Madness and Reason in Marat/Sade

This text refers to the Dramatic Publishing Company 1993 edition of Marat/Sade and the 1988 Vintage Books Edition of Madness and Civilization.

Marat/Sade is a play that takes place in an insane asylum in Napoleonic France. In it, the Marquis de Sade (who is imprisoned there) directs his own play (with inmates as actors) about of the assasination of Jean Paul Marat during the French revolution. It is a complex play where the reader is often left wondering what motivates the characters, what is reasonable and what is insane. In this essay I attempt to use Foucault's model of reason and unreason to examine the sanity and insanity of several characters, as well as the roles of reason and unreason in the form of the play.

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In Marat/Sade, that which appears completely reasonable does so merely by appealing to one’s biases. That which is familiar is easily extended the benefit of the doubt. The benefit, in this case, is the assumption of reason and humanity. That which is unfamiliar is assumed mad until proved sane. In a world that confines the unknown, the appearance of reason and conformity allows one freedom. But where physical freedom is found, psychic freedom is difficult to maintain. In the “reasonable” world, unreason is still present, but it is taboo, and therefore denied. A person who wishes to succeed in a reasonable society must follow its conventions and maintain the benefit of society’s doubts. Socially prescribed behavior is often so far out of touch with one’s actual values that one must live in a state of constant denial. This is the madness of convention. It is embodied in Marat/Sade by the character of Coulmier. Coulmier claims to be “modern enlightened” (p. 8) and “the voice of reason” (p. 17). However, he frequently interrupts the play to make objections to its content with fallacious arguments that read more like threats: “nobody now objects to the church since our emperor is surrounded by high ranking clergy” (p. 34). Coulmier objects, not because of the truth of what “indisputably occurred” (p. 27), but because of its application to modern times. Coulmier is a member of the “new victorious class” (p. 47) The inmates are members of the defeated class, the poor and oppressed “who always lose the lottery”. As oppression was carried out before the revolution in the name of God (“suffer, as he suffered”, p. 32), in post-revolutionary times it is carried out in the name of reason and its agent, the state.

Experiences of unreason are useful for discovering truth because they allow one an entirely new approach, unencumbered by what Marat calls the “dead ideals, passed from generation to generation” (p. 39). When one in the “Age of Reason” experiences the unreasonable, he can only safely express it within the constraints of the accepted forms of art, religion, and violence. If he expresses ideas conflicting with what is generally accepted, he is bound to be repressed by the majority. This is what happened to Sade. Sade saw the abyss but returned to the world with his faculties intact, well armed with criticism. Sade saw in man the classical madness of bestiality—the “mad animal” who “helped commit a million murders” (p. 37). He became the gryllos, drawing his power from the image of a nature that is indifferent and thus “goads us to greater acts” (p. 29). Sade is conflicted about his beliefs: “I wasn’t capable of murder, although murder was the final proof of my existence” (p. 54). “I hate nature”, he says. He is disgusted, but seeing life as such he cannot believe otherwise. From the darkness, he has been utterly convinced, but though his belief is strong he is doubly unreasonable in his inability to act according to his beliefs.

The character of Marat is a prime example of the madness of presumption. Marat was originally a member of the bourgeoisie with high medical, scientific, and philosophical aspirations, but after early success, his later works were repeatedly rejected, and he fell back into poverty: “turned to the streets he thought it best to join the revolutionaries and beat his dilettante breast crying out The oppressed must rise. He meant of course, I am oppressed” (p. 76-77). Marat personally identifies himself with the revolution (p. 21), and believes that only he knows what is best for France. He sees himself as a tragic hero, bravely defending the people of France against those who seek to exploit them. Foucault writes, “it is because man is attached to himself that he accepts error as truth, lies as reality, violence and ugliness as beauty and justice” (Madness and Civilization, p. 26). Marat’s solution is to incite the people of France to violence, to guillotine all suspected of opposing the revolution. The first thrust of the revolution was a crime of passion, probably necessary for the success of the Revolution. The Reign of Terror, in comparison, is excessive and mechanical. What may originally have been a necessary action becomes a compulsive, corrupting influence. As Corday laments:

What kind of town is this? What sort of streets are these? Who invented this? Who profits by it? I saw peddlers at every corner. They’re selling little guillotines with tiny sharp blades, and dolls filled with red liquid which spurts from the neck when the sentence is carried out? What kind of children are these who can play with this toy so efficiently? And who is judging? Who is judging? (p. 98)

Her last question can be read either as an indictment of Marat, who composed many death lists, or of God, who now seems estranged from the people of France. Sade comments:

We condemn to death without emotion and there’s no singular personal death to be had, only an anonymous cheapened death which we could dole out to entire nations on a mathematical basis until the time comes for all life to be extinguished. (p. 30)

As the play progresses, Marat’s sickness takes hold of him, and he appears more and more insane. First he hallucinates his tormentors of the past, and then himself speaking to the National Assembly. Many speak against him, but primarily Sade. He proclaims his work and his message louder and louder as Sade’s criticism becomes more stinging until finally he begins to understand the sense of Sade’s perspective. “Why is everything so confused now? Everything I wrote or spoke was considered and true, each argument sound. And now doubt. Why does everything sound false?”(p. 94) The justification for Marat’s actions depended on his own infallibility. This is the madness of presumption. When he realizes that he is capable of making bad arguments, or that even good arguments lead to bad results, he experiences great conflict. In order to resolve it, he merely proclaims himself right ever the louder (“No, I am right”, p. 100) and thus with an act of pure unreason restores his prior “reasonable” position.

Form

Marat/Sade is a play about a play, set in an insane asylum. The actors of the interior play are inmates, and therefore we understand that they are mad according to the standards of the period, and possibly according to our standards as well. The inmates are reading lines that were written for them by the Marquis de Sade. In the universe of the asylum, Sade is the center of the cosmos. He has created a puppet world of Revolutionary France where he argues with Jean-Paul Marat, but really only with himself. This cosmos is not stable, though. It is not fortified with reason, as the revolutionary cosmos appears to be to Marat. Rather, it is oozing chaos from the artifice and orifice of each actor. Their madness, their subversions, put every word in doubt.

There is a constant sense of instability, and a confusion of what is truth or madness. Unlike Coulmier, who is able to contain Sade’s criticism physically, by the power of the hospital, and mentally, by categorizing and reducing it to the "unreasonable", we, as Weiss's audience, cannot easily pin down or reduce the meanings. We are forced to consider all perspectives, without activating the blind defense mechanisms that protect us from blame. Weiss’ structure invites us to look deeply at how the dynamics of power and oppression play out in our expectations of what is reasonable and desirable.

If Weiss had just written a play about the French Revolution, it would have been easy to dismiss it as leftist rhetoric, revising history and drawing false parallels with the present time. Instead he took a step back and wrote a play about a play. If he had written the interior play only, we would have had the sense that he was proposing a certain truth. The effect of the play within a play is similar to the effect that Foucault achieves in Madness in Civilization, where by expressing a continually shifting historical discourse, we gain the impression that there is no conclusion, only process. This is different from Sade’s arguments with the fictitious Marat, because in Weiss’ case, as with Plato’s stories of Socrates, Weiss does not appear in the work himself. Weiss has distanced himself from the play, allowing it to exist in our minds without reference to his intentions, without reduction to cliché.

At the end of Marat/Sade, Sade announces, “Our play’s chief aim has been—to take to bits great propositions and their opposites, see how they work, then let them fight it out. The point? Some light on our eternal doubt. I have twisted and turned them every way and find no ending to our play.” (p 110, II.32) This might as well be Weiss speaking about his own work. Reason demands conclusion, but unreason is happy to work in possibilities. Marat/Sade is not a work of pure reason, and we do not use only reason to interpret it. The form Weiss chose for Marat/Sade gives us a full experience that cannot be completely analyzed.

Through madness, a work that seems to drown in the world, to reveal there its non-sense, and to transfigure itself with the features of pathology alone, actually engages within itself the world’s time, masters it, and leads it; by the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without an answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself. (Madness and Civilization, p. 288)