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For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications 1 ‘Spectacles of woe’: Sadean Readings of Contemporary European Drama by Aida Bahrami A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Theatre Studies University of Warwick, School of Theatre and Performance Studies September 2017 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 4 Abstract 5 Introduction 6 • An Exhibition 6 • A Concise Biography 8 • Sade’s Modern Relevance 11 • Research Topic and Methodology 14 16 • Chapter Preview Chapter 1: The Libertine before and with Sade 19 • A Terminological Enquiry 19 • ‘No protestations of modesty’: Restoration Rake and Paranoia as 22 Performance • Les Liaisons dangereuses and 18th- Century Libertinism: Vanity as 28 Performance • ‘Il catalogo è questo’: Don Giovanni’s Quest for a Libertine 34 Constitution 41 • The Sadean Libertine: ‘c’est celle des autres’ Chapter 2: The Sadean Self/Other dialectic and Samuel Beckett’s Not I 52 • Woman and Cruelty in Sade 53 • The Female Narrator 57 • Mouth of the Narrator 63 • Invention of the Ambiguous Woman 69 Chapter 3: The Sadean Will to Act in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and 77 Guildenstern Are Dead • Sadean Nihilism and Natural Tyranny 78 • ‘over your dead body’ 85 • ‘We count for nothing’ 94 • Free Will versus the Will to Act 102 Chapter 4: Sadean Apathy and the myth of Phaedra/Hippolytus 113 3 • Phaedra’s Desire 116 • Hippolytus’s Apathy 124 • Motherhood in Sade 129 • Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love 136 Chapter 5: The Sadean Animal in Fernando Arrabal’s Garden of Delights 145 • The Other as Animal 150 • The Libertine as Animal 158 • The Animal as Sacrificial Matter 165 Chapter 6: Sade’s Infernal Pleasure Machines 177 • The Sadean Machine 178 • The Paradoxical Programme in Giuseppe Manfridi’s The Cuckoos 187 • Mechamorphism and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking 204 Chapter 7: The Sadean Utopia/Dystopia and Jean Genet’s The Balcony 217 • Libertine Utopia 219 • The Mirror(ed) Stage 223 • The Sadean Habit 233 • Dystopian Games 239 Bibliography 250 4 Acknowledgments I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Silvija Jestrovic for her dedicated supervision of my research, for her invaluable insight and for providing me with her kind and continuous guidance and support. My thanks also to Professor Jim Davis, for his much appreciated advice throughout my annual reviews, and to Professor Brian Singleton and Dr Milija Gluhovic, for their perceptive and meticulous observations during my viva examination. I am grateful to my parents, in particular, for always being there for me. 5 Abstract A distinctive feature of Sade’s writings is the amount of theatricality involved in libertine activities. Every episode of libertinage is charged with an awareness of performativity on behalf of the characters, and a conscious employment of theatrical vocabulary on the author’s behalf – e.g. the participants are often called actors, the events drama, and so on. At the same time, I have noticed how there are close resemblances in specific contemporary European drama to what constitutes Sadean intersubjectivity. These semblances occur most specifically when the dramatic text is addressing a paradoxical concept, where paradox is defined as that which confronts common opinion or doxa. The intention of this research is, first, to establish what comprises Sadean theatricality, and second, to examine how Sadean intersubjectivity is represented in selected dramatic texts. This objective calls for a comparative approach and a focus on meta-theatricality. I begin with exploring definitions of libertinage before and through Sade, with particular attention paid to performative and theatrical properties of libertinage. Next, I proceed to investigate, in each chapter, one aspect of libertine intersubjectivity in certain dramatic texts. The main challenge in this research is to create a balanced dialogue between two analyses which occur simultaneously. Even so, I have found that studying Sadean intersubjectivity in parallel with contemporary drama facilitates the isolation of those elements within the Sadean text which are required for a paradigm to be formed. Similarly, observing contemporary dramatic texts through a Sadean lens offers a novel way of looking at concepts such as violence, apathy, and a self/other interaction that feeds on the desire for absolute autonomy. A dialectic conversation between the two narratives, I maintain, generates a better understanding of how Sade’s paradoxical ethics is theatrically represented in our time. 6 Introduction An Exhibition In December 2014, The Musée d’Orsay hosted an exhibition titled ‘Sade: Attaquer le Soleil’ to commemorate the bicentenary of the death of the Marquis de Sade. The title translates into ‘Sade: Attacking