I bought my tickets last night. That's it. I'm officially going to France!

A Textual Analysis of Aimé Césaire's Poetry and Knowledge

Everything leads us to believe that there exists a certain mental point from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived contradictorily. And one would search in vain for a motive in surrealist activity other than the determination of that point. –André Breton

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Content

The main focus of the essay is the difference between poetic knowledge and scientific knowledge. Poetic knowledge is spiritual and whole, whereas scientific knowledge is “half-starved”. Scientific knowledge is incomplete, but because of its shortsightedness, it is unable to recognize its flaws. For much of modern history, science has been given a kind of sacred status and the result is a depersonalized and impoverished humanity. Poetic knowledge, on the other hand is based on “an astonishing mobilization of all human and cosmic forces” (p. xlvii). What is important is “not the most lucid intelligence, or the most acute sensibility, but an entire experience”. (p. xlvii). Poetry is the union of all experience, including things that scientific knowledge finds incompatible. “In the image, A can be not-A” (p. lii).

The highest ambition of poetry, according to Césaire, is to locate a point “from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived contradictorily.” (Breton, p. xlvii). The resolution of apparent contradictions is wisdom. That which appears contradictory is actually exposing the limits of the system in which it is expressed. Poetry is not bound by any system. “In the image, A can be not-A” (p. lii). “[An] original handling of the word can make possible at any moment a new theoretical and heedless science that poetry could already give an approximate notion of.” (p. xlix). Science is derivative of poetry, because poetry contains everything. “modern science is perhaps only the pedantic verification of some mad images spewed out by poets” (p. lii). A poem is an incarnation of Truth in some smaller truths.

Form

Césaire wrote Poetry and Knowledge in an essay format, but he frequently breaks the rules of standard grammar. He makes statements and allows one to judge them as one judges a work of art, not by what convincing evidence he presents, but rather by experience, by its verisimilitude. Césaire frequently makes use of repetition. He sometimes does not finish his sentences but allows them to trail off: “It was both desirable and inevitable...”, “Poetry ceased...” (p. xliv). A particularly formal expression is made in his list of propositions about poetry (p. lv).

There are many contrasting pairs in Poetry and Knowledge, such as judgment and image, man and nature, Mallarmé and Apollinaire, Dionysus and Apollo, poetry and prose, poetic knowledge and scientific knowledge, precision and feeling.

Conclusion

The paired form suggests analogous relationships among the pairs. On one side is scientific knowledge, based on the principals of precise measurement and logical judgment; it is best conveyed in prose. Poetic knowledge is a knowledge of all of nature, of feeling and imagery. Of course it is better expressed in poetry. The process of analogy is what links these pairs together. Analogy is the creative process of unification. It is the means by which art interacts with life.

This essay is composed of prose and poetry, and is thus whole. It contains rationality, to be certain, but not “the most lucid intelligence”, rather, the “entire experience”. The most logically structured element of this piece are the concluding propositions, but there is an ironic contrast between the highly structured form of the proposition, and the content of those propositions, which are made up of poetic language, and thus cannot be used for argument. Whether or not one has been established as the “living heart of [oneself] and the world” (p. lv) is not a falsifiable proposition.

Gide's Immoralist and Nietzsche's Metamorphoses

This refers to the Dover Dual-Language 2003 edition of The Immoralist / L'Immoraliste.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes a parable of metamorphosis. The metamorphosis is not of the body, but of the spirit. The spirit begins as a camel “that would bear much” and transforms into a lion “who would conquer his freedom and be master in his own desert”. The lion's power is “the creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred ‘No’ even to duty”. Then finally the lion must become a child, “innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred “yes”. Nietzsche seems to be talking about these changes as a process of development in the human spirit, both individual (probably one that he himself underwent) and historical. The camel finds meaning inside the bounds of an accepted system. The camel is dutiful and shoulders every difficulty in order to do what he “shalt” do. What, particularly, one should do of course varied, but the idea that there were particular thing went relatively unquestioned until the 20th century. In modern times, old values still assert their power over us, but they are no longer appropriate, no longer conducive to the highest aspirations of man.

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In André Gide's The Immoralist, a brilliant young scholar named Michel gets married, travels to northern Africa and contracts tuberculosis. The experiences he has during his recovery leave him in a hedonistic mode, unable to depend on the values of his upbringing. Before becoming ill, Michel was like the camel. He performed the most difficult and exacting scholarly work he could find for himself, did not enjoy himself physically, and conformed to the standards of middle class morality. He lived with a sort of puritan asceticism and work ethic. “That sort of austerity, a taste for which my mother had left to me while inculcating its principles, I transferred in its entirety to my studies.” (p. 17/pt. I). As a camel, Michel was also very shortsighted: “Not for a moment did it ever occur to me that I might have been able to lead a different life, or that a different life was even possible.” (ibid.). This unawareness that “God is dead” is essential to maintain oneself as a camel. Once one realizes that he is trapped by old, hollow values, he will soon desire to become a lion and free himself from them.

