On the Sanity of Marat/Sade: In Defense of the Young Leftist
Boyers, Robert
That Lionel Abel misinterpreted Peter Weiss's Marat/ Sade is entirely forgiveable, though not a little pitiful considering the play's straightforwardness and clarity of intention. But that...
...I believe that Lionel Trilling is responsible for touching off a whole series of pious attacks on advocates of emotional and intellectual extremism in the arts (see Mr...
...Abel's diatribe, consisting of various notions about the ideological status of madness in our culture, and the immorality of the ambivalent young leftist...
...Abel would do well to reread Lionel Trilling's essay on "Freud: Within and Beyond Culture," in which Mr...
...Abel to demand that one party yield to the other is to make precisely the sort of ideological demand which he condemns in those who interpret madness as something of a privileged vantage point...
...Abel, we all want to be philosophers, we are all tempted by the pious response...
...Irving Howe has definitely analyzed them in his essay "New Styles in Leftism," for which we should all be grateful...
...In any case, Abel's attempt to accuse partisans of Marat/Sade of "an ideological interest in the mad" is silly...
...We are committed to socialism, but also are honest enough to acknowledge that we are in a bind...
...Bring on the reign of right reason, I say, and let wisdom be dispersed among us, only let us remember that whose wisdom, whose reason it is, makes all the difference...
...The madmen incarcerated in the Charenton asylum, in their roles as members of the Parisian mob, can be collectively mobilized only at moments of extreme provocation...
...I hope I may be pardoned for not having thrown the scoundrels out when I attended Weiss's play...
...Such an attribution is too simple...
...That immature people embrace an ethic of madness and criminality is insufficient cause to attack works of art that successfully employ madness...
...Together they enable us better to appreciate the conflict which Weiss is eager to elucidate...
...They are afraid to trust history, for it has proven fickle too often, and yet they are wary of philosophical purism, the morality of integrity embodied by the late Albert Camus, attractive as it may be...
...Why must there be a yielding...
...The chaos of Marat/Sade, theatrically choreographed by director Peter Brook, is an emblem of man thrown together with his fellows in an almost revolting intimacy, and yet incapable of meaningful collectivization...
...The anguish of our most sensitive young people today stems from a peculiar awareness of urgent necessities and insurmountable obstacles...
...We marvel as spectators at the unreality of the platitudes and the very real suffering to which the character himself is subjected...
...Abel asserts, rather than demonstrates, that Marat/Sade is merely theatrical, not dramatic, I shall not take the space to refute him, though someone should...
...Sartre has seen that man must "make himself historical in order to undertake the eternal...
...There are more intemperate passions in this world than are dreamt of in Mr...
...But where Mr...
...Mr...
...Otherwise we shall be caught in the act of comparing "a world without justice to a Justice without content...
...Mr...
...Abel observed the response of a typical audience of Marat/Sade, and decided that "there was a feeling in the theatre for leftism plus madness...
...It is Sade who relentlessly catalogues the isolation of man from man, in what is virtually a theory of erotic individualism...
...Though few young people, I suppose, read Wittgenstein, they do share a common assumption concerning the profound relativism of cognition...
...Abel's dignity seems to cry out against those who would besmirch his solemn reasonableness With occasional howls of confusion...
...Now isn't it too damned obvious to say that the sympathy of intelligent people confronting Marat/Sade is for the passion and futility of the mad, not for the superficial accoutrements of doddering erotomaniacs and paranoid schizophrenics...
...Miss Susan Sontag has described insanity in this play as the...
...Trilling's Beyond Culture...
...We must read history with all of the critical tools available to us, and hope that we place ourselves on "the right side...
...That Lionel Abel misinterpreted Peter Weiss's Marat/ Sade is entirely forgiveable, though not a little pitiful considering the play's straightforwardness and clarity of intention...
...Abel's displeasure is traceable to a failure of sympathy and understanding...
...The people are endlessly changeable, malleable, we are shown...
...It is not terribly difficult to account for the current attribution of prestige to maladjusted persons in our society...
...He complains, for example, of "the feebleness and platitudinousness of Marat's lines," and their subsequent failure to remove our attention from the speaker's spotted body...
...Trilling applauds Freud's emphasis on biology as a positively liberating idea...
...Given the conditions of the modern world, that is, madness or at the very least maladjustment is understandable, if not desirable, particularly for those who have no sense of being able to influence their own destiny...
...This is certainly the coup de grdce among an array of absurdities...
...They are un predictable, and their energies can never wholly be contained in any theory of total sensual gratification or program of absolute anarchy...
...Abel justifies his preference with a statement innocent of qualification, a statement somehow reminiscent of the English critic F. R. Leavis: "But real madmen, or persons presented as really mad, do not belong in any theater attended by people with a taste for drama...
...In action they may give themselves completely to causes and movements, but within, the commitment is frequently tenuous...
...Trilling is interested in defining cultural tendencies and refining our perception of them, his followers are interested in excommunicating those with whom they feel somewhat out of touch...
...The notion that there are instincts wholly beyond the reach of culture should give us hope...
...Mr...
...The success of Weiss's play lies in its ability to evoke a sense of fellowship with those who suffer and clamor for change, as well as the concomitant sense that collective goals often fail to satisfy the more consuming passions which torment us...
