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Performative Language and Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty radio play 'Tutuguri: The Rite of the Black Sun' as an Opposition to Logic

By Laura Jaramillo DuquePublished 6 years ago 8 min read
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Since the beginning of the twentieth century much European theatre has striven to engage the audience. Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty is one of those attempts; he tries to make the viewer feel and react to the play in the same way that a plague can kill without destroying the organs; in other words, changing the minds of the audience in ways that logic cannot express (2001: 17). The purpose of this essay is to analyse Antonin Artaud’s use of language based on Derrida’s concept of performative language in his radio play To Have Done with the Judgement of God (1988), specifically "Tutuguri: The Rite of the Black Sun" as an opposition to logic. For this I will start with the definition of Derrida’s performative language and logic, and its relation to the Theatre of Cruelty of Antonin Artaud, continue with a brief description of the use of language in "Tutuguri: The Rite of the Black Sun," and finally I will try to understand how Artaud’s use of language in the radio play is an opposition to logic.

The use, meaning and effects of language give the subject a nature and an identity, which are determined by social and linguistic conventions (Culler, 2000). According to Derrida, “language is performative in the sense that it doesn’t just transmit information but performs acts by its repetition of established discursive practices or ways of doing things” (Culler, 2000:94). This means that the language is related with acts that create. In this sense it is possible to understand its relation with Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty; for him, theatre has the obligation of purifying and liberating through a cruel use the body and its senses (Artaud, 2001), avoiding representations of the speech as the master of the play. Language should be used in a performative way, as an incantation, that allow the audience to become free from reason and logic, giving the chance of liberating the subconscious and to experience life in a cosmic way (LaBelle 1972). Logic should be understood from Derrida’s perspective as the “rational method of thought that explains the nature or origin of a phenomenon [and] it often refers to the concept of rational thought, as opposed to desire, which is irrational” (Klage 2012).

As an example of Artaud’s aim to use language as an incantation, he created in 1947 a radio play called To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1988) which had the intention of experimenting with the use of language in terms of “voice levels, volume and qualities” (LaBelle, 1972:389); the play was banned due to its obscenity and extremity (Sontag 1988:lii). The second part of the play, called "Tutuguri: The Rite of the Black Sun," Artaud experiments with screams and yells, but also recreates a child or women, with the purpose of making the audience feel uncomfortable, creating the necessity of rejecting or stopping the audio. The words used and its meaning do not have too much relevance because the “declamatory speech [is] beyond sense” (Sontag 1988:liii); giving, as a consequence, the feeling that the play does not have much logic.

At the beginning of "Tutuguri: The Rite of the Black Sun" what the audience first listens to is the sounds of screams and yells alternated with the sound of a drum as the initiation of the rite. In a sense it calls out the attention of the listener in a dramatic and explosive way, and it puts the audience in a stage of non-rationality (LaBelle 1972). This happens because the shouts connote the birth of a baby, but also death, in a very painful and cruel way, of life as a form of logic; and it is between that void where the immortality is, as a pure way of living (Derrida 2001).

For Artaud, the Theatre of Cruelty is not destruction, it is devastation (Derrida 2001). An example of this is a volcano, when it wakes up and erupts everything is devastated, but at the same time the soil around the volcano becomes more fertile. This new fertility is a reborn of life, is a necessary affirmation that contains mystery and magic, it contains the original essence; but theatre is disposed of affirmative essence due to its relation with speech. For theatre it is impossible to know exactly in which moment rebirth is going to happen; in other words, it can be said that theatre is still to be born, because its effects are implacable, devastating (Derrida 2001). The eve of reborn is somehow expressed in the first part of the rite of Tutuguri, where the earth is to be born again but inside a different order that is not based in logic and humanity. This is shown in the figure of the sun being the horse and not the man:

But, this seventh manis a horse,a horse with a man leading him.But it is the horsewho is the sunand not the man. (Artaud 1988:558)

Choosing the horse as the sun changes the god of humanity and logic for a god based on nature and purity, for real life; this means that the logic of speech in theatre cannot represent life anymore, because, in words of Derrida, the “Theatre of Cruelty is not a representation. It is life itself, in the extend to which life is unrepresentable” (2001:294). This is also shown with the voice used by Artaud during the radio play, his voice sounds like a child telling a story that does not make much sense, especially because the moments were he stresses the words give emphasis to the amazement of life itself.