When Michel first became sick he did not believe he had tuberculosis. He thought his illness had “a different cause; or rather, [he] didn't search for any cause” (pg. 35). It only seemed as if his body was conforming to the affliction of his spirit. Michel's physical illness appeared as a sign of his lack of what Nietzsche called “the great health”, which has little to do with physicality. Michel had never before noticed that he was quite imprisoned by his upbringing (“I did not yet suspect what great power that early childish morality has over us” pg. 17). As he recovered physically, he also wished to recover mentally, spiritually. This is when he began the transition from camel to lion. He renounces his academic pursuits, giving himself over to the sensual, which he had previously denied. Unlike Nietzsche, however, Michel is not able to continue on to the final stage of development. He is stuck as a lion, victorious over the dragon of values, but incapable of becoming the babe. “I've won freedom,” he tells his friends, “but for what?” (p. 185/pt. III). He does not know how to move on from the lion. He desire is to become like the child, “I'd like to start afresh” (pg. 187/pt. III), but he does not know how. This is why, ultimately, he calls on his friends to help him. He is unable to create meaning on his own.

Art as the Mechanism of Cosmic Syncretism

Page numbers given without reference to a particular source are to the Norton Paperback 2002 edition of Death and the King's Horseman. AA=Ambiguous Adventure, Heinemann paperback edition. M&C=Madness and Civilization. Punctuation is placed outside of quotation marks, except when it is a part of the material quoted.

Over the last quarter, we have repeatedly examined the role of ritual, analyzed texts from the framework of cosmos/chaos, the archetype of the sacred monster, and Foucault's concepts of reason and unreason. These ideas come from different sources. Can they be unified? With the framework of “syncretism” can we form a coherent a syncretism of program materials? By relating these concepts with Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, I have attempted to do just that.

In 1946, in the city of Oyo, the British District Officer interrupted the ritual suicide of the chief horseman of the king of Yoruba. This breach and the dramatic restorative response of the horseman's son represent key events in this history of the Yoruba people. These are the particularities on which the story of Death and the King's Horseman is based, but similar events have no doubt occurred in many societies subjugated to imperial rule. When such a disruption happens, an opportunity is presented for a sacred monster to arise and restore balance.

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Sacred monsters are the agents of constructive change in society. They are those who tap into chaos and use it to transfigure their cosmos. In Death and the King's Horseman, Olunde plays the role of a sacred monster. He travels outside of his cosmos, the world of Yoruba, and into Britain, the heart of the chaos that is imposing itself on his homeland. The actions of the British in Nigeria culminate in tragic results for the Yoruba people, and the only person capable of providing a remedy is Olunde.

As a young man, Olunde left his home for England, which implies that he saw greater value in spending his time abroad. It is apparent that he was encouraged to go by Pilkings, but Olunde's feelings are never directly revealed. Pilkings believes that Olunde left because he did not want to succeed his father as the king's horseman. But that role is among the most honored in the land. Elesin thinks that Olunde left “to seek to obtain the secrets of his enemies.” (p. 63). Pilkings claims that when Olunde left, he was “a most intelligent boy, really bright” (p. 28). Given his intelligence, it is possible that Olunde saw the threats facing his people and chose to go into exile to learn how best to deal with them. Whatever his original intention, it is clear that Olunde has experience with the British imperial mindset. “I discovered that you have no respect for what you do not understand.” (p. 50) He also had a renewed understanding of his own culture: “Jane: Simon and I agreed that we never really knew what you left with. / Olunde: Neither did I. But I found out over there.” (p. 54).

Elesin is the king's horseman, which is a very important role in Yoruba society. He is as close to the center of that cosmos as anyone. He is elevated by the Praise-Singer and the Women of the market. He boasts of his own greatness and of how he is ready to die “I am master of my Fate. When the hour comes / Watch me dance along the narrowing path / Glazed by the soles of my great precursors. / My soul is eager. I shall not turn aside.” (p. 14) He is approaching “that moment for which [his] whole life has been spent in blessings” (p. 62). He has the support of the entire community, “the honour and veneration of his own people” (p. 53). “He has protection. No one can undertake what he does tonight without the deepest protection the mind can conceive.” (p. 53). Elesin is “a man of enormous vitality, [he] speaks, dances and sings with that infectious enjoyment of life which accompanies all his actions” (p. 9). He has everything to live for. It is not surprising that ending his life is difficult, even with all the encouragement he has received. However, this is a tradition that goes back generations. Many horsemen of the kings of Yoruba have gone through this before. They must all have faced some difficulty, but finally they fulfilled their duties.