...For Mr...
...Like Mr...
...The tensions produced becauce conflicts of perception and choice are not resolved are ultimately creative in that the desired synthesis must be provided by each man for himself...
...In the midst of commitment to social values and participation in social projects the young are beset by intimations of inadequacy, of a passion which cannot be rationally controlled, or channeled...
...Marat/Sade in a sense comes to grips with this problem artistically...
...Since Mr...
...The drama of the play is largely provided by the tensions set up between the Parisian mob periodically chanting their irresistible demands and the two largerthanlife figures, neither of whom quite understands those he describes and prophesies about so confidently...
...Paul Goodman, for one, has had a great deal to say on this subject, and at a recent reading Robert Lowell wondered aloud at the widespread interest in his inability to cope with ordinary living...
...That the desired emotional effect of madness on an audience is vitiated, as Mr...
...Of course, these are characteristics of Marat which the dramatist intends us to perceive...
...We are waiting for the philosopher who will at once ratify our sense of reality, complex and shifting, and permit us to transcend the limitations of historical necessity...
...Weiss has understood and conveyed their frustration...
...This brings us to the crux of Mr...
...As in any argument, pertinent distinctions must be drawn...
...Being `calm' amounts to a failure to understand one's real situation...
...Sade himself points out in the course of the play the almost ironical disparity between Marat's fantastic idealism and the realities of his own agonized physical condition...
...The conflict has nothing whatever to do with insincerity, or with a nihilistic sense of aimlessness...
...The only thing that is certain is that they must be heard, must be given the dignity of recognition and concern...
...Unquestionably, there are young people who permit themselves to be caught up in the hysteria of irrational demands and violent rhetoric...
...Marat is unconvincing because he believes that there is a boundary to madness and to homicidal hysteria, that the lust for blood can be contained in a rational program built on the ruins of a degenerate class society...
...Their fervor soon degenerates into a mere whining irritation as they await a new infusion of hope from tomorrow's agitator...
...It is not, as Mr...
...But that Mr...
...And yet, placed against the fact of society's inexorable incursions into the recesses of our private lives, against the facts of TV advertising and political consensus, we must respond warmly to those free spirits who at their peril refuse to bend, or to those forever benighted spirits who have been broken in the attempt to resist...
...Do we envision the emergence of a rational politics from the blacks of Rhodesia once they have massacred the white men who have kept them in bondage...
...Abel makes the mistake of condemning young people for believing madmen equal to philosophers...
...Marat's physical condition must not, then, be conceived as standing in competition with his verbal utterances...
...In Weiss's view, Marat is an impossible leftist, a revolutionary ideologue motivated by a transcendent notion of "the masses," but incapable of perceiving the distinguishing propensities of the individual human animal...
...Abel erringly suggests, that both Weiss and the young activist "think socialism a failure...
...but unlike Mr...
...In a society efficiently organized to exact total, unconscious acquiescence in its goals and methods, the maladjusted person is a symbol of a hard core which stubbornly refuses to be se duced...
...In other words, sensitive young people are not drawn to madness because its manifestations are colorful, nor because they wish themselves to be mad...
...On the contrary, awareness of the emotional maladjustment which so often accompanies intellectual dissent in Western societies, taken with the empty slogans of respectable middleclass life, is enough to inspire the young with a sense of urgency that often approaches the apocalyptic...
...Trilling suggests, by our being ". . . organized for the reception and accommodation of new experiences," is not to invalidate the efforts of writers to go beyond popular preparedness...
...His complaint that the basic confrontation of Marat and Sade is undramatic because "there is no yielding of one to the other," does require response...
...Can this be so...
...Abel's philosophy...
...Abel should have based a criticism of contemporary culture, more particularly of modern left-wing youth, on his misinterpretation is provoking...
...Marat/Sale was tedious, he says, but he never deigns to tell us why...
...Mr...
...Abel see that Weiss would be writing in bad faith if he had it any other way...
...most authentic metaphor for passion...
...Commitment to radical change becomes an extremely complex and frustrating experience...
...Naturally, madness is an unpleasant prospect for anyone to contemplate, and neurotic personalities are consistently engaged in one painful conflict after another...
...We want to believe that men can be reasonable, and that once the basic needs of men can be provided they will want to live harmoniously...
...If intellectually there is an unresolved tension in Weiss's play, can't Mr...
...or, what's the same thing in this case, the logical terminus of any strong emotion...
...The volatile atmosphere of the play, the patent unpredictability of the mad, screaming for attention, demonstrate that an ethos of excess, a rationale of necessary violence, is likely to give way to a new rationale justifying a similar approach...
...Is it too much to ask that even Lionel Abel confront us with rational explanations of purely emotional reactions or non-reactions which he readily foists upon us...
...it fails to convey what we feel, which is that socialism, as a rationally organized system of social reconstruction, cannot cope with all of the problems that beset men today...
...Abel, we would prefer to do the right thing and not worry so much about what we look like to "reasonable people," and whether responsible folks aren't offended by the marijuana smoking would-be hipsters among us...
...Are American socialists going to ask Vietnamese peasants to be reasonable after we have destroyed their country...
Vol. 13 • July 1966 • No. 4