Then, the play continues with the image of six men leaping up like sun flowers from the ground following the gong of the drum (the drum the listener heard at the beginning of the radio play) and, simultaneously, a man is showed naked and virgin riding the horse; but the image of the horse and the man is a metamorphosis of man and animal, erasing any possibility of distinguishing the animal from the man:

until suddenly he comes galloping, at vertiginous speed,the last sun,the first man,the black horse with anaked man,absolutely nakedand virginriding it. (Artaud 1988:558)

This image and how it is said in the radio play – Artaud starts talking faster and louder, as if he was trying to simulate the speed of the horse – has the intention of creating a “productive image […] an autorepresentation of pure visibility and even pure sensibility” (Derrida 2001:300) of the cruel force of life and nature, giving the possibility to the listener to “overcome the split between body and soul” (Primavesi 2003:64) that logic and speech has created over the years. Another image related to the former is when the horse starts prancing and bleeding while the six men surround six crosses to uproot them from the earth; this is the moment when the essence of the rite is shown it is the moment of “THE ABOLITION OF THE CROSS” (Artaud 1988:559), when all logic is completely suppressed from the reality, and god and his judgment has ended.

In this context, god should be understood as the Father, the logic, the power of speech (Derrida 2001). When the cross, as a symbol of god, is uprooted and eliminated, all logic and representation of language stops subjugating the real life. Cruelty is presented again with the blood of the horse and the man as the death of the Father. The purpose of Artaud’s use of language in "Tutuguri: The Rite of the Black Sun" was related with the subordination of words to images, so that the words did not rule the play (LaBelle 1972). Therefore, his intention of experimenting with the voice and the sounds is a way of doing gestures without the body of doing glossopoeia, so that the images can devastated, in a cruel and tragic way, any kind of logical representation of life. As Derrida better explained:

Glossopoeia, which is neither an imitative language nor a creation of names, take us back to the borderline of the moment when the word has not yet been born, when articulation has no longer a shout but not yet discourse, when repetition is almost impossible, and along with it, language in general […] This is the eve of the origin of languages. (2001:302-303)

As this essay has shown, Derrida’s concept of performative language is related with social constructions as an opposition to desire and irrationality. Speech then has a logical structure that tends to define and describe the world in one way of perceiving and understanding life. Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty attempt’s to devastate this logic, so that theatre and life can reborn with purity. His radio play To Have Done With the Judgment of God is one example of this search, specifically the second part "Tutuguri: The Rite of the Black Sun" as an image of the abolition of logic. Despite the limitations of language and the supremacy of logic, Antonin Artaud’s ideas of theatre have been very influential, giving the possibility to new generations of performers to experiment and create using gestures and sounds without the necessity of having a specific and logical meaning, allowing more freedom in their creations.

References

Artaud, A. (1988) ‘Tutuguri: The rite of the black sun’ in Sontag, S. (ed.) Antonin Artaud selected writings. Translated by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. California: University of California Press, pp. 557-559.

––––(2001) The Theatre and its Double. Translated by J. Calder. Great Britain: Calder & Boyars Limited.

Culler. J (2000) ‘Performative Language’ in Literary Theory: a very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., pp. 90-103.

Derrida, J. (2001) ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’ in Writing and Difference. Translated by The University of Chicago. New York: Routledge Classics.

Esperluette Pantel, Artaud, A. (2012) Antonin Artaud, POUR EN FINIR AVEC LE JUDGEMENT DE DIEU (Version Intégrale). Available here.

Klage, M. (2012) ‘Logocentrism’ in Key terms in literary theory [online]. London: Continuum. Available here.

LaBelle, M.M. (1972) ‘Artaud’s Use of Language, Sound and Tone’ in Modern Drama 15:4, pp.383-390.

Primavesi, P. (2003) ‘A Theatre of Multiple Voices’ in Performance Research 8:1, pp.61-73.

Sontag, S. (1988) ‘Artaud’ in Antonin Artaud selected writings. California: University of California Press, pp.xvii-lix.

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About the Creator

Laura Jaramillo Duque

I am a Colombian writer, actress, artist and performer. You can find some of my artistic work in https://www.instagram.com/lajadu13/ and in https://liberoamerica.com/author/lajadu/

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