and practice in which the incessant movement of desire produces powerfully seductive verbal and physical images which are harboured like secrets yet revealed without shame. 96 Catastrophic Sexualities

This book poetically extends a discourse already touched upon in Barker's acclaimed Arguments for a Theatre, namely the question of tragic theatre's contested place in a contemporary commodity society characterised by an authoritarian imposition of "light" and a sanitised obsession with health, longevity, and laughter. Tragedy - Barker's Theatre of Death - embraces negativity and the unknown, yet without turning them into "positive," identifiable and verifiable concepts. By cruel necessity death and the beloved ("the one") must remain foreign and intractable to the self. The encounter of the self with the Other in love and in death produces a profound sense of longing and anxiety, which in Barker's theory of tragic theatre is transformed into ecstasy. Barker develops the notion of a tragic, catastrophic theatre in opposition to what he calls the "humanist theatre" which dominates the stage in Britain today - a theatre of issues and education (influenced by Ibsen and Brecht), which is conventionally described as political because it directly confronts the audience with recognisable social problems. Barker's rejection of the concepts of usefulness and moral purpose of theatre has led to an increasing interest in the dynamics of sexuality, eroticism, and death. In Barker's "promiscuous theatre" erotic sexuality, pain, and death are constructed as exclusively personal, solitary experiences, which affirm "the individual's right to chaos, extremity, and self-description.,,2 This manifests itself in theatrical explorations of transgressive human behaviour, which eludes mimetic, naturalistic representation. Although Barker rejects the idea of issue-based, educative theatre that offers the audience recognisable moral arguments, his theatrical project can nevertheless be regarded as a form of cultural critique in the sense of Theodor W. Adorno's notion of non-interventionist (non• engaged) art's critique of society. In numerous writings on art and the culture industry and especially in his late (unfinished) text Aesthetic Theory, Adorno argues in favour of aesthetic discourse as a form of human activity in which the non-identical (that which is allowed to exist outside the repressive, administered system) persists without the need to be reconciled. 3 In what he terms the "administered society" (in which human relationships are instrumentalised) the Other, the unknown, the non• identical, and contradiction as such are always forced to be physically and conceptually integrated, whereas in art the Other remains a mystery; meaninglessness can be entertained without the compulsion for positive understanding and resolution. Using negativity as a central aesthetic category, Adorno proposes art as an autonomous and sovereign discourse which has the power to liberate consciousness from the use-oriented logic that dominates the socio-political and economic realms. The disruptive and subversive quality of the aesthetic in Adorno's theory resembles the quality of erotic sexuality in the dramatic work of