the Sun’, which refers to an admission made by a libertine judge who describes the ultimate crime as the ability ‘to attack the sun, to deprive the universe of it, or to use it to set the world ablaze’.1 There is, of course, also an implication of Sade’s assault on the Enlightenment. The exhibition featured an adult-rated promotional video, showing an entanglement of naked bodies in an orgiastic arrangement which coincidentally resembled one of the murder tableaux imagined in the HBO series, Hannibal. In both the drama series and the Orsay video, human bodies appear as material carefully arrayed in order to produce a spectacle for a detached gaze: one, that of God (in Hannibal), and the other, that of the museum visitor. The promo constituted the most Sadean element in the entire exhibition. The purpose of the exhibition was to display works inspired, either directly or indirectly, by Sade’s writings. The expected shock value of any art piece related to Sade was emphasised as both a selling point and a reason to consider the marquis’s works of relevance to today’s audience. Visitors entered the exhibition through a relatively dark and small foyer from whose ceiling monitors where suspended, showing excerpts from such films as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Luis Bunuel’s L’Age d’Or, Michael Powel’s Peeing Tom, and Victor Flemming’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. From then onward, mostly paintings and sculptures were on display, interspersed with occasional textual material. I distinctly recall an escalating sense of anticipation as I heard a repetitive, rather ominous thumping sound, which I immediately attributed to a probable performance piece located in one of the upcoming rooms. Nevertheless, on entering 1 The Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom or The School of Libertinage, trans. by Will McMorran and Thomas Wynn (London: Penguin, 2016), p. 154. 7 the room, I realised the throbbing sound originated from the metro underneath, and not an installation in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’. The exhibition’s most controversial room – before entering which the visitors were warned by a placard about potentially offensive material – held a collection of vintage sex toys, comic phenakistoscopes, and postcards, replicas of which could be bought at the museum’s shop. That is not to say the exhibited pieces by themselves did not offer any confrontational interest; on the contrary, individually, most artworks (some of great canonical value) depicted intense instances of violence capable of provoking critical response from the observer. Even so, collectively, they lost a degree of their disruptive agency, similar to the bodies present in the promo arrangement: exposed before the eye of an apathetic beholder. Sadean narrative does not intend to shock; hence readers looking for a haunted text will be disappointed. Sade warns the reader to refrain from reading his book if they find the scheme outlined in the prologue scandalising, since ‘its execution will be even more so’.2 Nor is it a strictly pornographic chronicle; Samuel Beckett relates the narrative’s excessive ‘obscenity of surface’ to its inability to act as a pornographic text.3 The main challenge in reading Sade is in the presence of a continuous struggle between affect and intellect. This binary conflict does not concern the reader alone, but also the characters who appear in Sade’s works. In fact, the entire premise of Sadean discourse revolves around the constitution of autonomy on the basis of an absolute mastery of intellect over affect.4 To Sade’s libertines, acts of violence are no more than a collection of performances, viewed by a dispassionate spectator. This research aims to analyse the role of theatricality in the aestheticization of the other’s suffering in Sade’s oeuvres, and how this phenomenon is presented in contemporary dramatic texts. 2 Sade, 120 Days, p. 29. 3 ‘The obscenity of surface is indescribable,’ Beckett writes in a letter to Thomas McGreevy on the subject of Sade’s 120 Days. ‘Nothing could be less pornographical. It fills me with a kind of metaphysical ecstasy. The composition is extraordinary, as rigorous as Dante’s’ (Letters 2009: 607). 4 As such, Sade’s assault on the Enlightenment is carried out through an employment of the latter ideology’s own rational instruments. 8 A Concise Biography Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade, was born in 1740, to Jean- Baptiste François Joseph de Sade and Marie Eleonore de Maille de Carman. His father was a Versailles courtier and diplomat, and his mother a relative of the princely house of Condés.5 The young marquis’s ferocious temper disqualified him from being raised as a friend of the Prince de Conde, as his parents had intended for him, and so at the age of four he was sent to live with his grandmother.