The whole community relies on the proper completion of Elesin's suicide. The women of the market previously worried that they had troubled him: “For a while we truly feared / Our hands had wrenched the world adrift / In emptiness.” (p. 17). No person from the Yoruba cosmos could stop the ritual. “No arrow flies back to the string” (p. 44). But Pilkings is from the outside; he is chaos. At the time of action, when Elesin intends to commit suicide, Pilkings appears. His presence has an overwhelmingly disruptive effect, and Elesin is unable to consummate the ritual before he is clapped in irons. As Elesin explains to Iyaloja, “when the alien hand pollutes the source of will, when a stranger force of violence shatters the mind's calm resolution, this is when a man is made to commit the awful treachery of relief, commit in his thought the unspeakable blasphemy of seeing the hand of the gods in this alien rupture of his world.” (p. 69). What is divine but that which is other? The divine may interact with our cosmos to guide the unfurlment of events, but it is never bound to the rule of the world. When Pilkings appeared as he did, as no Yoruba could have, it was like an eclipse or a thunderbolt. He had all the power of a divine intervention, if only temporarily. Elesin had reservations about death, and at the time of the interruption, he was in a trance, operating in a mode of spirit and symbol. Before he could assess the situation rationally, he was taken by the mythic impact of Pilkings appearance: “You saw me struggle to retrieve my will from the power of the stranger whose shadow fell across the doorway and left me floundering and blundering in a maze I had never before encountered. My sense were numbed when the touch of cold iron came upon my wrists. I could do nothing to save myself.” (p. 68).

Olunde has a unique position in the world of Yoruba. As the heir to Elesin, he is able to make reparations for the failure of his father. As a result of his studies abroad, Olunde's cosmos has come to include the world of the British as well as that of the Yoruba. Olunde's intelligence and deep understanding of Yoruba culture allow him to quickly realize what must be done, and to formulate a plan. His exposure to the British has inoculated him against the paralysis that struck his father. He is no longer moved by their alien behaviors: “I am not shocked Mrs Pilkings. You forget that I have now spent four years among your people.” (p. 50). His ongoing relationship with the British gained him the confidence of Jane and Pilkings, and allowed him to proceed unquestioned: “I'd trust Olunde. I don't think he'll deceive you” (p. 72).

Marianne Bailey defined ritual as “calling to the present the energy of when the world first became” (lecture, 9/29/05). Ritual is the apex of the cosmos, steeped in symbols, rife with meaning. The energy that it calls is chaos, but in the overwhelming significance of the ritual, chaos is controlled and at the conclusion of the ritual, the old world has not fundamentally changed. The reversals of carnival are a perfect example of this. During carnival, the powerless assume positions of power, but once carnival is over, the world returns to the way it was. In a special subtype of ritual known as art, chaos escapes into the world and permanently alters it. Art, according to Foucault, “opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself”. It contains new forms, born of the chaos, which as of yet the world does not recognize. “Henceforth, and through the mediation of madness, it is the world that becomes culpable in relation to the work of art; it is now arraigned by the work of art, obliged to order itself by its language, compelled by it to a task of recognition, of reparation, to the task of restoring reason from that unreason and to that unreason.” (M&C, p. 288) Art is an event, not an artifact, which modifies the language by which chaos will hence be addressed. With art as its fulcrum, the world synthesizes the two sources, its old self and the intruding chaos, and forges a new syncretic cosmos encompassing both.

Francisco de Goya, The Incantation

The creative ritual of the sacred monster is present in Goya's Incantation. The man in the white represents the cosmos, or tradition. He is clothed in white and brightly illuminated, suggesting the light of reason and the purity of internally consistent morality. His face reveals fear at the prospect of the ritual (change). The figures in black represent various faces of chaos. On the far left is the old hag, symbolizing the truth of old age and death. “What overhangs human existence is this conclusion and this order from which nothing escapes.” (M&C, p. 15). To her right is a man wearing a fool's hat and holding a small animal. The fool represents madness and bestiality. His gaping eye sockets suggests that “The head that will become a skull is already empty.” (M&C, p. 16). Next is a woman in a white head wrap. She represents the virgin, the divine aspect of chaos, mysticism. She holds a book, representing the Word, and a torch representing the divine flame which illuminates herself, the book, the demon above her, and the wings of the owl to her right. The final figure is a man with an owl perched on his head, holding a basket of babies. His head appears shaven, an indication of monastic devotion. The jumble of babies he holds is the haphazard jumble of human life. The children, representing potential, are to be sacrificed for the realization of an important particularity (as with Olunde). The owls wings, illuminated by the virgin's flame, suggest the wings of an angel, and the inversion of good/evil in the monk character. Owls represent the wisdom of the night. In the center is the artist, or the sacred monster, who is invoking all these powers of chaos, and bringing them, with much gravity and care to the cosmos who is huddled in the corner. The artist appears similar to the cosmos, but he is colored by the experience of chaos. The cosmos character is colored by the background, by the light of the world. He has his hands clasped in prayer, but as with Elesin, what he is appealing to is only an aspect of himself; it has no power over that which is alien (“My charms, my spells, even my voice lacked strength”, p. 68). The action of this painting is surrounded by darkness. Nearly half of the canvas is solid black. The darkness, the chaos, is much greater than the illuminated focus. Cosmos is about to come into contact with all the forces of night and be transfigured by them.

The interruption of Yoruba death rituals by British authorities is chaos forced into cosmos, but it is not art. Art still possesses the cosmic background, the systems of symbols by which the world may mend a chaotic breach. The action of art is like the action of muscle. Though it may leave the cosmos sore for a few days, the outcome is vitality and strength. When Pilkings interrupts Elesin, that is the action of chaos. The effect is disruption, just as it is when the chaos is the effect of art, but it is without reparation. “You did not save my life District Officer. You destroyed it... and not merely my life but the lives of many.” (p. 62). Only a work of art, that is, a ritual with the power of cosmic transformation, could mend this damage.

Olunde is a sacred monster, fully contained in neither the Yoruba nor the British world but inclusive of both. His actions are thus entirely new, anticipated by neither Pilkings nor Elesin. Olunde's suicide is a work of art, drawing its power from “the madness which interrupts it” (M&C p. 288)--the chaos he possesses in his liminal position. It is through this work that Olunde is able to disrupt both worlds and inaugurate the new channel of their exchange. “The stillness seizes and paralyses everyone, including Pilkings who has turned to look.” (p. 75). Pilkings attempts to blame Iyaloja, but his denouncements are weak. “Pilkings (in a tired voice): Was this what you wanted?” (p. 76). Iyaloja's response is vibrant and full of meaning: “No child, it is what you brought to be, you who play with strangers' lives, who even usurp the vestments of our dead, yet believe that the stain of death will not cling to you. The gods demanded only the old expired plantain but you cut down the sap-laden shoot to feed your pride.” (p. 76). Some balance between the power of the Yoruba and the British has been restored though Olunde's actions. What is to happen next for the Yoruba cannot be predicted. The break with tradition marks an event horizon beyond which the future cannot be known: “What the end will be we are not gods to tell. But this young shoot has poured its sap into the parent stalk, and we know this is not the way of life. Our world is tumbling in the void of strangers” (p. 75). Olunde may have restored meaning to the lives of the Yoruba, but they are still locked in exchange with the British. As the knight says in Ambiguous Adventure “We have not had the same past, you and ourselves, but we will have, strictly, the same future. The era of separate destinies has run its course. In that sense, the end of the world has indeed come for every one of us, because no one can any longer live by the simple carrying out of what he himself is.” (AA79). Individual cosmos are ending as they collide with each other, but new syncretic cosmos are being formed, like Venn diagrams with greater and greater overlapping areas.

A cosmos that is completely stable is devoid of life. Life is energy, which is the action of chaos. Ritual is the means by which cosmos accesses chaos and thus ensure its continued health. Most rituals follow established traditions and do not fundamentally change the cosmos in which they occur. Periodically, though, rituals are performed which have a profound effect on the cosmos, effectively ending it as it previously existed and beginning again with that which is the syncretism of cosmos and chaos. These rituals we call “art”. They are frightening, but critical to progress. Those who perform art are called “artists”, or, in more evocative language, “Sacred Monsters”.

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)

Plunge your gaze into the mirror of the Marvelous: your tales, your legends, your songs—you'll see inscribed, luminous, the sure image of your Self.

-Aimé Césaire, from the class description

The purpose of this "blog" is to give me an easy way to share what I am writing for and in response to my experience in the program "Sacred Monsters" (from the French, monstres sacrés) at The Evergreen State College. The program has several sections, mine focusing on modern French and Caribbean literature.

There are reading assignments every week. My favorite selections last quarter were Madness and Civilzation, by Foucault, Death and the King's Horseman, by Soyinka, and Marat/Sade by Weiss. I didn't have enough time to do a thorough reading of Clitandres's Cathedral of the August Heat, or Cesaire's Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, but I had the impression that both texts are brilliant, deep, and certainly worthy of a closer examination.

A lot of what I post here is things I have written for class, and thus they may tend to rely on references to whatever materials we have been consuming (reading, watching) as part of the program. That said, I'm trying to make them comprehensible for a more general audience, so that those who are not in the program with me can follow along.

I hope you enjoy what I've written. Please let me know what you think. Leave comments!